The October Killings (25 page)

“Okay,” Freek said. “To your post and believe that he is here. Above everything, let your men believe that. Remember that he's no ordinary criminal.”

Something did not feel right to Freek. There was no logical reason for him to believe it, only the inner uneasiness that he rarely ignored. When he had, it had always been to his cost. He agreed with his captains that Bishop had not come through the lobby, and he knew that there was no other entrance. Or could there be? One of his lieutenants had entered the theater at the back to give himself a view of the entire place. Nkobi was in the lobby. Soon the choir would enter and the men in the choir would have a clear view of the stalls. The boxes had all been filled with private parties, leaving no room for anyone extra. Also, Freek's men on the upper level had searched the boxes earlier and watched the members of the audience entering them.

That left the emergency exits. Freek followed the hallway that encircled the theater on the lower level, checking again that the emergency exits were secure. Each one was solidly locked and did not yield a millimeter when he tried to budge it. Then he took the stairs to the upper level and did the same. The doors were as solid as those below.

Please, Lord, Freek prayed. Let us not have a fire tonight. Bishop or no Bishop, let's not have a fire. One of the lieutenants, who had been positioned on that side of the theater, had the keys for the emergency exits, but in the chaos of a fire they were unlikely to get more than one open in time.

In her seat, any small excitement Abigail may have felt, any amusement at Robert's murmured teasing, had fallen away. Now there was just a chill that went beyond ordinary physical coldness. It did not begin in the extremities, the way the cold of a winter night might grip you. This coldness came from within, a deep numbness somewhere in her chest and slowly spreading through her.

Through the opera glasses she had studied every face in the theater. And now she was no longer as sure as she had been earlier. Perhaps he could be the thick-set man, sitting alone in the back row. People changed. In twenty years they changed a lot. Then there were two others, a slight man with a woman, but he looked too young. There was also a dark-haired man of average build, with an older man.

Not impossible, she thought, looking at each of them. The microphone rested where Yudel had switched it on, just inside the neckline of her dress, but she remained silent.

I will know him, she thought. I will certainly know him when I see him. I am certain. Perhaps I am certain. If only I could get rid of this feeling of cold. She leaned against Robert, but the cold was everywhere inside her. There was no ridding herself of it.

30

The windows of the prop storeroom had been painted over many years before, covering the glass with a grimy, cracking coating that had once been cream in color. Despite the paintwork, the windows still let in some light from the street and surrounding buildings.

A row of figures, manikins dressed in the outfits of eighteenth-century pirates, vestiges of an ancient
Peter Pan
pantomime, would have been silhouettes against the dull glow of a window to anyone who came in at the door. No one did, so no one saw them or that one of the figures, this one dressed in the nondescript clothing of the early twenty-first century, moved from his position near the window toward the door.

Michael Bishop had been in the storeroom since early afternoon. He had waited without moving for almost six hours. Now he waited until, faintly in the distance, he heard the applause that marked the entrance first of the choir, then the soloists and, finally, the conductor. Then he waited still longer until he heard the overture begin.

Stepping out of the storeroom into a narrow passage, he closed the door carefully behind him. For a few seconds he stood quite still in the doorway, making sure that he was alone. The wariness he felt was something that never left him, no matter where he went or what he did. And he knew that at any time the authorities could decide that yesterday's hero had become today's problem. To Bishop there was no one who could be trusted and no set of circumstances that was entirely innocent.

The passage led into the broader one that surrounded the theater and off which a number of doors opened. Again he waited a long moment. A man in a tuxedo came out of the theater and moved away from him toward the lobby. Bishop watched him go, then started in the other direction, this time walking quickly, a patron who was late for the start of the performance.

The overture had ended and the tenor was singing, his voice light and clear. Bishop passed the doors at the back of the theater, knowing that they were too far from his seat. He stopped briefly at an emergency fire exit, tried the handle and found the door locked. Farther along the hallway, another emergency exit was locked. He wondered vaguely if this meant anything, or if it was simply incompetence.

