Treasonous

by David Hickson

  “And it had something to do with Lindiwe?” I suggested when Fehrson seemed on the verge of sinking into another trance.

  “Her boyfriend was one of the five. Did I mention that? It was her boyfriend’s little revolutionary cell. All of them. The mirror was broken. Seven years of bad luck for us. And she wasn’t giving any standing ovations. She blamed the Service. Du Toit got himself nominated for an award and received pats on the back, Freemason handshakes and the like. He flew home to Pretoria, blaming the wet air that came from the docks for his failing health.”

  “The fire was Du Toit’s idea?”

  “He denied it. But it was obvious to us he’d planned the entire thing. From our perspective, the fire had snuffed out any hope we had of an entry into the enemy camp. When you have that kind of opportunity you don’t put them in a tin pot and roast them to death. You keep them alive, at the very least. But Pretoria hailed it as a glorious success. The elimination of an entire terrorist cell. The greatest irony of all was that the principal target – because there was a target, despite all the protestations to the contrary – that target crawled out of the ashes.”

  “Thulani Mbuyo.”

  “The big one, the boy whose photograph the Pretoria boys had been using as a dartboard. The reason Pretoria was involved in the first place. Recently returned from Moscow, being groomed as leader of the pack. I believe he was the only one Du Toit and his cronies were really interested in and Pretoria probably considered him worth the collateral damage. It was worth losing all the possibilities provided by Spieël if they could eliminate Mbuyo.”

  “But Du Toit failed. If Mbuyo survived.”

  “Survived might be the wrong word. We didn’t describe him as having survived at the time. He was discovered alive, but the fire had taken most of his skin off. He spent months in a hospital bed being rebuilt, then was put behind bars. He was ‘discounted’ by Pretoria. Spirit broken, no chance of a return to the fighting was the official story. They were wrong about that, of course, but it was years later that anyone realised.”

  Fehrson dried up and Khanyi picked up the story.

  “Which is why Du Toit returned to Pretoria a hero,” she said and reached over the table to turn the pages of the register they had printed for me. “There was a debrief of course. The register shows the entries.”

  A long-nailed finger pointed to them.

  “Reports of the debrief,” she said. “The conclusion was that Du Toit had stepped in and taken advantage of Dlomo’s inside line on the group. He had single-handedly destroyed the best thing the Cape branch had going for it, and failed to kill the targeted revolutionary.”

  “The scope of the debacle was just beginning to emerge,” said Fehrson. “And I don’t imagine that Lindiwe had anything good to say at that debrief. Her boyfriend was dead, it had all been personal for her in any case, not some big political quest. They kept the debriefing closed. All hushed up. But she had never been one to hold her tongue. A few months after that the file was closed.”

  “With her boyfriend dead, I don’t suppose she had anything else to offer,” I said.

  “There was that,” said Khanyi. “But it was more … definitive.” Khanyi’s glitter-polished nail pointed to the written comment beneath the red-lettered stamp that marked the file as closed. “Subject deceased.”

  “Lindiwe deceased? Does it explain how?”

  “Not in the register,” said Khanyi.

  Fehrson had subsided into a silent heap. Khanyi glanced at him like they were actors about to take a bow, but he didn’t respond.

  “Nevertheless,” said Khanyi. “File closed. The story ends there.”

  Fehrson nodded regretfully, and they both looked at me.

  “It certainly provides a link between the woman and our president-to-be,” I said.

  “There you go jumping to conclusions,” said Fehrson. “Didn’t I tell you he’d do that?” he asked Khanyi.

  “You did,” said Khanyi, and she looked at me dispassionately. I’d proved a disappointment by fulfilling Fehrson’s worst predictions. Fehrson got to his feet and returned to the window to gaze down upon the populace.

