Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  “Some of you had real courage” – he glanced towards Rod Harris – “Some of you didn’t. Some chickened out” – this time his judgement fell on Porter, the tough-guy revolutionary, who could not meet his eye and scrambled to leave the gathering, Cobra in close pursuit.

  “But there were only two real players in this war,” Theron said, “people like me and people like Nyati. We were the combatants. The rest was window dressing, white liberals talking to foreign reporters like Miss Chase here – good evening, Mrs De Vere – then going home to the white areas we kept safe for them to write it up for the overseas papers and TV.”

  Jess fumbled in her handbag for a cigarette, then searched in vain for her gold cigarette lighter. When she did not find it, she glared at me.

  “Sure we liked to have lots of names to play with, match up, blackmail and so forth. There was plenty of idle chitchat. But when it came to the real war, there had to be a winner or a loser and all you were doing was picking your bets,” Theron went on. His rumbly, smoky voice seemed to enter your head and reverberate from within.

  “And you won your bets! You cashed in the chips with big houses and nice cars while we who had protected you went before the TRC to confess our sins and worse. Because we fought the war and you did not fight the war. You were spectators. Now, Nyati and his people, they were fighters, warriors, soldiers. And they knew that people die in wars. He knew he would die. He even knew who would kill him. We met once and I tried to turn him. Did you know that? I had him in a cell in PE and I knew it would do no good to beat him any longer, so I threatened him – with his family, his friends, his reputation. Nothing fazed him. So I told him: “You go now but one day, soon, I will come for you and you will die if you don’t change your ways, Mr Nyati.”

  “And he said: ‘you can do what you want to me but I will not change and the only thing that will change will be this. When you kill me, you will sign your own death warrant. When you kill me you will make me one more martyr and sooner or later there will be too many martyrs for the world to take.’”

  “So we both knew where we stood. He signed his death warrant. I signed mine. Call it our covenant. He died. My life was ruined. So tell me now who killed who. If you want to blame anybody, blame your American friend here for poking his nose in where it was not wanted. Blame Ambassador Kinzer for trying to make Nyati into a Mandela. And me, of course. Blame me. I took the rap when no one else would.”

  The deck began to empty, a rapid tide ebbing without farewells. Perhaps it was the sight of the ugly, worn machine pistol, or simply the appearance of Kobus Theron, this monstrous throw-back – the enemy, forgotten in all the bonhomie of the new era, the darkness that fell across the nation’s dream.

  The silence filled with the sound of engines starting, cars driven away in reckless haste.

  Riaan van Rensburg remained, Poirot to the end.

  “So that’s it, hey?” he said. “The American walks in with his stooge, his assassin, and the show’s over. We need to know nothing else. Uncle Sam’s puppet has told us the truth so we can all go home. Doesn’t that tell us everything? I mean, if you had asked whose side they were on, back then, they would have said they were the good guys, like they always want to be. But who is it now? So whatever Theron said, that’s not the truth, Kinzer, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why should we believe Theron? Why should we believe an apartheid killer, especially one with a gun?”

  Theron rolled his eyes and placed the machine pistol on the wooden deck, squatting beside it. He raised both hands in the air in mock surrender. Van Rensburg’s audience was dwindling. But Zoë Joubert had not left. Her eyes, fixed on mine, smarted with betrayal: how could you bring this into our midst? How could you bring this killer to denounce us all? How could you promise love when all you wanted was some warped testimony?

  When I glanced towards Jessica de Vere, she looked away in disgust, as if my appearance with Theron represented the most appalling breach of faith, or at least etiquette. I had committed the very stupidity she had warned me to avoid.

  Rod Harris moved his deck chair closer to Zoë Joubert. Vanessa van Rensburg moved across to her husband and took his hand. The ranks had thinned but the line-up was obvious: Theron was my only ally against them.

  Van Rensburg was not done with his questions.

