Sacrifices

by Roger Smith

  “I’m on my way,” she says and slides her feet into a pair of black pumps, grabbing her clutch bag from the kitchen counter.

  She blows Harpo a kiss and leaves the apartment, taking the elevator down to where the BMW waits in the street. Michael, sitting at the wheel, does a double-take as he reaches across to open the passenger door for her.

  “Wow,” he says, starting the car, “I didn’t recognize you.” Trying for lightness but she hears the tension in his voice.

  He turns left into Main Road and she waits for the Afrobeat blasting from a Nigerian bar to recede before she speaks.

  “So, I met him this afternoon at the taxi rank near the station. Had to really twist his arm to come into the city.”

  “Okay.”

  “I gave him the money and told him exactly how to get to the house. He’ll go in at nine and call me when it’s done.”

  “How do you know he hasn’t just taken the money and disappeared back onto the Flats?”

  She shakes her head, watching a very tall, very black hooker wearing a silver dress that shimmers like tinsel lean down into a car, talking to a white john. The woman’s laugh carries to Louise as they drive by.

  “He’ll do what he promises.”

  “You gave him the remote control for the gate?”

  “Yes.” It had still been on her keychain, the plastic clicker with the button that opened the little fortress in Newlands. “And I told him to watch out for the security patrols. Don’t worry, Mike, it’s sorted. He knows what he’s doing.”

  They drive in silence, the BMW flowing with evening traffic toward the city. Michael is a good driver. She’ll get him to teach her, Louise decides, when this is all over.

  They pass the Waterfront and hit Long Street. After a few blocks Lane turns right into a narrow road and parks outside what looks like an old factory. A discreet neon scribble—Le Petit Cochon—above the doorway the only clue that this is a restaurant.

  Michael nods to the car guard and escorts Louise into the place she’d so detested when he brought her here two years ago. But it was her choice for tonight, knowing that they needed an alibi while her father did what Michael had paid him to do. What better than a protracted four course meal in this cramped eatery stuffed with pale middle-aged diners, where they couldn’t fail to be noticed and remembered?

  The maître d' guides them through the room with its flocked fleur-de-lis wallpaper and teardrop chandeliers, the air heavy with cooked blood and garlic, and Louise has to bite back a smile as she feels the eyes on her, narrow white minds calculating the nature of the relationship between the handsome man in the suit and the young brown woman.

  She allows the smile to bloom as they sit, the maître d' pushing in her chair, calling her “Madame” in a French accent as unconvincing as his hairpiece. Michael toys with an empty wine glass.

  “Relax, Mike,” she says.

  He clicks on a smile and says, “Sure,” but she sees the tension knotting the muscles of his jaw.

  Louise takes her cell phone from her bag and puts it on the table beside the gleaming silverware that had so intimidated her the last time she was here. Feeling like a hick, she’d waited for Michael to select a spoon, fork or knife, aping him. The phone is on silent but its face will blink when Achmat Bruinders calls in about an hour to tell her it is done.

  The sommelier appears at the table, going through his absurd ritual before charging their glasses with wine, as serious as if he’s dispensing some holy sacrament.

  They eat foie gras, quail eggs, confit of duck and the restaurant’s signature stuffed pork fillets, washing their palates with sorbet between courses. A new bottle of wine appears with each dish.

  Michael drinks sparingly and barely touches his food, even though the portions are miniscule. Louise is surprised by her appetite—crunching little quail bones, feeling the blood of the pork running down her throat—and she allows herself to become pleasantly tipsy, the room softening into a yellow glow.

  When the phone strobes it startles her, and she almost knocks it off the table in her haste.

  Turning her face away from the neighboring table, she says, “Yes?”

  At first Louise thinks the connection is poor, hearing what she takes to be a wash of static, then she realizes that she’s listening to ragged breath.

  “Is that you?” she says.

