Yudel knew who he was talking about, but his response was automatic. ‘Hall?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know he’s gone?’
He heard the brigadier sigh. ‘The total of his possessions amount to some clothing and a few personal items. It’s all gone and the cleaners in the building tell us he had unauthorised visitors last night. We know what we’re doing, Yudel.’
‘So where’s he gone?’
‘Christ, Yudel. I found out fifteen minutes ago.’
‘Thanks for letting me know,’ Yudel said.
‘It’s my pleasure.’ But there was no pleasure in the brigadier’s voice.
A moment after he had hung up, Yudel called Beloved’s number. The phone rang for a while, then her recorded voice reached him. ‘This is Beloved Childe,’ it said. ‘I’m not available at this very moment, but I’m deeply fascinated to hear what you have to say. Please do leave a message after the signal. You can depend on receiving a reply as soon as I’m free. I know you’re going to have a lovely day.’
Yudel hated speaking into recording devices. He usually hung up when they invited him to leave a message. This time he told the recorder, ‘Beloved, this is Yudel. I’ve just received news that Oliver Hall has violated his parole. Please be careful. He is more dangerous—’ At that point the recorder lost interest in Yudel’s message and stopped recording him. He went on to tell cyberspace that he trusted that Hall did not know that she was working at the Freedom Foundation, but that she should stop working until Hall was rearrested. He had no way of knowing that the last part of the message was not going to reach her.
News of Elia Dlomo’s escape and the failed attempt to smuggle guns into C-Max had also reached Freek Jordaan’s desk and interrupted his reading of a national Afrikaans newspaper. Reading the newspaper was not an activity he usually indulged in while at his desk, but the subject matter of a report was especially interesting.
His office was in the new police headquarters building, and, according to the report, the way the tender had been awarded to a friend of the national commissioner of police was not legal. It seemed the public protector felt that the commissioner’s friend was going to make an excessive profit at the taxpayer’s expense. The disagreement between the public protector and the commissioner had reached the front page of all national newspapers.
So far, it had been an unusual morning in other ways too. A query had come by email from the police laboratory in Silverton, just outside the city, to ask if it was in order to use human heads in a ballistics test. ‘I trust the heads are no longer being used for their more common purpose,’ Freek replied, ‘and that we will not have complaints from the relatives of their former owners.’
Earlier he had turned down a photograph for the police magazine showing him addressing a hall full of officers. ‘Let’s find one in which the senior officers in the front row do not appear to be asleep,’ he had told the magazine’s editor.
Freek was putting down the newspaper when the phone rang, and he heard Yudel’s voice on the other end of the line. ‘Oliver Hall’s gone,’ Yudel told him.
‘The Department of Correctional Services is having an interesting morning. Any idea where he’s going?’
‘He has a brother in Johannesburg and there’s a woman in Cape Town who may need protection.’
‘The American?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d better tell me about her.’
‘I will,’ Yudel said.
‘I have to go to Midrand on an asset forfeiture matter. Come with me and we can talk on the way.’
Freek drove and Yudel told him about Beloved, the effect she had on the prisoners, her meeting with Hall and the time she had spent alone with him.
Freek glanced at him out of the corners of his eyes. ‘She had an effect on the prisoners, you say. You said nothing about the effect she had on you.’
‘She had no particular effect on me.’
‘Come on, Yudel. I’ve known you a long time.’
‘At my age,’ Yudel spluttered, ‘do you think …’
‘Gimme a break, Yudel. Good-looking is she?’
‘Her looks have got nothing to do with it.’
‘Great figure?’
Freek’s questions were almost identical to his own questioning of Dongwana over the matter of his having sex with a female prisoner. ‘How does her figure get into this?’
‘Nice little wiggle when she walks? Twinkle in her eyes?’
At last Yudel recognised the twinkle in Freek’s own eyes and realised that he was joking. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I share my thoughts with you.’
