Chapter 30
The winter shower wet his head as he hurried along the footpath; small shoes bombing puddles and spraying water; pink office hands hidden in his trousers pockets; a penguin of a man waddling through the rain. Usually he entered the building from the basement car park, but today his mind had carried him to another part of the Cross. It had been urgent. The hallmark of his ruthlessness necessarily had to be stamped across a colleague’s forehead.
He laughed slightly as he jumped the steps and landed lithely into the foyer where the usual groups of businessmen were lounging behind newspapers and magazines. Whether his gaiety arose from the stimulus of his morning’s bout, or from the dramatic drop in the price of gold, he wasn’t certain. Happiness rarely elicits analysis. Only sorrow makes people wonder why!
Milan Krulis was still laughing to himself when he greeted Margaret, his secretary, and passed into his cavernous office on the twentieth floor above the Cross. It was Tuesday and Margaret had her shoes off.
He went through his mail quickly, despatching memos and telephoning brokers. Bank drafts to Barclays in Harare were approved before he settled into the daily newspapers. Relevant articles were noted as he had an ever-changing update on his world; financial, social and international.
‘Mr Krulis. I have Mr Donleavy on the line.’
‘Thank you, Margaret. You may come in.’
He activated the tape then the phone hook-up. Margaret had closed the door. An easy turn of a key locked it. She was standing primly on the Persian, her stockinged feet crushing into the weave.
‘Hallo Frank!’ he called to the console and waited for its reply.
‘You sound like you’re down a fucking well!’ it said from a distance with Frank’s voice, tinny, but definitely Frank’s.
‘It’s the console, Frank. How are you?’
‘You fucking-well didn’t tell me Dorfman was arriving last fucking week!’
‘He had your phone number. Didn’t he call you?’
‘I wasn’t fucking in, was I, you wog!’
‘Frank!’
‘Don’t fucking Frank me! It’s a fucking wog’s action and you played it!’
Margaret’s skirt had come apart at the waist and had fallen to her ankles. She was reaching forty and her brown hair was greying. Her wedding finger was clumsy with rings.
‘He’s a big boy, Frank. Where were you, anyway?’
‘There’s the wog again! Not over the fucking phone! Jesus!’
‘Why did you phone me, Frank?’ said Milan with forced authority in his question.
Frank spelt out his needs. While he spoke Milan made reassuring noises into the phone as Margaret dislodged her clothes. She stood in her pants and stockings, an ointment jar in her hands. A creamy film coated her sagging nipples. Here and there her skin folded as she tucked in her stomach. Her hips were heavy with collapsed flesh as she knelt before the desk.
‘You taping this?’
‘Of course.’
‘You alone?’
‘Of course.’
‘Hello Margaret!’ piped the tinny voice from Africa.
Margaret’s head froze beneath the desk.
‘I’m alone, Frank!’ Milan struggled with his words as he eased himself out of his trousers. He looked at the silent console and felt oddly conspicuous. ‘Frank?’
‘Milan?’
Milan moved his thighs apart as Margaret applied the cream. ‘Good! Good!’ he urged.
‘I thought you’d be pleased, Mil.’
Again Milan stared at the console with an absurd suspicion. He was covered with cream and was suddenly cold. The nipples on his secretary’s depleted breasts had grown into cold creamy thimbles of forgotten pleasure.
‘I am, Frank.’ said Milan with the voice of a marathon’s end. Then he huffed with artless irony, ‘I am being well satisfied by my staff!’
An international silence followed over the telephone line. Frank could hear his friend’s noisy breathing.
‘Have you thought of setting up office while you’re over there?’ asked Milan finally.
‘Yeah! Thought about it only. Got a secretary lined up. Though she can’t do things like Margaret!’
The secretary stopped her pumping hand and blushed. For a split second her eyes shifted to the console then back again to the red shaft she was gripping. The cream was heating the flesh, expanding it, hardening it.
‘Have to cut off now, Mil.’ Frank continued after a panting silence. ‘Don’t be a wog, mate.’
Milan closed his eyes as streams of whiteness burst from his body in a series of decreasing spurts, and washed upon the shores of Margaret’s face.
‘Mil! Damn you! Are you still there?’
‘Er yes. I was having a slight interruption.’
Milan glanced contemptuously at Margaret as she got to her feet and put the top back on the ointment jar.
‘More like a fucking eruption if I know you, Mil.’ Frank laughed light-heartedly.
He hung up.
‘Margaret?’
‘Yes, Mr Krulis?’
