The Pride, page 24
‘It’s not a problem. She saw enough before the feed was cut. As far as she knows we have you.’
‘You’ve got your drugs. Let her go.’
‘Half of my cargo. I want the rest. You have an hour or your mother dies.’
What the hell, Emma thought, I may as well tell them the truth. ‘The other bag’s in Botswana. It’ll take me and a small army more than an hour to get it out of the Kasane police lock-up. We can pay you for the fucking drugs.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not just about the money,’ Wu said. ‘Trust me, Emma. If you want your mother to live, you should hand yourself in to us.’
‘No way.’
She heard him sigh on the other end of the call. ‘Very well. Then I must tell you, honestly, that if your mother is not one hundred per cent sure that you are alive, and that we are holding you as a hostage, then she will most surely die. She seems to have a great strength of character and that is about to be put to the test.’
‘What do you mean, most surely –?’
Wu ended the call.
Around her, tourists blithely went about their business, taking selfies, laughing, eating ice-cream, queueing for restaurants. Part of her wanted to scream: All I wanted was a fucking normal life! She stilled herself. The other part of her, the Sonja part of her, knew what she had to do.
Chapter 19
Sonja watched the warehouse begin to fill with cars and people. ‘I want to see my daughter again,’ she called out.
Hendricks was with a couple, an older man and a younger woman. Hendricks patted the man on the arm and walked towards her.
Sonja assessed the crowd. They were well dressed, but flashy. There was clearly a ‘masque ball’ dress code; Sonja didn’t know if it was some kind of kinky theme, or for security, with some of the attendees preferring to remain anonymous. The men sported a style she would have described as ‘gangster formal’. The women, although wearing cocktail dresses and insane heels, were rough around the edges. She saw homemade tattoos on exposed skin and when a pair of eyes locked on to her, they had the hardness of the streets in them. The one who had just been talking to Hendricks was staring at her.
‘Be quiet, now, Sonja,’ Hendricks said to her in a low voice. He was now wearing a Zorro mask tied behind his head. ‘Not long to go.’
‘I want to see my daughter. Proof of life.’
‘You think we’ve killed her already? I’m not that stupid.’
‘I think she might have killed a couple of your men by now.’
He laughed. ‘She’s an archaeologist, not an assassin, unlike you.’
Sonja ground her teeth.
Hendricks carried on, though he stayed a metre from the cage. ‘It’s quite simple: when the bell is rung, you and Jacob will fight, to the death. The one who loses will do so knowing his or her family will join them in heaven, see?’
She shook her head. ‘I have seen some sick shit in my life . . .’
He smiled and spread his hands wide. ‘Jacob has more to lose than you – two children and a pretty wife. You have one person. The winner will work for me, with their loved one – or ones – in protective custody for six months. After that period, he or she will be so compromised that they will have to continue in my service, or risk going to prison for a very long time. You and Emma already have a string of murders pinned on you the length of southern Africa. If you live, I should be able to make most of those go away. You should count yourself lucky I didn’t just put a bullet in your brain, the same as you did to my son.’
‘Listen to me, Hendricks.’
He looked over his shoulder and gave a small wave to another couple who had just arrived.
‘I did not kill your son.’
He turned back to her. ‘Really? Now you’re lying? What next, begging?’
‘I caught him, under water, cut his air hose, and stabbed him. To teach him a lesson.’
He shrugged. ‘For that alone I would kill you.’
She seethed. ‘And I could have – should have – killed him for attacking my daughter, but I didn’t.’
He looked hard into her eyes. ‘You know, I don’t think you know what you did, there, or in Hwange or in Victoria Falls with Wu’s people. Wu told me about the trail of executions you carried out, on people who wronged you and those you care about. I want you working for me. You’re just the kind of controlled psychopath I need.’ Hendricks started to turn back to his crowd of couture criminals.
‘Someone else killed your boy,’ Sonja called after him. ‘You let me and Dlamini out of this zoo and I’ll find out who.’
