From Cape Town with Love

by Blair Underwood

  “‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily . . .’”

  The truck’s engine was a lion’s roar.

  “‘Life is but a dream . . .’”

  Nandi lay on my shoulder, warm and quiet despite the noise. The grape leaves rustled around me, and it seemed I could see every vein, every imperfection, every budding grape. Each breath was a sip of wine. The moon and stars were glowing embers in a cloudless sky.

  Beautiful. Perfect.

  The winds came with a mighty beating fury, as if to carry us all into the sky. Light poured down, brilliant beyond daylight.

  Until I saw the helicopters, I thought I had died.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE VINEYARD SWARMED with activity as the night got darker.

  I recognized some of the alphabet soup on the windbreakers—FBI and ATF—but most of the men who had rescued me were in street clothes, without letters to announce them. I hadn’t seen Nandi since a gleaming gold badge pulled her from my arms.

  Nandi cried for too long after that, but she had been quiet for an hour. I hoped the helicopter had hurried her back home. I would have called Maitlin to tell her that Nandi was safe, but my cell phone was long gone. I’d watched a perp walk of fifteen people parade past, but it was hard to feel satisfied when the wheels of justice were rolling over me.

  “I work for Sofia Maitlin!” I said, hoarse from trying to explain myself. The knife wounds were an agony, but pain was better than prison.

  I was handcuffed to a gurney, so I didn’t have a choice about being loaded into the ambulance. Maybe I was being arrested, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know who was taking me into custody, or where I was going. I thought I’d recognized a sunburned face—he’d been wearing a Hawaiian shirt the first time I saw him—but I was too disoriented to place him.

  These are Marsha’s people, I thought. If so, the cavalry came with a price—but maybe that meant Marsha wasn’t hurt. If I knew that, the rest might be easier to take.

  I tried to make eye contact with the shaven-headed brother loading me into the ambulance, human to human. He looked more like a soldier than a paramedic. “This was a rescue, man,” I explained calmly. “I tailed Paki here with a sister named Marsha Willis. I haven’t seen her since I left her standing outside the kitchen door. I just want to know if she’s all right.”

  Marsha might have vanished after calling in the troops, or been injured before they arrived. She might be dying in the vineyard somewhere. I couldn’t stand not knowing.

  The medic shrugged with a curt shake of his head. Tell it to somebody else, man.

  And slammed the ambulance door.

  All I know is that it wasn’t Cedars-Sinai.

  Tight-lipped doctors and nurses examined me—including X-rays—decided I didn’t need surgery, gave me a blood transfusion, and patched me up. No one offered me painkillers, but I would have refused anyway. I wasn’t sure my mind was sharp enough to keep me out of prison.

  I didn’t know how much time had passed, or if it was night or day. The vineyard seemed like a dream with a happy ending for Nandi, but a different one for me.

  While the medical staff swabbed and stitched me like a NASCAR pit crew, I sat under the harsh fluorescent lights and remembered Marsha telling me that the deal I made to free Nandi might be prison. She’d told me in plain English.

  So that’s the next thing, I thought, with no particular feeling. All I wanted was sleep.

  If someone had offered me a bed, I might have signed my name to anything.

  But I was far from sleepy. The pain, and the wondering, kept me wide awake.

  After the doctors finished their work, I was brought to a conference room furnished with a small square table and a single iron chair. My hands were cuffed in front of me, which was hell on my bandaged wrist. I had been handcuffed for hours.

  And sitting, period, wasn’t fun. Considering.

  The room was too cold, with no clock and a reflective picture window that was obviously a two-way mirror. There was nowhere to lie down, so I tried to rest my head on the table. I learned pretty quickly that it was better to sit upright. I didn’t try to pose for anyone. Despite my discomfort, I was glad for the quiet.

  Maybe I slept. I’m not sure. I was alone in the room for at least two hours. Longer.

  Three agents—two men and a woman—finally opened the door and came inside. I didn’t expect good news, but I was glad to see them. If I was going to prison, I wanted to know.

  They stood over me, one on either side, the third straight in front.

