There was, of course, another option.
I could simply resolve – here and now – never to see any of these people again. I could turn right on the N2, to Port Elizabeth, past the turn-off to Humansdorp where Molly Blackburn had died, past all the phantoms of Nyati’s death. I could drive to the airport, book a ticket on the first flight out. Abandon the entire project. Cut and run. Have my chattels sent on to me. Port Elizabeth–Johannesburg– London–Washington. The cost of freedom – if not release – was a few thousand dollars, less than my fee at the conference.
Or, I could turn left, grab my bags, fuel the car for a fast late-night run to Cape Town, reversing the whole sorry route that had brought me here – a feeble Marlow, scuttling down-river as the awful message from Kurtz became too onerous to bear.
The horror, the horror! Mistah Kurtz, he very much alive!
I wished Theron had miscalculated on some far-flung minefield, dissolved in his “red haze” to spare me his droning disclosures, his psycho-games, his faked truth.
I reached the junction with the N2. Either way the road looked dark, uninviting, as if everyone else knew something I did not and had resolved to stay home.
Then I thought of Riaan van Rensburg, plump, sweating, holding forth like some kind of ludicrous Torquemada in beach shorts.
As I turned, the headlights of a vehicle approached from Nature’s Valley, hanging briefly in the rear-view mirror like twin moons.
With one hand on the steering wheel, I took another pull at the whisky bottle, then lit another cigarette. The speedometer crept up above the limit of 120 kilometres per hour – 75 miles per hour according to my mental calculation – but there was little traffic on the road. And besides, I was a foreigner, an outsider. If the traffic police pulled me over, what could they do? Deport me, an ex-ambassador still on the State Department database? Send me home? How convenient would that be for those who defined the purpose of my stay as “conference purposes only”.
The speedometer nudged towards 150 kilometres per hour – 90 miles per hour – but apart from a single vehicle a long way back there was no one else going my way. In the opposite direction an Intercape overnight bus rumbled by, pursuing a heavy tanker truck, duelling for dominion of the night. The sky was remarkably clear, the stars etched brightly on the darkness. I rolled down my window to allow a chill draft to ventilate the car.
The flashing light appeared suddenly close in the rear-view mirror.
The speedometer indicated that I was travelling at 130 kilometres per hour – 80 miles per hour – and I took my foot from the gas pedal.
Instinctively, I brought the rental car to a halt at the roadside, scrambling to push the whisky bottle onto the floor as the tires skidded on the gravel. In the wing mirror I saw a flashlight approaching while the blue light blinked directly behind me.
“It’s an old trick, the flashing light,” Kobus Theron said as he kneeled by the window of my hire car. “But effective.”
Apart from the flashlight, he was carrying a worn machine pistol.
“Here is the deal, Mr Ambassador,” he said. “I will tell what I know. You will take me to the widows.”
“And the gun?”
“Insurance. Take it or leave it.”
Twenty-Four
WITH HIMSELF AT CENTRE STAGE, on the same deck as had been the venue for Zoë Joubert’s party, Riaan van Rensburg had arranged loungers and deck chairs in a semi-circle.
At Theron’s urging, I chose not to declare my presence, but to remain hidden in the shadows off-stage, like an understudy in the wings awaiting the call.
Van Rensburg had positioned hurricane lamps on the balustrade and at various points among his audience so that, from a distance, the gathering might have been mistaken for some kind of formal assembly. A coven perhaps, or a Greek tragedy, or the appropriately macabre setting for the denouement of a particularly grisly murder story. (Which, of course, is what it was intended to be.)
He wore black cargo trousers and a loose, dark shirt, his black hair slicked back. As the members of the Old Deep set took their designated places – ordered to this lounger or that chair by a gesture from the satanic Poirot himself – he paced back and forth on his webbing sandals, deep in thought, sipping from a heavy tumbler.
