Sacrifices (30 page)

“Evening.”

Lane enters the eatery. A beefy man slouches behind the bar, watching rugby on TV. There are no other customers. Lane takes a table in the window and a chubby girl with pimples comes over.

“Drink?” she asks.

Before he can stop himself Lane says, “Do you have single malt?”

“Ja,
Islay. Okay?”

“Fine. Make it a double.”

“You eating?”

He shakes his head and the girl slouches off. Lane’s eyes are drawn to the TV: a rugby player dives over a try line and jumps to his feet in celebration, swamped by his team mates who hoist him into the air. Lane looks away, staring out into the night. When he hears his fingers drumming on the tabletop he stills them.

The girl is back with his drink. As he lifts it to take a sip, the peaty aroma filling his nostrils, a clatter has Lane turning his head, watching the homeless man wheeling a supermarket cart past the window to where a small, frail young woman stands, leaning on a storefront. The man lifts sections of flattened cardboard from the cart and lays them down in the doorway, helping her to sit. Lane sees she is heavily pregnant.

He sets his drink down and pushes the glass away.

Reaching into his jacket pocket he removes the photograph the detective left with him, sets the picture down on the table and stares at it for a very long time.

“Do you recognize this person?” Detective Perils had asked.

Lane, certain that his face made a lie of his words, said, “No. Is it a young man?”

Perils shook her head. “I’m pretty sure it’s a woman. I’ve shown the photograph around the apartment building but nobody knew her.” The cop’s eyes holding his. “Rings no bells?”

“No. Sorry.”

Why had he lied? Why hadn’t he said, it’s my wife, it’s
Beverley Lane?

Because this photograph was inconclusive. Because Beverley had planned everything meticulously. She’d chosen a night when she knew he’d be out of town. She’d disguised herself. And, he has no doubt, their son would be her alibi.

Lane can hear Chris saying, “Ja, my mom was home the whole night. We watched TV together.”

Lane would end up looking like an hysteric and Beverley would walk free. No, if there was to be payment for what she did, Lane would have to exact it.

But how?

For a moment he’s back on the slopes of Table Mountain, in the rain, reaching for the knife, hearing the ratcheting sound as he extends the blade, grabbing Jade’s sodden hair, lifting her jaw, exposing her neck.

Would he have done it, cut the girl’s throat?

He doesn’t know. Perhaps, driven by fear and adrenaline he would have. But, sitting in this dire bistro, ice melting in his untouched single malt, he knows he will never be able to murder his wife in cold blood. He doesn’t have the guts for that.

So what will he do?

Unable to answer the question Lane pockets the photograph, wedges a banknote under the whiskey glass and walks out to his car. The homeless man stands at the door of the BMW, saluting.

“Everything’s okay, captain.”

Lane digs in his pocket and gives the man a fifty rand note. The man smiles, revealing a drug-ravaged mouth, and gets in Lane’s way when he reverses out of the bay.

As Lane drives off he checks his rearview and sees the man running up to where the woman sits, giving her the money. She embraces him.

Lane turns a corner and loses sight of them, driving toward his apartment, toward a night without sleep.

Louise sits at her computer, the fluorescents leaching the bookstore of life. A day has passed since Michael showed her the photograph. Another frustrating day. He’s lapsed back into his semi-catatonia, marooned behind his desk, ignoring her.

She knows she should leave, go and feed and love-up poor neglected little Harpo. Clean her grungy apartment. Wash her underwear. Anything at all but sitting vigil here waiting for Michael Lane to thaw.

Louise grabs her backpack and crosses to Michael’s closed office. She knocks and without waiting for a reply opens the door. He sits in the dark, the only light coming from the glow of his monitor, staring through the hatch at the neon of the strip club: the red-outlined
dancer endlessly kicking her leg up in a jerky goosestep to the distant rasp of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.”

“Michael?” Louise says, not sure exactly why she’s come into this room.

He turns to look at her, one side of his face lit by the monitor. “Yes?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow.”

“No, I mean I’m leaving for keeps. I’m out of here.” The words surprising Louise as they exit her mouth.

Okay girl, she thinks, and where the fuck are you going with this?

“I see,” he says. “Well, thanks and good luck, Louise. I’m sorry things haven’t worked out.”

He is already turning away and she feels a hot jab of rage, letting it carry her over to his desk where she clicks on the Anglepoise lamp. She shoves her sleeves past her elbows and lays her arms on his desk, pulses upward, the suture scars thick and puckered. Michael stares at her arms then looks up at face, blinking in the glare of the lamp.

“You know why I did this, Michael?”

“No.”

“Because I got into that place you’re in now. Like I was already dead. So I thought well, what the fuck, why not just make it permanent?”

“What changed your mind?”

“Nothing. Medics found me and got me to the hospital. Long boring story. Point is, Michael, you can’t carry on like this.”

He nods. “I suppose not.”

“You have to live your life.”

He shrugs. “I have no life. Beverley robbed me of it.”

“So what are you going to do about her?”

Lane says nothing, looks away from Louise’s eyes—eyes that seem to X-Ray his soul—and stares at her arms. Fighting the urge to lay his fingertips on that puckered flesh, the keloid scars gray and yeasty against her light brown skin, he remembers sitting with the soap-scented child in pajamas and dressing gown, her eyes never leaving his face as he read to her at the kitchen table in the Newlands house.

A time of infinite possibility.

Louise draws her arms out of the pool of light and lets her sleeves fall to her wrists. She stands, slinging her backpack over her shoulder.

