The White Lioness

by Henning Mankell

  He checked the money; he had a total of 162,000 kronor.

  At six o’clock he switched on the television to catch the early evening news. Only Tania was back home by then, in the kitchen preparing dinner.

  The broadcast opened with the story Konovalenko was waiting for. To his astonishment, he found that the pistol shot intended to do no more than shatter the windshield had proven to be a master shot. The bullet hit one of the cops in the squad car right where his nose met his forehead, right between the eyes. He died instantly.

  Then came a picture of the cop Konovalenko had killed: Klas Tengblad, twenty-six years old, married with two small kids.

  The police had no clues beyond the fact that the killer had been alone, and was the same man who had robbed the Akalla branch of the Commercial Bank just a few minutes previously.

  Konovalenko made a face and moved to switch off the television. Just then he noticed Tania in the doorway, watching him.

  “The only good cop’s a dead one,” he said, punching the off button. “What’s for dinner? I’m hungry.”

  Vladimir came home and sat down at the table just as Tania and Konovalenko were finishing their meal.

  “A bank robbery,” said Vladimir. “And a dead cop. A solitary killer speaking broken Swedish. The town won’t exactly be clear of cops tonight.”

  “These things happen,” said Konovalenko. “Have you finished spreading the word about the contract?”

  “There’s not a single hood in the underworld who won’t know before midnight that there’s a hundred thousand kronor to be earned,” said Rykoff.

  Tania gave him a plate with some food.

  “Was it really necessary to shoot a cop, today of all days?” he asked.

  “What makes you think it was me who shot him?” wondered Konovalenko.

  Vladimir shrugged his shoulders.

  “A masterly shot,” he said. “A bank raid to raise the money for the Victor Mabasha contract. Foreign accent. It sounds pretty much like you.”

  “You’re wrong if you think the shot was a direct hit,” said Konovalenko. “It was pure luck. Or bad luck. Depends how you look at it. But to be on the safe side I think you’d better go in to town on your own tonight. Or take Tania with you.”

  “There are a few clubs in the south of the city where Africans generally hang out,” said Vladimir. “I thought I’d start there.”

  At eight-thirty Tania and Vladimir drove back to town. Konovalenko showered, then settled down to watch television. Every news broadcast had long items on the dead cop. But there were no hard clues to follow up.

  Of course not, thought Konovalenko. I don’t leave a trail.

  He had fallen asleep in his chair when the telephone rang. Just one signal. Then another ring, seven signals this time. When it rang for the third time Konovalenko lifted the receiver. He knew it was Vladimir, using the code they had agreed on. The noise in the background suggested he was at a disco.

  “Can you hear me?” Vladimir yelled.

  “I can hear you,” replied Konovalenko.

  “I can hardly hear myself speak,” he went on. “But I’ve got news.”

  “Has somebody seen Victor Mabasha here in Stockholm?” Konovalenko knew that must be why he was calling.

  “Even better,” said Vladimir. “He’s in here right now.”

  Konovalenko took a deep breath.

  “Has he seen you?”

  “No. But he’s on his guard.”

  “Is anybody with him?”

  “He’s on his own.”

  Konovalenko thought for a moment. It was twenty past eleven. What was the best thing to do?

  “Give me your address,” he said. “I’m on my way. Wait for me outside with a layout of the club. Especially where the emergency exits are.”

  “Will do,” said Vladimir.

  Konovalenko checked his pistol and slipped an extra magazine into his pocket. Then he went to his room and opened a plastic chest standing along one wall. He took out three tear gas canisters and two gas masks, which he put into the plastic carrier bag he had used earlier that afternoon for the money from the bank raid.

  Finally he combed his hair carefully in front of the bathroom mirror. This was part of the ritual he always went through before setting out on an important assignment.

  At a quarter to twelve he left the apartment in Hallunda and took a cab in to town. He asked to be taken to Ostermalmstorg. He got out there, hailed another cab, and headed for Söder to the south.

  The disco was at number 45. Konovalenko directed the driver to number 60. He got out and started walking back slowly the way he had come.

  Suddenly Vladimir stepped out of the shadows.

  “He’s still there,” he said. “Tania has gone home.”

  Konovalenko nodded slowly.

  “Let’s go get him, then,” he said.

  He asked Vladimir to describe the layout.

  “Exactly where is he?” asked Konovalenko when he could picture it.

  “At the bar,” said Vladimir.

  Konovalenko nodded.

  A few minutes later, they donned the gas masks and cocked their guns.

  Vladimir flung open the entrance and hurled the two astonished doormen to one side.

