FOUR AGENTS

FOUR AGENTS (Claude Fielies, Allan Pillay, Bob Zimmerman, Henry Innes)

1. CLAUDE FIELIES

I was admitted as a conveyancer in 1981, the same year that I was admitted as an attorney.

I later discovered that this would have no immediate significance as regards the type of work that I did, because Archie Shandling, who would henceforth be my senior, and who was the foremost conveyancer in the firm, was helpful but was certainly not about to hand me any part of his practice.

Nevertheless I did start to get conveyancing work of my own and looking back, this was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

I did get the odd new instruction from Archie and other partners, but these were usually difficult matters with low fee potential – all good training stuff, perhaps, but certainly not of record-breaking significance on budget day …

We had an enterprising Deeds Office clerk, Maureen, who had been with the firm for years – more enterprising I think, than anyone realised – and she decided to set her husband up as an estate agent in the area where they lived. Since she worked exclusively with property-related issues (albeit only from a conveyancing point of view), she had a foundation of sorts from which to launch this career. But for whatever reasons of her own I don’t think she really wanted it known that this was happening. Maureen came to me, and we slowly put the thing together. In the beginning I did so without seeing what she was up to – in fact, without even realising that the shadowy figure of Claude was somewhere behind her ...

First I had to prepare a “standard deed of sale” (how estate agents love doing this! No matter how many times you tell them that there is really no such thing as a “standard deed of sale”!); then having done so I had to pilot her (and unbeknown to me all this material and information was being passed down to her husband) through the process of signing the parties up. This was evidently done by Claude, who turned out to be a feckless individual whom Maureen had probably operated by remote control all their married lives: and then between the two of them, in their spare time, they helped the buyers to apply for their mortgage finance. There were no such things as “bond brokers” in those days.

This work started as a trickle, but somewhere along the line Claude must have lost his “daytime job”, and the work picked up. They were not officially registered as estate agents, and the whole thing was some sort of backyard operation, with Maureen moonlighting as an estate agent (and probably using our facilities for the paperwork). The whole thing produced about five to ten property transfers per month in the boom years between 1982 and 1984, with relatively low fees, but it was a steady trickle of work which was entirely independent of any scraps which the partners chose to toss my way.

There were subtle bribes involved, although I never saw them as such: the bribes lay in procedures which we evolved in order to facilitate these dodgy transactions – things which other attorneys probably wouldn’t have been prepared to do in the days of the stuffy old legal practices of Cape Town: unheard of things, like borrowing money from other sources to cover the disbursements which had to be paid in a transaction prior to registration, and even to pay the estate agents their commissions before transfer. Today these are common practices, and countless loan sharks make a good living in providing the finance for them, but they simply didn’t exist at that time.

The bribe lay in the fact that we never charged interest for the cash laid out for these “pre-transfer disbursements” as they glibly came to be known. We did this, not by borrowing money from outside, but by loans from cash on hand indide the firm: as other unrelated matters were finalised and we became entitled to our fees out of money already in our bank account, instead of debiting all those fees immediately, we set some of the cash aside to build up a fund which was then available for my purposes (of course, since I did not have big-fee items of my own it would have been impossible for me to build up such a fund on my own: I never appreciated what my partner Ricky Volks did for me by creating the fund out of his fees and making the cash available on demand).

I saw these procedures as being necessary for the specific economic range of these transfers, in the depressed market made up of poor coloured people in Mitchell’s Plain, where Maureen and her husband operated, because all the parties to the transactions were penniless and depended entirely on the one-hundred percent funding which they hoped to obtain from bank loans secured by mortgage bonds. The loans only paid out against registration of transfer, so anything requiring disbursement before registration, had to be funded elsewhere.

My bosses were very uneasy about all of this, but the system did produce work and they left me to continue.

In fact, the business became more complicated as we went along: Claude and Maureen were learning to build all sorts of costs and incentives into the price, like furniture removal costs, costs of refurbishing the properties (including curtains and new wardrobes!) – costs of a new motor car, the sins were huge and many, and the banks were taken for a terrible ride, and I was as guilty as they were because I was a professional and should have refused to cooperate, but I turned a blind eye and we carried on …

These things were necessary to induce parties to do business, although clearly they were getting more questionable as time went by. And yet, I started to get telephone calls from attorneys who were curious to know how I managed to do property transfers in circumstances where buyers couldn’t come up with the cash to pay their transfer costs. Ah, those were heady days! I don’t think that I would have wanted to disclose to them that I was also covering agent’s commissions and other benefits, although, I suspect, today this is mostly regarded as fair practice.

