The Soldier who Said No (30 page)

‘Tko-au,’ she echoed. ‘It might not be as difficult to find him as you might think.’

De Villiers had his doubts, but didn’t know quite what to say. They walked into the shopping centre side by side but in silence.

The pharmacist agreed with Liesl’s assessment that anti-inflammatories would be of no use and gave De Villiers a small container with colchicine tablets the size of a match-head. De Villiers started revising his opinion of her. He was unsure how Liesl could help, but he was tired of fighting the lone battle which had overshadowed more than twenty years of his life

Liesl’s methods were to bear fruit within a week. The gout receded fast, although they had to return for more colchicine. But she had also taken De Villiers to a small specialist bookshop in Gateway selling Africana and other indigenous books.

Voices of the San
provided a clue of sorts.

After a week in the Weber household, the patterns of the family had become clear. Johann Weber left for work late, usually towards the end of rush-hour traffic, and returned home late only to go to work in his study immediately after dinner. Liesl went for a run or a walk on the beach every morning. It had been her idea that De Villiers should accompany her on her early-morning walks. For a woman in her fifties, she was very active. Weber had decided that his son Michael’s car was not roadworthy after all and so De Villiers was designated the task of driving Weber to work in the morning. De Villiers then made his way to the oncology centre and returned to the city to fetch Weber in the afternoons.

It gave De Villiers something to do.

Liesl had hauled De Villiers out of bed on the first day of his radiation therapy. ‘Come on, you need to get ready and you might as well get up with me and have some exercise before you go for the radiation. It will do you good, I promise. Walking is good for the soul.’

It became their morning ritual: a drive to the parking lot above the beach, five rand to the car guard, a brisk walk along the promenade or a jog on the beach. Mercifully, there were public toilets a few hundred metres past the lighthouse and De Villiers could make his stop there, leaving Liesl to maintain her stride ahead of him.

‘Where do you work?’ De Villiers had asked, slightly out of breath one morning as they jogged side by side on the soft sand.

‘I don’t have a job. Johann says it will just complicate his tax return.’

‘But where do you go every day? I thought you were working.’

Liesl had smiled. ‘I organise food parcels for the pre-school children at the municipal flats in Umbilo three days a week and the other two days I work at an
AIDS
clinic in KwaMashu.’

‘Why?’

Liesl became defensive. ‘I have to do something. What else could I do? And if we didn’t do it, who would help these people?’

De Villiers remembered that there was no television in the Webers’ house. The dinners thus far had been subdued affairs with discussions about family matters and small talk.

They stopped at the turning-around point and looked up at the houses lining the pristine beach. Not quite as large as the ones that lined the golf course in Pretoria, they were nevertheless in a league of their own as far as Umhlanga Rocks was concerned, built on several levels to make the most of the view of the Indian Ocean with lush natural vegetation cut back to allow the houses space to breathe.

De Villiers considered the situation. ‘But you don’t watch television,’ he probed.

Without breaking her stride, Liesl explained the Weber philosophy. ‘We don’t watch television and we don’t read the newspapers. There is nothing new in the news. It’s the same every day. Zimbabwe.
AIDS
. Corruption. Israel and the Palestinians. Crime. And there’s nothing we can do about any of it. So we don’t watch and we don’t read. We just carry on with our lives.’

Johann Weber played tennis on Saturday afternoons, and once a month the members of his tennis school came over for dinner afterwards. De Villiers met a number of Weber’s colleagues and their wives. Adversaries in court, they appeared to be the best of friends out of it. Several times the Webers dragged him along when the Saturday-night dinner or braai was at someone else’s house. Everywhere they went, he was obliged to answer the many questions everyone seemed to have about New Zealand. Once he stopped in mid-sentence when he remembered that, in all the years he had been in the International Crime Section of the police, he had never been invited to the home of any of his colleagues, not once, yet here the Webers’ best friends were their colleagues. There was a vague memory at the back of De Villiers’s mind of a party at a colleague’s house soon after he had arrived from England with Emma. But it had been a Chinese detective, an immigrant from Hong Kong.

