Capture (17 page)

The voices kick in at a pitch so loud she feels something has clobbered her behind her knees and her legs almost give in and she has to grab the bars of the gate for support, her face pressed up against the hot metal.

She breathes. Curses. Begs. Gets hold of that bloody button again.

Static crackles beside her ear, dispersing the chorus. A sexless voice comes through the speaker, a tinny echo. “Yes, yes? What is it?”

Caroline surrenders the button and moves her mouth close to the metal plate. “Vlad?”

“Who is this?”

“I must see Vlad.”

“Mr. Stankovic is not home.”

“I must see him.”

“Go away.”

A dismissive clunk and silence.

Caroline gathers all of her concentration to send her skittish finger to the buzzer and once she finds it, she knows she won’t release it until somebody comes.

Eventually the door yawns open and a pale figure stands revealed. There is a blur and the scratch of nails on cement and a whining enquiry and she realizes that Sneg has run down the stairs to the gate, trying to force his snout and tongue through the bars. Oh God, he knows me, she thinks. He knows me.

She slides two fingers between the bars and feels the animal’s hot, sandpapery tongue on her skin.

“Sneg!” At the curt command the wolf’s tail curls around his balls and he retreats and slinks back up the stairs, watching Caroline from behind a woman’s long legs.

The woman is halfway down the stairs now. She stops. “What do you want with my husband?”

Caroline’s sight clears enough to see that this is not the dumpy babushka of her imagination. The wife is tall, elegant—chic is the only word—with straight blonde hair streaked with gray, coiled into a loose chignon. She is dressed in a beige and white pantsuit, her manicured toes emerging from a pair of designer sandals, nails painted a muted pearl.

When she speaks it is in plummy tones not unlike Caroline’s, with just a hint of Eastern Europe in the vowels. “I ask again: what do you want?”

“I must see him.”

“Who are you?”

“Caroline Exley.”

There is a bark, but it is too polite for Sneg and Caroline realizes the woman has laughed. “Ah, yes, the latest bit of crumpet.” An eyebrow arches. “A little frumpy even for my husband.”

“Where is he? Please.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, go away. Can’t you see he is finished with you, you little idiot? Do you think you are the first? Or will be the last?”

The woman is turning away, hissing at Sneg.

Caroline grabs the bars of the gate and shakes it but it is too sturdy to rattle. She hears a wild scream and it takes a moment to realize it is hers. The woman retreats toward the front door.

A hand grabs Caroline’s upper arm. Vlad. Thank Christ.

She spins, ready to embrace him, but it is the rent-a-cop, khaki-faced in his absurd action figure outfit.

“Mrs. Exley,” he says. “Let me take you home.”

Caroline is momentarily shocked into silence and so are the voices.

The security man half-bows to the wife, who hovers on the stairs.

“Mrs. Stankovic.”

“Officer.” Like a baroness greeting a serf.

Sneg bares his teeth and growls at Vernon, the first time Caroline has seen him behave this way.

I’m right, she screams inside her head, drowning the voices for just a moment. I’m right about this fucker. 

But she’s given voice to the thoughts—bellowed them—and he tightens his grip on her arm and she can feel her pale flesh bruising beneath his fingertips.

“Mrs. Exley, please.”

She fights loose. “Take your hands off me, you fucking brown bastard!”

“Mrs. Exley.”

“You fucking savage. You knew she was dead, didn’t you? You knew she was dead, knew my child was dead, yet you lay on her and filled her with your breath like she was a blow-up doll?”

He tries to take her arm again and she slaps him, screaming, hits out, her fists bouncing off his body armor. A car pulls up at the house next door and a pale woman mother-hens her gawking kids into the garage as the roller door closes.

The rent-a-cop has got behind Caroline, trying to wrap his arms around her, her skirt riding high on her thighs, her pale, freckled legs pedaling the air. “What? Did you want to fuck her?”

Two sturdy black maids, dressed in pinafores and caps, walking fluffy lapdogs, stop and stare and Caroline can feel their Xhosa clicks like slaps to her face.

Somehow she breaks free of Vernon Saul’s grip, still screaming, landing on all fours. She is drooling and weeping and snot dangles from her nose. She finds her feet and rushes for the Land Rover, dragging herself aboard, fighting the wheel and the pedals and the gears, and sets off lurching and veering down the hill.

