“This the real stuff?” asked Fehrson with feigned bonhomie, taking a deep sniff an inch above the ruinous milky brown liquid.
“It is not, Mr Fehrson,” said the spherical Belinda, who steadfastly refused to call him Father because, as she pointed out whenever she had an opportunity, she was almost his age, and she already had someone she called Father. It was generally accepted that someone was part of the Holy Trinity, because Belinda was Presbyterian.
“Besides, Mr Fehrson,” said Belinda as she withdrew from the room. “That nasty machine you bought last year has stopped working. I did tell you about that.”
Before Fehrson could respond, she closed the door.
“It’s because she tried to get it to produce coffee without filling the water tank,” confided Fehrson as he reached for a biscuit. “Two each,” he said in case our mathematics wasn’t up to the challenge. “Unless you’re not biscuit-ing today, Khanyi?”
Khanyi indicated that she was not biscuit-ing, and when I bit into one of them I realised why. It would have been more tasty to have taken slices out of the wooden floorboards.
“Dlomo,” I said, as the full name came back to me. “Lindiwe Dlomo was what he said.”
“Ah yes?” asked Fehrson casually as he tried to wash some biscuit down with what Belinda called coffee.
“That’s the one,” I said. “Lindiwe Dlomo. This journalist implied that it all had something to do with her.”
Fehrson didn’t respond but looked down at his biscuit as if suspecting that it wasn’t edible after all.
“Do we know a Lindiwe Dlomo?” asked Khanyi.
Fehrson shook his head and put the biscuit back onto the plate. “You don’t, my dear,” he said. “There was a Lindiwe Dlomo who did something for us a very long time ago. Back in the eighties. More than thirty years ago.” He glared at the plate of biscuits, wondering whether he’d been unlucky with his.
“There is a connection then?” said Khanyi. “I mean this journalist isn’t spouting absolute nonsense. The woman exists, and she had a connection with the Department.”
No, no,” said Fehrson, uttering the two words like the beating of a rhythm on a drum. He looked up at me, reluctantly giving up on the biscuits and focusing instead on our conversation. “She died many years ago. I doubt you’d find anyone here who even remembers her.”
Apart, of course, from Fehrson. I didn’t say that, but glanced at Khanyi and imagined I could detect the same thought tiptoeing its way across her mind.
“We could pull her file and see if anything floats to the surface,” suggested Khanyi.
Fehrson shook his head. “Those old files all went over to the archives when we moved here from that old Woodstock dungeon. All that Truth and Reconciliation nonsense. Before your time, you wouldn’t remember it.” Fehrson sniffed.
The Truth and Reconciliation ‘nonsense’ had been a commission established after the fall of the apartheid regime to sift through the troubled past of the country and expose the truth behind politically motivated crimes and military actions, then attempt to achieve reconciliation within a complex collection of cultures who had until recently been at war with one another. Fehrson was correct in saying that I didn’t remember it, because it hadn’t been big news at the grammar school I was attending at the time in Dorset, but I certainly did know of it. I also knew that it was Fehrson’s shortest fuse. It was well established among the Department staff that the quickest way to rouse Father’s temper was to mention the TRC.
“If it was with the TRC files she must have been more than a person of interest,” said Khanyi. “It would have been operational.”
“No, no,” said Fehrson again. “It was the time of the great collapse. The war was over and everything we had was ripped out from our carefully concealed hiding places and put up on the shelves like god-awful library books for everyone to read. Operational, personnel, even the office expense sheets were taken from us. You could go over to those archive people and ask for the files, I suppose. If they can find them.”
“It hardly seems worth it,” said Khanyi. “You don’t remember what this woman did for us, Father?”
Fehrson shook his head and adopted the look of a man struggling to recall his youth. “She was a bit-part player,” he said. “Just a pigeon; carried messages back and forth, if I recall. I was not directly involved, but she told us about things happening on the ground – that fire, that sort of thing.”
