Read Payback - A Cape Town thriller Online
Authors: Mike Nicol
In the car Mace said, pointing down Molteno Road, ‘Look at that. Don’t you want to live with this every day?’
Cape Town city spread below them, clear now with the brown haze lifted and the sun hard on the buildings. Across the bay a white sickle of beach gleamed up the west coast for such a distance you could almost make out the bulk of the nuclear power station.
Mace revelled, ‘Oh man.’
Oumou reached out to put her hand on his arm. ‘Oui, this is beautiful. But not the house. In the house there is a bad feeling.’
‘Ah, come on.’ Mace slowed for the traffic lights at the reservoir. ‘It’s an old house. Get the renovators and the painters in, like Dave says, it’s what the house can be, not what it is.’
Oumou smiled, took her hand off his arm.
* * *
Mace, she knew, could be stubborn and demanding. And sometimes she resisted and sometimes she didn’t. This time she would wait. In the waiting much would change. Maybe they would move to this house, but maybe they wouldn’t. She kept the smile, thinking of how for a time at the beginning she had resisted him, even when she didn’t want to.
‘You come here for your business, to my town Malitia to sell guns, you go away again,’ she had told him. ‘For months you are away. You come back with that woman, Isabella, I think she is your wife.’
‘Isabella is a contact. American. She can get us guns. It’s business.’
‘You sleep with her. This is business?’
Mace had said, ‘That’s over’ - and reached out for her hand, drawn her towards him.
She laughed at his brazenness, pushed him away.
In Paris men had been like that. She met them, she talked to them, they thought they could lay her. She told them no. Three years she’d spent fighting them off, one way or the other. Four or five she’d pulled a knife on to make her point. The ceramicist she worked for said, ‘Why make pots when rich men want to screw you?’
‘Because I do not want to screw them or you,’ she said.
He leered at her. Always trying to feel her bum, her breasts until she threatened his groin with a knife and said she’d set free his testicles, if he didn’t stop it. The gesture got them to an understanding.
When her time was up she went back to the desert, to Malitia, to shape pots from her native clay.
The potter said, ‘Stay in France, you will make more money. We can organise an exhibition.’
Oumou said, maybe one day.
The man she met on her return to Malitia was Mace Bishop. He was sitting with her brother at a café where men gathered in the afternoon, smoking hookahs, drinking coffee. Playing dominoes. He looked at her as the French men had done, but said nothing. That night he ate at their house. He and the other man, Pylon, joking with her brother.
He admired her pots. He spoke to her in poor French and she told him to speak in English.
‘You know English?’ he said, surprised.
‘Like French, it is the language of guns,’ she said. ‘When I was a girl there was a man here the same as you. An Englishman. If he had nothing to do he would teach me English.’
‘He couldn’t have been very busy.’
She laughed. As he stood grinning at her said, ‘Why must you sell guns here?’
The grin didn’t leave his face. ‘For the money.’
Oumou set a lump of clay on the wheel the French ceramicist had given her. ‘So that people can kill each other. Kill women and children. Little babies even.’
‘They do that,’ he said. ‘Anyhow.’
‘You are a heartless man.’
He told her then about his country and the war there and the need to finance what he called ‘the struggle’. He didn’t tell her about Cayman. About his nest egg.
‘And this makes it right, to sell guns?’ she said.
‘I sell guns to those who need to fight. Like we are.’
‘To children.’
‘In my country they took the lead. They have a future.’
‘Empty words,’ she said, turned to her clay, smoothed it, rounded it, began to shape a form that was long and elegant like her neck. She started the wheel and let this man who sold guns watch her make something beautiful.
For a time she resisted him, his kind attention that would tease her, never touch her, make her laugh. And then one sunset they walked through the mud streets, across the casbah where men packed away their wares and went up the steps onto the wall that had once enclosed the town, gazing into the wadi at boys playing soccer with a ball on the sand between the palm trees. Behind them the imams in their mosques called the faithful to prayer and Mace said, ‘I want to sleep with you.’
The words startled her. She stiffened, broke away from him. ‘You come here for your business, to Malitia, you stay for a few weeks then you go away again. Now you want a sex toy?’
Mace stepped towards her. ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘Stop.’ She put a hand against his chest. Glared at him. ‘If you stop the guns.’
He laughed. ‘What?’
