by JT Lawrence
Frankie took off her mask and drew the cigarette from behind her ear. She read the name, written in pen, on the cigarette paper—Bergdorf—then struck a match and ignited the end, enjoying the quiet crackling sound it made as she dragged the fragrant smoke into her lungs. As Frankie exhaled, she thought about her mother, and her neighbour, whose bravery never failed to strengthen her resolve. Once the cigarette began to burn the tips of her fingers, she dropped it and ground it into the concrete paver under her boot. Frankie checked her lipstick in the small mirror she kept in her pocket. It had been a gift—a silver clamshell of foundation powder. It had run out long ago, but the mirror still came in handy.
The young woman pushed open the solid door of the Six Seasons, reminding herself to smile and look approachable, despite her cottonwool mouth. The warm air that rushed at her was scented with sweat and cheap alcohol: stale, but welcoming. A few of the soldiers looked up at her—those not too drunk to notice—and some continued to stare as she found herself a booth and ordered a malt beer. Frankie opened the State-stamped book she had brought along, and pretended to read while she eavesdropped on the soldiers’ banter. Halfway through the drink, she had established who the high-ranking official was, and when Commander Bergdorf walked past her table, she knocked the beer bottle over, and it rolled and smashed on the floor.
“Oh!” Frankie cried, jumping up. Her cheeks were flushed. “Sorry!”
The man in his highly decorated uniform looked amused. “That’s what you get,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what you get for having your nose buried in a book instead of keeping us company.”
Frankie appeared flustered.
“I’m only kidding,” Bergdorf said. “I’d also rather be reading a good book than hanging around those bastards.” He tilted his head towards his men, in case Frankie didn’t know which “bastards” he meant. “Can I buy you a drink?”
She hesitated.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said. “I’ll leave you to read in peace.”
The beleaguered bartender came round and started sweeping the broken glass away.
“You shouldn’t be drinking that cheap beer, anyway,” the official said. “So, it’s good riddance. In fact, if you hadn’t dropped it, I would have grabbed it away from you.”
The commander was charming, and his eyes glittered in a violent way that made Frankie feel nervous, and excited. “Is that what you do?” she asked him. “Grab whatever you like?”
He didn’t know what to make of her. Was she criticising him, or was she joking? Was it an invitation?
“May I sit down?”
Frankie shrugged. “Sure.”
Commander Bergdorf ordered a bottle of champagne for them to share. “Someone as beautiful as you should be drinking something sparkling,” he said. She resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. If anything was sparkling between them, it was the wall of badges and medals on his lapel. The silver Shengdu Insignia was especially bright. Some people say the Sheng Swastika badges are moulded from the molten guns of their victims; some say the teeth.
“What do you say?” he asked, as if he had been listening to her thoughts.
“About what?”
“About this place. About life.”
Frankie nudged her book aside. “There are a lot of silly stories around,” Frankie said. “That’s what people do when they’re scared. They tell stories.”
“What stories do you tell?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she said, a smile playing on her lips.
How ridiculous it was to sit with this handsome man and drink imported wine when she and her family had been hungry for years.
When they came to the end of the bottle, Bergdorf was drunk enough to stroke Frankie's thigh under the table, and she was drunk enough to let him. When he got too close to her secret, she grabbed his hand to stop him. His eyes burned into hers.
Frankie pulled on her overcoat. “Do you want to get some air?” she asked.
Tipsy, they stumbled out of the restaurant. Frankie fetched her bike and wheeled it alongside them as they strolled towards the forest.
“You need to go slowly,” she said. “I’m not one of those Silver City girls.”
His eyes flashed under the flickering streetlights. “You’re worth a hundred of those girls.”
He seemed more excited, then, knowing she was a virgin, and he picked up his pace.
They reached the dark woods and disappeared into the trees. The commander started to touch her, and she let her bike fall. He kissed her hard on the lips and pushed her up against the rough trunk of the tree. He stroked her through her coat, and she groaned. His fingers traced her neck, her breasts, her stomach, and then went under her skirt.
“Wait,” she said, and he drew away from her. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Without taking her eyes off Bergdorf, she began to unbutton her coat. He watched her hungrily, one by one. Once it was open, she started opening her blouse. Cold forest air made her nipples shine through her brassiére.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “I don’t even know your name.”
Frankie reached under her skirt while the commander watched her with lust-glazed eyes. She pulled out her small revolver, and as he saw the glint of the milky moon on its barrel, she pulled the trigger three times. The trio of bullets exploded in Bergdorf's chest, and he fell backwards, his face contorted with shock.
Whenever Frankie rehearsed these liquidations in her mind, she would be cold-hearted and courageous. She’d have a line ready, something like, “Sparkly enough for you?” or “Good riddance,” and then smoke a cigarette. But when it came to the actual executions, her boldness leaked away and left her shivering. Her instinct was always to help them get up.
