The thing that stopped him from smiling was not just that his mouth no longer remembered how to smile – which it did not – but also the knowledge that he was choosing his own death when the people that he had killed had had no such luxury. One minute they had been happy and alive and the next minute, without any warning or a sign from the vast universe, they had been killed; and not only killed, but killed rather effortlessly – as though their lives, dreams, hopes and joys had never mattered at all.

But of course, they had mattered and each one of those lives, dreams, hopes and joys had, over the years, come to accumulate and accrue on Lukha’s shoulders until he stooped under their weight. So now, when the guerrillas he had fought with felt that they had won the war and were the heroes and conquerors, Lukha knew that he had been left so vanquished by his past deeds that he would never feel the victor.

Taking his own life would have been too easy a way out. He had committed the crime, tried the case, and found himself guilty. Now all he needed was the punishment, and since the punishment had to fit the crime he was making his way to The Tower. He had heard stories of how creative the operatives at The Organisation of Domestic Affairs were in their methods. He had heard tell of how, in the basement of The Tower, in a dark, concrete and cold room that had the omnipresent sound of water dripping, a light would unexpectedly flicker and an open flame would singe the skin; of how sleep could be taken from you in a breath; of how you could be drowned with only a cup of water; of how electricity could be made to travel through your body, all in a matter of seconds, with the act complete before you could even register or scream the searing pain.

Lukha, filled with hope, crossed Selborne Avenue and watched the beige bakkie driving up the street, expecting it to turn right on Fife Street – but it did not. It carried on straight towards Main Street. It was not making its way to The Tower as Lukha had anticipated. The weight on his shoulders buckled his knees and crumbled him to the pavement like a man begging.

He would have to wait another day for his appointment with death. No longer able to stand, Lukha found himself crawling on all fours on the dusty pavement that was overcrowded with moving and milling feet. Perhaps it was telling that none of the denizens sharing the pavement with Lukha looked at him as though what he was doing were strange, if they looked at him at all. As far as they were concerned, the war had finally ended and so anything was now possible in the City of Kings.

Some guys have all the luck, Tom Fortenoy thought as he stood outside the Main Post Office War Memorial Courtyard, where he had spent the night, and watched Emil Coetzee’s beige bakkie make its way through the roundabout surrounding the statue of Cecil John Rhodes.