Last Train to Retreat (28 page)

As he walked along the reed-fringed lagoon Zane felt reluctant to tell Lena. It would give her more to worry about. And like fuel poured over embers her rage would flare up if she knew that the man who wanted Zane dead was also in charge of the trafficking ring that had abducted Sarai. There would be no point; he could offer her neither solace nor a solution.

The sand was running through the egg-timer and the coin was spinning. All he could do was watch.

•

They nearly missed breakfast. For the first time he saw rings under her eyes. They ate in silence. She was as changeable as the weather on a Cape winter day. He wasn’t sure which Lena was sitting at the table with him. All he could hear was their existence ticking away. And there was so much he wanted to tell her, about his own past, his time as an Evangelical with Hannibal, and that he too might have killed before. Most of all, he wanted to tell her about the boy, the shadow rider who never spoke up, who chose to walk away from evil rather than fight it, and for whom not doing bad was always good enough. He needed to tell Lena all that before it was too late. And that he loved her.

But Zane never did because she remained as remote as a snowy peak in the Roggeveld Mountains. On Boxing Day they went to the beach again. There was already a mass of people burning under a cloudless heaven. She sat on a rise of sand looking out to the horizon – a dark blue blade against the light blue of the sky – not noticing the ball from the touch rugby match careering her way, the Frisbee floating like a UFO and the dog jumping its heart out to catch it, the lovers next to her with eyes only for each other.

B
ella returned from the Breede River to find that Philander had been murdered. She had purposely avoided newspapers while on holiday so that she wouldn’t be reminded of South Africa’s relentless crime wave. She was aghast that no one at the station had informed her.

‘Christ, Vince,
somebody
could’ve phoned me!’ she said. It was Christmas Eve and it was her first night duty.

Sergeant Vincent Bruins shifted his blue-clad block of a body uncomfortably from one boot to the other. ‘Captain, you were on holiday, we all thought you needed the break. I mean, what could you do? He wasn’t wounded, he was dead.’ He said it pleadingly as if the station’s love and respect for the Captain had won in a heart-rending trade-off. ‘And we thought you’d see it in the papers anyway.’

Bella looked up at him. ‘Oh, I see.’ Had she and Philander hidden their feelings that well? They had been cops not family, and cops got killed didn’t they? ‘Have they been caught?’

‘No, still looking …’

‘Who’s handling the case? It’s with us I hope, he was one of ours.’ He was mine, she thought. For a brief, heavenly while he had been hers. Why didn’t she tell him she loved him? She knew why as she thought it – it would have destroyed lives.

‘Warrant Officers Kuscus and Fritz are handling the case, Captain.’

Bella sat down. There was little justice in South Africa anyway when it came to arresting and convicting criminals, the system was too broken. But this – she looked away, shook her head in quiet desperation. ‘Thank you, Vince, that’ll be all.’

‘I’ll be off then, Captain, the Constable’s waiting in the patrol car.
Ja-nee,
it’s gonna be rough the next two weeks.’

‘Vince, I see you’re still not wearing a vest?’

‘Requisition’s gone missing, Captain, for ten vests, mine included. Not easy to borrow one, I’m an XXL you see …’ He grinned as he walked out.

•

Bella didn’t go home for breakfast on Christmas morning. She waited for Kuscus and Fritz to come in for their day shift. They were an odd pair. Kuscus’
bierpens
or beer stomach would not have been out of place at Newlands Rugby stadium. To Bella he was a ‘dye and perm’ man – hair mat-black like barbeque coal and curled as if blow-dried. It made him appear prosperous and self-satisfied. Fritz was like a pencil – slim, straight, with a pointy head as if it had been permanently pinched in childbirth, giving him a deprived look. They were hardly ever apart yet had wives. They always made Bella think of the saying ‘thick as thieves’.

