“Can you hear me?” Vladimir yelled.
“I can hear you,” replied Konovalenko.
“I can hardly hear myself speak,” he went on. “But I’ve got news.”
“Has somebody seen Victor Mabasha here in Stockholm?” Konovalenko knew that must be why he was calling.
“Even better,” said Vladimir. “He’s in here right now.”
Konovalenko took a deep breath.
“Has he seen you?”
“No. But he’s on his guard.”
“Is anybody with him?”
“He’s on his own.”
Konovalenko thought for a moment. It was twenty past eleven. What was the best thing to do?
“Give me your address,” he said. “I’m on my way. Wait for me outside with a layout of the club. Especially where the emergency exits are.”
“Will do,” said Vladimir.
Konovalenko checked his pistol and slipped an extra magazine into his pocket. Then he went to his room and opened a plastic chest standing along one wall. He took out three tear gas canisters and two gas masks, which he put into the plastic carrier bag he had used earlier that afternoon for the money from the bank raid.
Finally he combed his hair carefully in front of the bathroom mirror. This was part of the ritual he always went through before setting out on an important assignment.
At a quarter to twelve he left the apartment in Hallunda and took a cab in to town. He asked to be taken to Ostermalmstorg. He got out there, hailed another cab, and headed for Soder to the south.
The disco was at number 45. Konovalenko directed the driver to number 60. He got out and started walking back slowly the way he had come.
Suddenly Vladimir stepped out of the shadows.
“He’s still there,” he said. “Tania has gone home.”
Konovalenko nodded slowly.
“Let’s go get him, then,” he said.
He asked Vladimir to describe the layout.
“Exactly where is he?” asked Konovalenko when he could picture it.
“At the bar,” said Vladimir.
Konovalenko nodded.
A few minutes later, they donned the gas masks and cocked their guns.
Vladimir flung open the entrance and hurled the two astonished doormen to one side.
Then Konovalenko tossed in the tear gas.
Chapter Twelve
Give me the night, songoma. How shall I survive these nights full of light that prevents me from finding a hiding place? Why have you sent me to this strange land where people have been robbed of their darkness? I give you my severed finger, songoma. I sacrifice a part of my body so you can give me back my darkness in return. But you have forsaken me. I am all alone. As lonely as the antelope no longer capable of avoiding the cheetah hunting him down.
Victor Mabasha experienced his flight as a journey made in a dreamlike, weightless state. His soul seemed to be traveling on its own, invisible, somewhere close by. He thought he could feel his own breath on his neck. In the Mercedes, whose leather seats reminded him of the distant smell of hides from skinned antelope, there was nothing but his body, and above all his aching hand. His finger was gone, but was there even so, like a homeless pain in a strange land.
From the very beginning of his wild flight he had tried to make himself control his thoughts, act sensibly. I am a zulu, he kept repeating to himself, like a mantra. I belong to the undefeated warrior race, I am one of the Sons of Heaven. My forefathers were always in the front line when the impis attacked. We defeated the whites long before they hounded the bush-men into the endless wildernesses where they soon succumbed. We defeated them before they claimed our land was theirs. We defeated them at the foot of Isandlwana and cut off their jawbones to adorn the kraaler of our kings. I am a zulu, one of my fingers is severed. But I can endure the pain and I have nine fingers left, as many as the jackal has lives.
When he could bear it no longer he turned off into the forest on the first little dirt track he saw, and came to a halt by a glistening lake. The water was so black, he at first thought it was oil. He sat there on a stone by the shore, unwound the bloodstained towel and forced himself to examine his hand. It was still bleeding. It seemed unfamiliar. The pain was more in his mind than where the severed finger had been.
How was it possible for Konovalenko to be faster than he was? His momentary hesitation had defeated him. He also realized his flight had been thoughtless. He had behaved like a bewildered child. His actions were unworthy, of himself and of Jan Kleyn. He should have stayed put, and searched through Konovalenko’s baggage, looking for air tickets and money. But all he did was to grab a few clothes and the pistol. He couldn’t even remember the route he had taken. There was no possibility of returning. He would never find his way back.
Weakness, he thought. I have never managed to overcome it, even though I have renounced all my loyalties, all the principles that possessed me as I grew up. I have been burdened with weakness as a punishment by my songoma. She has listened to the spirits and let the hounds sing my song, a song of the weakness I shall never be able to overcome.
The sun never seemed to rest in this strange land; it had already climbed over the horizon. A bird of prey rose from a treetop and flapped its way over the mirror-like lake.
First of all he must sleep. A few hours, no more. He knew he did not need much sleep. Afterward, his brain would be able to assist him once again.
At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life.
Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious destruction, the whites failed to see the despair and hatred which is so boundlessly greater. All the things we have been carrying around inside us. It is inside myself I see my thoughts and feelings being split asunder as if with a sword. I can manage without one of my fingers. But how can I live without knowing who I am?
He came to with a start, and realized he had almost fallen asleep. In the borderlands of sleep, half dreaming, thoughts he had long since forgotten returned to him.
He remained on the stone by the lake for a long time.
