The White Lioness (19 page)

"Victor Mabasha has got to die," he said. "Sooner or later he'll come to Stockholm. I have a strong feeling that he's already here. I cut him badly, I am pretty sure. He'll have a bandage or a glove on one hand. He'll look for the clubs in town where Africans go. He has no other alternative if he's going to track me down. And so you can start spreading the word today that there's a contract on an African with a wound on one of his hands: 100,000 kronor to anybody who can eliminate this man. Go and see all your contacts, all the Russian criminals you know. Don't mention any names. Just say the person issuing the contract is OK."

"That's a lot of cash," Rykoff said.

"You leave that to me," Konovalenko said. "Just do as I say. There's nothing to stop you earning the money yourself. Nor me, come to that."

Konovalenko would have no qualms about putting a pistol to Mabasha's head himself. But he knew that was hardly likely. Such good fortune would be too much to hope for.

"Tonight we can tour the clubs," he said. "By then the contract must have been issued so that everybody who ought to know about it has heard. I'd say you've plenty to do."

Rykoff got to his feet. Despite his flabbiness he was extremely effective, Konovalenko knew, when it mattered. Half an hour later Konovalenko stood at the window, watching him in the car park, getting into a Volvo that looked to be a more recent model than the one he had last seen him in. He's eating himself to death, Konovalenko thought. He gets his kicks from buying new cars. He'll die without experiencing the great pleasure of exceeding his own limitations. He's just a cow chewing its cud.

Konovalenko also had an important job to do that day. He had to raise 100,000 kronor. The question was, which bank to rob?

He went back to his bedroom and was tempted to slip back under the covers and wake Tania. But he resisted, and quickly and noiselessly got dressed.

He left the apartment in Hallunda shortly before 10 a.m. There was a chill in the air, and it was raining. He wondered where Mabasha was now.

At 2.15 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29, Anatoli Konovalenko robbed the Commercial Bank in Akalla. The raid took two minutes. He ran out of the bank, sprinted into the side street on the left and jumped into his car.

He reckoned he had got away with twice as much at least as he needed. If nothing else, he would treat himself and Tania to a gourmet dinner - once Mabasha was disposed of.

The road curved sharply to the right as he approached Ulvsundavagen. There were two police cars blocking the way. He slammed on the brakes. How had the police had time to set up a roadblock? It was no time at all since the bank alarm went off. How could they have known he would choose this route?

He checked his mirrors and heard the tyres squeal as he swung the car in reverse. A rubbish bin flew onto the pavement and his mudguard tore loose on a tree. Now there was no question of driving slowly any more. All that mattered was to lose his pursuers.

He heard the sirens behind him. He swore and wondered again how the trap could have been set out so rapidly. He also cursed the fact that he did not know his way around the district north of Sundbyberg. He had no idea what was the best way of escape.

He strayed into an industrial estate and soon found himself trapped on a one-way street. The police were still in pursuit, even though he had stretched the distance between them by jumping two sets of lights. He leaped out of the car, the carrier bag in one hand and his pistol in the other. When the first police car screeched to a halt he took aim and shattered the windscreen. He had no idea if he had hit anybody, but now he had the advantage he needed. They would not chase him until they had reinforcements.

He scrambled over a fence and into an enclosure that could have been either a dump or a building site. But he was lucky. As he reached the road on the other side, a car with a young couple in it drew up. They must have been looking for some place off the beaten track where they could be alone. Konovalenko did not hesitate. He crept up on the car from behind and thrust the pistol through the window at the man's head.

"Keep quiet, and do exactly what I say," he said in his broken Swedish. "Out of the car. Leave the keys."

The couple seemed completely paralysed. Konovalenko had no time to waste. He ripped open the door, dragged the driver bodily out of the car, jumped in behind the wheel, and looked at the girl in the seat next to him.

"Now I drive," he said. "You have one second to decide if you come with me or not."

She screamed and flung herself out of the car. Konovalenko drove off. Now he was no longer in a hurry. Sirens were approaching from all directions, but his pursuers could not know he had a new car.

Did I wound anybody? he wondered. I'll find out if I turn on the television tonight.

He left the car at the underground station in Duvbo and rode back to Hallunda. Neither Tania nor Vladimir were at home when he rang the doorbell. He let himself in with his own key, put the plastic bag on the dining table, and got out the vodka bottle. A few big swallows and he was calm again. It had gone well. If he had wounded or even killed a policeman, that would raise tensions throughout the city, but he could not see how that would put a stop to or even delay the liquidation of the African.

He counted the money; he had 162,000 kronor.

