From Cape Town with Love (19 page)

“Tonight's no good.” The ice in my throat made my voice curt. I glanced over at Roman, who was listening to his video man's soft-spoken update—but Roman was as interested in my conversation as I was in his. I would have been curious about his phone call, too.

“Everything okay?” Marsha said.

“Just busy,” I said. “Call you in a couple days.”

“Relax, Ten,” Marsha said, her voice smiling. “Tomorrow, you'll die just fine.”

An ice pick jabbed the base of my spine, and the floor dropped from
beneath my feet.
First Marsha shows up, then Nandi's gone. Do the math!
my Evil Voice screamed.

Now my mouth felt frozen, too. “What?”

“Bang—you're dead?” Marsha said, laughing. “Your movie shoot's tomorrow, right?”

Lenox Avenue,
I realized dimly. My set call was first thing Monday morning. I'd told Marsha all about it.

So much for my film debut.

SUNDAY NIGHT WAS
interminable. The office was claustrophobic with so many men in and out, so I walked the grounds and visited the kitchen coffeemaker when I needed fresh air. We kept busy because we didn't want to admit the truth: Someone had stolen Nandi, and there was nothing we could do.

Every half hour, I almost called the police. Or my father. To this day, I wish I had.

I liked Roman, but he was a stranger. And there's no such thing as truly knowing someone; we're lucky if we know ourselves. If Roman was smart, he'd give his own men closer scrutiny, too. I had already collected their names, running cursory searches to see if anything caught my eye. I'd been searching the companies involved in Maitlin's party, too. Aside from a zoning problem with South African Sun on Melrose and a consumer complaint about high prices for the bouncy houses, I had zilch.

We didn't have much luck reaching any of the vendors on a Sunday night, so we left a lot of phone messages. Nothing specific, but we said it was an urgent matter regarding Sofia Maitlin. The limo company never called us back, but callbacks trickled in; first came South African Sun on Melrose. The owner's demeanor was cool after we told him we'd had a theft, but he answered our questions.
Are there any new employees at your company? Did you notice any unusual activity before or after the event? Do any of your employees have a criminal record?
The answer was always no.
The owner was annoyed when we asked him to fax us the names of every employee, whether or not they had attended the party.

“Call the blacks first, is that it?” the man said. He was the Afrikaner I'd met earlier, and he definitely wasn't black. He read my silence. “Oh go on, you know what I mean,” he went on, annoyed. “My cooks are black. Wasn't it enough that you had to escort them? We're not thieves. We've cooked for the mayor.” His indignation sounded real enough, but it's easy to fake.

Most of the people we reached weren't as testy, but no one was happy about being asked to name their employees. Especially since we couldn't tell them the real reasons. The sleepy vendor from Big Tent Carnival Services meekly asked about a warrant, but he backed down when I warned him that his next call would be from Sofia Maitlin's lawyers. Warrant enough.

Still, we were a long way from anywhere. From time to time, Alec and his son, or Rachel Wentz, came down to hover; but they stopped asking for news. Maitlin, we were told, had taken a Valium and fallen asleep. I bet she'd washed it down with wine.

On my two
A.M
. coffee run to the kitchen, I found Zukisa sitting alone at a table in the breakfast nook, staring out toward the pool. She was still dressed from the day. The skin beneath her eyes was puffy and dark from hours of crying, as if she'd just gone three rounds.

“Sofia's gonna need you alert tomorrow, darlin',” I said.

The flirtation in my voice was so mild that she might not hear it consciously. After Roman's grilling on her last minutes with Nandi, Zukisa was eager for a friendly voice. That's why good cop–bad cop works so well. People who feel trapped crave friends.

Zukisa had an impeccable background check: Before she worked for Maitlin, she'd spent nine months as a nanny for a high-ranking politico in Pretoria. Maitlin hired her away. She'd been thoroughly vetted in South Africa.

I didn't think Zukisa was a suspect, but I could understand why Roman did. Those crucial minutes Zukisa had waited helped the kidnappers succeed with their grab.

“He's never liked me, from the start,” Zukisa said. “He is so overprotective of Sofia.”

“Just doing his job. To prevent a situation just like this one.”

