6

January 1878

“He bought the Kerr brothers’ four claims. Practically right in the center of the Kimberley mine, right next to Kimberley Central’s prime claims,” Rudd said easily. He and Rhodes were drinking whiskey, sitting in the bar of the Kimberley Club. He glanced across the table at his companion, pleased with the bombshell he knew he was about to explode.

Rhodes looked up curiously from his thoughts. “Who?”

“Your friend Isaacs. Only he calls himself Barnato now. Full time, not like when they were doing their act at the Paris Hotel. Both of them call themselves Barnato, Harry and Barney both. The Barnato Brothers. Although the older one has gone back to London to open a diamond-trading office there. A branch, they call it, of the one Barney opened here.”

Rhodes snorted. “Come on! Open a diamond-trading office in London? On what? And where would a little kopje-walloping Jew get the money to buy the Kerr boys out? I offered them three thousand pounds for each claim and they practically laughed in my face.”

“Then he obviously offered them more,” Rudd said logically, “because he bought them.” He sipped his whiskey and moved his glass in little circles on the table, watching the amber liquid slowly swirl around. Rudd was enjoying himself, although none of this showed on his face. “And where did he get the money? From that fight he won, the one he had with that giant Angolan last year. They calculate he had over four thousand quid bet at extremely high odds.”

“And I would wager the fight was fixed,” Rhodes said with a sneer. “You notice he hired that big Angolan right afterward, to handle the Kaffirs in the big hole!”

Rudd laughed. “That fight wasn’t fixed, believe me. You should have heard that circus owner! Armando was out for a full ten minutes, and Barnato’s fist was in a cast for over a month. Believe me, a man doesn’t put any part of himself in a cast the day before he gets married. Not to a beauty like that. Although I’m sure that didn’t stop him any.”

Rhodes had scarcely been paying attention. “And that so-called trading office of his on Commissioner Street! It’s a joke! I don’t know what he’s going to send to any London office. If he trades a thousand pounds a week, I’d be surprised.”

Rudd’s bushy eyebrows rose. He looked at Rhodes curiously. “So you do keep track of Barney Barnato!”

Rhodes was not at all embarrassed. Very little could embarrass Cecil John Rhodes. He shrugged. “I hear things, of course. But the way people talk about the little kike, that upstart little Jew from the London slums, is enough to make a man sick!”

Rudd considered his partner for several moments in silence.

“Maybe I’ve got a stronger constitution than you,” he said quietly at last, and he was no longer in a joking mood. “Barney Barnato has something, and it’s foolish not to recognize it. Since Beit came in with us and we formed the De Beers Company, we’ve got a good piece of the De Beers mine under our belt. And Barnato, in my opinion, is going to do the same thing at the Kimberley mine before he’s through. He’s taking more diamonds out of Kimberley right now than any other company. So looking down your nose at him, underestimating him, is simply shortsighted. We may be doing business with him someday. I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you were to meet him and talk to him.”

“Meet him? Talk to him? Someday we may do business with Barnato?” Rhodes stared at Rudd as if the other man had lost his mind, and then gave a short bark of laughter. “Charles, the day I do business with Barney Isaacs—Barnato—whatever—or even talk to him, is the day I fail to blackball him here at the Kimberley Club! And that day will never come.”

“You’re sure?” Rudd said quietly.

“I’m sure,” Rhodes said with a faint smile, and raised a hand for the waiter to bring refills for their glasses. He waited until they were served and turned back to Rudd. “How is the construction of the compounds going at the sorting yard?”

“It’s going all right. The double fence is up and the buildings are well started. But I don’t think the Kaffirs are going to like the idea of being separated from their families for six months or a year. Or the idea of being penned up like cattle.”

