by Roger Smith
Burn drove along High Level Road, his eyes drawn to his rearview mirror. The two dead men, wrapped in the garbage bags, were under a tarpaulin at the very rear of the Jeep. The short guy had been easy to wrap and carry down to the car, but the tall man had left Burn sweating with exertion. Then he’d had to fold him double to fit him into the Jeep. The last body he had carried down had been that of his sleeping son. Burn prayed that Matt slept on; he’d already seen too much that night.
What Burn wanted to do was run again. Pack up and disappear like they had three months ago. But he couldn’t. Not yet. Not until Susan was stable.
He turned into Sea Point Main Road, on his way to the freeway. Before he could change his route he found himself in a roadblock, orange cones narrowing the road to one lane, uniformed cops with flashlights flagging down vehicles. A roadblock to flush out the stolen cars, the unlicensed drivers, and the drunks.
A car slowed behind him. There was no way he could reverse. He was trapped.
There were two cars in front of him. The cops were talking to the drivers, shining flashlights into the car interiors. They had pulled one man aside and were checking inside his car and in the trunk.
Burn started to sweat.
At last a flashlight waved him forward. A black cop in uniform shone the light into his face as Burn eased the driver’s window down. “Good evening, sir. Please turn off the car.”
“Good evening.” Burn killed the engine.
The accent immediately attracted the cop’s attention. “Are you on holiday, sir?”
“I’m out here visiting for a while.”
The cop directed the light onto the backseat and saw Matt asleep in the car seat.
“Your ID and license, please.”
Burn handed them over. The cop checked his passport photograph against his face. As always at these moments over the last few months, Burn prayed that they would stand up to scrutiny. Then the cop checked his international driver’s license and handed both documents back to him.
“Thank you, Mr. Hill.”
He seemed ready to wave Burn on when a cell phone rang, from the very rear of the car. Shit, Burn thought, it must be in the short guy’s trousers. The cargo pants with the endless pockets. The cell phone ring was loud, strident, the opening bars of some hip-hop song. Incongruous in this Jeep.
The cop heard it, looked at Burn, then started to walk toward the rear of the car, his flashlight held ahead of him.
Burn waited.
CHAPTER 4
It seemed as if the cell phone would never stop ringing. Then it did. Sudden, abrupt silence. Burn watched in his side mirror as the cop moved toward the back of the Jeep. Burn knew that if he was going to act, it would have to be now. The car in front of him was being waved away; the road was open. Either he was going to risk letting the cop find the bodies or he was going to take his chances and run. Floor the Jeep and get the hell out of there, hoping he had the jump on any pursuers.
And then? Ditch the car. Get back to the house, get rid of anything incriminating, open the safe, and access the backup passports he kept in case of just this kind of emergency. He knew the drill. He and Susan had done it before. He had the documents. He had the cash.
He watched the cop, who was about to shine his light into the rear of the Jeep. Burn found his hand moving toward the ignition key.
It would have to be now.
“Fuck you, you black bastard!” The voice was loud, angry, and drunk.
Burn spun around in his seat. A big Mercedes, brand-new, was parked behind him. The driver, a beefy white man in his fifties, was out of the vehicle. He had just shoved a uniformed cop away from him. “Keep your fucking hands off me!”
Cops were converging on the drunk, battling to subdue him.
The cop who had stopped Burn waved a hand, gesturing for Burn to drive on, before he ran over to join his colleagues in the brawl.
Burn’s hands were shaking as he started the car. He drove away slowly. The last glimpse he had of the drunkupt sis the big man was thrown to the ground, three cops wrestling him into handcuffs.
“I owe you a drink, pal,” Burn said quietly as he headed down to the freeway.
Burn drove along the N2 toward the airport. Even though it was way past midnight, the road was busy, taillights streaming away like fireflies in the dark. He kept to the speed limit as kamikaze taxi drivers from the Flats rattled past him in their battered minibuses, jammed full of faceless workers on their way home from the late shift.
