by Roger Smith
“That soon?”
“They had a cancellation. Doesn’t it work for you?”
“No, it does. It works. Well done.”
As she grinned and disappeared back to her desk the thoughts started up again and Turner, despite the peril, let them carry him along like one of those runaway stagecoaches that had swerved, hurtled and bucked through camera-ready canyons and gulches just like those surrounding him.
10
As Bekker walked from the pantry toward the living room, Bone said, “Shorty, we got us a problem.”
“A problem?”
“Yeah, a problem with him.”
He pointed his automatic at Peter’s corpse.
“A problem with a dead man?”
“With him, yeah.”
“Now, would this be a philosophical problem or a spiritual problem?”
Bone shook his head. “He’s done changed the game.”
“Can’t say I’m getting your drift, Bone. All he’s done is bleed on the floor and stink up the room.”
“There’s gonna be people lookin for him.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. His kin.”
“His kin?”
“Yeah. When he don’t show up at home,” Tard said, lumbering forward, scuffing the floor as he dragged his bad leg.
“Were you listening to what he said? About where his kin is headed?” Bekker asked.
Tard shrugged, his man breasts and gut doing the hula inside his filthy yellow sweat suit.
“I had this skanky bitch up in my ear.”
He nudged Tanya in the ribs with his boot. Her head lolled and a tendril of bloody drool swayed like a suspension bridge between her lower lip and the wooden floor.
Bekker addressed Bone. “And you? You hear anything before you carved the fuckin turkey?”
Bone said, “I’m recallin somethin about a plane.”
“That’s right. A plane. A plane to where?”
Bekker’s eyes panned from Bone to Shorty who shook their heads like dyslexics at a spelling bee.
“A plane to Anchorage,” Bekker said.
“Anchorage?” Tard said.
“Yeah, Anchorage motherfuckin Alaska. So nobody is going to be wondering where our bald friend is for many a long fuckin hour.” He looked at Bone. “That solve your problem?”
Bone shrugged. “I guess.”
“Good. So why don’t we relax and enrich and entertain ourselves. Yes?”
The two men muttered and nodded.
“Okay, so here’s how it’s gonna go. I’m gonna take Daddy Bear here over to his office, get him to open the safe and hand over the cash. You two watch Mommy Bear.”
“Why don’t one of us get to take him to the safe?” Bone asked.
“We got us another problem?” Bekker said.
“Depends.”
“Depends? Depends on what?”
“Depends on you.”
“On me?” Bekker said, head cocked like the His Master’s Voice fox terrier.
Turner knew from old that this head gesture usually preceded a bout of extreme violence and saw the small man’s body tense for battle.
“Yeah, you’re treatin us like the help, man.”
“The help?”
“Yeah.”
Bekker nodded. “You’re right.”
“Okay, then.”
“I am treatin you like the help. Know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you are the fuckin help.” He got right up in Bone’s face. “I found this score. Means this is my party. And the two of you are invited guests. Do we understand each other?”
Bone swelled beneath his T-shirt and leather waistcoat and then he looked across at Tard and something unspoken passed between them and he shrugged and took a step back.
Bone said, “I don’t trust you being alone with that fucker,” jabbing a blunt finger at Turner. “What if he jumps you the way he did me?”
“He’s a pussy,” Bekker said. “He won’t give me no trouble.”
Bone swung on Turner, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip as he advanced.
“That right, fucker?” he said, a spray of spittle flying like ejaculate from the mouth hole in his ski mask and landing on Turner’s cheek and nose. “You gonna play nice?”
Turner didn’t reply and when the thick man lashed out at him with a boot to the groin he crumpled and fell to the floor, face down.
Turner stared at Bone’s left boot as it flew in for another strike, the stitching unraveling, the black leather cracked and fissured, but the toecap—in some para-military conceit—polished to a mirror, and he saw his distorted reflection rushing toward him (like a frame grab from a manic Tex Avery cartoon) and the boot caught him hard enough in the jaw to dim his vision and set his ears ringing.
“That’ll keep him cordial,” Bone said, stepping away.
Bekker approached Turner.
“Get up,” he said through the sound of bells and the fizz of static. “Let’s go break open your piggy bank.”
11
When Turner, becalmed at a red light on William Nicol Drive, felt his fingers trembling on the wheel of the HiAce, he decided that he was suffering the effects of eighteen hours straight without booze or drugs.
Since the dainty joint he’d smoked the day before while riding shotgun beside Bekker in this battered van he’d ingested nothing stronger than instant coffee.
Returning to his cottage after the visit to the death house—the enormity of what he was doing rushing at him like the headlight of a subway train—he’d fallen onto his roiled bed, groping for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s stationed atop a dog-eared paperback of Siddhartha on the floor beside the mattress, ready to drink himself into a numb, dreamless sleep.
To his surprise, as he cracked the cap and lifted the whiskey to his lips, the cloying smell of the liquor made him nauseous and he set the bottle down and rummaged in a drawer—dirty underwear; smeared CDs; a furrowed copy of Rolling Stone with Bob Dylan on the cover, the aged musician’s face tinted Martian-green from the preparation of countless joints—and found a half-smoked spliff.