  “That’s what we have for you, Ben,” he said with resignation. “That’s all we have. Yes, there’s a connection between Lindiwe and Mbuyo. But she’s been dead for thirty years. Why would she be of any interest to him now? Your friend probably stumbled upon one of those old files while browsing the archives and let his imagination get the better of him.”

  The thought of Johansson stumbling upon an old file in the archives was an unlikely one, but I said nothing. Johansson had not been the sort of person to hang out where there were dusty books and minimal liquid refreshment.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “Just a flight of the imagination.”

  There was a lengthy silence as everyone tried to work out whose responsibility it was to bring the curtain down. “I’ve been wasting your time,” I said eventually.

  Fehrson turned back from the window, and the mood lifted as if the sun had managed to poke its way through the heavy rain clouds.

  Khanyi rewarded me with a smile, and Fehrson came back to the table in preparation for the farewell scene.

  “I doubt that Thulani Mbuyo would remember her name,” said Khanyi as I closed the folder. “The fire was not connected to the Spieël operation, which was in any case buried under a pile of other failed operations. I doubt very much he ever discovered that someone had been talking out of turn, let alone that they provided the tenuous link to the people who lit the matches that started the fire.”

  “So there’s not really anything I can say in the eulogy at the journalist’s funeral?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that,” said Fehrson with alarm. “Ah, of course. Always the clown. One day someone will take you seriously, Ben.” He wagged a scolding finger at me.

  “Would Riaan Breytenbach be worth speaking to?” I asked.

  The clouds returned, and the mood darkened.

  “About what?” asked Fehrson.

  “A final confirmation. That there is nothing to worry about.”

  “Already done,” said Fehrson. “He was the first person I called after you mentioned that journalist’s absurd suggestion. He agrees with me: no nasty secrets. But the point here, Ben,” Fehrson raised his hands again to calm the troubled crowd, “the point is that the tragic death of your friend can have nothing to do with the story of Lindiwe Dlomo. Now that you know her story you can see the absurdity of the idea that anyone from the Department would be covering up any dark secrets involving her. In any case, the absurd allegations that your journalist made are not the sort of thing that befits the attention of our office.”

  Fehrson waved vaguely to indicate the echoing space we were huddled in as if that demonstrated the extraordinary importance of his office. The truth fell a little short, as I well knew. Fehrson and his small team were relegated to dusty offices that offered a view of an internal courtyard and the aroma of the plumbing pipes.

  It was only later, after Fehrson and Khanyi had said their goodbyes, and after they had scurried back to their smelly offices, that I realised what bothered me. I took the stairs down, and emerged into the uncertain autumn morning. I lit the Gauloise I’d been avoiding all morning and wondered about Fehrson’s personal reasons for having been kept away from an operation involving Lindiwe Dlomo. A woman who had died shortly after the massacre that had nearly killed Thulani Mbuyo. What kind of personal reasons had they been? And why had he made sure that Khanyi was out of the room before revealing that minor detail? I regretted the Gauloise, stubbed it out, and threw the pack away for good measure.

  The rain that had been toying with the Cape Peninsula all morning chose lunchtime for the onslaught. This gave me the chance to gather my thoughts as I drove through the disaster movie set that the unpolished edges of Cape Town turn into whenever it rains – cars stopped haphazardly in the streets; their emergency lights blinked through the darkened twilight
of the rainstorm, while the cars still able to move crawled around them as if the survivors didn’t dare stop to see what the trouble was.

  I’ve been called paranoid, but I would always rather take the taunts than find myself floating face down in the Atlantic. And things were not making sense. I phoned the archives.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Johans,” said the archivist after I’d waited on hold for five minutes. “We have no files at all for a Lindiwe Dlomo.”

  “They were old NIA files,” I said. “National Intelligence Agency. I can provide you with reference numbers.”

  I provided the numbers from Khanyi’s generously printed register, and waited a further five minutes, as the rain did its best to break through the rusted roof of my car.

