Last Train to Retreat

by Gustav Preller

  In the late afternoon when the results were announced, Zane was among those who were awarded their black belts. Sensei Simon found him, shook his hand and said, ‘Remember, this is only the first step, the challenge ahead is even greater.’ He added, ‘From white belt to tenth dan master could take a cool sixty years. You and I and most of the world will probably never reach those heights but that’s beside the point. The point is it’s there to climb, like Everest.’

  As he lay exhausted that night with his eye bloodshot and sore, Zane knew why he wasn’t feeling elated. He had passed a test, an important one, but not the test. It reminded him of the story of the vaudeville artist, whose knives had outlined his wife’s body for years on a board, barely missing her. One day he found out that she had been unfaithful and he resolved to kill her during one of his acts, making it look like an accident. He tried for a week but couldn’t succeed – he had practised the art of just missing her for so long that he couldn’t kill her when he wanted to. Zane wondered if he was too much like the vaudeville artist – trained to hold back even when the intention was the opposite.

  Zane was a black belt. But what did it mean? That he had finally met and mastered himself? That he could stand up against someone like Hannibal? Zane fell asleep knowing his black belt was indeed just the beginning. The only small problem, as Appleby would say, was that he didn’t have sixty years. With Hannibal reappearing so suddenly and confronting Chantal, Zane had months, maybe weeks.

  •

  ‘Magnus wants to see you, Zane,’ Appleby said.

  Zane looked up to see if Appleby’s face carried good or bad news. Zane had been amazed and disturbed by the amount of space given to spirit coolers by liquor stores. The shelves were crowded with different brands and flavours – a veritable explosion of colours and funky copy, all to get more people to drink more alcohol disguised as fruit over Christmas and the New Year. To him the whole scene sucked. He thought the unthinkable – that alcohol advertising should be banned like cigarette advertising. Magnus would eat him for breakfast leaving nothing on the plate if he knew. But Appleby was grinning. ‘What are you waiting for, old man? He’s in the office.’

  Convinced that it wasn’t good news, Zane sighed as he got up. Magnus was behind his computer as Zane walked into his office. ‘Ah, Zane, sit down, sit down,’ he said without looking up. Bet he’s checking the bottom line and his headcount, Zane thought.

  Magnus’s eyes popped out above his laptop as if on stalks. ‘Good heavens, now what have you done, Zane, your face I mean?’

  Zane told Magnus how he got his blue eye. ‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ Magnus said, ‘your clients would like that … it’s not as if you were drunk or had a street fight, right?’ He got to the point, ‘It’s this time of the year, Zane, and I’m pleased to tell you that the Board has decided to give everyone a bonus because of the healthy state of the company. Here is yours.’ Magnus held out an envelope. He could have been handing Zane a letter of dismissal or retrenchment, with Magnus it was all the same.

  Zane took it. It was white and thin and felt as if there was hardly anything in it. ‘May I open it, Mr Theron?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Zane opened it carefully. He had not had any kind of present for a long time. He stared at Magnus’s letter and the amount in numbers and in words – R20 000 (twenty thousand rand). Never had he been given so much money in a single go. He was a step nearer to bringing his family out from Lavender Hill but he badly needed a break, perhaps a few days on the West Coast just to chill, with or without Bernadette, or mountain biking in the Boland. Such luxuries were unthinkable before. He suppressed the flash of guilt he felt telling himself he could get Chantal to stay in his flat, out of Hannibal’s way.

  Faraway places like England where Appleby lived could wait.

  Twenty-six

  The question facing Hannibal as he sat in his lounge polishing his trophies was whether he should settle old scores first or last. Two were down, Curly and Sarai, with three to go – Zane, and the man and the girl on the train. Zane he already had in his sights but the jackpot was hearing from the Thai girl that Lena had killed Cupido and was living right under Hannibal’s nose.

  Hannibal stared at his reflection in the polished silver. He needed to get the hairy spider that was the Gnome off his back. He put his trophies away carefully and called Sasman.

  ‘Jerome, it’s Hannibal, I got news, good news.’

