Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Her plans would have worked out very well if Archie had not had a memory, if they had met without Archie knowing her history. But they had not. Archie remembered only too well the night Sunny Tupper had made a fool of his best friend, a best friend with an engagement ring in his pocket. Housekeepers came a lot more expensively than Sunny and were a lot less pleasant, and Archie still enjoyed a little sex every now and again without having to go to the slightest trouble.

  For Archie, the arrangement was ideal. He had what he wanted without having to take the slightest risk. In business they had always known him as the bachelor with a long line of girlfriends. Cohabitation was as common as marriage; almost no one cared any more. Such a trivial matter as morality had long since been laughed away in the circles in which Archie moved. Commitment, truth and integrity had given way to lawyers circumventing the most meticulous agreements, advertising which never told the truth, and the size of a bank balance carrying greater weight than the magnitude of a man’s integrity — or so it seemed. Everybody lied to get what he could. It was a new world.

  Ben Munroe had found it difficult to have another shot at Matthew Gray but, with an eye to knowing what his public wished to read, he managed to turn a penniless recluse into a mass exploiter of the blacks in South Africa for the second time.

  The story and pictures became another Munroe sensation, read and believed by millions across the world. The photographs of a man at play with his young girl ‘wife’ had been taken with a telephoto lens, with Lorna generally topless and Matt in his loincloth surrounded by good-looking, young and seemingly carefree people. The pictures of the colony were like the pictures of paradise, but the words that went with the pictures were as far removed from the truth as the two extremities of right and wrong. But it did not matter. The trick was to sell newspapers and magazines.

  After Ben had been tipped off as to where Matt was hiding, he made a trip to Africa and quickly uncovered the fact that only a small portion of Matt’s original wealth had been distributed to the poor, as very few blacks, the majority of whom valued their dignity more than a free lunch, had come forward to the banks to claim their right to a day’s free food. Ninety per cent of the wealth remained in the trust account, earning compound interest and, as the banks had received only one instruction as to its distribution, it stayed where it was, with the banks making a nice ten per cent return on what they were paying the trust and charging their clients. According to the banks, the only signature that could change the situation was that of Matthew Gray. If it was ever proved that he was dead, the money would devolve to the state.

  Ben’s story centred on Matt living off the fat of the land at the expense of the starving masses, and that his disappearance was a gimmick to get him away from the press to enjoy this ill-gotten wealth that he had wrung from the blacks of South Africa and now refused to return to them, despite the sanctimonious illusion of altruism displayed at the man’s final press conference. Once again Ben Munroe wiped the floor with Matthew Gray and made himself a huge profit in the process. The fact that the local newspapers rushed down to Port St Johns and photographed the colony with all its arts and asked how rich a man could be who lived a hand-to-mouth existence made no difference.

  The following week’s editions of the world’s magazines carried another set of stories. Fortunately for the colony, the administration of the independent state of Transkei was so bad and corrupt that money for mending roads never figured in their spending, and the road from Umtata to Port St Johns was a test of skill and courage – the courage being needed when a bus came round the corner of the twisting mountain road on the wrong side of the broken down track. Only tourists who enjoyed the beauty of the Wild Coast with its rock fishing chanced the dangers of the road, most with four-wheel drive vehicles.

  After a three week flurry, life returned to normal at Second Beach, but the colony had now become famous for what it really was, a sanctuary from the modern world, and a steady flow of happy-go-lucky drifters found their way down the Umtata road and up the coast to Second Beach.

  The big problem for Matt was his wealth. After thinking he had thrown the whole lot away, he discovered that after all, the monster was still very much alive, and the visit from the bank manager, who was also the trustee, with Matt’s lawyer, came as no surprise. The bank wanted him to tell them what to do with his money. The sight of the top banker in a dark suit being deferential to Matt in a pair of shorts, no shirt and hair down his back, sent Lorna into a fit of giggles, earning her a rare frown from her husband and a “Please take Peace down to the beach.”

