Conspiracy

Odie Hawkins

• Publisher: Open Road Distribution
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781504035705
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

Henrik Malan was the South African secret agent who devised the plan to have the Black American ghettos destroy themselves by supplying them with a cheap but highly addictive drug known on the streets as "Ghetto Blaster."

Chapter 1

He alternately slept and gazed out of the window. There was so little to do on a plane. One could stroll the aisles, strike up nebulous conversations with fellow passengers, fix the earphones in place, watch the movie.

Henrik Malan did not care for any of those pastimes, he preferred sleeping and gazing out at the clouds. These two activities gave him the opportunity to rest and focus on the problems he would be forced to deal with when he finally reached his destination.

“Can I get you something, sir?”

“No, no thank you, I’m quite comfortable.”

He stared into the stewardess’ eyes. A dark-brown-skinned Black woman with blue contact lenses. It was obvious that she liked him. She had shown every sign of being attracted to him after the flight was less than two hours old.

A Black woman with blue eyes, as blue as his own eyes. He decided not to try to figure out why she was wearing blue contact lenses.

He had learned, over the course of many trips to the United States, not to judge the behavior of the African-Americans by his own standards. They were an unpredictable bunch, the American Blacks, a perfect illustration, in his mind, of what happened when inferior people were granted a piece of a superior process.

“Well, if you need anything, just buzz. O.K.?” And she winked.

“Yes, of course.”

He smiled at her back as she strutted toward the cockpit.

Women. Women were a species apart, he felt; scrape the skin off of them and no matter whether they were Black, brown, white or any other shade, they still had the markings of a different species.

Why was she attracted to him? Was it because he was “handsome?” He never thought of himself in matinee idol terms. His own reasoning told him that he was a youthful-looking fifty-year-old man, blonde hair streaked with gray, clean shaven, what some people called a distinguished-looking chap, lean and fit from regular exercise and no overindulgence in alcohol and the wrong foods.

He absently fingered the crescent-shaped scar at the right corner of his mouth.

I wonder what she would feel for me if she knew I was a South African, an Afrikaner, a Boer, a colonel in the South African Secret Police.

He smiled again, a wistful smile; who knows? Being a woman, she might find me even more attractive. I would have an “evil” quality that seems to be attractive to some women.

He flashed back to the white American college woman he had met three years before, on a mission to New York.

“Are you really from South Africa?” she had asked, puzzled by his slight accent.

“Yes, I am a South African.”

He was feeling congenial and felt no need to avoid the inevitable debate he knew that they would have to have. And they had had it.

They continued the debate well into the night, at his hotel, after a good French dinner, wine and cognac. He felt better with a false name, distant.

“Are you actually saying, bottom line, that Black people are not qualified to govern themselves?”

“No, I am not saying that. I’m saying that they are not qualified to govern us.”

He had watched her, pretending to be asleep, the following morning, as she scribbled a heartfelt note and tiptoed out of his life.

“Dear John,” he nodded off, remembering the contents of the note …

“Dear John, I had to leave before you woke up; I just couldn’t bear the thought of being with you any longer. Somehow you don’t really seem to be what you seem to be. I hate racism and racists, especially intelligent racists. I had a lovely time.

Sincerely yours,

Mary Beth Sawyer”

How many Mary Beth Sawyers had he been forced to deal with in the United States? He mentally counted three. No, five.

Strangely, he had found several other women who took a position to the right of him.

“I think what you guys are doing is right on. That’s one of the problems we’ve had here because we didn’t try to keep our niggers in their place.”

Racists. He hated them. He felt that there was something inherently warped about feeling that one race was superior to another.

He had tried to explain his position to an American businessman, on his previous trip to California.

“You must understand, my friend, we are not trying to keep the African in bondage. We are trying to maintain a civilization that he would destroy, if given the chance.”

“Say whatever you want to, pal. All I can say to you is this—keep those monkeys under your thumb by any means necessary or else you’re gonna have the kind of problems we have here.”

Once again, a wistful smile developed. The Americans were so unsophisticated about racial matters. It seemed to be quite simplistic for them: either you kept the Africans under your thumb or you released them.

