“And those hyena symbols are from the ’90s?”
“They didn’t carry tins of red paint with them in those days,” said Khanyi, “Dipped their hands into the blood. But it’s the same mark.”
“A copy-cat killer?” I suggested. “Or the same killers come back for more?”
“You know better than to ask me to speculate,” said Fehrson, then paused as Sara delivered large bowls of pungent smelling coffee to us.
“Need another lappie?” she asked Fehrson.
“If you don’t mind, my dear. These waffles of yours are little syrup bombs.”
Sara surveyed the damage and sighed. “You with the police?” she asked.
“Something like that,” said Fehrson.
“It wasn’t someone from round here,” said Sara. “We treat the blacks well, don’t we? They’re happy here, the blacks are. Why would they go and do something like this?” She looked from Fehrson to me, but neither of us suggested a solution. Fehrson made a disappointed tutting noise. Sara didn’t look at Khanyi, whose dark skin might have seemed a greater qualification for answering that question. Perhaps she shared the attitude of many South Africans, that race was a group concept, and not an individual one.
When Sara had left in search of another dishcloth to deal with Fehrson’s syrup problem, Khanyi said, “We don’t think it’s the same killers. The police have a handwriting expert looking at it, but it seems unlikely. The point is that there is a connection with the killings that took place in the ’90s.”
I tried the coffee, which was a mistake. It tasted as if it had been brewed several days ago and had been corroding a metallic container since then.
“Do you want to tell me why I am here?” I said. “It’s been good fun being hauled out of bed at the crack of dawn and flown here to witness the tragedy first-hand, but perhaps you would like to get to the point?”
“I will leave that to Khanyisile,” said Fehrson. “We are going through a transition; a transfer of leadership. The balance of power is shifting. I am becoming more of a figurehead. Khanyisile will be your contact on this.”
“My contact? You’re asking me to do something? Officially?”
Khanyi showed me all her teeth. With the high cheekbones and wide eyes, it was a powerful move.
“Not official,” she said, “but it is something uniquely suited to your skills.”
“The same skills that rendered me unemployable?” I asked. Those were the words used by Fehrson at the end of my brief tenure with the Department, and I couldn’t resist twisting the knife a little.
Khanyi did the thing with her teeth again and looked down to her folder of photos like a blushing bride about to confess. “It’s a simple task that we need you for,” she said.
“Not payroll kind of official then,” I suggested. “We’re talking more gratitude level than generous stipend level.”
“Khanyisile is your contact on this,” said Fehrson again, as if that absolved him of all blame. Sara returned with a fresh dishcloth and stood at the table while Fehrson fastidiously wiped each of his fingers. She gazed out of the window glumly, oblivious to the fact we might want to engage in private conversation.
“They’ll be fighting before the day’s out,” said Sara suddenly. She was watching two groups of youths on the street outside, clustered together on racially segregated lines. There was no indication of any aggression between them, but the way they turned inward as they conversed, and the challenging glances they exchanged revealed the tension between them.
“Couple of days ago they were jolling about, kicking balls, laughing, joking together. That’s what this does.”
“Tensions will ease,” said Fehrson. “Regardless of race, this is a shared tragedy. The town will come together, you will see.”
Sara shook her head and poured more of the black sludge into our bowls. “I told ma,” she said. “We close early today, put down the shutters. We don’t want our windows broken.”
“I am sure they wouldn’t do that,” said Fehrson, looking out at the shuffling youths, but his voice held little conviction.
“I’ll get your check,” said Sara with finality. The sight of the troubled youths had accelerated her plans for closing for the day. She left us, taking the pot of sludge with her.
“Let us leave this town of little hope,” said Fehrson. Then he turned to me as he remembered there was a foreigner present. “That is what it means,” he added helpfully. “Minhoop: little hope.”
“Yes,” I said. “Given that name by the original settlers who gave up hope of finding anything better as they travelled north in search of better lands.”
