Payback - A Cape Town thriller
Page 33
Afterwards they slept and Mace woke with the sunlight, and Oumou gently rocking him.
‘Mon chéri,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘there is a telephone call.’
Mace glanced at the bedside clock: 6:40. Who was going to phone at 6:40?
‘He said he is a policeman. Captain somebody,’ said Oumou. ‘Three times I ask him who but I cannot understand his name.’
‘Gonsalves,’ said Mace, pulling her down until she fell across him. ‘You are simply the best,’ he said into her hair but she pushed herself up and looked at him the way she had done earlier and said, ‘Oui, that is what you always say,’ laughing as she said it, holding out the cellphone.
Gonsalves said, ‘Mr Bishop you were supposed to call me.’
‘It was past your bedtime,’ said Mace.
Gonsalves ignored him. ‘How about this morning, first off?’ he said. ‘Another thing you might like to know: it was the same gun that killed the queers. And the man’s name is Riccardo Ludovico. Ring any bells?’
‘Yes,’ said Mace, ‘I’ve met him.’
‘Good. The morgue. Say eight o’clock.’
‘Eight-thirty,’ said Mace, but he was talking to dead air.
Mace showered and half an hour later put through a call to Dave Cruikshank, on the off-chance.
‘Seven-fifteen,’ said Dave, ‘is no time to be calling even if I haven’t heard from you since your famous clients were forcibly passed on. But I’ll overlook that, being as I am a man of generous nature. Well-disposed towards his fellow human beings, not inclined to disturb their early mornings without so much as a how are you? So how are you, my son? How’s the lovely Oumou? And the darling Christa who I heard tell along the grapevine is to be seen in the swimming pool giving her old man something to consider? The girl’s doing alright then?’
Mace said she was and reiterated his question: did he have any Americans on his books who’d signed for holiday lets in recent days?
‘Could be, my son, could be. But I need more clues.’
‘I’m looking for a guy called Paulo Cavedagno,’ said Mace. ‘Might be staying in a hotel, a self-catering flat, a B&B for all I know. Mightn’t even be in the city any longer for that matter.’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell, my son,’ said Dave. ‘A name like that would ring a bell.’
* * *
Salt River wasn’t Mace’s favourite part of town. Not at any time, especially not in a gritty wind. Wide Durham Street with its factory shops wasn’t his idea of a good address. Nor did the morgue’s palisade concrete fence topped with barbed wire thrill him. Nor the whipping flag. Nor the morgue itself, brown facebrick, a barrack-like building with an incongruous gable. Nondescript if you were driving past, too obviously visiting the dead if you were not. He registered at the security post.
‘No public until twelve o’clock,’ said the guard.
‘I’m with him.’ Mace pointed at the figure of Captain Gonsalves hunched at the entrance door, his back to the wind.
The guard grunted, pressed knobs to open the electronic gate.
Mace parked in the yard, as he killed the Spider’s ignition his phone rang: Dave Cruikshank.
‘My son, you’re in luck and as always it goes to show my finger is on the pulse. Turns out my young colleague here entered a Mr Paulo Cavedagno on our books. Even turns out I spoke to the selfsame man on Saturday afternoon. Not that the name stirred the dust when you mentioned it but then what does these days, all the names that come through my agency? Now, my colleague is a chatty sort and engaged Mr Cavedagno in some light conversation and learnt that after his stay at our fair Cape our client was headed up to a safari lodge for a few days before going home. Chap was doing a whistle-stop round the country. Only booked the house from Friday to Monday which is not our favourite rental but it happened last minute and the place was free so we did it. Money is money, my son, as you’d know.’
Mace could see Gonsalves waiting for him at the door, said, ‘Was he alone?’
‘A bachelor, my young colleague assumed, to use the old-fashioned term. Very personable, I’m informed. Drove a Merc. Came in himself to collect the keys. Paid with an American Express. Not our favourite card but when you’re dealing with our American cousins you take what they’re offering.’
‘That’s helpful,’ said Mace. ‘Any chance your colleague remembers the name of the lodge.’
He heard Dave relay the question and the answer: Hippo Pools.
