The gardens were worth enjoying. Rolling, green lawns with carefully tended flower beds, some of which contrived to add a little colour despite the season. Beyond the lawns, the serried rows of Groot Constantia vineyards were etched onto the valley floor, waiting hopefully for the heavy clouds above them to burst.
Four young women arrived for my consideration, ushered into the room one at a time by the bodybuilder with the white teeth. The first to arrive was coy, fluttering her eyelashes and smiling at me from a lowered face as if she was drinking from a non-existent straw and auditioning for a role in Lolita. She took a mineral water from the barman, perched on a stool and was toying with her glass when the second candidate arrived. Number two’s approach was more brash, a knowing pout and eyes that implied she knew my darkest secrets. Her mineral water provided her with something to tap with her long, sparkling fingernails while the three of us engaged in conversation about the weather. Number three was a sporty variation in case I turned out to be the fun-loving, energetic type of customer, despite appearances to the contrary. She wore a small amount of Lycra stretched over a lithe body, had glittering eyes and laughed at everything anyone said, whether it was intended to be amusing or not.
The fourth possibility was quiet and withdrawn, wearing an emerald silk dress with a high collar in the Chinese style. Her hair was tightly curled African, trimmed very short, so that she cut an androgynous figure. She was the only one of the four who did not smile at me, and when the bodybuilder announced that my lineup was now complete and that if I struggled with making my decision I could always choose a combination for a special price, she alone did not giggle.
None of the four had golden eyes.
The bodybuilder left me to make my choice, and instead of starting with small talk I broached the subject of the girl with the golden eyes. I explained that she might have been brought to Pandora at the same time as another girl, and that she might have had a troubled past. Numbers one, two and three shook their heads and looked confused, but number four kept her green eyes steady on me and said she might remember a girl with light eyes, but probably did not.
“She is no longer here at Pandora,” I said, to help jog her memory.
“No,” said number four. “She isn’t here.”
Number three laughed at that, in case it was amusing. Number one fluttered her eyelashes, and number two pouted because I was not being much fun.
“But you did meet her when she was here?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said number four, but her eyes said she had. They held mine with a steady gaze. The pupils were tiny pin-pricks in pools of green – she was high on something.
“Have you made your choice?” asked number two suddenly, and number three laughed again. “You’re staring at Leilah like it’s love at first sight.”
I said that I had made my choice, and number four stood and smoothed her silk dress over her narrow hips.
“Madame Lee doesn’t like men like you,” warned number two.
“Like me?”
“Men who want to talk, who aren’t here for the tits and ass. Are you a policeman?”
“No, I’m not.”
“A private dick then?”
“Not that either,” I said.
“You look after yourself, Leilah,” said number two, “you know the old dragon won’t like it.”
“I always look after myself,” said Leilah. “Don’t you girls know a soldier when you see one?” She turned to me. “Come on, soldier-boy,” she said, and led me out of the room.
She still hadn’t smiled.
Leilah led me through a maze of carpeted corridors and up two flights of stairs to a room with a four-poster bed with dark sheets and a mountain of pillows, on top of which sat a disgruntled teddy bear. A sash window was wide open, allowing an icy wind to sweep into the room and play games with the heavy drapes.
“I need the fresh air,” explained Leilah. She turned to me and placed a hand on my chest and looked up at me with her solemn green eyes. “Could you?” she said, turning her face to the side and touching the nape of her neck where the silk dress had a zip fastener.
“Your friend was right about my wanting to talk,” I said. “That’s all I need; to talk.”
“I like to talk too, but Madame Lee has her rules. Customers want their money back if we keep our clothes on. Please undo the zip.”
I unzipped the dress, and Leilah shrugged it off so that it slid to the floor. She stepped out of the dress and turned to face me, her eyes on mine to assess my reaction. The first thing I noticed was the scar. It ran across her neck in a thick line, as if she was a rag doll whose head someone had tried to remove. She was an attractive woman, with a face that could have been beautiful if it had not been so hard, and an elegant, long-limbed body, although she was too thin and altogether too vulnerable in her black lace underwear. Her face relaxed as she saw me accept the scar, and for the first time she gave a small smile.
“I was right about you being a soldier, wasn’t I?”
“What gave me away?”
“Your eyes – you’ve got the eyes of a killer – an official one. Licensed to kill.”
She stooped to pick up the dress and held it up against her.
“Could you close the window, soldier-boy? I like the fresh air, but it’s going to get cold if you’re just going to stand there and waggle your tongue.”
I closed the sash window and then Leilah insisted I unclasp her bra and sit in a low-slung armchair. She sat in my lap and picked up my hand and used a painted nail to trace the lines on it as if she was going to read my future.
“You are a killer, aren’t you?” she said. “I’m never wrong about that. I can see things about people, like an aura around you, and yours is stained with blood.”
She took my hand and placed it on her small breast, cupping it with my fingers.
“Look as if you mean it,” she said. “We need to keep Dragon Lee happy.”
