‘Christ, Vince, somebody could’ve phoned me!’ she said. It was Christmas Eve and it was her first night duty.
Sergeant Vincent Bruins shifted his blue-clad block of a body uncomfortably from one boot to the other. ‘Captain, you were on holiday, we all thought you needed the break. I mean, what could you do? He wasn’t wounded, he was dead.’ He said it pleadingly as if the station’s love and respect for the Captain had won in a heart-rending trade-off. ‘And we thought you’d see it in the papers anyway.’
Bella looked up at him. ‘Oh, I see.’ Had she and Philander hidden their feelings that well? They had been cops not family, and cops got killed didn’t they? ‘Have they been caught?’
‘No, still looking …’
‘Who’s handling the case? It’s with us I hope, he was one of ours.’ He was mine, she thought. For a brief, heavenly while he had been hers. Why didn’t she tell him she loved him? She knew why as she thought it – it would have destroyed lives.
‘Warrant Officers Kuscus and Fritz are handling the case, Captain.’
Bella sat down. There was little justice in South Africa anyway when it came to arresting and convicting criminals, the system was too broken. But this – she looked away, shook her head in quiet desperation. ‘Thank you, Vince, that’ll be all.’
‘I’ll be off then, Captain, the Constable’s waiting in the patrol car. Ja-nee, it’s gonna be rough the next two weeks.’
‘Vince, I see you’re still not wearing a vest?’
‘Requisition’s gone missing, Captain, for ten vests, mine included. Not easy to borrow one, I’m an XXL you see …’ He grinned as he walked out.
•
Bella didn’t go home for breakfast on Christmas morning. She waited for Kuscus and Fritz to come in for their day shift. They were an odd pair. Kuscus’ bierpens or beer stomach would not have been out of place at Newlands Rugby stadium. To Bella he was a ‘dye and perm’ man – hair mat-black like barbeque coal and curled as if blow-dried. It made him appear prosperous and self-satisfied. Fritz was like a pencil – slim, straight, with a pointy head as if it had been permanently pinched in childbirth, giving him a deprived look. They were hardly ever apart yet had wives. They always made Bella think of the saying ‘thick as thieves’.
Kuscus and Fritz were in an office for detectives at the back of the complex when Bella walked in. Kuscus got up and greeted Bella with put-on deference, ‘Captain, good morning!’ Fritz had been pacing up and down and now stood as rigidly as a pointer. Bella hadn’t been sure what to expect. They were detectives, they could have been watching Philander, seen him with her. She didn’t care. Philander wasn’t there anymore but she was. She could go higher up, reveal everything she knew and let others take care of it. But Bella had seen too much apathy, too much ineptitude and corruption in her time as a cop. She wasn’t taking any chances. And what proof did she have other than Philander’s verbal feedback which had been somewhat out of line anyway? As Bella looked at the two Warrant Officers she was aware of how much she despised them – men on the payroll of two opposing forces, working against everything she was working for. Did wearing civvies make it easier for them?
‘I understand you’re handling the Philander murder case?’ she said, looking at one, then the other. It was like dealing with a two-headed, double-mouthed monster.
‘Yes, we are. We’re short staffed so we volunteered to take this one on. He was our colleague after all.’ It was Kuscus who coolly said it but it could have been Fritz.
‘It was your turn to be away for Christmas and New Year, wasn’t it?’ Bella said to Kuscus. ‘You had already put in for leave when Philander was killed.’
‘I changed my mind, Captain. It couldn’t wait. It was a terrible thing that happened. And two heads are better than one.’
A two-headed beast indeed, Bella thought. ‘Okay,’ she said evenly, ‘here’s what I want: all the dockets he was working on in the month before he died, and secondly, all notes he made during the same period. I’d like them now, please. You’ll have them back today.’ She wouldn’t allow the murder of Quentin Philander to be buried in dockets and deceit the way his wife’s death had been. But she’d have to be careful – avoid making calls from her landline, or sharing information on Philander with colleagues. She was aware of corruption within the force but until now it hadn’t touched her. For the first time she felt the need to look over her shoulder – for her family’s sake, and Philander’s.