The weather in April is usually good in Auckland. It’s one of the better months on the North Island. This day was windy, with the sun breaking through the fast-moving clouds over the city.

The Prime Minister was oblivious to the general state of happiness good weather always brings to New Zealand. The polls were getting worse. It was almost as if there was a momentum to the swing against her party.

There had been more criticism of Labour and its policies and ministers in newspapers over the weekend. Even the staunch leftist Matt McCarten had declared Labour unelectable in the coming elections. A secret Cabinet memo had brought news so bad that, if the electorate found out, the government might as well resign immediately. A number of New Zealand’s largest financial institutions were, for practical purposes, bankrupt. On top of that, Finance Minister Michael Cullen had reported to her that a shortfall of up to one billion dollars could be expected in the Accident Compensation Fund, or was it the Health Services? She had been too upset at the news to concentrate on the details. Wait till National finds out about that, she thought. We are already twenty points behind them in the weekend poll.

She asked for an update on the assassination attempt and the Deputy Commissioner had to accompany Henderson and Kupenga to her house again.

‘Prime Minister, we have no proof at the moment,’ Henderson explained. ‘And we need our investigation to be kept top secret, otherwise we might never solve this.’

The Prime Minister considered the timing. Six months is a long time in an election year. The public mood can be turned around in a weekend.

‘You have until the end of July,’ she said. ‘Then we go public with it.’

I can’t lose here, she thought to herself. If they had enough to make an arrest, it should swing the vote dramatically in her favour. And if they didn’t, the voters’ sympathy would be with her anyway. She’d had their hearts and minds ever since she was a teenager, protesting against the Vietnam War and the American military bases on New Zealand soil. Now it seemed they’d turned against her, the same public who used to eat out of her hand, herded along by hostile media, but she’d show them. She wasn’t ranked the thirty-eighth most powerful woman in the world by
Forbes
magazine for nothing.

‘You have until the end of July,’ she said a second time as she showed them to the door. ‘Then we go public with it. We’ll go with either your success or your failure.’

Henderson was left with no alternative but to return to Macleans Road.

Marissa stood on the steps watching him park the Porsche. ‘Nice car,’ she said as De Villiers struggled out of the low seat.

De Villiers played along. ‘Just a souped-up Volkswagen someone told me,’ he said. ‘What are you doing out here? Did you come out for a smoke? I would have thought you would know better.’

He joined her on the steps. ‘Is the machine playing up again, or will I be in and out quickly for a change?’

Marissa took his arm as he joined her on the top step, an unexpected moment of intimacy between the forty-ish De Villiers and the vivacious twenty-something girl. She walked him through the reception area straight to the machine. De Villiers sighed as he removed his shoes and belt. Then he undid his trousers and slipped them down to just below the pubic line. He lay down on the gurney as Marissa pulled the protective shield marked with his name from the shelf. De Villiers put his hands behind his back and looked at the machine’s instrument panel. It had a variety of dials and lights. It might as well be Greek, he thought.

On a shelf running the length of the room there were rows of protective shields marked with the names of current patients.

‘We had to call the technician out,’ Marissa said. Her back was still turned to him. ‘He says there’s nothing wrong with the machine, but it takes a bit of time to warm up in the morning.’

Don’t we all? De Villiers thought. On second thoughts, not the younger generation. It seemed to him they had energy to burn.

‘So it wasn’t a good idea for me to insist on a morning slot,’ De Villiers retorted. With twenty-five treatments behind him, the machine had malfunctioned at least once every three times, coming to a halt with a rattling that shook the whole room.

If it wasn’t for that surgeon in Auckland with his shoddy technique, I wouldn’t be here at all, De Villiers said to himself and closed his eyes. He felt Marissa pulling his trousers and underpants even lower. He could imagine what she was looking at: the penned markings she had tattooed on his lower pelvis to aim the machine at.

