by Wilbur Smith
‘Stephen can take me and bring me back.’
‘Stephen?’ Shasa asked sharply.
‘Mommy’s new chauffeur. He’s so nice and awfully trustworthy – Mommy says so.’
Shasa wasn’t aware that Tara had taken on a chauffeur. She usually drove herself, but that reprehensible old Packard of hers had finally given up the ghost when she was away at Sundi and he had prevailed on her to accept a new Chevvy station wagon. Presumably the chauffeur went with it. She should have consulted him – but they had drifted further and further apart over the last few years and seldom discussed domestic routine.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I won’t have you driving around on your own at night.’
‘I’ll be with Stephen,’ she pleaded, but he ignored the protest. He knew nothing about Stephen, except that he was male and black.
‘I’ll tell you what. If you can get a written guarantee from one of the other girls’ parents – somebody I know – that they will get you there and back before midnight – well, then, all right, you may go.’
‘Oh, Daddy! Daddy!’ She showered soft warm kisses on his face, and then leapt up and did a little victory pirouette around his study. She had long willowy legs under the flaring skirt and a tight little bottom in lace panties.
‘She is probably,’ he thought, and then corrected himself, ‘she is without doubt the most beautiful child in the entire world.’
Isabella stopped suddenly, and assumed a woebegone expression.
‘Oh, Papa!’ she cried in anguish.
‘What is it now?’ Shasa leaned back in his swivel chair and hid his smile.
‘Both Patty and Lenora are going to have new dresses, and I shall look an awful frump.’
‘A frump, forsooth! We cannot have that now, can we?’ And she rushed to him.
‘Does that mean I may have a new dress, Daddy darling?’ She wound both arms around his neck again. The sound of a motor car coming up the drive interrupted their idyll.
‘Here comes Mummy!’ Isabella sprang from his lap and seizing his hand dragged him to the window. ‘We can tell her about the party and the dress now, can’t we, darling Daddy.’
The new Chevrolet with the high tailfins and great chromed grille pulled up at the front steps, and the new chauffeur stepped out. He was an imposing man, tall and broad-shouldered in a dove-grey livery and cap with patent-leather peak. He opened the rear door, and Tara slipped out of her seat. As she passed him she tapped the chauffeur on the arm, an over-friendly gesture so typical of Tara’s treatment of the servants which irritated Shasa as much as usual.
Tara came up the front stairs and disappeared from Shasa’s view, while the chauffeur went back into the driver’s seat and pulled away towards the garages. As he drove below the windows of the study, he glanced up. His face was half obscured by the peak of his cap, but there was something vaguely familiar about his jawline and the way his head was set on that corded neck and those powerful shoulders.
Shasa frowned, trying to place him, but the memory was an ancient one, or erroneous, and then behind him Isabella was calling in her special honeyed voice.
‘Oh, Mummy, Daddy and I have something to tell you,’ and Shasa turned from the window, steeling himself for Tara’s familiar accusation of favouritism and indulgence.
The hidden door to Shasa’s parliamentary suite of offices provided the key to the problem that they had been working on over the weeks that Moses Gama had been in Cape Town.
It was simple enough for Moses to enter the parliament building itself, dressed in chauffeur’s livery and carrying an armful of shopping – shoe boxes and hat boxes from the most expensive stores. He merely followed Tara as she swept past the doormen at the front entrance. There was virtually no security in operation, no register to sign, no lapel badges were necessary. A stranger might be asked to show a visitor’s pass at the entrance, but as the wife of a cabinet minister Tara merited a respectful salute, and she made a point of getting to know the doormen. Sometimes she paused to ask after a sick child, or the janitor’s arthritis, and with her sunny personality and her concerned condescension she was soon a favourite of the uniformed staff who guarded the entrance.
She did not take Moses in with her on every occasion, only when she was certain that there was no risk of meeting Shasa. She brought him often enough to establish his presence and his right to be there. When they reached Shasa’s suite, Tara would order him to place the parcels in the inner office while she paused to chat with Shasa’s secretary. Then, when Moses emerged from the office empty-handed, she would dismiss him lightly.
