by Jo Bannister
Elinor De Witte sat for a long time in the comfortable, very slightly shabby surroundings of her own drawing-room. The familiarity of her belongings, which waymarked her life with Joachim De Witte through three decades, was of more support to her than a close family. She looked at the curios and the photographs, and when a swift velot dusk swallowed the golden afternoon it did not matter that the room was dark because she knew everything in it intimately.
She thought about Joachim: the fierce red lion of a man he had been in his twenties, defending his land with his gun and the strength of his arm and his determination. In those days South Africa was a land of sun and blood, and a man was judged on his ability to hold what was his. In their determination to hold and prosper men like Joachim De Witte dragged the country out of the tribal morning into the full day of nationhood. Now their youth was gone and they were still holding it with strength and determination, and sometimes also with guns, because the young men who should have taken their place had not the same vision, the sense of purpose.
But of all the strong men, and they were all better known than De Witte, both at home and abroad, none had made as great a contribution to the survival of the Republic. A nation under siege, from within and without, depends utterly on the quality of its intelligence, and De Witte had created an intelligence service that was the grudging envy of half the world.
And it was because of his massive importance to his country, and not because of his incalculable worth to her, that Elinor De Witte was even contemplating what she was. It was a thing too terrible to undertake from even the most loving selfishness.
She had essayed the idea—tentatively, covertly—with Joachim’s doctor. He had ruled it out, kindly but totally. De Witte was a rare D-type, he said, explaining what that meant: that the chances of finding a suitable match in the time that Joachim had left were so vastly remote that she should dismiss the possibility from her mind.
Except that Elinor knew something which the doctor did not, something that even Joachim did not know—and which he must never know, whatever she did and whatever the consequences. In the dark room, surrounded by the shadowy pictures her thought-blind eyes needed no help to see, she wrestled with the appalling dilemma her twenty-five-year-old secret had become. She dared not seek help or advice. Anyone capable of advising her in this would have a vested interest, and if she shared her secret with those who needed De Witte even more than she did it would be too late for tears, too late for conscience: the terrible thing would be done. Only while she kept silent could she choose to do nothing; but through the long black night the aching within her pushed her steadily, and at last unresistingly, towards that ultimate act of love and betrayal, and when the clear pale light of dawn crept into the quiet room, from which the agony and the turmoil were finally gone, she picked up the telephone.
Chapter Two
The man who was De Witte’s deputy was unable to fill the big man’s shoes. Danny Vanderbilt, regarding him woodenly across the acacia expanse of the desk, was conscious for the first time of the actual size of the office, the size of the furniture, most of all the size of the vacancy left by the man by whom and around whom the department had been constructed. But he nodded politely enough in the gaps left by what Botha was saying. He knew that his opinion was not being sought.
Nor was his discretion being trusted very far, which was another change. If Botha found himself running the department permanently, which God forbid, he would have to learn to confide in his operatives. He had got all this need-to-know nonsense from the Americans he was so taken with, but Vanderbilt saw nothing in the results obtained by the CIA to justify emulating their methods.
“All you need to know,” said Botha, and Vanderbilt nodded politely, “is that Colonel De Witte is depending on you finding the man whose file you have there and bringing him in.”
Vanderbilt lifted the cardboard cover and considered the photograph. The face was unfamiliar to him. “Who is he?”
“He’s a ter,” said Botha. He seldom used a proper word if a colloquialism would do. “Listen, I’ve got better things to do with my day than telling you what you can read. The information’s all there: study it. There should be enough there to put you on his track. Find him and bring him in.”
That easy, hey? thought Vanderbilt. Aloud he said, “What if he’s out of the country?”
A little yellow fire sparked in Botha’s jaundiced eye. “He is out of the country. He got out, or more accurately was got out, via Rhodesia”—Ian Smith may have capitulated but there would be no Zimbabwe in Walter Botha’s lifetime—”five weeks after the Mpani raid and near as we can make out a scant ten minutes ahead of the Army. He went to England. Will you read the damned file?”
