But they had voted to give Sikosi Tsiki the assignment. That meant he and Jan Kleyn could go through with their plans.
“Sikosi Tsiki will be leaving in three days,” said Jan Kleyn. “Konovalenko is ready to receive him. He’ll fly to Copenhagen via Amsterdam on a Zambian passport. Then he’ll be ferried over to Sweden by boat.”
Franz Malan nodded. Now it was his turn. He took some blackand-white enlarged photographs from his brief case. He had taken the pictures himself and developed them in the laboratory he had installed at home. He had copied the map at work when no one was looking.
“Friday, June 12,” he began. “The local police think there’ll be at least forty thousand in the crowd. There are lots of reasons why this could be a suitable occasion for us to pounce. To start with, there’s a hill, Signal Hill, just to the south of the stadium. The distance from there to where the podium will be is about 700 meters. There are no buildings on the summit. But there is a serviceable access road from the south side. Sikosi Tsiki shouldn’t have any problems getting there, or making his retreat. If necessary, he can even lie low up there before making his way down the hillside later and mixing with the blacks who’ll be milling around in the chaos that’s bound to follow.”
Jan Kleyn studied the photos carefully. He waited for Franz Malan to continue.
“My other argument,” said Franz Malan, “is that the assassination should take place in the heart of what we can call the English part of our country. Africans tend to react primitively. Their first reaction will be that somebody from Cape Town is responsible for the killing. Their rage will be directed at the locals who live in the town. All those liberal-minded Englishmen who wish the blacks so well will be forced to face up to what is in store for them if ever the blacks come to power in our country. That will make it much easier for us to stir up a backlash.”
Jan Kleyn nodded. He had been thinking along the same lines. He reflected briefly on what Franz Malan had said. In his experience every plan had some kind of weakness.
“What is there against it?” he asked.
“I have difficulty in finding anything at all,” replied Franz Malan.
“There’s always a weak point,” said Jan Kleyn. “We can’t make a final decision until we’ve put our finger on what it is.”
“I can only think of one thing that could go wrong,” said Franz Malan after a few moments’ silence. “Sikosi Tsiki could miss.”
Jan Kleyn looked surprised.
“He won’t miss,” he said. “I only pick people who hit their targets.”
“All the same, 700 meters is a long way,” said Franz Malan. “A sudden puff of wind. A flash of reflected sun nobody could have foreseen. The bullet misses by a couple of centimeters. Hits somebody else.”
“That just cannot happen,” said Jan Kleyn.
It occurred to Franz Malan that while they might not be able to find the weak point in the plan they were developing, he had found a weakness in Jan Kleyn. When rational arguments ran out, he reverted to fate. Something simply could not happen.
But he said nothing.
A servant brought them tea. They ran through the plan once more. Spelled out details, noted questions that needed answering. Not until nearly four in the afternoon did they think they had gotten as far as they could.
“Tomorrow it’s exactly a month to June 12,” said Jan Kleyn. “That means we don’t have much time to make up our minds. We’ll have to decide by next Friday if it’s going to be Cape Town or not. By then we must have weighed everything, and answered all the outstanding questions. Let’s meet here again on May 15, in the morning. Then I’ll get the whole committee together at twelve o’clock. During the coming week we’ll both have to go through the plans, independently, looking for cracks or weaknesses. We already know the strengths, the positive arguments. Now we’ll have to find the bad ones.”
Franz Malan nodded. He had no objections.
They shook hands and left the house at Hammanskraal ten minutes apart.
Jan Kleyn drove straight to the house in Bezuidenhout Park.
Miranda Nkoyi contemplated her daughter. She was sitting on the floor, staring into space. Miranda could see her eyes were not vacant, but alert. Whenever she looked at her daughter, she sometimes felt, as if in a brief fit of giddiness, that she was seeing her mother. Her mother was as young as that, barely seventeen years old, when she gave birth to Miranda. Now her own daughter was that same age.
What is she looking at, Miranda wondered. She sometimes felt a cold shudder running down her spine when she recognized features characteristic of Matilda’s father. Especially that look of intense concentration, even though she was staring into empty space. That inner vision that no one else could understand.
“Matilda,” she said tenderly, as if hoping to bring her back down to earth by treating her gently.
The girl came out of her reverie with a start, and looked her straight in the eye.
“I know my father will soon be here,” she said. “As you won’t let me hate him while he’s here, I do it while I’m waiting. You can dictate when. But you can never take the hatred away from me.”
Miranda wanted to cry out that she understood her feelings. She often thought that way herself. But she could not. She was like her mother, Matilda senior, who was saddened by the continual humiliation of not being permitted to lead a satisfactory life in her own country. Miranda knew she had grown soft just like her mother, and remained silently in a state of impotence she could only make up for by constantly betraying the man who was the father of her daughter.
Soon, she thought. Soon I must tell my daughter that her mother has retained a little bit of her life force, despite everything. I shall have to tell her, in order to win her back, to show how the gap between us is not an abyss after all.
In secret, Matilda was a member of the ANC youth organization. She was active, and had already undertaken several undercover assignments. She had been arrested by the police on more than one occasion. Miranda was always frightened she would be injured or killed. Every time the coffins of dead blacks were being carried in swaying, chanting processions to their graves, she would pray to all the gods she believed in that her daughter might be spared. She turned to the Christian god, to the spirits of her ancestors, to her dead mother, to the songoma her father always used to talk about. But she was never completely convinced they had really heard her. The prayers merely made her feel better by dint of tiring her out.
Miranda could understand the confused feeling of impotence in her daughter because her father was a Boer, knowing herself to be sired by the enemy. It was like being inflicted with a mortal wound at the very moment of birth.
Nevertheless, she knew a mother could never regret the existence of her own daughter. That time seventeen years ago she had loved Jan Kleyn just as little as she loved him today. Matilda was conceived in fear and subservience. It was like the bed they were lying in was floating in a remote, airless universe. Afterwards, she just did not have the strength to cast aside her subservience. The child would be born, it had a father, and he had organized a life for her, a house in Bezuidenhout, money to live on. Right from the start she was resolved never to have another child by him. If necessary Matilda would be her only offspring, even if her African heart was horrified by the thought. Jan Kleyn had never openly stated he wanted another child by her; his demands on her as far as lovemaking were concerned were always equally hollow. She let him spend nights with her, and could stick it out because she had learned how to take revenge by betraying him.
She observed her daughter, who had once again lost herself in a world to which her mother was not allowed access. She could see Matilda had inherited her own beauty. The only difference was that her skin was lighter. She sometimes wondered what Jan Kleyn would say if he knew that what his daughter wanted most of all was a darker skin.