by Peter Rimmer
The most remarkable thing about her exploits was that none of it got back to mummy or daddy. Their dutiful nineteen year old daughter was always home by midnight. The fact that the father was also a senior member of the secret Broederbond may also have had something to do with it, as most of her conquests worked for the government and most of them were too scared to open their mouths. They knew about the father, but the father did not know about them and they were content to keep it that way.
Hector took out his list when he returned to his flat in Pretoria. He had moved there in order to be nearer to his job and to the girls on his list, which was updated for him by mail every six months. It was a dating service that any computer would have been proud of. And there she was, Helena Kloss, and her credentials were perfectly wonderful.
Very nervously, Hector called at the Deputy Minister’s house on the appointed evening, exactly on time. He sat for a moment in his car, uncomfortably aware of his heart pounding furiously within his chest. Success now was vital. If he could win the hand of the Deputy Minister’s daughter, then he would truly have hit the jackpot. The next few hours – the next few minutes, even – would probably determine the course of his entire future and, far more importantly, perhaps somehow he was already under suspicion or observation? It didn’t bear thinking about!
Greatly to his relief, his reception at the Kloss mansion was very low-key. In retrospect, he might have expected that, in view of Helena’s active social life, to use a euphemism. Daddy was not at home, but mummy thought Hector so nice for bringing her flowers in the continental tradition. That had been an inspired move, thought Hector. His information had shown him that the woman had grown up in Amsterdam. The girl’s mother was on his side already, despite him being an Englishman.
As he drove away ten minutes later with Helena in the passenger seat, he was surprised when Helena expressed her wish to see his apartment – and immediately, before the date had even started. Something in her voice made her intentions completely obvious and Hector, despite a reservation that he may be going a little too far too soon, played along with her. Once at the apartment, Helena dispensed with preliminaries, and Hector was astounded by the sheer unrestrained energy with which she got what she wanted. For the first time, Hector began to have doubts as to his ability to survive married life with this woman. But, at least until the knot was tied, he must make every effort to live up to her expectations.
After a good supper, therefore, he suggested that he drive her back to his flat again, an invitation he had no doubt would be accepted eagerly. Wryly, he thought to himself as they drove there that it was a good thing for him that she appeared unaware of the feminine tactic of playing ‘hard to get.” He had privately been somewhat worried about what strategy to adopt in pursuing an Afrikaner woman. But there was no doubt what this one wanted.
Leaving her back at mummy’s, well satisfied and just before midnight, Hector wiped his brow as he drove home and smiled to himself. The strenuous sporting activities of the evening had left him exhausted, although ‘pleasantly weary’ might have been a more positive term to use. He was sure he had found exactly what he wanted, and the Russians would be pleased with the swiftness of his progress.
No one was more surprised than Hector to be refused a second date. The panting sex-pot had turned as cold as a fish, and for a while Hector was convinced his cover was blown. He waited in fear for a week, expecting the police to pick him up for being a communist; a thought that sent shudders down his spine. For a week he was too frightened to phone and, when his courage was almost restored, the girl herself phoned him at his laboratory and asked him to take her out on a date. What Hector did not know was that the previous week had been fully booked, with an extra date for lunch on the Sunday, immediately after church.
The arrangement went on for some months, blowing alternately very hot and very cold. He did notice that once he had satisfied her sexually her interest waned, and the more climaxes he managed to draw from the young girl, the colder she became. This tendency was outside Hector’s considerable experience and, had her father not been a Deputy Minister and high in the Broederbond, he would have dropped her and gone on his way. All the young girls were doing it in early 1962; the whole world was swinging. There were so many for the good-looking Hector that he never ran short. But only Helena was on his list.
Helena first met Matthew some months after Luke had slipped out of the country unnoticed through Bechuanaland to join the military wing of the ANC. Matthew was attending a cocktail party in Pretoria, thrown by one of his clients who thrived on government contracts. Matthew was new on the Pretoria scene and being so tall stood out like the beacon to paradise for the insatiable Helena Kloss. She was the only pretty girl in the room and, as most of the guests were speaking Afrikaans, a language Matthew now associated with fascist policemen, he was quite willing to talk to her in English when he found her down by his elbow, Helena being just over one hundred and fifty centimetres tall.
“The long and the short of it,” she said, and gave him the full meaning with those baby blue eyes. Even Matthew smiled at the openness in such exalted company. He might have expected the same look from a whore in a Hong Kong night club but not from a young lady of what he presumed to be the Calvinist persuasion. When she gave him her card, he was sure that one of the rare Pretoria ladies of the night had somehow gate-crashed the party by mistake.
They chatted for half an hour, as even whores could be more interesting to Matthew than most of the Afrikaners in the room. After the terrible scene with the police and Luke, he was repulsed by the very accent, even when the person spoke English. Surprisingly for whom she was, Helena spoke English with little trace of her Afrikaans background and, as Matthew was loath to leave the party too soon and be rude to his client, the conversation continued.
