The relationship between De Villiers and Kupenga had been a stormy one. The Maori detective had been suspicious from the start when De Villiers had joined the International Crimes Unit in Auckland as the most junior detective on the squad. De Villiers had ignored Kupenga’s snide comments about Sharpeville, the 1981 Springbok tour and other events, but when Kupenga called him a japie once too often, De Villiers had reacted and, for his trouble, had been suspended and charged with racism. They had made up later when Kupenga had withdrawn his complaint. The affair had ended with their simultaneous promotion, which had resulted in De Villiers being appointed head of the unit and Kupenga being returned to his home district as head of detectives for the region. De Villiers needed him now to bring Zoë’s recovery within the bounds of New Zealand law.
While De Villiers had no compunction to break the law in Europe or, for that matter, in South Africa, he had no intention of putting his New Zealand residence at risk by committing a serious crime there.
He got the number from DS Veerasinghe and called Detective Chief Inspector Kupenga on his cellphone. They were on first name terms, although Kupenga outranked De Villiers by one notch.
‘Tau,’ he began. ‘It’s Pierre de Villiers here. I’m calling from South Africa.’
There was a moment’s silence on the line, which could have been due to the distant connection or to Kupenga’s surprise. ‘What the fuck are you doing over there while we are looking for your daughter over here?’ Kupenga asked.
‘It’s a long story, my friend, but I don’t have the time to tell it now. I’ll tell you everything when I get back home.’
‘And when will that be?’
De Villiers had to make a quick calculation. New Zealand was two long-haul flights from Europe and he needed two days for his operations in Hamburg. ‘Four days at the most,’ he said.
‘Why are you calling me?’ Kupenga asked.
De Villiers didn’t waste words. ‘I think I know where Zoë is. I’m pretty certain she’s in your district.’
Kupenga played by the book. ‘You were ordered not to interfere with the investigation.’
‘I didn’t,’ De Villiers said. ‘I don’t even know who they are and what they are doing. They interviewed me in the beginning, and since then I haven’t heard from them.’
‘Umpff,’ Kupenga snorted. ‘I know you better than to believe that crap. And it’s no wonder, if you’re not even in the country.’
‘Tau, I don’t have time for games. Do you have good men at Whakatane?’
‘Is she in Whakatane?’ Kupenga asked, incredulity in his voice. ‘The last I heard they were looking for her in Auckland.’
De Villiers knew precisely where she was and had even viewed the address on Google Earth. ‘I’ll know the exact address in forty-eight hours,’ he lied, ‘and will tell you immediately so that you can take action.’
‘What action?’ Kupenga asked. ‘Are we talking AOS here?’
‘If my information is correct,’ De Villiers replied, ‘the Armed Offenders Squad will be out-armoured and outgunned by the kidnappers. We’re talking Special Forces here.’
‘How many people?’
‘Two men, heavily armed and well trained in urban guerrilla warfare, and two women. Not much known about them.’
‘Pierre,’ Kupenga said slowly, ‘you’re not telling me everything you know.’
‘Tau,’ De Villiers responded, ‘I’ve told you as much as you need to know.’ He made another calculation. At this time of year, in June, Hamburg was in the same time zone as South Africa, ten hours behind New Zealand. ‘I’ll phone you on your mobile at precisely 4 a.m. on Friday and give you the exact address. It will be within half an hour’s drive from Whakatane,’ he said and cut the connection.
At Frankfurt International, De Villiers bought three cellphones, one from each of the different cellphone outlets in the duty-free. He paid cash.
When he arrived in Hamburg, he didn’t go to the seamen’s lodge in St Pauli but booked into the Grand Elysée on Rothenbaumchaussee near the university where Mohammed Atta and the other nine-eleven plotters had planned their attacks on America. Once he was in his room, which faced the university complex, he sat down and perfected his own plotting. He strapped his Leatherman to his ankle and went downstairs for a light lunch in the Brasserie Grand Elysée. He played the tourist and stopped in front of a stand with brochures of the city’s attractions. The words Sankt Katharinenkirche caught his eye. The brochure was in German, but he picked it up in any event. He read as much as he could understand during the meal.
