Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Tilda and Theo were left in the massive Sandhurst house with no servants and two dirty swimming pools, all Teddie’s assets being frozen. When the family lawyer came up with the will, there was a recent codicil explaining the parentage of his daughter and leaving all his money to the small son who had luckily tested positively with Teddie’s blood. Like everything at the office, Teddie had left behind a mess.

  Theodora Blaze had never felt more frustrated in her life, shouting at Lucky Kuchinski to do something.

  “What the hell can I do?”

  “I don’t know, but do something. There must be someone who can sort out the mess. The bloody man bought and sold shares; he didn’t run off with the company’s money. You’re all running around like chickens with your heads chopped off… Oh, hell, I wish I was a man.”

  Sunny Tupper saw her man disintegrate and decided her mask of subservience had better slip. She had worked at the company for a number of years and quickly realised that the problem was confidence – a run on the bank, so to speak, and not an inherent defect in the financial position of Security Lion Holdings. The demise of the third-largest life assurer was in the interests of the remaining insurance companies, despite their pained posturing to the press. The big boys were delighted and, business being competitive, no one could have blamed them for their hand-in-front-of-their-mouth jubilation. When the Security Lion shares had dropped forty per cent, she put her few saved rand in the market. The company was far too important to the country to crash, she reasoned, and then she went to work on Archie.

  “I want the car and I want to go away for a few days,” she told him.

  “That really is bloody marvellous at a time like this. Even you think the ship’s going to sink.” Looking at the woman who had been for so many years part of his life, he wondered if marrying her would have made any difference after all.

  “It’s quite clear you and Lucky can’t stop the rot,” said Sunny.

  “Where are you going?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “It’s my car.” He said it in the way a petulant child says, “It’s my toy and you are not going to have it to play with.” She looked at him and shook her head. The king really had lost his clothes.

  “Then I’ll hire one from Hertz,” she said, breaking the silence.

  “Take the damn car… See if I care.”

  “Have you ever thought of all those policyholders who could go without a pension if all this nonsense is not knocked on the head?” Sunny tackled him, trying to persuade him to see further than the end of his own nose.

  “I’ve got enough problems of my own… Matt got us into all this mess. If he’d let us invest our own money when we came out of the Congo, we would never have heard of Security Lion.”

  “I seem to remember it was a precondition before he financed and led you into the jungle.”

  “I don’t remember the details,” muttered Archie, sulkily.

  “You should, Archie. You were broke, remember. Your friendship with Matt was the one sensible thing you have done in your life.”

  “If you are going to be abusive, you can leave my house right now.”

  Sunny, remembering very clearly from whence he had come, slapped his face hard. “Give me your car keys,” she demanded.

  “How do I get to the office?”

  “With the amount of good you’ve been doing lately, you’re better off staying at home.”

  Archie listened to the clunk of the automatic garage door and heard his car going off down the drive. The thought of being penniless at the age of sixty-one was worse than being sent to jail. He had done nothing wrong. He had never stolen a cent from anyone in his life. It was the prospect of being fat, half-bald and poor that shattered him. His only armour of late had been his money and, once that had gone, even Sunny had walked out of his life.

  His mother and father were dead; he had no children, no wife, and lunches would come to an end. People would not want to listen to his jokes when they proved him negligent, as everyone was saying they would, the press mentioning his name at the top of the list of those responsible for the debacle. They would make him put every cent he owned into the liquidation. They would take his house and leave him a few clothes to go and stand in the street. There was no welfare in South Africa and, even when he reached sixty-five, the government pension did not apply to him as he was still British. He had left England because he thought the socialists would bankrupt the country and, after so many years overseas, they would also find a way to put him out in the street.

  If he had the guts, he would go into the bedroom and put his gun to his head, but he no longer had the guts. The soft living had left him an old man, a crushing bore. Even he knew that, in his heart of hearts, without the trapping of his wealth, no one would even bother to give him the time of day.

  Then he looked up from the floor. “They won’t call him Lucky any longer,” he said aloud. It almost gave him some kind of satisfaction.

  Lucky Kuchinski was a fatalist who never worried about anything he could do nothing about. He had just had a visit from his old flame, who had left, banging the front door to his Rosebank flat. Theo even made him smile. There was nothing worse than a woman like Theo parted from her money. The thought of jail, preceded by a long-winded trial, was the possibility that bored him most. He was a salesman and there was always something someone wanted to sell. Many people in business thought selling things was somewhat beneath them.

  Lucky rose and went to the window to look out at the Old Mutual building that stood on the site that had once been the George. He could still remember two of the girls he had met at the George, and that had been twenty-five years ago. He smiled at being able to remember both their names. They had had a good time; he remembered that, too. Good, carefree days when people were not talking politics every five minutes in South Africa and ten rand bought dinner for two in the best restaurant in town.