  The man facing me had wild eyes and a beard that needed trimming. He definitely wasn’t FBI. The second man looked Latino, gray-flecked hair cut stylishly, wearing a plain navy blue sweat suit. The woman, big boned and in her thirties, looked more officious in a schoolmarm’s skirt without a wrinkle.

  All of them were dressed to disappear in a crowd, unremarkable.

  “You can call me R.J.,” the bearded man said. “We’re gonna hang out for a while.”

  “My name is Tennyson Hardwick,” I said, my mantra. “I work for Sofia Maitlin.”

  R.J. held up his hand, but politely: no need. He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out handcuff keys. A practiced turn and my wrists were free. I hadn’t realized how uncomfortable they were until they were gone.

  R.J. went on: “This is Reiter, and this is Ramirez. The three R’s.”

  He smile was tame, but his eyes stayed wild.

  I was tired, so my eyes might have been a little wild, too. I’d needed to take a piss for hours, but I didn’t give them the satisfaction of asking. I didn’t trust R.J. removing my handcuffs.

  “I need to make a call,” I said.

  R.J.’s smile widened, suddenly looking sincere. But he shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

  “You’re saying I can’t call my lawyer?” I said.

  Still smiling, R.J. nodded slowly, as he would to a child. “Get that out of your system?”

  “I don’t talk without my lawyer.”

  “Good thing that chair’s comfortable,” R.J. said.

  After two hours, the chair was far from comfortable, handcuffs or not. I needed to be in a bed, probably a hospital. I hurt. Sonofabitch. It was going to be a long night. Or day.

  R.J. lit a cigarillo that smelled foul, far too close to my nose. “There’s a dead man back there, Hardwick. And your fingerprints are all over that cellar.”

  Too many fingerprints for denial. I gambled on the truth.

  “A kidnapper,” I corrected him. “On his way to murder Nandi. He attacked me with a knife, so it was self-defense. I’d do it again.” The memory of Spider in the basement was hazy, as if I had watched it on a movie screen. In memory, I watched another man, a lethal man without hesitation or doubt. I’d waited my whole life to meet him.

  “Whoa, whoa.” R.J. laughed, and the others chuckled. “He’s still dead. Chill out. Chill out—get it? The ME said that the tissue damage to his face and eye looked like extreme cold. There was a liquid nitrogen container on the floor. Wonder if that had anything to do with it.”

  “You’re kidding,” Reiter said. She sounded impressed.

  “Liquid nitro?” Ramirez said, peering down at me. “Classic.”

  At any moment, they might all start slapping my back and inviting me out for whiskey shots. I wondered what was waiting at the end of the bullshit.

  The room was gray with smoke. My throat wanted to cough, but I refused.

  “We like you, Tennyson,” R.J. said. “We like you a lot.”

  The others agreed. Reiter patted my back firmly, an old buddy. The impact sent a bolt of pain through my right leg, already stretched in a painful position. My teeth gritted. I made no sound.

  “There’s just a couple of problems with your story,” R.J. went on, his voice sober. “Actually, they’re pretty damn big problems. So we’re gonna take some time and clarify.”

  “Shouldn’t take more than a few hours,” Ramirez said.

  “A
few days at most,” finished Reiter.

  They said it like they were joking.

  “The Marsha thing, for starters,” R.J. said. He consulted a file folder. “Marsha . . . ?”

  “Marsha Willis.”

  “Yeah, Marsha Yvonne Willis, Hollywood High School?” R.J. said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “She lives in Canyon Country. We just talked to her on the phone. Nice lady.” I didn’t like where the tone of his voice was going. “The Marsha thing is bullshit, Tennyson. Marsha Willis didn’t go with you to Paso on a covert op. She wasn’t helping you rescue an abducted child. Tonight’s soccer night.”

  He gave me the folder.

  A sharp color printout of a driver’s license photo of a woman named Marsha Willis Henderson stared up at me. The years had filled out her cheeks, but her nose was exactly as I’d remembered from A Raisin in the Sun. I didn’t have to look at the rest in the file, although I saw a headline in a story where she was named her school’s teacher of the year.

