Those Who Love Night (2 page)

She knew who they were. This was Five Brigade. Everyone knew about them and what they were doing in her part of the country. She had been told that their orders were to crush all dissidents. They were doing it in the most fundamental way. She had heard about their bayonets and the way they used them. The orders by which they functioned demanded that, if the rebel women were pregnant, they were to be killed and their dissident sons with them before they were born.

Could such a thing be true? she had wondered.

The main track through the village was brilliantly lit by now. The driver of each invading vehicle had left his headlights burning after he brought it to a halt. She could see the soldiers, but they were not yet coming in her direction. The first wave, perhaps twenty of them, was moving straight down the track. The rest would probably spread the net wider.

The dense bush was too far away for her to reach it unnoticed. There was only the shed that the young Anglican priest had built. It was twenty or thirty paces away across open ground. But it was an obvious place for someone to hide. On the far side of the shed, the remains of a pigsty, rimmed by light scrub on the near side, were barely visible. It had not been in use since the pigs had sickened and died.

Night sounds that had consisted only of internal combustion engines, the grunting of people running and the occasional crying of a child, changed into something entirely different. The first scream was followed almost immediately by another, and then a third. But there had been no gunshots. They're using the bayonets, Janice thought. They're using them not to waste bullets or to make a noise.

The crash came from beyond the edge of the village. It was in the direction taken by Wally's truck. There were too many crowded into it, she thought, just too many. Why could they not have found their own way? Why did they have to crowd into our truck?

But where was Wally now? Had he been driving?

There was more screaming from the center of the village. The people were not dying quietly.

The pigsty was the only possibility. It meant they would have to cross open ground. They would be in clear sight for a minute, maybe less. If the soldiers' attention was on what they were doing, the chance of them reaching the sty safely was good.

Outrunning anyone was impossible. The very act of running was impossible. The only chance was to walk quickly and carefully to the shelter of the pigsty and then sit down on the nightdresses in the densest possible cover.

Janice carefully unfolded her son's arms where they held her leg. Taking her children by the hand, she stepped into the open. Katy was still holding the nightdresses against her chest. She was running a step ahead, pulling Janice. The screaming from the village had intensified, but Janice tried not to hear it. Let me concentrate only on picking my steps carefully, very carefully, she thought.

The possibility of snakes flitted through her mind, but only for an instant. She looked back for the first time when she reached the light scrub at the edge of the sty. There was no sign of pursuit. She could also see nothing of Wally's truck, but her view was obscured by the nearer huts. She wondered about the time. Dawn would bring light, and perhaps light would not be in her interest. She sank carefully into a crouching position, one arm holding the boy close against her and the other around her distended stomach. She could feel the girl pressing against her on the other side. Perhaps tonight darkness would be her good friend.

2

For an ambitious woman who had risen so fast in the organization that most of her male colleagues felt uncomfortable in her presence, Abigail Bukula was surprisingly unhappy. She felt that recent government decisions that affected her work were both wrong in principle and operationally unsound. She had just spent half an hour explaining her position to the director general of the Department of Justice in which she worked.

“The decision was not yours and it was not mine, Abigail,” he had said. “It was made by other people for us to implement. We simply have to abide by it.”

“But we were so successful. Everyone says so.”

“The media says so.”

“But we were.”

“Maybe so, but the decision is made.”

“Could I speak to the minister?”

The director general sighed. He had been Abigail's senior for not much more than a year, but already he knew her well. “Don't be foolish,” he said. “The minister himself is carrying out policy that has been decided in cabinet. You can't debate policy with him. I can't debate policy with him. Even he can't change this.”

She had tried to argue the matter further, but he had ended the discussion with: “This is no time to choose the wrong side.”

That was where it had ended. As the director general had explained, that was where it had to end.

The arm of the justice system that had been closed was the Directorate of Special Operations, known to the public as the Scorpions. Their cars were black and each bore a large white scorpion on either side. The organization had been made up of both police officers and lawyers. And their success rate had been almost as good as their sense of drama.

They had loved to make arrests in major cases in the bright light of television cameras. Not all heroes of the liberation struggle admired that characteristic, but they seemed to have decided to live with it. It only turned out to be an unforgivable sin when some of those arrested came from their own ranks.

The Scorpions were being replaced by something called the Hawks. In Abigail's view, the leadership of the new body had been carefully chosen, not for their effectiveness, but because they would give their political overlords the least trouble.

For the last year she had served under a talented, but little trusted, senior advocate by the name of Gert Pienaar. He and Abigail had formed a formidable combination. Gert's matchless investigative skills had combined brilliantly with Abigail's singular presence in the courtroom. “I provide the facts and you tear the enemy apart,” he had once said to her. She was not sure that she liked the inference that she was the bulldog while he was the brain, but had forgiven him a week later when she heard that he had described her as the finest analytical brain in the country in the field of criminal law.

Pienaar was, in his own words, “a refugee from the old regime,” having played an almost identical role in the apartheid government. “There were criminals in those days too,” he had told Abigail with a shrug.

The leaders of the new regime had decided that if they wanted to keep some sort of rein on organized crime they had better retain people like him. Now that he, and others like him, had started arresting some of their own members on charges of corruption, they were no longer sure of the wisdom of their decision. “We have given this apartheid spy the chance to attack us,” a party functionary had said in a recent speech, and the papers had reported it countrywide.

Damn, Abigail thought, how is it I always get involved with problem people? Why did he have to be a white Afrikaner and, most especially, why did he have to come from employment in the justice department of the old regime?

