Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “Thank you. You are most kind. Just give me what you can.”

  By the time Luke arrived at Johannesburg station four days after sailing into Cape Town harbour and his future, he was a wreck, hungry, unslept and dishevelled. When he phoned the Gray Associates number he expected to be blocked by the telephone operator, the same way he had been blocked trying to speak to David Todd.

  “Gray Associates, good morning.” The voice was light and Luke knew the girl would be pretty.

  “May I speak to Mister Matthew Gray?”

  “Certainly, I’ll put you through,”

  “Matthew Gray speaking.”

  “Matt, its Luke. You can’t have any idea how good it is to hear your voice.”

  “Luke, you old bastard. Where the hell are you?”

  “Johannesburg station. Third-class, non-white.

  There was a pause. “Oh, shit,” said Matthew down the line. “These people make me sick. I’m on my way, Luke. Hang on… Did you get your doctorate?”

  “Yes, then I came home. I got to Cape Town four days ago.”

  “You, jawling in Cape Town.”

  “No, Matt, I wasn’t jawling.”

  The sight of a very tall white man hugging a very tall black man in the third-class, non-white section of Johannesburg station stopped all movement on the platform. Matthew was the only white man in the non-white section out of uniform.

  “Kaffir-lover,” said a white railway worker.

  Matthew’s right hand shot out, gripping the man’s arm and dragging him round. “You want to say that to my face?”

  “You’re not allowed here. Non-whites only. Can’t you read, kaffir-lover?”

  A crowd had now gathered, all of it black. Matthew still had the man by his arm and was applying the pressure. “Take your hand off me.”

  “People like you make me puke.” As the man pulled away from him, Matthew suddenly let him go. The sudden release shot him back into the crowd of blacks where they parted to let him fall on his rear.

  “You pushed me, you bastard.”

  “I did not, and I have a hundred witnesses to prove it. It’s people like you who are ruining this country.” The sea of black faces stopped the man from repeating his threats. “One day, these people will rip you apart and the world won’t lift a finger. Luke, let’s get out of here.” To the surprise of the on-lookers, Matthew spoke Xhosa to his friend. “Don’t let people like that ruin your day.”

  “They already have. All the way from Cape Town.”

  A long, hot bath, with a T-bone steak twenty-five millimetres thick, and ten hours sleep put Luke back into the world. They had talked for hours, moving away from the cause of their anger to what they had both been doing since Matthew left London. Neither of them had been more than birthday and Christmas letter-writers, young men too embarrassed to speak of their emotions on paper. Even now, the emotions were expressed in body language rather than words. During the two-day train ride, Luke had wondered if Matthew had joined the apartheid system.

  “Where they’re clever, Luke, is in keeping us apart,” Matthew told him over supper. “I don’t even know any blacks in Johannesburg. So far as my day-to-day life is concerned, I see white faces all the time. We have a driver boy, a black girl in the printing office, and the rest of my staff are white. My clients are all white. The law stop blacks going where I socialise and if a policeman walks in here now they can arrest both of us, but in reality it will only be you. All but menial civil servants are white and Afrikaner, and schools, pensions and welfare benefits are for all intents and purposes white. Black people living in newly designated white areas get moved, forcibly removed to somewhere too far from their jobs to be economical; half the salary goes in transport. That way we live in a white world and forget about the blacks.

  “The rest of the fat cats in the world don’t worry about two-thirds of the world starving, so why should we, is what the advocates of our new system tell themselves. It must blow up in the end. I’ve heard there’s widespread opposition to the pass laws, people talking about burning their pass books in mass demonstrations. But the Afrikaner is tough, Luke. Some of the little men with power over your people make Hitler look like a philanthropist. They’ll use force with pleasure. Keep out of their clutches.”

  Next morning, Matthew was up with the dawn, and had finished three hours’ work and was making breakfast when Luke awoke.

  “Good morning, Luke. Feeling better?”

