Talion

by Beyers de Vos

  The police have been sniffing around his drug operations in Hatfield for months. Raiding his runners, trying to get them to turn on him. But they’ve never managed to raid one of his premises before. And all of this was coming from higher up in the police force than he had access to. His friend had so far managed to warn him about all the raids, but it won’t be long before they find and remove his mole. As soon as Lucky was arrested, he’d warned his friend: run.

  No, his time is up.

  But before he goes, he has one last debt to settle. One last fire to burn. He doesn’t, strictly speaking, have to kill the teacher. He could just leave; he could just let Sophie and her father off the hook. Lucky is in jail, after all, which is its own punishment, and he doesn’t need any final payment from Sophie October. But the teacher took something from Slick that night he attacked him; did what his own father had done: taken his power. Power that Mama Africa had taught him to protect with all his might.

  Debts have to be settled.

  Slick’s been watching the teacher. He’s been meeting Sophie and Lucky at different locations, pushing them to deliver more cash, pushing his way into their lives so he can get closer to the teacher’s house, his school. He’s been outside his church, in his classroom. Inside his car. It took all Slick’s willpower not to kill him the first night he sat outside his house, watching through the window. But he had to be clever. He couldn’t be impulsive. Not again.

  Tonight, he finally feels confident enough to strike. He knows that the teacher has his weekly poker tonight. He knows the best time to attack is before the teacher leaves the house; Sophie will be gone. And the teacher will be relaxed, off his guard.

  He watches the city rattle past in the distance. The city that knows him too well, has seeped into his blood, has drained him of himself. It is time to go, time to flee. The pressure has become too much to handle, the weight of his life too heavy to carry. There are only so many disguises, so many crimes, so many bribes, so many people killed, before the connections begin to bubble to the surface, before the dots are connected. This past year has proved that. Benjamin Rust proved that. He’s had enough of Pretoria to last two lifetimes; it knows him too well. It can expose him. He needs to go; he needs to be somewhere that is harsher and sharper and darker.

  In a few hours this will come to an end, and this blasted city will see the last of him. And then. Then, a new future. A new place in which to breathe shadows, test his resilience, be anonymous.

  Time to disappear for good. Like Mama Africa.

  Like a man who never existed.

  16

  Lately, Freya barely remembers anything. Everything is a blur, a haze. She is encased in a single, never-ending moment. Ben’s death is still happening; it was seconds ago that she heard the gunshot ring out into the night. Her heart is still exploding, the fierce, purple energy combusting, coursing through her, driving her onwards. And beyond this moment, there is nothing but a warm darkness that Freya cannot see past, or through.

  But the end is here. Finally, the end is here.

  It is just before dusk, and Freya is thinking about how easy it is to watch people from a car. Nobody notices a car parked across the street or in a parking lot; nobody ever investigates it or tries to see who is inside. Nobody ever thinks it has anything to do with them. She thought that was something that only happened in movies: the suspicious car parked across the street, the oblivious victim none the wiser. She thought parking her car around the neighbourhood day in and out would arouse suspicion. But no one has said anything; no one has approached her. People just assume she’s supposed to be here. People don’t look around them. People don’t notice; they don’t want to notice.

  She is parked right across the street from Abraham’s house.

  Freya’s eyes are drawn to the space between pavement and street that offers entrance to a murky world below. It’s a hypnotic darkness, the sound and shadows flowing steadily through her. What monsters are staring up at her through the sewerage grates? If she looked beneath the concrete, beyond the facades, what would she find gazing back at her?

  Beneath these schizophrenic streets, what kind of heart is beating?

  Here is what Freya is going to do. Here is the plan: in a few minutes, she will sneak across his back wall, and she will take refuge in his shed.

  She will wait for his daughter to go to her friend’s house, like she does every weeknight.

  She will wait until he leaves for his poker game.

  As he walks from his front door to his car, she will walk up to him and shoot him dead.

  And then she’ll be free.

  It is that simple.

  ‘Only two more hours, Abraham,’ she whispers, ‘enjoy them.’

  Before

  1

  Ben sneaked a glance at his sister, sitting beside him, her forehead resting against the glass. She was deep in thought. She could be so intense sometimes, so fierce and so fragile in the same moment, like a thread of spider’s silk. It scared him.

  He had his final deliveries under the seat – he was quite proud of his new delivery system. If someone wanted a hook-up while they were out, they could simply message him the model and make of their car and their licence-plate number, and he would wait for the bank transfer and then slip into the parking lot, leaving the package in their vehicle. Like a spy, like being in a thriller.

  But that night was the last. He would tell Slick tomorrow: he was out. He had been skimming some money off the top anyway, which was exciting at first but then became tedious. He didn’t really need the money. He told Leo he did, but the truth was that their parents had left them with enough.

  Freya was tracing her finger against the window. She was always dood­ling on the surfaces of things with her finger. She smiled at him. ‘Every­thing okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m really happy.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. Then, frowning, ‘Eric is calling.’ She sighed, ignoring the vibrating phone on her lap. Ben could sense that she didn’t want to talk to Eric in front of him.

