Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  Tandia was exhausted and enormously distressed, but she held herself together, not sure that they'd come to the end of the bizarre and terrifying night. Geldenhuis could as easily snap again and so she was careful to mollify him now.

  'I will try, what do you want me to do?'

  'Tell Peekay about what happened.'

  Tandia looked at Geldenhuis in alarm. 'Why?' she asked, astonished.

  Geldenhuis spoke impassively. 'Ja, well, you see if you try to bring a charge against the police for molesting you, Detective Sergeant Koekemoer and his two coons who brought you in will swear to the court you resisted arrest. A bruise like you going to have on your neck and maybe a mark on your back, that's consistent with resistance and necessary subsequent restraint.' Geldenhuis seemed to be smiling to himself as he placed his elbows on the table and began to gather together the tiny pieces of paper, pushing them into a neat pile between his cupped hands. Finally he looked up at Tandia, the smile still on his face. 'So, tell Peekay he can have his revenge in the boxing ring. Tell him he can come any time, you hear? Any time he likes. I'm ready.'

  Peekay had been in Barberton on the night of Tandia's arrest, seeing Flyspeck Mendoza at the prison. He'd arrived to find that Flyspeck had been brutally tortured by Colonel Geldenhuis the previous day so that now one eye sagged half an inch lower in the eye socket, his nose was broken and most of his teeth were missing. But the little guy swore to Peekay that he hadn't confessed to Nguni's murder, which is what Geldenhuis wanted him to do. Peekay had spent most of the day seeing to it that Flyspeck received adequate medical attention and so decided to remain overnight and leave for Johannesburg at dawn the following morning.

  Though Gert and Colonel Smit had been helpful, they had little sympathy for Peekay's client. In their book a selfconfessed murderer takes what comes to him, even if it ends up being a bastard like Geldenhuis. Peekay got into town by nine in the morning and went directly to Red. Chronic Martha met him with a message to call Tandia at his Hillbrow flat. Tandia had a key, for she would often go there to work on a case when she didn't want to be disturbed. It was convenient, no more than ten minutes by taxi from the office. Peekay called immediately and Tandia answered.

  'Peekay, I thought you'd be here,' she sounded distressed.

  'I spent the night in Barberton. What's wrong Tandy?'

  'Can you come please, Peekay?' she said in a tiny voice.

  'Hang on, I'll be right there.'

  'Tandia, you look bloody awful, what's happened?' Peekay said, dropping his briefcase and running towards her as he entered the flat. Tandia had attempted to smile as Peekay walked in but the sustained effort to remain in control of her emotions was too great and now, for the first time since she'd left Geldenhuis and John Vorster Square that morning, she was unable to push the horror of the night sufficiently away from her and her bottom lip began to quiver.

  The detective sergeant had put her into a non-European taxi just after half past seven that morning. He'd paid the driver and instructed him to take her home to Soweto. A block along she'd re-directed the driver to Hillbrow, to Peekay's flat. The taxi driver took one look at Tandia and without saying a word changed direction. Ten minutes later she arrived at the flat. 'He gave me too much money.' the driver said.

  'Your lucky day.' Tandia said, crossing the road. She'd rung the bell and when there had been no reply, she'd let herself in to Peekay's flat. He'd obviously not returned from Barberton. She panicked suddenly. Why had she come directly to him? She thought about retreating, returning home. Nobody need know. She was strong enough. Mama Tequila would have told her to get off her sweet arse and go to work.

  She went directly to the bathroom and turned on the shower, scrubbing herself from head to toe, washing the lather off her body and starting again until she had repeated the process three times. She felt sure she would never feel clean again in her life. She'd taken a spare toothbrush she'd found in peekay's bathroom cabinet into the shower with a tube of paste and she did the same thing, cleaning her teeth three times and spitting the foam violently at her feet in the shower.

  She was still dry-eyed as she towelled herself and fixed her make-up; then she called the office just after half past eight when Chronic Martha opened the switchboard. Her concentration kept lapsing and her attention span grew shorter and shorter as her panic grew. She'd been pushing it away ever since she'd left Geldenhuis but now it began to seep through her fingers. She thought again about running away, keeping what had happened to herself. She'd learn to live with last night, she always had in the past. It was one more hate, one more score to settle. But this time she knew it was more than this. The police colonel's threat to destroy them was real; they were all in danger. She must talk to Peekay and in doing so she would have to tell him what had taken place at John Vorster Square.

  How would Peekay react when she told him what Geldenhuis had done to her? How could she begin to tell him? She didn't have those kinds of words, she'd never shared an intimacy in her life with a man. Only once with another human being, Sarah. In Sarah's bed all those years ago. She'd never forgotten the touch, the loveliness of the touch of someone else's hand caring about her, gentling her spirit. It was a warmth she'd felt for a few stolen early mornings and then never again.

  Gideon had been Tandia's only lover. His lovemaking was masculine and direct; she expected no more, it suited her and meant she didn't have to pretend. She hadn't allowed Nguni to touch her and he, in turn, hadn't persisted; this had been one of the main reasons why she had continued to go out with him.

