Thirteen Hours (39 page)

'Mr B, it's not in the bag ... Yes, I'm positive.' A
long silence, then the sound of the vehicle slowing to a more regular speed,
smoother. Then: 'There was no time, and then this fucking fat cop turned up,
but Jay shot her, she's a goner ... No, I'm telling you, there was no time ...
OK ... OK ...' The sound of a cell phone snapping shut. 'The Big Guy says to
take her to the warehouse.'

Once he had managed to get the last member of the
press out of the door and locked it, Fransman Dekker heard a voice behind him:
'Fuck this, you'll have to do something, it can't go on like this.'

Mouton stood on the stairs, hands on his hips, looking
very displeased. 'I'll phone now, our PR people will come and help,' said
Dekker.

'PR?'

'Public Relations.'

'But when will you be finished?'

'When I have asked all my questions,' said Dekker, and
climbed the stairs, past Mouton, who turned and followed him.

'How many questions do you still want to ask? And
you're talking to my employees without a lawyer being present. It can't go on
like this - who do you want to talk to now?'

'Steenkamp.'

'But you talked to him already.'

They walked through the spacious seating area. Dekker
stopped in his tracks and shoved his face close to Mouton's. 'I want to talk to
him again, Willie. And I have the right to talk to every fucking member of your
staff without your lawyer sitting in. I'm not doing this little two-step with
you again.'

Mouton's skin flooded with crimson from the neck up, his
Adam's apple bobbing as though words were dammed up beneath it. 'What did Ivan
Nell say to you?'

Dekker stalked off down the corridor. Mouton followed
him again, two steps behind. 'He's not one of our artists any more; he has no
say here.' Dekker ignored him, went to Steenkamp's door and opened it without
knocking. He wanted to shut it before Mouton came through, but then he saw that
fucking legal undertaker sitting across from the accountant.

'Please, take a seat, Inspector,' Groenewald said in
his dispassionate voice.

The paramedics ran from the front door with the
stretcher. Griessel held the garden gate open for them, then jogged after them.
'Will she make it?'

'Don't know,' said the front one, holding out the bag of
plasma to Griessel. 'Hold that while we load, just keep it high.'

'And the old man?' Griessel took the plastic bag of
transparent fluid. Vusi held one ambulance door to prevent the wind blowing it
shut.

'I think so,' the paramedic said. They lifted the old
man up in the stretcher and pushed him in beside Mbali Kaleni, two figures
lying still under light-blue blankets. One paramedic ran around to the driver's
door, opened it and jumped in. The other one jumped in the back. 'Close the
doors,' he said and Griessel and Ndabeni each took a door and slammed. The
ambulance sirens began to wail as it pulled away in Upper Orange, made a U-turn
and passed them, just as the first of a convoy of patrol vehicles appeared over
the hump of the hill.

'Vusi,' Griessel said, loud enough to be heard over
the noise of the sirens, 'get them to seal off the streets and keep everyone
away. I don't want to see a uniform closer than the pavement.'

'OK, Benny.'

Griessel took out his cell phone. 'We will have to get
Forensics as well.' He stood and surveyed the scene - Mbali's car, the strewn
bullet casings, the front door open, its glass shattered. The old man had been
shot inside there and somewhere they had grabbed Rachel Anderson ... It would
take hours to process everything. Hours that he did not have. The hunters have
caught their prey. How long would they let her live? Why hadn't they killed her
here, like Erin Russel? Why hadn't he and Vusi found her body here? That was
the big question.

One thing he did know, he needed help, he needed to
make up time. Between Vusi and himself they didn't have enough manpower.

He called Mat Joubert's number. He knew it would piss
off John Afrika. But in the big picture, that was a minor issue.

'Benny,' Joubert recognised his number.

'Mat, I need you.'

'Then I'll come.'

Wouter Steenkamp, the accountant, laughed, and Willie
Mouton, leaning his long skinny body against the wall, gave a snort of
derision. The lawyer Groenewald shook his head ruefully, as though now he had
heard everything.

'Why is that so funny?' Fransman Dekker asked.

Steenkamp leaned back in his throne behind the PC and
steepled his fingers. 'Do you really believe Ivan Nell is the first artist who
believes he is being fleeced?'

Dekker shrugged. How would he know?

'It's the same old story,' said Willie Mouton. 'Every
time.'

'Every time,' mused Steenkamp, and laced the tips of
his fingers together, turned the palms outward and stretched until his knuckles
cracked. He laid his head back on the back of the chair. 'As soon as they start
making good money.'

'In the beginning, with the first cheque, they come in
here and it's "thanks, guys,
jislaaik,
I've never seen this much money".' Mouton's
voice was affected, mimicking Nell. 'Then we're the heroes and they are so
pathetically grateful ...'

'But it doesn't last,' said Steenkamp.

'They're not doing it for aaaart any more.'

'Money talks.'

'The more they get, they more they want.'

'It's a flash car and a big house and everything that opens
and shuts. Then it's the beach house and the sound equipment bus with a huge
photo of you on it and everything has to be bigger
and better than Kurt or Dozi or Patricia's. To sustain all
that costs
a shitload of money.'

Groenewald nodded slowly in agreement. Steenkamp
laughed again: 'Two years,
pappie,
you can set your fucking calendar to it, then they
start coming in here saying: "What is that deduction and why is this so
little?" and suddenly we've gone from hero to zero, and they have
forgotten how poor they were when we signed them.' His hands were on his lap
now, his right hand twirling his wedding ring.