Burn checked on Matt in the rearview mirror. His son was asleep, strapped into his car seat, his blond hair a halo in passing headlights.
Mean houses and shacks sprawled on either side of the freeway as Burn left Table Mountain behind. The Cape Flats. Where more people died of violence every day than in your average war zone. Where children disappeared and their violated bodies were found in boxes under neighbor’s beds. Where the dispossessed had their hungry eyes fixed on the rich man’s playground around the mountain.
Burn understood enough about Cape Town to know that the dead men in the back of his Jeep were coloreds from out here on the Flats.
When he had arrived in Cape Town, Burn, like most foreigners, had assumed that it was all black and white in South Africa. But things were more complex, of course, in the country that invented apartheid. He had learned that more than half the population of the city, mostly living out on the desolate Flats, were colored. And colored in South Africa didn’t mean what it did in the States. These were brown people of mixed race, a blend of tribal Africans, European settlers, and their slaves from Asia.
So he had killed two colored men. The tattoos he’d seen on their bodies branded them as gangsters. He knew that dead bodies out on the Flats were commonplace, not even rating a mention in the newspapers. He was going to drive out past the airport and dump them in the veld and hope that if they were found, they would be seen as the by-product of a gangland killing.
Just another night in Cape Town.
Burn took the airport exit and almost immediately swung onto a back road, leaving other cars behind. Within minutes he was driving along a dark and deserted road beside the far runways, a stretch of open ground between him and the nearest small houses.
He checked his mirrors. No cars. He turned the Jeep off the road, bumping his way along until a patch of windswept scrub hid his car from both road and houses. This would have to do.
Burn killed his headlights and got out, carrying a flashlight.
The veld was deserted, littered with junk blown in by the wind, but there was no sign of any human presence. Burn checked that Matt was still asleep before he swung up the rear door of the Jeep.
He lifted the tarpaulin and reached down and grabbed the bigger of the two bodies, letting it fall to the sand like a mummy wrapped in black garbage bags. He dragged the body until it was partly hidden by a clump of bushes. He came back for the second one and left the small man lying a distance away from his dead friend.
Burn checked that the only signs of his presence were the faint tracks the ep had left in the dust. The southeaster was picking up again and would wipe the sand clean by the time he was back on the road.
Matt woke up as Burn climbed back into the car. “Daddy?”
Burn leaned between the seats and took his son’s small hand. “I’m here, Matty.”
“When we going home?”
“Right now.”
“Home to Barney?”
Barney was the Labrador they had left behind when they fled their home in Los Angeles. Matt had loved that dog.
“No, not to Barney,” Burn said. “We’ll get you another dog, I promise.”
“I want Barney.” Now Matt was crying.
The tears of his son, coming after all that had happened that night, pushed Burn close to his edge. He had to fight to stay focused and withdraw his hand, start the car, and head back to the road.
Matt cried himself to sleep as they drove.
Most nights Benny Mongre
l dozed on the top floor of the house, sitting beside Bessie under the stars. But that night he couldn’t. He kept on playing the scene over in his head, the American gangsters climbing up into that house like monkeys. And not coming back.
For the first time he looked forward to being picked up at dawn.
When the Sniper Security truck rattled up just before 6:00 a.m., Benny Mongrel waited downstairs with Bessie. He helped her up onto the back and sat down on the bench, Bessie beside him. The truck bumped down the mountain and skirted downtown Cape Town. It was too early for rush hour, so the driver sped through the city streets, away from Table Mountain and its fleecy cloth of cloud. Soon they were in an area of run-down factories and cramped houses that hunched against the railway line.
There were four other night watchmen in the truck. Benny Mongrel ignored them. He had made no friends at Sniper Security. Life had taught him that if you worry about other people, you forget to look after yourself.
Benny Mongrel had lived by his wits since he was an hour old, thrown onto a garbage dump and left to die, his tiny naked body still covered in afterbirth. Some survival instinct had forced him to cry out into the night, and to carry on crying into the gray and drizzly dawn as a ragged band of homeless people mined the acres of garbage for anything of use.
