A Cleft Of Stars

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  'Rankin! Is that – Rankin?'

  If it had not been for the hyena I could have We-swiped him as he swivelled the torch on the digger's unconscious form. The pistol sagged and he was completely off guard. I slipped free of Nadine with the intention of going for him, but the animal leapt to its feet snarling. The sound seemed to bring Praeger back to earth.

  'Bowker and Rankin! Bowker and Rankin!' he kept repeating, as if stunned. 'Now I have it all in my hands!'

  The moon had risen and the enclosure was bright in its light. The little figure of the German in his too-neat safari suit, with his longish hair and thunderstruck face might have been the sort of image I would have conjured up had I been asked to embody the evil spirit of diamonds.

  When he spoke the entire character of his voice had changed. It was flat and vicious, like a dud note struck in the middle of a concerto.

  He addressed Nadine. 'And where do you fit into this?' 'I

  came to look for Guy. He . . . he . .

  'Think quickly!' he rapped out. 'Think up some yarn, very quickly! Your companion's pretty smart at lying. What's your name?'

  'Nadine Raikes.'

  'Raikes. The millionaire?'

  'Yes.'

  He rounded on me. 'The jigsaw begins to fit together, doesn't it? Bowker and Rankin peddling the greater half of the Cullinan to Raikes the millionaire – deal and dealer!'

  'Listen to my side of this,' I began in a sandpaper voice but he stopped me.

  'Cover Rankin up with the blanket. I can't risk anything happening to him now! It's going to take everything I know to pull him through. Button up his shirt too, gently!'

  I did as he bade me and straightened up to face the pistol again.

  'I came to The Hill, alone,' I said, holding myself in. 'I had a score to settle with Rankin. He framed me and I got shopped. Nadine flew here with Talbot to find me. Rankin shot down their plane. That's my story in a nutshell. All this stuff about the bigger half of the Cullinan is so much bull as far as I am concerned.'

  He laughed and I didn't like the sound of it. 'Very well improvised, at such short notice! But how about the truth? A shoot-out when thieves fall out after a double-cross in which the plane was deliberately set on fire to prevent the other party making off with the great diamond?Here's the evidence, and I believe what my eyes tell me.' He gestured at the two wounded men.

  Nadine broke in desperately. 'Guy being here has nothing to do with diamonds. I give you my word. He . . . it's something personal between us. He was in prison. He left without telling me. I came to look for him in a plane, that's all: 'All, eh, Miss Raikes?'

  'No. Guy was here hunting fossilized hyena excreta . . Praeger laughed derisively. 'Now I've heard everything!

  Well, at least fossilized hyena excreta is original! Somehow all roads lead to hyenas, don't they? Look at the debt I owe Dika here for tracking you down. She's justified the two years I spent training her.' He went on, with a grating note of selfapology, 'We Germans are a thorough and methodical people. I thought at the beginning that by training a hyena and studying its behaviour pattern something might emerge to give me a clue to what hyena's blanket meant. That's all unnecessary now. I've got you, Bowker, and Rankin as well. You'll tell me before long.'

  'Why don't you stop kidding yourself, Praeger?' I asked. 'I've never heard such a lot of nonsense in my life. You're projecting God knows what sick fantasies into a code for something which is as dead as the man who sent it. Forget it.'

  'I was beginning to think that way at one stage myself,' he answered. 'When all my leads ran dry in Europe I emigrated to South Africa. I scoured the country for traces of you without success. Then came one of those colossal breaks of good luck (like tonight) in my search. I'll come to that in a moment:

  While I listened I tried to hit upon some plan by which I could turn the tables on Praeger and grab his gun. That would also mean coping with the hyena at short range. The brute stood as watchful as a well-trained Wehrmacht non-corn. I felt sure however that the heavy calibre of Praeger's pistol in my hands would be sufficient to stop the hyena. I left Nadine out of my calculations. I hoped I would be the focus of attack.

  Von Praeger was saying, 'Good luck is followed by bad luck, as they say, and I certainly thought this was so a few days ago when I discovered that you and I had been under the same roof for the past eighteen months, Bowker.'

  'It's a pity we didn't share the same cell,' I retorted. 'You wouldn't have had the advantage of that gun.'