Hendricks ignored her and strode across the warehouse floor to a newly arrived Tesla. He embraced the man and woman who got out.
Sonja surveyed the crowd. Wu, distinctive by his height, hair and build, now had a tall blonde, pushing more than two metres in her stripper heels, on his arm. She was disguised with cat’s ears, eyes and whiskers and had the look of a high-priced rental about her, Sonja thought.
A girl standing with an old guy glanced back at her every now and then. She was beautiful, even in a mask, with coffee-coloured skin, curls and a hint of softness about her. Sonja manufactured a smile for her and she turned back to her sugar daddy.
A Land Cruiser FJ entered the warehouse. Sonja noted that each time a new car came in, two guards in black suits, AK-47s slung over their shoulders, opened and closed roller doors. Sonja reasoned that even this lot of ostentatiously clad gangsters didn’t want to attract attention by parking their equally flashy rides out on the dock – the smell of cold salt air and the occasional toot of a ship’s horn told her she was by the sea. A man with a bleached mullet and another blonde got out of the FJ, which sported a Western Province number plate – local abalone dealers, she guessed.
The next couple walked in, perhaps after being dropped off outside. Uber or chauffeured transfer, Sonja thought. He was tall and broad, grey-haired, carrying a mix of old muscle and new flab. Under his cheap, simple bandit’s mask was a red nose that had been flattened in a fight or two in a previous life. The woman on his arm was much younger than him, judging by her slim but muscled alabaster arms and long, straight black hair. She was clad in a lime-green shimmering sheath, her face fully covered by what looked like a Roman or Viking death mask, which would make it hard for her to do drugs or booze. Even from a distance, and Sonja did not have her glasses or contact lenses, there was something familiar about her. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to think where she might have seen the young woman, or, at least, her body, before.
Like everyone who entered, this couple paused to look at her then moved on to assess Jacob, as though she and the Zulu man were racehorses or cattle at auction. Jacob caught her eye every now and then, and searched her face for some kind of answer or way out of this madness.
The thugs had set up the room with rows of seats like a concert venue, and were now doubling as drinks waiters. They had wheeled in trolleys of food from outside – clearly the caterers were not going to be treated to the sight of cage fighting. The criminals reverted to type, jostling at the tables for oysters, canapes and mini cardboard boxes of something hot.
The curly-haired sugar baby, champagne flute in hand, drifted closer to Sonja while a circle gathered around Hendricks and Wu. The girl reminded Sonja of an impala, big dark eyes, twitchy, like she was worried about the predators in the room. She cast her eyes down at Sonja’s upper arm.
‘What’s your tattoo?’ She pointed to the ring of letters and numbers around Sonja’s bicep.
Really? Sonja thought. Not: What are you and that man doing in cages and why will you be beating the shit out of each other soon?
‘My home, or the closest thing I ever had to one.’ Sonja glanced down at the letters and numbers. ‘Latitude and longitude, like on a GPS.’
‘Where?’
‘Botswana. A place called Xakanaxa, in the Okavango Delta.’
She nodded. ‘Your happy place, right? I saw it once, on DSTV. Lions in the water. Were you really happy there?’
‘My first love was there, but my father beat me and my mother.’ Sonja detected the slightest movement in the girl’s eyes, back towards the old man she’d arrived with. ‘I left.’
‘You were lucky.’
Sonja nodded to the man. ‘I’m guessing he’s not your father.’
The girl lowered her voice and came half a step closer, almost within reach. ‘He tells people he’s my godfather.’
‘Does he hurt you?’
Her long lashes blinked through the holes in her feathered mask, like a doll Sonja had bought for Emma as a child. Her daughter, however, had preferred digging in the sandpit to playing dollies – a promise of things to come. ‘It was worse, where I grew up. Mitchells Plain. He saved me, from the drugs, you know?’
‘It doesn’t make it right,’ Sonja said. ‘I’m thirsty.’
The girl glanced behind her, quickly, then closed the gap between them and held her glass to Sonja’s lips and tilted it.
