by Jon Zackon
He said they’d run out of brake pads for my model and there was nothing he could do. Another branch was supposed to have sent some the previous afternoon but they hadn’t arrived yet. He’d fit them himself as soon as they did arrive. Please come back at one or phone, sir.
“Fucking garages,” I muttered as I walked away. It was too soon to panic. If I got the car back at one I could leave by two and put plan B – sleeping over at Harrismith – into operation. The problem was, I could barely average thirty miles an hour in the Anglia, especially as travelling from the coast back to the Transvaal meant climbing a total of six thousand feet. The car was designed for British conditions and only had three gears. It hated hills.
I walked back to the flat, put on a cossie, grabbed a towel and went to the beach, all the time looking about me for signs of danger.
At exactly one o’clock I used a public phone box to call the garage. The service manager made a grovelling apology. The brake pads had still not arrived but he assured me they were on their way in a van. The car, he said, would definitely be ready by four.
I felt like screaming as I replaced the receiver. When I’d calmed down I went to have my last ever curry at Jake’s kiosk. I ate as slowly as possible. It was going to be a trial, getting from lunch to four o’clock.
After a tedious couple of hours I went back to the flat, dressed and, ever the optimist, got to the garage five minute early.
“It will be ready in ten minutes, sir,” said the oleaginous service manager.
I phoned Ruth.
“I’m not on until five, Danny. Please come and say goodbye,” she said.
And so, twenty minutes later, I drove back to the flat, threw everything into the car, drove round to the nurses’ home, kissed Ruth goodbye, brushed a tear from her cheek, clung to her, reluctantly disengaged myself, didn’t dare speak, tried not to shed any tears, got back in the car and set off for Jo’burg. It was after five o’clock.
As I rolled along West Street I turned my mind to the trip ahead. There’s very little twilight on South Africa’s eastern seaboard, so I knew it would be dark by seven. Only two hours of light before facing a long, dark and lonely drive into the hinterland. I wasn’t sure how to play it. Just keep going through the night, stopping only for petrol and personal needs? I’d have to be careful not to fall asleep at the wheel.
The alternative, remembering that I would have to find a hotel with a functioning late-night reception desk, was to stop off, not at Harrismith, but at Estcourt, which was only a hundred miles from Durban. I’d then be left with a long journey tomorrow and I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I decided to wait and see how I felt after that first hundred miles. And I cursed the garage for the umpteenth time for putting me in such an uncertain predicament.
Thinking about the journey took my mind off the fact that I was leaving a place I had come to love. No time to get sentimental. I didn’t dare let my thoughts turn to Ruth.
As the car climbed towards Pinetown my major discomfort was that the setting sun was in my eyes, even though I had the visor down. I knew it wouldn’t last long though before a crepuscular gloom would set in, to be quickly followed by a curtain of blackness.
Without realising why, I suddenly thought of a line in an Edgar Allan Poe poem – the one that tells of “A ghost called Night ...”
The sky was beginning to darken and it sent a shiver up my spine.
Chapter 24
THE TIN-ROOFED houses of Pinetown receded in my rear view mirror. I could see tribal huts dotting the hillsides where dense bush had been cleared.
Towns were few and far between on the Durban-Jo’burg road. The next one was Howick. It would be dark long before I reached it. The sun was already lost behind the Drakensberg mountains in the west, which made driving a little easier. The glare had been a trial.
But I still had to contend with extreme heat. It had been a scorching day and I’d hoped that as I moved inland the humidity would fall and it might feel cooler. No such luck. The front windows were open, which generated a mild breeze through the car, but this didn’t stop my back sticking to my shirt, and my shirt sticking to the seat.
I wiped the sweat from my brow before it fell into my eyes, gasped, “Whew,” and drove on.
Dusk turned to night and the traffic thinned. Driving in the dark was not that difficult. I could see the headlights of oncoming cars for miles before they got near. Only one or two selfish idiots came towards me on full beam. My tortoise of a car was being regularly overtaken, so I kept well to the side of the road.
I remembered the radio in Ruth’s car. What I would have done for one now! So I sang to keep my spirits up and stop any negative, Edgar Allan Poe-type thoughts creeping to the fore.
I must have been thirty miles past Pinetown when I noticed lights in my mirror. Nothing new, except that this time the car made no attempt to overtake.
I slowed; it slowed. I could see it was a sizeable saloon, a Zephyr, maybe.
A Zephyr …
Koos drove a Zephyr.
A terrible weight squeezed the air out of my lungs. I fought to catch my breath – which was made all the more difficult because I was suddenly paralysed with fear. I felt so weak I could hardly grip the steering wheel.
And I noticed something different about the countryside around me. Most of the way up to this point I’d seen lights – a cooking fire here, a lamp there. Now there was nothing but blackness.
Presuming it was Koos behind me, had he chosen this unpopulated area deliberately?
The Zephyr flashed its lights. I tried to ignore it. But the lights flashed again.
I was slowly getting my breath back, and as I did so the fear inside me began to give way to anger.
The Zephyr drove up alongside.
