Treasonous

by David Hickson

  “Like hell it was. That maniac Du Toit put it in their heads. If you’re looking for someone to blame, it would be him. That girl and her boyfriend had a grudge, and Du Toit told them it was payback time.”

  BB leaned back in his chair and gave a nasty smile.

  “Du Toit ran it as his own operation?”

  “Du Toit wanted a piece of the action, thought he could muscle in on our territory. I was young, doing my national service, and he didn’t like the fact that they allowed me to handle secret documents. There was nothing secret in them. I just laughed at him. Old, cranky arsehole. Then the whole thing blew up in his face. Served him right.” BB’s tanned face twitched, and he made an effort at a sneering laugh.

  “Looks like we’re in the clear then,” I said, “in terms of Lindiwe Dlomo being a dark secret in the president-elect’s past. If the whole thing was a botched operation from Pretoria. You don’t think the president-elect would have figured out a connection between the fire and Lindiwe?”

  BB smiled at the absurdity of that suggestion. “In the clear,” he confirmed, with a satisfied smirk. “She is well and truly forgotten. And even if, in his dying moments, the brother confessed to their crimes, what could he have done about it? He was lying in a hospital bed for weeks. Then maximum security on Robben Island. He was a terrorist, wasn’t he? So what if he was seething with rage? Planning his revenge. What could he do? It’s not like he could slip a note to someone who would go out and wreak that revenge. They weren’t having piss-ups with their hoodlums on the outside. There is really nothing that can be pinned on him.”

  “Although he did receive one visitor.”

  BB’s eyes had strayed to a point above my head, a habit of his that I remembered from the debriefings in Uganda. A little device of his to show his superiority, as if he were not speaking to me, but some more important audience beyond me. His eyes jumped back to me now.

  “On Robben Island?” he said.

  “Lindiwe visited him there. Wasn’t she sent in by the service?”

  “Visited him? What the hell you talking about?” BB shook his head. “Prisoners on Robben Island didn’t get visitors.”

  “Perhaps it was arranged by Du Toit?”

  BB shook his head again. “Du Toit was out of the picture by then.”

  “Perhaps there would be something about it in the files?”

  “There aren't any files.”

  “Fehrson's office said they had been moved here, to your archives.”

  BB shook his head regretfully, but there was no regret in his voice. “Lost in the transfer. It was thirty years ago. Those bits of paper were in a dreadful mess. A good many of them were simply thrown away.”

  “This facility doesn’t seem the kind of place where papers go missing.”

  “Nothing wrong with the facility. I checked myself, after your Fearsome Father called.”

  “I thought these archives were considered one of the better storage facilities.”

  “State-of-the-art,” said BB with a bully’s tone. “We’ve invested heavily in this place. I’ve invested personally. There isn’t a safer place on the whole of this continent.”

  He waited for me to express some admiration. I didn’t.

  “It’s like an iceberg,” said BB. “We drilled down beneath it, it’s what we do. Mining is in my blood. We have levels and levels below ground. There isn’t a safer place on the continent.”

  “I’ll tell Fehrson we’re in the clear then.”

  “You tell your Fearsome Father there is nothing to worry about. That journalist was just peddling horseshit. He dreamed the whole thing up. The new boy is clean as a whistle. You can take it from me. Forget the whole thing.”

  I climbed out of the low-slung chair, and considered offering my hand in farewell, but BB remained crouched behind his desk and didn’t look in the mood for physical contact. I gave him a nod instead, and his eyes narrowed.

  “I remember you now,” he said. His voice had an awed quality. “Thought there was something familiar. You were with that team of killers they sent us. To the mine – my gold mine in Uganda.”

  “I served in the 14th squad. That’s correct, they posted us to your mine.”

  “14th squad? But you guys were no ordinary squad, were you? I thought they were sending me a team of soldiers. But you guys … you guys weren’t soldiers.”

  “22nd Special Forces Regiment, G squadron, 14th squad.”

