From behind the sofa he picked up his small case. He went to the front window, drew back the curtain and looked out. There were two cars waiting.
He left his home in the Waterkloof suburb of Pretoria at 3.40 on those Tuesday and Thursday mornings. He let the cars wait for two more minutes, then emerged from his porch at 3.39. The cars would be moving off at 3.40. His was an exact science, and he had nurtured exactness in most aspects of his life.
At the front door he paused. He could hear the faint sounds of his sons, asleep. They shouldn't have had to share a room, but all government salaries were falling behind the private sector. Costs were steepling and taxes too, and there was no chance of a larger bungalow so that the boys could each have a room of their own. Great boys, doing well at school, and they'd do well when they went into the army.
The boys would be a credit to their father and mother because their parents had scrimped to give them an education that had not been possible for the young Frikkie de Kok.
The boys thought that he worked as an instructor in the carpentry shops. Time enough to tell them what he did when they had finished their schooling and perhaps not even then. He closed the door gently behind him. There was no tightness in his legs, no nervousness as he walked. If Frikkie de Kok showed either emotion or hesitation then the effect on the men around him would be catastrophic.
He saw the glow of two cigarettes in the second car. On those mornings he always had an escort of two plain clothes policemen. His work was classified as secret. When he went to the prison before dawn he always had the armed men in support, and he carried his own hand gun in the shoulder holster.
The first car was driven by his assistant. A fine young man, heavily built, bull-necked, hands that could pick up a blown football, one in the right and one in the left. The assistant had been a policeman and had served in the Koevoet unit in the Owambo area of South West Africa. The "Crow-bar" men were an elite inside the South African police confronting the S. W. A. P. O. insurgency campaign. The assistant was equally at home with the F.N. rifle, the M79 greanade launcher, 6omm mortars, and. 50 cal machine guns.
There was nothing squeamish about the assistant's attitude to his civilian work. Frikkie de Kok thought him the best of young South Africans. If Frikkie had had a daughter then he'd have been pleased for her to become his assistant's wife.
He climbed in beside his assistant and closed the door noiselessly.
The cars pulled away. Waterkloof was a fine suburb for Hermione to live in. They weren't in one of the better avenues, but it was a good district. They lived alongside good clean-living people. Just hellish expensive for a man who worked with his hands for the government.
The capital city of the Republic slept.
They came fast down Koningen Wilhelminoweg and past the bird sanctuary.
Frikkie loved birds, all of them from the big predators to the little songsters. When he retired he hoped to buy a small farm in the north east of the Transvaal, not that he would do much farming but he would be able to study the birds.
All dependent on bastard politics. Farms were already selling cheap if they were up in the north east of the Transvaal because the farmers were quitting, and those that were slaying were buying rifles and German Shepherds and spending their thin profits on high wire fences. Just like Rhodesia.
Hut if he bought a farm he'd take some shifting. Take a big, big fire to burn out Frikkie de Kok if he'd put his life savings into a farm house and some acres and some stock.
In the centre of the city they came on the first of the corporation's street cleaners. No other sign of life. The city slept, and it didn't know and didn't care that in the state's name Frikkie de Kok and his assistant were going to work.
They drove through the empty streets, past the great buildings of commerce and government power. He had lived 35 years in the capital, he was proud to be a part of it. No way that the communists and the terrorists and the agitators were going to undermine the authority of Pretoria. Over Frikkie de kok's dead body… They turned onto Potgieterstraat. Nearly there. He noticed that the breath came faster from his assistant. He'd learn. Frikkie de Kok had been like that, panting, tightening when he was the assistant to his uncle, and he'd conquered it.
They went under the railway bridge.
The floodlights of Pretoria Central were in front of them.
The assistant was changing down, slipping his clutch, shaking the var before the right turn in front of Local.
Frikkie de Kok never criticised his assistant. On from Local and past the high walls of the White politicals gaol. They came to the checkpoint. From his hut the armed prisons man stepped into the middle of the road. The lowered bar was behind him. The assistant dipped his lights. The prisons man cradled an F.N. More than a hundred times a year this car and Frikkie de Kok and his assistant came up this side road, Soetdoringstraat, to the road block. They held their ID cards up against the windscreen. The prisons man had seen their faces, good enough for him. The car slid under the raised bar, was inside the perimeter of the prison complex.
Left now, past the prison service store on Wimbledon Road, past the prison service swimming pool, past the prison service tennis courts, past the rows of prison service houses and flats, past the old gaol where he had worked his apprenticeship with his uncle.
A long lit wall rose in front of them. They were high on the wooded hillside above the scattered lights of Pretoria.
They were at Beverly Hills. And in Frikkie de Kok's opinion that was a hell of a silly name to be given to a section of a gaol- But maximum security had always been Beverly Hills to both the prison staff who came in and out on their shift pattern and to the inmates on their one way visit.
Beverly Hills, Frikkie had heard, was a flash hotel down in Durban. Frikkie disliked Durban. Too many English down there, too many liberals, not his place for a holiday. But the new gaol, opened eighteen years before, the most modern in the country, and the most secure, was Beverly Hills to all who talked of it. The most modern and the most secure.
The detectives parked the escort car. They would wait outside for Frikkie and his assistant until their work was clone.
The assistant drove to the gates. The lights beamed down on them. A television camera jutting from the wall followed them. By a hidden hand the gates glided open. The car drove inside. The gates closed behind. More gates in front.
An airlock. Close walls. An iron grille for a roof.
Through a glass panel a warrant officer looked down into the car from his control centre.
The assistant wound down his window, showed their two cards perfunctorily, then passed their hand guns up to the waiting hand. It was two minutes to four o'clock. The gates ahead of them opened and they drove on.
The hangman and the hangman's assistant had reached their place of work. All of the "condemns" who had been sentenced to death in courts throughout the Republic were brought to Beverly Hills to while away the months before their appeal, before the State President deliberated on the matter of clemency. All of the condemns whose appeal failed, whose plea for clemency was rejected, died on the Republic's single gallows beam in Beverly Hills.
They were in a small parkland. Their headlights caught a startled antelope and a warthog in the white light. Frikkie thought it a good thing that a hanging gaol should harbour a small nature park between the perimeter walls and the cell blocks. He liked to see the animals. If he had been asked he would have said that he thought it unfortunate that the cells of the condemns did not have windows that looked out onto the animals. The windows were set too high for the condemns to see out. But Frikkie was never asked what he thought, and he would not have ventured an opinion of any matter that was not his business.