by Roger Smith
The old man laughed. “Come, son, you getting soft on me? We were fighting a war. We had nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Then why did you apologize?”
Oubaas fidgeted with the hem of the blanket covering his knees. “Sometimes you do what you have to do. Times change.”
Louw stood and crossed to the window and looked up into the sky, watching a hawk ride the thermals, hanging motionless in the air before flapping lazily away over the hills.
He turned to his father. “So what did you do, after those guys died?”
“I called Albie Burger. He and I were the last two standing. He was living up in Oudtshoorn with some colored slut, working as an electrician. He said he had found Jesus. I thought he was taking the piss so I said, ‘Ja? Where’d you find him? On an ostrich farm?’ but he didn’t see the joke and said he prayed every night for what he’d done. Didn’t do him much good. He was electrocuted wiring some old house.”
“Then there was only you?”
“Ja, then there was only me.” He finished the wine and held out his glass. Louw topped it up. “After Albie died, he called me. Bungu.”
“Ja?”
“Ja, out the blue. That phone rang,” Oubaas pointed a quivering finger at the old black analog phone on the sideboard. “Your mother answered and then I took the phone and he said, ‘Colonel, was that your wife?’ and I said, ‘Who wants to know’ and when he said ‘You’re lucky to have a wife’ I knew who it was.” The old man drank and then looked at Louw. “You heard of hangpaal?”
“The gallows?”
“The prison gangs punishment.”
Louw shook his head. “No.”
“Neither had I when Bungu said, ‘Oubaas, I’m sentencing you to hangpaal.’ And then he described how they do it in prison. If the gangs have it in for somebody, if he betrays them, maybe, they have a meeting and then they sentence him to death. But they don’t just kill him and get it over with, they go and tell him that he’s been sentenced, and that it will take time, a year, maybe two. The poor bastard is locked away forever, so where’s he going to go? And just so he knows they’re serious once every month they will stab him, not fatally, just enough to cause him pain, just enough for him to be bloody sure they mean what they’re saying. Until one day, god knows how long after, they finally get him and they do it. They kill him.”
“You’re saying Bungu sentenced you to hangpaal?”
“Ja, he said it. He said it to me.”
“Jesus.”
“Ja.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Why didn’t you speak to me about this?”
“What could you do? Bungu was in thick with the new lot. Nobody could touch him, least of all you.” A sneer at this.
Louw nodded. The old man was right.
“Have you heard from him again?”
“No. But I’m sure he’s watched me get old and sick and have bits of my body chopped off. That would give him more pleasure than killing me, I reckon.”
“But now he’s come after me. Because of you. Because he doesn’t just want to punish you, he wants to punish your family.”
The old man sucked his teeth. “You can’t be sure of that.”
“Oh, I think I can,” Louw said.
His father held out his empty glass. When Louw ignored him he set the glass down on the table. “So, what are you going to do, Johann?”
“I don’t know,” Louw said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What’s he got on Leon anyway?”
“He murdered a man. A young black man.”
“Not a good idea, in this country now. For a white man.”
“No.”
Louw sank back into the chair and regarded the reduced man before him.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asked.
“What?”
“The killing? The torturing?”
Oubaas flapped a dismissive hand and clucked irritably.
“No,” Louw said, “answer me. You owe me that.”
The old man sighed and rubbed his rheumy eyes. “It was my job. I did it.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Ja.”
“So those were just crocodile tears at the Truth Commission?”
Oubaas shrugged. “I told them what they wanted to hear so I didn’t end up seeing my days out in prison.” He sneered again. “They were too bloody soft, that lot. If I was them I would’ve put us all against a wall and shot us.”
“Me too,” Louw said.
He stood and crossed the room, heading for the lobby. When he reached the front door he looked back and saw his father sitting slumped in his wheelchair, staring at the floor.
The brown nurse appeared, disengaged the brake of the chair and wheeled the old man from view.
