Blood Rose

by Margie Orford

  Riedwaan looked at her face. Her cheekbones, the sweep of her eyebrows were sculpted, beautiful, but the eyes were blank. All he could see in them was his own reflection, twice in miniature.

  ‘Who taught you that?’ he asked. He could imagine. She had such a perfect mouth, full and red. Made for a certain kind of love.

  The woman sat down opposite him, intrigued by his question.

  ‘A boyfriend?’ guessed Riedwaan. ‘A teacher?’

  She clasped her slim arms around her knees, as if folding her forgotten vulnerability away from his prying gaze.

  ‘Your mother’s boyfriend?’

  The woman said nothing, but she shivered. Riedwaan was on target. He had to keep her talking.

  ‘Your mother?’ The wind had dropped and Riedwaan’s words reverberated in the sudden lull. The pain in his arms was unbearable. He was glad of it. It distracted him from the charred skin on his chest. He inched himself higher up the tree.

  ‘Not my real mother,’ the woman spoke at last, though she did not look at Riedwaan. ‘The woman who took me after my mother died.’

  ‘Tell me what she made you do,’ Riedwaan coaxed.

  The woman got up and walked away as if she had not heard Riedwaan. She walked into the hut, leaving him alone. Riedwaan moved his body a little higher up the tree. The trunk narrowed a little, a dry cycle must have stunted its growth.

  When the woman returned, she was holding a box of menthol cigarettes and a lighter. Riedwaan, though desperate for nicotine, feared what she might do. ‘Can you—?’

  ‘He was old,’ the woman interrupted. ‘In the army, but he always smelt dirty. He used to come to see her.’

  Riedwaan nodded. ‘And he decided he liked the look of you?’

  Again, she seemed not to hear him. ‘I choked and he hit me, but she made me finish.’ The memory of it danced like a blue flame as she raised her expressionless eyes to stare at Riedwaan. ‘Once you get used to it,’ she said, ‘it’s such an easy way to pay the rent.’

  Riedwaan kept moving his body upwards. He could flex his wrists a little now. ‘How old were you?’ he asked.

  The woman picked up a stick and jabbed it into the sand. ‘I was eleven.’

  Riedwaan pictured the hand, nails lacquered red, holding the child’s small, round chin to wipe her face clean.

  ‘Tell me about those boys you shot,’ said Riedwaan.

  ‘What about them?’ she asked.

  ‘So close,’ he said. ‘You did it so close. I’m impressed.’

  Her eyes glittered. An arc of light again. He had to keep her facing him.

  ‘Tell me about it, what it felt like.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to rush this, do you? When I’m gone, then your fun is over.’ It was true; he could see it in her face. Clare would be impressed with him, he thought. His new conversational ways with women. ‘How did you feel?’ he pressed.

  ‘How do you think?’

  ‘Like no one could argue with you. Powerful.’

  ‘More than that.’ She came closer.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me where it all began.’

  ‘I can tell you where it’s going to end.’

  ‘With me?’

  The woman smiled at him and lit a cigarette. ‘Why not? Any requests?’

  ‘A cigarette,’ he said.

  She held the cigarette to his lips.

  ‘But we aren’t at the ending yet, are we? So why don’t you start with the first one, Fritz Woestyn?’

  ‘Oh, was that his name?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t do him.’

  ‘Who killed him, then?’

  The woman hesitated. ‘Don’t be clever with me. You think I’d betray him, my guardian angel. I told you, you need one.’

  ‘Nicanor Jones?’

  ‘He was sweet,’ said the woman. ‘My dry run.’

  ‘The others?’

  ‘Those were all mine. You’ll see later,’ she said. ‘I’ve learnt to be a good shot.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ muttered Riedwaan.

  The woman stirred the fire with the fence dropper. He didn’t think he could endure another session. ‘Why?’ he asked. It was a weak question, he knew, but he had to do something.

  ‘Why what?’ the woman shrugged.

  ‘Why did you do it? Love?’

  ‘I suppose you could call it that.’ She considered the notion.

  ‘Who are we waiting for, out here in the middle of nowhere?’ Riedwaan asked.

