by Roger Smith
“Yes, Magnus Kruger,” Zondi said, in the way of the Afrikaner: Mugniss Kreer.
His Afrikaans had become fluent in the last few years. If you wanted to hunt a man it paid to think like him, in the language he dreamed in.
“Oh, I don’t know a thing,” she said. Then she hesitated and put a painted nail to her rouged cheek. “Well, I do know he,”—jerking her head toward the absent director’s office—“was on the tellyphone with the big noises in Cape Town this morning.”
“Oh yes?”
“Mnnn. A tellyphone call came through from the Justice Ministry and I directed them to his mobile phone.”
“Ah,” Zondi said.
“I’ll alert you when he arrives,” Mrs. Marsh said. She paused in the doorway. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m sending you an email with a link to a video.”
“What video?” he asked but she was already gone.
Despite his earlier resolution Zondi found himself pondering Kruger. The hard truth was that in its five years of existence the Directorate had done little of significance, had brought to book a handful of sad old men, often ailing, living out their lives in obscurity.
Kruger, though, was a belligerent, swaggering bully, undiminished as he neared seventy, still the face and voice of the Afrikaner ultra-right, smug in the knowledge that the law had never been able to touch him.
The khaki clad thug had masterminded—if that was the right word—a series of bombings and armed attacks on black townships and settlements that had claimed two dozen lives in the run up to the 1994 elections that saw Mandela elected as president.
But there had been no proof of his involvement (he’d been careful to use underlings for the dirty work) and he had scorned the Truth Commission and there was no direct evidence linking Kruger to these crimes. Witnesses were dead, or knew they soon would be if they spoke, even a quarter of a century later.
Zondi’s phone chimed and he opened Mrs. Marsh’s email, clicked on the link and found himself watching a clip from a documentary about Magnus Kruger, shot in the late ’80s, on the land he had farmed back then.
Kruger, dressed in khakis, in the company of a group of his beefy acolytes, held forth to the camera in his brandy and tobacco mellowed voice about the genetic inferiority of the black man.
In a chilling piece of spur-of-the-moment improvisation he beckoned over an African laborer who was at work in the fields, a pathetic serf somewhere between fifty and death, dressed in torn blue overalls. The man slunk over, folding in on himself with fear, a rictus of a smile prompted by terror on his face.
Kruger took the worker’s dark hand and wagged it at the camera, saying, “Is this the hand of a man? Is it? No.” He held up his own hand, a thick, blunt fingered, suntanned mitt. “This is the hand of a man.” He wagged the black man’s calloused extremity. “And this, this is the hand of an animal. The hand of an ape.”
All through this the laborer stood staring at the ground, silent, grinning, trembling.
Kruger dropped the man’s hand and told him to get back to work, the wretch nodding and bowing and stumbling off back into his hellish life.
The video ended and Zondi set down his phone stared out the window and knew he was going after Kruger.
That clip had inflamed Zondi.
The way Kruger had looked at the camera, had smiled a self-satisfied grin, smiled with the certainty that nothing could or would ever touch him.
That grin made Zondi run hotter then he, a chilly man, usually did. Made him emotional, which was not altogether a healthy, or welcome, thing.
I’ll touch you, he thought. I’ll reach into your world of suffocating Calvinism; of maudlin dirges about parched veld and lost battles; of animal trophies, peach brandy and unfiltered cigarettes; of casual violence and sentimental verse and crocodile tears, I’ll reach in and fucking touch you.
The door opened and Mrs. Marsh peered in. “He’s here.”
Zondi calmed himself and went through to his boss’s office, tapping on the door.
“Yeah.”
Zondi entered and saw the director behind a desk as vast as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. He was a nut-colored Sotho, small and sleek, dressed by his ambitious wife in a laughably fashionable suit. Though still a young man, not yet forty, he had about him a weary air, an air of disappointment, as if he were holding out to the world a tab that he knew would go forever unpaid.
