by Tony Park
Jane shook her head. ‘Don’t underestimate George. But, God, I can’t believe he’d sanction someone shooting an innocent woman.’
It was time for them to stop dancing around the central issue. Jane obviously wasn’t going to mention it, so he had to. There was no more time. ‘Jane, George Penfold didn’t have someone rob and shoot Lisa Novak and murder her maid in order to get payback on a bunch of pirates.’
She licked her lips, betraying her nervousness, then downed a mouthful of wine.
Alex continued: ‘Something went missing from the Penfold Son that George wants back. If you’ve told him you don’t have it, then he thinks I do – or one of my men does. He might want us out of business, but he wants whatever belongs to him more than anything else in the world. The captain of the Peng Cheng told me he’d delivered something to the Penfold Son’s master – he thought it might be diamonds. Is that what MacGregor gave you, Jane?’
She looked out of the bar, at the passing parade of tipsy office workers looking for another drink, and tired restaurant staff heading home. ‘I don’t know, Alex.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Wu told me it was worth a million quid. Didn’t you look?’
‘You forget, there was a gun battle going on – you were shooting at us from that bloody helicopter. MacGregor opened the safe and thrust a package into my hand. It was a zippered black leather pouch with something small and hard in it, about the size of a box of matches. There was nothing rattling inside. He said to me, ‘Guard this with your life. It belongs to George.’ Then he said something like he feared he’d been double-crossed.
Alex tried to imagine her fear and uncertainty – then and now.
‘You see the predicament I’m in? I can’t be a party to a crime, and I can’t marry a criminal. I’m sorry, Alex, but I wanted George to think you had whatever it was that was valuable to him. Now I can’t bear the thought that my actions caused the death of one woman, perhaps two.’
Alex stayed silent a moment. He couldn’t blame Jane for doing what she’d done, though right at this moment he cared far more about Lisa and the family of her maid than he did about a lawyer’s principles. He forced the thoughts from his mind and said, ‘So, what are you waiting for? Tell him where his stuff is – whatever it is.’
She looked at him now, her face resolute. ‘No. I want to see what it is first. I need to know.’
Alex felt the anger surge in him, like rising bile. ‘If Lisa dies it’ll be on your head, Jane. I can look after myself, but there are other innocents who depend on me and my men. If your fiancé’s mercenaries pick a fight with me I’ll happily go to hell with as many of them as I can take with me, but if they kill anyone else on my island then those deaths will be down to you as well. You’ve got the power to end this.’
Jane picked up her purse and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. She left her glass half full and stood. ‘Don’t you dare lecture me. You’re a fucking pirate, Alex. You take what you want at the point of a gun and you’d kill to protect your precious bloody men and your island. You think you’re some kind of god to those people, but the truth is you’ve put them all in danger – not me. For fuck’s sake, grow up and start taking some real responsibility for yourself and the people around you.’
She turned on her heel and walked out. He pulled out a handful of crumpled bills and tossed them on the bar. Outside he saw her striding away, heels clicking purposefully on the pavement. ‘I can’t guarantee your safety if you walk back to the hotel.’
She laughed at him without turning around.
19
George Penfold kicked off his shoes and undid his tie. He poured himself a Scotch from the minibar and added ice from a dewy bucket.
He switched on the television remote and surfed through a few channels. The Melrose Arch Hotel didn’t have a satellite adult channel, but one of the five complimentary DVDs in the drawer under the screen was an adult movie. George had wanted to bed Jane again but she had begged off with a headache. He wondered if there was more than pain on her mind.
He took the disc from the drawer and spun it on his little finger, deciding whether or not to watch it. After a commercial break the local news, in English, resumed. The Indian South African’s diction was precise and cultured.
‘Police have today released descriptions of four men masquerading as Eskom workers who broke into a Kempton Park home yesterday and shot dead a domestic worker and seriously wounded the owner of the property . . . Reporter Sipho Bandile has more.’