Frankie watched as the commander’s body convulsed on the dark forest floor. She had to watch them until they were motionless. Her fingers shook as she buttoned up her clothes again, and even though she tried to swallow her horror, she turned and doubled over, vomiting up the sour champagne.
The men had already dug a hole, deeper in the woods. They'd arrive in a few minutes to undress the commander and bury him. Frankie picked up her bike and wheeled it swiftly out of the forest. When she got to the outskirts, she took her compact mirror out and flashed it in the direction of where Erica was waiting, then hopped onto her bike and started to ride home. A few minutes later, she crossed paths with Erica, and they nodded at each other. This time they didn't stop.
“No one will suspect a young girl like you of being a resistance fighter,” Erica had said, the day she had arrived to recruit Frankie. “You’ll be able to make a real difference.”
Frankie’s mother had reluctantly agreed.
It started with distributing pamphlets and defacing Silver State propaganda. That wasn’t new to Frankie; her mother had been sheltering dissidents for years. They had always collected clothes and baked bread for the Akeratu children orphaned by the war, even if it used their last sack of rationed flour. Their neighbour, Jana—a respected journalist—had been writing against the Shengdu policies for as long as she could remember. Frankie would babysit her small children, Kitsune and Milla Mouse. Jana was like an older sister to her.
After a successful mission one day—slipping past Shengdu soldiers unnoticed to deliver some explosives—Erica asked her if she wanted to save children.
"Of course," said Frankie. She loved Kitsune and Mouse as if they were her siblings. Her breath caught when she thought of them starving in a concentration camp. "Of course I want to save them."
"What is required of you won't be easy," warned Erica. "You'll hate yourself if you do it."
They took her to an underground potato shed and taught her how to shoot. She had a natural talent for it, and Erica was pleased. She gave her the powder compact and a tube of red lipstick. When she tried to give the revolver back, Erica told her to keep it.
Frankie had been confused.
“How will this help save the children?”
The idea of the children in the camps haunted her. There were no photographs—of course there weren’t—and no official documentation. But Jana had contacts all over Akeratu, and she told Frankie about the atrocities taking place all over the province. Children in silver cages, she said. Barcodes tattooed on their necks. Gas chambers that look like showers.
Frankie lay awake for nights on end, stomach growling from hunger, brain buzzing with the idea of the toddlers in camps. The soldiers would bang their rifle butts on the doors of adjacent houses, and the terrible sound would travel through the whole neighbourhood. First, they took disabled people—even a limp could be enough to make you disappear overnight—then homeless people, then orphans. They said they were taking them over the Fiume River, where life was more comfortable. Then when the meat rations ran out, they began shooting the cats and dogs.
"Can't they take the animals across the Fiume, too?" Frankie had asked her mother. She couldn't answer her daughter; she didn't know how.
Then Frankie understood that one day the soldiers would come for Jana’s family, for Erica, for her mother, and for her. They’d bash their rifles on the door and then it would be over.
"Not without a fight," Erica said, and smiled.
Frankie smiled back and clipped her loaded revolver into the leather holster strapped to her thigh.
“We’ll fight the evil our own way,” Erica said, checking her lipstick in the mirror. “We’ll stop the generals and the captains. We’ll stop the commanders of the silver cage concentration camps. We’ll fight them one liquidation at a time.”
What had Bergdorf said that night when Frankie had knocked her cheap beer onto the floor? She remembered how his Sheng Swastika badge had sparkled on his lapel.
Good riddance, the commander had said. And his eyes had glittered with violence.
2
The Generation of Lost Girls
“What does your wife think of you paying for another woman’s hotel room?”
Robin Susman knows that Captain De Villiers uses his own money to bankroll her visits to Johannesburg. The station’s budget would never stretch this far.
“She doesn’t mind,” he lies.
In other words, she doesn’t know, thinks Susman. “You’d better come in.”
She steps aside, and De Villiers walks into the sparsely furnished room. There's only one chair, so he decides to stand.
“I assume the case is complicated,” says Susman. “Or high profile.”
He had refused to tell her what it was over the phone, which he'd never done before. Usually, she would stay well away, but they'd had a good run of luck solving the last few problem cases, and she could do with a victory in her life.
The captain hesitates.
“Spit it out, Devil,” she says. “I know it’s a case I wouldn’t have agreed to, or you would’ve told me what it was on the phone.”
"I know you'll get angry, but bear with me," says De Villiers. His discomfort is evident: he has new sweat-stains under his arms, and he keeps flicking the inside of his wedding ring with his thumb.
Robin purses her lips. Maybe this would be the case to ruin their run of recent successes. Still, it had come at a good time. The sheep were freshly sheared, and it would be a quiet week on the farm.
"A girl is missing," he says slowly, cautiously, as if waiting for Susman to explode.
Her expression of mild amusement melts off her face. “A girl? Do you mean a child?”
Devil rubs his stubble. “Fifteen years old.”
