The White Lioness (45 page)

He had passed through Tingsryd and turned off towards Ronneby when a moose loomed up on the road in the gathering dusk. For one desperate moment, with the brakes screeching in his ears, he was convinced he had reacted too late. He would run smack into the enormous bull moose, and his safety belt was not even fastened. But all of a sudden the moose shied away, and without knowing how, Wallander shot past and did not even touch it.

He stopped at the side of the road and sat there, his heart beating madly, his breath coming in gasps, feeling ill. When he had calmed down he got out of the car and stood motionless in the silent forest. A hair's breadth from death yet again, he thought. I can't have any get-out-of jail-free cards left. He wondered why he did not feel jubilant at having been miraculously saved from being crushed by the bull moose. What he did feel was more like a vague guilty conscience. The bottomless depression that had taken possession of him that morning returned. What he most wanted was to leave the car where it was, walk into the forest and disappear without trace. Not to disappear for ever, but for long enough to recover his equilibrium, to fight off the dizziness that had taken hold of him as a result of all he had been through these last weeks. But he got back into the car and kept on driving, now with his safety belt fastened. He came to the main road to Kristianstad, and turned off to the west. He stopped at an all-night cafe and ordered a cup of coffee. Some long-distance lorry drivers were sitting in silence at a table and a group of youths were whooping it up around a games machine. Wallander did not touch his coffee until it was cold, but he did drink it in the end, and went back to his car.

Shortly before midnight he turned into the yard outside his father's house. Linda came out onto the steps to greet him. He smiled wearily and said everything was fine. Then he asked if there had been a telephone call from Kalmar. She shook her head. The only calls had been from journalists who had found out her grandfather's telephone number.

"Your flat has been repaired already," she said. "You can move back in."

"That's great," he said.

He wondered if he ought to call Kalmar, but he was too tired. Tomorrow would do.

They sat up late, talking. But Wallander said nothing about the feeling of melancholy weighing down on him. For the moment, that was something he wanted to keep to himself.

Tsiki took the express bus from Kalmar to Stockholm. He got to Stockholm just after 4 p.m. His flight to London would leave at 7 p.m. He looked everywhere but could not find the airport bus, so he took a taxi to Arlanda. The driver was suspicious of foreigners and demanded the fare in advance. He had handed over a 1,000 kronor note and settled down in the corner behind the driver. Tsiki had no idea that every emigration officer in Sweden was on the lookout for him. All he knew was that he should leave the country as a Swedish citizen, Leif Larson, a name he had very quickly learned to pronounce. He was completely calm, as he trusted Konovalenko. His taxi had taken him over the bridge, and he could see something had happened, but he did not doubt that Konovalenko had disposed of the man who had turned up in the garden that morning.

Tsiki took his change when they got to Arlanda, shaking his head when asked if he wanted a receipt. He went into the departure hall, checked in, and stopped to buy some English newspapers on the way to passport control.

If he had not stopped at the newspaper stand, he would have been arrested at passport control. But during those very minutes he took choosing and paying for his newspapers, the passport officers changed shifts. One of the new ones went to the toilet. The other, Kerstin Anderson, had arrived for work at Arlanda very late. Her car wouldn't start and she turned up at the last moment. She was conscientious and ambitious and would normally have been early enough to read through all the notices that had arrived that day, lists of people to look out for, as well as the lists still current from previous days. As it was, she had no time to do so, and Tsiki went through passport control with his Swedish passport and smiling face, no problem. The door closed behind him just as Kerstin Anderson's colleague came back from the toilet.

"Is there anything special to look out for this evening?" Kerstin Anderson said.

"A black South African," her colleague said.

Kerstin remembered the African who had just gone through. But he was Swedish. It was 10 p.m. before the supervising officer checked with the officers to make sure that all was in order.

"Don't forget the African," he said. "We have no idea what he's called, or what passport he'll be travelling on."

Kerstin Anderson could feel a sudden tightening of her stomach. "He was a South African, surely?" she said.

