God knows how long they drove for, I lost all track of time. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe an hour. But eventually the bakkie came to a halt. I could hear the sounds of traffic in the distance, but not the constant hum of township music and chatter. I was carried off the bakkie and into a building, through a couple of doors and dumped on to a hard cold floor. A moment later the hood was lifted.
I was in some kind of store room. There was a small window which was boarded up. A single electric bulb hung from the ceiling. A rickety table stood in the center of the room, on either side of which were two upended Castrol oil drums. The two men who had dumped me on the floor left the room, locking the door behind them. I stood up and began to yell for help. Instantly one of the men was back. He stepped rapidly over to me and struck me once in the stomach. It didn’t seem a particularly hard blow, but it winded me and left me doubled up on the floor again, gasping for breath.
“Quiet!” he snapped, glaring at me. Then he left the room again.
I decided not to scream anymore. I stood up and paced about the room, my hands still tied behind my back. I wondered who these men were. If they were kidnapping me for money, would Neels pay? A couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have had to ask that question. But now? Would he view this as a simple means of getting me out of the way?
The men were tough and professional. I assumed they wanted money.
I was very scared.
After about ten minutes the door opened and another man appeared. He was white, which surprised me. He was short and bulky, muscular rather than fat. He had a thick neck, a small moustache and hard little eyes. I noticed his hands were very large. I realized my first instincts had been wrong: this man was a policeman, a “rockspider,” as Zan would no doubt call him. He looked mean, but my spirits rose. I was in the hands of the authorities. I should be safe.
“Sit down, Mrs van Zyl.” Although the accent was harsh, the voice was surprisingly soft. Soft and confident.
I did as he asked, perching on the oil drum. He sat on the other one.
“I’m sorry we had to bring you here,” he said, pulling out a packet of cigarettes. He offered me one, and when I had shaken my head, lit one up himself. “I’m afraid we don’t have any coffee. But we do have some water. How about that?”
I shook my head again.
The man smiled. “I think you’ll need some water before we have finished.” He went over to the door and shouted out to someone called Elijah.
Then he sat down on the oil drum and examined me across the table.
“Why have you brought me here?” I asked.
“To talk to you.”
“But why did you kidnap me like that? Who are you, anyway?”
A man came in with a plastic cup of water, the man who had pulled the hood off my face and hit me in the stomach. The white man waited until the other had left.
“I’m a member of the Laagerbond.”
“And what are you holding me for?” I said. “You can’t do this. I’m an American citizen. I demand to speak to someone from the US consulate. Do you know who my husband is?”
The Laagerbonder smiled. “I know very well who your husband is, Mrs van Zyl. In fact, that’s why you are here. And as for the consulate, well you can demand what you want, but although my friends and I are employed by the government, we are acting in an unofficial capacity.”
“Well, in that case let me go.”
“I want you to tell me everything you know about the Laagerbond.”
“I don’t know anything about the Laagerbond. I’ve never even heard of it.”
“Now, I know that’s not true. Please answer my question.”
“I have answered it. I’ve never heard of the Laagerbond.”
“I can make you tell me.”
“No you can’t,” I said, stupidly.
This made the rockspider smile. “I can’t think how many dozens of people, hundreds of people, have told me what I want to know over the years. You will tell me.”
It was the certainty of his last comment that shook me. Until then I had been doing well with the bravado, buoying myself up with it.
“You won’t torture me,” I said. I meant it as a brave statement, but it came out of my mouth more as a half question.
“I won’t have to,” the man said, leaning forward. “There’s really no need. I will, of course, if necessary, but you and I both know that what you are hiding from me isn’t that important, at least not to you. I could make you betray your own mother, your husband, even,” he paused and smiled quickly, “your daughter. It wouldn’t take me long, less than an hour. But I don’t want that. All I want is for you to tell me something that really has nothing to do with you. You don’t care, or you shouldn’t.”
“You dare not torture me,” I said. “My husband is an important person. There would be all kinds of diplomatic consequences.”
“I’m going to show you some photographs,” the man said. “You’ll probably recognize Elijah, he’s the man who showed you in. And although you won’t see my face, you might recognize these hands.” He held out his meaty fists and opened and closed his fingers. “And you might recognize someone else.”
He opened the brown envelope and withdrew about twenty prints which he placed face down on the table in front of him. He turned the first one over. It was a black and white photograph of the terrified face of a black man, or kid really. Eyes wide, teeth bared, I had never seen such fear.
Another photograph. This time a black woman of about twenty. Fear again, but not just fear, dread. “Remember this face, you’ll see it later on,” the rockspider said.
I should have shut my eyes, but I stared at the photographs, I couldn’t help it.
The next was of the torn back of a child of about ten. The man called Elijah was standing next to him, a rhino-hide whip in his hands. Then more photos. Men, women, children; naked, bloodied, bruised, broken. Then the face of the first woman I had been shown, pressed against the floor, her eyes staring sightless. “I told you to remember that face,” the rockspider said.