  Then Konovalenko tossed in the tear gas.

  Chapter Twelve

  Give me the night, songoma. How shall I survive these nights full of light that prevents me from finding a hiding place? Why have you sent me to this strange land where people have been robbed of their darkness? I give you my severed finger, songoma. I sacrifice a part of my body so you can give me back my darkness in return. But you have forsaken me. I am all alone. As lonely as the antelope no longer capable of avoiding the cheetah hunting him down.

  Victor Mabasha experienced his flight as a journey made in a dreamlike, weightless state. His soul seemed to be traveling on its own, invisible, somewhere close by. He thought he could feel his own breath on his neck. In the Mercedes, whose leather seats reminded him of the distant smell of hides from skinned antelope, there was nothing but his body, and above all his aching hand. His finger was gone, but was there even so, like a homeless pain in a strange land.

  From the very beginning of his wild flight he had tried to make himself control his thoughts, act sensibly. I am a zulu, he kept repeating to himself, like a mantra. I belong to the undefeated warrior race, I am one of the Sons of Heaven. My forefathers were always in the front line when the impis attacked. We defeated the whites long before they hounded the bush-men into the endless wildernesses where they soon succumbed. We defeated them before they claimed our land was theirs. We defeated them at the foot of Isandlwana and cut off their jawbones to adorn the kraaler of our kings. I am a zulu, one of my fingers is severed. But I can endure the pain and I have nine fingers left, as many as the jackal has lives.

  When he could bear it no longer he turned off into the forest on the first little dirt track he saw, and came to a halt by a glistening lake. The water was so black, he at first thought it was oil. He sat there on a stone by the shore, unwound the bloodstained towel and forced himself to examine his hand. It was still bleeding. It seemed unfamiliar. The pain was more in his mind than where the severed finger had been.

  How was it possible for Konovalenko to be faster than he was? His momentary hesitation had defeated him. He also realized his flight had been thoughtless. He had behaved like a bewildered child. His actions were unworthy, of himself and of Jan Kleyn. He should have stayed put, and searched through Konovalenko’s baggage, looking for air tickets and money. But all he did was to grab a few clothes and the pistol. He couldn’t even remember the route he had taken. There was no possibility of returning. He would never find his way back.

  Weakness, he thought. I have never managed to overcome it, even though I have renounced all my loyalties, all the principles that possessed me as I grew up. I have been burdened with weakness as a punishment by my songoma. She has listened to the spirits and let the hounds sing m
y song, a song of the weakness I shall never be able to overcome.

  The sun never seemed to rest in this strange land; it had already climbed over the horizon. A bird of prey rose from a treetop and flapped its way over the mirror-like lake.

  First of all he must sleep. A few hours, no more. He knew he did not need much sleep. Afterward, his brain would be able to assist him once again.

  At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life.

  Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious destruction, the whites failed to see the despair and hatred which is so boundlessly greater. All the things we have been carrying around inside us. It is inside myself I see my thoughts and feelings being split asunder as if with a sword. I can manage without one of my fingers. But how can I live without knowing who I am?

  He came to with a start, and realized he had almost fallen asleep. In the borderlands of sleep, half dreaming, thoughts he had long since forgotten returned to him.

  He remained on the stone by the lake for a long time.

  The memories found their own way into his head. He had no need to summon them.

  Summer, 1967. He had just passed his sixth birthday when he discovered a talent distinguishing him from the other children he used to play with in the dusty slum just outside Johannesburg. They had made a ball out of paper and string, and it suddenly dawned on him he had far more skill with it than any of his friends. He could work miracles with the ball, and it followed him like an obedient dog. This discovery led to his first great dream, which was to be crushed ruthlessly by the apartheid society held sacred. He would be the best rugby player in South Africa.

  It brought him untold joy. He thought the spirits of his forefathers had been good to him. He filled a bottle with water from a tap and sacrificed it to the red earth.

  One day that summer a white liquor dealer stopped his car in the dust where Victor and his friends were playing with the paper-andstring ball. The man behind the wheel sat for a long time watching the black boy with the phenomenal gifts of ball control.

  On one occasion the ball rolled over to the car. Victor approached gingerly, bowed to the man and picked up the ball.

  “If only you’d been born white,” said the man. “I’ve never seen anybody handle a ball like you do. It’s a pity you’re black.”

  He watched an airplane sketching a white streak over the sky.

  I don’t remember the pain, he thought. But it must have existed, even then. Or did I simply not react because it was so ingrained into me as a six-year-old that injustice was the natural state of affairs? Ten years later, when he was sixteen, everything had changed.

