Recoil Read online

  The Indian greeter was dressed in a crisp white shirt that looked as if it had just come out of its wrapper. He gave my sweatshirt and jeans the once-over as he stepped forward.

  ‘I’m meeting Lex Kallembosch.’ I beamed, hoping he didn’t get close enough to smell me. ‘He said he’d be in the False Bay bar.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He held out his hand for my bag. ‘I’m afraid Sir requires a jacket and tie for the clubhouse.’ He eased me towards the cloakroom. ‘We have a small selection of jackets and ties, sir, but I’m afraid . . .’ He indicated my sweatshirt with barely concealed distaste.

  ‘No shirts?’

  ‘One moment, sir.’ He disappeared behind a curtain and returned with a white bundle in his hands. ‘The laundry basket . . . I’m sorry, but—’

  ‘Not a problem. Thanks.’ I made sure I chose one about three neck sizes too big so it didn’t strangle me when I did up the top button.

  The greeter was as happy as he was going to get with my turnout. ‘If Sir would like to follow me . . .’ In my chunky-checked sports jacket, crumpled white shirt and red-striped kipper tie, I looked like the star of a seventies detective series.

  He navigated me into the lounge. A dozen or so men were sitting either at the bar or at tables. The panelling gave the place the feeling of an old colonial club, where retired colonels hatched plots over a few G-and-Ts and a bowl of Bombay mix, or Mark Thatcher’s mates cooked up get-rich-quick schemes. Big picture windows overlooked the first tee. In the distance, the sun was winding down for the day, dipping towards the horizon.

  A white guy in a dark suit detached himself from the bar and came towards me, hand outstretched. ‘Nick, right?’ His accent was as thick as his legs and forearms. These people must eat meat eight times a day.

  ‘Lex?’

  We shook. His face was so tanned it had cracks, and his hair so sun-bleached he must have showered in Domestos for the last fifty years.

  He led me back to the bar. ‘Listen, man, I don’t need to know how your flight was. Just tell me you have the money.’ He laughed loudly at what I hoped was a joke. His teeth sparkled. Maybe he cleaned them with Domestos too. ‘If that’s a yes, I’ll get you into the shit. Then, if you and this woman manage to meet up and stay alive, I’ll fly you back out again.’

  Fuck the money. I’d find a way out of that in a minute. ‘When do we go?’

  Maybe I’d suggest Silky paid him double when he got her back here, but I somehow doubted Lex spent too much time thinking long term.

  ‘Drink?’ He signalled the bartender. ‘I’m having a Cutty Sark.’

  ‘Water – I’m gagging here.’

  A familiar voice boomed behind us: ‘And mine’s a pint of Castle.’

  I nearly fell back on to the bar. Lex chuckled away to himself as he took control of another whisky. Sam held out a hand. I wasn’t sure if it was to shake or pull me upright. ‘You all right, Nick? Been a long time . . .’

  We shook, but I didn’t have a clue what I was going to say or do after that. I’d spent too long replaying the film in my head of Annabel diving into the dirt and the little kid slipping out of my hands . . . ‘I kept meaning to, you know, drop you a postcard . . . If I knew, well, you know . . .’ Then I noticed he had a huge smile on his face: he seemed genuinely happy to see me.

  He was more burned than tanned, but ageing well: his face was growing softer rather than harder.

  ‘What’s your secret, Sam? Oil of Olay?’

  ‘Not on your life, son. Holy water!’

  I might have guessed. Perhaps that explained the smile. Sam was still in the forgiveness business.

  Lex raised a hand the size of a baseball glove. ‘Hold on there, Padre. Before you launch into the sermon, I want to make sure Nick’s brought enough for the collection. Today, sinners, it’s going to a very worthy cause: the Lex Kallembosch Retirement Fund.’

  Sam looked shocked. ‘You old devil. You charging him for a flight you’re making anyway? How much?’

  Was this a set-up? Were they taking the piss?

  ‘Bargain basement, man. Ten large, US. Nick’s rescuing a poor little rich girl so he needs to spread his good fortune about a bit.’

  It was Sam’s turn to laugh. I was glad he found it funny. I was wondering what other juicy little bits of intelligence Crazy Dave had passed along the bush telegraph – and starting to regret separating the manipulative shit from his wheelchair.

