The Harbinger

by Mark Graham

  “Som bitch,” he hissed, working himself up an ire, truculency being one of Sam’s weaker suits. “Mo’ fo’ can just up and take his goddamn snooze some other place, and thas fo’ sure.”

  Shoulders squared and lunch sack swinging, Sam took long, loud strides across the concrete floor. “Okay, mister,” he snapped. “Yeah, you.”

  But Sam stopped cold. A shiver leapt from his lower back to the hair on the top of his head. It smelled like ol’ Jolly Fanon’s cell after that stupid guinea pig of his up and died, and ol’ Jolly wouldn’t take it out of its cage for a week. No, man, Sam thought, this’s worse. Guy musta drunk his fill of something awful nasty, an then up an puked right where he passed out.

  Sam held his nose. He walked closer. Forty-watt bulbs didn’t provide much light, but he saw flies buzzing about the head and something else moving around the face.

  “Hey, mo’ fo’, what the shit you doing down here?” Sam shouted. “Get your ass up, will you? Get on outa here.”

  Sam grabbed a handful of hair. He pulled the head back, and a black hole jumped out at him from between sunken eyeballs.

  Sam screamed first and then threw up.

  ****

  The telephone rang as Nigel Mansell laid swimming trunks into the bottom of a suitcase. On the third ring, he heard Jennifer answer. He waited thirty seconds before relaxing again.

  As he was crossing the floor to his chest of drawers, the full-length mirror next to Jennifer’s dressing table caught his eye, and he stood before it. He wore Jockey shorts and slippers. Genetic inheritance having blessed Mansell with a lithe, rangy body, he rarely exercised. Squash and snorkeling when time permitted. Still, he weighed in at eighty kilograms, and most of it was still in the same places it had been ten years ago. But the ivory hue of his skin caused Mansell to sigh. Silently, with shoulders ridged and a smirk on his face, he ordered himself to find time for a few hours of sun this weekend. For the good of your own reflection, he thought.

  When Jennifer entered the room, he struck a comic strong-man pose. She didn’t notice. “Who was it?” he asked.

  “Your office. I told them you’d already gone up to the bay.” “Any message?”

  “I didn’t ask.” Jennifer stripped off nylon stockings. “You’re on vacation for seventy-two hours, remember?”

  Expelling a sharp breath, Mansell walked to the oak lampstand next to the bed. “I’m not a stockbroker. I’m a servant of die Volk, remember?”

  “The bloody arm of the law. I wish to God you were a stockbroker.” He picked up the phone and dialed.

  Mansell left Jennifer with the Impala and the promise to meet her later that evening at Jarrad and Harriet Pruitt’s in Oyster Bay. He drove the police sedan to the airport.

  “The victim was sitting in this chair, in this very spot when he was shot,” said the pathologist. Steenkamp brushed fly eggs and maggots away from the face. Mansell sucked smoke into his lungs, a futile attempt to combat the attack on his olfactory senses. Despite powder burns, a tattooing ring around the bullet hole, and the blackish hollow between the eyes, Mansell knew he was looking at Fredrik Steiner.

  “A single bullet entered here at the base of the frontal,” Steenkamp continued, “exiting a centimeter below the occipital. Extremely close range.

  The chief inspector stood opposite the luggage cart. He struck a classic stance for firing a handgun: feet spread, arms extended, hands together, a finger impersonating the gun barrel.

  “Sixty to eighty centimeters. A clean shot.”

  “It’s cool enough down here,” said Steenkamp, “but putrefaction is well advanced. Our friends the maggots and their busy cohorts attest to that.”

  Bloating from gas, darkening of the skin of the suspended arm, blisters, discoloration. All tools used to pinpoint time of death. But an unused airline ticket would probably suffice, thought Mansell. He said, “He had a plane ticket to Jo’burg at nine thirty-eight the morning of the fourth.”

  “Someone displayed a rather strong prejudice against his being aboard, I’d say.” Steenkamp continued his examination. The pool of dried blood on the luggage rack was small, the muscles of the face slack. “He died immediately, and, I’m quite sure, without protest.

