Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  On Wednesday, 14 July 1880, Harold Feinberg toppled down the stairs of his office on Kimberley’s main street, as stiffly as a scarecrow. He died three hours later, in his own bungalow, in his own bed. Barney was at his bedside, and read for him as he died his favourite psalm, number 84, a psalm for the sons of Korah.

  ‘How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

  ‘For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.

  ‘O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee.’

  Barney sat by Harold for almost an hour after he died, the Bible open on his knees. It was still morning, a few minutes before noon, and the sunlight shone through the blind in parallel stripes. A stray dog barked and barked, and yet Harold could not hear it. The silver hairs in Harold’s ears still curled around his lobes; his nose was still as proud and fleshy and Jewish as always; his hands looked as if they were about to move at any moment. But he was dead, and he would never speak again.

  Barney cried no tears for Harold, but he knew that Harold would understand. He simply stood by the window and looked out across the street and wondered on Harold’s behalf why a God who was supposed to be such a model of humility should invest his children with so much ambition.

  A week and one day later, a small spiky-haired boy in clogs came around to the Grand Hotel Putte and asked to speak to Joel. When Joel came out of the hotel dining-room, wiping sauce from his mouth with his napkin, the boy handed him a note. Joel gave him ten centimes and shooed him away. Then he swung himself back to his table, where his poached lemon sole was growing cold, and tore open the envelope with his butter-knife.

  The note read: ‘I am ready to cleave the diamond. I expect you by noon. Respectfully, Frederick Goldin.’

  Joel finished his breakfast slowly, mopping up the last of his hollandaise sauce with torn-off pieces of breadroll. After his coffee, he asked for a schnapps, which he stared at for five minutes, and then drank with a flourish. Anna, who served as a waitress at mealtimes, dragged out his table for him so that he could haul himself out on his crutches, and make his way upstairs. She said, ‘You’re all right?’, and he nodded at her.

  He dressed with care, tying his necktie in a large butterfly bow. Afterwards, he felt so tense that he had to sit on the bed and pour himself a brandy from the bottle that he kept in his bedside table. He had been living on his own in Antwerp for a year now, so short of money that he had scarcely been able to afford to eat, waiting with badly-controlled impatience for Frederick Goldin to finish his preliminary studies of the Natalia Star and begin cutting.

  Anna knocked on the door, and looked in on him. ‘That was not bad news?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Joel. ‘It was very good news. News that I’ve been waiting to hear for a long time.’

  ‘You will have money soon? Father is worried about your bill.’

  Joel drained his brandy glass. ‘Father will just have to be patient for a little while longer. But don’t let him fret. When I do settle up, I’ll pay him twice over, plus interest.’

  Anna came across and took his hands. ‘I don’t know if I feel frightened of you or sorry for you,’ she said, in Flemish.

  Joel grunted. ‘I’d rather you didn’t feel either way. I’d rather you just felt affectionate.’

  She kissed him. ‘You can wish me to feel anything; but how I will really feel, that will be private, inside of me.’

  ‘Anna,’ said Joel, quietly.

  Before directing the cab driver to take him to de Pecq’s, Joel asked him to stop at the small synagogue on Pelikaanstraat. He was thinking of offering a prayer before he went to see the diamond being cleaved. But when the cab actually drew up outside, Joel changed his mind. All he could depend on now was his own luck, the flukes and chances of his own destiny. He rapped his crutch against the side of the cab and told the driver to carry on.

  Usually, the cleaving of a huge diamond would have been a well-publicised and well-attended event, and the workshop would have been jostling with dignitaries and journalists and artists. But when Joel arrived in Frederick Goldin’s rooms a few minutes after twelve, Frederick Goldin and Joseph Mandlebaum and two assistants were the only people there. Outside the windows, the sky was relentlessly grey. Joel stood in the doorway for a moment, and then one of Goldin’s assistants brought forward a chair for him, while the other closed the door behind him and, on Goldin’s instructions, locked it.

