Blood Rose

fifty-three

Out in the desert, Riedwaan’s stomach had hollowed beneath his jeans, but the belt buckle stood clear of his skin. He could feel the place where the sun had bored heat through the metal to brand the tender skin. He tried to calculate how long he had been out, measuring the air in even packages of breath. In. Then out. Pacing himself.

He remembered the road, winding through the tamarisk trees. He had passed the no-entry sign where Lazarus Beukes had been found. He had gone on, his bike churning the virgin sand in the riverbed. He had found the place Darlene had told him about, the tree a dark-green sentinel, a couple of kilometres east of Spyt’s makeshift hideout. He could see the old railway tracks sinking into the heaped sand. The ruined roof of the huts, the rafters protruding like the ribs of a carcass picked clean by scavengers. The stationmaster’s house, the red sand curved through the windows, heaped like treasure in the front rooms. The track. The end of the track, the riverbed again, the ghost gum tree towering above him, the entrance to the hut. Then nothing. Except this blinding pain.

Riedwaan opened his eyes. The sun was dipping west. He closed his eyes against the searing light, the sand whirling in the wind. He made his mind work. Remember.

There had been tracks everywhere. He had gone into the building. A pick, shovels too, standing against the wall. New ones. A boy’s peaked cap, tossed in a corner. The pit, recently dug. A single drum standing against the wall, the hazard sign visible beneath the crusted sand. The others had been dug up and were no doubt now on the Alhantra, moving towards their targets like deadly wraiths. The pain. That’s when it had come, from behind him when he stood inside the room.

‘You’re awake.’ A woman’s voice. Riedwaan could just make out her figure stacking a pile of wood into an ashy hearth. Her fire would be going in minutes. His eyes fluttered closed.

He opened them again and looked at the woman standing above him now, her hair gleaming in the angled light. Riedwaan tried to move his arms. They were tied tight around the trunk of a tree, the slender nylon rope cutting into his wrists. The ground was hard. Riedwaan’s cellphone was in his back pocket. It bit into his back. He shifted his weight and hoped it was on silent. His gun was gone.

‘Who are you?’ Riedwaan’s own voice sounded unfamiliar. It hurt his cracked lips when he spoke. The woman dropped to her knees beside him, fanning her cool fingertips over his hot skin. He concentrated on her face, trying to get his vision to stabilise.

‘Your guardian angel.’ Her voice was husky. ‘You’re going to need one. The Namib Desert’s not safe.’ She held out her hand. ‘Oh, you can’t shake. Sorry.’ She returned to the fire and turned the metal fence dropper she had placed in it. The tip glowed an ominous red.

‘Water,’ Riedwaan begged.

The woman turned to look at him, not a glimmer of compassion in her pale-blue eyes. ‘You must learn to ask nicely.’ A shadow passed over her face. Pure menace.

She pressed the dropper into the smooth skin on Riedwaan’s chest. The acrid smell of charred skin hit him before the pain convulsed his body. He bit down on his bottom lip, the taste of his own blood sharp on his tongue.

‘A perfect circle,’ the woman said, admiring the mark she had made. She lifted the rod to do it again.

‘Give me some water,’ croaked Riedwaan, watching her face, trying to judge how far she would go, how much he could take. ‘Please.’

‘You can do better than that,’ she laughed, the soft red dunes echoing the curves of her body, but she put the rod down.

Riedwaan felt like he was walking a tightrope in the dark. If he was sure-footed, he might rekindle some empathy in her. If he got it wrong, he would fall, triggering a release of cruelty.

He thought of Clare, the gentleness in her face when she thought no one was watching her. Yasmin, his daughter. She would be calling tomorrow at their usual time.

Riedwaan knew if he drifted, he was going to pass out. And if the woman drifted any further, the slender thread of empathy would snap and he would die. He fought off the siren call of unconsciousness.

Shift things.

