The White Lioness Read online

  Jan Kleyn could not understand. What he did understand made him angry. He had dedicated his life to the fight against disorder. For him, disorder included everything that was unclear. What he did not understand must be fought against, just as all other causes of society’s increasing confusion and decay must be fought.

  He remained sitting in his car for a long time. Darkness fell. Only when he felt totally calm did he drive up to the front door. He noticed a slight movement behind the drapes in the big living room window. He picked up the bags of supplies, and opened the gate.

  He smiled at her when she opened the door. There were moments, so short that he barely managed to notice them, when he wished it was all in the imagination. But now he knew what was true, and he wanted to know what lay behind it.

  The darkness in the room made it difficult to distinguish her dark features.

  “I’ve come to visit you,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise you.”

  “You’ve never done this before,” she said.

  It seemed to him her voice was rough and strange. He wished he could see her more clearly. Did she suspect he had seen the guy leaving the house?

  At that moment Matilda came out of her room. She looked at him without saying a word. She knows, he thought. She knows her mother has betrayed me. How will she be able to protect her except by staying silent?

  He put down the bags of food and took off his jacket.

  “I want you to leave,” Miranda said.

  At first he thought he had misheard her. He turned around, his jacket still in his hand.

  “Are you asking me to go?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He contemplated his jacket for a moment before letting it drop to the floor. Then he hit her, as hard as he could, right in the face. She lost her balance but not her consciousness. Before she could manage to scramble up off the floor, he grabbed her blouse and dragged her up on her feet.

  “You are asking me to leave,” he said breathing heavily. “If anybody is going to leave, it’s you. But you aren’t going anyplace.”

  He dragged her into the living room and flung her down onto the sofa. Matilda moved to help her mother, but he yelled at her to stay back.

  He sat down on a chair right in front of her. The darkness in the room suddenly made him furious. He leapt to his feet and switched on every light he could find. Then he saw she was bleeding from both her nose and her mouth. He sat down again and stared at her.

  “A man came out of your house,” he said. “A black man. What was he doing here?”

  She did not answer. She was not even looking at him. Nor did she pay any attention to the blood dripping from her face.

  It all seemed to him a waste of time. Whatever she said or did, she had betrayed him. That was the end of the road. There was no going on. He did not know what he would do with her. He could not imagine a form of revenge that was harsh enough. He looked at Matilda. She still had not moved. Her face bore an expression he had never seen before. He could not say what it was. That made him insecure as well. Then he saw Miranda was looking at him.

  “I want you to go now,” she said. “And I don’t want you ever to come and visit me again. This is your house. You can stay, and we’ll move out.”

  She’s challenging me, he thought. How dare she? He felt his rage rising again. He forced himself not to beat her again.

  “No one’s leaving,” he said. “I just want you to tell me what’s going on.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Who you’ve been talking to. About me. What you’ve said. And why.”

  She looked him straight in the eye. The blood under her nose and on her chin had already congealed.

  “I’ve told them what I found in your pockets while you were sleeping here. I listened to what you said in your sleep, and I wrote it down. Maybe it was insignificant. But I hope it ruins you.”

  She spoke in that strange, rough voice. Now he realized that was her normal voice, and the one she had used all those years had been a sham. Everything had been a sham. He could no longer see any substance in their relationship.

  “Where would you have been without me?” he asked.

  “Maybe dead,” she replied. “But maybe I’d have been happy.”

  “You’d have been living in the slums.”

  “Maybe we’d have helped to pull them down.”

  “You leave my daughter out of this.”

  “You are the father of a child, Jan Kleyn. But you don’t have a daughter. You have nothing but your own ruin.”

  There was an ashtray on the table between them. Now that words were beyond him he grabbed it and flung it with all his might at her head. She managed to duck. The ashtray lay beside her on the sofa. He leapt up from his chair, shoved the table to one side, grabbed the ashtray, and held it over her head. At the same moment her heard a hissing noise, like from an animal. He looked at Matilda, who had moved forward from the background. She was hissing through clenched teeth. He could not make out what she was saying, but he could see she had a gun in her hand.

