Pienaar was, in his own words, “a refugee from the old regime,” having played an almost identical role in the apartheid government. “There were criminals in those days too,” he had told Abigail with a shrug.
The leaders of the new regime had decided that if they wanted to keep some sort of rein on organized crime they had better retain people like him. Now that he, and others like him, had started arresting some of their own members on charges of corruption, they were no longer sure of the wisdom of their decision. “We have given this apartheid spy the chance to attack us,” a party functionary had said in a recent speech, and the papers had reported it countrywide.
Damn, Abigail thought, how is it I always get involved with problem people? Why did he have to be a white Afrikaner and, most especially, why did he have to come from employment in the justice department of the old regime?
She knew that he was a good man. She had met others; men as good, who had stayed in the employ of the old regime right to the end. She had never understood any of them.
Pienaar’s sin had been the single-mindedness with which he had gone after the corrupt practices of a certain group of politicians. She had worked next to him for all of twelve months. They had dug through evidence together and she had agreed with all his conclusions. The difference between them was that Pienaar had only seen it as his job, while she had been outraged that people who had been her seniors during the days of the liberation struggle should be behaving in this way. Pienaar had wanted to collect the evidence and pass it on to someone else to handle. She had wanted to prosecute them herself.
“It’s different for you,” he had said. “You have a history in the struggle.”
“This is not about politics,” she had told him, admitting later to herself that it was a pretty naïve statement.
If Pienaar had characteristics that would always keep him an outsider, Abigail had a few of her own. Chief among these was the fact that growing up in exile in the United Kingdom had resulted in English being her primary language. She had spent a year in Matabeleland, the province of Zimbabwe’s minority Ndebele. Those were the latter years of the apartheid regime and she had not felt safe in her own country. Her time there had given her a knowledge of Zulu that was less than rudimentary. All of the country’s other African languages were unintelligible to her. When approaching a group of her colleagues engaged in conversation in one of the vernacular languages, they would switch to English for her benefit. She was grateful for the considerate way she was dealt with, but it also emphasized the differences between them.
She got up to go in search of Pienaar. For a long time, the rumors around the closure of the Scorpions had been threading their insidious way through the passages of the department, some of them even reaching the press. Today, for the first time, it was official. By the time the evening papers were out, the whole country would know it.
Before she reached the door, her phone rang. Johanna, her trusted and irrepressibly curious PA, was on the line. “A call from Zimbabwe.”
“Put it through.”
“It’s a man. He wouldn’t tell me who he is.”
“Damn it, Johanna. Just put him through.”
“I’m putting him through,” Johanna said.
There was considerable background noise on the connection. “Abigail Bukula?” The voice reached her across an insecure connection. “Is that Abigail Bukula?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Abigail Bukula of Zimbabwe?”
“No, I’m not a Zimbabwean. I practiced in your country for a year…”
“My name is Krisj Patel. I…” The voice faded in a shower of static and only returned when the crackling faded. “… are hoping you would be able to come to our country to represent them in this matter.”
“Mr. Patel, I can barely hear you. I think you want me to represent you in some matter?”
“Not me, my clients. I am Krisj Patel, of Smythe, Patel and Associates, attorneys at law. My clients were hoping…” Again the voice faded and the crackling grew, but not for as long this time. “I think we can get a high court injunction to have them released.”
“And you said you are…” Abigail was writing it down.
“Krisj Patel of Smythe, Patel and Associates.”
“You’re the Patel of Smythe, Patel and…”
“… Associates,” he said. “Yes, I am. Will you call me Krisj?” he asked. “People here are proud…” Again the voice was gone. When it came back, she heard him say, “… your cousin. So we thought you may want to help…”
“My cousin?”
“Tony Makumbe. As I understand it, he’s your Aunt Janice’s child.”
“No, she had a daughter.”
“She also had a son.”
“Mr. Patel, I don’t think…”
“He’s one of the seven dissidents. Our people…” Again the crackling rose, but the phone went dead, even the crackling disappeared. Abigail waited a few minutes for him to call again, but the phone remained silent. Mr. Patel was wrong about everything. As far as she knew, her Aunt Janice only had a daughter. In any event, she had no doubt that Patel could find an advocate in his own country. And the closing down of the Scorpions was, to her, a matter of far greater importance.
Usually, when Abigail left the building, she had Johanna send an e-mail to both Pienaar and the director general to keep them informed of her whereabouts. This time she walked past Johanna without responding to her question: “Is it true about the Scorpions?” The offices of the department were just too damned constricting this afternoon.
Abigail was a good-looking woman, a little above average height, with the leanness and easy stride of an athlete. Most men, when seeing her for the first time, took special interest. Her African curls were cropped close to her head. Time spent at the hairdresser was, in her view, time lost.