  There’s a wet, rattling cough that cuts through the pleasant ambrosia of the booze and Louise’s free hand grabs at the starched table cloth. Michael leans forward, watching her through the dancing candles.

  “It’s gone bad,” Achmat Bruinders says and there’s a muffled curse and the unmistakable clatter of the phone dropping to the ground.

  Then nothing.

  16

  The drive from the city to Newlands takes forever, Lane keeping to the speed limit, checking his mirrors for police cars. He drank only a little and feels all-too sober, but a breathalyzer may tell a different story. Louise sits beside him, neurotically prodding at her cell phone, which stays stubbornly mute.

  When he’d seen her stricken face as she lowered the phone in the restaurant, he’d leaned forward.

  “Smile,” he said, stretching his mouth into something that resembled a grin.

  She blinked at him. “Michael—”

  “People are watching,” he said, “so put the phone down and smile at me and take my hand.”

  She did as he said and he moved his face close to hers, feeling the heat of the candles on his cheek, freezing the smile in place as he listened to her tell him what she’d heard.

  “We have to get his phone back,” he said.

  “You mean go there?”

  “Smile, Lou, smile. We have no bloody choice, your number’s on it.”

  He turned and caught the eye of the maître d', making a scribbling motion in the air to call for the check.

  It had taken an age for his credit card to be processed and they’d had to endure an eternity of bonne nuit’s before they were finally released into the night, Lane having to restrain himself from dashing to the BMW.

  At last they turn into the street where he’d lived for so many years, a purple pulp of jacaranda blossoms lying in his car headlights. A Sniper Security vehicle passes them and Lane’s hands tighten on the wheel until the car disappears.

  “What if Beverley got to the panic button?” Louise says. “What if the cops are there?”

  “Then we drive by and think of another plan.”

  They pass the closed gates of the house and see no flashing lights or emergency vehicles. His once-upon-a-time neighbor is having a party—some old disco anthem blaring out into the night—and the street is lined on both sides with Beemers and Mercs and SUVs. Lane finds a parking bay and he and Louise walk back toward the house like just another couple of partygoers.

  They stop outside the gates and Lane peers through the bars. The lights burn in Chris’s cottage and the living room of the house. In the lull between dance tracks from next door he thinks he can hear the murmur of a TV before the music kicks in again.

  Lane presses the button on the remote on his keychain and the gates open like a pair of welcoming arms. He and Louise pass through and the gates close after them.

  As they walk down the driveway the sound of the TV gets louder. Beverley would have been watching one of her courtroom dramas, drinking wine, when her killer came. They pass Chris’s room and a breeze swells the curtain in the open doorway just as it had the night when this nightmare began.

  When they cut across the lawn to the front door they see the body. Lane hears Louise’s sharp suck of breath as they walk toward a man lying on his back, arms flung out, warm light from the big windows of the living spilling over him.

  Lane stares into the face of a stranger, a face covered in blood, head pulped as if he was bludgeoned to death. And when Lane sees one of Christopher’s crutches, the rubber tip thick with gore, lying on the brick paving beside the body, he has some intuition about what happened.r />
  “Is this him?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “Is he—?”

  Swallowing his revulsion, Lane kneels down and touches two fingers to the man’s tattooed throat. No pulse. As he’s about to rise Lane catches the glow of plastic and picks up a cheap cell phone from the bricks beside the body. He shows it to Louise before he pockets it.

  “The gate remote,” she says.

  Lane forces himself to frisk the dead man, finding the little box with its two buttons in his jeans pocket.

  They stand a moment, facing the open door to the house, Abba’s “Mama Mia” rolling in from next door along with drunken laughter, then Lane finds the courage to walk forward, avoiding the splatters of blood that trail from the house.

  Stepping into the hallway Lane sees a smeared track of blood, as if somebody dragged himself along the tiles. Following the blood, but careful not to step in it, Lane moves into the living room, Louise half a step behind him.

