The White Lioness

by Henning Mankell

  “He was drunk,” said Martinson. “Or temporarily senile. Kurt isn’t suffering from senility.”

  “Do you think he might have Alzheimer’s?” wondered Björk.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Svedberg suddenly. “For God’s sake, let’s stick to the facts. Whether or not Kurt has had some kind of mental breakdown is something only a doctor can decide. Our job is to find him. We know he was involved in a violent shoot-out in which two people died. We saw him out there in the training ground. He pointed his gun at us. But he wasn’t dangerous. It was more like desperation. Or confusion. I’m not sure which. Then he disappeared.”

  Martinson nodded slowly.

  “Kurt wasn’t at the scene by chance,” he said thoughtfully. “His apartment had been attacked. We must assume the black man was there with him. What happened next we can only guess. But Kurt must be onto something, something he never had a chance to tell us about. Or maybe something he chose not to tell us about for the moment. We know he does that sometimes, and we get annoyed. But right now only one thing counts. Finding him.”

  Nobody said a word.

  “I never thought I’d have to do anything like this,” said Björk eventually.

  Martinson and Svedberg understood what he meant.

  “But you’ve got to do it,” said Svedberg. “You have to get the whole force looking for him. Put out an APB on him.”

  “Awful,” muttered Björk. “But I have no choice.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  With a heavy heart, Björk went back to his office to put out an APB on his colleague and friend, Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander.

  It was May 15, 1992. Spring had arrived in Skåne. It was a very hot day. Toward evening a thunderstorm moved in over Ystad.

  The White Lioness

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The lioness seemed completely white in the moonlight.

  Georg Scheepers held his breath as he stood in the back of the safari vehicle, watching her. She was lying motionless down by the river, about thirty meters away. He glanced at his wife Judith, who was standing beside him. She looked back at him. He could see she was scared. He shook his head carefully.

  “It’s not dangerous,” he said. “She won’t hurt us.”

  He believed what he said. But even so, deep down, he was not convinced. Animals in the Kruger National Park, where they were, were used to people watching them from the back of open safari vehicles, even at midnight as in this case. But he could not forget that the lioness was a beast of prey, unpredictable, governed by instinct and nothing else. She was young. Her strength and speed would never be greater than they were now. It would take her three seconds at most to shake herself out of her sprawling langor and bound powerfully over to their car. The black driver did not seem to be particularly alert. None of them carried a gun. If she wanted to, she could kill them all within the space of a few seconds. Three bites from those powerful jaws, on their necks or spines, was all that was needed.

  Suddenly it seemed as if the lioness had read his thoughts. She lifted her head and gazed at the car. He felt Judith grab hold of his arm. It was as if the lioness was looking straight at them. The moonlight was reflected in her eyes, making them luminous. Georg Scheepers’ heart started beating faster. He wished the driver would start the engine, but the black man was sitting motionless behind the wheel. It suddenly occurred to Georg Scheepers in horror that the guy might have fallen asleep.

  At that moment the lioness got up from the sand. She never took her eyes off the people in the car for a moment. Georg Scheepers knew there was such a thing as freezing. You were able to think about being afraid and running away, but had no strength to move.

  She stood absolutely still, watching them. Her powerful shoulders rippled prominently under her skin. He thought how beautiful she was. Her strength is her beauty, her unpredictability her character.

  He also thought how she was first and foremost a lion. Being white was only a secondary thing. That thought stuck fast in his mind. It was a sort of reminder to himself of something he had forgotten about. But what? He couldn’t remember.

  “Why doesn’t he drive away?” whispered Judith by his side.

  “It’s not dangerous,” he said. “She won’t come over here.”

  The lioness stood motionless, watching the people in the car parked right out by the water’s edge. The moonlight was very strong. The night was clear, and it was warm. Somewhere in the dark river they could hear the lazy sounds of hippos moving.

  It seemed to Georg Scheepers the whole situation was a reminder. The feeling of imminent danger, which could turn into uncontrollable violence at any moment, was the normal daily state of affairs in his country. Everybody went around waiting for something to happen. The beast of prey was watching them. The beast of prey inside them. The blacks who were impatient because developments were taking place so slowly. The whites with their fears of losing their privileges, their fear of the future. It was like being there on the river bank with a lion watching them.

  She was white because she was an albino. He thought of all the myths attached to people and animals that had been born albino. Their strength was mighty, and they could never die.

  Suddenly the lioness began to move, coming straight towards them. Her concentration was unbroken, her movements stealthy. The driver hastily started the engine and switched on the headlights. The light blinded her. She stopped in mid-movement, one paw in the air. Georg Scheepers could feel his wife’s fingernails piercing his khaki shirt.

  Drive, he thought. Drive away now, before she attacks.

  The driver shifted into reverse. The engine coughed. Georg Scheepers thought his heart would stand still when the engine almost stopped. But the driver increased pressure on the gas pedal and the car started rolling backwards. The lioness turned her head away to avoid being blinded.

