Love's Golden Spell

by William Maltese

  She grabbed her purse, finding her comb in it by the time she reached the hallway. She shared the elevator with two men who eyed her appreciatively as she put her hair into some semblance of order. There was no time for makeup.

  She asked one of the men for the time; she’d left her wristwatch in her room. The man’s watch was an expensive Piaget. No chance of the wrong time. A Piaget only lost one second every two years, according to the ads.

  She was beyond the fifteen-minute deadline. She had made the right decision too late. There would have been plenty of time if only she had started dressing the minute he left. Sixteen years and fifteen minutes to end like this, before any new beginnings.

  He was waiting, his muscular body leaning against a pillar facing the elevator. He smiled, walking toward her. “I knew you’d come,” he said confidently. Her anger flushed her cheeks. She shouldn’t have come running. She should have denied him his obvious satisfaction. “Not because I’m personally so irresistible,” he added quickly, intuitively sensing her second thoughts. “I merely knew you had a sense of fair play.”

  “I thought you’d be gone,” she commented with feigned coolness.

  “I’ve never known a woman who could get ready for anything in fifteen minutes,” he said. “You must have set some kind of record as it was.”

  “My being here doesn’t mean I’m making any promises,” Janet said. Too many promises were regretted later.

  “I’ll get the Van Hoons,” she’d promised her father. He hadn’t heard. He was dead. It was a promise nevertheless. Now she was consorting with the enemy.

  “My car is outside,” he said, his fingers on her elbow. Fire ran the length of her arm. He did that with his slightest touch.

  Because it was early, the hotel lobby was almost deserted. Shops, theaters and restaurants that would soon pull a crowd into the Carleton Complex were closed and awaiting proprietors. Beyond the revolving door, the city stirred. There was a vital pulse to Johannesburg that existed night and day. That activity had begun on a deserted piece of wasteland less than one hundred years before, conjured by the discovery of gold, still the main reason for Johannesburg’s existence.

  Gold raised a city where there should never have been one. Perched on one of the highest ridges of the South African plateau, seventeen hundred meters above sea level, it had no water that wasn’t pumped in from the Vaal over sixty kilometers away. Its petrol and diesel came all the way from Durban, 720 kilometers to the southeast, where tankers from the Persian Gulf fed an insatiable pipeline.

  Johannesburg had a population of nearly a million and a half people. It was nearly twice the size of Durban and Cape Town, South Africa’s other big cities, and three times the size of Pretoria, the republic’s administrative capital.

  Christopher was driving a Mercedes sports car. He opened the door on the passenger side for Janet and went around to the other side to slide in beside her.

  “Relax,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white, his hair as golden as the metal dug beneath the city. “I’m really not a dentist out to yank your molars. I’m here to show you a good time.”

  There was no denying that Janet was tense. She was debating whether she had been right in coming. There was something about being with Christopher now that muted the unhappiness of the past sixteen years. With his handsome face and muscular body so near, Janet could forget her father and her husband. She knew it was unhealthy to escape reality by recalling the past. She was with Christopher Van Hoon not because they were children, enjoying each other’s company, but because they were adults engaged in adult games.

  She settled back in her seat, caressed by the luxurious softness of expensive leather. The leather smells became more erotic when mingled with the scent of Christopher’s distinctive after-shave. The car was moving toward the maze of great mounds, evidence of three thousand million tons of rock pulverized in the search for gold. But these mine tailings were less the unsightly boils on the landscape they had once been. Years of experimentation and large outlays of cash had resulted in the discovery of ways of getting hybrid vegetation to root in the unsavory mixture of silica and cyanide. The dumps looked more and more like low-lying foothills: the Johannesburg Downs. A standard joke on the stock exchange was that the mining companies took all the ups, leaving the city the Downs. The still un-vegetated segments caught the early-morning sunshine, telegraphing flashes of gold.

  The same sunlight caught in Christopher’s hair, held captive in silky strands glowing with luminescence. Janet wanted to comb her fingers through that mating of hair and celestial fire. Electricity built inside her without the touching.

  “The Cassandras have been prophesying an end to the gold for years,” Christopher said, steering the car along a highway that sliced one man-made dune into mirrored halves. “As far back as 1911, the mines were supposedly about to give up their last. New discoveries, however, combined with advanced technology and periodic increases in the selling price of gold, now project the life of the mines into the year 2030.”

  “There used to be wildlife wandering here in vast herds,” Janet said. “Where do you suppose they are now?”

  “Mining companies in Johannesburg employ over four hundred and fifty thousand men,” Christopher answered; his reply automatic. He was programmed for his response. “Without the profits from the mines, this country would be very poor indeed, attempting to eke an existence from the export of agricultural products at the mercy of periodic droughts and severe crop failures.”

  “Yes, well, I imagine there is a rationalization for everything, isn’t there?” Janet said, refusing to be impressed. She knew the arguments for industrial development versus maintenance of an ecological status quo. Christopher wasn’t the only one who considered corporate profits more desirable than environmental preservation. Unfortunately, there were too many like him. If they weren’t the majority, they were still in positions of power that gave them the edge.

