by Mike Nicol
48
Pylon, in the kitchen upending poached eggs onto croissants, said to his step-daughter, ‘Pumla, tell your mother, breakfast’s on the way’ – giving her a tray with bowls of marmalade, jam and grated cheddar to take upstairs.
Pumla saying, ‘I didn’t hear you fetch the croissants?’
Pylon plopped out a perfect egg, not breaking the yoke, came back, ‘’Cos you were asleep. I got them from the deli half an hour ago.’
‘Kalk Bay?’
‘A new place, nearer.’ Licked his fingers.
‘Mom’ll know,’ said Pumla. ‘She only likes the Kalk Bay ones.’
‘She won’t guess.’ As he took out the last egg his cellphone rang. Captain Gonsalves. The phone vibrating across the work surface. ‘Take the tray,’ he said to Pumla, ‘tell Treasure I’m almost there.’
Pumla giving him that look he was on dangerous ground.
‘Captain,’ said Pylon, ‘this’s Sunday.’
‘For some people it doesn’t matter,’ said Gonsalves. ‘One of them’s you. You know the Smits? Young couple. Lots of money.’
Pylon tucked the phone in between shoulder and ear, made a mess of getting out the last egg. ‘Sure.’
‘I’m standing in their apartment. Nice place. Very expensive. I’m looking at this view of the ocean all the way to the horizon. You ever wondered how far that is?
Pylon could hear the cop chewing. Imagined yellow tobacco juice leaking at the corners of his mouth.
‘What’s happening, captain?’ he said.
Mash, mash. ‘I think,’ said Captain Gonsalves, ‘the best thing is you come here and talk to me about some things. We can look at the view.’
‘The Smits…?’
‘Dead. Four people in one week the name of Pylon Buso’s in there somewhere. Sort of coincidence makes a policeman wonder.’
‘I’m there,’ said Pylon.
He took a bite into his croissant and egg, through the mouthful shouted up to Treasure. ‘Emergency. I got to go out.’
Heard her yell for him.
‘Later,’ he called back. ‘This’s bad news.’
She got him on his cellphone. ‘What’s going on?’
He explained.
‘I don’t know, Pylon,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the way I see family life.’
‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘Be more fun mowing the lawn.’
‘Pah!’ He could picture the smile on her face. ‘You think you’re Mr Clever giving me breakfast in bed?’
‘Must score some points.’ Pylon took another mouthful of croissant.
‘If the croissants were Kalk Bay.’
Before he could respond she’d disconnected. The sarky way pregnant women got it was a wonder men wanted children. Maybe explained why so many men ran away.
Gonsalves was out on the balcony of the Smits’ apartment with a cup of tea. ‘Next door,’ he said, ‘the people there told me that broad in Basic Instinct came here to a party the Smits gave. Last Christmas. Movers and shakers, hey.’
Pylon said, ‘How’d they die?’
‘There’s tea in the kitchen,’ said Gonsalves. ‘I made a pot.’
‘Come on, captain.’
The cop looked at him over the top of his cup. ‘What I could ask first is what you saw them about last Thursday.’
Pylon sat down, pulled his chair round to face Gonsalves. ‘It was business, okay. Business. I wanted them in on a development up the west coast’
‘You into property now?’
‘Investing.’
‘And how’d the Smits fit in?’
‘They owned some of the land.’
Pylon left it there, Gonsalves signalling with his hand come on, spill it.
‘They wanted to go with the other bidder. I told them it wasn’t a good idea.’
‘Like that? Calm?’
‘Ah, save me Jesus, I wasn’t threatening them.’
‘No? What then?’
‘Warning them off.’
‘Offa who?’
‘Someone called Obed Chocho.’
Captain Gonsalves put down his cup and saucer. ‘The one…’
‘Yeah, the one whose wife copped it.’
‘Serious.’
‘Serious.’ Pylon tapped his fingers on the table. ‘So now you’re going to tell me what happened.’
