by Tony Park
‘Another beer,’ he said to the waitress who collected his empty.
The blonde woman’s husband was in the john and Mitch smiled at her again. She continued to ignore him, pretending to read a magazine. It would have been easy, once they were in Johannesburg, to tail her and her man back to their home or hotel. But he had other business on his mind.
Revenge.
Mitch had grown tired of playing second fiddle to Alex on the island and had become increasingly disgusted at the other man’s weakness. What kind of pirate limited his takings to building materials and cars? They could have made a fortune ransoming or selling the ivory and rhino horn. The leopard would have been fun to hunt. He’d hunted three others of the big five – lion, buffalo and elephant – on trips to the mainland. He would have liked to see the big cat die.
He was certain he could take command on Ilha dos Sonhos if he could get Alex out of the way for good. Damn Alex. He would have had some serious fun with that bitch, whether she’d told him the location of the diamonds or not. And then he would have done the sensible thing – killed her. Alex had no backbone, but the men respected strength. All had killed in the course of duty and none was squeamish. Novak was Alex’s closest friend and ally and, while all would swear their allegiance to Tremain publicly, Mitch had already proved to himself that he could divide and conquer the gang. Henri had voiced some initial misgivings about torturing the woman, but he had also agreed with Mitch that Alex’s softly-softly approach with her was a waste of time. Mitch had been able to talk the gay Frenchman around. The others would be difficult, but not impossible. The cracks were there . . . Mitch just had to bust them wide open.
Jose, as the man with some vague ancestral claim on the island, was another kettle of fish. He was intensely loyal to Alex. They were like brothers, but without an income Jose and the villagers would have to pack up and move to the mainland. Sure, they could fish for their supper, but Mitch had seen the way Jose liked to flash his gold chains, designer clothes and new BMW when he was around the ladies in Vilanculos. He’d grown used to the stream of income piracy had brought to the island. Alex had invested his share of the loot in that crumbling money pit of a hotel, more fool him, though he hadn’t begrudged his local ‘partner’ from spending his takings on material possessions. Nope, Jose had tasted western consumerism in all its glory and he would follow the dollar once Alex was dead. Kufa, the Zimbabwean, would do as he was told.
Alex’s childish dream was that they would steal until there was enough money to reopen the resort and go legit. Supposedly Mitch and the others would then either retire gracefully or take up gainful employment as cabana boys and bartenders. Mitch wanted more in his old age than a redundancy payment, or the promise of tips and vacationing rich widows. He wanted it all: the island, Alex’s sleek boat, and a licence to rob, kill and fuck at will.
‘Pelican Air Flight 401 to OR Tambo Airport, Johannesburg, is now ready for boarding,’ said a voice through a tinny public-address system. The aircraft’s starboard engine whined and the propeller began to turn.
Mitch finished his beer slowly, unlike the tourist couple, who left their drinks half full and hurried downstairs. The man shot him a backward glance – his bitch wife must have said something. Mitch just smiled at him.
Yep, he thought, he wanted it all, and soon he’d have it.
‘A photo?’ George Penfold tossed the glossy print on the table of the open-air coffee shop outside the Melrose Arch Hotel. He lowered his voice to a serpentine hiss. ‘You kill two people, and all you bring me is a bloody photograph? I was told you were the best, Van Zyl.’
On the street, an African in a Zegna suit eased himself awkwardly out of a low-slung canary-yellow Lotus and handed the keys to the hotel’s valet parking attendant. George looked out across the mock-Italian cobbled square at yuppies with Bluetooth receivers in their ears, talking and gesticulating on their way to work like lunatics conversing with God. Nothing was understated in Johannesburg. The morning sunlight that glittered off a white woman’s chunky gold necklace and diamante-encrusted sandals was diffused by the smoke from shanty-town cooking fires somewhere beyond Melrose’s border.
