by MP Miles
“I want to go out,” she’d said.
“Out? To a bar or someplace?” Angel had asked, already anxious about what she had in mind. He’d wondered where a rich farmer’s daughter might go for a Sunday lunchtime drink and in his mind had settled on the Main Bar at the Rand Club, a vast colonial affair with lots of mahogany and the walls filled with the severed heads of herds of African animals. It would have been a little difficult for him to go with her.
“I want to feel people, to hear kids having fun,” she’d said.
“Johannesburg Zoo,” Angel had quickly suggested.
For an hour he’d led her along Tiger Track, around Baboon Bend and Elephant Walk, Elanza listening to children chattering about eland, rhino and lemur. She had soon tired, and Angel had taken her to an outside restaurant in the park but immediately regretted his decision, feeling uncomfortable among tables of white families. Johannesburg Zoo and the park around Zoo Lake were a unique public space, open to all races, but only white people sat at the restaurant under the trees with a cool Chenin blanc and gambas a la plancha. A young girl with a drinking straw in her mouth stared at him with her head on one side. Her mother noticed him and they left, the woman dragging the girl by the strap of a satchel.
Angel watched the early autumn sunshine, still warm in April, flicker through the old oak trees around Zoo Lake on to Elanza’s face and hair. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back to catch the sun, her neck thin and sinewy, fragile but beautiful.
“Could you see anything of the animals, Elanza?”
Elanza shook her head.
“Not a thing.”
Angel felt pity for her, imagining a life of black nothingness.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” she asked him.
“Well, just darkness must be…”
Elanza held his arm.
“Oh, it’s not dark, Angel. It’s beautiful and light. Ever-changing colours I couldn’t describe. It’s distracting though. You can’t turn it off. Closing your eyes doesn’t help. It’s all still there, still bright and light. It’s like being deaf but with a constant ringing in your ears.”
Angel felt her hand on his arm. For the first time in his life he was with a woman whom he could care for and who might care for him, tenderly and in public.
“What can you see right now?” he asked through a lump in his throat.
“I can’t see a waiter bringing me a Bloody Mary.”
“What else?”
Elanza sat upright and stared ahead as if concentrating.
“Right now, it’s a warm brown colour like a dark wood but with something glowing blue in the front. Now it’s bright blue with yellow flecks but I think quite soon it’ll all be orange. There are squashed shapes like pyramids and clouds, but in a moment it’ll all be different. It’s like fireworks, bright and noisy, but all the time. I sit and stare at it, longing for quiet darkness.”
A waiter approached them and crossed his bare arms. Angel looked at them, pink and freckled, and propped his British passport against a big peppermill on the table where the waiter could see it.
“At last,” said Elanza.
The waiter took her order and turned to Angel.
“And you? What do you want?”
“He was a little rude,” she said as the waiter walked stiffly away, and then, “You spoke English.”
“Did I?”
“Your English sounds odd too. Very Michael Caine.”
“My mother’s fault.”
Elanza relaxed into the wooden chair. As she leant backwards Angel could see over the empty table vacated by the woman and the young girl to the other people in the restaurant. A man sat alone at a table among the families. He had a camera with a long lens.
“I would have liked to have seen London,” Elanza said.
Angel looked at the man. There was something about the way he was dressed. He looked like a tourist but one that had thought too hard about what to wear. He was a caricature of a tourist, unsuccessfully hiding his identity in the same way that Angel could always spot an off-duty junior soldier – his trainers too clean, his jeans pressed, his polo shirt collars starched.
“Hmm?”
“Your mother in London – how is she?”
“I’m not sure.”
Elanza sat upright.
“What?”
“I haven’t talked to her lately,” explained Angel lamely.
Elanza had been ten years old when her mother had died unexpectedly at home. Her father had held her wordlessly, then together they had moved sheep to water. She had heard him crying that night, then he’d never spoken of her. Elanza hadn’t cried at all.
“You probably see more of your father,” she said.
“He moves around a lot. In fact, I don’t know where he’s living now.”
Elanza felt she was pushing him to talk against his will.
“We should find him,” she said and held his hand. “I’d like to meet him.”
Angel had been trying to find him for years, had quietly utilised resources at work to help in his search. He had little to go on. A man named Rots, first name unknown, age unknown, an engineer who had worked on the railway over thirty years ago.
“I’m sorry, Elanza, I should be getting back.”
“Sure… Angel, have I said something wrong?”
Angel had watched the man leave. He hadn’t stopped to photograph the picturesque flamingos on the lake.
“No, nothing wrong. There’s a guy over there I recognise from work.”
Elanza, curious, asked, “Oh really? Shall we go and say hi?”
“Too late. He’s gone.”
“Shame,” she said, disappointed. “What’s his name?”
“Heining.”
A cloud had drifted across the sun, now lower in the trees. It felt cool, winter just around the corner. Angel shivered.
“Heining?” she asked. “That’s an unusual name.”
“He’s an unusual guy.”
Angel took her arm.
