We Are Not Such Things (24 page)

Every day in court, Pikker stared at the three men at the defense table: haughty Mongezi, who chewed a toothpick and wore sunglasses in court; Vusumzi, who anyone could see was struggling with intellectual disability and possibly a case of jailhouse tuberculosis; and Easy, small and uncomprehending and often racked with a cough. They kept nodding off during the proceedings, or they winked at female journalists, or they doodled on little sheets of paper.

At first, Pikker had believed they were part of a PAC-sanctioned protest, but after questioning them, he changed his mind. The accused, he decided, had simply found their way to a PAC student rally and subsequently gotten all riled up. And then they’d marched around the townships, making trouble.

The government and commercial trucks they had stopped? Sure, maybe the kids were sticking it to the white capitalists. “But also, if you stop a vehicle, you can plunder it,” Pikker observed. In Langa, on their way to the scene of Amy’s death in Gugulethu, many kids recalled stopping a furniture delivery truck, and those sofa sets, taken in 1993, were probably still sitting in somebody’s mother’s living room today. Easy had once guaranteed me as much, and we’d asked a neighbor of his to show us the items, but she scuttled away.

Amy, Pikker said, was not victimized by activists or great minds, but by a bunch of good-for-nothing low-level criminals. Once cornered in the holding cells, not one of them could articulate any ideology, as far as Pikker remembered. When he questioned them, he was surprised, and maybe even a little disappointed: it seemed that they had been far less intent on black liberation than they had been on causing chaos.

“Possibly I would have had some more respect if they had some intelligent agenda, but they weren’t politicians or trained or well read,” he said. “They were just bloody hooligans.”

Chaos was nothing new to Pikker. Crime pulsed through the townships, where everyday life was tinged with brutality. Why? The blacks, according to Pikker, displayed a particular “savagery.” He had watched people burn down an old man’s house because instead of striking against the bank, the old man had continued to pay his mortgage. He had seen a father receive the news of his son’s death with little surprise. Pikker rued the wretchedness of township life, but he did not connect it to his own actions. He could explain why police were reported to be laughing at dead bodies (“It’s a defense mechanism, not disrespect—if you take that stuff seriously on a daily basis, you’ll kill yourself”) but not how a black man might remain stony-faced while a white cop delivered news of his son’s death. He did not blame the violence on the apartheid government, nor did he believe that he had benefited from apartheid. To Pikker, the problems facing black South Africa were largely of their own making.

“They said we cheapened black lives, but it was a rude awakening,” he mused. “Nobody cheapened black lives like they did.”

Pikker also studied the Biehls from afar. He found them as alien as the black men he chased every day, perhaps more so. “The daughter’s killed. Although she’s basically on the other side of the fence from where I was, I felt she was following her heart and doing what she felt was right. And also in retrospect, she was doing a noble task. I put myself in the Biehls’ shoes, and I thought how devastating it must have been to lose a child. I think they then wanted to believe that what they saw here in South Africa justified the actions. If it were a bunch of hooligans that took their daughter’s life, it would have had less meaning. So they decided she died in political conflict, at the hands of freedom fighters. It was: ‘She died for the cause.’ To me, she didn’t die for a cause. However you want to highlight it, and whatever foundation you want to build up around it, she died in a senseless way. There was no point in it.”

Also, Pikker muttered sheepishly, the Biehls never bothered to thank him.

“You think they should have thanked you?”

“I felt it would have been in order, to appreciate my work. Although they didn’t know to what extent the sacrifices I made.”

“What were the sacrifices?”

“I ended up in the psychiatric ward. Twice.”

In fact, the Amy Biehl case marked the beginning of a terrible time in Pikker’s life. The government that employed him was crumbling, along with all the organizing principles of his life: his fraternity of cops, with a common purpose and a common enemy; a life of black-and-white and cut-and-dry. He was overworked and underpaid, transporting witnesses from the townships with no backup, walking into riots alone. Years later, he still reached for his gun if he heard a car backfire or a door slam.