The director hated his job, a barometer of his fall from grace—he had backed the wrong horse during a bout of in-fighting in the ruling party and his punishment was being removed from the cut and thrust of the justice ministry and being given the helm of this entirely meaningless outfit that chased shadows.
He’d spent most of the last few years preparing for the moment that was about to come, when he would be launched into the private sector, by using his insider status to influence government tenders—construction, sanitation, transport—seeing them awarded to close relatives, and, when he left this building in one week he would walk into a little realm of nepotism and corruption and sink like a pasha into its cushions plump with swag.
“Sit, Zondi,” he said.
Zondi sat.
“Okay, here it goes. There’s a warrant out for the arrest of Magnus Kruger. He killed some young black guy near Witsand, his white homeland.”
Witsand. White sand.
The perfect name for the little Afrikaner-only preserve Kruger had founded in the desert wasteland of the Northern Cape.
“This is a recent killing?” Zondi said.
“Yeah. Few weeks back.” The director spun a buff-colored folder across to Zondi. “It’s all in there.”
Zondi didn’t touch the folder. “Then it’s not for us.”
The director shook his head. “Wrong. The minister doesn’t trust the local cops. He wants a senior investigator, someone who can take the heat of these Boers.”
“Then why not the Hawks?”
The Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, the glamour boys of South African law enforcement.
“Jesus, Zondi, why all the fucking questions, man? We’re getting Kruger on a fucking platter.”
“I haven’t investigated a crime in years. I’m rusty.”
“This is open and shut. The murder weapon has been found in his pickup truck. Just go down there and arrest him and see him through the bail process, then stitch this thing up tight in time for his trail. Okay?”
“We’re shutting up shop in a week.”
“Your contract will be extended. Full pay. You’ll work under the umbrella of the Ministry. Yes?”
Zondi hesitated, then he thought of that video clip and nodded. “Yes.”
“Good. Mrs. Marsh will brief you on your travel arrangements.”
The director was already busy flipping open his iPad (Zondi glimpsed bountiful black women in Day-Glo athletic wear) while his taking a bite of a Colonel Burger—a spill of flesh, mayonnaise and ketchup that brought to mind a surgical procedure.
Zondi took the file and exited and went down the corridor to Mrs. Marsh’s office and hovered in the doorway, watching her tap at her computer keyboard.
“So you’re going after Kruger?” she said, looking at him over her reading glasses.
“Yes.”
She handed him a printout of a plane reservation. “I’ve booked you on a flight to Kimberley. There’ll be a rental car at the airport and you’ll drive up to the town nearest Witsand and liaise with the local police.” She squinted at her monitor. “The town’s called Nêrens.”
Zondi laughed.
“What’s so amusing?” she asked.
“Do you know what Nêrens means?”
“You know I don’t speak Afrikaans.”
“It means nowhere. You’re sending me to nowhere.”
“Well, I wish you bon voyage,” she said.
Zondi closed his office and went out through the glass doors. Alone in the elevator, as he sank toward the earth, he looked at himself in the mirror
and said, “Call me fucking Ishmael.”
SIX
“Think of it as a bit of acting,” Steve Bungu said, driving the black Benz SUV as if this was bloody Le Mans, the blue light on the roof shoving slower cars from his path like a cowcatcher on the snout of a train. “Think of it as a movie.”
“Do I look like a fuckin movie star?” Louw said, watching the brown and yellow of the West Coast blur by, the outskirts of Cape Town already appearing, that famous mountain on the horizon.
“Ja, Nick Nolte, maybe twenny, twenny-five years ago. I always thought he could play a Boer.”
“You’re a fuckin comedian,” Louw said, slumped in his seat, burping the Nescafe he’d swigged before he’d packed a small suitcase and followed this man across some invisible line in the sand, a line he’d always managed to stay south of, even when he’d shot that unfortunate dressmaker.
Bungu swung out past an eighteen-wheeler and had an oncoming car flashing its lights and veering off onto the shoulder, horn bleating in futile protest. The squat Xhosa was unmoved, relaxed in his seat, holding the wheel lightly with one hand, elbow resting on the door bin.
