Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Sunny had arrived back at the house to find it empty. The servants knew nothing. The drive through Lusikisiki and been almost as bad as the journey through the hills from Umtata, one oncoming bus crammed with people forcing her into the ditch to avoid a head-on collision. She had only relaxed after leaving the Transkei, a state that had retrogressed back into the Third World: goats and chickens all over the road, fences broken, acute soil erosion and too many cattle to the hectare. Leaving a barren earth, stripped as cleanly as though by a plague of locusts. So much for black self-government, she told herself, even with aid from Pretoria paying half the Transkei national budget. She felt there was some similarity between the Transkei and Security Lion Holdings – no visible management.

  The next morning, after a night alone in the house, she phoned the office and had been told that neither Mr Fletcher-Wood nor Mr Kuchinski were to be found, and had she not read the newspapers? Typical of them, she had thought, not to face the problem. She was not an employee of Security Lion, so there was nothing more to do. She had money in her own bank account, the allowance given to her by Archie to run the house and the servants. The rates had been paid, there were no mortgages or instalments remaining and, as Archie had based his allowance to her on what he spent when he was running his own affairs, there was good money in her bank saved by prudently administering the household. Sunny sat back and awaited further developments.

  Matthew Gray arrived in Johannesburg on the same day that Ben Munroe’s ANC sponsor had landed with his head on the concrete outside John Vorster Square, cracking open his skull and breaking his neck. There had been no enquiry or inquest, the remains of the man being simply removed and shovelled into the ground, without a mark to show for his passing.

  Matt had delayed uprooting his family until he was sure he had enough votes to make him CEO at a general meeting of shareholders. Despite the telephone system from the Transkei being anything but direct dialling and because he spoke Xhosa to the switchboard operator in the Port St Johns post office he was able to arrive in the financial capital of South Africa with a majority of shareholders prepared to vote him back on the board as managing director.

  The shareholders’ meeting had been called for a week after his arrival, at Matt’s request. He had some preconditions of his own. Before he took on the job he wished to know what was going on. So far as he could ascertain very few of his old staff still worked for the company and the names he was given of those remaining were not the ones he wished to hear.

  Finding Archie and Lucky had been easy. One educated guess was the bush on the other side of the South African border, and the Harare exchange had given him Aldo Calucci’s phone number.

  “You got Archie or Lucky staying with you?” Matt asked after the briefest of greetings.

  “Both here, Matt. Where you?”

  “Port St Johns. You okay? Hear you’re married. Wife. Kids. Me, too. Put Arch on the line, old friend. We drink beer again soon, you hear”

  “Hello, Matt. Bit of a mess, what?” said Archie, trying to sound hale and hearty. There was little doubt as to why Matt had contacted him; it was their first phone call in sixteen years. “Bad news travels fast.”

  “A courier will be coming up with proxy forms for both of you. Sign them in my favour, and stay where you are.”

  “I’m sorry, Matt,” mumbled Archie after an embarrassed silence.

  “So am I.”

  The value of Security Lion Holdings shares were half what they had been when Teddie Botha was alive, and the next important call from his base in the Cape Hermes Hotel had gone to the lawyer who was the trustee to the money Matt had tried to give away without success, probably through the black man’s ignorance not knowing how to draw money from a white man’s bank, as much as his pride.

  “Buy Security Lion Holdings shares through nominees and seven brokerage houses.”

  “But, Matt the shares are going to be suspended.”

  “No, they are not. Please be kind enough to do as I say. Buy slowly. You have a month to pick up as many shares as possible.”

  “Where are you speaking from?”

  “The Transkei.”

  “It’s a hell of a mess up here. Are you sure?” Matt replaced the receiver without answering. He had finished the conversation and other matters were on his mind. He had no time for argument. The next call had been to the registrar of insurance in Pretoria.

  “If I come back, will you give me three months to find out what has gone on and another three months to put it right?”

  ‘You will be doing me a personal favour Mister Gray. This is a mess the government can well do without”

  “Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn about the government.” retorted Matt. “I’m worried about the policyholders. I shall want our agreement in writing, and signed by the minister of economic affairs. I don’t want the Afrikaans insurance companies to use this as an opportunity to land on my head. I have enough bad memories about the insurance industry.”

  “Funnily enough, the shares have picked up this morning.”

  “I know.”

  “The letter will be ready for your collection.”

  The following days were spent gleaning proxy agreements from institutional shareholders as the main block of shares. Teddie Botha’s, were in limbo, with the executor of the estate refusing to make a decision preferring to wait for the courts to make the decision for him. It was a safe way out for the attorney but a major frustration for Matt. He had refused to shave off his beard, but had agreed to a good trim, which Lorna performed to perfection, still leaving a little of the painter to look back at him from the mirror. The two insurmountable problems were the effect this radical change of lifestyle would have on his family and his life as a painter. The colony would look after itself he was sure of that.

  “Cousin, old chap, would you mind very much if I came with you?”

  “Charles, old chap, the only good thing I could see in all this was leaving you and your shooting stick behind.”

