The Harbinger

by Mark Graham

  “Things are working well just the way they are, Delaney. Opening up another vice-presidency? I don’t know if it’s warranted at the moment, kiddo.”

  “Let’s be candid, Ian. You see me emerging as a threat to your position and you don’t like it.”

  He concealed the truth with a display of anger. “I’m the only one who makes threats where the Affiliated Union is concerned, Mrs. Blackford, and don’t you forget it. . . .”

  The ripples of a coal train’s shrill whistle rode a brisk wind up the coast and chased this last thought from Delaney’s head. She crossed the tracks to the station.

  Front and center, it was a production, she admitted, worthy of the South African police. Barricades the length of the terminal sealed the premises from defacing intruders. Police lamps revolved over empty patrol cars, red on blue raking the scene with the ominous regularity of prison spotlights. Policemen paced. Their raptorial gazes studied each onlooker with individualized suspicion, generally by race. Ignoring this was easy, Delaney realized, disregarding it was not.

  Last night, the fog had obscured the station’s hulking mass, shrouding it in mystery. The coming of day transformed it again into a grounded beast void of secrets. The rear doors to the ambulance swung open in tandem with those at the station entrance. A gurney emerged, propelled by beefy attendants and escorted by a graying physician. Taut sheets rendered a protuberant corpse a prisoner without escape. The crowd stirred. Craning necks vied for a better view.

  Delaney pressed between bodies to the guardrail. She was awestruck. Though not, she realized, by this ghoulish display of death on wheels, but rather by the sterility of the doctor, the brutal formality of the attendants, the craving and boredom of insensitive spectators. But then, Ian was dead. What did he care?

  She tried to picture his face. She glanced at the stretcher again as it was hoisted into the ambulance. Ian had indeed, she thought, found his cocoon in Port Elizabeth, after all. She searched herself for evidence of remorse. The discovery eluded her. Emotion, she told herself, would emerge in time.

  Delaney followed the course of the departing ambulance until it was out of sight. Her footsteps took her to the side entrance that had provided Ian Elgin access to his fateful climax.

  In the alleyway beyond the door, policemen and technicians were gathered in a surrealistic diorama beneath a broken window, the opaque glass of a rest room. One man commanded the attention of the others. He stood tall and erect, his head tipped forward slightly. In his hand, he cradled a cigarette. Smoke spiraled above his head. When he moved, his gestures were liquid, choreographed with intent. Delaney tried imagining the sound of his voice; their meeting, she knew, was a foregone conclusion. Then, the blue and gray of Security Branch muscled its way into the picture, and she turned away.

  Pacing in the sand along Algoa Bay’s golden shore, Delaney realized there was nothing she could do about Security’s inevitable inquiries. But to their poisonous questions, the answers, she told herself, would be of her own choosing.

  ****

  Along the south side of the terminal, rectangular plots of turned soil lay beneath each window group. The tread impression of a single car tire cut through the plot directly below the broken window in the ladies’ lounge. The matter of smoking was Mansell’s way of getting his bearings and harnessing snap judgments. Then he bent down. The semicircular impression was nearly unbroken. Pieces of cloudy glass were scattered among the dirt. Mansell discovered evidence of torn masking tape nearer the wall. Using steel tweezers, a forensic specialist placed the tape in druggist’s paper and samples of the glass between layers of cotton.

  A scattering of shoe prints was less distinguished. The soles were distorted, as if made by worn tennis shoes or desert boots. One set faced the wall. The wearer, it appeared, had been standing on the balls of his feet, testing the limits of his reach. The height of the window above ground level, a good two meters, and the positioning of the car, Mansell determined, gave credence to the theory that the would-be intruder had used the hood of the vehicle as a boost.

  It was this image that Mansell carried with him as he drove the two blocks back from the waterfront to the three-story brick edifice on Military Avenue and Main Street that served as the Port Elizabeth Police Station.

  He parked in a tow-away zone out front. Overhead, a stark yellow sun shone among estranged feather clouds, and Mansell dismissed any romantic notions of rain.