  “Yes, yes,” said BB. “But you were like the phantom squad, weren’t you? They only told me after. You guys were the killers. You weren’t the real deal soldiers. You were the outcasts, the ones they’d pushed too far in the training, the ones they could rely on to do what no self-respecting soldier would do. That’s who you are.”

  I turned back to the door and stepped towards it.

  “Didn’t one of you guys get himself killed at that plane crash? It was an ambush, wasn’t it? And you numbskulls just walked straight into it.”

  “It was a mine,” I said, turning back to BB. “He stepped on a mine. They booby-trapped the dying civilians with mines.”

  BB smiled. “Well, that’s too bad. One less killer in the world.”

  I smiled in agreement and didn’t say that the killer who had stepped on the mine had been a friend. A good friend.

  “And now you’re an office boy for the Fearsome Father?” said BB, with the note of a taunt. “No more killing?”

  I said nothing. Memories of our mission on the mine in the northern reaches of Uganda were coming back to me and making me feel queasy.

  “Never thought I’d bump into one of you again.” He regarded me as one might consider an interesting curiosity. “You guys did an outstanding job, I’ll give you that. Killing was clearly your game.”

  My agreeable smile was still in place. I took it down, nodded and left the room. It had occurred to me there was one other person who might know what had happened to Lindiwe Dlomo.

  Eight

  South Africa is a country where the elderly are cared for by their children, are revered by their grandchildren, and are given pride of place at the head of the table when the family convenes. Their stories are listened to with interest and enthusiasm, and their wisdom is passed down through the generations. But this is not true for the elderly white people, who invest their life savings in order to stay in euphemistically named retirement villages, which are one step up from hospitals, one step down from hotels, and not far from the morgue.

  Andre du Toit was withering away in one of these retirement villages to the north of Pretoria. A two-hour flight, and an hour in a hired car had brought me to the place he had chosen to die. It had been built around a golf course and inmates were encouraged to play the game for as long as their medical plans could keep them fit enough. After which they could sit on the balconies of their clustered bungalows, breathe oxygen from the provided canisters, and dwell alone on what memories they retained, while they waited to die – or worse: simply faded away from lack of interest. I had made the journey here because, despite Fehrson’s assurances that I would not find anyone who remembered Lindiwe Dlomo, and BB’s confidence that she was forgotten, it turned out that the villain of their version of events was still alive. Although as I approached the terrace of Du Toit’s bungalow and made out his huddled form under a blanket with an oxygen tank at his side, I wondered whether there would be much memory left. He reached up a shaky arm from his wheelchair and allowed me to grasp his birdlike hand for a moment. His eyes were clear above the oxygen mask, but there was a confusion in them, as if he knew that he should challenge strangers who came asking questions but had forgotten why that was.

  “Don’t tire him out now,” said the cheerful nurse who had shown me the way. “He cannot talk for too long. Ten minutes, or he’ll not make it to dinner. Too many cigarettes, wasn’t it, Major Du Toit?” she said loudly at him.

  “What’s that?” he asked in a surprisingly forceful voice and looked up at her as if suspecting that she was
saying nasty things about him.

  “You smoked too many of those cigarettes, didn’t you Major Du Toit?”

  “Bullshit,” he retorted. “Gave them up years ago.” And he gave a scoffing laugh with a wheeze that turned into a cough.

  Du Toit was the wrong end of his eighties, and the once tall and domineering man I’d seen in photographs had shrivelled into an old man.

  “He gets a bit cranky,” the nurse said to me. “It’s the pain. Never takes his pills, and then this is what happens. Take it easy with him.”

  “She’s a tricky one,” said Du Toit as he watched the nurse’s large rear end retreat. “Always fussing about.” He removed the oxygen mask and looked over at the tray of drinks the nurse had brought with her. Two glasses with generous tots of rum, a bottle in case we needed more, and two cans of Coca-Cola.

  “May I?” I asked, realising that we were not likely to get past the pleasantries until Du Toit had one of the glasses in his hand.

  “Not too much Coke,” he said. “I have to be careful with sugar.”

