Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Ikey also realised that if Hannah and David and his two sons in New South Wales were determined to wait until his death so that they might claim the entire contents of the Whitechapel safe, he was left with a most peculiar dilemma: how to convey his combination number without telling either Mary or Hawk about the safe until he was certain he was on his death bed. It was still his greatest hope that Hannah and David would relent and agree to a fifty-fifty share of the safe and that Hannah would entrust the opening of the safe to his youngest son Mark and to Hawk, who would each separately hold a half of the combination.

  Ikey had several times made this proposal only to have it rejected by Hannah and David. They insisted on the eight-part split and grew increasingly confident that they would soon be in possession of the entire contents as Sarah would often express her genuine concern at Ikey’s frailty when she visited her family in New Norfolk.

  Hannah knew also that Ikey could not openly leave his half of the treasure to Mary or her nigger brat in his will for fear that the authorities might confiscate it. Nor could he write his combination into it because, as his wife, she had the right to attend the reading of the will so that, even if Ikey told Mary or Hawk his combination number, without the addition of her own they could do nothing.

  David had once suggested, if only to spite them, that Ikey on his death bed might go to the authorities about the Whitechapel safe, so that they received nothing. Hannah knew this to be impossible given Ikey’s nature. And in this she was right. Even if Ikey had not wished to leave his share of the treasure to Mary and Hawk, he could never bring himself to allow the laws of England to triumph over him, even though he should be dead. Rather a thousand times the perfidious Hannah and her odious sons than the greedy coffers of England.

  Ikey would have liked to tell Mary about the safe and its contents but he dared not do so for fear she would immediately know that the incident where David had presented him with the severed finger of an Aboriginal child had been brought about, not by his son’s demand for Mary’s brewery, but because of Ikey’s reluctance to trust them with his half of the combination to the Whitechapel safe.

  Though it was not possible to prove, Mary strongly believed that Hannah and David were more than mere scheming opportunists when they set up the finger scam. She was convinced they had genuinely attempted to kidnap Tommo and Hawk and their plan had gone disastrously wrong. Though Ikey did not admit it, he, too, had always felt that David knew a great deal more than he had said.

  But if Ikey did not have the courage to face Mary’s wrath, he knew that before he died he must confess his guilt and tell her of the reward he was to give her as penance. To this end Ikey taught Hawk how to value jewellery and as much as he could about the characteristics of each precious stone and how they should be inspected for purity. He purchased a set of gold scales and a testing kit and drilled Hawk in the weighing of gold and silver and in the testing of both to see if they were genuine and of what quality, though Hawk often declared himself puzzled that Ikey should wish him to be so interested. One day, while Ikey was explaining the valuation of diamonds and carefully drawing the various cuts of the stones, Hawk signalled that he was impatient with the lesson and wished it to end.

  ‘Please, my dear, you must pay attention!’ Ikey had said in something of a panic. ‘There is a fortune waiting for you in this knowledge!’

  ‘Why?’ Hawk signalled, his face sullen. ‘I shall be a brewer. What has the cut of diamonds got to do with the brewing of ale?’

  ‘If you are to get the machinery you will need, and own the land to grow your own hops as you must if you are to succeed, you will pay very close attention to what I say,’ Ikey insisted.

  Hawk was seldom impolite in his manners and though he knew Ikey to be a villain, he loved him, but now he had had enough. ‘I grow weary of this stuff, Ikey. Mary says our great good fortune, our luck is in hard work and the making of good beer, that this is luck more than enough!’

  Ikey looked at Hawk and then said quietly, ‘Hawk, I shall give you a riddle and you must believe me, should you find the answer you may be halfway to owning a fortune which be a king’s ransom!’

  Hawk, who was very adroit at listening to his stomach, hearing with his eyes and seeing with his ears as Ikey had taught him, knew with absolute certainty that Ikey was no longer playing, or even attempting to teach him yet another tedious lesson. He indicated to Ikey that he was listening most carefully.

