by Tony Park
Nick followed her into the office. The view of the harbour glittering on a sunny day could lift flagging spirits, but today the water reflected the Harbour Bridge’s dull grey and the dreary sky.
Pippa stayed standing, looking out at the unappealing view, rather than at him. ‘The tile company walked.’
Nick shrugged. ‘Typical small-client syndrome – asked the world, whinged all the time and paid peanuts. We’re better off without them.’
Pippa turned and her face told him he’d said the wrong thing. ‘That’s easy for you to say, Nick, you don’t have to pay the wages around here. The CEO said you offended him.’
Nick spread his hands. ‘I told him that I couldn’t sell a turd sandwich.’
‘He was launching a brand-new product.’
‘Yes.’ Nick nodded. ‘And he wanted us to get him on breakfast television.’
‘You didn’t even try, Nick.’
He took a breath. ‘I tried telling him that we needed to say something newsworthy, maybe run a scare campaign saying that metal roofs are dangerous in high winds or that tiles are better for the environment or some shit like that.’
Pippa straightened and put her hands on her hips. ‘Your heart’s not in this any more, Nick.’
‘In roof tiles? You think?’
‘That was my first account when I went freelance, Nick. Tiles helped me build this business, gave you a job.’ Pippa drew a deep breath before continuing, ‘Nick, we all know what a terrible year this has been for you.’
But, he thought she was about to say, your wife dying doesn’t give you an excuse to be rude to clients. And she would be right, of course, he had no reason, no right to be picky about what accounts he worked on. Pippa managed corporate and government affairs for a couple of big corporations, but they were cutting their funding. She could not afford to overlook their smaller clients. But the man running the tile company did not like him and he was pushy and demanding. He was always asking why Pippa wasn’t at the client meetings. It was an unreasonable gripe, but Nick could see why he would want to have a smart, attractive woman telling him what he wanted to hear rather than a burned-out fifty-year-old setting him straight.
‘I’m sorry, Nick.’
‘I’m getting better, Pippa,’ he said, though he wasn’t sure he was.
‘I am sorry about Jill, Nick, really I am, but that’s not why I just apologised.’
For the briefest moment he didn’t understand. ‘Why, then? What have you done wrong?’
‘I . . .’
‘Pip, please.’ His heart started pounding. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go back to tile man. I’ll grovel and get him back, buy us some time.’
She gave him a sad smile and shook her head, slowly. ‘Nick, I’m sorry. I lost the car account as well this morning. We’ve known for years that they were closing their factories in Australia and it happened. Even if I can get the tile account back I’ve got to downsize.’
He felt a tightening in his chest and for a moment wondered if it was the beginning of a heart attack. No such luck. She might have felt sorry for him then and reversed her decision.
‘Of all the gang,’ she went on, though he barely heard her, ‘you’ve got the most experience and you’ll find it easiest to get another job. If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only person I have to talk to this afternoon. I’m sorry, Nick, you’re too high-powered for me. I can’t afford you any more.’
Which was, he registered, the equivalent of a dumper saying to the dump-ee, ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ It never made a difference.
‘When?’ he asked.
‘You can work out a couple of weeks’ notice if you like. I’ll pay you all that you’re due.’
A few weeks at best, he thought, plus accrued holiday leave which he hadn’t taken. He nodded, turned, and started to walk out of Pippa’s office.
‘Nick . . . maybe there’ll be some freelance work, maybe I’ll pick up another client.’
He nodded but didn’t look back at her. He went to his desk, the eyes of the millennials burning into his back, and opened his laptop. He tried to concentrate on a half-finished media release for an advertising company client. Something about a new experiential marketing campaign, whatever the hell that meant.
Nick alternated between flashes of anger and self-pity. He wanted to stand up and go back to Pippa’s office and explain to her why she needed him, his contacts and his experience, but he could also see it from her point of view. His expertise and experience had proved invaluable to Pippa, for a while, but now he was an expensive mouth to feed from a shrinking pot. By his own admission he was no good at drumming up new business; Nick was a journalist, not a salesman, and not afraid who knew it.
Unable to concentrate and not willing to give any of his juvenile co-workers the satisfaction of seeing him walking out, he checked his emails.
There was one from someone he didn’t know, but the subject line was something a PR man could not ignore: Seeking Nicholas Eatwell – journalist needs help with a story. Nick opened it, noting the email address ended in ‘.co.za’.
Dear Mr Eatwell,
You don’t know me, but my name is Susan Vidler. I am a South African freelance journalist visiting Australia on holiday and business. I am researching a feature on an Australian who served in a unit called Steinaecker’s Horse in the Anglo-Boer War in 1902 and later in a rebellion against the German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia, in 1906. My research indicates that you may be the last surviving relative of this man, Sergeant Cyril John Blake. If you are the son of the late Denis and Ruth Eatwell, then you are the man I’m seeking. If so, I was wondering if you might have any documents or other information relating to Sergeant Blake that you would consider sharing with me.
