Outside Cape Town, among the lovely vineyards of Franschoek, lives a Sicilian by the name of Vito Palazzolo. The name is well-known, at least to Interpol. He was the banker in the "Pizza Connection", a £1.1 billion heroin smuggling ring which was cracked by international law-enforcement authorities in the mid-1980s.
Serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence in Switzerland for drug-related offences, Palazzolo jumped a Christmas parole in 1986 and turned up in South Africa, on a false passport.
He is still here. Every now and then someone asks: Why? The answer, perhaps inevitably, is "friends in high places".
He got into the country with the help of senior figures in the apartheid government. He was deported in 1991, but resurfaced in the new South Africa. In 1995 - despite the fact that his involvement in drugs rackets was wellknown - he was granted South African citizenship.
Today, he is not only living in freedom in South Africa, but has made a business out of it. If you're drinking a glass of mineral water on the national carrier, South African Airways, it's likely to be courtesy of Vito Palazzolo, who owns the bottling company.
He also owns a game farm in neighbouring Namibia and a stake in the Angolan diamond industry.
Who exactly is Palazzolo's protector is not clear. But on record at Interpol's offices in Pretoria - along with extradition papers and documents from Italian police detailing his alleged Mafia connections - is a testimonial from one Andre Lincoln, offering assurances that Palazzolo's record in South Africa is impeccable. Mr Lincoln, a former intelligence operative in the ANC, is the head of a shadowy special-police unit which - despite heated denials from his office - is seemingly directly answerable to the deputy president, Thabo Mbeki.
The link between Mr Mbeki and Palazzolo is obviously tenuous and there is nothing to suggest that the deputy president has had anything to do with the Sicilian's refuge in South Africa.
But the vague association of his name with that of Palazzolo is somehow typical of the miasma of what might be described as "low intensity suspicion" which surrounds Mr Mbeki.
In the exile years, there were snide remarks about his associations with a controversial financier, Andrew Sardanis. On his return to South Africa, he was photographed by the local press celebrating his 50th birthday in the company of Sol Kerzner, the controversial casino boss.
It emerged that the surprise party had been funded by another controversial character, Paul Ekon, who subsequently left South Africa with the police gold and diamond branch snapping at his heels.
More recently, Mr Mbeki has been associated with Emanuel Shaw II - finance minister in the kleptocracy which was Liberia under Samuel Doe, who has mysteriously emerged as a key figure in the South African oil industry.
AGAIN there is no evidence of wrong-doing on Mr Mbeki's part. It is rather as if he was short of a spin-doctor, the PR flak which is such an essential part of a modern politician's armoury, if only to fend off the dubious characters who inevitably cluster around the scent of power.
As it is, Mr Mbeki continues to rely, for that sort of protection, on a press officer who was publicly accused last year of offering the glamorous, but securely married correspondent of the New York Times, an appointment with him in bed, in exchange for an appointment with the president-designate.
If the PR industry is failing South Africa's president-in-waiting, it must be said that he does seem to be an intrinsically enigmatic character.
Is he a father? One of the standard works of political biography says he is not. Another gives him two children. He is the son of one of the country's best-known communists, but just about all that is known about his ideological stance is contained in the opening lines of a famous speech he made last year on the adoption of South Africa's new constitution: "I am an African." Even his own father seems to find him something of a puzzle.
Govan Mbeki's famously austere intellect is undimmed by his 87 years, as is his gentle sense of humour. His voice offers a hint of a chuckle when asked where the ANC offices are to be found in Port Elizabeth; "At 344, Govan Mbeki Avenue," he answers. "Main Street," says the taxi driver disconsolately, muttering on about the pretensions of the new gang at city hall as he accelerates through the seaside town.
The deification, or at least municipalisation of living politicians is frowned upon by the ANC in the new South Africa. But if anyone is to be subject to such honour in his life-time it might as well be Govan Mbeki.
After all, he is the third of the legendary trio - Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki - seen as the liberators of South Africa. Part of the high price paid for the life of a revolutionary is a degree of alienation from close family. But Govan offers at least a few of the many gaps in the jigsaw puzzle which is the life of his son.
Thabo's paternal grandfather, recalls Govan, was a tribal headman, a convert to Christianity whose people were moved in the 19th Century from the wilds of what was to become the homeland of the Ciskei to Mpukane location, on the edge of the Kei River - to act as a buffer between British colonists and the warring Xhosa chiefs of the time.
Govan was the youngest of five children by a second marriage. He himself had four children of whom Thabo was the second oldest. Thabo's older sister sells alcohol, one brother is in business in Johannesburg and the other is dead.
