Treasonous

by David Hickson

  I said nothing.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said. “With my toothbrush and sleeping bag.” Her eyes glistened with a laugh. “And I’ll leave the bottles at home.”

  Fourteen

  Chandler’s lunatic of a snoop man was called Stanley, although he suggested I call him Fat-Boy because, as he pointed out, he was. He told me he was of Xhosa origin, while we shared a cigarette on the fire escape stairs outside what Chandler called mission headquarters.

  “We’re the soft ones,” he said. “The forgiving ones. Not like those Zulu bastards who stride around like they can’t get their legs past their over-sized cocks, because some distant ancestor called himself a warrior. Warrior!” he scoffed, then made a sound like a trumpeter warming up his lips. “Weren’t warriors, nothing but savages who set out to kill anyone who got in their way. You know they came south because they’d killed so many people up north they couldn’t sleep up there for all the wailing from the women? They’d left the women alive. Some of them.” Fat-Boy spoke with a strange mixture of American and African pidgin English syntax, with the accent wandering between the two.

  I had never heard that version of the history of the Zulu people and told him so, but Fat-Boy insisted. “S’true,” he said. His pear-shaped face had heavy cheeks that pulled his mouth into a natural expression of deep sadness, and his left eye was lazy, so it kept drooping as if he’d been hit on the head and was struggling to remain conscious. “So that’s why,” he said and sucked desperately on his cigarette. I realised that the history lesson was all background to his weight problems. “Mandela was one, is why he was so forgiving. Xhosa. Soft people.”

  Fat-Boy covered his lazy eye with a hand while he exhaled a cloud of smoke as if he had just noticed there was something wrong with the eye. Then he moved his hand to the other eye and turned his head gently. Like he was performing some kind of alignment.

  “I thought you’d given up,” said Chandler when we went back in.

  “I had,” I said, and we left it at that. Chandler went back to laying out notebooks on three school desks that he had arranged in the room.

  Robyn arrived as promised with her toothbrush, and a small bag that might have contained a sleeping bag, although from the weight of it I suspected it was more likely to contain her favourite handguns and enough ammunition to mean she wouldn’t have to do anything as insecure as going out to stock up. She was wearing dungarees that looked a couple of sizes too big, with baggy trouser legs and straps that looked like they might slip off her narrow shoulders. Fat-Boy seemed to notice that aspect of her attire and revealed his sexual persuasion with a momentary raising of his eyebrows and a twitch of his left eye as it overcame its laziness. Even in baggy overalls Robyn exuded a sexual energy made all the more appealing by her apparent lack of awareness of it.

  “When you’re quite done gawking at each other, we have work to do,” said Chandler.

  The space Chandler had rented for the purpose of preparing us for the task ahead was the first of a series of conversions in an old brick warehouse that had been a match factory in its youth. The new conversions consisted of inserting vertical and horizontal planes to divide the big warehouse space into a large puzzle of interlocking cubes. Steel staircases linked the spaces, and new balconies thrust themselves out to take advantage of the fashionable view of the foreshore area of Cape Town, a view that had been considered ugly a hundred years ago.

  “We’re on a photo shoot,” said Chandler. “Remember that, if anyone asks. Not that I expect them to. Builders have been sent away while they work out what went wrong with the budget, so we have the place to ourselves.”

  Chandler was walking up the centre of the room, starting his briefing from a position of power behind us. We were all seated on straight-backed chairs at small tables like overgrown school children.

  “All above board,” he said. “Paid for, cash in advance, we’re taking some nice pictures of Robyn. Or of Fat-Boy as far as I could care. But nice pictures. Clothes on, nothing anyone could point a finger at. We like the unfinished concrete look.”

  He reached the front of the room where Fat-Boy and I had placed a portable blackboard, and several easels on which were mounted large printouts of the architectural plans of the Gold Archives. He did the parade ground pivot and faced us.

