Benjamin grabbed a constable by the arm and handed him the cage. “Take care of this. And get the drivers.”
“Ja, Sergeant.” The young man disappeared into the torrent of bodies.
Verwoerd was still nailed to the spot, the whole stadium’s eyes fixed on him while he mouthed the words to the anthem. As the last notes died down, he waved to the crowd, a strained smile on his face. A well-rehearsed pantomime followed, men moving swiftly, keeping the crowds at bay, sweeping the prime minister away. Benjamin jumped the bottom fence and walked over to the camera operators. The outside world would never see what had happened.
Melanie Steenkamp was alone in the house. Benjamin trained his binoculars on the opening between the curtains behind which she sat, her profile coming into focus. A pencil was pinched between her lips, her pale brow furrowed at the book in front of her.
“Good girl,” he whispered.
She was beautiful, like a doll, with delicate molded features and porcelain skin. Benjamin had gone back to the stadium in civilian clothes after Verwoerd had been taken care of, joining the festivities, pretending to be nobody. The girls had been put on display in a large white tent with a sign that read MEET THE BEAUTIFUL LADIES OF THE UNION. Benjamin had walked right up to her, taken her hand in his, like something delicate that might shatter. He hadn’t trusted himself to say more than “Hallo.” Melanie had giggled at his silence, turning to the next person in line. Up close, he noticed that she didn’t have Tessa’s high cheekbones or full lips, but it was her eyes that betrayed her. Those impossibly light eyes. Benjamin knew in the moment he saw them what she really was.
Melanie closed the curtains and switched off the light. Benjamin eased himself out of the crook in which he had been nesting all evening. He dropped stealthily from the tree and crouched in the shadows. In the distance a dog barked, but the neighborhood around him remained placid.
Benjamin tested the handle on the back door. It moved easily. Doors were rarely locked. There was no reason to fear anything. The black threat was contained in the location, which was heavily guarded by police patrols. The door stuck in its frame, the wood swollen from the rain. He put his weight behind it. It inched in, accompanied by a hollow scraping sound.
“Hallo?” Melanie had heard him. The neighbors’ house was close enough that they would hear her scream. “Tienie, is that you? I thought you said—”
Benjamin took a deep breath and slammed his body into the door.
“Dove Refuses to Leave Prime Minister.”
The newspaper lay crumpled on Van Vuuren’s desk. According to the article, the dove was so enraptured by Verwoerd’s magnetism that it would rather die than leave his side.
“What do you think of this?” Van Vuuren pushed the newspaper across the desk. “It’s kak, of course,” he said when Benjamin didn’t answer. “Damage control.” He leaned his head on the back of his chair and stared up at the ceiling. “Maybe they’ll even be stupid enough to believe it.”
Benjamin wasn’t sure where Van Vuuren was going with this. The presence of authority figures made him nervous. They were more malignant entities than human in his eyes.
Van Vuuren lifted his head. “I’ve been looking at your file, De Beer. There are some … issues I’d like you to explain.” He opened a file on the desk, making a show of going through the pages.
Fear gripped Benjamin’s mind. He was in a police station with the chief of police in front of him. If Van Vuuren cornered him now, there would be no way out.
“Seems you have a degree. Before that, military service. That would make you …” He ran his eyes over Benjamin’s face. “Thirty-something?”
Benjamin stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt.
“What I don’t understand is why a man with this level of education wants to be a policeman.”
Benjamin tried to reach through the clutter in his mind. He had altered his birth certificate before applying to the force, but he still looked very young. It was a stretch to make people believe that he was thirty. He tried to calm himself down. “There was nothing more for me to learn, Brigadier,” he said, smiling.
Van Vuuren returned the smile. He stood up and came out from behind the desk. His uniform was pristine, not a hair out of place. Benjamin admired that. He realized that he respected this man for his power, a power that forged simultaneous respect and loathing.
“Yesterday. All those stupid fokkers standing there with their fingers up their backsides. You took charge, De Beer. You have smarts, the way you look … I think we could put you to better use in Pretoria.”
