The October Killings Page 15

  The result of their diverging fortunes meant that visits that had once been regular had dwindled away until they had almost stopped altogether. Rosa had arranged the lunch in the hope of restoring something of the past friendship. She felt that Yudel was becoming increasingly isolated and needed it.

  As for Yudel, he looked across the table at Freek, resplendent in his uniform, looking as relaxed and confident as always, no matter who was in power, and thought, Fuck him. Everything works out for him. It always has.

  Freek caught his glance and tried a forced smile. “So, Yudel, how are things?”

  The question only irritated Yudel further. Did Freek really expect an answer to it? Well, fuck him, if he did. He was not going to get one.

  “Did you hear about Yudel’s contract?” Rosa asked, trying to lighten the mood. She was wondering if the lunch had been a good idea. She could already see that Yudel was in one of what she called his black hole moods.

  “We did,” Magda said. “Congratulations, Yudel.”

  “They realize they need somebody who can get the job done,” Freek said.

  Yudel looked grimly from one to the other. He was determined to show no sign of pleasure or even interest.

  At none of the other tables had the patrons received their orders. Usually a continual stream of waitresses, dressed in the same bright yellow as the décor, flowed in and out of the kitchen to serve the patrons. Today, there seemed to be none at all.

  Inside the café, a young manager was hurrying back and forth behind the counter with quick, light movements. Blocking the entrance to the kitchen, the waitresses had gathered in a tightly packed, discontented knot. Yudel noticed the face of one, lips pursed in indignation, cheeks puffed up as if by inner pressure. As he watched they started moving through the entrance to the kitchen, leaving the young man to flit frantically about his duties alone. A few moments later he arrived at their table and leaned forward apologetically. “I’m terribly sorry, people.” He blinked as he spoke. “We have a small difficulty. If you’re prepared to wait a few minutes, I’ll have your order with you.”

  Freek looked heavenward, a gesture of supplication. “What’s the problem?”

  “The ladies who wait on the tables are staying away until three o’clock.” He glanced uncertainly at the curious faces of his patrons at the other tables. “Management did a survey and found that the waitresses get good tips, so they reduced their wages.”

  “There you have it.” Freek waved a disgusted hand. “No one is interested in doing a job properly anymore.”

  “Well, management pulled a rather sharp trick there,” the manager said. “They have reason to be unhappy.”

  Freek was about to pursue the matter when Magda laid a restraining hand on his arm. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll wait.” After the young man had left, she spoke to Rosa. “Isn’t it wonderful when they sound so middle-aged?” She mimicked Freek. “ ‘No one is interested in doing a job properly anymore.’ ”

  A moment later the waitresses were streaming out of the front of the café, joining the passing throng until they were no more than a few bright patches in the rest of the foot traffic.

  “There goes lunch,” Freek said soberly.

  “It’s a long time since things were so tense,” Magda said. “Freek has been called out nearly every night for the last three months. Armored car heists mostly. He’s only been sleeping two or three hours a night.”

  Yudel and Rosa both turned inquiringly to Freek. For the first time Yudel noticed how the other man’s face was tinted with gray and seemed more lined than usual. Red veins showed in his eyes. “But why?” Rosa asked. “Freek has so many men he can send.”

  “Not when you’re the only one who can do things properly,” Magda said. “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” She was mimicking Freek again.

  “Is he doing this apart from his ordinary duties?” Rosa was awed.

  “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Magda said.

  Freek patted Rosa’s hand in a brotherly way. “The problem is that there is too much crime and too few experienced policemen. Some ordinary constables have been on duty sixteen hours a day. It’s not going too damned well, let me tell you.”

  The young man of the café was back at their table, massaging his hands fretfully. “Will four tuna salads be in order? I know that isn’t…”

  Freek interrupted him. “Yes, the Lord knows. Four of anything, so long as we can eat it.”

  They watched him dash back to the counter, squeezing between a standing patron and a table. “Not Freek’s kind of man,” Magda suggested.

  “He didn’t do too badly there with the staff a few minutes ago,” Freek said. “Not badly at all.” But another thought had entered Freek’s mind. “Yudel, do you remember a political by the name of Simon Mkhari? He spent time on death row, I think. I don’t know why.”

  “He burned an old woman alive,” Yudel said. “Yes, I remember him.”

  “Yudel remembers all these awful things,” Rosa said.

  Freek nodded. He had not needed that piece of information. He also knew Yudel well. “Mkhari was killed yesterday. You heard about the firefight in Marabastad between a gang of robbers and some of our men?”

  “I read about it in the papers.”

  “Mkhari was one of the robbers we killed. It looks like his crimes may not have had only political motivation.”

  “They didn’t,” Yudel said. “I remember him well.”

  23

  As Yudel turned the corner, entering the street where they lived, he recognized the car blocking the entrance to the driveway as belonging to Abigail. She was standing next to it, looking both tense and determined. It was a look that Yudel was beginning to recognize.

  “It looks as if Abigail needs to speak to you again,” Rosa said.