  The woman I had known as Marsha shared her complexion and height, enough to be her sister, but it wasn’t her. I knew right away. Shit. I hadn’t checked her out because I’d thought I knew who she was. Since I’d proposed the name to her, I’d never been suspicious.

  I could have been pissed off, or sad, but I still had a little of that odd sensation of floating outside myself. I tried, but I couldn’t feel anything.

  “She played me,” I said. “She lied.”

  “Someone’s lying,” Ramirez said. His eyes were sober, too.

  “This is our entire conundrum,” R.J. said. “We talk to Marsha, who turns out to be a junior high school drama teacher of the year—and then we’ve got you. You, by the way, have broken a pretty alarming number of federal laws. I don’t know how well you’ve been briefed, but you are in a shitload of trouble.”

  “I haven’t been briefed, actually,” I said.

  “The FBI is writing a book on you as we speak,” R.J. said. “Usually that’s the bad news. But in your case, that’s the good news.”

  I couldn’t resist. “Then what’s the bad news?”

  “You seen that TV show . . . ? What’s the name?” R.J. asked Ramirez and Reiter.

  “What show?” Reiter said.

  At first, I thought he was talking about my old series, Homeland. I’d played an FBI agent working with the Department of Homeland Security.

  R.J. snapped his fingers. “Without a Trace,” he said. “It’s about people who’ve disappeared, right? One day they’re here, then bam, they’re gone. That’s a fascinating show.”

  He was looking at me again, the wildness back in his eyes.

  “You ever heard of the Patriot Act?” R.J. asked me.

  “For fighting terrorists,” I said.

  “For example,” R.J. said.

  I suddenly realized how hungry I was. I wondered again if it was day or night.

  “That’s got nothing to do with me,” I said. I wanted to force him to say what he was hinting at. “I’m not a terrorist.”

  “But you’re an interesting guy,” R.J. said.

  “Fascinating guy,” Ramirez agreed in a singsong voice.

  R.J. went on. “And if we decide we want to talk to you for a while, get to know you better, we can keep you around as long as we need to. But nobody wants that,” R.J. said.

  “Pain in the ass,” Ramirez said.

  Cold-steel reality unfolded in my head: I was in an interrogation room in an unknown location. My body felt butchered. I had been promised a long stretch in prison. I had just lost my oldest friend. I had barely survived the night, and a man had died at my hands.

  No. I had killed a man. For the first time in my life I’d stilled a beating heart. Wasn’t I supposed to feel something about that? Anything at all?

  He was dead, I was alive.

  I wondered how many people R.J., Ramirez, and Reiter had killed among them, or what measures they were willing to take when they wanted information. I didn’t get along with most cops already—but they weren’t cops, or anything like it.

  I wished they were. I understood the rules with cops. There were no rules in this room. There were ends, and means, and God help anyone caught between them.

  R.J. folded his arms, sighing for me. We both understood my predicament.

  “As for the dead guy, it’s your word against a witness,” R.J. said. “Our witness, it turns out, has a lot of surprising things to say.”

  “What witness are you talking to? Paki?” I said. No one answered, but Paki was probably on a crusade to keep himself out of prison. “He sold his daughter out for ransom. He’ll say anything to stay out of jail.”

  “But what will you say to stay out of jail?” R.J. said.

  I finally got it.

  “This is all about my statement,” I said. “My official story to the FBI.”

  Stone silence from the three R’s.

  “Let me guess . . . ,” I went on. “You don’t want me to mention a certain female operative.”

  R.J. smiled, approving. “That’s a good start. But you’re missing the big picture.”

  “Bigger than lying to the FBI?” I said.

  R.J. leaned closer to me, those wild eyes at the bridge of my nose. “You’re not thinking too clearly, are you?” R.J. said.

  I didn’t blink. “I’m thinking very clearly,” I said.

  “I hope so,” R.J. said. “People who don’t think weary me.”

  I thought about my bed at home. Wondered what Dad and Chela were going through, worried about me. Those were the thoughts R.J., or whatever his name was, wanted me to have.