Following the end of the Amy Biehl trial in October 1994, Pikker returned to his office. Mandela had been elected president six months earlier, and the government was being reshuffled. Pikker called his wife to tell her he was coming home, hung up the phone, and burst into hiccuping sobs. Two other officers eyed him uncertainly. He began to weep harder, a huge man bawling like a baby. His commander drove him home. Pikker walked into the house to find his wife watching TV.

“Help me,” he said.

She took him to the police doctor, who diagnosed him as having post-traumatic stress disorder, considered an “injury on duty.” He recovered at home for two weeks and then returned to the squad room—with a biweekly psychiatrist appointment as the only apparent lingering effect of his meltdown. Then, as he was wading back into work, the Amy Biehl case reemerged.

Though Easy and Linda had both claimed that Ntobeko—on the run and scared—told them that he had turned himself in, Pikker claimed that in fact one of Ntobeko’s family members gave the boy up. By January 1995, Pikker was preparing for Ntobeko’s trial. In the end, it was a speedy thing. A nineteen-year-old Ntobeko was tried in Afrikaans at a municipal court near Gugulethu. Chief prosecutor Nollie Niehaus sent his assistant Leon Nortier to make the case against Ntobeko, who was swiftly sentenced to eighteen years and shipped off to Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, a tangle of concrete buildings, guardhouses, and barbed wire set in the ritzy suburbs near the lush Tokai Forest and Constantiaberg Mountain and close to the current site of the fortresslike U.S. consulate.

Meanwhile, the police were also launching a gang investigation unit to combat the growing gang activity in the Cape Flats, and they wanted Pikker on that force. He was excellent at sitting before a judge and opposing bail, so he began to attend never-ending trials of gangsters. Case files again rose high on Pikker’s desk. The sunset clause allowed for a slow but steady integration of black, colored, and Indian employees, and as new workers arrived they began to rearrange the station’s layout. One day, Pikker returned from court to find that his desk had been moved into a corner. He rushed to his new space and began to search frantically for a small device his children had given him for Father’s Day: a wee television with a radio function and an attached calculator. He found it atop the detritus on his desk. The radio aerial was broken.

Pikker set the splintered gadget down and walked outside to have a cigarette. “I did my part,” he muttered, nonsensically. “They
promised
.”

A colleague, also having a smoke, studied him. The man had been confronting his own psychological issues, not unusual in members of the old guard. “Go phone your psychologist and make an emergency appointment,” the man ordered. “Go now.”

Within hours, Pikker was booked into a psychiatric institution. He’d handed over his service weapon and his vehicle. He switched off his pager for the first time in years and fell into a deep, unyielding sleep for three days. Then he cycled into a mind-numbing routine of eating, sleeping, evaluation, and medication. Initially they called his illness “burnout.”

Then one day, Pikker was reading a magazine when he came upon a profile of a man that the apartheid government had designated a terrorist. Pikker remembered that the man had been categorized as “shoot to kill”—if you caught him, you were to take him out, no questions asked. Now, it seemed, this very man was a colonel in the new South African Police. Pikker tore out the picture and pinned it above his bed. When the psychologist visited him and asked about the new decor, Pikker launched into what seemed, at the time, like a reasonable rant.

“I never want to go back to the police,” he said as the psychologist took notes. “That man was on the terrorist hit list. He doesn’t belong. He’s never made a commitment to be a policeman. Now they give him an officer’s rank and he must be in charge of
me
? I’ll kill him when I go back. I’ll kill him.”

That was when the psychologist decided Pikker was no longer fit for duty.

“They told me I can’t be assimilated back into the police force and my career is finished. But I don’t think I’d meant what I had said about killing the colonel. I didn’t want to be finished. I had things to do, so much more to do. I was ready to normalize, study, atone for my sins.”

“What sins?”