  ‘Well, jump out.’ He stopped the car. ‘I’ll park. Get me a double. I’ll see you in there.’

  ‘Yup,’ she said, ‘see you in there.’

  Murder

  June

  1

  The city hovers above itself, looking down through the smog; the city lingers underneath itself, looking up from the screaming streets. From trees and skyscrapers, out of windows and through steel, the city sees the four people collide in the tiny backyard in Sunnyside.

  The city can feel the halo of grief – blue like a bruise, like a fallen berry, like a broken heart – and anger – red like a wound, like a falling knife, like a burst balloon – radiating outwards.

  The city can sense the impending bloodshed; the city craves it.

  The city smiles.

  The city rushes in.

  Tuesday

  2

  Freya will never forget Ben’s last breath. It touched her cheek: a warm, wet exhalation which coated her skin. In the dusky lavender light slipping through the shed’s window, Freya can still feel it there: the final evidence of his life condensing on her cold face.

  She stands waiting for the man who killed her brother.

  She stands perfectly still, unwilling to disturb the stale air inside the cabin, reading the symbols on the walls one more time, drawing power from them.

  But something isn’t right.

  She watches the mulberry tree, the tree that reminds her so of Ben. It seems to be forged from ice, so dark and grey has the winter made it. And Freya can clearly see the red, red berries that will hang plump on the branches in a few months, fall to the ground and burst like wounds. She can see them as if they were real, just as she can feel the blood of the heron on her hands. Just as she can see her mother’s bloody fingerprint floating above her. As she can feel Cheery’s skull cracking underneath her hands.

  And if you asked her right here and now, right in this mome
nt, the ghostly tree hanging over her, what the colour of time is, she would say that it is purple.

  Purple: the colour of corruption, the colour of rot, the colour of life, the colour of death.

  3

  Slick has left the bustle behind him, passed the great lofty schools and the churches with their spires, walked along the blue street beneath the dead trees, following it as it narrowed and folded back on itself, until coming here, to the top of the cul-de-sac. There is the little white house behind the faded blue gate, in this unconcerned, unremarkable street, where unremarkable people live unremarkable lives; everyone getting ready for dinner, sitting on plastic chairs eating plastic food. Not knowing that in a few minutes, the texture and timbre of this street will for ever change, for ever have blood on its hands.

  He can feel the magnetism of the kill pulling him forward, guiding him. This kill seems more significant than the others, more significant than his father, than Benjamin Rust. The teacher means nothing to him, did not betray him nearly as significantly as either of those people. But this will be his last kill, his final contribution to this city that has forged him. As he walks, he feels lighter; he feels the warmth of a fire at his back. He imagines the whole city burning behind him, the whole of Pretoria erupting into ash, blackening the sky.

  He feels cleansed, unborn.

  Slick is ready, ready to fade from this world.

  4

  Before they step out the door, Mr October gives his daughter a kiss on the forehead. And hands her the car keys.

  ‘You ready to do this?’

  She nods and takes the keys from him. She has gone quiet since lunch, her eyes infused with a sad glimmer.

  ‘Everything will be okay, sweetheart. This is the beginning of better days.’ His words sound slightly hollow even to him, but he tries to breathe as much truth into them as he can. ‘Should we go?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says.

  5

  The rough texture of brick is still crawling on his skin when Slick lands on the other side of the wall with a silent thud. He squats, hiding in the shadow of the wall; there is a security light atop the wall that will switch on if he moves, so he sits perfectly still. The breeze itches across his sweaty brow; he can smell himself, the scent of adrenaline, the scent of the hunt. His lip twitches; he flexes the muscles in his shoulder. He has his gun in his hand. His other hand is pressed down into the grass; it scratches. He can hear the distant slam of a door, the rumble of an engine – the sounds of a heavy day exhaling, settling down.

  He tenses his muscles; he is ready to leap up. To run across the lawn, lithe and powerful, to shoot down his enemy. And then to jump across the back wall and disappear into the maze of the streets, to flee into the inner city.

  When he hears the click of the front door, he steps into the light.

  6

  Freya steps out of the shed when she hears voices.

  It is now or never.

  She has a clear view of the front garden, and she hears Abraham and his daughter talking as they walk down the front steps. They will come around the corner any second now.

  Freya has a vision of the daughter’s shoe pressing down on the discarded hose lying beneath the tap seconds before the real shoe comes into view and deftly avoids the hose altogether.

  They are framed by the dusk-made sky, the bruised blue. Dappled in shadow from the big tree. Everything in this second is hushed: Freya stands in the doorway of the shed like a shadow-soaked ghost, watching Abraham and Sophie move through a living world. She is on the edge of this pretty suburbia, this father and daughter walking from their whitewashed house to their car, along a paved stone pathway, underneath a mulberry tree, past a garden bench, past a rake leaning casually against the outside wall, listening to the distant humming of a pool-pump and sprinkler system, cars on busy roads not so far away: a whole world of normal things happening just as they should.

