Last Train to Retreat (17 page)

He laughed. ‘Maybe, but can there be better bait than Kuscus and Fritz? I’ve asked them to ask Hannibal Fortuin if Gatiep and Curly and Cupido are Evangelicals. Note
are,
Bella, not
was
– Hannibal doesn’t know I know they’re dead. There’ll be
two
hooks on the line, one at the end and one higher up. Guess who the higher one is for? It’s a long shot but you
can
catch two fish with one cast, you know.’

‘You’re talking in riddles, Quentin, and I don’t fish. I imagine you need a lot of luck,’ she said. The name Hannibal was like a siren. Hannibal the Evangelical, the Lord’s own vigilante, self-proclaimed protector of Lavender Hill, community do-gooder, Christian equivalent of the Muslim PAGAD. But that had been in the beginning. Then something happened. Today he was still leader of the Evangelicals but it had become just another gang on the Flats, feeding off the community, feared even by cops. Hannibal had become more powerful but as a criminal, making the job of the police in Lavender Hill more difficult. Somehow Hannibal always managed to stay a step ahead when it came to raids and witnesses.

Slowly he explained what he was doing. ‘That’s the plan, Bella. Let’s hope it works.’

‘You
do
have a way of pulling things together, Quentin,’ she said softly and with admiration. How could she tell him it was her heart that he was pulling apart?

I
t occurred to Zane that if Justin, BAT’s creative director, were to draw his brain as a pie chart of thoughts it would slice three ways with little room for anything else: Lena, his new liquor client, and his imminent black belt grading. It was all he could think about.

He hadn’t counted on Bernadette. He was busy doing a call report when his phone rang.

‘
Hello
big boy.’

The way she said it was unsettling when he was trying to remember who had said what in a tricky GHD meeting. Since winning the cooler business, BAT had gone into overdrive to catch the time of the year when holidays, Christmas and the New Year, and soaring temperatures all conspired to make people drink more than usual. Bernadette didn’t wait for a response. ‘How about we eat in tonight?’

‘Mm … just a moment, Bee … ah, look, I’ve just gotta train extra long tonight, the grading is around the corner and I’ve skipped too many sessions already.’

One of her silences consumed the line. Usually he said something to break it, this time he didn’t feel like it. Then a torrent, ‘Zane, for weeks you’ve been distant … even when we’re together it’s like you’re not there, baby! We don’t make love like we used to – it’s unnatural, unhealthy, actually depressing considering it’s so good. What must a girl do, hey?’ Her voice became sultry. ‘I’d have to, you know …’ she giggled, knowing the thought of her masturbating turned him on.

Instead of erotic images of Bee he thought immediately of Appleby, who had at last explained brand wanking to Zane after drinks in GHD’s pub one evening. Appleby was a good
oke
. Any edges he may have had as a young man had been chipped away by disappointment, like when he was swapped for a younger man by his wife and overlooked for senior jobs in London. ‘Jeez Appleby,’ Zane had said, ‘all they talk about are their brands, oh, and rugby. It’s like there’s nothing else in the world. Don’t they have families, food, friends and warm beds to go to? Reading a novel would be better!’

Appleby had brought his face, creased like old granadilla skin, closer to Zane’s. ‘It’s the phenomenon of brand wanking, old man. You’re obviously ready for it. You see, it’s found amongst clients who’ve been with the same company for a long time – marketing types mainly, but you’d be surprised how high up it goes – and amongst agency people who play along, creative types especially. It’s rampant where there are brand leaders that have acquired iconic status …’

‘Iconic? Ah, that’s what everyone calls the new Green Point soccer stadium.’

‘White elephant would be more appropriate,’ Appleby said caustically. ‘Anyway, these people are in awe of their brands. They won’t be seen dead using a competitive brand. They even try to convert people, engaging in campaigns of misinformation and giving the competition a bad rap.’

By this stage Zane was grinning. Appleby’s dark humour always cracked him up. And it suited Zane’s frame of mind as regards GHD. ‘
Ja,’
he said, ‘they talk as if their brands are people, no, more like
choms
deserving respect. They’re so defensive, Appleby, you can’t say anything negative about their brands. It’s arse-creeping really, isn’t it?’