Then, I think I started to sob. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the photos. A white man being hit with chains. The chains were held by the same meaty fists that were clutching the photo. The white man naked on the ground. The man’s face, dead.
“Isn’t that …?” I said.
“Yes,” the rockspider said. “I thought you would recognize him.”
It was the face of the Reverend Tom Kettering, an activist in the UDF who had been found murdered in Soweto two years ago. The authorities had said it was one of the township gangs. Except it wasn’t.
“Was that you?” I asked.
“You thought you recognized the hands?” the man said. “Mr Kettering had important friends in the US, didn’t he? I’d say he was more important than you, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You’re not going to do that to me, are you?”
The man smiled. “It’s entirely your choice. I can if you want. Oh, I’ve got one more photograph for you to look at.” He pulled out one final print. It was Caroline! She was chattering with her friends in the school playground. The man reached into his pile of prints and picked out the one of the ten-year-old boy with the torn back and placed it next to the photograph of Caroline.
That was it. I broke down. The tears came. It was true I was afraid for myself and for Caroline, but it wasn’t just that, I was crying for the people in those photos, for all the victims of the evil regime and the monster sitting in front of me.
He waited, until my sobbing had abated. “All right. Back to my questions. How much do you know about the Laagerbond?”
I told him, of course. It wasn’t as if I knew that much. I told him about stealing into Daniel Havenga’s car, I told him about the memo about Neels and I admitted I had seen the list of Laagerbond members. This last information caused him some concern. He asked me several times whether I had removed the list, but each time I said I hadn’t. Then he asked me which names I cou
ld remember. I couldn’t remember all of them, but I recounted the famous ones, the generals and the politicians I had recognized. Then I mentioned Visser and Havenga and a couple of others on the list. His eyes flickered when I said Moolman, a funny name that had stuck in my mind. I bet that’s him.
He never asked me whether I had copied the names down so I didn’t tell him.
He asked me who I had spoken to about the Laagerbond. I mentioned George Field, Neels and Zan, but swore that I hadn’t told any of them any of the details, although I assumed Neels knew them all already.
At last, the questions stopped.
“Thank you, Mrs van Zyl. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” the rockspider said. “I knew there wouldn’t be any need for physical force.”
I didn’t answer. I hung my head, ashamed that I had given in so easily, when those other brave people I had seen in the photographs had held out.
The rockspider seemed to read my mind. “Oh, don’t be ashamed. I’m certain you would be a much more difficult case if you were protecting someone you loved.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like your daughter.”
“You won’t harm Caroline!”
The man sighed with impatience. “Of course we won’t harm Caroline. Because you will never mention the Laagerbond to anyone ever again. Not even to your husband. Will you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Will you?” His voice, which had been unnaturally soft throughout the whole interview, hardened.
“No,” I whispered.
He examined me, trying to make sure I meant what I had said. I did.
“Excellent. I can see you have no need to fear for your daughter’s safety. Now, time you went home. Elijah will take you. But it will involve putting that hood back on.”
An hour later I found myself by the side of the road half a mile up the valley from Hondehoek.
Finneas came home a couple of hours later. He had two broken ribs and had lost a tooth.
I’ve talked a lot over the years about fighting the regime. Only now do I have any inkling what that really means.
13
Sandy Waterhouse stood in the ‘All Other Passports’ queue at Heathrow’s Terminal Three. Her flight from New York had arrived at the same time as one from Pakistan and another from Jamaica, and the line was moving slowly. She was tired – she hadn’t done more than doze on the plane – but her brain was buzzing.
She knew that this was an important trip, but now, standing on British soil, she was beginning to feel it. She was scared and excited and impatient. The dice were thrown and she wanted to see how they would land.
Officially she was in London for three days working with a client, a large American insurance company, on the acquisition of a British investment-management firm. But she had an appointment to see the senior partner of her own firm’s London office that morning at eleven o’clock. She checked her watch. It was barely seven. She had plenty of time to go to her hotel and have a shower before seeing him at Trelawney Stewart’s office in the City.
The firm, medium sized by New York standards but with a strong reputation, was doing well in London and was expanding. They were recruiting locally, and planning to send over two more partners from New York. They also needed experienced, capable associates who understood both the American and the British way of doing things. That, Sandy hoped, was a good description of herself.
She had spent two years in London and had hated most of it. She had no friends there and because of the ridiculous hours she had been forced to work she had found it virtually impossible to make any. There had only been Jen, whose death had deeply shocked her. And Alex. Alex Calder.
Jen’s death had brought them together as she had supported him in his single-minded attempts to find out what had really happened to his assistant. She liked Alex, she liked him very much. It wasn’t just that she found him physically attractive, with his strong, well-toned body and those thoughtful blue-grey eyes that seemed to assess and understand her, his kind smile and his gentle voice with that soft Scottish intonation. She admired him too. He had been willing to take on great risks to do what he, and she, thought was right. Many of the men she met every day on Wall Street took few risks in doing what they knew was wrong.
