Du Boise looks up at Michael, pushes his cap back out of habit, the sun sinking sharply in the west blinds him. He cocks a hand over his eyes as he peers up. It is as if Michael has been given a signal, as if this is a ceremonial execution and the condemned man has had his blindfold fixed. Michael raises the gun, sees the fleeting horror in Du Boise's eyes, then the sudden look of acknowledgement. He has been waiting for such a moment for a long time now. Du Boise seems unafraid, a smile begins to form on his thin mouth.

Du Boise's complexion is unnaturally white, heavily smeared with cream. Of course, his cancer. Michael sees the bits of flaking skin, those tired, red-rimmed eyes, the bitter half-smile, sees himself mirrored in the sweat breaking through the powdery brow. That could be my face one day, my thin body (how pot-bellied and red-faced he might have been were it not for the cancer!).

My heritage, he says in a whisper, unwanted, imposed, my history, my beginnings.

Michael fires – twice – directly into Du Boise's face, forgetting his carefully worked-out plan: shoot into the heart, it is quieter, tends to attract less attention. He wants to obliterate Du Boise's face, wipe away that triumphant, almost kindly expression, leave behind nothing but splintered bone and shattered skin.

Then he hurries away, not waiting to see which way the body will tumble. He walks briskly down the road. On the corner of Oxford and Riviera there are numerous taxis. He will take one into the city, then a fifteen-minute walk to Fordsburg. He has to be at the Oriental Plaza by 6.30. At Moola's Silk Bazaar, he is to introduce himself.

‘Salaam u aleikum, I am Noor.’ The Prophet's light. One of his most devoted disciples.

Someone will drive him to Lenasia, drop him off at the Nurul Islam Hall. From there, he will be transported to a scholar's retreat near Potchefstroom in the North West Province. India comes later, much later, after he has learnt enough about being a Muslim to perhaps become one.

Michael does not look back, does not wait for the inevitable cry, the first frantic voice that sets off a tumult: Look, that man is bleeding! Is he dead? Oh my God, look at his face! Someone help, call the police!

He, too, is going to a death of sorts. Michael is to die, Noor will be incarnated in his place.

May Michael's truth live on after him.

30

Lydia learns of Du Boise's death from a television news report. She is in a hotel room in Kimberley, some five hundred kilometres south of Johannesburg, on the less fashionable route to Cape Town. She has just come in from a rather lonely dinner in the Steers Diner, a ‘franchised eatery’ attached to the franchised hotel chain. The room, with its mock Texan décor, stucco walls and stained wood, was empty, and as a consequence desolate. Such places demand noise, loud voices, the drink-driven sociability of computer consultants, today's equivalent of travelling salesmen. It is the twenty-third of December, these ‘Lone Rangers’ have gone home to their families.