Barnard was obese. Zondi was trim and athletic. Barnard believed in the power of God. Zondi believed in the power of Justice. Barnard was a glutton, a junk-food junkie. Zondi ate sparingly and was fastidious about what he consumed. Barnard had little interest in sex. Zondi was the owner of roiling passions that continually threatened to upset his equilibrium, but he suppressed and controlled them through sheer force of will.
The nearest Zondi got to a religious notion was the image he had of himself as an inquisitor, riding out through the battlefields of corruption in contemporary South Africa. There was one absolute about Zondi: he could not be bought. He had dealt with men in a much grander league than Rudi Barnard. Politicians and tycoons. He had been offered millions, which he had rejected without pause. He had been offered power and position. These held no appeal.
He had been offered women: wives, daughters, mistresses, the bodies of female miscreants themselves. These offers had been more difficult to resist. He had been forced to dig deep into his resolve. But he had stood firm. He had resisted.
Disaster Zondi believed that the police were the bulwark, the thin blue line that stood between society and anarchy. His mission in life was to weed out the bad cops merrily enriching themselves off the back of South Africa’s miracle of transformation.
Zondi was well aware that Rudi Barnard was a dinosaur who’d somehow managed to escape the ice age of apartheid’s end. He had carved out a fiefdom for himself here in Cape Town, murdering and extorting out on the lawless Cape Flats. It was extraordinary that he had got away with it as long as he had. Well, his time had come. Special Investigator Zondi was here to bring an end to the reign of Rudi Barnard.
The door opened, and the massively fat cop wheezed his way in. Zondi saw the little eyes, like cigarette burns in a pigskin sofa, scanning his dark features, white shirt, and Roberto Cavalli suit.
He saw that Barnard didn’t recognize him. Why would he? The last time Zondi had seen Barnard, through a veil of pain and blood, had been nearly twenty years ago. He had been just another faceless black kid.
Zondi rose and extended a perfectly manicured hand.
“Disaster Zondi,” he said.
They climbed onto the minibus taxi in Mowbray, two teenage girls crippled by skin-tight jeans, bumping past Benny Mongrel, taking the seat behind his. Their eyes widened at the sight of his nightmare of a face. As the taxi rattled away, they were whispering about him, sure that he couldn’t hear them over the racket.
But he could.
“You see his face?”
“Ja. It’s horrible!”
“Imagine waking up with that in the bed.”
“I would scream. Honest.”
“Think he got a wife?”
“If he do, she must be blind!”
They were giggling into their hands with false nails like claws.
Benny Mongrel wanted to turn and tell them that he didn’t need no mean-mouthed bitch of a wife. Scare the living shit out of them. But he did nothing, tuned them out.
Anyways, he’d had his fill of wives. In Pollsmoor Prison an officer in the 28s could take his pick. Benny Mongrel had walked among the newcomers, and when he saw a young body untouched by gang tattoos, he had pointed a finger.
The man would always follow.
Benny Mongrel would install the man in the bed beside him. He would give him protection and in return demand that his food was cooked, his clothes were washed and ironed, and his toenails clipped. And at night, in the crowded cell, Benny would lie face to face with the boy and bugger him.
The duties of a wife.
If you suggested that Benny Mongrel was homosexual, he would kill you. There were gay men in prison, outrageous queens who wore short T-shirts as dresses, grew their hair and rolled it in curlers, had lipstick and rouge smuggled in. These men-the prisoners called them moffies -were tolerated. They were amusing; they were part of the prison culture. But Benny Mongrel never went near them.
Benny Mongrel never kept a wife longer than a few weeks. There was never any question of intimacy. It was cold, brutal, and functional.
In the last few years he was in jail, Benny Mongrel had stopped taking wives. He had lost interest. He had no desire to touch or to be touched. He had lain alone in his bunk and tuned out the animal sounds of rape and lust.
It had meant nothing to him.
Now that he was out, the last thing on his mind was taking a woman. By force or otherwise. He saw the way they looked at him, like the little sluts sitting behind him in the taxi. Like he was a monster. He could take them at knifepoint, drag them into the bush by their hair, and have them. He had done it before. But he had no appetite for this any longer.
He had resigned himself to being a man alone.
Until he met Bessie.
To his surprise, he had found his still-point, a place of peace, with the old dog. Bessie was a constant. She was pleased to see him in the evening. She slept beside him, ate the food he gave her, and asked for nothing more. It was strange, but when he was with her he felt a different sense of himself. For the first time in his life, he could simply be.
Just two more days, and he could start the new life he had wanted since he got out of prison.
The taxi lurched to a halt in Salt River, and Benny Mongrel climbed out. It was a short walk to Sniper Security and the start of his shift.
The hot wind roared with a ferocity that got the nerves screaming like tight banjo strings. And the fires had started. A carelessly flicked cigarette, a spark, a shard of broken glass concentrating the sun onto the dry scrub-any of these was enough to get the mountain blazing.
Burn stood next to the plunge pool, watching as a helicopter hovered over the ocean, scooping water into the basket suspended beneath its fuselage. The chopper lifted, battling the weight of the water and the force of the wind, and passed almost directly over him. He watched as it banked over the fire that ate its way down Lion’s Head and released its load of water. Then, lighter, it flew down toward the ocean again.
Dark orange smoke blotted the setting sun, obscuring the top floor of the buildings in Sea Point.
Burn felt trapped.
The house on the mountain was like a magnet for Rudi Barnard. He couldn’t explain rationally why he was parked up the street from the American’s house, but he didn’t question the impulse. His hunches were usually right.
Barnard sat in his car watching the helicopter clatter over, so low that drops from the basket splattered his windshield. He finished the last drag of a cigarette and flicked the still smoking butt out into the street. Fuck it, he couldn’t give a shit if the whole bloody place burned to the ground.
His hemorrhoids were killing him, but his mind was on that monkey in a suit. Disaster Zondi. What a fucken name.
The face-to-face with Zondi had gone as Barnard’s intuition had warned. The darky had sat there and looked at Barnard like he was shit under his expensive shoe, tapping his fingers on the thick file that lay in front of him. The file that had Barnard’s name on it.
Zondi hadn’t confronted Barnard with anything, just said that he was under investigation. Called this a preliminary meeting. Said they would have some more face time. Used those words, face time. His voice, a kind of semi-American drawl, had grated on Barnard’s nerves like a hangnail on a blackboard.
He knew men like Zondi. Hell, he had spent a whole chunk of his life hunting, torturing, and killing them. Some had screamed like women, begged for their lives, but others had stared him down until death glassed their eyes over.
Zondi had that look. Like he wanted to take Rudi Barnard down and nothing would stop him. Least of all Barnard’s so-called superior officer.
Superintendent Peters was everything that Rudi Barnard hated. A half-breed who had benefited from affirmative action to pole-vault over the careers of more qualified white cops. A minor politician who wore a
