Treasonous

by David Hickson

  “You have a duty to protect yourself,” I said.

  “What duty? The people of this country do not need a killer president. I am the wrong person for the job.”

  Through the window behind Mbuyo I could see the racing outlines of clouds moving in to darken the sky. With the sun about to drop below the sea, the winter evening would be a dark one. The stadium was like a black cardboard cut-out against the shifting greys, but then suddenly the lights sprang on, and a black curtain was drawn over the sky, and the stadium returned to its full Technicolor glory.

  “They found the switch for the generators,” said Mbuyo, “and the spare diesel because the tanks had probably been drained and the fuel sold for cash. It’s Africa, that’s the way it’s done here.”

  The door to the suite opened again, and one of the junior aides put his head in.

  Mbuyo held up a hand to acknowledge him. “We’re done,” he called to him, then said to me, “There is no protection for Lindi, and there is none for me. This is a stone that has been waiting to roll for many years. It is too late to stop it now.”

  Mbuyo reached out with his crippled hand and gripped my shoulder. His face was a mask of scar tissue, his eyes full of kindness.

  “Don’t kill him,” he said. “There has been enough killing.”

  I thought he was going to say something more, but he gave my shoulder a parting squeeze, released it and looked back to the aide. “Call the circus back in,” he said, and his scarred face twisted into a regretful smile.

  I drove through the descending gloom of the evening towards the beckoning warmth of the cosy retreat where Robyn would be waiting, and the thought of her filled my mind as I struggled along the slippery roads, banging the heater of the car and shivering despite my insulated jacket. I thought of the regrets of the two people who had confessed to me that day that they were killers and I wondered about my own regrets.

  It had taken me over an hour to get out of the parking lot at the stadium because of the endless security checks and all the people streaming in to hear the president-to-be speak, so it was two hours before I dropped into the Franschhoek valley. The quaint village greeted me with the warm twinkling lights of its bars and restaurants, and with the smell of wood smoke from the fires keeping their customers warm. The door of a bar burst open, throwing a golden light onto the road ahead of me and a man came running out as if he was being chased. He stood in the road in front of me and waved his hands above his head. I slowed to a halt, and he came around to the window.

  “They’ve killed him,” he said in a voice strangled by panic. Rain poured down his face, and he stared at me with wide-eyed challenge as if I might provide an answer. I recognised the signs of shock. “Shot him,” he said as I didn’t react.

  “Shot who?” I asked.

  “Fucking idiots,” said the man, and he ran off to spread the news further.

  Fear crept over me like a suffocating wave. I parked the car and went into the bar the man had emerged from. Everyone was gathered around a TV mounted on the wall. The volume was up, and the only sound in the place was the strained, slightly breathless voice of a news reporter. Mbuyo was on the screen, his hands held up in the gesture of a great orator. Behind him were the members of his new parliament, looking pleased with themselves. The image moved slowly as the news crew made the most of the moment and cranked up the slow motion. Even in slow motion, it happened surprisingly fast. One moment Mbuyo’s scarred face was opening its mouth to say something. The next he had fallen out of frame, and in the background other people on stage were suddenly crouched to the ground. Other camera shots showed security men stepping forward, putting themselves into the line of fire. Mbuyo lying sprawled on the stage. Security men clustering around him, and then medics appeared. In the background I could see Matlala crouched low and gazing with horror at the fallen figure of Mbuyo.

  There was no movement from Mbuyo.

  “A shot to the head,” said the news reporter, and the image switched to show a man in a sheepskin jacket outside the stadium, holding a microphone in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Behind him the floodlit stadium looked like some alien witch’s cauldron beaming light up into the sky to signal its home planet. No one was being allowed to leave, he explained. The police had a perimeter around the stadium. Still no news on President-elect Mbuyo’s condition. “But we have reports coming in of a man who threatened the president-elect earlier this evening. Here at Green Point Stadium. The police are urgently seeking this man.”

  I returned to my car and was with Robyn within five minutes. She had cooked a lamb stew, and the cottage was warm from the fire she’d had going all day. The rooms were lit with candles, and for a moment I glimpsed another way of life. But we turned the lights on, and I called the Department’s emergency number.

  Twenty-Five

  Not one of the five policemen who searched, x-rayed and prodded me on my way back into the stadium seemed to think for a moment that I bore any resemblance to the blurry image of the man they were urgently searching for, whose picture was pinned up beside their makeshift workstations.

  Green Point Stadium had the feeling of a disaster relief camp. The police had decided that the person who pulled the trigger was still within the stadium, a reasonable assumption given that there were no outside vantage points overlooking the stage, and that the police surrounding the stadium had closed all exits within a minute of the shot being fired. And so they had decided to record the identity of every single person leaving the stadium and had called in the army to help with the processing. Twenty temporary search and record stations had been set up, and they were photographing faces and scanning ID cards. By the time I arrived they had been busy with this for almost three hours and were a little over halfway through the thirty thousand people in the stadium. The mood was surprisingly buoyant, in the way that the survivors of a disaster gather and feel the elation of having survived. The army was tasked with moving the people who had been processed out of the building and into their cars, because most of them loitered and held back, not wanting to leave the embrace of this new community.

