Your Arabic is very good for a foreigner, said the shorter one, who in my mind I was starting to call Moonface – his face was broad and round, and his skin bore the scars of vicious teenage acne. My mother is (was) Algerian, I said; my father, Swiss – which is the truth, as you know. The other detective, the taller one with the moustache, asked if I enjoyed sight-seeing. They both had that practised, slightly off-hand demeanour that I have always so detested in men who believe they are in a position of power, as if they can’t quite be bothered. But I knew where his questions were going, and so pre-empted him with something about being a town planner at home in Switzerland, and being interested in the transitional zones between industrial and residential land uses. He looked nonplussed.
And you are travelling alone, said the shorter one. It was not a question, but its mere utterance triggered a lurch deep within me, the reignition of the simmering conflict between what I have come to see as the two poles of my being: the conservative, Muslim, conventional, maternal side; and the progressive, Western, secular, rebellious paternal part. Travelling alone I invite harassment, danger, ridicule. It is improper, immodest. This is something that you, mon amour, a man, can never understand – the undercurrent of fear that never leaves me. Of course, I have as much right to travel alone as anyone. And yet, as this debate raged inside me, I recognised that more than anything, I wanted you here with me to stare down these bullies, to walk with me, to make me whole. I know I can do the same for you, mon amour. I can make you stronger, surer of life.
I lowered my gaze and told the detectives that I am a widow. That seemed to mollify them slightly. Islam offers special protection to widows.
The shorter one, Moonface – did I only imagine that he was slightly embarrassed? – looked at his notebook. Do you have friends here? he asked.
Professional acquaintances, yes, I replied.
He looked at me a long time, a withering gaze that I held at first, staring back hard, unflinching, challenging. I would like to say that my defiance persisted, but in truth it was not more than a fraction of a second. I quickly provided the response that these men expected – a respectful and demure lowering of the eyes. Defiance is not the way to be invisible. It was the first thing they taught us in the Directorate. Conform in every way, blend in, be silent, anonymous.
Enjoy Egypt, said the taller one. The pyramids are very nice. Finally, they left.
The implications are clear. Yusuf Al-Gambal is being watched by the police. When they observed him meeting with a strange woman in a café – someone they had not registered previously – they followed me to my flat. It was a warning. Stay away. Be a tourist. Thank God I spent some time going through the Egyptian Museum and walking along the Nile.
* 10 *
Diverse and Cruel Motivations
Dawn came. Low cloud misted over a becalmed and leaden sea. Clay doused the sails, started the motor. They chugged along, the coastline materialising in the distance. He wondered about the rhythm of meetings and partings, of the people he’d known for periods shorter and longer, of lives suddenly and brutally ended, as if the savage chemistry of existence was predicated on this eternal cycle of beginnings and endings, with such scant and difficult territory in between.
Crowbar fixed breakfast and handed Clay a mug of coffee. They sat in the cockpit and ate. Clay sipped, holding the tiller in the crook of his left elbow.
After a time he ended the silence of hours. ‘Did Manheim see you, Koevoet, back on Zanzibar?’
‘Ja, definitely. I’d just capped those two black fokkers, and was about to climb aboard. He looked right at me.’
‘That’s when he let Zuz go.’
‘Ja, and tried to shoot me.’ Crowbar raised his hand, pointed forward. ‘Slug’s still there in the fokken mast. You said you were going to take care of him, Straker.’
Clay shrugged.
‘Fokken leave me to do everything.’
Clay said nothing. You just had to let Crowbar go through it.
‘While you were hiding on the bottom of the ocean, Manheim was trying to take off my shoulder.’ Crowbar winced as if to prove the point. ‘Good thing he’d alternated slug and shot, or I’d be a cripple now, just like you, Straker. Or dead. Most of it ended up in the boom and the mast.’
‘Finished?’
Crowbar smiled. ‘What’s your hurry, Straker. I’m enjoying this.’
‘Fok jou, Koevoet.’