  June 1976. Soweto. More than fifteen thousand students were assembled outside Orlando West Junior Secondary School. He did not really belong there. He lived on the streets, lived the obscure but increasingly skillful, increasingly ruthless life of a thief. He was still only robbing blacks. But his eyes were already drawn to the white residential areas where it was possible to carry out big robberies. He was carried along by the tide of young people, and shared their fury over the decision that education would take place in future in the hated language of the Boers. He could still recall the young girl clenching her fist and yelling at the president, who was not present: “Vorster! You speak zulu, then we’ll speak Afrikaans!” He was in turmoil. The drama of the situation as the police charged, beating people randomly with their sjamboks, did not affect him until he was beaten himself. He had taken part in the stonethrowing, and his ball skills had not deserted him. Nearly every throw hit home; he saw a policeman clutch at his cheek as blood poured out between his fingers, and he remembered the man in the car and his words spoken as he bent down to the red earth to pick up his paper ball. Then he was caught, and the lashes from the whips dug so deeply into his skin, the pain penetrated his inner self. He remembered one cop above all the others, a powerful red-faced man smelling of stale liquor. He had suddenly detected a gleam of fear in his eye. At that moment he realized he was the stronger, and from then on the white man’s terror would always fill him with boundless contempt.

  He was woken out of his reverie by a movement on the other side of the lake. It was a rowboat, he realized, slowly coming toward him. A man was rowing with lazy strokes. The sound from the oarlocks reached his ears despite the distance.

  He got up from the stone, staggered in a sudden fit of dizziness, and knew he had to see a doctor. He had always had thin blood, and once he started bleeding, it went on for a long time. Moreover, he must find something to drink. He sat in the car, started the engine, and saw he had enough gas for an hour of travel at most.

  When he came out onto the main road, he continued in the same direction as before.

  It took him forty-five minutes to get to a little town called Almhult. He tried to imagine how the name was pronounced. He stopped at a gas station. Konovalenko had given him money for gas earlier on. He had two hundred-kronor bills left, and knew how to operate the automatic dispenser. His injured hand was hindering him, and he could see it was attracting attention.

  An elderly man offered to help him. Victor Mabasha could not understand what he said, but nodded and tried to smile. He used one of the hundred-kronor notes and saw it was only enough for just over three liters. But he needed something to eat and above all he needed to quench his thirst. He went into the gas station after mumbling his thanks to the man who helped him and drove the car away from the pump. He bought some bread and two large bottles of Coca-Cola. That left him with forty kronor. There was a map among various promotional offers on the counter, and he tried in vain to find Almhult.

  He went back to the car and bit off a large chunk of bread. He emptied a whole bottle of Coca-Cola before his thirst was quenched. He tried to make up his mind what to do. Where could he find a doctor or a hospital? But he had no money to pay for treatment anyway. The hospital staff would turn him away and refuse to treat him.

  He knew what that meant. He would have to commit a robbery. The pistol in the glove compartment was his only way out.

  He left the little town behind him and continued driving through the endless forest.

  I hope I don’t need to kill anyone, he thought. I don’t want to kill anyone until I have completed my assignment, shooting de Klerk.

  The first time I killed a human being, s
ongoma, I was not alone. I still can’t forget it, even if I have difficulty in remembering other people I have killed later. It was that morning in January, 1981, in the cemetery at Duduza. I can remember the cracked gravestones, songoma, I remember thinking I was walking over the roof of the abode of the dead. We were going to bury an old relative that morning; I think he was my father’s cousin. There were other burials taking place elsewhere in the cemetery. Suddenly there was a disturbance somewhere: a funeral procession was breaking up. I saw a young girl running among the memorial stones, running like a hunted hind. She was being hunted. Somebody yelled that she was a white informant, a black girl working for the police. She was caught, she screamed; her despair was greater than anything I had ever seen before. But she was stabbed, clubbed, and lay between the graves, still alive. Then we started gathering dry sticks and clumps of grass we pulled up from between the gravestones. I say “we,” because I was suddenly involved in what was happening. A black woman passing information to the police—what right had she to live? She begged for her life, but her body was soon covered in dry sticks and grass and we burned her alive as she lay there. She tried in vain to get away from the flames, but we held her down until her face turned black. She was the first human being I killed, songoma, and I have never forgotten her, for in killing her I also killed myself. Racial segregation had triumphed. I had become an animal, songoma. There was no turning back.

  His hand started hurting again. Victor Mabasha tried to hold it completely still in order to reduce the pain. The sun was still very high in the sky, and he did not even bother to look at his watch. He still had a long time to sit in the car with his thoughts for company.