The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  Oppenheimer gave him a moment before saying, “Is he about to offer you a job?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I only wish I did.”

  “Would he have heard of this talk to move the Antwerp stocks to London? It’s only talk by the way. King Leopold and his government are adamantly opposed to such a move lest it be perceived by the Germans as a breach of Belgium’s policy of neutrality.”

  “Heydrich must know of it, Sir Ernest.”

  Again there was that moment’s pause, the careful searching of him. “We’re trapped, Richard. You, the Committee, all of us, by governments over which we have no control. Britain hedges, Belgium hedges, Germany makes its secret moves, and we, poor mortals, do what we must.”

  Sell diamonds. “Sir Ernest, the Germans are thinking of alternate supplies. I believe that soon they’ll be sending someone to Brazil. If I know him, it won’t be long before he realizes he has to head for the Congo.”

  “La Forminière, yes. The deposits at Mbuji-Mayi. Well, he might have some trouble there. Did you know we’ve just concluded a long-term agreement with the Belgian government?”

  Hagen hid his surprise. “No, I didn’t, but like others I assumed some arrangement might be in the offing.”

  “De Beers will buy all the stones from Mbuji-Mayi and Tshikapa, both the gem rough and the industrials, including the thirty million carats of crushing boart the Diamant Boart have in stock in Antwerp. In return, we’ve agreed to supply the Antwerp dealers with the best of each year’s production of high-quality gem diamonds from our mines.”

  Impressed by the extent of things, and the secrecy under which the agreement had been made, Hagen spoke his thoughts aloud. “That ensures Antwerp will remain the cutting center of the world unless …”

  Oppenheimer nodded grimly. “Unless there is a war. Try not to upset the Committee unduly, Richard. They’re nervous enough. Keep an eye on the Nazis and send us a signal if you think we ought not to wait any longer.”

  Among the diamonds on the tables were those that when cut and polished would be Jagers, the clear white stones. Oppenheimer picked up a small handful and let them trickle through his fingers. “I had a cable from America yesterday, Richard. We’ve done all the market studies and things look good. Do you know what we’re about to accomplish?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  The chairman’s look was distant, his thoughts lost to the dream. “We’re about to embark on an advertising campaign that’s designed to persuade the average American woman to want a diamond engagement ring. Up to now such a thing has been a matter of choice or chance, most couples preferring not to bother with a ring and certainly not with a diamond. Pearls, yes. Rubies—perhaps something a grandmother might give the girl. Imagine then the transformation in the eyes of each of those millions of girls when they know, Richard, that the box they have just received will contain the rarest and most precious gemstone of all. A pure white, absolutely clear and beautifully faceted diamond.”

  Oppenheimer tossed a hand. “I’m convinced this will succeed, and if it does, we’ll have an almost unlimited market for stones of a size that has previously been hard to sell at the best of times.”

  The smaller ones, the kind the average Joe could just afford.

  “We’re going to convince them, Richard, to hold on to their diamonds not just as an investment in their marriages, but in their financial futures. We’re going to eliminate once and for all the threat of that blessed overhang that haunts us!”

  They were miles ahead of everyone else in their thinking. That’s what it took.

  In silence they strolled the length of the sorting room—passed by a fortune or a pauper’s sum. There were diamonds with yellowish tinges, others that were a light coffee shade. Those that were clear white had been sorted from those that were colored. Among the fancies, those very rare and beautifully tinted stones, there were those of a deep emerald green, others of a soft and delicate rose, others still of a citrine yellow, a lemon yellow, a canary shade.

  There were even some clear black stones with a hidden fire that only the cutters and polishers could release. There were blue stones, too, but none as fine as the one he’d purchased.

  Oppenheimer said it for the two of them. “Fontainebleau … isn’t it odd that your diamond should have come from there?”

