The White Lioness kw-3

by Henning Mankell

  Then he went home. He crossed the threshold again for the first time since the explosion.

  He felt like a stranger in his own apartment. The furniture that had been damaged by the smoke was stacked in a heap, covered by a plastic sheet. He pulled out a chair, and sat down.

  The atmosphere was stifling.

  He wondered how he was going to get over everything that had happened.

  About then his telex message arrived in Stockholm. A stand-in not fully familiar with procedures was instructed to send the message to South Africa. Because of technical problems and careless checking, page two of Wallander’s report was never sent. And so the South African police were informed that night, May 23, that a gunman by the name of Victor Mabasha was on his way to South Africa. The police in the Johannesburg section of Interpol were puzzled by this strange message. It was unsigned, and ended very abruptly. Nevertheless, they had been requested by Inspector Borstlap to send all telex messages from Sweden to his office immediately. As the telex arrived in Johannesburg late on Saturday evening, Borstlap did not receive it until the following Monday. He contacted Scheepers right away.

  They now had confirmation of what was in the letter signed by the secretive Steve.

  The man they were looking for was called Victor Mabasha.

  Scheepers also thought the telex was strangely abrupt and was concerned that it was unsigned. But since it was merely a confirmation of something he already knew about, he let the matter rest.

  From now on all resources were concentrated on the hunt for Victor Mabasha. Every border post was put on standby. They were ready.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The day he was released by Georg Scheepers, Jan Kleyn called Franz Malan from his house in Pretoria. He was convinced his telephones were tapped. But he had another line nobody knew about, apart from the BOSS special intelligence officers in charge of security-sensitive communications centers throughout South Africa. There were several telephone lines that did not exist officially.

  Franz Malan was surprised. He did not know Jan Kleyn had just been released. As there was every reason to suspect Malan’s telephone was also tapped, Kleyn used an agreed code word to prevent Malan from saying anything that should not be mentioned on the telephone. The whole thing was camouflaged as a wrong number. Jan Kleyn asked for Horst, then apologized and rung off. Franz Malan looked up his special code list to check the meaning. Two hours after the call, he was to make contact from a specified public phone booth to another.

  Jan Kleyn was extremely eager to find out immediately what had been happening while he was under arrest. Franz Malan must also be clear that he would continue to take main responsibility. Jan Kleyn did not doubt his own ability to shake off shadows. Even so it was too risky for him to make personal contact with Franz Malan or to visit Hammanskraal, where Sikosi Tsiki was presumably already in residence, or would soon arrive.

  When Jan Kleyn drove out through his gate, it did not take him many minutes to locate the car tailing him. He knew there was also another car in front, but he did not worry about that for the moment. They would naturally be curious when he stopped to make a call from a public phone booth. It would be reported. But they would never find out what was said.

  Jan Kleyn was surprised that Sikosi Tsiki had arrived already. He also wondered why there was no word from Konovalenko. In their master plan was an agreement to inform Konovalenko that Sikosi Tsiki had actually arrived. That check should be no later than three hours after the assumed arrival time. Jan Kleyn gave Franz Malan some brief instructions. They also agreed to call from two other specified phone booths the following day. Jan Kleyn tried to discern whether Franz Malan seemed worried at all on the telephone. But he could hear nothing apart from Malan’s usual slightly nervous way of expressing himself.

  When the call was over he went to have lunch at one of the most expensive restaurants in Pretoria. He was pleased at the thought of the horrified reaction when his shadow handed his expense report to Scheepers. He could see the man at a table at the other end of the dining room. Jan Kleyn had already decided that Scheepers was unworthy of continuing to live in a South Africa that, within a year or so, would be well organized and faithful to its old ideals, created and then defended forever by a close community of Boers.

  But there were moments when Jan Kleyn was hit by the awful thought that the whole business was doomed. There was no turning back. The Boers had lost, their old territory would be governed by blacks who would no longer allow the whites to live their privileged lives. It was a sort of negative vision he had difficulty in fending off. But he soon recovered his self-control. It was just a brief moment of weakness, he told himself. I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by the constantly negative approach South Africans of British origin have toward us boere. They know the real soul of the country is to be found in us. We are the people chosen by God and history, not them, and so they cherish this unholy envy they cannot shake off.

  He paid for his meal, smiled as he passed the table where his shadow was sitting, a small, overweight man sweating profusely, and then drove home. He could see in the rearview mirror that he had a new shadow. When he had put his car away in the garage, he continued his methodical analysis of who could possibly have betrayed him and provided Scheepers with information.

  He poured himself a little glass of port and sat down in the living room. He drew the drapes and switched off all the lights apart from a discreet lamp illuminating a painting. He always thought best in a dimly lit room.

