Free Gallows Hill by Margie Orford Page B

Parliament to open. Down for the season, they’d dumped their wives in the parliamentary village on the other side of Milnerton. The MPs, of course, were filling up rooms at the President,the Mount Nelson, the Cape Grace.
    Riedwaan scanned the crowd. Girls with expensive breasts and cheap accents draped themselves over laps and the backs of chairs. The music was a series of gasps and shrieks fed through a drum machine. Orgasm ambient. The room smelt of hamburger grease, sweat, aftershave and self-satisfaction.
    He lit a Camel. The clean smell of Turkish tobacco cleared abreathing space around him.
    Waleed Williams. Die Hond . There he was. Back-lit in the double door. The broad shoulders and chest. Muscles earned in a prison where there was nothing to do but pump iron.
    Survival of the fittest, and Williams was fitter than most.
    When he had walked out of Pollsmoor Prison, he had gone straight to a plastic surgeon in Sea Point instead of the shelteringlabyrinth that was the Cape Flats. He had had his tattoos removed. Then he had gone to a dentist who had given him a bridge and restored his front teeth. He had bought a fancy watch, three Hugo Boss suits, two pairs of hand-tooled leather shoes, six Armani shirts, and a Louis Vuitton briefcase. Then immediately, he flew to Johannesburg and a new life.
    The manager was at Williams’s side ashis entourage arrayed themselves behind him. The Cape Flats muscle he had acquired in prison now formed an archipelago of violence across the province. All of them clean. Tattoos gone, designer suits. Indistinguishable from the newly minted millionaires they partied with. Apart, that is, from their accents and the Afrikaans dialect they occasionally slipped into for tactical reasons.
    The managercleared a path and seated Hond Williams at the best table. A waitress already there, hovering over a bottle of Moët & Chandon on ice. Nik-Naks. Williams was obviously a regular.
    Riedwaan watched as a hard-eyed hostess herded some younger blonde girls over to his table. Unwilling, they seemed, for all their perkiness. There are only so many bruises a pretty girl needs to put up with for cashand a fix. Williams gestured, and a girl settled, light as a butterfly, on the arm of his chair. Her red-lipsticked smile was not enough to conceal her anxiety.
    Williams put a hand on her thigh. Riedwaan imagined how her skin would contract at the touch. Clare Hart had taught him that. Putting yourself into the body of a frightened woman. It was something he would rather not have known.
    The barman filled Riedwaan’s glass again, pushed over a saucer of olives. He stayed where he was, behind a pillar covered with silk roses, out of Williams’s line of sight.
    Cigarettes. More champagne. A table dance.
    A man appeared at the door. He had Johannesburg written all over himself. The watch, the snakeskin shoes, the swagger. At his side was the lawyer, Malan. The company Williamskept had clearly not improved. Except that he had added politicians and lawyers to his usual choice of gangsters, dealers and pimps. That’s what living in Jo’burg did. Taught a man to drink with anybody, if he could turn it into a deal.
    Williams raised his hand to greet the new arrivals. The girl slid away as the two men approached.
    Malan dropped into a seat next to Williams. His plumpfriend took a seat on the other side. That smug face, a cabinet minister with no apparent competence apart from his presidential connections. One hundred pounds overweight, one hundred per cent in the palm of the man who was sloshing champagne into his glass. They all looked so comfortable as they raised their glasses in a toast.
    Riedwaan asked for the bill. The fact that the barman gave itto him meant he didn’t think he was a cop. Given the total for two Irish whiskeys and four olives, it was apparent that this was not a favoured haunt of policemen who paid their bills.
    Williams noticed Riedwaan when he stood up to leave.
    ‘Faizal,’ said Williams.