Rhodes considered him evenly. “Nobody forced them to sign their contracts in the first place. If they don’t want the jobs, there are plenty of others from the bush to take their places, and more coming in every day. You notice they’re happy enough when they’re done with their six months or their year to go back home with some money in their pockets, some clothes on their backs, and guns in their hands.” He looked across the table at Rudd, his face deadly serious. “There’s only one way to stop the thieving in the mine and in the sorting yards and sheds, Charles, and that’s to see that nobody leaves the area for the entire period of their contract, and then only after a damned thorough search.”

“And those searches,” Rudd went on a bit stubbornly, not at all put down by his partner’s words. “That’s another sore point. Using trained police dogs to keep the Kaffirs inside the compound. Going over a man’s scalp, like one monkey picking lice from another. Feeling around a man’s balls to see if he’s hidden a stone in the hair there. Feeding a man castor oil and then having someone search through his shit afterward for a diamond he might have swallowed. Putting a finger up a man’s ass—” He stopped. In the years he had known Rhodes he had long suspected that in the past the latter action would not have been distasteful to his partner, although Charles Rudd had to admit the other man had never made the slightest advance toward him in those years they had roomed together. Now, of course, it was no longer his problem; they each had separate houses, Rhodes living with his new male secretary, Neville Pickering, Rudd living with a new wife. Maybe I wasn’t his type, Rudd thought with an inward sour smile. He dropped the thought and went on. “Searches like that aren’t dignified, Johnny.”

“Dignified?” Rhodes shrugged. “You’re a sentimentalist, Charles. There’s no room for sentiment in this business. Illicit diamond dealing can ruin this industry, and you know it. It’s bad enough prices are dropping again in London and Paris without the problem of illicit diamonds on the market. And the only way to stop illicit diamond buying is to make sure there are no illicit diamonds around for the crooked traders to purchase. And to see that the trader gets a good stiff term on the Cape breakwater when he’s caught. And as far as the compounds are concerned, once they’re completed and in operation, the Kaffirs will only be searched once, at the end of their contract, instead of at random as at present, and possibly every day if one of them has bad luck.”

He drank and put his glass down.

“Besides,” he added, “these Kaffirs are animals. I’m sure the searches and the castor oil and everything else doesn’t bother them anywhere near as much as it seems to bother you. Simply realize you are not dealing with civilized men, you’re not dealing with Englishmen. These Kaffirs are animals, merely animals, and treating an animal like an animal is only natural and proper. So don’t let it upset you, Charles. It’s the only way to stop the illicit trading.”

“Except it will only work if all the other diggers go along,” Rudd pointed out. “The question is, will they? Will Baring-Gould at Kimberley; or Robinson at Kimberley? Or Barnato? Or the diggers at Bultfontein and Dutoitspan? There’ll be trouble with the Kaffirs.”

“There’ll be no trouble with the Kaffirs,” Rhodes said confidently. “Especially if everyone puts up compounds like ours. The bloody Bushmen will have no choice. And I’ve already talked to Baring-Gould and Robinson. They thought it a wonderful idea. They agree with me completely. I’ll talk to the others today.”

“Including Barnato?” There was a faintly sardonic smile on Rudd’s face.

“Not including Barnato,” Rhodes said, and there was an equally sardonic smile on his own lips. “You see, Charles, the day we get all the other diggers searching their Kaffirs properly, all the others except Barnato, let us say, then we’ll know fairly certainly from which claims any illicit diamonds are coming, won’t we?”

“And if he puts in compounds like the rest?”

“Then we’ll end the business of illicit diamonds once and for all,” Rhodes said calmly, “and that’s all I’ve been aiming at from the beginning …”

The compounds were low one-story brick buildings laid out in the form of a huge square with one side missing. Each building was divided with interior brick walls into spaces of a size that a tall man standing in the middle of each small room could touch the walls with his outstretched arms. A slot high in the back wall of each cubicle allowed the entrance of a small amount of light while being too small for the smallest man to pass through, even though there still remained a goodly distance between the building and the first of the two parallel fences. An entrance without a proper door gave access from the little cells to the enclosure of the compound itself. Each tiny room contained wooden shelves to accommodate eight men in sleeping.

