Zulu (15 page)

 

 

 

A
re you such a dreamer? To put the world to rights?

Thom Yorke's voice was wailing from the car radio in the Mercedes. Concentrated despair. The asphalt was baking in the noon sun. Brian Epkeen was waiting outside the school of journalism. David wouldn't be much longer. A few boys with the same post-grunge look came out through the gates, as well as some neatly dressed blondes and colored girls who didn't do anything to brighten his mood. Dan Fletcher had died in their arms, more or less, and they hadn't been able to save him.

Brian was thinking about Claire, the scene at the hospital, and his heart contracted even more. It was the first time he had ever seen anyone collapse with grief. Her legs had given way, like a cripple whose spine has been struck. She collapsed on the plastic-coated hospital floor, tearing her hair and screaming, half crazy, that she wanted to be left alone, even though all she had for support was her blonde wig, which had fallen at her feet, and her bald head. He had helped her to her feet, and, frail as she was, she'd felt as heavy as an anvil. As heavy as a corpse.

Brian saw his son's gangling figure on the sidewalk, reminding him of himself a long, long time ago. There was a sexy blonde with him, presumably his girlfriend (he had forgotten her name—Marjorie, wasn't it?). He opened the windowless door and crossed the street.

The asphalt was white-hot, and his soles stuck to it. David saw his father and immediately froze.

“Hi!” Brian said.

“Hi. What do you want?”

The blonde was chewing gum as if it were leather. She gave Brian a long, impudent look.

“Nothing special,” he said, with his hands in his pockets. “I just thought we could talk.”

“What for?” His bluntness would have crucified a mountain.

Brian shrugged. “I don't know. To get to understand each other better.”

“There's nothing to understand,” David said, with a conclusive air.

The gum-chewing blonde with a diamond in her nostril and two chrome-plated nails in her eyelids seemed to agree.

“It's your exam soon, isn't it?”

“Tomorrow,” David replied.

“We should celebrate. Why don't I buy you dinner?”

“Why not just give us some money? That'll save us all time.”

“I know a Japanese chef who—”

“Don't knock yourself out,” David cut in. “Mom told me how you harassed her on the phone. You're jealous of her happiness, is that it?”

“Sleeping with the king of the dentures, no thanks.”

David shook his head as if it was hopeless. “You're really crazy.”

“Yes. I was thinking of doing something dramatic, like slashing my wrists, but then I thought, why steal work from the young?”

“Reactionary old bastard.”

The girl was smiling. She was his one hope.

“You're quite pretty when you stop chewing your gum, you know that?” Brian said. “I hope David hasn't told you too much about me?”

“Not a lot.”

“They can be sensitive at that age.”

“I told you he was a sex maniac,” David said. “Let's get out of here before he shows us his dick.”

She laughed. “Cool.”

“Have you found an apartment?” Brian asked.

“7 Wale Street,” Marjorie replied.

Tamboerskloof, the old Malayan quarter, where the rents had doubled now that it had become bohemian.

“Come over sometime,” the blonde said, with curly-haired innocence.

“Don't even think about it,” David cut in.

“There's a bar just over there,” Brian said. “We could have a drink.”

“With a cop?” his son scoffed. “No thanks! If you want to do us a favor, go back to your fascists and your whores, and leave us alone, O.K.?”

“Aren't whores women? Maybe you think they're a subspecies of humanity? I thought you were the bleeding-heart liberal among us.”

“Be that as it may, I don't mix with guys who used to throw blacks from the top floors of police stations.”

“My best friend is a Zulu.”

“Don't play Mother Teresa, dad. It suits you like a rainbow in the middle of your face.”

With these words, David grabbed his girlfriend's hand and pulled her away, like it really had started raining. “Come on, let's get out of here.”

Marjorie twisted slightly to wave him goodbye, then stamped off after the prodigal son. Brian stood there on the sidewalk, weary, hurt, and angry.

No common ground.

No future together.

You might as well run after a desert.

