Vendetta, page 16
Mia beamed. ‘Thank you, Mr Ferri.’
‘Tony.’
‘Thank you, Tony.’
The mother cheetah made a high-pitched squeaking noise, almost like a bird call, and her cubs scampered after her as she headed off, over another sand dune. Mia stayed until the last of the cats had disappeared and Evan finally lowered his camera.
‘Guys, if you’re ready, we can move on?’
‘Fine by me,’ Tony said.
‘Yes, that was awesome, thank you, Mia. What a great start to our drive,’ Evan said.
Before she started the engine, Mia was able to turn around and look both of them in the eye properly, one at a time. ‘Would you like to go to the spot where I found Luiz now?’
They looked at each other and nodded. ‘Yes, please,’ Tony said.
Both men seemed to have genuinely enjoyed seeing the cheetah and her cubs, and Mia felt like it was a shame to bring the mood back to one of sad reality, but they had asked to go to the sundowner tree and this was, after all, related to the reason they had visited.
Mia drove on, stopping briefly to point out a brown snake eagle. The bird stood atop a thorn tree, as ramrod-straight as a soldier on a parade ground, as it surveyed its domain, looking for prey. The sun was low, turning the bark of the sundowner tree a mellow orange-brown when they arrived. Mia switched off the engine.
The silence descended over them like a blanket and seemed to prevent any of them from speaking or moving in the Land Rover.
At last, Evan said: ‘OK, let’s do this.’
Mia thought it was interesting that it was the businessman rather than the former army officer and aspiring leader of the country who made the first move.
‘Yes,’ said Tony.
The vehicle’s springs creaked as they climbed down. Mia scanned the landscape, looking and listening for the telltale presence of predators – the flick of an ear or tail, or the sound of a bird alarm-calling. The morning’s encounter with the leopard was still very fresh in her mind. Even Mother Nature, however, seemed to be holding her breath.
Mia opened her door, got out and caught up with the men who were headed towards the big tree. She pointed to a spot about ten metres away, in the open. ‘I found him there.’
Evan looked where she was pointing, but Tony was still looking in a different direction, out over the desert. Nonetheless, he started walking in the direction Mia had just indicated.
‘It’s like I can feel him here, still,’ Tony said.
‘Can we go there, stand there?’ Evan asked.
‘Sure,’ Mia said.
Tony walked ahead of them, as if he was drawn to the place by Luiz’s ghost. He looked around him, on the ground. The wind and sun and the hungry sand had already obliterated all traces of Luiz’s grisly death.
‘You found him?’ Evan said.
She nodded and closed her eyes.
Tony nodded. ‘I’m afraid we all saw death too often, men killed by guns.’
Mia remembered the vultures and the effect of the hyenas, who had also partially fed on Luiz’s body. She said nothing of that to her two guests.
‘It must have been very hard on you,’ Evan said.
Mia gave a little shudder. ‘I called it in, but it was worse for Shirley, his niece, who had to formally identify him.’
‘Poor woman,’ Evan said, ‘having to see something as horrific as that, and to identify a warrior that way.’
‘I remember he had a Flechas tattoo,’ Tony said. ‘That was his Portuguese unit, the “arrows”. You know, they had almost crushed the various resistance movements in Angola before Portugal threw away all its colonies, in 1975?’
‘They didn’t count on the Cold War, or Russia and Cuba getting involved to the extent they did, after they legged it,’ Evan said.
Tony nodded. ‘There’s no point trying to rewrite history, or refight old wars.’
‘Luiz was as brave as a lion,’ Evan said to Mia.
She stared at the spot where he had died, then out over the endless desert. ‘I wish I’d got to know him better; that he had opened up to me.’
‘He was always quiet,’ Tony said. ‘Colonel de Villiers told me that many of Luiz’s family had been killed in a massacre in Angola. After the Portuguese withdrew, some of the local African guerrillas sought payback on the San, who had fought against them. By all accounts it was a brutal conflict, with atrocities committed on both sides.’
‘Did you . . .’ Mia almost wanted to withdraw the question that had spilled from her lips.
Tony turned to her. ‘Did I commit any atrocities or war crimes? Is that what you mean, Mia?’
She shook her head. It was not. She had been trying to ask if Tony had witnessed anything illegal.
‘No,’ he added quickly. ‘And nor did your father or any of my men. Frank was tough, and could be a pain in the arse for his superiors, but he was no war criminal. As for what he saw, I can’t say.’
She noted how Tony had used the politician’s trick of deflecting her question in a direction he was comfortable with rather than necessarily telling the truth. Mia did not feel like she had the right to press the question.
‘War is brutal,’ Evan said. ‘I think all of us saw or heard things we would rather not have. Mostly, for me, combat was confusing and hectic, but then unlike Tony I wasn’t in command. I just had to do what I was told.’
Mia thought she might be on safer ground asking about Luiz. She wanted to try and understand why he had killed himself. ‘What about Luiz? Tony, you said there were atrocities committed on both sides in the war in Angola?’
‘Do you really want to know, Mia?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘Some of it may have been boasting, or rumour, but there were stories of the Flechas, in the Portuguese colonial days, cutting the ears off corpses. There was even a tale of a Flecha who cut the heart from a guerrilla while he was still alive, and then took a bite out of it while it was still beating.’