“I’m ready to serve, Brigadier.”
“Many men are, until their mommies need them or their wives get pregnant. Then it’s ‘My family, I can’t.’ ”
Benjamin looked away from the man’s scrutinizing gaze. “I don’t have family, sir.”
“Which is why you’re the right man, De Beer. But tell me, what happens when you get an itch for some wide-eyed slut and she drags you in front of a Dominee?”
“I …” Benjamin took a deep breath to steady himself. He met Van Vuuren’s eyes without wavering this time. “That won’t happen, sir.”
Van Vuuren nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sending you for special-ops training, De Beer. Get your affairs in order. I’ll expect you in Pretoria on Monday.”
Benjamin walked out of the office, his thoughts careening. He had dedicated every free moment of the past five years to finding Tessa, depleting every resource in the Bond and police. Booysen’s car was found in Klerksdorp. The current owner described Tessa as the blond woman who had sold it to him. There the trail ran cold. If he was part of Security Branch, he’d have room to maneuver, abandon conventional methods of investigation. Nobody would bat an eyelid, all activity sanctioned in the name of combating Communists.
“Watch it!” Warrant Officer Steyn roared, almost colliding with Benjamin as he barreled down the passage. He stopped short at the service desk. “What do you mean he isn’t in?” he barked at the young constable on duty.
“Called in sick, Warrant.”
“Sick my gat. Too much celebrating, if you ask me. I’m supposed to go off duty in ten minutes, man.” Steyn looked over at Benjamin, day-old stubble on his face. “De Beer. You’re coming with me. And you, Constable, get on that radio and send two cars to this address.” He threw an incident report at the constable, interrupting before the youth had a chance to reply. “I don’t care where you find them. They better be there.”
Benjamin ran to keep up with Steyn as the warrant officer stormed out of the station to the yellow police van parked up front. He had barely shut the van’s door before tires screeched on the asphalt.
“Supposed to have the day off after covering for everybody and their bloody mother,” Steyn mumbled. He ignored a stop sign and a Mercedes slammed on its brakes. The driver turned red in the face, yelling something obscene. Steyn flipped the man off, stepping on the gas. “Hope you have your act together, De Beer, because I’m fokken tired.”
Benjamin reached for his seat belt. “What happened, Warrant?”
“We’re going out to the university. Seems Little Miss Free State has been murdered.”
Flippie
Unforgiving heat bore down on the small brick houses and the sink-plate shacks, radiating from the dirt streets long after the sun had set. After the Sharpeville massacre, the Johannesburg police patrolled Soweto with tanks and guns, hovering on the periphery at night. Gangsters and skollies had resumed their roles with ease after the relocation from Sophiatown, running the shebeens, terrorizing everyone who resisted them. Community leaders tried to keep order, doing their own patrols, their own citizen’s arrests, but as long as the chaos was contained, the government turned a blind eye to what happened inside township borders. The barbarians could murder each other if they wanted. It was in their nature, after all.
“The referendum is decided. It is our turn to take action.” Flippie sat in the small living room of his
sparsely furnished house. Coffee mugs and full ashtrays were scattered on the floor and the low wooden table in the center of the room. Six men occupied the available seats, the others sat on the hand-pulled rug, legs crossed under them.
“This is madness.” Albert, a middle-aged man, threw his hands in the air. “I can’t have anything to do with it. The ANC is banned. If they catch us, we’ll be hanged for treason. I have a family.”
As if on cue, a baby started crying in the back room of the house. Prudence rushed out of the kitchen, the telltale belly of a new mother bulging under her tight skirt. She shot a meaningful glance at Flippie before disappearing down the hallway.
“Our backs are against the wall, Albert,” Flippie tried to reason. “They have left us no means of legal protest. If the country becomes a republic, independent from the Commonwealth, things will get worse.”
“Maybe it will not be so bad.”
Guffaws rose from the other men. Albert shook his head.
