Mosaic (3 page)

He had a single, slender lead: an address. It was not Joel Grant's address. There was no reason to suppose that he had ever been there, or even knew the woman Vanderbilt was looking for. The connection was that tenuous.

Two years before Joshua Mpani had a lieutenant called Nathan Shola. Shola had been one of the leaders of the raid, and one of those to evade the subsequent army dragnet. He was known to have been with Grant later in Zimbabwe; both had needed hospital treatment, although Shola's injuries had been superficial. After the black man was discharged they were not seen together again, and Pretoria had lost track of Shola's movements. There was no record of him following, or preceding, Grant to England. But a girl of Shola's had found her way to England, and was dancing in the chorus of a strip-club in Soho. She had been recognized by a businessman visiting London, whose loyalty to the army he had until recently served in outweighed any personal reluctance he might have felt to admit frequenting black strip shows. The address of the club was Vanderbilt's lead, although he had some shopping to do before going there.

Although the grey February day was already drawing in among the high narrow streets of the capital, by the clock it was hardly more than mid-afternoon and Vanderbilt had expected a wait of some hours before he could see the girl Suzanne. But the door of the club was open, a dark gap like a missing tooth beside a shop-window full of marginally pornographic photographs curling at the edges, and the outrageous old queen in the box-office was doing a steady trade in a desultory kind of way.

Vanderbilt paid his way in, grinning to himself at the thought of Botha's face when he came to initial the expense account. Nondescripting his accent—a much more effective and less suspicious vocal dissemblance than assuming someone else's—he remarked through the box-office grill, “I haven't been in London for ages. You still got Suzanne here?”

From close to the old queen was anything but outrageous. He was a rather sad, weary-looking man of more than middle age, in gaudy trashy clothes that did nothing to disguise an essential greyness of the spirit He was about as gay as a public execution. He hardly looked up at Vanderbilt's enquiry. “Suzy Lavalle? Yes, she's still here. She's on in a few minutes. You want to see her after?”

It was a pleasant change for Vanderbilt to have someone doing his work for him. “That would be nice. You don't think she'll mind?”

The man behind the grille looked up then, with a brief glint of sad humour. “No, dearie, I don't think she'll mind.”

She was a coloured girl, and her name was not Lavalle but Kop. She took him to her room, which was round the corner from the strip-club, and the walk was short enough and the girl uninterested enough that he did not have to do much more than smile and nod from when the old queen introduced them until after the girl locked the door of her room behind them and switched on a two-bar electric fire. “You got a name, honey?” she asked, not looking round as she unbelted her coat.

“You could call me boss,” suggested Vanderbilt.

She looked at him then, eyes saucering whitely. There was nothing you could do to a white South African accent that a black South African would stay fooled for long. Anyway it was time for her to know. There were occasions when pussy-footing round got you what you wanted, but this was not one of them. To tell him what he wanted to know Suzanne Lavalle, née Suzy Kop, would have to be very frightened indeed, and she might as well start now.

Vanderbilt left forty minutes later, alone, quietly locking the door behind him. In due course, he supposed, when she did not return to work, somebody might get irritated enough (rather than concerned enough) to force the door. But there had been no noise to annoy the neighbours, even had they been normally alert neighbours rather than the deaf, dumb and blind variety preferred by hookers, and Miss Lavalle would not be capable of making herself heard for some hours yet. Vanderbilt thought he was probably in the clear until morning, and even then he was not worried about official complications. Wherever she turned when she recovered sufficiently to tackle the five pairs of nylon tights presently securing her to the bedstead, it would not be the police.

She might try to contact Shola, if she was thinking straight enough by then. Or she might find it harder than he would. She had been unable to give Vanderbilt either a telephone number or an address, only the name Shola used in England and the name of a Mickey Mouse newspaper up north for which he occasionally wrote. She was not in contact with him; she had seen him only once in this country, when he got her a job with an African charity. She gave it up after a couple of months: the strip-club paid more, and was more fun. She had heard of Joel Grant but had never met him; she did not know he was in England too.

