Payback - A Cape Town thriller

by Mike Nicol

  Oumou turned sad brown eyes on him. Said nothing.

  * * *

  9:50 a.m. At the office Mace went through the guest list Ducky Donald had emailed. One hundred and fifty high-end names. Predictably the cellphone didn’t belong to any of them. He could scratch off about thirty people as above suspicion but even a team of ten working the phones and shoe leather mightn’t have hit a link to Sheemina February or PAGAD in two weeks among the others. All the same what else could he do but make random calls on the off-chance. He started at the top.

  Had they ever sought legal advice from a Sheemina February?

  No.

  The five people he spoke to knew the name, though. Told him, she’s PAGAD.

  10:20 a.m. The New York clients phoned: how about a shopping trip down at the Waterfront? Mace explained that a colleague would be collecting them.

  Mr New York was unhappy. ‘Is this boutique service?’

  ‘A temporary emergency,’ Mace said.

  When his wife was under the knife, the New York client said, he didn’t want any temporary emergencies.

  Mace assured him there wouldn’t be any. Went back to the list.

  12:00 p.m. Bang on the noonday gun, Pylon phoned.

  ‘This’s cute,’ he said, ‘Business class passenger Sheemina February on last night’s London flight. Due back day after tomorrow. Convenient.’

  ‘No bloody coincidence.’

  ‘So now?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’ The thought of Christa came back on Mace, heavy and painful. His daughter alone, scared. Strange men about her. A thought he couldn’t bear. He groaned out loud.

  ‘What’s it?’ Pylon coming in fast. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mace, thinking, no, there’s this bloody great pain in my chest tearing me up.

  ‘Go swimming,’ said Pylon, ‘I’ll come back and chase the list.’

  ‘Wouldn’t do any good.’

  Pylon about to hang up when Mace said, ‘Christ! The goon. She said he trains at the Point. Mitch. Mick. Micky. Mikey. Some shit like that.’

  Pylon going, ‘What? What’re you talking about?’

  Mace going, ‘Get down there. Meet me down there. Now.’

  12.45 p.m. The day manager at the Point told Mace, ‘I can’t do that. The list’s private, confidential. I can’t let you see it.’

  Mace and Pylon sat in his office, watching the young manager squeeze an exercise grip to pump his biceps. The guy’s pecs strained against his T-shirt like he was a walking advert for health and vitality.

  ‘Alright,’ said Pylon, ‘there’s another way we can do this. We give you a description, we give you a first name, you say, “Oh hell yes, I know blah de blah, trains here all the time, lives out at blah.” How’s that sound?’

  The day manager looked dubious. ‘Dude, what are you okes?’

  ‘You know,’ said Mace. ‘You know me. I swim here three days a week. I step out of your office, ten people’ll greet me.’

  ‘I’ve seen you. I mean what’s it you do?’

  ‘Protection,’ said Pylon. ‘Celebrities. Movie stars. Business people. High net worth individuals.’

  ‘So what’s it with this chappie you wanna contact?’

  Pylon leant forward, placed his hands on the manager’s desk. ‘Tony,’ he said, picking up the manager’s name from a staff schedule pinned on a notice board, ‘Tony, you don’t want to know. But let me tell you this, our client, a major business figure, is about to lay a charge against this man. For stalking his daughter. Here at your gym. And elsewhere. In this sort of situation we first take a soft line, try to intervene, talk the parties out of the courts.’

  ‘Like beating him up?’

  ‘Talking to him, I said, Tony. Talking to him.’ Pylon sat back. He and Mace watching the day manager squeezing the grip.

  ‘Another thing you have to consider,’ said Mace, ‘is the publicity. Especially if it comes out it could have been stopped. This guy, Mikey, hitting on her, here where she’s supposed to be safe.’

  ‘Mikey?’ said Tony. ‘Mikey Rheeder? No ways.’

  ‘Muscled fella,’ said Pylon, puffing out his chest. ‘Like you. Surfer-type, tanned, very short blond hair. Probably a number one cut.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the day manager. ‘That’s Mikey Rheeder. No ways he’d do that.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I’ve trained with him a few times. I don’t know him. I know him like that, from training. From seeing him around. You know.’

