A SONG IN THE MORNING (21 page)

He had tidied his room. He had sprayed again with his deodorant.

He had made up his mind. He was on the road, far on the road.

Jack Curwen went shopping on a sunny Johannesburg afternoon.

* * *

The army of prisoners whiled away the hours in the half basement cells of the east wing, some under investigation, some in detention, some criminal and some political.

The hard everyday afternoons were reserved for the politicals. The criminals were just
tsotsis,
the hooligans, the thieves of the townships. The criminals made only a slight impact on the smooth running of the state's apparatus. The politicals needed breaking, putting in court, locking away. The politicals threatened the state's apparatus.

Bars dominated the east wing cell blocks. Bars across the windows, bars across the corridors, bars across the light wells. A filthy place where the prisoner is dehumanised, where he cannot believe that anyone cares about his fate. A place where the grime of years coats the cell floors and walls.

Where the graffiti is of despair. Since the state of emergency on the East Rand the prisoners had been brought in their hundreds to John Vorster Square. Many Blacks and a few Whites. The elderly and the schoolchildren, the community workers and the trade unionists, the revolutionaries and those registered by computer error or an informer's malice on the police records. Better to be a robber of banks than to have publicly denounced as "mere tinkering with apartheid" the State President's package of reforms. Better to have mugged the migrant workers in the shadows outside their township hostels when they have wages and are drunk, than to have protested on the streets the right to vote.

The politicals were the targets of the security police working on the upper floors of the south wing of John Vorster Square. Pleasant offices, airy and light behind the plate glass windows, but in their interrogation rooms the air and the light could be cut with the dropping of blinds.

The security police at John Vorster Square were good at their work. A White Methodist priest once held in John Vorster Square had written afterwards of the "decrepit doci-lity of despair" that cowed the Blacks in the townships. The policemen exploited that despair in the interrogation rooms, they found little resilience in those they questioned. Even the comrades of the Umkonto we Sizwe condemned themselves in their statements given on the ioth floor. Happy Zikala and Charlie Schoba and Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu had made their statements here, gathered the noose closer to their necks here. All the Whites, those who talked and those who stayed silent, those with the privilege of third level education, those who were active in the cadres, would speak of the expertise of the security police on the ioth floor.

Most cracked.

Jeez hadn't. He was a rare exception.

And Jeez was now little more than a faded statistic in the hand-written ledgers of John Vorster Square, remembered only by a very few.

The colonel was principal amongst the few.

The instruments of his power were the Terrorism Act, No. 83 (1967) with a minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of death - the General Law Amendment Act, No.

76 (1962) Section 21, also five years to death - the Internal Security Act, No. 79 (1976) giving the power of preventive detention and banning orders. There were not many prisoners, politicals, who did not feel the sliding bowel weakness and the tickle of terror when they stood in the presence of the colonel.

He would have described himself as a patriot. He would have said that every action he undertook in John Vorster Square was for the benefit of his beloved South Africa. He would have said that he stood in the front line of the battle against the contagion of communism and the drift to anarchy.

On that everyday afternoon, the colonel watched with grudging satisfaction as a full time clerk of F.O.S.A.T.U.

made a voluntary statement. Small beer, a Coloured, an insignificant creature, admitting to handing out leaflets demanding the release of political prisoners. With the vermin's own guilt tied down, the work might begin of extracting information from him on more senior members of the Federation of South African Trade Unions. He would be charged under the Terrorism Act. They could do for the clerk under "activities likely to endanger the maintenance of law and order", or they could do for him under "activities likely to cause embarrassment to the administration of the affairs of state". They had him by the throat, they had his confession, and now they could bargain the length of his sentence against the incrimination of the leaders of F.O.S.A.T.U. It was the leaders that the colonel wanted, not this rodent.

The clerk sat at the table and dictated a stuttering statement to a White corporal. He was watched by the colonel who stood in the doorway.

The journey to Pretoria was a sore in the colonel's mind.

He did not comprehend how a White preferred to hang rather than to come clean about the Blacks with whom he had collaborated. The visit to Beverly Hills had been a failure. He would happily have hanged James Carew himself to have expurgated that failure. He was no fool, he could rationalise his failure. He supposed that he had failed with Carew because he was unaccustomed to interrogating White politicals. One or two a year came into his domain on the top floors of John Vorster Square. Some he categorised as dedicated communists, some were gripped with the martyr wish, some he regarded as mentally deranged, some were all three. All of them he thought stupid. To suffer in the cause of Black freedom was idiotic. Carew was outside his categories, a mystery. He thought he hated the man which was why in this same room he had lost his temper, shouted.

There was no further reason for the colonel to stay and watch the clerk. He went back to his own office.

The sun was dipping between the mine waste mountains to the west. Far below him were the gaudy street lights and the ribbons of the headlamps of the homegoing traffic.

There was a sheaf of telex messages on his deak. There was a photocopy of a report from Major Swart in London.

The colonel thought that Pretoria overrated Swart.

Darkness was falling on the city.

He gutted Swart's telex. More failure. Buck passing and excuses. Failure to make the connection between Mrs Hilda Perry and James Carew. Failure to link one Douglas Arkwright, deceased, on a contact between a White male, unidentified, and Jacob Thiroko. Failure to maintain a tail on Jacob Thiroko.

Categorised totally incompetent, that Swart. The one and only link to Carew's earlier life and Swart had failed to make anything of it. The report was soon pushed aside, categorised not useful, back in the tray beneath less intractable problems.

The piece of paper that had failed, that he had reckoned a guarantee of success, the piece of paper that carried the minister's signature, lay in the colonel's personal safe. He would shred it on the morning of the execution. That failure would die with Carew.