  “Give it away,” he said, turning back to the bank manager.

  “But to whom?”

  The bank manager had drawn up a list of charities, but Matt knew the fund raising business was a business like any other and that most of his money would be siphoned off by the fund raisers to cover their expenses. His grand gesture had not been so simple after all, to do the job properly so that the right people benefited from it required Matt as well as his money. Even giving it away was an exercise in good management. For the first time since he had walked up the coast, he was truly stumped. The thought of returning to the world he had left was out of the question.

  “Gentlemen, leave the money as it is in the trust,” he decided eventually. “Maybe one day I will have cause to give it away properly.”

  “Do you wish to sue the overseas newspapers and Ben Munroe?”

  “Whatever for? All that would do is make him copy. The problem is his, not mine; his and the poor people he purports to champion. You can’t exploit a man who has nothing to be exploited.”

  “Mister Gray, there is one more thing I would like to ask. A favour.”

  “So long as it does not require me to leave the Transkei.”

  “The painting. May I buy that painting? I presume it was done by your wife. My only hobby is art and that is very good. Where does she exhibit?”

  “She doesn’t. She sells her paintings to the local tourists. It’s what we live off. That and odd building jobs I do in Port St Johns.”

  They were both looking at the large canvas hanging on the wall opposite the window, where the afternoon sun was playing on the rich colours of the flamingos foraging in the wetland at Umgazi Bay. The birds were tall and beautiful, the third dimension so deep in its execution that they looked as if they were walking right out of the picture into the room.

  “Then how much does she want for the flamingos?”

  “That one’s not hers.”

  “You have another painter in the colony?”

  “Yes,” answered Matt, laconically.

  “Will she sell me the painting?”

  “No, but he’ll give it to you. I’ll have to take it off the frame to get it into your car.” Matt went over to the wall and busied himself.

  “You can’t give away a painting like that. It’s worth a lot of money.”

  “Of course I can. It’s mine.”

  “But who painted the picture?”

  “I did,” answered Matt, shortly.

  The bank manager looked from the painting to Matt and back again. Matt went onto explain, as he carefully rolled up the painting two metres by two metres in size. “My mother was an artist. She taught me to draw as a child. I get more enjoyment out of painting than business, and I give it away but only to people who understand. And none of them are ever signed. I don’t have the ego for signatures.”

  Frikkie Swart had followed his wife across Pretoria to the house of a mutual friend, whose husband also worked for the bureau of state security. The man’s wife had often given him the eye. Helena was on the fat side, but still voluptuous, and the baby blue eyes focused on some other male made him jealous, violently jealous, which led to the best sex, even if it meant that his wife was bruised for a week afterwards.

  His friend’s wife turned him on not at all. She was far too fat. He had known that whatever was going on was going on during the day, and it was not with the tennis professional
. At night, when he came home, Helena was the dutiful wife and only made the rare mistake of looking at another man in his company, the subsequent pleasure of sex being tempered by the progressively more violent beatings.

  Frikkie arrived at his friend’s house at two in the afternoon, just after lunch. The house had high walls and good security, befitting a man who fingered activists as part of his job.

  “This is state business,” he told the guard on the gate, and pushed past him, striding up the tree lined driveway to the house. Silently he walked through the rooms, checking each one as he went, until he came to the back and the patio with the pool, hidden from anyone’s view. Frikkie’s friend was in Cape Town, attending to business at Frikkie’s request. He opened the door into the back of the changing room that opened up on to the pool and its grass surround.

  On the lawn, naked, spread out in the sun, were his wife and his friend’s wife. She looked worse with her clothes off, her flabby breasts hanging to her waist. In the tableau, one next to each woman lay two coloured boys, young, free of fat and full of erection. Frikkie watched half an hour in the cool and the dark of the dressing room, and when he had taken his pictures he left as silently as he had come.

