The answer came through the door. So-and-so has collapsed. She named the head of the investment company through which, but not in which, I had invested my life’s savings. The man was one whom I had known for thirteen years and whom I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I could trust.
I misunderstood the word collapse and presumed a heart attack or stroke, which seemed odd, because he was only in his forties. She meant his company had collapsed and he had been arrested.
Even when I learned the truth, I was not particularly worried. After all, my investments were nothing other than what had been chosen on his recommendation, and I had insisted on fund managers who were utterly reputable, solid, and above all safe. No spectacular returns, thank you, no matter how inviting the blandishments. It was only when seated with the detectives of the Metropolitan Police City Fraud Squad that the full measure of the swindle was explained to me.
The investments simply were not there. The documents were forged. The savings had been raided, embezzled, and spent trying to prop up the great Wizard of Oz–style facade. And I was not the only one. Other victims were banks, insurance houses, and all the private clients.
Receivers were appointed, but quickly realized the total assets of the collapsed sham would be just enough to cover their own fees. Naturally. The total missing sum from all the victims combined was about £32 million, £20 million to financial institutions and the remainder from private clients.
It was a strange year. The detectives slowly prepared their case for the Crown Prosecution Service, and I was amazed to learn how many victims would refuse to testify. It is the vanity factor. Those who pride themselves on their acumen cannot bear to admit they have been taken.
I had no such inhibitions, having always known I was useless in the management of money. So I became the detectives’ favorite guest and they explained how it had all been done.
Actually, I was not simply penniless, but owed an additional million pounds. This was because, seeking to buy the farm, I had suggested I encash some portfolio to buy the place outright. I was persuaded to take out a mortgage instead, as the shrewd management of the million would generate more than a mortgage would cost. It was all bunkum, of course. The necessary portfolios could not be encashed because they were not there. So it was soon clear I was worth zero minus an extra million.
The case ground on at a snail’s pace. Eventually, in 1993, it came to court. I was not needed as a witness. Thanks to a brilliant defense lawyer, a useless prosecutor, and a judge who had never tried a criminal case in his life, the charges were reduced to two small technical offenses and the sentence was 180 hours of community service.
The Biafran affair had deprived me of any faith or trust in the senior mandarins of the Civil Service. The trial of 1993 did the same for my belief in the legal system and the judiciary.
Anyway, I had made up my mind that there was only one thing for it. That was, at the age of fifty, to write more novels and make it all back. So I did.
THE PASSING OF HUMPY
There were three of us standing at the stern of the game-fisher Otter out of Islamorada, in the Florida Keys, and we were after amberjack, those big, heavy, deep-bodied giants of the mackerel family who fight like hell.
Both my boys were with me; Stuart, the fanatical angler who never took his eyes off the rigs, and the younger Shane, who could get bored when nothing struck. The Otter was hove to several miles out into the Gulf Stream, right over a submerged mountaintop called “the 409,” because it was 409 feet beneath the water, or simply “the Hump.” It was the school summer holidays of 1991.
It was Shane who first saw the tiny, fluttering object off the stern, struggling toward us on exhausted wings, coming from the east. High above the little traveler was a black-backed gull, its orange razor beak eager for a kill. Another joined it and they screamed at the sight of the tiny prey beneath them. One by one we ceased watching the rod tips for the giveaway tremble of a bite far below and watched the struggle.
The little flier was not a seabird at all—there is none that small. It was evidently exhausted and at the end of its strength. It dipped in tiredness toward the tea, fluttered frantically to rise and struggle on for a few more yards. We watched in silence, yearning for it to win. A few more yards and it could fall onto our afterdeck. But tiredness won. It finally sank again and the sea rose to take it.
But it was only a few feet from the transom. Perhaps there was a chance. I grabbed the scoop net from the deck and, above and behind me, watching from his flying bridge, skipper Clyde Upchurch engaged gear and moved back a few feet. I got the mesh beneath the little bird that lay motionless on the swell and hoisted it aboard.
I am no ornithologist, but I was pretty certain it was a finch out of Africa. It should have been emigrating to Europe, but clearly had been blown way off course and out to sea. Disorientated, it must have taken refuge in the rigging of a freighter and thus had crossed the Atlantic, but without food or water seemed weakened.
But there was land behind us, the chain of Florida’s islands six miles away, and perhaps the little fellow had sensed this and tried to get there. But it had failed. Above the stern the gulls screamed in outrage over their lost meal and veered away.
Shane took the tiny body in his cupped hands and went back into the cabin. Because of where we were, we named the little stowaway Humpy. And we went on fishing.
Shane prepared a bed of paper tissues and laid what we presumed was the little corpse upon it in a pool of sunlight on the cabin table. Ten minutes later, he gave a yell. The tiny beady eye that had been closed in death was now open. Humpy was still alive. Shane appointed himself nurse in chief.
He formed the flat bed into a nest of soft tissue paper, took some bottled water, and dribbled a few drops onto the beak. It opened and the drops disappeared. Humpy woke up and began to preen. More spring water, more tissues, a slow wipe-off to clear the tacky salt from the plumage. Humpy perked and fluttered.
