Man Down

by Roger Smith

  “So, tell me,” Turner said.

  Bekker, lighting another cigarette, said, “Tell you what?”

  “The story.”

  Bekker shook his head. “It’s premature.”

  “Jesus, Bekker, give me something here.”

  “I have,” the cop said, flicking Turner’s hip pocket with his index finger. “But there’s something interesting brewing.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t elaborate until I assess its viability.”

  “And I’d play a role?”

  “Chill, Englishman. Chill. ”

  “Unfortunate advice to give a guy who’s about to end up in a freezer drawer.”

  Bekker laughed and blew a smoke ring that wafted across to Turner like a toppled halo.

  “Gimme a couple of days to firm things up, okay?”

  Turner wagged his empty glass at the bartender and took himself off to the bathroom (he could never address the silver urinal without flashing back to that day of piss-sodden humiliation) and on his return was waylaid by two women in a booth.

  They were advertising account executives—blonde, brittle and botoxed, as free of wrinkles and expression as sex dolls—drawn from their antiseptic Sandton offices by a recent magazine piece on the beer hall that had glamorized the grimy décor and raffish clientele, even pronouncing the foul, peri-peri drenched colonial Portuguese food “honest and authentic.”

  These women, hungry for excitement, had convinced themselves that Turner, who’d more than once been told that he resembled a low-rent Brad Pitt on the backend of the motherfucker of all debauches, was irresistible, but (floundering in a lava sea of chemicals) something he said or did must have torn the fragile skein of seduction for they fled and when he returned to the bar Bekker had disappeared.

  Turner threw some of the cop’s money onto the counter and drank until he was blind and woke up the next morning in Tanya’s bed with no recollection of how he’d got there.

  7

  “By nature I’m an optimist,” Shorty said, leaning against the kitchen island, watching Tanya who, at his insistence, was making him food—scrambled egg, sausage and toast—all achieved one-handed, “which is why I believe the little bit of unpleasantness we’ve had so far is over and we’re all gonna enjoy our evening together. I’ll break bread,” he waved his pistol at the sausage spitting in the pan, “while my associates relax according to their own whims.”

  Turner, sitting on the floor of the living room with his back to the couch, felt like he had as a small child on the nights his parents had thrown parties, when he’d wandered through the house dwarfed by the drunken adults, the cloud of smoke from their cigarettes that floated above his head like mustard gas leaving his pajamas reeking of tobacco when, at last, he’d collapsed into his bed.

  He’d been ordered into this position by Bone, who stood over him swigging from a tequila bottle filched from the kitchen. It was Turner’s badge of honor that, even though he was dry, he kept a stock of liquor for guests.

  The smoke was provided by Tard, who’d fired up a glass meth pipe, the unmistakable, acrid smell of the burning crystals speeding Turner from childhood to another, much later, way more troublesome memory, a memory that he quickly shut down as he observed the huge man out the corner of his eye.

  As the giant vacuumed the pipe, his head disappearing into a fragrant white mist, Turner felt a deep yearning and it was all he could do to stop himself from springing to his feet and wrenching the pipe from the freak’s grasp, sucking the soporific smoke into his lungs, smoke that he knew would gift him with the kind of calm and detachment that even a Buddhist lama would envy.

  A clatter from the kitchen drew Turner from his reverie and he saw that Tanya had dropped a plate that shattered on the tiles.

  “Butterfingers,” Shorty said, still leaning against the island, watching her.

  Tanya took another plate from a drawer and set it on the counter beside the stove. She ladled scrambled egg from pan, then served sausage and toast.

  “Go sit with hubby,” Shorty said, waving her away with his automatic.

  She did as he said, crouching beside Turner, who could smell her bitter sweat.

  Tanya’s face was pale beneath her tan and when she worried at the adhesive tape on her cheek her fingers shook. Her mangled hand lay in her lap, the fingertips protruding from the bandage an unsightly mottled color.