That’s what he had learnt when he had trained as a hostage negotiator. Shift things and get them to talk, to trust you. Then the hostages have a chance of survival. It seemed like a rather fragile straw to cling to now that he was the hostage. Unlike Clare, he was a betting man, but he didn’t like to think of his odds.

‘Talk to me,’ said Riedwaan, watching the woman, ignoring the stabbing pain in his bound arms, his seared chest. She was so at home, preparing things. The fire, the rope, the gun. Riedwaan had not picked a winner in this charnel-house hostess. He had to bring her back to him.

‘Give me some water.’ He said the words with an authority he did not feel. His tongue was swelling in his throat.

The woman glided towards him and held the flask to his mouth, the liquid pouring in, hot and choking at the back of his throat. She was so close Riedwaan could feel the warmth of her body, smell the unsettling, feral mix of perfume and adrenaline. Her hair swung over her shoulder and brushed his skin. It was bleached and porous, the colour and texture of dried grass left from last year’s rain. The desert wind made it crackle with static.

‘Just swallow,’ she said, holding his chin expertly. Riedwaan choked, his lungs burned, but the alcohol gave him a kickstart. ‘It’s only the first time that’s really bad,’ she added.

Riedwaan looked at her face. Her cheekbones, the sweep of her eyebrows were sculpted, beautiful, but the eyes were blank. All he could see in them was his own reflection, twice in miniature.

‘Who taught you that?’ he asked. He could imagine. She had such a perfect mouth, full and red. Made for a certain kind of love.

The woman sat down opposite him, intrigued by his question.

‘A boyfriend?’ guessed Riedwaan. ‘A teacher?’

She clasped her slim arms around her knees, as if folding her forgotten vulnerability away from his prying gaze.

‘Your mother’s boyfriend?’

The woman said nothing, but she shivered. Riedwaan was on target. He had to keep her talking.

‘Your mother?’ The wind had dropped and Riedwaan’s words reverberated in the sudden lull. The pain in his arms was unbearable. He was glad of it. It distracted him from the charred skin on his chest. He inched himself higher up the tree.

‘Not my real mother,’ the woman spoke at last, though she did not look at Riedwaan. ‘The woman who took me after my mother died.’

‘Tell me what she made you do,’ Riedwaan coaxed.

The woman got up and walked away as if she had not heard Riedwaan. She walked into the hut, leaving him alone. Riedwaan moved his body a little higher up the tree. The trunk narrowed a little, a dry cycle must have stunted its growth.

When the woman returned, she was holding a box of menthol cigarettes and a lighter. Riedwaan, though desperate for nicotine, feared what she might do. ‘Can you-?’

‘He was old,’ the woman interrupted. ‘In the army, but he always smelt dirty. He used to come to see her.’

Riedwaan nodded. ‘And he decided he liked the look of you?’

Again, she seemed not to hear him. ‘I choked and he hit me, but she made me finish.’ The memory of it danced like a blue flame as she raised her expressionless eyes to stare at Riedwaan. ‘Once you get used to it,’ she said, ‘it’s such an easy way to pay the rent.’

Riedwaan kept moving his body upwards. He could flex his wrists a little now. ‘How old were you?’ he asked.

The woman picked up a stick and jabbed it into the sand. ‘I was eleven.’

Riedwaan pictured the hand, nails lacquered red, holding the child’s small, round chin to wipe her face clean.

‘Tell me about those boys you shot,’ said Riedwaan.

‘What about them?’ she asked.

‘So close,’ he said. ‘You did it so close. I’m impressed.’

Her eyes glittered. An arc of light again. He had to keep her facing him.

‘Tell me about it, what it felt like.’

She hesitated.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to rush this, do you? When I’m gone, then your fun is over.’ It was true; he could see it in her face. Clare would be impressed with him, he thought. His new conversational ways with women. ‘How did you feel?’ he pressed.

‘How do you think?’

‘Like no one could argue with you. Powerful.’

‘More than that.’ She came closer.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me where it all began.’

