risk. They had to blend into the environment the client was moving through, appearing only to whisper polite suggestions at convenient moments. The client expected that, because film and television had set the standard of behaviour. (I had a Scandinavian businesswoman who insisted I wear an earphone complete with a trailing wire disappearing down my collar, despite the fact that I was working alone and had no one to communicate with.)
Consequently, Jeanette Louw would ask prospective clients or their agent: ‘Do you need a gorilla, or an invisible.’ In the world of the rich and famous it was recognised terminology.
But Carel-know-it-all hadn’t got it quite right. His mistake told me something – his knowledge was only fragmentary.
‘When you hire a bodyguard, Jeanette asks you if you want a ghost or a gorilla,’ he explained to the rest of the table. ‘We have only used the gorillas for the celebrities who come to make ads.’
I couldn’t think of an appropriate response. The situation was strange to me. The employee didn’t usually sit at the same table as the employer – it was socially unacceptable. Add to that my own lack of enthusiasm for small talk. But Carel didn’t require a response.
‘The gorillas are the big guys,’ he said. ‘They look like nightclub bouncers. But the ghosts are the real pros. The ones that guard state presidents and ministers.’
They stared at me, the whole table.
‘Is that your background too, Mr Lemmer?’ Carel asked. It was an invitation, but I turned it down with a mere nod, slight and unenthusiastic.
‘There you are, Emma. You’re in good hands,’ said Carel.
Good hands. I suspected that Carel did not have first-hand experience of the hiring process at Body Armour. It was something he left to subordinates. If he had handled it himself, he would have known that Jeanette had a price list and I wasn’t anywhere near the top. My place was in the bargain basement, the one that didn’t like teamwork, the one with a secret history and defective public relations.
Did Emma know? Surely not. Jeanette was too professional. She would have asked, ‘How much would you like to spend?’ and Emma would have said she had no idea of the cost. ‘Anything between ten thousand rand a day for a team of four and seven hundred and fifty for a solo operator.’ Jeanette would have explained the choices without mentioning her twenty per cent cut, plus administrative charge, unemployment insurance, income tax and bank transfer fees.
What did a brand consultant earn? How big a chunk of that was R750 per day, R5,250 per week, R21,000 a month? Not small change, especially for imaginary threats.
‘I’m sure I am,’ said Emma with a distant smile, as if her thoughts were somewhere else.
‘There’s more ice cream,’ said Carel’s wife hopefully.
He invited me to his playroom. He called it his den.
‘Invited’ in the broadest possible sense. ‘Shall we have a chat?’ were the words Carel used, a grey area between invitation and order. He went first. A mounted kudu head stared out over the room. There was a billiard table and a cane bar, bottles on a shelf, along with a small cigar humidor. The pictures on the wall were of Carel- and-gun posing with dead animals.
‘Drink?’ he asked, and moved behind the bar counter.
‘No, thanks,’ I said, leaning against the billiard table.
He poured for himself, two fingers of brown, undiluted liquid. He drank from the glass and opened the humidor. ‘Cuban?’
I shook my head.
‘You’re sure? These are class,’ he said complacently. ‘They age them for twenty-four months, like wine.’
‘I don’t smoke, thank you.’
He selected a cigar for himself, stroking his fingers down the chunky cylinder. He snipped the end off with a large instrument and put the cigar in his mouth. ‘Your amateur trims it with that cheap rubbish that crimps it here at the end.’ He held up his clipper for my inspection. ‘This is what they call a .44 Magnum. Makes a perfectly round hole.’
He reached for the box of matches. ‘And then you get the fools who lick cigars before they light up. That comes from the days when you bought local cigars in the corner cafe. If the moisture content is properly maintained, you don’t lick them.’
He struck a match and allowed the flame to burn strongly. Then he held it to the cigar. He inhaled in short, rapid puffs while rotating the cigar in his fingers. White clouds of smoke floated up around him and a rich aroma filled the room. He shook the match. ‘They say the best way to light a cigar is with a Spanish cedar spill. You take a long thin strip of cedar, set that alight first and then use it to light the cigar. It has a pure, clean flame that does not influence the flavour of the cigar. But where would we get Spanish cedar? I ask you.’ He smiled at me as if we shared the same difficulty.
He drew deeply on the cigar. ‘Cuban, nothing can touch them. The Jamaican is not bad either, nice and light, the Dominican somewhere in between, Honduras is too wild. Nothing touches the cream of old Fidel’s crop.’
I wondered fleetingly how long he could maintain a monologue in front of a bored audience, but then I remembered that he was a Rich Afrikaner. The answer was: infinitely.
He drew an ashtray closer. ‘Some fools think you shouldn’t tap off a cigar’s ash. Total myth. Bullshit.’ He chuckled. ‘The guys smoke cheap cigars and then say the bitter taste is the result of knocking off the ash.’
Carel sat on a bar stool, cigar in one hand, drink in the other.
‘There’s a great deal of bullshit in the world, my friend, a great deal of bullshit.’
What did he want?
Another puff on the cigar. ‘But let me tell you one thing, there’s no bullshit in little Emma. None. If she says there are people out to harm her, then I believe her. Do you understand?’
I was not in the mood for this conversation. I did not respond. I knew he didn’t like it.
‘Don’t you want to sit down?’
‘I’ve been sitting too much today.’
‘She’s like a daughter in this house, my friend, like one of my own. That is why she came to me about this thing. That’s why you’re here. You have to understand, she’s gone through a lot in her life. Deep waters …’
I tried to temper my annoyance by thinking how fascinating a man like Carel van Zyl was.
Self-made Men all share a personality type – driven, smart, hard working and dominant. When the wealth grows and people start to defer to their power and influence, every Self-made Man makes the same mistake. They believe the respect is for them, personally. It polishes their self-esteem and tones down their personality towards geniality. But it remains a thin veneer; the original dynamo is still at work behind the self-deceit.
He was accustomed to being the centre of attention. He did not like standing on the sideline of this event. He wanted me to know that he was responsible for my involvement; he was the father figure serving Emma’s interests, therefore he was actually in control, and the arbiter of my services. He had the right to interfere and to be a part of this. Above all, he had Knowledge. And he was about to share it with me.
‘She came to work for me after she graduated. Most men would have seen just a pretty little thing, but I knew she had something, my friend.’ He punctuated his sentence with the cigar.
‘I’ve employed a lot of them, account managers, and they just see the glamour and the long lunches with clients and the fat pay cheques. But not Emma. She wanted to learn; she wanted to work. You would never say there was money behind her; she had the ambition of someone from a poor background. Ask me, my friend, I know. In any case, she had been working for me for about three years when the thing with her parents happened. Car accident, dead on impact, both of them. She sat in my office, my friend, poor little thing, crushed, I’m telling you. Crushed, because she had no one left. That’s when she told me about her brother. Can you imagine? So much loss. Turbulent times. What can you say?’
He reached for the bottle and unscrewed the cap.
‘But she’s strong, that one. Strong.’
Drew the glass nearer.
‘I only heard about the size of the estate later. And let me tell you now …’ He poured two fingers. ‘This is all about the money.’
A dramatic silence, cap back on the bottle, a sip from the glass, a short pull from the cigar. ‘There are a lot of vultures out there, my friend. A lot. The bigger the fortune, the quicker they sniff it out. Ask me, I know.’