  Four meters behind the victim, there stood a framed wall covered only in Sheetrock. Mansell stepped around the luggage rack, positioned himself with his back to the victim, and took four steps. He bent down. The concrete was dusted with white powder. A recent occurrence, he thought. With his fingertips, Mansell picked up fragments of the white granules. He followed the line to the wall. A puncture hole the size of a goose egg revealed itself in the Sheetrock a meter up from the floor. Using a penknife, Mansell cut away the drywall. He found the bullet embedded dead center in a stud.

  “A gunman of remarkable accuracy,” he said, wrapping the slug in a cotton handkerchief.

  Amid the lumination of portable flood lamps, Anna Goodell photographed the scene. She completed detailed sketches from three different viewpoints. At last, they moved the body away from the luggage rack. Steenkamp checked the abdominal area and the lower extremities. Mansell searched the victim’s pockets. They were, except for a single piece of paper, the size of a business card, empty. He discovered the card in Steiner’s shirt pocket. He extracted it with great care. The card was blank on one side, but on the other, four words had been typed. They read “Caves of the Womb.”

  Mansell stared at the words like an aging philosopher convinced, beyond doubt, that he must surely be on the brink of some profound epiphany, only to find his memory failing and his mind wandering.

  He passed both card and bullet to the chief of forensic science and ordered the body removed for immediate autopsy. He and Joshua proceeded with their search. They found the freight elevator inoperable, but little in the way of physical evidence.

  While Forensic set about its tasks, Mansell spent fifteen minutes with Samuel Crawley. The witness was excitable, curious, and undeniably without guilt. His lack of insight into the matter was equally undeniable, and Mansell sent him back to the boiler room with a pack of cigarettes and an uneaten lunch.

  A moment later, Merriman Gosani returned from upstairs with a half-eaten candy bar and a full scratch pad.

  “I spent an hour with the airport chief of operations and the maintenance super,” he told Mansell. “The freight elevator’s been out of action all week.”

  “And they discovered that when?”

  “Monday, the super said, but it was definitely in working order last week. The elevator stops at every floor—in the baggage-claim area on the lower level, on concourse A on the first floor, in the terminal cafeteria on two, and in an employees’ lounge on three. But it’s rarely used.” Merry showed Mansell a typed page with ten names on it. “The elevator is key-operated. Those are the names of the people with keys, but the super said spares are available on the board in the employees’ locker and in his office. I’ve got a man working through the list right now.”

  “Okay. The elevator stops at four places. Use those as your reference points,” Mansell said. “Start with the employees in baggage claim and on the concourse, and anyone who might have used the lounge or the cafeteria on Friday the fourth. If nobody ever uses the elevator, then maybe someone noticed something. Use the portrait sketches we got from Lea Goduka and the manager of The Outdoorsman. Who knows?”

  They started back toward the crime scene, a stage now illuminated by purple spots and flashing speedlights.

  “By the way,” Merry said, “didn’t you have plans for this weekend, pal?”

  The chief inspector raised an eyebrow, and Merry turned away, smiling. Mansell fished for a cigarette. The words wouldn’t leave him alone. The Caves of the Womb, he thought, extemporizing, . . . where blue light flickers from the soul of the earth and the sun is . . . and the sun is what? . . . Damn it.

  He went in search of a telephone.

  Mansell harbored a strange fondness for the ballistics lab.

  It was a s
mall room with a worn tile floor and pale green cement walls. Some energetic soul had plastered the walls with posters of Table Mountain and graphics from a production of Carmen.

  A water tank four meters long dominated the space. A marble counter filled with X-ray lamps and photographs lined one wall. The lab technician was scanning the bullet through a comparison microscope when Mansell arrived with a Styrofoam cup of hot tea and lemon.

  Mansell leaned over the apparatus, adjusting the focus. Beneath the left eyepiece lay the slug he had taken from the stud at the airport. A second bullet occupied the right slide, an unfired comparison. The first was severely damaged from contact with bone, concrete, and wood.

  “It’s not one we see very often, Inspector,” said the technician. “It’s a .45-caliber manufactured primarily for an American semiautomatic. The model number is M1191 Al. It’s a service weapon by and large.”

  “The U.S. Army pistol.”

