We Are Not Such Things (22 page)

My only hope, then, was a sliver of civil servants I had come to regard as “the dinosaurs.” These were the white government employees, most of them pushing sixty, who had stayed on through 1994, and had gone from working for a state led by the National Party to one led by the ANC. The “sunset clause,” agreed upon during the 1990s negotiations, enabled white civil servants to keep their jobs for life if they so desired. Some took a buyout, but many hangers-on kept at it. I picked them out in the back rooms of prisons, working through the filing systems, or behind desks at Home Affairs. They were usually pulled into tight uniforms, name tags bearing Afrikaner monikers pinned to their chests: Botha, Coetzee, van der Merwe. With the exception of a few old-school communist sympathizers, they fell loosely into two camps: lifelong bureaucrats who couldn’t bear the thought of entering the private sector or were too old or unskilled to do so, or largely apolitical worker bees who were passionate about their jobs.

One such passionate dinosaur detective led me to Pikker, finally. I had been conducting an interview with Nollie Niehaus, the prosecutor in Amy’s case, who had remained a state prosecutor. When I mentioned Pikker, Niehaus racked his brain. Pikker had been making a sorry pittance his whole working life, Niehaus remembered, and as far as he knew, had left the police force at the time of Mandela’s election. According to Niehaus, Pikker briefly owned a suburban “escort agency” called Partners, and, after that folded, had taken off to Dubai to pursue other sketchy endeavors.

Just then, in a lucky coincidence, a dinosaur detective passed through. He was a broad-shouldered, friendly man with a pale pitted face, large nostrils, and an aggressive military-style buzz cut. His name was Mike Barkhuizen and he had a reputation as one of the best detectives in the country. I would eventually take to meeting him for a burger once in a while. He wore three holsters on his hips: two for BlackBerrys and one for a semiautomatic pistol. Pikker and Barkhuizen had worked together in the 1980s and 1990s, Niehaus recalled. Maybe Barkhuizen could help me out?

“Ja, Pikker.” Barkhuizen smiled at the memory. “Used to call me Bike Markhuizen!”

Barkhuizen remembered trolling the township streets with Pikker in the early mornings, cracking up laughing. Pikker, he said, was a real riot. As far as he knew, Pikker was indeed based in the Gulf, but he sometimes visited South Africa. He wasn’t exactly dead, but he also wasn’t well: last time the two had seen each other, several years earlier at a police reunion barbecue in the suburbs, Pikker had displayed a blazing scar running down his chest from open-heart surgery.

Barkhuizen had Pikker’s South African number. He pulled out one of the two BlackBerrys, dialed, announced that it was “Bike Markhuizen,” let out a booming guffaw, spoke animatedly in Afrikaans, and hung up.

“It’s your lucky day,” he said. “Pikker’s on vacation now out in the suburbs and he’ll talk to you.” He scribbled down a number, which I dialed as soon as I left the office. Pikker agreed to meet far from town, in a fish restaurant in a big mall, and he gave me exacting directions.

I took the N1 heading toward the Northern Suburbs, a collection of largely white and colored areas stretching above and to the east of the city center. A giant bearded white man in heavy boots and long shorts plodded down the side of the highway in the boiling sun, dragging behind him a human-sized wooden cross. Nearby, a small colored boy looked longingly across the road, readying himself to jump the median and book it to the other side. Century City, a sparkling shopping development, rose up to the left, dwarfed only by the curving roller coasters of the abutting amusement park. Century City reminded me of those manufactured U.S. Sunbelt towns that crumbled when the housing bubble burst—the garish mid-priced condominiums made of plaster and designed to appeal to nouveau sensibilities, the medians lined with palm trees, the improbably circular man-made lakes. The whole development had been carved from inhospitable bush by the highway, sliced down to accommodate furniture megastores and the spiffy offices of laser-wielding cosmetic dermatologists.

I continued on toward Bellville, an Afrikaner-dominated suburb, and turned onto Willie van Schoor Avenue, named after the town’s former Afrikaner nationalist mayor. Congolese and Zimbabwean immigrants and asylum seekers surrounded my car at the exit stoplight.
Hey sister, need a roll of blue garbage bags? Some cheap sunglasses? A colorful beaded rhinoceros made in China? A cellphone car charger? Sister, I’m suffering, can you please support me?

I entered a main stretch, the commercial district of Bellville, a long strip of car dealerships, chain restaurants, and shoddily constructed apartment complexes, all built around a gray constructed lake. I parked and made my way through the mall to a sleek franchise of the fish restaurant.

At the entrance, a host approached me. “You’re here to meet Mr. Pikker?” he asked. Taken aback, I nodded. “He’ll be arriving shortly. Let me show you to your table.”

He led me to the edge of the cavernous space, where a pair of sliding doors opened into a hermetically sealed smoking section. There, a woman in a short red bandage dress and a man in baggy jeans were sharing a plate of prawns. The host motioned to a couch, where I obediently sat.

Sitting in that hazy, fishy chamber, waiting for him to appear, I imagined Ilmar Pikker as a grand evildoer. He was remembered in the townships as part of the rough old guard, a kind of heartless white yes-man with a gun and a badge.

“Pikker, he was
rude
,” Wowo once recalled.

Plus, Barkhuizen had called Pikker a jokester, after which I visualized a villain flying through the townships at night, flanked by his cruel sidekicks, laughing maniacally as he targeted various innocent black pedestrians for attack. Add to that three apparent facts: Pikker had once had an escort service with a lame name, he lived off the grid in Dubai, and he had a far enough reach to place me in the seat of his choosing in some smoky back room of a restaurant in a far-off suburb.

