Mountain of Black Glass (11 page)

W
AITING to die, as Joseph Sulaweyo discovered, was surprisingly like waiting for anything else: after a long enough time, your mind began to wander.

Long Joseph had been lying in darkness on the floor of a car with his face covered by some kind of sack for what seemed at least an hour as his kidnappers drove slowly through the streets of Durban. The hard shin of the man who had snatched him from in front of the hospital was pinning Joseph's arm against his side, and the even harder barrel of the gun rested against the top of his head like the beak of a murderous bird. The sack itself was foul and close, with the ammonia-stink of old, sweaty clothes.

It was not the first time in his life that Joseph had been abducted by armed men. Twenty years earlier a rumor of cuckoldry had led one of the neighborhood hard men and his cousins to drag Joseph out of his house and bundle him into a truck, then drive him to a shebeen one of the men owned on the far side of Pinetown. Guns had been waved around and Joseph had been slapped a few times, but at least a dozen witnesses had seen him dragged from the streets and knew who had done it. The whole thing was mostly a face-saving display by the husband of the whispered-about wife. Joseph had been much more afraid of a bad beating than of being killed.

Not this time,
he thought to himself, and felt cold all over.
Not these men. The kind of people Renie got onto, they don't bother with no hitting and yelling. Take you out to the edge of the township and just put bullets into you.

Beyond a swift, partially whispered conversation as he was being forced into the car, his two captors had not spoken. The man driving seemed in no hurry, or perhaps was trying to avoid being noticed. Whatever the case, Joseph had at first been frightened rigid, but had found that he could not sustain such an extreme pitch of fear. After going round and round with the imminence of his own death dozens of times, he began to slip into a kind of waking dream.

This what Renie feel like, down in the dark?
He shifted on the car floor, his back arched uncomfortably. The man with the gun shoved him, more in irritation than in threat.
Just wish I could see her again, one more time. Tell her she's a good girl, even though she drive me crazy with her nagging.

He thought of Renie's mother, Miriam, who had nagged him, too, but who had also loved him up sweet as honey. Once, when they were first together, he had stripped naked and waited for her on the front room couch. She had laughed when she came in and saw him, saying,
What will I do with a crazy man like you? What if my mother had been with me?

Sorry,
he had said,
but you have to tell her I am just not interested.

Miriam had laughed so hard. That night, as they lay together on top of the sheets, the old fan only barely pushing the hot air around the room, he had told her that she was going to marry him.

Might as well,
she had said, and he could hear her smile, there in the dark beside him.
Otherwise you'll probably just keep bothering me.

They had made Renie in that bed, and Stephen, too. And Miriam had slept with him there the last night she spent at home, the night before that terrible day when she did not come back from the department store. That had been the last night they lay together belly to belly, with her snoring in his ear the way she did—the way that sometimes when his head ached had made him crazy, but which he would now give anything to hear again. He would have slept beside her in her hospital bed in her last days, but she was too badly burned. Even a slight movement of the mattress, just setting down a magazine near her arm, had made her whimper.

Goddamn, it is not fair,
he thought, then continued with an unusual leap of perspective.
Especially for poor Renie. First her mother, then her brother, now her foolish father gone and get himself killed, and she has nobody.
He entertained a brief fantasy of managing to escape when the car reached its destination, a sprint for freedom that would take the kidnappers by surprise, but the unlikeliness of it was too heavy a weight for his reverie to bear.
Not these men,
he told himself.
People burn down a whole flat-block just to tell someone like Renie to shut up and leave things alone, they not going to make any mistakes. . . .

Without warning, the car slowed and then stopped. The driver switched off the engine. Long Joseph's body turned to ice in an instant—it was all he could do to keep from pissing himself.

“I don't go any farther,” the driver said, the seat between them muffling his voice so that Long Joseph had to strain to make out his words. “You get me?”

It seemed a strange thing to say, but before Joseph could think about it, the man with the gun made a noise, almost a grunt, and pressed the barrel hard against his neck. “Get up,” he told Joseph gruffly. “Don't do anything foolish.”

Tripping and staggering, grudgingly assisted by his captors, Long Joseph at last managed to clamber out of the car and onto his own two feet again, lost in the dark sack covering his head. He heard a distant shout echoing as though down a long street. The car door slammed shut, the engine started, and it rumbled away.

Someone yanked the bag off, pulling at his hair in the process so that despite everything he yelped in anger and surprise. At first the dark street and its one flickering streetlight seemed shockingly bright. Tall, graffiti-tattooed walls loomed on either side. Half a hundred meters down the street a fire burned in a metal drum, surrounded by a small crowd of figures warming their hands, but before he could even contemplate calling out to them the gun jabbed his backbone.

“Turn around and walk. Through there.” He was shoved toward a doorway in one of the walls. At the gunman's direction Joseph pulled the door open and stepped through into blackness. He flinched, positive that any second the bullet would slam into the back of his skull. When something clicked, he jumped. A moment later he realized he was still alive, but that controlling his bladder was no longer an option. He was ridiculously glad he hadn't had much to drink in the last few hours—at least he would die with only a small show of cowardice.

A fluorescent light spasmed on overhead. He had been brought to some kind of garage or storage room, empty but for a few cans of paint and some broken chairs, the kind of place someone whose small business had failed might rent to keep his equipment in until he could sell it off. Joseph saw his own shadow stretched against the floor with his kidnapper's flung alongside it.

“Turn around,” the gunman said.

Long Joseph did, slowly. The dark-skinned black man who stood before him wore what surely had once been a nice overcoat, but which was stained, as was the white shirt he wore beneath. His hair had been expensively cut at some point, but had not been tended recently. Even Joseph, one of the world's less observant people, could see that the man was nervous and upset, but the gun in the fellow's hand kept him from saying anything about it. “Do you recognize me?” the kidnapper asked.

