a week to dissuade Duff from building an Opera House but he succeeded and instead they joined most of the other members of the Diggers Committee in financing a different type of pleasure palace. At Duff's suggestion they called it the Opera House. They recruited the performers not from the great companies of Europe but from the dock areas of Capetown and Port Natal and chose as the conductor a Frenchwoman of vast experience named Blue Bessie after the colour of her hair.
The Opera House provided entertainment on two levels.
For the members of the Committee and the other emergent rich there was a discreet side entrance, a lavishly furnished lounge where one could buy the finest champagne and discuss the prices on the Kimberley Stock Exchange, and beyond the lounge were a series of tastefully decorated retiring-rooms. For the workers there was a bare corridor to queue in, no choice for your money and a five-minute time limit. In one month the Opera House produced more gold than the Jack and Whistle mine.
By December there were millionaires in Johannesburg: Hradsky, the Heyns brothers, Karl Lochtkamper, Duff Charleywood, Sean Courtney and a dozen others. They owned the mines, the land, the buildings and the city: the aristocracy of the Witwatersrand, knighted with money and crowned with gold.
A week before Christmas, Hradsky, their unacknowledged but undoubted king, called them all to a meeting in one of the private lounges of Candy's Hotel. Who the hell does he think he is, complained Jock Heyns, ordering us round like a bunch of kaffirs. Verdammt Juden! agreed Lochtkamper.
But they went, every last man of them, for whatever Hradsky did had the smell of money about it and they could no more resist it than a dog can resist the smell of a bitch in season.
Duff and Sean were the last to arrive and the room was already hazed with cigar smoke and tense with expectation. Hradsky sagged in one of the polished leather armchairs with Max sitting quietly beside him; his eyes flickeried when Duff walked in but his expression never changed. When Duff and Sean had found chairs Max stood up. Gentlemen, Mr Hradsky has invited you here to consider a proposition. They leaned forward slightly in their chairs and there was a glitter in their eyes like hounds close upon the fox. From time to time it is necessary for men in your position to find capital to finance further ventures and to consolidate past gains, on the other hand those of us who have money lying idle will be seeking avenues for investment. Max cleared his throat and looked at them with his sad brown eyes. Up to the present there has been no meeting-place for these mutual needs such as exists in the other centres of the financial world. Our nearest approach to it is the Stock Exchange at Kimberley which, I'm sure you will agree, is too far removed to be of practical use to us here at Johannesburg. Mr Hradsky has invited you here to consider the possibility of forming our own Exchange and, if you accept the idea, to elect a chairman and governing body. Max sat down and in the silence that followed they took up the idea, each one fitting it into his scheme of thinking, testing it with the question How will I benefit?.
Ja, it's darn fine idea. Lochtkamper spoke first. Yes, it's what we needCount me in. While they schemed and bargained, setting the fees, the place and the rules, Sean, watched their faces. The faces of bitter men, happy men quiet ones and big bull-roarers but all with one common feature, that greedy glitter in the eyes. It was midnight before they finished.
Max stood upGentlemen, Mr Hradsky would like you to join him in a glass of champagne to celebrate the formation of our new enterprise. This I can't believe; the last time he paid for drinks was back in sixty, declared Duff. Quickly somebody find a waiter before he changes his mind.
Hradsky hooded his eyes to bide the hatred in them.
With its own Stock Exchange and bordel Johannesburg became a city. Even Kruger recognized it; he deposed the Diggers Committee and sent in his own police force, sold monopolies for essential mining supplies to members of his family and Government, and set about revising his tax laws with special attention to mining profits. Despite Kruger's efforts to behead the gold-laying goose, the city grew, and overflowed the original Government plots and spread brawling and blustering out into the surrounding veld.
Sean and Duff grew with it. Their way of life changed swiftly; their visits to the mines fell to a weekly inspection and they left it to their hired men. A steady river of gold poured down from the ridge to their offices on Eloff Street, for the men they hired were the best that money could find.
Their horizons closed in to encompass only the two panelled offices, the Victoria Rooms and the Exchange.
Yet within that world Sean found a thrill that he had never dreamed existed. He had been oblivious to it during the first feverish months; he had been so absorbed in laying the foundations that he could spare no energy for enjoying or even noticing it.