A cookhouse was located at each end of the compound, and meals were intended to be taken in fingers while sitting on the ground of the open area. An uncanvased latrine was located to one side, a pole across a shallow ditch. The sorting yards where the earth from the mine was left for the rain and the weather to help break down stood between the compounds and the mine itself.

Rhodes, walking about and critically inspecting his partner’s handiwork, nodded in satisfaction. He stared at the high parallel fences topped by barbed wire that circled the compounds and ended at a large watchtower that would be manned by armed guards also equipped with sjamboks later that day when the first of the compounds went into service. In the runway formed by the space between the double fence large fierce-looking dogs already prowled restlessly. Rhodes gave the inner fence a push, as if to test its strength; instantly a large dog came running, baring its teeth and growling. Rhodes smiled and turned to Rudd at his side.

“A quite commendable job, Charles. Congratulations. Some of the other mineowners will be here later today to see what you’ve accomplished and to ask your help in telling them how to duplicate your work.”

“Barnato included?”

“Barnato not included,” Rhodes said, and his smile widened.

In the bar of the Paris Hotel, Barney Barnato was doing his imitation of Cecil John Rhodes.

“Omnibus,” he said in a high, affected falsetto, holding one hand with a limp wrist a bit higher than his shoulder and parading about the barroom with tiny mincing steps, his other wrist folded delicately at his waist. “Offnibus, animus, deadimus, oneimus, twoimus, threeimus. That’s Latin and Greek, you ignoramimus. I mean, ignoramimuses.” He stopped before a laughing man, looking at him sternly. “What are you laughing at, Charles? Being me is no laughing matter!” He paused to draw back with a little scream as an elderly maid came in the barroom to dump a bit of refuse into a pail. “A woman! Help!”

The laughter rose and then was interrupted. An argument had sprung up at one end of the adjoining dining room and the men turned from Barney to see what the fuss was all about. Two men, seated and facing each other at a table covered with their dishes of food, were leaning across the table, shouting at each other, their faces getting red, their voices rising in volume. Suddenly one of them came to his feet, grasped the edge of the table, and upended it, sending the other man to the floor under a deluge of dishes and food. The fallen man came to his feet roaring with rage, picking a knife from the spilled utensils on the floor as he did so. He shoved the upended table out of the way with one heave to give himself room to maneuver. He was a very large man with a full beard; the knife glittered in his huge hand as he handled it expertly. His opponent was a bit smaller but not much, with a rakish mustache and a scar that ran from the comer of his mouth to disappear at the end of a hard-looking jaw. The man with the knife made a quick forward-thrusting move and suddenly found himself flying through the air to crash painfully against a wall, the breath knocked out of him. The mustached man, cursing steadily aloud, his eyes narrowed cruelly in hate, walked over and kicked the knife from the paralyzed hand. He then began to systematically kick the fallen man in the head and sides. One kick broke the man’s nose; blood spurted. Barney hurried over, grabbing the mustached man by the arm.

“Hold it, chum! That’s enough,” he said firmly.

The man turned to meet this new interference, pulling back an arm to swing, but Barney held up a hand warningly. “I’ve no quarrel with you,” he said quietly, his very calmness causing the man to hesitate. “He pulled a knife on you and maybe deserved what he got. But that’s no reason to kick him to death. Come on,” he added in a lighter tone. “Leave him be. I’ll buy you a drink.”

The man on the floor had managed to come to a sitting position. He was holding a rag to his broken nose; it was soaked with blood. “Buy him a drink, eh?” he said thickly, speaking through the blood in his throat. “You don’t know who yer buyin’ a drink for, mister!”

The mustached man, his jaw clenched, turned with a curse and raised his foot to kick his fallen opponent again, but Barney dragged him back. The mustached man stared at the man on the floor a moment, finally shrugged, and followed Barney to the bar. Barney called over the bartender and turned back to the stranger. “What are you drinking?”

“Whiskey. Double.”

