‘Let’s keep it a surprise.’ He caught the waterproof thrown by a team member and handed it to Kemp. ‘Wear it.’ The Englishman pulled it over his sweatshirt, deliberately, eyes staying engaged. A nod from his captor. ‘Okay, moer. So far, so good. You fok with us, you get fokked. Ja?’
‘No problem.’ No problem, but for a kidnap in progress, but for the presence of five heavy-set opponents with enough intent and muscle density to cause damage. No problem, but for a vanishing act seawards.
He was hustled on board and forced to a seat before the coxswain’s station as the Rib reversed, spun and opened throttle. Turnaround. Exit. The vessel bounced, gathered speed and found its groove, planing smoothly on the swollen surface, reading waves, heading out. They were not a talkative group. Kemp saw the shoreline recede, dissolve, as they entered the ocean. For those in peril on the sea. He had taken the plunge, might soon be taking a different kind. Best to lie low, avert the head. They were ignoring him anyway, preoccupied with nothing, uninterested in their catch. He was another client snatched, assigned for delivery; another body. It had the hallmarks of repetition, the commonplace, of routine tasking placed somewhere on a list. Spume ejected outwards, ripples batting beneath the hull. Putting in miles, losing sense of place and time. He stared between his knees at the deck. Getting ready to pray, to kiss his ass goodbye.
Solitude, a privilege of the wealth- and ocean-bound. The yacht was alone, immense and elegant, brilliant white in the heavy fastness. He had found Denys Krige; the tycoon had found him. There was no ceremony, only the wordless actions of the crew, the manoeuvring alongside, the climb-up steps ready deployed midships. Some boats were loved, others had the antiseptic ambience of expensive charter and tax engineering. This one was loved. It showed in the detail, in the teak, in the lack of flamboyance, the avoidance of the new. Ruth. Much was in a name. A female hand had supervised, a family had once laughed, played games, thrown quoits, had swum from the stern. Happy times. Many ghosts. Kemp was escorted through, past a reception salon, up a grand staircase, along a row of master cabins towards a sun lounge. Snapshots imprinted. He took it in, felt the softness of the carpet, inhaled the hinted fragrance of cut flowers. A safe haven that no longer sheltered, that had lost its role. No one was untouchable. There was grief overlaying the empty spaces, poison overhanging the charm. The stink of memory.
Krige did not bother to rise, had his hands folded. A picture of grey-haired and weathered sleekness, corporate power, packaged in a lightweight suit. He was a big man, in shape, a late sexagenarian with tepid eyes betraying neither mood nor intention, indicating control. Resources that demanded – and got. Groomed looks, patrician blood, entrepreneurial instincts, the face of a pugilist-aesthete, the veldt bred out, the hardness retained. Wronged man or amoral tyrant, it depended on the light, the angle, the circumstance. Kemp paused, observed. It was harder to demonize an enemy in the flesh, harder to confront without outright confrontation.
The gaze was clear, fathoming. ‘Kemp versus Krige. It has the ring of a court battle to it.’
‘I thought you abandoned legalities some time ago.’
‘Ah, yes. The British and their ethics, their sanctimony, their fair play, their high-mindedness. It was why I avoided shaking your hand, making you press the palm of a mass murderer.’
‘I’m grateful.’
‘And also a hypocrite.’ He indicated the chair opposite. ‘Please sit. A drink?’ Kemp declined with a shake of his head. ‘Pity. There’s an excellent Meerlust you should try.’ He sat back as Kemp took up position. They were alone in the glass-bounded room, the lieutenants, the bodyguards retreating into invisibility, the two men left to face-off across a table. Appraisal and focus, without the chessboard. The businessman did not blink. ‘There’s nothing strange in a representative of Her Majesty’s government dealing with a butcher.’
‘Realpolitik.’
‘The catch-all, the justification. Realpolitik.’ He rolled it, light, Dutch-accented, on his tongue. ‘Self-interest. It’s why the West held cocktail receptions for the dictators and mutilators of Africa, sponsored atrocity, yet baulked at friendship with the apartheid regime. It’s why hand-wringing South African liberals pushed for change, yet now populate New York salons to avoid living in the criminal cesspit they helped create.’
