by Wilbur Smith
'The dining-room,' she thought, in near panic. 'I have to warn Moses. I have to warn him it cannot be tomorrow - all his arrangements will have been made for the escape. I have to let him know." Shasa dropped her at the front doors of the chiteau and took the Rolls down to the garages. When he came back, she was in the blue drawing-room and the servants, who had as usual waited up for their return, were serving hot chocolate and biscuits. Shasa's valet helped him change into a maroon velvet smoking-jacket, and the housemaids hovered anxiously until Shasa dismissed them.
Tara had always opposed this custom. 'I could easily warm up the milk myself and you could put on a jacket without having another grown man to help you,' she complained when the servants had left the room. 'It's feudal and cruel to keep them up until all hours." 'Nonsense, my dear." Shasa poured himself a cognac to go with his chocolate. 'It's a tradition they value as much i3s we do - makes them feel indispensable and part of the family. Be'sides, chef would have a seizure if you were to mess with his kitchen." Then he slumped into his favourite armchair and became unusually serious. He began to talk to her as he had at the beginning of their marr4age when they had still been in accord.
'There is something afoot that I don't like. Here we stand at the opening of a new decade, the 1960s. We have had nearly twelve years of Nationalist rule and none of my direst predictions have come to pass, but I feel a sense of unease. I have the feeling that our tide has been at full flood, but the turn is coming. I think that tomorrow may be the day when the ebb sets in --' he broke off, and grinned shamefacedly. 'Forgive me. As you know, I don't usually indulge in fantasy,' he said and sipped his chocolate and his cognac in silence.
Tara felt not the least sympathy for him. There was so much she wanted to say, so many recriminations to lay upon him, but she could not trust herself to speak. Once she began, she might lose control and divulge too much. She might not be able to prevent herself gloating on the dreadful retribution that awaited him and all those like him, and she did not want to prolong this tte-a-tdte, she wanted to be free to go to Moses, to warn him that today was not the day he had planned for.
So she rose. 'You know how I feel, we don't have to discuss it. I'm going to bed. Excuse me." 'Yes, of course." He stood up courteously. 'I'll be working for the next few hours. I have to go over my notes for my meeting with Littleton and his team tomorrow afternoon, so don't worry about me." Tara checked that Isabella was in her room and asleep, before went to her suite and locked the door. She changed out of her lc dress and jewellery into jeans and a dark sweater, then she made cannabis cigarette and while she smoked it, she waited fifteen minu by her watch for Shasa to settle down to his work. Then she switch off her lights. She dropped the cigarette butt into the toilet a: flushed it away, before she let herself into the passage once ago locking her suite against the unlikely chance that Shasa might cot up to look for her. Then she went down the back stairs.
As she crossed the wide stoep, keeping against the wall, staying the shadows and moving silently, a telephone rang in the libra wing and she froze involuntarily, her heart jarring her ribs. Then s] realized that the telephone must be Shasa's private line, and she w, about to move on, when she heard his voice. Although the curtail were drawn› the windows of his study were open and she could s.
the shadow of his head against the drapes.
'Kitty!" he said. 'Kitty Godolphin, you little witch. I should ha guessed that you'd be here." The name startled Tara, and brought back harrowing memorie but she could not resist the temptation to creep closer to the curtaine window.
'You always follow the smell of blood, don't you?" Shasa said, an chuckled at her reply.
'Where are you? The Nellie." The Mount Nelson was simply th best hotel in Cape Town. 'And what are you doing now - I meal right this moment? Yes, I know it's two o'clock in the morning, bu any time is a good time - you told me that yourself a long time ago It will take me half an hour to get there. Whatever else you do, don' start without me." He hung up and she saw his shadow on the curtaiI as he stood up from his desk.