As he was saying goodbye to his client at the door, he was more surprised than usual to find that his chatty friend was the daughter of one of the top men who directly perpetrated the savagery that had been inflicted on Luke, for no other reason than the colour of his skin. He dropped her card in the waste bin he passed on the way to his car and drove home to Sandown.
No one, not even the liaison office of the Fifth Commando in Johannesburg, had heard of Lucky or Archie for two months. Both had been reported lost on a patrol deep in Simba country. The only thing that was going right in Matthew’s life was his business, which was booming on three continents. To counter the sickness in his stomach, he had concentrated exclusively on business during the months after he had left Luke on the beach.
When Helena phoned Matthew at his office the following Monday and suggested a date, he politely declined. When she asked why, as they had gotten along so well at the party, he was tempted to tell her the truth. Then he thought of his client, mumbled about a girl who was about to become his fiancé, and left it at that.
The fact was he had not taken out a woman since Luke’s demolition in the police cell, he was still too angry to look for pleasure, although he did go for platonic drinks with Sunny Tupper, who let him talk about Luke. Again, blind to reality, he was unaware of how much his now-perfect secretary was in love with him, a fact which anyone in the office could have told him had he asked. It never crossed his mind. There was Rule 7 and staff did not mix business with pleasure.
Every time he rejected Helena’s body by refusing to take her out, Matthew instructed reception to channel his calls through Sunny. This was something he disliked doing, as he believed a chief executive should be openly available to everyone at all times of the day, but his anger over the treatment of Luke was finding an outlet in the form of this Afrikaans woman, and he was afraid of losing his self-control and giving vent to an outburst that he would later regret and would do his business no good.
Sunny was only too pleased to be given the opportunity to obstruct another woman’s attempts to seduce Matthew. Two more calls from Helena, which ended with Sunny putting on her worst East End London accent and the vocabulary to
go with it, finally put a stop to this particular approach, but not to Helena’s interest. She had even found out from party gossip that he had not dated a girl for over six months, and he was certainly not after men.
Figuring out why Matthew Gray would not take her out became an obsession with Helena, almost as much as she herself was an obsession for Hector Fortescue-Smythe, who would by now have pursued Helena anyway, whether she was on the list or not. And it was through Helena that Matthew met Hector, and found they had a lot in common. Well-read people were hard to find, and both of them liked to discuss more than the cricket score or how much money they had made. With Helena deliberately drawing Hector to places she knew Matthew frequented, they began to meet on a regular basis, with Helena making use of Hector for a reason other than sex. Little did he realise that Helena was using him as a stooge, in order to ensnare the man she really wanted.
Three months after Lucky and Archie had disappeared somewhere in the Kivu province north of Elisabethville, Matthew made his decision. He phoned the liaison office twice a week and though he understood the problems in leaving his business, he finally made up his mind. At the regular Monday management meeting he told his shocked account executives that he was going to the Congo to look for his friends. It was the first real opposition he had encountered from any of them and, in their fear of losing their security, they told him he was being irresponsible.
“This business runs when I am in Canada or Australia,” retorted Matthew. “It can run when I am in the Congo.”
“What happens to the business if you’re killed, Matt?”
“That’s your problem.”
“But you got us into the company.”
“Are you complaining?” asked Matthew, rather coldly.
“Security means a lot to most of us.”
“Are you saying I work for you, not the other way round?”
“You are the company, Matt.”
Matthew Gray looked around his staff, seeing them for the first time with new eyes – comfortable, well-paid and full of self-interest. Deliberately he kept these thoughts to himself. “Tomorrow I start. I’m going to find out what has happened to my friends.”
“But, Matt…”
“Oh, shut up.” It was also the first time he had been rude to any of them.
In the ensuing silence, Sunny Tupper came in with the coffee and put the tray down. Matthew’s Johannesburg branch manager told her that Matthew was going up to the Congo to look for Archie and Lucky. An expression of horror flashed over her face as she turned to look down the table at Matthew, seated at the head. Then she burst into tears and ran out of the room.
“What was all that about?” asked Matthew, quite taken aback, when she had gone.
“This guy’s something else,” thought the branch manager, but he held his tongue.
Matthew’s mind was already back on the subject. “You’ll tell our clients I am in Australia. I will phone this office whenever I can, though I’m not sure if there are phone lines coming out of Katanga.”
“What do you know about warfare?” asked the youngest AE.
“Nothing at all, but I will find out. I am not going alone. There will be three of us. I have investigated the problems in depth, you can be sure of that… I have shut down my current projects or delegated where I can. I’m sure I will come back and find the company in better shape than when I left. We are on our way up and I am quite confident that you will be able to maintain the impetus during my absence. And remember, when we go public next year, you will be allocated a block of shares each, and you won’t have to pay for them for five years. Share options. My guess is that you’ll make more out of the shares than your salaries, and capital gain is tax-free in South Africa. Guys, if I snapped at you just now, I apologise. My friends mean a lot to me.”
When he left the smiles were back on their faces. He had again offered them money.
The Viscount landed at Salisbury airport, still resplendent in its Central African Airways colours that would be gone shortly with the break-up of the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Zambia, Malawi and Southern Rhodesia were to have their own airways.