At 6 p.m. he turned on the television to see the early evening news. Only Tania was back by then, in the kitchen preparing dinner. The broadcast began with the story Konovalenko was waiting for. To his astonishment, he learned that the pistol shot intended only to shatter the windscreen had hit one of the policemen right where his nose met his forehead. He died instantly.

Then came a picture of the policeman Konovalenko had killed: Klas Tengblad, 26 years old, married with two small children.

The police had no clues beyond the fact that the killer had been alone, and was the man who had robbed the Akalla branch of the Commercial Bank just a few minutes previously.

Konovalenko made a face and moved to switch off the television. Just then he noticed Tania in the doorway, watching him.

"The only good policeman is a dead one," he said, punching the off button. "What's for dinner? I'm hungry."

Rykoff came home and sat down at the table just as Tania and Konovalenko were finishing their meal. "A bank robbery," he said. "And a policeman killed. A killer speaking broken Swedish. The town won't exactly be clear of police tonight."

"These things happen," Konovalenko said. "Have you spread the word about the contract?"

"There's not a single paid-up member of the underworld who won't know before midnight that there's a 100,000 kronor reward to be earned," Rykoff said.

Tania handed him a plate of food.

"Was it really necessary to kill a policeman, today of all days?" he said.

"What makes you think it was me who shot him?" Konovalenko said.

Rykoff shrugged his shoulders. "A masterly shot," he said. "A bank raid to raise the money for the contract. Foreign accent. It sounds pretty much like you."

"You're wrong if you think the shot was deliberate," Konovalenko said. "It was pure luck. Or bad luck, depending on how you look at it. But to be on the safe side I think you'd better go in to town on your own tonight. Or take Tania with you."

"There are a few clubs in the south of the city where Africans hang out," said Rykoff. "I thought I'd start there."

At 8.30 Tania and Vladimir drove to town. Konovalenko showered, then settled down to watch television. Every news broadcast had long items on the murdered policeman. There were no clues to follow yet.

Of course not, Konovalenko thought. I don't leave a trail.

He had fallen asleep in his chair when the telephone rang. Just one signal. Then another ring, seven signals this time. When it rang for the third time Konovalenko lifted the receiver. It was Rykoff using the code. The noise in the background suggested he was at a disco.

"Can you hear me?" Rykoff was shouting.

"I can hear you."

"I can hardly hear myself speak," Rykoff said. "But I've got news. Mabasha's here right now."

Konovalenko took a deep breath. "Has he seen you?"

"No. But he's on his guard."

"Is anybody with him?"

"He's on his own."

Konovalenko thought for a moment. It was 11.20 p.m. What was the best thing to do? "Give me the address," he said. "Wait for me outside with a layout of the club. Most important to know where all the emergency exits are."

"Will do," Rykoff said.

Konovalenko checked his pistol and put an extra magazine into his pocket. Then he went to his room and from a chest he took three tear gas grenades and two gas masks, which he put into the carrier bag he had used for the money from the bank raid.

Finally, he combed his hair in the bathroom mirror. This was part of the ritual he went through before setting out on any assignment that mattered as much as this one did.

At 11.45 p.m. he left the apartment and took a taxi into town. He asked to be taken to Ostermalmstorg. He got out there, hailed another taxi, and headed for Soder. The disco was at number 45. Konovalenko directed the driver to number 60. He got out and walked slowly back the way the taxi had come.

Rykoff stepped out of the shadows. "He's still there," he said. "Tania has gone home."

"Let's get him, then," Konovalenko said.

Rykoff described the interior of the club.

"Exactly where is he?" asked Konovalenko when he could picture it.

"At the bar."

Konovalenko nodded. They donned the gas masks, took a while in the shelter of their doorway still to get used to breathing through them, and cocked their weapons. They walked steadily to the club entrance. The street was empty. They negotiated the steps down to the black iron outer doors.

Rykoff flung them open and brushed the two startled doormen aside. Konovalenko primed the first grenade and tossed it along the floor by the bar.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Give me the night,
sangoma.
How shall I survive these nights full of light that prevents me from finding a hiding place? Why have you sent me to this strange land where people have been robbed of their darkness? I give you my severed finger,
sangoma.
I sacrifice a part of my body so you can give me back my darkness in return. But you have forsaken me. I am all alone. As lonely as the antelope no longer capable of escaping the hunting cheetah.

Mabasha experienced his flight as a journey made in a dream-like, weightless state. His soul seemed to be travelling on its own, invisible, somewhere close by. He thought he could feel his own breath on his neck. In the Mercedes, whose leather seats reminded him of the distant smell of antelope hides, there was nothing but his body, and above all his aching hand. His finger was gone, but was there even so, like a homeless pain in a strange land.