Yes, I could see Koos at the wheel. He was glowering at me.
I leaned out of the window and screamed, “Go fuck yourself, you fucking maniac!”
I expected him to laugh in his best cat-and-mouse manner, but he merely pointed his finger and shouted something I couldn’t make out, although I guessed it was an order to pull over.
I kept driving.
He closed in on me, as if getting ready to push me off the road.
It wouldn’t be difficult for him to do this in his bigger car. What then? The Anglia was light and far too upright and would probably roll. If the crash didn’t kill me he could then do so at his leisure, stick my body back in the damaged car and make it look like an accident. That would be a perfect scenario for him.
I couldn’t let that happen.
And if I stopped? At least I could put up a fight. If he was going to kill me, then let him do it on or near the road, where there would be a nice lot of my blood left lying about. And he’d have to dispense with my undamaged car. Someone would see, surely – either witness the act of him killing me, or driving the car away later.
I pulled up on the shoulder of the road, virtually resigned to the fact that I was about to die, one way or the other. The Zephyr pulled up in front of me.
Make him fight to get you out of the car, I told myself. Make him shoot you. If you get the chance, hit him. Punch his lights out. He may be a cop but he’s small and probably not that strong. Fight him!
Another, ironic, thought struck me: Make sure you don’t kill him. There wasn’t a court in the land that would allow me to kill a cop and escape the hangman. Which would really upset my mom, I thought crazily.
Koos got out of his car and walked cautiously in the road towards me, keeping wide, presumably in case I tried to run him down. He carried his revolver in his left hand. Grim determination showed on his face.
I cannot forgive myself for what happened next. Oh shit, I should have seen it coming.
He was in line with my door. Then he closed in rapidly – and hit me through the open window.
Full in the face. A sucker punch.
The blow was like a firework going off inside my skull. No memory o
f the next minute or two remains. He must have knocked me out and dragged me out of the car.
I came to trying to clutch on to the bonnet, screaming and fighting against being pulled forwards.
Dazed, I lashed out, but hit nothing. Then I felt myself being pushed from behind.
I was on the edge of an embankment.
Another shove and I tumbled down, landing face forward against a boulder.
Koos was on me in an instant.
I knew I had to face him. It was my only chance. I rolled over and saw his hand raised.
I threw my arms over my head as his hand came crashing down. But I was protecting the wrong body parts.
The butt of his gun smashed into my left knee.
A grenade of pain exploded in my leg. I let out a yell that must have woken every sleeping soul in Zululand.
“So there you are, Danny,” said Koos in an unbelievably mild tone. “Now you won’t be running away from me again, hey pal?”
I grabbed my knee with both hands, unable now to protect myself.
He bent over, grabbed my belt and tore at it, breaking the strap away from the buckle.
Don’t give in, I told myself. Forget the pain. You have to fight!
“Roll over, you cunt,” said Koos, raising his voice a little as he grappled with me, trying to force me over.
“Pervert! You fucking pervert, Koos!” I shouted as loudly as I could.
I fought violently to turn back and face him again.
His face, directly above me, was contorted in effort. The light caught his protruding eyeballs. It also caught a line of spittle that glistened as it hung from his bottom lip to his chin.
Light?
What light?
A voice, deep and authoritative, came eerily out of the darkness.
“Put the gun down, swaer, and step back,” it said.
I turned towards it. I could just about make out the silhouette of a giant, standing high up on the edge of the road and shining a torch down at Koos and me.
Koos looked stunned, his eyeballs popping, his chest heaving. Stunned, perplexed, thwarted and angry. He held a hand up to shield his eyes from the beam.
“Jesus Christ, Theo! What the fuck are you doing? Just fuck off, hey! I’ve got unfinished business with this piece of shit.”
“No, Koos. If you raise that gun one inch towards him, or one inch towards me, I am going shoot to kill. Right through your heart, man. So drop it! Drop the fucking gun!”
Koos was panting heavily, almost whooping. His head turned this way and that, like a trapped animal looking for an escape route.
Through a curtain of pain I wondered if he was weighing his options, getting ready to call Theo’s bluff. Perhaps Theo felt this too. He took a step forward, threateningly.
This time Koos hesitated for only a second, then dropped his gun.
Theo went up to him, grabbed his shoulder and pushed him towards the road.
Then Theo put his own gun back in its holster and bent down to pick up Koos’s.
“Now fuck off home, Koos. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”
Koos swore softly. He was no longer in the torch’s beam, but I saw him turn round to look at Theo – and then, or so it seemed at the time, to fix me with a menacing stare.
Still swearing, he shuffled back to his car, got in, started up, did a U-turn and headed back towards Durban.
I clutched by injured knee, rocking and moaning.
“Shit, you’re late,” I said. “He was going to kill me. Where the fuck have you been?”
Theo walked over to me.
“Get up and shut up,” he said.
“I can’t. Your pal just smashed my knee in.”
A huge hand gripped me under the arm and hauled me up as if I were a bunch of bananas.
“And stop the moaning,” said Theo. “You’re like a fucking girl. It’s just a fucking sore knee.”
