Rough Diamond, page 18
Barney walked past the dead body, shouldered Luckner aside, and bent to pick Fay up in his arms. He carried her into their room and laid her on the bed. He covered her with the coverlet and bent to kiss her. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Pa … he killed Pa …”
“I know, darling. Are you all right?”
She nodded slowly, still sobbing softly. He kissed her again, gently, tenderly. “I’ll be right back, darling.”
He walked out into the hall, closing the door softly behind him. He looked at the body a moment and then took off his jacket, laying it to cover the battered face of the dead man. Then he straightened up to look at Luckner. When he spoke his tone was almost conversational.
“You’re insane, do you know that?” he said.
Luckner didn’t bother to answer. He walked to the steps and pushed his way through the crowd still standing there stunned by what they had just witnessed. He walked behind the bar, took a bottle of whiskey and a glass and walked to a table, sitting down heavily. Barney picked up the pair of shears lying in the hallway, studied them a moment, and put them in his pocket. Then he followed Luckner down the stairs, people standing back for him, and went to stand before the other man. Luckner didn’t look up. Those in the audience stood away, holding their breath in view of the unexpected drama that had presented itself for their attention. Barney paid them no heed, considering Luckner evenly.
“How did it come to happen?”
Luckner shrugged as if it were unimportant. He poured himself a big drink from the bottle and drained it in one gulp. “He pulled something on me,” he said, still not looking up, and refilled his glass.
“A little old man. With these.” Barney took the shears from his pocket and tossed them on the table contemptuously. “You, the big, strong, hard Jap-trick expert from Tokyo and Cape Town. And you had to kick him to death to protect yourself.”
“He pulled them on me,” Luckner said stubbornly. “I don’t let anyone pull anything on me.”
Barney looked at him coldly. He reached over, took the bottle from the table and handed it to the bartender standing there watching. He turned back to Luckner. “Finish your drink and get out. And don’t come back.”
The liquor was beginning to have its effect on Luckner.
“Now listen, you little runt Jew,” he said, looking up at last, his temper beginning to return. “D’you know why you want me to get out and not come back? So’s you can cheat me out of what’s mine, like you been cheating me all the bloody months I’ve been here!” He sneered. “We split the profits fifty-fifty, do we? With you keeping the books? What a laugh! Sure we split—ninety-ten, and who do you think gets the ninety? Little Barney Barnato, that’s who!” He drained the glass with Barney watching and listening quietly. Luckner looked at the glass a moment and then tossed it into a corner of the room. “You don’t fool me, Isaacs, who wants to call himself Barnato so’s people might think he’s an Eye-tie instead of a kike! You don’t fool me, Isaacs! Fifty-fifty—Jew percentage!”
Barney fought against the flush of temper that rose in him.
“Just get out!” he said, his voice nearly cracking under his growing anger. His Cockney came back automatically. “What brass y’got comin’ ye’ll get, and not a farthing more! Y’killed a man, me wife’s pa, a poor addle-brained old crock what was a bit off his bean but couldn’t help hisself none. If I didn’t know them shears I’d seen them so often, and if I didn’t think he really pulled them on you—and I wonder what y’was doin’ to make him do somethin’ like that—I’d see you hang if it was the last thing I ever did fer the old man! Now get out!”
Luckner sneered, the liquor now fully at work, and his temper as well. All the frustration of having seen and desired Fay Barnato all those months without ever having had her, and with the chances of ever having her now sharply reduced by the unfortunate circumstances of his having killed the girl’s old man by pure chance, were in his voice.