Thanking you in advance,
Susan Vidler
Whoever this woman was she had done her research well because his parents Denis and Ruth had both passed away. The woman gave an Australian mobile number. He called it, grateful for a distraction from what had just happened, and the call went through to voicemail. He left a message saying he was the man she was looking for, and gave his number.
He ended the call and checked his watch. Three hours until he could go to the pub and get drunk. At least, he told himself, he now had a reason other than Jill.
Chapter 2
Munich, Germany, the present day
Anja Berghoff looked out the window from her desk in the Ludwig Maximilian University library and saw blue sky. It was what passed for a warm summer’s day in Munich and while it would have been nice to be sitting outside in a park she wanted to be somewhere further away.
Namibia.
It was the land of her birth, but her parents had fled in 1990 fearing retribution at the hands of the new South West African People’s Organisation government. Even though SWAPO had proved to be magnanimous in its transition to majority rule, following the United Nations–supervised elections, her father, of Namibian-German stock, refused to ever return, and had died proclaiming he had made the right decision.
Anja felt differently. She had been taken from Africa at the age of ten, just old enough to mourn the loss of friends and to appreciate the beauty of the arid but enchanting land in which she had begun to come of age. Germany had been everything that her birth country was not – cold, wet, green, predictable. She had hated it.
Of course, in time she had learned to appreciate her European life, but as impressive as the castles and rivers and snowfields and rich green grass were, they were not a patch on an African night sky awash with stars, the sight of a cheetah stalking its prey through dry golden grass, or the ghostly apparition of one of Etosha’s white-dusted elephants emerging from the dark onto the eerie canvas of a floodlit waterhole.
For Anja, the only thing to rival the fascination of Namibia’s landscapes and wildlife was its history. She was research
ing her master’s degree in history and her thesis was on the origins of another of Namibia’s natural attractions, the wild horses of the Namib Desert, sometimes called the ghost horses.
By a strange chain of events she had found herself wading through once highly classified intelligence documents, which she had obtained online from the national archives. The scans were of letters from a spy based in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. What was of interest to Anja was that the agent was a woman, Claire Martin, who, like her, had lived in Namibia, or German South West Africa, as the Kaiser’s colony was known at the time.
Claire Martin’s life story read like a movie screenplay. She had been born in Germany to an Irish father and a high-born Prussian mother. Her father had fled Ireland after being involved in the Fenian uprising against the British in 1867 and ended up serving on the Prussian side during the Franco–Prussian War. He had married the widow of a Prussian comrade and moved the family to America, where he’d tried to make his fortune on the goldfields in California. After failing there he had taken his wife and daughter to South Africa, and in the 1890s across the border to German South West Africa. There Claire had married the owner of a German shipping company, but he’d gone bankrupt and committed suicide.
In truth, Anja was interested in Claire Martin’s later life at around 1906 as a horse breeder in South West, where she and her second husband, Peter Kohl, had had a number of farms and a horse stud, but Claire’s early reports about her time as a spy for the Kaiser in 1902 made for fascinating reading. She would have been an unusual and very valuable spy, being a woman and speaking fluent German and English. Plus, while her letters were not directly relevant to Anja’s research into the origins of the desert horses, Anja had a theory that something had happened during Claire’s time as a spy in South Africa that had a direct bearing on her later life back in the German colony across the border.
Anja saw that Carla, the librarian she usually dealt with at LMU, had returned from her lunch break. She left her notes and laptop and went to the desk to ask Carla if the books she had ordered had been returned.
‘Yes, Anja, I have them here for you.’ Carla reached under the counter and slid the books over to her. ‘What did you say you were researching specifically?’
‘The desert horses of Namibia,’ Anja said. ‘Most people think they’re descended from military mounts that escaped or were let go during the First World War, but I’m working on a new theory, that the core group of horses from which the modern ones are descended arrived in the desert some time before then. It’s sensitive though; I can’t tell you more than that.’
Carla rolled her eyes. ‘No need to be so prickly.’
Anja frowned. This woman was not the first person to use that word to describe her. Anja’s mother was always saying she needed more friends, and Carla was nice and helpful.
She’d just opened her mouth to apologise when a young man, another student by the look of his ripped jeans and olive-green Bundeswehr surplus parka, came to the counter to ask for assistance. Looking away, Carla picked up a sheaf of printouts and passed them to him.
Anja instead thanked the librarian, took the books and went back to her desk, where she selected the next letter. It was another report from the last months of the Anglo-Boer War, dated 1902. What was becoming clearer in the letters was that Claire Martin had not been in South Africa only to gather intelligence for Germany on the course of the war – which was fascinating enough in its own right – but was also there to facilitate some kind of covert arms deal between Germany and the Boers in a last-minute bid to turn the tide of the war, in which the British had finally gained the upper hand.
This letter, like the others, was addressed to German Naval Intelligence, by way of the Kaiser’s embassy in neutral Portuguese East Africa.
On the fourteenth of the month I met with Kommandant Nathaniel Belvedere at an abandoned trading post on the banks of the Sabie River in the low country of the eastern part of the Transvaal. Belvedere is the commander of a battalion of Americans fighting for the Boers against the British. They call themselves the George Washington volunteers. Many are of Irish extraction and have a deep-seated hatred of the British.
