Glass House (32 page)

Three years later, diamonds were found in
and connected to the kimberlite deposits, making large-scale soil
mining of the stones possible. And less than twenty years after
that, Cecil Rhodes outmaneuvered Barney Barnato for control of
Barnato’s majority interest in the Kimberley Central Mining
Company, controller of the largest mine in the world at the
time – the Big Hole. In uniting the Kimberley Central with his
holdings, Rhodes merged the interests of Africa’s two biggest
stakeholders into the world’s predominant diamond company, which he
named after the brothers who owned the land on which Rhodes’ own
mines first developed.

He called it “De Beers.”

Without De Beers, the diamond industry
simply wouldn’t have existed as it ultimately did, because without
De Beers, the marketing, organization, and market control that
collectively made diamonds valuable wouldn’t have come together.
Following its formation in 1888, De Beers set about monopolizing
the diamond supply in the richest field ever discovered, the south
African subcontinent. Through careful negotiations, strong-arm
purchases, and – above all – overwhelming use of capital
to acquire and horde diamond rough, De Beers had locked the
industry down for a century, shaping it to the company’s will and
benefit through rigid manipulation of supply, demand, and
price.

That began to crumble only as the supply of
rough expanded. Discoveries of diamonds in Russia, Australia, and
Canada caused the most serious tremors. With mining interests
cropping up outside De Beers’ reach, the cartel suffered the first
dips in its power. By the close of the twentieth century, De Beers’
control of rough was supporting its weaker competitors by ensuring
stable prices, and, pushed by marketing consultants, De Beers
responded with a tide-turning decision to open its vaults and flood
the market with diamonds.

Despite De Beers’ lasting reputation as the
world’s leading producer in and protector of the diamond industry,
whether accurate or not, the company and the industry were never
the same. The free market began to impact diamond pricing more than
De Beers did. And the company, moving to shake off structures that
existed within it for a century, moved right along with it.

The same consultants who pushed successfully
for De Beers to enter the real world market by dumping diamonds
also pushed for the company to change by trimming itself. By that
point, Rhodes’ monopolistic company, born and raised a
nineteenth-century creature, was a fat and hairy cartel, full of
tangents and stragglers, things collected along the way and never
cast off.

The Dutch Consortium was one of those.
Planted directly in the path of De Beers’ geographic extensions in
South Africa, the Dutch were swept up early, and quite happily, by
Rhodes. The small company and its two mines got lost and buried in
the De Beers structure, one of many sub-entities that had names and
histories that were swallowed whole by Rhodes’ expansion.

That didn’t change until 1999. The
consultants listed the Consortium and its mines as ripe for
spin-off in the changed diamond market, and De Beers did exactly
that. The Dutch mining company was cut loose to fend for itself,
like a straggling shoot that was severed from an oak.

It struggled for a time after that. The
mines were poorly run and deeply in debt, short on equipment and
squeezed on all sides by others who were bigger or faster or just
smarter. But that had been changing lately.

Four years after De Beers cut the Consortium
loose, Krelis Hoopmans became superintendent of mines for the small
company. The Dutch Consortium was his life, and it had been since
he was a teenage immigrant from Rotterdam, employed there as a
runner, an errand boy. Now, better than two and almost three
decades later, he was using everything he’d learned about the
mines, top to bottom, to remake them in the image of the business
he wanted.

Krelis was an active super, overseeing
physical operations almost round-the-clock and applying the same
diligence to financial controls. He was everywhere at once, and, in
the end, became responsible for everything from the miners and
production to the inventory for toilet paper in the water closets.
There never was a moment when he wasn’t rushing, when he wasn’t
focused intently on the latest issue to arise. And it was paying
off.

The mines hit their money bottom six months
after he got his position. Another year, and they were showing a
small profit. And now, with the results for the latest period
shaping up favorably, people on the governing committee in
Amsterdam were starting to whisper that Krelis Hoopmans might be
suited to join the Board and claim an ownership slice.

