Blood Safari (23 page)

I just looked at him and carried on chewing.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘Someone was angry with us.’

‘But why? What could make someone so angry?’

‘I don’t know.’

He looked at me in disbelief. ‘It’s true,’ I said.

‘People don’t usually react like that,’ he said.

‘I know.’ The question was: who did? And why?

In my room there was another typed letter from Maggie T. Padayachee. And a car key.

I phoned Jeanette. ‘Thanks for the car.’

‘A pleasure. They tell me her condition has improved.’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘And you? How do you feel today?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘The flights are full, Lemmer. The entire country is flying off somewhere for New Year. We can only come tomorrow.’

‘We?’

‘I’m bringing Fikter and Minnaar.’

‘Oh.’ Not usual for her to come. She heard my surprise.

‘You know what the Cape is like in the holidays. Full of Gautengers and foreigners. I haven’t been to the Lowveld for a long time.’

‘What time are you coming?’

‘We’ll be there by lunchtime. I’m bringing your Christmas present. I hope it’s what you wanted.’

‘Thanks.’

‘It’s the least I can do.’

Strange thing to say, I thought.

‘She’s stable enough to do the scans this afternoon,’ Eleanor Taljaard said when I was back at the intensive care unit by two o’clock. ‘You’re on duty until four.’

I sat down. Emma was still pale and wan under the sheets.

‘Hello, Emma.’

They had replaced the bag of fluid dripping into her vein. It hung fat and transparent above her bed.

‘I went for lunch. Chicken schnitzel. It wasn’t Mohlolobe’s standard. Then I phoned Jeanette Louw. They’ll be here tomorrow,
she and two bodyguards. They will look after you here, Emma. Until I’ve finished.’

Finished. Finished what? I hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin. Sitting here beside a woman I barely knew, with the urge to smash someone’s head in, and I had no idea how I was going to do it.

I wanted to go and lie on my bed, shut my eyes and think about where Emma and I had been, about every little thing that had happened. I hadn’t believed her when I should have. Not listened, not looked, nor paid attention. Now there were things in my head, things that didn’t quite make sense, but I couldn’t get a grip on them. Like soap in the bath, they slipped out of my grasp when I closed my hand on them. I must think. The whole thing just didn’t make sense. Not enough to kill Emma le Roux. What had she done to cause that? What evil had she interfered in?

Gloves? In summer? In the Lowveld? Gloves and balaclavas, but the sniper had not worn them.

In Cape Town there had been three, but all three were covered then. Had they also worn gloves? Understandable, since they didn’t want to leave fingerprints. But in the veld?

Why only yesterday? Why had they waited? Did they have to come up from the Cape first?

I tried to arrange the events in sequence. Emma said the news report about Cobie de Villiers had been two days before they attacked her in the Cape. Three days before Christmas. The twenty-second. Saturday, 22 December.

Two days. Why the delay between the call to Phatudi and the attack in the Cape? What did it mean?

We had arrived here on 26 December. One, two, three, four days before the ambush.

Did it mean anything?

I must talk to Emma. I couldn’t just sit here and think. She must hear my voice.

Where was I last? Jeanette. On her way.

‘Jeanette …’ I said.

‘I had been in Loxton for two months when the phone rang. It was Jeanette Louw asking if I was looking for work.

‘I hadn’t much in the bank. I had sold the flat in Seapoint for a big profit, but my legal fees and buying the AI Qaeda house ate up most of it. So I asked, “What kind of work?” and she explained.

‘I asked her how she knew about me and she said, “There are one or two of your old colleagues who speak well of you.”

‘“I’ve just come out of jail.”

‘“I don’t want to marry you, I want to offer you a job.” Then she explained how it worked, how much she paid and, “You should know, I’m a lesbian and I don’t take shit from anyone. When I call, you come. Immediately. If you get up to shit, I’ll fire your butt. Immediately. But I never drop my people. Are you interested?”

‘So I accepted, because I looked around my house and I knew how much needed to be done. I hadn’t even begun to break down and rebuild. The place was empty. I had a bed and a table in the kitchen with two chairs. I bought the table in Victoria West at an auction and I got the two chairs from Antjie Barnard as a present.

