by Mike Nicol
‘Now let me tell you my story with Amina so that the truth does not die with me. This is very fortunate you are in Germany for me to tell this story of Amina.’ He nodded. ‘Very lucky Henry could arrange this. You know about Amina, something of her story?’
Vicki sipped at the tea, kept her hands around the mug for its warmth. ‘I didn’t know her. Or if I met her I was too young to remember. All I know is the family story, what I’ve been told by relatives over the years in bits and pieces. I know she had to leave South Africa because the security police were after her. I know she came to Europe. I know that she was stabbed to death in the Paris Metro. That is all I know.’
‘Ah so. Then that is very little.’ Detlef Schroeder settled himself further into the couch. ‘You believe it was apartheid agents that killed her? A useful assassination.’
‘Yes.’
‘There are some other people that didn’t want her alive.’
‘Other people? What other people?’
‘That is my story,’ said Detlef Schroeder. ‘So let me tell you.’
With the back of his hand scratched at the bristles beneath his chin. A rasping loud enough for Vicki to hear.
‘When Amina escaped she came to East Berlin for some months before I met her. She was here with the African National Congress working for them in their office. But this you must know. So my story is one day in the Russian Embassy in East Berlin there is a cocktail party and there is Amina, like you, most striking, talking to some of my colleagues. I think, she is a lovely woman, I must find out her name.’
Vicki wondering what it was Amina had had to do with this man. The old version gave no hint of the younger man.
‘Slowly,’ Detlef Schroeder was saying, ‘over the next months we would meet at such receptions. By then she was a student at the university in West Berlin, Freie Universität, so she would go there to that side of the city three or four times in the week. She had a special pass that I am not sure how she got it. Maybe the British helped her.
‘This was very good for me. Very fortunate. One day I asked her to take a letter to a friend over the Wall in the West. She did this some more times but by now we are more friendly. We meet to go for walks. We like each other. Never does she ask me about the letters.’
‘What were they?’
Detlef Schroeder chuckled. ‘She doesn’t ask me but you do? That is where you are different. Different generations. Different times.’ He paused. ‘They were intelligence for the British, MI6.’
‘You were a double agent?’
He nodded. ‘Ja, this is not so shocking. This was a way of life on both sides.’
‘But Amina knew?’
‘I suppose, yes, I suppose. She would not ask, I would not say. We lived secret lives in those days. You must understand this.’
‘We all do.’ He kept his eyes on her, Vicki seeing in them the dull grey sky of Europe. Cold War eyes.
‘This is true, but in those days, in that time, we had to be careful. We had to keep secrets. This is what it meant for us. How it was for us to be alive in that time. Today it seems like a bad movie with everyone lying. As if there was no truth.’
He put down his mug on the arm of the sofa.
‘But we must go back to the story of your aunt. So then I say to her, we must have a weekend in Rugen and I can show her what it is like by the sea. I remember she says to me that no sea can be the same as the Cape sea. The sea of Cape Town. She is so homesick for Cape Town it is like a pain she has in her chest. But yes we have this weekend, and we become lovers.’
‘You what?’ said Vicki.
‘This is a surprise for you?’ He was smiling at her. ‘You see, in a better world I would be your uncle.’
Jesus, thought Vicki. Talk about family secrets! ‘When?’ she said. ‘When was this? Why didn’t anybody know?’
‘The year of 1986. Some few months before she went to Paris.’ He scratched his bristles again. ‘There is a reason no one knew because we did not broadcast the information. We did not live together in East Berlin, we had separate apartments. The same in Paris. Sometimes I would stay overnight or for a weekend but it was never for long. That was difficult for us, the Paris months. It was difficult for me to be there. I could not travel so freely all the time because it would have looked bad. People would have asked questions. Most times she would come to East Berlin which was okay, she could do it to meet her comrades. There was always a good reason for her to go to the GDR. So my times in Paris were, how do the English say, far and few between. But we had many good times in that city, Paris was the place we felt a freedom.’
