The October Killings (29 page)

“And, Yudel, then the strangest thing happened. I was sitting with my back against the wall when I saw the cell door open. It swung slowly inward without a sound. But no one came in. There was a long moment, more than a moment, perhaps a minute or more, that I looked at it as if it were an hallucination. Then I got up and started toward it. I remember Julia catching me before I reached the door. Have you ever been in the cells, Yudel? I mean, I know you've been inside many, many times, but have you ever been inside as a prisoner.”

“No, never.”

“Not once?”

“No.”

“Well, the door opening and no guard there … this is the strangest thing of all. You don't expect it to happen that way.”

“What did you do?”

“I don't know how long I looked at that open door, with Julia holding me. Eventually, I asked her to let me go, but she wouldn't. She was telling me not to go there, that it was a trap, that they were going to kill us as escaping prisoners if we went outside. That door was standing there, wide open, and I had to go. It took a struggle to free myself. She gave up eventually. I heard her starting to cry as I got to the door.

“The passage was empty and I followed it until it ended at a door into the yard, which was also open. If they had set a trap, they were well hidden in the open piece of ground between the cells and the police station. I walked across that open patch of dirt as if I were in a trance. If there were sounds, I don't remember them. As far as I remember, everything happened in complete silence.

“There was a flight of four or five stairs leading up to the back door of the police station. Why I went up the back stairs into the open door I will never know, but that's what I did. I did not even pause at the door. Like the cell door, it was half open.

“The light in the room was coming from the front of the building somewhere. By that dim light I could see the body of one of the policemen. He was on his back, as if asleep, but I knew immediately that there was no life in his body.”

She stopped again, struggling with some, private part of the memory. Yudel tried to get her going again. “He was the enemy. You must have been glad to see him dead.”

“You would think so. But to me it was a continuation of the night before. I did not see the Ficksburg policemen as my enemies. They seemed like ordinary men. And Jan had been a friend.

“I think that finding Jan was somehow the worst moment of both nights, even worse than my father's death. Perhaps the death of my father had driven me to saturation point. My threshold for brutality had been reached. I had no longer the capacity to deal with more of it.

“What looked at first like a pile of washing against one of the passage walls turned out to be Jan's body. I remember kneeling next to him and touching the graying hair that reminded me of my father's. I don't know how long I stayed in that position, but later I found myself in the charge office at the front of the police station. And there I found the body of the white sergeant. He was lying on his side behind the counter. The light was better there, and I could see a very thin cut across his throat. I thought at the time that it had been made by a very sharp knife. I have since learned that it was made by piano wire.

“The front door was wide open and I stopped there. I remember a hedge and a wooden fence made of round poles. By the light of a street lamp, perhaps half a block away, I could see a young white man. He was sitting on one of the horizontal poles of the fence. He seemed to be waiting for someone and he seemed completely unconcerned about the bodies inside the police station. I knew at once that he had killed them.

“He noticed me the moment I appeared in the doorway, and I believe he knew who I was. He never looked directly at me, but I believe he saw me in every detail. I was still standing there when he slid to the ground and started coming toward me.”

Abigail was lost in her story now. Yudel knew that this was Michael Bishop and that it was this part of her story she had come to tell him.

“His grip on my arm felt strange. He did not seem to be holding me tightly, yet I was helpless. I thought someone that strong did not need to use his strength. When he led me back into the police station I cannot say that I fought him. There was a room with a couch. It had a hard coir mattress on wooden slats. Scratchy bits of the coir stuck out of the mattress and rubbed against me.

“I can't say that he used any force. That would suggest that I resisted. He also did not undress me and there was no foreplay. He only unzipped my jeans and pulled them down to my knees. He did even less undressing himself. I think he only unzipped his fly.

“I closed my eyes so that I would not see him and turned my head away, but he turned my head back and kissed me. I remember how hard his lips felt. They did not seem to be made of flesh at all. And I remember his voice. There was no expression in it. You are lucky, he said. You are blessed. Do you know that?

“I never answered and he never looked for an answer. That was all he said. I thought at the time that I was immune and that he was not touching me, but I have never been able to think about that time that started when I first saw Jan's body, and ended when Michael Bishop got off me and went away. Tonight is the first time since then that I have ever tried to remember it. If Leon was not in such trouble, I would still have closed my mind to it.

“To understand just how bad it was, you have to understand what the killing of my father meant to me, then the killing of all our other people—then, when it seemed to be over, the killing of Jan … and you also have to understand what Bishop was like. There was no fury in him, not even any lust, just a strange, cold desire. I can't describe it.”

Abigail stopped speaking as suddenly as she had started. She slid off the chair until she was kneeling next to the desk. “I'm sorry, Yudel.” To her own ears she sounded feeble, undone by the images that had been buried for so long. “I always hid it from myself. Forgive my weakness.” She bent over her hands in a position of prayer.

Yudel knelt next to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. Slowly she lifted her head and he helped her back to the chair she had been sitting in. Then she was speaking again: “Bishop didn't use a condom, and I leaked blood and his semen all the next day. For years afterward I thanked God from the depth of my soul every night that it had not resulted in a pregnancy. It was my first experience of sex, and my last until I met Robert nearly ten years later.

“Julia found me zipping up my jeans and helped me. I remember her saying that they were bastards and they didn't need to do this. She took me to a minibus taxi that had come to take us away. By morning we were in a house in Johannesburg, having traveled on back roads all the way. Bishop sat in front with the driver, but to my knowledge he never even looked at me once during the drive. Within a week I was in Botswana and a month later I was at ANC headquarters in Lusaka.

