Chandler looked up with irritation when I arrived, and for a moment we were all held at the door by the hostility evident in his eyes. Vusi, our exclusive barman, welcomed us from beyond Chandler’s tableau with a smile and an enthusiastic rattle of the cocktail shaker. He had been waiting to shake it for a good twenty minutes because Chandler wouldn’t allow it before now. Chandler was always a little touchy before the curtain went up. On seeing that I had company, Chandler beckoned us into the room with a nod of approval as if he’d assessed my newfound friends and hadn’t found them entirely lacking. He stood up as we entered, his eyes on us as he listened to the person on the other end of the phone call. He studied each one of the new arrivals intently, and shuffled the papers before him distractedly as if he was going to pack them away, but then threw his head back and spoke in a voice that was not angry, but was laden with threat.
“You think I care about your bureaucratic problems?” he hissed. “You get them loaded by this evening. I’ll be flying in at sunset with Freddy and if those beasts aren’t riding the Benguela current Freddy’s going to pull your fat fingers off one by one. You know how Freddy gets when I’m angry.” Chandler turned away from us, took two strides and opened the glass door without the blinds, as he had rehearsed, then stepped out and was swallowed by the sunlight on the terrace. He closed the door behind him with a menacing gentleness, and Vusi’s shaking picked up pace like the applause of the crowd. The Van Rensburg entourage were still stopped in their tracks at the doorway. Roelof turned to me.
“You sure this is alright?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said, and smiled apologetically. “So sorry about that. Bureaucracy is the bane of our lives. Getting all those bits of paper signed. Transport is nothing but a hurdle these days. And this air traffic delay hasn’t improved the colonel’s mood any. Vusi, fix some drinks all round for our fellow shipwreckees.”
Hendrik had a rum and coke because he didn’t mind playing to stereotype. His father took his rum on the rocks. Melissa worried about her job in the morning and posed beside Hendrik on the deep leather couch with a lime and soda. Roelof’s was a sparkling mineral water, and the final member of their entourage was introduced to me by Piet as Kenneth. Kenneth also had a sparkling water. He was a muscular black man with huge hands and knuckles that looked purple with bruises. He wore a collection of rings on his fingers that could have served pretty well as knuckledusters when the occasion arose, and under his baby blue sports jacket he was wearing a shirt that must have been purchased before he spent all that time in the gym. Good quality cotton, it stretched accommodatingly over his pectorals, but the buttons didn’t look like they’d make it through the day. And when he took his jacket off the sleeves were revealed, gripping tightly above the biceps like tourniquets. He had a big smile and a bald head and tried not to look like the protection, although he did remain on his feet, and kept his knees loose in case he needed to move quickly.
“You been out in the park?” I asked conversationally, when everyone had their drinks and had taken their places. “The Kruger Park, looking at the game?”
Hendrik sipped his rum and gave me the blank look of a man who employed people to answer stupid questions. His father answered, his bright eyes studying me as he tried to position me within the hierarchy. “Lunch with business colleagues,” he said and smiled.
“What line of work are you in, Mr Moss?” asked Roelof, who was taking his mineral water standing up, positioned behind Piet van Rensburg and near the big meeting table so that if we started playing musical chairs he’d be assured of getting to a seat before anyone else.
“Freddy,” I said. “Logistics, nothing very interesting. Mostly we seem to be dealing with bureaucracy and red tape. And trying to get things from A to B.”
The shadow of Chandler striding angrily past the door cast a momentary gloom, and the menacing sound of his voice suppressed our conversation. I went over to the door to check that it was closed, which it was, then sat down at the table to play host from the other side of Chandler’s papers. I indicated that Roelof should take a seat, which he did a little reluctantly.
“I don’t need to ask about your line of business,” I said. “You don’t get to run Media-Mark without your picture being splashed about town.”
“Roelof did all the running,” said Piet. “I was just the pretty face, wasn’t I, Rudi?”
“Nonsense,” said Roelof, and he gave a dutiful smile. “Mr Van Rensburg started the company in his parents’ garage,” he explained.
“Water under the bridge,” said Piet, and he finished his rum with a gulp. Vusi was there in a moment and refilled it. Worth every cent of his fee, Vusi was.
“Mr Van Rensburg has stepped aside from the management of the company,” said Roelof in a confidential tone.
“Spilt milk,” said Piet, revising his choice of cliché, but he took some more rum for the pain.
“I read about that,” I said.
“The papers made it sound like a political move,” said Roelof, “but it wasn’t. Mthembu is the right man to take the company forward. He’s done some good things, hasn’t he, boss?”
“Good man,” said Piet. “Company’s in good hands.”
Roelof leaned over the table towards me and spoke quietly. “Mr Van Rensburg remains the major shareholder,” he said, as if that was a secret he was sharing.
I nodded and almost said what a good thing that was, but instead put that thought into my expression and also leaned forward a little over the table where my attention was naturally taken by Chandler’s papers. I could read the title at the head of the page: “Terms of Agreement”, and a little lower in bold text the name “Richard Mabele”, and the name “Steven Colchester”. Chandler like to keep the initials constant; that way he could use the engraved accessories when appropriate, and the entwined ‘SC’ on the platinum fountain pen wouldn’t raise suspicion. I moved the papers as if suddenly aware that they were exposed, but made sure that the name Mabele was still visible.
