The White Lioness kw-3

by Henning Mankell

  Jan Kleyn nodded. He had been thinking along the same lines. He reflected briefly on what Franz Malan had said. In his experience every plan had some kind of weakness.

  “What is there against it?” he asked.

  “I have difficulty in finding anything at all,” replied Franz Malan.

  “There’s always a weak point,” said Jan Kleyn. “We can’t make a final decision until we’ve put our finger on what it is.”

  “I can only think of one thing that could go wrong,” said Franz Malan after a few moments’ silence. “Sikosi Tsiki could miss.”

  Jan Kleyn looked surprised.

  “He won’t miss,” he said. “I only pick people who hit their targets.”

  “All the same, 700 meters is a long way,” said Franz Malan. “A sudden puff of wind. A flash of reflected sun nobody could have foreseen. The bullet misses by a couple of centimeters. Hits somebody else.”

  “That just cannot happen,” said Jan Kleyn.

  It occurred to Franz Malan that while they might not be able to find the weak point in the plan they were developing, he had found a weakness in Jan Kleyn. When rational arguments ran out, he reverted to fate. Something simply could not happen.

  But he said nothing.

  A servant brought them tea. They ran through the plan once more. Spelled out details, noted questions that needed answering. Not until nearly four in the afternoon did they think they had gotten as far as they could.

  “Tomorrow it’s exactly a month to June 12,” said Jan Kleyn. “That means we don’t have much time to make up our minds. We’ll have to decide by next Friday if it’s going to be Cape Town or not. By then we must have weighed everything, and answered all the outstanding questions. Let’s meet here again on May 15, in the morning. Then I’ll get the whole committee together at twelve o’clock. During the coming week we’ll both have to go through the plans, independently, looking for cracks or weaknesses. We already know the strengths, the positive arguments. Now we’ll have to find the bad ones.”

  Franz Malan nodded. He had no objections.

  They shook hands and left the house at Hammanskraal ten minutes apart.

  Jan Kleyn drove straight to the house in Bezuidenhout Park.

  Miranda Nkoyi contemplated her daughter. She was sitting on the floor, staring into space. Miranda could see her eyes were not vacant, but alert. Whenever she looked at her daughter, she sometimes felt, as if in a brief fit of giddiness, that she was seeing her mother. Her mother was as young as that, barely seventeen years old, when she gave birth to Miranda. Now her own daughter was that same age.

  What is she looking at, Miranda wondered. She sometimes felt a cold shudder running down her spine when she recognized features characteristic of Matilda’s father. Especially that look of intense concentration, even though she was staring into empty space. That inner vision that no one else could understand.

  “Matilda,” she said tenderly, as if hoping to bring her back down to earth by treating her gently.

  The girl came out of her reverie with a start, and looked her straight in the eye.

  “I know my father will soon be here,” she said. “As you won’t let me hate him while he’s here, I do it while I’m waiting. You can dictate when. But you can never take the hatred away from me.”

  Miranda wanted to cry out that she understood her feelings. She often thought that way herself. But she could not. She was like her mother, Matilda senior, who was saddened by the continual humiliation of not being permitted to lead a satisfactory life in her own country. Miranda knew she had grown soft just like her mother, and remained silently in a state of impotence she could only make up for by constantly betraying the man who was the father of her daughter.

  Soon, she thought. Soon I must tell my daughter that her mother has retained a little bit of her life force, despite everything. I shall have to tell her, in order to win her back, to show how the gap between us is not an abyss after all.

  In secret, Matilda was a member of the ANC youth organization. She was active, and had already undertaken several undercover assignments. She had been arrested by the police on more than one occasion. Miranda was always frightened she would be injured or killed. Every time the coffins of dead blacks were being carried in swaying, chanting processions to their graves, she would pray to all the gods she believed in that her daughter might be spared. She turned to the Christian god, to the spirits of her ancestors, to her dead mother, to the songoma her father always used to talk about. But she was never completely convinced they had really heard her. The prayers merely made her feel better by dint of tiring her out.

  Miranda could understand the confused feeling of impotence in her daughter because her father was a Boer, knowing herself to be sired by the enemy. It was like being inflicted with a mortal wound at the very moment of birth.

  Nevertheless, she knew a mother could never regret the existence of her own daughter. That time seventeen years ago she had loved Jan Kleyn just as little as she loved him today. Matilda was conceived in fear and subservience. It was like the bed they were lying in was floating in a remote, airless universe. Afterwards, she just did not have the strength to cast aside her subservience. The child would be born, it had a father, and he had organized a life for her, a house in Bezuidenhout, money to live on. Right from the start she was resolved never to have another child by him. If necessary Matilda would be her only offspring, even if her African heart was horrified by the thought. Jan Kleyn had never openly stated he wanted another child by her; his demands on her as far as lovemaking were concerned were always equally hollow. She let him spend nights with her, and could stick it out because she had learned how to take revenge by betraying him.

