by Roger Smith
“That deputy president.” She shuddered. “Jesus.”
“Exactly. But I could put pressure on the president, now. Because I know what I know. Lean on him when it comes to reforms and policy issues. He has to answer to the party, but he still has the power to change things, stop some of the rot.”
Filander stared at Bungu. “You’re talking about blackmailing him?”
“Well, let’s just say influencing.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
“You know me, Shanelle. This isn’t my area, the politicking. You could guide me.”
She barked a laugh. “You fuckin serious, Steve?”
“Ja.”
“I’d put in my requests like its karaoke night and you’d get them done?”
“If I could, yes.”
“So I’d be blackmailing the sitting president of our country by proxy?
“Well, that’s a blunt way of putting at it.”
“It’s the fuckin truth.”
He shrugged. “Then it’s the truth.”
She shook her head. “And you’d have your claws in me then, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“I’m walking away, Steve.”
“Okay.”
“We never had this conversation.”
“Sure. You know where to find me.”
“No, Steve, I don’t. For all I know you live under a fuckin rock. And let’s keep it that way.”
Filander turned and strode off, disappearing into the night.
Bungu stood a while, hands in pockets, and thought about what she’d said.
What would he have done, once he’d had that lever on her?
Would he have used it?
Does a lion shit in the veld? he said to himself and laughed.
He pushed his gut away from the railing and started to walk back to where he’d parked his car down near the miniature golf course, hearing the silly, happy laughter of the people who lived in another world.
TWELVE
Time passed. Zondi had no idea how much time. Hours? Days? Weeks? He lay suspended in a kind of muffled twilight, floating in and out of consciousness, listening to the music of the machines that kept him alive. If he had any thoughts in his head he could not find them.
Nurses and doctors flitted in and out of the room like wraiths, checking instruments, scribbling notes. They did not speak to him and he could not speak to them.
Then, all at once, he surfaced, as if from a very long dive, seeing the room clearly: the banks of machines, the fluorescents that washed a cold light over the bed. Seeing the many blue-black bruises on his arm and the bags his body emptied itself into. Seeing the green chair standing against the white wall by the closed door, every scuff mark and peel of paint revealed with forensic clarity.
A nurse came in, her shoulders heavy with the insignia of her rank. A vigorous black woman with eyes that had seen human suffering in all its shades.
“You’re awake?” she said.
“Yes.” Zondi could speak, but his tongue felt thick and inert. “How long have I been unconscious?”
“Five days.”
“And how am I?”
“You had two bullet wounds. Your lungs collapsed and you’d nearly bled out by the time they airlifted you here.”
“Where’s here?”
“Pretoria Mediclinic.” She scribbled on a clipboard. “Don’t worry, you’ll live.”
He remembered something, vaguely, and lifted his left arm. It was no longer handcuffed.
“There’s an old white lady comes every day to see you,” the nurse said. “She brings flowers but we can’t put them in here. She’s outside again. Do you want her to come in?”
Zondi imagined some churchy do-gooder, preying on the ailing and vulnerable, ready to pounce on him with her Christian dogma and was about to decline, when he said, “Do you know her name?”
“I forget.”
“Not Mrs. Marsh?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“I’ll see her then.”
“Only for five minutes, ne?” the nurse said and left.
After a while Doris Marsh, with her carefully drawn eyebrows and her painted lips, appeared in the doorway, wearing her twinset and pearls, carrying with her a fragrance that was cloying and sweet and clashed with the bitter medicinal air of the ICU.
“Investigator Zondi.”
“Mrs. Marsh.” He pointed to the chair. “Please sit.”
She sat with her bag in her lap and her knees together.
“I’m pleased to see that you’re recovering.”
“Thank you. I’m told you have been here every day.”
She lifted a spotted, veiny hand. “Oh, it was nothing. I live nearby.”
“Still, it’s kind of you.”
She smiled. “You’ve caused quite a stir.”
“Yes. Was I under arrest for a while?”
“You were. Charged with multiple murders.”
“But no longer?”
“No.”
“And was the director here? Or did I dream that?”
“No, I’m told he was here kicking up quite a fuss. He is rather agitated.”
“Yes.”
“It seems that what you did caused ripples and he has been under scrutiny and various irregularities have surfaced. Nothing to do with you, of course. But he seems to be in for the high jump.”
Zondi laughed for the first time in days and did not mind the pain it caused him. The laugh became a cough and he fought for breath.
“Are you alright, Investigator Zondi? Should I call a nurse?’
“No, I’m fine.” He winced and calmed himself. “So how come I’m in the clear?”
“A Detective down in Nêrens with a most peculiar name—”
“Assegaai?”
“Yes, Assegaai. He appears to be something of a champion of yours. He said you uncovered that whole dirty business that Magnus Kruger was involved in. Killing that farmer and so on. Seems he discovered a witness. A young man who had been, or so I’m told, locked away in the trunk of a car.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, the upshot is that while you were unconscious you became quite the media darling.”
“Oh god.”
“Don’t worry, their gaze has shifted.”
