by Wilbur Smith
‘Of course I told Nana first.’ Isabella hugged his arm. ‘I always start at the top.’
‘When she was little I always threatened to hand her over to a policeman if she was naughty,’ Centaine said complacently as she carried her plate to the breakfast table. ‘I hope this policeman can cope with her.’
‘He’s not a policeman,’ Isabella protested. ‘He’s a brigadier.’
Shasa ladled eggs and fried tomato onto his plate and went to his place at the head of the table. The morning paper was folded neatly on his side plate, and he shook it open at the front page as he sat down. The main news was the proposed meeting between the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and Ian Smith to settle the Rhodesian issue. Now he saw that the suggested venue was a British warship at sea. Israel and Jordan were still disputing the Hebron Valley, and closer to home the Robben Island ferry had capsized during the night with the certain loss of at least two lives, while eight others were missing.
The telephone on the sideboard rang and Centaine looked up from buttering her toast. ‘That will be Garry,’ she said. ‘He rang twice while you were out riding.’
‘It’s only eight o’clock in the morning,’ Shasa protested, but he went to answer the telephone. ‘Hello, Garry, where are you?’
Garry sounded surprised. ‘At the office, of course.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Swimming-pools,’ Garry answered. ‘I have a chance to get the franchise for a new process of making cheap swimming-pools. It’s called Gunite. Holly and I saw it when we were on honeymoon in the States.’
‘Good Lord, only the very rich can afford private swimming-pools,’ Shasa protested.
‘Everybody will buy my swimming-pools – every home in the country will have one by the time I’m finished.’
Garry’s enthusiasm was infectious.
‘It works, Pater. I’ve seen it, and the figures add up perfectly. Only trouble is I have to give an answer by noon today. Someone else is interested.’
‘How much?’ Shasa asked.
‘Four million initially – that’s for the franchise and plant. Another four million over two years for running costs, then we will be into profit.’
‘All right,’ Shasa said. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Thanks, Pater. Thanks for trusting me.’
‘Well, you haven’t let me down yet. How is Holly?’
‘She’s fine. She’s right here with me.’
‘At the office at eight in the morning?’ Shasa laughed.
‘Of course.’ Again Garry sounded surprised. ‘We are a team. The swimming-pools were her idea.’
‘Give her my love,’ Shasa said and hung up.
As he went back to his seat, Centaine said, ‘It’s the Prime Minister’s budget vote this afternoon. I thought I’d drop in.’
‘It should be interesting,’ Shasa agreed. ‘I think Verwoerd is going to make a major policy speech about the country’s international position. I have a committee meeting on armaments this morning, but why don’t you meet me for lunch and you can listen to Doctor Henk’s speech from the public gallery afterwards. I’ll ask Tricia to get you a ticket.’
Tricia was waiting for him anxiously when an hour later Shasa walked into his parliamentary suite.
‘The Minister of Police wants to see you most urgently, Mr Courtney. He asked me to let him know the moment you arrived. He said he’d come to your office.’
‘Very well.’ Shasa glanced at his appointment book on her desk. ‘Let him know I’m here and then get a ticket for my mother for the public gallery this afternoon. Is there anything else?’
‘Nothing important.’ Tricia picked up the in-house telephone to ring the Minister of Police’s office and then paused. ‘There has been a strange woman ringing you this morning. She called three times. She wouldn’t give her name and she asked for Squadron Leader Courtney. Funny, isn’t it?’
‘All right, let me know if she calls again.’ Shasa was frowning as he went through to his own office. The use of his old Air Force rank was strangely disquieting. He went to his desk and began work on the mail and the memoranda that Tricia had placed on his blotter, but almost immediately the buzzer rang on his intercom.
‘Minister De La Rey is here, sir.’
‘Ask him to come right in, Tricia.’
Shasa rose and went to meet Manfred, but as they shook hands he could see that Manfred was a worried man.
‘Did you read the news report about the sinking of the ferry?’ Manfred did not even return his greeting but came immediately to business.
‘I noticed it, but didn’t read it all.’
