See No Evil

by Michael Ridpath

  His flight arrived at Johannesburg at about eight o’clock. He hired a car and drove on to Pretoria, where he checked into a hotel in Arcadia, the diplomatic quarter. The next morning he headed out on to the high veld in search of Visser’s farm.

  Where Cape Town had been green and mountainous, the veld was yellow and flat, or at best gently undulating. For miles on all sides stretched grassland dotted with heavily guarded farms, patches of succulent green in the parched landscape. They needed rain.

  Visser’s farm was set back from a small straight road that led from one tiny dorp to another. It seemed to be bigger than most of its neighbours, the farmhouse itself was substantial, as was the cattle shed next to it. There was a perimeter fence along the road, and then an inner barrier of twelve-foot-high floodlit barbed wire. The metal plates on the gate threatened armed response, dogs and electrocution. Calder almost expected to see a sign telling him to beware of the minefield.

  He opened the gate and drove along the track towards the farm. After Professor Havenga he had felt quite confident about meeting a retired civil servant, but this wasn’t the quaint rustic farmstead he had expected. It looked more like a military camp. He almost turned back, but he had come this far and he didn’t want to waste the trip. Besides, he planned a more subtle approach with Visser, less confrontational, more indirect.

  He approached the inner gate to the farm to be met by two Dobermanns barking their heads off. No way was he going to open that gate, so he hooted the hired car’s horn.

  He waited a minute and then the door to the farmhouse opened, followed by the iron security gate. A thin man emerged. He tried to shout at the dogs, but his voice was hoarse and weak. Despite that, the dogs seemed to hear and slunk towards him. He shut them into a shed next to the house and limped over to the gate to open it.

  Calder leaned out of the window of his car. ‘Mr Visser? My name’s Alex Calder –’

  ‘I know who you are,’ wheezed Visser. ‘Come in.’

  Calder parked his car and followed the man inside. ‘A lot of security you have here,’ he said.

  ‘We need it. We lose several cattle every year. We have to protect them ourselves, we can’t rely on anyone else.’

  ‘I see,’ said Calder.

  Visser led him into what was clearly a study of the practical sort, cluttered with books, ledgers, box files and computer equipment. He coughed, a rasping affair that shook his whole body.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating a sofa. As Calder lowered himself into it, Visser moved to the corner behind his desk. There Calder noticed a rifle. He leaped to his feet, but Visser had already picked up the gun and was pointing it at him.

  ‘Keep still!’ he wheezed.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Calder said, raising his hands in a placatory gesture.

  ‘Hands by your sides!’

  Calder let his arms drop.

  ‘You should know, Mr Calder, that I am very different from my friend Professor Havenga. Not as friendly. In fact I object to the way you questioned him.’

  Calder swallowed. ‘I see.’

  ‘This isn’t Britain,’ Visser said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You see, I can shoot you right now. This is my land, my farm, and you are an intruder. I know the local police chief. He might ask a difficult question or two, but he wouldn’t argue with my story. My family and his have known each other for generations.’

  Calder remained silent.

  ‘You ask too many questions. Turn around.’

  Calder remained still.

  ‘I said turn around!’ Visser raised his voice, but that brought on a fit of coughing. Calder stared down the barrel of the rifle and then did as he was asked. He faced a blank wall.

  ‘This isn’t the Wild West, either,’ Visser continued. ‘Here it’s OK to shoot an intruder in the back. In fact it’s more credible. And I’m going to shoot you on the count of three. Are you ready?’

  Calder swallowed again. Jesus! What was this? So much for the subtle approach. Was he going to be shot dead just like that? Visser was bluffing, surely …’

  ‘One.’

  Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. But Visser was too far away for Calder to jump him; the second Calder moved he would be dead. Perhaps he could talk him out of it. ‘Andries …’

  ‘Quiet! Two.’

  This was it. Calder closed his eyes. He thought of his father. And from somewhere he thought of Sandy. Odd.

