See No Evil

by Michael Ridpath

  He directed most of this to Zan, and she listened sympathetically, although I could see she wasn’t convinced. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him. But he deserves all this blame! He’s right, things do look bad with the State of Emergency and the rioting, but this is when his country needs people like him the most.

  And there’s the bimbo. I know I don’t have any evidence, but I know she exists. I just know it. It explains everything.

  After breakfast Zan and Neels decided they would go for a long walk up into the mountains. I watched them go, two tall energetic figures cutting through the thin layer of mist hovering a couple of feet above the ground among the golden vine leaves. They left their footsteps in the dew glistening on the lawn. It’s three o’clock now and they are still out. Part of me feels a little jealous of Zan; she is taking on the role that I should have, supporting my husband in his hour of difficulty.

  Neels has announced that he is going to Durban and then on to Philadelphia next week, to work on the Herald deal. I’ll be glad to have him gone, believe me. One of his bankers is coming to dinner with the Pellings tonight. I will do my wifely duty.

  July 3

  Had the Pellings over to dinner last night with Neels’s banker. Zan was there and behaved herself well: she looks stunning with her tan and her beaded hair and she impressed Graham Pelling. I played the perfect hostess.

  Actually, I’m not bad at entertaining, especially for small groups. Neels does it a lot, and we get an interesting bunch of people, most of whom are very friendly. When we were first married in the seventies we used to invite some of the leading radicals, white and black, but nowadays they are all in prison or banned from meeting other people or just too suspicious. Then there are the academics from Stellenbosch University who are quite amusing and so gossipy. There’s one of them I particularly like, a professor of journalism of all things, called Daniel Havenga. He’s a funny-looking man: he’s probably only forty-five but he has a shock of prematurely white hair, a little round face with a beard, wicked brown eyes and little ears that stick out at right-angles from his head. He refers to Stellenbosch as “hanky-panky town,” and if half of what he tells us over the dinner table is true, the name is justified. Although none of them talk to us about their support for apartheid, I think several are members of the Broederbond, including Daniel.

  I asked Neels once whether he was a brother, and he assured me he wasn’t. I believe him, but then the whole point of a secret society is that you’re not supposed to admit to being a member. I remember when my friend Nancy discovered her father was a freemason when she was twelve it freaked her out. From what I can make out it is the Broederbond who come up with all the apartheid regime’s bright ideas, so it is highly unlikely that Neels would be part of that. I bet they’d love to have him, though.

  We all talked about how important the press is, even in these days of ever more draconian restrictions on what newspapers can report, and then Neels mentioned in confidence that he might be forced to sell his South African papers. He did it very well: Graham seemed interested. They talked by themselves after dinner and Neels thinks that Graham might bite. He would make a good owner and with all those gold mines he’s got the cash. Perhaps he’d take the Mail as well?

  The banker was black! Oh, my God, can you stand it? We were, I hope, able to treat the man like a normal human being. The poor guy’s name is Benton, and he has to do some kind of work on Neels’s South African newspapers. He’s stuck in an “integrated” hotel in Cape Town but Neels has assigned him a driver to take him wherever he wants. In practice that’s just going to be back and forth to the office.

  It was so good to talk to another American, especially just before Independence Day. He seems like a really nice guy, more widely read than most of the investment bankers I’ve come across, and smart too. He’s read all the Latin American literature I like – he said the new Isabel Allende is really good, and he’s just read Nadine Gordimer. He lives in Greenwich Village. Apparently, it’s been hit hard by AIDS; it’s like a ghost town. At least that’s one problem South Africa doesn’t have to worry about.

  I feel sorry for the poor man, beavering away at work on the Fourth of July. Maybe I’ll bake some of my chocolate-chip cookies and leave him a care package at his hotel.

  But what will I use for the chocolate chips? I’ve still got some Toll House left, but they are made by Nestlé, and I’ve started boycotting them again. I read the other day that they are still trying to sell baby formula to African mothers who can easily use breast milk instead. You would have thought with all the fuss over the years they would have stopped that by now. I might have to slice the chocolate by hand. Perhaps Zan will help me, just like she used to when she was a little girl.

