Chapter 57
Physically, Myburgh felt better, his hunger satisfied and his bruised body clad in snug, warm clothes. But now that Jeppe had made the connection between his wreck on the KwaNdebele Road and the stopping of Grim Boy's Toe several miles beyond that roadblock, Myburgh feared that maybe these single-minded men were determined to link him to the same absurd scenario to which they had already linked Thubana and Skosana. If that happened-if they succeeded-his comfortable station in life would evaporate like mist and only his brother Kiewit, a lukewarm friend or two, and some of his more appreciative clients would care at all. He would vanish forever, a statistic of the state of emergency.
"Coincidence," Myburgh said uneasily.
"You've never read this book?"
"No. Why?"
"Certain pa.s.sages are underlined. We thought you could help us explain their encoded meanings."
"I'm a financial advisor, not a cryptologist."
"But if you were also a traitor and spy?" Jeppe said, smiling. Abruptly, he shouted: "Steenkamp!"
Steenkamp came into the room with Thubana's T-s.h.i.+rt. He spread it out on the table next to the book.
"And this?" Jeppe said. "What about this?"
At that moment, Myburgh heard the familiar staticky tinniness of a resistance radio broadcast: "... and the Ten Point Program of the Unity Movement put forward in 1943. This advance reflected the awakening of the people and departed from a liberal democratic program by posing the issue of the 'Land to the Tiller' as being of paramount..."
Jeppe stood up. "Not again." He went from the room, followed closely by Goosen and Schoeman. Steenkamp remained behind to guard both Myburgh and the seditious T-s.h.i.+rt TOE.
"... only one meaning amongst scientific socialists: seizure without compensation. Lenin in his Agrarian Program repeated this point again and again to distinguish it from...
"Skosana," Myburgh whispered.
Over the staticky lecture, a scream: "MORDECAI-I-I-I-I-I!"
Myburgh stood up. Steenkamp laid a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down.
"MORDECAI-I-I-I-I-I!"
Christ, what was going on? He could hear (over both the radio broadcast and Skosana's screaming) the sounds of scuffling, grunts, billy clubs clattering, metal bars gonging.
"Steenkamp!" someone yelled. "Steenkamp, get out here!"
"Stay put," Steenkamp said. He slipped around Myburgh's chair, darted into the hall like a soccer wingman.
The uproar went on: shortwave screeches, screams, the muddled warring of iron and wood and boot leather. Myburgh's heart pounded like a machine press stamping out badges. He told himself to obey Steenkamp's warning and stay put, but when the hubbub persisted and no one returned to check on him, he crept to the door.
"Mordecai-i-i-i-i-i...!"
Six or seven men at the far end of the corridor were wrestling Winston Skosana around its dogleg, hurrying to get him out of sight and hearing. Myburgh could still hear him calling Thubana's first name, but with less and less energy.
Then the long hall was empty: a bright tunnel of plasterboard, tilework, and staggered, ceiling-mounted smoke detectors. Myburgh could not believe the feeling he had. As if he had become shadow matter again, an invisible man in the near-invisible empery of the security police.
In his bleached takkies, Myburgh hobbled down the hall. Past van Rhyn's office. Past a pair of closed-what?-storage rooms? Past a lavatory, another shakedown room, and two vertical strips of chrome suggesting that this end of the hall had a purpose different from that of the end he had just left, namely, imprisoning people who knew things that the state needed to know. And then, suddenly, Myburgh was at Thubana's cell again.
Thubana's naked feet hung half a meter off the floor. His body twisted from a light fixture in a noose made from a cracked leather belt.
Thubana's belt was his only article of clothing. Why? Myburgh wondered. A man with no pants didn't need a belt.
Jeppe, blowing his nose into a handkerchief, marched around the corner with Goosen, Steenkamp, and Schoeman. When he saw Myburgh standing outside Thubana's cell, he cursed, waved his handkerchief, and piped congestedly, "Get him!"
Before Myburgh could react, Goosen ran at him in a dutiful fury and flattened him with an expertly swung elbow. Steenkamp kicked him in the ribs. Goosen gave him an exasperated conk as he sought to roll away, for Myburgh was writhing-involuntarily from the pain and calculatedly to avoid further blows.