St Catherine’s Church was named after the patron saint of fire-men, nurses and the sick, De Villiers gathered. St Catherine of Siena (1347–1380). Known even during her lifetime for her ecstatic visions and for being immune to fire. He wondered whether she would care for him if his cancer came back. Not if … when, a voice whispered in his inner ear. His hand dropped involuntarily to rub the operation scar below his belly button. On the way out, he took an English version of the brochure and slipped it into his pocket.
There was a line of taxis waiting outside the restaurant. De Villiers asked the driver to take him to the Hamburg International Maritime Museum. He waited for the taxi to drive out of sight before he walked back towards St Catherine’s Church at Katharinenkirchhof 1.
The church was far more impressive than De Villiers remembered. He slowly walked around it, not like a tourist, but as a soldier scouting the scene of an operation. He craned his neck to look up at the spire a hundred and fifteen metres above the ground. The roof of the church and the spire were covered in verdigris. He’d read that the base of the church tower was the oldest remaining building in the city, and that it, together with the walls of the church, was the only part of St Catherine’s left standing after the Allies’ bombing raid named Operation Gomorrah. The sounds of an organ and a practising choir drifted out from one of the windows at the back of the church. De Villiers looked across to the churchyard where generations of parishioners had been buried.
According to the tourist brochure, the church dated back to before 1256 and was built on an island next to the harbour. A haven for sailors from around the world, it had served the spiritual needs of the maritime fraternity ever since. The church was destroyed by British bombers during Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, when forty-two thousand civilians were killed by the bombs and the firestorm they unleashed. A million Hamburgers had to be evacuated from their homes.
Where was St Catherine then, De Villiers wondered. Will she be here now to put out the fires burning inside me?
He carefully scouted the area around the church. There was a secluded area behind the church on Grimm-Strasse where tall shrubs would give some privacy. A body could be hidden there. The front steps of the church stood out in the open and were clearly visible from the road. Across the busy Bei den Mühren dual carriageway in front of the church was a canal. It would not do, he concluded, as it had a busy pedestrian and cycle path flush against its wall. There was continuous traffic along Bei den Mühren as it carried the road traffic along a principal quay of one of the busiest ports in Europe. De Villiers stood and watched for a while as heavy trucks laboured past in a continuous roll of thunder, almost to a schedule, like airplanes landing at a busy international airport. A gunshot would go unnoticed here. There were nooks and crannies behind the church. A man could be lured into one of the corners and dealt with there.
There were several cars parked behind the church, out of sight from Bei den Mühren. One in two was unlocked. A man could insist on a meeting inside a car and do the business there. He looked up at the spire of the church, as a tourist would. There were no windows. No one would see what was happening inside a car parked in the churchyard. There were no CCTV cameras in sight.
There was a notice board in front of the church with a stack of brochures for tourists. De Villiers took one. It was in English. It invited contributions towards the restoration of the choir organ. He put the brochure in his pocke
t and started making his way back to the city centre. At fifteen degrees and with a clear sky, the Hamburgers might think it a nice summer’s day, but to De Villiers it was cold. Auckland might be wet, he thought, but it isn’t cold. Yesterday, in Durban’s winter, the temperature had been in the mid-twenties.
He zipped up his jacket and walked on.
At a bicycle stand near St Pauli, he surreptitiously snipped two stainless-steel bicycle spokes from a thick wheeler chained to the rack. It appeared abandoned, its rear tyre flat and its front wheel missing.
St Catherine won’t do the job for me, he thought. She might cleanse by fire, but she won’t do the job for me.
Hamburg
Thursday, 25 June 2009 40
The bicycle spoke as an assassin’s weapon had its origins in the townships southwest of Johannesburg. The gangsters of the fifties and sixties – the tsotsis – plied their trade on the trains that carried workers from Soweto to and from their jobs in the city. The workers were usually paid in cash and, packed like sardines in the coaches of the dilapidated trains, were easy prey for the tsotsis.
