The Fourth Protocol (20 page)

“Maybe,” mused Preston. “This life story ... There’s something odd about it.”

Captain Viljoen shook his head. “We’ve had this file in our hands ever since your Sir Nigel Irvine contacted the general. We have been over and over it. It’s absolutely accurate. Every name, date, place, Army camp, military unit, campaign, and tiny detail. Even to the crops they used to grow before the war in the Mootseki Valley. The agriculture people confirmed that. Now they grow tomatoes and avocados up there, but in those days potatoes and tobacco. Nobody could have invented that story. No, if he went wrong at all, which I doubt, it was somewhere abroad.”

Preston looked glum. Outside the windows, dusk was falling.

“All right,” said Viljoen, “I am here to help you. Where do you want to go next?”

“I’d like to start at the beginning,” said Preston. “This place Duiwelskloof, is it far?”

“About a four-hour drive. You want to go there?”

“Yes, please. Could we start early? Say at six tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll get a car from the pool and be at your hotel at six,” said Viljoen.

It’s a long haul on the road north to Zimbabwe, but the motorway is modern and Viljoen had drawn a Chevair without insignia, the car usually driven by the NIS. It ate up the miles through Nylstroom and Potgietersrus to Pietersburg, which they reached in three hours. The drive gave Preston a chance to see the great limitless horizons of Africa that impress the European visitor accustomed to smaller dimensions.

At Pietersburg they turned east and ran for fifty kilometers over flat middle veld, with more endless horizons under a robin’s-egg blue vault of sky, until they reached the bluff called Buffalo Hill, or Buffelberg, where the middle veld drops to the Mootseki Valley. As they started down the twisting gradient Preston drew in his breath in amazement.

Far below lay the valley, rich and lush, its open floor strewn with a thousand beehive-shaped African huts, the rondavels, surrounded by kraals, cattle pens, and mealie gardens. Some of the rondavels were perched on the side of the Buffelberg but most were scattered across the floor of the Mootseki. Timber smoke eddied from their central smokeholes, and even from that height and distance Preston could make out the African boys tending small groups of humped cattle, and women bent over their garden patches.

This, he thought, was African Africa, at last. It must have looked much the same when the impis of Mzilikazi, founder of the Matabele nation, marched north to escape the wrath of Chaka Zulu, to cross the Limpopo and found the kingdom of the people of the long shields. The road bucked and twisted down the bluff and into the Mootseki. Across the valley was another range of hills, and in their center a deep cleft, through which the road ran. This was the Devil’s Gap, the Duiwelskloof.

Ten minutes later they were into the gap and cruising slowly past the new primary school and down Botha Avenue, the principal street of the small township.

“Where do you want to go?” asked Viljoen.

“When old farmer
Marais
died, he must have left a will,” mused Preston. “And that would have to be executed, and that means a lawyer. Can we find out if there is a lawyer in Duiwelskloof, and if he is available on a Saturday morning?”

Viljoen drew up to
Kirstens
Garage and pointed across the road at the Imp Inn. “Go and have a coffee and order one for me. I’ll fill the tank and ask around.”

He rejoined Preston in the hotel lounge five minutes later.

“There’s one lawyer,” he said as he sipped his coffee. “He’s an Anglo, name of Benson. His office is right there across the street, two doors from the garage, and he’ll probably be in this morning. Let’s go.”

Mr. Benson was in, and when Viljoen flashed a card in a plastic wallet at Benson’s secretary, the effect was immediate. She spoke in Afrikaans into an intercom and they were shown without delay into the office of Benson, a friendly and rubicund man in a tan suit. He greeted them both in Afrikaans. Viljoen replied in his heavily accented English.

“This is Mr. John Preston. He has come from London, England. He wishes to ask you some questions.”

Benson bade them be seated and resumed his chair behind the desk. “Please,” he said, “anything I can do.”

“Can you tell me how old you are?” asked Preston.

Benson gazed at him in amazement. “All the way from London to ask how old I am? As a matter of fact, I’m fifty-three.”

“So in 1946 you would have been twelve?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me, please, who was the lawyer here in Duiwelskloof in that year?”

