Ivory (35 page)

‘Alexandra,' he said.

The driver raised his eyebrows with a ‘you're
sure
?' look, but then just said, ‘
Yebo
.'

The driver cut through the back streets of Edenvale and eventually navigated his way onto the multi-lane N3 for the short hop to London Road, the entrance way to Alexandra.

More commonly known as ‘Alex', the township was set up to house the black workers of northern Johannesburg. These days more than
three hundred thousand souls lived there in shanties, modest houses and imposing multistorey hostels that loomed like prison blocks over the bustling eight hundred hectares of humanity.

Few whites had business here, but Alex had visited a man he knew only as Sipho on half-a-dozen occasions. He gave directions to the driver as they crossed the Jukskei River. Things were changing here, slowly but for the better, and the Alexandra Renewal Program had had a few wins since his last visit. There were more new houses, a new primary school he hadn't noticed last time, and the stadium was coming along. Even the river didn't smell as bad.

He had to call Sipho's mobile phone to make sure he had the right house.

‘Yes, this is my home. You are welcome. I can see your car and I am coming now,' Sipho said into the phone.

Alex recognised the short, hunchbacked African man waving to him from behind a stout grilled security door, but not the house around him. What had once been a drab single-storey grey house with a flat iron roof was now a two-storey dwelling with angular, sloping lines, its walls painted a bright ochre. There was the struggling beginnings of a garden in front, which looked like it could desperately use the fat drops of rain that were now pinging the top of the Mercedes. ‘Wait here,' he told the driver. The man looked up and down the narrow street. Half-a-dozen young men were sitting in the gutter opposite them, eyeing the shiny black sedan, but Alex said, ‘Don't worry. Once they see where I'm going, no one will touch you.' The driver nodded, though he plainly wasn't convinced.

Sipho held open the security door for Alex, looked left and right, and across to the youths, who nodded back at him. Alex guessed they were his lookouts. They shook hands in the African way, raising their palms to interlock thumbs halfway through. ‘How are you, my friend?' Sipho asked.

‘Fine, and you? You seem to have prospered since my last visit.'

Sipho smiled, following Alex's gaze around his new home. The house was starkly furnished, though spotlessly clean, and Sipho proudly
showed Alex the three bedrooms and the indoor flushing toilet, which he also demonstrated with obvious pride. ‘You probably take these things for granted.'

‘Not in Mozambique, believe me.'

‘What can I do for you, my friend?'

Sipho already knew why he was here, even though they hadn't discussed it over the phone, and he led Alex into the back yard, where there was a much smaller brick building, with a flat roof like Sipho's old house. It had a solid steel door, which squeaked noisily when Sipho unlocked a padlock as big as Alex's fist. The windows, he saw, were blocked with more steel plate behind the original burglar bars.

Not everyone in the neighbourhood was as prosperous as Sipho. Despite the rain the smell of wood smoke and raw sewage was strong. On one side he heard a child screaming from a house, while somewhere else nearby a man raised his voice in anger.

Sipho closed the door behind him and they were in darkness. Alex casually brushed open his coat, the fingers of his good hand resting on his pistol. Sipho pulled a cord and a bare electric light came on, revealing enough weapons, ammunition and explosives to equip a hundred soldiers.

Alex went to the home-made wooden gun rack and selected one of more than a score of R5 military assault rifles.

‘A good choice,' Sipho said, not that he had any idea why Alex was interested in such a weapon.

The weight and feel of the rifle were familiar in his hands, like an extension of his own body. Thanks to his service with the South African Army he could strip and assemble one of these blindfolded. He pulled back the slide, checking the breech was empty at the same time as cocking it. He aimed at a fly speck on the wall and squeezed the trigger. The hammer clicked. The R5 was a copy of the rugged Israeli Galil. On full automatic it could fire more than six hundred bullets a minute.

‘Ex-army?'

Sipho shrugged. ‘The defence force themselves estimate they've misplaced nearly five hundred rifles in the last few years.'