She was wearing a lavender-gray trouser suit, relieved only by an inexpensive turquoise brooch. Robert had given her many presents of jewelry that she felt were far too expensive. And this was neither the town nor the country in which it was wise to flash high-priced baubles. Robert’s paper had recently carried an incident in which a woman had lost a ring on which a large imitation diamond was mounted—and her finger along with it. It seemed that a pair of garden shears had been used. The result had not been a neat cut.
Abigail’s own diamonds stayed safely in the bank’s safe deposit box, only to be used two or three times a year for various state banquets. The only three skirts she possessed were part of the evening wear she had reluctantly invested in for those occasions.
* * *
Robert’s office was only a few blocks away, but Abigail took her 7-series BMW. It was something else Robert had insisted on paying for. She was not intending to return that afternoon.
The security man at the basement parking in his building recognized her immediately and opened the boom to let her in. She brought the car to a stop in the parking space Robert had reserved for the odd occasion when she visited him.
In the lift on the way to the top floor, two people, whom she was certain she had never seen before, greeted her with “Good afternoon, ma’am.”
The top floor of the building held only Robert’s office, that of the chairman, the deputy chairman, the financial director, the marketing director, the human resources director and the editor of the group’s major weekly, together with their personal assistants, of course. Before Abigail’s first visit to the building, she had heard what she thought were exaggerated stories of corporate extravagance—that on the executive floor the pile carpet was so deep you had to wade through it. It was only when she visited Robert for the first time that she realized her husband’s office was inherently a subject for satire. And the carpet really was so heavy that it slowed you down.
Until this moment, Abigail had not seen Robert’s new PA. She would have been a surprise to most wives. It was not just the long blond hair, the milky-white complexion, the neckline that allowed her boss a view of jus
t enough breast to keep him interested, the petite waist, the trim legs and tiny feet that fitted into stiletto-heeled shoes—the kind that showed both the toes and the heels, narrow leather bands encasing each ankle. Abigail was sure she had read somewhere that women who wore such shoes were on the hunt. It was not just the PA’s appearance, though. As she came round the desk, a question in her eyes, Abigail saw something insufferably confident in them. If these offices were the caricature of corporate splendor, this girl was the caricature of the trophy PA.
How did we come to this? she asked herself; our ostentatious cars, our ridiculous home with its acres of garden, three entertainment lounges and five bedrooms—for two people. And now this PA … worst of all, this PA. And to run into her today, after what she had already been through. On what did Robert base his hiring criteria? she wondered. Pictures in Cosmopolitan? More likely, Playboy.
Something had brightened in the PA’s face. “Oh, you must be Mrs. Mokoapi?”
Mokoapi was Robert’s surname. Abigail had never adopted it. “I’m Abigail Bukula,” Abigail said. “Is my husband here?”
To Abigail’s satisfaction, the clear white skin deepened till it reached a full pink around the eyes and in patches on the neck. “I’m sorry, Mrs.…” She was visibly casting around in her mind. Clearly, Mrs. Bukula was not going to work either. “May I call you Abigail?” she asked.
But Abigail had not yet finished with the PA, she of the neat little white breasts peeping out at Abigail’s husband. “Ms. Bukula will do,” she said. “Where is my husband?”
“Robert is…” she started, but stopped immediately. “Mr. Mokoapi is in a meeting with the chairman and some of the institutional investors. They should have been out already.”
“Tell him his wife was here.” As she turned to go, another thought, or perhaps just a barb, came to her. “Tell him also that I’d appreciate him being home on time tonight.”
“Yes, Mrs.… Ms. Bukula.”
Abigail stopped in the doorway of the office and looked back at the still pink face of the PA. For the first time she realized that the kid was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. Jesus, Robert, she thought, what were you thinking? What part of your body were you thinking with?
3
The gates of Abigail and Robert’s home opened at the touch of a button. The house was set back perhaps fifty paces into a garden that required two gardeners to keep it in trim. Abigail had tried to persuade Robert that neither a property that size, nor a house that magnificent, were necessary, but he had said the company expected it. If you were the beneficiary of an empowerment deal of this size, the company expected you to behave that way. What sort of impression would it make if the CEO lived in an ordinary town house? Where would he entertain clients and investors?
She still felt the same, but Abigail admitted both to herself and to Robert that she loved the garden. There was a beautiful lawn kids could play on, if there ever were going to be kids. There were summer seats in cool shady corners, hooks for a hammock, also in the shade, a spot in one corner that was sheltered from any wind but caught the winter sun for most of the day. She loved the flowers, the trees, the ponds with their frogs and crickets, and the birds that visited daily. She loved them not because they were hers, but because they were beautiful and they were alive.
The house too, needed two servants, both of whom had soon learned that the fact that they shared skin color with the madam did not mean that they were going to get away with anything. To Abigail it was not a family relationship. They were well paid by the standards of the city in which they lived, their hours were reasonable and they were expected to work well. The first one to overstep her boundaries by extending three consecutive weekends by an extra day each, without permission or satisfactory reason, had been fired, bringing home the nature of the relationship to the others. They, in turn, would have passed on the news to the replacement. Since then, Abigail had no real staff problems.
