Devil's Peak (7 page)

* * *

By the end of his second beer he saw the Boss Man approaching him from across the room, a fat black man with a shaven head and a gold ring on every finger. He would stop at a table here and there, almost shouting as he spoke to the guests—from the bar his words were drowned in the racket—until he reached Thobela. There were tiny drops of perspiration on his face as if he had exerted himself. Jewelry glittered as he offered his right hand.
“Do I know you?”
His voice was remarkably high and feminine and his eyes small and alert. “Madison Madikiza; they call me the Boss Man.”
“Tiny.” He used a nickname from the past.
“Tiny? Then my name is Skinny,” said the Boss Man. He had an infectious giggle that screwed up his eyes and shook his entire body as he hoisted it onto a bar stool. A tall glass materialized in front of him, the contents clear as water.
“Cheers.” He drank deeply and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, waving an index finger up and down in Thobela’s direction. “I know you.”
“Ah . . .” His pulse accelerated as he focused more sharply on the man’s features. He did not want to be caught unawares. Recognition meant trouble. There would be connotations, a track with a start and an end.
“No, don’t tell me, it will come to me. Give me a minute.” The little eyes danced over him, a frown creased the bald head. “Tiny . . . Tiny . . . Weren’t you . . . ? No, that was another fellow.”
“I don’t think—”
“No, wait, I must place you. Hell, I never forget a face . . . Just tell me, what is your line?”
“This and that,” he said cautiously.
The fingers snapped. “Orlando Arendse,” said the Boss Man. “You rode shotgun for Orlando.”
Relief. “That was a long time ago.”
“Memory like an elephant, my friend. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven, thereabouts, I still worked for Shakes Senzeni, God rest his soul. He had a chop shop in Gugs and I was his foreman. Orlando asked for a sit-down over division of territory, d’you remember? Big meeting in Stikland and you sat next to Orlando. Afterwards Shakes said that was clever, we couldn’t speak Xhosa among ourselves. Fuck, my friend, small world. I hear Orlando has retired, the Nigerians have taken over the drug trade.”
“I last saw Orlando two or three years ago.” He could remember the meeting, but not the man in front of him. There was something else, a realization of alternatives—if he had remained with Orlando, where would that have left him now?
“So, what do you do now?”
He could keep to his cover with more conviction now. “I am freelance. I put jobs together . . .” What would he have done when Orlando retired? Operated a nightclub? Run something on the periphery of the law. How close to a potential truth was the story he was fabricating now?
“A broker?”
“A broker.” There was a time when it was possible, when it could have been true. But that lay in the past. What lay ahead? Where was he going?
“And you have something for Johnny Khoza?”
“Maybe.”
Shouts rang out above the music and they looked around. The strong colored man was dancing on the table now with his shirt off. A dragon tattoo spat faded red fire across his chest while bystanders urged him on.
Boss Man Madikiza shook his head. “Trouble brewing,” he said, and turned back to Thobela. “I don’t think Johnny is available, my friend. I hear he’s on the run. They got him in Ciskei for AR and manslaughter. He did a service station—Johnny never thinks big. So when the court case went wrong, it cost him big money to buy a key, you know what I’m saying. I don’t know where he is, but he is definitively not in the Cape. He would have come creeping in here long ago if he was. In any case, I have better talent on my books—just tell me what you need.”
For the first time the possibility occurred to him that he might not get them. The possibility that his search could be fruitless, that they had crept into a hole somewhere where he could not get at them. The frustration pressed heavily down on him, making him feel sluggish and impotent. “The thing is,” he said, although he already knew it would not work, “Khoza has information on the potential job. A contact on the inside. Is there no one who would know where he is?”
“He has a brother . . . I don’t know where.”
“No one else?” Where to now? If he couldn’t find Khoza and Ramphele? What then? With an effort he shook off the feeling and concentrated on what the Boss Man was saying.
“I don’t know too much about him. Johnny is small time, one of many who try to impress me. They are all the same—come in here with big attitude, throw their money around in front of the girls like they were big gangstas, but they do service stations. No class. If Johnny has told you he has a contact on the inside for a serious score, you should be careful.”
“I will.” The farm was not an option. He could not go back. With this frustration in him it would drive him insane. What was he going to do?
“Where can I get hold of you? If I hear something?”
“I will come back.”
The Boss Man’s little eyes narrowed. “You don’t trust me?”
“I trust nobody.”
The little laugh bubbled up, champagne from a barrel, and a marshmallow hand patted him on the shoulder. “Well said, my friend . . .”
There was a crash louder than the music. The dancing dragon’s table had broken beneath him and he fell spectacularly, to the great enjoyment of the onlookers. He lay on the floor holding his beer glass triumphantly above him.
“Fuck,” said the Boss Man and got up from the stool. “I knew things would get out of hand.”
The colored man stood up slowly and gestured an apology in Madikiza’s direction. He nodded back with a forced smile.
“He will pay for the table, the shit.” He turned to Thobela. “Do you know who that is?”
“No idea.”
“Enver Davids. Yesterday he walked away from a baby rape charge. On a technicality. Fucking police misplaced his file, can you believe it—a genuine administrative fuck-up; you don’t buy your way out of that one. He’s more bad news than the
Financial Mail.
General of the Twenty-Sevens. He got AIDS in jail from a
wyfie.
More cell time than Vodacom, and they parole him and he goes and rapes a baby, supposed to cure his AIDS . . . Now he comes and drinks here, because his own people will string him up, the fucking filthy shit.”
“Enver Davids,” said Thobela slowly.
“Fucking filthy shit,” said the Boss Man again, but Thobela was beyond hearing. Something was beginning to make sense. He could see a way forward.