Melrose Arch was like an industrial estate for bankers, jewellers and insurance companies – a mini suburb with cafes and upmarket bars and restaurants rather than supermarkets and fast-food joints. It was part Milano piazza, part Manhattan rush hour, part London drab. Like most fusions it had failed to create an identity for itself, but that didn’t matter. Only money did.
Piet leaned back in the sculpted white plastic chair and sipped his cappuccino. ‘The Novak woman pulled a gun on me. It was self-defence.’
‘I read the newspaper on the plane. What was the maid carrying, a butter knife?’
‘I thought this was important to you, Mister Penfold, recovering your lost property and finding the English woman.’ He laid his cup back in its saucer and dabbed his lips with a serviette.
George pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d slept fitfully in first class on the overnight BA flight from London and he’d been up most of the previous evening, giving the blonde hooker the thrashing she so richly deserved and, he was sure, secretly craved. The sex and the punishment had not relieved his tension, nor lessened his concerns. The only bright light was that Jane was alive and would soon be joining him. She’d said on the phone that MacGregor had given her nothing, but George thought he’d detected a trace of dissembling in her pauses before answering. Time would tell. In the meantime, he was seriously doubting the wisdom of hiring Van Zyl. Not because of his ruthless disregard of human life, but because of his failure to deliver. ‘It is important, Mister Van Zyl. Which is why I am so monumentally unimpressed that all you bring me for the loss of two lives is a piece of paper with no names on it.’
‘One name. Check the sign on the front of the hotel. I enlarged the writing on my laptop. It says Ilha dos Sonhos – Island of Dreams.’
‘And where exactly is that?’
‘Off the coast of Mozambique, in the Bazaruto Archipelago. It’s at the epicentre of fifteen recorded acts of piracy in the last twelve months. Novak, the South African, is second from the left. I can find out who the other men are, but the important thing is we have a location.’
George pursed his lips. The coffee was too cold to drink and his flight had been delayed an hour on the tarmac. Did nothing go according to plan on this godforsaken continent? ‘I’m listening, Mister Van Zyl, but only because I have no one else to see for the next hour.’
‘My men and I take that island. We take your pirates out of the game and we find out from those we take alive what they have done with your package, since you say the woman doesn’t have it.’
George had read the reports of the damage done to his company’s flagship – the vessel that was named after him. The criminals residing on the Ilha dos Sonhos would be an even greater thorn in his side to his legal and illegal cargo operations once he bought out the South African shipping company. They had to be dealt with. ‘Why should I trust you to recover my property?’
‘You should have trusted me with your true agenda before sending my men and me to rendezvous with the Penfold Son. If you had, we could have tightened security on board. MacGregor was a fool to keep your goods in the ship’s safe. It’s hard to ensure the safety of something when you don’t know it exists. My men and I are soldiers, Mister Penfold. We would, naturally, expect a finder’s fee for goods recovered, but I’m also looking for a business partner, someone with the wealth to back other ventures I might have in mind in the future. I would think that a retainer arrangement would be of mutual benefit, now that I’m aware of, shall we say, the full suite of your shipping activities.’
Bloody hell, but the man had balls. Van Zyl had failed at every turn, and here he was blackmailing him. George liked the idea of direct action against the pirates on their island lair. If he was twenty years younger and without the responsibilities of running a shipping business, he might have offered to join
in the raid. The phone in his pocket vibrated. ‘Penfold.’
‘Sir, it’s Gillian, good morning. I’m sorry to disturb you, but reception has just put through a call to me from a man currently in Johannesburg – an American. He wouldn’t give me his name but he said he had information about the identities of the men who raided the Penfold Son. He said he would speak only with the owner of the company. I have a number, sir.’
George took out his Mont Blanc and wrote the telephone number down on the back of a serviette. He slid it across the table to Van Zyl. ‘It appears I must do most of your work for you, Mister Van Zyl, now that we are prospective business partners. Call this man and tell him you’re acting on my authority. Set up a meeting.’
14
Jane stank.
‘Would you like a beer?’ said the sweating Afrikaner sitting next to her in the Toyota Hilux, not for the first time.
