Mixed Blood (5 page)

When he’d come home after dumping the bodies, the party next door had still been going strong, the BMW lost among the other cars. He’d forgotten about the red car. All he’d wanted was to wash the stink of death from his hands and body.

He looked at the bedside clock. It was after seven.

Burn pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and left his son sleeping on the damp double bed. He unlocked the front door of the house and went down through the small front garden to the door set into the high wall. He opened it, peering out cautiously.

The BMW was still there, but so were the building crew. There was no way he was going to be able to move the car unobserved. Burn cursed himself. This was a loose end he shouldn’t have allowed. But the decision was forced on him: he would have to leave the car until that evening, when the builders were done for the day.

Burn shut the door.

C
HAPTER
5

Benny Mongrel climbed from the minibus taxi that had dropped him in Lavender Hill. He slung his small kit bag over his shoulder and set off, walking like he was hugging the wall of an invisible prison corridor.

Apartheid’s faceless bureaucrats had displayed a macabre sense of humor when, with a pen stroke, they banished thousands of people to ghettos on the Cape Flats with sweet names like Surrey Estate, Blue Downs, and Ravensmead. This was no more apparent than in Lavender Hill, where there was no lavender and not a single hill, just an endless sprawl of cramped houses built on windswept scrubland.

Benny Mongrel passed a straggle of pedestrians and dodged sidewalk vendors selling fruit, vegetables, cigarettes, and cheap sweets that tasted like piss. Even though he wore a cap, the hard morning light threw his livid scar into stark relief. His ruined face was like an icebreaker on the prow of a ship, parting people in his wake. They whispered behind his back, and only the half-naked children with snot-caked faces stared openly. He didn’t care what people said as long as they left him alone.

Benny Mongrel lived in a shack behind a narrow house. He unlocked the padlock on the makeshift door and stepped inside, his eyes adjusting to the windowless gloom. A stained mattress, a blanket scarred by cigarette burns, a three-legged chair, a primus stove, and a rusted tub to wash in. The corrugated iron room was barely big enough for him to spread his arms wide, and he couldn’t stand upright without his head touching the roof.

Once a day he was allowed into the bathroom of the main house to empty his slop bucket. A frayed extension cable snaked from the house, giving power to the naked lightbulb that dangled from a hook in the roof of his shack.

The place was a furnace in summer and flooded during the winter rains, but Benny Mongrel didn’t mind. After spending decades sharing prison cells designed for ten men with fifty others, the shack felt luxurious.

When he was released from prison, he had made a decision not to return to Lotus River, where he’d spent his brief youth. He had no family and nobody to call a friend, but he could have fallen in with the older Mongrels, who sat in taverns, drinking, smoking marijuana and tik, reminiscing, and planning the action that would send them back to the security of prison.

He never wanted to go back. Somehow he knew that a different sort of life was possible outside prison, even though he wasn’t sure exactly what that was. The only clue was Bessie. He missed the old dog during the empty, endless days. He couldn’t wait to see her at night, feel the reassuring sandpapery rasp of her tongue on his hand.

Benny Mongrel lay on the mattress in his trousers, his torso alive with crude prison tattoos: epaulettes indicating his officer rank on his shoulders, the words
I dig my grave
and
evil one
scrawled across his chest. Dollar signs, knives, and pistols. A Zulu shield, the emblem of the 28s.

It was too hot to sleep, and the relentless southeaster sandblasted Lavender Hill.

He thought about what had happened the night before. About those men who went into the house and never came back. The Americans. The 26s.

Benny Mongrel had killed more Americans than he could remember, in prison and out. The Mongrels and the Americans were kept apart in Pollsmoor. They watched each other uneasily in the corridors and across the exercise yard. Every now and then a new prisoner would come in, and one of the older gangsters would order him to kill one of the enemy, as an initiation rite. If he balked, he was gang-raped and made a wife.

Benny Mongrel had passed his initiation without blinking.

The last man he had killed had been an American, a 26, a year before he was paroled. There had been a half-heard word, an insult muttered as he passed. In prison this could not go unanswered. Benny Mongrel could have ordered a junior to do what needed to be done. But he preferred to do the work himself.

