Lucky Packet

by Trevor Sacks

‘How?’

  ‘You just talk about all we’ve achieved in the past year and all the great things we’re going to do in the year to come. You do the words, I do the numbers.’

  We sat at the computer terminal and began to type. I was only slightly faster than Leo Fein at the keyboard, but it was enough of an advantage to gain the position.

  ‘So, you write “Northern Horizons” there,’ he said, pointing at a space on the screen. ‘Then you go on to a little blurb about the organisation.’

  ‘Okay, what do I say?’

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing me the annual report of a firm called Span Investment Holdings, Ltd. ‘I want you to look at how they do it and do something similar for us.’

  I flipped through the bland pages of the A4 booklet in the glossy cover. Leo Fein looked at his watch and stood. ‘Right – I’ve got to go now. We’ll look at it tomorrow. Just see what Span did and do something like that.’

  ‘I don’t know how to do that,’ I said, getting up to follow him with the Span Investment Holdings, Ltd book.

  ‘Just write what they write but where it says their name, you write “Northern Horizons”.’

  I was left holding the Span Investment book, which ran to eighty-four pages. It included several colour photographs of people at desks, often one of them bent over a workstation, pointing to something on a computer screen. There was another shot of a young couple with their baby on the wooden floor of a house that didn’t look South African, and one of a grey couple holding hands on a beach. The rest were headshots of middle-aged white men in ties.

  There were pie charts in pastel colours, graphs with keys and tables of figures. And in between were pages-long descriptions of mission statements, the chairman’s message, something called ‘Synergy’, another called ‘Integration’ and a small section at the back named ‘Social Responsibility’ with pictures of black children.

  Copying the document was deadening to my mind, my fingers, my eyes and my arse. The next time Leo Fein looked at it he sat down next to me and gripped his chin beneath his straight mouth. ‘I think we need something special here, boy. What do you think?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know – something that tells the world about us in one line.’

  ‘Like this thing in the front?’ I flipped the Span Investment annual report to the front pages and showed him the line: Creating growth opportunities through innovative relationship synergies.

  ‘Something like that, ja. But better, hey? More imagination. Something about the future.’

  ‘Your future … is safe with us?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Your future in good hands.’

  ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Shouldn’t it say what Northern Horizons actually does?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It has to be bigger than that. It has to answer the dreams of every person out there.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Ja, it has to “wow”.’

  ‘What about something to do with the name, Northern Horizons? The future just got closer. Or, the future brought closer. Your future, now. Take it to the edge. Beyond … beyond something.’

  ‘I like where you’re going with it.’

  ‘Beyond good investment?’ I said.

  ‘Northern Horizons. Beyond good investment.’ He said it in a kind of whisper. ‘I love it. Type it up. And write a little intro about horizons and how we take you beyond them.’

  Mrs de Bruin came into my thoughts. ‘Maybe we need something that nobody else can say. Like, is there something about us being the top something-or-other for so many years?’

  ‘Oh, sure. We’ve been the top fund for five years now. Oh, we must put that in.’

  ‘The best-performing fund for the past five years? Is that true?’

  ‘Ja,’ he said, nodding vigorously. ‘Absolutely. No one can catch us.’

  ‘So, something like—’ and I began to type:

  It’s not often we look back, but Northern Horizons has been the best-performing fund for the past five years.

  ‘It sounds good like that,’ he said. ‘What else you got?’

  ‘I had this,’ I said, pulling out a pad I’d done some rough work on. ‘We don’t only rewrite history, we write our own future. And this – where other funds end, we begin.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leo Fein. ‘Where other funds end, we begin.’

  ‘I’m not sure what it means,’ I said.

  ‘Me neither, but it’s good. It’s really good, Ben.’

  More than at any time before – even during the raid on Roy’s Uptown Liquor – I was actually enjoying myself with Leo Fein.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘What about this?’ I started typing while the thoughts were fresh. They appeared on the screen in front of Leo Fein.

