by Roger Smith
“And Amanda was a fallen woman?”
“Ja. And in my experience when a woman has fallen she doesn’t get up.”
“A man too. And the bigger he is the harder he falls,” Zondi said, deadpan.
“You a fuckin comedian?”
“No. Just saying.”
The giant laughed. “Ja, well.” The laugh died in his beard and he stared at Zondi. “Amanda was a lot younger than old George. Poor bastard had never been married. You don’t meet many women out here. He even advertized in that thing they have in the Farmer’s Weekly, ‘The Hitching Post’. Poor cunt. Amanda met him and made a play. Saw he had a farm and thought he had some money but he didn’t have two rand to wipe his arse with.”
“There was a child?”
“Ja, a girl. Pretty little thing. Not sure it was George’s.”
“Why?”
“George was blond and so is Amanda. Kid’s got dark hair.” Van Staaden held up a hand broad as a soup plate. “Ja, I know. It’s not fuckin scientific but that Amanda is a slut, man.”
“Can you give me that address?”
“Wait.”
Van Staaden walked off and Zondi crossed to Sue Kruger’s car and kicked one of the new tires.
The big man returned and handed Zondi an oil-stained scrap of paper. He gestured toward the car.
“She was meant to come and get it yesterday. Kruger’s mad daughter.”
“You one of them?” Zondi asked.
“The Witsand lot?”
“Ja.”
“Why? Because I’ve got a fuckin beard and I wear khaki?”
“Good enough reasons.”
“Like you’re black, so you must be ANC?”
“I know, ethnic stereotyping.” Zondi shrugged.
Van Staaden shook his head. “When they first came here I had some sympathy for them. Then I realized Magnus Kruger is just another taker, surrounding himself with the lame and the lazy and the useless who’ll lick his arse. Not for me, man.”
Zondi waved the paper. “Thanks for this.” He started walking to his car.
“You’re going to drive to Upington in that fuckin thing?”
Zondi shrugged. “It’s all I could get.”
“Jesus, Zondi, don’t be fuckin stupid. It’ll take you hours.” He beckoned. “Come.”
Zondi followed him around the side of the building. A big red Nissan pickup was parked in the shade. A few years old but in decent shape.
Van Staaden said, “The key’s inside. Keep it as long as you need.” Zondi looked at him. “It’s for free, man. Take it.”
“Why?”
Van Staaden shrugged. “You’re the only bugger lifting a finger about George. It’s the least I can do.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
“That’s okay.”
“How long to get to Upington?” Zondi asked.
“Depends if you stick to the speed limit.”
“I’ve got a badge, why would I stick to the speed limit?” Zondi said.
The Afrikaner laughed. “Then this beast’ll get you there in around an hour and a half.”
The big man walked back into the workshop.
Zondi pulled himself up behind the wheel and saw the key in the ignition. He turned it and heard the thrum of the engine. He put the car in reverse and backed up, then made for the road, feeling the surge of power. Alwyn Van Staaden stood in the dark mouth of his workshop, watching him.
Zondi took off down the main drag, ignoring the red light swinging in the hot wind that blew in off the desert, scuffing little eddies of sand across the road.
FIFTEEN
The stink from the crematorium, an unpleasant mix of burned toast and something fleshier, filled Louw’s nose as he walked through the endless graves. He hadn’t been there since his wife’s funeral two years before, and it took him a moment to get his bearings and remember where she was buried.
He’d never seen her gravestone, leaving it up to the undertaker and Yolandi’s sister to get it done, already in hiding up the West Coast by the time it had been unveiled. His sister-in-law had emailed him a photograph showing the simple granite stone with its Afrikaans inscription: YOLANDI LOUW. LOVING WIFE OF JOHANN AND MOTHER OF LEON.
Louw hadn’t wanted to put Leon’s name on the stone but Yolandi’s sister had prevailed, saying it’s what his wife would have wanted and she’d been right.
Louw found the grave and shoved his big hands into his pockets, guilty that he wasn’t carrying flowers.
