‘An old man was beaten up on Table Mountain a couple of months ago. The pen he lost
was found near where Yasmin Faizal disappeared.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out. Snake tattoos are hard to miss.’ She opened the door. ‘You got someone to check out the tattoo parlours in town?’
‘Rita Mkhize,’ said Clare. ‘Captain Faizal’s partner.’
‘Let me see what I can find.’
‘You’ll call me?’
‘Later. When I get home,’ said Pearl. ‘If I get something in the meantime.’
‘Where’re
you headed?’
‘The Winter Palace first, to see what’s going on there. Then Valhalla Park,’ said Pearl, punching numbers into her phone, ‘where Voeltjie’s old connections hang out. The ones he
verneuked
. I’ll see if I can find someone who knows something and who’s smoked enough to talk.’
‘Be careful, Pearl.’
She gave a little wave as she walked along the broken white line in the middle
of the street, her phone pressed against her ear. And then she was gone.
Kennedy’s Cigar Bar was packed, and the noise from the band doing bad cover versions was spilling out onto Long Street. There was already a queue at the door. Riedwaan took off his helmet and was enveloped by an old Pogues hit: punk meets wild Irish drinking song. The Congolese bouncer was a giant of a man, and his cowboy boots gave him another couple of inches. He cleared a path through
the tipsy patrons and instructed a harried waitress to find Riedwaan a booth.
Riedwaan ordered a burger and a Coke. The waitress brought it over, but he couldn’t eat a thing. He pushed his plate aside and ordered coffee instead. Sipping it, he endured the lead singer’s wailing version of ‘With or Without You’. An improvement on Bono, he couldn’t help thinking, as he waited for Clare Hart to
arrive.
Half an hour later, she turned up.
‘I need to eat,’ she said, sitting down. ‘So do you – unless you want to collapse.’
She placed her order with the waiter. A lamb burger. A Coke.
‘You get anywhere with Van Zyl?’ she asked.
‘Somewhere and nowhere,’ said Riedwaan. ‘What I want to know is, what do these cases have to do with Yasmin – if anything?’
Taking the grubby
bit of elastic out of her bag, Clare said, ‘They’re connected.’
She dropped the elastic into Riedwaan’s upturned hand. He curled his fingers round it, shutting in the fractured heartline that crept up his palm.
‘She’s alive as long as we have no proof to the contrary,’ said Clare, unpacking her notes. She put the drawing of the tattoo on the table.
‘The old prof I spoke to, the one
who was mugged, says he remembers seeing this tattoo on the wrist of one of his attackers. He drew it for me.’
‘Looks like an expensive one.’ Riedwaan tucked the elastic into his breast pocket and picked up the sketch.
‘That’s exactly what Pearl said,’ said Clare. ‘She did some digging around Voëltjie. Says something big was meant to be happening this weekend. Something, she didn’t know
what, that looks like it might be coming unstuck. She says he’s on edge.’
‘He’s always on edge,’ said Riedwaan. ‘His paranoia is what makes him so dangerous. And so fucking effective. What else did Pearl find out?’
The waitress appeared with a plate of food. Clare cleared a space for it and put tomato sauce on the chips.
‘One rumour was about cash flow problems,’ said Clare. ‘Missing
stock. Maybe this heroin?’
‘Possible,’ said Riedwaan.
‘She also said that it was a cop’s daughter that caused all this trouble.’
‘Yasmin’s six years old,’ said Riedwaan. ‘How can she cause anyone trouble?’
‘Not Yasmin.’ Clare put down her fork and looked at him. ‘Pearl said he was talking about Calvaleen.’
Frowning, Riedwaan stared at her.
‘Pearl said that Calvaleen had
been raped. Some guy she’d been seeing,’ said Clare. ‘And that was where her drug problem started.’
‘I heard something like that, but Van Rensburg didn’t like to talk about it. Jesus, as if the family hadn’t had enough after he was crippled. Gangsters target policemen’s kids. One little drop of poison is all you need to destroy a family.’ Riedwaan rubbed his left eye. ‘What else did Pearl
say?’
‘Something about Yasmin’s abduction being freelance, a hire for someone else.’
‘For who?’ Riedwaan pushed his plate away, the food untouched. The noise level surged as a crowd of English tourists came in, sunburnt and already drunk. ‘I Love Cape Town’ T-shirts stretched across their beer bellies.
