The Hunter (13 page)

In truth, Anna Cliff did not know what she needed in life, other than that she was not happy being who she was, where she was, doing what she was doing right now. Perhaps her considerate if romantically inattentive husband was right; maybe the answer was back in Africa.

*

‘Oh, I don’t know. I still can’t make up my mind,’ the young woman, stage name Bambi, real name Emily, said to Peter Cliff as he washed his hands in his surgery. ‘I know I can make more if I have bigger boobs, but I’m scared.’

‘There’s a minute risk with any surgery, of course, but you’ve no reason to be
scared
,’ Peter said. He buttoned his cuffs and sat down behind his desk. Emily listed her occupation as ‘dancer’, leaving out the ‘lap’ bit. It was her fourth consultation and she was still dithering about whether or not to go ahead with a breast enhancement. Emily had been referred to him by a colleague.

‘Giles told me you were the best,’ Emily said, tucking in her blouse and sitting down again in the chair on the other side of his desk.

Peter’s time didn’t come cheap although Giles, an orthopaedic specialist, was loaded, so Peter consoled himself that his friend wouldn’t mind paying for his mistress’s indecisiveness.

‘Giles wants me to get the operation,’ she said.

‘Yes, but the important question – the only question – is, do you want it?’

She forced a little smile with those pouty lips. ‘I want him to be happy, and he’s ever so good to me. Sometimes, though, I . . .’

Peter crossed his legs and waited.

‘Well, you know, sometimes I wish he was a bit more like you. A little more concerned about what I want.’

‘Read this,’ Peter said, and slid across his desk a brochure that detailed the ins and outs of the sort of surgical procedure Emily was considering. She reached as if to take it, but instead put her fingers, with their shiny red nails, on his.

‘Giles said I should thank you, properly.’

Peter snatched his hand away. ‘That’s very nice of you, Emily, but you’ve said thank you already. You can thank me by paying the bill.’

She seemed suddenly emboldened, her embarrassment gone. Peter assumed she knew exactly how to get men to do what she wanted. Despite her youth she no doubt had a wealth of experience in getting men to fork over tipping dollars at whatever strip club she worked at.

Emily stood, put her palms on either side of the blotter advertising a drug company’s wares, and leaned forward. Her breasts were close and he smelled her sweet, girlish perfume. Her long, straightened hair brushed his cheeks and he sat, unable to move for the moment as she moved her mouth to his left ear and gently bit the lobe. ‘He told me to give myself to you, but I want you anyway,’ she whispered.

Peter put his hands on the edge of his desk and pushed, propelling himself backwards on the rollers of his office chair, out of her reach. ‘I’m a married man, Emily. And I do not, under any circumstances, get involved with my patients. Sorry.’

She pouted and tilted her head. Along with the spoilt child expression he thought he saw a flash of anger in those brown eyes. She was used to turning men away, but not to being spurned. Peter wondered if the business about Giles telling her to have sex with him was true – he would have words with him if it was – or if she was getting sick of Giles and was in the market for a new doctor sugar daddy. ‘That’s nice.’ She straightened and took her overcoat off the back of the chair. ‘Sorry from me too.’ She turned and walked to the door of the consulting room and, as she put her hand on the knob, looked back over her shoulder. ‘But I meant the bit about wanting to.’

Peter pulled himself back under his desk and exhaled as Emily closed the door. He had more important things to worry about than randy strippers.

He checked his watch; even with the flirting he had finished Emily’s appointment with ten minutes to spare. He pulled the computer keyboard to him and switched from the patient records software to his internet browser. He googled Hudson Brand and scrolled down the hits to the man’s webpage.

He sized up the guide cum private eye from his picture. ‘Arrogant prick,’ he muttered. He clicked on the tab that said ‘Book a safari’. On the page that came up were the details of a travel wholesaler that handled bookings for Brand’s tours in Africa, and which had with branches in the UK, America, Australia, Germany, France, Portugal and Spain.

Peter clicked on the link to an email address for the UK operator and typed a short message, saying he wanted a quote for a three-week safari guided by Hudson Brand around Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. He included a line claiming that Brand had come highly recommended by friends who had used his services as a guide, and that he wanted no one else. He made sure to sign off the email as ‘Dr Peter Cliff’, as he knew for most people this conjured up images of a man with money to burn, and guaranteed a prompt reply.

