A SONG IN THE MORNING (34 page)

Jack punched the boy in the ribs.

Away to the right there was the bellow of a loudspeaker from the police block. Jack couldn't hear the words. He thought they were beyond rifle range as they slipped the cordon.

There were holes in the fence. Jan searched for one that was wide enough for the Suzuki and jolted through it.

Jan cut the engine.

A terrible quiet around them, and then a dog barking. No people. Jan pushed his moped. Jack was close behind him.

They went forward down a wide street of beaten dirt.

Jack thought that Soweto was chic in comparison. He saw overturned and burned cars. He saw a fire-gutted house. He saw the dog, tied by string to a doorpost, angry and straining to get at them.

"Straight roads make it easier for the police and military to dominate. They haven't electricity here, the water's off street taps, but they've good straight roads for the Casspirs."

Jack hissed, as if frightened of his own voice, "Where the hell is everybody?"

"A funeral's the only thing that gets everyone out. They've had enough funerals here in the last eighteen months. It's a tough place, it's hot. There's not a Black policeman can live here any more, and the Black quisling councillors are gone.

Shit . . . "

Jan pointed. It was a small thing and without having it pointed to him Jack wouldn't have noticed. Jan was pointing to a galvanised bucket, filled with water, in front of a house.

Jack thought of it as a house but it was more of a brick and tin shack. He saw the bucket. When he looked up the street he saw there were buckets filled with water in front of each house, each shack, in the wide street.

"Means bad trouble. The water is for the kids to wash the gas out of their faces. If there's going to be trouble everybody leaves water on the street."

"If you don't put the water out?" Jack asked.

"Then they would be thought of as collaborators and they get the necklace. Hands tied behind their backs, a tyre hung on their shoulders, that's the necklace. They set light to the tyre."

"Bloody nice revolution you've started."

"It's hard for these people to touch the police, they haven't a cat in hell's chance of hurting the state. What are they left with, just the chance to hurt the Black servants of the state."

"So what do we do? Scratch our backsides, then what?"

"We just have to wait."

* * *

The gathering was illegal. Under the amendment regulations following the state of emergency it was prohibited that mourners should march in formation to open air funeral services. It would have required a battalion of infantry to have prevented the column reaching the grave that had been prepared for the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, knocked over ten days before by a speeding Casspir.

Sometimes the regulations were enforced, sometimes not. Enforcement depended on the will of the senior police officer for the area, and the size of the forces available to him.

On this Sunday the military were not present. The police seemed to have stayed back and watched from a distance as the migrant ant mass of men and women and children took the small white wood coffin to the cemetery.

An orderly march to the grave. Hating faces, but controlled. The young men who had charge let the priest have his say, and they allowed the bereaved family to get clear in an old Morris car, and they gave time for the old men and the women and the small children to start back towards the township.

There was organisation of a sort in what happened afterwards.

A single police jeep was out in front of the main force, there to overlook and photograph. A shambling charge at the jeep, and the driver had lost his gears, and lost time, and the men who guarded the photographer and his long lens had fired volleys of bird shot and gas to keep the running, stoning crowd at a distance.

The driver of the jeep never found his gears. The crowd surged on, vengeance within reach. The police ditched the jeep, left it with the engine howling, ran for their lives. Good and fit, the policemen, and running hard because they knew the alternative to running fast, knew what happened to policemen who were caught by a funeral mob. The photographer didn't run fast, not as fast as he had to run. The lens bouncing awkwardly from his stomach, and the camera bag on his shoulder, and none of the policemen with guns taking the time to cover him.

The officers commanding the police were still shouting their orders when the fleetest of the mob caught up with the photographer. The photographer was White and a year and a half short of his fiftieth birthday. A growl in the mob, the breath intake of a mad dog.

The hacking crack of rifle fire, aimed at random into the crowd at four hundred metres. The crowd of youths not caring because the photographer was caught.

The Casspirs came forward, and the kids fled before them, back towards the township.

The photographer was naked but for one shoe and his socks and the camera with the long lens that lay on his belly.

His clothes had been taken from him as vultures take meat from bones. He was dead. An autopsy would in due course state how many knife wounds he had received, how many stone bruises.

The start of a routine township battle. An hour of unrest.

Shotguns and rifles and tear gas grenades from behind the armour plate of the high built Casspirs. Petrol bombs and rocks from the kids. Pretty unremarkable happenings for the East Rand.

The police saw the kids back into the warren streets of Duduza and left them to their destruction. Eighteen months after the start of the petrol bombing and the rock throwing against the Black policemen's homes and councillor's homes there was little left for the crowd that was worth burning.

Two shops were destroyed by fire. The days were long since gone when the elderly would try to prevent the kids burning a shop out. To have tried to have saved a shop from the fire was to have invited the accusation of collaborator.

Two shops burned.

Four kids died. Eighteen kids were treated for buck shot injuries in Duduza's unregistered clinic. No chance of them going to hospital.

A thirteen-year-old girl had been successfully buried.

Sunday afternoon in Duduza, and time to bring the buckets indoors.

• • *

He sat on a wooden chair in a small room.

Faces peered at him through the cracked glass of the window. Jack looked straight ahead, looked all the time at the man who had been introduced as Henry Kenge, and at Jan.

He dabbed his eyes with his water-soaked handkerchief, and each time he did it he heard the pitter patter of laughter from all around him.

He had made his speech. He had asked for help. He had been heard out. He had been vague and unspecific until Jan had waved him quiet, taken over and whispered urgently a statement of intent in the ear of the one identified as Kenge.

He was filthy from the ditch he had lain in as the Casspirs had rumbled down the main street. With Jan in the bottom of a ditch that doubled as a street sewer.

