Capture (2 page)

“Your mother’s cunt,” Vernon said into the microphone that spiraled   from the radio mounted on the dash, hoping the dispatcher, a fat white bitch with zits and hair dyed the color of pus, caught this before she signed off.

She did. “What you say?” Her voice shrill through the static.

“You fucken heard me,” Vernon said, holstering the mike, laughing as he imagined her froth of consternation back in the Sniper HQ down in Hout Bay.

He took a couple of painkillers from the glove box and dry-swallowed them, tasting acid on his tongue, like he’d licked a battery terminal. He needed a break, to stretch his legs, take a piss and have a smoke. Check in on one of his projects.

Vernon smacked the red Ford into gear and rocketed off from where he was parked on the shoulder of the road switchbacking down to Llandudno, this suburb of palatial houses that clung to the slope of the mountain and danced a conga line along the shore. A place nobody could spell and half the people in the Cape Flats ghettoes—where he came from—couldn’t even pronounce. And who could bloody blame them?

As he passed the wooden Sniper sentry box that guarded the road Vernon leaned on his horn, startling awake the fat darky who dozed inside, wagging a thick finger in warning as the uniformed man leaped off his stool and came to attention in the doorway, like Idi Amin inspecting his troops.

Vernon drove to the ocean below, passing glittering confections of stone and glass hunkered down behind high walls and electric fences, most of the houses wearing the red signage of Sniper Security.

It was Saturday, which meant that hundreds of cars clogged the streets; people from all over the Cape Peninsula come to swim at Llandudno beach, popular with picnicking families and surfers and body-boarders. Parking bays down near the beach were limited and the day-trippers ended up blocking the driveways of the rich bastards, who phoned Sniper to sort things out.

Vernon had just about got used to the plummet in status from being a police detective to a rent-a-cop, but he couldn’t handle being a    glorified traffic warden, hassling these sunburned whities to move their cars, and he had no intention of sticking around here. He waved at a couple of Sniper patrolmen who manned the boom that stemmed the flood of cars and drove along the shore until the road narrowed and the houses dribbled away, and there was just one glass box out there on its own. With the ocean and the sky reflected in the windows, the house looked like it was floating, ready to drift out on the tide.

A clutch of Benzes, Beemers and chunky SUVs cluttered the road outside the house and, as he eased the truck between them, Vernon saw a little parade of white families (well-fed men in their thirties, their gym-crazy wives and pale kids) exiting the Sniper-branded front gate, getting into their cars and driving away into their perfect lives.

The house disappeared in his mirror and the road ran dead, rocks and scrub blocking the view of the ocean. Vernon parked the Ford behind the granite boulders that flanked the house, forming one side of the small bay that opened from the private beach.

Easing his bulk out of the Ford, his withered leg stiff from the hours behind the wheel, Vernon felt the sweat on his chest and around his balls. He ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair, leaving his palm and fingers wet. With his mid-brown skin and straight nose he was almost handsome until he removed his fake Ray-Bans and revealed his khaki eyes, too small and set too close to his nose, like they were retreating into his skull. Pitbull eyes. He wiped the sunglasses clean and slid them back on.

Vernon took a warm can of Coke and an uneaten Big Mac, still in its styrofoam container, and left the truck, the radio muttering as he walked away. He adjusted the hang of the Glock at his hip and limped up onto the rocks, in shadow now that the sun was low, his dun-colored uniform blending with the boulders. The rocks were slick with kelp and he stepped carefully, finding purchase for his boots.

Walking along the ridge until the ocean came into view, he looked down at the private beach and saw a small group of whities gathered around a table, all festive with balloons and empty bottles.

Slowly, Vernon descended to the water, the rocks blocking the house from sight. There was no beach here, not like on the other side, just a shelf of rock, where a black man, bare-ass naked, was on his hands and knees, matted dreadlocks dangling into the ocean. The Rastaman shouted and moaned like a wild beast.

“Hey! Hey, Bob Marley!” Vernon yelled.

Vernon had no idea of the lunatic’s name but the darky answered to this one now and looked up and smiled a gap-toothed smile.

“Cover up your stinking ass. Quick, quick.”

