Talion

by Beyers de Vos

  She came back despite Dr Phillippidis’s strong urging to the contrary. ‘You aren’t ready,’ he said.

  ‘But this isn’t Mamelodi,’ she argued, despite her own reservations.

  ‘Does that make a difference?’

  Yes, it does. Because here, in the suburbs, crimes make more sense. Crime has reason; crime has motive. It isn’t inbred; it isn’t the only way out or the only way forward. It isn’t a way of life. She understands her own cowardice, fleeing the place that needed her more – the struggling, impoverished place that made her – for the comfort of a neighbourhood that barely notices her as she walks past. But Mamelodi wasn’t good for her. She wouldn’t have survived there, not for much longer, surrounded by all that trivial violence. All that infectious anger, which still sticks to her, like a dark syrup coating her bones. Anger was the thing that almost destroyed her. Which made her do . . . the thing she did. Which ended with a man dead. A man who deserved it.

  ‘Please, it’s only one murder case and a few burglaries. They need me,’ she told Dr Phillippidis confidently.

  ‘But you transferred from Mamelodi to get away from violent crime.’

  ‘I know. But I’m ready.’

  He upped her dosage anyway.

  She sighs.

  She has to stifle a small yelp when a voice is suddenly beside her: ‘The Benjamin Rust ballistics report, boss,’ Frik says, ‘and the autopsy report on Maralene du Toit.’ Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees Angie smirking. ‘Oh, and here.’ He hands her something concealed in a bright blue wrapper she doesn’t recognise. ‘You need to eat.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, unwrapping the package. Inside there is a large chocolate-covered biscuit, giving off a nutty-caramel glow. She takes a bite, discovering a crunchy-gooey centre. She closes her eyes and savours the rich chocolate, loving it because it is delicious, because it is the opposite of a crime scene.

  She can’t decide whether Frik is attractive or not. She never can with white men. They are always so . . . soft around the edges. Pink and squidgy. Collapsible, unsturdy. Even the tall muscular ones look a little insubstantial. But there is something – something about him she can’t quite identify – that she finds sexy. The way he moves, maybe; the way he carries himself. She likes how tall he is, his broad shoulders, the way he keeps his head shaved. His dark, heady eyes. His soothing voice. And he’s been so helpful lately, necessary even, on the two cases they’ve worked together since she was reinstated. If she overlooks the way he occasionally pockets the marijuana he confiscates when he’s on duty, the slight misogyny with which he treats female suspects; if she adjusts her ethics just slightly – and why not, she’s done it before – then he is almost charming.

  She hears a chuckle from her left. From Angie’s desk. Angie is the station’s liaison officer, slight and beautiful and full of mischief. Angie knows all about Nolwazi’s crush on Frik, and she uses every opportunity she gets to mock Nolwazi. Now, Angie winks salaciously and brings her thumb and forefinger together slowly, until they barely touch. Nolwazi rolls her eyes and looks away; she hasn’t yet been able to let her imagination stray far enough to imagine Frik naked.

  From behind Angie, Hans – short (not quite as short as Nolwazi herself) and podgy, with a receding hairline he hides with a comb-over and stringent denial – is staring at them, hostility engraved on his face. ‘Why doesn’t he like me?’ she asks, flicking her eyes in Hans’s direction and putting down the chocolate, trying to hide her blush.

  ‘Because you stole his gig,’ Frik says. ‘He was next up for a promotion. He’s been trying to get on the murder squad for years and when that student died last year, you swooped in and took the job he wanted.’

  ‘He didn’t like me before Benjamin Rust died, Frik.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Can’t he just go work at another station?’

  ‘They keep denying his transfer requests.’

  ‘And I didn’t take your job?’

  Frik shrugs. ‘I’m young. I like being in uniform. Detectiving sounds hectic. Anyway, you’ve already done this job. You’re just going back to it.’

  Nolwazi almost doesn’t ask the question, but it slips out of her mouth faster than her intentions: ‘And if I had been a white man who took his job instead of a black woman?’

