The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  Van Heuten held the candle high, and cleared a chair with a wide sweep of his hand. “Sit down, eh? Sit down. First – another bottle. Here. Ah – that’s good.” He rolled the drink upon his tongue. “Now, I show you. I show you my fortune.” He set the light upon the table, began to turn away, then stopped, his expression suddenly drunkenly wary. He pushed his face close to Josef’s. Josef recoiled from the evil breath. “You listen to me. You say nothing about this. You hear? To no one. Or I kill you, eh?”

  Looking into the brutal face, Josef did not for a moment doubt the threat. He said nothing.

  “You hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  The Dutchman watched him for a moment, still belligerent. “You better hear me. You cross me – I break you in half—” he raised a hand, snapped dirty fingers beneath Josef’s nose “—like that. Believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  The silence stretched a few heartbeats longer. The man gave a sudden shout of laughter. “Of course you do. You’re my friend. My good, Russian friend. My good Russian friend in the diamond business.” Still chuckling, he went to a small cupboard in the corner of the cluttered room. “Now. Now, you see – wait—” he came back to Josef, something cradled in his cupped hand. In the act of holding it out for the other man to take he hesitated for a moment, as though he might after all change his mind and snatch the thing back. Then, “There.” He deposited something the size of a small egg in Josef’s hand, where it lay, heavy, gleaming, lucent in the unstable light, opaque yet lustrous as lit ice.

  In the silence a barge hooted outside, a lonely sound.

  “It’s beautiful, eh?” The voice was still soft, somehow lustful.

  “I – yes, it’s beautiful.”

  “A man would kill for such a stone, eh?” the Dutchman snickered boastfully, watching Josef for his reaction.

  Josef hardly heard the words. He was staring in wonder at the thing that nestled in the palm of his hand as if it belonged there. It was beyond doubt the biggest and most beautiful rough diamond he had ever seen.

  Chapter Three

  From the first moment he saw it, in the darkness of that stinking, dirty room, the light of the candle glimmering deep in its heart, Josef coveted the stone as he had never coveted anything in his life before, nor ever was to again. Here, cradled within the grasp of his open hand, was the means to change his life and Tanya’s at a stroke, the glittering key to a future of which he had all but despaired. He had no doubt at all as to its value, needed no minute examination to convince him of the diamond’s flawless quality; he knew it, would have staked his life upon it, felt it in his blood the moment he held it. Yet – it was not simply the fantastic value of the thing that drew him, the knowledge of the fortune that must surely await the man who could release the living fire that smouldered within it. From the start it was as if the gem bewitched him, called to him, revealed to him, and to him alone, planes and angles and the rainbowed refraction of light that an unpractised eye could never have recognized. From the moment he held the stone, his fingers ached for the feel of the tools that would discover the beauty that lay dormant within it. So rapt was he in those first moments that he hardly heard the rambling, drunken tale that accompanied it – a story of treachery and murder and betrayed friendship that later he was to sicken of hearing; for, once the Dutchman’s tongue had loosened, it was as if a vicious compulsion urged the telling and retelling of the tale, often with added, lividly embroidered details – but always with the same core that Josef came to recognize as the barbaric truth.