"Enough!" Jeppe cried.
Myburgh lay under the security men's feet. There was blood on his clean flannel s.h.i.+rt. This angered him all out of proportion to the s.h.i.+rt's value. Maybe because Thubana was dangling in his cell from his own belt.
"You murdered him," Myburgh said.
"A lot of them commit suicide," Jeppe said. "He's just another G.o.dd.a.m.ned kaffir who took the easy way out."
"Where did he get the belt?"
"Perhaps his friend slipped it to him."
"When? You confiscated their belts, didn't you?"
Jeppe paused in his niggling attentions to his nose. "How did you know that?"
Myburgh hesitated. "A deduction. Procedure, isn't it? Aren't you supposed to take their belts?"
"Procedures vary." Jeppe's voice
"You murdered him," Myburgh said again.
Goosen c.o.c.ked his billy threateningly.
"Don't," Jeppe told Goosen. "Get him back down the hall. He never should have been out here."
"That wasn't my-"
"Shut up."
"I'm bleeding," Myburgh said. "These men a.s.saulted me."
"A cut from your automobile accident," Jeppe said.
"It's a cut I received when that swine there tried to-"
"From your accident. From hitting Motalil Pra.s.sad's runaway elephant. Please remember that."
Myburgh was afraid to contradict Jeppe, who should have been at home, taking antihistamines and drinking healthful juices. More or less pa.s.sively, Myburgh returned to the interrogation room in which Steenkamp had so precipitously abandoned him.
This time, Jeppe had Goosen stand watch. Myburgh studied his guard. Goosen was late twenties or early thirties, a dark-haired fellow who would have been handsome if his eyes hadn't carried in them a perpetual look of unfocused shock, as if almost everything about life offended him. He was hair-trigger, a grenade with the pin pulled.
Or he gave that impression. Maybe it was the job. Maybe he had a wife and babies at home. Or maybe he had the job because something cankered and peeling in him had pointed him to it, and maybe he still had a wife and babies at home. So far as Myburgh knew, there was no law on the books against borderline psychopaths marrying and raising families...
Oddly, Myburgh felt fairly safe with the boy. Jeppe was going to let him go. Or else why caution him to remember that the cut on his head had come from an automobile accident, not the attentions of this duty-conscious pretty boy? Something-something beyond the barbarous lynching of Thubana-had happened, and so Jeppe & Company were on the brink of releasing him.
"What's your name?"
Goosen looked at him with stupidly sn.o.bbish disdain. "Maybe I don't care to tell you."
"I know your family name. What's your Christian name?"
"All you need to know is Warrant Officer Goosen."
"You look like"-Myburgh pretended to consider possibilities-"a Hans, I think."
Goosen was insulted. "Not a Hans. A Hugo. And you're to keep your mouth shut."
"A while ago you wanted me to talk."
A glint of smug cunning sparked from Goosen's eyes. "You have a statement to make?"
"Where did the hanged man's belt come from?"
"You heard Major Jeppe. That other kaffir, probably."
"From you, far more probably. Or from Wessels, or Steenkamp, or Schoeman."
Goosen merely smiled. "Oh, Meneer Myburgh."
"I think the 'other kaffir' told you his friend had nothing to do with the others you were investigating."
"Why don't you shut up?" Goosen said, leaning across the table; his breath reeked of cream cheese and beer.
Myburgh ignored the smell: "But you gentlemen had done such lovely hosepipe work on the man it would have been awkward to let him go."
"Such a mind. What a detective. You should join the special branch yourself."
"So you found his belt. And gave it to him. To help him hold up his appendectomy scar, I suppose."
Goosen's brow furrowed. "He had no appendectomy scar."
"No, but you people hanged him naked, anyway. And with his own belt too."
Goosen went to the room's file cabinet. Did he plan to take a hosepipe from it?
Wham! Wham!
