“Isn’t that...?” I said.
“Yes,” the rockspider said. “I thought you would recognize him.”
It was the face of the Reverend Tom Kettering, an activist in the UDF who had been found murdered in Soweto two years ago. The authorities had said it was one of the township gangs. Except it wasn’t.
“Was that you?” I asked.
“You thought you recognized the hands?” the man said. “Mr Kettering had important friends in the US, didn’t he? I’d say he was more important than you, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You’re not going to do that to me, are you?”
The man smiled. “It’s entirely your choice. I can if you want. Oh, I’ve got one more photograph for you to look at.” He pulled out one final print. It was Caroline! She was chattering with her friends in the school playground. The man reached into his pile of prints and picked out the one of the ten-year-old boy with the torn back and placed it next to the photograph of Caroline.
That was it. I broke down. The tears came. It was true I was afraid for myself and for Caroline, but it wasn’t just that, I was crying for the people in those photos, for all the victims of the evil regime and the monster sitting in front of me.
He waited, until my sobbing had abated. “All right. Back to my questions. How much do you know about the Laagerbond?”
I told him, of course. It wasn’t as if I knew that much. I told him about stealing into Daniel Havenga’s car, I told him about the memo about Neels and I admitted I had seen the list of Laagerbond members. This last information caused him some concern. He asked me several times whether I had removed the list, but each time I said I hadn’t. Then he asked me which names I could remember. I couldn’t remember all of them, but I recounted the famous ones, the generals and the politicians I had recognized. Then I mentioned Visser and Havenga and a couple of others on the list. His eyes flickered when I said Moolman, a funny name that had stuck in my mind. I bet that’s him.
He never asked me whether I had copied the names down so I didn’t tell him.
He asked me who I had spoken to about the Laagerbond. I mentioned George Field, Neels and Zan, but swore that I hadn’t told any of them any of the details, although I assumed Neels knew them all already.
At last, the questions stopped.
“Thank you, Mrs van Zyl. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” the rockspider said. “I knew there wouldn’t be any need for physical force.”
I didn’t answer. I hung my head, ashamed that I had given in so easily, when those other brave people I had seen in the photographs had held out.
The rockspider seemed to read my mind. “Oh, don’t be ashamed. I’m certain you would be a much more difficult case if you were protecting someone you loved.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like your daughter.”
“You won’t harm Caroline!”
The man sighed with impatience. “Of course we won’t harm Caroline. Because you will never mention the Laagerbond to anyone ever again. Not even to your husband. Will you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Will you?” His voice, which had been unnaturally soft throughout the whole interview, hardened.
“No,” I whispered.
He examined me, trying to make sure I meant what I had said. I did.
“Excellent. I can see you have no need to fear for your daughter’s safety. Now, time you went home. Elijah will take you. But it will involve putting that hood back on.”
An hour later I found myself by the side of the road half a mile up the valley from Hondehoek.
Finneas came home a couple of hours later. He had two broken ribs and had lost a tooth.
I’ve talked a lot over the years about fighting the regime. Only now do I have any inkling what that really means.
13
Sandy Waterhouse stood in the ‘All Other Passports’ queue at Heathrow’s Terminal Three. Her flight from New York had arrived at the same time as one from Pakistan and another from Jamaica, and the line was moving slowly. She was tired — she hadn’t done more than doze on the plane — but her brain was buzzing.
She knew that this was an important trip, but now, standing on British soil, she was beginning to feel it. She was scared and excited and impatient. The dice were thrown and she wanted to see how they would land.
Officially she was in London for three days working with a client, a large American insurance company, on the acquisition of a British investment-management firm. But she had an appointment to see the senior partner of her own firm’s London office that morning at eleven o’clock. She checked her watch. It was barely seven. She had plenty of time to go to her hotel and have a shower before seeing him at Trelawney Stewart’s office in the City.
The firm, medium sized by New York standards but with a strong reputation, was doing well in London and was expanding. They were recruiting locally, and planning to send over two more partners from New York. They also needed experienced, capable associates who understood both the American and the British way of doing things. That, Sandy hoped, was a good description of herself.
She had spent two years in London and had hated most of it. She had no friends there and because of the ridiculous hours she had been forced to work she had found it virtually impossible to make any. There had only been Jen, whose death had deeply shocked her. And Alex. Alex Calder.
Jen’s death had brought them together as she had supported him in his single-minded attempts to find out what had really happened to his assistant. She liked Alex, she liked him very much. It wasn’t just that she found him physically attractive, with his strong, well-toned body and those thoughtful blue-grey eyes that seemed to assess and understand her, his kind smile and his gentle voice with that soft Scottish intonation. She admired him too. He had been willing to take on great risks to do what he, and she, thought was right. Many of the men she met every day on Wall Street took few risks in doing what they knew was wrong.
She hadn’t encouraged the relationship, if it could be called that; she knew that her eighty-hour weeks weren’t really conducive to it. But they had had a great time together in Italy. Since then their encounters had been characterized by frustration and the occasional snatched jet-lagged day. Then there had been the awful weekend when he had come to New York to see her and she had been whisked off to Dallas. All right, he had blamed her for that, but he didn’t seem to understand that there was nothing that she could do about it, that a deal was closing and there was no other lawyer who knew the documents, and that she couldn’t have refused to go and still keep her job at Trelawney Stewart. She had been looking forward to the weekend too! It hadn’t been exactly fun to spend Friday and Saturday night awake until four a.m. arguing over warranties in legal agreements. He hadn’t understood that.
The conclusion was obvious to both of them: there was no future in this relationship. Sandy was angry about this. Angry with herself, and angry with Alex. But as the weeks went by she was sad about it too. It wasn’t often that someone like Alex came along. Couldn’t she do something to make things easier? It would be difficult. She knew what Trelawney Stewart’s partners would think. That she was a soft-headed woman who was willing to put her career second to her love life. Before long she’d be married and having babies. They’d never say it, probably not even to each other, but they’d think it.
Why should it be she who made the compromise? Why couldn’t Alex move to New York? She understood very well his reasons for stepping away from the financial world, but perhaps he could do something with airfields or flying. He could at least try; he could at least discuss it with her. The anger and frustration that had been simmering since that disastrous weekend flared up again.