“Dicky Mabele is a bit of a stickler,” I said, as if I needed to explain myself.
I looked up at Roelof and confirmed that his eyes had followed mine, and even though the letters were upside down for him, the way his eyes followed the papers made me think he had registered the name.
“We got the farm now, anyways,” said Hendrik, as if he was following the conversation with a slight lag and had only now remembered the silver lining.
“The farm?” I said.
“Such a lovely farm,” said Melissa, and her eyes reached out across the table to touch me again.
“Game farm in the Cape,” said Roelof, and his eyes came up to mine. I could almost see the dots being joined.
Piet took some more rum and said nothing. Hendrik glanced at him anxiously. The door behind me opened, and the ominous shadow of Chandler darkened the room. The others all looked up.
“Dicky wants a word, Freddy,” he said in reverent tones, and handed me his phone like it was a baby bird that had fallen from its nest.
I muttered my excuses and was out of the room in seconds. Richard “Dicky” Mabele was not the kind of person one kept waiting. I heard Chandler saying that his name was Colchester, and no, he wasn’t a town in the old country, nor was he a castle, and giving what he thought was a laugh but sounded more like an animal in pain.
“What the fuck?” said Fat-Boy on the phone.
“Yes sir, of course, Mr Mabele,” I said. I closed the door behind me.
“I’m not doing no animals,” said Fat-Boy. “I don’t do wildlife.”
“We’ll do whatever the colonel decides we do.”
“Yeah right, you war heroes stick together, why don’t you? Put on your smart suits and send us darkies out to handle the wildlife. Let the darkies do the dangerous stuff. What’s the bet I’ll be the guy with the whip on the wrong side of the bars. Hundred bucks I’m him.”
I did a pass by the glass door again, phone to my ear, head down, the obedient assistant
to the colonel.
“You still there, Angel?” said Fat-Boy, “You’re so fucking irritating, you know that? Can we stop with this now? When am I gonna play my part? You said I’d be the main man.”
Our time was nearly up. I opened the door and said, “Of course sir, this evening. Absolutely, absolutely.”
“Tonight, then. I’ll hold you to it, fucker,” said Fat-Boy.
“You too, sir.” I said obsequiously and ended the call.
Melissa had taken it upon herself to open another blind and was standing at the glass demonstrating the practical outcome of her decision not to wear anything opaque beneath her silk dress.
“Which is yours?” she asked when I joined her there. Chandler was holding forth. He had imposed some structure onto the proceedings: Hendrik had joined them at the table beside Roelof, and Piet’s attention was fixed upon Chandler. Kenneth had resigned himself to his role and was still standing, but he had managed to fold his arms despite all the muscles.
“The big cats,” I heard Chandler saying, “are more difficult, of course. No wonder you’ve encountered some headwinds there.”
“Ours hasn’t been able to get in yet,” I said to Melissa, because I knew that if I picked one of the neat line of private jets, the chances were it would turn out to belong to a distant cousin, or to one of her previous suitors and I’d be caught in the lie.
“That’s ours over there,” said Melissa, pointing to the jet I’d seen their Yorkshire pilot inspect at the airstrip on the Van Rensburg farm. “Did I show it to you before?”
“Lovely,” I said.
“It’s not the biggest,” said Melissa with regret.
“Goes pretty fast though, I’ll bet.” Melissa nodded but was not much cheered by this thought. She wanted the fastest and the biggest. Then she frowned, a small delicate frown of the sort that would not leave crease marks.
“I thought all the flights were stopped,” she said. “Where are they going?” The flock of Japanese tourists had formed a single file and were leading a column of other holidaymakers like a trail of ants heading across the apron towards a waiting airbus.
“Must have sorted it out,” I said. The air traffic controllers had told us we had only two hours, and that our money would expire before the Johannesburg flight. Messing with the commercial flights would have been a different price scale altogether.
“They’re boarding the flights,” Melissa announced to the room. Hendrik and Piet turned to her, but I noticed that Roelof’s gaze remained fixed on Chandler.
“They’ll announce it, poppie,” said Hendrik. “Don’t worry your little head about it.” He turned back to Chandler. Poppie was the Afrikaans word for ‘doll’, but Hendrik used it more as a slap in the face than as a term of endearment.
“I don’t want lions, anyway,” said Melissa with some bitterness as Chandler resumed his disquisition and moved into the closing arguments. “They have families, you know that? Can’t move them without breaking up the family, but Hendrik doesn’t care about that.”
Chandler was wrapping up the story about the rhinos. “We couldn’t bring them into harbour,” he was saying to his rapt audience. “The officials refused entry. That poor crew were floating out there with those three beasts for five days. The captain told them to stop shovelling the shit overboard because he had some loopy idea the port authorities would let them in if he told them the rhinos were dead. Well … I don’t know if you have any idea of the volume of dung that a single rhino can produce in a day.” His mouth stretched as a cue for laughter. Hendrik and Piet obliged. Roelof was doing sums in his head, so he didn’t join in. “After a couple of days they were swimming in the stuff, and the crew were passing out from the stench. The captain revised his manifesto to state fresh meat, rhino skins and horns … you know rhino horns are highly treasured and used in Chinese medicine.”
