Divide the Night, page 18
Freek had not seen the court order, but down the years he had dealt with many van Jaarsvelds. "Would you like a copy?" he asked.
Van Jaarsveld shook his head. "No, no, that's not necessary." Both his expression and his tone of voice said, please, gentlemen, I am not doubting you. "It is best to see the exact wording of a court order sometimes," he explained.
Freek smiled. He was playing the prosecutor's game. "Quite true," he said. "We should have got you a copy. What it says is that he has to have psychiatric treatment. We want to force him to comply."
“Most probably it won't do him any good any way," van Jaarsveld said. "But why are you two tackling this old man?"
"You know about his case?" Yudel asked.
"He shot some burglars if I'm not mistaken."
"We only have Weizmann's word that they were all burglars."
Van Jaarsveld shrugged. "Why would he have shot them if they weren't burglars?" It was said in a way that suggested that no answer was necessary.
"In the Singh case," Yudel told him, "there was no burglary. It started with a motorcar accident and the magistrate ordered him to have psychiatric treatment. He ignored it. We want to enforce it. Do you understand that?"
The brutality of Yudel's way of speaking and his choice of words cut through the other man's bland reassuring front. His face lost some of its friendliness. "Now yes. Are you sure he hasn't had treatment?"
"I'm the psychologist."
"If you're the psychologist then he has had treatment."
"Two visits," Yudel said.
Van Jaarsveld's eyebrows and shoulders came up in unison. "The court order says he must have treatment and he went twice. It's a matter of interpretation. Perhaps twice is treatment."
"That would be for the psychologist to decide."
"Who says that, you or the court order?"
"Obviously a mental patient does not decide when he is cured."
Freek had listened to the exchange between Yudel and the prosecutor, frowning at Yudel’s lack of progress. “Mister van Jaarsveld," he said, "why don't you want to help us?"
Van Jaarsveld's eyes widened and he raised his hands in protest. "It's not that I don't want to help you. This is not a simple matter though..."
"Then you're not prepared to do anything?" Yudel asked.
"It's not that I'm not prepared to do anything. I don't think there's anything I can do. There's an inquest coming up soon, I think."
"Friday," Freek said.
"Why don't we just leave things to the inquest?" van Jaarsveld suggested.
Freek and Yudel got up to go. Van Jaarsveld winked at Yudel. "Business is a bit bad at the moment, hey?"
The woman looked to be in her middle forties. Years of practice had her looking superior without any effort. Her lips were pursed into a neat little rosebud, her hair firmly lacquered into position. Her clothing looked tailor-made, the cut smart and conservative. "You need an appointment to see the Deputy Attorney General," she said. "He is very busy."
"I understand that," Freek told her, "but the matter is urgent. I had hoped he could see us today."
She consulted a diary. She was manifestly unimpressed with Freek's urgencies. "Wednesday afternoon. What about Wednesday afternoon? If anything comes up that he cannot see you then I'll give you a ring. Leave me your number..."
On their way out Yudel asked, "Why didn't we use the same tactic that we did with the other one?"
"Because I've only got one neck to give for my country," Freek said. "A prosecutor and the Deputy Attorney General are not the same thing."
"Let's try the Attorney General himself." The look Freek gave him answered Yudel decisively. It did not seem wise to pursue that line.
"What the donner, Freek, wait till Friday," Brigadier van Zyl said. "We can't always do what we want to, you know."
"It's just that we don't have much confidence in what will happen on Friday and in the meantime there is this old court order. Also it seems to be urgent."
"Why is it urgent? I understand that you don't want this Weizmann shooting people. That's good, but what's so urgent?" Yudel explained about Weizmann's precarious state of mind, how he might kill again at any time, finishing with the significance of the number three in Weizmann's mind. Before he had stopped speaking he realised that the last part had been a mistake. The brigadier's eyes were opening wider and wider in unfeigned scepticism. When Yudel finished the policeman said, "Well, that's very interesting, Mister Gordon, from a psychological point of view, I suppose...but I'm an ordinary policeman." He turned suddenly to Freek. "Freek, old brother, do you believe this?"
