“Sounds to me like you’re in trouble, Angel. You can tell me, you know that.”
“I’m not in any trouble.”
“Is it that journalist chick of yours? Sex-bomb told me she’s dead and now there’s all kinds of shit coming your way.”
“I’ll get the rental fixed and see you up there.”
“No need to be so touchy,” said Fat-Boy. “I’m here for you, brother. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
The humanitarian politician Jessop Ndoro’s death had been a more dramatic one than that of Justice Francois Rousseau, if the newspapers I found while waiting for Fat-Boy to meet me were to be believed.
Unlike Justice Rousseau, he did not speed up his death by drowning, but he wasted most of his extra minutes trying to get back to his feet after his legs collapsed at the glass wall that offered a picture-postcard view of Cape Town and Table Mountain over the bay. The mountain would have glistened across those waters on a better evening because of the huge floodlights that lit the flat face of the mountain, but on the occasion of Jessop Ndoro’s death the sea was troubled by an angry westerly wind and the tablecloth cloud had spilt into the city and the lights had been turned off. It occurred to me that the fact he had died on the night of the storm meant I had an alibi to prove my innocence. But explaining what I had been doing with Fat-Boy on board a barge loaded with heavy concrete blocks and a couple of corpses, might prove difficult.
Jessop Ndoro had apparently held his hand up to the wound in his neck in a vain effort to stem the flow of blood, then as his limbs weakened and his life drained from him, that hand had instead been used to try to climb the glass wall, leaving pathetic streaks of sticky blood like arcane symbols painted on the glass, as if he was trying to send a final message. If he had, it was a message that nobody understood. Some journalists suggested he had painted the sign of the Christian cross in an effort to pass in the good graces of his God, but that took a stretch of the imagination.
The newspaper articles were lyrical in their remembrance of Jessop Ndoro’s concern for the education of those who could not afford it. None mentioned his preference for young sexual partners, nor his role in founding a club that arranged the availability of those young sexual partners, nor the occasion that he had donned a mask and witnessed an underage girl succumb to a death not dissimilar to the one that came to him. His three wives and a small tribe of sexual partners were kept silent with the promise of compensation from his extensive estate, and I expected that those who were not yet adult would receive their compensation first – the government couldn’t afford another scandal.
And an insignificant tab at the Miners Club in Heerengracht Street had probably interested the police, who had no doubt already worked out who the man was that had ordered the whisky, a drink that Jessop Ndoro never consumed. And further deduced that the same man had caused Jessop Ndoro to phone his lawyer and complain that he was receiving threats on his life from members of the public.
Fat-Boy’s wheels were a blue 1970s Volkswagen camper van which had last passed a roadworthy test in the previous century. But the exterior was polished, the windows were tinted and there was a foam mattress in the back which Fat-Boy said would be big enough for the both of us as long as I didn’t mind him snoring. The van was also fitted with a powerful sub-woofer, which meant that we could feel the Xhosa rap music as it vibrated our hearts as well as hear it, and it left my ears ringing after Fat-Boy turned it off. The front seat was a long bench with a crater-like depression behind the steering wheel, which had been moulded by Fat-Boy’s rear end over many years. He filled the driver’s side of the vehicle like a loaf of bread that has risen too much and threatens to break open the oven door. His right hand drooped over the wheel, his left rested on the gear stick, and his stomach held the lower end of the steering wheel in position. He had an unnerving habit of turning to face me when I spoke, relying on his peripheral vision to ensure that we stayed on the road, which we didn’t do as much as I would have liked.
We took the small coastal road because we were less likely to encounter roadblocks and Fat-Boy preferred a route that required him to keep his hand on the steering wheel, which was something he forgot to do when the road was too straight. He turned the music off after half an hour because he wanted to tell me how he had found the boat. It had taken him three days, most of which had been spent sitting in bars and drinking beers with local fishermen up the west coast, a pub crawl that had culminated in his discovery of the boat anchored outside the main harbour at Saldanha Bay.
