‘All right—but you’ll shake, won’t you?’ Balfour seized Tauwhare’s dry hand in his wet one, and shook it vigorously. ‘There’s a good man, Ted—there’s a good man.’
But Tauwhare was still looking severely displeased, and he withdrew his hand from Balfour’s grip as soon as he was able. Balfour felt a twinge of regret. It would not do to make an enemy of the fellow—not with so much of this business yet unsolved, he thought. There was a chance that Tauwhare’s testimony might have to be called upon at a later time; there was a chance that he knew something about the relations, whatever they were, between Crosbie Wells and Francis Carver—or between those two men and Lauderback, come to think of it. Yes: it would be useful, to keep the man appeased. Balfour reached into his pocket. Surely he had something small, some token. They were fond of tokens. His fingers found a shilling and a sixpence. He pulled the sixpence out.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You can have this, if you tell me some Maori. Just like you taught Crosbie Wells. Eh, Ted? Then we’ll have done business, just as you wanted to. All right? Then we’ll be friends. Then you won’t be able to complain.’
He pressed the silver piece into the other man’s palm. Tauwhare looked at it.
‘Now, tell me,’ said Balfour, rubbing his hands together. ‘What does … what does Hokitika mean? Hokitika. Just the one word, that’s all I’m after. And I’d call that a tidy price, by the bye—a sixpence, for a single word! I’d call that a song!’
Te Rau Tauwhare sighed. Hokitika. He knew the sense of it, but could not translate. This happened so often between the languages, English and Maori: the words of one tongue never found their exact equivalent in the other, just as there was no white man’s herb that one might perfectly exchange for puha, and no white man’s bread that exactly called to mind rewena pararoa: however close the flavour, there was always something approximated, something imagined, or something lost. Crosbie Wells had understood this. Te Rau Tauwhare taught him korero Maori without using any English at alclass="underline" they used their fingers to point, and their faces to mimic, and when Te Rau said things that Crosbie Wells did not understand, he let the sounds wash over him, like prayers, until their meanings clarified, and he could see inside the word.
‘Hokitika,’ said Balfour. He wiped the rain from his face. ‘Come on, mate.’
At last Tauwhare lifted his finger and described a circle in the air. When his fingertip returned to the place from which he had begun, he jabbed his finger, sharply, to mark the place of return. But one cannot mark a place upon a circle, he thought: to mark a place upon a circle is to break it, so that it is not a circle any longer.
‘Understand it like this,’ he said, regretting that he had to speak the words in English, and approximate the noun. ‘Around. And then back again, beginning.’
The Reserve Bank was always very crowded on a Saturday at noon. Diggers stood about with their hands full of gold; the Libra-scales rattled up and down as the ore was measured and recorded; the junior bankers ran back and forth from the archives, checking claim papers, marking tax payments, and receiving fees. Along the wall that faced the street were four barred cubicles where the bankers sat; above them hung a gilt-framed chalkboard, upon which was written that week’s yield in ore, with subtotals for each district, and a grand total for the Hokitika region as a whole. Whenever a sum of raw gold was banked or bought, the chalked numbers were erased and then totalled anew—typically to a murmur of appreciation from the men in the room, and occasionally, if the total was a remarkable one, to a round of applause.
When Balfour entered the bank the attention of the crowd was focused not upon this chalkboard but upon the long table opposite, where the gold buyers, identifiable by the bright copper satchels that they wore upon their belts, inspected the raw ore for purchase. The buyer’s work was slow. He weighed each nugget in his hand, scratched and tested the metal for impurities, and examined it through a jeweller’s loupe. If the ore had been sifted, he filtered it through sieves of matting to check the flakes had not been cut with grit or gravel, and sometimes shook glistering handfuls over plates of mercury, to ensure that the metals bonded as they should. Once he declared the stuff pure and fit to be valued, the digger in question shuffled forward, and was asked to state his name. The Libra-scales were then calibrated until the arm hung parallel with the desk—and then the buyer poured the digger’s pile of gold into the left-hand tray. To the right-hand tray the buyer added cylinder weights, one by one, until finally the scales lurched, and the tray bearing the man’s fortune shuddered, and swung free.
That morning there was only one buyer present: a slick-haired magnate, wearing a pale green hunting jacket and a yellow tie—a gaudy combination, and one that might have served to mark him rather too obviously as a moneyed man, had he been doing business alone and unprotected. But the Hokitika gold escort was on hand. This small army, a uniformed infantry of ten men, presided over every sale and purchase of the colour. Later they would oversee the bullion’s transfer into an armoured van, and ensure that it was safely conveyed offshore. They stood behind the buyer, and flanked the desk at which he sat—each man armed with a .577 Snider-Enfield rifle, a massive, gleaming piece of the most modern design. It took a cartridge as long as a man’s index finger, and could blow a fellow’s head to bloody dust. Balfour had admired the Snider-Enfield when the model was first shipped in, but seeing ten armed men in this enclosed space gave him an anxious premonition. The room was so crowded he doubted any one guard could find the room to raise his weapon to his shoulder, let alone discharge a round.
He shouldered his way through the diggers to the bankers’ cubicles. Most of the men in the room were present as spectators only, and so parted to admit him; it was in very little time at all, therefore, that Balfour found himself at a barred cubicle, facing a young man in a striped vest and a neatly pinned cravat.
‘Good morning.’
‘I’m wanting to know if a man named Francis Carver has ever taken out a miner’s right in New Zealand,’ Balfour said. He removed his hat and slicked back his wet hair, an action without a perceptible benefit, for the palm of his hand was very wet also.
‘Francis Carver—Captain Carver?’
‘That’s the man,’ said Balfour.
‘I am obliged to ask who you are, and why you are requesting this information.’
The banker spoke without affect, and in a mild tone of voice.
‘The man owns a ship, and I’m in the shipping trade,’ Balfour said smoothly, replacing his hat. ‘Tom Balfour’s my name. I’m looking to set up a side venture of a kind—tea-trading, back and forth from Canton. Just canvassing the idea at this point. I want to find out a bit more about Carver before I make any offers of business. Where his money’s spread. Whether he’s ever been bankrupted. That kind of thing.’
‘Surely you could just ask Mr. Carver yourself,’ replied the banker, speaking in the same inoffensive tone, so that the remark did not come off as rude, but, merely, as pleasantly offhand. He might have been passing a broken wagon in the street, and observing, quite affably, that there was a very simple way to mend the axle.
Balfour explained that Carver was at sea, and could not be contacted.
The banker seemed unsatisfied with this explanation. He considered Balfour, and put his finger against his lower lip. Evidently, however, he could not conjure a further objection that might give him reason to decline to pursue Balfour’s request. He nodded, pulled his ledger towards him, and wrote a note in a thin, precise script. He then blotted his page (a little unnecessarily, Balfour thought, for the ledger remained open) and dried the nib of his pen with a square of soft leather. ‘Wait here, please,’ he said. He disappeared through a low doorway, beyond which lay an antechamber of some kind, and soon returned carrying a large folder, bound in leather and marked on its spine with the letter C.