‘Thank you, Stephen. You may go down now. I will need the car at eleven. Please bring it around to the front and wait for me.’
Then Moses would walk down the main staircase, standing respectfully aside for parliamentary messengers and members and cabinet members, once he even passed the Prime Minister on the stairs and he had to drop his gaze in case Verwoerd recognized the hatred in his eyes. It gave him a weird feeling of unreality to pass only an arm’s length from the man who was the author of his people’s misery, who more than any other represented all the forces of injustice and oppression. The man who had elevated racial discrimination to a quasi-religious philosophy.
Moses found he was trembling as he went on down the stairs, but he passed the doormen without a glance and the janitor in his cubicle barely lifted his eyes before concentrating once more on his newspaper. It was vital to Moses’ plans that he should be able to leave the building unaccompanied, and constant repetition had made that possible. To the doormen he was almost invisible.
However, they had still not solved the problem of access to Shasa’s inner office. Moses might go in there long enough to deposit the armful of parcels, but he could not risk remaining longer, and especially he could not be in there behind a closed door, or alone with Tara. Tricia, Shasa’s secretary, was alert and observant, and obsessively loyal to Shasa; like all Shasa’s female employees she was more than just a little in love with him.
The discovery of the concealed rear door to the suite came as a blessing when they were almost desperately considering leaving the final preparation to Tara alone.
‘Heavens, it was so simple, after all our worrying!’ Tara laughed with relief, and the next time Shasa left for his inspection tour of the H’ani Mine, taking Garry with him as usual, she and Moses made one of their visits to parliament to test their arrangement.
After Moses had left her parcels in the inner office and in front of Tricia, Tara sent him away. ‘I won’t need the car until much later, Stephen, I’m having lunch with my father in the dining-room.’
Then as he left, closing the outer door behind him, Tara turned back to Tricia.
‘I have a few letters to write. I’ll use my husband’s office. Please see that I’m not disturbed.’
Tricia looked dubious, she knew that Shasa was fussy about his desk and the contents of his drawers, but she could not think of any way to prevent Tara making use of it, and while she hesitated, Tara marched into Shasa’s office, closed the door and firmly locked it behind her. Another precedent had been set.
On the outside there was a light tap, and it took her a moment to discover the inside lock, disguised as a light switch. She opened the panelled door a crack, Moses slipped through it into the office. She held her breath against the snap of the lock, and then turned eagerly to Moses.
‘Both doors are locked,’ she whispered, and she embraced him. ‘Oh, Moses, Moses – it’s been so long.’
Even though they spent so much time in each other’s company, the moments of total privacy were rare and precious and she clung to him.
‘Not now,’ he whispered. ‘There is work to do.’
Reluctantly she opened her embrace and let him go. He went to the window first, standing to one side as he drew the drapes so that he could not be seen from outside, and then he switched on the desk lamp and removed his uniform jacket, hanging it on the back of Shasa’s chair, before crossing t
o the altar chest. He paused before it, putting Tara in mind of a worshipper, for his head was bowed and his hands clasped before him reverently. Then he roused himself and lifted the heavy bronze Van Wouw sculpture from the top of the chest. He carried it across the room and placed it on Shasa’s desk. He went back and carefully opened the lid, wincing as the antique hinges squeaked.
The interior of the chest had been half-filled with the overflow from Shasa’s bookshelves. Piles of old copies of Hansard, out-of-date White Papers and old parliamentary reports. Moses was annoyed at this unexpected obstacle.
‘You must help me,’ he whispered to Tara, and between them they began to unpack the chest.
‘Keep everything in the same order,’ Moses warned, as he passed the piles of publications to her. ‘We will have to leave it exactly as it was.’
The chest was so deep that at the end Moses found it easier to climb into it and pass the last of the contents out to her. The carpet was covered with stacks of paper now, but the chest was empty.
‘Let me have the tools,’ Moses ordered. They were in one of the packets that Moses had carried up from the car, and she handed them to him.