“Just floating there, man, it’s what these boat people do. They drop a heavy fucking anchor and then they sit there. There’s hundreds of boats floating out there. I spotted ours ’cos the driving hut up front is all shot to shit, and there’s the crane thing on the back.”
“And no sign of the gold?”
“All gone,” said Fat-Boy, and he scowled at the road and swung the steering wheel around a bit to get us back onto it. “No concrete, no gold, nothing – boat was empty when the coast guard found it. They towed it back in and left it there while they figure out who it belongs to. The locals say it will be sold off at auction. The cops think it’s a gang thing, blaming some trouble he got into with smuggling cigarettes. I took a look at it, couldn’t see too well from where I was, but our gold is gone, that’s for sure.”
“You didn’t make it too obvious, did you, Fat-Boy? The police must be watching it – probably the Dark Bizness people too.”
“Course not. There’s a great campsite above the bay. That’s where I’ve set up.”
“Set up what?”
“You and me gonna camp there.”
“Why?”
“’Cos we’re gonna find our gold.”
“By watching an empty boat? What will that achieve? We know who has the gold – Lebogang Madikwe. Staring at the empty boat won’t bring it back.”
“You should call him Lebo. Only a whitey would call him Lebogang.”
There was a pause in conversation as Fat-Boy pretended to focus on the driving while he came up with a response to my pessimism. Eventually he said, “You’re the brains, Angel. I’m the muscle. You figure out how we get it back.”
Our outside wheels left the tar and started spitting loose gravel at the undercarriage. Fat-Boy over-corrected and we swung towards an oncoming car, which flashed its lights and hooted angrily as it tore past.
“Stupid fucker,” said Fat-Boy. “You see that? He was going way too fast.”
We settled back into our lane and Fat-Boy glowered at the road ahead.
“Is it that journalist of yours, Angel?” he asked, when we’d settled into a steady cruise. “The one that went AWOL? Is she the reason you’re on the run?”
“I’m not on the run.”
“I knew it was that journalist chick.” Fat-Boy handed control over to his stomach and turned to me. “Sex-bomb told me you’re in deep shit ’cos of her being dead.”
“Robyn said nothing of the sort. She knows nothing about it.”
“She’s sharp, sex-bomb is. Knows stuff you don’t tell her – she’s got that gift. Why you two not doing it anymore? Is it ’cos you don’t like her drinking?”
“It’s got nothing to do with that.”
“You should let her drink, man. She’s never gonna come back to you if you stop her from doing her shit.”
“Perhaps I don’t want her back. Did that occur to you?”
“Don’t give me that,” Fat-Boy said with a shake of his head. “You got her right here.” He lifted a hand off the gear lever and placed it on his chest. “Right here, I can see it. You want her back, course you do.”
He kept his hand on his chest but turned back to the road in time to prevent another head-on collision with a car that had been flashing its lights and hooting.
“Too fast, you fucker,” Fat-Boy shouted as the car howled past us.
“’Sides,” he continued when we were back on an even keel. “Sex-bomb says you got enough problems, what with all the people y
ou and the colonel killed. Fucked you up proper, she says.”
“When did you and Robyn find the time to have all these discussions?”
“I gotta lot of time for sex-bomb; she saved my life, you know that?”
His lazy eye opened up to make sure that I understood the intensity of his feelings.
“I thought that was me,” I said.
“Saved my life?” said Fat-Boy incredulously, then blew air between his rubbery lips to produce a scornful sound. “All you done, Angel, is nearly kill me several times.”
We drove in silence for a while, then he said, “You figure out why your journalist went AWOL?”
“She got involved with things she should have stayed out of.”
“Things? What things?”
“If you must know, human trafficking, prostitution, that kind of thing.”
Fat-Boy gave a low whistle. “Fuck,” he said, dragging the word out as long as his breath allowed. “She did that shit?”