  On the way to Hagen’s club in St. James’s, Sir Ernest asked him about his gathering intelligence for the very few that would listen. “I’m not unaware of the way things are here in England, Richard. The people don’t want to believe Hitler means anything more than what he claims—namely, peace. The government, far from being totally ignorant, is very well aware of the situation. But there are those who would preach more than this, those who would urge rearmament at a far faster pace. If you are gathering information for them, then Herr Heydrich will have a great deal of interest in you. For the sake of us all, I sincerely hope you aren’t.”

  “I’m just a salesman, and up to now I’ve been allowed to travel freely within the Reich. I can’t help seeing their war machine in action. After all, I’m an essential part of it. Heydrich is not an easy man to comprehend.”

  “And Mr. Churchill?”

  “He knows nothing of me, nor have I any thoughts of trying to meet with him.”

  “Then perhaps my information is incorrect. We want you with us, Richard. You know there’s a place for you here. Why not consider it? A move to London would do you good.”

  “I will, Sir Ernest. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

  “Then stick to selling. That’s what you’re paid for.”

  “Would you like to acquire the stone?”

  Oppenheimer sadly shook his head. “I have too many. When things ease up a little, why, yes, I’d take it kindly if you’d sell it to me. At a handsome profit, of course.”

  Hagen was surprised that the chairman hadn’t asked him Dieter Karl’s name. Instead, he had told him about the arrangement with the Belgian government and La Forminière.

  Rain … constant rain. The river swollen beyond its banks, the red mud clinging to the boots, the knees, the hands. So heavy …

  Rain. The din of it. The way it got into everything, the bread, the tea, the porridge, the meat, the punky wood, the hammock at night.

  Rain. The racket it made. The way it ripped apart the leaves so high above them. The way a sudden deluge hit the shoulders and stung the skin.

  Rain on the backs of the blacks. Rain puddling on the ground behind them as they squatted and shit themselves. Rain in their haunted eyes, the terror of the unknown. Rain on their naked flanks. Rain in the singing of them as they fought to keep their loads and the long, long line of them followed the river.

  Rain. The smell of it. The sweet, sickening stench of everything. The warmth, the heat, the cold.

  From the streambed of the Tshiminina to that of the Tshikapa, then down the Kasai to the Lulua and up the Lulua to its juncture with the Luebo and the trading post.

  Rain on the jungle thatch. Rain dripping through on him. Rain. The cold. The shakes. The heat.

  Rain …

  “Richard. Richard, listen to me. It’s malaria, son.”

  The chills, the shakes coming on him so suddenly. Defenseless now, frightened, weak. Cold, hot, cold, hot. The bitter taste of whisky and quinine …

  Rain. The sound of it.

  Hagen shut his eyes and ran a shaky hand across his brow. As the late-morning train left the outskirts of London, the sweat clung to his fingers.

  The diamonds of Mbuji-Mayi had been a disappointment. The year had been 1917—just forty years after Stanley, the country still largely unexplored, the bush often hostile. For 155 days they had been on the trail, only to find at the end of it handfuls of diamonds that had had no value at all back then.

  After the malaria had passed, they had left the trading post and had cut overland. The rain forest had finally given way to open woodland, brush and savanna. The sun had burned down.

  Mbuji-Mayi had la
in on a low plateau. There had been diamonds in the gravel of most of the streams, diamonds virtually everywhere they had dug their grid of test pits through the ocher-red lateritic soils to the beds of old rivers now long since moved on. Ten, fifteen, twenty and thirty meters down, the diamondiferous gravels had all been thin, the stones seemingly spread over an immense area.

  Never one to leave a region until he had worked it to death, his father had dammed off a bend in the Katsha River and had made it swing west of them. With the riverbed baked under the glaring sun, they had set the blacks to work screening the gravels and panning the coarser sands.

  All the indicator minerals had been there, the tiny brown crystals of zircon, the deep red grains of pyrope garnet, uvarovite, too, and ilmenite. Diamonds … lots and lots of diamonds.

  Each pan, each nest of screens had held them. By the end of a month they had had handfuls of crushing boart—cubes with dimpled surfaces and weak, greasy colors of yellow, brown, green, black, gray and white. But not one gem, not one good, clear crystal that might have helped to pay for things. Just boart. A bust. Damn!

