A Sailor's Honour

by Chris Marnewick

  But now they needed something more spectacular. The country had become too secure, too prominent, too cocky. It was time to bring the house down, just as the general had said.

  The major turned his ear to the crunching of bones at the lion kill and smiled. He knew the general would be pleased. The first phase of an operation that had been in preparation for months had been completed without a hitch.

  Auckland

  Monday, 15 June 2009 2

  It had been a good day for Pierre de Villiers.

  Until the phone rang.

  Auckland 2009 did not look like Auckland 2008. Not at all. The National Party had won the elections the previous November, as predicted by the polls, and John Key was the new prime minister. Helen Clark was all but forgotten and the man she had once called insipid was now at the helm of Labour. Labour’s sins while in power were being exposed one after the other, often by Labourites who were not only dissatisfied with the new order, but also with the new regime within their party. Failure to manage the economy, proliferating and overlapping government agencies staffed by party apparatchiks, MPS living high on the hog while admonishing their constituents to tighten their belts, some even renting porn videos for the public account while on government business.

  Pierre de Villiers 2009 was also not the Pierre de Villiers of 2008. Not at all. His cancer had been cured, as far as cancer can ever be completely cured, by the combination of the surgery in Auckland and the radiation therapy in Durban. The last blood test had failed to detect any PSA – prostatic specific antigen. All he now needed was treatment for the side effects of treatment he wouldn’t have required if the original treatment – the surgery – had been carried out competently. But the fact that there was no detectable PSA did not mean that the cancer had been defeated.

  The successful resolution of the prime minister’s case and the arrest and conviction of the Urewera plotters had resulted in De Villiers’s rapid promotion to Detective Inspector. He now headed the International Crimes Unit where – after working there for nearly ten years – he had previously felt unwanted and an outsider. But after tracing the Bushman arrow which had been used in the attempted assassination – that’s how the papers still referred to it – of the prime minister and connecting it to a man in Auckland, the very man engaged in training the Tuhoe tribe for an uprising, De Villiers had become the golden boy of the New Zealand Police and had been promoted to his current rank. In the process, he had leapfrogged several colleagues who now worked, without any grudge, under his command. De Villiers commanded with a light hand, preferring to let his men and women use their own judgment, to follow their instincts. What use was a team of twelve if only one did the thinking? He was content to leave the footslogging and stalking to them too, directing operations from his desk. His days of running after criminals were all but over; the side effects of his treatment made it difficult in any event.

  Yet, on this occasion, De Villiers was in the field, watching a house on the golf estate in Beachlands, east of metropolitan Auckland. It was not the kind of place one would expect a long-haired and tattooed gangster riding a Harley-Davidson to live, but there he was on the sixteenth green, taking his time over a three-foot putt. The New Zealand market for the product of the local criminals was too small to generate the kind of profits necessary to sustain the lifestyle the biker enjoyed. The other three members of the foursome, now watching in silence as the biker lined up the putt, gave the game away. De Villiers knew their details, courtesy of the Immigration Service. They were Chinese who had arrived from Hong Kong via Mexico. That meant drugs, and that meant international trafficking and money laundering. Work for the International Crimes Unit which ended on De Villiers’s desk.

  When he had seen enough, De Villiers started his unmarked Holden and drove home. It was too late to drive all the way back to his office only to have to drive home again when he arrived, so he went home early. The rain arrived before he did, a sudden downpour. Auckland weather: clear one moment, foul the next.

  He found his wife in the kitchen. She had her back to him and was busy stacking plates in the dishwasher.

  ‘Where is Zoë?’ he asked and hugged her from behind.

  ‘Hello,’ Emma said. ‘And I love you too.’

  He pushed his hands into the front of her jeans. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Where is Zoë?’

  Her breathing quickened. ‘It’s Monday and they stay late at school on Mondays and don’t pretend that you don’t know that.’

  Kiwi kids are bred tough and play their sport in all weather. Zoë would come home soaked but happy, they knew.

  ‘Let’s make love,’ he said.

  ‘What, here?’ she teased. ‘In front of the dishwasher?’

  He led her upstairs. Outside, the rain pelted down on the pressed aluminium roof tiles and gushed out of the downpipes into the drains. The passing cars threw up sheets of spray. Scholars walked past the house, bent over into the wind, hugging their bags in front of them to protect their books. Upstairs, above their heads, De Villiers and his wife made love.

  Sex on a weekday afternoon. It lifts the gloom.

  They lay close together, all arms and legs.

  ‘I have to go back to South Africa for a check-up,’ he said. De Villiers wondered whether he should tell her that the incontinence the oncologist had predicted would arrive in eleven months had already started. Perhaps she noticed his more frequent visits to the bathroom, or that he stayed there longer.

  Emma stirred against his chest. ‘As long as you don’t stay there for three months, like you did last year.’

  She stroked the wound where the surgeon had cut De Villiers. De Villiers suspected – no, he knew – that she had been more gentle in their lovemaking since the surgery, as if afraid of his fragility. She and Zoë treated him as if he were sick, and there was no way he could prove to them that he was still the man he had always been before his cancer.