Gonsalves took off his glasses, scratched his eyebrows. Wild flying eyebrows. ‘Thursday night they didn’t pitch for a dinner with friends. The friends got worried. Couldn’t get them on their cells. Couldn’t get them here, left messages on the answering machine. Even came round. No answer. They phone some hospitals. Nada. They go to the police, the officer says what’s the big deal? Could be a simple reason. They forgot. They’re on a flight to New York. The friends say no something’s wrong. The officer says come back tomorrow if they’ve not rocked up.’
Gonsalves took out a cigarette, tore at the tip and unravelled the tube, shreds of tobacco falling into the cup of his hand.
‘The next morning the friends are back on the job. Good friends, hey? Phone hospitals, cop shops, even the mortuary. Try again in the afternoon. Naathing. Yesterday, guy at the mortuary listens to the descriptions believes he has a match to two bodies. Wallah.’
Gonsalves rolled the tobacco round his palm with the index finger of his right hand until the fibres had balled, popped the pellet into his mouth.
‘That bring meaning to your world?’
‘You haven’t said what happened?’
‘Probably a hijacking.’ He glanced at Pylon, raised his wiry eyebrows.
Pylon stayed shtum.
‘Upstairs on the parking deck they’ve got two cars, the Smits. More’n enough for most people. A Saab coupe. BM five-series. What’s missing is a white BM. Sort of courtesy car they kept for visiting friends. Thoughtful, hey.’
‘Very. They were shot?’
Gonsalves grinned, stopped chewing, the moisture from the tobacco glistening on his lips. ‘Leading question.’
‘So?’
‘So, ja.’ The policeman’s jaws going at the tobacco again. ‘Only not where the bodies were dumped.’
‘And that was?’
‘Flamingo Vlei. Big wetlands, lotsa reeds. Hadn’t been for what they call twitchers counting birds they coulda spent a while there. Ever wondered why you’d wanna count birds? Why you wouldn’t wanna count mosquitoes instead? Or locusts?’
‘No,’ said Pylon. Then: ‘.22 long by any chance?’
Gonsalves picked tobacco fibres from his lips. ‘More like .38s from what I saw. Why?’
‘Curious.’
‘Spit it.’
‘Dlamini and Chocho’s wife were head shots. .22s.’
‘Nah,’ said Gonsalves. ‘Not the same at all.’
The two men stared at the horizon: a container ship crossing their line of sight heading for the harbour.
‘Obed Chocho, huh,’ said Gonsalves. ‘Got a shut down on any stuff about his wife, pronto, pronto. No telling when that case’ll see the light. You think he’s involved here?’
Pylon shook his head. ‘Why if they were going in with him would he do that? Knock them off.’
Which wasn’t what Pylon thought. Pylon thought Obed Chocho was right at the bottom of this. He and his hitmen. The question was more how to place him there?
‘Maybe,’ said the captain, ‘he’d already got what he wanted. They’d signed a deal?’
‘Could be.’ Had to be, Pylon was thinking.
‘Maybe,’ said the captain, ‘I should talk to him. Given the business connection. Find out their association.’
‘Why not?’ Pylon watched the container ship slide from view. ‘I’d be interested to know that.’
‘Offering some sort of incentive?’
‘Depends.’ Pylon’s phone rang. On the screen an unknown number. ‘We can talk about it when you’ve got it. Whatever it is.’ He connected.
49
The pain brought him back. Every breath burned
. Vicious, a skewer through his lungs. He lay still keeping his breathing shallow, listened to the night. He heard nothing. When he tried to move, a sear of agony took him out again.
Later, he said, ‘Water’, felt the cold dampness on his lips. He imagined lying beneath a waterfall with the spray splashing his face. He could open his mouth, swallow clear, cool torrents.
‘Papa,’ he heard. And his daughter sobbing.
He drifted away to a place with two wounded men. The dead all about, Boers and MK guerrillas. Techipa, Angola. The last months of the war. The one MK clutching at his own entrails, moaning with pain each time he gasped for air. The other MK shot in the thigh, the flesh stripped away, the bone exposed. The left cheek of this man missing, his teeth showing. No other wounds. He saw himself shoot this man first. A heart shot into a cammo T-shirt soaked with blood mess. Took out the one gut-wounded next. Also a heart shot.
