The White Lioness (29 page)

"What is there against it?" he said.

"I cannot find anything at all," Malan said.

"There's always a weak point," Kleyn said. "We can't make a decision until we've identified it."

"I can only think of one thing that could go wrong," Malan said, after a few moments' silence. "Tsiki could miss."

Jan Kleyn looked surprised. "He won't miss," he said. "I only pick people who hit their targets."

"Seven hundred metres is a hell of a distance," Malan said. "A puff of wind. A flash of reflected sun. The bullet misses by a couple of centimetres. Hits somebody else."

"That won't happen," Kleyn said.

They might not be able to find the weak point in the plan they were developing, but Malan had found a weakness in Jan Kleyn. When rational arguments had run their course, he took refuge in fate. It could not happen.

But he said nothing, and after a servant had brought them tea they ran through the plan once more, spelled out details, listed questions that needed answering. Not until nearly 4 p.m. did they think they had gone as far as they could.

"We are now a month and three days to June 12," Kleyn said. "That means we don't have much time to make the plan final. We'll have to decide by next Friday if it's going to be Cape Town. By then we must have weighed everything, and answered all the outstanding questions. Let's meet here again on the 15th, in the morning. I'll get the whole Committee here at noon. Meanwhile we'll both go through the plans, independently, looking for cracks. We know the arguments in favour. We'll have to find the arguments against."

Malan had no objections. They shook hands and left the house at Hammanskraal ten minutes apart. Kleyn drove straight to the house in Bezuidenhout Park.

Miranda Nkoyi contemplated her daughter. She was sitting on the floor, staring into space. Miranda could see her eyes were not vacant, but alert. Sometimes when she looked at her daughter she felt, as if in a brief fit of giddiness, that she was seeing her mother. Her mother was as young as that, just 17, when she gave birth to Miranda. Now her own daughter was that very age.

What is she looking at? Miranda wondered. She sometimes felt a cold shudder run down her spine when she recognised those features characteristic of Matilda's father. Especially that look of intense concentration, even though she was staring into empty space. That inner vision that no-one else could understand.

"Matilda," she said tenderly, as if hoping to bring her back down to earth by treating her gently. The girl came out of her reverie with a start, and looked her straight in the eye.

"I know my father will soon be here," she said. "Since you won't let me hate him while he's here, I do it while I'm waiting. You can never take the hatred from me."

Miranda wanted to cry out that she understood her feelings, that she often thought that way herself. But she could not. She was like her mother, saddened by the endless humiliation of not being free to lead a satisfactory life in her own country. Miranda knew she had grown soft just like her mother, and remained in a state of impotence she could only make up for by constantly betraying the man who was the father of her daughter.

Soon, she thought. Soon I must tell my daughter that her mother has retained a little bit of her life force, despite everything. I shall have to tell her, in order to win her back, to show her that the gulf between us is not an abyss after all.

In secret, Matilda was a member of the ANC youth organisation. She was active, and had already undertaken several undercover assignments. She had been arrested by the police more than once. Miranda was terrified she would be injured or killed. Every time the coffins of dead blacks were being carried in swaying, chanting processions to their graves, she would pray to all the gods she believed in that her daughter might be spared. She turned to the Christian God, to the spirits of her ancestors, to her dead mother, to the
sangoma
her father used to speak about. But she never wholly believed that they had heard her.

Miranda could understand the confused feeling of impotence in her daughter, knowing that her father was a
Boer
, knowing herself to have been sired by the enemy. It was as if a mortal wound had been inflicted on her at the very moment of her birth.

Nevertheless, she knew a mother could never regret the existence of her daughter. Seventeen years ago she had loved Jan Kleyn as little as she loved him today. Matilda was conceived in fear and subservience. It was as though the bed they were lying in was floating in a remote, airless universe. Afterwards, she simply did not have the strength to throw off her subservience. The child would be born, it had a father, and he had organised a life for her, a house in Bezuidenhout, money to live on. She was resolved never to have another child by him. If Matilda would be her only offspring, so be it. Kleyn had never said that he wanted another child by her; his demands on her as far as lovemaking was concerned left her always feeling uninvolved. She let him spend nights with her, and could suffer it because she had learned how to take revenge by betraying him.

