The Harbinger

by Mark Graham

  “You read the book, boss. You know the answer.”

  “You missed three months’ worth of dues payments and took a swing at your foreman. A class act.”

  “It wasn’t worth my job.”

  “No? You petitioned the union. They turned you down. Elgin’s name’s on the rejection.”

  “I made twice the goddamn money there. Still, a measly fourth what the whitey doing the same job made. You hear that? A measly fourth. . . .”

  “So fucking what? You don’t like it here, move. Move to Nigeria. You’ll do twice the work and make half as much. Better yet, move to England. You won’t work at all.” Mansell crushed out his cigarette. “All right. Tell me what kind of trouble you and your wife were having.”

  “It’s private, man. You hear? Private. How’s your marriage? Perfect?”

  Touché, thought Mansell. He felt the muscles in his throat constricting and the invisible hands picking away at his stomach. In self-defense, another cigarette materialized. He told himself the question hadn’t mattered and changed direction. “You knew Ian Elgin came to the railroad station on a regular basis.”

  “How would I know that? I work at the other end of the terminal and down in the basement. You said that yourself.”

  “And you knew Elgin had a hand in the situation you’re in now—a baggage handler scraping to make ends meet. You didn’t go to the ladies’ lounge to clean up after your wife. You know it, and so do I. Elgin had money. He didn’t care who he stepped on, and last night he was on your turf.”

  It didn’t happen—the quick change of expression, the slight twitch of the hand, the shortness of breath. It was as if Mabasu hadn’t heard the accusation at all; his answer, Mansell thought, was equally confounding.

  “What do you want me to say, man? Say I fixed the guy and then stuffed his body in a locker just for looks? He’s some high-and-mighty and I ain’t nothing, right? So maybe the high and mighty had it coming his way.”

  Mansell found himself thinking about the three coins that lay at the foot of the locker. Here was a killer who was thorough, painstakingly so. He’d stripped Elgin’s watch and ring and emptied his pockets. He’d made a point of taking Elgin’s wallet, papers, and keys. Yet the coins remained. Why? It didn’t make any sense, and maybe . . . that was the whole point.

  Mansell pushed away from the table and gestured toward the door. “I think we’re finished for now, Anthony. I’ll get you a ride. It’s been a long day. Get some sleep before you go back to work.”

  Mansell ordered a car. He also arranged to have Mabasu’s house in New Brighton watched.

  It was 3:35 in the afternoon, and the dread of formaldehyde filled his nostrils.

  Chapter 2

  Eight thousand miles to the northwest, where the Asters and rose of Sharon of summer were blooming and the muskrats and fox had long forgotten winter, another man paced in a warehouse outside of Wethersfield, Connecticut. His anxiety was the result of a taxing, yet lucrative business venture. A venture that dated back to an equally balmy September, seven years ago.

  The entrepreneur’s name was Karl Simon Brinker. Brinker was an arms dealer, a seller of lethal weapons in a trade that, next to narcotics, was the most lucrative in the world.

  Brinker’s office was a partitioned corner in an otherwise open warehouse. The walls were cluttered with army memorabilia and framed paintings of such champions as Secretariat, Man 0’ War, and Citation. A pull-string lamp hung over a small wooden desk, and a half pint of brandy sat on the desk top.

  Brinker poured three fingers’ worth into a paper cup. The roar of a forklift echoed in the background. He heard his foreman shouting directions. Not long now, Brinker thought, pacing again.

  In time, he paused before an eleven-by-fourteen-inch color photo of two army officers with their arms draped around one another. Father and son dressed in their formal army blues. A lieutenant colonel’s silver cluster glistened on Brinker’s lapel. The two stars on the general’s chest seemed dull in comparison. The father retired with three stars some years after the photo was taken; Karl Brinker left for Korea the next day. The Twenty-fifth Infantry Division landed on Korean soil in July, and Lieutenant Colonel Brinker caught a bullet in the hip in August.

