From Cape Town with Love

by Blair Underwood

  “Where do you want me?” I asked Roman when I found him at the check-in table beside a red-haired security staffer with freckled, thickly muscled forearms. Roman introduced the man as Carter. Roman’s staff could be a wrestling team.

  Roman patted my back. “Just work the room. Eyes wide open.” Pretty vague, especially since “the room” was several acres large.

  The sound of the helicopter propellers beating overhead made my teeth grind. “What about the chopper?” I said. “We can get the police to—”

  “Already done,” Roman said. “LAPD’s bird will chase ’em off. Just make sure nobody bothers the guests. Absolutely no photos by staff.”

  There were twenty tables with ten seats apiece in the backyard, which had been transformed into an amusement park with carnival games, a mini merry-go-round, strolling clowns, pony rides, and two massive inflated bouncy houses shaped like pirate ships, one mostly red, one mostly yellow, prows poised for battle. The gift table was a mountain, more toys than most children would see in a lifetime. Children swarmed everywhere, laughing and shrieking at imaginary peril. I recognized Roman’s children from the picture he’d shown me, romping alongside the princes and princesses of Hollywood.

  For the first half hour, the birthday girl and her parents were nowhere in sight. Scanning the guest tables, I found a printed placard with my name—my neighbors were Halle Berry and Jennifer Garner (and yes, it’s true: Halle has no pores)—but I stayed only long enough to smile politely and sip from my glass of lemonade with frozen mint-leaf ice cubes.

  Murmurs, coos, and applause wove through the crowd.

  The sky was finally quiet when Maitlin’s family walked outside through the back-patio door, past the pool. Maitlin had waited for the helicopter to leave. She was carrying Nandi in her arms, and two men trailed behind them. Maitlin and Nandi were dressed in matching casual backless white summer dresses, their hair pinned up with crowns of white ribbons. Nandi’s wrist sparkled with a diamond bracelet I guessed was one of her birthday gifts, easily worth ten grand.

  Maitlin’s husband was on her heels, a balding and frumpy dark-haired man in reading glasses who tried to smile but looked uncomfortable under so many eyes. Maybe the inanity of a lavish party for a child who wouldn’t remember it was sinking in, even to a billionaire.

  I didn’t recognize the second man, who was black and in his midthirties, so giddy that his grin was nearly bigger than his face. His off-the-rack suit didn’t fit quite right, and his eyes seemed dazed. The birth father, I realized. He was tall, with a thick, cut frame like LL Cool J. Nandi hadn’t gotten her looks only from her mother’s side. If the birth father had been an actor, he could have found an agent that day.

  I could only imagine the impact of the deal he’d made with Maitlin and her billionaire husband. Overnight, he’d been transformed from a Cape Town local with a daughter in an orphanage to a man worthy of a seat at the table with Hollywood’s upper echelon. His eyes were bright enough to burst.

  Maitlin’s husband, Alec, headed straight for the discreet bar near the pool, a clove cigarette dangling between his fingers, meeting a huddle of other men who also looked Mediterranean, probably relatives.

  Maitlin walked from table to table with Nandi on her arm, flanked by the birth father and Zukisa, the nanny. Zukisa looked watchful and anxious, as if she expected Maitlin to drop the girl. As guests exclaimed and hugged Maitlin and Nandi, a hired photographer snapped photos of Maitlin’s table-side visits.

  I didn’t expect Maitlin to notice me, but she grabbed my arm.

  “Steve, this is Tennyson Hardwick!” she said, as if it were critical for Steven Spielberg to know my name. “He’s costarring in Lenox Avenue, and he was an absolute lifesaver in South Africa. We never would have found Nandi without him.”

  An exaggeration, but it won me beaming smiles and hearty handshaking from people I don’t usually get to shake hands with. I won’t name them all, but you get the picture. Yeah, Steve-O, so why don’t you sign me to star in your next movie? Here’s my card, I told him in my imagination, which my agent would kill me for not saying aloud.

  “Mis-ter Ten!” Nandi said, remembering me with shining eyes. It was oddly moving to hear Nandi say my name. “It’s my birthday!”

  “I know it is, kiddo. Happy birthday.”