  July 4

  Independence Day. How I wish I was in America today, without Neels. I delivered the cookies to Benton’s hotel. I hope he likes them.

  Zan announced that she’s going back to Jo’burg today for a couple of days. I think it’s got something to do with the End Conscription Campaign, but she wasn’t very forthcoming. I didn’t ask. I’ve asked her about the Black Sash movement, but she won’t tell me anything about it other than it’s an organization for white women opposed to apartheid. I think she still doesn’t trust me. Which is understandable, I guess.

  There was a massive bomb blast on Saturday, outside Ellis Park rugby stadium. There was a match going on inside; the papers are amazed that only two people died. It does kind of underline Neels’s point about how the country is falling apart. But I’m not sure we should run away.

  July 5

  Just got back from dinner with Benton Davis. He sent me a sweet note about the cookies Zan and I baked for him, so I called him and suggested we meet. Benton didn’t want to leave his hotel, so we ate in the dining room. Neels is in Durban tonight, trying to figure out what to do with the Durban Age. Alone, I hope, but of course I have no way of knowing.

  Unsurprisingly, Benton can’t stand this country. He says the worst thing isn’t just all the little rules discriminating against blacks, the separate toilets and so on. Those are vile, but he was expecting that. It is the way the white people look at him, a tall black man dressed in an expensive suit. He says the reactions vary: there’s fear, there’s hatred, there’s shock and there’s contempt on their faces. The one response that he can handle is astonishment. That’s what makes it worthwhile.

  He was walking through the lobby of the hotel on his first morning in the country when he heard a shout: “Boy!” He ignored it, not for a moment thinking it was meant for him, when it was repeated. “Boy! Wait!” He turned and saw a short gray-haired man with a moustache approaching him.

  “Can I help you, sir?” he had said, falling back on politeness in his confusion. He could smell alcohol as the man got closer.

  The man’s eyes lit up when he heard the accent. “Go back to your own country, boy. We don’t want you stirring up trouble with our Kaffirs here.”

  Benton’s first instinct was to hit the man, who was much smaller and older than him. Then he realized that’s exactly what the man wanted, and he turned on his heel and walked out of the hotel. But he spent the rest of the day rehearsing to himself all the replies he should have come up with.

  He asked me whether they have the term “redneck” in this country. I told him “redneck” is actually a term the Boers use for English-speaking liberals, but there are a couple of near equivalents to the American usage: “rock-spider” or “hairyback.” He liked rockspider.

  I asked him why he had come. After years of ignoring South Africa, America has gotten itself all excited about the place, especially black America. Didn’t he think he was consorting with the enemy?

  He said it had been difficult. He hates his boss. When it became clear that someone from Bloomfield Weiss had to go to South Africa to check up on Neels’s South African newspapers, his boss thought this was a great opportunity to send Benton. Benton objected and his boss called him a coward. I’d have
thought that was asking for a racial discrimination suit, but apparently that’s this guy’s game: he’s always trying to force Benton to play the race card. This is something Benton says he has never done and never will do; he’s determined to succeed on his own terms, not because of his color. He was unsure whether to go when Neels spoke to him.

  Apparently, Neels had anticipated the whole problem. He said that South Africa needed blacks like Benton to travel there, to show the whites that in the outside world blacks could be well-educated men and women in positions of power and authority. Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the UN, and Leon Sullivan, the black board member of General Motors, were both prominent black Americans who had visited South Africa and sent out an important message. Benton could do that too.

  Benton was clearly impressed with Neels. He has always been a fan of Leon Sullivan in particular. He decided to come.

  Dinner was fun. But toward the end Benton let slip something about Zyl News that I hadn’t suspected. It was a shock, a major shock. I will try to find out more from Neels when we are speaking to each other again. If we speak to each other again.