  Then she fired. She hit him in the chest, and he lived only for a minute after collapsing to the ground. They stood looking at him, he could see them although his vision was fading. He tried to say something, tried to hold onto his life as it ebbed away. But there was nothing to hold onto. There was nothing.

  Miranda felt no relief, but neither did she feel any fear. She looked at her daughter, who had turned her back on the corpse. Miranda took the pistol from her hand. Then she went to call the man who had been to see them, the one called Scheepers. She had looked up his number earlier, and written it on a scrap of paper beside the telephone. Now she realized why she had done that.

  A woman answered, giving her name as Judith. She shouted to her husband, who came straight to the telephone. He promised to come to Bezuidenhout right away, and asked her to do nothing until he got there.

  He explained to Judith that dinner would have to be postponed. But he did not say why, and she suppressed her desire to ask. His special assignment would soon be over, he had explained the previous day. Then everything would return to normal, and they could go back to the Kruger and see if the white lioness was still there, and if they were still scared of her. He called Borstlap, trying various numbers before tracking him down. He gave him the address, but asked him not to go in until he got there himself.

  When he arrived in Bezuidenhout, Borstlap was standing waiting by his car. Miranda opened the door. They went into the living room. Scheepers put his hand on Borstlap’s shoulder.

  “The man lying dead in there is Jan Kleyn,” he said.

  Borstlap stared at him in astonishment.

  Jan Kleyn was dead. It was striking how pale he looked, and how thin his face seemed to be, almost skeleton-like. Scheepers tried to make up his mind whether what he was witnessing was the end of an evil story, or a tragic one. He did not yet know the answer.

  “He hit me,” said Miranda. “I shot him.”

  When she said that, Scheepers happened to have Matilda in eyeshot. He could see she was surprised to hear what her mother said. Scheepers realized she was the one who had killed him, had shot her father. He could see Miranda had been beaten from her bloodstained face. Did Jan Kleyn have time to realize what was happening, he wondered. That he was going to die, and it was his daughter who was holding the last gun that would ever be pointed at him.

  He said nothing, but indicated to Borstlap he should accompany him into the kitchen. He shut the door behind them.

  “I don’t care how you do it,” he said, “but I want you to get that body out of here and make it look like a suicide. Jan Kleyn has been arrested and interrogated. That hurt his pride. He defended his honor by committing suicide. That’ll do as a motive. Covering up incidents involving the intelligence service doesn’t usually seem to be all that difficult. I’d like you to take care of this right now, or at least before tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll be putting my job on
the line,” said Borstlap.

  “I give you my word that you’re not risking anything at all,” said Scheepers.

  Borstlap stared at him for what seemed like an eternity.

  “Who are these women?” he asked.

  “People you’ve never met,” replied Scheepers.

  “Of course, it’s all about the security of South Africa,” said Borstlap, and Scheepers appreciated his weary irony.

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

  “That’s another lie.” said Borstlap. “Our country is a production line for lies, twenty-four hours a day. What’ll happen when the whole thing collapses?”

  “Why are we trying to prevent an assassination?” said Scheepers.

  Borstlap nodded slowly.

  “OK, I’ll do it,” he said.

  “On your own.”

  “Nobody will see me. I’ll leave the body somewhere out in the countryside. And I’ll make sure I’m in charge of the investigation.”

  “I’ll tell them,” said Scheepers. “They’ll open the door for you when you come back.”

  Borstlap left the house.

  Miranda had spread a blanket over Jan Kleyn’s body. Scheepers suddenly felt tired of all the lies surrounding him, lies that were partly within himself as well.

  “I know it was your daughter who shot him,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter. Not as far as I’m concerned, at least. If it matters to you, I’m afraid that’s something you’ll have to deal with yourselves. But the body will disappear later tonight. The police officer who came here with me will pick it up. He’s going to refer to it as suicide. Nobody will know what actually happened. I can guarantee that for you.”

  Scheepers detected a gleam of surprised gratitude in Miranda’s eyes.