Joseph shook his head helplessly—although now that the man mentioned it, there was something vaguely familiar. . . .

“My name is Del Ray Chiume. Does that mean anything?” The gunman shifted from one foot to the other.

Long Joseph frowned, still frightened, but now puzzled, too. “Del Ray . . . ?” It came to him a moment later. “You used to see my daughter Renie?”

“That's right!” The man laughed explosively, as though Joseph had conceded a hard-fought point. “And do you know what your daughter has done to me? Can you even guess?”

Joseph watched the gun go up and down, up and down. “I don't know nothing that you are talking about.”

“She's ruined my life, that's what she's done.” Del Ray paused in his back-and-forthing to wipe the sleeve of his overcoat along his damp forehead. “I've lost everything because she couldn't leave well enough alone!”

“I don't know what you are talking about.” Joseph gathered his courage. “Why you kidnap me? You going to kill me because my daughter break up with you or something?”

Del Ray laughed again. “Are you crazy? Are you crazy, old man? That was years ago. I'm a married man! But my marriage is over because of your daughter. I've lost my house, everything. And it's all her fault!”

Renie, Long Joseph decided, had clearly been keeping a lot to herself. And she had the nerve to criticize
his
behavior. He was beginning to feel that there was a good chance he was going to live after all, and he was torn between an urge to collapse and a desire to shout out his joy and fury. This was no hard man. Long Joseph knew this type. This Del Ray fellow was some kind of businessman, the kind who turned down your loan application with a sneer, but when push came to shove and he wasn't on top anymore, had no balls. “So are you going to shoot me, then? Because if you are not, then put your damn gun away, but don't keep waving it around like you some kind of Mafia hitman.”

“Hitman!” Del Ray's laugh was theatrically bitter. “You don't know shit, old man. I've met the bloody hitmen. They came and had a talk with me—that was before they burned my house down. One of them had fists as big as your head—biggest, ugliest Boer you ever saw. Face like a bag of rocks. You know what they said? Told me if I didn't do what they wanted, they were going to rape my wife and then kill her, right in front of me.” Del Ray suddenly burst into tears.

Long Joseph was taken aback—how did you deal with a weeping man with a gun? In fact, how did you deal with a weeping man of any kind? “Why would they do a thing like that?” he asked, almost gently. “Why they so angry at you?”

Del Ray looked up suddenly, his eyes bright, madly intent. “Because of your daughter, that's why! Because Renie dragged me into something I didn't want to know about, and my wife's left me, and . . . and . . .” The tears returned. He sank to the floor and sat, legs stretched in front of him, like a toddler who had fallen down. The gun lay on the floor between his knees.

“So you going to shoot
me
?” Long Joseph asked. “You been waiting around in front of that hospital just to shoot me?” He considered for a moment. “Or you waiting to shoot Renie?”

“No, no.” Del Ray wiped his sweat-shiny face with his sleeve again. “No, I have to talk to Renie. She has to tell these people what they need to know so I can stop hiding.”

Joseph shook his head, unable to keep up with the man's logic. “I can't tell nothing to Renie. She is not here. I just come to see my son, and that's what I'm going to do. Unless you going to shoot me.” He had allowed a sneer to creep onto his face—now that he thought back on it, he had never liked this high-talking fellow very much, and had been openly glad when Renie got shed of him.

Del Ray's hand suddenly snapped up, the gun clutched in it once more, the alarmingly large black hole pointing right at Long Joseph's face.

“You
are
crazy,” Del Ray said. “You don't know how lucky you are it was me got you first. My brothers and I have been watching out for you or Renie for days and days, but if I can watch that place, so can the hitmen. Do you think for a second you can just walk in and see your son without them knowing? These people won't just kill you, old man, they'll torture you first to find your daughter—and then think what they'll do to her.”

Joseph frowned. “I don't understand any of this talk. It all sound crazy to me—crazier than what Renie says, even.” He blinked, trying to remember how it had been when he could talk to someone and make them understand him, and he could understand them in turn. It seemed like years. “Put that gun away, man. Just tell me what happened.”

Del Ray stared at him for a moment, then looked at his own outstretched arm and the gun trembling in his fist. He tucked the pistol into his coat pocket.

“That is good,” Joseph said. “Much better. Now tell me what happened to you.” He looked around the dimly lit garage, then back to Del Ray Chiume's wide-eyed, sweaty face. “But can we go somewhere? I truly need a drink.”

 

I
T was not good to think too much about things, Jeremiah was discovering.

When there was no one to talk to but yourself and nowhere to visit but the same echoing rooms, when you saw no sun, and had listened to the radio voices babble about a world that had nothing to do with you until you wanted to scream, when you had heard little else except the breathing and amplified heartbeats of two people who for all intents and purposes had left you behind in another country, it was bad to spend too much time letting your mind wander.

There had been times during the years he had worked for the Van Bleecks, first for both of them, Doctor and Doctor, but most of the time for Susan alone in her long widowhood, that Jeremiah Dako had thought,
I would give everything I have for just a little time to rest and think.
Acting as secretary, housekeeper, cook, and chauffeur for a brilliant, cantankerous, absentminded old woman, he had done a job that two younger men would have found arduous, but Jeremiah had prided himself on his ability to take anything life (or Susan Van Bleeck's dubious skills of organization and personal punctuality) could throw at him and keep going, venting his frustration only in small steam-valve gusts of bad temper and irritable over-solicitousness. He had given up his own social life for it, had been out of the bars and club scene so long that on the few occasions he found himself with a night off and his mother otherwise engaged, he not only didn't recognize any of the people he met, but could not understand the music or the clothing, as though an entire generational shift had happened while he wasn't looking.