by Mark Graham
“You’re asking me? My men call them the Caribbean Peasant Corps.”
“Is that a yes?”
“They won’t be missed, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Fine. Mr. Zuma, can you see to the evacuation of this ‘nonessential personnel’?”
“With pleasure.”
****
While lunching in his room on braaivelis and potato soup, Mansell opened the Elgin-Mabasu murder file. He studied the sketch of the man who’d bought the nylon-rayon rope at The Outdoorsman almost a week before Elgin’s death, and the one of the man who reportedly hit Lea Goduka’s car the night Elgin died. There was no comparison. The first was a man of average height, a narrow face, dressed in a three-piece suit and a fedora. The second was a large-boned man with an oval face, wearing glasses, a raincoat and a golfer’s hat. Undistinguished, Mansell thought, but somehow familiar. And, he recalled, he wore gloves. Tan leather gloves with gold buckles across the wrists.
At 12:30, Mansell set out in the Audi for Logan. He kept an eye out for the Impala and used the flat, empty Karoo as a visual buffer, much like the cheetah uses the flat, empty grasslands in northern Africa.
Logan, as it turned out, was located six kilometers east of Pampoenpoort. The center of the village lay beneath a single roof housing a grocery store and a gas pump and resting along a two-lane road that had never been paved.
The clerk at the store gave Mansell directions to Route 76 at Die Kill, which proved to be not a street at all, but a shallow stream flanked on either bank by willow and locust trees. A two-story, kelly green farmhouse huddled within walking distance of the water.
A sward of browning grass stretched from the road to a split-rail fence. A yawning sheep dog met Mansell at the gate. A walkway made of tree-trunk slabs led to a screen-enclosed porch. A black woman, dressed in a gaily colored shift and wearing a white bandana over her hair, dozed in the porch swing.
Mansell tapped on the door. “Excuse me, lovely lady.”
The woman stirred. Her eyes popped open, and she sneezed. “Hmpph. By the looks of you, there’s no excuse,” she said, rising and picking up the broom that lay at her feet. “And since I get plenty nervous seeing a strange face dressed in city duds, maybe you’d best tell me your business.”
“I’ve come to see Sheena Goosen. Is she about today?” “Who’s askin’?”
Mansell pressed his shield against the screen, and this subdued her.
“I’m Miss Goosen’s live-in,” she said. “I’m afraid you caught her napping. But you’re welcome to wait.”
Beneath a giant willow at the foot of the stream, Mansell sipped lemonade and watched the sheep graze. An hour later, he joined Sheena Goosen on the back porch for tea. In her eighties now, the old schoolmistress smiled, her oval face crinkling like a walnut shell. She wore hearing aids in both ears, was confined to a wheelchair, and her legs were swaddled in a wool blanket.
After hearing Mansell’s well-rehearsed preamble, Miss Goosen said, “I retired after the new schoolhouse was finished-1953 that was. I was still a youngster at the time, but by then I had a little nest egg set aside and a healthy flock of sheep. And, without Anna, it lost some of its magic. That woman, God rest her soul, could turn a lesson in brushing your teeth into an adventure, young fellow.”
“I understand. A terrible loss.” They discussed the accident and Cecil Leistner’s background for fifteen minutes, and then Mansell asked, “Was there ever any attempt made to restore any of the old school’s records?”
“I don’t see how.” Miss Goosen drank her tea, and then, quite furtively, inquired as to the possibility of the inspector having any tobacco. Mansell offered his Camels. The old lady glanced about for the prying eyes of her maid, tucked the pack beneath her blanket, and winked. Finally, she said, “We were a small school. Records weren’t as important as learning.”
“I see. A good philosophy. Did the old school have yearbooks or class pictures? Anything like that?”
“You can forget the yearbook. No money. We did have a display case, though, outside my office on the wall. Every year old Doc Bailey would take pictures of everyone in the senior class. Then we’d put copies of those in the display case until the next year. `Class of ‘48.’ `Class of ‘49.’ Like that.”
“What became of the pictures when the next class went into the display case?”
