Zulu (26 page)

Maia's friend had been
phanding
since she'd arrived in Manenberg five years earlier, and had shared the bed of a local dealer, a permanent resident. Thanks to him, Ntombi didn't have a cement bunk bed in an overcrowded dormitory but a real room, with a mattress, a door with a lock, and a modicum of privacy.

Ntombi's hostel was run by a heavy-lidded colored who was as friendly as an oil tanker. Neuman left him looking at the school exercise book that served as a register. They stepped over the people sleeping in the corridor and made their way to Room 12.

Ntombi was waiting for them by the light of a candle, dressed in a close-fitting bright red dress. She was a round, well-built colored woman, with tired skin. Once the introductions were over, she sat Maia and Neuman down on the bed and offered them an orange-colored drink from her icebox, before tackling the subject that had brought them.

Ntombi had met Sam Gulethu five years earlier, when her destiny had led her to Manenberg. Ntombi was young at the time, not yet twenty, a country girl who couldn't tell the difference between a “boyfriend” and a habitual rapist. Gulethu had taken her under his wing, and they'd slept in different places, depending on what he was dealing. He boasted of belonging to a gang, but she didn't want to know about that, all she wanted was to survive. Gulethu was weird. He liked to be called Mtagaat, the Sorcerer, as if he had gifts, but mainly he came across as sick.

“He hated everyone,” Ntombi said. “Especially women. He beat me all the time. For no reason at all. Or at least . . .”

Ntombi left the sentence unfinished.

“Why did he beat you?” Neuman asked.

“He was crazy. He would say all kinds of things. He said I was possessed by the
ufufuyane
.”

The endemic disease that affected young Zulu girls and, in the terminology used, caused them to be “out of control” sexually. A paranoid delusion that seemed to fit what they knew of Gulethu's character.

“You're not Zulu,” he said.

“No, but I'm a woman. That was enough for him.”

Her eyes wandered over the skirting board, as if the wolf was prowling in the room.

“Was he jealous? Was that why he beat you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No. I could tell him anything, he didn't care. But he'd made up his mind I had the young girls' disease, and that was what he punished me for. He'd get these tempers, really bad tempers, and he'd beat me with whatever he could find. Bicycle chains, sticks, iron bars.”

Nicole. Kate. Whites or coloreds, he didn't care.

“Did he make you do drugs?”

“No.”

“Did he do drugs himself?”

“He smoked
dagga
,” Ntombi replied. “He also drank, with the others. I preferred to keep out of their way when they drank.”

“The other members of the gang?”

“Yes.”

“Where were they from? Abroad?”

“Mostly they were from the local
shebeen
.”

Neuman nodded. Maia, sitting next to him, hadn't batted an eyelid.

“Did Gulethu have a ritual?” he asked. “Particular things he did when he beat you? Things to do with
sangomas
, or Zulu customs?”

Ntombi turned to her friend, who gave her an encouraging look. She stood up and, by the light of the candle, took off her dress.

She was wearing white undergarments, and there were nasty scars on her stomach, waist, buttocks, and thighs. The scars were purple and raised, and ran, strangely, in straight lines.

Neuman's face clouded over. “How did you get those marks?”

“Barbed wire. He'd tie it around me.”

“Gulethu?”

He remembered Nicole, the scratches on her arms—rusted iron, according to Tembo.

“Yes,” she said. “He'd tell me to strip, and he'd tie me up with barbed wire. The
ufufuyane
.” She shuddered. “He said I was possessed. That if I screamed, he'd kill me. He'd leave me like that, on the ground, and he'd call me names—whore, bitch. Then he'd beat me.”

Maia sat impassively on the bed—she'd also met a few crazy men in her time.

Ntombi shivered in the middle of the room, but Neuman had stopped looking at her. Gulethu had tried to tie up Nicole with barbed wire, but she wasn't as far gone as he'd anticipated. She'd defended herself, so he'd beaten her to death.

Ntombi put her dress back on, looking anxiously toward the door as if any minute now her boyfriend was going to come in.

“Did he often lose his temper like that?”

“Every time he got aroused,” Ntombi replied. “And he always used barbed wire. That was his thing, the filthy pervert. The others didn't know. He said that if I told them, he'd tie me to a car and drag me through the township. I believed him.”

“Did he rape you?”

Ntombi laughed. “Oh, no! There was no risk of that.”

“Why?” Neuman asked, frowning.

“Gulethu was a mule,” she said, scornfully.

A mule, in township slang, was someone who refused all contact with the opposite sex. Neuman felt a pang in his heart. Gulethu beat women, but he didn't touch them. He was afraid of them. He would never have raped Kate. Her death had been stage-managed.

