Bare Ground: A Novel

By Peter Harris

As the head of Wits Mining, the last major mining company to do an empowerment deal, Max Sinclair has a mandate from the board and a clear directive: to sell a share of the company to a black consortium. Born and bred in the city that remains, at heart, a mining camp built on gold and the greed of men, Max is used to being a player in the high-stakes game of deals and political influence, and he keeps his cards close to his chest.

There is no shortage of takers for the deal. A shareholding spells possible riches for some – like Sifiso Lesibe, geologist and newest member of the board – and increased influence for others. Support for the deal from government is crucial, particularly when it comes to mining and mineral rights. Politics, power and money are an irresistible combination. Mistrust is everywhere and nothing is as it seems.

Former human rights lawyer Musa Madondo has seen the rise and fall of many a former comrade and he knows he is not immune to the tug of temptation. When Walter Berryman, a former client and friend, comes to Musa for professional advice, in fear of his life after having stumbled across evidence of large-scale industry collusion, he finds himself drawn into an underworld of intrigue and sophisticated espionage every bit as ruthless and deadly in the present day as it was during the country’s struggle for liberation. And in Johannesburg, as in politics, things change in an instant.
Bare Ground is the third book authored by Peter Harris. In a Different Time (2008; winner of the Alan Paton Non Fiction award) was about the 1980s and an extraordinary treason trial. The second book, Birth (2011), was about the extreme challenges that South Africa encountered in getting to and conducting the 1994 election. This novel, located in the cauldron of Johannesburg, is about the society we have become.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770105829

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The family has retreated before the midday heat to sleep, the great stone villa quiet, battened down, lilac blue shutters drawn against the white glare of the Provençal sun. The bleached stone surrounding the swimming pool is a frame for the sky blue of the water. In the distance the ruined château of the disgraced Marquis de Sade looms majestically as it sits astride the village of Lacoste, clustered tastefully around the hilltop. On the right of the villa is Bonnieux, one of the most beautiful and well-appointed villages in all of France, carved by the medieval Templars in the twelfth century into the very rock of the cliffs that first gave it purchase.

The singing of the cicadas in the forest behind the villa is tumultuous and incessant, a ringing in the head for those unable to sleep. Inside the villa, the thick stone walls and granite floors ensure a measure of coolness for those occupants who are having an afternoon rest. For most, the lunchtime bottles of rosé have managed to procure deep sleep. The child, irritated by the ceaseless screaming of the cicadas, waits fractiously in the solitude of his room for the call from his mother, the signal that he will again be allowed into the sun, and the swimming pool which beckons. Long and rectangular, the pool runs symmetrically from the house, lining up in its sights first the rows of vines in the valley below, and then the château of the Marquis de Sade.

In the pool, a baby descends gently to the shimmering white tiles on the bottom. The hands wave in slow motion. Bubbles from her perfect mouth, framed by strands of blonde hair, small crystals, accelerate lop-sided as they rise in a silver stream to the surface. And then stop.

ONE

It wasn’t the first funeral Musa Madondo had attended that turned out to be an exercise in hypocrisy. Now, when the man was dead, speaker after speaker solemnly declared that he was a great man – well, almost. ‘A man who lived his life with integrity and honour,’ the first speaker declared. ‘A life of sacrifice and commitment,’ another intoned. Yet, when the man had been alive, he had felt alone, bereft of friends and company, or so he had told Musa. Why should it take a man to die for him to achieve recognition? What was it that compelled the speakers to claim him as theirs now, when they had never done so in life?

Too late, thought Musa. The man was dead and incapable of listening now. And actually, although they might never have expressed this to his face, he knew that some of the eulogisers had actively disliked him. They spoke of good times past, when they were young and immortal, before life had stamped its heavy boots on their innocence and dreams.

Each eulogy stressed the special role the speaker had played in the deceased’s life, how close they had been, and how much the man would be missed; each intimating a friendship and bond no other could claim. The pallbearers, some in dark suits, were a history lesson on their own: two government ministers, a captain of industry, a director general, two comrades in full military uniform from a time gone by, a hero of the struggle now in her seventies, and an academic whose face was familiar but whose name escaped Musa. The priest summed it up, really, quoting from the Book of Revelations. ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away … He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.’