  “Maybe I should make a break for it.”

  “Go back to Scotland and sell that damn castle,” said Matt emphatically.

  “Still no buyers, you see. You’ll be able to paint at the weekends.”

  “So that’s it.”

  “Not really. Sophia. I don’t think she loves me.”

  “I could have told you that the day you arrived,” Matt informed him, trying not to sound too curt.

  “There was always hope until she heard from that man she was going to marry. That mixed-marriage act which has just been repealed allows her to marry in Cape Town. He’s a doctor. Poor old Charlie’s left out a bit now, old chap. Well, you see, I don’t really have anywhere else to go. I thought we could fill up the old hamper and drive up to Johannesburg together. The kids love travelling in the back of the kombi and there’s a roof rack for the bits and pieces, if you see what I mean.”

  “When’s Sophia leaving?”

  “She’s gone… You’ll have to excuse me, old chap.” Charles Farquhar, twelfth earl of Lothianmore, was crying.

  Matt did not have the heart to ask what would happen to the school which had so relied on Sophia. He could not be in two places at once.

  The entire family arrived in the floral camper at Archie’s house, where they were going to stay. Matt had put his foot down about living with his in-laws. There would be enough problems without arguing about how his children should be brought up. Through the paramount chief, a letter was sent to Luke, telling him that Sipho was going to Johannesburg and giving the reasons why. The alternative raised greater problems than the ones to be faced in the future.

  Surprisingly, the kombi had rattled all the way there without breaking down, the only mistake being leaving the hamper of food in the back with the children and the dog. When they stopped for lunch, the food had all been eaten and the dog and Robert had been sick on the floor. It was one of the few times Matt had ever seen his cousin get really angry.

  Sunny had gone acro
ss to Tilda’s where the situation had normalised. When she heard that Sunny had dragged Matthew Gray out of the bush, Theo danced a little jig, a vision of personal wealth flashing back into focus.

  “So that’s why the shares are going up and not down,” she said, hugging herself.

  “Have you read the will, Theo?”

  “The boy gets the money but it’s all the same, really; I’m his grandmother.” Theo sat there with an obvious smirk on her face; number one was going to be all right, and that was all that concerned her.

  Sunny turned abruptly away from her, and spoke to her daughter. “Tilda,” she said. “I want Teddie’s office keys for Matt. He wants to make a personal investigation. If he is satisfied and takes over the management of the company, he will most probably save your son’s inheritance.”

  Once she had the set of keys in her bag, Sunny was glad to get out of the house. Such obvious avarice made her question the laws of inheritance. It was fortunate that Matt would be dealing with the trustees of Teddie’s estate until the boy turned twenty-five, rather than the two women she had left gloating around the sparkling clean swimming pool. She did not envy the children, their mother or their grandmother.

  Matt let himself into the grand building, Security Lion House that had been built after his day to show how grand the company had become, the money to erect the monument to pride having come from the policyholders. He took the lift to the top floor, the executive floor.

  It was six o’clock in the morning, and the man on the gate to the basement parking had recognised Archie’s car and his security clearance disk with its parking bay number, and taken little interest in the bearded man driving the car. With the ANC throwing bombs around all over South Africa, it was not the kind of security which protected the building and the staff. Teddie’s office was opulent, too big and too plush with carpet, in contrast to the riot of untidiness. The great expectations for the Rhodes Scholar, the man who had played rugby for Oxford, had come to a strange and sad end.

  Matt looked around the mess in disgust. He would have to read everything among the litter to restore any kind of order. He had once seen a lawyer’s office in the same kind of turmoil. The man had had moments of brilliance, but lost the crucial facts when they were most needed. The lawyer, Matt was happier to remember as he rummaged through the mess in Teddie’s office, was on the other side, so Lion Life had won the case easily, and the lawyer’s client in a-follow-on criminal case had been taken off to jail for trying to defraud an insurance company. Standing with his back to the chaos, he looked out of the twenty-first floor window on the corner of Rissik and Plein Streets, across to the railway station that Nelson Mandela had sent his men to bomb, sending him to jail so many years before.

  Matt wondered vaguely what he was doing here, away from the sanctuary of Port St Johns. There were so many wrongs and so many different ways of setting them right. He hoped the struggle for Luke would be worthwhile for all of them, and that they would not exchange one tyranny for another. There were always two sides to the same tale. Maybe the armed struggle was Mandela’s only option those many years ago. How could he judge the pain from his ivory tower, his position of privilege? How could he know the burning frustration of impotence against a sea of overwhelming injustice? Maybe he too would have bombed the railway station and rationalised the civilian deaths as a small price to pay – good rationalisation except for the innocent dead and the starving poor suffering the pain of the subsequent ANC instigated sanctions that lost them their jobs. But what else could they do against omnipotent oppressors? He was not able to judge, and thanked his lucky stars that this one had not been either his decision or his responsibility.

  With a big sigh that spoke of so many problems outside his control, he turned to face the mess left behind by Teddie Botha. If there was one thing that Matthew Gray detested, it was the chaos left by the incompetence of other people who professed to know what they were doing. Putting the last glorious sixteen years out of his mind, he sat down behind the desk and began to work.