“Make that two.” Barney turned back to the other man. “That was quite a move you made when you tossed that big bloke over your shoulder. How did you do that?”

The mustached man shrugged. “It’s a Jap trick. Learned it in Tokyo, when I was in ships.”

“It’s very clever,” Barney said admiringly. “You’ll have to teach me that sometime.” He held out his hand. “I’m Barney Barnato.”

If the name meant anything to the mustached man there was no indication of it. “Carl Luckner.”

The two men shook hands, each aware of the other’s strong grip. Barney relaxed his hand, withdrew it, and picked up his drink. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you around here before. What are you doing in town?”

“Had a little trouble in Cape Town,” Luckner said evenly. “Decided to come up here and see the place. Looking for some kind of work, as a matter of fact.”

“What kind of trouble? I’m not being nosy,” Barney said quickly, “but I could maybe use somebody like you. But the thing is, Kimberley has gotten awfully respectable lately. No more Miner’s Committee. Now we’ve got a mayor—J. B. Robinson himself—and a council and a regular police force, and everything. Including a jail,” he added significantly.

“I had no trouble with the law,” Luckner said grimly. He downed his drink and rapped his glass on the bar sharply for a refill. “Well, I suppose you could say I did, in a way, if you mean trouble with the stupid police chief they got down there. But it was really the other way around. I was a police officer there. The trouble I got into was that the chief said I was too tough on the bastards I picked up. Beat them up first and asked questions afterward. He never denied most of them deserved it, though.” He took his replenished glass and drank, setting the glass down. “Oh, I’ve a miserable temper, I’ll admit that. I lose my head, see red. I can’t help it.”

Barney glanced into the dining room. Someone had set the fallen table on its feet; a woman was cleaning up the mess. A boy from the kitchen was sweeping up the broken crockery. The large bearded man with the broken nose had been helped to his feet and out the door. Barney jerked his thumb toward the arena of the fight.

“And what was that all about?”

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?”

“Disasters are supposed to come in threes,” Solly said sourly.

“So this time it’s simply mistakes. They won’t be disasters until I’m proved wrong. Don’t take it so hard, Solly. You’re doing a good job at the mine. I appreciate it.” Barney finished his beer and came to his feet, wiping his mouth. “I’ll get you the proper equipment as soon as possible.”

“But what kind of equipment?”

Barney smiled. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said, “but when I first came here I didn’t know what a pick was, or a whim, or anything else. And all I knew about diamonds you could put in your eye and it wouldn’t make you blink. The right equipment? Get me some samples of that blue ground if you have to dynamite it, and I’ll have somebody on the next coach to Cape Town with it to find out what it takes in machinery to dig it and crush it.” He looked at the clock. “I’ve got to run. I’m meeting Carl Luckner at the boxing academy for a lesson in that tricky Jap stuff. You know what? It’s cute and all that, but I like using these better.”

He raised his two fists in the air, shook them, smiled, and walked out, leaving his nephew shaking his head in frustration. The yellow dirt was running out, and with it the diamonds would be running out, and all his uncle could think of was taking a lesson in some Japanese silliness!

But Japanese silliness was very far from all his uncle was thinking of. As Barney walked quickly down the dirt road toward the boxing academy where he was to meet Luckner, his mind was on the blue ground that apparently was at the base of the yellow dirt, and if it was found on the Kerr claims and on Kimberley Central’s as well, then the chances were it would eventually be found on the French Company’s claims and Robinson’s. There was a man named Atherstone that Barney had once talked to, a man from Grahamstown, who had said that the diamonds came from extinct volcanoes, that the yellow soil was the top of a pipe. If this was true, then the chances were that there were even more stones in the blue ground than in the yellow, and the farther down they went the richer the yield.

