'Some people have all the fun,' he grinned. 'Rough house?'
I told my story briefly. He grinned again. 'Bob Sheriff's the name. I must admit to noticing a slight pong of seal now that you've come aboard.'
We sped towards the Mazy Zed. Smoke was now pouring from her curious high twin stacks. Diesels thumped heavily. A group of men were gathered round the heavy hose which led, pulsing and shaking, from the gantry into the sea. Where it entered the 'hopper bin' high up, another group was busy. Water cascaded everywhere.
Sheriff said, 'Your untimely arrival has held up the proceedings.'
'You mean…?'
'First diamond run, old boy. Carats in the morning, carats in the evening, carats at supper-time; I hope-so, anyway.'
We swung on to the steel deck. The air of tension was obvious. There were no gunnels and the deck was barely a foot or two above the water. Where the rough coat of red lead had been chipped, the steel had rusted from the corrosive sea fogs. We picked our way though a confusion of metal platforms, derricks, pumps, hoses, pipes and men into a dank corridor which smelt like the deep ocean and was as wet as a submarine. Condensation showed in the light of a weak bulb set into a steel beam, where red-leaded rivets nestled in rows like frogs' eggs. I pulled open a watertight door. The strip lighting was bright after the corridor. About half a dozen men in white overalls stood round a dull steel table like an operating theatre. Rhennin was in faded khaki overalls and a red sweater.
Mary spun the circular hand sieve and, with a peculiar deft movement, upturned it and emptied its gravelly contents on the table.
In the centre lay a handful of diamonds.
I didn't hear the hubbub of congratulations as the men leaned forward, peering eagerly at the first stones ever won from the sea in all man's long quest for riches.
I was oblivious of the superb machinery in the sorting-room — the six-foot-high glass retorts and six-inch-diameter transparent tubes through which sea water, still carrying its deep-sea life in the shape of lobsters and small fish, made its way to the gravitational sorter; the grease table with its greasy yellow roller to catch the stones; the surrealist electro-static separator flickering with a savage blue charge of 25,000 volts; the aluminium-decked vibrator shaking stones into fourteen categories at a rate faster than the eye could follow… I saw none of these. I saw a man with a sieve standing where his daughter stood now, skilfully swilling the diamond-bearing gravel round in the old-fashioned way on the Oyster Line, and I was sensible of the presence of Destiny, his inescapable, malign fellow-traveller, who had snatched his life's-search from the precious gravel not once, but three times in a short life.
'You should have used Caldwell's trommel.' The words thudded in my brain like the pulse of the Mazy Zed's pumps.
They all turned and looked at me. The wash of water in the tubes and the heart-beat of the pumps filled the long silence.
Then Mary said, wide-eyed, 'Why do you say that?'
The forceps in her fingers played idly, unseeingly, in the pile of diamonds before her.
We stared at one another. 'The first diamonds from the sea — a Caldwell has made history again. Perhaps you've killed the Caldwell jinx, too.'
Rhennin frowned. 'You've had a going-over, John. Better get a change and clean-up. Draw some fresh clothes from the stores.' He turned to Mary. 'You're the wardrobe mistress — Mike and Jim can go ahead with the sorting — will you fix John up?'
I said, 'Shelborne would have called it the slop-chest, not wardrobe.'
Mary was puzzled, uncertain, but excitement brought a remarkable clarity to her hazel eyes. She undid a top button of her surgeon's smock, pulled out a magnifying glass, the sort jewellers use, and held it out on a thin gold chain to me. I walked over to her, frowning, for something which had been dredged up in my mind at the sight of those first sea-diamonds now eluded me, something important on the point of definition. But it was gone now.
Mary held a stone in her forceps. There was an intricate tracery of fine lines which seemed at first glance to be a blurring.
She cupped the diamonds into a small pile. 'Look! They're frosty!'
The blurring, on looking closer, resolved into a mass of fine cobwebs. There was a green at the heart of it like the green I had seen in Shelborne's eyes.