As soon as he hit send Peter got up and walked out to reception. Emily was at the counter paying her bill. She looked over at him and winked and he knew he had failed to stop his own blush. He looked around the waiting room and recognised his next patient. ‘Mrs Hyland. Come through, please.’

9

I
typed an email on my iPhone as Lungile drove our new car, a BMW sedan, through the leafy streets of the Houghton Estate, one of Johannesburg’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. Nelson Mandela had lived here in his final years. The car was hot – Fortune’s work – but it had been re-sprayed and sported the plates from a wreck.

The email was addressed to the person at the insurance company in England who was supposedly processing the claim:

Dear Miss Johnson,

I was contacted here in South Africa, where I am currently staying on business, by a Mr Hudson Brand, who claimed he was an assessor for your company, and needed to meet with me and get me to sign some papers. I made some enquiries with your affiliate here and was told no such assessor existed. Given the high rate of crime in this country I was immediately suspicious. Also, from further contact I have had with other people in the insurance business I have learned there was nothing regular about Mr Brand’s request. Can you please clarify who this man is and why it is taking so long to process my late friend’s claim, and fulfil her wishes, as outlined in her will. If there are additional declarations which I need to sign then please email them to me and I will reply accordingly.

Regards, Linley Brown

The mesh-covered slit I was looking through was annoying and I had to tug it, again, to make sure I was hitting the right key to send the message.

‘You look good in black.’ Lungile gave a muffled laugh from inside her own burqa. She had bought the kind that concealed us completely. She had even found us gloves so that no one would know if the women under the outfits were black, white or brown.

‘I’m sweating like a pig in this thing,’ I said. ‘Turn up the air con.’

We needed to leave Johannesburg, especially after the front-page exposure our last job had elicited, but Lungile wanted one more go at the big end of town before we relocated our operation. I had laughed when I had seen the special dresses she had bought for our next job; it really was a stroke of genius.

I wondered if it would be a one-off. If the home owners we were about to rob connected the two women in burqas to the loss of their belongings then the media and the police would probably connect the case to the ‘glamour girls’ in a matter of minutes. Perhaps Muslim women in traditional dress would be banned from open house viewings as a result, and we certainly wouldn’t be able to risk trying the same trick twice.

That was fine with me because I definitely, positively, wanted this to be my last job with Lungile. My money was surely close to coming through, despite what the Brand guy got up to in Zimbabwe. There was no reason for me to think otherwise, but I just did not want to meet him in person. Lungile’s brother, Fortune, had fenced the loot from the widow’s house and while it was not as much as Lungile had hoped for – it never was, and I was sure Fortune was taking more than the twenty-five per cent commission he claimed he skimmed – I at least had enough money in my bank account now to buy food and a few items of new clothing, and to contribute to Lungile’s rent. We would, however, need some more cash if we were to relocate, as there would be up-front payments to make on a new house.

I felt another pang of guilt over the anguish we’d caused the widow on our last job. Maybe the phone I’d stolen had been her husband’s. What if the loss of it had brought her grief to the surface again? I resolved, as I had before, that when my money came through I would find my victims and try to do something for each of them, to repay them in some small way for any hurt I’d caused them. I was never meant to be a career criminal; the feeling of shame was eating me from the inside out and I wanted this ride to stop.

I wondered what it was like for Muslim women to wear this get-up every day. What did they wear underneath it? I was wearing a pink Lycra running top and short black exercise shorts and I was boiling. Did they wear nothing at all? I was made up, but my makeup felt grimy in the heat and my hair was plastered to my face.

‘Are you still thinking of leaving me and flying to Kenya or wherever when you get your money?’ Lungile asked me.

‘Yes.’ I was glad I couldn’t see her face. I hoped she wouldn’t continue her thieving without me, but I knew she probably would. She couldn’t pay her mother’s hospital bills on the wages of a domestic or waitress, which would be about the only line of work she could pick up as an illegal immigrant.

I detected a shrug under the folds of Lungile’s burqa. ‘I’ll miss you.’