‘I can tell you where it’s going to end.’

‘With me?’

The woman smiled at him and lit a cigarette. ‘Why not? Any requests?’

‘A cigarette,’ he said.

She held the cigarette to his lips.

‘But we aren’t at the ending yet, are we? So why don’t you start with the first one, Fritz Woestyn?’

‘Oh, was that his name?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t do him.’

‘Who killed him, then?’

The woman hesitated. ‘Don’t be clever with me. You think I’d betray him, my guardian angel. I told you, you need one.’

‘Nicanor Jones?’

‘He was sweet,’ said the woman. ‘My dry run.’

‘The others?’

‘Those were all mine. You’ll see later,’ she said. ‘I’ve learnt to be a good shot.’

‘I can’t wait,’ muttered Riedwaan.

The woman stirred the fire with the fence dropper. He didn’t think he could endure another session. ‘Why?’ he asked. It was a weak question, he knew, but he had to do something.

‘Why what?’ the woman shrugged.

‘Why did you do it? Love?’

‘I suppose you could call it that.’ She considered the notion.

‘Who are we waiting for, out here in the middle of nowhere?’ Riedwaan asked.

‘This time’ – she leaned close to him – ‘it’ll be just the two of us. Tête-à-tête.’

‘So why did you do it?’

‘It made me feel. He made me feel, standing close to me. Here.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Close.’

Riedwaan could feel it with her. The man behind her, close, his hands under her elbows, adjusting them, helping her aim, sliding back the smooth upper arms, under the breasts. Stepping back as she fired to watch the dénouement. There didn’t seem any reason why it shouldn’t be pleasurable.

‘Why did the Topnaar move them?’ Riedwaan asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, agitated.

‘I don’t know who moved them. Nobody’s business, but ours.’

‘And why didn’t you stop?’

‘We had to finish what we started.’ She looked at him, surprised that this logic had eluded him. ‘That is what he taught me; to finish what you start.’ She stirred the fire, mesmerised by its flames. ‘And I always pay what I owe.’

‘So now you get the clean-up?’

Rage flared in the woman’s eyes. ‘He’s not like that.’

Her phone purred on cue. She fished it out of her jeans and looked at the screen. Riedwaan watched the pulse at the base of her slender throat. He inched his arms up the tree, closer to where it narrowed. Blood oozed where his skin tore on the rough bark.

‘Who?’ he managed to say. ‘Who’s not like that?’

The woman laughed, the sound low, malignant. ‘You think you’re so clever, making me talk to you, distracting me. You think I haven’t seen it before?’ she sneered. ‘You’ll stop being so full of yourself when you meet him. He’ll fix you as soon as he’s finished.’

‘Finished with what?’

‘Your little doctor friend.’

Riedwaan was quiet. The stakes had just notched higher, and the woman knew it.

‘You want to see?’ She held up her cellphone, so Riedwaan could see the screen: Clare, half-turned, startled, in a narrow passageway.

Horror made him lucid. Riedwaan played his last card. ‘You believe he’s coming back for you?’ he asked.

‘He’s coming,’ said the woman, petulantly.

‘He’s finished with you. He didn’t even bother to kill you, did he?’ The air pulsed. The wind was rising again, fast, and visibility was dropping.

For a moment, the ghost of the broken child the woman had been softened the carapace of her adult face. But only for a moment. It was gone when she started to strip. She unbuttoned her shirt. Off it came and her bra, her jeans, the shoes, the watch, even her rings.

Riedwaan watched her, riveted. A quick shower and any traces of his blood on her skin would be gone. This perfect woman, naked except for the wings tattooed on her back and the pistol in her right hand. She flicked off the safety catch. She was so close, he could feel the warmth of her. It chilled him. She touched the gun against his forehead – cold, like a dog’s snout, and stepped back.

Knees soft, elbows locked.

She breathed in slowly.

Then out.

She knew what she was doing.