  “Nothing like disaster to bring us together,” agreed the sergeant who escorted me up to the VIP suites.

  “How do they know people aren’t sneaking through an exit they don’t have covered?”

  “They’ll not have the mark, will they?” The sergeant lifted a hand with his thumb up as if he was making an OK sign. He pulled a pen out of a pocket and pressed a button on it. His thumb glowed brightly in the dim corridor. “Ultraviolet,” he said. “Same stuff they use when you vote. Takes a week to wear off. They won’t let you out if you don’t have one of these.”

  “How do I get myself one?”

  “Show them that entry card on your way out, and they’ll do it.”

  “I have to join the queue?” I asked. “I should cancel my dinner plans.”

  The sergeant laughed. “No queue. With the entry card, you bypass all that.”

  Fehrson’s greeting lacked the enthusiasm of our previous encounters. He rose to his feet and sighed heavily, as if he’d hoped I might not arrive despite his insistence that I should. Khanyi stood obediently beside him and her eyes were no more welcoming.

  “Here’s your man,” said Fehrson to a tall man with a bald head and bulbous nose in a police uniform. The man looked me up and down as if he wasn’t sure that I met expectations, then he thrust out a hand which I shook.

  “Major Fehrson tells me you were on official business,” he said in a deep bass voice and a tone that made it clear he didn’t believe Major Fehrson.

  “I was,” I said, and Khanyi’s lips pursed.

  “Mind sharing with me some details of that official business?”

  “It is mostly classified, Captain Shiya,” said Khanyi before I could say anything.

  “Broad strokes then,” said the Captain. “Leave out the mostly classified bits.”

  Khanyi nodded at me as if tacitly granting permission.

 
“We had been running some background checks for him, and I was reporting back,” I said. We watched to see how the Captain would take this quickly improvised fabrication. He didn’t take it well.

  “Background checks that required you to be alone with him for ten minutes?” said the Captain.

  “There were some sensitive aspects,” I said. “Women in the past, that kind of thing.”

  This made more sense to the Captain.

  “But you found it necessary to threaten him?” he said.

  “That was a misunderstanding. I made no threat. If anything, I was concerned for his safety.”

  The Captain sucked on his teeth while keeping his eyes fixed on me. We were in a similar VIP suite to the one that I had stood in with Mbuyo. It was occupied by teams of military personnel who had set up an impromptu operations room and they milled about us in a state of frenetic haste.

  “We’ll need a statement,” said the Captain.

  “I regret,” said Fehrson, clearing his throat with that regret, “that it is unlikely that we will be able to contribute anything meaningful.”

  The Captain looked at Fehrson as if trying to remember who he was. “Make it a meaningless statement then,” he said in a patronising voice.

  Khanyi showed her teeth and applied her charm at full throttle. “We will do our best, Captain Shiya,” she said. The Captain’s hard face melted a little under the glare.

  “Thank you,” said the Captain. “Any help that you and your elite team of concerned citizens can provide will be much appreciated.” He stepped away from us before the force of Khanyi’s charm could do permanent damage.

  “Want to tell us what’s going on?” asked Fehrson.

  “I’m not sure you’d like it,” I said.

  “I’m sure I won’t,” he said. “But let me decide that.” He turned to Khanyi. “Find us somewhere quiet to talk.”

  Khanyi found us a quiet corner of the room where we could talk undisturbed. The VIP suite was at fever pitch because of their conviction that the shooter was still in the stadium and would soon be forced to make a move. Sure enough, as we settled down in our quiet corner, the room erupted. The sergeant who had escorted me upstairs was talking to the Captain in a high-pitched, anxious voice as if someone was squeezing his voice box. An ambulance had passed through the exit gates a few minutes before. A single driver. With an exit card, but the driver had not matched the photo of the person issued with that card. The Captain spoke into his radio. And then we heard the sirens wailing into the distance as the chase began.

  The TVs mounted on the glass walls were displaying the news and it wasn’t long before the helicopter circling the stadium picked up the ambulance travelling at high speed with its lights flashing, and not far behind it the fleet of flickering blue lights giving chase. The Captain was on the radio to the leader of the vehicles, and we could hear them calling distances, and confirming the progress of other vehicles approaching from the opposite direction. As we watched the fleeing ambulance, I wondered about the choice of escape vehicle. And couldn’t help wondering whether imitation was indeed the greatest form of flattery.

  The ambulance was on the N1 highway now, and the traffic ahead of it was slowing because of the impromptu roadblocks that had been set up further to the north. Traffic heading in the other direction had been stopped, and those lanes were enticingly empty. Further ahead was another fleet of police vehicles, but the driver of the ambulance couldn’t see them yet. Each direction of the highway consisted of three lanes, with a ditch between them. A water drain ran through the middle of the ditch and lining the side of the road in both directions was a crash railing. Crossing over to the other lane would not be possible.

  As the police vehicles gained on the ambulance, the tension in the room mounted. Then suddenly a policeman shouted out excitedly.

