We reached the Houghton house without further incident and waited for nightfall before unloading the car. Our haul wasn't all we'd hoped for. Mac had only located a single Ruger Mini-14 and I'd taken birdshot shells, not buckshot. Fortunately, André managed to swap these shells for the ammunition we needed. He never said how or where he'd made the transaction and I never asked.
Some days later, André and I bought man-bags, which had become fashionable, and I went around armed with a Ruger .357 magnum revolver and the .45 Remington pistol that had belonged to the gunshop woman.
The press revealed her name as Marlene Henn. (She was fatally shot in her Randburg home by robbers in 2008.) I also had her customer's compact Astra Falcon, which he had carried in an ankle holster. The rounds in the Remington were all notched: homemade dum-dum bullets. These expand on impact, making a truly nasty wound.
"You ever done this, Al?" he said, producing his Ruger .357, opening the cylinder and removing five bullets. These he very deliberately placed on the counter in a row. "Russian roulette. You ever played Russian roulette?"One night not long after the Potshot robbery, André and I were at the bar of the Houghton house eating pizza and drinking whisky. More accurately, I was eating the pizza and André was drinking a lot of whisky.
"You're mad," I said. "That's crazy. Insane."
"So you're saying I'm insane?"
"Yes. If you've played Russian roulette, then you're insane."
"Well then, if that's what you think, let me treat you to a live demonstration of insanity." With that, he spun the cylinder, closed it, and cocked the hammer. All the time looking at me, dead serious.
Before I could say anything, he put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger. I leapt off my stool in horror. He just sat there, staring at me, the gun still at his head. Slowly he lowered it.
"Man, oh man!" he breathed out. "That's just the greatest thrill a man can have. It's the ultimate form of letting it all hang out. It's so personal and intimate that it brings a new and unique way of interacting with your own destiny and fate." He said all this quietly, slowly, intensely.
He was terrifying me.
"You've just shown me the most extreme form of contempt imaginable," I said. "Besides feeling nothing for yourself, you were prepared to subject me to the horror of watching you blow your brains out. Right in front of me. Man, that's just crazy."
I stopped there, realising he was drunk and scarily unpredictable. I didn't want to antagonise him.
"You can say that, but you don't know what a thrill it is."
I wondered if he was challenging me. Again he went through the routine of opening the cylinder, spinning it and closing it.
"Your turn!" he shouted, aiming at me and pulling the trigger. There was a click. "Lucky bugger. How does it feel, hey?"
I was speechless.
Again he spun the cylinder and pointed the gun at me. This time I was away, running for my life into the garden with a drunk André in pursuit. We ended up running round and round the swimming pool. Again the dry click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber. He was close enough to inflict a deadly shot or, worse, a permanently disabling one. I raced towards the house to find my own revolver.
Then I stopped. He was in the process of repeating the operation, but paused to look at me.
Suddenly I remembered an incident he'd told me about, where a colleague had suffered a gunshot wound by accident. As a result, André had resolved always to have only five rounds in his revolver so that the hammer rested on an empty cylinder. This way he could avoid an accidental discharge. So the revolver had been empty all along.
"You sick psycho!" I yelled at him. "What a sick thing to do. Always only five rounds in your revolver, hey? And what about a chance mistake? Did you ever consider that?" I was trembling with rage. And the louder I shouted, the more André laughed, until his laughter was hysterical.
I left him there beside the pool, went back to the bar and poured myself a large whisky. He came in still chuckling, reloaded the five rounds and, pointing the gun at the floor, carefully lowered the hammer onto the empty chamber.
"I'm going to sleep here," I told him. I had drunk more than my limit and decided not to drive to the Linmeyer house. "You should go to bed." He waved me away and refilled his glass.
I woke late the next morning with a gentle rap of knuckles on the door. "What is it?" I responded, annoyed.
André's head appeared round the door and he stood there looking at me. He was barely coherent, mumbling something about Russian roulette and chasing me. "What happened?"
I didn't reply and he left, closing the door.
I followed him and found him sitting on the couch in the living room, bent over with his head in his hands. He looked up at me and shook his head slowly. I could see regret and remorse for his stupidity, but there was no apology. André Stander was incapable of apologising.
After a few stunned moments, I said, "And achieve what? Where does that fit into our plans? You're the one lazing around reading, cleaning the pool and playing gardener with the roses."Some days later, André again left me almost speechless with one of his observations. "You're beginning to concern me," he said. "You've been out a while now and you still don't have a car and you haven't robbed a bank yet."
"I think you've lost your nerve."
"Oh, you do, do you?"
"Yes, I do. One of these days I'll get into that Cortina and start at one end of town and rob every bank along the way until I reach the other side."
It was easy talk, but with André you never knew what lay behind his idle chatter. "Seems we're trying to prove something to each other," I said. "So how about I get a car tomorrow, rob a bank the next day, then wait for your dramatic response?" I spoke calmly, although I felt far from composed.
I spent the night in Linmeyer, and the following morning Mac dropped me at a car dealership in Germiston. I took my time looking over the stock and settled on a low-mileage, grey Opel Rekord 2.2. I asked the salesman if I could take it for a drive and he readily agreed. He drove at first, then stopped to let me get a feel for the car. While he was walking round the vehicle to get in the passenger side, I locked all the doors, slid behind the wheel and slowly pulled off with the salesman jogging beside the car, knocking on the window. I waved at him and accelerated away. During the day, I acquired another set of plates belonging to a matching Opel and a third-party disc.
I also scouted out two banks and familiarised myself with routes and the surroundings. These two were to be my answer to André's challenge - whether inadvertent or intended.
The next morning, as I was getting ready to go out, Mac casually asked what I had planned for the day. "I'm going to rob a bank," I said, rather foolishly. The next thing was, he wanted to come along. "It's two banks, Mac."
He did his Mac shuffle and hesitated while I was sorting out my final preparations. But before I could start the car, he had joined me. "It should be a doddle," I told him. "You cover me from the doors and we'll be OK."
That's exactly what happened, and we were in and out of the area in no time, only stopping in a secluded spot to change the plates.
Back at the Linmeyer house, I divided the spoils into three. "No," Mac protested, "we did it and that's the, um . ah, the way that we, um, that Andre and I had always . ah, had decided ."
It was certainly not the case that we had decided to cut André out, but I went along with it to keep the peace. Mac grabbed half of the R13,000 and was gone in a flash.
A couple of hours later, André rang. "I've just heard it on the news," he said, laughing. "Two? You did two!" He could hardly get the words out he was laughing so hard.
"What're you talking about?" I said, trying to sound nonplussed.
More laughter from André. This was unusual behaviour from him. During the day, when he was sober, André was quiet, controlled and serious.
"Listen here," I said, trying to sound sincere, "there's no way I could rob two banks, never mind one bank, because apparently I've lost my nerve."
We met the next day and I gave him his share of the remaining cash, explaining Mac's accounting methods. "Bloody typical. Gutter scum," he said.
"It's partly my fault. I should have been more forceful. Then again, you're also to blame for bringing him along. We're both saddled with him now, and you can stop saying you'll deal with the issue."
• This is an edited extract from Bank Robber: My Time With André Stander, by Allan Heyl, published by Penguin Random House South Africa (R280)..