‘You’re going to make a good advertising man, Zane.’

•

It was after 9 pm when Zane rode back from the dojo, his body warm and loose from focused training, his mind as keen as a katana. The last class of the day was always hard – brown and black belts only with Sensei Simon actively participating – but tonight had been extra rigorous with the grading around the corner. Zane’s black belt syllabus was demanding: complex
kihon
combinations, high-level
kata,
and freestyle
kumite
fighting. His
kata
of choice was
Kankudai,
one of the longest – sixty-five movements that took about ninety seconds. For two years Zane had been honing it for his
shodan
grading but tonight it was as if he had just started, prompting Sensei Simon to say, ‘Done with energy like a rock falling into a pool – too much going in too many directions. And you didn’t end where you started – you
must
end on the same spot, on the
embusen
.’ His blue eyes quizzed Zane, like the time Zane arrived with his mouth busted from Curly. What Sensei Simon really meant was, ‘you cocked up, now pull yourself together.’ Zane had responded with a spirited ‘
Oss,
Sensei!’

Late sunsets and long twilights had arrived in the Cape and there was the Christmas and New Year break to look forward to. Maybe surfing with Malaki in False Bay for a week, Zane thought, and then doing a bike trail in the Boland where there were no cars, pedestrians, or lampposts. And before that hopefully a bonus, although the grapevine had gone ominously quiet with Magnus morosely walking the floors at BAT. Hell, with a Hermanus holiday home and bigger profits on the way from the cooler business Magnus should be delirious. If Magnus had a
quarter
of his troubles he’d be suicidal, Zane thought as he took on the speed humps. Zane no longer enjoyed them, didn’t ramp and whoop, he just rode over them like motorists did, with irritation and impatience. Of his many preoccupations Lena weighed on him the most. She’d been thrust into his life like an unplanned, unwanted child – no gurgling, red-faced baby that melted hearts and took away some of the regret, but a creature as cold-blooded and dangerous as a Cape cobra. Zane’s thoughts jumped to the little brother he almost had but his mother never wanted – a brother who thankfully died in birth, strangled by his own umbilical cord at home with no medical help. There had been no preparation for his coming – no knitted clothes, no second-hand cot, not even a name. Nine months earlier, on New Year’s Day, Zane’s father and mother had engaged in a screaming session after a bout of heavy drinking. In a rage Eddie dragged Gloria to the bedroom. With their hands over their ears but still hearing it, Zane and Chantal fled the flat. Gloria’s cries followed them into the street, it sounded as if she was dying. They ran and ran, all the way to the police station. But the patrol cars were so busy on that New Year’s Day it took an hour before the police got to the flat. They found Gloria in a heap on the bed looking like a boxer after fifteen rounds, and Eddie in front of the TV watching sport. Zane’s mother refused to lay charges – out of fear or perverse loyalty, Zane wasn’t sure. All he knew was that three months later his mother’s stomach started to grow. The fact that no one said a word about the episode could not remove the bulge. It became bigger by the month and his mother’s silences longer. Had the kid lived she probably would have called it September to have something for the birth certificate. Trouble was there were already too many Septembers on the Flats.

On the stretch of road that was Wellington Avenue it was as though Zane had another rider with him, ghostly in the street lights, accelerating when he did, slowing down with him, stopping when he stopped. He was like a shadow rider but Zane recognised him. It was the boy who had run away when his father beat his mother, watched school fights with clammy palms. It was the Evangelical who had done nothing to stop the man next to him from being shot or the girl from being gang-raped as part of Hannibal’s initiation rite. It was his shadow rider who had crossed the line from Lavender Hill to Wynberg with him – the boy with the joyless eyes.

Zane shook his head as he entered his building. He’d gone to Lena’s aid on the train, yes, but with what fearful frame of mind, what half-heartedness! It had been more out of self-preservation. And the medicine to save her was so that he wouldn’t have to take her to hospital and risk his past from floating up like something putrid and long dead.