But failure it was. At the heart of the failure was the void that was Carew's past, exacerbated by the man's refusal to talk. The bachelor apartment in Hillbrow had been searched and searched again and revealed not a clue to the past. The drivers on the taxi ranks had been quizzed, interrogated even, and found to know nothing significant about the man at all. The bombing team had all said in their statements that they had never seen the man before he drove them away from Pritchard. The void spirited up the colonel's suspicions. No man could so effectively hide his past, unless he had deliberately hidden it, had a very good reason for hiding it . . .

He consumed the paperwork on his desk. He had promised his wife that he would not be late home.

* * •

He had taken the lift down twice before, holding the grip bag sagging close against his knee, and each time the lobby had been almost empty and he would have been noticed by the night porter and the bellboy and the luggage boys and the doorman. Twice he had gone back to his room to while away the minutes before trying again. Very tense, close in his thoughts. All his concentration was on the hulk that was John Vorster Square, and the fence around it, and the lights, and the armed police sentries, and on his father and on suppressing his fear. The plan called for him to expose himself to challenge and gunfire. He knew of no other way.

He stepped into the lobby. The lift doors shut behind him. The bellboys and the luggage boys were marshalling a huge pile of suitcases, the doorman was loudly supervising their distribution. The reception was lost in a half moon of argument because there was a double booking problem. The night porter was doling out keys to those who had been checked in and who had allocated rooms. They were Americans, fresh f r o m safari.

Jack crossed the lobby unnoticed. Unseen, he went out through the swing doors. Behind him rose a tumult of angry voices.

Dark streets. Streets given up by the Whites. The Whites were powering home to the suburbs in their BMWs and Jaguars. Jack walked with a brisk purpose. He stayed far out on the pavement, close to the kerb and the cars' lights, avoiding the shadowed shop entrances from which spurted the flash of a match, the glow of a drawn cigarette. There was no reason that he should have attracted attention. He was a young White who was late, hurrying with a bag that might contain his sports kit, whose weight he struggled to disguise.

He took the route that he knew, down Van Brandis, right onto Commissioner. Above him the lights were flickering out in the towers, the last workers leaving. The security guards with their polished staves patrolled the wide entrances.

Jack saw the lights in John Vorster Square, an oasis of work as the rest of the city shut down for the night. He took from the bag a rough stone, picked from a street building site on Commissioner. The stone gripped in his left hand, the size of a cricket ball. At school, in the team, they'd played him for his fielding. He could certainly throw. The stone was now his weapon and his protection.

* * *

A presentable young man, straight-backed, clean-shaven, and he wore his uniform and his Sam Browne well. He was often given the 6 pm to 10 pm shift on the rear entrance because his sergeant thought him the right sort of constable to open and close the gates on the comings and goings of the top brass. The constable sat in his box. His service revolver was holstered, the flap buttoned down because that was tidier. In the box was a loaded F.N. rifle, safety on, a gas mask, a telephone link to the operations room inside, and his personal radio.

He saw the car approach. He saw the lights flash and the indicator wink to him. He saw the uniform of the driver, and the uniforms of the passengers.

Behind him he heard the revving of an engine outside the gates, and he heard the shout for the gates to be opened.

The constable had a car to let in and a car to let out.

He went forward. He slipped the bolt that was accessible only from the inside. He swung the near gate back towards him, pushed away the further gate. He had to step back smartly to avoid the car coming from the outside, from Main Street.

There was a moment when he was back at the edge of the driveway, readying himself to salute, and the gates were fully opened, and the cars were jockeying to pass through.

There was a moment when he did not think to study the shadows across the road.

He only saw the blur of a man running. He saw the figure coming fast across the road. He saw the low-slung bag trailing from the figure's arm. He stepped forward, picking at the flap of his holster. He hesitated. He turned back for his rifle. Whichever way he looked he was dazzled by the headlights. The figure ran past him on the far side of the incoming car. The constable was rooted to the concrete floor of his sentry box. The figure charged to the main doorway, pushed it, swung the bag inside. The constable saw the bag sailing into the rectangle of light, and lost sight of it.

He was spinning, trying to get the lights from his eyes.

He saw the figure for a moment more, seeming to fill the doorway into the hallway area. He reached again for his holster, then for his rifle, then for his radio, then for his telephone link. The constable had never before confronted an emergency, and nothing had ever happened at the back gates of John Vorster Square. And the bastards in the car hadn't reacted.

He saw the shadowy shape of the figure turn and run back from the doorway. He hadn't the flap off his holster, nor the rifle in his hand, nor was he reaching for his radio, nor had he lifted his telephone.

Everything too fast for the constable. The figure running to get by the car that was coming out. The driver of the car that was entering seeing a figure, no longer in shadow, bright in the headlights, swung the wheel to block the figure, run the figure down. The figure stumbling to a stop, backing away, into the courtyard, trapped. An anorak hood over the figure's upper head and a handkerchief knotted over the figure's lower face, and a dark slash where the eyes would be. So fast, too fast. The arm of the figure swinging back, whipping forward. The crack of the windscreen, like a bullet snap. The constable saw the windscreen freeze, shatter to opaque. The incoming car swerving. The outgoing car turning away from collision.

He yelled, not into his radio, not into his telephone, out into the night air.

"BOMB!"

The presentable young constable ran from his box. The outgoing car careered from a side-on collision towards him.

He was blinded by the lights. He ran for his life, and behind him his sentry box was taken down by the impact of the outgoing car's radiator and engine weight, squashed away through the shrubs, flattened against the low wall and the high railings.

There was the thud of running feet. He saw the figure come down the driveway, skip past the incoming car.

He had the flap off his holster now. He had the pistol butt in his hand, lifting. The figure gone, out into the street. The pistol was in his hand, his thumb had taken across the safety.