  July 7

  Neels came back from Durban yesterday and he’s off to the States tomorrow. I’ll be glad to see him go. Especially since I know he will be away from his woman, whoever she is. At the moment I don’t want to think about her.

  With Zan gone, things were strained. I mentioned I’d had dinner with Benton the night before, but didn’t ask Neels about what Benton had told me. We went to bed in silence. Just after he turned the light off, Neels began to speak to me.

  “Liefie?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something I want to tell you. I’ve been meaning to tell you for a couple of days.”

  I steeled myself, lying on my side in bed, facing away from him. I was the one who was supposed to mention his mistress, not him. I didn’t like surrendering the initiative.

  “Do you remember that Zan and I went for a long walk on Saturday?”

  “Yes,” I said, puzzled.

  “She told me something then. Something she heard while she was in London.”

  “I didn’t know she’d been to London.”

  “Neither did I,” said Neels. “Maybe she had to interview for her place at the LSE. I don’t know. I didn’t want to ask her.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well. She bumped into a South African. A member of the South African Communist Party.”

  “Who?”

  “She wouldn’t say. But remember she lives with the Mackie girl. Maybe it was her parents. Or friends of her parents. Who knows? But this South African told her something quite disturbing.”

  I waited. Cornelius was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.

  “He said there was a list. A list with my name on it.”

  “What sort of list?”

  “A come-the-revolution-who-are-we-going-to-line-up-against-the-wall list.”

  “No!” I turned toward him.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. The SACP’s headquarters is in London, everyone knows that.”

  “Who else is on the list?”

  “It’s a long one, apparently. The man didn’t give her any more names. Apart from one.”

  “Whose is that?”

  He raised himself on to his elbow and looked me in the eyes for the first time that evening.

  “Yours.”

  7

  Cornelius’s study was a mess. Every surface of the expensive furniture was covered with paper: spreadsheets, financial reports, printouts of news articles, consultants’ studies, and even some newspapers. Cornelius tried to make sure he read at least the Herald and the Philadelphia Intelligencer every day, but the copies were piling up. There were also back issues of The Times. These he had been studying closely.

  Edwin was looking worn. His three-piece suit was intact, he was wearing a tie and the top button of his shirt was still done up, but he was frayed around the edges. Cornelius’s insistence that no one else from Zyl News be involved meant that Edwin had had to do a lot of the work he would normally have farmed out to his MBA grunts. He had done it diligently and well, but he hadn’t slept much.

  Cornelius, on the other hand, was a volcano of energy. He found it difficult to sit still for more than a minute or two without darting from one problem to another. He threw himself into the transaction and drove Edwin into the ground.

  The Bloomfield Weiss bankers filed into the study. Benton led the way, followed by Dower, but now they had a real deal for which they would be paid fees, the team had grown to six. There was probably a battalion of Bloomfield Weiss’s own grunts back at their office in Broadgate also working on the transaction out of sight.

  ‘Sorry about the mess, gentlemen,’ Cornelius began. ‘How’s it going with the banks?’

  Dower opened his mouth, but before he could say anything Benton spoke. ‘Very well. I think they had some trouble at first, the numbers are a bit tight, there’s no getting around that, but we’ve got National Bank of Scotland interested in taking on the role of lead manager. They’re a good institution, I think they’ll do a fine job for you.’

  ‘What kind of covenants will they want?’

  ‘Andy?’ Benton turned to Dower, who was obviously seething. Cornelius could see Dower had been upstaged by Benton and was angry about it. He found investment bankers’ grandstanding tiresome, but after twenty years he had become used to it. For all Bloomfield Weiss’s faults, and there were many, they had stuck with him through good times and bad, and that was worth a lot. Cornelius would never totally trust them, though. They were investment bankers, after all.

  Dower went into details of the financial covenants the banks would demand be included in the legal agreements, and the presentation Edwin and Cornelius would have to make to them the next day. Then discussion moved on again to the price they were planning to pay for The Times.