  It was all over. Judith’s fingernails were no longer digging into his arm. They clung tightly onto the rail as the safari vehicle bumped and jerked its way back to the bungalow where they were staying. The nocturnal outing would soon be over. But the memory of the lioness, and the thoughts her presence on the riverbank aroused, would stay with him.

  It was Georg Scheepers who suggested to his wife they should go up to the Kruger for a few days. He had spent a week or more trying to sort out and understand the papers van Heerden left behind after his death. He needed time to think. They would be away on Friday and Saturday, but on Sunday, May 17, he would spend his time trying to master van Heerden’s computer files. He wanted to do that when he was alone at work, when there was nobody in the corridors at the prosecutor’s office. The police investigators had made sure all his material, all his diskettes, had been placed in a cardboard box and sent to the public prosecutor’s office. His boss Wervey had given the order for the intelligence service to hand over all the material. Officially Wervey himself, in his capacity as chief public prosecutor of Johannesburg, should be going through the material, which BOSS had immediately classified as top secret. When van Heerden’s superiors refused to release the material until their own people had gone through it, Wervey threw a fit and immediately contacted the Minister of Justice. A few hours later BOSS relented. The material would be delivered to the prosecutor’s office. It would be Wervey’s responsibility. But it was in fact Georg Scheepers who would go through it all, in circumstances of extreme secrecy. That was why he intended to work on Sunday, when the building would be deserted.

  They left Johannesburg early in the morning of Friday, May 15. The N4 freeway to Nelspruit took them quickly to their destination. They turned off onto a minor road and entered the Kruger National Park at the Nambi Gate. Judith had called to book a bungalow in one of the most remote camps, Nwanetsi, not far from the Mozambique border. They had been there several times before, and liked going back. The camp, with its bungalows, restaurant, and safari office, appealed primarily to guests looking for peace and quiet, people who went to bed ear
ly and got up at dawn in order to see the animals coming to the river to drink. On the way to Nelspruit Judith had asked him about the investigation he was undertaking for the minister of justice. He said he did not know much about it yet. But he needed time to figure out the best way of approaching the matter. She asked no more questions as she knew her husband was a man of few words.

  During their two days at Nwanetsi they were out on game drives all the time. They looked at animals and scenery, leaving Johannesburg and its troubles far behind them. After meals Judith would bury her head in one of her books while Georg Scheepers thought over what he now knew about van Heerden and his secret work.

  He had started methodically by going through van Heerden’s filing cabinet, and very soon realized he would have to step up his ability to read between the lines. In among formally correct memoranda and reports he found loose scraps of paper with hurriedly scribbled notes. Reading them was slow work and needed a lot of effort; the difficult handwriting reminded him of a pedantic schoolteacher. It seemed to him they were sketches for poems. Lyrical insights, outlines for metaphors and images. It was then, when he tried to penetrate the informal part of van Heerden’s work, that he had a premonition something was going to happen. The reports, memos and loose notes—divine poems, as he began to regard them—went back a long way. At first they were often precise observations and reflections expressed in a cool, neutral style. But about six months before van Heerden died, they began to change character. It seemed like a different, darker tone had crept into his thoughts. Something had happened, Scheepers thought. Something had changed dramatically either in his work or his private life. Van Heerden was starting to think different thoughts. What had previously been certain suddenly became unsure, the clear voice became hesitant, tenuous. He thought he could see another difference as well. Before, the loose papers had been haphazard. From now on van Heerden noted down the date and sometimes even the time. Scheepers could see van Heerden had often worked late into the night. Most of the notes were timed after midnight. It all started to look like a poetically expressed diary. He tried to find a basic and consistent theme as a starting point. Because van Heerden never mentioned his private life, Scheepers assumed he was only writing about what happened at work. There was no concrete information to assist him. Van Heerden’s diary was formulated in synonyms and parallels. It was obvious that Homeland stood for South Africa. But who was The Chameleon? Who were The Mother and Child? Van Heerden was not married. He had no close relations, according to what Chief Inspector Borstlap of the Johannesburg police had written in a personal memo responding to Scheepers’s request. Scheepers entered the names into his computer and tried to figure out the connections, without success. Van Heerden’s language was evasive, as if he would prefer not to be associated with what he was writing. Over and over again Scheepers had the feeling there was a note of threatening danger. A trace of confession. Van Heerden was onto something significant. His whole world suddenly seemed under threat. He wrote about a kingdom of death, seeming to imply we all had it inside ourselves. He had visions of something falling apart. At the same time Scheepers seemed to detect feelings of guilt and sorrow in van Heerden, which grew dramatically stronger during his last weeks before he died.

  Scheepers noted that what he wrote about all the time was the blacks, the whites, the Boers, God and forgiveness. But nowhere did he use the words conspiracy or plot. The thing I’m supposed to be looking for, the thing van Heerden informed President de Klerk about. Why is there nothing about it?

  On the Thursday evening, the day before he and Judith were due to drive to Nwanetsi, he stayed in his office until very late. He had switched off all the lights apart from his desk lamp. Now and then he could hear the night guards talking outside his window, which he had left ajar.