“You are blind, my friend.” Flippie leaned forward in his seat. “Twenty thousand stood in the rain last night in Natal. To demand that basic human rights be included in the constitution. Do you think it did them any good?”
“We’re organizing strikes.”
Flippie shook his head. “It won’t be enough. Peaceful resistance has gotten us nowhere.”
“So you want to start a war, Phillip?”
“It’s already a war, Albert. And they are winning.” Flippie ran his hands over his face. “Can’t you see? They’ve forced us onto reserves that can’t possibly house everybody because they claim blacks are not citizens of this country. Our children have to go to Bantu schools and we have to sit on Bantu buses and shit in Bantu toilets. They provide one water tap for a whole block of houses, then complain that we stink. Our men are crammed into mining compounds away from their families, our women have to work as servants if they want to work at all. And for what? A wage that barely feeds us after we pay them bus transport into their cities because they won’t allow us to live there. The pigs get fat off our labor. How much worse does it need to get before we fight back?”
“But bombs? Guns?” Albert’s face contracted. “Aikona.”
“They have guns.”
“You have a son. Think of that before you do this.”
“I think of nothing but Jacob and his future, Albert.”
“I cannot do it.” Albert got up from his chair. “Thank your wife.”
“Who needs him?” Zweli said to Albert’s face, disdain in his large brown eyes. Prudence’s brother had grown up and become a real gangster, with his own crew.
Albert looked around the room and shook his head. “I hope to God I am not looking at dead men.” He closed the door behind him.
“He is old and scared,” Zweli said.
Flippie looked at the young faces in the room. “You all would do well with a bit more fear.”
“Bah!” Zweli waved his hands dismissively. “The whites are rigid and stupid. They will not expect us to stand up to them.”
“Don’t underestimate them. They have a lot to lose.”
“And we have nothing to lose.” Zweli raised his fist in the air. “That gives us the advantage.” A few of the younger men voiced a chorus of agreement.
“We have just as much to lose, my friend,” Flippie said. “But we have more to gain.”
“We’ll fight them. To the end. An attack on apartheid, on all the whites. Amandla!” Zweli shook his fist in the air. “Umkhonto we Siswe.” The others copied him, their voices unified. “Amandla.”
The men left one by one under the cover of dark. Flippie found Prudence in the bedroom, rocking the baby in her arms, her back to him. He nuzzled his head in the crook of her neck.
Prudence turned around, the baby between them. “I do not like this, Phillip.”
“A noose is tightening around our necks, my love. We have to do something.”
“Perhaps you can leave it for the young ones?”
“Young bucks act without thought. They need guidance.” Flippie touched the head of his son. Before Jacob’s birth, he had wanted to leave. The idea still crossed his mind in times of weakness. But this was his country. His son’s country.
The bang on the front door startled them both. “Open up. Police. Maak oop!”
The men were inside the house before Flippie and Prudence had time to react, white faces and blue uniforms everywhere, guns pointed at them and their infant son. Jacob wailed, startled by the noise. Flippie tried to block them with his body, but the barrel of a pistol came to rest between his shoulder blades.
“I shoot you dead,” a young milk-beard said, his voice breaking in a comic falsetto.
Flippie wanted to burst out laughing, imagining a five-year-old with a gun, but then he saw the raw fear in Prudence’s eyes, their baby clutched to her breast. He froze, slowly lifting his hands in the air.
“You Phillip Morgan?” It was an older man. The one in charge.
“Yes, sir. What is going on?”
“I ask the questions, okay?”
The other policemen snickered. Flippie turned his head to see the man and was greeted with a blow to his temple.
“Stand still!” The young policeman hit him again in the small of his back. Pain pulsated through his spine. Flippie’s legs gave way and he fell to his knees.
Two men lifted Flippie to his feet. They dragged him outside. He tried to tell Prudence to go to Zweli, but he had trouble speaking, her silhouette in the doorway of their house the last thing he remembered before the police threw him into the back of a van.