  ‘Then maybe,’ Frik says hesitantly, ‘he wouldn’t be so hostile. Maybe.’

  Nolwazi snorts.

  ‘Cut him some slack,’ Frik says. ‘You know he joined the force in ’93; he thought he was joining to protect and serve a community that was dying. He’s a little lost in the new South Africa.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right? Cut him some slack? Because he hasn’t managed to find his footing in this big scary new world? It’s been over twenty years; he does know that, right?’

  Frik shrugs.

  Nolwazi is standing, although she can’t remember getting up, and she is breathing deeply, and despite her effort to the contrary, she doesn’t think she’s managed to keep her voice down. Shaking her head, missing her fantasies, she says, ‘Just go back to your desk, sergeant.’ In the corner of her eye, Angie’s face is flashing like a giant red question mark.

  But Frik is smiling at her. ‘Would you like to get ice cream some time?’ he says.

  3

  Slick can’t shake the nostalgia that’s welling up inside him. Everything he passes has the faded look of a photograph; on each street he walks down, memories latch on to him. It’s becoming one of those days – one of those days where he seems to have woken up in the past. A wistful day, a day where the future has resisted him. He knows people who live like this every day, who stew in their regret. His livelihood depends on such people. But he doesn’t like the feeling. He can’t handle the weight of it.

  Central Pretoria is alive around him. The streets are bristling. Traffic is a mess: hooting, pushing, shouting. People in shopfronts are yelling out specials. The sky is grimy and smoke-filled.

  He walks onwards, until he comes to the house he is looking for. The house: the very house he grew up in; the house where Mama Africa brought him after she’d rescued him from oblivion.

  It’s been three years since he has dared come anywhere near it.

  It’s a two-storey dump. Just as abandoned now as it was then, just as rotten. He is surprised it hasn’t been condemned yet. It looks to him to be frozen in time: could that really be the same blue paint, still peeling? Could that be the same broken window frame? Surely not. Back then they were squatting here illegally, of course. Slick imagines Mama Africa greased the palm of any authority figure who became too curious. (Another trick Slick picked up from her.) Mama Africa had not lived in the house herself, although she had a kind of office on the second storey, which she called her parlour. Slick never found out where she went when she wasn’t in. Although he did hear her say once, as she moved towards the door, ‘Time to go back to the white picket fence.’ When she said this, her accent, which at the best of times rippled and changed like the surface of a lake, contained a twang, a saltiness he could only later identify as American.

  Access to the house was not guaranteed once Mama Africa recruited you. It depended entirely on your performance. If you were a good thief, a good runner – trustworthy, discreet, and loyal – you were allowed to stay. If you were not useful, then your access was cut off. Slick remembers clearly the number of times he fell asleep to the screams of a desperate child who had been locked out when they tried to come home; he remembers the rope that tied itself around his heart every time he came back to the house and knocked on the door; the long moment before the large bodyguard stood aside to let him in. That pause between recognition and permission was the longest pause in the world.

  Whenever he thinks of Mama Africa or this house, the two of them always seem to be alone: no other children, none of the many henchmen she had working for her, her security, her children wranglers. (Another woman did live in the house with them. A maid of sorts, who cooked and cleane
d and kept a kind of domesticity going, but Slick hardly remembers her. When he thinks of being fed or bathed or given new clothes – of being nurtured in any way – he thinks of Mama Africa, even though he cannot entirely be sure she deserves this place in his memories.)

  Of course, there were other children. There was Zelani, who had only one eye. There was Progress, who was deaf and was taught sign language by Mama Africa. There was Retief, the only white one among them, who Mama Africa said ‘would prove useful’. And many, many others besides with whom he shared rooms and roamed the poverty-rich streets of the inner city. But all of them fade from his memory when he thinks about that time of his life.

  His memory is like a large, echoing chamber at the centre of which are only him and Mama Africa.

  He is almost too scared to climb the stairs. If there is one thing that has changed, it is that the house no longer looks like home to him. It is alien. Like seeing a childhood friend after they have aged into themselves. Distorted, unkind.

