'Why don't you stop kidding yourself, Praeger?' I asked. 'I've never heard such a lot of nonsense in my life. You're projecting God knows what sick fantasies into a code for something which is as dead as the man who sent it. Forget it.'
'I was beginning to think that way at one stage myself,' he answered. 'When all my leads ran dry in Europe I emigrated to South Africa. I scoured the country for traces of you without success. Then came one of those colossal breaks of good luck (like tonight) in my search. I'll come to that in a moment:
While I listened I tried to hit upon some plan by which I could turn the tables on Praeger and grab his gun. That would also mean coping with the hyena at short range. The brute stood as watchful as a well-trained Wehrmacht non-corn. I felt sure however that the heavy calibre of Praeger's pistol in my hands would be sufficient to stop the hyena. I left Nadine out of my calculations. I hoped I would be the focus of attack.
Von Praeger was saying, 'Good luck is followed by bad luck, as they say, and I certainly thought this was so a few days ago when I discovered that you and I had been under the same roof for the past eighteen months, Bowker.'
'It's a pity we didn't share the same cell,' I retorted. 'You wouldn't have had the advantage of that gun.'
'No chance of that: I'm the senior prison doctor. That's the job I took when I came to South Africa.'
It was my turn to be taken aback: the giveaway became obvious.
'Charlie Furstenberg,' I ground out.
'Quite. Charlie would rat on a rat. You were in the ranks of short-term prisoners, which are not my concern, so our paths didn't cross. I only heard your name after you had slipped away, and through my net at the same time. I came straight here, of course. And here you are, as Charlie said you would be.'
It was my turn to smile. 'Charlie held out on you, too. He didn't tell you about Rankin.'
'My time will come with Charlie.' The menace was very plain.
'If you're building castles in the air about a greater half of the Cullinan on the strength of the word of a small-time crook like Charlie, you're in for a disappointment.'
'I was sidetracked into telling you about Charlie. We are going too fast. As I said, I emigrated to South Africa and became a prison doctor'
'It seems a very appropriate post for a Gestapo handyman.' '
If you're trying to provoke me into attacking you, it won't work.' He nodded towards Rankin and asked in his unpleasant ripsaw voice. 'I suppose you did that?'
'Yes,' I replied with more bravado than I felt. 'And he had two guns.'
He shrugged but I noticed that he edged closer to his pet.
'A prison doctor occupies a unique and often all powerful position,' he went on. 'He's something between warder and confessor. There was a murderer called Kettler who was due to be hanged. He sent for me and tried to drive a bargain but it was already too late. Kettler had been the mine detective at the Premier Mine for a long time before his arrest. He never believed a word of the story of how your father and Rankin were supposed to have found the Cullinan. And do you know what he offered me to help him escape? — the other half of the Cullinan Diamond.'
'If you fell for that one, you're an even bigger sucker than I thought.'
Von Praeger remained unruffled. 'He had only a few hours to live. Who knows, if he could have brought himself to the point earlier? Then, when the rope was already round his neck, he asked for me again in place of the usual priest. What he told me put the clincher on what Erasmus had said when he died. Kettler whispered to me — he couldn't bear to part with the whole secret even then — as the gallows lever went over, " the hyena's blanket"'
Rankin's wheezing and the bats' thin metallic cries punctuated the still night. Von Praeger said after a tight pause, 'Bowker, Rankin; the Cullinan; The Hill; all those links in the chain are now complete. All that remains is that key phrase, the hyena's blanket. I intend to find out what it means. Somehow the Cullinan has something to do with hyenas. You can make it easy for the girl and yourself by telling me.' When I did not answer he glanced at Rankin. 'Perhaps he'll be less intractable, but there's a lot of work ahead before he'll be conscious.'
I reasoned that the longer I kept Praeger talking the greater would be my opportunity of jumping him. Moreover, I wanted to keep him out of the cave where the confined space would make action more difficult.
· 'You're on very thin ice basing such a preposterous idea on a criminal's word,' I said. 'Everyone knows there are always so-called eleventh-hour confessions by murderers. Can you think of one that turned out to be true?'
He responded brusquely. 'Kettler spent his whole life on the trail. I consider that I'm much more qualified to judge on the question of condemned men's confessions than you. I know that Kettler was right.
He jerked his head towards the cave. 'What's in there?' '
Rankin's hide-out — a lot of junk. There's no light, either.' '
March!' He waved us ahead of him. 'Dika I '
We had no chance but to obey. Praeger's flashlight threw long shadows before us and when the shaft of light traced the outline of the weird structure of beams, spindles and gears and rested finally on the turntable with its peculiar treadle, von Praeger rapped out. 'Halt! Turn and face me!'
I saw that he was excited; there was a feeling of danger in the air.
'I quite understand why you were reluctant for me to see this, Bowker! A lot of junk, eh?'
'You tell us what it is. I haven't a clue — a workshop of some sort, I suppose?'
'They learn to lie like that in jail,' he scoffed at Nadine. 'No one ever knows anything about anything. I suppose that goes for you too?'
She shook her head wordlessly.
'Let me tell you, then. It is a diamond polishing mill'
CHAPTER NINE
The word kept coming back with the recurring persistence of a nagging musical phrase which despite all deliberate effort to exclude it intrudes and thrums through one's mind — camisado night attack!
I was teased into wakefulness through the long night which followed and into the small hours of the morning as I lay imprisoned in Rankin's inner cave by the tantalizing question of what manner of night attack I should resort to in my predicament; as the hours passed without a solution there came a growing sense of impotence on my part. Over and over I formulated fresh plans for a break-out. Each one, when I came to evaluate it, would abort on some initially unsuspected snag. Then I would abandon it and start the process again, working round in seemingly endless, unproductive circles. My eyes became completely accustomed to the inky blackness and I could make out various objects in the kitchen cave: the Aladdin-jar water vessels; Nadine's ritual pots next to them; a table and a diamond boiling set, which consisted of a small lipped mug resembling a sauce boat, over a spirit burner standing on a screened asbestos pad. My eyes moved from one object to another; there was simply nothing else to look at. I came to the conclusion that Rankin must use his diamond mill equipment for the secondary purpose of kitchen utensils.
I consulted my illuminated watch dial for the hundredth time as my hundredth plan collapsed — 2.15 a.m. In three hours it would be dawn and still I had concocted no plan of night attack. I became jumpier and more frustrated, both of which hindered clear thinking.
I compelled my mind to go back right to the beginning when Praeger had forced us into the cave, in the hope that by going over every detail some ray of light might emerge. There were two interconnecting caves and I was in the deeper one, the shorter leg of the L-shaped hide-out. The diamond polishing mill occupied the longer section. This in its turn opened via a crooked entrance to the outside enclosure with its commanding view. Nadine was held in the mill section while Talbot and Rankin were in the open, out of sight beyond an invisible line drawn by the glint of moonlight on the pug barrel of a machine-pistol held by our guard. The cave ran dead against solid rock where I was lying and as far as I could discover there were no cracks through which I might possibly have wormed my way to freedom.