The work was really a “niche market”, although that phrase implies a level of class which it definitely didn’t have. Mitchell’s Plain was a monster child of the Apartheid era, whereby entire communities  of coloured people were uprooted from the stable villages and suburbs which they had occupied for centuries, and dumped amongst strangers in an empty, featureless dust bowl on the Cape Flats many miles away, in what was essentially a dormitory suburb, an environment without order, so that it became a seething cesspool of humanity. The Municipality sold small houses to residents in a legal transaction known as “suspended transfer sales”, which enabled low income earners to pay what amounted to a nominal rental that was retrospectively converted into a credit against the purchase price of the property after five, or in some cases, ten years.

The interesting thing about this from an economics point of view was that people who would otherwise not have been able to participate in the property market, were being empowered to do so in a small way. Unfortunately the level of sophistication of the people was such that they simply hung on for the contract period and then sold their properties for what looked like a massive profit – but since in most cases they simply frittered the money away again, they were once more left homeless. Since the second owner had raised so much credit – over and above the real value of the property – he, too, staggered under a mountain of debt which minimised the value of his investment. And so the allegedly noble ideals of the social architects of Apartheid were very slow to bear fruit, as the success rate was so low, and Mitchell’s Plain remained pretty much as it was for a long time.

Because the local municipality was the source of all the property, and we were constantly linking with them for the purpose of registering the second transfer (which I attended to) with the first transfer (from the municipality to the first buyer), and because all the municipality’s work was attended to by one law firm, we had quite a strong working relationship with that firm and its staff who were dedicated to the high volume of municipal transfers which they attended to daily.

But Claude and Maureen had other vices. Especially Claude. I think he turned out to be a heavy drinker and it appeared that Maureen would need more than remote control to keep him on the straight and narrow. Maureen eventually left us – whether to better manage Claude, or to take up work elsewhere, I cannot say – but it is quite possible that she eventually ended up working for the municipality’s law firm, doing what she had done with us. Even after she left I continued getting work from them for a while, but eventually it petered out, and either they went out of business or Maureen managed to train some other attorney to do what I had done. But by then the market had changed anyway, and things (good and bad) which we had pioneered were starting to become common practices elsewhere.

ALLAN PILLAY

In law, one thing leads to another, and somewhere in the course of these adventures I met Allan Pillay, another agent working in the Mitchell's Plain area. When I met Allan, he was already an established presence, but like many small agents he needed a “home” in the form of an attorney-on-tap, whom he could call, and call on, whenever he needed to. I became that person, and in doing so, I really began to build a property-law practice, albeit at a low socio-economic level.

The fascinating thing about these individuals is that I had no social relationship with them; we had nothing in common; I never gave them anything beyond the service which they got from my office; I did not tout for their work, nor did I ever visit their homes or spend any social time with them, or give them little gifts (or big gifts). We did business across the social barriers of South African society, across the legal barriers of Apartheid, across the less significant but undeniably extant barriers of class, colour and religion – just doing business - because we all needed to. I think it was the recognition of that need which kept us working as a team.

But Allan worked in and out of Mitchell’s Plain, and I encountered other “coloured” and “Indian” and “Muslim” communities (such was the level of fragmentation of the world which we lived in). He seized at the cash-advance system which I made available to him, and unlike Claude and Maureen, he really worked it to benefit his clients. 

Allan really could sell. He was the strategist of desperation, and his deals were often a salvage operation which he turned around to benefit everyone. Often, we had a situation where a seller had managed to get himself into such debt that he would have to pay in money on registration of transfer in order to get the creditor bank to cancel the bond – but of course, the seller was penniless, and had nothing to pay in. And then we’d find that the buyer was also penniless, and needed the proceeds of his bond to pay for the property, the legal costs of transfer and bond, and the costs of his move!