  The Purple Heart, still in its case, was tacked on the wall next to the photo. Brinker stared at the emblem, a gold heart with a raised profile of George Washington in the center. Cracked fingers stroked the purple-and-white ribbon. A hundred years ago, he thought. The drinking started soon after. The pain, he reminded himself, had been unbearable. He was transferred home. An interest in horses led to the track, which led to the gambling.

  The discharge, fifteen months later, was honorable, true, but no one knew better than Brinker himself that the “early retirement” was the army’s way of ridding itself of a bad apple.

  But the contacts were still there. Papa Brinker’s old comrade, General Armstrong, opened the doors for the business. It was his recommendation to the armament director that secured Brinker’s franchise. Family money provided the backing.

  Now Brinker was franchised by the United States government to sell small arms at a profit and to keep stock on his premises. He dealt with wholesalers and retailers, gun clubs, police forces, and militia units, most national but some foreign. He dealt in odd lots, irregular orders, and flexible prices.

  But money was still Brinker’s elusive companion, his nemesis still the same: the wager and the bottle.

  Initial contact with Liberian Defense Minister Mustafa Okoya occurred seven years ago. It had been a cool, vibrant day filled with the rusts and golds and yellows of the ash and the oak and the hickory. It felt wrong from the beginning.

  Brinker knew Okoya’s reputation: the mistress in Monrovia, his growing addiction to coca paste, the “service” contracts with several Eastern-bloc countries. But in the end, it was pure finances that sucked the arms dealer in. Thirteen million dollars’ worth of small arms over a six-year period. A fee plus a percentage. It was an offer too good to pass up. The order, for his own convenience, Okoya had said, was broken up into five shipments. It consisted of assault rifles, handguns, light mortars, machine guns, grenade and rocket launchers, and ammunition—nothing Brinker would have to order out of normal channels.

  After the first shipment, Brinker’s delirium gave way to reality and nagging questions. The orders were too big for a dealer of his stature. The prices were too extravagant. Brinker also knew that the Liberian State Police, proposed recipient of the goods, consisted of two thousand men, not twenty thousand. But by the time Okoya let on about the “peculiarities” in the paperwork, Brinker was a lock.

  The paper cup was empty.

  Brinker took a pull off the bottle and walked to the office door. He watched the forklift hoist the last crate into the rear of the tractor trailer.

  His dock foreman entered the warehouse with a clipboard in one hand and a leather pouch under his arm. The State Department inspector followed him toward the office. Brinker capped the brandy and stowed the bottle out of sight.

  They gathered around the small wooden desk. Brinker initialed the shipping manifest. He passed it to the government man, who checked each item against his own list. Finally, he initialed the document, retained two copies, and passed the original back.

  “A tidy bundle,” he said with a grin. “Someone over there must be plannin’ an awful big safari, eh?”

  Shut your face, Brinker thought, as the agent leafed through the leather pouch. When he came to the End-User Certificate, the document that guaranteed the identity of the rightful buyer of the goods and thus their rightful “user,” he took a light meter from his belt and ran it over and under the parchment paper on which the document was printed.

  Sweat formed on Brinker’s brow. “What the hell is that?”

  “Infrared. It’s new. It picks up the tracers we’re puffin’ in the End-User paper now.” Brinker leaned forward, but the agent withdrew the meter, chuckling again. “Well, I can’t sh
ow it to you right now, but I can tell you it’s been damn effective.”

  “I’m thrilled,” Brinker replied.

  The agent replaced the End-User. He inspected the sales agreement, the export and import licenses, and finally the export permit. Halfway down the page, he paused, and his brow furrowed. He pulled on his ear. Brinker lit a cigarette. In time, the inspector made a brief note on his own ledger, initialed all four documents, and filed them back in the pouch. He passed the lot back to Brinker.

  “Looks okay,” he said absently. “We’ll see you next time around, eh?”

  The foreman escorted the State Department man outside. Brinker watched the agent get into his car. Then, turning a blind eye to the trembling of his own hands, he filed the leather pouch in the side pocket of his jacket. In the other pocket, he filed a second half pint of brandy.

  ****

  The forensic laboratory occupied the entire basement floor of the police station.