He had reached the entrance to the theater that was closest to his seat when he saw the last emergency exit and its door that was standing slightly ajar. He entered the theater opposite the fifteenth row where his seat had been booked and waited briefly in the shadow of a deep doorway. The theater was brighter than he had expected, but it made little difference. The lights would be going up between the acts anyway.

The seat number on his ticket gave him the last seat in the row. But next to his seat were two empty ones and then a young couple who were clearly entranced by the music. He moved quickly past his own seat and sat down next to the man, reached across and shook his hand. “Apologies for being late,” he whispered.

Three rows back one of the police couples had seen him enter, a lone man, slight of build, possibly fiftyish, exactly what they had been told to watch for. But then they saw him take the seat next to the couple and shake the hand of the man, clearly a friend. The female officer looked at her partner, but he was shaking his head, a barely perceptible movement. This could not be their man.

Up in her box, Abigail had also seen him. She had seen the side door of the theater open and close, a barely visible movement against the dim light in the hallway. She had seen the quick, light way that he moved, and the sudden movement of his handshake. She knew that the handshake meant nothing. If you offered to shake the hand of a stranger, that person would usually respond. She knew who it was with as much certainty as she had ever possessed about anything, all her life. “He's here,” she told Yudel, speaking so softly that he was not sure that she had spoken at all.

Yudel slid from his seat in a crouch, trying to stay in the shadows. He waited for Abigail and Robert outside the box. “Where's Freek?” she gasped as she reached him, with Robert close behind.

“Downstairs,” Yudel said.

From the top of the stairs, Abigail could see that Captain Nkobi had his firearm drawn and was aiming it at a short, broad-shouldered man. One of the other policemen was cuffing his hands behind his back. She could hear the man's voice, menacing, but not raised. “Have you people gone completely fucking mad?”

“This way,” the captain said. He had the man by the arm and was propelling him into the manager's office.

“You bastards are going to pay for this.” The voice was raised a little higher now. “Consider this the basis for a front-page news story.”

As Abigail reached the bottom of the stairs, the door to the manager's office slammed closed. One of the policemen in a tuxedo stepped in front of it to block the entrance. “You've got the wrong man,” Abigail told him. “The man you're looking for is inside.”

“The captain's questioning him,” the sentry said.

“This is lunacy.” Abigail had grabbed the lapels of the tuxedo and was trying to pull him out of the way. “Where's Deputy Commissioner Jordaan?”

“I don't know, ma'am. Let the captain do his work.”

Yudel joined the discussion. “You'd better stand aside. This lady is the only one who's ever seen the suspect and she has just identified him inside the theater.” The façade of complete assurance that is the territory of every police officer in charge of a situation began to crack and the first flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. “You're going to be in big trouble if he gets away,” Yudel added.

The officer opened the door and turned to enter, but Abigail was already pushing past him. “Who the hell is this now?” The handcuffed man spat out the words in disgust. He was wearing a carefully tailored leather jacket over a silk shirt. It was not the sort of outfit you would have found on a poor man.

The captain had also turned toward the door. He looked determined. If this was their man, he was not going to release him easily.

“This isn't the man.” Abigail tried to keep her voice down. It would be a disaster if the sound of the argument should reach into the theater.

“Thank you, ma'am,” the handcuffed man said. “I don't know who you are, but it's pleasing, under these circumstances, to meet someone who is not a complete moron.”

“I'm sorry,” Abigail said. “This is just a mistake. I apologize.”

“Then I trust I can be set free. My name is Lee McKenzie. I am the chairman of Gauteng Fiber Boards. We can still ignore this matter if it is resolved immediately.”

The captain was looking at Abigail. He looked as uncertain as the man who had been guarding the door. “He's inside the theater. I saw him,” Abigail told him. “This is not the man.”