  Where other funds end, we begin

  It’s not often we look back, but Northern Horizons has been the best-performing fund for the past five years. With that said, we believe our best results are ahead of us.

  Northern Horizons. Beyond good investment.

  ‘Wow,’ said Leo Fein.

  I craved his approval and was repulsed by it as soon as I’d earned it. But I was pushed by this revulsion into broaching the subject of money. I knew an advance to the amount Will requested was out of the question. I’d have to earn it.

  ‘If I wanted to start making more money here, what would I have to do?’

  ‘I like your initiative,’ he said after a moment.

  I was relieved that he saw it that way and not as greed; or perhaps he admired greed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Northern Horizons is good but we have other sidelines, you know. Growth industries. You could earn commission eventually.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  He nodded, rose, and patted my shoulder. ‘Let’s see what comes up. We might have something.’

  After the satisfaction of completing the annual report to Leo Fein’s liking, I soured with the knowledge of another betrayal of the man. As I sat in the office, I made myself face the situation: that I was to use Leo Fein’s own money to bring about his demise. It was mental self-harm, to consider what I was doing; and, like most self-harm, it was a distraction from something more serious.

  As much as I tried to skirt Leo Fein’s operations, I couldn’t pretend for too long that I was unaware of what he was doing. As soon as I had the money for Will, I told myself, I’d cut my ties with Leo Fein and be free of him forever. Or perhaps I wouldn’t work through Will, I’d pay the lawyers myself this time. Either way, I’d get the skatofatsa.

  * * *

  Victor glared at me as I spoke on the phone in the hallway, even though it had rung for me. ‘I’d better go,’ I said to Marieke.

  ‘Okay, so I’ll see you for dinner,’ she said. ‘Bring your brother, okay?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Ja, do it, okay?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll ask him, but I don’t know if he’ll come.’

  I went to sit with the others in the living room. On the TV news report, wax-like under the studio lights, the anchor presented details of a bomb detonated at a school while a two-dimensional graphic of an explosion, a cartoon blast, sat in a box above his shoulder. Partly covering the flames of the Looney Tunes explosion was the three-legged swastika emblem of the AWB.

  ‘Fucking morons,’ said Victor to the TV, draining his first and pouring his second brandy and Coke. ‘Bombing schools now,’ he half-spoke, half-belched.

  Next was a report of violence at a men’s hostel in the East Rand. The cartoon graphic in the square over the newsreader’s shoulder displayed a panga and a knobkerrie crossed over a lurid orange background.

  It cut to film footage of the aftermath, blood streaming from a man’s head as he walked across camera, oblivious to the police teargas.

  ‘Killing each other,’ said Victor. ‘They’re doing the morons a favour here. There’s going to be trouble next Friday with the referendum. Big time.’

  Usually Elliot�
�s presence curtailed our uncle’s political commentary. Perhaps Victor’s imminent emigration spurred on a more hostile attitude. Elliot held back, but I could tell that our uncle’s opinions were becoming harder for him to ignore.

  I looked at Ma. Only a few years ago Victor’s comments would have elicited a reproach from her too. Her face was pulled into a strained expression, as if the news had affected her deeply, but her stare went beyond the surface of the TV screen.

  ‘Hey,’ I said to Elliot as unobtrusively as possible, ‘do you want to come over to Marieke’s for dinner?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Elliot, about to remove himself anyway from Victor’s commentary. ‘Can we take your car, Victor?’

  ‘Who’s driving?’ asked our uncle.

  We stopped at the Acropolis Café for Elliot (always more thoughtful than me) to pick up a slab of chocolate, and arrived outside the De Bruins’ house. After introducing everyone, I sat next to Marieke, anxious of how to behave with a girl in front of my brother and of how the De Bruins would receive Elliot.

  Elliot, meanwhile, settled in comfortably on the sofa and took a cool drink brought in on a tray by Hannes. Hannes couldn’t take his eyes off Elliot. Here were the two moffies sitting in his house, drinking his cream soda.

  ‘So, Elliot,’ said Mrs de Bruin, ‘that’s very interesting hair you have.’

