Роберт Фиш - Rough Diamond

“Oh, Barney,” she said, “you’re such a fool! I love you.”

He reached for her hand with his good hand, squeezing it. “I’ve loved you so long, Fay!” He suddenly realized that Harry and the boys were keeping their eyes rigidly to the front, although they obviously were listening. “Harry!”

Harry turned, a big grin on his face. “What?”

“We’re getting married tomorrow!” Barney couldn’t keep the pride from his voice, or his total surprise and absolute joy.

“I knew you two would one day,” Harry said, still grinning. “As soon as you got some sense.”

Barney turned back. A problem had just occurred to him. “Fay…”

“Yes, darling?”

“Would you mind — becoming Jewish?”

“No, darling. I’ve already spoken to the rabbi about getting instruction.”

Barney stared. “I didn’t even know we had a rabbi in town!”

“There’s even a synagogue. Which you should attend.”

Barney grinned. “You’re not even a convert yet, and already you’re a better Jew than I am.” He thought a moment. “Someday,” he said quietly, squeezing her hand all the more tightly, “we’ll go to London and get married again, just for my folks. Would you mind?”

“I’ll marry you as often as you like, wherever you like,” she said, smiling. “Now try to get some rest.”

He closed his eyes, still holding tightly to Fay’s hand as if to hold on to the good fortune that had come to him, marveling that Fay could possibly love him. He could almost thank Armando, the Angolan Giant, for giving him the beating he had taken, since it seemed to have triggered Fay’s action. Bless the big man! A thought came; he opened his eyes again and turned his head.

“Harry!”

Harry’s head came around. “Yes, Barney?”

“That big man, that Armando—”

“What about him?”

“He’d make quite a diamond miner, don’t you think?”

Harry smiled. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I think he would. I’ll go talk to him after we get you taken care of at the doctor’s.”

“It might keep him from killing somebody someday,” Barney said with a smile, and kept his eyes open, staring up at Fay’s lovely face, still trying to believe that everything he had ever wanted had come to him in that single day…

“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.”