Despite the Darkness, page 35
Was the echo of a James Bond villain in the first bit of his response deliberate? Van Zyl hadn’t put any particular emphasis on the ‘preferred’, but was the past tense, used again, the slip Cameron had been looking for?
‘As for making it known that you are not a police spy,’ van Zyl continued, ‘there are two obvious problems. The first is that nobody would believe anything that a Special Branch Colonel said with regard to who is or isn’t working for us. The best way to make everybody even more certain that you are working for us would be for me to stand up and say that you aren’t. I don’t, incidentally, think the word “spy” is appropriate. lf we are to protect this country from the threat President Botha correctly identifies – though his labelling of it as a communist-led ‘total onslaught’ is a bit simplistic – it is essential that we have people working undercover some of the time. The word “spy” implies under-hand as well as under-cover – there is nothing underhand about protecting one’s country.’
‘The second problem,’ van Zyl went on, ‘is that if I were somehow to convince people that you aren’t working for us I would be undoing the very successful implementation over many months of a brilliantly conceived strategy. You see, Doctor Beaumont, the minor battle that you have unwittingly been engaged in with me on one corner of the board has wide implications for many of the other stones on the board. I have been telling my superiors for some time that banning our opponents, whether they be Christian Ministers or communist agitators like you, is counter-productive. Banning people is not good for our reputation in the West.’
Van Zyl’s voice remained perfectly even and entirely devoid of any emotion.
‘Banning people just inflames the Anti-Apartheid Movement around the world unnecessarily,’ he went on. ‘I’ve been telling my superiors that it is not necessary to ban people. It is also very seldom a good idea to kill university lecturers – no matter how irritating they might be. There are other ways to achieve the same end. Why would you ever ban somebody? Because, Doctor Beaumont, you don’t agree with what they are saying and you are worried that it might generate further opposition to your government. You ban people because that makes it illegal for anybody to publish anything they write, or to quote anything they say. You put them under house arrest to stop them from going around the country, or going abroad, saying things you don’t want them to say. But what if you can succeed in discrediting them so effectively that nobody will choose to publish what they write, and nobody will believe anything they say? Banning people enhances their credibility with the opponents of apartheid. My strategy discredits them completely – and forever. I am pleased you have come here this afternoon, Doctor Beaumont, so that I can explain this to you.’
Van Zyl smiled a tight-lipped smile.
‘I am sorry if I have gone on at some length,’ he said. ‘As an academic, particularly as a historian, you will appreciate both the brilliance of my strategy and your own historical importance as the first, very successful, test case. What do you say?’
Cameron was no longer trembling. As he listened to van Zyl he felt himself becoming stiller and stiller, hardening like quickset concrete in a cast. He said nothing for so long that van Zyl repeated his question.
‘So I’m just a counter in a strategic game aimed at ensuring that nobody is prepared to publish anything I write, or listen to anything I have to say,’ Cameron said finally. ‘Even if I hadn’t already been fired, thanks to your good offices and those of your half-tamed gorilla, Venter, I might as well resign my job as an academic historian. I have lost my wife and children; I have lost all credibility with my academic peers around the globe; and my political comrades have been turned against me – all just so that you can prove a point.’
‘Precisely,’ said van Zyl, sounding like a schoolteacher who was delighted that his star pupil had grasped a difficult concept. ‘I knew you would quickly grasp the elegance of this move. You are right, of course. Your career is now finished. Even if you could ever prove that you weren’t working for us, you would still have to live under the shadow of the suspicion that you betrayed your student. And, as you rightly ask, how can you prove a negative? We don’t have to kill you. We have effectively silenced you already. Just now you talked about being a counter in some kind of game – exactly so. Let us revert to Go for a moment. You are a stone, black or white doesn’t matter, that has been surrounded. Technically you have one life left, but you are effectively dead. I could put a stone on the one remaining point beside your stone and remove you from the board. But you are already dead, so I can leave you helpless and impotent on the board and get on with other fights on the other corners of the board. If I were you, though, I would take heed of the name.’
