Closed Circle, page 23
The door to Yudel's office opened quietly without knocking and he heard a brief whispered consultation in Tswana. He looked up from the report he was completing to see the cleaner from the floor above being pushed inside and the door closed behind him. “Yes?" His voice sounded more abrupt than his state of mind warranted and he immediately tried to soften the effect. “Yes, what can I do for you?"
The man looked down at his feet, then in Yudel's direction but not directly at him. He was small, not much over thirty and although he was sober now his face showed the signs of excessive drinking.
“Yes?" Yudel tried again in Afrikaans. Few of the lower ranks of black staff members could speak English. “Phineas is it? What can I do for you, Phineas?"
“My boss . . . " He was trying to frame the words in terms both clear and inoffensive. “My boss, Jackson he say..."
“Yes? What does Jackson say ?"
“Jackson he say the boss can get me the house."
It took Yudel a moment to digest the meaning of Phineas's statement. When he did understand he leapt to his feet, sending Phineas backing towards the door in alarm. “No, it's all right. You've done nothing wrong." He held up a hand, gesturing to the cleaner to stay where he was. “Wait here. Just wait here."
Yudel threw open the door to go looking for Jackson and found him pretending to sweep the passage. “Come in here, Jackson." The old man came in, walking proudly erect, his broom tucked under his right arm. When he was inside and the door closed, Yudel spoke to him. “So, explain this to me. I smell your work here."
"For the boss is easy," Jackson explained.
“What is easy?"
“Get the house for Phineas. For the boss is no problem." Phineas looked from the assurance on Jackson's face to the puzzlement on Yudel’s and nodded. “The boss can just phone."
“And say what?”
“And say must give the house."
Yudel looked at Jackson's confident face and tried not to look at Phineas's anguished one. “What are you talking about, Jackson? The waiting list for houses is more than ten years long."
“The waiting list is nothing." Jackson explained to Yudel. “The boss can phone."
"What difference will it make if I phone? It won't make any difference if Brigadier De Beer phones."
“He's bigger than you?" Jackson sounded unbelieving.
“Brigadier De Beer..." Generally Yudel followed Jackson's use of Afrikaans. For the moment though, he had lost Yudel.
“He's not bigger than you?"
“Who's not bigger than me?" Yudel suspected that there might be unforeseen ramifications to almost any admission now. “What are you talking about Jackson?"
“Boss De Beer, he's not bigger than you." With a vigorous nodding of his head he gave Phineas his attention, speaking animatedly to him in Tswana. Yudel understood no word of it, but he could see Phineas was impressed. “The boss can phone," Jackson said with a finality that seemed to sort out everything.
Whatever Jackson had told Phineas the result had clearly been to cause Yudel's prestige to grow in his eyes. Yudel did not want to think about the home circumstances that were at least partly responsible for Phineas's drinking. He hardly dared ask the next question. “What have you just told Phineas?"
“I tell him the boss can phone. That man stab my son. The boss put him inside - one time."
It was a moment before Yudel understood what Jackson was referring to, then he remembered the incident in which the old man's son had been stabbed. It had been ascribed to the power of Yudel's position. “A house is different," Yudel said. He turned his attention to Phineas's unhappy face. “I will phone, but I don't think I will be successful."
“Boss?" The word held both a question and a plea.
“I don't think I can get you a house. I'll try. Where are you living now?"
“Single quarters," Phineas said.
“Wife in Mafikeng," Jackson added.
Christ, Yudel thought. How do I get involved in these things? “Have you been to see the social worker?"
“He's bigger than you?" Jackson sounded scornful.
“It's not a question of who's bigger." Yudel was aware that his voice had acquired a thin edge. “I'll try, Phineas." The two cleaners made no move to leave and Yudel repeated himself. “I'll try to get you a house. You can go now."
“The boss can just . . . "
“You also, Jackson. You can go now. I'll do what I can." Yudel held up a hand to stop Jackson expanding on the subject. “Go on now. I'll see what I can do."