Freek took hold of Yudel’s shoulder closest to him and shook it hard enough to rattle his teeth, had they been dentures. His ready laughter roared up from within him. ‘Your parolee probably got himself drunk and will turn up in the next twenty-four hours.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Yudel said.
When Freek swung the car into the gate of the Gentleman’s Lodge, Yudel turned to him in genuine surprise. ‘And this?’
‘Come along. We manage it now.’
‘Who does?’
‘The Asset Forfeiture Unit.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘That’s what everybody says when I tell them.’ Freek had stopped the car in the parking area and had reached the steps of a fairly grand front entrance by the time Yudel caught up to him. He pressed a bell set into the doorframe. A closed-circuit television camera, mounted high on the wall, was aimed at them.
The door opened almost immediately. A primly dressed young woman who looked like a secretary in the office of an accounting firm invited them in. ‘Good evening, gentlemen. If you’d like to go into the lounge …’ She was gesturing to an open door. ‘… I’ll call the ladies. Or perhaps you’d like a drink first.’
Freek smiled warmly at her. ‘It’s all right, my dear. We’ve come to see Lieutenant Moloi.’
‘And you are?’
‘Brigadier General Jordaan,’ Freek told her.
The girl took a step back, clearly trying to put a little distance between them. She glanced at Yudel. ‘Yudel Gordon,’ he said, feeling a warm glow creeping up into his face. Yudel rarely met women in this line of work.
The girl smiled. ‘You gentlemen haven’t come to close us down?’ she asked coquettishly.
‘It’s quite all right, my dear.’ Freek’s winning smile was still in place. ‘I’m just a representative of the new owners.’
‘Louis’s got an office in the back. If you’ll follow me.’
‘Louis?’
‘That’s his name.’
She led the way past the lounge to which she had invited them and through a larger one. The women, perhaps ten of them, whose function it was to entertain the guests of the establishment, were seated or reclining on armchairs and couches. Some were reading, others listening to music on earphones, while two were seated at a coffee table, playing cards. All were dressed much less primly than the girl who had met them. Much skin, of shades that varied between nut brown and snow white, was on display. All turned to observe their visitors. ‘It’s all right, ladies,’ the girl said. ‘These gentlemen have just come to see Louis.’
‘What a pity,’ one of the ladies said, ‘specially the big one.’
Freek smiled and walked on without slowing. He gave the speaker a little wave with one hand.
Another voice said, ‘I rather fancy the little one.’
Yudel again felt the warm glow rising up his neck into his face.
‘Look, he’s blushing,’ a third voice said. ‘Isn’t that cute?’ Yudel’s blushing was a wonderful source of merriment. A chorus of giggles burst from the women of the establishment as if on cue. Freek glanced down at Yudel with at least as much amusement.
‘What?’ Yudel demanded as they entered a small office at the back of the building.
Lieutenant Moloi was seated at a table with two handsome black girls, one on either side of him.
He was writing in a notepad. An open bottle of beer was within arm’s length. He was wearing a collarless West African shirt and jeans, his uniform on a hanger against the wall, his left hand on the knee of the girl on that side. He leapt to his feet. ‘Deputy Commissioner.’
Freek had adopted his stern, senior officer demeanour. ‘Working hard, Lieutenant?’
‘These ladies are assisting me with an evaluation of the company’s strategy.’ He held out a hand to Yudel. ‘Louis Moloi,’ he said.
‘Yudel Gordon.’
Freek glanced at the ladies in question. ‘Perhaps you ladies could give us a moment alone with the lieutenant,’ he said.
Both rose, one of them saluting. ‘Please don’t take him away,’ she said. ‘He’s so clever. He’s turning the business around.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of parting you,’ Freek told them. As soon as they were out of the room, he turned to Moloi. ‘He’s so clever, turning the business around?’
‘Well, since I came we’ve made some strategic adjustments that have already increased revenues and the ladies’ earnings. So everyone’s very happy. And the sole shareholder, which is us, is also doing much better.’
