“She was wonderful,” said Chandler as we rose to leave, having taken the subtle hint from the way in which Lategan had shuffled to the side so as not to block our exit. Meghan squeezed out a bright smile, although she was pretending not to listen.
“The British Marines thank you,” said Chandler, and we pressed our hands together again and walked like satisfied men to the lift that would get us out of there. As the doors opened, I turned back and raised a hand in farewell. Meghan and Lategan were standing there like wax dummies, but their smiles had expired, and I noticed Meghan’s hand resting on the files she had retrieved for us. They’d be going through them, I had no doubt. Fortunately, Chandler’s contact at the Marines knew what he was doing, and they were all genuine names. Except for Lindiwe Dlomo. That one would prove to be a problem.
Twelve
“The secret to our future lies in the secrets of our past,” said Chandler raising his espresso cup in a toast. A cafe corretto should only be considered in the morning or after lunch. But special occasions brought special demands.
“And they will not be sharing that secret,” I said.
“Let’s clear up the conflict of interest, shall we?” said Chandler as he sipped at his corrected espresso.
“Conflict?”
“You’re a manipulative bastard, Gabriel, I’ve always known it. Don’t think I don’t know you planned this. The moment you walked in here, I guessed this was where we’d end up. But you knew I’d not be interested in some old file, and the sad demise of a woman thirty years ago, so you dangled BB’s underground vaults before me. I know you well enough by now.”
“There is no conflict, Captain. This is a mutually beneficial opportunity.”
“If we do this, Gabriel, there is no us and them. We can do our best to get your file and also lighten BB’s load a little. But they are one and the same. I won’t have you flying your flag of moral rectitude while I do the dirty work.”
“When have I ever done that, Captain? There is nothing morally right about what I want to do. Perhaps we should have a good laugh about our play-acting, I will apologise for taking up your time, we can shake hands on it, and I will walk out of your door and not bother you again.”
“Bravo,” said Chandler in his soft voice. “But that’s bullshit, isn’t it?”
I poured myself a little more aniseed. Who needed the coffee anyway?
“You’re in trouble aren’t you, Gabriel?” said Chandler. “I heard what happened with that woman of yours. She ran away. And the job with the desk-wallahs didn’t last. I’ve been keeping my eye on you, just as you’ve been watching me. It’s all falling apart, isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” I said.
Chandler looked up to the ceiling and used a hand to drag his cheeks down and test the closeness of his shave.
“Let’s laugh about it then,” he said. “I’ll accept your apology, and we’ll shake hands.”
He stood up, and I did the same. He held my hand firmly and looked into my eyes. I looked back.
“There are five levels of underground vaults,” he said, still holding my hand.
“I saw that,” I said. “Just like those men in Uganda said.”
Chandler released my hand and walked over to the window where he gazed out at the grey expanse of sea and cloud.
“We’ll need others,” he said to the window.
“Of course,” I said.
“Your friend’s widow,” said Chandler. “Why don’t you go see her?”
“Robyn?” I said with surprise. Robyn and Brian had been engaged to be married, and so she was not strictly his widow, but this seemed like a change of subject. Robyn was surely not someone we would need. I knew that she had a history of struggling to stay on the right side of the law, but that had been years ago. Chandler turned back to me and I was surprised to see indignation in his eyes.
“Yes, Robyn. Why do you never see her? She asks me every time we get together. She wants to know what you’re doing, when you’re going to be ready.”
I said nothing, and Chandler’s voice rose. “How the fuck should I know, Robyn? That’s what I tell her. Brian’s death affected us all differently, and I’m not holding a candle for that little Gabriel creep. You are! That’s what I tell her.”
“I should see her,” I said.
“She’s struggling, really struggling. Been hitting the bottle and making new friends who are no good for her.”
“I will go and see her,” I said.
“She could do with something to keep her sober for a week or two, and better she does that kind of thing with friends. Starck wouldn’t hold it against you, Gabriel, you know that. He would want her cared for, and you would have been the top of his list if he’d been pushed.”