She ran to the end of the long stoep and jumped down into th hydrangea bed and crouched'in the bushes. Within a few minute, Shasa came out of the side door. He had a dark overcoat over his smoking-jacket. He went down to the garages and drove away in the Jaguar. Even in his haste he drove slowly through the vineyards so as not to blow dust on his precious grapes, and, watching the headlights disappear, Tara hated him as much as she ever had. She thought that she should have grown accustomed to his philandering, but he was like a torn cat in rut - no woman was safe from him, and his moral outrage against Sean, his own son, for the same behaviour, had been ludicrous.
Kitty Godolphin - she cast her mind back to their first meeting and the television reporter's reaction to the mention of Shasa's name and now the reason for it became clear.
'Oh God, I hate him so. He is totally without conscience or pity.
He deserves to die!" She said it aloud, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. 'I shouldn't have said it, but it is true! He deserves to die and I deserve to be free of him - free to go to Moses and my child." She rose out of the hydrangea bushes, brushed the clinging soil from her jeans and crossed the lawns quickly. The moon was in its first quarter, but bright enough to throw her shadow in front of her, and she entered the vineyard with relief and hurried down the rows of vines that were heavy with leaf and grape. She skirted the winery and the stables and reached the servants' cottages.
She had placed Moses in the room at the end of the second row of cottages and his window faced out on to the vineyard. She tapped on his window and his response was almost immediate; she knew he slept as lightly as a wild cat. 'It's me,' she whispered.
'Wait,' he said. 'I will open the door." He loomed in the doorway, naked except for a pair of white shorts, and his body shone in the moonlight like wet tar.
'You are foolish to come here,' he said, and taking her arm drew her into the single room. 'You are putting everything at risk." 'Moses, please, listen to me. I had to tell you. It cannot be tomorrow." He stared at her contemptuously. 'You were never a true daughter of the revolution." 'No, no, I am true, and I love you enough to do anything, but they have changed the arrangements. They will not use the chamber where you have set the charge. They will meet in the parliamentary dining-room." He stared at her a second longer, then he turned and went to the narrow built-in cupboard at the head of his bed and began to dress in his uniform.
'What are you going to dot she asked.
'I have to warn the others - they also are in danger." 'What others'?." she asked. 'I did not know there were others." 'You know only what you have to know,' he told her curtly. 'I must use the Chev - is it safe?" 'Yes, Shasa is not here. He has gone out. Can I come with you."?" 'Are you mad?" he asked. 'If the police find a black man and a white woman together at this time of night--' he did not finish the sentence. 'You must go back to the house and make a phone call.
Here is the number. A woman will answer, and you will say only "Cheetah is coming - he will be there in thirty minutes." That is all you will say and then you will hang up." Moses threaded the Chev through the maze of narrow streets c District Six, the old Malay quarter. During the day this was colourful and thriving community of small stores and businesse..
General dealers and tailors and tinsmiths and halaal butcherk occupied the ground-floor shops of the decrepit Victorian building while from the cast-iron fretwork of the open balconies above him a festival of drying laundry, and the convoluted streets were clarr.
orous with the cries of street vendors, the mournful horns of itinerar fishmongers and the laughter of children.
At nightfall the traders shuttered their premises and left the streel to the street gangs and the pimps and the prostitutes. Some of th more daring white revellers came here late at night, to listen to th jazz players in the crowded shebeens or to look for a pretty coloure, girl - more for the thrill of danger and discovery than for any physJ cal gratification.
'Look after it well,' Moses flipped him a silver shilling. 'If th tyres are slashed when I come back, I'll do the same for your back side." The child grinned at him evilly.
He climbed the dark and narrow staircase to the Vortex Club. t couple on the landing were copulating furtively but furiously agains the wall as Moses squeezed past. The white man turned his fac away but he never missed a beat.
At the door to the club somebody studied him briefly through th peephole and then let him enter. The long crowded room was haz with tobacco smoke and the sweet smell of cannabis. The clientel included the full spectrum from gang members in zoot suits an( wide ties to white men in dinNer-jackets. Only the women were all coloured.