  “Standard issue,” he replied with a shrug that barely concealed his enthusiasm. “Check the rifling, Inspector, and the lands and grooves.”

  “New?”

  “Brand-new. The gun hadn’t been fired before, period. This was the first bullet.” Mansell sipped his tea, listening. He glanced at the wall clock. Four-fifteen. The technician showed him a photo of the gun. “It’s a beautiful design.”

  “John Browning, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s it. Nineteen fifteen.” Excitement burst forth. “The United States Army has used various versions of this same gun ever since. But it hasn’t been imported here to any extent since the mid-1960s. And since the ‘77 embargo, well, not at all.”

  Mansell departed ballistics at a slow gait, cursing his addiction while striking the match.

  A gun that hasn’t appeared in this country, legally, for over ten years, he thought. How likely is it that someone has had a brand-new .45-caliber handgun stashed in an underwear drawer in his bedroom for the last ten years? The victim knew his assailant, trusted him some—enough. Enough to follow him down a rusty freight elevator to a dingy basement three floors below the airport. Enough to sit quietly in a folding chair while the man put a bullet between his eyes. Steiner was a professional himself, and how often does a guy like that let his guard down? Mansell wondered. With a friend maybe, or an accomplice. Or his employer. Which means they were talking about what? Money? A new contract? More money?

  Since homicide was the spice of their science, the specialists in Forensic always appreciated a visit from the chief inspector. The one vacuuming pockets from the victim’s clothes smiled thinly. A second scraped blood samples from the luggage cart.

  Chas du Toits had just returned from the airport.

  “What we know for certain is what you know for certain,” he offered. A spark of mischief flashed from his eyes, for there existed a definite correlation between an inspector’s consternation and the rising value of his forensic team. “The victim is definitely Fredrik Steiner. We have print confirmation. We have the shoes. We have SEM and protein analysis on the hair.”

  “My day is made. And how about the clothes?” Mansell hoped that a locally produced item might give a clue to Steiner’s employer. “Any idea on the manufacturer or the place of purchase?”

  “Playing the long odds, are we?” Du Toits turned up the collar on Steiner’s long-sleeved shirt. Made in the People’s Republic of China. Fifty-five percent ramie. Forty-five percent cotton. “Who knows where clothes come from in this day and age? You could find the same shirt at Sander’s in Jo’burg or at La Bola here in P.E. The sweater comes from Italy, as we expected. Expensive, very nice.”

  “Anything on the card?”

  “Standard business-card stock, available at a thousand office-supply stores from here to Cape Town. No prints. But we know that the words were typed on a 1949 Olivetti portable. I like that. A nice touch. The character e is mis-set, high left. We’ll have more in the morning.”

  “Joshua will be around,” Mansell replied. “Don’t give him any less grief than you give me, please.”

  ****

  Oyster Bay, by carrier pigeon, was a hundred kilometers from the heart of Port Elizabeth. Using the freeway, the drive took an hour and twenty minutes, but Mansell opted for the scenic route, the beach highway. An impending dread hung about his shoulders, and he couldn’t talk himself out of it. The weekend, he told himself half sarcastically, meant putting out, facing up, and making decisions. Three of his favorite things. Absolutely. Still, he thought, Jarrad and Harriet were the kind of people you could spend a weekend with in comfort.

  Jarrad Pruitt and Mansell were college chums. They had met in the dormitory at the University of Natal. They shared the same suite, the same passion for tequila and hash, the same diet-pill approach to studying, some of the same women. Mansell began his education in marketing; Jarrad ended his there. Advertising, he never tired of telling Mansell, made the world spin. “People can be sold anything.” He was right, Mansell thought. The more fallacies that are applied, the more gullible people become, and the more society degenerates.

  He cranked down the back windows. Cool air filled the car as he drove southeast on Humewood Drive past the Apple Express into Summerstrand. In the spring and summer, the tourists flocked here. The beaches were wide and white. The water seldom dropped below seventy degrees. The waves were tailor-made for body surfing, and the women were so scantily clad that the imagination numbed.

  This evening it was quiet—a lone sailboat with a pinstripe spinnaker billowing in the breeze, a sunset washed in pinks and purples.

