The Redbreast

32

Johannesburg. 28 February 2000. hillbrow police station was in the centre of Johannesburg and looked like a fortress with barbed wire on top of the walls and steel mesh in front of windows, which were so small that they were more like gun slits.

'Two men, black, killed last night, in this police district alone,' Officer Isaiah Burne said as he led Harry through a labyrinth of corridors with peeling white walls and worn linoleum. 'Did you see the big Carlton Hotel? Closed. The whites moved out to the suburbs a long time ago, so now we only have each other to shoot at.'

Isaiah hitched up his pants. He was black, tall, knock-kneed and more than a little overweight. The white nylon shirt had dark rings of sweat in the armpits.

'Andreas Hochner is usually held in a prison we call Sin City out of town,' he said. 'We brought him in today for these interviews.'

'Are there others apart from mine?' Harry asked.

'Here we are,' Isaiah said, swinging open a door. They went into a room where two men were standing with folded arms and staring through a brown window.

'Two-way mirror,' Isaiah whispered. 'He can't see us.'

The two men in front of the window nodded to Isaiah and Harry and moved away.

They looked into a small, dimly lit room with one chair and one small table. On the table there was an ashtray full of cigarette ends and a microphone on a stand. The man sitting on the chair had dark eyes and a thick black moustache which hung down over the corners of his mouth. Harry immediately recognised him from Wright's blurred photographs.

'The Norwegian?' one of the two men mumbled, inclining his head towards Harry. Isaiah gave a nod of assent.

'OK,' the man said, turning to Harry, but without letting the man at the table out of his sight. 'He's yours, Norwegian. You got twenty minutes.'

'The fax said -'

'Screw the fax, Norwegian. Do you know how many countries want to interrogate this guy or have him handed over?’

‘Well, no.'

'Just be happy you can talk to him at all,' the man said. 'Why has he agreed to talk to me?’

‘How should we know? Ask him yourself.'

Harry tried to breathe from his stomach when he came into the cramped, airless interview room. On the wall, where red stripes of rust ran to form a kind of grille pattern, there was a clock. It showed 10.30. Harry's mind was on the policemen following him, Argus-eyed; that was what must have been making his hands clammy. The figure on the chair was hunched, his eyes half closed.

'Andreas Hochner?'

'Andreas Hochner?' the man in the chair repeated in a whisper, raised his eyes and gave the impression that he had just spotted something he wanted to crush under his heel. 'No, he's at home banging your mother.'

Warily, Harry took a seat. He thought he could hear guffaws of laughter from the other side of the black mirror.

'I'm Harry Hole from the Norwegian police,' he said softly. 'You agreed to talk to us.'

'Norway?' Hochner said with some scepticism. He leaned forward and inspected the ID card Harry held up. Then he smiled a little sheepishly.

'Sorry, Hole. They didn't tell me it was Norway today, you see. I've been waiting for you.'

'Where's your lawyer?' Harry put the briefcase on the table, opened it and took out a sheet of questions and a notepad.'

'Forget him. I don't trust the guy. Is the mike on?'

'I don't know. Does it matter?'

I don't want the niggers to hear. I'm interested in making a deal. With you. With Norway.'

Harry looked up from the question sheet. The clock on the wall over Hochner's head was ticking. Three minutes gone. Something told him he wasn't going to get his allotted time.

'What sort of deal?'

'Is the mike on?' Hochner whispered between his teeth. 'What sort of deal?'

Hochner rolled his eyes. Then he leaned forward over the table and said in a rapid whisper, 'In South Africa it's the death penalty for the things they maintain I've done. Do you understand what I'm getting at?'

'Maybe. Go on.'

I can tell you certain things about the man in Oslo so long as you can guarantee your government will ask the nigger government for a reprieve. Because I helped you, right. Your Prime Minister, she was here, right? Her and Mandela went round hugging each other. The ANC honchos in charge now, they like Norway. You support them. You boycotted us when the nigger commies wanted us to be boycotted. They'll listen to you, right?'

'Why can't you make the same deal by helping the police here?'

'For fuck's sake!' Hochner's fist hit the table so hard the ashtray jumped and it rained cigarette butts. 'Don't you understand anything, you fucking oinker! They think I've killed nigger kids.'