Louw went out to his rental car that still stank of the junk food. He turned up the AC and headed back down the driveway. The gates juddered open and he turned toward the city.
As he drove Louw thought about his dead wife and about his son and when he asked himself, as he had so many times before, why his son had become what he had become, he still could find no answer.
TWO
Water brought Sue Kruger back to consciousness. A stream of water striking her swollen, aching face, but when she opened her parched lips to drink and tasted the acrid bitterness she clamped her mouth shut and turned her head and saw the man who had attacked straddling her, pissing down on her.
He finished and shook himself, staring at Sue, laughing. The fierce sun threw his shadow black as paint onto the pale dirt.
She was naked, lying on sand so hot that it burned her skin. In every direction she saw nothing but an empty expanse of parched nothing.
When she tried to get to her knees he kicked her in the face, which got her bleeding again. Then he put his shoe on her head and pushed her down to the burning earth.
He kneeled beside her and took a gun from his belt and raised her chin with the barrel.
“Open your mouth,” he said. She stared at him, blood running down her jaw, dripping onto the gun barrel. “I said open your mouth.”
She obeyed and he shoved the barrel between her teeth and she gagged. He cocked the weapon and she closed her eyes and waited for the end.
But he withdrew the pistol, wet with her spit and blood, and placed the cold metal against her temple. Again she waited, eyes clamped shut.
Then he laughed and removed the gun.
“No, that would be too easy. Waaaay too fuckin easy.”
She stared up at him, squinting at the sun that was a molten ball behind his head. “Why are you doing this to me?” Her voice sounded thick and muffled. She remembered his name and said, “Why are you doing this to me, Leon?”
“What do they say in those lame-ass American TV shows? Because I can?” Leon laughed and shook his head. Then he spoke in Afrikaans for the first time. “I’m a friend of your pappie’s.”
She said nothing, not able to compute this.
He wiggled his fingers at his clothes. “Don’t let all this fool you.” He peeled a Band-Aid from between his right thumb and forefinger and shoved his hand in her face. Her vision was blurred with pain and tears and it took a moment for her to focus on the crudely rendered swastika, the blue-black ink bleeding into his skin.
“You live at Witsand?” she said.
“Ja. Me and your dad are like this.” He sandwiched his index and forefingers together and held them up. “He asked me to get rid of you.”
“He told you to kill me?”
“Oh boo fuckin hoo.” He laughed again. “No, just to get your skanky ass out of town. I’m using my own initiative here.”
He had a small canvas bag with him and removed a pair of tent pegs and a hammer. He crouched down and drove the pegs into the hard ground a few feet apart. He delved back into the bag and found guy ropes and attached a rope to each of the pegs and tested their firmness. They held.
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p; When Leon was satisfied he stood and turned to Sue and said, “Come here.”
She didn’t move.
He reached down and grabbed her by the hair and dragged her close to the pegs. She tried to fight him and he kicked her again, in the head and the ribs, knocking her wind from her.
She lay on her back, blinded by the sun, feeling the rope burn at each of her wrists as he tied her to the pegs.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said. He pointed at the sun. “Meanwhile you get a nice tan.”
He laughed and, craning her neck, she watched him walk away across the sand and up a rise to where his truck was parked, boiling in the heat haze.
Sue heard the engine stutter and catch and then he drove away, the truck swallowed by dust, the sound of the engine fading into the massive, empty silence that oppressed her.
She fought at her constraints and managed only to get her wrists bleeding.
She yelled and begged some long-forgotten god for mercy.
Time passed.
She didn’t know how long, and then she saw a woman walking toward her, a thin woman in a blue dress and dark glasses.
“Help me!” Sue tried to shout, but her voice was a whisper.
As the woman drew closer Sue realized it was her mother, thick, dark blood clotting the side of her blonde hair. She stared down at Sue and then she evaporated into the heatshimmer.