‘What name?’ Cameron asked. What on earth was he talking about now? Cameron felt as if his brain were hardening like concrete too – a deadened, dazed feeling.
‘Go, of course,’ van Zyl said, smiling his enjoyment of his wordplay. ‘Go – but not just yet. Before I turned my attention to your corner of the board Venter’s object was to unnerve you and your wife so seriously that you would get yourselves out of our hair by emigrating. Hence the 3am phone calls, the wreath, the elaborate hoax with the estate agents and so on. That didn’t conflict fundamentally with my strategy, so I didn’t stop him – but I did tell him I didn’t want you killed. So I was very angry with him when he allowed the men from Edendale to think that you had been responsible for their arrest. Venter does not think strategically – it would be most unfortunate if those men were to exact their revenge on you before I have had the opportunity to demonstrate the success of my strategy to my superiors, would it not?’
Was van Zyl really expecting Cameron to agree that the main reason it would be a pity for him to be killed by the men from Edendale would be because that would mean van Zyl’s strategy had been pre-empted?
‘Venter then became obsessed with your wife,’ van Zyl continued. ‘I don’t know precisely what she said to him, but I have never before seen anyone so incensed by a single conversation. After that he had a visceral desire to give her a thrashing, he wanted to take a sjambok to her, so it was good that she left before he created an opportunity.’
‘But you could have ordered him not to,’ Cameron said. ‘It is grossly unfair to terrorize my wife and children, who have done nothing to you, because you don’t like what I say. You should have instructed Venter to leave Jules and my children alone long ago.’
‘Whoever said life was supposed to be fair, Doctor Beaumont?’ van Zyl asked. ‘Why would I call Venter off? I need attack dogs and Venter is a particularly good attack dog. Attack dogs need meat. If he finds an excuse to do so, why would I want to alienate him by stopping him from punishing your wife? Just as you deserved the kicking you got for being provocative in Brighton, so your wife needs to learn to be careful whom she antagonizes. Being whipped by Venter would certainly help her with that.’
‘But, to get back to what I was saying,’ van Zyl continued, after a pause to allow the implications of what he was saying to sink in, ‘my advice to you would be to go when your notice expires. That will be time enough for my purposes. I have nothing against you personally – but Venter certainly has. If you stay, he will find a reason to detain you and when he does he will hurt you very badly. His frustration at not being able to do what he would like to your wife will be taken out on you. Killing you would, by then, not be at odds with my strategy. Even if he doesn’t kill you, you will surely wish he had. Now I need to get on with my work – there are other areas of the board that need my attention. If your wife were still with you I would send her my greetings.’
There was clearly no point in saying anything more. Cameron stood up slowly from his chair while van Zyl got briskly to his feet and walked around to open the door.
‘Take my advice,’ van Zyl said.
‘I am going,’ Cameron replied.
But going where? That was the question, Cameron thought a few minutes later as he sat behind the steering wheel in his baking hot car, trying to summon up the energy to start the engine. On second thoughts, that was only the immediate question. The ultimate question was why go anywhere. Van Zyl was not going to call Venter off, Jules would not be coming back to him, and he would hardly ever get to see Nicky and Hilton.
Van Zyl’s calculating ruthlessness was reason for despair. If those pulling the levers of power behind the scenes were even half as cold-blooded as van Zyl was, Jules was right – 1984 stretched endlessly ahead. As so often recently, Cameron found Desmond Tutu’s words coming back to him unbidden: ‘Either there is going to be power sharing or not. If not, then we must give up hope of a peaceful settlement in South Africa … your ghastly alternative will be upon you.’ That was five years ago. They had had five years in which to change their minds, and Botha’s Rubicon speech made it crystal clear that they were not going to – they were refusing to share power. Now, following the declaration of the State of Emergency, Tutu was talking about a cauldron bubbling below the surface and was predicting ‘an almighty explosion’ – and if anyone had a handle on what was going on below the surface it was Tutu. The ghastly alternative was upon them.