If he was pleased with the turnout, he gave no indication of it. Around him, looking variously anxious and curious, mystified and querulous, the players in his orchestra awaited the tap of his baton – Jessica de Vere at the centre-rear, as if a timpanist (Chris de Vere was not in evidence), Zoë Joubert and Rod Harris as the wind section, Ferd and Cobra off to the right like ponderous, quarrelsome double-basses, Vanessa van Rensburg close to the maestro himself, doubtful and troubled, taut as the strings of a fiddle. Theron held me back in the darkness, the natural milieu of our erstwhile trades.
“I have been doing some homework,” Riaan van Rensburg began. “Something that affects us all, where we come from, where we’re going.”
A snuffle of suppressed laughter from the double-bass section brought him to a halt in mid-sentence and he paused, raising a hand.
“Guys, this is no joke.”
From a pocket of his cargo pants, Van Rensburg pulled a folded sheet of yellow A4 legal paper. Wrapped in it was a letter in a grubby envelope with gaudy stamps showing fish and birds.
“Exhibit A, m’lud,” one of the lawyers said scornfully, drawing ripples of laughter from the others on the deck.
“I’m obliged,” another chimed in.
With the moon high behind him, Riaan van Rensburg scanned his closest friends. Among them, he knew, he had been mocked for his serial failures, a forlorn cuckold, yearning always for the successes that lay just beyond his grasp. Now, they had no choice but to listen to him.
His latest wife was sitting to his right. No sign of her companion. Her eyes pleaded with him not to proceed, but he ignored her.
At centre stage, he caught another questioning look from Zoë Joubert. How haughty and superb she looked; how she would admire his handiwork once she understood its purpose – purging the group of its rottenness; not simply expelling the outsider, Kinzer, who had proved so disruptive – so threatening – but cleansing the Old Deep set itself of the hypocrisy on which it had been founded. A Judas, a traitor would be exposed; a new era would begin with a clean slate. As the inquisitor, he would finally be worthy. And if he won her, it would not matter that he lost all else – wives or children, lovers or friends.
The ocean stretched to the horizon, black and silver, below a clear, southern sky embroidered with the familiar markers that brought comfort to navigators in treacherous waters – Orion’s Belt, the Southern Cross.
“There are two things I have to say. One relates to our visitor, the American Kinzer. The other relates to us.”
At the mention of my name, the group became still, steadying itself after the initial ribaldry. Zoë Joubert looked up sharply and caught Van Rensburg’s eye. He smiled to reassure her but, in the up-light of the hurricane lamps, his face seemed to crumble into a clownish grimace.
“This,” he said, waving the documents he had taken from the pocket of his cargo pants, “is evidence, exhibits A to Z. What it shows is that Kinzer is not some passing conference delegate, some ambassador. Remember all those questions? Who was there with Nyati? Who attended, who did not? Who was with whom? Who knows who his real masters are? The CIA? Our own NIA? Maybe some private outfit, out to get the dirt on all or one of us for who knows what purpose.”
He was looking directly at Jessica de Vere. “But there is no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that his intention was to discover something about us, all of us, that would divide us, discredit us. Read this letter and you will see how cleverly he had arranged his cover so that he looked like an emissary of Nyati’s widow, so that he had the ultimate credibility of support from a genuine heroine of The Struggle.”
He handed the letter around. Still no smoking gun.
“But this,” Van Rensburg went on, brand
ishing the single sheet of yellow A4 legal-pad paper with scribblings in my own handwriting, “this is the real clincher. This is the poison he was trying to spread.”
He glanced to Zoë Joubert for approval but she was shaking her head, staring directly at him, her eyes fixed on him. Vanessa van Rensburg glowered – in rage or pity it was hard to tell.
Rod Harris reached out to take the hand of Ricky Rajbansi. But his acolyte withdrew and seemed to melt away. Harris tilted back his head, peering up at the stars. Then he looked across at Zoë Joubert, shrugging his shoulders, smiling a wan smile, as if to say that no secret lasts forever. Porter, the academic, stared out at the ocean, unconcerned, shielded by revolutionary purity.
The sheet of yellow paper passed quickly around the gathering.
“This is inadmissible. This is nothing,” Cobra said with his courtroom sneer, less familiar now that he had joined his former comrades in The Struggle in the scramble for a niche in the rainbow’s spectrum.
