The Harbinger

by Mark Graham

  “Related in any way to the prevention of terrorism. Thank you, I know the law,” Leistner snapped. “That’s the easy part.”

  The act also prohibited the identification of any person connected with said investigation or arrest. Which meant, Leistner thought, the media didn’t touch it. Unauthorized disclosure of information under the Police Act carried an automatic ten-year jail sentence, and a dozen journalists wasting away behind the bars of Modder Bee Prison could testify to the authenticity of the act.

  Leistner sucked air into his lungs, suppressing a grimace; it wasn’t a decision without complications. Koster watched him. The red telephone hidden in the armrest in the middle of the backseat provided a direct line to the commissioner’s office in the Palace of Justice, and when Leistner lifted the receiver from the cradle, Koster looked away.

  ****

  It was not the chief homicide inspector’s favorite duty. Had it been within his power, he would have dispensed with it altogether. But, though the press hounds in Port Elizabeth were patient, they were also persistent.

  Therefore, at 5:01, Mansell relented. Five minutes, he told them.

  Ian Elgin, in death, warranted a larger gathering than the average homicide victim. Besides Port Elizabeth’s two locals, the Cape Province Bulletin and the Port Elizabeth Daily Mail, there were reporters from Die Vaderland in Jo’burg, The Argus in Cape Town, the Rand Daily Mail, a black-oriented magazine called The Press, and Reuters.

  Mansell gave them a brief synopsis of the crime and the current status of the investigation. He answered a half dozen questions as elusively as possible and then referred them all to the front desk.

  And while the reporters from Reuters, The Press, Die Vaderland, the Rand, and the Bulletin all took Mansell’s advice, the baby-faced stringer from The Argus had a 5:20 deadline to meet, and he was on the phone sixty seconds later. Likewise, the journalist from the Port Elizabeth Daily Mail, a newspaperwoman with twenty-two years’ experience, went directly to the phone booth next to the front desk. Her rewrite man was standing by, and the story went to press on the front page ten minutes later.

  The person-to-person call from the commissioner’s office in Pretoria caught Captain Oliver Terreblanche completely off guard. The Police Act, bloody Christ. It was the last thing he expected or needed, and what made it worse, the order had been issued directly from Leistner himself. Christ damn.

  Terreblanche jumped up from behind his desk, raced out of his third-floor office, and down the corridor to the stairwell. He took the stairs at a run, nearly colliding with a policewoman carrying two cups of tea, to the first floor.

  He stopped on the last step, stretching on the tips of his toes. He stared out over the tops of innumerable busy heads. The conference room was empty, and he couldn’t spot Mansell anywhere. Terreblanche recognized the Daily Mail reporter as she left by the front door. He saw the junior reporter from The Argus step out of the phone booth, smiling. He was replaced by another man who Terreblanche recognized by face only, a nervous type in a fedora and tan trench coat: the reporter from Reuters International wire service.

  Waiting on Mansell’s desk were two sweet rolls and a half liter of milk. Waiting behind the desk was Joshua Brungle.

  “Don’t get up,” Mansell said to the detective. Then he noticed the food. “That for me?”

  “My guess is you haven’t eaten a thing all day,” answered Joshua. “And man does not live by caffeine and nicotine alone.” “Scholarly. Socrates or Lovejoy?”

  “Nietzsche, I believe.”

  “Of course.” Mansell shed his sports jacket. He dropped into an office chair, stretching long legs over the oak desk top. He needed a shave and a shower, but the pit in his stomach took precedence. He finished off the first roll and washed it down with milk. “Thank you, sir. You’re a better mother to me than my own wife.”

  “Does that come under the definition of a compliment?”

  “Good question.” Laughter filled the room for a time, and then, when the second roll had been eaten and he was sipping on the last of the milk, Mansell asked, “So what have we found out so far? Anything earthshaking?”

  Joshua opened a notebook. “The clerk at the newsstand knew Elgin, not by name, but by sight. She says she would see him two, sometimes three times a week whenever he was in town. Always after midnight. Always very dapper. A nice guy. Sometimes he’d buy a paper. So she figures he goes to the Men’s Club for a short workout or a steambath, right? But the club attendant says he saw Elgin maybe once a month, if that. The shoeshine boy at the club confirms—”

  They were interrupted by a knock at the door, and SB Lieutenant Rhoodie stepped past the threshold.