If that were the case, he could pick up some of what had been Kimberley Central’s finest claims for a song, claims that only weeks before had been estimated to be worth thousands of pounds. Added to the other claims he already controlled, it would make the Barnato Mining Company as large as De Beers, and probably a lot more productive. He was sure that proper equipment to dig and crush the hard blue ground had to exist, and he intended to buy it no matter what it cost. If he were wrong, of course, the expenditure of buying other claims, no matter how cheap, added to the cost of useless machinery and to the fact that with the yellow soil running out the diamonds would also be running out, and Barnato Brothers would be stony. It was quite a gamble.

It was also a sobering thought…

Gustave Bees was having a hard time of it. Without his daughter Fay to handle the chores and to do the cutting and the basting and the delivery and the collecting of payments and the buying of the cloth and all the many things Fay had done for him since his wife’s death, Bees was in trouble. The Kaffir woman Fay had arranged to do some of the work had been bush-trained and knew nothing about the cutting of cloth, or basting; a simple breechclout for her man working in the mines on contract was the extent of her previous experience with garments. Besides, she was ugly as sin, hugely pregnant, the food she cooked was sickening, and she smelled. In appreciation for the many things Fay had done for him—and also partially out of some touch of fear of the strong woman his daughter had become—Gustave Bees had tried to overlook the fact that, having married an infidel, his daughter was living in sin and would go to hell unless he brought her home and had the minister say the proper prayers over her. But when, added to the discomfort of his life put upon him by Fay’s absence, he also began to hear from his dead wife in his constant conversations with her in his mind, and when Emily Bees told him she wanted Fay eventually to be with her in heaven, which was impossible as long as she lived with the infidel, Bees knew he had to act.

Accordingly, one day he put his shears into their holster at his belt from habit, and set out to walk the several miles from his tent in Bultfontein to the Paris Hotel. The bar was fairly crowded when he walked in and climbed the steps, paying no attention to the men standing there drinking. Bees remembered the room on the second floor where his daughter lived with her lover; Fay had brought him back the day after her wedding to show him the hotel and the room. It had been when she told him she was married and would not be coming home but would arrange a Kaffir woman to do the chores and help him. She had not told him she was taking instructions to become a Jew; she had felt she had to give her father time to recover from the first shock before encumbering him with the second.

Bees rapped on the door and waited. Fay opened the door and then smiled a bit dubiously when she saw it was her father. There was nothing in his expression to indicate that the visit was a fatherly one, or even a friendly one. Fay opened the door a bit wider, inviting entrance.

“Hello, Pa,” she said and stepped back. “Come in.”

“There’s no need to come in,” Bees said. “I’ve come to take you home. Get your things.”

“Pa, be sensible. I’m married now. I live here. This is my home.”

She might not have spoken, or Bees might not have heard her, for he went on with scarcely a pause. “Your ma wants you home, too.”

Fay drew in her breath sharply. “Ma’s dead,” she said quietly. “She’s been dead and buried for years.”

“She still wants you home. She told me. You’re living in sin,” Bees said accusingly. “You’ll go to hell and your ma in heaven will never be able to see you again. Get your things together. I’m taking you home.” He reached over and put one large hand on Fay’s arm, pulling. Fay went white as she pulled back.

“Pa! Let me go! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

Carl Luckner, hearing some kind of a fuss in the hallway, came from his combination room and office to see some elderly man pulling at Fay Barnato’s arm. Touching Fay was something Luckner had contemplated for some time, running his hands all over that lush body, kissing those swollen red lips, but the inviting smiles he had given the girl had evoked no response at all on her part, and his job was too valuable at the moment for him to risk making advances that might be rejected. Although why they should be had been a mystery to Luckner since he had first seen the girl; what a girl that beautiful could see in a plain-faced runt with goggles like Barney Barnato when he, Carl Luckner, was available, was something Luckner could not understand. Still, here was some old coot, probably having gotten drunk at the bar, trying to manhandle the girl. Luckner moved forward quickly.

“Here! Let her go, you drunken fool!”

Bees dropped Fay’s arm, turning to face this new threat. “Who are you?”

“Never mind who I am. You’d better leave while you can, old man.”

