We Are Not Such Things (49 page)

“Every time there is a crime, this person is suddenly state witness,” Mzi said—in other words, she was known to work with the cops.

We drove to her house and knocked on the door. An older lady, presumably Miss A’s mother, pointed us to the back, where Miss A lived alone in a freestanding room. We knocked and a small, delicate woman in her mid-forties answered the door. Her face was pale and freckled, her short hair in cornrows that ended at the nape of her neck. She wore a green velour J.Lo brand tracksuit, orange flats, black socks, and dangling crystal earrings.

“How did you find me?” she asked nervously. Mzi explained that he had told me about her, and she agreed to speak as long as I didn’t reveal her real name. She then welcomed us into her space. A quarter of the ceiling of her small room gaped open to reveal the corrugated tin roof. On the walls, she had pasted pictures from her modeling days: Miss A in a swimsuit on the catwalk, a close-up of Miss A’s face, Miss A showing off a pixie cut. Books about the ANC and women’s rights were piled up around the room. I didn’t know Miss A’s story, but this was a space designed with an eye looking toward the past, housing memories and photographs of herself when she was full of potential.

Miss A didn’t smile and instead excused herself. Mzi and I sat, gazing at the floral couch, the muted TV. She returned, lugging a worn leather suitcase full of “evidence,” which she set down on the coffee table.

She pushed the papers toward me. “You can read them and return to me with questions,” she said, before she turned to Mzi. I heard her say to Mzi in Xhosa, “wrong information,” and after much jabbering, they came back to me.

“She is saying that she once passed a tour guide who was discussing the Amy Biehl case with white visitors, and she tried to correct his story, but he sent her away.”

“He just said,
‘Suka, suka,’ 
” Miss A said—
suka
, Xhosa for “get out of here.” “He treated me poorly. I didn’t want money, I only wanted to tell what really happened.”

“What did really happen?”

“Those boys were not PAC,” she said, the anger still there, rising up, raw. “They just killed a woman like that. A
woman
.”

The suitcase contained piles of yellowed newspaper clippings, bearing headlines from the time of Miss A’s testimony:

STATE CLOSES ITS CASE IN BIEHL TRIAL

MAN IN COURT OVER BIEHL MURDER

AMY WAS KICKED, STONED, STABBED

“MISS A” TELLS COURT OF BRUTAL ATTACK

One clipping was a slender article entitled
BIEHL: TRUTH MAY NOT EMERGE,
which detailed defense attorney Poswa’s contention that the witnesses had lied under oath about the danger they faced. He added that the witnesses—Misses A, B, and C—were “shrewd and dangerous” in giving selective evidence. Another clipping was a 9 x 11 article detailing the trial verdict:
THREE GUILTY IN KILLING AMY BIEHL
. Ntobeko, at that time lying low in the Eastern Cape, had not yet been turned in.

Each clipping was marked by hand with a date. The contact information for Detective Mike Barkhuizen, who had helped me track down Pikker, was written across one article. Pikker’s name and pager number were jotted across two separate clippings, for Pikker was Miss A’s handler, who drove her daily to court. He remembered these rides as pleasant and set to the tunes of Kenny G, while Miss A’s memories were less charitable: she recalled being hauled in and out of court, paid less than promised, and, while waiting to testify, held in a small, chilly cell, near the very men against whom she was giving evidence.

Miss A had also kept her official statement, dictated to Pikker a year after the attack and written out in a tidy, girlish cursive at odds with his physique and chosen profession. Pikker had spelled out the woman’s full name and age, and noted that she “states in Xhosa translated into English under Oath” the following:

1.  I am not prepared to give my address for security reasons.

2.  On Wednesday 93-08-25 at 16:10 I caught a train from Cape Town to Heideveld station. At Langa station when the train stopped, a whole lot of youths mainly males got on the train. They were very rowdy. I heard them talking about a cooldrink truck which they had just burnt in Langa. I got off at Heideveld station, and this group of youths also got off at this station. They were singing but I can’t remember what they were singing. I walked a short distance in front of them and proceeded in the direction NY1, Guguletu. As we approached NY1, I saw a truck approach towards us traveling along NY1. The group of youths started picking up stones and bricks from the grounds of the Apostolic Church in NY1 and attempted to throw these at the truck, but they missed as the truck passed. I saw then a beige Mazda 323 coming up from behind the truck and this group started stoning it with the bricks and stones. I then saw that some of the members of this group had pocket knives in their hands. The stoning took place in front of the Caltex garage on the corners of NY1 and NY132. I saw how the bricks smashed the windscreen and the driver, a white woman, was bleeding from the head. The car stopped and she got out and ran in the direction of No 32 or 31. A woman named Pamela tryed to assist her but the group of youths forced Pamela away. I could see this white woman was confused, and she ran in the direction of the garage. The group was shouting “One settler—one bullit.” Some of the group chased after this woman, and a girl tripped her. This girl lives in NY123 (number unknown). The white woman stumbled and fell on the grass near the garage fence. A person I know as Ntobeko Peni, NY111, No 4, jumped on this woman with his feet and the woman screamed. Peni had a brick in his hand. A youth I know by sight who lives at NY1 No 62, stabbed the woman once on the left side with a knife he had in his hand. Another person I know as Easy, of NY111 (number unknown—thirty-something) stabbed the woman at her legs. Peni hit the woman with the brick on her head. There were quite a few people around her and there was a lot of movement and I couldn’t see everything. Some left her alone and ran back to the car. The other occupants of the car which I noticed, was an African woman and a Moslem guy. They ran to the garage when the attack started. The group was taking things out of the car and they also turned the car on its side. I saw a person running away from the car with a leather jacket and a black bag. It looked as if there were books in the bag. I heard somebody calling for matches, but the police arrived and this group ran away. I stayed there until the car was towed away. The police put the car back on its wheels, and also took out the remaining things in the car. Nobody attacked the car from the time the police came to the garage.