  Yudel and Rosa got out of the car together. “Leon’s missing,” Abigail started without any preliminaries. “He seems to have been abducted.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, we have to find him.”

  “There are things you need to tell me,” Yudel said. “You’d better come to my study.”

  Abigail glanced at Rosa, as if asking permission. “Run along, my dear. I’ll make coffee afterward.”

  * * *

  “There were eighteen of us living in the house outside Maseru at that time.” Abigail was again in Yudel’s study. This time they were seated on the same side of the desk, Yudel’s eyes never leaving her face. “I was the youngest in the house. I was just fifteen. Usually I was at boarding school, but I had been sick. If they had waited another day I would have been back at school. My parents were there and most of the others were couples. All of them were youngish people, under forty.”

  Abigail was leaning forward, her hands clasped in her lap. Yudel was surprised by her transformation as she started speaking. The confidence that was so much a part of her disappeared. She gave the appearance of being no older than the fifteen she had been at the time. The words poured out of her, as if she had been waiting for the last twenty years to tell someone the story. “I don’t know why we thought we were safe. The house was no more than five kilometers from the border, as the crow flies. It seems so naïve when I think about it now. To have assumed that the apartheid regime would have respected the borders of little Lesotho seems crazy. And to have assumed that they did not know about our house seems equally crazy. In those days the movement was riddled with informers in the pay of the security police.

  “I remember clearly that evening before they came. It’s as if the later events etched even the earlier part of the evening in my mind—as if they were also part of that night’s horror.

  “I had been outside with a young married woman, Julia. We were batting a ball back and forth with wooden paddles, the kind you take to the beach. She had just come back from a stint in Lusaka. The movement had deployed her there as a teacher in the ANC school. There was a small lawn in front of the
house and the ball kept escaping into the overgrown flower beds whenever I missed it. I’ve never been good at that sort of thing.

  “It was a lovely late spring evening. When it got too dark to play anymore, Julia and I sat down on the grass. I remember telling her about my ambitions. At that age I wanted to be an actress. I suppose most fifteen-year-old girls want to be actresses. The stars were as bright as they can only be on the Lesotho highlands. It seemed that if we reached up we would be able to gather handfuls of them. On such nights there always seem to be more stars in the Lesotho sky than anywhere else on Earth.

  “Through the open window of the living room I could hear my father and one of the other men talking. They were arguing about the sort of government we should have in South Africa after the revolution. The other man was a Trotskyite and he wanted a government that would follow Trotsky’s thinking. I was never sufficiently interested to try to understand what sort of government that would have been. My father was a social democrat and wanted a government like Sweden’s. The doors and windows stood open, no curtains were drawn. And none of us gave a thought to the possibility that there could be men on their way to kill us. Oh God, Yudel, and there were men on the way to kill us.” The flow of words stopped as suddenly as it had started. “Must we do this? Must we really?”

  Yudel could see that this was not just an idle question. Abigail would rather have done anything other than tell this story. He doubted that, without the disappearance of Lourens, he would ever have heard it. “You are not doing it,” he said. “You’re telling me about that evening, but you are telling me everything except what is really important. If I am to help, I must hear about the important things, not the stars and the bat-and-ball game or Trotskyite plans.”

  Abigail’s eyes were begging him to find some other way, but she nodded. “I will tell you. It must have been about ten o’clock before I went to bed. I had a small room off the kitchen that had probably originally been the pantry. I heard some of the others moving around for a while as I lay in bed. Then everything was quiet.

  “I don’t know how long I slept, but I heard later that they came at about half past three. I don’t remember how I woke up or exactly what happened and in what order things happened. I do remember being on my hands and knees next to the bed. The noise was deafening. There was shouting and heavy boots on the wood floor and what sounded to me like explosions. My door was open a bit and through it I saw the figures of men in camouflage. They all seemed to be moving.”

  While telling this part of the story, she did not look at Yudel. The memory of that night so long ago absorbed her completely. Now she turned her attention to him. “Yudel, you have to understand. Until then I had been a schoolgirl in a comfortable private school. My main challenges in life were being accepted by the in-crowd at school and staying out of the way of our awful English teacher.”

  “Just tell me,” he said. “Tell it in the order in which it happened.”

  “I don’t know in what order anything happened. I do remember that I was out in the living room at one point. There was a terrible pain in my right side and I was rolling on the ground. Some of the men in camouflage were in the room, but none of our people were there. I heard the explosions coming from the bedrooms and from the kitchen. At one point I was looking out of the open door and seeing more soldiers on the dirt road outside.

  “I was in the hallway, trying to get to the closed door of my parents’ room, but the pain in my side was terrible. There was a loud crash against the door from the other side, as if something big had been thrown against it. Then I think the door burst open and one of the soldiers fell headlong into the hallway. His rifle was on a shoulder strap. It clattered to the ground next to him. He was young and I saw him raise a hand to his forehead, then suddenly my father was there and trying to take the rifle from him. That was the first time I saw Leon. Of course, I didn’t know who he was at the time.