  Autopsy had its own private cell in the southeast corner. As it should be, Mansell thought. He bolstered himself for the session ahead by lighting a fresh cigarette at the entrance. He coughed from the pit of his lungs. Then, as if expecting to interrupt an embarrassed corpse, Mansell knocked.

  Joseph Steenkamp was hunched over a long table occupied by the remains of the victim.

  “Ah, to be certain. My favorite infrequent visitor, the chief inspector. Of Homicide of all things. Where have you been? Nearly done here.” Steenkamp spoke Afrikaans, the Dutch-German confluence that first appeared in South Africa three centuries ago, and, as Africaners loved to claim, the only indigenous language of the country. “There are paper bags on the counter if you insist upon being sick.”

  “You’re a gentleman.”

  “A gentleman being one who insists his guests have adequate facilities to deal with their phobias.”

  “Exactly.” Mansell picked up a copy of the preliminary report at the foot of the table. Steenkamp added side comments as he read.

  “The victim was only fifty-six years old, poor chap. Hope I’ve got more than a year left, old boy.”

  “You’ll outlive us all.”

  “I have high hopes.” Steenkamp pointed to the report. “Postmortem lividity, the onset of rigor mortis, body temperature, and digestive tract contents all put the time of death between three-fifteen and three forty-five this morning. Cause of death is still asphyxia due to strangulation.”

  Mansell made a quiet note of Ian Elgin’s physique. He was not a tall man, but his chest was broad, and his forearms and shoulders suggested a man who exercised with both regularity and vigor.

  “Occlusion of the greater vessels of the neck obstructed the flow of oxygen to the brain. Inhibition of the heart muscle was caused by extreme pressure on the vagus. An unpleasant way to die, I assure you.” The pathologist reached for a rotary saw as he spoke, and Mansell held up a hand. Steenkamp grinned. “Squeamish fellow for a man in your particular trade, aren’t you?”

  Mansell propped up against an empty examination table. He stared down at the paper in his hands. Some event, he thought, compelled two men to enter the same women’s locker room within an hour of one another, and within that common denominator, he told himself, lay the solution. Sylvia Mabasu?

  Unconvinced, he laid the paper aside and asked, “Any surface prints, Joe?”

  “None.”

  “Fingernails?”

  “Clean and unbroken. Not very considerate. The fingers on the right hand are bruised, but not the left. Resistance was minimal,” answered Steenkamp.

  “What can we tell from the groove in his neck?” asked Mansell, moving back to the body.

  “Narrow, but very deep. The cord, as you know, was nylon.” Abrasions and contusions covered the neck and the skin beneath the cheekbone. Tiny hemorrhages had occurred around the eye sockets, but not on the forehead or cheeks, Mansell noted. Bile filled his mouth. It was the taste of anger he always felt looking down at a murder victim; the anger of being an imperfect, cruel animal in a world filled with imperfect, cruel animals. “The groove runs from the upper end of the trachea in front, high around the neck, to a point just below the base of the skull.”

  “So the killer was above the victim,” Mansell suggested. “Or the victim was slumped down.”

  “We found dirt stains and scrapes on the victim’s hands and on his knees, indicating he’d slumped forward on the floor. My opinion is that his assailant was standing next to him, on his right side.”

  Mansell bent his head forward. He tapped the paper with his index finger. “The victim was either unconscious or in a state of severe disorientation, then. From the blow to the nose?”

  “There were two blows,” corrected Steenkamp. “One to the back of the neck. One to the nose, which was broken.”

  “The one to the back of the neck would have been first.”

  “The blow was delivered with power, but it wasn’t clean. Too low on the collarbone to cause unconsciousness. The second blow, the one to the nose, was square.”

  The chief inspector asked himself why, if the victim was unconscious after the second blow and if the motive was robbery, the thief had thought it necessary to kill the man. Had they known each other? Did he panic? Or was robbery simply a smokescreen?

  Mansell studied the victim’s hands. Two fingers on the right hand had been hooked beneath the rope as the victim hung in the locker, his last futile attempt at salvation, but this did not support the theory that the victim was unconscious. Yet the thumb and finger showed only minor bruising and the fingernails looked as if they had just come from a manicurist. Mansell expelled a sharp breath. He pushed strands of hair off his face.