‘Antjie. Now there’s a character. I called her “Tannie”, “Aunt”, showing respect for one’s elders, and she threatened to hit me with her walking stick.

‘That’s another story. Antjie Barnard came knocking on my door in Loxton, four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. She was wearing big walking boots and a wide-brimmed hat. She said, “I’m Antjie Barnard and I want to know who you are.” She was sixty-seven then and you could see she was a lovely woman, beautiful perhaps when she was young, green eyes of an unusual shade, like the sea at the South Pole. She put out her hand and I shook it and said, “Lemmer. Pleased to meet you, Tannie.”

‘“Tannie? Tannie? Am I married to your uncle?” The walking stick lifted ready to beat me. “My name is Antjie.”

‘“Antjie.”

‘“That’s right. What do I call you?”’

“Lemmer.”

‘“Right then, Lemmer, stand aside so I can come in. You have coffee, I expect.”

‘I told her, “I don’t have chairs.”

‘“Then we will sit on the floor.”

‘And we did, coffee mugs in hand. She pulled out a packet of long cigarettes, offered one to me and asked, “What is a man like you doing in Loxton?”

‘“Not for me, I don’t smoke.”

‘“I hope to God you drink,” she said, and lit one for herself with a slender electronic lighter.’

‘“Not really.”

“Not really?”

‘“Actually, I don’t drink at all.”

‘“Sex?”

‘“I like sex.”

‘“Thank God. A person must have a sin. Not bad sins, Lemmer. Good sins. Otherwise you don’t live. Life is too short.”’

“What are the good sins?”

‘“Gossip. Eating. Smoking. Drinking. Sex. What do I do with this ash?”

‘I fetched her a saucer. When I came back she asked, “Was it a good sin that brought you to Loxton?”’

“No.”

‘“Was there a woman involved? Children?”’

“No.”

‘“Then it doesn’t matter. We all have our secrets and that’s fine.”

‘I wondered what her secret was.

‘Two weeks later she came knocking again, this time late on a Tuesday. “Bring your pick-up, I’ve got some chairs for your table.” We drove to her house, a perfectly restored Victorian Karoo house with white walls and a green roof. The furniture inside was tastefully antique. Down the passage was a row of black-and-white photographs of Antjie Barnard and her life. I looked at them and she said, “I was a cellist.” An understatement, because the images in frames told a story of an international career.

‘The same afternoon we initiated the chairs in my kitchen over coffee – and a cigarette for her.

‘“And this ashtray, Lemmer? Have you taken up smoking?”’

“No.”

‘“You bought it for me.”’

“I did.”

‘“That’s my trouble.”’

“What?”

‘“Men. They can’t leave me alone.”

‘I laughed. Then I saw she was serious.

‘She looked at me with those clear, piercing eyes and said, “Can you keep a secret, Lemmer?”’

‘“I can.”

‘Those eyes measured me again.

‘“Do you know why I’m here? In Loxton?”

‘“No.”

‘“Sex.”

‘“Here?”

‘“No, you idiot. Not here.” Then she told me how she grew up in Bethlehem in the Free State in a typical conservative Afrikaans home, how her talent for music quickly outgrew the coaching available in that town. She was sent to the Oranje Meisieskool in Bloemfontein so she could take cello lessons at the university. At seventeen she won an international bursary and studied in Vienna. At twenty she married an Austrian, at twenty-eight an Italian, at thirty-six a German, but concert tours were no good for marriage.

‘“Men liked me too much, and I liked men too much.”

‘At fifty-five she had had enough. Enough money, enough memories, enough strange cities and hotel rooms and fair-weather friends. So she came back to the Free State and bought herself a house in Rosendal near Bethlehem.

‘“Then I met Willem of Wonderkop. A farmer. Sixty years old, married, but a Man with a capital ‘M’. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. One Wednesday evening he told his wife he had to go to a church council meeting, but instead he came to me and we made love like a pair of twenty-year-olds, wild and abandoned. We fell off the bed and I broke my arm and he broke his hip and there we lay, naked, guilty and in big trouble.

