“It sounds risky to me. The docks will be crawling with armed freaks wanting to shoot one another.”
“It will be like old times,” said Chandler, and he gave me a grim smile. I didn’t think it would be anything like old times, but I said nothing about that.
“How do you suggest we tell the big brother who was to blame for the little brother’s death?” I asked.
“We make friends with him,” said Chandler.
“Are you suggesting he and Fat-Boy exchange Xhosa folktales, discuss ancestral memories, swap wives, that kind of thing?”
“Swap wives?” protested Fat-Boy. “Now you’re being racist.”
“No,” said Chandler, before I could respond to Fat-Boy’s allegation. “I want you and Robyn to go see him. You’re a charming couple. Go and shed a few tears with him about the trauma of seeing his baby brother killed. Give him a bit of the real stuff, tell him how you held his brother’s hand, his last words, all that shit.”
“How would we explain our presence there?”
“Tell a little of the truth for a change,” said Chandler. “Breytenbach has your name, we know that. He knows who you are. We’re not giving anything away by sending you in to see this man. But we have everything to gain if he goes to war with BB.”
“Then after the war starts – if it does – you want to bring the crane down?”
“We bring it down, cut our little yellow bars out of that concrete, and float them out to sea.”
There was a long silence as we all considered this hare-brained scheme.
“I don’t do sea,” announced Fat-Boy eventually, breaking the silence.
“We could get you swimming lessons,” I suggested.
Fat-Boy’s lazy eye jumped open in order to see whether I was making a racial slur. He had once told me that racial prejudice in the country had prevented him from learning to swim.
“You are racist,” he said.
“I’m trying to right the wrongs that were committed against you because of your race,” I said. “That doesn’t mean that I’m prejudiced against you. A racist is prejudiced because of race, not because of your inability to swim.”
Fat-Boy produced a sound like a jazz trumpeter warming up his lips.
“That’s enough, you two,” said Chandler with the weary tone he adopted whenever he struggled with the incompetence of his crew. “We have a plan, and we need to get moving. Coast guard activity has delayed our fence, but he will be in place to receive our little bars in less than a week. So let’s get moving. We’ve got a war to start.”
Chandler fixed me with his icy glare again. “And no more personal issues with the women we’ve lost, is that clear?”
“There is one person I need to see, Colonel,” I said. “One quick meeting, and then I’m all yours.”
Chandler considered me through narrowed eyes again, as if he was trying to communicate telepathically. When that failed he said, “Make it a quick meeting, then we’re all hands on deck. Swimmers and non-swimmers alike.”
Jessop Ndoro had won awards for his humanitarian work. As a politician he had expressed the humanitarian side of his nature by motivating for a change of the laws that were preventing the children of impoverished families from gaining access to the education that benefited the children of wealthy families. He had argued vociferously, had sprayed his opponents in the National Assembly with spittle because his saliva glands became overactive when he was excited, and he had become the champion of the poor. Which was a little ironic given the excessive wealth he accrued over many years of accepting bribes to award contracts to companies to deliver that education to the poor. But this irony was seldom mentioned because who wants to criticise the champion of a good cause?
He wasn’t looking much like a champion as he sat in the members-only bar of the Miners Club, sweating a little with anxiety. Not from the heat, because the subtle lighting was not warming the place at all, serving only to make the opulent room feel ominous. He was wearing his dark suit and striped tie, which were both looking a little worse for wear. He had come to the bar directly from the Parliament buildings because he had agreed that meeting at his soonest convenience would be to his advantage, given that it was his own safety that we needed to discuss. From the way his tie hung askew and his collar was twisted, I surmised that the martini before him on the bar was not his first.
“What do you mean?” he said to me after we’d exchanged a handshake and I’d been served a single malt on the rocks by the barman, who then retreated discreetly to the far end of the bar. “What do you mean … at risk?”
“I mean that I believe your life is at risk,” I said. It seemed clear enough to me what that meant.
“At risk?” repeated Jessop Ndoro as if the two words might have some other meaning that would become clear if he repeated them often enough.
“In the same way – and for the same reason – as the life of Justice Francois Rousseau was at risk,” I said.
“I didn’t know Rousseau,” he declared, and reached a shaky hand out for his martini.
“He died a few days ago. In his swimming pool. But he didn’t drown – he bled to death, from a knife wound to his throat.”
The hand carrying the martini wobbled and a small amount of gin, vermouth and olive juice splashed onto Jessop Ndoro’s shirt.
“You’re white,” he protested, as if he had just noticed the colour of my skin.
“I am,” I admitted.
“You said you were a journalist, Sandy something or other. But I looked the name up, and she was coloured, and a woman.”
“I said it was about her, not that I was her. Do you remember her?”
“Never met her.”
Jessop Ndoro gulped a little more martini than he should have. He swallowed the alcohol with an effort, and his tongue came out to clear up the traces of salt around his lips.
“I’m trying to find out what happened to her.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I asked Justice Rousseau about her, and he also denied knowing anything.”