‘You played your part, stayed behind.’
‘Did I have a choice? If you leave your country, you leave your soul, your ancestors, your inheritance, you abandon the graves of your loved ones.’
Kemp watched a flock of gulls plummet and rise, wheel across the panes of glass. So like the birds diving to feed on Professor Pitt. He returned to the present, to Krige. ‘I thought you supported the political transformation.’
‘At the time. I’m a businessman, a pragmatist. The situation was untenable, becoming desperate. And for a moment, I believed the hyperbole, forgot the truth, forgot the meaning of Africa, the mind of Africans. Rainbow state.’ The term was delivered monotone, the voice colourless. ‘Forgot that the only thing lying at the end of a rainbow was a crock of shit and a pile of lies.’
‘I know what happened to your children.’
‘Do you? Do you know how Jonty and Vicky suffered, how they were raped for hours, ended up skinned and nailed to a tree, were strangled and revived, strangled and killed? Do you know how my staff were tortured to death that day as a pan-Africanist political statement?’ He was not expecting an answer. ‘And you travel to this continent to ask me why, to ask me my motive.’
‘Vengeance?’
‘It’s a purer cause, more powerful, than the manipulation and expediency of your politicians.’
‘At least they try, at least they’re mandated.’
‘By whom? They’ve squandered their legitimacy, hidden behind their elections.’
Kemp reconnoitred for weakness, probing, testing. ‘What was your authority? A primal urge to create horror on a scale beyond imagination? An assumed right to unleash atrocity, barbarity, that makes the death of your children seem mundane? How about the suffering you created – in Britain, across America?’
‘Apocalyptic problems require apocalyptic solutions.’
‘Solutions,’ Kemp repeated slowly, suppressing anger, regulating his breath. ‘The Nazis had a word for it. Rassenkampf.’ Race war.
‘Am I expected to defer to your terminology?’
‘Only to be honest. Remember Sophie, the girl in London? Probably not. Your black extremists carved her up, murdered her family, her friends. Your white extremists trained her, conditioned her, to deliver a car bomb.’
‘Synergy.’
‘Savagery,’ Kemp countered. ‘Hardly gives you the moral high ground.’
‘Morality is for academics. I have no requirement for it. Wake up, Mr Kemp. Smell the fear, the blood, the fury. I didn’t export cruelty to your island, to the United States; I didn’t invent hatred, conjure a racial divide. They’re there, dormant. I merely awakened, illuminated.’
‘To what end? To produce another Jonty or Vicky, to see civilians caught in the cross-fire, to see mothers like Sophie blow themselves apart?’
Krige’s fingertips had arched together to form a pyramid. ‘In total war, there is no such thing as a non-combatant.’
‘What about a just war?’
‘Just? It was your systems that destroyed my country, my family and my life, your systems that will bear the consequence, be held to account.’
‘Whatever the cost.’
A shallow incline of the head. ‘Quid pro quo. Start enough cycles, you will never halt the revolution. Start a large enough fire, it will rage indefinitely.’ The magnate’s attention flitted to a line of family photographs and back to Kemp. ‘Kindling was dry, Mr Kemp. I added the accelerant, I brought together the flint and the steel.’ It had created not a spark, but an inferno.
‘The Tigers? The Forresters?’
‘Indeed. And spare me the counter-arguments, that wrongs don’t make a right, revenge doesn’t bring back the dead.’
‘You recognize them.’
‘I abhor them. They justify cowardice, passivity, inertia.’ Fish odour wafted faintly through the open doors, the greedy screech of seabirds carried behind. Krige stayed focused on his guest, his theme. Measured delivery, measuring the captive. ‘I have lived in Africa all my life. I’ve watched as each of its states gained independence, I’ve watched as productivity fell, conflict flared, famine spread, as each of its states dragged itself into an abyss of its own making. And in my soul, I understood that one day, when the black took over South Africa, my country, my children, everything for which I had striven, would follow into that abyss.’