The darky stood and pulled on a torn pair of khakis over his dangling balls. His naked torso so thin that his ribs pushed out at his flesh like xylophone keys.

“Here,” Vernon said, setting down the Coke and the Big Mac on a rock. The Rasta clasped his hands, bowing. Vernon had never heard an intelligible sound come from his mouth. Reckoned the fuckhead couldn’t speak. Suited him. Heard enough bullshit from the world, day in and day out. The darky went at the food like an animal, stuffing it into his mouth.

Vernon turned his back, unzipped and drilled a stream of piss onto the rocks, releasing a long sigh of relief, working his shoulders to loosen some of the tension. He zipped and sat down, stretched his bad leg out in front of him, shook a Lucky Strike from the pack in his pocket and fired it up, letting the smoke do its magic as he stared out toward the horizon. The tide was ebbing, and the hot breeze whipping off the mountain drove waves into the shore.

The darky had inhaled the food and was washing it down with the Coke, his pitiful belongings spread out around him. A torn blanket. A few shopping bags full of fuck-knew-what. A pile of old newspapers, pages waving in the breeze. A row of plastic Coke bottles filled with sea water. They drank it, these darkies, as a purgative.

When Vernon had first seen the Rastaman sneaking down here a few weeks back, he’d been of a mind to kick the shit out of him and run him off. But something held him back. Some intuition. And Vernon was a man who trusted his intuition, knew all too well that not everything was plain and simple, that life didn’t run in nice straight lines: it zigzagged like a bastard, took off in unexpected directions. A successful man understood that. Stored up things that could be of use to him.

So he let the darky be. Turned him into one of his projects. Brought him food now and then, made sure he didn’t stray from this desolate spot and stayed well hidden from the houses of the rich. The man had come to think of Vernon as his benefactor.

Vernon stood, his leg bitching at him. “Okay, my friend, I’m going now. I see you soon, okay?” He flicked his unfinished smoke at the Rastaman, who caught it, juggling it in his outstretched palms, bobbing his wild head as he sucked on the end.

Vernon hobbled back toward the truck and as he crested the rocks the house rose into view. Now there were only five people on the little beach: the skinny white guy standing with his wife, who looked like the sun had faded her to nothing, their girl kid, and two other men. One was the Australian dope smoker who lived in the cottage of a house a few streets away, a loudmouth with a red face and a big gut. Vernon heard his laugh, carried on the breeze. The other guy, older, tall with white hair—some kind of European—owned a massive place that backed up against the mountain.

As Vernon saw the woman go off into the kitchen, the kid at her heels, his leg caved on him and he sat down on the rock. He kneaded his hamstring, watching as the white-haired guy said something to the other two, shook their hands, laughed and disappeared into the house, sniffing after the wife.

Caroline Exley stood at the kitchen window watching Nick talk to Vladislav Stankovic, who had been fucking her for the last two months.

Vlad threw his head back and laughed at something the hideous Australian ex-cricketer, Shane Porter, said. Then he turned and stared at Caroline and winked.

Her husband and her lover couldn’t have been more different. Nick was small and slight, Peter Pannish, looking nowhere near thirty-six, dressed in the baggy clothes favored by people who spent their lives in communion with computers.

Vlad was at least fifty (too vain to disclose his age) and tanned the color of old teak. With his beak of a nose and thick, iron-gray hair swept back from a high forehead, he looked like a Serbian ethnic cleanser. She called him Vlad the Impaler. Of course.

So different between the sheets from her husband, too. Nick had used humor to seduce her. He’d been quite funny back when they met, ten years ago. They flirted, kidded and joshed one another into the sack.

Sweet it may have been but Nick was never passionate.

Sex with Vlad was a carnal brawl—he smothered her with his big body, damp flesh stinking of meat and Balkan cigars, his barrel chest covered in a carpet-like gray pelt, his coarse pubic hair abrasive on her clitoris. He fucked her until the voices were stilled and her rage softened and dispersed like smoke. The thought of his fat cock inside her made Caroline wet and she had to grip the kitchen counter to compose herself.

She ran a hand through her hair, looking around the kitchen, overwhelmed by the evidence of the gross excess of her life. Plates of half-eaten food occupied every available surface: marbled gouts of birthday cake torn at by greedy little mouths, then discarded in favor of Belgian chocolates, syrupy Chinese confections and fluffy orange centipedes that stained fingers and tongues tartrazine-yellow.