Anger rises and flares on Susman’s cheeks. “Damn you, De Villiers.”
“I know,” he says. “I know. It was a huge risk asking you to come out.”
“Damn you,” she says again, this time through gritted teeth. “I trusted you.” She feels like tearing up the room, breaking something, punching De Villiers in his worry-crumpled face.
“There’s something else,” he says.
Susman stands there, in the middle of the hotel room, seething. “No,” she says. “No. I’m going home.”
“She’s fifteen years old, Susman. Would you have me wait for her next birthday to ask for your help?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not the one being ridiculous,” he says, and it stings as it leaves his mouth. It burns because it’s not true, and it’s not fair, but he’ll do what it takes to keep her on the case.
“You don’t understand anything.” Her eyes are shining.
“Explain it to me,” Devil says. “I want to make this as easy on you as possible.”
Acid drips from her laugh. “You want to make it easy on me?” She fights the urge to upend the dresser, kick the coffee table, smash the small glass mirror framed in wood. She feels fury in every molecule of her body.
“I want you to tell me how it feels.”
“No,” says Susman.
“I want to—”
“What?” she demands, her voice stony.
“I want to share your pain,” he says. “And I want you to share mine.”
Was he saying what she thought he was saying? He was telling her he loved her.
She shakes her head. “We’re not doing this.”
De Villiers is about to say something else, then changes his mind.
“You need to understand,” she says. “You need to understand that I have to protect myself.”
“Of course,” he says.
“Part of protecting myself is having boundaries.”
“Yes.”
“No missing children. No dead children. No children, full stop.”
“I know,” he murmurs. “I know the rules.”
“And yet here I stand in a hotel room in a city I detest—”
“I can explain.”
“Do you want me?” she asks, and Devil breaks eye contact. “Do you want me around, to work cases when you need me? Then I need to be able to function, Devil. I need to be able to think clearly. Working with children unravels me, you know that. You know me.”
De Villiers rubs his face again. “It’s my niece.”
Susman blinks at him uncomprehendingly, as if he’d just spoken in a foreign language.
“The missing girl,” Devil says. “It’s my niece.”
“You don’t have a niece,” says Susman. “You’re an only child.”
“That’s what I tell people.”
"Now she's a child and a relative. That's two reasons to stay away from this case.”
"That's the difference between you and me," says De Villiers. "I think that's two reasons to work harder than ever."
Susman snatches her handbag. On their way out, she slams the hotel door.
Susman refuses to go into the station, so they head to a coffee shop. She doesn’t feel like seeing the friendly faces there, doesn’t feel like returning empty smiles—and she hasn’t yet decided if she’s working the case or not.
“So,” says Robin as she stirs her flat white. “Let me guess. You have an evil twin.”
De Villiers laughs, and it diffuses some of the tension between them. “Not quite,” he says. “Of the two of us, I’m the evil one. And we’re not twins, just brothers.”
“You’re the evil one?” she muses. The man didn’t have a wicked bone in his body, which is probably why his nickname had stuck like glue. She hadn’t known him in his pre-Devil days.
“He’s … conservative. Religious. Strict with the kids.”
“Too strict?” asks Robin.
“Maybe.”
“You think she ran away?”
“I don’t know,” he says, tipping the last of his coffee into his mouth. “All I can tell you is that if I were her, I wouldn’t have waited this long.”
Robin fidgets with the salt grinder. "What do we know so far?"
“Dieter—that’s my brother—and Magriet say she was supposed to be sleeping at a friend’s house. They trusted the girl’s family. They belong to the same church. Th
ey only realised Marijke was gone when they arrived to collect her and she wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there at all. The family said Marijke hadn’t been feeling well after school and called off the sleepover. They assumed her parents knew.”
“So she’s been missing since Friday afternoon?” Her mouth goes dry. It was a long time to be missing, and every hour they wasted cooled the trail.
“It’s been almost 36 hours,” says De Villiers, scrubbing his scalp with his knuckles. His anxiety creases his brow. “She could be on the other side of the world by now.”
If Marijke was in another country, they had close to no hope of finding her.
“Blom is checking flights, passenger lists, airport footage, border control. He’s also got a team kicking down doors in the city—premises of previous offenders.”
Robin’s stomach clenches. She bats away the picture of a fifteen-year-old girl being restrained in a dirty flat somewhere in downtown Johannesburg.
“And a search?” Susman asks.
“Khaya’s taking care of that.”
“A dry search?”
“For now,” says Devil, and his face darkens. “Then we’ll get the divers in. Why?”
Susman puts down the salt and looks the captain in the eyes.
"Please," he says to her as if she is the one who gets to decide who lives and who dies. "Please."
What could she say? She was just a damaged woman with a dry mouth.
“Robin,” De Villiers says, not breaking eye contact. “Is she alive?”
At that moment, it feels like the people around them are frozen in time, and only the two of them exist.
