So you thought the bad old ways had died with the birth of the new, that the whispers and lies of the past had been forgotten in the freshly minted land of Mandela. You’d be dead wrong. Alan Cowell’s high-speed thriller rips a wormhole in the rainbow nation and throws us back to a time when right and wrong were fixed in blood and love came off second best. In a broodingly atmospheric story that piles on the suspense, Cowell lays bare the fragile human hearts that beat uncertainly in the aftershock of apartheid. There are no heroes here except dead ones. And even they’re not perfect.
– CHARLOTTE BAUER, WRITER
A political thriller by a legendary New York Times correspondent who knows South Africa, its history, its secrets and its intrigue so well.
– ROBIN WRIGHT, AUTHOR AND FORMER AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
When old friends reluctantly revisit their role in The Struggle against apartheid, they find they have secrets to hide, betrayals to forget and new loves to pursue. Permanent Removal is a tautly told tale of inner torment – contemporary, courageous, compelling.
– JOHN BORRELL, AUTHOR OF THE WHITE LAKE, AND FORMER TIME MAGAZINE BUREAU CHIEF IN AFRICA
With a journalist’s eye for detail, and a consummate knowledge of time, place and circumstance won the hard way, Alan Cowell weaves a spellbinding tale of a society steeped in blood and deception, and still far from truth or reconciliation. Permanent Removal should be required reading for every South African, and for everyone who wants to know, or thinks they know, about the struggle to end apartheid, and its legacy.
– ALLEN PIZZEY, CBS NEWS
Cowell has done it again, proving himself master of all genres. Paris Correspondent was the funniest of novels on modern journalism. Now, Permanent Removal raises the bar for political thrillers. It’s taut, romantic and, at the end, a shock. You’ll love it.
– CHARLES GLASS, AUTHOR OF, AMONG OTHERS, AMERICANS IN PARIS, DESERTERS AND SYRIA BURNING
A refreshing new work by an author who delves into the brutal past and the trembling present in an approach which is both stimulating and provocative, and certain to cause controversy. Disturbing, unusually structured and enthralling.
– WILF NUSSEY, AUTHOR AND RETIRED FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Permanent Removal
Alan S Cowell
First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2016
10 Orange Street
Sunnyside
Auckland Park 2092
South Africa
+2711 628 3200
www.jacana.co.za
© Alan S Cowell, 2016
All rights reserved.
Cover design by publicide
Job no. 002461
Also available as an e-book:
d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-2344-6
ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-2345-3
mobi file ISBN 978-1-4314-2346-0
See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Part Six
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
Prologue
WHEN SHE LEFT THE PLACE, she felt free. The tin roofs and dirt roads receded in the rear-view mirrors. Passion and its artful satisfaction replaced the preoccupation with “the issues”. She drove with ever-greater urgency, crossing town, watching the landscape change before her eyes. So what if They followed her?
At the beginning, the cars were rusted, cast-offs. The roadsides choked under a litter of greying, abandoned garbage bags and rags of newspaper caught on rusting wire. You could smell the sweat, the poverty. People walked miles looking for work, money, relatives, carrying their shoes over their shoulders to save on wear and tear. Then, the mess gave way to silvery high-rises, glass-flanked behemoths clustered on the golden reef, the gateway to the other side: the quiet lawns under the sprinklers’ rainbow, the discreet remote-controlled gates, the late-model German cars hissing on highways of smooth asphalt, bearing their cargoes of golf-sleek men and bejewelled women.
Once or twice, her sense of mission rebelled and she swung the blue Kombi around in a perilous 180 to return to The Place, where people lived on the edge. Most times, anticipation lured her on – love in a place of tennis courts, private pools, discretion. If there was a salve to her conscience it was, simply, that these crazy moments were the exception to prove the rule. A necessary aberration, a cleansing. Hungers sated, she would return gladly to The Struggle.
Part One
They will use the flashing patrol light to force the sky-blue Honda to pull over – an old trick, but effective. They will manacle their captives and switch licence plates. They will drive the four men back towards the dunes. In the first instance, there will be knives and bludgeons. Then petrol to incinerate the bodies and the Honda.
Dirty work, no doubt, but someone had to do it.
One
THE LETTER ARRIVED IN THE FINAL delivery before I closed the house and set the alarm sensors for a long absence. I resisted an irrational temptation to call a last goodbye to someone who had been there only in my imagination.
The cab – not, please note, an official vehicle placed at my exclusive disposal – was waiting across the frosted lawn. The driver yawned, reaching for a Styrofoam cup of something warm and steamy. The music on the car radio sounded vaguely oriental, but this was an era before the quarter-tones of the mosque and the muezzin’s call became, for us, the symphony of menace. Down the street, between petrified trees and iced-over SUVs, newspapers were being delivered to other people: my subscriptions to the Times and Post and Journal had been suspended indefinitely – an act of giddy liberation. Untethered from my daily rites, I felt remarkably, peacefully, alone.