‘Moses Gama was on the boat when it sank,’ Manfred said.
‘Good Lord.’ Shasa glanced involuntarily at the ivory and gold-leaf altar chest which still stood against the wall of his office. ‘Is he safer?’
‘He is missing,’ Manfred said. ‘He may have drowned, or he may be alive. Either way we are in a very serious predicament.’
‘Escaped?’ Shasa asked.
‘One of the survivors, a prison officer, says that there were two vessels at the accident scene, a large ship without lights that collided with the ferry and another smaller craft that arrived seconds after the ferry capsized. In the darkness it was impossible to see any details. It is a distinct possibility that Gama was spirited away.’
‘If he drowned, we will be accused of murdering him,’ Shasa said softly, ‘with disastrous international repercussions.’
‘And if he is at large, we will face the possibility of a popular uprising of the blacks similar to Lange and Sharpeville.’
‘What are you doing about it?’ Shasa asked.
‘The entire police force is on full alert. One of our best men, my own son Lothar, is flying down from the Witwatersrand in an Air Force jet to take charge of the investigation. He will land within the next few minutes. Navy divers are already attempting to salvage the wreckage of the ferry.’
For another ten minutes they discussed all the implications of the wreck, and then Manfred moved to the door.
‘I will keep you informed as we get further news.’
Shasa followed him into the outer office, and as they passed Tricia’s desk she stood up.
‘Oh, Mr Courtney, that woman called again while you were with Minister De La Rey.’ Manfred and Shasa both paused, and Tricia went on, ‘She asked for Squadron Leader Courtney again, sir, and when I told her you were in conference, she said she had news for you about White Sword. She said you’d understand.
‘White Sword!’ Shasa froze and stared at her. ‘Did she leave a number?’
‘No, sir, but she said that you must meet her at the Cape Town railway station at five-thirty this afternoon. Platform four.’
‘How will I know who she is?’
‘She says she knows you by sight. You are merely to wait on the platform, she will come to you.’
Shasa was so preoccupied with the message that he did not notice Manfred De La Rey’s reaction to the code name ‘White Sword’. All colour had drained from Manfred’s craggy features, and his upper lip and jowls were covered by a sheen of perspiration. Without another word he turned and strode out into the corrider.
The name ‘White Sword’ kept plaguing Shasa all through the Armscor meeting. They were discussing the new air-toground missiles for the Air Force but Shasa found it difficult to concentrate. He was plagued by the memory of his grandfather, that good and gentle man whom Shasa had loved and who had been murdered by White Sword. His death had been one of the fiercest tragedies of his young life, and the rage that he had felt at the brutal killing came back to him afresh.
‘White Sword,’ he thought. ‘If I can find out who you are, even after all these years, you will pay, and the interest will be more onerous for the time the debt has stood.’
Manfred De La Rey went directly to his office at the end of the corridor after he had left Shasa. His secretary spoke to him as he passed her desk but he did not seem to hear her.<
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He locked the door to his own office, but did not sit at the massive mahogany desk. He prowled the floor restlessly, his eyes unseeing and his heavy jaws chewing like a bulldog with a bone. He took the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his chin and then paused to examine his face in the wall mirror behind his desk. He was so pale that his cheeks had a bluish sheen, and his eyes were savage as those of a wounded leopard caught in a trap.
‘White Sword,’ he whispered aloud. It was twenty-five years since he had used that code name, but he remembered standing on the bridge of the German U-boat, coming in towards the land in darkness, with his hair and great bushy beard dyed black, staring out at the signal fires on the beach where Roelf Stander waited for him.
Roelf Stander had been with him through all the dangerous days and the wild endeavours. They had planned many of their operations in the kitchen of the Stander cottage in the little village of Stellenbosch. It was there in that kitchen that he had given them the details of the action that would be the signal for the glorious uprising of Afrikaner patriots. And at all those meetings Sarah Stander had been present, a quiet unobtrusive presence, serving coffee and food, never speaking – but listening. It was only many years later that Manfred had been able to guess at how well she had listened.