  The radiation therapy a year earlier had taken nearly seven weeks, but on that occasion De Villiers also had a major investigation to complete, and a personal mission. In the three months he had spent in South Africa, he had finally put together the links that ultimately solved the prime minister’s case, but his personal mission was still incomplete. He waited for the opportunity that would provide closure. Last year, he had torn up his South African passport, more in anger than premeditation, but he had known in the back of his mind even then that he would have to return.

  And then there was the bleeding the oncologist had warned him about. It started dead on time, eleven months after the completion of the radiation therapy.

  But he didn’t tell Emma that. Better that she didn’t know. Instead he said, ‘No, this time I want you and Zoë to come with me. We can have a proper holiday and you can meet my family.’

  Emma lay still. He could feel the flutter of her eyelashes against his chest. It tickled and he shifted slightly. ‘Come on, let’s have a decent holiday for a change. I don’t know how often we will be able to go back there and do that.’

  ‘My father’s not well,’ Emma said. ‘I would rather go home and spend some time with him now, before it’s too late.’

  De Villiers noted that, after twenty years away, Emma still spoke of Indonesia as home. He spoke of South Africa as home only in unguarded moments.

  ‘Why don’t you and Zoë go?’ Emma suggested. ‘You can show her to your family and take her to the game parks and show her all those animals you always talk about.’

  They dozed off again.

  The phone rang. The one Pierre de Villiers always carries on a leather thong around his neck.

  Only three people had the number. His wife, his daughter and his brother-in-law. Emma, Zoë and Johann.

  But Emma was lying in bed next to him in post-coital slumber. Zoë was on the way from school and should arrive any minute. And Johann Weber was in Durban where it should now be – De Villiers did a quick calculation – a few minutes after seven in the morning. They should get out of bed a
nd dress quickly before Zoë arrives, he thought, and poked Emma in the ribs.

  His special phone did ring now and then – people dialling the wrong number – but he answered anyway. ‘De Villiers.’ He didn’t mention that he was a detective in the New Zealand Police.

  ‘Pierre?’ It was Johann.

  De Villiers sat up and swung his feet off the bed. ‘Yes, hello, Johann.’ He walked into the passage. ‘What …’

  Weber interrupted. ‘I have an urgent message for you. Please listen carefully.’

  De Villiers felt his groin muscles tighten. He ran the fingers of his left hand across the operation scar stretching from his pubic bone to his navel. The itchy keloid tissue was a constant reminder of the cancer. He looked over his shoulder to see if Emma had followed him into the passage. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Johann Weber spoke slowly, with the clipped diction of an advocate. Every word was carefully enunciated, with equal emphasis so that each word carried the same weight. Every sentence was carefully constructed so that there was a natural balance between subject and object, with a verb the fulcrum between them.

  ‘Listen carefully,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you?’ De Villiers asked, ignoring the injunction.

  ‘I’m at the office,’ Weber said, impatience in the usually calm voice. ‘Now listen, a few minutes ago I had a call from a man who said that he had been tasked – that’s the word he used – by the major to instruct me to give you a message and to do so immediately.’

  De Villiers took a deep breath and held it. The major. After twenty-five years of conflict, he still didn’t know the major’s name. He didn’t know the name of the man who had sent him into Angola on a near-suicidal mission, the man who then had him arrested by the military police, held in detention and tortured. He had long known that the major had been behind the torture and the use of the mind-altering drugs that had left big gaps in his memory. This was the man who had persuaded him to leave the army – I wanted to be a soldier, he felt like crying out – and then pulled the plug on the covert operation that was so irregular and so secret that the regular SADF could not be associated with it. This is the man, De Villiers said to himself, who was somehow involved in the murder of my wife and children back in 1992.

  De Villiers might not have known the major’s name, but he knew that a message from him spelled trouble.

  ‘What did he say?’ he asked. A mere second had passed from the first mention of the major.

  There was a small pause. ‘He said: “And you thought we couldn’t reach you there in New Zealand.”’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ De Villiers asked. ‘“You thought we couldn’t reach you there in New Zealand.”’

  ‘No,’ Weber said. ‘“And you thought we couldn’t reach you there in New Zealand.”’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ De Villiers said. ‘What difference does it make? Are you sure you got it right?’

  This time there was a longer pause. ‘Pierre,’ Johann Weber said, ‘don’t argue with me. I can tell you at four in the afternoon what a witness said at ten in the morning, to the word, with every nuance and pause. It’s what I do every working day. I listen and interpret what people say. He said: “And …”’

  ‘But what does it mean, Johann? You always say that you’re a man who works with words. What does this mean?’

  ‘It means that something has already happened,’ Weber said immediately.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  De Villiers thought of possibilities. He could see no immediate reason for the major to send him a message. But they had come looking for him the last time he had been to South Africa. He’d been forced to take an earlier flight out of the country to evade them.

  ‘Did he say anything else?’ he asked.