He heard his wife’s voice saying, “It’s not a date, Joe. You don’t have to pitch up with a bunch of roses or a box of chocolates.”
Louw laughed and then he felt such a wave of sadness that he had to sit down on the grass. There were fresh flowers in vases at the base of the headstone. Her family, he supposed. The kind of people who took their duties seriously.
Sitting by the grave he felt suddenly at a loss.
What was he meant to do?
He remembered a onetime colleague of his, Solly Tshabalala, a flashy Zulu guy from Jo’burg, who’d been forced to relocate to Cape Town when his wife, some Black Empowerment hotshot, had been transferred by her investment bank. The wife’s income had dwarfed her cop husband’s so there was no question of him refusing to move.
Solly was a really urban guy—wearing the designer suits his wife bought for him, getting his hair cut at the most expensive salon at the Waterfront—and it had shocked Louw when, after a few months and they’d become friends of sorts, he’d asked the Zulu over lunch one day what he’d missed most about Jo’burg, expecting him to say the buzz, the nightlife, the jazz, but he’d said Avalon Cemetery in Soweto.
Louw had stared at him, a burger halfway to his mouth, sure he was being mocked. “A cemetery?”
“Ja. My whole family is buried there. Grandparents. Parents. Aunts and uncles. Even my kid brother, the drunken asshole. All buried together. Every weekend I’d go over and visit and sit and talk to them all.”
“You’re shitting me, right?” Louw’d said.
Solly had shaken his fashionably barbered head. “Nope. Hey, that’s what us darkies do man, we talk to the ancestors. Talk to the departed.”
Louw had said, “And do they answer back?”
Solly had nodded. “You know, they do.”
“You hear their voices?”
“Ja, sometimes. Other times it’s just a feeling.”
“A feeling?”
“Yeah, like maybe something’s been hassling you and you can’t figure it out and you ask their advice and the answer just comes, just pops into your head. You know what I mean?”
Louw had snorted. The idea absurd to him.
Solly had laughed. “Ah, you whities are too fuckin hung up, man. Go to Avalon on the weekend and you see lawyers and doctors and street cleaners and bus drivers all sitting around talking to the dead. It’s just how it is and there’s no bloody shame in it. In fact it’s healthy. You feel connected to all of those who have come before you. Or those who have gone too soon.”
Louw stared at his wife’s gravestone and wished he could do it, wished he could just speak his mind, even though he knew it would be a one-sided conversation.
Then he did hear a voice, but it wasn’t it wife’s, it was that of a homeless man in tattered clothes—these people sheltered among the graves—holding out a trembling hand, asking for money.
Louw almost told him to fuck off but some impulse, prompted by superstition rather than kindness, had him digging in his wallet, finding a twenty rand note for the man, who clapped his hands and bowed and said, “God bless you, boss.”
Louw watched the beggar shuffle off and turned back to the gravestone and before he knew it, he heard himself saying, “Jesus, I miss you, baby.”
He didn’t get a reply but he felt something, felt his wife close and maybe this was what Solly Tshabalala had been talking about.
Anyway, Louw didn’t question it, he just shrugged off his jacket, making himself c
omfortable.
As he removed the jacket the cigarettes in the pocket jostled his hand and he snagged the Camels. Without thinking about what he was doing he put the smokes on the grass at the foot of the stone. He dug out the pack of Nicorettes and placed them beside the cigarettes.
He sat with his back against the gravestone and said, “Hey, babes, you remember those two promises I made you? Okay, well I’ve kept one. Sort of. I haven’t smoked, but I’ve been chewing Nicorettes like a wild man. But no more. That stops today. No smoking. No Nicorettes. Finish and bloody klaar. Okay?”
He felt lighter, knowing that this time he could do it, shake the stupid habit once and for all.
Then Louw thought of the second promise and saw his son’s face, the last time they’d been together, years ago up in Nêrens, Leon swearing at him, yelling, out of control, and the lightness was gone.
Louw sighed.