  “Don Fehrson sends his regards,” I said. Du Toit’s eyes flickered up from monitoring the proportion of Coke to rum to show that he knew I was lying about that.

  “You work with him?” he asked.

  “In the new building on Greenmarket Square,” I said as I handed him his drink. “The Department moved out of Woodstock.”

  “I heard he was running his own little circus,” said Du Toit.

  “Just a small team.”

  “That’s what I heard. A small team. They’re cutting him out, aren’t they? He was never any good at reading the writing on the wall.” There was an element of smug satisfaction in his voice.

  “He survived all the changes,” I said, and immediately regretted it. Du Toit had not come through those changes smelling of roses. His stellar career in the National Intelligence Agency had been reduced by the Truth and Reconciliation process to a series of brutal crimes as his victims’ families had taken to the stand and wept. Du Toit had emerged as a cruel and unrepentant abuser of the power the former government had given him. He took a sip of his rum and Coke and looked out over the links with an irritated pursing of the lips.

  “But you’re right,” I said. “He is being moved sideways. I think they’re treading water until he retires.”

  That seemed to lift Du Toit’s spirits.

  “It was that fire you wanted to know about? And that woman with the boyfriend.”

  “Some files have gone missing. We’re tying up a few loose ends.”

  “Gone missing? What kind of ‘gone missing’?”

  “They’ve been transferred to the archives, and it’s all a bit of a mess.”

  Du Toit nodded as if it was to be expected. A golf cart rolled onto the green before his bungalow, and two elderly couples clambered out with stiff legs, and looked around as if choosing a picnic spot. One of the men raised his hand in greeting to Du Toit, who pushed his lower lip out and scowled.

  “It’s because of that new Zulu chieftain they’re putting in, is it?” said Du Toit. “He wants to read the files and see if there’s anyone else they can hang from the rafters. Anyone they didn’t get the first time round.”

  “Is that what happened? They hanged people from the rafters?”

  “Course they did. What did you imagine they were doing on Robben Island?”

  “There’s no record of what happened, with the files all gone.”

  “As soon as they’d cut his tongue loose from where it had welded into the roof of his mouth he sent them out after her, you can be sure of that. She was a marked woman, I told them that. Fehrson and his incompetent crew. But did they care?”

  The four golfers were standing around like party-goers who realise they’ve got the venue wrong. Then a second golf cart rolled onto the green with two young caddies and a bunch of golf bags. The caddies set about handing out clubs like they were organising a children’s party.

  “How was she killed?” I asked.

  Du Toit turned to me, and for a moment his eyes shone with something other than the dull glow of pain. “You don’t know?” he said.

  “It’s not mentioned in the register, and there’s no reference to it.”

  “Of course there isn’t. There wouldn’t be. The file was closed. The spring had run dry. When that Zulu survived they flipped sides didn’t they? Found a scapegoat to blame: that’s me. Have they told you the whole thing was my fault?” Du Toit didn’t wait for the answer to that. “They let the Zulu kill the girl so he could get his rocks off and turned a blind eye so they could be best buddies afterwards.”

  Du Toit looked out at the golfers, who were preparing to putt. The man who had waved at Du Toit was pacing about the green, tapping it with his putter, and stooping down occasionally to rearrange the blades of grass.

  “Scapegoat?” I said. “Are you telling me it wasn’t your plan to set fire to that hut?”

  “My plan?” Du Toit sprayed spittle and splashed rum over me in his anger. “I was the one who warned them it would go wrong. They had that limp rich kid on it. Homosexual piece of shit.”

  “Breytenbach?”

  “That’s the one. He had no idea what he was doing. There was some ground contact who used to meet with them and give him the reports. Someone whose identity nobody was allowed to know, except of course the fucking homo. I smelt a rat from the beginning. I knew there was something wrong.”

  Du Toit watched the golfer he had spurned taking his putt. The ball missed by a few centimetres and his fellow golfers oohed and aahed. A satisfied look settled onto Du Toit’s features.