Then Allan would call me, days before transfer was due to be registered and the deal was about to fall apart, as the seller sank into a morass of debt from which there would be no salvation. “Harry”, he’d say, “we’ve got to make this deal work. We’ve come this far. Help me, here. Phone the bank and tell them there isn’t enough money to repay the bond. Tell them they have to write something off”

“That’s ridiculous!” I exploded the first time he did this to me – “they’ll never agree to that! I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“Just phone them” he’d say. “Give it a try. Don’t be so negative”

I felt that I was being pushed beyond limits, but I called the bank. They, too, had never heard of such a thing. In Yiddish, pulling a stunt like this would be described as “chutzpah” – indeed, this was the most classic example of chutzpah that I had experienced in my brief spell as a lawyer. 

“Put it in writing” said the lady in the default payments section of the bank. “I need to think about it. I need to ask my boss.” I really gave it my best shot. I wrote a heartrending tale, drew up a reconciliation account, supplied copies of letters of demands from other creditors (oh yes, I had become the seller’s debt administrator, too)

The bank came back to me. “We’re not gong to give you everything you’re asking for” they said, “but we’ll write off some of the debt. For the rest, the debtor must try harder”

Try harder? There was still a shortfall. Are they mad? I’m dealing with a debtor in extremis, and the bank wants him to try harder!

I called Allan. “We have a concession” I announced, “but it’s not enough. We’re still short. It’s not going to work”

“There’s got to be a way” he said. There was a pause. I could hear him sucking air through his teeth on the other side of the line. “You have to help me here” he said, and I sighed. I’d heard this before. “How much is the shortfall?” I gave him the figure.

“Tell you what. The bank is taking a cut. I’ll take a cut on my commission. You take a cut on your fees. We can make it.”

“Jeez, Allan, this is really pushing it. What about all the extra work I’ve done for this man? Who is going to pay for that?”

I could hear the laughter in his voice: “And if you stop now, what’re you going to be paid? Nothing! Come on, it’s better than nothing! Let’s do business here!”

Of course, at that point in this transaction, he was right. Anything else would be stupid. But we were setting a precedent. The first time we did it, it was hard, but we did it again and again, and although I was doing a lot of work at discounted fees, I built a strong relationship with an extraordinary man, and it lasted for many years. I learnt that you can break just about any rule, and you can do it for the good of everyone – the seller gets out of his debt, the buyer gets a new house, the bank gets (most of) their money, and the attorney and the agent do business.

Allan was a philosopher, a dreamer, a bullshitter. He had ambition, and a sense of humour. He was a family man (more of that later) with several grown-up children, a long-suffering wife, and a loyal agent who did the running for him. The agent was a quiet, hardworking woman, but I never realised just how important she was to him, until I had known Allan for some years.

One day Allan called to say that he was bringing some new deeds of sale in to my office. This may sound incredible, but for a long time after the man started to give me work, I was so disdainful, so un-user friendly, that in spite of the fact that he always brought his new deeds of sale to my office personally, I had never actually met him face to face. He just left them at the reception desk, where my secretary went to pick them up later in the day.

That day, I resolved to be different. I met him in reception. He was a chubby, prosperous-looking middle-aged man with a ready smile, a large gold ring, blue suit and tie, and good shoes. The shoes are important. Someone once told me that you can always tell a man by his shoes. I have found that to be true. Polished, new, black leather shoes. That was Allan. I showed him to my office, and we spoke about all sorts of nonsense for a long time. Lunch-time came round, and I asked him to go to lunch with me.

This was not as easy as it might seem: apartheid was still legally in force, although virtually dead in practice. Was I really going to walk into a “white” restaurant with an Indian man, and risk whatever censure might follow? Yes, dammit, conservative as I was, I was going to do that. The hell with it. I think he was a little surprised at the invitation, but after a slight hesitation he accepted, and off we went.

It was my usual restaurant (little prick that I was – I already had a “usual restaurant!”), and we sat at my usual table. I didn’t look at anyone, so I don’t know whether they looked at me. Menus arrived. Allan looked a little uncomfortable, but I attributed that to the Apartheid thing. But then I noticed something odd. He was looking at the menu, but not in the way a person looks at something when they are reading. He wasn’t really looking at the words. The waiter arrived to take our order. As would be normal, I invited him, as my guest, to order first. He brushed that aside breezily, and said I should order, and I did so. Immediately he smiled broadly at the waiter and said, “I’ll have the same, thank you!” and handed back the menu.

