by Jo Bannister
Liz had the lift to herself, so she let the smile slip. It was inappropriate to both the occasion and her feelings about it. As the car climbed she was thinking about Elinor.
By a careful cocktail of truth and suggestion she had succeeded in reassuring Mrs. De Witte that the operation would not go ahead. She told her about Joel’s friends in England who were already hard on Vanderbilt’s heels and would undoubtedly pin him down within hours. She told her about the police who would be pulling out all the stops, and the careful check that would be mounted on airports and docks. She had managed to convey a supreme confidence that Vanderbilt would be stopped and his prisoner freed at, if not before, the point where he tried to escape the country.
She had not said what she already knew, that the police were being deliberately hampered for political reasons; and when she was called from an early lunch by the telephone, and it was Will Hamlin phoning from hospital in Glasgow, his voice thick with pain and defeat, while the doctors hovered irritably in the background waiting to anaesthetize him and set his arm, she felt no compulsion to pass on to Elinor the bitter news he brought her. Nor was there anyone else whose help she could call on. The possibility she had foreseen when she bought her plane ticket had finally developed: Grant’s last hope was a friend on the ground in Pretoria.
She had not, in all honesty, expected to be able to free him. She had considered the pros and cons of launching a public scandal, but decided it would take a great deal more in the way of atrocity, and a great deal more time than she would be allowed, to mobilize public opinion in this three-monkeys of a city. She had come reluctantly to the conclusion that the best service she might be capable of doing Grant, who had lived in her house and slept in her bed and shared his worst dreams with her, was to contrive his death before he disappeared again into the bowels of the building where they had wrecked him before.
But what she had learned from Elinor De Witte altered things, raised the possibility of new solutions. True, the likeliest end was still death or imprisonment for both Grant and herself, but there was at least a chance for them if she was successful now. She dared anticipate success. The foundations for it had already been laid. But she took no pleasure in it, did not relish—even apart from its implications for herself—what she was about to do.
The lift doors opened and she cranked the smile back into place, and stood for a moment chatting and joking with the guards of the man she was going to murder. Then one of them opened the door for her and, smiling, she passed inside.
She closed the door quietly and turned to the bed, the tiny, utterly serious gun from her pretty purse in her hand. De Witte’s grin of welcome died on his lips.
Liz’s voice was low and flat, her eyes emptied of emotion; or almost. De Witte saw no fear there, no hesitation, but he thought he saw regret. Liz said, “If you give me the chance I’ll explain this. But if you call for help I will kill you immediately and take the consequences. All in all, I don’t think your government will want to put me on trial, in open court.”
For De Witte the threat of death had been a dark companion for as long as he could remember. He had been within moments and inches of it on many occasions. For more than a year, apparently, it had been only the thickness of a worn heart wall away. He did not wish to die but death held no terrors for him, so he did not panic at the sight of the small, serious gun but took her at her word. “So explain.”
Liz drew a deep breath, wondering where to begin. The chain of events had been forged a quarter of a century before, the vital link that made sense of all the rest closed only hours before. Not knowing how far she would get before circumstances forced her to cut short the account, she began with what was, from De Witte’s point of view, the most important part. “You have a son.”
She told him the story Elinor had told her, about the girl and her child, and how everything his wife had done was out of love for him. Liz knew it was important for him to hear that; it was also, less explicably, important to her that he should know.
De Witte listened without interrupting, at first with disbelief, then with gathering tears brightening his eyes. Liz watched a whole lexicon of emotions play across his white face: grief and anger and delight and regret and shame and hope. And she knew, leaving the difficult parts till last, that he had deeper wells of feeling yet to plumb.
When she paused for breath, De Witte said, “I want to meet him. You know where he is, don’t you? I want you to bring him here.”
“You’ve already met him. His name is Joel.”
His brow furrowed as he tried to remember. Liz saw understanding strike him with the force of a blow. “Joel Grant?” he whispered, stricken. “Oh dear God.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” De Witte’s voice actually broke.
“He didn’t know. He still doesn’t. The only people who ever knew were his mother and your wife, and Mary died when he was a boy. Joshua Mpani as good as raised him.”
“That Kaffir! Raised my son a traitor?”
“And lost his own life rescuing him from your torturers. You’d have torn him apart but for Mpani. Between you, you damn nearly destroyed him. And now he’s in terrible danger again, and I think maybe I’m the only person in the world who can help him, and the only way I can see to do it is with this.” She waved the little gun, and if there was resolve in the gesture there was also despair.
“You want to kill me? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t want to kill you, Colonel. Perhaps I should but I don’t. But Joel needs you dead. Your people have him. A man called Vanderbilt kidnapped him from my house three nights ago, and an hour ago I heard he’d succeeded in getting Joel out of the UK. He’ll be here tomorrow. And if you’re still alive when he arrives, your people will kill him. Not for anything he’s done, or anything he is except that he’s your son.
“They knew about him long before I did. They have his medical records, from when you had him before and probably from the hospital where he was born. Your funny blood, Colonel—Joel has it too. That’s why they want him. They want to give you his heart.”