  He mounted the stairs to the main floor, a distortion in terms more appropriately dubbed “The Pit.” As he wove his way among the standard-bearers of this overcrowded arena, the duty officer caught him by the shoulder.

  “Terreblanche’s got a burr up his ass,” he said. “Very testy. Up on three. Joshua and Merry are on their way.”

  Mansell took the stairs to the third-floor communications center. Air-conditioning sent chills down his spine. Egg-white computers lined three walls. The fourth wall was an enormous map of the district: west to Oyster Bay, north to Somerset-East, and east to Alexandria. Green lights denoted nine other stations within the district. Blue lights denoted misdemeanor infractions committed within the last seventy-two-hour period; red lights denoted felonies. And like a festive occasion, Mansell thought, glancing at the wall, the Port Elizabeth map was always forthright in its display of color.

  Noting the arrival of his chief inspector, Captain Oliver Terre-blanche, a bearish man with thinning silver hair, reduced the length of his pacing by half but did not look up.

  “This is just lovely, Inspector.” Terreblanche punched a meaty paw at a copy of the Elgin preliminary report. “It’s not enough that we have a township ready to go up in flames, now some lunatic decides to squash the vice-chairman of the country’s largest union inside a clothes locker.”

  “Yes, most inconsiderate,” Mansell replied ripely. He nodded as detectives Joshua Brungle and Merriman Gosani came through the door. “When we find the guy, I’ll have a talk with him about his timing.”

  “I don’t like it, Inspector. We’ve got a mining union facing contract negotiations, and the dockers wrapped up in arbitration. Some people might call it a coincidence. I don’t. And in the Kaffirs’ lounge? There’s a bloody message in there someplace, don’t you think?”

  Kaffir. Terreblanche had used the aspersion without blinking an eye, as if Merry were a fence post. Mansell felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

  “It was the Blacks Only lounge, actually,” he said, “and if there is a bloody message to be had, Captain, then it’s Security’s case, isn’t it? And it won’t matter what I think one way or the other.”

  “I keep asking myself,” Joshua interjected, “why the ladies’ lounge? I mean, Elgin’s coat was hung as neat as a pin over the back of a chair in the sleep room. Would a killer do that?”

  “Elgin was at the train station for a reason. Let’s find that reason,” answered Mansell. He consulted the nearly indecipherable scribbling in his notebook. “Elgin didn’t live in P.E., did he?”

  “He kept an apartment,” Merry answered. “Home’s Jo’burg.” “Okay. Merry, let’s find out who benefits by Mr. Elgin’s sudden demise, shall we? Start with his family.”

  “It could be a long list,” Joshua said. “If our victim’s blood-and-guts reputation is even half accurate, then you can bet he’s made at least as many enemies as he has friends.”

  “He spent most of his time in the Transvaal,” Terreblanche told them. “It was one of those love-hate relationships. The money in Jo’burg thought the guy walked on water. Pretoria, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so fond.”

  “The thorn in Pretoria’s side,” Mansell uttered. “Steenkamp’s words.”

  “A sobriquet Mr. Elgin no doubt found amusing.”

  Mansell glanced up from a single-page summary of the victim. “What do we know about the miners? Any word on their negotiations?”

  “I think they were more concerned about the rumor that Elgin was considering a position in our esteemed prime minister’s
cabinet,” Terreblanche answered. “The vacancy in Industry and Finance, I believe it was.”

  The very sound of his own words seemed to disturb the CIB captain, and he broadened the range of his pacing. The report clenched in his fist, Mansell noticed, looked more like crepe paper now.

  “There’s been some trouble on the docks,” the chief inspector said. “We know that. Is that related to arbitration?”

  “From what I’ve heard,” Joshua replied, “the dockers weren’t too thrilled with Elgin’s last proposal to the Harbour Association. Some of the locals stepped out of line.”

  “Elgin didn’t like it,” Terreblanche added. “It was . . . a personal thing, you might say.”

  “Meaning he wrapped a few knuckles, right?”

  “Elgin’s charm was that he could turn your life upside down and not give it a second thought.”