  She observed her daughter, who had once again lost herself in a world to which her mother was not allowed access. She could see Matilda had inherited her own beauty. The only difference was that her skin was lighter. She sometimes wondered what Jan Kleyn would say if he knew that what his daughter wanted most of all was a darker skin.

  My daughter betrays him as well, Miranda thought. But our betrayal is not malice. It’s the lifeline we cling to as South Africa burns. Any malice is all on his side. One of these days it will destroy him. The freedom we achieve will not be primarily the voting slips we find in our hands, but the release from those inner chains that have been holding us prisoner.

  The car came to a stop on the drive outside the garage.

  Matilda got up and looked at her mother.

  “Why have you never killed him?” she asked.

  What Miranda heard was his voice in hers. But she had convinced herself that Matilda’s heart was not that of an Afrikaner. Her appearance, her light-colored skin, those were things she could do nothing about. But she had preserved her heart, hot and inexhaustible as it was. That was a line of defense, albeit the last one, which Jan Kleyn could never overcome.

  The shameful thing was that he never seemed to notice anything. Every time he came to Bezuidenhout his car was laden with food so that she could make him a braai, just as he remembered it from the white house where he grew up. He never realized he was transforming Miranda into her own mother, the enslaved servant. He could never see that he was forcing her to play different roles: cook, lover, valet. He did not notice the resolute hatred emanating from his daughter. He saw only a world that was unchanging, petrified, something he considered it his main task in life to preserve. He did not see the falseness, the dishonesty, the bottomless artificiality on which the whole country was based.

  “Is everything OK?” he asked as he placed all the bags of food in the hall.

  “Yes,” said Miranda. “Everything’s fine.”

  Then she made braai while he tried to talk to his daughter, who was hiding behind the role of the shy and timid girl. He tried stroking her hair, and Miranda could see through the kitchen door how her daughter stiffened. They ate their meal of Afrikaner sausages, big chunks of meat and cabbage salad. Miranda knew Matilda would go out to the bathro
om and force herself to throw up the whole lot, once the meal was over. Then he wanted to talk about unimportant matters, the house, the wallpaper, the yard. Matilda withdrew to her room, leaving Miranda alone with him, and she gave him the answers he was expecting. Then they went to bed. His body was as hot as only a freezing object can be. The next day would be Sunday. As they could not be seen together, they took their Sunday stroll inside the four walls of the house, walking around and around each other, eating, and sitting in silence. Matilda always went out just as soon as she could and didn’t come back until he had left. Only when Monday came would everything begin to return to normal.

  When he had fallen asleep and his breathing was calm and steady, she got carefully out of bed. She had learned how to move around the bedroom in absolute silence. She went out to the kitchen, leaving the door open so she could check the whole time that he did not wake up. If he did, and wondered why she was up, her excuse was a glass of water she had poured earlier.

  As usual, she had draped his clothes over a chair in the kitchen. It was positioned so he could not see it from the bedroom. He did once ask why she always hung his clothes in the kitchen rather than in the bedroom, and she explained she wanted to brush them down for him every morning before he got dressed.

  She carefully went through his pockets. She knew his wallet would be in the left inside pocket of his jacket, and his keys in his right pants pocket. The pistol he always carried was on the bedside table.

  That was generally all she found in his pockets. That particular evening, however, there was a scrap of paper with something written on it in what she recognized as his handwriting. With one eye on the bedroom, she quickly memorized what it said.

  Cape Town, she read.

  12 June.

  Distance to location? Wind direction? Roads?

  She put the scrap of paper back where she had found it, once she was certain it was folded exactly as it had been.

  She could not understand what the words on the piece of paper meant. But even so she would do what she was told to do whenever she found something in his pockets. She would tell the man she always met the day after Jan Kleyn had been to visit her. Together with their friends, they would try and work out what the words meant.

  She drank the water and went back to bed.

  He sometimes talked in his sleep. When that happened it was nearly always within an hour of his falling asleep. She would also memorize the words he sometimes mumbled, sometimes yelled out, and tell the man she met the following day. He would write down everything she could remember, just as he did with everything else that had happened during Jan Kleyn’s visit. Sometimes he would say where he had come from, and sometimes where he was going as well. But most often he said nothing at all. He had never consciously or accidentally revealed anything about his work for the intelligence service.

  A long time ago he had said he was working as a chief executive officer in the Ministry of Justice in Pretoria.

  Later, when she was contacted by the man who was looking for information and heard from him that Jan Kleyn worked for BOSS, she was told she must never breathe a word about knowing what he did for a living.

  Jan Kleyn left her house on the Sunday evening. Miranda waved goodbye as he drove away.

  The last thing he said was that he would come back late in the afternoon the following Friday.

  As he drove along, he decided he was looking forward to the coming week. The plan had begun to take shape. He had everything that was going to happen under control.

  What he did not know, however, was that Victor Mabasha was still alive.

  In the evening of May 12, exactly a month before he was due to carry out the assassination of Nelson Mandela, Sikosi Tsiki left Johannesburg on the regular KLM flight to Amsterdam. Like Victor Mabasha, Sikosi Tsiki had spent a long time wondering who his victim was going to be. Unlike Victor, though, he had not concluded it must be President de Klerk. He left the question open.