  “Something wrong with the ground contact?”

  “Homicidal maniac. He’s the one the Zulu should have killed.”

  “If you weren’t allowed to know the ground contact, how do you know he was a maniac?”

  Du Toit moved his eyes to me like a chameleon looking for its prey.

  “She told me, didn’t she?”

  “Lindiwe?”

  “Of course Lindiwe, you idiot. The night of the fire, she told me.”

  “That it was their ground contact that did it?”

  “No, she did it alright. She started the fire. But he set her up for it.”

  Du Toit took a sip of his rum, lowering his lip to the glass, and then lifting it slowly so that the liquid reached his waiting tongue.

  “The night after the fire she told me,” he said. “Late that night. Very late, two or three in the morning. The place had been in chaos all day, we’d all been running around like headless chickens. At first it was the way it always was after something big goes down. Like after a bomb hits. Silence all about, everything goes still. Then the whoosh of hot air, and we were all running. They clamped down on the news, and it was impossible to know what was going on. We had ears on the ground, but not nearly as many as we should. Like a bunch of amateurs caught with their pants down. We had photographers in there, but they were the enemy as far as those army guys were concerned, so they couldn’t get clear shots. I’ll have a little more of that.” He waved his empty glass at me. I poured him another drink.

  The spurned golfer was being cheerful about his missed putt. He noticed us watching him and raised his hand again in greeting. Du Toit didn’t respond.

  “And you saw Lindiwe?”

  “It looked bad,” said Du Toit, and he swirled his rum about to make sure there wasn’t too much Coke mixed in with it. “The whole shack was gone, nothing but twisted metal and smoke. And of course the bodies. We wanted close shots so we could identify them, but the idiots went for the arty nonsense where you can’t make out shit.” Du Toit repeated his painstaking drinking action and licked his lips, savouring every drop.

  “We got an emergency meet request. Breytenbach was busy panicking, couldn’t get hold of the ground contact. I wasn’t going to send him in to see her. That prick of a priest had been kept out of it because of ‘personal’ reasons, and so I went down there. Train station, end of the pla
tform, and she was all peace and quiet. I thought she’d lost her mind. Back in the office everyone’s running around feeling a bit sick. But also maybe good. You wouldn’t know what it feels like. The vermin were dead, but you feel sick in your stomach. You wouldn’t understand.” Du Toit paused and watched as the third golfer dropped the ball into the hole on a long putt from the far end of the green. The other three cheered, and the caddies applauded obediently. I didn’t bother telling Du Toit that I understood only too well.

  “Anyway,” he said with a sigh, “when I got to her it was like she’d had some religious experience. Found God. I said to her, ‘What’s eaten your goat?’ and she laughed. Laughed! Said it was all good. I didn’t want to burst her bubble, but I could count, and we had six dead bodies. That meant her boyfriend was one of them. I said something about trying to identify the bodies, and it didn’t look altogether good. She just smiled and said it was okay, he’d survived. That’s when I realised it was the shock. It does that, turns people upside down. They go from hysterical to zombie just like that.”

  The golfers were moving on to the next hole. They handed their clubs to the caddies and climbed into their golf cart. The friendly one waved again at Du Toit.

  “Arsehole. Does that every day,” said Du Toit, glaring after the cart.

  “She said he’d survived?” I prompted. “Mbuyo?”

  “Some paramedic told her he would live. It was the first we heard of it. Our reports said all dead, but it turned out the one cockroach lived. We went through our photos, but they all looked good and dead to us. Turns out the guy lay there some time before anyone bothered checking the pulse.”

  “And she was pleased about that? That Mbuyo survived?”

  “Pleased, oh yes. But she had the wrong Mbuyo, didn’t she? That was the joke. Thought it was her lover lying there in the mud with his clothes all melted into his skin. Guess it was hard to tell.”

  “When did she realise her mistake?”

  “About Mbuyo? A couple of days, I guess. Not such a religious experience after all. She found God, but not in the way she’d expected. Considering as she’d been the one to kill him.”