He would be waiting for the explosion by himself. He had lost his job, his colleagues in the struggle would have nothing more to do with him, he had lost his wife and his children – what he loved most in life had been wrenched from him. Van Zyl and Venter had won. Except only that van Zyl’s entire strategy depended on Cameron living long enough to prove that it hadn’t been necessary to ban him or murder him. Van Zyl saw himself as a Master of Go, which has very few rules – all very simple. One rule is that you can’t commit suicide. You can’t remove your one remaining liberty yourself – you can’t close your own remaining eye. But actually you can.
The obvious place to go would be Howick Falls, where from time to time others had gone to that end. But if you don’t have a head for heights there must be better ways. A trip to Highmoor Dam with a bottle of whisky and his waders would fit the bill – he needn’t bother to take his rod. A slow wade out towards the middle would be an appropriate way to close that one remaining eye – unsticking his waders from the clinging mud step by step as the cold water pressed in against his legs and torso until it topped the waders. There was no other way to win what van Zyl chose to call the skirmish on Cameron’s corner of the board. But first he had promised to go back to tell Lynn what had happened.
Did he take her too much for granted? As far as he knew there hadn’t been any repercussions for her as a result of letting him use her car to go to Edendale, but he hadn’t even considered whether there might be. And here he was heading straight back to tell her about his latest brush with the darkest representative yet of the forces of darkness.
Van Zyl had been perfectly happy to tell him everything, which meant that he was entirely confident that Cameron had been so discredited that nobody who mattered would believe anything he said. Cameron could say what he liked – he could even tell people about how he had managed to get Mirambo through the police roadblock to relative safety. People simply wouldn’t believe him. But telling people, even telling Lynn, would still not be a good idea. Van Zyl’s strategy wouldn’t stop Venter from detaining him for a bit of questioning, or from going down to pick Jules up from Cape Town to bring her back for what Venter would refer to as a bit of singing practice. Now Lynn was also vulnerable. He shouldn’t have borrowed her car.
Van Zyl was right – they didn’t need to kill him to neutralize him. ‘Neuter’ seemed as apposite as ‘neutralize’. They didn’t intend to kill him – the death threats were just off-stage sound effects. Van Zyl’s strategy was bloodless, both literally and figuratively.
Lynn was in her office, as promised. She listened without interruption as he repeated the entire conversation with van Zyl more or less word for word – it wasn’t a conversation he was going to forget in a hurry – and teased out its implications. That meant having to tell her about the current state of play where Jules was concerned. Lynn’s sympathy appeared to be distributed evenly between them.
If Lynn had been wanting to get into his pants for some time – Jules’s phraseology was uncomfortably direct at times – she gave no sign whatever of that. After the raid Cameron had told her how furious Venter had been about Jules’s verbal assault on him, but he hadn’t elaborated on the precise nature of the threat. Nor had he told her about Venter’s bizarre sjambokking of the jacaranda tree, or the home video. Lynn was appalled and said that Jules must never, under any circumstances, be prevailed on to come back while Venter was around.
The more Cameron told her about his conversation with van Zyl the more despondent he felt, and the more appealing the Highmoor option seemed. Van Zyl’s Go analogy was dead right. Cameron’s stones had been surrounded and left for dead. Each facet of his life was a separate stone cut-off from any hope of survival – his teaching, his research, his credibility with the ANC and UDF, his relationship with his students, his family life. Technically he was still alive – his group of stones had its one remaining life – but that life could be extinguished quite easily at any time by the placement of a single stone. That single stone could easily be a bullet – they could do to him what they had done to Rick and any number of named and unnamed others. But, as van Zyl had pointed out to such devastating effect, they didn’t need to. He might as well be dead already.
