can plunder it,” Pikker observed. In Langa, on their way to the scene of Amy’s death in Gugulethu, many kids recalled stopping a furniture delivery truck, and those sofa sets, taken in 1993, were probably still sitting in somebody’s mother’s living room today. Easy had once guaranteed me as much, and we’d asked a neighbor of his to show us the items, but she scuttled away.
Amy, Pikker said, was not victimized by activists or great minds, but by a bunch of good-for-nothing low-level criminals. Once cornered in the holding cells, not one of them could articulate any ideology, as far as Pikker remembered. When he questioned them, he was surprised, and maybe even a little disappointed: it seemed that they had been far less intent on black liberation than they had been on causing chaos.
“Possibly I would have had some more respect if they had some intelligent agenda, but they weren’t politicians or trained or well read,” he said. “They were just bloody hooligans.”
Chaos was nothing new to Pikker. Crime pulsed through the townships, where everyday life was tinged with brutality. Why? The blacks, according to Pikker, displayed a particular “savagery.” He had watched people burn down an old man’s house because instead of striking against the bank, the old man had continued to pay his mortgage. He had seen a father receive the news of his son’s death with little surprise. Pikker rued the wretchedness of township life, but he did not connect it to his own actions. He could explain why police were reported to be laughing at dead bodies (“It’s a defense mechanism, not disrespect—if you take that stuff seriously on a daily basis, you’ll kill yourself”) but not how a black man might remain stony-faced while a white cop delivered news of his son’s death. He did not blame the violence on the apartheid government, nor did he believe that he had benefited from apartheid. To Pikker, the problems facing black South Africa were largely of their own making.
“They said we cheapened black lives, but it was a rude awakening,” he mused. “Nobody cheapened black lives like they did.”
Pikker also studied the Biehls from afar. He found them as alien as the black men he chased every day, perhaps more so. “The daughter’s killed. Although she’s basically on the other side of the fence from where I was, I felt she was following her heart and doing what she felt was right. And also in retrospect, she was doing a noble task. I put myself in the Biehls’ shoes, and I thought how devastating it must have been to lose a child. I think they then wanted to believe that what they saw here in South Africa justified the actions. If it were a bunch of hooligans that took their daughter’s life, it would have had less meaning. So they decided she died in political conflict, at the hands of freedom fighters. It was: ‘She died for the cause.’ To me, she didn’t die for a cause. However you want to highlight it, and whatever foundation you want to build up around it, she died in a senseless way. There was no point in it.”
Also, Pikker muttered sheepishly, the Biehls never bothered to thank him.
“You think they should have thanked you?”
“I felt it would have been in order, to appreciate my work. Although they didn’t know to what extent the sacrifices I made.”
“What were the sacrifices?”
“I ended up in the psychiatric ward. Twice.”
In fact, the Amy Biehl case marked the beginning of a terrible time in Pikker’s life. The government that employed him was crumbling, along with all the organizing principles of his life: his fraternity of cops, with a common purpose and a common enemy; a life of black-and-white and cut-and-dry. He was overworked and underpaid, transporting witnesses from the townships with no backup, walking into riots alone. Years later, he still reached for his gun if he heard a car backfire or a door slam.
Following the end of the Amy Biehl trial in October 1994, Pikker returned to his office. Mandela had been elected president six months earlier, and the government was being reshuffled. Pikker called his wife to tell her he was coming home, hung up the phone, and burst into hiccuping sobs. Two other officers eyed him uncertainly. He began to weep harder, a huge man bawling like a baby. His commander drove him home. Pikker walked into the house to find his wife watching TV.
“Help me,” he said.
She took him to