  “In a sense, maybe it was suicide,” he said. “A man who lives like him maybe shouldn’t expect anything else.”

  “I can’t even cry over him,” said Miranda. “There’s nothing there.”

  “I hated him,” said Matilda suddenly.

  Scheepers could see she was crying.

  Killing a human being, he thought. However much you hate somebody, no matter how desperate you were, there will be a wound in your soul that will never heal. He was her father after all, the father she didn’t choose, but couldn’t get rid of.

  He did not stay long, as he could see they needed each other more than anything else. But when Miranda asked him to return, he promised to do so.

  “We’re going to move out,” she said.

  “Where to?”

  She threw her arms wide.

  “That’s something I can’t decide alone. Maybe it’s best if Matilda decides?”

  Scheepers drove home for dinner. He was thoughtful and distant. When Judith asked how much longer this special assignment was going to go on, he felt guilty.

  “It’ll be over soon,” he said.

  Borstlap called just before midnight.

  “I thought I’d better tell you Jan Kleyn has committed suicide,” he said. “They’ll find him tomorrow morning in a parking lot somewhere between Johannesburg and Pretoria.”

  Who is the strong man now, wondered Scheepers. Who will be directing the Committee now?

  Inspector Borstlap lived in the suburb of Kensington, one of the oldest in Johannesburg. His wife was a nurse on permanent night duty at the big army camp in town. As their three children had left the nest, Borstlap spent most weekday evenings alone in the house. He was generally so tired when he came home from work, he did not have the strength to do anything but watch television. He sometimes went down to a little hobby room he had made for himself in the basement. He cut out silhouettes. It was an art he had learned from his father, although he had never managed to be as skillful as he was. But it was a restful occupation, carefully but boldly cutting out faces in black paper. That particular evening, when he had transported Jan Kleyn to the dimly lit parking lot he knew about because there had been a murder there not long ago, he found it difficult to relax when he got back home. He was going to cut out silhouettes of his children, but he was also thinking about the work he had been doing these last few days with Scheepers. His first reaction was that he enjoyed working with the young lawyer. Scheepers was intelligent and energetic, and he had imagination to boot. He listened to what others had to say, and he did not hesitate to admit he was wrong when appropriate. But Borstlap wondered what his assignment really was. He realized it was something serious, a conspiracy, a threatened assassination of Nelson Mandela that had to be prevented. But apart from that, his knowledge was pretty scanty. He suspected there was a gigantic conspiracy, but the only one he knew was involved was Jan Kleyn. He sometimes had the impression he was taking part in an investigation with a blindfold on. He said that to Scheepers, who told him he understood. But there was nothing he could do to help. His hands were tied by the level of secrecy he was working under.

  When the strange telex message from Sweden landed on his desk that Monday morning, Scheepers had immediately gone into high gear. After a couple of hours they tracked down Victor Mabasha in the register and felt the tension increase when it was established that he had frequently been suspected of being a professional killer engaged in contract murders. He had never been convicted. Reading between the lines of the case histories, it was clear that he was very intelligent and always went about his business with skillfully set-up camouflage and security arrangements. His most recent known address was the township of Ntibane just outside Umtata, not far from Durban. That had immediately increased the credibility of Durban, July 3, as the crucial setting. Borstlap had contacted his colleagues in Umtata without delay, and they confirmed that they kept an eye on Victor Mabasha all the time. That same afternoon Scheepers and Borstlap drove there. They joined up with local detectives and raided Victor Mabasha’s shack at dawn. It was empty. Scheepers had trouble in concealing his disappointment, and Borstlap wondered what they could do next. They returned to Johannesburg and mobilized all available resources to track him down. Scheepers and Borstlap agreed that the official excuse, for the moment, should be that Victor Mabasha was wanted for violent attacks on white women in the province of Transkei.

  Strong warnings were also issued that no word of Victor Mabasha should reach the mass media. They were working around the clock now. But they still failed to find any trace of the man they were looking for. And now Jan Kleyn was dead.

  Borstlap yawned, put down his scissors and stretched.