3.  I know and understand the contents of the above declaration, I have no objection to taking the prescribed oath and I consider the oath to be binding on my conscience.

Guguletu

94/08/31

18:40

Miss A guided me and Mzi through the day. We walked from her house to the murder site. The wind blew fierce, but the day was bright.

“Here they are singing,” Miss A said, pointing to the spot where the road leading from Heideveld station met NY1. Today, a cherry-red spaza shop operated out of a shipping container there, advertising phone cards and Coca-Cola. Behind it, cordoned off by a chain link fence, sat some of the fading old hostels. Children played at the elementary school where the Amy Biehl Foundation operated its programs.

“They start throwing stones they took from a pile and she was running, confused about which way to go. They are after her. She lay down there, where that guy’s sitting.” The old man who camped by Amy’s cross was, as always, sprawled on the pavement with his dogs. Linda Biehl called him Amy’s Angel, since nobody knew his name or his purpose for returning day in and day out to that spot. Once, when I asked him why he sat there, he said that he was employed by the foundation as security. “Protection,” he mumbled.

“The police come this way, make a U-turn, drop her in the van, take her to the police station. The boys were dispersing and then they tried to turn her car and then they jumped the gates of the houses to get away.” She pointed at a pale green house that advertised
BABS SALOON: SPECIALIZE IN EYELASHES * NALS * PEDICURE MENICURE TWIST AND STYLE EYE BROUZE WAXING
. The perpetrators had hopped over the back fences to flee the scene.

“It didn’t even take half an hour. Before it was white, this wall. It rained and the rain cleaned the blood, there was a lot of blood. After, maybe for an hour, my friends and I talk about that thing and then after six I just went to the police station.”

We walked slowly over to the Gugulethu police station, where the men behind the desk agreed to allow us to inspect the driveway area. Miss A led us to the area where Amy’s body had lain shrouded beneath a blanket. “Then I go to the charge office, then I saw Rhodes, then I called Rhodes, then I told him who I saw was involved.”

“Why did you tell him?” I said. “Talking to the police in the townships is dangerous.”

“Was not about me. Was just that picture of that woman, crying for help but nobody can help.”

I asked Miss A to show me where she had stood on NY1. She positioned herself by a crumbling gray home, set diagonally across the street from the Caltex. I measured it as thirty-nine paces away, though the criminal case judge had said Miss A was standing only six paces from the scene of the crime. It would have been easy enough, standing at such a distance, to mistake one man for another, especially if they looked alike, especially if both were swept up in the teeming mob, especially if there were hundreds of people on the street. And Amy and the boys ran away from the car, and away from where Miss A had been standing. To keep up with the action, and to keep a really good eye on what was unfolding, Miss A would have had to quicken her pace, perhaps to a run, to follow the group. In a tumble of people, in the chaos of that moment, and from a distance, could a bystander really have made out all the distinct features of the members of a fast-moving crowd engaged in a violent activity?

“Did you know that Easy had a little brother?” I asked.

“No, I don’t know his little brother,” Miss A said, looking at me hard. “I only know Easy. But I
know
Easy.”

As we headed back to Miss A’s house, where Mzi and I would collect my car, we began chatting. Miss A revealed that she had been missing her long intestine and rectum since a 2003 operation. Now all she could eat was bread, peanut butter, and bananas. The operation, she explained without any apparent emotion, was the result of an octopus living in her stomach, which the doctors had removed and placed in a glass. Such otherworldly happenings were quite common in South African hospitals, she noted gravely.

“If you are an African person, they jump on you because they know they find a lot of things in the African people. A snake in the leg. An octopus, black, in the belly. A frog in the stomach. It depends where it was installed. It’s witchcraft, black magic. If you can stay here in the township with the African people, you will see terrible things. Things you can’t believe.”

“So you would like me to tell my side of the story, of that special incident?” Pamela asked.

Pamela had been mentioned, by first name only, in court transcripts of Miss A’s testimony, but she herself had never spoken of what she’d seen that day. She’d refused to divulge anything to the authorities, and had been quite cross at Miss A for dragging her into the whole mess. For this reason, Miss A had feigned not knowing where Pamela was these days. “She’s always away, playing African drums, so you can’t talk to her.”

Miss A claimed that she had approached Misses B and C for me, and that they had refused to be interviewed; I had no further information with which to track them down. Mzi and I spent a day knocking on doors down the block, but nobody ever confessed to witnessing the crime. Still, Mzi mulled over Miss A’s characterization of Pamela, and finally recalled that a woman named Pam, who indeed played African drums, lived just off NY1. That’s how we found her.

“Molo, mama,” Mzi said when we pulled up. A stocky older woman stood in the yard. He explained our purpose in long-winded Xhosa, as the woman listened silently and intently until he had finished. Then she nodded her assent and called a younger woman, who came outside. They opened the gate and extended their hands: the older woman was Eunice, and the younger her daughter, Pamela.

“Come inside, sisi, bhuti, and we can talk,” Eunice said.

While Eunice busied herself in the kitchen, Pamela led us into a sitting room, which boasted wall-to-wall carpeting covered by two rugs. On the television, a black American judge was presiding over a couple in a courtroom feud. Pamela was a woman of forty with her black hair in a short bob. Judging from old photographs, her face had barely changed in twenty years: only a little rounder, a little more worn. Because the day was a holiday, she was hanging out at home in a red terry-cloth robe.