*   *   *

In the fifteenth row of the theater Michael Bishop was not enjoying the music. The choir was singing vigorously, but he had come to realize that two of its members were silent. They were both making a pretense of singing but, to his eyes, it was a poor pretense. He had noticed the one on his side of the theater first and then started examining the others. After that he studied the other members of the audience. A couple seated four rows in front of him were not touching each other and seemed to be watching the audience to their left and probably in front as well. As far as he could tell, they seemed to have no interest in the music. On the far side of the theater he found another such couple. They were looking across the theater toward the side where he was sitting, but ahead of him. As far as he could see, they never once looked at the stage. Five or six rows ahead of them another couple were behaving in much the same way. Bishop rested back in his seat.

Without turning his head he looked toward the doorway through which he had entered. It was empty and, beyond that, there was the emergency exit that he had seen where the door was open.

In the lobby, Lee McKenzie had been released and had accepted the briefest apology. “But don't go back into the theater, not yet,” Captain Nkobi told him. “I don't know where Commissioner Jordaan is,” he said to Abigail. “The last time I saw him, he was going upstairs toward the boxes.”

“Christ,” McKenzie said, sitting down on a couch against one of the walls. “What the fuck is this? I can't believe it.”

Abigail did not hear him. She was again talking to the captain. “You can't wait, captain. I'll point him out to you.”

The captain nodded. As he followed Abigail, he collected his men from their posts. “Two will go down the center aisle,” he said softly, “to cut off that path. Two others will come with me through the side door to make the arrest.”

Inside the theater, Michael Bishop knew that he had already waited too long. The signs were there. How they could have known was of no interest to him, only that it appeared they did know.

Some thirty seconds later the captain, Abigail and the two officers stepped into the theater. It took a moment for Abigail's eyes to become accustomed to the semidarkness. For a second she thought that she must be looking at the wrong row. But it was only a moment, then she realized that the seat he had been occupying was empty.

“Yes,” the captain whispered through his teeth. “Which one is he?”

“He's gone.”

“Christ, was he ever here?”

“Yes, he was there, in that seat.”

“There was a man here.” It was the voice of the man whose hand Bishop had shaken.

A male voice from one of the nearby seats sounded irritated. “Could you pipe down? Some of us came for the music.”

Michael Bishop was pushing closed the emergency exit through which he had just passed, so that there would be no obvious trace of his flight. He went quickly down a single flight of a fire escape, but not so quickly that he might risk stumbling. His senses were tingling with the possibility of pursuit. He felt no sense of victory, only the animal fear that comes with the need to flee.

He reached ground level in a narrow alley. The street was no more than thirty meters away. Once he got there he would turn left, then left again at the first corner and disappear into the jumble of streets and alleys that made up the eastern part of the inner city.

He walked quickly, knowing that if there was a policeman at the end of the alley, it would be important not to run. There would be other people on the pavements around the city hall, and they would be walking. A running figure would only draw attention.

Ahead, and partly hidden by a corner of the city hall, was a street lamp. It was close enough that he held up a hand to shield his eyes. A ragged street urchin, probably a homeless child, ran past the entrance to the alley. He was followed by another, almost as ragged. Bishop's eyes followed them for only an instant, but it was too long an instant. In front of him something flashed in the light from the street and his consciousness exploded in a shower of sparks.

Freek Jordaan stepped away from the wall, massaging the knuckles of his right hand. He bent over and handcuffed the unconscious body of Michael Bishop. Can't handle him one-to-one? he thought. Whatever gave them that idea?

From the main entrance to the lobby Abigail saw the growing crowd of policemen around Freek in the mouth of the alley. For a moment the excited knot of men parted and she caught a glimpse of the figure on the ground. It looked limp, almost lifeless. And yet she could move no closer. She saw Yudel walking down the pavement toward the alley, but as she felt Robert's left arm around her shoulders, she moved closer to him.