  Shorty found a fork in the silverware drawer, turned away from the room and rolled up his mask so that he could shovel in a mouthful of scrambled egg.

  He spit it back onto his plate.

  “Jesus Christ,’ he said, “these fuckin eggs are raw.”

  He rolled his mask back down and beckoned Tanya.

  “Come here.”

  She rose and went to him.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “Scrambled eggs.”

  “Are you trying to insult me?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No.”

  “Would you eat this?”

  She said nothing.

  “Answer my fuckin question.”

  Still she stayed silent.

  Shorty shook his head, lifted the plate and shoved it into her face.

  He released it and it fell to the floor and broke beside the other one.

  Tanya stood a moment with her face smeared with egg, staring at Shorty and then she said something under her breath.

  “What was that?” Shorty asked.

  Tanya stayed mute.

  “What did you say to me?”

  She stared at him.

  Shorty swung back his leg like a sling blade and scythed Tanya’s legs from under her and she hit the tiles hard, falling onto the discarded food and broken crockery.

  “Now, I never let it snow on my fiesta,” Shorty said. “So, get the fuck up and make me my food and this time do it right.”

  Tanya, lying prone, struggled to get on all fours, sliding in the greasy food that smeared the kitchen tiles.

  When she gained her knees she said, “Fuck you, you little cocksucker,” and Shorty kicked her in the ribs and she fell again behind the kitchen island and all that Turner could see of her were her old Nikes worn sockless, her heartbreakingly bony ankles jutting from the bottom of her faded jeans.

  8

  “Englishman, that money I gave you?” Bekker said, piloting the massive black Mercedes Benz S63 AMG north into the night, the M1 freeway unspooling in the headlights.

  “Want it back?” Turner said from the shotgun seat.

  “No, I don’t want it back.”

  “Good. Because if you did you’d have to squeeze it from my liver like fucking foie gras.”

  “What I want is to tell you that story,” Bekker said, eyes on the road, foot heavy on the gas, going nowhere but getting there fast.

  Turner looked across at the cop, the headlights of an approaching car fingering his pretty face.

  “The story about the money?”

  “Yeah. The story about the money.”

  “Has it got a happy ending?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Why?”

  “Hasn’t ended yet.”

  “No?”

  “No. But it’s got the makings of a winner. Got all the fuckin food groups.”

  “I’m listening.”

  The car passed and darkness claimed the cabin of the Mercedes again and Turner welcomed it because it hid the fear that a torrent of drugs had failed to quell, his unruly mind trapped in a flashback loop, endlessly conjuring Mr. Paul whaling away at the white man’s head with the bloody hammer.

  As always, the ripe tang of putrefaction hung heavy in the car and five days into his death sentence it seemed to Turner to be an especially fitting perfume. He had the side window cranked all the way down to allow in the thick heat and the gasoline fumes; preferable to the stench that had pickled the leather upholstery and seeped into the carpets. A stench that would never leave, no matter how man
y times the cop had the car detailed.

  Bekker had bought the Mercedes dirt cheap at a police auction when it was just three months old. It had belonged to a Johannesburg hotelier who was carjacked outside his Sandown apartment one morning and shot dead in the veld near Alexandra, his body dumped in the trunk of the car.

  The carjackers abandoned the Mercedes in the parking lot of the Carnival City casino and fled. This was in molten February, during the fiercest heat wave the city had experienced in decades and the hotelier had to be poured into a body bag when the fetor brought the cops to the car ten days later.

  Bekker, who claimed to have been born without a sense of smell, was blissfully immune to the stink but Turner tasted it thick in his throat.

  And hanging out with Chris Bekker meant spending time in this car.

  Restless, insomniac, he ranged the city at night, keeping an eye on his many interests from behind the wheel of the tainted Mercedes.

  Bekker said, “Last week me and my partner get called out to a house in Hyde Park. Fuckin mansion. Think a mega motherfuckin urban Zulu Southfork.”