The workers knew that you did not, under any circumstances, resist the tsotsi holding the sharpened spoke against your spine or under your throat. You didn’t even make eye contact as the tsotsi rifled through your pockets.
‘Tsk, tsk,’ the other passengers would say when you alighted. They knew their turn was just around the corner.
A sharp spoke in the ribs or in the spine: guaranteed to produce an instant heart attack or paralysis of the lower limbs. If you resisted, that is.
Those who did resist – perhaps they were new to the city or from a country to the north – were thrown off the moving trains, stripped of all identification and any valuable possessions. The railway police patrolling the lines would find them next to the tracks, the bodies mangled by the fall against the ballast and the railway sleepers. They didn’t care enough to investigate. There was far less legwork and paperwork involved in an inquest than a murder investigation. The head of the railway police in the area was a member of the Third Force and he had issued instructions not to bother with such cases. ‘Let them kill their own,’ he said in private. In public he vowed to make the trains safe, but never by risking the life of a single policeman.
The district surgeon – another member of the Third Force – routinely recorded the cause of death as Accidental death; multiple injuries consistent with a fall from a moving train. The workers were migrants – many without the papers that allowed them to be in the city in the first place, men who moved in the shadows – and their families in their distant villages would never learn what had happened to their breadwinners. Many assumed their men had taken new wives and were forever lost to them, but it was the spokes that had claimed them.
The bicycle spokes had numerous advantages over other weapons of the robber’s trade. They were ubiquitous. All you needed was a pair of pliers and a rough stone on which to sharpen them. They were disposable too, and no great loss when left in the victim’s body, where they would remain undetected during the cursory police investigation and the superficial postmortem. They could be concealed in the seam on the side of your trousers, just below the pocket, should an overly ambitious railway policeman brave it onto the platform to conduct a random search of the passengers streaming past. Possession of a dangerous weapon meant instant arrest and jail. While an assortment of home-made knives and sharpened screwdrivers and the Zulu’s beloved ntshumetshu clattered onto the gravel as the snaking queue came nearer the policeman, a stealthy hand would slip the spoke into its sheath in the seam.
The simple effectiveness of the spoke as a means of killing in public places and escaping detection, did not go unnoticed. The sharpened bicycle spoke became the tool of choice of a select band of assassins trained to kill on behalf of the state, sometimes in the local streets, sometimes in the concourse of an international airport or the lobby of a five-star hotel abroad, and sometimes in a public restaurant, where a man would suddenly slump over his plate and not respond to the Heimlich manoeuvre.
The Rathaus was less than five hundred metres away and De Villiers walked back through the business district. The buildings were old but solid. The brochure he’d read at the hotel said that the central district of Hamburg had been destroyed by Allied bombers during the latter part of the Second World War and there were photographs to support the fact. Still, De Villiers found it difficult to believe that a defeated nation could rebuild a whole city exactly as it had been before.
He walked past the Rathaus and sat on a small wooden bench on the Alter Wall, diagonally across from the bank. The HypoVereinsbank was housed in a nineteenth-century building three storeys high. He hid the Leatherman under the bench and went into the bank: there was no security, he noted. He went up to the customer services desk in the foyer and asked for a balance slip. There was $19,805,307.55 in the account. He went to the teller behind her bulletproof glass window and withdrew sixty thousand converted to euro to cover his expenses. He went back to the customer services desk to ask for a detailed account statement and folded it carefully. There would be time to study it later. He needed to know how much was government money and how much was interest.
He asked if he could speak to Herr Schmidt. Mr Schmidt had been his contact at the bank during the Alicia Mae operation, but no longer worked at the bank. De Villiers was directed to Herr Amsinck’s office. There he explained the nature of his business.
‘Yes,’ Mr Amsinck said in good but heavily accented English, ‘we could close the account. There will be no bank charges. What do you want to do with the funds in the account?’ Mr Amsinck asked.
