by Roger Smith
Zondi nodded. “These three.”
“She say she saw the woman, Carmen, leave before any of these guys come in. She had a boy with her. He was white with blond hair.”
Zondi reached for his phone and called Bellville South HQ. He spoke to a sergeant on duty, wanted an APB put out on this boy.
“Sir,” the sergeant said. “The boy. He’s sitting right here.”
Burn drove through the sprawling ghetto without any sense of direction, just trying to get as much distance as possible between himself and the dead bodies. The wind had come up again, and it drew a gauze of dust across the Flats. The dust hid Table Mountain, the only landmark he could navigate by. He’d given the watchman the. 38, and the crowd had taken the Mossberg. He was alone and unarmed in one of the most violent places on the planet.
Burn stopped at an intersection. A taxi drew up beside him, and the passengers stared down at him. He pulled away and almost collided with a beat-up pickup truck. The men inside swore at him. Burn barely noticed.
Maybe he had fled the ghetto block too soon? Maybe there was somebody there who could tell him where Matt was? He could offer money. He still had a million in local currency in the trunk of the car.
Jesus, he told himself, you go back to that place, even if you could find your way back, and you’ll be arrested or murdered. And you’re the only person who has some vague idea of what happened to your son.
Burn passed a group of youths, who shouted something. One of them threw a beer can, which bounced off the rear window of the Ford. Without the watchman he had no idea of how the hell to get out of this place.
Burn was lost.
CHAPTER 32
When Zondi heard the kid talking American, he didn’t doubt for a second that this was the son of the man who’d called himself Hill. He had to be. Just too many coincidences.
The child was sitting on the counter in the charge office, wearing a soiled T-shirt and pajama bottoms. They matched the pj top Zondi had seen in the apartment. The child’s hair was matted on one side with something that looked like blood. He was saying, through tears and snot, that he wanted his mommy.
In that unmistakable accent.
A prim-looking woman with tight hair and tighter features stood next to the boy in the charge office. She looked as if she couldn’t wait to unload him and get the hell out of there. The constable on duty was taking her statement with painful slowness.
“How did this child get here?” asked Zondi.
The woman looked him up and down, immediately suspicious of this dark stranger. He allowed her a glimpse of his ID before repeating his question.
“My name is Belinda Titus. I’m a social worker. A girl, a former case of mine, brought him in. She refused to say where she had found him.”
“Name of Carmen?”
“Yes. Carmen Fortune.”
Zondi had no patience with children, but he manufactured a smile as he turned to the boy. “What’s your name, son?”
“He says his name is Matt,” said the woman.
Zondi’s smile frosted over when he turned it on her. “Thank you, but let me handle this.”
Zondi took the pen and a piece of paper from the desk cop’s hands and slid them to the boy. These American kids were precocious, so he went with a challenge. “Bet you can’t write your name.”
The kid looked at him through the tears, wiped a grubby hand across his nose. “I can, too.”
“Do you like ice cream?” The kid nodded. “Okay, you write me your name and I’ll buy you an ice cream. Deal?”
The kid weighed the offer; then he took the pen and concentrated, tongue jutting from his lip, while he applied himself to the paper. His penmanship only a little worse than the desk cop’s.
Zondi looked at the paper. “Matt Burn?” The kid nodded.
Zondi reached into his jacket pocket and took out the same mug shot printout he had shown the American. He held it up for the kid to see. “Matt. Who is this?”
“That’s my mommy,” the kid said, and started to wail again.
Zondi scooped him up off the counter. His suit would need to be cleaned after this. The child stank, and already he had deposited a smear of snot on Zondi’s shoulder.
“I’ll take this from here,” he told the woman.
“This child needs medical attention,” she said, anxious that her guest role in this little drama not end without the proper climax.
“I’ll take him to hospital, don’t worry.”
Zondi walked the kid out to his car, set him in the rear, and tried his best to secure him with the seat belts. He retrieved his laptop from the trunk and went online. It took him less than two minutes to find out that Jack and Susan Burn were fugitives from justice.
He didn’t know where Jack was, but he had a good idea where he could find Susan.
But first he had to find an ice cream.
Susan Burn lay in the recovery room, feeding her baby. A painkiller dripped into the catheter in her spine. She removed Lucy from her breast and lay with her cradled in the crook of her arm. Susan felt blank. Empty. Devoid of volition. Waiting for something to happen.
She became aware of voices outside the recovery room. The nurse’s voice, insistent, agitated, and then a man’s voice, emphatic. The door opened, and the nurse came in.
“Susan, I’m sorry, but there’s a policeman here. And he insists on seeing you.”
Susan sat up. The waiting was over. “Okay, bring him in, please.”
A tall black man in a dark suit came in. He carried Matt. She saw that her son was filthy, his light hair crusted with dried blood. When Matt saw his mother, he reached for her and started crying. Susan was beyond surprise. She held out her arms for her son.
The man gently placed Matt on the bed beside Susan. She hugged her son, staring at the man over Matt’s shoulder. The man turned to the nurse. “Leave us alone, please.”
“She’s just had a procedure. This is highly irregular.”
“I won’t be staying long.”
