Piranha

By Rudie van Rensburg

SAP Captain Kassie Kasselman is a crack detective, in spite of appearances. When he starts investigating the disappearance of an ex-colleague, it becomes clear that more is going on than a simple drug-related missing person case. Somehow it seems linked to the kidnapping that has struck the curio shop where his colleague Rooi Els’s wife has started work.
From the Cape ganglands to Kruger’s rhino poachers, Kassie must unravel the mystery quickly but with care – or Rooi’s wife is fish food.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Queillerie
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780795802362

Rudie van Rensburg

Rudie van Rensburg woon in Kaapstad en het al vyf uiters gewilde spanningsverhale geskryf: Slagyster, Kopskoot, Judaskus, Pirana en Kamikaze. Hy was ook samesteller van die misdaadverhalebundel Op die spoor van en het ’n besige 2017 afgesluit met die baie suksesvolle komiese roman Hans steek die Rubicon oor.

Book preview

Prologue

It had all begun with a line of white powder offered on a prostitute’s compact mirror in Hanoi.

Barnie Wolhuter had been pissed on bia hoi beer and had long since lost his ability to think clearly. Under loud encouragement from Phan Can Dung, the diplomat, who’d been at least as drunk as Barnie, he’d grabbed the mirror from the woman and snorted the powder up his right nostril.

And here he was now, tied up, naked and shivering in a small, dark storeroom. That single thoughtless deed had been the dawn of his own private hell on earth. Since then he’d lost everything: wife, child, house, money, dignity and, finally, his mind. The plan he’d cooked up to keep feeding the drug demon was the signature on his own death warrant.

Not eight years ago he’d been riding the crest of a wave. He’d been out of the police force for two years and was revelling in his newly monied life: the Merc, the Newlands mansion, holidays in Mauritius, platinum credit card. Plus, a radiant wife and their first-born on its way. His struggling existence as a detective in the South African Police Service had been put to bed. He’d become a jetsetter. Exports. Easy work. And undemanding, mostly thanks to Phan Can Dung’s political connections and smooth talking.

It had taken a while for Barnie to discover how naive he’d been. Stupid, frankly. Why would someone like Montgomery Smith pay an insignificant little ex-detective that much money to handle his company’s exports, to make sure things arrived safely in Hanoi and a number of other destinations in the East? And why did a Vietnamese diplomat have to keep the machinery well oiled behind the scenes if the exports were innocent African curios?

A year into his new job, he’d accidentally come across an open crate at the company’s Cape Town warehouse and discovered what was being sent over with the masks, shields, spears, pots and carvings. Everything instantly came sharply into focus: he was African Curio’s frontman – and its fall guy. Montgomery Smith and Phan Can Dung’s influence stretched far and, when things went tits up, it would be his word against theirs.

If only he’d buggered off then. He and his wife could have disappeared. He’d had enough money. But he’d been too proud to admit to her that he’d made a complete and utter ass of himself. In any case, he had no desire to return to his previous life of scrimping and saving.

A few months later, he inhaled that line in Hanoi. It soon became a habit. How else to ease the stress? Told himself he could stop whenever he wanted to.

But the cocaine didn’t want to let him go … eight grams, thousands of rands per night, every single night. Not even the enormous salary he was earning then was enough. He started selling things, eventually going as far as pawning the jewellery Maria had inherited. In the end, he’d had to downscale to the more affordable khat.

But his appetite for drugs was so insatiable, it started swallowing everything. Maria kicked him out. At work things started going off the rails. He made little mistakes that pissed Smith off. Time was running out.

The linings of his ragged life unravelled completely when he switched to tik a few months ago. ‘More bang for your bucks,’ his drug buddies assured him. Tik had turned him into a goddamn zombie. He couldn’t work any more. He went AWOL. Thought he could quietly slip away … go and die alone in a corner somewhere.

But dying’s not that easy. His son made sure of that. It was for Fransie’s sake that he tried one last time to turn things around. He set himself up in a different area, with new friends. He thought he’d start again, at the bottom. Find work. Win back his loved ones’ trust.

That never happened. Like his vagrant buddies, he used the money from selling copper pipes and scrap to feed his tik addiction. He scraped by from day to day, barely surviving. It was a living hell.

He knew he couldn’t carry on like that. That was when he’d come up with the crappy plan that had backfired so spectacularly. And here he was now, awaiting his fate. Scared shitless.