‘That’s better, seun. We’ve got a long way to go.’
‘Why is Manheim trying to kill you, oom?’
‘Kill both of us, ja.’
‘Me, I can understand, after what I told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But you? You said you knew him.’
Crowbar did not answer for a long time, sat sipping his coffee, staring out at the brown smudge of the coast. ‘We were friends, once.’
‘Serious?’
‘It was a long time ago. We did some Special Forces ops together in Angola, back in the seventies. But we fell out, years back.’
‘Is he with the Company?’ ‘The Company’ was the independent security firm that Crowbar had started with two ex-SADF colleagues after the election of Nelson Mandela’s ANC in South Africa in 1994. No longer wanted by their country, they were putting their skills and experience to use, fighting other people’s wars across Africa. Angola, ironically, was their latest and most lucrative contract.
Crowbar shook his head. ‘The last time I saw him, back in the eighties, he’d joined the AWB – Afrikaner Weerstands Bewring.’ Crowbar hesitated a moment, thought it through. ‘He’d changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘He’d gotten meaner. More ideological. Always on about fokken God, People, fatherland, all that kak about an independent Boer homeland.’ Crowbar spat across the lee scupper. ‘After that I lost track of him. Last I heard he was doing contract security work for one of the big mining companies in the Transvaal.’
‘Well, whatever happened to him, he’s working for the Broederbond now.’
‘Looks as.’ Crowbar tossed the dregs of his coffee over the side. ‘Fokken good fighter, though. Once saw him take out a whole SWAPO squad single-handed. Just charged in chucking frags like fokken John Wayne. Never seen anything like it.’
‘So why is the Broederbond after you, Koevoet?’
Crowbar shrugged. ‘Must have given Manheim a hell of shock, seeing me on your boat.’
Clay waited for Crowbar to elaborate, but he didn’t.
‘I hope that slug I put into him is keeping him awake at night, ungrateful bastard.’
‘What aren’t you telling me, oom?’
Crowbar waved this away.
‘Goddam it, Koevoet.’
Crowbar didn’t move.
‘For once, can you just tell me the truth? What the hell is going on?’
Crowbar spun around and faced him, the crags of his face and his pale eyes cast in the grey morning light. ‘Don’t you fokken talk to me like that, soutpiele. Ever. You hear me?’
Clay stared back at him. ‘God damn it, Koevoet. I’m not a fucking rofie anymore. Rania’s in trouble, and I need to know what you know.’
Crowbar sat for a moment, staring back. But the expected counter-attack did not come. Instead, he hung his head. ‘What the fok do you know about anything, Straker?’ His voice sounded far away, resigned. ‘You and all those other cowards. Just fokken upped and ran – left the rest of us to do the fighting.’
Clay breathed in, let it go. ‘I don’t know if you’ve figured it out yet, old man, but the war’s over. We’re not in the army anymore.’
Crowbar rubbed the stubble of his beard. After a while he got to his feet and disappeared below deck.
Clay stood tiller in hand and ran his gaze along the horizon. He’d fled South Africa in 1981 as a twenty-year-old combat veteran and deserter – with Crowbar’s help. He hadn’t returned until 1996, to testify to Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Crowbar had warned him not to go, that it w
ould end badly. He’d been right.
There was a lot Clay had missed. Thirteen years of pain and upheaval, rebellion and useless sacrifice. The death of a system, the rise of a nation. And all that time, Crowbar had stayed, lived it, right until the end.
Sometime later, Crowbar reappeared and clambered into the cockpit. He handed Clay a hip flask. ‘The Broederbond isn’t what you think, seun. It’s changed.’
Clay put the flask to his lips, let the liquid flow into him. He handed it back. You couldn’t push Crowbar, you just had to let him come to things in his own time.
Crowbar sat, lit a smoke. ‘Started back in the eighties. Apartheid was doomed, and they knew it. How do you hold on to power when your system is crumbling?’