She observed her daughter, who had once again lost herself in a world to which her mother was denied access. Matilda had inherited her own beauty. The only difference was her lighter skin. She wondered sometimes what Kleyn would say if he knew that what his daughter most of all wanted was a darker skin.

My daughter betrays him as well, Miranda thought. But our betrayal is not malice. It's the lifeline we cling to, even as South Africa burns. Any malice is on his side. One of these days it will destroy him. The freedom we achieve will not primarily be the voting slips we find in our hands, but the release from those inner chains that have been holding us prisoner.

The car came to a stop by the security gate.

Matilda got up and looked at her mother.

"Why have you never killed him?" she said.

What Miranda heard was his voice in hers. But she had convinced herself that Matilda's heart was not an Afrikaner heart. Her appearance, her light skin, those were things she could do nothing about. But she had preserved her heart, hot and inexhaustible as it was. That was a line of defence, albeit the last one, which Kleyn could never overcome.

The shameful thing was that he never seemed to notice anything. Every time he came to Bezuidenhout his car was laden with food so that she could make him the meals, just as he remembered from his childhood. He never recognised that he was transforming Miranda into her own mother, the enslaved servant. He could never see that he was forcing her to play different roles: cook, lover, valet. He did not notice the resolute hatred in his daughter. He saw only a world that was unchanging, petrified, something he considered his main task in life to preserve. He did not see the dishonesty, the bottomless artificiality on which the country was built.

"Is everything OK?" he said as he laid the bags of food in the hall.

"Yes," Miranda said. "Everything's fine."

Then Miranda cooked while he tried to talk to his daughter, who was playing the shy and timid girl. He tried stroking her hair, and Miranda could see through the kitchen door how her daughter stiffened. They ate their meal of Afrikaner sausages, big chunks of meat and cabbage salad. Miranda knew that Matilda would go to the bathroom and force herself to throw up the whole meal when it was over. Then he wanted to talk about unimportant matters, the house, the wallpaper, the garden. Matilda withdrew to her room, leaving her mother alone with him, and she gave him the answers he was expecting. Then they went to bed. His body was as hot as only a freezing object can be. The next day would be Sunday. As they could not be seen together, they took their Sunday stroll inside the four walls of the house, walking around and around each other, eating, and sitting in silence. Matilda always went out as soon as she reasonably could and didn't come back until he had left. Only when Monday came would everything begin to return to normal.

When he had fallen asleep and his breathing was calm and steady, she got out of bed. She had learned how to move around the bedroom in perfect silence. She went to the kitchen, leaving the door open so she could the whole time check that he did not wake up. If he did, and wondered where she was, her excuse was a glass of water she had poured already.

As usual, she had hung his clothes over a chair in the kitchen, which he could not see from the bedroom. He did once ask why she always left his clothes in the kitchen rather than in the bedroom, and she explained she wanted to brush them for him in the morning.

She went through his pockets. She knew his wallet would be in the left inside pocket of his jacket, and his keys in the right-hand pocket of his trousers. The pistol he invariably carried was on the bedside table.

This was usually all she found in his pockets. That evening, however, there was a scrap of paper with something written on it in his handwriting. With one eye on the bedroom, she swiftly memorised what was written.

Cape Town
/
12 June
/
Distance to location?/Wind direction?/Access road?

She put the paper back, folded exactly as it had been.

She could not understand what the words meant, but she would do what she was told to do whenever she found something in his pockets. She would tell the man she met every day after Kleyn had been to visit her. With their friends, they would try to work out what the words meant.

She drank the water and went back to bed.

He sometimes talked in his sleep. When that happened it was nearly always within an hour of his falling asleep. She would also memorise the words he mumbled, sometimes yelled out, and tell the man she met the following day. He would write down everything she could remember, just as he did with everything else that had happened during Kleyn's visit. Sometimes he would say where he had come from, and sometimes where he was going as well. But most often he said nothing at all.

