Rage (63 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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Manfred thought for a moment. His instinct was to dismiss the request out of hand, but he let reason dictate to him.
‘All right,' he agreed heavily. ‘I will meet him.' There would also be a perverse pleasure in confronting a vanquished foe. ‘But he is going to hang – nothing will stop that,' he warned quietly.
T
he prison authority had confiscated the leopard-skin robes of chieftainship, and Moses Gama wore the prison-issue suiting of coarse unbleached calico.
The long unremitting strain of awaiting the outcome of his appeal had told heavily. For the first time Vicky noticed the frosting of white in his cap of dark crinkling hair, and his features were gaunt, his eyes sunken in dark bruised-looking hollows. Her compassion for him threatened to overwhelm her, and she wished that she could reach out and touch him, but the steel mesh screen separated them.
‘This is the last time I am allowed to visit you,' she whispered, ‘and they will only let me stay for fifteen minutes.'
‘That will be long enough, for there is not much to say, now that the sentence has been confirmed.'
‘Oh, Moses, we were wrong to believe that the British and the Americans would save you.'
‘They tried,' he said quietly.
‘But they did not try very hard, and now what will I do without you. What will the child I am carrying do without a father?'
‘You are a daughter of Zulu, you will be strong.'
‘I will try, Moses my husband,' she whispered. ‘But what of your people? They are also children without a father. What will become of them?'
She saw the old fierce fire burn in his eyes. She had feared it had been for ever extinguished, and she felt a brief and bitter joy to know it was still alight.
‘The others will seek to take your place now. Those of the Congress who hate and envy you. When you die they will use your sacrifice to serve their own ambitions.'
She saw that she had reached him again, and that he was angry. She sought to inflame his anger to give him reason and strength to go on living.
‘If you die, your enemies will use your dead body as a stepping-stone to climb to the place you have left empty.'
‘Why do you torment me, woman?' he asked.
‘Because I do not want you to die, because I want you to live – for me, for our child, and for your people.'
‘That cannot be,' he said. ‘The hard Boers will not yield, not even to the demands of the great powers. Unless you can find wings for me to fly over these walls, then I must go to my fate. There is no other way.'
‘There is a way,' Vicky told him. ‘There is a way for you to survive – and for you to put down the enemy who seek to usurp your place as the leader of the black nations.'
He stared at her as she went on.
‘When the day comes that we sweep the Boers into the sea, and open the doors of the prisons, you will emerge to take your rightful place at the head of the revolution.'
‘What is this way, woman? What is this hope that you hold out to me?'
He listened without expression as she propounded it to him, and when she had finished, he said gravely, ‘It is true that the lioness is fiercer and crueller than the lion.'
‘Will you do it, my lord – not for your own sake, but for all us weak ones who need you so?'
‘I will think on it,' he conceded.
‘There is so little time,' she warned.
T
he black ministerial Cadillac was delayed only briefly at the gates to the prison, for they were expecting Manfred De La Rey. As the steel gates swung open, the driver accelerated through into the main courtyard and turned into the parking slot that had been kept free. The prison commissioner and two of his senior staff were waiting, and they hurried forward as soon as Manfred climbed out of the rear door.
Briefly Manfred shook hands with the commissioner and said, ‘I wish to see the prisoner immediately.'
‘Of course, Minister, it has been arranged. He is waiting for you.'
‘Lead the way.'
Manfred's heavy footfalls echoed along the dreary green-painted corridors, while the senior warders scurried ahead to unlock the interleading doors of each section and relock them as Manfred and the prison commissioner passed through. It was a long walk, but they came at last to the condemned block.
‘How many awaiting execution?' Manfred demanded.
‘Eleven,' the commissioner replied. The figure was not unusually high, Manfred reflected. Africa is a violent land and the gallows play a central role in the administration of justice.
‘I do not want to be overheard, even by those soon to die.'
‘It has been arranged,' the commissioner assured him. ‘Gama is being kept separate from the others.'
The warders opened one last steel door and at the end of a short passage was a barred cell. Manfred went through but when the commissioner would have followed, Manfred stopped him.
‘Wait here!' he ordered. ‘Lock the door after me and open it again only when I ring.'
As the door clanged shut Manfred walked on to the end of the passage.
The cell was small, seven foot by seven, and almost bare. There was a toilet bowl against the side wall and a single iron bunk fixed to the opposite wall. Moses Gama sat on the edge of the bunk and he looked up at Manfred. Then slowly he came to his feet and crossed the cell to face him through the green-painted bars.
Neither man spoke. They stared at each other. Though only the bars separated them, they were a universe and an eternity apart. Though their gazes locked, there was no contact between their minds, and the hostility was a barrier between them more obdurate and irreconcilable than the steel bars.