It was another thirty minutes before he felt able to fly. Shane was catching flies trapped in the cabin windows. I suggested Humpy was a seed eater, as he refused the flies but finally accepted a tiny crumb of bread from the packed lunch. Then he spread his wings and flew.
Not far at first. Just off the table, around the cabin and back to the table. As in pilot training, we called it circuits and bumps. He did about a dozen circuits of the cabin, had a rest, had more drops of water, and then found an open window. Shane yelled in alarm and rushed outside.
Humpy was doing his circuits, all right, but around the moored boat. The afternoon wore on, and it was time to go. The charter was almost over and we had to get back to Islamorada. Then it all went wrong.
With lines retrieved and rods stored, there was no cause to stay. High aloft, Clyde engaged gear and pushed the throttle forward. The Otter leaped to the command and Shane screamed. Humpy was somewhere astern and his salvation was racing away to the west. We all turned and yelled, but Clyde could not hear us above the engine roar.
Stuart ran up the ladder to tap him on the shoulder. The Otter stopped in the water, but she had surged for at least two hundred yards. We all gazed astern, and there he was. Fluttering above the wake, trying to catch up with the only sanctuary for miles around.
We started shouting encouragement . . . and the gull came back. Humpy so nearly made it. He was ten yards from the stern when the sharp orange beak took him. I noticed a box of lead weights lying open on the deck, seized the largest I could see, and flung it at the gull above us.
A hit would have been impossible, but the gull must have seen some dark object coming toward it, for it uttered another raucous scream. And dropped the little finch in its beak. The crumpled form fell back to the surface of the ocean again. Clyde backed the Otter slowly toward the feathery lump on the water. Again I fished it out.
But this time there was no hope. The gull’s beak had crushed the life out of
Humpy and no more drops of spring water could bring him round. Shane tried all the way back to the marina, and the salt on the finch’s wings was washed away again, but this time by the tears of a little boy.
That evening, in a cigar box lined with moss, beneath the casuarina trees of the Cheeca Lodge Hotel, we buried Humpy in the sand of the New World, which he had tried so hard to reach, like so many before him, and very nearly did.
A VERY BURNING QUESTION
It was a very simple query put to me by the Firm in 1992: Do you by any chance know anyone high in the South African government? And the answer was yes.
Because of years patrolling southern Africa, I had a passing acquaintanceship with Pretoria’s foreign minister Roelof “Pik” Botha, even though by then I had not seen him for several years.
If the profession of foreign correspondent made a very good cover for a bit of “enhanced tourism” on behalf of the Firm, an established author researching his next novel was even better. It enabled me to go just about anywhere, ask to meet and converse with just about anyone, and pose just about any question. And all to be explained as research for a novel yet to be written—or not, for all anyone could prove.
Back in the seventies, the target had been the Rhodesia of Ian Smith and occasioned several visits to Salisbury, now renamed Harare. Once again my amiable but witless “Bertie Wooster” pose paid dividends. The men at the top were white supremacists, which is to say racial bigots.
There is no greater lure for the bigot than the earnest inquirer who, seeming basically sympathetic and right-wing, asks that the complexities of the situation be explained to him. No white supremacist can resist. As nothing other than a seeker after knowledge, I was favored with many hours of explanation—and classified information—from the likes of Rhodesian foreign and defense minister Peter van der Byl. He was a way-out racist who referred to his domestic staff—all Matabeles because he loathed the Shona—as “my savages.”
I do not think any of them suspected, as I listened, nodded, and smiled, that my views were the opposite of their own. But what they revealed was useful back home.
In the eighties, with Rhodesia now Zimbabwe, the target was the South Africa of the National Party, the originator and enforcer of apartheid, which was both brutal and tinged with insanity.
I once found myself closeted with General Hendrik van den Bergh, the head of the Bureau of State Security, the dreaded BOSS, and he insisted on telling me a story to prove not only his legitimacy but his sanctity as well.
“Let me tell you this, Mr. Fosdick”—he always called me Fosdick, forefinger waving, eyes alight—“I was standing once, quite alone, on the High Veldt when a great storm came up. I knew the land was riven with iron ore deposits and lightning strikes would be frequent and dangerous. So I took shelter under a large mwataba tree.
“There was an old kaffir standing nearby, also sheltering. And the storm raged with biblical intensity. The thunderbolts poured out of the sky and the thunder was enough to deafen me. The tree was struck and split down the middle, its core a smoking ruin. The old kaffir was struck and at once electrocuted.
“But the storm passed, Mr. Fosdick, and the sky cleared. And I was not touched. And that was when I knew, Mr. Fosdick, that the hand of God was upon me.”
I recall thinking that I was alone with the mast of one of the most brutal secret police forces in the world, and he was mad as a frog.
On another occasion, I was invited as dinner guest at the house of professor Carel Boshoff, head of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the Brotherhood, which was the intellectual and ecclesiastical (Dutch Reformed Church) origin and underpinning of the whole concept of apartheid.
Dinner proceeded with the usual courtesies until, over pudding, he asked me what I thought of the Homelands Policy. This was a particularly pernicious idea whereby the indigenous ethnic groups that made up the black majority would be allocated tracts of barren and often unworkable land, and be told that this was their true and original “homeland.”
