A SONG IN THE MORNING (27 page)

The two don't sleep in the same bed . . . "

Jack slid out of reach of the driver's eyes in the rear-view mirror, took a fast, deep breath, and asked: "Did you know the taxi man, the one they're going to hang?"

"Carew, that bastard?"

"Did you know him?"

"I didn't myself. I've a friend who did."

"What sort of fellow was he?"

"Mystery man, that's what my friend says. When the name was in the papers he just didn't believe it, says he was a very private fellow."

A recklessness in Jack. "Where did he live?"

"He had a flat, behind Berea, furnished, that's what my friend says. When he was arrested he gave instructions to his lawyer man that everything in the flat should be sold, went to a children's home charity. My friend says there wasn't much, bits and pieces and his clothes, but they've all gone, like he knew he was never coming out. My friend says that he used to talk quite a bit with this Carew, but he never knew anything about him. I mean, they didn't talk about family, just used to talk about the motor, that sort of thing.

Long time ago, he wrote to ask whether Carew would like a visit, and the letter came back from the authorities that Carew didn't want any visit. . . What's your interest?"

Jack said, "I read about it in the English papers."

He was dropped at the main entrance.

He must have been one of the first customers that morning because the wide sloping grounds with the autumn in the trees were near-deserted. He walked over the dun yellow parched lawns. He did exactly as he had been instructed.

He went to ihe cafeteria where they were still putting out the tables, and he ordered a cup of coffee. When he had drunk it he walked away past the big wingspan vulture in a tall cage, and past the compound where a young gorilla gambolled, and past the green water pool of the sea lions.

He understood why the instructions had demanded that he followed a set route. He was being watched and checked to see that he had no tail. He climbed the hill and strolled slowly past the big cat enclosures. Well before the heat of the day and the leopards and the jaguar and the lions were pacing. He sat on a bench in front of the Bengali tigers. He didn't look around, he made no attempt to identify the people he assumed to be watching him. Up again and past the stink of the elephant and the rhino, past a bee swarm of tiny Black children out with their teacher, past a party of shambling mencaps with their nurses. He followed the instructions.

He went up the long hill towards a huge memorial, to British victory in the Boer War of nearly a century ago. He drifted into the military museum. More schoolchildren, but middle teens and White, and with a pretty young teacher who had a strident voice as she quizzed her pupils on Bren gun carriers, Churchill tanks, 25 pounders, an 88 mm recoilless anti-tank. They'd be needing that knowledge, the little sods. Their country was going into automatic rifles and armoured personnel carriers and White conscripts in the townships, and by the time these kids were fattened up then it might have come down to tanks and artillery. It was a bad image for Jack. His thoughts ran fast to Potgieterstraat and Defence Headquarters and the guns of the sentries and the fire slits on the walls of Local. A bad awful bloody express train of thought because he had never believed that Beverly Hills could be so well protected . . .

If he had known it would be
that
well protected then Jimmy Sandham would be alive, and Duggie would be alive, and Jack Curwen would be in his office, at his desk, on the north side of Leatherhead.

Bit bloody late, Jack.

He sat on a bench. He waited.

* * *

Jan and Ros had argued half the night away. They had argued in the car on the way to the zoo. The argument had continued as they tracked the Englishman.

"Violence doesn't change anything."

"The Boers listen to violence, they don't listen to debate."

"Blowing people up, killing and maiming people, won't change the government."

"Change will only come when control of the townships is lost."

"The state is committed to real change, all that's needed is a breathing space for the moderates on all sides to come forward and negotiate."

"The
moderates
? What do they want to talk about? About opening up Whites beaches for non-segregated bathing? Do you think they care in the townships, where they're queuing up for charity food parcels, about a nice little swim on a Whites Only beach? The moderates aren't relevant, might have been twenty years ago, not now. It's about power, not about which beach you're allowed to swim on. Anyone who has power will never hand it over voluntarily. The Boers'll have to be burned out of power."