Vanderbilt gave a soft low whistle. Impressed in spite of himself, he leafed through the flimsy sheets. “So he was one of the six.”
In a celebrated incident two years previously a terror gang had shot its way into the building where they were now talking, killing two security men and a secretary, and released seventeen prisoners from the detention cells in the basement. As most of those detained were suspected associates of Joshua Mpani the raid was widely beheved to have been instigated by him, a rumour which was never refuted by the rebel group or its leader. It would probably have been claimed as a victory of considerable propaganda and practical value had the escape proved as successful as the raid.
But De Witte, spitting tacks, had saturated the borderlands with army patrols and put the squeeze on communities known to be sympathetic to the Mpani group. Eight of the seventeen detainees were recovered, another three were killed resisting arrest; fourteen terrorists were taken prisoner, five terrorists were killed. Joshua Mpani was one of them. Six men rescued from government detention reached the safety of the border, but to all intents and purposes it had cost an entire rebel unit to get them there. One of those expensive men was Joel Grant.
“If he’s still in England,” said Vanderbilt thoughtfully, still skimming through the papers, “how am I supposed to get him out?”
Botha sniffed and jerked his chair forward in a petulant little gesture meant to convey to his subordinate that the audience was over. “You’re an experienced man, Vanderbilt. It says so on your record, presumably to explain the ludicrous salary we pay you. You’ll think of something.”
Vanderbilt elevated a sardonic eyebrow but declined to chase the hare. Sticking stubbornly to the point he said, “Can I hurt him?”
Botha rocked a hand ambivalently. “So long as you don’t actually injure him. That is important.”
Great, thought Vanderbilt sourly. “Then can I—?”
Botha cut him off, inadvertently answering the question he had forestalled. “All I ask,” he said, “is that you don’t involve the embassy.”
Two days later Danny Vanderbilt was driving a hired car up a wet road, shivering intermittently in his too light clothing, reflecting on the amazingly dismal nature of the main highway linking the city of London with its chief international airport. He bad been here once before, more than ten years before, and he had thought the same thing then. Also, it was still raining.
He had a single, slender lead: an address. It was not Joel Grant’s address. There was no reason to suppose that he had ever been there, or even knew the woman Vanderbilt was looking for. The connection was that tenuous.
Two years before Joshua Mpani had a lieutenant called Nathan Shola. Shola had been one of the leaders of the raid, and one of those to evade the subsequent army dragnet. He was known to have been with Grant later in Zimbabwe; both had needed hospital treatment, although Shola’s injuries had been superficial. After the black man was discharged they were not seen together again, and Pretoria had lost track of Shola’s movements. There was no record of him following, or preceding, Grant to England. But a girl of Shola’s had found her way to England, and was dancing in the chorus of a strip-club in Soho. She had been recognized by a businessman visiting London, whose loyalty to the army he had until recently s
erved in outweighed any personal reluctance he might have felt to admit frequenting black strip shows. The address of the club was Vanderbilt’s lead, although he had some shopping to do before going there.
Although the grey February day was already drawing in among the high narrow streets of the capital, by the clock it was hardly more than mid-afternoon and Vanderbilt had expected a wait of some hours before he could see the girl Suzanne. But the door of the club was open, a dark gap like a missing tooth beside a shop-window full of marginally pornographic photographs curling at the edges, and the outrageous old queen in the box-office was doing a steady trade in a desultory kind of way.
Vanderbilt paid his way in, grinning to himself at the thought of Botha’s face when he came to initial the expense account. Nondescripting his accent—a much more effective and less suspicious vocal dissemblance than assuming someone else’s—he remarked through the box-office grill, “I haven’t been in London for ages. You still got Suzanne here?”