  The Natalia Star had been placed into a little wooden cup called a dop, and set there firmly with a cement of brickdust, shellac, and rosin, so that only the angle to be cleaved off was exposed. Goldin had already cut a small notch or kerf in the top of the Star with another diamond, and had wedged the dop into a tapered hole in his workbench. All he had to do now was slot a knife blade into the kerf, tap the blade with an iron rod, and the diamond would split along its cleavage plane. At least, it was supposed to.

  ‘I intend to cut the diamond into an emerald-shaped stone of about 160 carats,’ said Goldin. ‘Then there will be three other major stones – a square emerald, a briolette, and a baguette.’

  ‘You’re only going to be able to get a 160-carat diamond out of a 350-carat rough?’ frowned Joel.

  ‘Believe me,’ Frederick Goldin told him, ‘that’s a greater saving of weight than Yussels could manage out of the same stone. The Regent is only 140·5 carats, out of a rough of 410 carats. Weight is important, but not if it detracts from a diamond’s brilliance. What I will give you out of this stone will almost be a miracle. So remember that.’

  ‘Very well then,’ said Joel. ‘You’d better get on with it.’

  Frederick Goldin rolled up his shirtsleeves, and dragged over a stool to sit down at his workbench. He positioned the long rectangular metal knife-blade in the kerf, resting it between his thumb and his index finger. It seemed to take him over half an hour to position the blade to his complete satisfaction, and Joel began to feel stiff and uncomfortable, and to wish that he had stayed at the Grand Hotel Putte instead of coming here to watch. To have to sit utterly still and silent while his whole future was put at crucial risk in front of his eyes was almost more than he could bear. He would have done anything for a drink. He wished he had brought his flask with him. But now Frederick Goldin was ready for the first cleaving, and the workroom was crowded with tension.

  ‘This first blow will decide exactly how much of the weight of this diamond I shall be able to recover, and exactly how valuable the finished Natalia Star will be,’ said Goldin, matter-of-factly. ‘You can understand that the slightest error on my part, the slightest miscalculation, could result in the loss of thousands of francs of value. So, I will have to be careful, won’t I?’

  Without any further preliminaries, he tapped the iron rod on to the back of the knife-blade in a way that appeared to Joel to be absurdly casual. The rough fragment of diamond which was protruding from the cleaver’s cement dropped neatly on to the workbench.

  Joseph Mandlebaum let out a noisy sigh of relief. The two assistants gave Frederick Goldin a short burst of spontaneous applause. Frederick Goldin looked at Joel and grinned in pride.

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Joel.

  Goldin’s narrow face gradually cleared of self-satisfaction, like clouds moving away in front of a cold easterly wind. ‘What do you mean, “is that all”?’ he asked Joel.

  ‘It took you nearly a year to get yourself ready to do that? Just one tap?’

  ‘You’re playing a joke on me,’ said Goldin. His two assistants laughed, but not very happily.

  ‘You think so?’ Joel demanded. ‘I’m beginning to wonder who’s playing the joke around here, you or me. It took you nearly a year to cut one piece o
ff the side of that diamond; how long is it going to take you to finish it?’

  ‘Mr Blitz, with the greatest respect, you know that such a cutting just can’t be hurried. That is why you brought the rough to me in the first place. To have it cut perfectly, not hastily. Now you’re trying to tell me that I’m too slow?’

  Joel took a breath. ‘When I first brought you the Natalia Star, I had a little money left. Now, I don’t have anything. I’m broke; and as you can probably understand, that makes a difference.’

  ‘You really don’t have money?’ asked Joseph Mandlebaum. ‘But you own half of the world’s largest diamond-mine.’

  ‘Sure I do. I’m a wealthy man. Except that as soon as I start drawing money out of my accounts with the Capetown banks, my brother is going to be able to locate me within a matter of weeks.’

  Frederick Goldin looked across at Joseph Mandlebaum and made a face. ‘Maybe between us we could advance you a few thousand francs,’ he suggested. ‘Just enough for you to live on until I finish the diamond.’

  Joel said sourly, ‘That’s just marvellous, isn’t it? The poverty-stricken millionaire. When I first looked at that diamond, I saw dreams of incredible riches. Now look at me.’

