by Roger Smith
Wearing only his boxers he stood up out of the bed into the chill pre-dawn air and crossed to the open window, staring out at the black Atlantic, a dark blue smear at the horizon hinting at the coming day.
Louw pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and went through to the kitchen, the house—a wooden affair on stilts, built on the dunes right on the beach—shaking under his weight. An even bigger man than he’d been that day he’d ended his career, the pounds packing themselves on now that he no longer had a wife to keep his calories in line.
He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Coke, listening to the hiss as he unscrewed the plastic cap, tilting the bottle and drinking and hearing Yolandi say, clear as a bell, “You’re killing yourself, Joe. Putting yourself in an early grave.”
He burped gas and said out loud, “Ja, well, you’ve got no bloody room to talk.”
Yolandi—the cancer rampaging through her with devastating violence—had had her last weeks made even more hellish because he was under investigation for the death of Rose MacDonald, suspended, but kept busy with legal briefings and hearings.
Louw capped the Coke bottle and bolted from the house and out onto the beach, into a low mist, the infinity of sea and sand swallowing his distress. His was the only dwelling within fifty miles. The land, wild scrub that ran from the ocean to the national road and as far as the horizon in either direction, belonged to a Cape Town businessman who’d inherited it and had done nothing with it.
Years back, when Louw had been at his peak—Cape Town’s Sherlock bloody Holmes—and he’d tracked down the businessman’s kidnapped daughter unharmed and had arrested her kidnapper, one of her father’s disgruntled employees, the magnate had told him that whenever he needed anything, anything at all, he only had to ask.
When Louw, though he’d been cleared of any wrongdoing in the death of Rose MacDonald, had resigned, his boss, a brown man, thin, like a turtle in a blue uniform, had said to him, “Don’t do this, Joe. You’ve got ten good years in you. If she had been black or even colored there would have been a fuss. But you’re white, she was white . . .” The brigadier had shrugged.
But Louw had walked, taken early retirement and called the businessman and said, “About your offer.”
Within a week he was in the house. Rent free. His forever.
Or for as long as he wanted it.
Louw walked the beach, trying to calm himself, watching the sun paint the sky.
He walked every day. Fished off the rocks. Once a week he drove sixty miles to the nearest town to buy supplies.
That was his life.
Walking back, as he watched the sun rise over the ocean, slowly burning away the mist, he thought of the last time he had spoken to his wife. Yolandi—winnowed to a husk—had clutched his hand and extracted two promises from him before sliding into a coma.
For two weeks thereafter nothing had changed. Each morning when he’d come to the hospital she’d looked exactly as she had the night before when the nursing staff had insisted that he leave.
The heart monitor beeped and the machines hummed and her body emptied itself into the bags hanging beside the bed.
Then, one afternoon, he arrived at the hospital after the hearing, his head still filled with questions about the day he’d killed the woman, and as he entered the ward he realized he heard no chirp from heart monitor, no mechanical gasp from the ventilator, even though Yolandi still lay in the bed.
A nurse followed him into the room, a woman he’d come to know well these last weeks, and she shook her head.
Louw sat down and held his wife’s hand. It felt no different: clammy and cool. And her slitty eyes still stared at the same nothing they’d been staring at for weeks. He reached forward with his free hand and closed them, one after the other.
Later, a pair of young brown nurses came in, followed by a male orderly pushing a gurney. The orderly parked the gurney beside the bed and looked down at Yolandi without expression. Louw detached his fingers from his wife’s and stood up, retreating to the window as the nurses pulled the white curtains shut around the bed.
He heard low murmurs, whispers of flesh on sheets and a grunt from the orderly. Then the gurney’s rubber wheels squeaked away on the tiled floor and the nurses rolled back the curtains with a rattle of runners and left the ward, carrying bundles of bedding.
Louw had sat down beside the empty bed, stripped of its sheets and blankets, the off-white ticking of the mattress a contour-map of stains and stared out the window with no idea of what to do next.