  “If I hear you’ve mentioned my visit, you’re fired, and I’ll stop you getting another job in South Africa.” He spoke to the guard on the gate in Afrikaans, and enjoyed the fear in the man’s eyes. Then he returned to his office at the Union Building.

  Judging his time carefully, he returned home half an hour earlier than usual and, when Helena opened the front door to their home he shot her three times in the face and one in the pudenda. Then he drove with the polaroid photographs to the house of his father-in-law and showed him the prints.

  “What are you going to do?” asked the minister, looking quite ashen. In apartheid-ruled South Africa this was the ultimate scandal. Frikkie must be placated at all costs.

  “Your daughter shot herself, Mr Kloss, when I showed her these pictures.” They looked at each other for some time in silence.

  “Very well. I will have the police return a verdict of suicide.”

  The only surprise for Frikkie Swart was the tears in the minister’s eyes.

  At the end of the year, while Hector was watching the triumphant march of communism through the talks at Lancaster House in London that were paving the way for Marxist rule in Rhodesia, the weather in Port St Johns was perfect. The warm balm of summer was brushing the Indian Ocean and the long white beaches, disturbing the fronds of the wild banana and the feathers of the peacocks with the gentlest touch.

  Matt had taken his fishing rod to the rock below their hut soon after the sun had set behind the colony, touching the sky with red and orange, a triumphant fanfare to a perfect day. It was too hot to lie in bed, and the breeze that came from the sea cooled his naked body as he stood with feet firmly planted on the smooth rock, to cast far out in front of the short reef for the deep, sea fish of the ocean. Reeling back the slack, and with five hooks waving from his line deep in the ocean, he sat back on the rock to enjoy the stars and the sea. Tied to the hooks were juicy limpets he had cut from the rocks and expertly fastened to the big hooks with cotton. He had the certainty of a big, fat fish. Life was good to him. He had never been better. He was happy. He was in love. His wife loved him. What else could a man ever want?

  The fact that, by midnight when the half-moon rode high in the darkness of the sky, the fish had ignored his baited hooks mattered not at all. Obviously the fish had better things to do than eat dead limpets tied up in cotton thread. He had placed the handle of the rod in a holder wedged into the crevice of a rock, and only if an unwise fish swallowed a hook would he know what was going on down in the deep in front of the reef. Twice Lorna had come down with a pot of lemon-grass tea and they had sat and enjoyed the night together, silent but in perfect harmony with each other and the balmy warmth of the night. Each time, when the tea was finished, they climbed off the big rock to the soft sand and swam in the sea and the slow, gentle waves.

  After the third pot of tea, brewed in an old coffee jug a tourist had tossed out with the garbage, Matt carried down two old mattresses from the hut and they went to sleep next to the phallic rod, a piece of string attached to Matt’s big toe and the taut line that gently moved to the swell of the sea. Peace was fast asleep in the hut and there were no sounds from the colony; only the sucking noise from the sea and an owl back in the forest.

  They would have slept through the night and woken with the dawn, had a fish not swallowed a limpet, swum up over the reef and headed out to sea, yanking Matt awake with a yell of pain that continued after the string broke, as he grabbed the rod and tried to apply the drag. By the time he had finished bellowing his pain and excitement, the whole colony was awake and the dogs were barking. The moon had gone, but two layers of stars were so bright that they showed the line tight and running.

  Lorna tried hard to strap on the leather rod holder, for the reel was running out of line, when the fish turned back to shore, Matt wound the line in furiously while Lorna fitted the handle into the hole in the leather holder now tied around his waist, and the fish came under control. Matt walked down off the rock to fight the fish from the beach, where he could sink his feet into the wet sand and hold when the fish turned back out to sea.

  The day of the copper steenbras saw the arrival of a young girl at Second Beach. The whole colony had emerged with the dawn to watch Matt land a sixteen kilogram fish with a big, fat head, a wide mouth and an oval body that shone in the wet with the colour of copper. When the girl arrived, walking from First Beach where she had slept the night under a tree in the campsite, the fish had been eaten. She was carrying a backpacker and wearing shorts that displayed a good pair of legs which contrasted with a sturdy pair of brown leather boots and short grey socks. Her hair was black, her skin well-tanned and smooth, and Lorna knew she was Jewish.

