by Roger Smith
And now the universe had sent him the message he’d been waiting for.
As he drove he kept an eye open for a green 1993 Mazda 323. Rudi was a moron, but—kinda tragically for a guy who was too fucked in the head to drive—he had a thing about cars, and a photographic memory, and if he said Sue Kruger was driving a ’93 Mazda, then Leon wasn’t going to argue.
The black township came and went and the squat silhouette of downtown Nêrens was on the horizon when Leon saw a car pulled off on the berm.
A green Mazda.
He turned the music down a little and slowed, cruising past the car, seeing a blonde woman standing staring into the open hood, then looking up at him with a helpless expression. Fighting back his laughter, Leon pulled over and stepped out, smiling his sweetest smile.
- - -
When Sue Kruger saw the truck slowing she tensed, especially when she saw it had local plates. Then, as the door opened, she heard a blast of hip hop—Eminem?—and saw a young guy who looked way more Cape Town than Nêrens step down, she relaxed a little.
“Hi,” he said in English, “you having trouble?”
“Ja. The thing just died.” She shrugged helplessly, flicking away a tendril of hair that the wind sent over her eyes.
The man walked up to her, small and skinny, dressing in trendy surfer wear. Not at all threatening.
He looked into the engine and shook his head. “Look, sorry, if you were having hassles with your laptop or your iPad I’d know what to do, but when it comes to cars . . .” he raised his hands to the sky and grinned.
“Maybe you could give me a ride into town?” Sue said.
“Sure. No problem.”
She rescued her backpack from the Mazda and followed him to the truck. As she slid into the seat beside him she caught a vague chemical smell, like burned plastic. Tik? Surely not. He looked way too clean for that.
As he started the pickup the rap blared and he muted it as he accelerated toward town.
“Sorry.”
“No, I like it,” she said.
“Okay, cool.” He turned up the volume, but left it soft enough so they could talk.
“You’re not from Nêrens?” she said.
“Jesus, no ways. I’m from Cape Town. Visiting some family up here. My granny, she hasn’t been too well.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Ja, well she’s old, you know? I used to spend a lot of time up here when I was a kid. Not so much these days, these people kinda creep me out.”
“Me too,” she said.
She felt him eyeballing her through his shades. “What?”
“You’re her aren’t you?” he said.
“Who?”
“Magnus Kruger’s daughter?” He flapped a hand. “Hey, it’s cool. I saw the YouTube thing you did at the courthouse. Wow, just awesome. Really. Just sick!”
“Yeah, well, maybe a little ill-conceived, in retrospect.”
“They need some of that up here, shake up their ideas.”
“It’s like getting into a time machine, isn’t it?”
“You’re not kidding.” He smiled at her. “I’m Leon, by the way.”
“Hi, Leon.”
Without explanation he swung the truck off the main road onto a salt pan, heat shimmer turning the horizon liquid.
“Where are we going?” Sue asked.
“You’re an artist, right?”
“Well, kind of. Why?”
“Then you’ll love this.”
“What?”
“Just wait. You’ll see.”
And suddenly, in that moment, something slipped out of register, like a bad print job, and Sue felt a pang of unease and wondered if she’d been right about the meth, after all.
She looked back, the road and the town disappearing into a cloud of dust.
“Look, it’s nice of you,” she said, “but I really need to get into Nêrens. Can we do this some other time?”
The Ford bounced over a low rise and then there was nothing but desert all around, the road lost to view.
“Sure,” he said, slowing the truck. “Not a problem. Just me being impulsive.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” she said, relaxing a little.
She waited for him to swing the wheel and take them back the way they had come, but he just let the pickup roll to a halt.
He stared out the windshield at the endless, burning nothingness. “Fuckin beautiful.”
“It is,” she said, even though it wasn’t, not for her.
“I’m not talking about that shit,” he said, sweeping a hand out toward the desert.
“No?” she said, uneasy again.
He took off his sunglasses and looked at her with blurred, bloodshot eyes. He grinned and there was nothing sweet in his smile now.
“No, I’m talking about you.”
Sue was reaching for the door handle when he clasped her by the shoulder and spun her. Then his hand was behind her neck and she thought he was about to kiss her and was ready to fight him off when he head-butted her, the shelf of bone above his eyebrows striking her nose and breaking it and blood geysered and the brightness dimmed.
She tried to push him away but he grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face against the dash, again and again and again.
“You fucking idiot,” Sue thought as she was sucked into blackness.
PART THREE
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
CONFUCIUS
ONE
Chili sauce that could clear backed-up drains ran down Joe Louw’s face, dripping onto his shirt, and his hands looked as if he were deep into an autopsy. He crammed the last of the bread into his mouth, fumbled a napkin from the glove box of his rental Hyundai and did his best to clean his fingers. He washed the food down with a Coke and felt the chili already wishing him many happy returns.
After his session with Shanelle Filander he’d needed the comfort that only junk food could give him and he’d bought the chili dog from a vendor on the Parade, near where he’d left his car.