Rubber. The smell shot straight up into his sinuses with the last molecules of oxygen. He tasted it, trying to chew at the thick membrane that stretched tight over his nose and mouth. Flippie’s eyes darted from one corner of the fluorescent-lit room to the other. Asbestos walls, like those of his childhood schoolroom. Linoleum floors. Even a blackboard to complete the picture.
Flippie’s eyes watered, the pressure building until he was sure they would explode in a gelatinous mess down his cheeks. A tall man in a blue uniform stepped in front of him. He gave a nod and suddenly the tentacle released its grip. Air gushed into Flippie’s raw lungs.
“You ready now, hey?”
Flippie tried to answer, but spasmodic coughs interrupted him. The force of a tonfa blow sent his chair toppling to the side. He tried to stop his fall, but his hands were bound to the chair. His head made contact with the floor. Softening up. That’s what the men who took him called it. His skin throbbed, pain coursed through his nerves.
“Get him up, Peaches.”
A big pair of hands wrapped around Flippie’s shoulders and the world was turned right-side-up again. The two white policemen looked down at him.
“Shall we go another round, Boss? Work him a little more?” It was the big one, Peaches. He had reddish-blond hair and skin as smooth as a baby’s. He held the piece of inner tube between his hands, a human face worn into the rubber.
“Nee, Baas. Please.” Flippie struggled to let his voice be heard. He was tired, so tired. “I’ll tell you anything. Please, Baas.”
Peaches looked at the tall man for confirmation.
The tall man pulled up a chair in front of Flippie. “Stay close, Peaches, we’ll see if he means what he says.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, his legs spread wide. “These things, they are distasteful to me, see?”
Flippie had trouble focusing his eyes. Blood ran from a gash in his temple and his eyelids were almost swollen shut.
“I was brought up in a good Christian house, where we were taught right and wrong, see? I attend church, I’m a deacon.”
“Ja, Baas.”
“What do you know?” The tall man stood up.
“Niks, Baas.”
“You’re right you know nothing. God-fearing men like me are being forced to choose between right and wrong, good and evil. And you know what side I will always choose, Phillip? I will stand on the side of
good. Of God. Just like my father did and his father, since all the way back when He gave us this land. We are being threatened by the Communists, and it is my job to eliminate that threat, see? And I know you know things that will help me do that.”
Flippie stared ahead of him. There had to be something he could tell the man. One thing that wouldn’t matter so much, that wouldn’t compromise the others. His mind felt thick and slow, the pain in his side the only thing that kept him alert.
“You are going to help us do that, Phillip.”
“I don’t know how, Baas.”
The tall man sighed. “You’re educated. A lawyer, ja? You help all those ANC buddies of yours keep out of jail. We’ve been watching you for a long time, see? I’m sure Peaches will appreciate the overtime to help you remember. Maybe we’ll even get your wife a free stay in our lovely hotel. Will that help your memory?”
“She doesn’t know anything, Baas. Please.”
A smile ghosted on the man’s lips. “Then I’m sure we understand each other. Start by telling me who was at that meeting tonight.”
Tessa
There was nothing striking about Dean Kritzinger. He was of average build, average height, with average sandy hair and average hazel eyes. His face was soft and pasty white, and he carried a few extra pounds around, but that didn’t matter to Tessa as she sat with him at John Vorster Square police station, waiting for Flippie’s release. What mattered was that Dean embodied the only hope she had known in a long time. Dean’s own people saw him as a traitor for offering up his evenings and weekends to go into the townships and help blacks find their loved ones, disappeared behind the veil of police custody. Before Flippie’s arrest, Tessa had only known Dean as a lawyer-friend of Flippie’s, and he knew her as Lilly Maartens, the name that was now printed in her ID book, a friend to the cause. But something had changed. Tessa wasn’t sure what to call it, but she welcomed it. She admired Dean, felt safe with him. His talk of marriage and family after only a few weeks didn’t feel rushed to her. For the first time, it felt right.
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