  The days he had spent with Scheepers had made him hate the current regime more than ever. He could not get away from the feeling that it was humiliating for him, a superior, trusted, and loyal civil servant in the intelligence service, to be arrested under suspicion of subversive activities. What he was doing was the exact opposite of that. If it were not for what he and the Committee were doing in secret, the risk of national collapse would be real rather than imaginary. As he sat sipping his port, he became even more convinced that Nelson Mandela must die. He no longer regarded it as an assassination, but an execution in accordance with the unwritten constitution he represented.

  There was another worrisome element that added to his irritation. It was clear to him from the moment his trusted security guard on the president’s personal staff called him that somebody must have supplied Scheepers with information that should really have been impossible for him to obtain. Someone close to Jan Kleyn had quite frankly betrayed him. He had to find out who it was, and quickly. What made him even more worried was that Franz Malan could not be completely excluded. Neither he nor any other member of the Committee. Apart from these men there could possibly be two, or at most three, of his colleagues in BOSS who could have decided, for some unknown reason, to sell him down the river.

  He sat in the darkness thinking about each of these men in turn, dredging his memory for clues; but he found none.

  He worked from a mixture of intuition, facts, and elimination. He asked himself who had anything to gain by exposing him, who disliked him so much that revenge could be worth the risk of being found out. He reduced the group of possibilities from sixteen to eight. Then he started all over again, and every time there were fewer and fewer possible candidates left.

  In the end, there was nobody. His question remained unanswered.

  That was when he thought for the first time it might be Miranda. Only when there was no other possible culprit was he forced to accept that she too was a possibility. The very thought worried him. It was forbidden, impossible. Nevertheless, the suspicion was there, and he had no choice but to confront her with it. He assumed the suspicion was unjustified. As he was certain she could not lie to him without him noticing, it would be resolved the moment he spoke to her. He must shake off his shadows within the next few days and visit her and Matilda in Bezuidenhout. The answer was to be found among the people on the list he had just worked through. The problem was that he still had not found an answer. He put both his thoughts and his
papers on one side, and devoted himself instead to his coin collection. Observing the beauty of the various coins and imagining their value always gave him a feeling of calm. He picked up an old, shiny, gold coin. It was an early Kruger rand, and had the same kind of timeless durability as the Afrikaner traditions. He held it up against the desk lamp and saw it had acquired a small, almost invisible stain. He took out his carefully folded polishing cloth and rubbed the golden surface carefully until the coin started to shine once again.

  Three days later, late on Wednesday afternoon, he visited Miranda and Matilda in Bezuidenhout. As he did not want his shadows to follow him even as far as Johannesburg, he had decided to lose them while he was still in central Pretoria. A few simple maneuvers were sufficient to shake off Scheepers’s men. Even though he had got rid of the shadows, he kept a close eye on the rearview mirror on the freeway to Johannesburg. He also did a few circuits of the business center in Johannesburg, just to make certain he was not mistaken. Only when he was sure did he turn into the streets that would take him to Bezuidenhout. It was very unusual for him to visit them in the middle of the week, and in addition, he had not given advance notice. It would be a surprise for them. Just before he got there, he stopped at a grocer’s and bought food for a communal dinner. It was about half past five by the time he turned into the street where the house was situated.

  At first he thought his eyes were deceiving him.

  Then he saw the man who just came out onto the sidewalk had emerged from Miranda’s and Matilda’s gate.

  A black man.

  He stopped by the curb and watched the man walking towards him, but on the other side of the road. He lowered the sun visor on each side of the windshield so that he could not be seen. Then he observed him.

  He suddenly recognized him. It was a man he had been keeping under observation for a long time. Although they had never managed to prove it, BOSS had no doubt he belonged to a group in the most radical faction of the ANC that was thought to be behind a number of bomb attacks on stores and restaurants. He used the aliases of Martin, Steve, or Richard.

  Jan Kleyn watched the man walk past, then disappear.

  He froze. His mind was in turmoil, and it took some time to recover. But there was no getting away from it: the suspicions he had refused to take seriously were now real. When he eliminated one after the other of his suspects and ended up with none at all, he had been on the right track. The only other possibility was Miranda. It was both true and inconceivable at the same time. For a brief moment he was overcome by sorrow. Then he turned ice-cold. The temperature inside him fell as his fury grew, or so it seemed. In the twinkling of an eye, love turned to hate. It was aimed at Miranda, not Matilda: he regarded her as innocent, another victim of her mother’s treachery. He gripped the wheel tightly. He controlled his urge to drive up to the house, beat down the door, and look Miranda in the eye for the last time. He would not approach the house until he was completely calm. Uncontrolled anger was a sign of weakness. That was something he had no desire to display in front of Miranda or her daughter.

  Jan Kleyn could not understand. What he did understand made him angry. He had dedicated his life to the fight against disorder. For him, disorder included everything that was unclear. What he did not understand must be fought against, just as all other causes of society’s increasing confusion and decay must be fought.

