The Serpentine Road (37 page)

He takes a deep breath, begins to lower himself gingerly down the concrete sides of the river, immersing himself in the cold, dark water. Ahead, beneath the road, he sees one higher step of concrete and realizes that a man could hide there. He edges along through the water until he is under the side-road, the entrance to his own street. Ahead of him, it is pitch dark. His pyjamas, so rarely worn, adhere to his body, wet as the river, cold as the air that rushes through the crawl space beneath the bridge. He grabs a branch from the edge of the river, where it has become entangled in the overhanging bushes, and cracks off a side shoot, drops to his knees. The spray from the water exiting the tunnel soaks him; ahead, he can see nothing, knows that the tunnel runs for no more than seven, maybe eight metres, until it re-emerges on the opposite side of the road, deep in the cover of overhanging willow trees.

He edges forward, straining to form an image of what lies ahead of him, unable to hear anything but the hollow echo of rushing water. For a moment, a shard of light permeates the blackness as a car on the Liesbeek Parkway rushes past, the beam of headlight refracted dimly by the concrete lining. Ahead, on the same side as he is on, he glimpses something which could be a figure. He scrambles forward on his knees and one hand, the tree branch still held out ahead of him to warn of danger ahead. He sees nothing, hears nothing, but imagines a sudden movement, a strike, the cold agony of the blade penetrating him, gutting him.

He pushes on until he is under the centre of the road, the ceiling barely a metre above the top ledge along which he crawls. Ahead, he sees dim, pale light as the tunnel opens back out into the river-side. Suddenly, the light is obliterated; a black form scrabbles away from him. He thinks he hears a cry, but he cannot know. He pulls himself forward, slowed by the branch ahead of him. He shoves it into the river, feels one end pulled back past him even before he has released the other. Head down, he thrusts himself forward, one lurch after another. As he reaches the grey, dismal light of the Cape Town night, beside the Parkway main road, he sees ahead of him a figure limping, almost slithering up the side of the canal bank. He forces himself upright, grits his teeth and scrambles up the first tier. He looks up. Above him, the figure stands: he cannot see whether he is armed. He looks down to find a handhold, up again to see a wide, dark shape raised above the head of the figure, a shattering cry and the thick heavy log flying through space, out a little and down fast towards him. He throws himself against the side of the concrete bank, feels the air compress as the projectile crashes onto the step above him, bounces over him and lands in the foaming swell. He struggles for a breath, looks back up into the rain of silver nails which seem to assault him, sees the figure still standing above him. He blinks. The figure stumbles away.

De Vries clambers up the side and pulls himself up onto the slippery, greasy grass verge, rights himself, sees the shadow ahead of him, silhouetted against the streetlight. He watches as it seems to turn to face him, then turns away again. He hears the sound of a car changing gear and accelerating down Liesbeek Parkway towards the traffic lights, sees the figure stumble toward the road. He stands, exhausted and disorientated, and watches the figure step out in front of the car.

The car swerves away from the impact, brakes, skids, then accelerates away uphill, rear lights suddenly gone. De Vries runs up the bank towards the road, sees it now deserted, races to the fallen form, lit faintly red by the changed traffic light, yet seeming to him nothing but black against black against black. He bends down, sees something like a child’s body. He picks it up, cannot comprehend its lightness, feels breath in it, stumbles to the curb, half falls, half throws the body onto the grass, and fumbles to turn it over. The speckled white light of the streetlamp at the junction illuminates her face. She wears nothing but a black leotard, a thin black belt and matching bum-bag. He sees blood on her lips, eyes flickering, mouth gaping and twisted in agony. De Vries gathers her up in his arms, holds her to him, feels a final sigh leave her body, and then a deathly, absolute slump into his own sodden body.

He looks up, around. He is completely alone: a near-naked white man, bloated by a drenched Kevlar vest – a life-saving present – and a dead black girl, so strong when alive yet, in death, almost nothing more than a shadow made real. He closes his eyes and mourns for her, mourns for the history which binds them.

