by Wilbur Smith
He delivered the article to Leon Herbstein on the Thursday and found himself immediately embroiled in an editorial review of it that lasted until almost eight o’clock that evening. Leon Herbstein called in his assistant and his deputy editor, and their views were divided between publishing with only minor alterations and not publishing at all, for fear of bringing down the wrath of the Publications Control Board, the government censors who had the power to ban the Mail and put it out of business.
‘But it’s all true,’ Michael protested. ‘I have substantiated every single fact I have quoted. It’s true and it’s important – that is all that really matters.’ And the three older journalists looked at him pityingly.
‘All right, Mickey,’ Leon Herbstein dismissed him at last. ‘You can go on home. I will let you know the final decision in due course.’
As Michael moved dispiritedly towards the door, the deputy editor nodded at him. ‘Publish or not, Mickey, it is a damned good effort. You can be proud of it.’
When Michael got back to his apartment he found somebody sitting on a canvas holdall outside his front door. Only when the person stood up did he recognize the massively developed shoulders, the glinting steel-rimmed spectacles and spiky hairstyle.
‘Garry,’ he shouted joyously, and rushed to embrace his elder brother.
They sat side by side on the bed and talked excitedly, interrupting each other and laughing and exclaiming at each other’s news.
‘What are you doing in Jo’burg?’ Michael demanded at last.
‘I’ve come up from Silver River just for the weekend. I want to get at the new computer mainframe in head office, and there are a few things I want to check at the land surveyor’s office. So I thought, what the hell – why spend money on a hotel when Mickey has a flat? So I brought my sleeping-bag. Can I doss on your floor.’
‘The bed pulls out into a double,’ Mickey told him happily. ‘You don’t have to sleep on the floor.’
They went down to Costa’s restaurant and Garry bought a pack of chicken curry and half a dozen Cokes. They ate the food out of the pack, sharing a spoon to save washing up, and they talked until long after midnight. They had always been very close to each other. Even though he was younger, Michael had been a staunch ally during those dreadful childhood years of Garry’s bed-wetting and stuttering and Sean’s casually savage bullying. Then again Michael had not truly realized how lonely he had been in this strange city until this moment, and now there were so many nostalgic memories and so much unrequited need for affection to assuage, so many subjects of earth-shattering importance to discuss. They sat up into the small hours dealing with money and work and sex and the rest of it.
Garry was stunned to learn that Michael earned thirty-seven pounds ten shillings a month.
‘How much does this kennel cost you a month?’ he demanded.
‘Twenty pounds,’ Michael told him.
That leaves you seventeen pounds ten a month to eat and exist. They should be arrested for slave labour.’
‘It’s not as bad as that – Pater gives me an allowance to make do. How much do you earn, Garry?’ Michael demanded, and Garry looked guilty.
‘I get my board and lodging and all my meals at the mine, single quarters, and I am paid a hundred a month as an executive trainee.’
‘Son of a gun!’ Michael was deeply impressed. ‘What do you do with all that?’
It was Garry’s turn to look amazed. ‘Save it, of course. I’ve got over two thousand in the bank already.’
‘But what are you going to do with all that?’ Michael insisted. ‘What are you going to spend it on?’
‘Money isn’t for spending,’ Garry explained. ‘Money is for saving – that is, if you want to be rich.’
‘And you want to be rich?’ Michael asked.
‘What else is there?’ Garry was genuinely puzzled by the question.
‘What about doing an important job the best way you can? Isn’t that something to strive for, even better than getting rich?’
‘Oh, sure!’ said Garry with vast relief. ‘But then, of course, you won’t get rich unless you do just that.’
It was almost two in the morning when Michael at last switched off the bedside lamp and they settled down nose to toes, until Garry asked in the darkness the question he had not been able to ask until then.
‘Mickey, have you heard from Mater at all?’
Michael was silent for so long that he went on impetuously. ‘I have tried to speak to Dad about her, but he just clams up and won’t say a word. Same with Nana, except she went a little further. She said, “Don’t mention that woman’s name in Welteveden again. She was responsible for Blaine’s murder.” I thought you might know where she is.’
