“Why not?”
Benjamin turned to me, the lenses of his spectacles an opaque white with condensation. He removed them.
“She was going to go after them,” he said. “She was so angry, she wanted to avenge Amanda’s death.”
“Do you know who she was going after?”
Benjamin took a sip of tea before answering.
“Important men, she said – prominent men who had a club of sorts. She’d found a letterhead belonging to the club. She was going to expose them, show the world what they had done.”
He went silent again and studied me through the steam rising from his mug.
“Sandy said you were not a regular soldier,” he said.
“I was not.”
He nodded slowly, his eyes still on me, as if debating whether to continue.
“Three respected men, she said. The kind of men who think they are above the law.”
“I see,” I said.
“She was so angry when she called. Something terrible had happened to her, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. I told her to come and see me – I worried she might do something foolish – but she refused.”
“Did you ask who the men were?”
“She wouldn’t say. I begged her to share the burden of her knowledge – that kind of thing can be a terrible burden, you know.”
“But she refused that too?”
Benjamin nodded, and we both drank some tea.
“She sent me a letter, weeks after. Made me promise never to share it. But – well – given the circumstances.”
Benjamin stood abruptly, crossed the room and opened a door at the far end of the wall of books. He returned a minute later with some folded pieces of paper, sat down with a sigh and unfolded them – they were a little crumpled as if they had been crushed in anger, then smoothed out again. He held them delicately, lest they fall apart in his fingers.
“Dear Father,” he said and then thought better of reading the whole thing to me, and his finger moved down the margin of the handwritten letter until he found the relevant part. “The first is a judge,” he read, “the others a politician, and a church leader.” Benjamin looked up at me, his eyes damp behind the thick lenses. “She names the judge,” he said, and looked down at the letter again. “The Honourable Francois Rousseau, a judge of the Gauteng High Court.” He ran a finger down the letter, but found nothing else to read and looked back up at me.
“Just the one name?” I said. “No other details?”
“They used false names on the letterheads of the club’s documents, but she thinks they were names with the same initials. It’s mostly guesswork on her part. That’s why she wanted me to keep quiet about it. It’s all supposition. She thinks the judge called himself Frank Rose.”
Benjamin handed me the second sheet, which bore an unimaginative letterhead of curvy lines that might have represented two interlocked mermaids. Beneath the tails were three names. The first was Frank Rose.
“She said it took her a long time to work out who the judge was. She was working on getting the other names.”
Benjamin blinked again and looked down at the letter as if he might find something else there.
“I knew it was foolish of her. You don’t interfere with people like that. But how could I have stopped her? She only sent me the letter because I had begged her on that call to share the burden of her knowledge. What could I have done?”
Benjamin’s voice dried up. He reached for his mug of tea, sipped at it, and swallowed noisily.
“There was nothing you could have done,” I said. “Do you think she went to that judge? Confronted him?”
Benjamin removed his spectacles again and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“His name eats at my soul,” he said. “And the thought of the others – three prominent men who consider themselves above the law. What could I do? Spend my life standing beside the street under my big umbrella and getting splashed by their fancy motor cars as I watch them and think morbid thoughts? I wish now she had not sent this to me. She knew I could do nothing. And she was right about that. Some men can step up and take action, but I am not one of them.”
Benjamin replaced his spectacles and laid a hand on mine.
“Another mug of tea?” he suggested.
“Of course.”
I went through the open door of the kitchen and refilled the kettle.
“How did you know she didn’t phone to tell me about Amanda?” Benjamin called after a minute of companionable silence.
“I found a friend of Amanda’s, and she told me about meeting Sandy – but Sandy only disappeared some time after discovering what happened to Amanda.”
“I warned her,” said Benjamin. “When she said she was going to find out what had happened to Amanda, I told her to be careful. I knew it would only bring her trouble.”
“There was no stopping her,” I said. “There never was.”
We finished our second cups of tea, then left the fire burning with extra logs so that Benjamin would have some warmth to return to that evening. We splashed our way back to the hotel like old friends sharing the umbrella.
“Have you forgiven her yet?” he asked when we reached the entrance to the hotel.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think I ever will.”
“Good,” he said. “I don’t think forgiveness is what she would have wanted.”
“Vengeance perhaps,” I said, and Benjamin shrugged.
“Maybe vengeance is what we all need,” he said, then he reached out his arms to embrace me. His shoulders were frail and hunched with sadness and regret.
He watched me from the porch as I struggled back through the rain to my car, and he raised a hand beneath his enormous umbrella as I tried not to splash him when I passed.
First is a judge.
It didn’t take me long to find the address of the Honourable Justice Francois Rousseau, and that afternoon I took the two-hour flight to Johannesburg. It was a Saturday.
Sunday morning seemed a good time to pay a visit to a judge.
II
Then a Politician
Ten
The rainstorm over Cape Town on Monday taunted me by hiding the Atlantic Ocean from view, then revealing it again suddenly, but snatching it away the moment I thought the day was brightening up. Winter might have been nearly over, but the season was running encore performances and was giving us all it had.