 

 *

 

The New South Africa had to succeed where apartheid had failed. Violence wasn't just African, it was inherent in the human condition. In expanding, the world was becoming increasingly hard for the weak, the maladjusted, the pariahs of the big cities. The political immaturity of the blacks and their tendency to violence was merely an old saw of apartheid and the neo-conservative forces now in control. It would take generations before the black population would be well enough educated to take up key positions in the marketplace. The emerging black middle class might aspire to the same Western codes, but you had to know a system from the inside before you could criticize it, let alone reform it root and branch. Neuman lived with that hope, which had also been his father's. They hadn't left the Bantustans to end up in the townships.

But the figures told a different story. Eighteen thousand murders a year, twenty-six thousand serious assaults, sixty thousand rapes, officially (probably ten times as many), five million firearms for a population of forty-five million. The balance sheet was grim indeed.

Krüge and the government couldn't hide forever behind the excuse that he didn't have enough men and that those he did have were underpaid. The murder of the young officer made it look as if violence was the country's principal means of expression, as if the police were not only powerless but themselves victims of the situation.

The FNB's anti-crime campaign was in full swing. Everyone was demanding a clampdown, the prospect of the World Cup made the situation even more urgent, the challenge was a national one.

The spotlight was on Karl Krüge now. He had just been talking on the phone with the Attorney General, Marius Jonger. Murder in broad daylight, acts of barbarism—this time, a reassuring statement from the president wouldn't be enough. Worse still, the report he had just been handed by Neuman seemed to echo the criticisms of the media. The police had cordoned off the beach, but the killers had escaped over the dunes. They had found only an old tank half full of homemade beer beneath a rudimentary straw canopy, tracks on the sand that led toward the highway, a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie in a hut, and the bodies of three
tsotsis
near a smoking barbecue where a young sergeant lay dying.

“At least tell me you have a lead,” Krüge said from behind his desk.

His left ear covered with a bandage, his shoulders stooped inside his dark suit, Neuman looked like a man who'd survived a shipwreck and could think only of those who hadn't. Sonny Ramphele had just been found in the latrines of Pollsmoor Prison, hanged with his own jeans. As usual, no one had seen or heard anything.

“We've identified one of the three men killed on the beach,” Neuman said, in a hoarse voice. “Charlie Rutanga. A Xhosa, thirty-two years old. Prison terms for carjacking and grievous bodily harm. Probably a member of a township gang. I've sent his file and description to the police stations concerned. The other two are unknown to the police. We only know their nicknames, Gatsha and Joey. Almost certainly foreign. I met one of them in Khayelitsha last week, and he was speaking Dashiki to a friend of his.”

Krüge crossed his arms over his belly, which was as large as a pregnant woman's. “What are you thinking? A Mafia-related gang?”

“The Nigerians control hard drugs,” Neuman said. “And apparently a new product has been launched on the market. A drug with devastating effects, which Stan Ramphele was selling on the coast. He and Nicole Wiese went to Muizenberg the day of the murder. Sonny confirmed that, and probably signed his own death warrant in the process. Binoculars, a walkie-talkie, almost new guns—this isn't a bunch of
tsotsi
junkies we're dealing with, but an organized gang. The tracks we found on the dunes led to the highway. If they got through the roadblocks, there's a strong chance they took refuge in one of the townships.”

There were half a dozen around Cape Town, in other words, a population of two or three million people, not to mention the squatter camps. Not much chance of laying their hands on them.

“What are you planning to do?” Krüge asked. “Send Casspirs into the townships, hoping they'll just fall into your lap?”

“No. I need you to trust me, that's all.”

The two men looked at each other across the air-conditioning. A duel without a victor.

“The Wiese murder wasn't just any old crime,” Neuman insisted. “They tried to get Stan Ramphele to take the fall. I'm sure the people who supplied him with the drugs are involved.”

Krüge massaged his sinuses with his thick fingers and sighed. “You know how highly I think of you. But we're running out of time. The mob's after us, Neuman, and you're the first in the firing line.”