  That it might involve Nelson Mandela had never even occurred to him.

  On Wednesday, May 13, shortly after six in the evening, a fishing boat pulled into the harbor at Limhamn.

  Sikosi Tsiki jumped ashore. The fishing boat pulled out right away, headed back to Denmark.

  An unusually fat man was standing on the dark to welcome him.

  That particular afternoon there was a southwesterly gale blowing over Skane. The wind did not die down until the evening.

  Then came the heat.

  Chapter Twenty

  Shortly after three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, Peters and Noren were driving through central Ystad in their patrol car. They were waiting for their shift to come to an end. It had been a quiet day with only one real incident. Just before noon they received a call to say a naked man had started demolishing a house out in Sandskogen. His wife made the call. She explained how the man was in a rage because he had to spend all his leisure time repairing her parents’ summer cottage. In order to secure some peace and quiet in his life, he decided to pull it down. She explained how he would prefer to sit by a lake, fishing.

  “You’d better go straight there and calm the guy down,” said the operator at the emergency center.

  “What’s it called?” asked Noren, who was looking after the radio while Peters did the driving. “Disorderly conduct?”

  “There’s no such thing anymore,” said the operator. “But if the house belongs to his in-laws, you could say it’s taking the law into his own hands. Who cares what it’s called? Just calm the guy down. That’s the main thing.”

  They drove out toward Sandskogen without speeding up.

  “I guess I understand the guy,” said Peters. “Having a house of your own can be a pain in the ass. There’s always something that needs to be done. But you never have time, or it’s too expensive. Having to work on somebody else’s house in the same way can’t make things any better.”

  “Maybe we’d better help him pull the house down instead,” said Noren.

  They managed to find the right address. Quite a crowd had gathered on the road outside the fence. Noren and Peters got out of the car and watched the naked guy crawling around on the roof, prying off tiles with a crowbar. Just then his wife came running up. Noren could see she had been crying. They listened to her incoherent account of what had happened. The main thing was, he obviously did not have permission to do what he was doing.

  They went over to the house and yelled up at the guy sitting astride the roof ridge. He was concentrating so hard on the roof tiles, he hadn’t noticed the patrol car. When he saw Noren and Peters he was so surprised, he dropped the crowbar. It came sliding down the roof, and Noren had to leap to one side to avoid being hit.

  “Careful with that!” yelled Peters. “I guess you’d better come down. You have no right to be demolishing this house.”

  To their astonishment the guy obeyed them right away. He let down the ladder he had pulled up behind him, and climbed down. His wife came running up with a robe, which he put on.

  “You gonna arrest me?” asked the guy.

  “No,” said Peters. “But you’d better quit pulling that house down. To tell you the truth, I don’t really think they’ll be asking you to do any more repairs.”

  “All I want to do is to go fishing,” said the man.

  They drove back through Sandskogen. Noren reported back to headquarters.

  Just as they were about to turn into the Osterleden highway, it happened.

  “Here comes Wallander,” he said.

  Noren looked up from his notebook.

  As the car drove past, it looked like Wallander had not seen them. That would have been very strange if true, as they were in a marked patrol car painted blue and white. What attracted the attention of the two cops most of all, however, was not Wallander’s vacant stare.

  It was the guy in the passenger seat. He was black.

  Peters and Noren looked at each other.

  “Wasn’t that an African in the car?” wondered N
oren.

  “Yeah,” said Peters. “He sure was black.”

  They were both thinking about the severed finger they had found a few weeks earlier, and the black man they’d been searching for all over the country.

  “Wallander must have caught him,” said Noren hesitantly.

  “Why is he traveling in that direction, then?” objected Peters. “And why didn’t he stop when he saw us?”

  “It was like he didn’t want to see us,” said Noren. “Like kids do. If they close their eyes, they think nobody can see them.”

  Peters nodded.

  “Do you think he’s in trouble?”

  “No,” said Noren. “But where did he manage to find the black guy?”

  Then they were interrupted by an emergency call about a suspected stolen motorcycle found abandoned in Bjaresjo. When they finished their shift they went back to the station. To their surprise, when they asked about Wallander in the coffee room they discovered he had not shown up. Peters was just going to tell everybody how they had seen him when he saw Noren quickly put his finger over his lips.

  “Why shouldn’t I say anything?” he asked when they were together in the locker room, getting ready to go home.

  “If Wallander hasn’t shown up, there must be some reason why,” said Noren. “Just what, is nothing to do with you or me. Besides, it could be some other African. Martinson once said Wallander’s daughter had something going with a black man. It could have been him, for all we know.”

  “I still think it’s weird,” Peters insisted.

  That was a feeling that stayed with him even after he got back home to his row house on the road to Kristianstad. When he had finished his dinner and played with his kids for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinson lived in the same neighborhood, so he decided to stop by and tell him what he and Noren had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinson had inquired recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.