The Soldier who Said No (35 page)

‘Seriously,’ he picked up the argument when she returned, ‘a Porsche is easier to drive than a Beetle, as long as you don’t try to show off.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Marissa eventually conceded.

When De Villiers had pulled up his trousers and had tied his shoelaces, he turned to face Marissa. She was adjusting the gurney for the next patient. He decided to feed her the facts slowly, one by one.

‘If you come to Pretoria,’ he started, ‘if you come up with me next weekend, you may get a chance to find out, to drive it yourself.’

Marissa smiled. ‘My mom says to watch out for a man driving a Porsche.’

De Villiers became defensive. ‘I need some company on the drive there. I have no designs on you, Marissa, I promise.’

She shook her head. ‘Not much of a compliment, that.’

At first De Villiers didn’t know what to say, then he blurted it all out. ‘The car needs to go for a service in Johannesburg and I need someone to drive it back to Durban on Sunday, a friend, someone I can trust.’

Marissa folded her arms below her breasts, unknowingly accentuating them. ‘Oh, so that’s the real story! You need a driver to bring the car back here. And there I was thinking that you were making a move on me.’

It was De Villiers’s turn to shake his head. ‘Marissa, I have no designs on you. You’ve seen me naked. Besides, I’m too old for you. I just need a friend to come up to Pretoria with me and to drive the Porsche back here. You’ll have to stay at your grandmother’s.’

Marissa had not done teasing him. ‘Mmm, now that you put it like that, perhaps I should think about driving a Porsche and stop dreaming of the man driving a Porsche.’

‘We’ll have to leave on Thursday. Will you come?’

A bell rang somewhere and Marissa ushered De Villiers out of the room. ‘The next patient is waiting. I’ll tell you on Monday. And I
will
sleep at my grandma’s.’

At the cycle store in the Berea Centre De Villiers bought half a dozen stainless steel bicycle spokes. He bought a complete change of clothing, shoes included, from a menswear outfit. He found a small hardware store on the same level. There he bought a small hand-operated emery wheel. He made his way to the yacht mole and tipped a car guard to look after the Porsche.

De Villiers prepared six of the spokes on the stone wall separating the railway line from the harbour. Three would be needed, and three would be for back-up. Directly in front of him members of the Point Yacht Club were working on their boats, some scraping, sanding and painting the hulls of their yachts, while others scampered around on deck testing, repairing and maintaining the fittings and equipment topside.

To casual onlookers De Villiers might have looked like just another yachtie, working away at one of the many time-consuming minor items of maintenance every yacht-owner has to do. The nib of each spoke would provide a firm base but the other end had to be shaped into a sharp spike. The emery wheel blasted the shavings off as sparks and in minutes the sharpening was complete. When he was satisfied with his work, De Villiers casually looked around before he threw the emery wheel into a dumpster half filled with empty paint cans and the scraps and off-cuts of a deck-planking repair. Later he emerged from the Yacht Club change rooms in a completely new outfit, down to the non-skid Sebago boat shoes. He draped his old clothes, now dripping wet, over the sun-baked stone wall.

De Villiers walked back to the car, confident that his old clothes and shoes would disappear before they were dry, that some vagrant or passer-by would benefit from his largesse and that there would be no trace of the filings of the sharpened bicycle spokes that he now carried in his shirt pocket. Nor would there be any filings to link him with the deadly spokes on his new clothes.

Treatment thirty-three started late. The machine had refused to warm up at first and De Villiers had been trapped behind a string of patients with earlier bookings. He watched them paging listlessly through the tattered magazines on the coffee table in the reception area. They avoided looking directly at one another and De Villiers had to wonder whether they were scared of the signs of impending death they would see in each other’s eyes. The disc jockeys on East Coast Radio laughed at their own jokes and played their favourite music. The Traffic Guy warned of delays as a result of roadworks in Pinetown.

‘So, what’s the plan for next weekend?’ Marissa spoke from the foot of the gurney when it was his turn.

De Villiers was businesslike, for the first time bashful and uncomfortable with his nakedness. ‘We leave on Thursday, no later than twelve. I drop you at your grandmother’s and I go to my mother’s place. I take the car in for a service in Johannesburg on Friday. I pick you up on Sunday at around lunch time. We drive to the airport, you drop me there and I fly out to New Zealand while you drive the car back to Durban. My brother-in-law will collect it on Monday.’

