by Caryl Ferey
“Did you get my package?” he asked.
“Dan’s things? Yes. You should have put his hands in with them, as a souvenir.”
Her own spitefulness was about to make her cry. Big tears were already welling in her swollen eyes. She had become unrecognizable to him. To herself, too, probably.
“Go away, Brian,” she said. “Please.”
The children’s cries came from the pool. He kissed her fake hair, helplessly, while she massacred the figurines.
*
The buffer zones of Nyanga, Crossroads, and Philippi were where most of the squatter camps were situated. These buffer zones had their own laws, their own shebeens, brothels, music venues, and horse races. A few shack lords had short careers there. Sam Gulethu was one of them.
In the end, they’d found the shed, a former spaza shop, that they’d used as a hideout, on the edge of Khayelitsha. The fingerprints and the traces of DNA left on the cigarette butts confirmed that the gang had stayed there. The shed was divided into a dormitory and a kitchen, the windows covered with steel sheets. As an HQ, it was easy to defend in case of attack, with a lock-up garage and an alley that led to the dunes on the nearby open space. A four-by-four could get to the highway in a few minutes, Muizenberg in less than half an hour. The police hadn’t located the stock of powder, but they had discovered unused syringes and traces of marijuana all over the rooms. Two of the tsotsis killed during the attack on the Marabi were known to the police: Etho Mumgembe, a former witdoeke, one of those militiamen tolerated during apartheid who clashed with the young progressives in the Bantustans, and Patrice “Tyson” Sango, a former recruiting sergeant for a rebel militia in the Congo, wanted for war crimes. No one knew what had led the tsotsis to kill each other in the cellars, or if Gulethu had eliminated them because the police were after them. They had found sixty-five thousand rand in Gulethu’s pockets. The money from the drug dealing, presumably. That didn’t tell them where the stock of dope was, if it still existed, or if the gang was being supplied by one of the Mafias, but toxicological tests had provided an explanation for the suicide attack on the Americans’ HQ. Gulethu and his killers had been high during the shootout, on that same tik-based drug, with the same level of toxicity as the mutilated tsotsis in the cellar. Had they become hooked, too? Had Gulethu manipulated them in order to carry out his criminal rituals? The shed was packed with weapons: police revolvers with their numbers erased, offensive grenades, two assault rifles, and Zulu fighting sticks, including a shorter one, an umsila, still stained with Kate Montgomery’s blood and covered in Gulethu’s prints. The young woman’s hair and nail clippings were hidden in an iron box under a makeshift mattress, along with grigris and amulets.
Gulethu hadn’t had time to put together his muti, and his “battle” with the Americans had come to an abrupt end. War, genocide, suicide—whatever crazy ancestral idea he’d had in his head, his secrets had died with him.
Anyway, now wasn’t the time for psychological speculations. The auditorium of the courthouse in Cape Town was packed for the chief of police’s press conference, and the atmosphere was electric. Photographers and journalists squeezed up against the platform where Superintendent Krüge, in his dress uniform, was delivering the preliminary conclusions of the investigation.
Twelve dead, including two policemen, six people in hospital in a critical condition—the operation in the township of Khayelitsha had ended in carnage. What with the FNB’s anti-crime campaign, the presidential elections looming, and all the things the damned World Cup meant to the economy and the media, Karl Krüge was facing early retirement if he didn’t pull this off.
The first part of his speech was a paean of praise for the Crime Unit, which had gotten rid of the Mafia-related gang and the killer of the two young women, but the rest of it evaded the issue. There was no resurgence of Zulu identity, no disappointed Inkatha members ready to take on the rest of the country, demanding secession or independence. There were no extremist political factions, no resentful ethnic groups, just a gang of mercenaries with Mafia links selling a new drug on the peninsula, and their leader, Sam Gulethu, a tsotsi stupefied by years of extreme violence, who saw himself as some kind of exterminating angel, led by some kind of indigenous vision, a jumble of vague beliefs, homemade witchcraft, revenge, and chronic degeneration, a coward who had taken advantage of the innocence of white youth to settle scores with his old demons.
