Free The Serpentine Road by Paul Mendelson Page A

you?’
    ‘Nowhere else to go . . .’
    ‘Holt Industries was a product of the old South Africa. Graeme Holt built his companies on the back of the Apartheid regime and the cheap labour market, expanded it throughout Southern Africa. The Nationalist government backed him and he supported them: as a growing business in an otherwise shrinking economy, and personally . . .’
    ‘I thought you said you knew nothing about this . . . ?’
    ‘It’s what I was trained to do.’
    De Vries levers open a bottle of East Coast Ale, tips it gently into the waiting glass. Marantz watches him. When his family was taken, and the service in London prohibited him from seeking them, he exiled himself to Cape Town to build a house and drink. He drank with De Vries for four long years, marvelled at how De Vries would be at work early the next morning, functionally sober, while he would stay in bed until mid-afternoon, when he would begin again. Now, he sips Dry Lemon and pale, weak cordials, smokes ganja, sleeps when he is not playing poker or following De Vries’s cases, happy to fight battles at the green baize and involve himself in De Vries’s mysteries.
    ‘I’m still not used to you being a beer drinker.’
    De Vries says: ‘My life in alcohol: brandy and coke is an emotional drink; you end up angry, or you end up crying. White wine is basically piss and the red was killing me. You know I have an internal gauge that gets me to work in the morning? The Cabernets were fucking it up. Besides, as I get older, I get thirstier: this works better.’
    They walk from the kitchen into the huge triple-height living space looking out over what are usually lush green suburbs close to the Mountain, beyond to the poor suburbs, townships and squatter camps on the Cape Flats and, in the far distance, the Hottentots Holland Mountains and the thin sliver of silver sea at Strand and Gordon’s Bay. The fires have been burning on those mountains on and off since the beginning of the year.
    ‘What else do you know?’
    ‘About Holt?’
    ‘ Ja .’
    ‘He was very vocal about what he called “De Klerk’s capitulation”: the decision to release Mandela, to dismantle Apartheid and hold elections. After the ANC came to power, he spent more time outside South Africa, rarely came back. Married once, one daughter – Taryn Holt. Now, they’re all dead: the mother, the father and the daughter. Mother had leukemia, but Graeme Holt’s death was suspicious: a collision, but the other car was never identified. And now, Taryn Holt . . . Murdered, I assume?’
    De Vries snorts.
    ‘How did you know this?’
    ‘I told you: a news story online, some research. You know I dealt in information.’ He looks down. He knows his wife and daughter must be dead, yet questions this every moment he thinks of them. There has never been confirmation, never closure. He feels the blood draining from his head. He ducks it between his legs. ‘That’s why, to have none for myself, it’s still agony.’
    ‘You need to get out . . . And, I don’t mean those illegal fucking poker games. I mean out-out. Meet some girls, think about the next part of your life.’
    ‘That what you’re doing?’
    ‘Never was a time when I didn’t, Johnnie. Life is short. Take pleasure where you can.’
    Marantz takes a sip of Dry Lemon, looks up.
    ‘Taryn Holt: love or money?’
    ‘I don’t know . . . But I hope to God it’s one of them.’
    Don February rings the bell at the gate to 14 Park Terrace, opposite Taryn Holt’s house. It buzzes open, and Don walks up the narrow path to the front door. The small garden is immaculate, lawn green and mown, bright bedding planted in neat rows. The front door opens as he reaches the little covered porch. He holds up his ID, and the short black woman in an apron squints to study first it and then him.
    ‘You want to talk to my mistress?’
    The words ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ make Don uncomfortable, remind him of how his mother would talk