Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Working a grizzly is very, very dangerous, Mr Reed. Most of the accidents happen on a grizzly. You’re supposed to have procedures, go by the book, but often – in fact, mostly – it isn’t practical and you have to take risks, huge risks. For instance, the rocks jam at the entrance to the grizzly shaft that drains the ore from the stope – maybe two or three hundred tons of rock jammed sixty feet above the grizzly bars – and you have to somehow climb up to it and lay a charge to break it up, so it will flow again. Maybe it’s all being held by only a small rock, and it comes loose and you’re up there and that’s the end.’ He shrugged. ‘No more grizzly man.’

  ‘I’m having trouble understanding what a grizzly is,’ I said. ‘How does it work?’

  ‘Hard to describe – you really need to see one. It’s a grid that sieves the ore so that it’s the right size before it’s carted off to the surface. The bigger chunks get stuck on the bars of the grid.’ I must have looked blank because he went on. ‘Imagine lengths of railway line laid side by side with good-sized gaps in between across the mouth of the shaft below a slope where the diamond driller is working. The grizzly man balances on the bars and breaks up the rocks with a sledge hammer or, if that doesn’t work, he blasts them. It’s dangerous, even with a safety chain, and lots of them don’t bother, so there’s always the risk they’ll fall through the bars. Grizzly bars are banned in other countries but up there on the Copperbelt they’re still the most efficient way to extract ore.’

  ‘But why would a grizzly man take risks like that?’

  ‘Agh, man, there’s huge pressure on him to empty the stope. If it isn’t empty the diamond driller can’t drill and he doesn’t get his full ore bonus, which is calculated on the number of ore trucks filled from the night shift. And then the grizzly man doesn’t get his share of the bonus. All grizzly workers are young guys like you, willing to take risks but also proud. They don’t want to look like fools or cowards in front of the diamond drillers.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t they wear a safety chain?’ I asked.

  ‘Because if they slip and fall through the bars, the chain will snap them to a halt twelve feet down, and sometimes that can break your spine or a rock falling from the stope can smash you to pieces.’

  ‘So, grizzly men are more or less forced to break the rules?’

  ‘Ja, man, all the time, with everyone turning a blind eye. When someone gets injured or killed, the mine management points out that he broke their very strict operating rules. If you come off the grizzlies after a year and you haven’t been badly injured, it’s a miracle, man.’

  ‘I can see why they need medics.’

  Miss Truscott entered with the letter and waited by the desk while I enjoyed the sight of her slim figure. ‘Thank you, that will be all, Miss Truscott,’ Mr Leslie said.

  I thanked her and wondered for a moment if I should invite her for lunch, or a drink after she finished work, but then I remembered I was on the run, and squiring a pretty girl in a New York cocktail bar was hardly inconspicuous. Miss Truscott gave me a gorgeous smile as she left, and I knew under normal circumstances I would definitely have followed it up. After five years at the GAWP Bar, I guess I could read most female body language. The smile, the slight turn of the shoulders, the second glance, the hardy perceptible increase in the swing of her hips and the slightly mincing steps she took to make her derriere move in an even more deliciously suggestive manner were all words in that unspoken female language.

  Mr Leslie reached for his fountain pen and signed the single page, then rolled a blotter over the wet ink before folding the letter and sliding it into the envelope. ‘I haven’t sealed it, Mr Reed, so please read it if you want, hey.’ He extended his hand. ‘I hope you take up our offer.’

  I shook his hand. ‘You’ve been extraordinarily generous with your time and advice, sir. Please be assured I am most grateful.’ I held up the envelope and repeated. ‘Thank you. You may be sure I’ll use this.’

  ‘It has been a pleasure, Mr Reed.’ He held onto my hand a fraction longer than might have been necessary. Releasing it, he said, ‘Whatever you’re running away from, Jack, I hope it all turns out well for you in the end.’

  I stepped out of Mr Leslie’s office and was about to smile at the delectable Miss Truscott, thank her and stroll past her desk, when I stopped. What the hell, I was headed into purgatory anyhow, and the closest I’d been to a woman since darling Bridgett had been the nursing staff at the Albany General Hospital, who were capable, cheerful and efficient older women.