Not many things surprised Freek. This one did. ‘All this in two days?’ he asked.
‘Almost three. I’ve been working hard.’
‘And what have you changed?’ Freek’s face still held its stern senior officer expression.
‘I looked at the cars driven by our clients and decided they could pay more. So I changed our standard package to a two-hour treatment, instead of half an hour or an hour. And I upped the rate per half hour by twenty-five per cent. We’re getting more clients than before and making twice the money.’
‘Anything else?’
‘We also worked on the treatment, refining it.’
‘Treatment? That’s the term you use?’
Moloi shrugged.
‘Who did the refining?’
‘Mostly the ladies. I offered a few suggestions.’
Freek looked from Moloi’s eager face to Yudel’s stunned one. ‘What do you think, Mr Gordon?’
‘I think the lieutenant has found his calling.’
TWENTY-TWO
Johannesburg Central Business District – 1 405 kilometres from the Freedom Foundation
OLIVER HALL had waited too long to be patient now. The years in prison had been a torment that he had only been able to endure because he knew that his day would come. He had always felt in some deep, secret place within him that freedom would again be his. Now it was.
The task given to him by Enslin Kruger so exactly fitted his own needs and desires that it could have been designed to reward him. In his mind he saw the face of Beloved Childe, looking at him across the table after Yudel had been called away. And he remembered how that little Gordon bastard had not wanted to go. He had seen looks on the faces of women just like the one he saw on Beloved’s face. I know a randy woman when I see one, he thought. She knew he was coming out and she would be waiting.
And he had seen women who looked like that as they died. He knew what that was like too. And it had been too long since he had last seen that.
And then there was the matter of Elia Dlomo and his woman. Down the years, Hall had heard about Jenny Pregnalato more than once. Some years before he had even paid to get her address. He had written it down on a piece of paper that was now tight against his skin in the back pocket of his pants. Not that he needed the paper. The address was carried indelibly in his mind. Hall never forgot what was important to him. The way Kruger knew what it would take to destroy Yudel, he knew what it would take to destroy Dlomo.
Before he had boarded the minibus taxi to take him the sixty kilometres from Pretoria to Johannesburg, he already had a clear idea of how he would travel to Cape Town and make that one pleasurable stop along the way. He had been given too little money to travel by air. That did not matter. Air and train travel held essentially the same distrust for him. In both, once you were on board and moving you were trapped. You could perhaps jump from a train, but if it was moving fast you might kill yourself. That was not a chance he intended to take.
The walk from the Noord Street taxi rank to the house where his brother lived took almost an hour. The house was much as he remembered it, but if anything it was in better shape. The roof and walls were newly painted, and the garden wall was higher now. A new, heavier gate with an intercom had been installed. He pressed the button and the gate’s lock clicked open. Someone inside was expecting him.
A narrow strip of grass in front of the house was neatly trimmed. A few petunias grew in a small bed on one side. The curtains were open, but he could not see into the front room through the heavy lace curtain.
Hall hesitated only a moment at the bottom of the short cement path before approaching the house and knocking on the front door. He thought he heard a voice from inside, but a truck was passing in the road and he could not be sure. He knocked again. This time he could make out the voice of his brother and what he was saying. ‘Come in, Oliver. Come inside.’
The knife was holstered below Hall’s left armpit. He had told them what he wanted and they had got it exactly right. The haft of the knife pressed lightly against his upper arm. If needed it would be in his right hand in less than a second.
The door opened at a gentle push. The entrance hall was dark compared to the daylight outside and his eyes took a moment to adjust. A few doors opened out of the hall. ‘Come in, Oliver.’ He heard his brother’s voice again. It seemed to be coming from the first door on his right.
He stopped in the doorway. Ashton was seated at a small desk, facing the door. A three-eight special lay in front of him. A small, white, woollyhaired dog at his fleet was growling softly. Ashton had changed almost beyond recognition in the years since Hall had last seen him. His face, which had been lean, was puffy now. His body too had become heavy and distended. He seemed to be breathing with difficulty. But his voice was the same. Even after all this time, Hall would have recognised it in a crowd. ‘Come in, Oliver,’ he said, ‘but just two steps.’