He cried until a homeless woman reached down and pulled him from a pile of rotting bones and fish heads and lifted him to her breast. And then he never cried again. Ever.
So began Benny Mongrel’s procession through orphanages and poorhouses. Some unknown petty official had given him the name Benjamin Niemand. Benjamin Nobody.
By the time he was ten Benny Niemand lived on the streets. He was twelve when he approached a group of Mongrels who were hanging outside a shebeen in Lotus River, eyeing a band of Americans chatting up girls across the road. Benny Niemand walked straight up to the Mongrel leader, Chippies, and told him he wanted to join their gang.
They all laughed at him, and Chippies, half in jest, handed him a long-bladed knife and pointed toward the group of Americans. “See that one with the hat on?”
Benny Niemand saw a thickset man of thirty, heavily tattooed, leaning against a building as he pulled a girl toward him. Benny nodded.
“Show him his mother and you can be a Mongrel.” Chippies laughed, exposing his missing front teeth, expecting the boy to hand the knife back.
Instead Benny Niemand walked across the road, the knife held close against his leg. The tattooed American had walked the girl into a doorway, and his hand was moving between her legs. Benny Niemand tapped him on the back with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife.
The American spun on him. “What you want?”
“To show you your mother,” Benny said, and slipped the knife between the American’s ribs. He pulled the knife out, watched the dying man slump to his knees, heard the screams of the girl, and calmly walked back to where the Mongrels stood. He handed the knife to the leader.
From then on he was Benny Mongrel. He lived by his wits, and he developed an almost infallible sixth sense. He knew when trouble was coming.
He and his knife were always ready.
The truck slammed to a halt in the Sniper Security yard in Salt River. Bessie lost her footing and skidded in the back of the truck, her nails fighting for a grip on the slick metal. One of the other guards laughed but quickly shut up when he saw Benny Mongrel looking at him. Benny Mongrel helped Bessie down. Her hips were always much worse in the morning, and she limped when he led her off toward the kennel enclosure.
“Hey, Niemand.” Ishmael Isaacs, the shift foreman, stood across the yard. He waited for Benny Mongrel to come across to him. The epaulettes on the shoulders of his crisp uniform were a sign of his seniority.
Isaacs, a brown man like Benny Mongrel, had done prison time, and the fading tattoos on his arms proved that. He had been out for years and had made a better life for himself. Benny Mongrel knew that Isaacs had taken against him from the start, probably because he was an ex-con, an uncomfortable reminder of the foreman’s own past.
“What’s up with that dog?” Isaacs watched Bessie’s painful progress as they neared him.
“Nothing, Mr. Isaacs.”
“She always walk like so?”
“No, she just a bit stiff. From being in the truck.”
Isaacs grunted, his eyes scanning Benny Mongrel. He sniffed the air. “When last you wash?”
“Yesterday. Before work.”
“Your ass stinks.” Isaacs stretched out an arm and flicked a dismissive finger at Benny Mongrel’s sleeve. “And don’t they teach you to iron in Pollsmoor?”
Benny Mongrel said nothing, not showing anything on his face. Like this fucker was a warder back in prison.
“Tomorrow, one hour before shift, you rort to me for inspection.”
“Yes, Mr. Isaacs.”
“And make sure your ass is clean and your kit looks proper. Or I dock your pay. Got me?”
“Yes.”
Benny Mongrel watched as Isaacs turned on his heel and walked away. He wanted to show that bastard the epaulettes tattooed on his own shoulders, real rank, earned the hard way. Then he wanted to show him his knife.
But he whistled softly and led Bessie off toward the kennels.
Burn woke up with a wet body against his. For a crazy, nightmarish moment he was sure the dead men were in the bed with him. This was enough to jolt him upright like he’d been tasered, and he flung the covers aside. Matt was sleeping next to him, and he had wet the bed. For the first time in nearly two years.