I was nervously sipping my rooibos tea when a clodhopper of a man ambled through the door: six feet and well over three hundred pounds, with a silver beard and a matching silver pompadour combed neatly back. He wore a tiny rectangular leather pouch strung diagonally across his body and a heavy gold chain around his neck.

“So sorry I’m late,” he said gently, shaking my hand, his face rosy with exhaustion and embarrassment, his palms soft. He sat down, perching his body on the edge of a couch that suddenly looked comically small. He had a meaty, lined face and hangdog eyes, and bore a passing resemblance to a hard-living Santa Claus.

Every ex-cop and old cop I ever met in South Africa seemed to have signed a contract pledging to adhere to a common stereotype: cigarette permanently stuck in mouth, cup of coffee attached to hand. Pikker obligingly lit up and ordered a coffee with cold milk on the side.

“One of the addictions I picked up when I joined the force,” he said apologetically. “I can’t stop.”

Pikker urged me to get anything I wanted, and then explained that the host was an old schoolmate of his son’s. He had picked this place not because he wanted me alone in a sealed room, but because he knew he could smoke. And while I had half expected him to interrogate me, he instead seemed eager to reminisce and to answer any questions I had. In fact, instead of being stoic and secretive, Ilmar Pikker was extremely candid. I now think this is a quality common to people who feel they have nothing left to lose and nothing left to gain. They may as well spill the beans.

“Man, I loved being a cop,” Pikker said in his soft, gravelly voice, drawing on a cigarette and thinking back to those times. “I loved it so much, it nearly destroyed everything.”

Amy Biehl died when Pikker was at his peak, and his memory of the time was stitched with happy nostalgia. Back then, Pikker and his brotherhood of police officers worked most days out of what they called “the office in the bush,” a makeshift clubhouse based in an old storage unit out in Bellville. The place sat among the trees, and the men barbecued and drank beers out back. They did some things Pikker wasn’t proud of, and that he’d never speak of, but back then, it was all about having fun, about brotherhood and machismo and serving your country.

“You could not be weakened by emotion, and that type of indifference strengthens you, until one day, out of the blue, the dam bursts,” he said.

But the dam had not yet burst in 1993, and Pikker was living the dream: hunting criminals, carrying a gun and a badge, solving cases. Pikker wasn’t an Afrikaner, and so he had to exert a little extra effort to fit in. He had grown up as a first-generation South African; his father and grandparents were Estonian refugees who had fled the communist regime and had imbued in him a lifelong hatred of communism. He was raised in a modest home in the Gardens area of Cape Town, near downtown, and joined the South African Police in 1975, when he was eighteen.

Pikker had dreamed of being a cop since he was a kid, and in a sense he got to live his dream during the most exciting twenty years in South African policing history. That is, if riots, petrol bombs, and shootouts were your thing. And they were Pikker’s thing. After the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre—the police killings that brought the PAC onto the world stage—the government had largely succeeded in quelling unrest by asserting its military authority, expanding apartheid policies, and banning opposition organizations. But by the time Pikker took his oath, tumult was again bubbling up.

In 1968, a twenty-two-year-old activist and medical student named Steve Biko began to espouse an ideology called Black Consciousness. Biko defined Black Consciousness as “the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their subjection—the blackness of their skin—and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude.”

The teachings of Black Consciousness spread across the country. On June 16, 1976, thousands of students in Soweto marched to protest a new regulation that made Afrikaans language classes mandatory. The students, riled up but reportedly peaceful, marched, demanding that they not be forced to learn the mother tongue of their oppressors. Security forces ambushed them, firing tear gas. The march erupted into a riot, which ended in a predictable haze of police bullets. A famous black-and-white photo made the rounds in the international media: a black man in overalls, carrying in his arms a dying thirteen-year-old boy still dressed in his school uniform, the boy’s young sister walking next to the man, her face contorted in grief. The world turned even more firmly against apartheid. Pikker, only a year on the job, became more firmly committed to protecting it.

Following the uprising, seven hundred people died in political clashes, and Biko’s South African Students Organization was banned. In 1977, thirty-year-old Biko died in police custody. Initially, the minister of justice claimed Biko had simply died from complications relating to a six-day hunger strike, which doctors had tried to treat. At the subsequent inquest, security police claimed his head injuries resulted from a “fall” against a wall during his interrogation.

Growing forms of resistance emerged in communities, schools, and workplaces across the country. The previously fractured brown-skinned majority—Indians, coloreds, blacks—began to band together, often with liberal whites, to protest mistreatment and inequality. Local anti-apartheid organizations sprang up. Protesters campaigned against social, political, and economic inequalities, opposing rent increases and the imposition of “stooge” political representatives. They mobilized communities around issues such as housing, transport, and racial segregation. There were consumer, rent, and bus boycotts. “Collaborators” (black policemen, for example) were attacked and often killed. Local institutions considered oppressive were petrol-bombed and destroyed. Unions gathered more members willing to risk their jobs and lives to fight for fair conditions. In 1985, more than 240,000 workers took part in 390 strikes, and rallies and riots raged across the country; in 1987, there were 1,148 strikes. By 1986, the political situation had grown so tense that the apartheid government, which had begun to roll back some segregation laws, instituted another State of Emergency. Between five thousand and eight thousand soldiers were deployed to the townships to keep control of the roiling black population.

In 1986, during the State of Emergency, a twenty-nine-year-old Pikker was sent from the regular uniformed police to the security branch. The State of Emergency, which banned TV and radio from broadcasting rallies and protests, also allowed officers like Pikker the power to arrest, detain, and interrogate without a warrant. A study showed that 78 percent of detainees had been mentally abused, and reports of torture by security forces were widespread. Despite increasing repression through the continuing State of Emergency, the detention of thousands of activists, and the continued banning of organizations and individuals, political protests peaked in 1989 with the Defiance Campaign, during which thousands openly defied apartheid laws.