Far down below was a car wreck.
“The car has evidently not been traced yet,” said Jan Kleyn. “When they discover it, they’ll find three dead men. Black men aged about twenty-five. Somebody shot them and then pushed the car over the cliff.”
Jan Kleyn pointed to a parking lot just behind them.
“The agreement was they’d get their money here,” he said. “But they didn’t, did they?”
They turned and retraced their steps.
Franz Malan did not bother to ask who had executed the three men responsible for the restaurant massacre. There were some things he would rather not know.
Shortly after one that afternoon Jan Kleyn dropped Franz Malan at an army camp near Durban. They shook hands and parted rapidly.
Jan Kleyn avoided the freeway back to Pretoria. He preferred to take roads with less traffic through Natal. He was in no hurry, and felt the need to assess how things stood. There was a lot at stake, for himself, for his fellow conspirators, and not least for all the white citizens of South Africa.
It also occurred to him that he was driving through Nelson Mandela’s home territory. This is where he was born, this is where he was raised. Presumably he would also be brought back here when his life was over.
Jan Kleyn was sometimes scared by his own lack of feelings. He knew he was what was often called a fanatic. But he knew of no other life he would prefer to lead.
There were basically just two things that made him uneasy. One was the nightmares he sometimes had. In them he saw himself trapped in a world populated exclusively by black people. He could no longer speak. What came out of his mouth were words transformed into animal noises. He sounded like a laughing hyena.
The other was that nobody knew how much time they had been allotted.
It was not that he wanted to live forever. But he did want to live long enough to see white South Africans secure their threatened dominion.
Then he could die. But not before.
He stopped for dinner at a little restaurant in Witbank.
By then he had thought through the plan one more time, all the assumptions and all the pitfalls. He felt at ease. Everything would go according to plan. Maybe Franz Malan’s idea about June 12 in Cape Town would be a good opportunity.
Just before nine that evening he turned into the drive leading to his big house on the outskirts of Pretoria.
His black night porter opened the gate for him.
The last thing he thought about before falling asleep was Victor Mabasha.
He already found it difficult to remember what he looked like.
Chapter Fourteen
Pieter van Heerden was depressed.
Feelings of uneasiness, of insidious fear, were nothing new to him. Moments of excitement and danger were a natural part of his work in the intelligence service. But it seemed he was more defenseless in the face of his unrest, now that he was in a hospital bed at Brenthurst Clinic, waiting to be operated on.
Brenthurst Clinic was a private hospital in the north Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow. He could have chosen a much more expensive alternative, but Brenthurst suited him. It was famous for its high medical standards, the doctors’ skills were tried and tested, and the level of care was beyond reproach. On the other hand, the wards were not luxuriously appointed. On the contrary, the whole building was rather shabby. Van Heerden was well off without being rich. But he did not like ostentation. On vacation, he avoided staying at luxury hotels, which just made him feel surrounded by that special kind of emptiness white South Africans seemed to wallow in. That was why he preferred not to have his operation in a hospital that treated the best-placed white citizens in the country.
Van Heerden was in a room on the second floor. He could hear someone laughing outside in the corridor. Shortly afterwards a tea cart rattled past. He looked out the window. A solitary pigeon was sitting on the roof of a house. Behind it the sky was the dark shade of blue he was so fond of. The brief African dusk would soon be over. His uneasiness increased as darkness rapidly drew in.
It was Monday, May 4. The next day, at eight in the morning, Doctor Plitt and Doctor Berkowitsch would perform the straightforward surgery that would hopefully cure the urinary problems he had been having. He was not worried about the operation. The doctors he saw during the day convinced him the operation was not dangerous. He had no reason to doubt them. A few days later he would be discharged, and after another week or so he would have forgotten all about it.
There was something else bugging him. It was partly to do with his illness. He was thirty-six years old, but afflicted with a physical complaint normally restricted almost exclusively to men in their sixties. He wondered if he were already burned out, if he had aged so prematurely and so dramatically. Working for BOSS was certainly demanding; that had been clear to him for a long time. Being the president’s special secret messenger was another thing that increased the pressure he was always forced to live with. But he kept himself in good physical shape. He did not smoke, and he very seldom touched alcohol.
What made him uneasy, and was no doubt also an indirect cause of his illness, was the growing feeling that there was nothing he could do about the state his country was in.
Pieter van Heerden was an Afrikaner. He grew up in Kimberley, and had been surrounded since birth by all the Afrikaner traditions. His family’s neighbors were boere, as were his schoolmates and his teachers. His father had worked for de Beers, the Afrikaner-owned company that controlled the production of diamonds in South Africa and, indeed, the world as a whole. His mother had assumed the traditional role of Boer housewife, subservient to her husband and dedicated to the task of raising their children and teaching them a fundamentally religious view of the order of things. She devoted all her time and all her energy to Pieter and his four siblings. Until he was twenty and in his second year at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, he had never questioned the life he led. The very fact that he managed to persuade his father to let him attend that reputedly radical university was his first great triumph on the way to achieving independence. As he did not think he possessed any special talents and cherished no startling future ambitions, he envisioned a future career as a civil servant. He was not tempted to follow in his father’s footsteps and devote his life to mining and the production of diamonds. He studied law and found it suited him, even if he did not distinguish himself at all.
The big change came when he was persuaded by a fellow student to visit a black township not far from Cape Town. In acknowledgement of the fact that times were changing, like it or not, some students were driven by curiosity to visit black suburbs. The radicalism claimed by the liberal students at Stellenbosch University had previously been no more than words. Now there was a change, and it was dramatic. For the first time they were forced to see things with their own eyes.
It was a shocking experience for van Heerden. He became aware of the wretched and humiliating circumstances in which the blacks lived. The contrast between the park-like neighborhoods where the whites lived and the black shanty towns was heartrending. He simply failed to understand how they could all be living in the same country. His visit to the black suburb sent his emotions into turmoil. He became introverted and withdrew from the company of his friends. Looking back long afterward, it seemed to him it was like unmasking a skillful fake. But this was not a painting on a wall with a false signature. The whole of his life so far had been a lie. Even his memories now seemed to him distorted and untrue. He had a black nanny as a child. One of his earliest and most secure childhood memories was the way she lifted him in her strong arms and clutched him to her breast. Now he could see she must have hated him. That meant it was not only the whites who were living in a false world. The same applied to the blacks who, in order to survive, were forced to conceal the hatred caused by the boundless injustice they constantly suffered. And this in a country that had belonged to them but had been stolen from them. The whole basis on which his life was built, with rights given by God, nature, and tradition, had proved to be a morass. His conception of the world, which he had never questioned, was founded on shameful injustice. And he discovered all this in the black township of Langa, situated as far away from exclusively white Cape Town as the architects of apartheid had considered appropriate.