  Maitlin’s attention stayed on me. “Tennyson, say hello to Paki Zangwa. This is Nandi’s birth father. We just helped him move to San Diego, and he’s visiting for the party.”

  Up close, the man’s genetic stamp on Nandi’s long forehead and eyes was obvious. I assumed he’d had a DNA test months ago, but except for complexion, Nandi was his clone.

  “Molo,” I said, the traditional Xhosa daytime greeting. “Ndiyavuya ukuwazi.” I’d only said I was pleased to meet him, but with pronunciation good enough to make him gasp.

  “You speak Xhosa?” he said.

  I laughed. “Hey, man, that’s all I remember from my travel book. Welcome to the States.”

  Zukisa looked at me with fresh eyes, ready to take me home to her parents. Her gaze found my camouflaged hickey, and she tried to hide a small smile.

  “A pleasure!” Paki Zangwa said, speaking to the entire table. “This is all so very special. From a nightmare, a dream has come true for Nandi. Thanks be to God. And to Sofia and her very good husband, for this home that is . . .” He blinked back tears. “. . . beyond words.”

  To my surprise, I liked Paki. Had he abandoned his daughter, then resurfaced when little Nandi started pooping in gold diapers? Maybe. But I found myself wanting to believe in him.

  It was a beautiful day for a party, cloudless but not too hot, and children’s laughter tickled my ears as they scurried between the carnival games and the massive bouncy houses, their faces smeared with clown paint, melted ice cream, and ketchup from their gourmet hot dogs. Clowns dispensing hot dogs and ice cream strolled the grounds with catering carts.

  I monitored the support staff, and everyone seemed efficient and businesslike, without much open gawking. I caught a frozen-lemonade guy trying to snap cell phone photos of Halle, but he was embarrassed when I caught him, blushing and apologizing profusely. He looked like a college student, or maybe a young actor between gigs. The right photo would fetch thousands of dollars from the tabloids. Roman probably would have fired him, but I confiscated the phone and sent him back to work.

  In the days afterward, I would mull over every decision I made at Nandi’s party, with a firestorm of regrets.

  What could I have done differently? What had I overlooked?

  Maitlin stayed close to Nandi’s side most of the afternoon, taking her own photos of Nandi with the clowns, on the ponies, or on the merry-go-round. Maitlin’s husband made token appearances, but it was easy to guess that he’d been much less interested in adopting a child than his younger wife. One of the men he spent most of the time with at the poolside bar might have been his son, probably close to thirty himself.

  But marriages are all about accommodating each other’s needs, and celebrity marriages take that model to a science. Sometimes love even has something to do with it. Yeah, a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of love. I invested in a brief, silent, cynical speculation that her half-year “spiritual retreat” had been suggested not by her guru, but her lawyers.

  “I want to jump!” Nandi said, pointing to the brightly colored pirate ship. Its thirty feet must have looked like the Titanic to her. While a generator kept it inflated, I counted nearly two dozen children romping through its mazelike portals, throwing themselves against the rubbery walls and launching themselves down the huge inflatable slide modeled after a pirate’s plank. Children could leave and enter from the aft, the stern, or the side, and they wriggled in and out at dizzying speed. It looked like a recipe for trampling, but so far, no ambulance. My attitude toward kids is simple: no transfusion, no foul.

  Maitlin looked like she was having doubts about the ships. Nandi was small for her age.

  “Please, Mommy?” N
andi said. “I want to go in!”

  Maitlin motioned for Zukisa, who was a few paces closer than I was. “She wants to jump. Will you make sure she doesn’t get hurt? I need to eat.”

  “Of course!” Zukisa said, taking Nandi’s chubby hand. The diamond bracelet glistened in the sunlight, even from my ten-yard distance.

  “Wait,” I said, stepping closer. “Better take off her jewelry.”

  “Alec would kill me if she lost that!” Maitlin said. “Thank you, Tennyson. My brain must be fried from the sun.”

  I wanted to mention that Alec had been crazy to give Nandi the bracelet in the first place, but I left that unspoken. Zukisa and I shared a look: These rich people!