And then it dawned on me. Allan couldn’t read. He couldn’t read, and he had found a way to navigate round that obstacle. The hard-working little estate agent lady did the paperwork for him. He did the deals, she reduced them to writing. He did the figures in his head, he didn’t always have a clear idea of the numbers because they can get quite complicated, but he had an overall understanding of the deal. I had heard of this sort of thing, but I’d never seen it in real life. Of course, we never spoke about it – then or later -  and I don’t even know whether he was aware that I had figured it out, but it is clear that this is a sore point amongst illiterate adults, and you have to be terribly careful how you deal with it. Anyway, he had gone beyond reading, he had made his money and raised his family without it. I was amazed. 

Through Allan, and the deals I did through him, I met other estate agents, and moved steadily into higher-priced areas and more rewarding work, but the tough days in Mitchell’s Plain were a good training ground – after that, everything else looks easy!

As Allan’s business grew, he became bolder. He confided in me that he had met another woman. She was a beautiful, white woman. I heard a lot about her, until it became clear to me that he was virtually stalking her. I warned him about that, but he was too far gone in infatuation to listen to me. I was never sure what happened to that relationship.

I never met Allan’s family during those years, except for the occasional brief appearance of his wife, who would sometimes drop off documents, but got to know something about them through our conversations.

Then one morning I received a phone call from his daughter. 

“My father died”, she announced, in a flat, unemotional voice. 

I was shocked. He had been such a vibrant man, he was so young – what had happened? How had he died?

“He got a heart attack at about 4 last night.” she said, still in that flat voice. “He was doing push-ups.” 

So that was it then. Whether he had finally overcome the resistance of the beautiful woman he had stalked, or some other woman, the push-ups were more than he could take. I was to do his estate. Mother and daughter came in to my office. The daughter was a stunner – she looked like an Indian princess – and worked as an air-hostess on South African Airways. How the world was changing - now South Africa was proud to showcase an Indian beauty on their international flights! He had not left a king’s ransom in his estate, but there was something for everyone, and he had assessed their characters pretty shrewdly in the legacies which he left to each one.

His estate agency died with him. The hard-working little estate agent woman went off to work for some other agency, who may or may not have appreciated what they were getting, but I never heard from her again. I heard from the mother and daughter from time to time – the daughter actually tried to take the agency over and to run it for a while, but its a hands-on job, and she couldn’t do that and keep her day-time job.

3. HENRY INNES

From one link in the chain to another. One of the deals which I did for Allan involved a linked transaction which had been put together by an agent from the estate agency firm Steers: his name was Henry Innes.

He had put the deal together badly. In fact, it was shocking just how little understanding Henry had of a transaction which involved the biggest asset of some poor woman’s life. Yet, as much as I tried to explain it to him, he just didn’t get it. Eventually I lost my temper with him and yelled at him over the phone. I had the most terrible customer relations attitude. He offered to come in to my office to discuss it with me.

He was a chubby, pimply, sallow-complexioned, overconfident and slightly sly young man with a nervous laugh and little brown eyes which darted around the room and missed nothing. He was classified as “Coloured”, and was proud of his Scottish surname, on which he had evidently done some research. So many South Africans have interesting stories to tell about their origins, and Apartheid was nothing more than G-d’s bad joke in the history of many families – it was just a twist of fate whether you were light- or dark- skinned enough to fall on one side of the line or the other when Verwoerd brought the axe of Afrikanerdom down in the 1960’s.

Once he was in the office, I drew him a flow chart to show him how a regular property transaction works. I watched his face. I could see the moment when the penny dropped and he finally got it. He wasn’t stupid, he simply had no training and only the most vague idea of what happened after the contract was signed.

Instead of chasing him off, I had made a friend and a source of much work. He started to send me house transfers – first a trickle, then a stream. He was a good salesman and no-one at Steers had told him which attorney to send the conveyancing work to, unlike the present time, when the boss of an agency regularly bullies his agents into sending the conveyancing work to whichever conveyancer pays the highest bribes...

