by Roger Smith
Cold, gray, countries, with shitty little cars and big, ugly buildings. Pretoria in the snow, he’d always said. The few South African exiles he’d met over there had laughed at this, his Soviet hosts blinking in bemusement.
After a couple of years he’d snuck back into South Africa and carried on as before. Better to be caught and executed than live a slow death in some foreign hell.
But he hadn’t been caught.
Then, just like that, it was all over and Mandela walked free, and the wild boys and girls of the struggle were suddenly wearing suits and being called director this and minister that. And when any of them had needed things fixed—and, of course, human nature being the messy affair that it was, there was always something to be fixed—they’d called for Bra Steve and he’d done what had needed to be done.
And now, like a grand mahout, he shoveled the most rarified of shit. The shit of the president of the Republic of South Africa.
Bungu tapped the lip of his coffee cup and heard it ping.
He looked at the big clock on the wall.
2:58 PM.
He glanced out the window and tried without success to find some interest in the passing parade.
His eyes were drawn back to the clock.
2:59 PM.
Fuck it.
Bungu threw money on the table and shoved his way through the lawyers out into the street, flinging his bad leg ahead of him as he lurched toward the Holiday Inn.
- - -
Louw approached the podium, hearing the buzz of the assembled media, the room packed, the video cameras ready, the photographers unleashing a barrage of flashes as he stood behind the mike and cleared his throat, feeling sweat break free from the hairs in his armpits and soak into his shirt.
Cold sweat.
“Thank you,” he said, but his voice was lost in the buzz. He raised a hand and spoke again. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to keep this short.”
Louw glanced down at the media, a blur of lenses and staring faces and felt dizzy for a second so he moved his gaze to the door at the back of the room, looking straight at Steve Bungu who muscled his way in and stood staring at Louw, who held his eye for longer than he should’ve, before he said, “I have come here today to give you my assessment of the circumstances surrounding the murder of the president’s wife. My honest assessment.”
- - -
Fucker. You fucker.
Bungu heard Louw’s voice and, even from the back of the room, could see enough on his face to know that he was about to blow this all to shit. The big blond Afrikaner wore the look that suicide bombers wore just before they reached down and yanked the detonators on their vests.
Bungu surged forward, clearing a path like a runaway forklift, ignoring the shouts of protest, shoving bodies aside, sending a woman reporter sprawling, hearing her shriek, taking an elbow in the face, battling on, getting ever closer to the podium.
- - -
Louw was silenced for a moment by the rampaging Bungu and saw some of the media turning toward the back of the room to see who was causing the commotion, heard the yells of indignation as the squat man forced a path toward him.
Then Louw unfroze and reached forward and smacked the microphone so sharply that it screamed—high-pitched, earsplitting feedback cutting through the buzz in the room—and he said, “I am going to tell you the truth.”
Said it in a voice so freighted with meaning that all eyes and lenses and microphones swung his way again, and he knew now that there was nothing that could stop him.
- - -
Bungu, even with his bulk and his sumo shoulders and his mad determination, couldn’t penetrate the photographers and video cameramen who surrounded the podium like a Macedonian phalanx.
These were fuckers who covered wars. Who had trained themselves to hold their positions and their nerve in the face of rocks and bullets and bombs, in the quest for the perfect shot, for the praise, for the kudos, for the fuckin Pulitzer, man.
And although Bungu cursed and shouted and flailed he was stalled in the media scrum and he looked up into the face of Joe Louw who gave him his best fuck-you Nick Nolte smile and leaned into the microphone and said, “The truth is, the president of South Africa—”
- - -
As Joe Louw said those words his eyes were dragged from those of Bungu when a man popped up like Mr. Punch, right in front of the podium, a sweaty, red-faced man, and for a moment Louw couldn’t place him exactly, and by the time he could, by the time he knew that it was Ross Murker—husband of the luckless Rose MacDonald—the man had raised a 44. Smith and Wesson (the gun held so close to Louw that he couldn’t but identity it) and fired into Louw’s face, the bullet muting forever his next words.
Louw sagged and felt another round take him in the side of the head and then he was going down, his grip on the lectern weakening, and he was plunging to the floor.
- - -
Bungu, wedged between a Swedish photographer and an American video cameraman, watched this unknown guy kill Joe Louw, the Afrikaner’s brains spraying out against the acoustic tiled wall, watched as the gunman shoved the barrel into his own mouth and pulled the trigger and blood and brain matter and bone splinters rained like confetti over the assembled media, dozens of lenses capturing this both as stills and as video, fresh road kill to be dumped on the information superhighway for the consumption of millions of viewers until something sexier and more exciting and more titillating caught their attention.
Bungu backpedalled, swimming upstream against the tide of media surging toward the podium, fighting his way out of the room, into the corridor.
As he pressed for the elevator he felt something wet on his cheek and rubbed it with his finger and it came away red.
Louw’s blood or his killer’s?