‘You must stop the guns.’
He stared at her for a long time and she didn’t waver. In the wadi the boys ended their game as the dusk thickened, their voices sharp in the stillness. ‘Okay.’ He turned away from her. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Two days later Mace came in from the desert with the body of her brother. She did not cry, her grief was silent. He told her he knew about those who had raped her when she was a girl. Raped her, stabbed her in the stomach, left her for dead. That her brother had told him this in the long hours he took to die. Mace told her he could not let rest the matter of her brother’s death. That night she did not resist him.
But she was insistent. You must stop the guns. You must stop the guns.
When she told him she was pregnant, he said he would stop selling guns.
‘This you will make as a promise?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
And she believed he would.
Matthew and Ducky Donald were standing on the pavement when Mace and Oumou pulled up. The two of them smoking. Only Ducky Donald’s slight lean to the right a clue that he might be favouring a good leg. No one else in the short side-street. At night a trendy part of town; during the day not a lot went on. Some cars got repaired at a small garage. A junk dealer took in odd pieces of the city’s discard. Maybe import-export happened in upstairs offices. Nor much passing traffic. The motormac and the junk dealer were keeping to themselves. Mace stopped behind Ducky Donald’s SUV.
‘Won’t take a minute,’ he said to Oumou.
‘Perhaps you can let me have the car?’
‘Ten minutes. That’s all, ten minutes.’
She told him in French he pushed her to the limit.
Ducky Donald leant over the open Spider, grinning at Oumou. ‘Hey, darling! You the one made Mace all the money in the
desert
? Can see why he did business with you.’ He leered at Mace. ‘Shouldn’t hide her, boykie.’
Mace ignored him. ‘What’ve you got me here for?’
‘Art exhibition,’ said Donald. ‘Appeal to your pitiless heart. Step inside.’ He quashed one cigarette, lit another. ‘The best of gothic. Not so, Mattie boy? Bloody wonderful example.’ Matthew scowled, stepped away so his father couldn’t thump him a second time on the back. ‘Come on, bring the wife, Mace, nothing here she wouldn’t have seen before. Considering what the Arabs get up to.’ He opened the door of the club and they followed him into the darkness.
Mace’s eyes took a moment to adjust. Before they did he heard a mewing, very soft. Also smelt a faint odour like old cat litter. When he could see he saw that kittens had been nailed to the walls through the fur at the nape of their necks. Most were dead, a few squirmed.
‘A grand display, don’t you think!’ said Ducky Donald,
whisping
a stream of exhale over their heads. ‘You want Mattie to switch the lights on? The strobe’s good.’
The strobe came on: pulsing at images of skulls, tombstones, ruined churches. Bats crossing a sickle moon.
‘Maybe you can tell me what happened?’ Mace said to Matthew.
Matthew licked the dryness of his lips. ‘About ha-ha-half an hour ago I got a ca-all.’
‘Cell? Landline?’
‘My cell-cellphone.’ He cadged a cigarette from his father. ‘No num-number. This guy sa-says they’ve added some decor-ations to my c-club. He ha-hangs up. My first thought it’s Pa-PAGAD. Second that they’ve t-trashed the place. I get down here the door’s o-open …’
‘You called the cops?’
Matthew gave him a pained look. ‘L-like what’s with you-you and the c-cops?’
‘Like breaking and entry. Cruelty to animals. What about Centurion?’
Matthew got red-faced. ‘Wa-wasn’t act-activated. The contract’s ex-pired.’
‘We need protection here, Mace,’ said Donald. ‘These people are shitting the constitution. You gonna let what we struggled for go up in a kilo of Semtex?’
‘You want my protection? Call the cops.’
‘Je-Jesus,’ Matthew rounded on Mace, ‘don’t you g-get it? This isn’t st-stuff for the cops. This is Sh-Sheemina Feb-February. The cops can do sweet fa-fanny about her. You see Abdul Abdul
wa-walking
around. Two mur-murder charges, he’s out f-free. This’s tha-thank you Sheemina. So what good’re c-cops? Huh! You can t-tell me?’
A shadow darkened the doorway into the street and Oumou came in. Mace heard her catch her breath, say, ‘Merde!’ and disappear.
‘That’s a stunner you picked up,’ said Ducky. ‘You’re a cagey boy, Mace Bishop.’