Musa looked at the packed pews, seeing men and women nodding wisely, taking comfort from the words. Then the priest suddenly changing tack. ‘But the fearful and the unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.’ The mourners were no longer nodding. Lips were pursed; some looked straight ahead. He heard someone whisper, ‘That’s a bit rough,’ and he smiled to himself. This priest knows his congregation, he thought. A lone voice in a godless place.

Afterwards, the mourners gathered on the circular tarmac outside the Braamfontein Crematorium. Many of the gravestones in the cemetery behind were dilapidated and forlorn. Sunglasses on, people exchanged sad pleasantries, kisses on cheeks, hands on shoulders, tissues touched to eyes, meaningful hugs. ‘He was a good man.’ None mentioned how he had died. It probably didn’t help that the cause of death remained unclear, as did the circumstances of his passing. There were those who claimed this was no normal accident; that things were found in the car that told their own story; that he’d had a recent brush with the law. There was also talk of suicide, of a man tormented, driven by fear and isolation. A man at the end of his rope.

Personally, Musa had ruled out suicide. But he hadn’t ruled out murder.

TWO

If truth be told, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t be, Max Sinclair struck one as a picture of success. Certainly, his charm was a quiet one, attentive almost, regardless of who he was talking to, and people didn’t forget that. He was one of those men who are often described as being ‘hard to say no to’. And that was a fact. Not many people turned Max down, whatever it was he was offering, or asking for. True, he did have a reasonable pedigree – good family, fine school, Oxford – but the bulk of his wealth was his own doing. Property and construction initially, then mining.

Now close to sixty, his hair still thick and dark, Max’s blue eyes looked not so much at you, as through you, making you feel that you needed to say something, anything really, that would please him and secure his approval. He was tall and slim, and he always seemed to know what to do with his hands. His gestures were almost, but not quite, languid.

There were some detractors, very few though, who spoke of him as being ruthless, or worse, in business, but in Johannesburg, a city built on gold and still somewhat proudly flaunting its mining town mentality, that was more of a compliment than an insult. Besides, when a man was as successful as Max Sinclair, there were always stories that did the rounds. Whatever the original truths, they were supplemented and altered in order for them to be more interesting to the listener, or the relevant dinner table, and so they became legend, and the myth of Max was born. He himself would neither admit nor deny when approached for comment, saying airily, ‘People talk too much.’

The story about how he was meant to have first made his money is worth telling, even though no one really knew if it was true. Some said they knew the woman, others said the builder had told them the story word for word. But when questioned more closely on their source or challenged by a contrary version, the narrator would become vague, if not defensive. No one wanted to be seen to be ‘exaggerating’. People would stop taking you seriously.

The most often-told version was that Max managed to get hold of an eight-storey apartment block in downtown Johannesburg, and this was before other developers caught on to the inner city, before the new gold rush, as they called it. The place was pretty run-down but still a grand old building, wood panelling and brass. His plan was to knock out the internal walling of the old apartments and turn the building into office accommodation and then to secure a tenant to take the entire building. Risky stuff, given the flight of most of the major companies from the city to Sandton in the north, where the construction of an entirely new city was well under way. Amazing, but that’s what South African business does. If they don’t like something, they just make another plan. And cost is not really a factor. In this instance, they thought the city of Johannesburg was going to seed, which, frankly, it was, invaded by squatters and the like with many of the buildings deserted. It really wasn’t safe at all. And so they simply took their money, and their business, to a place ten kilometres away and built a new high-rise city, nestling in the safety and greenery of Sandton. The city of Johannesburg was only just over a hundred years old anyway; it wasn’t as though they were leaving the centre of London, or Paris, for that matter.