George was dialling his mobile phone and only half listening to the reporter’s monologue. He gulped his whiskey, the fiery liquid burning the inside of his throat.
‘Van Zyl,’ said the voice on the end of the phone. He sounded as if he’d just woken.
‘You told me both women were dead.’
‘They are,’ Van Zyl said.
‘Turn on SABC 3, you bloody idiot. Why did I ever waste my time hiring you? The Novak woman’s in a coma. If she regains consciousness you’re finished.’
There was a pause on the end of the line, then Van Zyl said, ‘And so are you. What hospital have they got her in?’
‘Jo’burg.’
‘I’ll take care of it.’
George hung up. He was too wound up now to gain relief from masturbating to a porn movie. He picked up the hotel phone and dialled the concierge. ‘I need the number of an escort service. An expensive one.’
‘Of course, sir.’
Alex attacked the city traffic.
The effort it took to concentrate on weaving in and out of the fast-moving streams did little to take his mind off his heated conversation with Jane.
She was playing both him and George Penfold.
He ignored the hooting horns and scowls of other drivers and pushed the four-wheel drive until its big diesel engine was screaming. He left the M1 and made his way towards Parktown and the sprawling Johannesburg Hospital. He turned left into York from Prince of Wales, then followed the road around the bend to Jubilee and the hospital’s car park which, despite the late hour, was crowded. As he walked towards the bunker-like concrete complex he realised this was probably the busiest time of day for the medicos on duty.
As if to reinforce his suspicion he had to step sharply back out of the gutter as he approached the entrance, to avoid being run down by a minibus taxi that skidded to a halt with a screech of brakes and smell of burning rubber. The side door of the tinted-windowed vehicle slid open and two black men climbed out, carrying between them a third man whose white T-shirt was stained purplish red with blood. One of the men carrying him was bare-chested and the injured man had his friend’s shirt pressed against his stomach. He screamed in pain as they tried walking him.
A medical team of a young female doctor and two nurses ran out, the male nurse wheeling a gurney in front of him. They eased the wounded man onto the trolley as Alex walked by.
‘What happened to him?’ the doctor asked, already starting her examination as the orderly wheeled the bed.
‘He got shot in the stomach. Bang, bang, these tsotsis opened up on us, like, for no reason.’
The doctor looked to Alex like she’d heard it all before and Alex caught the strong scent of booze coming off the man as he spoke.
Inside the sliding doors, the emergency room looked more like a war zone than any Alex had ever been in. He’d been one of three patients in the American military hospital in Bagram, Afghanistan, where he’d been flown by a Black Hawk after losing his fingers in the grenade blast. A team of US Army surgeons and nursing staff had cared for him before he was airlifted in a C-17 cargo jet to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and then on to Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, England. All along the way he’d been surrounded by calm, experienced professionals.
This, however, was barely organised chaos. Some of the people sitting in rows of plastic chairs had makeshift bandages. There was fresh blood on the floor and a cleaner merely smeared it pink when she sloshed her mop through the s
tain.
Ambulance officers in green overalls called for doctors and nurses, in competition with each other for priority. Gowned staff crossed the floors and patients groaned or cried in agony. A woman was screaming abuse at a hospital staffer who simply stood in silence and nodded. A baby cried. A young man vomited on the floor.
Alex stopped an Indian woman in a white lab coat. ‘Excuse me, are you a doctor?’
‘Yes,’ she said brusquely, looking at her watch.
‘I’m looking for a woman who was admitted yesterday. She suffered two bullet wounds –’
The doctor cut him off. ‘We get eighteen thousand patients a year coming through this emergency room and too many of them are gunshot wounds.’
‘Her name is Novak. Lisa Novak.’
‘Tell the lady on reception over there. I’m sorry, I have to go.’
Alex queued for ten minutes behind angry relatives and bleeding patients. Eventually, the harried African receptionist looked up Lisa’s details on a slow computer and directed him down the corridor to the intensive care unit.