He didn’t know this place they’d brought him to this morning. It was somewhere on the R44, out towards Wellington. They’d turned off onto a gravel road and then into a tree-lined lane that led to an old house and a yard behind high electric fences and heavy security gates. He’d caught a very brief glimpse of his surroundings before they’d locked him up. It appeared to be a neglected smallholding with a few chunks of rusted machinery abandoned in hip-high grass around a big concrete dam. No sign of life.

The storeroom was dirty and stuffy. Two oil drums were pushed into a corner and, strewn across the dusty stone floor, were nuts and bolts, the odd tool and filthy rags. A bluebottle buzzed against the tiny window. In spite of the stifling heat, Barnie’s body shook uncontrollably, and his teeth chattered.

He heard footsteps on the gravel outside. His heart jumped. He could barely breathe.

The zinc door scraped across the floor and Montgomery Smith walked in. Behind him, Graeme West, his personal little doormat, and – of course – Wolf Breede. He was the one who’d manhandled Barnie into the car in Cape Town earlier.

Smith looked the same as ever, his lean body poured into a perfectly tailored suit and a crisp white shirt. Red silk tie. Shoes polished to a high shine. As though he was briefly stepping out of a boardroom meeting.

He glared at Barnie. His cigar-yellowed teeth were bared behind thin lips pulled into a half grimace. It chilled Barnie. He’d seen that grimace before. It had a name: evil.

Barnie began pleading pathetically: ‘Please, Mr Smith, please! Give me another chance. I didn’t mean what I said … I promise, I’ll never bother you again.’

‘No one blackmails me.’ Smith’s gaze was icy.

Barnie turned desperately to West. ‘Mr West, I’m begging you. Spare my life.’

It was pointless. West wouldn’t dare cross his boss. He looked at Barnie quietly, the tiniest trace of sympathy in his eyes. Which wasn’t much comfort.

‘Let’s finish this, Wolf,’ Smith said.

Wolf untied the ropes around Barnie’s ankles and jerked him up by the shoulders. He was led out the door with his hands still tied behind his back, through the tall grass towards the concrete dam. Barnie began to cry. Were they going to drown him? Tears ran down his cheeks and down his neck.

Wolf forced him up the dam’s concrete steps onto the wide wall. Then he pushed Barnie, without ceremony, into the dark water.

Barnie gasped for breath. His feet couldn’t touch the bottom. He tread water, desperate.

Montgomery Smith appeared on the dam wall beside Wolf. He lit a cigar. They watched the struggling man with blank expressions as he tried to keep his head above water.

Barnie felt a burning pain on his right calf … then on his little finger, his left thigh, a big toe. He watched in horror as the water around him turned blood red.

1

17 July 2014

Two muffled shots rang out almost simultaneously. The bull expelled a high, pained bellow before it fell on its side and then rolled onto its back, a leg jerking in the air. Blood bubbled from its nostrils.

The cow moved too slowly to escape. She ploughed nose-first into the ground when the first bullet hit her. Her bellow was bloodcurdling. It was as bad as the sound a pig made when its throat was cut. Another bullet silenced her.

Freedom motioned to his companions to spare the calf. ‘Waste of time. Too small,’ he whispered.

They worked quickly. Freedom drove the knife expertly into the skin around the horn’s base, wiggled the blade underneath and, after a few minutes of accurate cutting, lifted it out. Fourteen minutes later they were all done.

The calf stood a little way off, trampling the ground restlessly and whimpering. It was the sound Freedom’s own little Morgan made when he wanted his mother’s breast.

He ignored it. They wrapped the horns in canvas and jogged back to the bakkie. The horns, guns and knives were hidden deep down beneath the pile of logs.

He took out his phone as he shifted in behind the steering wheel and called Theodore. As arranged, he killed the call after a few rings, then called again.

The signal was bad but he got through.

‘Two,’ was all he said.

‘Good work,’ Theodore’s voice crackled back.

* * *

I was born on 16 September 1952 in Uganda, in the Kabuwoko district in the south-west of the country, the son of a missionary and his teacher wife.

My friends were the children of the peasant farmers of the valley and the domestic workers of the handful of missionaries in the area. My first words weren’t English, but Luganda: ‘Wasuze otyanno’ (Good morning) and ‘Musula mutya?’ (How are you?). It’s a language that is sweet and rhythmic on the ear, permeated with coos and hums. And when people laugh, they laugh uproariously: loudly, clapping their hands, falling around.