  ‘Three!’ There was a sharp crack, the feeling of wind on his cheek and then the plaster on the wall next to him exploded, fragments tearing into his face. He flinched as his ears and chin burned. He touched his face. Blood from the plaster.

  He turned to see Visser holding the rifle to his shoulder. ‘On second thoughts there would be some tiresome interviews to deal with,’ Visser said. ‘But remember, this is my country, not yours. I can have you killed here easily any time I like. And I will do that unless you take a plane out of South Africa tonight. My people will be watching you. Now go.’

  Calder hesitated.

  ‘Go!’ wheezed Visser. Calder left the room and walked stiffly out to his car. His knees were weak and he had a strong urge to run, but he didn’t want to give Visser the pleasure. He slowly climbed in, and drove off down the track. As he reached the small country road, a blue Toyota Corolla appeared behind him. There was a white man inside with a thick neck and a baseball cap. Calder made no attempt to evade the car as it followed him all the way to Pretoria.

  There were many Bloomfield Weiss bankers that Benton Davis disliked, but the one he loathed most was the man who was at that moment screaming at him down the telephone. Simon Bibby was an Englishman, but he was based in New York where he was head of Global Fixed Income, and also chairman of the Underwriting Committee. A powerful man. An angry man.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that you committed the firm to underwriting a junk-bond issue without referring to the Underwriting Committee first?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ! I thought we’d sorted this problem out years ago. Bankers cannot commit the firm to a client on a whim in a meeting. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘I did what I had to do to secure the deal,’ Benton said. ‘The financing letter went out to Zyl News yesterday.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you leave it to Dower?’ Bibby said. ‘He’d never have done that. It’s a rookie’s mistake, Benton.’

  ‘There’s only another fifty million pounds needed,’ said Benton. ‘That’s less than 10 per cent of the value of the transaction. Surely we can raise that? What happened to that famous Bloomfield Weiss placing power?’

  ‘The point is that it’s we who decide how much of the firm’s capital we risk, not you. You know that. I do not like being bounced into taking decisions by idiots who will sell the firm to win a deal.’

  ‘If you haven’t the balls to stand up for a lousy three hundred and fifty million for one of the bank’s best clients don’t blame me,’ said Benton.

  Bibby sputtered. ‘You’re out of here,’ he snarled. ‘Once this deal is over, you’re history, I’ll make sure of that.’

  ‘Great to have your support,’ said Benton as he put down the phone.

  Bibby wasn’t his direct boss, but he could get him fired. Benton knew that he had sinned, he had known it at the time he had given his word that Bloomfield Weiss would come up with the funds. There was a strong likelihood that he would lose his job as a result. But he didn’t regret what he had done.

  Cornelius van Zyl deserved support from Bloomfield Weiss. This was the key moment in Zyl News’s history. The company had been a loyal client for over twenty years, since Bloomfield Weiss had structured the complicated set of parallel loans that had enabled Cornelius to evade South African exchange controls and make his first investment in US newspapers. Since then the firm had done a dozen deals with Cornelius, big and small, profitable and less profitable. At that moment Cornelius had needed Bloomfield Weiss’s unequivocal support and Benton was g
lad he had given it. It had been the right thing to do. And he was sick of cowering before the likes of Simon Bibby.

  His phone rang. He picked it up. ‘Benton Davis.’

  ‘I’ve just had Peter Laxton on the phone,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s worried that we can’t raise nine hundred million.’

  ‘Where did he get that idea from?’

  ‘Gurney Kroheim. They’re telling him that the debt markets are getting tougher.’

  ‘That’s true, but we can handle it.’

  ‘Did you see the article in the Lex column this morning?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Benton. The Financial Times’s daily Lex column carried comment on the stock market and recent takeover gossip. That morning it had questioned the reliability of Zyl News’s bid, and suggested that shareholders might be safer taking the slightly lower price from Sir Evelyn Gill. ‘Gill’s PR is working overtime.’

  ‘So you’re sure you can raise the funds?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Benton. ‘You’ve got our letter, haven’t you?’