  Had they been employed by La Forminière it would have helped. Had they had permission, that, too, would have helped.

  As it was, not only had they been in the territory illegally, they had done so over the governor’s expressed refusal to let them prospect.

  The concession, the right to search for diamonds, had gone to others.

  The cofferdam had kept the river away long enough. Hagen recalled how he had placed the charges at intervals along the length of it. By the age of fourteen he’d done this sort of thing often enough. But now he was to do it entirely on his own.

  “What delays did you use, Richie?”

  The black powder fuses had burned at a rate of one foot per minute. “Sixteen feet on number-one, twelve on number-two, and eight on number-three. I can run between them, Dad. By the time I get to number-four I’ll still have six minutes to get clear.”

  His father had cast an eye over the naked bed of the river to the cofferdam beyond. No one had been around. The blacks had all been moved well away. Since leaving the trading post they hadn’t seen another soul. Even so, they both looked upstream as far as the bend would allow.

  “All right, son, go and light them.”

  On the silence of the day had come the excited murmurings of the blacks.

  Number-one’s fuse had sputtered as it caught. Number-two’s had ignited. With number-three there had been trouble. Finally in desperation he had cut a foot of it away and had got it going.

  Running then, he had made it to number-four. Again the fuse had sputtered.

  He’d got it going, had started to run, to get clear …

  “A boat! A bloody boat!”

  For one brief second the bend, the chocolate-brown river, the green haze of the scrub and the sky beyond had appeared before him.

  Then he had heard the beat of the drums. A canoe … white pith helmets … rifles … the governor …

  “Richie, don’t! Richie!”

  Hagen shut his eyes and wiped the sweat away. The fever raged. His shirt was soaked with sweat.

  He remembered the day, the river, the flotilla of canoes and how it had drawn nearer and nearer to the cofferdam. He remembered how he had thought they would all be killed.

  The burning fuse had been at his feet, the cutters in his hand. He had run from charge to charge and had cut the fuses, but number-one had been too short. Number-one had had to be dug out of the boulders and earth with bare hands clawing, clawing now, the fuse burning faster and faster, he shouting at himself to throw the dynamite into the river, to throw it as far away from the canoes as he could …

  They had found him downstream on a sandbar lying face into the sun with the vultures circling above him.

  Others had moved in on the prospect, and his father had gone off to war.

  “Porter, could you get that bag down for me?”

  “Right you are, sir. Now watch your step. Will there be anyone waiting for you?”

  “My mother, I should think.”

  “That’s what mothers are for.”

  “Not this one.”

  She was standing at the far end of the platform, her ash-blond hair cut short and pinned back by barrettes, the suit of dove-gray tweed, her figure still that of a willow wand.

  As he walked toward her, all the bitterness of his father’s death and her remarriage within one week of it made her swim before his eyes.

  Hagen wished she hadn’t done it. He wished he could bring back the past. If only he hadn’t shaved. If only he stank of gin and beer and sweat. If only he’d just come out of the bush …

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Lois Anne Winfield—Mrs. Frank Albert Winfield—threw her stern blue eyes swiftly up at him and saw the grin, wanted to smack it from his face. How could he do this to her? How could he? “Richard. Oh, Richard, for God’s sake, you’ve got malaria again. Couldn’t you have waited? Couldn’t you have come to see me just once without reminding me of your father?”

  Reaching up, she felt his brow. Reaching down, she took the suitcase from him.

  Then she stood there looking at him. “Darling, why? Why must it always be like this? I was so looking forward to seeing you.”

  “Where’s Duncan? Didn’t you tell him I was coming?”

  He was still the same, still intractable, still blaming her for everything. “Get in the car, damn you! I’ll have to call Dr. Simpson as soon as we’re home. I only hope for your sake and for your stepfather’s and mine that he’s not off birding again.”

  “Mother, I asked about Duncan. I have to know if you told him.”

