Nowhere

  Also by Roger Smith

  Man Down

  Sacrifices

  Capture

  Dust Devils

  Wake Up Dead

  Mixed Blood

  Ishmael Toffee (a novella)

  Vile Blood (as Max Wilde)

  Roger Smith's novels are published in eight languages and two are in development as feature films. Visit his website

  NOWHERE

  By

  Roger Smith

  © 2016 by Roger Smith

  All rights reserved

  Nowhere is a work of fiction and names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without the express written permission of the author or publisher except where permitted by law.

  For my daughter, Isabella

  PART ONE

  No wind is of service to him that is bound for nowhere.

  OLD PROVERB

  ONE

  The president of the Republic of South Africa, flaming drunk on five star Maceira brandy—a gift from his Portuguese counterpart during a recent state visit—finally buckled beneath a twenty-eight year avalanche of nagging and hectoring, shoved aside a plate of sheep’s head on a bed of mielie pap corn porridge and rose from the dinner table at Genadendal, his official residence in Cape Town, seized a Zulu iklwa stabbing spear from where it hung on the wall beneath a portrait of Queen Victoria (a juxtaposition the statesman had always appreciated) and shoved it between the ribs of his chunky wife who stood bellowing at him like a cow in calf, severing her aorta and silencing her forever, leaving her lying dead on a Persian prayer rug that dated back to the tenure of Cecil John Rhodes.

  TWO

  When Steve Bungu arrived at Genadendal eight minutes after receiving the call from the president’s senior bodyguard—the blue light atop his Mercedes-Benz SUV allowing him to cleave his way through the night traffic, mostly the sleek European cars of affluent whites on their way back to the Southern Suburbs from the cinemas and restaurants at the Waterfront—he found three of the president’s protectors in the antechamber outside the dining room restraining a fourth man with a bloodied lip who was determined to get free and belatedly defend his mistress.

  Bungu, who had recruited the man specifically to spy on the president’s troublesome spouse, said, “Easy, Sizwe, easy now,” as if he were calming a skittish mountain pony, his voice a low rumble, like a tremor deep in the earth.

  Bungu was a short but very wide man, his shaven head as dented and pitted as an old miner’s helmet, his brow a shelf of bone that shaded a pair of eyes that had seen the worst of men and never blinked. He wore a yellow Lacoste golf shirt that stretched across his barrel chest, his gut swelling over check shorts and his thick feet were squeezed into pair of bespoke Italian oxblood loafers so costly that they could have fed a family of shack dwellers for six months.

  He shoved open the door to the dining room and found the drunken president seated at the table, dark face agleam with sweat, his bodyguard hovering over him.

  Bungu took in the scene.

  The toppled chair.

  The plate of food on the floor.

  The thickset woman in her floral dress and matching turban—ethnic haute couture—lying on the rug with the spear still protruding from her side like a toothpick from one of the pigs in blankets that were borne around this room on silver salvers during state functions.

  “Bungu, I seem to have killed my wife,” the president said.

  “Ja, sir, so it seems,” Bungu said.

  “But don’t worry, I have seven others.” The president laughed and then his laughter evaporated and he pointed a finger at Bungu. “You’ll fix this, hey bra Steve?”

  Bungu didn’t reply, just rolled on a pair of surgical gloves, flexing his fingers like a concert pianist.

  He grabbed the spear and pulled it from the woman, hearing the suck of the wound, and stood and trundled over to the president, who watched him blearily.

  As he neared the table Bungu raised the spear and launched himself at his leader, the inebriated man raising a hand in defense, taking a cut to the right palm and another to the upper arm, the fabric of his silk shirt gaping beneath the blade.

  The bodyguard, panting, had his automatic out, aiming it at Bungu who reached forward, grabbed the barrel and took the weapon from him.

  “Get Sizwe in here,” he said. “Go on!”

  The bodyguard looked at the president who was mopping his blood on a linen napkin, and the rapidly sobering statesman nodded.

  The wife’s minder came hurtling into the room, yelling at the sight of his charge’s body.

  Bungu raised the automatic and shot the man twice in the head and once in the chest before he returned the weapon to its owner.

  “Shoot him again,” he said. The bodyguard stared at him dumbly. “For the fuckin forensics, man. Do it.”

  The bodyguard, his face blank with confusion, raised the pistol and fired at the dead man, the corpse jerking when the round took it in the torso.

  Bungu carried the spear across to the body. Grunting as he kneeled, his multitude of old wounds crooning their familiar lullaby of agony, he manipulated the weapon in Sizwe’s hands until he was certain that it bore the dead man’s prints.

  He levered himself to his feet, wheezing.

  “Okay gents,” Bungu said to his rapt audience, “time to get your stories nice and fuckin straight.”

  THREE

  “You could be the invention of a white man,” the Danish journalist said in her precise, almost accentless English.

  “Yes?” Disaster Zondi replied, his impassive face half in shadow.

  “Yes. You criticize your government like a white man but because you’re black you get away with it.”

  “I don’t agree,” Zondi said.

