Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Instead of being put off by her infidelity, it made Hector even more determined to own the woman. Despite his original reason for wanting to marry her, he was now becoming quite infatuated with her.

  “But we’re so good together, Helena. Why won’t you marry me?”

  “First, I could think of nothing more boring than living with one man. Secondly, I don’t want to be faithful to anyone, so what’s the point? Third, I’d prefer to end up a fat old bag on my own than lead my parents’ sort of lives. Fourth, I never screw married men.” She looked at him, carefully waiting for the laugh that did not come. “And fifth, you’re not rich enough. Oh, no, not for me to cook food and put clothes in washing machines when nearly every man wants my body. And while we’re on that subject, what the hell’s the matter with Matthew Gray? He takes more notice of you than me. Is he a faggot? Now, he’s rich. If I had to forego the pleasures of my life, it would be for a rich man like Matt. And he’s so big…”

  “One day I will be a lot richer than Matt.”

  “One day… They all dream about one day. You, working for the government! My dad lives richly but even the house is owned by the ministry of defence, to say nothing of the car and who pays the servants. You couldn’t get rich if you lived to be a hundred, lover boy.”

  Her mini-skirt had ridden up, showing red panties, and he was sure the crotch was already wet, turning his mind to water. If this woman had been the chief witch of South Africa, he would still have wanted to marry her. He was besotted beyond distraction.

  “Have you heard of Smythe-Wilberforce Industries?” Hector asked her.

  “Sure, they have a factory in Germiston.”

  “And another in Cape Town. They are the largest private company selling into the chain stores, selling everything from detergents to rice crispies. Their turnover in this country is one and a half billion rand, representing six per cent of the company’s worldwide turnover.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked Helena, sitting up straighter on the couch and involuntarily shutting off his view of her panties.

  “Smythe, darling. The Fortescue part was put on the name to make it sound better than Smith or Jones. Not so common. My father owns Smythe-Wilberforce Industries through a family trust fund and, even though we hate each other, when he dies I inherit the lot, Helena Kloss, and that will put me up with the Oppenheimers, making Matthew Gray look like a pauper.”

  “Then what on earth are you doing out here?”

  “Working my own way through life. I don’t believe in reaping the benefits off another man’s labour.”

  “You sounded like a capitalist when you talked to Daddy.”

  “I wanted to be my own man.”

  “But what’s the point, with that money on the way? Don’t the trust pay you now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not.”

  “I told them not to.”

  “But you can tell them to anytime you like, can’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are an enigma, Hector. A bloody enigma. Now come here and let’s get down to business. Real business.” The flush of revelation had made her instantly randy.

  “How much is the trust worth?” she asked him drowsily, as she stroked him ten minutes later.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Seven hundred million pounds, I should think, after limited death duties. But please don’t tell anyone, Helena. At the lab they think I’m just an ordinary bloke who managed to get a county scholarship to Cambridge. No one knows what I just told you.” He was now worried that he had told her too much in his need.

  “I wouldn’t tell a soul,” she lied.

  “Are we going out to supper?”

  “Not tonight, lover. I have to get home. Mother has some of those boring government officials to dinner, and one of them is the prime minister.”

  “You won’t tell anyone, Helena,” he said at her parents’ door.

  “Why would anyone be interested?”

  When she told her father the story, before the guests arrived, it was the first time he had shown any interest in his daughter for months, and certainly in any of her boyfriends. They were speaking in Afrikaans, and he asked her to repeat the story once more. The idea of a son of one of England’s richest industrialists working for Armscor was so bizarre it had to be true.

  “Why would he want to come out here?” Meneer Kloss asked his daughter.

  “I told you, daddy… And he proposed to me.”

  “Before or after he told you about his money?”

  “After I turned him down.”

  “If he’s that rich, you’d be stupid to turn him down.”

  “I’m too young to get married,” Helena excused herself.

  “You won’t say that in five years’ time. I’ll check out Mister Fortescue-Smythe.”

  “Oh, daddy, don’t look so serious. You really do think there’s a communist under every bed.”

  “Total onslaught, Helena. It’s going to be total onslaught. The communist world against South Africa standing alone… But we did it before and, though we lost the battle of the last war, within nine years our General Botha was prime minister of the Union, including their previous Cape and Natal provinces. And we can do it again.”

  “You really do think Hector might be a commie?”

  “It’s possible, yes. We have a lot of strategic minerals in this country, and the Cape sea route is vital to capitalist commerce. We are a perfect communist target, you can be certain of that.”

  “You’d let me marry a Brit?” She was genuinely surprised. “Oupa says the only good Brit is a dead one.”

  “Even oupa might change his mind for seven hundred million pounds. Why don’t you ask him?… But give it a little time and don’t tell your mother. She’ll have you measured up for a wedding dress tomorrow morning. The boy always brings her flowers. Women! I don’t understand any of them.”

  “Quite right – you don’t,” thought his daughter. For once in her young life, she had more to think about than men.

  Frikkie Swart was shown into the minister’s office the following Monday morning. He had returned to South Africa six months earlier on promotion.