The toothy adults had eviscerated olive breads and croissants, leaving them to drown in a soggy smear of Chardonnay, balsamic vinegar, Brie, Roquefort and gaudy dips. Even the leaf salads looked stripped and violated.

Sunny, who’d followed her inside, sat perched on a kitchen chair, keeping up an endless, inane patter that Caroline ignored. In some pretence of tidying up, she lifted a plate still coated with caviar, thick as sand on a lava beach, and nearly vomited at the gynecological reek.

Dumping the plate, she closed her eyes and massaged her temples, trying to rub away the voices that were stirring within. A reminder to take her medication.

The day had sapped her energy and she was glad it was nearly over; the obscenely cheerful thirty-somethings and their unruly brats had left her feeling frayed around the edges. God knows, she’d done her best to keep her disdain—and her incessant, nagging rage—in check.

Vlad exchanged handshakes with Nick and Porter, trotted up onto the deck and breezed into the kitchen, dressed in his ridiculous Eurotrash outfit: a pink Lacoste shirt and blue drawstring trousers, tanned legs sockless in white espadrilles.

“Darlink,” he said in that joke accent.

“Careful. Little ears,” she said, nodding at Sunny, who watched them, squinting, as if she sensed something.

“It was lovely day,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Next time you must bring your wife.” A running gag this, between them. The unnamed, eternally absent wife—away at health farms and spiritual retreats.

“Of course.” Coming closer, laying his broad-fingered hand near hers.

She could smell him, his fleshy odor welling up beneath the noxious designer aftershave. Every time she saw him she told herself that he was absurd, a buffoon. And then she let him fuck her, anyway. He didn’t know or care that she had been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her first, and only, novel. Or that after three years her publishers were demanding back their piddly little advance for the book on the Brontë sisters she had never quite been able to write. All he wanted to do was shag her stupid.

Caroline looked out the window and saw Nick and the Australian hunched over a joint, laughing smoke. Idiots. Then she saw the toy ship bobbing in the shallows, the retreating tide lapping at it, rocking the sails, the backwash threatening to suck it into the waves. This gave her a moment’s inspiration.

Pushing her hair out of her face, Caroline turned to Sunny and smiled her most maternal smile. “You had better go and rescue your boat, darling,” she said, sending her daughter to her death so the Serbian philistine could shove his thick fingers inside her sticky knickers.

Exley could relax at last, now the guests had left. He’d had to be vigilant all afternoon, waiting for one of Caroline’s episodes. But she’d been on best behavior. Aloof and distant, sure, but that was Caroline. There had been no insults, no tantrums, no broken glass. A pretty good day, then, after all.

Shane Porter handed him a joint, saying, “Come on, mate, let’s get baked.”

Exley seldom smoked weed but he had a little buzz going from drinking wine and maybe a hit or two would keep his good mood afloat. And he sensed that Porter could be persuaded to tell him about that incident in Islamabad three years before when a world of shit had landed on the spin-bowler-turned-commentator’s blond head, leaving him living like a remittance man here in Cape Town.

Exley had googled Porter and it seemed that he’d called a Pakistani opening batsman (a bearded character who knelt, faced Mecca and kissed the cricket pitch every time he scored a hundred runs) “Osama bloody Bin Laden” during a commercial break, not realizing his mike was still live and that he could be heard all across the subcontinent. But the details were vague and contradictory, the Wikipedia entry warning that the allegation was unsubstantiated, and the garrulous Aussie had spoken of everything except his fall from grace in the two months Exley’d known him.

Emboldened by the weed, Exley said, “Tell me about it, Port.”

“And what would that be, Ex?”

“What really happened in Pakistan?” Floating the question out on a cloud of smoke.

Exley was aware of Sunny at his side, saying something as she tugged at his boardshorts. He absent-mindedly stroked her hair, his attention on the Australian, and she slid away from his hand.

Exley took another hit and passed the joint back to Port, who sucked it down to nothing, exhaled a fragrant cloud and flicked away the butt toward a sky streaked with reds and mauves. He spluttered, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, shaking his head.