‘But you never told him what you were doing.’
Mannering was shocked. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Confess my sins? Of course I didn’t! Anyway. To all appearances, it looked like the Aurora was pulling twenty pounds a week. Nobody knew it was the same twenty pounds, over and over! She just looked like a good, steady claim.’
Mannering had begun his tale in a posture of some exasperation, but his natural affinity for storytelling could not long be held in check, and it was enjoyable to him, to recount a proof of his own ingenuity. He relaxed into his narrative, thumping the brim of his stovepipe hat against his leg.
‘But then Quee started to catch on,’ he said. ‘Must have been watching, or maybe he just figured me out. So what does he do? Cunning fox! He starts retorting the dust each week in a little crucible of his own. Then he brings it to the camp station already smelted, and done up in these one-pound blocks, about so big. There’s no throwing that back among the stones!
‘No matter, I thought. I had plenty of other claims for sale, and the other ones were pulling good dust. I could shuffle it around. So I started banking Quee’s squares as returns against the Dream of England claim, and every week, I’d salt the Aurora just as before, only I’d use Dream of England dust, not Aurora dust—do you see? Aurora had been pulling twenty pounds a week until then; she had to maintain that same yield, or it would look like her profits had started to fall away—and I wouldn’t get my profit, when I sold.
‘But then Quee got wise to that,’ Mannering went on, raising his voice in a final cadence, ‘and the bloody devil starts carving the name of the plot—Aurora—into his little squares. I can’t bank that against the Dream of England without raising a few eyebrows, can I? Would you believe it? The cheek of him!’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Frost, who was still feeling very much betrayed.
‘Well, there it is, anyway,’ said Mannering. ‘That’s the story. That’s when Emery arrived.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Well—what happened?’
‘You know what happened. I sold him the Aurora.’
‘But the claim was a duffer, you said!’
‘Yes,’ said Mannering.
‘You sold him a duffer claim!’
‘Yes.’
‘But he’s your friend,’ said Charlie Frost, and even as he spoke the words he regretted them. How pathetic it sounded—to reprimand a man like Mannering about friendship! Mannering was in the august high noon of his life. He was prosperous, and well dressed, and he owned the largest and most handsome building on Revell-street. There were gold nuggets hanging from his watch chain. He ate meat at every meal. He had known a hundred women—maybe even a thousand—maybe more. What did he care about friends? Frost found that he was blushing.
Mannering studied the younger man for a moment, and then said, ‘Here’s the heart of it, Charlie. A four thousand-pound fortune—smelted, and every square of it stamped with the word Aurora—has turned up in a dead man’s house. We don’t know why, and we don’t know how, but we do know who, and that “who” is my old friend Quee in Kaniere. All right? This is why we have to go to Chinatown. So as to ask him a question or two.’
Frost felt that Mannering was still concealing something from him. ‘But the fortune itself,’ he said. ‘How do you account for it? If Aurora is a duffer, then where did all of that gold come from? And if Aurora’s not a duffer, then who’s cooking the books to make her appear as if she’s worth nothing at all?’
The magnate put his hat on. ‘All I know,’ he said, running his finger and thumb around the brim and back again, ‘is that I’ve got a score to settle. No man makes a fool of Dick Mannering more than once, and the way I see it, this johnny chink has had a jolly good try. Come along. Or are you turning yellow on me?’
No man likes to be called a coward—and least of all, a man who is feeling downright cowardly. In a cold voice Frost said, ‘I’m not yellow in the least.’
‘Good,’ said Mannering. ‘No hard feelings, then. Come along.’
Frost thrust his arms into his coat. ‘I only hope it doesn’t come to blows,’ he said.
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Mannering. ‘We’ll see about that. Come on, Holly—come on, girl! Giddyap! We’ve got business in the Hokitika gorge!’
As Frost and Mannering stepped out of the Prince of Wales Opera House, tugging down their hats against the rain, Thomas Balfour was turning into Weld-street, some three blocks to the south. Balfour had spent the last hour and a half at the Deutsches Gasthaus on Camp-street, where a pile of sauerkraut, sausage, and brown gravy, a seat before an open fire, and a period of uninterrupted contemplation had helped to refocus his mind upon Alistair Lauderback’s affairs. He quit the Gasthaus refreshed, and made immediately for the office of the West Coast Times.
The shutters were drawn inside the box window, and the front door closed. Balfour tried the handle: it was locked. Curious, he stamped around to the rear of the building, to the small apartment where Benjamin Löwenthal, the paper’s editor lived. He listened for a moment at the door, and, hearing nothing, cautiously turned the doorknob.
The door opened easily, and Balfour found himself face to face with Löwenthal himself, who was sitting at his table with his hands in his lap—quite as if he had been waiting for Balfour to startle him out of a trance. He stood up, in haste.
‘Tom,’ he said. ‘What is it? Is something wrong? Why didn’t you knock?’
The table at which he had been seated was properly a laboratory desk, the surface of which was pocked and worn, and mottled with spilled ink and chemicals; today, however, it had been swept clean of the detritus of Löwenthal’s trade, and covered with an embroidered cloth. In the centre was a little plate upon which a fat candle was burning.
‘Oh,’ Balfour said. ‘Sorry, Ben. Hello, there. Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb your—I mean, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘But you are most welcome!’ said Löwenthal, perceiving that Balfour was not bearing ill tidings after all, but had simply dropped in for a chat. ‘Come in, out of the rain.’
‘Didn’t mean to break your—’
‘You haven’t broken anything. Come in, come in—close the door!’
‘It’s not business, exactly,’ Balfour said, by way of apology, knowing that Löwenthal’s holy day was a day of rest. ‘It’s not work, exactly. I just wanted to talk with you about something.’
‘It is never work, talking with you,’ Löwenthal replied generously, and then, for the fourth time, ‘But you must come in.’
At last Balfour stepped inside and closed the door. Löwenthal resumed his seat and folded his hands together. He said, ‘I have long thought that, for the Jew, the newspaper business is the perfect occupation. No edition on Sunday, you see—and so the timing of the Shabbat is perfect. I have pity for my Christian competitors. They must spend their Sunday setting type, and spreading ink, ready for Monday; they cannot rest. When you came up the path just now, that was the subject of my thinking. Yes, hang up your coat. Do sit down.’
‘I’m a Church of England man, myself,’ said Balfour—who, like many men of that religion, was made very uncomfortable by icons of faith. He eyed Löwenthal’s candle with some wariness, quite as if his host had laid out a hairshirt or a metal cilice.