The October Killings Read online

  At almost the same moment, Abigail’s advice came to him. Advice? he thought. It was an order, not advice. Although she was more than twenty years younger than he was, it was almost like a new instruction from his mother.

  Rosa was pouring the coffee. Yudel struggled to frame the words that would reflect his intentions. “Rosa,” he started.

  “Yes, Yudel.”

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to mention.”

  “Yes, dear. What is it?”

  Fuck it, Yudel thought. Why does that damned woman have this effect on me? I won’t do it. Why should I embarrass myself this way?

  “Yes, Yudel. What did you want to say?”

  “I just thought I should mention…” Damn that Abigail, he thought.

  “Yes, Yudel, what did you want to mention?”

  “I think I have been remiss in some way.”

  “Oh?” She was handing him his coffee. The last remark had got her attention. “What have you been up to?”

  “I…”

  “It can’t be too serious,” she assured him, “or I would have noticed.”

  “Rosa, I’ve been meaning to remind you…” He paused again, building his courage. “… that I love you,” he finished, studying her face for a reaction.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “I love you.”

  “I thought that’s what you said, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “Well, that is what I said.”

  She had started sitting down. Now she rose slowly, assuming perhaps that Yudel’s declaration heralded some other action on his part. “What brought this on?”

  He considered briefly telling her that it was Abigail’s idea, but rejected the thought. It might be better, he reasoned, simply to take the credit. “It just came to me,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all, Yudel.” She was on her feet now, obviously expecting that there would be more to this that just the bland statement of his affection.

  Yudel also rose. The kitchen table was between them and he had to circle it in order to reach her. On the way he stumbled over a chair. By the time he reached her, her eyes were closed and her lips were being held up to him. He kissed them, just as Abigail had told him to.

  * * *

  That night there was a full moon over Pretoria and the surrounding veld. It threw a clean, white light over buildings, trees and hills bright enough to cast sharp shadows, and even to compete with the city’s artificial lighting.

  In the apartment block where Abigail and Robert lived, it seemed brighter than anywhere else. There was only one street light near the building, a few muted lights in the next-door garden and, tonight, only scattered lights from the apartments. The grounds were partly in the moon’s bright light and partly in deep shadow.

  If their building felt the effect of the full moon more than others, their apartment felt it most of all. No lights were on and the curtains in their bedroom window were open, allowing the moonlight to flow unhindered into the room.

  If the moon itself had been able to see and to follow its own light into Robert and Abigail’s bedroom, it would have seen that Abigail had been gathered, unresisting, into Robert’s arms. It would also have seen a slow, rhythmical movement from the bed. It was a movement that restarted a number of times during the night, long after the moon had set and the room was in darkness.

  46

  Freek Jordaan had gone straight to bed when he got home. The last few days without sleep and the capture and interrogation of Michael Bishop had left him near exhaustion. As he fell asleep, he had reflected sadly that he no longer had the stamina of earlier years. The last thing he said to Magda was that he felt that he was going to sleep for a week.

  In fact, the week lasted less than an hour. He sat up suddenly and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The thought that woke him had emerged, unbidden, from some deep recess in his mind. How is it that I was called away to that riot at just that moment? If that was just bad luck, it was the worst possible luck.

  Magda had not yet come to bed. Freek could see that the lights in the living room were still on. She was probably sitting in her favorite chair, reading. He went to his cupboard and, feeling in the top pocket of his tunic, found the piece of paper where he had written down the number of the minister’s mobile phone. An old mechanical clock on the bedroom bookcase told him that it was still a few minutes before eleven.

  Sitting down on the room’s only chair, Freek called the number from the bedroom telephone and heard the minister answer. He announced himself, then said, “We did manage to save the building.”

  “This is very late, deputy commissioner, to be reporting on something that happened twenty-four hours ago,” the minister said.

  “I also wanted to apologize for seeming reluctant to attend to it myself,” Freek told him.

  “That’s quite all right. I understand fully. I’m sure you were operating under orders.” He was the senior man, showing himself to be deeply and self-consciously magnanimous. “And I was sorry to hear about the problem that developed in that police station while you were away.”

  Were you? Freek thought. “That’s all right. We caught up with the suspects. Unfortunately we had to kill them.”

  There was a long moment before the minister spoke. “I understood one got away.”

  “No. They’re both dead.” Freek lied well, with the off-handedness of someone who was not even considering the possibility that he may not be believed.

  “Michael Bishop?” The minister was no longer able to hide the surprise in his voice.

  “Who?” Freek asked.

  “I thought that was the name…” His voice trailed away.

  “Michael somebody, you say?”

  “You had him in custody,” the minister said. “Are you telling me you didn’t know his name?”

  “Perhaps you can tell me about him, Mr. Minister,” Freek said.

  “I barely know him. I didn’t know him. I heard about him.”