Kuscus and Fritz were in an office for detectives at the back of the complex when Bella walked in. Kuscus got up and greeted Bella with put-on deference, ‘Captain, good morning!’ Fritz had been pacing up and down and now stood as rigidly as a pointer. Bella hadn’t been sure what to expect. They were detectives, they could have been watching Philander, seen him with her. She didn’t care. Philander wasn’t there anymore but she
was.
She could go higher up, reveal everything she knew and let others take care of it. But Bella had seen too much apathy, too much ineptitude and corruption in her time as a cop. She wasn’t taking any chances. And what proof did she have other than Philander’s verbal feedback which had been somewhat out of line anyway? As Bella looked at the two Warrant Officers she was aware of how much she despised them – men on the payroll of two opposing forces, working against everything she was working for. Did wearing civvies make it easier for them?

‘I understand you’re handling the Philander murder case?’ she said, looking at one, then the other. It was like dealing with a two-headed, double-mouthed monster.

‘Yes, we are. We’re short staffed so we volunteered to take this one on. He was our colleague after all.’ It was Kuscus who coolly said it but it could have been Fritz.

‘It was your turn to be away for Christmas and New Year, wasn’t it?’ Bella said to Kuscus. ‘You had already put in for leave when Philander was killed.’

‘I changed my mind, Captain. It couldn’t wait. It was a terrible thing that happened. And two heads are better than one.’

A two-headed beast indeed, Bella thought. ‘Okay,’ she said evenly, ‘here’s what I want: all the dockets he was working on in the month before he died, and secondly, all notes he made during the same period. I’d like them now, please. You’ll have them back today.’ She wouldn’t allow the murder of Quentin Philander to be buried in dockets and deceit the way his wife’s death had been. But she’d have to be careful – avoid making calls from her landline, or sharing information on Philander with colleagues. She was aware of corruption within the force but until now it hadn’t touched her. For the first time she felt the need to look over her shoulder – for her family’s sake, and Philander’s.

Bella spoke to her son, her daughter, and her husband telling them that the opening of presents and Christmas lunch would have to wait until the evening. She loved them, she said, more than anything in the world. She felt happy that she could say it and mean it and still love Philander more than ever, because he was no longer of this world.

•

Bella sat in a meeting room, dockets and papers spread out on the large table. For five hours she went through everything systematically, some pieces two or three times, drinking coffee to stay awake. What did she expect, she thought wearily, for two crooked detectives to leave incriminating evidence? There was nothing about Philander probing the Evangelicals, no mention of Hannibal, Gatiep, Curly or Delron or other gang members, not a word about visits or trips he had made relating to them. The docket on Philander’s death contained only the report on where, when and how he had been killed. It was as if Hannibal and the Evangelicals did not exist. To Bella but to no one else it was painful proof of the guilt of Kuscus and Fritz.

The order to eliminate Philander – she didn’t believe it was just another hijacking – and his actual murder could have involved members of Hannibal’s gang, Hannibal himself, Kuscus and Fritz, maybe a high-flying crime kingpin, and others. Hits by organised crime were often disguised as something else and notoriously difficult to crack. And when the target was a cop, tracks were covered extra carefully. She’d have to think hard about how she was going to handle it.

Bella took out her standard issue Z-88 from its holster, her slim, elegant hands looking unbecoming on the gun – a heavy, all-steel construction with a coarse plastic grip, the barrel protruding a short distance from the frame giving it a snub-nosed look. But, like Bella, it was reliable. In a tight spot it did what it was expected to do. During target practice she had got used to absorbing its shock, but coming to terms with its intimidating safety mechanism took longer. With the hammer back she could apply the safety catch, pull the trigger, and see the hammer drop without the gun firing. The fact that the percussion cap was protected from the firing pin gave her little comfort and for years she would hear the explosion in her mind every time she did it. There was an easier way – lowering the hammer gently using thumb and forefinger as with other handguns – but Bella had to prove to herself that she could do what men did. Conquering a spooky safety mechanism combined with a good eye on the practice range had given Bella Ontong a quiet courage.

But still, she had never had to kill. She’d been lucky. She stared at the ‘V’ logo on the grip, took out the 15-round magazine from the base and checked it. She pushed it back in and looked down the sights mounted atop the slide at the front and at the rear.
God knows what I might have to do,
she thought.