“Certainly. My father, Cedric Benson.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes. He’s over eighty and he handed the business over to me fifteen years ago. But he’s pretty spry.”

“Would it be possible to talk to him?”

For answer Benson reached for a telephone and dialed a number. His father must have answered, for the son explained there were visitors, one from London, who would like to talk to him. He replaced the receiver.

“He lives about six miles away, but he still drives, to the terror of all other road users. He says he’ll be here directly.”

“In the interim,” asked Preston, “could you consult your files for the year 1946 and see if you, or rather your father, executed the will of a local farmer, one Laurens
Marais,
who died in January of that year?”

“I’ll try,” said Benson Junior. “Of course, this Mr.
Marais
may have been with a lawyer from Pietersburg. But local people tended to stay local in those days. The 1946 box must be around somewhere. Excuse me.”

He left the office. The secretary served coffee. Ten minutes later there were voices in the outer office. The two Bensons entered together, the son carrying a dusty cardboard box. The old man had a fuzz of white hair and looked as alert as a young kestrel. After the introductions Preston explained his problem.

Without a word the older Benson took the chair behind the desk, forcing his son to draw up another one. Old Benson placed glasses on his nose and gazed at the visitors over them. “I remember Laurens
Marais,”
he said. “And yes, we did handle his will when he died. I did so myself.”

The son passed him a dusty and faded document tied in pink ribbon. The old man blew the dust off it, untied the ribbon, and spread it out. He began to read it silently.

“Ah yes, I remember it now. He was a widower. Lived alone. Had one son, Jan. A tragic case. The boy had just come back from the Second World War. Laurens
Marais
was going down to Cape Town to visit him when he died. Tragic.”

“Can you tell me about the bequests?” asked Preston.

“Everything to the son,” said Benson simply. “Farm, house, equipment, contents of house. Oh, the usual small bequests in money to the native farmworkers, the foreman—that sort of thing.”

“Any other bequests—anything of a personal nature?” persisted Preston.

“Humph. One here. ‘And to my old and good friend Joop Van
Rensberg
my ivory chess set in memory of the many contented evenings we spent playing together at the farm.’ That’s all.”

“Was the son back home in South Africa when the father died?” asked Preston.

“Must have been. Old Laurens was going down to see him. A long trip in those days. No airliners then. One went by train.”

“Did you handle the sale of the farm and the other property, Mr. Benson?”

“The auctioneers did the sale, right out at the farm. It went to the Van Zyls. They bought the lot. All that land belongs to Bertie Van Zyl now. But I was there as chief executor of the will.”

“Were there any personal memorabilia that did not sell?” asked Preston.

The old man furrowed his brow. “Not much. It all went. Oh, I recall there was a photograph album. It had no commercial value. I believe I gave it to Mr. Van
Rensberg.“

“Who was he?”

“The schoolmaster,” cut in the son. “He taught me until I went to Merensky High. He ran the old farm school until they built the primary school. Then he retired and stayed here in Duiwelskloof.”

“Is he still alive?”

“No, he died about ten years ago,” said the older Benson. “I went to the funeral.”

“But there was a daughter,” said his son helpfully. “Cissy. She was at Merensky with me. Must be the same age.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“Certainly. She married, years ago. A sawmill owner out on the Tzaneen road.”

“One last question”—Preston addressed himself to the old man—“why did you sell the property? Didn’t the son want it?”

“Apparently not,” said the old man. “He was in the Wynberg Military Hospital at the time. He sent me a cable. I got his address from the military authorities and they vouched for his identity. His cable asked me to dispose of the entire estate and cable the money to him.”

“He did not come for the funeral?”

“No time. January is our summer in South Africa. In those days there were few morgue facilities. Bodies had to be buried without delay. In fact I don’t think he ever returned at all. Understandable. With his father gone, there was nothing to come back for.”

“Where is Laurens
Marais
buried?”

“In the graveyard up on the hill,” said Benson Senior. “Is that all? Then I’ll be off to my lunch.”

