worse by thinking he would be satisfied with an envelope.
“I can’t tell you that,” said Stewart.
“There’s always somebody wanting to see me,” said Victor. “Question is, do I want to see him?”
“It’s all in the envelope,” Stewart repeated.
Victor held out his hand and took the thick, brown envelope. He could feel right away there was a thick bundle of bills in there. That was both reassuring and worrisome. He needed money. But he did not know why he was being given it. That made him uneasy. He had no desire to get involved in something he knew too little about.
Stewart wiped his face and bald head with a soaking wet handkerchief.
“There’s a map,” he said. “The meeting place is marked. It’s close to Soweto. You haven’t forgotten the layout there?”
“Everything changes,” said Victor. “I know what Soweto looked like eight years ago, but I have no idea what it looks like today.”
“It’s not in Soweto itself,” said Stewart. “The pickup point is on a feeder road to the Johannesburg freeway. Nothing has changed out there. You’ll have to leave early tomorrow morning if you’re going to make it in time.”
“Who wants to see me?” Victor asked again.
“He prefers not to give his name,” said Stewart. “You’ll meet him tomorrow.”
Victor shook his head slowly and handed back the envelope.
“I want a name,” he repeated. “If I don’t get a name, I won’t be at the pickup point on time. I won’t ever be there.”
The man hesitated. Victor stared fixedly at him. After a long pause, Stewart seemed to realize that Victor meant what he said. He looked around. The kids had gone away. It was about fifty meters to Victor’s nearest neighbors, who lived in a corrugated iron shack just as dilapidated as his own. A woman was pounding corn in the swirling dust outside the front door. A few goats searched for blades of grass in the parched red earth.
“Jan Kleyn,” he said in a low voice. “Jan Kleyn wants to see you. Forget I ever said that. But you’ve got to be on time.”
Then he turned and went back to his car. Victor stood watching him disappear in a cloud of dust. He was driving far too fast. Victor thought that was typical of a white man who felt insecure and exposed when he entered a black township. For Stewart it was like entering enemy territory. And it was.
He grinned at the thought.
White men were scared men.
Then he wondered how Jan Kleyn could stoop so low as to use a messenger like that.
Or might it be another lie from Stewart? Maybe it wasn’t Jan Kleyn who sent him? Maybe it was somebody else?
The kids playing with the hubcap were back again. He went back into his hut, lit the kerosene lamp, sat down on the rickety bed, and slowly slit open the envelope.
From force of habit he opened it from the bottom up. Letterbombers nearly always placed their detonators at the top of the envelope. Few people expecting a bomb through the mail opened their letters the normal way.
The envelope contained a map, carefully drawn by hand in black India ink. A red cross marked the meeting place. He could see it in his mind’s eye. It would be impossible to go wrong. Apart from the map there was a bundle of red fifty-rand bills in the envelope. Without counting, Victor knew there were five thousand rand.
That was all. There was no message saying why Jan Kleyn wanted to see him.
Victor put the envelope on the mud floor and stretched out on the bed. The blanket smelled moldy. An invisible mosquito buzzed around his face. He turned his head and contemplated the kerosene lamp.
Jan Kleyn, he thought. Jan Kleyn wants to see me. It’s been two years since the last time. And he said then he never wanted anything to do with me again. But now he wants to see me. Why?
He sat up on the bed and looked at his wristwatch. If he was going to be in Soweto the next day, he’d have to take the bus from Umtata this evening. Stewart was wrong. He couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning. It was nearly nine hundred kilometers to Johannesburg.
He had no decisions to make. Having accepted the money, he would have to go. He had no desire to owe Jan Kleyn five thousand rand. That would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. He knew Jan Kleyn well enough to be aware that nobody who crossed him ever got away with it.
He took out a bag tucked under the bed. As he did not know how long he was going to be away, or what Jan Kleyn wanted him to do, he just packed a few shirts, underpants and a pair of sturdy shoes. If the assignment was going to be a long one, he would have to buy whatever clothes he needed. Then he carefully detached the back of of the bed frame. His two knives were coated in grease and wrapped in plastic. He wiped away the grease and took off his shirt. He took down the specially made knife belt from a hook in the ceiling and buckled it around his waist, noting with satisfaction that he could still use the same hole. Although he had spent several months until his money ran out drinking beer, he had not put on weight. He was still in good shape, even though he would soon be thirty- one.
He put the two knives in their sheaths, after checking the edges with his finger tips. He needed only to press slightly to draw blood. Then he removed another part of the bed frame and produced his pistol: that, too, was greased with coconut fat and wrapped in plastic. He sat on the bed and cleaned the gun meticulously. It was a 9mm Parabellum. He loaded the magazine with special ammunition that could only be obtained from an unlicensed arms dealer in Ravenmore. He wrapped two spare magazines inside one of his shirts in the bag. Then he strapped on his shoulder holster and inserted the pistol. Now he was ready to meet Jan Kleyn.
Shortly afterwards he left the shack. He locked it with the rusty padlock, and started walking to the bus stop a few kilometers down the road to Umtata.
He screwed up his eyes and gazed at the red sun rapidly setting over Soweto, remembering the last time he was there eight years ago. A local businessman had given him five hundred rand to shoot a competitor. As usual, he took all conceivable precautions and drew up a detailed plan. But it all went wrong from the very start. A police patrol happened to be passing by, and he fled Soweto as fast as his feet could take him. He had not been back since.
The African dusk was short. Suddenly, he was surrounded by darkness. In the distance he could hear the roar of traffic on the freeway headed for Cape Town and, in the other direction, Port Elizabeth. A police siren was wailing in the far distance, and it occurred to him that Jan Kleyn must have a very special reason for contacting him of all people. There are lots of assassins ready to shoot anyone you like for a thousand rand. But Jan Kleyn had paid him five thousand rand in advance, and that could not be only because he was considered the best and most cold- blooded professional killer in all of South Africa.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car peeling off from the freeway. Soon afterwards, he could see headlights approaching. He moved further back into the shadows, and drew his pistol. He released the catch with a flourish.
The car came to a halt where the exit road petered out. The headlights lit up the dusty bushes and wrecked car. Victor Mabasha waited in the shadows. He was on tenterhooks now.
A man got out of the car. Victor could see right away that it was not Jan Kleyn. He had not really expected to see him anyway. Jan Kleyn sent others to summon the people he wanted to talk to.
Victor slipped cautiously around the wreck and worked his way in a circle behind the man. The car had stopped exactly where he thought it would, and he had practiced the flanking movement to be sure of doing it silently.
He stopped just behind the man, and pressed the pistol against his temple. The man started.
“Where’s Jan Kleyn?” asked Victor Mabasha.
The man turned his head carefully.
“I’ll take you to him,” the man replied. Victor Mabasha could hear he was scared.
“Where is he exactly?” asked Victor Mabasha.
“On a farm near Pretoria. In Hammanskraal.”
Victor knew right away this was not a setup. He had done business with Jan Kleyn once before in Hammanskraal. He put his pistol back into its holster.
“We’d better get going, then,” he said. “It’s a hundred kilometers to Hammanskraal.”
He sat in the back seat. The man at the wheel was silent. The lights of Johannesburg appeared as they drove