Cape Town shelters beneath the flat-topped Table Mountain, which forces westbound traffic into a series of bottlenecks as it winds along the narrow coastal road. Heading west from the city you reach a string of luxury apartments teetering on the cliffs above the sea, strung down the coast like the pearls of a necklace. These luxury apartments are where you find the film stars, underage entrepreneurs, spuriously wealthy and other scoundrels. But before reaching this luxurious stretch of the peninsula you are squeezed into a narrow passage that leads through the less salubrious suburb of Seapoint, where the prostitutes lie in wait hoping to snare themselves a wealthy customer. And on the doorstep of Seapoint is a tranquil cove called Three Anchor Bay, a jumble of buildings that teeter on the side of respectability.
My apartment is on the fifth floor of one of those buildings. There is never any parking within several blocks, and so by the time I unlatched the door and stepped into the apartment my clothes were thoroughly wet and I dripped all over the terracotta tiled floor as I listened for signs of Robyn.
I heard nothing but the sound of the rain, so loud that it might as well have been raining inside. I discovered why when I walked further into the apartment and found the glass door onto the balcony wide open, allowing the wind to bring the rain in and spread it across the floor. Robyn was seated with her back to me, facing the open door and the storm that entered through it. I stepped up to the door, closed it, and turned back to her. Her face was pale, her dark eyes showed no surprise or pleasure in seeing me. She was wearing a crumpled white shirt that I recognised as one of mine, a shirt
she had liked to wear at night when she had stayed with me in the apartment.
“The colonel told me to find you,” I said.
Robyn didn't react, but her dark eyes were steady on mine. She has a quirky beauty. Not spoilt, but enhanced by the fact that her chestnut hair was still growing out after they shaved it for the stitches when one of Breytenbach’s men had tried to shoot her. She has delicate, pointed elf-like ears, and a narrow nose, with eyes that are constantly alive and amused. But today the amusement was all spent, and her eyes were full of regret. On the counter behind her was a row of empty bottles, and I wondered where she was in the cycle of her addiction. Probably coming out of a period of intense drinking – she had tidied up, arranged the bottles as evidence of her failure – and was hoping that by sheer willpower she would pull herself out of the deepening spiral she had fallen into.
“We need to go back to the warehouse,” I said.
Robyn blinked, and she opened her mouth. She took a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh.
“I'm not going anywhere,” she said.
“Be sensible, Robyn. It’s only a matter of time before Breytenbach sends his black-suited goons over here.”
“Let him.”
Robyn reached a hand to the low table beside her chair and lifted her Glock 9 mm.
“You can't shoot all of them,” I said. “You know he’ll just send more.”
Robyn looked down at her gun, as if wondering whether I was right.
“I’m tired of running,” she said, her eyes still on the gun. “Let them come and get me, it’s what I want.” She looked back up at me and said, “I've been drinking,” as if that explained everything.
“I know you have, but that's it for now. I'm taking you back.”
“Why?”
“Because waiting here for BB’s men will not solve anything. We’re in this together, you know that. You’re being selfish, and besides, self-pity doesn't suit you.”
That roused a flash of anger. “Did you promise Brian you’d look after me, Ben? Is that why I cannot shake you off? You promised him, just before he stepped on that mine?”
I didn't answer. Brian came up whenever we argued and there was nothing more to say on the subject. It had been a few years since he had triggered the IED in the forests of the Congo. But as my friend and Robyn’s fiancé, he continued to haunt us. Robyn looked down at her Glock and stroked it as if she was trying to soothe it after her outburst.
“Did you find her?” she asked after a moment of silence.
“Yes.”
She looked up at me and knew I was lying.
“I’ll get your things,” I said.
Robyn closed her eyes like she was turning to stone. She knew there was no way out. Not for her, or for any of us.
I took the high road back to the docks because on my way to the apartment I had driven past a team of soldiers mounting their shiny aluminium pod beside the main road. Robyn sat in silence, her face drawn as if with pain, and she kept her eyes closed. The rainstorm weakened as we climbed the gorge and I caught occasional glimpses of one of the world’s most beautiful coastlines, the deserted sandy beaches being scrubbed clean by an angry sea. As we descended the narrow shoulder between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head, the rain stopped as abruptly as if someone had flicked a switch and the city lay before us, glistening in the late afternoon light that poked beneath the cloud.
“Did you really find her?” asked Robyn, whose eyes had opened with the sun.
“No,” I said.
“Is she dead?”
“What makes you say that?”
“I can hear it in your voice, Ben.”
“Yes,” I said, “I think so.”
Robyn released her breath in a drawn out sigh.
“I’m sorry.”
We drove in silence for a few minutes.
“He wants to move the gold, doesn’t he?” said Robyn suddenly.
“Yes. We need to move it – Breytenbach’s goons are searching the docks. You would have had to wait a long time before they showed up at my apartment. They’re too busy trying to find the gold.”
“We should let them find it. They can take it back and suffer the consequences themselves.”
