Murderous by David Hickson (best ereader for comics .txt) 📕

table and topped up my glass again after I’d taken a sip and told him it was the best Verdicchio I had tasted. I was pretty sure it was the same Verdicchio that I enjoyed at every meal, but we did not let that impede our comfortable routine.

“Like the United States,” he said, with an Italian click of the tongue. “Man walks into a church with a gun. Why are they doing it here now?” Aldo had delivered the afternoon papers to my table and was staring gloomily at the first photographs of the inside of the church where the Minhoop massacre had taken place. The walls had some blood splatters, and the marks where the victims had fallen were visible, but behind the altar the walls were white. There were no badly drawn hyenas, and no threatening words in Zulu.

“Now they want to call it a war,” said Aldo, and his lips pushed out from beneath his nose to show his displeasure. “One lunatic with a gun and it’s a war! What craziness is this?” Aldo’s ruddy complexion darkened behind the white stubble which covered his jaw. “I’ve seen war, and this is not war,” he proclaimed.

I knew it wasn’t entirely true that he had seen war, but nodded in sympathy. Aldo had been born a decade after the Second World War, but he had spent many hours standing beside my table with a bottle of Verdicchio in his hand as he told me all about the privations of his childhood life in postwar Italy, which was how he had ‘seen war’. Recently the presence of Robyn had encouraged him further, and the stories had become more detailed and numerous. Eventually he had graduated to sitting at the table with us, which had been Robyn’s influence. It was the effect she had on all men. And presumably it was her absence tonight that had him standing by the table again, giving me anxious glances and trying not to ask where Robyn was.

“Genocide?” he said with greater scorn. “More craziness. We must all run away because our skins are not a dark shade of brown? What nonsense is this?”

Indeed, the less sober of the papers were flashing a ‘White Genocide?’ headline. The only restraint they showed was in the question mark.

“It’s nothing but media madness,” I agreed. “What journalists write when they don’t have any facts.”

“Of course, you know all about journalists.” Aldo shook his head and made a ‘tsk’ sound with his tongue. The reason I knew about journalists was Sandy, Robyn’s predecessor, who had sat at this same table with me in a previous life. Aldo had liked her and had been as surprised as us all when I admitted to him one day that she had disappeared. She hadn’t left, with her suitcase packed as Robyn did. Not stormed out after an ugly scene, nor drifted away from a lack of interest. No. Sandy simply disappeared. Aldo gave a Mediterranean shrug now as if he was remembering this detail, and he patted me on the shoulder. Then he topped my glass up again and went to put the bottle into the fridge.

Khanyi’s buff folder turned out to contain a lot more than disturbing photographs of graffiti and brutal scenes of murder. There were pages of background to Dirk’s operation. Starting with the ‘discard’ from the upper levels of state security, the levels above Fehrson and his insignificant department. An unsubstantiated report of a right-wing extremist group: White extremists who called themselves the ‘White Africans’ were stockpiling weapons and planning to defend their land with their lives, should the government choose to redistribute that land to the greater populace, which was something that they had already started doing with questionable success in other parts of the country. The discarded report was nothing more than a rumour, a man who had overheard – and potentially completely misunderstood – a conversation in a bar. The one detail the eavesdropper had been certain of was that the farm where this stockpile of weapons might or might not be was the Van Rensburg farm.

And that is where Dirk put up his hand and said how lucky it was that he had known Piet van Rensburg’s son at school. They had not been bosom buddies, but Dirk was sure he could win himself an invite to the farm. And that was the plan as far as I could tell. Reading it now, I wondered how Fehrson had survived so many years in the security business. An over-enthusiastic youngster is sent off with a pat on the back and a ‘let us know how it goes’. And scant chance of rekindling a friendship with the son of a multi-millionaire whose farm had been mentioned in the same breath as militant extremists. Other documents in Khanyi’s buff folder told of the background to the Van Rensburgs and their farm. The story of how a young, ambitious Afrikaner with some family money had recognised a need of the smallest, but wealthiest sector of the population at the southern tip of Africa: the need to escape their isolation through entertainment from the First World. Media-Mark had started as an exclusive pay-TV service, and South Africa’s first media mogul was created. As the company grew, astute advisers had pointed out that a business was more likely to survive in Africa if it embraced a larger percentage of the population. Media-Mark had set out to achieve this, armed with the enthusiasm of unlimited wealth and the desire to overcome a dubious background.

The crowning glory of Media-Mark’s transition from elitist pariah to ‘company of the people’ was when they climbed into bed with the populist government and started broadcasting thinly disguised propaganda. As part of this move Van Rensburg named his successor: a man with none of the stains of an apartheid background, a man who was a survivor of the apartheid regime, a man who was not Afrikaans, and not of European descent.

Piet van Rensburg, a man who rose