Mosaic

by Jo Bannister

The early years of their marriage (said Elinor) had been hard and idyllic. Elinor worked beside De Witte as he broke the bright veldt for farmland, and loaded for him as calmly as a duchess on a grouse moor as he fought off raiding parties. At first they thought the hardship and worry were why they were not having children, which both of them wanted passionately. They supposed that when their life settled down a little it would happen.

  But after ten years, with Elinor approaching thirty, they were desperate enough to seek help. When the doctor declared there was no physical obstacle to conception they returned to their farm inspired with new hope; and indeed, within six months Elinor’s swelling belly was beginning to push out her clothes.

  “I was thrilled, of course. Delighted. But Joachim was like a child at Christmas.”

  They lost the baby. It died before term, and she had to labour to expel the thing with no hope of fulfilment. The hard, long travail damaged her inside and afterwards the doctor said they must not think of trying again. De Witte swore to her it did not matter, and cried like a thing broken when he thought she could not hear.

  “Tell me about Joel.”

  When De Witte was called to Pretoria they were almost middle-aged. It was then that her husband had the only (Elinor said with confidence) fling with another woman in all the years of their married life. It was brief, apparently not very meaningful to either of them, and over by several weeks before Elinor learnt of it—from the girl herself, who arrived on the farmhouse step one day with the two bottom buttons of her cardigan unfastened.

  It had not been blackmail which prompted her visit, or vindictiveness, so much as sheer desperation. She had not known when she saw him last, and she had been unable to break through the ring of security at his office in order to tell him. She thought he might have given instructions to keep her at bay because no one would even take a message. They took a phone number and said he would call, and he never did. Finally, thinking he might be at home one weekend, she got a ride out to his farm, only to be met by his wife.

  “I think she would have left without saying anything, but between what I could see and what I could guess there wasn’t a lot of point. And I wanted to know.”

  She was about twenty-two. Elinor could see nothing about her that would have tempted her husband to adultery after fifteen years, but accepted that she was not seeing her at her best. She was worried and frightened, carrying a baby she did not want for a man she never expected to see again, with no family of her own to see her through and no money to raise a child. She was in dire need of help, and by the time Elinor had prised her story from her and supplied handkerchiefs and coffee to stem the tears it had been clear to both women that whatever arrangements needed making would be best made between themselves.

  “I don’t remember being shocked, or even terribly surprised. I felt I should have seen it coming. I wasn’t even angry with her, and I still loved Joachim with every ounce of my being and believed he loved me the same way. The thing with Mary Grant had been an aberration. The more I thought about it, the luckier I felt that she had come to me, not to him. He would never have left me, but having to choose between his wife and his child would have ripped him apart.”

  Elinor provided the money for the girl’s confinement. She thought that once the baby was safely born and the risk of disappointment past, she would adopt it and present Joachim with his child with as much love and pride as if she had borne it herself. But by the time she was ready to leave hospital Mary Grant had become as attached to her baby as mothers usually do. Anticipating—unfairly, in fact—that Elinor’s interest in the baby would result in a custody battle she was ill-equipped to win, she discharged herself a day early and disappeared up-country with the new infant in a flight that both must have found tough to survive.

  Elinor knew that one word to her husband would have half the security forces in the country searching for his missing son. She did not want to do that, seeing in it the start of a chain of consequences that would destroy them all. Instead, discreetly, she employed a private detective. Whenever he found them she sent money and expressions of friendship, and they hit the road again, trekking the length and breadth of the country in Joel’s first year of life. At last Elinor came to see that she was hounding them with her money, sent a final contribution and notice of disengagement, and dismissed the private detective.

  For twenty years she heard nothing, did not know if her husband’s son was alive or dead. Then the rebel group of Joshua Mpani rose to prominence, and a counter-insurgency measure captured fourteen terrorists including a twenty-one-year-old white boy called Joel Grant. The weeks that followed were the worst of Elinor De Witte’s life.

