Despite the Darkness, page 5
Cameron wasn’t getting anywhere. Looking at his watch he realized that there was time to get home and talk to Mirambo again before Jules got home – there were bridges to be rebuilt. Apart from wanting to maintain a good working relationship with Mirambo, who, after all, still had a thesis to complete at some point, it was important that when he left to find a safer house to lie low in he shouldn’t call Cameron’s good intentions and commitment into question.
The swirling dust outside the library door, flecked with dry jacarada leaves, promised another unpleasant walk home – sun-glasses helped a bit, but this was no country for contact lenses. The children were always extra excitable when the wind was blowing, and Cameron had spent enough time on horseback to know that wild winds excited horses too. Unlikely as it sounded, it must have been, at least in part, the wind that propelled him into throwing down the gauntlet to Venter.
As he approached the house, Cameron could see the white car parked in its usual place facing away from him down the hill, positioned with a full view of his gate and front door. It was half on the pavement, half in the road, in the shade of one of the jacaranda trees on the far side of the road from the house. Falling trees often crush cars and kill the people inside them, but never the right cars or the right people.
As he looked, Cameron saw the driver’s window of the car being lowered and a crumpled paper bag being thrown out onto the pavement. It pirouetted briefly in the road before being caught up by the wind and blown drunkenly over the hedge and into Cameron’s garden. It would have landed in the swimming pool. The car window closed as soon as the deed was done. The sun was reflecting off it, and Cameron couldn’t see from the other side of the road who was in the car – but it would almost certainly be Venter.
Cameron could feel himself losing it. The stress and sleeplessness of the night, the tension of the day, the foul wind, the bullying bastard in the car who couldn’t even be bothered to hang onto his rubbish until he could put it in a rubbish bin, were all too much. Retaining just enough presence of mind to look carefully in both directions to make sure he wasn’t run down, he half-walked half-ran across the road and knocked hard on the car window.
It was Venter alright. His large head with its slicked-back jet-black hair and painstakingly cultivated moustache stared straight ahead through the windscreen, unmoved. His shirt was open at the neck and the top two buttons were undone, allowing enough graying chest-hair loose to make it clear that the hair on his head was dyed. It was too hot for a jacket and Venter’s was carefully folded on the passenger seat beside him. Equally carefully placed on top of his jacket, its straps tidily looped, lay a well-worn shoulder holster revealing the butt of a loosened 9mm automatic.
Cameron knocked even more angrily on the window. Venter’s head and thick-set body remained entirely motionless. All that moved was his left hand which slowly left the steering wheel and moved down to rest on the edge of the passenger seat a couple of inches from the butt of the automatic.
If the threatening gesture was intended to have a sobering effect it worked, even if there was no way Venter was going to shoot him in broad daylight on a road outside the university in front of witnesses, no matter how much he might have liked to. A group of five students had just come around the corner on their way home from lectures and were walking down the other side of the road, just out of earshot. Cameron could see the end of the ammunition clip in the butt of the automatic, which brought sickeningly to mind an image of the hollowed-out ends of dum-dum bullets.
‘You are a stupid, selfish, littering bastard,’ Cameron said, enunciating every word very slowly and very precisely, loudly enough he hoped to be heard inside the car in spite of the wind.
He went on more rapidly and with rather less control.
‘It is bad enough having to put up with your filthy piles of cigarette butts without also having to fish the packets you wrap your boerewors rolls in out of my swimming pool. I don’t suppose you would like to get off your backside and fish it out for me would you?’
No reaction whatever.
‘No, I thought not,’ Cameron said. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do than sit outside my house all day? Shouldn’t you be out somewhere trying to catch whoever planted the bomb last night?’
The right hand also came off the steering wheel, the window was wound half-way down, and Venter slowly turned his head and looked at Cameron. His pale blue eyes, with widely dilated pupils, were as expressionless, and seemed almost as mechanical, as those of a china doll. Cameron found himself wondering irrelevantly whether they would close if Venter tilted his head back. Venter’s glass-cold eyes called vividly to mind Mirambo’s comments about pliers and testicles and Cameron felt his scrotum contracting at the memory. All he had managed to summon up by way of condemnation of a vicious sadist who was known to enjoy torturing people was a less than withering indictment of littering.
After several seconds’ pause for effect, Venter finally spoke.
‘Perhaps I am out somewhere catching the terrorist who planted that bomb.’ Venter’s heavy Afrikaans accent landed ponderously on every syllable. ‘You think you are clever, Doctor Beaumont, but you are not. Just because you work at a University, Doctor Beaumont, and because your communist friends and some of your students think that you are clever, you also think that you are smarter than the rest of us. But you are not. If you are lucky we will end up locking you up and throwing away the key – but maybe you won’t be that lucky.’
His left hand moved fractionally towards the butt of the automatic again to reinforce the message.
‘So bugger off and pick up the litter yourself,’ Venter concluded.
So much for Cameron’s verbal tilt against the windmill of the apartheid state. Another round to the SB. This was clearly not a conversation it was worth prolonging.