‘I need six, plus twenty-five thirty-five-round magazines,' Alex said, replacing the rifle and wandering slowly down the rack of assorted guns, knives and explosives. Sipho's place was a veritable supermarket of death. It was surprising he didn't have a few stolen shopping trolleys as well. ‘And ten of these,' he said, hefting a fragmentation hand grenade. He smiled as Sipho winced when he tossed the grenade and caught it. ‘Don't trust your own merchandise?'

‘Hey, there are kids living next door.'

Alex was tempted to say something about Sipho's apparent concern for his neighbours, while dealing in products that would leave children fatherless and motherless across the country. Alex knew very well why Sipho was doing such a good trade in R5s. Johannesburg's street crime was an escalating arms race. When the security guards started carrying semiautomatic shotguns and wearing body armour, the crooks needed weapons that would punch a hole through Kevlar and outgun their opposition.

If all went according to plan no one would be injured by Alex's purchases and the guns, he promised himself, would end up at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, along with his other weaponry, once he went legit. With luck, that would be very soon.

‘Shit, Sipho, what don't you have here?' Alex picked up a grenade the shape and size of a beer can. He whistled. ‘Thermite?'

Sipho nodded.

‘Who uses these?'

‘You can burn through the top of a safe with one of those.'

Alex nodded. Pulling the pin of an ANM 14 thermite grenade set off a chemical reaction between the aluminium and iron oxide inside, producing temperatures in excess of two thousand degrees. The grenades were designed to sabotage equipment and could melt through a vehicle engine block or the breech of an artillery gun in minutes.

‘I'll take four. What's in these boxes?'

Sipho shuffled along and opened a cardboard carton. From it, he pulled a tan army load-bearing vest. ‘Brand new. Straight from the factory.'

‘Perfect,' Alex said. He'd thought he would have to stop at an army surplus store. ‘Six sets.'

They haggled over the price for a few minutes, but met, as they usually did, in the middle. Oddly, Alex trusted Sipho, and he knew he was getting a good deal on the equipment. He hoped, though, he would never meet the man again in his life.

‘You want to take all this now?' Sipho asked.

‘No.' He gave Sipho the address of a self-storage place in Nelspruit, the last major town on the N4 tollway between Johannesburg and the Mozambican border. Alex had used the garage there to store stolen goods that he'd moved from Mozambique into South Africa. In an adjoining unit there was also a stolen Nissan
bakkie
, which would soon be getting resprayed in South African Army tan brown. ‘Three days from now?' Alex pulled a key to the storage garage off his key ring.

‘
Yebo
, Alex. A pleasure doing business with you, as always.'

Not for long, Alex told himself.

J
ane and George said little to each other for most of the journey by limousine from Melrose Arch to Pretoria's Capital Park Station, where they would board the train for their trip to Cape Town.

George had a list of calls to make, mostly to the UK, which was fine by Jane. The airconditioning in the Mercedes was icy and Jane asked the driver to turn the temperature up and the radio down.

She hadn't confronted George about the prostitute in his room and nor would she, until she knew exactly who she was dealing with. What was clear to her now was that George had lied to her about his relationship with his wife and was sleeping with other women as well. She now doubted he had any intention of divorcing Elizabeth. His actions, while despicable, were not criminal. However, once she found out what was in the package she had hidden on board the
Penfold Son
she might clarify that assumption.

The countryside between Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city, and Pretoria, its capital, had once been open farm and grazing land, but it was being increasingly filled with housing developments. Wealthy citizens were seeking escape from Johannesburg's violent crime.

Jane wore a cream linen jacket and skirt and matching heels that she'd bought that morning. She was on first-name terms now with the
lady at the boutique at Melrose Arch. She looked out of the tinted window so George wouldn't see the concern on her face. Not that he would notice.

What, she asked herself yet again, was she doing? From what she had learned in the past twenty-four hours the handsome, urbane millionaire businessman next to her had a predilection for hitting prostitutes, and had quite possibly paid a man to try and kill an innocent woman. She wondered if the mildly kinky sex she and George had already engaged in would have been a precursor to something much more violent and dark.

