“Then how come you still here?”
“He must of been in a good mood.” The man laughed sourly and turned and made his way toward the shabby house, dragging one leg as he walked.
Benny Mongrel headed away from the sirens, puffing on the cigarette behind his cupped hand. The wind had died, and the air hung as heavy as a blanket on the Flats.
Carmen Fortune left the mob behind and walked back toward her apartment block. She was relieved that she wouldn’t have to deal with Gatsby finding out what she had done with the boy. At least there was that.
She passed a white man getting into a dented brown Ford. Most of the white men you saw on the Flats were cops, but he didn’t look like one. He was bleeding from his head, and he looked confused. Lost. When he pulled away, he grated the gears of the car.
She climbed the stairs, and as she got up to the landing she saw her neighbor Whitey Brand come walking out of her apartment with her TV, casual as you please.
“Hey, what the fuck!” Carmen ran up the last few stairs.
Whitey just looked at her and walked on, taking the TV into his place.
When Carmen got to her apartment, she saw the door was standing open. It was splintered like it had been kicked in. Then she saw Whitey’s brother Shane bending over some dead guys in her living room-guys she didn’t know-ripping off their money and cell phones.
Carmen decided she was experiencing a particularly bad tik crash, that she honest-to-god was starting to lose her mind. She shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw Shane pushing past her, his hands full. The dead men were still there, bleeding on her floor. And the sirens were slicing through her head like a butcher’s saw through bone.
She turned and walked away. There was nothing in that place that she needed anymore.
Disaster Zondi stood and looked down at the charred remains of Rudi Barnard. The smell of burned human flesh reached his nose, a smell both awful and haunting. The clothes had burned into the skin. The hair was gone. The shoes had melted onto the feet. The tire had burned away completely; all that eft were the three steel rings from its inner core circling what had been Barnard’s neck and chest.
It had been years, decades, since Zondi had seen a necklacing. The first time had been at the funeral of a youth activist in Soweto in the mideighties when he’d been sixteen or seventeen. The comrades had attacked a young woman accused of being a police informer. Zondi remembered being drawn into the fervor, chanting freedom songs and dancing the toyi-toyi as the woman was stoned and hacked. A boy younger than Zondi had shoved a broken bottle up the woman’s vagina. Then she was encircled by a tire and burned to death.
The necklacing, far from being gruesome and terrifying, had been heady, exciting. Had left him filled with an enormous sense of power, his own and that of the untold number of kids who were going to bring the enemy down.
Zondi, a youth of his time, had swapped the Book of Common Prayer of his mission school childhood for the altogether more appealing manifesto of Leon Trotsky. Who was he to experience pangs of distaste, never mind guilt, if they executed their enemies in this way? After all, the mother of the nation, Winnie Mandela-Nelson’s very own wife-had stood before them and applauded their actions, saying they would liberate the country with their boxes of matches and tires.
Zondi had participated, at a distance, in a number of other necklacings. He had long since closed the book on those memories and the thorny questions they sometimes begged. Now, like a lot of men washed up in the twenty- first century without an easy moral compass, he was defined more by what he didn’t believe in than what he did.
But this, he had to concede, had a certain poetry to it.
He overheard two young colored uniforms talking on the other side of the crime scene tape.
“Shit way to die.”
“Ja. I won’t be able to eat Kentucky for a week.”
They laughed and started talking about South Africa playing Australia in a rugby test match that weekend.
Zondi took a last look at Barnard, successfully fought the urge to toyi-toyi in his Roberto Cavalli suit and Brunori loafers, and walked over to the cops.
“He was running away from something, apparently?”
The cops gave him the usual once-over, just a degree away from insolence, before the taller man answered. “Ja, he was in those flats up there. People say he jumped out the window.”
“Drive me up there, please, Constable.”
Zondi was already walking across to the cop van, getting into the passenger seat. The tall cop exchanged a glance with his colleague, then got in beside Zondi and started the van. They bumped down the sand road, coming to a stop outside the ghetto block branded by the thug life graffiti.
Zondi climbed out, looked up at the shattered window. A bloody blanket lay in the dirt directly below. Zondi saw a lace curtain twitch in the apartment above the one with the broken window, and he glimpsed a leathery old face before it disappeared.
Zondi followed the cop up the narrow stairs. His nose wrinkled at the smell of piss. The door to the apartment withthe broken window stood ajar. Zondi gave it a push with the toe of his loafer, and it swung open until it stopped against the body of a man. The constable had his service pistol in his hand and followed Zondi into the apartment.
Three dead men. All with that unmistakable look of gangsters. Two of them shot, one probably by a shotgun. The third man, who had at some point in his career had his fingers amputated, lay with his throat cut. Zondi could see bone.
Zondi and the cop walked through to the bedroom. He looked down at the fourth body, an emaciated man in his sixties, wearing only briefs. The dead man’s brains were all over the statuette of the Virgin Mary that lay on the floor beside the bed. Zondi saw a child’s pajama top, covered in blood and brain matter, lying beside the dead man. He noticed the American label: Big Kmart.
Zondi turned to the cop. “Constable, there’s an old woman in the flat above. One of those types who spends her whole day watching at the window. Ask her who lives here and who she saw coming in and out of here today. And ask her about a kid. A boy. A white boy. You got that?”
The cop nodded. “Yes, sir.”
He left Zondi to wander around the apartment. Zondi opened a chipped closet in the bedroom and saw a few items of women’s clothing. A brush, clogged with dark hair, lay on a dresser beneath a broken mirror. The stinking bathroom didn’t tell him much. A few cheap cosmetics and a box of sanitary pads.
Zondi went back into the living room. From the way the bodies lay, the gunshot victims had been met with fire as they entered the apartment. And then the amputee’s throat had been slit.
At some point during all the action, Barnard had thrown himself out the window.
The constable was back. “She say a woman lives here. Early twenties, maybe. Carmen something, doesn’t know her last name. The old guy is her uncle. An alkie, she say. She saw three guys come in here; one was white. Then another three. Coloreds. Gangsters, she say.”
Zondi nodded. “These three.”
“She say she saw the woman, Carmen, leave before any of these guys come in. She had a boy with her. He was white with blond hair.”
Zondi reached for his phone and called Bellville South HQ. He spoke to a sergeant on duty, wanted an APB put out on this boy.
“Sir,” the sergeant said. “The boy. He’s sitting right here.”
Burn drove through the sprawling ghetto without any sense of direction, just trying to get as much distance as possible between himself and the dead bodies. The wind had come up again, and it drew a gauze of dust across the Flats. The dust hid Table Mountain, the only landmark he could navigate by. He’d given the watchman the. 38, and the crowd had taken the Mossberg. He was alone and unarmed in one of the most violent places on the planet.
Burn stopped at an intersection. A taxi drew up beside him, and the passengers stared down at him. He pulled away and almost collided with a beat-up pickup truck. The men inside swore at him. Burn barely noticed.