"Your way, Jan, only slows the pace of change."

"They're
playing
with reform, Ros. They want to get the Americans off their backs, so they can go back to living the way they've always lived, the White boot on the Black throat."

"Are you ashamed of being White?"

"I've no shame, because I'm fighting against a White evil.

I didn't ask you to spy in my room. You can get out of my life."

"I'm stuck with your bloody life. I'm your sister. On your own you're dead or you're locked up. I won't turn away from you. I wish I could, and I can't."

For half an hour they watched the Englishman move through the zoo's gardens. At the sea lions and the compound for the big cats they had split and gone in opposite ways so that each of them could be sure they were free of a tail. Jan thought that his sister learned fast. If there had been a tail he believed they would have seen it.

For Jan there was the fascination of seeing the clean shouldered back of the man who had achieved the remarkable, and carried a bomb into John Vorster Square. For Ros there was the fascination of seeing the man who had come as an activist to their country, who was capable of murder.

For what he had achieved, Jan thought the stranger was a hero. For involving her brother, Ros thought him an enemy.

They came into the military museum.

Through the heads and shoulders of the schoolchildren, between the snub barrels of the artillery pieces, they saw him. They were a boy and a girl out walking, there was nothing about them to excite suspicion. They looked at the man who sat hunched on the bench.

Ros said, "Once you've spoken to him then you're more deeply involved than ever before. You could turn round, you could go home. Father would get you a ticket, you could fly out of the country tonight. You could be safe."

Jan said, "I don't run away."

"You don't run away because you can't run . . ." She hated herself.

"They don't listen to reason. Last year when they hanged Ben Moloise they had petitions from all over the world.

They didn't give a shit. They strung him up because what the rest of the world says doesn't c o u n t . . . "

"He was convicted of killing a policeman."

"Now they're going to hang five men, and again the rest of the world's pleading for mercy. They don't give a shit.

This man knows it, fight force with force. Fight the force of John Vorster Square with the force of a fire bomb."

"And Pretoria Central?"

"I don't know," Jan said.

He had the diagrams of the gaol in the inner pocket of his windcheater jacket.

"You're getting to be a real creep, Jan."

They went forward, Jan limping and ahead, and Ros trailing him.

* • *

He turned when he heard the voice. The voice spoke his name.

Jack saw the boy. He saw the shallow body and the thin face. He saw the way the shoulder drooped. He saw that the boy was crippled. The boy was behind the bench, trying to smile a greeting.

He looked the other way. The girl was standing back two more paces than the boy. A nice looking girl, and older than the boy, and she wore a summer skirt and a blouse buttoned to the throat. He could see the lines at her mouth, tension lines.

"I'm Jack Curwen."

"I was ordered to contact you. You followed the instructions, thank you."

They stared at each other. As if neither had quite believed the ordinariness of the other.

Jack smiled, the boy grinned. Jack wondered why the girl didn't smile.

"I'm Jan, this is my sister. You don't need any more names."

Strangely formal. Jack shook hands with them.

A shyness in Jan's voice. "What you did at John Vorster Square was incredible."

Again the silence. None of them knowing what to say.

Out of earshot the schoolchildren were spidering over the hulk of the museum's largest tank.

Jan drew the envelope from his pocket. He passed it to Jack. Jack ripped open the fold. He saw the diagrams. He leafed quickly through the sheets of paper, the frown settling sharp cut on his forehead. He knew the girl's eyes never left his. The school teacher's voice carried gently to him. She had raised her voice because she was describing to her class the cyclic rate of fire of a heavy machine gun from the Great War. He saw that the diagrams were detail of Pretoria Central. He saw the positioning of Beverly Hills, he understood why he had not seen the walls when he had walked on Potgieterstraat.

"What happens now?"

Jan said, "I have to take you into the north of the Transvaal. There is a rendezvous there for you, close to a town called Warmbaths. It is a spa town about a hundred kilometres from Pretoria. You should go back to your hotel, and you should check out of your hotel, then we drive to Warmbaths."

