The White Lioness Read online

  Only twenty-six hours had passed since the man who introduced himself as Stewart stood outside his home in Ntibane. When he heard the knock at the door, he thought at first it was the police in Umtata. Seldom a month went by without a visit from them. As soon as a bank robbery or a murder took place, there would be an investigator from the Umtata homicide squad at his door. Sometimes they would take him in to town for questioning, but usually they accepted his alibi, even if it was no more than that he’d been drunk in one of the local bars.

  When he emerged from the corrugated iron shack that was his home, he did not recognize the man standing in the bright sunlight claiming to be Stewart.

  Victor Mabasha could see right away the man was lying. He could have been called anything at all, but not Stewart. Although he spoke English, Victor could hear from his pronunciation that he was of Afrikaner origin. And boere just weren’t called Stewart.

  It was afternoon when the man showed up. Victor Mabasha was asleep in bed when the knock came. He made no attempt to hurry as he got up, put on a pair of pants, and opened the door. He was getting used to nobody wanting him for any thing important anymore. It was usually somebody he owed money to. Or somebody stupid enough to think he could borrow money from him. Unless it was the cops. But they didn’t knock. They hammered on the door. Or forced it open.

  The man claiming to be Stewart was about fifty. He wore an ill-fitting suit and was sweating profusely. His car was parked under a baoba tree on the other side of the road. Victor noticed the plates were from Transvaal. He wondered briefly why he had come so far, all the way to Transkei province, in order to meet him.

  The man did not ask to come in. He just handed over an envelope and said somebody wanted to see him on important business on the outskirts of Soweto the following day.

  “All you need to know is in the letter,” he said.

  A few half-naked children were playing with a buckled hubcap just outside the hut. Victor yelled at them to go away. They disappeared immediately.

  “Who?” asked Victor.

  He mistrusted all white men. But most of all he mistrusted white men who lied so badly, and made things worse by thinking he would be satisfied with an envelope.

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Stewart.

  “There’s always somebody wanting to see me,” said Victor. “Question is, do I want to see him?”

  “It’s all in the envelope,” Stewart repeated.

  Victor held out his hand and took the thick, brown envelope. He could feel right away there was a thick bundle of bills in there. That was both reassuring and worrisome. He needed money. But he did not know why he was being given it. That made him uneasy. He had no desire to get involved in something he knew too little about.

  Stewart wiped his face and bald head with a soaking wet handkerchief.

  “There’s a map,” he said. “The meeting place is marked. It’s close to Soweto. You haven’t forgotten the layout there?”

  “Everything changes,” said Victor. “I know what Soweto looked like eight years ago, but I have no idea what it looks like today.”

  “It’s not in Soweto itself,” said Stewart. “The pickup point is on a feeder road to the Johannesburg freeway. Nothing has changed out there. You’ll have to leave early tomorrow morning if you’re going to make it in time.”

  “Who wants to see me?” Victor asked again.

  “He prefers not to give his name,” said Stewart. “You’ll meet him tomorrow.”

  Victor shook his head slowly and handed back the envelope.

  “I want a name,” he repeated. “If I don’t get a name, I won’t be at the pickup point on time. I won’t ever be there.”

  The man hesitated. Victor stared fixedly at him. After a long pause, Stewart seemed to realize that Victor meant what he said. He looked around. The kids had gone away. It was about fifty meters to Victor’s nearest neighbors, who lived in a corrugated iron shack just as dilapidated as his own. A woman was pounding corn in the swirling dust outside the front door. A few goats searched for blades of grass in the parched red earth.

  “Jan Kleyn,” he said in a low voice. “Jan Kleyn wants to see you. Forget I ever said that. But you’ve got to be on time.”

  Then he turned and went back to his car. Victor stood watching him disappear in a cloud of dust. He was driving far too fast. Victor thought that was typical of a white man who felt insecure and exposed when he entered a black township. For Stewart it was like entering enemy territory. And it was.