My mother disliked it when I laughed in this way. ‘We don’t laugh like that. When we go back to England one day, you’re going to have to behave like a white boy or the children will mock you.’

She’d worried for nothing. I never went to England to stay. My father was happy in his adopted country, a man who pursued his life’s calling in the ministry with enthusiasm and dedication. And Uganda was the only home I knew.

The few times we visited my grandparents in Manchester are some of my worst childhood memories. The cold, grey air, the drab buildings and the cramped little houses – it was all a thousand miles from the blue skies and wide, rolling hills of Uganda.

Ankole cattle with their spectacular horns roamed those hills, cattle that, according to visiting Westerners, showed similarities to the drawings of buffalo-like animals found in Egyptian tombs. Perched on their withers, or on the ground beside their hooves, were the ubiquitous white egrets. It is this image of Uganda that always comes to me first when I remember my childhood there.

It was a carefree time, though I found school a difficult adjustment. Suddenly, I had new friends – white friends – the children of missionaries, teachers and the scattering of white farmers.

One of them was to influence my life profoundly. Though that’s putting it mildly …

* * *

Carina Vosloo was surprised to see Theodore walk through the door of the warehouse. She stood up, touched her hair and self-consciously ran her hands over her slightly creased dress. Her face felt warm. She always blushed when he arrived.

She knew it was silly to feel this way about him. She was a good fifteen years older than him, but he lit her fire. He reminded her of the Camel Man from those cigarette adverts years ago: the wild curls, the tan, the stubble. And those blue eyes that seemed to see right through you. Good-looking. Tough. Inscrutable.

‘I was expecting you tomorrow,’ she said.

‘I was in the area. Has the new consignment come in?’

She nodded and smiled. ‘You’re in luck. It arrived early this morning.’ She pointed across the room. ‘By the wall. I’m impressed with the variety.’

They walked over together. He crouched down in front of the first mask. His chest hair was curling up through the collar of his khaki shirt. It caused her whole body to tingle. God, the man was a testosterone tiger!

He looked up at her. ‘Ashanti tribe in Ghana … is my guess?’

She nodded. ‘We got seven of them.’

‘They always sell well.’

He stood up and walked on, stopping at a different mask. ‘This is extraordinary.’ He bent down and lightly swept his fingers over the wood.

Carina swallowed. What she wouldn’t give to have those fingers running over her skin.

‘From the Masai in Kenya. Turn of the eighteenth century,’ she said.

He nodded. His eyes flashed across the sixty-four masks. ‘Right. I’ll take the lot.’

‘Such a pleasure to do business with you, Theodore.’ She smiled. ‘Ten percent discount sound good?’

‘How about fifteen?’

Her heart jumped. There were tiny laugh lines around his eyes.

‘It’s impossible to refuse you.’ She almost added that that was true of anything he might ask of her.

Back at the counter, he flicked through a wad of notes. He always paid cash, making him by far her favourite client.

‘Nichols will come around on Monday to fetch everything when he takes our next consignment to Cape Town. Would you mind giving me notes on the background of each of the masks again, please?’

‘Of course. It’s part of the service.’

He looked as though he might be in a hurry, but she made a desperate bid to keep him around a little longer.

‘Musina’s damn hot again today. It feels like the middle of summer. Can I offer you a cold beer?’

He wavered, but then shook his head. ‘I’d love to, Carina, but I’m expecting a Mozambican with a delivery of beads. I’m going to have to go.’

She watched his tall figure as he strode away. He always said her name with so much tenderness …

She had to find a way to get to his home. She’d been threatening to for a long time. She figured he had to be pretty lonely out there in the bush …

2

Werner Erwee swore. He had no energy for this day. He wiped a hanky across his clammy forehead. The wind blew litter into the gutters alongside the pavements and against the walls of buildings in Musina’s dusty main street. It wasn’t even ten in the morning and already it was unbearably hot. In the car on the way from Vaalwater this morning, he’d heard the weather report: thirty-three degrees Celsius in the shade. In the middle of winter.

He was on his way to the unremarkable little building squeezed between a spaza shop and Mabel’s Massage Parlour & Hair Saloon. The name above the barred window was hard to make out, because the kerning between the red letters was too narrow: International Endangered Species Agency (IESA).