He kicked the file cabinet, then turned back to Myburgh with comets in his eyes, the red and yellow fallout of Voortrekker Day sparklers. The pupils s.h.i.+ning inside these fireworks were those of a man high on his own ill-suppressed rage.
"You'd better stop, brother-man. You'd better just stop!"
"All right, Warrant Officer Goosen. All right." Myburgh held up his hands placatingly.
Given everything that had happened, maybe the best course was to keep his mouth shut. To refrain from antagonizing Major Jeppe, Warrant Officer Goosen, and all the other high-strung men of the special branch.
To maintain his composure. And, maybe hardest of all, simply to bide his time.
He had not guessed wrong; they were releasing him. Lieutenant Cuyler, according to Major Jeppe, had done some telephoning and had learned that Myburgh was a clean case. Each reference, though, had needed cross-checking and confirmation. That was why, regrettably, they had held him so long.
"Not because you thought me a terrorist?" Myburgh said.
Jeppe swallowed a cold tablet with a gulp of water. "It isn't often that a man who hits an elephant on the KwaNdebele Road comes into our building to report it"
A tactful way of confessing that they had grilled him because they had been suspicious of him. Thank G.o.d they hadn't subjected him to the "refrigerator," the "airplane," "Dr. Frankenstein," the "marionette," and so on. Thank G.o.d.
Without warning, Jeppe started. "Meneer Myburgh! Where the h.e.l.l did you go?" He dropped his gla.s.s and looked around the room as if Myburgh had left it. His gla.s.s, meanwhile, broke on the floor into a nebula of scattershot shards and chips.
"I'm right here."
Jeppe recovered. "Ah, yes, there. You faded out on me. It's this cold, I guess. My vision's bollixed. My head aches. My nose feels like a cherry pepper."
"You should go home," Myburgh said.
But he was frightened. It wasn't Jeppe's cold that had caused him to fade; it was a brief reversion to shadow matter, the result of his again beginning to view things-a little, at least-from the pedestrian focus of Henning Jeppe. He had to cling to Thubana. If he did not, this entire nightmare would cease to signify.
"I should go home," Jeppe said. "And so I will. Allow me to drive you to your own place, Meneer Myburgh."
"I can't. It wouldn't-"
"The least I can do. For all the nasty inconvenience."
In the end, Myburgh permitted Jeppe to chauffeur him along the tree-lined boulevards of Pretoria, past the monuments and parks and museums, to his condominium. A good ride. Last week's clouds were only memories. The blue Transvaal sky-a dome of fragile porcelain-made him forget that it was winter, that the jacarandas would not blossom for another three months. Even Jeppe's reminders not to speak of anything that had happened during his confinement seemed benign and sensible, for Myburgh had the odd feeling that his life was beginning anew.
Back in his apartment, hanging his dry-cleaned but ruined suit in a closet, he realized that he had bought his mellow spirits with counterfeit coin. Thubana was dead, the victim of men hostile to the quixotic Grand Unified Theory toward which he had so touchingly-but ineffectively- pointed his dreams.
And Thubana, dead, was a living rebuke.
The dressing mirror on Myburgh's closet door gave back an image that modulated in and out of visibility like the picture on a snow-afflicted TV set. He was there, then he wasn't. He wasn't there, then he was. The degree of reality he had was contingent on forces over which he had no direct control.
Or, at least, so it seemed at the moment.
Myburgh crossed his arms in front of his chest and clutched his shoulders. Stay put, he told himself; stay put. Arms crossed, he walked into his apartment's living room-a studio decorated with opera posters, ferns, an aquarium with Chinese carp, and a wall of books, few of which he had opened since taking his degree from the University of Pretoria nearly twenty years ago. Today, his reading was almost all business related, with a smattering of international news to keep him abreast of fluctuating trends, and he did the bulk of it in his office at Jacobus & Roux.
Thubana was at the fish tank tapping nutritional dandruff out of a colorful box onto the water for Myburgh's starving carp. The fish rose in pairs or trios, hit at the scaly food, then splashed away through the bottle-green water to allow another greedy pair or threesome to surface and feed.
-They're hungry, Thubana said. -You were gone a long time, Mr. Myburgh.