Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “I hope the state president knows what certain elements in his police force are up to.”

  “So do I. You don’t really think someone could…”

  “Yes, I do,” Sunny asserted. “It’s always the very few who give the rest of us the bad reputation. Too much secrecy in government. Too many people terrified of the total communist onslaught. Too much power without accountability. They don’t even tell the public where the money’s spent.”

  “Then this country is in a lot more trouble than I thought.” Sunny wasn’t quite certain that the man was not being sarcastic.

  The wheels began to turn, but each enquiry to the police was like eating soup with a fork. Everything dribbled through. Nothing stayed on the fork.

  While Sunny was driving back to Pretoria, Charles’ jumbo was landing at Nairobi airport and, when she reached home late that night, Lorna said Charles had also disappeared.

  “You think the same people have run off with Charles?” she asked Lorna, as they rummaged in his room.

  “Who on earth would want to do that! Anyway, his shooting stick has gone. When Matt comes home, he will think it the only good thing to have come out of this affair. The children want to know where their father is, and I said he’d gone down to Port St Johns for a few days, and they all went mad thinking he’d left them behind. They hate this place. Peace says it’s the first time she’s ever been bored in her life because there’s nothing to do, and Sipho wants to know why everyone around here looks at him funny. He’s taken to sticking out his tongue and says school is not so much fun without Sophia, poor girl. I only hope she’s happily married by now.

  “My mother and father have been as much use as a sick headache. Both on about ‘once a hippie, always a hippie’, and dad says the rumours are that Matt’s run away from his responsibilities for the second time and that leopards never change their spots. They could be some help, damn it. They won’t even take the children, as they don’t want Sipho in their house. And I’m so worried I can’t think, and Lucky pitching up hasn’t helped. If he had done what he was supposed to do and run this company properly, all this would never have happened.

  “Archie’s in the lounge. I just don’t know what’s going on. And some black man’s sidled up to the cook and said if we want any help the ANC are waiting, and the cook says if the police find out he’s dead, he doesn’t want anything to do with anyone and has gone on the bus back to the Transkei. There’s just no one I can turn to. I’m a painter and a mother and I love Matt, but I know nothing about big business and police and everyone hating everyone else.

  “The place has gone mad. I grew up in Jo’burg but the place has gone mad. This is the real loony bin, not Port St Johns. Every one of them down there is sane in comparison. . . Damn it, I want Matt, and I want to go home and so do the children.” Lorna was crying, and there was very little Sunny could do to help.

  One hour and forty minutes after the British Airways Boeing 747 landed at Heathrow airport, Charles arrived in a taxi at the London office of the ANC and asked to see Luke Mbeki.

  “He’s not here at the moment,” said the girl at reception.

  “Then I’ll wait.” Charles opened up the shooting stick and planted the sharp end in the carpet.

  “You can’t do that; you’ll make a hole!”

  “The longer I sit, the bigger the hole.” He tried the big smile to see if that would help. “And please hurry; I have to give a speech in the House of Lords at half-past two.”

  “I’ll get Mister Mbeki, but please don’t sit on that shooting stick. What is your name, sir?”

  “Charles Farquhar, earl of Lothianmore.”

  When Charles stood up at question time, the press gallery was surprisingly full, Luke having warned reporters sensitive to the anti-apartheid cause to be ready for headline news.

  Charles had been introduced in the House of Lords soon after his father died but had never returned, as he had not seen the reason. Without one note and straight from his own experience, he gave an impassioned speech to the British people, urging them not to bury their heads in their South African investments but to bring pressure to bear on the white minority government to stop a system that was a crime against humanity.

  “There are almost two million of this island stock in South Africa. They must either stand up for counting or accept responsibility for apartheid, and that goes for Her Majesty’s government as well. Two days ago, my cousin, Matthew Gray, was abducted in the night because he publicly admitted to having an ANC executive as a friend. It is my opinion that they want him dead. We British cannot politely ignore what is really happening in South Africa. They must be forced to change and we must help to force them.’

