Gold Mine

by Wilbur Smith

  He had not seen her for almost two weeks, not since their meeting just after Manfred Steyner's return from Europe.

  He had spoken to her twice on the telephone, hasty, confused conversations that left him feeling dissatisfied. He was increasingly aware that he was missing her. His one attempt to find solace elsewhere had been a miserable failure. He had lost interest halfway through the approach manoeuvres and had returned the young lady to the bosom of her family at the unheard-of hour of eleven o'clock on a Saturday night.

  Only the unremitting demands of his new job had prevented him from slipping away to Johannesburg and taking a risk.

  "You know, Ironsides, you'd better start bracing up a little, don't lose your head over this woman. Remember our vow Never Again!" He punched the pillow into shape and settled into it.

  Terry lay quietly, waiting for it. It was after one o'clock in the morning. It was one of those nights. He would come soon now. As never before she was filled with dread. A cold slimy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Yet she had been fortunate. He had not been near her since his return from Paris. Over two weeks, but it could not last. Tonight.

  She heard the sound of the car coming up the drive and she felt physically ill. I can't do it, she decided, not any more, not ever again. It wasn't meant to be like this, I know that now. It's not dirty and furtive and horrible, it's like... like... it's the way Rod makes it.

  She heard him in his bedroom, suddenly she sat up in bed. She felt desperate, hunted.

  The door of her room opened softly.

  "Manfred?"she asked sharply.

  "It's me. Don't worry." He came briskly towards her bed, a dark impersonal- shape and he was undoing the cord of his dressing-gown.

  "Manfred," Terry blurted. "I'm early this month, I'm sorry." He stopped. She saw his hands fall back to his sides, and he stood completely still.

  "Oh!" he said at last, and she heard him shuffle his feet into the thick pile of the carpet. "I just came to tell you," he hesitated, seeking an excuse for his visit, "that... that I'll be going away for five days. Leaving on Friday. I have to go to Durban and Cape Town."

  "I'll pack for you," she said.

  "What? Oh, yes thank you." He shuffled his feet again.

  "Well, then." He hesitated, then stooped quickly and brushed her cheek with his lips. "Good night, Theresa."

  "Good night, Manfred." Five days. She lay alone in the darkness and gloated. Five whole days alone with Rod.

  Inspector Hannes Grobbelaar of the detective South African Criminal Investigation Department sat on the edge of the office chair with his hat tipped onto the back of his head and spoke into the telephone, which he held in a handkerchief-covered hand.

  He was a tall man with a long sad face and a mournful looking mustache that was streaked with grey.

  "Gold buying," he said into the receiver, and then in reply to the obvious question, "There's gold dust spilled all over the place and a jeweller's scale, and a.45 automatic with a full magazine and the safety-catch still on, dead mans prints on it." He listened. "Ja.

  Ja.

  All right, ja. Broken neck, looks like." Inspector Grobbelaar swivelled his chair and looked down at the corpse that lay on the floor beside him. "Bit of blood on his lip, but nothing else." One of the finger-print men came to the desk and Grobbelaar stood up to give him room to work, the receiver still held to his ear.

  "Prints?" he asked in disgust. "There are finger prints on everything, we have isolated at least forty separate sets so far." He listened a few seconds. "No, we will get him, all right. It must be a Bantu mine worker and we have got all the finger prints of the men from outside the Republic. It's just a matter of checking them all out and then questioning.

  Ja, we'll have him within a month, that's for sure! I'll be back at John Vorster Square about five o'clock, just as soon as we finish up here." He hung up the receiver, and stood looking down at the murdered man.

  "Ugly bastard," said Sergeant Hugo beside him. "Asked for it, buying gold. It's as bad as diamonds." He drew attention to the large envelope he carried in his hand. "I've got a whole lot of glass fragments. Looks like the container the gold was in. The murderer tried to clean up, but he didn't make a very good job. These were under the desk."

  "Prints?"

  "Only one piece big enough. It's got a smeary print on it.

  Might be of use."

  "Good," Grobbelaar nodded. "Get cracking on that, then." There was a feminine wail from somewhere in the interior of the building, and Hugo grimaced.

  "There she starts again. Hell, I thought she'd exhausted herself Bloody Portuguese women are the end."

  "You should hear. them having a baby," grunted Grobbelaar.

  "Where did you hear one?"

  "There was one in the ward next door to my old girl at the maternity home. She nearly brought the bloody roof down." Grobbelaar's mustache took on a more melancholy droop as he thought about the work that lay ahead. Hours, days, weeks of questioning and checking and cross-checking, with a succession of sullen and uncooperative suspects.

