Reconciliation for the Dead

by Paul E. Hardisty

  19th September 1981,

  Pretoria, South Africa

  She had left the windows open. And through them came Africa.

  Came the warm caress of the breeze, laden with a continent’s fertile beauty, all of its dark, warring despair. Came the earth-red smell of laterite, the sweet tang of wood smoke and the blossom of wildflowers, that unmistakable redolence of rain in the distance. Sounds, too, flooded in. Sounds that would always be home. Thunder rumbling on the horizon, like a faraway waterfall. A woman’s Zulu lullaby drifting through razor wire and the green hanging boughs of suburban trees. Birdsong.

  And the absence of things too. Missing, the sting of burning rubber, the acrid shove of cordite, the stink of death. Absent the wail of jet fighters and the rip of gunfire, the screams of the wounded and the cries of dying animals. Here, now, there was no war.

  Clay pushed himself up in the bed.

  The room was big, with a high ceiling and shuttered French doors that opened up onto a polished stone veranda. Morning sun streamed through the mosquito net in thick beams heavy with pollen. Hardwood floors gleamed. A ceiling fan spun quietly overhead. Opposite, a young couple smiled out at him from within a silver frame set on an antique chest of drawers. It was – he realised he’d never asked her name – the doctor from the military hospital. She had her arms around a young man’s neck. Their hair was tousled, sun-bleached. They looked happy, their beauty captured in that moment forever.

  On the bedside table was the standard-issue Beretta Crowbar had given him, the copy of Catch-22, the muslin pouch with the diamond in it. A glass of water, too, a box of some kind of pain medicine, the copy of Crime and Punishment she’d given him in the hospital, and a note. The bedside clock showed twenty-nine minutes after ten in the morning. He reached for the paper, wincing in pain as his side stretched out. I will be back soon, it said. You’re safe here. But don’t leave the house. Stay away from the front windows. Keep quiet. No music! If you are up to it there is some soup on the stove, bread and butter on the counter, water in the kettle for tea. My shift finishes at 3 pm. I should be home by four. I will explain everything then. Vivian.

  Vivian.

  Clay levered himself up and swung his feet to the floor. Pain burned through his side. Sweat bloomed from his pores. He sat panting, hands propped on his knees. An image of Botha standing above his bed came to him, the last thing he remembered: that dark malevolent stare, those words. A cold chill bit a long way inside him.

  Maybe Botha was right. Maybe Clay was a traitor. He’d killed one of his own, had known he was doing it. He’d disobeyed orders. He’d lied at the inquest. They all had. They’d court-martial him, probably shoot him.

  Sitting here on this marital bed, none of it seemed real. He’d wake in a moment and he would be back at the war with Eben, and it would all have been an echo in his mind, fast receding, soon forgotten. The thought of his friend brought it all rushing back. That glimpse of brain through the opened skull, the weight of him in his arms as he hoisted him onto the casevac’s deck – all of it too real, none of this a dream.

  He pushed himself slowly to his feet, took a first tentative step and found that he could walk without too much pain, as long as he kept his strides short and didn’t try to twist at the waist. She – Vivian – had done a good job.

  He wandered the rooms, through the big archway into the sitting room with the river-rock fireplace, the big mullioned windows letting out onto the leafy garden, then into the library, back through to the kitchen. A hardwood-floored corridor led from the main room to the front of the house. The planking underfoot was old, worn, creaking under his weight. A formal sitting room and dining room flanked the front door. He checked every room, determined possible entry and exit points. Every interior door but one was unlocked.

  Why was he here, in her house? For it was hers. Everything about the place spoke of a life of order and learning, of love and hope for the future, of compassion and beauty. But it was also his – the man in the photograph, her husband. The 1:72 models of aircraft ranged across the wooden shelf by the bookcase, each one carefully painted and decaled; the painting of the Spitfire climbing through the clouds; the SAAF dress uniform with captain’s insignia and campaign ribbons carefully pressed and hanging in the closet; the weight bench out on the patio, the bar still loaded up with a hundred kilos of rusting iron.