‘Pearl had another version of your run-in with Voëltjie Ahrend,’ said Clare. ‘She
suspects that Ahrend doesn’t have anything to do with Yasmin’s disappearance. At least, not directly. That he’s not sure what’s going on, or what you’re up to. Which is why he’s allowed you to live. He also wants to find out what’s happening – how it’s going to affect him.’
‘If Voëltjie Ahrend had her, I’d know,’ said Riedwaan, his hand touching the swelling around his right eye. ‘We go back
a long time. Why would anyone take her, though, with no demands?’
‘If I could tell you that, then I could probably tell you where your daughter is,’ said Clare. ‘So let’s stick to what we do have, okay?’
‘Okay.’ Riedwaan took out his cigarettes. ‘What else do you have?’
‘I called Rita,’ said Clare. ‘She had the pen finger-printed but nothing showed up on the records.’
‘Couldn’t
lift the print?’
‘They got some, but they didn’t match. So that could mean you have a new recruit with Number tattoos who’s never been to jail. This is a professional tattoo, not a blue prison chappie.’
‘Using the tattoos as a kind of brand, you mean?’
‘Something like that,’ said Clare. ‘Which isn’t going to make the old guard happy.’
‘Neither would using Graveyard de Wet’s gun
– the signature murder of those two girls in Maitland.’ Riedwaan lit a cigarette. ‘What did Pearl say about the docket numbers?’ he asked. ‘Where did she get them?’
‘It wasn’t Pearl who dropped them off,’ said Clare.
‘No?’ Riedwaan looked at her. ‘Then who’s pointing us that way?’
‘Would it work for Voëltjie to keep Yasmin out of the way for something?’
Riedwaan shook his head.
‘Would he have known that suspicion would fall on you?’
‘The last time, there was big trouble.’ Riedwaan’s face hardened. ‘You know that. Ndlovu came down on me. It was all over the papers: “Cop abducts daughter”. And anyway, Voëltjie pays for enough eyes and ears in the force not to have to spend another five rand buying the
Cape Times.
’
‘Lady in Red’ crescendoed as the drinkers at
the bar sang along with the band, either squeezing their girlfriends or demanding more beer from the barmaid.
‘If she was with Voëltjie Ahrend and his 27s and she’d survived the first five minutes of their company, I’d know about it. And if I knew about it, I’d be making a deal with him.’
‘What would you trade?’ asked Clare.
‘Anything.’ His voice low. ‘Anything at all.’
‘Those
docket numbers,’ said Clare. ‘Did you find anything?’
‘Heroin busts.’ Riedwaan took a pull on his cigarette. ‘Smallish amounts, but very pure, so a high street value.’ He unrolled Clare’s map and marked the places. ‘Here, here and here. Look where they are: in town, in Sea Point and in a million-rand security estate. Cape Town’s caviar and cocaine belt.‘
‘So?’ prompted Clare. ‘Heroin’s
expensive.’
‘It’s a whole new market, heroin,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Can be all things to all men. The new boutique drug for the kids with wealthy parents and nothing to do.’ He pointed to the Cape Flats. ‘And here we have
tik
land. Where people still manage to find money for drugs that make them forget they’re too poor even to buy polony for a sandwich. Both are places where you can print money
by selling drugs. Just the denominations are different. The rich kids pay with their parents’ cash until that runs out. And the poor kids pay with their bodies if they’re good-looking enough – or, if they’re not, by doing what their dealers tell them.’
‘Ahrend is behind all this?’
‘You could call him a kind of social bridge for the rainbow nation: his kind of corruption is equally at home
in both places. Van Rensburg and Delport didn’t buy it, but that’s exactly what I was investigating with Phiri. Then things got a bit warm for certain people.’
‘You spoke to the officers who made the busts?’
‘I did,’ said Riedwaan. ‘All of them old-school station cops responding to things like noise complaints, so no big operation. I checked them out. Just the fluke of being in the right
place at the right time. They went in, didn’t like the look of things, and took it on themselves to search. At the time there was an order to take anything suspicious to Louis van Zyl’s drug lab to get it checked out – some research he’s doing, trying to track where different samples are manufactured so you can pin something more than a few grams on a dealer.’
Riedwaan pushed the lab notes
towards Clare, who soon gave up after trying to read Van Zyl’s handwriting.
‘Well, what happened?’ she asked.
‘All of the cases got slapped with illegal search and seizure suits by Valkov and Cohn, an expensive city law firm. Apparently the venues all belong to the same owner.’
‘And who’s that?’