  I didn’t follow Zukisa and Nandi into the closest bouncy house, but I peeked inside, noticing how many places she could vanish and reappear in the ship’s elaborate layout, like the rooms of a small house. Nandi was fearless, flinging herself down the slide while Zukisa tried to keep up with her. Zukisa was only in her twenties, but she was perspiring after ten minutes of chasing Nandi. Luckily, Nandi avoided collisions with other children, nimble as a running back.

  “Ooh, that girl!” Zukisa finally said, sitting on the grass beside the slide. “She can go all day long like this. I can barely stand up in there!”

  When Nandi was inside the bouncy house for the first time by herself, Zukisa and I both waited twenty seconds for her to appear at the top of the bright yellow slide. This time, she rode down on the lap of a sturdy tomboy who looked about ten, both of them screaming with laughter. They landed in a tangle on the pad on the grass.

  Zukisa leaped to her feet, alarmed. “Be careful with the young one!” she scolded.

  Nandi sat up, red faced with laughter. “Again!”

  And so it went on. I checked my watch: It was almost four o’clock. Only an hour to go. I couldn’t wait to get home and start poring over the information about Chela’s mother.

  “Hardwick!” Roman jogged up behind me. “What are you, the au pair? I’ve got caterers who need watching. They want to heat some food in the kitchen, so make sure they only take what they brought in.”

  Call it instinct, or maybe premonition: I didn’t want to leave the ship. I almost said so.

  He pointed to a caterer’s table, in the shade of the trees near the path back to the front yard. Theirs was the only table that offered anything except kiddie food, styled after a South African barbecue called a braai. Spicy sausage called boerewors, dried strips of meat called biltong, and Indian samosas. Their table smelled like Cape Town. I speared a piece of sausage with a toothpick and wolfed it down. Yum. I made a note of the restaurant’s name on a small placard on their table: SOUTH AFRICAN SUN ON MELROSE.

  “You need the kitchen?” I asked the man in the chef’s hat.

  “Yeah, yeah.” The stout, ruddy white man had a slight Afrikaner accent. He was overseeing a staff of three black workers, two men and one woman, who might have been South African, too. “The stew’s not heating fast enough on our burners, and the first batch is going fast.”

  He motioned authoritatively to two of his workers, and they lifted a huge iron cooking pot filled with stewed meat and potatoes. It looked like it weighed a ton. One of the black men was short but stocky, with broad shoulders. He seemed intimidated by me, casting his eyes down from mine. He was the only cook who looked over forty, and his grip on the stew pot nearly slipped more than once as they made the long journey across the yard. I wished Roman had offered them a golf cart.

  I barely knew my way to the kitchen, but I dutifully led them. Their arms had to be aching by the time we crossed the property, but they never complained. As we walked, I cast another glance at the pirate ship in time to see Nandi dive headfirst down the slide. Watching her made me smile.

  On the way to the kitchen, we passed Maitlin at a table with her husband, Rachel Wentz, and Nandi’s birth father, all of them enjoying a toast of golden wine. The wine bottle caught my eye: a big yellow smiley face grinning at me from the label. Their table was a cozy portrait. Rachel Wentz grinned at me and waved, and I waved back.

  In Maitlin’s immense kitchen, tiles, marble, and stainless steel glistened like Nandi’s diamonds. A housekeeper in a gray uniform and white apron was waiting inside to instruct the men on how to use the stove, a middle-aged Latina who was glad for the company. She gave us a crash course on the kitchen’s endless features. The children outside were laughing so loudly that I could hear them despite the closed windows and the grounds that separated us.

  “Who gives a baby diamonds?” one of the men said to me as he stirred the stew, his voice laced with a ring of contempt I didn’t like. “Nice life, eh?”

  “Nice lady,” I said.

  There was a sharp clap, and the shorter, broad-shouldered man gestured angrily at the first worker, who looked nervous about having angered him.

  “It is not our concern,” the angry man said to me, apologizing in his lyrical accent. His brow was knit with focused attention as he tended to the stew. He wore nondescript black slacks and a white shirt, but he carried himself like a chef, not just a cook. “We are not paid to gossip.”

  While the food heated up and filled the kitchen with exotic scents, I stood at the kitchen’s picture window and watched the backyard’s flurry of activity. The party looked more chaotic from a distance, and I yearned to be closer to the crowd. The cooks didn’t need another babysitter. Why was I wasting my time?

