Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “I don’t think either of them works, and history has proved it,” stated Matthew. “No one would say capitalism was the solution in 1930, any more than British socialism seems to be working now. They both work to a degree. Does that help you?”

  “You don’t subscribe to your government’s view that a communist with horns rests under every bed in South Africa, just waiting to jump out?”

  Matthew laughed. “The NATS are paranoid. Now take Hector’s father-in- law. This man thinks he is holding back the tide of history. Maybe he is.”

  “When we are young, we subscribe to ideals without reservation. We think in the birth of our first understanding that we have the solutions to man’s problems… Are you a friend of Hector’s?”

  “Not really. I like him. I enjoy his ability to think and argue logically. Time with Hector is time well spent.”

  “Then get him out of South Africa and as far away as possible from his father-in-law. Even go and see his father. I know what Hector’s doing. I thought he had matured but he hasn’t, obviously.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Hector joined the communist party when he was here at Cambridge. I may have been the influence, for which I am deeply sorry. The movement, like so many others, was hijacked, Mister Gray. People use ideology as a weapon. They don’t really believe in justice or an equitable distribution of wealth. They believe in power. Our mutual acquaintance is being used, and if it does not kill him it will certainly ruin a very promising life.”

  Matthew was accepted for the seminar and joined the other fifty students to listen to economic professors theorising the way to wealth. Matthew had to smile, as did the rest of the adult students, when the floor was opened to questions and the reality of business moved swiftly from man to man, leaving academics with problems they never knew existed.

  To be accepted, Cambridge had used the same rules as Harvard. A man’s wealth had to be self-made, not inherited, and he had to have created business with a turnover in excess of three million dollars before he was thirty, and to attend the course before he was thirty-five. In the days that followed, Matthew talked and argued with like-minded men from right around the English speaking world. The seminar was a success, and Matthew walked away with new knowledge and a list of business contacts that would otherwise have taken years to make.

  Returning to London and spending every evening with Sunny, Matthew called James Fortescue-Smythe at his London office, and was unable even to reach the great man’s private secretary. Sunny was having a problem, which she would not explain, in taking him to Luke Mbeki. Hiring a car and making Sunny take the day off from work, Matthew drove down into the countryside, having first established from three judicious phone calls that Hector’s mother stayed at home most of the day and that her husband only returned to his country estate at the weekends. Putting speculation about such a lifestyle out of his mind, he drove deep into the Surrey countryside, stark in its winter coat, the only green being the yew trees and the holly.

  Matt studied the cold landscape silently for a long while. “No wonder my ancestors emigrated,” he said eventually. “How can anyone enjoy this climate?”

  The small roads wound through villages, and at one they stopped for lunch and the comfort of a log fire.

  “You want to come back to Africa, Sunny?”

  “What are you saying, Matt?”

  “Come and live with me.”

  “We’re not even lovers… Is something wrong?”

  Matthew laughed happily. “No. Nothing wrong. Marriage frightens the hell out of me. I thought maybe you could break me in gently.”

  “Why don’t you live in England?”

  “That is quite impossible. I would prefer to live in a mud hut and eat mealie meal porridge. I can’t even see the stars in England. No space. I would not be able to see far enough into the heavens to yearn for my destiny, locked up in a brick house with brick walls and the sky just over my head. I have to go into the bush regularly to purify my soul. Okavango. I learnt there how insignificant the loss of Gray’s insurance brokers figured in my life. It did not matter, camped out on an island listening to the hippo and stoking the fire to keep off the lion. I was just another animal, alive and related to all God’s miracles.

  “Africa is real. Today’s Europe was made by man. No, I will live and rest my bones in Africa. We will buy ourselves a smallholding at Halfway House, between Johannesburg and Pretoria. Keep horses. A cow to milk. An African man must have cows to pay for his bride. There’ll be sun and dry earth, a pool to swim in and stars to count each night. We’ll be happy.”