  ‘This time’ – she leaned close to him – ‘it’ll be just the two of us. Tête-à-tête.’

  ‘So why did you do it?’

  ‘It made me feel. He made me feel, standing close to me. Here.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Close.’

  Riedwaan could feel it with her. The man behind her, close, his hands under her elbows, adjusting them, helping her aim, sliding back the smooth upper arms, under the breasts. Stepping back as she fired to watch the dénouement. There didn’t seem any reason why it shouldn’t be pleasurable.

  ‘Why did the Topnaar move them?’ Riedwaan asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, agitated.

  ‘I don’t know who moved them. Nobody’s business, but ours.’

  ‘And why didn’t you stop?’

  ‘We had to finish what we started.’ She looked at him, surprised that this logic had eluded him. ‘That is what he taught me; to finish what you start.’ She stirred the fire, mesmerised by its flames. ‘And I always pay what I owe.’

  ‘So now you get the clean-up?’

  Rage flared in the woman’s eyes. ‘He’s not like that.’

  Her phone purred on cue. She fished it out of her jeans and looked at the screen. Riedwaan watched the pulse at the base of her slender throat. He inched his arms up the tree, closer to where it narrowed. Blood oozed where his skin tore on the rough bark.

  ‘Who?’ he managed to say. ‘Who’s not like that?’

  The woman laughed, the sound low, malignant. ‘You think you’re so clever, making me talk to you, distracting me. You think I haven’t seen it before?’ she sneered. ‘You’ll stop being so full of yourself when you meet him. He’ll fix you as soon as he’s finished.’

  ‘Finished with what?’

  ‘Your little doctor friend.’

  Riedwaan was quiet. The stakes had just notched higher, and the woman knew it.

  ‘You want to see?’ She held up her cellphone, so Riedwaan could see the screen: Clare, half-turned, startled, in a narrow passageway.

  Horror made him lucid. Riedwaan played his last card. ‘You believe he’s coming back for you?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s coming,’ said the woman, petulantly.

  ‘He’s finished with you. He didn’t even bother to kill you, did he?’ The air pulsed. The wind was rising again, fast, and visibility was dropping.

  For a moment, the ghost of the broken child the woman had been softened the carapace of her adult face. But only for a moment. It was gone when she started to strip. She unbuttoned her shirt. Off it came and her bra, her jeans, the shoes, the watch, even her rings.

  Riedwaan watched her, riveted. A quick shower and any traces of his blood on her skin would be gone. This perfect woman, naked except for the wings tattooed on her back and the pistol in her right hand. She flicked off the safety catch. She was so close, he could feel the warmth of her. It chilled him. She touched the gun against his forehead – cold, like a dog’s snout, and stepped back.

  Knees soft, elbows locked.

  She breathed in slowly.

  Then out.

  She knew what she was doing.

  fifty-four

  Visibility was getting worse. Clare could see a few metres ahead. That was it. The wind was a keening banshee. It hurled the sand in stinging waves off the tops of the dune, driving them down like vengeful furies that flayed the skin and tore at the eyes and ears. Her mouth was soon filled with choking red dust. Clare stopped to orientate herself. The stand of tree
s was thick, the black bark coated with mica. She fought her way towards the outflung arm of dune in the lee of the wind. Here, the wind was less constricting and she could make out the outlines of trees. She was close. She had to get to the top of the dune. She looked for the signs of human habitation that would be there. Eucalyptus. Here in the desert it would have been planted and nurtured for some time so that its delving roots could tap into the subterranean lake where the Namib hoarded its water. She closed her eyes and pictured the aerial map. If she pulled it out here, it would be whipped out of her hands.

  She had seen the eucalyptus earlier, exactly as Oscar had drawn it, with its dark spire squared against the undulating horizontality of the desert. She had seen it and then it had disappeared, so it must be behind the ruff of dunes that had formed in the last flood. She would have to go up and over the dune she was sheltering against. Due east. At least the wind would help her orientate herself: she had to face down the valkyries of sand that screamed past her towards the sea. It was horrible going forward: two steps forward was one backwards. Her throat was dry and cracked, and her muscles screamed at her to stop. There was a momentary lull. An absolute and deafening silence fell. The dust hung in abeyance, waiting for the next onslaught.

