Деон Мейер - Cobra

‘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.