  “We’re talking our new African elite here?”

  “Oh yeah. Shiny, shiny black diamonds, Englishman. Husband and wife. She’s a fat savage in Prada looking down her flat nose at me. Thirty years ago she would’ve been in skins with bare tits, shitting in a hole outside a mud hut. He’s a pissant lawn jockey with a watermelon smile.”

  “I’m guessing she’s got a pedigree?”

  “Yep. Her father’s a genuine anti-apartheid struggle icon. They named a fuckin airport after him.”

  “High flyer.”

  “Very. Anyway, you know the story, after Mandela took South Africa on its long walk to freedom this fucker ditched his Marxist ideals and morphed into a capitalist tycoon. Donald fuckin Trump in blackface.”

  “Let me guess: gold, platinum and uranium mines and cell phone networks and casino resorts?”

  “Just for openers.”

  “Rags to riches. I’m liking this story,” Turner said, doing his best to keep things light, to keep his terror tamped down.

  “So, the Lawn Jockey spins us this yarn about some fuckers breaking in and stealing his wife’s jewels while the happy couple were up at Sun City for a night at some celebrity golf charity fuckfest. Shows us a smashed window. Shows us the bedroom with drawers tossed and closets stripped.”

  “And you’re thinking set dressing?”

  “Yeah, fuckin right I’m thinking set dressing. Place has more alarms than Tiffany’s. Got a couple of Idi Amins in a sentry box at the gate. Lawn Jockey tells us the Idi Amins fell asleep and forgot to activate the alarm. Now my partner—”

  “Your black partner?”

  “My fast-track-promoted-beat-cop-to-detective-just-add-fuckin-water-and-stir black partner is so overawed at being in the presence of these great ones that he’s nodding like a car doggy and scratching notes in his pidgin English.”

  “But you’re adopting a skeptical attitude?”

  “Fuckin right I am. I know a bit about this Lawn Jockey fucker from the media: playboy with a gambling problem. In a no-fly zone with Daddy-in-law. This is an insurance scam. And a stupid one. I’m giving him that look. You know that look?”

  “I know that look.”

  “And the Lawn Jockey susses this out and he gets me alone and he starts to give me a whole fuckin story about how back in the apartheid days he’d always known where he stood with us Boer boys—actually says that, Boer boys—because we were straight shooters. If we were going to fuck up your shit we’d tell you. If we were going to kill you we’d tell you. No bullshit. He liked that, he says.”

  “He’s softening you up.”

  “Oh yeah, he’s fuckin marinating me, Englishman. And I’m smiling and I’m nodding. He dips a hand into the pocket of his Ozwald Boateng suit and takes out a wallet and snags a wad of bills and holds it out to me.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I say, ‘Are you trying to bribe me, sir?’ And he says, ‘I’m opening up the lines of communication.’”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I take the money. What he gives me is nothing. A fuckin trifle. But I’m seeing something in prospect. You with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “So I leave with my dumb ass partner and we go back to the station and I let him write up the whole fairy tale, him hunting and pecking at his computer like Helen Keller after a muscle relaxant, and I go drinking with you. And I let you share in my spoils.”

  “Fucking white of you.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “You gonna blackmail this guy?’

  “The Lawn Jockey?”

  “Yeah, the Lawn Jockey.”

  “Jesus, Englishman, now why the fuck would I blackmail a guy who’s tapped out?”

  “What then?”

  Bekker glanced at him. “I waited.”

  “And?”

  Bekker was silent for a while, the wash of his breath filling the car, then he said, “And he called me. This afternoon. With a proposal.”

  “What proposal?”

  They were on a quiet stretch of freeway now, leaving behind the floodlit Sandton City Mall and its cordon of office towers, like a shrine to some African god of greed, heading north toward Pretoria, the traffic thinning enough for Bekker to relax and stop obsessively watching his mirrors and ask Turner to dip into the Coleman cooler that sat on the back seat and hand him the plastic Coke bottle inside.