‘Don’t make any noise,’ she pleaded.
The chest was large enough to conceal him completely. She went to the door and listened for a moment. Tricia’s typewriter was tapping away reassuringly. Then she went back to the chest and peered into it.
Moses was on his knees working on the floor of the chest with a screwdriver. The screws were authentically antique, taken from another old piece of furniture so that they were not obvious recent additions, and the floor panels of the chest were likewise aged oak and only close examination by an expert would have revealed that they were not original. Once the screws were loose, Moses lifted out the panels to reveal the compartment beneath. This was tightly packed with cotton waste and gently Moses worked it loose, and as he removed the top layer placed it in the package that had contained the tools.
Tara watched with awful fascination as the contents of the first secret compartment came into view. They were small rectangular blocks of some dark amorphous material, like sticky toffee or carpenter’s putty, each covered with a translucent greaseproof wrapper and with a label marked in Russian Cyrillic script.
There were ten blocks in the top layer, but Tara knew that there must be two layers below that. Thirty blocks in all, each block weighed two pounds, which made a total of sixty pounds of plastic explosive. It looked mundane and harmless as some kitchen commodity, but Moses had warned her of its lethal power.
‘A two-pound brick will destroy the span of a steel bridge, ten pounds would knock down the average house, sixty pounds—’ he shrugged. ‘It’s enough to do the job ten times over.’
Once he had removed the packing and reassured himself of the contents, Moses replaced the panel and screwed it closed. Then he opened the centre panel of the floor. Again it was packed with cotton waste. As he removed it, he explained in a whisper, ‘There are four different types of detonators to cover all possible needs. These,’ he gingerly lifted a small flat tin the size of a cigarette pack out of its nest of cotton packing, ‘these are electrical detonators that can be wired up to a series of batteries or to the mains. These,’ he returned the tin to its slot and lifted the loose cotton to reveal a second larger tin, ‘these are radio receiver detonators and are set off by a VHF transmission from this miniature transmitter.’ It looked to Tara like one of the modern portable radios. Moses lifted it out of its nest. ‘It needs only six torch batteries to activate it. Now these are simple acid time-fused detonators, primitive, and the time delay isn’t very accurate, but this here is a trembler detonator. Once it is primed, the slightest movement or vibration will set it off. Only an expert will be able to defuse the charge once it is in pace.’
Until this moment she had considered only the abstract dialectic of what they were doing, but now she was faced with the actuality. Here before her was the very stuff of violent death and destruction, the innocent appearance no less menacing than the coils of a sleeping mamba, and she found herself wavering.
‘Moses,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody will be hurt. No human life, you said that – didn’t your
‘We have discussed that already.’ His expression was cold and scornful, and she felt ashamed.
‘Forgive me, please.’
Moses ignored her and unscrewed the third and last panel. This compartment contained an automatic pistol and four clips of ammunition. It took up little space and the rest of the compartment was packed with cotton waste which Moses removed.
‘Give me the other packet,’ he ordered, and when she passed it to him, he began to pack the contents into the empty recess. Firstly there was a compact tool kit which contained a keyhole saw and hand drill, drill bits and augers, a box of hearing-aid batteries for the detonator and torch batteries for the transmitter, a Penlite torch, a five-hundred-foot roll of thin electrical wire, diamond glasscutters, putty, staples and tiny one-ounce tins of touch-up paint. Lastly there was a pack of hard rations, dried biscuit and cans of meat and vegetables.
‘I wish you had let me give you something more appetizing.’
‘It will be only two days,’ Moses said, and she was reminded how little store he set by creature comforts.
Moses replaced the panel, but he did not tighten the retaining screws fully, so that they could be loosened by hand.
‘All right, pass the books to me now.’ He repacked the chest, replacing the bundles in the same order as he had found them, so that to a casual glance it would not be apparent that the contents of the chest had been disturbed. Carefully Moses closed the chest and replaced the bronze statue on the lid. Then he stood in front of the desk and surveyed the room carefully.
