Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

Cassiem trudged on through the veld, the woman panting behind him.

Berenice had spent the day looking for Ronnie. She had gone to his school. He wasn’t there. She caught a taxi to the amusement arcade in Bellville, hoping for the first time ever that she would catch him cutting school. No sign of Ronnie.

After school she went to Cassiem’s house, two streets away from hers. Cassiem said he hadn’t seen Ronnie since yesterday. At first the boy denied all knowledge of the dead bodies. Only after Berenice had threatened to make trouble with his parents did he relent and tell her the truth. He had been with Ronnie when his friend had helped himself to the Nikes.

“I want you to take me there,” she told Cassiem.

“Why, Auntie? It’s horrible.”

“Because maybe Ronnie went back there.”

“But why, Auntie?”

She couldn’t answer the question. Just knew that she had to be taken to the bodies.

Cassiem walked through thick bush into a small clearing. He pointed toward a clump of thorns on the other side.

“It’s there.”

“Go on,” she ordered him.

The boy was reluctant. Berenice gave him a shove and he walked slowly forward.

Berenice caught the unmistakable smell of burned flesh. Then she saw a mound of something black, burned, unrecognizable.

Ronnie stopped. Berenice found the last of her courage and stepped forward. Please, God, she beseeched under her breath.

Berenice approached the bodies. It took her a few moments to make sense of what she was seeing. Two men, she assumed they were men, lying side by side, charred black. Then she made out a smaller form, somehow sprawled across them.

No features were recognizable. Blackened flesh burned off a skull. Scraps of cloth burned into the skin. Then she saw something that made her gasp.

Berenice fought back a wail and sank to her knees in the dirt, to get closer to the bodies, to see- please, God -that it wasn’t what she already knew it was. On the arm of the smallest body was a watch. A ridiculously large watch, way too big for the skinny wrist. The glass was shattered and the face was blackened and warped, but enough of it remained for hr to see the Caped Crusader.

Berenice lifted her face toward the blazing sun and let the wail break loose from her breast, screaming for God’s mercy.

Special Investigator Disaster Zondi sat in the interview room at Bellwood South Police HQ, waiting for Rudi Barnard, who was twenty minutes late. Zondi showed no sign of impatience or irritation. He spent the time rereading the file on Barnard. The file was as fat as the cop whose photograph stared up at him.

Disaster Zondi, despite the ridicule his name attracted, flat-out refused to change it. He wore the name, given to him by his illiterate Zulu parents, as a badge of pride. Every time he was mocked, it had made him stronger. Reminded him that he had dragged himself by his fingernails from a life of rural poverty and deprivation. He had won a bursary, earned a degree in criminology, and now answered only to the minister of safety and security. Few people laughed to his face now that power, like an invisible cloak, had settled upon him.

Rudi Barnard and Disaster Zondi were perfect opposites, book-ends in the struggle of good versus evil. Barnard was obese. Zondi was trim and athletic. Barnard believed in the power of God. Zondi believed in the power of Justice. Barnard was a glutton, a junk-food junkie. Zondi ate sparingly and was fastidious about what he consumed. Barnard had little interest in sex. Zondi was the owner of roiling passions that continually threatened to upset his equilibrium, but he suppressed and controlled them through sheer force of will.

The nearest Zondi got to a religious notion was the image he had of himself as an inquisitor, riding out through the battlefields of corruption in contemporary South Africa. There was one absolute about Zondi: he could not be bought. He had dealt with men in a much grander league than Rudi Barnard. Politicians and tycoons. He had been offered millions, which he had rejected without pause. He had been offered power and position. These held no appeal.

He had been offered women: wives, daughters, mistresses, the bodies of female miscreants themselves. These offers had been more difficult to resist. He had been forced to dig deep into his resolve. But he had stood firm. He had resisted.

Disaster Zondi believed that the police were the bulwark, the thin blue line that stood between society and anarchy. His mission in life was to weed out the bad cops merrily enriching themselves off the back of South Africa’s miracle of transformation.

Zondi was well aware that Rudi Barnard was a dinosaur who’d somehow managed to escape the ice age of apartheid’s end. He had carved out a fiefdom for himself here in Cape Town, murdering and extorting out on the lawless Cape Flats. It was extraordinary that he had got away with it as long as he had. Well, his time had come. Special Investigator Zondi was here to bring an end to the reign of Rudi Barnard.

The door opened, and the massively fat cop wheezed his way in. Zondi saw the little eyes, like cigarette burns in a pigskin sofa, scanning his dark features, white shirt, and Roberto Cavalli suit.

He saw that Barnard didn’t recognize him. Why would he? The last time Zondi had seen Barnard, through a veil of pain and blood, had been nearly twenty years ago. He had been just another faceless black kid.

Zondi rose and extended a perfectly manicured hand.

“Disaster Zondi,” he said.

They climbed onto the minibus taxi in Mowbray, two teenage girls crippled by skin-tight jeans, bumping past Benny Mongrel, taking the seat behind his. Their eyes widened at the sight of his nightmare of a face. As the taxi rattled away, they were whispering about him, sure that he couldn’t hear them over the racket.

But he could.

“You see his face?”

“Ja. It’s horrible!”

“Imagine waking up with that in the bed.”

“I would scream. Honest.”

“Think he got a wife?”

“If he do, she must be blind!”

They were giggling into their hands with false nails like claws.

Benny Mongrel wanted to turn and tell them that he didn’t need no mean-mouthed bitch of a wife. Scare the living shit out of them. But he did nothing, tuned them out.

Anyways, he’d had his fill of wives. In Pollsmoor Prison an officer in the 28s could take his pick. Benny Mongrel had walked among the newcomers, and when he saw a young body untouched by gang tattoos, he had pointed a finger.

The man would always follow.

Benny Mongrel would install the man in the bed beside him. He would give him protection and in return demand that his food was cooked, his clothes were washed and ironed, and his toenails clipped. And at night, in the crowded cell, Benny would lie face to face with the boy and bugger him.

The duties of a wife.

If you suggested that Benny Mongrel was homosexual, he would kill you. There were gay men in prison, outrageous queens who wore short T-shirts as dresses, grew their hair and rolled it in curlers, had lipstick and rouge smuggled in. These men-the prisoners called them moffies -were tolerated. They were amusing; they were part of the prison culture. But Benny Mongrel never went near them.

Benny Mongrel never kept a wife longer than a few weeks. There was never any question of intimacy. It was cold, brutal, and functional.

In the last few years he was in jail, Benny Mongrel had stopped taking wives. He had lost interest. He had no desire to touch or to be touched. He had lain alone in his bunk and tuned out the animal sounds of rape and lust.

It had meant nothing to him.

Now that he was out, the last thing on his mind was taking a woman. By force or otherwise. He saw the way they looked at him, like the little sluts sitting behind him in the taxi. Like he was a monster. He could take them at knifepoint, drag them into the bush by their hair, and have them. He had done it before. But he had no appetite for this any longer.