“What do you mean, how? She arrived in a car.”
“But under what pretence?”
“Pretence?”
“Did she say she was looking for her sister?”
“She knew her sister was dead, but she didn’t know how. That came later, when we told her how it happened, after the transfer.”
“Transfer?”
“Natasha bought us, didn’t I say that? She bought us from the monsters. She arrived in her car, paid them with a big bundle of cash, and drove away with us like we were household appliances she’d picked up at the store.”
“Did she bring you here?”
“No, she wanted us to work for her, didn’t she?”
The heavy drapes beside the windows billowed into the room suddenly, as if someone was trying to get through them. I felt the slipping sensation again, of things not making sense, but I still couldn’t put my finger on what it was. The thought that Sandy would buy women to ‘work’ for her seemed absurd.
“Just you, or were there others?”
“Two of us. Flossie and me.”
“And this was the work you did?” I said, gesturing vaguely around the room, encompassing the bed, the low-slung armchair, our mutual state of semi-nudity.
“Yes,” said Leilah, “but classy, not dog-shit-on-the-shoe work. Natasha found us top clients, the very top.”
Leilah wanted another cigarette. She watched me curiously as I lit it in a cupped hand to protect from the gale coming in through the window.
“What’s your name, soldier-boy?” she asked.
“Gabriel,” I said.
“There was an angel, wasn’t there? An angel Gabriel?”
“He was an archangel, one of the big ones. But there’s nothing angelic about me.”
“I can see that. Didn’t I tell you I can see your aura?”
“Tell me how you came here,” I said. “To Pandora.”
“Natasha arranged that we would come here when we were done with her. She knows the business. Her family have their own house, did you know that?”
“Yes, I knew that.”
“She wanted us to join the family house, but I think she argued with her family. So she arranged for us to come here.”
“Why did you stop working for Natasha?”
Leilah shrugged, took the cigarette from my hand and sucked at it like it was a straw.
“We didn’t stop. We came to Pandora, didn’t we?”
“You know what I mean.”
Leilah looked at me as she blew smoke into the cold wind.
“We helped her find one of the men who killed Manda. That was all she needed. Then our job was done.”
“And the other girl, Flossie – did I meet her in the front room?”
“No, she’s gone back to the street, back to Thabo.”
“And what did Natasha say she was going to do with the men who killed Amanda?”
“She said nothing.”
“You saw her after you came here?”
Leilah handed the cigarette back to me and shook her head.
“She said we would not see each other again. That she was going back to her other life. What did you say her name was?”
“Sandy.”
“But she didn’t go back to that life?”
“She didn’t.”
Leilah turned to look out at the vineyards. She was leaning up against me at the window in a pose that she had explained the Dragon would appreciate as being post coital. She laid a hand again on my chest and felt the ridges of the scars.
“Why have you waited so long to look for her?” she asked. “It’s been months.”
“I didn’t know where to start. And besides, I wasn’t sure she wanted to be found.”
Leilah took the cigarette from me again. She sucked at it, then flicked it out the window.
“Why did you stay on here at Pandora?” I asked.
“Because Pandora is heaven. I have died and now I have come to heaven.”
She smiled, and for the first time I glimpsed something approaching joy in her face.
“I’m good at what I do,” she said. “You don’t know what you’ve missed, Angel Gabriel. And Pandora is good to me – I have a life, I have more money than my drunk mother ever dreamed of. This is the life your Sandy gave me, and I will never let it go.”
As we shared a last cigarette together and Leilah’s fragile body warmed me against the icy wind, I realised what had been bothering me. Sandy’s father had told me she had called him weeks after staging her disappearance in order to tell him that her sister had died, but Leilah’s story implied she had discovered that truth earlier, before her decision to assume a new identity and rescue Leilah and her friend, a process that had taken several months. And if that was the case, why had she phoned her father? And what did she have to say to him?
Someone was not telling the truth.
Seven
That afternoon I drove past Robyn’s apartment block, then I took various routes that allowed me to circle past it several times. I took note of the cars parked outside the block, but only one of them was occupied, and it had moved away on my fourth loop, so I parked in a position that gave me a view of her windows and waited. The windows were closed, and the blinds were drawn. It was still raining; the street was deserted and there was no sign of life.
After fifteen minutes of watching the window, I climbed out of the car and dashed through the rain. I took the stairs out of habit and reached the third floor a little out of breath. I listened at the door first, but there was no sound from within, and so I rang the doorbell, then knocked. There was no answer. Robyn was either not there, or was there, but not conscious. I considered picking the lock, but the elevator door pinged, and Robyn’s neighbour appeared, a youthful man with a pink face who worked for a bank in the city.
“Looking for Robyn?” he asked, then without waiting for a reply, said, “Not seen her for weeks. I think she’s left town or something.”
“Damn,” I said. “Just my luck. I should have called first.”
And we shared the regretful smiles of two men who have let a beautiful woman slip through their fingers.
