“Like in a murder thriller. Hercule Poirot. So you were the last to see the deceased” – she mimicked a Gallic intonation and I smiled – “therefore you are suspect. Non?”
“Riaan was telling me he was there.”
“He wishes he was there. You were no one if you weren’t there.”
“But he said he drove the Kombi.”
“For sure. He drove the van from Jo’burg down to PE. He refused to let anyone else take the wheel. I wasn’t with him then. It was during my very brief Kaplan phase. Well, Kaplan-plus, I suppose you would call it because there was a lot of confusion under all those sleeping bags in the back of the Kombi. Porter was there, too, whatever he says now. But Riaan was driving. Most of the time I can remember him hunched over the wheel. Zoë was asleep in the passenger seat. It was quite a journey. Road trip. Down through the Free State, along the Lesotho border. Things sort of got out of hand around Aliwal North. Lots of lips, elbows, stray fingers, sticky fingers. But old Riaan just kept on rolling along.”
“What did Rod make of all that?”
“Rod wasn’t there and Zoë didn’t join in the other stuff. Rod had stayed back at Old Deep. Something about finishing a big poem. The Epic of The Struggle. So Riaan was the big hero, Alpha male, escorting Zoë, doing all the driving. But then when we got to PE, he lost his nerve. Decided the whole venture was crazy. What was it to do with us? It was their Struggle, the blacks. Let them have it. Let Nyati go it alone. He was scared. Because nothing happened without the security police knowing. Anyone who went would have had a file opened on them, even if they didn’t have one already. And you never knew when the police were up to some dirty tricks or other. So Riaan handed over the wheel. Zoë ended up driving. Riaan always says now that he was at the meeting with Nyati. And no one contradicts him but we all know. If anything it’s the shame of his life – well, one of them. At the very moment he was supposed to take a stand, he copped out. He’s been living with that ever since. Remind me to tell you the whole story some time.”
“You don’t seem to like him very much.”
“Are you crazy? I love Riaan. I think that in a perverted way he loves me. But we neither of us love exclusively. We’re not capable. That’s all. You saw us today. Kids on the beach. Picnic with our friends.”
“And then night falls.”
“Exactement, Monsieur Poirot.”
“And he doesn’t mind? The women? The men?”
“He’s used to it. It gives him his freedom. He doesn’t like it. But he understands that I can’t be the little housewife. He prefers it if it’s women – less of a threat – but he doesn’t like it whichever way.”
“So why has he done this? He almost pushed me into the car with you.”
“And you don’t like the idea?”
“Too old-fashioned. Sorry.”
“Or too smitten. Too smitten with Zoë Joubert. Like you all are. That’s it, you see. He knows I will behave badly and if he can make you behave badly with me, it might keep dear Zoë away from you so he will have a chance.”
Sixteen
HURRYING THROUGH THE HOTEL LOBBY, I caught sight of myself in a wide mirror across a circular, glass-topped table held aloft by stone carvings of three fish. My hair was caked and spiky from the brine, my skin mottled by the beginnings of sunburn. I was wearing a T-shirt with salt lines where my protective surfer top had dried underneath. My garish shorts were still slightly damp and I had pulled on my sneakers without bothering with socks. In one hand I carried a beach towel wrapped around my Tilley hat and in the other a cooler box, now relieved of its contents.
During my time in the Foreign Service, I had maintained a tailoring account at Brooks Brothers in the belief that appearances matter – a view that prevailed among a certain breed of diplomat. I had shirts made at a place in Jermyn Street in London that kept my measurements on file and would dispatch its handmade Egyptian cotton creations across the globe.
Over the years, through diet, exercise and – I suppose – more than a hint of vanity, I had contrived to ensure that my measurements barely changed. The fine woollen suits tailored in my 20s and 30s had not required alteration. When I appeared as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, I did so in the knowledge that the studded cuffs of my shirts and the dark glow of hand-lasted Oxford shoes by John Lobb of St James’s Street reflected the dignity of my office.
But now I represented no government, no nation, no policy. The only loyalty required of me was to my suddenly haphazard self.
