Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
Here he was being offered the opportunity to deal those forces a telling blow. He knew then what his duty was.
'I cannot give you your freedom,' he said quietly. 'That "is too much - but you knew that when you demanded it, didn't you?" Moses did not answer him, and Manfred went on, 'This is the bargain I will offer you. I will give you your life. A reprieve, but you will never leave prison again. That is the best I can do." The silence went on so long that Manfred thought he had refused and he began to turn away when Moses spoke again. 'I accept." Manfred turned back to him, not allowing his triumph to show.
'I will want all the names, all the evidence,' he insisted.
'You will have it all,' Moses assured him. 'When I have my reprieve." 'No,' Manfred said quietly. 'I set the terms. You will have your reprieve when you have earned it. Until then you will get only a stay of execution. Even for that I will need you to name a name so that I can convince my compatriots of the wisdom of our bargain." Moses was silent, glowering at him through the bars.
'Give me a name,' Manfred insisted. 'Give me something to take to the prime minister." 'I will do better than that,' Moses agreed. 'I will give you two names. Heed them well. They are - Mandela and Rivonia." Michael Courtney was in the city room of the Mail when the news that the Appellate Division had denied Moses Gama's appeal and confirmed the date of his execution, came clattering out on the tape.
He let the paper strip run through his fingers, reading it with total concentration, and when the message ended, he went to his desk and sat in front of his typewriter.
He lit a cigarette and sat quietly, staring out of the window over the tops of the scraggly trees in Joubert Park. He had a pile of work in his basket and a dozen reference books on his desk. Desmond Blake had slipped out of the office to go down to the George to top up his gin tank and left Michael to finish the article on the American elections. Eisenhower was nearing the end of his final term and the editor wanted a pen portrait of the presidential candidates. Michael was working on his biographical notes of John Kennedy, but having difficulty choosing the salient facts from the vast amount that had been written about the young Democratic candidate, apart from those that everybody knew, that he was a Catholic and a New Dealer and that he had been born in 1917.
America seemed very far away that morning, and the election of an American president inconsequential in comparison with what he had just read on the tape.
As part of his self-education and training, Michael made a practice each day of selecting an item of important news and writing a two-thousand-word mock editorial upon it. These exercises were for his own sake, the results private and jealously guarded. He showed them to no one, especially not Desmond Blake whose biting sarcasm and whose willingness to plagiarize Michael had learned to fear. He kept these articles in a folder in the locked bottom drawer of his desk.
Usually Michael worked on these exercises in his own time, staying on for an hour or so in the evening or sitting up late at night in the little bed-sitter he rented in Hillbrow, pecking them out on his rickety old secondhand Remington.
However, this morning he had been' so moved by the failure of Gama's appeal that he could not concentrate on the Kennedy story.
The image of the imperial-looking black man in his leopard-skin robes kept recurring before Michael's eyes, and his words kept echoing in Michael's ears.
Suddenly he reached forward and ripped the half-completed page out of his machine. Then he swiftly rolled a clean sheet into it. He didn't have to think, his fingers flew across the keys, and the words sprang up before his eyes: 'A Martyr is Born." He rolled the cigarette to the side of his mouth and squinted against the spiral of blue smoke, and the words came in short staccato bursts. He did not have to search for facts or dates or figures. They were all there, crisp and bright in his head. He never paused. He never had to weigh one word against another. The precise word was there on the page almost of its own volition.
When he finished it half an hour later, he knew that it was the best thing he had ever written. He read it through once, shaken by the power of his own words, and then he stood up. He felt restless and nervous. The effort of creation rather than calming or exhausting him had excited him. He had to get outside.
He left the sheet in the typewriter and took his jacket off the back of his chair. The sub glanced up at him enquiringly.
'Going to find Des,' he called. In the newsroom there was a conspiracy to protect Desmond Blake from himself and the gin bottle and the sub nodded agreement and returned to his work.
Once he was out of the buildfng, Michael walked fast, pushing his way through the crowds on the sidewalks, stepping out hard with both hands thrust into his pockets. He didn't look where he was going, but it didn't surprise him when at last he found himself in the main concourse of the Johannesburg railway station.
He fetched a paper cup of coffee from the kiosk near the ticket office and took it to his usual seat on one of the benches. He lit a cigarette and raised his eyes towards the domed glass ceiling. The Pierneef murals were placed so high that very few of the thousands of commuters who passed through the concourse each day ever noticed them.
For Michael they were the essence of the continent, a distillation of all of Africa's immensity and infinite beauty. Like a celestial choir, they sang aloud all that he was trying to convey in clumsy stumbling sentences. He felt at peace when at last he left the massive stone building.
He found Des Blake on his usual stool at the end of the bar counter at the George.
'Are you your brother's keeper?" Des Blake enquired loftily, but his words were slurred. It took a great deal of gin to make Des Blake slur.
'The sub is asking for you,' Michael lied.
He wondered why he felt any concern for the man, or why any of them bothered to protect him - but then one of the other senior journalists had given him the answer to that. 'He was once a great newspaperman, and we have to look after our own." Des was having difficulty fitting a cigarette into his ivory holder.
Michael did it for him, and as he held a match he said, 'Come on, Mr Blake. They are waiting for you." 'Courtney, I think I should warn you now. You haven't got what it takes, I'm afraid. You'll never cut the mustard, boy. You are just a poor little rich man's son. You'll never be a newspaperman's anus." 'Come along, Mr Blake,' said Michael wearily, and took his arm to help him down off the stool.
The first thing Michael noticed when he reached his desk again was that the sheet of paper was missing from his typewriter. It was only in the last few months, since he had been assigned to work with Des Blake, that he had been given his own desk and machine, and he was fiercely jealous and protective of them.
The idea of anyone fiddling with his typewriter, let alone taking work out of it, infuriated him. He looked around him furiously, seeking a target for his anger, but every single person in the long, crowded noisy room was senior to him. The effort it cost him to contain his outrage left him shaking. He lit another cigarettes, the last one in his pack, and even in his agitation he realized that that made it twenty since breakfast.
'Courtney!" the sub called across to him, raising his voice above the rattle of typewriters. 'You took your time. Mr Herbstein wants you in his office right away." Michael's rage subsided miraculously. He had never been in the editor's office before, Mr Herbstein had once said good morning to him in the lift but that was all.