  ‘Good. Because that’s what I told Peter Laxton. My reputation’s at stake on this one.’

  You’re not the only one, thought Benton. But he didn’t say it. What he did say was, ‘You can rely on us, Cornelius.’

  ‘I don’t know whether Laxton will go with us,’ Cornelius said. ‘But I do know we can’t bid any higher than nine hundred.’

  ‘That’s higher than Gill. Laxton’s shareholders will get more cash if they sell to us. That’s the important point.’

  ‘Very few of the institutional investors have tendered their shares to us so far,’ Cornelius said.

  ‘Don’t worry. They’re playing a waiting game, hoping for a better offer. When one doesn’t materialize they’ll accept ours, you’ll see.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Cornelius and rang off. Benton stared at the phone. He went through the outcomes. If Zyl News won the deal and the junk-bond issue was a success, he would live to fight another day. If they didn’t win the deal, he was in trouble. If the bond issue flopped and Bloomfield Weiss were left with a three hundred and fifty million pound bridging loan to a struggling Zyl News, then he was toast. There was nothing more he could do to influence the outcomes one way or the other.

  Cornelius was worried too as he replaced the receiver. He appreciated Benton Davis’s support, and he himself had sounded supremely confident to Peter Laxton. But he could feel the doubt in Laxton’s voice. They were going to go for Gill’s offer, the safer option.

  He looked up from his desk as his assistant came in. ‘I’ve just had a phone call from Todd,’ she said. ‘He wants to see you. Right away.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘He says he has something to ask you.’

  Calder took Andries Visser’s threat seriously. He was confident that he was on to something and he didn’t want to give up. The closer he got to finding out who had really killed Martha van Zyl, the more determined he was becoming, for Todd’s sake, for Kim’s, for Anne’s, for his father’s, for his own. But neither did he want to die. He might evade the Toyota, but there could be other people watching him, people he hadn’t seen. The Laagerbond was clearly a powerful organization, and at this stage he had no idea how powerful, or how widely its tentacles stretched through South Africa.

  If he was to stay alive he had to be seen boarding a flight leaving South Africa that day.

  He drove back to his hotel in Pretoria, where there was a message for him to call Tarek in London. He tried, but his friend was in a meeting. So he checked out, drove the fifty kilometres south to Johannesburg airport and bought a one-way ticket to London via Lusaka. Two hours’ wait, two hours to Lusaka, and there he bought a one-way ticket back to Johannesburg. He was back in South Africa by ten o’clock, hoping that whoever had watched him leave the country was not hanging around the arrivals hall to see if he returned. He hired a car and drove to Sandton, a northern suburb of the city, where he found a hotel. It was too late to call Tarek, but he did call Kim’s mobile. It was switched off, but he left her a message on her voicemail explaining where he was.

  Despite the fact that his room was four floors up, that he kept his window firmly closed and locked, that he slid into place the deadbolt and the chain on his door, he didn’t sleep well that night. He had only to drift off for a few moments when his eyes would start open to examine the dim outlines of armchair, lamp and curtains and his ears strain in an effort to pick out the sharp sound of an intruder above the muffled din of the night outside. He could tell his conscious self that there was no one there. But his unconscious self didn’t believe it.

  Libby Wiseman lived in Yeoville, which, according to Calder’s map, was a suburb just to the east of the Central Business District of Johannesburg. Sandton in daylight was quite a sight. Opulent hotels, smart new bank headquarters wider than they were tall, vast shopping malls, the place reeked of wealth. Wealth and white people. He drove south through leafy suburbs of well-fortified houses. As he neared the centre of the city things changed. More black people, fewer trees, dilapidated houses, impossibly large bus queues. By the time he reached Yeoville, there wasn’t a white person around, apart from two shaven-headed thugs in a police patrol car.

  Uneasy, he located Libby Wiseman’s street and drove up to her house. It was a large rambling edifice with peeling paintwork, surrounded by similar properties in a worse condition. Fifty years ago it might have been a grand residence; now it was a dump. The street was busy with hawkers and loafers. A painfully thin, very black man tried to sell him a packet of something. Calder said no without really knowing what it was. He looked about him. He felt like a sitting target for Visser, or anyone else for that matter. He was relieved when the door was opened.

