City of Blood

by Martie de Villiers

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Place of Gold

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Two: In the Presence of Angels

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Three: The Hand that Holds the Gun

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Siphiwe, a nineteen year old orphan dreaming of a better life, is haunted by memories of the brutal murder of his elder brother. When a woman selling mangoes is stabbed on the street in front of him, Siphiwe rushes to her aid, desperate to stop history repeating itself, but in doing so unwittingly crosses the paths of two very dangerous men.

  McCarthy Letswe, notorious crime lord, has returned home to Johannesburg after several years in exile, determined to wreak his revenge on Abaju, the Nigerian gangster responsible for Letswe’s forced departure, and the man now seen as Johannesburg’s king of crime. Siphiwe’s actions have set him on a collision course with both Letswe and Abaju, and as the violence on the streets intensifies, and the danger to those he loves most increases, Siphiwe is soon forced to seek help amongst criminals and police alike.

  A story of survival, revenge and ultimately, redemption, told in prose which is deceptively simple and utterly compelling, City of Blood is a gripping coming of age story set against a searing backdrop of violence, heat and colour.

  About the Author

  MD Villiers was born in Johannesburg and studied psychology at the University of Pretoria. Her passion for the country she grew up in provides her with a backdrop for her fiction in which she explores life in a country always on the brink of change.She was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger in 2007 and is now based in London, but often visits South Africa, where her family still lives.

  City of Blood is her debut novel.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Sabelo Ntose,

  who died on 12 March 2003. He was accused of stealing

  cooking oil, tortured and tied to a railway line by a mob in

  the Sweet Home squatter camp in Nyanga, Cape Town.

  City of Blood

  MD Villiers

  we are the creatures of our time,

  its passing wind,

  murder done,

  blood drying in the sun.

  Tatamkhulu Afrika, ‘Maqabane’

  PART ONE

  THE PLACE OF GOLD

  1

  THE WOMAN LAY bleeding on the pavement on the corner of Loveday and Jeppe Street. The circle of people who’d gathered around had grown into a small crowd, spilling over into the road, causing the traffic to snake by in a single lane. I had been there from the start, from the moment the Nigerian had pulled the knife. I could see it coming. The Nigerian had that way about him. I’d watched his approach, the way his eyes never left the woman.

  She had been busy behind her stall, a blanket wrapped tightly round her shoulders to keep out the morning chill, her hands rearranging the mangoes by putting their red sides up to give them a better chance of being bought. So busy was she that she had not seen him, had not seen the knife until he was right in front of her. He had stabbed her twice and pulled the knife from her as she fell down. He wiped his hands on a rag and took a mango before walking away. He’d looked at me as if he could see straight through me, as if I were a window in an empty house.

  The crowd shuffled round, whispered, stared and did nothing but wait for the woman’s life to ebb away. Sirens screamed further down the road – at least someone had phoned for an ambulance. The woman’s eyes were open, her hands clutching her bloody belly. I thought she was looking at me, at my feet, and I glanced down myself. Old running shoes, blue and white, with the sole of the right shoe loose at the back. And I thought about shoes, about how they were all you could see when you were lying on the ground surrounded by strangers.

  That was the moment I stepped out of the crowd. I did not know why. Perhaps because I didn’t want to be part of something this dead and silent, because I didn’t want to do nothing, like everybody else. I knelt next to the woman.

  ‘Sister?’ I ripped off my shirt and covered her stomach. ‘You hold on, sister.’ Around us the city held its breath. The street vendors, the passers-by, the Nigerian knifeman, all watched with surprise. Above me a thin strip of blue showed over the skyscrapers. It made me wish that I was somewhere else.

  ‘You hold on, sister.’ Blood was pooling on the pavement next to me. My shirt was soaked in it. Why was I doing this? She would not live and I could feel the Nigerian’s eyes on my back.

  The ambulance stopped, a police car behind it. The silent crowd parted to let them through. One of the paramedics was a woman. She knelt next to the wounded woman and talked softly, while her hands got busy. She spoke English, but with a heavy accent. An Afrikaans woman here in the middle of Johannesburg. There was kindness in her eyes – these things you noticed when you watched closely, as I did. Kind eyes and clever hands, but surely they would not save the woman. She’d lost too much blood. In the distance gunshots punctuated the city noise. Someone else, somewhere, dying.

  They took her away in the ambulance and left her blood in a pool on the street. The crowd stirred when the police pushed forward. Four of them, two black, two white. Two in uniform, the other two wearing ordinary clothes, but with bulletproof vests and guns. They were throwing questions around. The crowd, like ants, rushed off to work. I should have left too, but my thoughts were still with the woman and, before I could move, one of the white cops marched over to me. He offered me a cigarette, which I took. He was a young man, not much older than me, with pale skin and freckles. When he held out a light, I noticed the muscles playing in his forearms and the size of his hands. Fingers like bananas.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  I didn’t like the look of him. He looked like a man who knew how to use his fists.