“Absolutely.” Rugby-boy spoke now. “We know nothing of its provenance. It is just a sheet of paper. It has no status in law. And this is not a court.”
“Unless it’s a kangaroo court,” Cobra added, not so sotto voce.
“This is not just a piece of paper,” Riaan van Rensburg said, his voice rising. “This piece of paper is in Kinzer’s handwriting. It was in Kinzer’s hotel room. It is his list of suspects. Most of our names are on it, but only one has been ticked. You can all see whose name that it is. Rod Harris!”
The poet made to rise in defence, but Vanessa van Rensburg jumped up before he could speak.
“Ticked? Lists? What is this, Riaan? McCarthy?” she said. “Some kind of old Russian-type show trial? Sure there are lists. So what? There were always lists – lists of good guys, lists of bad guys, lists in police files, lists of lovers, lists in our heads, for God’s sake. But you don’t presume guilt because of a tick on a piece of paper. Who ticked it? You? Kinzer? The room maid? Maybe the tick means good guy and the rest are all bad guys. And wouldn’t that be closer to the truth? Can we all say we were so virtuous? Were none of us ever called in? Did none of us get the offer: how about a little cooperation, a little koöperasie? Isn’t that part of who we are now? Just survivors who managed to scrape through The Struggle intact – not saints, but no sinners either”.
A voice from the crowd said, “Speak for yourself, Vannie, baby.”
“And you, of all people, Riaan,” she continued. “How can you stand there as if you were so holy?”
“We all know about Riaan.” Zoë Joubert had risen to speak now. “He wasn’t the only one.”
The deck fell silent.
Riaan van Rensburg stared at his friends, looked from one to the other with hangdog, questioning eyes. Each of them nodded assent. Finally, he looked for confirmation from his wife and she nodded, too. They had known! And the one who chose to slide home the stiletto with such effortless, sweet-faced ease was Zoë Joubert, who was speaking again with a new urgency.
“We’ve all seen this piece of paper now. What can I say? Blame me. I brought this American into our midst. I thought I knew him. I was conned as much as Riaan was conned, as much as Rod Harris was pressured.”
Until this point, she had been looking directly at Riaan van Rensburg but then she turned and scanned the assembled membership of the Old Deep set. Her eyes came to rest on Jessica de Vere, staring back at her, biting her lower lip.
“I happen to know why Rod’s name has a tick next to it,” Zoë Joubert was saying. “Rod is who he is, how he is. That has not been exactly a secret for a long time. But it has nothing to do with this list. The people involved – and they are not all here – know the reason. They know how wrong it is to depict Rod Harris as a traitor when he was a greater hero than any of us for the sake of the one person who could really be hurt by all of this. I will not say more. But please let us not squabble. We have survived. We have been each other’s best friends, neighbours, sometimes more than that, sometimes less. We don’t have to ask how many sugars we take in our coffee, or what we have for breakfast, or which newspaper we read, or where we were when Nyati died or when Madiba was freed. We know. We are family. We take each other on trust. We assume that if people were less than noble, they acted for a purpose, that there was no malice aforethought and any damage was limited. We know things, collectively and singly, about each other. We don’t always say them. The Old Deep set is more complicated than it looks. It always has been. It exists on our sins as much as our virtues, whatever they may be. But we cannot do anything but destroy it if we go on like this. And ask yourselves, look around. Take all these people out of your lives and what’s left? Who would we call on in bad times? Who would we share a concert ticket with? Who would you rely on to listen to your story without taking advantage? And who would you expect to tell their story to you?”
Now, finally, Rod Harris rose to speak. He removed his odd, Alice-in-Wonderland hat and held it clasped between his hands.
“Condemned by a tick on a piece of paper. Poetic justice? Poet’s justice? Justice for the poet? Well, if you all want to condemn me, fine. I don’t plan to dignify these proceedings with any kind of defence. There are much more important things at stake. People. Tender souls. And I will not be the one to break trust. But I ask all of you this: if you seriously believe I betrayed Solomon Nyati, then consider also the person who is bringing the allegation. The same person we have protected and sheltered all these years, even though we all knew his secret.”