“As it does.”
“Yes. Fortunately their attention span is short,” she said.
They sat in silence for a minute and Mrs. Marsh tapped a painted finger nail on the brass clasp of her handbag, until Zondi said, “So, what does the future hold for you, Mrs. Marsh?”
“Well, ultimately, death, of course.” She waved her hand and laughed softly. “Oh, I’m sorry. There are a few years left. I have a son who lives in Cape Town with his family and he’s invited me to come and stay in their granny flat.” She winced. “His terminology.”
So there had been a reconciliation, after the schism years ago.
“I’m pleased for you,” Zondi said.
“Thank you.” She stood. “I’m leaving tomorrow, so I think this is goodbye.”
She stepped up and offered her hand. The grip was surprisingly strong.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Marsh.”
She smiled and left and Zondi lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling and felt an emptiness none of his medication would temper.
THIRTEEN
Steve Bungu drove aimlessly through the night. He drove north as far as the Grand West Casino but the frantic neon hurt his eyes so he swung around and headed back toward the city. A light, unseasonal shower began to fall and he clicked on the wipers, watching the floodlit mountain blur through the smear of rain drops.
After he passed the Waterfront, that gaily lit shrine to consumerism, the road narrowed, funneling him toward Sea Point, but he wasn’t going to go there.
No, not tonight.
He stopped at a red light, the bass from the minibus ta
xi beside him setting his fingers trembling on the steering wheel, but when the taxi roared away his fingers were still trembling and he let his hands turn the wheel to the right and cruised down Main Road, his mind as empty and purpose-driven as a homing pigeon’s.
She stood on the corner in the glare of the 7-Eleven, sheltering from the rain, and was walking toward his car even before he’d decided to pull over.
He unarmed the central locking and she opened the door and clambered up, smelling of damp clothes and stale smoke and some acrid hair straightening product. As Bungu floated the SUV out into the stream of traffic she settled herself, smiling the vacant smile of the freshly self-medicated.
“Nice hat,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“So, you gonna tell me another story?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No more stories,” Bungu said.
“Why not?”
“Got no more stories to tell,” he said.
“Then what?
“I dunno.”
“You dunno?”
“No.”
“Should I be scared?”
“Maybe. I am.” Bungu laughed. “Relax. What if we just go for a drive?”
“A drive?”
“Ja.”
“A drive to where?”
“To nowhere.”
She shrugged. “Hey, whatever. It’s your time.”
“Yeah,” Steve Bungu said, “it’s my time.”
FOURTEEN
Jan Assegaai, driving his pickup truck across the flat plain toward Witsand, was pleased to be back in the heat and the desolation, an environment far more comfortable to him than the air-conditioned offices of police headquarters down in Kimberley.
Assegaai avoided the blacktop, driving across the desert where he was invisible from the road. This had less to do with a desire to be unobserved—though he was by nature a secretive man and preferred anonymity and obscurity—than an imperative of his blood: he had not been reared a nomad, but he had been schooled in the lore of the wandering hunters and he enjoyed traveling through the desert and reading the wind and the sand and the dust, seeing and hearing what other men could not.
In the strange way of the world, Assegaai was now the acting station commander of Nêrens police station. Which didn’t mean that he acted like the commander—well, certainly not like his predecessor, Captain Neo Mmutle, who was now in Kimberley ready to face the same review board that Assegaai had faced a few days before.
The assault charges against Assegaai had evaporated after the events at Soetwater, Rosetown and Witsand, events that had thrown up hidden alliances, skullduggery and malfeasance like old bones in a flooded graveyard.
Amidst the media frenzy and chaos it had been the diminutive detective alone who had provided a path forward. Assegaai had given a very carefully pruned version of the circumstances leading up to that night of death and mayhem.
Some of it was truth and some flat-out lies that, as lies often do, had more of the ring of gospel than the truth itself.
He’d told his superiors that Captain Mmutle had been paid off by Kruger to shut down the investigation into George Maritz’s murder before it had even begun when, of course, it had been Steve Bungu’s handiwork. But Bungu had been left on the cutting room floor in the gaunt detective’s edit, along with the sword the chunky Xhosa had dangled over Assegaai’s neck.
But Mmutle was as rotten as a week old plate of tripe and the assertion had prompted an examination of the captain and his little empire of dirt and he now faced a laundry list of charges.
Assegaai had gone on to claim that the five policemen who worked under Mmutle were complicit in his crimes. Again he had supplied no concrete proof, but he was confident that even a cursory investigation would reveal this as true.
So the Nêrens police station had been purged and Assegaai had been installed as acting commander. He’d been encouraged to cherry-pick a new team and had done so from cops in the province who, while they may not have been as pure as the driven snow he’d heard about but never seen, they were discreet in their venality and grateful enough for the opportunity to take his orders.
Would Assegaai remain in the post permanently?
He didn’t know if he wanted to, even if it were offered to him. But meanwhile he would try and do what he could to correct what Mmutle and the commanders before him had wrought.