“That fire?” said Khanyi. “The Khayelitsha Massacre fire?”
“Amongst other things,” said Fehrson.
“They call the president-elect the Phoenix because he survived that fire,” she said. “That would be a connection between them.”
“I doubt it. She was a carrier pigeon, that was all. Don’t complicate things unnecessarily, Khanyisile.”
Khanyi turned to me. “Was that all this journalist said? Just a name?”
“That was it. A woman called Lindiwe, and someone from the Department ‘covering up’ for the new president.”
“And why did he come to you?” asked Khanyi. “Why didn’t he ring our doorbell and come up for some tea?”
I wanted to ask Khanyi whether she had seen the size of the men who answered their doorbell, but instead I shrugged. “He thought I might have more influence with you.”
“Influence with us?” asked Fehrson. “Why would he think that? Are you part of some club of people who do this sort of thing? Go around stirring up nonsense from the past,” He gave a faint shiver of horror. “He wants a statement from us to stop him publishing this ridiculous nonsense?”
“I rather think he is not planning on publishing anything,” I said.
“Well, of all the ludicrous … What on earth is he planning on doing?”
“He wants hush money, doesn’t he?” asked Khanyi.
“I think so.”
“And you came to us expecting we would agree?” asked Khanyi, her eyes lighting up with anger.
“I came here because I thought you should know someone was going around spreading this rubbish. I wasn’t going to mention any money.”
Khanyi narrowed her eyes to slits as if she could see my flaws better that way.
“Of course you weren’t,” said Fehrson. “We’re all friends here, Khanyisile. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Khanyi flashed a perfect white smile at me. “I know that, Father,” she said, and shared her smile with him.
“My advice, young Ben,” said Fehrson as he pushed his coffee away in case he accidentally took another sip. “My advice is that you go back to this journalist friend of yours and tell him he’s got his knickers all in a twist, and that there is no story.”
“And there is no money,” said Khanyi.
“That is my intention,” I said. “Has been all along. I thought it would be rude not to mention it to you though.”
“For which we are very grateful, my dear boy,” said Fehrson. “Khanyi can take some action as you suggest. A small statement perhaps? Just in case your friend decides to go ahead and publish when we refuse to pay. We’ll go through what paperwork we have and play an open hand. Come back in a couple of days and we’ll show you what we’ve got. You can go back to your friend and tell him with your hand on your heart that there is no dark secret. My goodness,” he produced a hearty laugh. “The sheer absurdity of it. Now you help yourself to a few of those biscuits. It’s not every day Belinda is so generous.”
“It’s that Swedish jerk, isn’t it?” asked Khanyi as we descended in the lift together. “He’s the kind who would dream up some nonsense from thirty years ago and then try to extort money from us.”
I didn’t answer, but dug around in the pockets of my jacket for some cigarettes. I found a pack of Gauloises and pulled one out.
“Never liked the rubbish he wrote,” continued Khanyi. “He picks on the vulnerable and then crushes them. Aren’t journalists meant to do things the other way round?”
“Is the Department vulnerable?” I searched for s
ome matches.
“You can’t smoke that in here you know,” said Khanyi. “I thought you’d given up.”
“I had,” I said, and held the matchbox in my hand as the lift lurched downward in small discreet steps. “But what are we going to do when this lift gets stuck and they have to call the firemen to cut us out?”
Khanyi sighed.
“Of course we’re vulnerable,” she said. “You know how they’re always trying to push Father out. He’s a dinosaur, an embarrassment for Pretoria. We’re fighting for our lives here, Gabriel, you know that. It was the same when you were here.”
I did know it, and for the last few floors we descended in silence. There had been a time, before I understood the subtlety of the situation, when I’d thought Khanyi would have welcomed Fehrson’s downfall. As the high priestess of the Department, she would have stepped into his shoes and achieved the ultimate accolade: her own department. But Johansson’s comparison with a ship came back to me. Like a ship that has travelled too far off course, if the captain went down the ship would be doomed. None of the crew knew the way back.
