The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  ‘Fuck you! Get back to your house before you get hurt.’

  The boys advanced on De Villiers, holding their spray cans in front of them.

  De Villiers raised the knobkierie and jabbed it into the solar plexus of the nearest one. ‘Don’t push your luck, boy.’ With his left hand he dangled the keys to the Subaru in front of their eyes. ‘How far do you think I can throw these keys? And do you really think you will get away with threatening a policeman?’

  The boys backed off, but had nowhere to go without the keys. They retreated to the other side of the Subaru. A patrol car with two police officers, a man and a woman, stopped behind the Subaru. De Villiers went over to the police car and introduced himself.

  ‘I have the situation under control, thank you. Could you please wait a minute or two while I wrap things up?’

  ‘Sure,’ the woman said.

  ‘Okay, boys, get in the car,’ said De Villiers. He could see Emma watching from the veranda of his house. ‘No, in the front, not the back,’ he said as the boys made for the back doors.

  De Villiers closed the doors and joined the two boys in the car, taking the seat behind the driver.

  ‘Okay, what’s this shit?’

  The boys kept mum, their hoodies pulled low over their faces. De Villiers reached across and pulled their hoodies back. They were mere boys, no older than fourteen or fifteen, and they wore identical blue scarves tied around their right wrists.

  ‘Whose car is this?’

  ‘Mine,’ said the boy in the driver’s seat. His companion cast a glance at him and averted his eyes.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me,’ De Villiers said, ‘or you’ll sleep in the cells tonight.’

  ‘My brother’s,’ the driver said.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’

  The boys exchanged another look.

  ‘Where’s your brother? I’m not going to ask again.’

  After a pause, ‘Jail.’

  There was a pair of rugby boots in the footwell of the car behind the passenger seat.

  ‘What school do you go to?’ De Villiers asked.

  ‘Edgewater.’

  ‘Edgewater, Sir,’ De Villiers said.

  ‘Edgewater, Sir,’ the boys echoed after him.

  ‘That’s a good school.’

  The boys said nothing.

  ‘Have either of you been arrested before?’

  ‘No, Sir.’ They spoke as a unit.

  ‘Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. The officers behind me are going to take you home. You’re going to come back here at ten o’clock in the morning with someone who has a driver’s licence. Then you’re going to paint the box before I give you the keys, alright?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘If you don’t turn up, if you’re even one minute late, I’ll send the officers back to fetch you and you’ll be charged with car theft, understand?’

  ‘We didn’t steal the car, Sir.’ It was the passenger.

  ‘I don’t care. Now get out of the car and get into the patrol car.’

  De Villiers waited until both boys were strapped in before he spoke to the driver of the patrol car. ‘Please take them home. Make sure they go into the house they point out. If either of them gives you any trouble, lock them both up. I’ll come in to the station and sort out the paperwork in the morning.’

  The Subaru locked at the press of a button and De Villiers threw the keys into the fruit bowl on the dining-room table before he went upstairs and got back into bed. The bed was cold and he snuggled up to Emma. She was upset. He could feel it in the stiffness of her back.

  He woke up and counted the days since the surgery. The surgeon had said that he might be impotent after the operation, but that they would talk about sex during the follow-up visit. And now this, De Villiers thought. He pushed his hand down the front of his pyjama pants. The operation wound was still covered with surgical tape. He turned slowly towards Emma. She was lying on her left side, facing away from him. He pulled her around gently until she was on her back, and lifted her right leg over his. She sighed. Her eyes were closed.

  Auckland

  Tuesday 1 January 2008 16

  Henderson and Kupenga arrived exactly on time, at nine o’clock. It was New Year’s Day and they were working.

  De Villiers played sick and opened the door in his pyjamas.

  ‘Come in, I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.

  The two detectives started taking their shoes off, but De Villiers stopped them. ‘There’s no need to remove your shoes.’ It was a kiwi habit De Villiers couldn’t get used to. When they arrive at your house, they take their shoes off. When he had asked why, years earlier, someone had mumbled, ‘Because it’s always so damned muddy outside!’