‘There will be transfers in US dollars,’ De Villiers said. ‘And one domestic transfer.’
‘If you have the account details, it will be no problem. Just bring your passport again,’ Mr Amsinck said.
De Villiers stood up. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon with the details,’ he said and shook hands with the banker.
De Villiers retrieved the Leatherman and went to the university grounds near the hotel. He found a protected spot under a tree where there was a small wooden garden seat and sharpened the spokes with the Leatherman’s steel file. He tested the fit of the first spoke in his right hand. The head of the spoke was bent at a ninety-degree angle with a small bevelled head at the end where it would rest against the hub of the wheel. He pressed the head of the spoke hard against his palm and concluded that it would not cut the hard skin at the base of his palm, even if the spoke had to be driven through bone.
Two spokes, and then I’ll be done with this business, he said to himself. But if everything goes right, I’ll only need one.
He sat under the tree and closed his eyes, visualising the moment of the killing. In his mind’s eye, he slipped the spoke into his hand so that the head of the spoke would sit flush against the base of his palm, the length of it between the index and ring fingers. He practised with both hands, not knowing in advance which hand would have the best opportunity to strike when the time was right. His hands followed his thoughts and a passer-by might have thought that he was crazy.
The major’s face was constantly in his mind. He alternated hands in practising the moves.
De Villiers had killed before, but he was a soldier then and the killings had been his duty. A Russian colonel at Techamutete in Angola. Several Cuban officers and low-ranking soldiers. An assassin lying in wait to shoot a visiting foreign minister in Pretoria. He had used a sniper’s rifle then and had shot them from long range. He had no qualms about those killings, although the Russian woman still entered his dreams from time to time. He could see her falling backwards under the impact of the bullet, her blonde hair escaping from her military cap.
The sniper’s rifle is a long-range weapon, almost impersonal, and useless at close quarters. The spokes were for face-to-face contact: you had to look into the victim’s eyes.
De Villiers wasn’t sure he could do it. He had been trained to use the s
pokes and had once had the opportunity to use them, but he had walked away. He wondered if he would walk away again.
It was hardly a year earlier, when he had tracked the killers of his wife and children to Loftus, where they were security guards for a soccer boss. The killers had been convicted of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment, but the president had given them a pardon, calling them heroes of the African struggle for equality and democracy. De Villiers couldn’t understand how the killing of women and children could turn you into a hero. He’d decided to take his own revenge.
He had dreamed of the opportunity for years.
Yet, when the moment came, he couldn’t do it. He’d had the killer at his mercy in the toilets at the back of the stand. The man was coughing blood, the victim of a drug-resistant and untreatable strain of tuberculosis combined with Aids. He’d been likely to die in months, if not weeks. His two companions were in no better shape, having also contracted the deadly combination while in prison. In a way, De Villiers realised at the time, they had been sentenced to death, not to life imprisonment.
But it wasn’t the fact that they were dying and would be dead soon that stopped him using the spokes he had so carefully prepared. With the spoke pressed against his throat, the killer had divulged the identity of the man who had ordered the killings.
White man. Afrikaans. Completely bald. Pink eyes with white eyelashes. Said a general had sent him.
The major whose name De Villiers still didn’t know after all these years.
The man he was due to meet in less than twenty-four hours.
De Villiers tested the sharpness of the spokes on his index finger. He drew a drop of blood. He had time to spare and took a stroll along the lakes. He thought of his promise to Emma not to take any risks. He resolved not to, no matter what the provocation might be.
I have to be cold, clinical, like a soldier. And not just any soldier, he said to himself. More like a sniper. Taking deep breaths. Waiting for the heartbeat to slow. Relaxing every muscle except the trigger finger’s. Watching the target intently. Suffering no distractions. Waiting. Waiting and waiting, until the right moment. Then pack up and leave quickly, without leaving any trace behind.
A Sailor's Honour Page 22