Bella spoke to her son, her daughter, and her husband telling them that the opening of presents and Christmas lunch would have to wait until the evening. She loved them, she said, more than anything in the world. She felt happy that she could say it and mean it and still love Philander more than ever, because he was no longer of this world.
•
Bella sat in a meeting room, dockets and papers spread out on the large table. For five hours she went through everything systematically, some pieces two or three times, drinking coffee to stay awake. What did she expect, she thought wearily, for two crooked detectives to leave incriminating evidence? There was nothing about Philander probing the Evangelicals, no mention of Hannibal, Gatiep, Curly or Delron or other gang members, not a word about visits or trips he had made relating to them. The docket on Philander’s death contained only the report on where, when and how he had been killed. It was as if Hannibal and the Evangelicals did not exist. To Bella but to no one else it was painful proof of the guilt of Kuscus and Fritz.
The order to eliminate Philander – she didn’t believe it was just another hijacking – and his actual murder could have involved members of Hannibal’s gang, Hannibal himself, Kuscus and Fritz, maybe a high-flying crime kingpin, and others. Hits by organised crime were often disguised as something else and notoriously difficult to crack. And when the target was a cop, tracks were covered extra carefully. She’d have to think hard about how she was going to handle it.
Bella took out her standard issue Z-88 from its holster, her slim, elegant hands looking unbecoming on the gun – a heavy, all-steel construction with a coarse plastic grip, the barrel protruding a short distance from the frame giving it a snub-nosed look. But, like Bella, it was reliable. In a tight spot it did what it was expected to do. During target practice she had got used to absorbing its shock, but coming to terms with its intimidating safety mechanism took longer. With the hammer back she could apply the safety catch, pull the trigger, and see the hammer drop without the gun firing. The fact that the percussion cap was protected from the firing pin gave her little comfort and for years she would hear the explosion in her mind every time she did it. There was an easier way – lowering the hammer gently using thumb and forefinger as with other handguns – but Bella had to prove to herself that she could do what men did. Conquering a spooky safety mechanism combined with a good eye on the practice range had given Bella Ontong a quiet courage.
But still, she had never had to kill. She’d been lucky. She stared at the ‘V’ logo on the grip, took out the 15-round magazine from the base and checked it. She pushed it back in and looked down the sights mounted atop the slide at the front and at the rear. God knows what I might have to do, she thought.
Thirty-four
The yearning for blood was stronger in Hannibal than ever. He felt like a giant mosquito in Jurassic Park at four in the morning with an empty sac. After his last and final visit to the Gnome’s house he dreaded the thought of his binge coming to an end.
He and Delron alternated their vigil outside Zane’s flat and Lena’s house – every day from 4 pm to 10 pm and again from 6 am until 9 am, hoping to catch either or both of them. Delron nearly succeeded one night after seeing Lena go into the house. He waited a few hours to make sure she was asleep, but by the time he got in through the front door he found only her still-warm bed. Zane had simply vanished after Hannibal’s abortive attack, as completely as a bird on a migratory flight, throwing Hannibal into a rage so vicious that Delron and other members of the gang wouldn’t go near
him.
Hannibal took to sitting in his lounge morosely watching Hong Kong triad movies and cleaning his trophies. The beautiful women only made him ache for Chantal. The thrill he felt reading the headlines and the reports on what investigators found in the largely destroyed R15-million house had worn off, leaving him on edge. ‘Bizarre’, ‘chilling’, ‘vigilantism or revenge?’, ‘PAGAD on the march again?’, ‘even the dogs didn’t stand a chance’ – Hannibal had cut out the articles he loved most and stuck them on the wall next to his trophies. A few reporters had said that for both Dobermans to die like that the killers couldn’t have been strangers. Hannibal was immensely proud that they thought one person could not have perpetrated such a massacre. It made him feel powerful.