  He grinned at the thought.

  White men were scared men.

  Then he wondered how Jan Kleyn could stoop so low as to use a messenger like that.

  Or might it be another lie from Stewart? Maybe it wasn’t Jan Kleyn who sent him? Maybe it was somebody else?

  The kids playing with the hubcap were back again. He went back into his hut, lit the kerosene lamp, sat down on the rickety bed, and slowly slit open the envelope.

  From force of habit he opened it from the bottom up. Letterbombers nearly always placed their detonators at the top of the envelope. Few people expecting a bomb through the mail opened their letters the normal way.

  The envelope contained a map, carefully drawn by hand in black India ink. A red cross marked the meeting place. He could see it in his mind’s eye. It would be impossible to go wrong. Apart from the map there was a bundle of red fifty-rand bills in the envelope. Without counting, Victor knew there were five thousand rand.

  That was all. There was no message saying why Jan Kleyn wanted to see him.

  Victor put the envelope on the mud floor and stretched out on the bed. The blanket smelled moldy. An invisible mosquito buzzed around his face. He turned his head and contemplated the kerosene lamp.

  Jan Kleyn, he thought. Jan Kleyn wants to see me. It’s been two years since the last time. And he said then he never wanted anything to do with me again. But now he wants to see me. Why?

  He sat up on the bed and looked at his wristwatch. If he was going to be in Soweto the next day, he’d have to take the bus from Umtata this evening. Stewart was wrong. He couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning. It was nearly nine hundred kilometers to Johannesburg.

  He had no decisions to make. Having accepted the money, he would have to go. He had no desire to owe Jan Kleyn five thousand rand. That would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. He knew Jan Kleyn well enough to be aware that nobody who crossed him ever got away with it.

  He took out a bag tucked under the bed. As he did not know how long he was going to be away, or what Jan Kleyn wanted him to do, he just packed a few shirts, underpants and a pair of sturdy shoes. If the assignment was going to be a long one, he would have to buy whatever clothes he needed. Then he carefully detached the back of of the bed frame. His two knives were coated in grease and wrapped in plastic. He wiped away the grease and took off his shirt. He took down the specially made knife belt from a hook in the ceiling and buckled it around his waist, noting with satisfaction that he could still use the same hole. Although he had spent several months until his money ran out drinking beer, he had not put on weight. He was still in good shape, even though he would soon be thirty-one.

  He put the two knives in their sheaths, after checking the edges with his finger tips. He needed only to press slightly to draw blood. Then he removed another part of the bed frame and produced his pistol: that, too, was greased with coconut fat and wrapped in plastic. He sat on the bed and cleaned the gun meticulously. It was a 9mm Parabellum. He loaded the magazine with special ammunition that could only be obtained from an unlicensed arms dealer in Ravenmore. He wrapped two spare magazines inside one of his shirts in the bag. Then he strapped on his shoulder holster and inserted the pistol. Now he was ready to meet Jan Kleyn.

  Shortly afterwards he left the shack. He locked it with the rusty padlock, and started walking to the bus stop a few kilometers down the road to Umtata.

  He screwed up his eyes and gazed at the red sun rapidly setting over Soweto
, remembering the last time he was there eight years ago. A local businessman had given him five hundred rand to shoot a competitor. As usual, he took all conceivable precautions and drew up a detailed plan. But it all went wrong from the very start. A police patrol happened to be passing by, and he fled Soweto as fast as his feet could take him. He had not been back since.

  The African dusk was short. Suddenly, he was surrounded by darkness. In the distance he could hear the roar of traffic on the freeway headed for Cape Town and, in the other direction, Port Elizabeth. A police siren was wailing in the far distance, and it occurred to him that Jan Kleyn must have a very special reason for contacting him of all people. There are lots of assassins ready to shoot anyone you like for a thousand rand. But Jan Kleyn had paid him five thousand rand in advance, and that could not be only because he was considered the best and most cold-blooded professional killer in all of South Africa.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car peeling off from the freeway. Soon afterwards, he could see headlights approaching. He moved further back into the shadows, and drew his pistol. He released the catch with a flourish.