She hadn’t encouraged the relationship, if it could be called that; she knew that her eighty-hour weeks weren’t really conducive to it. But they had had a great time together in Italy. Since then their encounters had been characterized by frustration and the occasional snatched jet-lagged day. Then there had been the awful weekend when he had come to New York to see her and she had been whisked off to Dallas. All right, he had blamed her for that, but he didn’t seem to understand that there was nothing that she could do about it, that a deal was closing and there was no other lawyer who knew the documents, and that she couldn’t have refused to go and still keep her job at Trelawney Stewart. She had been looking forward to the weekend too! It hadn’t been exactly fun to spend Friday and Saturday night awake until four a.m. arguing over warranties in legal agreements. He hadn’t understood that.
The conclusion was obvious to both of them: there was no future in this relationship. Sandy was angry about this. Angry with herself, and angry with Alex. But as the weeks went by she was sad about it too. It wasn’t often that someone like Alex came along. Couldn’t she do something to make things easier? It would be difficult. She knew what Trelawney Stewart’s partners would think. That she was a soft-headed woman who was willing to put her career second to her love life. Before long she’d be married and having babies. They’d never say it, probably not even to each other, but they’d think it.
Why should it be she who made the compromise? Why couldn’t Alex move to New York? She understood very well his reasons for stepping away from the financial world, but perhaps he could do something with airfields or flying. He could at least try; he could at least discuss it with her. The anger and frustration that had been simmering since that disastrous weekend flared up again.
Then she had flown up to Martha’s Vineyard to spend the long Memorial Day weekend at the end of May at her folks’ place. Over dinner her father asked her about Alex. She explained the problem, why the relationship wasn’t really going to work. She expected him to leave it at that, her father never usually seemed to take more than a polite interest in her boyfriends, whether because he wasn’t interested or he respected her privacy, she wasn’t quite sure. But this time it was different.
‘Do you like this man?’ he had asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘A lot?’
She had reddened at this untypical question from her father. ‘Yeah, I guess. A lot.’
‘Then why don’t you talk to Trelawney Stewart? See what they can do.’
‘You know how these firms work, Dad,’ she said. ‘They’ll just view it as a sign of weakness. I’m doing really well at the moment and I don’t want to screw it all up.’
Her father exchanged glances with her mother. Sandy detected a conspiracy. They ate in silence. Sandy was wary.
‘Stanhope Moore asked me to go to Sydney once,’ her father said at last. ‘They wanted to make a big push in Australasia. They wanted me to head it up. It was a great opportunity. I guess I was about thirty-five. You were three.’
‘I don’t remember going to Sydney,’ Sandy said.
‘No. Grandmother Peabody was very sick. She had cancer and Mom was spending a lot of time with her. I told them we couldn’t go. They suggested I leave the family in the States and spend one month there and two weeks here. They were very persuasive. But your mother needed me here with her.’
‘OK, but that didn’t hurt your career, did it?’
‘Sure it did. I got passed over for promotion that year and the next. It took me three or four years to get back on to the fast track.’
‘That was different,’ Sandy protested. ‘You’re a man, they understand that kind of thing. I’m a woman. I’m not supposed to put my personal
feelings ahead of the job.’
Sandy’s father shrugged. ‘I don’t know where you get that idea from. I nearly went to Sydney. I guess all I’m telling you is that I’m glad I didn’t.’
Sandy looked at her father, countless arguments running through her head. Her father’s point was, of course, that his career had recovered. Until the bank had been swallowed up in a merger a few years earlier, he had been chairman of Stanhope Moore, one of the most prestigious and conservative commercial banks in the country.
But Sandy couldn’t agree with her father. It just wasn’t allowed. She loved him of course, and he loved her, but ever since she was eighteen he had been the enemy. At college she had stumbled into a student debate on whether the United States’ big banks should forgive the billions of dollars of debt owed to them by the world’s poorest nations. The argument that they should seemed to Sandy incontrovertible. She also realized that her father was one of the few men in the country who could really make it happen. And so, unlike the other fifty or so students in the room, Sandy could actually influence the fate of the Third World.
That running war with her father was still being waged, if on a much lower level than it had been in her early twenties. Cornered by him on her attitude to Alex and to her work, Sandy’s instinct was to summon the plight of the starving in Africa and Latin America to her aid, but she didn’t. She did, however, exercise her right to behave grumpily for the remainder of the weekend.
But her father’s point had sunk in. And now, now she was willing to give it a go.
Her passport stamped, she strode through baggage reclaim and customs, her carry-on sized suitcase trundling along behind her. She decided to take the train to Paddington rather than a taxi. She didn’t know what it was about her, but whenever she took a cab in London, invariably the driver began a conversation. Usually she didn’t mind, but this time she wanted some peace and privacy. She bought an International Herald Tribune to hide behind and sought out the platform.
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