‘I tried,’ Tarek said. ‘He’s a tough nut to crack.’
‘Come on, Zero. We need you here. We need a guy with balls.’ He looked contemptuously towards the parallel row of desks where the traders were seated. Cash Callaghan was a salesman, the most successful in Bloomfield Weiss’s London office. He had been around a long time, but he hadn’t lost any of his energy. Despite appearances, he was well known for his memory. Bonds might come and go, but Cash would remember them all, who issued them, who bought them, who sold them, what happened to them.
‘Actually, he wanted to ask you about one of our favourite junk-bond issuers,’ Tarek said. ‘Zyl News.’
‘Ah, yes. So is there something in the rumours they’re taking a run at The Times?’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Calder said. ‘I want to ask you about 1988.’
‘Hmm... 1988.’ Cash thought a moment. ‘I remember. The Herald takeover. Two hundred million dollar issue, thirteen and a half per cent coupon, maturity two thousand, boy was that difficult to get away. It was less than a year after the October ’87 crash and the junk market was just opening up again to good issuers. Zyl News was not a good issuer.’
‘What was the problem?’
‘There were rumours they were in trouble. Their cash flow was barely covering their interest costs. We’d backed Cornelius van Zyl all through the eighties. He bought all kinds of papers in the states — the Philadelphia Intelligencer was the biggest, but there were many more, including a couple of major metros in Indiana and Ohio. And he did a great job turning them around, cutting costs, jacking up advertising rates, that kind of thing. But he kept paying up to make these acquisitions and borrowing from the banks and the junk market to do it. It was all great as long as we could keep lending him the money to feed the machine. In ’86 he tried a start-up in the Los Angeles market against the LA Times — that was an expensive disaster. Then in October ’87 the stock market melted down and it looked like the junk-bond market was history. Guys like van Zyl were in big trouble. Without the junk market they couldn’t do any more deals, and without new deals they were left struggling to meet the interest payments on the old ones. The only way out of the bind was to buy a larger company and use its cash flow to service the debt. So the Herald acquisition was an important one. Make or break.’
‘Was anyone else interested in the Herald?’
‘Yeah. Evelyn Gill. No one had heard of him back then. He’d made his money in commodities and he owned a small magazine publisher. Then he suddenly decided he wanted to use his cash to buy a newspaper. It was his first deal. He ended up offering a higher price than Zyl News, but the Herald went to Zyl anyway. Gill was pissed. He and van Zyl have been big enemies ever since. Of course, Gill has bought a whole bunch of other titles since then, including the New York Globe and the Mercury.’
‘But you say it was difficult to get the Zyl deal away?’
‘Oh yeah. They had to jack the coupon up, I think they started at twelve per cent and had to raise it to thirteen and a half. I was worried about it, to be honest. You hate to sell something to your customers that’s gonna blow up in their face.’
‘So you didn’t sell any yourself?’
Cash grinned. ‘They doubled the sales credit, I had to rethink my priorities. I sold forty million in Europe. The guys in New York loved me.’
Calder rolled his eyes.
‘Hey!’ Cash said. ‘I’ve dug you out of a hole on more than one occasion.’
‘That’s true.’ Calder had made use of Cash’s sales skills to get rid of troublesome positions that the rest of the market didn’t want. Calder had had to put up with a certain amount of stick from him, but Cash had been able to sell the bonds. Cash was always able to sell the bonds. ‘How’s Zyl News been since then?’
‘Well, they did a good job. They turned the Herald around and met all their interest payments, and although they’ve done more deals — some regional papers in this country, a couple in Australia and Canada, some more in the US — they’ve learned their lesson. They’ve only got one bond issue outstanding at the moment and that’s trading well.’
‘Thanks, Cash.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve got to figure out what I’m gonna do with those five hundred million asset-backeds if Josie does sell them.’
As Calder left the Bloomfield Weiss building his mobile phone rang. It was Kim. She sounded agitated.
‘What is it?’ Calder asked.
‘When are you getting back?’
‘I was planning to fly up this afternoon. Why? What’s up?’
‘Well, hurry up. I’ve just been talking to the police. I was right, I knew I was right. The plane crash wasn’t an accident. It was sabotage.’
8
July 11, 1988
Went to a board meeting of the Project today, the Guguletu Literacy Project. Nimrod drove me: I don’t like driving there by myself since the riots of a couple of years ago. In fact, we’ve only gone back to holding the board meetings in the township in the last few months; until recently the place was a no-go area for whites. Guguletu doesn’t exist in the mind of white South Africa. It isn’t even on the map, despite the fact that a couple of hundred thousand people must live there. It’s a sprawling warren of single-room shacks made of wood and corrugated iron, each one crammed with people taking up every inch of floor space to sleep on. For some reason the dominant color seems to be pistachio green. But the township is teeming with life: children running around everywhere, chickens scratching about, even the odd cow, which still retains its importance as a symbol of wealth. There are smells of cooking and of filth, sounds of chatter, children’s laughter and everywhere the beat of “location music,” the same stuff that Finneas picks out on his harmonica at home.
Miriam Masote founded the Project ten years ago to try to teach adults to read and write. Her father has been in jail on Robben Island for nearly thirty years now. Her view is that when enough black South Africans can read they will develop a voice that the rest of the world will have to hear. I hope she is right. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of inhabitants of the township who can now read thanks to her. She does an amazing amount with very little money. That’s where I can help, not just by giving them some of our money, but by raising funds from the States. Mom does a good job with the churches in Minnesota.
Libby Wiseman was on excellent form. That woman is a hoot. God knows, you need a sense of humor in a place like Guguletu. She is pretty outspoken about the regime, and I think she’s been arrested a couple of times, but she seems to have avoided a banning order somehow. She gets very upset about greedy capitalists in South Africa, without ever actually mentioning Neels by name. Perhaps she’s a communist? I wonder if there are any of the SACP left in South Africa, or whether they are all in jail or in exile. She and I get on well, though: she’s one of the few South African women who I can call a friend. I can’t imagine her putting Neels and me on any execution list, although presumably that’s decided by the leaders in exile.
After the meeting she asked me back to her house for a drink, but I said no. I just feel like curling myself up into a ball and hiding away at Hondehoek.
I’ve been thinking about Neels a lot these past couple of days, thinking about when we first met. It was the moment that defined my life. It was the late sixties, I was a year out of graduate school and I was fired up about all the injustices of the world, foremost among them apartheid. I’d written a couple of successful freelance articles for Life magazine on student protest movements, and I planned to try to sell them an article on the press and apartheid in South Africa. I had a friend whose father was the Time correspondent and I managed to arrange to stay with him in Johannesburg. He helped me get interviews with some of the editors and owners of the South African newspapers.