Cobra (38 page)

‘I thought . . . I don’t know. It must be the card. But I thought . . . I was very confused . . .’

‘What kind of card? A credit card, a bank card?’

‘The one Frenchman, he phoned Tyrone after they grabbed me. And he said Tyrone had stolen a wallet, and there was a memory card in the wallet, and he would exchange the card for me . . .’

‘A memory card? What memory card?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But . . . Hang on . . .’ Griessel struggled to understand the new angle.‘We thought that was what happened at Bellville Station. Tyrone gave them something, and he got you back.’

‘I was very confused. I also thought . . .’

‘Nadia, this is very important: What can you remember from the station?’

She closed her eyes, shook her head. ‘I don’t know . . . The guy held me so tight, we first went to a man in a blue jacket. He handed over something. I couldn’t see exactly, something small . . .’

‘Wait, slowly. What guy held you?’

Nadia opened her eyes. ‘I’m not even sure that things really happened this way.’

‘Just tell us exactly what
you think
happened,’ said Mbali.

‘OK,’ she said, with conviction.

‘When did you start having an affair with Adair?’ asked Cupido.

Lillian Alvarez looked towards the entrance of the hotel, wiped away tears, and blew her nose. She kept looking out ahead of her as though they weren’t there.

‘Bones, if she doesn’t want to save him, perhaps we should just abandon the search. He’s not a South African citizen. Let the British Consulate look for him.’

Bones realised what he was doing.‘But they don’t have the resources, Vaughn. And his life is in real danger,’ he said.

Cupido stood up. ‘If she doesn’t care, why should we?’

Bones hesitated before he got up. ‘Good day, Miss Alvarez,’ he said.

‘Happy holiday,’ said Cupido, and began walking towards the door, and Bones followed suit.

‘Wait,’ said Lillian Alvarez, before they had taken four paces.

Nadia Kleinbooi told them everything, as she remembered it. They had shoved her down in the Nissan X-Trail, two of them. Frenchmen, she thought. That was the language they spoke to each other. One was white and blond. He looked like a surfer. The other one was bald. Also white. Of the driver, she could only see the back of a head in a cap. The blond one phoned Tyrone and right after that one of them injected her in the arm with something. Then she became very drowsy, and everything was as vague as a dream.

She could remember driving down Durban Road later, the effect of the drug was not so strong then. But then there was another man in the car. Left front. Coloured she thought.

Four, then?

Yes, four.

One was on the phone all the time. He talked about the card. They stopped. Blondie made her get out. Her knees buckled. He swore at her and dragged her with him. To the station, she could remember the stalls, the colours of the stalls. Then they stopped for a while. It was like she was slowly waking up. Then they walked up to a scruffy man in a blue jacket, a workman’s jacket, ‘with a zip’. She wasn’t sure if the man in the blue jacket had handed over the card. He did give Blondie something. She had to hold a laptop. But then Blondie said she must walk until she saw Tyrone. She walked a long way, it felt very long, then Tyrone was there with her. Then she got very confused. There was a black man who said she was drunk. She wanted to protest, but the words wouldn’t come out, it frustrated her so much. She remembered the other coloured one who shot her. It was the other man, who hadn’t been in Stellenbosch in the Nissan.

Perhaps, she said, he shot her because Tyrone hadn’t given him the card. But that was all she could remember. Except for Tyrone’s arms around her in a lorry, on the way to hospital.

‘Your brother definitely said he has something they want?’ asked Griessel.

‘Yes.’

‘And that they are going to pay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nadia, if you show me the number, we can see if we can trace him.’

She held the phone against her breast. She asked, ‘Do you know who these people are?’

‘We think so.’

‘Do you know how Tyrone got mixed up in this?’

‘What does your brother do for a living?’ Mbali asked before Griessel could say anything.

‘He’s a painter. A house painter. He works so hard . . .’

‘We think he got into this by accident,’ said Mbali. ‘That is why we want to help him.’

Griessel knew why Mbali told this white lie. To upset Nadia now with the truth about her brother the pickpocket might cost them her cooperation.

‘Yes, that’s what I thought. He’s a very gentle person. They will kill him.’

‘We can help him. If you just show me the number.’

‘But he turned the phone off.’

‘If we have the number, we can find out where he phoned from.’

‘He lives in Schotsche Kloof. I can give you his address.’

‘He’s not there any more. We went to look.’

She thought for a moment, then nodded and held out the phone to him.

Cupido and Bones sat down again.

The lovely Lillian Alvarez put her feet on the stool and pulled her knees up under her chin. She wrapped her arms around her legs, as if she was embracing herself, and didn’t look at them. She said something, but so quietly that they could not hear.

‘I’m sorry, but we can’t hear you.’

‘We didn’t have an affair.’

They said nothing.

‘An affair is when one person is married. An affair is something . . . fl eeting. It’s not like that.’

‘What is it like?’ asked Cupido.

‘You will do a lot of damage,’ she said.

‘We don’t need to tell anybody,’ said Bones, and he shot a pleading look at Cupido.

‘That’s right,’ said Cupido. ‘All we want to do is to find him.’ He got up, shifted his chair closer to her, and sat down again. Bones followed his example.

She waited until they were settled, looked from one to the other. ‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes,’ they said almost in unison.

47

Lillian Alvarez did not start talking again immediately. She sat there as though gathering her strength. And when she told the story, the subtle signs of lying were gone for the first time.