Maybe he was too early. Perhaps he should wait in the car another fifteen minutes. Or was he just stalling because of the news he had to convey?

Werner shook his head. He should never have become involved. When Tim unexpectedly made him this offer, he thought it might be good for his image. He’d still had parliamentary aspirations back then. Now IESA was nothing but a millstone around his neck. He’d never been interested in the protection of endangered species. He’d been an auditor until his retirement. Numbers were his thing. His political dreams were focused on the contribution he could make to the country’s bank balance. Not its wildlife.

But Tim’s phone call from the States had flattered him. ‘You are the only unimpeachable South African I know, Werner,’ he’d said.

Truth was, of course, that Werner was the only South African Tim knew. They’d met when they shared a room in the students’ residence after Werner had won a scholarship to study in the States.

‘The position isn’t chief executive officer in the traditional sense. It’ll take up very little of your time,’ Tim had explained. ‘All you’ll be required to do is to keep an eye on the finances on behalf of IESA in South Africa. The management officer will deal with the operational side of things.’

It hadn’t worked like that in practice. IESA’s donors were wealthy and influential Americans with a great passion for the cause. They would speak to no one but the CEO. He was forever having to rush around trying to find answers to their questions. Natasha van der Merwe was his only source of information, and she was seldom in the office.

Natasha … If it hadn’t been for her, he would have opted out a long time ago. But her enthusiasm for the job was contagious.

When Tim flew in three years ago for the interviews with potential managers, they never expected their choice would land on her. The image of a former international ramp model certainly wasn’t reconcilable with what they’d had in mind.

There had been some serious heavyweights queuing for the job, men with years of experience. At twenty-five, Natasha was a rookie. The only reason they’d reluctantly granted her an interview was that she’d worked for the Conservation Action Trust for two years after she’d given up modelling.

She’d stood head and shoulders above the other candidates. It was the way she answered their questions in the interview that had convinced them. Not one of the others was able to speak about conservation with as much intelligence and knowledge. And she had a clear vision, one that had essentially redefined IESA’s role for him and Tim. They’d practically fallen over their feet to make her an offer.

Since then she’d developed IESA into an indispensable component of southern Africa’s battle against rhino and elephant poaching. In fact, the head honcho at SANParks had admitted to Werner that the crisis in the Kruger National Park, in particular, would have been much worse if it hadn’t been for IESA’s proactive analyses of poachers’ movements. His exact words had been that ‘Natasha van der Merwe has given us a competitive advantage we’ve never had in South Africa before’. Conservationists from Zimbabwe and Mozambique had recently said similar things to Werner.

And now he had to go in there and deliver the bad news.

* * *

On my very first day of school I met a boy who seemed to have a permanent smile on his face. We were the same age and sat next to each other in the class for six-year-olds. One of the other kids called him Smiley and I went along with it. Years later he forbade me from using the nickname.

Smiley’s father was one of the few white farmers in the district. Because Uganda was a British protectorate, and not a colony, most of the agricultural land actually belonged to Ugandans. Only a handful of white settlers were allowed to own land. As a result, Uganda was one of the most peaceful British areas, in sharp contrast to its neighbour Kenya.

Smiley and I soon became good friends. At break, we often ran over to my house, where my father treated us to ginger beer and little tarts baked by Mum. Then we played with my toy cars or marbles until my father sent us back to school. Those were carefree and innocent times.

When we were older, Smiley often invited me to his parents’ farm, a place that felt like paradise to me. We hunted birds with airguns, swam in the dam and played soccer with the farm workers’ children on the huge lawn in front of the house.

Joseph, who was a few years older than we were, was an exceptional soccer player who put the rest of us to shame. I soon realised that Smiley, who was a good player himself, didn’t like him. Smiley always wanted to be the best. Whenever Joseph and Smiley played on opposing teams, an argument would break out between the two of them.

Joseph was the son of a Tutsi, Rwandan refugees who’d joined the exodus from their country after the Hutu rebellion of 1959. The Baganda had always looked down on the refugees because they were foreigners and because they were mostly extremely poor.

There was always tension between the two groups. Theft was not tolerated in Uganda, especially not when the accused was a Tutsi. Suspects often paid with their lives and no one said a word about it.