The nurse left, reluctantly.
The man showed Susan his ID. “My name is Special Investigator Zondi. Ministry of Safety and Security.” She nodded. “Is your name Susan Burn?”
She felt relieved. It was over. Finally. “Yes. Have you come to arrest me?”
“No. That’s out of my jurisdiction. I came across your son, and I wanted to return him to you. Get a positive ID on him.”
“What happened to him?”
The man was standing. “I’m going to leave you now. I’ll ask the nurse to take a look at your son and clean him up.”
“Where’s my husband?”
“I have no idea, Mrs. Burn.”
Susan was staring at him. “That’s it? You’re just going to leave?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Wait. Please tell me what happened. Where you found Matt.”
He looked at her. “I don’t know exactly what happened. My guess, and I could be wrong, you understand, is that your son was kidnapped. And your husband tried to get him back, but the boy was released out on the Cape Flats.”
Susan was processing this, through the fog of the painkiller. “Matt was kidnapped?”
“Yes. I believe so.”
“And Jack, my husband, tried to handle this on his own?”
“It seems that way, yes.”
“My son could have been killed?”
He nodded. “Yes. It was a dangerous situation.”
Susan felt Matt crying, his body racked by sobs. Then she felt an enormous and all-consuming anger, like a fire raging inside her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Zondi.”
“Mr. Zondi, I want you to help me, please. Help me to put an end to this.”
Zondi stared at her. Then he nodded.
Burn had found the distant Table Mountain through the smoke, and that led him to the freeway. He was on his way back into Cape Town. He had made up his mind; he was going to Sea Point police station to repo
rt the kidnapping of his son. He knew this almost certainly meant that the truth about who he was would emerge, but he didn’t care. He had to find Matt. If it wasn’t already too late.
As he came around Hospital Bend, the sprawl of city and harbor below him, his phone rang. When he saw Susan on caller ID, his impulse was to ignore the call. How could he face his wife now? But he answered.
“Susan. How are you?”
“Jack, I’m fine. We’re fine.”
“So it’s done?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s okay? The baby?”
“She’s perfect.”
“I’m glad, Susan.”
She interrupted him. “Jack, Matt’s here.”
He thought he was hallucinating. “What did you say?”
“I said Matt’s here. A policeman found him out on the Cape Flats.”
“My God, Susan, I’m so sorry…”
“Shhhhhh, Jack. Don’t say any more. Just come here. Come here now.”
“Okay.” He felt a heady rush of relief. His son was safe. His infant daughter was alive. His wife wanted him to come to their side.
“Jack, you’re coming here? To us?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
CHAPTER 33
Carmen Fortune sat for a long while at the taxi stand, watching the minibuses hurtling in and out, the distinctive cries of “Caaaaape Teeeeeuuuuunnn” as the sliding-door operators urged her to board. She ignored them.
It was still light, only just gone seven, and the sun hammered the Cape Flats.
On impulse she stood and walked a block, until she came to the street where she had grown up. Protea Street. She hesitated, almost turned on her heel, before she gathered the courage to approach the house of her nightmarish childhood. A small, scruffy place surrounded by a sagging wire fence, no different from hundreds around it.
Carmen hadn’t been inside, or spoken to her parents, since her mother had thrown her out six years ago. Before she could stop herself, Carmen opened the front gate and walked up the short pathway and banged on the door.
The door opened a crack and she saw her mother’s face. She fought the urge to run.
Her mother glared at her, shocked. “What do you want here?”
“I want to see him.”
“You’re not welcome here. Go back to the street where you belong.”
Her mother was closing the door. Carmen pushed the door open, forcing her mother backward. Then she was walking down the corridor toward the main bedroom, her mother’s hands clutching at her back.
Carmen swung and faced her. “Is it true that he gonna die?”
Her mother wilted. “Ja. He don’t have long.”
“Then I have the right to say good-bye.”
Her mother said nothing, but she slumped in defeat. Carmen went into the bedroom without knocking.
A skeleton with gray skin and sunken eyes lay under a sheet on the bed. It took her a moment to connect this emaciated thing with the sweating, grunting weight that had pressed down onto her small body night after night.
It was the voice that did it.
“Carmen. You’ve come.” The voice was weaker, but it was still the one that had poured filth into her ears as he raped her. This was her father, okay.
She walked up to hionntood over him, staring down.
He tried to smile, revealing gums set into a mouth like a sinkhole. “Carmie, the good Lord has answered my prayers.”
“Ja? Has he?”
“I prayed that you would come to say good-bye to me before I go.”
Her father’s eyes were filled with self-pity and fear. He was not going easily to his final destination.
A clawlike hand was groping for hers. She slapped the hand away and pressed her face close to his. “Drop this God bullshit, you bastard. You think raping your own child for years, making her pregnant twice, and throwing her out of your house is something God is going to forgive?”
She saw the terror well up in his eyes as his sunken, toothless mouth searched for words. Her mother was hovering in the gloom at the bedroom door. Carmen heard a sharp intake of breath.
“We both know you’re going to rot in fucken hell for what you did to me.” Carmen laughed in his face and pushed past her mother. “And you’ll get yours, you bitch.”