  “The little bird who sings in the ear of the beast,” snapped Joshua. “The songfest has been canceled, pal. Shove off.”

  “I left a note earlier, Inspector,” Rhoodie said. “I was hoping for a conference. May I—”

  “The note said ‘Wolfe.’ “

  “By his authority. I suppose that was my thinking.”

  “The major has no authority in this office, Lieutenant.” Mansell finished his milk and returned to the rush of nicotine. He gestured to a chair. “Come in and sit down.”

  Joshua repeated his summary for Rhoodie’s benefit, and then continued. “Neither the attendant at the club nor the shine boy knew Anthony Mabasu, but the boy knew his wife by sight. ‘A nice piece,’ he called her. And he thinks he saw her and Elgin talking together sometime last week.”

  “Do we suspect either of them or the newsstand clerk?” asked Rhoodie energetically.

  Joshua regarded him with disgust. Then he passed Mansell one of the files. “The lady at the newsstand is sixty-six years old. The shine boy has a club foot and a bad limp. But the attendant’s a different story. He’s a weight lifter and a bit too subdued for my liking. Anyway, I’ve got Piet Richter doing a follow-up.”

  Joshua waited while Mansell scanned the file. The attendant’s name was Martin Engels. A law-school dropout with a business degree from Cape Town University, he’d been employed at six different jobs over the last two years. His police record showed two petty-theft charges, both dropped, and a harassment conviction, again all within the last two years.

  “Our weight lifter has a chip on his shoulder,” Mansell said, closing the file. “Let’s wait and see if Richter can add anything to the rise and fall of Mr. Engels. Who’s next?”

  “The lady at the information center had a little dirt on everyone. Who smokes pot, who snorts coke, who’s doing it with whoa And she claims that our victim was dipping his wick into a couple of the female swartes who work the night shift.”

  “Names?”

  “No names. And so far I haven’t heard even a whisper of confirmation. We’re still looking.”

  Remembering the chiffon scarf hanging in the sitting area outside the locker room, Mansell scribbled a note to himself. Then he asked, “What have we heard from our ticket-agent friend, Thomas Horwood? Recovered from the flu yet?”

  “I think Mr. Horwood’s covering something,” Joshua replied. “I think both ticket agents are. I can feel it. Piet Richter talked to Horwood this afternoon. He’s white. Big enough and surly. Says he had an attack of the runs or some mysterious affliction this morning. He’s made a remarkable recovery according to Piet. Horwood says he left by the front entrance around five-fifteen, but the officer on the barricade says no way. Horwood claims he doesn’t know Mabasu or his wife, and he says he’s never laid eyes on Ian Elgin. Oh, and he says he won’t talk anymore without a lawyer present. I talked to the other agent myself, and the best she could do was confirm my suspicions. She’s black, not pretty but shapely, and she flaunts it. Said of course she knows Sylvia Mabasu, right? But she chokes up the minute I show her a picture of the victim and claims she doesn’t recognize him. I don’t know. Bad vibes, Nigel.”

  “Horwood’s a pot smoker, we know that much,” said Mansell. He told them about Mabasu’s encounter with the ticket agent outside the depot
.

  “Chapter two,” Joshua replied, on his feet now and rummaging through his notebook. “The same habit cost him a job at the harbor a few years back. Horwood was a pilot trainee at the time. Good record. Good advancement. But he was nailed smoking a joint on the docks one night, in the cab of a forty-ton boom crane. The union expelled him the next day. He appealed the dismissal. They all do, right? It was denied. Rumor has it that he threatened the local president over the issue, but nothing ever came of it.”

  “Let’s bring Mr. Horwood in for a private chat, Joshua.”

  “The man’s guilty of a misdemeanor offense,” snapped Lieutenant Rhoodie. “And he’s withholding information. There’s no excuse for that. He should be—”

  “We know his weakness now,” Mansell cut in. “He’ll cooperate.”

