Tandia (102 page)

'Who? Who are you?' he said thickly, not yet seeing the gun.

'Sit up, Nguni!' Johnny said.

Nguni opened his mouth, about to protest when he saw the gun and gave a start, his eyes suddenly huge in his head. He pulled himself up into a sitting position, his eyes never once leaving the gun Johnny Tambourine held. Then he looked up slowly, his lips gibbering with fright. But then, just as quickly, his expression changed.

'It's you, Johnny Tambourine! I thought it was Special Branch. Put your gun away, man, we can talk.' He snapped the gold Rolex off his fat wrist and handed it to Johnny Tambourine. 'Here, take it, I am your friend,' he smiled.

Johnny took the watch and handed it to Flyspeck. It felt heavy, people said it was real gold. 'We are not friends, Nguni.'

The large black man must have had the constitution of an ox for he seemed to have recovered instantly, though his eyes were completely bloodshot and his skin puffy from drink. 'Johnny, Tandy is my friend, you are my friend.'

'No more, man! You killed Mama Tequila.'

Nguni actually chuckled, his stomach wobbling. 'Why would I do that?' he said, his voice amused.

'No bullshit, Nguni. We have proof.' Johnny was bluffing. Tandia had simply told him that he was the prime suspect. 'What proof?' Nguni said, raising his head slightly and sticking his jaw out. He was gaining confidence by the second. 'You are lying, Johnny Tambourine! If this was so, they would have said it in the newspapers.'

Nguni cursed himself. He was still drunk, he'd slipped, his mind wasn't working fast enough, he'd virtually admitted his guilt. He tried to recover, hoping the boys were not very bright. 'I left that place before the explosion.'

'Why did you run away? Because you are guilty!' Johnny replied for him.

Nguni shook his head slowly. 'Haya, haya, Johnny, it was my business. There were people who wanted money from me, I couldn't pay them.' He spread his hands. That is the simple reason, man. I am hiding from these people.' Johnny sighed, 'Nguni, we are tsotsi, not lawyers or the police, we do not ask how is a thing? Why?' He pointed the muzzle of his gun in Flyspeck's direction. 'My friend here has been hired by Tandia. He is a killer, a hired gun. But Tandia doesn't want to kill you. "Don't kill him, Johnny," she says. "Tell him only, if he makes a confession we will let him go. If he does not, we will tell Geldenhuis where he
is."
At the mention of Geldenhuis's name Nguni jerked backwards hitting his head hard against the bedhead. It was so sudden as to be almost ridiculous. The giant Zulu was suddenly out of bluff, unable to hold himself together any longer.

'That whore!' he spat.

Johnny and Flyspeck froze, not believing what they'd heard. 'What? What did you say?' Flyspeck said. It was the first time he had spoken.

'Geldenhuis has a paper, a confession, when she was a schoolgirl she was a whore,
isiFebe!'
He started to laugh. 'That Geldenhuis, he is a very clever man, so clever he got me a bus transport licence for Soweto. It is not possible for a black man to have a licence, but he fixed it for me.' He spread his hands, squinting up at Johnny Tambourine and Flyspeck Mendoza. 'You can work for me, I will pay you 'well. One day I will be the richest black man in Africa!' He seemed to find this last statement very amusing and started to laugh again, his laughter turning almost immediately into a fit of coughing.

Nguni leaned forward, his head bent towards his knees. Flyspeck didn't even think, the spoke came out of the seam of his trousers and entered the first and second vertebrae, his wrist turning to sever the nerve and cut through the soft, pulpy tissue. Nguni was dead without having moved. He simply sat slumped over his huge black belly. 'Shit!' Johnny said.

Flyspeck shrugged and grinned. 'He bad-mouthed Tandy, man!'

'Dog Poep heard them and came running into the room.

'What happened? What's the matter?' He stared at them both. Johnny Tambourine and Flyspeck Mendoza were pointing at the huge buckled shape of Mr Nguni and pis sing themselves with laughter.