The SUV was a mess of junk food wrappers, empty Coke bottles and newspapers. Bungu was a man who spent a lot of time in this car.
Louw looked at his blunt profile. Scarred. Pitted. A tough fucker. He’d never met the guy before but his name had floated up through the thick scum of party politics, usually when dirty work had been done.
Steve Bungu had a reputation.
When he fixed something it stayed fixed.
“Just play you,” Bungu said, “that shouldn’t be too tough.”
“Ja, ja.”
“Serious. How hard can it be? A quick press conference, then you visit Genadendal, talk to the bodyguards, check out the forensics and in a couple of days hold another press conference where you say it all smells like roses.”
Louw just stared out the window.
They were nearing the city now as they sped along the N1, Grand West Casino gleaming on their left, the fake Tuscan sprawl of Century City Mall on their right, Table Mountain smack in front of them, the chunk of black rock getting closer, a smudge of cloud hovering over its flat top.
“I’ve got you a room at the Cape Grace, at the Waterfront,” Bungu said.
“Fuck that. Take me to the Holiday Inn.”
Bungu squinted at him. “Why? It’s a shithole.”
“I stay at the Waterfront and you might as well skywrite that you and your boss are paying me to lie for you.”
“We’re not paying you and, hey, let’s not say lying, let’s say massaging.”
“It’s lying. Plain and fuckin simple. People are going to see straight through this.”
Bungu shook his dented head. “No ways. ‘If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.’ Know who said that?”
“Your boss?”
Bungu laughed from deep in his belly, a seismic rumble. “No. Adolph Hitler.”
He flicked something on the dash and the cabin of the SUV was filled with seventies funk, somebody from long ago asking about war and what it was good for.
SEVEN
“So, this is the Hawk?” Captain Neo Mmutle, the Nêrens station commander, swelling plumply out of his blue uniform, said as he eyed Zondi across his desk.
“I’m not a Hawk,” Zondi said.
“Thought not. You look more like a mossie to me.”
An undistinguished, dun-colored garden sparrow.
“Doesn’t he look like a mossie, Detective Assegaai?”
Assegaai, a little strip of jerky who could’ve fitted under Zondi’s armpit, stood with his back to the burning window and said nothing.
Even though he was dressed in a jacket and necktie, not running around in a loincloth out in the desert, Assegaai carried his ancestry on his face. He was a Bushman. Or a San, or Sho, or Basara, or !Xun or !Khwe, or whatever politically correct name was being hung on the almost vanished tribe this year. Skinny with wide, high cheekbones, almost oriental eyes and yellow-brown skin that was deeply furrowed around the mouth and across the forehead. His hair would’ve grown out in tight curls if he hadn’t kept it mowed close to his skull.
The small office was as hot as a sweat lodge, a juddering desk fan doing nothing more than stir the heavy air and riffle the pages of the Farmer’s Weekly calendar on the wall, a flip book of Massey Fergusons and John Deeres.
“I’d like to see the arrest warrant, Captain,” Zondi said.
“It’s all okay,” Mmutle said. “We’re not moegoes down here.”
“I’d still like to see it.”
The cop sighed and levered himself from behind his desk and left the room.
“I’ll want to talk to you later, Detective,” Zondi said to the man at the window.
“You’ve read my report?” Assegaai spoke in the Afrikaans-accented English of the mixed race.
“I have.”
“It’s all in there,” Assegaai said. “Open and shut.”
“Maybe. I’ll see you here once I’ve brought Kruger in.”
Zondi’d sat aboard the small aircraft—a Bombardier Q400 NextGen, or so the meager in-flight magazine had informed him—the file on Magnus Kruger open on the tray before him, but after reading half of the first page, written in bureaucratic Afrikaans as heavy and indigestible as cold porridge, he’d put it aside and resolved to get the details from Jan Assegaai.
