Despite the Darkness, page 11
‘But,’ Venter continued, after a brief pause, ‘I’m thinking a cane might not be what I need. I’ll maybe take a sjambok to her instead. You know what a sjambok is? It’s a whip made of hippo hide. Zulu men use them to keep their wives in order – you should buy one. Uniform use them for crowd control – they were used to break up that crowd in Durban last week. We have plenty of them. Your wife has enough cheek for a crowd – but she won’t ever be cheeky again after I’ve finished with her.’
Of course Cameron knew what a sjambok was. Venter signalled to Poggenpoel, who had been standing to one side listening to his boss with the shadow of a smile on his face. They walked to the back door together, but before he left Venter turned for a final word.
‘Nothing to say for once, Doctor?’ The venom in his ‘Doctor’ sounded even more deadly than it had done earlier in the afternoon. ‘You think you are clever, but you are in for a surprise or two – we are cleverer than you and you may be quite sure that we are going to win. Apartheid is here to stay. Bombs won’t make any difference – we will just teach the bombers a few lessons before we hang them. People who don’t like it must either shut up and live with it or get out. For now we are leaving – I will be back.’
Cameron stood listening for the sound of Venter’s car – they could be playing cat and mouse and still come back. When he heard the sound of the engine he slumped into the nearest chair, utterly drained. He needed to talk to Jules but he had an excuse to put that off – the children needed to be properly asleep first. It had been better not to respond to Venter’s threats – particularly his threats to Jules, which she mustn’t know about – rather than provoking him any further. Thank God Venter hadn’t shot Kali. If there was ever a day from hell this had been it.
Chapter 8
The children had taken a long time to settle after the trauma of the raid. Supper was eaten in silence. Cameron started to explain why he had come back late but Jules interrupted his first sentence.
‘Eat now, talk later.’
Jules’s earlier flight of oratory had clearly taken its toll on her reserves of eloquence for the evening – at least for now.
The moratorium on discussion of what had happened was extended first by an unspoken ‘wash up now, talk later’ and then, when Jules announced that she was going to bed, by an implicit ‘sleep now, talk later.’
The first part of that was a lot easier said than done, partly because delaying the talking gave him time he would rather not have had to go over and over what had happened and what he was going to tell Jules.
Was it worth lying to Jules? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t managed to get herself permanently crossed off Venter’s Christmas card list without any help from him. But irritating the hell out of Venter by telling him he was a bully was one thing, being implicated as an accessory to a lethal bomb blast was another thing altogether – that could cost her her life. That could cost the children their mother. Cameron realized he was beginning to drop the ‘alleged’ caveat from his thinking about accessories to the bombing.
Venter could come back any time and take Jules in for questioning. If he did he wouldn’t have any difficulty in carrying out his threat to get her alone in a cell. It would be much better that she couldn’t tell him anything about Mirambo. He needed to get Jules away – get her down to her mother’s house in Cape Town for a bit. But in the meantime lying was the only option.
Cameron picked up the novel he had been trying to read – but he couldn’t concentrate enough to get beyond what he thought was the last page he had read the previous time he picked it up. Listening to music wasn’t much better. Eventually he followed Jules to bed and lay under the sheet listening to the wind still gusting outside in the camphor tree. Jules was lying inert, her back towards him. Her back still felt hostile, but perhaps that was just because he was feeling guilty. It was difficult to tell from her breathing whether she was asleep – even if she wasn’t, ‘sleep now, talk later’ was clearly still the order of the day, or, more accurately, night. It didn’t seem possible that it was only twenty-four hours since Mirambo had knocked on the door.
What was that? Startled wide awake from the exhausted doze he’d eventually slipped into, Cameron looked at the alarm clock and saw it was a few minutes before 3am. It had sounded like a gunshot followed by a thud. He might have dreamed it, except that he could hear Kali whining from the kitchen. It was his Diwali and Guy Fawkes whine, only occasioned by very loud bangs.
If Jules had also been woken she gave no sign of it. Cameron slipped out of bed and reached for the Sig Sauer under the mattress again. Two nights in a row – either things were getting completely out of control or he was getting paranoid. The noise that had woken him was probably just a branch from the camphor tree or one of the jacarandas succumbing to the wind, but there was no point in taking chances. At least the phone wasn’t ringing – they probably felt they had spent enough time on him for one night.
There was nothing to be seen from the study window. Moving noiselessly from room to room in the house in the dark, checking on noises, had become second nature. The noiselessness was for the benefit of Jules and the children. The care taken not to disturb the curtains enough for the movement to be seen from outside by men with guns was for his own benefit.
There was nothing to be seen through the crack in the curtains of the French window – if it had been a branch it hadn’t been from the camphor tree. The curtains on the front window were of a heavier fabric and a streetlight on the pavement immediately opposite shone directly onto the window, so peering through to survey the front garden without any movement being apparent was a lot more painstaking. It brought the answer he had hoped for – a large branch from the jacaranda tree in the garden was lying on the lawn looking very dead. Kali was no longer whining.