Pikker considered this. He ate a piece of shrimp and took a gulp of coffee. He didn’t get into specifics on this particular subject. “You have these dreams after you leave the police. Sometimes you dream that your house is burning. That people are running around your house and you can’t protect your family. You don’t have the support of other police officers around you, the camaraderie and bravado, and things fall apart. After, when it’s stripped away, you’re raw. You get this incredible feeling of guilt, of self-loathing, that you’re not worth anything and you don’t deserve anything.”

“Is the self-loathing related to apartheid or just police work?”

“To me it’s just police work because I wasn’t really a political activist.”

“But who would you be sorry for, then?”

“Well, maybe I questioned a person too intensely. Maybe I could have questioned them differently.” He paused. “I might be sorry for my behavior. Possibly.”

“Possibly?”

“No admissions.” He smiled sadly. “I miss the work, but the police made me something else. I became so indoctrinated. In base, I’m not what they made me.”

“What are you?”

“What am I? A loving, good person. You know, I love music. I could play guitar and harmonica. I could maybe even have done it professionally. But straight out of school, as a student policeman, I shot my first person.”

“What were you eventually diagnosed as, when you were medically boarded from the force?”

“They eventually put it down to major depression and anxiety.”

“Do you think that’s accurate?”

“No.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I just think they broke me.”

After his breakdown, Pikker cobbled together his post-transition living. He did in fact open an escort agency, Partners. He tried some gigs as a private investigator for a bit, but he could never get ahead financially. Finally, low on funds and tired of subsisting on a meager state pension, he decided to accompany his wife, a nurse, to the Middle East.

During the twentieth century, South Africa had made major medical advances, partly encouraged by the need to go it alone in a world that increasingly isolated the apartheid government. A South African doctor named Christiaan Barnard, for example, had performed the world’s first successful heart transplant at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital in 1967. By the mid-1990s, the country boasted a plethora of well-trained white South African medical professionals that wealthy Arab states were keen to hire for twice the price South African hospitals could pay.

So Pikker had not absconded to the Gulf, as I had imagined, and gone undercover. Rather, for the past few years, he and his wife had been living in an apartment building on an anonymous and spotless avenue in the Emirates, where Nurse Pikker went to work assisting on surgeries performed on wealthy sheikhs and ex-lieutenant Pikker sat around, missing his days on the force and the South African land: the ocean and the cool winds and the mountains and the bush.

Pikker rarely left his Abu Dhabi apartment, and the highlights of his days were the regular visits of a neighbor’s cat. To avoid too much reflection, he started a correspondence course to become a hypnotherapist, but he could never find any subjects on whom to practice. He took up playing the keyboard. He got involved in untenable importing schemes—for example, he was particularly enamored of a tiny speaker, which he felt could make a splash on the electronics marketplace. He poked around on Facebook, reposting inspirational messages from pages called “Healing Hugs” and furious complaints by his white friends about the abysmal state of the new South African government. He hated rhino poachers. He loved rescue puppies. He also offered a steady stream of off-color jokes, concerning nuns having orgasms and such.

Hoping for a reason to leave the house, Pikker bought a motorcycle and imagined sailing down the wide boulevards. But the Emirati sun melted tires to the road. So he had tried to ride at night, out to the shores of the manufactured desert city, and had sometimes fished as the sun rose over the Gulf. But then the battery went flat, followed by the tires. When he fixed those, the insurance ran out. And by the time he’d renewed it, his license had expired. Finally, a year after I first met Pikker, the bike was stolen.

So much for a crime-free country!
he wrote me when it happened. In any case, by 2015, Pikker was no longer fit to ride a bike—he’d been hospitalized for yet another heart attack and was wheelchairbound.

Though I offered to pick up the tab, Pikker insisted on paying. As we left, I slowed to match his pace.

“Ilmar, do you think they got the right guys, for Amy’s murder?” I asked.

“No, not all of them,” he said. “They said the case was a success, internationally. To me it was a fail. There was thirty people there that day, and I would have liked to see them all in prison, but we couldn’t get the witnesses to talk. The four we got are just a weak consolation prize.”