by Wilbur Smith
Tara felt not the least sympathy for him. There was so much she wanted to say, so many recriminations to lay upon him, but she could not trust herself to speak. Once she began, she might lose control and divulge too much. She might not be able to prevent herself gloating on the dreadful retribution that awaited him and all those like him, and she did not want to prolong this tête-à-tête, she wanted to be free to go to Moses, to warn him that today was not the day he had planned for. So she rose. ‘You know how I feel, we don’t have to discuss it. I’m going to bed. Excuse me.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He stood up courteously. ‘I’ll be working for the next few hours. I have to go over my notes for my meeting with Littleton and his team tomorrow afternoon, so don’t worry about me.’
Tara checked that Isabella was in her room and asleep, before she went to her suite and locked the door. She changed out of her long dress and jewellery into jeans and a dark sweater, then she made a cannabis cigarette, and while she smoked it she waited fifteen minutes by her watch for Shasa to settle down to his work. Then she switched off her lights. She dropped the cigarette butt into the toilet and flushed it away before she let herself into the passage once again, locking her suite against the unlikely chance that Shasa might come up to look for her. Then she went down the back stairs.
As she crossed the wide stoep, keeping against the wall, staying in the shadows and moving silently, a telephone rang in the library wing and she froze involuntarily, her heart jarring her ribs. Then she realized that the telephone must be Shasa’s private line, and she was about to move on, when she heard his voice. Although the curtains were drawn, the windows of his study were open and she could see the shadow of his head against the drapes.
‘Kitty!’ he said. ‘Kitty Godolphin, you little witch. I should have guessed that you’d be here.’
The name startled Tara, and brought back harrowing memories, but she could not resist the temptation to creep closer to the curtained window.
‘You always follow the smell of blood, don’t your Shasa said, and chuckled at her reply.
‘Where are you? The Nellie.’ The Mount Nelson was simply the best hotel in Cape Town. ‘And what are you doing now – I mean right this moment? Yes, I know it’s two o’clock in the morning, but any time is a good time – you told me that yourself a long time ago. It will take me half an hour to get there. Whatever else you do, don’t start without me.’ He hung up and she saw his shadow on the curtain as he stood up from his desk.
She ran to the end of the long stoep and jumped down into the hydrangea bed and crouched in the bushes. Within a few minutes Shasa came out of the side door. He had a dark overcoat over his smoking-jacket. He went down to the garages and drove away in the Jaguar. Even in his haste he drove slowly through the vineyards so as not to blow dust on his precious grapes, and, watching the headlights disappear, Tara hated him as much as she ever had. She thought that she should have grown accustomed to his philandering, but he was like a tom cat in rut – no woman was safe from him, and his moral outrage against Sean, his own son, for the same behaviour, had been ludicrous.
Kitty Godolphin – she cast her mind back to their first meeting and the television reporter’s reaction to the mention of Shasa’s name and now the reason for it became clear.
‘Oh God, I hate him so. He is totally without conscience or pity. He deserves to die!’ She said it aloud, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘I shouldn’t have said it, but it is true! He deserves to die and I deserve to be free of him – free to go to Moses and my child.’
She rose out of the hydrangea bushes, brushed the clinging soil from her jeans and crossed the lawns quickly. The moon was in its first quarter, but bright enough to throw her shadow in front of her, and she entered the vineyard with relief and hurried down the rows of vines that were heavy with leaf and grape. She skirted the winery and the stables and reached the servants’ cottages.
She had placed Moses in the room at the end of the second row of cottages and his window faced out on to the vineyard. She tapped on his window and his response was almost immediate; she knew he slept as lightly as a wild cat.
‘It’s me,’ she whispered.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I will open the door.’
He loomed in the doorway, naked except for a pair of white shorts, and his body shone in the moonlight like wet tar.
‘You are foolish to come here,’ he said, and taking her arm drew her into the single room. ‘You are putting everything at risk.’
‘Moses, please, listen to me. I had to tell you. It cannot be tomorrow.’
He stared at her contemptuously. ‘You were never a true daughter of the revolution.’
‘No, no, I am true, and I love you enough to do anything, but they have changed the arrangements. They will not use the chamber where you have set the charge. They will meet in the parliamentary dining-room.’
He stared at her a second longer, then he turned and went to the narrow built-in cupboard at the head of his bed and began to dress in his uniform.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘I have to warn the others – they also are in danger.’
‘What others?’ she asked. ‘I did not know there were others.’
‘You know only what you have to know,’ he told her curtly. ‘I must use the Chev – is it safer
‘Yes, Shasa is not here. He has gone out. Can I come with you?’
‘Are you mad?’ he asked. ‘If the police find a black man and a white woman together at this time of night—’ He did not finish the sentence. ‘You must go back to the house and make a phone call. Here is the number. A woman will answer, and you will say only, “Cheetah is coming – he will be there in thirty minutes.” That is all you will say and then you will hang up.’
