A SONG IN THE MORNING (40 page)

He kissed her. As if they both knew it would be for the last time. He snapped off the bed. He went to his clothes, he started to dress. She lay in the darkness, her eyes under her arm. She heard the movement of his body. She could not let her eyes see him. She felt his hands on her head, lifting her head. She felt the cold of the chain on her neck, on the skin above her breasts. She opened her eyes. She saw the gold chain, she lifted the crucifix of gold to see it better.

"Wear it and remember."

"I won't forget you, Jack, not ever."

She watched him go out through the door.

She heard his desultory conversation with Jan in the living room. She heard him speak aloud as he went through his check list of the items he would carry up Magazine Hill, and down Magazine Hill, to the gaol.

She was numbed. Too unhappy, now, for tears. She swung her legs off the bed.

As she dressed she heard Jack talking to Jan. They had moved on to the list of street places at which the grenades would be thrown, where the pistol shots were to be fired.

Her fingers played with the crucifix. She thought she would wear it for the rest of her life, for the ever of her life. She had promised that in the morning she would be at her office desk, and Jan had promised that he would be in the lecture theatre at Wits. At home, in the top drawer of her wardrobe, there was a yellow silk scarf. She thought that when she was again in her room, that night, when she was back with her parents and everything familiar, she would leave her curtains open and she would tie the yellow scarf to the handle of the window, and she would allow the light from beside her bed to be thrown against the yellow scarf and to be seen outside her window. It was important to her that the yellow scarf should be seen, should be her beacon to save him. Her fingers were tight on the edges of the crucifix.

When she was dressed she went into the living room.

Sitting on the floor with the street map of Pretoria spread out in front of him, Jan looked up at her. He was grinning, amused. She blushed.

"Bit bourgeois, Ros, handing out home comforts to the troops before the battle."

She ignored her brother. "Can I do anything, Jack?"

"Have you a nail file, metal?"

"Yes."

"Please, would you take the serial number off the shotgun."

"Aren't you going to take it with you, to the border?"

"Just in case I get separated from it," Jack said easily.

"You'll need it all the way to the border."

"Wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands, come back to you."

It was insane to be thinking about the border. Jack passed her up the shotgun, and he pointed to the serial number.

She took it into the bedroom where she had left her handbag.

She would remember him for ever, as she had seen him in her bed, because she would never see him again.

* * •

Pretty damned stupid when he thought about it, that he should have an armed escort every time he went to Pretoria Central and an armed escort back from Pretoria Central, but nothing when he took Hermione shopping nor when he took his boys to the Loftus Versfeld for rugby.

It had gone pretty well, a pretty damned good day's work.

The assistant had done him proud. Right from the start in the morning, right from the time his assistant had picked him up, he had told him to take his time, not to get himself rushed, just to go through the procedure the way he had seen Frikkie do it. It had been fine because it was only one man. The assistant had executed his first man. Not that he had
officially
executed the man, not that it went into the paperwork that he had done it, but the arrangement had been made with the governor. The governor could not really have put the spoke in, because the governor had to accept that if a man was booked for hanging on a Tuesday or a Thursday and Frikkie de Kok happened to have the influenza or he had ricked his back in the garden, then the man still had to go. Frikkie de Kok with influenza or a bad back shouldn't be a reason for a stay of execution. And the time came when an assistant had to prove himself, show that he could manage the work himself, and pretty damn well he'd done for a first time. Frikkie had been behind him, ready to lend a hand if he was needed, and he hadn't been.

All right, his assistant had been a little clumsy when they brought the fellow into preparation, but who wouldn't have been, on his first time with the responsibility. A little aggressive with the pinions, a little rough moving the fellow onto the centre of the trap, a little hard when he had hooded him, a very little bit fierce when he had ringed the fellow's neck with the noose. Little things, not grounds for complaint. Little things to be pointed out over a beer. No trouble with the drop. The assistant had made his calculations to the inch and to the pound, just right the drop had been.