  The car came to a halt where the exit road petered out. The headlights lit up the dusty bushes and wrecked car. Victor Mabasha waited in the shadows. He was on tenterhooks now.

  A man got out of the car. Victor could see right away that it was not Jan Kleyn. He had not really expected to see him anyway. Jan Kleyn sent others to summon the people he wanted to talk to.

  Victor slipped cautiously around the wreck and worked his way in a circle behind the man. The car had stopped exactly where he thought it would, and he had practiced the flanking movement to be sure of doing it silently.

  He stopped just behind the man, and pressed the pistol against his temple. The man started.

  “Where’s Jan Kleyn?” asked Victor Mabasha.

  The man turned his head carefully.

  “I’ll take you to him,” the man replied. Victor Mabasha could hear he was scared.

  “Where is he exactly?” asked Victor Mabasha.

  “On a farm near Pretoria. In Hammanskraal.”

  Victor knew right away this was not a setup. He had done business with Jan Kleyn once before in Hammanskraal. He put his pistol back into its holster.

  “We’d better get going, then,” he said. “It’s a hundred kilometers to Hammanskraal.”

  He sat in the back seat. The man at the wheel was silent. The lights of Johannesburg appeared as they drove past on the freeway to the north of the city.

  Every time he found himself in the vicinity of Johannesburg he could feel the raging hatred he had always felt welling up inside him. It was like a wild animal constantly following him around, constantly appearing and reminding him of things he would rather forget.

  Victor Mabasha had grown up in Johannesburg. His father was a miner, rarely at home. For many years he worked in the diamond mines at Kimberley, and later in the mines to the north-east of Johannesburg, in Verwoerdburg. At the age of forty-two, his lungs collapsed. Victor Mabasha could still remember the horrific rattling noise his father made as he struggled to breathe during the last year of his life, a look of terror in his eyes. During those years his mother tried to keep the house going and take care of the nine children. They lived in a slum, and Victor remembered his childhood as one long, drawn-out, and seemingly endless humiliation. He rebelled against it all from an early age, but his protest was misguided and confused. He joined a gang of young thieves, was arrested, and beaten up in a prison cell by white cops. That merely increased his bitterness, and he returned to the streets and a life of crime. Unlike many of his comrades, he went his own way when it came to surviving the humiliation. Instead of joining the black awareness movement that was slowly forming, he went the opposite way. Although it was white oppression that had ruined his life, he decided the only way to get by was to remain on good terms with the whites. He started off by thieving for white fences, in return for their protection. Then one day, shortly after his twentieth birthday, he was promised twelve hundred rand to kill a black politician who had insulted a white store owner. Victor never hesitated. This was final proof that he sided with the whites. His revenge would always be that they did not understand how deep his contempt for them was. They thought he was a simple kaffir who knew how blacks should behave in South Africa. But deep down, he hated the whites and that was why he ran their errands.

  Sometimes he read in the newspapers how one of his former companions had been hanged or given a long prison sentence. He could feel sorry for what had happened to them, but he never doubted that he had chosen the right way to survive and maybe in the end start to build a life for himself outside the slums.

  When he was twenty-two, he met Jan Kleyn for the first time. Although they were the same age, Kleyn treated him with superior contempt.

  Jan Kleyn was a fanatic. Victor Mabasha knew he hated the blacks and thought they were animals to be controlled by the whites. Kleyn had joined the fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement at an early age, and in just a few years reached a leading position. But he was no politician; he worked in the background, and did so from a post he held in BOSS, the South African intelligence service. His biggest asset was his ruthlessness. As far as he was concerned, there was no difference between shooting a black and killing a rat.