  “You wouldn’t have heard how that riot started?”

  This time the pause was longer as the minister considered the implications of all possible answers. Eventually, he resorted to his rank. “What are you implying, deputy commissioner?”

  “I wasn’t implying anything, Mr. Minister. I simply wondered if you knew how that riot started.”

  The minister thought about that and made his decision. “Of course I don’t. It’s very late. You have no business phoning me this late.”

  Freek apologized again and hung up. What was I implying? he mused. What indeed?

  He hung up and went back to bed. Before he fell asleep he wondered if Yudel and Abigail were sleeping well. He hoped so. It seemed possible that the events of the last week may yet reecho in all their lives.

  47

  The car was late and the pilot of the light aircraft had been kept waiting for an extra thirty minutes. The driver got out of the car and made his way across the sun-scorched dirt surface of a runway surrounded by dense bushveld.

  Apart from the moon and the last remnants of daylight, the runway had no lighting of any sort. Neither that nor his passenger’s lateness bothered the pilot. He had known that this was going to be a night run and that there was a fair chance his passenger would not be on time. He had done this sort of thing before and schedules were always approximate at best.

  The pilot had been a member of the armed forces of the apartheid regime, and had some success at dropping bombs on the forces of liberation. After the change of government he had been one of the first to be told that his services were no longer required. He had found this new line of work, shuttling the kind of people across the country’s borders who, for their own reasons, would rather keep their passage secret. It was only marginally less hazardous than his old occupation had been, but it paid much better.

  What did surprise him was that only one man got out of the car and was now approaching the aircraft on foot. In the moonlight he could
watch his passenger all the way from the car. The pilot had flown this man on other occasions. He knew him to be a strange one. He said little, but he paid without quibbling and that was not something to ignore. The pilot did not know what his passenger’s game was, but that did not matter. He would do the job and, as long as he got his money, nothing else mattered.

  The man arrived at the aircraft and climbed into the seat next to him without saying anything. “I thought there were going to be two,” the pilot said. “Is the other one still coming?”

  “He won’t be coming. It’s just me tonight.”

  “You realize the price is the same. It doesn’t change my expenses if there’s one or two passengers.”

  “I realize that.”

  “I’m sorry, but my time … and it hardly uses any less fuel…”

  “It’s all right.”

  The pilot started the engine, gave it time to warm up and took off, facing north, the direction in which they would be traveling. “Your people know what to do with the car?” his passenger asked.

  “Yes. It has already been taken away. By tomorrow night it will be a collection of spares in four different Jo’burg scrapyards.”

  “Good.”

  For the first few minutes the pilot flew no more than fifty meters above the tangled African scrub that covered the landscape below. Later, he would have to climb a few hundred meters to get above the Waterberg range, and still later the process would be repeated for the Soutpansberg range. But, for the entire trip, he would stay out of the reach of any South African radar system.

  It was after ten when they crossed the Zimbabwe border and another half hour before they found the runway they were looking for. It was not unlike the one from which they had taken off—a strip of dry veld grass surrounded by bushveld. To guide the aircraft in, it had been marked by four brush fires made in old oil drums and positioned at the edges of the runway.

  The landing was smoother than Michael Bishop had expected, and the pilot brought the aircraft to a halt not far from two parked cars where, if you looked carefully, two men could be seen waiting in the moonlight. Bishop paid first the pilot, then the men who had brought the car, both payments being in South African folding money. An hour later he was driving down a little-used dirt road off the national road between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls.

  The full moon, the same one that flooded Abigail’s bedroom with its light, was still overhead. He switched off the headlights and drove by the moonlight for a while. Even after the events of the last few days, the risk was invigorating.

  He was alone. It was the first time in his adult life that he had been altogether alone. That Matthew was gone was bad enough, but the way he had been taken made it worse. And he had sat there, just down the road, and watched it. He could still see the face of the prison guard who had pulled the trigger. He would never forget it.

  When Bishop finally reached his destination and brought the car to a halt, he looked at his watch by the light from the dashboard. Matthew had died only hours before, but it was already the twenty-third.

  Also by Wessel Ebersohn

  In Touching Distance

  Klara’s Visitors

  The Otter and Mr. Ogilvie

  Closed Circle

  Divide the Night

  Store Up the Anger

  The Centurion

  A Lonely Place to Die

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE OCTOBER KILLINGS. Copyright © 2010 by Wessel Ebersohn. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ebersohn, Wessel.

  The October killings / Wessel Ebersohn.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-65595-2 (alk. paper)

  1. Anti-apartheid activists—South Africa—Fiction. 2. South Africa—Politics and government—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9369.3.E24O3 2011

  823'.914—dc22

  2010037509

  First published in South Africa by Umuzi, an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd.

  First U.S. Edition: January 2011

  eISBN 978-1-4299-9010-3

  First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: January 2011