He groaned. Felt pressure on his hand and smiled, whispering his daughter’s name.
It was light when the pain brought Mace into consciousness and kept him there. He said, ‘Christa, Christa’ forcing out her name through the stab and rack of breathing.
His daughter’s face appeared blurred, hanging above him, disembodied. His vision slowly cleared. Her cheeks streaked with tears, a smear of blood on her forehead.
He managed: ‘Are you alright?’
She nodded.
‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said. ‘Help me sit.’
She tried to prop him up but he was too heavy, the movement causing him to moan with agony. She cried at her father’s hurt. A viscid spread of blood oozed from him.
Mace waited with his eyes closed until the pain settled.
‘The farmer…’ he said. ‘Dead? His wife?’
Heard her whisper, ‘Yes,’
Mace opened his eyes to see the body of Mr Nine Mil on the floor.
‘The man shot him,’ said Christa.
‘Did he touch you?’
Christa shook her head.
Mace let the moment hang, the throb in his arm and chest sucking away the room. A perfect white pain held him.
Slowly colour came back. He saw his daughter. Heard noise: the racket of guinea fowl. Just bullet wounds, he told himself, you can get up. From the blood soaked in his shirt, slicked on the floor he’d leaked badly. But that’d stopped, mostly. Hardened into a crust. Yet the pain wouldn’t let go. Kept him from moving. Kept him from realising he couldn’t move.
‘Time?’ he said.
Christa told him ten.
‘Okay,’ said Mace, his voice rasping, tasting blood in his mouth. ‘Find a phone. In the bedroom. In the kitchen.’
Probably they’d have cut the wires but maybe they wouldn’t have bothered.
‘I’ve done that,’ she said.
‘Pylon?’
Saw her nod. Wanted to say, my girl, but couldn’t.
50
Spitz had stopped every five kilometres once through the farm gate. Got out of the car, walked to the fence, threw a gun into the veld. Left hand side, right hand side. First Manga’s two nines, then the Ruger without the can, next the silencer, the rifle Manga’d been lugging around, finally he dropped the Mossberg into a river. They’d be found eventually, most of them. One or two might end up with the cops, even that was unlikely.
On the highway he plugged the iPod into the sound system, let the voices of his killer country wrap around his soul.
The right way for a job to finish with all the problems sorted out. He fired a menthol, exhaled a long stream at the windscreen, the blueness tingeing the dark terrain he drove through.
Six hours later Spitz turned into an old mine estate on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Private property notices dangling from the fences and gates, the gates hanging off their hinges. He drove past the old headgear, the abandoned buildings clustered around the shaft, into a bluegum plantation and left the car there. It too would be found, eventually. Before that would probably be stripped.
Spitz walked off with his bag and Manga’s. Went through the plantation down into reeds where a stream ran, a rainbow slick of oil along its surface. Plastic, cans, broken bottles strewn about. Old fireplaces ringed by stones.
He dumped Manga’s clothes on the bank, threw the bag into the reeds. Went on following a dirt track that took him out of the mine estate onto a tar road. Here Spitz waited for a taxi. Smoked menthols, listened to his tunes, wondered if he could polish the scratches from his brogues.
THE ISSUES
51
The surgeon said, ‘You’re lucky to be alive. You’re lucky you can walk out of here. Thank your daughter, Mr Bishop.’ Mace walking out of the hospital between Oumou and Christa ten days after the Red Cross had airlifted him in.
The doctor’s words coming back at him: ‘Your daughter hadn’t been there, I’d have given you, what, twenty, thirty hours at the most and you’d have shuffled off our mortal coil. Not a great way to do it, Mr Bishop. Lying there in all that pain, bleeding out.’ He’d unscrewed the lid of a specimen container, dropped a lump of lead into Mace’s palm. ‘That was against your spine. The reason you couldn’t move.’
When he was strong enough Mace took the cable car up Table Mountain. Felt he needed the sense of space. Time out of the city. Of being above it. Somewhere he could vent his frustration without being heard.