  Peekay had kissed her just once, thinking she was asleep, after Juicey Fruit Mambo's death, and the touch of his lips on her brow was like nothing she had felt before. Now she wanted it again, like a little girl who wants a hurt kissed better. When she'd called him from Barberton hospital after the fire bombing at Eendrag, Magistrate Coetzee's farm, he'd been barely able to reply, his voice choked with emotion and relief at her safety. It was then that she had begun to realize he was fundamental to her life. When she'd seen him lying dazed in the smoke and chaos of the explosion at the Christmas party her heart, empty for so long, had suddenly filled, like water rising up from an underground stream, rising from the bottom of an empty well and splashing over the lip, all in a time frame faster than her mind could comprehend. In that moment she was totally without fear and she'd run to him and held her head against him and brought her arms around him. For a few dazzling minutes before the doctor's asinine voice had tom her from this completeness, she'd known what it felt like to be totally in love.

  Now Tandia waited for Peekay to return, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what to do, but returning blindly to him, knowing instinctively that if she pushed the hurt and the anger and the loathing back into her one more time it would corrupt her spirit to the point where even the hate she felt couldn't sustain her need to live.

  Peekay sat beside her and put his arm around her and pulled her into his chest. She couldn't look at him, dared not look. 'Tandy, please, tell me?' He pushed her gently away from him, took her face in his hands and made her look at him. At last the tears came, the tears for what Geldenhuis had done to her, the tears for Patel and the tears for herself as Peekay held her in his arms and stroked her and started the healing of her with his strong hands.

  When finally Tandia was able to control herself sufficiently to speak she looked up at Peekay. 'Last night I was arrested by Geldenhuis.'

  The shock on Peekay's face was enormous. 'Arrested?

  How? Why?'

  'Peekay, we are in danger. He tried to indict me for complicity in Nguni's murder. He had a verbal supposedly taken from Flyspeck Mendoza, accusing me of ordering the murder.'

  'It's not true, Tandy. I spoke to Flyspeck yesterday. They tortured him, but they got nothing!'

  Tandia sighed. 'It was only an excuse, Peekay. It is a long, long story, but you and Hymie are in danger so I must tell it.' T
andia looked up at Peekay and burst into tears again.

  'Come Tandy, you don't have to say anything.'

  'No, I must.' She began to talk, telling Peekay of the rape after Patel's funeral. She spoke quietly going through every detail, as though the words were in braille etched into her mind and she was running her fingers over them and saying them out aloud. There was a flatness to her voice, as though by keeping it in a monotone she could hold the emotion she felt at bay. She spoke without looking up at Peekay, until she paused to blow her nose, and then she saw that tears were running down his face as he looked at her, his love for her so intense that she could feel it burning into her. He felt a terrible shame that he'd doubted her, that Geldenhuis had so easily conned him with the confession.

  Tandia talked on and on, finally coming to the arrest, despite her distress not sparing herself or working shy of the sordid detail.

  Peekay felt a deep, dark presence rise up in his soul, a need to destroy so great that his entire body shook. He grew so pale that Tandia grew fearful. But what Tandia was witnessing was the coming of hate to Peekay, the destruction of innocence. The power of hate roared into him like a white-hot furnace, consuming everything; he disappeared into it,'a silent scream of vengeance shouting in the flames. Nothing of him was spared by the consuming fire; only the scream remained, the single violent scream of hate. Slowly he started to control it, to hold its gnashing teeth from his heart.

  It was the same feeling he'd experienced when suddenly confronted by the Judge in the mines. The hate which had been bottled up in him all the years of his childhood had burst like a ripe boil and he'd beaten the huge man senseless. He'd pushed the incident back into his subconscious; never allowing it to surface. It was the single moment in his life of which he was monstrously ashamed, knowing he had been no better than his oppressors, that within him there was a darkness.

  Now the need to strike out blindly, to inflict a physical hurt, senseless and violent, had returned. If he allowed it to grow it would bind into a knot that would fill his being, a giant serpent of hate writhing within him.

  Tears ran down his cheeks as he fought to control the desire to smash Geldenhuis, to take a club to him and pulp his head for all the hurt and suffering his kind brought upon others. But Peekay knew that the spirit of an evil dragon slain in this way simply enters the heart of its slayer where it eats from the inside to destroy him. That the killing had to stop in the beloved country. That men and women must see that the world is not simply the domain of the cruel, vicious and rapacious. That good can grow from the killing fields and that justice was a mighty sword that could work for their side.

  'Geldenhuis wants a fight, Tandy. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to beat the shit out of him in the ring, if only to try a little to make up for the brutality and humiliation his kind have imposed on others, on you! But it won't do anything of the sort. When I step into the ring I accept that his way is right, that violence is the only revenge. But we have to stop believing in the right of might, we must get him on our own terms. Just once, in this wretched country's history, I promise you, justice will be seen to be done!'

  A week later, Gideon was captured along with six other Umkonto we Sizwe terrorists attempting to blow up a government fuel depot on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The depot wasn't of particular strategic importance but was located close to a very up-market white suburb and the explosion was designed to shatter windows for a mile around and to bum conspicuously, a part of. the campaign designed by Gideon to undermine the confidence of whites in the ability of the police ultimately to protect them from black aggression.