“I must resign,” she said.

“Not so fast. Unless you've been asked to resign, there's no need for that right now. You have no more reason to resign than Roman does. Don't try to make this about you.”

“He will have me fired,” she said, tight lipped. “He said I waited too long.”

“About how long?”

I'd already heard her recounting of events, but I wanted to listen for inconsistencies.

“Maybe only five minutes, or six!” she said. “It seemed like only a moment to me. I went back and forth from those ships. There were so many children—so many places to look. And all the while . . . I wanted it so badly—to see her face. I wanted it so much that I believed she was there. I
believed
I would find her. I expected that any moment, she would be there.”

Zukisa still sounded amazed that Nandi had never turned up. She'd been in denial. And she didn't have to say the rest: Going to Roman—who already disliked her, in her mind—would have been her last resort.

More tears filled her eyes. “I don't know how I will ever sleep again. I see Nandi every time I close my eyes. Roman treats me like I am nothing to Nandi, but that girl spends three times as much time with me.” Her voice shook.

All the more reason you might want to snatch her to take her back home,
I thought. But if Zukisa was faking the grief that wrenched her face, she was in the wrong business.

“Nandi will be fine,” I said. “We'll bring her back.”

“Yes,” Zukisa said, nodding eagerly. “You
must
bring her back. God is with you.”

“What do you think of Paki?”

Zukisa clicked her teeth, shaking her head, snapped from grief. “What do I think of a man who only steps forward when a wealthy woman chooses his child? What
should
I think of him? I think he is despicable. Half a thief! I can't stand the sight of him.”

With a sigh, she went on. “But a kidnapper? I do not think so. He is a very simple man, still wide eyed and confused, like a child, about everything
in America. Whoever did this . . .” Her eyes sharpened with icy rage at the thought of the kidnappers. “These are awful people, but they are not simple. They are sophisticated. They are not wide eyed. They know all about how things work. They know all about Sofia.”

She had good instincts, or she was good at deflecting suspicion. That assessment could potentially eliminate her as a suspect, too, except for the inside knowledge of Maitlin's life.

I toured the sitting rooms until I found Paki watching soccer on TV, a six-pack of Newcastle Ales ready on the coffee table. I had sat in while Roman questioned him, too—
Do you know of anyone who would want to kidnap Nandi?
—and I still wasn't sure how to read him. His worry seemed genuine, but he also rubbed his armpit in uncomfortable moments, which made me wonder if he was hiding something.

Was it a cultural quirk, or what poker players call a “tell”?

“Mind if I join you?” I said.

Paki nodded and gestured at the empty half of the sofa, but he didn't look eager. He rubbed his armpit. It might be too late for the good cop–bad cop approach, but I tried.

“Real hard-ass, that Roman. Huh, brother?” I said, reaching for one of the bottles. “Bet you're used to that back home.”

Paki glanced at me, as if to be sure of my meaning. I winked. Roman and his Nordic features probably reminded Paki of every bad experience he'd had before the end of apartheid—and every story his father and grandfather had told him about police interrogations.

“His job is to find Nandi,” Paki said, shrugging. His speech seemed self-conscious as he enunciated carefully over his accent. “He should ask as many questions as he chooses, all night long, if he thinks that that will bring her back. I only hate to waste his time.” Paki wasn't taking my race bait.

“Yeah, well, he was riding you and the sistah pretty hard,” I said.

“Zukisa?” Paki said, surprised. “That lovely woman adores Nandi! How could anyone think she would do this terrible thing? Zukisa has nothing to do with this awful business.”

I wasn't surprised by the way Paki flew to Zukisa's defense. He had seemed smitten with Zukisa from the first time I saw him looking at her, despite Zukisa's obvious disdain for him. He seemed
very
certain she
couldn't be at fault, considering that she was the last person with Nandi. But he wasn't rubbing his armpit.

“So how'd it happen, Paki? You and Nandi?”

Paki sighed, flipping through the channels. The volume of the television was too low to hear, as if he didn't want to disturb the household. He flipped at random, never stopping long. “Ah . . . you want to know about the princess I did not deserve?”