"Presumably," the supervisor said. "But that won't tell us what nationality he'll claim when he leaves Sweden." She told him immediately what had happened a few hours earlier. After some hectic activity, they established that the man with the Swedish passport had taken the British Airways flight to London at 7 p.m.

The aeroplane had taken off on time. It had already landed in London, and the passengers had been through customs. Tsiki had used his time in London to tear his Swedish passport into small pieces and flush it down a lavatory. Now he was a Zambian citizen, Richard Motombwane. Since he was in transit, he had not been through passport control with either his Swedish or his Zambian passport. Moreover, he had two separate tickets. He had no check-in baggage, so the girl in Sweden had only seen his ticket to London. At the transit desk in Heathrow he showed his ticket to Lusaka. He had left the first ticket and the boarding card on the plane from Stockholm.

At 11.30 p.m. the Zambia Airways DC-10 Nkowazi took off for Lusaka. Tsiki arrived there at 6.30 on Saturday morning. He took a taxi into town and paid for a South African Airways ticket for the afternoon flight to Johannesburg. It had been booked some days earlier. This time he used his own name. He returned to the airport, checked in, and had lunch in the departure hall restaurant. He boarded at 3 p.m., and shortly before 5 p.m. his plane landed at Jan Smuts Airport outside Johannesburg. He was met by Malan, who drove him straight to Hammanskraal. He showed Tsiki the deposit receipt for the half-million rand which constituted the second to last part of the payment. Then he left him on his own, saying he would be back the next day. Meanwhile, Tsiki was not to leave the house and compound. When Tsiki was alone, he took a bath. He was tired, but contented. The journey had passed without problems. The only thing that concerned him was what had happened to Konovalenko. He was, strangely, less curious about the identity of the person he was being paid so much to shoot. Could any individual be worth so much money, he asked himself. But before midnight he had settled down between cool sheets and fallen asleep.

On the morning of Saturday, May 23, two things happened more or less simultaneously. Kleyn was set free in Johannesburg. Scheepers told him that he could expect to be called in for further questioning.

He stood by a window, watching Kleyn and the lawyer Kritzinger making their way to a car. Scheepers had asked for him to be watched around the clock. He took it for granted Kleyn was expecting that, but thought it would at least force him to be passive.

He had managed to extract no information from Kleyn that gave concrete weight to the suspicions surrounding the Committee, but Scheepers now felt certain that the real scene of the assassination was to be Durban on July 3, and not Cape Town on June 12. Every time he had come back to the notebook Kleyn displayed signs of nervousness, and Scheepers did not believe it was possible for anybody to fake reactions such as sweating and shaking hands.

At about the same time as Kleyn was getting into his lawyer's car, Kurt Wallander arrived at the Ystad police station. He received the congratulations and good wishes of those colleagues who were at work that Saturday morning. He smiled his lopsided smile and mumbled something inaudible in response. When he got to his office he closed the door. His whole body felt like he had been raving drunk the night before. He had feelings of remorse. His hands were shaking. He was sweating. It took him nearly ten minutes to summon the strength to call the Kalmar police. Blomstrand passed on the disappointing news that the African they were looking for had almost certainly left the country the night before, from Arlanda.

"How is that possible?" Wallander said, indignantly.

"Carelessness and bad luck," Blomstrand said, explaining what had happened.

"Why the hell do we bother?" Wallander said.

When their conversation was over, he left the receiver off the hook. He opened the window and stood listening to a bird singing in a tree outside. It was going to be a hot day. It would soon be June. The whole month of May had passed without him really noticing that the trees were in leaf and flowers were starting to grow. The scents of early summer were in the air.

He went back to his desk. There was something he could not postpone until the following week. He fed a sheet of paper into his typewriter, took down his English dictionary, and started slowly to write a report for his unknown colleagues in South Africa. He set out what he knew about the planned assassination and described in detail what had happened to Victor Mabasha. When he got to the end of Mabasha's life, he inserted another sheet of paper into the typewriter. He continued typing for an hour, and finished with the most important information: that a man by the name of Sikosi Tsiki was Mabasha's replacement. Most regrettably he had managed to slip out of Sweden. It could be assumed that he was on his way back to South Africa. He gave his name, found the telex number to the Swedish section of Interpol, and invited them to get in touch with him if they needed any more information. He gave the secretary instructions to send it urgently to South Africa.