I handed back the glass. 'Felix, I want to tell you how Shelborne
There's plenty of time to talk. Get Mary to find you the clothes first. How many carats are there, Mary?'
Twenty, thirty maybe.'
Rhennin spoke to the group at the sorting-table. 'We've found sea-diamonds, and that's a pretty big thrill for all of us. Remember, though, that what's here on the table isn't a quarter enough to pay her way for one day.
You all know that it could simply be an isolated pocket…'
Mary gestured to me and we went to a big room in the Mazy Zed's 'flatland' which was filled with shirts, overalls, jackets, jerseys, trousers, shoes, socks. It looked like a small department store for men.
'Is this really part of your job?' I asked.
She laughed. 'Woman's touch and all that. Being the only female aboard, Mr Rhennin put the slop-chest, as you call it, in my care.' She looked at me appraisingly. 'Sixteen collar, forty vest?'
I nodded. She put them into my hands.
'Why did you say "Caldwell's trommel" the way you did?'
'It seemed appropriate that what the father missed the daughter should have.'
She shook her head. 'That explains the words, yes. But not the way you said them.' She paused when I did not reply. 'And Shelborne?'
'When a man has just tried to kill you, it is difficult to get it out of your mind.'
'Kill your
I told her about the Praying Mantis and the Borchardt.
She said flatly, 'Shelborne isn't the type. There is some other explanation.'
'Are you trying to find excuses for your father's murderer?'
She flushed. 'I don't believe that either.'
'He made me a nice goodbye speech, practically saying it would be the last time we would meet. He was pleased, too, that I'd helped you get this job — why, I don't know. I think that was the reason he showed me over Mercury.'
She handed me a pair of shoes and socks. 'John, I know in my heart that Shelborne isn't a killer. He is complex, brilliant, and there's something inward-looking about him which I find hard to define or comprehend. And I feel an affinity — a rapport, you could call it that — with him which I cannot understand…'
The whole thing's quite simple: Shelborne got your father to Strandloper's Water, extorted the concession from him, and then did away with him. How, we shall never know.'
'He's not like that at all. I know it, I feel it. Shelborne lives on different planes — and one of them is an exalted state where it is difficult to come anywhere close to him. Rarefied, maybe, but exciting and unique, not murderous. If something on one plane stood in the way of his ideas on another…'
'In other words, Shelborne has his price, too. Like Strandloper's Water. I wish I knew what the price was — the concession wasn't the half of it.'
She said angrily, 'It isn't like that either, and you know it. You're oversimplifying. You're working the facts backwards to try to incriminate Shelborne. It doesn't work. He…'
'Look, Mary, I saw your father's own pistol, with his name engraved on it — F. W. Caldwell. Shelborne had it, but no one parts with a gun like that, custom-made for his own hand only…'
'You know a lot about guns,' she flashed at me.
'Yes,' I said, 'I do. I've collected them, studied them, used them…'
She remained silent and I went on: 'To act the way Shelborne is capable of acting, or think the way he thinks, you have to have a motive — a compulsive motive force. I sat on his stoep, his quarter-deck, and watched his mental processes at work not longer than a couple of days ago. He frightens me, just as his island frightens me. Look at the facts: a sea-bed diamond concession, some guano islands which are literally only
for the birds, and he refuses a handsome offer to cooperate with the Mazy Zed outfit. It doesn't add up to the man who sat there with me on that grim little island. Caldwell
'Why do you keep bringing my father into it?'
'Because I feel him as a presence. In the sorting-room back there too. I know, I know — he's been dead thirty-odd years. But Caldwell is diamonds.'
'Now Mary Caldwell is diamonds too,' she added quietly.
I waited before I spoke. 'What if Shelborne has in his hands the luck that eluded Caldwell?'
She stared at me, wide eyes. 'What do you mean?'
'Caldwell became the legend because the world knew it was really he who found the great strikes, — but each was taken from him at the moment of putting the golden cup to his lips, so to speak, by a cruel stroke of luck. Oranjemund is the star example. He should have been a millionaire half a dozen times over.' I chose my words slowly, carefully. 'What if there were something else, his biggest strike of all?'
