“So this is what it was all for, hey,” I say to him. “Your great Struggle.”
“You don’t know anything,” he says.
“I was there, Shaolin.”
“Be quiet now.”
“My people and my country is what you used to say.”
He snorts. “The only country is the country of Joseph Lukhele.”
“Your comrades.”
“My family is my comrades.”
Oberholzer comes out of the dark to lay his long hand on Lukhele’s shoulder. “You see,” he says. “There it is. Even a solid old ANC man will say it straight now. You tell it to him, Joe.”
Lukhele knocks the hand off and swears at him and Oberholzer chuckles and turns away. Lukhele glares at me. “Don’t judge me, boy,” he says. “I gave my blood for it and all what changed is the faces at the top. The rest are down in the dirt, like always.” He hits himself in the chest hard enough to thump like a drum. “Not me,” he says. “Not anymore.”
“But Mandela,” I say. “Nelson Mandela.”
A snarl shows teeth like jagged walls in the fierce dark circle of his face. “How is he different? Sitting in that big luxury house in Houghton.”
I blink at him, remembering. “I saved your life, Shaolin.”
“You’re confused,” he says. “My name isn’t Shaolin anymore. Your mind does not function. You come to my office rambling how you are your brother.”
“I remember it. The red Jag.”
“Let me tell you—that night I was caught it was Marcus who did it. He was working for him then, he was his top man.” He stabs his thumb backwards at Oberholzer somewhere behind. “So I don’t owe you Helgers. Nothing.”
Oberholzer is back, drawn by the gesticulation. “Hell, those were the days,” he says. “And Marcus was bladdy good. The Machine we called him. Machine Marcus. My machine.”
“It was where he was taking you that night,” Lukhele says, “to meet Marcus and start more trainings.”
“Would have worked beautifully,” Oberholzer says. “But you ran away that time, Martin. It’s okay. Every negative holds a positive seed. Things happen for a reason. You’ve come back now with this—what a gift, hey.”
Understanding seeps into me like a chill. I turn to Lukhele. “I went to your office and you ran straight to him. You knew I was all confused. You sold me out.”
“When opportunity walks in the door,” says Lukhele, “you have to think fast.”
“Where’s Pienaar?” Oberholzer is asking someone else.
“He’s coming, boss.” A masked man is pointing. I stare at him, the source of the voice, because it’s another black man’s accent, and I say to him, “And you also? This is Mandela, man.”
The man’s laughter is like a shout. “He’ll take his offshore account over Mandela any day,” says Oberholzer to me. “They all will. They’re not like me—I do it on principle. The principle of payback. Eye for eye, jiz like your holy scrolls here says it. But I take good care of my men.” He’s walking back out of the light, to the camera. He’s all legs. He’s got that same rifle strapped across him, had a name for “her” back then. Picking off meerkats in the desert as the sun went down. Meantime Lukhele and another one push me back to my mark in front of the bench, in the brightness. The burn in my groin stings terribly. “Oright, chop-chop,” Oberholzer is saying. “Say something like My name is Martin Helger and I am the leader of our Zionist commando, we do this bomb to protect our world order and a free South Africa. Try that. We’ll play with it. Look straight here in the lens, man. Three two one and . . . action.”
There is a wet snapping noise and a man falls into the light with something spraying from his head.
20
The light swings around and in its white burning a masked man has a black submachine gun up to his cheek flickering yellow from the tip of its fat muzzle, making only a low buzzing sound and others are shouting, diving, and then the light goes out with a pop of breaking glass. Things are whirring in the air, cracking like pebbles hitting metal all around. I dive down in the blindness after the glare and someone heavy lands on top of me with the bzzzz noise in close and hot casings falling on my cheek. To my right one of the masked men is dropping—not flying backwards like in a movie but straight down like some string-cut puppet. Now this guy on top grabs me and starts dragging me with him across the bimah floor, saying, “With me, Martin. Stay low.” It’s his voice and it paralyzes me. He curses and yanks, telling me to wake up. We slither over sprawled bodies. My hand slaps a viscous puddle of something hot with chunks in it. We reach the glass-brick wall and slide our backs along it to the stairs—a break in the wall that he starts easing around. Immediately there’s a zoop noise and a sharp crack very close and he shouts in pain and jerks back. The moonlight is strong and my eyes are adjusting and the bimah is empty now but for the bodies of fallen men and broken glass and casings and the two of us, huddled against the wall. “Aw shit,” he’s saying. “Shit a fucken brick.” He rips off his pouched vest and his mask, starts patting at himself and pawing at the side of his head in a kind of panic. He doesn’t have any hair anymore and his head is rounder, his face fatter, but it is no one else but my brother, my blood. The true Marcus Helger. I notice that the top of his ear is gone, the bleeding made oil-black by the moon. I tell him it’s just the ear as he’s opening a package with his teeth, a dressing he gets me to hold there while he tapes round his head to keep it in place. He’s saying, “Bladdy good shot. Christ shit fuck.”