Then he went home. He crossed the threshold again for the first time since the explosion. He felt like a stranger in his own flat. The furniture that had been damaged by the smoke was covered by plastic sheeting. He pulled a chair out, and sat down. The atmosphere was stifling.

He wondered how he was going to come to terms with everything that had happened.

At about this time his telex arrived in Stockholm. A temp, not fully familiar with procedures, was instructed to send the message to South Africa. Because of technical problems and careless checking, the second page of Wallander's report was never sent. And so the South African police were informed that night, May 23, that a hitman by the name of Victor Mabasha was on his way to South Africa. The police in the Johannesburg section of Interpol were puzzled by this message. It was unsigned, and was obviously written by someone for whom English was not their first language, and perhaps that explained why the message ended as it did. Nevertheless, they had been requested by Inspector Borstlap to send all telex messages from Sweden to his office. As the telex arrived late on Saturday, Borstlap did not receive it until Monday morning. He called Scheepers immediately.

They now had confirmation of what was in the letter signed by the secretive Steve. The man they were looking for was called Victor Mabasha. Scheepers, too, thought that the telex was oddly abrupt and was concerned that it was unsigned. But since it was merely a confirmation of something he already knew about, he let the matter rest.

From now on all resources were concentrated on the hunt for Victor Mabasha. Every border post was put on standby. They were ready.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The day he was released, Kleyn called Malan from his house in Pretoria. He had to assume his telephones were tapped, but he had another line nobody knew about, apart from the NIS special intelligence officers in charge of security-sensitive communications centres throughout South Africa. There were several telephone lines that did not exist officially.

Malan was surprised. He did not know Kleyn had been released. As there was every reason to suspect Malan's telephone also was tapped, Kleyn used an agreed code word to prevent Malan from saying anything that should not be mentioned on the telephone. The call was camouflaged as a wrong number. Kleyn asked for Horst, then apologised and rang off. Malan looked up his special code list to check the meaning. Two hours after the call, he was to make contact from a specified public phone box to another one.

Kleyn was eager to find out what had been happening while he was under arrest. Malan must also be clear that he would continue to take main responsibility. Kleyn did not doubt his ability to shake off shadows. Even so it was too risky for him to make personal contact with Malan or to visit Hammanskraal, where Tsiki presumably already was or shortly would be.

It took Kleyn very few minutes to locate the car tailing him. He knew there would also be another car in front, but he did not worry about that for the moment. They would be curious when he stopped to make a call from a phone box. It would be reported, but they would never find out what was said.

Kleyn was surprised that Tsiki had arrived already. He was also wondering why there was no word from Konovalenko. In their plan was an agreement to inform Konovalenko that Tsiki had indeed arrived. That check should be no later than three hours after the assumed arrival time. Kleyn gave Malan some brief instructions. They also agreed to call from two other phone boxes the next day. Kleyn tried to detect whether Malan seemed especially anxious. But he could hear nothing beyond Malan's usual slightly nervous way of expressing himself.

He went to have lunch at one of the most expensive restaurants in Pretoria. He was pleased at the thought of the reaction when his shadow handed his expenses to Scheepers. He could see the man at a table at the far end of the dining room. Kleyn had already decided that Scheepers was unworthy of continuing to live in a South Africa which, within a year or so, would be well organised and faithful to its old ideals, created and then defended forever by a close community of Boers.

There were moments when Kleyn was assailed by the awful thought that the whole plan was doomed, yet that there was, after all, no turning back. But he soon recovered his self-control. It was just a moment of weakness, he told himself. I've allowed myself to be influenced by the negative approach South Africans of British origin have towards us
boere
. They know the real soul of the country is to be found in us, not in them, so they cherish this unholy envy.

He paid for his meal, smiled as he passed the table where his shadow was sitting, a small, overweight man sweating profusely. As he drove home he could see that he had a new shadow. When he had put his car away in the garage, he continued his methodical analysis of who could possibly have betrayed him and provided Scheepers with information.