Bungu didn’t know.
He stepped into the elevator to the muzaky strains of "My Baby Just Cares for Me."
It had been Nandi’s favorite song.
Bungu closed his eyes and leaned against the side of the cage and let the music carry him up to Louw’s room.
PART FOUR
Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that's always been my motto.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy
ONE
Halfway back to Nêrens Disaster Zondi’s phone, lying in the sun on the seat beside him, purred. He took his eyes off the road for a moment—the road that stretched straight and flat to infinity—and saw Mrs. Marsh’s name on the face of the iPhone.
Zondi reached for phone, the aluminum body hot to his touch.
“Mrs. Marsh,” he said.
“Investigator Zondi, kindly hold the line for the director.”
Zondi was left listening to nothing as he stared through the bug splattered windshield at the blacktop liquid with heatshimmer as it parsed the endless expanse of sand and thorn trees, a range of low hills in the middle distance getting no closer even though he was pushing the truck to its limit.
After a minute he heard the Americanized drawl of his boss. “Zondi.”
“Sir.”
“I’ve just had a call from the minister.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah, seems there’s been some screw up with forensics at the lab in Cape Town.”
Zondi said nothing, but he heard another tile of the mosaic clicking into place.
“That gun, the one found in Magnus Kruger’s truck, well it seems as if it was somehow contaminated during testing. I don’t know the details, but, bottom line, it won’t be admissible in court. The case against Kruger will be dismissed. Unfortunate, I know, but there it is.”
“I see,” Zondi said.
“So, pack up and come home. You’ll get here just in time for our farewell party.” The director chuckled.
“Sir,” Zondi said, “I think there may be another way to get Kruger.”
He heard a sigh. “Zondi?”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t going rogue on me, are you?”
“No, but I’v
e unearthed something that bears investigating.”
“Jesus, Zondi, aren’t I making myself clear? It’s over. You’re done. Pack up and come home. That’s an order. Understood?”
“Understood,” Zondi said and killed the call.
He thumbed Assegaai's number for the umpteenth time since leaving Upington, and for the umpteenth time got voice mail.
Zondi saw a Shell station swimming up out of the haze and nudged the turn signal. He didn’t need gas, but he could use a drink.
A yellow man in a torn coverall watched the truck listlessly from the pumps as Zondi bumped past and found a scrap of shade near the door of the mini mart.
He stepped down from the Nissan and went into the store.
Zondi walked to the freezer to get himself a bottle of water and as he opened the door a flashing caught his eye and, even though it was February, he saw a threadbare plastic Christmas tree, decorated with a few blinking baubles, standing in a corner of the gloomy store. Maybe it was left there the whole year long.
Looking through the glass at the tree Zondi had a powerful feeling of déjà vu, spun back to when he was a kid of maybe seven or eight. It was after his father had been murdered in a blood feud and for a while his mother had taken a job working in the house of rich white sugarcane farmers, and on Christmas morning he’d been left out in the cramped servants’ quarters, peeking through the window as the white kids rode their new bikes and shot their toy guns, while his mother had prepared the roast for lunch.
At nightfall his mother had returned to the room with a broken plastic toy whistle—something from inside a Christmas cracker—and table scraps dished on a tin plate for them to eat, the crockery of the white family kept safe from their black mouths.
An old, dusty memory, coming to him in a dusty place.
Why?
Who knew.
Zondi tucked the memory away and paid the Griqua woman behind the counter who regarded him with a look as blank as the flat, empty landscape outside, and went back to the truck.
He fired the Nissan and cranked up the AC, sipping water, looking out at nothing as he sat with the big engine idling, the loose exhaust knocking against its housing.
When he’d emptied the bottle he clicked the truck into gear and drove out onto the blacktop. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got to Nêrens, but he knew he wasn’t going home.
Not yet.
TWO
Bungu sat opposite the president’s chief of staff at Tuynhuys, the Cape Town office of the presidency, a colonial building adjacent to the Houses of Parliament—a few city blocks from where Joe Louw had died just thirty minutes before—staring at the youngish Zulu woman with a fringe of dark fuzz on her upper lip as she regarded the laptop on her desk as if it were a rearing rattlesnake.
It was Joe Louw’s computer. Bungu had liberated it and the dead man’s cell phone (the ex-detective too much of a pro to take even a muted phone into a press conference) from his hotel room before the cops had had a chance to get in.
“So you just went in and took Colonel Louw’s laptop?” the chief of staff said.
“Yes.”
She rubbed her eyes beneath her thick glasses and shook her head.
“That’s highly irregular.”
Bungu almost laughed. She’d been kept deliberately in the dark about the events at Genadendal four nights ago. How would she have described them?
“Look, we all know that the cops who searched Louw’s room were Shanelle Filander’s people,” Bungu said. “They would have used any opportunity to make political capital against the president, so I had to do what was necessary to protect him.”