  ‘What’s ten grand to you?’ Sam asked. ‘Your tonic-water bill comes to more than that. Tell you what, you old miser, we’ll have eighteen holes when we get back, and when I win the slate’s clean, OK?’

  ‘But you’ll lose.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Sam turned back to me and took a swig of his beer. ‘Where you staying?’

  ‘Do I need anywhere? I was thinking we could leave today.’

  He didn’t give me the answer I was hoping for. ‘We need to make tracks as well, but can’t until the morning. Lex has to wait for a delivery.’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Stay at my place. It’s not far.’

  Sam took a couple of parting swigs, and I picked up the tiny bottle of water I’d been given instead of the litre I’d been hoping for.

  He clapped Lex on the shoulder too. ‘Eighteen holes, you old fraud. As soon as we get back.’

  3

  Sam leaned against the cloakroom wall as I changed back into my own gear. I tried to keep the conversation focused on Silky. No matter how much time he spent in Bible class, anything else would open a can of shit I could do without. For all his goodwill, I felt uneasy around him. I had to keep thinking of ways to avoid opening that can.

  I rezipped my jeans and concentrated hard on doing up my belt. ‘What time we leaving?’

  ‘About five from the house. We’ll drive to meet up with Lex. The cargo should be there by then.’

  ‘When Hendrika said we were meeting in a bar, I didn’t expect Cape Town’s answer to Blenheim Palace.’ I pulled my rancid sweatshirt over my head as I struggled to think of what to say next. ‘I didn’t expect you to be riding shotgun, either. Crazy Dave left that bit out of the brochure.’

  ‘That’s because although Crazy Dave thinks he knows what’s going on here, he actually knows zip. He knows Lex from his wild, wild Bosnian women, whisky and gun-running days, and he knows I’m somewhere in the picture, but it’s been a while since I put my trust in Mammon – especially if it hails from the Herefordshire region . . .’

  I still didn’t know if Sam was taking the piss, or handing me a formal invitation to open the shit can. I kept fucking about with the sweatshirt to avoid getting any eye to eye, and left the air empty for him to fill. I felt hugely relieved when he did.

  ‘Either way, he doesn’t have a clue about what we do here. It’s a private enterprise, very private. And we like to keep it that way.’

  I whipped the neck of the sweatshirt over my head and bent down to fasten my boots. I knew he was gagging for me to ask who ‘we’ were and what the ‘private enterprise’ was. That bit of the kid was still knocking about in Sam’s head.

  Was he playing with me? It was pointless flapping about the timings: we weren’t leaving until the morning and that was that. There was nothing I could do but make sure my cell had a signal and hope that I’d get a call.

  We walked out of the clubhouse and back into the sunlight. The big orange ball was still sitting on the line that separated the sky from the sea. Sam slipped on a pair of designer shades and I stopped to dig my cheap plastic filling-station pair out of the holdall.

  We were following a path that I expected to take us to the car park. Instead, Sam stopped by an electric golf cart standing in a lay-by. He saw the look on my face. ‘It’s OK, we don’t have time for a round.’

  He jumped in behind the wheel. I threw my bag on to the back seat and off we went with a gentle electric whine.

  Sam didn’t look to left or right as we followed the green Tarmac path that snaked round the edge of the course. ‘I guess you’d
like to know what I got up to after I arrived back in Kinshasa?’

  He had the can of shit in his hand, and his finger in the ring pull.

  ‘I heard you’d become one of God’s patrol commanders. I thought you’d maybe have a white collar on by now, doing weddings, funerals and Highland flings in some Jock parish.’

  ‘That sort of thing isn’t me, you know that.’ He grinned. ‘Apart from the flings, obviously.’

  He was doing it again. These games had a set of rules I didn’t completely understand. I wanted to keep it simple: the past, back in its box; the immediate future, a lift on a plane.

  We seemed to be heading for a cluster of rather grand mansions about a K away, a stone’s throw from the sea. We rolled past a big colonial-style spread with fancy iron gates. Four guys were painting them with sheets over their heads to protect them from the sun. I could see a fountain in the middle of the gravel turning area. Sam nodded. ‘That one’s Lex’s.’