  He and the girls had driven down to Cape Town for a week on the beach. They had stayed at the Clifton Hotel which had been turned into sectional title flats a good many years ago… They had been good days and, whatever they took away from him now, they would never take his memories: memories of when he was young, of laughter, a zest for life and all that life could give. He had had a better innings than most, but he was not going to end up in jail. He sold the policies. What they did with the money afterwards was their business. Then he laughed aloud and began to whistle as he picked up the phone.

  “That you, Archie? Lucky. Pack a suitcase and a passport, and I’ll pick you up, old buddy.

  “I’ll tell you where we are not going. We are not going to jail, old buddy.”

  “You sound as cheerful as a cricket.”

  “I am.”

  Back in the house, Archie returned the gun to its drawer next to his bed, below the telephone. Then he gave a bellow of joy. He was not on his own after all.

  Heading north, the two friends were over the Zimbabwe border before the sun went down, and drinking beer out of the bottle in the Lion and Elephant. The most remarkable surprise came in the person of Aldo Calucci, who greeted them the following day, not in the least surprised himself. Whenever Aldo had had a problem he had taken refuge in the bush to live with the animals. He understood the news of Security Lion, which had even penetrated to his bush camp on the banks of the big river.

  While the three friends sat on the stoep drinking cold beer from frosty cans, they could hear the lions roar on the Zambian side of the Zambezi River, not far from where Jonathan Holland had let the young Jamba Sithole escape over the water. And since Robert Mugabe had taken over Rhodesia and called it Zimbabwe, the only gunfire in the valley had been the shooting parties culling the game or the game rangers keeping the poachers away from the dwindling herd of rhinoceros. There was peace in the Zambezi Valley and goodwill to all men, except for all the poachers.

  “How long can we stay, Aldo?”

  “You can stay long you like.” His Italian accent was st
ill as thick as treacle. “It always good to have old friends. Old friends, most important. My wife, she best cook in Africa. Good Italian wife. Two boys. She give me good food and two boys. Hey, why you always come when in shit?” Aldo pronounced the word like something that is put on the blankets of a bed.

  For the first time since he heard Teddie had been killed, Archie Fletcher- Wood relaxed. Maybe there was life after death.

  The news was splashed across the top of every newspaper ‘DIRECTORS ABSCOND’. The shares for Security Lion Holdings, Security Life and Security Lion (UK) were suspended and Ben Munroe arrived in the country from Washington, sensing there was an anti-white story for Newsweek that would make the earlier stories pale. The collapse of a major South African institution was better than General Motors being forced by American public opinion to disinvest from white-ruled, apartheid, racist South Africa.

  In London, Smythe-Wilberforce were delighted they had been forced to sell their Lion Life and Security Life shares. Hector read about it in the Economist, which took delight in pointing out once again that the old empire was falling to bits. The UK company then divorced itself from its parent, its own books being exemplary and up to date, the shares being reinstated on the London exchange. The English directors promptly looked around for a buyer, and the brave who bought the shares before the suspension made a happy, unworked-for capital gain of fifty per cent.

  Among them was Hector Fortescue-Smythe who bought in London and Johannesburg. He may have inherited his communist instincts from his mother, but the genes of his grandfather were strong in his DNA. Being a man of clear thinking, he was hedging his bets and testing his nerve. There was only one way to make money under the capitalist system and that was by speculation. The rich in Europe, America and Japan were those who made money on the telephone, hard work having long since given way to the rise or fall of the financial markets, a system that Hector was convinced would one day take them all to financial hell. Alone in his splendid country estate, sometimes playing chess with the parson, he watched the markets: share, currency and commodities. Socially, he was a recluse, and the condition was suiting his temperament.

  In an attempt to find the clue to the imminent collapse of communism, he was rereading the Greek and Roman philosophers, though all of them seemed to confirm that man’s condition never improved, that reform rarely solved anything in the long term; that the flaw was man himself, not his systems.

  Hector celebrated his fiftieth birthday all alone in front of the fire. The party he had was only in his head, with all the people he had known through his life: revisiting his Cambridge tutor, and his mother and father, all dead; his wife dead; his woman dead; his hope for the future of humankind being, according to one who should know, his controller, mortally wounded. It was the beginning of the eccentric, the end of the communist, and he saw it all in the leaping flames of the fire, a half-bottle of very old port mellow in his belly, the rest of the bottle ready beside him, ready to go.

  The same day he had heard that they had made Porterstone an archbishop, and he had laughed. Sometime before, the man had returned his communist party card, saying that if anyone suggested he had ever had anything to do with the party, he would say it was a communist plot to undermine the church. Personally, Hector thought it a great pity the bomb had not killed the bishop. Gilly Bowles had been worth ten Andrew Porterstones. He missed her more than he would ever have imagined.

  The one thing Ben Munroe wanted more than anything else was to be deported from racist South Africa. His entry visa said he was a Newsweek reporter. The man he brought in with the camera came as a tourist. With the help of the underground ANC, they were going to make a one-hour documentary that would show every white in the country sitting pretty at the expense of the blacks. It would show the white voting population to have abdicated their right to know what the police were doing to the blacks, as none of them wished to know.

