The Soldier who Said No (28 page)

With the events at Vila Nova Armada having taken place more than twenty years earlier, and with the handover of power in 1994, De Villiers thought that the military secrets of the past would now be in the public domain. He spent the mornings in the National Library in a lane off Vermeulen Street and the afternoons at Exclusive Books in the Woodhill Shopping Centre looking for clues.

De Villiers tried the telephone directory. It listed quite a few Versters in Pretoria, but only one acknowledged knowing someone by the name of Jacques Verster. He phoned Directory Services for the number and spoke to Jacques Verster. The voice wasn’t one De Villiers recognised.

When he also found no reference to the Russian officer he had shot at Techamutete in the many biographies dealing with the war, he gave up. It was as if there was a conspiracy of silence.

He turned his attention to the captain who had shot Jacques Verster. The starting point was 32 Battalion, but none of the books was of any help. There were tall tales of bravery and victories against an under-trained and ill-equipped enemy, but no mention of the captain in command of Camp Buffalo in 1985.

De Villiers had to approach the official channels for assistance. Voortrekkerhoogte had been renamed Thaba Tshwane. He drove slowly past the detention barracks. Some soldiers lazed about in the shade of a tree in a small park. ‘Could you please tell me where the records section is?’

They shook their heads.

He found it when he was about to give up. There the answer was the same as he had been given elsewhere, ‘The apartheid security apparatus has destroyed all the records from before 1994. This is a military base, not a library.’

‘All I want to know is whether the officer in command of Camp Buffalo in May 1985 is still in the Force,’ De Villiers asked the officer in charge of the records. De Villiers was made to wait half an hour while the officer trawled through his computerised records.

‘He’s no longer here,’ he said.

‘Not in the army?’ De Villiers said, more as a question than an affirmation.

‘Not in the country,’ the officer said. ‘We are paying his pension in another country.’

But he wouldn’t say where.

While De Villiers could find no trace of !Xau, Verster or General van den Bergh in Pretoria, the killers were easy to trace. The Mayor had given them an official reception when they were released, and rewarded them for their sacrifice in the interests of the struggle by allocating council flats in Sunnyside to them. They were in the news on an almost daily basis. De Villiers drove past the building twice and was surprised to find that he recognised it. It was in Mears Street. When he had been courting Annelise, it was still part of Pretoria Normal College and housed the female teacher trainees. On the ground floor there were a dance hall and street café with tables and chairs on the pavement where a large hall used to be. A poster on the plate glass window advertised a live band every Friday and Saturday night.

De Villiers parked the car and walked around, carefully noting the access points. There was no security at the entrance and people streamed in and out of the building. When he was certain that he would know how to find his way in, he studied the escape routes.

De Villiers went inside and studied the list of residents on the board. The killers had rooms on different floors. Their names and room numbers were in brand new lettering.

Johann Weber met De Villiers at Durban International Airport. There was an oily smell about the airport, a mixture of sea air and the petrochemical plant nearby.

‘Liesl has prepared one of the boys’ rooms for you,’ Weber said as they waited for the man ahead of them to find the right coins to feed into the machine. ‘She wouldn’t hear of it that you stay in a hotel.’

The Weber boys were in the
UK
, De Villiers knew.

‘Thanks. How’s Bozo doing?’

Weber smiled laconically as he pulled the parking ticket from the pay machine and spoke with the pride of a father pleased with the way his son has turned out. ‘Charming his way through the London School of Economics and costing me a fortune at the same time. But his brother is paying his own way, at last, and turning more and more into me all the time.’

When De Villiers raised an eyebrow, Weber added, ‘Too serious, too soon.’

De Villiers had fond memories of the Weber boys. Full of fun and not averse to getting up to some mischief with their cousins.

They reached the car, a small
SUV
, before Weber spoke again. ‘I didn’t think we’d be able to fit your luggage into my car, so I borrowed Liesl’s. And you can use Michael’s car while you’re here. It’s a real jalopy, but it’s good for short trips in the city.’