  By the time the door to the office opened at half past eight, there were three neat piles of paper on the large desk. One was important, the second was to be read again and the last was destined for the waste-paper basket.

  The young girl who gaped at the bearded man in the ill-fitting suit was almost pretty, if a little too severe for Matt’s taste. He stood up and gave her his softest smile, turning the well-tanned skin around the corners of his eyes into well-defined crow’s feet. The girl backed away in apprehension at the sudden size of the man behind the desk.

  “What are you doing here?” she finally managed to ask, gathering up her dignity.

  “Trying to make some sense of all this,” Matt explained, waving a hand at the papers. “You must be Teddie’s secretary. My name is Matthew Gray. I used to be chairman of this company. I’m here to help and I am going to need a lot of yours. Maybe you could find us both a cup of coffee, and I can tell you what I want to do. At first glance it all looks a lot worse than it actually is. Teddie never used to be so untidy.”

  “Since that woman.”

  “So that was the problem,” mused Matt, understanding. So his original assessment of Teddie’s potential had not been completely wrong after all.

  “You don’t think there was anything financial worrying Mister Botha?”

  “Why should there have been, sales had never been better.”

  “And Mister Strover?”

  “He was insider-trading on his own account. The shares he bought were always good. Nothing wrong with that man’s judgement. Just greedy. Did he not steal your paintings?”

  “Only in a way. A way that suited me well.” Matt wondered how the girl knew about his paintings. He was back in what they called the real world, the one he saw as artificial.

  “I’ll get some coffee.”

  Matt used all his charm to make the girl relax and, by the end of the day, he was instinctively sure that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the company. There were no red lights flashing. Everything was merely six months behind where it should have been in the chief executive’s office.

  “I want to interview every member of the staff individually,” declared Matt.

  “It will take you a week.”

  “I have six days. Miss Tupper will interview the ladies. She is employed by me, not by Security Lion. She will not interfere with your job, but I might just mention she was my right hand when I owned this company.” He was smiling again. “You may know Miss Tupper as the friend of Mister Fletcher-Wood. I know her a great deal more, especially her competence. We started the whole thing together. Sunny will reread the larger piles of paper and then we will go into the filing cabinets.

  “Your job is to keep everyone else away from us, except those to be interviewed. Draw up a list, starting from the bottom, and please include the black staff including the lady who made the coffee. I like happy people to work with. Smiles. Long faces are not for me. Now you go off home and have an early night. You and I are going to sort out this place and put the smiles back on all the faces.”

  When the tea-girl was interviewed in Xhosa, it was the first time she had ever heard a white man speak her language and the first time she had ever sat down in any of the offices when there was a white man in the room. When she left, the beaming smile on her black face lit the corridor.

  The press conference was set up at the end of the week in the company boardroom, and Matt sat in the centre of the big table set at the back of the room, facing the cameras and the reporters. The senior partner of the company’s auditors was on his right, a man who had welcomed the return of Matthew Gray with even more enthusiasm than the registrar of insurance. The modern trend with insolvent financial institutions was to go for the directors, senior management and the auditors, in that order. The era of impregnable professional accountants was over. Everyone had to be accountable.

  On Matt’s left was a representative of the outside auditors sent in by the regis
trar of insurance to protect the public. Flanking them were the outside directors, non-executive, every one of whom had offered to resign, a condition Matt was going to be happy to accept when his control of the company was confirmed at the shareholders’ meeting which would follow the press conference. Archie and Lucky were still in Zimbabwe, though Matt had their letters of resignation in his pocket.

  He stood up to address only the second press conference that he had called in his life. After his memories of the first, his throat was dry and he felt very tense, but he took care to make sure it didn’t show.

  “I am confident that my friend on my left will find nothing amiss in the books of Security Lion Holdings or its subsidiaries. I have spent a hard week finding out what was wrong around here. Mister Botha was under extreme personal pressure. The daughter that he thought was his own was not; his wife had been impregnated by another man. They would have divorced but for the fact that the blood tests which showed the impossibility of his being the father of the girl came after his wife was again pregnant. This time it was proved seven months later that he was indeed the father. The two doctors who conducted the tests are here for you to question.”

  “For twenty long months before his death in battle, the chairman of this company was unable to function as a man or as an executive. His wife, by her infidelity, had destroyed him and had gone a long way towards destroying this company. My two original partners, both competent salesmen and responsible for the graph of sales that shows a rise of seven per cent above the next best sales in the industry, were, by their own admission, incompetent as administrators. I have both their resignations, together with those of the rest of the board, in my pocket, along with signed proxy forms that give me control of this company once again. The mysterious buyer you gentlemen have speculated upon for seven weeks was myself, through the trust I invoked when I was forced to depart from this industry at the instigation of a colleague of yours from overseas. That was his prerogative. I have no quarrel with the methods of your reporting. Enough to say, that Ben Munroe of Newsweek did me the greatest favour of my life.