The October Killings Read online

  Abigail told him what she was able to and everything Jones Ndlovu had told her. In the telling it all sounded pitifully thin to her own ears.

  “And Ficksburg? Tell me more about Ficksburg.”

  “I have to go,” Abigail said.

  “Did Michael Bishop kill the policemen in Ficksburg?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I must go.”

  “Don’t do this,” Yudel said. “Don’t run away again. I need to understand.”

  “I’m not running away and I will tell you everything, but I have to fetch Robert at the airport.”

  “Before you go—surely the thing is to find Leon, not Bishop.”

  “If we find Bishop, we will find Leon. I know it.”

  Yudel stood outside in the gathering twilight and watched Abigail drive away. Will you tell me everything? he wondered. What is it that happened in Ficksburg that still cannot be approached after all these years? Whatever it is, right now you are fleeing from it again. How many times in the past have you fled from it?

  24

  “Why?” she had asked Yudel. “Why did you stay in the service of the apartheid government all those years?”

  They had the prisoners, he had replied. Yudel sat at his desk, crouched forward, his eyes directed to the floor between his knees, but he was seeing nothing. His hands were on his thighs and his shoulders were hunched tightly together. He was rocking slightly.

  Why? was indeed the question. He had often explained it to himself by remembering that the government had the prisoners. But the truth was that Yudel was ashamed of those years. He had often told himself that he was doing some good and there were times when he had done good. He had tried to bring sanity to situations in which sanity was in short supply. But there was no avoiding the fact that he had been part of the apartheid apparatus. If Abigail was fleeing from something, then so was he.

  Perhaps that was part of his resentment of Freek. It all seemed so easy to him. He seemed to suffer no self-doubt. What Freek Jordaan did was the right thing to do—unlike Yudel Gordon, who was never entirely sure what the right path looked like.

  Now there was Simon Mkhari, whose final chapter had been written in the dirt of a dusty Marabastad backyard the previous day. There had been many like him.

  Yudel was not one to harbor hatred, but there were classes of criminal to whose cases he had been unable to bring objective detachment. Foremost among these were those who killed for political reasons. The self-righteousness with which they explained the burning alive of an old woman or the blowing to unrecognizable fragments of late-night revellers in a beachside bar was more than he had ever been able to digest. In recent years he had come face to face with some of them, now dressed in the respectability of senior government positions. They repelled him still.

  Mkhari had not been one of those that the new government either needed or wanted. He disgusted Yudel, but not as much as those who had profited from their past homicides, under the cloak of liberation. This afternoon at lunch he had felt no regret at hearing about Mkhari’s end. It had seemed a fitting one.

  Despite all this, there had been a few minutes he had spent in Mkhari’s company that would stay with him always. It had been to his shame, not Mkhari’s.

  Mkhari had originally been sentenced to death for the burning of the old woman and Yudel had visited him on death row. The prisoner had asked for the visit. He had heard the story that occasionally did the rounds on death row that no one was ever really executed. They fell through the floor of the gallows to an underground passage that led to the mint, where they made money for the rest of their lives. The theory was that the government could not allow people to go free who knew how to make money. So those who were sentenced to death went to the mint instead.

  Yudel had been telling him that this was not so, and Mkhari had started to interrupt loudly when he suddenly stopped speaking. Something had happened down the passage toward the entrance of the block. Yudel had also heard it, but had not immediately attached any importance to the single word that now hung in the air like a sharp lowering of the temperature. The humming of voices that was always a part of death row had all but stopped. Within seconds, there was complete silence. The skin covering Mkhari’s face had become taut. His pupils had dilated until the brown of the irises had all but disappeared. His nostrils flared with a sudden intake of breath. He had forgotten what he had started to say and even seemed to have forgotten that Yudel was with him in the cell. Like everyone else in the entire community of some 130 condemned prisoners, he was listening.

  Yudel was listening too. That one word had been submerged below conversation level, yet it clung to the edges of his memory, an anonymous intrusion. The double row that made up the death cells had been reduced to a single, quivering sensor, straining to pick up whatever more there might be.

  The door of a cell closed. Yudel heard steps in the passage and the sound of another door opening. Then the word he had heard before, but had not been able to hold on to.

  “Pack.”

  Mkhari’s eyes were set, unblinking. There were other words too, but it was that one for which all were now listening. Again a door closed, the steps came closer and another opened.

  “Pack.”

  That was three. Yudel knew that there was not a man who was not counting. To know the number meant nothing in itself. It was only a statistic on which to hang their wondering. Again the man who had spoken was in the passage. The sound of his footfalls and those of his entourage was sharp and clear, leather heels clicking on the concrete surface. He stopped, just a few doors away. The heavy steel bolt slid clear and the hinges creaked briefly as the door swung open.

  “Pack.”

  And that was four. They were close enough for the other words to be audible. “I want jacket and address now.”

  Again the footsteps in the passage. Just a little way and they would be level with Mkhari’s cell. Yudel saw the expectancy with which the prisoner’s eyes were fixed on the door. But this was fear, not excitement.

