Blood Safari

4

It was dark outside, but the street lights were bright. I walked around the house. It was no fortress. There was burglar-proofing on the ground floor only, subtle enough not to offend the aesthetics. The weakest point was the sliding glass doors that opened on to the big veranda overlooking the sea. Tuscan pillars, corners and protuberances offered four or five alternatives to access the windows on the first and second storeys.

Inside, I knew, was the usual alarm system with motion sensors and a connection to a local private security firm. Their blue-and-white sign was prominently displayed beside the garage. It was holiday home security, designed as an optimistic deterrent and to keep insurance premiums down.

The house was about three years old. I wondered what had been here before, what did they knock down to build this excess and splendour, and what that had cost.

Lemmer’s Law of Rich Afrikaners: If a Rich Afrikaner can show off, he will.

The first thing a Rich Afrikaner buys is bigger boobs for his wife. The second thing a Rich Afrikaner buys is an expensive pair of dark glasses (with brand name prominently displayed), which he only removes when it is totally dark. It serves to create the first barrier between himself and the poor. ‘I can see you, but you can’t see me any more.’ The third thing the Rich Afrikaner buys is a double-storey house in the Tuscan style. (And the fourth is a vanity number plate for his car, with his name or the number of his rugby jersey.) How much longer will it be before we outgrow our inherent feeling of inferiority? Why can’t we be subtle when Mammon smiles on us? Like our rich English-speaking compatriots whose nose-in-the-air snootiness so offends me, but who at least bear their wealth in style. I stood in the dark and speculated about Carel-the-owner. Apparently he was already a client of Jeanette’s. The Rich Afrikaner does not use bodyguards, only home security – high fences, expansive alarms, panic buttons, and neighbourhood security companies with armed response. What requirements did Carel have for protection?

I had my answer at the dining table, later.

When I entered the room, most were seated at the big table. Emma did the introductions. She was apparently the only one who was not part of the family.

‘Carel van Zyl,’ said the patriarch at the head of the table, his handshake unnecessarily firm, as if he needed to prove something. He was a big man in his fifties, with fleshy lips and broad shoulders, but the good life had already left its mark on his cheeks and midriff. There were three younger couples – Carel’s children and their spouses. One of them was Henk, who had met me at the door. He was seated beside his wife, a pretty blonde with a baby on her lap. There were four other grandchildren, the oldest a boy of eight or nine. My seat was beside his.

Carel’s wife was tall and attractive and unbelievably well preserved. ‘Feel free to take off your jacket, Mr Lemmer,’ she said with exaggerated warmth as she placed a plate of steaming turkey on the table.

‘Mamma …’ said Carel reprovingly.

‘What?’ she asked.

He made a pistol of his hand and pushed the finger barrel down his shirt. He wanted to tell her I was wearing a firearm, and would be reluctant to show it.

‘Oh! Sorry,’ she said, as though she had committed a social blunder.

‘Come, let’s ask the blessing,’ said Carel sombrely. Everyone held hands and bowed their heads. The boy’s hand was small and sweaty in mine, his father’s cool and soft on the other side. Carel prayed with comfortable eloquence, and in bullet points, as though God were a fellow member of the board.

‘Amen’ echoed around the table. Dishes were offered, children encouraged to take vegetables. There were short silences: a secret consciousness of the stranger in their midst and a subtle insecurity about the correct form of interaction. I was a guest, but also an employee, an intruder with an interesting job. The boy watched me with unashamed curiosity. ‘Have you really got a gun?’ he asked. His mother hushed him and said, ‘Don’t mind him.’

I forked turkey on to my plate. The hostess said, ‘It’s just leftovers.’ Carel said, ‘It’s delicious, Ma.’

Someone introduced the weather forecast as a topic and conversation began to flow – plans for the next day, how the children could be kept occupied, whose turn it was to braai. Emma did not join in. Her attention was on her food, but she ate little.

