Apocalypse Now Now Page 13

  ‘Clever,’ I say.

  ‘Goes way deeper than that,’ he says. ‘The South Africa Sceptics Alliance is an MK6 front. They spend a lot of time and money debunking the stuff that does get leaked.’

  It sounds so damn plausible to my pop-culture-attuned mind. Shadowy government organisations, secret agents, mass cover-ups. If I’m not completely insane, that is.

  ‘Do you ever think you’re crazy?’ I say. ‘I mean, crazier than you are normally. That you’re ill and you’re making all this supernatural stuff up?’

  ‘Every single goddamn day,’ he responds with a laugh.

  A black van appears under the bridge and moves slowly toward us. Its chromed wheels glint in the dim light. The van has tinted windows and plates that say MK 962. It stops in front of the Cortina and kills its headlights.

  The doors open and two guys get out. One is absolutely huge, a professional wrestler with a blond crew cut and a badly fitting suit, his hairy forearms jutting from the cuffs. He has an assault rifle hanging on his shoulder and he leans against the front of the van and points it lazily at our windscreen.

  The other one is much smaller, a black guy with grey hair that’s pulled back into cornrows. He’s dressed in an expensive suit that has grey and white beads crossed over it like bandoliers. He isn’t armed except for a walking stick which clacks against the concrete as he approaches.

  ‘Blackblood,’ he says in a slow drawl.

  ‘Don’t know who you mean, Tone,’ Ronin growls.

  Tone shrugs. ‘You know what they say about leopards and their spots.’

  Ronin hawks and spits on the tarmac. ‘That they’ll fucking bury anybody who brings it up?’

  Tone smiles. ‘Your belligerence is misplaced, old friend.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately your boss isn’t here, so you’ll have to do.’

  Tone rolls his shoulders in a non-committal shrug. ‘Mirth is what he is. Not everybody likes it but he’s the boss now.’

  ‘Everybody loves a Rottweiler until he turns around and rips out your throat.’

  ‘I assume you didn’t invite me here to reminisce about old times, Ronin?’ He looks at me and then back to Ronin. ‘Rent boy?’ he says.

  ‘Screw you,’ I say.

  He purses his lips and emits a sharp squealing whistle. It hits me like a sonic hammer in the solar plexus and my knees buckle involuntarily. Ronin grabs my shoulder to stop me from falling.

  ‘OK,’ Ronin says. ‘I think he gets what a supremely powerful warlock you are. The very earth trembles at your name and all that shit.’

  I steady myself on Ronin’s arm. ‘Tacky,’ I say. ‘You must be bummed you only got the cocktail party powers.’

  Tone bursts out laughing. ‘Where the hell do you find these clients, Ronin?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Ronin says with a sigh.

  Tone waves to the big guy back at the van. He peels himself off the hood and stumps toward us, the assault rifle swinging from its strap.

  ‘Half-breed giant,’ Tone says, leaning in to whisper to me. ‘His great-grandmother got lonely on the plaas and banged one of the mountain giants in the area.’

  ‘Great,’ I say, rubbing my solar plexus. The pain subsided quickly but has left a dull ache. ‘What’s his code name?’ I ask.

  ‘Savage,’ Tone says. ‘We let him choose his own.’

  Up close I see just how big Savage is, like a granite slab with legs. He pulls a rolled-up brown folder from the inside jacket pocket of his suit and hands it to Tone. ‘I was kidding with the rent-boy comment. I know all about your problems, Baxter Zevcenko,’ he says. ‘Fortunately for you, your girlfriend’s disappearance intersects with the case we’re working on.’

  A bright spark of hope ignites in my chest. He hands us photographs of a group of street people being herded into a van by a guy in a lab coat. A close-up of the clipboard he’s holding shows an invoice with a red octopus on the letterhead.

  ‘Human trafficking operation,’ Tone says. ‘Our intel says it’s not for sex, which makes it quite unusual. Our agent inside said he’s seen an Obambo, which makes it downright odd, given the fact that they’re supposed to be extinct.’

  ‘What’s that logo?’ Ronin says, pointing to the red octopus.

  ‘Corporate called Octogram. They’re into a lot of things; mining, pharmaceuticals, weapons. We’ve been keeping an eye on them for a while but this is the first time we’ve actually found anything tying them to illicit activities.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like your usual beat,’ Ronin says.

