Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  “How could I unmask him?”

  “It’s not general knowledge.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He thinks Zoë doesn’t know.”

  “And that’s important?”

  “I sometimes think that is all that is important to my husband.”

  “Well. Let me ask you something. Do you think this acquaintanceship with Guillaume played any part at all in his decision not to meet with Nyati that night?”

  “Tom, that’s a question I have often asked myself. I don’t know. I wish I did. But if you find an answer, you understand, don’t you, how destructive that could be? After all these years. Very few of us, from Old Deep, have left the circle or introduced new members into it. All we have is each other. We go on vacation together, like now. We have parties. We phone. We e-mail. We marry. Our children know each other. Old Deep is our point of departure. It’s our guarantee that we can trust one another. Like a cabal. A secret society. A lodge. We measure ourselves against what we were then and we are proud of what we have become. We have our alpha males and our not-so-alpha males, our den mothers, our courtesans. We make allowances for each other, those of us who made it this far. Some died. Some survived. And the survivors have built their lives on those same friendships they formed in The Struggle. On each other. But, right down at the bottom of it, we have our rules, our beliefs, our faith, if you like, that we all in one way or another held the line. To discover now that one of us …”

  One day earlier, her disclosure would have seemed like a clincher. Riaan van Rensburg had been one of the principle suspects. His wife’s confession would have confirmed his position at the top of the list.

  But as I hurried to my suite, up the curving sweep of the staircase two steps at a bound, along the long corridor covered in a chic, rough weave of sand-coloured seagrass carpeting, I was thinking only of the scribbled address Jessica de Vere had given me.

  Kobus Theron. Fifth Street. Nature’s Valley.

  Nature’s Valley was another, far less glitzy vacation resort no more than a 20-minute drive along the coast, a hideaway amid indigenous forests favoured by Afrikaner vacationers reliving their pioneering days in darkly shaded log cabins. Kobus Theron, the self-confessed murderer of Solomon Nyati, was the architect of the entire conspiracy at Crystal Sands, and with him lay the answers to Lily Nyati’s questions.

  I entered the suite and hurried to retrieve the black concertina file from the antique dresser. At first glance it looked undisturbed, exactly as I had left it. But as I spread its folders open to again go over Theron’s testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I saw quite clearly that one compartment was empty. A page had shifted from one folder to another. Part of the transcript was in the wrong numerical order. The missing pages included those concerning Nyati’s meetings with me and Jess.

  Something else was missing too, but I could not quite place what it was. For the first time since I had taken the suite, the phone rang. I did not initially recognise the unfamiliar buzzing. I imagined that the caller might be Vanessa van Rensburg, and was prepared to be curt with her. But instead, I hear the voice of Zoë Joubert.

  “Disturbing you?”

  “Not at all. Never!”

  She laughed gently.

  “I wondered if you would be free later on. Maybe after dinner? For a night cap?”

  “Of course. I would love to. But don’t you have commitments?”

  “Mills has a sleepover with her friends and everyone else from the house has other plans. We would have the place to ourselves.” I heard the rush of wind over the phone and guessed she was calling from a cell phone.

  “Where are you?”

  “The Robberg. We’re all waiting for Riaan, of course. He’s been held up somewhere. No, wait. Here he is. So will you come? Later on? Please.”

  “Of course.”

  “Riaan wants a word.”

  There was a pause as the phone changed hands, covered to muffle some indistinct exchange. Then he spoke.

  “Hello, Mr Ambassador, Mr Spook,” Riaan van Rensburg said. His voice sounded as if he had cupped a hand around the phone so as not to be overheard.

  “Before you plan any socials, I thought I’d let you know that I’m planning a little meeting tonight with all the ODAC set. Extraordinary General Meeting, so to speak. You might want to be there, Kinzer. Or should I say TJ?”