From the very beginning of his wild flight he had tried to make himself control his thoughts, act sensibly. I am a
zulu
, he kept repeating to himself, like a mantra. I belong to the undefeated warrior race, I am one of the Sons of Heaven. My forefathers were always in the front line when the
impis
attacked. We defeated the whites long before they hounded the bushmen into the endless wildernesses where they soon succumbed. We defeated them before they claimed our land was theirs. We defeated them at the foot of Isandlwana and cut off their jawbones to adorn the
kraaler
of our kings. I am a
zulu
, one of my fingers is lost. But I can endure the pain and I have nine fingers left, as many as the jackal has lives.

When he could bear it no longer he turned off into the forest on the first dirt track he saw, and came to a halt by a glistening lake. The water was so black, he thought at first it was oil. He sat there on a stone by the shore, unwound the bloodstained towel and forced himself to examine his hand. It was bleeding still. The pain was more in his mind than where the finger had been.

How was it possible for Konovalenko to be faster than he was? His momentary hesitation had defeated him. His flight, too, had been thoughtless. He had been like a bewildered child. His actions were unworthy, of himself and of Kleyn. He should have stayed put, and searched through Konovalenko's baggage, looking for air tickets and money. But all he did was to grab a few clothes and the pistol. He couldn't even remember the way he had come. He would never find the road back.

Weakness, he thought. I have never managed to overcome it, even though I have renounced all my loyalties, all the principles that possessed me as I grew up. I have been burdened with weakness as a punishment by my
sangoma
. She has listened to the spirits and let the hounds sing my song, a song of the weakness I shall never be able to overcome.

The sun never seemed to rest in this strange land; it had already climbed over the horizon. A bird of prey rose from a treetop and flapped its way over the mirror-like lake.

First of all he must sleep. A few hours, no more. He knew he did not need much sleep. Afterwards, his brain would be able to assist him once again.

At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. To look inward, not outward. Inward, towards the secret places where the spirits of one's ancestors were waiting to act as a man's guide through life.

Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That's what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow small and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no-one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural distinctions between white and black, the superiority of white civilisation. That superiority turned me into a murderer,
sangoma
. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller as a child. For what has this Apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious destruction, the whites failed to see the despair and hatred which is so boundlessly greater. All the things we have been carrying around inside us. It is inside myself that I see my thoughts and feelings being split asunder as if with a sword. I can manage without one of my fingers. But how can I live without knowing who I am?

He came to with a start. He had almost fallen asleep. In the borderlands of sleep, half dreaming, thoughts he had long since forgotten returned to him.

He remained on the stone by the lake for a long time.

The memories found their own way into his head. He had no need to summon them.

Summer, 1967. He had just passed his sixth birthday when he discovered a talent that set him apart from the other children he used to play with in the dusty slum in the suburbs of Johannesburg. They had made a ball out of paper and string, and he had far more skill with it than any of his friends. He could work miracles with the ball: this discovery led to his first great dream. He would be the best rugby player in South Africa.

It brought him untold joy. He thought the spirits of his forefathers had been good to him. He filled a bottle with water from a tap and sacrificed it to the red earth.

One day that summer a white liquor salesman stopped his car in the dust where Victor and his friends were playing with the paper-and-string ball. The man behind the wheel sat for a long time watching the black boy with the phenomenal ball control.

When once the ball rolled close to the car, Victor approached gingerly, bowed to the man and picked up the ball.

"If only you'd been born white," the man said. "I've never seen anybody handle a ball like you do. It's a pity you're black."

He watched an aeroplane sketching a white streak across the sky.

I don't remember the pain, he thought. But I must have felt it, even then. Or did I simply not react because it was so far ingrained in me as a six-year-old that injustice was our heritage? By the time he was 16, everything had changed.

June 1976. Soweto. More than 15,000 students were gathered outside Orlando West Junior Secondary School. He did not really belong in that assembly. He lived on the streets, lived the obscure but increasingly skilful, increasingly ruthless, life of a thief. At that time he was still only robbing blacks, but his eyes were by then drawn to the white residential areas where it was possible to pull off big robberies. He was carried along by the tide of young people, and shared their fury over the government's ruling decree that all education would in future be conducted in the hated language of the
Boere
. He could remember still the young girl clenching her fist and yelling at the President, who was not present, "Vorster! You speak
zulu
, then we'll speak Afrikaans!" He was in turmoil. The drama of the situation as the police charged, beating people with their
sjamboks
, did not affect him until he was hit himself. He had taken part in the stone-throwing, and his ball skills had not deserted him. Nearly every throw hit home; he saw a policeman clutch at his cheek and blood pour out between his fingers, and he remembered the man in the car and what he had said as Victor bent down to pick up his paper ball. Then he was caught, and the lashes from the whips dug deeply into his skin, the pain penetrated his inner self. He remembered one policeman above all the others, a powerful red-faced man smelling of stale alcohol. He had detected a gleam of fear in his eye. At that moment he realised he was the stronger, and from then on the white man's terror would always fill him with boundless contempt.