He entered Witsand via the hole that the wounded Zondi had torn in the fence when he’d sped, bleeding, into the night a week ago. Assegaai would have met no resistance had he entered through the main gate—the boom pointed skyward like an accusing finger and the sentry box stood empty—but this route was the most direct.
He stopped the pickup near the dusty Boer icons and stepped down, listening to the panicky call of a sunbird and watching a buckspoor spider scuttle into its nest in the sand at the base of Verwoerd’s statue.
The place was silent but for the squeak of a rusted windmill that stuttered on a soft breeze, trying in vain to draw water from the parched earth.
Witsand was deserted now. Over the past days Assegaai had witnessed the flight of its inhabitants, trekking off not in ox wagons but tired pickup trucks and faded old cars held together by baling wire and duct tape, their worn faces staring blankly out the windows as they abandoned Nêrens.
The death of Magnus Kruger had left a vacuum that could not be filled, for these human dregs were followers not leaders, and they were driving off in search, no doubt, of some new liar in khaki who would promise them a return to a time when a white skin was exulted.
Assegaai dipped a hand into the rear pocket of his jeans and snagged a 200ml bottle of Klipdrift brandy—called a nip out here. The bottle was conveniently curved to fit snugly against the haunch. He cracked the seal and drank the bottle dry in one long swallow, the burn of the warm booze a balm to his gut.
It was not his first bottle.
Assegaai was drunk. He had been drunk for days and would continue to be drunk for the foreseeable future, in his quiet way. Then the morning would dawn when he would throw the liquor away and go into the desert with only the clothes on his back, foraging for food and water, purging his body, and when he returned he would be sober for a time and then the urge would seize him and the cycle would begin again.
That’s just how he was and he felt no need for self-examination or, god forbid, self-improvement.
Assegaai found himself standing at Strijdom’s fallen head. A brown smear drooped from forehead to cheek like a canker—the remnants of Magnus Kruger’s blood and brain. Assegaai wasted no time on pondering the karmic implications of this, he was searching the wind for a clue to the one piece of the tapestry that still eluded him: the whereabouts of Kruger’s daughter.
A missing person’s report had been logged at Nêrens police station while Assegaai had been down in Kimberley. A friend of Susanna Kruger’s from Cape Town, Tjaart de Wet, had called saying she’d been expected back but had not arrived home.
In the carnage that followed the report had gone ignored.
But, on his return, once he’d dealt with the fallout around the slaughter at Witsand, it had piqued Assegaai’s curiosity.
He’d seen the Kruger woman’s car still standing at Alwyn Van Staaden’s workshop when he’d gone there to liberate Frans Moshweng from the trunk of the blue BMW, even though she’d checked out of the hotel.
A few enquiries had led him to the tow truck driver, Gabriel Goliath, who’d told him that Sue Kruger had rented a car from Doep du Plessis that she’d abandoned outside town, the oil pump seized. When Goliath had gone out to retrieve the car the next day there’d been no sign of the woman.
“Blonde like that,” Goliath had said, “probably showed some leg and stuck out a thumb and a horny trucker stopped for her and she could be anywhere by now.”
Anywhere but home.
Standing amidst the Apartheid relics Assegaai closed his eyes smelled the dust. He sensed something, some connect
ions just beyond his grasp, flapping out there in the wind.
By the time he opened his eyes he’d decided Sue Kruger was neither above the ground of Witsand nor below it.
Just an instinct, but he trusted his instincts.
He hoisted himself back up into the cab of his truck, exited the erstwhile white enclave and drove out into the desert again, toward the railroad track where Leon Louw had met his end.
Assegaai hadn’t yet visited the site, but he found it easily: the torched scrub, the sand around the tracks charred to syrup, shards of glass catching the sun like diamonds on the dirt.
Assegaai left his pickup and stood by the rails, taking in the scene. The line was open again, but there would be no train until late afternoon.
Something drew his eye to the sky in the distance, black shapes floating like twists of burned paper.
Vultures.
Toeing an emergency worker’s latex glove, lying abandoned in the dust, Assegaai watched the birds and wondered, again, what had driven Leon into the path of that train.
In the reports the engineer had said that Leon’s truck “appeared out of nowhere” and then seemed to stall on the tracks. The engineer had braked, but a freight train towing one-hundred and twenty loaded box cars does not stop on a dime.
There was talk of suicide, but Assegaai wasn’t buying that.
Fucked up little narcissists like Leon Louw didn’t end their own lives.
Assegaai would bet that Zondi, barely alive and completely unreachable in an ICU in Pretoria, would have some answers.
But so could the vultures.
Assegaai returned to his truck and drove toward the birds that floated on the air before descending lazily to the sand, only to rise again.
A camelthorn, standing like a sentinel on a low hill, drew Assegaai toward it and he stopped beneath the tree and surveyed the ground that sloped away. Something was out there and the vultures were busy.
Assegaai didn’t trust that the powdery slope would support his truck, even in four-wheel drive, so he set the brake, quit the pickup and skidded down the shelf of sand. The vultures saw him coming and protested in choking squawks.