  “The way I see it,” R.J. said, “you have two choices: Sit here and piss on yourself for the next few days, or you can play it smart.”

  My heavy bladder pulsed, taut. “I’m listening.”

  “Here’s what happened,” R.J. said. “You got drunk. You mouthed off at two guys in a bar. Or four. Whatever your ego can handle. They jumped you. You passed out. You lost track of time.”

  No one who knew me would believe that story.

  “You never met anybody in covert ops,” R.J. went on. “You’ve never heard of Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “You were never in San Diego,” Ramirez said. “Or Paso. Or Happy Cellars.”

  Reiter finished: “You haven’t seen Nandi since the failed drop.”

  They had my story all worked out.

  “The FBI found Nandi,” I said, trying the lie out on my tongue.

  R.J. smiled. “Damn right.”

  “Best agents in the world,” Ramirez said.

  “God bless America,” finished Reiter.

  We worked out the story a bit longer, and I thought they might be willing to let me go home soon. When I asked to use the bathroom, they cheerfully agreed.

  R.J., Ramirez, and Reiter were gone when I was brought back to the interrogation room, but lunch was waiting for me on the tiny table—a bag from In-N- Out Burger that smelled like Heaven in a wrapper. Inside, the double cheeseburger and fries were still warm.

  It was the best damn burger I ever tasted, just like Marsha promised.

  Wherever she was. Whoever she was.

  We were both invisible that day.

  The man who had killed Spider and rescued Nandi was somewhere in the room, somewhere in my body. But he wasn’t me.

  If he wasn’t me, then . . .

  A voice from the dead whispered in my ear: “After we dance, you and I . . . if you survive, you will understand my words.”

  Spider’s words. He claimed to have found the answer to my life’s question.

  And now, so had I. I thought he’d seen the fighter in me, because that was what I’d always thought I was seeking. Instead, what I’d found was a killer. He had known it from the beginning.

  Cliff had told me I’d make a breakthrough in six months. I had gone to a place beyond my dreams, and it had taken only six minutes.

  Of all the teachers I had ever known, how very strange
that, in the end, a little South African named Spider had been the best.

  * * *

  Tennyson escapes with Nandi

  http://www.simonandschuster.com/multimedia?video=87316084001

  * * *

  THIRTY

  I LOST ABOUT thirty-six hours after the shoot-out in the vineyard. By the time an unsociable FBI team dropped me off at my front door, it was seven o’clock in the morning the day after Nandi got home. I didn’t know what day of the week it was. My street fascinated me, as if I’d never seen it before, shiny cars and colorful gardens. The gardens reminded me of Paki’s house.

  There were no paparazzi waiting. I wasn’t a part of their story anymore, and that was fine with me. Anonymity has its advantages.

  I hopped up my walkway with my crutches. My right leg was wrapped and braced.

  “Holy crap!” Chela said when she opened the door. Her face twisted, as if the sight of me hurt her feelings. I hadn’t expected the tears in her eyes. “Ten, are you okay? What the—”

  “Better than the other guy,” I said, a rote joke that made my stomach drop. “I’m fine.”

  “What the hell, Ten?” Chela said. “Nobody knew anything. Your agent called and said Sofia Maitlin was trying to find you. Nandi’s back home, but you’re gone? No calls, no cell phone? We went to the freaking morgue last night!”

  “Shhhhh. It’s okay,” I said, and hugged her. I could have been talking to Nandi.

  Dad stood in the doorway with a new wooden cane, eyeing me to see if he believed me. He watched the unmarked FBI sedan drive off until it turned the corner, out of sight.

  “What happened?” Dad said when I didn’t offer a story.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Bad night. Too much to drink. Couple of guys jumped me.”

  The cover story was the plainest way to tell Dad I couldn’t talk about it. He’d never known me to be drunk in my life. I trusted Dad with my secrets—but like Marsha said, I didn’t know who was listening.

  “Next time, pick up a damn phone,” Dad said, and I wondered if he’d believed me until I saw the comprehension in his eyes. We would talk later. Privately.

  “Were those cops?” Chela said, and gently led me into the foyer.