I took a swig of beer, making a mental note not to drink more. I just wanted Paki to feel at ease. He followed my example, twisting off the cap from another bottle.

“The price of lust. What did I know? I met a girl at a nightclub.” Paki flicked his hand at his face as if the memory were a bug biting at him. “She gave me a ‘club name,' not her real name. We went to the back of her car, both of us drunk. That was the last I saw of her until I heard from some friends that she was pregnant. I could not find her, or even learn her real name. I went to the club every night. I found a girl who knew her, but she said she had moved away. What should I have done?”

“I don't know. Maybe you did everything you could. How did you hear about Children First? Why did you suspect Nandi was yours?”

Paki looked up at me with hangdog eyes. Unblinking. “Imagine you are me: You walk past a man reading a newspaper and you see a child who looks exactly like your sister, on the arm of an American movie star—exactly!
Haw!
And Children First is well known in the township. The age and coloration were right, and I stepped forward, demanded a blood test. Sofia's people paid for the DNA test, and for that I thank them. I could not stay quiet. I had to claim her. I wanted her to remember she had come from somewhere.” His voice quivered with emotion. “Do you understand this . . . brother?”

I nodded. I also understood that anyone would be tempted to get a piece of Sofia Maitlin and the life she could offer Nandi.

“I get no stipend!” he said, objecting to my unspoken thoughts. “She pays me nothing. She only helped me get a work visa and find a place to live, and enough to move. That is all. Aside from these things, all I asked was to see my daughter from time to time. On her birthday. At Christmas! Does it make me a criminal to ask for these things?”

“No one said you're a criminal, man.”

“No one has to say it,” Paki said, and switched the channel again.
The Golden Girls
was on, its laughter frozen in time. Paki seemed to forget I was there, sinking into the soft pastels with glazed eyes. “So much to watch!” he said. “Hundreds of channels. Everything here is choice after choice. There is so much! How do you make the right choice?”

Paki had nothing left to teach me, and his choices were his own.

I hadn't slept when my cell phone rang the next morning. Barely past dawn.

It was Len Shemin, my agent. I was walking the grounds outside, relieving the night shift's patrol. I was tired of my thoughts, so I picked up the call.

“Hey, man, I can't make the shoot today,” I told Len.

“Really?” Len said. “Nice afterthought, Ten. Think you could have waited any later to let me know you're blowing off your career's biggest shoot? The one you hired a lawyer to fight for? It's still ninety minutes before your set call. Sure you're cutting it close enough?”

“Look, I can't go into it, but—”

“Never mind,” Len said, chuckling. “I'm just giving you shit. I got an email from Rachel Wentz. I don't know what kind of voodoo you're practicing over there, but the whole shoot's been pushed back because Sofia Maitlin's production company wants to invest in the project—if he can spare you for a couple of days. Apparently, that's just fine with Spike. He emailed me, too. Sofia Maitlin. Whoa. I just called to say to remember us little guys, okay?”

“Ain't even like that.” Len is a genuine friend, so I wished I could tell him more. I wished the real picture was half as rosy as the one Rachel Wentz had painted for him.

“You okay, Ten? You sound like shit.”

“To quote Ving Rhames in
Pulp Fiction,
I'm pretty fucking far from okay. But I'll live.”

Len laughed. “What's this I'm hearing about a kid going AWOL from the party? Someone must have been shitting bricks.”

“And Angelina Jolie gave birth to a two-headed calf. Bullshit tabloid rumor,” I said. “Gotta go, Len. Thanks.”

I didn't give him the chance to ask any more questions. I can weave lies with the best of them, but I never enjoy lying to friends. I was deep in the bosom of celebrity life, but I wasn't in Hollywood by far. I didn't need an agent that day.

Sometimes, life becomes instantly clarified.

Mine was all about Nandi.

There was a call at noon. Four of us crowded Maitlin's phone, straining to hear Nandi's small voice. Nandi didn't sound happy, whining about how she didn't have any apple juice, so we were left with an image of deprivation before the kidnappers took the phone. When we heard Nandi's cries, Maitlin hugged her stomach, as if she had been speared. Maitlin's ghostly face reminded me of the painting
The Scream
by Edvard Munch.