  “Should I have told him?—that by keeping Mary’s secret I had let his son become a traitor and a terrorist; that the boy whose body and mind he had already mangled and would have to mangle some more was his only child? What could he have done? To help him escape would have been to betray everything he had worked for and believed in. To hand Joel over to someone else would have meant only that his interrogation would have been less efficient, and so longer. I had to spare him that choice. I had to. I lay awake nights praying that the boy would die.” She smiled shakily. “I don’t know what our minister would have to say about that.”

  Liz wondered how their minister, or indeed Mrs. De Witte herself, came to terms with the fact that her husband extracted information from people in the same way that a liquidizer extracts juice from vegetables for his living. But she refrained from saying so. She was acutely aware that the answers she had come here seeking were only moments away, and hardly dared breathe for fear of scattering them like startled butterflies. She chose her way and her words with exquisite care.

  “Mrs. De Witte, Joel is a friend of mine. He lives in my house in England; I’ve been helping him get over what happened to him here. It took time because he was hurt badly, but he was beginning to pull his life together again. I think you might have liked one another, at least if you’d kept the conversation off politics. Anyway, I like him. I care about him.

  “And then two nights ago a man broke into my house and took my friend away. He was a man from your husband’s department, and he appears to be trying to smuggle Joel out of Britain, presumably in order to bring him here. Mrs. De Witte, can you tell me why?”

  Elinor De Witte met her eyes for almost the first time since the surprising moment in the hospital room. Her head lifted and her voice was almost steady. There was an unmistakable courage in her demeanour, at once dignified and vulnerable. She said, “I too acted from love. What I did was inexcusable, unforgivable. I knew that at the time. I managed to persuade myself that it was an act of patriotism, that the greatest good of the greatest number was what counted, and that somehow it made a kind of sense of everything that went before—losing the baby, my childlessness, Joachim having a son he didn’t know about. That was essential, you see. And he had to live. So many people depending on him—not only me. No, I cannot ask you to forgive me. But try to remember that I did it for love.”

  “Did what?”

  “Afterwards I had this terrible sense of awe. I knew then how wrong it was—even for Joachim, even for love. I tried to stop it, but nobody would listen to me then. I had served my purpose, told them how to save him—they weren’t going to turn back because of what they considered my quite irrational sense of guilt. They said I’d get over it when I had Joachim safely home again. And poor Joel was only a terrorist to them, you see, not a son—not nearly a son. I couldn’t stop them. Can you? Please, can you?”

  “Elinor. What did you do?”

  The telephone rang as Hamlin was about to pull the front door closed behind him. He waved an explanation to Shola in the car and trotted back inside.

  The line from Pretoria was clear. The tremor was in Liz’s voice. “Will, have you found him yet?”

  “No. But we have a good lead—we’re hopeful. Liz, you have no idea what the police—”

  “Will, listen. Tell Nathan. You
have to stop this. Somehow you have to. I know what they want him for.”

  “Shall I call Nathan? He’s in the car—”

  “Listen.” He heard her suck in a deep breath six thousand miles away. “Joachim De Witte is dying. He needs a heart transplant, but they can’t find a suitable match. Joel is De Witte’s bastard. Will, they don’t want Joel at all. They want his heart.”

  Life for Life

  Chapter One

  Vanderbilt drove to the address he had been given. It was a lock-up garage barely a mile from the airport perimeter, directly under the flight path. It was already dark—another night was setting in—and as he hunted for the right alley the lights of a big passenger jet seemed to fly down the street towards him. Involuntarily he ducked. He knew the thing was already hundreds of feet up and climbing, but human instinct had been bred in before there were aeroplanes.

  He picked it up in the rear-view mirror and watched it go with regret. He would have liked to be on it, but once again his plans had been frustrated. When he called his controller back, from a filling station outside Dumfries, he was told that a suitable plane had been located but the earliest departure they had been able to arrange was the following morning. Once more he was faced with killing time in a hostile land surrounded by enemies. He was advised to wait until dark and then make himself at home in the garage. A van would come for them in the morning.

