City of Golden Shadow (49 page)

Yoo-hoo, Mister Big-League Computer Criminal, it's me, Orlando Gardiner. Drop by any time. I won't put up much of a fight.

Hell, all someone would have to do was fiddle his medical records. The wrong dermal patch and it would be Sayonara Irene.

TreeHouse. An image out of childhood, a place to escape the real world of grownups and rules. But who else liked to lurk beyond the edge of the playground, out of reach of authority? Bullies. Serious troublemakers. Bad guys.

Eyes wide open, Orlando sat in the dark and listened to Nothing.

CHAPTER 17

NETFEED/SPORTS: Caribe Youth Signs "Guinea Pig" Contract

(visual: Bando playing dirt court basketball game)

VO: Solomon Bando, a twelve-year-old Dominican boy, will become the first child to receive hormone treatments paid for and administered by a professional sports franchise. Bando's family signed a contract with the Ensenada ANVAC Clippers of the World Basketball Association that permits their son, chosen as an optimum specimen from several hundred applicants, to undergo a series of body-building hormone treatments and bone grafts designed to help him reach an adult height of at least seven and a half feet,

(visual: Roland Krinzy, Clippers vice president)

KRINZY: "We're building for the future, not just taking the short view. Our fans appreciate that."

Renie fumbled with her packages, trying to juggle them into some kind of manageable arrangement. The bus wheezed and rolled slowly away on underinflated tires, off to deposit a few more souls on a few more corners, like a strange animal marking the circuit of its territory.

The day had turned even hotter while she had been on the bus, although the sun was well down toward the horizon; she could feel sweat trickling down the back of her neck and along her spine. Before the fire, her stop had been only a few streets from her flat, although that had always seemed a terrible trudge at the end of a working day. Only two weeks later, she was beginning to look back on the old days with nostalgic fondness.

The streets of Lower Pinetown were full, as they usually were this time of the day. People of all ages lounged in doorways or on front steps, gossiping with neighbors next door or even across the street-shouting something scurrilous so everyone who could hear was part of the fun. In the middle of the road a group of young men were playing football, the contest watched closely by a pack of children who ran up and down the sidewalks as the progress of the match shifted from one end of the street to the other, and more casually by the audience on the stoops. Most of the players wore only shorts and battered takkies. As she watched their perspiration-slicked bodies move, listened to them laughing and shouting, Renie felt a deep, hollow craving for someone to hold her and love her.

Waste of time, girl. Too much to do.

One of the young men in the match, lean and shaven-headed, looked something like her old boyfriend Del Ray, even had a little of his insolent grace. For a moment he was there in the street in front of her, even though she knew the boy who had captured her attention was years younger. She wondered what the real Del Ray was doing, where he was at this very moment. She hadn't thought of him in a while, and wasn't sure she was happy to be reminded. Had he gone to Johannesburg, as he had always sworn he would? Surely nothing could have kept him from going into government and making his way up the ladder of respect-Del Ray had been very ambitious. Or was he still here in Durban, perhaps returning home from work to a waiting woman-to his wife, maybe. It had been at least five years since she'd seen him, time enough for anything to have happened. He might have children. For all she knew, he might be dead.

She shivered a little and realized she had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The young man, who now raced ahead of the entire pack dribbling the scuffed ball, flew past her. She saw a flash of gold in his grin of exertion. He didn't really look much like Del Ray.

A group of small children swept past her like an ocean wave, following the young man who wasn't her old boyfriend as he hurtled toward the goal. She had to cling to her packages as the shrieking troop swirled by, then she began walking again. A few hundred yards took her past the stoops and into the small and rather depressing shopping district.

A dress in a window caught her eye. She slowed. The pale fabric had a strange sheen, and the slanting sunlight seemed to move across it unevenly. It was odd but somehow striking, and she stopped to look more closely. It had been a long time since she'd bought herself any clothes that weren't practical.

She shook her head with a small sense of triumphant martyrdom. If there was ever a time when she needed to save her money, when she couldn't afford something just because it would make her feel nice, now was that time.

A movement in or behind the reflection caught her eye as she turned back to the sidewalk, for a moment she thought it was someone in the shop window, but when she moved to a different angle, she could see the window was empty but for mannequins. Something had moved quite close behind her. She whirled, but saw only a bit of dark clothing disappearing down a sidestreet a dozen yards away. Just the other side, walking away from Renie on the sidewalk, two young women were looking back over their shoulders with faintly puzzled expressions, as though watching whoever it might have been.

Renie readjusted her bag and walked a little more purposefully. It was not as if it were after dark, or she were the only person on the street. A small crowd stood in front of the corner market just a hundred steps ahead, and there were at least a half-dozen people closer to her than that. She might well be in some kind of trouble, but it was dangerous to start believing that people were following you.

As she waited to cross the street, she casually turned and looked back, A rangy man in a dark shirt and metal-framed sunglasses was staring fixedly into the dress shop window. He did not meet her eyes or show any sign that he even knew she existed, but she still felt a kind of attention emanating from him.

Perhaps she was jumping at shadows. Then again, that was what they called it when somebody followed somebody, wasn't it-shadowing?

It's dangerous to believe that people are following you, but maybe it's dangerous to disbelieve it, too.

She went into the market on the corner even though she'd already done her shopping near the Poly. where the better stores were. When she came out with a soft drink in her hand, there was no sign of the man in the dark shirt.