‘Yes?' Manfred asked at last. The temptation to gloat over a vanquished adversary was strong, but he withstood it. ‘You asked to see me?'
‘I have a proposal to put to you,' Moses Gama said.
‘You wish to bargain for your life?' Manfred corrected him, and when Moses was silent, he smiled. ‘So it seems that you are no different from other men, Moses Gama. You are neither a saint nor even the noble martyr that
some say you are. You are no better than other men, no better than any of us. In the end your loyalty is to yourself alone. You are weak as other men are weak, and like them, you are afraid.'
‘Do you wish to listen to my proposal?' Moses asked, without a sign of having heard the taunts.
‘I will hear what you have to say,' Manfred agreed. ‘That is why I came here.'
‘I will deliver them to you,' Moses said, and Manfred understood immediately.
‘By “them” you mean those who also claim to be the leaders of your people? The ones who compete with your own claim to that position?'
Moses nodded and Manfred chuckled and shook his head with admiration.
‘I will give you the names and the evidence. I will give you the times and the places.' Moses was still expressionless. ‘You have underestimated the threat that they are to you, you have underestimated the support they can muster, here and abroad. I will give you that knowledge.'
‘And in return?' Manfred asked.
‘My freedom,' said Moses simply.
‘Magtig!'
The blasphemy was a measure of Manfred's astonishment. ‘You have the effrontery of a white man.' He turned away so that Moses could not see his face while he considered the magnitude of the offer.
Moses Gama was wrong. Manfred was fully aware of the threat, and he had a broad knowledge of the extent and the ramifications of the conspiracy. He understood that the world he knew was under terrible siege. The Englishman had spoken of the winds of change – they were blowing not only upon the African continent, but across the world. Everything he held dear, from the existence of his family to that of his
Volk
and the safety of the land that God had delivered unto them, was under attack by the forces of darkness.
Here he was being offered the opportunity to deal those forces a telling blow. He knew then what his duty was.
‘I cannot give you your freedom,' he said quietly. ‘That is too much – but you knew that when you demanded it, didn't you?' Moses did not answer him, and Manfred went on, ‘This is the bargain I will offer you. I will give you your life. A reprieve, but you will never leave prison again. That is the best I can do.'
The silence went on so long that Manfred thought he had refused and he began to turn away when Moses spoke again.
‘I accept.'
Manfred turned back to him, not allowing his triumph to show.
‘I will want all the names, all the evidence,' he insisted.
‘You will have it all,' Moses assured him. ‘When I have my reprieve.'
‘No,' Manfred said quietly. ‘I set the terms. You will have your reprieve when you have earned it. Until then you will get only a stay of execution. Even for that I will need you to name a name so that I can convince my compatriots of the wisdom of our bargain.'
Moses was silent, glowering at him through the bars.
‘Give me a name,' Manfred insisted. ‘Give me something to take to the Prime Minister.'
‘I will do better than that,' Moses agreed. ‘I will give you two names. Heed them well. They are – Mandela and Rivonia.'
M
ichael Courtney was in the city room of the
Mail
when the news that the Appellate Division had denied Moses Gama's appeal and confirmed the date of his execution came clattering out on the tape. He let the paper strip run through his fingers, reading it with total concentration, and when the message ended, he went to his desk and sat in front of his typewriter.
He lit a cigarette and sat quietly, staring out of the window over the tops of the scraggly trees in Joubert Park. He had a pile of work in his basket and a dozen reference books on his desk. Desmond Blake had slipped out of the office to go down to the George to top up his gin tank and left Michael to finish the article on the American elections. Eisenhower was nearing the end of his final term and the editor wanted a pen portrait of the presidential candidates. Michael was working on his biographical notes of John Kennedy, but having difficulty choosing the salient facts from the vast amount that had been written about the young Democratic candidate, apart from those that everybody knew, that he was a Catholic and a New Dealer and that he had been born in 1917.
America seemed very far away that morning, and the election of an American president inconsequential in comparison with what he had just read on the tape.
As part of his self-education and training, Michael made a practice each day of selecting an item of important news and writing a two-thousand-word mock editorial upon it. These exercises were for his own sake, the results private and jealously guarded. He showed them to no one, especially not Desmond Blake whose biting sarcasm and whose willingness to plagiarize Michael had learned to fear. He kept these articles in a folder in the locked bottom drawer of his desk.
Usually Michael worked on these exercises in his own time, staying on for an hour or so in the evening or sitting up late at night in the little bed-sitter he rented in
Hillbrow, pecking them out on his rickety old secondhand Remington.
