course: my guard will have to be intensified as discreetly as possible. I’m rather more doubtful about the other one.”
Van Heerden suspected what the president had in mind. He waited for him to continue.
“Shall I tell him, or shan’t I?” wondered de Klerk. “How will he react? Or should I wait until we know a bit more?”
Van Heerden knew de Klerk was not asking him for advice. The questions were directed towards himself. The answers would also be his own.
“I’ll think about it,” said de Klerk. “We live in the most beautiful country on earth. But there are monsters lurking in the shadows. I sometimes wish I could see into the future. I’d like to be able to. But to be honest, I don’t know if I dare.”
The meeting was over. Van Heerden disappeared into the shadows.
De Klerk sat staring into the fire. He was really too tired to make a decision. Should he inform Mandela of the conspiracy, or should he wait?
He remained seated by the fire, watching it slowly die down.
Eventually, he made up his mind.
He would not say anything to his friend just yet.
Chapter Ten
Victor Mabasha had been trying in vain to dismiss what happened as just a bad dream. The woman outside the house had never existed. Konovalenko, the man he was forced to hate, did not kill her. It was just a dream that a spirit, a songoma, had poisoned his mind with, to make him unsure, and possibly unable to carry out his assignment. It was the curse hanging over him because he was a black South African, he was aware of that. Not knowing who he was, or what he was allowed to be. A man who ruthlessly wallowed in violence one minute, and the next minute failed to understand how anybody could kill a fellow human being. He realized the spirits had set their singing hounds on him. They were watching over him, keeping tabs on him; they were his ultimate guardians, so vastly more watchful than Jan Kleyn could ever be…
Everything had gone wrong from the very start. He instinctively disliked and mistrusted the man who met him at the airport outside St. Petersburg. There was something devious about him.
To make things worse, Anatoli Konovalenko was clearly racist. On several occasions Victor had come close to throttling him and telling him that he knew what Konovalenko was thinking: that Victor was just a kaffir, an inferior being.
But he didn’t. He controlled himself. He had an assignment, and that had to come before anything else. The violence of his own reaction surprised him. He had been surrounded by racism his whole life. In his own way, he had learned to live with it. So why did he react like this to Konovalenko? Perhaps he could not accept being regarded as inferior by a white man who did not come from South Africa?
The journey from Johannesburg to London, and then on to St. Petersburg, had gone without a hitch. He sat awake on the night flight to London, looking out into the darkness. He occasionally thought he could see fires blazing away in the darkness far below. But he realized it was his imagination. It was not the first time he had left South Africa. He once liquidated an ANC representative in Lusaka, and on another occasion he had been in what was then Southern Rhodesia to take part in an assassination attempt on the revolutionary leader Joshua Nkomo. That was the only time he had failed. And that was when he decided he would only work alone in the future.
Yebo, yebo. Never again would he subordinate himself. As soon as he was ready to return to South Africa from this frozen Scandinavian land, Anatoli Konovalenko would be no more than an insignificant detail in the bad dream that his songoma had poisoned him with. Konovalenko was an insignificant puff of smoke that would be chased out of his body. The holy spirit hidden in the howls of the singing hounds would chase him away. His poisoned memory would never again need to worry about the arrogant Russian with gray, worn-down teeth.
Konovalenko was small and sturdy. He barely came up to Victor Mabasha’s shoulders. (But there was nothing wrong with his head, something Victor had established right away.) It was not surprising, of course. Jan Kleyn would never be satisfied with anything less than the best on the market.
On the other hand, Victor could never have imagined how brutal Konovalenko was. Of course, he realized that an ex-officer in the upper echelons of the KGB whose specialty was liquidating infiltrators and deserters would have few scruples about killing people. But as far as Victor was concerned, unnecessary brutality was the sign of an amateur. A liquidation should be carried out mningi checha, quickly and without unnecessary suffering for the victim.
They left St. Petersburg the day after Victor arrived. The ferry to Sweden was so cold he spent the whole voyage in his cabin, wrapped up in blankets. Before their arrival in Stockholm Konovalenko gave him his new passport and instructions. To his astonishment he discovered he was now a Swedish citizen named Shalid.
“You used to be a stateless Eritrean exile,” Konovalenko explained. “You came to Sweden at the end of the sixties, and were granted citizenship in 1978.”
“Shouldn’t I at least speak a few words of Swedish after more than twenty years?” Victor wondered.
“It’ll be enough to be able to say thank you, tack,” said Konovalenko. “No one will ask you anything.”
Konovalenko was right.
To Victor’s great surprise, the young Swedish passport officer had done no more than glance casually at his passport before returning it. Could it really be as simple as this to travel into and out of a country? He began to understand why the final preparations for his assignment were happening so far away from South Africa.
Even if he distrusted-no, positively disliked-the man who was to be his instructor, he could not help but be impressed by the invisible organization that seemed to cover everything that happened around him. A car was waiting for them at the docks in Stockholm. The keys were on the left rear wheel. As Konovalenko didn’t know his way out of Stockholm, another car led them out as far as the southbound highway before disappearing. It seemed to Victor the world was being run by secret organizations and people like his songoma. The world was shaped and changed in the underworld. People like Jan Kleyn were mere messengers. Just where Victor fitted into this secret organization, he had no idea. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to know.
They traveled through the Swedish countryside. Here and there Victor glimpsed patches of snow through the conifer trees. Konovalenko did not drive especially fast, and said practically nothing as he drove. That suited Victor, as he was tired after the long journey. He kept falling asleep in the back seat, and immediately his spirit would start talking to him. The singing hound howled away in the darkness of his dreams, and when he opened his eyes he was not at all sure where he was. It was raining non-stop. Everything seemed clean and orderly. When they stopped for a meal, Victor had the feeling that nothing could ever go wrong in this country.
But there was something missing. Victor tried in vain to put his finger on it. The countryside they were traveling through filled him with a nostalgic longing.
The journey took all day.
“Where are we headed?” asked Victor after they had been in the car for over three hours. Konovalenko waited several minutes to reply.
“We’re headed south,” he said. “You’ll see when we get there.”
The evil dream of his songoma was still some way off. The woman had not yet entered the yard, and her skull had not yet been shattered by the bullet from Konovalenko’s pistol. Victor Mabasha had no thoughts beyond doing what Jan Kleyn was paying him to do. Part of the assignment was to listen to what Konovalenko had to say to him. According to Victor Mabasha’s imagination the spirits, both good and bad, had been left behind in South Africa, in the mountain caves near Ntibane. The spirits never left the country, never crossed borders.
They arrived at the remote house shortly before eight in the evening. Even in St. Petersburg Victor had noted with surprise that dusk and night were not the same as in Africa. It was light when it should have been dark, and dusk did not drop down over the earth like the heavy fist of night; it wafted down slowly like a leaf floating on an invisible breath of air.
They carried a few bags into the house and installed themselves in their separate bedrooms. Victor noticed the house was comfortably warm. That too must have been thanks to the perfectionism of the discreet organization. They must have assumed a black man would freeze to death in polar regions like this. And a man who