Neuman did not flinch at this—he would shoot first.

 

 *

 

Dan Fletcher lying mutilated on the ground, Dan Fletcher and his stumps covered in sand, Dan Fletcher and his pretty throat gaping open, Dan Fletcher and his blood-streaked smile, Dan Fletcher and his burned hands, bearing the marks of the barbecue griddle. Janet Helms had looked at the photographs of the murder with a morbid fascination. They had killed her love, the one she had kept hidden for when his wife died, in that bed into which he would never climb. Two whole days she had cried, disorientated by tears, with rage in her heart and her heart in flames. She would avenge him. Whatever it took.

She looked up from her computer when Brian Epkeen passed the open door of the office. She smoothed her skirt, which had ridden up her thighs, and ran after him.

“Lieutenant!” she called down the corridor. “Please! Lieutenant Epkeen!”

Brian stopped by the watercooler. He had been trying to trace the girl he had met under the straw canopy, but none of the hundreds of faces he had looked at in the records at headquarters looked familiar. Ditto for the guy he had slashed with his knout. Too many javas. No memory left. Fletcher would have known. He'd been their hard drive. But Fletcher wasn't here anymore. Here was his colleague, though, running up to him, bursting out of her navy blue uniform.

Janet knew Epkeen by reputation (weird) and gossip (feminine), but she preferred to trust Dan's judgment: a man uninterested in power, although a stickler for the way it was exercised, an unreliable dandy who sought oblivion in the arms of pretty women. No chance of his replacing Dan.

“If you have a few minutes, Lieutenant,” she said, breathless after her run, “I've got something that might interest you.”

He looked at his watch—now wasn't the time to be late—and gave her five minutes.

Dan's things were still on the shelves, the photograph of Claire next to his computer. Janet Helms sat down at hers.

“The Simon's Town police have a body on their hands,” she said. “A man named De Villiers, a surfer out on the peninsula. A patrol killed him two days ago after he tried to hold up an all-night drugstore. De Villiers was armed and started firing to cover his escape. He was shot down on the street.”

A face appeared on the screen: a white Rasta of about twenty, his chin framed by a goatee with a pearl in it.

“According to the drugstore assistants,” she went on, “De Villiers was unusually aggressive during the holdup. A real bundle of nerves. He'd been arrested before, for possession of narcotics—marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy—but never for assault or using firearms. Simon's Town isn't far from Muizenberg. I took the liberty of asking for a postmortem.”

Janet had been fearing his reaction—she had exceeded her authority—but Brian merely looked at his watch. “Do we have the results?”

“They've just come in,” she said, becoming emboldened. “De Villiers was under the influence of a drug during the hold-up. A
tik
-based product that seems to have driven him crazy.”

“Methamphetamine and an unidentified molecule?”

“Exactly.”

Brian lit a cigarette, even though the office was a non-smoking one. De Villiers was presumably not an isolated case. How many others had become hooked?

“There's another thing, lieutenant,” she said, sensing how impatient he was to go. “I was checking out the area around the beach when I noticed there's an uninhabited house on the edge of Pelikan Park. It's about half a mile past the straw hut. I tried to contact the owners, but didn't have any luck.”

“Maybe they're on vacation.”

“No, I mean I can't get hold of the name. It seems obvious the purchase was made by a front man, or a bogus company, via a foreign bank.”

“Is that possible?”

“And absolutely legal. A property-management company handled the transaction. I phoned them, but no one would tell me anything.”

He grimaced—those assholes in the real-estate business.

“And no one lives in the house?”

“No. It's never been rented. It may, of course, have been acquired as a speculative venture. If the park is extended, the land may end up being a protected site, which would double or even triple its value. For the moment, it seems to have been abandoned, as if the owners are waiting for better days. I don't know if this gets us anywhere. But it is the only dwelling between the straw hut and Pelikan Park nature reserve.”

“Carry on looking into this,” Brian said. “You have full powers on this case.”