Digging into the pocket of his Levis he snagged his lucky Zippo (whether a genuine relic of the Vietnam war as the Albanian photojournalist who’d traded it to him for a baggie of weed had sworn it was, or just a Thai knock-off, Turner neither knew nor cared, but the crudely engraved motto was something to live by: “When I die bury me face down so the whole world can kiss my ass.”) and spun the flint wheel beneath his thumb, catching a sharp whiff of butane before the flame flared as he brought the lighter toward the stubby doob clamped between his lips.
Turner fired the joint, the paper crackling with promise like an unopened gift, but the acrid smoke tickling his nostrils was suddenly as toxic to him as a gust of pesticide and he was unable to take even a hit, spitting the roach onto the carpet and crushing it dead beneath his Chuck Taylor as if it were one of its termite namesakes.
What the fuck was going on?
Liquor and weed were the staples of his daily diet.
Without them he would unravel, his frayed nerves (all forty-five miles of them) would stutter and scream and send messages of terror to his unmedicated brain.
Nothing for it but to take a pill.
But when he flipped the cap of a transparent plastic container and shook a Mandrax onto his sweating palm and regarded the white pellet, its face grooved into the impersonation of a mocking smile, he knew he wouldn’t swallow it.
If he were to do what he’d promised Bekker he would have to do it straight.
Straighter than he’d been in maybe ten years.
It wasn’t so much that he feared screwing up snatching the girl, or even the consequences of being caught (although the thought of being thrown into one of Jo’burg’s overcrowded prisons—his white skin as distinct from the rest of the inmates’ as the film of cream atop an Irish coffee—caused a swoosh of fecal matter to dribble from his anus into his skivvies) it was the kn
owledge that he had to be present, to bear witness to his actions, rather than watch himself through a lens of booze and drugs with all the detachment they allowed.
Why this was he couldn’t say.
It was what it was.
So he’d sprawled fully clothed on his bed and viewed a succession of beloved DVDs—The King of Comedy; The Sweet Smell of Success; The Conversation—until, finally, he’d fallen into an uneasy slumber while Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe mumbled his way through an L.A. supermarket, searching for Courry Brand cat food in Altman’s The Long Goodbye.
And now here Turner was, sweating in the furnace that was noon in the Jo’burg summer, the Toyota’s fans blowing hot, gasoline-perfumed air in his face, his fingers atremble on the sticky molded plastic of the steering wheel.
Then he realized it wasn’t some precursor to delirium tremens that had him in its grip, it was the thumping bass from the mini-bus taxi idling beside the Toyota, blasting out Kwaito—South Africa’s homegrown bastard-child of hip-hop and techno—causing tremors powerful enough to get his fingers shaking.
Turner laughed and lifted his hands from the wheel, amazed to see that they were absolutely steady.
Why was he so preternaturally calm?
Surely a man who’d been trapped since adolescence in a revolving door of liquor, cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine and any and every sundry mood-fucker-upper he could swallow, smoke and even spike should be Saint Vitus dancing his way to his date with destiny?
But as the lights changed and he accelerated away at speed, causing a legless beggar who balanced his torso on a skateboard to nosegrind his Tony Hawk Birdhouse into the asphalt in his haste to get clear, Turner suddenly reveled in the newfound clarity, taking in the shockingly blue sky that soared from a layer of khaki smog and framed the giant billboards advertising cellphone networks, cosmetics and luxury cars here in the money belt of Johannesburg, a city that had fled from itself, rushing northward from the festering downtown cesspit.
Speeding past the concrete bunker of the Sandton City Mall Turner felt dangerously omnipotent.
Could he do this?
Could he snatch the girl and save his head from Mr. Paul’s hammer?
Fuck, yes.
Yes, he could.
12
Turner exited the sliding door of the living room and walked with his hands locked behind his head, Bekker dogging his heels, the snout of the small man’s pistol gouging his spine.
As they skirted the pool, the glass from the shattered tequila bottle lying like diamonds on the tiles, the PoolShark nosed to the surface and floundered for a moment, gulping air, before sliding beneath the water and juddering away, the ripples from its motion sending curls of light across the two men.
“Jesus, Bekker,” Turner said, “this is a fucking mess.”
“Ain’t it a kick in the head?”
“This thing is out of control.”
“Just shuddup,” Bekker said, nudging him with the gun, “and keep walking.”
When they reached the door to the office Bekker stepped back a pace.
“Unlock it.”
Turner removed his keys from his pocket and opened the door.
“Switch on the light.”
Turner reached over and pressed the rocker switch and four recessed halogen lamps cast a cool glare across the two desks and twin vertical file cabinets.
A PoolShark was mounted on one wall, Turner’s idea of a retro joke, echoing the sports fishing trophies that had once decorated the manly dens of Papa Hemingway and other swinging dicks.