  Eighteen months before, on shore leave in Cape Town, van Heuten had embarked upon a drunken orgy that had ended in the cutting of the throat of a ship’s officer. Judiciously, he had decided the time had come to leave the sea for a while, and he had jumped ship in the hope of trying what he saw as the easy pickings of the newly-opened diamond fields upcountry. Lacking in experience, equipment and luck he had at first been disappointed. But not for long. In such a place and at such a time there would always be alternatives for a man like Pieter van Heuten. Leaving the hard work to others he gambled, swindled and cheated his way from the Orange to the Vaal and back again, finally going into dubious partnership with a German called Weitner – a man from all accounts as villainous as himself – with whom he had entered into the lucrative business of stealing sheep and cattle from the vast farms that surrounded the diggings, slaughtering them and selling the meat at hugely inflated prices to the hungry men of the mining camps that had sprung – mushrooms of timber and corrugated iron – along the banks of the diamond-rich rivers of Southern Africa. But they had badly underestimated the tough farmers of the veldt; the day came when van Heuten and his partner had stolen one sheep too many – on their next foray an unfriendly reception committee awaited them. Weitner was taken and hanged on the spot with no ceremony. Van Heuten was luckier – though slightly wounded he managed to escape and make his way towards the newly christened town of Kimberley, centre of the new diamond rush and a good place for a wanted man to lose himself. A few miles from the town, however, he collapsed, weakened by his wound, and was found by the roadside by a young American, Johnny Burton, who, unlike most in his position, neither left the stranger to die nor robbed and finished him off himself. Believing, to the Dutchman’s private amusement, van Heuten’s fabrication about being attacked and robbed, the young man befriended him, took him in and nursed him back to health. More fool him, said van Heuten with a grin; and predictably had repaid the young man’s misplaced generosity with a conscienceless betrayal that had cost the American his fortune and his life. It had been almost a month after van Heuten had moved into Johnny’s corrugated iron shack – an oven in the heat of the African sun, but a haven nevertheless for a hunted man – that the American had at last found the stone that all along he had been convinced was waiting for him. Flawless, weighing nearly seventy carats, it was every diamond man’s dream of swift fortune. Sitting that night with the Dutchman around their small cooking-fire he had, with naive elation, shown the man he considered his friend his find, had sat till the early hours dreaming aloud of his future – a cattle ranch somewhere in the Western States, marriage to the girl he had left behind, a family – twenty-four hours later Johnny Burton was dead, battered almost beyond recognition with his own shovel and Pieter van Heuten was on his way to Cape Town, the diamond in his pouch. He had, however, made one bad miscalculation; Johnny Burton was not, as were so many of the men that haunted the diamond diggings, a friendless down-and-out to be left for the vultures and no one to care. Even among the hard-bitten men of the mining camps his good nature and friendly open-handedness had won him many good friends, among them a dour, tough Canadian known simply as Bull, who had detested and mistrusted van Heuten on sight. As luck would have it, Bull it was who found Johnny’s battered body within an hour of the Dutchman’s departure and, drawing the only possible and absolutely correct conclusion, immediately set out to hunt the man who had killed his friend. So it was that van Heuten, to his astonishment, had found himself the subject of a grimly single-minded manhunt that had, as well as disturbing his peace of mind, effectively prevented him from disposing of the diamond. Finally reaching Cape Town with the stone still in his possession and with Bull right on his heels, he had signed on to the Marie Anne, a freighter bound for Amsterdam, and had fled to safety.

  “Why haven’t you sold it here?” Josef asked that first time, weighing the diamond in his hand, turning it gently upon his palm with the tip of his finger.

  “Pah!” The sound was a compound of disgust and anger. “Do you think I didn’t try? Cheats! Cheats and thieves!” He snatched back the stone, brooded over it. “Can I go to the ponces that live on the Herrengracht with something like this? Clearly not. Questions would be asked, eh? Questions I should not be happy to answer. So I went—” he paused, shrugged “—elsewhere. To the smaller dealers – to the ones who don’t ask so many questions. Pigs. They thought they could cheat me. Told me the stone was
worthless. You know what they offered me?” He spat, too close for comfort to Josef’s boot. “A stinking six thousand guilders. Six thousand! Do they think I floated in to Amsterdam on the last tide?”

  “I suppose they guessed that you wouldn’t dare try to sell it on the open market.”

  “I suppose they did.” The light eyes gleamed in the guttering light, glinting malevolence, fixed upon Josef. “But perhaps – now – they’re wrong, eh? Now I have a friend – a friend who knows diamonds – a friend who can tell these cheating jackals that Piet van Heuten knows the value of this stone and won’t be made a fool of by misbegotten sons of bitches who think they can pull the wool over a man’s eyes.”