  “Six months,” countered Sunny.

  “What about six months?”

  “I’ll live with you for six months on two conditions.”

  “Spit it out.” Matt suggested, leaning back and eyeing her curiously.

  “You make love to me tonight and, if you don’t marry me after six months, I come back to England. I want kids as well as you.”

  “We’ll dine again at the Savoy. Let’s get to see the lady and drive back fast. Never before in my life have I been so nervous… I wonder if she knows her son is a communist,” he said after a while.

  The day Matt went looking for Luke Mbeki in London, his ‘twin’ was nearly ten thousand kilometres away in the rebellious colony of Rhodesia. He was sitting dripping wet under the warm rain in a forest of Mopani trees on the banks of a small river that was raging with flood water.

  He had met up with his Matabele counterparts, all communist-trained guerrillas like himself, on the north bank of the Zambezi River in the newly independent Zambia. The rains were good, and they had come across Lake Kariba in pouring rain that cut visibility to ten metres but stopped any rebel police from seeing the three makoris of the insurgents. They were linked, at Luke’s suggestion, by rope to prevent them drifting off across the great expanse of man-made lake, the second-largest in Africa. Luke led the first boat and took them across to a lonely landing, where they buried the canoes under grass-some fifty metres from the edge of the rising water, Luke fixing the position as accurately as possible.

  Luke had brought the expedition forward a month when he realised that the girl making the enquiries was an emissary of Matthew Gray. Luke had no wish to defend his new principles, however sure he was of their correctness, with Matt. A slogan coined by Luke in a training camp eighty-five kilometres north of Moscow, ‘One settler, one bullet’, was on the lips of the cadres of the newly-forming guerrilla armies of Africa, who were to fight the colonial or settler governments that refused to hand over power to the people.

  The wars of liberation in Southern Africa had begun. The Russian and Chinese inspired wars which would return the blacks of Africa to their lands of milk and honey, free of exploitation and government by foreigners. The Nguni people were going to liberate their lands. One settler, one bullet. What Luke refused to acknowledge, even in the back of his mind, was that Matt also ranked as a settler. The rancher and his wife ran cattle over six hundred square kilometres, a herd of just under a thousand beasts that were regularly dipped against tick-borne disease. The rancher and his black herd-boys chased the animals into the dip-tanks from horseback, riding all day, for day after day in the burning heat. The man’s children had left for the bright lights of Bulawayo, but work continued on the ranch, and life, much quieter but still rewarding, went on the same in the old house on the banks of the small river.

  Luke was camped on the opposite bank among the thick Mopani trees, a couple of kilometres upriver, away from barking dogs and the white man’s labour force. They sat without fire or comfort throughout the night and, shortly after three o’clock by Luke’s watch, the rain stopped, but the trees dripped water till the dawn came spreading through the trees, a clear and crystal dawn with a sky clean blue and a fierce sun searching for drops of rain on the leaves of the trees, sparkling like a million diamonds. Luke, the only African National Congress fighter among the Matabele of the Zimbabwe African Peoples�
� Union, waited throughout the day, which grew steadily hotter. They dried their clothes, bringing the curse of the Mopani flies to cluster round their eyes and noses, tiny irritating flies that no amount of brushing stopped from crawling into nostrils and eyes. The dusk approached, the men stood to under Luke’s command and the attack got under way.

  The rancher and his wife, both in their sixties, were drinking sundowners on their long stoep, watching the great ball of fire that was the sun sink below the horizon, giving way to the approaching night. They were talking softly, the talk of long custom, when Luke fired the first rocket at the stoep and blew the old couple straight to eternity. By the time Luke led his men back to the canoes, the cry of ‘one settler, one bullet’ still rang in his head. Luke’s revenge had begun.

  Matt and Sunny had been lovers for a week not leaving her flat except to buy food. Sunny had resigned from her job by telephoning and their bags were packed for Africa. There was peace in their souls, after a strange week which had started with their drive into the countryside. The front door of The Cedars had been opened by an elderly lady.