Johnny Tambourine, Dog Poep Ismali, Too Many Fingers Bembi and Flyspeck Mendoza, with the help of Gideon's people, crossed the border into Mozambique to join a terrorist training squad. Or that's what Tandia thought, but halfway across the Komati River Flyspeck Mendoza lost the grip of the guide who was holding him and panicked. He couldn't swim and, being the smallest, the water came up to his neck. He disappeared under the swift-flowing current, came up thrashing and disappeared again as the river current carried him off. Several minutes later and several hundred yards downstream he was washed up unconscious on a part of the bank covered with reed. The villagers guiding the boys across called him with the soft hoot of a river owl, which was the signal to keep them together in the dark. Two of them came back and searched the riverbank to no avail, and they assumed he was drowned.

Flyspeck Mendoza regained consciousness just before dawn and climbed up the riverbank, not knowing which side he was on. He started to walk and skirted the lights of a town, which unbeknown to him was Komatipoort. When the sun came up he slept, and travelled all of the next night.

At dawn, hungry and footsore, he came to a farm where he waited until sun-up and then asked the farmer for work. The farmer asked him for his work papers and when Flyspeck said he'd lost them the farmer grinned and said he could work for his food, but no pay. And so he became a slave.

Flyspeck was a city boy, a bad guy who stayed up late and rose around noon, a hired gun. He had a bad leg from a knife fight and he'd never worked a day in his life. The farmer took the gold Rolex he was wearing and then beat the living shit out of him. He continued to do so daily with a sjambok until Flyspeck was working quite well for a city boy with a bad limp.

But at night in the dark cell, no different to a prison, where the farmer kept all the vagrants - who turned out to be just about everyone who worked on the farm - he sharpened the end of a bicycle spoke he'd stolen, using a small slab of slate-stone. Though he was exhausted from the dawn-to-dusk work and the others around him fell asleep within minutes of eating their evening meal of mealie pap and watery gravy, Flyspeck forced himself to stay awake long enough each night to do a little honing.

For almost two months, night after night, he worked in the pitch blackness until the point of the bicycle was smooth and narrow and sharp as a needle and the sides felt like satin to his touch. The time had come for Flyspeck Mendoza to depart.

Two days later the tractor broke down in a field where they were sowing potatoes and the Boer climbed down and buried his head in the engine. Then he sent his boss boy back to the shed for something. The boss boy laid his sjambok over the back of the tractor and walked quickly away. Suddenly the Boer was alone in the field with only his slave workers, his head in the tractor engine and the top three vertebrae deliciously exposed on the base of his red, sunburned neck.

The spoke went in so cleanly that the Boer let out a soft 'pffft!' like a long sigh. To anyone watching, he would have appeared just like before, on his knees with his head in the tractor engine. Only this time he was dead and the beautiful spoke was already back down the seam of Flyspeck's ragged trousers. Flyspeck reached down and unclipped the Rolex from his wrist and put it in his pocket. Then he picked up his bag of seed potatoes and walked to the end of the field and he just kept walking. Two days later the police caught him on the outskirts of Barberton where he was arrested and thrown into gaol to await trial.

Flyspeck Mendoza confessed readily to the murder of the Boer, but he'd not used his proper name when he'd asked the Boer for employment. His fingerprints were sent to Pretoria to the Department of Native Affairs which keeps the fingerprints of every African over the age of sixteen. A month later he was indicted for murder a second time, this time under his correct name which, because it showed up on a computer check of wanted persons, was also sent to the Special Branch. Finally it arrived on the desk of the youngest colonel in the history of the South African police force.

Colonel Jannie Geldenhuis didn't take long to make the connection between Flyspeck Mendoza, the death of Mr Nguni, and the disappearance of the four boys. The Rolex watch found on Flyspeck was instantly identified as having belonged to Mr Nguni. The Boer who'd been murdered on a farm about twenty miles outside Komatipoort had died in exactly the same way as Nguni had done. He was also sure that Tandia was behind the murder somewhere - otherwise why would all four boys, Johnny Tambourine in particular, have found him when a national manhunt had failed? Johnny Tambourine was her chauffeur and minder; she had to be involved somewhere. Even if Tandia was only aware of the murder and hadn't reported it to the police she could be indicted.

The more Geldenhuis looked at the file on Johnny Tambourine, the more excited he became. Flyspeck Mendoza was a lifelong friend, they did everything together. The four boys, he discovered, all worked for Tandia. He had to find out if Nguni had said anything before he'd died. Geldenhuis grew suddenly cold. He had to find out whether she had anything and if she did he had to compromise her so that it couldn't be used.