He still had no idea.
As Louw neared his house he realized that there was a man sitting on the top of the steps that led to the front door.
A black man.
The man, short but chunky, dressed in loud shorts and a golf shirt, stood, held up a hand and said, “Relax, Colonel, I come in peace.”
- - -
Bungu watched the big man stop and stare up at him, keeping his distance.
“Who are you?” Louw said.
“My names Steve Bungu. I do things for the presidency.”
“Ja? And what are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
“Why?”
“I suppose you’ve heard what happened last night?”
“No.”
“No? Jesus, what are you, some kind of a hermit?”
The big blonde Afrikaner waved a hand around the beach and the scrubland.
“Ja, I am. Look around. See a TV aerial? See a cell phone tower? See any fuckin Wi-Fi?”
“The president’s wife was stabbed by her bodyguard who also attacked the president and was shot by his protection team.”
“Ja?”
“Ja.”
“Which wife?” Louw asked.
“Number one.”
“Okay, but I don’t know what this has got to do with me.”
“Can we go inside?”
“Nobody can hear us out here.”
“All this space makes me nervous,” Bungu said.
Louw laughed and walked up the stairs, setting the house shaking. He stepped around Bungu and opened the unlocked door. Bungu followed Louw into the front room. The Afrikaner stayed standing, folding his arms across his chest.
“Speak.”
“Okay, listen, I’m going to tell you the truth.”
“I was a cop for thirty-two years. When a guy says that to me I know he’s bullshitting.”
“Then this is the exception that proves the rule.”
Louw shrugged. “I’m listening.”
“The president killed his wife.”
“Ja?”
“Ja. He was drunk. Out of his skull on brandy and the woman was a shrew and he just fuckin lost it.”
“Brandy’ll do that to you. Cooks the blood.”
“So they say. Anyway, I massaged the crime scene and created the bodyguard scenario.”
“You killed him?”
Bungu raised his palms to the ceiling. “When it’s in the national interest you do what you gotta do.”
Louw shook his head in disgust. “Look, Bengu—”
“Bungu.”
“Bungu. This is all fuckin fascinating, but I ask again: what the fuck’s it got to do with me?”
“You’re going to investigate the incident. Interview everybody you have to. Fine tooth comb everything and then tell the world that it all smells like roses and there’s no doubt that the bodyguard did it.”
“Me?” Louw laughed. “You’re dreaming my buddy.”
“No. If the cops, or even the Hawks or some other fuckin elite squad do it, people are always going to say the truth was massaged.”
“Which it was.”
“Ja, but if you, the brilliant, incorruptible Joe Louw rubberstamps it, they’ll believe it.”
“Get out of my house.”
“Joe, like it or not you’re going to do it.”
“Threaten me, hold a gun to my head, I don’t give a fuck. Nothing will make me do this.�
��
“You know that’s not true.”
“I said get the fuck out of my house.” Louw loomed over him.
“You know you have a vulnerability, Joe.”
Bungu took his cell phone out of his shorts pocket and thumbed it.
“I told you, there’s no signal here,” Louw said.
Bungu ignored him and opened the phone’s gallery and swiped at the touchscreen until the picture he wanted appeared.
He held the phone out to Louw who stared at the photograph.
“Fuck,” he said, his look of belligerence replaced by an expression of defeat.
Bungu pocketed the phone.
“Now sit, Joe, and I’ll tell you how this is going to go.”
Louw sat.
FIVE
Zondi lay on the bed in his hotel room, dressed in his suit and tie, watching dust motes hang-glide on the shaft of morning light that had found a gap in the curtains. The sunlight dimmed—rain clouds were gathering—and the dust disappeared leaving him staring at the abstract print on the wall. He thought he could detect an African grass hut and maybe a bull in its Rorschach swirl.
Or maybe not.
