Mixed Blood ct-1

by Roger Smith

  He recognized them because, he supposed, he was one himself.

  Zondi shook himself free of his thoughts and walked across to the desk. A laptop, lid closed, lay next to an empty notepad and a cheap ballpoint. Zondi slipped the laptop into its bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he walked across to the bed and opened the Afrikaans Bible that lay on the bedside cabinet. He saw the inscription in cramped writing: TO RUDI. FROM YOUR FATHER ON YOUR TENTH BIRTHDAY.

  Even monsters had fathers. And mothers.

  Zondi sat on the bed and slid open the cabinet drawer. A Hustler magazine, well thumbed, and a tube of Preparation H hemorrhoid ointment. Zondi, a fastidious man, recoiled from the image of the obese Barnard applying the ointment to his fundament. He slid the drawer closed.

  He opened the door to the cabinet and saw a small pile of right-wing Christian tracts. Illiterate bile. Predictable. A photograph, the first he had found in the apartment, lay beneath the pamphlets.

  Zondi lifted a faded color shot of four men cooking meat over an open fire out in the bush. They were all white, beefy, holding beers in their hands, and mugging for the camera. He recognized one man immediately, a former Security Police captain who had later publicly apologized for the atrocities he committed during the apartheid years in order to avoid prosecution. The man on the captain’s right was the young Rudi Barnard. No mustache, still heavy, but much slimmer than the mountain of flesh who had wheezed into the interview room the other day.

  Zondi stared at the photograph. The quiet conversation of the detectives faded from his ears.

  He slipped the photograph into his pocket.

  Barnard was parked across from the Station Bar. He saw Captain Lotter step out of the bar and walk toward a new Nissan. Barnard crossed the road and dropped into the passenger seat of the Nissan before Lotter pulled away.

  Lotter took one look at Barnard and started shaking his blow-dried head. “I had nothing to do with this. Nothing.”

  Barnard laughed one of his sucking laughs. “Relax. If I was going to plug you, I would’ve doneit already.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “All I’ve heard is that there’s a warrant out for you.”

  “What for?”

  “Killing a kid. And two unidentified males.”

  This was unexpected. He’d anticipated some trumped-up charge, but they had connected him to the little half-breed. “I didn’t kill those two bastards.”

  Lotter was looking at him. “And the kid?” Barnard said nothing. Lotter shook his head. “Jesus, Barnard.”

  “Have they got Galant?”

  Lotter nodded. “He’s locked up at Bellwood South. Hear he’s already sung.”

  “Piece of shit.” He sucked on his mustache, staring ahead.

  “You better disappear bloody fast, Barnard. I don’t fancy your chances in Pollsmoor.”

  Barnard said nothing as he lifted himself from the car. He watched Lotter drive away, probably already on his cell phone to Peterson.

  Barnard went back to his car and got the hell out of there.

  The pressure was on him. He had to move-and fast. The only way he was going to survive this was to get enough money together to go deep underground, change his identity. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

  Just like his American friend.

  The helicopter cut through Burn’s sleep, low enough for him to hear the blades whipping. The sound of the chopper and the acrid smoke in his nostrils spun him back to February 1991, as an Apache attack helicopter swooped over Burn and his platoon driving through the smoldering wreckage on the Highway of Death.

  The four-lane highway through the desert, jammed with vehicles laden with plunder from the Iraqi sack of Kuwait City, had been bombed the night before. Vehicles were riddled with bullet holes, cars blown up, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and civilians incinerated.

  Then Burn woke up. He was in Cape Town. The mountain was burning, and he had the mother of all hangovers. He lay in the spare bedroom, and the windows were closed, the room airless.

  He pulled himself to his feet, still fully dressed. His mouth tasted like shit. He put a hand in his pocket and found a wad of notes. Last night’s blackjack winnings. He cursed himself for his weakness and stupidity.

  He headed off to the kitchen to find an aspirin.

  Susan was making breakfast. Bacon and eggs. The smell of the food was enough to make him puke. Matt sat at the counter, swinging his legs, reading Dr. Seuss. A book that Burn used to read to him at night back home. Jesus, how long ago had that been?