  He sighed and jerked a thumb at the corpse. "All right, we've finished with him. Tell the butcher boys to come and fetch him.

  It had taken Rod almost two days to design his drop blast matt. The angle and depth of the shot holes were carefully placed to achieve maximum disruption of the hanging wall. In addition he had decided to drill and charge the side walls of the drive with charges timed to explode after the hanging wall had collapsed. This would kick in on the rubble filling the tunnel and jam it solid.

  Rod was fully aware of the power of water under pressures of 2,000 pounds per square inch and more and he had decided it was necessary to block at least 300 feet of the tunnel.

  His matt blast was designed to do so, and yet he knew that this would not seal off the water completely. It would, however, reduce the flow sufficiently to allow cementation crews to get in and plug the drive solid.

  The Delange brothers did not share Rod's enthusiasm for the project.

  "Hey man, that's going to take three or four days to drill and charge," Johnny protested when Rod showed him his carefully drawn plan.

  "Like hell it will," Rod growled at him. "I want it done properly. It will take at least a week." "You said ultra-fast. You didn't say nothing about drilling the hanging wall with more holes than a cheese!" "Well, I'm saying it now," Rod told him grimly. "And I'm also saying that you will drill, but you won't charge the holes until I come down and make sure that you've gone in as deep as I want them." He didn't trust either Johnny or Davy to spend time drilling in twenty feet, when he could go in six feet, charge up and nobody would know the difference. Not until it was too late.

  Davy Delange spoke for the first time.

  "Will you credit us bonus fat homage while we fiddle around with this?" he asked.

  "Four fathoms a shift." Rod agreed to pay them for the removal of fictitious rock.

  "Eight?" said Davy.

  "Hell, no!" Rod exclaimed. That was robbery.

  "I don't know," Davy murmured, watching Rod with sly ferrety little eyes. "Maybe I should talk to Brother Duivenhage, you know, ask his advice." Duivenhage was No. 1 shaft shop steward for the Mine Workers" Union. He had driven Frank Lemmer to the edge of a nervous breakdown and was now starting on Rodney Ironsides. Rod was pleading with Head Office to offer Duivenhage a fat job in management to get him out of the way. The last thing in the world that Rod wanted was Brother Duivenhage snooping around his drive on the Big Dipper.

  "Six," he said.

  Well. Davy hesitated.

  "Six is fair, Davy," Johnny interrupted, and Davy glared at him.

  Johnny had snatched complete victory from his grasp.

  "Good, that's agreed." Quickly Rod closed the negotiations. "You'll start drilling the matt right away." Rod's design demanded Nearly 1,200 shot holes to be filled with two and a half tons of explosive. It was 1,000 feet down the drive from the main haulage on 66 level to where the matt began.
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br />   The drive now was a spacious, well lit and freshly ventilated tunnel, with the vent piping, the compressed air pipe, and the electrical cable bolted into the hanging wall, and a set of steel railway tracks laid along the floor.

  All work on the face ceased while the Delange brothers set about drilling the matt. It was light work that demanded little from the men. As each hole was drilled, Davy would insert his charging rod to check the depth and then plug the entrance with a wad of paper. There was much time for drinking Thermos coffee and for thinking.

  There were three subjects that endlessly occupied Davy's mind as he sat at ease, waiting for the completion of the next shot hole. Sometimes for half an hour at a time Davy would hold the image of that 50,000 rand in his mind. It was his, tax paid, painstakingly accumulated over the years and lovingly deposited with the local branch of the Johannesburg Building Society. He imagined it bundled and stacked in neat green piles in the Society's vault. Each bundle was labelled David Delange.

  Then his imagination would pass automatically on to the farm that the money would buy. He saw how it would be in the evenings when he sat on the wide stoep, with the setting sun striking the peaks of the Swart Berg across the Valley, and the cattle coming in from the paddocks towards the homestead.

  Always there was a woman sitting beside him on the stoep. The woman had red hair.

  On the fifth morning Davy drove home in the dawn, he was not tired. The night's labours had been easy and un exacting The door of Johnny and Hettie's bedroom was closed.

  Davy read the newspapers with his breakfast; as always the cartoon strip adventures of Modesty Blaise and Willie Uarvin intrigued him completely. This morning Modesty was depicted in a bikini and Davy studied her comparing her to the big healthy body of his brother's wife. The thought of her stayed with him as he rolled onto his bed, and he lay unsleeping, daydreaming an adventure in which Modesty Blaise had become Hettie, and Willie Garvin was Davy.