* * *

His hands trembled on the steering wheel. They had a life of their own. He felt cold in the warm summer night and he knew it was withdrawal. He knew it was beginning—it was going to be a terrible night in the flat of Josephine Mary McAllister.
He reached out to the radio, locating the knob with difficulty, and pressed it. Music. He kept the volume low. At this time of night Sea Point’s streets were alive with cars and pedestrians, people going somewhere with purpose. Except for him.
They had made a circle around him once everyone was finished. They gathered around him, touched him as if to transfer something to him through their hands. Strength. Or belief? Faces, too many faces. Some faces told a story in the rings around their eyes and mouths, like the rings of a tree. Heartbreaking stories. Others were masks hiding secrets. But the eyes, all the eyes were the same—piercing, glowing with willpower, like someone in floodwaters hanging on to a thin green branch. He will see, they said. He will see. What he did see was that he was part of The Last Chance Club. He felt the same desperation, the same dragging floodwaters.
The tremor ran through him like a fever. He could hear their voices and he turned the music up. Rhythm filled the car. Louder. Rock, Afrikaans, he tried to follow the words.
Ek wil huis toe gaan na Mamma toe,
Ek wil huis toe gaan na Mamma toe.
Too much synthesizer, he thought, not quite right, but good.
Die rivier is vol, my trane rol.
He parked in front of the block of flats, but didn’t get out. He allowed his fingers to run down the imaginary neck of a base guitar—that’s what the song needed, more base. Lord, it would be good to hold a base guitar again. The trembling limb jerked to a rhythm all of its own and made him want to laugh out loud.
’n Bokkie wat vanaand by my wil le a . . .
Nostalgia. Where were the days, where was the twenty-year-old little fucker who throttled a base guitar in the police dance band until the very walls shook?
Sy kan maar le a, ek is ’n loslappie.
Emotion. His eyes burned. Fuck, no, he wasn’t a crybaby. He banged the radio off, opened the door and got out fast, so he could get away from this place.

11.

T
he minister wondered if she was telling the whole truth—he searched between her words and in her body language. He could see the anger, old and new, the involuntary physical self-consciousness. The continuous, practiced offering of mouth, breasts and hair. Her eyes had a strange shape, almost oriental. And they were small. Her features were not delicate, but had an attractive regularity. Her neck was not thin, but strong. Her gaze sometimes skittered away as though she might betray something: a thirst for acceptance? Or was there something rotten? Or spoilt, like a child still wanting her own way, craving attention and respect, an ego feeding on alternating current—now brave, now incredibly fragile.
Fascinating.