It was times like this – not to mention the time the ship she’d been sailing on had been hijacked by pirates – that she wished she wasn’t terrified of flying. ‘No thank you.’
At least six in the evening was a civilised hour for drinking. The three men she was sharing the vehicle with had been taking turns at driving, drinking and snoring throughout the entire gruelling fifteen-hour trip. Jane had offered to drive, partly out of fear for her own safety as whoever was behind the wheel was likely to be fatigued or drunk at any one time, but the South Africans wouldn’t hear of it.
They were all coalminers from Witbank, huge men with huge hands and huge beer bellies. Weynand, Christo and Dirk were gentlemen – none had made a pass at her and Christo had offered to ‘klap’, which Jane assumed meant hit, ‘the Englishman’ she had told them she was running away from. She’d assured them that it was just a tiff and that she needed her own space. No klapping was required.
They were in South Africa now and according to Weynand, who was behind the wheel again, rubbing his reddened eyes, only three hours from Johannesburg. All the men had agreed, despite her telling them that she would catch a bus or hitch a ride from Witbank, that they would travel the extra two hours to see her deposited safely at her hotel. ‘You don’t want to hitchhike on South African roads, hey,’ Christo had told her solemnly. ‘We all go, and that way we can keep each other awake and have an extra dop or two before we gets home to our wives.’ A ‘dop’ she had learned, was a drink.
‘On second thoughts, I think I will have a beer please, Dirk.’ True to form, he popped the can of Castle Lager for her, and even slipped it into a neoprene cooler.
Jane thought about Alex as she drank, and what she would say to George when she met him in Johannesburg. She had slept very little during the evening, after she had returned to her bungalow in Chitengo Camp, alone. He hadn’t touched her during or after dinner, not even a goodnight kiss, but even now in the truck she could still feel the softness of his lips on hers. She remembered the spontaneous arousal his kiss had drawn from her body and her mix of excitement and shame. It was confusing that she might feel guilty about the possibility of betraying a man who was already married. Alex had stared at her during dinner and she’d seen the desire in his eyes.
He was a criminal and she was a lawyer. She had questions for George, both as his lawyer and mistress, and no doubt there were difficult decisions to come, but a pirate could not help her, nor be her moral compass. Besides, she had to keep reminding herself, Alex had probably only wanted to bed her in order to find out what she’d done with the package.
She’d dressed, quickly, and walked to the camp ground, following the sound of clanging pots and half-muted conversations in Afrikaans. The South Africans they had seen the previous evening had been on a fishing holiday to Inhassoro and had decided, on the spur of the moment, to take an overnight detour to Gorongosa National Park. They were breaking camp when she found them, and planning on driving the long road back to Witbank in one hit. She’d told them a tale of a lover’s tiff and a holiday that hadn’t worked out. They’d been happy to offer her a lift.
She’d slept through a lot of the drive south on the EN1 down the coast of Mozambique. When she’d woken she’d glimpsed palm trees and sugar plantations, gangly boys on the roadside holding up huge crayfish and plastic bags of cashew nuts for sale. The South Africans had stopped only to urinate and restock their cold box with ice for their beer, of which they seemed to have an unending supply. The border crossing had caused her some problems, given that she didn’t have an entry stamp or visa for Mozambique. She’d concocted another story, about having two passports. She said she’d been robbed of her Australian passport and been told by immigration that she would have to report to the immigration authorities in the capital, Maputo. Weynand had whispered to her to pull out some cash, and that had settled the visa problem, though it had cleaned her out of the two hundred US dollars she’d kept in her money belt for emergencies. She smiled to herself as she drank her beer. An officious Mozambican civil servant was the least worrying incident that had happened to her lately.