‘You want my advice?’ Mace shifted from one kitten to the next. They were well tacked in. Some had their heads busted in the hammering. Five of the twelve were alive. ‘Close down. That’s the best protection I can give.’
‘Not possible,’ said Ducky. ‘We’re talking business, Mace. Mattie closes down, the income stream collapses.’
‘They put a pipe bomb in here it’s going to explode, not just collapse.’
‘What you’re engaged to prevent.’
Oumou came back with a pair of pliers from the motormac.
‘You gonna yank the nails out with that you gonna need visibility,’ said Ducky Donald. ‘Bring the lights up, Mattie, give the girl some illumination.’ He closed on her. ‘You need a hand there?’
Oumou ignored him. Got at the first live kitten, put the pliers to the nail head and pulled back hard with a grunt. The nail came out and the kitten fell to the floor, screeching. Ducky Donald got a load of French for not catching it. Pity was, Mace thought, he couldn’t understand a word of it.
‘You gonna enlighten me?’ Ducky Donald asked as Mace handed him a box that must have been the container the kittens were brought in.
‘In a word, you’re an arsehole.’
Matthew sniggered. Oumou pulled free another kitten, gave it to Ducky with an expression suggesting arsehole was too soft a
translation
. She got down the five, said, ‘Give this back to your neighbour’ - swapping the pliers for the box. Mace followed her out.
‘Ask him what he saw,’ Mace called back at father and son. ‘The motormac.’
Ducky Donald shouted, ‘You’re not running out on us Mace?’
‘Till four-thirty. Meantime think of closing down.’
The vet saved three. While he was snipping fur, cleaning the wounds, preparing syringes, wanted to know what happened. Mace gave him a story of how he and Oumou had found them tacked to a wall in the wrong part of Woodstock, probably some sort of gang initiation. Right, he said, he’d heard of that. Dogs being crucified. Cats skewered. Even cows with their udders cut off. Once about a dozen hens plucked alive. Made you wonder what sort of drugs they took, these gangsters.
‘You want me to take these to a pet’s refuge?’ he said. ‘Should imagine if they stay alive over the next few days someone’ll give them a home.’
‘We are having them,’ said Oumou.
The vet glanced at her sympathetically. ‘You’ve done enough already, you don’t have to feel responsible.’ He flicked his eyes at Mace for confirmation.
Oumou said, ‘They are for us to look after.’
Mace didn’t argue. Arguing with Oumou on matters like this got nowhere.
In the car heading up the steep streets she told him it was a good idea for Christa to have pets. This was something they should have done years before. The girl was six years old she should have a pet to look after. ‘You can see this is true, no?’
Mace swung the Spider out of Kloof Street into Union, slowing on the approach to Christa’s crèche.
‘They’re not going to live. Not all of them anyhow. How’s she going to feel when they die?’
‘We face that one, maybe, when it happens.’
‘It’s going to.’
‘Maybe.’ He got flashed a look a million years old. ‘But maybe not.’
The crèche was hidden behind a high wall, a notice at the
security
gate read: ‘Parents must ensure that their children are handed into the care of accredited staff at the beginning of the day.’
Oumou slid out of the car, reached the gate in two strides and punched the intercom buzzer. He heard her speak her name. The gate clicked unlocked and she went in. The noise of kids at play came loud from behind the wall. Mace opened the boot to gentle the kittens.
Christa came hurtling through the gate. She stopped at the sight of the kittens curled into one another in the box.
She wore a red T-shirt, black tracksuit bottoms and Nikes. Her hair was wild, dark, but in the sunlight it caught fire and turned almost auburn. Her eyes could have been her mother’s, he believed, mysterious pools that had gathered secrets for so long they were incapable of registering surprise. She had the same texture and skin colour as her mother, a brown as golden as the head on an espresso. When he searched for traces of his genes in her expressions, movement, the tilt of her face he could find none. Other stuff, yes: pigheadedness, temper, irritability. Then again nothing there that wasn’t in her mother. To look at, most times he reckoned Oumou made her alone. She was the only child they could have, and that gave her special dues he felt.
Mace took her hand, drew her closer to the boot. There was blood on the cardboard. The kitten with the leaking wound stared up, opened its mouth to mew but made no sound. Christa reached out to touch it, poking a finger into the fur.