Bernadette was waiting for him, in his gown with nothing on underneath. For the first time he regretted that she had her own key. The realisation that he would rather have Lena in the flat than Bernadette troubled him. Was it self-preservation too – that it was safer to have Lena with him because of what she might say when she was
not
with him? How crazy, not long ago he was worried she would stick a knife into him while he was asleep. What strange women he had in his life – Bernadette, a rebel who liked to hang out in funky places, a good-time girl, happily taking what her rich father offered her. Lena, also a rebel but genuine – her rage against the things men did to women pure in its intensity even though it was frightening. Zane didn’t know about modern slavery – Lena’s words – in the way he knew about drug trafficking. He had been shocked at what she had told him. Human trafficking wasn’t the kind of thing ordinary people
acted
on, he thought, even if they knew about it. But Lena
had
acted – had gone out into the streets and rescued the Thai girl, looked after her until she disappeared. Lena was the real thing, like Coca-Cola in the ads on Justin’s wall. She stood up for what she believed in, took injustice, abuse, and evil head on. She might be a murderer but she had no shadow rider following her everywhere. Or did she?

H
annibal ran a hand over his stubbly hair, his eyes like embers in his brown-sugar face.

‘So, Delron, this cop came to see you in the
shebeen,
huh?’

‘
Ja,
Boss.’ Then hastily, ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was
sommer
minding my own business.’ Delron looked the athletic type – not an ounce of fat, only muscle, number 1 haircut. He was a cool dude – T-shirt the colour of red paw-paw, ‘Dockers’ in white broken letters on the front, black Diesel jeans, and loafers. Girls loved him. The gang thought he was lean only because he had so little to eat after spending his money on
larney
threads.

‘Exactly, Delron, so why pick on
you
, in a packed
shebeen?
I don’t like it. Are you sure you haven’t fucked up?’ They were at the
tik
house making crystal meth. With a huge street value per kilo, money had been pouring in since they started making the stuff and providing lollies and lighters for free – a ‘one-stop
tik
shop’ as Hannibal described it. He knew that taking
tik
made one crave sex not food. Hannibal could see it in the eyes of the dumpy, dowdy housewives who bought the crystals – the prospect of having great sex and losing weight at the same time. It was an irresistible proposition, the bonus being that it kept their husbands faithful for a while.

‘Apart from causing the explosion, no, Boss. The
mang’s
not for this
gamat.
No sirree, I wanna stay free! Jesus, I’d rather be dead than do time again.’

Delron had blown a hole through the wall of the
tik
house two days earlier, the second explosion since they started. Making crystal meth was easy except once the chemicals came together they had the potential of a small bomb. Every batch was like a man with a short fuse – it didn’t take much for it to go off. By some miracle nobody had been killed or maimed when the fireball flung glass, burning plastic, acids and solvents, and flesh-eating anhydrous ammonia in all directions.

‘What was the
gatta’s
name?’

‘Philander, Warrant Officer Philander. I know because I demanded to see his ID,’ Delron said aggressively, trying to regain favour.

Hannibal stopped what he was doing. Shit, it had to be Philander. He would have preferred any cop except Philander. When Hannibal’s men hijacked that car how could they have known that Philander’s wife was inside? Out of millions of cars they had to pick that one. Fuck it. And now Philander talking to Delron. Why now, after so long? What was new? Hannibal had been edgy since pushing Curly off the ledge. He had burnt Curly’s stuff in his yard where he normally made a fire for a barbeque. The plastic, canvas, and cloth had let off weird horrible smells, burning like some witches’ brew spelling trouble for him.

‘Think again, Delron, did he ask questions, about
anything
or
anybody
?’ Hannibal turned unblinking eyes on him. He
had
to know if Gatiep or Curly were mentioned.

‘Not a thing I can aim my piss at, Boss. That’s why I got nervous … like, why me, and why was he there? Maybe it’s because I’m an Evangelical, he knows I am.’

‘That’s not against the law. He’s sniffing, Delron, sniffing, for what I don’t know. Maybe it’s still that wife of his who got burned accidently, remember? Maybe …’ Hannibal got Delron in his sights again, ‘maybe it’s because you’re a dude, Delron, and you look easy?’

Delron looked hurt. He was about to say something when Hannibal gave him a disarming smile and slap on the back. ‘Forget about it, Delron, forget Philander, he’s sore about his woman, he’ll get over it. Don’t we all have to get over people who die, huh,
my bra?
’