  “You have to understand, Yudel, that while my father was a member of the armed wing of the movement, he was not a soldier. He was a medical doctor, deployed by the movement to any area where his skills were needed. The young man was still stunned and I thought my father was going to be able to take the gun from him, when suddenly he was struck by the stock of a rifle. He fell to the floor, holding his shoulder where the blow had landed. Immediately one of the men was standing over him. That was the first time I saw that man.”

  “Van Jaarsveld?”

  Abigail had started weeping. Until this moment she had not been able to hide her distress, but her control had been complete. Yudel saw that now the story had reached the point that had, until now, made telling it impossible. “What happened to your father?” he asked.

  “He … he…” Continuing suddenly seemed impossible.

  Had she been a patient, Yudel might have waited to hear the rest of the story. But she was not a patient and Leon Lourens had been taken from his workshop. Waiting was out of the question. “You have the strength to tell me,” he said, speaking slowly. He reached out to take one of her hands in his.

  “My father … my father … he and Leon were on the floor … I was crawling…”

  “Crawling? Where were you crawling to?”

  “Toward my father. I was crawling … toward my father. He was unarmed and injured, but to me he had always been the place I could find safety. Then…”

  Yudel knew what happened then, but he had to hear it from her. Inserting his own assumptions into her memory could do no good. He waited for the weeping to stop. When it did she was again in control and the words again came pouring out.

  “I was almost touching him when van Jaarsveld killed him. I never saw where the bullet entered. I only saw him fall backward onto the floor with his eyes closed. He could have been asleep, but I knew he wasn’t.

  “There was terrible screaming. I was sitting up and I remember the room swaying as I rocked myself back and forth. I could not immediately tell where the screaming was coming from, only that every time I gasped for breath it stopped. Van Jaarsveld hit me across the face and the back of my head. I was flat on the floor again, but my screaming continued. I could do nothing to stop it. I heard him shouting at me. He pointed his rifle at me and for the first time I could make out words in all the surrounding noise. ‘If this doesn’t stop, I’ll kill the kaffir meidjie too.’ I understood enough Afrikaans to know what he was saying. But I had no control over the screaming. He lifted his rifle to his shoulder and said something about shutting me up permanently.

  “Then there was another voice, telling him to put down his weapon. It was Leon, and he was pointing his rifle at van Jaarsveld. Van Jaarsveld shouted something at him about obeying orders, but he kept his rifle pointed at van Jaarsveld. I heard him say that if van Jaarsveld shot me, he would be the next to die. I don’t think this was what van Jaarsveld expected. I remember startled faces of young men around us. Van Jaarsveld was shouting an order at him, but Leon kept his rifle pointed straight at him.

  “I don’t know how long it went on like that, but I remember van Jaarsveld saying that he did not have time for this. He said he had work to do, and he turned and left. As he went I heard him shouting orders at the others. Even then I realized that he was trying to save face. There was something about Leon. I believe he would have killed van Jaarsveld if he tried to shoot me. I think van Jaarsveld believed it too.” The torrent of words that had been pouring out of Abigail stopped abruptly and she fell silent.

  “Of the people in the house, how many survived the night?” Yudel asked.

  “Just six of us.”

  “And you were taken to cells in Ficksburg?”

  “Yes. At the police station.”

  “And something happened there?”

  “We were freed by the movement.”

  “How?”

  “The three policemen on duty were killed, all in the same way. And all in the way that these apartheid policemen have been dying over the last twenty years.”

  “And the date
of the incident in Ficksburg was October 22?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know who killed the policemen in Ficksburg?”

  “His name is Michael Bishop.”

  “You saw him that night?”

  This time Abigail did not answer, nor could she look at Yudel. There was a desk calendar on Yudel’s desk. He turned away from Abigail to look at it.

  “It’s the nineteenth,” she said.

  “And this man who saved your life in Maseru was abducted today?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Abigail, you can be sure that Bishop, or whoever is doing this, will wait till the twenty-second. Where is Bishop?”

  “No one seems to know. Will you help me find him?”

  “And if we find him, what will we do with him?” he asked.

  She was looking helplessly at Yudel.

  “We need the police,” Yudel said.

  “I can’t even interest my own department.”

  “Tell me about Bishop.”

  He believed her and he wanted to help. Abigail could see that. It seemed to her that there was more than a desire to help in Yudel. He needed to help. Perhaps, she thought, he needed to atone for the fact that throughout the bad years he had worked for the apartheid government. “Why, Yudel?” she asked.

  “So that I can try to understand…”

  “No, not that. Why did you stay in the service of the apartheid government all those years?”

  “I’m a criminologist,” Yudel said. “They had the criminals in their cells. There was nowhere else for me to work.”

  “Is that all it was?”

  “That’s all.”

  “And private practice?”

  He shook his head. “No. I wanted the real thing.”

  And now we are here, Abigail thought. Me from the movement and you from the old prison system. And will you really be able to help me?

  “Tell me about Michael Bishop. Tell me everything you know.”