  Burn ruffled his son’s hair. “Morning, Matty.” His voice sounded like a work in progress. A poor one.

  Matt nodded, absorbed in the book. Susan didn’t look around from the stove.

  Burn found aspirin in the drawer and washed two of them down with a glass of water. Susan dished food for herself and Matt. She set the boy’s plate before him and walked out onto the deck with hers. It wasn’t much after seven but the sun was already fierce.

  Burn followed her outside, squinting.

  The mountain above them was charred, black, smoldering. Choppers were dousing any last sparks. The wind, mercifully, had stopped.

  Susan sat down at the table on the deck, her eyes hidden behind black Ray-Bans.

  Burn didn’t sit. He hovered over her. “I’m sorry.”

  She said nothing. It was as if he wasn’t there.

  There was nothing more he could say to his wife. He knew that she would find peace only when he turned his back on her and left.

  Disaster Zondi sat at a table in his room at the Arabella Sheraton and ate his breakfast. Fruit salad with extra kiwi, poached eggs, and whole-wheat toast. Freshly squeezed orange juice. No bacon. He never touched pork. He wore his suit trousers and white shirt without a tie. His Italian loafers gleamed.

  When you worked for the ministry, you were looked after. You flew business class; you rented BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. You had an expense account that allowed you to afford the Cavalli suits. Almost. And why the hell not? It was a tough job, trawling the dark pits of corruption, facing the very worst of human nature day after day. A few small luxuries were a balm to the soul.

  He carefully picked crumbs off the white tablecloth and placed them on a plate. Then he put the breakfast dishes on a tray and deposited it in the corridor.

  Zondi returned to the table and booted up Rudi Barnard’s laptop once again. He had spent the previous night, into the early hours of the morning, trawling through the contents of the hard drive. It didn’t reveal much, which didn’t surprise him. Barnard wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave details of his activities on a computer.

  Searching his e-mail files had produced mostly innocuous correspondence: police pension fund updates, an objection to a rental increase at his apartment. Then Zondi had found the e-mail to an anonymous Yahoo address with a JPEG of a fingerprint attached. Zondi had pondered it at length the night before, studying the whorls as if they would lead him to some further understanding. None came, and he had forced himself to sleep.

  After breakfast he returned to his meditation on the fingerprint. He knew somehow that this was important, that it could lead him to Rudi Barnard. Who had vanished.

  Zondi had the photograph of the smiling men at the bush barbecue propped up next to the laptop. As he sipped his cup of Earl Grey, he allowed himself the indulgence of memory.

  It was 1988. Zondi was eighteen, at university in Johannesburg, running with a crowd of youth activists. His best friend, Jabu, was a student political leader with a high profile. Zondi was at Jabu’s Soweto house one night when the security cops raided. Beefy white men in jeans and T-shirt, with blunt haircuts and shoulders like rugby forwards. One of them was the captain in the photograph. They threw Zondi and Jabu into a car and drove them to John Vorster Square in Johannesburg.

  Zondi and Jabu were separated, locked up alone. Over the next few days a succession of men came into Zondi’s cell
and tortured him, demanding to know the names of Jabu’s associates. Zondi didn’t know the names.

  The younger Barnard had pulled a wet sack over Zondi’s head and then pushed his head into a bucket of water, until he was sure he was going to drown. Then the fat man had kicked him and stomped him. Barnard and another man tied Zondi’s legs together, kept the wet sack over his head, and carried on kicking him. Broke his ribs.

  They pulled the sack off his face, just as he was about to lapse into unconsciousness. He was bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears.

  Barnard again demanded answers that Zondi couldn’t give him.

  Barnard kicked him into unconsciousness.

  Zondi woke up bleeding and wet, in the cell. He was held for another two days, beaten regularly; then without explanation they took him to a car. He was driven to Soweto and dumped in a field. Aside from the broken ribs, his kidneys were bruised and his right arm was fractured. But he was alive.

