He sat up on the bed and looked at his wristwatch. If he was going to be in Soweto the next day, he’d have to take the bus from Umtata this evening. Stewart was wrong. He couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning. It was nearly nine hundred kilometers to Johannesburg.
He had no decisions to make. Having accepted the money, he would have to go. He had no desire to owe Jan Kleyn five thousand rand. That would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. He knew Jan Kleyn well enough to be aware that nobody who crossed him ever got away with it.
He took out a bag tucked under the bed. As he did not know how long he was going to be away, or what Jan Kleyn wanted him to do, he just packed a few shirts, underpants and a pair of sturdy shoes. If the assignment was going to be a long one, he would have to buy whatever clothes he needed. Then he carefully detached the back of of the bed frame. His two knives were coated in grease and wrapped in plastic. He wiped away the grease and took off his shirt. He took down the specially made knife belt from a hook in the ceiling and buckled it around his waist, noting with satisfaction that he could still use the same hole. Although he had spent several months until his money ran out drinking beer, he had not put on weight. He was still in good shape, even though he would soon be thirty-one.
He put the two knives in their sheaths, after checking the edges with his finger tips. He needed only to press slightly to draw blood. Then he removed another part of the bed frame and produced his pistoclass="underline" that, too, was greased with coconut fat and wrapped in plastic. He sat on the bed and cleaned the gun meticulously. It was a 9mm Parabellum. He loaded the magazine with special ammunition that could only be obtained from an unlicensed arms dealer in Ravenmore. He wrapped two spare magazines inside one of his shirts in the bag. Then he strapped on his shoulder holster and inserted the pistol. Now he was ready to meet Jan Kleyn.
Shortly afterwards he left the shack. He locked it with the rusty padlock, and started walking to the bus stop a few kilometers down the road to Umtata.
He screwed up his eyes and gazed at the red sun rapidly setting over Soweto, remembering the last time he was there eight years ago. A local businessman had given him five hundred rand to shoot a competitor. As usual, he took all conceivable precautions and drew up a detailed plan. But it all went wrong from the very start. A police patrol happened to be passing by, and he fled Soweto as fast as his feet could take him. He had not been back since.
The African dusk was short. Suddenly, he was surrounded by darkness. In the distance he could hear the roar of traffic on the freeway headed for Cape Town and, in the other direction, Port Elizabeth. A police siren was wailing in the far distance, and it occurred to him that Jan Kleyn must have a very special reason for contacting him of all people. There are lots of assassins ready to shoot anyone you like for a thousand rand. But Jan Kleyn had paid him five thousand rand in advance, and that could not be only because he was considered the best and most cold-blooded professional killer in all of South Africa.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car peeling off from the freeway. Soon afterwards, he could see headlights approaching. He moved further back into the shadows, and drew his pistol. He released the catch with a flourish.
The car came to a halt where the exit road petered out. The headlights lit up the dusty bushes and wrecked car. Victor Mabasha waited in the shadows. He was on tenterhooks now.
A man got out of the car. Victor could see right away that it was not Jan Kleyn. He had not really expected to see him anyway. Jan Kleyn sent others to summon the people he wanted to talk to.
Victor slipped cautiously around the wreck and worked his way in a circle behind the man. The car had stopped exactly where he thought it would, and he had practiced the flanking movement to be sure of doing it silently.
He stopped just behind the man, and pressed the pistol against his temple. The man started.
“Where’s Jan Kleyn?” asked Victor Mabasha.
The man turned his head carefully.
“I’ll take you to him,” the man replied. Victor Mabasha could hear he was scared.
“Where is he exactly?” asked Victor Mabasha.
“On a farm near Pretoria. In Hammanskraal.”
Victor knew right away this was not a setup. He had done business with Jan Kleyn once before in Hammanskraal. He put his pistol back into its holster.
“We’d better get going, then,” he said. “It’s a hundred kilometers to Hammanskraal.”
He sat in the back seat. The man at the wheel was silent. The lights of Johannesburg appeared as they drove past on the freeway to the north of the city.
Every time he found himself in the vicinity of Johannesburg he could feel the raging hatred he had always felt welling up inside him. It was like a wild animal constantly following him around, constantly appearing and reminding him of things he would rather forget.
Victor Mabasha had grown up in Johannesburg. His father was a miner, rarely at home. For many years he worked in the diamond mines at Kimberley, and later in the mines to the north-east of Johannesburg, in Verwoerdburg. At the age of forty-two, his lungs collapsed. Victor Mabasha could still remember the horrific rattling noise his father made as he struggled to breathe during the last year of his life, a look of terror in his eyes. During those years his mother tried to keep the house going and take care of the nine children. They lived in a slum, and Victor remembered his childhood as one long, drawn-out, and seemingly endless humiliation. He rebelled against it all from an early age, but his protest was misguided and confused. He joined a gang of young thieves, was arrested, and beaten up in a prison cell by white cops. That merely increased his bitterness, and he returned to the streets and a life of crime. Unlike many of his comrades, he went his own way when it came to surviving the humiliation. Instead of joining the black awareness movement that was slowly forming, he went the opposite way. Although it was white oppression that had ruined his life, he decided the only way to get by was to remain on good terms with the whites. He started off by thieving for white fences, in return for their protection. Then one day, shortly after his twentieth birthday, he was promised twelve hundred rand to kill a black politician who had insulted a white store owner. Victor never hesitated. This was final proof that he sided with the whites. His revenge would always be that they did not understand how deep his contempt for them was. They thought he was a simple kaffir who knew how blacks should behave in South Africa. But deep down, he hated the whites and that was why he ran their errands.
Sometimes he read in the newspapers how one of his former companions had been hanged or given a long prison sentence. He could feel sorry for what had happened to them, but he never doubted that he had chosen the right way to survive and maybe in the end start to build a life for himself outside the slums.
When he was twenty-two, he met Jan Kleyn for the first time. Although they were the same age, Kleyn treated him with superior contempt.
Jan Kleyn was a fanatic. Victor Mabasha knew he hated the blacks and thought they were animals to be controlled by the whites. Kleyn had joined the fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement at an early age, and in just a few years reached a leading position. But he was no politician; he worked in the background, and did so from a post he held in BOSS, the South African intelligence service. His biggest asset was his ruthlessness. As far as he was concerned, there was no difference between shooting a black and killing a rat.
Victor Mabasha both hated and admired Jan Kleyn. Kleyn’s absolute conviction that the Afrikaners were a chosen people and his utter ruthlessness combined with a total disregard for death impressed him. He always seemed to have his thoughts and emotions under control. Victor Mabasha tried in vain to find a weakness in Jan Kleyn. There was no such thing.