However, this morning he had been so moved by the failure of Gama's appeal that he could not concentrate on the Kennedy story. The image of the imperial-looking black man in his leopard-skin robes kept recurring before Michael's eyes, and his words kept echoing in Michael's ears.
Suddenly he reached forward and ripped the half-completed page out of his machine. Then he swiftly rolled a clean sheet into it. He didn't have to think, his fingers flew across the keys, and the words sprang up before his eyes: ‘A Martyr is Born.'
He rolled the cigarette to the side of his mouth and squinted against the spiral of blue smoke, and the words came in short staccato bursts. He did not have to search for facts or dates or figures. They were all there, crisp and bright in his head. He never paused. He never had to weigh one word against another. The precise word was there on the page almost of its own volition.
When he finished it half an hour later, he knew that it was the best thing he had ever written. He read it through once, shaken by the power of his own words, and then he stood up. He felt restless and nervous. The effort of creation rather than calming or exhausting him had excited him. He had to get outside.
He left the sheet in the typewriter and took his jacket off the back of his chair. The sub glanced up at him enquiringly.
‘Going to find Des,' he called. In the newsroom there was a conspiracy to protect Desmond Blake from himself and the gin bottle and the sub nodded agreement and returned to his work.
Once he was out of the building, Michael walked fast, pushing his way through the crowds on the sidewalks, stepping out hard with both hands thrust into his pockets.
He didn't look where he was going, but it didn't surprise him when at last he found himself in the main concourse of the Johannesburg railway station.
He fetched a paper cup of coffee from the kiosk near the ticket office and took it to his usual seat on one of the benches. He lit a cigarette and raised his eyes towards the domed glass ceiling. The Pierneef murals were placed so high that very few of the thousands of commuters who passed through the concourse each day ever noticed them.
For Michael they were the essence of the continent, a distillation of all of Africa's immensity and infinite beauty. Like a celestial choir, they sang aloud all that he was trying to convey in clumsy stumbling sentences. He felt at peace when at last he left the massive stone building.
He found Des Blake on his usual stool at the end of the bar counter at the George.
‘Are you your brother's keeper?' Des Blake enquired loftily, but his words were slurred. It took a great deal of gin to make Des Blake slur.
‘The sub is asking for you,' Michael lied.
He wondered why he felt any concern for the man, or why any of them bothered to protect him – but then one of the other senior journalists had given him the answer to that. ‘He was once a great newspaperman, and we have to look after our own.'
Des was having difficulty fitting a cigarette into his ivory holder. Michael did it for him, and as he held a match he said, ‘Come on, Mr Blake. They are waiting for you.'
‘Courtney, I think I should warn you now. You haven't got what it takes, I'm afraid. You'll never cut the mustard, boy. You are just a poor little rich man's son. You'll never be a newspaperman's anus.'
‘Come along, Mr Blake,' said Michael wearily, and took his arm to help him down off the stool.
The first thing Michael noticed when he reached his desk again was that the sheet of paper was missing from his
typewriter. It was only in the last few months, since he had been assigned to work with Des Blake, that he had been given his own desk and machine, and he was fiercely jealous and protective of them.
The idea of anyone fiddling with his typewriter, let alone taking work out of it, infuriated him. He looked around him furiously, seeking a target for his anger, but every single person in the long, crowded noisy room was senior to him. The effort it cost him to contain his outrage left him shaking. He lit another cigarette, the last one in his pack, and even in his agitation he realized that that made it twenty since breakfast.
‘Courtney!' the sub called across to him, raising his voice above the rattle of typewriters. ‘You took your time. Mr Herbstein wants you in his office right away.'
Michael's rage subsided miraculously. He had never been in the editor's office before, Mr Herbstein had once said good morning to him in the lift but that was all.
The walk down the newsroom seemed the longest of his life, and though nobody even glanced up as he passed, Michael was certain that they were secretly sniggering at him and gloating on his dilemma.
He knocked on the frosted-glass panel of the editor's door and there was a bellow from inside.
Timidly Michael pushed the door open and peered round it. Leon Herbstein was on the telephone, a burly man in a sloppy hand-knitted cardigan with thick hom-rimmed spectacles and a shock of thick curly hair shot through with strands of grey. Impatiently he waved Michael into the room and then ignored him while he finished his conversation on the telephone.
At last he slammed down the receiver and swivelled his chair to regard the young man who was standing uneasily in front of his desk.
Ten days before, Leon Herbstein had received a quite unexpected invitation to a luncheon in the executive
dining-room of the Courtney Mining and Finance Company's new head office building. There had been ten other guests present, all of them leaders of commerce and industry, but Herbstein had found himself in the right-hand seat beside his host.
