Man Down

by Roger Smith

  As she went down the stairs she looked back and saw that they were standing in the doorway of the boy’s apartment, talking to him, glancing in her direction.

  5

  Tanya, blood flowing between the fingers pressed to her cheek, turned and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Shorty asked.

  “To stop the bleeding,” she said, still walking.

  Shorty jabbed a gloved finger at Turner.

  “Watch him,” he said to Bone and took off after Tanya.

  He grabbed her by her shirt, spun her and flung her against the refrigerator, her back dislodging a clutch of Lucy’s poetry magnets that clattered to the tiled floor.

  Shorty put the pistol to Tanya’s head.

  “Listen, bitch, I think you have a problem understanding the chain of command here.”

  Tanya stared at him, her breath ragged.

  “Fuck you,” she said and Turner couldn’t but admire her kamikaze pluck.

  Shorty laughed, shrugged his shoulders and looked back toward Turner and the masked men standing like awkward party guests in the living room.

  “Well, ain’t she the little firecracker?”

  Moving very deliberately he placed his pistol beside the blender on the counter, far from Tanya’s reach, slid open the silverware drawer and in one rapid motion grabbed Tanya’s left hand, shoved her fingers in the drawer and slammed it shut.

  Turner could hear the sharp crack of her bones breaking.

  Tanya gasped, sobbed and sank to her knees, head slumped, blood dripping onto her blouse, her hand still trapped in the drawer that Shorty held closed.

  He lifted her chin with the toe of his Reebok, forcing her to look up at him.

  “Do you grasp the new order of your little universe?’

  She nodded.

  “Use your words, bitch. Use your words.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice thin with pain.

  He released the drawer and Tanya removed her hand, the broken digits dangling. She employed her good hand to cradle the ruined one and sat rocking, blood and tears flowing unhindered from her face, puddling the floor.

  Shorty retrieved his weapon and stood over her with the gun hanging loose at his side.

  “Now, the milk of human kindness runs as strong through my veins as any man and it looks to me like you’re in need of some assistance.” He cocked a finger at Turner. “You, get over here and help her.”

  Turner approached Tanya cautiously, half expecting her to spit and hiss at him like a wounded animal, and when he laid a hand on her bony shoulder she shrugged it off with a violent twitch.

  “Just get the first aid kit, for fuck’s sake,” she said through clenched teeth.

  He stared down at her blankly, unaware that they owned such a thing.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, “it’s in the cabinet below the sink.”

  Turner knelt and opened the cabinet, smelling the foul marsh gassy odor coming from the U-bend.

  Moving aside containers of solvents and detergents, he spied a small plastic tackle box that he grabbed by the handles and lifted out onto the floor.

  Removing the lid he exposed layers of fold-out trays crammed with bandages, Band-Aids, antiseptic creams and over-the-counter drugs.

  “Clean the cut on my cheek and close it with surgical tape, then bandage my fingers,” Tanya said.

  With shaking hands Turner lifted a cotton ball from the box, stood and moistened it under the faucet. Taking his small, skinny wife by the elbow, he helped her to her feet and wiped the gash on her face, which still oozed blood. Then he squeezed antiseptic ointment onto another ball and applied it to her cheek.

  It stung and she shut her eyes and cursed under her breath.

  Finding a square of sterile gauze in the tackle box he secured it over the wound with medical adhesive tape, his fingertips brushing her skin.

  This was the closest Turner had been to his wife in a very long while.

  They slept in separate bedrooms and their marriage had degenerated into a protracted war that consisted of lobbing verbal mortars at each from a distance.

  Forced into this unaccustomed proximity he saw the years had not been kind to Tanya. There were flecks of gray in her cropped hair that he’d never noticed before and she looked much older than forty-five.

  Tanya still equated feminism with a denial of femininity and scorned beauty products as frivolous. Her blemished, sun-browned skin was crosshatched with wrinkles and a stippling of blackheads like Benday dots clogged the pores of her nose. It was as if her anger and dissatisfaction had found expression on the canvas of her dry, pitted skin.