Two days later, after identifying Johansson’s remains, I returned to my apartment and took a shower to clean off the lingering smell of death. Then I stood on the balcony and watched a cold front approach over the sea as the evening light faded. I lit the cigarette I’d been toying with the past couple of days and wondered how much time you would need to plan to push someone off a waterfront quay. There had been about eight hours since the time I left the Warehouse and the time that Johansson discovered just how cold the Atlantic gets in late autumn. That would have been enough time. But surely Fehrson didn’t still engage in that sort of messy activity. Or did Khanyi handle it all for him?
The sun found its way under the bank of clouds but then collapsed into a molten pool which oozed into the Atlantic. I found no answers out to sea, but the gathering storm did provide me with some resolve. I might not have liked Johansson, but the least I could do was find out what sordid intrigue might have ended his life.
Three
Cape Town swims through the Atlantic like a jellyfish alongside the whale that is the African continent. Behind it trails a single knobbly sting, the Cape Peninsula that keeps the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean from getting together too soon. There are two strings of suburbs, one on each side of the peninsula. On the east you find the suburbs for serious types who commute into work and like to pretend that they’re not living in a holiday camp. On the western side of the peninsula are the more frivolous suburbs that squeeze onto the steep slope between the sea and a row of mountain peaks called the Twelve Apostles. These people are well aware that they live in a holiday camp. It’s why they’re here, after all. This is where all the big money resides, where the international pop stars live incognito behind their sunglasses, sipping gin on terraces overlooking the sea, waving coyly at the yachts that drift past.
If you drive down the road that winds along this coast you eventually leave behind all the glitz and glamour, and arrive at Hout Bay, one of the most beautiful bays on the peninsula. It has a small harbour for yachts and fishing boats, a few real old fishermen, and houses that yearn to be little farms, each with their own plot for growing vegetables and orchards of fruit trees.
Bill Pinter had a house one road up from the shoreline, so that when the genuine oak French doors were open one could hear the sea below and smell the ozone. It was an old building, a touch of Provençal France, and one wall was still the original stone wall that had been part of the farm building that stood here before Bill came along and modernised it. Terracotta tiles with underfloor heating paved the way onto the terrace with vines growing over the trellis. From here one could survey the fruit trees, and beyond them the sea. Bill insisted that his trees were on a plot: apparently gardens are the things with flowers. Plots are much more serious.
“You’ve got nothing more than her name?” asked Bill as he topped up my glass. “The name of a woman who died thirty years ago? That’s going to be a tough one.” He was wearing an apron stretched across his ample stomach, because my unexpected visit had inspired him to indulge in his favourite pastime, and he was ‘whipping up’ something in the kitchen while I admired the view.
“She had a file with the NIA,” I said.
“Oh no, Gabriel,” Bill paused in pouring the wine as if not sure that I deserved any more. “You’re not working with those government goons again are you?”
Bill had never approved of the Department. He didn’t approve of anything related to government and had made his position on the matter abundantly clear when Sandy had introduced us. Theirs was a friendship of many years, one that I had been fortunate to inherit when Sandy ‘took me on’ as Bill liked to say.
“Back then just about everyone had a file with the NIA,” I said.
“But now they’ve misplaced it, and they’ve asked you to sweep the remains under the carpet?”
“They haven’t asked me anything. A journalist suggested that she was a stain on Mbuyo’s past. I’m intrigued, that’s all.”
I didn’t mention that the journalist was now lying in a morgue.
“Why don’t you take a look at the NIA file?”
“I don’t think they have it. They transferred those old files to the archives after the TRC hearings.”
