Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  “You know, Ambassador. Kinzer. Thomas. Whatever. If I wanted to take you out, I could do it. If I had wanted to take you out years ago when you drove past my OP and into Nyati’s house, I could have done it then. I could have done it when you parked your BMW in Nyati’s garage and thought no one had seen you. In a silver BMW! I could have taken out the old Kombi they hid you in to take you around the township when they thought no one was on your tail. I could have taken you out in company in that motel on the PE road. Permanent Removal. If you weren’t worth it then, why bother now?’

  We sit opposite one another in his kitchen. There are odours of tobacco and sweat, mixed with fried breakfasts and disinfectant where the help has scrubbed the white tiled floor. The walls are panelled with varnished pine that matches the table and chairs and cupboards. Theron has laid out his cigarettes, pen and cell phone like soldiers in a neat row. He has removed his camouflaged hat and I am surprised to see that he still has a head of thick, gingery hair. He has brought a bottle of Klipdrift brandy, a bucket of ice and a litre of cola. As he pours, his hand is rock steady.

  “When I used to do interrogation, when we captured the terrs, you could tell very quickly whether they would turn and join you against their comrades,” he began. He spoke in a gentle, remember-when voice. “You had control of them. You could hurt them and they knew it. You could help them or not help them. You could eat with them and then they were indebted to you. You could show them the bodies of their comrades and tell them they were going the same way. You could threaten. You could intimidate, the way the removal of personal freedom intimidates most people. But, right now, here, I am not sure who is interrogating who and for why.”

  “Tell me again why you told Jess where I could find you.”

  He took a drink – no more than a cautious sip – and eyed me in a somewhat histrionic way, as if mimicking a poker player. He leaned back from the table and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “That is simple. I had not heard from her for quite some time, some years, in fact, but I had met her and talked to her back in the Eastern Cape days. Not interrogated. Just talked. I told her things that were happening. I told her who was dangerous and who was not. Ach, you know, man, I talked to a lot of them reporters. Not just the on-sides bunch like Gilliomee. Tried to make them see sense. Sell them the line. But she was different. There was something she had that made everyone want to talk to her. And she listened so you felt you had something worthwhile to say. I even told her some private things that maybe I should not.”

  “But then we went different ways, after Nyati, because she knew things she could not prove and I knew things I could not tell. In the end, I left the security forces because it was going nowhere for me. I was getting older and they gave a good pension to get us out. We were an embarrassment, people like me. We had done the jobs, and now the mucky-mucks did not want to know us. They were too busy saving their own skins after Mandela was free. And there was plenty other work. The kind of jobs for people with some training and background in military things, weapons, logistics, deployments, et cetera. And one job was for the famous Mr De Vere – a few days in DRC Congo, scoping copper and cobalt prospects with his cronies. Private jet in and out. No immigration. No passports. No questions asked. So we fly out to Shaba, Katanga, whatever they call it these days, and keep an eye on him in the bush.”

  He wishes to amuse me, draw me in to a sympathetic hearing of his story. I nod encouragement, but cannot bring myself to smile.

  “He meets up with some contact or other, Congolese chap who kept a big white launch, Bertram or some such, like you see in the fishing magazines, on one of those great rivers – the Lualaba, I think. So it’s a sort of crazy assignment. There we are on the flying bridge, old hands from the bush, armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs and RPGs, sweating like pigs, swatting the flies. And down below, in the air-con, there’s these big mining guys with their contact offering all kinds of deals and concessions. Concession! What a word, hey? I give you my country’s wealth and you pay me in Switzerland and it’s a concession.”

  He laughed again with a degree of bitterness.

  “Anyhow, while we are cruising on the river, some oke in the bush on the bank decides to take a pot shot at us with a bow and arrow. A bow and arrow, man! And the Congolese chappie shouts up to the flying bridge to open fire, but Mr De Vere, he’s smart. He says: no way. We don’t want to cause an international incident. So all he had brought us along for was show. But the Congolese guy, he pulls out his pistol and blasts away at the bush where the guy with the bow and arrow was, and kills him. And – plop – he falls out of the bush and into the river. And you know what? It’s a kid. Some fool kid trying it on with a homemade bow and arrow. Dead as a post. Croc-bait. Africa! And they call me a cold-blooded killer!”