  Victor Mabasha both hated and admired Jan Kleyn. Kleyn’s absolute conviction that the Afrikaners were a chosen people and his utter ruthlessness combined with a total disregard for death impressed him. He always seemed to have his thoughts and emotions under control. Victor Mabasha tried in vain to find a weakness in Jan Kleyn. There was no such thing.

  On two occasions he carried out murders for Jan Kleyn. He performed satisfactorily. Jan Kleyn was pleased. But although they met regularly at that time, Jan Kleyn had never so much as shaken his hand.

  The lights from Johannesburg faded slowly behind them. Traffic on the freeway to Pretoria thinned out. Victor Mabasha leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He would soon discover what had changed Jan Kleyn’s decision that they should never meet again. Against his will, he could feel his own excitement building. Jan Kleyn would never have sent for him unless it was a matter of great importance.

  The house was on a hill about ten kilometers outside Hammanskraal. It was surrounded by high fences, and German shepherds roaming loose ensured that no unauthorized persons gained entry.

  That evening two men were sitting in a room full of hunting trophies, waiting for Victor Mabasha. The drapes were drawn, and the servants had been sent home. The two men were sitting on either side of a table covered by a green felt cloth. They were drinking whiskey and talking in low voices, as if there might have been someone listening despite all the precautions.

  One of the men was Jan Kleyn. He was extremely thin, as if recovering from a serious illness. His face was angular, resembling a bird on the lookout. He had gray eyes, thin blond hair, and was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and necktie. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, and his way of expressing himself restrained, almost slow.

  The other man was his opposite. Franz Malan was tall and fat. His belly hung over his waistband, his face was red and blotchy, and he was sweating copiously. To all outward appearances they were an ill-matched couple, waiting for Victor Mabasha to arrive that evening in April, 1992.

  Jan Kleyn glanced at his wristwatch.

  “Another half hour and he’ll be here,” he said.

  “I hope you’re right,” said Franz Malan.

  Jan Kleyn started back, as if somebody had suddenly pointed a gun at him.

  “Am I ever wrong?” he asked. He was still talking in a low voice. But his threatening tone was unmistakable.

  Franz Malan looked at him thoughtfully.

  “Not yet,” he said. “It was just a thought.”

  “You’re thinking the wrong thoughts,” said Jan Kleyn. “You’re wasting your time worrying unnecessarily. Everything will go according to plan.”
r />   “I hope so,” said Franz Malan. “My superiors would put a price on my head if anything went wrong.”

  Jan Kleyn smiled at him.

  “I would commit suicide,” he said. “But I have no intention of dying. When we have recovered all we have lost during the last few years, I will withdraw. But not until then.”

  Jan Kleyn had enjoyed an astonishing career. His uncompromising hatred of everyone who wanted to put a stop to apartheid policies in South Africa was well known, or notorious, depending on one’s point of view. Many dismissed him as the biggest madman in the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. But those who knew him were well aware he was a cold, calculating man whose ruthlessness never pushed him into rash actions. He described himself as a “political surgeon,” whose job was to remove tumors constantly threatening the healthy body of South Afrikanerdom. Few people knew he was one of the BOSS’s most efficient employees.

  Franz Malan had been working more than ten years for the South African army, which had its own intelligence section. He had previously been an officer in the field, and led secret operations in Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique. When he suffered a heart attack at the age of forty-four, his military career came to an end. But his views and his abilities led to his being redeployed immediately in the security service. His assignments were varied, ranging from planting car bombs in the vehicles of opponents of apartheid to the organization of terrorist attacks on ANC meetings and their delegates. He was also a member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. But like Jan Kleyn, his role was behind the scenes. They had worked out a plan together, which was to be realized that very evening with the arrival of Victor Mabasha. They had been discussing what had to be done for many days and nights. Eventually, they reached an agreement. They put their plan before the secret society that was never known as anything other than the Committee.