  ‘Tuesday’s come and gone, Hannibal, it should’ve been before Tuesday, by my reckoning.’

  Hannibal took a deep breath. One day, one day, there would be another reckoning. ‘We found the girl, yesterday, in a brothel in Sea Point. I spent time with her last night. She was zonked … tried to swim to Robben Island thinking it was her Thai island, ha, ha … maybe there’s something in the paper today, maybe tomorrow.’

  Silence, then, ‘It’s a start, my friend, it’s only one …’

  ‘It gets bigger, Jerome. She told me who killed Cupido – someone called Lena who lives, can you believe it, in Lavender Hill! She’ll be easier to find than the Thai girl …’

  ‘The man, Hannibal, where’s the man who was with her on the train? All I need is for kak to happen when I’m not here!’

  ‘If we find her we’ll find him. I’ve got the manpower now. Listen, Jerome, I gotta go …’

  ‘Whaddaya mean if? You don’t get it, man, do you?’

  Hannibal imagined the Gnome’s hairs standing up like the pile on a carpet rubbed the wrong way, his ridiculous body sucking in air to make it look bigger. It was amazing that the little shit thought he could control all men.

  •

  In the kitchen, eating a half Gatsby filled with Viennas and mustard and sliced tomatoes, and gulping milk between bites, Hannibal wondered who to kill first, Lena or Zane. It wasn’t straightforward at all. Lena belonged to the three of them – to him, Sasman, and Danny. Zane was his only. At this moment Lena was a mere description but it was enough to make Hannibal suspect that she and the girl on the train were one and the same person. The way Sarai had described Lena, and Curly’s memory of her on the train, was just too close – squarely cut fringe, full mouth, and slender physique. When the thought first came to Hannibal it had been like a shot of heroin into his veins – it meant Lena had killed Cupido and Gatiep. So why not kill her first? It would avenge the murder of two members of the syndicate as well as the abduction of Sarai. It would certainly be Sasman’s choice. But then Sasman had probably never truly loved or made himself vulnerable to love. He was a fucking spider, and spiders never made themselves vulnerable; they simply spun defensive layers.

  Hannibal knew that killing Lena wouldn’t make him feel a thing. It was because he didn’t hate her. She had simply become a nuisance to be crushed like a mosquito or a fly. No, to really feel something he had to kill Zane. The unthinkable came to Hannibal then that killing Chantal could be the ultimate – a rush lasting days, weeks, years, because his hatred and his grief would be in his blood until he died.

  Hannibal looked down at his Gatsby with surprise. The one end was turning soggy. Then he saw it was from his tears. Even the milk seemed to taste of it. It was an unfamiliar sensation – he couldn’t ever remember crying. He got up knowing that Zane had to come before Lena. With Chantal he’d have to think a lot more.

  In the dead of night a thought gnawed at Hannibal. If he shot Zane, Chantal would know who it was and go to the police. Philander would come for him but Philander would find only Hannibal’s body because the Gnome always got in first. With Zane he had to create another accident. Had he, Hannibal the General, not become a master at accidents? He grinned and the hole where his four front teeth used to be opened up black in the dark.

  •

  Two days later Hannibal was parked in Sunninghill Road, his car’s angel wings facing away from Zane’s block. From where he was sitting he would not miss Zane coming up the hill.

  Instead Zane suddenly emerged from his building wheeling his bik
e and wearing a sweat top, helmet, and rucksack. Simultaneously a girl came up Court Road. Instead of passing each other as strangers would they stopped and talked. Something about her made Hannibal’s skin tingle, nothing sexual, rather a feeling of unsavoury familiarity as in a relationship gone bad. The sun, almost over the mountain, tried to throw light on her but failed. Hannibal shook off the feeling. It was Zane he had come for.