  Part Three

  Nyati wriggled his legs through his manacled hands in the back of the car and started unexpectedly to fight back. Theron fired a single 7.65mm round over his shoulder. The resistance came to an abrupt halt. Theron retrieved the brass cartridge case but not the bullet. Later, De Kock suggested he throw his damned Skorpion into the sea. But Theron could not quite bring himself to part with such a treasured, trusted companion.

  Twenty-One

  TURNING EAST ALONG THE N2 highway, I drove out of Plettenberg Bay, barely taking note of the irrigated fairways at Goose Valley and the moored legions of motor boats on the Keurbooms River. There had been a time when the country’s disparities would have produced righteous indignation: sprinklers for the golfing elite while the caddy-class lived without running water; floating gin palaces for some while others could not even aspire to a bicycle.

  But liberal umbrage was no match for the concerns that were beginning to dawn on me at the prospect of finally tracking down the one person who knew the full story, a person whose genius for lethal violence was a matter of public record. On the emotional register, egalitarian pique falls a long way behind the stirrings of fear.

  The road on the outskirts of town was clogged with family saloons and SUVs towing trailers full of beach gear and boogie boards, but as I progressed further, the traffic eased. Long-distance buses and heavy tanker trucks monopolised the inside lane, heading on for the long haul on the toll road towards Port Elizabeth and beyond, cutting through the luscious foliage of the Garden Route, soaring over ravines where signboards told motorists not to feed the baboons.

  In my rear-view mirror, some way back, I espied the familiar outline of a white pickup, but such cars were common. I thought little of it, concentrating more on finding my way.

  All I had was a street name and no inkling of how Theron would receive me. In a matter of days the statute of limitations would liberate him from the likelihood of any further inquiry into his past. More pressing, Riaan van Rensburg seemed to be hoping that by discrediting me he would save the tatters of his own reputation – in the eyes of Zoë Joubert above all. I had a sinking feeling that, somehow or other, he had learned far more about my inquiries than was healthy for either of us.

  As an offering for Theron I had brought a carton of locally produced cigarettes and a bottle of imported Famous Grouse Scotch. No single malts for assassins! As a precaution – in case of a formal interview – I had packed a tape recorder and legal pad. I was not sure why but I had stashed my sharp-bladed Swiss Army knife in my pocket – an improbably optimistic weapon against a battle-hardened operative of the dreaded Koevoet.

  A large, green signpost pointed the way to Nature’s Valley and I turned right onto a narrow, two-lane black-top across a flat plain. Smaller roads splintered off at right angles leading to distant homesteads and farms clinging to a narrow shelf of land between the sea and the ridges of the Tsitsikamma range.

  Soon the road began a steep descent, twisting and turning along the side of a ravine where rock-falls had left football-sized chunks of debris. The light weakened, filtered through creepers and thick-trunked, ancient trees. Then, the road released me onto the flatlands of the coast.

  It seemed an improbable bolt hole for the leader of an apartheid-era death squad.

  The tide surged through a narrow, rocky inlet, then slowed and fanned out in spangled shoals and flat beaches. Children frolicked in the sand or floated on airbeds in the slowing current, staring into the mysteries of water – shells shifting, whorls of light refracting tiny rainbow prisms, crabs scuttling on secret missions, far more impene
trable than mine.

  I tried to clear my mind, the way I had been trained; to make a mental list of priorities. Zoë Joubert and the future of our relationship figured prominently in my calculations. Every amorous instinct was telling me to abandon this fool’s errand, to return and silence Riaan van Rensburg with whatever threat I could devise to defuse the time bomb of his disclosures. But I could not again break my pledge to the widows.

  Van Rensburg had clearly plundered my trove of documents (had his wife helped him, like a conjuror’s assistant whose sequined attire and leggy looks distracted the audience from the sleight-of-hand?) Vanessa van Rensburg had called me Hercule Poirot, but it was her husband who was planning the drawing-room crescendo, the finale of disclosure, the unmasking of the villain. Yet the cast of suspects was wider than he could conceive, certainly more fragile than I had imagined when I embarked on the mission assigned by Lily Nyati.