  The detectives followed De Villiers to the breakfast nook and he indicated they could sit. They took seats on the stools and watched as he filled the kettle. De Villiers joined them at the breakfast nook. Henderson placed a Ziploc bag on the granite surface. There was an arrow inside.

  De Villiers recognised the arrow immediately and felt the blood drain from his face. He sat down on a barstool. The two men watched him carefully. He wondered if Henderson had noticed his discomfort and hoped that what Henderson would see was a man who was pale from the blood loss caused by surgery.

  De Villiers realised that he was leaking, unable to hold his water, and turned to hide his embarrassment. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said.

  Upstairs he cleaned himself and dressed in denims and a T-shirt. Underneath he wore a pair of incontinence underpants Sister Appollus had issued from the hospital’s stock. ‘Don’t be embarrassed to wear this,’ she had said. ‘You’ll need it for a while, until you have control again.’

  De Villiers made his way downstairs and sat on the barstool, forcing his eyes not to look at the arrow.

  ‘Are you feeling alright?’ Henderson asked.

  De Villiers took a few deep breaths and turned to the sink. He poured a glass of water and took his time to swallow two tablets for the pain.

  He made a show of carefully studying the arrow. It was immediately obvious to him that its point had been fashioned from bone. He was convinced, no, he knew that it was giraffe.

  ‘Has Forensics finished with it?’ De Villiers asked, hoping the demons would tire and allow him to think clearly, to make sense of the arrow’s presence on the granite top of his breakfast nook.

  ‘Yes, but we’re not to touch it. It must remain in the bag with the seals intact,’ Henderson said.

  That meant they had a crime and they wanted to preserve the chain of evidence.

  The water boiled. ‘Tea or coffee?’ De Villiers asked, still stalling. He tried not to look at the arrow, but it was difficult and he felt Henderson’s eyes on him. His own eyes were drawn to the arrowhead in the Ziploc bag. It certainly wasn’t made of the fencing wire or steel nails used by most modern Bushmen.

  ‘Coffee, please,’ Henderson said.

  ‘Nothing for me,’ Kupenga said. De Villiers hadn’t made eye contact with him once.

  De Villiers placed the mug with milk and sugar in front of Henderson and picked up the Ziploc bag.

  He took his time to inspect every aspect of the dainty missile. He held it to the light and checked the alignment of its three main sections: the arrowhead, the foreshaft and the shaft. He shifted his scrutiny to the back of the arrow. A wide groove in a shallow V had been carved into the nock end of the shaft with a blade that had been none too sharp. The edges of the V were rough and the fine grain of the wood had been bruised. There was no fletching and no sign that there ever had been.

  De Villiers again became aware of Henderson’s eyes on him. Henderson pretended to be sipping his coffee, but was watching De Villiers intently with the ease of an experienced policeman who doesn’t miss anything, an eye that would detect the subtle shifts in tone or the changes in body language which would signal a lie or a concealment, or, worse still, a guilty conscience. But this man was sick and in pain, on
medication that made him sluggish. De Villiers sabotaged Henderson’s efforts to read his mind by turning his back to his visitors and taking the arrow to the window. He studied the arrowhead close-up.

  ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ he said abruptly and disappeared down the passage. He emerged seconds later with a magnifying glass and continued his study of the arrowhead, pulling lightly on its foreshaft and watching as it slid out of the main shaft exactly as he had known it would. There were evenly spaced grooves in the bone, confirming his suspicion about its manufacture.

  Behind Henderson and Kupenga, Zoë turned on the television, a handy distraction giving De Villiers more time to think. She made herself at home on the carpet and held the TV remote in both hands as she skipped from channel to channel.

  ‘Let’s go to my study,’ De Villiers suggested.

  The study was behind the kitchen. There was a small desk, a chair and a couch.