I went through the final fussy mental checklist of a protracted itinerary – passport, cash, medications, credit cards, traveller’s cheques, money belt, shortwave radio, maps, workout kit, letters of introduction, contact book, backup USB, PDA, Swiss army knife (not in the carry-on, of course – even in those days!), batteries and cables and connections for the technology that burdens the modern wanderer. Past travellers took with them great steamer trunks and cases of victuals – limes, porter, salted hams, firearms in anticipation variously of scurvy or pirates or hostile receptions.
These days, you prepare as if you are some kind of techno-turtle, carrying your cyber-shell on your back: bound to the world wherever you are, wired or wireless, made whole by e-mail and internet access.
I looked back at the white colonial home, memorising the empty porch and shuttered windows that mocked any dreams of a family seat, a cradle of generations. Then I fell into traveller mode, staring without seeing past the cab’s stained, Perspex division into the gloaming.
My mind was alread
y far ahead, across miles of ocean and desert and bush that I would traverse at a sanitised altitude of seven or eight miles, untouched by storm or pestilence. Or so I thought. But your ghosts always find ways to haunt you. When they are awoken, it is well to be prepared.
I have sometimes asked myself how events might have unfolded if the letter had arrived in time for me to absorb its contents, in time to weigh its implications so much earlier. Or if I had never seen it at all. But “what ifs” has never been my style. What happened, the past, may be written about – as in this attempt – but not rewritten. Not if we are honest. Not if we seek to avoid making the same mistakes over and again.
An early transatlantic connection deposited me in London with just enough time to switch terminals for the overnight flight to Cape Town. In my previous existence, Embassy Suburbans – with tinted windows, driven by armed, over-fed minders wearing fishing vests and cargo pants – ferried me across bumpy tarmac; the kind of ostentatious discretion that people associate with American policy in the half-light between diplomacy and mischief. At dingy airport lounges in Cairo or Tashkent at some unwelcome hour, with large insects buzzing in pools of flickering neon and soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms cradling worn Kalashnikovs, second-tier officers ensured that I traversed their ambassador’s territory without embarrassment or offense. Envoys handed over sealed cables: eyes only, and so forth. Not anymore.
Thomas J Kinzer, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, abbreviated sometimes with faux bonhomie to “TJ”, had become Tom Kinzer. Lecture-circuit guru, TV soundbite dispenser, conference invitee and attendee, panel moderator, occasional op-ed contributor.
When journalists asked – with decreasing frequency – I told them I embraced this early change of life, this transfer from public to private sector, from the closed world of diplomacy to the open exchange of ideas. But there were times – in the right company, at the appropriate hour and with the requisite lubrication of Jack Daniels, when I would vouchsafe a degree of bitterness at having played the diplomatic game so dutifully and with such consummate duplicity. Only to be knifed by my own side. A high-flying career sustained by the rapier thrust of ambiguity had been lost to the political sabre-slash.
The metaphors of treachery are always those of the blade.
Somehow, in the very early retirement deal, along with the annuity and healthcare provision, I wanted my morality back. But how could a scarred diplomatic warrior insist on the return of openness, honesty? Would a courtesan demand the restoration of maidenhood?
Materially there was no real hardship. I could hardly complain of mistreatment when my garage housed a late-model Jaguar (despite the attentions of my ex-wife’s lawyers in Washington and Paris) and my calendar was generously booked with paying engagements. But, left to dangle in the wind, your name not mentioned inside the Beltway without the appended question “wasn’t he the one?”, financial reward is not everything you consider to be your due.
On that journey from a northern winter to a southern summer, I had particular cause to attend the conference to which I had been invited, far beyond the stated agenda.
True, I felt stimulated by the challenge of steering debates with some of the host nation’s great thinkers, by the flattery of sharing a podium with the likes of Suzman and Gordimer. Folders of pre-conference material told me the theme was “Truth and Reconciliation – Prerequisites of Justice?” The list of speakers was impressive, a galaxy of moral celebrity – Tutu and Mandela, Boraine and Bizos. The kind of people for whom the subject under discussion was the indigestible, daily reality, lodged in the national throat, not some nebulous college-campus theory.
But voyagers harbour subliminal motives. Nostalgia moulds journeys as surely as flight schedules. I had travelled this way before, much earlier in my life. I found myself asking: would the mountains be lower now, the passions less intense, its objects less gilded?