  Clay sat on the back patio step and looked up at the sky. He felt like an intruder. He turned his face to the sun. Photons rained over him, swam red across his retinae, warmed the scar on his cheek. A bird landed on the patio, hopped towards him and stopped just beyond touching distance, looking at him, waiting for something. It was a ring-necked dove, so common here, grey with a dark collar and white lilac-tinted breast. It crooned, those three familiar syllables that transported him to another house in another suburb in Gauteng province, where, as a boy, he’d lain in his bed under the eaves and listened to the doves cooing in the big jacaranda outside his window in the early hours before school. And, as these memories came, that empty place opened up inside him and he could not close it or hold on to it so as to describe it any way that he could understand. And much later, he would reflect that his life had been divided into two halves, whether by accident or by design of fate. One, a period of belonging, the other of loss. And he would try to calculate that point at which the loss had eroded the treasured store of belonging such that, for a short time, an equilibrium had been reached, a point at which the sum of his life had balanced to zero. And in this he came to realise that, with each passing day, the essence of him was further reduced, become negative, a gravity so powerful as to swallow light, crush matter.

  The dove, tired of waiting, flapped up to a high branch. As it did, another sound, this one from inside the house, made Clay start. He froze, listened. It couldn’t yet be past eleven. Vivian wasn’t due back until four. There it was again: a creak, then a click.

  Jesus. Someone was inside the house.

  Pulse jack-knifing, Clay reached to the small of his back for the Beretta. It wasn’t there. He’d left it on the bedside table. He cursed and pushed himself to his feet. He shuffled to the edge of the open patio door and hid behind the outside wall. From here he could see through into the main sitting room. He waited. Then the sound of a door being pushed to, slowly. The slightest click. Without a weapon, unable to run, he was defenceless.

  Footsteps approaching now, creaking over the hardwood. A rustling sound, like crunching paper or plastic. Then another door opening and closing, with stealth. Clay looked back towards the garden. Through the shrubs he could make out a high back wall lipped with coiled wire. There was a garden shed, but no obvious exit. He cursed himself for not having reconnoitred the garden too, identified at least one exfil route. He started moving along the back patio towards the bedroom. If he couldn’t run, he would fight.

  The French doors of the bedroom were still open. He stepped over the threshold, holding his breath. He picked the gun up from the bedside table and eased back the action, wincing at the sound. It was loaded. He moved towards the open bedroom door and flattened himself against the wall just inside the doorway, listened for a moment, then glanced into the sitting room. It was empty. Whoever it was, he had to assume that there was more than one of them. The sound of footsteps again, coming from the hallway that connected the main sitting room with the front parlour and front door. The footsteps were getting louder. He cycled a few breaths and raised the Beretta.

  He’d never seen her out of uniform before.

  She wore a pretty, knee-length dress that swayed as she walked. Her hair was down, wisped about her head in the breeze blowing through the open windows. She’d put on some lipstick. Her eyes looked bigger than he remembered, very blue, even from here. She was carrying a paper shopping bag in one arm. He watched as she turned away and disappeared into the kitchen, heard her open and close the fridge, run the tap. He didn’t move, stayed hidden. A moment later she emerged from the kitchen carrying two mugs and
started walking across the big sitting room, past the bookcase and the expensive-looking hi-fi system. Her dress clung to her body as she moved. It was of some thin material, tied about the waist with a belt of the same cloth, patterned in hues of blue, like the sea from altitude, ripples and waves and currents and the frisson that surfed up Clay’s spine and foamed through his groin.

  She stopped in the middle of the room and glanced outside, as if she’d heard something. Her forehead knitted into a frown.

  When she turned back, Clay was standing in the open bedroom doorway, the gun still in his hand.

  The look of worry on her face disappeared into a big smile. ‘Good morning,’ she said.

  ‘Howzit,’ he said, aware that she probably knew he’d been watching her, feeling it come as heat to his face. ‘You’re home early.’

