Dark Heart

by Tony Park

  He looked up into her eyes. He was so short. She saw the flicker there and although she did not want to lead him on, she couldn’t imagine the sadness of being confronted with the memory of his wife every day in the faces of his two daughters, so she gave his arm a little squeeze. Liesl knew some people would see it the other way around – that Piet’s wife was ‘living on’ through her daughters – but she liked her world better, where it was just her and, except for times like now, no one and nothing to remind her of the horror.

  She reached around him and set her glass down on the table. ‘Excuse me. Back soon.’ Before he protested, she ran her hand lightly down his arm; she’d learned years ago that the key to getting off the hook without a fuss was letting the guy think he was still in charge. He smiled obligingly.

  Liesl threaded her way back through the crush of people – even more had arrived – towards the ladies’ room inside the bar. An African waitress carrying three plates stacked with huge eisbein and mounds of sauerkraut nearly bumped into her. ‘Sorry,’ Liesl said.

  ‘Hey, sexy,’ a voice behind her said.

  Liesl didn’t know if the comment was directed at her, but she didn’t turn to check. If it was, the man was probably drunk. She felt a hand grab her elbow and this time she spun around.

  ‘Howzit, babe.’ The man was ten or fifteen years younger than her. His eyes were bloodshot and he swayed as she wrenched herself free.

  ‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, chill, meisie,’ he said. ‘Just trying to be friendly. Come dance with me.’ He reached for her again.

  ‘No!’ Liesl took a step back, but at the same time the man started to fall backwards, his eyes wide. Behind the man she saw Piet, who was a good eight inches shorter, pull the drunkard by his collar. ‘Keep your fokken hands off her,’ Piet spat.

  ‘Hey, get your hands off me, you fucking Dutchman.’ The younger man rounded on Piet with a big swinging punch that Piet, who was not nearly as drunk, was able to dodge.

  It was almost comical as the young guy started to lose his balance as his fist sailed harmlessly past Piet’s face. Liesl raised her hand to her mouth but her laugh turned to a gasp as Piet, his eyes narrowed and shoulders squared, delivered a short, sharp jab to the other man’s solar plexus. He doubled over and coughed, spewing part of his last drink onto Piet’s shirt.

  ‘Fokken soutie,’ Piet spat. His left fist shot up from low down, snapping the man’s head back.

  ‘Piet!’ Liesl yelled. ‘Leave him. It’s OK.’

  The pub crowd was gathering around them as word spread of the fight. The singer kept singing, but glanced down at the action. People started cheering as the drunk man, blood and spittle hanging from his mouth, took another swing at Piet. Although Piet was older he was quick on his feet and he danced out of range of the coming blow. His next punch caught the drunk man on the chin and sent him flying back towards Liesl. He landed at her feet. She held out her hands in appeal. ‘Leave him, Piet. Enough!’

  The younger man winced in pain and rolled onto his side. He spat and raised himself on one elbow as Piet stood over him. ‘Fucking hairyback,’ he spluttered up at Piet.

  Piet kicked the man in the ribs then grabbed a handful of his hair, lifted his face and punched him again. ‘Shut up, you fucking rooinek soutpiel.’ Others broke from the mob, seeing the fight had gone too far, and two men grabbed Piet’s arms and pulled him back. The other man looked like he’d passed out.

  Liesl turned and ran.

  ‘Liesl!’ she heard Sannette call behind her.

  Liesl was gasping for air as she weaved through the chaos of the crowded car park. She ran up the steep driveway to the street where Sannette had parked her Santa Fe people mover.

  ‘Liesl, come back. It’s over,’ Sannette urged. ‘You’ve had a fright. Piet’s a good guy, hey?’

  Liesl stared at her friend. ‘Bliksem, he nearly killed that poor guy!’

  ‘That Engelsman was trying to molest you. I watched you going to the ladies’ and saw what happened and I sent Piet to save you from that soutie.’

  ‘I didn’t need saving, Sannette. Especially not by Piet! That guy was just drunk and stupid, that’s all. And listen to yourself . . . Engelsman, soutie. The guy’s not a “salt prick” with one foot in South Africa and one foot in England, he’s a South African, like you and me. OK, sure, he’s an idiot, but he’s not an excuse for tribal warfare to break out.’