I became aware of an unnatural geniality between them, despite my presence. There was no conflict here, no fraternal rivalry, and none of the usual banter between couples. It was rather like one of those ideal families portrayed on an American TV programme. It was emanating from the way Carel had the final say, the casting vote. Their submission was barely noticeable, interlaced with a cheerful, practised pattern of interaction, but it was there, bowing to the benign despot – the one with the wallet and the fortune.

How did Emma fit into all this?

Once the plates were emptied and a discussion of the next day’s golf had ended, Carel decided that it was time to engage me. He waited for a moment of quiet and gave me an intimate smile.

‘Now we know what the ghosts looks like, Mr Lemmer.’

For a fraction of a second I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I got it. He had had previous dealings with Body Armour but had the wrong end of the stick.

To all appearances Jeanette Louw is a lesbian in her fifties with big bottle-blonde hair, a dreadful smoking habit – Gauloise was her brand of choice – and an outspoken preference for seducing recently divorced, hurting, heterosexual women. But hidden behind that front was a razor-sharp intellect and a brain for business.

She had been the legendary regimental sergeant-major of the Women’s Army College in George, before taking her package seven years ago. After months of market research she had opened her own business on the sixteenth floor of a luxury office building in the Cape Beachfront area. On the glass double doors, through which you could see Jolene Freylinck, the manicured receptionist, BODY ARMOUR was printed in bold, masculine letters and the explanatory ‘Personal Executive Security’ below in slim sans serif.

Initially, her clients were foreign businessmen, the senior executives of international corporations who came to find out how a quick buck could be squeezed from Africa. Their embassies had whispered in confidential reports that the country was stable enough for investment, but safety on the streets was not quite up to Western standards. Jeanette aimed her marketing at the diplomats, the economic attachés and consuls, the embassy clerks and switchboard operators. Would their important visitors prefer to avoid the long list of personal threats, the muggings, car hijackings, assaults, rapes, abductions and break-ins? Body Armour was the answer. The first few clients went home safely and her reputation grew. Gradually the whole spectrum from East to West had hired her specialists: Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Germans, French, Brits and Americans.

Then the foreigners began to make movies in the Cape, and the pop stars of the world came to sell their concert tickets to the boere and her client list took on a new dimension. Snapshots of Jeanette with Colin Farrell, Oprah, Robbie Williams, Nicole Kidman and Samuel L. Jackson preened on her walls. She would sit behind her desk and tell you about the big ones that got away. Will Smith and his huge entourage, including his own American bodyguards who travel around him like African praise singers. Sean Connery had earned her eternal admiration by turning down her service with a ‘Do you think I’m a fucking wimp?’

As with similar services the world over, Jeanette’s portfolio of hand-picked freelance bodyguards took on a two-part character. First, there were the deterrents – those highly visible, muscle-bound, thick-necked, steroid-bulked colossi that accompany the famous and keep hoi polloi at bay through visual intimidation. Their sole qualifications were the intimidating size of their torso and limbs and the ability to scowl in a menacing manner.

In the other branch of Jeanette’s service were those whose job was to manage more subtle but also largely imaginary threats. They had to flatter the client’s ego with a curriculum vitae reflecting both official training and high-profile experience. They preserved the illusion of danger by moving in the periphery, incessantly observing and evaluating. Sometimes they worked in teams of two, four or six with tiny concealed ear- and microphones. Sometimes they worked alone, depending on the size of the client group, the financial means, or the nature of the risk. They had to blend into the environment the client was moving through, appearing only to whisper polite suggestions at convenient moments. The client expected that, because film and television had set the standard of behaviour. (I had a Scandinavian businesswoman who insisted I wear an earphone complete with a trailing wire disappearing down my collar, despite the fact that I was working alone and had no one to communicate with.)

Consequently, Jeanette Louw would ask prospective clients or their agent: ‘Do you need a gorilla, or an invisible.’ In the world of the rich and famous it was recognised terminology.

