Payback - A Cape Town thriller Read Free Page B

down to the purple lipstick, saving the best for last: Cayman and Techipa.
    A long silence from Pylon. Then: ‘Save me Jesus.’ Then: ‘You think he knows or he’s guessing?’
    ‘Cayman, it’s possible. Those bankers say they’re like the gnomes but stuff gets out. If someone’s looking.’
    ‘We’ve given no clue. No flash living. So-so business.’
    Mace said, ‘He starts putting this around we’re buggered. Big time.’
    Pylon coming in, ‘What I don’t get is Techipa. Everyone was dead.’
    ‘Someone wasn’t.’
    ‘He started this with the guns? Return of a favour?’
    ‘Yup.’
    ‘I’d forgotten the guns.’
    ‘Was a long time ago in another country. Hadn’t been him it would’ve been someone else. We’d have got them in the end.’
    Except in the end it was Ducky Donald who saved them from what might have been The End with slit throats. As Mace recalled it the Arab wasn’t pleased that his suppliers had hit a shortfall on the consignment. No matter who the partners contacted there was nothing in that corner of the Sahel at that time that would appease their irate buyer. Until a desperate call to Ducky Donald siphoned off the requisite from a cache stockpiled in a Jo’burg mineshaft. Where the RPGs came from Mace never asked. Suffice to say he suspected Ducky Donald was also trading for the SA army. For him business was business. For Mace and Pylon at the time business was revolution. Which came to seem a quaint perspective. Which now seemed positively idealistic, Mace thought.
    ‘We could say no,’ said Pylon. ‘Call his bluff.’
    Mace took the last concrete step into the piss-stink of the foyer. ‘We could, except Ducky isn’t. Bluffing. He’d put it out and that’d be bye bye Cape Town.’
    ‘Nice.’
    ‘Exactly. So much for old comrades. My thoughts: better to bite the bullet for two weeks, what happens afterwards is we come to an arrangement.’
    ‘We can do this?’
    ‘Egg-dancing. What we were so good at. The Pylon and Mace routine.’
    Dar-es-Salaam, 1984: a house up the coast north of the city. Old colonial beach place: shuttered windows, covered veranda round three sides with French doors onto the bedrooms. A short walk off the veranda across the sand scrub onto the beach into a sea, tepid and salty.
    A month they spent there, waiting, playing backgammon, waiting for the buyer to collect. No one around day after day after day. Occasionally a dhow sailing along the horizon. The light pouring down. Only fish and coconuts for food. Back in the house anti-personnel mines, assorted assault rifles, Canadian Sterlings, Mats, Madsens, a few Chinese 79s, sweating in the heat. Sufficient hardware to depose an African dictator. All of it packed neatly into rooms where once the colonials frolicked their white mischief.
    Mace and Pylon were extended, their credit zippo because their middleman wanted bucks on the table. If the deal went bad they could ship the stuff elsewhere, over time. Over time was the problem. Each day increased the risk of bad guys lifting the merchandise without payment. The ordinance sweated. They sweated: at night the egg-dance. Until the deal went solid, and they carried payment away in three suitcases. He who sits it out sits it out. The first time they skimmed a commission.
    Freetown, 1986. On the runway the weaponry being unpacked from a Hercules transport into three UN trucks destined for a warlord in the hills. When a better offer came in. Actually came steaming out of the cane fields in a Land Rover: three soldiers, one driving, two in the back toting Brazilian Urus, a man wearing a DJ in the passenger seat. DJ put down his offer in cash, US dollars, on the bonnet of the Land Rover. Mace counted it. Said to Pylon, ‘Let him have it.’ Happy to fly out on the Hercules toot sweet. Pylon unsure. They confabbed. Pylon arguing, the warlord was a source they’d supplied before. Someone who, if he stayed alive, would want guns again. Mace countered, with a