The Italian with whom he had been in contact met him at the airport, and Matthew liked the look of him when they shook hands. Aldo Calucci was thirty centimetres shorter than he, but Matthew determined never to try him out in a fight. The grip from the handshake had nearly crushed his knuckles. The smile that played up at Matthew was infectious, making him think that here was a man who might well have made his mark as a salesman.
Aldo Calucci was a broad-shouldered, thickset northern Italian with dark southern eyes and the features of an Austrian, although in fact he had no connections with this country which adjoins the north of Italy. He had come to Southern Rhodesia via Kenya, where he had worked as a white hunter who took tourists into the bush and put the big animals close enough for the Americans to shoot, but not close enough for them to kill the client.
After World War II his only clients were Americans, as no one else could afford his services. He had fought the Germans with a hunting rifle when he was twelve. His job in Southern Rhodesia had been shooting game in the Zambezi Valley to the south of Chirundu, the border between the two Rhodesias. He was now working for the British sugar giants, Tate and Lyle, who had cleared and planted sugar cane on eleven thousand hectares of land, irrigating the crop by pumping water from the mighty Zambezi River. His current job, one that took very little of his time, was to keep the elephant out of the sugar cane, as the big mammals did considerable damage with their trunks and feet as they walked through the lush-green cane, the only greenery in the dry season for a thousand kilometres around.
The problem with travelling from Chirundu to the old Belgian Congo was not so much the distance as the type of terrain that had to be crossed. Following Matthew’s wish to travel to Katanga, the province in the Congo adjoining the Northern Rhodesian border, Aldo had hired a second fully-equipped Land Rover. This would be driven by his black assistant, Mashinga, to give them back-up in the event of one of the vehicles breaking down on the way, and to carry further supplies. There were no tarred roads to speak of on the route they were taking.
Optimistically, Aldo had taken two weeks’ leave from the Chirundu sugar estate, but privately doubted it would be anywhere near adequate. His client did not know where to look for his friends in an area fully the size of South Africa, and did not even know if they were still alive. The wish to travel into the deep bush was a stronger urge than that of making money, but Aldo appreciated the funds to equip the expedition properly. When heading into such a situation as this, it was quite obviously essential to make sure they had everything they needed, with nothing left to chance. Preparing for the worst, barring death or captivity, Aldo had stocked up with enough supplies for several months, and there was very little room to spare in either Land Rover.
Top of the list were food and medical supplies. Obtaining food within the Congo would quite probably be difficult, if not impossible at times, with fresh water a potentially serious problem. The second Land Rover contained several large water tanks. The medical supplies were very well stocked, equipped to deal with any imaginable emergency and several that were unimaginable into the bargain. Snakebite serum was a priority. Aldo was nothing if not thorough. So far, he had never lost a client; worried as he was that this particular expedition might bring that proud record to an end he was leaving nothing to chance.
“I asked in my letter, but you never told me where you got my name,” Aldo said as he loaded Matthew’s gear into the back of his own Land Rover. “Not that it really matters. Here we are.” He spoke with a very thick, singsong accent, and Matthew had to listen hard to understand all he was saying.
“I asked one of my friends,” replied Matthew. He reminded Aldo of his past contacts with Archie, when the latter, before coming to Johannesburg, had been living in Mongu, a small town in Barotseland, in the half-forgotten, underdeveloped north western corner of the then North
ern Rhodesia. Archie had spent a few months as manager of the tiny airport at Mongu, which hosted generally just one aeroplane a week.
“You and he had a scheme of flying chickens and vegetables into Mongu and aviation fuel out, so he told me,” Matthew continued. “I believe some of your friends blew their car engines on your high-octane fuel. You had four hectares of land in Chirundu under vegetables, irrigation compliments of Tate and Lyle. You trucked them to Salisbury to meet the Mongu flight. Archie said you both made a lot of money.”
“Fletcher-Wood, he is lost? That’s it? Then we find him. What have they got in the Congo of value?”
“He was last seen on patrol in the Kivu.”
Aldo gave this some thought. “Diamonds! That bastard is after diamonds. He not dead. Gone missing. Oh yes, but with a bag of yellow diamonds. We will spend tonight at the sugar estate and then drive in convoy to look for our friend. Now I know why you write me. Why you not say?”
“He mentioned you as a supplier, not a friend.”
“Oh, we were friends, hunting friends, and we were not always hunting game. Me and Archie met many ladies together.”
“You’d better teach me how to fire a gun.”
“Oh, shit,” said Aldo as he climbed into the driving seat of his Land Rover. Then he gave a shrug, put the Land Rover into gear and shot out of the parking lot.
When Hector proposed to Helena, she burst out laughing and told him she would not marry him in a fit.
“But why? We’ve been going out for months.”
“And I’ve been going out with a lot of other men for months.”
“But you don’t sleep with them, do you?”
“Not usually, as mother likes me home at night. Gives her a sense of security. But if you ask me whether they screw me or not, that’s another story.”