It was an open-and-shut, sordid little case. The magistrate, in sentencing me to eighteen months' imprisonment in Pretoria, moralized on young adventurers with get-rich-quick ideas. Nadine came at once to the dreary little town. Throughout the trial her faith in me never wavered. She was the only person who believed my story about Rankin. After my conviction she tried to persuade me to forget him. Her heart, she said, was big enough to bridge eighteen months in prison because she had pledged it for a lifetime. She often spoke of plans for our new life together when I came out of jail.
It was Charlie's remark when I had finished this account which sowed the first seed of revenge.
'You're going after Rankin when you come out, surely?'
My inner turmoil and frustration edged my answer. 'What's the use? Nadine spent a small fortune trying to locate him before the trial. There wasn't a clue — not a single, solitary trace.'
'She's quite a girl, that,' said Charlie. 'Plenty of lolly?'
'Her father's Harold Raikes, the gold mining tycoon.'
Charlie whistled. 'Well then, you've nothing to worry about. In your place, I'd forget about Rankin.'
'He didn't think much of me before this business anyway. Collecting rocks wasn't his idea of a job fit for the man who was to marry his only daughter. He made that more than plain. Now he hates my guts for what happened.'
Charlie slipped a renovated book under a big screw-press. I was too engrossed in the tale of my misfortune to notice the over-casual note in his question. I also felt better inclined towards him after having got Rankin off my chest.
'What's this. place, The Hill?'
'It's a sort of ancient ruined fortress way up in the Northern Transvaal — beyond the back of beyond. Slap on the banks of the Limpopo River on the Rhodesian border. No one knows who built it, or when.'
'What's so special about it that it needs a guard?'
'There was a big treasure strike there in the 'thirties,' I explained. 'There could be a lot more. The government clamped down and sealed off the area — forbidden territory. It looks, though, as if someone is trying a little private enterprise from what Nadine had to say. There were a couple of scientific expeditions but they came to an end with the war. There's only been one since. They cost a packet.'
'What's your interest in The Hill?' he persisted. 'Or hers?'
A warning note sounded at the back of my mind. I'd told Charlie Furstenberg enough — perhaps too much — about myself. I shrugged it off. 'Scientific. Both of us.'
But he eyed me narrowly and persisted.
'Say, if you knew where Rankin was, would you go after him?'
I was taken aback by this continued questioning. Until then I had never seriously considered either revenge on Rankin or forcing an admission of my innocence out of him. He was simply the target of my hatred, as disembodied as a malign ghost. Charlie's question therefore only sounded academic.
'Naturally. I told you. I've got a big score to settle.'
Charlie started to fiddle with a book, his eyes down. Probably I would not have seen the trap in them if he had looked directly at me, they were so dark and inscrutable. His voice was very soft. I thought I was hearing things.
'Rankin's at The Hill.'
I have no recollection of grabbing him by the front of his khaki overall and lifting him bodily so that his face was level with my own.
'Let me go, you fool!' he snapped, keeping his voice down.
'They'll see! Let go — do you want to spoil everything?'
I released him but my hands were shaking so I couldn't hold the book-binding tools steady when I pretended to start working again.
At last I found my voice. 'Who says so?'
Charlie shrugged. 'The grapevine. It's reliable. He's there all right.'
'But how. .
'Rankin's holed up there, I tell you. If you both know the layout of the place it should be easy enough to find him.'
A tidal wave of emotions, unformed plans and hopes swept across my mind. They included Rankin, The Hill, Nadine, my release date, Charlie, the future. I simply stood and looked stupidly at the piles of battered books on the table. Charlie said, 'Get a grip of yourself, man. So — are you going after him?'
I was too overwrought to notice his insistence.
'Yes! Yes! Just let me get my hands on him!'
There was an odd, almost reminiscent note in his response.
'Maze! un b'rachah then!'
'What does that mean, for Pete's sake?'
He was very quiet. 'Good luck and prosperity. We used to say it to clinch a bargain at the Diamond Dealers' Club in New York. It's Yiddish. Traditional. Binding. Members never break their word. Or hardly ever.'
For a moment the set smile vanished as a curtain opened on the past, revealing a hard, almost cruel face. I said, softly, 'You've come a long way on the back of that little devil called IDB, Charlie.'
In a flash the fixed smile was back and his reply held no overtones.
'It's the way the cookie crumbles, boy.' He looked at me keenly. 'You've got a lot to think over. My guess is that you won't sleep tonight.'
Nor did I.
In the small hours, from Charlie's cell next to mine, came the words of a song, sung too softly to reach beyond my own ears:
Winkel, winkel, little store,
How I wonder more and more.
Whether with the mine so nigh,
You deal in diamonds on the sly.
I made a vow to go back to The Hill, alone.
CHAPTER TWO
My resolve brought me no inner peace: on the contrary, it did the opposite. A restless fret took over from my previous static bitterness and I started counting the days until my release. My frame of mind, sharpened often to explosion-point against my fellow-prisoners, was aggravated by my decision that Nadine could have no hand in my confrontation with Rankin. How this was to be engineered cost me as many nights' sleep as my plans to waylay Rankin himself. At times the weight of the problem seemed as heavy as The Hill's own bulk. This was especially so after I had seen Nadine on her Friday visits. For she was so bound up with The Hill that it seemed inconceivable to exclude her. Nadine and I had gone to The Hill together as students on the first post-war scientific expedition in 1947. The place had, as I had told Charlie, lain undisturbed for years. Its natural population of wild animals had soared during the war period when ammunition for hunting was unobtainable. What few communications had existed in the way of tracks had been destroyed by floods or sandstorms.
The Hill has no counterpart in Africa. It is a kind of landlocked Gibraltar across a strategic communications route where two great rivers and a natural north-south migration highway meet. It is situated about sixty miles west of the South African border town of Messina, where one of the world's richest copper mines is located. The town lies in the heart of a broad belt of semi desert which spans a one hundred and fifty mile wide strip of territory from the Zoutpansberg mountains of the Northern Transvaal to the southern reaches of Rhodesia. To the north and south is pleasant savannah country. Sandwiched between is a sandy area of burning heat half the size of Scotland studded with eroded, mesa-like hills, or koppies as they are known in South Africa. It is primarily the home of the grotesque baobab trees whose bulbous, purple-hued trunks reel across the arid landscape like an army of drunken Falstaffs, blown and dropsied with stored water. Archaeological evidence shows that as recently as a thousand years ago the climate of this part of Southern Africa was vastly different from what it is today and that it supported great populations.