He asked me to come to his office and lecture his colleagues on property registrations at the Deeds Office. I was excited at the prospect, and created a board with large pages showing colourful diagrams, flow charts and lists, got into my Volkswagen Beetle and took the material through to his office in Claremont late one evening. Between Claude, Allan and Henry, I had quite a little practice in cheap properties going, but by now I was doing Mitchells Plain, Grassy Park, Athlone and Rondebosch East – although for me Steers was a gateway to the Southern Suburbs, and eventually Claremont.

The lecture took much longer than expected (I had no idea how to prepare a timed lecture). Henry walked me to my car afterwards, and stared at the Volkswagen Beetle. “Harry”, he said in a serious voice, “I thought I would see you getting into a lovely, sleek ‘Benz!” I really didn’t know how to deal with that. At that stage in my career, and taking into account all the American movies I had seen involving lawyers, I also imagined that I should have been getting into a lovely sleek ‘Benz by now – but somehow that hadn’t happened …

Henry was restless and ambitious. He left Steers and opened his own agency. He took on a partner, of whom he was very proud. He kept speaking about his partner, but I never got any work from that individual, and then one day he asked me to lunch in Claremont. The idea was to meet this partner.

We had lunch at one of Claremont’s fancier restaurants. Henry insisted on paying. We all wore suits, and it was very formal. It turned out that this partner wasn’t actually interested in selling properties – that was Henry’s side of the business. The partner was lending money to cover “pre-transfer disbursements” at usurious rates. They made as much money out of the loans as they did out of commissions on sales. The partner was a young, silent type but eventually he warmed up and had quite a lot to say – and as he gesticulated in making a point, his jacket flopped open and I noticed that he had a 9mm Special snub-nosed revolver (stainless steel, with pearl handles) (commonly known as a “Saturday-Night-Special”) in his belt. It struck a strange note. Did a money lender need one of those? Probably not – but a money collector might …

Henry got greedy. The deals became more and more dodgy. Then one day he faxed me a deed of sale in a new matter, and it came out quite blurred on my side. I called his office and asked for a re-transmission, and again the document came through – a better quality copy than previously, but still blurred and illegible in one place. I called again and asked for a third transmission – still blurred in respect of one clause.

The clause dealt with the buyer’s deposit – it should have provided that the cash deposit would be invested in a trust account – but that part of the clause was totally illegible. I didn’t smell a rat, and not wanting to be difficult, I proceeded on the assumption that he held the deposit in his trust account, as required by the law, although I could never get an unequivocal answer when I asked about that.

The date for transfer arrived, and I did my accounting on that assumption, and called for him to pay over the buyer’s deposit. I got no answer from him. This was one of those desperate deals. The seller, a widow, had sold her property to pay off her debts. She planned to go and live with her daughter. No-one could afford a delay. Henry never answered me, and the money was missing. The partner, too, was “unavailable”. I explained the situation to the seller as best I could. She was a simple woman, but she understood all too well that she had been duped by a crook – there is no other way to say that - and she laid a charge of theft against Henry.

I never heard from Henry again, but I did eventually hear from one of his ex-colleagues at Steers that he was arrested, tried and sentenced to a spell in Pollsmoor.

4. BOB ZIMMERMAN

Finally, there was Bob Zimmerman. 

Bob worked in the same branch of Steers as Henry Innes, and I met him at that lecture which I gave. He was the most persistent questioner during that lecture, he took my number (we didn’t have business cards in those days), and the questions continued mercilessly thereafter – and the conveyancing instructions in his sales followed.

Bob pestered the hell out of me. I got calls at night, over weekends, on holidays – time was no issue to Bob, and he put together really crazy deals. With him, everything was a problem.

He was an American who had settled in South Africa (I only found out why, much later). He thought Henry was a bit of a joke, but that also only came out after Henry had left Steers. The only time I ever saw him in the flesh was at that lecture. The rest of our relationship consisted entirely of telephone and written communication, but in spite of that, I grew to know quite a lot about the crusty old bugger, and eventually, to love him. 