He made a subconscious groan, and peered down into the sulfite-flaked clouds of the Los Angeles basin.

“Please, adjust your seat belts. We’ll be landing at Los Angeles International Airport shortly. Thank you for flying …”

He stared at the city welling up on his right; rows of pillboxes, kidney-shaped swimming pools, monotony. She strutted through the aisle one last time, making certain that everyone had his/her seat belt in place, leaned over to place a slip of paper with her name and telephone number on it in his lap.

Once again he was in Los Angeles, one of the cities in the world he really enjoyed, an insane place, laced with freeways and shopping malls.

He could never put his finger on what he liked about the place. There were several things: the “spread-out flavor” appealed to him, the sense of being anonymous, it was as though you were in a kind of fairyland. And the fact that he didn’t feel repressed to the wall by Africans.

“Call me,” she whispered as he left the plane, and winked again, her blue contacts giving her a weird look.

He smiled and nodded yes and immediately thought, call you what?

He had five days to do his work, no time to “call” anyone, indulge in sex-fantasy games.

Van Damm was there, almost the caricature of a subservient chauffeur. Malan made a mental note to request that the Consulate get rid of Van Damm, he always greeted his arrival as though he were a Mafia chief or some kind of royal figure. It focused too much attention on him.

“Good afternoon, sir, I trust you had a good flight.”

“Good enough.”

He handed him the ticket for his bags and, in the process, rolled the stewardess’ number into a small ball and flicked it away from him.

He settled into the passenger’s seat, feeling slightly rusty from the hours of sitting down, but focused.

“Van Damm, I want you to drive east to Western Avenue, make a left turn going north on Western, and then turn left, going west on Wilshire Boulevard when you get there.”

“Yessir.”

He felt in tune with a city when he was driven through it, absorbed a sense of its rhythm.

Los Angeles was always changing, in small ways; a new gas station here, a one-story building torn down on this corner, a two-story building replacing it, a small shopping mall overwhelmed by a larger shopping mall, affluence everywhere, even in the Black areas.

He stared at the Black faces as they drove north on Western Avenue. It could be a section of Soweto, he thought, as they paused for the light at Manchester and Western.

“Ever seen so many filthy kaffirs in your life, sir?”

“They are not ‘filthy kaffirs’, Van Damm. They are underprivileged African-American citizens.”

“Yessir.”

He hated that, the automatic assumption prevalent amongst a certain level of South Africans (and a number of others) that being a South African white automatically translated-equated to being a racist. He freshened the mental notation to have Van Damm fired.

Western Avenue seemed to reveal one of the classical circumstances of America: the familiar stranger-neighborhood.

Now Black, now Latino, now Korean. Korean. He took in the shop fronts, the exotic block lettering. Koreans.

There seemed to be thousands more than he remembered seeing during his last visit.

“Wilshire Boulevard, sir.”

He sighed and settled back. Nothing ethnic about the core of Wilshire, it was a street that was created for money. It could’ve been one of the main boulevards in Jo’burg.

“I was instructed to remind you, sir, that your meeting with Dr. Allen is for 10:00 a.m.”

“Thank you, Van Damm, I have the schedule.”

The Beverly Wilshire, the top-hatted Black doorman in the black green monkey suit.

“Evening …”

He felt bored to the bone after a half hour in his suite. Same old, dreary stuff on the television, same old, uninteresting hotel room. He decided to rent a car. He knew where to go and what to do on a Monday night in Los Angeles.

“This is 515, I’d like to have a car for the evening.”

“Immediately, sir, thank you.”

Fifteen minutes later he was in a rent-a-car, heading toward the Crenshaw Strip.

Wonder if I’ll run into the blue-eyed woman in the Pied Piper? Hardly likely, she’d be more likely to be found in the beachfront joints.

He never Celt hesitant to tour the jazz points in Los Angeles, the Black good-time spots. Whenever his presence was noted, there seemed to be an immediate assumption, after his “English” accent was noted, that he was an adventurous type who had strayed from the beaten path, along...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Prologue
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Post-Script
• Epilogue
• Copyright Page