‘You hear that?’ said Dave.
‘I got it,’ said Mace.
‘Nice chatting, then. Got to rush, my son, morning call of nature. My best to your lovely lady wife.’
Mace thought, well, wasn’t Hippo Pools in for some exciting times, deciding not to tell Gonsalves until he’d checked out the information.
The captain was shrugged into a jacket with leather patches at the elbows. ‘This’s not my favourite place,’ he said as Mace approached.
‘Not anywhere I’ve been before,’ said Mace.
‘I bring people here usually they’re going to be looking at someone they love who was alive the last time they looked.’ He made no move to go inside. ‘This Ludovico, how’d you meet him?’
‘He was at a house in Llandudno. I was there on business.’
‘Business?’
‘For a client.’
Gonsalves chewed on this, then gestured at the morgue. ‘He’s American, this Ludovico?’
‘Certainly sounded it.’
‘So why’s he dead?’
‘I wouldn’t know. My business wasn’t with him. My client was a Paulo Cavedagno.’
‘Smooth talker,’ said Gonsalves. ‘I met him the day I went there looking for the bird. What was it you did for him?’
‘Hey!’ said Mace, ‘why the questions?’
Gonsalves shrugged. ‘So tell me, what? When? How?’
‘The man was interested in a surgical safari, I went to explain the details.’
‘And this Ludovico was there?’
‘Watching the cricket on television. Pylon even talked to him about the game.’
Gonsalves nodded. ‘You know what the dead smell like in here?
Before Mace could answer, he said, ‘Disinfectant. Jeyes fluid. Ammonia. Dettol. Toilet cleaner. Everything you eat for the rest of the day’s gonna taste like the morgue.’ He pushed at the glass and aluminium entrance door and led the way into the building, down a corridor and through swing doors into a room with two gurneys, bodies on both of them, side by side. The attendant uncovered the face of the nearest one and Mace looked down at the man who’d been watching television, who’d come out to intervene after he’d slammed some punches into the arsehole Paulo. ‘That’s him,’ he said. Dread filling his stomach, the certainty coming on him hard and cold that Isabella was the other body.
‘You want to take a look at the female?’ the attendant asked without waiting for an answer, pulling down the sheet.
Mace forcing himself to glance over, taking in the wound between the eyes, the pallid skin, knowing it was her before he recognised the face.
‘Jesus!’
He stepped closer, reached out to touch her face, saying her name, ‘Bella. Bella.’ Heard Gonsalves say, ‘You know this woman?’ - the voice coming from a distance as Mace gripped the side of the gurney, bent over the body, his breathing loud and ragged in his ears. He looked at her: her closed eyes, the roman nose, her lips unsmiling, the angry rose in her forehead where the bullet had smashed in. He stood like that looking down at her and it might have been five minutes or half an hour, there were no thoughts but her name on a loop through his mind and behind it the realisation: She’s dead. She is dead.
* * *
They gave him sugared tea in an office, he and Gonsalves alone, sitting at a table. The captain waited until Mace finished the tea before he said, ‘For now what I need to know is her name, okay, and where she was staying. Some contact numbers too if you’ve got them.’ He pushed a notepad and pencil across the desk to
Mace. ‘This’d be a help, okay? Statements can come later.’
Mace nodded. He picked up the pencil, a tremor in his hand and wrote down the name: Isabella Medicis. Brought out his cellphone, copied the numbers he had for her, and for Francisco. ‘The last one’s her brother,’ he said. ‘In New York.’
Gonsalves stretched over for the pad. ‘Any idea where she was staying.’
Mace told him the Mount Nelson.
Gonsalves stood. ‘I’ve gotta go. If you want some more time with her that’s okay. Just ask them.’
Mace shook his head.
‘Then how about you come to my office about eleven, eleven-thirty? That give you enough time?’
‘Sure,’ Mace said, the word grating in his throat.
He heard Gonsalves pause, then turn away and go out, closing the door quietly. For a while he sat tracing beneath his fingertip a pattern formed by the gouges and gashes in the table top, round and round. No thoughts, only the distracted circling of his finger from scar to scar until slowly he refocused, the image of two people walking hand-in-hand on Llandudno beach rising in his mind’s eye. Paulo and the woman Vittoria.