The woman couldn’t deny this but she pursed her lips. “Still . . .” she said.
Bungu was becoming impatient. “Just read the document.”
She glanced back at the computer, the screen reflected in her glasses.
“You found this document on the laptop?”
“Yes,” he said, with infinite patience. “In a folder called Genadendal.”
“It’s Colonel Louw’s speech?”
“Yes.”
“But he wasn’t reading from notes, on the podium.”
“No, he wasn’t. This was a draft, obviously. A way to collect his thoughts. He must’ve typed it shortly before going down to the press conference.”
The chief of staff continued reading.
Reading what Bungu, the playwright manqué, had sat and pecked out in the front seat of his SUV in the underground car park of the Holiday Inn, after scouring the laptop for anything incriminating and finding nothing. Louw had made no case notes on the Genadendal business, smart enough to keep his dirty laundry away from a computer memory.
But there’d been notes from Louw’s earlier investigations, back when he’d been a hotshot cop, each kept in a discreetly named folder. So Bungu had created the Genadendal folder in the same style and then, remembering the exact words spoken by Louw at the podium, typed, “I have come here today to give you my assessment of the circumstances surrounding the murder of the president’s wife. My honest assessment. I am going to tell you the truth. And the truth is, the president of South Africa . . .”
Bungu had paused, and then called up his writer mojo, and tapped out: “. . . like his wife, was the victim of a crime, but, because he holds the highest office in the land, he had to hide his grief and ensure that the people of South Africa are satisfied that they have learned the truth of what happened in that room that night. I am here to tell you that they have. This investigation is over.”
Bungu watched the woman finish reading.
“So,” she said.
“So, you need to get that out to the media. Soonest.” Bungu said.
“And how do I explain how I came to be in possession of this document?”
Bungu smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find a way.” He stood and lumbered to the door. “That’s why you earn the big bucks,” he said from the doorway.
He left, walking down the corridor whistling "My Baby Just Cares for Me."
THREE
Jesus Fuckin Christ.
Leon Louw, his fingers a blur on the screen of his iPad, recued the video and hit play, and—bam!—there it was again, his father’s brains spraying out against the wall behind the podium and then the second shot hit him smack in that rock jaw, a plume of crimson blood spurting like some special effect, but it was real, real, real, man, before he tumbled and disappeared behind the lectern as the gunman took himself out, standing so close to the camera that a shower of messy shit was flung against the lens in wet gouts.
Leon dragged the cursor back down the timeline and jogged through frame by frame: the puff from the weapon, the spray of his father’s blood and brain, Joe Louw folding and sinking from view behind the lectern: first his destroyed head, then his hand that gripped the slanted wooden top, the fingers loosening their grip and disappearing with what, in slo-mo, looked almost like a jaunty little wave but was probably, Leon realized, some kind of death spasm.
He closed his eyes.
Fuck.
Leon found himself at the window of his house, dressed only in his boxers, looking out at the fat red sun sagging toward the desert like a blob of wax in a lava lamp.
Jesus, he was stressing, his breath coming in gasps, his skinny ribs pumping.
Just a few minutes back he’d been lounging on his sofa with his iPad, drinking a beer, cupping his balls, idly surfing the Web for porn or any other shit that was interesting when he’d stumbled across the video of his father's murder down in Cape Town.
The video was already going viral. There was a huge appetite for this kind of gore, and this wasn’t some laggy stuff shot on a phone, or blurred crap from a dashcam, this was HD quality video from the press conference, already grabbed from a feed somewhere and unleashed on the Web before the news bulletins could show the more sanitized, family-friendly version.
Leon stepped away from the window and paced the room, trying to chill and make
sense of what he had seen.
Okay.
His father was dead.
Killed by the fuckhead husband of that woman he’d plugged in the street a few years back.
Leon remembered gloating over that shit: Joe fuckin Louw, the hero, suddenly looking like a complete loser, not the supercop who’d always got his man.
Looking reduced and haunted, stammering out apologies to the media.
And then he'd pulled the plug on his career and run away like a little pussy and hidden up the West Coast.
You fuckin got yours, Leon had crowed at the time.
But now this?
It was too fuckin much to compute. His father had always seemed indestructible, like some force of nature. Maybe he could be diminished a little, take a knock or two, but he’d endure, wouldn’t he?
No.
He hadn’t endured.
He was stone cold fuckin dead.
Jesus.
Leon, hastily whipping up a pipe—cursing as his shaking hands spilled the meth—realized that despite his hatred of his father he’d always expected him to be there, to bail him out if the shit ever really truly hit the fan, no matter what he’d said last night on the phone.
He’d always been reassured that big, solid Joe Louw would be there as a safety net.
And now, boom, just like that, the fucker was gone.
Leon sat with the unlit pipe in his hand staring at the garish sunset, feeling so freaked he could cry.
His mind went to the woman he’d left out in the desert.
Jesus, what had he been thinking?
