Free Chase Your Shadow by John Carlin Page A

turning down the offer.
    There he suffered, but in some style. Arnold Pistorius lived in a mansion perched on the hills of Waterkloof Ridge, where the rich people of Pretoria and the foreign ambassadors lived. His home stood out in the stately neighborhood. While other residences were built in a gentle Mediterranean style, with pastel walls and terracotta-tiled roofs, his was a forbiddingly sturdy, red-brick pile, with the air of a military compound. A waterless moat and a sentry box manned round the clock by security guards defended the front of the property. A sign by the entrance gate announced the name of the house, ‘Bateleur’ – after a breed of African eagle that preys on snakes.
    Arnold Pistorius liked to say that he lived in ‘an African house’. Originally a church minister’s home, he and his wife Lois had spent a decade supervising its reconstruction, carefully selecting the hardiest stone, brick and wood the continent could yield and hiring the finest local craftsmen to assemble it all. On the second floor were the bedrooms, reached by a manorial wooden staircase; downstairs, a large entrance hall, lounge, dining room, study and kitchen. Sculptures large and small of giraffes, elephants, leopards and baboons adorned each room; paintings on the walls depicted scenes from the African bush. High windows on the ground floor at the back of the house looked down onto a large swimming pool in the shape of a cross, and beyond that, across a valley, on a hill three miles away, could be seen South Africa’s most imposing architectural landmark, the Union Buildings, seat of state power since 1910.
    Arnold’s seat of power inside the house was the room in which he conducted his business meetings – a dark study, with brown leatherchairs, where he kept a collection of antique guns and, rearing from a wall, a big-game trophy, the head of a black buffalo. For Arnold, it served as a statement of his proud Africanness, of his authority as the ruler of a traditional Afrikaner household, and as a symbol of his material success. In his early sixties, he was a lean, tall, white-bearded man, ramrod straight, who never tired of saying that to be an Afrikaner gave you as much claim to be an African as if you were a Zulu, Xhosa or any other of the darker-skinned peoples who called the southern tip of the continent home. His family had inhabited Africa, he would say, since long before the forebears of most American families had arrived in the United States.
    Arnold Pistorius had done well in modern, post-apartheid South Africa. Rather than cower and cringe and consider emigrating to Australia, as some other white people had done when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994, he had seen democracy as an opportunity. Mandela had not sought revenge against the Afrikaners, apartheid’s inventors and, for twenty-seven years, his jailers. Mandela had calculated that, in the interests of peace, not only the Afrikaners but white people in general should be allowed to keep their money and, in the interests of prosperity, be encouraged to invest it in the country of their birth. Arnold Pistorius took Mandela at his word. A black aspirational middle class, a concept quite alien during the apartheid years, was newly rising, and Arnold bet that building shopping malls for them would be good business. The bet worked and he made a great deal of money, much of which he invested in game reserves in the Kruger National Park, where the animals evoked in the sculptures of his home ran free.
    To his nephew Arnold gave the run of his big home, which included access to an indoor cinema and a spacious gym equipped with all the latest apparatus, where he worked out with frantic enthusiasm.But where he lived now, since what they referred to in the family as ‘the incident’, was not in the main house but in a large apartment – or ‘cottage’, as Arnold called it – located at the bottom of a long, steep flight of steps beyond the swimming pool, next to a