After they had left, Yudel dialled the number of the social worker and explained the problem to him. “You can forget it, Mister Gordon," he said. “I know the man. He's got TB and we've tried to get him to the front of the housing queue with doctor's certificates and everything. There's a ten-year waiting list for the hard-luck cases. The rest can forget it. How come you're involved?"
Yudel started telling him, but decided that the truth did not make a lot of sense. “His wife works for my sister," he said.
“I didn't know you had a sister," the social worker said.
Yudel hung up and looked at his watch. It was after four and Freek was going to give him a lift home. Phineas's problem was just another part of the country's endless inter-linking chain of more or less insoluble difficulties. In the black areas, except for the few who were relatively wealthy, everyone got their houses from the authority, and houses that the authority did not supply simply did not exist. Yudel's position in the matter was not something that Phineas and Jackson were ever going to grasp though. A man who could pick up the phone and issue an order to have someone thrown into jail should not have a problem getting one of his subjects a house. Yudel sighed. The hell with it, he thought. Although there were still ten minutes of his working day left, he packed a few prisoners' files into his briefcase and was about to clip it shut when the door opened and the genial Gert van Staden looked in. “Ja, Yudeltjie," he said, "slipping away early?"
“If it hadn't been for you," Yudel said.
“I brought back your pencils." He handed over the box of coloured pencils he had borrowed from Yudel two years before.
“Not mine," Yudel said.
“I borrowed them for my staff attendance graph," van Staden said, smiling benignly.
Yudel reached into the box and took out a pencil that was now about a quarter of its original length. “They've seen better days. How long have you had them?"
“Some time. I don't know, a couple of months."
Yudel dropped the pencils into one of his desk drawers and snapped closed his briefcase. “Thank you," he said. “Anything else I can do for you?"
“Agh, don't be like that, Yudeltjie." He sat down on the edge of the desk. “I hear your friend Robin Du Plessis is in trouble again." Yudel looked at van Staden's friendly guileless face. Despite himself he was interested in what his colleague had to say. The part that chose rather not to hear about Du Plessis's trouble was dominant though and he said nothing. “My sources tell me that our colleagues from the special branch want to detain him, but he got to hear about it and he's on the run."
“We all have problems," Yudel said. “Do your sources also tell you that you are stopping me from going home?"
Van Staden looked at his watch. “Still five minutes, but I see I've come at a bad time. Thanks again for the pencils."
“Any time," Yudel said, scooping up his jacket from the back of his chair and his briefcase in almost the same movement.
He accompanied van Staden into the hallway. “They say Du Plessis has gone underground. They're talking about limpet mines and AK47 rifles and things like that. They say he's a soft Jo'burg socialist who's gone hard. They say your other old friend, Colonel Wheelwright, is not amused. He detained your lefty friend the first time." The nature of the information he was transmitting conflicted with his friendly smiling face and the gossiping eyebrow-raising way in which he told it.
Yudel took him by the arm and brought his mouth close to van Staden's ear. “This information," he whispered, “is all governed by the Official Secrets Act. You tell your sources that I will report them to Mister Poena van der Merwe, senior transport clerk in our department." He nodded gravely at van Staden, releasing his arm as they passed the door of his office. He looked back as he reached the lift. Van Staden was still where he had left him, grinning and waggling an admonishing finger at Yudel.
Freek was waiting in the parking area when Yudel got downstairs. He was seated at the wheel of his thirty-year-old immaculately maintained Jaguar coupé, a car he rarely used and of which he was immoderately proud. Yudel got in on the passenger side. “You trying to impress me?" he asked.
He acknowledged Yudel's presence with a preoccupied nod and moved the car into the city's late afternoon traffic, a weary gaggle of economy cars bearing homeward the capital's army of civil servants on their nightly migration. “My car's having a new diff put in," he said. “Do you mind if we take a detour?"
“To get the car?"
“No, no. We've got an interesting necklace murder up near Monument Park."
“Funny place for a necklacing."
“You're telling me," Freek said. “A damn long way from the nearest township."