  He found the key, and the dust hiding it appeared undisturbed. Still he entered cautiously, checking inside and outside and only driving the car into the garage when he was sure he had neither pursuit nor ambush to contend with. He locked the door behind him and groped around for the light switch.

  All down the long side wall were packing-cases, stacked anything up to three deep. Many had been used before and carried old Customs markings. He found one which had already been to Zaire, that carried an old red stencil claiming “Machinery—with care,” and pulled it down. It was one of the smaller crates, big enough to take the folded body of an unconscious man but perhaps not big enough to look that it would. The top was loose, and when he removed it the contents made him grin: a hammer, a tin of nails and an enormous suit of overalls. Someone else had picked the crate out too. Joel Grant would enter the airport in the packing-case, as cargo; Vanderbilt would enter in the overalls, as a cargo handler. He would stay aboard after the last crate was loaded and, since he should never have been there at all, would probably never be missed. There would be no difficulty getting himself and his burden off the plane and through Customs at the other end. The Hastings was going beyond Zaire.

  He pulled the overalls on over his suit, then turned back to the car. He was still worried about the sedative, unsure whether he should risk using it. The only other option, since Grant had to be kept quiet throughout the loading and right through until the plane was in the air, allowing for any delays, was another fairly substantial thump behind the ear. For a cargo Vanderbilt had been warned to handle with care Grant had already been knocked about a good bit. If Pretoria was right the drug would be safer; if Grant was, the rabbit-chop would be. Finally deciding that if there was to be a débâcle, with a dead body smuggled thousands of miles at massive risk and expense, it would be better on Botha’s record than his own, so once again he prepared the hypodermic. He compromised a little by reducing the recommended dosage by twenty per cent in consideration of Grant’s frail physical condition and suspect medical history. A bleary mumble in the depths of a packing-case in a cargo plane with the screws already turning was a small and justifiable risk.

  Only then did he unlock the boot of the car, unlock the handcuffs, untie the rope anchoring his feet and drag Grant out.

  Grant had been confined in the dark, cramped trunk for some hours. The force of the weak, fly-bespeckled light bulb hit him like a blow and above the gag his eyes screwed tight against it. He could not straighten his legs and when Vanderbilt let go of him he crumpled awkwardly to the cement floor. He hardly felt it as in quick succession the hard rough floor hit his knees, elbows and face. He had long since passed the apex of pain to which the cramps had steadily risen and which had had him whining into his gag in the rattling dark while sweat and tears mingled on his temples. Until his circulation returned to normal, inflicting as much agony in the flood as it had in the ebb, all sensation would be dulled. He lay on his side on the floor, eyes clenched against the light, and waited patiently to be picked up.

  Vanderbilt looked down at him: not without concern, but it was the concern of a trucker for valuable goods possibly damaged in transit, or a vet for a hamster that might not make it through the night. Professional detachment like an impermeable membrane stood between Grant and any hope of compassion. So when Vanderbilt knelt before him and began chafing vigorously at his sleeping limbs, it was a purely professional service, given and received as such. All it meant to the Boer was the careful handling of fragile goods; all it meant to Grant was some more pain to add to that he had already had. He did not see in it the grains of another escape. He no longer thought in those terms. He knew he was too weak now to fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

  When he was satisfied with the results of his efforts, Vanderbilt fastened the handcuffs round his prisoner’s left wrist and to the towing-ring under the bumper. “Sweet dreams,” he said.

  So passed the third night they had been together, without incident except for the brief disturbance that followed from Grant lapsing into an exhausted slumber and dreaming far from sweetly. Vanderbilt slapped him awake in a manner oddly similar to the way Liz used to free him from nightmare, even with something of the same gentleness.

  Vanderbilt had himself and his prisoner ready to leave before dawn, but it was well into the morning before he heard the throaty rumble of an engine in the alley outside. Just in case he knelt by Grant and folded a hand across his mouth. But at the quiet rhythmic tattoo at the door he rose to his feet and went to stand by the door. “Ja?” It was too late for concealment.