  By the time the British newspapers were carrying the contents of his speech, Luke was able to tell Charles where Matt was being held.

  “Underground in the cells at John Vorster Square. He’s nearly dead, Charles. They want to kill him… I have never felt so impotent in my life.”

  Charles used the phone in Luke’s flat to call Sunny, and Lucky answered.

  “Lucky Kuchinski.”

  “Charles Farquhar. I’m in London. Matt’s in John Vorster Square and he’s nearly dead. Tell Sunny. Tell his wife.”

  “We are going to tell South Africa if my plan doesn’t work,” gritted Lucky through his teeth.

  After the second day of torture, Matt’s body had again been unable to respond to the command to run for the open window and, when they dumped him back down in the bowels of the earth with a thin blanket to cover his nakedness, with water but no food, he took his mind out of his body and left the room.

  He took his spirit back to Port St Johns where he heard the loud cry of the gulls, watched his children, looked at his paintings and saw the blood-red sun sink down on the horizon. All that night he stayed away from his shattered body but, when they came for him on the third day, they had to carry him up to the fourth floor to the welcoming arms of Warrant Officer Higgins.

  “Strap him in the chair, sergeant,” he said in English.

  “Today, this commie bastard is going to tell us all about his friends. And sergeant, please open the window.”

  Minister Kloss had begun to feel the heat, but the secret of the success of the bureau of state security was that the Ministry always backed its operatives to the full. He had merely called Frikkie Swart into his office to give him a warning.

  “The British press believe we are holding Gray, something I don’t wish to know, one way or the other, you see. Just don’t leave evidence. Make sure everything is clean. No one knows anything for sure.” They were speaking in Afrikaans. The two men had not even looked at each other.

  For the first time in years, Lucky Kuchinski was enjoying himself. He and three other ex-members of Mike Hoare’s fifth commando, ex-mercenaries who had fought together against the Simba rebels in Katanga, were driving along the M1 freeway from Johannesburg to Pretoria, heading for the most expensive suburb.

  They found the house they were looking for without any difficulty and Lucky drove the car just inside the driveway, where they waited until it was dark, the light fading just after half-past six. The house among the jacaranda trees would be burglar-alarmed, and Lucky smiled at the smugness of the governing establishment that considered itself so powerful that its officials only required normal household security to protect themselves. Archie, a broken reed, was not among his group. Lucky was now the one with the initiative and courage.

  After his meeting with the minister, Frikkie Swart had spent a pleasant three hours in an illegal gambling house where the girls were both pretty and willing. He found the liquor and girls relaxed him after a hard day’s work.

  As he turned into his driveway, he was in a very good mood and just a little drunk from his exertions. In the warm March evening, there had been no rain that day, so he had the window down and his right elbow rested comfortably on the driver’s door, a little out of the window.

  Lucky took him out of the car i
n three swift moves – throttling him, opening the door and yanking him on to the gravel, while one of the ex-mercenaries stopped the car and turned off the engine. Within sixty seconds, they had obliterated foot-and-tyre-prints and were driving away from the house.

  “There are two more of us at John Vorster Square charge office waiting to receive Matthew Gray,” Lucky informed Frikkie. “And you will tell Warrant Officer Higgins to let him out, or we will repeat what Higgins has done to Gray and then hand you over to the ANC in Angola.” They were driving to an ANC safe house in Glen Furness on a four-hectare smallholding.

  “The police will get you bastards,” snarled Frikkie, trying to cover his fear.

  “Possibly, but not before you end up in an ANC detention camp.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “That’s a big shame… Guys, shall we do the stick up the rectum or break every bone in his body one by one?” Lucky was very much enjoying himself at the man’s fear.

  “Stick up the arse. Lasts longer,” said the driver. “Took me three days to kill a Simba that way in the Congo. Bloody works, man. Only trouble is when the bowels burst they shit all over the place.”

  In the safe house, they sat him down next to the telephone. “Which do you want, Swart? The stick, break your bones, or make a phone call?” Lucky’s accent had broken some way back to his Polish origin.