  An hour later he was still awake. He sat up and reached for the towel which lay across the foot of his bed. He wrapped the towel around his waist as he went down the passage to the bathroom. As he reached for the handle of the bathroom door, it opened under his hand and he was face to face with Hettie Delange.

  She wore a white lace dressing-gown with ostrich-feather mules on her feet. Her face was innocent of make-up and she had brushed her hair and tied it with a ribbon.

  "Oh!" she gasped with surprise. "You gave me a fright, man."

  "I'm sorry, hey." Davy grinned at her, holding the towel with one hand. Hettie let her eyes run quickly over his naked upper body.

  Davy was muscled like a prizefighter. His chest hair was crisp and curly. On both arms the tattoos drew attention to the thickness and weight of muscle.

  "Gee, you are built," Hettie murmured in admiration, and Davy sucked in his belly reflexively.

  "You think so?" His "grin was self-conscious now.

  "Yes." Hettie leaned forward and touched his arm. "It's hard too!"

  The movement had allowed the front of her dressing gown to gape open.

  Davy's face flushed as he looked down into the opening. He started to say something, but his voice had dried up on him. Hettie's fingers stroked down his arm, and she was watching the direction of his eyes.

  Slowly she moved closer to him.

  "Do you like me, Davy?" she asked, her voice throaty and low, and with an animal cry Davy attacked her.

  His hands ripping at the opening of her gown, pinning her to the wall of the bathroom with his mouth frantically hunting hers. His body pressing hard and urgent, his eyes wild, his breathing ragged.

  Hettie was laughing, a breathless gasping laugh.

  This was what she loved. When they lost their heads, when they went mad for her.

  "Davy," she said, jerking loose his towel. "Davy." She kept wriggling away from his thrusting hips, knowing that it would inflame him further. His hands were tearing at her body, his eyes were maniacal.

  "Yes!" she hissed into his mouth. He threw her off balance and she slid down the wall onto the floor.

  "Wait," she panted. "Not here the bedroom." But it was too late.

  Davy had spent the afternoon locked in his bedroom, lying on his bed in an agony of black all-pervading remorse and guilt.

  "My brother," he kept repeating. "Johnny is my brother." Once he wept, each sob tearing something in his chest.

  The tears squeezed out between burning eyelids, leaving him feeling exhausted and weak.

  "My own brother," he shook his head slowly in horrified disbelief "I cannot stay here," he decided miserably. "I'll have to go." He went to the washbasin and washed his eyes. Stooping over the basin, water still dripping from his face, he decided. ""I will have to tell him."

  The burden of guilt was too heavy. "I'll write to Johnny. I'll write it all, and then I'll go away.

  Frantically he searched for pen and paper, it was almost as though he could wipe away the deed by writing it down.

  He sat at the table by the window and wrote slowly and laboriously.

  When he had finished it was three o'clock. He felt better.

  He sealed the four closely written pages into an envelope and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He dressed quickly, and crept out of the house, fearful of meeting Hettie, but she was nowhere about.

  Her big white Monaco was not in the garage, and with relief he turned out of the driveway and took the road out to the Sander Ditch. He wanted to reach the mine before Johnny came off shift.

  Davy listened to his brother's voice, as he kidded and laughed with the other off-duty miners in the company change house. He had locked himself in one of the lavatory closets to avoid meeting his brother, and he sat disconsolately on the toilet seat. The sound of Johnny's voice brought his guilt flooding back in its full strength. His letter of confession was buttoned into the top pocket of his overalls, and he took it out, broke open the flap and reread the contents.

  "So long, then." Johnny's voice sang out gaily from the change room.

  "See you bastards tomorrow." There was an answering chorus from the other miners, then the door slammed.

  Davy went on sitting alone for another twenty minutes in the stench of stale bodies and urine, dirty socks and rank disinfections from the foot baths. At last he tucked the letter away in his pocket and opened the closet door.

  Davy's gang were at their waiting place at the head of the drive. They were sitting along the bench laughing and chatting. There was a holiday spirit amongst them for they knew it would be another shift of easy going.

  They greeted Davy cheerfully, as he came down the haulage. Both the Delange brothers were popular with their gangs and it was unusual that Davy did not reply to the chorused greeting. He did not even smile.

  The Swazi boss boy handed him the safety lamp, and Davy grunted an acknowledgement. He set off alone down the tunnel, trudging heavily, not conscious of his surroundings, his mind encased in a padding of guilt and self-pity.

  A thousand feet along the drive he reached the day's work area.

  Johnny's shift had left the rock drills in place, still connected to the compressed air system, ready for use.