  Tone smiles. ‘I’ll tell you why we’re interested, and you’re going to love this; it turns out their base for operations is the Flesh Palace.’

  ‘Goddamn,’ Ronin hisses through his teeth.

  ‘The place where the creature porn stuff is shot?’ I say.

  ‘The very same,’ Tone replies. ‘Which makes it even weirder that the trafficking is not part of the sex trade. We’re particularly interested in what part the Queen of the Anansi is playing in this.’

  Ronin’s face has gone pale and he starts to flex his fingers convulsively. ‘I’d like to send that bitch back to hell.’

  ‘I thought that’s what you’d say. Our problem is that the Flesh Palace is on the social radar of many of our esteemed politicians and we’re reluctant to carry out a raid in case we catch somebody too high up on the food chain. But if an independent operator were to go in there …’

  ‘So what you’re saying is that we should go in, do your job for you, and then maybe you’ll create some paperwork about it?’ Ronin says.

  ‘Isn’t that the way it always works?’ Tone says with a bright smile.

  ‘We’ll do it,’ I say.

  ‘Now hang on, sparky,’ Ronin says. ‘We need to talk about this.’

  ‘What’s there to talk about?’ I say. ‘The Obambo is in the Flesh Palace. We go in, we find him, we make him tell us where Esmé is. That’s why I hired you.’

  ‘He’s got a point,’ Tone says.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Ronin says.

  Tone lifts his hands in mock defence. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, Ronin. Anyway, I’ll let you boys discuss it. Savage and I have to rattle someone.’ He looks around. ‘And this is as good a place as any.’

  Tone gestures to Savage and the half-giant opens the back door of the van and pulls out a small bald guy wearing a white T-shirt, grey jeans and fashionable glasses.

  ‘You’re still doing that medieval bullshit?’ Ronin says with disgust.

  ‘C’mon, Ronin,’ Tone says. ‘You used to enjoy this stuff.’

  Savage drags the guy across to Tone and pushes him onto his knees. ‘Please,’ the guy gasps. ‘A free, independent media is vital for a democracy. You can’t have government agencies that are not accountable –’

  ‘Actually you can,’ Tone says. ‘And it’s worked for us pretty well so far.’ He undoes his jacket and pulls a thin black syringe from a scabbard at this waist.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I whisper.

  ‘Rattlebone,’ Ronin says softly to me. ‘Made with black mamba poison. Ugly stuff. It attacks the brain and takes out the memory. It would be better if they just killed him.’

  ‘What …’ the reporter says, struggling against Savage’s iron grip. ‘You can’t kill me! There’d be an investigation.’

  ‘We’re not going to kill you,’ Tone says. ‘We’re just going to press control-alt-delete and restart you.’

  ‘Wha—’ the guy starts but Tone slides the needle deftly into his neck. The reporter’s eyes widen and his body locks into a grotesque spasm before he collapses onto the floor and begins to shake uncontrollably.

  ‘Urgh,’ he says, staring through us with vacant eyes. ‘Uhhhhaasppphhft.’

  ‘The stress of reporting,’ Tone says, spinning the syringe between his fingers and replacing it in the scabbard like a gunslinger. ‘It gets to everybody eventually.’

  ‘You put on that little show to impress us?’ Ronin says. ‘I�
��m not impressed.’

  ‘Just showing your friend here what happens to people who run around telling people crazy stories about elementals,’ Tone says with a dangerous smile.

  The sun is setting behind the mountain as we drive through Epping Industria. We pass over an abandoned train track and through a dingy street filled with tyre merchants and industrial cleaning equipment distributors.

  ‘Charming,’ I say.

  ‘It only gets better,’ Ronin says. He’s been in a bad mood ever since we left the bridge and I’m pretty sure it’s because we’re headed toward the Flesh Palace. I, on the other hand, am excited. Not only is the Obambo there, but it’s also the place where a large percentage of the porn I’ve been selling is made. I feel like I’m going on some kind of pornographer’s pilgrimage.

  We pull up next to an ugly grey warehouse and Ronin kills the headlights. An old drunk wanders down the road, stopping near the Cortina to take a leak, before disappearing into the darkness.