  Ikey relaxed, regaining his composure. ‘Ah, my dear, you ‘ave done well, very well and exceedingly well and weller than most wells and better than most bests. I be most proud, you has the same affinity with numbers as Mary and perhaps you will become even better in time.’ Ikey paused and appeared to be momentarily lost in thought, then he looked up at Hawk. ‘Words can become numbers, just like the signs you now use to talk to me can become words. There are secret, silent numbers to be found in the most innocent words if you know how to decipher them. A code o’ numbers to unlock a fortune!’

  Hawk became immediately interested, for not only did he sense that Ikey had never been more serious, but that he was about to give him a riddle. There was nothing he loved more than solving one of his mentor’s riddles. His eyebrow arched and his hands motioned Ikey to continue.

  ‘Here is a riddle made to a poem to test you beyond all solving, my dear. But should you solve it, it be half o’ the key to a great fortune.’

  ‘And then shall I have the other half when I have solved this riddle?’ Hawk asked wide-eyed.

  Ikey shook his head. ‘I cannot say, but without the answer to my riddle you have no hope. With it, there be a great chance that you will gain the fortune for Mary and yourself.’

  ‘Will you give it to me then?’ Hawk’s hands shook with excitement as he made the words with his fingers.

  Ikey cackled the way he had done when Hawk and Tommo were young and a new lesson was about to come from him, and he clapped his hands and rolled his eyes in secret congratulation at his own cleverness, just like old times, then he began to recite.

  If perchance I should die

  And come to God’s eternal rest

  Let me in plain pine coffin lie

  Hands clasped upon my breast.

  Let a minyan say kaddish for me

  in words ancient and profound

  In a chapel white, there safe it be

  ‘neath familiar English ground.

  On my flesh these words be writ:

  ‘To my one and only blue dove’

  To this cipher be one more to fit

  then add roses ringed to love.

  Hawk had never before been confronted with a riddle so elaborate or beautiful of rhyme and he fetched quill and paper and made Ikey write it down so that he knew every word was correct.

  ‘Remember always,’ Ikey chuckled as he read what he’d written, ‘the answer is at arm’s length and words can have two meanings!’

  ‘Numbers from the words and words what has two meanings?’ Hawk signalled, wanting to be sure he had it right.

  ‘Aye, words what mean other things and numbers from words, if all is done properly you will be left with a three digit number! There be three more to come, six in all!’ With this said, Ikey would cooperate no further.

  Hawk worked for several weeks in what time he could spare on the riddle, but came no closer to solving it. Finally he had returned to Ikey, but he was evasive, other than to say, ‘It be about London’.

  This helped Hawk very little, for while Ikey had talked a great deal to the two boys about London when they’d been younger, he had only the knowledge of what he’d read about the great city and no more.

  Finally, one evening when he and Mary were walking home from Strickland Falls after work, ashamed at his ineptitude, Hawk begged Mary to help him, telling her about the riddle and explaining what Ikey had said about it being half of a great treasure.

  Hawk at fourteen was considered a grown man. He already towered above Mary and stood fully six feet. Wit
h his serious demeanour, many took him to be much older. He worked a full day with Mary at the Potato Factory and was reliable and hardworking, though Mary sometimes wished he were not quite so serious-minded for a young lad.

  Hawk handed her the slip of paper with the poem and Mary, who had much on her mind, read it somewhat cursorily and was unable to venture an opinion so she simply said, ‘It be a nice poem, lovey.’ Though in truth she thought it somewhat maudlin and typical of Ikey’s increasing preoccupation with his own demise.

  ‘What’s a minyan and kaddish?’ Hawk signalled.

  ‘It’s Jewish religion, a minyan be ten men what’s got to be present when a Jew dies and kaddish, that be the prayer they says at the funeral,’ Mary replied.