  He never saw Jabu again.

  Nine years later Zondi sat with Jabu’s mother and sister, in an anonymous Johannesburg office building, listening to the captain in the photograph offer his apologies before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. To avoid prosecution. On the tribunal facing the captain were an Anglican archbishop, a lawyer, a doctor, and an academic, their faces haunted by the horrors they had absorbed over the past years.

  The captain, an ingratiating man with a shit-eating grin, told how Jabu had died during interrogation. His body was taken to an isolated spot and cremated over a log fire for seven hours until all traces had been destroyed. During the cremation a group of security policemen drank and cooked meat at a separate barbecue.

  As Jabu’s mother folded forward in silent horror, the captain had provided more detail. While the security cops were drinking, cooking, and eating their supper, they would tend the cremation fire, turning the buttocks and upper part of the legs frequently during the night to make sure that everything burned to ashes. And the next morning, after raking through the ashes to make sure that there were no pieces of meat or bone left, they had all gone their own way.

  When Zondi had been given the file on Barnard, he had not remembered him immediately. It was only when he read Barnard’s Security Police record and saw the ID shots from the eighties that Zondi had realized who he was dealing with.

  Knowing who Barnard was changed nothing for Zondi. He was a professional. And he would behave like a professional. But Zondi knew he’d raise a glass of single malt to Jabu when he brought Rudi Barnard down.

  CHAPTER 15

  Barnard reversed a brown eighties Ford out of the storage container, leaving it empty. He locked up and drove through rows of similar containers to the exit.

  He had kept the Ford for just such an emergency, making a ritual of charging the battery every second Sunday. On those Sundays, while the battery charger ticked over, he had sat and cleaned and oiled a Colt Cobra. 32 and a Mossberg 500 Special Purpose pump-action shotgun. The weapons, and the small stash of banknotes he had kept in the container, were in the trunk of the Ford.

  After dumping his police Toyota in Goodwood the previous night, he had caught a taxi into the city center and booked into a cheap hotel, far from his usual haunts. He had paid cash in advance. He hadn’t slept well. Not out of fear; he didn’t believe the door was about to give way and Disaster Zondi enter like an avenging angel. No, it was the anticipation of what was to come.

  In the morning he had caught another taxi to within a few blocks of the storage depot, waiting for the cab to disappear into the rush-hour traffic before he went to retrieve the Ford and the weapons.

  Now, as he drove toward the city, he ran through a checklist of what had to be done. He had his plan.

  He knew exactly what was in store for the American.

  It was the toughest day of Burn’s life. It was the last day he would spend with his son.

  Burn and Matt drove down the peninsula in the Jeep. Although the fires were dead, some still smoldered in places, the mountain looking like a lunar landscape. But the sky was blue and the wind had died. The ocean went from turquoise near the shore to a deep aquamarine farther out.

  They were listening to the Beach Boys as they drove, singing along to “Good Vibrations” just as they always did.

  Burn forced himself to keep it light, to keep Matt laughing. Otherwise he would start to cry, and he didn’t think he would be able to stop.

  That morning Burn had selected a new identity from the safe. William Morton. He took the passport and a wad of dollars down to the travel agent in Sea Point and booked a flight to Denpasar, Indonesia, by way of Johannesburg and Singapore. His flight left Cape Town airport at 10:00 a.m. the next day. He had chosen Indonesia because it seemed a lot more hospitable than Algeria, Angola, Moldova, Yemen, Zimbabwe, or any of the other countries that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.

  Now that he wouldn’t have a pregnant wife or a small child with him, the sprawl of Indonesia seemed appealing. And there were worse places than Bali to stitch his life back together.

  He had made peace with the fact that Susan was going to give herself up. He hoped the U.S. authorities would be sympathetic, and that Susan’s punishment would be light.

  Sometime in the future they would be together. He had to believe that.

  Burn and Matt stopped at a small harbor and walked out onto the pier, watching as men lazily fished from the breakwater. Brightly painted wooden fishing boats chugged in, loaded with their catch.