“Is she a dragon?”
“She breathes fire, and sits on her hoard of gold. Isn’t that what dragons do?”
Leilah tilted her head back and closed her eyes. She opened her mouth and gave a sigh, as if the slight pressure of my hand was giving her a disproportionate amount of pleasure. It was a convincing display.
“That one’s for the camera behind the mirror,” she said. “But there’s no microphone, so you can tell me why you’re interested in the girl with the golden eyes.”
“She’s been missing for some time. I’m trying to find her.”
“She a friend of yours?”
“No, not a friend.”
“Well, you won’t find her.”
“Why not?”
“Because your girl with the golden eyes is dead.”
“I see. And do you know how she died?”
Leilah nodded and brought her face close to mine. “I know how she died, soldier-boy. She lost the game, and I had to watch them kill her, didn’t I?”
“What game?”
Leilah smiled, a strangely mesmerising smile with not one iota of joy.
“The game of life, the game of death. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Who is they? Who killed her?”
Leilah took a deep breath as if she was about to make an announcement, but then she pursed her lips and blew minty breath into my face.
“What do you want with the golden-eyed girl, soldier-boy? What did she do that I cannot do?”
“I am trying to find someone else,” I said. “Someone who wanted to help the golden girl, but failed.”
“Wanted to help her? Why?”
“They were sisters.”
Leilah stopped the gyrating movement of her hips and pulled back from me.
“You want the golden-eyed girl, or her sister?”
“You know the sister?”
“Yes, I do. Natasha saved my life.”
“Natasha?”
Leilah’s eyes narrowed. “Does Manda have more than one sister? Na
tasha was the sister who saved my life.”
“And how did she do that?”
Leilah lifted herself off my lap and took up a pose against a post of the bed – one leg raised to point its narrow knee at me, her arms held high to lift her breasts.
“Natasha was an angel sent from heaven,” she said. “She came down to hell, where she saved me. Then she hunted the devils, didn’t she?”
“The devils?”
“She said she would hunt them all down. She even found one of them. Gave me the name of the devil.”
“Perhaps you should tell me what happened, from the beginning?”
“You want it from the very beginning – with all the dirty bits?”
“Let’s start with the highlights.”
“We’ll start in prison then – that was a highlight. Manda and I were in together for three months. We rode there from the courthouse with a bunch of other girls. I’d been doing too much tik. I kept some of the money I made from my tricks to myself, and Thabo, my main man, wasn’t any too happy, so he checked me in for some rehab – that’s what he called it – and Manda was there with me in the truck, coming down and shaking ‘cos she’d been too high. She was just a baby – only fourteen, fifteen maybe?”
“Wait a moment,” I said. “Manda, short for Amanda: the girl with the eyes?”
Leilah nodded.
“Tik? What is that?”
“Crystal meth – we call it tik. We all do it, but Manda did too much of it.”
“And Thabo, your main man?”
“My dealer, my pimp, my main man. He was my protection, but when I broke the rules he let them take me in for some rehab behind bars.”
“And after prison?”
“The friends of the devils were there to meet us when we came out. But you are skipping the best bits, soldier-boy.”
“What were the best bits?”
“When they seduced us with their little messages.”
“What messages?”
“Letters, phone calls. They even sent us little bits of money, enough to buy ourselves cigarettes, not enough to buy our way out of trouble.”
“Who sent the messages?”
Leilah made a sound like she was blowing a feather off her lips.
“They said they were our friends, wanted to help us. That they understood us.”
“Didn’t the prison warders block those messages?”
Leilah blew another feather.
“Of course they did, but the warders were on the side of the police and the magistrates. What did they know? The harder they tried to stop the messages the more we wanted to hear from the people who said they were our friends.”
“And they were the ones there to meet you when you’d served your time and came out?”
Leilah nodded and changed her pose with a different leg up and a hand pulling at her panties.
“Of course they were there. They pay the prison warders for the tip-off.”
“What about your family?”
She gave a small laugh. “I had a mother, but she killed herself with booze. There was a man, not my father, who preferred me to my mother, and who hit me when I said no. So he doesn’t count.”
“Alright, so your new friends met you and Manda outside the prison. What happened then?”
“They had a big van, one of those family cars with ten seats that they could load girls into. Tinted windows and free tik for the ride. They parked outside the gate, and the guards knew them and waved, and grinned at them.”
“You went with them?”
“What else should I do? Sure, I had a choice – get in the van and take a hit of tik, or stand on the street corner and wait for some stranger to come along and shove his beer bottle up my fanny, after he broke the top off. I don’t come from your world, where your sweet mother comes along and takes you for ice-creams so you feel better.”
“And the place they took you?”
Leilah said nothing for a moment. Her green eyes turned into deep pools, and two perfect tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Come and lie with me,” she said, after wiping angrily at the tears. “Do you mind the teddy bear?”