So Max saw his opportunity and he jumped at it, picking up a building in the middle of town for virtually nothing. He put in a paltry offer, fully expecting the owner to reject it with the contempt it deserved but, hey presto, the owner accepted. Then he took his money and fled the city, leaving Max the proud but worried owner of a serious structure in the middle of the city. The plan was simple: get the few tenants in the building out, renovate and lease. The owners and tenants were the easy part. They were only too happy to be given reasonable offers (okay, not that reasonable) and move to a more salubrious part of Johannesburg. Squatters were forcibly evicted; niceties of eviction orders and legal proceedings were bypassed. Max felt that those who had themselves trespassed and broken the law were not entitled to receive the largesse of the legal system.

There was, however, one recalcitrant owner, an old lady who refused to accept the package offered by Max.

The story went that Max visited the old lady, tried to charm her into agreeing to leave. Urbane and transparently honest, he accepted the cup of tea she offered him in a sitting room that was elegantly finished and reminiscent of an era when apartments were built on a grander scale. Max admired the apartment, complimenting her on its sparse but tasteful furnishings. He meant it; he always did. So they said.

The woman sat in an old wingback chair, a light blue knitted shawl over her shoulders. Max noticed that the apartment was cold and that her hands shook as she gripped the arms of the chair, her fingers knotted, like the roots of a tree. She told him that she had lived there for forty years. Her husband had died ten years before of a heart attack, right there, in the apartment. He had worked in the city at the Supreme Court in the Office of the Registrar and had risen to be chief registrar. The sad thing was, she told him, he had retired at the age of sixty-five and they had planned to move to the coast, Scottburgh, south of Durban at the mouth of the Mpambanyoni River. ‘I looked into its history, and Mpambanyoni in Zulu means confuser of birds, which I thought very quaint. Three months after my husband’s retirement, while we were making arrangements to move, he died of a heart attack in the early hours of the morning. I phoned our doctor in Parktown but he didn’t want to come to the city. Too dangerous, he said. The ambulance from the Joburg Gen eventually arrived – two hours too late. And that was that. I buried my husband at West Park Cemetery. And I decided to stay here. Somehow moving down to the coast to a new town by myself was not what I wanted. I had friends in the building and in Johannesburg, and I just felt comfortable here. You feel like that when you live in a place for thirty years, which I had by then. Of course, things changed over the years, people moved out, some died and some squatters moved in, but they have never harmed me. They don’t want trouble, they just want to live and work here and they always treat me with respect. I know you want me to move out, Mr Sinclair …’

The look the old lady gave Max was whimsical.

‘It’s no longer safe here,’ Max said. ‘Things have changed a lot, maybe you don’t see it but others have. Besides, they are all moving. You are the only one left in this building and we are going to turn the block into offices.’ Max took a sip of his tea, lukewarm. Taking in the surroundings, he noticed she didn’t have a television set, or perhaps it was in the bedroom. He thought the unthinkable – of the horror of being old and completely alone.

‘You know, Mr Sinclair, when you reach the age of seventy-eight, every day is dangerous, every day a blessing, and so safety is less of a worry, less important. I am very sorry but I simply cannot sell. I have nowhere to go and this is all I know now. Here, I have memories and I know how things work. Even with the people in the building moving out, the people who have moved into adjacent buildings have been helpful. There are a group of people from Malawi who live in the building across the road; a couple, a man and his wife. They help me by buying my groceries. I give them a tip, not much, I’m afraid, but what I can afford. They have a young daughter who comes to visit me in the afternoons after school. I make her tea and I let her read my books. Occasionally, she reads to me, which I love as my sight is failing.’

Max listened intently, nodding as she spoke. Finally, telling her he did not mean to be pushy, he doubled his offer, there and then. He would find another apartment for her, he promised, and set her up in it. He would pay for the move as well. The old lady looked at him and then slowly shook her head. She turned Max down, but in a sweet old lady kind of way. Max took his leave, shaking her hand in the fashion of a real gentleman and, smiling, he said goodbye.

A week later the builders moved in and started breaking down the apartments.

The old lift, with its wonderful brass railing and its two sliding steel mesh gates, the kind that have to be closed for the lift to move, still worked. The gates clanked closed and the lift shuddered from floor to floor. Of course the brass was no longer polished but you could imagine what it had once been like. Slowly the lift moved up and down between the floors. The old woman saw the men knocking down the flats on the ground floor and after that, well, the workmen got through a floor a month, smashing down walls, drilling with jackhammers, disconnecting the electricity floor by floor as they went. The noise was stupendous, but they stopped working every day at four in the afternoon, and a deathly hush would descend on the building.