Her answer was taciturn. “I was the headmistress. I kept the pictures, of course.” Cut-and-dried. Mansell grinned. “And now you want to steal the 1949 photo of young Cecil right out from under me, don’t you, young fellow? Well, I’m a believer in the barter system myself. It is a one-of-a-kind, after all.”
The deal cost Nigel Mansell a half carton of cigarettes and a solemn vow of eternal silence. It was near evening when he left Logan with a black-and-white snapshot of Cecil Leistner, smiling coyly, wearing knickers and knee socks, a high collar, and a sleeveless sweater. He was standing behind a sagging tennis net swinging an old wooden tennis racquet.
Mansell calculated. Pampoenpoort’s telephone system still operated out of a central switchboard. As a precaution, it wouldn’t do to place a call back to Port Elizabeth from here. A call from a switchboard might well raise eyebrows, and worse, could easily be traced.
Carnarvon was located seventy-five kilometers away, an hour’s drive.
Mansell returned to the inn. He made an obvious display of reserving his room for a second and third night. He left Pampoenpoort at 6:50, alert for the Impala and more concerned now with the coming of night. Despite road construction fifteen kilometers out of town, he still arrived in Carnarvon by eight.
At the first public telephone, outside a fast-food joint called Whimpy s, Mansell pulled over. He entered the restaurant, approached the counter, and ordered a soft ice cream. He asked for three rand’s worth of change.
Graffiti scribbled on the inside of the booth read, “Slug It Out with Becky Jo. Six-to-One Odds. First Come. Best Two Out of Three. Call RE6-1921.”
An angel in hobnail boots, thought Mansell.
He rang the message return at the Clavers’. Delaney’s message played through so quickly that he wasn’t sure he’d heard it right. He dialed again. No message. There had to be a way of rewinding the tape, Mansell told himself. He played it through in his own mind, re-creating. “. . . Nigel, it’s been a long time since I’ve made love to a man. Please call. . . .”
He sagged against the glass, repeating the words. He felt a stirring in his loins, a shortness of breath. He tried the number again. Same result. Why didn’t she want me to use her home phone? he wondered. The answer was obvious.
He looked at Becky Jo’s phone number and hissed.
Mansell booked a room at the Kareeberge Lodge at the foot of the low-lying Kareeberge Mountains. He parked the Audi in the underground garage beneath the lodge. In his room, he consulted the local directory. He found that Jaap Schwedler’s son, Anson, still resided at the same address the attorney had given him.
When the main desk informed him that room service operated only “in season,” Mansell walked a half kilometer into town. At a food-and-drug called Shelley’s, he bought cheese, crackers, biltong, and hot peppers. At the Karoo Liquor Mart he selected a pint of Canadian whiskey, and then carried his purchases back to the lodge.
He ate first and then showered. Thirty minutes later, he heard someone tapping at the door. Mansell scurried across the room to the bed, unleashed the Browning from its harness, and crouched alongside the entry. With a flick of his wrist, he swung the door open. There at the threshold, with hands dug deep in his pockets, stood Joshua Brungle.
****
Detective Merriman Gosani chose a dry creek bed at the west edge of the East Fields property. Thickets of willow and stands of evergreen lined one side of the wash, while a four-meter-high fence with coils of barbed wire along the top lined the other. The wash provided Merry with sufficient cover and a view of the road—for the moment, his primary needs. He hid the Honda 150 moto
rcycle, a rental from the Johannesburg airport, in a ravine beneath the trestle bridge spanning R555. He used tree limbs and willow branches as camouflage. Next to the bike, he put a small backpack and a large thermos.
Within an hour of sunset, the temperature dropped ten degrees. By midnight, it would broach the freezing mark.
Merry reconned the perimeter of the East Fields property on foot. Beyond the fence, he discovered roving patrols every hundred meters. Well armed and in teams of two.
The news wasn’t surprising, nor was it defeating; Merry didn’t consider forced entry into the mine a viable option. Still, it had occurred to him that the forged work permit and identity card he’d gotten from Mansell’s office would probably not be sufficient to see him past the guard towers at the entrance.
Any military or paramilitary operation worth its salt, Merry thought, would, by necessity, have built-in safeguards. A password. A code. A checklist. Something. Which meant he might have to assume another identity.
