B
ILLY AFRIKA KNEW HE WAS HOME WHEN THE TRIBAL WOMAN SET off the metal detector at Johannesburg airport.
He’d hitched a ride on a Brit cargo plane from Baghdad to Dubai. Then flown Emirates to O. R. Tambo in Jo’burg, a flight crammed with South Africans returning from shopping sprees in the duty-free desert paradise. They wandered the aisles of the airbus like zombies, still feverish from days of burning plastic.
Billy was in domestic departures for his late-night connection to Cape Town. A lean brown man, midthirties, wiry hair buzz-cut to his scalp. Watching the world through the green eyes inherited from a German father he’d never known.
He stood behind the tribal woman as they went through security. She was barefoot, wrapped in an embroidered blanket, braided hair heavy with beads, her legs and arms thick with wire bangles. Didn’t make the metal detector happy.
As Billy lifted his duffel bag from the conveyor belt, he saw the woman being led off to be body searched. Later he glimpsed
her talking Zulu into the latest Nokia, standing against a backdrop of floodlit Boeings.
He had been maintaining since he’d flown out of Baghdad. Focused his mind on his immediate mission, letting his anger fuel him. By the time he was seated on the 737 he was feeling closer to his normal, controlled self than he had in a week.
Until Abdul leaned down and told him to fasten his seat belt. Of course it wasn’t fucken Abdul, just some Muslim flight attendant from Cape Town with a black mustache and bad breath.
But sweat pricked Billy’s forehead, and he caught his hands clutching the armrests as he felt the percussive whump of the explosion smashing into the left side of the BMW, piercing the armor plating and decapitating the Iraqi driver, sending his head into Billy Afrika’s lap. Abdul had looked up at him, mouth twisted in a smile, like he was about to crack funny about Sunni women and desert donkeys. The force of the blast buckled the chassis of the BMW, bending Billy’s door open and allowing a partial target: him.
A round smacked his Kevlar vest. The lead car was lost in smoke, but he could see the third car pulled over, the men inside laying down covering fire. He batted Abdul’s head away and took a quick look into the rear, checking on the asset, the VIP he was meant to be protecting: the Swede or the Dane or whatever he was. He wasn’t. He lay smeared across the seat. A closed-coffin case.
Billy kicked the door open and went out firing the Czech submachine gun, specially modified for close-quarters work. A ricochet bounced off his helmet, leaving his ears ringing. He sprinted to the car behind and almost made it when the second explosion lifted and tumbled him, tearing off his helmet, flak jacket, and boots, before flinging him to the ground.
When he opened his eyes four hours later, in the Twenty-eighth Combat Support Hospital, he was looking at the peeling
pink nose of the albino Afrikaner Danny Lombard, the whitest man he had ever seen.
“There’s good news, and there’s bad news,” Lombard said.
“What’s the good news?”
“Your ball bag is still there.”
“And the bad news?”
“Your ass has been fired.”
“Why?”
“Somebody gotta take the blame for losing the asset. Not gonna be one of the Yanks.”
Billy shrugged. The movement made his head throb. “I’ll talk to the recruiting people back home.” He saw the albino’s face. “What?”
It got worse.
The South Africans had been recruited by a security broker in Cape Town who had hooked them up with an American outfit in Iraq, Clearwater Tactical. Clearwater paid the broker, who paid them, deposited the money in their bank accounts back home each month. Or was supposed to. But they were each thirty thousand down, and the broker wasn’t taking calls.
Multiply thirty thousand dollars by seven, and you got the reason Billy was risking his ass in Iraq. Two hundred and ten thousand rand. When he’d been a cop in South Africa, it had taken him over three years to earn that kind of money.
Billy thought of the man buried out on the windswept Cape Flats, and the promise he’d made him. Felt things starting to seep through the crumbling wall he’d built around himself these last two years.
He’d checked himself out of the hospital with a couple of bruises and a killer headache. He was going home. Back to Cape Town.
The 737 hurled itself off the runway and into the night sky. Billy Afrika knew what he had to do. And who he had to see.
The broker. Joe Palmer.
ASIDE FROM THE surprisingly small entry wounds in his forehead and leg, Joe looked pretty much the way he always looked first thing in the morning: white and unhealthy and butt naked. His flabby gut sagged, and his penis drooped sadly toward his hairy thigh. His left eye was closed. The right eye stared up at Roxy, heavy-lidded, lazy. Like he was winking at her. A tag dangled from the big toe of his left foot. Roxy noticed that he badly needed a pedicure.
“Jesus, can’t you cover him at least?” Dick Richardson, Joe’s lawyer, stood at Roxy’s side by the freezer drawer.