Marissa had a thousand questions. ‘When am I going to get to learn to drive it? I can’t just get into the car on Sunday and drive it all the way back.’

She had a point. ‘Okay, I’ll show you how on the way up,’ De Villiers offered.

‘No,’ Marissa insisted. ‘That won’t be enough, and anyway, that’s on the highway. I need to drive the car in town in traffic. I need to get used to the gearbox and the clutch first. You can’t just get in and drive a car like that.’

De Villiers had to compromise. ‘Okay, I understand. But I think we can do that on the way up.’

Marissa was still not convinced. ‘Why don’t you just fly home from here? Far less hassles and you won’t have to put up with my presence and be irritated by my talking your ears off for seven hours on the road.’

De Villiers avoided the direct answer. ‘I want to spend some time with my mother before I fly back to New Zealand. My brother-in-law says the car needs a long run every now and then. It’s not good for the car to do just the short runs to work in the mornings and back in the evenings. And it needs a service, which they can only do in Johannesburg, so I thought I would do him a favour, but I need someone to bring the car back. And it’s only five hours in the Porsche. Six if we take the top down and go slowly.’

‘Let’s go slowly then,’ she said. ‘Lie still, I’ll be back.’

The machine started humming and De Villiers held his breath.

‘You have to see Dr MacDonald on the way out,’ Marissa said when the session was over. ‘She wants to talk to you.’

Dr MacDonald was businesslike. ‘Dr McKerron and I have prepared a report for your
GP
in New Zealand. We’ve given full details of your treatment here and what she has to look out for the next year or two.’ She passed a large envelope across the desk to De Villiers. ‘All the scans and reports are in there, including my dosage calculations and the graphs from the radiographers downstairs.’

De Villiers stood up to leave. ‘Thank you for everything,’ he said. He extended his hand.

She stood up and held his hand. ‘You’ll feel some discomfort in about ten or eleven months. Don’t be too concerned; that is the time the radiation’s side effects kick in. Speak to your
GP
about that, and call me if you feel that you don’t know what to do.’

De Villiers turned at the door. ‘What side effects?’

‘There will be some bleeding.’ She shrugged. ‘There might be a lot of blood.’

Liesl made a special effort for their final dinner together. For once Johann Weber didn’t gulp down his food and disappear to his study.

‘So you found the Bushman,’ Weber said. ‘What does that mean exactly?’

Liesl answered on behalf of De Villiers. ‘It means that what Pierre remembers is true and what the army told him isn’t.’

De Villiers was more cautious about the meaning of their find. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that, I think. It means !Xau exists and that we know each other, but I’m not sure what it means beyond that.’

‘What will Pretoria say if confronted with the facts?’ Weber asked.

‘They will lie, as usual,’ Liesl suggested.

‘I think they’ll say we were together on another operation. The old man can’t hear or talk, and it looks to me as if he no longer has possession of his faculties.’

‘So it’s their word against yours,’ Weber said.

‘I’m afraid that’s what it boils down to,’ De Villiers had to concede.

The lawyer in Weber took over. ‘So far the weight of circumstantial evidence is against you.’

Liesl stood up and started gathering the crockery. De Villiers stood up too and helped carry the dishes to the kitchen.‘There must be something we can do,’ she suggested. ‘Ask Johann what he thinks. He can’t resist a puzzle.’

They returned to the dining room. Weber was swirling his wine in his glass. Liesl nodded at De Villiers.

‘What do you suggest, Johann?’ De Villiers asked. ‘I’m at my wits’ end, looking for answers to questions that have kept me awake for twenty years. I know what happened. I know what I know, but they say it’s all imagined. They think I’m paranoid.’

‘Well, as they say, it’s not paranoia when there’s really someone after you!’ Weber said without a hint of a smile.

‘It’s nothing to joke about, Johann,’ his wife scolded him.

‘No, no,’ Weber defended himself. ‘You should prove them wrong.’

