by Jo Bannister
Shola’s lip hardened. “You’ve had him three days and you don’t know? You think he was always scared of the dark? What the hell good would he have been to us? You did that to him—you and your Security Police and your Section Sixes and your twenty-four-hour interrogations. And De Witte. Oh yes: do you know about De Witte?”
Vanderbilt thought he knew all about De Witte. He shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shell-shocked? He nearly broke my neck. He did kill my pilot. But for that we’d have been out of this country thirty-six hours ago. I wish he had been sick. I wish De Witte had done a proper job on him.”
In Shola’s eyes the anger surged. He took a long stride forward and swung the gun; the barrel clipped Vanderbilt across the jaw with enough force to send pain lancing through every nerve in his face but not quite enough to fell him. He reeled back, agony pulsing in his skull, taking care to reel towards the car.
Shola stole a moment then to look at Grant. “Joel, my friend, we almost lost you this time.”
For Grant reprieve had come almost too abruptly on top of despair. His face was aglow, his eyes bright with fever and unshed tears. He could hardly speak; all he could do was repeat, “Jesus, Nat; oh Jesus,” and fret at his chain like a dog.
“Easy, Joel. We’ll have that thing off you in a minute. First, tell me has he got a gun.”
On his knees by the bumper, Grant looked up at the big Boer. Vanderbilt had one hand on the car wing to steady himself, only partly for the sake of appearances, while the other nursed his raging jaw. Behind hooded eyelids he was hoping that he had not miscalculated, that the pain would not prove too much of a disability. He was hardly aware of Grant’s burning gaze.
Grant said unsteadily, “He was taking me back to Pretoria.” It was not possible to tell whether the tremor in his voice was due to fear, or hatred, or only deep fatigue, all of which cast their shadows by turns across his hollow face.
Shola spoke to him sharply. “The gun, Joel. Did he have a gun?”
Without shifting his gaze Grant responded. His voice was strange, strained. At first he seemed to be talking at random, talking out the horror. Only after a minute did Shola realize that it was a reply of sorts; not an answer so much as an invalidation of the question. He said, “He was going to take me back. To De Witte. To have my head ripped up again. I fought him, Nat; I did fight him, but I couldn’t beat him. I couldn’t even make him kill me. But I got the pilot.”
Vanderbilt waited for the pause, as if unwilling to interrupt him, and then said quietly, “There is a gun. In the car, in the glove compartment. He never saw it.”
Shola despatched Will Hamlin with a jerk of his head. Hamlin kept carefully clear of the line of fire and went to the nearside door: the Boer was beside the driver’s door. The pilot, Crane, was at the back of the lock-up—not because he hoped to find an exit there but because it was the furthest he could get from the gun. If he once knew how far a hand gun can throw lead accurately, given a good enough hand, he was trying hard not to remember. Hamlin took Vanderbilt’s gun—a little gun, not much more than a lady’s gun, that would disappear in his big hand but still blow incapacitating holes through anyone who stood in his way—and returned with it, holding it gingerly, the way he had come.
Shola said, “Now the keys. Free him.”
Grant said, still in the same oddly flat voice, “He’s good, Nat. They knew what they were doing when they sent him. He may be better than you. You should kill him now. Before he finds a way to fight back. You should kill him now. For what he’s done. For what he was going to do. Kill him, Nat. Kill him now. Or let me do it.”
Vanderbilt had taken the keys to the handcuffs out of an inner pocket and was bending towards the kneeling man. He stopped then and turned his gaze towards Shola, quizzically. “I gave you my gun,” he reminded him gently, with the mildest possible reproach.
“Yes,” agreed Shola.
“I won’t go on being helpful if you’re going to shoot me for my trouble.”
“I know how to unlock a pair of handcuffs.”
Will Hamlin was looking between them, one to the other, with increasing anxiety. He could not tell if they were serious. He knew Grant was, but Grant could be forgiven. He did not know Vanderbilt, only by his works and reputation, but Shola he had known long enough and well enough to know he was capable of it. Despite the lightness of his manner, he thought Vanderbilt knew that as well. He cleared his throat. “Er—I’ll whistle up the cavalry, shall I?”