The Toyota’s engine whined under the weight of the fishing boat it towed, yet they climbed steadily out of what the men called the Lowveld into the Highveld. It was as different to the hot, humid coast of Mozambique as could be. They sped on good roads through wide open rolling hills of crops and grazing land that stretched to the horizon. Like her travel companions, everything seemed bigger than in England. They passed a turnoff to a place called Emalahleni, which Weynand explained was the new name for his home town, Witbank. ‘It means “place of coal” in Zulu, but I’m not a Zulu, so I’m going to call it Witbank until I die,’ he said. The monotony of the landscape was broken by enormous coal-fired power stations, which the miners explained they supplied, and towering man-made mountains of mine waste as they neared the golden city of Johannesburg.
All the men were awake as they entered the outskirts of the city. As they passed the nondescript suburb of Benoni, which Christo explained with some pride was the birthplace of the Academy-Award winning actress Charlize Theron, Weynand said something in Afrikaans to Dirk, who then opened the glove compartment and drew out a nickel-plated hand gun. Jane thought of the moment when she had pulled the trigger and the shock in Mitch’s wide eyes, distorted by the eyepieces of his mask, as the bullet punched him backwards onto the deck.
‘Don’t worry,’ Weynand said to her in English, seeing but misreading her expression. He held the pistol up. ‘We’re safe with “the equaliser”.’
The locals called the city Egoli, city of Gold, and for a moment its buildings were bathed in a pale yellow as the sun slid behind a mine dump. The men said it was smoke from cooking fires and car exhaust fumes that softened the light, and the smell, when she cracked the window a little, confirmed it. She’d heard it was a dangerous place and had been warned by Harvey Reynolds, before leaving London, not to walk or sightsee by herself while staying there on business. After what she’d been through on the high seas and in Mozambique she wondered how bad it could be. The men, however, started exchanging stories of friends of friends who had been robbed, car-jacked, assaulted or murdered on the streets they were now driving.
Was Alex Tremain, she wondered, in the same league as a black man who shot a white for his BMW or executed the owners of the house he robbed to eliminate witnesses? Was one less of a criminal than another? Alex had tried to explain that he and his gang used firearms as a tool to coerce cooperation from those they robbed. They would never, he assured her, fire unless to save their own lives, as had happened on the Penfold Son.
She shook her head, ignoring the sideways glance from Dirk, and drained the rest of her beer. Alex went on board those ships armed to the teeth and trained and ready to kill to get what he wanted. That was wrong, and she had been wrong to be tempted by his kiss, though even now she could still feel his lips on hers.
‘Where are we dropping you?’ Weynand asked.
‘Oh, sorry. I must have been half asleep again. It’s a place called Melrose Arch. Do you know it?’
‘Ja? It’s where the rich fat cats hang out. I thought you was a pommie tourist, a backpacker or something?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘You not in trouble with the law, are you?’
‘No,’ she assured him.
‘Wouldn’t have mattered if you were. We couldn’t leave you stranded with that creep in Mozambique, whatever is going on.’
She wanted to tell them that Alex wasn’t a creep, just a pirate, but couldn’t think of a way to do so without having a long complicated conversation. ‘Actually I’m here on business. The holiday in Mozambique was just a side trip that went wrong. This is where I’m supposed to be now. This is where I belong.’
And, as the reflective glass towers of the corporate sanctuary of Melrose Arch loomed canyon-like around them, she wished to God that was true.
Alex was in a philosophical mood as he drove back to Vilanculos from Gorongosa National Park.
He tried to put her out of his mind, but failed. He told himself he should let her go, that he would be risking far too much by pursuing her and the package she had hidden. He had come to the conclusion that she had left it somewhere on the Penfold Son before climbing into the lifeboat. Whether she would tell him where it was or not was something he would never know. She had been concerned that her boss, George Penfold, appeared to know of the exchange that had occurred between the Peng Cheng and Penfold Son. That obviously worried her, but if her employer was involved in something criminal, what would she, as a lawyer, do about it? He’d hoped that he could get close enough to her for her to lead him, willingly or not, to the stones. That was before last night.
He’d awoken feeling as he did now, that he was more concerned for her than he was for the missing treasure.