But when he’d heaved himself behind the wheel and started to unwrap the food, intending to dispatch the hot dog right there in the underground car park, his appetite had done a runner and he’d started the Hyundai and swooped up the ramp into the hard sunshine and hit the freeway north, his head thick with the implications of what the Western Cape premier had disclosed.
He knew to a bone certainty that what she’d told him about his father and Steve Bungu was the truth. Spend thirty years staring at people across tables in interrogation rooms and you developed an infallible bullshit detector.
No, what she’d laid on him had been gospel, which meant that Bungu’s game was even more twisty and convoluted than Louw had thought and there were more angles here than in a bloody hall of mirrors.
Without clearly thinking through his motivation—except for the primitive understanding that he had to get to the source—Louw had found himself heading to his childhood home, the Durbanville house where his father still lived.
As he’d approached the house a half hour later, driving past the endless beige condos that had mushroomed over the past few years, replacing the fields and paddocks of his childhood, he’d felt the familiar anxiety at coming face-to-face with his father, and on the heels of the anxiety had come a surge of appetite, the smelly chili dog leaking into its wax paper wrapping suddenly irresistible.
A shrink would’ve been like a pig in shit with the all too clichéd link between his fear of his father and the unruly appetite that had made him an overweight teenager and had dogged him his whole life, even when Yolandi had been there to both bolster and admonish him.
As he’d pulled the car into the shade of a tree half a block from his father’s house he’d felt a terrible longing for his wife coupled with the sense of a void within himself that time would never fill. And, Christ knew, neither would the chili dog, but he’d unwrapped it anyway and started shoving it into his face like he hadn’t seen f
ood in a week.
As he’d eaten a white Volkswagen bearing a Sniper Security logo had cruised by, and he’d seen the two brown rent-a-cops in Kevlar vests staring at him through their knock-off Aviators.
Wiping his hands he saw the car again in his rearview, ready to pull in behind him, and he hastily started the Hyundai, his fingers sticky on the key. As soon as they recognized him the patrolmen would have been all fawning smiles, ready to chew the cud with the famous detective, but he had no desire for this and he drove to the driveway of his father’s house, winding down his window and pressing the buzzer of the intercom at the gate, the Sniper car cruising by.
Louw waited, finding himself hoping that there was nobody home, although he knew that was impossible. His father was always home these days.
Finally the intercom squawked and he heard the voice of a colored woman. His father's live-in nurse. The same one who had been here when he’d last visited three years ago? He had no way of knowing and no recollection of that woman’s name.
“Uh, it’s Johann Louw, here to see my father.”
In this house there was no Joe, only a Johann.
A long pause and then a clatter and a bird-like squeal and the gates shuddered open and Louw drove the Hyundai down the long driveway into his past. The property was large, with wide lawns and a swimming pool—empty of water now—enclosed within high walls, sealed from the world by three-hundred-year-old oaks. A slate roof appeared through the trees and Louw arrived at a split-level house, big but not flashy and parked outside the closed double garage.
His father’s Mercedes would be inside the garage, undriven for years but meticulously maintained. When Oubaas left the property, on his rare excursions into the city for medical checkups, he was a passenger in the Nissan van that would be parked beside the Mercedes, a vehicle with a hydraulic ramp built to hoist the big old man and his wheelchair into its interior.
Louw sat a moment in the car, listening to its engine ticking as it cooled, composing himself. He was afraid of his father. No, that wasn’t quite accurate. Growing up he’d been afraid of him, but that fear had turned to loathing, a more manageable emotion.
But now, in later years, he felt fear again. Not fear of the man, but fear that he had somehow become what his father had been.
Louw stood up out of the car and approached the front door, solid oak with a bizarre brass knocker: the face of a screaming woman. His mother had chosen the knocker and the choice had always fascinated him. He believed that it was an expression of an emotion that his stolid, stoic, uncomplaining mother had never allowed herself to show to the world.
An expression of what it had felt like to be imprisoned in a marriage to Colonel Leon Albertus Gerhardus Louw.
Six years ago Marike Louw had died as she had lived: quietly, of an aneurism in her sleep. Since the worsening of his father’s illness his parents had slept in separate rooms. His father’s nurse had found her in the morning.
As Louw reached for the knocker the door opened and a large, middle-aged brown woman in a white uniform looked at him unsmilingly. He had never seen her before. His father’s temperament made for a high turnover of staff.
She stood aside and allowed him to enter the hallway, unchanged in forty years. A coat stand. A bad oil painting of some bearded ancestor of his father’s. A yellowwood bureau. In his mother’s day there would have been a vase of fresh flowers, picked by her each morning from the garden, on the bureau but now the surface was empty save for a stack of letters, neatly squared away.
Gone too were the dogs. Rottweilers. One of his father’s passions. The last one had died not long after his father became ill and no new puppies had been procured.
“If you would wait in the lounge, Colonel,” the woman said. “The Colonel will join you.”
Louw had to bite back a laugh at all the “Coloneling”, like he was in some comic operetta.