Since arriving in South Africa, I had paid court to a stranger and re-found a former love. A married bi-sexual woman whose husband coveted the new woman of my dreams had hinted at her availability. Had I chosen, at this very moment, I could have been striding arm-in-arm with a bikini-clad Vanessa van Rensburg towards the boudoir of my suite.
The lure of availability – mine and hers – sent a visceral thrill through me. I felt a perverse sense of gratitude to Lily Nyati. My pursuit of her truth had triggered an accidental liberation of my own. No matter what I did, the results would be on my personal account. I alone would seek out the traitor, the informer who had knowingly sent Solomon Nyati to his death. Was I not the captain of my soul?
I tipped a concierge who approached from nowhere with the keys to my repaired rental car, re-shod with four new tires. I sprinted upstairs, two at a time. My mind was racing ahead, to the entries I would be able to make into my new filing system, my case notes.
Then the alarm bells began to jangle.
The door to my room was slightly ajar and a light was burning. A whiff of cigarette smoke seeped into the corridor outside.
Whoever had broken in was making no secret of the fact. I steeled myself. Crime here was often terminal, with the clatter of automatic rifle fire and witnesses left in pools of blood to tell no tales. As a diplomat I would have retreated, called security, weighed options. In my new recklessness, I braced for confrontation and pushed open the door with a sneakered foot.
“You look awful.”
She had been sitting in an armchair and rose to face me.
“Don’t get ideas. There are things we need to talk about.”
“What on earth are you doing here, Jess?”
“Chris is with his drinking friends playing poker. Annual event. Boy’s night out. Girl’s night off. I have questions to ask and you have the answers. I apologise for the break-in. Easily done if you pretend to have locked yourself out. And I hope I haven’t disturbed any romantic plans.”
I showered quickly, shaved off a day’s stubble and dressed in the privacy of my bathroom, reverting to predictable chinos and a plain blue Oxford cotton button-down. By the time I emerged, my hair slicked back, the reek of sea and sweat expunged, Jess Chase had telephoned a dinner order and thrown open the windows that framed a vista made pungent by fynbos.
She had positioned a small table at a point where we could benefit from the evening breeze and a degree of privacy. When the room service attendant tapped on the door, she darted across the bedroom, past the king-size bed with its white cover and into the still steamy bathroom.
My suite – Room 65 – was decorated in muted tones of eggshell blue and dove grey. It was the kind of accommodation that explained why the hotel qualified for its five stars. Original prints of various species of iris, exotically titled in Latin, adorned the walls. Bright, modern drapes offset older, mellow furnishings from much earlier times in the Cape, crafted from yellowwood and the almost black stinkwood.
My papers had found discreet lodgings in an antique dresser that I had used as a desk. I wondered, briefly, if Jessica de Vere had reverted to the instincts of Jess Chase to rifle through them, but dismissed the idea as counterproductive. If she had, I would soon know. If she had not, my thought had been unworthy.
I was tempted to recall our previous hotel time together after she composed her articles. There had been the soulless chains, Holiday Inns from Ulundi in Zululand to Bloemfontein, tawdry small-town pensions r
un by severe Afrikaners, the stellar hostelries of Durban and Cape Town. Once, way out in the east, during a massive downpour, we had lodged at a place called the Hydro Baths Hotel, little more than a series of thatched-roof rondavels scattered in the scrub near the border with Mozambique.
On arrival the owner warned us against allowing a black retainer – identified as James, no second name offered – to join us in the car as he showed us to our hut. To our enduring regret, we watched him through the slosh of the windscreen wipers, guiding us on our way, caught in the headlights as the rain soaked him to the skin.
When I returned to the reception to inquire about food, I was told we would have to wait for sandwiches because “the ladies are watching ‘Dallas’”. But, I was assured, James would be on hand to bring them just as soon as the TV schedule permitted.