Moses threaded the Chev through the maze of narrow streets of District Six, the old Malay quarter. During the day this was a colourful and thriving community of small stores and businesses. General dealers and tailors and tinsmiths and halal butcheries occupied the ground-floor shops of the decrepit Victorian buildings, while from the cast-iron fretwork of the open balconies above hung a festival of drying laundry, and the convoluted streets were clamorous with the cries of steet vendors, the mournful horns of itinerant fishmongers and the laughter of children.
At nightfall the traders shuttered their premises and left the streets to the street gangs and the pimps and the prostitutes. Some of the more daring white revellers came here late at night, to listen to the jazz players in the crowded shebeens or to look for a pretty coloured girl – more for the thrill of danger and discovery than for any physical gratification.
Moses parked the Chev in a dark side street. On the wall were the graffiti that declared this the territory of the Rude Boys, one of the most notorious of the street gangs, and he waited only a few seconds before the first gang member materialized out of the shadows, an urchin with the body of a child and the face of a vicious old man.
‘Look after it well,’ Moses flipped him a silver shilling. ‘If the tyres are slashed when I come back, I’ll do the same for your backside.’ The child grinned at him evilly.
He climbed the dark and narrow staircase to the Vortex Club. A couple on the landing were copulating furtively but furiously against the wall as Moses squeezed past. The white man turned his face away but he never missed a beat.
At the door to the club somebody studied him briefly through the peephole and then let him enter. The long crowded room was hazy with tobacco smoke and the sweet smell of cannabis. The clientele included the full spectrum from gang members in zoot suits and wide ties to white men in dinner-jackets. Only the women were all coloured.
Dollar Brand and his Quartet were playing a sweet soulful jazz and everybody was still and attentive. Nobody even looked up as Moses slipped down the side wall to the door at the far end, but the man guarding it recognized Moses and stood aside for him to enter.
In the backroom there was only one man sitting at
a round gambling table under a green shaded light. There was a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, and his face was pale as putty, his eyes implacable dark pits.
‘You are foolhardy to call a meeting now,’ said Joe Cicero, ‘without good reason. All the preparations have been made. There is nothing more to discuss.’
‘I have good reason,’ said Moses, and sat down on the empty chair, facing him across the baize-covered table.
Joe Cicero listened without expression, but when Moses finished, he pushed the lank hair off his forehead with the back of his hand. Moses had learned to interpret that gesture as one of agitation.
‘We cannot dismantle the escape route and then set it up again later. These things take time to arrange. The aircraft is already in position.’
It was an Aztec chartered from a company in Johannesburg, and the pilot was a lecturer in political philosophy at Witwatersrand University, the holder of a private pilot’s licence and a secret member of the South African Communist Party.
‘How long can he wait at the rendezvous?’ Moses asked, and Cicero thought about it a moment.
‘A week at the longest,’ he replied.
The rendezvous was an unregistered airstrip on a large drought-stricken ranch in Namaqualand which was lying derelict, abandoned by the discouraged owner. From the airfield it was a four-hour flight to Bechuanaland, the British protectorate that lay against the north-western border of the Union of South Africa. Sanctuary had been arranged for Moses there, the beginning of the pipeline by which most political fugitives were channelled to the north.
‘A week must be enough,’ Moses said. ‘Every hour increases the danger. At the very first occasion that we can be sure Verwoerd will take his seat again, I will do it.’
It was four o’clock in the morning before Moses left the Vortex Club and went down to where he had parked the Chev.
Kitty Godolphin sat in the centre of the bed, naked and cross-legged with all the shameless candour of a child.
In the years Shasa had known her, she had changed very little physically. Her body had matured slightly, her breasts had more weight to them and the tips had darkened. He could no longer make out the rack of her ribs beneath the smooth pale skin, but her buttocks were still lean as a boy’s and her limbs coltishly long and slim. Nor had she lost the air of guileless innocence, that aura of eternal youth which so contrasted with the cynical hardness of her gaze. She was telling him about the Congo. She had been there for the last five months and the material she had filmed would surely put her in line for her third Emmy and confirm her position as the most successful television journalist on the American networks. She was speaking in the breathless voice of an ingénue.
‘They caught these three Simba agents and tried them under the mango trees outside the burnt-out hospital, but by the time they had’ sentenced them to death, the light was too bad for filming. I gave the commander my Rolex watch, and in return he postponed the executions until the sun was up the next morning so that Hank could film. It was the most incredible footage. The next morning they paraded the condemned men naked through the marketplace and the local women bargained for the various parts of their bodies. The Baluba have always been cannibals. When they had sold all three of them, they took them down to the river and shot them, in the head, of course, so as not to damage the meat, and they butchered them there on the river bank and the women queued up to claim their portions.’ She was trying to shock him, and it irritated Shasa that she had succeeded.
‘Where do you stand, my love?’ he asked bitterly. ‘One day you are sympathetically interviewing Martin Luther King, and the next you are portraying all the grossest savagery of Africa.’
She laughed, that throaty chuckle that always roused him. ‘And the very next day I am recording the British imperialist making bargains with your gang of bully boys while you stand with a foot on the neck of your slaves.’