  He remained sitting in his car for a long time. Darkness fell. Only when he felt totally calm did he drive up to the front door. He noticed a slight movement behind the drapes in the big living room window. He picked up the bags of supplies, and opened the gate.

  He smiled at her when she opened the door. There were moments, so short that he barely managed to notice them, when he wished it was all in the imagination. But now he knew what was true, and he wanted to know what lay behind it.

  The darkness in the room made it difficult to distinguish her dark features.

  “I’ve come to visit you,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise you.”

  “You’ve never done this before,” she said.

  It seemed to him her voice was rough and strange. He wished he could see her more clearly. Did she suspect he had seen the guy leaving the house?

  At that moment Matilda came out of her room. She looked at him without saying a word. She knows, he thought. She knows her mother has betrayed me. How will she be able to protect her except by staying silent?

  He put down the bags of food and took off his jacket.

  “I want you to leave,” Miranda said.

  At first he thought he had misheard her. He turned around, his jacket still in his hand.

  “Are you asking me to go?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He contemplated his jacket for a moment before letting it drop to the floor. Then he hit her, as hard as he could, right in the face. She lost her balance but not her consciousness. Before she could manage to scramble up off the floor, he grabbed her blouse and dragged her up on her feet.

  “You are asking me to leave,” he said breathing heavily. “If anybody is going to leave, it’s you. But you aren’t going anyplace.”

  He dragged her into the living room and flung her down onto the sofa. Matilda moved to help her mother, but he yelled at her to stay back.

  He sat down on a chair right in front of her. The darkness in the room suddenly made him furious. He leapt to his feet and switched on every light he could find. Then he saw she was bleeding from both her nose and her mouth. He sat down again and stared at her.

  “A man came out of your house,” he said. “A black man. What was he doing here?”

  She did not answer. She was not even looking at him. Nor did she pay any attention to the blood dripping from her face.

  It all seemed to him a waste of time. Whatever she said or did, she had betrayed him. That was the end of the road. There was no going on. He did not know what he would do with her. He could not imagine a form of revenge that was harsh enough. He looked at Matilda. She still had not moved. Her face bore an expression he had never seen before. He could not say what it was. That made him insecure as well. Then he saw Miranda was looking at him.

  “I want you to go now,” she said. “And I don’t want you ever to come and visit me again. This is your house. You can stay, and we’ll move out.”

  She’s challenging me, he thought. How dare she? He felt his rage rising again. He forced himself not to beat her again.

  “No one’s leaving,” he said. “I just want you to tell me what’s going on.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Who you’ve been talking to. About me. What you’ve said. And why.”

  She looked him straight in the eye. The blood under her nose and on her chin had already congealed.

  “I’ve told them what I found in your pockets while you were sleeping here. I listened to what you said in your sleep, and I wrote it down. Maybe it was insignificant. But I hope it ruins you.”

  She spoke in that strange, rough voice. Now he realized that was her normal voice, and the one she had used all those years had been a sham. Everything had been a sham. He could no longer see any substance in their relationship.

  “Where would you have been without me?” he asked.

  “Maybe dead,” she replied. “But maybe I’d have been happy.”

  “You’d have been living in the slums.”

  “Maybe we’d have helped to pull them down.”

  “You leave my daughter out of this.”

  “You are the father of a child, Jan Kleyn. But you don’t have a daughter. You have nothing but your own ruin.”

  There was an ashtray on the table between them. Now that words were beyond him he grabbed it and flung it with all his might at her head. She managed to duck. The ashtray lay beside her on the sofa. He leapt up from his chair, shoved the table to one side, grabbed the ashtray, and held it over her head. At the same moment her heard a hissing noise, like from an animal. He looked at Matilda, who had mov
ed forward from the background. She was hissing through clenched teeth. He could not make out what she was saying, but he could see she had a gun in her hand.

  Then she fired. She hit him in the chest, and he lived only for a minute after collapsing to the ground. They stood looking at him, he could see them although his vision was fading. He tried to say something, tried to hold onto his life as it ebbed away. But there was nothing to hold onto. There was nothing.

  Miranda felt no relief, but neither did she feel any fear. She looked at her daughter, who had turned her back on the corpse. Miranda took the pistol from her hand. Then she went to call the man who had been to see them, the one called Scheepers. She had looked up his number earlier, and written it on a scrap of paper beside the telephone. Now she realized why she had done that.

  A woman answered, giving her name as Judith. She shouted to her husband, who came straight to the telephone. He promised to come to Bezuidenhout right away, and asked her to do nothing until he got there.

  He explained to Judith that dinner would have to be postponed. But he did not say why, and she suppressed her desire to ask. His special assignment would soon be over, he had explained the previous day. Then everything would return to normal, and they could go back to the Kruger and see if the white lioness was still there, and if they were still scared of her. He called Borstlap, trying various numbers before tracking him down. He gave him the address, but asked him not to go in until he got there himself.