As the flight attendant leaned over to lower the window blind, I caught sight of myself, slightly stubbled, but still presentable – dark around the chin and with the beginnings of greyness at the temples – peering back at my own reflection with an expression somewhere between bemusement and apprehension: was I, Thomas Kinzer, arch-cynic, one-time manipulator of governments and dark events, looking for some magical return to innocence?
I have never been prone to airborne excess. Yet on this journey, feeling unready for sleep, I took a little more wine than usual with dinner, and, surprising myself, requested a Scotch on the rocks instead of decaf. I tried reading some of the standard authorities – Gobodo-Madikizela, Krog, Joubert – but could not concentrate. I swung the small, personal in-flight screen into place and flicked through a digital sheaf of movies, not altogether gripped by any.
On the real-time navigation display, the airplane resembled a child’s cut-out toy, already south of the blue Mediterranean and the empty reaches of ochre desert, starting its long haul towards the tip of sub-Saharan Africa, coloured green – fecund, mysterious. I had once found the place names exotic. Kano, Accra, Nairobi. A line across the map was marked “Equator”.
Far below, I imagined pin-pricks of light signalling the course of sightless, powerful rivers: fishermen’s pirogues, hewn from single tree-trunks, drawn up on the muddy banks of dark villages. The inner eye, as Wordsworth put it, resurrected long-ago visits to towns built as administrative centres by the European colonial powers decaying inexorably, their night spots seething, their medical dispensaries empty.
Memories from an earlier, unchronicled life bubbled from forgotten depths: security guards with night sticks snoozing fitfully outside aid workers’ guarded villas, patrolling the razor-wire barricades of traders’ padlocked storehouses; a web of single-track roads through tunnels of impenetrable bushland, ribbons of rusty sand, impassable in the rains.
Far below, there would be ramshackle churches (usually less ramshackle for the wealthier Catholic dioceses) and village huts shaped like round, chocolate cakes topped by straw, the perimeters swept clean by women fearful of snakes, perching like birds on small, three-legged stools; a baby, usually, strapped to the back, another clamouring for the breast and another in gestation, hostage to the dreaded virus that would leave her children orphaned before they followed their widowed mother into an early grave.
Then you could imagine how it would all change when pre-teen gunmen and soldiers with amulets rampaged through these places, exhilarated by sudden screams, mortal panic. Kigali, Geneina, Gulu, Bukavu, Sharpeville, Kolwezi. Names on a different map, unrelated to aerial navigation. A drumbeat of horror.
I thought I should make a note of these ideas in order to provoke debate at the conference by asking – mischievously, maliciously – whether it was only in wealthy lands like the one I was visiting that “Justice” and “Reconciliation” had meaning. Whether, elsewhere, such themes represented an impossible luxury, subjugated to the grim dictates of daily survival against hunger, sickness, poverty, oppression. As it turned out, I would need much more powerful navigational tools than an airline’s digital gazetteer.
I finally opened the letter at that late hour when the picked-over meals have been cleaned away and the seats have been tilted back and the overhead cabin lights are dimmed; when the insomniacs commune with laptops and the cabin attendants pray for a quiet night.
The stamps were bright, gaudy, showing birds and fish identified in minute script as lilac-breasted rollers and coral rock-cod. The envelope, made of cheap paper, was smudged with much handling, as if too many people had wished to touch it, to speed it on its way.
The postmark was from a remote station in a province of South Africa. I did not really need to open it to guess who had sent it, and, by association, what it might say. Even if I had not broken its seal of sticky tape and failing gum, I doubt that I would have been able to – or wished to – side-step the events that came to inspire some of the more sensational accounts that I want to correct with this narrative, this testimony. One headline still rankles: “An America
n’s Shame in the New South Africa.”
There were two documents, one handwritten in blue ballpoint on a single piece of lined paper that might have been torn from a school notebook.
“Our Dear Tom,” it began. My eyes prickled. I blinked to focus.
“We send you our warm greetings. We wonder if you will remember us, the Widows. We wonder if you remember that you said you would help us find why our great Husbands died. We remember you said you would find the person who betrayed them. We remember you said one day you would return and Justice would be done. So now the new clues are here so you can help with all the powers of your Great Country.”
It was signed: “The Widows of the Cooktown Four.”
Enclosed with the letter, a newspaper clipping offered what seemed to be a transcript or excerpted record of some kind of hearing or interrogation. One passage had been singled out with hieroglyphics of emphatic underscoring and exclamation marks in the same blue ballpoint ink as had been used in the letter.
Question: What happened then, Mr Theron?
Answer: Information was received that Nyati and a number of black activists would be there to meet the white liberals. The activists were identified by means of informers. One informer, really. It was important for us to know where and when the meeting was taking place because that would tell us whether the conditions were right to undertake the operation. And I reported that evening we would make an attempt or investigate the possibility of undertaking the operation.
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