‘She’s in London,’ Michael said softly. ‘She writes to me every week.’
‘When is she coming back, Mickey?’
‘Never,’ Michael said. ‘She and Pater are getting a divorce.’
‘Why, Mickey, what happened that she had to leave like that, without even saying goodbye?’
‘I don’t know. She won’t say. I wrote and asked her, but she wouldn’t tell me.’
Garry thought he had gone to sleep, but after a long silence Michael said so softly that he barely caught the words, ‘I miss her, Garry. Oh, God, how much I miss her.’
‘Me too,’ said Garry dutifully, but each week that passed was so filled with excitement and new experience that for Garry her memory had already faded and blurred.
The next morning Leon Herbstein called Mickey into his office.
‘OK, Mickey,’ he said. ‘We are going to run the “Rage” article as you wrote it.’ Only then did Michael realize how important that decision had been to him. For the rest of that day his jubilation was tempered by that reflection. Why was his feeling of relief so powerful? Was it the personal achievement, the thought of seeing his name in print again? It was part of that, he was honest with himself, but there was something else even deeper and more substantial. The truth. He had written the truth and the truth had prevailed. He had been exonerated.
Michael went down early the next morning and brought a copy of the Mail up to the bed-sitter. He woke Garry up and read the ‘Rage’ feature to him. Garry had only come in a few hours before dawn. He had spent most of the night in the computer room at the new Courtney Mining building in Diagonal Street. David Abrahams, on Shasa’s discreet suggestion, had arranged for him to have a free hand with the equipment when it was not being used on company business. This morning Garry was red-eyed with exhaustion and his jowls were covered with a dense dark pelt of new beard. However, he sat up in his pyjamas and listened with attention while Michael read to him, and when he had finished Garry put on his spectacles and sat solemnly reading it through for himself while Michael brewed coffee on the gas-ring in the corner.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ Garry said at last. ‘How we just take them for granted. They are there, working the shifts at the Silver River or harvesting the grapes at Weltevreden, or waiting on table. But you never think of them as actually having feelings and desires and thoughts the same as we do – not until you read something like this.’
‘Thank you, Garry,’ Michael said softly.
‘What for?’
‘That’s the greatest compliment anybody has ever paid me,’ Michael said.
He saw very little more of Garry that weekend. Garry spent the Saturday morning at the deeds registry until that office closed at noon and then went on up to the Courtney building to take over the computer as soon as the company programmers went off for their weekend.
He let himself back into the flat at three the next morning and climbed into the bottom end of Michael’s bed. When they both awoke late on the Sunday morning, Michael suggested, ‘Let’s go out to Zoo Lake. It’s a hot day and the girls will be out in their sundresses.’ He offered the bait deliberately for he was desperate for Garry’s company, lonely and suffering from a sense of anti-climax after all the worry and uncertainty pr
evious to the printing of the ‘Rage’ article and the subsequent apparent lack of any reaction to it.
‘Hey, Mickey, I’d love to come with you – but I want to do something on the computer. It’s Sunday, I’ll have it to myself all day.’ Garry looked mysterious and self-satisfied. ‘You see, I’m on to something, Mickey. Something incredible, and I can’t stop now.’
Alone Michael caught the bus out to Zoo Lake. He spent the day sitting on the lawns reading and watching the girls. It only made him feel even more lonely and insignificant. When he got back to his dreary little flatlet, Garry’s bag was gone and there was a message written with soap on his shaving mirror: ‘Going back to Silver River. Might see you next weekend. G.’
When Michael walked into the Mail’s offices on the Monday morning he found that those members of the newspaper’s staff who had arrived ahead of him were gathered in a silent nervous cluster in the middle of the newsroom while half a dozen strangers were going through the filing cabinets and rifling the papers and books on the desks. They had already assembled a dozen large cardboard cartons of various papers, and these were stacked in the aisle between the desks.
‘What is happening?’ Michael asked innocently, and his sub gave him a warning glance as he explained.
‘These are police officers of the security branch.’