On Christmas day he sat in his house listening to carols and feeling sad. He usually felt this kind of sadness on Good Friday when he would think of Jesus not only dying without a fight but actually choosing to do so for the human race. Hannibal couldn’t imagine anyone, let alone the son of God, dying for the likes of himself, the Gnome, Danny the triad, Cupido, Gatiep, Curly and Sarai, Zane and Lena, even Chantal. What a futile death, what a waste of a good man! It should have been called Black Friday.
On this Christmas day the sadness Hannibal felt was for himself at the prospect of an existence without Chantal. Zane and Lena he would find, of that he had no doubt – they didn’t have the means to escape to another city or country – but the love he’d had with Chantal he would never find again. It gnawed at him relentlessly like the incisors of a rodent – the thought that he was not yet thirty and would live the rest of his life without love.
•
Hannibal got up the day after Boxing Day with the curtains in his house still drawn. He showered, splashed on Brut, put on clean jeans, a Quicksilver T-shirt with cool patterns, sneakers, and his shoulder holster. Then he packed a large training bag with stuff to tide him over for at least a week. His car he left in the driveway, angel wings away from the street.
He exited the house squinting in the light like a mole emerging from a hole. Down the street he went in his bomber jacket, the heavy bag moving from side to side with his swagger. Down Concert Boulevard, past the school, the church, the police station, the community hall – places where people had lectured him on what was right and wrong when all they wanted was to bring him in line with how they saw things. How they had failed! Even the police, with the might of the law behind them, had never been able to nail him. Hannibal had God on his side in the early days and then the Gnome. But they both disappointed him, becoming meddlesome in their different ways. The two G-forces. And he had killed them both. As he strutted along he thought there was nothing and nobody Hannibal Fortuin couldn’t handle.
He walked about a kilometre to the tik house, checked out the high walls that had been erected around it recently. Inside the property he made sure none of the new locks had been tampered with. Only then did he go in through the front door. He surveyed the large room that had been created by bashing down the internal wall damaged by Delron’s accidental explosion. He’d get the boys to take all the stuff – the containers, acids and solvents, and glass lollies scattered around – out to the stoep. On the one side of the large room was the kitchen, on the other a passage leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. He went into the bedrooms, emptied his bag in a cupboard and spent an hour cleaning that part of the house. Finally, he went to the superette near the mosque and the halal butcher and bought provisions for a week, ticking off items mentally as he put them in the trolley.
With the bulging bag over one shoulder and plastic packets banging against his legs he made his way back to the tik house. Soon he would be ready.
Thirty-five
On their fourth day in Wilderness Zane was sitting on the beach with Lena feeling as if his world was teetering. He had the awful realisation that all along he had been building his new life on flimsy foundations on the mountain side of the track, and that it was now threatening to fall apart. And nobody was to blame except himself – he had kept that which could not be seen away from others and, worse, himself. The Zane Hendricks people could see – the flat in Wynberg, the job, the clothes, the bit of money he could now flash – he had been more than happy to present to the world, to his parents, Chantal, Bernadette, the people at BAT, even Malaki and Lena.
He thought of how spin had entered his life. How different was the new Zane from an ad campaign that relied on airy fairy promises? Had he become what he disliked so much? Maybe his father was right. He should have learnt a trade – something real, honest, and lasting. Zane stared at the sand castle a boy and a girl were building, their zeal and commitment such that they were convinced it would stand against the tides. Just like him.
Zane sat stiffly on the sand. The deep peace that the mountains, forests, lakes and lagoons had gathered over millions of years he had lost in four days. It was unable to lull him into thinking that things weren’t as bad as they seemed to be. He stopped taking in his surroundings. It was as though they’d been painted on shiny canvas and were bouncing off his eyes. He was aware only of the waiting, knowing he would have to confront his shadow rider once and for all. He and Lena were both waiting, he thought – so young, so new to the world to be facing their separate destinies so soon. It made every day they were together a precious day of reprieve.