“You see, Yudel. On one night in Maseru I was saved by a good man, defending an evil cause, and on the next I was saved by an evil man, fighting for a good cause.”

“Nothing in life is ever without complications.”

“I know that. And I also know that one of the complications is the way many people in the movement see Michael Bishop. To them, he is a genuine African hero.”

“He's no hero,” Yudel said. “He doesn't have the motives of a hero.”

“Many believe that he is one.”

“He's not a genuine African hero. You are.”

“Why don't I feel heroic then?”

“I don't think heroes usually do.”

“I think that Bishop felt heroic after every successful mission. He seemed to be using me to celebrate what he did to those policemen. I don't care whose side they were on, Yudel. They were human beings and he was exulting in the death of all three.”

“You didn't see him again until this week?” Yudel asked.

“I did not even hear anything about him till last Thursday, when our department decided to honor him. I did not see him again until I saw him unconscious on the pavement last night. The first time I ever spoke to him or he to me—except for those few words—was early this morning in that interrogation room.”

“What I don't understand,” Yudel said, “is that I've never heard of the Ficksburg thing. Maseru was all over every South African paper. Then, the next night, something as dramatic takes place less than a hundred kilometers away, but there's complete silence.”

“I don't know for sure,” Abigail said. “But I do know that the movement did not want to publicize Michael Bishop's activities. He was too clinical, too effective, even. The leadership thought that if people knew about him they might start to sympathize with the regime. As for the government side, they always tried to cover their defeats.”

Yudel nodded. But there was something else. “This has affected your relationship with Robert,” he told her.

“How can you tell?”

“It has though, hasn't it?”

“What does it matter, Yudel? When this is over we can get back to normal.”

“It matters to Robert.”

He could see her anger only in the sharp points of light in her eyes. “It's not your business. In any case, how can you know?”

“I can see it in him.”

“Christ, Yudel, it was my first time. I was fifteen and till we came to Maseru I had been living a sheltered suburban life in London. My father had just been murdered. It was not a nightmare. It was real. It was beyond even torture. First my father's death, then Jan, then that. I can't describe what it did to me.”

“It wasn't Robert,” Yudel said gently. “He came to you long afterward in pure love. And he took all that away.”

“How do you know?”

“He did, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“That is the true reality, the one you must hold on to. The other thing happened long ago, and it's over. Robert is here and he's not going anywhere. What he is to you is one pole of the human compass; Michael Bishop is the opposite pole. There is no similarity between them.” He rose slowly.

Abigail rose too. “You're a good man,” she told Yudel.

“Not everyone agrees with that assessment.”

She stood where she had risen, without moving. “But Leon, where is Leon?” she asked.

Yudel moved away from her into his private thoughts. It was a tendency she had noticed before. She waited for his return. “Abigail,” he said slowly, “something has been eating away at me all day.”

“Yes?” Abigail found herself struggling for breath. She felt deep within herself that this strange little man may yet find the key to it all.

“Earlier today, you said that when you mentioned this place to Bishop there was a reaction. Do you remember that?”

“Of course.”

“What form did the reaction take?”

“He shook.”

“What part of him?”

“His faced twitched and his hands shook.”

“But they were cuffed.”

“He raised his hands and I could see that they were shaking. It happened twice.”

Yudel retreated again into his thoughts. And again Abigail waited. “He wanted you to go to that house,” he said at last.

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“How can you be sure?”

“People like Bishop are different from you and me. No matter what the urgency, his face will not twitch and hands will not shake. He knows that other people have these weaknesses and he showed them to you to convince you of something. It was an act. He wanted you there. But I don't know why.”

“Is this what psychopaths do?”

“The term ‘psychopath' is just a word. I'm not sure it has that much meaning.”

“But isn't he what the books describe? One who is completely single-minded in achieving his goals and will do anything to achieve them, risk his own life—kill, if necessary.”

“Yes, that is what the books say, but it's not enough.”

“What would be enough?”

“It's not what he would do to achieve his goals that explains anything. The question is why does he have such goals.”

“That is a terrible question.”

“The answer may be more terrible than the question.”

“Yudel?” Her voice held a new sharpness. This was something she needed to know now. “Will they get what we want from the interrogation?”

“No.”

“Rosa says we should thrash him. What if Freek tortures him?”

“No. He will simply give us wrong information.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And Freek? Do you think he agrees with you?”

“Yes, but like us he does not know what else to do. So he will continue interrogating and hoping that Bishop makes a mistake.”

35

Sometime around noon Freek's desperation got the better of him. It was a desperation that had been building almost since the interrogation began. Bishop's smug calm did not help much either. Freek lunged across the table at the prisoner, seizing him by the throat with a grip that few men would have been able to break. “You bastard,” he grunted. “Have you got no decency at all? I'll fucking kill you.”

Both chairs and the table were thrown across the room and the two men crashed to the floor. Bishop, his hands cuffed, was helpless.

Freek's attack lasted only seconds before he was being pulled off the prisoner by two of his officers. Captain Nkobi was one of them. “Stop, deputy commissioner,” he whispered close to Freek's ear. “This will play into his hands.”

With the return of sanity, Freek's grip loosened and he stumbled to the far side of the room as the two policemen rearranged the furniture and put Bishop back on one of the chairs. It took a few minutes before Bishop could speak and then he could manage no more than a whisper. “Yes, deputy commissioner. This attack will play into my hands.”

“There was no attack here.” Freek still sounded out of breath. “Did either of you men see an attack?”