He stopped. Vicki waited. His hands were clasped in his lap, long bony fingers knotted together. He sat with bowed head. Punctuating the silence the sound of a dripping tap. From outside voices, someone calling a child, farther off a small dog yapping. Detlef Schroeder lost in his memories. Vicki wondering how this musty old man had attracted her aunt.
Eventually he pointed at an envelope on the small table beside her chair. ‘There are photographs in there for you.’
She reached over, drew out of the envelope a colour photograph of a woman in her mid-thirties on a beach, carefree, laughing into the wind. Another of her wearing a cheeky red beret, sunglasses, a long black coat. A cigarette stuck between the fingers of her right hand. You glanced at it quickly, you could see Vicki’s posture, her stance, mirrored in this woman. Uncanny. The one or two pictures she’d ever seen of Amina looked nothing like this. Those versions of Amina were demure. Formal.
Next to the woman in this photograph stood a man in his early forties, athletic, tall, his face lean. He, too, wore a coat, unbuttoned to show off a dark suit, a roll neck instead of a shirt. Detlef Schroeder as James Bond. He had his right arm around the woman, in his left hand a cigarette. They looked happy. They looked at ease.
‘In the one we are at the Baltic. There, in the one you are holding, we are in the Tuileries, December 1986. We asked someone to take the photograph,’ he said. ‘We were very happy for that weekend and then something, I don’t know what, happened. Or I should maybe say I did not know then what it was but many years later I was told.’ He reached over for the photograph. ‘Yesterday was the first time for many years I looked at this. Now when I look at you, I see Amina. You must keep the photographs, please.’ He looked at her.
‘What happened?’
‘It was a month before we met again. This time in East Berlin. Maybe she was quieter. I thought maybe she was worried. She had a big job in Paris and there was all the time the threat of assassination. A letter bomb, a bullet, even poison like anthrax. Always there was this worry. But still we enjoyed a few days together.’
Vicki watched him closely for any twitch, any tic that he was making this up. Nothing. His face relaxed, a moisture in the corners of his mouth, his eyes flicking between her and a spot on the wall as if the past spooled out there like a movie. He cleared his throat, once, twice.
‘Then she tells me by telephone about some six weeks, maybe it is two months later that she has to go to Botswana. Okay, I understand, in these jobs of ours we are deployed everywhere at sudden notice.’
He sniffed, pinched at his nose. Cleared his throat again.
‘Because we have been apart for two months I say what about a weekend holiday in Rugen? No, she is going the next day to Gaborone. So that is that. For half a year we are apart. Then suddenly she is back in Paris. No reason. A redeployment. For me I don’t need a reason, there is nothing strange in these movements.
‘When I see her she is my Amina. The same quickness. The same life. Yes, of course we would go to Rugen to enjoy the weekend we missed. Of course we did the same things. Ate smoked fish on the beach. Stayed in the same small hotel. Again it was wonderful. Except that when I wanted to know about Botswana, Amina would say something then talk about the new things that were happening: the sanctions against the apartheid government, the protests. The trained MK guerrillas going from Botswana into South Africa to fight for
freedom.
‘Because she will not talk about Botswana I think it was not a happy time. This puzzled me but what could I do? What could I say? Here she was. We were together. We spoke instead about the new things. And also there were talks with Afrikaner businessmen. Even Afrikaner priests were coming to see her. She said the days of white government were finished. Over. There was going to be a new country. Not even two months later she was killed.’
He stopped there. Took off his glasses, wiped the lenses.
Vicki waited, reflux at the back of her throat unsettling her. ‘A government hitman,’ she said, swallowing hard to keep down the acid rise.
‘That is what we all thought.’ Detlef Schroeder glanced at her. His eyes lost their force without the spectacles, Vicki thought. They were small, piggy. Yet Amina had gazed into those eyes, as her face came up to meet this man’s in a kiss. Vicki shivered. Detlef Schroeder, the spectacles in both hands, slipped them back onto his face, blinked.
‘You know something different?’ she said.
‘I do not know anything for certain. I hear stories. This is all. I put things together from the stories to make my own story.’
‘Which is?’