His gaze wandered to the blank TV screen and he saw his reflection, dark and blurred. He had no desire to rouse the TV and get an update on the Cape Town fiasco.
Zondi looked at his watch, a TAG Heuer Carrera bought back when he’d still cared about such things. He wondered what it would fetch now. He would know the answer to that soon enough when he had it appraised prior to auctioning it on eBay. He needed to start making plans to jettison his Johannesburg condo, too.
Last night he hadn’t told the provocative blonde journalist that his unit was being shut down. The squad hunting Apartheid’s leftovers had been an enthusiasm of a Justice Minister (an old man who had spent most of his youth and middle years locked up by the Afrikaners for treason) who had since gone to his eternal reward and his successor was wielding a new broom.
At the end of the month Zondi would be without a job, with only a meager pension to support a lifestyle that, while not lavish, would soon be beyond his means. He well knew that his days on the peripheries of South African law enforcement were over. He was nudging fifty and his prospects were limited.
What lay ahead for him?
Would he end up as a researcher at one of the NGOs that fed off the country’s violence and corruption?
An uninspiring thought.
His phone warbled and he saw his boss’s name on caller ID. He answered it expecting a few empty words of congratulation after yesterday’s conviction.
“Sir,” Zondi said.
“Where are you, Zondi?”
“At my hotel.”
“Aren’t you coming into the office?”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Then change your plans.”
“Why?”
“Magnus Kruger had landed in our laps.”
“How?”
“Just get your ass over to the office, Zondi. I’m on my way in. We need to strategize.”
His boss—at the helm, no doubt, of his brawny black SUV with a chrome grille like a snarling mouth—was gone and Zondi pocketed his iPhone.
Magnus Kruger.
A big fish.
No, a great white fucking whale.
Despite himself, Zondi felt a quickening of his pulse, a moment’s excitement that he shut down fast. Like an eternal bridesmaid, he’d suffered too many disappointments.
- - -
Zondi disliked Pretoria, which is why he lived in Johannesburg, thirty miles away. Only thirty miles, but culturally another planet. The commute was brutal, anything up to two hours on the overburdened N1—the busiest stretch of road in South Africa—but Zondi mostly worked from home, carrying Apartheid’s ghosts in the memory of his laptop, and he was sanguine about the twice or thrice monthly trips he had to make to attend briefings.
For the duration of Andries Venter’s trial—three days at the Pretoria Supreme Court—Zondi had stayed at the hotel, paying out of his own pocket. More than worth the expense. He’d been able to stroll to the courtroom, as he strolled now toward the building that housed his all-but-defunct unit.
Pretoria, a city of wide boulevards and brutalist buildings had been invaded by minibus taxis and sidewalk vendors, and most of the faces Zondi saw were black, but the history of the place, what it had represented for so many years—still represented for some hard-bitten and unrepentant whites—pressed down on him.
For this city, the headquarters of the military in South Africa, a very Afrikaner city, had once been Apartheid’s showpiece.
Zondi approached Church Square and the statue of the bearded Paul Kruger (a Boer political and military leader at the turn of the twentieth century, the man who had gone to war with the hated British) rendered faithfully in all his unloveliness by a fawning Anton Van Wouw.
Kruger, wearing a top hat and a presidential sash and leaning on a cane, glowered down at Zondi who heard off-key voices singing the old Apartheid-era anthem, “Die Stem”, and came upon four bearded khaki-clad white men waving Boer flags, and a teenage girl dressed in a beige polyester dress.
The girl, who appeared both undernourished and unhinged, was chained to the base of Kruger’s statue, and she sang with her eyes closed and her face lifted as if to some snow white hereafter.
The statue had been defaced again by black protestors who, incensed that this Boer icon remained untoppled, had splashed it with green paint and daubed it with graffiti, and the ragged right-wing band were here to voice their outrage as a lone photographer clicked away while chewing gum.
