Unofficial and Deniable

5

‘Never conceal,’ the Chairman had said, ‘that you were in the South African army. People like Clements and Spicer can do that but you’ll be too high-profile to get away with a lie like that – you may fool people for a while but sooner or later somebody who knows you will blow into town and people will wonder why you concealed the truth. So tell ’em upfront: you were a professional officer fighting an honourable war against communism. Rub in Sandhurst, the sword of honour, all that good stuff. But disown apartheid, make all the usual noises against it – these people love to hear others singing their song …’

But it wasn’t that easy when Harker met Josephine Valentine the next Saturday for lunch at the Tavern on the Green. She came striding into the restaurant, ravishingly beautiful, her long blonde hair flowing, wreathed in smiles for her potential publisher, the file containing her typescript under her arm. He had intended telling her that they had met at the Battle of Bassinga only if the conversation and atmosphere between them warranted it: within minutes of the small-talk beginning he saw a look enter her eyes, a glint of challenge when he mentioned his military background, and he decided against it. She listened with close attention as he sketched in his personal history, fiddling with the cutlery. Then she politely took up the cudgel.

An honourable war? Yes, she understood how a career officer had to do his duty to the state, even if he didn’t personally approve of all its policies. And she understood how most people might consider the communists to be dangerous people, she could understand that honourable soldiers would feel justified in fighting them to their last breath – one took up a military career to defend one’s country and that would necessarily involve killing as many of the perceived enemy as possible. But in the case of South Africa, the communist ‘enemy’ – she made quotation marks with her fingers – was also fighting for the liberation of South Africa from the apartheid yoke, helping the ANC in their armed struggle. This surely made the Cubans the honourable soldiers, because apartheid – ‘on your own admission, Mr Harker’ – is evil, and the intelligent, honourable South African army officer must surely have seen this paradox and been in a quandary, not so? He was indirectly – indeed directly, surely? – fighting for the evil of apartheid? So how this officer could have justified his actions, if only to himself, profoundly puzzled her. A moral dilemma, no?

‘Did you come up against this quandary in yourself, Mr Harker? Or in any of your brother officers?’

‘Please call me Jack.’ Harker could see his potential relationship with this lovely woman going out of the window. He didn’t give a damn about the CCB’s loss, it was his own. He said, truthfully, ‘Oh yes. We didn’t talk about it much in the officers’ mess but I and a good few others had considerable qualms. But I considered myself to be fighting the greater evil of communism only, the important thing was to defeat the enemy, drive him into the sea, and then let the politicians unscramble the mess of apartheid.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘And if the politicians had not unscrambled the mess of apartheid, what would you have done? Would you have quit the army?’

‘I quit anyway. The politicians still haven’t unscrambled apartheid, but here I am.’

‘But you were wounded.’

‘But not killed. I could have stayed in the army in a non-combatant role.’

She looked at him calculatingly, smiling. ‘Okay, but when you went into battle did you really feel that you were only fighting against communism?’

Harker smiled. ‘Yes.’ That was more or less true.

‘But in the heat of battle too?’

He didn’t think it would be helpful to explain that in the heat of the battle all you felt was terrified hatred for the bastards trying to kill you. Like the saying ‘There are no atheists in a fox-hole’, there are few starry-eyed liberals on an African battlefield. But he didn’t want an argument with this beautiful woman, he wanted to have a nice lunch while Clements burgled her apartment again and then, if at all possible, he wanted to get laid. If not today then some time. Soon. ‘Yes, in battle too. Shall we order?’

She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘A bit later perhaps; I’m enjoying this conversation, I’ll bring it into my book.’

Harker smiled. The Chairman would love that. ‘So tell me about your book. May I?’ He indicated the folder containing her typescript.

She placed her hand protectively on it. ‘Please, not yet.’ She gave him another dazzling smile. ‘I’ve only written about ten chapters so far, anyway. I thought I was ready to show them to you but now I know I’m not. You’ve given me some new ideas.’ She grinned, then hunched forward earnestly. ‘So tell me, what’s going to happen in South Africa?’