Getting up and doing a circuit of the house checking the perimeter defences in the middle of the night had the same effect on sleep as the phone-calls – the adrenalin took almost as long to subside. The time it took to do so was inevitably taken up with going over and over what had happened during the day, and working out what to tell Jules.
Giving his shirt to Mirambo was the moment of the day he felt best about. It brought a kind of closure to the brief interlude of hostility and distrust – but how was he going to explain to Jules why he had come back home in the evening wearing a shirt she had never seen before? Even if she didn’t remember that he had been wearing the shirt she gave him, and she probably would, there weren’t too many plausible reasons for going off to one’s office wearing one shirt, working in the office all day, and then coming back in the evening wearing a different one.
If Jules asked, and she was bound to ask at some stage, he would just have to tell her that there was a good reason, and that he would tell her one day, but he couldn’t tell her now. That would be better than telling some far-fetched lie, and he couldn’t dredge up any story that would sound even remotely plausible.
The ‘talk now’ bit arrived towards the end of a tetchy breakfast – the children were clearly still disturbed. They had both woken early and should have been hungry, but were both less than enthusiastic about eating. Eventually Jules lost patience and told them they could get down from the table with sufficient brittleness in her voice to make it clear that the talking was about to begin. At least this interrogation wouldn’t be spurred on by electric shocks and pliers.
‘If you were in your office all the time until you came back last night,’ Jules asked, ‘why weren’t you answering your phone? Why do I get the impression that you are hiding something from me?’
‘What makes you think I wasn’t answering my phone?’
‘Graham somebody or other – the President of the SRC – phoned and asked for you,’ Jules replied. ‘He said you had asked him to phone about Mirambo but there was no answer from your office.’
Damn – he’d completely forgotten that he’d asked Graham to let him know whether his lunchtime visit to Mirambo’s digs had come up with anything.
‘I needed to get some photocopying done for next week,’ Cameron said, ‘so I spent some time in the department secretary’s office. Graham must have phoned during the time I was out of my office.’
‘So how come the President of the SRC and Venter both happen to be talking to you about Mirambo’s whereabouts on the same evening?’
‘Mirambo was supposed to be coming with Graham to see me yesterday morning,’ Cameron said, ‘but he didn’t pitch at the SRC offices and Graham was worried about him. He phoned me yesterday to ask if I knew where he was. When I said I didn’t he said he would go round to Mirambo’s digs at lunchtime and would let me know the outcome. Venter is clearly also looking for Mirambo and presumably thinks, because I’m his supervisor, that I’m likely to know where his is.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No,’ Cameron answered.
All of which was strictly true – sticking as close as possible to the truth was less likely to result in getting caught out.
‘Has this got anything to do with the bomb?’ Jules asked. ‘Mirambo couldn’t have been involved in any way could he? Have you seen him? It seems a bit much of a coincidence that the SB should have raided us looking for him last night. One would have expected all their energies to be devoted to finding whoever planted the bomb.’
‘I’ve already told you I have no idea where Mirambo is,’ Cameron said.
That wasn’t precisely what he’d been asked – but it was true, and amounted to more or less the same thing.
‘From what we know of him,’ Cameron went on, ‘it doesn’t seem likely that he would be the kind of person who would go around planting bombs, does it? Spending hours kicking a ball with a five-year-old white kid doesn’t exactly fit the identikit picture of your typically murderous white-hating black terrorist.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ Jules agreed. ‘But Mirambo is very bright and very passionate and it wouldn’t be in the least surprising if he were politically active with the ANC, would it?’
‘No – I suppose not,’ Cameron conceded. ‘But, even if he were an ANC operative, that wouldn’t mean he goes around planting bombs – not all ANC members or sympathizers are involved in sabotage.’
‘And Venter obviously knows that,’ said Jules. ‘But he suspects you are at the very least an ANC supporter, if not a member, and if he could find evidence of that he would lock you up. If you were black you would have been locked up long ago – in fact they would probably have acted on their death threats already and you would have been assassinated like Rick. Venter watches us closely enough to know that you don’t spend your spare time making bombs – but, for all we know, he might know that Mirambo belongs to an ANC cell that either makes bombs or plants the grenades and limpet mines the ANC is now managing to get into the country.’
Cameron suddenly realized that what had been niggling at the back of his mind during their conversation was not just his unhappiness at having to lie to Jules. Had all the throwing of things on the floor during the search the previous evening just been malicious vandalism? It isn’t an unavoidable functional requirement of conducting a search that you have to throw everything on the floor – particularly if the search is for a person rather than, say, a banned book or magazine. The contents of all the drawers in the bedroom had been strewn around on the floor, and some of his books still had to be put back in the bookcases. They had obviously wanted to make as much mess as possible, just for the sheer pleasure of making a mess. But what if the noise had been partly in aid of just that – noise?
Jules had been with the children in their bedroom. Cameron had arrived back only when the raid was already well under way. Once he was back he could only be in one room at a time. The SB could have planted any number of bugs in just about every room in the house during the time they were there. It was possible that Venter had been listening to every word they had spoken. Cameron felt like kicking himself – he should have been alert to that. He wasn’t getting enough sleep – he needed to keep on the ball.