  “Much. Do I smell bacon and eggs?”

  “I’ve phoned my office, cancelled appointments and I’m free for ten days,” Matthew told him. “After breakfast, we’re driving down to Port St Johns. You want to see your father. David Todd said on the phone I should get you out of the way until he has your proper papers. He’s highly annoyed you did not tell the Todd Trust you were coming back so soon after graduation. They want you to work for Security Life. There’s something in your bursary to that effect.

  “Just remember, Luke, however difficult it gets, not every white is a bigoted racist. There are a lot of us who know we have to share this country and its wealth. Harry Oppenheimer said the other day that the real wealth is in the people, not in the minerals. You guys have got to get educated, that’s the bottom line, and you’ve done just that. We’ll feel free in Port St Johns. You’ll see. We’ll walk the beach, swim, eat crayfish, oyster, catch us a mussel or two, and you can tell Sipho the wonders of London. Then I go to Australia. We’re opening a branch in Sydney.”

  “You’ve done well.”

  “We’ve just over two per cent of the country’s short-term premium income. We’re in the top twenty brokers, but I’ve made a lot of enemies in the industry.”

  The massacre at Sharpeville took place the following day, bringing the spotlight of the world on to the cruel system of pass laws and apartheid. Matthew had been right. The blacks burnt their pass books, surging around the police station near Paarl where hundreds died in a hail of bullets. Naked racism had gone to war.

  3

  While Matthew and Luke were sitting round the cooking fire outside Sipho’s hut with the sound of the Wild Coast surf pounding the soft air, Hector Fortescue-Smythe was waiting for his controller beneath a tree in Green Park, London. Between Hector and the entrance to the Cavalry Club, the Piccadilly traffic was as constant as the rain. He would have preferred being inside the club, in front of the fire with a whisky and soda, but the instruction had been emphatic and Hector knew better than to keep the Russian waiting.

  Hector had been recruited at Cambridge before he went into the army to do his national service in tanks, where he had received his commission with minimal help from his father, a man Hector loved and despised in equal proportions. After his two years in the army, during which time he had heard nothing from his controller, Hector had drifted around London refusing to join his father’s business. He wanted nothing to do with his family business because it was founded on the seat of the working man.

  Hector’s great-grandfather had been a chemist who had invented the first detergent, a blue that whitened clothes. He had made the discovery while in the bath in the shed at the back of the family semi-detached house in Liverpool. They lived on the corner of Sister and Bold streets, the bath and shed having been turned into his laboratory. James Smythe (the ‘Fortescue’ had been added by Hector’s grandmother) had both an inventor’s and a business brain, and refused the offer from Reckitt’s to buy his patent.

  He began to build his empire by selling his product in a handcart around the streets of Liverpool, leading to a factory, a large number of staff and Hector’s confusion. Not having gone into the business, Hector was convinced that a rich man who inherited a business, albeit making it grow and doubling its work force, was living off everybody’s work other than his own. He was not aware that retaining wealth was just as difficult as making it in the first place, it being the way of man to take away rather than to give. The pure scent of communism was the ocean air he wished to breathe. His naivety w
as matched only by his sincerity, a sincerity so intense that, had it been channelled to religion, it would have found Hector ensconced in a monastery.

  Unbeknown to Hector, the reason for the meeting was the massacre at Sharpeville and, when his controller arrived at the appointed hour, the picture of dead black bodies strewn around the police station incensed Hector far more than his father’s exploitation. There were white policemen and white soldiers with pointed rifles, and all the blacks were either dead, dying, or had their backs to the guns. They were running away as fast as their legs could take them. It did not require the Russian to point out that the dead and wounded had been shot in the back.

  The controller explained in detail that Russia wished to help the black oppressed by challenging the power of the white minority government which was backed by the West. He made it clear to Hector that the capitalist West was just as guilty as the white South Africans and that the Americans and British were racist pigs, something Hector was quick to deny so far as he was concerned. The rain had run water down the photographs, and it reminded Hector of blood, the spilt blood of the poor and helpless.