  “Do you remember interviewing a Fortescue-Smythe?” Minister Kloss waved his hand at the seat in front of his desk for Swart to sit down. The conversation was in Afrikaans.

  “The chemist?” queried Swart. Kloss nodded his head. “We don’t get them that good very often on assisted passage.”

  “Didn’t you think that odd?” the minister asked him.

  “It seemed to be too good to be true.”

  “Maybe it was. What did he say about his father?”

  “That he was a socialist and was bank-rolling the labour party’s shot at power. Said socialists were communists in disguise.”

  “Did he now? And he told my daughter last week he had wanted nothing to do with his father as he exploited the workers. Did you know he was heir to seven hundred million pounds?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” exclaimed Swart, his head shooting back in surprise. “He said his father would not leave him a penny. Something about a cat’s home. Brilliant chemist. Top of his class.”

  “Cambridge— wasn’t Cambridge where they found Burgess and Maclean?”

  “The two who escaped to Russia. It was Oxford or Cambridge.”

  “Also rich fathers. Eton, I think,” murmured Kloss.

  “Eton, sir?”

  “Public school. Same class of school where Fortescue-Smythe did his secondary education. Did you check him out?”

  “Thoroughly, sir,” Swart assured him earnestly. “Don’t you think your daughter may have got the workers in the wrong perspective, I mean so far as this man is concerned.”

  “Did he ask for Armscor?”

  “I believe he did. I first offered him the oil from the coal project… How did he come across your daughter, sir? I mean, obscure government employees like myself and Fortescue-Smythe don’t generally meet ministers’ daughters.”


  When Kloss questioned his daughter that night, telling her again not to wear mini-skirts, she ignored his dress sense but confirmed emphatically that Hector had said his father was exploiting the workers.

  “Keep away from him.”

  “What, daddy?”

  “Keep away from Hector. You may be being used.”

  “You don’t want me to marry him?” asked Helena, in some surprise.

  “No.”

  “But mother said she had never even heard of that kind of money so I made a call to England. He’s his father’s son, all right.”

  “I don’t want you to see him again.”

  “You were right about one thing daddy. Oupa still says the only good Englishman is a dead one. He showed me his South African war rifle with eleven notches. Rather ghoulish. Said each notch was a dead Englishman.”

  If Minister Kloss had wanted his daughter to marry Hector, he could not have gone about ensuring her acceptance more positively. Helena liked to do what she was told not to do… And her best friend had told her how much money it all really was, how many lovers she could have and, if the young man did not like it, she could give him a divorce in exchange for a fortune. Her friend had giggled and said that every pretty girl was sitting on a fortune. Before the Minister could start an in-depth investigation, Helena had accepted Hector’s proposal of marriage and the Minister’s wife had told everyone who would listen. Kloss’s own father, eighty-six years old, had said there was no way that he would attend the wedding and, if he was forced to go, he would give a speech about dead Englishmen and what the hell, as he’d soon be dead anyway. He had rambled on about something that had nothing to do with either weddings or his granddaughter.

  Maybe as a son-in-law I can keep an eye on him better thought Minister Kloss. He would have to make the best of a bad job.

  Hector was ecstatic, but insisted that his father, the man who financed the British labour party, should not be invited.

  “But you said he was exploiting the workers,” said his future wife.

  “Putting the workers into power is what I meant. That’s what the old bastard has been doing.” He had his story back on the right track.

  Had she repeated that conversation to her father, Helena would have been given his full blessing for the marriage, which would probably have changed her mind. There were a lot of other men with money who fancied Helena Kloss. But she did not change her mind; the Kerk, the Dutch Reformed Church, was full of all the right people for the wedding and, when a press cutting was shown to Hector’s controller, who was keeping well in the background, he could not have been more pleased.

  “Sometimes you can do the right thing and enjoy it as well” said the controller.

  “What’s that, comrade?” inquired his companion.

  “Nothing.” The controller had recognised the bedroom eyes even from the photograph. “May they have lots of children,” he mused. “Children are always so vulnerable, though I doubt our man will give us any trouble. We’ll bury him deep, comrade, for the day when we arrange South Africa’s Armageddon.”

  A beetle dropped in the long dry grass, and Lucky Kuchinski awoke in an instant. His body was trembling. The nightmare the beetle had broken was no worse than the reality. He listened with intense desperation, and slowly the movements faded away into the night. There was no moon, not even stars. He put his hand out for his gun, and panic took control… Then he found it, and it was the wrong way round. In the writhing of his slumber, he had turned himself round.

  The heat was intense, and the large Congolese mosquitoes had punctured his flesh where the net had tangled with the contortions of his dream. Forcing himself to be calm, he brought his FN automatic rifle around inside the mosquito netting and thankfully found the trigger. Another beetle dropped outside the window and he recognised the sound. He put the gun down beside his body, and fear seeped out of him. He could identify the shape of the tree outside the broken window, sturdy enough for a Simba, one of the Katangan guerrillas, to climb and shoot down from into the room. Archie was still snoring, a sound he had not even noticed as he came awake listening for the Simba.