A long time ago he had said he was working as a chief executive officer in the Ministry of Justice in Pretoria. Later, when she was contacted by the man who was looking for information and heard from him that Kleyn worked for NIS, she was told that she must never breathe a word to anyone about knowing where in fact he worked.

Kleyn left her house on the Sunday evening. Miranda waved goodbye as he drove away. He said that he would come back at the end of the following week.

As he drove, he decided he was looking forward to the week to come. The plan had begun to take shape. He had everything that was going to happen under control.

What he did not know was that Mabasha was still alive.

On May 12, a month to the day before he was to carry out the assassination of Nelson Mandela, Sikosi Tsiki left Johannesburg on the KLM flight to Amsterdam. Tsiki had spent a long time wondering who his victim was to be. Unlike Mabasha, though, he had not concluded it must be President de Klerk. He left the question open. That it might involve Mandela had never crossed his mind.

On Wednesday, May 13, in the evening, a fishing boat pulled into the harbour at Limhamn. Tsiki jumped ashore and the fishing boat pulled out straightaway, headed back to Denmark. A strikingly fat man was waiting on the dock to welcome him.

On that afternoon there was a southwesterly gale blowing over Skane. The wind did not die down until the evening. Then came the heat.

CHAPTER TWENTY

On Sunday afternoon, soon after 3 p.m., Peters and Noren were driving in central Ystad in their squad car, waiting for their shift to come to an end. It had been a quiet day with only one significant incident. They had been told by the emergency centre that a man had started demolishing a house in Sandskogen, and that he was stark naked. The wife had made the call. She explained that the man was in a rage because he had to spend all his free time repairing her parents' summer cottage. To ensure some peace and quiet in his life, he had decided to tear it down. He would prefer to sit by a lake, fishing, she had said, evidently terribly upset.

"You'd better go there and calm him down," the operator said.

"What's the charge?" Noren said, who was looking after the radio while Peters did the driving. "Disorderly conduct?"

"There's no such thing any more," the operator said. "But if the house belongs to his in-laws, you could say it's taking the law into his own hands. Who cares what the charge is? Just calm the man down."

They drove to Sandskogen without exceeding the limit.

"I understand the man," Peters said. "Having a house of your own is trouble enough. There's always something needing to be done. But you never have the time, or it costs too much. Having to take care of someone else's house makes it all the worse."

"Perhaps we should help him pull the house down," Noren said.

They found the address. A crowd had gathered on the road by the fence. Noren and Peters got out of the car and watched the naked man crawling over the roof, prying off tiles with a claw wrench. His wife came running up, still in tears. They listened to her incoherent account of what had happened.

They went over to the house and shouted up at the man, now sitting astride the roof ridge. He was so focused on dislodging tiles that he hadn't seen the police car. When he saw Noren and Peters he dropped the claw wrench. It came sliding down the roof, and Noren had to move smartly to avoid being hit.

"Careful!" Peters yelled. "You'd better come down. You have no right to be pulling down this house."

To their astonishment the man immediately obeyed them. He let down the ladder he had pulled up behind him, and climbed down. His wife met him with a dressing gown, which he put on.

"You going to arrest me?" the man said.

"No," Peters said. "But you'd better stop pulling the house down. After this, I can't see anyone asking you to do any more repairs."

"All I want to do is to go fishing," the man said.

As they drove back through Sandskogen, Noren telephoned his report to the station.

As they were about to turn into the Osterlen highway, they saw him.

"Here comes Wallander," Peters said. Noren looked up from his notebook.

But apparently Wallander had not seen them. That would have been very strange if true, as they were in a marked patrol car painted blue and white. What attracted the attention of the two officers, however, was not Wallander's fixed stare. It was the man in the passenger seat. He was black. Peters and Noren looked at each other.

"Wasn't that an African in the car?" Noren said.

"Well," Peters said. "He was certainly black."

They were both thinking about the finger they had found a few weeks earlier, and the man they'd been searching for all over the country.