  “The South Africans are offering a free passage to whites to emigrate and boost their numbers, and we want you to go.”

  “I couldn’t live in a country that did that…”

  “But you would if the blacks came to power with your help and ours, and created a one-party state, governed for the people, by the people. There is a fledgling South African communist party that was started by the white workers in 1923 during the miners’ strikes.

  “We wish to take control and turn it into the tool that will fan the flames of black nationalism and bring about another great victory for the working classes. We want you to apply to join the South African army. There are many ex-members of the Royal Navy at the Simonstown base where we have sent another young man. You will be a sleeper for many years, Mister Fortescue-Smythe, but, in the end, the South African communist party will control the African National Congress, having taught it how to fight a guerrilla war. Since the massacre at Sharpeville, this ANC has let us know that the time for peaceful words is over.

  “They are ready to launch an armed struggle.”

  “Shouldn’t I join that struggle?”

  “You will be far less conspicuous in the white army, and far more useful to us and the communist party. You will work hard. You will agree with all their sentiments. You will learn Afrikaans and you will marry an Afrikaans girl and join their Broederbond, a secret elite, white society that controls their white nationalist government. You will be more racist than the racists. You will attain high rank, and when we tell you, and only when we tell you, will you come out of the closet.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “Time is on the side of communism. When the time is right, mankind will be set free. We will eliminate all want. There will no longer be rich and poor but sufficient for everyone. There will be one world. One government run on the heroic principles of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. It will be the greatest day on earth, and you will be part of the rejoicing.”

  The Russian hugged Hector twice, happy with the expression of total belief on the face of his prospect. For a moment, he thought he had gone too far.

  “How am I going to find a suitable Afrikaans wife?” It was the only part that struck a discordant note.

  “We will give you a list. Her father must be high in the government and the Nationalist Party of Dr Verwoerd, a man we are going to kill in his own parliament to demonstrate to our friends the strength of the communist party and our commitment to black rule. I hear you have a way with women. You may even love the girl, if you wish, but that is your business. Personally, I have never believed there is only one person for each of us. Like religion, sex is the opium of the people?’

  As the Englishman walked away with his written instructions to join the South African army, instructions that bore no reference to their source, the Russian smiled to himself at how easy it was to manipulate a true believer. Such men went to their deaths with smiles on their faces. The strategy of exploiting the wrongs of racism and colonialism which he had helped to formulate in Moscow was coming together, and when they had finished they would totally control the chrome, manganese and twelve other strategic minerals that were found only in South Africa and the Soviet Union. The American Arms programme would be crippled at source. The rights and wrongs of racism and colonialism mattered as much to the Russian as the rain dripping off the brim of his hat. Power. It was all about power.

  Lucky Kuchinski and Archie Fletcher-Wood were bored with their lives. Chasing women, going to parties, drinking too much and having more money than they could spend had lost its edge. They needed a little excitement.

  They were thirty-one and thirty-three respectively, and the idea of settling down with a wife had few attractions for either of them. Archie had tried, and had ended up with a woman who did little for herself, expecting to be entertained and pampered by Archie for what soon became a rather boring ten minutes of sex every day. The woman was always wanting something and, for Archie, one-sided arrangements had a habit of coming to a speedy end. Lucky had watched his friend, and was determined not to make the same mistake. The value of home and hearth was not worth that price to pay.

  The conversation had begun on a Sunday morning after reading the Sunday papers in Archie’s Rivonia cottage. The papers were screaming of the criminality of women, children and missionaries being massacred by rampaging blacks in the recently ex-Belgian Congo. The obscene rush out of Africa by the European powers had been matched only by their obscene rush into Africa during the previous century. Within months, the Belgians had decided to get their troops and administrators out of the Congo and, within fourteen days of their departure, all forms of government disintegrated and rebellious troops went on the rampage. The South African press was outraged, and the Afrikaans press, still smarting from overseas criticism over the Sharpeville massacre, said, “We told you so.”

