The White Lioness kw-3

by Henning Mankell

  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 early 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’etat. 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.

  One more possibility, he thought. Same word. But in Afrikaans. He keyed in spriengboek.

  Immediately the screen started flashing. Then a list of contents appeared.

  He had cracked it. He had found his way into van Heerden’s world.

  He noticed he was sweating. The elation of a criminal when he’s just opened a bank vault, he thought.

  Then he sat down to read the screen. Afterwards, at nearly one in the morning when he came to the end of the texts, he knew two things. In the first place he was now certain van Heerden had been murdered because of the work he was doing. Second, the premonition of imminent danger he had felt previously was justified.

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched.

  Then he shuddered.

  Van Heerden had compiled the notes recorded on his diskette with cool precision. He could see now that van Heerden was a deeply split personality. The discoveries he made in connection with the conspiracy had reinforced the feeling he had earlier, that his life as an Afrikaner was based on a lie. The deeper he penetrated into the reality of the conspirators, the deeper he penetrated his own. The world as depicted in the loose sheets of paper, and the cool precision of the diskette, existed in the very same person.

  It occurred to him that in a sense, van Heerden had been close to his own destruction.

  He stood up and walked over to the window. Somewhere in the distance he could hear police sirens.

  Just what have we believed? he asked himself. That our dreams of an unchanging world were in fact true? That the small concessions we made to the blacks would be sufficient, although they did not really change anything?

  He was overcome by a feeling of shame. For even if he was one of the new Afrikaners, one of those who did not regard de Klerk as a traitor, the many years of passivity on the part of Judith and himself had enabled the racist policies to continue. He too had inside himself the kingdom of death van Heerden had written about.

  It was ultimately this silent acceptance that formed the basis of the conspirators’ intentions. They were counting on his continued passivity. His silent acceptance.

  He sat down at the screen once more.

  Van Heerden had done good work. The conclusions Scheepers was now able to draw, and which he would pass on to President de Klerk the very next day, were impossible to miss.

  Nelson Mandela, the self-evident leader of the blacks, was going to be murdered. During his last days van Heerden had worked feverishly to try and find the answers to the crucial questions of where, and when. He had not found the answer when he switched off his computer for the last time. But the indications were that it would be very soon, in connection with a speech given by Mandela to a large public gathering. Van Heerden had drawn up a list of possible locations and dates over the coming three months. Among them were Durban, Johannesburg, Soweto, Bloemfontein, Cape Town and East London, with dates attached. Somewhere abroad a professional killer was making preparations. Van Heerden had managed to discover that a former KGB officer was hovering indistinctly in the murderer’s background. But there were a lot of other things to be clarified.

  Ultimately there was the most important question. Georg Scheepers read one more time the section where van Heerden analyzed his way to the very center of the conspiracy. He spoke of a Committee. A loose collection of people, representatives of dominant groups among the
Afrikaners. But van Heerden did not have all their names. The only ones he knew about were Jan Kleyn and Franz Malan.

  Georg Scheepers was now convinced the chameleon was Jan Kleyn. On the other hand, he had not identified Franz Malan’s code name.

  He realized van Heerden regarded this pair as the chief actors. By concentrating on them, he hoped to be able to figure out who the other members of the committee were, and just what they were intending to achieve.

  Coup d’etat, van Heerden had written at the end of the last text, dated two days before he was killed. Civil war? Chaos? He did not answer the questions. He merely asked them.

  But there was one more note, made the same day, the Sunday before he went into the hospital.

  Next week, wrote van Heerden. Take it further. Bezuidenhout. 559.

  That’s his message to me from the grave, thought Georg Scheepers. That’s what he would have done. Now I have to do it instead. But what? Bezuidenhout is a suburb of Johannesburg, and the number must surely be part of the address of a house.

  He suddenly noticed he was very tired and very worried. The responsibility he had been given was greater than he could ever have imagined.

  He switched off the computer and locked the diskettes in his filing cabinet. It was nine o’clock already, and dark outside. Police sirens were wailing non-stop, like hyenas, keeping watch in the darkness of the night.

  He left the deserted prosecutor’s offices and walked to his car. Without really having decided to do so, he drove toward the eastern edge of the city, to Bezuidenhout. It did not take him long to find what he was looking for. Number 559 was a house bordering the park that gave Bezuidenhout its name. He parked by the curb, switched off the engine and put out the headlights. The house was white, in glazed brick. A light was on behind drawn drapes. He could see a car in the drive.

  He was still too tired and worried to think about how he should proceed next. First of all, the whole of this long day would have to sink into his consciousness. He thought of the lioness lying motionless by the riverbank. How she stood and came towards them. The wild beast is clawing at us, he thought.