Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
Then you can tell them everything." 'Why?" she asked.
'For me and for my children. Please Tricia." Again she nodded and he kissed her forehead. 'You are a good brave girl,' he said and left her.
He went back into the inner office. The security police were grouped around Moses Gama. He was manacled but he lifted his head and stared at Shasa for a moment. It was a smouldering gaze, dark and filled with outrage. Then they led him away.
The office was crowded and noisy. White-uniformed ambulance attendants were bringing a stretcher through the doorway. A doctor, a member of parliament summoned from the chamber, was working over Blaine as he lay on his back, but now he stood up, shook his head and gestured at the stretcher bearers to take Blaine's body. The uniformed guards, supervised by Manfred De La Rey, were already gathering up the pieces of the smashed transmitter and beginning to trace the wire to its source.
Tara was sitting in the chair behind his desk, weeping silently into her halads. Shasa went past her to the wall safe hidden behind one of the paintings.
He tumbled the combination and swung open the steel door, screening it with his own body. Shasa always kept two or three thousand pounds in banknotes against an emergency. He stuffed the wads into his pockets, and then quickly he sorted through the stack of family passports until he found Tara's. He relocked the safe, went to where she sat and pulled her to her feet. 'Shasa, I didn't--' 'Keep quiet,' he hissed at her, and Manfred De La Rey glanced at him across the office.
'She's had a terrible shock,' Shasa said. 'I'm taking her home." 'Come back here as soon as you can,' Manfred nodded. 'We'll need a statement." Still gripping her arm, Shasa marched her out of the office and down the corridor. The fire alarm bells were ringing throughout the building and members and visitors and staff were streaming out through the front doors. Shasa joined them, and as soon as they were out in the sunlight he led Tara to the Jaguar.
'Where are we going?" Tara asked, as they drove away. She sat very small and subdued in her corner of the bucket seat.
'If you talk to me again, I may lose control,' he warned her tightly.
'I may not be able to stop myself strangling you." She did not speak again until they reached Youngsfield Airport, and Shasa pushed her up into the cockpit of the silver and blue Mosquito.
'Where are we going?" she repeated, but he ignored her as he went through the start-up procedures and taxied out to the end of the runway. He did not speak until they had climbed to cruise altitude and were flying straight and level.
'The evening flight for London leaves Johannesburg at seven o'clock. As soon as we are in radio contact, I will reserve your seat,' he told her. 'We will get there with an hour or so to spare." 'I don't understand,' she whispere into her oxygen mask. 'Are you helping me to escape? I don't understand why." 'For my mother, firstly. I don't want her to know that you murdered her husband - it would destroy her." 'Shasa, I didn't --' she was weeping again, but he felt no twinge of compassion.
'Shut up,' he said. 'I don't want want to listen to your blubbering.
You will never know the depths.of my feelings for you. Hatred and contempt are gentle words that do not describe them." He drew a breath.
Then went on, 'After my mother, I am doing it for my children. I don't want them to live their lives with the knowledge of what their mother truly was. That is too much for a young man or woman to be burdened with." Then they were both silent, and Shasa allowed the terrible grief of Blaine's death, which up until then he had suppressed, to rise up and engulf him. In the seat beside him Tara was mourning her father also, spasms of weeping shook her shoulders. Her face above the mask was chalky and her eyes were like wounds.
As strong as his grief was Shasa's hatred. After an hour's flying, he spoke again.
'If you ever return to this country again, I will see you hanged.
That is my solemn promise. I will be divorcing you for desertion as soon as possible. There will be no question of alimony or maintenance or child custody. You will have no rights nor privileges of any kind. As far as we are concerned, it will be as though you have never existed. I expect you will be able to claim political asylum somewhere, even if it is in Mother Russia." Again he was silent, gathering himself, regaining full control.
You will not even be at your father's funeral, but every minute of every day his memory will stalk you. That is the only punishment I am able to inflict upon you - God grant it is enough. If He is just, your guilt will slowly drive you mad. I pray for that." She did not reply, but turned her face away. Later, when they were on approach to Johannesburg, descending through ten thousand feet, with the skyscrapers and the white mine dumps glowing in the late sunlight ahead of them, Shasa asked: You were sleeping with him, weren't you?" Instinctively, she knew it was the last chance she would ever have to inflict pain upon him, and she turned in the seat to watch his face as she replied.
'Yes, I love him - and we are lovers." She saw him wince, but she wanted to hurt him more and she went on. 'Apart from my father's death, there is nothing I regret. Nothing I have done of which I am ashamed. On the contrary, I am proud to have known and loved a man like Moses Gama - proud of what I have done for him and for my country." 'Think of him kicking and choking on the rope, and be proud of that also, Shasa said quietly, and landed. He taxied the Mosquito to the terminal buildings and they climbed down on to the tarmac and faced each other. There was a bruise on her face where he had struck her, and the icy highveld wind pulled at their clothing and ruffled their hair. He handed her the little bundle of bank notes and her passport.
'Your seat on the London flight is reserved. There is enough here to pay for it and to take you where you want to go." His voice broke as his rage and his sorrow took control of him again. 'To hell or the gallows, if my wish for you comes true. I hope never to see or hear of you again." He turned away from her, but she called after him.
'We were always enemies, Shasa Courtney, even in the best times.
And we will be enemies to the very end. Despite your wish, you will hear of me again. I promise you that much." He climbed into the Mosquito and it was minutes before he had himself sufficiently in hand to start the engines. When he looked out through the windshield again, she was gone.
Centaine would not let them bury Blaine. She could not bear the thought of him lying in the earth, swelling and putrefying.
Mathilda Janine, Blaine's younger daughter, came down from Johannesburg with David Abrahams, her husband, in the company Dove, and they sat with the family in the front row of the memorial chapel at the crematorium. Over a thousand mourners attended the service and both Dr Verwoerd and Sir De Villiers Graaff, the leader of the opposition, were amongst them.
Centaine kept the little urn of Blaine's ashes on the table beside her bed for almost a month, before she could get up her courage.
Then she summoned Shasa, and the two of them climbed the hill to her favourite rock.
'Blaine and I used to come here so often,' she whispered. 'This will be the place where I shall come when I need to know that he is still close to me." She was nearly sixty years old, and when Shasa studied her with compassion, he saw that for the first time she truly looked that old.
She was letting the grey grow out in the thick bush of her hair and he saw that soon there would be more of it than the black. Grief had dulled her gaze and weighed down the corners of her mouth, and that clear youthful skin which she so carefully cherished, seemed overnight to have seamed and puckered.