As he turned away and crossed the road back towards his gate, Cameron reflected on the weight of resentment and contempt Venter had managed to inject into his heavily loaded ‘Doctor’. What was that all about? The university was perceived as a breeding-ground for communists and agitators – anyone who objected to the race policies of the government had to be either a communist or an agitator, and probably both – but the weight of hatred in Venter’s contemptuous ‘Doctor’ suggested a deeply personal bitterness of some sort. If Mirambo did ever find himself at the mercy of Venter, it certainly wouldn’t help his cause that he was a doctoral student.
In the meantime, as he turned away to cross the road with the memory of the automatic in its holster etched on his consciousness, Cameron found himself listening for the sound of the car window being wound up again to keep the Berg wind out. He couldn’t hear it.
Chapter 4
Cameron was acutely conscious of Venter’s malign glare on his back as he walked across the road and opened the gate. His back felt wholly exposed – as of course it was – as if it was the 9mm automatic rather than just the steel cold eyes that were aimed at a spot between his shoulder blades. Or, more likely, aimed at the back of his head – Cameron remembered that pumpkin. He glanced across to the pool and saw the crumpled paper bag, already half submerged, blown against the far end. But that could wait – he wouldn’t give Venter the satisfaction of seeing him divert from the path to fish it out.
He obviously couldn’t go round the back to talk to Mirambo with Venter watching. Margaret should have gone some time ago but if she hadn’t finished the ironing he would just have to wait to check on Mirambo until she left.
Cameron opened his front door to a faint smell of burning. Nothing seemed amiss in the lounge so he went through to the dining room where it was stronger. The kitchen door was closed, which was unusual, but whatever was burning didn’t smell like food. Opening the door cautiously, Cameron found Margaret sitting at the kitchen table with a mug in her hand. She looked as if she had been crying, something Cameron had never seen before.
The ironing board, propped against the closed back door, was disfigured by a very large burn mark and Cameron could see that one of his casual shirts, lying crumpled on the table next to Margaret’s elbow, had also been burnt. Margaret sat silently looking at him.
‘It doesn’t matter, Margaret, it was an old shirt,’ Cameron said, ‘I was going to throw it away soon anyway. Are you alright?’
Not strictly true, but it wasn’t one of his best shirts, and Margaret was looking rather more shaken than a lapse of concentration over the ironing merited.
‘What happened?’
‘I am so very sorry, Cameron,’ Margaret whispered after a few moments. ‘It was the boer.’
‘What boer?’ asked Cameron, knowing the answer before he asked.
‘The one who sit in the white car outside,’ Margaret said. ‘The one who says bad words to me when I walk past the car. I told Jules what he says. I always walk on the other side now.’
Jules hadn’t told him – she probably thought that he would be so angry that he would confront Venter and do something stupid. She was almost certainly right.
‘What did he say?’
‘Bad words. He asked what kind of kaffir works for a communist. He said if I go on working for you I end up in prison. He said he can think of much more better things I can do than work for you.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘Bad things. I can’t tell you.’
Cameron didn’t need to be told, he could imagine. So they had been harassing Margaret and he hadn’t been told. She had only worked for them for a few months since Patience had died from an asthma attack – wholly unnecessarily. Had she been white she would still be alive, like the many thousands of others. When her daughter had phoned for an ambulance all the ambulances for ‘non-whites’ had been busy and they hadn’t been able to get her to hospital. Margaret wasn’t yet thirty but had to support a teenage daughter, which accounted for her having had to leave school early.
Cameron found himself hoping that it wasn’t just the difficulty of finding another job that had made her want to carry on working for them in spite of Venter’s threats – what a bastard.
‘So what happened today?’ Cameron asked.
‘I was ironing when suddenly the door was banging very loudly and I heard shouting to open it,’ Margaret answered. ‘I was frightened – the noise was very loud and I didn’t know what to do. I put down the iron on its end. The banging got louder and a man shouted that he was going to break the door. So I ran to open it. Kali came running into the kitchen under the table and I think bumped the ironing board.’
‘I opened the door and the boer was standing there shouting,’ Margaret went on with a catch in her voice. ‘He shouted right in my face, close up. I think he must have been been drinking but I didn’t smell beer. I thought he was going to hit me.’
‘What was he shouting?’ Cameron asked.
‘He was shouting asking if there are other people in the house. I said no and asked would he like to come inside and look. He said not now. He said if they find any black man in the house they will arrest me along with you and Jules because terrorist must be my boyfriend. He said I will be put in prison and bad things will happen to me. I said I don’t have a boyfriend. He said I must go tell police which person comes to the house and what they say and police will pay me.’
What on earth could have possessed Venter? This went well beyond their everyday racist intimidation of just another black domestic worker.
‘Jules pays me well, Cameron,’ Margaret said, ‘and I do not like the boers – I won’t go to the police station.’
‘No – I’m sure you won’t,’ Cameron said. ‘What did he do then?’
‘He just told me “watch it”. He said I am already in trouble for working for you. He said more rude words and went away. I smelt burning and ran back to kitchen and saw the iron has fallen on your shirt and burnt it and also burnt a hole in the board. I’m very sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Cameron said. ‘We can easily buy another cover, or another ironing board for that matter. You need to get home, you are already late – Naledi will be back from school long before you get back. Don’t worry about Venter – he’s just a bully. He won’t do anything to you. When you are ready I will drive you to the bus stop so you don’t have to walk past his car today.’
