The message Vlok sends is both that change will be morally necessary for whites to undertake and also that it will be all-encompassing and very psychologically difficult, excavating deep-seated attitudes most people aren’t even aware they possess. He told me he didn’t think he ever would have found it in him to change at all if his life hadn’t already been upended by his wife’s suicide. “You have to be brought to nothing before change begins,” he mused.

There’s a final, more personal reason, though, that some Afrikaners distrust Adriaan Vlok. I felt it in my last visit to him at his house. As we sat down on maroon couches inside his spartan sitting room, I asked what his greatest wrong was as police chief.

“I hurt my gardener,” Vlok answered instantly. “I regarded myself as better. Many [white] people still believe, ‘I treat my [black] gardener nice!’ But I did not treat him as an equal.”

But what about the killings committed under his watch, the torture, the thuggery? He admitted he had “hurt many people, thousands of people” through his arrogance, including “by locking them up.” He denied having any actual blood on his hands, however. “The guy on the ground would not tell me what he has done! I would not know about it!” he insisted. His brow arched into a pleading loop above the puppy-dog eyes. He seemed at pains to convince me. He said he gave his police deputies only vague guidelines, like “You must do something,” which they took as a license to commit atrocities.

The official TRC decision concluded that Vlok had personally “decided to use explosives” in 1988 to destroy Khotso House, a building thought to be occupied by anti-apartheid militants. But when I asked him about it, he said he told his commissioner of police merely that “we must make a plan.”

“And a couple of months later, they blew it up! I went to him and said, ‘Hey, why did you blow it up?’ And he said, ‘What else were we supposed to do? Should we have painted it black so they couldn’t find it in the evenings?’ ”

Vlok even said his desire to wash Reverend Frank Chikane’s feet had stemmed not from a sense of personal guilt but from a nebulous desire to repent to black people. He claimed he hadn’t been aware of the specifics of the plot against Chikane and had been horrified when he found out later: “If you wanted to shoot a man, that would’ve been OK, but don’t put poison in his underwear!”

Somebody has to take the blame for these acts, though. And by owning up to a thousand subtle sins of ego but denying culpability for apartheid’s worst crimes, Vlok has pushed the guilt onto his former underlings. In 2001, an Afrikaner journalist named Chris Louw wrote a bitter open letter to former white leaders like Vlok. They had won plaudits for declaring apartheid as a systemto be wrong and negotiating its end, Louw argued; former President F. W. de Klerk even got a Nobel Prize for it. But Louw, who served in the apartheid army, was still haunted by the specific actions he took in uniform. “What is left for me?” he wrote. “I’m now nothing but an old sinner, tainted with gun-oil, the sweat of the parade-ground, and the blood of black children. ... I’m too innocent to beg for forgiveness. I’m too guilty to wash clean my hands.”

I got the impression Vlok himself might feel more guilt than he let on. In his house, after we talked about the plot against Chikane, he fell silent for a minute. I stared at my hands. Suddenly, he shifted his weight to pull a small blue plastic-covered Bible from his pants pocket. “Man, I am still struggling with this verse,” he said, frowning behind his enormous glasses.

He opened to the passage from Matthew he had quoted to me in the café, the one that had absorbed him after the death of his wife.“If you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person.”

My eyes drifted just above the text. I saw there was another line to the passage, one Vlok hadn’t quoted me. “You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment.”

I asked him if he was afraid of judgment.

“After I die, yes, yes, the Lord will sit in judgment,” he muttered. “But Jesus will be there next to me. If anyone accuses me, He will say: ‘But I already paid the price.’ ”

Even so, he told me he had gone to visit Eugene de Kock, the Vlakplaas assassin, in prison. Vlok had intended to ask him for forgiveness. But sitting face-to-face with his old deputy, a primordial urge seized him instead: the urge to defend himself. “Eugene!” he cried out. “Did I ever tell you to kill somebody?”

“No,” de Kock replied. “But you gave me a medal when I killed them.”