‘I’ve tried to do that,’ De Villiers said. ‘But there’s nothing. There are no records and the only two people who knew were Verster and !Xau. The one is dead, his body was never found, and the other one … Well, you know the other one can’t help.’

Weber turned around and produced a box of cigars from the sideboard behind him. ‘I think you deserve a cigar,’ he said, offering a selection to De Villiers.

‘Ag no, Johann, not in here.’ Liesl complained. ‘You’ll stink up the curtains for weeks.’

‘Let’s go to my study then,’ Weber said. ‘I want to show the two of you how you bolster your case by concentrating on the little details no one takes seriously. Individual pieces of evidence appear to be insignificant, yet they have a cumulative effect.’

They followed him to his study and watched as he turned his computer on. ‘What’s the name of that town where
you
say you conducted your operation, the one you say is not in the road atlas?’

‘Vila Nova Armada,’ Liesl answered for De Villiers.

‘Let’s look for it on Google Earth,’ Weber said.

They waited for the computer to open the programme. Weber fiddled with the mouse. ‘Okay, here we have southern Africa.’

Liesl and De Villiers stood behind him. ‘Now let’s move the cursor up to more or less where the operation took place and see what towns are there,’ Weber mouthed the words as if speaking to himself. ‘Okay, there we have the Caprivi. So we go up a bit.’

The elevation was too high to see anything except the international boundaries between Angola and Namibia in the south and Angola and Zambia in the east. Botswana lay below the Caprivi.

‘Pierre, put the cursor where the town was,’ Weber instructed, getting up. He indicated for De Villiers to take his place.

De Villiers moved the mouse up the mouse pad, clicking a few times to focus. He saw a landscape peppered with what appeared to be trees on either side of a river. He followed the river north to a fork. He again had to wait for the focus to sharpen, and when it did, he saw the signs of a small town just south of the fork in the river.

‘That would be the Cuito and Longa rivers,’ he explained. He clicked on the town to magnify. The elevation scale dropped to three thousand feet. The town he had known as Vila Nova Armada rose from the background to a clarity that astounded him. The lines drawn on the military maps of the area in 1985 were absent. In their place he had a bird’s eye view of the town, down to the last detail.

A small white square appeared above the town, which really was not more than a village. ‘Click on that,’ Johann Weber suggested.

At the click of the mouse the name appeared.
Vila Nova Armada – rio e quartel fusileiros.

De Villiers stared at the screen, transfixed, his heart beating in his throat.

There was the airfield, a long straight line pointing north of northeast, directly at Vila Nova Armada. There was the dirt track leading from the airfield to the town, straight as an arrow, almost an extension of the landing strip, ending in the open area serving as the town square. De Villiers could remember the exact distance as given to him by his spotter, Jacques Verster. One thousand four hundred and sixty-eight metres.

His eyes drifted south. There was the army camp built by the Portuguese fifty or more years ago, shelter for
SWAPO
and
FAPLA
in 1985.

Behind him Johann Weber blew cigar smoke over De Villiers’s shoulder. ‘That’s what you call a significant item of circumstantial evidence. How could you possibly know the name of a town which doesn’t appear on the road atlas and is situated in an area where you’ve never been.’

De Villiers found the spot where he and Jacques Verster had set up the weapon, where he had lain on the ground and had looked through the scope at the ribbons on the target’s chest. His eyes slowly traced the path the bullet would have traversed if he had pulled the trigger.

Would have traversed.

But he had said no. This is where my life was set on a different course, he thought, with all the consequences of a significant alteration in direction.

‘Annelise would still be alive,’ he said aloud without realising that he had spoken.

‘What?’ Johann Weber asked. ‘Are you feeling alright?’

De Villiers lowered his face into his hands. ‘Your sister would still be alive, if it wasn’t for that place,’ he said. ‘And Marcel and Jeandré would be alive too.’

Weber sighed. ‘Linking Annelise’s death to this place is a bit farfetched.’

De Villiers shook his head, too overcome to answer. His mind was racing ahead, his thoughts not quite coherent. I refused to obey an order and look what happened. Everything leads back to this place, Vila Nova Armada – rio e quartel fusileiros.

Liesl squeezed De Villiers’s shoulder and pointed at the name on the screen. ‘That’s not an implanted memory, Pierre. What you see there is real.’