by Roger Smith
This was a sign that not even the obsessively rational Zondi could ignore, so he muted the TV and called Assegaai again.
Voice mail.
Zondi lay on the bed beneath the ineffectual fan and tried to relax, tried to empty his mind of the half-formed notions that made him edgy and agitated, and found himself thinking of an American photojournalist he’d had an affair with years before.
His last affair.
The one that had left him with little interest in the hunt.
Superficially the photographer had resembled many of her predecessors: blonde and beautiful and just old enough for signs of wear to make her interesting and he’d been drawn to the unmistakable shadow of pain in her violet eyes.
What had made her distinct, though, and impossible to forget, was that her left leg had been amputated just below the knee, the result of an IED explosion when she’d been embedded with a platoon of US Marines in Afghanistan.
When Zondi’d met her in the cocktail bar of a plush Johannesburg hotel they’d both been at loose ends. Zondi, after a Quixotic attempt to bring charges against a flagrantly venal cabinet minister, had been ejected from his elite investigative unit and was awaiting reassignment, the dinosaur Directorate still in his future.
He’d been suspended with pay (a favor from his old boss who’d had some sympathy with his mission) and found himself adrift during a February heat wave that had made the air in the city unbreathable, so he’d seen out the dog days in the comfort of bars that were cool, dim and beyond the pocket of the rabble.
The photographer had been sent to the city by Newsweek to shoot the portrait of an African dictator who’d fled his country and had cashed in his struggle-era chips (he’d once succored ANC cadres) and now lived in Jo’burg with a string of Maseratis and a harem of mistresses. There had been a standing bet among the media as to which were more numerous, the cars or the girls. There was no doubt as to which were more expensive or prized. The dictator had been hospitalized for some liver ailment and the photographer had to wait for him to be discharged.
When they’d first met in the bar—the photographer was staying in the hotel, her expense account had run to such things—Zondi’d detected a slight limp as she’d walked to the toilet wearing the distressed True Religion jeans that had been in vogue that month.
But it was only later, up in her darkened room, that she’d disclosed the nature of her disfigurement—her word. He’d been allowed to touch her stump (the skin surprisingly smooth to his fingertips) but it had remained unseen for a week, since Zondi was no sleep over man and she’d been happy for him to depart in the dark.
Then, one night, after they’d ingested some party drug she’d scored off a Slovakian news cameraman, Zondi’d passed out and had awoken with the hard light of morning burning the bed. The covers were thrown off, revealing the photographer in her naked entirety, including the truncated limb.
The image had carried a powerful erotic charge and he’d been inside her before she’d woken, and he’d seen her eyes flicker open, scummy with sleep and desire and a moment’s anxiety, had felt her body tighten and then relax as a wave of pleasure had carried her beyond care.
Things had changed after that. She’d been naked in front of him. In the light. The first time, she’d said, that anybody who wasn’t a medic had seen her thus. It had been liberating for her and it had pleased Zondi to be useful at a time when he’d felt particularly useless.
She, with more recent access to the business of suffering, had understood better than he that he was depressed. One day he’d been lying on her bed, drinking a Scotch, when she’d dug in her bag and slung something onto the covers. It was a child’s drawing toy. Not something he’d owned as a kid, his playthings had been tin cans and stones and wire cars crafted by his father.
“You know what that is?” she’d asked.
He’d pointed at the yellow lettering on the red plastic that framed the gray screen.
“It says right there that it’s an Etch a Sketch.”
“Yes. But what it really is a master class in Zen.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, it is.”
The photographer had sat down beside him and taken the toy and, using the two white knobs set into the frame, she’d moved a stylus that displaced some kind of powder on the back of the screen leaving solid lines, and she’d expertly conjured his profile in a few squiggles.
“Very impressive,” he’d said, taking it from her hand.
She’d grabbed the toy back and shaken it vigorously. The image had disappeared, and she’d slung the plaything into his lap.
“See what I mean?”
“I think so,” he’d said. “It’s all about non-attachment?”
“Clever boy,” she’d said, pouring a drink. “When I was lying hospital after this,” she’d wagged hand at her stump, “and feeling oh so very sorry for myself—”
“As was your right.”
“Maybe. But it was curdling my innate joie de vivre.” She’d smiled sourly and he’d felt a jolt of lust that had him reaching for her. She’d evaded him and moved herself to the chair opposite the bed. “A friend came to visit and left the Etch A Sketch with me. The kind of ironically campy gift urban sophisticates like us exchanged. I fooled with it and then, after a day or two, I suddenly had it. That light bulb moment.”
“The Zen of Etch A Sketch.”
“You better believe it.”
When the blonde, her prosthesis and her drawing toy had disappeared from his life a few weeks later Zondi had felt an unaccustomed void. He’d usually been relieved when these entanglements ended, but he was forced to admit that he’d fallen a little in love with her.
The first time he’d allowed himself these feelings since he’d been a teenager.
Even when the memories of their love making had faded like Polaroids left in the sun that conversation had stayed with him, the toy with the red plastic frame and white knobs sharp in his memory.