‘Who are you?’ The plain-clothes officer who was in charge of the detail came across to Michael, and when he gave his name the officer checked his list.
‘Ah, yes – you are the one we want. Come with me.’ He led Michael down to Leon Herbstein’s office and went in without knocking.
There was another stranger with Herbstein. ‘Yes, what is it?’ he snapped, and the security policeman answered diffidently.
‘This is the one, Captain.’
The stranger frowned at Michael, but before he could speak Leon Herbstein interrupted quickly.
‘It’s all right, Michael. The police have come to serve a banning order on the Saturday edition with the ‘Rage’ article in it, and they have a warrant to search the offices. They also want to talk to you, but it’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ said the police captain heavily. ‘Are you the one who wrote that piece of Commie propaganda?’
‘I wrote the “Rage” article,’ Michael said clearly, but Leon Herbstein cut in.
‘However, as the editor of the Golden City Mail it was my decision to print it, and I accept full responsibility for the article.’
The captain ignored him and studied Michael for a moment before going on. ‘Man, you are just a kid. What do you know, anyway?’
‘I object to that, Captain,’ Herbstein told him angrily. ‘Mr Courtney is an accredited journalist—’
‘Ja,’ the captain nodded, ‘I expect that he is.’ But he went on addressing Michael, ‘What about you? Do you object to coming down to Marshall Square police headquarters to help us with our investigations?’
Michael glanced at Herbstein and he said immediately, ‘You don’t have to go, Michael. They don’t have a warrant for your arrest.’
‘What do you want from me, Captain?’ Michael hedged.
‘We want to know who told you all that treasonable stuff you wrote about.’
‘I can’t disclose my sources,’ Michael said quietly.
‘I can always get a warrant if you refuse to cooperate,’ the captain warned him ominously.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Michael agreed. ‘But I won’t disclose my sources. That’s not ethical.’
‘I’ll be down there with a lawyer right away, Michael,’ Herbstein promised. ‘You don’t have to worry, the Mail will back you all the way.’
‘All right. Let’s go,’ said the police captain.
Leon Herbstein accompanied Michael down the newsroom and as they passed the cartons of impounded literature the captain observed gloatingly, ‘Man, you’ve got a pile of banned stuff there, Karl Marx and Trotsky even – that’s really poisonous rubbish.’
‘It’s research material,’ said Leon Herbstein.
‘Ja, try telling that to the magistrate,’ the captain chortled.
As soon as the doors of the elevator closed on the captain and Michael, Herbstein trotted heavily back to his office and snatched up the telephone.
‘I want an urgent call to Mr Shasa Courtney in Cape Town. Try his home at Weltevreden, his office in Centaine House and his ministerial office at the Houses of Parliament.’
He got through to Shasa in his parliamentary suite and Shasa listened in silence while Herbstein explained to him what had happened.
‘All right,’ Shasa said crisply at the end of it. ‘You get the Associated Newspapers lawyers down to Marshall Square immediately, then ring David Abrahams at Courtney Mining and tell him what has happened. Tell him I want a massive reaction, everything we have got. Tell him also that I will be flying up immediately in the company jet. I want a limousine at the airport to meet me, and I will go to see the Minister of Police at the Union Buildings in Pretoria the minute I arrive.’
Even Leon Herbstein, who had seen it all before, was impressed by the mobilization of the vast resources of the Courtney empire.
At ten o’clock that evening Michael Courtney was released from interrogation on the direct orders of the Minister of Police and when he walked out of the front entrance of Marshall Square headquarters he was flanked by half a dozen lawyers of formidable reputation who had been retained by Courtney Mining and Associated Newspapers.
At the pavement Shasa Courtney was waiting in the back seat of the black Cadillac limousine. As Michael climbed in beside him, he said grimly, ‘It is possible, Mickey, to be a bit too bloody clever for your own good. Just what the hell are you trying to do? Burn down everything we have worked for all our lives?’
‘What I wrote was the truth. I thought you, of all people, would understand, Pater.’