  ‘Thank you. And yours, too,’ said Elliot, taking a sip of his green drink. Mrs de Bruin smiled stiffly and patted a hand under her bouffant.

  We sat in silence a while. Elliot put down his drink and took up a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from under the coffee table. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  Marieke groaned.

  ‘Sunday School Attack’ read one headline above a story about a black church group that was assaulted by farmers outside the town of Louis Trichardt. ‘Bomb Rocks Radio Tower’ read another that was about an incident in Lydenberg.

  ‘It’s mine,’ said Hannes with a challenging smirk.

  There were other articles about meetings, and pictures of the hulk I’d met in Leo Fein’s house. The black-and-white dots that formed his face didn’t come close to capturing the power his eyes possessed.

  A vacuum cleaner adapter clicked under the fingers of little Danie beneath the coffee table while we looked at the clippings. The scrapbook, as a collection, gave the events a form that may or may not have existed yet; no one knew how organised groups like the AWB really were. There was certainly a feeling – an assumption, perhaps – that they were a small minority but the events, placed together as they were in the book, gave them substance and order.

  I wondered how much of Leo Fein was in these acts; how much of myself would be in whatever plots being devised and deployed by the hulk and his henchmen. My dealings with Leo Fein may have been a secret from my family but their implications were being tested here by Elliot out in the open. How far could I go along with Leo Fein?

  I caught Elliot’s revulsion like a sickness and would have to face my employer to rid myself of it, one way or another.

  ‘You’re really into this?’ asked Elliot.

  Hannes grinned.

  ‘You know they’re idiots, right? Dangerous idiots, but hopeless, just hopeless.’

  Hannes tried to take the book back but Elliot pulled it back again. He turned the page to reveal an article with the headline: ‘Cow Vandal Still at Large’.

  ‘Spray-painting swastikas on cows,’ said Elliot. ‘That’s a new one.’

  ‘It’s not a swastika,’ said Hannes, snatching the book away.

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘It’s three sevens. Six-six-six is the devil, three sevens is God.’

  ‘Looks like a swastika to me,’ said Elliot. Well, he’d know, I thought.

  ‘Come, put it away, Hannes,’ said Mrs de Bruin. The doorbell rang and Marieke shot up with an excited inhalation, and went to the door. She returned hand in hand with her friend Carlien.

  I immediately looked to my brother for his reaction. Elliot, always yanking at the lead, sure of where he was going, impervious to impediments – and now, frozen.

  Carlien moved stiffly and looked at Marieke every so often with a pleading look, like a skittish animal who might bolt at any second.

  Elliot and Carlien were both saved from any interaction with each other by Mrs de Bruin. ‘Hello, Carlien,’ she said, giving the girl a kiss on the cheek and an affectionate squeeze. ‘Come, let’s eat.’

  We shuffled to the table and Elliot hung back next to me to make sure of his seating. He chose a place next to me but Danie, in his unshakable way, inserted himself between us and took up that chair; Elliot was forced to sit next to Carlien after all.

  ‘Do you want to say grace, Hannes?’ said Mrs de Bruin. It was customary at the De Bruin dinner table to form a ring of clasped hands, and she took up Marieke’s to her left and Hannes’s to her right.

  It might be too much to say that a moment of prayer opened the heart of an Aronbach brother; but I kept my eye on Elliot throughout Hannes’s sugary recitation and noticed that Carlien’s fingers lingered in Elliot’s after the Amen.

  The display at Doren’s Outfitters had drawn Carlien back to Elliot after all. Though she’d missed seeing the mannequins in the flesh, two weeks after the event someone had handed a roll of film in at the CNA photo counter, where she worked on Saturdays.

  Here, among grainy snapshots of red-eyed, beer-bellied men around the braai and far-off buck in the yellow bushveld, she watched several photos emerge from the machine showing a she-mannequin in cowboy boots and a man-mannequin with war-feather dreadlocks in a confusing but intriguing tableau.