 

 *

 

Janet Helms had followed up on Brian's lead.

Frank Debeer, the ATD branch manager, was a former
kitskonstable
, one of those policemen trained in three weeks during apartheid to swell the ranks of the vigilantes. After the regime had come to an end, Debeer had been involved with various private police forces, and for the last three years had been running the Hout Bay branch of ATD, one of the most successful security companies—property surveillance, personal protection—with branches throughout the country. The Pinzgauer parked in the garage in Hout Bay matched the description of the suspect vehicle, and Debeer, caught unawares, had admitted being out on patrol that night.

Janet was as good as any hacker around at getting past security systems. What she was doing was illegal, but Epkeen had given her a free hand. She hacked into ATD's computer system and, after a labyrinthine journey through the technological jungle, managed to obtain a list of ATD's shareholders and examine their bank accounts.

The dividends were distributed among half a dozen banks, in other words, the same number as the accounts whose numbers she had acquired. Here, too, the operation was illegal, the results uncertain, but she'd been right. One of the Hout Bay numbers corresponded to the offshore account that had rented the house at Muizenberg.

Tax evasion? Secret funds in a tax haven to finance covert operations? The ATD dividends were transferred via a South African bank, First National—the very same one that had started the anti-crime campaign. A name appeared: Joost Terreblanche.

Janet continued her research, but there wasn't much information available. Terreblanche was a former colonel in the army, who had taken early retirement when Mandela was elected, and didn't even seem to be living in South Africa anymore. There was an address in Johannesburg, but that was four years old, and after that the trail petered out. It was all a question of method, though. Janet switched her attention to the intelligence services and, once again illicitly, gained access to the army records.

These were more specific. Joost Terreblanche had served in the province of KwaZulu during the apartheid era, as a colonel in the 77th battalion, a unit that recruited and trained men for operations in the Bantustans. Frank Debeer had been a
kitskonstable
in the same battalion.

She searched through the registers, the files, the commissions. After a while, a name came up on the screen. A sinister name. Wouter Basson.

 

 

 

W
outer Basson (born July 6, 1950). Cardiologist and chemist. Brigadier general and private doctor to President Pieter Botha. Begins his career in 1984, when, fearing a Communist biochemical attack, General Viljoen, head of South African defense, develops a special unit for Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW). Code name: Project Coast.

Wouter Basson is asked to set up a military laboratory at Roodeplast, in the suburbs of Pretoria. With the threat of Mandela and his program (one man, one vote), the authorities realize that the demographics are against them. Basson recruits two hundred scientists, given the task by the CCB (Civil Cooperation Bureau) of developing chemical weapons—sugar containing salmonella, cigarettes containing anthracene, beer containing thallium, chocolate containing cyanide, whisky containing colchicine, and deodorant containing S. typhimurium—with the aim of eliminating anti-apartheid militants, not only in South Africa but also in Mozambique, Swaziland, and Namibia. (Number of victims still unknown.) Basson pursues his secret research and comes up with a deadly molecule, sensitive to the melanin in black people's skin pigmentation. Carries out studies on the spreading of epidemics in the African population, mass sterilization of black women through the water supply, etc. Despite signing treaties on the non-proliferation of biological and chemical weapons, and despite the anti-apartheid embargo, the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Switzerland, France, Iraq, and Libya cooperate in the laboratory's programs until 1990, when the new president, De Klerk, calls a halt to the production of chemical agents and orders them to be destroyed.

Project Coast is dismantled in 1993, and an internal inquiry is held into Basson's activities, but in 1995 he is hired by the Mandela government to work with Transnet, a company specializing in transportation and infrastructure, before joining the armed forces medical unit as a surgeon.

In 1996, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Desmond Tutu investigates the activities of the security forces in the field of biological and chemical weapons. Basson tries to leave South Africa, and is arrested in Pretoria, carrying large quantities of ecstasy and a number of confidential documents. He is charged not only with tax fraud and drug production on a massive scale but also with some sixty murders and attempted murders, the intended victims including such high-profile figures as Nelson Mandela, and Rev. Frank Chikane, adviser to the future President Mbeki.

1998: Basson, dubbed Doctor Death, appears before the Commission. Refuses to ask for amnesty. Sixty-seven of the charges against him are accepted, including possession of drugs, drug trafficking, fraud, 229 murders and attempted murders, and theft. The prosecution presents 153 witnesses, including ex-officers from the special forces, who tell stories of opponents anaesthetized or poisoned and thrown out of planes into the sea. The trial drags on.