The alcohol had reached Jessop Ndoro’s stomach, and he emitted a small belch like a slimy toad sitting on a big rock.
“Why are you threatening me?” he asked.
“I’m not threatening you. I’m warning you. We both know what happened to Justice Rousseau.”
“I could call the police and have you arrested.” His saliva gland started over-compensating, and his voice climbed the scale. “I’m a Cabinet Minister and you are making threats on my life. I should call the police.”
“You could and you should,” I said. “But then you would have to explain about the club.”
“What club?”
He put his martini glass down in case he would need both hands to fend me off.
“The club of which you are a founding member,” I said, and sipped at my whisky while Jessop Ndoro’s bloodshot eyes challenged me from the heavy bags of flesh they rested upon. “There are three founding members. The first was Justice Rousseau. The second is you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and sprayed some saliva over his distended belly in his indignation.
“Your name isn’t on the club papers,” I said. “But the same initials are. Do you know a James Nokwe? That seems like a foolish conceit – to use the same initials. Justice Francois Rousseau did the same thing by using the name Frank Rose.”
“Would you stop talking about Rousseau? I didn’t know the man.”
“Didn’t you? You must have met each other without the masks at some point.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” said Jessop Ndoro, and he reached for his martini without removing his eyes from mine, and succeeded in knocking the glass forward – it fell and shattered across the bar. The barman looked up at the sound and produced a damp cloth from nowhere as he travelled behind the bar towards us.
“Haven’t you?”
The barman cleaned up the mess and provided Jessop Ndor
o with a fresh martini while the humanitarian’s wary eyes studied my face for clues to the depth of my knowledge.
“Nothing,” he said eventually, by which time the barman was out of earshot.
“Human trafficking is considered wrong,” I said.
“Trafficking?” spluttered Jessop. “What do you mean, trafficking?”
“It is the word that is used to describe the enslavement of others.”
“I know what it means. I’ve never been involved in anything like that.”
“Where do you think those girls came from?”
“Girls?”
“Young women, like the one who died at that party.”
“What party?”
“The party you wore the mask to.”
Jessop Ndoro’s eyes sagged lower into the bags of flesh.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“Was it just the one party? Or were there others? That’s something I haven’t been able to work out.”
He gazed at me as if he hadn’t heard my questions.
“I want to know what you did to her,” I said. “To the journalist, not the poor girl who bled to death at the party. I know what you did to her.”
Jessop Ndoro stood suddenly, an anticlimactic action that involved little more than rolling his stomach forward to find support on his spindly legs, which were shorter than the legs of the barstool so that his swollen face actually dropped a little lower.
“I’m not scared by your threats,” he said in a voice weak with anxiety. “I’m not scared,” he repeated, a little more forcefully and with more spittle.
“You should be,” I said. “Justice Rousseau is dead, and I think that you know why.”
Jessop Ndoro said nothing. He turned away from me and stumbled a little as he rushed for the exit to face his fear from behind the fog of five martinis.
I finished my whisky and told the barman to put it on Jessop Ndoro’s tab. If my suspicions about the circumstances of Justice Rousseau’s death were correct, I wasn’t sure he’d be alive long enough to settle it, but no doubt the executor of his estate would honour all outstanding debts. Debts of a financial nature, that is; I didn’t expect that the other debts would ever be settled.
Fifteen
The head offices of the Dark Bizness cosmetics company occupied the twenty-fourth floor of Portside Tower, Cape Town’s most sparkling skyscraper. Its outer walls were floor to ceiling glass, which gave one the impression of floating in an alien spacecraft above the city. The alien invasion was being planned by the amorphous mass of flesh that was Lebogang Madikwe, from his super-strength office chair that had enough levers and hydraulic arms to serve as a dentist’s chair should the need arise.
Lebogang was staring out over the city, presenting us with the back of his chair and large bits of his stomach which bulged out to either side, testing the elasticity of his woven-silk Armani suit.
We sat in silence for several minutes. Robyn and I were both wearing black in honour of the situation, and Robyn looked as if she had been crying, but I think that was just an effect of having been sober for two days. The interior walls of the office were lined with individually spotlit panels with high-definition photographs of black women, their oiled skin resembling the dunes of a dark-grained desert, or a stream of molten chocolate. I noticed that there were no images from the early range of creams that Dark Bizness had offered when they promised that lightening the colour of your skin would change the course of your life. The latest range of Dark Bizness products suggested the reverse – a better life would result from a darkening of the skin.
A subtle purring sound came from Lebogang Madikwe’s chair as it revolved to reveal the magnificence that was Lebogang. He was a tall man, taller than his late brother, but the same vast circumference. I was struck by the physical similarity he bore to Fat-Boy. The same large middle section, wide Xhosa nostrils in a round, bald head. But Lebogang’s eyes were closer together and not nearly as generous, and the wrinkles on his face – drooping now with grief – were deeper with age and the struggles of a hard life. There wasn’t a muscle with enough energy to hold the corners of his mouth up, and so it curved down like a child’s drawing of sadness. He gazed at us blankly; we waited respectfully.