This was the opening he was waiting for, the reason why Clements was burgling her apartment at this moment. He turned the question around: ‘What do you think is going to happen?’ He particularized: ‘In Angola?’

‘I asked first.’

He decided to give his honest opinion rather than the propagandist one.

‘The war will go on for some time. But communism is on the ropes. Russia is in big economic trouble. Cuba is Russia’s cat’s-paw and Russia cannot afford to support them much longer. Angola is Russia’s Vietnam. However, nor can South Africa afford it much longer, though we’re in better shape than Russia and Cuba. So even if we don’t achieve a knockout blow now and drive the Cubans back home – which we could do militarily – Russia’s poverty will eventually do the job for us. So I think South Africa will finally win the war.’ He added, in the hopes of drawing her out, ‘I don’t think the South Africans will ever quit, no matter what economic hardships they encounter. And I think Castro realizes this and he’ll soon start looking for a face-saving way to make a peace deal.’ He added, ‘Don’t you?’

Josephine was not to be drawn. She had her hands clasped under her chin, her eyes attentive. ‘And what’s going to happen to apartheid?’

Harker took a sip of wine. ‘Meanwhile apartheid is on the ropes too. It is a proven failure. Cruel, and economically unjust – and economically wasteful. So there will be reform – already the state president has warned his Volk that they must “adapt or die”, and a lot of apartheid’s petty laws are not being enforced. So after the communist threat is removed, I expect apartheid will be eroded until there is none of it left. There’ll be resistance to the process, of course, diehards threatening civil war, but my guess is that by the turn of the century apartheid will be well and truly dead and we can get on with reforming ourselves our way.’

Josephine took an energetic sip of wine. ‘And what is “our” way? One man, one vote?’

‘Yes, but we must prepare for that over at least a decade. To instil a democratic culture into the blacks.’ He added, ‘One of the greatest sins of apartheid is that we wasted forty years during which we could have done that, brought them up gradually into political maturity. Instead, apartheid just translocated them back into their tribal homelands, threw independence at them and let them make a mess of it.’

Josephine sat back, on her hobby horse. ‘You don’t think that their “mess” is perhaps a teeny-weeny bit due to the rape of colonialism?’

Harker sat back also. He frowned reasonably. ‘Indeed, some of it. The Germans, for example, were bad colonialists, ruling by the whip. But they were kicked out of Africa during the First World War. The Portuguese were also bad – but at least the Latins didn’t practise segregation. King Leopold raped the Belgian Congo and brutalized the natives with forced labour, and the government did nothing to prepare the natives for the independence they threw at them at the first sign of rebellion, so of course the place erupted in chaos – particularly as the Russians and Chinese were fuelling the flames in their quest for worldwide communist revolution. Yes,’ he agreed sagely, ‘the communist powers were very bad neo-colonialists.’

Josephine sat back firmly in her chair, one hand clutching her wine glass to her breast.

‘And the Dutch were bad colonialists,’ Harker continued. ‘They subjugated the natives, very much like you Americans did with the Red Indians – you people were also bad colonialists.’ He smiled and took a sip of wine, then frowned. ‘But the British were pretty good colonialists, Josephine. They tried to teach the Africans democracy, tried to bring them into government gradually. But the Wind of Change forced them to go too fast, grant independence too soon and their colonies became corrupt dictatorships.’ He ended mildly: ‘Don’t you think?’

‘So,’ Josephine said, ‘you think that South Africa should spend the next ten years teaching them a democratic culture, before giving them the vote?’

‘It’s starting now. The government has created a separate parliament for Coloureds, by that I mean the half-castes, and another one for Indians. Apartheid is in retreat.’