‘Thanks.’ De Villiers had no intention of staying more than a few days. His return flights were booked for exactly one week hence.

Weber drove them to Durban North. The houses on the way appeared to be old, but there were new fences and walls with bare electric wires on top. The walls sported the signs of several security companies De Villiers had never heard of. Combat Force.
ADT
. Coin. Chubb. Amandla Security. Enforce. They passed the La Lucia Shopping Centre and wound their way around a grassy park. Multi-storeyed apartments cascaded down the hillside on the left.

A traffic sign cautioned motorists:
Monkeys Crossing!

Weber saw De Villiers turn his head and laughed. ‘Yes, they’re quite a pest around here and they’ll even come into the house if you leave a door or window open. Liesl has a constant battle keeping them out, but secretly she feeds them, which is against the rules of the Home Owners’ Association. She says she feels sorry for them, that we’ve destroyed their entire natural habitat and consequently we have a moral duty to look after them.’

They stopped at the gates of a small security complex called The Gardens. The security guards waved them through. When De Villiers had last visited the Webers, they were living in a sprawling three-acre property with a tennis court and a swimming pool in Kloof. In The Gardens the houses were close together. In some cases the garages of adjoining houses shared common walls.

Weber answered the unspoken question. ‘Security has become a problem and I couldn’t leave Liesl at home during the day.’

Weber parked the
SUV
between a white Porsche convertible and a battered Citi Golf. The rest of the four-car garage was filled with sports equipment and bicycles. There was a rack of surfboards and cricket, rugby and baseball equipment all sorted in batches on the shelves.

Liesl Weber received him like a long-lost son.

‘Mr de Villiers? Hello, I am Hamish McKerron. Annette de Bruyn has given me a full report. Please come in.’

De Villiers followed the urologist into the consulting room. When Johann Weber had dropped him off in front of the building, De Villiers hadn’t known what to expect, but after being escorted to the general reception room on the first floor, he was left in no doubt. Nearly a dozen patients sat waiting, some in wheelchairs. One was on an oxygen pump with a nurse in attendance. Family members sat next to their kin, listlessly paging through tattered magazines.

As McKerron led De Villiers towards the door of a small consulting room off the reception area, the tired eyes of the waiting patients followed his progress, sizing him up, the same question in every eye. De Villiers felt their eyes boring into his back and shivered.

There was a second doctor in the room, a small woman. McKerron made the introduction.

‘Mr de Villiers, this is Doctor Gabrielle MacDonald. Gabrielle, Mr de Villiers.’

Her hand was soft. ‘Call me Pierre, please,’ De Villiers mumbled.

There was a desk with two visitors’ chairs pushed against it, a small round coffee table and three soft chairs arranged around it. ‘Let’s sit over here,’ Gabrielle MacDonald suggested, pointing to the soft seating. De Villiers waited for her to sit down and took a seat against the wall. The doctors on either side of him, McKerron on the right.

Dr McKerron was a wiry Scot, unsmiling and businesslike. ‘What do we have here?’ he asked as he flipped though the papers. He passed everything he had read to Dr MacDonald.

De Villiers studied the two doctors in turn. McKerron appeared to be on the wrong side of sixty, his grey hair thinning at the top. McKerron glanced at De Villiers over his reading glasses from time to time. MacDonald was much younger. She looked no older than thirty with frizzy black hair and gold earrings. De Villiers didn’t know what to make of the duo. He hadn’t expected there to be two of them.

MacDonald turned and stood with her back against the wall. She held one of the reports in her hand. De Villiers recognised a pathology report.

MacDonald sat down again and slipped the report across to Mc-Kerron, pointing to a line in it. McKerron pursed his lips and made eye contact with De Villiers over his reading glasses.

‘Have you seen this report before?’ he asked.

‘Dr de Bruyn said that there was something odd in the pathology report and she wanted me to ask you about it.’

‘I’m looking at it,’ McKerron said, holding up the two-page path lab report.

MacDonald spread the pages of the path lab report on the coffee table. The two doctors scanned the report, line by line, it seemed to De Villiers. McKerron’s finger stopped at a line and he tapped a word or phrase several times.