  We step out into the pools of murky light on the pavement. Ronin nods to the gaudy facade of a club about a hundred metres away on the other side of the road. I can see two large bouncers outside. ‘OK, sparky, I’m not going to bullshit you,’ he says. ‘If we step foot in that club, there’s a pretty good chance that we’re both dead.’ He breathes in deeply through his nose, holds it for a couple of seconds and then lets the air out with a whoosh. ‘Either we can go in there and try to find the glowing man and probably get killed. Or we can go home, I’ll give you back your money and you forget that your girlfriend ever existed.’

  ‘We go in,’ I say decisively.

  He looks at me intently. ‘I must admit, I wouldn’t have pegged you as the knight-in-shining-armour type.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  He nods. ‘I get ya. Who can understand the cruel commands of the heart, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  He flexes his fists and rolls his neck from side to side. ‘I had a girl once. We were going to get married and everything.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I stood her up at the altar and she’s been trying to kill me ever since.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘Now I know who to come to for relationship advice.’

  ‘Stupid thing is, I really loved her.’

  ‘So why’d you stand her up then?’ I say.

  Ronin stretches his arms above him and in the half-light he looks like some kind of demented Viking praying to Odin. ‘It may be difficult to believe but I’ve got a lot of baggage,’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I think I can believe it.’

  He takes another breath, looks up at the sky and lets it out into the night air. He pounds himself a couple of times on the chest, slaps his cheeks, and then hands me his keys. ‘Well, if we’re going to do this I’m going to need what’s in the trunk,’ he says. I grab the keys and walk around to open the Cortina’s trunk. It’s a mess but I quickly isolate what Ronin wants from the jumble. Although I could be wrong, I’m pretty sure the Hawaiian boardshorts, the copy of Eat, Pray, Love and the cheese grater are not what Ronin’s after. Which leaves a bandolier of shotgun shells and a short, brutal sword in a red scabbard.

  I grab them both, slam the trunk shut and take them back to the bounty hunter. He takes off his coat and straps the bandolier across his chest, then pulls the sword from its scabbard and cuts the air a couple of times.

  ‘This is Hagaz,’ Ronin says as if he’s introducing me to an old friend.

  ‘Do you name all your weapons?’ I say.

  ‘Only the ones that have killed beings with higher-order brain function,’ he says. Strangely, that makes me feel better. He slides the weapon back into its scabbard, straps it around his waist and pulls his coat back on. He reaches into his mojo bag and takes out what looks like a weird green root with little black veins beneath the surface.

  He breaks a piece off and puts it into his mouth. ‘Eat this,’ he says, pulling a face as he chews.

  I take the green thing in my fingers. ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Urfrog,’ he says. ‘It’ll help if the Anansi get too friendly.’

  ‘Frog?’ I say. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Trust me,’ he says. ‘It tastes bad but it’s better than the alternative.’

  I sniff it and then place it gingerly in my mouth. It tastes dry and old, like some kind of weird fungus. I close my eyes and chew until I can swallow it. Ronin offers me a sip from his hip flask and I take a gulp and wince at the sharp, medicinal taste. He takes a couple of sips, breathes in deeply again, and then he nods to me and starts to walk toward the entrance of the Flesh Palace. As we get closer I can see that the bouncers are well over six foot and immaculately dressed in black tuxedos. Their faces are jagged and uneven, the skin the grey and purple of Table Mountain, and greenish fungi juts from their heads like samurai topknots. One carries a huge, grisly halberd and a katana protrudes from a sheath on the back of the other.

  ‘Golems,’ Ronin whispers to me. ‘They’re new. The Queen must have access to a high-level sangoma to animate these bad boys.’

  ‘What do we do?’ I whisper.

  ‘Don’t worry, they’re mostly for show. You usually have to answer some dumb question and they’ll let you in. The punters love it, think it’s hilarious.’

  The golems loom over us, their eyes black with a rainbow sheen like an oil spill. The Roman numeral I is set in gold into the forehead of the one with the halberd, and II into the forehead of the other.

  ‘What is the name of the Flesh Palace’s most popular performer?’ II says, his voice like the sound of rocks being crushed.

  ‘John Smith,’ Ronin says.

  ‘Incorrect,’ II says.