  She resembled a stunted, prematurely aged boy.

  Turner remembered the first time he saw Tanya, when he’d arrived home close to midday still drunk and high after a night of carousing, spying what he took to be a scrawny young man lying naked on the grass in the African sun outside the long-vacant cottage beside his.

  It was only when Tanya had sat up and stared at him, allowing gravity to coax two tiny breasts from her bony chest, that he’d realized his new neighbor was a woman. Ten minutes later they were on his mattress, fucking.

  Turner stepped away from Tanya and inspected her hand. The thumb was unharmed but the fingers were crooked, already swelling and turning a mottled yellow-blue. He had no idea what to do next.

  “Just tape my fingers together,” Tanya said.

  Taking her injured hand—she hissed and whinnied—he turned it palm up and used the adhesive tape to bind the fingers tightly.

  Shorty hovered in close attendance throughout.

  A blast of music had them all looking toward the living room. Tard had approached Lucy’s docked iPod and prodded it to life. Some mindless teen pop—Justin Bieber?—blared out.

  “Fuckin shut that down!” Shorty shouted.

  The giant flayed at the iPod but the music continued.

  Shorty stalked halfway out the kitchen, yelling, and Tanya took advantage of the diversion to hiss in Turner’s ear.

  “We have to do something. They’re going to kill us.”

  “Just do as they say. Don’t piss them off.”

  “Jesus, you’re a useless piece of shit.”

  “If they’re going to kill us why are they bothering with masks?” Turner said.

  “They’re using their fucking names, you brain-dead asshole.”

  “Tard? Bone? Shorty? Those aren’t names.”

  “What the fuck are they then?”

  “Codenames. Aliases.”

  “Jesus, do you think this is a fucking Hardy Boys novel?”

  The music ended abruptly and Turner heard the squeak of Shorty’s shoes on the tiles as he advanced, yelling at them to shut up, the barrel of his pistol a hypnotic black eye.

  Tanya, leaning in close, her bitter breath hot on Turner’s ear, said, “Maybe it’s your karma to die like this but not a fuck is it mine.”

  6

  Turner acknowledged, of course, that ten years ago the weave of his life had been way loose and searching for the single strand that had started the unraveling would be foolish, but the moment when Chris Bekker had skimmed the wad of cash toward him along the sticky surface of the Johannesburg bar counter (his memory of palming the banknotes—wilted and damp as salad leaves from being in the rogue cop’s back pocket on that furnace of a day—strained through the broth of booze and drugs that he’d consumed in such heroic proportions in that long ago time in a country far, far away) had taken on an emblematic weight.

  For an eternity Turner had sat and stared at the folded bills that lay grinning at him in the bitter yellow beam of a downlight, his terror after the encounter with Mr. Paul two nights before driving him to self-medicate with alcohol, weed, barbiturates and some nostril-scouring pulverulence that’d been touted as cocaine but, in its blunt assault on his neuroreceptors, had more closely resembled angel dust and he’d needed to keep one eye closed in order to maintain his precarious
balance on the stool.

  “What the fuck’s this?” he asked in a voice so slow and slurred he sounded like a digitally distorted snitch on a TV crime report.

  “I’ll tell you what its not,” Bekker said. “It’s not fifty k.”

  Turner blinked, confused.

  “Call it a down payment, Englishman,” Bekker said, fixing his boy band hair in the mirror behind the bar.

  Now, Turner was no Englishman—he was South African five generations deep and had never set foot in England, but he’d grown up speaking English, which set him across a cultural and ideological divide from Afrikaners like Bekker, who, despite their cosmopolitan pretensions, would always use his mother tongue to define his otherness.

  Turner shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it and looked at the cop who was still inspecting himself in the mirror.

  Slight, almost pretty, with his moussed black hair and his designer clothes, Chris Bekker looked more Latin than Afrikaans and was often mistaken for someone in fashion or on the fringes of what passed for show business in South Africa.

  Nobody ever guessed he was a cop.