  'No chance of that: I'm the senior prison doctor. That's the job I took when I came to South Africa.'

  It was my turn to be taken aback: the giveaway became obvious.

  'Charlie Furstenberg,' I ground out.

  'Quite. Charlie would rat on a rat. You were in the ranks of short-term prisoners, which are not my concern, so our paths didn't cross. I only heard your name after you had slipped away, and through my net at the same time. I came straight here, of course. And here you are, as Charlie said you would be.'

  It was my turn to smile. 'Charlie held out on you, too. He didn't tell you about Rankin.'

  'My time will come with Charlie.' The menace was very plain.

  'If you're building castles in the air about a greater half of the Cullinan on the strength of the word of a small-time crook like Charlie, you're in for a disappointment.'

  'I was sidetracked into telling you about Charlie. We are going too fast. As I said, I emigrated to South Africa and became a prison doctor'

  'It seems a very appropriate post for a Gestapo handyman.' '

  If you're trying to provoke me into attacking you, it won't work.' He nodded towards Rankin and asked in his unpleasant ripsaw voice. 'I suppose you did that?'

  'Yes,' I replied with more bravado than I felt. 'And he had two guns.'

  He shrugged but I noticed that he edged closer to his pet.

  'A prison doctor occupies a unique and often all powerful position,' he went on. 'He's something between warder and confessor. There was a murderer called Kettler who was due to be hanged. He sent for me and tried to drive a bargain but it was already too late. Kettler had been the mine detective at the Premier Mine for a long time before his arrest. He never believed a word of the story of how your father and Rankin were supposed to have found the Cullinan. And do you know what he offered me to help him escape? – the other half of the Cullinan Diamond.'

  'If you fell for that one, you're an even bigger sucker than I thought.'

  Von Praeger remained unruffled. 'He had only a few hours to live. Who knows, if he could have brought himself to the point earlier? Then, when the rope was already round his neck, he asked for me again in place of the usual priest. What he told me put the clincher on what Erasmus had said when he died. Kettler whispered to me – he couldn't bear to part with the whole secret even then – as the gallows lever went over, " the hyena's blanket"'

  Rankin's wheezing and the bats' thin metallic cries punctuated the still night. Von Praeger said after a tight pause, 'Bowker, Rankin; the Cullinan; The Hill; all those links in the chain are now complete. All that remains is that key phrase, the hyena's blanket. I intend to find out what it means. Somehow the Cullinan has something to do with hyenas. You can make it easy for the girl and yourself by telling me.' When I did not answer he glanced at Rankin. 'Perhaps he'll be less intractable, but there's a lot of work ahead before he'll be conscious.'

  I reasoned that the longer I kept Praeger talking the greater would be my opportunity of jumping him. Moreover, I wanted to keep him out of the cave where the confined space would make action more difficult.

  · 'You're on very thin ice basing such a preposterous idea on a criminal's word,' I said. 'Everyone knows there are always so-called eleventh-hour confessions by murderers. Can you think of one that turned out to be true?'

  He responded brusquely. 'Kettler spent his whole life on the trail. I consider that I'm much more qualified to judge on the question of condemned men's confessions than you. I know that K
ettler was right.

  He jerked his head towards the cave. 'What's in there?' '

  Rankin's hide-out – a lot of junk. There's no light, either.' '

  March!' He waved us ahead of him. 'Dika I '

  We had no chance but to obey. Praeger's flashlight threw long shadows before us and when the shaft of light traced the outline of the weird structure of beams, spindles and gears and rested finally on the turntable with its peculiar treadle, von Praeger rapped out. 'Halt! Turn and face me!'

  I saw that he was excited; there was a feeling of danger in the air.

  'I quite understand why you were reluctant for me to see this, Bowker! A lot of junk, eh?'

  'You tell us what it is. I haven't a clue – a workshop of some sort, I suppose?'

  'They learn to lie like that in jail,' he scoffed at Nadine. 'No one ever knows anything about anything. I suppose that goes for you too?'

  She shook her head wordlessly.

  'Let me tell you, then. It is a diamond polishing mill'

  CHAPTER NINE

  The word kept coming back with the recurring persistence of a nagging musical phrase which despite all deliberate effort to exclude it intrudes and thrums through one's mind – camisado night attack!

