‘How did I get you the passport? These things can be done, my dear Looksmart. Of course your visa only gives you three months. You’ll have to think of something else by then.’
‘Yes, but how —’ Looksmart tried again. His tongue sat wooden in his mouth, sluggish, thick and unable to respond to signals from his brain. ‘But… how?’ It wasn’t quite what he had wanted to say, but it would have to do.
Gabriel said, ‘How what? How did I do it? Please, give your brother some credit.’
‘How?’ asked Looksmart again.
‘Forget it,’ snapped Gabriel. ‘Better you don’t know.’
Here Looksmart wept. He didn’t mean to weep but it had become an uncontrollable response after weeks of interrogation. Anyone raising their voice to him got that response from the tear ducts. There was a furnace in his right ear and a subterranean rumble which reminded him of the rockfalls on the gold mines which from time to time shook the city and set the cups complaining on the shelves and windows shivering in their panes.
He paused at the barrier at the airport and waved. Gabriel raised an encouraging thumb. Looksmart squared his shoulders and shuffled through fully expecting to be stopped and turned back but feeling in the face of Gabriel’s efforts that he ought at least go through the motions, if only to please his brother.
Gabriel had this gift of making people want to please him. He had a honeyed charm, a lightness, a fleet delicate mind, he was little, gracious, winning, not at all dark but golden. There had always been this contrast with his brother ever since their days in Lynch’s garden when he called them his greyhounds, his porcelain slave boys, his unlikely pages. Gabriel was deft and surefooted, Looksmart was heavy, solid mahogany, his lips pink and full as inflatables, a lump beside Gabriel’s vaulting allure. Gabriel forged ahead effortlessly in the seminary towards ordination and a brilliant career while Looksmart stumbled and floundered in a bog of black theology, making passionate speeches about ‘The first Kaffir Christ’, and burning his Bible on the seminary steps as the white man’s bank book, and thereafter departing in a kind of glory.
‘My vocation,’ Gabriel sweetly told friends, ‘is the priesthood. Looksmart’s is prison.’
Indeed it was. Looksmart proceeded there by the usual route: demonstrations, marches, plots, arrests and bannings and all the blood-warming activities which opponents of the Regime practised in the hope that somehow, someday, they might have some effect. At last grey and despondent he went underground and dreamed of bombs.
When Kipsel’s bombs went off he would have been a prime suspect had he not had a cast-iron alibi. He was already in prison at the time, in the cells of the Central Police Station being beaten with a length of hosepipe by a blond young man called Captain Breek, that very same Arrie Breek who was later to become so close to wresting the world middleweight boxing crown from the American Ernie Smarf in their memorable encounter in the amazing amphitheatre hewn from solid rock in a newly independent black homeland cum casino, run by the Syrian entrepreneur Assad, before a ferocious crowd of 75,000. As Breek later told the papers, his heart had never been in his police work and this may explain why the young man with his great blond cows-lick and the open fresh looks of a serious young accountant should have so forgotten himself during the interrogation of Looksmart that he seized the prisoner’s head and banged it repeatedly against the wall, a method as clumsy as it was inadvisable, since it broke the cardinal rule of police interrogation which is never to leave discernible marks on a live victim and on a dead one only such marks, bruises, lesions, or breakages as would accord with the kinds of fatal injuries the coroner could reasonably expect to find on a dead prisoner who has fallen from a high window, or down a steep flight of stairs, or has hanged himself in his cell.
This Breek was to go on to become a famous entrepreneur and promoter himself, with his own casino and his own homeland and his own international pro-am golf tournament.
Looksmart had been stretched to his limits by Captain Breek. There had been electric shocks to his testicles and when this failed, the current was passed from his nape to his coccyx to render him more pliable. Then he was taken swimming. In this procedure his head was dunked in a bucket of water for a period determined by the swimmer who could obtain release before he drowned by tapping the floor with his foot thereby indicating that he wished to talk.
His lungs burning, Looksmart tapped. Breek hauled him out. Looksmart took a few, deliberately deep breaths while Breek waited impatiently. ‘I forget the question,’ Looksmart confessed. It was true, although even if he could have recalled it he couldn’t have answered. He did not know what Breek wanted, but then neither did the policeman. He kept demanding that Looksmart tell him all he knew. He swore that he would get at the truth. But what he wanted to know, and what he imagined the truth to be, he never made clear and Looksmart found it impossible to guess. Looksmart’s tears mingled unnoticed with the water streaming from his nose and ears. Angrily Breek seized his hair and plunged his head back into the pail. Looksmart prepared to die. He would not tap. He waited for unconsciousness. He welcomed death. Deliberately he thrust his head further into the pail. His chest felt as if it were collapsing, he felt the terrible burning pressure grow. He could hear his heart firing away crazily. Just another few seconds, another few moments and he would open his mouth and suck water into his lungs. He would cheat Breek. He would die in front of his eyes. Breek realised almost too late what was going on. Furiously he yanked Looksmart’s head from the pail and in his rage began banging it against the wall until Looksmart passed out.
The next day he was released, his head swathed in bandages, an eye closed, an intense burning feeling in his right ear, a deep rumbling groan deep in the eardrum together with a rather strange inertia of the tongue which simply wouldn’t obey him, baulked at even easy words, no matter how he whipped it up to them, refused like a horse at a jump. He was recovering in Gabriel’s house when the police came and asked about the bombings of the electricity pylons.
‘He was in jail. How could he be involved?’ Gabriel asked them.
The police went away.
The papers headlined the story. LUCKY LOOKSMART! ‘JAIL ALIBI’.
The next day Gabriel suddenly said he must leave. He had heard that the police were coming back. That they were definitely after him even now, whether or not he had been in jail at the time of the bombing. They had other reasons for looking for him. He must skip the country.
‘How do you know they won’t arrest me as soon as I show them my passport?’ That had been the question he had wanted to ask Gabriel. After all if the police were looking for them, then the airport officials would know and would turn him back.
But they did not. His passport was cursorily checked and he was waved through. An hour later he was airborne over the baked brown veld of Africa. This was even more puzzling still. For if the police wanted him they would have been watching the airport. Since they weren’t, he had to conclude that they were not looking for him yet. Was it not a miraculous sign of Gabriel’s power and prescience that he had known that the police would be looking for him before the police knew themselves? Thus Looksmart was long gone when the police issued a warrant for his arrest, citing information supplied which revealed that he had a hand in the maps showing the locations of the electrical pylons in the townships destroyed by Kipsel, Zandrotti and others.
DOUBLE BREAK FOR FREEDOM, the papers said. DLADLA — LENSKI, FLEE COUNTRY!