Mia felt sick. But if the San soldiers had mutilated corpses, what effect did that have on a person? Had Luiz been unable to live with the memory of some thing, or things, he had done? ‘What about Luiz?’ she repeated. ‘Did you ever see him do anything wrong?’
Tony stared at her, his face unsmiling. She had done it after all, she realised; she’d pressed him for a straight answer to her earlier half-formed question.
The politician spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘I never saw Luiz commit a war crime.’
Unable to hold his gaze, Mia glanced at Evan. The other man was looking sideways at Tony, and Mia wondered what Evan was thinking. Did he know or think the possible future leader of the nation was lying? Mia had read about Tony in the news and she wanted so much to like him. She’d been taken aback by how good-looking he was in the flesh, as well. Was he too good to be true?
‘But did Luiz do anything outside of military regulations?’ Tony continued. Mia returned her gaze to him. Tony nodded. ‘Yes, Mia, I believe there is a good chance that he or maybe his brother did. They came from an era and a culture different from ours, even though we were separated by only a few years. The world remembers the brutality of the apartheid years, but few people know of the iron fist that other countries, such as Portugal, Belgium and Germany, used to rule their African possessions. We all have blood on our hands, in some way, shape or form, and people can be brutalised by war and persecution. As Evan just said, none of us can take back the things we saw or heard. All I can tell you is what I did, and what I saw. I’ll share it with you, if you like.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mia said. ‘I just wanted to learn, perhaps to understand.’
Tony exhaled audibly. ‘I came across Luiz, after one contact, and found him standing over the body of a dead Angolan soldier. The man had been wounded in a contact, but then he’d been shot in the head. His weapon, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, was far away from him, in the bush. At the time, I thought Luiz had shot a prisoner in cold blood. I later reported it to my superior, the sector commander, and was told that because I had not actually witnessed any wrongdoing then I should keep my mouth shut. I haven’t told anyone that story since, Mia, just you.’
Mia was stunned. She had thought him a ‘typical’ politician, with his half-answers and misdirections, but now he had opened up to her, entrusting her with something he had not told the world. ‘Thank you.’
‘Sheesh,’ Tony said. ‘I’ve been carrying that around with me a long time.’
‘Did you know that Luiz had a gun?’ Evan asked Mia.
Mia shook her head. ‘No idea, and nor did Shirley. It was such a shock. He seemed like such a gentle man; it’s amazing to hear of his past. But you know, I never thought my father would kill himself, either.’
‘Frank always seemed so . . . strong,’ Evan said. ‘He was like the glue that held the platoon together. He was tough, but you could go to him if you had a personal problem and he always stood by us.’
‘Losing his job really hurt him,’ Mia said, ‘but I hoped he would get work in one of the safari lodges. I don’t think he was the kind to be a guide, but with what I know about the industry these days he would have been a great maintenance or operations manager. He had all the skills, and the bush was his true home.’
‘Sometimes it creeps up on you later in life,’ Tony said. ‘You tell yourself you’re doing fine, that it’s all behind you, but when you get older, when you mature and start thinking about the things you’ve done in your life, those very things that you tried to push aside with work, or booze, or whatever, come back to haunt you.’
‘Do you think that’s what happened to my father, and to Luiz?’ Mia asked.
Tony just stared out over the desert, where the sun was heading for the dunes, in silence. Mia wondered if it was happening to him.
Chapter 15
Adam enjoyed the feeling of being back behind the wheel of a car: the speed, the barely audible hum of the engine and the sensation of moving forward, not backwards.
Sannie had fallen asleep again. Her mouth was half open and while the look was not flattering, he smiled. It was a memory from another time, a road trip with a beautiful woman who felt safe enough to be able to let herself sleep while he drove.
He remembered family holidays in a different life. It had been, to some extent, an illusion of happiness. The poison that killed his relationship had been present in him even before he met his wife. He hadn’t been aware of it, when he went back to university and told himself he could put the army, Angola and the war behind him.
Sannie woke. ‘Where are we?’
‘Only about an hour out of Kuruman.’ The sun was setting, the sky turning pink.
‘I can’t remember the last long road trip I did. It feels like holidays, almost.’
‘You’re reading my mind, now,’ he said, glancing over at her and smiling to hide the hurt. ‘I was just thinking how happy I seemed to be.’
‘Seemed?’
‘You’re perceptive,’ he said. ‘I think I was playing at happy families, playing at life. I married a girl I’d gone out with before the army, since I was seventeen, because it seemed like the right thing to do, and we had kids for the same reason. We were very different people, and the army had changed me.’
‘You went to university after the army?’
‘Yes. And even while we were making plans to marry and our families were getting excited, I knew that I couldn’t support a family on a marine biologist’s wages. I let my studies fall away, and I was drinking too much.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I look back and I can see that I had a wild time, that I enjoyed it, but I think I was running away, or hiding, or both. Funnily enough I ran towards stability, a wife, kids and a job. OK, it was a good, fun job, running a dive business and being out on the water all the time, but it wasn’t what I had wanted to do, before the army.’