The morgue attendant, a young brown man in a stained white coat, shrugged.
“And why the hell aren’t we in a viewing room?” asked Dick.
“Viewing rooms is full.”
Roxy was still numb after the events of the night, and anyway, she’d seen Joe looking worse. The attendant watched her like she was edible, waiting for her to speak.
“Yes. This is my husband.”
He made a note on a clipboard and shoved the drawer closed.
“Hell of a business,” Dick said as he took her arm and led her away. “This bloody city is out of control.”
He held open a door the color of clotted cream and let her walk out into the corridor.
A bedlam of bodies on gurneys, cops, harried morgue officials trying to deal with the deluge of the dead and the grieving families they had left behind. Industrial-strength disinfectant fought a losing battle against the sweet smell of human flesh gone bad.
Dick moved in to take her arm again, but she edged away from him. He had graying sandy hair, and yachtsman’s wrinkles fanned out from his pale eyes. Cultivated a passing resemblance to a younger Robert Redford.
“Sorry you had to go through this. I asked the police if I couldn’t do it, but they insisted you identify Joe.”
“It’s okay.”
They stopped at an office, where Roxy had to sign for Joe’s personal effects. An asthmatic woman with faded yellow skin wheezed as she dumped a bulging plastic bag onto the counter. The woman removed each item for Roxy to identify. Joe’s shoes, socks, underwear, suit pants, belt, and bloodstained white shirt. His wallet was there, with his driver’s license and credit cards, but the wad of cash she’d glimpsed the night before when he’d paid for the meal was missing. As were his wedding band, cell phone, and the Patek Philippe watch she’d bought him for his last birthday.
Bought with his money, but still.
Roxy didn’t bother to query the missing items. If the living were targets in this city, then why not the dead? She signed the form, and the woman sucked on an inhaler and crammed the clothes back into the bag. Roxy took the bag and followed Dick out into the corridor.
“There were things missing, weren’t there?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“In this place you’re lucky if they only steal your phone or your money. Last week they sawed the foot off some poor bastard who died in a car accident.” This got her attention. “Probably sold it for
muti
.” Coming out as
moo-tee
in his nasal accent. “Witchcraft, you know? Bloody savages.”
He held another door open, and they were out in the brightness of the Cape Town morning, the hard African sun showing all the blemishes of the Salt River morgue and the shabby buildings around it, out on the fringes of the city.
Roxy slipped on her sunglasses. As they walked toward Dick’s Range Rover his cell phone warbled, and he mouthed an apology and took the call. Roxy stood and looked up at Table Mountain, looming above the squalid buildings, a soft white
cloud boiling over the flat top like spume as the wind drove in from the south.
It was still early, just gone eight in the morning. She hadn’t slept the night before, lay on the bed in the spare room—unable to face the bedroom that still smelled of Joe—staring out into the dark, until the sun touched the rocky face of Lion’s Head. Lying awake when Dick called her at seven, told her the police wanted her to formally identify Joe so they could start the autopsy. Dig the bullets out of him.
Roxy walked over to a trash can on the sidewalk. Junk overflowed onto the pavement, so she set the plastic bag on top of the mound of garbage beside the can. A homeless couple lurched out of a nearby doorway and hurried toward the trash, leaning like sailors on a storm-swept deck. She turned back to the car. Dick was still talking into his phone, his free hand patting down the sandy hair that lifted in the wind.
Roxy heard shouting and looked back. The couple fought over the bag. The man tore Joe’s shirt out of the woman’s hands and unballed it, holding it up against his chest, the cloth flapping like a bloody flag of defeat.
Roxy saw Joe’s body surrounded by cops and emergency teams, flashing lights washing the road red and blue. And she saw herself, wrapped in a paramedic’s blanket, telling her story. There had been two men. No, she never really got a look at them. It had all happened too fast. One of them shot Joe twice, and they fled into the night in the Mercedes.
Carefully editing out how, after she had fired that shot, she had thrown the gun over the cliff, into the scrub far below. Manufacturing widow’s tears as she watched the paramedics sliding Joe’s body into the morgue van like they were taking out the trash.
She was still shocked at how easy it had been, how light the gun had felt in her hands, how the recoil had flowed effortlessly up her arms and into her shoulders. How the lies had flowed from her tongue.
F
IRST THEY MADE HIM DIG HIS OWN GRAVE.
Because they were young—at sixteen Piper was the oldest, and Goose with the withered arm was just twelve—they were impatient and the grave was shallow. Then they beat him to the ground with their fists, kicked him as he folded himself into a ball in a vain attempt to protect himself. Piper kneeled over him and applied the blade, even at that age expert at understanding the difference between wounding and killing.