  ‘Ikey said it be about London and a treasure, a treasure in London,’ Hawk repeated and then asked with his hands, walking backwards so that Mary could plainly see his fingers, ‘Did he ever say anything about a treasure to you?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘Careful, you’ll fall,’ she cautioned, then with Hawk once again at her side added, ‘Ikey be very tight-fisted about money, tight-mouthed too, tight everything!’ She laughed. ‘He often stored stolen goods in all sorts o’ places when he was prince o’ all of London’s fences.’ Mary stopped, her head to one side and seemed to be thinking. ‘Maybe it be the number of a house where he’s got something stashed?’ Then she added ruefully, ‘Well, it ain’t much use to him now. He can’t go back to find it and he won’t trust any o’ his sons not to tell Hannah, so he might as well. . .’ She stopped suddenly in mid-sentence and pointed to Hawk and said softly, ‘. . .send you!’

  Hawk looked startled at the idea. ‘What do you mean?’

  Mary did not answer for a moment, then she shrugged. ‘I don’t know, lovey, I’ll think about it tonight. Make a copy o’ this for me, will you?’ She handed the poem back to Hawk.

  Hawk nodded though he looked anxious. ‘You’ll tell me what you thinks, won’t you? I be most anxious to be the one to work out the riddle.’

  Mary laughed. ‘Don’t worry, lovey, it be more’n a mouthful, believe me. My stomach tells me Ikey be onto something what ain’t no nursery rhyme.’

  ‘A three digit number has to come out of all this,’ Hawk said finally, folding the poem and placing it back in his pocket.

  That night, after she had made Ikey his tea, Mary sat at the kitchen table with the poem and read it more carefully. The first incongruity which struck her were the words ‘chapel white’. In the context of a Jewish funeral these seemed strangely Christian. Why would someone of the Jewish persuasion use them about his funeral?

  ‘Chapel white?’ she said aloud. She had passed the Duke Street synagogue a thousand times as a child and chapel to her was a word used by the Wesleyans and not at all appropriate to the ancient, gloomy building the Jews used as their church. Almost the moment she thought this the words transposed in her mind. ‘White-chapel!’ she exclaimed triumphantly, clicking her fingers. Mary’s nimble mind now began to sniff at the words in quite a different way. Long after her usual time for bed she had isolated a group of words which could have a double meaning or be fitted together: safe, beneath, familiar and finally, ground. She was too tired to continue and finally went to bed.

  The next morning after breakfast, when Ikey had left to totter down to his cottage in Elizabeth Street to sleep, she gave the words to Hawk.

  ‘Work with these, there may be something,’ she said explaining the link between the words ‘chapel’ and ‘white’, into the word Whitechapel. Several days passed and one morning Hawk came into Mary’s office at Strickland Falls and gave her his brilliant smile. Then he started to signal, his fingers working frantically.

  ‘The safe in Whitechapel containing Ikey’s fortune is within the house beneath the ground!’

  ‘Huh?’ Mary said, taken aback. ‘What you mean, lovey?’

  Hawk handed Mary a piece of paper and Mary saw that it was written somewhat as an equation. But first he had transcribed the lines:

  In a chapel white, there safe it be

  ‘neath familiar English ground

  Safe = Safety + Iron box. ‘Neath = under. Familiar = family. English = London. Ground = soil + below surface.

  Beneath these careful notations Hawk had written in his beautiful hand.

  Translation: The treasure be in a safe below the ground in the family home in Whitechapel.

  ‘Good boy!’ Mary beamed, delighted with her son’s tenacity and careful analysis. But then she added, ‘That be the second verse, what of the first and the third?’

  Hawk signalled that he was convinced that the first verse was meant to deflect any suspicion of a hidden meaning and meant exactly what it said. Then he frowned. ‘Last verse be most difficult, Mama.’

  Mary set aside her barley mash register, a ledger in which she kept the temperature of the barley mash as it came out of the crusher. ‘Here, let me see that poem again?’ she asked.

  Hawk produced the poem and Mary read the first and the last verse. She agreed that with the first verse Ikey had meant to mislead by the very fact that there was no ambiguity within it. But the last verse sounded very strange and she read it aloud.