'What are you trying to say?'
'A great prospector with a kindly, gentle and, it seems, slightly credulous nature, walks out on his home, his child, on everything that is dear to him, vanishes, and is seen only once again at Strandloper's Water. He just went prospecting? No!'
'But he had the German concession for the sea-bed.'
'Why?' I demanded. 'Why the sea-bed, why, why, why?'
'Because he thought…'
'Caldwell didn't think, he didn't go on guess-work — he knew. Shelborne knows too.'
'What, John, for God's sake?'
I told her. Until that moment it had been undefined, uncrystallized in my mind.
She looked carefully at me. Then she burst out. 'No! No! You must be mad. It's too big…'
'That's just why,' I said. 'It's too big. Too big altogether. So was Caldwell's fate.'
9
Gruppe Eisbar
There was a little vein by the bridge of her nose; it began to beat noticeably.
'My father!' she exclaimed. 'My father! It isn't possible.'
'It fits the facts. That is why they were at Strandloper's Water. A name like the Hottentots' Paradise was good enough to camouflage their real reason.'
We stood staring at one another, while the enormous implications of what I had said dawned upon us. The little vein pulsed again. I gathered up the clothes she had selected.
'Rhennin must know about this — at once.'
She nodded without speaking, and we set off down the damp, wet-slicked corridor towards his quarters. She stumbled over the high lintel of the first water-tight door we came to.
Breaking the seriousness of our mood, I said, 'That's almost a Mazy Zed in the minuet.'
She smiled and hummed softly: '"… for she is such a sweet little craft, such a neat little, sweet little craft, such a bright little, light little, trim little craft…"'
Despite my preoccupation with what was racing round in my mind, I found myself grinning, too..'Koeltas puts it much more forcibly than Gilbert and Sullivan.'
She wrinkled her nose at my closeness. 'Seal!'
'They were sort of kind to me.'
She said, 'I thank the seals, but I think it will be better for everyone if I keep your fresh clothes until… until…'
I laughed at her shyness. '… until I can sample the Mazy Zed's bathrooms.'
I knocked on Rhennin's door and he opened it quickly. The cabin was as bare as the desert: a big desk and some untidy chairs matching the battleship grey of the uncarpeted steel decking. Big-headed rivets marched in battalions along the overhead beams. An air conditioner whined softly against the heavy pulse of the diamond pumps. Fluorescent lighting robbed Mary's make-up of colour and left her lips and nails a weird violet-blue. The cabin was stacked with charts — old German and new British ones on easels as well as my detailed surveys; a blown-up version of Angras Juntas hung over the back of a Kennedy rocking-chair near the desk. On its surface lay a glass tube of sea-diamonds.
Rhennin opened his mouth to greet us, but it closed again in surprise at our air. For a moment I looked at Mary. She knew what was coming.
I said without preamble, 'Felix, you believe in sea-diamonds, don't you?'
He was puzzled, uneasy. He shrugged. 'You two are damnably serious about something. Is this a conspiracy?'
I waited, not sure where to begin. The idea was so big, so fantastic, I had to put it to Rhennin the right way.
He got up, considering, watching our faces, and poured three brandies. 'Naturally I believe in sea-diamonds, John. You remember that when we started the Mazy Zed project nearly four years ago now we thrashed out whether there could be such a thing. It was basic to the project. It seems the most reasonable thing geologically that there should be an extension of shoreline deposits such as were found at Oranjemund into and under the sea. We know marine terraces exist. There is no reason to say that just because the high-water mark is here or there, the shoreline deposits should end at that line. Of course they don't. And today we've proved it — the Mazy Zed became history when she took diamonds from the sea.'
I shook my head. 'It wasn't history, Felix. It was all known before. There was nothing original about it at all.'
He became puzzled and angry. 'What the hell has bitten you, John? For years you've planned and schemed with me, backing your hunches, and now today, when the Mazy Zed has proved herself, you change your mind. I don't understand. Has Shelborne's attempt against you given you cold feet?'