  Finally, he fell asleep again, but the torment of his life continued. As soon as he fell asleep, his nightmare returned; only this time his gun was nowhere to be found, and the drug-crazed Simba were screaming and charging, and he was screaming… A boot hit him hard in the face. He sat up with the gun and fired out the window up at the tree.

  “Lucky, young man, with all that screaming and gunfire, you’ll bring every Simba in Kasai on our heads. I want to sleep.”

  “I was dreaming… Arch, my nerves are shot. We must get out.”

  “We’ve been trying.”

  “Leave the money. Run. Tomorrow, now, let’s run.”

  “Go to sleep. There is no way Archibald Fletcher-Wood is leaving behind Lobengula’s gold, no chance. Those old coins, a whole sack of old coins; will help you and me live on the French Riviera, never being bored again in our lives. You will get that truck going.”

  “And petrol?”

  “We will find more petrol on the road. If the refugees hadn’t eaten every horse and mule in the Congo, we could ride into Johannesburg. The gold must have come up here on a horse. They didn’t have trucks in 1896.”

  Archie kept himself awake for another long five minutes and eventually fell into a dreamless sleep. The hum of bees in the acacia tree finally brought him awake a few hours later. Lucky was still asleep, and a shaft of sunlight came into the room, touching a picture of sixteenth-century Holland and making Archie wish he knew more about the paintings of the old masters. The gold he knew; the diamonds he would leave behind, as he knew the penalties of illicit diamond-buying, with de Beers bottling up the world market. But pictures were out of his field.

  They had stumbled into the farmhouse six weeks earlier, two months after losing all contact with the Fifth Commando. Archie had not been sure exactly where they were until the map of the farm, an aerial mosaic in the owner’s study, had given them the first hope of escape. There were aerial photographs covering the whole of that part of the Kasai province with a set including the dead man’s farm enlarged to show the coffee bushes in neat lines and water spraying overhead for kilometres. There was another enlargement of the diamond mine and the cluster of mine buildings. The man must have been richer than any man Archie had known richer than David Todd.

  Gunfire and the screams of the Simba had brought them to the house. After two years of civil war, the grounds and lawns overgrown, the swimming pool stagnant and the servants gone. At first they had thought themselves under attack, but the rebels were firing the other way into the thick jungle. Not knowing who was shooting whom, they waited in thick bush all morning before advancing with caution.

  The house had once been beautiful, an exquisite mansion set like a great jewel in the jungle, a copy of a chateau in France or Belgium. Everywhere in the shambolic garden, colour rioted among the creeping jungle, and multi-coloured birds, many of which Archie had never seen before, hooted and flitted in the trees. He recognised the strident ‘jabo’ of a peacock, and saw the bird as it fanned its tail feathers. Half a morning after death, the jungle had forgotten the rude intrusion. The lion had killed and departed, and the birds were singing.

  The woman was dead, butchered by more than bullets and bayonets. She had been old, over seventy. The old man was alive. The Simba had propped him against a Louis XIV chair to watch them rape his wife and her screams were there in his eyes when Lucky found him on the floor, staring at her death and the knowledge of his own.

  “Are you all right, sir?” asked Lucky in French, the second language they had taught him in school.

  “Do I look all right?” groaned the old man, turning his head from his wife. “They raped her. No, why would they rape an old woman of seventy-six? No, don’t try to move me. I am waiting to die, have been for years. We said we wished to die together, and now we will. Who are you, young man?”

  Lucky to
ld him and introduced Archie, and they watched him slide towards death.

  “There’s a walk-in safe down in the basement. These are the keys. You are welcome to anything you can carry. You remember Lobengula, king of the Matabele? The one Rhodes chased out of what he wanted to call Rhodesia? The old savage was rich in gold. All the land concessions he sold, all the ivory. Lobengula got as far as Katanga, where he died. They never looked for his gold so far to the north. It’s all there. Every sovereign. I was a coin collector and found the source from which an old black was bringing me the coins. I gave him a house and all the beer he could drink for the rest of his life in exchange for the gold. What else did he wish to do but sit in the sun and drink beer with his friends? One of the happiest men I ever knew, as God had not given him the brains to think.”

  “You can have the gold for burying me and my wife. In my study there’s a map showing you the family mausoleum. I am second generation. I would like to rest forever with my father and mother and that lovely woman lying over there. Isn’t such bliss worth all the gold of Lobengula? All the gold of the world? Enjoy your lives, young men, as they are the only ones you will have.”

  Lucky woke when the sunbeam reached his face. His tension had fled with the darkness. A spider had spun a web from the net to the window sill. The spider, a black, furry mass of body and legs, waited in the centre for insects to fly into his web. Lucky marvelled at the intricacy of the lace work and the hours of industry. Even the spider worked for his food.

  Very carefully, Lucky climbed out from his net and stepped over the sill, clutching his gun all the while. A brief deluge during this latter part of the night had washed the jungle clean. Birdsong was clear and beautiful, one of the flycatchers making a sound like liquid gurgling from a crystal water jug. The sky was cobalt blue, tinged with dust-red. Butterflies and bees moved from flower to flower and sunbirds, their collars metallic red, flitted over the cannas, dipping beaks as long as their bodies deep into the flowers for nectar.