The climate east and west of the mountains at Duiwelskloof varies dramatically. West of the range the rainfall in the Mootseki is about twenty inches a year. East of the range the great clouds beat up from the Indian Ocean, drift across Mozambique and the
Kruger
Park, and butt into the mountains, whose eastern slopes are drenched with eighty inches of rain a year. On this side the industry comes from the forests of blue gum trees. Six miles up the Tzaneen road Viljoen and Preston found the sawmill of Mr.
du Plessis.
It was his wife, the schoolmaster’s daughter, who opened the door; she was a plump, apple-cheeked woman of about fifty with flour on her hands and apron. She was in the throes of baking.

She listened to their problem intently, then shook her head. “I remember as a small girl going out to the farm, and my father playing chess with farmer
Marais,”
she said. “That would have been about 1944 or 1945. I recall the ivory chess set, but not the album.”

“When your father died, did you not inherit his effects?” asked Preston.

“No,” said Mrs.
du
Plessis. “You see, my mother died in 1955, leaving Daddy a widower. I looked after him myself until I married in 1958, when I was twenty-three. After that, he couldn’t cope. His house was always a mess. I tried to keep going to cook and clean for him. But when the children came, it was too much.

“Then in 1960 his sister, my aunt, was widowed in her turn. She had lived at Pietersburg. It made sense for her to come and stay with my father and look after him. So she did. When he died I had already asked him to leave it all to her—the house, furniture, and so forth.”

“What happened to your aunt?” asked Preston.

“Oh, she still lives there. It’s a modest bungalow just behind the Imp Inn back in Duiwelskloof.”

She agreed to accompany them. Her aunt, Mrs. Winter, a bright, sparrowlike lady with blue-rinsed hair, was at home. When she had heard what they had to say, she went to a closet and pulled out a flat box. “Poor Joop used to love playing with this,” she said. It was the ivory chess set. “Is this what you want?”

“Not quite, it’s more the photograph album,” said Preston.

She looked puzzled. “There
is
a box of old junk up in the loft,” she said. “It went up there after he died. Just papers and things from his schoolmastering days.”

Andries Viljoen went up to the attic and brought it down. At the bottom of the yellowed school reports was the
Marais
family album. Preston leafed through it slowly. It was all there: the frail, pretty bride of 1920, the shyly smiling mother of 1930, the frowning boy astride his first pony, the father with pipe clamped in his teeth, trying not to look too proud, with his son by his side and the row of rabbits on the grass in front of them. At the end was a monochrome photo of a boy in cricket flannels, a handsome lad of seventeen, coming up to the wicket to bowl. The caption read
Fanni, captain of cricket, Merensky High, 1943.

“May I keep this?” asked Preston.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Winter.

“Did your late brother ever talk to you about Mr.
Marais?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “They were very good friends for many years.”

“Did your brother ever say what he died of?”

She frowned. “Didn’t they tell you at the lawyer’s office? Tut. Old Cedric must be losing his wits. It was a hit-and-run accident, Joop told me. It seems old
Marais
had stopped to repair a puncture and he was hit by a passing truck. At the time it was thought to be some drunken kaffirs—oops”—her hand flew to her mouth and she looked at Viljoen with embarrassment—“I’m not supposed to say that anymore. Well, anyway, they never found out who was driving the truck.”

On the way back down the hill to the main road, they passed the graveyard. Preston asked Viljoen to stop. It was a pleasant, quiet plot, high above the town, fringed by pine and fir, dominated in its center by an old
mwataba
tree with a cleft trunk, and enclosed by a hedge of poinsettia. In one corner they found a moss-covered stone. Scraping away the moss, Preston found the epitaph carved in the granite:
Laurens
Marais
1879-1946. Beloved husband of Mary and father of Jan. Always with God. RIP.

Preston strolled across to the hedge, plucked a sprig of flaming poinsettia, and laid it by the stone. Viljoen looked at him oddly.

“Pretoria next, I think,” said Preston.

As they were climbing the Buffelberg on the road out of the Mootseki, Preston turned to look back across the valley. Dark gray stormclouds had built up behind the Devil’s Gap. As he watched they closed in, blotting out the little town and its macabre secret, known only to a middle-aged Englishman in a retreating car. Then he put his head back and fell asleep.