I went over to the porthole. All that the light had left of the implacable shore was a faint luminosity. There was a distant sound of an engine being revved up: Bob Sheriff was on the job.
Mary came across and looked at the faint coastline with me. Caldwell would have felt proud of her, as I did, when she spoke. 'Diamonds are travellers, you know. Like all travellers, they seem to head instinctively for the sea. They are tough voyagers, though. Look at today's stones — you can't find any wear on them to measure the length of their journey. If they did show it, what John is about to tell you would be easier to demonstrate. I just want you to remember that — the diamonds on the Sperrgebiet, washed as they are by the ocean currents, did not come far.'
Mary's was a true Caldwell analogy; Caldwell had been that above all, a traveller. He had the wanderlust.
Rhennin waited. Mary went on: 'Currents, waves — remember them also. They shift all sorts of material from place to place and sort it, tirelessly, twenty-four hours a day, and they have done so for thousands of years.'
We saw the iron-bound Sperrgebiet, the wind and the sea, as a gigantic sorting-jig; Shelborne saw them as symbols of life and death.
Mary had given me the opening, and I followed up quickly. 'Felix, Mary is right: diamonds are travellers. But travellers must come from somewhere, mustn't they?'
'What are you trying to say?'
'Stratton told the court…'
'Stratton was a bore.'
The words tumbled out, not the way I had meant to muster them, but with the same rush and thud as the water through the Mazy Zed's pumps.
'Stratton told how diamonds were washed down by the Orange River, or other unnamed prehistoric rivers, into the sea and were then thrown back along the coast by the action of the currents…'
'We went into all this at the outset, John.'
'What we didn't go into was where do they come from, Felix? Today's haul, for example?'
'From the sea.'
The sea didn't make them.'
'You mean, from what part of the sea-bed did they originally come?'
'Listen: I believe that under the sea off the Sperrgebiet coast somewhere lies a single volcanic pipe, a bigger and better source of diamonds than either Kimberley or Cullinan, from which diamonds are washed ashore today — as they have been washed ashore for a million years…'
Mary supplemented, 'We think there is a parent crater, an undersea fountainhead.'
'Shelborne knows where it is,' I resumed. 'Caldwell discovered it. Shelborne murdered Ca
ldwell for his seabed concession. That's why he fought us in court. That is why he won't give in, even now. That is why he could afford to throw away a couple of big diamonds in a lodestone matrix to kill me. He knows the whereabouts of this fountainhead, but it is too big for him to tackle…'
Rhennin was on his feet: 'But not too big for the Mazy Zed}'
The Hottentots' Paradise was so much hooey. A man of Caldwell's integrity would not fall for that one. Nor would he abandon everything, including his wife and infant daughter…' I waved at Mary. '… for the sake of a pub tale like that. The parent crater under the sea from which all South-west Africa's fabulous diamonds have orginated — don't you see, man, how that discovery would have righted the balance, cancelled all Caldwell's previous monumental failures and ill luck? Oranjemund, the richest field in the world, is paltry compared to the fountainhead, because Oranjemund has only got in its terraces stones the parent rock can spare. Caldwell went after his big chance — his fate — but he missed again because Shelborne killed him at Strandloper's Water.'
Mary said quietly, 'I still don't believe that.'
Rhennin's voice trembled with excitement. 'By God, John! We've all become so bemused with the technical problems of mining diamonds — on land at Oranjemund or at sea in the Mazy Zed — that we've lost sight of the cardinal question of where they come from. We've had it so good that we never thought to look farther! We have been satisfied with the eighteen million pounds a year from diamonds that we can lay our hands on.'
'It took a man like Caldwell to find it,' I said, turning to Mary. 'He had to play the stakes big. Fate had tossed down the odds three times before and each time he had lost. He was playing for everything.'
Rhennin was carried away: 'When I started on the Mazy Zed idea I spent months analysing the diamond returns of defunct German companies which first worked the shore deposits. I wanted some indication whereto begin…'
The River of Diamonds Page 13