  2:15 p.m. Mace and Pylon sat in the big Merc outside a Sea Point block of flats eating salami and olive pizzas. They’d buzzed the button beside Mikey Rheeder’s name, and got no response. From a public phone on Main Road, Mace had called the cellphone number the day manager had given them and Mikey had answered, at least Mace believed it was Mikey from how he remembered his voice, nasal, too high-pitched for the size of his body. Mace hadn’t said anything. Mikey had said, ‘Who’s this? You got a wrong number, pal. Piss off.’ He’d laughed. Said, ‘Cheers, arsehole. Your fingers too fat for the keys.’ The connection was dropped and Mace hung up the handset, waiting to see if Mikey would ring back. When the phone rang he lifted the receiver. Mikey said, ‘Who’s this? Stop bugging me arsehole.’ This time Mace cut the connection.

  ‘He’s got my daughter,’ said Mace, toying with the pizza. Not hungry suddenly. ‘That’s the shit part. He’s sitting there with Christa. Wherever they’ve got her.’

  The wind came up the canyon street blustery with rain, rocking the car.

  Pylon looked up at the block of flats. ‘Makes you wonder how this Mikey Rheeder guy can afford this. A flat in Sea Point. Alright not ocean frontage but these’re rich larneys stacked in these properties. Lawyers, gynaes, chemists. How’s a common goon get in among the Jews you have to ask?’

  Mace didn’t. He was thinking about Christa in the hands of Mikey Rheeder but he couldn’t take that thought too far before he imagined the fear on Christa’s face.

  6.04 p.m. Pylon was saying what he didn’t understand was why there’d been no word from them, the kidnappers, no demand? Not to close down the club. Not to stop Matthew dealing drugs. Not even a ransom.

  ‘I was wondering that,’ said Mace.

  ‘The longer they hold out, the more you sweat. That’s the strategy, you reckon?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Mace’s cellphone rang and both men jumped at the shrillness. No number on the screen.

  Mace said, ‘Maybe this’s it.’ He thumbed on the connection, held the phone to his ear.

  ‘Mr Bishop this is Sheemina February. I believe you called at my office.’

  Mace got a coldness in his veins, fastened his stare on the entrance to the block of flats, said, ‘Where’s my daughter?’ - keeping his voice even as if he were asking about nothing important.

  Pylon in the driver’s seat glanced at him, touched his shoulder. Mouthed Sheemina February when Mace turned, Mace nodding twice.

  ‘What about your daughter?’ said Sheemina February. ‘I’m sorry I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘My daughter is what I’m saying,’ said Mace, still no heat in his voice. No emotion. ‘You don’t have to kid me you don’t know.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  A pause, and for a moment Mace thought he’d lost her.

  ‘This is an international call I’m making,’ she said, ‘I don’t need to be sworn at.’

  ‘Where’s my daughter? Where’ve your thugs got her?’

  ‘I don’t have thugs, Mr Bishop. I don’t know anything about your daughter.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Mace let out an explosion of air. ‘I’m expected to believe that. My daughter gets kidnapped. It just so happens the night you fly to London. From where I’m standing that looks like you pulled a move.’

  ‘Mr Bishop you’re distraught. I’m sorry about your daughter.’

  ‘I’ve got a description,’ Mace lied. ‘Of a guy called Mikey Rheeder
. A guy I met in your company. A guy you told me about. About how he recovered from a bullet wound to the shoulder. One of your thugs.’

  ‘I know of this man.’

  ‘Sure you do. I want my daughter.’

  ‘Mr Bishop I’m in London. You need the police.’

  ‘I need you to make a call, tell Abdul Abdul and this Mikey Rheeder to bring my daughter back.’

  ‘You think I can do that? Mr Bishop you overestimate my position. I’m a lawyer.’

  Mace had his gaze fixed on the entrance to the block of flats at an elderly couple coming out, buttoned up in raincoats against the drizzle. The woman with a scarf over her hair.

  ‘I know what you can do,’ said Mace. ‘You know where my daughter is. Tell me.’

  A pause. He could hear no background noise, then she said, ‘Some things, Mr Bishop, are not what they seem.’

  The connection closed off. Mace shouted, ‘You bitch. You fucking bloody bitch.’ Hit the dashboard, again and again, the elderly couple edging past the front of the Merc staring at the two men inside. The one yelling, hitting the dashboard.