“The other promise? Hell, babes, that’s a bloody tough one.” He massaged his eyes. “Leon’s got himself in a world of shit and I’ve tried like hell to bail him out. To the point where I’ve turned myself into a liar. Worse than a liar. I’ve got myself caught up in really bad things that are tearing me apart.”
Louw was back in the garden of Genadendal, standing with Mercia Booysen, promising her that he’d keep her safe.
He felt sick, blinking the memory away.
“But no matter what I’ve done or try and do, I can’t help Leon. Not after what he did. So I’m sorry, Yolandi, but that’s it. He’s a man now and he’s got to walk his own road, tough as that will be.”
Louw felt tears in his eyes and swiped at them with his hand.
“We did everything we could for him, didn’t we? Christ knows we were good parents. He wanted for nothing. Did my work take up too much of my time? Jesus, I suppose it did. I dunno. But what could I have done? That was the job. I tried to be there, you know that, but I missed something, didn’t I? Didn’t pick up on how he was changing, me the great bloody detective, couldn’t even see what was happening with my own son. One day he was a sweet little lightie, next he was a holy bloody terror with the drugs and the car thefts and god knows what else. We lost him, didn’t we? We just bloody lost him.”
Louw sniffed and ran his hands through his hair.
“But I’m not going to lose myself, baby. That’s all I’ve got now. So I’m going to that press conference and I’m going to tell the truth even if it opens floodgates of bloody shit. I owe it to me and I owe it to you. Okay?”
Louw sat a moment with his eyes closed, conjuring his wife’s gaunt face as she’d slipped closer and closer to death, her last words of love barely audible over the suck of the respirator.
Then he rose and walked back to Voortrekker Road, ready to wave down a taxi and go into the city and stand up at the press conference and do what he had to do and fuck the consequences.
SIXTEEN
The woman who opened the door to Disaster Zondi, a skinny white harpy somewhere north of fifty with a bird’s nest of hair, dressed in just a T-shirt—leg veins like rivers on a map—jumped back as if he’d cattle-prodded her, clearly expecting a more welcome guest.
“The fuck are you?” she said, her toothless mouth gumming a cigarette.
“Where’s Amanda?” he asked, flashing his badge.
“No Amanda here.”
Zondi pushed past her.
“Hey, you got a warrant?”
“I don’t need a warrant,” he said, moving through a living room littered with empty booze bottles and ashtrays that looked like lava flows.
The house stank of stale fried food, tik smoke, baby piss and female underparts that hadn’t seen water for too long. He walked down a short corridor and used his shoe to edge open a peeling wooden door.
The bedroom was even riper. A blanket covered the window and in the gloom he couldn’t count the naked bodies sprawled across the floor like it was a mass grave. He saw a froth of dirty blond hair and reached down and grabbed a fistful.
Amanda Maritz, barely recognizable from the abandoned wedding photograph, woke up shouting, “What the fuck—?”
Zondi saw the terror in her eyes when she clocked his dark skin.
“I’m a cop,” he said in Afrikaans. “You get your dirty ass up and come talk to me outside.”
Zondi went through to the little front yard and stood in the sun, looking out over the ugliness. Upington was Nêrens on steroids. Spirals of razor wire gift-wrapped the low brick houses strewn across the sand and scrub. Dusty cars, rusted and dented, littered the road, like they’d just retreated from some desert war.
Amanda came out, blinking, squinting, belting a robe that had been white long ago.
She scratched at a herpes scab at the side of her mouth. “What you want?”
“I’m here about your husband.”
“My husband’s dead.”
“I know that. I’m here about who killed him.”
“Kaffir did it. He’s dead too.”
Zondi saw the look on her face, like she wanted to reel the word back into her mouth.
“Did Magnus Kruger approach him when he was still alive, about selling the farm?” Zondi asked.
She blinked at him. “Ja. So?”
“But he didn’t want to?”
“No. George he didn’t wanna sell. Said the farm was in his family for hunnerds of years. Blah, blah, blah.”
“But you’re selling?”
“What can I do? I got a kid.”
“And a tik habit?”
