“Any disaffected CIO agent would either be dead or in jail.”
“There is one,” Prince said. “He fled south last year, lives in Johannesburg now. I know his name, nothing else.”
“Write that down as well,” Yudel said.
“What the hell is all this for?” Helena demanded.
For all her fury, her bitterness and her easily aroused hatreds, Yudel recognized that this was a brave woman who was ready to go through hell to find her friends. Already this morning they all had a fair taste of hell. He was still framing his answer when Abigail spoke. “Do you want them back or don’t you?”
They reached the place where Helena and Prince were to get off. Abigail took the piece of paper, the margin of a newspaper page, from Prince. He had written down the name of the former CIO agent and the name and address of the woman who had cared for the Makumbe siblings. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t Joyce who we found.”
Prince got out quickly. Answering was impossible.
As they drove away, Abigail looked at Yudel. “Where are you going with all this?”
“I have a feeling that we are missing too much. There is too much that we don’t understand. We have to begin where the story starts. I think the answers may lie there.”
“We have little time.”
“I know.”
* * *
Abigail was not one to linger over anything. Too much needed to be done in her life for her to spend excess time on anything. This principle applied to showering as much as to any other activity. But on this occasion she stayed in the shower much longer than usual. She needed to wash away any remaining vestige of Chikurubi. She soaped her body again and again, allowing the streams of warm water to flow over her. She hoped they would cleanse even the memory of the place.
From the single high window of the shower, she could see the western sky. It was still blue, but a deeper color now and fading to white-gold near the horizon. When she switched off the water, a few street noises reached her. Somewhere in the middle distance a woman’s pleasant contralto was singing what Abigail recognized as an African lullaby.
The air temperature on this lovely African evening seemed to be almost that of the human body. Abigail felt that she was contained by a medium that was made for her, or that she was a part of. At any other time, on any other evening, that sky and the wonderful air would have allowed the sounds, the sights and the red wine that was waiting for her on the room’s only table to spread a calming net over mind and body. But this was not such an evening, and Abigail already feared the night that was approaching. At least Yudel was just a few doors down the passage, but then how much could she expect from him? She feared that she had dragged him into something that was too big for either of them.
Answering a knock at her door revealed the waiter who had earlier brought her glass of wine. He had an envelope for her. She opened it absentmindedly. It was a note from the proprietor, saying that a Mr. Robert Mokoapi had called three times during the day and that he would be at home this evening. Her home telephone number was written underneath.
She dressed slowly, then went to stand at the window. The short twilight was deepening fast. As on other evenings in this place, the window had drawn her with an almost irresistible force. She opened the curtains, but stood a full stride back from the glass so that she would be in deep shadow and all but invisible from the street.
Abigail had been there for five minutes before she saw the uniformed policeman step out of a shadow and pass slowly in front of the hotel. In the semidarkness she could not make out his face, but judging by his size, he could have been the policeman of the night before.
She stood there, unmoving, for almost twenty minutes before the black CIO double-cab stopped outside. This time there was no doubting who stepped out of the cab and into the light from the hotel’s front door. This was the first time she had seen Agent Mpofu without a jacket. He scowled in the direction of the guard, then looked up and down the street. Abigail had the strong impression that this was a man unconvinced of the necessity of spending his evening this way.
Abigail only drew the curtains closed after Mpofu had left. She did not look at her watch to see how much time she had spent that way, or what the time was now. She again read the note that told her Robert had been looking for her. Then she crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket. The front desk answered at her first ring. “Please hold all calls for me,” she said. “I’ll be asleep and I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“A Mr. Mokoapi…” the girl at the front desk started.
“If he calls again, tell him I’m asleep.”
What did you do about a good man who had made a mistake? she asked herself. Did you forgive him? Might he make other, future mistakes?
Abigail knew that the problem was not that Robert was a good man who had made a mistake, but that he was a good man who had lifted her from desolation to exultation, and then made this mistake, this awful, most serious of all mistakes. She could not speak to him now, not tonight. Maybe she would be able to speak to him some other night. But she was not even sure of that.
And what did you do about a different kind of man—one you did not understand, in whose presence, if you were alone with him, you could hardly breathe? And nor could he? How different was he? Perhaps he was not personally responsible for any of the evils she had heard and read about, and seen today. But they were all around him, everywhere. If he was not responsible for them, at the very least he seemed to ignore their existence.
He had been unable to enter what passed for a morgue in Chikurubi. What did that say about him?
She had heard him talk about Zimbabwe and his life and where he came from, how he too was from the Ndebele minority, that he too had suffered. And she had felt his body against hers and she remembered the grace with which he had stepped back when she could not continue. Perhaps a good man could be trapped in a web from which he could not escape. She could not believe that Jonas was an evil man. She had come too close to him. He was still the one who was able to help her. He was the one who sought to protect her. She needed to believe it.