  ‘What can you tell us about this arrow?’ Henderson asked. ‘We don’t have much time.’

  The way De Villiers had looked at the exhibit suggested that he knew something about the arrow, and that it could not be from the Tokelauan Islands. Henderson was too good a policeman to have missed De Villiers’s discomfort when he first saw the arrow. And he had not missed the fact that De Villiers somehow knew that the foreshaft would slip out of the main shaft of the arrow so easily that the arrow had to be designed to work like that, yet for what reason Henderson did not know.

  Behind Henderson a battered khaki backpack with its numerous pouches and aluminium buckles hung on a hook on the wall.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ De Villiers asked at last.

  ‘Where does this arrow come from? Let’s start with that,’ Henderson said.

  ‘From Africa.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m from Africa.’

  ‘The expert from the university thinks it’s from the Tokelauan Islands.’

  De Villiers shook his head. ‘No, it’s from Africa.’

  ‘The Commissioner says it is a Bushman arrow. What do you think?’

  ‘I agree with the Commissioner. It is a Bushman arrow.’

  ‘Do you know where it comes from?’ Henderson asked. ‘Or how it got here?’

  ‘It comes from Africa, I’m sure.’ De Villiers was deliberately vague.

  ‘Yes, but how did it get here? That’s what we have to find out.’

  ‘Here where?’ De Villiers asked. ‘What’s this arrow doing here?’

  Henderson decided to impart some information.

  ‘Someone used it in an assassination attempt.’

  ‘Here, in New Zealand?’ De Villiers asked. There was a degree of alarm in his voice which didn’t escape Henderson.

  Henderson nodded.

  De Villiers took another look at the arrow. He thought he knew where and by whom it had been made, but he wasn’t sure that he was ready to tell Henderson, or that Henderson was ready to know. Henderson had said assassination. It wasn’t the right word for the kinds of murders which were most common in New Zealand: domestic killings, gangland killings, drug-crazed people killing for money to buy drugs, scum preying on tourists and immigrants from Asia and farmers shooting intruders on their farms.

  ‘If it is a Bushman arrow, there’ll be poison on it,’ Henderson said. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ De Villiers said immediately, ‘but the poison loses its potency after about a year.’ He regretted having added the unnecessary detail.

  ‘Why do I get the impression that you know more about it than you’re telling us?’ Henderson asked.

  The blood drained out of De Villiers’s face a second time. What could he say? If he admitted to being present when the arrow had been made, he would immediately be a suspect in an attempted murder. While he was working out how to answer Henderson’s question, the doorbell rang. De Villiers beat Zoë to the door. When he opened it, he found that Henderson and Kupenga had followed him. He asked them to wait, but they said they had work to do and left, taking the arrow with them.

  There were three men at the door, the two boys from the night before and a tall young man wearing a baseball cap back to front. They stood awkwardly, watching Henderson and Kupenga leave in the police car.

  ‘Please come in,’ De Villiers said.

  They took seats in the lounge. ‘Are you their brother?’ De Villiers asked the young man with the baseball cap.

  ‘They are my nephews.’

  ‘Good,’ De Villiers said. ‘Let me see your driver’s licence.’

  The young man opened his wallet and handed him a driver’s licence. De Villiers checked the details. The photograph matched the young man sitting opposite him.

  ‘Do you know what happened last night, or rather, early this morning?’

  ‘They were causing trouble.’

  ‘True,’ De Villiers confirmed. ‘I am tired of cleaning up after them. And they were driving without a licence and without the permission of the owner of the car.’

  The young man didn’t look him in the eye, a sign of respect for an elder. The two boys sat staring at the carpet. They were still wearing the blue bandannas tied around their wrists. De Villiers was suddenly angry.

  ‘Take those bandannas off immediately,’ he said. ‘This is not your street.’

  The one boy was slow to react. His uncle cuffed him roughly on the side of his face and the scarf came off promptly.

