The Zero Hour (2 page)

At half past nine in the morning, Baumann entered the auto shop and was greeted by the warder, Pieter Keevy. Baumann rather liked Keevy. He was basically a good sort, if a bit slow on the uptake.

The relationship between
boer
and
bandiet
was a strange one. Warders were famously cruel, to the point of sadism—yet at the same time, touchingly, they desperately wanted to be liked by the prisoners.

Baumann was aware of this vulnerability and took advantage of it whenever possible. He knew that Keevy was fascinated by Baumann, wanted to know about his life, where he came from. Baumann duly provided the guard with morsels from time to time—morsels that piqued Keevy’s curiosity without ever satisfying it. He liked Keevy because it was so easy to manipulate him.

“We’ve got a new one in for you boys today,” Keevy announced heartily, clapping Baumann on the shoulder. “Food-service lorry.”

“Oh?” Baumann replied equably. “What’s wrong with it,
baas
?”

“Don’t know. They’re saying it smokes whenever they shift gears.”

“White smoke?”

Keevy shrugged. “Thing sort of shifts with a bang.”

“I see. Probably drinking up transmission fluid, too. Not a big deal. Probably a bad vacuum modulator.”

Keevy cocked an eyebrow and nodded sagely as if he understood. “Bloody pain in the arse.”

“Not really, Piet. And we’re almost done with the chaplain’s car.” Baumann indicated the small black Ford sedan he’d been working on for the last few days.

“Let Popeye do it,” Keevy said. “Popeye” was the prison nickname for Jan Koopman, the other
skolly
who worked in the auto-repair shop. “Like I said, it’s a food-service lorry. We wouldn’t want to miss any meals, now would we?”

Baumann chuckled at the warder’s pathetic attempt at humor and replied dryly: “I’d hate to miss out on another ear.” This was a reference to a time when Baumann, tucking into his maize and cowpeas at supper a few weeks ago, discovered a large, hairy, filthy pig ear.

“Oh!” Keevy gasped as he exploded with laughter. “Oh—the hairy ear!”

“So why don’t I ask Popeye to take a look at the lorry, while I get the chaplain’s car out of here.” Keevy was still laughing, silently and helplessly, his large round shoulders heaving.

Popeye, whose shoulder boasted a large, crude tattoo, which signified he’d knifed a warder, arrived a few minutes later and sullenly obeyed Baumann’s directions. He was actually larger than Baumann and weighed a good deal more, but he knew enough to be afraid of his coworker and did what he was told.

As Baumann opened the trunk of the chaplain’s car, he furtively glanced over at Keevy, who was by now taking a drag on a cigarette. Sure enough, as he did every morning after he lit his cigarette, Keevy lumbered to the door and went off to get a mug of coffee and take a ten- or fifteen-minute break with the warder at the next station.

Standing at the trunk of the car, Baumann called over to Popeye, “Could you check out this fucking tailpipe? Think it’s got to be replaced?”

Popeye came over and knelt down to inspect the tailpipe. “Shit, what the hell are you talking about?” he said belligerently, seeing nothing wrong with it.

“I’ll show you,” Baumann said quietly as he reached down with both hands, grasped Popeye’s chin from behind and above, and, with a sudden, violent shake from side to side, pulled the chin upward to a forty-five-degree angle. It was all over in a few seconds, and there was not even time for Popeye to cry out before he slumped, dead, to the concrete floor.

Baumann quickly dragged the inert body across the floor to the glossy cinnamon-red tool cabinet. He opened it, removed the shelves of drill bits, wedged the body inside, and turned the lock. He glanced back at the door. Old reliable Keevy still hadn’t returned from his break. At least five minutes remained before Keevy would be relieved by the next guard. Always there was a routine: human beings thrive on routine.

Baumann reached deep into the trunk of the chaplain’s car and lifted a section of the tan carpeting that lined it. Behind the flap of carpeting were the latches he had installed during the last few days of work on the car. He opened the latches and pulled back the false wall, which he had installed and camouflaged by gluing the carpet liner over it.

Behind the panel was a concealed compartment between the trunk and the car’s backseat, just big enough for him to crawl into. All of this he had accomplished while doing the requested bodywork on the car. Keevy, who paid no attention to Baumann’s work, suspected nothing.