  Burn bought a cod fresh from the ocean. Maybe he could cook it that night, as a kind of undeclared farewell meal. He intended to wait for Matt to go to sleep and then tell Susan of his plans. He would say goodbye to his son before he left in the morning. That was t only way he could imagine doing the unimaginable.

  Matt held Burn’s hand and stared in fascination as a bronze-skinned woman in gum boots sat on a crate surrounded by fish innards and gutted their cod. She worked the filleting knife without needing to watch her hands, all the while flirting with fishermen in the singsong local patois. She had a raucous laugh, the kind that is marinated in cheap booze and cigarettes.

  She winked at Matt. “Pretty boy,” she said in heavily accented English. “He got his daddy’s eyes.” Then she looked up at Burn. “He gonna break some hearts.” She laughed again as she scraped the last of the pink fish guts onto the ground.

  Burn walked back to the car still holding Matt’s hand, carrying the fish in a plastic bag.

  Barnard drove the Ford along Main Road, Greenpoint. He stopped at a red light and lit a smoke while he waited. He felt the nicotine infuse his system, slowing things down just a fraction. He knew he was hyped. Primed for action. That was good. But he needed to keep his focus. This was a critical time.

  A police van stopped next to Barnard, the uniformed woman cop looking down at him. He returned her look and then stared straight ahead, feeling the sweat flowing down his chest, his jeans chafing his thighs. He had that fucken rash again, inflamed red pustules on his ocean of white flesh. He needed a shower, and to change into some of the clothes he’d brought from the container.

  The light changed, and he pulled away slowly, working his way through the gears. The cop van surged ahead, getting lost in the traffic. Barnard passed a couple of teenage hookers in short dresses. One of them blew him a kiss. Any other day he would be out the car, flash his badge, and run them off. Scare the hell out of them. Not today. Today his profile was as low as that of a man built like a tank could be.

  He saw a sign advertising rooms and turned off into a parking lot. The hotel was small, cheap, and nasty. Home to hookers and dealers and low-rent adulterers. It would suit him fine.

  Barnard popped the trunk of the Ford. He had stashed the weapons, money, and clothes in a kit bag. He locked the car and went into reception, carrying the bag.

  An unenthusiastic colored man sat watching cricket on TV. He hardly looked at Barnard, took the cash he offered, and slid him a key.
Barnard humped his fat up a flight of stairs and into a cramped room. The air-conditioning was noisy, but it worked.

  First thing, he stripped and headed for the shower. There was no separate shower cubicle, just a curtain around the bathtub. It was difficult to maneuver his bulk in the tight space, and the spray from the nozzle was weak and tepid.

  But at least he was clean.

  He parted his butt cheeks and slathered on his ointment. The hemorrhoids had been playing up, aching like hell. He lumbered naked into the bedroom and took a plastic container of baby powder from the kit bag and rubbed it under his arms and between his thighs where the skin chafed when he walked. Then he dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and heavy boots. He sat on the bed, the springs compressing under his weight.

  He laid out what he needed. First the Mossberg 500 pump-action, barrel ch the length of the magazine tube. The stock was cut almost to the pistol grip. Barnard had taken it off a Flats gangster, forced him to eat the barrel, then pulled the trigger. He had liked the way it lifted off the top of the gangster’s head and decided to keep the gun.

  He cleaned it, checked the action, and pumped two cartridges into the chamber. Then he cleaned, oiled, and loaded the. 38 he’d been carrying for the past couple of days. Lastly, he prepared the. 32 and strapped it into an ankle holster.

  He took a roll of duct tape, a pair of surgical gloves, a piece of cloth, and a couple of black plastic cable ties from the kit bag and stowed them in the small waist bag he’d attached to his belt.

  He shrugged on a shoulder holster and slid the. 38 into place. He drew it a couple of times, adjusting the hang of the holster until it was comfortable. Then he wrapped the sawed-off in a garish beach towel he found in the bathroom and put it in the kit bag. He zipped the bag, checked around the room to make sure he hadn’t left anything, then headed to the door.