‘Ja. Which is a strange story. You see at that time Amina was talking to a South African man called by the nickname Dr Gold. He was in Switzerland, a most important person in the apartheid government. There was millions and millions the South African government had stolen from the taxpayers which Dr Gold had brought to Switzerland. Gold bullion too. He was what is called in thriller books the bagman. The story is that Dr Gold shared these millions with the ANC top men. They made a deal. How do you say, they came to this arrangement. Long before there were proper talks of a settlement in South Africa these men helped themselves to the money.’
Vicki shrugged. ‘This story’s been around.’ She’d heard it before in relation to Amina, just didn’t want Detlef Schroeder to know she knew.
‘But the thing I heard was Amina didn’t like her comrades taking this stolen money. She told them it was wrong. The money should go back to South Africa. Then in the future they could use it for building hospitals, schools, houses.’ He paused, Vicki going into the pause.
‘You’re saying her comrades had her killed? That’s pretty serious stuff.’
‘I am saying many things, many interpretations. Maybe her comrades did not protect her. They knew she was a target. Maybe they wanted a hitman to kill her. Or maybe they even connived. That is the right word, yes?’
Vicki nodded.
‘This was convenient for them. For both parties this was convenient to get rid of Amina Kahn. She was becoming a troublesome woman. Writing letters to the anc president in London telling of the wrongdoing, she was making these waves in the movement that some people did not like. Then she was trouble for the apartheid people because she knew about the gold. So if she is killed there is no stain on the comrades. She is a martyr. For both sides this is what you call the win-win situation.’ He rubbed his hands together, the skin rasping. ‘But there is more, something else. Something I found out from my old friends in MI6.’
His cellphone rang, the classic ringtone. He fumbled it up from a pocket. Said, ‘Was?’ The German clipped, harsh, hard. He listened, didn’t speak again except to say danke before he disconnected. The phone went back into a pocket, he smiled at Vicki.
‘I am afraid we cannot continue now.’ He pushed himself up off the couch. ‘This other bit of the story must wait. Maybe this afternoon we can talk again?’
‘Can’t you tell me quickly?’ said Vicki, rising, fighting the nausea that rose with her. It would be a damn nuisance having to come back.
‘It is not a short story. But it is important for you. For your family.’
Vicki nodded, thinking what the hell could be so important that it couldn’t be trotted out in five minutes? The old man just wanted her back in his flat again, to project his fantasies of Amina onto her. Touch up her bum again.
‘Good. Shall we make a time at five o’clock? If you give me your cellphone number that would be handy.’ He laughed. ‘I make a pun. In Germany we call them handies.’
‘I’ll phone you,’ said Vicki, ‘to confirm the time.’
He made a face. ‘You do not trust me with your number?’
‘No.’
He laughed again. ‘Now you are like your aunt. I look forward to our next meeting, Vicki Kahn.’
30
Fish Pescado parked his bakkie in Bree Street. A miracle to find street parking, in tree shade as well. Tree shade a bonus under a hard sun pushing the temperature north of thirty-two degrees centigrade.
‘You want thirty minutes? Five rand fifty,’ said the parking attendant.
Fish gave her twenty rand, told her make the chit for an hour, keep the change. ‘Buy a Coke.’
‘Coke’s twelve rand,’ she said.
Whokaai, wena! Fish stared at her. Plump, short woman sweating in her uniform. Writing his parking slip. Not looking at him.
‘It’s a contribution,’ he said. ‘A sponsorship.’
She put the slip under his windscreen wiper. ‘Sometimes people steal it,’ she said. ‘The slip. Just for fun.’
‘I get a fine,’ said Fish, ‘I’ll hunt you down.’
The woman still not looking at him, shrugged. Walked off to nail another citizen.
Fish pulled out the parking receipt from under the blade, put it on the dashboard. Locked the cab. No trusting anybody.
He took the Fan Walk bridge over Buitengracht. Shit, chided himself, not the Fan Walk any longer. Nowadays the Walk of Remembrance. City packaged its fun with the shame of the past. Fish remembering the winter afternoon he’d done the Fan Walk to watch a World Cup match: Uruguay against the Netherlands. About a hundred thousand people streaming across the city. Bloody wonderful time that’d been. The Dutch winning. You did the history, that was one for Jan van Riebeeck.