  7:15 p.m. Oumou phoned Mace, her voice a whisper. As Mace pieced it together a man had buzzed her from the street intercom, said he was a courier with Ajax Deliveries, had a package for Mr and Mrs Bishop. Sender one François Barber. Oumou had said, no, she wasn’t expecting a parcel. Didn’t know anyone called Barber. The courier said, Please lady, here’s the tracking number, look up Ajax in the phone book, I can’t stand here all night. Oumou did, everything was kosher. She let the guy in, he handed over the parcel.

  That was when her voice disappeared.

  ‘What, Oumou, what?’ Mace shouted.

  ‘It is Christa’s hair,’ Mace heard her say.

  He told her he’d be there in five.

  He left Pylon in the Merc, took the Spider, jumping lights into Glengariff, along High Level, after the quarry going through the Bokaap side streets, down Wale into Buitengracht to Orange and steeply up to the house on Glen Steps. Rushed in shouting Oumou’s name from the front door to where he found her in the kitchen. On the table the envelope, a standard over-the-counter padded number for sending documents. Beside it, a huge pile of Christa’s hair, dark and soft. Mace picked up a handful, held it to his nose. Could smell his daughter.

  He didn’t want to imagine where she’d been when they’d shaved her head, how they’d held her, except the flash came unbidden: a bare room, his daughter on a stool in the middle, shivering. Mikey Rheeder with a hand on her neck, another on her shoulder. Abdul Abdul holding electric clippers, the cord trailing across the floor to a wall plug. Grinning, his sharp-pointed teeth grin. Behind him a woman in a long coat. Her arms crossed. Sheemina February. Didn’t matter where she was, she was there. The only sound the electric hum of the clippers.

  A printed note that’d been included with the hair read: ‘Get your friend to close his club.’

  Mace checked with Ajax who had brought in the parcel. The clerk remembered the sender, a personable man wearing a suit had paid the fee in cash. Coloured guy. His only stipulation that the delivery was urgent. They’d got it dropped in forty-five minutes. Not bad going the clerk felt, seeing as the point of departure was their northern office, twenty clicks out of the city.

  Mace reckoned that’s where they’d got Christa: somewhere in the northern suburbs, in one of those ranch-style houses, double garage, behind high walls in a street where nobody was going to notice anything out of the ordinary. Knowing this didn’t make anything any easier.

  He stayed with Oumou, the two of them sitting either side the kitchen table with Christa’s hair between them.

  7:40 p.m. An SMS. Disappointed in you again Mr Bishop. What next must your daughter sacrifice?

  A new cellphone number.

  Mace didn’t show it to Oumou, told her it was an update on a client.

  8:10 p.m. Pylon phoned. ‘I’m sitting here with Mikey in his flat,’ he said. ‘Nice place. Very comfortable. He wants to tell us where Christa is, but he’d rather give it straight to her daddy. That right, Mikey?’

  Mace heard Mikey say, ‘Piss off, prick.’

  Then Pylon: ‘I can understand why you shot him. He has this effect on people.’

  ‘I’m there,’ said Mace, pocketing his phone. He reached across the table for Oumou’s hand, laced his fingers into hers. ‘We have someone who might know where Christa is. With a little persuasion. I won’t be long.’ He squeezed her fingers, unlocked their hold.

  ‘I must come with you,’ said Oumou. ‘This is our daughter.’

  Mace shook his head. ‘No. I need you to be here, for any phone calls. Sometime they have to talk to us. Make their demands, ask us for money, whatever it is they’re after. They want to hear we’re desperate. Frightened for what they’re doing to Christa. They’ve sent her hair, they have to know how they’re hurting us. If they call you’ve got to tell them that.’

  Oumou stayed focused on his eyes.

  ‘I know,’ said Mace. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You want to hear him say it. Tell you where she is. You have to hear it, I know. But you’ve got to be here.’

  ‘They will not phone,’ she said.

  ‘We can’t be sure of that. My guess is they will, in the next hours, unless this Mikey tells us first.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  Mace shrugged. ‘Can’t say, really. There’s a way we had, Pylon and me, in our early days at the camps. Membesh especially. When people were coming through that we didn’t know if they were genuine or spies. If the word was that they were spies we’d talk to them and they’d usually tell us. Quite quickly.’

  Oumou said, ‘I have a way too.’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ said Mace. ‘But this time you have to be here.’ He stood, bunched his hand again into the pile of Christa’s hair. ‘I’m going to take some.’