Even the time he’d lost recently wasn’t
cutting against that, and he made sure of it. Every day he spent
laid out in a hospital bed, Krelis had called the administrators at
the mines, minding the details as though he were down the hall and
not stuck in an infirmary. Each day, he called Consortium committee
members in the Netherlands to give updates on mine performance.

He was finally back at work, however, and he
was glad about it. He’d missed seven weeks and thought he was going
to lose at least an eighth, but the last exam went well. The doctor
poked and prodded, another round of X-rays was taken, and they’d
watched him walk, measured his gait, and asked how he’d rank the
pain from one to ten.

It was a solid seven, higher on some days,
but he’d lied and told them two at worst. He swallowed the limp
when he paced across the room, clenching his teeth as hard as he
could without giving anything away. And he prayed on the X-rays,
smiling and nodding when they were okay and the doctor signed off
on his return. They cut his cast off, replaced it with a brace
inflated to tighten against the leg, and Krelis was at the mine the
next day.

It was an accident that cost him all that
time. Despite all the progress, the Consortium mines still had
catching up to do, and things like automotive upkeep didn’t
necessarily come high on the list of things to pay for, when
payrolls had to be met. Every month still was scrimp and save and
try to keep the mines running with whatever Band-Aids had to be
used, so Hoopmans himself gave the sign-off to skip some repairs
for another few weeks.

An unfortunate delay.

The transmission of the particular vehicle
in question had been acting up for some time. If anyone checked the
records that actually did exist, in fact, they’d have found that
the truck hadn’t seen maintenance in two years, and drivers were
complaining about the shifting for almost half that.

There wasn’t any way to know that when
Hoopmans, standing in front of the parked truck, passed off a
shipping manifest and turned just as the transmission slipped. He
saw it soon enough to get out of the way, but the thought that
first occurred to him was to stop it. In that moment, he was very
much the mine superintendent, concerned about people getting hurt
or property being destroyed. Those things were costs, and costs
weren’t things the Dutch Consortium could handle.

He put a hand on the truck’s hood, and his
mind flashed a quick picture of a Superman serial he saw as a kid.
An opening scene, where the Man of Steel stops the locomotive.

Any resemblance ended there. In the real
world, Hoopmans was turned around too much to come close to
stopping the truck. It pushed him back, his legs twisting under him
as he fell to the ground.

Krelis rolled onto his stomach in a final
effort to avoid the wheel, but his leg didn’t make it. The truck
wheel went up the bottom of his foot, over his calf, and above his
knee before moving off him.

The weight of it tore Krelis’s Achilles
tendon in half at the top. That first night in the hospital, the
doctors had sutured it back together.

The bones in his leg and foot were also
broken in four places. Two of those breaks were in the upper arch
of the foot, high, near the ankle. The third was a crack in his
fibula. And the fourth was also high, but this break was in his
femur, near the femoral neck. All of them together prompted the
cast that ran from his toes to his waist, the traction, and the
weeks of unwanted time off work that followed.

When Krelis came out of surgery, his wife
nearly killed him. Their twenty-fifth anniversary had been the day
after the accident, and she’d made plans, something arranged in
Upington. They spent the time in the hospital there instead.

Thinking about it now, he grinned a little.
The day was long, his leg ached like hell and he’d gotten to
limping on it again, and his wife was still aggravated at him for
getting himself run over two months before. But he smiled anyway,
because he was finally back at work.

That was when the phone rang.

“
Hallo?
” Krelis answered.

A man on the other end chuckled into a sigh.
“Now is that Afrikaans? Or is it Dutch? I really can never tell
what I’ll get with you.”

Krelis knew the voice, but he couldn’t place
it yet. “Who is this?”

“That’s disappointing,” the man replied.
“How soon they forget when they’re away for a while.”

“Rupert.” Krelis practically spat it.

“Ah, he does remember!”

“What do you want?”

“I was simply wondering how you were doing.
I heard what happened. Terrible tragedy, but one that’s to be
expected when your company is as poor as the Consortium is.”