Alone on the plateau of the mountain he brooded about being caught like a sucker. First by the vagrants, then by the hitman and his sidekick. Brooded about his own uselessness. Gazed down at the beaches, and along the spine of the mountain to the end of the peninsula, forced a bitter laugh at the irony of being a security man.
Brooded until a woman called out to him for help, a Spanish tourist, trembling with fright.
‘Please, please, they have stolen my camera. A man with a knife.’
He’d given chase but the man was gone.
Later he’d said to Pylon, ‘What they need up there are some vigilantes. That’ll stop the mugger.’
Pylon’d raised his eyebrows, said, ‘Don’t even think about it.’
Except he did.
Mace brooded about whacking the mugger.
Took the cable car up with the tourists and walked away south along a path until he could hear nothing but birdsong. Sat on a rock nursing his wounded arm, nothing in view but wildness and sky, willing the mugger to seek him out. Bastard knocked over tourists daily, why didn’t he have a go at him?
Mace thought, do something useful, take out the rubbish. Leave his body for the crows. Who was to know who’d done it?
Get a silenced Ruger like Mr Short Dreads, plop, plop, nobody’d even hear it. Drag the body off the trail into the bushes, it’d be three days, a week before anyone found the corpse.
Mace fantasising about the surprise on the mugger’s face, the prick standing there with a rusty kitchen knife looking fearsome. Give me your cellphone. Give me your money. Give me your boots. Suddenly the Ruger up the thug’s nostrils. A bit of shock and awe dawning in his eyes.
Cap the bastard.
What a pleasure! Nothing there that would come back to haunt him. Like the justice said, getting rid of the scum.
The desire stirred Mace so much he jumped up to walk it off. Found his way to the path, hoping someone would take him on.
Give him back his self-respect.
That it wasn’t for nothing he’d taken lead. The first in a lifetime with guns and ammo. Three bullets that’d almost done it for him. A flesh hole in the bicep, a chest shot that’d skated round a rib and torn out a hole in his armpit, and the ricochet. At a time when he should’ve been protecting people. Let alone his daughter.
Mace walked back slowly to the cable station, wondering why he had no plan? Sat on a bench looking down at the city and the bay. The murmur of city noise rising loud in his ears. Like the beast was growling. Nothing clear in his head about what to do, he phoned his daughter.
‘Papa,’ she said, ‘I can’t talk now.’
Ma
ce brooded:
With Oumou on the Sea Point promenade, the two of them walking there one afternoon. Time out with sun and ice creams.
Mace saying, ‘I’m not functioning, Oumou. I’m half a-bloody-sleep. I got to get back to normal.’
A story she’d heard repeatedly over the past month. But he hadn’t quit them.
‘I could’ve got us killed.’
A line he trotted out once a day.
‘You could not do anything otherwise.’
A line she countered with.
‘I could’ve. I’ve thought about it. The pistol was in my belt, for heaven’s sake. I had the time. I could’ve done them both. Probably before short dreads got the woman.’
‘Mace, cherie.’ She stopped, reached out a hand to his good arm. ‘We have been over this many times, no?’
He swung his eyes from her face over the lawns to the blocks of flats, an urban cliff along the sea front. Where fatcats lolled in deckchairs, sunning their stomachs. Fatcats needing protection. And he brooded about the short dreads hitman who’d walked out like he didn’t care that there were two witnesses. That he could dispense death. Allow life. Untouchable.
‘Sure,’ Mace said.
‘If you stop with blaming yourself, you will feel better.’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
They leant against the wall. Below some men stretched out on towels soaking in sun and cancer rays, on the rocks a gran with two boys. Mace looked across the sea to Robben Island, the island low in the haze.
‘Fat chance I’ve got of swimming there now.’
Oumou rubbed a hand over his back.
‘If Christa can walk again, then you can swim one day.’
‘I don’t know.’
The self-pity bubbling up in Mace. The way he felt so often: a spare part.
‘I’ve got to do something.’ He turned to Oumou, pulled her to him. He could smell clay in her hair.