  “I am truly very sorry Mr Johans,” said the archivist, who had written Johansson’s name when I’d provided it, but struggled with including all three syllables. “We don’t have any of those files. If you would like to leave your number, I’ll ask the director to give you a call.”

  I assured her it wasn’t important and ended the call.

  Bill had left a message while I was on hold, but I had another call to make first. I dialled the archives again and asked whether Mr Riaan Breytenbach had an office there. I was treated to a minute of music, and then the smooth voice of a woman told me I had the pleasure of speaking with his private secretary, but that regrettably Mr Breytenbach had no times free on his busy calendar. Not today, not next week, nor for the foreseeable future. I explained that it was a private, sensitive matter that I wished to discuss, and that Father Don Fehrson had insisted. I was placed on hold again. It took Mr Breytenbach only a minute to find time on his busy calendar for the private and sensitive matter. Mr Breytenbach would squeeze me in before his lunch. He would do that for a man of the church. Of course he would. He was that kind of man.

  I called Bill back.

  “Remember the brother?” he said.

  “Wandile?”

  “She was his girlfriend.”

  “Lindiwe?”

  “What are you? A poet? Stop with the word games, Gabriel. Yes, the woman you’re looking for was the girlfriend of the big guy’s brother. Thulani Mbuyo’s brother was her boyfriend.”

  So much for Khanyi’s suggestion that Thulani Mbuyo wouldn’t recognise her name.

  “I called Matlala,” said Bill with enough volume to make the use of the phone seem superfluous. “The guy who was on the island same time as Mbuyo. He helped me when I was researching Prison Island. You know I did a section of that book?”

  I did know. “Good book,” I said.

  Bill was taken aback. “Sandy force it on you?”

  “Just the blurb on the back,” I said, although I had read the full book, and not because Sandy had forced it on me.

  “Well anyway, Matlala knew the name. The woman’s name. And there’s more. You are not going to believe it. Very odd. Very odd, all of it. You free now?”

  “Believe what?” I asked.

  “Come around here, we’ll go see Matlala and he can tell you all about it.”

  Five

  Jacob Matlala lived in a house nestled between the vineyards of Constantia. The rain was trickling to a stop when Bill and I arrived, and a few shafts of sunlight poked down to highlight some of the best vines. For a moment we were trapped in a picture calendar, the buttress slopes of the wrong side of Table Mountain providing the ominous backdrop to the glistening vineyards.

  “I chose money over power,” said Jacob Matlala after we had squeezed hands and Bill had explained that I was doing research for a documentary video. “There were others,” he said, “who chose power over money, but I was never one for the limelight. I prefer the quiet life.”

  The quiet life had not been disappointing. Matlala’s business endeavours – aided, a sceptic might suggest by the government requirement that South African businesses have management with a racial balance more representative of the country’s population – had proven to be lucrative. Having an ex-freedom fighter on the board, particularly one who had served time in the political prison on Robben Island, was worth at least two non-political dark-skinned members, and Matlala had taken full advantage. We were sitting in the lounge of Matlala’s Cape Dutch homestead, a room that was large enough to accommodate my entire apartment. The wooden floors had been recently polished, and several Persian carpets were needed to improve the acoustics. An open fireplace crackled its way through logs that would have required two people to carry in from the wood store beside the stables that housed Matlala’s champion racehorses.

  “We’re preparing him for the Durban July,” explained Matlala as we watched ‘Beast of the Night’ follow his stable hand out to the exercise track. A diminutive jockey trailed behind them carrying a saddle and a handful of riding accessories, like a child who has just had a tantrum and doesn’t want to walk with the adults. “Three sessions every day, rain or no rain. Can’t let the weather get in our way.”

  Matlala’s wife Rose brought us a tray of tea and biscuits. A round, cheerful woman, she smiled at us in a sympathetic way. “Don’t let my Jacob go on too much about those horses,” she said. “He’ll never stop, and we’ll have to bring you something stronger than this tea.”