  Zane gave her something, she went into his building and he sped down the road. Hannibal gunned the car – turned right at the bottom, left into Wolfe. But Zane had vanished. Which side street had he taken, Jesus! Hannibal took the corner of Durban with squealing tyres, into a maze of smaller streets. It was only when Hannibal reached Wellington Avenue that he saw Zane speeding towards Plumstead. Ten minutes later Hannibal saw Zane chaining his bike to a pole next to a hall, greeting the car guard and walking inside. Hannibal followed him and stepped into what was unmistakably a dojo – places Hannibal scorned for their phoney fighting and empty manners. Spectators stood on the side waiting for something to happen. Five minutes later the initiation for new black belts started, supervised by a sensei with a black belt frayed almost white. Hannibal’s lip curled to reveal his latest bridge, the one he had made for Chantal – L-O-V-E. How could a few fights against other black belts in a dojo with a million rules prove anything? It was nothing but a sham.

  Hannibal watched as Zane’s rubber-like legs found their opponent time and again to appreciative shouts from the crowd. But always the fighters remained standing. When would they learn that ‘kissing’ the target wasn’t real life? Not even the cage was real but at least there was blood. Real was where you found bodies, like on the Flats.

  Hannibal felt a tugging in his brain, tentative at first as if not sure of itself, then more insistent. When it finally breached the force of it made him step back. Bruce Lee man, Curly had said. Hannibal was looking at the man who’d been on the train.

  •

  Zane made his way back to the flat feeling happy with the way he had handled his initiation. He’d given more than he’d taken and it made him feel good following the nerve-wracking grading the previous Saturday.

  He found it strange that he didn’t miss Bernadette all that much – she had regularly made supper for them and slept with him. Now it was Lena preparing dinner and he’d never even kissed her. He’d held her in his arms but only to comfort her. He thought of the time he had to clean and dress her wound, how nice her legs were and how her rich brown eyes seemed to follow him everywhere. He had to watch his back then for the knife that could come at any moment. Now she needed him. It was a need without a hint of sex, intense yet distant. Dark eyes still followed him but words were held back. Were there any? Zane had come to accept that meeting occasionally was purely for self-preservation. Anything more would bring risk. From his side he wasn’t sure if he could sleep with a girl who reminded him of death.

  Zane heard the car behind him but thought nothing of it. Wellington Avenue was in a quiet part of Wynberg – lying straight and clear with enough natural light left to stop street lights from coming on. He moved to the side of the road without slowing down giving the approaching vehicle plenty of space. The engine sound rose up a pitch higher. Zane processed the change as just another urban noise. It was when the engine started screaming that he turned around. A car with its lights on full was coming for him. It blinded him, transfixed him like a lamppost in the tarmac – a mass of steel on wheels with no visible driver, out to crush him. The car hit a speed hump, took flight briefly before it crash-landed setting off sparks like fireworks. It had struck the hump at an angle causing it to lose direction and it now spun as it skidded – all the way to the next hump where it came to a smoking halt. Zane couldn’t believe he was still in one piece. His impulse was to get away as fast as he could but what if the driver had had a heart attack or the accelerator pedal had got stuck? Malfunction had been known to kill drivers – brand suicide, Appleby called it.

  Zane was still vacillating when the driver got out on the far side. A yellow-stubble head stared at Zane over the roof. It was Hannibal. Zane froze. Neither said anything, as if they understood that nothing needed to be explained. Hannibal pulled out a gun and Zane looked into the bulbous snout of a silencer. For a bizarre moment he thought it would sit nicely below Magnus’ protruding eyes. Then his reflexes kicked in and he took off, holding the bike by its handles and mounting it in one movement like an expert rider would a horse and aimed for the nearest side-street ten metres away.

  He heard plopping sounds, felt a rush of air next to his helmet then a tug on his back as he rode headlong into the narrow mouth of the street.

  Twenty-seven

  Somewhere in the labyrinth of small streets between Wellington and Main, Zane stopped. Had he been hit? He couldn’t see blood and he felt no pain. He took off his rucksack and saw the hole – a bullet had gone straight through it at an angle. It must have missed his right side by millimetres. With shaking hands he made his first call.

  ‘Lena it’s Zane. I can’t talk long. Just do as I say …’

  ‘Hey, what’s wrong? Supper’s ready.’

