by Wilbur Smith
‘I’ll take a gin, thank you.’ He poured from a special bottle that he produced from under the counter. They both knew that the colourless liquid was water and the silver shilling would go directly into the barman’s pocket.
‘Your health.’ He leaned over the counter, prepared to be affable for a shilling and the possibility of another.
They chatted idly, agreeing that times were hard and would get harder, that they needed rain and that the Government was to blame for it all.
‘How long have you been in town? I haven’t seen you around.’
‘One day – one day too long,’ Lothar smiled.
‘I didn’t catch your name.’ And when Lothar told him, he showed genuine interest for the first time.
‘Hey,’ he called down the bar to his other customers. ‘Do you know who this is? It’s Lothar De La Rey! Don’t you remember the reward posters during the war? He is the one that broke the hearts of the rooinekke.’ ‘Red neck’ was the derogatory term for the newly arrived Englishman whose neck was inflamed by the sun. ‘Man, he blew up the train at Gemsbokfontein.’
So great was their approbation that one of them even bought him another beer, but prudently limited his largesse to Lothar alone.
‘I’m looking for a job,’ Lothar told them when they had all become firm friends, and they all laughed.
‘I heard there was work out at the H’ani Mine,’ Lothar persisted.
‘I’d know if there was,’ the barman assured him. ‘The drivers from the mine come in here every week.’
‘Would you give them a good word about me?’ Lothar asked.
‘I’ll do better. You come in Monday and I’ll set you up with Gerhard Fourie, the chief driver. He is a good pal of mine. He’ll know what’s happening out there.’
By the time Lothar left, he was established as a good fellow and a member of the inner clique of the corner bar, and when he returned four nights later he was hailed by the barman.
‘Fourie is here,’ he told Lothar. ‘Down at the end of the bar. I’ll introduce you after I’ve served these others.’
The bar-room was half full this evening, and Lothar was able to study the driver. He was a powerful-looking man of middle age, with a big slack gut from sitting hours each day behind the driving-wheel. He was balding but had grown the hair above his right ear and then plastered it across his pate with brilliantine. His manner was bluff and loud; he and his mates had the well-satisfied air of men who had just performed a difficult task. He didn’t look like a man that you could threaten or frighten, but Lothar had not yet finally decided on what approach to make.
The barman beckoned to him. ‘Like you to meet a good friend.’ They shook hands. The driver turned it into a contest but Lothar had half-expected that and shortened his grip, taking his fingers rather than his palm so that Fourie could not exert full force. They held each other’s eyes until the driver winced and tried to pull his hand away. Lothar let him go.
‘Buy you a drink.’ Lothar felt easier now – the man was not as tough as he put out, and when the barman told them who Lothar was and related an exaggerated version of some of his exploits during the war, Fourie’s manner became almost fawning and obsequious.
‘Look here, man.’ He drew Lothar aside and lowered his voice. ‘Erik tells me you’re looking for a job out at the H’ani Mine. Well, you can forget it, and that’s straight. They haven’t taken on any new men in a year or longer.’
‘Yes.’ Lothar nodded glumly. ‘Since I asked Erik about the job, I’ve learned the truth about the H’ani Mine. It will be terrible for you all when it happens.’
The driver looked uneasy. ‘What are you talking about, man? What truth is this?’
‘Why, I thought you’d know.’ Lothar seemed amazed by his ignorance. ‘They are going to close the mine in August. Shut it down. Pay everybody off.’
‘Good Christ, no!’ There was fear in Fourie’s eyes. ‘That’s not true – it can’t be true.’ The man was a coward, gullible, easily impressed and even more easily influenced. Lothar was grimly satisfied.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s best to know the truth, isn’t it?’
‘Who told you this?’ Fourie was terrified. He drove past the hobo camp down by the railway every week. He had seen the legion of the unemployed.