Josephine leant forward. ‘Bullshit!’ She tapped her breast. ‘I’ve just come from that neck of the woods and I can tell you that apartheid is monstrously alive and hideously well! South Africa is not ruled by parliament any more, it’s ruled by the goddam security forces! By so-called securocrats. By the so-called State Security Council which is nothing more than a committee of police and army generals which bypass the whole goddam parliament!’ She looked at him. ‘Your parliament is irrelevant now, the country is run by the goddam generals, like the Argentine was. Like Chile.’ She glared at him. Before Harker could respond she went on, ‘And what about the NSMS – the National Security Management System that this State Security Council has set up – hundreds of secret intelligence committees across the country with tentacles into every facet of life, spying on absolutely everybody, committing murders and mayhem. Absolutely above the law.’ She glared. ‘What your parliament says is irrelevant in these days of the Total Onslaught, Total Strategy.’

Harker was impressed with her general knowledge. He said: ‘But that sort of thing happens all over the world when a state of emergency is declared. However, I doubt that parliament is irrelevant. I agree that in matters of security the State Security Council bypasses parliament, but I don’t believe that they are above the law.’

Josephine said: ‘You don’t think that the South African police has a hit-squad of two? Boys in dark sunglasses who knock off the odd enemy of the apartheid state?’

Harker shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Nor the army? The army hasn’t got Special Forces capable of hit-and-run skulduggery?’

Harker dearly wished to change the subject. ‘Of course, all armies have. Like the British SAS, the American Green Berets. But hit-squads? No.’

Josephine had her hands clasped beneath her chin, eyes bright. Then: ‘Not even with the policy of Total Onslaught, Total Strategy inaugurated by your President P.W. Botha ten years ago – in 1978 to be exact. The ends justify the means – any means?’

Harker shook his head, and took a sip of wine. ‘Not “any means”.’

Josephine looked at him, very polite. ‘But what about the bomb that exploded at the ANC headquarters in London in 1982? Who did that? And who blew up Cosatu House last year in downtown Johannesburg – the headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions? The Boy Scouts? And who blew up Khotso House only last year, the headquarters of the South Africa Council of Churches – also alleged to be the underground headquarters of the ANC?’ She smiled at him. ‘President Botha blamed it on “the Godless communists”.’ She snorted. ‘What crap. As if the communists would blow up the ANC’s headquarters – their ally. And what about Khanya House, the united church’s building in Pretoria, a couple of months later? And what about Dulcie September? And what about the beautiful Jeanette Schoon, who worked for the British Volunteer Service in Angola, got blown to bits with her little daughter by a parcel bomb. You remember that case, only last year?’

Harker remembered reading about it. He had attributed it to rogue cops. ‘Yes.’

‘Who do you think sent the Schoons that nice parcel bomb? Father Christmas? And what about Albie Sachs, the ANC lawyer in Mozambique, somebody rigged a bomb to his car last year which blew his arm off when he opened the door. Who did that, d’you think?’ She frowned. ‘Albie Sachs was the sixth senior ANC official to be targeted in foreign countries.’ She looked at him. ‘Doesn’t that suggest to you that there is a department in the South African government that specializes in that sort of thing?’

Harker badly wanted to get off this subject. ‘That could all be the work of individual rogue cops acting on their own initiatives.’

Josephine smiled and sat back. ‘Come on. Taking all the evidence together, the irresistible conclusion seems to be that the Total Strategy means the police and army can do what they goddam like to combat the perceived enemy.’ Josephine took a sip of wine. ‘Anyway, what’s your opinion of the anti-apartheid movement?’

Harker was relieved to change the focus of the subject. ‘They do important work, raising public awareness.’

Josephine looked surprised. ‘Really? Would you be prepared to join us? Work with us?’

Harker could almost hear Dupont and the Chairman whooping in glee. He said, ‘Sure, though I don’t know how much practical work I could do.’

Her demeanour had changed. ‘Oh, your name as a publisher would help us a lot. We’ve got some famous companies and organizations supporting us. And seen being associated with a good organization like ours would surely do Harvest House some good.’