Govan is uncertain about the circumstances of the death of his younger son, Jama. The young man took an LLB at Leeds, in England, moved to Botswana, married and had three children. At some point in the 1980s - Govan is not sure of the date - Jama went to Lesotho to visit an old friend from his student days who had gone on to study medicine in the Soviet Union. Jama did not realise his friend had changed sides; when he arrived, the security forces were tipped off that the son of Govan Mbeki was in town and he was killed.
"We have not been able to trace where they buried him," says Govan. He was not to be the last of the Mbeki clan to vanish mysteriously.
Govan's main recollection of Thabo's boyhood is that he was a voracious reader. Govan's library was not large, but it was worthy - with works on Marxism-Leninism, his own early writings and his set-work books from Fort Hare university. Having attended a Presbyterian-Methodist primary school, Thabo went on to Lovedale College in Alice, the alma mater of most black intellectuals from the region.
The ANC's biography says that he completed his studies at home after "his schooling at Lovedale was interrupted by a strike in 1959". Govan says bluntly that he was expelled, but - with the fine disdain of one who has spent his life thumbing his nose at authority - confesses that he does not know the details other than that it was "student politics".
He is equally vague as to exactly when his son joined the ANC and the South African Communist Party, observing that the boy "grew up in them". It is recorded elsewhere that he joined the ANC Youth League at the age of 14.
Thabo went on to study at a private college in Johannesburg. It was at about this time that he fathered a son, Monwabisi - his only child. Like Jama, the boy vanished mysteriously, 21 years later.
According to his mother, Nokwanda Mpahlwa, the young man set out for Durban in 1981 in search of other members of his family and was never seen again.
Despite the demands of politics and youthful romance, Thabo did well enough at college to win a place at Sussex University, in England, taking a master's degree in economics, with a thesis on industry in Ghana and Nigeria.
IN 1970, Thabo's mother, Epainette, got intimations that her son was on the move again when their house was placed under intense surveillance. He had vanished from London and the South African security forces assumed he had returned home, and gone underground. But he had gone east, to Russia for military training and a grounding in Marxism at the Lenin Institute.
Thabo's relationship with the Communist Party is a confusing one. None of the official biographies acknowledges his membership of the SACP, but he is believed to have been a member - elected to the politburo in 1979 and again in the mid-1980s - until his return to South Africa in 1990.
Govan offers no more detail but attributes his son's resignation from the party to "pragmatism" in anticipation that he would be assuming a leadership position in a democratic South Africa.
"It was not going to be a communist who would be leading the country," he points out. "The Africans themselves were not willing to accept it, to say nothing of the whites and the coloureds and the Indians."
Does he believe his son is still a Marxist? "He imbibed so much of it, he can't expel it from his mind," the veteran communist observes with the well-worn cynicism of a Jesuit talking of an acolyte who has deserted the flock.
Certainly, pragmatism would seem to mark Thabo's rise to the leadership of the ANC; first as political secretary to Oliver Tambo, then as head of the department of information of foreign affairs and finally as deputy president.
It could be credited with his early and seemingly whole-hearted involvement in the cloak-and-dagger meetings with agents of the apartheid regime which led to the constitutional settlement - meetings set in train by Mandela, but regarded with some initial suspicion from the likes of Govan, who feared a "sell-out".
If President Mandela is to be taken literally in his statements that Thabo has been effectively running the country for some time, his pragmatism can even be credited with the realpolitik which has recently replaced the diplomacy of morality in South Africa's foreign policy.
The only departure from pragmatism which stands out where Thabo is concerned is his vision of the "African renaissance" - an admirable vision of a weary continent rejuvenated by the miracle of the "rainbow nation".
If Thabo has offered a political credo, it is contained in that celebrated "I am an African" speech of 1996. In the absence of Mandela - who seems to have retired from rhetorical competition since his "statement from the dock" at the Rivonia trial - the speech probably qualifies Thabo for description as South Africa's most eloquent politician.
Essentially a passionate declaration of identity with all the race groups in South Africa - by an inclusive definition of who is "an African" - the speech, however, sits uneasily with the fact that he surrounds himself with advisers who are "Africanist" in the exclusive sense.
"Labels don't help us," reproaches Govan. "Thabo grew up in the ANC, and the policies of the ANC have been consistent, even before 1912, in regarding South Africa as one country and the people of South Africa as one people," he declares.
He adds: "He's a highly intelligent young man who I believe will not do anything stupid." It is the last word of comfort offered by the father of a man who would be president.