  “And then?” I had begun to revise my opinion of De Vere. He was not, it seemed, some rich guy frittering away the family silver. It took a degree of courage – and greed – to embark on a river cruise with the kind of warlord Theron seemed to be describing. It made it easier to see why Jess Chase had been drawn to him. I had a sudden memory of her avid consumption of early Wilbur Smith novels, the kind set in Africa, where men were men. Real men.

  “So we skedaddle off that boat” – he gestures with the open palm of his left hand striking the clenched fist of right hand – “and we fly back and she is at the airport. I could not believe my eyes. Miss Chase. Now Mrs De Vere, what I did not know. And, man, was she angry! He hadn’t taken her with! She was no one’s little woman, she told him, right in front of all of us – execs, close protection, everyone – and she’d seen more shit in her time than he was likely to in his entire life … so don’t even think that a few concessions in the Congo were anything for her. She could hack it. Then she saw me. She knew my whole record. I didn’t want to lose the connection – it was good money with the mining guys, even better if you kept quiet about things like what we had just seen. So I asked her – you know, quietly, when she had calmed down – please not to tell her husband about the Eastern Cape. She had it in for me because of Nyati and all the others. Nyati most of all. She really liked him. But she did not want her husband to know that she knew me! Or him! What do they say? Wheels inside wheels! So she made a deal. She said she wouldn’t rat on me to De Vere, and neither would I with her, but I must keep in touch and one day she would call and tell me how I could start doing some payback. Atonement, she called it.”

  “So who was the Judas?”

  “Judas who? Iscariot?” He laughed his coarse, smoker’s laugh again.

  “Who told you where Nyati was that last night in PE?”

  A note of protest entered his voice, as if to say I was pushing too abruptly.

  “Tom. Thomas. Ambassador. What am I supposed to call you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Listen, man. My legal situation is precarious. If you have done your homework, you will know that they refused me amnesty. When I had sung my little heart out to all their fancy Jo’burg lawyers in front of all the cameras and tape recorders and the reporters and Archbishop Tutu and everyone, and told them who did what, that’s when they said: no amnesty for you, Kobus Theron. Then they said I would be on trial for murder and go to prison with all those guys who would love to get their hands on an old white security officer, if you know what I am saying. And now they are saying there will be the statute of limitations and there will be no trial and I will be free if I just wait a few days.”

  “Free? How can you ever be free of what you have done?”

  Theron had rehearsed his words too frequently to be hurried or halted. He rose from the table to grab a white plastic bowl that he filled with potato chips. He refilled both our glasses, even though I had barely sipped at mine. Then he took a second bowl and decanted salted peanuts, as if he was settling in for the long haul. This was a moment he had been anticipating – a captive audience, an opportunity too precious to miss. Certainly he would not hurry to meet any deadline Riaan
van Rensburg had set for me.

  “This was war, man. Like in Israel. It was a war we would have to fight forever for our people. When I was a teenager I read all the books about the communists in Africa, the Congo, Uhuru, Mau Mau, all that. Blood and mayhem. You Americans, you outsiders, you all figured the terrorists were freedom fighters. But we, the security forces, were reacting to threat. We were fighting for our lives. Our freedom. The freedom of our people to be themselves, speak their language, run their affairs, go to their churches, feel safe in their homes. We did not see that it was them reacting to us. We did not care less about hearts and minds. We did not see that you could not win the way we were fighting because we weren’t offering carrots – only stick. But we had no doubts that our actions were correct. We had a cause, too – our cause, the cause we had been brought up to in our schools and churches and homes. We ignored the reason why these people had become freedom fighters. If they were our victims, we were their victims. If we perpetrated acts against them, they perpetrated acts against us. If we tortured, they burned. They burned their enemies! They burned people who had done nothing to them. They would have burned the whole damn place if we let them – remember what Winnie Mandela said: ‘With our matchboxes and our tires, we will liberate our country.’ Man, she meant it.”

