'Let us hope so,' Moses agreed. A reunion would mean that the Puck's Hill team would join him here on the island, or take the shorter road to the gallows.
The hour passed too swiftly, and the warder was standing up.
'Time up. Say your goodbyes." 'I leave my heart with you, my husband,' Vicky told him, and watched the warder lead him away. He did not look back at her, and his gait dragged like that of an exhausted old man.
'It is only the starvation,' she told Joseph as they walked back to the ferry. 'He is still courageous as a lion, but weak from lack of food." 'He is finished,' Joseph contradicted her quietly. 'The Boers have beaten him. He will never breathe the air of freedom again. He will never see the outside of his prison again." 'For all of us, born black, this whole country is a prison,' Vicky said fiercely, and Joseph did not reply until they were once more aboard the ferry and running back before the gale, towards the flattopped mountain whose lower slopes were flecked with white walls and shining glass.
'Moses Gama chose the wrong road,' Joseph said. 'He tried to assault the walls of the white fortress. He tried to burn it down, not realizing that even if he had succeeded all he would have inherited would have been ashes." 'And you, Joseph Dinizulu,' Vicky flashed at him scornfully, 'you are wiser?" 'Perhaps not, but at least I will learn from the mistakes of Moses Gama and Nelson Mandela. I will not spend my life rotting in a white man's prison." 'How will you assault the white man's fortress, my clever little brother?" 'I will cross the lowered drawbridge,' he said. 'I will go in through the open gates, and one day the castle and its treasures will be mine, even if I have to share a little of them with the white man. No, my angry little sister, I will not destroy those treasures with bombs and flames. I will inherit them." 'You are mad, Joseph Dinizulu." She stared at him, and he smiled complacently at her.
'We shall see who is mad and who is sane,' he said. 'But remember this, little sister, that without the white man we would still be living in grass huts. Look to the north and see the misery of those countries :whites. No, my sister, I will keep the w. bite ae will work for me, not I for him." son." Hendrick Tabaka leaned forward and P .... Raleigh's shoulder. 'Your anger will destroy you. Your enemy oo strong. See what has happened to Moses Gama, my own brother. See what is the fate of Nelson Mandela.
They went out to fight the lion with bare hands." 'Others are still fighting,' Raleigh pointed out. 'The warriors of Umkhonto we Sizwe are still fighting. Every day we hear of their brave deeds. Every day their bombs explode." 'They are throwing pebbles at a mountain,' Hendrick said sadly.
'Every time they explode a little bomb against the pylon of a power line, Vorster and De La Rey arm another thousand police and write another hundred banning orders." Hendrick shook his head. 'Forget your anger, my son, there is a fine life for you at my side. If you follow Moses Gama and Mandela, you will end the way they have ended - but I can offer you wealth and power. Take a wife, Raleigh, a good fat wife and give her many sons, forget the madness and take your place at my side." 'I had a wife, my father, and I left her at Sharpeville,' Raleigh said. 'But before I left her, I made a vow. With my fingers deep in her bloody wounds, I made a vow." 'Vows are easy to make,' Hendrick whispered, and Raleigh saw how age had played like a blowtorch across his features, withering and searing and melting the bold lines of his cheekbones and jaw.
'But vows are difficult to live with. Your brother Wellington has also made a vow to the white man's god. He will live like a eunuch for the rest of his life, without ever knowing the comfort of a woman's body. I fear for you, Raleigh, fruit of my loins. I fear that your own vow will be a heavy burden for all your life." He sighed again. 'But since I cannot persuade you, what can I do to ease the rocky pathway for you?" 'You know that many of the young people are leaving this country?" Raleigh asked.
'Not only the young ones,' Hendrick nodded. 'Some of the high command have gone also. Oliver Tambo has fled and Mbeki and Joe Modise with many others." 'They have gone to set the first phase of the revolution afoot." Raleigh's eyes began to shine with excitement. 'Lenin himself taught us that we cannot move immediately to the communist revolution.
We must achieve the phase of national liberation first. We have to create a broad front of liberals and churchmen and students and workers under the leadership of the vanguard party. Oliver Tambc has gone to create that vanguard party - the anti-apartheid movemenl in exile - and I want to be part of that spearhead of the revolution.
'You wish to leave the country of your birth?" Hendrick stared all him in bewilderment. 'You wish to leave me and your family?" 'It is my duty, Father. If the evils of this system are ever to be destroyed, we will need the help of that world out there, of all the united nations of the world." 'You are dreaming, my son,' Hendrick told him. 'Already that world, in which you place so much trust and hope, has forgotten Sharpeville. Once again money from the foreign nations, from America and Britain and France, is pouring into this country. Every day the country prospers --' 'America has refused to supply arms." 'Yes,' Hendrick chuckled ruefully. 'And the Boers are making their own. You cannot win, my son, so stay with me." 'I must go, my Father. Forgive me, but I have no choice. I must go, but I need your help." 'What do you want me to do?" 'There is a man, a white man, who is helping the young ones to escape." Hendrick nodded. 'Joe Cicero." 'I want to meet him, Father." 'It will take a little time, for he is a secret man, this Joe Cicero." It took almost two weeks. They met on a municipal bus that Raleigh boarded at the central depot in Vereeniging. He wore a blue beret, as he had been instructed, and sat in the second row of seats from the back.
The man who took the seat directly behind him lit a cigarette and as the bus pulled away, said softly, 'Raleigh Tabaka." Raleigh turned to look into a pair of eyes like puddles of spilled engine oil.
'Do not look at me,' Joe Cicero said. 'But listen carefully to what I tell you --' Three weeks later Raleigh Tabaka, carrying a duffel bag and authentic seaman's papers, went up the gangplank of a Dutch freighter that was carrying a cargo of wool to the port of Liverpool. He never saw the continent disappear below the watery horizon for he was already below decks at work in the ship's engine room.
Scan did the deal at breakfast on the last day of the safari. The client owned seventeen large leather tanneries in as many different states and half the real estate in Tucson, Arizona. His name was Ed Liner and he was seventy-two years of age.
'Son, I don't know why I want to buy myself a safari company.
I'm getting a little long in the tooth for this big game stuff,' he grumbled.
'That's bullshit, Ed,' Sean told him. 'You nearly walked me off my feet after that big jumbo, and the trackers all call you Bwana One-Shot." Ed Liner looked pleased with himselfú He was a wiry little man with a ruff of snowy hair around his brown-freckled pate. 'Give me the facts again,' he invited. 'One last time." Sean had been working on him for three weeks, since the first day of the safari, and he knew Ed had the figures by heart, but he repeated them now.
'The concession is five hundred square miles, with a forty-mile frontage on the south bank of Lake Kariba --' As he listened, Ed Liner stroked his wife as though he were caressing a pet kitten.
She was his third wife and she was just two years younger than Sean, but fifty years younger than her husband. She had been a dancer at the Golden Egg in Vegas, and she had a dancer's legs and carriage, with big innocent blue eyes and a curling cloud of blond hair.