When the demolition started, the old lady went to the city council’s office in Loveday Street and complained. The man behind the counter took down the details of the property and promised to send someone round to look at the situation. In the second month, seeing the devastation on the second floor, she went in a taxi with the Malawian man to the city council, although he had stayed outside when she went in. He said he would only make her situation worse if they saw him. This time she spoke to a different man, who found no record of her original complaint. He took her details and promised to send someone round.

It’s a long story but to cut it short: the old lady didn’t wait for them to reach her flat on the seventh floor. After six and a half months, when the builders were working on the sixth floor, she killed herself. Pills. The Malawian couple’s daughter found her when she went to visit one afternoon.

This is just one of the versions, of course. Some say the old lady accepted Max Sinclair’s offer and moved out; others say she died of natural causes months before the renovations even started. Like all good stories, it grows with the telling.

Actually, the entire story about the stubborn old lady in the building in downtown Johannesburg was one of the few things that Max flatly denied, saying he was simply not capable of acting in that fashion. So maybe it was just a good deal that had a bit of a sad part to it. The ending for Max, though, was a happy one, a fifteen-year lease to the provincial department of Environmental Affairs. It set him up. Sometimes, you just get lucky.

THREE

‘I’ll take it,’ said Musa, with a smile.

The salesman’s hand was pale and fleshy pink. ‘You won’t be sorry, my friend, trust me,’ he said, grabbing Musa’s outstretched hand and pumping it up and down. ‘You have just joined an elite club. With your good looks and this car, you are going to be very popular, my friend.’ Smiling, the man handed over a leather pouch of accessories, all with the distinctive Porsche logo.

Certainly, Musa thought, he now had a key ring that would be noticed on a drinks table. Actually, he had known he was going to buy the Porsche Carrera 911 from the moment he’d pressed his foot on the pedal and felt that surge pushing him back into the seat, along with hearing the low roar, and ground close to him, passing in a blur. That was contact. There was simply no way he could go back to his Honda after that. A bit like the time he had drunk a single malt whisky or even a Johnnie Walker Black – man, you just couldn’t go back to Bell’s.

Driving home, he felt comfortable. This car suited him. And it would be a magnet for women, an added bonus. Not bad for an ex-human rights lawyer, and why not, he thought self-consciously. He had worked hard to get to this point. And he could afford it – just. His bottom lip tensed, and his head tilted to the left, as it always did when he did something that was a little dicey, something he thought he might regret, but which he knew he would do anyway. He would make a plan. Sure, some of his clients wouldn’t like it, although he did know a good few politicos who were now being driven in fancy cars, but what the hell – he was doing less of that type of work now anyway; perhaps his new car would attract some new business clients who paid better fee rates, people who liked their lawyer to drive a Porsche, people who were attracted to someone who wore their balls on the outside. There was no harm in showing a bit of flash, was there? Plus, he could dictate the terms. Most of the time when he consulted with his clients, the car would be out of sight in the firm’s basement, although he wasn’t kidding himself that they wouldn’t find out. In this town news travelled fast. But, given his past, they would forgive him. Besides, he was good at his job. Everyone knew that. That was why, when they were really in trouble, they all called him, no matter what the time was.

Hell, he had been detained twice, once in solitary confinement for eighteen months, and as a young lawyer he had represented seriously high-profile political figures in all of the major treason trials. He could afford to indulge himself a little, he thought. He had paid his dues. A man who could name numerous past and present cabinet ministers as his current or ex-clients could be forgiven. Man, he had visited those guys on the Island and the women in the Women’s Prison in Pretoria. They were not just comrades, they were brothers and sisters.

He had never thought that he would be self-conscious about the car he drove or that he would acknowledge – or enjoy – its symbolism and the status it implied. He’d had friends in the past for whom, particularly in the eighties, driving a downmarket car was a badge: identification with the masses even if they could afford a better vehicle. Displays of wealth or opulence were discouraged and frowned upon. It had puzzled him then but he thought he understood it now. The truth was that, either way, none of them had earned very much back then; there was no money in being a resistance lawyer. For many, the vehicle they drove was not a matter of choice.