“Come on. Let’s go. You’ll get cold.”
The waiter watched them leave, walking close together and holding hands, and shook his ginger head.
*
Nels met Roux at Burgers Park, four hectares in the centre of Pretoria named after the second President of the Transvaal. It had originally been set aside for a park in 1874 but it had taken until 1892 for it to be finished. A young government botanist with the very English name of James Hunter had eventually completed a Victorian-style English park, complete with curved paths and a cast-iron bandstand for tea concerts, deep in the heart of the Afrikaner homeland.
At lunchtime Roux liked to relax in the park and enjoy a brief respite from the office. It had been a difficult morning. A South African government procurement minister had been on a business trip to France, talking with the giant arms supplier Dassault, vainly trying to find ways to circumvent restrictions on arms exports to South Africa. Roux had received a call from his opposite number in Paris to say that the minister had slept in a swanky hotel with a woman they knew as Paula, known to them as being KGB. He thoughtfully suggested that if the minister needed such diversions, the French External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service in Paris could find him prettier and safer women. It remained only for Roux to point out to the minister that such behaviour would likely be a security risk. He felt a moment of contemplation in Burgers Park to be most definitely in order.
Nels found Roux on a bench by a World War One monument honouring the South African Scottish Regiment. He had become frustrated with the National Intelligence Service for not finding the boy. NIS seemed anything but intelligent.
“You know Treurnicht might be right,” said Nels. “Botha may not be around for much longer. It could be a long trek. You might want to make sure y
our horse is following the right wagon.”
Andries Treurnicht, an MP, minister and Dutch Reformed churchman, had quit PW Botha’s ruling National Party in opposition to Botha’s limited reforms to apartheid and his talk of power sharing. Treurnicht had taken twenty-two right-wing MPs with him and formed the Conservative Party. They’d immediately held a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister.
And the ANC bombings continued to scare and disrupt: bombs on the Administration Board in Soweto twice; guerrillas attacking the Koeberg nuclear power plant near Cape Town; bombs against the Department of Internal Affairs near Durban; against railways and depots and bridges; limpet mines against power transformers, under cars and along oil pipelines.
Roux worried that he might be wrong about South Africa’s future. What if he and Lombard persuaded Botha that the only way forward would be to make a deal with the ANC for a transition to majority rule, and then they were all murdered in their beds in revenge for what they had done wrong for so many years?
If Botha became replaced by a more right-wing government, Roux couldn’t imagine what might happen. Maybe they would have to fight to the last man standing. In that situation a new government would need a respected National Intelligence Service more than ever, if only to keep the likes of Cornelius Nels under control.
Roux thought about the hills behind the seaside town of Rooi-Els and the long beach with the Overberg test facility just the other side of the dunes. He had a few unsettling doubts about Angel’s abilities. He worked after all as an analyst and not a field agent. Perhaps it would be useful to have two people looking for Ralph, in case Lombard’s concern about the suspected British spy they referred to as Zac was correct. Roux didn’t like Nels but considered he should be prepared to use him to safeguard South African nuclear secrets. He felt like he might be making a deal with the devil.
“I’ll tell you on the condition that if I ask you for a favour one day you’ll do something for me.”
Nels nodded.
“Such as?”
“If I have an employee that’s gone bad, for example.”
“You want me to kill him?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know about that.”
Nels smiled.
“An employee who works for you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Nels scratched the side of his head. Ridges of flesh moved on his scalp underneath stubbly hair.
“What sort of employee?”
Roux looked sadly at the ground in front of him.
“A Coloured employee.”
“Oh yes,” said Nels cheerily, “that wouldn’t be a problem.”
Roux wondered if he was doing the right thing. Nels scared him. He was something malevolent and menacing, like a shark.
“Ralph’s going to Nairobi and flying home from there,” he said.
Central Africa
13th April to 5th May, 1982
Thirteen
The small fishing town of Mpulungu, Zambia’s only port, crouched in the lee of a small island on Lake Tanganyika. Water, the life blood of the town, made it different to any place Ralph had been through. At its heart, in the marketplace and fish-drying area, boys from small wooden boats threw buckets of wet fish onto tarpaulin sheets, or scooped them dry into old sacks. Brightly painted fishing boats moored stern to the beach and spread red nets to dry, while women washed clothes and hung them over bushes. Around the market stood clusters of mud huts with reed roofs, left with untrimmed shaggy fringes like cheeky boys. Dusty paths went straight to the water where women carried baskets on their heads and children lay like fish in the shallows of the calm lake.
From jumping off the train Ralph had walked through Ngolo and camped the first night twelve kilometres south of the town of Nendo, the sound of village drums following him all the way. The next night he made Senga Hill and looked for the mission, but the missionaries had not been as accommodating to a dirty English boy as the Baldwin family near Lusaka had been, their God working only for locally lost souls. He slept that night out of town under a bridge. Halfway to the next town of Mbala, where the road bent and went over a river, curious children walked with him in a long cheerful line.