“They were running from the British,” said Fehrson, accusingly. “Driven out by the ridiculous restrictions the British imposed on them.”
“Ridiculous restrictions?” said Khanyi. “Such as not allowing them to enslave the native population?” If her hair had not been braided, we would have seen her hackles rise.
“Nonsense,” said Fehrson. “The Great Trek of the Afrikaans people started before the Brits abolished slavery. It had nothing to do with slavery. Goodness, the ground floor of the Castle in Cape Town was given over to housing the slaves of the British garrison. No, no, slavery wasn’t the problem.”
He gave Khanyi a glare for being so obstreperous, but the glare faltered as he realised there might have been weaknesses in his argument.
“Slavery wasn’t a problem, except perhaps for the slaves,” said Khanyi, who was not going to give ground. “It was a problem for them.” Khanyi might have started at the Department as a lowly secretary, but she had been bright enough to discover the legislation that stipulated the amount of educational funding available to staff, and now had a couple of university degrees to her name, and the force of personality to apply them.
“It was two hundred years ago,” said Fehrson, and he pushed the remains of his waffle away lest the blame for that disaster be levelled at him as well.
“Nevertheless, Father,” said Khanyi. “It’s inappropriate to glorify the Afrikaans ‘trekkers’. Just because thirty of their descendants were killed here yesterday.”
Fehrson shuffled the sugar pot and salt shaker about on the table, and we endured a sulky silence for a moment. Then he looked up at Khanyi with innocent blue eyes.
“My dear,” he said in his kindly uncle voice, “I am not glorifying them. You know I would not do that, Khanyisile.” He bestowed a parental smile on her, then turned to me and provided the subtitles. “There are currents that ride beneath the surface of this country, young man. Dangerous currents with a powerful undertow. This whole dreadful business is the kind of thing that results from that. Khanyisile here thinks I am too old and set in my ways to keep an open mind about these things. That is why she has insisted we come to you.” He sniffed, then added. “My mind is open, despite my advanced age.”
He gazed at me for a moment as if one of us had forgotten our lines, and we held that pose as we waited for the prompt. It came eventually from Khanyi. Of all the education she had received, and of all the skills she had learnt, by far the greatest was her skill at manipulating her boss.
“Of course I know that, Father,” she said. “I would never suggest that you have a closed mind.” Khanyi turned her smile onto me and managed to keep it from turning sour. “Have you been reading history books, Gabriel? How did you know where the town got its name?”
“It was in all the papers,” I said, and refrained from rising to the history book challenge. It was rumoured that Khanyi read history books for the joy of it, and she thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to flaunt her knowledge.
“It could also mean ‘a little hope’,” said Fehrson. “They had been struggling through the Karoo, which is just about a desert, and with the river here and that hill … Is it a hill or a mountain? At any rate, it was a place that gave them a little hope, perhaps.” He gazed beyond the troubled youths and over the thatched roofs of the historic buildings to where the hill in question was being squ
eezed by the winter rain clouds. He frowned as if trying to remember at what point a hill became a mountain.
The rain was coming down in great swathes that obscured the road ahead and drummed constantly on the roof of the military jeep as we drove back to the airfield. Khanyi sat in the front beside the soldier driving and was the first to see the beacons.
“Roadblock,” she announced, and the driver grunted in confirmation and geared down. Miserable looking soldiers drifted past the windows of the jeep, waving their glowing red beacons. A hundred metres ahead of us, a mobile command centre crouched on the muddy strip beside the road. A rectangular cube in steel and aluminium, its lights on because of the gloom, the halogen floodlights on each corner adjusted to light up the road. Two soldiers in clear plastic raincoats were adjusting the level on one of the corner struts which had subsided into the mud. Beyond the handful of cars held up in the queue, the motorised cab that had transported the box pulled out into the road and disappeared into the haze.
“That was quick,” said Khanyi.
“They were setting up when we drove in,” said our driver, lest Khanyi find his colleagues more deserving of praise than him. “Only takes forty minutes.”