Oberholzer’s voice floats up from the pews, the open blackness on the other side of the wall—he could be anywhere out there. “Hey, hey, Martin! Is he still moving by you? He is hurt izzen he? You on your own now, Martin.” I don’t say anything and then Oberholzer says, “It was your brother, hey? The real Marcus. He’s wearing Pienaar’s kit. Thought he’d fox me but I’m too quick.”
I can hear Marcus grinding his teeth, mumbling, “How many how many how many. Two, three, four. Four. Fuck shit. Four.” I realise he’s counting the number of bodies on the bimah as the echoing voice of Oberholzer floats back. “I got him,” it says. “He is dead or dying there izzen he. I never miss. I put a hole in his head and I can do the same for you. You know that. So I want you to stick your hands up now, Martin. Stand up slow with your hands over your head.”
I look at my hand and it’s smeared with that oily black and I look at the bodies and I can smell the burnt gunpowder. It was seconds. My brother started shooting and he would have got them all but then it must have been Oberholzer who spun the blinding light onto him and jumped off. Others did too—that’s why Marcus was counting. Three of them are out there including Oberholzer who was already set up and waiting for us when my brother reached the stairs. Bladdy good shot. I remember him firing one-handed at the farmhouse, touching a bullet to whatever he wanted. I wipe my sticky hand off on my jeans. We’ve lost all surprise and now we’re marooned on a stage with no way off.
“Martin, come out. You know that I am a reasonable man. Let’s work this through. I am a positive thinker—every adversity has an opportunity in it, you know.”
Marcus twitches and his arms whip around and the submachine gun buzzes again. I look in time to see someone ducking back as bullets hit the glass-brick wall across from us, cracking hard, spraying chips. Marcus changes magazines. Oberholzer starts shouting in Afrikaans. Screaming at someone called Jannie that he needs me alive. Then Jannie shouts back, “Daar’s twee van hulle!”—that it’s two of us—and Oberholzer says, “Marcus! Marcus! You still there, hey? It is you, hey?” Marcus doesn’t answer, his teeth grinding. Oberholzer calls, “Can’t believe I missed. You got Jew’s luck, Sergeant. Always did. You come out of nowhere, just like we trained you. You musta got Pienaar in the bog. A nice plan. Put on his kit and shoot us all in the backs. But now listen here, Marcus Helger. Hear me, you fokken traitor Jew. You failed. You didn’t get us all. I am on this side and Jannie is on the other. Meantime old Joe Lukhele has gone to find t
he stairs up to the ladies’ chairs up there. He’ll be on top soon. With a lovely view down. Then the fun’s ganna start.”
There’s a silence and then a banging, distant and steady—something heavy slamming into wood. It must be Lukhele at the locked teak doors that lead up to the women’s gallery. I can picture them, they’re big and solid, but if he’s got a sledgehammer or something it won’t take him long to bust through. Marcus grimaces and calls out, his voice hoarse, “I don’t think so, Bokkie. You open fire, this thing goes boom.”
“Don’t con yourself,” says Oberholzer’s voice. “He’ll pot you clean.”
“I’ll set it off myself. Less you back off.”
“Go for it—we’ll be ukay out here, we outside the blast radius. You a suicide case now, Machine? What about your little brother, you taking him with? It’s over, man. Show your hands. We got you.”