  “And at Vlakplaas. Who burned people there?”

  “Listen,” he said. “It was our duty to defend our country. There were bombings in shopping arcades and nightclubs. Terrorism. It was war and we fought on opposite sides but by the same rules. You see? It was only later that some of us realised we had to have a justifiable cause to win because you could never win on the battlefield alone. And, of course, it was different when it finished because the enemy got amnesty and we did not, and they got justice and we did not, and they got freedom and we did not but we had both been fighting in the trenches like the French and the Germans at the Somme or the Americans and the Viet Cong in Vietnam. We were all soldiers but some soldiers got victor’s justice and the others did not.”

  “You Americans today are like we were then, in the old days. You want to be liked and to be admired because you are taking a stand. You are doing what you think is right. And when you are not liked or admired, you are surprised and hurt. But you must realise some time – as we had to in the end – that no one likes a bully, no one likes someone who lays down all the rules but doesn’t play by them himself. No one likes someone who messes up your life and then tells you they did it for your own good.”

  “Come on, Theron. There may have been a war in Ovamboland fighting insurgents. But by the time Nyati died you were a cop and they were civilians. It was straight, calculated, cold-blooded murder. Assassination. There was no insurgency.”

  “Maybe not by your definition, but there was a revolution. You should know. You were there! I remember now seeing you through my binos, on that funeral day when they buried Nyati. There weren’t too many whites in the crowd so you and those reporters and cameramen stood out and I remembered you had been secretly visiting Nyati with Miss Chase, because we had a big file on her and we had one on you through the diplomatic section, and I thought: yes, that’s one more good reason to get rid of Nyati because he was becoming an international figure, like Mandela, and we didn’t need two of those.”

  I heard crickets in the dense forest outside, and, more remotely, the sound of a cheery, indistinct conversation as two people pedalled by outside on bicycles.

  “Say that again. Say what I think you are trying to say.”

  “We knew you, Thomas. Ambassador. Press attaché as was. So-called. Maybe something else, for all we knew. Agent provocateur. Enemy agent.”

  He was speaking in a different tone now, more slowly, as if trying to make complicated ideas accessible to a witless child.

  “There was a file on you. Haven’t you read the testimony? Your name is in it, along with Chase and some of Nyati’s other visitors from the outside. Ted Kennedy. Not done your homework? Before the order came for Nyati – permanent removal, extreme prejudice, whatever you would call it – we didn’t just barge in. There were reports, committees, decisions, surveillance. Bureaucracy. Preparation. It was a big step because he was causing a lot of grief. We didn’t just wake up one day and go and take him out. There were two plans. One was what I called the soft option: if we gave him his job back, promoted him, he would come back into the system. That was what the Department of Bantu Education wanted. Bring him back in, co-opt him, give him a good job and a fat paycheck and a new place with a big house and the unrest would cease. It would never have worked. The man was a revolutionary. Like Lenin. Or Castro. He was sending out the comrades to training so they would come back with AK-47s. He was making the place ungovernable, same as Goniwe in Cradock and Mkhuseli Jack in PE. And that was the big threat, when you think of it, because for all we had been told that blacks were not able to govern, there they were, running the show in their townships. Taking the initiative. Beyond our control.”

  He paused to sip his drink and I tried not to join him in this macabre toast, this companionable reminiscence. But I weakened and took a slug of brandy barely diluted with Coke. In the heat, the ice had all but melted, leaving just a slender frozen disk to float on the surface. I coughed and my eyes watered. He waited while I composed myself, offering a clean white handkerchief – still folded and ironed – from the pocket of his shorts.

  “Then there was Plan B – permanent removal from society as the ministers and them called it. That was the security option from the police and army and special branch. So we put him under extra surveillance. We had a tamatie – a bug – right in his living room, in the plastic flowers on his coffee table. How could you not have suspected? We were amazed to hear you talking like there was no tomorrow.”