  Guided by the scrap of paper from Jess Chase I drove through the grid streets of Nature’s Valley. It struck me as a dark and forbidding place, the wood-frame houses set back in shaded foliage where you would not be surprised to find a venomous menagerie of snakes and spiders. The house numbers were marked on small wooden boards made indistinct by years of exposure to the heat and humidity of the coast. I drove slowly.

  The address I had for Theron on Fifth Street matched a plot with a small, wooden home but no street number on display. I drove past and reversed into a leafy turn-off some 50 yards further on. All I could hear when I switched off the engine was the distant rumble of the surf.

  A white pickup was parked in the driveway – not the fancy kind with four-wheel drive and fat tires, but an old working model with a battered flat-bed and chipped panels. The tail gate was crusted with ochre dirt from long journeys on unpaved roads. A stout one-piece fishing rod with a worn Penn surf-casting reel and heavy-gauge nylon line was clipped to the hood, stretching back over the cab in a taut curve.

  Theron was a man who had spent his adult life at the cutting edge of security forces, feared and envied across Africa. As a field commander he had called up airstrikes, napalm runs, reinforcements, medical choppers for the wounded – daka-dakas, as the military argot had it. As a security policeman he represented the final executor in a chain that stretched directly to the highest echelons of power in Pretoria, hangman, judge and jury – usually in that order.

  His actions had the imprimatur – if not the formal, written authorisation – of those untouchable colonels and brigadiers who sent him on his missions with a nod or a wink: the paper trail of accountability stopped at his desk, his office, his Skorpion. If he announced himself as Theron of the security police, the introduction bore an unspoken threat of cells and beatings.

  During the emergency years, people in his position had been formally indemnified against any appeal by their victims. Apartheid made them immune to justice.

  I resisted the thought that his relationship to power was not so far removed from mine as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. We both drew authority from office. We demanded access by right. We were the extension of remote and all-powerful authorities. In the end, we could both say that we were only following orders. But they said that at Nuremberg, too.

  Now, like me, he was a man without a calling card, without the validation of a laminated ID denoting the embrace of great institutions. The collapse of white power left him naked. His formal title, Captain, was a rank from a lost army.

  He was Kobus Theron. Just as I was Tom Kinzer. But I doubted whether such formalities meant that Theron had forgotten his many years of training and expertise in darker arts than I could imagine. He was still a seasoned killer – and I was still a former functionary versed only in the niceties of diplomacy.

  The afternoon seemed to slow. There was no movement from the house and I began to think that maybe Theron was at the beach, or out shopping with his wife, or in bed with a mistress. I realised I knew nothing about him, or how he would react to being cornered in his lair by an upstart American.

  What I wanted was one name from him. But I had no idea what price Theron would set on that information and I had no plan to prise it out of him.

  “And you, I imagine, would be Thomas Kinzer. Ambassador. Or should I maybe say: Dr Kinzer, I presume.”

  I had not heard or sensed anyone approach. The passenger door of my rental car had opened and he had clambered in without invitation.

  He smiled ruefully, as if we were old, familiar enemies, too weary for battle, ready for truce. He offered a hand to shake. I took it without thinking.

  “Kobus Theron is my name,” the man said. I must have recoiled for he tightened his grip. “Don’t worry about my hand. There is no blood on it right now.”

  His appearance had not changed all that much from the images in Ray Gilliomee’s book.

  His close-cropped, gingery beard traced his jawline, while his top lip and neck were clean shaven. He wore faded blue rugby shorts, a lightly checked short-sleeve shirt and veldskoen suede ankle boots without socks. His legs, forearms and the V in the neck of his shirt were all tanned in a deep, nutty way that had nothing to do with vanity.

  The face of his watch was hidden by a leather flap – a device to guard against the scratches of wait-a-bit thorn in the bush and to cloak glints of reflected light that might draw enemy fire. His narrow-brimmed hat was made of faded camouflage material. A jagged tear along one side suggested a narrow escape – a lucky charm, a talisman.