I didn’t mind the teddy bear. Leilah arranged the mountain of pillows around us like we were lying in a small cave, and she insisted on removing my shirt. She ran a delicate finger over the scars on my chest.
“Bullets?” she said.
“Shrapnel: little pieces of metal, screws and nails that are built into the homemade bombs and mines the gooks build.”
“What gooks? Terrorists?”
“These were in the Congo. Allied Democratic Forces was what they called themselves.”
“You were lucky they didn’t go deeper. This one is right over your heart. I can feel it beating.”
“We weren’t all so lucky.”
Leilah looked up at me and kept her finger running along the scars. I could see the thoughts being marshaled as she considered telling more of her story.
“You have your own scars,” I said.
“We all do. That’s what life is, isn’t it? One scar after another.” She let her breath out in a long sigh. “They sucked my life from me. That’s what they did in the place they took us to. It was worse than prison – too much tik and booze. There was a big red couch with broken springs, and a crappy widescreen TV. That’s what I remember, having my life sucked out of me on that couch in that room. More than my life, they sucked my soul dry. We were the dog shit on their shoes. We were their slaves.”
“How did you get out?”
“Natasha found me, didn’t she?”
“You and Manda?”
“No, Manda was dead. Didn’t I tell you she was dead? I watched her die.”
“You met her sister after she died?”
“Her name was not Natasha, was it?”
“Her name is Sandy.”
Leilah’s green eyes looked into mine as she considered this. Her hand kept moving gently over the scars on my chest. There was something bothering me about her story, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Something to do with the sequence of events and Manda dying before Sandy appeared.
“You’ve watched friends of yours die?” she asked. “The ones who were not so lucky with the bits of metal in the bomb?”
“Not really. Those deaths come quickly. I couldn’t say I watched. But I’ve been there when friends of mine have died.”
I thought for a moment of Brian’s eyes as he turned to look at me and Chandler after we heard the clumsy trigger the ADF had rigged. A tripwire with a spring-loaded device that was armed when Brian caught the wire with his boot. We all heard the sound of it arming over the whimpering of the little boy he had been wanting to comfort, pinned to the ground with a bayonet beside the body of his dead father.
“Manda took ten minutes to die,” said Leilah. “That’s what my friend said, ten minutes, but to me it felt like hours.”
“In the room with the red couch?”
“No, this room had a golden couch with thin legs and little feet on them like a lion’s paws. Fancy chairs, and a nice carpet that was rolled up because they didn’t want Manda’s blood all over it. It was a party in a party room with pretty pictures of naked women – they didn’t want to spoil it with blood.”
“You were at a party?”
Leilah closed her eyes, and I thought for a moment that she had decided to feign sleep, but then she said, “It was a special party. A big job for us, they said, a lot of money. There were three of us girls.”
Her eyes were still closed, and her hand continued to feel its way around my scars as if she were trying to read a Braille message on my chest.
“Three of us went in, two came out,” she said in a voice without breath.
“The game?” I said. “Is that what you meant by the game?”
Leilah opened her eyes and looked at me. There was a wall of stone now behind her green eyes.
“It was their game, not ours.”
“These were th
e same people that sent you messages and took you away after your time in jail? Your friends? It was their game?”
“No, we had no friends, soldier-boy. These were a different level of monster. Fat and old and evil. They wore masks, you know those masks you see in the movies? With the hooked nose, and the holes their nasty eyes could look out of. They had wrinkly skin, and tired, limp cocks. It was their party, and their game – we only learnt the rules of the game after Manda had lost. They’d given us a whole truckload of shit before it started, so our heads were in the clouds, you know what I mean?”
“You were high.”
“Not just high, we were higher than ever. They had coke, tik and E. Fancy paintings on the walls, glass tables, big cushions, soft carpets rolled up, and we left our heads up in the clouds and our bodies went down to hell. The windows were closed, they had cigars they smoked, and while Manda dripped her blood all over the floor, I couldn’t breathe. They fucked her while she died. Did I say that? Their cocks went harder, they took it in turns, and we watched.”
Leilah rolled away from me on the bed and scattered pillows onto the floor as she flailed her arms up and down like she was trying to shake herself free of the memory. She placed her hands on her breasts and made as if she was going to tear her chest open.
“Can you open the window, soldier-boy? I can’t breathe, I need some air.”
I opened the window and a blast of icy air burst into the room. In the distance the clouds had succumbed and trailed patches of rain over the vineyards. Leilah lay on the bed, taking huge gulps of air, and started to cry. I looked out over the trimmed lawns and Leilah said I should light a cigarette because she wanted some, but I ended up smoking most of it as I watched the rain shift like a lace curtain over the vineyards.
Natasha, whom I knew as Sandy, had arrived at the hell-hole with the red couch months after Manda had died. Leilah had recognised the golden eyes, and knew immediately that there was a connection with Manda, but her keepers had already long forgotten about Manda and made no connection between them.
“How did she arrive?” I asked.
Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3) Page 5