Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game (26 page)

I’ve done it before and I can do it again. I’m not afraid of hard work.

But this wasn’t London. It was Africa. Nothing had prepared Gabe for the backbreaking work, hauling bricks and mixing cement in the hundred-degree heat, bitten to death by mosquitoes and sand flies. Often he found he was the only white man on a crew, which was lonely and dispiriting. The blacks all spoke Swahili to one another, laughing and joking as they lifted huge slabs of stone with no more effort than a mother lifting a baby. Gabe had always considered himself strong and physically fit. But at thirty, with a white man’s muscle tone, he was no match for the nineteen-year-old local boys. Every night he crawled back to his filthy single-room apartment on Kennedy Road and collapsed on the bed, his body screaming with pain. For the first six months, before his skin hardened, Gabe’s hands would blister and bleed so badly he looked like he had stigmata. Worst of all was the loneliness. It followed him everywhere, like a stalker, even into his dreams at night. Sometimes he could go an entire week without talking to anyone other than the foreman who paid him his wages. Gabe had to make a conscious effort not to slide into depression and despair.

I got through heroin. I got through prison. I can get through this.

And slowly, as the months rolled into years, he did get through it. Giving up drinking was the first step, not so much a choice as a physical necessity. Gabe’s body was already stretched to the limits of endurance. There was no way he could work with a hangover. With the booze out of his system, he started sleeping better. His mood and energy levels began, imperceptibly, to lift. Once he raised his head and smiled at the black men working beside him, he found that they were not so standoffish after all. The thought struck him that perhaps it was
he
who had kept himself isolated, not them.

He made friends with a man named Dia Ghali. Dia was a joker, sunny-natured, with a deep, booming laugh that erupted frequently and incongruously from his skinny body. Dia was a foot shorter than Gabe, and as black as Gabe was white. Standing side by side, they looked like a comedy act. But Dia was every bit as serious as Gabe about making something of his life.

“I grew up in Pinetown. You know what happened last week, in the street where I lived? A baby girl, four months old, was killed by a rat.
Killed.
By a
rat.
”

Gabe looked suitably horrified.

“The city refuses to collect the trash so the bloody rats are everywhere. They say the shack dwellers are ‘illegals’ and not entitled to ser
vices. As if we
choose
to live that way. Well, it’s not happening to my child. No way. I’m getting out.”

By pooling his money with Dia, Gabe was at last able to afford to move out of his single room. Together the two men rented a minuscule two-bedroom apartment downtown. It was a shoe box, but it felt like the Ritz.

“You know what we should do?” Gabe emerged from his first hot shower in a year and a half to find Dia watching cricket on their secondhand TV. “We should go into business for ourselves, in Pinetown. That’s the problem in South Africa. There are shantytowns and mansions, but nothing in between. Low-cost, cooperative housing my friend. It’s the future.”

Dia nodded absently. “Fine. But you know what we should do first?”

“What?”

“Get laid.”

Gabe hadn’t had a woman since Ruby. Alcohol had deadened his libido. Since he gave up drinking, he’d begun, slowly, to notice women again. But he was too poor, and too exhausted, to spare much thought for dating. Cruising the bars of the Victoria and Albert Waterfront with Dia, watching the girls in their miniskirts and heels dolled up for a night out, Gabe felt like a tortoise emerging from hibernation. His first few attempts to chat up women were met with blunt rejection.

Gabe couldn’t understand it. He’d always found flirting so easy.

“It’s because you’re with me,” Dia told him. “Women don’t trust a white guy who hangs out with a native.”

“A
native
?” Gabe laughed. “Come on, Dia. Apartheid’s been over for years.”

Dia raised an eyebrow. “Really? Where have you been the past two years, brother? In a cave?”

He was right. Glancing around, Gabe saw that none of the groups hanging around the Waterfront were of mixed race. Whites and blacks might frequent the same stores and bars, but they each stuck with their own. Gabe thought of his ancestor Jamie McGregor and his lifelong friendship with Banda, a native revolutionary. A hundred and fifty years had passed since those days.
But how much has really changed?