35
More than twenty-four hours had passed since Tony Makumbe had been brought from his cell in Chikurubi and put into the truck. But it was now nearly two weeks since his arrest. He had not heard about the arrest of the others. This was the first time since then that he had seen them.
He had struggled to climb the ladder at the back of the truck. At the second attempt he hung by an arm hooked over one of the rungs. By that time even the prison staff could see that without help they would never get him loaded. All the others had managed to climb the four rungs without assistance.
“Why’s this man so weak?” he heard a voice say. “Has he been eating?”
“We gave him the food.”
“You know what the instructions are.”
“Yes.”
“Enough?”
“Yes.” It was true that he had been receiving it, even if he had not been eating it.
Tony missed the mumbled response, but he felt a strong hand take hold of his waistband and lift him. The hand released him and he tumbled into the truck between two rows of seats. “Tony,” a voice said. “It’s Tony. Tony, have you seen my sister?”
It was one of the Makwati girls. He could never tell them apart. “No, I haven’t seen anyone else.” He looked at the other faces in the truck, all of whom were watching him closely. “All our people,” he said, as much to himself as to the others. “Is it only our people?”
“Just our people,” someone else said. “Just us.”
Tony looked at the faces of the others. They were all watching him with a singular expectancy. What is it? he wondered. Is it my weakness? Can it be that? They don’t look too good either.
One of the men was speaking. Tony struggled to make sense of the words. “Tony, we have something to tell you—something bad.”
They were all still looking at
him in the same peculiar way. So this is it, he thought. But what worse news could there be than being in the hands of these people?
“It’s Krisj. He’s been killed. We heard it on the prison grapevine.”
* * *
After an hour’s travel it was clear that they were not on their way to the cells in the Supreme Court building. Despite this, some of the others continued to talk as if that was their destination. By the time another two hours had passed, no one could be deluded into believing that they were going to the court building. “I think they’re going to kill us,” Tanya Makwati sobbed. “They’re taking us into the country to kill us.”
Tony did not believe that. The voice he had heard had been angry that they had not been fed and that he had appeared weak. Surely he did not want them to be in good shape just to be killed? That made no sense.
He believed he knew why Krisj had to die. Had he thought about it, he would have come to expect it before the event. But the death of someone you loved was not something you thought about.
Tanya Makwati was still sobbing. Tears that she made no attempt to hide were streaming down her face. Those Makwati girls reminded him so of Katy. It was not the way they looked. Katy had a round face, while theirs were long. The similarity had to do with their personalities. The Makwati twins showed their emotions, crying and laughing readily; quick to anger, but equally quick to forget the reason for it. Katy had been just like that.
He remembered how much he had loved her, how much they had shared, and what effect her death had on him. The only one he had loved as much as Katy was Krisj. He had loved them both more than anyone else he could remember. He had often thought about it, and he knew too when the mist had first appeared in his life. It had started on the day Katy died.
36
The Ponte was tall, circular and hollow. The apartments were arranged facing outward, while the hollow center provided a clear fall to a courtyard at ground level. Within months of being opened for tenants it had become known as Johannesburg’s suicide center.
The building’s depressives did not seem able to resist the opportunity that the hollow center presented. All you had to do was slip over a waist-high wall and, for you, the problems of life were over. So bad was the effect on the building’s reputation that a screen had been erected on every floor to block the residents’ access to the hollow center. Renting only to suicides was not a policy with a long-term future.
It had been intended for young, upwardly mobile white people, but they had tired of the Ponte at about the same time that the country’s restrictions on where black people were allowed to live had fallen away. Within a few years, the nation’s disenfranchised majority had also rejected the building and its beckoning chasm.
By the time Freek Jordaan, deputy police commissioner for Gauteng province, invited the building’s security personnel to step aside or spend a long time thinking things over in prison, the Ponte had been filled almost exclusively by immigrants, both legal and illegal, for more than ten years. Other Johannesburgers thought of it as the headquarters of the Nigerian Mafia in the city, but in truth it was filled with a mixture of the citizens of almost every African country south of the Sahara. Freek knew this, and he also knew where to find Ephraim Khumalo, the CIO operative who had fled south a little more than a year before.
Yudel had spoken to him the previous night and given him the man’s name. It had taken a team of Freek’s officers most of the morning to establish his whereabouts. A battle with Immigration to establish whether he was in the country at all had been followed by calls to a foundry where he had briefly done heavy manual labor; a restaurant where he had been employed as a waiter; and a casino where he had trained briefly as a croupier. After the croupier job he had disappeared, but an enterprising lieutenant had discovered a recent conviction for possessing an illegal substance in quantities large enough for the authorities to charge him with dealing. He was currently out on a two-thousand-rand bail.
Freek knocked softly on a door on the Ponte’s twenty-seventh floor, then stepped aside to be out of the range of the peephole. He had to knock a second time before the door first opened a crack, then a little wider, then a head peered round the corner of the doorway. In the same moment that the occupant peered into the corridor, he was seized by the front of his vest and dragged out. “Ephraim, my man,” Freek whispered, “I’m so glad to see you.”