He poured himself a little glass of port and sat down in the living room. He drew the curtains and switched off all the lights apart from a discreet lamp illuminating a painting. He always thought best in a dimly lit room.

The hours he had spent with Scheepers had made him hate the current regime more than ever. It was an intolerable humiliation for him, a superior, trusted, and loyal civil servant in the intelligence service, to be arrested under suspicion of subversive activities. What he was doing was the exact opposite of that. If it were not for what he and the Committee were doing in secret, the risk of national collapse would be real rather than imaginary. As he sipped his port, he no longer regarded the death of Mandela as an assassination, but as an execution in accordance with the unwritten constitution he represented.

There was another element that added to his irritation. It was clear to him from the moment that his trusted security guard on the President's personal staff called him, that somebody must have supplied Scheepers with information it should have been impossible for him to obtain. Someone close to Kleyn had betrayed him. He had to find out who it was, and quickly. What worried him was that Malan could not be excluded. Not he, nor any member of the Committee. Apart from these men there could possibly be two, or at most three, colleagues in NIS who could have decided, for whatever reason, to sell him down the river.

He sat in the darkness thinking about each of these men in turn, dredging his memory for clues. But he found none.

He worked from a process of intuition, facts and elimination. He asked himself who had anything to gain by exposing him, who disliked him so much that revenge could be worth the risk of being found out. He reduced the group of possibilities from 16 to eight, then started all over again, and each time there were fewer possible solutions. In the end, there was nobody. His question remained unanswered.

It was then he thought for the first time that perhaps it was Miranda. Only when there was no other possible culprit was he forced to accept that she too was a possibility. The very idea appalled him. It was impossible. Nevertheless, the suspicion was there, and he had no choice but to confront her with it. As he was certain she could not lie to him without his noticing, it would be resolved the moment he spoke to her. He must shake off his shadows within the next few days and visit her and Matilda in Bezuidenhout.

He put both his thoughts and his papers on one side, and devoted himself instead to his coins. Studying the beauty of the various coins and imagining their value always gave him a feeling of calm. He picked up an old, shiny, gold coin. It was an early Kruger rand, and had the same kind of timeless durability as the Afrikaner traditions. He held it up to the desk lamp and saw that it had acquired a small, almost invisible stain. He took out his neatly folded polishing cloth and rubbed the golden surface until the coin shone again.

He visited Miranda and Matilda in Bezuidenhout on Wednesday afternoon. As he did not want his shadows to follow him even as far as Johannesburg, he had decided to lose them while he was still in central Pretoria. A few simple manoeuvres were sufficient to shake off Scheepers's men. All the same, he kept a close eye on the rear-view mirror on the highway to Johannesburg. He also did a few circuits of the business centre, just to be sure he was not mistaken, before he turned into the streets that would take him to Bezuidenhout.

It was very unusual for him to visit them in the middle of the week, nor had he given them advance notice. It would be a surprise. Just before he got there, he stopped at a grocer's and bought food for dinner. It was about 5.30 p.m. by the time he turned into the street.

At first he thought his eyes were deceiving him. But it was so. He saw that the man on the pavement had come out of Miranda and Matilda's security gate. A black man.

He drew up at the curb and watched the man walking towards him on the other side of the road. He lowered the sun visor on each side of the windscreen so that he would not be recognised.

He knew who he was. It was a man he had been keeping under observation a long time. Although they had never managed to prove it, NIS were certain he belonged to a group in the most radical faction of the ANC, thought to be behind a number of bomb attacks on shops and restaurants. He used the aliases of Martin, Steve and Richard.

Kleyn watched the man walk past. His mind was in turmoil, and it took some time to recover. But there was no getting away from it: the suspicions he had refused to take seriously were now real. When he eliminated one after the other of his suspects and ended up with none at all, he had been on the right track. The only other possibility was Miranda. It was both true and inconceivable at the same time. For a moment he was overwhelmed by sorrow. Then he turned ice-cold. The temperature inside him fell as his fury grew, or so it seemed. In the twinkling of an eye, love turned to hate. It was aimed at Miranda, not Matilda: he regarded her as innocent, a second victim of her mother's treachery. He gripped the wheel tightly. He controlled his urge to drive up to the house, beat down the door, and look Miranda in the eye for the last time. He would not approach the house until he was utterly calm. Uncontrolled anger was a sign of weakness. That was something he had no desire to display in front of Miranda or her daughter.