All I really wanted was a life free of drugs and hassles and, for a while at least, men. I wasn’t turning gay – though life might have been easier if I could – but after my last relationship I needed to get away, and a new country was a good start. I had stopped after four glasses of wine the night before, and I was proud of myself and my newly found willpower. Lungile had carried on and started twerking in front of the TV, and for a little while I felt nervous, angry even, that I hadn’t reached the same point of release. I wanted to mix a couple of pills with my drink, badly, but I held off, made some black coffee, then went to bed.

I asked myself again what I was doing here, sweating nervously, wiping my hands on the material of my disguise before I had to put my gloves on. I was telling myself the insurance payment would come soon, and if I lived on noodles and
pap
I could have survived without thieving any more. But Lungile had pleaded for me to come along, and I was excited by the novelty of her brazen plan to hit Johannesburg’s millionaires again. I didn’t feel like we were female Robin Hoods, but I did take some consolation from the fact that everything we stole would, if the owners were sensible, be replaced by their insurers, and that no one would ever be harmed as a result of our raids. Also, Lungile’s mother needed her cancer treatment.

I knew it was a thin justification, but despite my feelings of guilt and conviction that I had to stop, I was addicted to the thrill of stealing almost as much as I was to prescription drugs. My precarious mental state was balanced on such justifications. I had blurred too many lines in the past couple of years and I didn’t think I knew the difference, really, between right and wrong any more. So much of what I did was legally or morally unjustifiable that I had constructed an elaborate web of excuses for my actions – love, lust, addiction, drugs, adrenaline, Lungile, him – it was always the fault of some other person or substance or condition, never me. It would all change, I told myself again, when my money came through. Until then, I had to eat.

‘There’s the house,’ Lungile said.

I saw the over-sized real estate agent’s sign in front of the security gate and had a flashback to the last job. Part of me wanted to tell Lungile right then to keep on driving and to forget all this. What the hell, I would get a job as a phone sex operator, a car park guard, anything to avoid breaking the law again. But for some reason I couldn’t do it, so I held my tongue.

As Lungile turned into the drive, I noticed an Eskom
bakkie
parked across the street. I guess power failures and the theft of copper electricity cables didn’t only happen in the townships and poorer suburbs of Johannesburg.

The estate agent waiting to greet us was a man, solidly built with a spiky grey crew cut that was running to a mullet in the back. His jacket was buttoned, stretched across a beer belly, and as we got out he ran a finger around his collar. I wondered if he was new to the job.

‘Morning, ladies,’ he smiled as we eased ourselves awkwardly from the car.

‘Good morning,’ I said, in what I hoped was a passable Middle Eastern accent.

‘Welcome.’ He had a clipboard in one hand and pulled a plastic biro from his shirt pocket with the other. I glanced down and saw that the black shoes beneath the slightly frayed charcoal cuffs had a mirror sheen. I knew it was spit and polish rather than patent leather because the sides of the shoes merely gleamed instead of shone. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, ladies, could I perhaps get a name and cell phone number from you?’

This was standard procedure among the agents we dealt with and Lungile or I always bought new pre-paid SIM cards before each job so that if someone tried to call us just after the viewing we could reply, thus establishing we hadn’t given fake numbers.

‘Fatima el-Khouri,’ I said.

Lungile waited while I spelled it out for the agent, then did the same when she gave her name.

The man coughed as if clearing his throat. ‘Ladies, I don’t like to sound rude, but you don’t perhaps have some ID do you? I understand and respect your traditional dress, but we can’t be too careful these days.’

‘You mean these women who rob the houses?’ I asked, disappointed he couldn’t see my theatrically raised eyebrows.

‘Just standard procedure,’ he said quickly.

Bullshit
, I thought, but I reached into my real Gucci handbag and took out Fatima el-Khouri’s ID book. ‘Is one enough or do you need both?’

‘No, no, no,’ he said, scribbling down Fatima’s ID number. ‘The one will be fine.’