He pulled out his cellphone. Directory inquiries gave him the telephone number of Hippo Pools. The receptionist at Hippo Pools confirmed that Mr and Mrs Cavedagno were expected during the morning for a short stay. Was there anything she could do for him? But Mace had disconnected and was thumbing through his contacts for the travel agent he used. He had her book him onto a noon departure to the airport nearest Hippo Pools. A three-hour flight, maybe an hour’s drive from the airport to the lodge. Beyond that he wasn’t planning.
Mace left the room. He found the attendant drinking tea in the corridor and arranged for five minutes with the body of the woman who’d been his lover once. Who’d tempted him again for old-time’s sake.
‘No problem,’ said the attendant, taking him to the room they’d been in first, the gurneys as they’d left them.
‘I need to be alone,’ said Mace. ‘Can you get him out?’ - waiting until the other trolley was wheeled away before he lifted off the sheet to expose her head and shoulders, her marbled whiteness.
‘Nice guy you picked for a husband,’ he said, feeling her hair between his fingers, not the soft texture he’d felt mere days back but strands, coarse and sandy. ‘The issue is how you’d like him to die?’ He trailed his fingers down her face over the curve of her jaw and down her neck to the hollows at her collarbone, but the flesh wasn’t her flesh anymore. It was meat. ‘Personally I’d opt for hanging. Both of them. Side by side from a fever tree. Or maybe staking them out on an anthill for the hyenas.’ He bent towards her and caught a faint hint of the Chanel, and sniffed closer to her skin but the scent was gone. He swung away. ‘Jesus, Bella. This, after everything. This arsehole.’
Paulo and Vittoria’s plane touched down mid-morning at a small airport only used now for tourist flights but had once been an airforce base in the border-war years, the pilot told them. Admitted he’d been stationed there, Number Two Mirage Squadron. Those were the days, folks. Enjoy your stay, folks.
They stepped out into heat and glare, white heads of cumulus building on the sky’s horizon.
‘Real Africa,’ Paulo said as the courtesy Land Rover took them to the lodge along a dirt track through scrub mopani and bushwillow woodlands, the air dry and singing. At the sight of grazing impala, Vittoria made the driver stop and he said, ‘Lady, by tonight you’re not gonna want to see another one of these buck. They’re everywhere.’
‘But now is not tonight,’ said Vittoria, snapping off a picture on the digital she’d bought courtesy of Isabella’s credit card.
The lodge accommodation thrilled them: a stand-alone wooden and thatch-roofed chalet under this tree the porter said was called a jackalberry tree. Right at the edge of a waterhole. Inside bushveld chic: exposed rafters over a large bed with white linen, grass mats on the tiled floors. From the bedroom window Vittoria could see pig creatures on their knees rooting in the grass along the banks of the water. And what could have been a log but what the porter said was a crocodile at the far end of the pool.
‘Sometimes at night,’ he said, ‘we get lions in the camp. It is best not to wander around after your dinner.’
‘Exciting,’ said Paulo.
They arranged for a night game-viewing drive then settled on the deck with beers from the minibar.
‘Nice place,’ said Vittoria. ‘Maybe four days isn’t going to be long enough.’
Six hours later Mace landed at the same airport. He was travelling light: from the overhead locker took down a plastic packet with a coil of thick rope and a torch, the pockets of his bush jacket carried a tape recorder and a twenty-pack of cigarettes, and at the exit the stewardess handed him his nine mil with a full clip and a Leatherman that’d been stowed in the plane’s safe. Told him the car hire desk was in the terminal.
On the flight he’d spent time with a map and a layout of Hippo Pools pulled off their website. The place ran a small guest lodge and five individual chalets overlooking a waterhole, each one located for privacy which was good. The guest lodge of ten rooms, a dining room and bar fronted a river and the hippo pools that gave the reserve its name. Well to the side were staff quarters, probably hidden from the lodge by thick bush. Outside the main building a small parking lot. All this in thirty thousand hectares of rolling hills savannah. Pure paradise for Paulo and his chick. Mace saw Isabella’s dead face and thought, It’s going to be hell, pal.