‘What you wrote, my boy, is incitement. Taken by the wrong people and used on simple ignorant black folk, your words could help to open a Pandora’s box of horrors. I want no more of that sort of thing from you, do you hear me, Michael?’
‘I hear you, Pater,’ Michael said softly. ‘But I can’t promise to obey you. I’m sorry, but I have to live with my own conscience.’
‘You are as bad as your bloody mother,’ said Shasa. He had sworn twice in as many minutes, the first time in his life that Michael had ever heard his father use coarse language. That and the mention of his mother, also the first time Shasa had done so since she left, silenced Michael completely. They drove without speaking to the Carlton Hotel. Shasa only spoke again when they were in his permanent suite.
‘All right, Mickey,’ he said with resignation. ‘I take that back. I can’t demand that you live your life on my terms. Follow your conscience, if you must, but don’t expect me to come rushing in to save you from the consequences of your actions every time.’
‘I have never expected that, sir,’ Michael said carefully. ‘And I won’t in future either.’ He paused and swallowed hard. ‘But all the same, sir, I want to thank you for what you did. You have always been so good to me.’
‘Oh, Mickey, Mickey!’ Shasa cried, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘If only I could give you the experience I earned with so much pain. If only you didn’t have to make exactly the same mistakes I made at your age.’
‘I am always grateful for your advice, Pater,’ Michael tried to placate him.
‘All right, then, here’s a piece for nothing,’ Shasa told him. ‘When you meet an invincible enemy you don’t rush headlong at him, swinging with both fists. That way you merely get your head broken. What you do is you sneak around behind him and kick him in the backside, then run like hell.’
‘I’ll remember that, sir,’ Michael grinned, and Shasa put his arm around his shoulders. ‘I know you smoke like a bush fire, but can I offer you a drink, my boy?’
‘I’ll have a beer, sir.’
The next day Michael drove out to visit Solomo
n Nduli at Drake’s Farm. He wanted to have his views on the ‘Rage’ article, and tell him of the consequences he had suffered at Marshall Square.
That was not necessary. Solomon Nduli somehow knew every detail of his detention and interrogation and Michael found he was a celebrity in the offices of Assegai magazine. Nearly every one of the black journalists and magazine staff wanted to shake his hand and congratulate him on the article.
As soon as they were alone in his office, Solomon told him excitedly, ‘Nelson Mandela has read your piece and he wants to meet you.’
‘But he is wanted by the police – he’s on the run.’
‘After what you wrote, he trusts you,’ Solomon said, ‘and so does Robert Sobukwe. He also wants to see you again.’ Then he noticed Michael’s expression, and the excitement went out of him as he asked quietly, ‘Unless you think it’s too dangerous for you.’
Michael hesitated for only a moment. ‘No, of course not. I want to meet them both. Very much.’
Solomon Nduli said nothing. He simply reached across the desk and clasped Michael’s shoulder. It was strange what a pleasurable sensation that grip gave Michael, the first comradely gesture he had ever received from a black man.
Shasa banked the HS125 twin-engined jet to give himself a better view of the Silver River Mine a thousand feet below.
The headgear was of modern design, not the traditional scaffolding of steel girders with the great steel wheels of the haulage exposed. It was instead a graceful unbroken tower of concrete, tall as a ten-storey building, and around it the other buildings of the mine complex, the crushing works and uranium extraction plant and the gold refinery, had been laid out with equal aesthetic consideration. The administration block was surrounded by green lawns and flowering gardens, and beyond that there was an eighteen-hole golf course, a cricket pitch and a rugby field for the white miners. An Olympic-size swimming-pool adjoined the mine club and single quarters. On the opposite side of the property stood the compound for the black mineworkers. Here again Shasa had ordered that the traditional rows of barracks be replaced by neat cottages for the senior black staff and the bachelor quarters were spacious and pleasant, more like motels than institutions to house and feed the five thousand tribesmen who had been recruited from as far afield as Nyasaland in the north and Portuguese Mozambique in the east. There were also soccer fields and cinemas and a shopping complex for the black employees, and between the buildings were green lawns and trees.