She said the last thing she expected was a love affair with her supervisor. She was so grateful and happy when she was accepted by DAMTP for her Masters degree, she looked forward to Britain, to the whole English experience. She wasn’t well travelled. Not then. No one in her family was well travelled. Her father had been to Washington, DC. She did graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles campus. She had been to Vegas and San Francisco with her student friends, but no one in her middle-class family had even been in New York or Chicago. Never. Not to mention crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

And then she was accepted at Cambridge. Cambridge! One of the best universities on the planet. Another country, another culture, with a history that stretched back thousands of years. The world of the Beatles and Princess Di and the Queen and Prince William and Kate. On the edge of the European continent, with the opportunity of weekends in Paris or Milan or Madrid.

Cupido began to listen. He knew the art of being father confessor. As people started spilling all, you had to shut up, and let them talk, let them free themselves. Sometimes they needed to take long detours.

The university was everything she had dreamed of. The first time she saw King’s College Chapel – nearly six hundred years old – it had taken her breath away. To study mathematics at the same institution that produced Newton and Lord Kelvin and Lord Rayleigh. And Charles Babbage, the father of computers . . .

And then, as she knew she could not put it off any longer: ‘A week after I arrived, I walked into David Adair’s office and I fell in love. Just like that,’ with a soft snap of her thumb and middle finger. There was still a sense of amazement to how she said it. It was such a shocking joy, that moment. It was a first. She had waited so long to fall head over heels in love that she had begun to suspect it would never happen to her. She had had relationships before – a school romance, and two friendships of more than a year each at UCLA. She loved them, for sure, but was never intensely in love. And then she said pensively, and without any arrogance, that perhaps it was because neither of them was her intellectual equal.

And then David Adair happened.

She only realised much later that he was actually twenty-five years older than she was. He could have been her father (said with the easy irony and self-mockery of someone who had verbalised it before). But it was never relevant, because their souls were equally old. She said that twice.

They couldn’t stop talking. About mathematics, about the world, about life. About people and their ways. About food. Did they know he was a foodie? He was a good cook too, at weekends he prepared them the most delicious meals, just the two of them, Chopin on the hi-fi, the Sunday papers, a good bottle of French wine, and David busy over the cooking pots.

But that was later. She guarded her love for him closely. Thought it was one-sided. It took him nearly two months to confess that he had ‘feelings’ for her.

She relived it all with a strong voice, with the self-confidence that it was good and right, clearly also trying to portray him as a true gentleman: he had asked her to drive with him, please. He took her to a restaurant in Huntingdon, he didn’t want to do this in his office where the power balance of lecturer and student reigned. He bought her lunch. They finished eating. His face grew suddenly serious. He said he had thought over the matter for a long time, but he could no longer remain silent. He had feelings for her. She wanted to respond in jubilation, she said his name, and he stopped her with a hand on hers. He said, please, let him finish. He was sincerely sorry. He would absolutely understand if she wanted to change supervisor. He would help her to make the change, he would take responsibility, he would explain that his schedule had become too full. There would be no embarrassment for her. But his feelings were so strong that sooner or later he was going to do something stupid. That was why he was telling her now, before he humiliated himself and put her in an impossible situation.

‘And when he was done, I said, “David, I love you very much”.’

While Mbali tried to get the best possible descriptions of the four ‘Frenchmen’ out of Nadia Kleinbooi, Griessel walked out into the hospital corridor and phoned the colonel. He explained what had happened. That there was a chance that the Cobras were still in the Cape, and that they still hadn’t got what they were looking for. And that David Adair might still be alive.

Nyathi was businesslike, and Griessel wondered if someone was there with him. ‘Let’s meet as soon as you’re back, Benny.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He stood in the corridor and tried to process that odd feeling – half an hour ago he was resigned to the fact that the Cobras were going to get away. Now there was a chance.

Tyrone Kleinbooi had bought them time. How much, he didn’t know.

And the chances were slim. To track someone down quickly in this city, someone with false passports, who took professional precautions, who did not want to be found, was well-nigh impossible.

But there was another possibility. The chances were marginally better.

It depended on what Nadia could remember.

He took a deep breath and walked back into the ward to go and ask his questions.

Cupido thought she was a
kwaai
smart girl, so pretty, but emotionally so immature. Still he said nothing, let her tell the whole story. Alvarez said she and David Adair agreed to keep their affair secret until she attained her degree. Because, although they were both adults, morally unencumbered and not involved with third parties, a relationship between a middle-aged lecturer and a much younger student remained a serious and thorny problem in the corridors of academia. In addition, he was the DAMTP study leader who could best support her with her specific thesis. The most logical alternative was a transfer to another university, but neither of them wanted that. He insisted on the appointment of a fourth external examiner for her degree, and got one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So that no fingers could be pointed when she graduated in a year and a half, and their relationship became public.

And then there were serious problems from what she described as ‘his position’: on the one hand, his work with highly secret anti-terrorism algorithms, and on the other hand, his protests against the British and European authorities and the banking industry. The ‘position’ meant that for security reasons he was watched like a hawk, but also that different factions would very much like to shut him up, muzzle and control him, should they get the right sort of ammunition.

‘What factions?’ Bones interrupted her for the first time.

She answered quickly. Her haste, the tone of her voice betrayed something again. ‘Well, politicians, to start with. He had been fairly vocal in his opposition of privacy intrusion, and had been publicly criticising the government for not going far enough in fighting organised crime, for instance. Then there’s organised crime itself. You should see the threats he received . . .’