  ‘Siphiwe Modise,’ I said.

  ‘OK, Siphiwe, you have an ID?’

  ‘No.’ Of course I had an ID, but I kept it at the shelter, where it was safe, and I saw no reason to tell him about it.

  ‘You saw what happened here?’

  I shook my head. His shoes were black and shiny. It would take hours to polish shoes to look like that.

  ‘Can you look at me, Siphiwe?’

  ‘I saw nothing.’

  ‘Ja, I bet. You saw nothing and heard nothing, eh? But you sat by the woman and held her hand. You must know her.’

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  Another cop joined us, a black man with sharp eyes.

  ‘I swear he saw everything,’ the younger one said. ‘He’s suddenly g
one blind and just about mute.’

  Behind his back the Nigerian stood in the door of a shop, eating his mango, looking on as if it had nothing to do with him.

  ‘We’ll talk some more later, OK, Siphiwe?’ the young policeman said. ‘Where do you live?’

  I waved my hand to the east.

  ‘On the streets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe we should take him to the station with us,’ the white cop said, but the other one had already turned his back on us.

  They left me alone on the pavement. I stood there for a while, not knowing what to do, then I started to pick up the mangoes from the upturned boxes on which they were displayed. I put them all in one box. People were getting back to what they were doing before as if nothing had happened. Two women were talking to each other on the opposite side of the road; one of them pointed in my direction. I glanced at the shop again. The Nigerian had gone.

  Around me the city went back to normal. The rhythmic voices of the street vendors blended with music blaring out from shops, traffic, horns blowing, sirens screaming.

  I crossed the road, turned the corner, and walked straight into the Nigerian’s fist. He was a strong man and he hit me hard. I dropped the mangoes and raised my arms to protect my face. His fist found my stomach. When I fell, he kicked me twice, bent over me and twisted his fingers through my hair. He forced my head back.

  ‘You listen to me, boy. I’ll fucking kill you.’ I felt the edge of his knife against my throat. ‘You talk to the cops and I’ll cut your throat, you hear?’ He let go of my hair.

  Dragging my knees up to my chest, I covered my head with my arms, expecting more kicks. I focused on the patterns on his shoes, the little dots in the shiny brown leather. He spat at me and walked away. I stayed still, waiting for the pain to stop. This was a very bad day. I had lost my best shirt. I’d been beaten up and there was spit running down my arms. Why did people think they could spit at me as if I were a dog?

  ‘Siphiwe!’

  I opened one eye as wide as I could, tried to open both, but my right eye was swollen shut.

  ‘Siphiwe, are you dead?’

  Msizi was nine years old. He had no parents, like most of the children at the shelter. Small and tough, he followed me around like a puppy. I groaned. The box of mangoes stood next to me.

  ‘Look, I picked them up for you,’ he said. ‘I ate one.’

  He showed me his hands, which were stained yellow with the juice.

  ‘Do you want one?’

  I struggled to my feet and wiped the blood from my nose with the back of my hand.

  ‘Do you want one, Siphiwe?’

  ‘No!’ He was a nuisance, this boy, always chattering like a monkey, pestering me with questions.

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ he said and his sticky fingers closed around my wrist.

  I went down on one knee to lift the box, wishing I could leave it, but we could do with fruit at the shelter. Each step brought agony, each breath sent needles into my chest. Msizi babbled on, but I did not listen. I tried to think of other things, of this city and its people and my life here.

  They called it the Dark Continent – the people who did not live here – and they called this Egoli, the Place of Gold. The place of gold? I had lived on the fringes of this city all of my life and I’d never seen a single ounce of gold. I had seen the miners crawl out of the earth’s dark belly, drinking in the bright blue sky as if they’d not seen it before. I’d seen their faces and heard their talk and had promised myself I’d never go down there. There were better ways to die.

  And they called this the greatest city in Africa: Johannesburg. People came from all over, from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and places up north: Ghana, Nigeria. All flooding this place, hoping things would be better here. More than a hundred years of city built on nothing but gold and the dreams of fools.

  Without the shelter, I would not have made it. My mother died when I was fourteen, leaving my brother and me alone. The next year, a month before his seventeenth birthday, my brother too was dead. That was when I came to the shelter. They took me in, asking questions which I refused to answer. They took me in despite that.

  There were three women at the shelter. One was called Grace. She was the cook and the one who looked after all of us. Everyone talked to Grace. Everyone listened when she spoke. Grace had two pairs of shoes, one brown, one black, both lace-ups with flat heels, because she was on her feet all day.