Dollar Brand 'and his Quartet were playing a sweet soulful jaz and everybody was still and attentive. Nobody even looked up a Moses slipped down the side wall to the door at the far end, but th man guarding it recognized Moses and stood aside for him to enter In the backroom there was only one man sitting at a rounc gambling table under a green shaded light. There was a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, and his face was pale as putty, hi, eyes implacable dark pits.
'You are foolhardy to call a meeting now,' said Joe Cicero, 'with.
out good reason. All the preparations have been made. There is nothing more to discuss." 'I have good reason,' said Moses, and sat down on the empty chair, facing him across the baize-covered table.
Joe Cicero listened without expression, but when Moses finished, he pushed the lank hair off his forehead with the back of his hand.
Moses had learned to interpret that gesture as one of agitation.
'We cannot dismantle the escape route and then set it up again later. These things take time to arrange. The aircraft is already in position." It was an Aztec chartered from a company in Johannesburg, and the pilot was a lecturer in political philosophy at Witwatersrand University, the holder of a private pilot's licence and a secret member of the South African Communist Party.
'How long can he wait at the rendezvous?" Moses asked, and Cicero thought about it a moment.
'A week at the longest,' he replied.
The rendezvous was an unregistered airstrip on a large droughtstricken ranch in Namaqualand which was lying derelict, abandoned by the discouraged owner. From the airfield it was a four-hour flight to Bechuanaland, the British protectorate that lay against the northwestern .border of the Union of South Africa. Sanctuary had been arranged for Moses there, the beginning of the pipeline by which most political fugitives were channelled to the north.
'A week must be enough,' Moses said. 'Every hour increases the danger. At the very first occasion that we can be sure Verwoerd will take his seat again, I will do it." It was four o'clock in the morning before Moses left the Vortex Club and went down to where he had parked the Chev.
Kitty Godolphin sat in the centre of the bed, naked and crosslegged with all the shameless candour of a child.
In the years Shasa had known her, she had changed very little physically. Her body had matured slightly, her breasts had more weight to them and the tips had darkened. He could no longer make out the rack of her ribs beneath the smooth pale skin, but her buttocks were still lean as a boy's and her limbs coltishly long and slim.
Nor had she lost the air of guileless innocence, that aura of eternal youth which so contrasted with the cynical hardness of her gaze. She was telling him about the Congo. She had been there for the last five months and the material she had filmed would surely put her in line for her third Emmy and confirm her position as the most successful television journalist on the American networks. She was speaking in the breathless voice of an ingdnue.
'They caught these three Simba agents and tried them under th mango trees outside the burnt-out hospital, but by the time they ha sentenced them to death, the light was too bad for filming. I gave th commander my Rolex watch, and in return he postponed the executions until the sun was up the next morning so that Hank could filr It was the most incredible footage. The next morning they paraded th condemned men naked through the market-place and the local wome bargained for the various parts of their bodies. The Baluba have always been cannibals. When they had sold all three of them, they too] them down to the river and shot them, in the head, of course, so a not to damage the meat, and they butchered them there on the rive bank and the women queued up to claim their portions." She wa trying to shock him, and it irritated Shasa that she had succeeded.
'Where do you stand, my love?" he asked bitterly. 'One day yol are sympathetically interviewing Martin Luther King, and the nex you are portraying all the grossest savagery of Africa." She laughed, that throaty chuckle that always roused him. 'Ant the very next day I am recording the British imperialist makin bargains with your gang of bully boys while you stand with a loo on the neck of your slaves." 'Damn it, Kitty. What are you - what are you trying to do?" 'Capture reality,' she told him simply.
And when reality doesn't conform to your view of it, you bribe somebody with a Rolex watch to alter it." 'I've made you mad." She laughed delightedly, and he stood UlC from the bed and crossed to where he had thrown his clothes ovel the back of the chair. 'You look like a little boy when you sulk,' she called after him.