“Makes you horny,” said Hendrik, as if he had just discovered how to make a pun, although the pun had probably been unintentional. He grinned like a schoolboy enjoying some toilet humour.
“Aphrodisiac,” said Melissa, and Hendrik glared at her for speaking out of turn. She dropped her eyelids, produced a small smile and looked up to see how he was taking it.
“I’ll Afro-dizzy you, poppie,” said Hendrik, and Kenneth thought that was funny. Roelof turned to Kenneth and said something that caused Kenneth’s laugh to die and his face to turn back to stone. I watched Chandler as he waited to resume his story, and I guessed that he was registering this moment. Roelof had spoken in an indigenous language to Kenneth, not in the way a clumsy foreigner trying to get his tongue around the uncomfortable words would, but the smooth, natural speech of someone speaking their mother tongue.
“Well, that was a mistake, of course,” resumed Chandler. “Our legitimate and squeaky-clean transportation of live animals became the subject of an investigation into rhino horn smuggling. We had to cancel the whole thing and tell them to come back home. One rhino was so upset it broke out of its cage and trampled one of the crew on its way out. The captain had to call in S and R – rhino overboard.”
Piet laughed at that, and Roelof allowed himself a hint of amusement around the corners of his tight mouth.
“He had to explain that not only had the rhino come back to life, it was now attempting to swim ashore.”
More laughter, with Hendrik making a late start with a loud guffaw.
“I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen a rhino swim, but they’re really not much good at it. It took three helicopters to get the poor animal out of the sea and back onto the ship.”
“It’s cruel,” said Melissa, “that’s what it is. Moving those animals. Just cruel.”
Chandler turned to her, and his face glowed with appreciation at her contribution.
“Cruel indeed,” he said. “But only cruel, if I may say so, Melissa, when it is not done properly.” I hoped that the introductions had been performed while I was out of the room. It would have been a serious blunder for Chandler to have addressed her by name if they had not been introduced. But Chandler didn’t make mistakes like that. “That was a debacle, I grant you,” he said, “and cruel indeed. But we learnt our lesson and never made that mistake again. That captain never sailed again. Freddy made sure of that.”
All eyes turned to me as everyone wondered how Freddy had made sure that the captain never sailed again. I gave a modest smile.
“Never sailed for us again,” I clarified. “We don’t tolerate that kind of thing. The illegal trade.”
Roelof looked as if he might pop at the word illegal. His eyes travelled the path we had laid for him again, from the papers on the table before him, to me, to Chandler and round the loop again. But he kept his mouth pinned shut.
“Won’t touch it with a bargepole,” agreed Chandler. “You have to stay legal in this business.” He settled an encouraging look on Roelof as if inviting questions, but Roelof merely nodded. Chandler wanted to say his piece about the media stories around Richard “Dicky” Mabele being exaggerations. That Dicky wasn’t in truth the kingpin of the illegal arms and wildlife smuggling business. That was all a misunderstanding. Then a smile and collection of the papers, and the seed would be planted. But Roelof didn’t take his cue, and instead we all listened to the theme tune of Star Wars playing on the tinny speaker of Piet’s mobile phone.
Piet answered just as we were building to the chorus. He put the phone to his ear and said nothing. There was a pause as he listened to a scratchy voice and we tried to remember the polite thing to do, which was probably not to look at Piet as if expecting to share in his conversation.
“The village?” he said in Afrikaans, and the scratchy voice raised its volume. Piet made some harrumphing sounds, and then he went very still. The voice at the other end of the line stopped, and we were suspended in time for a moment. “Call Jacques,” said Piet, and then he ended the call. He put the phone back into his jacket pocket. We all watched him, waiting for him to share the bad news.
“They’ve arrested Q,” he said to Roelof, who took that news fairly well, and raised an eyebrow as the only indication he had heard. “Fucking idiots,” added Piet. “We’ll get Jacques onto it, get him out. Call him now.”
“Right away,” said Roelof, and he pulled out his phone. Nobody mentioned that Piet seemed to have asked two people to make the same phone call within the space of a few seconds. Perhaps that was how big business was done.
Piet turned to us. “Going to have to go. Thank you for your kind hospitality.” He turned back to Roelof. “Get up that tower and shake those fuckers until they fix their problem. We need to get out of here.”
“Of course,” said Roelof, who seemed unperturbed by the conflicting orders he was receiving. He returned his phone to its pocket and stood up. The idea of Roelof shaking anyone was a little absurd. But he gave a small nod to Kenneth, and said something in Xhosa or Zulu, so presumably Kenneth was the one who would do the shaking. I hoped that Kenneth did not shake them so hard that our recent contribution fell out of their back pockets.
Piet turned back to us. “That shooting last Sunday was in our church,” he said. “Police have been crawling over our farm the past few days looking for the shooter. God knows why. We’re a long way from the town. It couldn’t have been anyone from the farm.”
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