  “Corporal Gabriel,” he said, switching to the business side of things, “for reasons known best to himself would like to read the contents of an ancient file which is to be found here.” Chandler had armed himself with a snooker cue which he now used to strike the architectural plans. It produced a satisfying bang. We jumped a little at the sound, and so Chandler whacked the plans again for good measure.

  “The Gold Mining Conglomerate of South Africa Archives,” he announced. “It’s a fortress, crawling with security, fingerprint scanners, cameras galore. And we also suspect that there is something of a little more interest in there to us non-readers.”

  “Gold,” said Fat-Boy, breaking Chandler’s flow. “Big fucking blocks of it.” He grinned.

  “Gold,” agreed Chandler. It wasn’t the climax he had intended, but we all looked impressed about it. “Big blocks as Fat-Boy says. What they call Good Delivery bars. Four hundred ounces, twelve kilograms per bar.”

  “What are they doing in an archive building?” asked Robyn.

  “Good question,” said Chandler, and he rewarded her with a thin-line smile. “Those bars belong in a vault. They should be sitting in the Bank of England, but Mister Riaan – ‘BB’ to his friends – Breytenbach took offence when the London Gold Bullion Association refused to accept him as a member and insisted that he deal with them through an agent. An agent BB didn’t like. Which is when he had the idea to substitute a cheaper metal that has a similar density into a few of the bars he was sending them.”

  “Tungsten,” said Robyn, then added sharply, “Colonel,” like a cadet in an army training movie showing her discipline.

  “Tungsten indeed,” said Chandler, wondering if she might be teasing him. It was a feeling that Robyn often aroused in men, perhaps because her eyes always seemed to be laughing, even when she was serious.

  “Tungsten weighs the same as gold,” he explained to the slower members of the class. “But is a fraction of the value. Add to this the fact that BB discovered a weakness in the antiquated physical gold bullion system. The inspection of his gold would happen at source, it would then be transported to the Bank Of England by trustworthy bullion couriers and locked away in their vault. There were no repeat inspections, apart from simple weight checks. If he substituted a few of the bars with gold-plated tungsten after the initial inspection, they would pass all the follow-up checks. He wouldn’t substitute all the bars, that would be too obvious. Just a bar here and another there.”

  “This man BB a friend of yours?” asked Fat-Boy suspiciously.

  Chandler looked at Fat-Boy as if wondering whether he was strong enough to hear the truth.

  “Not a friend, Fat-Boy,” he said with restraint. “No. Not a friend.”

  There was a regretful silence.

  “The tungsten bars are sitting in the vault at the Bank of England?” said Robyn.

  “We have reason to believe so,” said Chandler. “The Bank of England never discovered the deception. BB’s business partner, Lord Eversham, found out, but was not aware of the extent of the crime, and kept quiet about it to protect himself. The bars that might be sitting four levels below ground here …” Another satisfying whack of the snooker cue. “Are the original bars. Ninety-nine point nine-five percent gold. Our great benefactor Riaan ‘BB’ Breytenbach has taken his revenge on the condescending members of the London Gold Bullion Association by slipping them the fake bars. It is probably a crime that sits heavily upon him.” Chandler paused and avoided my eyes lest I challenge his portrayal of BB as a man with any kind of conscience. “It is our intention to lighten his load a little.”

  Robyn gave a nod of approval, gazing at Chandler with the at
tention a precocious girl at the front of class lavishes on her university lecturer.

  Fat-Boy looked disgruntled.

  “Might be, Colonel?” he said. “What’s might be? You don’t know it’s there?”

  “That,” said Chandler, and he pointed the snooker cue at Fat-Boy’s forehead, “is where you come in Fat-Boy. You need to get eyes and ears in there. Your equipment arrives this afternoon. The Angel Gabriel will give you a hand.”

  “Angel?” said Fat-Boy.

  “The Archangel Gabriel,” said Chandler. “You don’t know your angels? He’s one of the big ones.”

  Fat-Boy pushed a lower lip out, studied me with some disdain, and shook his head.