'It will be light in an hour. I have to get back home and change,' he said. 'I've got an appointment with my Imperialist slave-masters at eleven." 'Of course, you've got to be there to hear Supermac tell you how much he wants to buy your gold and diamonds - and he doesll't care whether they are dripping with the sweat and blood--' 'All right, sweetness,' he cut her off. 'That's enough for one night." He stepped into his trousers, and as he tucked in his shirt, he grinned at her. 'Why do I always pick screaming radical females?" 'You like the stimulation,' she suggested, but he shook his head, and reached for the velvet smoking-jacket.
'I prefer the loving - talking of which, when will I see you again?" 'Why, at eleven o'clock at the houses of parliament, of course.
I'll try to get you in the shot, you are so photogenic, darling." He went to the bed and stooped over her to kiss that angelic smile on her lips. 'I can never understand what I see in you,' he said.
He was still thinking of her as he went down to the hotel carpark and wiped the dew off the windshield of the Jaguar. It was amazing how she had been able so effortlessly to hold his interest over all these years. No other woman, except Tara, had ever done that. It was silly how good he felt when he had been with her. She could still drive him wild with erotic desire, her tricks still worked on him, and afterwards he felt elated and wonderfully alive - and, yes, he enjoyed arguing with her.
'God, I haven't closed my eyes all night, yet I feel like a Derby winner. I wonder if I am still in love with the little bitch." He took the Jaguar down the long palm-lined drive from the Mount Nelson Hotel. Considering the proposition and recalling his proposal of marriage and her outright rejection, he went out through the hotel gates and took the main road that skirted the old Malay quarter of District Six. He resisted the temptation to shoot the red of the traffic lights at the foot of Roeland Street. It was highly unlikely there would be other traffic at this time of the morning, but he braked dutifully and was startled when another vehicle shot out of the narrow cross street and turned in front of his bonnet.
It was a sea-green Chevrolet station wagon, and he didn't have to check the number plate to know that it was Tara's. The headlights of the Jaguar shone into the cab of the Chev and for an instant he had a full view of the driver. It was Tara's new chauffeur. He had seen him twice before, once at Weltevreden and once in the House of Assembly, but this time the driver was bare-headed and Shasa could see the full shape of his head.
As he had on both the previous o
ccasions, Shasa had a strong sense of recognition. He had definitely met or known this man before, but the memory was eroded by time and quickly extinguished by his annoyance. The chauffeur was not permitted to use the Chev for his own private purposes, and yet here he was in the small hours of the morning driving around as though the vehicle belonged to him.
The Chev pulled away swiftly. The chauffeur had obviously recognized Shasa and the speed was proof of his guilt. Shasa's first instinct was to give chase and confront the man, but the traffic light was still red against him and while he waited for it to change, he had time to reflect. He was in too good a mood to spoil it with unpleasantness, besides which any confrontation at four in the morning would be undignified, and would inevitably lead to questions about his own presence at the same hour on the fringes of the city's notorious redlight area. There would be a better time and place to deal with the driver, and Shasa let him go, but he had neither forgiven nor forgotten.
Shasa parked the Jaguar in the garage at Weltevreden, and the green Chev was in its place at the end of the line of cars, betwee Garry's MG and Shasa's customized Land-Rover. As he passed i he laid his hand on the bonnet of the Chev and it was still hot, t metal ticking softly as it cooled. He nodded with satisfaction an went on up to the house, amused by the necessity to creep up to hid own suite like a burglar.
He still felt light and happy at breakfast and he hummed as loaded his plate with eggs and bacon from the silver chafing dish o the sideboard. He was the first one down but Garry was only minute behind him.
'The boss should always be the first man on the job, and tl last man off it,' he had taught Garry, and the boy had taken it t heart. 'No, no longer boy." Shasa corrected himself, as he studie Garry. His son was only an inch shorter than he was, but wid across the shoulders and heavier in the chest. Down the full lengt of the corridor Shasa had often heard him grunting over his hody building weights. Even though he had just shaved, Garry's jaw wa blue with beard that by evening would need the razor again, an despite the Brylcreem his hair was already springing up in unrul spikes.