  “You don’t agree that you are critical?”

  “No, I don’t agree that I get away with it.”

  The journalist, a woman of around thirty with snowy hair, dark eyebrows and blue eyes and slightly irregular but very white teeth under plump lips, stared at him. Her hair was greasy and he could smell her sweat, and he’d seen dark half-moons under her arms when she’d stretched into her bag for her digital recorder after keeping him waiting in the gloomy cocktail lounge of his Pretoria hotel for a half hour.

  Zondi hadn’t minded waiting. He had nothing better to do and had found sitting in the deserted bar with décor so dated that it was almost fashionable soothing to his nerves. He’d agreed to meet her at ten, in the hope that the late hour would make her a no-show. But she’d come, albeit late, carrying with her an aura of irritation and ennui.

  She narrowed her eyes and said, “I am thinking that if I reached across and touched your face the black would come off.”

  The journalist delivered the line with a kind of nonchalant insolence. Not that long ago (ten years, even five) Zondi would have interpreted the insolence as a baited hook, the first move in a dance of desire and back then he would’ve said, “So do it. Touch me.”

  And she would have laid her very white fingertip on his very dark skin and established his indisputable blackness and soon they would’ve been upstairs in his hotel room, fucking until the sun torched the Voortrekker Monument that stood vigil like a giant Deco radio over the city that had once been Apartheid’s headquarters.

  But he said nothing. Felt nothing. True, he was older now but he knew that wasn’t it. It was just that desire, that troublesome flame, that addiction—he’d seen it as such, had once prayed that it could be exorcized from him—had ebbed and died like so many things.

&
nbsp; Like his passion.

  Like his idealism.

  So he responded with only a shrug. He knew where she was going. He was well known for his criticism of the present administration, for his onetime zeal to use the law as a poultice to drain the poison of corruption. A misplaced zeal that had seen him booted from the elite investigative units, sidelined, scorned and left without promotion, shoved into a corner where he now spent time tracking down Apartheid’s relics—security policemen, genocidal bureaucrats, collaborators—the stragglers who had been too arrogant twenty years ago to testify and cleanse their dark souls before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

  It was tedious and nobody had much appetite for it any more. Not the courts, not the public. Who cared? And why should they?

  Zondi’s masters no longer did. And neither did Zondi.

  Not really.

  “Why don’t you investigate and prosecute them?” the journalist asked.

  “Our corrupt leadership?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did, once. Tried to at least.”

  “But now, no more? Why?”

  “Because they have put themselves beyond the law,” he said.

  “So you take on the Afrikaner dinosaurs?”

  “Not only Afrikaners. Their black henchmen, also.”

  “A handful, maybe. Most are Afrikaners.”

  “Well, that reflects the demographic. They too thought themselves beyond the law, once. I’m here to show them that they weren’t.”

  “Do you think the same thing will happen also with the present regime?

  “Yes, I suspect so. Africa can be an unforgiving mistress.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at Charles Taylor, Sese Seko, Gaddafi. Do you think they expected the reckoning they got? Do you think Gaddafi, with all those uniforms and all that power and wealth, expected to die in a ditch like a dog?”

  The journalist sneaked a look at her slim wristwatch.

  “This must be very dull for you,” Zondi said.

  She shrugged, lifting one shoulder, gazing past him out the window at the floodlit jacaranda trees, vivid against the night, their purple blooms almost psychedelic in the incandescent beams.

  The journalist looked back at him and said, “Does it give you satisfaction? Being this Simon Wiesenthal of South Africa?”

  “I’m no Simon Wiesenthal.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m not worthy of that comparison. My work is slight. Negligible.”

  “Like today, this old man, Andries Venter. He is what? Eighty?”

  “Seventy-nine.”

  “Okay. He is pulled into court and given a suspended sentence and sent back to his farm in god knows where.”

  “Mooinooi. In the Northwest Province.” He saw her face. “It means pretty girl in Afrikaans.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. But what good is it doing? This court case?”

  “You talked to the man Venter tortured when he was a security policeman? The man who escaped and went into exile in Copenhagen?”

  “Yes, of course I talked to him. He’s old and he’s sad and confused being back here after forty years to testify against Venter. He can think only of going home and feeding the ducks in the Tivoli Gardens. But I suppose it gave him some closure.”

  “You’ll really use that tired word? In your piece?”

  She dragged her mouth down in a sour smile. “If I write it at all. Nobody is very enthusiastic.”

  Things were lurching to a close and Zondi longed for a Scotch. He hadn’t ordered one while waiting for her—for some reason he hadn’t wanted this woman to see him sitting alone, drinking.

  “Do you need anything else?” Zondi asked.

  “No,” she said, standing. “Thank you.”

  As she shouldered her bag her phone rang and she spoke into it in Danish and suddenly she looked and sounded animated and he wondered if she were talking to her lover.

  The journalist killed the call and, already walking away, said, “I have to go. Thank you again.”

  Zondi rose and wandered over to the bar where a black man in a white shirt and a blue bowtie stood staring at the news on TV, ignoring him.