  “A down payment for what?” Turner asked.

  “I heard about the little DIY thing.”

  “With Mr. Paul?”

  “Yes, with Mr. Paul,” Bekker said, adding Coke to his brandy. “You have to admit, it was a fuckin great bit of theater.”

  “Yeah,” Turner said, “especially if you had a front row seat.”

  “A smart move on his part,” Bekker said.

  “Well, he scared the shit out of me.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Englishman, that performance wasn’t for you alone.”

  “No?”

  “No. Mr. Paul knew word would get around that he was prepared to kill a white man if he was crossed. Now that means one helluva lot more than just offing some jungle bunny.”

  “True.”

  “And now you’re into him for fifty k?”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’ve got one finger on the pulse of this whore of a city and another deep up its rotten asshole,” Bekker said, drinking. “I know fuckin everything.”

  He looked at Turner.

  “You’re a stupid cunt.”

  “Yes, I’m a stupid cunt.”

  “How did you let things get so fucked up?”

  Turner shrugged. “Mr. Paul extended me a line of credit.”

  “Which you shnarfed up your nose?”

  “Elegantly put.” Turner looked across at Bekker. “Can you help me?”

  “Help you how?”

  “Speak to Mr. Paul.”

  Bekker shook his head.

  “I’ve got no pull with him, buddy. Not when it comes to this.” He lit a cigarette. “But I may be able to help you in another way.”

  “How?”

  “With the money.”

  “With the money?’

  “Yes.”

  “You’d give me fifty grand?”

  “No, I wouldn’t give you fifty grand. I’d maybe put you in a position to earn fifty grand.”

  “Earn it how?”

  Bekker shrugged. “You’ll know when I know.”

  Turner tapped the banknotes that lay on the bar counter.

  “There’s a story behind it, isn’t there? This money?”

  “There’s always a fuckin story.”

  And there always was with Christiaan Bekker—dubbed Bek (Afrikaans for animal’s mouth) by his colleagues—who didn’t look like a cop and definitely didn’t look (or sound) like he’d dragged himself from a scummy gene pool of interbred chicken farmers from the badlands east of Johannesburg.

  He was proud of his English and he’d carefully honed away the guttural vowels that clotted the speech of most Afrikaners.

  It was his talent as a monologist (spewing a stream of profanity and baroque racism so vivid it became a form of scat poetry) that’d attracted the wannabe writer in Turner, even though it was in his role as a small-time narcotics merchant that he’d first encountered Bekker a year before as a minnow caught in a drug sting, arrested with enough cocaine and MDMA under the saddle of his Kawasaki to earn him prison time, but cut loose by the cop who was in the employ of Mr. Paul, Bekker not wanting to risk his patron’s exposure when Turner sang as he surely would have.

  When, a few days after the bust, Bekker had called Turner’s cell phone and demanded “face time”, Turner had been unsurprised, already resigning himself to becoming a canary for the cop, chirping out the names and proclivities of his dwindling clientele.

  But, meeting Bekker in this very bar—a murky beer hall wedged between a witchdoctor’s rooms and an escort agency halfway down Louis Botha Avenue—he’d been amused when he’d come to understand that it was the cop’s vanity that had prompted him to reach out.

  When he was busted Turner had told Bekker he was a writer (talking up his novel, hinting at non-existent film and TV projects) and before their drinks had even hit the counter the cop was pitching a movie—Serpico meets Scarface meets Rush—based on his own exploits.

  Turner started bullshitting, the potpourri of chemicals he’d ingested to fortify himself for the meeting (plus the little bump of primo coke in the bathroom shortly after his arrival) making him as grandiloquent as a showrunner in a Hollywood writers’ room, flattering the cop, conjuring from the stale ether of the bar money men and fabled directors and A-list stars.

  “Johnny Depp’s the only fucker with balls enough to play you,” he said, intoxicated with his own bullshit.

  “Depp? For real?” the cop said.

  “Yeah, Depp’s got that look in his eye. That cool thing.”