As such, they could then have a token “government” and thus lose their citizenship of the Republic of South Africa (the RSA) and thus any rights they might have had in the first place, which were already few enough. I visited one of the “homelands,” Bophuthatswana, the so-called home of the Tswana people. It made the old American Indian reservations look like Shangri-La, although Sol Kerzner built a resort called Sun City on it to bring in a bit of tourist revenue.
Anyway, I was by then heartily tired of expressing views that were the inverse of what I really thought, so I explained exactly what I thought. My half-eaten dessert was removed and I was escorted from the house.
But in the course of all this, I met Pik Botha, the only man among them that I liked. He was practical rather than theoretical, had traveled very widely, and seen the outer world. I suspected that despite his position he was a moderating influence on successive presidents and probably privately despised the extremists around him.
By 1992 it was clear to anyone with eyes that the rule of the National Party and apartheid was finally moving to its close. There would soon have to be elections and they would have to be one man, one vote, which the African National Congress under its recently released and newly elevated chief Nelson Mandela would win. The white president, the last, was F. W. de Klerk, and Pik Botha was his firm ally and partner in reform.
Nevertheless, there was something “our political masters,” as the Friends put it, urgently wanted to know, and the “received wisdom” (as they also put it) was that an inquiry via our embassy in Pretoria was not the right channel. Too formal, too undeniable. What was needed was a quiet inquiry in a very private situation.
It was summer in Europe, winter in South Africa, and both parliaments were in recess. Ministers were also taking their holidays. It was known that Pik Botha had two passions: game fishing and big-game hunting. But the winter seas off the Cape of Good Hope were too rough, so it would probably be a game lodge for the foreign minister.
Then it was discovered he would indeed be vacationing for a week on a game lodge in the South African section of the Kalahari Desert.
These lodges are situated in the corners of simply enormous game reserves where the natural fauna—mainly antelope—are protected from their natural predators such as lions, leopards, and crocodiles. So they overbreed. The numbers have to be culled to preserve the life-support system. To defray costs, licenses are issued, and amateur hunters, escorted by professional game wardens, are allowed to track and shoot limited numbers for a fee appropriate to the size of the animal being taken.
Personally, I will take out of circulation either something that is a pest or vermin and has to be culled for the preservation of the rest of the ecosystem or if it will definitely reappear on the dining table. Or, like rabbit and wood pigeon, both. But not for fun and not for a wall trophy. But this would have to be an exception. The question was very important.
Of course, there had to be a cover story, and it was sitting at home doing schoolwork. My two sons would come with me.
Over the years, I had tried to introduce them to as wide a variety of adventurous holidays as possible, so that they could perhaps latch onto what really enthused them.
Thus we had been snorkeling and diving in the tropics, skiing and snowboarding in the Alps and Squaw Valley, flying, riding, and shooting. My older son, Stuart, had decided already; he was a passionate fisherman and has remained so. Shane had no particular preference, but had demonstrated on the estates of friends that he was a crack shot, a natural.
The game reserve where Pik Botha would spend part of his vacation in the Kalahari was discovered and bookings were made for me and the boys for the same week. So we flew to Jo’burg, thence to Krugersdorp, and thence by light aircraft to a dusty strip in the grounds of the shooting lodge.
It was a very convivial week, and Pik Botha was affable when we met again. He was eager to bag himself
an eland and spent days tracking them. I thought it wise at least to “purchase” something for Stuart and Shane. On the second day, Stuart bagged his impala and was delighted when the forehead and horns, stripped to whitened bone, were presented for him to hang on his wall.
Shane was lectured lengthily by a warden as to what he should do, listened politely, and then from the back of a stationary truck put a bullet through the heart of a blesbok with a snap shot at 150 paces. The buck was photographed, but the real picture was the warden’s face. After that, he became their mascot.
My opportunity came on the penultimate day. A very small party would camp overnight in the wilderness. There were Pik Botha and his “minder” from Pretoria; the two sons of the owner of the ranch; my two lads and me. Plus two game wardens and several African porters.
After a long day tracking, the porters built a fine fire of brushwood, a barbecue and a braai provided a meat supper, sleeping bags were unrolled, and we settled down to sleep. The atmosphere was intensely relaxed and I thought the moment was ripe. We were all around the dying fire with the four sleeping boys between the foreign minister and me. So I asked quietly, “Pik, when the rainbow revolution comes and the ANC takes over, what are you going to do with the six atom bombs?”
South Africa had long had atomic bombs, built with Israeli help. Everyone knew this, despite the strict secrecy surrounding them. London also knew there were six and they could be carried by the RSA’s British-built Buccaneers.
That was not the problem. Nor was the moderate Nelson Mandela. The problem was that the ANC Party had an ultra-hard-line wing, including several devoted pro-Moscow Communists, and even though the USSR had been disbanded by Mikhail Gorbachev the previous year, neither London nor Washington wanted nuclear bombs under the control of the anti-West extremists. It only took Nelson Mandela to be toppled by an internal coup as so many African leaders had already been and . . .
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