by Roger Smith
“Oh, I’m a believer.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I spent the last five years with a mean drunk.”
A look of vulnerability crossed her face for just a moment before she wiped it away with a sweep of her hand.
“Well, I admire you, John.”
She pushed her half-empty glass to one side and stood.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before you stumble.”
“Not going to happen.”
But he rose and followed her out into the glaring sunlight.
As they crossed the parking lot to where his Lexus waited—the asphalt tacky beneath their shoes—Grace slipped on a pair of black sunglasses reminiscent of Camelot-era Jackie Kennedy. A soft, hot wind licked at her blonde hair.
Turner opened the car door for her and worked hard not to look at her legs as she slid into the passenger seat.
After they’d been driving a while through the sunstruck streets, past strip malls and industrial sites, Grace spoke.
“John, can I say something?”
“Sure.”
“I like you.”
“I like you too.”
“And I really like my job.”
“I’m pleased.”
“What I mean is, I’m just coming out of a mess of trouble and I’m trying to get my life back. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I think I do.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you any trouble.”
“Good.”
Turner was swinging the Lexus into his driveway when Grace said, “Oh shit.”
A black BMW convertible with Phoenix plates was parked in front of the garage.
The driver’s door opened and a woman stood up out of the car.
She was tall and rangy, dressed in jeans and a work shirt, her dirty-blonde hair worn in a careless tangle.
When Turner saw the way Grace was staring at her he knew he needed to revisit the easy assumptions he had made.
“You okay?” he asked.
Grace nodded, opening the door.
“I’m fine, John. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Grace stood, walking toward the other blonde.
There was an awkward moment, the lanky woman holding out a hand to touch Grace, who shrank back.
Then, aware of Turner’s eyes on her, she stepped in and let the woman hug her.
Grace said something that Turner couldn’t catch and the blonde looked toward him.
Grace got into the passenger seat of the BMW and the woman gunned the engine and reversed at speed, almost colliding with Tanya driving up in her Subaru.
Tanya, stepping down from the SUV, watched the BMW drive away and then she looked at Turner in a way that only she could.
In a way that denuded him.
He started to walk toward the house, Tanya falling in behind him.
“Johnny?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got the hots for that milk cow, haven’t you?”
He walked on without answering, peeling off toward the office.
Tanya said, “You can fuck her, I don’t care. But don’t stray, or . . .”
She drew a finger across her throat and tipped him a wink as she walked into the house.
14
As Turner lifted the calendar from its nail, revealing the digital touchpad on the wall safe, he felt Grace’s phone hanging heavy in his pocket.
What if it rang?
“Jesus, Englishman,” Bekker said, “hurry the fuck up. I can’t leave those mouthbreathers alone for too long.”
Turner keyed in the code and opened the safe. Three stacks of bound dollar bills sat on the slim pile of paperwork important enough to keep under lock and key.
He handed the money to Bekker, who rifled through it.
Turner got in close to the wall, making himself invisible to the watchers in the house and said, “I want you to take the money and go.”
Bekker stashed the bills in his jacket pockets, shaking his head.
“Too late for that, Englishman.”
“Why?”
“After we met today I caucused with the Lawn Dog and we’re of a mind that your cunt wife poses too great a threat. It has to be done.”
“Jesus.”
“Full disclosure, Englishman, I’m only doing this because that bitch’s mouth needs shutting. If it were just a matter of her cockblocking you I would’ve reluctantly refused.”
“You owe me.”
“You think?”
“Yes.”
“You’re alive. I’d say that’s payment in full.”
“I’m asking you to stop this. Now.”
Bekker shook his head again. “You were the initiator of all this. No time to get cold feet.”
“But having my daughter here . . .”
“No fault of mine. I trusted your intel that she’d be out of the way.”
“How the fuck could I have predicted what happened? Or that you’d kill that poor bastard?”
“Well, I didn’t kill him. My associate did.” Bekker flashed a smile through the mouth hole of his mask. “Hey, look on the bright side. Offing that guy and having your kid here only helps you.”
“Helps me?”
“Yeah. Think about it.”
Turner shook his head.
“Okay, way it was gonna go down is that Wifey was gonna be taken out and you were gonna survive. That mighta looked a little, well, suspicious. Now we’ll have the dead guy, your kid as witness, the bitch dead and you bruised but unscathed. Did I mention that I’m gonna have to take a boot and a fist to you before we decamp, Englishman, just to make things authentic?”
“I’ve already had the shit kicked out of me.”
“That’s the thing with your average garden variety psychopath: great for the wet work, but short on impulse control.”
“Where did you find those fuckers anyway?”
“The Young Republicans Club.” Bekker laughed.
“You’re sure they know nothing about our plan?”
“Those two bottomfeeders know nothing about nothing. I cherry-picked them for their low intellectual bandwidth.” He spread his gloved hands. “They’re useful idiots.”
“They were challenging you earlier.”
Bekker shrugged. “The pack always tries to bite the lead dog in the ass. Chill, Englishman, I’m in the driving seat.”
“What’ll you do with them? After?”
