'There is another story breaking,' she said. 'I have to go." 'When will I see you again?" Shasa asked, and she looked at him as though he were a complete stranger.
'I don't know,' she said, and she and her crew were on the commercial flight that left for Johannesburg an hour later.
Shasa was angry and humiliated. He had never offered to divorce Tara for any other woman - had never even contemplated it - and Kitty had laughed at him.
There were well-explored avenues down which he knew he could cure his anger, one was the hunt. For Shasa nothing else existed in the world when the hunter's passion thrilled in his blood, when a bull buffalo, big as a mountain and black as hell, came thundering down upon him, bloody saliva drooling from its raised muzzle, the polished points of its curved horns glinting, and murder in its small piglike eyes. However, this was the rainy season and the hunting grounds in the north would be muggy wet and malarial, and the grass high above a man's head.
He could not hunt so he turned to his other sure panacea, the pursuit of wealth.
Money held endless fascination for Shasa. Without that obsessive attraction he could not have accumulated such a vast store of it, for that required a devotion and dedication that few men are capable of.
Those that lack it console themselves with old platitudes about it not buying happiness and being the root of all evil. As an adept, Shasa knew that money was neither good nor evil, but simply amoral. He knew that money had no conscience, but that it contained the most powerful potential for both good and evil. It was the man who possessed it who made the ultimate choice between them, and that choice was called power.
Even when he had believed himself to be totally absorbed with Kitty Godolphin, his instinct had been in play. Almost subconsciously he had noticed those tiny white specks way out on the green Benguela Current of the Atlantic. Kitty Godolphin had not been gone from his life for an hour before he stormed into the offices of Courtney Mining and Finance in Windhoek's main street and started demanding figures and documents, making telephone calls, summoning lawyers and accountants, calling in favours from men in high places in government, despatching his minions to search the archives of the registrar and the local newspapers, assembling the tools of his trade, facts, figures and influence, and then losing himself happily in them, like an opium-eater with his pipe.
It was another five days before he was ready to bring it all together, and make the final weighing up. He had kept David Abrahams with him, for David was an excellent sounding-board in a situation like this one, and Shasa liked to bounce ideas off him and catch the returns.
'So this is what it looks like,' Shasa began the summing up. There were five of them in the boardroom, sitting under the magnificent Pierneef murals that Centaine had commissioned when the artist was in his prime, Shasa and David, the local manager and secretary of Courtney Mining, and the German lawyer based in Windhoek whom Shasa kept on permanent retainer.
'It looks like we have been asleep on our feet. In the last three years an industry has sprung up under our noses, an industry that last year alone netted twenty million pounds, four times the profits of the H'am Mine, and we have let it happen." He glowered cyclops-eyed at his local manager for an explanation.
'We were aware of the recommencement of the fishing industry at Walvis Bay,' that unfortunate gentleman sought to explain. 'The application for pilchard trawling licences was gazetted, but I didn't think that fishing would match up with our other activities." 'With due respect, Frank, that's the kind of decision I like to make myself. It's your job to pass on all information, of whatever nature, to me." It was said quietly, but the three local men had no illusions as to the severity of the reprimand and they bowed their heads over their notepads. There was silence for ten seconds while Shasa let them suffer.
'Right, Frank,' Shasa ordered him. 'Tell us now what you should have told us four or five years ago." 'Well, Mr Courtney, the pilchard-fishing industry was started in the early 1930s at Walvis Bay and although initially successful, it was overtaken by the depression, and with the primitive trawling methods of those days was unable to survive. The factories closed down and became derelict." As Frank spoke, Shasa's mind went back to his childhood. He remembered his first visit to Walvis Bay and blinked with the realization that it had been twenty years ago. He and Centaine had driven down in her daffodil-coloured Daimler to call in the loan she had made to De La Rey's canning and fishing company and to close down the factory. Those were the desperate years of the depression when the Courtney companies had survived only through his mother's pluck and determination - and ruthlessness.
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.