Vanderbilt was not interested in her life-story, though he did wonder in passing what it was about her that could have appealed to a man of Nathan Shola's physical, intellectual and political prowess; not appreciating that for such a man a fondness for silly women might be less a weakness than a strength. But just now all that interested Vanderbilt was how little she could do about protecting, or even warning, Shola. The most she could do, if she would not go to the police, was call the newspaper and ask them not to give out any information about him, which an English newspaper probably would not have done anyway. That did not matter: Vanderbilt had no intentions of asking for it. By the tone Kop was able to contact the paper, he expected to have everything

it was capable of yielding.

He returned to his car and searched out the signs for the Ml.

Liz Fallon found herself lying awake, with no knowledge of what had wakened her. She was well enough used to broken nights, her sleep fractured by another person's dreams, but that was different, and familiar. After fourteen months the signal pattern of his moaning, tiny animal whimpers growing over a period of two or three minutes to full-throated yells if she did not get to him first, was to her as routine a call to duty as, for example, the pipping of his bleeper to a doctor or the howl of a siren to a factory worker. She had installed the baby alarm so that she could wake him before he reached screaming pitch. Grant had not liked it but she had made no effort to mollify him. She made it a matter of policy not to protect him from life's little harshnesses, only from the big one.

She lay still in the dark room, breathing softly, listening to silence. Whatever had disturbed her was not repeated. The half-expected litany of despair had not yet begun. If Grant was having nightmares, he was keeping them to himself.

But something prevented her resuming her interrupted sleep: an echo in her mind like a distant shriek, insubstantial as windsong but insistent, incapable of being ignored. Its very remoteness, its lack of identity, called to her like a lost child so that at last, grudgingly but without any real option, she pushed the quilt off her legs and went to investigate. She started with Grant, even though what she had almost heard had not sounded like him, because he was her charge.

His light was on, a ribbon of brightness under his door. He must have heard it too, she reasoned, entering without a knock from force of habit alone.

She saw Joel Grant sprawled on the floor, a jumble of bare arms and pyjama legs, his dark hair tumbled in his white face, and a big man in a raincoat bending over him.

Danny Vanderbilt had not allowed for the baby alarm. It was a rogue card. He had had one enormous piece of luck tonight, finding the address he had acquired for Nathan Shola occupied not by that large, tough and sneaky warrior but by the altogether easier target he had intended Shola to lead him to—not voluntarily, Vanderbilt was an optimist but not a fool, but perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps there might have been old letters lying about the house—so it would be unreasonable of him to resent the unforeseeable reverse which had now brought him face to face with the other tenant of the house.

He knew she was there, of course. He had established which rooms were in use before entering the building, and his first act on the inside was to find out who was using them. In the master bedroom the faint beam of his burglar's torch picked out the girl, sleeping deeply and rhythmically, on her stomach with the quilt slipped down to her waist. Neither the creak of the door nor the glow of the torch disturbed her; she looked set to sleep until morning.

In the other bedroom a man was sleeping, fitfully, the sheet tangled about his legs. Vanderbilt knew it was not Shola, even in the dark the skin was the wrong colour, but with his face half buried in the pillow Vanderbilt could not see who he was. He thought it did not matter: if Shola was not in the house the person he wanted to talk to was the girl. This was her place: her name was over the bell, her mail was on the hall table, her tights were drying over the bath. If Shola used it as a forwarding address, she would know where he was. Vanderbilt's only interest in the man was to ensure that he did not interfere while she was telling him.

He moved over to the bed, weighing up how to hit him efficiently from the awkward angle, and as he stood there the sleeping man moaned and twisted onto his back. A bar of moonlight admitted by the imperfectly drawn curtains fell across his face and diagonally down his body. His body was pocked with small marks Vanderbilt had seen before. Startled, he looked at the man's face and he had seen that before too. A flash of the torch confirmed it.