But Carel-know-it-all hadn’t got it quite right. His mistake told me something – his knowledge was only fragmentary.

‘When you hire a bodyguard, Jeanette asks you if you want a ghost or a gorilla,’ he explained to the rest of the table. ‘We have only used the gorillas for the celebrities who come to make ads.’

I couldn’t think of an appropriate response. The situation was strange to me. The employee didn’t usually sit at the same table as the employer – it was socially unacceptable. Add to that my own lack of enthusiasm for small talk. But Carel didn’t require a response.

‘The gorillas are the big guys,’ he said. ‘They look like nightclub bouncers. But the ghosts are the real pros. The ones that guard state presidents and ministers.’

They stared at me, the whole table.

‘Is that your background too, Mr Lemmer?’ Carel asked. It was an invitation, but I turned it down with a mere nod, slight and unenthusiastic.

‘There you are, Emma. You’re in good hands,’ said Carel.

Good hands. I suspected that Carel did not have first-hand experience of the hiring process at Body Armour. It was something he left to subordinates. If he had handled it himself, he would have known that Jeanette had a price list and I wasn’t anywhere near the top. My place was in the bargain basement, the one that didn’t like teamwork, the one with a secret history and defective public relations.

Did Emma know? Surely not. Jeanette was too professional. She would have asked, ‘How much would you like to spend?’ and Emma would have said she had no idea of the cost. ‘Anything between ten thousand rand a day for a team of four and seven hundred and fifty for a solo operator.’ Jeanette would have explained the choices without mentioning her twenty per cent cut, plus administrative charge, unemployment insurance, income tax and bank transfer fees.

What did a brand consultant earn? How big a chunk of that was R750 per day, R5,250 per week, R21,000 a month? Not small change, especially for imaginary threats.

‘I’m sure I am,’ said Emma with a distant smile, as if her thoughts were somewhere else.

‘There’s more ice cream,’ said Carel’s wife hopefully.

He invited me to his playroom. He called it his den.

‘Invited’ in the broadest possible sense. ‘Shall we have a chat?’ were the words Carel used, a grey area between invitation and order. He went first. A mounted kudu head stared out over the room. There was a billiard table and a cane bar, bottles on a shelf, along with a small cigar humidor. The pictures on the wall were of Carel-and-gun posing with dead animals.

‘Drink?’ he asked, and moved behind the bar counter.

‘No, thanks,’ I said, leaning against the billiard table.

He poured for himself, two fingers of brown, undiluted liquid. He drank from the glass and opened the humidor. ‘Cuban?’

I shook my head.

‘You’re sure? These are class,’ he said complacently. ‘They age them for twenty-four months, like wine.’

‘I don’t smoke, thank you.’

He selected a cigar for himself, stroking his fingers down the chunky cylinder. He snipped the end off with a large instrument and put the cigar in his mouth. ‘Your amateur trims it with that cheap rubbish that crimps it here at the end.’ He held up his clipper for my inspection. ‘This is what they call a .44 Magnum. Makes a perfectly round hole.’

He reached for the box of matches. ‘And then you get the fools who lick cigars before they light up. That comes from the days when you bought local cigars in the corner café. If the moisture content is properly maintained, you don’t lick them.’

He struck a match and allowed the flame to burn strongly. Then he held it to the cigar. He inhaled in short, rapid puffs while rotating the cigar in his fingers. White clouds of smoke floated up around him and a rich aroma filled the room. He shook the match. ‘They say the best way to light a cigar is with a Spanish cedar spill. You take a long thin strip of cedar, set that alight first and then use it to light the cigar. It has a pure, clean flame that does not influence the flavour of the cigar. But where would we get Spanish cedar? I ask you.’ He smiled at me as if we shared the same difficulty.

He drew deeply on the cigar. ‘Cuban, nothing can touch them. The Jamaican is not bad either, nice and light, the Dominican somewhere in between, Honduras is too wild. Nothing touches the cream of old Fidel’s crop.’

