Closed Circle, page 14
He sat down on the edge of the bed, bent over the woman's sleeping form and kissed her. Her sleep-hooded eyes flickered open and she smiled, a slow vague expression. He kissed her again and her mouth opened to renew the intimacy of their contact.
In the early Durban morning with the beginnings of dawn filtering through the lace curtains and the sound of the traffic limited to only the occasional passing car, Yudel made love to Dahlia again. When it was over she smiled up at him, the expression, made indistinct by sleep and softened by the twilight in the room, was warm and at peace. “You're a horny little so and so," she said lovingly.
Thirteen
For the second time in two days Yudel was seated at the dining room table in Lionel Bensch's home. “I am the last remaining free member of Umkhonto we Sizwe," Bensch was saying, "at least the last one the police know about. All the others are still on the island. I was the first to be arrested and I spent three years in Pretoria Central for making a bomb. At that stage I don't think they realized how big the movement was. A year later they were picking up our members by the score and practically everybody got life. Mandela was one of the last to be caught."
The events that he was recalling had taken place more than twenty years before and Bensch was no longer a young man, but there was a leanness about his figure, a lightness of movement and a keenness in his conversation that would have been more at home on a thirty-year-old. Superficially his appearance was one of wildness and an inability to compromise. Most of his face was covered by a spreading poorly-trimmed beard, a large hooked nose that had been broken many years before dominating the narrow space between beard and long brown hair that hung in a sweep across his forehead. It was the eyes that revealed what the rest of the face seemed to be trying to hide. In them Yudel saw an inner gentleness and concern for other human beings that should not have been present on the face of a convicted member of the military wing of the national resistance.
“But I'm a political dinosaur, Yudel. I haven't been involved in anything for a long, long time. These people who came looking for me are either operating from an old list or they are from the old days themselves."
The table was large and square. Yudel sat directly opposite Bensch. Next to the artist was his twelve-year-old son, a pale blond child whose face bore signs of tension out of place on one so young. To one side Dahlia sat next to Daisy, Bensch's wife, a pretty woman in whom Yudel believed he could see an unusual capacity for patience. She said little, watching her husband while he talked. From time to time he looked directly into her eyes. In such moments the exchange between them, brief as it was, seemed to speak of great pain they had caused each other and possibly a determination never to hurt each other again.
Dahlia, for her part, was sitting primly upright on the edge of her chair, her hands neatly folded in her lap. The effect was only spoiled by a certain ostentation in her primness. She looked so respectable that Yudel hardly recognized her.
“Fucking arseholes, Yudel," Bensch went on, “it smelt like Guy Fawkes. And the sound of it. In the dead quiet of night you can't imagine the noise. I think that was the worst part. But, if they try again, I'm ready for them." He patted the canvas cover of a shotgun that leant against the wall behind his chair.
“That was the second time?" Yudel asked. "The first time he knocked on the back door, I think."
“That door there." Bensch pointed and Yudel could see into the kitchen and the back door where it led into the yard. “Daisy opened the door and he was standing there, stripped to the waist, his body covered in oil and holding the gun in both hands. I think he'd seen too many bad movies. I was sitting behind Daisy and I just got a glimpse of him. He fired immediately. Then he ran like hell. We thought it had been a blank, but the next day we found a hole in a picture that was hanging above my head. The bullet was lodged in the wooden panel behind it."
“The police didn't find it?"
“No, but on the other hand I told them it had been a blank and they didn't search for a bullet."
“But the man who was charged was found not guilty. In fact, Mrs Bensch, I believe that you did not pick him out at the identification parade." Yudel had turned his attention to Daisy Bensch where she sat modestly upright, for her an altogether more natural posture than Dahlia's overblown propriety.
She answered softly, but not so softly that she might be retreating from what Yudel wanted to know. Yudel saw in her a strong personality, a woman who, like women in every age and all societies, absorbed whatever life had in store for them and somehow bore and cared for their young, kept their men away from some of their most foolish excesses and managed to hold the species together. “I think he got off," she said, “because of me. In court I said he was the man, but at the identification parade I didn't. His lawyer made a lot of that. I had to put my hand on his shoulder and I just could not do it. It seemed so damning. I told the officer as we left the room that he was the man, but I could not do what they wanted me to."
“And was he the man?"
“On my oath, I swear it." It was said simply and without emphasis. Whether it was accurate or not Yudel could not say, but that Daisy Bensch believed it, he had no doubt.
“Here comes Maureen. Here we are, Maureen. Join us," Bensch called, disregarding the fact that she was coming straight down the hallway with the clear intention of joining them. “Yudel," he continued, his attention again diverted, “what about some wine. Would you like a glass of wine." Yudel glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past eleven in the morning. “Don't look at your watch," Bensch berated him. “It's all right to drink wine in the morning. What do you say, Maureen ?"
Daisy was looking at her husband with an amusement and affection that she had not quite succeeded in suppressing. Maureen Baker did not answer. Yudel turned to greet her but the look of disapproval on her face aborted what he may have said. She was looking at Dahlia, who in turn was looking at the ugly hands that caused her such embarrassment. Bensch had gone into the kitchen in search of the wine. “Are you here with Yudel? " the old lady asked Dahlia.
