Apocalypse Now Now (10 page)

I shrug helplessly. ‘I’ve been trying to figure that out.’

‘It might be some kind of UV spray,’ he says thoughtfully.

‘Why would a kidnapper do that?’ I say as I pick up a smooth stone and balance it on my hand to test the weight.

‘Maybe he’s into rave?’ he says. ‘I’ll do some research, see if there’s any kind of tech that can do that. Oh, and I got into Esmé’s bank account online.’

‘How the hell did you do that?’

He pushes his sunglasses back down onto his nose. ‘Her PIN is her birth date. You might want to tell her to change that when we find her. There are no charges on her debit card since she’s gone missing, but I’ll change the contact details so that I get a text if she uses it.’

I flick the stone at the gnome. It clips his little red hat and causes him to teeter on the edge of the diving board. I’m about to take another shot when I look up to see my least favourite retard standing at the other end of the pool. Despite the heat he’s dressed in camo cargo pants and a thick orange jersey that brings out the redness of his mussed-up hair and makes him look like his head is on fire. He’s clutching a magazine to his chest and staring at us.

‘What?’ I say.

He holds up the magazine.

‘Great, so you can read. My hearty congratulations,’ I say acidly.

He walks slowly around the edge of the pool and comes to stand in front of the lounge chair I’m lying on. Carefully he places the magazine on the edge of the chair, opens it to a page and then stands back as if presenting gold to the baby Jesus. I feel the rage rising. ‘I don’t want to read your dumb-ass magazine,’ I hiss.

‘Bax,’ Kyle says. He’s leaning over the magazine and sucking his teeth like he does when he’s thinking hard about something. ‘You may want to take a look at this.’

I scowl and lean forward. It’s a film magazine from three months ago. Kyle puts his finger onto the page and I read the line
he’s pointing to: ‘Glamorex is owned by alleged member of the Russian mafia, Yuri “the Russian” Belkin, who is currently under investigation over allegations that he has kidnapped underage girls to appear in his movies.’

‘They mention
Tokoloshe Money Shot
and
Dwarven Ass Patrol
!’ Kyle says. These are two of Kyle’s favourite creature porn offerings. I can understand his enthusiasm.

‘It makes sense,’ I say. ‘He makes creature porn. Maybe the tooth is from one of the costumes!’

‘I don’t know, Bax,’ Kyle says doubtfully.

‘It’s right there,’ I say. ‘He kidnaps young girls and forces them into porn. We need to find out where he’s got her.’

Kyle sighs. ‘We’re going to do something stupid, aren’t we?’

‘More stupid than kidnapping and torturing a senior member of the Russian mafia?’ I say. ‘No, not more stupid than that.’ I pick up a sharp rock and take aim. ‘If he’s done anything to her …’ My throw is dead-on and the gnome explodes like a suicide bomber.

‘Cheerio, chaps,’ Douglas says, clutching the two bottles of wine from Kyle’s dad’s collection that we’d paid him with. ‘Thanks awfully for the tipple.’ Douglas has just helped us put into action the first phase of what we’re calling ‘Operation From Russia with Love’.

So far it’s been surprisingly easy. The funny thing about the mafia is that they’re required to act as if they’re legitimate businessmen. Yuri’s repeated assertions that he was merely an honest businessman victimised in xenophobic South Africa because of his Russian heritage requires a lot of backing up. Particularly in light of the current human trafficking allegations.

So when we phoned him and asked him to be a keynote
speaker at the ‘South African Business and Technology Forum’ he jumped at the chance. Well, when I say ‘we’ phoned him, I, of course, mean Douglas, the homeless guy with the toffish accent that makes him sound like he’s a British Conservative MP, phoned him. Douglas was a denizen of the canal near my house and we sometimes hired him to buy booze for us. He was pleased to be promoted to CEO of the SABTF and gave a solid, if slightly too theatrical, performance.

We’d set up a meeting for the following day to ‘discuss the presentation’, by which of course we meant ‘tase him, put a bag over his head and torture him until he tells us where Esmé is’. Riding the wave of sympathy, I ask my parents if Kyle can stay over on a school night. My mother agrees and we retire to my room, which has become the command post for this little adventure. Kyle shows us a map of the unfinished business park where we’ve agreed to meet Yuri.

‘Target will arrive at sixteen hundred hours tomorrow, so we’ll go straight from school to the rendezvous point,’ Kyle says. ‘My only issue is the efficacy of the tasers.’ He looks down at the small plastic device in his hand dubiously. ‘I mean, they were pretty cheap.’

He has a point. Fong Kong rip-offs are great for some things. But when you’re attacking a high-level mobster with a reputation for violence, you want to make sure your weapons actually work.

I look at Kyle and smile.

‘Uh-uh, no ways,’ he says, ‘you’re not testing them on me.’

Rafe backs away from both of us and looks ready to run.

‘OK, relax,’ I say to them, ‘we’ll find someone else to test it on.’

Tuesday night in Claremont is like a jock convention. Drinks specials designed to get people out during the week run in all the clubs. We dodge two girls in short skirts throwing up onto their high heels as we walk down the main road.

Guys with popped collars and pseudo-Mohawks hug each
other and shout at passing cars. Kyle, Rafe and I wander the streets looking for suitable subjects. We only have two tasers between the three of us and antagonising too big a group would result in a beating. We still need to be able to run in case the tasers don’t work properly.

After ten minutes of trawling, we isolate the perfect targets: three huge jocks standing in an alley initiating mating behaviour with a group of girls. They puff out their chests and find a reason to point to their crotches every few seconds. The girls laugh, lick their lips, flick their hair and thrust their hips forward.