  The report from Research Bureau lay on the passenger seat next to a bag of green grapes and two bottles of Suaza tequila. Mansell switched on the radio. Humewood Drive mutated into a numerical interchange called M4. M4 swerved westward past the golf course and the Wool Institute. The University of Port Elizabeth slipped past on the right. A broad, flat champaign of wild grass and scrub oak opened up before him. The ocean protected his flank. He felt immune.

  Mansell picked up the research report. He anchored it across the steering wheel. A man, he thought, is shot down in cold blood. His body is stripped of every article except a business card with four words typed on one side. Why? Three explanations came to mind. Either the killer overlooked it, or he didn’t consider it of value, or he planted the card himself.

  When a dozen questions besieged him for every explanation rendered, Mansell took refuge in the report.

  The Caves of the Womb, it began, lay beneath the Pyrenees Mountains in the Basque Province of Spain, four kilometers east of the city of Tolosa. The caves were the remnants of an underground saltwater lake believed to have dried up ten million years ago. Theory suggests that the caves developed during the orogenic period of the Pyrenees. Over many millennia, underground streams from the Bay of Biscay served as the lake’s source.

  Ten million years ago the border plates between France and Spain collided. Structural onslaughts of incredible power and duration followed, and violent earthquakes sealed the caves from their natural water supply. Gradual desiccation began, a drying process evidenced by the huge pockets of sodium deposits that still lingered at the base of the caves.

  A mining expedition, led by a Spaniard named Diego Franco, discovered the caves in the early 1930s. Interest in the area developed after archeologists digging in the area found deposits of silver and high concentrations of cobalt. The Spanish government commissioned Franco to explore further. One hundred and twenty meters below the surface, they stumbled upon the great caverns. Initial estimates suggested that the caves covered 150 acres. Later exploration revised the figure to include thirty-four connecting caves covering 425 acres.

  The name, Caves of the Womb, originated from an entry in Diego Franco’s journal dated 7/18/33. It read, “We have tumbled into the belly of the mountain, the heart of the world, the caves of the womb where blue light flickers from the burning soul of the earth, and the sun is but a wishful dream at the doorstep of imagination.”

  Durin
g the Spanish Civil War the Basques used the caves for their base of operations in support of the Loyalist movement. As a precaution against invasion by pro-Franco forces, the Basques rigged explosives at the entrances to all surface tunnels and inside all access shafts. At their peak, in 1937, the caves housed as many as twenty-five hundred Basque soldiers, but they abandoned the caves on April 1, 1939, the day the Loyalists surrendered.

  The report’s last notation jumped off the page at Mansell, and he read it aloud. “Today, the caves are a favorite site for the sport of spelunking (the exploration of underground caves).”

  He read the whole report again, and then set it aside.

  The beach along M4 dissolved into a shoreline of rocks and tide pools. The road snaked through a rugged strip of land known as The Willows and narrowed outside the tiny village of Skoenmakerskop, the Shoemaker’s Hillock. Mansell eased off the gas, enjoying the shadowy view and the fragrant scent of evening. He plucked a handful of green grapes from the bag.

  At Sardinia Bay, the road turned inland. Mansell stopped for petrol at Sea View. He bought coffee and cigarettes. Here he caught the freeway and concentrated on driving. Fifteen kilometers later, he approached a narrow oiled road. The sign on the shoulder read, OYSTER BAY-6K.

  Jennifer walked along the beach with Harriet, a perfect contrast. Jennifer: blond, sleek, aloof. Harriet: Latin, buxom, challenging. Mansell and Harriet had cultivated a stormy relationship during his junior year at school. It lasted two months. Back then, she wore torn T-shirts and lace panties. She needed it twice a day, and her hands were always busy. Jarrad never asked, and Mansell never volunteered. Five kids and eighteen years had taken its toll on Harriet physically. But sexually? Mansell wondered.

  He and Jarrad sat on the redwood deck in the face of a gentle breeze. The air was alive with the fragrance of sea and jasmine. A waxing moon highlighted the whitecaps of tiny breakers and the foam of a rising tide. They drank tequila. Mansell listened to the ocean with one ear and Jarrad Pruitt with the other.