Burn lay back, calming his racing pulse. He cradled his sleeping son and stroked his head. Then an image came into his mind. A red BMW parked next door, outside the building site. He’d glimpsed it when he’d followed the ambulance to the clinic and wondered if it had brought the dead men to his street.
When he’d come home after dumping the bodies, the party next door had still been going strong, the BMW lost among the other cars. He’d forgotten about the red car. All he’d wanted was to wash the stink of death from his hands and body.
He looked at the bedside clock. It was after seven.
Burn pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and left his son sleeping on the damp double bed. He unlocked the front door of the house and went down through the small front garden to the door set into the high wall. He opened it, peering out cautiously.
The BMW was still there, but so were the building crew. There was no way he was going to be able to move the car unobserved. Burn cursed himself. This was a loose end he shouldn’t have allowed. But the decision was forced on him: he would have to leave the car until that evening, when the builders were done for the day.
Burn shut the door.
CHAPTER 5
Benny Mongrel climbed from the minibus taxi that had dropped him in Lavender Hill. He slung his small kit bag over his shoulder and set off, walking like he was hugging the wall of an invisible prison corridor.
Apartheid’s faceless bureaucrats had displayed a macabre sense of humor when, with a pen stroke, they banished thousands of people to ghettos on the Cape Flats with sweet names like Surrey Estate, Blue Downs, and Ravensmead. This was no more apparent than in Lavender Hill, where there was no lavender and not a single hill, just an endless sprawl of cramped houses built on windswept scrubland.
Benny Mongrel passed a straggle of pedestrians and dodged sidewalk vendors selling fruit, vegetables, cigarettes, and cheap sweets that tasted like piss. Even though he wore a cap, the hard morning light threw his livid scar into stark relief. His ruined face was like an icebreaker on the prow of a ship, parting people in his wake. They whispered behind his back, and only the half-naked children with snot-caked faces stared openly. He didn’t care what people said as long as they left him alone.
Benny Mongrel lived in a shack behind a narrow house. He unlocked the padlock on the makeshift door and stepped inside, his eyes adjusting to the windowless gloom. A stained mattress, a blanket scarred by cigarette burns, a three-leg
ged chair, a primus stove, and a rusted tub to wash in. The corrugated iron room was barely big enough for him to spread his arms wide, and he couldn’t stand upright without his head touching the roof.
Once a day he was allowed into the bathroom of the main house to empty his slop bucket. A frayed extension cable snaked from the house, giving power to the naked lightbulb that dangled from a hook in the roof of his shack.
The place was a furnace in summer and flooded during the winter rains, but Benny Mongrel didn’t mind. After spending decades sharing prison cells designed for ten men with fifty others, the shack felt luxurious.
When he was released from prison, he had made a decision not to return to Lotus River, where he’d spent his brief youth. He had no family and nobody to call a friend, but he could have fallen in with the older Mongrels, who sat in taverns, drinking, smoking marijuana and tik, reminiscing, and planning the action that would send them back to the security of prison.
He never wanted to go back. Somehow he knew that a different sort of life was possible outside prison, even though he wasn’t sure exactly what that was. The only clue was Bessie. He missed the old dog during the empty, endless days. He couldn’t wait to see her at night, feel the reassuring sandpapery rasp of her tongue on his hand.
Benny Mongrel lay on the mattress in his trousers, his torso alive with crude prison tattoos: epaulettes indicating his officer rank on his shoulders, the words I dig my grave and evil one scrawled across his chest. Dollar signs, knives, and pistols. A Zulu shield, the emblem of the 28s.
It was too hot to sleep, and the relentless southeaster sandblasted Lavender Hill.
He thought about what had happened the night before. About those men who went into the house and never came back. The Americans. The 26s.
Benny Mongrel had killed more Americans than he could remember, in prison and out. The Mongrels and the Americans were kept apart in Pollsmoor. They watched each other uneasily in the corridors and across the exercise yard. Every now and then a new prisoner would come in, and one of the older gangsters would order him to kill one of the enemy, as an initiation rite. If he balked, he was gang-raped and made a wife.