  Goldin held up the cleaved-off fragment of the Natalia Star. ‘When this diamond is polished, my friend, you won’t be poverty stricken any longer. You will be a king in your own right. You know that, don’t you? And that is why you must give me the time that I need to do this job to perfection.’

  Joel reached for his crutches. ‘Come on, Mandlebaum,’ he said. ‘I believe you can start advancing me money by buying me a drink.’

  On the morning of February 1881, Boer guerrillas shot and killed ninety-three British soldiers in a surprise attack on the crest of Majuba Hill, in the Transvaal. There were only a handful of them, but they abruptly and successfully halted a full-scale British advance through Laing’s Nek to relieve British garrisons trapped in the Transvaal by a recent Boer uprising. The action was described by the British C-in-C as ‘a rout almost unparalleled in the long annals of our Army.’

  The Boers wept openly as they fired at the fleeing backs of the Gordon Highlanders and Northamptons; but by August they had won from the negotiations which followed Majuba a concession which they fervently hoped would be a first step towards fresh independence. The British government agreed to recongise Paul Kruger and his advisers as the legitimate leaders of the Boers, and to let them administer the Transvaal independently – although they were still to be subordinate to what was vaguely described as ‘British suzerainty’.

  The Treaty of Pretoria which guaranteed these concessions sent nervous ripples through the diamond industry – as any signs of Boer independence always did. The prime target for any act of Boer aggression against the British would obviously be the diamond fields at Kimberley, especially since the Orange Free Staters still bitterly resented their annexation.

  For Barney, however, Majuba Hill had an immediate and startling effect. When the news reached Kimberley the following day over the new cable link, it was reported that among the 133 wounded was a young Australian naval rating named James McPherson. McPherson, as it turned out, was a cousin by marriage to Agnes Knight’s husband, Robert Joy, and in their boyhood in Sydney they had been inseparable and loving friends, ‘Bob and Jim’. After a week of indecision, Robert Joy decided with almost violent immediacy to travel to Durban, where James McPherson was in the military hospital, with the declared intention of bringing him back to Kimberley to recuperate.

  Two months later, in April, Agnes received a telegraphic message from Natal saying that Robert had decided to take his wounded cousin straight back to Australia. His cousin had lost his right eye and the use of his left arm, and Robert wanted to take care of him. It was ‘unlikely’ that he would return. ‘Kimberley is not really for me and I suppose neither are you really, my dear,’ part of his message had read. ‘You may seek annulment on grounds of desertion and keep whatever I have left behind. I am sure you will be much happier with somebody else; after all, you always were happier in other men’s arms.’

  Mr Knight was outraged that his daughter’s honour should have been impugned over the open telegraph, but Agnes soon calmed him down. She was glad to be rid of Robert so painlessly, although she discovered that before he had set sail for Sydney he had drawn the last remaining three hundred and sixty pounds out of their bank, and left her with a few coppers.

  It may have been for that reason that she arrived on the front doorstep of Vogel Vlei on a hot shimmering afternoon just before Christmas, 1881, in a wide white sun-bonnet and a white layered dress of silks and Brussels lace, and asked Horace if she might speak to Barney.

  Barney came to the door himself, still carrying the copy of the Capetown newspaper he had been reading. He was wearing a pure silk shirt and a fawn-coloured vest and trousers that had been tailored for him in London. His dark brown silk necktie was held in place with a 22-carat diamond stickpin.

  ‘Agnes?’ he asked her. ‘Won’t you come in?’

  Through the white veil of her hat she looked as if she might have been crying. She said, ‘Only if you want me to.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I want you to?’

  ‘You know why. I’ve never been a faithful person.’

  He folded his paper up, and smiled. ‘I don’t know whether I’ve ever been looking for a faithful person.’

  ‘You heard about Robert?’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘It was the talk of Kimberley for a whole month. I don’t think I could have avoided hearing about it.’