Belvedere and a troop of his Americans were part of the Boer force that safeguarded President Paul Kruger out of South Africa when he left Pretoria by train in 1900. Belvedere, formerly a senior manager in a Transvaal goldmining company, was a close confidant of the President. He was to be my contact for the sale of the guns. He intimated to me, once we had established a rapport, that he did not have the funds on his person, but knew the location of enough currency to complete the transaction. I am yet to extract the whereabouts of his money.
Anja set down the letter and opened one of the books Carla had just given her. It was a German-language publication about foreign volunteers who served with the Boer forces. There were a good many of them, not only from America but also from Ireland, Holland, France, Sweden and Germany. Anja thumbed her way to the index and found the name Belvedere. On the listed page she found a photograph of a man with long fair hair, a drooping moustache and pointed beard. He stood in a stiff pose and wore a frown, but Anja detected a smile in his eye. Undeniably handsome, Colonel Nathaniel Belvedere looked like a Wild Bill Hickok character from the American Wild West. The few pictures she had sourced of Claire Martin told Anja that she, too, had been attractive. Anja let her mind wander as to the nature of the ‘rapport’ the pair had established.
There was no one in Anja’s life, romantically, and nor had there been for four years now. She had lived with a man for five years, but unlike her he had not wanted to have children. Eventually, he left. She was almost forty now and as difficult as it was for her she had almost resigned herself to the fact that she would not find a man and have a child. Maybe her mother was right, maybe she wasn’t trying hard enough, but for all her longing for a family Anja had become increasingly used to her own space and her own life, which she happily divided between Namibia and Germany.
Maybe, she told herself for perhaps the thousandth time, she would find an intelligent, financially secure safari guide in Namibia who was happy to live with her there during her regular visits. She forced the thought from her head and returned, instead, to the world of Claire Martin and her handsome American officer.
Chapter 3
Sabie River, eastern Transvaal, South Africa, 1902
Claire took off her broad-brimmed cattleman’s hat as Nathaniel opened the door of the farmhouse, a Colt .45 revolver in his hand. He grinned then stuck the pistol back in his belt. ‘Ma’am.’
It was pleasingly warm as she went inside and Nathaniel took her cloak from her. The Transvaal lowveld was much warmer than Pretoria, on the highveld, from where she had ridden two days earlier, and while the May days were sunny and clear now that the summer rains were a memory, the nights were beginning to turn cool. A small fire crackled comfortably in the hearth.
Nathaniel took a step back, his eyes blatantly, proprietorially reacquainting himself with her body. Claire took a step towards him and kissed him.
‘We’re alone, except for one man, Christiaan, who’s keeping watch from the stables,’ he whispered in her ear as he waltzed her down a hallway, through a door to a four-poster bed. The building, made of pole and dagga – timber and mud – with a grass thatch roof had once been the home of a Portuguese trader who had established his store in a second building. The property sat astride one of the routes plied by transport riders travelling from the goldfields higher up the escarpment to Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese East Africa, and its port of Delagoa Bay, some two hundred and fifty kilometres further eastwards. ‘Christiaan’s looking the other way.’
Claire liked the American and she knew he was besotted with her. As he lay over her she shifted and reached for his pistol, which was digging into her belly. She slid it out and placed it on the bedside table.
‘M
y turn.’ He kissed his way down her bodice and dropped to his knees on the floor, where he lifted her skirts. ‘I know it’s in here somewhere.’
Claire put her head back and savoured the feel of his fingers moving slowly up her woollen stockings to the bare skin of her thighs. Nathaniel found the pocket derringer she kept there in the loop of a custom-made leather garter. He pulled it free, and when she looked down over her breasts she couldn’t suppress a laugh. He had the tiny gun between his shiny white teeth, like a dog fetching a bone. He took her pistol from his mouth and placed it on the bedside table next to his. He lowered his head again.
She grabbed the posts at the top of the bed with both her hands, her grip tightening and her hips undulating as Nathaniel continued the ministrations hidden by her petticoats. Quite where he had learned his repertoire even she was too modest to ask, but he had clearly been a willing and erudite student. Claire tried to keep her mind on the goal she had set herself, which was to learn where the Boers had hidden the loot that would be used to pay for her guns, but it wasn’t easy.
Unable and unwilling to maintain total control, Claire gasped and shuddered and, satisfied he had completed his mission, Nathaniel navigated his way back onto the bed and scaled her. He kissed her and, once she had found her breath again, she rolled him onto his back.
When they were sated a naked Nathaniel led her, wrapped in a sheet, back to the hearth. He moved a Chinese printed screen to one side to reveal a brass hip bath. He topped up the water from a copper.
‘Thought you’d never get here,’ he said.
Claire saw his cigar box on the mantelpiece. She opened it, took out a cheroot and lit it with a taper from the fire, then drew on it. Claire passed it to Nathaniel, dropped her sheet and slid into the bath.