“There’s a lot of fucking sand and coyotes out there.” He moved toward the door. “Come on let’s get the fuck outta here, those two back there have the attention spans of meat flies.”
“How’s it going to play out from here?”
“I take you back to the house. I take Wifey into the bedroom and do what I gotta do and then we get the hell out and you call the cops and tell them your sad and tragic tale.”
Turner stared at him.
Bekker stood in the doorway. “Come, Englishman, step into your future. As a fella once said: It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
15
Still powered by the unexpected surge of optimism—perhaps just his shell-shocked body making a mixtape of his neurotransmitters?—Turner cruised to Sandown where he swung the van into a quiet, leafy avenue of luxurious houses lost behind high walls and electric fences.
Twenty-five years ago this had been open land, the paddocks and stables of Jo’burg’s self-made gentry, carved up now by developers.
He rattled past the girl’s school, a place so exclusive that it was identified only by a modest brass plaque, and searched for the lane that would lead him down to the river that trickled through the suburb.
Hearing a sound like an upturned hornet’s nest Turner saw four black men in overalls busy with weed eaters, trimming grass at the mouth of the lane.
He drove on half a block and pulled over, pretending to talk on his cell phone, watching the workers in his side mirror, waiting un
til they moved farther down the road before he reversed back and nosed the HiAce into the wooded little avenue, the towering walls of the school and a neighboring mansion boxing it.
He came to a low wooden fence and stopped the van, checked his mirrors to make sure he wasn’t being observed and pulled on a cap and rolled on a pair of surgical gloves.
Turner left the Toyota and, keeping his gloved hands in his pockets, walked through a gap in the fence and along a grassy bank until he saw the stream bubbling over rocks, flowing strongly after the recent rains.
Veiling himself behind the low branches of a willow tree, Turner was surprised at how bucolic the scene was, barely a plastic bag or rusted beer can to mar its beauty.
Though he’d never seen the river in those affluent surroundings Turner was familiar with the watercourse in a very different setting farther downstream, where, as the more brawny Jukskei, it carved a path through the teeming Alexandra ghetto—Sandton’s dark twin—its water black with shit, its banks a stew of rotting garbage.
One afternoon, years ago, getting drunk in the cocktail bar of Sandton’s Michelangelo Hotel, a faux-Italianate confection that looked as if it belonged on the Las Vegas Strip, Turner had fallen in with a crew of Xhosa boulevardiers who’d ferried him to Alex in search of a supplier of mythically potent hashish.
In the souk-like warren of shacks they’d found an Ethiopian dealer who’d—with a flourish worthy of a fakir—swept back an ornate Coptic shawl to reveal his resinous wares arrayed on a prayer rug. A girl of surpassingly regal beauty appeared with a hookah and the afternoon (and the Xhosa flâneurs) disappeared in a cloud of pungent smoke.
How Turner had ended up alone with the girl in an adjacent shack he could never recall (perhaps money had been exchanged, although he liked to believe it hadn’t) but overcome by hash-induced lust they had fucked long and loud on a grass mat as torrential rain battered the tin roof and the floor turned to mud, the shanty lurching and groaning as if it were about to break its mooring and take to the waters.
It was night when, mired to the calves in sludge, Turner stumbled from the shack and by the glare of the light towers that rendered the hovels the color of tripe and guts, he watched the river roar past, sweeping in its wake uprooted trees, doors, rooftops and the bloated corpse of a goat, its spiral horns adorned by trash.
The Ethiopian girl, a chainmail of bangles whispering on her slender arm, had led him back into the shack and when he’d woken it was morning and she was gone and he’d been forced to flee for his life across the filthy brown river but, that, as they say, was another story, because another, much younger girl from a very different Africa was heading toward him along the bank of the stream, wearing a blue blazer, white shirt, black necktie and gray skirt.
Watching this girl—it was only much later, when the rabid media had seized the story and wrung from it all its juices, that Turner had found out her name—he was surprised at how small she was, more of a child than a teenager.
She sat down on a tree trunk, produced an iPod from her uniform jacket, slipped in the earbuds and, with her back to Turner, stared at the water.
Turner delved into the pocket of his Levis removing a little glass bottle of clear liquid and a white linen handkerchief. The anesthetic, supplied to him by a veterinarian who bought coke from him by the shovel full, had assured Turner that it would be enough to render a small teenager unconscious for up to thirty minutes.
The girl’s shoulders were moving and he thought she was bopping in time to the music, but, when she turned in profile, gazing up at the sky, he saw tracks of tears on her face.
The tears undid him.
All the cool, all the confidence he had felt, drained from him in an instant, and the lunacy of the plan stood revealed.
He couldn’t do this.
Even a vivid flashback of the raincoated Mr. Paul applying his hammer, blood and brain matter bursting from the white man’s head, couldn’t urge Turner’s feet toward the weeping child.
He shrank back into the shadows, standing frozen, willing the girl to return to her schoolyard before something dark and weak within him forced a change in his thinking.