  De Villiers could hear a door slamming and someone saying good morning. ‘Yes,’ Weber said softly. ‘He said that he had a message from the general for me. It was: “It’s time to get even.”’

  For a time neither spoke. Then De Villiers broke the silence. ‘What do you think this means, Johann?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ his brother-in-law said, ‘but I think we are going to find out soon.’

  ‘Well, I’ll think about it and get back to you,’ De Villiers said.

  ‘Yes, I think we are both going to have to think what we might have done to have them threaten us in this manner.’ A thought occurred to Weber. ‘Do you think it’s the same people who came looking for you last year when you were here?’

  ‘The major, for sure,’ De Villiers said. ‘But I can’t for the life of me imagine why.’

  ‘There must be a reason,’ Weber said.

  For a time neither man spoke while De Villiers tried to think of a reason. ‘I can understand that they would hold a grudge against me,’ he said eventually. ‘But not you.’

  ‘It might go back a long time,’ Weber suggested. ‘A long, long time.’

  De Villiers took the cue. ‘But why now? And what could they want?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Weber said and rang off.

  They found out within minutes.

  De Villiers dressed slowly as he thought the matter over. What happens at 5 p.m. here and at 7 a.m. in Durban that would affect both Johann and me?

  The answer came as he was tying a shoelace.

  Zoë comes home from school here at the same time that Liesl Weber goes to work there.

  De Villiers had stayed with the Webers for nearly three months in the winter of 2008 when he was receiving radiation therapy at the Durban Oncology Centre. He knew the timetable of their household intimately. Liesl Weber leaves for work at her Aids clinic at 6.45 a.m. three days a week: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

  It was Monday.

  ‘I think we’ve been threatened,’ he said to himself.

  ‘What did you say?’ Emma asked behind him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  He scrolled to his bother-in-law’s number on the cellphone and pressed Call. Weber answered on the second ring.

  The idea came to De Villiers as he spoke. ‘Contact Liesl immediately and take her to a safe place. I’m going to fetch Zoë.’

  ‘I was about to phone you and suggest the same thing,’ Weber said. ‘If they touch my wife, they’ll have a war on their hands.’

  De Villiers remembered his brother-in-law’s soft lawyer’s hands from their last meeting. They were not hands used to making war. ‘It won’t be a war,’ De Villiers said. ‘If they hurt Zoë, I will kill them in their beds, every one of them.’

  He ended the call and rushed from the house. It was a short walk to the school. He followed the route Zoë always took. Left into Murvale Drive. Right into Maugham, left into Priestly and left again into Wycherley Drive to the school. He had forgotten to take a coat or an umbrella. Cold rain ran down the back of his neck and spine. He shivered as he walked. Numerous children in their school uniforms were walking in the opposite direction. The school was deserted. Even the teachers had left. He retraced his steps and was soon back home. Emma was in the kitchen preparing dinner. He went into every room.

  Zoë was missing.

  He returned to the school along a different route, running this time. She was not supposed to take that route. It was longer and carried more traffic. When he arrived back home, Zoë had still not arrived.

  He went outside and phoned Johann Weber.

  Weber phoned back ten minutes later. Liesl Weber was missing too.

  Now the ‘And’ made sense.

  What did the major want?

  Johann Weber had a different question. ‘Why would anyone want to abduct my wife and threaten me?’

  De Villiers didn’t have an answer. ‘Could it be a client or an opponent who is disgruntled enough to want to get back at you?’

  ‘I’m a commercial lawyer, Pierre. I don’t deal with clients of that kind. And if I did, it would have nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ De Vill
iers conceded.

  ‘Why both of us at the same time?’ Johann Weber asked the logical question.

  De Villiers couldn’t think of a common enemy. ‘I can’t work it out.’

  For a while the only sound on the line was the static of the long-distance call while Johann Weber and Pierre de Villiers thought about it.

  They ended the call without having found an explanation that made sense.

  Auckland

  Monday, 15 June 2009 3

  Auckland has everything a great city should have, and more. A million and a half people, living in diverse suburbs stretching over sixty kilometres from north to south and forty from east to west. The warm Pacific to the east and the cold Tasman Sea to the west. Volcanic rock rising above the houses, islands dotting the ocean. It has a modern central city, but you can still find parking at any time in the main streets. Every suburb with its schools: preschool, primary, intermediate and high school, with children walking to and from school in their uniforms, the little ones wearing hats to protect them from the sun. Modern shopping centres, north and south, east and west. Modern people, from north, east and west. A blend of Polynesian, Asian and Caucasian. Infrastructure that works. Sanitation, electricity, water. Highways with traffic flow. Streets without potholes. Ferries carrying cars and passengers to the islands and to work. Marinas for the 200,000 boats. Parks with old, established trees for greenery. Universities, institutes for higher education and libraries. Sports fields and gymnasia. Beaches for swimming, fishing and sailing, and lots of inland waters. Municipal workers in the parks and police patrolling the streets at night.

  And the police are good. Very, very good.