“I’ll call her,” I said.
Clearly there were things I didn’t know about Robyn, but Chandler was on a roll. He turned back to the sea as if it was luring him in.
“Fat-Boy is the perfect snoop man,” he said. “He’s a lunatic, but the best ones are.”
Then he turned back to me like he was coming to attention on parade. He smiled. Lips in a straight line that you had to know him well to realise was a smile and not a nervous tic. There was a light in his eyes that I remembered from some time back.
“Trust you, Gabriel, to come up with something like this. It would have made Brian laugh.”
Thirteen
I stood wrapped in a long coat to keep warm as I watched workmen throwing sparks over an old whale of a ship in the dry dock. Other workers huddled in little groups on scaffolding, reaching up with tall poles to stroke on fresh paint. Beyond the dry dock the sea lapped gently, calmed by two outer basins. The rain had stopped, but the sea was still feeling pretty angry about the whole thing.
Robyn had not answered my call. I hadn’t expected her to, not after three years. And when she finally answered on my fourth attempt, I could hear the hesitation in her voice. We agreed to meet on neutral territory. The wind buffeted me and caught a strand of sparks from the welder closest to me, trying to string them between us and set fire to my coat. I turned to look out to sea and found Robyn standing by my side. Her elfin face was floating on a huge red scarf, her eyes hiding behind wide-screen dark glasses, and she allowed herself the glimmer of a smile when I caught her watching me. She hesitated a moment, then stepped closer and committed to the embrace. Her arms came up and squeezed me.
“Oh, Ben,” she said and held onto me like I was her last chance. Her body was thinner and more frail than I remembered. “We fucked it up, didn’t we?” She let go and grabbed my arms to hold me at the right distance to see my face. Her brown eyes were so dark as to seem black, and they were ever so slightly off balance so they seemed to be doing that subtle curling in movement that eyes do as a girl leans in to kiss you, holding your eyes for every last moment. Her dark hair was cut in a straight fringe, like a forties actress, but it gave up on being organised around her ears, and ended a little above her red scarf. A narrow nose and thin raised eyebrows gave her a teasing look that told you she didn’t take you or anything else very seriously.
“Should have stayed in touch,” I said.
“We’ll promise now,” she said. “We won’t be strangers. Never again.”
“It’s a deal.”
“And you found your soul mate. The Colonel told me.”
“And lost her,” I said without having meant for it to sound pathetic.
“He told me that too,” she said, and tucked an arm into mine and leaned against me as we walked along the edge of the dock. “He’s been keeping tabs on you, you know. Like a proud father. And he’s been kind to me, so kind.”
“He feels responsible,” I said.
“No,” she stopped and pulled me around to face her so she could make her point. “Not responsible.” Her eyes were a little bloodshot at the edges. “He’s over that, Ben. And it’s right that he is. What happened on that last trip to the mines …” she searched for a word, and blinked, “…
well it was what it was.” She laughed lightly at herself and used the back of her hand in a familiar gesture to wipe away her tears. It was a child’s gesture, not the sort of thing you’d expect from an elegant woman. “I’m no good with words, you know that. I mean it happened, and it’s over. The Colonel doesn’t see me only because of what happened in the Congo. And neither should you, Ben.”
“You’re right,” I said. “And what’s with the ‘Colonel’? He’s only a Captain.”
Robyn gave a coy smile. “Just what I call him,” she said. “And no, it’s not what you’re thinking. There’s none of that going on.” She slapped my chest playfully and leaned against me. We continued down the quayside. A whistle sounded and the workers on the ship in the dry dock put down their tools, pulled off gloves, and started clambering down the steel steps that ran up the scaffolding.
“Lunch,” said Robyn. “You will treat me to the best meal out I’ve had in years and tell me all about this thing you’ve got going.”