  “Nice guy,” Mansell said distractedly. “Merry, we’re going to need some help on this thing, I think. Jo’burg, Durban, Cape Town for starters. And let’s dig out anyone who’s made waves in the union recently and have them brought in. Who knows?”

  “For what it’s worth,” Joshua interjected, “Anthony Mabasu worked on the docks for a while.”

  Mansell’s eyes widened. “He was in the union, then.”

  “He got the boot two years ago. He appealed, right? They denied. And guess whose name appears on the rejection? Anyway, I found that interesting enough to leave the follow-up for you. Mabasu’s downstairs. The file’s on your desk.”

  A computer operator handed the chief inspector printouts from the Bureau of Records, the Labor Bureau, and Printmatix. He and the two detectives started out.

  “Inspector!” Oliver Terreblanche held the ruffled preliminary out like a communal offering.

  “Captain?”

  “This needs a solution. Yes?”

  Mansell tipped his head forward. “The right solution, yes.” Terreblanche’s narrowed eyes returned to the district map, and after a moment, Mansell backpedaled to the door.

  ****

  The gold mines that occupied Ian Elgin’s thoughts in the hour before his death were of equal concern to a man now seated in the cramped, stuffy passenger compartment of a Westland-TL helicopter.

  The Westland-TL, a seven-rotor job equipped with a Rolls-Royce turboshaft engine, was on permanent call to the minister of justice. The private terminal in Pretoria was located on Church Street adjacent to Strijdom Square and a field of bronze horses.

  Outside, the stark yellow sun that preyed upon the shores of Port Elizabeth, eleven hundred kilometers to the south, was, this day in the Transvaal, trapped behind a wall of bone-black clouds.

  Jan Koster, the Deputy Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Affairs, tightened his seat harness.

  Next to him, Minister of Justice Cecil Andrew Leistner dozed, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and irregular. Left to the discomfort of his own thoughts, Koster’s blue eyes gazed down at the implant scar on Leistner’s right cheek. Not for the first time, no. Indeed, for the last seven years he had made a study of Leistner’s few weaknesses and built defenses against his considerable array of strengths.

  It had taken all of those seven years to fully test the limits of Koster’s survival instincts; seven years to learn that he would do anything to stay alive, even . . . Yes, Koster thought, even that.

  He would never forget that gusty, restless morning, those seven years past, that day when he discovered the sealed envelope locked inside the top drawer of his desk; and it took all of his strength now not to dwell on the sixteen prosperous, glorious years that had come before that day. How had they expected him to react? Like a well-trained robot, that’s how. Exactly as he had. . . . Well, not exactly. Leistner must have received a similar message, but they had never talked about it.

  The undertaking had been “suggested.” Resistance, Koster had determined then, would have been unacceptable. Oddly, he had also determined that resistance might well serve as his one chance for survival.

  Koster watched now as the pilot ran a final check on his instrument panel. The engine turned over. Rotor blades whipped stagnant air into a lather of dust and dried leaves, and a moment later, the chopper leapt into the air.

  He and Leistner had taken this same flight once before; it was five years ago, and Koster could recall every word they had spoken, every crazy notion they had discussed, and every knot that had eaten, like a starving tapeworm, into his stomach. Knots that had seemed a permanent part of life ever since. But he wouldn’t think about that now. Instead, he thought about another day, and another conversation concerning South Africa’s most inviolate treasure, and the moment he knew their plan was actually possible . . .

  “The whole bloody thing started back about a hundred years ago, Mr. Koster, when some half-drunk prospector, name of George Harrison, stumbled on this gold-bearing outcrop of rock. Was on a farm they called Langlaagte.” The old miner spoke through a huge gap in his teeth, and his tongue worked its way between the space when he was thinking. The conversation took place in a shack that rested upon the bank of a played-out stream twenty kilometers east of Johannesburg. “The miners took to calling it the Witwatersrand, the White Waters Ridge. Back then, after a good rain, when the sun came out, the hills round here shimmered with a brilliance the sun itself would’ve been proud of. The shimmering was gold.”

  “The birth of fair Johannesburg,” Koster said.