Then one day he felt the first voluptuous tickle of it.
He had sent to the bank for a land title document he needed, expecting it to be delivered by a junior clerk but instead the sub- manager and a senior clerk filed respectfully into his office. It was an exquisite physical shock and it gave him a new awareness. He noticed the way men looked at him as he passed them on the street.
He realized suddenly that over fifteen hundred human beings depended on him for their livelihood.
There was satisfaction in the way a path cleared for him and Duff as they crossed the floor of the Exchange each morning to take their places in the reserved leather armchairs of the members lounge. When Duff and he leaned together and talked quietly before the trading began, even the other big fish watched them. Hradsky with his fierce eyes hooded by sleepy lids, Jock and Trevor Heyns, Karl Lochtkamper, any of them would have given a day's production from their mines to overhear those conversations.
Buy! said Sean. Buy! Buy! Buy! cUrnoured the pack and the prices jumped as they hit them, then slumped back as they sucked their money away and put it to work elsewhere.
Then one March morning in 1886 the thrill became so acute it was almost an orgasm. Max left the chair at Norman Hradsky's side and crossed the lounge towards them. He stopped in front of them, lifted his sad eyes off the patterned carpet and almost apologetically proffered a loose sheaf of papers. Good morning, Mr Courtney. Good morning, Mr Charleywood. Mr Hradsky has asked me to bring this new share issue to your attention. Perhaps you would be interested in these reports, which are, of course, confidential, but he feels they are worthy of your support.
You have power when you can force a man who hates you to ask for your favours. After the first advance by Hradsky they worked together often. Hradsky never acknowledged their existence by word or look. Each morning Duff called a cheerful greeting across the full width of the lounge, Hello, chatterbox, or Sing for us, Norman. Hradsky's eyes would flicker and he would sag a little lower into his chair, but before the bell started the day's trading Max would stand up and come across to them, leaving his master staring into the empty fireplace. A few soft sentences exchanged and Max would walk back to Hradsky's side.
Their combined fortunes were irresistible: in one wild morning's trading alone they added another fifty thousand to their store of pounds.
An untaught boy handles his first rifle like a toy. Sean was twenty-two. The power he held was a more deadly weapon than any rifle, and much sweeter, more satisfying to use. It was a game at first with the Witwatersrand as a chessboard, men and gold for pieces. A word or a signature on a slip of paper would set the gold jingling and the men scampering. The consequences were remote and all that mattered was the score, the score chalked up in black figures on a bank statement. Then in that same March he was made to realize that a man wiped off the board could not be laid back in the box with as much compassion as a carved wooden knight.
Karl Lochtkamper, the German with a big laugh and a happy face, laid himself open. He needed money to develop a new property on the east end of the Rand; he borrowed and signed short-term notes on his loans, certain that he could extend them if necessary. He borrowed secretly from men he thought he could trust. He was vulnerable and the sharks smelt him out.
Where is Lochtkamper getting his money? asked Max.
Do you know? asked Sean. No, but I can guess.
Then the next day Max came back to them again. He has eight notes out. Here is the list, he whispered sadly. Mr Hradsky will buy the ones that have a cross against them. Can you handle the rest?
Yes, said Sean.
They closed on Karl on the last day of the quarter; they called the loans and gave him twenty-four hours to meet them. Karl went to each of the three banks in turn. I'm sorry, Mr Lochtkamper, we have loaned over our budget for this quarter. liver Hradsky is holding your notes, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Mr Lochtkamper, Mr Charleywood is one of our directors. Karl Lochtkamper rode back to the Exchange. He walked across the floor and into the lounge for the last time. He stood in the centre of the big room, his face grey, his voice bitter and broken. Let Jesus have this much mercy on you when your time comes. Friends! My friends! Sean, how many times have we drunk together? And you, Duff, was it yesterday you shook my hand? Then he went back across the floor, out through the doors. His suite in the Great North Hotel wasn't fifty yards from the Exchange. In the members lounge they heard the pistol shot quite clearly.
That night Duff and Sean got drunk together in the Victoria rooms. Why did he have to do it? Why did he have to kill himself? He didn't, answered Duff. He was a