‘Ashton, my man …’ Hall’s face glowed with warmth.
‘Just two steps, no more, then stop.’
The two steps took him away from the doorway. The dog barked once, a shrill soprano sound, then went back to growling, but with greater intensity now. Hall nodded in the direction of the animal. ‘That thing supposed to protect you?’
‘This is what protects me.’ Ashton waggled the revolver at his brother. It was in his right hand now, and the hand was resting on the surface of the desk. In its present position it was pointing at Hall’s genital region. With the slightest movement it could find a target in his gut, heart or head. Hall considered that his genitalia were a serious enough target. ‘And the gun? What’s the gun for?’
‘I was told this morning you were released yesterday. I’ve been expecting you. The gun is to welcome you.’
‘Christ, Ashton.’ The sound of his voice was all injured innocence.
‘The jacket, take off the jacket. Touch nothing else, just the jacket.’
‘Jesus, Ashton—’
‘Just take it off.’
Hall knew that once his jacket was off the knife would be useless. If he moved first and Ashton hesitated or fumbled for only a moment he would die for his clumsiness. On the other hand, all Ashton had to do was pull the trigger, an action that would take perhaps a quarter of a second. The little dog was trembling.
‘The jacket,’ Ashton said again. His voice was deliberately low and reasonable. ‘Take off your jacket.’ He had lifted the gun off the surface of the table. The barrel was now pointed somewhere in the region of Hall’s solar plexus.
‘I came because I need some help from my brother. I thought I could get some help …’ The knife’s handle was an insistent pressure against his left bicep.
‘The jacket,’ Ashton said again. ‘Take off the jacket. Remember, you’re a murderer who’s breaking the conditions of h
is parole. I won’t even be charged.’
Hall slipped out of his jacket, letting it fall to the floor. The dog made a dash forward, but stopped almost immediately.
‘Come, Rosie. Come back.’
‘Sweet little thing,’ Hall said. He had seen his brother’s eyes follow the dog when it moved, but the distraction had been too brief. And yet, maybe the little mongrel would yet be useful.
Ashton’s eyes found the knife, but he showed no surprise. ‘Now, unbuckle the holster and let it fall to the floor. If you touch the knife – or my dog – I’ll fire.’
‘Jesus, I thought … Just tell me why.’ Hall was still trying the injured innocence approach.
‘You know me and I definitely know you. Don’t touch the knife. Just unbuckle the holster. Any wrong move and I got a hair trigger here.’
Hall did as he was told and the holster dropped to his feet.
‘Now take a step back.’
Hall followed the instruction. He knew he was now too far from the knife to make any kind of move. But the moment may come when Ashton would be distracted. It would only have to be a moment. He tilted his head in a gesture intended to take in the neatly furnished room and its contents. ‘Things going good for you, I see.’
Ashton ignored the remark. ‘What do you want?’
‘I need your car and your ID.’
As if life around you was that simple, Ashton thought. ‘What happens after that?’
‘Then I’ll be gone and I won’t ever be coming back.’
‘I got no car. The radiator’s in for repair.’
Hall had seen no car in the street outside and the houses had no garages, so it could be true. ‘Can you get one for me?’
‘No. I got money for you though. I knew you gonna be coming so I drew all the money I got.’
‘How much?’
‘Five hundred.’
‘It’s not much.’ Hall knew Ashton was lying. ‘I’ll take it. What about your ID?’
‘My driver’s licence picture was taken before I put on the weight. You can have it. It’s the only ID I got.’
‘Okay.’ There was no need for thanks. He knew Ashton was trying to make a deal that would get rid of him permanently. He would take what he could get. The permanent part would look after itself. ‘But I need my knife.’
The Top Prisoner of C-Max Page 14