From close to the old queen was anything but outrageous. He was a rather sad, weary-looking man of more than middle age, in gaudy trashy clothes that did nothing to disguise an essential greyness of the spirit He was about as gay as a public execution. He hardly looked up at Vanderbilt’s enquiry. “Suzy Lavalle? Yes, she’s still here. She’s on in a few minutes. You want to see her after?”
It was a pleasant change for Vanderbilt to have someone doing his work for him. “That would be nice. You don’t think she’ll mind?”
The man behind the grille looked up then, with a brief glint of sad humour. “No, dearie, I don’t think she’ll mind.”
She was a coloured girl, and her name was not Lavalle but Kop. She took him to her room, which was round the corner from the strip-club, and the walk was short enough and the girl uninterested enough that he did not have to do much more than smile and nod from when the old queen introduced them until after the girl locked the door of her room behind them and switched on a two-bar electric fire. “You got a name, honey?” she asked, not looking round as she unbelted her coat.
“You could call me boss,” suggested Vanderbilt.
She looked at him then, eyes saucering whitely. There was nothing you could do to a white South African accent that a black South African would stay fooled for long. Anyway it was time for her to know. There were occasions when pussy-footing round got you what you wanted, but this was not one of them. To tell him what he wanted to know Suzanne Lavalle, née Suzy Kop, would have to be very frightened indeed, and she might as well start now.
Vanderbilt left forty minutes later, alone, quietly locking the door behind him. In due course, he supposed, when she did not return to work, somebody might get irritated enough (rather than concerned enough) to force the door. But there had been no noise to annoy the neighbours, even had they been normally alert neighbours rather than the deaf, dumb and blind variety preferred by hookers, and Miss Lavalle would not be capable of making herself heard for some hours yet. Vanderbilt thought he was probably in the clear until morning, and even then he was not worried about official complications. Wherever she turned when she recovered sufficiently to tackle the five pairs of nylon tights presently securing her to the bedstead, it would not be the police.
She might try to contact Shola, if she was thinking straight enough by then. Or she might find it harder than he would. She had been unable to give Vanderbilt either a telephone number or an address, only the name Shola used in England and the name of a Mickey Mouse newspaper up north for which he occasionally wrote. She was not in contact with him; she had seen him only once in this country, when he got her a job with an African charity. She gave it up after a couple of months: the strip-club paid more, and was more fun. She had heard of Joel Grant but had never met him; she did not know he was in England too.
Vanderbilt was not interested in her life-story, though he did wonder in passing what it was about her that could have appealed to a man of Nathan Shola’s physical, intellectual and political prowess; not appreciating that for such a man a fondness for silly women might be less a weakness than a strength. But just now all that interested Vanderbilt was how little she could do about protecting, or even warning, Shola. The most she could do, if she would not go to the police, was call the newspaper and ask them not to give out any information about him, which an English newspaper probably would not have done anyway. That did not matter: Vanderbilt had no intentions of asking for it. By the tone Kop was able to contact the paper, he expected to have everything
it was capable of yielding.
He returned to his car and searched out the signs for the Ml.
Liz Fallon found herself lying awake, with no knowledge of what had wakened her. She was well enough used to broken nights, her sleep fractured by another person’s dreams, but that was different, and familiar. After fourteen months the signal pattern of his moaning, tiny animal whimpers growing over a period of two or three minutes to full-throated yells if she did not get to him first, was to her as routine a call to duty as, for example, the pipping of his bleeper to a doctor or the howl of a siren to a factory worker. She had installed the baby alarm so that she could wake him before he reached screaming pitch. Grant had not liked it but she had made no effort to mollify him. She made it a matter of policy not to protect him from life’s little harshnesses, only from the big one.
She lay still in the dark room, breathing softly, listening to silence. Whatever had disturbed her was not repeated. The half-expected litany of despair had not yet begun. If Grant was having nightmares, he was keeping them to himself.