It was almost as crowded there as it was in the emergency room. Patients with tubes sticking out of their bodies lay side by side in the open ward, which was festooned with monitors, drips and ventilators. It looked like the aftermath of a major disaster, but this was everyday life in Johannesburg.
He heard Mark Novak before he saw him.
‘You can’t smoke in here, sir,’ said a man in Afrikaans.
‘Fuck off,’ Novak replied in the same language, then switched to English. ‘I’m not leaving my wife.’
Alex poked his head around a curtain and saw the face-off between the fierce looking ex-soldier and a tall African male nurse, who looked as though he could more than hold his own if it came to a fight.
‘Howzit, Alex,’ Novak said, exhaling smoke.
‘Hi Janine,’ Alex said to Novak’s daughter. She looked up at him and tried to smile, but he could see the tears in her eyes. Janine was twenty, and only recently married. She was sitting by her unconscious mother, holding a hand from which an IV drip protruded. ‘Don’t get up. Novak, I need to see you – maybe outside is better.’
They threaded their way through the carnage of the emergency room and Novak was lighting a second cigarette off the first by the time they stepped out into the clear night air. A siren was getting closer and somewhere in the car park an alarm was screeching. ‘How is she?’
Novak shrugged. ‘You’ve probably seen as many head wounds as I have. You know how they go. Sometimes they kill straightaway, other times the oke lives. She took one shot to her neck, a through-and-through that missed her carotid and her windpipe, so that was relatively minor, though she lost a lot of blood. The doc says the other bullet deflected partially off some bone and lodged in what they call the dura matter – it’s like a tough outer layer of the bone. He operated and got the bullet and skull fragments out and . . .’
He was like an engine that had run out of petrol. He leaned against the hospital’s outer wall and coughed as he tried to drag on his cigarette. He raised a hand to his eyes.
‘She’s tough, man,’ Alex said.
When he moved his hand, Alex saw his eyes were red-rimmed and glistening. Novak shuddered and he drew a breath of fresh air and straightened himself. ‘Ja. I know. Anyway, like you see, she’s still in a coma. The doc doesn’t know when – or if – she’ll come out of it, or what damage the bullet caused. He says there’s a lot of brain tissue that’s relatively underused and people can recover from hits to those areas. Man, I don’t know, but I’m telling you, if I catch whoever did this, Alex, I’m going to peel the skin off his body while he lives.’
‘I think I know who’s responsible.’
Novak dropped his cigarette and ground it out. ‘Tell me.’
‘George Penfold.’
‘The oke who owns that ship we boarded?’ Novak sounded surprised.
Alex nodded.
‘Shit, man. We didn’t even get anything and those goons of his nearly kicked our arses.’
‘Penfold doesn’t know that. Whatever went missing from that ship, Penfold thinks we took it.’
‘Well if we didn’t take it, who did? Was it that fucking woman?’
Alex bridled at Mark’s description of Jane, though he’d been thinking similarly uncharitable thoughts during the drive to the hospital. He was still angry at the fallout from Jane’s decision not to tell Penfold she knew where the diamonds were, but if he were her he would probably have done the same thing.
‘You should have let Mitch get the information out of her.’
Alex shook his head. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘OK. But my Lisa is the one who’s been hurt, and Trudy’s dead. She was part of our family. This Penfold wouldn’t have done the hit himself?’
‘The cops are looking for three white men and a black man who were driving a stolen Eskom bakkie. It was on the radio tonight. I’m betting it’s the same gunslingers we ran up against on the ship.’
Novak nodded. ‘All right. I want them, but I also want the man who pays them – this Penfold poes.’
Novak was right, Penfold was a cunt, but Alex couldn’t let him charge into the Melrose Arch Hotel with all guns blazing.
‘You really want to hurt Penfold?’ Alex asked, unnecessarily.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then what we do is get our hands on whatever it is he was prepared to kill Lisa for.’
‘The diamonds?’
Alex wasn’t so sure that was all Penfold was missing, but he said, ‘Yes. I saw Jane this evening. She doesn’t have them, but she’s hidden them somewhere on board the Penfold Son. It’s in dock at Cape Town.’