“Well, I'm damned,” murmured Vanderbilt.

Joel Grant woke with a cry. It was instinct that woke him rather than Vanderbilt's looming presence, his spying torch or his startled, whispered words: an instinct for danger whetted by three years in the bush and honed to a painful edge by two months under interrogation. The big man with the white moustache had sent for him often in the night but never once had he needed to be roused. The footsteps outside, the turn of the lock, had torn him bodily from sleep and left him waiting achingly in a corner with his legs drawn up to his chest, even when he could not stand from exhaustion. Those stretched seconds between hearing their feet and feeling their hands were almost the worst of the whole bad time; at least, so far as he could remember.

Weeks in a Harare hospital had healed his body and the subsequent months in Liz Fallon's house had gone a long way towards repairing his mind, but that instinct for danger went deeper than iodine and kindness and when the conditions which had fostered it recurred—this long after, this far away—that instinct galvanized him like an electric shock and he woke with the cry that Liz heard through her own slumber.

For Grant it was as if the nightmare had finally claimed him back: waking had not freed him from it, left it to slither away, noisome but harmless like seaweed from the ankles of a paddling child, but had confirmed it in its own reality. It was as if he had known of this possibility all along, and that was what the dread was really about: not something that was over but something still to come. In that moment of waking he thought that, by some means which he had not at present the intellectual control to consider, he was back in South Africa, in the security building in Pretoriakin his midnight cell, and the soft background susurrous of despair fell to a breathless pause while booted feet stalked the corridors and the tumblers fell in a single lock. Even through his own surging fear Grant had felt the wash of relief across the rest of the block. He could not blame them for that: he too had known the brief, intense pulse of joy when it was someone else's turn.

But now after two years it was his again, and he jacked himself up the bed to cower against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. If any lingering rationality was aware that the fresh stripes over his knees, the cool of cotton sheets and the sophisticated geometric wallpaper half seen by moonshine failed to support his perception of events, the discrepancy did not penetrate sufficiently far into his fear to make him question. Yet some detached portion of his mind, or perhaps only a reflex of his body, knew where he was because while he crouched against the wall one hand was scrabbling wildly for the light switch.

When he found it the room sprang into bright relief. Grant still did not know where he was: the room was not his old cell and the big man looming over him had no moustache, but that was the only difference—he was the same sort of man, his eyes held the same sort of promise, and Grant knew that when he spoke the same Boer accent would lance through his nerves. He did not think he could bear for it to start again.

Vanderbilt had thought he was groping for a weapon. He dived at the crouching man, one big hand pinning Grant's arm to the wall, the other clamping across his mouth. His bones were not much bigger than a girl's, though squarer. When the light came on, almost simultaneously, Vanderbilt realized there was no weapon and allowed himself a pause—kneeling on the bed, the smaller man immobile in his broad hands—to assess the situation. Had they made enough noise to waken the girl? He thought back and decided they had not—a decision in which he was more misled than mistaken. He had still to get Grant out of the house and away without arousing pursuit. For that he had to take the girl out of the equation, at least temporarily. He could gag her while she slept and then tie her without causing her harm, he thought What he had had to do to the Kop girl still rankled with him. He regarded Grant pensively. He was light enough to carry without inconvenience as far as the car he had left in deep shadow in an adjacent side-street. This late no one should see them, but if Vanderbilt took his time he could anyway make it look as if he was helping a drunk. Vanderbilt often took risks, but none he did not have to.

Grant's eyes, wide with terror, gazed whitely back over the silencing hand. Vanderbilt made up his mind. He jerked Grant's head forward and then back against the wall, hard, and when his eyes rolled up he tugged him forward onto the bony prominence of a waiting knee which met his jaw with a dull sound like rocks and stopped him dead. Grant's spare body went as limp as rags. Vanderbilt spilled him onto the floor, rubbing ruefully at his knee.