  Then the sliding of steel against steel was coming from the solid steel door of Mkhari’s cell. With a jerk it swung open and Sergeant Paulsen, senior warder in charge of the block, came in. He stopped at seeing Yudel. “Mr. Gordon … I didn’t realize … I have to…”

  Yudel nodded. Unconsciously he had taken a step back, so that he would not be between the warder and prisoner. There was no avoiding what had to be done. Paulsen stepped aside to let the sheriff come through.

  “Pack,” the sheriff said. He was a pale, balding, nondescript man of middle age. “Give me jacket and address now.” Jacket and address. They were everything in the world that a condemned man possessed. Jacket stood for his personal effects. He would be moving to another cell, and they needed to go with him. The address was needed because his status would be changing and his next-of-kin would have to be informed.

  The others had all complied silently and without resistance, but Mkhari rushed to the farthest corner of the cell that was only just big enough to contain a narrow bed and room to move around it. Paulsen gestured and two more warders came in. “I need you to wait outside, Mr. Gordon,” he told Yudel.

  From outside the cell, Yudel heard Mkhari’s deep grunting protest. “No, leave me.” He was speaking Afrikaans. “I stay here, I’m telling you, I stay here.” There was a scuffling of feet and a muttering from the warders. The struggle was brief and they soon appeared with Mkhari between them. He was taken down the corridor in the direction of the lawyers’ room at the end of the block.

  The sheriff stopped at four more cells, making a total of ten. After he too had left for the lawyers’ room, death row returned to such life as it possessed. Someone down at the far end laughed; a thin, piping tenor, an uninhibited release of tension. A second voice, deeper and coarser, joined the first, while close at hand, Yudel heard someone sobbing. “God save the queen,” another shouted with comic irrelevance. Loud talking, laughing and whoopin
g sounds of joy echoed from walls where the windows were uncurtained and floors uncarpeted, as every man who had been bypassed regained his voice.

  On his way back to the entrance Yudel had to pass the lawyers’ consulting room. He knew what he would find there. He had seen it all before and knew the form it took.

  Despite himself, he slowed as he approached it. Nine of the prisoners were queuing at the door, watched over by two warders. Mkhari was the first man in the queue. He had given up the struggle and was staring in front of him through unseeing eyes. Immediately behind him was Peanut Setlaba, a body-builder who had often boasted to the others on death row that they would not be able to hang him, his neck was too thick for the rope. It was a boast that was soon to be proven empty. He had been found guilty of killing his wife in a crime of passion. Behind him stood Bernard Kanasi who, in an act of revenge, had killed his former mistress’s nine-year-old son. The faces of the men, all of whom had been the center of hideous killings, each in its own way reflected a state of deep shock.

  Inside the room the sheriff, looking excessively solemn and dignified, was seated at a table. A third warder stood next to him. As Yudel watched, Mkhari was ushered into the room and positioned in front of the sheriff. “You were convicted of murder,” the sheriff told him. “You were given leave to appeal by the trial judge. Your sentence was upheld by the Appellate Division. You petitioned the state president, but clemency was not granted.” The voice was flat and unemotional, reciting the prisoner’s history from the time he had been taken into custody. Among death row prisoners the sheriff was called the storyteller. “Accordingly, the date for your execution has been fixed for O-seven-hundred hours on the morning of…”

  Every man on death row passed this way. Without any exceptions they took their turn in this queue and waited to hear whether they would be going to the pot, so called because you stewed there, in which no one was scheduled to spend more than seven days—or down the hill to the main prison and life.

  But Mkhari had not been destined to die that way. Before his seven days in the pot were up, the old government had granted a moratorium on the death penalty. Reconciliation talks with the liberation movement had started, and would have stopped as suddenly if the apartheid government had continued executing the movement’s activists. Once the new government had come to power, Mkhari’s murder of the old woman was seen as a political act, furthering the aim of liberation, and he had been freed. Yudel had filed a report, outlining the reason for his opposition to this prisoner’s release, but the man who turned out to be the last white commissioner of correctional services was trying hard to keep his position. He had no intention of opposing the wishes of his new masters in even the slightest way. He granted Yudel an interview, but from the first moment it was clear to Yudel that he was speaking to a man who was not listening to him.

  The new South Africa had been no more accepting of Simon Mkhari than the old one had been. Yudel felt no pleasure at having been right about him. Hearing about his death in the Marabastad firefight left him with nothing but the emptiness of failure.

  Mkhari was just a small part of Yudel’s memory of those years. How did I stay so long? he asked himself. How was it possible? Little by little, perhaps. One day at a time.

  But he knew that it was not that simple. The state of the country was a tragedy, perhaps the world’s most significant tragedy of the time. And he was at the center of it.

  The truth is that I was fascinated by it, he told himself. I loved being at the center of it. I loved it. No, let me not admit to that. I was fascinated by it. That’s enough.

  25

  Abigail’s anxiety to get away from Yudel and an even greater anxiety not to be late for Robert saw her reaching the airport half an hour early. She did not want to spend another night alone in the apartment.