  ‘You heard him, Liesl. He called Piet a Dutchman, and worse.’

  ‘So? He was drunk.’

  For an instant she’d almost let her guard down when she pictured Piet at home in his empty Tuscan mansion on some estate trying to work out how to raise two teenage girls. Her heart really had gone out to him, and then an instant later he was kicking the shit out of a helpless, if stupid, man on the ground. The anger inside people, the harm that ordinary people were capable of, never ceased to scare her. That’s why they were better off avoided.

  ‘So? He got what he deserved,’ Sannette said.

  Liesl shook her head.

  ‘Come, let’s go back to the party, Liesl.’

  It was the last thing she wanted to do. Her idea of fun wasn’t watching two guys beat the shit out of each other. Also, she couldn’t tell Sannette but the sight of the blood pouring from the drunk man’s nose and mouth made her want to either vomit or burst into tears. She hadn’t, as she told people who asked, given up reporting on war zones because she’d been offered a better deal by Escape!. She’d been fired by the wire service she worked for in Afghanistan because she’d broken down in the field after an American soldier on the patrol she’d been accompanying had taken a bullet in the neck. Oddly, as she’d been in the Humvee when it had been hit by an IED – an improvised explosive device as the Americans called roadside bombs – the sight of her own blood hadn’t fazed her nearly as much.

  ‘I’m tired, Sannette, really tired. You go back to the party. I’m sorry.’

  Sannette put her hands on her hips and glared at her.

  ‘I know you want to set me up with Piet, but it’s never going to work. I’d feel like a fool going back in there now. I couldn’t speak to him after what just happened.’

  Sannette’s shoulders slumped and she opened her arms. ‘Ag, come here, sis.’

  Liesl fell into her friend’s embrace and had to swallow to hold back the tears.

  ‘It’s OK, babe. I didn’t want to say anything, and I know we hit the wines a bit last night, but you looked so tired this morning. I’m worried about you.’

  A man walking through the car park wolf-whistled in their direction. ‘I don’t sleep a lot.’ Liesl gently broke the embrace and brushed her hair from her eyes.

  ‘I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to keep you from your friends, and I’d be miserable company tonight. I’ll call a cab or something.’

  Sannette opened her handbag and fished inside. ‘Eish, but you’ve been away from South Africa for too long. This isn’t London. Here, doll, take my keys. Drive home. The gate thingy’s on the key ring. I’ll be too pissed to drive home by the end of the night anyway. Make yourself at home and if you’re still awake when I get back we’ll open another bottle to help you sleep.’

  ‘I can come get you if you give me a call,’ Liesl said taking the keys.

  Sannette waved her hand. ‘No problem at all. I’ll get one of the girls, or maybe Piet, to drive me home. You go home and put your feet up.’

  Liesl reached out and placed her hand on Sannette’s forearm. ‘You really are a pal. Thank you, and I’m sorry again, hey.’

  ‘Your loss,’ Sannette grinned. ‘Now, be a good girl and run on home. I hardly ever get a night out away from the kids, so I’ve got some serious jolling to do.’

  Liesl waved goodbye to her friend and looked around the congested car park. She pushed the unlock button alarm fob on the car key and saw the flash and heard the beep of Sannette’s people mover. There was something els
e on the key ring and she held it up to the glare of the security lighting as she walked to the car. It was a small can of pepper spray. Liesl got in the car and slid the seat back; she was several inches taller than Sannette. She adjusted the mirror and saw the crumb-littered back seat and the discarded junk-food wrappers. She’d wanted to drive the BMW to the bar, but Sannette had cajoled her into coming with her, perhaps fearing she’d try to pull out early. ‘Besides,’ Sannette had added, ‘that Black Man’s Worry is a prime hijacking target. I wouldn’t drive around in that thing if you paid me.’