Cameron put his finger to his lips and mouthed ‘bugs’ across the table to Jules, who grasped the point immediately. They abandoned the conversation. Cameron’s mind raced back over anything they had said that could have been incriminating – anything that could have told Venter more than he knew already.
It wouldn’t have helped the cause that Jules had made it clear that she thought he was hiding something. He hadn’t said anything he shouldn’t have about Graham. Jules’s speculation about whether Mirambo was ANC would certainly have served to establish that she wasn’t part of, or party to, any inner political circle to which Mirambo belonged. Thank goodness something had stopped him short of saying ‘I’m an ANC supporter and I don’t go around planting bombs.’
Cameron resisted the urge to get down on his hands and knees to see whether he could spot a bug. Provided he and Jules were alert to the possibility, it didn’t matter precisely when they established whether any bugs had been planted. It would probably be a good idea to borrow Vishnu’s bug-detecting device again. The last time he had borrowed it they had found one fixed under the corner of a table in his office.
In the meantime he could carry on his conversation with Jules outside the house if she wanted to pursue the matter. Jules would certainly have other questions to ask – nothing had been said about the shirt yet. But she gave no sign of wanting to pursue the matter. She was going to the supermarket and would be taking the children with her.
A desultory and distracted day passed slowly. Once everything had been put more or less to rights, which took the better part of a couple of hours, Cameron tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on marking essays. Flashbacks from the events of the last two days kept randomly intruding, to the point where there was no point in trying to keep pushing them aside. But giving up on the essays and trying systematically to address the question of whether Mirambo had anything to do with the bomb didn’t get anywhere either. Going back over his conversations with Mirambo in as much detail as he could remember didn’t help – he couldn’t identify any pointers that hadn’t already been worried to exhaustion.
Jules appeared not to want to pursue the question of what Cameron had been doing the previous evening, but that did not mean that he had been forgiven. She volunteered no conversation whatever for the rest of the day and only spoke to him when spoken to, and then as briefly as possible. She again went to bed early, leaving Cameron to sit up by himself, nursing a glass of whisky, waiting with increasing dread for the banging on the door that would indicate that Mirambo had been arrested and was talking.
Dangerous as it would be, Cameron found himself wishing that the suspense of not knowing what had happened to Mirambo could be broken by another round of midnight tapping on the verandah door. Finding ways to get food up to Mirambo in the blind-spot behind the chimney in the ceiling would be less stressful than not knowing where he was or whether he was dead or alive – and, assuming he was still alive, whether he was talking.
The tension ratcheted up several further notches when the phone rang just after 9pm. It wouldn’t be Mirambo, who would know that all calls would be being recorded. It wasn’t 3am, so it was unlikely to be the SB. As he picked up the receiver he heard the familiar click that told him that the conversation would not be private. It was Lynn.
‘Hi. I hope I’m not waking anyone,’ she said. ‘I’ve been down in Durban with old school friends all day and have only just got back, but I wanted to check that you and Jules are OK – I gather you had a crowded house last night.’
Lynn knew that their phone was bugged and would be circumspect in what she said. Cameron found he couldn’t speak for a couple of seconds – the concern in Lynn’s voice brought a lump to his throat.
‘Yes, we’re fine thanks,’ he said. ‘We did have unexpected company. The children were traumatized and Kali was less than impressed, but Jules and I are OK. We have spent part of the day tidying up after them. Kali had the most excitement – he was discriminating enough to bite Venter and nearly got a bullet in his brain for his pains.’
‘It must have very been traumatic for Jules,’ Lynn said, ‘particularly if Nicky and Hilton were very upset.’
‘Jules gave as good as she got, and more,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ll tell you about it next week.’
‘OK – well I won’t keep you up any later,’ Lynn said. ‘I’m glad I didn’t wake you. I’ll see you at the Department meeting on Monday. Good night.’
‘Thanks for phoning – I really appreciate it. See you on Monday. Bye.’
It was only a very brief conversation, constrained, as always, by the knowledge that some thug in a smoke-filled room at the back of a non-descript government building somewhere out there in the darkness was listening to every word they spoke – but it made a disproportionate difference to the feel of the day.
The phone-call lessened, if only a little, the sense of rejection Jules’s back made Cameron feel when he went to bed. When sleep eventually came, the dread of a Special Branch posse hammering at the front door was never far below the surface.
Sunday followed the same pattern of anxious waiting for something to happen, or something not to happen – it was difficult to know which. The wind had dropped a little. Hilton insisted on a swim in the pool and, in spite of Cameron’s best efforts to clear the assorted vegetation floating on the surface, he came out covered in tiny brown scales from all the jacaranda leaves that had evaded the net. The house still felt violated, even though the work they had put into getting everything to rights the day before had left no visible traces of the raid. It felt exactly the same as it had after the two burglaries that had forced them to yield to having burglar guards put on all the windows. It was ironic that the cops should leave exactly the same feeling of violation as the robbers.