  When the phone call had been made, Lucky shook his head in disgust.

  “Bullies are always the same. No guts. Nasty, weak little men.”

  “They’re going to take Gray back to the Transkei,” said Frikkie.

  “Then you stay here until he arrives. We will know soon enough. If you think how l know Higgins’ name, you know I know which cell. You not get him out, you’re in pain, quick, you see.”

  Frikkie, smiling inwardly, let the threat pass. He had all the time in the world. It was his country. The police would find him soon. They had far too much at stake.

  Half an hour later, the phone rang in the house and Lucky looked down on the seated Frikkie Swart after speaking on the phone. “Take off his trousers. This little man does not understand.”

  “You touch me and you’re all dead,” warned Frikkie Swart.

  “You’re dead meat anyway. So’s Higgins. But I want you to scream a lot for what you do to my friend and too many other people. By the time I finish, you’ll wish your mother had had an abortion.”

  The police first threw tear-gas at the crowd outside John Vorster Square, then they fired rubber bullets. Then the people began to die and all the time the cameras of the world recorded the carnage. The placards were explicit, and the message flashed round the world again: ‘TORTURE’, ‘GRAY’, and the names of seventy-four other men and women who had died in police custody that year alone.

  The message to the police to release Gray came not from Frikkie Swart but from Minister Kloss, the first time he had ever interfered with his operatives. When they carried Matt into the ambulance, Matt was unaware of what was going on as his spirit was still in Port St Johns and his body naked in the cell. By then, Frikkie Swart was on his way to Angola and an ANC detention camp. Two days later, Warrant Officer Higgins, ex-British Malayan police, was found mutilated in his garage. Someone had cut off his genitals and left him to die.

  On the Monday, Sunny, in conjunction with the auditors, sold Security Lion to a consortium of banks and financial institutions, and the shares of Security Lion Holdings were suspended on the Johannesburg stock exchange. Lucky and Archie returned to Aldo’s safari camp with the ex-Congolese mercenaries who had set up an anti-poaching unit for the Zimbabwean government in a last-ditch effort to save what was left of the black rhinoceros in the Zambezi Valley.

  After he had spent two weeks in hospital, Lorna and the children took Matt back to Port St Johns. But his spirit had not yet returned to his body, a body that was now a skeleton of its former self. The colony welcomed him home and went away to cry.

  The most visible sign of his experience was a permanent trembling of the hands. Even if his mind had been able, he would not have had the strength to hold a paintbrush or his palette. The sun was warm on his body and Lorna fed him as she would have fed a child, half the food dribbling down the slack sides of his mouth while the sunken eyes looked out to sea with a thousand-metre stare that saw nothing. For the first time Lorna saw how old he was, and it made her sad and ever more determined.

  “You are going to paint again, my husband, and you will paint in your own name and we will never again leave the harmony of Port St Johns.”

  Sunny, alone in her house, was wondering what to do with the rest of her life. Archie had gone without a whimper, not even helping Lucky with Frikkie Swart. She was standing in the lounge looking out of the window at a butterfly hovering over the pool, when a man came up the driveway. She heard the maid answer the door and a man ask for Miss Poppy Tupper.

  The man was a policeman in plain clothes, and the deportation order was for Sunny to be out of the country within twenty-four hours. Standing looking at the back of the man walking back down the drive, she was not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  When the sale of Teddie Botha’s shares in Security Lion was explained to Theo Blaze, she was at first unable to comprehend the magnitude of the money. Her grandson was super-rich and she, the grandmother, would never have to worry about money ever again. She did not even need men any longer. In the past, she had only ever needed men for their money.

  Neither Theo or Tilda gave one thought to the man who had been incinerated, half in and half out of his tank. Neither of them had ever wanted the man, only his money. They brought out the best French champagne and began to celebrate.