  Back at the United Nations, the Russians stirred the pot and made the Americans run around like headless chickens, no one knowing whom to support or whether to condemn the slaughterous blacks or the fleeing Belgians; whether to tell the Belgians to send the para-troops back in to save women and children and evacuate the whites, or to send in a United Nations force.

  The only province to retain any semblance of order was Katanga. Their leader, Moise Tshombe, wished to declare a separate state for his copper-rich country and asked the Americans to support his secession, which the Indians and Russians vociferously opposed. The Americans prevaricated and tried to get the leading lights amid the anarchy to talk to each other. It was Tshombe’s carefully worded advertisement in the Sunday Times, calling for men of military age to help his breakaway country that caught the eyes of Lucky and Archie.

  “He’s recruiting a force of mercenaries,” said Archie, after taking the proffered page from Lucky.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Why don’t we go?” suggested Archie. “The commies are going to take over Africa if someone doesn’t do something. The Yanks are so anti-colonialist they’re going to sit back and see the Russians take over exactly where the Belgians, French, British and Portuguese left off. Or, as here, the vacuum leaves a bloodbath.” Archie threw the paper on the table, its screaming headline face up. “Poor sods. For every white killed and reported in the press, there’ll be hundreds of blacks killed in the power struggle. Why can’t people stop interfering in other people’s business?”

  “Self-interest,” replied Lucky. “I got out of a communist state. All the shit in the Congo is an extension of the cold war. The Russians want to run the world, Buddy boy. Anyway, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives? I’m sick of jumping in and out of the car without opening the door.”

  “You think Matthew will want to come?”

  “No… He’s too busy running round the world opening branches. Never stops. Why do people go on making more and more money w
hen they can’t even spend what they’ve got?”

  “You’re jealous,” teased Archie.

  “Maybe. We can ask him… You want me to phone the number in the paper? There are pygmies up there. And gorillas.”

  “Both kinds. You think they’ll give us some kind of military training? Whom shall we phone first: Matt, or the number in the paper?”

  When they spoke to Matthew, he turned them down flat. He was three years younger than Archie, and his period of disillusionment had not yet arrived. The adrenalin he pumped into business was still surging through his body. Matthew was hyperactive, permanently on the go, flying twenty thousand kilometres every month in an aeroplane. He wanted to float his company on the Johannesburg stock exchange before he was thirty, and use the injection of capital to create his own conglomerate. The stock market was on a strong bull run and Matthew had targeted two of his clients as likely candidates for takeover. He knew the business of each as well as its staff and he had studied their balance sheets for years, every time he adjusted their Loss of Profits insurance. And as a broker under ‘Section 20 bis of the Insurance Act’, he was only obliged to pay over his client’s premiums to underwriters ninety days after renewal of the client’s policies, and most of Matthew’s clients paid him on receipt of the first statement. When Lucky asked him to drop everything and run off to fight another man’s war, he had over four million rand out with the banks earning interest.

  “You guys are crazy. Cool it, Lucky. What the hell am I going to do for friends if you go to the Congo? Look, I’d come over but my plane leaves from Jan Smuts for America in two hours. Talk to you when I get back. Six weeks. We’re looking at Canada with the Bank of Montreal. They like our systems and want to lock them into a computer with a patent. It will mean we can prepare reports for the client, closing instructions for the underwriter, and the summary of insurance by one input. Absolute break-through if it works, which it will. The computer automatically amends everything when there is an endorsement, throwing out a new summary at the press of a button. It can print the policy document and cut out all the underwriter’s overheads. Gray’s will issue policies, and the insurance company will merely act as a reinsurer, saving the forty-three per cent overhead factor. I can drop the premium rates by forty per cent and make everyone the same profit.”