“She was investigating it.”
“But she’s dead now?”
“Yes, she is dead.”
“All that shit about going AWOL was just you stirring up some sympathy?”
“No, she disappeared and then later she died.”
Fat-Boy turned to me again so that he could watch my eyes as I answered his next question.
“Did you kill her, Angel?”
“No, Fat-Boy. I didn’t kill her.”
“You coulda killed her and then acted all innocent with your stories of her going AWOL.”
“I could have,” I agreed.
“Sex-bomb says you never can tell with you, ’cos you’ve killed so many people.”
Another car horn blared past us, but Fat-Boy needed to keep looking me in the eye to see if I was being open and honest with him.
“Sex-bomb is a fount of information,” I said and kept looking at the road myself, hoping Fat-Boy might follow my example. He did eventually, with an unconvinced grunt.
“Gotta lot of time for sex-bomb,” he said again, when he’d adjusted our course and our van had regained the road. “Speaks the truth, she does.”
He turned to me again.
“I don’t mind if you killed her, Angel. I don’t mind about that shit.”
“Thank you, Fat-Boy,” I said. “That means a lot to me.”
And I kept my eyes on the road.
Nineteen
The campsite that overlooked Saldanha Bay was little more than a section of hill on an outcrop of rock where patches of scrub had been cut back to accommodate tents and camper vans. We were the only ones foolhardy enough to brave the icy weather, so we had the campsite to ourselves. Fat-Boy had selected an open patch on the front edge that offered a panorama across the Atlantic Ocean, the quaint town of Saldanha, and the busy port below, which he told me was used to transport iron ore from the mines in Sishen eight hundred and sixty kilometres away. He knew this interesting detail because the white people had killed several of his relatives by forcing them to build the railway line that connected Sishen to Saldanha.
“Forced labour?” I asked.
“Killed them,” said Fat-Boy.
“I didn’t know the railway lines of South Africa were built by slaves.”
“My mother’s uncle’s cousin worked himself to death on that railway line.”
“But it was a job, wasn’t it? Paid employment? Or was it slave labour?”
“What’s the difference? Building that railway line for the white people killed him.”
“I thought you said there were several of them.”
“You saying there weren’t?”
We set aside our differences of opinion around the possible enslavement of Fat-Boy’s ancestors and offloaded two folding deck chairs so as to take stock of the situation. Fat-Boy retrieved cold beers from the camping fridge in the back, and we looked out over the bay with the assistance of a pair of binoculars that looked as if they’d been abandoned after a failed operation in the Angolan war forty years ago. One of the lenses was cracked, but they were good enough for me to see our barge lying at anchor. The damaged wheelhouse didn’t look too bad at this distance. I remembered it seeming to explode into splinters, but from across the bay it merely looked a little crooked, although the windows were no more than gaping holes. There was nothing on deck at all, except for the furled loading arm. No dead bodies, and no stacks of gold bars embedded in blocks of concrete.
“What next?” asked Fat-Boy, after we had taken it in turns to peer at the boat through the good lens and neither of us had seen anything that suggested a course of action.
“Dinner?” I proposed. The sun had dropped below the far edge of the sea and it was getting too dark to see much on the water.
“Got some sausage,” said Fat-Boy, and he pulled a gas camping stove from a compartment beneath the foam mattress, unfolded a small table and in a few minutes had the boerewors sausage sizzling in a pan.
“You got a plan yet?” asked Fat-Boy after we’d opened another beer each and he’d arranged his deck chair so that he could cook the sausage while remaining seated.
“I don’t,” I admitted.
Fat-Boy poked at the sausage, which retaliated with a spurt of boiling fat that produced a small cloud of steam.
“I thought you were the one with the ideas.”
“Is that why you brought me out here? To have ideas?”
“You don’t believe that voodoo shit,” said Fat-Boy. “Sex-bomb and her shit about the gold being cursed. You and me don’t believe it. We gotta show the colonel it’s just a load of crap.”