Cameron wished that he could feel as confident that Venter wouldn’t do anything to Margaret as he had tried to sound. Venter could do pretty much anything he liked to her – from having her arrested and questioned to having her raped or killed, the last two not being mutually exclusive. Venter was perfectly capable of harming her just to get at him. She would be better off working for someone else, but jobs were not easy to come by, and she had Naledi to look after.
While Margaret changed in the bathroom, Cameron wondered what on earth Venter could have thought he was doing. Special Branch officers did not bang on the front doors of houses suspected of hiding terrorists in the middle of the day, only to threaten and abuse the domestic workers who came to the door. They preferred the small hours of the morning when their suspects could be guaranteed to be at home and their resistance was at its lowest. Venter didn’t need to be told that neither Cameron nor Jules was in the house when he came to call, he would have known.
If they had any grounds for suspicion that Mirambo was hiding in the house they would have mounted a full-scale raid. But if they didn’t suspect Cameron to be somehow involved and likely to lead them to Mirambo, even if he wasn’t actually sheltering him, what was Venter doing sitting in a car outside his house at all? A bomb had gone off during the night and a man had been killed. What was one of the SB’s heavies doing sitting in a car outside a lecturer’s house doing nothing? Not quite nothing – intimidating a young black woman who happened to have the misfortune, at that moment, to be working for someone Venter didn’t like.
From what Cameron knew of Venter it seemed highly unlikely that he had had a rush of blood to the head, that he too had been over-stimulated to the point of stupidity by the relentless wind. He was a vicious racist bully – but he was not stupid. The lack of any obvious explanation for such wholly unexpected behaviour made Cameron feel disorientated, almost dizzy – too much stress and too little sleep, he thought. It suggested that the rules of the game had somehow been changed. But he had no idea in what way or to what end.
Publicly, Cameron’s role in the game for the past three years had been to work on the local United Democratic Front committee and for fifteen years now – it seemed a lifetime – to push the boundaries of what could legally be said in lectures and speeches, as well as in letters and articles in the press. His less public role had been to act as one of many communication links between the UDF and the ANC in exile, which included the distribution of banned material.
The SB’s role so far had been to identify some kind of illegality to pin on him sufficient to put him inside for several years and, failing that, to harass him to the point where he would give up and emigrate, as so many others had done. Hence the death threats, the phone and mail monitoring, the police spies in classes, and the piles of cigarette butts on the pavement outside his house. The constant surveillance made life more difficult, as it was obviously intended to, but the SB agents were predictable enough for ways to be found.
That, of course, was the whole point of there being rules to a game – predictability. Occasionally something unpredictable did happen to change the game, something like Rick’s murder. It only took one assassination to add extra menace to every death threat delivered to opponents of apartheid around the country. It became the rule to take appropriate precautions on the basis that death threats might now be signals of serious intent.
Margaret came out of the bathroom in her every-day clothes. She looked shaken and vulnerable – and much too young to have a teenage daughter. Cameron would have liked to put his arm around her to comfort her, but that would be open to misinterpretation.
It was absurd, he thought, to put Venter’s bizarre doorstep outburst in the same category as Rick’s murder as a potential game changer. It had been wholly unexpected and didn’t fit any game pattern, but in itself it was trivial – even if it hadn’t felt so for Margaret. But, whatever was behind it, it certainly made it even more urgent to get Mirambo out of the house. Right now it was important to stop speculating and concentrate on what had to be done.
Cameron led Margaret across the back verandah and opened the door, which was always kept unlocked during the day when Margaret was there. As he closed and locked the door, Cameron spoke loudly enough for Mirambo in the outside room a few feet away to hear.
‘I’ll just take you round and drop you at the bus stop so you can get home to Naledi, you are already late this evening’.
Margaret looked at him questioningly.
‘Venter will almost certainly follow us,’ Cameron continued, ‘but you needn’t worry as he won’t bother you – he is bound to follow me back here. He’s probably used to being led round in circles but I hope it irritates the hell out of him.’
‘The boer was very angry,’ Margaret volunteered. ‘It would not be good to make him more angry. Be careful, Cameron – he was very angry.’
Cameron pulled up the garage roller-door as Margaret stood aside to wait until the car was out of the garage. From where he was watching, Venter would see the car as it reversed out of the drive. As he turned into the street and headed down the hill, Cameron saw Venter’s car bump off the pavement onto the road behind him.
It was no doubt childish, but Cameron couldn’t resist extracting minor revenge for Venter’s earlier points victory by leading him round in circles – or, if not circles, at least in squares. Margaret had a point, if it irritated Venter enough it could be dangerous – at least in the long run, even if not immediately – but what the hell. Cameron crossed the main road instead of turning down it towards the bus-stop, drove a couple of blocks further and then turned off and did a complete circuit of the large block in which Lynn lived – he noticed that her car was in the drive as he went past. He then drove back to the main road and down to the bus stop – all the while watching in his mirror to make sure that Venter was following.