“Your poor cunt’s pa I killed, did I? Well, let me tell you something about your poor cunt. Anytime I wanted her I had her, and she isn’t all that prime if you ask my opinion! Oh, she loves getting it from me, used to beg for it as a matter of fact—”
It was as far as he got. Barney, a growl in his throat, was on top of the man. Luckner’s chair with him in it went over with a crash and Barney was on top of him still, in insane fury, choking him. Luckner rolled, choking, breaking the grip, and then found himself being battered by vicious blows to his head and face. He shoved with all his strength, trying to hold the infuriated smaller man away with his greater reach, but Barney would not be denied, breaking through, his fists sledgehammers that battered Luckner unmercifully. The larger man finally scrambled loose and came to his feet only to be tackled fiercely about the knees and brought down. Once more he managed to get to his feet to face Barney and find that the punishing blows could not be avoided. Luckner tried a Japanese grip but Barney avoided it almost contemptuously. Luckner tried to protect himself from the constant barrage of blows and found himself on the floor. He sat up and wiped a hand across his face, staring in angry shock to see the blood that covered it. Barney picked up a chair, raising it on high, determined to bash the brains out of the liar who had had the nerve to impugn the good name of his beloved Fay, but the chair was suddenly seized by someone behind him, and others swarmed in to hold him, pulling him away.
“Barney, for God’s sake!” It was the bartender who had put down the whiskey bottle hurriedly and had grabbed the chair. “You’ll kill the man!”
“Damn right I’ll kill the bastard! Let me go!”
“Barney, cool down! He didn’t pull a knife on you or anything! He ain’t worth hanging for!”
Barney slowly came to his senses. He allowed the chair to be taken from him while he stood trembling from the force of his fury. Luckner was staring up at him with a look of pure hatred on his face, wondering how this little man whom he could break in two had managed to not only beat him but make him look a fool. It was something Luckner knew he would never forget and never forgive. Barney tugged himself loose of the hands that had been restraining him. “I’m all right. Let go.” He took a deep breath, trying to control his trembling, and looked down at Luckner with no expression at all on his face. “Get out.” It seemed to him he was standing there talking, listening to his own voice as from a stranger somewhere off to one side. “If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”
He watched Luckner come to his feet and stagger from the bar into the street. He turned to the bartender, who was watching him anxiously.
“I’m all right. Get the old man down to the undertaker, tell him I’ll be down later to talk to him. Clean up the hallway. See the place is straightened up.”
“Right, Barney.”
He slowly climbed the stairs, skirted the dead body in the hall, and walked into their room. He closed the door behind him and walked to the bed, slowly feeling the trembling in his hands and arms subside. He sat on the edge of the bed. Fay had stopped crying and was staring at the ceiling almost sightlessly. She turned and looked at him inquiringly. Barney leaned over and kissed her cheek; she put her arms around him, holding him tightly, the tears beginning to come again.
“Oh, Barney—”
“It’s all right, darling,” he said softly. “It’s all over. Luckner’s gone and he won’t be back. Your pa will be well taken care of. We’ll give him a good funeral.”
“… the poor man …”
“He wasn’t a happy man since your ma died, honey. After the funeral I’ll go down to the tent and see that everything’s taken care of.”
“No,” Fay said, a bit more of her usual strength in her voice. “I will. You won’t know where everything is, or who has clothes half finished. We’ll have to find someone else to finish them …”
“Someone else?” Barney tried to sound insulted. “Don’t you think I can do it? I ain’t a bad snip meself, if I’m the one’s got to say it.” He dropped the Cockney. “We’ll both go down and do the job right. Your pa would want that.”
“Oh, Barney!” she said with a catch in her voice, and held him even tighter. “I love you so much! I don’t know what I’d do without you!”
“You’ll never have to find out, I promise you that,” Barney said quietly, and knew that despite the horror of that day he had never felt happier or more secure than he did at that moment.
7
August 1883
The directors of the De Beers Mining Company were holding a meeting in a private room of the Kimberley Club. Present were Cecil Rhodes, Charles Rudd, Alfred Beit, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, and Neville Pickering, Rhodes’ private secretary. The advantages of using the club rather than their own company offices just two blocks down the street were many. The club was less austere, for one thing; for another, there was a small serving door from the private room to the bar which permitted liquid refreshments to be served during the meeting. Then, too, the dining room of the Kimberley Club served the best food in town, should the meeting prove to run into the lunch hour. But while holding this particular meeting at the club made for pleasant surroundings, the subject of the meeting was less pleasant. They had met to discuss what to do about Barney Barnato.