  No wonder, if he was charging ten grand a plane ride. This place was more Beverly Hills than Bob Geldof.

  ‘You said Bosnia?’

  ‘Aye. But he was in the South African Air Force before that, fighting their war. Then he flew Hunters for the Rhodesians during theirs. Then, well, he flew for anyone who paid him, I think. My little place is just along the way.’ Whatever the ‘private enterprise’ was, it paid well.

  Sam hadn’t lost his thread. He got the talk straight back to Zaïre. ‘And you, Nick? Still hedging your bets and being Mr Agnostic? Remember what we talked about on the roof that night?’

  ‘Yep. Still haven’t met this imaginary friend of yours or been shouted at from burning bushes.’

  ‘There’s an answer to that, but I’ll spare you for the moment. So, how have you been filling your life? You obviously haven’t wasted too much of it in the kirk . . .’ He swung the cart into a wide Tarmac driveway and clocked my surprise. ‘Yeah, not bad, eh?’

  He wasn’t wrong. It was the sort of thing you see on the cover of architecture magazines at airport news-stands. Acres of glass, bare wood and whitewashed rendering, with multi-pitched roofs and a big shiny pool thrown in for luck. The bishop would have approved. ‘Fuck me, Sam – tell me you’re only the butler!’

  He jumped out of the wagon.

  ‘I mean, I’ve heard God provides, but this is ridiculous.’

  ‘They’re company houses, not ours.’

  I followed him up to the huge double doors. His neighbour’s place looked like it had been done by the same architect but bigger, and the landscapers obviously had a fondness for razor wire.

  Sam opened up and we found ourselves in a hallway the size of a departure lounge. There was excited barking, the scampering of paws on stone and two rat-like dogs hurled themselves at him. He did what dog lovers do, fussing about and getting slobber all over his clothes and hands.

  He talked to them like they were his kids. He even introduced them. ‘This is Vegas, and this is Mimi.’ If he wanted me to say hello, he had another think coming. Apart from anything else, I was too busy being impressed by the décor and cheering myself up by thinking how jealous Stefan would have been.

  I shook my head in disbelief. ‘Just as well you didn’t become a vicar. Their company houses aren’t a patch on this.’

  ‘I work as a peacemaker, Nick.’ He motioned towards Mimi and Vegas. ‘Dog collars are for dogs.’

  ‘You on the circuit?’

  We walked along the hall and into the kitchen. He opened a huge, stainless-steel, double-doored fridge. ‘No, no, none of that rubbish. That’s Crazy Dave’s end of the market. What we do is a wee bit more sophisticated.’

  He was waiting for me to fold. Fuck it, I’d held out for a while and, besides, it got us away from Zaïre. ‘Who’s “we”? I know them?’

  He was happy now. ‘There are four others on the team. You know one of them for sure, and might remember another.’ He passed me a cold can of Castle. ‘Come on, then, tell all. I want to know what you’ve been getting up to.’

  That was fine by me: it put more distance between us and the shit can. ‘Bit of this, bit of that. I worked for the Firm for a while, then the Yanks.’ I took a mouthful of lager.

  ‘You did the Iraq gigs?’

  ‘Madness not to. What about you? Where do you keep the peace most days?’

  ‘Security for a mine in DRC. We fly to the Rwanda border and conduct operations into DRC from the base camp.’ He lost the sparkle in his eyes for a moment, and I had the strange impression that his red skin had gone a shade lighter. ‘It’s a nightmare up there, Nick. The miners need protecting, the communities need protecting.’ He touched my arm. This stuff was coming from the heart. ‘But tell me about the girl.’

  I toyed with my beer can as I wondered whether to give him the truth. If he was fucking me about, I still needed to make sure I got on that flight. The next step would be begging. Maybe that was what he wanted from me. ‘This isn’t just a job, Sam. She’s important to me. I have to get her out of Nuka.’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘Not a healthy place, Nick. Everyone’s getting slaughtered left, right and centre. But I’ll take you in.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do without her.’ Fuck. Where did that come from? So much for keeping things under wraps . . .

  Sam eyed me with real concern. Eventually he resorted to the shoulder-clapping routine and changed the subject. ‘Let’s worry about that tomorrow. I’ll show you round.’