  And as Zondi watched the drama that was unfolding in Cape Town he understood the journalist’s excitement and understood that she had not been talking to her lover.

  FOUR

  Joe Louw was in Adderley Street among the flower sellers, middle-aged brown women (called coloreds here in Cape Town) many of them in Muslim headgear, who bantered and heckled one another in machine-gun Afrikaans. He picked out an array of colors and the women drew the flowers from the cans they rested in—the stagnant water smelling like piss—and wrapped the stems in newspaper. He handed over a hundred bucks and left with a fistful of flowers.

  Flowers that would be added to the rest in his wife’s hospital room that already looked like a bloody florist.

  Making his way back up the slight rise to the Barnard Memorial Hospital, sweating in the hard sunlight, unfit, fifty years old and overweight, dreading having to tell his wife what he had to tell her, what the doctor had told him an hour ago. Louw ducking out of the hospital to get some air and to get the balls to go back and say that the operation was a failure, that they’d hacked off her breasts for nothing, that the cancer had spread and she had, maybe, tops, best estimate, three months to live. So lost in this that it took a moment for his cop’s instinct to kick in when he heard the shot.

  By the time he heard the next two shots he had the flowers under one arm and he was reaching for the 9mm holstered at his hip, hurrying toward the sound. He was in St. George’s Mall now, a pedestrian walkway, and saw two men running away from the Nedbank housed in the old building that looked like a museum.

  Two uniformed security guards were in pursuit and one of them fired and dropped a running man. The other runner spun and got off two shots and took down both the guards—this bastard could shoot—and then he was barrelling through the crowd that split before him, racing away from Louw.

  An old Xhosa woman sat on the sidewalk selling tourist crap and Louw dumped the flowers on her. “Look after these, mama. Please.”

  Then he was sprinting, cursing the leather-soled shoes Yolandi had bought him—Louw dressing up in his church suit and fancy footwear to see the doctor, some weird superstition telling him that this would scare away the bad news—making the sidewalk as slippery as an ice rink. And Louw, a senior detective, a colonel, was no athlete: he used his brains to chase down perps, not his feet.

  The fleeing man had disappeared around The Argus newspaper building, plunging up one of the narrow roads. By the time Louw reached the corner he caught a glimpse of the man’s red T-shirt dodging through pedestrians. He’d never run him down.

  Then he caught a break. The man, looking behind him, hurtled out into the road and a minibus taxi clipped him, sending him sprawling. But he was rolling and up on his feet, limping but still moving.

  Louw, despite the heat and his bulk, was gaining now, adrenaline pumping, all thoughts of his wife washed away by the action.

  Red Shirt ducked into Long Street, running with difficulty, and Louw pounded after him, shouting pedestrians out of his way. The man ran past a small mosque, guys in beards and white outfits watching from the shadowy doorway, and darted up an alley. Louw had to wait for cars, then he was across.

  The alley led up to the next street, Bree. The street the hospital was in. A flash of Yolandi, wired to those drips. Was she awake, wondering where he was?

  Thinking of his wife nearly got him killed.

  A couple of cars were parked on the left side of the alley, and Red Shirt had ducked behind one and he was firing at Louw. A round took the brick work just behind Louw’s head and he dived and rolled, hitting the pavement hard, getting behind a car, hearing a clang as another slug took the body work.

  No more shots.

  Louw, sucking air, his wind gone, peered
around the fender of the car. Red Shirt was on the move, speed-limping toward the mouth of the alley that opened into Bree, silhouetted against the sun baked buildings. If he got around the corner Louw would never run him down.

  Kneeling Louw took a bead on him, the man weaving to his right, close to the buildings, almost at the end of the alley.

  Louw fired and as he squeezed the trigger he wished he could grab the bullet back, stop its forward momentum.

  Because a light-haired woman, as if she had been standing waiting, stepped out of one of the doors that led from the alley into the stores.

  Stepped into the path of Louw’s shot.

  She was carrying a bottle of wine and it shattered as she dropped to the asphalt.

  Later Louw would find out that her name was Rose MacDonald. That she owned a small clothing store called Bygones that specialized in lacy dresses. That her car, a new Mazda, was parked in the alley, a picnic hamper on the back seat. She’d been behind the wheel, ready to drive away to meet her husband on Clifton Fourth Beach for sundowners, when she’d realized that she’d left the bottle of Riesling chilling in the fridge in the kitchen of her store. So she’d rushed back in through the rear door, grabbed the wine and stepped out right into the path of Louw’s bullet.

  He ran up to the woman but by the time he got to her, blood and wine reaching tentacles toward his shoes, he knew she was dead.

  Crouching on the blacktop, the knees of his good suit red with her blood, he reached a hand toward her neck, but his hand found nothing but air and he reared up in bed, in the dark, fighting himself out of the dream, his heart hammering, the bedclothes damp with sweat.

  Louw clicked on the bedside lamp and gulped air, calming himself.

  He couldn’t count how many times he’d had the dream in the last two years and still it had the power to leave him weak and fragmented.