"Wallander must have caught him," Noren said hesitantly.

"Why is he going in that direction, then?" Peters said. "And why didn't he stop when he saw us?"

"It was as if he didn't want to see us," Noren said. "Like children do. If they close their eyes, they think nobody can see them."

Peters nodded. "Do you think he's in trouble?"

"No," Noren said. "But where did he manage to find the black man?"

Then they were interrupted by an emergency call about a motorcycle, suspected stolen, found abandoned in Bjaresjo. When they finished their shift, they asked about Wallander in the canteen, and discovered he had not appeared all day. Peters was about to tell everybody how they had seen him when he saw Noren put his finger to his lips.

"Why shouldn't I say anything?" he said, when they were in the locker room, getting ready to go home.

"If Wallander hasn't shown up, there must be some reason," Noren said. "Just what, is nothing to do with you or me. Besides, it could be some other African. Martinsson once said that Wallander's daughter had something going with a black man. It could have been him, for all we know."

"I still think it's weird," Peters said.

It was a feeling which stayed with him after he got back home to his terrace house on the Kristianstad road. When he had finished his dinner and played with his children for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinsson lived in the neighbourhood, so he decided to stop by and tell him what he and Noren had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinsson had asked recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.

Martinsson himself answered the door. He invited Peters in.

"I must get home pretty soon," Peters said. "But there is one thing I'd like to bounce off you. Do you have time?"

Martinsson had some position or other in the Liberal Party and was standing for a seat on the council; he had been reading some turgid political surveys the party had sent him. He lost no time collecting a jacket, and came out to join Peters.

"Are you positive?" Martinsson said.

"We can't both have been seeing things," Peters said.

"Most odd," Martinsson said thoughtfully. "I'd have heard right away if it was the African who's missing a finger."

"Maybe it was the daughter's boyfriend."

"Wallander said that was all over and done with."

They walked in silence for a while, watching the dog straining at its leash.

"It was as if he didn't want to see us," Peters said tentatively. "And that can only mean one thing. He didn't want us to know what he was up to."

"Or at least about the African with him," Martinsson said, lost in thought.

"There'll be some perfectly simple explanation," Peters said. "I mean, I don't want to suggest Wallander is up to something he shouldn't be."

"Of course not," Martinsson said. "But it was good you told me."

"I don't want to go spreading gossip," Peters said.

"This isn't gossip," Martinsson said.

"Noren will be mad," Peters said.

"He doesn't need to know," Martinsson said.

They parted company outside Martinsson's house. Peters assured him that he could buy a puppy when the time came.

Martinsson wondered if he ought to call Wallander. Then he decided to wait and talk to him the next day. With a sigh, he returned to his political documents.

When Wallander arrived at the police station the next morning, he had an answer ready for the question he knew would come. When, after much hesitation, he had decided to take Mabasha with him in the car, he thought the risk of bumping into a police colleague or anybody he knew was small. He had taken roads squad cars seldom used. But he ran into Peters and Noren. He saw them so late there was no time to tell Mabasha to crouch down and make himself invisible. Nor had he managed to turn off in some other direction. He could see in the corner of his eye that Peters and Noren had noticed the man in the seat beside him. They would want an explanation, no getting away from it. He cursed his luck, and wished he had never set out.

Then, when he had calmed down, he turned once more to his daughter for help.

"Herman Mboya will have to be resurrected as your boyfriend," he said. "If anybody should ask. Which is pretty unlikely."

She stared at him, then burst out laughing.

"Don't you remember what you told me when I was a kid?" she said. "That one lie leads to another? And eventually you get into such a mess, nobody knows what's true any more."

"I dislike this just as much as you do," Wallander said. "But it'll soon be over. He'll soon be out of the country. Then we can forget he was ever here."

"OK, I'll say Herman has come back," she said. "To tell you the truth, I sometimes wish he had."