But something prevented her resuming her interrupted sleep: an echo in her mind like a distant shriek, insubstantial as windsong but insistent, incapable of being ignored. Its very remoteness, its lack of identity, called to her like a lost child so that at last, grudgingly but without any real option, she pushed the quilt off her legs and went to investigate. She started with Grant, even though what she had almost heard had not sounded like him, because he was her charge.
His light was on, a ribbon of brightness under his door. He must have heard it too, she reasoned, entering without a knock from force of habit alone.
She saw Joel Grant sprawled on the floor, a jumble of bare arms and pyjama legs, his dark hair tumbled in his white face, and a big man in a raincoat bending over him.
Danny Vanderbilt had not allowed for the baby alarm. It was a rogue card. He had had one enormous piece of luck tonight, finding the address he had acquired for Nathan Shola occupied not by that large, tough and sneaky warrior but by the altogether easier target he had intended Shola to lead him to—not voluntarily, Vanderbilt was an optimist but not a fool, but perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps there might have been old letters lying about the house—so it would be unreasonable of him to resent the unforeseeable reverse which had now brought him face to face with the other tenant of the house.
He knew she was there, of course. He had established which rooms were in use before entering the building, and his first act on the inside was to find out who was using them. In the master bedroom the faint beam of his burglar’s torch picked out the girl, sleeping deeply and rhythmically, on her stomach with the quilt slipped down to her waist. Neither the creak of the door nor the glow of the torch disturbed her; she looked set to sleep until morning.
In the other bedroom a man was sleeping, fitfully, the sheet tangled about his legs. Vanderbilt knew it was not Shola, even in the dark the skin was the wrong colour, but with his face half buried in the pillow Vanderbilt could not see who he was. He thought it did not matter: if Shola was not in the house the person he wanted to talk to was the girl. This was her place: her name was over the bell, her mail was on the hall table, her tights were drying over the bath. If Shola used it as a forwarding address, she would know where he was. Vanderbilt’s only interest in the man was to ensure that he did not interfere while she was telling him.
He moved over to the bed, weighing up how to hit him efficiently from the awkward angle, and as
he stood there the sleeping man moaned and twisted onto his back. A bar of moonlight admitted by the imperfectly drawn curtains fell across his face and diagonally down his body. His body was pocked with small marks Vanderbilt had seen before. Startled, he looked at the man’s face and he had seen that before too. A flash of the torch confirmed it.
“Well, I’m damned,” murmured Vanderbilt.
Joel Grant woke with a cry. It was instinct that woke him rather than Vanderbilt’s looming presence, his spying torch or his startled, whispered words: an instinct for danger whetted by three years in the bush and honed to a painful edge by two months under interrogation. The big man with the white moustache had sent for him often in the night but never once had he needed to be roused. The footsteps outside, the turn of the lock, had torn him bodily from sleep and left him waiting achingly in a corner with his legs drawn up to his chest, even when he could not stand from exhaustion. Those stretched seconds between hearing their feet and feeling their hands were almost the worst of the whole bad time; at least, so far as he could remember.
Weeks in a Harare hospital had healed his body and the subsequent months in Liz Fallon’s house had gone a long way towards repairing his mind, but that instinct for danger went deeper than iodine and kindness and when the conditions which had fostered it recurred—this long after, this far away—that instinct galvanized him like an electric shock and he woke with the cry that Liz heard through her own slumber.
For Grant it was as if the nightmare had finally claimed him back: waking had not freed him from it, left it to slither away, noisome but harmless like seaweed from the ankles of a paddling child, but had confirmed it in its own reality. It was as if he had known of this possibility all along, and that was what the dread was really about: not something that was over but something still to come. In that moment of waking he thought that, by some means which he had not at present the intellectual control to consider, he was back in South Africa, in the security building in Pretoriakin his midnight cell, and the soft background susurrous of despair fell to a breathless pause while booted feet stalked the corridors and the tumblers fell in a single lock. Even through his own surging fear Grant had felt the wash of relief across the rest of the block. He could not blame them for that: he too had known the brief, intense pulse of joy when it was someone else’s turn.