Sacrifices (16 page)

Louise’s bladder aches, so she heads for the cramped bathroom and finds a
sink full of dirty dishes, alive with ants. She pushes the door closed and the ammonia reek of urine brings tears to her eyes. The toilet bowl is cracked, liquid leaking out onto the linoleum, and the lid is brown with dirt.

Louise squats, trying not to touch the seat. As she releases a stream of pee she hears the front door open and slam and the voices of Layla and another woman.

There is no toilet paper, so Louise pulls up her panties and jeans and yanks the flush chain that dangles from the wall. Pipes groan and water trickles from the cistern. Louise rinses her hands, wipes them on her jeans and flees the stink.

Standing by the couch is a woman of around fifty, head wrapped in a Muslim scarf, shrugging off a raincoat. She’s short and skinny, with the sharp features that seem to run in the family. When she turns Louise sees a livid scar reaching from her right ear to her nose. The flesh around the scar is furrowed and one side of her mouth curls up in a permanent half-smile.

She gives Louise a long stare. “Well, look at you.”

“Mrs. Bruinders?”

“You can call me Auntie Fazila.”

“Thanks for seeing me.”

“It’s okay.”

“Can you help me find him? Achmat?” Louise asks.

Fazila Bruinders prods the girl slouched on the couch, knees splayed, eating and smoking, hypnotized by a crotch-grabbing rapper.

“Layla,” she says, “go sit by Vicky.”

“I’m watching this.”

“Go, I said.” Fazila reaches over and clicks off the TV, the room suddenly silent, just the muffled
doof-doof
of rap coming from the apartment below, like an exchange of body blows.

The girl mutters but heaves herself from the couch and waddles out the front door, slamming it after her.

Fazila sighs. “I was seventeen when I had her mother, who was sixteen when she was born. Now this one’s not even fifteen and she’s ready to push one out. We’ve always been early starters, us Bruinders women. But not you?”

Louise shakes her head. “No.”

“You clever.” She points at the couch. “Sit, Louise. Layla offer you tea?”

“No, I’m fine, really.”

“Okay.” She sinks down next to Louise who has to work hard not stare at that liverish scar. Fazila kicks off her shoes. “I been on my feet the whole blessed day, working overtime for peanuts.”

“I’m sure you’re tired, so I won’t keep you long. I just want to know how to get in touch with Achmat.”

The woman looks at her. “You speak so nice. Like a proper white girly.”

“I was lucky. I went to school in Newlands.”

“Your ma in service there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about her passing, though I never really knew her, of course. When Achmat came out of Pollsmoor I got her number from some people up on the farms, thought maybe she would want to know. But she was short with me on the phone, like she thought herself better than us out here.” She sniffs, then shrugs. “Who can blame her, hey?”

She gives Louise a long look. “Plain to see you Achmat’s daughter. What you know about him?”

“Not much. My mother wouldn’t talk about him, but she told me his name and said he went to prison right after my brother was born. I read about what he did, on the Internet.”

“That business in the
Karoo?”

“Yes.”

“Too terrible, that. Makes me ashamed to have the same blood in my veins. But he was always so, from when he was this big,” she holds a hand a few feet from the carpet, “just like our father was before him.” Her eyes blink away a memory and she shakes her head. “You don’t want to know about what he done to us, our daddy. But it’s no excuse for how Doogie turned out.”

“Doggy?”

“No, Doogie. Like
Doogie Hauser
? That TV show with the kid doctor?” She sees Louise’s blank expression. “Before your time. Achmat called himself that ’cause he likes to cut people.” She fixes her sharp eyes on Louise. “My girl, I tole you to come here ’cause there’s something I want you to see.”

“What?”

She points to her scarred face. “This. Doogie took his knife to me when I fell pregnant. Said I was his and my daddy’s alone, that he’d make sure no other man would want me again. And none ever did.” She nods. “Ja, my brother is an evil bastard. He done things to people—women, children—that only an animal would do. You look like a nice girl. Soft. Keep away from him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got no one else. My mother and my brother are dead.”

“I’m sorry, but sometimes it’s better to have nobody than let a thing like that into your life.”

“You know my brother was murdered in Pollsmoor?”

“I heard something, ja.”

“I need to know why. And I think Achmat can tell me.”

“Won’t bring him back, your brother.”

“No, it won’t, but it’ll give me some peace.” She looks at Fazila. “Please, will you help me contact Achmat?”

“You not gonna listen to me, are you?”

Louise shakes her head. “No.”

The woman closes her eyes, sighing. Then she looks up at Louise. “Okay, I tell you what I’ll do.”

“What?”

“I’ll call him tomorrow. Tell him you want to see him. If he say yes, I call you back. Okay?”

“Okay.” Louise stands. ‘Thank you.”

“No, nothing to thank me for.”

Fazila walks her out into the damp night. The men are gone and the landing is empty. The woman bangs on a neighboring door and it opens, Layla peering out.

“You go home now,” Fazila says and the girl shuffles into the apartment, holding her lower back, sliding her eyes over Louise.

“Have you seen Achmat since he got out of prison?” Louise asks, speaking softly.

“Ja, once. He come on here and I chase him. I can’t have him here, not with Layla.” She leans in close, the smell of stale tea on her breath. “He’ll do things to her, just like him and our daddy done to me. And honest-to-god my girl, being his daughter don’t make you safe.”

Fazila Bruinders closes the door and Louise hears the turning of locks and clanking of chains. She walks down the swaying fire escape, a distant aria of sirens rising into the wet night.

Lane, fingers drumming on the scarred surface of his desk, stares at his cell phone lying in the dusty light of the Anglepoise lamp, willing it to ring.