  In the distance, a farmcart trundled through the heat, and even from a quarter of a mile away, Barney could hear its iron-rimmed wheels on the road. Agnes said, ‘The marriage won’t be annulled for another six months, at least. But I couldn’t wait to ask you.’

  Barney lowered his head. He knew what she was going to say; and he knew, too, that it was what he wanted. But somehow on this warm and restless day, with the air like liquid mirrors, the words seemed to be magnified beyond any sensible meaning. Too obvious, and too overblown, and years too late. Yet what else could he do? Live alone in his decorated palace for another silent decade, in his fashionable suits and his opulent jewellery, eating alone in a dining-room that could have seated a hundred? He had been a prisoner of his own life when he was poor, and living in New York; but in Vogel Vlei he would be just as trapped, just as isolated, even though he was rich.

  He said to Anges, ‘Come back when they tell you your marriage is over. I’ll be here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked him, her voice so soft that he could hardly hear her.

  He nodded. Then he reached out for her hand, and held it against his cheek. ‘Something tells me that we were made for each other,’ he told her.

  It was snowing when Joel laboriously mounted the stairs of Frederick Goldin’s workshop in the last week of February 1882. Outside, he could see the grey flakes whirling down on to the rooftops of Antwerp, and transforming the whole city into an encampment of white.

  It was today, Wednesday, that Frederick Goldin had promised him that the Natalia Star would finally be ready.

  Joel had seen the diamond through every stage of its cleaving and grinding and polishing. The last time he had examined it, only two weeks ago, it had already appeared to be finished. A brilliant, flashing lozenge of pure light. But Goldin had told him that one of Antwerp’s most talented brilliandeers was going to spend a final few days bringing it up to a perfect shine. To Goldin, everything had to be ‘perfection’.

  ‘I can never show the diamond to anybody, and claim credit for it, so my reputation is not at stake,’ he had told Joel. ‘But, I must satisfy my own pride.’

  Joel knocked on the door of the workshop, and one of Goldin’s assistants let him in. The light in the room was grey and unearthly, and from up here the view of the city seemed even more unreal. Even the rigging on the ships that were moored along the slate-coloured curve of the River Schelde had snared
the snow, so that they looked like ghostly vessels from a nightmare.

  Frederick Goldin was cleaving a small canary-yellow diamond in his dop; and Joel had to wait until he had halved the stone before he could approach him.

  ‘Well?’ Joel said, peeling off his damp leather gloves, and forcing them into his coat pocket.

  Goldin looked at him for a long time. ‘Well, what?’ he asked, at last.

  Joel cleared his throat. ‘Where’s the diamond?’ he said. ‘Is it completely finished?’

  Goldin sat up straight on his stool and looked this way and that in obvious bafflement. ‘I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t think you know what I’m talking about? I want to see the diamond!’

  ‘I don’t know what diamond you mean,’ Goldin protested.

  ‘The Natalia Star,’ whispered Joel. ‘What else do you think I mean?’

  Goldin stood up. ‘There’s no such diamond,’ he said.

  ‘What the devil are you playing at?’ Joel snapped. ‘The Natalia Star. Three hundred and fifty carats of lilac-pink diamond. You’ve been cutting it for the past two years!’

  Frederick Goldin turned towards one of his assistants, and the assistant shook his head.

  ‘I’ve been in the diamond business long enough to know every major diamond,’ said Goldin. ‘It’s my profession to know them. But I have never seen or heard of a diamond called the Natalia Star.’

  ‘I brought it here myself,’ Joel told him. ‘It’s my diamond and I want to know where it is.’

  ‘You say you brought the diamond? It’s yours?’

  ‘You know damn well I did! By God, Goldin, I’m going to have you thrown in to jail for this! Where the hell is my diamond?’

  ‘I’m sorry. You never brought me any diamond of any description,’ smiled Goldin. ‘And as for your threats of jail … well, if you can prove that I took such a diamond from you, then obviously I will have to be arrested, and perhaps tried. But where is your proof? Where are your documents of provenance? What have you got on paper to say that the diamond ever existed, or that even if it did, it was yours?’