  Libby Wiseman was a heavy-set woman of about sixty. Her dark hair was streaked with grey and hung loose down to her shoulders. She was dressed in a long denim skirt and a baggy green sweatshirt. She was expecting him: he had called earlier that morning. She smiled as she led him into a large kitchen smelling of damp and gas.

  ‘Interesting neighbourhood,’ Calder said.

  ‘It’s a war zone,’ Libby said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yeoville used to be the radical capital of South Africa,’ Libby said. ‘My grandparents came here from Lithuania a hundred years ago. Good Bolsheviks, they were. The tradition lived on: in the early nineties, when the ANC exiles began to return to South Africa, they set up home here. I was born here and after my divorce in 1991 I left Cape Town to come back. I even had a brief stint in politics myself.’

  She picked out a cigarette from a packet on the kitchen table and lit up. ‘Sorry, do you want one?’ she said, waving the packet vaguely at him. He shook his head. ‘Thought not.’

  ‘Then the whole world wanted to move here,’ she continued. ‘South Africans, Nigerians, Congolese, Kenyans, everybody. The area became very cosmopolitan. Too cosmopolitan for all those radicals. They hightailed it for the white suburbs, leaving a couple of old crones like me behind them.’

  ‘Why do you stay?’ Calder asked.

  ‘I spent the first half of my life fighting segregation. I’m not going to spend the second half running away from the consequences.’

  ‘You said you were a politician for a while?’

  Libby laughed. ‘That only lasted a year. I soon realized my mistake.’

  ‘Didn’t you like Mandela?’

  ‘Oh, everyone loves Mandela, even me. No, it wasn’t that. The ANC was supposed to be a socialist organization. I was a member of the Communist Party. We were going to nationalize the means of production, feed the poor, give them schools and hospitals and houses and land. I know it sounds incredibly old-fashioned these days, but I really believed that stuff; still do, as a matter of fact. As soon as the ANC comes to power, what does it do? Privatizes everything in sight. A government like that wasn’t for me, so I quit.’ She stared at Calder
’s face. ‘What did you do to your cheek?’

  Calder touched the scab. The damage from the plaster on Visser’s study wall had only been superficial, but the memory of that rifle shot distracted him. He didn’t answer.

  ‘Do I take it you have already experienced the warmth of sunny South Africa’s hospitality?’ Libby said.

  ‘Er … yes. You could say that.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m getting cynical, I suppose. I just hoped that when apartheid disappeared, so would the violence in this country. It hasn’t.’

  ‘It’s violence I wanted to talk to you about. Murder, specifically.’

  ‘Yes. George Field called me and said you were trying to find out what happened to Martha van Zyl. He said I should trust you and give you all the help I can, by the way. I don’t know George well, but he was a brave man in his time, and I’m inclined to do what he asks.’

  ‘Thank you. I understand you and Martha were friends. You were both on the board of a charity?’

  ‘Yes. A literacy project in Guguletu. We weren’t great friends, I’m not sure Martha had many true friends in South Africa, but we liked each other. She was a little naïve, but her heart was in the right place. Her husband sold out, though, and I don’t think she was very happy with that.’

  ‘Sold out?’

  ‘Yes. Literally in his case. I was never convinced by those businessmen who raked in profits off the backs of the black labour they were exploiting and then wrung their hands in anguish over apartheid. But in his case he gave up, demolished the Cape Daily Mail and disappeared to America to make his millions. He must be seriously rich by now, isn’t he?’

  ‘I think so,’ Calder said.

  ‘Well, Martha didn’t like his plan, and I don’t blame her.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why she was killed? Do you believe it was the ANC?’

  ‘It may have been. Or it may have been someone else.’ Libby smiled conspiratorially. ‘I know one thing that the official account missed out. She didn’t travel to Kupugani alone.’