Marissa adjusted the shield – a heavy pad containing a sheet of lead to protect the organs outside of the targeted area – and pulled the barrel of the machine over to the exposed spot, an area the size of a stick of chewing gum just above the pubic bone. She moved De Villiers’s legs, alternately pushing and pulling until she was satisfied that he was in exactly the right position.

‘Now lie still. I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said and left the room.

The machine started buzzing almost immediately and De Villiers held his breath as he measured the time in his head. The machine stopped a moment after he had exhaled. He had the timing down almost to the second.

Marissa returned to the room and adjusted the machine so that it would give the cancer cells a blast from the side. She left the room again and the machine did its work while De Villiers held his breath again. They completed the procedure with a blast from the other side.

‘Okay, that’s it for today,’ Marissa said.

De Villiers sat up, but Marissa pushed him down again.

‘Wait a moment,’ she instructed. ‘I have to redo the markings. They are getting a bit faint.’

She retraced the lines with a felt-tipped pen.

‘Okay, you can finish up now,’ she said.

De Villiers slid off the gurney and adjusted his clothing. He put on his shoes and turned to face her. Marissa’s interest in Johann Weber’s Porsche had been preying on his mind while the machine was humming. As a Recce, he had been trained never to work alone, always to have a spotter or a back-up. He wondered whether he could use Marissa as a helper, even an unwitting one.

‘Would you like a ride in the Porsche?’ he asked. What are you doing? De Villiers heard the voice of his conscience in his inner ear.

Before he could think of an escape from the consequences of his question, Marissa answered. ‘Of course, but it depends who’s asking.’

He advanced his plan by one move. ‘Do you have anywhere to stay in Pretoria?’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘I might have to go up there for a weekend soon,’ he said.

‘I haven’t seen my grandmother for a while,’ she said.

De Villiers hesitated but was forced to speak. ‘I’ll see what I can arrange,’ he said, ‘but it will have to be after I’ve completed the treatment here.’

Outside he rubbed his beard. It was coming along nicely.

Henderson and Kupenga arrived at De Villiers’s home. No one answered their persistent knocking. When they walked around to the back of the house, they couldn’t see into the garage. The neighbour confronted them across a low picket fence and immediately added to their sour mood.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, but his attitude said,
What are you doing here?

Henderson held up his warrant card. ‘We’re looking for Detective de Villiers.’

‘He’s gone to South Africa.’

‘Fucking hell!’ Kupenga exploded. ‘He’s just getting deeper and deeper into it.’

Kupenga had to follow Henderson to their car. They drove to the airport. At the Immigration Office, hidden away behind doors requiring special passes, they were eventually led to Chief Immigration Officer Devaki Sharma. She accessed the data on her computer and told them that De Villiers had departed for South Africa ten days earlier.

‘He was travelling alone and left on a valid New Zealand passport,’ she added.

‘What reason did he give for going?’ Henderson asked.

The computer quickly gave up the information stored in the database. ‘He ticked the box for
Other
and was required to give a specific reason. He wrote
Confidential.
’

‘What does that mean?’ Kupenga wanted to know. ‘Surely he has to give a proper reason. That’s like saying he is not telling you the reason.’

‘It’s a free country, Sergeant. We can’t force anyone to give more specific reasons, unless, of course, there is a police warrant or other prohibition against travelling listed on our system. And for this man there’s nothing.’

They thanked her and turned to leave. At the door Henderson turned. ‘Did he have to say how long he would be away?’

Sharma had exited from the database and punched at the keyboard until she had the information on the screen again. ‘Two weeks,’ she said. ‘He should be back in less than a week. Do you want us to post an alert for him and let you know when he arrives?’

‘Can you do that?’

‘We can, Inspector, but we need an official police request for that.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘You can ask me and I will put it in the system for you.’

‘Please could you do that, then?’ Henderson asked.

She pressed a key and a box opened on the screen. ‘Give me your phone number and we’ll ring you when he presents his passport at the Arrivals Desk.’