The stars were out in force-shining cold and sharp through the high veld’s dry, thin air.
Torches guttered from metal stands scattered around the brick-lined patio, creating a curiously medieval atmosphere. Acrid tobacco smoke rose from half a dozen burning cigarettes and mingled with the aroma of slowly roasting meat. Small groups of casually dressed middle-aged men clustered around the central barbecue pit. Their low, guttural voices and occasional hard-edged laughter carried far through the still, silent night.
Emily van der Heijden frowned as she leaned over the tiled kitchen countertop, filling glasses with soft drinks and lemon flavored mineral water. Even as a child, she’d thought her father’s friends were a rather dull, coarse, and unthinking bunch. Nothing in the snatches of conversation she heard drifting up from the patio changed that impression.
She’d already heard enough to make her ill. These men, most of them now high-ranking government officials, seemed callous almost beyond belief.
Contemptible words such as kaffir rolled too easily off their tongues as they casually discussed the desirability of “shooting a few thousand more of
the most troublesome black-assed bastards to cow the rest.” All had nodded sagely at the idea. One had even gone so far as to claim that “there’s nothing the black man respects more than a firm hand and a touch of the whip.”
Emily paled with anger and slammed the glass she’d just filled down hard on a circular serving tray. Liquid slopped over the edge and stained her sleeve and white, full-length apron.
“Here now, mevrou. You’d better calm down and wipe that ugly sneer off your face before you embarrass your poor father. You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?” Malice edged every word.
Angrier still, Emily turned her head to look at the dour old woman standing beside her at the counter. Tall and stick-thin beneath her shapeless black dress, Beatfix Viljoen had been her father’s devoted housekeeper for as long as Emily could remember. And the two women had been enemies for every hour of every day of that time.
Emily despised the domineering older woman’s ceaseless efforts to make her into a “proper” Afrikaner woman-a woman concerned only with the wishes of her husband, the health of her children, and the written, inflexible word of God. In turn, the housekeeper resented Emily’s ability to go her own way, unbound by convention or propriety.
Their dealings over the years had been a series of cold, calculating, and venomous confrontations-exchanges wholly unmarked by any warmth or friendly feeling. As her widowed father’s only child, Emily had generally come out ahead in these skirmishes.
All that had changed since her frantic phone call to get Ian out of jail and her enforced return home. Marius van der Heijden had been bitterly angry about his daughter’s “sinful” liaison with the American reporter-someone he referred to only as “that godless and immoral
Uitlander.” Emily still wasn’t sure which angered him more: her involvement with Ian, or the possibility that it could be used against him by one of his political rivals. It scarcely mattered. The hard fact was that his anger had put Beatfix Viljoen in the catbird seat.
It wasn’t something the housekeeper ever let her forget.
“Well, mevrou? Am I not right?”
Emily saw the eager look in the other woman’s eyes and bit down the ill-tempered reply she’d been about to make. Quarreling with Beatrix wouldn’t help her escape this trap she’d put herself in to save Ian.
Instead, she quietly picked up her loaded tray, turned, and walked out onto the dim, torchlit patio.
Silently fuming, she orbited through the separate groups of men-stopping only to allow them to pluck drinks off the tray she held in both hands.
As always, their ability to ignore her was infuriating. Oh, they were courteous enough in a ponderous, patronizing way. But none of them bothered to hide their view of her as nothing more than a woman-as a member of the sex ordained by God for marriage, child rearing housework, and nothing more.
She stopped circling and stood beneath the fragrant, sweeping branches of an acacia tree planted long ago by her grandfather. Her tray held more empty than full glasses, but she was reluctant to leave the patio’s relative quiet. Going back to the kitchen meant enduring another verbal slashing from Beaxtrix’s knife-sharp tongue.
Emily took a deep breath of the fresh, cool night air, seeking refuge in the peaceful vista spreading outward from the torchlit patio. It was the one part of the Transvaal that she had missed in Cape Town. Her father’s farmhouse sat on the brow of a low hill overlooking a shallow, open valley. Gentle, grassy slopes rolled down to a meandering, treelined stream-brimming during the summer rains, but dry now. Happier memories of her carefree childhood rose in Emily’s mind, washing away some of the frustrations and tension of the present.
“I tell you, man, the leader is a genius. Practically a prophet touched by God himself.”
“You speak true, Piet.”
Emily stiffened. The voices were coming from the other side of the tree.
Damn them! Was there nowhere she could go to find a moment’s peace? She stayed still, hidden from
view by the acacia’s low, overhanging branches-hoping the two men, whoever they were, would wander off as quickly as they’d apparently come.
Cigarette smoke curled around the tree.
“You remember the bra ai at his home last month? Two weeks before those kaffir swine killed Haymans and his own pack of traitors?”
The other man laughed.
“Of course, I do. I tell you, Piet, at first I thought the leader had been smoking some of his field hands’ dagga.
Telling us to be ready for great change, for our days of power, and all that. But now I see that he was inspired, given the gift of foretelling like our own modern-day Solomon.”
Emily’s stomach churned. Karl Vorster … a prophet? The very thought seemed blasphemous. But could there be a horrifying truth behind the two men’s sanctimonious ranting? Just as the symptoms of a deadly illness could be cloaked by those of another, less serious disease? Until now, she’d viewed Vorster’s rise to power as simply the grotesque side effect of the ANC’s triggerhappy attack on the Blue Train. But perhaps that was too simple a view. Had Vorster known of the ambush in advance?
My God, Emily thought, dazed. If that was true … the events of the past several weeks flickered through her mind -each taking on a newer, more sinister significance. The swift retribution for the train attack.
Vorster’s meteoric assumption of power. The immediate proclamation of various emergency decrees and punitive measures against South Africa’s blacks-measures that could only have been drafted days or weeks before news of the Blue Train ambush reached Pretoria. It all fit. She tasted something salty in her mouth and realized suddenly that she’d bitten her own lip without being aware of it.
The first man spoke again, quieter this time so that Emily had to strain to make out his words.
“Only one thing troubles me, Hennie. I cannot bring myself to trust all of those our leader allows around himself.
Especially… “
“That pretty boy Muller?” the other finished for him.
“Va. That one will be trouble for us all, you mark my words, Hennie.”
Light flared around the tree trunk for a split second as the other man struck a match and touched it to a new cigarette.
“Also true, Piet. And van der Heijden agrees with us. But what can we do about it? So long as
Muller does the dirty work, he’ll have the leader’s ear and confidence.
After all, no man throws away an ax that’s still sharp.”
“Then we must sharpen our own axes, my friend. And I know just the neck
I’d like to use them on….”
Their voices faded as the two men sidled away from the tree, returning to the larger group standing around the open air barbecue pit.
After they’d gone, Emily stayed motionless for several minutes, lost in thought. Muller … the name was familiar. She’d heard it pronounced contemptuously by her father. And also by Ian. But who was this Muller?
Clearly some kind of official in Vorster’s old Ministry of Law and Order.
An official disliked by his peers and apparently heavily involved in