  Turner did as he was asked and Bekker unscrewed the cap and the liquid fizzed, the pungent whiff of brandy sharp enough to rise above the juices of the departed hotelier. Chris Bekker had lived on this mixture of Klipdrift and Coke as long as Turner as known him but he had never seen him drunk.

  Half the Coke bottle was flattened before Bekker handed it back to Turner and swung off at an exit, hung a left and headed through the open land to a stand of trees and an abandoned roadhouse.

  “What are we doing here?” Turner asked.

  Becker didn’t answer, just parked the Mercedes behind the ruined building, leaving the engine running and the headlights on as he cracked his door.

  “Get out,” he said.

  A hand reached in and grabbed Turner’s innards, twisting at his gut.

  “Is Mr. Paul paying you to do it?”

  “Paying me to do what?”

  “Kill me, man?”

  Bekker laughed. “Jesus, all that shit you ingest is making you paranoid. Just get the fuck out of the car.”

  Turner obeyed, smelling the blue gum trees and the wood fire fumes from the advancing shack settlements that wafted in on a warm breeze.

  Bekker stood by the hood of the Mercedes, pointing at the headlight beams that skewered the night, spotlighting dust and bugs.

  “I need you to stand there and get naked.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it, Englishman. I need to be sure you aren’t wearing a wire.”

  “And you call me paranoid?”

  “Just do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because maybe, just maybe, I’ve got a way to solve your Mr. Paul hassle.”

  Turner looked at the small man and shrugged. Then he pulled off his sneakers and stripped off his shirt and jeans, naked but for his skivvies.

  “Those too,” Bekker said.

  Turner nearly toppled over as he shed the underwear, standing in the beams with his balls dangling.

  “Leave your clothes and walk with me,” Bekker said and they stepped away from the car, Turner hopping as his bare feet found broken glass on the floor of the wrecked building.

  Bekker lit a smoke.

  “So, I met with the Lawn Jockey this afternoon. All hush hush and undercover.”

  “And?”

  “He’s in deep trouble. Needs to get his hands on a bundle of cash.”

  “I feel his pain.”

  “But he’s cooked up a plan that’s so fucked up batshit crazy it just might work
.”

  “What plan?”

  Bekker hesitated before he answered.

  “He wants me to kidnap his step-daughter and get ransom money from his wife’s father.”

  Turner stared at Bekker, thinking that maybe the chemicals were cross-talking and leaving him confused.

  “You’re shitting me, right?”

  “I am not shitting you.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s the big one.”

  “How much are we talking? The ransom?”

  “A boatload.”

  “Why’s he so certain he’ll pay up? The old man?”

  “Because the old bastard is besotted with the kid. He’ll do anything for her. I checked this out and word is that it’s all true. Pictures of them together all over the Web, hanging out in shopping malls. Making cute on MySpace.”

  “You’re seriously thinking of doing this?”

  Bekker nodded.

  “Yes, Englishman, I am. It’s the one I’ve been waiting for. The one I was fuckin born for.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I can’t do this alone. Help me and I’ll cut you in for half a million.”

  Turner, standing very still, the night air suddenly crisp on his skin, was aware that this was it.

  The moment when everything changed.

  “What do you say?” Bekker asked.

  “I say it’s madness.”

  “Yeah, but what the fuck do you have to lose?”

  Turner nodded. Shrugged.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Now Turner was a sworn heathen and the notion of a soul laughable to him, but as he spoke those words he felt a moment of powerful vertigo, a curious lurching, like an elevator coming suddenly uncoupled from its winding drum, and, despite clenching his fists, jaw and asshole, the feeling persisted, as if something so deep within his being that he’d become aware of it only by its absence had broken its tether and was now lost to him forever.

  9

  “Jesus, this fuckin game is getting whack. Why don’t we just hit the reset button and start again, okay?” Shorty said, raising his hands in mock surrender.