Harker inwardly sighed. ‘Quite possibly.’

She hesitated, then said, ‘And if a good anti-apartheid book were written, you would consider publishing it?’

Christ, what would the Chairman think about that? ‘If I considered it a commercially profitable book, yes. Indeed that –’ be indicated the folder containing her typescript – ‘is what I hoped this meeting today was about.’

Josephine evidently had decided suddenly that this South African was okay. ‘Oh yes, but I wasn’t sure it would be your kind of book, you being a heavy-duty battle-scarred war veteran and all that jazz.’ She grinned. ‘Thought maybe I was barking up the wrong tree.’ She leant forward earnestly. ‘I hope I didn’t offend you?’

‘Not at all.’ Harker smiled. Very relieved to be off the subject of South African hit-squads. He added, to ease his conscience about raising false hopes, ‘However, a bigger publisher may do better for you than Harvest House. But your literary agent will advise you on all that, of course.’

She said earnestly, ‘But I’d really like to give you first go at it, I mean, being a South African you know what I’m talking about, you’d be very helpful editorially.’

I’m a bastard, getting this woman’s hopes up, Harker thought. But he would be able to pass the buck to his editor. ‘Well, let’s drink to that prospect.’ He raised his glass.

‘Right!’ Josephine picked up hers and they clinked across the table. ‘Oh,’ she beamed, ‘this is exciting. I’m going to go home and work like hell on my revisions. Can we meet again next week, so I can show the first few chapters to you without dying of embarrassment?’

Harker grinned. ‘Same time, same place?’

‘Perfect. And I’ll be paying!’

‘You will not.’ The South African taxpayer was paying. Harker was very pleased she had relaxed. She’s a volatile one, he thought. He was pleased not because he was fulfilling Dupont’s orders so unexpectedly easily, but because he really wanted to meet her again next week. Even if, regrettably, he might never get laid now that their relationship had unfortunately degenerated into a potential one of publisher and author – Ms Josephine Franklin Valentine looked too smart to make the mistake of sleeping with her mentor. Authors like to keep their publishers on pedestals. But had she not screwed plenty of army officers for helicopter rides into battle-zones? He said: ‘So, shall we order?’

‘I feel like getting drunk first!’

Harker laughed. ‘So do I.’ He beckoned to their waiter and pointed at the wine bottle for a replacement. He turned to Josephine. ‘So,’ he said, not for duty’s sake, ‘tell me why you got deported from South Africa.’

‘The cops raided my hotel room, confiscated my writing and escorted me on to an aircraft to London.’

‘But what had you done to make them raid your hotel room?’

Josephine smiled. God, she was beautiful.

‘When the Soweto riots broke out in South Africa – turmoil. I flew down to Johannesburg to get some action. I had to tag along behind the press corps – not being a full-blooded journalist accredited to any newspaper I was vulnerable. Anyway, there I was, a hanger-on, and the police commander called a press conference to explain to the world why so many blacks had been killed in Soweto that day. And I had the audacity to say: “But Brigadier Swanepoel, couldn’t you have used rubber bullets instead of real ones?” And Brigadier Swanepoel looked at me with his Afrikaner beetle-brow’ – Josephine furrowed her forehead in imitation – ‘and responded: “Rrubber bullets? Madam, I will starrt using rrubber bullets when those kaffirrs starrt thrrowing rrubber rrocks!”’

Harker threw back his head and laughed.

Of course she’d done a hell of a lot more than criticize Brigadier Swanepoel to antagonize the authorities into deporting her: Dupont had said in his covering report that she shouldn’t have been let into the country in the first place. She was obviously a communist, the South African Embassy in America should never have granted her a visa, somebody had slipped up as fucking usual. But Josephine didn’t want to talk any more about it. ‘It’ll all be in my book, I don’t want to steal my own thunder by telling you twice, so let’s just have a jolly lunch …’

And it was jolly. The initial suspicions and fencing behind them, the conversation flowed like the wine, copiously. She hardly mentioned her experiences as a photo-journalist again: instead she regaled him with anecdotes about her other adventures around the world, her work for the anti-apartheid movement in London, her investigation into the politics of Hong Kong, into the plight of the Aborigines in Australia, of the Palestinians in Israel, the plight of the whale, the coral reefs – ‘The whole goddam environment’s in a mess!’