She knew that he was a good man. She had met others; men as good, who had stayed in the employ of the old regime right to the end. She had never understood any of them.

Pienaar's sin had been the single-mindedness with which he had gone after the corrupt practices of a certain group of politicians. She had worked next to him for all of twelve months. They had dug through evidence together and she had agreed with all his conclusions. The difference between them was that Pienaar had only seen it as his job, while she had been outraged that people who had been her seniors during the days of the liberation struggle should be behaving in this way. Pienaar had wanted to collect the evidence and pass it on to someone else to handle. She had wanted to prosecute them herself.

“It's different for you,” he had said. “You have a history in the struggle.”

“This is not about politics,” she had told him, admitting later to herself that it was a pretty naïve statement.

If Pienaar had characteristics that would always keep him an outsider, Abigail had a few of her own. Chief among these was the fact that growing up in exile in the United Kingdom had resulted in English being her primary language. She had spent a year in Matabeleland, the province of Zimbabwe's minority Ndebele. Those were the latter years of the apartheid regime and she had not felt safe in her own country. Her time there had given her a knowledge of Zulu that was less than rudimentary. All of the country's other African languages were unintelligible to her. When approaching a group of her colleagues engaged in conversation in one of the vernacular languages, they would switch to English for her benefit. She was grateful for the considerate way she was dealt with, but it also emphasized the differences between them.

She got up to go in search of Pienaar. For a long time, the rumors around the closure of the Scorpions had been threading their insidious way through the passages of the department, some of them even reaching the press. Today, for the first time, it was official. By the time the evening papers were out, the whole country would know it.

Before she reached the door, her phone rang. Johanna, her trusted and irrepressibly curious
PA
, was on the line. “A call from Zimbabwe.”

“Put it through.”

“It's a man. He wouldn't tell me who he is.”

“Damn it, Johanna. Just put him through.”

“I'm putting him through,” Johanna said.

There was considerable background noise on the connection. “Abigail Bukula?” The voice reached her across an insecure connection. “Is that Abigail Bukula?”

“Yes, it's me.”

“Abigail Bukula of Zimbabwe?”

“No, I'm not a Zimbabwean. I practiced in your country for a year…”

“My name is Krisj Patel. I…” The voice faded in a shower of static and only returned when the crackling faded. “… are hoping you would be able to come to our country to represent them in this matter.”

“Mr. Patel, I can barely hear you. I think you want me to represent you in some matter?”

“Not me, my clients. I am Krisj Patel, of Smythe, Patel and Associates, attorneys at law. My clients were hoping…” Again the voice faded and the crackling grew, but not for as long this time. “I think we can get a high court injunction to have them released.”

“And you said you are…” Abigail was writing it down.

“Krisj Patel of Smythe, Patel and Associates.”

“You're the Patel of Smythe, Patel and…”

“… Associates,” he said. “Yes, I am. Will you call me Krisj?” he asked. “People here are proud…” Again the voice was gone. When it came back, she heard him say, “… your cousin. So we thought you may want to help…”

“My cousin?”

“Tony Makumbe. As I understand it, he's your Aunt Janice's child.”

“No, she had a daughter.”

“She also had a son.”

“Mr. Patel, I don't think…”

“He's one of the seven dissidents. Our people…” Again the crackling rose, but the phone went dead, even the crackling disappeared. Abigail waited a few minutes for him to call again, but the phone remained silent. Mr. Patel was wrong about everything. As far as she knew, her Aunt Janice only had a daughter. In any event, she had no doubt that Patel could find an advocate in his own country. And the closing down of the Scorpions was, to her, a matter of far greater importance.

Usually, when Abigail left the building, she had Johanna send an e-mail to both Pienaar and the director general to keep them informed of her whereabouts. This time she walked past Johanna without responding to her question: “Is it true about the Scorpions?” The offices of the department were just too damned constricting this afternoon.

Abigail was a good-looking woman, a little above average height, with the leanness and easy stride of an athlete. Most men, when seeing her for the first time, took special interest. Her African curls were cropped close to her head. Time spent at the hairdresser was, in her view, time lost.

She was wearing a lavender-gray trouser suit, relieved only by an inexpensive turquoise brooch. Robert had given her many presents of jewelry that she felt were far too expensive. And this was neither the town nor the country in which it was wise to flash high-priced baubles. Robert's paper had recently carried an incident in which a woman had lost a ring on which a large imitation diamond was mounted—and her finger along with it. It seemed that a pair of garden shears had been used. The result had not been a neat cut.

Abigail's own diamonds stayed safely in the bank's safe deposit box, only to be used two or three times a year for various state banquets. The only three skirts she possessed were part of the evening wear she had reluctantly invested in for those occasions.

*   *   *

Robert's office was only a few blocks away, but Abigail took her 7-series
BMW
. It was something else Robert had insisted on paying for. She was not intending to return that afternoon.

The security man at the basement parking in his building recognized her immediately and opened the boom to let her in. She brought the car to a stop in the parking space Robert had reserved for the odd occasion when she visited him.

In the lift on the way to the top floor, two people, whom she was certain she had never seen before, greeted her with “Good afternoon, ma'am.”

The top floor of the building held only Robert's office, that of the chairman, the deputy chairman, the financial director, the marketing director, the human resources director and the editor of the group's major weekly, together with their personal assistants, of course. Before Abigail's first visit to the building, she had heard what she thought were exaggerated stories of corporate extravagance—that on the executive floor the pile carpet was so deep you had to wade through it. It was only when she visited Robert for the first time that she realized her husband's office was inherently a subject for satire. And the carpet really was so heavy that it slowed you down.