Sue yelled and tried to free herself, blood flowing down her arms.
Hours passed and finally, as the sun plunged into the sand and darkness crawled over her, Sue passed out.
THREE
Joe Louw lay on the hotel bed in his socks, his pants unbuckled, his head still abuzz with the conversation with his father. After he’d arrived back from Durbanville he’d pigged out on room service and now he wanted to smoke, so he dug a Nicorette out of his pocket and sucked on it.
Using the remote he roused the TV and surfed away from the news, finding some mindless magazine program: wine farms and shark diving and aging beauty queens who’d clung to their fading good looks like lifeboats.
The flow of crap lulled him into a stupor and it took him a second to realize that he was staring at the pugnacious face of Ross Murker, his annoying, nasal voice cutting through Louw’s post-gluttony reverie.
The on-camera reporter, an earnest blondish woman whose pregnant pauses after almost every word lent her utterances an unwarranted import, stood outside a garage in the backyard of a shabby Southern Suburbs house.
“Two years after the death of his wife at the hands of onetime super cop, Joe Louw, Ross Murker lives in this garage in the Cape Town suburb of Retreat.”
There was a cut to Murker inside the garage, sitting on a narrow bed, staring morosely at a photograph. He was unshaven and looked unwashed, his hair standing in greasy spikes. A close-up of the photograph revealed Murker and Rose MacDonald standing arm in arm outside a beautiful Victorian house, smiling the smiles of the youngish and well-heeled.
The reporter told of how Murker and his wife had, until her death, lived in fashionable Tamboerskloof in a “stylish love nest.”
Murker was on camera: “We mortgaged our house to open Rose’s clothing store. After she died the boutique had to close—I mean, she was the store, she was Bygones—and I suffered from severe depression so I lost my job and then the bank took the house.”
The reporter was sitting in the garage with Murker. “Ross, were you ever compensated for your wife’s death?”
“I never got a cent, but Joe Louw, the cop who shot Rose, got a fat pension. I mean, where’s the fairness in that? Tell me, where’s the fairness?”
Louw fumbled for the remote and killed the tube.
The desire to smoke almost overwhelmed him and he dug for another Nicorette.
The pack was empty.
He cursed and pulled on his shoes and left the room to buy more lozenges.
Ten minutes later, without knowing how he’d got there, Louw found himself standing beneath the discreet twist of neon above the window of a very fancy French restaurant on the Foreshore, staring in at the expensively dressed diners but seeing himself and Yolandi, years ago, faces aglow with orange candlelight as they swilled champagne to ease their awkwardness, unused to this kind of swish and swank—they were steakhouse people, maybe something Italian if they were really splashing out—celebrating his promotion to colonel, his wife insisting that the occasion called for this over-rich and overpriced dinner.
Still hungry after the meal—the portions too tiny for a man of his appetite—they’d ended up at a Spur on Long Street way after midnight, feeding one another french fries in a booth by the window.
“Now that’s what I call French cuisine,” Louw had said and Yolandi’d laughed like a sailor and rested her head on his shoulder and he’d felt like the king of the bloody world.
Louw walked on, aimlessly, the Nicorettes forgotten, too restless and disturbed to return to his claustrophobic hotel room.
As he waited for a light on Adderley Street he hunched against the South Easter that knifed between the buildings. The wind mussed his hair and his jacket billowed like a spinnaker, and when the light changed and he crossed the road, his chinos clung to his legs, flapping.
The wind died as suddenly as if somebody had flipped a switch, leaving a NO PARKING sign squeaking on a pole and a Coke can rattling from the sidewalk to the gutter. The gale would be still for a few minutes, like it was storing up anger, then it’d come back again, howling even more furiously.
Louw’s trip down memory lane wasn’t over.
He rounded a corner and was confronted by the floodlit bunker that was the Nico Malan Theater. Well, it had been renamed the Artscape, ten—fifteen?—years before but he and Yolandi had always called it the Nico Malan.