  “So what is the truth, then, Ambassador? Your henchman, the killer, says none of us was to blame. But why believe him? He’s already lied to the TRC. He’s lied because the truth is a stranger to him, just something to be manipulated. You were even mentioned at the TRC visiting Nyati. What were you doing? A bit of advance work for Theron? With Jessica here?”

  He brandished the missing pages of transcript from my hotel room.

  “Stop it, now, Riaan,” Zoë Joubert said, but, to my surprise, Vanessa van Rensburg came to his defence.

  “Why should we stop it, Zoë? Don’t we always stop it before it reaches the point of no return? When you decide? I know where I was. I know who I finished up with. I have my alibi for the night Nyati died. Shall I tell you who it was? Does it matter, except to embarrass some wife or girlfriend or boyfriend? Of course not. But what about everybody else. Where did you go after the meeting with Nyati, Zoë? What about you, Jess, where were you? You set it up, but you never pitched. So what’s your story?”

  Riaan van Rensburg reached into a pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out a golden cigarette lighter. He held it aloft, turning it so that the light of hurricane lamps was reflected in its cross-hatchings.

  “Does this help remind you?” he said. “I found it in Kinzer’s hotel room. Does your husband know this?”

  “Of course not. It was all before Chris decided what he wanted, who he wanted. But he will know everything now, tonight.”

  “And this lighter got where it was because? You left it at Nyati’s all those years ago? I don’t think so. With love from Chris,” he read from the inscription. “How sweet!”

  He tossed the gold lighter across the deck to Jess Chase. Her hand reached for it in mid-air but it fell onto the wooden decking. She knelt to retrieve it. When she rose, she looked straight at me.

  “Maybe you should ask the ambassador.”

  Before I could say anything, Zoë interrupted.

  “Jess was not the only one waiting for Chris,” she said gently. “I know that all too well. So before any of you go throwing accusations around, please remember that. It ended then, so let’s leave it that way.”

  “But did it end, Zoë, the double-crossing?” Jess Chase had stepped across the deck and stood facing Zoë Joubert. “I know, for me, it ended when Chris snapped his fingers. But not everyone was quite so single-minded in their relationships, were they? Did it end with you and Chris when I broke with Tom? Did it? Can you answer that? Honestly? Or was it always that little joke – Boys’ night out. Wasn’t that the excuse? Like the other day? Once in a while. In Plett or Davos or somewhere. Boy’s night out for old time’s sake. Girl’s night out. Or even day out when I was not around. Well, for your information, I played it straight. Even when I left this lighter behind on my girl’s night out, I played it straight down the middle. But you can’t say that, can you, Zoë?”

  She did not wait for a reply.

  The moon was high over the water, turning the surf line silver. The chairs Van Rensburg had laid out were abandoned. One or two had been knocked over in the rush to leave and no one had bothered to right them or collect glasses of half-finished drinks littering the wooden planking. Vanessa van Rensburg took her husband’s hand and led him to their battered Jeep. Theron took a cold beer from the fridge.

  Briefly, Zoë and I were finally alone together. She leaned against the balustrade. It wobbled, dangerously, as if some vital carpentry had begun to unravel. A section of the rail fell away and landed below in the garden. I took her arm but she recovered quickly.

  “So, confession time,” she said. “Don’t interrupt. You wanted to know how it all happened, why it was so impo
rtant not to go digging up the past. I will tell you and you can make your own mind up whether it has been the right price to pay for Lily’s peace of mind. I was at Old Deep. Chris was at his mansion. Sometimes I crossed the line, going back to my own roots, really, away from all the tin roofs and the noisy crèches and the endless political debate. In theory I was married to Rod, but he was struggling more and more with pretending to be straight. A marriage of convenience, if you like. Cover for him, protection for me. So it suited Rod if I disappeared for a day or two and he could disappear for a day or two as well. And then with Chris it got a lot more serious. I thought we would become the couple people had always expected us to be. If there’s someone else, you sense it. But I didn’t know who it was and, frankly, I would have been amazed if I’d learned who was sharing Chris’s bed while I was back at Old Deep and you – poor Tom – were attending diplomatic cocktails. It’s obvious now though I didn’t realise it until just tonight. You were the backup in case none of this worked out. In case I won.”