  But, as so often happened in the past, the Special Branch, under the leadership of Colonel Jannie Geldenhuis, proved worthy of this task and the six terrorists were allowed to disarm the three guards patrolling the depot and to cut the wire and enter. Police waiting inside caught them with fifty pounds of common mining gelignite, cordtex for linking up the explosives, half a pound of semtex plastic explosive and two fairly sophisticated timing devices in case one failed. They were totally surrounded and out-gunned. Gideon conceded without a fight.

  Geldenhuis personally arrested Gideon, pulling his arms behind his back and borrowing a pair of handcuffs to do the job. Gideon was unarmed except for a knife on his belt which Geldenhuis now removed. 'You had your chance, Mandoma. I told you in the ring to kill me; now it's my turn. But first I have something to return to you.' The police colonel's head drew back and he spat in Gideon's face.

  Gideon laughed, spit running down his cheek. 'I am sorry I spat at you, Geldenhuis. You are not worthy of a black man's spit.' Gideon saw the police colonel's face contort and the left hand coming, but there was nothing he could do to avoid the fist which smashed into his face. Gideon steeled for the second blow; a boxer instinctively follows through and the right now smashed into the side of his jaw. He stood panting, waiting for Geldenhuis to hit him again, but the policeman held back. Gideon's nose was bleeding and he could taste blood in his mouth. He grinned. 'Your right hand was never any good, Geldenhuis!' He paused momentarily. 'Not like Peekay, he's got a right you have to respect, man!'

  The morning papers, having completed printing at midnight, ran an additional two-page supplement on Mandoma's capture which was on the streets by half past seven. Though Gideon wasn't the official leader of the ANC he was looked upon, particularly by the young blacks, as the man who would eventually lead them to victory. To the whites his arrest represented a high water mark in the campaign against terrorism and they applauded the brilliant Colonel Geldenhuis who'd brought it about.

  Hymie called Peekay, who had been at Johannesburg Fort since three in the morning trying to get access to Gideon and had only just returned home. 'Peekay, we've got Geldenhuis just about nailed down, let's move now. With Gideon's capture the bastard has become a national hero.

  Two of the morning papers speak of him as a future general.

  If we move quickly and bring a charge of murder against Geldenhuis it should force the state to postpone Gideon's treason trial until the court has heard the murder charges against him.'

  Their case against Geldenhuis was almost complete. Mr Bottomley-Tuck, the chief legal clerk at Red, had obtained a set of Geldenhuis's fingerprints simply by applying for them through the cryptics department in Pretoria. These were sent to London where they were found to match those on a tube of glue found by Brown during his search at Poulos Industrial & Heavy Engineering. The glue type also matched the glue used to attach the bomb to the metal surface inside the train engine.

  Another piece of proof surfaced closer to the trail. Peekay obtained a warrant to search Geldenhuis's flat and Swart and Brown discovered a pair of overalls hanging behind the kitchen door. In the left pocket lining of the overalls was a thin piece of wire about three inches long, resembling the filament which runs through the centre of magnesium tape. This exactly matched the tiny sample taken from the train engine. On further examination in a laboratory a small part of the hem of the pocket lining was "found to be stained a pinkish colour; this was analysed as magnesium of the same type used to fire the wheel of the little train. Red was ready to pounce.

  FORTY-TWO

  Colonel Jannie Geldenhuis was arrested by two of General Van Breeden's men leaving the office just after six in the evening. The warrant charged him with the murder of Sophie Van der Merwe (Mama Tequila) and the attempted murder of Solomon Moshe Levy.

  The arrest of Geldenhuis was a bitter blow for die volk, who regarded the police colonel as Die vuis van regverdigheid, the fist of righteousness, a white knight who single-handedly stood between them and the black hordes. Churches throughout the country asked their congregations to pray for the safe deliverance of Colonel Jannie Geldenhuis from the forces of evil and from the anti-Christ whose hand was so clearly in evidence.

  On the afternoon of the day following the arrest, General Van Breeden was summoned to Pretoria by the Depar
tment of Justice and from there he was taken to see Balthazar Johannes Vorster, the Minister for Justice and of Police and Prisons.

  Bul Van Breeden was ushered politely, though almost silently, into the minister's office by his male secretary. Vorster was a large, bull-necked man. He sat at his desk signing documents as the secretary tapped lightly on the door. 'Kom!' the minister said; then, still not glancing up, 'Sit!' as General Van Breeden entered.

  But Van Breeden had known Vorster for a number of years and, had they met on a casual basis, they would have referred to each other by Christian name. But Vorster, who was widely tipped to be the next prime minister, was a stickler for procedure in his ministerial capacity and it was obvious to Bul Van Breeden that he was on anything but a casual visit.

  'Good morning, Minister,' Bul Van Breeden said, taking the chair at the desk. The fact that he hadn't been ushered into the minister's lounge to wait for a formal interview boded. badly. Vorster was an impatient and outspoken man with the usual politician's long and spiteful memory.