“Bye, Mike.”

“Wait,” he says. “Please don’t go.”

“Why?”

“I have a plan.”

“What plan?”

“Sit.”

She hesitates, shrugs almost imperceptibly, then perches on the edge of the seat opposite him.

“What’s your plan, Michael?”

“The thing with Lyndall wasn’t the worst thing Bev and I are guilty of.”

“What do you mean?”

Lane tells her about Jade—Sally Skinner—about that rainy night on the mountain, about watching his wife throttle the life from the girl.

Louise stares at him. “Jesus, Michael.”

“If I tell the police it’s Beverley in that CCTV photo she’ll slip through the cracks. It’s too inconclusive. But if I tell them about Chris and Lyndall and the girl there’s no way she’s going to walk.”

“But you’ll take yourself down too, Mike. Surely you know that?”

“Of course I do, but what choice do I have?”

Louise doesn’t answer and he searches the darkness for her eyes.

“There’s another option,” she says.

“Is there?”

“What if she gets taken out? Permanently?”

He laughs. “Jesus, Lou, don’t you think I haven’t considered that? But I can’t do it. I’m too weak. Too spineless.”

She shakes her head. “Not by you.”

“By who then?”

“I know somebody.”

“You? Come on.”

“I’m serious.

“Who?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“This is crazy, Louise.”

“I can organize it. But you understand what we’re talking about here, Michael?”

“Paying somebody to kill Beverley? I understand.”

“Think about it.”

“I don’t need to think about it.”

“It’ll cost.”

“Money’s not the issue.”

She nods, standing. “Then I’ll see what I can do.”

“Why would you want to get involved in this?”

“Let’s just say I have a vested interest.” She crosses to the door. “And I never liked the bitch.”

As she leaves he sees that child again walking out into the night with
Through the Looking-Glass
tucked under her arm, Lane holding the kitchen door open, letting her go.

The sun bleaches the matchbox houses and ghetto blocks that litter the sand of the
Cape Flats. There is no wind today and the sky is hot and cloudless, bilious with the gauze of pollution that smothers the cramped hovels.

Louise is alone in the minibus taxi, the other passengers spat out earlier along the route. The co-driver sits on the jump seat facing her, raping her with his heavy-lidded eyes. He’s maybe eighteen, his skinny frame lost in his ’banger clothes.

“Where you from, girl?”

She ignores him, watching a naked child with a distended belly staring at her from the doorway of a shack.

The asshole reaches forward and grabs her leg, dirty fingers biting into her thigh.

“Girl, I’m fucken talking to you.”

He stands and leans over Louise as the driver throws the taxi into a corner, balancing like a sailor on a yawing deck, a trifecta of sweat, meth and lust radiating from him. He cups his package and thrusts it toward her face.

Louise doesn’t think, just makes a fist and punches upward into his groin, feeling the softness beneath her knuckles. He gasps out foul breath and sags, holding himself, hissing, “Fucken cunt.”

She shoves him aside and stands. “Let me out.”

The driver, thickset with a Braille of boils on his neck above his T-shirt, stares at her in the rearview, then he laughs and hits the brakes—sending Louise flying into the back of a seat, bruising her ribs—bringing the taxi to a dusty halt at the train station where a knot of passengers wait.

Louise battles the sliding door open and steps down into the dirt, searching for a landmark. She sees the dark bulk of the landfill, the scavengers on its humped back inky shadows against the bitter lemon sky.

A breeze—a foretaste of the gale that’ll attack the Flats later—throws dust over her shoes and swirls the stink of the dump beneath her nostrils, like the sommelier at the absurd French restaurant Michael Lane took her to
a few years ago, when she’d scored six distinctions in her matric finals, just turned eighteen, old enough to drink the wine that Michael had made such a fuss off, Louise awkward and uncomfortable, hating the food, hating the knowledge that that this had nothing to do with her, that it was all about Michael showing off, showing
her
off, his little colored once-upon-a-time protégé.

Louise shakes off the stupid memory, diluting her anger by conjuring Michael last night, at his desk.

Weak.

Reduced.

Hers for the taking.

She waits for a funeral procession, a massive silver hearse dragging in its wake a rattling string of dented, rust-chewed old cars, and crosses the road to the maze of shacks, knowing that what she’s about to do is at best ill-advised, at worst just plain fucking suicidal.

Last night she’d tried repeatedly to call Achmat Bruinders, but was met each time with the same vaguely African-accented electronic voice saying his number wasn’t available on the network. In desperation she’d called his sister, Fazila, but when she said her name the woman killed the call, and hadn’t answered when Louise tried twice more.

So she’s come out here knowing that Achmat could be back in prison. Or dead.

Louise stops at the shacks, searching for a way into the maze of sheet iron and plastic and coils of wire. Trying, and failing, to remember the route she’d taken with Achmat when last she was here.

Trying to orient herself she scans the nasty little playground where a pair of boys, maybe ten or eleven, toss a rugby ball in high, looping arcs, yelling at one another, the names Marcellino and Terrill reaching her through a stream of glottal
Cape Flats profanities.

One boy fumbles and the oval ball bounces wildly, squirts across the road and comes to rest in the dust at Louise’s feet. She picks up the ball, holding onto it, the sketch of a plan forming in her mind.

The taller of the boys—Terrill—stripped to the waist, with a sunken chest and arms too long, shouts at her in a tumble of words that she barely understands. He waves his arms like a rapper and pimprolls over to Louise, cursing her sex and her stupidity.