His hands grabbed the edge of the table and he glowered at Harry with wide eyes. Then it was as if his face cracked, it crumpled like a punctured football. He hid it in his hands.

'They just want to see me swing, don't they!'

There was a bitter sob. Harry studied him. He wondered how many hours the two of them in there had kept Hochner awake with questions before he arrived. He took a deep breath. Then he leaned across the table, grabbed the microphone with one hand and pulled the lead out with the other.

'Deal, Hochner. We've got ten seconds. Who's Uriah?'

Hochner watched him between his fingers.

'What?'

'Quick, Hochner. They'll be here in a moment!’

‘He's… he's an old guy, over seventy for sure. I only met him once, at the handover.'

'What did he look like?’

‘Old, as I said.’

‘Description!'

'He was wearing a coat and hat. It was the middle of the night in a badly lit container port. Blue eyes, I think, medium height… mm.’

‘What did you talk about? Quick!'

'This and that. We spoke English at first, but changed when he realised that I could speak German. I told him that my parents came from Elsass. He said he'd been there, somewhere called Sennheim.'

'What's his game?'

'Don't know, but he's an amateur. He talked a lot, and when he got the gun, he said it was the first time he'd held a weapon for more than fifty years. He said he hates -'

The door to the room was torn open.

'Hates what?' Harry shouted.

At that moment he felt a hand tighten around his collar-bone. A hoarse voice close to his ear. 'What the hell are you doing?'

Harry held Hochner's gaze as they dragged him backwards towards the door. Hochner's eyes had glazed over and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down. Harry could see his lips move, but didn't hear what he said.

Then the door slammed in front of him.

Harry rubbed his neck as Isaiah drove him to the airport. They had been driving for twenty minutes before Isaiah spoke.

'We've been working on this case for six years. The list of arms deliveries covers twenty countries. We've been worried about precisely what happened today; that someone would dangle diplomatic help in front of him in order to get information.'

Harry shrugged his shoulders.

'So what? You've caught him and you've done your job, Isaiah. All that's left is to pick up the medals. Whatever deals anyone makes between Hochner and the government has nothing to do with you.'

'You're a policeman, Harry. You know what it's like to see criminals go free, people who don't blink an eyelid about killing, who you know will continue where they left off as soon as they're out on the street again.'

Harry didn't answer.

'You do know, don't you? Good, because this is the deal. It sounded like you got your end of the bargain with Hochner. That means it's up to you whether you want to keep your part. Or let it go. Is that right?'

'I'm just doing my job, Isaiah, and I could use Hochner at some point as a witness. Sorry.'

Isaiah banged the steering wheel so hard it made Harry jump.

'Let me tell you something, Harry. Before the elections in 1994, when we still had white minority rule, Hochner shot two black girls, both eleven years old, from a water tower outside the school grounds in a black township called Alexandra. We think someone in Afrikaner Volkswag, the apartheid party, was behind it. There was some controversy surrounding the school because it had three white pupils. He used Singapore bullets, the same type they use in Bosnia. They open after a hundred metres and bore their way through everything in their way, like a drill. Both girls were hit in the neck and for once it didn't matter that the ambulances, as usual, took over an hour to turn up in a black township.'

Harry didn't answer.

'But you're wrong if you think it's revenge we're after, Harry. We've understood that you can't build a new society on revenge. That's why the first black majority government set up a commission to uncover assaults and harassment during apartheid times. It wasn't about revenge; it was about owning up and forgiving. It has healed a lot of wounds and done the whole society some good. At the same time, though, we're losing the fight against criminality, and particularly here in Jo'burg where everything is completely out of control. We're a young, vulnerable nation, Harry, and if we want to make any progress we have to show that law and order means something, that chaos can be used as a pretext for crime. Everyone remembers the killings in 1994. Everyone is following the case in the papers now. That's why it is more important than your personal agenda or mine, Harry.'

He clenched his fist and hit the steering wheel again.

'It's not about being judges of life and death, but about giving a belief in justice back to ordinary people. Sometimes it takes the death penalty to give them that belief.'

Harry tapped a cigarette out of the packet, opened the window a little and stared at the yellow slagheaps that broke the monotony of the arid landscape.

'So what do you say, Harry?'

'You'll have to put your foot down if I'm going to make that flight, Isaiah.'

Isaiah punched the steering column so hard Harry was amazed it survived.