The shelter had been a truck depot, and it still retained its former sense of intimacy and warmth. The twelve-meter-high ceilings gaped in places where the cheap corrugated fibramic didn't quite meet. The floor was concrete, still blackened in places with ancient oil stains. The Greater Durban Social Welfare Department had done what it could, mostly with volunteer labor-the huge space had been hived with fiberboard partitions across which curtains could be hung, and a wide, carpeted common area in one corner held a wallscreen, a large gas fire, dartboards, and an old billiards table-but the building had been converted hastily in the wake of the flooding three years before and hadn't been modified since. At the time it had been meant only as temporary housing for those displaced from the lower townships, but after the overspill had receded, the local government had kept the building. They hired it out between the fairly infrequent emergencies for dances and political rallies, although it had a core population that had never found other homes.

Keeping the shelter had not meant being able to improve it, though. Renie wrinkled her nose as she walked across the open area near the front door. How could a place that was so drafty in cold weather hold in the heat and stink so effectively during the summer?

She dumped the packages in the four-by-three-meter booth which was their temporary home. Her father wasn't there, but she had not expected him to be. She pulled the tab on a cigarette, kicked off her shoes, then pulled the curtain closed so she could take off her work clothes and keep them relatively clean. When she had changed into shorts and a loose-fitting shirt, she put the groceries in the tiny refrigerator, set the kettle on the hot plate, stubbed her cigarette, and went off to search for Long Joseph.

He was over by the wallscreen with the usual bunch of men, some his age, some younger. They were watching a football match being played on green grass somewhere, a contest between well-paid professionals in one of the commercial sports-ground Neverlands that only existed on broadcasts; she couldn't help thinking about the real game in the street only a short distance away. What brought the young men in out of the sunshine and turned them into the only slightly older ones here-slow of speech but quick to argue, shallow-swimming, content to sit and nurse a few beers through a long afternoon in a steamy warehouse? How could men start out so strong, so vital, and then turn so sour?

Her father looked up at her approach and, in guilty reflex, attempted to hide his beer. She ignored it. "I'm making some coffee, Papa, then we have to go see Stephen."

He sneaked a quick look down at the bottle held against his leg. It was almost empty. The other men were watching the screen intently. Renie had heard a colleague say that men were like dogs; if so, it was never more apparent than when they watched the movement of a ball. Long Joseph swallowed the last mouthful, then put it down on the concrete with a defiant flourish. "I'll come. Got to see the boy."

As they walked back across the broad expanse, Renie thought she saw the man in the dark shirt again, this time silhouetted in the front doorway, but it was hard to be certain with the light streaming in from behind him. She pushed down a surge of unease. Even if it were him, that didn't mean anything. There were almost five hundred people living in the shelter, and many more who just came in during the day to hang around. She knew only the few dozen other refugees from their burned flatblock.

She looked again when the light wasn't in her eyes, but couldn't see him anymore.

"It used to be good," her father said suddenly. "Every day. Good to do it."

"What?"

"When I was working. When I was an electrician. Finish up, put down the tools, stop with my friends to have a drink. Good to be finished. But then my back got hurt."

Renie said nothing. Her father's back injury had occurred, or at least he claimed it had occurred, in the year after the death of her Uma' Bongela, her grandmother, who had been the children's caretaker after their mother's death in the store fire. Long Joseph's injury had also coincided with his much greater interest in drinking, and in his coming back so late from his social evenings that Renie had usually taken her baby brother into bed with her to quiet his crying. She had always had her doubts about his back injury.

Unless he had been bowed down so long by hard work piled on hard work, and then by the added, almost impossible burden of losing wife and mother-in-law and being left as sole parent to two young children, that he had just reached a point where he could not straighten up anymore. That, too, could be called a back injury of sorts.

"You could still do it, you know."

"What?" He was distracted, staring out into the middle distance as he walked.

"Be an electrician. God knows, there're lots of people with problems around here. I bet they'd love to have you help them."

He gave her a quick, angry look before staring ahead again. "My back."

"Just don't do anything that will make it worse. I'm sure there're lots of other things you could do. Half the people in this building have their power outlets overloaded, old wires, bad appliances. You could go around and have a look. . . ."

"Goddamn, girl, if you want to get rid of me, just say it to me!" He was suddenly furious, his hands clenched into fists. "I'm not going 'round begging people for jobs. Trying to tell me my monthly payment isn't enough?"

"No, Papa." In his early fifties, he was becoming a querulous old man. She wanted to touch him but didn't dare. "No, Papa. It was just an idea. I'd just like to see you. . . ."

"Make myself useful? I'm useful to me, girl. Now you mind your own business."

They walked in silence back to their space. Long Joseph sat down on the bed and conducted a long, critical examination of his slippers while Renie made two cups of instant coffee. When the tablets had finished effervescing, she passed one to her father.

"Can I ask you something else, or are you going to be in a bad mood all evening?"

He looked at her over the rim of his cup. "What?"

"What did the man look like in front of our flatblock? Remember? The one you saw waiting in the car that night when !Xabbu came over."

He shrugged and blew on his coffee. "How do I know? It was dark. He had a beard, a hat. Why do you want to know that?"

The man shadowing her had been beardless, but that proved nothing-anyone could shave.

"I'm . . . I'm worried, Papa. I think there might be someone following me."

He scowled. "What nonsense is this? Following you? Who?"