‘I am walking out with one of the women who works for Abraham Abrahams.’ He was the attorney who conducted all the business of the H’ani Mine in Windhoek. ‘She saw the letters from Mrs Courtney in Cape Town. There is no doubt. The mine is shutting down. They can’t sell the diamonds. Nobody is buying diamonds, not even in London and New York.’
‘Oh my God! My God!’ whispered Fourie. ‘What are we going to do? My wife isn’t well and we’ve got the six children. Sweet Jesus, my kids will starve.’
‘It’s all right for somebody like you. I’ll bet you’ve got a couple of hundred quid saved up. You’ll be all right.’
But Fourie shook his head.
‘Well, if you haven’t got anything saved, you’d best put a few pounds aside before they lay you off in August.’
‘How does a man do that? How do I save – with a wife and six kids?’ Fourie demanded hopelessly.
‘I tell you what.’ Lothar took his arm in a friendly concerned grip. ‘Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy a bottle of brandy. Let’s go some place where we can talk.’
The sun was up by the time Lothar got back to the camp the following morning. They had emptied the brandy bottle while they talked the night away. The driver was intrigued and tempted by Lothar’s proposition but unsure and afraid.
Lothar had to explain and convince him of every single point, particularly of his own safety. ‘Nobody will ever be able to point a finger at you. I give you my sacred word on it. You’ll be protected even if something goes wrong – and nothing will go wrong.’
Lothar had used all his powers of persuasion, and he was tired now as he trudged through the encampment and squatted down beside Hendrick.
‘Coffee?’ he asked and belched the taste of old brandy into his mouth.
‘Finished.’ Hendrick shook his head.
‘Where is Manfred?’
Hendrick pointed with his chin. Manfred was sitting under a thorn bush at the far end of the camp. The girl Sarah was beside him, their blond heads almost touching as they pored over a sheet of newsprint. Manfred was writing on the margin of the page with a charcoal stick from the camp fire.
‘Manie is teaching her to read and write,’ Hendrick explained.
Lothar grunted and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. His head ached from the brandy.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’ve got our man.’
‘Ah!’ Hendrick grinned. ‘Then we will need the horses.’
The private railway coach had once belonged to Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers Diamond Company. Centaine Courtney had purchased it for a fraction of the price that a new carriage would have cost her, a fact that gave her satisfaction. She was still a Frenchwoman and knew the value of a sou and a franc. She had brought out a young designer from Paris to redecorate the carriage in the Art Deco style, which was all the rage, and he had been worth every penny of his fee.
She looked around the saloon, at the uncluttered lines of the furnishings, at the whimsical nude nymphs which supported the bronze light-fittings and the Aubrey Beardsley designs inlaid with exquisite workmanship into the lightwood panelling and she remembered that the designer had struck her at first as being a homosexual, with his long flowing locks, his darkly decadent eyes and the features of a beautiful, bored and cynical faun. Her first estimate had been far wide of the truth, as she had discovered to her delight on the circular bed which he had installed in the coach’s main bedroom suite. She smiled at the memory and then checked the smile as she saw that Shasa was watching her.
‘You know, Mater, I sometimes think I can see what you are thinking, just by looking into your eyes.’ He said these disconcerting things sometimes, and she was sure that he had grown another inch in
the last week.
‘I certainly hope that you cannot.’ She shivered. ‘It’s cold in here.’ The designer had incorporated, at enormous expense, a refrigeration machine which cooled the air in the saloon. ‘Do turn that tiling off, chéri.’
She stood up from her desk and went out through the frosted glass doors onto the balcony of the coach and the hot desert air rushed at her and flattened her skirts across her narrow boyish hips. She lifted her face to the sun and let the wind ruffle her short curly hair.
‘What time is it?’ she asked with her eyes closed and face uplifted, and Shasa who had followed her out leaned against the balcony rail and consulted his wristwatch.
‘We should be crossing the Orange river in the next ten minutes, if the engine driver has kept us on schedule.’
‘I never feel as though we are home until I cross the Orange.’ Centaine went to lean beside him and slipped her arm through his.