The Wiese/Montgomery case was closed. The country wasn’t facing social breakdown, just a lot of economic problems.
Ignored by the flashlights, Ali Neuman watched the scene with a vague sense of embarrassment.
He had just been speaking to Maia on the telephone. They had arranged to meet in Manenberg, where Gulethu had lived. Every step he took was like a knife to the heart, but he could still move. The journalists were jostling one another in front of the platform, where Krüge was sweating in his impeccable uniform. Neuman left the courthouse before the press conference was over.
Brian Epkeen hadn’t even bothered to show up.
2.
The Cape wine road was one of the loveliest routes in the country. The vineyards at the foot of the mountain, the architecture of the French and Dutch mansions, the wildness of the rock against the blue of the sky, the dense, pervasive vegetation, the restaurant menus—a paradise on earth, for those who could afford it.
For Sunday lunch, Brian and Ruby used to come to La Colombe, a gourmet restaurant owned by a French chef, where they would blow a week’s money on one meal. They may have maintained their anti-establishment credentials in the few underground venues of a city condemned to the pastoral boredom of “separate development,” and lived from hand to mouth more often than they should have, but when the weekend came he and Ruby didn’t make do with fish and chips—no, they deserved an à la carte lunch washed down with Chardonnay and Shiraz from the valley, come what may. They would spend hours drinking in the shade of the amorous cypresses, relaxing in the restaurant’s pool talking about her famous record label, the indie groups she was going to produce to get up the nose of this regime of sexual retards, before working off their own frustrations in the bushes. The good old days. Those boozy Sunday lunches hadn’t lasted. David had come along, and it had gotten harder to make ends meet—most of Brian’s black clients couldn’t pay for his services, and it was Ruby who provided for the household. Then there were the frayed nerves whenever the police or the intelligence services came down on him, making their lives hell with petty little bureaucratic or legal obstacles, not to mention all the times he’d been left beaten up in a ditch, the fear of a phone call announcing that this time he wasn’t going to make it, his attempts to reassure her, her pathological mistrust, and then the day she had caught him in town with a black woman, in a position that left no room for misunderstanding.
The breeze stirred the ashes in the driver’s compartment of the Mercedes. Brian turned off the sun-drenched road and drove between the vines.
Ruby had come back into his life just when everything seemed to be going wrong, and there had to be a reason for that. Unable to understand, Brian drove on through the countryside.
The Broschendal estate was two hundred years old, and was one of the most famous vineyards in the country—like all migrants, the French Huguenots had come here with their own expertise and the means to develop it. Brian drove past the fields of vines to the next property, a former farm that could be glimpsed at the end of the trail.
A chorus of cicadas greeted him in the sun-drenched yard. A bull mastiff with glistening jowls advanced toward him, baring its teeth. It was the property’s guard dog, stocky, powerful, weighing more than a hundred and thirty pounds, and capable of knocking a man to the ground and pinning him there.
“So, big man, getting enough to eat?”
The dog was suspicious. It was right to be—Brian wasn’t afraid of dogs.
The dentist’s house stood on the side of a hill, a tastefully refurbished former farmhouse. Snapdragons, c
osmos, azaleas, petunias—the garden that bordered the vineyard filled the air with fragrance from beyond the left wing of the building. Brian walked past the ceramic swimming pool, and found his ex-wife half-naked on a deckchair in the shade of a Belle Portugaise climbing rosebush.
“Hi, Ruby.”
Dozing behind her sunglasses, she had not heard him coming, and she gave a start. “What are you doing here?” she cried, as if her eyes were playing tricks on her.
“Obviously, I’ve come to see you.”
Ruby was wearing a yellow bikini and nothing else. She covered herself with a pareo, then glared at the bull mastiff trotting on the lawn.
“And you, asshole,” she said to the dog, “would it hurt you to do your job?”