  Turner smothered his laugh in his Scotch and excused himself to go to the bathroom.

  While he was taking a piss Bekker entered and stood beside him at the trough, drilling a loud stream of urine onto the stainless steel.

  “You really think you could get Depp?”

  “Why not? If the material’s good enough.”

  Turner shook and zipped and as he was crossing to the sink the detective grabbed him by the collar of his leather jacket and swung him back toward the urinal.

  He had maybe fifty pounds on the cop but the Afrikaner possessed a wild strength and ninja street fighting skills and before Turner knew it he was on his belly on the piss-splattered step and Bekker had him by the hair, forcing his face into the stinking yellow mire in the backed-up trench.

  Turner struggled and tried to keep his mouth shut but Bekker had a foot on his head and he went under, and when he gasped for air the foul stream went up his nose and into his mouth and burned his eyes.

  Bekker removed his foot and Turner dragged himself to his knees, spluttering, his hair and clothes sodden.

  “Jesus,” he said as he tried to stand, slipped and ended up on his knees again.

  The door squealed and a big guy with a bald head and a goatee stepped in.

  “Fuck off,” Bekker said without looking over his shoulder.

  The big man hesitated a moment and then he retreated, shutting the door after him.

  Bekker kicked Turner in the gut, hard enough to wind him, and he felt his back against wet steel of the urinal.

  “You think I’m fuckin stupid?” Bekker asked.

  “No,” Turner said, his voice barely audible.

  “Then why you blowing smoke up my ass?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re not a writer. You don’t know movie people. You’re a bottom feeder, a fuckin nobody, a nothing.”

  Turner stared up at him.

  “Am I fuckin right?” Bekker said.

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  The cop was breathing hard, from rage rather than exertion.

  “What does Mr. Paul say about me?”

  Turner, left confused by this sudden change of tack, shook his head, drops of urine drizzling from his hair.

  Bekker lashed out with his foot again, catching Turner in the chest, smacking his skull against
the metal.

  Turner, covering his face with his hands said, “I swear, he’s never even mentioned your name.”

  Bekker glared down, his right eye twitching in a manic little dance and then he composed himself, breathed deeply and crossed to the sink and washed his hands, watching in the mirror as Turner finally regained his feet and stood dripping, eyeballing the cop in drug-addled befuddlement.

  “There are people who want to take me down,” Bekker said.

  “I know nothing, man.”

  “I know. I know you know nothing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Shuddup,” Bekker said, yanking a length of towel from a rattling dispenser and drying his hands. “You hear anything, ever, about me, from anywhere, you tell me, okay?”

  “Yes. I’ll tell you.”

  “And you never lie to me again. Fuckin ever. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Bekker stepped toward Turner who raised his hands in surrender, shrinking backward.

  The cop laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Englishman, I like you. Let’s do this again sometime.”

  He headed for the door.

  As he opened it he looked back over his shoulder, saying, “And, for the fuckin record, the only person who could’ve ever played me in a movie was Andy Garcia round the time he did 8 Million Ways to Die. Minus that lame fuckin pony tail.”

  Then he was gone.

  But he’d called again a week later and they’d started the meetings that become a habit, the Afrikaner using him as a confessor, unburdening himself by describing in Proustian detail bloodletting and mayhem of a magnitude that impressed even the terminally jaded Turner, who convinced himself that hanging with the detective was a means of protection coupled with a way to gather material for his book, but the simple truth was that he was attracted by the darkness in Bekker.

  The violence and strength contained in the cop’s compact frame had astonished Turner and often when they met for drinks he’d sneakily inspect Bekker’s manicured hands, hands that would have appeared almost feminine if not for the scarred, misshapen fingers and flattened knuckles that spoke of a lifetime of brawling.

  But now it was his own hand that he watched, his right hand—the nicotine-stained fingers and grimy, bitten nails rendered foreign by the pharmaceuticals stewing his blood—as it rose from the bar counter and, after a fumble, snagged the wad of greasy notes and disappearing them into the hip pocket of his jeans.