One Saturday, when we were about thirteen, Smiley and I were walking in the veld when we heard a huge racket. It was coming from the other side of the hill and we ran to see what was going on. A group of Baganda were beating Joseph up, two of them hanging around with pangas in their hands. Joseph’s bloodied face was almost unrecognisable.

I turned to Smiley and shouted at him hysterically to do something to stop them. He calmly established from a bystander what was going on and, when he heard that Joseph was supposed to have stolen a screwdriver from his father’s storeroom, he threw down his airgun, grabbed a panga, commanded the men to back off and, with a mighty swing, slashed open Joseph’s temple. The Baganda laughed, whistled and applauded. I stood frozen to the spot and watched Smiley swing the panga a second, then a third time.

When Joseph stopped moving, Smiley turned towards me with blood splatters like freckles all over his face. He told the workers to bury Joseph, picked up his airgun, smiled his familiar blinding smile, and said: ‘Let’s go for a swim.’

3

Natasha van der Merwe, Werner realised each time he saw her, did not look like the models in glossy magazines. She had high cheekbones and big, dark eyes, but there was a lack of softness in the lines one usually saw in cover girls. There was something angular about her face that excluded her from the mainstream idea of beauty. There was something challenging in her gaze, too.

She didn’t wear makeup, nor did she need it. But she was naturally sensual. She even looked great in IESA’s unflattering khaki uniform.

‘Morning. You’re early,’ she said when she saw Werner. ‘You didn’t drive all the way from Pretoria, did you?’

He shook his head. ‘No. I went to see my brother in Vaalwater yesterday. I left there this morning.’

She waved her hand towards the chair across her desk. ‘Make yourself at home. Can I get you some cold juice?’

‘Not right now, thanks.’

He took the documents out of his briefcase. No use hedging. He’d get straight to the point. Natasha had little patience for detours. She preferred straight talk.

As he was about to begin, the cellphone lying on her desk rang. She picked it up and looked at the screen. She frowned. ‘It’s Gert. I’m going to have to take it.’

She got up and moved towards the back of the long, narrow office. The way she walked, with a languid swing to her hips, was a reminder that she’d once sashayed down runways in designer clothes. This thought was somehow hard to reconcile with her current reputation as a relentless hunter of game poachers.

He heard the pitch of her voice rise, but her exact words were drowned out by the drone of the fan on the windowsill behind him. It was a disgrace, really, that they had no air conditioner, but Natasha had decided it would be too indulgent.

‘I don’t spend enough time in the office to justify the expense.’

When she was done and had sat down again, she looked upset. Her face was flushed and her eyes were darker than usual. ‘The Silencers have struck again. Two rhinos dead. They left the calf, thank goodness, but …’

She swallowed. ‘He’s blind. They’re guessing from the trauma of losing his mother. It’s happened once before. To a calf in Zim.’

‘Where were they shot?’

‘In the Kruger, near Shingwedzi. Gert and his people saw the carcasses from the helicopter this morning. The rangers are shocked. They said they were in the area all day yesterday and they didn’t hear a thing.’

‘Any clues?’

She shook her head. ‘They had the cheek to drive right up to the rhinos, so at least there are tracks. It’s The Silencers’ modus operandi: no one heard a thing and the horns were loosened and cut out, not sawn or chopped off. The whole operation couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes.’

She sighed. ‘If only we could catch that lot. Then we’ll have won half the battle.’

Werner coughed. The poachers’ timing couldn’t be worse. He already felt guilty about what he had come to say.

He pointed at the documents on the table between them. ‘Tim sent me this yesterday. It’s not good news.’

Natasha narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice had dropped an octave.

‘They’re cutting our budget by half,’ he said, summarising the fifteen pages of the report.

‘What! They can’t!’

He nodded, sighed. ‘I’m afraid it’s their money. They can do with it what they like.’

Shock and disbelief showed on her face. ‘But why? We’re doing a damn good job here!’

She pulled open the top drawer of her desk and took out a piece of paper. ‘I was collating our latest stats last night. Since we started three years ago, forty-six poaching rings have been nailed, thanks to our intel. Because of IESA, four hundred rhinos and more than three hundred elephants have been rescued … and that’s a conservative estimate.’

Werner held up his hands. ‘I know. I know, Natasha. You don’t have to convince me. And they know it too. They recognise that your team has made an