Rage - Smith Wilbur - Страница 32
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He remembered how Lothar De La Rey, Manfred's father, had pleaded with his mother for an extension of the loan. When his trawlers lay against the wharf, loaded to the gunwales with their catch of silver pilchards, and the sheriff of the court, on Centaine': orders, had put his seals on the factory doors.
That was the day he had first met Manfred De La Rey. Manfret had been a bare-footed, cropped-head hulk of a lad, bigger and stronger than Shasa, burned dark by the sun, dressed in a navy-blue fisherman's jersey and khaki shorts that were smeared with dried fish-slime, while Shasa had worn immaculate grey slacks, white open neck shirt and a college sweater with polished black shoes on his feet.
Two boys from different worlds, they had come face to face on the main fish wharf and their hostility had been instantaneous, their hackles rising like dogs, and within minutes, gibes and insults had turned to blows and they had flown at each other furiously, punching and wrestling down the wharf while the coloured trawlermen had egged them on delightedly. He remembered clearly even after all this time Manfred De La Rey's pale ferocious eyes glaring into his as they fell from the wharf on to the slippery, stinking cargo of dead pilchards, and he felt again the dreadful humiliation as Manfred had forced his head deeply into the quagmire of cold dead fish and he had begun to drown in their slime.
He jerked his mind back to the present, to hear his manager saying, 'So the position is now that the government has issued four factory licences to catch and process pilchards at Walvis Bay. The department of fisheries allocates an annual quota to each of the licensees, which is presently two hundred thousand tons." Shasa contemplated the enormous profit potential of those quantities of fish.
According to their published accounts, each of those four factories had averaged two million pounds profit in the last fiscal year.
He knew he could improve on that, probably double it, but it didn't look as though he was going to get the chance.
'Approaches to both the Fisheries Department, and to higher authority-' Shasa had taken the administrator of the territory himself to dinner, 'have elicited the firm fact that no further licences will be issued. The only way to enter the industry would be to buy out one of the licensees." Shasa smiled sardonically for he had already sounded out two of the companies. The owner of the first one had told Shasa in movingly eloquent terms to commit an unnatural sexual act on himself and the other had quoted a figure at which he might be prepared to negotiate which ended with a string of zeros that reached to the horizon. Despite his gloomy expression, it was the kind of situation in which Shasa revelled, seemingly hopeless, and yet with the promise of enormous rewards if he could find his way around the obstacles.
'I want a detailed breakdown of balance sheets on all four companies,' he ordered. 'Does anybody know the director of fisheries?"
'Yes, but he's straight up and down,' Frank warned him, knowing how Shasa's mind worked. 'His fists are tight Closed, and if we try to slip him a little gifty, he'll raise a stink they'll smell in the high court in Bloemfontein." 'Besides which the issue of licences is outside his jurisdiction,' the company secretary agreed with him. 'They are granted exclusively by the ministry in Pretoria, and there won't be any more. Four is the limit. That is the decision of the minister himself." Five more days Shasa remained in Windhoek, covering every possible lead or chance with a total dedication to detail that was one of his strengths, but at the end of that time he was no closer to owning a factory licence at Walvis Bay than he had been when he had first spotted the little white trawlers out on the green ocean. The only thing he had achieved was to forget that malignant little sprite, Kitty Godolphin, for ten whole days.
However, when at last he admitted to himself that there was nothing more to be gained by staying on in Windhoek and he climbed into the pilot's seat of the Mosquito, Kitty Godolphin's memory mocked him from the empty seat beside him. On impulse, instead of laying a course direct to Cape Town, he detoured westwards, heading for the coast and Walvis Bay, determined to have one long look at the site before finally abandoning the idea.
There was something else besides Kitty's memory that plagued him as the Mosquito dropped down the escarpment towards the sea.
It was a burr of doubt, a prickle of discomfort that he had overlooked something important in his investigations.
He saw the ocean ahead, wreathed in tendrils of fog where the cold current brushed the land. The high dunes writhed together like a nest of razor-backed vipers, the colour of ripe wheat and copper, and he banked the Mosquito and followed the endless beaches upon which the surf broke in regular snowy lines until he saw the horn of the bay spike into the restless ocean and the lighthouse on Pelican Point winked at him through the fog banks.
He throttled back the Rolls Royce Merlins and went down, brushing the tops of the scattered fog banks and in the gaps he saw the trawler fleet at work. They were close in to the land, on the edge of the current line. Some of the boats had their nets full, and he saw the silver treasure glittering through the water as the trawlermen raised it slowly to the surface, while over them hung a shimmering white panoply of seabirds, greedy for the feast.
Then a mile away he picked out another boat hunting, cutting a foaming arabesque with its wake as it stalked yet another pilchard shoal.
Shasa pulled on flap and banked the Mosquito steeply, turning above the trawler to watch the hunt develop. He saw the shoal, a dark shadow as though a thousand gallons of ink had been spilled into the green waters, and he was amazed by its size, a hundred acres of solid fish, each individual no longer than his hand, but in their multitudes dwarfing leviathan.
'Millions of tons in one shoal,' he whispered. As he translated it into terms of wealth, the acquisitive passion flared up in him again.
He watched the trawler beneath him throw its net around a tiny part of the gigantic shoal, and then he levelled out and flew at a hundred feet, skimming the fog banks, towards the maw of the bay. There were the four factory buildings, standing on the edge of the water, each with its own jetty thrusting out into the shallow waters, and black smoke billowing from the chimney stacks of the furnaces.
'Which one belonged to old De La Rev."?" he wondered. On which of those flimsy structures had he fought with Manfred and ended with his ears and nose and mouth filled with fish slime.`? He grinned ruefully at the memory.
'But surely it was farther north,' he puzzled, trying to cast his mind back twenty years. 'It wasn't down here so close to the hook of the bay." He banked the Mosquito and flew back parallel to the beach, and then a mile ahead he saw the line of palings, rotted and black, running in an irregular line out into the waters of the bay, and on the beach the roofless old ruins of the factory.
'It's still there,' he realized, and ins-tantly his skin prickled with excitement. 'It's still there, deserted and forgotten all these years." He knew then what he had overlooked.
He made two more passes, so low that the blast of his propellers raised a miniature sandstorm from the tops of the dunes. On the seaward wall of the derelict factory whose corrugated iron covering was gnawed and streaked with red rust, he could still make out the faded lettering: SOUTH WEST AFRICAN CANNING AND FISHING CO.
LTD.
He pushed on throttle and lifted the Mosquito's nose into a gentle climbing turn, bringing her out of the turn on course for Windhoek.
Cape Town and his promise to his sons and Isabella to be home before the weekend were forgotten. David Abrahams had flown the Dove back to Johannesburg, leaving a few minutes before Shasa that morning, so there was nobody in Windhoek whom Shasa would trust to conduct the search. He went down to the registrar of deeds himself and an hour before the deed office closed for the weekend he found what he was looking for.
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