  “My name is Matthew Gray…”

  “Wait there until I find my glasses. I like to see new people when I talk to them… Here they are. Now, what can I do for you, young man?”

  “I have come down from Trinity College, Cambridge, where the former tutor of Hector Fortescue-Smythe told me to see his father or mother. Mister Fortescue-Smythe would not take my call and neither would his secretary, so I would be very obliged if I could speak to the lady of the house?” Listening to his formal words echoing in the hallway of the house, Matthew smiled.

  “I am Hector’s mother… Oh, don’t look so surprised. He was born when I was forty-two. I had two other sons and a husband who were all killed in the wars.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “So was I at the time. They killed my first husband in 1918 and my boys in 1940. I was a suffragette. Capitalist wars. Ordinary people were slaughtered by the millions. You have word of my son? Have you met his wife? What is she like – Dutch, I believe? Is he in trouble?”

  “The tutor thinks he is a communist.”

  “Everyone has the right to his own opinion.” the lady replied, a little tartly.

  “The communists are banned in South Africa. He can be sent to jail.”

  “Why are you concerned? What do you want? People always want something.”

  ‘I am looking for a business partner with great deal of money, and one of the people on my list is your son. I do not recruit partners without knowing who they are, and I find your son an enigma.”

  “You want the money, but not the man if he is a communist? How much do you want from my son? How much?”

  “Risk and loan capital of thirty million pounds.”

  “And how much do you plan to put into the venture?” The tone of voice was sarcastic.

  “Thirty million pounds and the expertise to provide an above average return on capital. I do have a track record,” Matt stated.

  “And you wish to warn us so that Hector will return to the capitalist fold before his thirtieth birthday?”

  “His father-in-law is the head of BOSS, an organisation I believe similar to the German Gestapo, and I have first-hand knowledge of their methods. Hector, I believe, has joined the secret society which is the cement of the Afrikaner establishment, and he is working in the most secret government-funded company to give South Africa a military capability to enforce the ideology of apartheid, none of which marry well with a man who was a communist sympathiser at Cambridge, if not a card-carrying member. The tutor thinks he is a sleeper under deep cover and instruction from Moscow. I believe marrying Helena was part of a preconceived plan. I can think of no other reason for marrying her. The parents accepted Hector, despite being English, as he was an answer to a very serious problem.”

  “And what problem was that?”

  “The lady is a slut, Missus Fortescue-Smythe.”

  “You had better come in and sit down, and start from the beginning.”

  “There is a lady in my car outside who would also like to hear the story. It would save me repeating myself.”

  “Does she know Helena?” asked Missus Fortescue-Smythe.

  “Yes.”

  “Would she also call my daughter-in-law a slut?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  “Will you take a cup of tea?” the lady offered.

  “That would be most kind.”

  “And some crumpets, I think.” Matt was at the door, returning to fetch Sunny, when the old lady spoke. “And remember, Mister Gray, when you are telling your story, that I am also a communist – not card-carrying as you say, but a true believer in the way of life that might just stop war and starvation and the degradation of three-quarters of the people on this planet. One central government. There is enough for everyone. How can we have mountains of surplus food in Europe and starvation in Africa? Why?”

  Matt turned back from the door and thought for a moment. “Ideologies,” he then answered her. “The slogans of ideologies are simple. The nature of man is not. The reality of what you want will mean that a small percentage of society, those who willingly work for the satisfaction of achievement, will be forced to create the food and goods for the lazy masses. Most people do not work unless they are made to work.