“By having ideas?”
Fat-Boy studied my face for a minute and closed his lazy eye to better see whether I was being disrespectful.
“We’re gonna get the gold back, Angel, that’s why we’re here. We’re gonna get it back.”
“There will be other jobs,” I said. “The colonel is right – we need to move on.”
Fat-Boy rejected that idea with a trumpeting of his lips.
“There’s only one job that counts,” he said. “That’s this job. That’s what the colonel always says. You think he buys that curse shit?”
“It’s not about the curse. It’s his philosophy – united we stand, divided we fall. Without Robyn we are not united.”
Fat-Boy shook his head and tutted dismissively.
“It’s a test, Angel – he’s testing us – he wants us to find the gold for him and prove ourselves.”
“That wasn’t the feeling I got.”
“You don’t know him as well as I do,” said Fat-Boy. He switched off the gas and allowed the sausage to sizzle in the pool of fat in the pan. His look challenged me to contradict his assertion, and when I didn’t he said, “You were in the army with him, is all.”
I didn’t rise to the challenge of Fat-Boy’s resentment of my history with Chandler.
“Sex-bomb says you were killers,” he said after a pause. “In the army – trained killers.”
“We were soldiers. All soldiers are called upon to kill when necessary.”
“Assassins, that’s what sex-bomb says. You were assassins. You and the colonel and her boyfriend, the one who had the idea for the gold.”
“Brian didn’t have the idea for the gold. He joked about it; that was all. I’m surprised she even mentioned him.”
“Why? Sex-bomb tells me everything, Angel. She and me and the colonel are tight. No secrets kind of tight.”
I didn’t rise to that challenge either – my status as an outsider to their tight-knit group was another theme that Fat-Boy liked to dwell upon.
“How did you meet the colonel and Robyn?” I asked instead.
Fat-Boy had two hot dog rolls which he sliced open with a folding knife, then he cut the sausage in half and placed one half in each roll.
“Ketchup?” he said. “Mustard?”
I nodded to both, and he squirted some tomato sauce and mustard into each, wrapped them with paper towel, then handed me one and to
ok a huge bite of the other. It occurred to me that this camping trip of his had been more thoroughly planned than I had thought.
“Sex-bomb found me,” he said through a mouthful of sausage. “Colonel needed someone good with computers, and I know computers, don’t I?”
“You do.”
“I’d had a bit of trouble, and sex-bomb said she knew someone who could help.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Fat-Boy took another monster bite of his hot dog and chewed it thoroughly with his eyes on me, as if wondering whether I was to be trusted.
“I worked at a bank,” he said when he had finished chewing, swallowed and washed the sausage down with some beer.
“You were doing something with computers at the bank?”
“I created a detour for some of the money,” said Fat-Boy. “My ma was ill with the cancer – I needed the money more than they did, the fuckers.”
“And the bank found out about the detour – that was the trouble you were in?”
Fat-Boy shook his head. “Never did, but they would have. Sex-bomb and the colonel found out about it, and told me to put all the money back before the bank locked me up.”
“You did that? Put it back?”
“When the colonel says something, I do it, Angel. I learnt that lesson a long time ago. Colonel is the man, there’s no one above the colonel.”
“And your mother?”
“He took care of her, gave her everything she could need. Checked her into a care home. Cotton sheets, full-time nurses, good food, best doctors, she had everything those last months.”
Fat-Boy wiped at his eyes with the paper towel from his hot dog and cleared his throat with a sound like a diesel engine starting up.
“Like the sausage?” he said.
“Delicious.”
Fat-Boy wiped his eyes again.
“We need a good idea,” he said, and looked out over the bay as if he might find one there. It was a beautifully clear night. The sea was flat and black and the moon was spilling its light onto the horizon. I noticed a small cluster of lights in the distance, halfway across the bay towards the town of Langebaan.
Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3) Page 16