Right. And whose identity would that be? he asked himself. Convoys of black men, workers supposedly, were arriving at the mine at regular intervals. He knew that. But arriving how? On foot? By truck? And from where? How often? How many?
It could, Merry thought dejectedly, take days just to formulate a safe plan for getting inside. So we wait, he told himself. We wait and watch and freeze our tail off and try not to wonder why in the motherfuck we’re here because a friend who saved our black ass is up to his white ass in trouble and now it’s time for us to set the record straight. Dig it? It’s as simple as that. So.
So Merry checked his map. The wind howled. He thanked his mama for the long underwear she’d sent him last Christmas from Klerksdorp, where it got damn cold in the winter without electricity. He’d laughed then, yeah, but something had told him to find a corner in his closet just in case. He’d send her flowers later.
At 9:15, Merry heard the rumble of trucks. He scrambled up the bank on his stomach. He saw headlights bearing down R555 from the west. Three flatbed trucks with wooden guard rails. As they crossed the bridge, Merry saw migrant workers, black bodies packed like sardines in a can. He clambered out of the wash. He ran down the shoulder of the road until he saw brake lights.
When he was certain the trucks had turned at the East Fields entrance, Merry walked back to the wash. He turned up the collar on his denim jacket and pulled a stocking cap over his ears.
Ten minutes later, the empty trucks steamed back down the road. Merry checked his watch, considering. The trucks, he decided, were the key. Should they return again tonight, and the tempo of their departure indicated that they might, then he would follow them back to their pickup station. Using a pencil flash and a red marker, Merry studied the map again. Benori, Brakpan, and Springs were the closest train depots of any size, and size, Merry knew, meant less attention. The buses stopped closer yet, in Welgedacht, Delmas, and Geduld.
He munched an apple and a thick slab of dried biltong.
The convoy appeared again at 11:35. Merry climbed to the edge of the bank. Same trucks, less crowded. He used binoculars to follow their progress. Brake lights illuminated; dogged figures scrambled to the ground. The trucks drove through the entrance and disappeared. A bad sign, Merry thought, crouching in the wash again. He opened his thermos.
Fifteen minutes passed. A half hour. At 12:40, Merry packed his gear. The closest town was Delmas. He’d spend the night there. Abruptly, he changed his mind. Hell with it, he told himself, another hour. That felt better.
A transparent mist settled in the wash as the temperature bottomed out at a couple of degrees below freezing. Merry felt the weight of his eyelids. He was pacing in circles and chewing through toothpicks when he heard voices. In an instant, he checked the camouflage around his motorcycle and flattened himself against the bridge support.
The voices grew louder. The echo of footsteps. Laughter. The click, click sound of a dialect Merry didn’t recognize. The volume indicated a large procession. But from where? he wondered, beginning a count. Springs was twenty kilometers away, Welgedacht half as far. Still, a healthy walk.
Those at the head of the pack were beyond the bridge now, marching at a brisk pace against the cold. Merry heard two other dialects, Zulu and Xhosa, both of which he spoke fluently. But the procession strung out for a half kilometer, the later marchers less spirited, struggling, grumbling. Merry saw the bottles passing between them. He counted eighty-five workers in all.
When the last straggler lumbered by, Merry scrambled out of the wash, hunched his shoulders, and set out in pursuit. The last half dozen workers were in single file, the gaps between them widening, their pace waning. Merry was considering a play for the last straggler when a worker further up the line stopped.
Merry hesitated. He was fifty meters back. The man staggered. He moved onto the shoulder of the road. He unzipped his pants. The last worker passed him by without a word. The man started peeing into the rain ditch off the side of the road. He turned his head as Merry approached. Merry flashed a broad smile, nodded, and punched the unsuspecting man as hard as he could. The blow drove the man into the ditch. Merry punched him a second time.
He stripped off the man’s coat and beret, exchanging these for his own. He searched every pocket, exchanging work permits and identity cards, pocketing the man’s travel papers, a pocket knife, a crumpled deck of playing cards, and a folded business card with the words Caves of the Womb typed on the back.