  Janus Renko. The unfamiliar name. The hard face familiar. And not just from Der Blaue Engel. The chord it had struck echoed through the chaos of sandy wind. The quiet kitchen. Clare saw it with startling clarity: the woman with her gun-metal hair, pointing out her husband in the desert. In the photo, one arm draped over a friend, the unknown man standing aloof, shadowed. The same face, distilled down to its cruel essence. The half-empty ship. The numbers: 2, 3 and 5. Coded for her, inscribed upon the dead boys’ chests by Spyt, the desert’s silent witness. The drums loaded, not with the obscuring load of fish, but with the deadly treasure dug up by five boys, watched, found and delivered by Spyt.

  Two, three, five. Unleashed in air or water, a stealthy death no one could fight. Enriched uranium: more than a pension that. A fortune for anyone willing to sell mass murder to the jostling numbers eager and able to make a dirty bomb. She couldn’t think of that now. Not here. She was concentrating on one life. One death.

  She was on the summit. Below, a vortex of red dust writhed beneath the yoke of the wind. Her heart thudded at the thought that she had lost her way, but the storm was so wild, the only thing to do was to struggle towards the tree she had glimpsed earlier. It offered the only sanctuary. She plunged over the edge of a dune, into the comparative silence in the well of sand. She rested, recovering from the assault of the wind.

  Ahead of her was a mound where the desert had heaped against something. Shelter. She made her way to it. The shape, the outline, a flash of colour. The familiarity of it caught like a cry in the throat. She crawled forward and collapsed against the mound.

  Mara.

  Clare repressed the hot flare of panic. Face to face with her, the girl’s expression rigid, the eye sockets already emptied. The final bullet a rose on her forehead. Beautiful, for a split second. Mara had been dead a good twenty-four hours, by the looks of her. The wind howled over the top of her discarded body, her outstretched hands covered in sand. Clare brushed the insects away from the girl’s face, curling her hand into hers. Mara’s paisley jacket was open, hanging loose from her body, revealing her white shirt. A few strands of hair stuck in the bloodstain drying on her sleeve.

  Clare touched the stain. It was still moist. She picked up one of the blood-sticky hairs. It was a deep auburn where it wasn’t stained. The colour of the dunes where Mara lay.

  It could only be Oscar’s hair. There was a faint impression on the sand where the boy had curled, nestling into the stiffening curve of the dead girl’s body. He had crawled here, inching his way across the dune, as she had, to find shelter. Clare shivered, looking out into the wind-blurred sand. There was no sign of the boy.

  She wound her scarf tighter around her face. The series of regular impressions leading away from Mara’s body was nearly obscured. The lure of them, the possibility that they were footprints, that Oscar was alive, was overwhelming. Clare stood up and looked north, the direction into which the tracks vanished. There was a gulley on the other side of the dunes, and then nothing but an ocean of dancing sand. If she followed these ephemeral marks she would be lost in minutes. Oscar had survived the desert before. She had to hope that he could do it again.

  She struggled up the incline, leaving Mara’s lifeless body to be buried in the desert. Below, she could make out the broken spine of the railway line and the eucalyptus standing in solitary splendour, marking where someone had tried to make a home, or coax a crop out of the sand. Clare made her way down, zigzagging along the contour, dreading what she was going to find. The wind had sculpted the sand over the low scrubby bushes, rocks and any detritus that lay on this dry tributary. It moulded sand over everything, making the shifting landscape surreal, blurred by the whirl of fool’s gold.

  Clare crouched as her eye registered a movement at the tree. A woman with her knees parted and bent just a fraction. The arms locked, clasped in front of her body. The man bound and watching the woman’s face as one would watch a weaving mamba.

  Riedwaan.

  Clare slipped the dust-sticky safety off Tamar’s gun. Before her mind had a chance to even register, she fired.