Without sparing him a glance, Shola said, “No.”
Vanderbilt sighed. Bending again, fitting the key to the lock where the cuff braceletted the towing-ring, he remarked to Grant, “I don’t suppose I’d have liked the prisons here any more than you liked ours.”
“I think here they keep the electricity for running the television sets,” Grant said.
Vanderbilt smiled. “How quaint.”
Hamlin was oblivious of the small exchange. All his attention was focused on Shola. His voice was low, vibrant with urgency. “Nathan, we have to get the police. Somebody has to drive these bastards away in a Black Maria.”
“The police aren’t interested. They washed their hands of it, remember? Well, we managed without them and we sure as hell don’t need them now. You want to do something useful, you could call up a hearse.”
Hamlin shook his head quickly. His heart was pounding. He counted Shola his friend. They espoused the same causes: Hamlin fought for them with words, Shola with weapons. Hamlin had never challenged his right to wage war for the freedom of his own people in their own land. But now, for the first time clearly, he perceived the true nature of that commitment. There was nothing intellectual about it. It was to do, only and always, with hatred and with blood.
Will Hamlin had carried the strange device that was a reasoned peace in Southern Africa long after sensible people had taken sides or arranged to be elsewhere for the duration, but it had never seemed utterly impossible until now. The reason was the four other people in that dusty Glasgow lock-up. Not one of them wanted peace. They did not want compromises and accommodations. They all wanted total victory.
This was not exactly news to Hamlin. He had known of course that the old Boers would sooner raze the country than share it, and he knew there were black leaders who felt the same way. Still he had persisted in believing in a middle-ground that was more than a dream of weary men and idealists; had thought that a commonality existed to be tapped in intelligent people on both sides. He expected to be disappointed by men like Vanderbilt, but the discovery that his intelligent, articulate friend was no more interested in just settlements than Pretoria was turned his heart to ice. In that moment all his hopes, the gentle breeze that had kept flying his banner with its strange device, sank and died. He recognized that he had been wrong.
But the idea, if unattainable, was still right; and, stubborn in his own way as were the others in theirs, he was not prepared to stand by while murder sullied it. He took a deep breath and tried to hold his voice steady. “Nathan, you’re not going to shoot them. I won’t permit it.”
For almost the first time Shola took his eyes off Vanderbilt. “You won’t?” His eyes were filled in complex patterns and proportions with anger, hatred, hunter, menace and a tiny bewilderment. Probably instinctively his gun rounded with his gaze, settling briefly on Hamlin’s belly.
The ice in Hamlin’s heart spread, a numbing grief. His voice broke. “Nathan—”
Movement on the periphery of his vision brought Shola’s eye and gun racing back to the car, but it was already too late. Vanderbilt had used the scant distraction to yank Grant to his feet by the short chain and held him now before him like a shield, his fettered wrist twisted up his back, the chain kept taut by the large hand which gripped his shoulder, the strong blunt fingertips digging into his throat. Still captive despite the taunting proximity of freedom, he was dragged unceremoniously backwards as Vanderbilt hastened to put the steel plates of the car as well as the body
of his hostage between Shola and himself. Even as he did so his right hand was inside his coat. It came out taloned with a five-inch blade that winked broadly in the dusty light. “He never saw this either,” he observed by way of an addendum. He was hardly breathing any faster.
Grant’s teeth parted in an inarticulate cry of rage, frustration and soul-deep despair that brought erect, like soldiers, every hackle. The howl ripped from him until Vanderbilt’s hard fingers choked it off. “That’s better,” murmured the Boer.
After a single murderous glance at Hamlin that burned his face like acid, Shola was back behind his gun, sighting down the length of his arm at what remained of his target. He said, very coldly, “Unless you let him go now I will shoot bits off you until you have nothing left to hold him with.”
Vanderbilt chuckled appreciatively. “You may be that good,” he allowed. “Some people are. A lot more just think they are. Precision shooting requires constant practice, and I don’t think you’ve had that sort of spare time. You’ll hit Grant a dozen times before you find me.”
