Death is Forever

the mine if we dare to go ‘Where men are Percys and Lady Janes are stone,’” Street said, drawing it out. “Aussies call their cock their Percy. Guess what a Lady Jane is?”
    Van Luik grunted. He didn’t have to guess. He’d heard it all before, many times.
    “So Abe is telling us to go where men have a cock and women have a stone pussy,” Street said succinctly. “Welcome to the outback. That narrows the mine’s location down to a few thousand square miles of uninhabited country.”
    When van Luik would have spoken, Street talked right over him.
    “In the next verse, an ‘amber river’ must be beer, right?” Street said. “You drink enough of it and you’ll ‘piss a yellow sea.’ Then there’s—”
    “Go to the next verse,” van Luik interrupted.
    “Right. ‘Crawl into my bed and onto my Percy,/Bridget and Ingrid, Diana and Mercy,/Kewpie and Daisy and Kelly,/Rooting and hooting about love./Mistresses of lies,/Damn their hot cries.’” Street took a breath and continued sarcastically, “We’ve already decoded Percy, which leaves us with the other names. They aren’t cities, towns, settlements, crossroads, tracks, paths, stations, or any other bloody thing but Aussie slang for pussy.”
    Van Luik made a sound of disgust.
    “Rooting is screwing,” Street continued relentlessly. “Now maybe the old bastard saw mining as a sexual experience or maybe he didn’t. Either way, that verse has sweet fuck-all to tell us about where he found his bloody diamonds.”
    “Go to the ninth verse,” van Luik said.
    “You go to it. I’ve had enough.”
    “Begin with the fourth line.”
    Street gripped the phone so hard his hand ached, while he reminded himself that now was not the time to lose his temper. Even though it hadn’t been his fault, the secret to the Sleeping Dog Mines had slipped through his fingers. If going over “Chunder” one more time was the only punishment he got, he’d be lucky.
    “‘Stone womb giving me hope,/Secrets blacker than death/And truth it’s death to speak.’” Street waited, but van Luik said nothing. “‘Stone womb’ is a mine, right? Didn’t we decide that—oh, six, seven years ago, when he changed ‘woman’ to ‘womb’?”
    Van Luik ignored the sarcasm. “Yes. Go on.”
    “Wombs, women, and mines are dark places, and telling where his mine was would have been the death of Crazy Abe, and he bloody well knew it.”
    “‘But I will speak to you,/Listen to me, child of rue.’”
    Street said nothing, too surprised by the reversal of roles, van Luik reading the doggerel they both had come to loathe.
    “‘Let secrets sleep/Waiting for the offspring of deceit./While ’roos and rutting gins/Leap on the ground above,/A handful of old candy tins/Rattle around below.’”
    Silence stretched over the communications link as an unhappy certainty grew in Street. “He’s talking about an heir, isn’t he? Not just any poor sod that happens to be reading ‘Chunder,’ but his own bloody heir.”
    “I am afraid you are correct. ‘Child of rue’ can no longer be understood to be a comment on the general unhappiness of mankind.”
    “Bloody hell,” Street snarled. “What could his heir find in that blurter’s poetry that we can’t?”
    The ache between van Luik’s eyes grew greater with each heartbeat. It would have been so much easier if there had been some unmistakable hint of treachery on Street’s part, some tangible proof of unreliability from the man on the other end of the line. But there wasn’t, which meant that some unknown and therefore utterly unpredictable force was at work to upset the fragile balance of ConMin’s Diamond Sales Division, a balance Hugo van Luik had spent his life trying to maintain, a balance that had been achieved at the cost of so many principles and ideals and lives.
    Van Luik pictured the Australian scene in his mind, wondering whether Abe Windsor had finally babbled the secrets of his mine to the spinifex as he lay dying. A useless speculation in any case, for the spinifex had neither ears to hear nor mouths to communicate. All van Luik had was the fact that Jason Street had been told about a holographic will and had been shown sheet after sheet of manic poetry; and that, when drunk, Abelard Windsor would talk about diamonds as green as billabongs shaded by gum trees, diamonds as pink as a white girl’s nipples, diamonds the color and clarity of distilled water.
    Futilely, fiercely, van Luik wished that