He is alone at the bookstore. Tracy Whitely left twenty minutes ago, taking with her a faint trace of cinnamony perfume—the first time he’s smelled fragrance on her. Does she have a date? He realizes that this thought disturbs him.

Lane lifts his phone, checking that it has reception. The signal bar is at maximum. As he lays the Nokia down it rings and he grabs for it, clearing his throat. When he sees the name of a book dealer from Johannesburg he curses and sends the call to voice mail.

A few more minutes pass. He blows his nose. He hears his fingers drumming again and stills them. He stares through the hatch at the busy sidewalk, looking for the girl who calls herself Jade, the neon of the strip club across Long Street winking at him.

Reaching under his chair, he lifts out a brown paper shopping bag with string handles (LANE’S BOOKSTORE – SINCE 1962 printed discreetly on the front) and opens it, for the umpteenth time checking on the bundle of money inside.

Before lunch he walked down to his mausoleum of a bank on
Adderley Street and withdrew one hundred thousand rand from the bookstore account. There was no difficulty getting the cash. Beverley deposited more money into his checking account each month than he ever used, and even after the withdrawal he was left with a surplus.

The cash came in ten bundles of crisp notes, bound with elastic bands. Lane stowed the money in his jacket pockets and kept looking over his shoulder as he hurried back to the bookstore. He’d been mugged in Long Street a few years ago: three street kids shouldering him into a doorway, holding a knife to his ribs, relieving him of his phone, watch and wallet. But today he made it back without incident and wrapped the money in a yellow bag from the neighboring liquor store and shoved it into his desk drawer, beneath piles of old invoices.

After Tracy left he retrieved the money—fighting a neurotic urge to count it—and slipped it into the shopping bag.

He’s had a nervous day, certain that he has been betrayed by Jade. Each time the phone rang he’d expected
Tracy to tell him the police were on the line. Each time the doorbell sounded he’d expected to see blue uniforms.

But the day has passed uneventfully.

Lane waits, staring through the hatch at the pink neon: the outline of a naked woman, her leg kicking out, then falling, then kicking out again.

His cell phone rings. Unknown caller. Lane snatches at the phone, nearly knocking it to the floor.

“Yes?” he says.

“Hey, Mike, it’s me.” The slangy voice with the well-bred undertone.

“Okay.”

“You got it?”

“Yes, I have it.”

“Cool. Meet me at your car in five minutes.”

She’s gone and he pockets the phone, clicks off the desk lamp and grabs the bag of money. Lane locks the bookstore and steps out into a stream of pedestrians. He passes the busy liquor store—a tense moment when two dark men smelling of booze shoulder past him—heading for a gated alleyway. Five years ago, after endless break-ins and one fatal carjacking, Lane and a few of the other tenants in the area successfully petitioned the city for permission to enclose the alley and use it as a private parking area. Holding the bag under his arm, he digs out his keys. Two remotes, one for home and one for this gate. The keychain of a jailer.

He hits the blue button and the gate judders open. Sensing someone behind him he spins, ready for an attack.

“Relax, Mike. It’s me.”

Jade is wearing a black hoodie over dark jeans, her face lit for a moment as she fires up a cigarette. “Let’s go to your car.”

Lane points. “It’s over there.”

“I know, Mike,” she says, already heading toward his BMW.

Lane unlocks the car and sits behind the wheel, the shopping bag in his lap. The girl slips in beside him, exhaling smoke.

She points at the bag. “The cash?”

“Yes.”

He hands it to her and she cracks her door to activate the dome light. She tosses the cigarette away, takes the money from the bag and flips quickly though the bundles of bills, then stows them inside her jacket.

“Cool,” she says, already half out the car.

“Wait,” he says, grabbing her by her skinny wrist, pulling her back.

Lane hears a ratcheting sound—the blade of a utility knife being extruded from its handle—and feels a stab at his jugular.

“What the fuck you tryna pull, Mike
?” Jade says, that bruised mouth right up close, the burned plastic smell of drugs on her breath.

“Jesus, I just wanted to ask—”

“Ask what?”

“What happens now?”

“Nothing.” She thumbs the blade back into its handle and it disappears into her pocket. “Nothing happens now.”

“How do I know you won’t go to the media?”

“The media means the cops. Me and the
boere
aren’t the best of friends.” She slips out of the car. “Relax, Mike, we’re solid.”

The door slams and she hurries away. A squall has blown in off the
Atlantic, and she disappears into the sudden deluge.

Lane puts a finger to his throat and it comes back lightly smeared with blood. He opens the glove box and finds a pack of Kleenex. Freeing a tissue, he tears off a square of paper and glues it to his skin.

Lane starts the BMW and drives out into the night, rain patterning the windshield, the city melting into the gutters.

Achmat Bruinders called and she missed him.

Around seven the old woman from across the way knocked on Louise’s door, asking if she was also having a problem with her TV. When Louise said she didn’t have a TV, the woman chattered on, lonely and wanting company. She was deaf and shouted rather than talked and Louise barely heard the ringing of her cell phone.

She excused herself, slammed the door and ran for the phone, her fingertips brushing the plastic as it fell mute. Almost immediately the phone bleated and the red message light flashed.

Louise played the message, hearing a man saying, “Fuck.”

Nothing more. But she knew who it was. Louise searched the list of her incoming calls. Private number.

She dropped the phone and watched the rain run down the window like tears. He’d call back.

But forty minutes later she still sits staring at the phone.

She dials Fazila Bruinders, sure that she’ll get voice mail, but the woman answers: “Ja?”

“This is Louise.”