Back at the warehouse I opened the enormous doors that let onto a slipway, and sat at the entrance to smoke and watch the sea beat itself against the dock and try to climb ashore. The afternoon’s rainstorm had dissipated into a fleet of low-hanging clouds that hovered out at sea, as if they were planning a fresh invasion. The last light of the day still lingered on the horizon beyond them.
There were only a few places that Robyn could have gone, and I ran through them in my mind. There was a girlfriend she hardly ever saw, a rehab centre she spoke fondly of, and my own apartment: the most foolish place to hide, because we knew that Breytenbach had men watching it. The ringing of my phone interrupted my ruminations.
“Well?” said Bill when I answered. “Who is it? I thought you were going to call me?”
“Sorry,” I said, and lit another cigarette. “I’ve been busy.”
“Working?” asked Bill suspiciously. Bill Pinter was a history lecturer at the University of Cape Town and his appreciation of the country’s history had instilled in him a scepticism for government departments. Ironically, his scepticism was something we shared.
“No, I haven’t worked for weeks,” I said.
“Who was it? Who did Sandy call?”
Bill had been Sandy’s closest friend. He was an over-sized man, both in terms of his physical presence – with a substantial belly and extra chins – and in terms of his personality. The world, according to Bill, was more dramatic, more desperate and more extraordinary than anyone else’s world.
“Her father,” I said. “Did you know her father was still alive?”
Bill was silent for a moment. His heavy breaths came over the line and it occurred to me that I should probably have softened the blow. Bill might be loud and bigger than life, but a lot of that was sheer bluster.
“Shall I come around?” I suggested.
Bill Pinter’s house was what estate agency crooks would call a homestead, because it had fruit trees on the land below the terrace, neatly pruned and maintained so as not to obscure the view of Hout Bay’s quaint harbour and the sea beyond. Not pruned by Bill, he assured me, because he was not built along the lines of a person who could climb ladders.
The house was elegant in a simple country-kitchen way, but it was not expansive. Bill just about fitted himself into it, and there was space for a large variety of female companions, who squeezed into the small space left by Bill’s personality. The terracotta tiled floor was heated, and a fire crackled in the grate to help things along, because Bill had the French doors open so that we could see the masts of the yachts below.
“I thought her father was dead,” he said, looking at me through spectacles misted from the steam. His brown hair was forming untidy tufts because of the way he had been running his hands through it as part of the creative cooking process. “Died years ago when she was little more than a baby. She was raised by her aunt – or great-aunt?”
“Tannie Sara is her great-aunt. Her mother was Tannie Sara’s niece, who died giving birth to Sandy.”
“That’s right, I remember now.”
Bill pronounced the lamb ready, removed his apron, and rolled up his sleeves. We sat at the table before the open doors, warmed on one side by the fire, and cooled on the other by the breeze coming off the sea.
“You know she never introduced us?” said Bill, his vast face drooping. “I met none of her family.”
“I didn’t know that.”
When Sandy had disappeared, I had lost a lover and partner, but Bill had lost a friend. Sometimes I forgot that. Before her disappearance, Sandy had been the only thing that Bill and I had in common, but the shared disaster of her disappearance had drawn us together. We had been united in the struggle to understand what she had done and why. At first we had both been convinced that something dreadful had happened to her – an accident or a brutal crime. But when her clothes and belongings were removed from my apartment, our sense of dread turned to confusion and dismay.
It was Bill who received the handwritten note posted two weeks after her disappearance. I remembered the evening he had read it out to me, doing his best to keep his emotions in check, although his powerful bass voice betrayed him and wavered as he read the words aloud.
In the days, then weeks that followed, we had become friends.
“Of course, I knew about her family and what they did,” he said. “Was she ashamed of them, do you think?”
“Not ashamed.” I thought back to the times I had spent with Sandy and her aunt. “She was proud of her family. Perhaps the fact she was proud of them was what shamed her.”
“She needn’t have been,” said Bill. “It was a different time. Brothels fifty years ago were not what they are today. Nowadays they are places of shame – scarcely legal, bent lawyers on the payroll, huge bribes to the police, dark rooms hidden behind heavy security.”
“It was different fifty years ago?”
“You must remember the political situation when Sandy’s family started their brothel. Did you know District Six House is a celebrated part of the history of District Six? You go to the museum today and there are old black and white photos from the fifties with the women standing proudly on the steps. Those are Sandy’s great-great-grandmothers and aunts.”
“I’ve seen some of those photos, on the walls of the new place in Greenpoint.”
“They had to find new premises when the government bulldozed the whole suburb. You know they did that? Literally razed the entire area to the ground.”
“They have photos of that too.”
“District Six House was a place of empowerment. Sandy’s great-great-grandmother was entrepreneurial. She empowered women to fight against the apartheid regime. She believed in the power of women, and if that meant exchanging sexual favours in return for the kind of income beyond the wildest dreams of the poverty-stricken workers squeezed into those tiny houses in District Six, then for her it was an opportunity to uplift her people.”