  And she, the wound on the edge of it all, about to throw balance into chaos.

  She raises her gun.

  And then, on the other side of the garden, there rises another shadow. Taller and thicker than she is, come for vengeance, too.

  7

  The experience of your own life is a difficult thing to describe from the inside. If he wrote it down, then he could perhaps examine it with an objective eye, reach into the abyss and explain all his choices, interrogate the turning points – sequence his life like it was something that had a beginning, a middle, an end. But lived life doesn’t read like that; it’s something you live from one moment to the next. On some days, things happen. Some days, things don’t. Sometimes you remember, sometimes you don’t. Life is much more random than memories would lead you to believe. Hindsight is a tricky, foolish device.

  Stories happen in the past; life happens now.

  Is happening now.

  But there are moments, certain moments, when your life seems to be coming to a point: when you see your choices stretch out behind you, your consequences out in front of you, and you are in both the future and the past at the same time. Suspended between the two with a clear view, a crystalline vision of your whole life. You see the points in time where things could have gone differently.

  Illumination.

  A young woman pointing a gun at him. And maybe this is God sending an angel to avenge all the choices he’s made that led to this night, this way of life. An angel with the saddest eyes he has ever seen.

  Pull the trigger, angel. Let me fall.

  The shots echo into the purple night, and the world goes black.

  8

  When the first shot rings out, Freya falls to her knees.

  When the second shot rings out, she drops her gun at her side.

  She watches Abraham October’s face convulse, his eyes narrow. His hand comes up halfway to his chest, as if he wants to pull his heart out, before it falls back down to his side, slack.

  Freya is filled with a great relief, an electric relief so powerful that her skin tingles, that she begins to cry. She hears herself screaming – great anguished screams – but they sound odd against the bliss, the blistering bliss surging through her.

  The night is dark and warm. She can smell the mulberry tree; she feels Ben’s breath against her face.

  ‘I love you, Sizzle,’ he says.

  ‘I love you too, Rusty,’ she says.

  After

  The crime scene is smeared across her vision, a stain. It hovers just in front of, just behind, the real world. A mirage. A bloody, ghostly mirage.

  Nolwazi is driving back to the station, through these quiet Pretoria streets. The city in the witching hours: desolate, peaceful, indifferent.

  A few minutes ago, she had been standing among the corpses silently, while police activity rotated around her. Urgent whispers, forensic teams pushing past.

  A barricade of police cars at the end of the driveway; a driveway which snaked between the bodies towards the dirty street.

  She had looked down at her shoes, the protective crime-scene shoe-glove glinting whitely under the June moon. Her shoes caked in mud. Big spotlights had been erected, all the better to see the dead with.

  She had felt, in the moment, like the axis of something. The bodies pointed away from her like arms of a clock.

  She could probably close the Benjamin Rust case, now that they’d found the man driving the red car. Even though her instinct all along has been that something else happened that night.

  Freya Rust had been sure, though. Sure enough to hunt him down.

  A tangled thing. A complex knot that will need careful untying. Not her job. The job of Sunnyside Police Station. Only reason she was called in at all was because her name came up in connection with Freya Rust. A courtesy call by the Sunnyside detective at the scene; an old acquaintance.

  Now Philomena Ash was waiting for her. Waiting for news. Nolwazi, the messenger of doom.

  She had looked at Sophie October sitting on the steps of the house and immediately recognised her, a
nd when she spoke to her later, the girl’s voice somehow both soft and sharp, Nolwazi regretted the way she had been jealous of her the night Benjamin Rust was shot. So long ago, and not long ago at all.

  Sophie October is heartbroken, overwhelmed, shocked. And full of anger. Nothing wrong with anger; it can be a force of liberation. Anger can be logical and methodical. It can be used to make something; it can be harnessed, deployed, made useful. But Nolwazi saw hatred there too, pure and proud. That would destroy her. Like it had Freya Rust.

  She tried to explain that to Sophie October after she questioned her. Tried to make her see. Tried to get her to understand she could break the cycle. But who is Nolwazi to be trusted by Sophie October?

  Freya Rust certainly hadn’t trusted her. And look where that got Freya Rust.

  Nolwazi had looked at the scene around her, at the bodies and where they had fallen, the bullet casings and where they had landed, the abandoned gun on the wet grass. She looked at the blood, the pools of it on the ground, the tissue matter scattered around the scene like confetti, like horribly pink confetti. And she had had a vision of events as they unfolded.

  The facts as she understood them: Freya Rust had somehow tracked down Abraham October to his house. Nolwazi remembers the cracked voice, the cracked and cunning voice of Freya Rust, which had said, ‘His name is Abraham. He’s really helping me cope.’

  Abraham October, for his part, had no criminal record. Upstanding citizen. Except for the stolen car he drove. She would get a stab at that red car once the Sunnyside guys were done with it. Not that she was optimistic.