He left the little town behind him and continued driving through the endless forest.
I hope I don’t need to kill anyone, he thought. I don’t want to kill anyone until I have completed my assignment, shooting de Klerk.
The first time I killed a human being, songoma, I was not alone. I still can’t forget it, even if I have difficulty in remembering other people I have killed later. It was that morning in January, 1981, in the cemetery at Duduza. I can remember the cracked gravestones, songoma, I remember thinking I was walking over the roof of the abode of the dead. We were going to bury an old relative that morning; I think he was my father’s cousin. There were other burials taking place elsewhere in the cemetery. Suddenly there was a disturbance somewhere: a funeral procession was breaking up. I saw a young girl running among the memorial stones, running like a hunted hind. She was being hunted. Somebody yelled that she was a white informant, a black girl working for the police. She was caught, she screamed; her despair was greater than anything I had ever seen before. But she was stabbed, clubbed, and lay between the graves, still alive. Then we started gathering dry sticks and clumps of grass we pulled up from between the gravestones. I say “we,” because I was suddenly involved in what was happening. A black woman passing information to the police-what right had she to live? She begged for her life, but her body was soon covered in dry sticks and grass and we burned her alive as she lay there. She tried in vain to get away from the flames, but we held her down until her face turned black. She was the first human being I killed, songoma, and I have never forgotten her, for in killing her I also killed myself. Racial segregation had triumphed. I had become an animal, songoma. There was no turning back.
His hand started hurting again. Victor Mabasha tried to hold it completely still in order to reduce the pain. The sun was still very high in the sky, and he did not even bother to look at his watch. He still had a long time to sit in the car with his thoughts for company.
I have no idea where I am, he thought. I know I’m in Sweden. But that’s all. Perhaps that’s what the world is really like. No here nor there. Only a now.
Eventually the strange, barely noticeable dusk descended.
He loaded his pistol and tucked it into his belt.
He no longer had his knives. But then, he was determined not to kill anybody, if he could possibly avoid it.
He glanced at the gas gauge. Soon he would be forced to fill the tank. He needed to solve the cash problem-still, he hoped, without killing anyone.
A few kilometers farther on he came upon a little store open at night. He stopped, switched off the engine and waited until all the customers had gone. He released the safety catch on his pistol, got out of the car and went quickly inside. There was an elderly man behind the counter. Victor pointed at the cash register with his pistol. The man tried to say something but Victor fired a shot into the ceiling and pointed again. With trembling hands the man opened the cash drawer. Victor leaned forward, switched the pistol over to his injured hand, and grabbed all the cash he could see. Then he turned and hurried out of the store.
He didn’t see the man collapse on the floor behind the counter. As he fell, he hit his head hard on the concrete floor. Afterwards, they would decide the thief had knocked him down.
The man behind the counter was already dead. His heart could not cope with the sudden shock.
As Victor hastened out of the store, his bandage caught in the door. He had no time to carefully extricate it, so he gritted his teeth against the pain and jerked his hand free.
Just then he noticed a girl standing outside, staring at him. She was about thirteen, and wide-eyed. She gaped at his bloodstained hand.
I’ll have to kill her, he thought. There can’t be any witnesses.
He drew his pistol and pointed it at her. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He dropped his hand, raced back to the car and drove away.
He knew he would have the cops after him now. They would start looking for a black man with a mutilated hand. The girl he hadn’t killed would start talking. He gave himself four hours at most before he would be forced to change cars.
He stopped at an unmanned gas station and filled his tank. He had noticed a signpost for Stockholm earlier on, and this time he made a point of remembering how to retrace his steps.
He suddenly felt very weary. Somewhere along the way he would have to stop and sleep.
He hoped he would manage to find another lake with still, black water.
He found one on the great plain, just south of Linkoping. He had already changed cars by then. Near Huskvarna he turned into a motel and managed to crack the door lock and short-circuit the ignition of another Mercedes. He continued driving until his strength ran out. Shortly before Linkoping he turned off onto a minor road, then onto a still smaller one, and eventually came to a lake stretched out before him. It was just turned midnight. He curled up on the back seat and fell asleep.
He awoke with a start just before five in the morning.
Outside the car he could hear a bird singing in a way he had never heard before.
Then he continued his journey northward.
Shortly before eleven in the morning he came to Stockholm.
It was Wednesday, April 29, the day before Walpurgis Eve, 1992.
Chapter Thirteen
Three masked men turned up just as dessert was being served. In the space of two minutes they fired 300 shots from their automatic weapons and disappeared into a waiting car.
Afterwards there was a brief moment of silence. Then came the screams from the wounded and shocked.
It had been the annual meeting of the venerable wine-tasting club in Durban. The dining committee had carefully considered security before deciding to hold the banquet after the meeting at the golf club restaurant in Pinetown, not far from Durban. So far Pinetown had escaped the violence now becoming increasingly common and widespread in Natal. Moreover, the restaurant manager had promised to increase security for the evening.
But the guards were struck down before they could raise the alarm. The fence surrounding the restaurant had been cut through with wire cutters. The attackers had also managed to throttle a German shepherd.
There were fifty people altogether in the restaurant when the three men burst in, guns in hand. All the members of the wine-tasting club were white. There were five black waiters, four men and a woman. The black chefs and kitchen hands fled the restaurant through the back door with the Portuguese master chef as soon as the shooting started.
When it was all over, nine people lay dead among the upturned tables and chairs, broken crockery, and fallen chandeliers. Seventeen were more or less seriously wounded, and all the rest were in shock, including an elderly lady who would die later from a heart attack.
More than two hundred bottles of red wine had been shot to pieces. The police who arrived at the scene after the massacre had a hard time distinguishing blood from red wine.
Chief Inspector Samuel de Beer from the Durban homicide squad was one of the first to reach the restaurant. He had with him Inspector Harry Sibande, who was black. Although de Beer was a cop who made no attempt to conceal his racial prejudice, Harry Sibande had learnt to tolerate his contempt for blacks. This was due not least to the fact that Sibande realized long ago he was a much better cop than de Beer could ever be.
They surveyed the devastation, and watched the wounded being carried to the stream of ambulances bound for various Durban hospitals.
The badly shocked witnesses to whom they had access did not have much to say. There were three men, all of them masked. But their hands were black.
De Beer knew this was one of the most serious raids carried out by any of the black army factions in Natal so far this year. That evening, April 30, 1992, open civil war between blacks and whites in Natal had come a step closer.