‘Did you write about all those subjects?’ He had not seen any cuttings about the environment in her CCB file.

‘You bet. I’ll show you my file of cuttings one day.’

She wanted to set the world on fire. ‘But I’m not a communist, Jack. I’m all for enterprise, it’s the unacceptable face of capitalism I’m against. The monopolies, the exploitation, the sweated labour.’ She waved a hand. ‘Of course, when I was a starry-eyed freshman at university I went through the usual phase of communist idealism, but I grew out of that. And I think the world had to go through this period of communist revolution to sweep aside the feudal injustices of centuries, to redress the obscene imbalance of wealth and power that existed at the time. I admire the communists’ achievements.’

Like what? Harker was about to say, but changed it in his mouth: ‘Which ones?’

‘It’s undeniable,’ she said earnestly, ‘that the average Russian and Chinese peasant – the vast majority of those two massive countries – it’s undeniable that they’re much better off now than before their revolutions.’

Harker didn’t want to argue but he had to say, ‘But it’s 1998 now, and though the average Russian and Chinese probably is better off than his grandparents, he’s still very poor compared to his modern Western counterpart.’

‘Yeah? What about the poor of South America? The masses of India? They’re supposedly “Western” too in the sense that they’re in the West’s sphere, of influence.’

‘But the moral wrongs in those countries don’t make the economic and moral wrongs in Russia and China right, do they?’

‘True.’ She grinned. ‘So we’re coming up with profound truths. And I’m feeling more profound every minute.’ She pointed her finger at his nose. ‘But only a revolution will sweep aside the wrongs of most Third World countries, and the only power capable of making such a revolution is communism. All the other kinds are pussy-footing and piss-weak. So I applaud those underground communists who’re plotting to overthrow the repressive governments of Argentina and Chile and the like. I applaud the likes of Fidel Castro – I support the Cubans in Africa because even if they are driven back into the sea as you want, I betcha –’ she jabbed a finger – ‘that win or lose the Cubans will have been a big factor in the eventual collapse of apartheid.’

She looked at him an earnest moment, then thrust her warm smooth hand on his. ‘But even though you don’t like that, Major Jack Harker, sir –’ she gave a little salute – ‘will you please please please still consider publishing my shit-hot humdinger of a book?’

Harker threw back his head and laughed. It all seemed terribly funny.

‘Oh …’ she laughed, ‘I’m having a lovely day …’

Yes, it was a lovely day. On their second Irish coffee he just wanted to take her hand and walk with this lovely young woman through this lovely park with its trees in full summer bloom, its lovers and roller-skaters and musicians and horse-drawn carriages – just walk hand in hand, being frightfully learned and amusing, telling each other more about each other, going through that delightfully earnest process of impressing: that’s what Jack Harker wanted to do, then hail a taxi to take them back to his nice old apartment off Gramercy Park, then fold her in his arms. But there was going to be none of that delightful business: it was a non-starter because Josephine wanted to rush home to work.

‘While my writing blood is up! I’m not going to waste all this booze, I’m going to go’n pound out the prose so I bowl you over next Saturday, Jack Harker of Harvest House fame …’ She blew him a dazzling kiss as her taxi pulled away from the Tavern on the Green.

Harker watched her go with regret. As her cab disappeared she twiddled her fingers over her shoulder at him. He grinned and waved. Then he pulled out his cellphone and dialled Clements.

‘The eagle is on her way back,’ he said.

‘I’m clear,’ Clements replied.

‘Anything new?’

‘Some.’

‘So, drop everything around to me tonight.’