Kyle, Rafe and I walk down the alley toward them. ‘Hey, it’s time for bed, kiddies,’ one of the jocks says as he sees us approach. I smile. ‘That’s what we were thinking,’ I say, ‘so why don’t you and your boyfriends go and touch each other inappropriately and we’ll show these girls a good time?’

Time stands still. The jocks are taking a little time processing this. Eventually a ‘What the fuck did you say?’ comes from the jock in a pastel-pink golf shirt. Confrontation initiated, time to rachet it up a notch.

‘Oh, but then your mother might get jealous,’ Kyle says, ‘so why don’t you go and service her first and then carry on with your rugby-buddy orgy?’ Gay, gay, your mother, your mother. It’s a time-honoured fight starter.

The three gorillas peel themselves off the wall and walk toward us. The look on their faces says that they can hardly believe their luck. The opportunity to beat up people smaller than them in front of women doesn’t come along every day. Providence has smiled upon the jock kingdom tonight.

The resulting conflict is short and brutal. Kyle and I drop two of them almost instantly, the tasers working like a charm. The third stands bewildered, wondering exactly what is happening. Kyle does a spinning jump and tasers him in the neck, like he’s an anoxeric Jet Li. Rafe, obviously disappointed that he hasn’t had
any action, walks over and kicks one of the jocks in the groin.

‘Rafe, what the fuck?’ I say. He grins at me and shrugs.

‘I think they work,’ I say as we stand over the groaning bodies. ‘Indeed,’ Kyle replies.

The bevy of future Botox victims look at us with horror. ‘Enjoy your evening further, ladies,’ Kyle says. Their wide eyes watch us disappear into the night like fearsome avenging angels of geeks and freaks everywhere.

Yuri hadn’t brought anybody with him. The prospect of being accepted by the legitimate business community made him ignore his native Russian cautiousness, which was unlucky for him because he’s now tied up in Kyle’s garden shed with a jump rope.

So far our plan to kidnap a member of the Russian mafia has gone surprisingly smoothly. We’d given him directions to an unfinished office park in Obs and then tasered him as he wandered around looking for the non-existent ‘Clayton Enterprises’.

I’d driven his Audi A5 back to the house and between the three of us we had managed to drag the semi-conscious gangster down to the garden shed. Kyle’s parents are academics and they’re out at a conference, and won’t be back until they’ve either solved issues of gender and ethnicity or are too drunk to stand.

‘First, we just want to say that we’re big fans of your work,’ Kyle says. ‘
Tokoloshe Money Shot
is one of the finest works of pornography –’

‘I will feed you to my dogs,’ Yuri shouts, veins popping out of his sweaty, shaved head and saliva dripping down onto his maroon suit. He rocks back and forth, struggling futilely against his bonds.

After a couple of minutes he calms down a little and looks at
us, eyes wild like a wolf with rabies. To be fair we must look a little strange. Our strategy for avoiding Russian mob retribution consists mostly of wearing the masks of former South African statesmen that Kyle’s parents had bought as a joke for Halloween. I’m F. W. de Klerk, Kyle is P. W. Botha and Rafe is Hendrik Verwoerd.

‘No need to be rude,’ PW says, waggling his finger in Yuri’s face. ‘We’re crossing the Rubicon now.’

‘I will rip your eyeballs out,’ Yuri growls, resuming his struggling.

Hendrik calmly picks up a half-brick from the floor of the shed and smacks Yuri in the knee with it. ‘Arhggggeeeee,’ Yuri screams.

‘What the hell, Rafe?’ I say.

‘Do you know who I am?’ Yuri shouts. ‘I will have you all killed.’

‘Scalpel,’ I say and Kyle hands me a rusty pair of garden shears. I open them and place them gently on Yuri’s thick neck. ‘We know exactly who you are,’ I say.

The Russian stops struggling and breathes in and out forcefully. ‘What do you want?’ he croaks. I pull my wallet from my pocket with one hand, balancing the garden shears against his neck with the other. The rusty metal bites into the folds of flesh beneath his chin and a thin line of blood trickles down onto his shirt.

I flick through my wallet and pull a picture of Esmé from it.

‘Dude,’ PW says, ‘You’ve got a picture of her in your wallet? That’s soooo romantic.’

‘Fuck off,’ I say. I hold the picture in front of Yuri’s face. ‘We know you’ve taken her to be in one of your movies,’ I say.

Yuri looks at the picture and then bursts into an unpleasant bout of laughter. ‘You think I took her to work on a movie?’ He laughs then winces at the pain from his knee. Hendrik lifts the brick again but I hold up my hand. ‘Did you?’

He leans forward. ‘If I want white girls I find them in Eastern Europe. It’s easier. Besides, your bitch – she’s not pretty enough.’

I look at the photo of Esmé. She is pretty, but I know what Yuri
means. The girls in
Tokoloshe Money Shot
are six-foot blonde-haired nymphs. Esmé doesn’t really fit the profile. I stuff the picture back into my pocket and pull out the tooth. ‘What about this?’

His eyes widen and then his mouth curls in a sneer. ‘You don’t want to know what that is.’

I grab both handles of the shears tightly and close them so that the rusty blades are tight against his neck. ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I say.

Yuri pushes his head back to try and get away from the blades. ‘If I tell you, you let me go?’ he says.

I nod.

He breathes out deeply. ‘You don’t know what you’re getting yourselves into. My business caters to a very specific market. Sometimes when I need to find actors I require a little help.’

‘Who helps you?’ I say.

‘There’s only one person in Cape Town who deals with finding the weird,’ he says. ‘You need to see Jackie Ronin.’