Magnus Kruger, the self-styled Boer general who, more than twenty years after the death of Apartheid, still spewed racist hate speech (his right to do this protected, ironically, by South Africa’s liberal constitution) claimed to be a descendent of Paul Kruger and sported a similar beard.
The thought of Magnus Kruger had Zondi sighing.
Why this complication now, when he had made peace with being put out to pasture?
He’d step away, Zondi decided. He’d let some other wannabe Ahab venture out to harpoon Kruger.
Feeling lighter, he crossed Strijdom Square, where once the bust of J.G. Strijdom (an architect of Apartheid) had loomed. Here, in the late ’80s, under the gaze of his near-namesake, another Strydom—Barend, an Afrikaner lunatic—had gunned down black pedestrians, killing seven and wounding eighteen. He’d been sentenced to death but had walked free in an amnesty deal.
The head of ex-prime minister Strijdom had come plummeting from its plinth a few years into the new century—bizarrely, on what had once been independence day for Apartheid South Africa—when an underground car park had collapsed. The head had been split in two, Humpty Dumpty-like, and one half of it lay on old tires in a storage yard at the Voortrekker Monument, wrapped in shade cloth and splattered with bird shit, and the other half, Zondi suddenly remembered, had found its way down to Magnus Kruger’s nasty little Boer homeland in the desolate Kalahari Desert.
Kruger again.
Zondi walked on, trying to shake the weight of history that bore down on him like a jackboot to his throat.
He entered the unsightly concrete building that housed his unit, completed the security formalities and rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor in the company of a diverse group who spoke in Tswana, Afrikaans, English and Sotho about the same thing: the death of the president’s number one wife at the hand of her bodyguard.
Zondi, for the thirty seconds that it took him to reach his destination, bemoaned his linguistic profligacy, and briefly envied the sole white man in the elevator—a stunted specimen in a cheap suit and a shirt with frayed cuffs—who was left in ignorance when the Afrikaans and English speakers quit the car on lower floors.
At last Zondi escaped for the beige corridor with the soul sucking strip lights that led him to the frosted glass doors of Directorate for Apartheid Crimes.
The doors were kept locked and he use
d his key to gain entry. The Directorate, in preparation for its demise, had already jettisoned personal deemed superfluous to requirements.
Gone was Amina Hassan, the sardonic Muslim receptionist, her desk left empty but for a week-old Pretoria News and (who knew why?) a brochure for Avbob funeral directors.
Perhaps her idea of a joke?
Gone too was Albert Molepo, a bulky, silent man who had made tea and run errands. Zondi marveled that the absence of such a quiet man could be felt so keenly, and realized with some astonishment that he had liked him.
Zondi let himself into his seldom-used office and clicked on the air conditioner, settled himself behind his desk and closed his eyes. He didn’t open them when the hinges of the door squealed. He didn’t need to, the tap of Mrs. Marsh’s high heels were her signature tune.
At last he looked up at her. “Morning, Mrs. Marsh.”
He had worked with this pale, refined woman for five years but had never been able to call her Doris, this sixty-something veteran of the struggle, who decades before had fought Apartheid with cake sales and solo protests beside busy suburban roads, her placards and clothes left filthy from the missiles thrown by irate white drivers.
She had told him none of this, but he had learned over time that her husband had divorced her because of her political views—an embarrassment to him and his country club cronies—and the courts had granted him sole custody of their two small children.
A woman who’d made sacrifices for her convictions.
A woman with an encyclopedic knowledge of Apartheid’s monsters, which is why (long past retirement age) she’d been recruited by the Directorate.
“Is he in yet?” Zondi asked.
She shook her head of old lady permed hair. “Not yet. I’ve just had him on the telephone and he’s in the traffic. I’d give him a few minutes.”
She spoke in the genteel accent of a certain class and generation of English-speaking South African that had all but disappeared. An accent that made telephone into tellyphone.
“What do you know about this business?” Zondi asked.
“Kruger?” Pronouncing the name the English way: Crew-ger.