'Nell says—' Dekker began.

'Do you know what his name was?' Mouton asked,
suddenly pushing himself off the wall and heading for the door. 'Sakkie Nell.
Isak, that's where the
I
in Ivan comes from. And please don't forget the
accent on the "a".' Mouton opened the door. 'I'm going to get myself
a chair.'

'Ivan Nell says he compared your figures with the
amounts he made from compilations with independents.'

This time even the lawyer sang in the choir of
indignation. Steenkamp leaned forward, ready to speak, but Mouton said: 'Wait,
Wouter, hold onto your point, I don't want to miss the joke,' and he walked out
into the passage.

Benny Griessel stood in the hallway, the urgency hot
in him. He didn't want to get too involved with this part of the investigation,
he had to focus on Rachel and how to get her back.

He pulled on rubber gloves and looked fleetingly at
the blood on the pretty blue and silver carpet where the old man had been shot,
the shards of stained glass on the floor. He would have to phone her father.

How the hell had they found her? How did they know she
was here? She had phoned from this house.
My name is Rachel
Anderson. My dad said I should call you.
She had talked to her father and then with him. How
long had it taken him to get here? Ten minutes? Nine, eight? Twelve at the very
most. How could they have driven here, shot Mbali and the old man and carried
Rachel off in twelve minutes?

How was he going to explain this to Rachel's father?
The man who had asked him:
Tell me, Captain: Can I trust you?

And he had said: 'Yes, Mr Anderson. You can trust me.'

Then I will do that. I will trust you with my
daughter's life.

How had they found her? That was the question, the
only one that mattered, because the 'how' would supply the 'who', and the 'who'
was what he needed to know.

Now. Had she phoned anyone else? That was the place to
start. He would have to find out. He took his cell phone out of his pocket to
phone Telkom.

No, phone John Afrika first. Fuck. He knew what the
Regional Commissioner: Detective Services and Criminal Intelligence was going
to say. He could already hear the voice, the consternation.
How, Benny? How?

Griessel sighed, a shallow, hurried breath. That
fucking feeling he had had this morning - that there was trouble brewing...

And this day was still far from over.

Mouton pushed his luxury leather desk chair up to
Groenewald, sat down and said: 'Let the games begin.'

'Let me explain to you about a compilation first,'
said Steenkamp, leaning over the desk, picking up a pencil and twirling it
between his fingers. 'Some or other clown decides he wants to make money out of
Valentine's Day or Christmas or something. He phones a few people and says:
"Have you got a song for me?" There are no studio costs, not a cent,
because the recording has already been done. That makes a huge difference,
because all he has to do is market the CD a bit, make a few TV ads that he
gives to a guy with an Apple and Final Cut to cobble together, so really he's
only paying for the airtime and he sticks it in the fifteen-second slots in
Seven de Laan
for three days and all the old
biddies snap it up.'

'He does his accounts on the back of a cigarette box,'
said Mouton irritably.

'No overheads. We sit here with an admin department
and financial department and marketing and promotions department. We carry
forty per cent of a distribution wing, because we are a full-service operation
- we stand by the artist for the long term. We build a brand, we don't just
flog a few CDs,' said Steenkamp.

'Tell him about RISA and NORM,' said Mouton.

Steenkamp pulled a sheet of A4 paper out of the
printer beside him and made a start with the pencil, writing RISA alongside.
'Recording Industry of South Africa.'

'Fucking mafia,' said Mouton.

'At least they present the SAMA Awards,' said
Groenewald, and Mouton snorted derisively.

'They take twenty-five cents for every CD we sell,
because they ...' he made quotation marks with his fingers,' "protect us
from piracy".'

'Ha!' said Mouton.

'Do you think the independent making the compilation
is going to keep score? Is he going to pay on every CD? Not likely, because it's
work, it's a schlepp, it's expense and it's profit.' Steenkamp scribbled
another star, wrote NORM on the paper.

'NORM are the guys who have to see to it that, if I
write a song and you do a cover of it, I get paid. Six point seven per cent.
But that's the theory. In practice it's only us big players who pay. If you're
an independent, you have to put down your NORM money when the CDs are printed.
So you print five thousand here and another five thousand there, but you tell
NORM you only had five thousand printed, you show them the slips, and you pay
only half. NORM is ripped off and the songwriter is ripped off and the
independent is laughing all the way to the bank.'

'We have to pay NORM as the sales come in,' said
Mouton, 'audited figures, everything above board. But then the artists
complain: "Why is my share so small?"' He mimicked Nell's voice
again. 'Let me tell you another thing. Half of the hits in this country are
German pop songs that have been translated. Or Dutch or Flemish or whatever.
What Adam did - and he was brilliant at it - he had guys in Europe and as soon
as there was a pop song that stood out they would email it in MP3 format and
Adam would sit down with a pen and write Afrikaans lyrics. Forty minutes,
that's all it took, and he would phone Nerina Stahl and—'

'That was before she left...'

'All her fucking hits were German pop, who do you
think is going to get them for her now? Anyway, we sit with the whole caboodle,
we have to administer it all. That money has to go to Germany, the songwriter
and the publisher have to get their cut. But here comes this independent and he
gets someone to do a cover of Adam's translation of this German song . . . you
get it?'