The three bodies were in a thin screen of eucalyptus trees that ran along the edge of open grassland. Freek parked the Jaguar next to the row of police vehicles that had formed at a barbed wire fence a hundred metres from where officers on his staff and others from the city's forensic laboratories were already at work. As they approached, one of the forensic men, who had been crouching over the bodies, straightened up to speak to Freek. Under the spindly, anaemic-looking trees two CID men in plain clothes were searching the ground while others in uniform walked back and forth through the long dry grass. At a distance a man wearing khaki trousers and a discoloured white shirt with sleeves rolled up above the elbows, probably the owner of the land, looked on with an expression of distaste.
It was only when they reached the end of the grass that for the first time they could see the ground underneath the trees and the three bodies in a neat row, close enough to be touching. Their clothing was charred and the skin of all three blackened, twisted and pitted by the heat of the flames. There was no sign that tyres had been used. The ground around the bodies was also black as the petrol had run and burnt where it soaked into the sand. “Well, they were burnt here," Yudel heard Freek say.
“But they didn't die by burning," the forensic man said.
All three had been lean long-legged youngsters, probably between fourteen and eighteen. The way they had been laid on the ground indicated special care, a sense of neatness and correctness. They were wearing open-neck shirts, only one of the three with long trousers and shoes. The other two had short pants and their feet were bare. The faces were particularly disfigured as if the killers had given them more than one treatment in order to obliterate the features. The rest of the burning had not been as thorough. Here or there a leg or an arm had not been touched by the flames at all. Sections of clothing too had remained unburnt. But it was the care with which the bodies had been arranged that held Yudel's interest, the way the shirts were buttoned, right to the throat, the feet together, heels touching, and the arms, elbows tucked in at the waist in parade ground fashion. Someone had paid an almost loving attention to their appearance. “They had not been dead long when they were brought here," he found himself saying.
“That's right," the forensic expert said, immediately following his agreement with “Who is this man ?"
“It's all right," Freek said. “He's a friend of mine from the Department of Prisons."
The man accepted the explanation without comment. “This is the interesting part," he said. He looked harassed and had his laboratory dustcoat over his uniform. “Look at this." He had cut away the burnt shirt to reveal the torso of one of the bodies. Yudel moved closer to see what he had found. Despite the burning, the stab wounds that covered his stomach were clear. “...nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen," the forensic man counted. “Unlucky thirteen for him." The flesh had erupted in little raised portions through the wounds, looking like thirteen sets of fried pouting lips. It was not just the wounds that interested Yudel though. It was the piece of scorched and blackened shirt that had been cut free and folded away from the body. The material was altogether intact. Whatever the instrument was that had been used to kill the boy, it had not passed through his shirt first.
Yudel and Freek watched in silence as the shirts of the other two were cut away to reveal that they had been killed in the same way. “Very interesting," Freek said at length. “Very interesting. What do you think, Yudel?"
But Yudel was not thinking about the three boys and the manner of their dying. He was remembering a conversation with Dahlia and the condition of her husband's body when it had been found. “Yes, very interesting," he said.
Yudel sat in the lounge of his home, watching the news service on television. He recognized the eucalyptus trees he had seen a few hours before. The cameras showed only the burnt ground under the trees after the bodies had been removed, while the commentary told viewers that the boys were victims of black-on-black violence that was sweeping the country. The disembodied voice went on to say that the necklace method of killing was often used to eliminate enemies by the so-called comrades, gangs of youth who opposed the government.
The newsreader moved on to deal with a report about hostilities between Iran and Iraq and Yudel found that Rosa had come out of the kitchen and was standing next to his chair. “I don't understand it," she said. “Why do they do it? Why do they kill each other? I understand why they're cross with us, but why do they kill each other?"
Yudel got up from his chair and put an arm around her shoulders. “What's for supper?" he asked.
Rosa pulled away. “Don't do that. Don't treat me like an ignorant female. At least allow me the dignity of a serious answer. Why do they kill each other?"
He looked at her face, tilted belligerently towards his, the dark eyes demanding. No, he thought, you don't really want to know. “I don't know," he told her.