  “Captain John Crane, Mr. Vanderbilt. I believe you have a cargo for me.”

  Vanderbilt opened the door. Captain Crane did not so much walk in as fly in, propelled from behind by a large black hand. The other large black hand held a gun. Towering in the doorway, Nathan Shola seemed for a moment to represent the quintessential vengeance of all black men against all white: Montezuma’s revenge, and Atahualpa’s, and Cetewayo’s, and Steve Biko’s, and Nelson Mandela’s. He was not so much a man as a vessel for an anger which spanned centuries and continents, a storm of rage contained in glass, visible and potent and constrained only by that flimsiest of fabrics, civilization. In that first moment he could have killed them both, in cold blood and without compunction, as he had killed his enemies when he fought on his own land; and if he had been alone it is probable that he would have done. But he was not alone and he was not at home, and the moment for murder passed; and when it had he followed the gun into the garage and Will Hamlin followed him.

  Inevitably, Danny Vanderbilt had faced death before. Not many times: he was too good at his job, and so were the people he dealt with, for that kind of thing to become a habit. But it had happened: the feeling was familiar, that deep dynamic stillness of body and mind that lasted perhaps only a moment before events proceeded, demanding their own responses almost automatically. But afterwards that frozen moment of death in a cage was what he remembered. Sometimes he could not even recall exactly how he had evaded it: his training went as deep as instinct, but no training could wipe out those few glacial moments in his life when he had confronted infinity down a dark tunnel maybe . 38 in diameter.

  Now here was another one. Staring at the gun in Nathan Shola’s hand—not down the barrel, it was not pointed at his head, Shola knew better than to choose the smallest effective target and anyway he did not owe Vanderbilt the favour of a clean kill—he felt the same stillness, the same coolness in the air, the same sense of waiting for history to take its course. He was not afraid, not even of the likelihood of pain. He was irritated,
hardly more than that, to be thwarted so close to success. He wondered if there was any way he could take at least one of them with him; Grant, unfortunately, was some distance behind him and certain to remain there, attached to the car and hunched up on the cement floor in front of it.

  Vanderbilt looked up from the gun to the face of the man holding it. It was hard enough to drag the eyes away from the organ of his imminent destruction, but it was necessary. Guns never showed weakness. “You, I take it,” he said, “are Shola.”

  Shola’s face displayed a black rage seen, as it were, through a veil of watchfulness. It was bad news for Vanderbilt, who would have much preferred a mouthing, spitting fury, lurid threats and a waving gun. There was a small chance of being shot almost accidentally, but the excitable gunman was little more than a dangerous child to be disarmed. Shola was something else: another soldier, another professional. The anger in his eyes would not distort his vision, nor the fury in his soul interfere with his reactions. He would not be hustled into firing off potshots before he was ready, and when he was ready he would hit what he aimed at. Vanderbilt had faced death before: not until now had he felt in the marrow of his bones that the odds were on the other man’s side. Had it been a situation where he could have admitted defeat, turned his back and walked away he would have done so. He had no time for death before dishonour. But he knew that if he walked past Shola with his back turned he would not reach the corner of the street.

  Shola said, softly, soft and sibilant as the hiss from the lips of a serpent, “And you, I suppose, are the bastard who beats up on women and breaks up sick kids.”

  “Him?” Vanderbilt had to screw on his heel and look back over his shoulder to see Grant. He did not look sick: a bit the worse for wear, perhaps, but time in a car boot tended to do that to a man. He had had the opportunity to work off the worst of the night’s cramps, and the sudden turn in events had filled his body with animation though he could only kneel beside the bumper. The life was back in his eyes, too, which never left Shola’s face, although Shola would not glance away from Vanderbilt long enough to return the look. Vanderbilt said, interestedly, “Why, what’s wrong with him?”