Quickly, he dragged the man behind a thatch of juniper. With his belt and handcuffs, Merry harnessed the body to the trunk of a tree. A thick piece of bark and a bandana proved an effective gag.
Returning to the road, Merry jogged ahead until the gap between himself and the last worker closed to within fifty meters. He was whistling softly when he reached the entrance. The group was bunched up in front of a chain link gate beneath bright spotlights. No one gave him a passing glance. Merry stamped his feet, tugged at the crusty black beret, and nudged forward. By the time he reached the guardhouse, he was tenth from the rear.
Two white guards armed with pistols and automatic rifles stood before the gates. Merry held out his identity card, work permit, travel papers, the playing cards, and the business card. One of the guards glanced quickly at the words on the business card. Then he snatched away the identity card. He studied the photo and stuck a flashlight in Merry’s face. Merry had seen the look a thousand times—denigration tinged with fear. His eyes never wavered. By this time in the night, the guard had seen seven hundred dirty black faces, and they all looked the same. The moment passed. He relinquished the card and spat on the ground. The other guard studied the work permit, the job description, and the labor bureau’s seal. He flipped the papers over to the last page. He passed a flashlight over it, and Merry saw something on the page give off a blue reflection.
Wordlessly, the guard returned the document, and Merry passed through the gates into East Fields.
****
Joshua glanced down at the weapon dangling from Mansell’s hand.
“There’s something about these wide-open spaces on the Karoo,” the detective said. “Small towns, clean fresh air, springboks and antelope. Everyone knows everyone else. Gossip, cliques. Animosity, suspicion.”
“The good life,” replied the inspector. “I’ll buy you a drink.” The room was smoky, curtains drawn tight. The television flashed an underwear commercial, but no sound.
“All we need’s a stripper and a saxophone,” said Joshua, parting the curtains. “Bloody hell, we’d have ourselves a party.”
He cracked the window. Cool air filtered in. Mansell perched on the corner of the dresser, watching. A nine-millimeter Browning, he told himself gallantly, can put a hole the size of a cantaloupe in a human body.
Joshua pointed to the whiskey bottle on the nightstand next to the television. “A drink?”
“There’s ice in the bathroom. Make it two.”
As he stepped into the bath, Joshua glanced back over his sh
oulder. He disappeared. Mansell heard the tingle of ice meeting glass.
“You figured it had to be me or Terreblanche,” he heard Joshua say.
Muscles taut, Mansell circled to the window, leaning heavily against the sill. “Jurgen, maybe.”
“A long shot,” Joshua said. He emerged from the bathroom carrying two stubby glasses packed with ice. “Jurgen’s a wimp. He’d run before he’d investigate. Who was it that said, ‘The path of least resistance is a road heavily traveled’?”
“That sounds like one of mine.”
Joshua chuckled. He poured two ounces of whiskey into each glass. “Yeah, but you probably stole it from Jean-Paul Sartre or Marcel Proust. Somebody earthy, deep, you know.”
“I think it was Empedocles, actually.”
“Ah, a student of Greek essentialism.” Joshua set the glasses on the edge of the dining table. He kicked out a plastic-covered club chair and dropped into it. He sipped his drink epicureally. Then he said, “There is another possibility, other than myself or Terre-blanche. Other than Cyprian Jurgen. But it’s not a pleasant one. It seems that Delaney Blackford and Minister of Justice Leistner have been . . . or became . . . involved about two years back. Word has it that it’s over, but. . . . It may be coincidence, probably is, but they were introduced by—”
“Ian Elgin.”
“Yes.”
“So.” Mansell looked aside as the seeds of betrayal invaded his stomach. “And is there more?”
Joshua shook his head. “But I thought you should know.”
“You’ve told me.”
Joshua returned to his drink. Ice swirled at the touch of his finger. Whiskey sent tentacles of heat throughout his body. He said, “It wasn’t me, Nigel.”
“Oh?”
“Six shots from fifteen meters? Six misses?”
“You ever see me move when I’m dodging bullets?”
Joshua chuckled. “You played goalie in soccer, not halfback. I’ve seen you run,” he replied. Seconds passed. His voice changed. “And besides, I seem to recall that you’re my best friend.”