  Oumou reached up to him, to his fist that held their daughter’s hair. ‘Hurt him,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, that’s likely,’ Mace said, smiling at the desert in her eyes.

  ‘I’ve been asked to hurt you,’ were the first words he said to Mikey Rheeder fifteen, sixteen minutes later after Pylon had buzzed him into the block and he’d taken the lift to the fifth floor and gone down the corridor to number five ten and knocked and been let in. Mikey Rheeder sat on a straight-backed oak carver, one of six around a lime-washed oak dining room table. His arms were taped to the arms of the carver. The left arm he’d fastened himself under the watchful barrel of Pylon’s pistol, before Pylon had done the other.

  ‘Nice dining table,’ said Mace.

  ‘Part of the rental,’ said Pylon. ‘Not a reflection of Mikey’s taste.’ He indicated the open-plan kitchen. ‘That’s nice too. Well equipped. Serious knives for the serious chef. Got everything in it for someone doing a gourmet meal. Sort of thing would make Treasure rush out to Boardmans to upgrade the cutlery.’

  Mace took the fistful of Christa’s hair out of his jacket pocket, put it on the table, dark against the white surface. He saw Mikey’s eyes flick to it and away.

  ‘Recognise that?’ he said.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ said Mikey.

  ‘This’s not an attitude I would take,’ said Pylon. ‘Under the circumstances. The best would be for you to treat us politely. Know what I’m saying?’

  ‘My sense is you would recognise it,’ said Mace, sitting down across the table from him. ‘I have a feeling you probably helped shave my daughter’s head this afternoon and your friend, the coloured guy, delivered this to the couriers, Ajax.’ He pushed the clump of hair into the centre of the table. ‘Surprising how soft her hair is, like that. But you’d know this from stuffing it in the envelope. When she asks me to brush it, it seems different, almost liquid. If I smell that hair, I can smell her. Amazing that. That we can tell one another from the smell of our hair.’

  Mikey said, ‘Up yours.’

  Mace and Pylon let it go, stared at him until Mikey said, ‘Look, you’ve got the
wrong guy. I’m not on this one. I’m just security for them. They don’t let me go on jobs. I’m white can’t you see. White’s not a colour they trust.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Pylon, ‘this’s not our understanding. We believe differently. Especially about the kidnapping of Mace’s daughter.’

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘Ah, Mikey that’s easy for you to say now. How you convince us is the more difficult part.’ Pylon put a hand on his shoulder. ‘We need you to scoot up closer to the table so’s your hands are on the surface. I’ll help you, keep the chair from falling over. Don’t want you to hurt yourself.’

  Mikey wouldn’t oblige. Mace sighed, stood up and went round the table to Mikey’s chair. He and Pylon manoeuvred the man against the table and got Mikey’s hands where they wanted them.

  ‘You’re a big guy, Mikey,’ said Mace. ‘What’re we talking, eighty-five, ninety kilos? Impressive. Good muscle tone, too. Is it steroids you’re using? The boys do, I’m told. The serious weightlifters.’

  ‘Look,’ said Mikey, ‘I’m not the man you want.’

  ‘Are you right-handed or left-handed?’ asked Pylon. ‘It’s important we know otherwise you’ve got no way of communicating with us, and you’ll most certainly want to do that.’

  ‘Right-handed,’ said Mikey. ‘What d’you mean anyhow?’

  ‘We need you to write down where we can find Christa,’ said Mace. ‘It’s that simple. Give us a clue where the paper and pens are, you write down the address, and then we go check it out. If you’re sensible we could have put this whole thing behind us in … what? An hour? Hour and a half max.’

  Mikey said, ‘I can’t give you the address. I don’t know it. I’m not involved.’

  ‘But you know about what’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve heard. I won’t lie.’

  ‘That’s good, Mikey,’ said Mace. ‘Telling the truth’s a good start.’

  Pylon found a pad of notepaper and ballpoints in a bureau drawer, brought them over to the table. He went across to the kitchen, returned with a chopping board and mallet for tenderising steak. One of the old-fashioned wooden ones, heavy, no staining so probably unused. Pylon smacked it into the palm of his hand, said, ‘Eina. Points are still sharp.’ He placed board and mallet beside Mikey’s left hand, just out of reach.