Jane glanced at George, then back out the window. She was still having trouble believing all of this – any of it – was true. She wished there was some plausible explanation for the way he'd spoken to his wife and the horrible things the prostitute had said he'd done to her. At the same time, the revelations had confirmed to her that she'd made the right choice in not telling George about the package MacGregor had given her. Aside from the terrible consequences for Lisa Novak, which Jane felt genuinely sorry for, she'd put at least one of George's dishonest pursuits on hold. What she needed to do now was find out what was in that package.

Pretoria's streets were busy with civil servants on their lunch breaks. The traffic, however, didn't seem as heavy, or as fast, as Johannesburg. They skirted the centre of the city but rejoined its main thoroughfare, Paul Kruger Street, near the zoo.

Like the train they would be travelling on, Capital Park Station was a lovingly restored relic of the golden years of rail travel. Green-liveried African porters took their bags and a hostess led Jane and George, who was still talking on his mobile phone, into the high-ceilinged station building. There were no tickets to hand over or boarding passes to collect. Nor were there metal detectors or X-ray machines to scan their baggage. This was yet another reason why Jane preferred terrestrial travel to aeroplanes. That, and the fact a waiter in a bow tie and silk vest was approaching with a tray of champagne and orange juice.

George waved his hand dismissively, but Jane took a glass to steady
her nerves. She looked around for Alex, wondering if he would show up. She couldn't see him.

The hall was filling with passengers. The accents were a mix of German, British and American. It was the sort of train where men were expected to wear a jacket and tie to dinner. Jane had worried briefly, despite the bigger concerns in her life at the moment, if she would be underdressed in her work suit. In fact, looking around the room she thought most of the women looked pretty shabby. If anything, she was overdressed. A South African matron in her fifties was wearing a cropped top and three-quarter length camouflage trousers that would have looked bad enough on a teenager – ditto the piercing that one woman wore in her belly button. An elderly couple speaking a Nordic language arrived in matching khakis, their faces reddened from an arduous few days at some luxury safari lodge, no doubt.

A steam whistle blew outside, loud enough to make her flinch. Jane left George on his phone and threaded her way between chintz armchairs and steamer trunk tables bearing silver platters of triangular sandwiches with no crusts. She was too tense to eat, but exchanged her empty champagne flute for a full one from a passing waiter. From the French doors leading to the platform outside she could see the locomotive. It was long and sleek, painted dark green and wreathed in steam. She'd read that while the train would actually be pulled by a diesel or electric engine for most of the trip, departures and arrivals were always done with a steam loco. It was all for show, not unlike her presence in Africa at George's side, she thought bitterly.

If she hadn't been so worried about what was going to happen at the end of the journey she might have enjoyed the build-up more. Now she was just anxious to get on board and under way. She checked her watch and tapped her foot on the ornately tiled floor while she waited for boarding to commence. Outside on the platform millionaires with tiny digital cameras snapped pictures of each other on the locomotive's footplate.

George finished his call, made his way to Jane, then said he was going to find the bathroom. Jane turned and caught sight of Alex.

She recognised him even before she saw his face. He was looking away from her, but the thick, longish black hair and the broad shoulders that filled his black suit jacket gave him away immediately. He wore tight-fitting jeans and fashionable brown leather shoes. Alex seemed completely at ease in this world of moneyed shabby chic.

She felt oddly comforted, seeing him. He was talking to an African porter and as Jane threaded her way towards him she could hear it was in the man's native language. She glanced over her shoulder and saw George disappear into the gents at the far end of the station hall. As Jane came up behind Alex the porter laughed out loud at whatever Alex had said to him.

He turned, as if sensing she was behind him, and when he smiled her mind flashed back to the moment they had shared on the stairs of the ruined building in the middle of Gorongosa National Park. She felt safer now that he was here, which was ridiculous given his occupation.

‘I smelled your perfume,' he said. ‘It's Beautiful.'