  ‘Miss Truscott, I’d love to buy you a drink,’ I said quietly, ‘then, if you’re free, perhaps dinner? I’m ravenous. I was too nervous to eat today.’

  She was silent for a moment, her eyes lowered, and I noted she was wearing light grey eye shadow. Finally she looked up, her lovely grey eyes amused. ‘As long as that’s the only thing you are ravenous for, I’d love to accept, Mr Reed,’ she laughed, adding, ‘I finish in twenty minutes.’

  I knew that kind of laugh, too, with its hidden meaning. Never know your luck in the big city, Jack Spayd . . . er, Jack McCrae, oh shit, Jack Reed, I thought to myself. Maybe later, after dinner, a little serenade on the harmonica . . . ‘It’s Jack. I’ll be waiting in the foyer, Miss Truscott.’

  ‘It’s Stacey, Jack.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WHEN STACEY SUGGESTED WE go to her favourite trattoria I swallowed hard. In my imagination any Italian restaurant was likely to be swarming with members of the Mob. Clearly, I was more paranoid than I’d realised. But she was so pretty I couldn’t refuse, and I told myself that a familiar restaurant would mean she’d feel at ease, always a good start to an evening.

  Barney’s champagne had worked like a charm – ‘good liquor makes seduction quicker, Krug Rosé is the perfect way!’ and when the lovely Stacey invited me home to her tiny flat, my ‘lullaby’ on the harmonica added the finishing touch to the pink bubbly. ‘You’re a real classy guy,’ she’d said happily after two glasses, which had been a great boost to my faltering ego.

  Yes, I did feel guilty about Bridgett, but I’m a man and I told myself the evening was part of a deliberate attempt to forget and move on. Also, I guessed that it could be a long, long time before I was fortunate enough to meet a suitable woman in Africa. Mr Leslie had made it clear that even looking at a woman of colour would not be tolerated and that all white women were either wives or daughters, both out of bounds.

  Despite this, and the many pleasures of Stacey’s company, I realised that the sooner I got out of New York, the better. It’s a big city in which to get lost but all it would take was one slip, one unlucky sighting. I knew that the Mafia’s tentacles could reach me wherever I tried to hide – Johnny Diamond had never mentioned the name of his home town, and yet the Mafia had discovered him in Oak Harbor, Ottawa County, Ohio, a village of less than eight-hundred souls on a tributary of Lake Erie. He was practically on the Canadian border and yet it wasn’t far enough away to keep him safe. As Lenny would have said, ‘Vamoose, Jack!’

  I knew better than to travel by passenger liner – too many people with time on their hands, curious about other passengers. I had heard somewhere that some of the freight lines carried a few passengers as well as cargo. Rather than visiting the various shipping lines I went back to the New York Library. Mrs Hodgson had taught me well and I knew my way around a library; although, of course, the New York Library was something else, and would have given the British Library a nudge. Regarded as the greatest library in the world, when I’d visited it during the war the British Library had been boarded up, with all of its valuable books and manuscripts removed to a safer location, so I hadn’t seen it at its best. Often I’d instead repaired to Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road for the steady diet of books I needed. Despite its eccentric and old-fashioned practices, it was a wonderful shop, stuffed with books from every writer published in English, or so it seemed.

  It didn’t take me long to discover what I needed to know about
shipping lines. The English Bank Line was one that carried a mere handful of paying passengers and shipped cargo to all points of the globe from American and Canadian ports.

  I called the shipping agents and learned from an English clerk that the Lossiebank was due to sail in about three days from New York for the port of Liverpool in the UK. ‘She’s a very comfortable ship, sir. You’d have your own private cabin and I’m told the Khalasi cook is excellent.’

  ‘Khalasi?’ I asked.

  ‘The cook is an Indian. The Khalasi are mostly dockworkers, porters and sailors, but I guess he’s been elevated to the galley.’

  ‘So, curries . . . ?’