Jess had changed too much to encourage light-hearted reminiscence, or familiar reference to her youthful indiscretions in remote mud huts. (Her presence in my room, though, suggested she had not lost all her dare-devil mischief). Her hallmark worn Levis and bland, baggy T-shirts had been supplanted by a black sheath tracing the lines she had once kept hidden. Thin straps settled across tanned, unblemished shoulders, offset by a platinum necklace crusted with ice-blue stones. The earrings matched the necklace in carats and sparkle.
Around her eyes no trace of heaviness or pouching betrayed the years’ advance, as if the process had been discreetly reversed. The muscle definition on her arms suggested workouts and tennis under personal, professional supervision. Her hands – and you could always tell by the hands and neck, my dear – offered the only clues but they, too, were camouflaged by gold and diamonds.
We settled at the table. I served the crayfish tails and salads she had ordered for us, poured the wine and eased the bottle into its bucket of ice. She had chosen a Chassagne-Montrachet – way beyond my usual budget, but perhaps a deliberate marker of the circles in which she now moved, of the gulf between us.
The pounding of the ocean carried into the room, a relief from some of the resort’s other acoustic offerings – the insistent bass thump of Flashbacks Bar that filled the nocturnal Main Street, the heavy period rock of Larry’s Bar, the crescendo of gossip at Cornuti’s, a pizza joint. (Didn’t they understand that the Italian meant “cuckolds”, or was that part of a joke I had missed?) Jess ate as if she had been fasting, dissecting the crayfish with minute attention, ensuring that no single trace of sweet, white meat was lost. She buttered a bread roll to dip into the light vinaigrette of her salad. She reached for the wine bottle to recharge her glass.
“What a day. “Tennis at dawn. Ocean swimming. As you know. Were you stalking me? Then golf in the afternoon. Eighteen holes at Goose Valley. Didn’t see you lurking behind the bunkers. Then bridge. Then drinks on the terrace. Who said leisure is easy?” Her day’s activities came out in a rush, a prelude to what she really wanted to say.
“What are you in fact doing here, Thomas J Kinzer?
I have a bad feeling, a premonition about all this. The old hack instincts die hard. As I recall, you used to love that Bogart line – “of all the gin joints, in all the world, she walked into mine.” So why mine? Why my gin joint?”
“You know why.”
“I know what you have hinted at. I know you are following Zoë Joubert as if she were in oestrus. But there’s something else, isn’t there? Always the hidden agenda. What is it this time? I fear you have no concept of the damage you could do. Still on Uncle Sam’s unauthorised missions?”
“I thought part of you was American,” I said, more as a rebuke than a riposte for I have little tolerance for those who wrap themselves in Old Glory when they need its protection, then burn it for reasons of political expediency.
“Nice suite,” she said. The light splintered on her jewellery. “I remember you always liked your comforts.”
“Preferably when someone else was paying. Aren’t you taking a risk, being in another man’s room?”
“Aren’t you taking a risk that Zoë Joubert might come calling and find me here?”
“Touché. But it’s more of a risk for a respectable married woman. I’m a bachelor, remember.”
“A calculated risk, yes. But rather this than being seen in public, or not knowing whatever time bomb you might be setting off.”
“I’m on vacation. Struze bob.”
The expression was from my lexicon of southern African English. Struze bob, struze fact – terms perverted from “true as” to insist on the veracity of a statement. Other usages: flat dog – crocodile; floppy – slain, black freedom fighter; lekker, meaning tasty; ou, pronounced oh and meaning a man; cherry, girl or chick. Hence, the lekker ous only get the cherries, hey! – the slogan from a long-forgotten TV advertisement. Struze bob!
As she lit a cigarette, I asked her, as casually as I could, about Zoë Joubert. Her reply seemed almost scripted. Another legend to be filed under “Venus.” Or maybe “X” for Jess Chase, the ex of all times.