“Damn nuisance,” said Fehrson. “Can’t you flash your lights and drive through? We are in a military vehicle, after all.”
The soldier looked at Fehrson by means of the rear-view mirror.
“No sir,” he said, and watched to see whether Fehrson had any other treasonous comments to make. Fehrson sighed but closed his mouth and reached into his tweed jacket for his identity card.
These mobile roadblocks had become a constant irritation in the weeks since the national State of Emergency had been declared. Rising tensions in the country, the Johannesburg Park Station bombing incident in which two people were killed, and the riots in Gugulethu township which had seen two soldiers injured had motivated the government to declare the first State of Emergency for over thirty years. The previous occasion the country had been placed under military control had been at the height of the civil unrest in the apartheid years, before my time. Our life continued much as it had before the declaration of the State of Emergency, but these roadblocks which sprouted like sudden alien invasions, and the impromptu patrols of armed troops were a constant reminder that we were tiptoeing across a very thin layer of ice.
“For goodness’ sake, Ben, this is not a card game.” Fehrson watched in horror as I selected an appropriate identity card and returned the others to an inside pocket of my camera jacket. “What on earth are you doing with those? You know it is illegal?”
“I hadn’t realised.”
“Hadn’t realised?” Fehrson spluttered. He looked to Khanyi for support in dealing with my delinquency.
“You’ll have to use the real one, Gabriel,” she said as we rolled forward to pole position. “The flight plan had our names on it; it will only cause trouble if you give them a fake ID.”
I handed her a different card, and Fehrson gave a disparaging sniff. Our driver handed over the IDs. The soldier who received them was a dripping wet blur under his plastic cover. He took the cards and shone a torch into the car to compare the pictures with the flesh versions. The torch lingered on each of our faces, a little longer on Khanyi, probably because of her striking beauty, and a little longer on me, probably because of my inherently untrustworthy face. Rain dripped in through the driver’s window and started soaking into the shoulder of his uniform, but he took it with stoicism and kept his head back so that his comrade could do his work. There were stories of civilians pulled from their cars and locked up for twenty-four hours for the crime of incivility at a roadblock. Even the story of a father taken away from his two children and held for eight hours while the children sat terrified in the back of the abandoned car, although I suspected that was an urban myth. The soldier moved back and gestured to Fehrson to wind down his window.
“What now?” said Fehrson, who always had people do things like open windows for him, and had no idea how to do it for himself. Our driver obliged, and the torchlight settled on my face again for a better look.
“Gabriel?” said the soldier.
“Like the angel,” I said. “The Archangel Gabriel.”
The soldier held the torch on my face for a few seconds, then moved away from our car and disappeared into the cold light of the interior of the metal box. He had taken our ID cards with him.
“What on earth is the problem?” said Fehrson. “He has taken our IDs, for goodness’ sake.”
None of us said anything.
“Close the goddamn window, will you? I will catch my death of cold with it open.”
“Better open,” said our driver, and a nasty silence descended upon us.
“What on earth is he doing with our IDs?” asked Fehrson, and he leaned forward to see what was happening in the box. Our soldier was speaking to a man dressed in a different uniform. Unlike the earthy tones of the standard army camouflage, the second man’s uniform was all black. There were a multitude of pockets and straps, with dull burnished buckles. Not a very practical uniform, I knew from personal experience. I had worn that uniform briefly myself. It was a uniform designed to instil fear in the hearts of your enemies, and I have to say it did that fairly effectively.
“He is showing our IDs to Breytenbach’s man,” I said.
“Breytenbach’s man? What on earth do you mean?”
I bit my tongue. I should not have mentioned it. Riaan ‘BB’ Breytenbach was a gold-mining magnate, one of the wealthiest men in the country, who was still in hospital following a shooting incident on his private game farm. He had survived, less one leg, with a badly bruised ego.
“Well?” persisted Fehrson.