After an eternity she wiped her eyes on a Kleenex and blew her nose, carefully furling the cord of the iPod’s earbuds and stowed the gear in her jacket.
She stood and walked away and disappeared into a gap in the fence of the school.
16
When Bekker ushered Turner into the living room at gunpoint Bone said, “What took you so fuckin long?”
Bekker shrugged. “Finger trouble.”
“The fuck you sayin, man?”
“I’m sayin that Daddy kept on punchin in the wrong code.” Bekker patted the pocket of his windbreaker. “Don’t fret, it’s all here.”
“Show us,” Bone said.
Tard shuffled across to stand beside Bone, scratching at the concertina folds of his fat neck.
Bekker laughed. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Show us the fuckin green.”
Ignoring Bone, Bekker said to Turner, “On the floor, hands behind your head.”
Turner obeyed, looking through the feet of the men at Tanya, seeing her good hand twitch, the fingers flexing for a moment and then flatten and lie still.
He listened for any sound of Lucy but could hear nothing from the locked pantry.
Bone got in close to Bekker, looming over him.
“Why’nt we split that cash now?”
Bekker shook his masked head. “You never heard of honor amongst thieves?”
“Show us the money.”
“Who are you? Jerry fuckin Maguire?” Bekker said. “Fuck you.”
Turner could hear a heat in his voice that was more than anger and wondered if the small man had taken to using whatever product he was bringing in from Mexico.
Black tar heroin, maybe?
Back in South Africa Bekker, despite consuming liquor in oceanic quantity, had always shunned chemicals, saying they made smart people stupid and stupid people dangerous, but yesterday in the aircraft boneyard Bekker had seemed animated by something other than booze, his impetuous behavior and blithe confidence resembling the by-product of some chemical payload rather than an infusion of liquor.
Turner had spotted no tracks on Bekker’s sinewy arms but that meant nothing; he could be smoking Mexican mud or spiking the shit between his fucking toes.
Bone had his automatic in his hand, not exactly pointing it at Bekker, but using it as a kind of exclamation point when he said, “Are you gonna give us our cash or we gonna have to take it from you?”
Bekker became very still.
“You better be ready to use that weapon or you’re going to wear it like a fuckin butt plug.”
Bone raised the pistol and pressed its muzzle to Bekker’s temple.
Tard, emboldened by his comrade’s action, raised his gun and the barrel found the base of Bekker’s skull like a rubber arrow leeching onto its target.
“Do it. Fuckin shoot me,” Bekker said, his voice flat, expressionless.
17
With a sweep of his gloved hand a smiling doorman in a peaked cap ushered Turner from the mid-morning heat into the artic chill of the lobby of the downtown hotel.
Turner hesitated a moment, then crossed to the desk and the clerk looked up and favored him with a tight smile.
Turner said, “Could you tell Ms. Worthington in room 804 that I’m here to see her?”
The man nodded and reached for the phone, dialing.
When Grace hadn’t shown up at work that morning Turner had tried her on her cell, reaching only her voice mail.
Tried her ten times.
Eleven.
Twelve in the car as some impulse he couldn’t properly identify—concern? attraction?—had him driving across to her hotel.
The desk clerk shook his head. “There’s no answer from her room, sir.”
“Thanks, I’ll just go on up.”
Turner shared the elevator with a yo
ung Asian couple who watched the floor as intently as if it were a trapdoor about to spring.
The doors parted with a sigh and Turner stepped out into the carpeted hush of the corridor and followed the signs to 804.
When he knocked on the unlocked door it creaked open a few inches and he said, “Grace?”
No reply.
He pushed the door wider and was offered a slice of the room, like a still from a movie: an empty bottle of Stolichnaya lay on the carpet beside a pair of discarded black stilettos.
“Grace?”
Again, no reply.
He opened the door and stepped inside.
A bar of hard sunlight lazered through a gap in the closed drapes, finding Grace who was sprawled face down on the bed, passed out, her dress—a designer confection in some rich fabric—creased and stained.
Turner saw all-too-familiar signs of a bender: one earring missing, lipstick smeared, a slug line of drool trailing from the corner of her mouth to her chin.
She smelled of stale cigarette smoke, alcohol and sweat and Turner caught the brackish fume of the unwashed groin of a woman in rut.
At her crown the black roots of her hair bled like an ink stain on paper.
He suppressed a jab of disappointment that she was a bottle blonde.
“Grace?”
Turner nudged her shoulder and she coughed and opened her eyes.
Grace lifted herself on her elbows, staring at him through a curtain of matted hair. Her right eye was swelling.
Turner said, “I was worried. Are you okay?”
She said nothing, rolling onto her back, her dress riding up her legs far enough for him to see that she wore no underwear. There were bruises on her thighs.
She looked at him and burst into tears.
When Turner attempted to lay a consoling hand on her shoulder she slapped it away and sprang to her feet. He thought she was about to strike him, but she sprinted for the bathroom and Turner heard her vomiting violently.
He sat on the bed, waiting. Wondering why he had come here.
After more retching, sighing and moaning the toilet flushed and Turner heard the sound of running water.