In the showers he slid the prison shank between the American’s tattooed ribs. He held the man close as he died, and as the light faded from his eyes he whispered what he always whispered, “Benny Mongrel say goodnight.”

He was back in his cell by lockdown.

The Americans and the other 26s were very quiet in the exercise yard the next day. Warders came and spoke to Benny Mongrel. He shook his head, shrugged. He knew nothing. They had tried to pry information from other lips, but men lived in fear of Benny Mongrel and knew it was better to stay silent or they, too, would hear a whispered goodnight.

What had happened last night wouldn’t just end there. No. He could sense invisible lines reaching out to the Flats, connecting to that house on the mountain. And to him, a Mongrel, a 28, who guarded the next-door house, just trying to lead a peaceful life.

Shit.

He sat up and took the knife from his pocket. He opened the blade and inspected it for imperfections. Then he reached under the mattress and found a scrap of sandpaper wrapped around a wooden block. With patient precision he honed the blade against the sandpaper.

After a few minutes he ran an index finger very softly down the blade. Beads of blood broke the surface of his skin. He wiped the blade, closed the knife, and slid it into his pocket.

Benny Mongrel lay back on the mattress in his shack and stared up at the tin roof, listening to the wind as it howled. Grit and dust blew in through gaps in the tin, and the corrugated iron rattled like gangs of manacled prisoners marching through Pollsmoor.

The southeaster blew itself out with a last violent gust, and then all was still. The city, purged of smog and filth by the wind they called the Cape Doctor, took on an almost hallucinogenic beauty. A cappuccino froth of white cloud floated on top of Table Mountain, and cars carrying tanned bodies and surfboards streamed down to the beaches.

Burn and Matt drove along the beachfront, past the tourist mecca of Camps Bay until they came to a small beach known only to the locals. Burn, Susan, and Matt had stumbled onto it during a walk, and it had become their favorite place to swim.

The beach was accessed by a steep path from the road above, too steep for most people’s liking. Burn and Matt walked down, holding hands, Burn lifting the boy when the path fell away too sharply for him to keep his footing. Burn was dressed in shorts and a cotton shirt, his feet in sandals. He carried a cooler and a beach umbrella. Matt was wearing his baggy swimming trunks, a bright T-shirt, and rubber flip-flops. They emerged through the bush onto a small beach surrounded by boulders, the azure ocean washing the sand. They were alone.

Burn jammed the umbrella into the sand and opened it, arranging towels in its shade. He stripped down to his swimming trunks. “You want to go in for a swim?” he asked Matt.

The boy was playing with a toy truck in the sand, absorbed. He shook his head.

Burn took a plastic bag from the cooler and went down to the water. He waded in, feeling the sharp bite of the icy Atlantic. No matter how hot the day, the water in Cape Town was always cold. At first, used to the temperate Pacific, he hadn’t ventured beyond his knees. Then he had grown to like the chilling sting, followed by the thawing when he went back into the sun.

Burn kicked out and headed toward a clump of rocks, towing the plastic bag with him. He untied the bag and took out the knives he had used to kill the two men. One by one he allowed the knives to si between the rocks into the deep water. He paddled a little farther and released the gun he had taken off the short man’s body, watching it slowly tumble out of view.

He had kept the tall man’s weapon: a snub-nosed Colt. He knew it was a risk, keeping the gun, hiding it in the closet in the bedroom, but it made him feel secure somehow. Like he would be able to fight back.

Against what, he didn’t know.

The water was starting to chill him, stinging his head and balls, but he forced himself to stay in a while longer, diving down until he touched the undulating kelp on the bottom. Then he floated to the surface and swam back to the sand. He waded out, gasping from the cold, feeling the sun on his body. Matt was under the umbrella, playing.

Burn dried himself. He took a plastic bottle from the cooler and started to smear high-protection sunblock into his son’s skin.

“Matt?”

“Yes.” The boy was still playing with his truck, not looking at Burn.

“Look at me.”

Matt dragged his eyes from the toy to his father.

“Last night, those men …” Burn was finding this as difficult as he knew he would. “They wanted to hurt Mommy.”

