Jack of Diamonds (89 page)

‘Of course, I know him well. I’ll add a personal note.’ He rose from his chair with some difficulty, clutching the edge of his desk to support his weight, and called to his secretary. ‘Miss Truscott, bring your pad! Dictation!’ He settled back into his seat with a pronounced sigh, and I wondered if he was in pain. ‘Make sure you go see us first when you arrive. We are the biggest, you hear? The pay for a white medic is good, very good, and also you get a copper bonus.’

Miss Truscott entered and took the seat beside me, her slim ankles crossed, shorthand pad at the ready on her lap. I caught a whiff of her perfume and my heart suddenly beat faster. It had been over three months since I’d made love to Bridgett in the laundry basket and, while I felt guilty at my response, I couldn’t help feeling horny as hell. Jack Spayd, who had been surrounded by women all his life, was suffering withdrawal symptoms. It wasn’t just the lack of sex, but the lack of the deeply enjoyable presence of women around me. My nights in the piano bar were over forever. Moreover, Central Africa and the copper mines promised to confound my desire to meet this one great need within me. Where would I find women’s laughter, smells, flirtatious glances . . . I suddenly felt very lonely.

Mr Leslie proceeded to dictate a very friendly letter to the appropriate department at the Luswishi River Copper Mine. ‘Look up his title, Miss Truscott. Make sure it’s the personnel manager, you hear, Coetzee is a very common Afrikaans surname,’ he instructed.

I watched Miss Truscott walk from the room, her perfume lingering – she was so very pretty. ‘Thank you, Mr Leslie,’ I said. ‘I’ll make a point of presenting your letter of introduction to Mr Curtsy.’

He laughed, ‘No, man, it’s pronounced Koot-see, to rhyme with look-see,’ he said.

I thanked him. ‘May I ask one more question?’

‘Ask away, that’s why I’m here, man.’

‘Well, can you tell me about diamond drillers? It seems curious that there would be miners who drill for diamonds in a gold or copper mine.’

He chuckled. ‘No, man, the diamonds are on the drills they use in the stope – that’s a big hole, sometimes fifty yards across and nearly as deep. There are dozens of them underground where they extract the copper ore. The tungsten steel bits in the big pneumatic drills are tipped with industrial diamonds to make them harder than the surrounding rock. They drill holes in the walls of this big hole and pack them with gelignite; that’s like dynamite,’ he explained. ‘Then they blast out the rock and ore. We call these men diamond drillers because of their drills. They’re the aristocrats, the most highly paid men underground, not the riffraff from here there and everywhere, like the grizzly men. They’re mostly from South Africa, but some come from Wales.

‘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.