Sonja took a sip, then got her teeth around the rim and bit down. There was the satisfying crunch of glass breaking.
‘Hey,’ the girl hissed, and snatched her hand away. The champagne flute slipped from her grasp as she stepped back and smashed on the concrete floor. Several people turned to look while others either politely or arrogantly ignored the mishap and kept talking. Hendricks strode over, followed by the girl’s older companion.
‘Laverne, stay away from there,’ the old man admonished.
‘Yes,’ Hendricks said, snapping a finger in the air for one of his men, who had already raced off to find a broom. ‘She’s a wild animal, that one. She bites.’
Sonja held on to the bars and smiled. She turned away from him, wiping a trace of blood from her mouth with a finger.
‘Let me see you,’ Hendricks said.
She pirouetted, fists up in a mock boxing stance.
He regarded her as the couple moved back to the safety of the group, the older man now gripping his girlfriend’s upper arm hard enough for her to try and wiggle away. Cocaine had been laid out on a silver platter on a table and two of the women in the group were indulging, via rolled-up two-hundred-rand notes.
Sonja’s eye was drawn back to the girl with the full-face mask and long black hair, who was also, she noted, watching her. A cage fight to the death might be socially acceptable on the Cape Flats, but perhaps not in London or Berlin where this mismatched couple was from.
The black-haired woman broke from the crowd and went to Jacob’s enclosure. Two other women were there, assessing him. Sonja continued to rack her brain. The skin, she thought. She remembered being on the beach at Silver Sands, scanning the other sunbathers. There had been the guy, the Silver Fox, and the one she had dubbed the ‘European swallow’. Pale skin, black hair peeking out from under a broad-brimmed hat.
The woman came to Sonja and, standing back a respectful distance after what had just happened, looked her up and down, very slowly, as a flunkey swept away the shards of broken glass.
‘Like what you see?’ Sonja asked.
‘I can see this is going to be an interesting evening.’
Her voice was muffled behind the mask, but the pronunciation of the ‘I’ gave it away immediately.
‘You’re from Belfast?’
The young woman nodded. ‘Close enough.’
‘You don’t have the cheap tattoos to be a drug dealer’s moll.’
The woman glanced at the crowd, then back at Sonja. ‘Thank you.’
Sonja noted her body shape and remembered the structure of her face. She thought of the person on the beach, in the sunhat; then it dawned on her that she’d seen the same hair, but pulled back in a ponytail, under a baseball cap, worn indoors at the Three Monkeys in Victoria Falls. Her heart felt like a fist had just squeezed it. This girl had been following her. ‘It wasn’t a compliment.’ Sonja tried to sound tough, but she wondered how long this woman had been on her tail.
‘That so?’
‘No, I think you’re worse.’
‘And what’s worse than a drug peddler or junkie skank then?’
‘A murderer.’
The woman laughed, then calmed herself. ‘Going to preach to me, are you? You’re the one who should be praying for salvation or making your last confession, looking at the size of your opponent.’
‘What are you doing here . . .?’
‘Fiona.’
Sonja stared at the mask, searching for the eyes, which usually gave away everything, but the woman was too far away. ‘Following me.’
‘Yes.’
The older, thickset man with the broken nose came to them, a beer in his hand.
‘This is David,’ Fiona said with a nod.
‘A pleasure,’ Sonja said to him. She turned on her own impression of a Northern Irish accent: ‘Sure and I’m guessing it’s not a first for either of you two, seeing someone bludgeoned to death.’
‘It’ll be the first time I’ve seen a woman killed in a fistfight,’ Fiona said. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’
‘I bet you are.’ Sonja looked to David.
‘Not for me,’ he said. ‘Women make just as good combatants as men, in my experience, and as such they deserve the same fate. Some folks thought me very progressive on that front, a true advocate of gender equality.’
Sonja ignored his sick joke and nodded to the crowd. There were shrieks of laughter as the drugs and alcohol began to take effect. One of Hendricks’s men had started taking bets, and wads of cash were being waved about. Sonja and Jacob were attracting more and more attention.