Stood for a moment on the bridge, scanning the Prestwich Memorial, wondering would Mart Velaze pitch. Perhaps the guy’d had a change of heart. Anyone had a change of heart, there had to be a reason. His gaze shifting up along the ridge of Signal Hill to the grey mountain. Amazing sight this city, this mountain behind it.
Fish trotted down the bridge’s steps, jaunty, hyped up to meet the spy. Found a seat outside, under a sun umbrella, ordered a cappuccino. Thinking great place this, a coffee joint next to an ossuary. Boxes and boxes of the jumbled bones of ancestors on the shelves of the memorial. Had caused a ruckus, the digging up of those bones. Thing about the city, there were skeletons everywhere.
His coffee came, lovely design in the foam. Clever that, the way they did it. Fish doing his appreciation: ‘Hectic design, man.’ The waiter smiling, giving him a note.
Fish cocked his head. ‘And this?’
‘Dude left it for you.’
‘Dude? What dude?’
‘Fris guy. You know, sharp.’ The waiter doing a jig. ‘Cool oke. Well built.’
‘Black? Coloured? Indian? White?’
‘Black.’
‘Where’s he?’
‘Gone.’
Fish standing. ‘Gone which way? Come’n, which way?’
The waiter backing off. ‘Dunno. Sorry, hey. I just work here.’ Hands raised. ‘Dunno which way.’
Fish picked up the note: Athens lookout. Fifteen minutes.
Athens lookout. What the hell was Athens lookout? Where the hell was Athens lookout?
Took a hot mouthful of coffee, wiped off a foam moustache. Bloody Mart Velaze playing his spy games. Athens lookout had to be nearby.
Fish dialled the professor. Professor Summers. Political science expert, history buff, never without food stains on his jerseys. Jerseys he called cardigans. One of Fish’s top dagga clients, bought a consistent baggie each week.
‘Yes, Fish,’ Summers came on. ‘When will you be delivering?’
‘Whenever you like,’ said Fish. ‘And a hello howzit to you too.’
The pr
ofessor ignoring the retort. ‘How about this afternoon? Unless you’re surfing, of course. Wouldn’t want to interrupt your worship of the waves. Your chance of getting eaten by a great white.’
‘Sure,’ said Fish. ‘No problem.’ Clearing his throat. ‘Ah …’
‘Ah, what, Fish? I hear that sound I know you’re after dope.’ The professor chuckling. ‘You get that, Fish. You like my pun?’
Fish wanting to say no, asking instead, ‘What’s Athens lookout? Or where’s Athens lookout?’
A silence. Then: ‘Sometimes, Mr Pescado, your ignorance truly astounds me. Your complete and utter lack of knowledge about the city you live in. How long have you lived here? No, don’t answer. I suspect it’s all your life. And short as that has been, you’ve managed to remain blissfully unaware of your surroundings. Of your history. Amazing, really. Probably it’s all that water you get in your ears, washes out your brain.’
‘Prof, it’s urgent.’
‘Of course it is. With you it would only ever be urgent. Google it on your phone.’
‘It’s quicker to call you.’
‘You think I’m a walking history book?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Ah, your flattery. So cheap.’ A pause. ‘Athens lookout, my ill-educated friend, is near the Mouille Point lighthouse. In the great gale of May 1865 the RMS Athens ran onto the rocks, losing all thirty crewmen. You can still see the engine block sticking out of the water. Is this a help?’
‘It is. Got to go.’
‘Remember my delivery.’
Fish thumbed him off. Took another dash of coffee. Left thirty bucks on the table.
31
Ten minutes later, Fish Pescado drove onto the gravel parking area above the rocks, the remains of the wreck sticking out of a low tide. The sea calm, the kelp glistening. Three other cars parked there. Fish wondering, what now?
Drove to the right, away from the other cars: people taking a break, enjoying the view. A couple, a lone man on a phone, three men in a black Benz.