  He hesitates on the pavement outside. Across the road, a hawker has set up her portable shop. A wooden plank laid across two upturned paint tins. Packets of crisps and bottles of Coke adorn the table. The hawker sits behind her goods, fanning her face with a newspaper, baring her broken teeth to the world. Slick would bet anything that what she is really selling is weed; in fact, she might even be selling some of his. He is quite well represented in this neighbourhood. Although she wouldn’t know that.

  Slick climbs the steps to the front door, which is standing open. The smell of decay is coming from the cool interior. According to his information, his target is on the first floor. The first room on the right. The room that had once belonged to the security guards, who had slept, like everyone else, on dirty mattresses on the floor. He’s been told that the rooms are now individually occupied. Every man for himself. The house no longer united, no longer a community. Which is a shame. But makes his life much easier.

  He doesn’t knock on the door, walks straight in. ‘Desré?’ he says as he enters. ‘I want my money.’ The room smells salty and sweet at the same time – a pot of putu is cooking in the corner, forgotten by Desré, almost to burning point. Desré herself is sitting in another corner on a low chair – a box, really – holding her head against the surface of a mirror. Her breath fogs up the glass. Her eyes are half-closed. She is wearing a purple tank top that doesn’t fit over her pale, protruding stomach. The fattest heroin addict he has ever seen.

  She has noticed him, and is trying to say something. But the words are coming out as desperate nonsensical sounds. She is slobbering. He wonders if she’s going to overdose. He begins to search the room. She must have something valuable somewhere.

  ‘Hey,’ she manages to say, ‘hey, stop stealing my stuff.’ He ignores her.

  His search doesn’t take long. Except for the single hotplate, perched precariously on a chair, and a few items of food, she has nothing in her possession. He hesitates to search her body. She is so dirty it makes his fingers itch.

  So he settles for hunching down beside her and tipping her face towards him with a finger. ‘Desré,’ he says, giving her a little slap, ‘can you hear me?’

  She makes a sound that could mean anything. He’ll have to wait out her high, see if she’s going to make it. He is sure, at least, that she hasn’t got any more drugs with her. And eventually she’ll want some, and then she’ll have to listen.

  She owes him two back payments. It’s his own fault for letting her slide into so much debt. It’s a habit he’s been getting into, giving away things for free, trusting people. He should have known better, but she’s an old friend; she grew up in this house too. No mystery why she chose to come back here when she had nowhere left to go. Although when Slick’s informant found her, he hadn’t quite believed it could be true.

  He sits down next to the stovetop and helps himself to some putu. There’s a carton of buttermilk next to the stove. He pours a thick layer of buttermilk over his spoils and looks down at the wounded woman. Taking a bite of the creamy-delicious porridge, he keeps it in his mouth longer than is necessary; he relishes it.

  ‘You’re giving me my money today,’ he says to her. ‘Or I’ll kill you.’

  4

  Justice is slow. Nolwazi is used to that.

  Labs are lethargic and underfunded, results delayed and delayed again. Backlogs, backlogs, backlogs. Often you can only really start work on a case six months after it is first opened, when evidence begins appearing in dribs and drabs. It’s pointless to complain, and unlike some of her colleagues, Nolwazi doesn’t spend her time banging her head against that particular wall. The system is the system is the system, and you have to work inside it as best you can. Eventually frustration becomes such a solid, real part of your everyday life that if you didn’t let it go, you would lose your ability to be effective. Things happen slowly, and most days are boring.

  She puts Benjamin Rust’s ballistics reports aside.

  No, for swift justice, she relies on television. Crimes on television are intellectual and pacey. Television gives her heroes and villains, reasons and justifications. Morality. On television, crime is a game, a mystery everyone participates in. And better yet, they know they are participating. Everyone knows what the stakes are. The criminals are arch and cunning; they have clear, unquestionable motives. The detectives are athletic and philosophical. Fictitious crime has rules. You know there’s a twist coming, because there’s always a twist coming.