  On my flesh these words be writ:

  ‘To my one and only blue dove’

  To this cipher be one more to fit

  then add roses ringed to love.

  Mary pointed to the word ‘cipher’. ‘This verse is where the numbers be,’ then added, ‘but what numbers? Why does we need numbers?’

  Hawk smiled and Mary was delighted at his sudden lightness of mood. ‘Like the safe you bought, Mama, they be a combination!’ he signalled.

  ‘Oh my Gawd!’ Mary cried. ‘You’re right, you’re dead right!’ Her heart started to beat so loudly that she could hear the thumping of it in her throat. ‘If we can get the numbers from the verse then we’ve got the combination to the safe, the fortune!’

  Hawk shook his head slowly.

  ‘What you mean?’ Mary cried, disappointment written on her face.

  Hawk’s fingers spoke. ‘Half, we got half the combination.’

  ‘Half?’

  ‘Ikey said the poem only be half, three digits. Six is what’s needed.’

  Mary had in the past often wondered about Ikey’s persistence with his family, for whom, with the exception of Sarah and perhaps Ann, she knew he had a general dislike, as well as a great loathing for Hannah and in recent years David. His periodical visits to New Norfolk, taken with their history with the Newmans and the debacle when he had come out of Port Arthur, had never made any sense. Ikey was a loner by nature and his pretence at being a diligent and caring family man had never convinced Mary in the least. She had often urged him, for his own peace of mind, to cut his ties completely, but he had always made the same reply: ‘We have unfinished business, my dear.’

  Now Mary knew what it was. Hannah had one half of the combination to the safe in their home in White-chapel and would not part with it.

  Mary urged Hawk to keep trying to isolate the numbers as she herself would, but admitted, ‘Alas, I doesn’t know nothing useful about the last verse, save that it should lead to three numbers, but if we should somehow find them then you must not tell Ikey!’

  Mary realised that if she had half of the combination she had the means to avenge herself on Hannah Solomon. But she simply told Hawk of the probability that Hannah possessed the second set of numbers. Hawk looked disappointed. ‘It don’t matter, lovey. We will find a way. Trust Mama!It be most terrible important you stay stum! Ikey must not know, we tell him nothing, all right?’

  Hawk nodded, his fingers working fast and his face took on a look of determination. ‘I shall solve it or die!’

  Mary grabbed him and kissed him. ‘Life is too precious that you should die for money, lovey. If you has to die, then die for love!’

  ‘Like you was prepared to do for me?’ Hawk’s fingers spoke and his eyes were serious.

  Tears rolled down Mary’s che
eks. ‘You and Tommo, gladly,’ she whispered.

  ‘Mama, we shall find Tommo too!’ Hawk’s fingers said. ‘And I shall never tell Ikey if we should find the numbers.’

  Mary and Hawk became obsessed with solving the riddle of the last verse and were hardly able to wait for Ikey to go to his ledgers before they began each evening.

  The third line in the last verse, ‘To this cipher be one more to fit’, seemed at first obvious to Mary. The second set of numbers, Hannah’s set, were the one more to fit, which would give them the total combination. Hawk agreed that this might be so, but then logically the numbers must come from the first two lines in the last verse and, in particular, from the second line, ‘To my one and only blue dove’, as the first line of the last verse was simply a location of some sort and the final line, ‘then add roses ringed to love’, was an addition to whatever discovery or number they would make in the second line.

  On my flesh these words be writ: = location

  ‘To my one and only blue dove’ = key to numbers

  To this cipher be one more to fit = Hannah’s combination

  then add roses ringed to love = additional information.

  It did not take them long to realise that the line ‘On my flesh these words be writ’ must represent a tattoo worn by Ikey, and while Mary had slept with Ikey perhaps a dozen times while they were joint owners of Egyptian Mary’s she did not remember any such tattoo. However, she admitted to herself that the dreaded deed took place in the dark and that he might quite possibly have obtained the tattoo while a convict in Van Die-men’s Land, in which case she would know nothing about it.