Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  On that Friday night when Sunny, Penny, Lucky and Matthew had enjoyed themselves so much, the MD of the sound recording studio drove a Cadillac into a tree, putting his girlfriend, a well-known model, through the windscreen. The Cadillac had come with the takeover of his company by a large record company. Fortunately, the ambulance arrived before the police, and the unconscious MD and his girlfriend were taken to hospital. By the time the police wished to take a blood test, it was too late. Matthew visited his client in hospital on the Monday soon after the accident was reported. He took a claim form and returned with a signed statement from the client saying, among other things, that the client was sober at the time of the accident. If the client had been drunk, the car, a write-off, was uninsured and the record company would be most annoyed. Worse, the model, whose face needed major plastic surgery, would be uninsured and forced to sue the driver in his personal capacity.

  Matthew knew the MD was short of money. The reason for the takeover had been a personal cash flow problem. In his personal capacity, the driver, Matthew’s client, would not have sufficient money to pay the doctor’s bills. And the prime witness to any question of drunken driving was the model. Matthew, knowing his client’s drinking habits first-hand, was sure that at five minutes to midnight on a Friday night, the chances of his client being sober were nil. It could have happened to any of them, he reasoned; young bachelors living in the fast lane.

  That morning, Matthew made an urgent appointment with the general manager of the insurance company which underwrote the Cadillac. He and Matthew were personal friends, and Matthew knew his friend drank with the best of them and a little bit better than some.

  “What’s the urgency, Matt? Had a good weekend?”

  “Superb.” For a moment, the vision of Penny, naked and calling for more, took him briefly away from the point. Matthew gave a brief smile and brought his mind back to his responsibility as broker to client and underwriter.

  “Have you ever been drunk behind the wheel?” he asked.

  “Probably… Do you have a point?”

  “We’ve all been drunk in terms of the law at one time or another, and most of us on a weekly basis. It goes with the job and none of us have drivers. Maybe we should. I’ve a claim here, signed by my client, saying he was sober when he smacked up his Caddy on Saturday night and put a top model through the windscreen. She looks awful. I just visited.”

  “What’s your point, Matt?”

  “My client was drunk, probably out of his mind.” Matthew told him frankly.

  “Did the police?…”

  “No. It’s his word and the girl’s, though I expect you could go back on his evening and prove he was motherless.”

  “You can’t expect me to pay an uninsured claim,” the general manager said firmly.

  “If you can’t nail down the barman, the restaurant manager and whoever, the claim from the girl will include a large sum for pain and suffering, another large sum for loss of earnings and then there’s plastic surgery. If I handle that claim, I think I can keep it to the Cadillac and plastic surgery. Also you miss any messy publicity about your refusal to pay out. Even though you are quite justified, it wouldn’t gain you clients.”

  The GM began to smile as the point became clear. “If the girl wishes to recover from your client, she will have to sue him; is that what you’re saying?”

  “And my client doesn’t have enough money.”

  “Can you talk to the girl?”

  “Poor kid doesn’t have a chance if she sues. Can you include a nose job? I’ve met the girl. She said to me once she needed a nose job, though I had no idea why. Maybe she’ll settle down and have kids. But not with my client. She’s mad as hell at him as he wasn’t even wearing his glasses. Vanity. Men and vanity.

  “Can I take you out to lunch? Never eat breakfast… Have you met my new secretary?”

  “You’re an honest extortionist, Matthew Gray. That’s what you are.”

  “All you have to do is withstand the temptation.” He was referring to Sunny Tupper.

  Four weeks later, the record company, itself a subsidiary of a large stock exchange-listed conglomerate, gave an instruction to all its subsidiaries to change their insurance to Price Forbes, the conglomerate’s broker. At the same time the subsidiaries were told to change the group auditors, lawyers, printers, shipping agents, confirming house and bank.

  The MD, recovered from his car smash and in line for the position of chief executive of the record company, a condition of the takeover, refused to change his insurance broker and, though never admitting that he was drunk behind the wheel, it seemed that he was fully aware of Matthew’s successful negotiation with his now ex-girlfriend and the insurance company. The man was no fool, despite his tendency to over-drink on weekends and leave behind his glasses in the company of pretty girls. The model, in the hands of the best plastic surgeon, was well satisfied with Matthew’s solution.

  The confrontation came between the MD and the head of the conglomerate, one of the best-known businessmen in the country. It was said that his short-term insurance account was the fifth-largest in South Africa, worth over a million rand in annual premium. The top man bullied; the MD argued, was threatened, and told the man he could shove his takeover and that the agreement of purchase said nothing about changing insurance brokers, only bankers and auditors. Finally, the MD told the truth about the accident and of Matthew’s solution, finishing with a shout that Gray Associates were the best bloody brokers in the country. The top man went quiet. Not for nothing had he built an empire, and he came up with the proposal that Gray’s reported on the entire group’s insurances and insisted that either the entire group changed to Gray’s, or the MD changed his broker.

