Love's Golden Spell. William Maltese
was all right, the sixteen years forgotten. He was playing games—not because he saw her as a threat but because she was a woman. Success with any woman offered him consolation for an ego bruised sixteen years before when Janet had been unable to succumb.
She wanted to be fair. She wanted more. Too late. Sixteen years too late. Fifteen minutes too late.
Her robe was off before she reached the closet. She didn’t look at the clock, fearing what it showed.
She dressed quickly, choosing a brown pullover. She had no trouble with the button and zipper on the matching slacks. The strap on her left shoe was less obliging. She softly cursed it into submission.
She grabbed her purse, finding her comb in it by the time she reached the hallway. She shared the elevator with two men who eyed her appreciatively as she put her hair into some semblance of order. There was no time for makeup.
She asked one of the men for the time; she’d left her wristwatch in her room. The man’s watch was an expensive Piaget. No chance of the wrong time. A Piaget only lost one second every two years, according to the ads.
She was beyond the fifteen-minute deadline. She had made the right decision too late. There would have been plenty of time if only she had started dressing the minute he left. Sixteen years and fifteen minutes to end like this, before any new beginnings.
He was waiting, his muscular body leaning against a pillar facing the elevator. He smiled, walking toward her. “I knew you’d come,” he said confidently. Her anger flushed her cheeks. She shouldn’t have come running. She should have denied him his obvious satisfaction. “Not because I’m personally so irresistible,” he added quickly, intuitively sensing her second thoughts. “I merely knew you had a sense of fair play.”
“I thought you’d be gone,” she commented with feigned coolness.
“I’ve never known a woman who could get ready for anything in fifteen minutes,” he said. “You must have set some kind of record as it was.”
“My being here doesn’t mean I’m making any promises,” Janet said. Too many promises were regretted later.
“I’ll get the Van Hoons,” she’d promised her father. He hadn’t heard. He was dead. It was a promise nevertheless. Now she was consorting with the enemy.
“My car is outside,” he said, his fingers on her elbow. Fire ran the length of her arm. He did that with his slightest touch.
Because it was early, the hotel lobby was almost deserted. Shops, theaters and restaurants that would soon pull a crowd into the Carleton Complex were closed and awaiting proprietors. Beyond the revolving door, the city stirred. There was a vital pulse to Johannesburg that existed night and day. That activity had begun on a deserted piece of wasteland less than one hundred years before, conjured by the discovery of gold, still the main reason for Johannesburg’s existence.
Gold raised a city where there should never have been one. Perched on one of the highest ridges of the South African plateau, seventeen hundred meters above sea level, it had no water that wasn’t pumped in from the Vaal over sixty kilometers away. Its petrol and diesel came all the way from Durban, 720 kilometers to the southeast, where tankers from the Persian Gulf fed an insatiable pipeline.
Johannesburg had a population of nearly a million and a half people. It was nearly twice the size of Durban and Cape Town, South Africa’s other big cities, and three times the size of Pretoria, the republic’s administrative capital.
Christopher was driving a Mercedes sports car. He opened the door on the passenger side for Janet and went around to the other side to slide in beside her.
“Relax,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white, his hair as golden as the metal dug beneath the city. “I’m really not a dentist out to yank your molars. I’m here to show you a good time.”
There was no denying that Janet was tense. She was debating whether she had been right in coming. There was something about being with Christopher now that muted the unhappiness of the past sixteen years. With his handsome face and muscular body so near, Janet could forget her father and her husband. She knew it was unhealthy to escape reality by recalling the past. She was with Christopher Van Hoon not because they were children, enjoying each other’s company, but because they were adults engaged in adult games.
She settled back in her seat, caressed by the luxurious softness of expensive leather. The leather smells became more erotic when mingled with the scent of Christopher’s distinctive after-shave. The car was moving toward the maze of great mounds, evidence of three thousand million tons of rock pulverized in the search for gold. But these mine tailings were less the unsightly boils on the landscape they had once been. Years of experimentation and large outlays of cash had resulted in the discovery of ways of getting hybrid vegetation to root in the unsavory mixture of silica and cyanide. The dumps looked more and more like low-lying foothills: the Johannesburg Downs. A standard joke on the stock exchange was that the mining companies took all the ups, leaving the city the Downs. The still un-vegetated segments caught the early-morning sunshine, telegraphing flashes of gold.
The same sunlight caught in Christopher’s hair, held captive in silky strands glowing with luminescence. Janet wanted to comb her fingers through that mating of hair and celestial fire. Electricity built inside her without the touching.
“The Cassandras have been prophesying an end to the gold for years,” Christopher said, steering the car along a highway that sliced one man-made dune into mirrored halves. “As far back as 1911, the mines were supposedly about to give up their last. New discoveries, however, combined with advanced technology and periodic increases in the selling price of gold, now project the life of the mines into the year 2030.”
“There used to be wildlife wandering here in vast herds,” Janet said. “Where do you suppose they are now?”
“Mining companies in Johannesburg employ over four hundred and fifty thousand men,” Christopher answered; his reply automatic. He was programmed for his response. “Without the profits from the mines, this country would be very poor indeed, attempting to eke an existence from the export of agricultural products at the mercy of periodic droughts and severe crop failures.”
“Yes, well, I imagine there is a rationalization for everything, isn’t there?” Janet said, refusing to be impressed. She knew the arguments for industrial development versus maintenance of an ecological status quo. Christopher wasn’t the only one who considered corporate profits more desirable than environmental preservation. Unfortunately, there were too many like him. If they weren’t the majority, they were still in positions of power that gave them the edge.
“I suppose it all depends on one’s priorities,” Christopher said smugly. “Some people seem more concerned about the welfare of four-legged animals than the welfare of their own two-legged species.”
“Some people find the four-legged varieties far less able to take care of themselves,” Janet said. “I don’t see animals lobbying for their grazing land while greedy businessmen divvy up the pot.”
There was an uneasy silence. Her every moment with Christopher was a battle. Perversely, she had hoped for something more.
“Look,” he said finally, his thoughts parallel to hers, “surely we’re not going to be the only two people on this lovely day who refuse to enjoy ourselves, are we? Couldn’t we try for a truce? It’s unlikely we’re going to resolve, in one day of bickering, any profit-versus-ecology questions that have been around longer than either of us.”
“Then what’s the purpose of this little outing?” Janet asked.
“I want you to know there are members of the opposition who are charming human beings and not the ogres you, and many of your cohorts, seem to think,” he said, flashing a wide smile that invited seduction.
“Is that what you think you are?” Janet asked, wanting to believe but refusing to do so. “A charming human being?”
“Oh yes,” Christopher said, ignoring her sarcasm. “As