She took the step towards him. She raised her hand. He didn't flinch. She slapped his face. His head rocked. She saw the smile that was beaming up at her.
"What are you going to do?"
She stared out of the window. She saw the maid hanging the washing on the rope line. She saw her father's good quality shirts, and her mother's good quality underwear, and she saw Jan's T-shirts and her blouses. She saw neat gardens ablaze with shrubs and flowers. She saw a Black man collecting grass cuttings. She saw their world that was comfortable and familiar, and now threatened.
"I'm going to fight to keep you out of prison."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that on your own you'll rot the rest of your life in prison."
The words were music to Jan van Niekerk.
Quietly he told her that he was under instruction to go to a certain place and deliver a message for a man to make a rendezvous. He knew the name of the man. He said it was the man who had taken the bomb into John Vorster Square police station. He told her that he had to meet the man and give him the plans of the Pretoria Central prison complex.
"Left to yourself, little brother, you'll rot for the rest of your life," Ros said.
The man was White.
He had been born in Latvia. He was a colonel in the K.G.B. He was marked for assassination by the security police and National Intelligence Service in Pretoria. He was the chief planner of Umkonto we Sizwe operations inside South Africa. More than a year before he had authorised the fire bomb attack on the Rand Supreme Court. That attack was one of a long list of projects that had crossed his desk.
He had approved the bombing of the Air Force headquarters in Pretoria, and the attacks on the Sasol synthetic petrol refinery and on the Koeburg nuclear power plant and on the Voortrekkerhoogte military base. More recently he had sanctioned the laying of mines in the far north east of the Transvaal on roads that would be used by civilians, and the detonating of a shrapnel bomb in a Durban shopping mall crowded with Christmas custom. The long retaliatory arm of the security police and N.I.S. had swiped close to him.
His former wife had died, mutilated by a letter bomb in her office at the Centre for African Studies in the Mozambique capital.
The meeting was in a small air-conditioned office at the back of the A.N.C. compound on the outskirts of Lusaka.
Jacob Thiroko was not interrupted.
He stated his plan. Five men, Kalashnikovs, grenades, one hundred kilos of explosives, four cars for the run to the Botswana frontier, the skill of the White explosives expert now loose in South Africa. Thiroko had spoken of John Vorster Square, he had sung of the pedigree of the expert.
He had been heard out. He kept his high card for the end.
"I will lead the cadre."
Nothing astonished this White man. His eyebrows flickered a trace of surprise. He stayed silent.
"I will go back myself into South Africa, into my mother-land. I have not been there since I was a young man. Perhaps it is a hallucination. Perhaps it is my duty to the men who otherwise will hang. I have a responsibility for them, five times of responsibility. You gave the authorisation, I prepared the plan. I cannot escape my responsibility… The young man in Johannesburg is the son of James Carew, the driver. The son taught me about sacrifice, when I thought I had nothing to learn. For his father he is prepared to sacrifice his life. I should be prepared to make the same sacrifice. They are sons to me, Happy, Charlie, Percy and Tom. What did we do when Benjamin Moloise walked to the gallows? We issued statements… I don't want to issue a statement this time!"
"Tell me about London, Comrade."
"In London I went to see a physician."
"What were you told, Comrade Jacob?"
"To live each day of my life to the full, to enjoy each minute of each day."
"Is there pain?"
"The pain will be nothing to the joy if I can give life to my children."
"Is it possible, to bring them out?"
"I would have said it was impossible for a stranger to carry a bomb into John Vorster Square. I no longer know what is impossible."
The pain was deep in the lower bowel of Thiroko's stomach. He winced as he stood, as he shook hands with the man from Riga. He had chosen the four men who would go with him, who would return with him to South Africa.
The physician had not been specific, he had spoken only of the few months that remained.
Jack came back into his room, closed the door behind him, slipped on the security chain, checked the suitcase.
In the afternoon, after the experience in Soweto, he had had to force himself to go out into the city, to walk on the streets amongst Blacks, be a tourist. Be a tourist and also make some enquiries.
He had gone to a small engineering firm in the back streets^ down from Marshall. He had asked about the availability of a short length of 8" iron piping.
When he crossed the room he saw, lying on his dressing table, left there by the bellboy, a sealed envelope.
He saw the bold handwriting. He thought the envelope had been addressed by a girl.
When the colonel left the meeting he brought back to his office a copy of the initial forensic report.
Embedded in the walls of the hallway of John Vorster Square had been found the synthetic fibres of a cheap bag.
Blown clear through the doorway and into a flower-bed had been a piece of a metal can. This first examination stated that the fibres came from a little-used bag, and the fifty cent sized piece of metal from a clean painted can without corrosion or rust.
The colonel had given it as his opinion that both items had been bought specifically for the bombing, for the making up of the explosive device, for carrying it.
**
"I'm truly sorry, Carew."
"Thank you, sir."
"There's not a decent man I know who can get pleasure out of this moment."
"I'm sure there isn't, sir."
"For what we do in life… we have to take the consequences of our actions."
"Just so, sir."
"I take no delight in seeing a man go to his punishment, whatever he's done."
"I appreciate that, sir."
The governor stood ramrod straight in the doorway of the cell. Behind him, his message read, the deputy sheriff of Pretoria waited, his arms hanging, his hands clasped in front of his trouser flies. Jeez had the centre of the floor space, he was at attention, his thumbs on the seams of his trousers. He thought the sympathy was genuine. He thought the governor was an honest man. The governor didn't frighten Jeez, not so that he had to imagine him out of his tailored uniform, shorn of his medal ribbons, stripped to his underpants. The governor was nothing like the bastard who had run Spac, who had been Jeez's gaoler way back for so many long years.
"I like a man to go proudly. I like a man to behave like a man. I can tell you this, Carew, go like a man and it will be easier for you. A prisoner who makes difficulties hurts himself, not us."
"Thank you, sir."
"I'd bet money on you, Carew, that you'll go like a man who is proud."
"Yes, sir."
"I always tell a man at this time that he should think through his life, think about his affairs, and stay with the good times. We don't want any melancholy."
"No, sir."
"Carew, you wrote a letter a few weeks ago, I checked with Records and you've had no letter back. I'm sorry. Of course, you are permitted to write as many letters as you wish."
"There won't be any more letters, sir."
"Is there anyone we should contact, anyone you would like to be offered facilities for a visit?"
"No, sir. There's no one who should visit."