“What consequences?”
“That gold is cursed.”
“That’s nonsense, Robyn.”
“Think about it, Ben, all the way back to the first person who had the idea.”
“The first person? You mean Chandler? Or me?”
“No, I mean Brian.”
“It wasn’t Brian’s idea,” I said. “That was nothing but a ridiculous joke.”
“You told me he made you promise.”
It was true that Brian had suggested we take some of Breytenbach’s gold for ourselves. In the messroom on the mines in Uganda, the snores of our helicopter pilot coming through the thin wall. It was a suggestion that our captain had rejected because he swore he would never stoop as low as common thievery. But Brian had persisted and had extracted a promise of sorts from me. It was a lighthearted promise, not a serious one. And we hadn’t known it was the last night of his life.
“It wasn’t a promise either of us took seriously,” I said.
“But that gold is cursed,” said Robyn again. “You wait and see, it will bring us nothing but problems.”
Eleven
“You’re an hour late,” said Chandler, who had been standing outside the warehouse. He watched us with obvious anger as we arrived on foot, having left the rental a safe distance away. His pale grey eyes studied us with displeasure.
“I found Robyn,” I said, unnecessarily because she was standing a few metres from us. “And we managed to avoid the roadblocks.”
Chandler turned to Robyn. I thought I detected a brief look of relief to see her standing. Or was it disappointment at the sight of her pale, drawn face?
“Robyn?” he said.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” said Robyn as she took her bag and walked up to the small door in the side of the rusty, old warehouse. She yanked it open as if it had insulted her.
Chandler and I stood for a moment and were buffeted by the wind that came across the water from the twinkling lights of the Waterfront.
“She’ll be okay,” I said.
“I hope so, corporal. I’ve said it before: if one of us goes down, we all go down together.”
A rhythmic sliding and clicking noise was echoing about the warehouse space. Fat-Boy was hunched over one of the chest of drawers in the brightly lit kitchen and was sliding a drawer open, watching it settle into position, then pushing it gently with a sausage-sized finger as if trying to determine the minimum effort required to have the drawer close again. It was a favourite activity of his. He stood and turned to face us at the sound of our footsteps. Fat-Boy looked like someone had rolled a large globule of viscous material into position and left it to droop in the middle of the bright kitchen – he was shaped like an enormous drop of water, small and pointed at the top and spherical below. His left eye was lazy and half-closed, a feature that he used to express a range of emotions from disappointment to scorn. He gave us the full range now as we approached, although his wide Xhosa nostrils flared a little at the sight of Robyn, whom he liked to call ‘sex-bomb’, because he was not immune to her appeal; but he did that mostly out of her hearing. Fat-Boy’s real name was Stanley, but only his close friends called him that – I was not one of them – I was one of the others, obliged to use the subtly insulting, but appropriate, nickname.
“Damage anything and you pay for it, Fat-Boy,” said Chandler.
“Pay with what?” countered Fat-Boy, and he gave Chandler a blast of scorn from his lazy eye. “Got nothing to pay with, have I, Colonel?”
“That’s why we’re all here,” said Chandler and he clapped his hands together and rubbed them as if he was about to perform some kind of hands-on healing.
Fat-Boy made a scoffing noise, but it was an act – he held Chandler in the highest regard, an attitud
e that sometimes verged on hero-worship. He only heckled because it brought him attention, and we all knew it.
“Briefing centre,” announced Chandler, as if he was auditioning for a war movie and expected us to salute him and fall into line. Fat-Boy gazed at him as if he hadn’t understood, then turned reluctantly and shuffled over to the deck chairs beside the hull of the Anna-Marie. Robyn was already there, settling into her regular chair like a cat curling itself into a ball. She was irritable and jumpy, but trying not to attract attention. Chandler stood against the rusted hull, and I took a seat in the back row.
“Our man Breytenbach,” said Chandler in his military briefing voice, “has been putting the pieces together. My connection to his chief of staff tells me he believes that crates containing live animals shipped from Maputo to these docks were used to conceal the gold that he is missing.”
Chandler produced a smile that was little more than a stretch of the lips into a flat line. He looked around at us, but there wasn’t a significant reaction. Robyn seemed to be sinking into a meditative trance and Fat-Boy was frowning with confusion. I gave a small smile to show Chandler I was keeping up.
“He's got money on us,” complained Fat-Boy. “You see that? One million bucks on each of us.”
“Don't worry about that,” said Chandler. “Did you recognise yourself in that picture?”
“No,” admitted Fat-Boy.
“Nothing to worry about. Besides, that’s one million dollars of protection on each of us. He wants us alive so that we can tell him where we’ve hidden the gold.”
Fat-Boy scowled and looked unconvinced.
“So!” said Chandler, doing his best to keep the momentum. “We need to move it.”
“How the fuck we gonna do that?” asked Fat-Boy.
“By sea – Breytenbach is a landlubber – we’re going to sneak it out to sea.”
“I don’t do sea,” said Fat-Boy.
Chandler’s smile didn’t falter.
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