In 1948, when the Afrikaners had at last won at the ballot box the power which they had failed to seize at the point of the sword, Manfred’s hard and loyal work had been rewarded with a deputy minister’s post in the Department of Justice.
One of his first acts had been to send for the files of the unsolved attempt on the life of Jan Smuts, and the murder of Sir Garrick Courtney. Before he destroyed the files he read them through carefully, and he learned that they had been betrayed. There had been a traitor in their gallant band of patriots – a woman who had telephoned the Smuts police officers to warn them of the assassination.
He had guessed at the woman’s identity, but had never extracted his full retribution, waiting for the moment to ripen, savouring the thought of revenge over the decades, watching the traitor’s misery, watching her growing old and bitter, while frustrating her husband’s efforts to succeed in law and politics, in the guise of mentor and adviser, steering him into folly and disaster until Roelf Stander had lost all his sustenance, his property and his will to carry on. All that time Manfred had waited for the perfect moment for the final revenge stroke – and at last it had arrived. Sarah Stander had come to him to plead for the life of the bastard he had placed in her womb – and he had denied her. The pleasure of it had been exquisite, made more poignant by the years he had waited for it.
Now the woman had turned vindictive. He had not anticipated that. He had expected the blow to break and destroy her. Only the greatest good fortune had given him forewarning of this new betrayal she planned.
He turned from the mirror and sat down at his desk. He reached determinedly for the telephone and told his secretary, ‘I want Colonel Bester in the Bureau of State Security.’
Bester was one of his most trusted officers.
‘Bester,’ he barked. ‘I want a detention order drawn up urgently. I will sign it myself, and I want it executed immediately.’
‘Yes, Minister. Can you give me the name of the detainee?’
‘Sarah Stander,’ Manfred said. ‘Her address is 16 Eike Laan, Stellenbosch. If the arresting officers cannot find her there, she should be on platform four of the Cape Town railway station at five-thirty p.m. this afternoon. The woman must speak to no one before she is arrested – your men must make certain of that.’
As Manfred hung up he smiled grimly. Under the law he had the power to arrest and detain any person for ninety days, and to hold that person completely incommunicado. A great deal could happen in ninety days. Things could change, a person might even die. It was all taken care of. The woman could cause no further trouble.
The telephone on his desk rang, and Manfred snatched it up, expecting it to be Bester again.
‘Yes, what is it?’
‘Pa, it’s me – Lothie.’
‘Yes, Lothie. Where are you?’
‘Caledon Square. I landed twenty minutes ago, and I have taken over the investigation. There is news, Pa. The divers have found the ferry. There is no sign of the prisoner’s body but the cabin door has been forced open. We must assume that he escaped. Worse than that, somebody engineered his escape.’
‘Find him,’ Manfred said softly. ‘You must find Moses Gama. If we don’t, the consequences could be disastrous.’
‘I know,’ Lothar said. ‘We will find him. We have to find him.’
Centaine refused to eat the food in the parliamentary dining-room. ‘It’s not that I am fussy, chéri, in the desert I ate live locusts and meat that had lain four days in the sun, but—’ She and Shasa walked down through the gardens, across the top end of town to the Café Royal on Greenmarket Square, where the first oysters of the season had arrived from Knysna lagoon.
Centaine sprinkled lemon juice and tabasco sauce, scooped a gently pulsating mouthful from the half shell and sighed with pleasure.
‘And now, chéri,’ she dabbed the juice from her lips, ‘tell me why you are so far away that you do not laugh at even my best efforts.’
‘I’m sorry, Mater.’ Shasa signalled to the waiter to top up his champagne glass. ‘I had a strange phone call this morning — and I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything else. Do you remember White Sword?’
‘How can you ask?’ Centaine laid down her fork. ‘Sir Garry was more dear to me than my own father. Tell me all about it.’
They spoke of nothing else for the rest of lunch, exploring together ancient memories of that terrible day on which a noble and generous man had died, a man who had been precious to them both.