  3

  The English spring came to Charles Farquhar with snowdrops, crocuses and an avalanche of social invitations. His speech in the House of Lords had been to help Matt and warn the British of impending disaster in South Africa, but it had also alerted every social-climbing mother in London where the affluence of Thatcherism had put fortunes into hands that wished to use the money to gain a permanent place in the way of things.

  A countess in the family was a prize that many thought the epitome of social arrival, and the fact that the old pile of stones, even if it was still in hock to the inland revenue, was still in the family sent a number of rich bitches into a frenzy of desire. There was a lot more money in England than hereditary titles, the new ones mostly of life-peerages which came when the old goats had done whatever they had set out to do. Charles at thirty was a target for the nouveau riche that sent the mothers off in a hunt which made some of their daughters blush.

  There were parties, flats to be borrowed (stocked with everything including the daughter), weekends in the country and prattling flattery that Charles let flow over him like so much water over the duck’s proverbial back. If Sophia had ignored him, here were a number of young ladies to whom he could return the compliment while having a lot of fun. The thought of Sophia married made going back to Port St Johns as pointless as living in the damp and cold of the family castle all on his own. In the south of England, the lilac was blooming in white and purple, the trees were breaking out in leaves of the palest green and the east winds had returned to Siberia. In a perverse kind of way, Charles was enjoying himself.

  Isidore Socrates Salvadori, born Jack Kemp in an earlier life, knew the value of belted earls more than Sophia van Hoek, and was delighted to give Charles a job in his Bond Street gallery, not worrying what time he arrived in the morning or the condition of his head. With so many rich mothers out to impress, Isidore marked everything up thirty per cent and laughed at how easy it was to part fools from their husbands’ money. The most that many of the wives had done in their lives was to provide the man with a daughter. The husbands more interested in other things than middle-aged women, were happy to write out the cheques.

  “My wife has jolly good taste. I mean, look at this painting. The earl of Lothianmore sold it to her, you know, in that Italian�
�s gallery in Bond Street. Don’t know much about paintings myself, but this one’s good. Even I can see that. Young Lothianmore’s taking out my daughter – crazy about her. We’ll have to fix up the castle, but what’s money for, anyway, I ask you? Great speech in the Lords. Go a long way, young Charles. Best thing the British can do in South Africa is get out. Waste of time. Macmillan worked that out in the sixties.

  “I’m all for the common market. Made a fortune. Bigger than America and, when the Russians collapse, there’ll be a huge market in the East. You read Gorbachev’s Perestroika? Man’s a capitalist trying to get out. All this communism and socialism never works in the end. Can’t expect something for nothing in this world. Started with nothing myself. Just goes to show. Imagine a grandson of mine being the earl of Lothianmore.”

  Charles was more than happy to play the game, having first discussed the morality of it all with Duncan Fox, the skipper.

  “They’d waste it on something else, those women. That type are only happy flashing money. Even with you out of their lives, Charles, they’ll still tell everyone who comes into the house who sold them the painting and how their daughter decided not to live in a draughty old castle in Scotland.”

  “Anything Isidore sells is valuable, a little over-priced for today, but valuable. The Bernard Strovers have doubled in price now the word has gone out that the painter’s finished. Isidore keeps his own Strovers locked away. The paintings are what matter, not the controversy about who the painter was. Probably adds to the value; bit of mystery. Never did Shakespeare any harm. Take the commission you make on the sales to the mothers as money well-earned and have some fun. Always have fun when you can, young Charles… So you really think there will be a civil war in South Africa?”

  “I’m convinced of it. The ANC with their ‘comrades’ in the townships have effectively kicked out the white government, made the place totally ungovernable. The kids can’t even go to school half the time. And if the ANC comes back from exile, you think the comrades, with their kangaroo courts and the charming practice of necklacing a man with a rubber tyre, filling it with petrol and setting it on fire, will want to give up power? Power’s a bigger drug than money. One of the reasons I enjoyed Port St Johns; no power, no money and the girl I loved thought old English titles quaint but irrelevant. We lived as individuals without the false face of materialism. Over here you need a fortune to live half as well, and most people are only interested in what you have got”