Now the thudding noise changes to a tearing, a splintering. There’s a pause and then the thumping goes on more rapidly bangbangbang—he must be almost through—and I get a trapped and desperate feeling which is mirrored in my new-gifted memories with the time that Annie Goldberg and I were caught in a storm that filled up the pipe and nearly drowned us like a pair of unlucky kittens. All-a-sudden I’ve elbowed my brother and I’m savagely pantomiming but he’s not getting it and I have to put my mouth right by his good ear to let him know and then he moves, we both slither over to the bench which is still open and we very carefully lift out the assembled bomb whole and set it down. I bend over and reach down, my hurt groin shrieking, and lift the metal trapdoor and then, staying low, I climb down into the dim space underneath. My feet find the very chair that Annie and I left there all those years ago. The banging has ceased out there, I picture Lukhele running up the curving stairway to the gallery, jumping three at a time. I step carefully off onto the desk and look up to find Marcus climbing down, lowering the trapdoor above him so that it goes black. He switches on a torch. Oberholzer is calling out again, the words muffled. I climb down off the desk. The dust and the jumbled-up stuff looks just the same, even the half-melted candles. I cross to the far side where the filing cabinet lies flat and the long slit in the brick wall behind is exposed. When I look at Marcus I can see his left leg isn’t working properly by the way he hops down, stumbling, and the chair goes crashing onto the metal desk—very loud in that small space. If I can hear Oberholzer’s muffled voice through the trapdoor they probably caught that. I hiss at my brother to give me the torch and he does and I head down the narrow, scratching slit as fast as I can, cobwebs brushing my face.
When I reach the main tunnel and turn around, Marcus is right there and I shine the beam up the slit. Shit—I forget to remind him to lift the filing cabinet across behind us. It’s too late to go back now, I start running but then I catch myself. He has one hand on the wall to keep weight off his leg and he is hopping to keep up. “Where you hit?” “S’fine. Go. Go.” I shine the light down and see the blood on his left shin and at the calf where the bullet must have come out. I lift the beam to his chest so I can see his face. “How can you be here?” I say. “How are you even alive, man? Where the hell have you been all this time?”
“Where’s this go?” he says, jerking his chin.
“Back to the pipe. Did you come in by the pipe?”
“Ja. Like them. I followed.”
They all came up the pipe because their coming and going could never be recorded. My grotesque mistake was to go to Lukhele. But how could I have known what he was? What he’d become? Their plan was neat—the bomb would kill Mandela, the video would explain who and why, me and mine. The New South Africa would maybe self-destruct. Oberholzer would pay back all the hurt and rage he nursed. He’d be the winner all the way and me the supreme loser just like all those games of Slinkers back in the foyer of the Emmarentia Shul with Ari and Pats—poor Pats. Meantime I’ve got my head under Marcus’s arm and we are hurrying down the tunnel, the torch beam stabbing around crazily. It’s not too long before that yellow eye hits the blankness of a wall ahead. When I lift it up what I see is not just the spring-loaded flap that Annie and I once squeezed our ways through with a bag full of videotapes but now there is a bar of steel behind it, to keep it from swinging open too wide.
“Calm,” says Marcus. “Gimme light here.” He is digging into camouflage pouches on his belt. I realise he left the bulky pouched vest behind on the bimah. He comes out with three grenades, two round black globes and one long cylinder. “Phosphorus,” he says of the long one. “Smoke. These two’re frags.” He’s looking up at the steel bar. “Ja,” he says. He puts down the grenades and digs out the roll of tape he used on his dressing, finds a chunk of loose concrete and wraps tape around it, and then he stretches a long piece and winds it around one of the frag grenades. Then he freezes. I’ve heard it too—a slow, slithering, softly crunching noise in the dark behind us. Marcus kills the light. His arm across my chest presses me to the wall beside him. It’s very dark but not utterly black, some moonlight is filtering in maybe from drains and seams above. There are concrete beams that run vertically down the walls every maybe fifteen metres on both sides, and Marcus starts inching up towards the shadow of the closest one. His feet encounter something and he hands me the submachine gun which I take by the fat snout, realising it must be a built-in silencer—why these weapons buzz and don’t bang. Marcus straightens up with an old half-broken plank, about as long as an arm. He takes the gun back and presses the torch into my hand and whispers close, “They won’t shoot you like me. When I say, walk to them. Turn the torch on and hold up your hands but keep it shining on them. Got it?”