Happily, Dia was not in the mood for philosophizing. “Check out that honey standing by the fountain.” He pointed out a tall, slender black girl
in tight jeans and a sequined vest. When she looked up and saw him staring, she smiled.

Dia grinned at Gabe. “You’re on your own, my friend. Don’t wait up.”

The black girl’s name was Lefu. Less than a year later, Dia married her.

“Quit complaining,” Dia told Gabe as he taped up the last of his boxes. He and Lefu were moving into their own place a few blocks away. “Now your crazy white women can make as much noise as they like through the walls.”

Gabe would miss Dia. But it was true, he
could
use the privacy. It hadn’t taken him long to rediscover his magic touch when it came to women. Cape Town, he quickly learned, was a mecca for Eastern European models. Girls flocked to join the hot new agencies—Faces, Infinity, Max, Outlaws—taking advantage of South Africa’s year-round sunshine and perfect photographic conditions. Gabe McGregor made it his personal mission—more like his Christian duty—to ensure that the poor things didn’t get too homesick.

“I’m providing a free service,” he told an envious Dia and disapproving Lefu as yet another Amazonian Czech breezed out of the apartment in hot pants. “Someone has to make the poor loves feel welcome.”

Now that Gabe had finally been promoted to foreman, he was working shorter hours and earning good money. He’d already repaid Angus Frazer and everyone who’d loaned him money for his appeal. On his thirty-fourth birthday, he put in a call to Marshall Gresham. Marshall had been released from Wormwood Scrubs the previous Christmas and was now living in splendor in a spanking-new mansion outside Basildon.

Marshall said: “I thought you’d done a runner.”

It was a joke, but Gabe was horrified.

“I would never do that. It took me a wee bit longer than I expected to raise the money, that’s all. But I’ve got it, every penny. Where should I send the check?”

“Nowhere.”

Gabe was confused.

Marshall said: “I told you five years ago, didn’t I? That money’s an investment. What I want to know is when are you going to get off your lazy Scottish arse and start a new company?”

Gabe tried not to show how touched he was.

“Even after what happened? You’d still trust me?”

“’Course I trust you, you wanker. Just don’t take on any more dodgy partners.”

“Ah. About partners.”

Gabe told Marshall about Dia and their plans to develop low-income housing close to the impoverished Pinetown and Kennedy Road areas. Marshall was skeptical.

“Your plan sounds fine. But I don’t understand why you need this black fella. What does he bring to the party?”

“He grew up in Pinetown. He knows the area far better than I do. Plus, ninety-eight percent of the population in these dumps is black. I need a black face on the team if I’m going to get the locals to trust me.”

Gabe didn’t add that Dia’s friendship meant more to him than any business. That even if it meant returning Marshall’s investment, he would never leave Dia in the lurch. Luckily he didn’t have to.

“Fine. You know what you’re doing. Call me once you’ve doubled my money.”

Gabe laughed. “I will.”

He was back in business.

Gabe and Dia called their new company Phoenix, because it had risen from the ashes of their old lives.

At first, everyone thought they were crazy. Fellow developers laughed in Gabe’s face when he told him Phoenix’s business plan.

“You’re out of your mind. None of the shack dwellers can afford a home. And anyone who
can
afford one isn’t going to want to live within twenty miles of those areas.”

Others went even further.

“You go home at night, the kaffirs’ll torch the place. Those shantytown kids have got nothing better to do. Who d’you think’s going to insure you in Pinetown?”

As it turned out, insurance
was
a problem. None of the blue-chip firms would give Phoenix the time of day. Just when Gabe was starting to give up hope, Lefu came to the rescue, introducing Dia to a boyfriend of one of her cousins who worked for an all-black building insurance agency in Johannesburg.

“The premiums are high.” Dia handed Gabe the quote.

“High?”
Gabe read the number and felt faint. “This guy must have
been
high when he came up with this rate. Tell him we’ll pay half.”

“Gabe.”

“All right, two-thirds.”

“Gabriel.”

“What?”

“It’s our only option. He’s doing this as a favor to Lefu. As a friend.”