Bill nodded, a movement that involved most of his upper body. He had always been Sandy’s ‘secret source’. A lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Cape Town, he was a walking and talking reference on everything that had happened in the country in the past fifty years. At least Sandy had always claimed so. When she needed to know something she had turned to Bill first and was rarely disappointed. Which was why I was now sampling Bill’s fine collection of Chardonnay and was preparing to enjoy his famous veal cordon bleu. It was rumoured he had perfected the dish by testing it upon a series of young and flirtatious female students, of whom he seemed to have an endless supply. Bill was like the Pied Piper of the History department. He was a junior lecturer and tutor, but most people were surprised when they discovered that he wasn’t the professor in charge. This probably had something to do with the way his voice would boom down the corridor, causing secretaries and other minions to flutter about with nervous anticipation whenever he paid one of his sporadic visits to his shoe-box office.
“Thirty years ago is my speciality. Not much I don’t know about that time.”
“She was probably no more than a messenger. Hardly headline material.”
Bill harrumphed and finished topping up my wine. Bill is large. I would like to find a kinder way of saying it, but there isn’t one really. He is tall, and big boned no doubt, but there is a substantial amount of flesh on those bones. He has several chins, and hands that look as if they’ve been inflated, but his largeness is not merely a matter of being fat. He has a presence that would be enough for two normal mortals. He dresses with refined taste in oversize clothes, usually in strong colours, and is hard to miss in a crowd, not that he ever hangs out in crowds. At the opera, Bill always sits in the balcony where he reserves two seats, one for each half of himself.
“It’s not a name that rings any bells,” said Bill as he returned to the kitchen.
“It was worth a shot,” I said. “Sandy always claimed you were the best place to start.”
“You should go direct to the archives,” he called back as he shook the pan and a wall of flame reached up to the ceiling. “Those old NIA files are in the Gold Archives now.”
The Gold Archives had been established by the South African Gold Mining Conglomerate, and were really just a big publicity stunt in which Riaan Breytenbach, the chairman of the conglomerate, stood around smiling in front of pictures of shelves of dusty files, and explained that he was using a microscopic portion of the blood money he and his cronies had made from their gold mines, in order to preserve the rich heritage of the country. Heritage in the form of the written history and archive material. It was too late to preserve the h
eritage in the form of the gold which had all been sold, or was stored somewhere safe and now mostly belonged to Breytenbach and his cronies, and certainly too late to preserve the heritage in the form of the thousands of lives lost in the mines. But everyone smiled for the cameras and Sandy had told me I was being a cynical bastard, which was probably true. That was when the Gold Archives were opened – before Sandy left. And she said that I was prejudiced, which was also true. It was during a posting to Breytenbach’s gold mine in northern Uganda that my military career had come to an end. He had needed help dealing with a terrorist problem, and the British government had been most obliging.
“And this Lindiwe had something to do with Mbuyo?” asked Bill as he brought the food out to the terrace.
“There’s a possible connection with the fire,” I said.
“The Khayelitsha fire?”
“The Khayelitsha massacre was what my erstwhile employer said.”
“Well, well. That’s an interesting connection.” Bill tucked a napkin beneath his chins and raised his cutlery as if about to perform a ritual slaughter. “I’ve got some old photographs and news clippings and the like. If you’re up to some nostalgia we could go through my slides after dinner. But have yourself some veal before it gets cold.”
Bill’s Veal Cordon Bleu was worth the wait. “That’s Dutch cheese, the genuine stuff, made down the road from here,” he said, and I believed him. I’d seen the cows on my way up.
“It’s very good,” I said. “And that’s an understatement.”
Bill shook his head, and grimaced. “Too tough,” he said.
“Nonsense, I hardly need the knife.”
“The point about cooking is to make each dish better than the last time. And this isn’t. An honest critic would tell me that.”
I was about to say that he hadn’t cooked this dish for me before when I remembered that he had. On the last occasion that Sandy and I had eaten with him. Bill saw the memory bubble up to the surface.
Treasonous Page 3