She looked away, out at nothing.
“Did Magnus Kruger threaten your husband?” Zondi asked.
She focused on him. “No.”
“You don’t want to bullshit me, Amanda.”
She scratched herself under her robe, exposing a heavy breast, the nipple red as a rash on her white skin.
“Kruger didn’t say nothing, but he sent some other guy who had a big mouth on him.”
“Who was this guy?”
“Some little asshole that lives at Witsand.”
“What did he say?”
“Just it would be better for George to sell. Better for everybody.” She squeezed at the sore on her lip and looked at her fingertips as she rubbed them together. “I wish he’d done it. Cause Kruger was offering okay money, then. Now he gonna pay me half and I gotta take it and shuddup. Nobody else want a fuckin useless farm in the desert.”
“This guy Kruger sent, he have a tattoo on his hand, here?” Zondi touched an index finger to webbing of his right hand.
Amanda squinted then nodded. “Ja, ja. Like one of them German things.”
“A swastika?”
“Ja, one of them.”
“This guy have a name?”
“Ja. Leon.”
“Leon who?”
“Leon Louw.”
Zondi was walking even before the words were out of her mouth, his iPhone in his hand, Googling.
He climbed up into the cab of the pickup and got the AC blasting while he refined his search, and when he saw that Joe Louw had a son named Leon he looked out over the drab houses and knew, now, what this was all about and why he was here.
SEVENTEEN
Joe Louw stood at the mirror in his hotel room and knotted his tie. He was freshly showered and shaved. On his return from the cemetery he’d found the time to stop at a barber shop on Long Street—no fancy salons for him, just a sweaty old guy who’d yakked about horse racing (an unintelligible spew of exactas and trifectas and bipots) as he’d taken the scissors and clippers to Louw’s gray-blond mop—and he looked neater than he had in years.
For some reason that was important to him.
He remembered Yolandi choosing his suit on the mornings when he was scheduled to address the media, brushing the cloth and removing imaginary lint from the collar.
“The outer man speaks of the inner man,” she’d always said, which had somehow sounded both less pretentious and more profound in Afrikaans.
As he shrugged
on his jacket his hand reflexively patted the inside pocket for the pack of Camels. He felt a sudden panic when he remembered that they lay atop Yolandi’s grave, along with the Nicorettes. Then the panic passed and with it so did the moment of craving, and he knew he was cured.
That he’d never want to smoke again.
He checked his watch. 2:52 PM. He’d appear in the conference room at exactly 3:00 PM, walk straight up to the podium and get right into it, giving himself no time for second thoughts.
Louw crossed to the window and looked down at the gridlocked cars and the crowded sidewalks and then he closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the glass and just breathed.
- - -
Steve Bungu sat in a café on Keerom Street watching an unwanted cup of coffee grow cold. He was keeping his word and avoiding the press conference but staying close by the hotel, just in case.
The coffee shop was near the Cape High Court and popular with the legal fraternity, tables crammed with harried lawyers with fat briefcases gabbling on their cell phones and self-important advocates who flapped in like vultures in their black gowns and sipped at tiny espressos during recess.
Bungu knew the courthouse well. He’d stood in the dock decades ago, on trial for terrorism and treason after bombing a police station in Woodstock, killing three cops and wounding four others. He’d been looking at the death penalty but he hadn’t given a fuck about that.
His life had meant very little to him after that week of communing with his wife’s decomposing corpse, the week that had changed Steve Bungu from an idealistic man of peace, a man who’d believed in the power of nonviolent passive resistance to a stone killer who’d quickly mastered the arts of the freedom fighter.
“Kill me,” he’d said from the dock. “You’d better fuckin kill me before I kill even more of you white fuckers.”
He’d been dragged down to the cells and out to a vehicle that had driven him back toward Pollsmoor Prison. His comrades had ambushed the truck and he was free—well, as free as a man with no soul could ever be—and on his way out of the Apartheid state, first to Botswana, then Zambia, then hopscotching his way through the Eastern Bloc countries that had offered him refuge.