Frikkie de Kok had shaken his assistant's hand while the rope still shivered, while a young creep on compulsory attendance was in the corner throwing up over his uniform

. . . Just Frikkie de Kok's view, and privately held, but it wasn't right to have youngsters in the hanging gaol, not the youngsters who had joined the prison service as an alternative to conscription into the army and service in the "operational area". The hanging gaol should be for professionals, not for shirkers. Just his opinion.

Afterwards he and his assistant had stayed all day in Maximum Security, because Thursday was a multiple, five on the trap. Thursday took preparation. Six was the most he could do, but that was a hell of a business even with a good assistant. Two and three and four at a time were pretty much all right, but fives and sixes were hard on everyone present. When he was busy round the trap he never looked at the spectators. Too much on his mind with the pinions and the hoods and the feet being right and the noose, but he could hear them. He could hear his audience gasping, willing him to go faster. Stood to reason that fives and sixes couldn't be as fast as hanging one man alone. Frikkie de Kok, as he always said to his assistant, would never hurry.

To hurry was the fastest way to a fiasco. So, they had stayed at the gaol all day, and they had made their preparations, and because he had a combined condemns weight of 325

kilos on the trap he had gone down underneath and checked each single bolt and screw of the trap. It paid to be careful in Frikkie de Kok's job. A good day's work, and after his tea his assistant was coming back to collect him, and there would be a good evening's entertainment at the Harlequins, a floodlit Cup match. He was thinking of his shower, and of getting out of his suit, as he pushed open his front garden gate. He was thinking of the match as he came up the path, and how the second team flank forward would cope, because he was replacing the injured first choice.

He opened his front door. He could see into the living room. His two boys, singlets and shorts, red cheeks and sweat, pumping iron on his living room carpet. So they shared the weights. Beautiful to Frikkie de Kok to see his boys working on the weights. And beautiful for him to hear that his Hermione was in the kitchen making his tea.

Beautiful also to be going to the Harlequins for a match.

And beautiful to know that he had a quiet day to follow before his waking before dawn on Thursday.

He thought he could smell a meat pie from the kitchen, and he thought the Harlequins would beat Defence, and he thought he would make a hell of a fine job of dropping five on Thursday morning.

* * *

Sometimes it was a good line from London. That evening it was a poor line. He was listening on an open line to the brigadier who headed security police operations throughout Western Europe. Major Hannes Swart enjoyed a particular autonomy in London, but nominally he reported to the brigadier.

He had forgotten the funeral, slipped it from his mind.

Aunt Annie was dead, buried, gone. He had forgotten the minister's rallying words and the repetitive threat of the Afrikaners' vengeance. He had forgotten them because they were meaningless, they were rhetoric when set against the real warfare of his own battlefield.

"They would have been carrying their IDs, so it cannot be a hospital situation. If they had been in any form of accident then we would have heard from the police or from a hospital. I have checked back over the instructions that were sent to Hannes yesterday morning. I have had a man go down to this Churchill Close address. Not easy, there is a police car parked outside the house. So, I have a problem.

What sort of inquiry am I to make? Delicate, eh, you understand me? This afternoon I have been to the Foreign Office and I have reported that Hannes and his two colleagues are missing. Perhaps the man I meet is lying, perhaps he is in ignorance. He tells me that he has no knowledge of the whereabouts of these three members of our staff. I cannot ask him if they are in police custody, because he will ask me why I should suppose that. I'm at a halt."

The telephone purred in the colonel's ear. He thought the brigadier didn't give a shit for the John Vorster Square bomb. The bastard was swanning in Paris and London and Amsterdam and Bonn, the bastard was freeloading in Europe.

He rang through to the library. He requested all communications over the previous month from Major Swart of the London Embassy. He was told such records were classified.

He said he knew they were classified. He was told that for access to classified communications he needed the counter-signature of the head of library on the docket. He shouted into the telephone that he knew access to classified communications required the counter-signature of the head of library. He was told the head of library was at supper, had left the building, would be back in 40 minutes.