‘But the Broederbond was the government,’ said Clay. ‘Controlled it anyway. Apartheid was their idea, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Exactly. But they knew black rule was inevitable. So, in the eighties, they secretly started repositioning. By ninety-three, when it was clear that apartheid was finished, they renamed themselves the AB – the Afrikaner Broederbond. Then they did a deal with the ANC and declared their support for a democratic South Africa.’
‘Jesus. Even while we were fighting…’
‘Ja, even then.’
Clay felt as if he was being swallowed up, as if a huge hole had opened up in the sea. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, trying to steady himself. ‘Eben, Bluey, Cooper, all of them…’
Crowbar closed his eyes, opened them again.
‘For nothing.’
‘Don’t, Straker. You can’t.’
Clay took a deep breath, tried to hold it all back. ‘And what about Manheim?’
‘When the AB did the deal with ANC, the shit flew. About a third of their members – the die-hard white supremacists, including Manheim – quit and joined the AWB. The AWB had fifty thousand SADF troops loyal to the Afrikaner cause ready to crush the ANC. We were a telephone call away from civil war.’
‘So how the hell did Manheim end up working for the AB?’
‘That’s what I don’t understand. The AB doesn’t give a shit about the Boers, or a white African homeland, or any of the things that Manheim believes in, or used to believe in. The AB is a business, Straker, a huge conglomerate of dozens of businesses – everything from agriculture to mining to telecoms, operating across Africa, from the Med to Cape Town. In reality, nothing’s changed. Not a goddam thing. They still run everything. Just in a different way.’
‘So, it was never about the volkstaat.’
‘Not since before you were a rofie, ja.’ Crowbar shifted in the cockpit, burned down his cigarette and flicked the smouldering end overboard.
Mombasa was now a distant smudge on the horizon. Clay checked the compass, judged speed through the water. A sea breeze was coming up. They could put up sail. ‘Should be there in about three hours,’ he said.
Crowbar nodded. ‘The AB did a deal with the ANC because it was a way to make money. A lot more money than they had ever before imagined was possible. Billions.’
‘So the same people who thought up COAST are running food and telephone companies now?’
‘Pharmaceuticals, metals, engineering, oil, lumber, diamonds, water, tourism … everything.’
Clay pondered this for a time, the variables and possibilities, the diverse and cruel motivations. ‘But why come after you now, Koevoet? They’ve had months, years.’
‘Who the fok knows? All I know is that now they’ve started, they’re not going to stop. That’s how they work.’ Crowbar levelled his eyes at Clay, held his gaze, meaning burning in his retinae. ‘The AB is very patient, very methodical.’
‘And Manheim?’
Crowbar shook his head, drank from the flask, secured the cap. ‘I’ve got to talk to him.’
‘And I’ve got to kill him,’ said Clay, looking away. He tried to assimilate it all, piece together the fragments, but there was too much void and far too few pieces.
After a while he said: ‘Did Hope say anything about why Rania’s in Egypt?’
‘Just that her husband and son were murdered back in France, and the cops think she did it.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘And you thought you had problems, Straker.’
4th November, 1997. Cairo, Egypt. 08:45 hrs
Yesterday evening, after dark, I slipped out through the back garden and walked to the metro. I knew immediately I was being followed. It was the two policemen – if that is what they are – who came to my flat earlier that day. They were hanging back, moving on opposite sides of the street. I walked on, stayed calm. As I neared the station, the crowds built. I went inside, bought a ticket, walked to the platform. I had to push my way between the waiting passengers. The policemen had followed me in. I could see them approaching the ticket barrier. I turned, sank deeper into the crowd.
The train arrived. I got on. I saw them push onto a carriage three or four back. The tall one gazed out over the bobbing heads of the passengers, searching for me. They were moving up the carriages, checking each as they went. At each station, Moonface, the shorter one, jumped off and stood by the open doors, scanning the platform. I moved forwards, trying to keep some distance between us. A group of tall young men in blue track suits were standing at the far end of the carriage. I went and stood among them. Shielded from view, I pulled off my burqa, shook out my hair. A couple of the boys looked at me in my black tracksuit and training shoes and smiled to each other, then at me. I smiled back.