  He ushered me through a door into his own private cinema. A giant plasma screen filled the far wall. A dozen La-Z-Boy armchairs faced it, and there was a bar tucked into the corner.

  ‘I’ve got my own church now. We educate, medicate, protect – and keep the Lord high on their agendas.’

  I didn’t run for the hills, these days, when God came up in conversation. I’d worked out long ago that the afterlife was just a comfort blanket for people who didn’t know what the fuck was going on and needed to believe there was some sort of reasoning behind it all, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim or Seventh Day Jehovah’s Buddhist. Me? I was glad I was too stupid to worry about the meaning of life. I just wanted to keep mine going as long as I could.

  I glanced at the row of photos on the wall behind the bar. ‘This the church?’

  All I could see was a jumble of mud huts with palm-leaf roofs and a few crosses hanging over the doorways. In the foreground, a bunch of kids were grappling with a goat, up to their knees in mud.

  ‘Not exactly. That’s Nuka, in fact, an orphanage I also run.’

  ‘I still don’t quite understand how God fits in with your private enterprise. God and gun?’ I indicated the opulence around us. ‘Where’s the join?’

  ‘It’s wrong to think of it like that. The two are totally compatible. What good could I do without the cash? This house means nothing. It’s not mine, nor will it ever be. It comes with a job that I take very seriously because it gets me to the people who need my help and provides the money to run the church, to run Nuka . . .’ He saw the expression on my face and held up his hand. ‘Yes, it’s near the mine. We’ll get to her, don’t you worry.’

  We went out on to a terrace overlooking the sea. The sun had just about sunk into it now. A woman was laying a table for two. Crystal glasses, gleaming candelabra, big linen napkins.

  Sam looked pleased. ‘I thought we’d get the company silver out and celebrate with a few courses of mealie-meal and Milo. Then maybe a movie. Very romantic, eh?’

  4

  Sunday, 11 June

  05:58 hours

  We’d left the house nearly an hour ago and I was feeling good, even if my cell hadn’t made a squeak all night. At least I was getting closer to where I needed to be. We’d driven through the golf course, past security and out on to the metalled road in pitch darkness. We’d turned off after twenty minutes, and for the last ten Sam’s shiny new company BMW X5 had been bouncing along a dirt track. A sliver of light was peeping over the horizon.

  Behind the
blacked-out windows, we listened to an early-morning talk-show. The only other sound was the gentle hum of the air-conditioning. The station said there was a festival and wine-tasting up in Stellenbosch this afternoon, but I knew at least three people who wouldn’t be going. By the time the organizers were pulling the first cork, Sam, Lex and I should be on the Rwanda–DRC border and less than fifty K from Nuka.

  I breathed in the aroma of brand new leather. Sam and I had spent the evening being served roast beef and fine wines. He seemed to have become a bit of a connoisseur. I couldn’t believe the transformation – but not everything about him had changed. He still thought God had created the earth, and that he needed to save everyone’s souls. Even the DVD we watched after dinner was a fund-raiser he’d put together.

  I believed him when he said that the house, even the BMW, meant nothing to him. We’d spent all night talking about how he’d stayed in Africa after the 1985 job and worked for different aid organizations. Not once did he ask me about Zaïre; there were no more leading questions.

  I suddenly realized I had to talk to him. ‘Sam?’

  ‘What?’ He adjusted the air.

  ‘The thing that happened on the heli, the boy . . . I need to talk about it.’

  ‘I know.’ He kept looking straight ahead.

  ‘I couldn’t hold him. I need you to know that. The little fucker was too slippery.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I couldn’t help Annabel. That fucking arsehole Standish, you see what he did?’

  Sam nodded. We hadn’t talked about him all night. It was just as well. I’d still be honking and banging the table.

  ‘After the boy fell it was too late – I couldn’t get off the heli in time.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘So why do I feel so guilty?’ I paused. ‘Do you know that too?’

  ‘Because you can’t get the sight of those kids’ corpses out your head. I do know that, because I can’t either. That’s why my life has been here ever since. I want to make up for killing those children. I want to make sure the ones who are still alive don’t have to suffer like the ones we killed. But you don’t have to feel guilty, Nick. We didn’t know. This is just my particular way of dealing with it.’