“I’ve got tickets for the Nico,” she’d say, and his heart would sink, knowing that hours of tedium lay ahead.
They’d come here to see a ballet on her last birthday. It had bored him into a snooze—Yolandi elbowing him when he’d started to snore—but she’d been enchanted, her eyes glistening when he’d emerged from his slumber and looked at her, his heart ready to burst with love for this woman.
Louw fled from the memory and found himself down near the train station in a rougher part of town. Two dicing minibus taxis blasting rap flew by him scattering angry pedestrians; a trio of tall black men shouted something in French as they pimp-rolled into a phone shop, the refuge of people too poor to afford cell phones.
On impulse Louw followed them in.
The eggplant-colored woman at the cash register eyed Louw like he was a stranded alien, then pointed him toward one of the corded phones mounted between soiled partitions.
He sat on a torn chair and stared at the graffiti scrawled around the phone, as meaningless to him as hieroglyphics.
Louw lifted the smeared receiver, heard its electronic purr, hesitated a moment, his finger hovering over the buttons, ready to punch in the number he knew so well but hadn’t dialed in years.
He couldn’t count the times he’d reached for his cell phone to key in this number, his nerve always failing him at the last moment.
So what made him think he could do it now, in the grubby anonymity of this store?
A commotion gave him a reprieve: a shirtless drunk man started to bang the receiver of a phone against the wall and the woman flew out from behind the counter, yelling, “Break my phone and I break your fuckin neck!”
“It cut me off,” the drunk said.
“I’ll cut your ball bag off,” the woman said, grabbing the man and hauling him toward the door, pitching him out into the wind that had recharged.
Comically, the man stood leaning forward into the teeth of the gale, like something from one of the jerky old Buster Keaton movies Louw and his toddler son had watched together on TV, Leon giggling without pause as Keaton fell off trains and houses collapsed around him, the comedian left unscathed, standing in the rubble in his baggy black suit and porkpie hat.
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Louw grabbed the phone again and his index finger was a blur, dialing.
He sat listening to ringing for an eternity and was expecting to be sent to voice mail—who knew if this number was even still active?—when somebody said, “Hullo?”
“Leon?” Louw said in a voice he didn’t recognize.
“Who is this?” his son said.
“It’s me,” Louw said. “It’s your father.”
FOUR
Disaster Zondi was back in his grim hotel room feeling irritated and frustrated. He’d called Assegaai from the police truck on the way back from Soetwater and had got his voicemail.
When he’d reached town he’d stopped by the station house, but there was no sign of the skinny detective. The sergeant behind the desk, a big Tswana with nostrils like shotgun barrels, had answered Zondi’s queries about Assegaai’s whereabouts with a mixture of boredom and insolence while barely lifting his eyes from the filth he was viewing on his phone.
So Zondi had returned to his room.
It was 6:00 PM and he watched the news. All about the president’s dead wife. When a pushy black reporter with a jarring faux-American accent waylaid Joe Louw on a Cape Town sidewalk the burly Afrikaner shook his graying head and said he couldn’t comment on the investigation, that he would be holding a press conference soon.
Zondi had never met the man but knew him by reputation. He wondered why he’d got involved in this horse and pony show.
The boredom of retirement?
The sense of uselessness that came with it?
Zondi, facing a similar fate, could relate to that.
He changed channels and he was looking at a wizened Bushman in a loincloth, walking through desert scrub as a twin engine plane flew overhead. The pilot swilled the last of his Coke, opened the flap window in the cockpit and threw the bottle out.
The bottle landed unbroken in the sand and the Bushman crouched over it, prodding it with his finger.
Zondi had to laugh. The guy was a dead ringer for Assegaai. Strip the cop of his suit, stick him in a loincloth, and it could be him out there in the desert, clicking and clucking over that Coke bottle in that dumb old movie.