So it was that when Wallander got to the station on Monday morning, he had an explanation ready for why there was an African in his car on Sunday. At a time when most things were threatening to slide out of control, that seemed the least of his problems. When he saw Mabasha on the street that morning in the fog, his first instinct was to run back to the apartment and summon his colleagues for assistance. But something held him back, something at odds with all his police logic. When they were in the cemetery that night in Stockholm, he had thought the black man was telling the truth. He might have been there, but he was not the killer of Mrs Akerblom. It was the man called Konovalenko, who later tried to kill Mabasha as well. Very possibly Mabasha had tried to prevent what happened at the deserted house. Wallander had been turning over and over in his mind what could lie behind it all.

That was the spirit in which he took him back to the apartment, aware that he might be making a mistake. Wallander often used unconventional methods, to say the least, when dealing with suspects or convicted criminals. Bjork had more than once felt obliged to remind Wallander of the correct police procedures. He had demanded of the black man that he surrender any weapon he was carrying. He accepted the pistol, and then frisked him. The man had seemed strangely unaffected, as if he expected nothing less of Wallander than an invitation to join him in his home. Wallander asked him how he had managed to track down his address.

"On the way to the cemetery," the man said, "I went through your wallet and memorised your address."

"You attacked me, Goddammit," he said. "And now you turn up at my home, many miles from Stockholm. You'd better have some damn good answers to the questions I'm going to ask you."

They sat in the kitchen, and Wallander closed the door so they wouldn't wake Linda. He would remember those hours as the most remarkable conversation he had ever had. It was not just that he received his first insight into the world from which Mabasha came and to which he would soon return. He also had to wonder how it was possible for a human being to be made up of so many incompatible parts: how a man could be a cold-blooded killer and at the same time be a rational, sensitive being with well-considered political views. He did not recognise that he was being taken in. Mabasha had seen how the wind was blowing. His seeming reliability could win him a passage home.

Wallander remembered most vividly what Mabasha said about a plant that grew only in the Namibian desert. It could live for two thousand years. It grew long leaves, like protective shades, to shield its flowers and its complicated root system. Mabasha took this plant as symbolic of the opposing forces in his homeland, and also of the struggle for supremacy in his own being.

"These privileges have become a habit with roots so deep," he said, "they've become a sort of extra limb. It's not all down to a racial defect. It's the whites who reap the benefits of this habit. If things had been different it could just as easily have been me and my brothers. But you cannot fight racism with racism. The habits of submission have to be broken and the whites must be made to understand that if they're to survive the immediate future, they have to hand back land to the deprived blacks. They have to give most of their riches to those who have nothing; they have to learn how to treat the blacks as human beings.

"Barbarism has always had a human face. That's what makes barbarism so inhuman. The blacks are so used to being submissive. It's so deeply ingrained. Progressing from being a nobody to being a somebody is the longest journey a human being can undertake.

"A peaceful solution is an illusion. The Apartheid system has gone so far, it's begun to flounder. A new generation of blacks has grown up who refuse to submit. They're impatient, they can see the imminent collapse. But progress is slow. Besides, there are many whites who think the same way, who refuse to go on accepting privileges requiring them to live as if all the blacks were invisible, as if they only existed to be servants or some strange sort of animals confined to remote shanty towns. In my country we have large nature reserves where wild animals can roam free, and we have large human reserves where the people are forever unfree."

Mabasha looked at Wallander as if expecting him to ask questions or make objections. It seemed to Wallander that all whites were the same to Mabasha, whether they lived in South Africa or anywhere else.

"A lot of my black brothers and sisters think this feeling of inferiority can be overcome by its opposite, a sense of superiority," Mabasha said. "That's wrong, of course. That leads to tensions between various groups where there should be co-operation. For instance, it can split a family in two. And where I come from if you don't have a family, you are nothing. For an African, the family is everything."

"I thought your spirits fulfilled that role," Wallander said.

"Spirits are part of our families," Mabasha said. "The spirits are our ancestors, keeping watch over us. They are invisible members of our family. We never forget them. That's why the whites have committed such a crime in driving us out of the land where we have lived for so many generations. Spirits don't like being forced to quit the land that once was theirs. The spirits hate even more than we do the shanty towns the whites have forced us to live in."