  Matt was standing by the fire on the high water mark, picking at the bones of the big fish with his fingers. He was smiling at everyone else’s happiness. It was going to be a beautiful day, the sky cloudless, the sea calm and the wind still a gentle breeze from the sea.

  “Are you Matt? I’m looking for somewhere to stay. My name is Raleen Urbach… I lost my kids and husband in the war in Rhodesia, and I’m looking for some peace. I don’t have money. All I have’s in the pack… I sold the farm but you can’t take anything out of the country.” They were all looking at the stranger.

  “You’ve found your sanctuary, Raleen,” smiled Matt. “Welcome to the colony. There’s a bit of fish left on the bones, so help yourself.”

  “Are you Jewish?” asked Lorna.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “So am I.”

  “Good,” said Matt. “Now we can build a synagogue.”

  For Lorna, it was to be her first true friend, a friendship that was to last them the rest of their lives.

  Book Four

  1

  Sven Hylan watched the demonstration from his fourth-floor office window that looked down Hamngatan, a major street in the city of Stockholm, Sweden. It was a cold winter day in early 1981. All the placards were in English for the benefit of the television crews that fed off the demonstration like a pack of barracuda feeding off a shoal of sardines.

  The placards were crude and handmade, and priceless for the cause, the struggle. ‘Viva Mandela’, ‘Viva ANC’, ‘One settler, one bullet’, ‘Apartheid is a crime against humanity’. He and the Russian watched the well-orchestrated crowd cross Malmskillnadsgatan. A flurry of snow floated past the double-glazed window and added to the picture for the cameras.

  Sven sighed. Another cause. Another demonstration. Anita was always anti something. He could not pick her out but under one of the fur hats in the cold street below his window, his daughter would be shouting with the best of them.

  The Swedes were great demonstrators who believed that man needs laws and discipline in order to live. The current butt of the jokes among the likes of
Sven, taken very seriously by everyone else, was the Swedish parliament, which had already passed one thousand new laws that year – one law for every eight hours of the day and night. He wondered if there was a law telling him how to go to the toilet. He did not have time even to read the new laws, let alone debate them and pass them through parliament. Were it not for the Russian connection, he would have left Sweden and gone to live somewhere else where he did not pay ninety-three per cent of his income in tax. His pile of untaxed money outside the country was all very well, but he could not spend it in Sweden.

  “You know the big black nigger?” asked the Russian, who was looking through the window next to him. He had refreshed his English in America.

  “One black man and five hundred Swedes,” responded Sven.

  “They’ve run out of ideas to interfere with the lives of their own people. What do they know about Africa?”

  “You think they don’t believe it?”

  ‘Passionately – for the moment. The house has rung with the horrors of white rule in South Africa for the past week.”

  “Only a week?” The Russian smiled to himself.

  Sven moved from the window and sat behind his desk. He had wanted a few minutes to think. Buying a mainframe computer from America and shipping it to Russia was a lot more difficult than stealing blueprints and formulas.

  “We’ll have to find a company that needs the technology,” he said.

  “Or a government.”

  “Can’t we get you the know-how?”

  “Take too long, buddy boy. By the time we build a replica, our weapons would be out of date.”

  “You don’t mention the price,” Sven reminded him. The Russian shrugged and went on looking out of the window.

  The Swede rose and re-joined him. The Russian made him nervous. He was thinking of Taiwan. Maybe his Chinese friends could buy the computer and sell it to a South African firm, who would tranship the container at Cape Town and ship it through to Russia. Everyone would blame the racist South Africans and say they wanted the mainframe for their own weapons programme. He could tip off the Americans when it landed in Cape Town, tell them they would buy it back and then simply make it disappear. The more bizarre, the more-likely it was that the Americans would believe his story.