At last Shasa called for the bill. ‘It’s half past one already. We will have to hurry to reach the House before it beings. I don’t want to miss any part of Verwoerd’s speech.’
At sixty-six years of age Centaine was still active and agile, and Shasa was not forced to moderate his stride for her. They were still talking animatedly as they passed St George’s Cathedral and turned into the gardens.
Ahead of them two men sat on one of the park benches, and there was something about them that caught Shasa’s attention even at a distance of a hundred yards. The taller of the pair was a swarthy complexioned man who wore the uniform of a parliamentary messenger. He sat very stiffly upright and stared straight ahead of him with a fixed expression.
The man beside him was also dark-haired but his face was colourless as putty and the dead black hair fell forward on to his forehead. He was leaning close to the parliamentary messenger, speaking into his ear as though imparting a secret, but the messenger’s face was expressionless and he showed not the least reaction to the other man’s words.
As they came level with the bench, Shasa leaned forward to see past Centaine, and at less than five paces looked directly into the pale face of the smaller of the men. His eyes were black and implacable as pools of liquid tar, but as Shasa studied him, the man deliberately turned his face away. Yet his lips kept moving, talking so softly to the man in the parliamentary uniform that Shasa could not catch even a murmur of his voice.
Centaine tugged at his sleeve. ‘Chéri, you are not listening to me.’
‘I’m sorry, Mater,’ Shasa apologized absentmindedly.
‘I wonder why this woman chose the railway station,’ Centaine repeated.
‘I suppose she feels safer in a public place,’ Shasa hazarded, and glanced back over his shoulder. The two men were still on the bench, but even in his preoccupation with other things the passionless malevolence that Shasa had seen in that tar-black gaze made him shiver as though an icy wind had blown upon the back of his neck.
As they turned into the lane that led to the massive edifice of parliament, Shasa felt suddenly confused and uncertain. There was too much happening all around him over which he had no control. It was a sensation to which he wa
s not accustomed.
Joe Cicero whispered the formula softly. ‘You can feel the worm in your belly.’ ‘Yes,’ the man beside him replied, staring straight ahead. Only his lips moved as he made the reply, ‘I can feel the worm.’
‘The worm asks if you have the knife.’
‘Yes, I have the knife,’ said the man. His father had been a Greek and he had been born illegitimate in Portuguese Mozambique of a mulatto woman. His mixed blood was not apparent. It seemed merely as though he was of Mediterranean extraction. Only Europeans were employed as messengers in the South African parliament.
‘You can feel the worm in your belly,’ Joe Cicero reinforced the man’s conditioning.
‘Yes, I can feel the worm.’
Eight times in the past few years he had been in mental institutions. It was while he was in the last of these that he had been selected and the conditioning of his mind accomplished.
‘The worm asks if you know where to find the devil,’ Joe Cicero told him. The man’s name was Demetrio Tsafendas and he had been introduced into South Africa the previous year, once his conditioning was completed.
‘Yes,’ said Tsafendas. ‘I know where to find the devil.’
‘The worm in your belly orders you to go straight to where the devil is,’ Joe Cicero said softly. ‘The worm in your belly orders you to kill the devil.’ Tsafendas stood up. He moved like an automaton. ‘The worm orders you to go now!’
Tsafendas started towards the parliament building with an even, unhurried tread.
Joe Cicero watched him go. It was done. All the pieces had been placed with great care. At last the first boulder had started to roll down the hillside. It would gather others as it built up speed and momentum. Soon it would be a mighty avalanche and the shape of the mountain would be changed for ever.
Joe Cicero stood up and walked away.
The first person Shasa saw as he and Centaine walked up the front steps to the parliament entrance was Kitty Godolphin and his heart surged with excitement and unexpected pleasure. He hadn’t seen her since that illicit interlude in the south of France eighteen months before. Shasa had chartered a luxury yacht and they had cruised as far as Capri. When they parted, she had promised to write — but she never kept her promises and here she was again with no warning, smiling that sweet girlish smile with the devilment in her eyes, coming to greet him as innocently and naturally as though their last kiss had been hours before.