Kleyn could not understand. What he did not understand angered him. He had dedicated his life to the fight against disorder. For him disorder included everything that was unclear. What he did not understand must be fought against, just as all other causes of society's increasing confusion and decay must be defeated.

He remained in his car for a long time. Darkness had fallen before he drove up to the security gates. He noticed a movement behind the curtains in the big living room window and then the gates swung open. He drove in and picked up the bags of supplies.

He smiled at her when she opened the door. There were moments, so short that he barely managed to notice them, when he wished it were all in the imagination. But now he knew what was true, and he needed to know what lay behind it.

The darkness inside made it difficult to read her expression.

"I thought I'd surprise you," he said.

"You've never done this before," she said.

It seemed to him her voice was rough and strange. He wished he could see her more clearly. Did she guess that he had seen the man leaving the house?

At that moment Matilda came out of her room. She looked at him without saying a word. She knows, he thought. She knows her mother has betrayed me. How will she be able to protect her except by staying silent?

He put down the bags of food and took off his jacket.

"I want you to leave," Miranda said.

He must have misheard her. He turned, his jacket still in his hand. "Are you asking me to go?"

"Yes."

He contemplated his jacket for a moment before letting it drop to the floor. Then he hit her, as hard as he could, right in the face. She lost her balance but not her consciousness. Before she could manage to scramble up off the floor, he took hold of her blouse and dragged her to her feet.

"You are asking me to leave," he said, breathing heavily. "If anybody is going to leave, it's you. But you aren't going anywhere."

He dragged her into the living room and flung her onto the sofa. Matilda moved to help her mother, but he shouted at her to stay back.

He sat down on a chair right in front of her. The darkness in the room suddenly made him furious. He leapt to his feet and switched on every light he could find. Then he saw she was bleeding from both her nose and her mouth. He sat down again and stared at her.

"A man came out of your house," he said. "A black man. What was he doing here?"

She did not answer. She was not even looking at him. Nor did she pay any attention to the blood dripping from her face.

It was a waste of time. Whatever she said or did, she had betrayed him. There was no going on. He did not know what he would do with her. He could not imagine a form of revenge that was harsh enough. He looked at Matilda. She still had not moved. Her face bore an expression he had never seen before. He could not say what it was. That made him insecure as well. Then he saw Miranda was looking at him.

"I want you to go now," she said. "And I don't want you ever to come and visit me again. This is your house. You can stay, and we'll move out."

She's challenging me, he thought. How dare she? He felt his rage rising again. He forced himself not to beat her again.

"No-one's leaving," he said. "But you will tell me what's going on."

"What do you want to know?"

"Who you've talked to. About me. What you've said. And why."

She looked him straight in the eye. The blood under her nose and on her chin had already congealed. "I've told them what I found in your pockets whenever you were sleeping here. I listened to what you said in your sleep, and I wrote it down. Maybe it was insignificant, but I hope it ruins you."

She spoke in that strange, rough voice. He realised that was her normal voice, and that the one she had used all those years had been a sham. Everything had been a sham.

"Where would you have been without me?" he said.

"Maybe dead," she said. "But maybe I'd have been happy."

"You'd have been living in the slums."

"Maybe we'd have helped to pull them down."

"You leave my daughter out of this."

"You are the father of my daughter, Jan Kleyn, but you do not have a child. You have nothing but your own ruin."

There was an ashtray on the table between them. Now that words were beyond him he grabbed it and flung it with all his might at her head. She managed to duck. The ashtray bounced onto the sofa beside her. He leapt up from his chair, shoved the table aside, took hold of the ashtray and held it over her head. At the same moment he heard a hissing noise, as if from an animal. He looked at Matilda, who had moved towards him. She was hissing through clenched teeth. He could not make out what she was saying, but he could see she had a gun in her hand.