He half carried, half dragged me to his car, opened the back door and more or less threw me in. Thankfully, I landed on my side, avoiding further jarring to my stricken joint. My face hit the Buick’s leather seat. It felt cool and comforting.
“I don’t want to hear one more word out of you, do you hear?” said Theo.
And with that we drove back through Pinetown to Durban, through the suburbs, down into the city centre and on to Addington Hospital.
I was going to see Ruth again. It would be an inglorious occasion but I didn’t care. The thought of holding her helped to ease the pain in my brain, let alone the one in my knee.
Theo parked and went into casualty to get orderlies and a stretcher.
When he came back he said, “Where are your car keys?”
“Still in the car, I hope.”
“I’ll get someone to fetch it tomorrow.”
He put his face close to mine and said softly, “I’ve told them inside that you’ve had an accident. Got out of your car to relieve yourself, fell by the side of the road and hit your knee on a rock. By happy coincidence I was passing, saw your car and came to your aid. If you change this story I’ll throw you to Koos. Do you understand? I don’t want you to tell anyone on this planet about what happened tonight, Danny. Your miserable little life is at stake here, so you’d better answer me – you’ve had an accident, right or wrong?”
I said nothing.
“Right or wrong?” he repeated, raising his voice.
“Yes, yes, anything you say,” I said.
***
Moira held her hand up to her mouth in shock. “What on earth’s happened to you, Danny?” she said, before delivering an anti-tetanus jab to my backside.
I started to give her the Theo Oudenstad version of the truth. Fortunately, she wasn’t interested in the non-details of the non-accident, being too busy focusing on my injury.
“We’ll have to get you into X-ray. I’d better get on to the radiographers,” she said walking away.
When she came back I asked her about Ruth.
“She went off duty about an hour ago. Do you want me to get her back?”
“No. Let her sleep. She can catch up with me in the morning.”
“I’ll leave a note for her. Don’t want to shock her too much, do we?”
And so I was wheeled into the X-ray department, after which I was wheeled into a ward and given a knockout jab.
Within seconds the world was blotted out. And Koos van Blatter was blotted out with it.
Chapter 25
WITH MY head on fire, I swam through the murky depths of drug-induced sleep up towards the glow of consciousness. My damaged knee had caused me to forget about the punch I’d received through the open car window. No longer. Pain now bore into the side of my head as if the bones that made up my skull were being prised apart.
Ever so slowly I became aware of a figure standing beside me, blotting out the light.
“Good morning,” said Theo.
I defied the pain and managed a grunt.
“Why the hell did you disobey me, hey Danny? I told you to catch a train. But no, you had to go by car. Why?”
“Never had time to sell the car,” I lied.
“Look where it’s got you. Let’s face it man, you’re damned lucky to be alive.”
Theo was speaking softly, even though my bed was curtained off from the rest of the ward.
“Are you in condition to remember anything I’m about to say to you?”
I mumbled that I was.
“Well, I’ve got bad news for you. The rules have changed.”
Now my knee was hurting as well. I could see that it was heavily bandaged.
“But first I have to make one thing very clear. There is no way I will back up any statement you happen to make against Koos. I’ve spoken to my chief about this. He agrees that Koos is worth a great deal to us while you, I’m afraid, are of not much account. Is that simple enough for you to understand? So note carefully, Danny. I will deny any allegations y
ou make against him.”
“I thought you made that pretty obvious last night. Accident, my eye.”
“Yes, well, so now you know my position. I’m duty bound to lay it on the line.”
He paused for a moment before continuing, “The new rules are also simple. Do you have a passport?”
What the hell was he on about?
“Yes. Why?”
“I’ll tell you – it’s no longer good enough for you to go back to Jo’burg and stay there. We want you out of the country. Do you understand?”
I was shocked. I needed to think about this before giving an answer.
But Theo didn’t wait for a reply. “To be frank, Danny, it doesn’t matter whether you understand or not. We are telling you nicely to get out. While you are, what’s the word … reachable … your life is in danger and there is also your family to consider.”
“What do you mean, my family? You’re forgetting you are a policeman, Theo. How can you let that monster become a threat to my family?”
“Yes, well, preventing crime from happening is the most important thing a policeman can do. I’m not saying there is a direct threat to your family. I don’t know anything about your family. Shit, Danny, I don’t even know if you’ve got one. But if you do, we can’t protect you or them at a distance. Do you follow? Anyway, we want you out of the country within the next three weeks. The doctor says no bones have been broken so you could be walking good enough to travel in seven or eight days. Catch a plane or the train out of Durban on the tenth and leave the country between the 17th and the 20th.”
A stab of pain shot through my gut. I felt sick.
“You’ll be safe up to then.” Theo’s huge features broke into a grin and his tone softened. He was trying his best to sound reassuring. “Me and my family and Koos and his family are going to the Cape tomorrow for two weeks. When we come back I’ll make sure he stays in Durban until after you leave Jan Smuts. Plenty of people are leaving the country at the moment and you’ll just be one of them.”
“You want me to pack up and go – just like that? What am I supposed to do for money?”