De Vries has no superstitions about death, believes the human body to be a receptacle of life no more sacred than that of any living thing which might have roamed the planet for thousands of years. He unfastens the bum-bag from her belt, wonders whether to leave her body at the roadside. He looks around, bends low and pulls the body by its hands towards the canal, pitches the light, insignificant form over the edge and rolls it into the water. Within a few seconds, and without seeming to surface, the corpse is gone.

He pulls himself back up, stumbles unsteadily to the road. At the junction, he unfastens his vest, rolls it under his arm, and walks – under cover of the dark, overhanging hedges and trees weighed down low with oncoming water – back up his street to his house. He sees no one, observes no movement to suggest human scrutiny.

He closes the front gates, re-bolts his front door, throws down the vest. As he approaches the staircase, he sees the knife. It is, maybe, thirty centimetres long, shaped like a pick, tapering to the point with a double-sided blade. He touches the point to his forefinger, realizes that he has punctured the skin. A tiny drop of blood appears. He wipes it away on his saturated pajama trousers, climbs the staircase heavily.

In his bedroom, he dries himself, dresses in old clothes, switches on every light and looks around. In the bathroom, there is an old built-in cupboard. At the very top are two narrow louvered doors, long since ignored. He sees that they are open. He studies the doors closely, the bath and cabinets, the flooring. There is not a mark to be seen. No visual evidence that anyone had ever been there. He drags a chair from his bedroom into the bathroom, stands on top of it, peers inside. Behind dusty, untouched sheets, there is a tiny space, a threadbare towel flattened like an animal’s nest in long grass. There, he now knows, she waited.

He unzips the small plastic bag which had been attached to her belt. It contains two tiny picks, thin rectangles of rigid rubber, hand-coiled wires and two small nine-volt batteries, a folding compact multi-tool, a narrow sharpening stone, a strapless digital watch; tools of an accomplished burglar, simple enablers of a higher, fatal cause.

He lies down on his bed, utterly spent, brain spinning, still panting twenty minutes after he has stopped all physical exertion. He hears the rain, the air in his chest, and feels every beat of his heart. He thinks of the girl moving across the country, a silhouette so dark it is invisible in the shadows; a girl beneath the water, swept away by the onset of winter.

For the next six hours he lies there, unmoving, unable to close his eyes.

‘I would think,’ John Marantz says, standing over him as he sits by the fire, drinking red wine, ‘that your overwhelming emotion should be relief. She killed six men – but not you.’

‘I was lucky.’ He looks up at Marantz. ‘And your friend Basson gave me the vest.’

‘Not my friend.’

‘Whatever.’

Marantz sits down, glances out of the tall windows of his living room, which overlook the Southern Suburbs. Everything is out of focus in the grey unending drizzle.

‘I went to him because I wanted to help you. Do you regret that?’

‘Not right now.’

‘But later . . . ?’

‘What was the cost to you, John?’

‘Cost?’

‘Price. Men like Eric Basson don’t do anyone favours. They do it for a price, to be owed something by someone who might help them in future. What did you promise him?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then you’re the lucky one. The more I try for information, the more compromised I become.’

‘In what way?’

‘You know things about me you shouldn’t . . .’

‘And you, me.’

‘But it doesn’t matter about you, does it? I’m trying to hold on to the last vestige of honesty in the whole damn system, and all the time, I am undermined, because now I owe you something. I owe Eric Basson.’

‘You don’t owe me.’

‘But I owe Basson and, probably, so do you.’

Marantz draws breath to speak, suddenly says nothing; he looks down silently.

After a moment, he says: ‘Basson told me that he was part of
Vlakplaas
; that he was a repository of secrets from the old days, the war that was fought.’

‘I knew about
Vlakplaas
,’ De Vries says. ‘I have some of my own sources. My mother always told me: being an adult, it’s all about compromise. I just didn’t think it would turn out to be every one of my ideals.’

‘That’s our choice of business.’

‘Perhaps . . .’

‘That the end always justifies the means.’

‘Does it, though? Can it? The end
always
justifies the means?’

‘That,’ Marantz says sadly, ‘depends on the end.’