"Do you know why I have come to South Africa?"

"No."

Ros snapped, "And he doesn't need to know."

Jack saw the anger on the boy's face.

Jan said, "I'm just a courier. I am ordered to deliver you to a rendezvous. I do what I am told, just as I brought you the envelope today, just as I brought you the package of explosives."

"You don't know why we are hitting the gaol?"

"As he said, he's just a courier."

Ros twisted away, swirled her skirt. Jack stood up and walked behind her and Jan hobbled after them. Jack caught up with her.

"You're not a part of it," she said bitterly.

Her eyes were on her sandals, striding out.

Jack bored on. "I'm not a part of it, it's true. In England, my home, I'm not an activist, I'm not political. I don't give a damn for this war. I have to be here, probably like you have to be here."

She tossed her head back, rippled her hair, gestured at her brother behind her. She said, "It's lunatic for him to be involved."

"Lunatic for all of us."

"So why did you honour us with your presence?"

"A week today they're going to hang my father."

She looked away. He saw her close her eyes, squeeze them tight shut. They stood together and waited for Jan to catch them.

• * *

There were eighteen detectives from the plain clothes branch of the security police who had taken the desks and tables in the large room set aside for the investigation. The detectives worked with their telephones and notebooks eight floors above the back hall of John Vorster Square.

Ten of the detectives worked on tracing the grip bag.

Eight worked on finding the source of the petrol can.

In front of each man was a commercial telephone directory of the greater Johannesburg area. By the middle of the morning it was believed that a manufacturer had been identified for the bag, a factory employing similar synthetic fibres to those retrieved by forensic. The detectives then took sections of the directories to ring each and every number where the bag could have been sold. The information given to the detectives pointed towards a White attacker. It was therefore probable that the bag and the petrol can, if bought in Johannesburg, had been bought either in the city centre or in a White suburb. The outlets through which the bag might have been sold were fewer than the outlets for petrol cans. It was thought that the bag, rather than the can, would prove decisive.

Twice that morning the colonel had come down the two flights of stairs to the incident room.

He was not directly involved, not yet. His involvement was two stages away in the process of the investigation.

First the source of the sales must be identified, second the purchaser must be described.

• • *

Jacob Thiroko and his group travelled apart, but on the same aircraft.

He carried a Tanzanian passport. He had never used that passport before. It described him as an engineer. He carried letters of introduction from the Botswana Enterprises Development Unit, and also from the Botswana Meat Corporation for whom, he could tell immigration, he was designing a new abattoir. The younger men were on a variety of Black African passports, and each was equipped with the cover to talk his way through immigration at the international airport at Gaberone.

With more time for planning and for taking advice, he might have attempted to travel overland from Angola, or overland from Mozambique, both difficult but both possible.

The fast way to South Africa was through Gaberone, not the safe way.

It was eighteen months since the Recce Commando squads had been helicoptered into Gaberone at night to kill twelve of Thiroko's comrades, to blow up their offices, to bring home what was described as a treasure trove of intelligence material. Since the raid, the Botswana government had ceded areas of their sovereign independence to permit covert members of the National Intelligence Service to operate in various guises from their territory.

Thiroko walked from the aircraft across the tarmac towards the single storey building housing lounges and offices. He walked almost in the shadow of the squat, square built, air traffic control tower. He was concerned with the immigration officers. He should have been concerned with a White air traffic control supervisor. His photograph was taken. It would not be a good likeness, but it would serve as confirmation of this supervisor's opinion, made instantly, that he had sighted Jacob Thiroko.

By the time that Thiroko and his four men had collected their baggage, queued for immigration, gathered together to be met by their contact driver, there were two vehicles waiting to follow them out of the airport car park. There was a land rover with the markings of a locally based safari holiday company driven by a White with a Black passenger, and there was a Peugeot 504 estate carrying three Blacks.