Only Grace had ever got the gag and had posed for a photograph where she had leaned in close to the mouth of the PoolShark, lips in a Monroesque-pout, her blonde hair falling like cotton candy around her shoulders.
After he took the photograph, wielding his BlackBerry’s camera like he was Bert Stern, Turner was so inflamed by this evocation of his pubescent fantasies that he’d bent Grace over his desk, lifted her dress and taken her from behind while the phone rang unanswered.
“Where’s the safe?” Bekker asked.
“Behind that calendar,” Turner said, pointing at the wall calendar beside Grace’s desk that showed scenes of the Southwest, this month a sunset rendering of Monument Valley.
“Open it,” Bekker said.
“We need to talk.”
“Just open the safe, Englishman,” Bekker said. “They can see us from the fuckin house.”
It was true.
The office, like all the rest of this biscuit-colored confection, featured floor to ceiling glass doors set into the pueblo plaster walls and the two masked men stood in the living room staring across the pool at them.
As he edged past Grace’s desk, empty drawers protruding like tongues, Turner’s arm brushed aside a brochure from a hardware retailer and revealed the gleaming curve of her cell phone reflecting the hard shine of one of the downlights, forgotten in her haste to box her things and get the hell away from him.
Turner, his hand hidden from Bekker’s view, reached down and snagged the phone, slipping it into the pocket of his chinos, a faint trace of Grace’s fragrance hanging in the air over her desk like a broken promise.
13
A dimly lit booth in a windowless cocktail bar where it was always midnight.
Frank Sinatra warbling about having somebody under his skin.
An American blonde looking into Turner’s eyes.
All that was amiss was the glass of club soda that he raised in salute.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers,” Grace said and sipped at her Jack and Coke.
Turner could smell the sweetness of the booze and it took all his resolve not to flag the barkeep, a troll with the beak of a carrion bird, and order one for himself.
“To you getting PoolShark into a big-box store,” he said.
“Well,” she said, “it’s not a done deal yet.”
“Oh, I’d say it is. You were brilliant in there. You had those good old boys eating out of your hand.”
She shrugged. “I just pretended I was talking to my horny uncles.”
“You had horny uncles?”
“Don’t all little girls have horny uncles?”
He looked at her.
“You make it sound like a rite of passage.”
“Don’t dress it up, John. It is what it is.”
Grace’s tongue slid between her lips and she used her thumb and index fingers to remove a fleck of tobacco from its tip and Turner had an almost overwhelming urge to kiss her.
“I had it better than most. Or no worse, at least,” Grace said.
He saw something in her face that made him regret the detour the conversation had taken and he leaned back in his seat.
“I meant what I said, about the commission.”
She nodded. “I know you did. And I’m not going to say that it won’t be welcome.”
They sat a while without speaking.
The place was sparsely populated: a man with a comb-over slumped at the bar counter and a couple of adulterers indulging in alcohol-lubricated verbal foreplay in a far booth.
Turner watched Grace drink.
She held the glass in her right hand, not releasing it even when it sat amongst the little rings of moisture on the tabletop, as if she needed something to anchor her.
Her fingers were long and looked as if they possessed a sinewy strength; the nails cut short and painted a pale ivory. The nail on her index finger was a little ragged, as if it had been chewed.
She lifted the glass to her mouth and took a sip.
Her lips were naturally full and her teeth white and even.
American teeth, Turner thought.
When he saw her blue eyes narrow quizzically—triggering a fine lattice of wrinkles at their corners—he realized he was staring.
Turner looked away and watched the fish in the tank behind the bar. A minnow, nothing more than an inky little blur, was swallowe
d by a fat red predator with yellow fins.
“John?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
Grace tapped her glass lightly with the nail of the index finger of her left hand.
Another tell?
“Sure.”
“You don’t drink?”
“No, I don’t drink.”
“But you used to?”
He nodded. “Yes. Now, I’m dry.”
“You had a habit?”
“Yeah, there wasn’t a drink or a party drug I didn’t love like a brother.”
She laughed. A breeze tickling a wind chime.
“I guessed it.”
“You guessed what?”
“Okay, when I look at you I see this well put together guy, kinda proper and even a little conservative, maybe. But there’s something else going on.”
“Something else?”
“Uh huh.”
She took a long drag on her cigarette, closing her eyes as she tilted her chin and exhaled and then she looked at him through the scrim of smoke.
“Like what?” Turner asked.
“You tell me.”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Nothing?”
He shook his head.
“Not anymore,” he said.
“You don’t mind me asking?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
“We work together. You should know this stuff.”
“How long since you quit?”
“Ten years.”
“Congratulations.” She swirled the ice in her glass. “Why did you suggest we stop off here? Isn’t it kinda tough being in a place like this?”
He shrugged. “You deserved a little celebration. But, yes, it reminds me of things.”
“Bad things?”
“Good and bad things.”
“What are the good things?”
“The way you look when you drink.”
“How do I look?”
“Thirsty.”
She laughed and tapped her glass.
Ting, ting.
“You sometimes miss just getting loaded or wasted?” she said.
“You better believe it.”