‘A shell company,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Difficult to track, but the cops got rapped over
the knuckles and so nothing happened with the cases.’
‘Interesting. And who’d picked the dockets up from the lab?’
‘The collections are logged into a tattered file that the security guard at the front desk fills out. I got a copy of the pages where the request for the dockets and the collections were logged. The names scrawled into the log book are illegible.’ He pointed to the photocopied
columns. ‘These cellphone numbers are all a digit short. Whoever picked up these dockets didn’t want to be found.’
‘All the same person?’ asked Clare.
‘Looks like it, from the writing.’
‘Security doesn’t remember?’
‘It’s like a railway station there. And it’s not a useful question, anyway. A security guard or a cop can earn his whole month’s salary by making one docket walk,’ said
Riedwaan. ‘Happens all the time.’
‘You said Van Zyl had worked out where the heroin comes from?’
‘All of it’s from Afghanistan. Pure as the driven snow.’
‘Where does it usually come from?’ asked Clare.
‘All over the show. Used to be mainly the Nigerians dealing in it, they cut it with lots of other stuff. This is something else, though.’
He took a coin out of his pocket and
put it on the table.
‘A kopek.’ Clare scrutinised the coin.
‘Yes, the second one I’ve found. 1989. End of the USSR, the year the Russians finally left Afghanistan,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Lots of veterans back on the streets of a country in meltdown. A bit like here, a couple of years later. First we have these drug busts, then two drive-bys, both with a kopek being tossed.’
‘The Afghans,’
said Clare. ‘A bit more than a brand, d’you think?’
‘The old gangs are moving on from simple extortion to holding entire communities hostage by selling drugs to their children, and then selling their children, who need to pay for those drugs. The Flats gangs and the prison gangs are consolidating, franchising their operations and extorting money when they can, pushing out small operators.
Creating a monopoly. If they don’t have to take it by force, then they pay for their new territory. Easier, quicker, and gets fewer officials into awkward situations.’
‘And how do the officials fit into all this?’
‘If your plan is to take over the running of a city’s night-time economy, you need a lot of official collusion. Airports, harbours, courts, city council for re-zoning permission.
You need them all – and they’re cheap to buy. If they refuse to cooperate, they’re easy to eliminate.’ Riedwaan stubbed out his cigarette. ‘The work I’ve been doing was to make the world safer for Yasmin,’ said Riedwaan. ‘It’s the work that Shazia says brought this monster into our home.’
He rubbed the back of his neck, the muscles tight. ‘If Pearl didn’t drop those numbers, then who did?’
Riedwaan persisted, ‘These cases had already disappeared, if that’s what someone wanted. So why bring them back again?’
‘It has to be related,’ said Clare ‘There’s a connection that we’re not managing to make.’ She paged through the copies Riedwaan had made, the details that Louis van Zyl had printed. Whatever it was that hovered on the periphery of her mind’s eye refused to come into focus.
‘Look, it’s impossible to track who collected the stuff.’
Clare moved the small candle on the table closer, and pored over the security log. The columns – name, rank, phone number, case numbers, reason for visit, date, time – were crammed with impatient scrawls.
‘Mandla, Verwey, Botha, Brickles, September.’ Clare deciphered the names around the entry that concerned them.
‘How’s
that going to help you?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘Might be someone who was there at the same time, who remembers something. ‘Delport. Barkhuizen, this looks like. Xolani.’
‘Delport,’ Riedwaan stopped her. ‘Which Delport?’
Clare studied the name. ‘The initial is a T or an I.’
‘What was he doing there?’
‘“Purpose of visit: Business”. Same as all the others.’
‘Tertius Delport. Narc
squad,’ said Riedwaan. ‘A survivor from the pre-’94 police force. But he’s well connected.’
‘Is he crooked?’
‘Weren’t they all?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Delport’s been around since the riot squad days. He wouldn’t win the SAPS award for moral fibre, but no suspicion ever sticks long enough to turn into a suspension. He’s been the cross Phiri has to bear, I suppose.’
‘I met him once, briefly,
at Caledon Square,’ said Clare. ‘With Van Rensburg. I didn’t take to him much. D’you work together?’
‘We do,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Well, we try, the three of us. Van Rensburg refuses to have anything to do with the drug cases. Ever since he was shot. Never goes out to the labs.’
‘But Delport does?’
‘Ja,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But there’s no reason for him to have mentioned this to me. He doesn’t
always buy my theories about organised crime, but he’d have business at the labs, I suppose. And he’s not much of a talker, Delport.’