  “I suppose it all depends on one’s priorities,” Christopher said smugly. “Some people seem more concerned about the welfare of four-legged animals than the welfare of their own two-legged species.”

  “Some people find the four-legged varieties far less able to take care of themselves,” Janet said. “I don’t see animals lobbying for their grazing land while greedy businessmen divvy up the pot.”

  There was an uneasy silence. Her every moment with Christopher was a battle. Perversely, she had hoped for something more.

  “Look,” he said finally, his thoughts parallel to hers, “surely we’re not going to be the only two people on this lovely day who refuse to enjoy ourselves, are we? Couldn’t we try for a truce? It’s unlikely we’re going to resolve, in one day of bickering, any profit-versus-ecology questions that have been around longer than either of us.”

  “Then what’s the purpose of this little outing?” Janet asked.

  “I want you to know there are members of the opposition who are charming human beings and not the ogres you, and many of your cohorts, seem to think,” he said, flashing a wide smile that invited seduction.

  “Is that what you think you are?” Janet asked, wanting to believe but refusing to do so. “A charming human being?”

  “Oh yes,” Christopher said, ignoring her sarcasm. “As you shall soon see if you give me half the chance.”

  “A preacher pontificating his own virtues must surely do so to a congregation of one!” Janet said, wishing Christopher’s charm was more the natural variety of his youth than the calculated efforts of a shrewd businessman out to win converts.

  “Touché!” Christopher said with a laugh so infectious Janet couldn’t help smiling. She shouldn’t have smiled; it gave him the proverbial inch that would encourage him to go for the mile. “There,” he said; “isn’t that better?”

  It was better. It was some of what she wanted; it was what she feared, too.

  “I didn’t mean to sound pompous,” she said. He was right. There would be no miraculous conversions in
their short time together. She knew that when she came down the elevator to meet him in the lobby. That was never her real purpose. She wanted a piece of her past. She was willing to settle for one day of renewal, here and now. Offered the chance of that day, she would be a fool to refuse it.

  “We won’t mention it again,” he said, sounding too triumphant.

  She didn’t like losing ground. “Tell me about this girl who I remind you of,” she said.

  “I thought we were going to have fun?” he demanded, his golden eyes shooting condemning daggers.

  “How can you have fun when I remind you of someone you’d rather forget?” Janet replied, hurt by his change of mood, even though she had anticipated it. She feared giving in to inner needs that could weaken her resolve.

  “There are good memories as well as the bad,” he said. She shouldn’t have pried for that admission. Despite her heartache, it was easier thinking he remembered only the bad. “Nothing is ever truly black or white,” he said, turning his face toward her, unreadable. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that it is. Relationships are painted in grays.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “For some reason, I feel compelled to be on the offensive.”

  “We do seem to be having our problems, don’t we?” he said, the humor back in his voice. She was glad for the return of lightness; it was contagious. “So, I will apologize, too,” he said, “and bring us back to square one. After all, why shouldn’t you be curious? Who knows, it may do me a world of good to talk about it.”

  Janet didn’t want him to talk about it. She didn’t want to open that can of worms, appalled that she had been the one to provide the instrument. He would paint her the villain of the piece. It would be easy to do. She had never answered his letters, never even read them, fearful that they held the magic to seduce her from her father. Janet couldn’t join in her father’s betrayal, and only Christopher had had the power to make her do so. She had hated her father for taking her from Africa and from Lionspride—from Christopher. The hate had been there, as well as the love, when his heart attack killed him. And she felt guilty, prepared to compensate for her feelings of disloyalty.

  “I knew her when we were children,” Christopher said, making Janet uneasy. How could she stop him? His memories weren’t hers, and time distorted things. The reality of her dreams might be inaccurate. “She hated to see animals killed,” he said. “She liked sliding down the banister at Lionspride. You see the similarities?”

  “I like her already,” Janet said, nervously glancing from the car window. Mine tailings stretched to either side of the highway. She and Christopher were driving the Golden Arc of the great South African gold fields. Millions of years ago, heat, cold and storms scoured debris from gold-bearing mountains into a great inland sea that was now the Transvaal Highveldt and the Orange Free State.

  “She was very likable…” Christopher said.

  “But?” Janet prodded. Pure curiosity made her want to hear the rest.

  “But she was a child,” he said. Maybe he understood after all. “I wasn’t more than a child myself.”

  “First love?” she suggested. She was torturing herself, making things worse. She was hoping he would recognize her as that thirteen-year-old girl.

  “Actually, I fared far better in my teens than most,” he said, steering toward an end to that line of conversation. He was laughing it off. It wasn’t special; it was only a phase of adolescence that everyone went through. Children grew up. Things that seemed world shattering were recognized later as mere childish exaggerations.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT WAS A JOKE: a very funny one about a black cat, an Englishman in a bowler hat, and an American tourist in Cairo. Janet would try to recall it later, but the punch line would always elude her. All she’d remember was how she was laughing when Christopher pulled the car to a stop on the small rise. He pointed through the windshield and down into a shallow valley, and the laughter died in her throat.