  “So was he conscious or not?” he muttered.

  “What was that, old boy?”

  “Nothing. Just the meanderings of an illucid mind.”

  Steenkamp grunted. “So be it.”

  Mansell started for the door. He called out over his shoulder, “I look forward to your final report, tonight I hope.”

  “Look for it in the morning,” snorted the pathologist in reply. “Oh, Nigel. Would you like to know what the man had for dinner?”

  When Mansell turned, his expression conveyed restrained exasperation. He was always in too big of a hurry to leave this room. “A late dinner,” he said. “Yes, please.”

  Steenkamp’s surliness dissolved into an avuncular grin. “Pasta.” “Pasta? With fish or meat?”

  “Ah, smart boy. There were traces of pork and beef. Italian sausage and meatballs would be my astute conjecture.”

  “Beretta’s. That’s Elgin’s style, I imagine. Or maybe that place on the west side, The Factory.” Mansell didn’t claim to be a connoisseur of Italian cooking.

  “Or Dardano’s,” added Steenkamp. He picked up the rotary saw again, pulling the trigger for just a second. “It’s out in Sunridge Park.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Try it sometime. The linguine would be my personal recommendation.”

  The door was already closing. Mansell heard the whine of the saw, and he hastened his exit with lengthening strides.

  ****

  At the Church Street heliport, Cecil Leistner’s press secretary stood slight and pale with hands clasped behind his back, his eyes turned skyward.

  Oliver Neff’s few friends described him good-naturedly as a wisp of smoke on a winter’s eve. There was little more to the man than that. His face, from a distance, was as delicate as a child’s. Age had done little to tarnish his pristine manner, but the sparkle behind his gray-blue eyes had dimmed in recent months.

  Fifty meters away, the helicopter landed in the center of a square pad lined with concentric circles. Neff watched as Leistner and another man deplaned and trotted in his direction. He groaned inwardly. Absently, Leistner introduced Jan Koster by name and title. Then he took Neff by the elbow and spoke directly to the subject. “We’ll want this matter handled by Security Branch, Oliver. We don’t want things to get out of control.” />
  Neff answered, saying, “I’ve been informed that an investigation is well under way, Minister.”

  “Of course. And who’s in charge?”

  “Major Hymie Wolfe.”

  Leistner knew the name, but not the face. They crossed the concourse to a circular drive, where Leistner’s personal car awaited them. “All right,” Leistner said. “Let’s inform our CIB people down there. . . . Who would that be?”

  “Terreblanche. Captain Oliver Terreblanche.”

  “Terreblanche. Yes.” Both a face and a name Leistner recognized. “We’ll inform the captain that the matter is now under Security Branch jurisdiction.”

  Neff scratched the bridge of his nose nervously. “That might be touchy, Minister. CIB has already instigated a full-fledged investigation. Their initial report has it listed as murder subsequent to robbery. That’s not a clear Security matter.”

  “The victim was white. His body was found in a Blacks Only. I deem that a Security matter. Case closed.”

  A black chauffeur ushered them into the rear of a long limousine with cross-facing seats. The inside reeked of well-tended leather and pipe tobacco. Koster sat opposite the minister.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Minister,” Koster said, disturbed by the direction of the conversation and covertly raising an eyebrow at Leistner. “Why draw undue attention to the situation? Two investigations certainly can’t hurt, and Security Branch would normally have precedence, if it came down to that. Correct? Consider this. Why not invoke the Police Act? Keep the press out of it. Publicity can’t help. I’m assuming that’s within your jurisdiction, of course?”

  Koster had a habit of delivering his suggestions, Leistner thought, like a mother hen chastising her baby chicks. It was a habit that would make his removal that much less painful. Still, he considered the idea.

  “It’s a thought,” he heard Oliver Neff saying. “The Police Act would give the local police the authority to forbid publication or disclosure of any information concerning the arrest or the investigation, if you’re willing to deem the matter security-related or—”