Then a plainclothes agent named Lieutenant Cuyler came in to report that the South African Police had found a Cadillac stalled on the KwaNdebele Road. The car was badly banged up. Plates and serial numbers proved, though, that it belonged to one Gerrit Jozua Myburgh of Pretoria.
“I hit an elephant,” Myburgh said.
“Meneer Myburgh,” van Rhyn said, shaking his head.
Cuyler came to Myburgh’s aid: “That may be true, sir.”
“How?” van Rhyn said.
“A Colored from Durban has a fleabite circus: Motilal Prassad’s Travelling Big Top. He carts it around to the Bantustans and makes a few rand entertaining the stay-behinds while their wage-earners are at work. Three days ago, he was in Bophusthatswana. Seems he lost an elephant there.”
“I found it,” Myburgh said. “I hit it.”
“Not unlikely,” Cuyler told van Rhyn.
“What happened to it?”
Both van Rhyn and Cuyler looked at Myburgh as if he had asked a very troublesome question.
“What happened to it?” Myburgh said again.
“We don’t know,” Cuyler said. “It disappeared.”
“An elephant?” van Rhyn said. “To where?”
“If we knew, we wouldn’t be saying it’s disappeared. Maybe to the proverbial elephants’ graveyard.”
Myburgh wondered if his Cadillac’s collision with the elephant had rendered it shadow matter, a kind of premonitory ghost from an era and a system long since doomed to perish.
But he had no time to mull the issue, for Cuyler had to leave, and van Rhyn and Wessels began questioning him relentlessly. What did he know about the Armscor bombing? About ANC plans to sabotage the Rietvlei dam? Questions that Jeppe and his henchmen had already put repeatedly to Mordecai Thubana.
Myburgh replied to all these questions in the negative (for he knew nothing, nothing at all), but he was also careful to tell his interrogators what an outrage his detention was and how deeply he resented the slanders implicit in their questions. He was a decent Afrikaner, a patriotic Vaalpens. They should ring up his brother Kiewit. Or the manager of his condominium. Or his secretary, Pia Delfos.
On the other hand, he railed at van Rhyn, what could he expect of a group of officers who had beaten one of their charges within a fingernail of his life and left him naked in a cold cell? The sort of men who would deny an injured countryman medical help? The sort who would bully that countryman with stupid innuendos about treason and terrorist collaboration?
“What we do,” said van Rhyn coldly, “we do to protect.”
Van Rhyn went off duty. Myburgh sat in van Rhyn’s office, all alone, for a long time. Exactly how long he couldn’t say, for Wessels had taken his watch—plus his keys and pocket change—and retreated to another part of the building.
Longer than an hour, though. Possibly two.
When Major Jeppe came on duty (whey-faced, thin, and struggling with the sniffles and watery eyes), he spoke with Cuyler, Wessels, and one or two others.
Then he left too, and Myburgh was escorted to a holding room where he stewed for another two or three hours, growing more and more frustrated and impatient.
Why the delay? Did they really think him an ANC collaborator? Apparently, they did. For that reason, they had not released him. For that reason, they had done nothing to see about his cuts or to replace his tattered clothes. Section Six of the Terrorism Act—that was the inappropriate statute they were using to detain him.
At last, Jeppe came back. Goosen, Steenkamp, and Schoeman came with him, and these four men surrounded the table at which Myburgh was slumped.
“How did you get to Pretoria from your wreck?” Jeppe said.
“I walked,” Myburgh said. (A lie, but better than admitting the hard-to-swallow truth.)
“How did you get into the building?”
“Through a street-level door.”
“Except for our entrance on the park, our street-level doors are all locked, Meneer Myburgh.”
“Not the one I used.”
The four men stared at him as if they had reached an impasse; obviously, they had.
“If I can’t go home,” Myburgh said, “I want some clean clothes and something to eat.”
They brought him a plate of food: sausages, rice, and a poached egg. They also brought him a pair of corduroy trousers, a flannel shirt, some heavy brown socks, and a pair of takkies that looked as if they had been bleached. Myburgh suspected that this outfit—except for the store-bought socks—had once belonged to a black man detained for political reasons. Where was that man now? In a jail cell? In a township cemetery? In the bundu, hiding?
“The man I gave my coat to,” Myburgh said: “He needs clothes and food too. And medical attention.”
“Kaffirboetie,” Goosen said, turning away.
“How do you happen to know him?” Jeppe said.
“I came up the stairs, onto this floor, and I saw him naked and unconscious in that cell down there.” He nodded vaguely.
“The man’s a terrorist,” Jeppe said. “You want nothing to do with him. Nothing. Leave him to us.”
When Myburgh finished eating, only Jeppe and Goosen were still in the interrogation room with him. Goosen cleared his plate away, returned, and laid the book Superstrings on the table exactly where the plate had been.