‘“What could I do? I couldn’t carry him and he couldn’t stand up. I had to get help. I had to choose between the preacher and the two gays who ran the coffee shop. Either way we were done for because nobody gossips like gays and ministers. So I chose the gays, to save him his place on the church council.

‘“When my arm came out of plaster, I got in my car and went looking for a place where the people wouldn’t know the story. That’s how I ended up in Loxton.”

‘She never asked me about my past. I told her I had been a bodyguard for the government. When I had to be away for two or three weeks I would tell her where I would be. Of course, then the whole town knew. They never say so, but there is some pride that someone from Loxton was guarding important and famous people from the evils of this world.

‘But I am not yet truly one of them. There is hope. At Easter this year I was having tea with Oom Joe and all his children and grandchildren were there when Antjie came in. Oom Joe introduced her to his children, “And this is our Antjie Barnard.”

‘Maybe, in four or five years, if nobody finds out why I went to prison, they will introduce me as “our Lemmer”.’

After four, when they came to collect Emma for the scan, I fetched the keys of the Audi and went out to find the car.

The car park was chock-a-block full, but I found the car near the entrance, as Maggie T. had promised. It was a two-litre manual sedan, silver, with satellite navigation. Jeanette was not stingy. I got in and drove to Klaserie.

I took the byroads, turned off unexpectedly, accelerated, memorising every vehicle in front and behind, but nobody followed me.

The BMW was no longer beside the R40. Only the deep ruts remained in the long grass, muddy now after the rain. I locked the Audi and walked the four hundred metres back to the T-junction. I felt the aches in my body. From the stop street I walked west to the flyover where the R351 went over the railway line. If I were to set up an ambush, how would I do it?

The two tar roads made a triangle with the railway line. In the middle of the triangle was a rise with rocks and trees. That is where I would position my sniper, because he could see the junction at the stop street. I climbed the wire fence and walked through the veld and up the slope.

How had they known we would come this way?

How had they known we were going to Mohlolobe – and not Hoedspruit? Was it because we drove this route every day? Because the western route to Hoedspruit was just about as far?

Or had they covered both alternatives?

I stood on the rise and looked down. Perfect panorama. You could see the traffic for two kilometres on the R351. Plus at least a kilometre on the R41 north. It was two hundred and fifty metres from the T-junction, equidistant from both roads. A manageable
distance for a sniper, wind wouldn’t be a great factor, gradient perhaps twenty degrees.

Still, he would have to know his job. On a moving vehicle, a tyre is not a big target.

Trouble is, there are hundreds of them here. Men who can shoot, who can drop a strolling steenbok at three hundred metres with a telescope – place trophy shots where they will.

But how did they know we would turn left at the stop, to the north? How had they known we were going to Mohlolobe – and not to Nelspruit? If I had turned right, he wouldn’t have got in the second and third shots.

Too many questions. Too many variables. Not enough information.

Where would he have lain in wait? I searched between the trees and rocks for the best spot – room to stretch out on your belly, unhampered vision, scope to swing the rifle through ninety degrees. Enough cover.

I had seen something flash in the seconds before he fired. I drew a line from approximately where we had been on the R351, searching for the logical spot.

There. I jumped down from a rock into a hollow he might have used. No tracks, the rain had seen to that. Grass stems were bent, a couple broken. I lay down, holding an imaginary rifle in my hands. This spot would work – shoot him there, keep an eye on him, see that he isn’t stopping, follow him with the scope, around the corner, wait until the BMW stabilises, fire another shot, another one, see the BMW leave the road. Once we had exited the car he hadn’t been able to shoot at us because there were trees interfering with his line of sight, and long grass. He would have followed our progress here and there. If he had a radio with him, the others could have given him directions, but he wouldn’t have been able to shoot. Would have had to stand up, because this rock directly to his left would have blocked his field of vision.

He had stood up and watched us with naked eyes. Saw us running; saw Emma fall, there, saw the other two running toward
us. He would have had to get moving too. Radio in one hand, rifle in the other?

He had only the rifle in his hands when I saw him.