1999: Presiding Judge Hartzenberg, brother of the president of the South African Conservative Party that was in office during the apartheid regime, reduces the number of charges to 46.

2001: Basson presents his defense, claiming that his actions were on the level. Several military figures from the apartheid era speak in support of him, including General Viljoen, former head of the high command, now an Afrikaner nationalist politician, and Magnus Malan, Minister of Defense during the events in question. Three CD-roms listing Basson's experiments suddenly disappear.

2002: Basson, who has pleaded guilty throughout the longest trial in the country's legal history, is acquitted by Judge Hartzenberg.

The South African State appeals to the Supreme Court, which refuses a new trial. Wouter Basson is safe from further prosecution. “A dark day for South Africa,” Desmond Tutu declares.

Today, Basson lives in a well-to-do suburb of Pretoria and is again working as a cardiologist, with a position at the Academic Hospital.

 

NOTE: Joost Terreblanche, colonel in the 77th battalion, took part in Project Coast until 1993, when it was dismantled. He was in charge of equipment delivery, and the maintenance and security of the research sites.

 

Neuman put Janet Helms's report down on the table and looked at Brian. The three of them had arranged to meet in a bar in the Waterfront, the shopping complex in the city's harbor area. Close by the terrace, a group of “ethnic” con artists were joylessly playing a selection of tunes tailor-made for the sandal-clad tourists. Neuman hadn't said why they were meeting here rather than at headquarters. Janet had showed up without asking any questions, in her uniform that was too tight for her, files under her arm.

“What do you think?”

“Same as you, Big Chief,” Brian replied. “We've been led down the garden path.” He blew out cigarette smoke, one eye on the document supplied by Janet. “The Muizenberg house, the Pinzgauer at the ADT branch, the offshore account. Sounds like Terreblanche is back on duty.”

“Yes. Apparently the aim of the operation isn't to get young people on drugs, as it was in the apartheid days, but quite simply to eliminate them. The
tik
base to hook the user, the virus to kill him.”

“Basson's done all this before,” Brian said. “Do you think the old bastard's still involved?”

On the other side of the table, her nose in a milkshake that wasn't going to make things any better for her, Janet Helms was asking herself the same question.

“No,” Neuman said. “Basson knows he's too closely watched. But Terreblanche is in on it. He and his accomplices.”

“Debeer?”

“Among others.”

The seal that had been basking on the edge of the jetty for the last half hour finally dived into the harbor, to the delight of the crowds. The waiter asked Brian to put out his cigarette—the terrace was a non-smoking area—but Brian sent him packing.

“O.K.,” he said. “Let's assume Terreblanche and his cronies produced a fatal drug, and were using Gulethu's gang to sell it on the peninsula. Let's assume the Muizenberg house was their hideout, that the gang was given the job of providing security, and that the premises were cleaned out when we got too close, leaving a few bodies in the cellar to put us off the scent. Let's also assume that Simon and his gang were minions in the operation.
Tik
or Mandrax would have been enough to keep them on a leash. What was the point in giving them this new crap, too?”

“To limit their life expectancy,” Neuman said. “The incubation period is too long for it to have been detected in Nicole or Kate, but the surfer in False Bay and Simon contracted the same virus several weeks ago. A strain of AIDS, which was added to the drug. That means all the people who took it are now infected. Unless they're treated soon, they have only a few months to live.”

“Which also means it's not the young whites on the coast who were the targets, but the kids in the township.”

“So it seems.”

Janet Helms was taking notes in her notebook, her lips sugary from the milkshake.

Brian swore into his espresso. “And where the hell's Terreblanche?”

“For the moment,” Neuman said, “nowhere.”

“I didn't find anything in the SAP files,” Janet said, “or in social security or the health service. Just a note in the army records.”

“How can that be?”

“No idea,” she said. “Terreblanche part-owns a number of South African companies, but hasn't lived here for years. At the same time, it's impossible to track him down abroad. I've looked in the army records but there's practically nothing about him. Just his service record and the fact that he was part of Doctor Death's Project Coast.”

“We could at least try talking to the Attorney General, get him to authorize an investigation,” Brian suggested.

“He'd send us packing,” Neuman said. “We don't have anything, Brian. Just information obtained illegally and twenty-year-old data on a case that's completely closed. Purchasing a house via an offshore account and patrolling in a Pinzgauer on the night of a murder aren't indictable crimes. We need evidence.”

Through loudspeakers, a recorded voice advised tourists not to venture beyond the gates of the complex, as if a horde of gangsters were waiting to rob them.

Brian lit another cigarette. “I can try leaning on Debeer,” he said.