But now, now in some of the circles in which he was moving, it was a completely different ball game. If you didn’t drive a fancy car, a Range Rover or a Porsche, you were the object of silent pity, the odd guy out. You hadn’t made it yet. Sure, people wouldn’t openly talk. They didn’t need to. It was all in the exchange of looks, fleeting, but definitely noticeable.

Times had changed, and that was a good thing. Who was it in the ruling party that had said, ‘We didn’t join the struggle to be poor’? This was just part of becoming a normal society again, some said. Again? We were never normal in this place. He remembered one of his partners coming into the firm in the eighties wearing a suit he had bought off an informal trader for R80 in Jorissen Street. Nowadays if you were seen in anything less than Armani, women would turn away from you. As his friend Mzoli had recently toasted at a birthday party, ‘Thank God for Prada.’ And who drank South African sparkling wine now? No one. Simply no one. Even Moët was passé.

He wondered when it had happened, this move to bling, or quality, as he preferred to call it. At what point had the attitudes shifted, or had it been more of a gradual slipping and slithering? If he really thought about it, when had he come to the view that he should drive a car that most people could only dream about? Had he really changed? No, he didn’t think so. Besides, the money was honestly earned, and he had worked damned hard for it. Frankly, it irritated him that he was even having this conversation with himself, justifying his actions. Now, at least, arriving at dinner parties, he would arrive in style, even if he did not have, or earn, remotely the kind of money that the other guests were familiar with, and displayed.

While Musa knew he couldn’t live like many of his clients, certainly not in houses like theirs, or ever claim their fantastic lifestyles, he could certainly hold his own. His history lent him an allure, and what was more, his connections, his networks were immaculate, almost worth gold, even if he didn’t have the real stuff himself. They respected him at least because he was a damn fine lawyer. And now he drove a Porsche. Was he comfortable in the new milieu? Yes, probably, but it had taken a while to get used to it.

Musa remembered the client he had taken to lunch at Linger Longer a few years back. The client had started out, at twelve noon, by ordering two double eighteen-year-old Glenmorangie whiskies and then followed that with the strong suggestion that they drink a bottle of Château Giscours. After the three-course lunch, the client ordered a series of brandies for both of them, excellent stuff. The bill had come to R4 300 for the two of them. The firm had paid. Thank God, he remembered thinking as he’d handed over his company card. The client was a former activist whom Musa had represented when he was in detention. Now he was the minister for Development and Planning, a good client and, after that lunch, likely to remain so.

That night when he got home he had googled Château Giscours and seen that it was a Bordeaux wine, a third growth, one of fourteen according to the classification of Bordeaux wines in 1855. From then on he had studied French wine. One had to know what one was drinking.

FOUR

Max had thought the board meeting of Wits Mining in London would be a more contentious one, given the agenda. However, not surprisingly, he acknowledged, the directors had shown a maturity born from a keen perception of the interests of the company and, of course, their own. It didn’t take a fool to see that the black empowerment credentials of the South African company were a problem, mainly because they were non-existent, and that Wits Mining was starting to lag behind the other mining companies in the receipt of mineral rights and leases, their claims and applications to the Minerals Registration Office taking twice as long to process as those of the other companies.

It had become clear that, as the last major mining company yet to do an empowerment deal, this was now becoming a hurdle for them, and a business risk for which they were paying a price with every passing day. It was simply not sustainable. Max’s careful friendships with the deputy president, Sandile Mtoba, and some members of cabinet had provided some cover, but the power of the deputy president had waned as the president, taking his paranoia to new heights, perceived his deputy to be a threat. Things were wearing thin now. The asset had to be shared. The knocks on the door could no longer be ignored.

The decision the board had needed to take was that a deal be done to sell 25% of the company to a black consortium. That was all. The actual deal structure – who funded it, the participants in the consortium – that would all come later, although Max had already started to think about the key elements of the consortium. Frankly, it was not as if