‘How is your daughter?’
‘Well, thank you, Mr Krulis.’
‘Bring her in next Tuesday, will you?’
*
‘The hydrofoils not working today?’
The words had trembled from his lips as he observed the harbour through the window. His back had lost its uprightness. A halo of despondency shrouded his eyes; sleepless eyes that bore through the glass to the harbour beyond.
‘No?’ Milan Krulis did not sound surprised, just disturbed from his thoughts. The day outside had become a surreal anachronism. The clock on the wall displayed a different hour from the watch on his wrist; there was an eight-hour gap and the wall clock was lagging. The two cities of Sydney and Harare were separated by a good night’s sleep.
Basil Horgan coughed phlegm into his handkerchief, inspected it, grimaced, then absently returned it folded to his pocket. He moved from the window and sat in Milan’s chair behind the desk. The jurist was not comfortable there either.
‘It would be eight o’clock in Harare?’ he said absently.
Milan smiled at the wall clock and agreed with the judge. A tugboat farted a stream of oily smoke from its funnel. It was heaving against the stern of a tanker.
‘That tug out there, Milan ... ’
‘Yes?’ Milan peered from his low cloth chair.
‘Deceptively tough, isn’t she?’
Oscar Pitt frowned from the quiet end of the office. He and Adam Smith, the appropriately named university professor of economics, believed in biding their time. Pitt was a miner and in his world he was boss.
‘Built from Aussie steel, Basil!’ he droned with deliberate nasality.
‘But can’t we expect something a little more malevolent than a bloody useless regime of sanctions?’ cried Charles Fitzroy, the media man.
‘Like what?’ demanded Sylvester Meggs, the unionist.
‘Like why we aren’t taking advantage of the situation!’ retorted Fitzroy with added fury.
‘And what, pray?’
‘We can’t let SBS manage the plot, surely?’
‘Don’t make me laugh,!’ said McIlroy the banker with loads of derision.
‘I repeat, gentlemen, that we are stuck in the mire if we do not accommodate ourselves to the inevitable.’ warned Basil Horgan gravely.
No one spoke for a few minutes. No fears were allowed to be shown. Apart from Horgan and Milan Krulis no one was certain of events in Zimbabwe. Those who had resisted the effort in Africa had let their opposition be whittled to a reluctant acquiescence. They had been persuaded by the philosophically potent forces of herd instinct, power and profit.
‘Well, gentlemen?’ Basil Horgan rose and, with a dropped silence, invited a decision from his colleagues in the Chapter.
‘I doubt if Mugabe will let go!’
‘Oh! There cannot be any doubt about that!’ argued Eric Jansen, the financier from Perth, ‘the ZANU[PF] government already has loosened its hawsers. It won’t be long before they slip away and lose themselves at sea.’
‘Oh droll, minister!’ laughed Sylvester Meggs in his Sir Humphrey Appleby impersonation.
‘Droll it may be, Sylvester, but even you would be aware that a boxer is vulnerable when in retreat. That’s the situation in Harare, gentlemen.’
Everyone glanced at the financier and saw that he was right. The embattled Mugabe regime was floundering in a sea of their making.
‘We’re beginning to head in the right direction.’
‘Oh, that’s just fine, Oscar!’
‘What’s just fine, Ernest?’
They continued into the night, arguing, compromising, settling nothing, oblivious of the two men from Sydney who were now working toward a bloody conflagration in Zimbabwe.
*
The evening was cold. Slight showers continued to fall on Sydney. The black LTD was motionless by the high wire fence. A pale rickety aircraft looked out from a hangar as a line of people walked by. It seemed to be raining only where the lights shone.
There was very little noise to accompany the Lear’s landing. It glided in effortlessly and dropped like a gull onto the tarmac. It came to rest away from the terminal, close to the LTD. Part of the fuselage opened and out slipped a stairway. A heavily coated figure emerged from the jet and followed the stairs to the ground.
‘Collect him.’ Milan ordered his driver.
An umbrella was proffered for the man but he ignored it. The driver folded it and led the man to the LTD.
‘How was the trip?’
The man was tall with Victor Mature’s face. A briefcase hung from a gloved hand. He sat himself next to Milan and accepted the scotch with a look of relief.
‘Thanks, Milan.’
With the door locked and the darkened windows closed, the LTD was warm for the drive to the Cross. The cocktail cabinet glinted as the bar light bounced off polished chrome and cut glass. Only the slish-slosh of alcohol competed with the distant purring of the engine. The limousine was an acoustic bubble on wheels.