We found a table on the balcony of the Hildebrand, where it reaches a point like the prow of a ship in an architectural fantasy that is considered quaint, and allows diners to feel as if they’re heading out to sea, but can enjoy the rich spaghetti al vongole without the inconvenience of having the deck move with the swell. Our maître d’ was a tall Zulu man with a polished bald head. He brought the spaghetti to our table personally in order to get a closer look at Robyn, who had that effect on all men. He took a few extra moments as our spaghetti cooled to explain that he was descended from the warrior who had led the victory at Isandlwana, enjoying Robyn’s rapt attention, and embellishing the story so as to linger in her gaze.
Robyn’s beauty was of the kind that attracted men, and women at times, like a magician’s spell. To strangers she was unreachable, like a goddess on another plane, but the moment she looked at you and smiled you were drawn in. Brian had complained that he’d fallen victim to an African voodoo spell when he met her on the week’s break we were given after the first operation on the gold mines. “I can’t breathe right,” he’d said in his strong north country accent, holding a hand on his chest as if to demonstrate this. “She’s done something to me Benny, I’m done for aren’t I? Put me out of my misery now, I cannot be falling for a felon. What are the old wrinklies going to be saying if I take her back home with me?”
But as it happened Brian didn’t take Robyn back home to meet his parents. They stayed on in Cape Town, where their whirlwind romance spread itself over breaks in Brian’s tours of duty, and the journey to the north country to show her off to his parents never came about because it was scheduled after the final tour to reclaim the Kigesi gold mine from the Allied Democratic Forces of the Congo. The operation that Brian didn’t return from.
Describing Robyn as a felon was accurate, but faintly absurd at the same time. Watching her now as she smiled demurely and focused on the Zulu warrior, it was hard to believe that she had spent three years behind bars. A predecessor of Brian’s – “We don’t mention ex-boyfriends,” he’d told me, “She’s moving up the scale and we don’t like to look back” – had been killed in a shoot-out with police when the two of them had tried walking out of a bank in the small town of Montague, a couple of hours drive from Cape Town, with a large burlap sack of the bank’s cash. The burlap sack had been Robyn’s idea and the defence lawyer had argued in the juvenile court – because Robyn was a few weeks short of her eighteenth birthday – that with that bag in her hands Robyn couldn’t have handled a gun and was therefore not involved in the shooting. He had obviously never seen Robyn handle a gun and encountered some difficulty explaining the number of holsters strapped to her body when they arrested her. But he won over on the sympathy vote, explaining why Robyn had left home at the age of fourteen: escaping an abusive stepfather, but glossing over the fact that she stole the abusive stepfather’s Glock 35, and spent months perfecting her skills on photographs of him stuck to the shooting range targets.
Having heard about the way in which our Zulu warrior’s ancestor had fought to the bitter end from a cave above the battlefield of Isandlwana, and shared for a moment in the glorious thought that the British army had suffered its most crushing defeat in history, “Every single officer killed?” repeated Robyn as if she refused to believe it, and a moment of silence for the one thousand seven hundred British soldiers who had died that day, Robyn turned to me and as her eyes focused, I remembered Brian’s claim that she possessed a witch’s magic.
“I meet the strangest people when I’m with you, Ben,” she said.
“I’m not sure I can claim responsibility for the shift management here.”
Robyn laughed and rested her hand on mine as if to enjoy gazing at this conjurer of strange people.
“Is your little project above board?” she asked as we tackled the spaghetti. “I mean it’s nothing official, surely, because you wouldn’t be coming to me. We don’t do official jobs.”
“It’s extra-curricular,” I said, wondering for a moment who ‘we’ was. “I’m no longer employed by any of those government officials. And no, the project is not entirely above board.”
Robyn’s eyes twinkled. “Would Brian have approved?”
“It was Brian’s idea. But he would have locked you in a cage and cut the phone lines to prevent me from talking to you about it.”