  He sat easily, poised to run or relax, depending on the requirement of circumstances. I had half-expected a boozy, gone-to-seed blowhard – hence the supply of whisky and cigarettes I had brought with me – but there was no obvious hint of decline or vulnerability.

  “So you came to see me. I had been expecting something, sometime. From the widows’ side, maybe. From Miss Chase. I did not know what. “

  The voice was deep, rough – a smoker’s voice – strongly accented. He was not looking directly at me, but peering out of the car.

  If you could imagine sitting on a park bench in Berlin in 1950, chatting casually with a camp Kommandant, the gruesome oddity of the situation would be the same.

  This was a man responsible for a roll-call of martyrs – the Pebco Three, the Cradock Four, Biko, Goniwe, Nyati. At the TRC, Theron had been named in some of the most appalling testimony concerning the Vlakplaas farm in the Transvaal where they cremated their victims over barbecue pits and drank beer to while away a long night of incineration.

  “You picked a pretty poor spot for a stake-out, Mr Ambassador, if I may say so. In one of my units you would not have lasted five minutes.”

  “I would not have wished to last one minute inside one of your units.”

  “As you wish,” he said. “So what brings you here?”

  “Did Jess – Mrs De Vere – tell you what I’m doing?”

  “Not so much.”

  “But you did talk to her.”

  “She had my number. Yes.”

  “And you agreed to this meeting?”

  “That is why I let you find me.”

  “So what did Mrs De Vere tell you?”

  “She said you would help me square things with the widows,” he said as he slid out of the car.

  A group of women wearing the pale green uniform of domestic staff walked by and he said something to them in isiXhosa, the language of the Eastern Cape, eliciting what seemed to be genuine laughter.

  Their voices receded in the hot, still air. There was no other sound, not even crickets.

  I locked the car and joined Theron to walk to his house.

  “I do different things now,” he was saying. “Dangerous things, but better things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Mines,” he said. “Bloody mines.”

  It sounded like: mahns, bleddy mahns.

  “Anti-personnel. Anti-tank. You name it. They plant them, whoever they are. I lift them. Plenty times, back in the old days, the Koevoet days in Ovamboland, my Cassp
ir hit mines and up I went. Flying through the air. Ever been hit by a mine? I thought not. You spiral in slow motion. When you land, if you are still alive, you are deaf as a post. People run up to you and ask if you are alright and you can’t hear a bleddy thing. So that’s what I do, I go into minefields and I lift mines. Angola. Mozambique. Cambodia. Balkans. Humanitarian work, they call it. You see those piccanins with stumps for arms and legs and you know it was wrong to put those mines there in the first place. So in my own way, I put things right.”

  “What else?”

  “Sometimes, I do close security, for the bigwigs when they don’t trust the locals so they want a few of the old timers along for the ride. But mostly it’s mines. Not so much the anti-tank kind, the big TM-57s that blew my Casspirs sky high. They need a lot to trigger. One twenty, one fifty kilos – a damn sight more than some African lightie in a village or even an old man on a bicycle. But it’s the anti-personnel mines, the fragmentation mines, the PFM-1s and the OZM-4s that I hate, the kind that do not always kill, that maim and cripple, and move around so you cannot find them. These days they say you can use sonar and all that to look for them but in the end you have to be out there on the ground and you may never come back, not in one piece at least – like you in this country, hey, Mr Ambassador, walking into a minefield? You hit the mine and, bang, what is there? Red haze. Nothing else. But I am happy with my job. I lifted the mines along the power lines to Mozambique so they could open the new game park across the border from Kruger Park. Seven times I got shot at because there was still a war on and I must have made a juicy target. Once I made it out on foot with a wounded comrade – black guy, before you ask – because there was no med-evac like in the old days. And when they opened the game park, Mandela came and cut the ribbon. And he shook my hand. Mandela shook this hand. With a lot less fuss than what you did. So how about that? Look at it. Is it clean? Can you see blood?”

  We had reached his front door and I hesitated to enter.