  ‘I nearly got killed … a man’s after me, someone I know. Lock the door, don’t answer the bell, tomorrow go to work late then stay away from the flat …’

  ‘Is it about Gatiep, tell me Zane!’

  ‘No, it’s about my sister Chantal … it’s a long story going back years.’

  ‘But … where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll call you, can’t talk now …’

  ‘Zane …’

  ‘He’s not after you, okay, but please do as I ask, and … and look after yourself. Gotta go, Lena, sorry …’

  He rung off and made his second call.

  ‘Chantal, Zane here … listen carefully, it’s serious …’

  He told Chantal what had happened. There was a long silence. ‘Chantal, you okay?’

  Then she blurted out, ‘He’s crazy, Zane, I knew he’d do something, but this! … God used to be with him, gave him a chance, and he lost it. Oh, it was me, Zane! I said no and he lost it. It’s too late now, for him and maybe for me …’

  ‘I don’t think you should stay at the flat, he might know where I live. Stay home but walk a different route, watch out …’

  ‘I’m more worried about you. He can’t have me so you must pay for it … he always thought it was you who turned me against him. He needs you to blame, Zane … he’d rather die than believe it’s me who saw the evil in him.’

  ‘Chantal, can’t talk now … don’t tell Ma and Pa, I don’t want heart attacks, okay?’

  ‘He’ll try again …’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, you take care. I love you, Sus …’

  ‘Zane, wait … is today the first time you’ve seen him in all these years?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Dunno, can’t explain, just a feeling … love you too, Boetie.’

  Finally, Zane called Appleby.

  ‘Zane, what’s up?’ Appleby had seen Zane’s name on his mobile screen. The sound of raucous laughter threatened to drown out his voice. After-work time was generally bad for Appleby. It was when memories preyed on him. Each glass he held was a grenade he could lob at his demons.

  ‘Appleby, something’s cropped up that needs sorting out.’ Then hastily, ‘Relax, it’s not work, everything’s fine with my clients.’

  ‘Must be woman problems then … take it from me, no woman’s worth it, in spite of what the L’Oreal girls say in the advertising.’

  ‘Women, Appleby, two of them, I used to have three – nothing to be happy about, I tell you. Remember I put in for some leave? Is it okay to go a few days earlier? It’s quiet at the office …’

  ‘Oh, like when?’

  ‘Like tomorrow, Appleby, please.’

  Appleby thought about it. ‘I suppose there’s no reason why not. There’s life after women, you know.’

  The lingering dusk finally gave way to the night as Zane
set off on his journey. He knew exactly where he was going yet it felt as if he was riding into the unknown.

  •

  He avoided Main Road, sticking to the smaller streets of Plumstead and Bergvliet that were so haphazard they could have been planned by madmen. They slowed him down and a few times he got lost or had to backtrack. Only at Ladies Mile did he meet up with Main Road. He rode past Concert Boulevard giving Lavender Hill barely a glance on his left. What would come his way once he was back in Wynberg he didn’t want to think about.

  Forty minutes later he could smell the ocean having ridden south along Prince George Drive via Military Road. As he turned into the south-easterly at Baden-Powell he could feel the sea on his skin. Then he saw it – the long lazy breakers of Muizenberg rolling white in the night towards him. He stopped, took off his helmet, and breathed in the salty air. It felt good. He looked up at the sky. How insignificant he must be from out there – not even the size of a grain of sand or a speck of dust, yet people were out to destroy him for something that had happened long ago.

  He left his helmet off for a while to cool his head. On this desolate, windswept stretch of road there were few cars at night. Along the great curve that formed False Bay, Strand and Gordon’s Bay appeared as distant light clusters like stars along the Milky Way. He felt as if he could ride forever. For a moment a freedom that knew no bounds swept through him until he remembered that the Flats were just on the other side of the dunes with their scruffy vegetation, and he knew that for the rest of his journey he wouldn’t be alone – his shadow rider would be there to remind him of his past.