Leon Herbstein had never had any great admiration for Shasa Courtney. He was suspicious of vast wealth, and the two Courtneys – mother and son – had a formidable reputation for shrewd and ruthless business practices. Then again, Shasa Courtney had forsaken the United Party of which Leon Herbstein was an ardent supporter, and had gone across to the Nationalists. Leon Herbstein had never forgotten the violent anti-Semitism which had attended the birth of the National Party, and he considered the policy of
apartheid
as simply another manifestation of the same grotesque racial bigotry.
As far as he was concerned, Shasa Courtney was one of the enemy. However, he sat down at his luncheon table quite unprepared for the man's easy and insidious charm and his quick and subtle mind. Shasa devoted most of his attention to Leon Herbstein, and by the end of the meal the editor had considerably moderated his feelings towards the Courtneys. At least he was convinced that Shasa Courtney truly had the best interests of all the people at heart, that he was especially concerned with improving the lot of the black and underprivileged sections, and that he was wielding an important moderating influence in the high councils of the National Party.
In addition, he left the Courtney building with a heightened respect for Shasa Courtney's subtlety. Not once had Shasa mentioned the fact that he and his companies now owned 42 per cent of the stock of Associated Newspapers of South Africa or that his son was employed as a junior journalist on the
Mail
. It hadn't been necessary, both men had been acutely aware of these facts while they talked.
Up to that time Leon Herbstein had felt a natural antagonism towards Michael Courtney. Placing him in the care of Des Blake had been all the preference he had shown to the lad. However, after that luncheon he had begun to study him with more attention. It didn't take an old dog long to attribute the improvement in much of the copy that Des Blake had been turning out recently to the groundwork that Michael Courtney was doing for him. From then onwards, whenever he passed Michael's desk, Herbstein made a point of quickly and surreptitiously checking what work was in his machine or in the copy basket.
Herbstein had the journalist's trick of being able to assimilate a full typed sheet at a single glance, and he was grimly amused to notice how often Des Blake's column was based on the draft by his young assistant, and how often the original was better than the final copy.
Now he studied Michael closely as he stood awkwardly before his desk. Despite the fact that he had cropped his hair in one of those appalling brush cuts that the youth were affecting these days and wore a vividly patterned bow tie, he was a likeable-looking lad, with a strong determined jawline and clear, intelligent eyes. Perhaps he was too thin for his height, and a little gawky, but he had quite noticeably matured and gained in self-assurance during the short period he had been at the
Mail
.
Suddenly Leon realized that he was being cruel, and that his scrutiny was subjecting the lad to unnecessary agony. He picked up the sheet of typescript that lay in front of him, and slid it across his untidy desk.
‘Did you write that?' he demanded gruffly, and Michael snatched up the sheet protectively.
‘I didn't mean anybody to read it,' he whispered, and then remembered who he was talking to and threw in a lame, ‘sir.'
‘Strange.' Leon Herbstein shook his head. ‘I always
believed we were in the business of writing so that others could read.'
‘I was just practising.' Michael held the sheet behind his back.
‘I made some corrections,' Herbstein told him, and Michael jerked the page out from behind him and scanned it anxiously.
‘Your third paragraph is redundant, and “scar” is a better word than “cicatrice” – otherwise we'll run it as you wrote it.'
‘I don't understand, sir,' Michael blurted.
‘You've saved me the trouble of writing tomorrow's editorial.' Herbstein reached across and took the page from Michael's limp fingers, tossed it into his Out basket and then concentrated all his attention on his own work.
Michael stood gaping at the top of his head. It took him ten seconds to realize that he had been dismissed and he backed towards the door and closed it carefully behind him. His legs just carried him to his desk, and then collapsed under him. He sat down heavily in his swivel chair and reached for his cigarette pack. It was empty and he crumpled it and dropped it into his wastepaper basket.
Only then did the full significance of what had happened hit him and he felt cold and slightly nauseated.
‘The editorial,' he whispered, and his hands began to tremble.
Across the desk Desmond Blake belched softly and demanded, ‘Where are the notes on that American what's- 'is-name fellow?'
‘I haven't finished it yet, Mr Blake.'
‘Listen, kid. I warned you. You'll have to extract your digit from your fundamental orifice if you want to get anywhere around here.'
Michael set his alarm clock for five o'clock the next morning and went downstairs with his raincoat over his pyjamas. He was waiting on the street corner with the
newspaper urchins when the bundles of newsprint were tossed onto the pavement from the back of the
Mail's
delivery van.
He ran back up the stairs clutching a copy of the paper and locked the door to his bed-sitter. It took all his courage to open it at the editorial page. He was actually shaking with terror that Mr Herbstein might have changed his mind, or that it was all some monstrous practical joke.

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