I wondered fleetingly how long he could maintain a monologue in front of a bored audience, but then I remembered that he was a Rich Afrikaner. The answer was: infinitely.

He drew an ashtray closer. ‘Some fools think you shouldn’t tap off a cigar’s ash. Total myth. Bullshit.’ He chuckled. ‘The guys smoke cheap cigars and then say the bitter taste is the result of knocking off the ash.’

Carel sat on a bar stool, cigar in one hand, drink in the other.

‘There’s a great deal of bullshit in the world, my friend, a great deal of bullshit.’

What did he want?

Another puff on the cigar. ‘But let me tell you one thing, there’s no bullshit in little Emma. None. If she says there are people out to harm her, then I believe her. Do you understand?’

I was not in the mood for this conversation. I did not respond. I knew he didn’t like it.

‘Don’t you want to sit down?’

‘I’ve been sitting too much today.’

‘She’s like a daughter in this house, my friend, like one of my own. That is why she came to me about this thing. That’s why you’re here. You have to understand, she’s gone through a lot in her life. Deep waters …’

I tried to temper my annoyance by thinking how fascinating a man like Carel van Zyl was.

Self-made Men all share a personality type – driven, smart, hard working and dominant. When the wealth grows and people start to defer to their power and influence, every Self-made Man makes the same mistake. They believe the respect is for them, personally. It polishes their self-esteem and tones down their personality towards geniality. But it remains a thin veneer; the original dynamo is still at work behind the self-deceit.

He was accustomed to being the centre of attention. He did not like standing on the sideline of this event. He wanted me to know that he was responsible for my involvement; he was the father figure serving Emma’s interests, therefore he was actually in control, and the arbiter of my services. He had the right to interfere and to be a part of this. Above all, he had Knowledge. And he was about to share it with me.

‘She came to work for me after she graduated. Most men would have seen just a pretty little thing, but I knew she had something, my friend.’ He punctuated his sentence with the cigar.

‘I’ve employed a lot of them, account managers, and they just see the glamour and the long lunches with clients and the fat pay cheques. But not Emma. She wanted to learn; she wanted to work. You would never say there was money behind her; she had the ambition of someone from a poor background. Ask me, my friend, I know. In any case, she had been working for me for about three years when the thing with her parents happened. Car accident, dead on impact, both of them. She sat in my office, my friend, poor little thing, crushed, I’m telling you. Crushed, because she had no one left. That’s when she told me about her brother. Can you imagine? So much loss. Turbulent times. What can you say?’

He reached for the bottle and unscrewed the cap.

‘But she’s strong, that one. Strong.’

Drew the glass nearer.

‘I only heard about the size of the estate later. And let me tell you now …’ He poured two fingers. ‘This is all about the money.’

A dramatic silence, cap back on the bottle, a sip from the glass, a short pull from the cigar. ‘There are a lot of vultures out there, my friend. A lot. The bigger the fortune, the quicker they sniff it out. Ask me, I know.’

He gestured with the glass: ‘Out there is somebody with a scheme. Someone that’s done his homework, someone who knows her history and wants to use it to get at her money. I don’t know how. But it’s about the money.’

He brought the glass to his lips again and then put it down on the counter with finality. ‘All you have to do is work out the scheme. Then you have your man.’

At that moment I could have told him Lemmer’s First Law. I didn’t.

‘No,’ I said.

It was not a word he was used to hearing. His reaction proved that.

‘I’m a bodyguard. Not a detective,’ I said before I walked out.

My room was beside Emma’s. Her door was shut.

I showered and set out clothes for the next day. I sat on the edge of the bed and sent Jeanette Louw an SMS: IS THERE FILE AT SAPS GARDENS RE ASSAULT/BREAK IN ON E. LE ROUX YESTERDAY?

Then I opened the bedroom door so that I could hear and I switched off the light.