As Zondi lay on the bed in the hotel room in Nêrens he closed his eyes and willed his mind to be empty, to be free of thought.
He fell asleep and when he awoke he was hot and the room was stuffy but he felt less burdened.
He reached for his phone and called the Bushman and this time the cop answered.
“Assegaai.”
“It’s Zondi. Can we meet?”
“Bad time, man. I’m pressed.”
“I went out to Soetwater today.”
A pause. “You did?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Curiosity. A couple of things were ringing alarm bells.”
“Where are you now?”
“The hotel.”
“Can you meet me at the Wimpy in fifteen minutes?”
“I can.”
Assegaai was gone and Zondi went into the bathroom and splashed his face with tepid water.
“Shake, shake, shake,” he said to his dripping reflection.
FIVE
Leon Louw sat at his kitchen table working under the light of a lamp. The kitchen was a pit, the sink filled with dirty dishes, the unemptied trash can stinking, the filthy floor like flypaper under the soles of his shoes, sticky with smeared food and spilled beer and fuck knew what else.
He’d cleared a space on the kitchen table by simply sweeping old junk off its surface, takeout boxes, empty booze bottles and paper plates of rotting scraps joining the mess on the floor.
That was the problem with this darkie-free policy here in Witsand. Everywhere else in South Africa a white guy like him had some black or brown serf—usually a long-suffering woman trying to scratch together a living to make a better life for her snotty little brats—cleaning up his shit after him.
Just how it was.
But not here in Witsand.
It was Kruger’s law that no darkies or coloreds set foot on this hallowed soil. Not even servants. So all the whities had to do their own dirty work. Clean their own houses, tidy their own gardens (well
, the fuckin drought and the dwindling water supply had pretty much put an end to the gardens) and empty their own trash, one of the crusty old Boers charging a fortune—in real money, not Witsand’s cartoon coupon currency—to collect garbage bags and drive them to the dump outside Nêrens twice a week in his ancient Chevy truck.
The sight of the miserable old fuckers sweeping their houses, hanging their threadbare clothes on lines and dragging trash bags to the communal collection point had never stopped being a source of amusement to Leon.
But his own home was no joke.
The last time it had been cleaned, two months before, he’d paid one of the little sluts that the tannies rescued to do it for him. The head of the Women’s League, an old bitch with a face like a fruit bat, had found out about this and had appeared at his door, scolding him, saying that these young women were not servants, that they were not brought here to make his life easy. They were Boer women who needed upliftment and getting on their hands and knees and scrubbing his dirty floors was not going to uplift them, now was it?
She had leaned in close, cabbage and something else unspeakably foul on her breath, hissing at him, “And don’t you think I don’t know what else you get them to do for you. It’s a scandal! You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Leon had closed the door in her face, but she’d obviously lectured the fallen women and thereafter none of them had made themselves available to clean up his mess.
But they’d still been prepared to open their legs, sneaking in and out of his house in the dark, wanting his cock, yes—they were horny little bitches—but also wanting the drugs and the booze that he dispensed so freely.
As he sat working at the kitchen table, the smoke from the soldering iron merging with the blue layer of meth smog that hovered in the air, he sniffed the ripe stench in the room.
He stank, too.
The stink of fear.
Before he’d smoked two quick pipes in succession he’d felt almost as terrified as the night that fireplug darkie had T-boned his life like a runaway eighteen-wheeler.
Terrified because of his father.
His fuckin father.
Leon was connecting a phone charger circuit to a wafer-thin mini solar panel, and had only managed to attempt the task after he’d hoovered up enough meth to stop the tremors in his hands.
He set down the soldering iron and found himself staring at his iPhone that lay just outside the pool of light from the lamp. Staring at it, waiting for it to ring again.
Even though it knew it wouldn’t.
Knew his father wouldn’t call again, ever.
The phone had rung when Leon had been ripping the guts out of the old charger—the kind of menial job that he enjoyed—his hands moving automatically, his mind on the woman he had left out in the desert.
Fuck, wasn’t that something? Amazing how that had all come together, off the fuckin cuff and unplanned.
Pure improvisation.
Living in the fuckin now.
He’d been chuckling to himself, thinking of all the sports that he was going to enjoy with Sue Kruger, when he’d seen the anonymous number blinking on the face of his phone as it blared out its Eminem ringtone. He’d almost ignored the call, but the worry that it may be one of his township informants—a darkie who would never leave a message—had him grabbing for the device and next thing he was listening to a voice saying, “It’s me. It’s your father.”
Jesus fuckin Christ.
He hadn’t spoken to his father in five years.
After he’d moved up here the little contact he’d had with his old life had been via his mother. He’d taken calls from her maybe twice or three times a year.
The last time she’d called was to tell him that she was dying and he’d cursed at her, said what did she fuckin expect from him? Pity? When she’d never protected him from his fucker of a father?
A few months later there had been a message on his phone from a distant relative, telling him his mother was dead.