“What the fuck…” Freek’s victim was a small man. At this moment the whites of his eyes were the most prominent part of him.
“I need to talk to you, Ephraim,” Freek murmured seductively.
“Fuck it, man.” He whispered. “I’m not Ephraim.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s inside with the others.”
“Let’s go and find him.” The small man stumbled ahead of him into the apartment’s tiny lounge. Four other men, all very much larger than the one who had come to the door, were rising from their chairs. “I’ll talk to Ephraim. The rest of you clear out.”
Freek flashed his official identification at them much too fast for them to focus on it. “Freek Jordaan,” he said. He had already picked out his man. The sudden widening of the eyes had been a giveaway. The alarm in the other faces was of a different sort. “Clear out now,” Freek said. He had made no move toward the automatic that rode in its holster under his left shoulder, but all of the men in the room had already looked in that direction.
One of the men, a blank-faced individual, wore a T-shirt from which the sleeves had been removed. The object was to show off biceps that had taken many hours in the gym to develop. “There’s a lot of us and there’s just you. Why should we go?”
Freek looked at him without the smallest glimmer of amusement. “I can see three possibilities,” he said. “You can leave this flat now, you can be on your way back to the countries you came from an hour from now, or maybe you won’t leave this room alive. You decide, but decide now.”
T-shirt spent no time thinking it over. He tilted his head toward the door as a gesture to his friends and started in that direction. The rest followed. When they were gone, Freek turned the key in the lock.
“Mr. Jordaan, I never did nothing, I swear. Only a little bit of dagga.” Ephraim Khumalo was also a big man, but he looked a lot smaller now that his friends had left. He was a long way from the CIO and the authority of those days. “But who the hell are you, man?”
“I’m the deputy police commissioner for the province.”
“Shit. Don’t you take muscle with you at times like this?”
Freek smiled for the first time since entering the room. “Only when I need it,” he said. “But sit down, make yourself at home.” Freek waved a hand in the direction of Khumalo’s own couch. He imagined that Khumalo’s mind was racing as he tried to guess just which of his many transgressions had caught up with him. “You don’t keep a job long, do you?”
“I’m trying, man. I’m trying. I just had bad luck so far. I’ll have a job soon, I swear.” A line of sweat was forming along Khumalo’s forehead.
“Relax, Ephraim. You tell me what I want to know, and I’ll do what I can to keep the immigration authorities off your back.”
“What do you want to know, man?”
“I want you to tell me about Zimbabwe.”
“Zimbabwe?” His relief was obvious. “What you want to know?”
“I want to know everything you can tell me about Director Jonas Chunga of the CIO.”
“He’s defecting?”
“Is that what you call it—defecting?”
“I call it like that.”
“No, Chunga’s not defecting. I just want you to tell me about him.”
Khumalo thought about this for a moment. “And what do I get?”
“You get to stay here. I don’t send you back to Chunga.”
“Shit, you can’t do that.”
“You want to try me?”
Khumalo said nothing. He did not seem to be enthusiastic about trying Freek.
“How long did you work with this man?”
“Ten years, plus-minus.”
“How closely?”
“I was his main man. I worked with him every day.”
“I believe there’s an officer called Mpofu working with him now.”
“Mpofu was nothing in those days. I did everything for Jonas.”
“But you don’t want to go back?”
Khumalo shrugged. He had decided on the role he should be playing. “I can go back. Jonas and me, we’re all right…”
Freek rose quickly. A pair of handcuffs had appeared in his hands. “On your feet,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Khumalo was struggling to his feet. “Jesus, man, what you doing?”
“You don’t want to cooperate with me, so you can cooperate with Jonas Chunga.”
“Wait. Wait, man. Wait!” He raised his hands in protest, trying to keep them away from the handcuffs. “I’m cooperating. Whatever you want, I’m cooperating with it.”
Freek sat down slowly, motioning Khumalo to do the same. “Now, why are you afraid of going back to Chunga?”
This time the answer did not come easily. “With Jonas everything is about loyalty. If he thinks you not loyal to him, you dead.”
“Dead?” Freek asked.
“Maybe not dead, but you outside, you nothing.”
“But not dead?”
“Something you got to understand about Jonas…” He was leaning forward and for the first time he was speaking earnestly to Freek. “… he tries to keep his hands clean. He tries to stay away from the killing and he tries never to give the order to have someone killed. Some of the top guys in the CIO don’t give a fuck. They’ll give the order to rub some small opposition politician out. It’s nothing to them. They even pull the trigger themselves sometimes. I think some of them like it.”
“But not Chunga?”
“Not Chunga. Jonas does his best to be a good man. But in his book, if you not loyal to your country, you a bad man.”
“And being loyal to your country means being loyal to Jonas?”
Those Who Love Night Page 21