I willed myself to breathe more slowly and I was now very pleased he could not see the sweat rolling down my face or my chest rising and falling. When Lungile had outlined her plan for us to dress as Muslim women I had insisted that we go mall-trawling in Johannesburg until we could find the handbag of a suitable target to lift. Fatima had, in fact, not been wearing a burqa but a rather fetching Prada suit when I spied her in a cafe in Sandton Square. Indeed, I complimented her on her outfit as I lowered my open-bottomed shopping bag over her Gucci number and then picked both up and walked away, holding tight to the two sets of handles. Finding her ID in the bag later, I used it to buy a new SIM card, registering it in her name under the RICA regulations which were designed to prevent criminal activity using mobile phones; I got a laugh out of that.

Lungile and I set off, joining half a dozen other women inspecting the six-bedroom, six-bathroom pile. When the theft was noticed the agent would give the police the list of names and numbers. My number would ring out, but even a tiny amount of surface scraping by the laziest of detectives should uncover the report of theft the real Fatima el-Khouri had no doubt submitted by now. The ladies in the burqas would be obvious first suspects.

Be calm
, I told myself as I entered the first of the bedrooms. It was a teenage boy’s, if the bikini-clad model on the wall and the cricket bat in the corner were any indication. On the desk was an Apple MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone.

I looked around the room and its adjoining en suite, then poked my head back out into the corridor. Lungile was asking the agent something, and glancing at me over his shoulder. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she was thinking,
Get on with it
as I returned her blank stare.

Slung across my torso, under the burqa, was my voluminous beach bag. I went back into the boy’s room and started to lift the hem of my disguise. I stopped and cocked my head. I heard nothing, but an alarm bell was trilling inside my mind. Instead of grabbing the loot I lowered my hem again and walked out into the lounge room.

Lungile was pretending to admire the couches and some art on the wall while the agent talked to a woman about council rates and projected rental income. He made no move to look over his shoulder at what Lungile or I might be up to. I knew Lungile was staring at me, but I couldn’t read her face. I shook my head and walked into the master bedroom.

On one of the bedside tables was a man’s gold watch.

‘Come on, who are they kidding?’ I whispered to myself inside my veil.

Quickly I went through the motions of viewing the other rooms. Just as I thought, there were three more laptops on desks in bedrooms and a study, along with a new-model BlackBerry and a couple of iPods. When I slid open the drawer of the writing desk in the home office there was a wad of two-hundred-rand notes.

‘What are you doing?’ Lungile hissed. I hadn’t seen or heard her come up behind me – I had no peripheral vision in the burqa. Meanwhile a dozen bells were ringing in my head now and I was sweating profusely under the black garment. ‘Have you got
anything
yet? There’s stuff just lying around,’ she persisted.

There was, indeed, a good range of very portable, valuable consumer goods on show in this house, ripe for the taking. ‘Let’s go,’ I said to her.

‘What is wrong with you? At least let me take that laptop. We’ll get a couple of thousand rand for that, easy.’

‘No. We’re leaving.’

I heard her groan in her burqa. ‘You’re getting cold feet.’

I grabbed her arm and moved her to the door of the home office. ‘Unless you want to end up being a party favour at Sun City I suggest you come with me
right
now.’ I was using the nickname for Johannesburg women’s prison, not suggesting Lungile and I might end up at the casino.

Out in the lounge room the burly estate agent was tugging on his collar again and studiously avoiding us, as he had done since he had taken down my fake ID details. I wondered if they were being checked right now.

‘Goodbye,’ I said to him, taking his attention from the would-be buyer. ‘House is nice, but not big enough for family.’

‘Really?’ He raised his eyebrows as he tried to peer through the gauze covering my eyes.

‘Big family.’

I forced myself to walk slowly to the front door. If he had checked us out already there would be a police
bakkie
blocking the gate in about thirty seconds. It looked clear, though, as Lungile and I got into the BMW.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ Lungile asked me. ‘
Eish
, did you see all that stuff lying around just waiting to be taken?’

‘Just drive.’

‘All right, all right, but what’s wrong?’

I ignored her for the moment and watched the Eskom
bakkie
as Lungile indicated right after we passed through the security gate and turned up the street. There were two men in the cab, and I was sure there’d been only one when we’d arrived. Perhaps the other had been in the back, or maybe, if they really were Eskom workers, one had been working in one of the houses. The
bakkie
’s
indicator light flashed and in the wing mirror I saw it pull out into the street behind us.