He was woken from his reverie by a movement on the other side of the lake. It was a rowing boat coming slowly in his direction. A man was rowing with lazy strokes. The sound from the rowlocks reached him despite the distance.

He got up from his stone, staggered in a sudden fit of dizziness, and knew he would have to find a doctor. He had always had thin blood, and once he started bleeding, it took an age to stop. He must find something to drink too. He sat in the car and started the engine. He had enough petrol for an hour's driving at most.

It took him all of 45 minutes to get to a town called Almhult. He wondered how the name was pronounced. He stopped at a petrol station. Konovalenko had given him money for petrol earlier on. He had two 100-kronor notes left, and knew how to operate the automatic dispenser. His hand was an agonising impediment, and it was attracting attention. An old man offered to help him. Mabasha could not understand what he said, but nodded and tried to smile. He used one of the 100-kronor notes and saw it was only enough for just over ten litres. But he needed something to eat and above all he needed to quench his thirst. He mumbled his thanks to the man who helped him and drove the car away from the pump. He bought some bread and two large bottles of Coca-Cola. That left him with 40 kronor. There was a map on the counter, and he tried in vain to find Almhult.

He went back to the car and bit off a large chunk of bread. He drank a whole bottle of Coca-Cola. He tried to make up his mind what to do. Where could he find a doctor or a hospital? He had no money to pay for treatment anyway. The hospital staff would refuse to treat him. He knew what that meant. He would have to commit a robbery. The pistol in the glove compartment was his only means of survival.

He left the little town behind him and drove on through the endless forest. I hope I don't need to kill anyone, he thought. I don't want to kill anyone until I have completed my assignment, until I have shot de Klerk.

The first time I killed a human being,
sangoma
, I was not alone. I still can't forget it, even if I have difficulty in remembering other people I killed later. It was on a morning in January, 1981, in the cemetery at Duduza. I remember the cracked gravestones,
sangoma
, I remember thinking I was walking across the roof of the abode of the dead. We were going to bury an old man that morning. I think he was my father's cousin. There were other burials going on elsewhere in the cemetery. There was a disturbance somewhere: a funeral procession was breaking up. I saw a young girl running among the memorial stones, running like a hunted deer. She
was
being hunted. Somebody yelled that she was a white man's informer, a black girl working for the police. She was caught, she screamed; her despair was greater than anything I had ever seen before. But she was stabbed, clubbed, and lay between the graves, still alive. Then we started gathering dry sticks and clumps of grass we pulled up from between the gravestones. I say "we", because I was suddenly involved in what was happening. A black woman passing information to the police - what right had she to live? She begged for her life, but her body was soon covered in dry sticks and grass and we burned her alive as she lay there. She tried in vain to get away from the flames, but we held her down until her face turned black. She was the first human being I killed,
sangoma
, and I have never forgotten her for in killing her I killed also myself. Racial segregation had triumphed. I had become an animal,
sangoma
. There was no turning back.

His hand started hurting again. Mabasha tried to hold it motionless to reduce the pain. The sun was still very high in the sky, and he did not bother to look at his watch. He had a long time to sit in the car with his thoughts for company.

I have no idea where I am, he thought. I know I'm in Sweden. But that's all. Perhaps that's what the world is really like. No here, no there. Only a now.

Eventually the strange, barely noticeable dusk descended. He loaded his pistol and tucked it into his belt. He no longer had his knives. But then, he was determined that he was not going to kill anybody, if he could possibly avoid it.

Soon he would have to fill the petrol tank. He had no money and he needed to solve that problem - and without, he said to himself, over and over, killing anyone.

A few kilometres further on he came upon a store open late. He stopped, switched off the engine and waited until all the other customers had gone. He released the safety catch on his pistol, got out of the car and went quickly inside. There was an old man behind the counter. Mabasha pointed at the cash register with his pistol. The man tried to say something, but Mabasha fired a shot into the ceiling and pointed again. With trembling hands the man opened the till. Mabasha switched the pistol to his injured hand and, leaning forward, grabbed all the cash he could see. Then he turned and hurried out of the store.