‘I will need a place to hide.’
‘The drapes,’ Tara suggested, and he nodded.
‘Not very original, but effective.’ The curtains were embroidered brocade, cut full, and they reached to the floor.
‘A key to that door – I’ll need one.’ He indicated the hidden door in the panelling.
‘I will try—’ Tara began and then broke off as there was a knock on the interleading door. For a moment he thought she might panic and he squeezed her arm to calm her.
‘Who is it?’ Tara called in a level voice.
‘It’s me, Mrs Courtney,’ Tricia called respectfully. ‘It’s one o’clock and I’m going to take my lunch.’
‘Go ahead, Tricia. I’ll be a little longer, but I’ll lock up when I leave.’
They heard the outer door close, and then Moses released her arm. ‘Go out and search her desk. See if she has a key to the back door.’
Tara was back within minutes with a small bunch of keys. She tried them in the lock and the third one turned the door in the panelling.
‘The serial number is on it.’ She scribbled a note of the number on Shasa’s noteblock and ripped off the top sheet. ‘I’ll return the keys to Tricia’s desk.’
When she came back, Moses was buttoning his uniform jacket, but she locked the door behind her.
‘What I need now is a plan of the building. There must be one in the Public Works Department, and you must get me a copy. Tell Tricia to do it.’
‘How?’ she asked. ‘What excuse can I giver
‘Tell her that you want to change the lighting in here,’ he gestured at the chandelier in the roof. ‘Tell her you must have an electrical plan of this section, showing the circuits and wall-fittings.’
‘Yes, I can do that,’ she agreed.
‘Good. We are finished here for the time being. We can go now.’
‘There is no hurry, Moses. Tricia will not be back for another hour.’
He looked down at her, and for a moment she thought she saw a flash of contempt, even disgust, in those dark brooding eyes, but she would not let herself believe that, and she pressed herself to him, hiding her face against his chest. Within seconds she felt the swelling and hardening of his loins through the cloth
that separated their lower bodies, and her doubts were dispelled. She was certain that in his own strange African way he loved her still and she reached down to open his clothing and bring him out.
He was so thick that she could barely encompass him within the circle of her thumb and forefinger, and he was hot and hard as a shaft of black ironstone that had lain in the full glare of the sun at midday.
Tara sank down onto the thick silken rug, drawing him down on top of her.
Every day now increased the danger of discovery and both of them were aware of it.
‘Will Shasa recognize you?’ Tara asked Moses more than once. ‘It is becoming more and more difficult to keep you from meeting him face to face. He asked about my new chauffeur a few days ago.’
Isabella had apparently drawn Shasa’s attention to the new employee for her own selfish reasons, and Tara could cheerfully have thrashed her for it. But there had been the danger of establishing the importance of her new driver even more clearly in the child’s devious mind, so she had let it pass without comment.
‘Will he know you?’ she insisted, and Moses considered it carefully.
‘It was long ago, before the war. He was a child.’ Moses shook his head. ‘The circumstances were so different, the place so remote – and yet for a short while we were close. I believe we made a deep impression upon each other – if merely because of the unlikelihood of such a relationship, black man and white boy becoming familiar, developing an intimate friendship.’ He sighed. ‘It is certain, however, that at the time of the trial he must have read the intelligence reports and known of the warrant for my arrest, which, by the way, is still in force. Whether he would connect the wanted revolutionary criminal with his childhood friend, I do not know, but we cannot take that chance. We must do what has to be done as soon as possible.’
‘It seems that Shasa has been out of town every weekend for the last five years.’ Tara bit her lip with frustration. ‘But now that I want him gone, he won’t leave Weltevreden for a single day. First it’s this damned polo business.’ The Argentinian polo team was touring the country, and Shasa was hosting their stay in Cape Town, while the polo fields of Weltevreden would be the venue for the first Test match of their visit. ‘Then immediately after that it will be the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s visit. Shasa won’t be leaving Cape Town before the end of the month at the very earliest.’ She watched his face in the driving-mirror as he pondered it.