  “When? When did De Vere decide?”

  “I suppose actually it was all just after the Nyati meeting. It made me quite famous actually. Now that I think of it, Jess made me quite famous with her articles about white liberals meeting the doomed black nationalist – that kind of thing. So perhaps she knew her stories would have repercussions. I think my name all over the papers put Chris off, a bit. Too prominent. Too publicly rebellious. So it all happened quite quickly. I went to tell Chris I was pregnant. He beat me to it by telling me it was all over between us because there was someone else. So I kept my news to myself.”

  “He didn’t know? About the child? Mills?”

  “Not for quite a time. Rod stuck by me during the pregnancy and the birth. He was fantastic. He did all the coo-cooing and the 3 am diaper changes and the cups of tea for tired, breast-feeding mama. Of course, he needed his space for his poetry and his own thing. And after a while, the way men do, Chris started having second thoughts – Jess turned out to be higher maintenance than he expected. So we would meet up occasionally. Boys’ night out? He was the father of my child! We had known each other since the year dot. We could talk and laugh. We read the same books, liked the same opera. We belonged together, really. And as Mills grew up, he started asking questions about her, about the timing of her birth, about Rod. And I told him he had a daughter. He and Jess had Charlie by then – she was no slouch in getting the son and heir into play pretty quickly to keep Chris in line. And, I suppose, like some old English king, I rather think Chris enjoyed having his public son and his daughter on the side. But Mills never knew. And Rod never let her down. He never forgot a birthday or a prize-giving – and believe me there were plenty of prizes. He was Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny. And he loves her and she loves him.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, poor Tom. You sank our little ship and didn’t realise you’d sink with it yourself. And the funniest thing of all is that when I saw Chris last night, I told him there’d be no more boy’s nights out because I had found someone I thought would last – you – and I think he was quite relieved.”

  “I tried to bring you the truth.”

  “The truth was always there. We just didn’t need it thrown in our faces.”

  “The truth. That word,” Theron said as we left. “Maybe one day she will tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning what I said.”

  Part Five

  In the first instance, they would deploy knives and bludgeons. Then they would pinion the body and pour petrol. Justice would be done. The people’s justice.

  Twenty-Six

  I PACKED AND CHECKED OUT. I WOULD not be coming back this way again. Depending on how the visit to Cooktown unfolded, we might never be coming back at all.

  The main highway from Plettenberg Bay traced a familiar route across great bridges spanning rivers that rose in the Kougaberg and Baviaanskloof and the Grootwinterhoekberge. At one point, as the highway rose over the flanks of the mountains, a sudden dense mist reminded me of why the foliage was so verdant from frequent drenching by damp weather sweeping in from the ocean. The little traffic there was on the road slowed right down. Spectral headlights suddenly appeared from the gloaming. Along the coast, the signposts pointed a way to pleasant-sounding places – Oyster Bay, Paradise Beach. We skirted Port Elizabeth, past the turn-off to the airport, alongside the auto plants and tire factories, and back down towards the coast. The road signs brought up old memories: New Brighton, Kwazakele, Uitenhage – places where I had watched the revolution unfold and Theron had struggled to thwart it.

  The highway would pass the turn-off to Crystal Sands – I was not relishing that.

  Theron snoozed in the passenger seat. We had retrieved his white pickup from the roadside and, at his behest, pulled in at Nature’s Valley in the early hours of the morning so that he could pick up freshly laundered clothes and sculpt his beardline. He had chosen a dove-grey two-piece suit and a white shirt with a regimental-looking tie, loose around his neck as we drove on. He had packed a tote bag and slung it heavily onto the rear seat of the rental car. It was not that clear where he thought we were going or for how long. Our journey overlapped the route Nyati drove on his last night on earth. We would pass the ambush point itself.