Down toward the suck of the sea and that vapid soulless house.

Down toward total fucking toys-in-the-attic madness.

Chapter 23

On the two-hour flight back to Cape Town, as Exley sits with his laptop open, tweaking his model of Sunny, a sense of dislocation nags at him, screwing with his concentration. He closes his eyes and reaches for a memory of his daughter on the morning of her birthday, desperate to have her close. But he can’t find Sunny’s face—her real face. He can only conjure up the digital version that he’s built.

A stewardess brings him a Scotch, his second—or maybe third—and he shuts down the laptop and puts it aside, feeling the pleasant burn of the booze on his tongue, trying to reassemble the timeline of his afternoon. The best he can do is a series of frame grabs. He must have spoken with enough conviction and dazzled the faithful with enough wizardry because he stepped down from the podium to loud applause, and young bum-fluffy geeks mobbed him, firing questions.

Exley, limp with fatigue, disappeared into the darkness, leaving Chalmers to run interference, shepherding the punters and their credit cards toward a cocktail bar that somehow manifested at the side of the studio, complete with lounge music and a barman in a bowtie.

On impulse Exley, before he slipped out to the waiting car, triggered a loop of Sunny dancing and sent it through to the bank of monitors.

The loop started with a wireframe model, stark white lattice-work against black, then transitioned through to his child fully rendered and textured.

A few people, drinks and snacks in their hands, paused in mid-conversation and turned to the screens. More followed their cue. A reverential silence fell as conversations fragmented and stopped.

This should have pleased Exley, flying into a sunset mauve with pollution, this proof that his reclaiming of his daughter is transcending the gap between the imaginary and the real, pixel by pixel. But he is unsettled by the understanding that Sunny has been replaced forever in his memory by what he has conjured from zeros and ones, and when he thinks of returning home and facing his wife he feels nothing but despair. Sunny was the glue that kept them together and now that she’s gone, he and Caroline stand revealed for what they are: antagonistic strangers. Not even united by grief. Driven farther apart, if anything.

The drinks trolley, pushed by a black stewardess with cruelly straightened hair, appears at his side again and Exley asks for another double Scotch straight up. The woman hands him the drink in a small plastic container, like a urine sample.

He throws it back in two swallows, desperate to escape this place where every thought and memory cuts like a blade.

Chapter 24

This is Dawn’s worst fucken nightmare. Okay, not the worst—that’s all about some sick filth doing to Brittany what was done to her way back—but, still, this is bad. Really bad.

Dawn, already late for work, took Brittany down the cabbage-stinking corridor to the old Porra woman’s apartment. Banging loud and long enough to get another neighbor—fat Boer loser, dressed only in his underpants—out his door, moaning. Dawn flipping him the finger with her left hand, right hand still banging away.

He muttered something like “bushman bitch” and then he was gone back to his beaver books and his Kleenexes. Finally, after the sound of many locks and bolts being worked free, the door opened to reveal Mrs. de Pontes, small as a child, dressed like always in her widow’s black.

“I sick,” the old woman said.

“What you mean?”

“I sick.” To prove it she let rip with a cough that sounded like a power saw attacking metal, Brittany staring up in awe.

“Jesus, Mrs. de Pontes, you can’t drop me like this. I gotta work.”

The coughing spasm ended with the old woman hacking up something into a tissue and slamming the door in Dawn’s face. Locks were locked and bolts were thrown.

Dawn, with her kid down on Voortrekker—the familiar perfume of exhaust fumes and KFC and dust and poverty—takes a gap in the evening traffic to get them across safely, the neon of Lips blowing them kisses.

The wall-eyed doorwoman with the mustache checks Brittany out like she’s trash. “Ja? And what is this?”

Dawn bites back a curse, taking Brittany inside. Fortunately the stage is empty, nothing that Dawn has to shield the kid’s eyes from. She gives Cliffie a wave and he nods, setting out bottles on the bar top. Dawn heads into the back, leading Britt up a short flight of stairs covered by a gum-tacky carpet. A steel door painted the color of flesh blocks the top of the stairs and Dawn knocks. Soft and polite.

“Ja?” The muffled voice of Costa, locked inside with his money.

“It’s Dawn.”

Just one lock is turned—a serious one, Dawn knows—and there’s Costa with a cigarette married to his lip, squinting at her through the smoke.