  “They need alcohol,” said Matlala, “not that colonial piss.”

  Rose smiled and shook her head regretfully. “Better stick with the tea. Jacob has an important meeting, and he should arrive sober.” She gave us each a hard glare to ensure we understood who was in charge. Matlala didn’t press the point.

  “You’re asking questions,” said Matlala when we had divided the ‘colonial piss’ into three equal portions and made a start on the chocolate biscuits. “Questions about Thulani,” he added with a touch of indignation.

  “My friend is filling in some background,” said Bill soothingly. “Background on President Mbuyo.”

  Matlala nodded and bit into his biscuit. He was a powerfully built man who had allowed his good fortune to abuse his waistline. His bald head was supported upon extra rolls of fat around his neck, but the impression of a cheerful clown was deceptive. His eyes glittered with a hard intelligence.

  “It’s what everyone is asking about now, isn’t it?” he said through a mouthful of crumbs. “Where did the big man come from? He came from the cold stone cells of Robben Island, that’s where he came from. Those little rooms with the twenty square centimetres of barred openings. That’s where he came from. There’s nothing I can add.”

  “He chose power over money?” I asked.

  Matlala’s bright eyes swung onto me like the headlights of a war machine.

  “No, no,” he said, and a chuckle bubbled to the surface. “He chose nothing. Thulani had it all thrust upon him. Power and money. It was always the way it was going to be, from the day he arrived on the island, pink and delicate like a newly made person. He’d been in the hospital for months, and they’d made him all new. The scar tissue was fresh, and he wasn’t black anymore. That’s what we used to say. He was a whole new race. Pink.” Matlala chuckled some more and helped himself to another biscuit.

  “He didn’t choose any of it,” he continued, “but what could he do? People saw him and said to themselves: This man, he is special. He’s the one. He has to be, he’s pink.” Another hearty chuckle. “And he didn’t want any of it. We could see that. He hid away in his new pink shell and wanted none of it. If they’d let him out, he would have faded into the background and the country would never have heard of him. That’s what they didn’t see. Those old Nationalist fools. Their prisons were no more than training centres, meeting rooms, incubation units where they reared their enemies.”

  “But he’d been a revolutionary leader,” I said. “Before prison, before the fire. He’d been to Moscow, formed his own resistance cell. He had a reputation.”

  Matlala shook his head and took a gulp of tea, then winced at the taste of it. “That might be,” he said, “but that fire burned it all out of him. It broke him. He wa
sn’t interested in any of it. Couldn’t bring himself to talk with the men he’d known from before the fire. Just shut himself up in his new pink shell. They said the effort to survive took all he had; there was nothing left for anything beyond that.”

  “He recovered though,” I said. “Got that energy back again. Look where it’s brought him.”

  “Not recovered,” said Matlala. “Over the years he grew into the new skin. He found his passion, but he found it in the way someone discovers something new. It was not a recovery of the old, but a new passion that was thrust onto him.”

  A rattling on the windows announced another cloudburst, and we looked out to where the jockey was remonstrating with an elderly man under an umbrella. The horse stamped its feet, and the stable hand finished tightening the straps of the saddle. The haze of falling rain moved away and across the field beyond them, and the jockey reluctantly held out a hand to confirm it had passed.

  “She runs like a beauty that one,” said Matlala. “Poetry in motion, you’ll see. When they get the midget up onto her.” He laughed at his political incorrectness and repeated the word “midget” to show he had no regrets.

  “Ben here is interested in the woman, Lindiwe Dlomo,” said Bill to get the conversation back on track.

  “You told me that,” said Matlala accusingly, still gazing out at his horse. “What is it that Ben-here wants to know about the woman?”

  “What the connection was with the president-elect,” I said.

  Matlala turned his gaze onto me again. “You’re digging for dirt aren’t you?” he said in a voice that didn’t hold any resentment. “Dragging the skeletons out of the closet.”