The one thing van Zyl wasn’t bargaining for was Cameron’s capacity to place that single stone himself. He could show Venter that his Sig Sauer could kill a person, in spite of being a popgun, or, still the more attractive option, he could substitute the Highmoor mud for that single stone.
Lynn was looking at him with a concerned expression. She knew he had been drinking more than was good for him and looked as if she was worried that he might go home and drink himself into oblivion, or worse. It was to forestall that rather appealing end to the day, rather than from any other motives, he thought, that she invited him round to her house for supper that evening. It seemed a bit late in the day to be inviting someone around for supper, but he no longer had anything to lose so he agreed to go. As he walked home, Cameron thought how much he would prefer to be supervising Hilton and Nicky’s bath and reading them their bedtime stories – but it would be a waste of time even trying to say goodnight to them.
Lynn had changed into a diaphanous silk blouse, through which a minimalist lacy bra was clearly visible, and skin-tight jeans. She kissed him briefly on the lips, but not so briefly that Cameron couldn’t catch the scent of jasmine again, and turned to reach for an unopened bottle of 18-year-old Macallan on top of her upright piano. As she turned around, his attention could not but be attracted to the way Lynn’s tightly stretched jeans highlighted the perfect contours of her bottom. She was clearly going out of her way to please him – Cameron would have been delighted enough to watch her opening a bottle of 12-year-old Macallan, his budget had never yet run to 18-year-old Macallan.
Lynn had joined the department six or seven years earlier and they had spent a good deal of time in each other’s company, but very little of it had been by themselves. Cameron understood that Lynn had come to Natal after managing to extricate herself from an abusive relationship, but she never spoke about it. As far as he knew she hadn’t risked any close relationship since. She had always seemed very comfortable in the company of men, but seemed not to feel the need to have them around her all the time or to have any particular one of them attached to her.
The short-notice dinner Lynn had managed to organize was more than adequate – grilled grapefruit, fillet steak and salad, and a fresh fruit salad. If that was the kind of thing Lynn ate at home on a regular basis, it was easy to see how she kept such a good figure. They ate at the kitchen table, which was homely and allowed them to carry on talking while Lynn did the last minute cooking. She had pushed the boat out again with the wine – opening a bottle of 1978 Kanonkop Cabernet Sauvignon to go with the steak. Where his tastes in whisky and wine were concerned, Lynn clearly had an intelligence network to rival the SB’s.
The dinner was drawn-out and relaxed. If Lynn’s intention had been to take the sharp edge off the van Zyl experience, she was succeeding admirably. A couple of glasses of the Macallan before dinner and his half-bottle of the Kanonkop were helping. When they had eaten, Lynn made a cafatière of coffee, put the new Dionne Warwick album Friends on her turntable, and came to sit beside Cameron on the sofa, casually putting her hand on his knee. The Highmoor option was beginning to lose its attraction.
You never know how much to read into the music people play. Was it significant that Lynn hadn’t decided to play Dionne Warwick’s I’ll never fall in love again, which Cameron could see in the record rack next to the gap made by Friends? On the other hand, as a title, Friends could hardly be designed to send a come-on message. The evening had been long and it couldn’t be much longer before the moment of decision arrived. Did he, or didn’t he, want to take the plunge and vindicate Jules’s suspicion that he was sleeping with Lynn?
There was no question that part of him wanted that. Lynn’s hand lying lightly on his leg was enough to arouse him. When he had lied to Jules he had told himself that he might as well be having an affair, and Jules had said exactly the same thing. If Jules suspected he was having an affair with Lynn he should prove her right again – Jules was always right. He would respond positively when Lynn broached the subject, however she wanted to do that – he just wouldn’t make the first advance himself.
Lynn was obviously not one to beat about the bush. After they had sat comfortably together listening to Dionne Warwick and drinking their coffee, which wasn’t having as sobering an effect as Cameron had hoped, Lynn took Cameron’s hand, lifted it to her lips, kissed it and looked over it at him.