‘What do you make of this rabble?’ Sonja asked David.
‘There’s an honesty to the gangs here, and the triads. A kind of purity in a bizarre sort of a way.’
Sonja raised her eyebrows, but she knew what he meant. ‘Loyalty.’
‘Exactly. Tradition and structure. They call their leaders “generals”, and salute. Just like an army, not just a bunch of thieves or mercenaries.’ David lifted his mask, almost casually, and rubbed his eyes, or pretended to, then replaced it.
He wanted me to see who he was, Sonja thought. ‘Who are you, David? Fiona’s father?’
Fiona turned her back to Sonja and tilted her mask up onto the top of her head. She took hold of David’s suit jacket lapels in her hands, drew him down to her and kissed him, on the mouth. She broke away from him, replaced her mask, and turned back to Sonja.
‘Not your father, then,’ Sonja said. ‘At least I hope not.’
‘Daddy, maybe,’ Fiona said, ‘but no, not my father.’
David shook his head. ‘No fear.’
‘I’m going to enjoy tonight,’ Fiona said.
Looking through the eye slits into Fiona’s soul, Sonja could see she meant it. Unusually for her, she felt a chill.
*
Emma’s phone dinged. The sun was setting, the daytime shoppers being replaced with the after-work crowd and holiday-makers venturing out to one of the Waterfront’s many restaurants and bars.
She went into Cape Union Mart, which was still open, and burrowed between shelves of camping gadgets and outdoor clothing.
‘Evening, ma’am. Can I help?’ a young assistant asked.
Emma grabbed a fleece jacket and a polo-neck top off the racks. ‘Can I try these on?’
‘Of course,’ the man said, ‘change rooms are out the back.’
‘Thanks.’ Emma made her way into a booth and slid her back down the wall until she sat on the small ledge seat. She exhaled. Her heart was racing. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to get the adrenaline coursing through her body under control.
I killed two people.
She shook her head and opened her eyes. On her phone was a cut-and-pasted message from Hudson. It was a report from News24.
Mother–daughter duo sought over murders
By Rosie Appleton
Breaking news: Police in three countries are looking for two foreign tourists suspected of involvement in a string of drug-related murders. Cape Town’s organised crime unit confirmed it was working with counterparts in Botswana and Zimbabwe over a series of killings allegedly related to a cross-border drug-smuggling operation. Sources say American national Sonja Kurtz and her daughter, Emma Kurtz, a British archaeologist, are wanted for questioning over the brutal killings of three men in Zimbabwe, and the driver of an overland tourist vehicle in Botswana two days ago. Police spokesman Captain Derek Minnaar said today the pair was also sought for questioning in relation to the killing of three men at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. ‘Police in Cape Town recovered a large quantity of crystal methamphetamine and a pistol at the V&A crime scene,’ Captain Minnaar told News24.
‘Shit.’
‘Everything all right in there?’ the male shop attendant called from the other side of the door.
‘Yes . . . fine, thanks.’ She was anything but. Emma put on the fleece jacket she had selected and ripped off the label. She emerged from the change room, took a beanie off a shelf and went to the cash register, where she grabbed the first pair of sunglasses she could reach. She paid for her purchases and put the beanie and glasses on too, then went out again.
Emma looked left, then right, and saw a pair of police officers heading her way. She ducked down another side alley and scrolled through the contacts in her phone. She dialled a number.
‘Hello?’
‘Kelvin, this is Emma.’
There was a pause. ‘Oh, British Emma? Um, howzit? This is a surprise.’
‘Cut the fucking chitchat, Kelvin, where are you?’
‘At the Pick n Pay, working.’ Kelvin sounded a bit taken aback.
‘Good, I hoped so.’ She’d remembered him telling her that he worked at the Waterfront. ‘I need to see you, now.’
‘Wow.’
‘Don’t get too excited,’ Emma said. ‘How do I find the supermarket?’