  I had been exiled in the kitchen for about fifteen minutes when sudden movement through the window caught my eye. Zukisa and Roman were running toward Maitlin’s table, near the pool. Zukisa’s erratic body language was loud and clear: Something was wrong.

  Roman leaned over Maitlin to say something to her, and Maitlin leaped to her feet so quickly that her chair fell over behind her. In unison, everyone at the table turned toward the party crowd, as if they had heard someone call to them. The group left the table, heading toward the party. Did one of the child swarm fall down, go Owie?

  I looked at my watch. It was 4:10.

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted the housekeeper, who was trying to educate me on the precise temperature range of the freezer. “I need to go back outside.”

  The housekeeper looked offended, but she shrugged and turned her back to me, continuing her recitation to the cooks. Both cooks gave me pleading looks.

  In the time it took me to get back to the party, I lost sight of Maitlin, Roman, Maitlin’s husband, and Zukisa. The gaiety was still in full swing outside, but I didn’t see Nandi.

  From a distance, I spotted Roman’s children rolling down the pirate ship’s slide, laughing. A clown was pulling an endless stream of scarves out of a (presumably) stuffed rabbit, so I had to wade through a crowd of twenty-five children in identical Bozo makeup while I searched their faces for Nandi’s.

  With the climbing rope hanging beside the pirate ship’s side entrance, I climbed up into the giant red bouncy house where I had last seen Nandi playing. A half dozen screaming children ran past me. My heart raced, until I noticed their grins.

  “Hey, mister—no shoes in here!” a boy scolded me as he pushed past. I ignored him, nearly losing my balance while the inflated floor gyrated wildly beneath my feet. I searched the colorful holes and passageways. “Zukisa?” I called. “Nandi?”

  No answer.

  “Who wants to see me make this little rabbit disappear?” the magician bellowed from outside, and an army of children shrieked, “MEEEEEEE!”

  At the far rear of the ship, a child-size archway led to a cubbyhole large enough for three or four children to climb into, or a couple of adults. Something pale against the corner of the red floor caught my eye, so I picked it up. One of Nandi’s white ribbons. Outside, nearly buried by the cheering children, Maitlin was calling Nandi’s name.

  Behind me, Roman stuck his head into the archway, anxious. Zukisa was panting beside him. I didn’t have to ask if Nandi was missing.

  I held up the ribbon. “She was h
ere.”

  Zukisa clutched her cheeks with horror, as if the ribbon were a corpse.

  Roman took the ribbon and pocketed it. “I was about to call for you.”

  “This was the last place I saw her,” I said, wriggling out of the cubbyhole. “How long?”

  Roman checked his watch, struggling to keep upright as the floor swayed wildly. “Almost fifteen minutes.” He nodded toward Zukisa, disapproving. “She waited ten minutes to tell me.”

  She must have disappeared almost as soon as I left, I realized.

  “She likes to hide!” Zukisa said, defending herself. “It’s like a maze, looking for her in these things.” But Roman’s glare silenced her.

  There was no reason to believe the worst—not yet—but I used my imagination.

  “The pool?” I said. I’d once read about a family on vacation who searched for their child all morning, only to find him drowned in a shadowed corner of a motel pool.

  “Checked there first,” Roman said.

  Someone could have snatched Nandi. Is anyone watching the front gate?

  “We just shut the gate,” Roman said, reading my mind. He clung to a balancing rail as he space-walked toward the closest exit. Outside, he gave me a handi-talkie that matched the one strapped to his belt. “I’m going around front. Start a full sweep out here.”

  A young security staffer who looked like a college football player ran up to us, slightly red faced. His name tag identified him as LEVITT. “Where do you want me, Roman?”

  Roman studied me, a barely noticeable hesitation. “Hardwick’s on point back here, so what he says goes. I’ll be up front with Carter. Every nook and cranny. Find her.”

  “Yessir,” Levitt said as Roman hopped into his waiting golf cart and drove off. Levitt had seemed surprised when Roman put me in charge, but he obediently awaited his orders.

  “Clear both bouncy houses,” I told him. “Ask about Nandi, but don’t start a panic.”