‘I’ve heard of people with PTSD who are fully functioning,’ Sannie said. ‘Instead of drinking or taking drugs, or withdrawing or whatever, they channel all their energy, all their anxiety into becoming consummate professionals. They use their work to escape from their problems.’
‘It feels good, though, to be going somewhere,’ he said, changing the subject.
She looked at him and smiled and it warmed his heart. ‘Yes. It does.’
Adam had the almost uncontrollable urge to reach out and touch her, not sexually, but just to have his hand on her, to feel some sort of connection between them. In the next instant, however, he knew that such a move would not only be inappropriate, but also a waste of time.
Here he was, hitching a lift with a widow across South Africa to go to a funeral. He barely had enough money to meet his promise of paying half her fuel, let alone enough to take her out to dinner or woo her, or provide for her. If it was another century then his prospects would have been described as non-existent. If, however, he could finish renovating the house and sell it, then he might have enough capital to start up another small business.
If.
He was kidding himself. If he hadn’t been so stupid and in such a rush to close the deal on the house he’d wanted to buy, he wouldn’t have lost all his money to the Nigerian fraudsters and he could have been funding himself through his studies with money to spare. If he’d taken the time to call the attorney, rather than just transferring the money, he’d be living in a grand place, and his parents’ house would have been fully renovated and sold to provide him with money to live on and cover the kids’ airfares when they wanted to visit. If he wasn’t such a failure.
They arrived in Kuruman and Sannie’s sat nav directed them to the B&B she had mentioned. They checked in. ‘Two rooms, please,’ Sannie said.
‘Yes,’ said the elderly proprietor. ‘My wife said you had specified that. Breakfast is from seven to nine in the morning.’
‘Thank you,’ Sannie said. They took their bags from the car to their respective rooms. ‘They don’t do dinner here, so I was thinking the Spur?’
‘Um, yes, fine by me,’ Adam said, wondering what he would be able to afford on his budget, without looking like a cheapskate or a pauper. ‘Half an hour?’
‘Sounds good to me,’ she said, ‘I’ll just have a quick shower.’
When they met again, Sannie had not only washed, but also changed. She wore jeans and a light long-sleeved pink top. She had tied back her hair. She smelled clean and he detected a hint of perfume.
They drove the short distance to the open-air mall and went into the Del Rio Spur. The restaurant, with its Wild West–themed decor, was as familiar as any of the more than three hundred other steakhouses in the chain across South Africa. A waitress showed them to a table and asked if she could take their drinks order.
‘Please can I see the wine list?’ Sannie asked.
When the waitress went to fetch it, Sannie put her hands on the table and leaned towards Adam. ‘I have a business proposition for you.’
He felt nervous. He was still wondering what he would do about dinner. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘Whatever house I buy is sure to need some work. I can see by all the painting and renovating that you’re doing at your folks’ place that you must be good with your hands.’
‘I like the work, always have.’
‘Well,’ Sannie said, ‘I’ll make you a deal. I’ll pay for dinner, and for fuel for this trip, if you agree to give me, say, three days’ worth of your time doing home handyman jobs around my new place. Or mowing the lawn or what-what-what.’
He clasped his hands together. ‘No.’
‘Oh.’ She looked crestfallen, then frowned. ‘If this is some male ego thing, I –’
Adam grinned. ‘Let’s make it seven days and it will be a pleasure.’
Sannie looked relieved. ‘I could bargain you down, but I’ll be working fulltime and even a police captain’s pay is not great, so, I reluctantly accept.’
Adam put out his hand and she took it. They shook. He did not want to let go.
Sannie didn’t pull her hand away but sat there, just holding his, smiling.
The waitress returned and Adam cleared his throat. ‘Well, since I’m going to be paying for this with the sweat of my brow, I’ll have a Castle Lite, draught, please.’
Sannie quickly scanned the list. ‘Will you share a bottle of red with me?’
‘With pleasure,’ Adam said.
Sannie ordered a bottle of Beyerskloof Pinotage and Adam told her it was one of his favourites.
At Sannie’s urging they ordered starters as well as a main course. The food at the Spur was not high cuisine, but Adam closed his eyes in raptures as he devoured the fried calamari and a medium rare fillet steak.
‘You look like you enjoyed that.’
‘I can’t remember the last time I had fillet.’ The thought could have brought him down, but he reminded himself of his shrink’s advice, to try and stay in the moment and not dwell on the past. ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you for all the work you’re going to be doing for me.’ Sannie nodded to the bottle of wine. ‘I don’t want to drink the rest of that here. It wouldn’t do for a police captain to get caught for drunk driving. You can finish it if you like.’
‘Let’s take it with us,’ Adam suggested.
‘Good idea.’
Sannie paid, and while Adam felt a little uncomfortable, he admired the way she had given him a way to save face through her offer of work. She was kind and thoughtful, and as he followed her out, he thought she looked great in her skinny jeans.
They drove back to their bed and breakfast and went to their rooms, then reunited at the small table and chairs outside Sannie’s room. They each brought a glass and Adam poured for them. The sky above was clear, the stars coming out, and the air was cool.