  “You’re in no condition to … Oh, for heaven’s sake, he’s not at the gate house—hasn’t been there in ages. He’s at Maiden Castle, at the hill fort again. At least I think he is, and at times like this I wish to hell he’d stay there and leave us alone. You’ve got to go to bed. The fever has to break. Please try to behave for once.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to see Duncan. You should have told him.”

  “I did! I drove down there as soon as I got your wire, only he was someplace in France. The girl didn’t know where.”

  “Then I’ll drop you off at the house.”

  “Richard, you can’t do that.”

  “Mother, I have to see him.”

  “Later. When you’re better, and not before then.”

  By nightfall he was delirious and running a temperature of 105°F.

  “Richard … Richard, please try to calm down.”

  “Brazil … Duncan, I shouldn’t have asked Dieter to take Dee Dee to Brazil. I should have got her out myself.”

  “Richard, I warned your father not to take you back into the bush.”

  “Munich … I’ve got to get back to Munich, got to ask Irmgard about Dieter. Can’t take that chance. Can’t let them know what I’m doing.”

  “The dynamite. Richard, listen to me. Darling, I knew something was going to happen to you. I begged your father not to take you with him.”

  The panic left him to be replaced by an icy calm. “Krantz, Otto. Berliner, about fifty-five or sixty years of age. Ex-soldier. Tough. Thorough—painstakingly so. Gestapo. Get me everything you can on him, Duncan.”

  His voice fell away. He gave a gentle smile, then laughed cruelly at himself. “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk … of shoes—and ships,’ and guns and tanks!”

  She caught her breath, but he said nothing further, and after a while she thought he had finally drifted off to sleep.

  As if the day, the moment, were long ago and he but a boy, Lois Anne Winfield saw him lying there in a thatched hut in the jungle. Dirt was everywhere. Dung was everywhere, but neither he nor his father gave them any notice. They never did.

  Flies … dear God, why did there have to be so many flies? Or rats, for that matter? Or snakes? Or the natives, their precious blacks, the Bantu who wondered at the color of her skin and liked to t
ouch it when she least expected?

  Richard and she had been reading the Alice books over and over again, because they shut out the world she had come to hate and brought her closer to the son she had feared she’d lose.

  “Folke-Wolfe Condor 200. Maximum speed, 224 miles per hour. Rate of climb, 656 feet per minute. Ceiling, 19,030 feet. Range … Duncan, the range is 2200 miles. They can hit us from anywhere. The bomb load is 4,626 pounds.”

  “Richard … darling, what in the hell have you been up to?”

  He was so like his father, so impossible. She wrung the cloth and clamped it to his brow. She sponged him off and tried to turn him over.

  Just as she had done so many times before, she whispered, “Sleep … sleep, damn you, Richard. The fever will soon pass.”

  “Arlette … can’t become involved with her. Must break it off before it’s too late.”

  She shook him hard. “Richard, you’re in England! You’re safe! No one’s going to bother you here.”

  Fog rolled in from Lyme Bay to blanket the Dorset hills. On Black Down Heath it drifted eerily, smothering the gardens at Inverlin Cottage and all but hiding the many chimney pots that crowned the brooding Tudor manor house.

  Hagen stood beside the Bentley that was parked on the circular drive.

  The days had passed on into the first week of September, bringing with them the cold, hard shock of reality. The attack of malaria had gradually lessened, the last of the fevers breaking two days ago. But the whole business had left him extremely weak and anxious.

  He was lucky it hadn’t happened in Germany, lucky only his mother had been there. He knew he had said things he shouldn’t have.

  Putting on his fedora, he looked up to the leaded windows of the library.

  His mother didn’t move. In her nightgown, she stood there staring down at him from beyond the glass, and he knew then that he had awakened her, and he felt sorry for this.

  She looked like someone out of the Brontë sisters, locked up in this great tomb of a place with only her garden and her husband to keep her warm.

  “Richard,” she whispered. “Richard, what is it with you? Are you so like your father you care nothing for those who love you?”