Those Who Love Night (6 page)

“In essence.” So, now that you know how unrepentant I am, tell me my fate and get it over with, she thought.

The minister took off the glasses that he usually wore indoors, wiped the lenses on his tie, and laid them down on the desk in front of him. “I share your concerns,” he said. Sensing the possibility that she was not finished, he raised a hand to ward off another Abigail broadside. “The unit you have been working in has been closed, it's true. But criminal justice has not ended with it…”

“But, Mr. Minister…”

The forbidding hand was still raised. “No. I have listened to you. Now, you listen to me.” He waited until he was sure that Abigail was ready to listen. “The Scorpions are dead, but the Hawks are alive. I am offering you a deputy director general position in the new organization. It's a well-earned promotion. You deserve it.”

For someone who had expected to be disciplined, perhaps even demoted, the minister's offering her a promotion and telling her that she deserved it was enough to upset her equilibrium. And Abigail was ambitious. The idea that she would, before the age of forty, be one step away from heading a government department was a powerful temptation. But, for her, it was not that simple. “And Gert?” she asked.

“The department's negotiations with another employee are simply not your business.”

She would not be that easily diverted. “But are you offering him a post?”

“I will tell you that, but only once I have discussed it with him.”

Abigail wanted the promotion more than anything, except perhaps faithfulness from Robert. And she was afraid that her desire was probably obvious to the minister. “I'll have to think it over, Mr. Minister,” she said.

Every trace of friendliness had left his face when he spoke again. “I'm afraid it's this or nothing.”

“I understand.”

“There's one more thing. If you accept, and I hope you do, I am giving you a six-month sabbatical.”

“Six months? But I haven't earned it.”

“I'll tell you the truth. The restructuring of the Scorpions into the Directorate of Priority Crimes, or the Hawks, as people are calling it, is going to be a delicate affair. I want you on leave while I do it. After your activities of the last seventy-two hours, I need you out of the picture for a while. After that, you can return, with my blessing. And remember, the new body is probably going to fall under the Minister of Police, not me.” Again that searching look seemed to be examining her every thought and motive. “I want you in the new organization, the Minister of Police wants you, the government wants you. Please consider the offer carefully.”

There was only one question left. “When will my sabbatical start?”

“Right now.”

8

It was early afternoon when Abigail arrived home. Thirty partly completed cases had been put aside, a crying Johanna had been hugged, a probably smug director general avoided and her office cleaned of personal items. Then she had left the building, driving slowly through the suburbs, a woman who no longer had a purpose in life.

At home, a parcel that had been delivered by a courier company was waiting for her. The sender was shown as Mr. K. Patel of Smythe, Patel and Associates, Harare. She tore open one end and shook it. The first items to fall out were two photographs.

The first was of a small African girl, not more than six or seven. She was wearing a school uniform and standing proudly erect, facing the camera, her heels touching and her hands at her sides. A school bag hung from one shoulder. The expression on her face was one of the simple pride that went with a first day at school.

The second picture was of the face of a young man, his main characteristic being his extreme leanness. The flesh seemed to have retreated around his eyes, making them seem unnaturally large. The whites were visible right round the pupils, giving him a frightened, even pursued appearance.

He was the one who, according to Patel, was being held illegally by the Zimbabwean authorities. Abigail's eyes searched the face of the young man in the photograph for much longer than she would remember afterward. She saw something of strength and vulnerability, also boldness and sensitivity. She imagined that he was not uncomplicated, and it seemed that he was kin to her. What has brought you to this point? she asked the photograph. And would we have been friends, had we known each other? Yes, she thought. I know we would have. I can feel it.

She laid the photographs down and reached into the parcel, bringing out a letter from Krisj Patel and two files of what seemed, at a glance, to be newspaper articles. She opened the letter first. “Dear Abigail,” she read. “These are the only photographs I have of Katy and Tony. As you can see, the one of Katy was taken many years ago. I'm afraid we've lost contact with her. The one of Tony is recent.

“He is a great writer and a real force in the democratic resistance to the dictatorship—a person of real quality. He writes wonderful, brave words for our underground Web sites, strong words to expose the regime's thugs. I have included some of his writings so that you can judge for yourself.

“Over the last year he has been very ill. We have seen him grow weaker, and we don't understand what the problem is. We feel that a prolonged stay in Chikurubi prison could have a permanent effect on his health. It could even result in his death. I'm afraid people are very poorly fed in our prisons. As far as we can make out, Chikurubi is the worst of all. And of course there are six others with him, all of whom are wrongly imprisoned.”

The letter ran on for six pages. Abigail's eyes skimmed over them quickly. She already understood what Patel wanted. Two hours before, it would have been out of the question. But now? No, it was still absurd. And this thing of Tony being a writer? What had he written?

That question was answered in the two files. Among the hundreds of pages in the first file were printouts from Web sites, pages of uninterrupted text from a computer and what appeared to be photocopies of newspaper articles, some of which carried Tony Makumbe's byline …

The articles had headlines that were filled with a young man's anger. “The Gukurahundi slaughter remembered,” said one. Another screamed at the reader: “Thousands left homeless after Murambatsvina.” A third article was headed “More
MDC
dissidents arrested without cause.”

The language of the articles themselves was filled with phrases that would have found an echo in all Zimbabwean dissidents and minorities. “Freedom will not come until every right-thinking Zimbabwean is willing to lay down his life,” Abigail read in one. “Death is preferable to our continued suffering,” the article screamed at the reader. “Many of us are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

Abigail had the general idea after only a few minutes. She was not sure that she agreed that Tony was a great writer, but she could see why people who were involved in the Zimbabwean freedom struggle might think so.