“Don’t waste my time. You want something
particular, so let’s get at it.”

Rupert ignored him. “Everyone was quite
concerned about your health,” he said. “Genuinely.”

“It would be the first time. Unless your
concern was in hoping for the worst, that is. Not that it would
make any difference in the futures of our two companies.”

“Are you so sure?”

Krelis didn’t miss a beat. “Meaning?”

“I have authority for an offer,” Rupert
replied. “A generous one.”

“Generous like your offer to Ariacht?”

Rupert laughed. “I assure you I’ve no idea
what you’re suggesting,” he said. “Arthur had some kind of issues
in the world. Some …
secret
. Something to disappear over
clearly, since he’s nowhere to be found. I don’t know what those
things were, and I didn’t ask when I had the chance. He wanted to
sell, and we took him up on it. No questions asked.”

“Not by you, in any event,” Krelis said, not
trying to hide his skepticism. “Plenty of questions by a number of
others, though.”

“You need to hear me out.”

“I need to hear nothing from the likes of
you. Our answer today is the same as it would have been years ago
and the same as it will be tomorrow. We’re not selling. Not to
anyone, and especially not to you and your keeper.”

“You should reconsider that.”

“I’m sure you’re not threatening me.”

Rupert waited. He gave it a few seconds then
said softly, “Of course not. We don’t work that way.”

“To the contrary, that’s precisely how
Laurentian works. We all know it. But it doesn’t matter, because
we’re not selling. If you don’t understand me when I say it that
way, I’ll try blunter terms that may make more sense to the likes
of you – you can bugger off.”

There was another chuckle from Rupert, but
it was more strained this time. “
Vaarwel, Meneer
Hoopmans,”
he said. “Or
totsiens
. Take your pick, Krelis, whichever you
like best. It’s all a jumble here, but regardless, it is still
goodbye to you.”

The line went dead.

Glass
House

Megan stood on the porch in the evening
darkness. Her eyes were on the street, but she wasn’t watching it.
She could hear the sounds of the traffic and birds, a light wind in
the trees, and faraway children being called in for the night, but
she wasn’t listening to those things. She was thinking about her
conversation with Waldoch, now a day back, and about the trial,
only a day away. And she was coming up blank on those things.

She didn’t know what Waldoch was, exactly.
Arrogant, without doubt. A liar and deceiver as well, certainly.
But it was another word –
murderer 
– that she kept
working over in her head, more troubled each time she came back to
it.

Still, she did keep coming back to it. Megan
was thinking over their conversation in his office, replaying each
word, and her announcement of Lora’s death kept catching her. That
and Waldoch’s emotionless response.

That’s terrible news. But all the better in
the end for us, I suppose.

Better in the end, I suppose
, she
thought. His assessment was matter-of-fact. So much so that he’d
seemed totally unsurprised at what was being reported.

And Chilcott, too, with his easy lie about
getting Lora’s necklace from her. Megan’s gaze glazed over with the
image of Chilcott in his crappy chair, no shoes on his feet, and a
bad but accurate joke emblazoned on his shirt.
Just Like
Judas
. And she thought about him reaching to Lora’s trapped and
dying figure and taking the necklace off her so he could cart it
back to the man he called
Boss
.

“
Fuck!
” she hissed in a spitting
whisper.

“Whoa,” a voice replied softly from the
walkway leading out from her house, beyond the screened-off porch
where Megan stood. Megan started at hearing it, but the man
standing there continued. “My day was long and bad, but it looks
like yours must have been even worse.”

He was two or three yards down from the
bottom step of the porch, toward the street. He was tall, a little
over six feet, his age old enough that hair that looked black in
the deepening dusk was probably nothing like that in the light. He
had a tanned face, unshaven for at least a week, with lines that
showed roughness from overexposure to sun or work or both. His
jacket was brown leather, soft and fitted like a bomber at the
waist, just above his jeans. His hands were buried in the jacket’s
pockets.