I nod. The slithering is getting closer. “This is nuts,” I say, feeling numb and dreamlike around the booming of my heart.
“I need to see them,” he tells me. “You go out hands up and they’ll show. Keep it shining on them no matter what. Then when I shout you run all out to that side and get down. But don’t stop shining. Even while you sprinting. They won’t fire on you. Say it back to me.” Then two things are happening almost at once. There’s another slithery crunch, sounding close, and Marcus leans out and gives a burst from the submachine gun for a second and then flattens himself back against the wall. In the flare of yellow from the gun all I saw was an empty tunnel down there—they must be pressed behind the concrete beams like we are.
A shout vaults out of the dark: “Hey stupids! Come out. Where can you go?” It’s Lukhele. “You stuck in here,” his voice says. “Show your hands, come out.”
Then comes an Afrikaans voice, it’s Jannie. He says, “You left your kit and your bag behind, Marcus. We know you got stuff-all on you. Time to get real.”
“Throw out the gun,” Lukhele says. “Hands on your heads and come out walking backwards.”
“Oright!” shouts Marcus. “Lemme just calm Martin.”
“Now!” says Lukhele.
“He’s scared here,” says Marcus. “Tell him you won’t shoot.”
A pause. “Mar-ten,” says Lukhele. “We not going to shoot you, okay?”
Meantime Marcus is whispering fast to me, repeating his instructions. Keep shining. Run to cover and get low. “And shout when you run.”
“Shout?”
“Your bladdy head off.”
“Marcus!” says Jan’s voice. “We got monolenses here. We got masks. I’m rolling in a gas.”
“Relax, china,” Marcus calls. “Here it is.” And he puts the submachine gun down flat and chips it carefully with his foot, sending it skittering out into the tunnel. “We unarmed,” he calls.
“Step out! Hands on heads! Walk backwards to us!”
For a second I think Marcus is hugging me close but what he’s doing is pushing some lumps of rubbery stuff into my ears and then he’s turning on the torch in my hand and prodding me out into the tunnel. I step forward and lift my hands above my head, the beam slanting down as I start walking up the tunnel. They won’t shoot you. Shouts come out of the blackness, telling me to turn aro
und, turn around, but I keep walking forward slowly. Waiting for the shout from Marcus behind, waiting for them to show like he said they would, but it’s just blackness and it feels like it’s receding from me as I keep walking. I’m getting so far away from my brother. And then on the left a giant insect appears and I give a huff of fright and almost drop the light before I realise it’s Lukhele wearing some goggling contraption over the top part of his face. A thrusting single lens—night vision. His one hand is aiming his submachine gun at my chest and his other arm is whipping down, shouting at me to drop the torch drop it. Jannie’s voice from the other side: “I will plug him, Marcus! I will! Hear me, Marcus! Come out down there!”
I move the light a little to the right and then I see him, Jannie, he’s squatting behind a beam behind the fat muzzle of his weapon. “Marcus!” he shouts. But there is no Marcus, only me, Martin, and the guns locked on me and I am surrendering truly. Marcus just wanted me to surrender, there’s nothing he can do—
“Go Martin go!”
That voice hits me from behind, a voice as far-sunk as my childhood, and I’m running with it already like I’m a sailboat punched by a sudden wind. I’m sprinting for the closest pillar on the wall and I remember the light too late, the beam flying everywhere at the end of my winging arm, my burnt groin stabbing me. Then my shoulder slams the wall and I steady the light. I forgot to shout. Meantime at the edge of my vision, behind, something small is tumbling through the air like a hurt bird. Marcus steps out and swings the plank. The attention of the others is on me, I drew them while behind Marcus hits that thing with the plank, a full-armed swing like a cricket bat, and I hear the clop of the impact as Marcus ducks back behind cover. As I’m dropping low there’s a hard crack on the other side, a near-instant echo, and I catch a glimpse of Lukhele’s insect head snapping back and a dark piece spinning off and there’s grit dancing on the wall in flickering yellow light—Jannie is firing, stepping out to get an angle on Marcus, and then the black tunnel turns into day.
The Mandela Plot Page 42