“Won’t you sit down?”
“We have…What we must do is to turn the clock back fifteen years. It’s our only chance.”
She stood between nothing and nowhere, decided to sit down. She had never seen him like this, excited, with such urgency in his voice.
“I’ve just realized I’ve been speaking to all the wrong people. I’ve been talking to everyone who didn’t know him fifteen years ago. It’s time for us to change that. There is a way.”
“How?”
“Publicity.”
She looked at him, not understanding.
“When he was murdered, O’Grady didn’t know that he had changed his name. Was there a picture of him in the newspapers?”
“No. Wilna van As wouldn’t…release the identity book’s photo to the press. There was no reason…”
“One thing has changed since then,” he said. “We now know he wasn’t Jan Smit. No one knew it then. If we can get the photo published now and ask if someone recognizes him, if we say he was someone else, we may be able to find out who he was. And if we know that, we may find out what was in the safe…”
“And who wanted it so badly.”
“We can place an advertisement,” he said. “Small ads, it wouldn’t cost much.”
“No,” she said. “We can do much better than that.”
“How?”
“Kara-An Rousseau,” she said.
He merely looked at her.
“She can get us publicity. Free for all. In every NasPers newspaper in the country.”
“She invited me to dinner this evening,” he said, suddenly sorry he had refused.
Jealousy raised its head. “Kara-An?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I refused. I didn’t know – ”
“You must go,” she said. I didn’t know you knew each other so well, she thought.
“I don’t know her.”
“We have so little time. We have to speak to her immediately.”
“Will you go with me?”
She wanted to go, she…but…
“I haven’t been invited.”
“I’ll ask if I may bring a partner.”
“No,” she said. “We don’t have to go to the dinner. It’s early enough. We can try to see her before dinner.” She got up, found the cell phone, looked up the number in the memory, and dialed. It rang.
“Kara-An.”
“It’s Hope. Am I phoning at a bad time?”
“Hi. Of course not. How are you?”
“Crazy at the moment, thank you. Do you remember the case of the will I told you about?”
“Of course. The one Mr. Sexy is helping you with.”
“We urgently need your help, Kara-An.”
“My help?”
“Yes. I know it’s a bad time, but we can have a very quick conversation. It would be easy…”
“Of course, it sounds fascinating. And you must stay to dinner. I’ve invited a few people. Come a bit earlier…”
“I don’t want to disrupt your Saturday evening, Kara-An.”
“Don’t be silly. There’s enough space and more than enough to eat.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I can’t wait to become a part of the Great Search.”
They said good-bye. Hope Beneke turned to Van Heerden.
“You’ll have to take your money,” she said, “before I spend it on a new outfit for this evening.”
♦
Eight hours later she would lie in her bed and wonder how an evening that had started so conventionally could end with so much violence and chaos. She would lie there weeping about the disillusionment and the humiliation and would again contemplate his words, “We’re all evil,” and wonder whether he was perhaps right – and where the badness in her lay.
But when he had come to fetch her and stood at her door in black trousers, white shirt, and a black jacket, she had felt a warmth toward him, for the effort he had made to conform with the clothes even if the cut wasn’t modern and the shoes were not really right. His eyes widened slightly when he saw her in the short black dress and he said with undisguised surprise and honesty, “You look great, Hope,” and for a moment she wanted to put out a hand and make physical contact, but mercifully he turned and walked to his car before she could act on the impulse.
They drove in comfortable silence in the rain toward the mountain until she guided him through the narrow streets high up on its slope and they stopped in front of a huge house in Oranjezicht, old and Victorian. He whistled through his teeth.
“Old money,” she said. “Her father was a member of Parliament.”
The sight of Kara-An in her scarlet dress and bare feet was like a clarion call from his past – the black hair, the blue eyes, the breathtaking, strong line of chin and cheekbone and neck – and he wanted to store it all in his memory bank for later meditation. He had to shake off the feeling almost physically.
There was a lot of activity in the house, young people in white aprons arranging flowers, carrying plates and glasses to the dining room. “The caterers are still busy. Let’s go through to the library.”
Caterers? Was that how the rich did it? he wondered, and followed the two women, aware of the dark, polished wood of the antique furniture, the expensive paintings, the Eastern carpets, the wealth that glowed in the light of a thousand candles. “I’ve invited a few people,” she’d said the previous evening.
Caterers.
Jesus. How could you ask strangers to cook for your friends?
Kara-An closed the door behind them and invited them to sit down. He wondered how many of the books on the dark paneled shelves she’d read, so many leather-bound copies, so many titles stamped in gold. He realized Hope was waiting for him to say something. “You explain,” he said.
He watched the two women as Hope spoke, careful because he knew there was old, well-known, dangerous terrain here: Kara-An, who looked at him every time Hope mentioned his name, Kara-An, who listened with great concentration, but there was something else in her look, an interest. Then he saw the distance he kept from everything in his life, not for the first time. It sometimes happened when he listened to music, when he looked through a recipe book for a new dish – sometimes it seemed as if life wanted to lure him back, when the pleasures, major and minor, of a normal, happy existence wanted to seduce him into forgetting that he didn’t deserve it, couldn’t afford it. This time the siren song was stronger – a woman’s wonderful beauty, two women in front of him, Hope’s eyes, which looked pretty tonight, her legs in the black dress, the touchable bottom. He wanted to compare and consider and philosophize and desire, blatantly and obviously desire, and play a lighthearted silly game of love, start a flirtation and talk to someone about it, laugh – Lord, he needed to laugh, he wanted to laugh with someone over a glass of chilled white wine, he missed it, he missed her so terribly…and then the fear was upon him, overpowering and strong, and he retreated from his own thoughts and Hope looked expectantly at him, wanting him to say something.
“What?” he said, and he thought his voice sounded scared.
“Was that an accurate version of where we stand?”
“Yes,” he said, withdrawing into his shell in a panic.
“It’ll make good copy,” said Kara-An.
“Copy?” said Hope, who didn’t know the terminology.
“Newspaper article. I won’t have much trouble in convincing the news editor…”
“There are two important points,” Van Heerden said. They looked at him. “The story must get the angle right. And it must appear in all your dailies. In Gauteng as well.”
“What do you mean by the right angle?”
He took the papers out of his jacket pocket, pages torn from his notebook. Control had returned. “I tried something, but it’s not quite right. You’ll have to work on it.” He handed it to Kara-An Rousseau. She leaned forward, the neckline of the red dress opening for a moment. He looked away. “It must sound as if we’re on the edge of a breakthrough, as if information about Smit is not essential, merely a…”