The Orange river drained the western watershed of the southern African continent, rising high in the snowy mountains of Basutoland and running down fourteen hundred miles through grassy veld and wild gorges, at some seasons a clear slow trickle and at other times a thunderous brown flood bringing down the rich chocolate silts so that some called it the Nile of the south. It was the boundary between the Cape of Good Hope and the former German colony of South West Africa.
The locomotive whistled and the coupling jolted as the brakes squealed.
‘We are slowing for the bridge.’ Shasa leaned out over the balcony, and Centaine bit back the caution that came automatically to her lips.
‘Beg your pardon, you can’t baby him forever, Missus,’ Jock Murphy had advised her. ‘He’s a man now, and a man’s got to take his own chances.’
The tracks curved down towards the river, and they could see the Daimler riding on the flat bed behind the locomotive. It was a new vehicle, Centaine changed them every year. However, it also was yellow, as they all were, but with a black bonnet and black piping around the doors. The train journey to Windhoek saved them the onerous drive across the desert, but there was no line out to the mine.
‘There it is!’ Shasa called. ‘There is the bridge!’
The steelwork seemed feathery and insubstantial as it crossed the half mile of riverbed, leapfrogging across its concrete buttresses. The regular beat of the bogey wheels over the cross ties altered as they ran out onto the span, and the steel girders beneath them rang like an orchestra.
‘The river of diamonds,’ Centaine murmured as she leaned shoulder to shoulder with Shasa and peered down into the coffee-brown waters that swirled around the piers of the bridge beneath them.
‘Where do the diamonds come from?’ Shasa asked. He knew the answer, of course, but he liked to hear her tell it to him.
‘The river gathers them up, from every little pocket and crevice and pipe along its course. It picks up those that were flung into the air during the volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the continent’s existence. For hundreds of millions of years it has been concentrating the diamonds and carrying them down towards the coast.’ She glanced sideways at him. ‘And why aren’t they worn away, like all the other pebbles?’
‘Because they are the hardest substance in nature. Nothing wears or scratches a diamond,’ he answered promptly.
‘Nothing is harder or more beautiful,’ she agreed, and held up her right hand before his face so that the huge marquis cut diamond on her forefinger dazzled him. ‘You will grow to love them. Everybody who works with them comes to love them.’
‘The river,’ he reminded her. He loved her voice. The husky trace of her accent intrigued him. ‘Tell me about the river,’ he demanded, and listened avidly as she went on.
‘Where the river runs into the sea, it has thrown its diamonds up on the beaches. Those beaches are so rich in diamonds that they are the forbidden area, the Spieregebied.’
‘Could you fill your pockets with diamonds, just pick them up like fallen fruit in the orchard?’
‘It’s not as easy as that,’ she laughed. ‘You could search for twenty years and not find a single stone, but if you knew where to look and had even the most primitive equipment and a great deal of luck—’
‘Why can’t we go in there, Mater?’
‘Because, mon chéri, it is all taken. It belongs to a man named Oppenheimer – Sir Ernest Oppenheimer – and his company called De Beers.’
‘One company owns it all. That’s not fair!’ he protested, and Centaine was delighted to notice the acquisitive sparkle in his eyes for the first time. Without a healthy measure of avarice, he would not be capable of carrying through the plans she was so carefully laying for him. She had to teach him to be greedy – for wealth and for power.
‘He owns the Orange river concessions,’ she nodded, ‘and he owns the Kimberley and Wesselton and Bultfontein and all the other great producing mines, but more, much more than that, he controls the sale of every single stone, even those produced by us, the few little independents—’
‘He controls us – he controls the H’ani?’ Shasa demanded indignantly, his smooth cheeks flushing.
Centaine nodded. ‘We have to offer every diamond we mine to his Central Selling Organization, and he will set a price upon it.’
‘And we have to accept his price?’
‘No, we don’t! But we would be very unwise not to do so.’
‘What could he do to us if we refused?’
‘Shasa, I have told you often before. Don’t fight with somebody stronger than yourself. There aren’t many people stronger than us – not in Africa anyway – but Sir Ernest Oppenheimer is one of them.’