  We saw it then. A break in the barrier, and a narrow track linking the two lanes, created for service vehicles and a place for emergency vehicles to change direction. The ambulance wobbled in the road as the driver also noticed the narrow gap.

  “He’ll never make it,” said Khanyi. She was right. The track was designed for negotiating at walking speed. The ambulance was travelling at a speed that would have enabled it to get airborne if it had been a little more aerodynamic. But after the initial wobble the driver turned the wheel and hit the brakes hard so that the vehicle looked as if the forward momentum had it sliding along on two wheels. Everyone drew their breath in, a communal gasp, as the ambulance veered towards the narrow gap in the railing.

  “He made it,” cried one of the policemen as the ambulance spewed sparks against the railings. But it was travelling too fast, and instead of dropping into the ravine, it launched into it like a long-distance ski jumper leaving the ramp. For a breathless moment it sailed across the ravine, but then hit the far side with such force that the back of the vehicle jumped upwards and it performed a cartwheel, landing on its roof in a shower of sparks in the other lane. It slid into the middle of the road like a beetle on its back and burst into flames.

  “Poor devil,” said Fehrson. No one else in the room spoke. The helicopter circled the burning vehicle and revealed the arrow-shaped cluster of police cars with their flashing blue lights approaching from the north. They skidded to a halt in a defensive formation and figures jumped out and took cover behind their vehicles.

  “They need him alive,” said Khanyi. “Surely they know that? They need to know who put him up to it.”

  There was a sudden commotion from the men gathered around the radio station as it crackled anxiously. A policeman pointed at the TV, and as the helicopter came around, we could see a man emerging from the inferno, his clothes on fire, an arm raised up and pointing at the police line. The arm jerked, and the radio crackled again. The man was firing on them.

  They let him approach to within twenty metres of the police line, his arm jerking with the recoil of the shots he was firing, and then a sniper fired.

  The man dropped, first to his knees, and then he fell forward, and lay face down, his clothes still flickering with flames. The room was silent for a moment. And then suddenly everyone was talking, the Captain was calling for updates on the radio, and others were reaching for their handheld radios and phones. On the screens we saw the first wave of police approach the prone body of the ambulance driver, and fire fighters started spraying foam over the burning vehicle.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Khanyi. “Now we’ll never know who tried to kill Mbuyo.”

  “Tried?” I said.

  “It turns out half his skull is steel,” said Khanyi. “They put metal plates in after the fire. But his condition is serious. It doesn’t look good.”

  Khanyi managed to persuade a policeman to help her insert some coins into a coffee machine, which he did while gazing at her cleavage. Then he took out his frustration on the vending machine with some helpful but unnecessary punches. We settled into the quiet corner of the room, and Fehrson glowered at me.

  “That’s absurd,” he announced after I’d told them that Mbuyo had refused to identify the person they’d called Frans.

  “Absurd that he refused?” I said.

  “Absurd that you think this attempted assassination has anything to do with what happened all those years ago. There are other political issues at play here. More relevant issues. Current issues.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “An unfortunate coincidence.”

  Fehrson sniffed and sipped at his coffee as if he enjoyed it. Khanyi’s eyes narrowed as she tried to determine the depth of my lie.

  “He gave you no idea who that person might be?” she asked.

  “No idea,” I said.

  Khanyi’s face radiated her disbelief. Fehrson grunted with approval and placed his coffee cup on the low table between us.

  “That brings an end to it then,” he said with some satisfaction and he smiled at me.

  Khanyi had explained the content of our afternoon discoveries to Fehrson while they waited
for my return to the stadium. Discoveries which I suspected he was already working to discredit and bury in the file of absurd speculation.

  I agreed that brought an end to it, and Fehrson nodded again and tried to smile his approval. His eyes were drooping with tiredness, and they were rimmed with red. He reached for his coffee again and sipped at it, then repeated how pleased he was that it was all over.

  Khanyi walked me to the door. “You can trust Father,” she said. “You should know that.”

  “Of course I know it,” I assured her. We looked back at Fehrson, huddled in his armchair in the corner like a man recovering from a disaster. Khanyi turned to me.

  “There was another shooting,” she said. “Near Dundee, Masotsheni. A woman was killed. I don’t know any details. The initial report came in an hour ago.”

  “You haven’t told Fehrson?”

  Khanyi shook her head. “Not yet.” She looked back at Fehrson and said, “If Mbuyo gave you a name it would be a breach of justice to keep quiet about it.”

  She turned back to me and I could see the exhaustion in her eyes too. It was an exhaustion I shared, which is probably why I didn’t keep my mouth shut.

  “What justice?” I said. “The problem, Khanyi, is that some people are beyond justice. The justice system in this country is about hiding the truth and protecting the privileged. Not righting any wrongs.”

  “You are an anarchist, Gabriel,” said Khanyi. “I didn’t realise it was true.”

  “And you are better? The man you call Father has spent his life covering up the heinous actions of people who use justice to increase their own privilege.”

  “You don’t understand, Gabriel.”

  “No, I don’t. Justice is not filing a report and then locking it away in some archive. Justice is action, not a neat little written summary of what went wrong.”