An old German ship, the Liemba, usually steamed up the lake to Bujumbura but had been delayed. At its berth a rusty cement freighter loaded cargo, the bow grounded in green reeds by the water’s edge.
A very dark man in a clean white vest directed operations by shouting at scurrying deckhands through the stub of a blunt cigar.
Ralph shouted up at him.
“I’m looking for the captain. Mr Georgolidis?”
The crew stood motionless, looking at him then looking at the man in the white vest on the bridge. He said something to them in an African language and they laughed.
“I was told Captain Georgolidis might take me up to the top of the lake.”
Ralph wondered if they were familiar with it.
“To Bujumbura,” he explained.
The man in the white vest slowly removed his cigar and examined him with one eye closed through dirty brown smoke.
“Are you English?” he said.
“Yes I am. Sorry.”
Ralph often felt as if he needed to apologise for his nationality. He felt he carried around the guilt of a small wet island that had taken foreign lands at will, plundered them, and at best had treated the locals with a benevolent paternalism.
The man in the white vest seemed to understand. He smiled down on him from his commanding lookout.
“Please don’t apologise.”
His English reminded Ralph of the vicar at home, announcing in church a birth, marriage or death. He spoke slowly and deeply, cautiously annunciating his thoughtful words with deliberate care.
He studied Ralph curiously.
“My name is Winston. Like the Great Man.”
He laughed loudly and the deckhands looked at him and laughed as well.
Winston stared at them.
“I am the captain.”
“I took the train. The Tanzam. It had to go back as a bridge had been washed away.”
Ralph felt he needed to explain.
“I had thought of getting a ride on the road to Dar es Salaam with a truck.”
Ralph expected him to say something but he continued smoking his beat-up cigar for a long while. He spat into the water.
“There are petrol shortages in Tanzania. There is very little road traffic.”
“Exactly,” Ralph felt relieved. “That’s what someone said.”
“Julius Nyerere is a fool. Socialism based upon a collective of agricultural villages. Ha. Simply medieval. He calls them ujamaa farms. Everyone should be a farmer. Ha. Even government ministers. I told him it wouldn’t work. Egalitarianism. Ha.”
Winston inspected his cigar, seemed offended by it, and shouted some more at the deckhands.
Ralph tried again.
“I’m really trying to get to Nairobi. I have a flight from there. To England.”
Winston, finally beaten by the remains of his cigar, threw it into the lake. It bobbed with other flotsam along a faded mark, well underwater, that at one time might have been a Plimsoll line.
Winston looked at Ralph.
“My dear fellow. You are welcome to come with us. It’s a three-day trip…” he hesitated, scanning the sky, “if we have no headwind.”
He looked at Ralph’s rucksack.
“But I’m afraid you’ll have to bring your own food.”
“I don’t have much money. To pay for the passage.”
Winston didn’t answer. He jumped in a single bound from the bridge, disappearing into the hold. A huge hand appeared at dock level through a scupper, Winston’s face following it as he peered over the gunwale.
“Do you play chess?” he asked.
From t
he bow of the ship Winston’s booming voice vibrated the length of the hull. He had stopped the men from loading more bags of cement.
The Independence was ready for sea.
*
The Independence had barely cleared the point, wet lines still being coiled on deck, and in the engine room gear oil pressure on a big brass gauge made in Glasgow not yet steady, when Winston set the chessboard.
Busy deckhands peered through the windows from the fly bridge, and a boy in a cut-down boiler suit, stained from grease and thick oil, stood ready to relay moves through an old speaking tube to the chief still sweating in the noisy engine room below. Chess looked to be a serious business on board the Independence.
Ralph made a bold move at the start of their first game, peeling a pawn off the board from a sticky pad and pressing it down hard to fix it determinedly onto e4.
“Stop!” shouted Winston.
A boy at the helm, too small to see over the panel, reached for the engine room telegraph. Winston glared and shouted at him, and his hand jerked back to the wheel as if shocked. Winston took out his cigar and looked at Ralph.
“Sir. Before we go any further I want to applaud you.”
The crew joined Winston and clapped.
“I don’t know if you have a Danish or a Cochrane in mind but I must tell you that I admire aggressive openings.”
He looked at Ralph through his smoke.
“As in life, gambits that put pieces into play are so much more interesting.”
The clapping stopped.
“I knew you wouldn’t disappoint.”
Ralph, his chess a relic from an indulgent schoolmaster looking to occupy restless minds, had been surprised at his unexpected ability. Ralph’s opening never varied since he’d watched his teacher cruelly checkmate a small boy in four devastating moves, but he had no idea how to progress a Kings, a Danish or a Cochrane.
There was something more surprising and unexpected about Winston. His chess expertise and his eloquence appeared at odds with his scaly bare feet, voluble management style and filthy chewed-upon cigar stuck in an unshaven scarred face. And there was the curious idea of the captain of a rusty cement freighter discussing economic theory with the president of a neighbouring country – too delicious a concept to leave unresolved.