“I am still absolutely amazed,” said Beit, addressing Rhodes who sat at the head of the table, “that you and Barnato have never met in person.” Beit was a short, rotund man with a happy disposition; he had been the leading trader in diamonds in Kimberley until Barney Barnato had overtaken him, but that fact had never dampened his good humor, nor did it in any way interfere with his meeting with Barnato when the need arose. He would even visit Barney at the Paris Hotel on occasion for dinner, mainly because he enjoyed Fay Barnato’s company. “After all,” he went on, “the two of you are the biggest factors in the business today.”
Rhodes shrugged. “There has never been any reason for me to meet the man as far as I could see,” he said, and leaned back in his chair, a large stoop-shouldered man with sharp hooded eyes that constantly went from face to face around the table. “He’s not my type of person,” he added, and fell silent, reaching for his whiskey glass, letting the others voice their opinions before he rendered the final decision.
“Well, I think it’s time to talk to him now,” Rudd said. He was sitting to the left of Rhodes, tilted back in his chair, a large cigar between his teeth. “Since he took over Kimberley Central and merged it with Barnato Mining, he’s taking more diamonds out of the mines than anyone else. Hell, we control the selling output of three mines, De Beers, Bultfontein, and Dutoitspan, and Barnato with half of the Kimberley hole is making us look sick.” He wiped ash from his cigar and returned it to his lips. “If he ever gets his hands on the other half, he could bankrupt us by flooding the market.”
“He got a big jump on us and everyone else in getting decent equipment to mine the blue ground,” Beit pointed out.
“That was a long time ago. Water over the dam,” Rudd said evenly. “You can’t cut your whiskey with it today.”
“He was also the first one to sink shafts and put through galleries to the blue, to get away from flooding,” Beit went on.
Rudd looked at him and nodded. Of all the others on the board of directors, Rudd liked Beit the best. He also thought that Beit had the best mind among them, and would have made a better chairman than Rhodes, although he also knew that Beit would have refused the position had it been offered him. “Everything you say is true, Alfred,” he said evenly, “which only makes the problem more acute. We lost a year to him back in ’seventy-seven and ’seventy-eight and we’ve never caught up. Between what’s in his safe and what he’s already shipped to London, Barnato probably has enough diamonds all together to put the entire market on the skids if he wants to. What he’s been releasing, added to our own releases, has already depressed the market. Try to picture what it would be like if he dumped the whole kit and caboodle.”
“Not to mention the illicit stones they say he handles,” Pickering said. Rhodes’ secretary was a smooth-faced young man in his late twenties, with a fair complexion and hair the color of mealie silk. No sooner had he spoken than he looked at the head of the table as if for confirmation from his boss, but Rhodes remained listening with no expression at all on his face.
“Let’s not get off on that tangent,” Rudd said sharply. “There’s no proof at all that Barnato deals in stolen stones, and if he did it would only make the situation worse.”
“So what’s the answer?” It was Dr. Jameson speaking. He was a handsome swashbuckling type in his early thirties with a swarthy complexion and black curly hair, a relative newcomer to Kimberley. His interest in diamonds was quite superficial; he had never been in a diamond mine and never intended to be in one if he could help it. His directorship was due principally to the fact that he was Rhodes’ personal physician and was a friend of the other directors. The small investment he had made in De Beers shares was merely the excuse the others had needed to invite him on the board. That investment had paid the doctor handsome dividends until the drop in diamond prices; now that investment could even be in jeopardy. He stared across the table. “Well, Rudd?”
“There’s only one answer that I can see,” Rudd said. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, as some great philosopher once said.”
“Dumping diamonds would hurt Barnato as much as us,” Pickering pointed out, and once more instantly looked at Rhodes to get his reaction. Again there was no sign from the expressionless face.