“It’s part of their agreement. With the Gold Mining Conglomerate.”
“Why that suspicious tone?” said Fehrson. “The Gold Conglomerate are providing resources to the army. There is nothing sinister about it. Frankly, it was about time. The private sector will suffer terribly if the country falls apart. Only right that they should do what they can to help.”
“What do you mean, part of the agreement?” asked Khanyi.
“Breytenbach has one of his men in every one of these mobile roadblocks around the country.”
“One of his men?” scoffed Fehrson. “What men?”
“The private security he uses on all his gold mines. Their numbers have been boosted recently. An investment in unstable times.”
“Are you sure?” asked Fehrson, and he squinted through the window on my side to better see the black-suited man studying our identity cards.
“Gabriel knows a good deal about Breytenbach’s private security,” said Khanyi. “Doesn’t he use his game farm as a training ground?”
“He does.”
“And the injury Breytenbach sustained,” persisted Khanyi. “The accidental shooting. Didn’t they say the man who shot Breytenbach was wearing the uniform of his private security?”
“They did.”
“He was shot accidentally three times,” said Khanyi. “They had to amputate his leg. He’s still recovering in hospital.”
“Indeed,” I said. The man in black looked towards our military jeep as the rain poured down around us. He seemed to be weighing up the advantages of thoroughness against the disadvantages of being soaked to the skin.
“And the gold,” said Fehrson. Then he cleared his throat because he could never mention BB’s gold without doing so. “He lost his leg, and all that gold.”
“He said it was only a few bars,” said Khanyi.
“We all know that is nonsense.” Fehrson gave a wheezy laugh. “Millions of dollars. Tens of millions of dollars. That is what they say on the street.”
I didn’t ask what Fehrson meant by ‘on the street’. It was hard to imagine anyone less connected with the common people than Fehrson, but I was not keen to pursue the conversation about BB’s gold bars.
“You think that Breytenbach has put a man in every roadblo
ck in order to catch the ‘gold-heist gang’?” said Khanyi, using the term the newspaper journalists had coined in their grossly misinformed articles about the robbery of BB’s gold bars.
“Seems a bit far-fetched,” said Fehrson. “Ah, there we go. He is coming back.”
The soldier returned with our ID cards. He handed them to our driver and gave a nod to indicate that we could proceed. The driver closed our windows and accelerated away.
“No heist gang here,” said Fehrson with false bonhomie, and he avoided looking in my direction.
“You’re such a conspiracy theorist, Gabriel,” said Khanyi as the brightly lit interior of the mobile command centre floated past in the rain. BB’s black-suited man was standing at the window, a phone to his ear and his eyes on our jeep.
Two
The rain stopped as abruptly as if someone had flipped a switch as we came over the escarpment above the airfield. But the clouds were still low and looked as if they were planning a rousing encore. The Minhoop airfield was a few acres of relatively flat farmland boxed in by tall eucalyptus trees. The strip pointed straight at the hill that wanted to be a mountain.
“Makes it uni-directional, see?” said the pilot past the stub of pencil he was chewing as he completed his inspection of the twin-engine Beechcraft. “Can’t take off into that lump of rock, those trees prevent an early turn, so it’s one-way in and one-way out.”
“Is that a radio station they’ve set up to control traffic?” I asked, indicating the old farm table standing just inside the open doors of the rusty hangar beside the strip. The jumbled assortment of crop sprayers and other barely airworthy machines had been pushed into the gloomy depths of the hangar, and an informal operation centre had been established around the entrance where the soldiers could see out onto the field without spoiling their hairstyles in the rain. On the table was a large radio transmitter that looked as if it dated back to the Second World War, with a handheld microphone on the end of a long spiral cord. A soldier with a face so dark all one could see was a beret floating above some teeth was speaking into it, while a colleague scanned the sky anxiously with binoculars. Beside the table stood Khanyi and Fehrson, the expressions on their faces betraying a distinct lack of confidence.
Murderous Page 2