Matt stared at him. “Why?”

“They were bad men. And I had to do what I did to stop them hurting Mommy, or you or me, do you understand?” Burn held his son’s gaze, the clear blue eyes that reminded him so much of Susan’s. But without the shadow of mistrust that had entered hers.

“Yes. I was scared.”

“So was I.”

Matt hesitated. “Those men … they’re not coming back?”

Burn shook his head. “No. They’re not coming back.”

Matt nodded. “Are they dead?”

Burn stared at his son. “Yes,” he answered. “They’re dead.”

The boy nodded. “Okay.”

Burn rubbed the sunscreen into Matt’s face, avoiding his eyes. Matt was wriggling, anxious to escape. “Matt, it’s okay if you feel scared. If you need to talk to me or Mommy.”

“No, I won’t be scared again. Not if they’re not coming back.”

“Matty, look at me.” The boy squinted up at him. “You know you can’t talk about what happened last night to anybody but Mommy and me. You understand?”

Matt nodded. “Yes, Daddy.”

Burn felt sick, making his son an accomplice. He rubbed in the last of the sunscreen and took his hands away from his son’s body. Matt found a sudden burst of energy and sped off to the water, running in until his toes were chilled, then running out again, laughing.

Burn lay on his back, propped up on his elbows, watchiht="0es son play on this idyllic beach. Still battling to process the violent detour his life had taken.

A detour that began two years back when Tommy Ryan knocked on his door.

He and Susan had just moved into a new house in the Valley when Tommy arrived, carrying a kit bag and wearing his killer smile only slightly dimmed by years of hard living and dubious dentistry. It was more than ten years since Burn had seen him.

After Desert Storm Burn had taken his discharge and moved to L.A., where he’d found work in the booming security industry. Tommy stayed on in the marines for another couple of years, then drifted into a series of jobs that never lasted, judging from the infrequent cards, always with different postmarks.

Susan hadn’t taken to Tommy Ryan. Burn sensed that when she looked at Tommy, Susan saw a fun-house reflection of her husband. The Jack Burn who might have been if things had worked out badly for him. But she’d done her best to hide her feelings, and made up a bed in the guest room for Tommy without asking how long he intended to stay. She laughed at Tommy’s jokes and pretended to enjoy the war stories. But Burn noticed that Susan avoided Tommy, spending her time with Matt, who was hitting the terrible twos head on.

Tommy had a gift. Bragged that his bullshit detector was more accurate than any polygraph. One night over a couple of beers, he asked Burn if he was happy and didn’t buy the answer. After a few more beers, Burn told him the truth: he was strapped for cash. His security business was less than a year old and not yet showing a profit. Renovations on the house had cost more than he’d planned, and Susan hadn’t worked since they were married.

His old buddy smiled that famous smile and offered a solution that was typically Tommy. Why didn’t they go down to Gardena and play poker? Tommy reminded Burn of the handle he’d worn back in the marines: Lucky. Earned because he’d cleaned up at every poker game he’d played.

“Jesus, Tommy,” Burn said. “We were playing for beer and smokes.”

“The cards are still the same, bro. ’Cept now you’ll take dollars from the suckers.”

And he did. He’d walked into the casino with two hundred dollars and was up two thousand by the time they quit.

Tommy laughed as they drove home, dawn already touching the San Gabriels. “What did I tell you? You haven’t lost your magic, man.”

The next day was Susan’s birthday, and Burn was able to buy her the pair of Italian shoes he knew she secretly coveted and take her to dinner at a fancy restaurant. They drank wine and laughed, almost like when they were dating. Then she paused a moment, her face suddenly serious in the candlelight, and asked if he could afford this. Susan was the daughter of an alcoholic gambler who had disappeared when she was ten, and Burn knew how she would react if he told her where he’d got the money. So he looked her in the eye and lied to her for the first time. Said business was good.

What else could he do?

He and Tommy went down to Gardena a couple more times. Tommy, of course, had introduced Burn to the other players as
Lucky
, and the name stuck. Each time he played, Burn lived up to the name. Sometimes he won big, and sometimes hiwinnings were modest, but he always left with cash in his pocket.