  If the police raided a man’s hut in the middle of the night to demand his pass, the document that told him where he could live in his own country and nowhere else and abused the man because he was black, whether he had or had not the discriminatory piece of paper, the white public did not wish to know. If a man accused of being a terrorist, but with no legal proof, was forced out of a third floor window and landed on his head, the whites did not want to know. If the police took a village of people and dumped them in the bush hundreds of kilometres away, the white public did not want to know. If the white army reserve was called up and sent into battle in a foreign country, the whites did not want to know. The sordid application of apartheid was left to the bullies and thugs, paid for from taxes collected from everyone in the country, black and white.

  The whites wanted a whites-only suburb, a swimming pool and the sun. They did not even want to see the blacks, except as servants, servants who would have to behave or they would call the police. For forty years, a progressively more corrupt National Party government had been maintaining their privileges, and it was quite satisfactory to them, the privileged white public. The means justified the end. The few living like kings, the many grovelling in the dirt of poverty, hoping for a few crumbs from the white man’s table.

  Ben Munroe was going to condense the abuse and the hate into sixty minutes of prime-time viewing, and it would take him from the written reporter to the small screen where he now wanted to be. He was going to expose the worst system of terror government since Hitler let the Gestapo loose on the world. He was going to make everyone who saw his documentary scream for the release of Nelson Mandela. He was going to help make South Africa explode.

  Sir Desmond Donelly was in his element. They wanted him. The audience at the Royal Albert Hall were on their feet giving him a standing ovation, and he had not yet begun to sing. The ‘RELEASE MANDELA’ banners were strung across the stage, draping the boxes lining the foyer outside. The people were standing in the aisle, in contravention of the fire regulations, and in the wings stood the greatest names in the world of pop music.

  Sir Desmond held up both his long arms, palms to his audience, and the noise subsided. There were tears in his eyes. It had been a long time since they had wanted him and, with the microphone firmly in his right hand, he began to sing the song that had made him famous twenty years before. His old band gave the same backing they had done at the time of his triumphs; he felt the true power of his lungs and sang like he had never sung before. Coming to his finale and throwing his arms to the heavens, he waited for the cascade of applause that would eclipse even the ovation they had given him when he first appeared on the stage. With his arms heavenwards, he waited.

  Luke, sitting in the front row as co-sponsor with Sir Desmond Donelly of the release Mandela concert, realised the horror of the moment. Before the terrible silence had lasted longer than a second, he stood up to his full height of one hundred and ninety-eight centimetres, dressed in the hired tuxedo Moss Brothers had found so difficult to fit, turned to the audience behind and clapped like he had never clapped before. He willed them to clap, willed them with all his mind to rise and give the man on stage what he wanted.

  The television cameras of the world took this moment in time into a hundred million households across the globe where the great population of the world was helping the ANC to carry on the struggle. The song did not matter. It was the singer they must clap… And then the tide broke, and he turned back to clap towards the man who had helped to raise so much money for the cause. But he had gone, fleeing into the wings, away from what he understood at last. The singing career of Des Donelly was over. It had been for many years. He had just made the perfect fool of himself.

  During the standing ovation, while the people were still expecting the singer to come back on stage, Luke Mbeki made his way round the orchestra pit and up to the stage. When he raised his arms for silence, a tall giant of a black man in the heart of British culture, the crowd sank back into their seats.

  “My name is Luke Mbeki. On behalf of Nelson Mandela, I want you all t
o rise once more and thank Sir Desmond Donelly, without whom there would be no concert. I CHALLENGE THE WORLD! RELEASE OUR LEADER! RELEASE MANDELA!”

  Outside in the street, the police contingent looked round to see what had happened in the hall. The shout for freedom had been proclaimed around the world. Inside the concert, without Des Donelly, continued to its climax, the great names of modern pop wooing the crowd to hysteria.

  For Luke, it was the greatest fund-raising platform he had ever created. For the first time in his life, he really knew they were going to win. They had the sympathy of the world. The roll of thunder had crashed around the globe. No one could stop them now. When the paying public had left, the jam session started. The artists had donated their time, but they were going to have a party and Luke wanted to join in the fun. He went off-stage to change out of his immaculate black dinner-jacket, white starched shirt and black tie.

  The party was turning into a riot, and not one person recognised him when he landed perfectly, barefoot, from two metres off-stage, the drums having taken over from the electric guitars at his instigation. The lion skin had a few more moth holes, but the rest of his tribal regalia had survived the years since he was a student playing the jazz clubs to help put himself through university. Two black bands from Soweto followed him on stage and the result was a sensation, which ended with Luke playing the bongo drums in a frenzy of sweat and adrenalin. Somehow, he half expected Matt to leap up on the stage in the hour of his greatest triumph but, instead, the greatest names in music gave him thunderous applause, word having gone round that the savage on the drums was the same man who had saved Des Donelly’s bacon.

  There were screams of ‘AMANDLA!’ to end the dance, and Luke fell back exhausted, almost passing out from the exertion, blackness overwhelming him. A member of the band threw a glass of water in his face and revived him just as he felt he would faint.