  * * *

  Exactly when the overwhelming desire to own the stone became a resolve – an astonishing resolve – to steal it, Josef was never sure. The thought must have been there, he realized later, from the very first moment he held the thing, must have lain quietly in the recesses of his mind waiting for the moment when desperation and necessity finally exerted themselves to transform the unthinkable into the acceptable and the decision could be taken. Certainly within a very short time he found himself to be completely obsessed with the stone. In his dreams, waking and sleeping, he handled it, worked it, watched its transformation from clouded crystal to living, lustrous gem. The thought of it lying neglected in that pigsty of a room above his head was more than he could bear; the knowledge that all of his own hopes, and Tanya’s, could well lie in that festering filth was far worse, and not even an innately honest nature could long remain proof against such enormous temptation.

  But if he could not recall the precise instant of decision regarding the theft itself, he never forgot the moment he saw, in Tanya, the means to that end.

  It occurred on an evening when van Heuten, as so often, turned up at their door with a bottle of schnapps and a present for Tanya. Carelessly at home as always, he flung his coat on to the hook on the back of the door, handed the bottle to Josef, his eyes already searching for the child.

  “Hey, my little Russian princess. Come see. Come see what Uncle Piet has for you.” He drew from his jacket pocket a prettily-dressed, slightly tattered rag doll with round blue eyes and smudged red cheeks. Grinning, he dangled the doll in the air, just beyond Tanya’s reach. She looked at it, pleadingly.

  “Say ‘Please’, now.” He taunted her as he might a puppy, keeping the doll just beyond her reach.

  She lifted her arms. “Please,” she whispered.

  “Please, dear Uncle Piet.”

  She turned her great eyes for a fleeting moment to Josef. Her colour was high. Then, “Please, dear Uncle Piet,” she repeated obediently.

  “Give it to the child if you’re going to,” Josef said shortly. “Why make her beg?”

  Van Heuten ignored him. He dropped to one knee and handed the doll to Tanya, catching her round the waist before she could grasp the doll and flee, as had been her obvious intention. “Doesn’t your Uncle Piet deserve a kiss then?”

  The child’s hesitation was barely noticeable. Then she allowed herself to be pulled on to his knee and petted.

  “That’s my good little girl. A kiss for Uncle Piet – just a little kiss.”

  It was then that it struck Josef that these times – when he fondled and played with Tanya – were the only times when he ever saw the man so relaxed, so unguarded. Vulnerable. He tried to push the thought away. To contemplate stealing – even from such a rogue as van Heuten – was bad enough. To consider involving the child, surely, was unthinkable. Yet the thought, once lodged, would not be dismissed. Through the long nights when he lay unsleeping, discarding first one impractical plan, then another, he came constantly upon the same stumbling block – van Heuten’s constant vigilance. The man trusted nobody, and though he treated Josef’s room as his own the compliment – if compliment it were – was in no way returned. Never did Josef find himself in the other man’s room alone, never on those occasions when the man was out of the house was his door ever left unlocked. The only way to get at the diamond was to get hold of the key. That, Josef thought, might be easy enough. But then he had to arrange for something – someone? – to distract the man’s attention, keep him safely downstairs, out of the way.

  He tried time and again over the next few days not to think of using Tanya as a decoy, yet no matter how he tried the thought would not be dismissed; on the contrary, as the days passed, he found himself reasoning with himself, justifying the unjustifiable. The child could not possibly come to harm. If he – Josef – stole the key from van Heuten’s pocket, made some excuse to slip out, went straight upstairs, took the diamond – why the whole operation would not take more than five or six minutes. What hurt could befall the child in such a short time? And she, after all, would partake no less than he of the new life that could follow. If the choice were between a life that had a meaning and a life that had none – what true choice was there? His plan to dispose of the diamond using the Amsterdam Anatovs meant using the child, and he had no scruples about that – where, in heaven’s name, was the difference?