  It was barely two kilometres from the complex that housed the Berlin Pub back to Featherbrooke Estate where Sannette and her family lived, just down the road from the Silver Star Casino. There seemed to be casinos everywhere in South Africa these days. When Liesl was growing up, in the apartheid era, casinos were only allowed in Swaziland and the black homelands – places where supposed decent, upstanding Afrikaners went to indulge in sinful gambling and to have sex with black people. She had hated living in a society where the government tried to dictate morals to its people and regulate where and how they lived, but in the new South Africa people lived behind brick and electric fences and carried pepper spray and pistols to the shops and the neighbourhood casino. Maybe she should have stayed in London, although even in that city there’d recently been rioting and looting. No, it wasn’t Africa, or youth unemployment, or disenfranchisement; it was just people and their stupid bloody tribes.

  She backed out of the car space, weaved around a couple of girls staggering arm in arm, and drove through the estate the pub was in. If she’d married a man like Piet, she wondered, would she have ended up in one of these places? She knew she couldn’t keep roving and trying to dodge the horrors that lived inside her – that had almost got her killed in Afghanistan – but nor could she bring herself to settle down. She wondered, not for the first time, if there was much point in her existence at all.

  Liesl stopped at the security barrier and an African guard pressed a button to raise the boom gate, allowing her to leave the complex. She waved back to him and wondered why there was security on an estate where anyone could come and go as they pleased to visit the local pub. The traffic lights in front of her turned orange so Liesl planted her foot. She swung the wheel to the left and made it through just as they turned red. Behind her she heard a horn hoot. She checked her rear-view mirror and saw a red Volkswagen Golf had followed her through, running the red light and causing the driver of a bakkie coming from the right to brake hard. It had been the bakkie driver beeping his horn at the Golf.

  She shook her head. She reckoned the number-one danger in Johannesburg wasn’t crime, it was bad driving. Liesl eased off the accelerator, expecting the maniac in the Golf to overtake her. Instead, he stayed behind her, though the driver of the bakkie, a burly male with a mullet haircut and moustache, leaned on his horn and blared abuse out the window as he passed the Golf, and then her. Liesl added road rage to her list of top risks in this sprawling, crazy city. She’d be glad to escape this zoo and get back out into the wilds of Africa, where the man-eating animals were much safer to be around.

  Ahead of her Liesl could see the left turn onto Furrow Road, which led to Sannette’s complex. The lights were green, but this time she didn’t rush it. She heard an engine being revved hard and checked her wing mirror to see the little Golf suddenly accelerate and fly past her. She shook her head again at the driver’s unpredictability. Still, it was a Friday and the end of the month – pay day for most people – so it was possible this car’s driver had had more than a few drinks. She couldn’t see who was behind the wheel as the windows were heavily tinted.

  Without indicating, the Golf veered suddenly back in front of her, cutting the turn so finely that Liesl had to brake hard. This time she thumped the centre of the steering wheel, although there was no hooting. She didn’t know where the damn horn was on Sannette’s car. ‘Poephol!’ she yelled instead. Ahead of the Golf the light was still green, but the car’s brake lights flashed red, forcing her to again apply her brakes ferociously.

  Liesl couldn’t overtake, as her left-hand turn was just ahead. What was this idiot doing? Next, he put on his left indicator.

  ‘Oh, great,’ she muttered. He’d nearly taken her out when overtaking her, just so he could make the same turn as her, in front of her. She fiddled with the indicator lever and found the horn. She pushed it. The sound was tinny and unimpressive. The Golf slowed even more. He was taunting her, which made her heart beat quicker. ‘Come on, come on. Please don’t stop at the robot,’ she willed him. Co-workers had laughed at her, years ago when she’d first moved to England, when she’d called traffic lights robots. She wasn’t laughing now.

  Just as it reached the lights, which were still green, the Golf stopped suddenly. Liesl didn’t see the flash of the brake lights, so she had no warning. One minute it was moving, the next it was stationary. She stood on the brake pedal of Sannette’s people mover and everything seemed to slow.

  She saw the Golf looming in her windscreen; saw the driver’s door open and the man jump out onto the roadway; felt Sannette’s car fishtail as she tried to veer left around the smaller car and miss the man on the road. She almost made it, but the kerb on the left side was too high for the low-clearance people mover to mount and when she hit it she careened back to the right.