De Vries sits in the Interview Room alone. In a few moments, he will be joined by Nkosi. Classon, maybe even Thulani, will sit behind the one-way mirror in the observation booth. No one is expecting anything of him, not even himself. Major Mabena is on his way with a personal instruction from the Police Ministry and the top of the top brass, ordering his release into Mabena’s custody and his return to Pretoria. Thulani has capitulated, as he must. De Vries has less than two hours.

Nkosi limps into the room, cuffed, his face bruised and scratched from the pursuit on the oil rig, and sits heavily on the iron chair across the desk from De Vries. His two guards stand to the side against the wall, but they do not leave the room.

‘In two hours you are to be released into the custody of Major Mabena. I imagine you are relieved?’

Nkosi says nothing, head bowed, breathing steady.

‘I have an offer for you, Lieutenant. Listen carefully because my time and yours is running out. We know your connection to the Marikana Mine incident, your previous identities and operations, and what you consider to be your continuing employment. But, I hope you appreciate that now it is different for you. Your bosses don’t want you back to reward you, change you, move you on. They want you to silence you, because you can provide the final link back to them which proves the conspiracy. How do people like them silence a man?’

He discerns no reaction from Nkosi, as if the man is in a trance, meditating. He realizes that this is his training: an enemy combatant on hostile territory, saying nothing.

‘You’ve read about a place called
Vlakplaas
? That was where the Apartheid Nationalist government established a centre for state-sponsored terrorism against your people. That farm was a charnel house, a place of interrogation and torture, of mind-control. When its existence became known, it was condemned around the world. And now the ANC have power, have been in government for twenty-one years, and what do you people do? You create your own
Vlakplaas
and they make you work there. You want to be part of that?’

Nkosi looks at him.

‘You know nothing about me.’

De Vries is startled at the sound of his voice, surprised that he has spoken one word.

‘What should I know?’

Nkosi stares at him. A few seconds run into hundreds, but his gaze never leaves De Vries. He says slowly, quietly: ‘When you first met me at Taryn Holt’s house you asked who thought they were in charge. You told me that you were in charge. That’s what you do not understand. You control nothing. You are nothing.’

‘But you are?’

‘I am a soldier.’

‘You wear the badge of the SAPS, Lieutenant. Not for much longer.’

‘You people never fought. You basked in absolute power and never accepted what we have known from the beginning. It is a war. It always was, and it always will be.’

Nkosi folds his arms, bows his head. De Vries knows that the conversation is over. Nkosi has loyalty to a cause which, in 2015, he misunderstands. He nods to the two guards, watches them lift Nkosi under his arms, drag him away.

To police during war, he reflects, is always harder. The value of life declines; those who have nothing to lose risk more.

* * *

At 4 p.m., De Vries finds himself standing behind General Sempiwe Thulani’s desk, next to Norman Classon and Brigadier David Wertner. Thulani is seated in his raised position facing a tall, thin black officer in full uniform. Thulani is reading. When he has finished, he looks up at his guest.

‘In response to these direct orders from the minister, Lieutenant Nkosi will be released into your custody upon your departure from this building. You will be responsible for him from that moment.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You will return with my written objection to his release from the custody of the Western Cape Province. You will present this to the Police Minister. You understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Furthermore, if this man, in whatever guise, re-enters the Western Cape Province, he will be arrested and detained on sight.’

‘That would not be in the interest of inter-departmental co-operation, sir.’

Thulani rises.

‘Do you know what, Major Mabena? I do not care a fuck what your department – whatever that might be – thinks. That is what will happen. You have information on me; I have information on you, and the ministry and the people who work for it. So, let us be completely clear on this. Distance is your best defence.’

Mabena smiles insolently.

‘Whatever you say, sir.’

‘I say, and I expect the meaning of my words to be conveyed to your superiors – whoever they may be.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You assure me that Sergeant Thwala is on his way home?’

‘As I have stated, we located and rescued SAPS Sergeant Ben Thwala. Those holding him have been detained.’

Thulani turns to De Vries, who says: ‘I spoke to him on his cellphone from the plane. He said that the main door had been closed and that passengers had been told to turn off their handsets.’