  ‘The Queen herself invited us.’ Despite the obvious attempt at diplomacy, he says ‘Queen’ like he’s talking about a particularly virulent STD. ‘You’re not going to stop one of her guests from entering, are you?’

  ‘Answer?’ the golem repeats.

  ‘I think we’ve come to the wrong place,’ Ronin says. ‘We’ll just stop hassling you and leave.’

  ‘Incorrect,’ I intones. ‘You have one more guess.’ II draws the blade from the sheath on his back. ‘Answer or die,’ I says.

  My mind kicks into action. The two most successful Flesh Palace franchises are Tokoloshe Money Shot and Legless Legolas. It’s possible that Legless Legolas, the elven amputee, is the most popular, but I don’t think so. His popularity pales in comparison to the manky, grey-haired tokoloshe with the big belly and an even bigger … well, it can only be him.

  ‘Rumpelforeskin,’ I say confidently.

  ‘Correct,’ I rumbles. ‘You may enter.’

  Inside, the place is a frenzy of flesh and fluid. Heavily tattooed waitresses push through the crowd with trays of drinks, one of them with a long, reptilian tail jutting from the back of skintight PVC pants.

  We walk past the stage where naked women gyrate on poles for squat, bearded men. ‘Dwarven Legionnaires,’ Ronin murmurs as we pass them. ‘Don’t stare. They’ve killed people for less.’

  I look down as we pass them, which gives me a good view of the grungy wooden floor. Judging by the dark red stains, beer isn’t the only thing that regularly gets spilled in this place. Topless dancers with suspiciously pointy ears proposition us and Ronin grins and winks at them.

  ‘A double Devil’s Tail,’ Ronin says as he gets to the bar. ‘With extra Devil.’ The bartender is the most beautiful transsexual I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve seen many. Especially ones with wings. She has blue-black skin, platinum-blonde hair and large white eyes that have no pupils or irises. A red latex dress sticks to her skin and a long string of pearls hangs between small breasts. Large white angelic wings are folded neatly behind her and they flutter gently as she gives us a jaw-dropping smile.

  ‘Katinka,’ Ronin says.

  ‘Jackie boy,’ she replies in a husky voice. ‘Have you decided to end it all? Death by the Anansi Queen?’

&
nbsp; ‘Is that any kind of greeting for an old friend?’

  She smiles and leans over the bar to kiss him on the cheek.

  ‘How’s the hormone treatment coming, darlin’?’ Ronin says.

  She sighs and cups her small breasts in her hands. ‘Expensive, Jackie. Dwarven doctors are a bunch of bloodsucking cunts at the best of times. When it comes to cases like mine … well.’

  ‘Dwarves are not really known for their tolerance of the transgendered,’ Ronin says. ‘Can’t you just, you know …?’

  ‘Illusion,’ Katinka says dismissively. ‘I use it when I have to. But it’s not just the looks, you know? Beneath it all I still have to look at myself in the mirror in the mornings. So it’s the goddamn dwarves, they’re the best with hormones. Luckily they’ll forget their allegiance to the dogma of the One Mountain God if you flash enough cash in front of their fat little noses,’ Katinka says and then spits on the ground. ‘A curse on their whole inbred race.’ She puts a hand in front of her mouth and breathes in deeply. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘That was unladylike.’

  ‘Never been fond of dwarves myself,’ Ronin says. ‘Well, besides Baresh.’

  ‘He was different,’ Katinka says softly. She pats Ronin gently on the shoulder and then turns her strange white eyes on me.

  ‘Are you … an angel?’ I blurt out. Smooth, Zevcenko. Really smooth.

  Katinka laughs throatily. ‘Many of my clients think so, sugar, but technically I’m an Osira.’

  ‘The Osiraii are like African Valkyrie,’ Ronin says. ‘Tasked with fetching the souls of fallen warriors.’

  ‘Mucho-butch,’ Katinka says, looking down at her blood-red nails. ‘No task for a lady.’

  ‘The Osiraii are all women,’ Ronin explains. ‘They keep a few males around for mating purposes, but the rest …’ He draws a line across his throat with his finger.

  ‘They kill them?’ I say.

  Katinka shrugs. ‘Why do the religious do anything? Part of the mythology. It has something to do with the female Mantis and her mating habits. The Flock says that the males are blessed and are sung onto the other side.’