  Riedwaan felt the blood spurt from his right wrist as he wrenched it free. He grabbed the metal rod beside him and brought it across the woman’s knees as she fired, felling her like a ham-strung animal. She lay across his lap, completely motionless. He worked his left arm free and slipped his arms around her. They were both slick with her blood. There had to have been two shots; Riedwaan was sure of it. That was the only thing that explained the sound. He turned Gretchen around to reveal a gunshot wound on her shoulder.

  ‘Well caught.’ The catch in Clare’s voice undid her attempt at a joke.

  Riedwaan looked up. ‘About time,’ he said. The blood was rushing back into his arms. It was excruciating, but the sight of Clare was like a shot of morphine. ‘Who is this?’ he asked. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

  Clare knelt beside the bleeding woman and turned her head towards her. The woman moaned.

  ‘The Blue Angel,’ said Clare. ‘I thought it might be.’

  ‘A friend of yours?’ said Riedwaan. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around Gretchen’s naked form.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. You could say we have a couple of mutual acquaintances.’

  ‘She’s not going to last long,’ said Riedwaan. He pulled out his phone and gave it to Clare. ‘You dial. My hands aren’t working that well at the moment.’

  Clare took the phone and dialled Tamar’s number, ducking into the hut to get reception.

  Riedwaan found his cigarettes. He put one between his lips and felt around for his lighter. It was gone.

  ‘You don’t have a light, I suppose?’ he said to Clare as she came out of the hut.

  ‘I do actually,’ she said, offering him the Zippo with the mermaid on it. ‘I picked it up outside the freezer just before Gretchen’s friend tried to push me inside.’

  Riedwaan turned the lighter over in his hand so that he could read the inscription: Magnus Malan. He lit his cigarette. ‘On the Alhantra?’ he asked.

  Clare nodded.

  ‘No sign of its owner?’

  ‘Just a trace of blood.’

  Riedwaan took a deep drag. ‘How much will you bet that Darlene’s husband is freezing in the hold with his uranium cakes?’

  Clare sat down next to him and watched him smoke. ‘I’m not much for betting,’ she said. ‘But if I were, the odds would be so low it wouldn’t be worthwhile.’

  She thought about kissing him, but the sound of the helicopter approaching drowned out the wind and by then it was too late.

  fifty-five

  The bundle of dollars Janus Renko handed over to the port captain in Luanda meant that the Alhantra had no trouble docking at the Angolan
port. He leant against the rail, waiting for his man. He had not met him before, but they all looked the same: shirt pressed and crisp despite the humidity, linen suit, shades mirrored, black hair precisely cut. He scanned the girls displaying their wares on the other side of the razor wire. There. Newly budded breasts. The girl held his eye, deliberately hooked a nipple on a barb. One crimson bead of blood spread across her tight white shirt.

  ‘Delivery complete?’

  Renko turned towards the soft voice.

  ‘Of course.’ He took the case the man had placed at his feet and opened it. The diamonds, nestled on green velvet, winked at him, complicit, true.

  ‘You want to look below?’ Renko asked, putting his eyepiece away.

  The man shrugged, his expression hidden behind his dark glasses. ‘It’s there. We checked.’

  Renko handed over the ship’s papers. The keys. Docking papers. Orange roughy, such a delicacy. Especially the way this lot was going to be prepared. Renko disembarked, avoiding the filth on the wharf. The girl peeled away from the others. She fell into step beside Renko once he was clear of the docks.

  ‘You lonely?’

  Renko checked his watch. He had a couple of hours.

  ‘A little,’ he smiled.

  When his plane flew low over the Luanda Hilton, the sun was dropping westward, the roofs of the town shining in its light. In the east, darkness.

  Hours later, the stars hung low. On the horizon, Scorpio setting as the plane touched down. Janus Renko’s shirt was white against the smooth, dark skin of his neck, despite the long flight to Johannesburg. He was tired. It took a second before he noticed the man in the black suit peel away from the shelter of the wall.

  That fraction of time was all Phiri needed. The Browning was hard in Renko’s kidneys; his arms high up his back, the sharp intake of breath indicating just how far.

  ‘Funny,’ said Phiri, his mouth close to the man’s ear. ‘A perfect fit.’

  Renko knew better than to fight. ‘Goagab?’ he asked.

  ‘Singing like a bird,’ said Phiri.