Dahlia's eyes were directed at her for only an instant. “You're not the only one who's interested in finding Ray's killer." The old lady sat down at the table, withdrawing into a cold dignity that would not admit to such heresy. “I expected better of you than this," she said to Yudel.
Bensch came back with a five-litre vacuum pack of wine. “Here we are," he said. “This is quite nice."
Yudel nodded in agreement that it was bound to be nice while Dahlia looked down at her hands again and Maureen Baker looked from Dahlia to Yudel as if she could see their writhing bodies copulating on her son's grave. Yudel tried not to look at her. Bensch poured the wine into tumblers and handed them round the table. “Hair of the dog," he said.
For Maureen Baker that Dahlia lived in her son's house with another man was sacrilegious and the idea that she was going around with Yudel who said he was looking for her son's killer was unthinkable, but despite the degree to which Dahlia and Yudel offended her, there was a matter of greater importance. She spoke to Yudel. “Do you think that the people who killed my son might have been responsible for the attacks on Lionel?"
“I don't know," Yudel said.
“It is an organization though, isn't it?" the old lady persisted.
“I don't know that either."
“One thing you must have realized by this time is that the authorities cooperate with the killers." Both Lionel and Daisy Bensch looked at the old lady with calm impassive faces. They had been over all of this many times before.
“I'm not yet convinced of that."
“What about Lionel's fire-arm licence? Why did they refuse him one after all this?" Maureen Baker would not be diverted.
Yudel's eyes focused unconsciously on the shotgun behind Bensch. “Daisy has the licence for this," Bensch said. “Even after the second incident they won't let me have a handgun." With a quick gesture he seemed to brush away the thought. “But I think it's just the bureaucracy. I was a banned person and if you were once banned you may not have a gun licence. It's that simple. I don't think there's anything sinister in it."
There was both distress and anger in Maureen Baker's voice as she turned on Bensch. “You’re too kind, the way Ray was. They just wanted you unarmed, that's all. They wanted you to be an easy target like Ray."
This was also territory that had been covered many times. Lionel Bensch looked at his guest without replying. His long hair had fallen away to either side, exposing a high pale forehead. It had the effect of completely removing the original impression Bensch made. There was an innocence about the man that belied both his past and his current anger. At length he said, “Oh, I don't know if it's the Afrikaner at all. Mark my words, Yudel. If you find them, they won't be among the government boys. They'll be among the English-speaking he-man types, the gun club boys who spend their spare time watching videos about vigilantes popping off everyone they don't like. That's where you'll find them."
Yudel did not want any preconceptions as to where he might find them. What he wanted to know was the question that had troubled him throughout his investigation. “Why you, Lionel? Of all the activists, why did they pick on you?"
The other man shrugged. He looked at his wife. Her eyes had never left his face. “I'm not an activist, Yudel. I was one a long, long time ago, so long ago that you wouldn't think anyone would remember. When I came out of jail I wrote a series of newspaper articles about conditions in prison. In court it was my word against theirs and I went back to jail for another three years under the Prisons Act. Since then, there's been nothing. Take my word for it, whoever is running this is either pretty old himself or he's working from a very old list."
Yudel was ready to go. He got to his feet and thanked Lionel and Daisy Bensch. Dahlia rose too, smoothing out her skirt with modest, downcast eyes. Maureen Baker looked sharply from one to the other. “Are you two leaving together?" she asked.
Yudel allowed the car to free wheel down the hill, slowed only by the engine compression. He turned into Quarry Road where it ran alongside the river and drove in the direction away from the coast. Dahlia was sitting neatly upright, her stockinged knees touching and her hands folded, still playing her newly adopted role. “Ray’s mother is a cow," she confided in Yudel.
He glanced curiously at her without answering.
“Did you see the way she looked at us? Some people always think the worst."
Yudel wondered what Maureen Baker might have thought that had not in fact taken place. “She has a suspicious nature," he said solemnly. “Anybody can see we aren't like that."
Dahlia considered this for a moment. She glanced sidelong at Yudel in time to meet his eyes in the briefest of contacts. Suddenly she threw back her head and released a short loud squawk of laughter. “I know why I like you, Yudel. You can see through me."
“This is attractive?"
“Not really. But it gives me confidence in you. It's not easy to find a man who inspires confidence these days." Her mind moved in a new direction. “Rhonda was right. She was right to go. Why should we all stay here to be killed? Ray had only been dead for a month when she took her son and left. She was right."
Yudel thought about it. He wondered about whether Rhonda had been right to go, or should she have stayed and, if so, to what purpose? He did not know the answer, but he did know with a fair degree of certainty that he would never find himself before such a choice. Although he had been born in North America, Yudel was as South African as the river that flowed, brown and slow, down the flats to the sea. He could no more live anywhere else than he could, at this point, close the book on these cases and forget them. For him, there were no alternatives.