“You want to risk that?”
“Certainly. I’ll go further: I’ll give you one free shot, after which we’ll decide what we’re going to do. After all, if he’s dead then—”
“Or if you are.” Shola let the gun drop slightly, caught his falling right hand in the rising palm of his left and pushed the blunt muzzle back up. His feet planted wide and his square stance gave him as steady an aim as he could contrive. There was no perceptible movement of arm, hand or weapon. Still wearing his Amsterdam suit, he was an ebony statue of a fighting man.
Hamlin said, “Nathan.”
“Damn you, stay out of this,” Shola grunted. “I can do it.”
“You can kill Joel.”
“So? Knowing what this is about, do you really think that matters? If it’s the only way I can stop them leaving, I’ll kill them both.”
“It isn’t. Nathan, it isn’t the only way.” Hamlin’s voice nagged away with the uninspiring message of common sense. “All you have to do is keep them here for five minutes while I get help. Five minutes, Nathan, and it can all be over.”
“It can all be over in two seconds. I don’t want your government setting up deals and sending him back to Pretoria. He deserves to die.”
“Probably. But Joel doesn’t deserve to be sacrificed, not to De Witte’s well-being and not to your vengeance. Nathan, we haven’t come this far so that you and not Pretoria can be his executioner. For pity’s sake—if you don’t care what I think, wonder how you’re going to explain it to Liz!”
For a long moment Shola continued sighting down the brief barrel, all his body tense with concentration. Then, slowly, the tension leaching away, he sucked in a deep breath and raised his head. “Go get help.”
“Excuse me,” said Vanderbilt, “I’m very sorry but I can’t agree to that.”
Shola’s mobile lip lifted. “What the hell do I care what you agree to? While I have the gun you’re not leaving this garage.”
“And while I have the knife,” Vanderbilt said, almost apologetically, “neither is your friend. Unless he wants to come back to a charnel-house.”
“Go,” Shola said tersely. Hamlin took an uncertain step towards the open door. Vanderbilt calmly placed the point of the blade below Grant’s right eye and drew the razor-edge firmly downwards. Blood sprang all the length of the wound from cheekbone to jawbone. Breath hissed in Grant’s teeth and his eyes rolled. For a moment his knees seemed to buckle; Vanderbilt held him up by his chained arm.
Hamlin’s eyes stretched wide with horror; and underneath the horror was the sick realization that such barbarism was new and shocking only to him. There were large parts of the world, and the three other protagonists (the pilot was a mere spectator) all came from one of them, where brutality he could hardly imagine was stock-in-trade. Hamlin had known that, had cared enough to try and fight it, but he knew now that knowing and caring and fighting at an intellectual level and actually being there, seeing and maybe suffering and having to cope with the brutality were two different things. He felt he had somehow wandered into the wrong world. He felt like an impostor, as if everything he had tried to do with the Democrat was based on fiction and hypocrisy. He wondered fleetingly how he had the gall to criticize Shola’s kill-while-the-killing’s-good barbarism when barbarity was so clearly the coinage in use and he himself had no answer to it. He recognized, with grief and shame, that if Shola had come to this rendezvous alone Vanderbilt would now be dead and Grant safe. He swayed on the spot, unwilling to stay, unable to leave.
Shola grated at him, “Go, Will. Go now. Don’t look back.”
He tried. He turned away and took a couple of resolute strides towards the door; but the hiss of breath like an almost silent scream made him falter and stop, and he turned round, his eyes drawn to the quiet horror as if by a magnet. Blood was washing down Grant’s face from a second cut, a perfect parallel to the first. “Jesus Christ.”
“Damn you, Will,” snarled Shola, “get out of here. He’s carving him up for your benefit. He’ll stop when you’re gone.”
“I won’t, you know,” Vanderbilt said pleasantly. “When there’s no one between me and my plane—that’s when I’ll stop.”
“Dream, Boer.” Shola’s gun was still sighted on the scant bits of Vanderbilt showing behind Grant’s head. His arms were beginning to ache, but while there was a chance that the big man would make a mistake and show enough of himself to present a target Shola was not going to lose a bead it could take him half a second to find again. Half a second was all he would get.