The silence between them grew and stretched and crawled, like a wakening beast. It was as if the monstrous thing was something quick and vital, and in the room with them, stirring and hungering. As if afraid to draw it, neither spoke.
De Witte was a sick man, and the news the woman had brought him had shocked him to the depths of his soul—much more than the gun she was pointing at him. But he was also an intelligent man, and neither sickness nor shock had made him foolish. He had probably as much skill as any man living at determining truth from falsehood: the fact that this was personal did not alter the criteria for judging it.
He recognized the essential truth in what Liz had told him. It made sense, it fitted with known facts, it matched with rational patterns of behaviour; it had the ring not only of authenticity but of inevitability that true stories have. That being so there was no point in launching a barrage of questions that would obscure rather than clarify the basic dilemma. They had almost nothing left to say to one another.
Except: “Joel is still alive?” De Witte was amazed and even faintly amused at the speed with which he had learnt to say his son’s name with proprietorial overtones.
“Yes. He has to be, for the transplant to succeed.”
“I won’t permit it. I can protect him.”
“Do you really believe that?”
De Witte thought for a long moment. Then he shook his head. Then he looked up and fixed Liz with a fierce gaze. “Who’s done this to us?”
“You’d know better than I,” said Liz.
De Witte nodded. “Botha. Not Vanderbilt: Danny would have come to me if he’d got wind of what they were planning. Harry Keppler, of course—my doctor, I’ve known him since we were boys, he was always a ruthless bastard. The rest of his team?”
“Not necessarily.”
“No. Once they have him here and they’re ready to go, all it
takes is someone to inflict the kind of head injuries transplant donors always have, he’s admitted as a road accident victim, complete with forged consents, and nobody’s any the wiser. Me least of all. I didn’t know I had a son to lose.” He sucked in a deep, painful breath. “But Elinor knew. It was her idea, wasn’t it?”
Liz saw no point in denying what was self-evident. “Yes. In a desperate moment she confided in your doctor. Afterwards she tried to stop it but they wouldn’t listen. She told me in the hope that I could stop it. I think, in the back of her mind, she knew then what I would have to do.”
“Kill me.”
“I don’t know what they’ll do then. They know there are people in England who know the whole story. They may give Joel back as the price of our silence. Or they may try to kill us all. If they win I shall die a murderer; but if we win, your death will have bought Joel’s life. I can’t offer you much in the way of consolation, but I promise that if there’s any way at all I’ll make sure he knows that. You two were never much good for one another before; maybe—” She did not finish the thought: it seemed impertinent to.
She raised the gun in both her hands. De Witte could see right into the barrel, so she was aiming at his right eye. At least she was not going to make a bollocks of it.
But then, she was not going to do it at all if he could prevent her. He said quietly, “Liz, wait. There’s a better way.”
“Better for whom?”
“Oh, for you.” He added sharply, “I listened to you, girl, now do me the courtesy of listening to me.”
“There may not be much time. If someone comes—”
“We don’t need much. Just long enough for you to be seen leaving the building. Have you your passport on you? Then forget about your luggage, go straight to the airport and get on the first plane going anywhere. With luck they won’t even think about you until you’re out of the country. Even if they do pick you up, all they can do is ask you what we talked about. Half Pretoria will know I shot myself after you left.”
“Shot—yourself?” Liz’s weapon wavered off target as she struggled to comprehend what he was saying.
“You heard.”
“You want my gun?”
“No, thank you,” he said politely, pulling a cannon from beneath the bedclothes, “I have my own.”
She regarded it with that supreme calm which is the only possible alternative to panic in certain extreme situations. Eventually she remembered to breathe. “How long have you had that thing pointing at me?”
De Witte raked up a small smirk of professional pride. “Since about five seconds after you pointed yours at me.”
Liz closed her eyes for a moment, trying to marshal her thoughts. She felt her firm, desperate grip on events beginning to slide. She felt that if she lost control now she would never wrest it back, the chaos would come pouring in and drown her. She looked from his gun to hers. It was trembling slightly. It had come to feel very large—not heavy, particularly, though perhaps heavier than it looked, but cumbrous and awkward and out of place. It was not part of her style, pointing guns at sick old men in hospital beds. She wished she could put it away. She wished she knew what De Witte was thinking.
She said, “Let me get this straight. You think I’m going to put this thing back in my bag, say a fond farewell to your bodyguard and walk out of here, trusting in your word as a gentleman that once I am clear of the building and thus beyond suspicion you will put a bullet in your own brain?”
“That’s about it,” agreed De Witte.
“Do I look stupid?” demanded Liz.
“No. Up till now you haven’t acted stupidly, either; rashly perhaps, but not stupidly. Don’t spoil it now.”
“I’ve come six thousand miles to kill you!”
“You came six thousand miles to save my son. There’s a difference. You achieved your aim when you told me who he is. You don’t need to risk yourself any further. There’s nothing you can do now that I can’t do better.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Yes you do. Because if I’d wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have shown you this”—he waved the big gun negligently—“I’d have used it.”