  I was teased into wakefulness through the long night which followed and into the small hours of the morning as I lay imprisoned in Rankin's inner cave by the tantalizing question of what manner of night attack I should resort to in my predicament; as the hours passed without a solution there came a growing sense of impotence on my part. Over and over I formulated fresh plans for a break-out. Each one, when I came to evaluate it, would abort on some initially unsuspected snag. Then I would abandon it and start the process again, working round in seemingly endless, unproductive circles. My eyes became completely accustomed to the inky blackness and I could make out various objects in the kitchen cave: the Aladdin-jar water vessels; Nadine's ritual pots next to them; a table and a diamond boiling set, which consisted of a small lipped mug resembling a sauce boat, over a spirit burner standing on a screened asbestos pad. My eyes moved from one object to another; there was simply nothing else to look at. I came to the conclusion that Rankin must use his diamond mill equipment for the secondary purpose of kitchen utensils.

  I consulted my illuminated watch dial for the hundredth time as my hundredth plan collapsed – 2.15 a.m. In three hours it would be dawn and still I had concocted no plan of night attack. I became jumpier and more frustrated, both of which hindered clear thinking.

  I compelled my mind to go back right to the beginning when Praeger had forced us into the cave, in the hope that by going over every detail some ray of light might emerge. There were two interconnecting caves and I was in the deeper one, the shorter leg of the L-shaped hide-out. The diamond polishing mill occupied the longer section. This in its turn opened via a crooked entrance to the outside enclosure with its commanding view. Nadine was held in the mill section while Talbot and Rankin were in the open, out of sight beyond an invisible line drawn by the glint of moonlight on the pug barrel of a machine-pistol held by our guard. The cave ran dead against solid rock where I was lying and as far as I could discover there were no cracks through which I might possibly have wormed my way to freedom.

  I attempted to recall everything I had seen in the mill section when von Praeger had shone his torch on the curious complex. I might have recognized it for what it was if it had looked like the equipment I had seen often enough at my grandfather's, but it didn't. Praeger himself was amused at it and remarked that it was the sort of thing shown in pictures of diamond cutters' workshops a century ago. The light had come to rest like an accusing finger on a collection of unfamiliar objects grouped round the turntable. One of these resembled a miniature metal crane's beak set into a heavy iron base. It was, in fact, a pair of tweezers mounted in a double ball joint so that it could be swivelled in any direction – a kind of 'third hand' to hold a diamond while a craftsman worked on it. All round were other tools and equipment which blew the gaff on Rankin's secret operations. Praeger had detailed them for our benefit; any of half a dozen of these would have been a useful weapon for me, but he had been wise enough to clear them out of the way before leaving us for the remainder of the night.

  Up to the moment when his torchlight fell on the mill I had still cherished hope of overpowering Praeger and his hyena; but his next words hit me like a bucket if icy water.

  'Koen will certainly be interested to see this.'

  'Koen?'

  My dismay made him laugh.

  'You didn't think I was fool enough to come to The Hill alone to tackle you, did you? Koen's my partner. He's also got a vested interest in the Cullinan. The name's enough to tell you why – Koen Kettler.'

  'You said they hanged Kettler.'

  'This is the son, and every bit as tough as the father. Now he's also on the trail.'

  I bit back what I was about to retort about never-never pursuits, in the hope that he might relax and enable me to get closer to some of the potential weapons. Meanwhile Nadine had started towards the bench with the purely innocent intention, I felt sure, of examining some of the strange things more closely.

  Praeger, however, was on the alert against any tricks we might attempt. 'Back! Stand back!'

  Nadine halted in bewilderment.

  'Men – and women – do remarkable things under the lure of diamonds. You're probably no exception: even the gentlest become savages. In fact, that was the cause of Kettler senior's downfall. He had the answer to Rankin in his hand but he couldn't restrain himself'

  'Murder,' I snapped.

  'I like to think of it rather as over-enthusiasm.'

  This remark gave me a further insight into what I was up against.

  'Let me tell you briefly about it and you'll see what I mean. Your father and Rankin pulled the big job to end all big jobs over the Cullinan. But even so, Rankin couldn't leave diamonds alone afterwards. In fact, he tried the same thing again.'