The animal passed close to them, slavering, and swerved to avoid the gestapo chief who had it in her sights.
Brian put his hands in his pockets. “Has David had the results of his exam yet?”
“Since when have you taken an interest in your son?”
“Since I saw his girlfriend. Can we talk seriously?”
“What about?”
“Kate Montgomery, for instance.”
“Do you have a warrant to enter people’s houses like this?” She held her pareo tight over her breasts, as if he stank.
“I need to fill in the details,” he said, trying to focus. “Kate didn’t have any friends, I haven’t been able to find out anything about her, and you were the last person to see her alive.”
“Why don’t they send a real cop?” she said, with disarming frankness.
“Because I’m the craziest of them all.”
A mocking little smile played on Ruby’s lips. At least he made her laugh.
“I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you,” she said, softening.
“All the same, I’d like your help. Kate was high when she was killed. Did you know she used to do drugs?”
She sighed. “No. But you didn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to see she wasn’t quite right in the head.”
“Kate was into cutting. You know what that involves?”
“Cutting your skin and watching the blood flow to feel alive, yes. I never saw her do that, if that’s what’s on your mind, or organize orgies with the local butchers.”
“The killer butchered his victims. Maybe he promised to relieve her, or something like that.”
“I told you, I didn’t know anything about her.”
“He knew when Kate would be driving along the coast road,” Brian went on. “He was waiting for her near her house to flag her down, pull a gun on her, whatever. It’s also possible they’d arranged to meet, and she was lured into a trap. Either way, the murder was premeditated. That means the killer knew her schedule.”
“What difference does it make, now he’s dead? The case is over, isn’t it? They said so on the radio.”
“You’re responsible for the schedules. One of the crew may have told Gulethu, and made sure Kate fell into the trap, just like the Nicole Wiese case.”
“I thought you’d questioned them?”
“I didn’t get much from them,” he admitted. “But I checked out this death-metal band of yours, all this satanic bullshit, cutting the throats of chickens, crap like that. Is that just to impress teenagers, or are they really interested in the occult?”
“They’re all vegetarians,” she said.
The tires of a car crunched in the yard, soon followed by the sound of a door opening and closing. A tall, long-haired, unshaven young man appeared at the other end of the garden, baggy jeans hanging down over his calves. David saw his parents by the pool, stopped for a moment in surprise, then came striding toward them.
“What’s he doing here?” he asked his mother.
“I already asked him that,” she replied.
“How did your exam go?”
“Go back to your girlfriends.”
Brian sighed—what a family. “What’s wrong with wanting to know?”
“Nobody asked you,” David retorted. “Ma, tell him to go.”
“Go,” she said.
Never far from tears, Brian almost felt like laughing. “Isn’t Marjorie with you?” he asked.
“Yes, she’s hiding in the vines taking photos of you to sell to porn magazines.”
“I love you, too, son.”
“Listen, Brian,” Ruby intervened. “I’ve told you everything I know about this business, in other words, nothing. Now, be good, and leave us alone.”
The tension rose a notch.
“Would it hurt you to talk to me differently?” Brian said, though clenched teeth.
At that moment, a slim man with graying hair appeared on the shady terrace. He saw Ruby’s son with his unkempt hair, Ruby half naked under her pareo, an untidy-looking guy in fatigues, and the guard dog circling around them.
“What’s going on? Who are you?”
“Hi, Ricky.”
“I haven’t introduced you,” Ruby cut in, still in her deckchair. “Rick, this is Lieutenant Epkeen, David’s father.”
Rick frowned. “I thought he was a traffic cop.”
Brian gave his ex-wife a look of fake surprise, and she blushed slightly. Apparently, he’d gotten a promotion.
“Not that it makes much difference,” she said.
She got up from the deckchair, pulling her pareo around her and lifting her five and a half feet with catlike suppleness. She had always been one hell of a cockteaser. Rick welcomed her into his arms in a protective gesture.
“What are you doing in my house?” he asked.
“Investigating a murder. Nothing to do with our private lives.”