Carmen fled the atmosphere of oppression and terror. She stood in the street sucking air, calming herself.
When she walked away, the sky seemed bluer.
Disaster Zondi drove along the freeway toward the airport. The shacks and mean houses of the Cape Flats sprawled on either side of him in the gathering darkness.
So, how did he feel, now that it was over?
He tried out that daytime TV word: closure. Was this how it felt? He felt lighter, he had to admit, but at the same time there was an inescapable sense of anticlimax. Was he still yearning for something more acute?
More transcendent?
What he did hear was the creak of the karmic wheel as it turned. For every action, you had better believe there would be a reaction. Like the American, Jack Burn, choosing Cape Town, of all cities, to run to. How different would it have been if he had parachuted his family into the safe, middle-class certainties of a Sydney or Auckland?
The wheel would have turned, no doubt, but probably in a more mundane way.
And as for Rudolphus Arnoldus Barnard getting sent off to the big barbecue in the sky, the punch line of that particular cosmic joke was irresistible.
Zondi laughed.
He found himself whistling as he drove to Domestic Departures. He was experiencing an unexpected feeling, a sensation that he was unfamiliar with. It took Zondi a minute of intense reflection before he decided that, quite possibly, it was happiness.
At dawn Benny Mongrel followed a footpath up the lower slopes of Table Mountain, etched into the scrub like a scar in coarse hair.
When he had walked away from the blackened horror that had once been the fat cop, Benny Mongrel had no desire to return to his cramped shack in Laender Hill. He’d spent too many years in confined spaces, with the stench and moans and sickness of other men mixed into the foul air he breathed.
So he had come to the mountain.
He had found an overhang of rock that gave him shelter, not far from a stream that hadn’t dried up despite the heat. He’d been down a little way now to where large houses clung to the slopes, their back gardens stolen from the mountain. Despite high fences and razor wire, he had come away with a shirt and a pair of jeans off a washing line. He needed no more than that.
As he walked up the path, he saw a movement in the scrub and slowed. He picked up a stone and crept forward, sure that he would find a rock rabbit for his breakfast.
The bush parted, and a puppy with a thick golden coat scampered out. It was too young to fear men, and it wagged its tail and pissed itself with happiness when it saw Benny Mongrel.
He knelt down and scooped the puppy up into his hands. The puppy licked him and wiggled like an uncoiling spring, pawing at him, trying to get to his face with its tongue. The paws were large, and Benny Mongrel knew that this puppy would grow up to be a big dog. The size of Bessie.
He stroked the puppy, feeling the smooth fur on its back. And feeling something that scared him: the thawing of his stone-cold heart.
Gently, he set the dog down. He stood up, gathered his stolen clothes, and walked on up the mountain. He never once looked back as the puppy tried at first to follow him, then stopped and sat down on the pathway and scratched at its ear.
Benny Mongrel was free.
Susan lay in the bed in the clinic, feeding her baby. Matt lay on the bed beside her, asleep, clean, dressed in crisp hospital pajamas. When the nurse had brought Lucy in for her early morning feeding, Susan had seen the uniformed policeman still seated outside the door.
Susan knew that the next phase of her life was not going to be easy. A man from the U.S. Consulate had come to
see her the night before, a smarmy pretty-boy who looked like he’d been dragged from a game of tennis. He told her she would be escorted back to the States as soon as she was strong enough to travel. Aside from the court appearances and-if she was lucky-a period of probation, there were very real practical issues to face. Like money, or the lack of it.
Their house in Los Angeles had been seized and their bank accounts frozen. Susan was broke. She hadn’t worked since she had married Jack Burn, and she knew that facing life as a single parent was going to be tough. That was okay, though; her children were alive and with her. Even if her husband wasn’t.
Matt woke up and looked up at her. “You want something to drink, Matty?”
He shook his head, clinging to her hand. He sucked the thumb of his free hand. She gently disengaged the thumb from his mouth. He hadn’t spoken since Zondi had brought him to her the evening before. Something had happened to him in those two days out on the Cape Flats. He’d been examined at the hospital, and aside from a bump on his head there was no sign of any physical injury. He’d appeared a little groggy, and a blood test had confirmed that he’d been fed sedatives but not enough to be life threatening.
Susan knew that her son had been injured on a deeper, invisible level. The type of injury that had turned this happy and extroverted child into a frightened shadow.
God damn you, Jack, she heard herself saying. God damn you wherever you are.
The tire burst somewhere north of a parched town Burn blew through so fast he couldn’t catch the name.
He’d been running since the evening before. Since the call from Susan. When he had told her that last lie, knowing the cops were waiting for him at the clinic. He’d allowed himself a minute to feel relief that Matt was safe, to register that his daughter had been born; then he had turned Barnard’s battered Ford north and driven through the night.
The morning found him somewhere in the Kalahari Desert. An endless expanse of red sand, prehistoric trees reaching like clutching hands from the dunes toward the cloudless sky. The road was flat and straight, a length of shimmering black ribbon laid across the sand. Not since he’d been in Iraq had he felt this kind of dry heat. Each breath burned his throat and his lungs.