Freek shrugged helplessly. Yudel thought he looked a little embarrassed doing it.
As they left Yudel said, "Thanks for the help in there. You were great."
"Do you realise how far I've stuck my neck out over this business?" Freek asked. "And this thing about the importance of the number three is rather a lot..." Yudel looked sharply at him. "...for an old policeman like Brigadier van Zyl to accept," he finished.
Yudel had left his office around mid-morning to go in search of Thandi Kunene. The afternoon had passed quickly with his fruitlessly trying to interest someone who occupied a position of sufficient power to enforce the court order against Weizmann. The evening had arrived early as if it had been blown suddenly over the city by a cold wind that had come up with the disappearance of the sun. By the time it was dark they were still in Freek's office, where Yudel had been telling him about Julie, Bill and Marion Hendricks, and about Thandi Kunene. Freek listened in silence. He would rather not have been confronted by the rebellious men, women and organisations that had been spawned by the social system his people had devised.
"What I don't understand is – the CID detective who saw Julie must have picked up from her that Majola was there when the child was killed. And he must have contacted the Special Branch. So why didn't he tell you?"
"It could happen. He may have thought that I wouldn't be interested."
"But it should have been in his report."
The thought troubled Freek, but he was not willing to see it as significant. His apparent conflict of interest with the security police was enough. He was not anxious to mistrust his staff. "I think I know the reason," he said. "I've also been busy. I found out that Dippenaar and Marais's boss is a colonel by the name of Tollie Nieuwenhuysen. I was Tollie's sergeant years ago when he was a constable."
"He caught up to you."
Freek sighed, looking a little chagrined. "They always get promotions faster in Security. It's the glamour department in the police."
"Have you spoken to him about Weizmann?"
"Not yet. I only found this out today. I found some other things too." Freek's frown deepened and he spoke reluctantly. He was moving onto a subject that he did not enjoy discussing. "I found that Tollie is a member of an anti-communist organisation called the South African Freedom Campaign and Weizmann is a member too, and so is Louis Pienaar, my man on the Weizmann case. I don’t think there was any deliberate attempt to exclude me. They just seem to think of each other first. This anti-communist business is just more important to Pienaar than his job. He'll probably find himself in the Special Branch one of these days and in a few years he'll be a colonel too. I don't think we must see too much in this." Yudel said nothing, but he was in agreement. An anti-communist movement would by its very nature attract policemen and especially security policemen. It would also attract Weizmann. "I discovered they're having a meeting tomorrow night in the George Hotel. You want to go?"
"Is it open to the public?"
"You have to be a member, but I'll fix us membership cards."
"If Weizmann is there, he'll see me."
"We'll slip in late – after they've started."
"Freek, if they're all friends – Weizmann, Nieuwenhuysen, your detective and God knows who else and they want to use Weizmann, why do they send officers around to talk to me? What do they need me for?"
"We'll ask them," Freek said.
"It won't do us any good to talk to those people."
“It won't do us any good to just sit around."
"I think it'll be a mistake to contact them."
"I don't think so. Nieuwenhuysen and the rest of them were ordinary policemen at some stage. And they can all be moved back to ordinary police duties at any time. They're policemen like me, Yudel."
Yudel thought that Freek was talking as much to convince himself as for any other reason. "They're not ordinary policemen," Yudel told him.
"I'm going to talk to them."
"It'll be a mistake."
"I don't think so." Freek sounded tired. "For a change let's follow my hunch."
"Are you going to try to talk to Nieuwenhuysen tomorrow night?”
“If I get the chance. We'll buy him a drink and get him into a friendly mood."
"This Nieuwenhuysen, do you still have any influence with him?"
"At one time what I said was law to him, but that was a long time ago. Now – I don't know. I'd be surprised." Freek got to his feet. His face was as troubled as before. "Let's go home," he said.