Beit looked at Pickering with a look that had more pity in it than censure. “He’d only dump them until we were bleeding at the pores,” he said. He had understood Rudd’s point perfectly. “When our shares fell to next to nothing on the London Exchange and the Paris Bourse, he’d buy us out for the price of cheap gaspers.”
“And we’d all go back to learning how to use a pick and shovel,” Rudd said glumly.
“I agree with Charles,” Beit went on, looking at the head of the table. “You’ve simply got to talk to the man, Cecil. You’re the major stockholder and the chairman. We all know, and have known for a long time, that the only way to keep the diamond market on an even keel, the only way to prevent the bottom from dropping out, is to have the release of all diamonds in the hands of one group, who would release enough stones to satisfy the market but not so much as to glut it and cause prices to go down. That’s been obvious for years. Things can’t go on the way they’ve been going. It’s foolish to have the equivalent of anarchy in this business when to all intents and purposes there are only two major parties left. Let the two parties come to an understanding, and everyone will benefit.”
There was silence. Rhodes waited, looking around the table, but no one spoke. After all, there was little reason to discuss an established fact. At last he drained his glass and nodded, not necessarily in agreement, but because he was now prepared to speak.
“Suppose,” he said slowly, “that we could get Robinson’s shares in his Standard Company, and Baring-Gould’s shares in the French Company. Think of it! We’d have half the Kimberley hole. Add that to what we already control, and let the little Jew have the rest!”
Beit reddened. He was Jewish, and although he was used to being put in a different category from Barnato in Rhodes’ mind, he still resented the other’s language.
“Just how would we get control?” he asked, trying to sound merely curious instead of negative. “We’re all agreed that Barnato has built up a fortune these last three or four years, enough to enable him to dump diamonds if he feels like it. We haven’t. If we start bidding for the Robinson and the Baring-Gould properties, bidding against Barnato—because obviously he’s not going to stand still and let us buy half of Kimberley—the price will simply go up and up until it could break both of us. And it would undoubtedly break us first. But just suppose”—he dropped his voice a bit so that the attention needed to hear him made the attention needed to understand him that much more acute—“just suppose we came to an agreement with Barnato! Suppose we could get Barnato to agree to ration his output, or to sell his stones through us? Then how could Robinson or Baring-Gould stand against us? Whether we bought them out or not would be immaterial; we could force them to either sell their stones through us or sell them at prices we determined. They’d have no choice, because we could put them out of business whenever we wished. What they would really do,” he added in a conversational tone of voice, “would be to sell out, because they are both intelligent men.” He smiled. “Sell out, that is, at our price, not at the exaggerated price that would be the result of a fight between Barnato and us.”
There was silence again as Rhodes considered what Beit had said. Like Rudd, Rhodes had a lot of respect for Beit’s opinion. He also knew that Jameson listened to Beit’s words, and Rhodes had no intention of losing his leadership of the company by misjudging the temper of the board. There was too much in the future at stake. He sighed.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll talk to the little Jew.” He glanced at Rudd a moment. “And don’t tell me, Charles, that I once said I never would. I’m not a stubborn man.” He turned back to the others, choosing to disregard Rudd’s discreet cough, raising a finger for emphasis. “But one thing must be clear! If I get nowhere talking to him—which in my opinion is what is going to happen—then obviously other steps must be taken. I’m sure we all agree with Alfred that things simply cannot go on as they are. Should I fail to convince Barnato to agree to the control of the release of all stones, then I must have your authority to take whatever steps I feel are necessary to resolve the matter.” He looked around. “Is that agreeable?”
“Of course,” Pickering said instantly, and flushed.
“I agree,” Jameson said quietly.
“What steps?” Rudd asked curiously.
“Whatever steps would be required,” Rhodes said enigmatically.
“You’d use discretion, of course?” Beit said a bit dubiously. It was more a statement than a question.