  “You were right when you asked me what I wanted. We all want something. We don’t give it away. I have created wealth in my life, and jobs and a good living for many. I wish to create more. Neither you nor anyone else will ever create your utopia merely by finding a way to distribute the food. Someone has to pay. No farmer will produce a surplus to give it away, or break his back for a gaggle of lazy fellow humans who prefer to live off the charity of others! Work, education, dedication. Not a permanent attack of gimmes; give me this, give me that. Feed a man for a year, and you have to feed him for the rest of his life. That is not a slogan, but a fact. I too have read Karl Marx. A wonderful theory. He would have starved in the real world of wealth creation. There is no substitute for hard, justly-rewarded work… I will go and call Sunny. Her feet will be freezing cold, and the fault will be mine.”

  Matt lay in the warm bed, his hands behind his head and Sunny fast asleep at his side. The old woman had listened very carefully for a long time, asking questions but saying little else. He had let Sunny describe Helena’s way of life, and Sunny had found it difficult not to sound like a bitch. They were both convinced that Hector knew all about his wife’s affairs but ignored them for the more important political advantage his marriage brought him.

  When they left, the old woman thanked them for coming, and Matt thought she meant what she said. She was still there by the open door, ignoring the cold, when Matt looked back from the bottom of the long, cedar-lined driveway. He was not sure whether he had made a friend or an enemy.

  Turning to the present, Matt began to tickle Sunny’s back very gently until she stirred, snuffling, half-awake and wanting to go back to sleep.

  “I have a surprise.”

  “You’re going to make love to me.”

  “That, too.” He nibbled the lobe of her ear. “I have a job scheduled in two months’ time, and a berth on the Lloyd Triestino’s, ‘Europa’, out of Venice, in three weeks’ time. Tonight we are taking the boat train from Victoria Station and beginning a slow, lazy journey home to Africa. We will explore Europe quickly, Egypt more slowly, and call at all the ports of East Africa from Mombasa to the clove island of Zanzibar.

  “While I am away, executing a job that will bring great wealth to myself, Arch and Lucky Kuchinski, you will search for the perfect smallholding and we will live happily ever after in the African sun. We will be happy forever. Nothing will interfere. And when you are very good for a very long time, I will take you down to Port St Johns and Second Beach and show you where the ‘twins’ were born.”

  They lay awake, holding each other, not wishing to emerge from the warmth of the bed.

/>   “You don’t think he’s avoiding me, do you?” asked Matt, thinking of Luke. “Why do you shiver?”

  “Someone ran over my grave… Matt, make love to me.”

  A week after the Fokker Friendship of TAP landed at Jan Smuts airport, Johannesburg, from Beira in Mozambique, bringing Matt home with Sunny from the last port of call on their voyage, three aircraft took off from Rand airport. In the lead Beechcraft Baron, Matthew sat beside the pilot, with Archie Fletcher-Wood, and Lucky Kuchinski in the passenger seats behind.

  The second aircraft, also a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron, was loaded with aircraft parts, paid for by Matthew as a present to Rhodesian United Air Carriers (RUAC), whose supply of spares had been rudely cut off by United Nations mandatory sanctions which forbade member nations any trade with rebel Rhodesia. Matt had happily signed a certificate for Beechcraft, USA, stating that the parts would not be supplied to any destination prohibited in terms of UNO resolutions or American law.

  The third aircraft was a much larger Beechcraft King Air, from which all seats other than that of the pilot had been removed and the fuselage crammed with an assortment of tubes and four long aerodynamic floats that had been made for Matthew from plans he had obtained in England. The Johannesburg engineering company that had done the job had been a client of Gray Associates.

  The flight of three aircraft was met at Salisbury airport by Aldo Calucci who had taken extended leave from the sugar estate. With the co-operation of customs and the Royal Rhodesian Air Force, the parts were delivered into the hands of RUAC. The tripod of a Vickers light machine gun was welded into place in the doorway of the second Baron, and an agreement in detail reached with the Rhodesian department of customs and excise to provide Matthew with airway bills and certificates of origin ‘to be listed’ for works of art, antique gold coins and uncut diamonds after Matthew had agreed to purchase in Rhodesia with hard currency large quantities of Sandawana emeralds that he would resell as Bolivian on the world markets.