  “He ain’t no angel, Colonel. Bubbles is better.”

  “Bubbles?”

  “Them big bubbles he’s got in front of his eyes.” Fat-Boy indicated the glasses I was wearing because I hadn’t bothered with my contact lenses.

  “Bubbles it is then,” said Chandler, “You okay with that, Gabriel?”

  I said I was okay with that and was rewarded for being such a good team player by one of Robyn’s smiles. She has a way of lowering her face when she smiles so that you get the full effect of the eyes included. It was pretty powerful.

  “A very old file?” said Robyn as she marked the positions of the fingerprint readers with a red highlighter. The large-scale printouts from the photographs Chandler had taken in the Reading Room of the archives were blurred in places, and so we were using coloured marker pens and straight rules to tidy them up and get a better idea of the layout of the building.

  “It’s an old military intelligence file,” I said.

  “You told me there was nothing official about this.”

  “There isn’t. I’m doing it to satisfy my own curiosity. For a friend who died.”

  Robyn stepped back from the plan we were working on and tilted her head like an artist considering her work. I thought about explaining that Johansson had not actually been a friend, but let it go.

  “Colonel said you worked for them. For military intelligence.”

  “For a short while.”

  “Isn’t it true what they say? Once a spy, always a spy.”

  “I was never a spy. I was on the other end of it.”

  “Managing the spies? Running the agents in the field?”

  “Something like that.”

  Robyn spotted another fingerprint reader and swooped on it with her red marker.

  “And this file,” she said, with her focus all on the plan, “is so important that you need to break into the archives to steal it?”

  She turned to me and I felt the force of her gaze, her eyes dark as coal.

  “It’s to do with the president-elect,” I said.

  “I know. Colonel told us. A woman that he killed.”

  “And there’s a journalist who has died, after asking questions about that woman.”

  “Your friend?” asked Robyn.

  “My friend.” I agreed, finally adopting the nasty Johansson posthumously.

  Robyn selected a green-coloured marker and turned her attention back to the plan.

  “I think I understand it now,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out why you were doing this, but now it makes sense.”

  “What do you mean?” I found the air-conditioning layout for the floor we were working on and set about marking the positions of the vents. I remembered this about Robyn. The way she would make leaps of logic and seem to divine the truth by intuition. I used to wonder whether she had known how I felt about her in the days that Brian had wanted the three of us to party together. Her dark eyes had scrutinised me as I made my excuses and suggested that they leave me out of it, and her mocking gaze told me she knew. Knew that my attraction to her was something I was struggling to control, was something that shook the foundations of my friendship with Brian. Or had she known it? I watched her now as she concentrated on the fire escape routes and wondered again whether I had misinterpreted her serious glances, her casual smiles. Sometimes the thing we dread is the thing we hope for the most, even if that thing could destroy us.

  “You didn’t go to your militarily intelligent mates with this problem because you think they’re part of the problem, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t ruled that out,” I said.

  Robyn laughed, the skipping pebble laugh. “It’s not just a matter of the president killing a woman,” she said with a teasing tone. “It’s a secret government plot.” She placed a hand on my arm. “I love your intensity, Ben, you’re so earnest. You know that? I really love it.”

  I smiled and said I knew it. A sensible smile, nothing inappropriate. Robyn removed her hand from my arm and turned back to the fire escapes.

  “I’ve loved that about you since Brian first told me about his serious friend. The thinking one – you know he called you that? He said you’d change the world one day.” Another light laugh and a glance to be sure I didn’t take that too seriously. “He said you would be the one to pay the debts to society, for all of you.”

  “Debts to society?”

  “I know what you and Brian did. What your unit did. He told me you were not a normal squad.”

  “I see.”

  Robyn turned back to her fire escapes again. I remembered Brian’s broad grin, the bottle of whisky he’d brought for us to share because he needed to tell me how strongly he felt about Robyn. And discuss with me the inconceivable idea that he should ask her to spend the rest of her life with him. His complete trust in me. He had not guessed how I felt, not even suspected it. Or had he? Right at the end, when the tripwire on the Claymore mine had latched, clicked, and he’d turned to look at me. Had he known then?