‘Damn it, Kitty. What are you – what are you trying to do?’
‘Capture reality,’ she told him simply.
‘And when reality doesn’t conform to your view of it, you bribe somebody with a Rolex watch to alter it.’
‘I’ve made you mad.’ She laughed delightedly, and he stood up from the bed and crossed to where he had thrown his clothes over the back of the chair. ‘You look like a little boy when you sulk,’ she called after him.
‘It will be light in an hour. I have to get back home and change,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an appointment with my Imperialist slave-masters at eleven.’
‘Of course, you’ve got to be there to hear Supermac tell you how much he wants to buy your gold and diamonds – and he doesn’t care whether they are dripping with the sweat and blood—’
‘All right, sweetness,’ he cut her off. ‘That’s enough for one night.’ He stepped into his trousers, and as he tucked in his shirt, he grinned at her. ‘Why do I always pick screaming radical females?’
‘You like the stimulation,’ she suggested, but he shook his head, and reached for the velvet smoking-jacket.
‘I prefer the loving – talking of which, when will I see you again?’
‘Why, at eleven o’clock at the Houses of Parliament, of course. I’ll try to get you in the shot, you are so photogenic, darling.’
He went to the bed and stooped over her to kiss that angelic smile on her lips. ‘I can never understand what I see in you,’ he said.
He was still thinking of her as he went down to the hotel carpark and wiped the dew off the windshield of the Jaguar. It was amazing how she had been able so effortlessly to hold his interest over all these years. No other woman, except Tara, had ever done that. It was silly how good he felt when he had been with her. She could still drive him wild with erotic desire, her tricks still worked on him, and afterwards he felt elated and wonderfully alive – and, yes, he enjoyed arguing with her.
‘God, I haven’t closed my eyes all night, yet I feel like a Derby winner. I wonder if I am still in love with the little bitch.’
He took the Jaguar down the long palm-lined drive from the Mount Nelson Hotel. Considering the proposition and recalling his proposal of marriage and her outright rejection, he went out through the hotel gates and took the main road that skirted the old Malay quarter of District Six. He resisted the temptation to shoot the red of the traffic lights at the foot of Roeland Street. It was highly unlikely there would be other traffic at this time of the morning, but he braked dutifully and was startled when another vehicle shot out of the narrow cross street and turned in front of his bonnet.
It was a sea-green Chevrolet station wagon, and he didn’t have to check the number plate to know that it was Tara’s. The headlights of the Jaguar shone into the cab of the Chev and for an instant he had a full view of the driver. It was Tara’s new chauffeur. He had seen him twice before, once at Weltevreden and once in the House of Assembly, but this time the driver was bare-headed and Shasa could see the full shape of his head.
As he had on both the previous occasions, Shasa had a strong sense of recognition. He had definitely met or known this man before, but the memory was eroded by time and quickly extinguished by his annoyance. The chauffeur was not permitted to use the Chev for his own private purposes, and yet here he was in the small hours of the morning driving around as though the vehicle belonged to him.
The Chev pulled away swiftly. The chauffeur had obviously recognized Shasa and the speed was proof of his guilt. Shasa’s first instinct was to give chase and confront the man, but the traffic light was still red against him and while he waited for it to change, he had time to reflect. He was in too good a mood to spoil it with unpleasantness, besides which any confrontation at four in the morning would be undignified, and would inevitably lead to questions about his own presence at the same hour on the fringes of the city’s notorious red-light area. There would be a better time and place to deal with the driver, and Shasa let him go, but he had neither forgiven nor forgotten.
Shasa parked the Jaguar in the garage
at Weltevreden, and the green Chev was in its place at the end of the line of cars, between Garry’s MG and Shasa’s customized Land-Rover. As he passed it, he laid his hand on the bonnet of the Chev and it was still hot, the metal ticking softly as it cooled. He nodded with satisfaction and went on up to the house, amused by the necessity to creep up to his own suite like a burglar.
He still felt light and happy at breakfast and he hummed as he loaded his plate with eggs and bacon from the silver chafing dish on the sideboard. He was the first one down but Garry was only a minute behind him.
‘The boss should always be the first man on the job, and the last man off it,’ he had taught Garry, and the boy had taken it to heart. ‘No, no longer boy.’ Shasa corrected himself, as he studied Garry. His son was only an inch shorter than he was, but wider across the shoulders and heavier in the chest. Down the full length of the corridor Shasa had often heard him grunting over his body-building weights. Even though he had just shaved, Garry’s jaw was blue with beard that by evening would need the razor again, and despite the Brylcreem his hair was already springing up in unruly spikes.
He sat down beside Shasa, took a mouthful of his omelette and immediately began talking shop. ‘He just isn’t up to the job any more, Pater. We need a younger man in that position, especially with all the extra responsibility of the Silver River Mine coming on stream.’
‘He has been with us twenty years, Garry,’ Shasa said mildly.
‘I’m not suggesting we shoot him, Dad. Just let him take his retirement. He is almost seventy.’
‘Retirement will kill him.’