•
It came the following afternoon, when the sun was three-quarters through the day heading in the direction of George and bathing the beach in a rich apricot hue. His mobile was ringing from his rucksack, muffled, barely audible. He hadn’t received any calls since stepping off the bus in George. He’d bought his parents a mobile and airtime – it could be them, he thought. It could be Appleby with a crisis at work, or Malaki with news, maybe Bernadette – they had not spoken for weeks. He thought how few people there were who had reason to call him, and smiled ruefully – that would be about it for his funeral too. But then he’d never been a Facebook man on a mission to collect friends. Crossing the line had been everything.
He stared at his rucksack as if it contained a reptile.
‘It’s yours, Zane,’ Lena said and took it out for him.
Its shrill ringing was now cutting through the roar of the sea – swells rising in long lines, pounding the shallows and throwing up plumes of white water. The small screen showed no name, only a number he didn’t recognise. He felt relieved, probably a wrong number. His impulse was to throw his mobile into the sea, cut off the world and hold Lena against him so that all he could hear was the beating of her heart and her breathing.
He pressed the green. A man’s voice said, ‘Zane?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Someone wants to talk to you.’
He was still trying to work out who it was using his name so familiarly when a new voice came on the line. As he listened he reached out for Lena’s hand and pressed it to his cheek, but it couldn’t stop the tears running silently down his face and into the sand.
•
Zane and Lena got to Malaki by 11 am the following morning. The first bus would only have left George at 11 am arriving in Cape Town in the evening. Zane would never have forgiven himself had he waited, and he had done the only thing he could think of – hitch-hiking the 450km from Wilderness to Cape Town. They had left Wilderness in the late afternoon reaching Swellendam three-and-a-half hours later after a long wait on the N2 outside Mossel Bay. Lena’s presence helped but Zane remarked that little did motorists know she was the dangerous one – she was still carrying her knife. They stayed at a B&B close to the main road running through Swellendam, Zane knowing he would not sleep. They talked until she dozed off in his arms he having told her about Hannibal who wanted them both dead because they had each crossed him twice. She stirred and said, ‘I’m sure he’s the one who killed Sarai. Your enemy is mine too. At least we got something straight.’ She kissed him goodnight and he wondered for the umpteenth time what it would be like to make love to her. Even with his mind in
turmoil he wanted her, she’d been driving him crazy for days. In the morning they walked to the outskirts of Swellendam at 5.30 am, got a lift half-an-hour later and arrived in Cape Town by 9.00 am. From there they took the train to Muizenberg and a taxi to Strandfontein. Zane had thought it best not to go near his flat or Lena’s house. What he had heard on the phone had been bad enough.
They found Malaki on the beach teaching three awe-struck kids how to surf. Zane wasn’t sure if it was Malaki’s dreads and physique or the scary surf.
‘You like to drop in, eh!’ Malaki grinned at Zane.
‘Especially on your waves,’ Zane said. They hugged then Malaki put an arm around a stiff Lena. ‘What brings you two back so soon?’
‘You don’t want to know, my bra. I’ll catch you later, at the camp.’
That afternoon Zane told Malaki everything. It was the only time Zane had seen Malaki twirl his dreads around his fingers like worry beads. ‘And you say you dare not go to the police?’
Zane nodded. ‘And I’ve got to phone my mother and father, otherwise they might. I pray they don’t panic … it’ll be the end.’
‘He’s forced you to come back and face him, Zane. And what if he doesn’t stick to his side of the agreement?’ Malaki placed a hand on Zane’s shoulder. ‘I and I aren’t happy at all.’ The sing-song rhythm of his voice did nothing to sooth them.
‘I’ve got no choice. It’s been a long time coming, my friend.’ Zane stared at the dune bush. How different nature was here compared with Wilderness. Here it was filled with menace. He could feel the presence of the Flats just beyond the dunes.
Zane chose to speak to his mother first. The news would play havoc with his father’s high blood pressure. She broke down halfway through his third sentence. He thought of Appleby who had advised him early on at BAT, ‘Give ‘em the headlines, Zane, then the bottom line, fast, especially with Magnus.’
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