“What do you know about this?” Jeppe said. “The man you saw up here was carrying it when we captured him.”
“Why should I know anything about it?”
“We had a tip, Meneer Myburgh. Our informant told us to take a man or two off a commuter bus from KwaNdebele.”
“So?”
“Major van Rhyn’s report says you had your accident—hitting that elephant—on the same stretch of road.”
Physically, Myburgh felt better, his hunger satisfied and his bruised body clad in snug, warm clothes. But now that Jeppe had made the connection between his wreck on the KwaNdebele Road and the stopping of Grim Boy’s Toe several miles beyond that roadblock, Myburgh feared that maybe these single-minded men were determined to link him to the same absurd scenario to which they had already linked Thubana and Skosana. If that happened—if they succeeded—his comfortable station in life would evaporate like mist and only his brother Kiewit, a lukewarm friend or two, and some of his more appreciative clients would care at all. He would vanish forever, a statistic of the state of emergency.
“Coincidence,” Myburgh said uneasily.
“You’ve never read this book?”
“No. Why?”
“Certain passages are underlined. We thought you could help us explain their encoded meanings.”
“I’m a financial advisor, not a cryptologist.”
“But if you were also a traitor and spy?” Jeppe said, smiling. Abruptly, he shouted: “Steenkamp!”
Steenkamp came into the room with Thubana’s T-shirt. He spread it out on the table next to the book.
“And this?” Jeppe said. “What about this?”
At that moment, Myburgh heard the familiar staticky tinniness of a resistance radio broadcast: “… and the Ten Point Program of the Unity Movement put forward in 1943. This advance reflected the awakening of the people and departed from a liberal democratic program by posing the issue of the ‘Land to the Tiller’ as being of paramount …”
Jeppe stood up. “Not again.” He went from the room, followed closely by Goosen and Schoeman. Steenkamp remained behind to guard both Myburgh and the seditious T-shirt TOE.
“… only one meaning amongst scientific socialists: seizure without compensation. Lenin in his Agrarian Program repeated this point again and again to distinguish it from…
“Skosana,” Myburgh whispered.
Over the staticky lecture, a scream: “MORDECAI-I-I-I-I-I!”
Myburgh stood up. Steenkamp laid a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down.
“MORDECAI-I-I-I-I-I!”
Christ, what was going on? He could hear (over both the radio broadcast and Skos
ana’s screaming) the sounds of scuffling, grunts, billy clubs clattering, metal bars gonging.
“Steenkamp!” someone yelled. “Steenkamp, get out here!”
“Stay put,” Steenkamp said. He slipped around Myburgh’s chair, darted into the hall like a soccer wingman.
The uproar went on: shortwave screeches, screams, the muddled warring of iron and wood and boot leather. Myburgh’s heart pounded like a machine press stamping out badges. He told himself to obey Steenkamp’s warning and stay put, but when the hubbub persisted and no one returned to check on him, he crept to the door.
“Mordecai-i-i-i-i-i… !”
Six or seven men at the far end of the corridor were wrestling Winston Skosana around its dogleg, hurrying to get him out of sight and hearing. Myburgh could still hear him calling Thubana’s first name, but with less and less energy.
Then the long hall was empty: a bright tunnel of plasterboard, tilework, and staggered, ceiling-mounted smoke detectors. Myburgh could not believe the feeling he had. As if he had become shadow matter again, an invisible man in the near-invisible empery of the security police.
In his bleached takkies, Myburgh hobbled down the hall. Past van Rhyn’s office. Past a pair of closed—what?—storage rooms? Past a lavatory, another shakedown room, and two vertical strips of chrome suggesting that this end of the hall had a purpose different from that of the end he had just left, namely, imprisoning people who knew things that the state needed to know. And then, suddenly, Myburgh was at Thubana’s cell again.
Thubana’s naked feet hung half a meter off the floor. His body twisted from a light fixture in a noose made from a cracked leather belt.
Thubana’s belt was his only article of clothing. Why? Myburgh wondered. A man with no pants didn’t need a belt.
* * * *
Jeppe, blowing his nose into a handkerchief, marched around the corner with Goosen, Steenkamp, and Schoeman. When he saw Myburgh standing outside Thubana’s cell, he cursed, waved his handkerchief, and piped congestedly, “Get him!”
Before Myburgh could react, Goosen ran at him in a dutiful fury and flattened him with an expertly swung elbow. Steenkamp kicked him in the ribs. Goosen gave him an exasperated conk as he sought to roll away, for Myburgh was writhing—involuntarily from the pain and calculatedly to avoid further blows.
“Enough!” Jeppe cried.
Myburgh lay under the security men’s feet. There was blood on his clean flannel shirt. This angered him all out of proportion to the shirt’s value. Maybe because Thubana was dangling in his cell from his own belt.
“You murdered him,” Myburgh said.
“A lot of them commit suicide,” Jeppe said. “He’s just another goddamned kaffir who took the easy way out.”