  ‘I told my boss I wasn’t feeling well.’ She walked up to him and handed him a mug. ‘You shouldn’t be up,’ she said, looking down at his torso, bare except for the bandage around his midriff. ‘That wound hasn’t healed yet.’ She took him by the hand and started guiding him back to the bed. ‘And put that horrible thing away.’

  ‘Didn’t your ma tell you that you should knock before you enter?’ he said, putting the Beretta on the chest of drawers next to the photograph.

  ‘Sorry. Next time, I will.’

  He sat on the bed.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m good.’

  ‘Well you look good,’ she said. ‘For a dead man.’

  Clay stopped, frowned, started to form a question.

  ‘I’ll explain,’ she said. ‘Now, come on. Listen to your doctor.’

  He lay back and propped his head up on a couple of pillows she arranged for him. She sat on the edge of the bed next to him.

  ‘So tell me,’ Clay said.

  When she’d found him in the ward, he’d been unconscious, his respiratory system in the process of shutting down. A nurse had been administering CPR, but to no effect. She’d been on duty in another ward when one of the nurses had come running. A man had been seen fleeing the hospital, dressed as a staff member. Beside Clay’s bed they’d found the partially depressed syringe still stuck into the IV line, and a single empty phial on the floor nearby. He was going into cardiac arrest. There was no other option. She’d administered adrenaline, straight to the heart.

  Clay’s heart was pounding now as the realisation hit him.

  ‘After everything we’d been through trying to save you, I was damned if we were going to lose you like that,’ she said, brushing a wisp of hair from the bridge of her nose.

  ‘It was Botha,’ said Clay. ‘The guy I met in Angola.’

  Her eyes opened wide. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I saw him standing by the bed trying to inject something into my IV. He told me he was going to kill me.’

  Vivian went white behind the dusting of earthy freckles. ‘Are you sure?’

  Clay nodded.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Big, broad, overweight. Dark moustache, balding. Skin like the pox. Ugly as hell, if you ask me. The guy in my dreams – the ones I told you about.’

  She shook her head. ‘Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?’

  Clay thought back. ‘That’s what I saw.’

  She rubbed her thumb across the knuckles of her index finger, staring at the bedclothes, lost somewhere. After a while she looked up at him. ‘If it is the same man, then we are all in real danger.’

  ‘It was him. I’m sure.’

  She was quiet a while, thinking this through. ‘What did you do out there, Clay?’

  ‘What I was told.’

  ‘I mean, what did you do that would make them want to kill you?’

  He told her about the rendezvous with the C-130, about Botha’s apparent role in taking delivery of the tusks and diamonds from UNITA, and their confrontation over the prisoner, about seeing him again on the Ondangwa base the night Wade was killed.

  ‘Botha argued with Wade, there, outside the mess hall. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’ Clay raised his hands to his face, pressed his fingertips into his forehead. ‘I should have tried to get closer. I was scared.’

  She put her hand on his head, ran her fingers across the rough brush-cut stubble. She did it absentmindedly, as if by habit. ‘Everyone is scared, Clay.’

  Clay said nothing, felt her fingers travelling through his hair.

  ‘Someone is making a fortune out there,’ she whispered.

  That hole opened up inside him again. It wasn’t enough that SWAPO and FAPLA were trying to kill him. Now it was his own goddamned people. People who were profiting from the very conflict Eben had just been sacrificed to. The hole gaped like an unfilled grave.

  Her face darkened. ‘Did Botha pay UNITA? For the tusks, I mean. Did he give them money, weapons?’

  ‘I couldn’t see everything. But there weren’t weapons – not on that flight, anyway. He did give Mbdele a small box. I have no idea what was inside, but it was too small for cash. More like a pack of smokes.’

  She nodded. ‘Drugs, perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Who is he?’ said Clay. ‘Botha. Who does he work for?’

  ‘I have no idea. But he used this.’ And from the pocket of her dress she withdrew an empty phial.

  Clay read the three characters on the label, the only markings. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.

  ‘Formulation 13B. As soon as I saw, I knew. It was only because you’d remembered what was in the stuff that I knew how to counteract it.’

  Clay pursed his lips, exhaled.