‘I want to see her.’
‘No. If you try and bully her she’ll just go to the cops. She actually kept quiet about us being responsible for the ship hijacking. She’s also worried that her boss is up to something criminal.’
‘But how did they know to go to my house, and what were they looking for?’
‘I don’t know, but I do know what they found.’ Alex relayed the information Jane had given him about the photo, and the fact that Penfold had been able to positively identify all the men in the picture.’
Novak slumped. ‘So what you’re saying is, we’re screwed.’
‘What I’m saying is that we need to bring George Penfold down – not only as payback for what his thugs did to Lisa and her maid, but to keep ourselves alive.’
‘But not in business. I’m finished with piracy if Lisa gets better. I’ve already promised God.’
This was a side to the South African Alex hadn’t seen before, but Novak’s wishes echoed his own. All he wanted was to go straight, but they couldn’t run or hide from the threat George Penfold posed to them now. Even if he recovered his missing property he would still be out to eradicate the gang on Ilha dos Sonhos in order to remove the threat they posed to his shipping interests.
Novak snapped his fingers and looked as though he had just remembered something. ‘Hey, did you take some stuff from my wardrobe that you weren’t supposed to?’
Alex had hoped Novak wouldn’t notice the missing uniforms. When he’d called him in Mozambique he had offered to collect some clothes for him from his house. Novak had agreed, and had told Le Roux, the detective in charge of the investigation, by phone to allow Alex to collect a bag of clothes for him from the house, which was still being treated as a crime scene.
The car alarm that had been honking away out in the car park finally fell silent.
Novak continued: ‘Janine took me back to the house earlier this evening to get some more stuff. I’m staying with her – I can’t be in the house without Lisa. I noticed all my old army uniforms were gone. What’s going on, Alex?’
With Novak’s fatigues and ones he’d stolen from Kim’s husband he now had enough uniforms for what he had in mind. ‘I didn’t think you’d care, and I didn’t want to bother you, what with Lisa in hospital and all . . .�
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‘Bullshit. Tell me, man.’
‘Go back inside. Your wife needs you.’
‘It’s for a job, isn’t it? What are you hitting? Why the army uniforms?’
Alex genuinely didn’t want to involve Novak in the plan to steal the ivory from the Kruger National Park. The man belonged here in Johannesburg, at his wife’s side.
Novak stood straight and poked a finger at Alex’s chest. ‘You’re always saying you just need one more job. A big one. Is this it, Alex? Have you got your white whale?’
‘We can handle it – me and the other guys.’
Novak shook his big head vigorously. ‘You can’t cut me out, Alex. We haven’t saved enough money, Lisa and me. We have the cars to pay off, and I want to help Janine and her husband buy a house. I need that last big job as much as you do. The doctor said . . . well, he said that when Lisa wakes up she might even be paralysed, man. I’ll need money to look after her, to make things right for her.’
Alex clapped a hand on the South African’s muscled, tattooed forearm. ‘I won’t see you left poor, Novak. I’ll take care of it.’
Novak shrugged his hand free. ‘Don’t patronise me. And I don’t want your bloody charity. The fact is that you need me if you’ve got a job, Alex. You’re one man short now that psycho Mitch is off our hands. No one misses him, but you’ll be two men down if you don’t take me. Also, you saw the way Henri sided with Mitch. The Frenchy knows he was wrong and it was good of you to let him stay with the team, but we can’t afford to have that sort of shit going on again – people doing things behind your back. It’s not a criticism of you as a leader, Alex, but you need me to help keep them together and focused.’
Alex nodded. He knew Novak was right, about everything. The truth was that Alex did want out of the piracy game and Mitch and Henri had picked up on his weakening resolve.
‘When’s the job on?’ Novak pushed.
‘A week from today,’ Alex said.
‘Tell me more.’
And when Alex had finished Novak said, ‘You’ve finally gone fokking crazy. Count me in.’