  She found a seat in a café from which she could see the board that would show her when Robert’s flight landed. She had ordered coffee when she remembered Susanna Lourens and what she would be feeling. She had saved her number on her mobile, and now she called it.

  A man answered in Afrikaans. “Dis Van Rensburg wat praat.”

  Having spent most of her formative years outside the country, Abigail knew little Afrikaans, but had followed enough of his reply to realize that his surname was not Lourens. He would probably be the half-brother Leon had told her about. “Abigail Bukula here. May I speak to Susanna?”

  “Why? What do you want?” The switch to English had been immediate, but the voice was hostile.

  “I’d like to speak to Susanna. She came to see me yesterday.”

  “Have you found Leon?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you want to say to Susanna?”

  “Look, she came to see me. I want to tell her what I’ve done.”

  “She’s asleep now. The doctor’s given her a sedative. But if you haven’t found Leon, I don’t think you’ve got anything to say to her anyway.”

  After Susanna’s timidity and pleading, Abigail had not expected this. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “Don’t say anything. You people have said enough. It’s people like you, people with influence, who are always making speeches attacking white people, who cause this sort of thing to happen. Perhaps it’s time for you to say nothing.”

  After he hung up, with twenty minutes before the flight was due to arrive, she finished her coffee and made her way to domestic arrivals. Leaning against a pillar, she waited for Robert.

  When news that the flight had been delayed for twenty minutes flashed onto the board, she barely reacted. Abigail told herself that she was not going anywhere without Robert. If it was delayed all night, she would be there, waiting.

  * * *

  It turned out that an all-night wait was not necessary. The flight was only ten minutes late and the familiar figure of Robert, tall and loose-limbed, a briefcase in one hand and a light traveling bag in the other, his tie absent and the top button of his shirt undone, came casually through the exit. He looked like a man who had never had a problem of any sort in all his life.

  If Abigail did not fully realize how powerful her need of her husband was at that moment, he realized it even less. He staggered back a few paces with the force of her welcome. “Whoa,” he said. “Take it easy. I’m just a little fellow.” She tried to laugh at his joke, but it was not easy when she could not see him for the tears filling her eyes. “With a reception like this, I should go away more often.”

  “Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever go anywhere without me ever again.”

  By this time Robert could see that this was no longer a laughing matter. “Let’s get to the car,” he said. “You can tell me there.”

  The highway between the airport and Pretoria was broad, had only slight bends and few of those. But that early evening a number of flights, international and local, had landed within minutes of one another and the road was busy. Despite the privacy in the car, Robert felt the need for a quieter road. He took the Olifantsfontein turnoff, a road that led through pastoral surroundings and quiet residential areas where the doors of houses were already closed and the streets were uniformly still. He slowed the car to give his attention to Abigail. “So, tell me,” he said. “Tell me quickly.”

  “Leon’s gone. I believe he’s been abducted.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “A single white man in police uniform took him away. We’ve phoned everywhere, but no government body has him.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  She told him everything, how she had met Yudel, her visit to Jones Ndlovu, her search of the house in the Magaliesberg hills and, most of all, how she had been unable to raise any interest from anyone. “I know Mandla Nyati would try to help, but he’s gone to Cape Town too.”

  Robert brought the car to a halt in an avenue of pines, entering the village of Irene. He turned to her. Uneven light from a street lamp, filtered and interrupted by the pine branches, fell on his face. She could see in h
is eyes how serious he was. “I don’t think there will be any help from senior people.”

  “Why? Just because he was a hero…”

  “It has nothing to do with that. No one will be able to help.”

  “But why not?”

  “The deputy president is going down. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority believes he has a case of corruption against him.”

  “My God. That’s why you had to go to Cape Town?”

  “This was just a briefing from our chairman. I expect in the next few days to be called, with other black editors, to a briefing by the man himself.”

  “I can’t believe it. Does the president know?”

  “The word is that he does.”

  “My God.” The abduction of the man who had saved her life did damage to Abigail’s view of her country in a singularly personal way. Now the possible guilt of the deputy president on charges of corruption, just eleven years into the new South Africa, did damage to that image in a much broader way. If this were true, the vision of a joyous future beyond apartheid had been sullied. “Is he guilty?” she asked Robert.

  “I’m the wrong person to ask,” he said. “I can’t stand the machine-gun song he sings at every rally. I know that I don’t have a rational view of him. I always hoped that he wouldn’t be around long, but it looks as if the NPA wants to try him in the press because they don’t have enough on him. That’s just not right.”

  “All this in just a few days,” Abigail said.

  “One thing you can be sure of—all of those in your department, who are high enough to help you, will be running around like headless chickens. They won’t even be able to hear what you’re saying, let alone do anything about it.”

  “But Leon…”

  Robert interrupted her. “Leon is just one apartheid soldier … not much in the broader scheme of things.”

  “Then we’re alone in this.” She sounded like a small child. Robert had never been able to resist it.