“With friends like him, who needs enemies?” Gabe grumbled.

They paid the full rate.

By the end of their first year, Phoenix was 700,000 rand in the red. They had built thirty small, simple prefab houses with running water and electricity and sold none. Gabe lost fifteen pounds and took up smoking. Dia, with one baby at home and a second on the way, remained inexplicably upbeat.

“They’ll sell. I’m working on it. Give me time.”

Gabe had worked out a financial model for shared ownership that he knew a number of the shanty families could afford. The problem was that none of them believed it.

“You have to understand,” Dia explained. “These people have been lied to by white men their entire lives. Many of them think it was white doctors who first spread AIDS here.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“Not to them. They think you’re trying to steal their money. The idea that they could afford a home—never mind a home with water and a roof that doesn’t leak—it’s totally alien to them. You may as well tell them you’ve found a way for them to live forever, or that you can turn horse manure into gold.”

“So what do we do?”

“You
do nothing. Go away for a few weeks, take a vacation. Show one of your Polish teenagers something other than your bedroom ceiling for a change.”

Gabe shook his head. “No way. I can’t leave the business, not now.”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” said Dia. “Bugger off. I know what I’m doing.”

Gabe spent two weeks at Muizenberg, a local beach resort, with a girl named Lenka. Once the site of a famous battle between the British and the Dutch, Muizenberg was now the go-to resort for affluent Capeto-nians, an African version of the Hamptons.

“Gorgeous!” Lenka gasped as they strolled past the Victorian mansions on the promenade.

“Gorgeous!” she enthused, taking in the wide sandy beaches and turquoise water of False Bay.

“Gorgeous!” she cooed, when a spaniel puppy bounded up to Gabe on the beach and promptly urinated on his deck shoes.

After two days, Gabe was climbing the walls. One more “gorgeous” and he’d be forced to try to hang himself with the hotel sheets.

I will never, ever go on vacation again with a girl with the IQ of a dog turd. Even if she does look like a movie star.

Muizenberg was dull. Deathly dull. But it could have been one of the Seven Wonders of the World and Gabe would still have hated it. His mind had never left Pinetown.

The morning he got back to Cape Town, he raced to the office. He hadn’t felt so nervous since the day he stood in the dock at Walthamstow, waiting to be sentenced.

“So?” he asked Dia breathlessly. “Did you make any progress?”

“A little.”

Gabe’s heart sank.
A little? They didn’t need a little. They needed a bloody miracle. He’d have to give up the apartment. Move back to Kennedy Road. Or perhaps the time had come to go
home
home? To admit defeat and go back to Scotland? There was no work at the docks, but maybe…

“I sold them all.”

It took a moment for Dia’s words to sink in.

“But…I don’t…how…but…”

Dia teased him. “You know, after two weeks away, I’d forgotten how articulate you can be.”

“You…but…
all
of them?”

“Every last one.”

“How?”

“Faith, my friend. Faith.”

Gabe looked at him blankly. Dia explained.

“I went to see the pastor at my old church and asked if he would let me speak there. He wasn’t keen at first, but I persuaded him. Church meetings around here are packed.”

“What did you say?”

“The same thing you’ve been saying, but in their voice. I talked about my own childhood. About the kids I knew who died as a direct result of the appalling living conditions, the lack of sanitation. I tried to let them know that I’ve been where they are, that I’m one of them. People started asking questions. From then on, it was easy. I talked them through your model, explained the financing. The next day I moved to another parish, then another.

“I actually sold the last unit three days ago. But I figured it could keep. I didn’t want to ruin your holiday with the lovely Lenka.”

Gabe thought about the nightmarish last few days in Muizenberg and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

Striding over to Dia, Gabe picked him up in a huge bear hug and danced around the room, whooping for joy.

“Gorgeous!” He laughed. “Dia Ghali, you are bloody gorgeous!”

T
WENTY

THE DAWN OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM USHERED IN A PERIOD of great change in the business world. Companies that had once been seen as untouchable giants began to disintegrate, outpaced by minuscule dot-com start-ups. Greed was still the name of the game. But the
rules
of the game had changed.