She had almost finished skimming the first batch of articles when the phone rang. Gert Pienaar was on the other end of the connection. “Abigail, I'm just calling to say goodbye,” he said. “I've decided to move on.” Despite the three days he had spent in police custody, he sounded surprisingly relaxed.

Gert did not stay on the line for long. Abigail tried to extend the conversation, seeking to persuade him to stay, even going over to the argument put forward by both Robert and Gert himself. “It's not a perfect world,” she told him, “but we can do a lot of good within those imperfections.”

Now that he had tasted them, Gert seemed to have changed his mind about those imperfections. He told her that, as far as he could see, this was payback time, a warning that he was overstepping his limits. “I was on the wrong side then. Maybe I'm the wrong color now.”

“That's bullshit,” Abigail had told him, “and you know it.”

“Do I?” he had asked. “Maybe I do, maybe I have some doubts.”

After Gert hung up, it was some time before Abigail could go back to her reading. The events of the last few days had brought back memories that she would rather have left hidden. She had been in a safe house in Lesotho when the house was attacked and her father murdered by soldiers of the old regime. Two years later her mother had been killed by a parcel bomb.

In some ways, the way they had died was easier for her to accept than the death of her aunt. Her parents were victims of the racist regime that she had accepted as being evil, an enemy of the people. Her aunt's death, on the other hand, had been at the hands of what she had been taught was an army of liberation. She was nine years old at the time and altogether unable to grasp this new reality. How had the heroes of the liberation struggle become murderers?

It was her father who had told her what had happened. For an hour or more she had questioned him, trying to understand something that was beyond all understanding. Eventually he had said, “Abigail, I really don't know the details. I was not there. All I know is that they were killed by the same soldiers who in the last year have killed a lot of Ndebeles.”

“But why, Papa?” she had asked. “They fought for freedom too, didn't they?”

“Perhaps that's not quite what they were fighting for, but you're too young to be wrestling with these things now,” he had said. “Later, when you're older, we will discuss them. I promise you that.”

It was a promise he had been unable to keep. Six years later he was killed by soldiers of the apartheid regime.

The second parcel of Tony's work was quite different than the strident pamphleteering of the first one. So absorbed was Abigail that she found herself reading every word of every page. Robert came in and was surprised by how quickly she returned to her reading.

Most of the pages were straight from a computer printer, seeming to indicate that their contents had never been published. A few were photocopies from a publication that carried its name,
Kultur Zimbabwe
, in small letters at the bottom of every page. A few were copies of standard-size magazine pages, and others of trade paperback pages.

By the time Abigail finally laid aside the last page, Robert was asleep. She looked at the bedroom clock, saw that it said a quarter to one and wondered if it was too late to call Yudel. Apart from the lateness of the hour, it had been nearly four years since she had last seen or spoken to him, and she was not sure how she would begin the conversation.

Although she barely admitted it to herself, Abigail felt uneasy about the differences in the paths her life and Yudel's had taken. Yudel had been retrenched from the Department of Correctional Services in order to bring about what government considered more acceptable representation, without ever specifying what sort of representation they were talking about. On the other hand, Abigail's Robert had been the beneficiary of an empowerment deal of such excessive proportions that she still did not feel comfortable in the seemingly endless expanses of their home.

It was true that when the department discovered how short they were of the requisite skills, Yudel was brought back on a generous contract. But, if her memory served her well, that too was about to expire.

She reached twice for the telephone on her side of the bed, but eventually did not make the call. The matter of Tony Makumbe's writing could wait till morning. Anyway, Yudel would probably not be able to contribute much.

9

Yudel Gordon sat at his desk in the office the head warder of C-Max high-security prison had allocated to him. Two hours before, it had taken him ten minutes to get through the gate at the outer perimeter, park his car in the lot outside the walls of the prison itself, pass through the security check at the main entrance and then gain access through another two heavily barred gates before he reached his office.

None of this was unusual. Changing shifts in C-Max took at least half an hour, sometimes longer. The system had been designed to keep the inmates within its walls. A little inconvenience to the personnel had to be expected.

Yudel was not a patient man. He hated queues, inept bureaucrats, dithering people who were slow to make decisions and any person or body that seemed to be conspiring to waste his time. That he spent so much of his life entering and leaving prisons, all of it without resentment, was a reflection of how much he was absorbed by his work.

This was not something to which he readily admitted. He was aware that it seemed crass to enjoy imprisoning other people. It is not the act of imprisoning people that I enjoy, though, he thought. It is the crawling through the channels of their minds, even if I sometimes get lost in the worst of those sewers.

He had often asked himself how enjoyment could be defined. He did enjoy his work, but, on reflection, that often seemed absurd. The petty thief, the white-collar swindler, the political loony, the serial killer, the family murderer: Yudel dug into the minds of every one of them with equal dedication. Perhaps enjoyment came from fascination, he thought. At least, in his case, this was probably so.

Yudel was physically a small man, in a nation of large ones. The unruly fuzz of his hair had been graying for some years now. He would have loved to have been a man whom women remembered after one meeting. The truth was that often they had to be introduced to him more than once. He was aware though that an occasional woman found his untidiness and absentmindedness somehow endearing. He was grateful to them.

In many respects Yudel lacked confidence. He was never sure how much to tip waiters, whether to expect a porter when arriving at a hotel, how to address his seniors in the department, or how to deal with what he saw as the impenetrable solidarity of his wife's circle of female friends.

It was for his work that Yudel was noticed, and then as much for his irregular forays into the territory of the detective branch as for his efforts at bringing sanity to a corner of the nation's prisons. Unconventional activities had, on occasion, brought him to the attention of the minister. Because of some of these activities he had been passed over for promotion a number of times under the old government and had been retrenched once by the new.