  He laughed. ‘Of course, but not exclusively, I’m sure.’

  ‘Sounds perfect,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me the exact date and time of departure?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. You have to understand that these are cargo ships; they leave when all the cargo is aboard. That can vary by a couple of days, depending on the dockworkers and their workload. You’ll need to call me every morning after ten. When she leaves, she sails on the evening tide for Liverpool. Shall I book a cabin, sir?’

  Sails on the evening tide . . . only an Englishman would use an expression that dated back to the days of sailing ships. ‘My final destination is Africa, as I said, so is it possible to find a ship in England that will take me there?’

  ‘Why, yes, sir, our ships sail to just about every part of the world with the old red duster.’

  ‘The red duster?’

  ‘The red ensign, the flag of the British merchant navy. The Bank Line has cargo ships sailing regularly from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa.’

  It wasn’t a hardship to wait a couple more days. Stacey Truscott had succumbed to ‘Tenderly’ by Walter Gross, played soft and low on the harmonica, and I felt fairly certain that until the call came to go aboard there was room in her bed for two. Stacey was open-hearted and affectionate, and when I explained that I was leaving America, she’d generously offered to take me back to her place for ‘my farewell gift’.

  Now, with the Lossiebank due to sail in three days or so, I hoped my farewell celebration might extend a little if I were lucky, so I found a top perfumery on Fifth Avenue and bought a bottle of Chanel No. 5 Eau de Parfum. Working in the GAWP Bar I’d smelled almost every type of French perfume and been assured by many of the women that Chanel No. 5, Joy by Jean Patou and Shalimar by Guerlain, were by far the most popular perfumes among the very rich. I hoped it might cement my ‘classy guy’ reputation and, I’m happy to say, it worked wonders.

  I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I’d need in Africa, but I visited Sam Ash Music in Brooklyn and purchased two sixteen-hole chromatic Hohner super harmonicas.

  Four days later I was told the Lossiebank would sail that evening on the tide. I’d paid the $120 for my passage to Liverpool, and gave thanks that, at least during this crossing to England, I wouldn’t be lying in my bunk having nightmares about German torpedoes.

  So, the die was cast. I stood at the stern of the MV Lossiebank, having waved farewell to the generous, pretty and tearful Stacey, and then watched as the old cargo boat nosed her way out of New York Harbour and began to roll gently on the Atlantic swell. As the Empire State Building receded, I wondered whether I would ever see North America again. I glanced down at my hand on the rail; it wasn’t a pretty sight. Perhaps I should have worn a leather glove to cover it, but then people would ask about it, which would lead to more explanations. Usually when anyone noticed my left hand, they didn’t comment. It was better that way. I’d learned from having a missing earlobe that explanations soon became tedious. I thought of Mr Leslie, who obviously enjoyed recounting the story of his underground mine accident, but I was different; I’d always preferred to grandstand from the keyboard.

  ‘Mr Reed, sah.’ I turned to see the owner of the voice, an immaculately white-jacketed Indian steward, standing to rigid attention and looking up at me. ‘Captain Irvine invites you for a drink in the saloon with the other passengers, sah.’

  I followed him into the interior of the ship, noticing as I went the beautiful old-fashioned teak panelling in the corridor, and the heavy reassuring ‘thunk’ of the teak door as it swung shut behind me, in effect cutting me off from my past.

  There were four other passengers at dinner: an American Episcopalian bishop and his English wife; and two American women who appeared to be in their late sixties, both ex-schoolteachers. The bishop had been invited to attend the coronation of the new queen, Elizabeth II, and was taking an extended holiday prior to the ceremony at Westminster Abbey. The captain, a Lancastrian, proved to be a man of few words who left the conversational work to his first officer, Alastair MacIntyre, and another Bank Line officer called Peter Adams, who was hitching a ride back to the UK to take up a position on one of the company’s cargo boats. We proved to be, as the bishop’s wife, Mrs Shillington, put it, ‘a jolly nice lot’, although I saw very little of the other passengers during the daytime, which they spent playing bridge. At meals, they discussed the relative merits of the different bidding systems used in the game, the two Americans, not surprisingly, favouring the American system, while Mrs Shillington insisted the British system was superior.