Louw walked through to the living room, floor-to-ceiling windows offering a sweeping panorama of the neighboring vineyard and a low range of soiled-looking hills beyond.
“Please to sit, Colonel,” the woman said as she left the room.
Louw disobeyed her, standing at the window staring out at the hills, trying to manage his nerves.
After his mother had died Louw had left the business of caring for his father to his only sibling, his younger sister, a brassy woman he struggled these days to recognize as kin. She’d been a beauty queen at Stellenbosch University and had married an ex-Springbok rugby player, a man as devious as he was charming, who now owned a string of luxury car dealerships and kept an ever-changing series of mistresses who grew blonder and younger by the year.
The husband had persuaded Oubaas to sell off some of his land to property developers—hence the blight of condos—which had left the old man wealthy enough to live out his last years free of financial care. No doubt the car dealer had received a hefty kickback.
The squeal of rubber tires had Louw turning and he watched as the nurse wheeled his father into the room.
Louw was shocked at his father's decline in the two years since he’d last seen him, when the old bastard had put in a brief appearance at Yolandi’s funeral. The big man was shrunken in his chair, and only one foot emerged from beneath the blanket that covered his lap. Colonel Oubaas Louw suffered from diabetes, among other ailments, and there had been talk of amputations. It seemed that the time of talking was past.
His sister, typically, hadn’t felt the need to share the news.
“Johann,” the old man said, his once overbearing voice little more than a whisper.
“Father.”
The woman set the brake on the chair and retreated from the room.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you,” Oubaas said. “In the flesh at least. You’ve been all over the bloody TV.” The voice may have been a whisper, but it was still waspish. He wagged a trembling hand, as spotted as a Dalmatian’s coat. “Sit, man, sit.”
Louw sank into a leather chair so plush it felt as if he were being swallowed whole.
“What’s that all about, anyway?” Oubaas said.
“What?”
“You with your head up the president’s fuckin poephol?”
When Louw didn’t reply the old man cast a furtive glance over his shoulder and then said, “Pour me a bloody drink man. There’s a nice Merlot in the cabinet.”
“You shouldn’t drink,” Louw said, annoyed at being put in this position.
“Oh for fuck sake, they’re slicing me up like biltong, what difference will a bloody glass of wine make?”
Louw shrugged and opened the cabinet, and saw a bottle of Merlot from the neighboring vineyard. He uncorked it and poured a little into a crystal wineglass.
“Top it up, man,” his father said and Louw obeyed.
As he seized the glass, the old man said, “If you hear her coming you take this and make as if it’s yours. Otherwise she’ll make my life a living hell.”
Louw bit back a laugh at this. There was some justice in the world, after all.
Oubaas lifted the glass of wine into a shaft of sunlight. His hand shook and the sun sent rosy dapples across his face. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and set the glass down on the table beside his chair.
“What do you want, Johann?”
Louw spoke before his courage evaporated. “I want to know about you and Steve Bungu.”
The old man coughed and closed his eyes. Wheezing, he opened them, his blue, yellow-flecked pupils fixed on Louw.
“So, it’s Bungu who has got you to do this dirty work for them?”
“Ja.”
“How?”
“He threatened Leon.”
Oubaas nodded. “He still up in Witsand?”
“Ja.”
“You should’ve taken that boy in hand when you had the chance.”
“Don’t you fuckin dare give me parenting advice.”
His father looked as if he’d been slapped and rage danced in his eyes, and
for just a moment Louw felt that old fear, but Oubaas subsided and slumped, breathing heavily.
“So, you’re here to talk about the past?”
“Ja.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Did you torture Steve Bungu and kill his wife?”
“We interrogated them, yes.”
“Did you kill her?”
The old man looked away, over the sunblasted hills. “It was another time, Johann.”
“Just answer me.”
“Ja. That’s what happened.”
“And did Bungu kill your four henchmen?”
Oubaas hesitated. “I believe so, yes.”
“You believe so?”
“He was clever, that bastard. Chappie Naude was first to go. Looked like a suicide, which was believable at the time. Things were fucking up for him and it looked like he wasn’t going to get amnesty, looked like they wanted to send him to prison.”
The old man was referring to the Truth Commission, before which he had been called after the change of government. At first he’d refused to appear, then he’d decided to save his ass and had gone and begged for forgiveness, granted amnesty for his crimes after he’d apologized to the families of people he had tortured and killed. It must have been an act beyond his constitution, for his illness took hold soon after.
“Hansie Conradie drowned while he was out fishing near Yzerfontein. He was pissed. Fuck, he was always pissed.” Oubaas was back in the past, looking through the window, probably seeing the ghosts of his men around the barbecue that still stood beneath the cypress, unfired for many years.
“When Piet Pretorius went I started to get suspicious. It was a car wreck. Not surprising, really, he always drove like a maniac especially when he’d had a few. But three of them in six years? Seemed a bit bloody much.”
“You didn’t think it was maybe divine justice?”
