Death is Forever

helicopter.” Van Luik almost gagged with the sudden blinding agony his outburst triggered. He breathed shallowly through his mouth for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was controlled and calm. “We must find out who has the poetry and the stones.”
    “I’m working on it, mate.”
    Van Luik shifted the phone to his left hand and massaged his right temple with long, well-manicured fingers. Light flashed from the little finger of his right hand, where he wore a five-carat, emerald-cut, D flawless diamond. The stone was pavé set in matte-finish platinum. It was the only jewelry van Luik wore or needed to wear. In Antwerp the stone was a calling card, instantly identifying him as a fellow of the international diamond brotherhood.
    “You have, of course, a copy of ‘Chunder from Down Under’?” van Luik asked.
    “Sarah checked it a week before Abe died. It hadn’t been changed since the last time I sent a copy to you.”
    “I don’t suppose she was able to copy the will, though?” Van Luik’s tone was quiet, almost accusing. When Street didn’t answer, the Dutchman added, “Did she even manage to look at it?”
    Street drew a deep breath and prepared to tell van Luik what he already knew. “Abe left ‘Chunder’ on his bedside table, but his will was his own bloody little secret, and he kept it even closer than the stones around his neck.”
    Van Luik grunted. He opened the file on the desk in front of him and glanced through a sheaf of photographs. They were grainy prints, blown up from the tiny negatives of a Minox camera, page after page of spidery, old-fashioned handwriting on rough, lined tablet paper. Meaningless ramblings or a dead man’s cleverly disguised clues to a missing diamond mine. The truth of the poetry was still elusive.
    “You have a copy with you,” van Luik said.
    It was a statement, not a question. Street bit back a savage retort and said only, “Yes.”
    “Begin.”
    “Rack off, van Luik. We’ve been around this course so many times that—”
    “Begin,” van Luik interrupted coldly.
    There was a silence, followed by the subtle rustling of paper as Street shuffled through pages of Crazy Abe’s oddly lucid handwriting.
    “Any particular verse strike your fancy?” Street asked in a goading tone. He knew that “Chunder” offended van Luik in more ways than his inability to pierce its central secret.
    “The fourth verse this time, I think.”
    “Right.” Street began reading aloud, his voice uninflected. “‘Find it if you can,/If you dare to go/Where the dark swan floats/Over a dead sea’s bones,/Where men are Percys and Lady Janes are stone.’” When he finished reading, Street waited.
    So did van Luik.
    With a muttered curse, Street began explaining lines he’d read and explained so many times he no longer really saw them. “The first line—”
    “Is self-explanatory,” van Luik cut in. “So is the second. Begin with the third.”
    “Right. Black swans are all over the outback, like koalas used to be all over the east coast. He could be talking about a strike near a billabong.”
    “Explain.”
    “A billabong is a deep river pool that becomes a waterhole in the dry season when the shallow parts of the river dry up,” Street said mechanically.
    “Go on.”
    Street’s hand tightened on the telephone. Of all van Luik’s quirks, the one of making someone repeat the same information over and over again was the most irritating. It was also the most effective in preventing lies, a fact Street understood and had put to use for himself with his own subordinates.
    “Abe could have made a strike near a billabong, except that there aren’t any waterholes on his mineral leases or on his station that are big enough to be called a billabong,” Street said in a monotone. “The only reliable year-round water is the well at his station house.”
    Van Luik made a curt sound that could have meant anything. Street knew it was a signal to keep talking.
    “That leaves the bloody ‘dead sea’s bones,’” Street continued tonelessly. “Since we don’t have a billabong for the swans to swim in, it’s no shocker that we don’t have any waterholes sitting on top of a marine fossil bed to point the way to the mine.”
    “Go on.”
    Street smiled thinly. He suspected that van Luik found sex distasteful. Abe hadn’t. The only time he wasn’t stuck in a woman was when he drank too much beer and brewer’s wilt took him down.
    “So Abe tells us to find