“You knew my brother,” he said eventually, in a deep bass voice.
“We did, Mister Madikwe,” said Robyn in a voice hoarse with emotion. Lebogang’s eyes lingered on her.
“He would have mentioned someone like you.”
“We asked him not to,” I said. “In our discussions with him we asked him not to mention us to anyone.”
Lebogang’s eyes swung reluctantly onto me.
“Why?”
“Because of the nature of our business.”
“Business?”
“The nature of it. Moving items of great value can attract unwanted attention, so we asked for his discretion.”
Lebogang did not look impressed. I played out a little more line.
“Vusi,” I said, hoping his younger brother hadn’t gone by some nickname; Lebogang’s eyes narrowed in his enormous face, and his mouth tightened. “Vusi was helping us with a problem we have in the Cape Town docks. With moving items of value.”
Lebogang’s eyes widened again as the penny finally dropped.
“You’re with that gang!” he exclaimed in a loud voice, as if someone had twiddled the knob too much. “You’re the gold gang!”
I gave a polite smile and used a bit of silence to emphasise the need for discretion.
“You killed him,” he shouted. “You’re the ones who killed my brother!”
I kept the smile up and shook my head.
“No,” I said with as much regret as I could muster.
“We would not have come to you, Mister Madikwe,” said Robyn soothingly, “if we had killed your brother.”
Lebogang’s eyes turned back to her, and his anger subsided a little.
“Who did?” he demanded, his voice cracking. He lowered the volume and asked again, “Who killed my brother?”
“Unfortunately your brother made a regrettable error of judgement,” I said. “We asked your brother not to mention to anyone that we had an understanding. And I knew that – as a man of honour – he would keep his word. And so, we might just be the only ones who know what actually happened.”
I raised a hand to block Lebogang’s protests, although he made no sign of making any.
“Regrettably, your brother made friends with the wrong people.”
“What wrong people?” asked Lebogang.
“The people who killed him. You see, we were not the only people your brother was communicating with about the items of value.”
Realisation spread across Lebogang’s broad face.
“That man Breytenbach,” he said.
I gave a solemn nod, and Robyn said gravely, “Never trust a Breytenbach,” as if that was a common aphorism.
“He had an arrangement with Breytenbach,” I said. “An arrangement that I don’t believe Breytenbach ever intended to honour.”
“Breytenbach killed my brother?” asked Lebogang.
“One of his men,” Robyn had a slight catch in her throat, as if a memory of the dying brother had returned to her at the mere mention of it.
Lebogang raised a dinner-plate sized hand and smashed the other fist into it. His glum face set with determination. We sat in silence as feelings of resentment built up in the mountain of a man across the table from us.
“We have a suggestion to make,” I said, when I judged the time was right. Lebogang’s thin eyebrows climbed up his forehead.
“The thing is, we need to retrieve our items of value, but Breytenbach’s men are making that extremely hard. We would be more than happy to share some of the bounty with you, if you could see your way to dealing with Breytenbach’s men. By which I mean keeping them busy while we retrieve our valuables.”
“Bounty?” asked Lebogang. “How much is the bounty?”
“In our conversations with your brother – which he would not have repeated to you, being a man of such honour – he told us that Mister Breytenbach had lied to you about the value of the material we have in our possession.”
“It’s twenty bars,” said Lebogang knowingly. “Vusi told me. More than the five bars the papers talk about.”
My smile broadened, and I shook my head at Breytenbach’s extraordinary audacity.
“It is a little more than that.”
“Thirty?”
I shook my head again.
“Thirty-five?”
I gave a subtle nod. Lebogang’s lips pursed as if to whistle, but instead he sucked in some air like he was trying to inflate.
“Three quarters of a million per bar?”
“Roughly,” I said.
“If I get Breytenbach’s men off your back, how many bars is that worth?”
“Well, we would like to honour the arrangement we had with your brother – twenty percent – which if you do the math is better than the offer Breytenbach was making.”
Lebogang looked as if he was doing the math. His eyes glazed over for a moment, but then he said, “Thirty percent,” as if it was an automatic response.
I raised an eyebrow and allowed my smile to freeze.
“I very much doubt we could do that, Mister Madikwe. We might be able to stretch it to twenty-two percent.”
“Twenty-eight,” said Lebogang.
I considered this for a moment.
“I will have to go back to my people with a suggestion of twenty-five percent,” I said. “They might ask you to go a little extra distance for us.”
“Extra distance?” he said.
“Well … our situation has worsened. As you can well imagine …”
But Lebogang was still doing the math in his head on the twenty-five percent, and so his imagination was a little clouded. I provided more detail.
“It is not a matter of simply driving the items of value out of the area. The police have the place surrounded. We cannot get near it.”
“The place?”
“Our warehouse, the place where your brother …” I let the sentence tail off.
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