  So he reasoned, knowing the devil’s voice, helpless to withstand it, a man driven against his nature to dishonour. His resolve faltered only once, when the woman Bea, with seemingly uncanny timing, chose to warn him against letting Tanya associate with van Heuten. Josef had noticed that there was intense bad blood between these two; the reason for it became clear on the day that the woman stopped him on the stairs with a crook of her finger and a conspiratorial jerk of her head. “A word with you.”

  Josef by now understood enough Dutch to follow most of what she said. He stood politely, waiting.

  “Him up there—” She jerked a fat thumb graphically towards the top landing. “Don’t let him near your girl. He’s filth.”

  Josef was more than a little taken aback at the directness of the words. “He’s been very kind to Tanya,” he began.

  The woman snorted. “Kind? Hah! I dare say he has. As he was to my little Hendrikje, eh? Giving her presents. Telling her his filthy stories. And me not knowing what was going on under my very nose! Till the day I caught him with his hand up her skirt—”

  Josef felt hot colour rise to his face. Ridiculously he felt as guilty and humiliated as if it were he himself the woman discussed with such contempt. “I don’t—”

  She ignored his attempt to speak. “I tell you the truth. His hand up her skirt. His fingers—” She stopped, eyeing the expression on Josef’s face, “Well, no need to say, eh? I tell you – he was lucky I didn’t chop them off, and his other parts with them. Filth!” she said again, with quarrelsome force. Then she softened. “Your little one, she’s an angel, a little angel, but,” sorrowfully she pointed a finger, screwed it illustratively into her own forehead, “she’s not quite right in the head, huh? And her so gentle. How would she know how to behave with such a man? What would he do to her, filth like that?”

  Josef fled. But though the woman’s words haunted him, still the compulsion, the necessity to acquire the stone, the key to their escape from savage poverty and indignity, drove him; and he could see no other way. He’d be a fool and worse than a fool not to take this chance. A heartless fate had kicked them in the teeth more than once this past year – now was the time to take fate by the throat and redress the balance. The man to whom the stone truly belonged was dead, foully murdered by van Heuten. It now belonged to anyone who could possess it. And who had a better right than the man who knew instinctively the secrets of the stone, and who could release its captive beauty to the world? The child would not be harmed.

  So he told himself, and so he more than half-believed.

  * * *

  Josef Rosenberg turned thief one gale-swept March night while the loose, ill-fitting shutters of the building crashed against the rotting brickwork in the wind, and small, chill drafts, sprites of cold mischief, scurried along passages, up stairs and beneath doors. He had laid his plans as far as he was able, and then simply and fatalistically
waited; who knew, perhaps the opportunity would never arise. But when, on this windy evening, van Heuten put his head round the door and Josef from the other side of the room smelt the raw spirits on his breath, he knew with a disturbing mixture of dread and anticipation that the gods had indeed decided to tempt him.

  The Dutchman, grinning foolishly, stumbled into the room, divested himself of his coat, tried unsuccessfully to hang it as usual on the hook on the back of the door and watched in drunken surprise as the garment slipped to the floor in an untidy heap.

  “It’s all right. I’ll do it. Here – sit down before you fall down,” Josef to his astonishment heard his own voice, even and self-contained as ever, betraying nothing of the sudden thumping of his heart, the dryness of his throat. He pushed the rickety chair forward, catching the Dutchman behind the knees. Giggling and wheezing, van Heuten collapsed into it. Casually, Josef stooped to pick up the coat. “What in God’s name have you been doing to yourself?”

  Van Heuten tossed back his head and roared with laughter. “Drinking, my friend! What else? Drinking a scoundrel under the table! Did I ever tell you of Hennie van der Post? The bugger who damn near got me cut into collops in Athens three years ago?” He launched into a garbled story, the slurred words almost unintelligible. Josef watched him, not listening. The man was drunk as a pig – surely he must soon slip into insensibility? Slowly he walked round behind the chair, and hung the coat he was still holding on the back of it. The room was far from warm, but a sheen of sweat stood on his face.