‘Uneventful, Milan.’
He drank his whisky with ceremony. Each mouthful was savoured for its redolence by passing the tumbler frequently under his nostrils. There was a sheen to the overcoat he wore; its high collar wrapped his head when he leaned back in the seat. He was Victor Mature with his creviced brow and cheeks, and the Sanpaku eyes dreaming in his head. He seemed to enjoy the tricks the light played on the glass.
At his throat, a black tie formed a knot.
‘Lovely city at night, this one.’ he said
‘Yes!’ Milan agreed out of habit. ‘Night shades the soot and imparts rusticity.’ He smiled secretly at his own little witticism. Rusticity, indeed! This rusty city! Indeed!
‘Rusticity?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Hmmm!’
The man with Victor Mature’s face decided to finish his whisky in silence.
*
The Sydney Harbour Bridge died behind the rain. Its arched ghost was a faint taunting candescence above the darkness that was water. From the twentieth floor, Milan watched the red and white tail-lights of vehicles pressed against each other, clogging the roads. As they advanced to the Bridge they dissolved as meringues in the rain.
The man with Victor Mature’s face had removed his overcoat before he reclined in the chair. The whisky decanter had been drained.
‘I have you under the name of Henderson. You don’t mind heights?’
Milan came over and sat. His tumbler was empty.
‘Henderson?’
‘You have no objections?’ Milan raised a theatrical eyebrow.
‘No, certainly not, Milan. It’s a regal name, Anglo-Saxon. I should fit it well.’
‘I think the decanter requires refreshing.’ Milan stood. ‘Excuse me, I won’t be a moment.’
At the desk Milan bent and opened a drawer. He touched the switch gently before taking the whisky and closing the drawer. Inside a locked drawer in another desk in another office, a silent motor stirred, and a tape recorder listened.
‘How is the scotch?’
‘Hmmm. Not bad, Milan. What first names have you baptised me with?’
‘I thought I would meet you halfway with initials only. B.A. You should find something compatible with that.’
‘BAH! How expressive!’
‘Yes, er, sorry about that!’
‘You won’t refer to me as B.A.?’
‘Of course not! What would you prefer?’
‘Hmmm. How about Benedict Arnold? That name has relevance.’
His accent had shifted as he slipped into an alcoholic high. At the moment he was flying over the mid-Atlantic.
‘Ben, perhaps?’
Henderson gave a satisfied nod and poured more scotch. The storm outside was silent misery.
‘Milan, like you I am a profiteer. The Chapters are full of modern buccaneers. We’re pirates and we’re looters.’
He waited for a reaction. A meagre smile of encouragement appeared on Milan’s weary face.
‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘when this adventure in Africa is concluded, then, and only then,’ he suddenly waved an excited arm about his head, ‘am I allowed permanence of abode.’
‘Would you settle in Europe?’
‘No, Milan. I have a taste for the tropics, in a small country where my future wealth can easily be transformed into power. >From there, power breeds just about anything I may require. I shall be an institution, Milan, the Rubirosa of ... shall we say ... the Republic of Hendersonia! Ha!’
‘I can well understand the temptations of having your prize early in life, but will you survive those whom you are about to betray?’
Henderson looked sharply about the office until he brought his search back to Milan. Then he directed his craggy eyes to the desk. ‘Do you have a recorder in the office?’
‘Only for the telephone. Do you want one?’ Milan’s question was ingenuous and too obvious.
‘No, thank you, Milan. It can wait.’
His Victor Mature face had become unsettled by a worrying motion of his distinctive lips. He removed his eyes carefully from the desk and stared straight at Milan. ‘Betray?’ he said and allowed a pause to convey his uncertain self across space. ‘No, Milan.’ he resumed a mite too haughtily, ‘think not of such thoughts of revenge,’ with an accent now decidedly Slavic, thick and rolling and content to be home again, ‘but of conclusion.’
‘Death will be a heavy baggage.’ Milan warned the man he could not name. ‘We cannot harbour you so your plans must be watertight. Our link to you will sever once you land at Harare. The account we have arranged has an automatic key which is activated when your task is done.’
‘What of your man there?’ His accent had flown out of Europe and was now circling over northern Britain.
‘He’s no adolescently minded idealist. He is a man who adjusts to any situation. Besides, you won’t have the need to meet. His world is far from yours. More scotch?’
‘Of course, thanks, Milan.’ Henderson soaked his throat from a tumbler full of whisky. ‘But if he meddles?’
‘Omelettes.’