An earlier doubt awakened in Yudel. He rose to follow. "What about Weizmann's brother's death? You know how he claims his brother was beaten to death."
"A lot of bullshit, Yudel. He made such a noise at the time that our people took photographs of the body. I wondered about the same thing and drew the pictures to have a look. There wasn't a mark on the body."
They made their way to the lane behind the building where Freek's car was parked. Yudel had come to Johannesburg that morning in an official car that had been taken back by someone else in the afternoon. He had arranged with Freek to travel home to Pretoria with him. After they got into the car they sat for a few moments in the darkness. A feeling of helplessness and ineffectiveness, unbeckoned, descended on them. Both Yudel and Freek were men who enjoyed being faced with problems because they found a special pleasure in solving them. Occasionally when either had a problem that presented special difficulties, and most of Yudel's special problems came to him from Freek, he would discuss it with the other. It was a system of co-operation that served both of them well and seldom led to a total frustration of their efforts. Their talents and spheres of influence supplemented each other well, filling the gaps in their abilities that even the best-equipped of men always possess. Neither was consciously aware of the extent of his dependence on the other, but at times like this, each automatically turned to the other for support, an extra brain or pair of hands – whatever was needed.
"Let's go past Weizmann's place," Yudel said.
"What's the point?"
"Let's go anyway."
"Is this one of the famous Gordon intuitions?"
"Let's just go there."
Freek parked the car a few blocks up the hill from Weizmann's café. "And now?" he asked. Yudel got out with Freek following reluctantly. "It was warm in the car," he said.
"You see that building across the road from Weizmann's place. From its roof you can see right into the flat. I'll show you."
"I'll take your word for it," Freek said.
"Come on," Yudel said.
The rooms of Weizmann's flat that Yudel had already identified as the kitchen and the living room were in darkness. A light was burning in one of the other rooms, probably a bedroom. Downstairs the shop was closed, the windows in darkness. The door of the storeroom was closed and the pavement in front of the shop was empty except for an old, probably illiterate black woman, wearing a sweater with the legend "I choked Linda Lovelace" in large letters across the chest. She was walking slowly in the direction of the station.
Yudel led Freek round the back of the building opposite and up the fire escape onto the roof. In one of the little rooms used by the servants a light was burning and Yudel thought he heard Julie's voice as she sang softly to herself. He showed Freek the view of Weizmann's kitchen and the corner of the stairs, both in almost total darkness and, from further along the roof, the view of his lounge where light from the bedroom was coming in through an open door, outlining the television set and a small table in the centre of the room. Freek looked patiently first at one, then at the other, then he looked at Yudel. "Tell me, Yudel," he asked eventually, "what are we doing here? What are we after? Are we looking for something?"
Yudel looked helplessly at him. "I don't know."
Freek had his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat against the cold. "I think we've gone as far as we can go. At the meeting tomorrow night I'll talk to Tollie and we'll see what we pick up there. Perhaps we'll be lucky."
"I've got no faith in that."
"Well then what? If we find nothing there we've still reached the end. We have to face it. Perhaps something good will come out of the inquest."
"There must be some way to sort it all out."
"Sort what out? Weizmann? Your friends who are in trouble with the Special Branch? Majola? It's impossible, Yudel. There are some things that you and I can’t sort out." Yudel did not answer. He continued to look down at the dark interior of Weizmann's flat without seeing it. There had to be a way. His life was built around the premise that nothing was insoluble. "This is crazy," Freek said. "We're standing up here on this roof, freezing, when we could be warm in bed..." He paused reflectively. "...with someone else's wife."
"That's a stupid thing to say," Yudel said. "It denotes a pocket of immaturity in your make-up."
"Don't preach, Yudel. I'd rather be in bed with someone else's wife than up here, dying of cold."
"You shouldn't pamper this sort of immaturity in yourself."
"Stop preaching. Do you mean to tell me you've never been unfaithful to your wife?"
“If I have I don’t glory in it.”