  Pieter van Heerden had been the ideal loyal servant, he thought. In the course of his work for the intelligence service that was growing more divided, acting more autonomously, he had come across something significant. A conspiracy against the state. A conspiracy whose aim was somehow or other to spark off a coup d’état. Van Heerden was sparing no effort in attempting to track down the center of the conspiracy. There were a lot of questions. And van Heerden wrote poems about his worries and the kingdom of death he had discovered inside himself.

  Scheepers looked at his filing cabinet. That was where he had locked away the diskettes Wervey had demanded from van Heerden’s superiors. That is where the solution must be, he thought. Van Heerden’s increasingly confused and introspective musings, as expressed on the loose scraps of paper, could only be part of the whole picture. The truth must be in his diskettes.

  Early in the morning of Sunday, May 17, they left the Kruger Park and returned to Johannesburg. He took Judith home, and after breakfast he drove in to the ominous-looking building in the city center in which the public prosecutor’s offices were housed. The city was deserted, as if it had suddenly been evacuated and people would never return. The armed guards let him in, and he walked along the echoing corridor to his office.

  The moment he walked through the door, he knew someone had been there. There were tiny, barely noticeable changes betraying a visit by an outsider. Presumably the cleaners, he thought. But he could not be sure.

  I’m starting to let my assignment get to me, he said to himself. Van Heerden’s unrest, his constant fear of being watched, threatened, is now starting to affect me.

  He shook off his uneasy feeling, took off his jacket and opened his filing cabinet. Then he slid the first diskette into his computer.

  Two hours later he had sorted out the material. Van Heerden’s computer files revealed nothing of significance. Most striking was how immaculately everything was organized.

  There was just one diskette left.

  Georg Scheepers could not manage to open it. He had the instinctive feeling this was where van Heerden’s secret testimony was to be found. The blinking message on his screen demanded a password before the diskette would open the doors to its many secret chambers. This is impossible, thought Scheepers. The password is just one single word, but it could be any word at all. I suppose I could run the diskette with a program containing a whole dictionary. But is the password in English or Afrikaans? Even so, he did not believe the answer would be found by working systematically through a dictionary. Van Heerden would not lock his most important diskette with a meaningless password. He would choose something significant as his secret key.

  Scheepers rolled up his shirtsleeves, filled his coffee cup from the thermos he had brought with him from home, and started looking through the loose papers one more time. He began to worry that van Heerden might have programed the diskette so it erased everything of its own accord after a certain number of failed efforts to find the unknown password. He compared it with trying to storm an ancient fortress. The drawbridge is up, the moat full of water. There’s only one way left. Climb up the walls. Somewhere there must be steps carved into the walls. That’s what I’m looking for. The first step.

  By two in the afternoon he had still not succeeded. Despondency was not far away, and he could sense a vague feeling of anger boiling up inside, aimed at van Heerden and the lock he was unable to prize open.

  A couple of hours later he was on the point of giving up. He had run out of ideas about how to open the diskette. He also had the feeling he was nowhere near finding the correct word. Van Heerden’s choice of password had a context and significance he had not yet managed to pin down. Without expecting any particular help he turned to the memos and investigation documents he had received from Chief Inspector Borstlap. Maybe there would be something there which could point him in the right direction? He read the autopsy report with distaste, and shut his eyes when he came to photographs of the dead man. He wondered whether it was just robbery with violence after all. The long-winded report of police proceedings gave him no clues. He turned to the personal memoranda.

  Right at the back of Borstlap’s file was an inventory of what the
police had found in his office at BOSS headquarters. Chief Inspector Borstlap had made the ironic comment that of course, there was no way of knowing if van Heerden’s superiors had removed any papers or objects they considered unsuitable for the police to get their hands on. He glanced casually down the list of ashtrays, framed photographs of his parents, some lithographs, a pen rack, diaries, blotting pad. He was just going to put it on one side when he suddenly paused. Among the items listed by Borstlap was a little ivory sculpture of an antelope. Very valuable, antique, Borstlap had written.

  He put down the memo and typed antelope on the keyboard. The computer responded by asking for the correct password. He thought for a moment. Then he typed kudu. The computer’s response was negative. He picked up the telephone and called home to Judith.

  “I need your help,” he said. “Can you look up antelopes in our wildlife encyclopedia?”

  “What on earth are you doing?” she asked in surprise.

  “My assignment includes formulating a stance on the development of our antelope species,” he lied. “I just want to make sure I don’t forget any.”

  She got the book and recited the various species of antelope for him.

  “When will you be home?” she asked when she had finished.

  “Either very soon, or very late,” he answered. “I’ll call you.”

  When he hung up he saw right away which word it must be, assuming the little sculpture in the list was in fact the right link.

  Springbok, he thought to himself. Our national symbol. Can it really be as easy as that?

  He keyed the word in slowly, pausing for a moment before the last letter. The computer responded right away. Negative.