As the author of many such reports—a little more nimble and literate than the one in front of him, he’d liked to imagine—Zondi knew that it was not a form that encouraged self-expression. In the knowledge that punctilious superiors were going to judge you, hunches, conjecture, inspired guesswork (all the juju that made up so much of detecting) were sifted out.
Get it from the horse’s mouth had always been his motto.
Mmutle returned and skimmed a sheet of paper across the desk to Zondi who checked the particulars.
“Satisfied?” Mmutle said.
Zondi nodded, folding the document and placing it in his pocket.
“Now I’d like to see the holding cell.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Show it to me.”
Muttering in Tswana, Mmutle led Zondi and Assegaai through the charge office, past a couple of sleepy constables and a pile of rags lying on a bench that moved and became a person of indeterminate gender and race, asking Zondi in Afrikaans whether he could spare a cigarette.
The captain cuffed the apparition in passing and waddled down to the single holding cell. The stench hit Zondi first: the lidless toilet hadn’t been flushed this century. There was no bed. The walls and floors were a Petri dish of filth, blood, shit and other bodily fluids.
“This is where you’re going to keep Kruger?” Zondi said.
“Yes.”
“Okay, first I want you to get a plumber in here and I want that toilet unblocked and working. Then I want this cell cleaned and disinfected.”
“You’re joking, ne?”
“I’m not. And get a mattress in here. A new one.”
“Where the fuck am I going to get a mattress?”
“I saw a Price ’n Pride across the road.”
“And who’ll pay for it?”
“Take it out of petty cash. Take it out of the bribes you get from the shebeens and the Griqua whorehouses. I don’t fucking care.”
When the captain swelled, looking ready to explode, Zondi saw a smile ghost across Assegaai’s wizened face.
“You’re out of fuckin line, Zondi,” Mmutle said.
“Then take it up with the minister.” He stared the cop down. “And get a blanket and a pillow, too. New and clean.”
“Why? Why are you doing this?” Mmutle asked.
“There’ll be media attention, Captain. We’ll show them we are not savages.”
“That Boer bastard murdered one of our own. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“He’ll get what he deserves.”
“Where are you going?” The captain asked.
“To arrest Magnus Kruger.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“No, you’re fucking not. You’ll take two trucks with my men in riot gear.”
“I’m going alone.”
“He’s right, Captain,” Assegaai said. “Go in there with a whole crew of black cops and those Boers are going to feel invaded. They’re going to stand up. It could get ugly. But just one guy . . .” He shrugged his tiny shoulders. “I think it’ll surprise them.”
Mmutle shook his head and walked away saying, “Zondi, if you get dead don’t fuckin come cry to me.”
Zondi turned and went out into the searing afternoon light that fell mercilessly on the ugly little town that sat upon the sand and scrub like an afterthought.
EIGHT
“So, Colonel, what have they got on you?” Shanelle Filander, the Western Cape premier, said from behind her desk.
“I’m not with you, Madam Premier,” Louw said, staring down at her. She hadn’t invited him to sit since her chief of staff had ushered him into the office and scuttled out.
Filander, during the Apartheid years the poster girl for the struggle down here in the Cape, with her clenched fist, her T-shirts, her dreadlocks and her bullhorn, hurling Marxist rhetoric and bricks across the barricades at the white cops, was now dressed in a dark business suit and low heels, her wild, graying hair trimmed and tamed into a bun.
And she was no longer a Marxist, no longer a supporter of the ruling party, the African National Congress, the party of Mandela and the struggle. She had famously repudiated the ANC’s leadership, accusing them of corruption and cronyism, saying they’d let down the very people on whose backs they’d been carried to power: the poor and the downtrodden.
She had crossed the floor and joined the official opposition, a party that had once been synonymous with elitist white liberalism and had, after five years, become its leader.
Her hair was shorter and her clothes more conservative, but the voice was the same. The guttural rasp of the Cape Flats that this woman made no effort to temper. A voice that she used like a blunt instrument.