Luckner shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I don’t exactly know. Nothing important. I knew him slightly in Cape Town, we figured we’d have supper together. Then he said something I didn’t particularly like, and one thing led to another. I told you I had a temper.” He dropped the subject. “What’s this job you said you could use me for? Mining?”
“No,” Barney said, and looked around. His eyes came back to the tall man at his side. “I’ve been thinking of buying this place, the Paris Hotel. It’s up for grabs; owner’s going home. I’d need somebody to run it, somebody who could keep order. But not lose his head with the customers,” he added evenly. “Toss them out on their arse if they get hard, but not kick them to death first.”
Luckner laughed. It was a harsh sound, as if he weren’t used to laughing much. “I seldom lose my head with strangers. Just with folks I know.” The laugh disappeared as quickly as it had come. His voice hardened. “And most people stay strangers with me for a long, long time.”
“Well,” Barney said, “would you be interested in the job? If I buy the place?”
“I don’t know,” Luckner said. He turned, resting his elbows on the bar behind him, looking around as if summing up the place and its possibilities. He glanced at Barney over his shoulder. “What would it pay?”
Barney made up his mind. Fast, as he had done with Armando, now working out so well in the big hole. Harry would think him crazy, making a decision that fast; Harry would have objected on general principles without further investigation of the man. But Harry was in London and really not involved. If it had been up to Harry he would still be kopje walloping and as far from Fay as ever!
“You show me what you can do the first thirty days after I close the deal,” he said, “and you get room and board and we split any profits the place shows fifty-fifty.”
Luckner looked at him coolly. “You’ve got a deal,” he said at last and raised his glass to confirm it. “But,” he added, “the best room in the place is mine.”
“The second-best,” Barney said evenly. “Me and me wife got the best.”
Solly Loeb, now handling the claims and the sorting yards for the newly formed Barnato Mining Company while his cousin, Jack Joel, improved his knowledge of diamonds in the trading office, found his uncle’s stubbornness most irritating.
“Uncle Barney—”
“You’re getting old enough to call me Barney. What do I have on you in age? Four years?”
“Less than three. All right, Barney. Rhodes is doing it over at De Beers; Robinson is doing it right next door to us, and so is Kimberley Central and the French Company people. And all the combines over at Bultfontein and Dutoitspan! We’re the only ones who aren’t putting in compounds, the only company that doesn’t sign their Kaffirs to contracts, the only company that doesn’t search them properly!”
Barney looked at his nephew with curiosity. “Solly — do you think making a man shit by giving him castor oil is going to stop illicit diamonds from being taken out of the mines or from the sorting yards? Or sticking your finger up his behind? When they start doing it with the foremen, the whites; when they start doing it with those police dogs they got running around like crazy wolves who’ll eat anything and then go crap for their trainers, then maybe. But only maybe. Anything one man can figure out to keep something from being stolen, another man can figure out how to steal.”
“But—”
“Or making a man live without his woman,” Barney went on, quite as if Solly had not tried to interrupt. “Instead of keeping his mind on what he’s doing, all he thinks about is how to get his rocks off. Did you notice, maybe, that since Rhodes put in his compounds the accident rate at De Beers almost doubled? You think that was an accident?”
“Then we ought to do it if only for our own protection! They’re starting to say that when all the other companies have compounds, any illicit diamonds would be our responsibility!”
Barney frowned. “What? Where did you hear that?”
Solly reddened a bit. “At the Kimberley Club. I… I’ve been invited there a few times…”
“Solly, if you want to go to the Kimberley Club, go. It’s a free country; it’s your business. But don’t lose your head. Don’t believe everything you hear. Anyone who says that the illicit stones would be our responsibility is either lying or sick in the head. Outside of the fact that the Kaffirs aren’t the only ones bringing stones out of the mines, if all the illicit diamonds were coming from our claims, whose loss would it be? Theirs or mine?” He shook his head. “Solly, Solly! You treat a man like a thief, don’t be surprised if he steals. And there are good Kaffirs and bad ones. When your friends from the Kimberley Club come to the end of the contracts with their Kaffirs, we’ll get the good ones; the bad ones will sign up again with them.”
“So you won’t put in compounds?”
“Not at this time, and maybe never.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
“So I may be wrong.” Barney shrugged. “It won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last. But at least it’s my mistake, not yours.” He changed the subject. “So outside of that, what’s new?”
“The yellow dirt is running out. We’ll have to close Kerr Number Three and let some of the Kaffirs go.”
Barney frowned. The two men were having lunch at the Paris Hotel, which Barney had bought some six months before; Fay was out shopping for hotel supplies; Carl Luckner was in his office in his room, and Jack Joel was taking care of the trading office in Commissioner Street. Barney put his beer mug to one side and stared at his nephew, puzzled.
“What do you mean the dirt is running out? Dirt keeps going down and down, right to the middle of the world, doesn’t it? How can it run out? What’s under dirt?”
“The yellow dirt,” Solly explained. “What’s under it is some blue stuff that’s hard as rock. They’ve run into it in other places and abandoned the claims, or put back some of the yellow and tried to sell them for practically nothing. Salting a mine with dirt, can you imagine? Anyway, you can break the point of a pick on that blue stuff, and how we’d break it up if we ever managed to dig it and send it up to the sorting yards, God knows! Kimberley Central, the claims next to our Kerr Number Three, are all down to the blue right now. And it’s just too tough to dig and break up.”
“Have you tried?”
“Well, no, not very hard,” Solly admitted, “but Kimberley Central did without any luck. They say it’s a waste of time.”
“Who says?” Barney demanded, and then answered his own question. “I know — your friends at the Kimberley Club. Well, if they’re as wrong on this as they are on everything else, like illicit stones and how to handle their Kaffirs, then the chances are the blue ground has even more diamonds than that yellow dirt.”
Solly shook his head at his uncle’s stubbornness. “I doubt it.”
Barney shrugged good-naturedly. “So that’ll be my second mistake in one day. And we don’t close down Kerr Number Three. We don’t let a single man go. We add men. And we dig.”
“But, how?” Solly was almost wailing. “How do you dig it? How do you break it down? Water doesn’t touch it; it’s been tried.”
“You mine it and you break it down with different equipment if you can’t do it with pick and shovel,” Barney said simply. “Bigger equipment, power equipment. I’ll get you the equipment.”
“It’ll cost a fortune! Money wasted! It’ll break the company!”
“So that’ll be mistake number three.” Barney grinned across the table. Despite their many differences, differences in attitude on almost every subject, differences in education, in appearance — for Solly Loeb was a well-built, handsome young man — Barney liked the boy. At least he had far more spirit than the other nephew, Jack Joel, and besides, he was the son of Barney’s eldest and favorite sister. “Good things are supposed to come in threes, no? So why not mistakes?”