He climbed into the trunk and positioned himself in the compartment. As he was about to pull the panel closed behind him, he heard the approach of a heavy set of footsteps. He struggled out of the space, but too late. Standing a few feet away, his mouth gaping, was Keevy.

Keevy was not supposed to be here, and it saddened Baumann. “What the fucking—” Keevy said in a funny, strangled little voice, trying to comprehend what Baumann was doing. In one hand he held a clipboard, which Baumann now realized the guard had absentmindedly left behind before taking his break.

Baumann chuckled to himself and gave Keevy a radiant, endearing smile. “Trunk’s coming apart,” he explained to the guard as he casually crawled out, swung his feet around, and stood up. “With what they pay that poor old man of the cloth, it’s not surprising.”

But Keevy, suspicious, shook his head slowly. “Coming apart?” he said stupidly.

Baumann put an arm around the warder’s shoulders, feeling the soft flesh yield like a bowl of quivering aspic. He gave him a comradely squeeze. “Look,” he whispered confidingly. “Why don’t we keep this between you and me?”

Keevy’s eyes narrowed with greed. His mouth was slack. “What’s in it for me?” he said at once.

“Oh, quite a lot,
baas
,” Baumann said, his arm still around Keevy’s shoulders. “A pig’s ear, for one thing.”

He smiled again, and Keevy began to chortle. Baumann laughed, and Keevy laughed, and Baumann made his right hand into a fist, and in one simple motion swung it back and then slammed it into the hollow of Keevy’s armpit with enormous force, crushing the brachial nerve, which is wide at that point and close to the surface.

Keevy collapsed immediately.

Baumann caught him as he sagged and crushed Keevy’s trachea, killing him at once. With some difficulty, he pushed the body underneath a workbench. In a few minutes, he had installed himself within the hidden compartment in the chaplain’s car and tightened the latches. It was dark and close in there, but there wasn’t long to wait. Soon he could hear the footsteps of another prison official entering the shop.

With a loud metallic clatter, the blue-painted steel doors, which led to the vehicle trap and the courtyard outside, began to lift. The car’s ignition was switched on; the engine was revved exactly three times—signifying that all was according to plan—and the car began to move forward.

There, a minute or two went by, during which time the guards in the vehicle trap carefully inspected the car to make sure no prisoner was hiding in it. Baumann was thoroughly familiar with how they inspected vehicles, and he knew he would not be caught. The trunk was opened. Baumann could see a tiny sliver of light appear suddenly at a gap where the panel met the trunk’s floor.

He inhaled slowly, noiselessly. His heart hammered; his body tensed. Then the trunk was slammed and the car moved forward.

Out of the vehicle trap. Into the courtyard.

Baumann could taste the exhaust fumes and hoped he would not have to remain here much longer. A moment later, the car again came to a halt. He knew they had arrived at the prison gates, where another cursory inspection would be done. Then the car moved on again, soon accelerating as it merged with the main road to Cape Town.

Clever though he was, Baumann knew he could not have orchestrated his escape without the help of the powerful man in Switzerland who for some reason had taken a keen interest in his liberty.

The car’s driver, a young man named van Loon, was an accountant in the office of the prison commandant as well as a friend of the chaplain’s. The young accountant had volunteered to pick up the chaplain, who was arriving on a Trek Airways flight from Johannesburg to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town, in the chaplain’s own newly repaired car.

By prior arrangement with Baumann, however, van Loon would find it necessary to make a brief stop at a petrol station along the way for refueling and a cup of coffee. There, in a secluded rest stop out of sight of passersby, Baumann would get out.

The plan had worked perfectly.

He was free, but his elation was dampened somewhat by the unpleasantness with the warder in the auto shop. It was unfortunate he had had to kill the simple fellow.

He had rather liked Keevy.

CHAPTER TWO

Several hours earlier, at eight o’clock on a rainy evening in Boston, a young blond woman strode brusquely across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel and toward the bank of elevators.

The set of her pretty face was all business, her eyebrows arched, her lips slightly pursed. She wore the uniform of an affluent businesswoman: a navy-blue double-breasted Adrienne Vittadini suit with padded shoulders, an Hermès scarf, an off-white silk blouse, a simple strand of pearls and matching mabe pearl earrings, black Ferragamo pumps, and, under one arm, a slim cordovan Gucci portfolio. In the other hand—somewhat incongruously—she grasped a large black leather bag.