“Yes, Dawn?” His gaze travels south and he finds Brittany, who clutches Dawn’s hand, disappearing halfway behind her ass at the sight of this white man.

“Costa, I got me a babysitter problem.” The Greek sighs. “Please can I leave my kid here with you? I’ll sit here with her between my sets.”

“Jesus, Dawn. You come to me with this?”

“Costa, man, please?”

He’s shaking his head, already closing the door, cigarette smoke tracing patterns in the air.

“I been thinking about what you want,” she says, desperate. “The rooms. With the men.”

The door stops and he looks at her. “Ja? And?”

“Okay. Just give me a couple of days and I’ll do it.”

“You not bullshit me?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head to hide the lie in her voice.

He nods, shrugs, opens the door. “She can sit by me. But tonight only, you understand?”

“Yes. Thanks, man. Thanks.”

He walks back inside and sits down at his desk, fingers flying like a piano player’s across an old adding machine. Dawn settles Brittany down on the floor, opens the bag that the kid always takes to Mrs. de Pontes. A coloring book. Comics.

“Okay, now listen to me, you sit here and you draw and you read, hear me?” Brittany nods. “You don’t hassle Uncle Costa, okay?” Another nod.

A loud exhalation comes from the Greek at the desk, rising over the whir of the adding machine.

Dawn is out of there, with one final glance at Britt sitting on the floor staring up at the strange man. Don’t fucken cry, she pleads silently, quickly closing the door and getting her ass through to the changing room, where the Ugly Sisters drink and smoke and scratch at her like barbed wire.

She ignores them and gets into her stage outfit and makes it just in time to catch up with the opening bars of “I Bruise Easily.” The place has filled: the usual white faces, the usual stink of booze and cigarettes and that man-smell. Dawn leaves her routine to muscle memory, willing the minutes to pass, her mind on her child.

She exits, naked and covered in sweat, carrying her clothes. Dennis, the other bouncer, lurks backstage. He’s family of Costa’s and works the nights Vernon does his rent-a-cop thing. Dennis always hangs around Dawn, his eyes like slime on her.

She brushes past him and hits the dressing room, ready to get into her clothes and go through to Costa’s office and be with her kid. Now not much stops Dawn in her tracks, but this sight does: Brittany sits on the make-up counter in the dressing room, the two Ugly Sisters, naked flesh dangling like meat in an abattoir, bookending her, the fat one teasing the child’s hair into a blonde halo, the skinny one painting her face in garish smears. The room is smoggy with
tik
-smoke and the two bitches laugh like backed-up drains at their handiwork.

“What the fuck?” Dawn says. Brittany stares up at her, dazed.

The fat thing turns and says, “Oh, here’s Mommy!”

“Where’s Costa?” Dawn asks.

“Had him an emergency by the house, so he left your little blondie with her aunties!” A shrieking laugh.

Dawn is ready to haul off and hit and kick and cause serious damage when she hears Dennis behind her.

“Dawn,” he says.

“Not fucken now, Dennis!” Spinning around to face him, but instead finds herself looking at a pinched-faced brown woman in a skirt and jacket and court shoes.

“Ms. Cupido,” Merinda Appolis says, “I was at your apartment for a routine inspection. Since you weren’t home, I thought I’d try your place of employment. I’m very glad I did.” The bitch social worker enjoying every moment of this. “You will appear before a magistrate within the next two days. I will be petitioning the court for this child to be removed from you and taken to a place of safety.”

“You can’t do that,” Dawn says, sounding like a stranger.

“Oh, I can, Ms. Cupido. And I shall.”

Appolis does a smart about-turn on her little heels and clicks herself out of there. Dawn grabs her phone from her bag and lifts Brittany off the counter and carries her toward the bathroom, speed-dialing, wanting nothing more now than to hear the voice of the man she hates more than anybody else on God’s earth.

Chapter 25

As Vernon draws his cell phone from one of the pouches in his Kevlar vest—the “Private Dancer” ringtone telling him it’s Dawn calling—he sees the lights of Exley’s Audi convertible strobing through the bush, the car taking the last curve toward the house. Vernon sends Dawn to voicemail and stands up out of the Sniper truck, walking to the middle of the narrow road, holding up his right arm to halt Exley, shielding his eyes from the halogen beams with his left.