  ‘I’m tired of repainting that box every time some hooligan sprays it with his gang’s logo,’ De Villiers said.

  ‘I can understand that. We’re trying our best with them, but it’s difficult.’

  De Villiers studied the young man carefully. ‘Do you work?’

  ‘I’m a builder.’ De Villiers looked at the man’s hands. They were honest hands with calluses and shaves and cuts, the hands of a working man.

  He decided to take a chance.

  ‘I think we can keep them out of trouble, but I’ll need some help from you. Can you work with me?’ he asked.

  The man nodded.

  ‘Okay, we start by taking them across the street and they can clean up their mess. Then I want you to take them to Brightside Hospital – I’ll explain where it is – and I want you to introduce them to two guys who work there. Then I want you to ask those guys how these boys can get into jobs like theirs, what training they need, and how old they have to be to join. How does it sound, so far?’

  The man nodded again.

  ‘Okay,’ De Villiers said, ‘I’ll get the paint.’

  He left them in his lounge while he fetched the paint and two brushes from his shed. Zoë was entertaining his guests with her xylophone when he returned.

  He sent the two boys off with instructions to repaint the whole of the electrical substation box and chatted with their mentor. The young man was part of an extended family living in Pakuranga Heights. Most of their money went back to Samoa every month to support their family there. De Villiers drew a map with directions to Brightside and wrote down the names of Te ’O and Leauanae at the foot of the map.

  ‘These are good men, blokes who’ll understand when you tell them we need to find something for your nephews to do so that they’ll keep their noses clean. It will help if they can also earn a bit of money.’

  They shook hands on the deal. De Villiers fetched the car keys from the dining-room table and handed them over. ‘Let’s see how they’re doing.’

  The boys were hard at work. De Villiers couldn’t work out whether they were more fearful of him or their mentor.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to the boys. ‘I’m not going to take the matter further out of respect for your uncle here. He’s a good man, but you two are on the wrong track. The police have your names and I know where to find you. This box doesn’t belong to you. This is not your street. As a matter of fact, not even the street where you live belongs to you. And I know your sign. If I see the same sign on this box ever again, I’m going to come and look for you. Do you understan
d?’

  The boys looked at their mentor and answered, one after the other, ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Their mentor had the last word. ‘And if the two of you ever come past here and you see the sign on the box, you come to this house and you knock on the door and you ask for the paint and the brushes to clean it up, do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’ They didn’t make eye contact with him. De Villiers shook hands with the mentor a second time and returned to the house.

  After a shower, De Villiers sat down and tried to make as much sense as he could of the arrow in the Ziploc bag. He had seen it before, or one exactly like it, and knew precisely how it could be made, but he had no idea how that arrow could have found its way to New Zealand. One of the ghosts of his past had followed him all the way to New Zealand, he sensed.

  Southern Angola

  May 1985 17

  They had made good time the first day east. They had started late in the afternoon after the choppers had turned back to their base at Rundu. When the sun came up the next day, they had covered more than thirty kilometres. They were dehydrated by now, but they had no choice other than to lie low, sleeping rough under a bush. From time to time they could hear helicopters in the distance, but they had no means of knowing whether they were SADF or Russian.

  De Villiers had a headache he ascribed to the glancing blow of the bullet that could so easily have killed him. He walked or ran, depending on !Xau’s pace, and occasionally found that the Bushman had slowed down to enable him to keep up.

  They reached a dry riverbed late in the afternoon of the second day, shortly after they had resumed their flight. It ran west to east, he noted, and was no more than a gully, but the dry reeds on the bank were evidence of water. They dug for the water immediately and found some shade where they rested and drank until their energy returned.

  !Xau used his Best to cut some reeds. ‘For arrows,’ he said.

  De Villiers marvelled at !Xau’s industry. His own bow was designed for tension – to kill with the speed at which the arrow travelled and the depth it penetrated, cutting through sinew and bone. But it was in his backpack. And that was back at Donkergat.