  Marieke had told her friend about the window display, but only when Carlien saw the image did it exert a pull on her she couldn’t quite explain. Now, after dinner, she and Elliot sat together on the couch, knees touching, watching Danie vacuum their calves.

  Hannes looked from one to the other with folded arms. ‘How’s Tjoppa?’ he asked.

  Carlien folded her arms herself and made herself smaller on the couch next to Elliot.

  ‘Is he flying the Mirages or the Cheetahs now?’ asked Hannes.

  Two things worried me while we had our coffee and condensed milk. One, would Marieke expect grand romantic gestures from me now, like the one Elliot had performed? Two, if Leo Fein’s ‘growth business’ needed an annual report, Hannes’s book of news clippings could do the job.

  ‘I want to go away with you,’ said Marieke while her mother was in the kitchen.

  ‘When?’

  ‘This weekend.’

  ‘What about your mom?’

  ‘I’ll say I’m at Carlien’s.’

  ‘Marieke, I’d like that but I don’t have a lot of money.’

  ‘It’s okay, I’ve saved from the job at the home industries.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘The Ranch Motel.’

  ‘And how do we get there?’

  ‘Tjoppa lets Carlien borrow his car.’

  ‘Tjoppa?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to know.’

  7

  BAKKIES OF MONEY

  Downstairs from the Nedbank building, Leo Fein’s reptilian Mercedes was humming. I pulled the door open and sank into the cream leather. I was entering into the growth business, beyond the cushy paper-pushing and report-fluffing of Northern Horizons.

  ‘What sort of deal are you doing with the AWB?’ I asked as the car growled down the road. I needed to know if Hannes’s vision of the movement’s operations was real, and what Leo Fein’s part in it was.

  Leo Fein squinted in his rear-view mirror though there were hardly any cars on the road. ‘Hmm?’ he said.

  ‘What kind of business do you do with the AWB?’

  ‘Oh, army surplus.’

  ‘Army surplus like tents and boots? Or like guns and missiles?’

  ‘AWB? These guys aren’t serious,’ said Leo Fein. ‘They think they’re serious. Trust me – I know them.’

 
‘So, it’s innocent?’

  ‘Totally innocent. It’s going to be a good sideline for us. Less government work, more independent operators. Governments pay, but who knows who’s in charge now? There’s a lot of change happening. Which can be good or bad.’

  From Landdros Maré Street, the Mercedes turned left at the water tower and started down a long, straight road. If I’d stuck to Northern Horizons, perhaps I could retain some purity, although it appeared there was nothing pure about Leo Fein’s dealings besides a single-minded opportunism.

  Okay, so he wasn’t arming the AWB; at least, not yet. But he was doing business with them. If he was helping to give the fascist movement the shape I discerned in Hannes’s scrapbook, I didn’t want to be a part of it. Yet here I was, stuck in the Mercedes-Benz again.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked but I knew already that the road on the outskirts of town, opening on both sides to wild, sparse bushveld, ended at a single destination and ran no further. Leo Fein hummed something between his straight lips. Soon we could see reflected back at us the silver-painted emblems on the heavy gate of the air force base. I was sure that I was being delivered into the jaws of the apartheid armed forces; Leo Fein had figured me out, that my intent was to betray him a second time, and now he’d betray me instead.

  A soldier came out of the guard hut and saluted when he saw the Mercedes. ‘I’ll tell the General you’re here, sir.’

  We drove through on the pristine road, past the squared-off little fields, and parked at a prefab office building. ‘Take this,’ said Leo Fein, reaching for a leatherbound folder on the back seat. ‘It’ll make you look more official.’

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘We’re seeing the General.’

  ‘He’s a customer?’

  ‘Supplier.’

  ‘With the fund?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘No, our growth business. He’s our principal backer. So be nice. In fact, just be quiet.’ For the second time, I was behind enemy lines, a draft-dodger on a military base. At least I wasn’t being press-ganged.

  The General, though retired, and uniformed only in polo shirts and chinos, commanded his way around the base as if he were still in charge. Or, more accurately, it was as if the base were his country club.