  In reality, crime isn’t a puzzle, isn’t something that can be arranged into a taut, tense sequence. It just is. There are the facts you have, and the ones you don’t. There is no aha! moment. She’s investigated hundreds of cases and she’s never, not once, done anything but follow the evidence to a clear and obvious conclusion. No mystery. No whodunit. No running into abandoned warehouses by herself with only her gun and wits to guide her. No tricking someone into giving a confession. She just collects the evidence, makes the arrest, and sends the suspect and evidence to court. It’s easy; it’s procedure.

  Most criminals are stupid. Stupid and desperate and lonely. Most of them don’t understand themselves, let alone the complex pathology that led them to commit a crime. They aren’t insightful. Even the smart ones are only smart enough to get away with it for a while. In those cases ‘smart’ usually translates to ‘rich’.

  ‘Hey, daydreamer? Boss wants to see you, babe.’ Angie is looking down at her, her bright pink eyelids lifted in mock curiosity, her too-red lips pursed.

  ‘Did he say what he wanted?’

  ‘He wants you. Babe.’

  ‘Shut up, Ange.’ Nolwazi gets up reluctantly, plucking at her blouse. Angie always manages to look so voluptuous, even in her uniform, oozing sex appeal. Next to Angie, Nolwazi feels plain, and she hates that. She hates the feeling; hates what it says about her. She hates jealousy – in her experience, the root of all things abusive.

  The colonel’s office is down a long, narrow hallway. The office itself smells like old cigarettes. He calls ‘Come’ when she knocks, in his soft, high-pitched voice. He is a big man, tall and fat, and he fills up almost the entire space behind his too-large desk. He is wearing a brown suit that doesn’t fit. He never wears his uniform; she doubts there is a uniform big enough to fit him. He smiles when she comes in, and says, ‘Sit, sit.’

  His eyes are yellow and small.

  The colonel reminds Nolwazi of her father. Something about the sharpness of his jaw and the way he tilts his head, examining you as you approach him. Something about the way he gives you bad news with a smile. Something about the way he looks at her – she’s not a person; an employee, a wife, or a daughter, but something to overpower. She knows how to deal with that gaze: she meets it. Usually, that is enough. Usually, he is shamed. It’s the ones without shame you have to look out for.

  ‘Tell me about the Benjamin Rust shooting,’ he says.

  ‘Well, sir. There’s not much to report. You know how long these things take.
I finally got the ballistics reports this morning. I’m still waiting for the forensic report on the victim’s car. I received the DNA and blood-tests report last week, but it only confirmed what we already knew. His blood tests showed marijuana in his system, but nothing else.’

  ‘The thing is, this relative of his—’

  ‘His sister?’

  ‘No, she stopped calling months ago, right. No, this aunt or whatever she is. Philomena Ash. She keeps calling here and now she’s threatening to launch an official complaint. Says we aren’t doing enough, right. Says she wants us to give back his car. And his phone. So you need to go and talk to her. Convince her we’re working hard on this case. And it couldn’t hurt to speak to the sister again. Right? And speak to more of his friends. He must have some.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The colonel is quiet for a moment. ‘This case is the reason you got your second chance, right,’ he says. ‘The reason you don’t have to run around wagging your finger at spoilt rich kids any more.’

  ‘No,’ she says sullenly, ‘just find out who shot them.’ She regrets it as soon as she says it, and the colonel’s expression is enough to cause a surge of shame to rise up her spine. She quickly tries to cover her mistake. ‘The thing is, sir. The ballistics report backs up the autopsy, sir. The bullet angle of the shot and so forth, it looks like the gun was fired from fewer than sixty centimetres from the car.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, the shooter’s car couldn’t have been that close to the victim’s car, sir. If the shooter shot from his driver’s seat while the victim was in his driver’s seat, as we previously assumed based on the eye-witness testimony, then the bullet would have travelled at least a metre. Added to the fact that Benjamin Rust must have been facing his shooter head on, which means he was shot as he was turning his car.’