  'Never! There's only been one Cullinan, ever.

  He moved round so that he stood between us and the bench while the hyena cut off our escape to the rear. He put down the torch with its beam still directed at us.

  'Remember Jagersfontein?'

  'Remember it! God's truth! I was dragged there by my father on one of his sentimental tours of diamond mines! A dreary, clapped-out village not so very far from Kimberley, living in the shadow of its past under a derelict mine headgear!'

  Von Praeger eyed me curiously. 'This diamond thing burns you up, doesn't it, Bowker?' Then unexpectedly his tone changed and the harsh note softened to an overtone which came close to reverence. 'Well, don't be too hard on Jagersfontein. It had a past. The world's biggest diamond came from there–before the Cullinan was discovered, that is.'

  'The Excelsior; you don't have to tell me!' I jerked out. 'I know every bloody detail by heart. Nine hundred and ninety-five carats. Purest blue-,white. Anything else you want to know?'

  'And Asscher cut that one too!'

  I made an impatient gesture which von Praeger misconstrued and he raised the pistol, level with my face. When he realized that I was not about to attack him he went on.

  'Jagersfontein was just the sort of place which Rankin was on the look-out for: a worked-out, has-been mine where a few old-timers scratched and pecked amongst the tailings for a diamond crumb or two which might have slipped past the sieves. Then suddenly Jagersfontein came into the headlines again. It yielded a perfect 120-carat blue-white of purest -. hater.

  'But Kettler wasn't fooled. He read the Indian signs. To a man who had studied every minute aspect of the Cullinan's discovery it was like a detective seeing the hallmark of one particular professional burglar on a safe break. The masterhand was Rankin's, of course. Kettler rushed post-haste to Jagersfontein. But the fox, Rankin under an alias, had already gone to ground, but not his partner in the venture. He was still there; a young chap called Fouche. Kettler worked on him but handled him too roughly.-Th
ey hanged Kettler for killing him. But not before Kettler had told me - enough. I'm sure Koen won't repeat with you his father's mistake of being too impetuous.'

  He gave us time for this to sink in, then the stretching of the thin lips which was his travesty of a smile took in Nadine also. 'You'll soon realize that Koen's ideas about women are somewhat primitive. He won't hesitate to smash up your face if necessary. After that, no amount of diamonds in the Raikes millionaire bracket would hide your disfigurement. So be careful, Miss Raikes.'

  Words gargled in my throat. 'Listen, you scum . . Nadine put her hand restrainingly on my ann. 'Please Guy!

  Give Doctor von Praeger a chance to check on our story and he'll find out that we have nothing to hide. Peter, for a start, will bear it out.'

  'I've made my own checks, all right,' retorted Praeger. 'But if you're relying on your pilot to carry on your bluff, you can forget it. He won't see morning.'

  Before we had time to digest his callousness he startled us by moving to the entrance and firing three shots into the air. The flat claps, obviously a signal from the spacing, struck back like a Spanish dancer's heels from the silent audience of hills. We've plenty of ammunition to spare,' he remarked, anticipating my calculation that there would be five rounds left in the automatic. 'You'll see for yourself when Koen arrives: he'll be along in a hurry now.'

  Praeger and the hyena escorted us to the entrance to await Koen's arrival. He left me no opportunity to turn the tables on him: he even handled a lantern himself, hanging it over the door to guide his companion.

  And it was ammunition indeed and a wicked-looking Czech M-25 machine-pistol which was my first impression of Koen. Von Praeger highlighted the weapon with the torch, keening the beam low for Koen to see his way across the stepping stones; with the result that his face and upper body were in shadow. The light showed a skeleton butt at the end of a long kinked Metal stalk and an ungainly magazine of 9mm shells projecting underneath a pug barrel.

  Koen reached us gasping and sweating from the dangerous crossing. He was much shorter and stockier than either Praeger or myself. He wore tight whipcord pants tucked into half-calf boots; his clothes generally had an air of cheap flashiness which belied the rugged toughness of his square chin. His thick pelt of black hair was glossy with pomade; a wisp fell over his forehead, giving him an old-young look. His fingernails were foul.