The map showed two entrances to Hippo Pools: one a private dirt track through the bush from the airport for the shuttle Jeeps so the guests never knew they were fifteen kilometres from a small town and granite mine; the other a ten kilometre stretch of tar road off the main north/south arterial. He would have to use that and bullshit his way through the main gate.
In the town Mace bought a Big Jack steak and kidney pie, two toasted cheese sandwiches and a litre of Coke from a Kwikspar. At the junction to Hippo Pools pulled off the road to eat the pie and sort through the messages on his cellphone: a list of irate callers, including four voicemails from Gonsalves up to half an hour ago wanting to know where he was, what he was playing at, to get in touch with him ASAP; five from Pylon saying call me urgently; three from Francisco that were incoherent; two from Oumou, the least panicked of the bunch. Five SMS messages: four from Pylon, one from Oumou. He reckoned by now Pylon would have been onto Gonsalves or vice versa and would know the details but that’s where the trail would stop. He wasn’t going to respond to either because they’d have him located to the nearest cellphone mast in half an hour. To Oumou he sent a message telling her where he was, that he would be off-air, that he’d speak to her first thing in the morning. And not to tell anyone, not even Pylon, that she’d heard from him. That Pylon and Gonsalves had contacted her he took for granted. He switched off his phone and headed for the main gate to Hippo Pools Safari Lodge.
The guard on the gate was in his mid-thirties, a dapper sort in pressed khakis and a wide-brimmed hat. Mace stopped at the boom and got out. The guard sauntered over and Mace went into a routine that involved sharing a smoke and a chat about how they were in the same line of business, Mace whipping out his SIRA licence to make the point and mentioning that he’d been asked to look over the security arrangements at the lodge following one or two incidents in the other private game reserves where bandits had walked out of the bush and robbed expensive tourists at gunpoint. In the exchange he learnt the guard - ‘I am Zwide’ - was on a six-to-six daily shift, seven days on seven days off. Day five of his current shift ending in an hour. Mace said he’d better be getting on before it got too late, he’d see Zwide on his way out in the morning. Pressed on him the pack of smokes and as he’d expected the guy opened the boom, not bothering to radio reception for clearance.
Mace parked among the other guests cars with a clear line of sight across a rockery of aloes to the front doors of the lodge. He checked there was cellphone connectivity, then sa
t and waited for dark.
Shortly before sunset, people gathered at the entrance for the night drive, among them Paulo and Vittoria. He watched them get onto the first Land Rover, choosing the highest seat at the back, the woman clutching her man like they were on honeymoon. When the vehicles left, Mace went to find their chalet.
Number one was occupied, number two contained the neat order of Germans, number three was where he would’ve put his money even without checking the passports lying on the table. The open suitcases, the rumpled bed, the towels strewn about the floor, the empty bottles outside on the deck, the traces of white powder along the glass top of the dressing table: exactly how he imagined Paulo and Vittoria. He did a cursory search of the room although he couldn’t see Paulo putting the diamonds anywhere but in the jewellery safe. How quickly Paulo opened that safe would depend on Paulo but Mace believed he’d be cooperative.
He went back to his car to eat a soggy sandwich, and wait.
43
From the darkness he watched the Land Rovers return. Watched Paulo and Vittoria talking to the ranger. Watched them sucking up to him, the ranger enjoying their adoration. Watched them shake his hand, head off for the dining room, the ranger fixated on her arse.
Mace walked quickly down the path to their chalet. Order had been restored: the towels replaced, the bed made, the empty bottles removed. Five-star lodge service.
He sat on the bed, shook the rope from the bag and measured out two four-metre lengths, hand to chin, cut them with the Leatherman and fashioned a hangman’s noose in each.
They were the first things Paulo saw when he and Vittoria, slightly drunk, getting off on the scare of lions on the walk from the dining room to their chalet, stumbled in, fumbled for the light switch, giggling.
The nooses hung side by side from the main truss over the bed.