He wasn’t well. He was an elderly man with all sorts of worldly experience. From the level of his conversation and the questions which he asked he was obviously very intelligent, and had also obviously done other things in his life. He wasn’t rich, and wasn’t making a fortune out of his work – but unlike the other agents in this story, he never asked for an advance on his commissions. He was obviously Jewish, and often threw Yiddish words into his communication. I think he expected us to get on much better than we did initially, but I was very wary of him (if I look back now I would say that I was a terribly spoiled young attorney and often failed to see work opportunities or exploit them as well or as quickly as I should have. I was outraged at his calls out of office hours, and made that clear to him, when I should instead have been overjoyed …) and I was quite rude and offish to him. I warmed to him very slowly over a long period of time.

A few years after this curious relationship began, during one of our long telephone conversations, he asked me if I knew anything about the Talmud. I had studied bits of Talmud with an old rabbi who droned on and on, at night classes, at which I was too exhausted after the day’s work to absorb anything at all and had not the faintest idea of what I was doing, but I answered in the affirmative. He quoted quite a long passage to me, in that peculiar form of Aramaic-Hebrew which much of the Talmud is written in. It was obviously some form of humorous anecdote, but it went right over my head. I had no idea what he had said, but I was more astonished that he had said it at all.

What on earth was this old estate agent doing, throwing passages from the Talmud at me? I was more curious than ever to learn about his background, but he was a completely closed book on that subject.

Then one day he spoke about someone – I think the person was a party to a deal that he was doing – and he said something about them being “from my old congregation in Johannesburg” – but again, I couldn’t draw him out on this curious comment, and I had to let it go. He wasn’t speaking about the person with any great affection, and I gathered that he would rather not have come across him.

He never said another word about it, and as his health declined, I heard less and less from him – and being as thoughtless as I was, I never called to enquire about him either. Eventually, he asked me to do a will for him, and I did that, and sent it to him, and he had it signed and witnessed at his home, and I heard no more.

Then one day I got a call from a Mrs Zimmerman. She was Bob’s wife. Bob had died, she said, and she asked if I would attend the funeral. 

One of the things which I had acquired from old man CK Friedlander was the habit of attending funerals as a formality. At the office, we used to joke about CK’s funeral attendances (we said that he probably did it in the hope of being instructed to attend to the deceased’s estate). He had a habit of visiting his best clients on Saturday mornings, and he would visit his elderly clients, so the story went, with increasing frequency up to the point of death – and then he’d see them down into their graves …

So the invitation wasn’t difficult for me to accept. The only thing which troubled me was the venue: the funeral was to be held at Schoenstadt, the Catholic monastery in Constantia. I was surprised and hesitated at this news, but it seemed to be quite important to the widow that I should attend, so I said I would. I could see that she understood the problem, (Jews are not supposed to enter the houses of worship of other religions) but she wanted me there anyway. Something was starting to fall into place in the Bob Zimmerman story.

She told me that Rabbi Sherman, the Rabbi of the Reformed Congregation, would attend the funeral. I was surprised, but I thought, well, if he attends, at least its half-OK for me to attend, so I went. But Rabbi Sherman never came. Either she lied to me, or he got cold feet at the last minute. Catholics bow at various points during their service, so I was very careful not to bow, and stayed right at the back of the church for the duration. I cannot recall whether he was buried or cremated, but if he was cremated, then that was another grievous sin on his head.

Bob had had a previous life, very different to that which he lived before I met him. He had been a Rabbi in the Reformed Shul tradition in America. He was appointed as a Rabbi to a Reformed community in Johannesburg, and had settled there with his wife. Something happened. I think he had an affair with the woman who was now his widow, and he left that community under a cloud, divorced that wife, married the mistress and settled in Cape Town, where he took up as an estate agent.

The widow was a devout Catholic from a poor family in Brooklyn, Cape Town. She was a quiet, pretty young woman who worked for the Catholic library in Hatfield Street. Amongst Bob’s possessions was a complete set of the Talmud, which I desperately wanted to buy, but she wouldn’t sell it. It hurt me to think that it had fallen into such hands, but there was nothing I could do since money was obviously not going to move this woman. I wonder what happened to those books? Perhaps they reside in the Catholic library now. 

I missed my rambling talks with Bob, but it took me a long time to recognise that I missed them. I allowed my irritation and impatience with the man to get in the way while he was alive. I regret that.

For me, Bob was the last of his kind. I never had another relationship with an estate agent like that.