  The bishop, who started on his first glass of claret at midday, abstained from expressing an opinion on either system. By the time we gathered for a ‘sun-downer’, he’d finished his first bottle of claret and took what remained of his third back to his cabin after dinner. A chubby, greying and undistinguished-looking man, his claret nose made Mr Leslie’s look relatively normal.

  I spent most of my time reading, or in the company of Peter Adams, another bibliophile and a keen amateur photographer; or ‘snapographer’, as he modestly called himself. I’d seen some of his photographs and they were a lot more than mere snaps. Apart from our love of books, we had the war in common and Peter proved to be excellent company, as did Alastair MacIntyre, when he wasn’t busy on the bridge.

  The crossing was comparatively calm compared with my first experience of the Atlantic, and one day blended seamlessly into the next, as they often do on voyages. We arrived in Liverpool and I took the train to London, the name of a decent small hotel in South Kensington, recommended to me by Peter Adams, tucked into my pocket. Almost the sole purpose of my trip to London was to visit Foyles Bookshop to stock up on Penguins, the famous paperbacks that had been popularised in the 1930s, and were orange for fiction, green for crime fiction, blue for biographies, and so on. I quickly filled the large canvas bag I’d brought along and saved on weight and also a small fortune. I also bought a copy of Gray’s Anatomy and two large books on industrial first aid, and emergency first aid, to study on the voyage out.

  A day later, Peter Adams phoned me at my hotel.

  ‘Jack, I’ve been appointed first officer on the Roybank, a cargo ship, sailing to Lobito in Angola, and assorted other African ports. She sails in four days’ time – interested?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘She’s a nice ship, I’m sure you’ll be comfortable. Captain Paul Eggert’s the man in charge . . .’

  I jotted down the address of the Bank Line head office in London where I could purchase my passage.

  My remaining three days in London I spent looking around. To my surprise, there was still a lot of bomb damage, and Londoners, generally speaking, looked drab and disconsolate in the late winter gloom. Perhaps it was the food rationing, which continued to make their lives joyless. They’d been required to show their stiff upper lips for way too long, and I couldn’t help wondering whether winning the war was all we’d thought it would be. The British certainly didn’t seem to be reaping any rewards for their courage and grit, and there was no sign of the brashness and optimism epitomised by Sammy’s pink Cadillac convertible. Instead of getting back on their feet, it seemed, they were still making an effort to rise from their knees. London in 1953 was a long way from the brassy neon-lit greedy opportunism of Las Vegas or the bright confid
ence of New York.

  At one stage on the crossing from America I’d toyed with the idea of ‘disappearing’ in England, but the dull weariness of London had left me depressed and I thought it unlikely that the British wanted jazz and blues harmonica playing to cheer them up. Africa, here I come.

  My fellow passengers on the SS Roybank were an Ethiopian diplomat, Berihun Kidane, and his wife, Fenet, who were on their way to Lagos, where he would take up his position as the new consul at the Ethiopian consulate in Abuja. The former consul had died suddenly of a heart attack and Berihun was being transferred from London. It was technically a promotion, but, as Fenet pointed out, a doubtful one. When I’d suggested that I didn’t know diplomats usually travelled by cargo boat, she’d admitted that she had a fear of flying and the Roybank had been the first ship leaving for Nigeria. They were a handsome young couple and she was an absolute stunner.

  I confess my ignorance at the time. All I knew about Ethiopia was that it was originally known as Abyssinia and was situated somewhere left of the Red Sea, occupying part of the Horn of Africa. What I learned from Fenet was that the ruling class, she and her husband obviously among them, came from the ancient Amhara people of the central highlands. Moreover, they are often very tall – she must have been close to six feet, elegant and slim as a pencil. Fenet told me she could trace her ancestry back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Like most people, I knew a little about the queen from Bible references, but I’d never considered her appearance. Now, looking at Fenet, I suddenly understood that she could well have been a beauty.