“Zoë, Zoë. What do we know about Zoë? Trust fund girl, essentially. Only child. Very wealthy, very nice parents. Her father, Benny, supplier in the mining industry. When men dig for gold, sell them the shovels, he used to say. So he did. Made a fortune. Tin roofs for mine hostels. Building contracts for pit heads, compounds and offices. Everything you needed to prosper, short of getting your hands dirty. Quit when the going was good and went into VC – private equity as you Americans call it. Bought into one or two big-time internet winners – Data Solutions, Safezone. Wasn’t too greedy. Didn’t get burned. Made his second fortune and still keeps his hand in. Bit of this. Bit of that. Very cultured man. Very protective wife, Yvette, runs his life brilliantly, which is what we are supposed to do. Houses in London, Jo’burg, Sardinia. I think they had ideas for Zoë – joining the firm, founding a dynasty, protecting the legacy. She went to the best schools. Ran with the horsey, polo set. African summers in Plett or Hermanus. Spring skiing in the Alps. Mediterranean yachting. Monaco. Cap d’Antibes. Lots of parties. Suitors among the gilded elite. The last thing Benny wanted was for some gold digger to run off with everything he had built up from his father’s general dealer’s store.”
“You didn’t lose your reporter’s touch.”
“I got to know them all quite well. Later, of course. After you left.”
“I left after you went first,” I reminded her. The breeze from the window caressed her, raising goosebumps, hardening her nipples. She reached for a pashmina shawl and pulled it across her shoulders and bosom.
“Do you want to know about her or not?”
“Okay. But how on earth did she get into The Struggle?”
“Of course she had to go through all the stations. PPE at Cambridge, post-grad at Harvard Law School. A media course at Columbia. And then she came home. Slap bang into The Struggle. Up until then she was more or less on track. But seeing her own country after she had spent so long in the home of the brave brought out everything she had been bottling up about how Benny made fortune number one, how the system exploited the blacks, the majority. She went back to college for the politics. Did African Studies to make the point. A brilliant leader. On the barricades, with her bullhorn, marshalling student protesters. Looked like a cross between Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. Left her cottage on the family estate, got arrested a couple of times. Moved to Old Deep. Married Rod the God. That’s when I met them. One minute they were the power couple, struggle-chic. The next it was over. Zoë took it quite badly. We were closer than we are now, but she didn’t tell me the whole story. She went through a crazy patch, which you’ll probably hear about from other people before too long. Then she swung the other way. Abstinence. Commitment. Months on end living in the homelands on doomed development projects with a baby in tow. No nannies. Just the two of them. She had one serious relationship. He was a photographer for one of those agencies in Paris. Jordan McBride. Big name guy. Won lots of prizes. Then the story moved on and so did he. Bosnia. Afghanistan. Whatever. He had talked
about getting married, moving out together, starting over in Europe. But when it came to it, he just cleared off with his flak jacket and his cameras. Zoë was devastated. But she didn’t go haywire. She just worked harder. Conferences. Projects. Research papers. Then, all of a sudden, here you are, pursuing her to her bolt hole in the sun. In front of all her friends who’ve watched her go through all this stuff with handsome foreigners once before. So don’t be too surprised if she doesn’t seem too keen on your idea of play-play.”
“And her daughter?”
“My, my. We are being the assiduous suitor, aren’t we? Funnily enough I could never see you as a father. Too self-absorbed, I guess. The daughter – Camilla, Mills – is incredibly bright. Protects her mother like a Rottweiler, and Zoë lets her. She can’t seem to let the child think anyone could be as important as her. I sometimes think Zoë lives her whole life through her when she’s not at the coalface with her research and papers. The shrinks call it co-dependency.”
“And you? What happened to you?”
She pulled the wine bottle from the ice bucket and poured a glass, jerkily enough to spill a few drops, the way people do when familiar constraints fall away and they drink more quickly than is good for them.
“I did keep track of you, you know, after you left. I had friends in the embassy and they told me your news: fast-track promotion to First Secretary, Cairo, Counsellor in Rome. I heard you married well. French nobility, right? Then what was it? Icarus? Daedalus? Too close to the sun? My embassy gossips told me you got to Paris as Ambassador – the full Monty for a career diplomat. Unprecedented. And so young. Right? Then something or other went wrong. White House sent in a political appointee, campaign contributor. Offered you Berlin but Madame wasn’t interested. You left. She stayed. You fell off the circuit. She remarried. Oil money. Sounds a trifle harsh, Tom. Even by my standards.”
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