Dahlia hands were shaking. Even her cigarette smoke seemed to emerge from her mouth in staccato fashion. “Jesus, Yudel," she said, “isn't it too bloody awful, just thinking that they can come in the night to kill like that and nobody stops them." She shifted in her seat to look more closely at him. “Except you. You have actually come here to stop them." From the corner of his eye Yudel thought he saw her shudder. “God, Yudel, they're going to eat you alive."
Yudel’s list held other names, that of Elizabeth Ngcube among them. She let them in the front door herself. “Why, Dahlia my dear, I didn't expect you to come. Are you looking after Mister Gordon? It is Mister Gordon, isn't it?" It was said in gently mocking amusement, without bitterness.
Yudel shook her hand. She was a small, mild-looking, middleaged woman. Soft and gentle colours were dominant in her dress and turban of West African design. The dress hung almost to the floor and to Yudel it completed a sense of worth and dignity that was a part of the woman. “I'm afraid that I don't understand what this is all about, Mister Gordon."
He told her what it was about. What the hell, he thought. Is there anyone who doesn't know?
“That's very interesting," she said. “It's also quite ambitious. “There are those who might not approve of what you are doing." Yudel had always admired understatement and Elizabeth Ngcube's was a well-rounded example of the art.
“This has been brought to my attention," he said. He was trying to match her.
She seated them in the lounge of her home. It was a pleasant room in a pleasant house and looked down on green Natal hills that folded gently into each other on the far side of a narrow valley. On the closer slope the township's tiny brick houses peeped out here and there among the dense greenery in many gardens and in the empty patches between the houses.
Elizabeth Ngcube was one of the small group of black business and professional people. She was also one of the strange subculture of restricted persons to which Baker and Bensch had belonged, the pariahs who, although they had never been convicted of any crime, had their every move monitored, were not permitted to leave the city in which they lived even for a few hours, were not allowed to spend a night under any roof but their own, had without fail to report to their local police station daily, had to live with the knowledge of the tape recorder waiting patiently and always on their telephone lines, were not permitted to prepare material for publication or attend public meetings, even if such a meeting was the baptism of a long-awaited child: she was part of this informal association, the members of which were presumed so dangerous that they were compelled to live under a set of regulations completely different to those which applied to other citizens. “May I offer you some tea ? " she asked gently.
She went to the door of the room to give instructions to a servant. As she came back she spoke to Dahlia. “Of course, I knew your late husband very well, my dear." She smiled. “Intellectually, I mean." Yudel could see Dahlia bridle at the other woman's words, but she said nothing. “He was a remarkable man."
“You shared his views?" Yudel asked.
“Certainly."
He sighed inwardly. “I've read about the murder of your husband, of course.”
“Of course. That's why you're here." Her voice was still soft and friendly. She could have been talking about a subject far more pleasant than the one Yudel had come to discuss. “I'll tell you a few things you did not read. I'm sure you didn't read that our dogs were poisoned the night before. They prepared the way before they came.
“I'm sure you did also not read about my daughter's experience on the way to Lesotho that night. My younger daughter was with her father and I was in Johannesburg for the week. My elder daughter was going to spend a few days with a friend in Maseru. She reached the border post exactly three hours before they shot Fellows. They were expecting her. They took her to an office, the police not the passport control people.
“Mister Gordon, they kept her in that office for the entire three hours, while outside the passport control officers almost took the car apart. Again and again they asked her what she was going to do in Lesotho and they repeated the same questions about her father. They said they knew she had contacts with the African National Congress and if she never arrived in Lesotho no one would know what happened to her.
“There were two of them and they were the worst sort of scum. They were dressed in jeans and windbreakers, not suits and ties as you would have expected. After a couple of hours of interrogation they got up and left her in the room, telling her to wait till they came for her. They said there would be a guard outside the door.
“Well, after a while a different one came in. He pretended to be friendly. He was older and he wore a suit, the typical father figure. She had been crying and he asked her what was wrong. So she complained about the other two. He said that their behaviour was shocking and he would have them reported. He was the worst scum of all. He had his arm around her, pretending to be concerned, trying to get her off guard. But he never got anything out of her. The Lord knows, Mister Gordon, the child had nothing to give them.
“When he was finished he said that he was going to fix everything up and she should just wait a few minutes for him. But he wasn't the one who came back. It was his two friends. They told her that they were going to make sure that she took nothing across the border into Lesotho. So, they stripped her naked, then searched her. They looked everywhere. There was no place on her or inside her where she could have carried anything over that border.
“While they were busy the phone rang. One of them spoke for a few seconds, then they lost interest in her. They threw her clothes on the floor and went out, leaving the office door open. People were moving around, walking past the door. They had even taken off her watch and she had to pick it up to put it on. It said ten minutes past nine. Fellows was shot just before nine.
“They knew, Mister Gordon. They knew all along that my husband was going to die that night."
“I don't suppose your daughter heard the names of any of them?" Yudel asked.
“I'm afraid not."
“Did she describe them to you ? "
“She only said that two were young and the other was old." She stopped to think about it. “What she did say was that the older one had something wrong with one of his eyes."