  Matthew’s summary and report system included a questionnaire which analysed a new client’s insurance needs and left nothing uncovered. It went into the client’s business and tailored insurance individually. There were one hundred and seventy-three companies in the conglomerate, distributed around the country, from hotels to a coal mine. Some of the subsidiaries fell under the same financial director, but it still required the completion of forty-three questionnaires and reports.

  Matthew first completed Johannesburg, flew by schedule airline to Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town and chartered an aircraft to visit the coal mine. By the end of his analysis, he proved the group was under-insured by twenty-four million rand on the fire and consequential loss policies, one factory building being without any insurance at all, and, with the help of the general manager who was paying the model’s plastic surgeon, was able to reduce premiums by ten percent at the higher sums insured.

  The forty-three reports were given to the individual financial directors six weeks after Matthew was asked to inspect the conglomerate’s policies. He had used dummy report forms to save writing out each insurance definition, now translated into English. Every one of his secretaries worked late. The excitement in the company was tangible. The head of the conglomerate, who expected to have Price Forbes pick holes in the young man’s reports, was faced with a unanimous request from his financial director to change over to Gray Associates. Matthew explained his share proposal, which offered the conglomerate shares in Gray’s in proportion to their annual premium. It was Matthew’s idea to float his company on the Johannesburg stock exchange when he reached ten million rand in premium income.

  Matthew was handed a letter of appointment to the group that was to make him open branches in Durban and Cape Town within six months. Matthew made a brief speech to his staff. The message was simple: he increased all salaries by twenty per cent. The enthusiasm rose to new heights. The company was on a roll. Gray Associates had arrived as a force in the insurance industry.

  Many of the big London brokers were not happy about an upstart interfering with a system that had worked well for half a century. Some of the insurance companies, faced with redefining their policy wordings to compete, agreed that Gray Associates were disturbing the industry. Matthew,
being young, failed to see the antagonism in his rush to take on new staff and open up his branches whenever he received a letter of appointment.

  The late nights, booze and cigarettes were catching up on Sandy de Freitas. Looking down the last year of her twenties, she was no longer sure where she was going. The married men had stayed married to their wives, the I’ve-got-a-lot-of-money bull shitters were easier to see through, and the real men had found their partners for life and were cutting lawns and reading bedtime stories to their children. Sandy tried to cut the same dash but her looks were beginning to fade and young girls like Sunny Tupper were infringing on her turf. Sandy tried a few of the second-time-arounders and quickly discovered why they were divorced. Her good time years were overspent and there wasn’t any money in the bank. Cynically, she thought she would have done better as a hooker.

  Taking stock one dreary Sunday morning on her own, something that never used to happen, she looked back on all the besotted men she had discarded in her search for the real pot of gold. All had married or drifted out of town. All but one.

  Having been unable to get out as much as usual, Sandy had not seen Matthew in two years. Their eyes had met again briefly across the heads of the hedonists at the Friday night swill in the Balalaika Hotel where all the singles met to find out where the party was going to be over the weekend. Times had been when Sandy never left the Balalaika without an invitation to dinner, but now too often she went home on her own to face the Saturday and Sunday in her flat.

  Matthew had never really turned her on. He had been too young and too nice. She had been able to make him do what she wanted, and, after a month, that had been boring. But now they said he was rich and the biggest aphrodisiac for Sandy was money. She looked him up in the directory on the Sunday afternoon and dialled his number, boredom having reached the stage of hurting the marrow in her bones. What she did not know was that Matthew had watched her carefully for half an hour on the Friday, at first stomach lurch turning to sadness as he watched the eye-desperation in his faded beauty. She had looked forty. The monkey on his back had climbed down and departed forever.

  “Hello, lover.” He recognised the voice and felt the lurch in his stomach. He kept silent.

  “Hear you’re making money… You know who this is? … Matthew?”

  As the silence continued, she knew this chance had long since departed.

  “Hi, Sandy. How’ve you been?” To Sandy, he sounded sad.

  “Are you alone?” she asked.

  “No. No, I’m not,” he lied. Sunday afternoons were always spent quietly, taking stock of the jobs he had to do during the coming week. This time Matthew listened to the silence on the telephone line. Just before he heard the click, there was a brief, terrible sob. He looked at the dead phone and put it back on the hook.

  Half an hour later he found her address in the telephone book and, with premonition pricking his nerves, drove speedily to the flat in Rosebank, the same flat. There was no answer to the ring. He called her name. A weak voice said, “Go away, you bugger. I’m going to sleep.” Using a technique he had mastered when locked out of his own fiat, he slid his American Express gold card into the crack of the door and pushed back the catch. There was still a faint smell of joss sticks, incense-from the past.

  “Why the hell did you do this?” he asked.

  “My life’s over, lover. You can’t have your cake and eat it. They all went. All of them… You ever been lonely, lover?”

  Matthew put the empty pill bottle in his pocket for the doctors and picked up the only woman who had taken his heart, a woman now gone and lost in the memory of his youth.