How Geldenhuis handled the kaffir on the murder charge at present in Barberton gaol was critical if he was to compromise Tandia. He picked up the phone and a voice answered, 'Constable Vermaas.'

'Vermaas, look up your prison directory and tell me the name of the Kommandant at Barberton prison.'

'Yes, colonel,' Stoffel Vermaas answered. A couple of minutes later he called back. 'Colonel Smit, sir. Do you want me to calI him for you?'

'Asseblief, ja.'
Geldenhuis thanked the operator and waited for the calI to come through from Barberton.

There was a click in Geldenhuis's ear.
'Smit hier,'
a voice said on the other end of the phone.

Geldenhuis identified himself to the prison officer. 'Not
the
Jannie Geldenhuis, the boxer?' Smit asked.

'Ja, I boxed a little.' Geldenhuis laughed, 'a long time ago.'

'We take our boxing pretty seriously down here, colonel. What can I do for you?'

Jannie Geldenhuis explained to Smit what he wanted. 'Ja, of course, colonel, we will make everything available and ready for your arrival. But, just one thing; prison regulations state that a prison officer must be present if an interrogation takes place within the prison. I cannot allow you to interrogate with only your own people in the room.' Geldenhuis cursed under his breath; he was dealing with a small-town yokel who played by the book. 'This is a Special Branch case, Kommandant, we do not require supervision with the work we do,' he said, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

'Nevertheless, colonel, I must insist.'

Geldenhuis was too good an operator to push it any further. He sighed heavily so that Smit would hear him on the other end. 'As you wish, Smit.'

'Colonel Smit, Colonel!' Smit corrected, his voice suddenly hard.

Geldenhuis realized at last that he wasn't dealing with a fool and softened his voice immediately. 'I'm sorry, Colonel, here in Special Branch we do a lot of undercover work, we get a bit careless with titles. If you will make a man available we'd like one who has been involved in getting information out of a prisoner himself, if you understand what I mean?'

Geldenhuis wasn't too worried. He'd have preferred to have Flyspeck Mendoza on his own with a couple of his own men, but Barberton prison was a place with a notoriously tough reputation and, anyway, in his experience, warders in country prisons didn't exactly play by the rules. He'd sweet-talk the prickly kommandant when they got there.

Smit called Gert immediately after the phone call. 'We've got Jannie Geldenhuis, the boxer and Special Branch Colonel coming down from Johannesburg tomorrow early to interrogate the kaffir who murdered the Boer from Komatipoort. I've told him you will attend.'

'Yes,
Colonel,' Gert replied, 'Do we want the interview on tape?' Though he and Smit had been friends for twenty years they generally kept things formal during working hours.

Colonel Smit looked up at Gert. 'You know who called yesterday?'

'No, sir?'

'Peekay. He's going to defend the kaffir murderer. He phoned to say he's coming down the day after tomorrow to see this Flyspeck kaffir.'

'Here,
man, why?' Gert asked, amazed. 'It's open and shut, the man has confessed.'

That's just what I said. He wants to expose the conditions on the farms. Blacks without papers used as slaves. This guy who got murdered, he says he's been doing it a long time.'

'Jesus! So what's new? It's been going on three hundred years!'

Smit looked up again. 'You know, Gert, I love Peekay like my own son, but I don't think he's going to make old bones, he doesn't know where to draw the line.'

That's what made him champion of the whole world, he never knew when he was beaten,' Gert said, though it was plain he was as concerned for Peekay as Smit was.

Smit cleared his throat. The subject of Peekay was too painful to discuss even with Gert. Peekay was the only truly innocent man he'd ever known and he found it a distressing experience coming to terms with this kind of truth. He admitted to himself that if he hadn't known him as well as he did he would despise him for it. Smit knew about fanatics; his own people, the volk, were often as fanatical and totally unreasonable and unreasoning. But you couldn't put Peekay in the same category. Peekay didn't hate the Afrikaner people or the kaffirs or anyone for that matter, he hated injustice. He couldn't see the grey shades, the reasons, the necessities for things to be as they were and this made him dangerous to a system which Smit himself supported. But it made him doubly dangerous to people like Jannie Geldenhuis, and Colonel Smit knew how people like Geldenhuis were and how they reacted when they were threatened.