He thought that if the youngsters he had seen that afternoon had been Black kids on the streets of London or Birmingham or Liverpool then he would have rated them as mindless and vicious hooligans. He thought the kids of Duduza were the bravest he had ever known. So what was the morality of that? Fuck the morality, Jack thought.

Kenge brought Jan a holdall. Jan passed the bag to Jack.

He counted five R.G.-42 grenades.

Jack tugged at Jan's sleeve. "This shouldn't be in bloody public."

"The necklace has made ashes of informers, they're scrubbed out of Duduza. The eyes of the security police have been put out with fire, that's why they're losing . . .

They have a song about you. They don't know who you are, but they have a song in praise of you. They made a song about the man who carried the bomb into John Vorster Square."

Jack shook his head, like he'd been slapped. "You told them about that?"

"You've been given half of this township's armoury. You grovel your thanks to them."

When they left they could see the lights of the road block vehicles. Jan kept his own headlight off and drove cross-country in a loop taking them well clear of the block.

For a short time a searchlight tried to find the source of the engine sound in the darkness, and they stopped in shadow until it lit upon some other threat, and then rode on.

Jack thought he was pretty damn fortunate to have the grenades. He appreciated that after Thiroko was killed Jan would be isolated from the Movement. That's what any Movement would do. He pounded Jan's back, in gratitude, in relief to be out of Duduza.

Ros was at the flat in Hillbrow. She showed Jack what she had brought. Only after he had seen and handled the pump action shotgun and the two revolvers and the ammunition did Jack realise that she had changed herself.

He thought Ros van Niekerk was quite lovely.

He had fifteen pounds of explosives and detonators and firing fuse and five grenades and a shotgun and two revolvers.

And he had a crippled student to help him, and a girl who worked in an insurance office and who was lovely.

No going back, but then there had never been a time for going back.

16

A crisp, bright, autumn morning over the flat veld, the diamond frost going with the sunlight.

Monday morning. Another week. One more used up.

Jack had dismantled the model. He had returned the pieces to the bread bin.

In a corner of the yard at the back of the block of flats he discarded one of the two metal tubes. He had explosive enough for one tube only. He had to go out the way that he went in.

Jan carried the suitcase to the car. Ros had the shotgun, broken and carried under an overcoat, and the two revolvers.

Jack brought the tube.

Jack had told them he needed a stop on the way for a bag of readymix concrete. He said that he would sit in the back of the car, that he needed to think. He sat in the back of the car and concentrated on an approach from the south side over Magazine Hill, and diversions on the north side near the guarded perimeters of Defence Headquarters.

They could rent a service flat in Pretoria, Ros said. It wouldn't be difficult to find one, but it would be expensive.

Jack passed her a wad of rand notes. He slipped back to his thinking.

How much could he ask of them, of Jan and Ros?

* * *

Two detectives, with the two original photo-fits and also with a third photo-fit that was an amalgam of the shopkeepers' opinions, were briefed to visit the city's four and five star hotels. Other teams were directed towards the two and three star hotels, the booking offices of South African Airways, of the European airlines, and to Jan Smuts.

Every one of them worked from John Vorster Square, had been violated by the bomb. The two with the four and five star list appreciated that the hotels worked shift systems of reception and porter staff. They knew that if they drew blanks with this visit that they must come back to interview those staff who were not on duty that Monday morning.

At the Landdrost, first visit, the detective found the Indian day porter on duty. He left his colleague with the brunette on reception, poring over the composite photo-fit. She had known the face. The detective showed the day porter the photo-fits.

The day porter recalled the features. He had quite liked the man. He'd had a good tip for arranging the visit to Soweto, and another tip when the man had checked out. He nodded his head. He understood that the detective was from the security police. And if it was the security police then it was not pilfering or the fraudulent use of a credit card, it was sedition or terrorism. Heavily, the day porter nodded.

He wrote a room number on a slip of paper and pushed it across his desk to the detective. He was asked whether he knew the man's name.

"His name was Mr Curwen."

"Was?"

"The middle of last week he left, sir."

The day porter was in work. Not big pay but the tips were good. He'd remembered this man, for courtesy and for a warm word of thanks when the man had gone, carrying his own suitcase out, he hadn't forgotten that. It hurt the day porter to implicate the young Englishman.

The detective went to the cashier's desk. With the name and the room number it took only half a minute for him to be given a copy of the bill, and the dates of the guest's stay.

Soon afterwards a watch salesman from Port Elizabeth, sleeping in late with a Coloured call girl, was disturbed in his room. They were given two minutes to get their clothes on.

The salesman was in the corridor zipping his trousers, his 100 rand companion was beside him buttoning her blouse, as the dog was unleashed in the room. The salesman, in increasing desperation, tried without success to discover why his room was being searched. The detectives stayed in the corridor and gave him no satisfaction. Just the handler and his small black labrador dog in the room.

The dog explored the bed, and the drawers of the bedside tables, no reaction. It covered the desk beside the window, and the drawers there. It went past the television set. The cold nose flitted over the dressing table. The dog and the handler had made a slow circuit of the room when they reached the wardrobe in the corner opposite the bathroom door.

The dog snorted.

It had been trained over months to recognise the scent of minute traces of explosive. The dog had no skill at tracking a man, nor at finding hard or soft drugs in luggage. It was an explosive sniffer dog. The dog pawed at the wardrobe door, scratched at the varnish finish. The handler slid open the door. The dog sniffed hard into the bottom corner of the wardrobe, then up to the inside of the door. The dog barked, the tail going, then came out of the wardrobe and sat, and the handler gave it a biscuit.

"There were explosives in this cupboard," the handler told the detectives. "My guess would be that the suspect had traces on his hands from handling the explosives when he closed the cupboard door. The dog has found the traces inside only, but the outside would have been cleaned by the maid staff. But there's no doubt, there were explosives very recently in this room."