  “Yes, sir,” the old miner replied, smiling without provocation. “The city was born that same day, near that same farm. Hell, you didn’t need much back then. A pickax, a muzzle-loader, maybe a strong stomach for deceit and death. Skill didn’t have one damn thing to do with it. Gold lay on the surface like moss, and prospecting spread like an out-of-control brush fire. Soon enough that shimmering was nothing more than a memory.”

  “And that’s when they went underground?”

  “No choice. The fever and greed of gold are strong, Mr. Koster. By then, the gold lay trapped hundreds of meters below the surface. The prospector, the donkey, the pickax? Disappeared. Gave way to pneumatic drills and dynamite. Nowdays it’s ultrasound and computers. Yes, sir. Left an old sourdough like me out in the cold.”

  “Times have changed, haven’t they?” Koster remarked.

  “You take a look out over the Witwatersrand these days and it’s like a huge pegboard. Access shafts and boreholes everywhere you look. Two-thirds of the world’s gold spews from those shafts, son. Two-thirds.”

  “Yes, I’ve been told,” Koster replied, fully aware that the lion’s share of what remained lay beneath the frozen tundra of the Soviet Union, equally aware of the power and leverage that could spring from the confluence of those two sources.

  “For every access shaft you can count a hundred tunnels, Mr. Koster, a thousand in some cases. How many tunnels from one end of the Wit to the other? No one knows. It’s like a gigantic honeycomb carved in solid rock down there. Good God, a man could roam those tunnels for a lifetime and never meet another living soul. . . .”

  “And an entire army,” Koster whispered, as the helicopter hit an air pocket and dropped like a yo-yo, “an entire army could hide itself in those same tunnels for months.”

  Next to him now, the minister of justice arched his back and grunted. A fierce yawn escaped, and his eyes popped open.

  Leistner’s first instinct was to reach for the pipe in the inside pocket of his suit coat. He filled the bowl and torched it. Dark eyes examined the spent match for the longest time. His voice, when he spoke, sounded raw and jagged, the tone more coarse than husky.

  “You were reminiscing, yes, Mr. Koster?”

  Surprise must have registered, at least briefly, on Koster’s face, and Leistner chuckled. But there was scant humor in the laugh; they weren’t close, Koster and he. Had they met under different circumstances, at a cocktail party on the diplomatic circuit, they would have been leery of one another, opposites to be avoided.

  Peering out the window, Lei
stner settled his gaze upon a dim spot among the rolling hills and evergreens of the East Rand. “How much further, Mr. Koster?”

  “Not far, Minister. Ten minutes.”

  ****

  Yielding to his aversion toward postmortem examination, Nigel Mansell decided on the witness before the autopsy.

  His office was thirty square meters on the second floor—vintage oak furniture, walls lined with geographical maps, and a barber’s chair. The Mabasu file was waiting for him on a desk strewn with textbooks.

  Realizing he hadn’t eaten, Mansell stopped at the station cafeteria. He poured hot water over tea bags in two paper cups, stashed a half dozen creams and sugars in his pocket, and started for the door. On impulse, he bought two candy bars.

  Anthony Mabasu sat on a narrow couch in a holding cell reading yesterday’s newspaper. The cell was four meters square, clammy gray concrete lit by fluorescent tubes. Mansell introduced himself. He motioned to a circular table in the middle of the room. He set a cup of tea and a candy bar in front of Mabasu and emptied cream and sugar from his pockets. Making an issue of the witness’s file, Mansell fumbled purposely for a cigarette.

  “So what did you think when you first saw the body?”

  “You kiddin’ me? I think, man, you got a shitload of trouble on your hands. That’s what I think.”

  Mansell offered the pack. “His face was pretty beat up, wasn’t it?”

  “I didn’t need to see no face to know he was dead, boss.”

  “You work in the baggage department. Your shift starts at two o’clock. And you found the body at four-thirty. Now, that wouldn’t be your lunch break, would it? More like a shift break.” Mansell stroked his chin. “So what did you do first?”

  Mabasu stared down into a cup of untouched tea. “Do? I’m here, ain’t I? You know what I did, man. What I shoulda done was got the hell out of there. I’m an easy target, and you bastards sure as shit know it.”