He hadn’t gone to the funeral.
Why would he?
Why would he stand there beside rock-jawed Joe Louw with all his aunts and uncles and cousins (and probably even his bastard of a grandfather) looking at him and judging him?
Fuck that.
He’d put her out of his mind.
She was gone. Bye fuckin bye.
So the sound of his father's voice had shocked him.
He’d hesitated a moment before he’d said, “What the fuck do you want?”
“I’ve heard about the trouble you’re in. About what you did,” his father had said.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Shut up, Leon, listen to me. I can’t protect you. Not against these people. All I can do is give you some advice: pack up and come to Cape Town and I will get you a good lawyer and we’ll try and fight this thing in court. Try and plea bargain it down to a lesser charge. Do you hear me?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m begging you, Leon, as your father—”
“I don’t have a fuckin father.”
Leon had killed the call and stared at the silent phone, his nerves screaming at him like a chainsaw.
If his father knew about what he’d done, then who else knew?
How long would it be before he was thrown into prison with those savage darkies?
To chill himself he’d hit a pipe and when that hadn’t done enough he’d hit another, and finally he’d been able to get his head together.
He was safe.
He’d done everything that terrifying darkie had demanded of him.
Fuck his father.
Fuck him.
The meth had soothed him and he’d got back to work, losing an hour in a blur of wiring and soldering.
When he felt anxiety starting to gnaw again at his nerve ends he made another pipe, a small one, and sucked in the meth, and on the exhalation he allowed the last remnants of his father and his shit to flow away and disperse into the stagnant air.
Then he returned to project, completing the solar powered charger.
He mated its USB connecter with an iPhone that had been confiscated from one of the Witsand teens, and twisted the lamp until its light was hitting the green surface of the solar panel.
A small lightning bolt next to the battery symbol on the face of the iPhone indicated that the solar powered charger was working, and Leon allowed himself a chuckle.
He was good to go.
He thought of Sue Kruger trapped out in the desert.
Performance art.
Tomorrow he’d show that little blonde cunt fuckin performance art.
SIX
“I’m thinking that it’s all about water,” Zondi said, leaning toward Assegaai across the table at the Wimpy, getting a strong whiff of liquor from the detective.
“Ja?” the little man said, shoveling a mixed grill into his creased face. The kind of guy who could eat a horse and not put on a pound.
Zondi recalled something about the Bushmen of old, the nomads of the desert, who would gorge themselves on the carcass of the animal they’d killed, their bodies able to store the food for days, even weeks.
Was this still hardwired into Assegaai’s genes?
“Ja. Soetwater has water and Witsand doesn’t,” Zondi said.
Assegaai shrugged, chewing. “Okay, but what’s the relevance, Zondi?”
“Well, it would be motive to kill George Maritz.”
“Zondi,” Assegaai said, “what the fuck is going on, man?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you’re down here to make sure Kruger is sewn up tight. The guy who killed Maritz is in the ground.”
“You telling me it’s a coincidence that Kruger is buying the Maritz farm?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’ve got a motherfucker of a caseload. I can’t worry about this, man.”
“So that’s it?” Zondi said.
Assegaai was standing. “I’ve g
ot to take a piss.”
Zondi watched the cop walk toward the washroom, saw the reflex patting of his pants pocket to locate his cell phone.
Zondi pushed away his untouched cup of coffee and looked out the window at the traffic light stuck on red.
- - -
Steve Bungu was outbound on Nelson Mandela Boulevard, blue light flashing, nosing cars out of his path, on his way to a meeting with the president when his phone rang.
The BMW’s Bluetooth system displayed information on the incoming call beneath the speedometer. Unknown number.
He nudged a button on the steering and said, “Ja?”
“It’s me,” Assegaai said.
“Okay.”
“Our friend is stepping outside his brief. He went to the farm today.”
“Ja?”
“Ja. Coming up with theories.”
“Okay, I’ll manage this and get him yanked. May take a day or two. Meanwhile can you get yourself out of town for a bit?”
“Jesus.” A beat. “How much longer, Bungu?”
“How much longer what?”
“Until I’m done?”
“It’ll be over when it’s over.”
Bungu ended the call as he sped through the curves at Groote Schuur Hospital.
The problem with Assegaai was that, under the inscrutable exterior, beat the heart of a crusader. He had an impulse to right wrongs. Always a dangerous preoccupation in a country like South Africa where wrong had become the new right.
A year ago the tiny detective had discovered that a Northern Cape tribal leader was paying ghetto dwellers to rape their toddler daughters. Assegaai knew he’d get nowhere with an investigation so he’d driven the man into the desert outside Nêrens and shot him dead.
His mistake was that he’d been drunk at the time and he’d left DNA—he’d cut a hand when he’d punched the chief in the mouth and had bled onto the man’s shirt—on the scene that Bungu, having made the district his area of interest, had intercepted at the Cape labs.
He’d made sure that Assegaai hadn’t been touched, but he’d held the DNA over his head to ensure his compliance.