  Against Theron’s advice, I called ahead to Lily Nyati to tell her I would be arriving with a visitor who wished urgently to speak with her about her husband’s last moments on earth.

  “You have taken away our surprise,” Theron complained as I clicked off the phone. “You may regret that later. And who else is listening to your phone?”

  “We are not fighting wars anymore,” I told him.

  He sighed loudly and lit a cigarette.

  After a while, I mentioned to him the incidents with the pickup truck at Elim, the punctured tires of my rental car.

  “Did you do any of this?”

  “Not guilty, your honour.”

  “People kept telling me that ‘They’ are still out there and I assumed that meant people like you.”

  “People like me, but not me. The ones people call ‘They’ are the ones that got away – the generals, the handlers, the bombers, the cabinet ministers. They are out there, and they don’t want to be disturbed, or reminded. They don’t want the boat to rock.”

  “And Faku. Do you know a police officer called Faku? Nieuwoudt? Who is Nieuwoudt?”

  “Where does those names come from?”

  “The transcripts. The TRC. And they were at the airport when I arrived. They picked me up.”

  To my surprise, he smiled as if he saw some irony, some bitter joke that eluded me.

  “So I trained them good, right? They were in my team and I trained them to keep out an eye for unusual things, names, inconsistencies, people who had been places where they should not have been. And they would have remembered your name alright, Mr Ambassador, after all the fuss you made with your Miss Chase and your BMW. So they would have just done a couple of checks when they were looking over the manifests. Did they find some papers on you? I always told them to follow the paper trail.”

  “A letter from the widows.”

  “So that is what is behind all this?”

  “At the start.”

  “Then you are perhaps less of a smart-ass than what I thought.”

  “In the transcripts Nieuwoudt was a lieutenant and Faku a sergeant. But at the airport, Nieuwoudt called Faku captain.”

  “Mind games,” Theron said. “They always liked mind games. I was their professor. Welcome to the new South Africa.”

  “So why are they still policemen and you are refused amnesty, Theron?”

  “Because they was following orders. And I was giving them. So I am the fall guy.” He was silent for a while. Then he turned on me with a quick flip of temper that alarmed me.

  “Man, I wish you had told me sooner. If Faku and Nieuwoudt have got wind of where we are going, they
will arrange a hot reception for us. For sure. It was me that taught them how to play that game, planting ideas, supplying the tires and the petrol. Black-on-black violence, we used to call it, but it was often enough with white supervision. And money. A few bucks for the ringleaders and you would get anyone to necklace anybody you wanted. And we know what meneers Faku and Nieuwoudt were up to the night Nyati died, don’t we, Ambassador? They might not like to be reminded of that. They might think that is all going to come out in the new South Africa. They have grudges from those days. They do not appreciate my sacrifice for the team.”

  “But if that’s what’s going on, why are you doing this? You don’t have to. Why not just wait for the statute of limitations?”

  “Because no statute will chase away the nightmares. Because I cannot think of anything else. Because I am at my wit’s end. Because my wife believes this is all fate. Because she thinks I must. Because she is a woman and believes other women will think like her. Because my sons say I must or they cannot stay in this country. Because, because. Why always because? Sometimes, in the bush, you did things and you did not always know why but then you’d find out there had been an ambush or a mine and you had driven around it without knowing a bloody reason.”

  Bleddy. Mahn.

  “All my training, my instincts are saying: don’t do this, because you are driving straight into an ambush and there’ll be mines all over the place.”

  “You think we’ll be ambushed. By widows?”

  “Not by widows. Not even by the old comrades you knew back then. You have not been keeping up, Ambassador. We are talking about generation X, the kids that never learned to do anything except throw rocks and burn tires. Burn people. Middle name violence with a capital V for Victor. If she has these guys around her, like Winnie Mandela with her football team, they won’t be making fancy arguments about the TRC and all that. Poverty and corruption makes people just as angry as apartheid did. And these days there are no police like us to hold the line.”