  I remembered the moment in every detail. I remembered listening to Nyati’s story, then taking a deep breath before I overstepped the boundaries of the policy. How could I have been so stupid?

  “You know, I have my files, too, my records, tapes, with my lawyer,” Theron was saying. “All genuine stuff from the old office in PE. I have all the transcripts of you saying how the United States of America would do this and that if you could persuade your ambassador. You wanted to end constructive engagement, as I recall, you wanted to tell Reagan he was wrong to support gradual change, evolution. You wanted them to shift their policy so that they would back Nyati and his like and of course that was no good for us because constructive engagement was a lifeline to the outside world – our only lifeline – and once we lost that we were finished, though the politicians never told us we were finished anyhow. They let us go on with our permanent removals. Even while they were talking in secret to Mandela. But the moment that counted for Nyati was when our bosses looked at all the tapes and the transcripts and figured that we could handle a little local troublemaker, but we couldn’t afford to have Uncle Sam in bed with him. So his fate was sealed.”

  “If you are trying to blackmail me, Theron, it’s a bit late. I no longer have an official position. And if you’re trying to sell me something, I’m not in that kind of market anymore.”

  “You can call it how you want. Blackmail. Selling. I am trying to help. I am trying to explain the facts to you, as I know them. More than what came out at the Commission. I am trying to help everyone put this behind us with the truth.”

  His eyes shone: hey presto, Mr American – who do you think killed Nyati now?

  “So who was the informer?”

  Twenty-Two

  A CAR PULLED UP. ITS ENGINE RATTLED into silence. A door opened, then slammed shut. A woman of around Theron’s age entered the kitchen. She carried a brightly coloured plastic bag from a supermarket chain. She was about to light a cigarette when she noticed me. I scrambled to rise in formal greeting, scraping my chair on the polished white tiles.

  She was taut and angular, her tanned skin stretched over her shoulder and collar bones above the shallow divide of her sternum. Her hair – strands of grey ming
led with auburn highlights – rose from her forehead in a rigid, bouffonned quiff held in place by a permanent wave. Tiny lines fringed bright red lips, as if from an enduring pout of disapproval or worry. She wore a strapped top in cream and a calf-length skirt with some kind of paisley pattern in russet and yellow. Jutting from rubber slip-slops, her toenails were painted in the same bright tones as her fingernails and lipstick. Accompanying her, a black and white Jack Russell terrier bounced as if on springs. Kobus Theron swatted it away and the dog yelped. The woman flinched but said nothing.

  “Anna-Marie!” Theron exclaimed. “Mr Ambassador, this is Anna-Marie Theron. My wife.”

  She smiled awkwardly. Her pale brown eyes – almost amber – betrayed suspicion, whether of me or her husband, or both, I could not be sure.

  “Ambassador Kinzer has come to talk about the old days.”

  “Ag, the old days, Kobie. The old days is past. I keep telling him it’s past. Isn’t it, Ambassador?”

  Theron rose from the table and took the shopping bag from his wife. He squeezed her arm gently, as if to prevent her from bolting. Somewhere in Theron’s life, I realised, there was a core of protection and warmth – an area of safety denied by this same man to Lily Nyati and the widows.

  “Did you buy enough for three?”

  “Are you staying for supper, Ambassador? You see, Kobie, he’s not sure.”

  Finally, she lit her cigarette with her red plastic lighter.

  No Cartier gold here; no bauble of the kind that had been in my hotel room when I left for lunch and was no longer there when I returned. Riaan van Rensburg would be preparing his presentation now, ready for the show, gathering the Old Deep set, Zoë Joubert among them, for the unmasking of the true Judas. He had already identified him: a man called TJ.

  Anna-Marie Theron inhaled, glancing with some disapproval at the bottle of Klipdrift and the molten ice.

  “Go start the braai, Kobie,” she said. “Please.”