“I’m leaving with my daughter!” Bees turned back to Fay, angry now. “Get your things together or I’ll drag you out of here without them!”

Luckner looked at Fay. In his mind was the thought that now she might appreciate him and show that appreciation in some proper manner someday when Barney was busy at the office, or some night when Barney was out with the boys. The thought of having Fay in his arms in bed was inflaming, but first things first. He forced his eyes up from her full bust to her eyes. “You want this old man thrown out?”

Fay didn’t know what to say; it was a dilemma. “No,” she said at last. “He’s my pa. I’ll handle him.”

Bees was outraged. “I’ll handle you!” he said angrily, and grabbed her arm again.

Fay cried out in pain. Luckner’s jaw tightened. He stepped forward and took Bees’ arm, twisting it until the man released the girl; then Luckner grabbed Bees by the collar and the seat of his pants, lifting a bit, and started to walk him police fashion down the hall toward the steps. Bees struggled against the undignified grip, his crotch painful from the pressure of the raised trousers. He reached for the shears in the holster at his side, managed to drag them free, and punched them backward in a desperate attempt to win release from the grip. The points narrowly missed Luckner. Luckner’s jaw tightened further; his eyes became mere slits.

“Why, you dirty bastard! You miserable afskeiding! Pull something on me, will you!” he said viciously, and swung Bees around roughly. He took the arm with the scissors and twisted until they fell to the floor. He kicked them away and kept on twisting. Bees cried out in pain and then screamed as the shoulder snapped, slumping to his knees and then sprawling on the floor. Fay screamed and tried to intervene, but Luckner roughly shoved her away, all else forgotten in his maddened rage. Bees was trying to sit up, whimpering in pain, holding his broken arm as tightly to his side as he could while he supported himself on his other arm. Luckner, cursing steadily in a mad monotone, kicked Bees first on the supporting arm, and when Bees collapsed with a loud cry of pain, Luckner kicked him on the broken shoulder. Bees screamed once and fainted, but Luckner continued to kick the inert body, making it jump grotesquely with each kick. Fay was holding her hands over her ears, her eyes wide with shock, screaming without stop. People were running up the stairs from the bar to see what was happening. The first man to reach the top of the stairs saw Luckner methodically kicking some man on the floor of the hallway, a steady stream of curses coming from him as he did so. The man on the stairs stopped abruptly; in the six months Luckner had been managing the Paris Hotel his reputation as a bad man to cross had been proven more than once. Fay saw the frightened faces of the people on the stairs and called to them, her voice tinged with hysteria.

“Stop him! Stop him!”

Nobody moved. Her hysteria increased.

“Then get Barney! Someone get Barney!”

One of the men turned and forced himself past the others on the stairs, running out into the street and down the road to Barney’s office in Commissioner Street. He burst in as Barney was examining a stone through his loupe, his eyeglasses up on his forehead, a digger sitting before him.

“Barney!”

Barney looked up and came to his feet at once, frightened by the urgency in the man’s voice. “What is it? What happened?”

“Luckner’s killing some man! Your wife is there, screaming!”

Barney called out to his nephew in the rear of the office. “Jack, take over!” He dashed out of the office and down the road, pounding along as fast as he could go with the other man running behind him. He ran into the hotel and forced his way through the crowd on the stairs, tearing at them, pressing through them. The scene that met his eyes when he came to the top was one of horror. Bees’ dead body lay on the hallway floor, his face barely recognizable, a bloody mask with one eye socket empty and staring blindly where Luckner’s heavy boot had torn the eyeball loose, flipping it away to lie somewhere in the shadowed hallway. The nose had been flattened to one side, a bloody smear, and one ear had almost been ripped off. The body itself was twisted obscenely, doll-like, most of the bones broken after death by the unceasing, merciless kicking. Fay, sobbing softly and incessantly, was slumped on the floor against one wall, her hands over her eyes to shut out the memory of that terrible scene. Luckner, the hot edge of his temper spent, was standing as in a daze, panting a bit from his effort.

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.