  After Matthew left London, Luke had kept on the flat, inviting a fellow black to share it with him. The man was from Northern Rhodesia and spent more time talking politics than anything else. Luke learnt that all the man wished for in life was the break-up of the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and for the independence of the country he called Zambia. Luke’s new flatmate was in his second year at the London School of Economics, which Luke concluded he would fail as the man never opened a book unless it had to do with revolutionary politics. He was going to be this Zambia’s minister of finance. The quotes from Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung came at regular, boring intervals.

  “A man is frightened into working or given a personal incentive,” Luke told his flat-mate. “‘Each according to his need’ is a licence for the bums to sit on their arses and feed off the fools who work for nothing. There are a lot of lazy buggers in this world who will work for nothing and who will hijack your utopia and have the likes of you and me working for them for nothing… And you won’t get a degree in economics by reading nothing but Karl Marx.”

  “Then we live under the yoke of the white man for the rest of our lives, our children’s lives. Communism and the party will set us free. I am being put through this university by the Russian communist party.”

  “What’s in it for them?”

  “You are cynical, Luke Mbeki.”

  “And you, my good friend, are naive. Nobody does anything in this world for nothing. Security Life, who pays for me, think there is a future market among the blacks for the insurance industry and the Todd Memorial Grant is a way to hedge the bet. But take advantage. Don’t waste an opportunity.”

  Luke had completed his doctorate and booked his passage home the day the results were known, and the Edinburgh Castle had sailed in early 1960, away from the cold of Southampton. He had been away for six years and, though the reports from home were as chilling as the English weather, Dr Luke Mbeki wanted to go back to South Africa. It never once occurred to him to look for a job in England. The greatest joy he had found during his six years was in sharing the flat with Matthew, talking about Port St Johns and longing for the years of their childhood.

  This time, Luke Mbeki did not make the same mistake as on his previous voyage when he had kept himself isolated, and tried to mingle with the passengers. But his efforts to break down the barriers were in vain. He kept to his lower-deck cabin, a six-berth, that, miraculously, he had to himself. He was the only black passenger on the Edinburgh Castle. They gave him a small table to himself in the dining room and gave him drinks in the bar by himself. Even the barman refused to be drawn into conversation. When he sat down on a deck chair, the space around him was cleared. No one was rude. They merely treated him as if he did not exist.

  The boat sailed into Cape Town harbour at six o’clock in the morning, with Luke out on deck. The sea was calm and there was a red sunrise behind Table Mountain. He turned to look back out to sea, in the direction of the penal colony of Robben Island. There was not one cloud in the sky, the previous day’s southeaster having chased away the rain. Luke’s euphoria continued as the ship docked, and he disembarked with his luggage.

  “Where’s your pass, man?” demanded the immigration officer, ignoring Luke’s passport which had been obtained by David Todd after bringing pressure to bear on the nationalist government.

  “You can’t come into Cape Town without a pass. Here, it says you were born in the Transkei. You either live in the Transkei or you have a pass.”

  “Where do I get this pass?”

  “At Bantu Affairs, man. You can wait over there till I’m finished.”

  “May I not go and get this pass?”

  “You can’t come into Cape Town without a pass, man. Don’t you kaffirs ever listen?”

  It took Luke four hours to get through immigration and collect his luggage, a man from Bantu Affairs coming all the way to the docks to issue a temporary pass which would enable Luke to travel through South Africa to his place of birth.

  “But I want to work in Johannesburg,” he said to the man.

  “Then you must go to the Transkei and ask them at Bantu Affairs in Umtata. I can only issue a travel pass.”

  “I have spent six years in England becoming a doctor of economics, and they don’t employ such people in Umtata.”

  “It’s the Law, man. If you want to work i
n Johannesburg, you must have a pass. Influx control, man. If the government didn’t keep control of the kaffirs they’d be swarming all over Johannesburg. If you want to work in a white area, you get a pass. That travel pass is valid for one week. If the police find you after that, they lock you up. Better catch your train.”

  “The boat train has left.”

  “That’s your problem. Just be in the Transkei a week from now.”

  “Do you know a hotel for tonight?”

  “All hotels are reserved for whites. A black man can’t sleep in a white area after dark. Group Areas Act.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “That’s your problem. You missed your train.”

  Luke spent the night on a wooden bench in the non-white section of Cape Town station. When the ticket office opened, he was told the next train would travel the following day.

  “Can’t travel on that ticket, man.” said the Afrikaner. Even in the non-white section of the railways, the civil servant was white. “First-class is for whites only. Where’d they give you that ticket?”

  “In London.”

  “Better change it or they won’t let you on the train.”

  “I’m a doctor of economics.”

  “I don’t care if you’re the king of England. If you’re black, you don’t travel first-class in South Africa. It’s the law. Railway Act, man… You want to change that ticket for a third-class, non-white.”

  “Do I get a refund?”

  “You’ll have to fill in a form if you want a refund and then it goes to the office and then it goes to Pretoria. Takes ten days.”

  “Give me a third-class, non-white. May I have a sleeper?”

  “You trying to be cute with me, kaffir. I don’t have to change your ticket, you know. I can make you take it back to the office that issued it, see. You get benches, third-class, non-white. Why, the tickets are cheap.”