“Then I don’t trust you. Joel Grant is your last chance. Without his heart you’ll be dead within weeks. Knowing what you should do and doing it are two different things: I don’t know what I’d do, so how can I trust you? Once I’m out of this room and on my way home, what’s to stop you having second thoughts? It’s not as if you have to do anything. All you have to do is nothing, and you live.”
“And my son dies.”
“You don’t know him. You’ve only met to exchange hatreds and hurts. You wouldn’t like him if you could meet again.”
De Witte smiled, a shade wanly. “How many fathers do like their sons? How many sons like their fathers? Infanticide is still frowned on in polite society.”
“This isn’t a joke,” cried Liz, indecision and frustration tormenting her.
“No, it isn’t. It’s my son’s life we’re talking about. I gave him that life and knew nothing about it. Two years ago I came close to killing him, still unknowing; I would have killed him, eventually, without the intervention of that damned Kaffir who was there for him when I wasn’t. You don’t get too many second chances in this world, girl, but I’ve got one now: to give my son life again, and to know it and pleasure in it like fathers are supposed to, and all it’s going to cost me is a few weeks of sickness I can do well enough without anyway.”
Against all her inclinations, Liz found herself trusting him. She believed he would kill himself in the hope of saving his son, and to save her the consequences of doing it. But once she left the room there would be no going back. She would have chanced her own life on his sincerity, but to chance Joel’s she needed to be more than sure.
She said, subtly persuasive, “You could have his life. You could be well again. He was never a son you could be proud of: not only a traitor to his blood but a deserter from his cause. I’m fond of him, but even I don’t think he’ll ever amount to anything.”
De Witte regarded her at once sternly and with kindness. “If I didn’t know what you were doing I’d tell you to stop being disgusting and go away. As it is I’ll just tell you to go away. Now. Please?”
She went. She went unsteadily, her emotions tearing her both ways, her mind that had been so sure and determined now a maelstrom of conflicts, an upheaval. She believed he would keep his word, but the awesome responsibility of having thrust that on him, coupled with the implosive anticlimax that came of tooling up, actually and psychologically, to execute a terrible deed only to have it taken from her at the last moment, had left her in a kind of shock, reeling and uncertain. She fumbled the little gun back into her purse and groped for the door.
“Liz!” De Witte hissed after her, and when she forced herself to face him he smiled and said, “Bravely.”
She took his meaning. Her head came up, her back straightened and she went out of the room with a quick smile for his guards. Before the door closed between them De Witte called to her, in a marvellously ordinary voice, “And if you do see him again, Liz, give him my love.”
She nodded without looking back and walked quickly to the lift.
The lift dropped slowly and the entrance hall was full of people cutting her off from the day. She smiled and nodded automatically at anyone who looked her way. She felt to be moving in a trance. At every moment she anticipated outcry behind her.
The bright day beyond the glass doors restored her equilibrium somewhat. She stood in the afternoon sun, taking deep breaths of the warm scented air and pushing the freshness into the bottom of her lungs. Then she looked up.
His room was at the front of the building, on the top floor. She did not know which window. They all looked alike, bright and blank as idiot eyes in front of no soul, impervious of tragedy and triumph alike. There was no way of knowing what, if anything, was happening behind them.
For perhaps two minutes she wre
stled with the fear that he would go back on his word, and with the urge to return and find out what was happening. If he chose not to die, perhaps believing that he could bully those around him into abandoning their monstrous ambition, choosing to ignore the reality that all the oaths in the world would not stop them slipping him a Micky Finn with his medication and acting in accord with their own and his best interests rather than his expressed wishes, De Witte would not be to blame—she would. She had held his fate, and Grant’s, in the palm of her hand, and there was no escaping the fact that—however good the reasons, however plausible the promises—she had left De Witte alive when only his death offered any hope of saving Joel.
But in the deepest recesses of her soul she still trusted him; and anyway it was too late to go back. If he had betrayed her there were men seeking her now; if he had not she risked wasting his generosity by hanging around here. She raised a hand to hail a taxi.
As she climbed in she heard, far above her head, a faint heavy report, muffled by glass, as if someone had slammed a door. She did not look up. She told the driver to take her to Johannesburg, to the airport. Long before she got there the tears were splashing
on her hands folded in her lap, and she did not know for whom
she wept.
Chapter Four
When the Hastings was clear of British airspace Vanderbilt vented a long, deeply sincere sigh of relief. And immediately began to feel badly about the whole messy operation.
If he was honest with himself, which was something Vanderbilt tried to be, it was not any of the specific actions which had been required of him that was causing this bad taste in his mouth. There was none he had not done before, without compunction or regret. He wished he had a rand for every time he had used his strength against people who were not his physical equal: women, men, kids, the hurt, the bound, the frightened. None of it was novel, and while he derived no great pleasure from it he accepted the need for it to be done and the desirability of it being done efficiently. Nor was it the first time his success had been crowned by another man’s death.