“Where did he get the belt?”
“Perhaps his friend slipped it to him.”
“When? You confiscated their belts, didn’t you?”
Jeppe paused in his niggling attentions to his nose. “How did you know that?”
Myburgh hesitated. “A deduction. Procedure, isn’t it? Aren’t you supposed to take their belts?”
“Procedures vary.” Jeppe’s voice was as unforthcoming as that of a veteran government spokesman.
“You murdered him,” Myburgh said again.
Goosen cocked his billy threateningly.
“Don’t,” Jeppe told Goosen. “Get him back down the hall. He never should have been out here.”
“That wasn’t my—”
“Shut up.”
“I’m bleeding,” Myburgh said. “These men assaulted me.”
“A cut from your automobile accident,” Jeppe said.
“It’s a cut I received when that swine there tried to—”
“From your accident. From hitting Motalil Prassad’s runaway elephant. Please remember that.”
Myburgh was afraid to contradict Jeppe, who should have been at home, taking antihistamines and drinking healthful juices. More or less passively, Myburgh returned to the interrogation room in which Steenkamp had so precipitously abandoned him.
This time, Jeppe had Goosen stand watch. Myburgh studied his guard. Goosen was late twenties or early thirties, a dark-haired fellow who would have been handsome if his eyes hadn’t carried in them a perpetual look of unfocused shock, as if almost everything about life offended him. He was hair-trigger, a grenade with the pin pulled.
Or he gave that impression. Maybe it was the job. Maybe he had a wife and babies at home. Or maybe he had the job because something cankered and peeling in him had pointed him to it, and maybe he still had a wife and babies at home. So far as Myburgh knew, there was no law on the books against borderline psychopaths marrying and raising families…
Oddly, Myburgh felt fairly safe with the boy. Jeppe was going to let him go. Or else why caution him to remember that the cut on his head had come from an automobile accident, not the attentions of this duty-conscious pretty boy? Something—something beyond the barbarous lynching of Thubana—had happened, and so Jeppe & Company were on the brink of releasing him.
“What’s your name?”
Goosen looked at him with stupidly snobbish disdain. “Maybe I don’t care to tell you.”
“I know your family name. What’s your Christian name?”
“All you need to know is Warrant Officer Goosen.”
“You look like”—Myburgh pretended to consider possibilities—”a Hans, I think.”
Goosen was insulted. “Not a Hans. A Hugo. And you’re to keep your mouth shut.”
“A while ago you wanted me to talk.”
A glint of smug cunning sparked from Goosen’s eyes. “You have a statement to make?”
“Where did the hanged man’s belt come from?”
“You heard Major Jeppe. That other kaffir, probably.”
“From you, far more probably. Or from Wessels, or Steenkamp, or Schoeman.”
Goosen merely smiled. “Oh, Meneer Myburgh.”
“I think the ‘other kaffir’ told you his friend had nothing to do with the others you were investigating.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” Goosen said, leaning across the table; his breath reeked of cream cheese and beer.
Myburgh ignored the smell: “But you gentlemen had done such lovely hosepipe work on the man it would have been awkward to let him go.”
“Such a mind. What a detective. You should join the special branch yourself.”
“So you found his belt. And gave it to him. To help him hold up his appendectomy scar, I suppose.”
Goosen’s brow furrowed. “He had no appendectomy scar.”
“No, but you people hanged him naked, anyway. And with his own belt too.”
Goosen went to the room’s file cabinet. Did he plan to take a hosepipe from it?
Wham! Wham!
He kicked the file cabinet, then turned back to Myburgh with comets in his eyes, the red and yellow fallout of Voortrekker Day sparklers. The pupils shining inside these fireworks were those of a man high on his own ill-suppressed rage.
“You’d better stop, brother-man. You’d better just stop!”
“All right, Warrant Officer Goosen. All right.” Myburgh held up his hands placatingly.
Given everything that had happened, maybe the best course was to keep his mouth shut. To refrain from antagonizing Major Jeppe, Warrant
Officer Goosen, and all the other high-strung men of the special branch.
To maintain his composure. And, maybe hardest of all, simply to bide his time.
* * * *
He had not guessed wrong; they were releasing him. Lieutenant Cuyler, according to Major Jeppe, had done some telephoning and had learned that Myburgh was a clean case. Each reference, though, had needed cross-checking and confirmation. That was why, regrettably, they had held him so long.
“Not because you thought me a terrorist?” Myburgh said.
Jeppe swallowed a cold tablet with a gulp of water. “It isn’t often that a man who hits an elephant on the KwaNdebele Road
comes into our building to report it”
A tactful way of confessing that they had grilled him because they had been suspicious of him. Thank God they hadn’t subjected him to the “refrigerator,” the “airplane,” “Dr. Frankenstein,” the “marionette,” and so on. Thank God.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 60