T
he yearning for blood was stronger in Hannibal than ever. He felt like a giant mosquito in Jurassic Park at four in the morning with an empty sac. After his last and final visit to the Gnome’s house he dreaded the thought of his binge coming to an end.

He and Delron alternated their vigil outside Zane’s flat and Lena’s house – every day from 4 pm to 10 pm and again from 6 am until 9 am, hoping to catch either or both of them. Delron nearly succeeded one night after seeing Lena go into the house. He waited a few hours to make sure she was asleep, but by the time he got in through the front door he found only her still-warm bed. Zane had simply vanished after Hannibal’s abortive attack, as completely as a bird on a migratory flight, throwing Hannibal into a rage so vicious that Delron and other members of the gang wouldn’t go near him.

Hannibal took to sitting in his lounge morosely watching Hong Kong triad movies and cleaning his trophies. The beautiful women only made him ache for Chantal. The thrill he felt reading the headlines and the reports on what investigators found in the largely destroyed R15-million house had worn off, leaving him on edge. ‘Bizarre’, ‘chilling’, ‘vigilantism or revenge?’, ‘PAGAD on the march again?’, ‘even the dogs didn’t stand a chance’ – Hannibal had cut out the articles he loved most and stuck them on the wall next to his trophies. A few reporters had said that for
both
Dobermans to die like that the killers couldn’t have been strangers. Hannibal was immensely proud that they thought one person could not have perpetrated such a massacre. It made him feel powerful.

On Christmas day he sat in his house listening to carols and feeling sad. He usually felt this kind of sadness on Good Friday when he would think of Jesus not only dying without a fight but actually
choosing
to do so for the human race. Hannibal couldn’t imagine anyone, let alone the son of God, dying for the likes of himself, the Gnome, Danny the triad, Cupido, Gatiep, Curly and Sarai, Zane and Lena, even Chantal. What a futile death, what a waste of a good man! It should have been called Black Friday.

On this Christmas day the sadness Hannibal felt was for himself at the prospect of an existence without Chantal. Zane and Lena he would find, of that he had no doubt – they didn’t have the means to escape to another city or country – but the love he’d had with Chantal he would never find again. It gnawed at him relentlessly like the incisors of a rodent – the thought that he was not yet thirty and would live the rest of his life without love.

•

Hannibal got up the day after Boxing Day with the curtains in his house still drawn. He showered, splashed on Brut, put on clean jeans, a Quicksilver T-shirt with cool patterns, sneakers, and his shoulder holster. Then he packed a large training bag with stuff to tide him over for at least a week. His car he left in the driveway, angel wings away from the street.

He exited the house squinting in the light like a mole emerging from a hole. Down the street he went in his bomber jacket, the heavy bag moving from side to side with his swagger. Down Concert Boulevard, past the school, the church, the police station, the community hall – places where people had lectured him on what was right and wrong when all they wanted was to bring him in line with how
they
saw things. How they had failed! Even the police, with the might of the law behind them, had never been able to nail him. Hannibal had God on his side in the early days and then the Gnome. But they both disappointed him, becoming meddlesome in their different ways. The two G-forces. And he had killed them both. As he strutted along he thought there was nothing and nobody Hannibal Fortuin couldn’t handle.

He walked about a kilometre to the
tik
house, checked out the high walls that had been erected around it recently. Inside the property he made sure none of the new locks had been tampered with. Only then did he go in through the front door. He surveyed the large room that had been created by bashing down the internal wall damaged by Delron’s accidental explosion. He’d get the boys to take all the stuff – the containers, acids and solvents, and glass lollies scattered around – out to the
stoep
. On the one side of the large room was the kitchen, on the other a passage leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. He went into the bedrooms, emptied his bag in a cupboard and spent an hour cleaning that part of the house. Finally, he went to the superette near the mosque and the halal butcher and bought provisions for a week, ticking off items mentally as he put them in the trolley.

With the bulging bag over one shoulder and plastic packets banging against his legs he made his way back to the
tik
house. Soon he would be ready.