The two policemen had by now moved up and were in the next carriage back. At the next stop, the boys started out the door. I went with them, stayed close as they moved along the platform towards the exit tunnel. By now, the boys were glancing at me and at each other as they walked. One of them said something that I could not make out and a few of them laughed. I kept with them. By the time we reached the ticket hall, I was reasonably sure that I was no longer being followed.
I peeled away from the boys and started back towards the southbound platform. As I moved away I heard one of the boys say: Where are you going, sister?
I kept going, jumped on the next train, doubled back. Finally I emerged into the night outside Al-Zahraa station. The streets were full of evening shoppers. I lost myself in the crowd, sure now that I was no longer being followed. Back in my burqa, I hailed a taxi and told the driver to take me to the Hadayek-el-Koba district.
The traffic churned. We crossed the Nile, the lights of the big hotels dulled by a fog of exhaust. The streets were choked with cars, the air thick with diesel and the smoke from burning rubbish. I could see the taxi driver glancing at me in the rear-view mirror. I flashed a scowl at him. He held my gaze a moment and looked away.
Hadayek-el-Koba is an industrial area, ventured the driver after a time.
I ignored him, remained silent. He drove on.
As we neared the district, the air grew thicker. You could see it, a brown miasma, skulking through the backstreets like a thief. The lights of the city dimmed behind us. The driver looked back at me again, but I silenced him with my gaze before he could say a word. He shrugged, kept going.
After a while, he found the address that was on the card – a gated entranceway attended by two armed guards. I told the taxi driver not to stop. He looked back at me again, questioning. Drive, I snapped. He kept going.
At the far end of the fenceline I told him to turn right and follow the perimeter road. It was a factory of some sort, one of many in the area: a series of windowless brick buildings set in a floodlit compound surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Yellow-lit smoke belched from two big chimney stacks, merged with the plumes from dozens of others and settled into the valley like a well-fed cat curling into its sleeping basket. Equipment, crates and used pallets choked the fenceline, spread along the walls of the buildings. Huge piles of what looked like black stone covered the back part of the compound. The smell was overwhelming. It reminded me oddly of the garage in Algiers where my father would take
our Citroën for service when I was a little girl. My memories, my girlhood fantasies and nightmares, are of big, hairy men with blackened faces and oil-stained clothes, blank, staring eyes, and these same odours: carbon and abrasives and hot metal.
After we had gone three-quarters of the way around – the complex must have covered at least ten hectares – I told the driver to stop. I had seen no other entrances or guards. I paid the driver and made to get out.
He asked me if I wanted him to wait. I said no.
Are you sure? he said. You should not be here alone, after dark, he said. Where is your husband?
I got out and slammed the door. He shrugged his shoulders and drove away, the red tail lights dematerialising in the smoke.
The streets were dark and deserted. In my black burqa, I felt almost invisible. I moved quickly along the rough ground outside the fence, keeping to the darkness between the streetlights.
It did not take me long to find the place I had noticed from the car: a crumbling mud-brick building – once a dwelling of some sort – that defied the fenceline like a protester refusing to retreat as the police cordon bends around her. As I entered the structure, I could see that the fenceline had been notched inward to detour around the house. I imagined some resolute family matriarch refusing to be moved from her home as the factory was built around her, succumbing eventually to age and poor health, alone and with no one to continue her fight.
I moved under a fallen archway, clambered over a pile of slumped brick, a few stars showing through the bare roof timbers. The fence skirted a small, overgrown garden, a wilderness of untended vines and collapsing trellises. Beyond, the back lot of the factory, dominated by a huge pile of the black stone and two big pits filled with dark liquid. The smell here was even stronger, and it was difficult to breathe.
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