* * *

He phoned his wife just after ten, when he knew she would have had her bath and would be sitting on their bed with her dressing gown pulled above her knees smoothing cream on her legs, and then turning to the mirror and doing the same to her face with delicate movements of her fingertips. He wanted to be there now to watch her do it, because his memories of that were not recent.
“I am sober,” was the first thing he said.
“That’s good,” she said, but without enthusiasm, so that he didn’t know how to continue.
“Anna . . .”
She did not speak.
“I’m sorry,” he said with feeling.
“So am I, Benny.” Without inflection.
“Don’t you want to know where I am?”
“No.”
He nodded as if he had been expecting it.
“I’ll say goodnight then.”
“Goodnight, Benny.” She put the phone down and he held his cell phone to his ear for a little longer and he knew she did not believe he would make it.
Perhaps she was right.

* * *

She saw that she had entranced him and said: “In Standard Nine I slept with a teacher. And with a buddy of my father.” But he did not react.
“What do you think?” she asked. Suddenly she had to know.
He hesitated for so long that she became anxious. Had he heard, was he listening? Or was he revolted by her?
“I think you are deliberately trying to shock me,” he said, but he was smiling at her and his tone was as soft as water.
For a moment she was embarrassed. Unconsciously, her hand flew up to her hair, the fingers twisting the ends.
“What interests me is why you would want to do that. Do you still think I will judge you?”
It was only part of the truth, but she nodded fractionally.
“I can hardly blame you for that, as I suspect experience has taught you that that is what people do.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Let me tell you that counseling from a Christian point of view distinguishes between the person and the deed. What we do is sometimes unacceptable to God, but we are never unacceptable to Him. And He expects the same from me, if I am to do His work.”
“My father also thought he was doing God’s work.” The words were out in reflex, an old anger.
He grimaced as if in pain, as if she had no right to make this comparison.
“The Bible has been used for many agendas. Fear too.”
“So why does God allow that?” She knew the question was lying in wait and she had not seen it.
“You must remember . . .”
Her hands seemed to lose their grip, she seemed to have lost her footing. “No, tell me. Why? Why did He write the Bible like that so that everyone could use it as they please?” She could hear her own voice, the way it spiraled, how it carried the emotion with it. “If He loves us so much? What did I do to Him? Why didn’t He give me an easy road too? Like you and your wife? Why did He give me Viljoen and then allow him to blow his brains out? What was my sin? He gave me my father—what chance did I have after that? If He wanted me to be stronger, why didn’t He make me stronger? Or cleverer? I was a child. How was I supposed to know? How was I supposed to know grown-ups were fucked up?” The sound of the swear word was sharp and cutting and she heard it as he would and it made her stop. Angrily, she wiped the wet off her cheeks with the back of her hand.
When he did react, he surprised her again. “You are in trouble,” he said nearly inaudibly.
She nodded. And sniffed.
He opened a drawer, took out a box of tissues and pushed it over the desk towards her. Somehow this gesture disappointed her. History—she was not the first.
“Big trouble,” he said.
She ignored the tissues. “Yes.”
He put a big, freckled hand on the cardboard box. “And it has to do with this?”
“Yes,” she said, “it has to do with that.”
“And you are afraid,” he said.
She nodded.

* * *

He pressed a hand over the man’s mouth and the assegai blade against his throat and waited for him to wake. It came with a jerk of the body and eyes opening wide and wild. He put his head close to the small ear and whispered, “If you keep quiet, I will give you a chance.” He felt the power of Davids’s body straining against the pressure. He cut him with the tip of the blade against the throat, but lightly, just so that he could feel the sting. “Lie still.”
Davids subsided, but his mouth moved under the hand.
“Quiet,” he whispered again, the stink of drink in his nostrils. He wondered how sober Davids was, but he could wait no longer—it was nearly four o’clock.
“Let’s go outside, you and me. Understand?”
The shaven head nodded.
“If you make a noise before we are outside, I will cut you.”
Nod.
“Come.” He allowed him to get up, got behind him with the assegai under Davids’s chin, arm around his throat. They shuffled through the dark house to the front door. He felt the tension in the man’s muscles and he knew the adrenaline was flowing in him too. They were outside, on the pavement, and he took a quick step back. He waited for Davids to turn to him, saw the dragon’s raging red eyes, and took the knife from his pocket, a long butcher’s knife he had found in a kitchen drawer.
He passed it to the colored man.
“Here,” he said. “This is your chance.”