  ‘We’ve had our analysts take a look at Evelyn Gill’s Beckwith Communications,’ Dower said. ‘Of course it’s totally private, and the accounts are a tangle of holding companies. When they borrow, they tend to go to a tight group of banks in Switzerland. But we don’t think Gill has access to more funding. A cash offer from you of eight hundred and fifty million would be hard to match. He won’t be willing to go to the bond markets for it, and his corporate structure is too messy to be able to get an equity offering away in a hurry.’

  Cornelius wasn’t going to fall into the trap of underestimating his opponent. Sir Evelyn Gill was a stout man with a defiant stare and a heavy lower jaw thrusting aggressively forward. He had worked in his father’s business trading steel in Sheffield, but had seen the writing on the wall for the industry and diversified into ever more precious metals, until he had transformed the family firm into an international commodity speculation outfit. He had invested some of his profits in the purchase of Beckwith Communications, a magazine publisher, in the 1980s, before using this vehicle to launch his failed bid for the Herald in 1988 and bagging the tabloid New York Globe the following year. Since then he had bought the London tabloid Mercury and a series of other newspapers and magazines throughout Europe, Australia and South Africa as well as a book publisher in London. Although Beckwith didn’t publish figures, his newspapers were rumoured to be extremely profitable. They all took a populist right-wing stance – anti-immigration, patriotic, anti-bureaucratic – that seemed to strike a chord wherever they were published. Even his more serious political weeklies in France and Sweden subtly followed that line, and circulation had increased. His contribution to the national media was recognized when he was knighted by the Conservative government in 1996, the year before their election defeat.

  ‘Gill has been trying to talk the price down,’ Cornelius said. ‘You know the game: bait and switch. Agree a price in principle and then negotiate it down because of problems you supposedly discover during due diligence. In this case it’s accounting
discrepancies and under-funded pensions.’

  ‘Those could be real issues for us as well,’ Dower said.

  ‘Laxton Media think it’s all bullshit. They are pissed off. Even better for us if we come in with a higher offer.’

  ‘How do we know this?’ Benton asked.

  ‘Edwin has a source.’

  There was a brief uncomfortable silence. Edwin stared at the papers in front of him while the minds of everyone around the table flitted over the possibilities of what Edwin’s source might be. Cornelius knew that Edwin had a reputation for the occasional use of underhand methods to get things done. Cornelius also knew this reputation was justified. He hadn’t asked Edwin about his source; he hadn’t wanted to know the answer. Perhaps he should have done. Cornelius realized that whenever he did retire, his reputation for integrity would retire with him …

  ‘Excellent,’ Benton said, to break the silence. ‘Now perhaps we can talk about the junk-bond issue.’

  ‘Are you sure I can’t tempt you back, Zero?’ The Saudi smiled as he sipped his orange juice. The dining room in Claridge’s was quiet this early in the morning. He and Calder were the only two people there, bar a lone businessman in the far corner. Their table was set for three. One chair was empty.

  ‘I’m quite sure you can’t,’ Calder replied, responding to the old nickname from his bond-trading days. ‘But I do appreciate you asking.’

  ‘Actually, I will always ask,’ the other man said. ‘Until one day you say yes.’

  Tarek al-Seesi had been Calder’s partner and immediate boss at Bloomfield Weiss. He was a small man, with a thick moustache, thinning hair, and large brown thoughtful eyes. He was no more than a couple of years Calder’s senior but he looked and acted much older and wiser. He combined the street-trading talents of the bazaar with a profound understanding of human psychology and good grasp of macroeconomics, backed up with a PhD. He was also a canny political operator, something that Calder emphatically wasn’t. Most importantly he was someone whom Calder not only respected but trusted. When Calder had phoned him the day before with his request, Tarek had been happy to oblige. So Calder had flown his Cessna down to Elstree the previous afternoon, and spent the evening with his sister in Highgate so that he could get up early to meet Tarek at ten to seven.