  I’m going to die, she thought as the nose of Sannette’s car ploughed into the back of the Volkswagen. The airbag exploded in her face as she was thrown forward. Looking to the right, wincing from the pain in her neck, she saw the man who had caused all this walking, almost casually, towards her with a black pistol in his hand.

  Liesl reached for the keys in the ignition and pulled them out. She scrambled to the left, over the gearstick and around the passenger side airbag, which had also inflated, towards the passenger door. She felt for the tiny can of pepper spray on the key ring. As she pushed the door open with one hand she twisted and depressed the yellow button on the can.

  She felt a breeze on her face as she scrambled and heard the man cry out, swearing, at the same time as she felt rather than heard the nearby impact of two bullets. One smashed through the plastic dashboard on her right and zinged off some metal, while the other punctured the passenger airbag as she tumbled forwards onto the road. Opening the door had created a draft that blew the irritating pepper spray away from her and into the face of the gunman. She kept pressing the red button, but heard the last of the spray escape the canister. She fumbled with the keys as she crawled along the road, manoeuvring them until a key was protruding between each of her fingers when she made a fist. She’d learned the move in a self-defence class years ago, and she would fight this bastard to the death.

  Except he had a gun and, as he wiped his streaming eyes, he moved around the back of the car. Liesl got to her feet. To her left was a drainage ditch and beyond that the electric-fence-topped wall of a housing estate. She’d be silhouetted against the ochre-coloured wall whichever way she ran. She turned and darted to the front of Sannette’s car so that it was between her and the gunman. He was blinking and his hand was wavering as he tried to focus through the pain of the chemicals in his eyes. He fired again and the bullet whizzed past her head. They were stopped on Hendrik Potgieter, a busy road, and she could see a car cresting the hill, its headlights on high beam as it raced down the slope towards the intersection with Furrow. The driver would have seen the Golf stopped at the robot and the people mover behind it. No one stopped for anyone or anything out of the ordinary in Johannesburg, especially at night. Liesl ran up the road, into the path of the oncoming Mercedes.

  The driver honked and blared the horn and Liesl waved frantically. The car swerved. Liesl tried to yell and point to the man in black. She made it across the road and would have kept on running if she hadn’t heard the screech of rubber and the sickening thud of the Mercedes slamming into the man who had just tried to kill her.

  4

  Carmel Shang took a Di
et Coke from the minibar in her room in the D’Oreale Grande Hotel and poured it into a glass.

  Ten years, two months and, oh, about four or five days ago, she would have set to work on the miniature bottles of alcohol as well, but she’d been sober all that time and the temptation wasn’t nearly as strong as it once had been. However, nights away from home, in the anonymous cocoon of a hotel with a drink at her fingertips, were difficult. Fortunately, as always, there was work to do.

  Carmel took her laptop out of her carry-on bag and turned it on, then fossicked in the bottom for the power cord.

  She retied the fluffy bathrobe and sat down at the hotel room desk. The shower had been reviving and, while the tiredness was creeping up on her, she knew the worst thing she could do for her jet lag was succumb too soon to the lure of the double bed. Carmel connected to the hotel’s free wireless service and opened Outlook. Sipping her Coke and scrunching her toes on the carpet, she waited for her thirty-two messages to download. As soon as the first message chimed its way into her inbox she opened it, read it and began to reply. She answered every message – or deleted it if it was spam as it arrived. The download was faster than her replies though, and she could see a message from Henri Bousson waiting for her. It was tempting to skip ahead and open it, but she didn’t. She was thorough and methodical in everything she did; it was what made her a good prosecutor.

  She replied to her mother, telling her that yes, she had arrived safely in South Africa and was flying to Livingstone in Zambia the next day. She reminded her mother that her email contact would be sporadic over the next few days, and during the two weeks she would spend in Rwanda, as the GPRS and 3G phone systems were erratic. It was partly true, but also partly an excuse. She would be busy – too busy for personal stuff.