The honor of pouring the gasoline fell to the feebleminded Elvis, who giggled and showed his missing front teeth as he doused their victim. Piper lit a cloth and threw it. They all stepped back and watched the flames leap, laughing as he screamed and writhed.
After a minute they rolled his burning body into the grave.
Two of them, black against the bleached sky, worked the shovels, the other three pushed at the sandy soil of the Cape Flats with their hands and feet. The earth pressed down onto
his limbs, filled his mouth and his nose, and covered his eyes until he saw nothing but blackness.
Billy Afrika fought himself up through the dark.
Found himself in bed at the backpackers’ hotel, light slicing through the shuttered windows.
Drenched in sweat, he pulled on a T-shirt and jeans to cover the scar tissue that patterned his legs and torso like the hide of a piebald horse, and went out onto the wide balcony that ran the length of the building. Eyes squinting against the sun, he drank air and gripped the railing, his fingers locked around Victorian wrought-iron filigree.
It was years since he’d had that dream.
He’d slept much later than he intended, and traffic snarled beneath him. The backpacker on Long Street, the low-rent tourist district of downtown Cape Town, was cheap, anonymous, and noisy. Beer bottles and dirty ashtrays littered the plastic table beside him. Jet-lagged, he’d battled to fall asleep the night before, kept awake by the mating calls of French and German kids, drinking and smoking weed with hard-eyed local girls the color of toffee. A watering hole on an African sex safari.
Calmer, Billy went back into the room, stripped to his briefs, and lowered himself to the wooden floor. After a hundred push-ups he felt a different kind of sweat dripping from his body. He pushed on, muscles warm and fluid.
Two hundred.
Lifting onto his fingertips.
Three hundred.
Sweat plopping to the wood beneath his eyes. Without breaking his rhythm he put his left hand behind his back, flattened his right palm to the floor and continued one-armed.
Three fifty.
Swapped in midair, right hand behind his back.
Four hundred.
Rolled himself up to a sitting position, feet hooked under
the frame of the bed, fingers laced behind his neck. Five hundred sit-ups. Fast. His scarred body a blur of muscle and sweat.
Then he lay back on the floor, staring up at the pressed metal ceiling high above him, letting the sweat cool, drawing air into his lungs through his nose. The terror had drained from his body. As he felt his pulse rate slow, he carefully packed away the fragments of his past.
THEY WERE IN Dick’s Range Rover, stuck in the morning traffic between Woodstock and downtown. Roxy had opened her window, not minding that the hot wind blew her hair into her eyes. Dick reeked of the aftershave a TV commercial told him would make him irresistible. It had lied.
He maneuvered into a gap in the traffic, searching for words to fill the silence. “Jesus, I still can’t get my head around this. Can’t believe Joe’s gone. He was one of a kind.”
“Yes, he was,” she said.
No, he wasn’t,
she thought. He was like most of the men she’d been with since she was a teenager. Like the man sitting next to her, looking at her as if she was a beautiful accessory, a floating trophy ready to move from one rich man’s bed to the next. The way she’d allowed them to look at her. The way she’d looked at herself.
No more.
“How are you for cash, Roxanne?”
“I dunno. Joe took care of that.” Playing dumb. Men like Dick liked dumb.
“Look, all his bank accounts will be frozen until the legalities of the estate have been observed. But I was holding some money in trust for him, which, under the circumstances, could be made available to you. About a hundred and fifty thousand rand.”
Around twenty thousand dollars.
“Thanks, Dick. I really appreciate it.”
“No problemo. Give me two days, max.” He beamed, like a golden labrador about to bury his snout in a woman’s crotch. “Now, can I take you to breakfast? The Mount Nelson is fabulous on a day like this.”
His insensitivity almost made Roxy laugh. “Some other time, okay?”
“Sure.” Hiding his disappointment behind a grin. “You need anything, you just shout. Twenty-four seven. Anything at all.”
She stared down at a small car stopped next to them at a light. A child—a girl with wispy blonde hair—was strapped into a car seat in the rear, having an animated conversation with a soft toy. She looked up and saw Roxy and covered her face with her hand, shy, but one eye still peeping. Roxy felt a moment of almost overwhelming sadness, followed by a flash of the same fury that had made her squeeze the trigger and kill her husband.
Then, as the Range Rover surged off into the traffic, leaving the girl behind, it was as if the anger was left behind too, and Roxy had a sudden sense of her own freedom. A soft voice nagged, telling her that things couldn’t be this easy. She should feel something. Guilt. Fear.
But she didn’t. Not yet.
She felt clean. Cleaner than she had in years.