Konovalenko. In their master plan was an agreement to inform Konovalenko that Sikosi Tsiki had actually arrived. That check should be no later than three hours after the assumed arrival time. Jan Kleyn gave Franz Malan some brief instructions. They also agreed to call from two other specified phone booths the following day. Jan Kleyn tried to discern whether Franz Malan seemed worried at all on the telephone. But he could hear nothing apart from Malan’s usual slightly nervous way of expressing himself.
When the call was over he went to have lunch at one of the most expensive restaurants in Pretoria. He was pleased at the thought of the horrified reaction when his shadow handed his expense report to Scheepers. He could see the man at a table at the other end of the dining room. Jan Kleyn had already decided that Scheepers was unworthy of continuing to live in a South Africa that, within a year or so, would be well organized and faithful to its old ideals, created and then defended forever by a close community of Boers.
But there were moments when Jan Kleyn was hit by the awful thought that the whole business was doomed. There was no turning back. The Boers had lost, their old territory would be governed by blacks who would no longer allow the whites to live their privileged lives. It was a sort of negative vision he had difficulty in fending off. But he soon recovered his self-control. It was just a brief moment of weakness, he told himself. I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by the constantly negative approach South Africans of British origin have toward us boere. They know the real soul of the country is to be found in us. We are the people chosen by God and history, not them, and so they cherish this unholy envy they cannot shake off.
He paid for his meal, smiled as he passed the table where his shadow was sitting, a small, overweight man sweating profusely, and then drove home. He could see in the rearview mirror that he had a new shadow. When he had put his car away in the garage, he continued his methodical analysis of who could possibly have betrayed him and provided Scheepers with information.
He poured himself a little glass of port and sat down in the living room. He drew the drapes and switched off all the lights apart from a discreet lamp illuminating a painting. He always thought best in a dimly lit room.
The days he had spent with Scheepers had made him hate the current regime more than ever. He could not get away from the feeling that it was humiliating for him, a superior, trusted, and loyal civil servant in the intelligence service, to be arrested under suspicion of subversive activities. What he was doing was the exact opposite of that. If it were not for what he and the Committee were doing in secret, the risk of national collapse would be real rather than imaginary. As he sat sipping his port, he became even more convinced that Nelson Mandela must die. He no longer regarded it as an assassination, but an execution in accordance with the unwritten constitution he represented.
There was another worrisome element that added to his irritation. It was clear to him from the moment his trusted security guard on the president’s personal staff called him that somebody must have supplied Scheepers with information that should really have been impossible for him to obtain. Someone close to Jan Kleyn had quite frankly betrayed him. He had to find out who it was, and quickly. What made him even more worried was that Franz Malan could not be completely excluded. Neither he nor any other member of the Committee. Apart from these men there could possibly be two, or at most three, of his colleagues in BOSS who could have decided, for some unknown reason, to sell him down the river.
He sat in the darkness thinking about each of these men in turn, dredging his memory for clues; but he found none.
He worked from a mixture of intuition, facts, and elimination. He asked himself who had anything to gain by exposing him, who disliked him so much that revenge could be worth the risk of being found out. He reduced the group of possibilities from sixteen to eight. Then he started all over again, and every time there were fewer and fewer possible candidates left.
In the end, there was nobody. His question remained unanswered.
That was when he thought for the first time it might be Miranda. Only when there was no other possible culprit was he forced to accept that she too was a possibility. The very thought worried him. It was forbidden, impossible. Nevertheless, the suspicion was there, and he had no choice but to confront her with it. He assumed the suspicion was unjustified. As he was certain she could not lie to him without him noticing, it would be resolved the moment he spoke to her. He must shake off his shadows within the next few days and visit her and Matilda in Bezuidenhout. The answer was to be found among the people on the list he had just worked through. The problem was that he still had not found an answer. He put both his thoughts and his papers on one side, and devoted himself instead to his coin collection. Observing the beauty of the various coins and imagining their value always gave him a feeling of calm. He picked up an old, shiny, gold coin. It was an early Kruger rand, and had the same kind of timeless durability as the Afrikaner traditions. He held it up against the desk lamp and saw it had acquired a small, almost invisible stain. He took out his carefully folded polishing cloth and rubbed the golden surface carefully until the coin started to shine once again.
Three days later, late on Wednesday afternoon, he visited Miranda and Matilda in Bezuidenhout. As he did not want his shadows to follow him even as far as Johannesburg, he had decided to lose them while he was still in central Pretoria. A few simple maneuvers were sufficient to shake off Scheepers’s men. Even though he had got rid of the shadows, he kept a close eye on the rearview mirror on the freeway to Johannesburg. He also did a few circuits of the business center in Johannesburg, just to make certain he was not mistaken. Only when he was sure did he turn into the streets that would take him to Bezuidenhout. It was very unusual for him to visit them in the middle of the week, and in addition, he had not given advance notice. It would be a surprise for them. Just before he got there, he stopped at a grocer’s and bought food for a communal dinner. It was about half past five by the time he turned into the street where the house was situated.
At first he thought his eyes were deceiving him.
Then he saw the man who just came out onto the sidewalk had emerged from Miranda’s and Matilda’s gate.
A black man.
He stopped by the curb and watched the man walking towards him, but on the other side of the road. He lowered the sun visor on each side of the windshield so that he could not be seen. Then he observed him.
He suddenly recognized him. It was a man he had been keeping under observation for a long time. Although they had never managed to prove it, BOSS had no doubt he belonged to a group in the most radical faction of the ANC that was thought to be behind a number of bomb attacks on stores and restaurants. He used the aliases of Martin, Steve, or Richard.
Jan Kleyn watched the man walk past, then disappear.
He froze. His mind was in turmoil, and it took some time to recover. But there was no getting away from it: the suspicions he had refused to take seriously were now real. When he eliminated one after the other of his suspects and ended up with none at all, he had been on the right track. The only other possibility was Miranda. It was both true and inconceivable at the same time. For a brief moment he was overcome by sorrow. Then he turned ice-cold. The temperature inside him fell as his fury grew, or so it seemed. In the twinkling of an eye, love turned to hate. It was aimed at Miranda, not Matilda: he regarded her as innocent, another victim of her mother’s treachery. He gripped the wheel tightly. He controlled his urge to drive up to the house, beat down the door, and look Miranda in the eye for the last time. He would not approach the house until he was completely calm. Uncontrolled anger was a sign of weakness. That was something he had no desire to display in front of Miranda or her daughter.
Jan Kleyn could not understand. What he did understand made him angry. He had dedicated his life to the fight against disorder. For him, disorder included everything that was unclear. What he did not understand must be fought against, just as all other causes of society’s increasing confusion and decay must be fought.
He remained sitting in his car for a long time. Darkness fell. Only when he felt totally calm did he drive up to the front door. He noticed a slight movement behind the drapes in the big living room window. He picked up the bags of supplies, and opened the gate.
He smiled at her when she opened the door. There were moments, so short that he barely managed to notice them, when he wished it was all in the imagination. But now he knew what was true, and he wanted to know what lay behind it.
The darkness in the room made it difficult to distinguish her dark features.
“I’ve come to visit you,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise you.”
“You’ve never done this before,” she said.
It seemed to him her voice was rough and strange. He wished he could see her more clearly. Did she suspect he had seen the guy leaving the house?
