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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 he’d been able to turn Street loose years ago to use his quick, cruel skills. Street would have opened up the old man like a sturgeon, spilling the glistening caviar of truth. Or better yet, if possible, a swift death, a death that would have killed the secret of the mine as well…. But neither ideahad been approved by van Luik’s superiors.
    Now it was too late.
    “No one can prove the mine exists,” van Luik said softly, not even aware that he was speaking aloud. “He was, after all, quite mad.”
    “Dream on, mate,” Street retorted. “The mine exists. They called him Crazy Abe and he might have been, but not like that. Diamonds were his children, his women, his country, and his god. I’ve heard a lot of lies in my day and bloody little truth. Hearing Abe talk about diamonds was like being a priest in the confessional. The truth, no matter how wild. I never got my hands on the stones in the bag, but I’d bet my life they were real.”
    Silence stretched into a sigh. “The sixteenth verse. Read it.”
    This time Street didn’t argue. Before he’d only feared that Abe Windsor would leave the secret of the diamond mine to someone other than his friend Jason Street. Now Street was certain. He’d sworn the poetry had nothing new to teach him.
    He’d been wrong.
    “‘It can be yours, all of it./Say goodbye to mallee root,/Say g’day to my queen,/Go a yard for each year of deceit,/Turn around once—see it?/Stupid merkin./Can’t find shit in a loo, can you?’”
    Van Luik waited.
    “Mallee root is rhyming slang for prostitute,” Street said tiredly, finding nothing new in the line. “There’s no map or local name like it on any of Abe’s properties or claims. As for his ‘queen,’ it’s probably his mine, right?”
    Van Luik grunted.
    “As for the rest, until you know where to stand and how long Abe was deceived, the words are useless. Same for ‘Take a map of Tasmania,/Find the little man in the boat./Go on, row on.’ The map of Tasmania is slang for pussy, and the