He was walking through the lobby of the hotel on his first morning in the country when he heard a shout: “Boy!” He ignored it, not for a moment thinking it was meant for him, when it was repeated. “Boy! Wait!” He turned and saw a short gray-haired man with a moustache approaching him.
“Can I help you, sir?” he had said, falling back on politeness in his confusion. He could smell alcohol as the man got closer.
The man’s eyes lit up when he heard the accent. “Go back to your own country, boy. We don’t want you stirring up trouble with our Kaffirs here.”
Benton’s first instinct was to hit the man, who was much smaller and older than him. Then he realized that’s exactly what the man wanted, and he turned on his heel and walked out of the hotel. But he spent the rest of the day rehearsing to himself all the replies he should have come up with.
He asked me whether they have the term “redneck” in this country. I told him “redneck” is actually a term the Boers use for English-speaking liberals, but there are a couple of near equivalents to the American usage: “rock-spider” or “hairyback.” He liked rockspider.
I asked him why he had come. After years of ignoring South Africa, America has gotten itself all excited about the place, especially black America. Didn’t he think he was consorting with the enemy?
He said it had been difficult. He hates his boss. When it became clear that someone from Bloomfield Weiss had to go to South Africa to check up on Neels’s South African newspapers, his boss thought this was a great opportunity to send Benton. Benton objected and his boss called him a coward. I’d have thought that was asking for a racial discrimination suit, but apparently that’s this guy’s game: he’s always trying to force Benton to play the race card. This is something Benton says he has never done and never will do; he’s determined to succeed on his own terms, not because of his color. He was unsure whether to go when Neels spoke to him.
Apparently, Neels had anticipated the whole problem. He said that South Africa needed blacks like Benton to travel there, to show the whites that in the outside world blacks could be well-educated men and women in positions of power and authority. Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the UN, and Leon Sullivan, the black board member of General Motors, were both prominent black Americans who had visited South Africa and sent out an important message. Benton could do that too.
Benton was clearly impressed with Neels. He has always been a fan of Leon Sullivan in particular. He decided to come.
Dinner was fun. But toward the end Benton let slip something about Zyl News that I hadn’t suspected. It was a shock, a major shock. I will try to find out more from Neels when we are speaking to each other again. If we speak to each other again.
July 7
Neels came back from Durban yesterday and he’s off to the States tomorrow. I’ll be glad to see him go. Especially since I know he will be away from his woman, whoever she is. At the moment I don’t want to think about her.
With Zan gone, things were strained. I mentioned I’d had dinner with Benton the night before, but didn’t ask Neels about what Benton had told me. We went to bed in silence. Just after he turned the light off, Neels began to speak to me.
“Liefie?”
“Yes?”
“There’s something I want to tell you. I’ve been meaning to tell you for a couple of days.”
I steeled myself, lying on my side in bed, facing away from him. I was the one who was supposed to mention his mistress, not him. I didn’t like surrendering the initiative.
“Do you remember that Zan and I went for a long walk on Saturday?”
“Yes,” I said, puzzled.
“She told me something then. Something she heard while she was in London.”
“I didn’t know she’d been to London.”
“Neither did I,” said Neels. “Maybe she had to interview for her place at the LSE. I don’t know. I didn’t want to ask her.”
“Okay.”
“Well. She bumped into a South African. A member of the South African Communist Party.”
“Who?”
“She wouldn’t say. But remember she lives with the Mackie girl. Maybe it was her parents. Or friends of her parents. Who knows? But this South African told her something quite disturbing.”
I waited. Cornelius was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.
“He said there was a list. A list with my name on it.”
“What sort of list?”
“A come-the-revolution-who-are-we-going-to-line-up-against-the-wall list.”
“No!” I turned toward him.
“Yes.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I don’t know. I think so. The SACP’s headquarters is in London, everyone knows that.”
“Who else is on the list?”
“It’s a long one, apparently. The man didn’t give her any more names. Apart from one.”
“Whose is that?”
He raised himself on to his elbow and looked me in the eyes for the first time that evening.
“Yours.”
7
Cornelius’s study was a mess. Every surface of the expensive furniture was covered with paper: spreadsheets, financial reports, printouts of news articles, consultants’ studies, and even some newspapers. Cornelius tried to make sure he read at least the Herald and the Philadelphia Intelligencer every day, but the copies were piling up. There were also back issues of The Times. These he had been studying closely.
Edwin was looking worn. His three-piece suit was intact, he was wearing a tie and the top button of his shirt was still done up, but he was frayed around the edges. Cornelius’s insistence that no one else from Zyl News be involved meant that Edwin had had to do a lot of the work he would normally have farmed out to his MBA grunts. He had done it diligently and well, but he hadn’t slept much.
Cornelius, on the other hand, was a volcano of energy. He found it difficult to sit still for more than a minute or two without darting from one problem to another. He threw himself into the transaction and drove Edwin into the ground.
The Bloomfield Weiss bankers filed into the study. Benton led the way, followed by Dower, but now they had a real deal for which they would be paid fees, the team had grown to six. There was probably a battalion of Bloomfield Weiss’s own grunts back at their office in Broadgate also working on the transaction out of sight.
‘Sorry about the mess, gentlemen,’ Cornelius began. ‘How’s it going with the banks?’
Dower opened his mouth, but before he could say anything Benton spoke. ‘Very well. I think they had some trouble at first, the numbers are a bit tight, there’s no getting around that, but we’ve got National Bank of Scotland interested in taking on the role of lead manager. They’re a good institution, I think they’ll do a fine job for you.’
‘What kind of covenants will they want?’
‘Andy?’ Benton turned to Dower, who was obviously seething. Cornelius could see Dower had been upstaged by Benton and was angry about it. He found investment bankers’ grandstanding tiresome, but after twenty years he had become used to it. For all Bloomfield Weiss’s faults, and there were many, they had stuck with him through good times and bad, and that was worth a lot. Cornelius would never totally trust them, though. They were investment bankers, after all.
Dower went into details of the financial covenants the banks would demand be included in the legal agreements, and the presentation Edwin and Cornelius would have to make to them the next day. Then discussion moved on again to the price they were planning to pay for The Times.