  One of the others was Lungile, a young Zulu woman who talked loudly and constantly. She was different from any Zulu I knew, because she was rich. She had been to a private school, went to England to study and came back home to change the world.

  The third was a white woman called Dr van der Sandt. She was old enough to know you didn’t go about changing the world with talk and good intentions. I had been there almost a year before I noticed her eyes. Blue eyes that asked questions and never left you alone. Before that day I noticed other things about her. She wore a different pair of shoes every day. She even had a pair of red shoes with needle-thin heels. She had thick ankles and strong, short legs criss-crossed with veins.

  Once she had asked me, ‘Siphiwe, what are you running from?’

  That was the day I’d noticed her eyes. I’d glanced up from my work and down again. It was an unfair question. What would it mean to her, a white woman in high heels? What would it be to her that a Sotho boy, whose parents had died, had also lost his brother?

  I had been living in the shelter for four years. They made me finish school. Grace had found a man who gave me free lessons in mathematics. She’d said that I’d fallen behind because my schooling had been badly interrupted. Lungile had helped me with the other subjects. I had to work hard. I didn’t want to disappoint them. In my spare time I worked in the garden where I taught myself about growing vegetables. I also helped Grace in the kitchen and listened to her talk and talk about what was wrong with this country. About the people coming from all over Africa to take our jobs, about the crime rate and corruption and the government not keeping their promises.

  2

  LETSWE LIT A cigarette while he watched the man die. He took his time, the blood bubbling in bursts from his mouth. It was always amusing, those last few minutes of a man’s life, from the moment it dawned on him that his time was up. You could learn a lot about a man by watching him die. Some begged, some tried to argue their way out, a few would put up a fight – he respected that – but most tried to run for it. One time he’d pulled out his gun to shoot a man and the man leapt over a fence and dived through a gap in the prefab wall around the next property. He hadn’t seemed exceptionally athletic, but he’d covered twenty metres in less than two seconds. Could have qualified for the Olympics. Letswe chuckled. For all he knew, the man was still running. Anyway, he got away, that one.

  ‘Eh, William,’ he said to the man standing next to him. ‘The way a man dies reveals a lot about his character.’ The irony of it had him laughing.

  William said nothing. He had no sense of humour, no understanding of the finer nuances of life. Brute force, that was William’s way, but that was OK by Letswe. He had seen William beat a man to death with his fists. He’d watched those big hands close around a man’s throat and squeeze all the life out of him. No one fucked with William and no one fucked with him, and the man, who was now dying by his feet, had known that and still he’d tried to cheat him.

  ‘Fool,’ Letswe said and spat.

  The man’s hands opened and closed like claws and then he died. The blood that had spilled down his chin and onto his chest ran down and seeped into the cracks of the pavement.

  ‘These foreigners, they are fools,’ Letswe said and flicked his cigarette away. They walked to the car, an Opel Cadet, good for a getaway car. William had stolen it earlier that morning. They’d dump it soon and get another. It was time for a BMW.

  ‘It’s good to be back in Jozi. Eh, William, it’s good, my man.’ He slapped William on the back. ‘I feel lik
e a beer.’

  Alfred’s shebeen was a place he used to frequent before circumstances forced him to leave Johannesburg. He knew Alfred from way back. Years ago Alfred’s sister was raped by a taxi driver from Thokoza and Alfred had spoken to him about dealing with the matter. Letswe had called the taxi driver over to hear what he had to say for himself. The driver had spat at him – he remembered that well. He had kicked the man’s head in and left his body in the street. Alfred thought that sufficient revenge for his sister’s rape. Letswe felt the man should have suffered more – spitting at another man was not a small thing. Spitting at him. What kind of a fool would do that? Anyhow, he was always welcome in Alfred’s shebeen.

  ‘I love this city,’ he said. ‘It’s a place of great opportunity, this. Did you know that the deepest mine shaft in the world is in this city? Four kilometres deep. All that trouble for gold. Stop over there.’

  William pulled over. They were on the edge of Berea, a dangerous area for uninvited guests. They sat in silence, watching the street, ten minutes, fifteen. Letswe took it all in. The two men at the bottom of the street dealing crack, the man standing under a tree, smoking a cigarette – there to watch the runners’ backs. A black BMW pulled in next to one of the runners, who almost jumped to attention. Two men got out. One talked to the runners; the other, the taller of the two, leaned against the car.

  ‘Look at that tall one. Flashy dresser, eh? He’d have a man watching his back.’ He glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘There he is, coming to check us out. See him? The one with the bleached hair.’

  ‘You want me to kill him?’

  ‘Not today,’ Letswe said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Let’s go to Alfred’s.’

  That was one of the reasons why he liked William. Had he said yes, he would have driven up to the man and shot him. He watched the tall man as they drove past and noticed his pink shirt.