  The mine was called the Van Hoon Deep Levels. Of course it would be the one Christopher would select. It was the company showpiece—the biggest, the deepest. It was the most profitable gold mine ever discovered. It produced more gold in one year than all the mines in the United States could produce during that same year. “Something on the order of eleven-million rand a month,” Christopher boasted, his voice filled with an owner’s pride.

  Janet looked through a lattice of high-power electric lines held aloft by giant four-legged supports. There were massive piles of mine tailings, three perfectly pointed like candy kisses done up in gold foil, the fourth a massive volcano whose top seemed blown away. The summit of the latter was misted in water from sprinkler systems designed to keep down the dust from the additional waste rock continually being dumped to build the pile higher.

  There was a cluster of buildings. Christopher isolated the structures, one by one, as if they were priceless jewels in a necklace. “The maintenance shop, the riggers’ shop, the smelter, the uranium and sulfuric acid plants. Uranium, and sulfuric acid are by-products of the operation.”

  “No animals,” Janet said. She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. It just slipped out. “There should be animals.” That barren landscape was denuded of wildlife by man’s burrowing in the ground like a mole.

  “Damn it, if you’re so hot for animals, why don’t you go to Kruger!” he suggested, angry at her return to a topic they had agreed to avoid. Kruger National Park was a game reserve of two million hectares in the northeastern corner of the Transvaal. Its wildlife population was enough to attract half a million visitors a year.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but their former levity was shattered. Christopher brought her here—of all places. She couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice. The Van Hoon Deep Levels was the major of three mines rising from her father’s useless dreams for the Lackland Animal Preserve. This shallow valley had been set aside as part of that proposed sanctuary. Now there were no animals. The lake, which might have sustained wildlife through the longest droughts, was stagnant behind the ugly mine tailings.

  The movement of cars, trucks, and people—all ant-like in the distance—wasn’t the vital sign of something vibrantly alive. It was a sign of death. Because of this abomination, thousands of animals lost a home. In the year 2030, with modern technology leeching the last of the gold from the rock below, nothing would live on the resulting desolation.

  Christopher pulled the car back on the highway. He exuded coldness. The illusion of truce was ruined. He was showing her the pride of the Van Hoon corporate complex, and she was committing the ultimate sacrilege of criticizing the necessary displacement of a few antelope, zebras and ostriches.

  She wanted to return to Johannesburg. There was no hope for her and Christopher—that was clear now. They were too far apart. Sixteen years might as well have been sixteen hundred. She had once persuaded him never to kill another gazelle, but she had surrendered all other influence over him by leaving him to his father. The Christopher she loved wasn’t here. What was beside her was a duplicate of Vincent Van Hoon. If more attractive and more charming, that was a veneer. The core of his being was no longer malleable.

  Vincent hadn’t liked her. The idea of his son promising her not to kill another gazelle had made him livid. He had got rid of her and her father none too soon. The death of Jack Kelley must have pleased him. The less anti-capitalistic idealists, the better!

  They took the road that led down toward the works. The Van Hoon name was proudly displayed on a high archway, whose gates opened for the car.

  Guards ushered them through the checkpoints. They knew Christopher. He authorized their paychecks. He kept this place running. He turned a vast deposit of compact, gray-green pebbly stone into gold. He was an alchemist extraordinaire.

  Without a word, he steered the car into a parking spot and stopped it. “Come on,” he said, breaking the silence. He didn’t open her door. He didn’t turn to see if she was following. He disappeared ins
ide the nearest building.

  She would sit there until he was ready to return to the city. She had seen all she wanted to see. Only an insensitive, avaricious man would view such an unsightly conglomeration of metal buildings, rumbling trucks, and floating dust and find satisfaction in the man-made desolation. What few trees, flowers and shrubs were planted by someone, to give the illusion of natural beauty among the expanding lunar landscape, were ghostly efforts thickly shrouded in dust. She hated this place and all it stood for. She wanted out.

  She got out of the car. She would insist he take her back to her hotel. It wouldn’t be the first time. She had made the same request at Lionspride. It got results when Christopher was ready—not before. It would be no different this time.

  He was coming to get her. She could tell by the determined expression on his face when she opened the door of the building and saw him facing her. “Good!” he said. “I would have hated a scene.”

  “I want to go back to Johannesburg,” she said, echoing her request at Lionspride. He might yet have an unwanted scene on his hands. Everyone was an employee of his here, as at Lionspride, and these men were as likely to gossip as household servants.

  “No, you don’t,” he contradicted. “And shall I tell you why?” If only he didn’t look like the Christopher she remembered. If only he were fat or bald. If only he were taller, skinnier, dissipated by vice. It was painful recognizing the boy within the man when that boy seemed only an illusion. “Because this visit is giving you more ammunition for your smear campaign against my family,” he said.

  “I want to go back to Johannesburg!” she insisted. She wanted to step back in time—if not sixteen years, then to the truce of a few minutes before. It was marvelous when she had pretended they hadn’t a care in the world, hearing his jokes, laughing with him—his eyes sparkling and his dimples deepening. Both of them had seemed like children again, their world less complicated than the world of adults. Wishful thinking!