Rosa did not look satisfied, but the ringing of the telephone gave Yudel the chance to escape her. He went into the study to answer it and she returned to the kitchen. Dahlia was on the line. “Yudel, I'm glad you answered. I was afraid it might be your wife, and I don't think she likes me. She always gives me those looks."
“Hello, Dahlia," he said. It was more than eighteen months since they last had contact. “I'm surprised to hear from you."
“I'm coming up tomorrow. I thought we might get together."
“Er..." The thought of seeing Dahlia again, perhaps making love to her, was beguiling. The range of convolutions that it might add to the currently uncluttered path of his life was not.
“Don't sound so enthusiastic. A lady could get a complex."
“I'd love to see you," he said. What the hell, he thought.
“We are legal now."
“Legal?"
“Sure. They've taken away the Act. We can be friendly without the danger of being thrown into jail. We're legitimate."
“That's nice," Yudel said.
“I'm only going to be up your side for the weekend. What about tomorrow afternoon?"
Yudel's eyes took in the calendar on his desk. The next day was Friday, a notoriously easy day for slipping away during the afternoon. Almost the entire upper level of the department's hierarchy had disappeared by three on Fridays. “Okay. Tomorrow afternoon."
“Bring your toothbrush."
“Dahlia." An unformed thought skittered along the edges of his thinking. It came out in words before the more circumspect side of his personality could stop it. “You told me once that you know where to find Reverend Dladla."
Dahlia was slow to answer. “You want him? "
“Yes."
After he had hung up he went slowly through to the kitchen where Rosa would be finishing the preparations for dinner. She had to repeat her question twice before he heard it. “Well, who was it? Who was on the phone?"
He watched her moving purposefully around her domain and told himself that she did not want the answer to that question either. “Freek," he said. “It was Freek." He sat down at the table. Bring your toothbrush, Dahlia had said. Yudel wondered idly why he would need his toothbrush.
Twenty-Three
Friday afternoon did not work out the way Yudel planned. Dahlia had phoned to say that the afternoon had become impossible, but what about the evening? He told her that he doubted that he could manage the evening, but he would try. Otherwise, maybe the next day. "Phone me," she said.
He left the building at three without his briefcase. If you did not have your briefcase with you it looked as if you intended coming back. Friday afternoons saw many briefcases left in offices throughout the civil service. Most were employed only to bring sandwiches to work and to provide a cover on Friday afternoons, but not to have one made it look as if you never took work home. He walked down the long arcade in the adjacent building.
Where it emptied into Pretorius Street, he struggled against the throng on the pavement until he reached the building where Freek had his office. The security man at the entrance let him in without enquiry. He was supposed to check with the person being visited, but Yudel was a regular caller and there is nothing like owning a familiar face to get you past security checkpoints.
Freek was at his desk, his elbows on the armrests, his hands folded in his lap and his head bowed in thought. It was a typical pose. Yudel paused in the doorway out of respect for the process and waited until he looked up. “Yudel," he said, the frown lifting enough to allow a smile. “I'm glad to see you."
“What about a beer?" Yudel asked.
Freek picked up the phone to tell the operator that he would be in Mamelodi for the rest of the afternoon, that it would be impossible to reach him and please to take messages. “Who's paying?"
“You are," Yudel said. “Why do you think I came to get you?" At Freek's insistence they stopped at a hotel to the west of the railway station. It was old and beyond repairing successfully, the rooms now rented only by Pretoria's small and intimidated band of prostitutes, themselves no fresher or brighter than the building. The only part of the hotel that was still a commercial success, and it had increased in profitability while the rest of the establishment had declined, was the bar. The hard-drinking manual workers from the railway yards whose wives complained that they spent too large a part of their salaries on beer had not yet arrived. The men along the bar and at the tables were the early drinkers, salesmen who had been avoiding the afternoon's rounds, others who had fled work, but did not have the courage to face their wives, no-hopers who had begged money for a drink God-only-knew-where, men who were desperate to blur the sharper, more painful edges of consciousness.