“First I heard of it,” David said.
“Stay out of this, O.K.?”
“I’m sorry, but she’s my mother.”
“I said shut up.”
“Don’t talk to your son like that,” Rick intervened. “We’re not at the police station here.”
“I don’t have to take lessons from a specialist in molars,” Brian growled.
Rick van der Verskuizen wasn’t going to let Brian scare him. “Get out of my house,” he hissed. “Get out of my house, or I’ll lodge a complaint with your superiors for harassment.”
“Rick’s right,” Ruby said, huddled by his side. “You’re jealous of our happiness, that’s all.”
“Yeah!” David said.
“Is that so?” Brian said, sharply. “And what’s the price of your new happiness? What does a girl like you have to do to get all this?”
Ruby’s expression changed abruptly.
Ricky took a step toward Brian. “Do you have a warrant to come and insult us in our own home?”
“Would you rather be summoned to headquarters? I’ve been looking through Kate Montgomery’s papers. Seems she had several appointments at your clinic.”
“So what? I’m a dentist, I look after teeth.”
“Six appointments in a month. That must have been one hell of a toothache!”
“Kate Montgomery had an abscess,” Rick said. “I took her on as a priority case, to please Ruby. My patients are very demanding, I don’t like to keep them waiting. Which is more than can be said for the police.”
Brian’s gave a nasty smile. “I know Ruby by heart,” he said. “She hates men so much, she always chooses old skirt chasers.”
“You’re repugnant,” Rick bellowed.
“Oh, I’m repugnant? Like tooth decay is really pretty.”
Ruby had had enough. She threw herself at Brian but he knew her moves by heart. He caught her by the elbow, twisted, and sent her sprawling. She slid over the ceramics, narrowly missed the edge of the diving board, and fell into the turquoise water of the pool. Rick rushed forward, yelling insults that Brian didn’t hear. He grabbed the man by the collar of his silk shirt and, with all his strength, flung him in after her.
David, who had not moved, threw his father a dirty look.
“Well?” Brian yelled. “You want to take a dip, too?”
/> For a moment, David stood there speechless. He saw his mother in the pool, the pareo floating, Rick coming up spitting water, and his father on the terrace, his eyes shiny with tears.
“Fuck this,” the prodigal son said. “You’re completely sick, you know that?”
Completely.
They were all starting to piss him off.
*
There wasn’t much mixing in the townships, where racism and xenophobia were as prevalent as they were anywhere else. The black population was concentrated in Khayelitsha, the coloreds in Manenberg. Maia had lived there for years, and had had her share of “boyfriends” to help her survive. Neuman had hesitated before phoning her—they hadn’t spoken since breaking up—but she had immediately agreed to help him.
Gulethu, although a Zulu, had lived in Manenberg, and one of her companions in misfortune may have had dealings with him. And in the end, one of them had in fact agreed to testify for a small sum of money—Ntombi, a country girl now living in a hostel.
The absence of street lighting and the drug trafficking kept most people indoors. Neuman drove slowly, peering at the occasional figures that loomed up in front of the car headlights then vanished again.
“Are you sure you don’t want a soda?”
Maia had bought two cans at the local spaza shop, thinking he’d be pleased.
“No. Thanks.”
She was wearing a new dress, and her talent for acting as if nothing had happened made him uncomfortable. They had been driving for half an hour around the cracked streets of Manenberg, the cortisone had knocked him out, he felt wary, irritable, impatient.
“So where is this hostel?”
“Next right, I think,” Maia replied. “There’s an all-night drinks shop, from what Ntombi told me.”
Maia wanted to talk to him, to tell him it was okay about the other night, a neighbor had patched up the living-room wall, she’d do other paintings, better ones, she might even have found someone who’d sell them in the city for her. She’d stop relying on boyfriends as a way of making ends meet, if that was what bothered him. He could come more often, stay as long as he liked, they just had to carry on as they’d done before, his codes, his caresses, they just had to carry on as if he had never said anything to her.