‘What could he do?’ Shasa persisted.
‘He could eat us up, my darling, and nothing would give him greater pleasure. Each year we become richer and more attractive to him. He is the one man in the world that we have to be afraid of, especially if we were rash enough to come near this river of his.’ She swept a gesture across the wide river.
Although it had been named Orange by its Dutch discoverers for the Stadtholders of the House of Orange, the name could have as readily applied to its startling orange-coloured sandbanks. The bright plumage of the waterfowl clustered upon them were like precious stones set in red gold.
‘He owns the river?’ Shasa was surprised and perplexed.
‘Not legally, but you approach it at your own peril for he protects it and the diamonds it contains with his jealous wrath.’
‘So there are diamonds here?’
Eagerly Shasa scanned the banks as though he expected to see them sparkling seductively in the sunlight.
‘Dr Twentyman-Jones and I both believe it – and we have isolated some very interesting areas. Two hundred miles upstream is a waterfall that the Bushmen called the Place of the Great Noise, Aughrabies. There the Orange thunders through a narrow rocky chute and falls into the deep, inaccessible gorge below. The gorge should be a treasurehouse of captured diamonds. Then there are other ancient alluvial beds where the river has changed its course.’
They left the river and its narrow strip of greenery and the loco accelerated again as they ran on northwards into the desert. Centaine watched Shasa’s face carefully as she went on explaining and lecturing. She would never go on until she reached the point of boredom – at the first sign of inattention, she would stop. She did not have to press. There was all the time necessary for his education, but the one single most important consideration was never to tire him, never to outrun his immature strength or his undeveloped powers of concentration. She must retain his enthusiasm intact and never jade him. This time his interest persisted beyond its usual span, and she recognized it was time for another advance.
‘It will have warmed up in the saloon. Let’s go in.’ She led him to her desk. ‘There are some things I want to show you.’ She opened the confidential summary of the annual financial reports of the Courtney Mining and Finance Company.
This would be the difficult part, even for her the paperwork was
deadly dull, and she saw him immediately daunted by the columns of figures. Mathematics was his only weak subject.
‘You enjoy chess, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed cautiously.
‘This is a game also,’ she assured him. ‘But a thousand times more fascinating and rewarding, once you understand the rules.’ He cheered up visibly – games and rewards Shasa understood.
‘Teach me the rules,’ he invited.
‘Not all at one time. Bit by bit, until you know enough to start playing.’
It was evening before she saw the fatigue in the lines at the corners of his mouth and the white rims to his nostrils, but he was still frowning with concentration.
‘That’s enough for today.’ She closed the thick folder. ‘What are the golden rules?’
‘You must always sell something for more than it cost you.’
She nodded encouragement.
‘And you must buy when everybody else is selling, and you must sell when everybody else is buying.’
‘Good.’ She stood up. ‘Now a breath of fresh air before we change for dinner.’
On the balcony of the coach she placed her arm around his shoulders, and she had to reach up to do so. ‘When we get to the mine, I want you to work with Dr Twentyman-Jones in the mornings. You may have the afternoons free, but you’ll work in the mornings. I want you to get to know the mine and all its workings. Of course, I will pay you.’
‘That isn’t necessary, Mater.’
‘Another golden rule, my darling, never refuse a fair offer.’
Through the night and all the following day they ran on northwards across great spaces bleached by the sun, with blue mountains traced in darker blue against the desert horizons.
‘We should get into Windhoek a little after sunset,’ Centaine explained. ‘But I have arranged for the coach to be shunted on to a quiet spur and we will spend the night aboard and leave for the mine in the morning. Dr Twentyman-Jones and Abraham Abrahams will be dining with us, so we will dress.’
In his shirtsleeves Shasa was standing in front of the long mirror in his compartment, struggling with his black bowtie – he had not yet entirely mastered the art of shaping the butterfly – when he felt the coach slowing and heard the loco blow a long eerie blast.