  ‘You’ve seen what it does to people. You’ve felt it.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s outrageous.’

  Botha had been there with Cobra when they’d taken away the hardwood and the tusks, but not over the Atlantic with Doctor Death and the dead and dying blacks – not that Clay had seen, anyway. But the implications were clear: it proved some sort of connection between Botha’s dealings with UNITA, and Doctor Death’s fucked-up experiments in Angola. The common element was Cobra. He’d been there both times, with his dozen or so Special Forces types.

  Clay’s head was spinning now, trying to make sense of the pieces. Then he remembered. ‘The document I told you about,’ he said. ‘It was on SAMS letterhead.’

  She recoiled visibly. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Formulation 13B – those notes were typed on South African Medical Service letterhead.’

  She sat for a long time without speaking. After a while she stood and walked to the still-open doors and out onto the back patio. He could see her standing in the sunshine, hands on hips.

  After a while she came back in and sat back down on the edge of the bed. ‘That would be how he got access to the hospital,’ she said, composed again. ‘If it was him you saw.’

  ‘It was him.’

  ‘Okay. It was him.’

  Clay thought back to the clearing in Angola, the men and boys collapsing to the ground, voiding themselves, the laughter of Cobra’s men as they stepped over the bodies. He shivered. ‘What the hell is our medical service doing with drugs that are designed to do this to people? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘That’s what we have to find out.’

  ‘Is that what Operation COAST is?’ he said. ‘Some kind of medical testing project?’

  ‘Here,’ she said, unfolding the hand-rendered reproductions he’d made for her in the hospital. ‘Look again.’

  Clay took the paper.

  She jerked three shallow breaths. Clay thought she was going to cry, but instead she took his hand in hers. ‘Is there anything else you can remember, Clay? Anything at all?’

  He searched his head for the image of the originals, compared the copy, character by character, line by line. They were identical in every way. He didn’t understand most of it, but he knew it was the same. ‘Everything’s there,’ he said. ‘I’m sure.’ />
  ‘How, Clay?’

  ‘My memory works like that. Not for everything, but definitely for numbers, strings of characters. The more random and meaningless, the easier it is. It’s been like that since I was a child.’

  The doctor nodded, clinician again. She looked at his scribblings. ‘What about the logo – the letterhead?’

  He looked at the papers. No letterhead. He’d left that out, missed it completely. ‘The SAMS crest was top centre,’ he said, indicating with his index finger. ‘Here. And you’re right. There was something else.’ He moved his finger to the top right corner of the page.

  ‘What was it?’

  He scanned the beam of his memory over the page, trying to focus. ‘There was something in fine print. A block of text. Part of the letterhead. I didn’t pay it much attention.’

  ‘Try to remember Clay. Top right. What was it?’

  He dredged. ‘An address block,’ he said.

  ‘Where, Clay?’

  Some of the words sharpened. ‘Pretoria,’ he said. ‘Definitely. And something else.’ He scanned, focusing. ‘Roodeplaat Laboratories, something like that.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ she said. ‘It’s not too far from the hospital, I think. Was there anything else, Clay?’

  He shook his head, tightened down on her hand. Questions spun in his head. ‘Why did you call me a dead man, Doctor?’

  She placed her index finger onto the note she’d written earlier. ‘Vivian,’ she said. ‘Please. That’s my name.’

  ‘Vivian,’ he repeated. ‘Please, Vivian. Tell me.’

  She attempted a smile. It didn’t come out as one.

  Over the next half-hour, Vivian recounted how, after she’d restarted his heart, she’d cleaned him up and wheeled him out of the ward and to an unused operating theatre. Swearing the other nurse to secrecy, she’d filled out a death certificate for Claymore Straker, 1st Parachute Battalion, SADF, indicating death due to wounds received in battle. Making sure he was stable, she’d covered him over with a sheet, and, enlisting the help of a trusted friend – Joseph, a black orderly she’d worked with for years – they’d wheeled Clay to the ambulance. Under the veil of darkness, the streets empty, they’d driven him to the morgue.