Bill laid his cutlery aside and produced a huge handkerchief from a pocket, which he held at the ready.
“The people labelled ‘coloured’ during the apartheid years are a fiercely proud community, but they have a humility learnt from years of being considered second-class citizens. Sandy should have been proud of her family.”
The handkerchief swooped in, and Bill blew his nose like a trumpet.
“It’s the season,” he said. “All this alternating from hot to cold. I just don’t know where we are. Think I’m getting a cold.”
He held the handkerchief ready and fixed me with an accusatory stare.
“Do you really think you should stir things up, Gabriel? You’re putting her at risk.”
“If she was ever at risk, Bill, that time has passed.”
Bill studied me for a moment through the lenses of his spectacles. What he saw didn’t seem to convince him.
“I know you think you’re this super-spy, Gabriel, with all your secret service work, but you’ve got the army written all over you. If Sandy’s investigating something to do with human trafficking, you should stay well clear of it.”
“I don’t think Sandy is investigating anything anymore, Bill. That’s what I’m saying.”
Bill tucked his handkerchief away and turned his attention back to the meal. After all these months, the possibility that Sandy was no longer alive was still not something we discussed.
Bill took his life into his hands by proposing that we enjoy our coffees on the terrace. He donned a thick woollen sweater, hand-knitted by one of his earnest fans, with a roll neck to keep the chins warm. He held his handkerchief in one hand and his milky coffee in the other, and gazed out over the moonlit bay with the expectant pose of someone about to sneeze.
“This young prostitute,” he said. “Has it occurred to you she might be making the whole thing up? Is there a word of truth in any of it?”
“It has occurred to me, and yes – I believe there are some words of truth.”
Bill looked out over the bay. A string of three fishing boats were heading out for the midnight cod haul, their lights played hide and seek with the moon.
“And is it possible that Sandy’s father, who must be terribly bereaved, has embellished his own version of the story?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Gabriel.”
“I won’t.”
Bill raised his handkerchief and sneezed. Birds in a tree took to the air in alarm. When Bill had recovered and finished wiping his nose, he sighed deeply.
“I want to find Sandy as much as you,” he said, “but you have to tread carefully.”
He stared out at the three fishing boats as they rounded the promontory beneath a rocky outcrop called the ‘Sentinel’.
“You think I should drop it?”
Bill turned back to me. We had been back and forth over these difficult waters so many times in the past few months that I could see the signposts pointing the way.
“She was the one who did this,” he said in his defence. “If she wanted us to find her she wouldn’t have written that note.”
I nodded.
“You’re right. It’s probably a wild goose chase.”
Bill turned back out to sea. The three fishing boats had disappeared, and it looked as if the view didn’t please him as much. A wind started running its fingers through the waters beyond the bay, and lifting the skirts of the swells. The winter was not done with us yet.
“She could have taken me to her family brothel,” he said, “could have introduced me to her family – I’m not judgemental – what did I care what her family business was?”
“If these few months have taught me anything,” I said, “it is that I knew very little about her.”
I hadn’t meant for that to sound so bitter
. Bill turned to me in surprise.
“You knew her better than anyone,” he said. “And you know she doesn’t want to be found. Promise me you won’t go chasing after her.”
I smiled in lieu of making another promise I couldn’t keep, and we both turned to look out to sea. The shimmering veil of wind on the water made a dash for the shore. Bill shivered and blew his nose as the chill wind struck us.
Eight
I couldn’t sleep that night with the constant drumming of the rain on the iron roof, so I sat again on the broken deck chair at the top of the slipway outside the warehouse. I was on my third cigarette when the rain receded and I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise.
“Is that my angelic soldier-boy?” asked Leilah in a whisper, as if she didn’t want me to hear her.
“Is an angel still an angel after falling from grace?”
“There was something I didn’t tell you,” said Leilah.
“Only one thing?”
“One big thing,” said Leilah, “about Natasha.” She paused, then said, “Did you say her name was Sandy?”
I confirmed her name was Sandy and lit another cigarette. A string of lights processed across the horizon – cargo ships and cruise boats making their way in and out of harbour. Blue lights fluttered between them like butterflies caught in treacle. Police boats searching the ships.
“You still there, Angel?” asked Leilah, and when I assured her I was, said, “Can you meet me?”
We arranged to meet at an all-night bar in Long Street, where the clientele at this hour would be mostly the women who worked the upper end of the street and their prospective customers. Leilah thought this would be amusing given the nature of her work, and my status as a paying customer.
I had half an hour to spare, so I smoked some more, and wondered again where Robyn had disappeared to. It had been only a few days since she had told me – again – that things wouldn’t work between us, had packed her small bag and left me alone in the warehouse. As I watched the police boats going about their systematic searching of the cargo ships, it occurred to me that I knew exactly where Robyn would hide, because it was in her nature to put herself in harm’s way. I would have to make sure I found her before anyone else did.
Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3) Page 6