  That left Mansell’s interview with Anthony Mabasu. The contents, the chief inspector deemed, were not yet meant for the SB lieutenant’s ears, so he explained about the food contents found in Ian Elgin’s digestive system.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. “It’s your task to find out where Mr. Elgin dined last night. Who did he dine with? Did anyone notice anything out of the ordinary? How many bottles of wine did they drink? Which wine? You know all the questions.”

  “You mean now, sir?” Rhoodie wore a hurt expression.

  “Now would be fine. Yes, I think now.” Mansell’s smile was ever so brief.

  The door closed, leaving them alone. Mansell saw the worry lines on Joshua’s face. “He’ll have to wait in line,” he said. “I sent Merry on the same job an hour ago.”

  “Was I worried?”

  Joshua found a dozen holes in Anthony Mabasu’s story, and one adjunct. “The clerk at the soda fountain told me that Mabasu stopped at her counter for a Coke sometime between one-thirty and two this morning. Before his shift started. He was jittery, she thought. Nervous. He kept wiping his forehead with a rag.”

  “The bandana.”

  “Maybe. When I asked her about the color she told me I was making her dizzy.”

  “Meaning Mabasu could have been in that locker room before he checked in for work.”

  “My thought exactly,” said Joshua. “My other thought is, should he be out on the street?”

  Mansell shook his head. “He’s not going anywhere. Let’s see what Forensic has for us in the morning.”

  “If it’s still our case.”

  Joshua left twenty minutes later, at 6:35. The three men who worked with Anthony Mabasu in the baggage department would be waking up about now.

  Nigel Mansell dialed his home phone number, but there was no answer. He wasn’t surprised. Still, he let it ring another thirty seconds on the slim chance that Jennifer might be in her darkroom.

  Craving drove him to dial the cafeteria. He ordered a cheese sandwich and a pot of English tea.

  He pushed an office chair across the room to a long narrow workbench and switched on the IBM office computer. The mutation, Mansell called it. He punched into Crime Research Bureau’s main data banks and asked for the personal file on Ian Elgin. Two error messages brought on a string of expletives. A third attempt proved, Mansell told himself, that even a dumb cop can run a computer, given time.

  Ian Elgin was born in 1934 in Durban to English-speaking parents. His father worked on the docks, a crane operator. His mother kept the books for a coal-mining firm. Elgin was educated in the public schools. He was raised in the Presbyterian faith, which he abandoned when he was twenty-one in favor of the Dutch Reformed Church. Admirable, thought Mansell, his first political maneuver.

  In 1952, Elgin left Durban to attend the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, Mansell’s own alma mater. He earned a four-year degree in pre-law, attended law school at the University of Pretoria, and graduated ninth out of a class of 112. His specialty was industrial relations, an unusual field at the time, which led to employment with Ford South Africa in Port Elizabeth.

  Departing Ford in 1968, Elgin joined the legal department of Anglovaal, a coal- and gold-mining company. The file offered no explanation for the move and no information on his new position.

  Just three years later, he hooked up with the Chamber of Mines, the largest employers’ group in South Africa. Nearly all mining-related companies of any size belonged to the Chamber. Its functions were multifarious—anything from mining research to safety regulation to wage standardization.

  Ian Elgin’s job description with the Chamber read “staff association liaison.” Staff associations, Mansell recalled, were self-contained black organizations meant to placate any drives toward unionization. But a staff association held no bargaining power. Its leadership was government-sanctioned, and thus white. It handled complaints and suggestions by offering sympathy and excuses, in truth functioning as nothing more than an ineffectual social apparatus.

  But next to Elgin’s job description, the computer flashed an “SB EXTRACT,” or Security Branch footnote. The extract explained that Elgin had taken a special interest in the Durban harbor staff associations, and, in 1975, managed to unite the railroad workers, the dock workers, and the stevedores together in what the extract termed “clandestine organizational meetings.”

  A year later, under Elgin’s presumed guidance, three simultaneous strikes occurred. The effect was unprecedented; South Africa’s foremost harbor was paralyzed. The government refused to negotiate. The armed forces were called up. During the ensuing four days, 632 arrests were made. Finally, the strike was broken, and on the fifth day, the docks resumed functioning.

  Ian Elgin was suspected, but never implicated.

