Cold as ice

A broken engagement -- and a broken heart -- sent Tom Zoellner on a wild journey to understand the endless allure of the diamond.

By Ben Cosgrove

Read more: Books, Africa, Reviews, Book reviews

July 19, 2006 | A few weeks ago, the front page of the New York Daily News featured a story about a Staten Island grandfather who lost, and then found, a personal treasure.

"Dump Luck: Hubby Finds Diamond Ring," the headline read.

Seems the 63-year-old had stuffed a 3.5-carat ring into a napkin for safekeeping while his wife was in the hospital. Ring and napkin then somehow ended up in a garbage bag at a transfer station in Elizabeth, N.J. Long story short? After an hour or so spent sorting through piles of trash, the man retrieved the ring he had given to his wife 35 years earlier.

"He was a very happy man when he found it," reported the guy who drove the garbage truck. If by "very happy" the driver meant relieved, grateful, amazed and spared both burning regret and a spouse's disappointment and, perhaps, wrath, then yes, one can picture the Staten Islander standing there, diamond ring firmly, miraculously in hand -- a very happy guy, indeed. Still, a grown man racing to the dump and digging through garbage to retrieve a chunk of compressed carbon might strike an observer as odd -- unless, of course, that observer has ever been engaged, married or otherwise caught up in the seemingly universal obsession with that most enigmatic of gems, the diamond.

"A diamond," writes Tom Zoellner in "The Heartless Stone," his exploration of the stone's near-mystical appeal, "is the thing set apart, a heart outside of the heart, the one shining irreducible moment in clear carbon that is supposed to make us forget our failings and mortality." While his near-florid language and the invocation of hearts and shining moments and immortality might sound to some ears like a tacit endorsement of the manufactured, strictly controlled myth ("A diamond is forever"), the sharply personal tale Zoellner tells in "The Heartless Stone" is far more chastening than celebratory.

Zoellner set out on the diamond's path -- a path carved over millions of years, by incomprehensibly huge natural forces and barely comprehensible cultural and economic variants -- as surely as miners have for millennia set out after riches. Except that, in the author's case, the catalyst for this "journey through the world of diamonds, deceit, and desire" was not blind greed or hope for a life-changing mother lode, but lost love and a broken heart.

"A month after Anne broke up with me," Zoellner writes early on in the book, "I moved back to my hometown in Arizona and took a job as a reporter at the local newspaper. Anne and I maintained a careful friendship over the phone for a few weeks. Then she stopped taking my calls ... Half a year went by. Our planned wedding date, June 16, came and went ... I dreamed about her almost every night that summer, and saw her in the faces of strangers."

Stunned, Zoellner focuses much of his forlorn, fractured energy on the emblem of the love, and the lover, that have slipped away. The diamond ring, the "heart outside of the heart" that he optimistically, ceremonially gave to Anne -- the ring that she returned to him -- grew in significance the longer he held on to it. The engagement long over, Zoellner still clung to the symbol of love ever after. His journey from that near-paralytic post-engagement depression along the winding and often dangerous routes that diamonds travel from beneath the earth to swank shop windows is the heart inside "The Heartless Stone."

That first mention of a broken engagement appears almost casually, well into the first chapter, after the author has already led the reader straight into the moral and economic morass of the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) and the diamond-smuggling trade between the two war-torn nations. By then, the author's descriptions of the smugglers he meets, the sudden, surreal dangers he faces, and the blasted, hopeless landscapes he encounters in the heart of the African continent establish, or re-establish, Zoellner's bona fides as a genuine reporter. (He has reported for the San Francsico Chronicle and co-authored the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hotel-manager hero of "Hotel Rwanda.") Like any good journalist, Zoellner has an eye for the telling detail, a nose for trouble and an ability to quickly re-create a scene's mood and sense of place. Wherever he is, he puts you there.

Fortunately for the reader, while his reporter's skills are solid, Zoellner's ambitions and occasionally his technique more closely resemble a traditional novelist's -- "The Heartless Stone" is filled with intrigue, "exotic" travel to places like India, Brazil, the Arctic and New York's hermetic Diamond District, as well as characters as bizarre, repulsive and endearing as those one might find in the most imaginative fiction.

Describing the Central African Republic, "the place to go if you want to see how some [diamonds] make their way to America," Zoellner veers cleanly back and forth between his narrative strengths:

"It is a land-locked crescent of ochre-colored earth about the size of Texas at the geographic heart of Africa. To fly over it at night is to fly over a carpet of complete darkness except for the occasional small cooking fire flickering up trough the trees. There are no traffic signals, not a single mile of railroad track and almost no electric lights outside the capital city of Bangui  Children drunk on glue wander the filthy core of Bangui in broken flip-flops, begging for francs. Their T-shirts from Western aid agencies are often dotted with gummy clots; this is where they have smeared the glue to huff through the cloth. Shoe polish is another favorite intoxicant -- it is spread on bread like jelly and eaten for a high."

Here, in a nation "corrupt, destitute and nearly forgotten by the rest of the world," diamonds smuggled from other parts of the continent make their way into the legitimate, glittering flow of the international diamond market. Zoellner is intrepid, meeting miners, smugglers, cryptic heads of this and that ministry (all of whom, it seems, live with a hand held out to collect some fee) and jaded officials ever ready to retreat back into the Graham Greene novel from which they've only briefly emerged after imparting some diamond-related information (or misinformation) to the author.

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