“Of course,” Vanderbilt went on conversationally, “he might run out of face before that. I thought I’d move on to his eyes then. How about that, sonny?” He jerked on the chain. “You reckon you’ll be much use to your friends with no eyes?”
Grant mumbled something, indistinctly because he was trying not to use his cheek muscles.
“Sorry, what?” said Vanderbilt, jangling the links again.
“I said,” Joel Grant gritted through his teeth, “I haven’t been much use to them since last time I played silly buggers with you people, but I have to tell you I’m quite getting the taste for it again.”
Shola stared at him in a kind of wonder. Vanderbilt chuckled, almost paternally. “I told you there wasn’t too much wrong with him. Mind you, that was five minutes ago.”
Deep in Hamlin’s brain, where shock had not wrapped all the gears in cotton wool, it occurred to him to wonder whether the big, humorous man who had come so far and risked so much to return Grant to his native land actually knew what he was wanted there for. He thought it might be useful to find out. “And how much use do you think he’ll be to Pretoria if you blind him?”
“That is a point,” Vanderbilt conceded. “I’d better leave him one eye, just in case. And his tongue. Otherwise, you’d be surprised just how much of the human body can be dispensed with at need.” It was true: if Vanderbilt’s briefing precluded him from practising vivisection on Grant, there was no way Grant’s friends could be sure of that.
But Hamlin said softly, “You don’t know why they want him, do you? You don’t know—you’ve been storming through my country, leaving a trail of blood and damaged lives, and you don’t even know why.”
Vanderbilt said patiently, “I told him, and now I’ll tell you, and maybe after that I won’t have to say it again. I don’t have to know. All I have to know is what they want me to do, and then do it. Which is why, when my plane leaves, I shall be on it and so will as much of this boy as is left. It really would be best if you went home now.”
“Over my dead body,” Grant said deliberately.
“Hush, sonny,” Vanderbilt said quietly, “the grown-ups are talking.”
Grant ignored him. “I’m serious, Nat. You don’t owe me much, but you owe me better than to leave me alive with this man.”
Hamlin looked at the harrowed, bloody face, appalled, unaware that he was hardly more prepossessi
ng a sight himself with his horror-smitten eyes staring out of the utter pallor of exhaustion. “What does he mean?”
Shola said nothing.
“I mean,” said Grant, thumping home the emphasis, “there’s more than one bullet in that gun. Shoot us both if you have to, I’ll take my chance. I don’t care about dying. But don’t leave me with him. Don’t let him take me back.”
Shola made his decision abruptly and acted on it immediately. He dropped his left hand from under the gun and moved quickly backwards until, outstretched, it found Hamlin. “Go. Go now, and go fast.”
The strong black hand launched him at the door. Hamlin went. He was out of the garage before Vanderbilt’s blade was halfway down Grant’s cheek a third time.
Chapter Two
Vanderbilt sighed and moved the knife away from Grant’s face and under the angle of his jaw where the carotid artery throbbed. He remarked to Shola, “I don’t suppose I’ll impress you with a blood-show, will I?”
“I’ve seen it before.”
“Yes. The next person who comes through the door, I cut the boy’s throat.”
“You’ll be dead before he is.”
“Yes, possibly. Well, that’s the game we play.”
There were a few moments of silence. Then Shola said thoughtfully, “If my friend Will was still here he would say there was an alternative.”
“Would he?”
“He would say that if you let me take Joel, and I let you and your flying friend there take your aeroplane, we could all sleep in our own beds tonight.”
A slow grin spread across Vanderbilt’s broad face. “Your friend Will doesn’t really understand about people like us, does he? He doesn’t appreciate that if I go home and leave Grant here alive I’ll never work again; and that if you let me go back, having once had me in your sights, none of those who now look up to you will ever again trust your judgement or accept your authority. He doesn’t realize that we’re both fighting for our lives here, or that if either of us cared more about the future of our children than the fates of our ancestors there would be no problem in South Africa. We can’t resolve the dilemma: we are the dilemma.”