“Terrific,” Riaan van Rensburg said. His voice had thickened. “Condemn Van Rensburg as a collaborator, the scapegoat more like. No judge or jury, mark you. Shoot the messenger. And everyone else is fine and cosy with their little secrets. But I think the secrets and the subterfuge have gone on long enough. Take this lot out of your lives and so what? At least there’d be some honesty. Everything we have built is built on lies. Who did what to whom when. To listen to La Joubert and her ex-husband it sounds as if it was all okay to play footsy a little with the regime. But the whole point was that we were in The Struggle. We were better than that. I have gone through hell because I once mistakenly said things I should not have said to someone I should never have talked to. I told him Rod Harris was gay. I told him the marriage to Zoë was a sham. And I spent years paying for that. Suffering, drinking, losing wives and partners. And now you all turn around and say: oh, we all know Riaan was a turncoat. We all knew he was on the security police books. Don’t you understand that’s why I didn’t go to the meeting with Nyati? So that I wouldn’t have anything to tell them! So I wouldn’t know where it was or who was there. All I did was drive the fucking Kombi while you were all playing sticky fingers in the back. And you all knew, did you? Did you know the times I got this close to ending it, with pills, with a razor blade, in the gas oven? Did you know how often I woke up knowing one more woman had taken a look at my sorry, drunken mess of a life and decided not to bother, thank you very much and walked away or climbed into bed with someone else? So, now we all know about me, what about the rest of you? Shall we do a roll call? Shall we say who was there that night, one after the other? Shall we say who we told about it later? Because for all your forgiveness, Zoë, someone told the Special Branch about that meeting. Someone betrayed Nyati. Someone was responsible for his death. So let’s see who else was not there? Let’s ask where they were, hey Jess, Miss Reporter. You weren’t there so where were you, then? And Porter and Mr Poet? What were you up to because I’m damned sure that whatever else I might have done I did not betray Solomon Nyati.”
“None of you did.”
Twenty-Five
NOT EVEN RIAAN VAN RENSBURG could have been hoping for this deus ex machina. The faces in the lamplight turned towards us. The expressions: bewilderment, incomprehension, surprise, fear. Theron, remember, was carrying the machine pistol with which he had killed Nyati.
“What the …,” I heard someone say. Riper expletives rippled around the audience. Then silence as
Theron moved into centre stage. Riaan van Rensburg shrank away.
“If you do not know who I am from the TRC, I am Captain – ex-Captain – Kobus Theron, formerly of Koevoet in Namibia. If you are looking for the person who killed Solomon Nyati, then look at me. I did it. With this gun in my hand. I have told it already. And my reasons.”
He raised the machine pistol aloft. The assembly seemed to close in on itself.
“There was no informer. That was just a line what I told the TRC. It was just mischief to hide the truth. The reason we knew his whereabouts was that his car was bugged. We had the technology from our overseas friends. We didn’t need informers. We knew where he was every hour of the day. We took him out when it suited us and it suited as that night on that road at that hour. Klip ’n klar! There was no Judas.”
“How do we know you are telling the truth?” Cobra rose, drawing himself up as if confronting a witness under oath.
“Ach, the lawyer,” Theron said. “The lawyer who drew up all those contracts for the sanctions busters while all the time he was telling us how bad we were. Shall I go on?”
Cobra sat in abrupt silence.
“I thought not,” Theron went. “I could go on like this. I could say how many of you met my colleague, Mr Guillaume. In Geneva. In New York. On your trips. But I choose not to. I could tell you who went to whose bed and who stayed at home and waited. I can tell you who was turned and who was not. I can bring you the tapes, transcripts. The photographs, even. But I do not choose to.”
“But if you think any of your good selves played any part in this particular sorry mess, all of you is wrong. Would you like to know why? The answer is simple: we did not need you. What were you? A few names on a few files. Fifth columnists. But you did not change events. Solomon Nyati would have died on that night anyhow, whoever he had met in PE. Because I had chosen that night, because it suited me. It was business. Business in a war. There had been matters like it before and later. None of you was important. Sure you were an irritant. Some of you I admired. “
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