"Ah." Freek was making little silent jumps in an effort to keep warm. "So you have. I always wondered about that. With whom?"
"Hell, Freek. Mind your own business."
"Don't be such a prude, Yudel. I'm your friend. Who'd you do it with?"
Yudel was silent. By the light coming up from the street he could see Freek grinning at him. "It's a funny thing..." he said and then stopped, possibly editing the admission he had been about to make.
"It's a laugh all right. Tell me about it."
"You know..." Yudel looked at him again. He wished Freek would stop grinning. "It's a funny thing, but whenever I've been unfaithful to my wife it's been with Afrikaans girls. I think it's a matter of dominance. By sheer weight of numbers you buggers are dominant in everything else. I think it's revenge, in a manner of speaking."
"Ah, dominance is it? How many girls have there been?"
"I don't see what that has to do with it."
"Come on, Yudel. What's there to hide."
"I don't see the relevance." Yudel was aware that he was sounding pompous, but it was difficult to do anything about it. However he defended himself it was likely to come out sounding pompous. "It's the principle that's important."
"Come on, Yudel. I'm interested from an academic point of view." Freek's teeth gleamed in the light from the street. If his grin grew any wider, Yudel thought, it would go right round to the back of his head. "How many girls have there been?"
"It's not relevant."
"Of course it's relevant. Scientists are always counting things – how often a wife screams at her husband, how many times a lion copulates – things like that. The number of times is very important."
Yudel was not taking seriously any part of Freek's dissertation, but he was growing tired of the conversation. He took a deep breath before answering. "Two," he said.
Freek tried to restrain his laughter by pursing his lips tightly closed. The result was that his cheeks puffed up like bellows, the air escaping like steam being blown off by a coal engine. He went straight over to coughing, trying to smother the sound with his handkerchief. "Two?" He struggled to get the word out between spells of coughing. "Dominance?" The coughing completely overwhelmed him so that he had to support himself on the low brick wall running along the roof's edge.
"You're making a noise," Yudel grumbled.
"Two?" Freek wheezed. "As an attempt at dominance, don't you think it's a pretty small attempt?"
"The principle is one of dominance," Yudel tried to say. With Freek still laughing he sounded pretty foolish to his own ears.
Freek put a hand on Yudel's shoulder and shook him back and forth in what was by Freek's standards an affectionate way. "As revolts go," he said, "I don't think yours poses an immediate threat to Afrikanerdom."
"Freek," Yudel said, but something in his voice had changed. The embarrassment and the pomposity were both gone. "Freek, the door's open."
Freek had to crouch to get a clear view of the storeroom door. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Wasn't it closed when we got here?"
"Yes. I looked at it when we were down on the street."
Yudel's eyes searched the windows of the building on the other side of the street, but the kitchen and the living room were exactly as they had been earlier. There was a trace of light on the stair that had not been there before. He could see no sign of movement. "Do you suppose someone has broken in while we've been here?"
"Either that or someone has opened the door from the inside."
"Willem Roelofse told me Weizmann does that."
"A truly superior source of information," Freek said.
The street and Weizmann's flat were both as quiet as they had been ever since Freek and Yudel arrived, but now the storeroom door was open. It was hard to believe that anything had changed, that someone had moved to open the door, that Weizmann was being robbed or that he had come downstairs to lay a trap and might now be waiting... Everything was quiet, only the relatively distant sounds of traffic and railway station intruding. But the door was open, not all the way, just enough for a man to squeeze through without disturbing it.
"Should we go down?" Yudel asked.
"Yes." Freek's voice was hard, the word clipped short. A moment later he was running for the fire escape. Yudel took a few steps, following him, but returned to the wall. It was no more than a second before he saw what Freek had seen. A young black man, wearing an old grey overcoat, had stopped under the tree immediately in front of the open door. Now for the first time Yudel saw a movement from within the flat. It came from the stair and in the faint light it was no more than a dark low shadow, moving quickly upwards. Without doubt it was the form of Weizmann's Alsatian.