What a fucking way to run a fucking intelligence gathering operation.

He telephoned his wife. He told her he would not be home until late. He said he thought the funeral had gone well.

She told him that the immersion heater had broken, the thermostat had failed, that there was no hot water in the house. He asked her what she wanted. Did she want South Africa sleeping safe, or did she want her husband as a plumber, for God's sake.

* • •

They moved all of their possessions to the corridor leading to the front door, their bags and the explosives and the firearms.

Each of them held a handkerchief underneath the kitchen tap and then set to work methodically to clean the rooms of finger prints. Jack took the bedroom, Jan the living room, and Ros did the kitchen. Not for the sake of Jack's prints, but for the brother's and the sister's.

When they had finished they carried the bags and the explosives and the firearms down the back fire escape to the car park, to Ros's Beetle, and to the car she and Jan had stolen.

• * •

Sergeant Oosthuizen had moved his chair from the end of the C section 2 corridor, by the locked doorway, to outside Jeez's cell. He allowed Jeez's door to be three, four inches open.

It was in direct contradiction of regulations. At this time in the evening, with the lights dimmed, Jeez should have been locked into his cell.

He was like a terrier with a rabbit, with conversation. If Jeez didn't respond to him then Sergeant Oosthuizen asked a question that demanded an answer. As though good Sergeant Oosthuizen had determined that a man who was to hang in less than a day and a half was best served by making conversation.

Jeez didn't know his mind, didn't know whether he wanted to hear the retirement plans over again, didn't know whether he was better with the silence and the worm of his own thoughts. A new worm crawling. The worm was money.

Money in the bank. Earning interest, accumulating. He had the account number and Century had the account number.

Who would tell Hilda the number? The guy who used to know him in accounts, old Threlfall, bloody long time retired. Worry worming as a cash register, and trying to hold the thread against Oosthuizen's battering. He understood why Sergeant Oosthuizen talked about his retirement and about his kids. It was all Oosthuizen could talk about that did not drive coaches through the already broken regulations. He couldn't talk about the State President's plans for reform, because Jeez wouldn't be there to see them. He couldn't talk about the unrest, because Jeez to him was a part of that unrest. He couldn't talk about Jeez, about Jeez being the centre of whispering interest through the gaol, because it was Tuesday night and Jeez was to hang at dawn on Thursday. Good Sergeant Oosthuizen ploughed on from his exhausted retirement plans into the difficulties at his son's liquor store in Louis Trichardt.

The murmur sounds of singing.

Jeez heard them.

Not the great choir of that dawn when a single man had gone to his death, when the whole company of Blacks had sung the hymn to strengthen him as he walked the corridor to the shed of execution. A fist of voices only.

Oosthuizen heard the singing, and the slam of a door that cut into the singing, and he was off his chair and straightening his tunic and heaving his chair away from Jeez's door and back to the proper place beside the exit door from the corridor of C section 2.

Firm, bold singing. More of an anthem than a hymn.

"I'm sorry, Carew, believe me. I have to lock you up . . ."

The singing was approaching. A few voices, along with the stamp of boots, and the shouts in Afrikaans for doors ahead to be opened.

"What's happening?"

"They're bringing the others down. The other four.

They're going to double them up in two cells in here."

"Why?"

Sergeant Oosthuizen snorted. "You know I cannot tell you, man."

The door closed. Oosthuizen turned the key. The corridor door opened. Oosthuizen had keys only for the cells, not for the door leading into the main corridor of C section. Of course Sergeant Oosthuizen could not tell Jeez why the Pritchard Five were to be together. Of course the prison officer couldn't chattily explain that for the final few hours it was more convenient to have all five men in one wing, one section, where the disruption to prison life would be minimised. Not an ordinary hanging because the five men were from Umkonto we Sizwe. A hanging that raised the tension pitch in the gaol. Jeez knew another reason that of course good Sergeant Oosthuizen could not explain to him.