“That would risk alerting Terreblanche,” Neuman objected. “I don't want him to get away. Janet,” he said, turning to the milkshake addict, “I need a list of everyone who collaborated with Basson on Project Coast, with their addresses and phone numbers, all the info you can find. Terreblanche may have recruited some of his former chemists into this business. Look in the special services files, the army records. I don't care how you do it.”

Janet nodded over the creamy leftovers. She would hack into the Pentagon's computers if he asked her.

“Can you get into computer networks without leaving a trace?” he asked.

“Er . . . yes. As long as you have the codes and a secure computer, it can be done. But it's risky, captain.”

All the same, she was putting her career on the line.

“There've been too many leaks in this case,” Neuman said. “If Kate Montgomery was killed in such a way as to make it look like Gulethu's work and get the case declared closed, that means Terreblanche and his accomplices had access to the postmortem reports. Or even our own files.”

“I thought they were secure?” Brian said.

“So were the army records Janet looked at.”

Brian made an exasperated gesture. There was corruption at all levels of society, from the individual buying stolen equipment on a street corner to the ruling elite. Tax evasion, fraud, financial irregularities, fiddling of accounts—two-thirds of the leaders were implicated.

“Janet, do you feel up to it?”

She nodded with almost military stiffness. “Yes, captain.”

Playing at being a soldier.

“O.K. I want you to concentrate on Project Coast. Brian, take a look at the ADT office in Hout Bay. See if you can find something, papers, anything. The four-by-four wasn't in the vicinity of the Muizenberg house for no reason, and they took the risk of leaving those bodies in the cellar because they were trying to hide something else.”

Brian followed his reasoning. “Their traces.”

“Presumably. Covered up by all the blood and shit.”

Janet abandoned what was left of her milkshake.

“What do you think was in the house?” Brian asked. “A drug factory?”

“That's for you to find out.” He gave Brian a knowing look. “Be discreet. I'll take care of the rest. Let's meet again tomorrow morning, same place. Shall we say eight o'clock? Until then, let's keep communication to a minimum.”

Neuman needed Krüge's authorization for a large-scale raid in the township. If, as he believed, Gulethu had been sacrificed during the suicide attack on the
shebeen
, then Mzala and the Americans were accomplices. They couldn't be arrested without a ruckus.

The last ferry from Robben Island was returning on the evening breeze by the time they finished working out the final details of their plan. Janet Helms was the first to leave, school exercise book under her arm, heels clicking on the floor, off to look for her precious codes. Brian went to the bar to pay, and Neuman took advantage of his absence to make a call.

Zina picked up at the first ring. “So,” she laughed, “left your sarcophagus, did you?”

“Let's say I'm fond of my bandages. Am I disturbing you?”

“I'm going onstage in three minutes.”

“I won't be long.”

“We have time.”

“Not sure of that.”

“Why? Do you still think I'm a terrorist?”

“Yes—that's why you're going to help me.”

“So nicely put. Help you with what?”

“I'm looking for a man,” he said. “Joost Terreblanche, a former army colonel who's gone into the security business, with numbered accounts in tax havens and a fog of mystery surrounding his activities.”

Zina blew into the phone. “You're pissing me off, Ali.”

“Terreblanche has disappeared from our records, but I'm sure he's still in yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Inkatha's records.”

“I don't give a fuck about Inkatha.”

“That wasn't always the case.”

“I've given up politics! All I do now is dance and put together stupid powders for idiots like you, or hadn't you noticed?”

Dead kisses were raining on the deserted terrace.

“I need you,” he said.

“Not as much as I do,
Ali
.”

He kept glancing toward the entrance, where Brian might appear at any moment. He didn't want to be seen talking to her.

“Terreblanche worked with Doctor Basson,” Neuman resumed in a low voice, “but never testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Someone's protecting him. His name has virtually disappeared from our records. Inkatha must surely have kept a file on him, with information we don't have access to.”

“I don't belong to Inkatha anymore,” Zina said.

“But you still have contacts. One of your musicians is the brother of Joe Ntsabula, who's close to Chief Buthelezi, and Joe is an old friend of yours, isn't he?”

She said nothing.

“Terreblanche has a base somewhere,” he insisted. “Either abroad, or here in South Africa.”

“Is that all you could find to trap me?”

“You said the word ‘trap,' not me. It's Terreblanche's skin I want, not yours.”

“Really?”

He sensed her hesitation. “This'll be strictly between the two of us,” he assured her.

She brooded at the other end of the phone. The stage manager was making panic-stricken signs in the doorway of the dressing room—it was time.