  The TV set lies on its back, burbling in American, its tube flickering. A coffee table is overturned, glass shattered. The couch lies on its side and Lane sees a white leg and a bare foot protruding from behind it. The leg is muscled, covered in a fleece of blond hair. His son’s leg.

  He edges forward, Chris coming into view, lying on his belly, unmoving, his stump flung out to the side, his T-shirt ridden up over his torso, blood pumping from stab wounds too numerous count. He cradles the head of his mother, a head that lies at an odd angle, and Lane sees that Beverley’s throat has been cut. Her mouth gapes slightly on bloodstained teeth, but her hair and make-up remain perfect.

  Lane sees it all playing out. The man catching Beverley unawares, slitting her throat as she watched TV. His son coming from the kitchen, where he’d been loading up on snacks, lashing out at the man with his crutch. The intruder fighting back, stabbing the boy repeatedly, even as the crippled giant carried on beating him, following the wounded man out onto the paving where he made his last call, Christopher raising his crutch and killing him before dragging himself back into the room to his dead mother.

  Louise stares down at the bloody tableaux, expressionless.

  “It’s done, Michael, we need to go.”

  Lane hears a groan and his son’s visible eye flickers open and stares up at him.

  “Jesus,” Lane says, “he’s still alive.”

  “Dad,” Chris says, a bubble of blood swelling from his mouth.

  Lane, kneeling, is back on that road twenty years ago, a small, bleeding boy staring up at him, sobbing.

  “Michael, we have to go,” Beverley says and Michael looks back over his shoulder and, of course it’s not Beverley, it’s Louise.

  “He’s still alive.”

  “He won’t be for long. We have to get out of here.”

  She tugs at his sleeve and he stands, his son’s eye following him, his lips moving soundlessly, thick blood flowing onto the tiles.

  Lane follows the girl back out into the night, past the dead man with the tattoos, down the driveway. She takes his keychain, opens the gates and closes them once they are free.

  As they walk toward his car she says, “We were never here, Michael. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he says, “we were never here.”

  17

  The Anglican minister’s patter—as insubstantial as the dust motes dancing in the beam of sunlight that lances through the stained glass window and warms the twin coffins—paints a counterfeit portrait of a happy family sundered by an unspeakable act of violence. An act of violence that has left in its wake a grieving husband and father.

  Michael Lane, standing alone in the foremost pew of the small stone chapel near Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, experiences a curious loss of synchronization, as if the audio track that should have accompanied Tracy’s funeral service three weeks ago—when his name was not spoken—has come adrift and slid down the timeline and attached itself, absurdly, to these proceedings today, where words like love and loss and grief have no place.

  But, clean-shaven, hair freshly barbered, wearing a new suit that fits his lean frame, Lane stands with his head bowed and lets the pain of the loss of his real loved ones—Tracy and the unborn Emma—inform the expression on his face and the slump of his shoulders.

  He does it so successfully, that when (to the strains of a canned version of “Abide With Me”) the caskets of Beverley and Christopher disappear behind a velvet curtain, he feels the sting of tears on his cheeks.

  Beverley’s sister, the boozy wife of a sugar farmer from north of Durban—an older, fleshier version of her sibling—arrives at his side and touches his arm.

  “Are you okay, Mike?” There is lipstick on her teeth and gin on her breath.

  “Yes, Monica, I’m fine. Thank you.”

  As he lets her lead him toward the doorway he sees Louise Solomons rise from a pew in the rear and slip out the door into the molten afternoon sunlight.

  There aren’t many people in the chapel—a few friends and acquaintances, awkward as they offer their condolences, knowing enough about the end of the Lane’s marriage to be uncomfortable with the minister’s fiction. Lane mutters blandishments and shakes hands, moving toward the arched doorway.

  When his sister-in-law suggests drinks at nearby hotel Lane demurs.

  “I don’t think I’m quite up to it, Monica. But thank you.”

  She snags his hand, saying, “Will I at least see you before I fly out tomorrow?”