She poured herself a glass of fruit juice and sat down in her favorite recliner on the patio. From where she was sitting, she had a view of the drive so that she would see Robert’s car when the gate opened. She could also see much of the garden where the two gardeners were busy closing up for the day. They were packing their implements onto the wheelbarrow to take them to the garden shed.
The worst thing about this huge house was being in it without Robert. When he was at home its absurd spaces did not seem that ridiculous. She hated being alone in the house, even if it was just for an afternoon. Very often she escaped into the garden or onto the patio on such days.
Abigail was a reader. She read novels, poetry, books about famous people and infamous ones, historical texts, wildlife studies, law reviews, case histories and newspapers. The newspapers she read were mostly those published by Vuna Corp., Robert’s company.
She had brought a book of Robert Frost’s poems out to the patio, but this afternoon the words made no sense. The picture of Robert’s so-called personal assistant rose in her mind, but she dismissed it. Worrying about this kid was foolishness.
The other matter was not. Oh God, she thought, how could they do this? She knew that this was not just an objective assessment. The liberation struggle, in which both her parents had died, had been intensely personal for her. Now, she felt, its legacy was being sullied. In the Scorpions they had created a crime-fighting force that, Abigail believed, was second to none anywhere in the world. They had delivered leaders of organized crime to the asset forfeiture unit, where the criminals had lost their ill-gotten fortunes. More than three-quarters of their cases had been successfully prosecuted. But then they had started to root out corruption in the state machinery. And, seemingly, that had been unforgivable.
Abigail put aside Frost’s poems and took up the afternoon paper. The front-page story was about the end of the Scorpions. Her eyes flicked across the columns, taking in the broad outline of the article. Opposition politicians were quoted as saying that this was a sure sign that government had no interest in bringing down the high crime rate. No spokesperson for either the Department of Justice, which was losing a division, or the police, which was gaining one, were available for comment at the time of going to press. A table compared the Scorpions’ excellent record to the relatively poor one of the regular police. In a sidebar, a criminologist she had never heard of compared the Scorpions to the FBI, coming to the conclusion that they were in the same category.
As she turned to page two, her cell phone rang. The voice on the other end told her that the caller was Sipho Dabengwa of the Sunday World. Abigail switched off her phone and went back to the newspaper.
It was on page five that she saw a story that she did read carefully. The headline read “Seven Zimbabwean Dissidents Still Missing.” Krisj Patel had managed to get in something about seven dissidents before the lines had gone down. This seemed to be his reason for calling her.
Abigail knew Zimbabwe well and loved it more than any place other than her own country, having lived there for a little more than a year, before the first democratic election made it possible for her to come home. She knew as much as any outsider about the Zimbabwean people’s struggle for their own democracy. Power was now being shared between the old dictator who had reduced the country to ruins, and the popular leader who, everyone hoped, despite the handicap of an unequal coalition, might have the strength and will to rebuild it.
According to the article, a few days earlier seven dissidents who had been particularly active before the power-sharing deal came into effect, had been picked up by the Central Intelligence Organization. She understood this body to be the political police that had often, during the previous twenty-nine years, been accused of providing violent solutions to the ruling party’s political problems.
The head of the CIO was quoted in the article as saying that the whole thing was a vicious slander; that they had not touched the seven in question. Even a representative of the popular co-leader had said that it was possible that the seven had left t
he country. One of the dissidents, who had asked not to be named, had said: “They were picked up by the CIO. We have witnesses to the arrests. The agents who arrested them are known to us.”
Abigail closed her eyes and lowered the newspaper till it came to rest over her face. Oh, my Africa, she thought. I’d hoped we were getting past this sort of thing.
It was almost dark when she was woken by Robert’s hand on her shoulder. He was bending over her. “Don’t sleep out here,” he was saying. “Let’s go inside.”
“Oh, you’re here.” She scrambled to her feet and into Robert’s arms. “Thank God you’re here.”
“Sorry about the Scorpions,” he said.
“Oh, Robert, what are they doing?”
“Let’s go inside,” he said. “It’ll soon be cold.”
4
Given the chance, Abigail was quick to tell others that she was never late for work. And her boast was close to being true. She was almost always first into the office. Being at her desk an hour or two before the others arrived gave her a chance to assemble her thoughts and her documentation for the day ahead. On the other hand, if she did come late, she seemed to be trying all day to catch up.
This morning she was late though, not just five or ten minutes, but almost forty. The powerful drive that comes with having a purpose had deserted her. She had been up too late the previous evening, arguing with Robert about the problem of working for an organization she did not believe in.
As soon as she passed the open door of Johanna’s office, she knew that something had happened to disturb her loyal assistant. Johanna was on her feet in a moment, her hands massaging each other in the way she had in times of crisis. “Gert’s been arrested,” she said.
Those Who Love Night Page 2