  It appeared, in fact, to Nigel Mansell, that Elgin’s stature redoubled. Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to Johannesburg, given a salary hike, and assigned by the Chamber to the task of upgrading the security methods used by individual mining operations. Two months later, Elgin was added to the staff of the government’s own Agency of Policy and Security Development, again for the purpose of evaluating plant security in the mines. Interim coordinator of the PSD at the time was Deputy Minister of Defense Cecil A. Leistner. Mansell half expected an SB EXTRACT to follow up, but none was forthcoming. He wondered why. While he was making a note to himself, an employee from the cafeteria brought in a tray with a sandwich and tea. Halfway through the sandwich, Mansell returned to the file.

  Elgin’s star continued to rise. In 1979, four months after the installation of the current prime minister, Elgin received a nomination to a government-appointed commission of inquiry: the Wiehahn Commission. His nominator was again Cecil Leistner, the new minister of justice. An extract informed Mansell that, until 1979, the Wiehahn Commission was strictly a research and lobbyist tool. That year, the commission strongly recommended that labor laws be loosened. Ian Elgin voted in favor of the recommendation. The government capitulated, and black unions became legal.

  Eighteen months later, Ian Elgin resigned from the commission and accepted the positions of vice-chairman and chief negotiating officer for the black Federation of Mineworkers Union, the FMU.

  In June of 1985, backed by a recruited membership of 72,000, Elgin negotiated the union’s first wage agreement with, ironically, Mansell thought, the Chamber of Mines.

  In May of 1986 the Affiliated Union of Dockers, Stevedores, and Rail Workers hired Elgin to handle its contract negotiations with the Harbour Association, and Elgin accepted the oblique title of board consultant. A position he held until his death.

  That year, with 430,000 new FMU members, Elgin again took the Chamber and several independent mines to task over housing, safety, retirement benefits, and wages. The Chamber decided to flex its muscle. Contract talks were severed. Elgin responded by calling wildcat strikes at six gold mines and a walkout by the United Dock Workers locals in Port Elizabeth and Durban. Negotiations resumed a week hence.

  A last SB EXTRACT appeared for March of this year. At that time, the Nationalist party offered Elgin an unchallenged seat on the Transvaal Provincial Executive Committee. Very prestigi
ous, Mansell thought, noting that the position would have required Elgin to forsake his union positions and take on formal party membership. The offer had been refused.

  Remembering the cabinet position Elgin was reportedly considering at the time of his death, Mansell pushed aside his cafeteria tray. Elgin, he thought, had meddled in enough hotbeds over his career, and stepped on enough toes, to acquire a healthy list of enemies. Unionization had seen plenty of careers catapult and plenty of others tumble. Pretoria distrusted Elgin to the point of resorting to bribery. Professional vendetta, Mansell found himself thinking, was disturbing enough. But political vendetta. . . .

  He was copying the Elgin file on the printer when Captain Oliver Terreblanche knocked on his door. He entered cradling a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch and two glasses.

  “I do so love a hard worker,” he said, spilling into an office chair. He set his CARE package on the desk and filled both glasses, neat.

  Mansell joined him. “Where’s the ice?”

  “Never scar quality Scotch whiskey with mere ice, Inspector.” Terreblanche had just gotten off the phone with the Afrikaner in Johannesburg, a man who knew the exact buttons to push, and like a black hole there seemed no end to his “requests.” Terreblanche tipped his glass in Mansell’s direction, selecting his words with care. “I was a little hasty this morning, Nigel. Pressing for a quick solution to this Elgin thing. How baroque. As if you would do anything less. I apologize.”

  Terreblanche’s voice was still strained, Mansell thought, watching the captain over the rim of his glass. Mansell remembered the rumors about Terreblanche’s “leanings,” and the rumors about the native boy that he “kept” in an apartment in Uitenhage. But that was two years ago, and like a bad joke, the rumors had fallen into memory. Terreblanche had emerged from the gossip with a wounded reputation, but his career had weathered it thus far.

  “Elgin was an important man,” Mansell replied. “The economy can’t afford any major upheavals right now. Matters are tense enough. We have a jailhouse full of rioters, a funeral march tomorrow, and a township set to ignite like a tinderbox. A strike is the last thing we need.”