Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
The officer in charge of the investigation was a major from Marshall Square. He had his men searching the wreckage already, working methodically in an. extended line across the concourse. He recognized Lothar and beckoned to him. The glass crunched under Lothar's feet as he crossed to join him.
'How many dead?" he asked without any preamble.
'We have been incredibly lucky, Colonel. About forty injured, mostly by flying glass, but only one dead." He reached down and pulled back the plastic sheet that was spread at his feet.
Under it lay a little girl in a short dress with a frilly lace petticoat.
Both her legs and one arm had been blown away, and the dress was soaked with her blood.
'Her mother lost both eyes, and her little sister will lose one arm,' the major said, and Lothar saw that the child's face was miraculously unscathed. She seemed to be sleeping. Her mouth was bright red with sticky sugar and in her remaining hand she still clutched the stick of a half-eaten lollipop.
'Lourens,' Lothar said quietly to his assistant. 'Ring Records. Use the telephone in the restaurant. Tell them I want a computer run on my desk when I get back to the square. I want the name of every known white radical on the list. It had to be a white man in this section of the station." He watched Lourens cross the concourse and then he looked down at the tiny body under the plastic sheet.
'I'm going to get the bastard who did this,' he whispered. 'This one isn't going to get away." His staff were waiting for him when he got back to the office forty minutes later. They had already vetted the computerized list and checked the names of those in detention, in exile or those whose whereabouts could be assumed to be outside the Witwatersrand area.
There remained 396 suspects unaccounted for. They were listed in alphabetical order and it was almost four o'clock before they had worked down to the 'S' section. As Lothar folded over the last sheet of the print-out the name seemed to leap from the page at him: STANDER, JAKOBUS PETRUS In the same moment Sarah Stander's plaintive voice echoed in his ears.
'Stander,' he said crisply. 'This one is a new addition." He had last checked the list twenty-four hours before. It was one of the most important tools of his trade, the names upon it so familiar that he could conjure up each face clearly in his mind's eye. Kobus' name had not been there on his last reading.
Captain Lourens picked up the internal telephone to Records, and spoke to the files clerk on the section, then he turned back to Lothar as he hung up the receiver.
'Stander's name comes from the interrogation of a member of the African Resistance Movement. Bernard Fisher. He was arrested on the fifth, two days ago. Stander is a lecturer at Wits University." 'I know who he is." Lothar strode out of the operations room into his private office and ripped the top sheet off his notepad. 'And I know where he is." He drew the .38 police special from his shoulder holster and checked the load as he gave his orders. 'I want four units of the flying squad and a break-in team with flak jackets and shotguns - and I want photographs of the bomb victims, the girl --' The flat was on the fifth floor at the end of a long open gallery.
Lothar placed men on every stairwell and both fire escapes, at the lift station and in the main lobby. He and Lourens went up with the break-in team, and they all moved stealthily into position.
With the police special cocked in his right hand, his back against the wall, clear of the door, he reached out and rang the bell.
There was no reply. He rang again, and they waited tensely. The silence drew out. Lothar reached out to ring a third time, when there were light hesitant footsteps beyond the glass panel door.
'Who is it?" a breathless voice called.
'Kobus - it's me, Lothie." 'Liewe Here! Sweet God!" and the sound of running footsteps receded into the flat.
'Go!" said Lothar and the hammer man from the break-in team stepped up to the door with the ten-pound sledgehammer. The lock burst open at the first stroke and the door crashed back against its hinges.
Lothar was the first one in. The lounge was deserted and he ran straight through into the bedroom.
Behind him Lourens shouted, 'Pasop! Look out! He might be armed,' But Lothar wanted to stop him reaching a window and jumping.
The bathroom door was locked and he heard running water beyond it.
He took the door with his shoulder, and the panel splintered. His own momentum carried him on into the bathroom.
Jakobus was leaning over the wash basin, shaking tablets from a bottle into the palm of his hand and cramming them into his mouth.
His cheeks bulged, and he was gagging and swallowing.
Lothar brought the barrel of the revolver down on the wrist that held the bottle, and the bottle shattered into the basin. He caught Jakobus by his long hair and forced him to his knees. He wedged open his jaws with thumb and forefinger and with the fingers of his other hand hooked the crushed damp porridge of tablets out of his mouth.
'I want an ambulance team with a stomach pump up here,' he yelled at Lourens. 'And get an analysis of that bottle - its label and contents." Jakobus was struggling and Lothar hit him open-handed, back and across the face. Jakobus whimpered and subsided, and Lothar thrust his forefinger deeply down his throat.
Gasping and chokirg and retching, Jakobus started struggling again, but Lothar held him easily. He worked his forefinger around in his throat, keeping on even when hot vomit spurted up over his hand. Satisfied at last he let Jakobus lie in a puddle of his own vomit while he rinsed his hands in the basin.
He dried his hands and seized Jakobus by the back of his shirt. He hauled him to his feet, dragged him through into the lounge and flung him into one of the armchairs.
Lourens and the forensic team were already working over the apartment.
'Did you get the photographs?" Lothar asked, and Lourens handed him a buff envelope.
Jakobus sat huddled in the chaii'. His shirt was fouled with vomit, and his nose and eyes were red and running. The corner of his mouth was torn where Lothar had forced it open, and he was trembling violently.
Lothar sorted through the contents of the envelope and then he laid a glossy black and white print on the coffee table in front of Jakobus.
Jakobus stared at it. It was a photograph of the truncated body of the child, nestled in a pool of her own blood with the lollipop in her hand. He began to weep. He sobbed and choked and turned his head away. Lothar moved around behind his chair and caught the back of his neck, forced his head back. 'Look at it!" he ordered.
'I didn't mean it,' Jakobus whispered brokenly. 'I didn't mean it to happen." The cold white fury faded from Lothar's brain, and he releas Jakobus's head and stepped back from him uncertainly. Those we the words he had used. 'I didn't mean it to happen." The exact war he had used as he had stood over the black boy with the dead gir head cradled in his lap and the raw wounds running red into tl dust of Sharpeville.
Suddenly Lothar felt weary and sickened. He wanted to go aw by himself. Lourens could take over from here, but he braced himself to fight off the despair.
He laid his hand on Jakobus's shoulder, and the touch wE strangely gentle and compassionate.
'Ja, Kobus, we never mean it to happen - but still they die. Now is your turn, Kobus, your turn to die. Come, let's go." The arrest was made six hours after the bomb blast, and even th, English press was fulsome in its praise of the efficiency of the polic investigation. Every front page across the nation carried photograph, of Colonel Lothar De La Rey.
Six weeks later in the Johannesburg Supreme Court, Jakobus Stander pleaded guilty to the charge of murder and was sentenced to death. Two weeks later his appeal was denied by the Appellate Division in Bloemfontein and sentence of death was confirmed. Lothar De La Rey's promotion to brigadier was announced within days of the Appellate Division's decision.