  Fat-Boy enjoyed complaining. Most of what he said was prefaced by a complaint of one kind or another, with a pout of his lips that dragged his cheeks down and showed you just how sad the whole thing made him feel. His boxes arrived that first afternoon, and he stood on the empty concrete floor of the ground level of our building like a man trying to build a castle from cardboard boxes.

  “What the fuck am I meant to do with these?” he asked me when I went down to give him a hand after Chandler pointed out that it had been over half an hour since the delivery.

  “Plug them in?” I suggested. “That’s normally the mistake I make with these kinds of things.” Fat-Boy didn’t think that was funny. He told me so several times as we heaved the boxes up the five flights of steel staircase. He enlisted my help in what he called ‘the mounting’. After setting up the frames, we mounted all eight monitors in two rows. Then he connected the box, “water cooled this baby, super silent” because he explained that you couldn’t have that humming shit going on when you needed to work. He fired it up and then fiddled about getting hooked up to a wireless modem and downloading software. It was mid-afternoon by the time we found ourselves on the roof of our match factory, bouncing a cigarette between us because I wasn’t buying packs.

  “C-276,” said Fat-Boy as he pulled a miniature satellite dish out of the bubble-wrap. “Can’t go wrong with these.”

  I did my best to look impressed, but frankly if I’d found it in my cupboard I’d probably have been eating my breakfast cereal out of it. It was about the right size to give you a great start to the day.

  Fat-Boy mounted the little dish onto the tripod stand that we’d bolted into the flat roof, allowing it to poke up above the low parapet.

  “How do you know where to point it?” I asked. “Or does that not matter?”

  Fat-Boy shook his head. It hadn’t taken him long to discover the extraordinary depth of my ignorance, but it continued to disappoint him.

  “Tomorrow my brother, we’ll do that tomorrow. For now, we wrap her up in this,” he brandished a roll of tinfoil, “and let her cook.”

  As Fat-Boy wrapped the dish in tinfoil, I finished the cigarette and gazed out over the view of the City Bowl and foreshore area. I could make out the corridor of green where the Company’s Gardens ran up the spi
ne of the city, and the jumbled tops of the buildings that marched alongside them.

  “You and the Colonel are tight,” said Fat-Boy as he smoothed the tinfoil to get rid of the wrinkles. It wasn’t a question.

  “I guess so,” I said vaguely.

  “You were with him in the army,” said Fat-Boy, and he gave me an accusatory glare. I nodded. “We been told not to talk to you about the jobs we’ve done with him,” he continued. “He thinks there’s something special about you because you were in the army together, and he’s gone all baby-talk and let’s pretend.” Fat-Boy regarded me critically and failed to observe anything that marked me as special, so he continued. “It fucked him up good and proper, the army,” he said and pulled another cigarette from his pack. “He don’t talk about it, but I heard enough from what others say. They say his squad were all killed.”

  “They do?”

  “They do,” said Fat-Boy and his eyes narrowed in a challenge for me to deny it. “He went nuts after that. Lost it completely. Rampage,” he said, adding in some extra ‘a’s for dramatic effect. He gazed at me through an exhalation of smoke, expecting a confirmation or denial.

  “I expect those rumours are exaggerated.”

  “Hmmph,” said Fat-Boy, leaving me in no doubt that I had confirmed his wildest suspicions.

  “At any rate, he was never a Colonel. He was a Captain, and that’s as far as it went.”

  “Colonel’s his name,” said Fat-Boy as if I just didn’t get it.

  “If you like,” I said and put up a friendly smile.

  “I do like,” said Fat-Boy with intensity. “Colonel is one of a kind. You don’t get them like that anymore.”

  “Like that?”

  “If Colonel asked me to walk into a furnace and close the door behind me I’d do it,” said Fat-Boy. “Like that.”