  “I doubt it,” he says, freeing himself from her fingers, walking across grass so green that it resembles Astroturf, the black bulk of Table Mountain rising above the dense foliage of Kirstenbosch.

  There is a fire on the mountain, fuelled by the hot Southeaster that grabs at Lane’s suit pants and ruffles his hair. A helicopter hovers over the blaze, dumping water onto the flames, its blades whipping at the gray smoke.

  Louise waits at his car, talking on her cell phone. Lane fingers the button on his key and the car chirps and turn signals flash as he opens the door and gets in, watching her as she speaks. Louise has been his rock these last days. Organizing the funeral. Running interference with the police and the media, quietly efficient in her role of Friend of the Family.

  Lane starts the car, the arctic A/C kicking in. While the BMW idles he frees himself from his jacket and tosses it on the rear seat, wrenching off his tie.

  Louise slides in beside him and he catches a whiff of some very subtle scent, like vanilla. She is wearing the same outfit she wore the night they went to dinner.

  “That was the police,” she says.

  “What did they want?” He looks at her, feeling a twinge of worry like a half-forgotten toothache.

  “They were just letting us know that they’re done with the house. It’s okay to get in the crime scene cleaners.”

  “Good. I think I still have the number of the people from last year.”

  “No worries, I’m on it.”

  He drives away, through Newlands, and then turns left toward the city, taking the same route they had taken five nights before, when Lane, numbed by what he had witnessed at the house, found himself on the dark streets of Sea Point without remembering how he’d got there. When he stopped outside Louise’s apartment block and turned to her and tried to speak, his words were glued to the back of his dry throat and he had to cough to dislodge them.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he said.

  “I’ll be fine, Michael. And you?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re not having any regrets, are you?”

  “No, of course not.” He coughed again. “Too late, anyway.”

  “Yes,” she said, opening the door, the dome light washing her delicate features.

  The interior of the car was returned to darkness as Louise closed the door and walked toward her lobby. Lane watched her unlock the glass doors and disappear inside, then he drove back along Main Raid toward the city, a straggle of listless prostitutes genuflecting as he passed.

  He
stowed the BMW in the car park beneath his apartment and negotiated a series of barred gates, as if he was taking himself to a prison cell. With the door to his apartment bolted, he sat a while on the couch, watching sports highlights with the sound muted.

  When a rugby package came on he killed the tube.

  He allowed himself to remember his amputee son as he lay dying on the sitting room floor, cradling Beverley’s bloody head. Lane knew that even if he’d chosen to intervene and called an ambulance, he would not have been able to save Christopher, his wounds were too grievous. And wasn’t it better, anyway, that his son was dead? What kind of a life would he have had without Beverley?

  Lane imagined Christopher growing morbidly obese, living a twilight existence of booze and weed and DVDs. Imagined uncomfortable and depressing encounters prompted by duty rather than affection.

  No, better that he was gone.

  Lane, who had been certain that he wouldn’t sleep that night, was woken by the yelp of his cell phone. He sat up on the couch, gray dawn light bleeding in around the curtains, and fumbled for his blinking Nokia.

  The police. Brenda Passens had found the bodies. Michael was required to come to Newlands.

  Lane shed his suit, pulling on jeans and a shirt, but he denied himself a shower and a shave, knew he would appear more convincing if he looked as if he’d rushed over.

  The scene at the house was as it had been the night before, but the garden and the living room were filled with cops and crime scene technicians, the driveway cluttered with vehicles.

  Lane parked in the street and walked down the driveway, thickset men with blunt haircuts watching him. He’d half expected Detective Gwen Perils to be running the show, but a beefy white man in a cheap suit detached himself from a group of uniformed cops and introduced himself—an Afrikaans name Lane promptly forgot.

  The detective gave him the bullet points: an as yet unidentified man broke in and killed Beverley. Christopher attempted to save her and killed the man and died himself.

  The motive? Almost certainly robbery.