Robyn focused on her spaghetti for a few minutes and then reached for her sparkling water. “No wine over lunch?” she asked. “Or champagne? Isn’t this a celebration? A reunion such as this deserves something sparkling.”
“I was thinking of a dry white with the lobster,” I said. “But if you want champagne …”
She shook her head and sipped at the sparkling water like she was doing the close-up in the seduction scene. “I’m kidding with you,” she said. “I can stay sober if I need to, and this is a moment I’ll enjoy for some time. Seeing how the mighty have fallen.”
“The mighty?”
Robyn’s laugh was a pebble skipping across a country stream. “The defenders of our moral integrity are crawling under the floorboards, and I think I’m entitled to enjoy that. Don’t get me wrong, Ben. I was proud of Brian, and of you. And Colonel, your whole unit. But sometimes the glare from your halos was a little blinding. You were fighting on the side of right and that puffed out your chests and gave you the right to strut about the farmyard. Sometimes us lowly rodents found you all a bit overbearing.” She turned to look out over the sea, which was throwing itself with abandon onto the pier beneath the prow of our ship, and she blinked. For a moment I wondered about the burden she carried with her; the shadow of her youthful mistakes. The whispering behind her back because she was a jailbird, the silence that would fall across a table when someone mentioned robbery, or even dropped an accidental ‘bank’ or ‘shoot-out’ into the conversation. Robyn turned back to me.
“So, we’re crossing over to the other side,” she said and tossed another pebble of a laugh. “I’m okay with that, Ben. Where you go I will follow, you know that.”
“I’m the one doing the following,” I said. “Chandler gave me a speech about crossing a line, and I’m not so naïve as to think that you and he are following my lead.”
Robyn sucked up a strand of spaghetti and looked at me with big innocent eyes.
“In any case,” I said. “We didn’t have any halos. You know the kind of soldiers we were.”
Robyn made a sympathetic noise as if I was a cute puppy that needed help climbing out of my cardboard box. She reached a hand to my cheek. “The nasty kind,” she said. “I know that. But you’ve still got that bayonet stuck up your arse, haven’t you, Ben? Shoulders back, chest out, fighting for what is right.” She stroked my cheek and looked into my eyes. She opened her mouth to say something else when she realised that our Zulu warrior was hovering and trying not to destroy the romantic moment of the day.
I realised, as he placed the lobster before us, and Robyn sympathised over the tragedy that was the Battle of Rorke�
��s Drift in which the British turned the tables on his ancestors, that I’d been wrong to feel any pity for her. I was wrong about the whole thing. She had not lived under a shadow of shame for all these years. She didn’t regret any youthful mistakes. I saw the tough woman of stone that lay behind her beauty as she looked at me to share the outrage of the treatment the British had dealt the Zulus. “She’s a tough cookie,” Brian had said when I asked about her act of felony one night, “the toughest I’ve met.” He had turned to look at her sleeping in the back of the car. “She has no regrets. I’ll say that.”
The lobster was followed by a tiramisu because the Hildebrand considered itself a cross-cultural establishment. After a couple of short coffees we walked back along the quay. The clouds were finally delivering upon their threat, and Robyn pulled her scarf up into a red hood.
“Brian would have been okay with this,” she said as she embraced me like I was leaving on a long journey from which I might not return. She pulled away but held on with an arm and looked over the water at a brightly coloured fishing boat that had been restored and fitted with windows for the tourists to enjoy the view even when it was raining. The boat was heading out of port and I could hear the loudspeaker on its roof announcing that the trip to Robben Island would take half an hour, and that they would be starting at the graveyard for the people who had died from leprosy in the days when it had been a leper colony before becoming a prison.
“This is such a beautiful place,” said Robyn, “but there is something that happens here, isn’t there? They might have sent the lepers out to that island, but all the rest of the flotsam of life ended up collecting here, at the bottom of the continent. We’re all outcasts, aren’t we? We live here because all this beauty makes it possible, despite who we are.”
Treasonous Page 13