  The following day they would have to start all over again, he thought. But there was still time, whether the crucial date was June 12 or July 3.

  Borstlap was not as convinced as Scheepers that the evidence pointing to Cape Town was a red herring. It seemed to him he ought to act as devil’s advocate with regard to Scheepers’ conclusions, and keep a close eye on the trail leading to Cape Town.

  On Thursday, May 28, Borstlap met Scheepers at eight in the morning.

  “Jan Kleyn was found at just after six this morning,” said Borstlap. “Some motorist stopped to take a leak. He informed the cops right away. I spoke to a patrol car that was first on the scene. They said it was obviously a suicide.”

  Scheepers nodded. He could see he had made a good choice when he asked for Inspector Borstlap as his assistant.

  “There are two weeks to go before June 12,” he said. “Just over a month to July 3. In other words, we still have time to track down Victor Mabasha. I’m not a cop, but I would think that gives us plenty of time.”

  “It all depends,” said Borstlap. “Victor Mabasha is an experienced criminal. He can remain hidden for long periods. He could disappear in some township or other, and then we would never find him,”

  “We have to,” objected Scheepers. “Don’t forget that the authority I’ve been given means I can demand practically unlimited resources.”

  “That’s not the way to find him,” said Borstlap. “You could get the army to besiege Soweto and then send in the paratroops, but you’d still never find
him. On the other hand, you’d have a revolt to deal with.”

  “What do you think?” asked Scheepers.

  “Announce discreetly a reward of fifty thousand rand,” said Borstlap. “A similarly discreet message to the underworld that we’d be prepared to pay for information enabling us to nail Victor Mabasha. That’ll give us a chance of tracking him down.”

  Scheepers eyed him doubtfizlly.

  “Is that how the police go about their business?”

  “Not often. But it happens, sometimes.”

  Scheepers shrugged.

  “You’re the one who knows about these things,” he said. “I’ll take care of the money.”

  “The word will be out tonight.”

  Scheepers turned his attention to Durban. As soon as possible they should take a look at the stadium where Nelson Mandela was due to address a large crowd. They must find out now what security measures the local police intended to take. They needed a strategy for how to proceed if they did not manage to find Victor Mabasha. Borstlap was worried that Scheepers was not taking the other alternative as seriously as Durban. He said nothing, but made up his mind to get in touch with a colleague in Cape Town and ask him to do some leg-work on his behalf.

  That same night Borstlap contacted some of the police informers he regularly received more or less useful rumors from.

  Fifty thousand rand was a lot of cash.

  He knew the hunt for Victor Mabasha had now started in earnest.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  On Wednesday, June 10, Kurt Wallander was given sick leave, effective immediately. According to the doctor, who regarded Wallander as taciturn and very uptight, he was vague and not sure exactly what was pestering him. He talked about nightmares, insomnia, stomach pains, nocturnal panic attacks when he thought his heart was about to stop beating—in other words, all the well-known symptoms of stress that could easily lead to a breakdown. At this point, Wallander was seeing the doctor every other day. His symptoms varied, and on every visit he had a different opinion as to which ones were worst. He had also started having sudden bouts of violent sobbing. The doctor who finally ordered him to take sick leave on grounds of acute depression, and prescribed anti-depressants for him, had no reason to doubt the seriousness of the situation. Within a short space of time he had killed one human being and actively contributed to another being burned alive. Nor could he wash his hands of responsibility for the woman who died while helping his daughter to escape. But most of all he felt guilty about the death of Victor Mabasha. It was natural that the reaction should set in with the death of Konovalenko. There was no longer anyone to chase, and no one hunting him. Paradoxically, the onset of depression indicated that the pressure on Wallander had eased. Now he would have the time to set his own house in order, and so his melancholy broke through all the barriers he had managed to erect thus far. After a few months, many of his colleagues began to doubt whether he would ever return. Occasionally, when news reached the police station of his peculiar journeys to places near and far, to Denmark and the Caribbean islands, there were some who thought he ought to be granted early retirement. The very thought caused much gloom. But in fact, it did not happen. He did come back, even though it took a very long time.