To the casual observer, the woman might have been a high-powered attorney or an executive returning from a dinner with clients. But a more thorough inspection would have revealed tiny details that punctured the illusion. Perhaps it was her too obviously dyed, shoulder-length ash-blond hair. Perhaps her restless blue eyes, which betrayed a discomfort with the hotel’s modern glass-and-marble opulence.

Whatever it was that didn’t fit, the concierge glanced up at her, back down to the petty-cash-disbursement sheet before him, then back again to the beautiful blond woman for the briefest instant. Then he inclined his head slightly to one side and caught the eye of one of the hotel’s security people, a woman who sat in a large comfortable armchair feigning to read
The Boston Globe.

Security arched her eyebrows a fraction to signal that she, too, was suspicious—or at least amused—then smiled and gave the tiniest shrug, invisible to anyone but the concierge, which said, Let her go, we can’t be entirely sure.

The Four Seasons did all it could to discourage call girls, but in uncertain cases such as this, it was far better to err on the permissive side rather than risk offending a legitimate hotel guest.

The blond woman entered a waiting elevator and got out on the seventh floor. When she reached room 722, she let herself in with a key.

*   *   *

About twenty minutes later, a well-dressed man in his mid-fifties unlocked the same door. Although he was not an especially handsome man—he had a high, speckled forehead, beaky nose, large pouches under his eyes, fleshy jowls—there was about him the patina of prosperity.

His face and hands were deeply tanned, as if he often sailed the waters off St. Bart’s, which he did. His hair was silver and neatly combed. His navy blazer was well tailored and expensive, his tie from Ermenegildo Zegna, his tasseled loafers polished to a high sheen.

Entering the room tentatively, he glanced around, but the only evidence of the woman was the clothes hanging neatly in the closet. The bathroom door was closed. He tingled with enormous anticipation.

In the exact center of the king-size bed an envelope had been placed. He reached across the bed and retrieved it. On its front was his name in large, loopy script. The note inside contained a simple set of instructions, which he read and immediately began to follow.

With trembling, clumsy fingers, he placed his briefcase on a desk and started undressing, dropping his jacket and then his pants in crumpled heaps on the gray carpet beside the bed. Fumblingly, he unbuttoned his shirt and then slipped off his monogrammed silk boxer shorts. He stumbled twice trying to remove his socks. Momentarily alarmed, he looked up to make sure the drapes were drawn. They were. She had, of course, taken care of every detail.

As he knelt in the corner of the room, naked, he felt his half-swollen member throb fully, almost painfully, to life, arching away from his body, proud and distended and flushed.

He heard the bathroom door open.

When the woman emerged, he did not turn to look: he had been ordered not to do so. In her black patent-leather boots with heels, the blond woman was just under six feet tall. Her body was covered entirely in a skin-tight black cat suit of four-way-stretch PVC, a wet-looking material made of a plastic substance bonded to Lycra. Her black gloves went to her elbows; the mask over her eyes was of thin black leather.

Silently, with fluid movements, she approached him from behind and placed a blindfold on him, the soft sheepskin against his eyes, the supple leather on the outside, its closure made of elastic. It looked like an oversize pair of goggles.

As she fastened the blindfold, she touched him gently, caressed him, wordlessly reassured. She placed a gloved hand under each arm, lifted him to his feet, and guided him over to the bed, where he knelt again, his engorged phallus compressed tightly between his abdomen and the side of the bed.

Next, she placed handcuffs on his wrists and clicked them shut. For the first time, she spoke. “It’s time for your hood,” she said in a husky contralto.

He inhaled deeply and quaveringly. His shoulders hunched with anticipation. He could sense her towering over him, could smell her leather gloves and boots.

She removed his blindfold, and now he was able to look at her. “Yes, mistress,” he said in a soft, childlike whisper.

The hood was made of leather, too, form-fitting and lined with rubber. It had no holes for eyes or mouth, only nose holes for breathing. His eyes widened in fear as he took in the severity of this piece of apparatus. She slipped it over his head, heavy and cold and stifling, and he trembled with mixed terror and excitement.