‘I agree,’ the oncologist said.

McKerron was blunt and brief. ‘They’ve left a piece behind.’

De Villiers didn’t know what to say at first. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means Dr de Bruyn was right and that we’ve found the source of the continued production of
PSA
,’ McKerron said. ‘The only question which remains is whether there are more cancer cells there.’

Gabrielle MacDonald stood up and smoothed her skirt. She looked at McKerron and indicated with her hand that he should answer.

McKerron took the lead again. ‘We’re going to have to run some tests. It’s also going to take a bit of time.’

‘I have a week,’ said De Villiers.

It was Gabrielle MacDonald’s turn to shake her head. ‘It’ll probably take a bit longer than that. And if you have to undergo treatment, it may be much longer than a week.’

De Villiers sighed. ‘Do you have medical aid?’ McKerron asked.

‘I have full medical aid in New Zealand and I’m on the army’s medical scheme here. They’re supposed to pay all my medical expenses until I die.’

The two doctors made eye contact again. De Villiers thought that there might have been a slight shake of the head on the part of Gabrielle MacDonald, but it was McKerron who spoke. ‘We can review the situation from time to time, but I think you should brace yourself for an uncomfortable and costly week for starters, and then we can consider our options once we have all the test results.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ De Villiers asked.

Gabrielle MacDonald took over. ‘We’ll start with some scans and a complete blood count. Then we can decide what to do based on the results.’

De Villiers looked around the room. ‘When do we start?’

Gabrielle MacDonald pressed the intercom button. ‘Sandra, could you please come here? I need you to take a patient to Radiography.’

She spoke to De Villiers. ‘We need bloods too, but we’ll take that here. My nurse will take you next door to make appointments for the
MRI
and bone scans. I’ll give them a call to speed things up.’

De Villiers nodded.

‘I’d like to see you later today, if at all possible,’ McKerron said. ‘My rooms are at Westville Hospital. I would like to do a thorough examination and a sonar scan. Then you and I can talk about the weeks ahead. I would have liked your wife to be present, but I can understand that won’t be possible. I just don’t want you to feel like you are in this alone. We take care of our patients here.’

The nurse came in as McKerron was about to say more, but bit his lip instead.

Gabrielle MacDonald handed the file to the nurse. ‘We need full bloods and some appointments at Radiology.’

Sandra read his name from the file. ‘Mr de Villiers,’ she looked up before she continued, ‘please come with me.’

De Villiers followed her through the gauntlet of patients and relatives in the reception area. He had expected her to take him to a room for the blood to be drawn, but she took him to the accounts section first, where he paid Dr MacDonald’s consultation fee as well as the fee for the blood sampling. In the room behind the reception desk, a very blond latter-day hippy with body piercings and a tattoo took his blood. She teased him when he turned his head away as she approached his arm with the needle. ‘You’re not scared of a little needle, are you? A big boy like you!’

Johann Weber had made De Villiers promise that he would phone when he was ready to be fetched, but De Villiers decided to walk to the advocate’s chambers instead. He needed the exercise and some time to clear his head. He turned right and started walking towards the city. At the top of the street the name was Moore Road, but it soon changed to Ché Guevara. The further De Villiers walked, the more unkempt the surrounding buildings became. He walked at an easy pace, a Bushman walk, evenly paced and with silent footfall, reading every sign and smelling the air. The street was dirty and several traffic lights were out of order. Motorists fought their way through intersections in a lethal game of chicken in which pedestrians appeared to be legitimate targets, even when they had the odd functioning green light in their favour. On the pavement, pedestrians similarly jostled with each other, stepping this way and that around informal business stalls in a bid to avoid bumping into each other.

Every street had two names; the old name was crossed out with a red line, a new name tacked to the pole above it. The city looked dishevelled – perversely reminding De Villiers of the Luanda of a couple of decades ago – with its pockmarked buildings and potholed streets strewn with litter. This is no way to honour someone, he thought. You wait until a street is filthy and then name it after one of your heroes.