Piranha. Rudie van Rensburg

      ‘His tik buddy. He used to come around to fetch Barnie to steal copper pipes with him.’ He laughed. ‘Copper’s the poor man’s trade for tik.’

      The police were always getting complaints about copper-pipe theft, Kassie knew.

      ‘Where can we find Maarman?’ he asked.

      Boepie shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maarman’s a drifter. But if I bump into him, I’ll tell him the generals want to talk.’

      Kassie took out his business card. ‘Tell Maarman to call me at this number or to come to the Newlands police station. Tell him we just want information about Barnie. We’re not planning to cuff him for stealing pipes.’ He gave Boepie another cigarette. ‘And come to us if you hear anything about Barnie.’

      He and Rooi walked back to the car in silence.

      ‘This scheme of Barnie’s bothers me,’ said Kassie when they got to the parking lot.

      Rooi nodded. ‘It could have backfired. Maybe he’d fallen in with a gang that was planning a robbery and now he’s dead and gone.’

      ‘We’re going to have to do a missing person … send the details to all the stations in Cape Town.’

      As he was getting into the car, Rooi’s phone rang. Kassie waited in the passenger seat while Rooi spoke excitedly outside.

      ‘Geeznuts, Kassie. Listen to this!’ he said as he got in behind the steering wheel. ‘Bugsy got a job. She went for an interview this morning and they just phoned her. Five hundred rand more per month than the last job. Starting tomorrow. At a shop in the Waterfront.’ He laughed. ‘That will give my poor credit card some breathing room.’

      ‘What kind of shop?’

      ‘African stuff.’

      * * *

      Theodore knew that sleeping with Carina Vosloo was a big mistake, but the whole thing had just taken him by surprise. He hadn’t had time to think. She’d practically dragged him to bed. The sex was wild, her shouting was loud and shrill, and her appetite was insatiable.

      It was an uphill battle to get rid of her this morning. He lied and told her he was due to meet suppliers at Beitbridge. Then she wanted to know when they’d see one another again.

      ‘How about tonight? Want to come round for supper? You probably never get a proper meal out here in the bush.’

      ‘My sister’s coming to visit me from Cape Town for a week. And she’s an excellent cook,’ he lied without batting an eyelid. Especially about his sister being a cook. She’d never lifted a finger in the kitchen.

      He walked over to his Land Rover. It’s not as though he hadn’t enjoyed the unexpected sex. It had been six months since that tourist. But he had no intentions of getting into a relationship, especially not with a woman fifteen years his senior. And there wouldn’t be much to talk about beyond masks.

      He sighed. The problem was, he needed her masks. He couldn’t afford to cut ties.

      * * *

      Afrikaans was a terrible struggle in the beginning. Luckily, we had an English-speaking classmate doing the same BSc subjects we were, who was prepared to translate his notes for us – at a price, of course. Smiley’s father also saw to it that we got Afrikaans tutoring. And luckily most of the textbooks were in English.

      Smiley made quicker progress socially than I did. He was naturally charming and a good sportsman. Some of his cricket team started hanging out at our little flat. The friendly ‘Soutie’ from Uganda soon became extremely popular.

      My biggest problem was that I was dependent on Smiley for money. His father paid for our studies, accommodation, food and other expenses by transferring money into his account and he was supposed to give me my share. But he started turning off the money tap with excuses like ‘my father paid in less than usual this month’. He soon bought himself a motorbike while I carried on walking everywhere. When the soles on my only pair of shoes got holes in them, he shrugged and said I couldn’t expect his father to buy my shoes too.

      I started working nights at a restaurant. Smiley had parties and entertained at the flat, providing alcohol bought with ‘our’ money.

      The first serious cracks in our friendship started to show … cracks that would lead to enormous crevasses on my side.

      11

      ‘The four poachers got six months each. That’s it,’ said Karel Koster, Musina’s busy environmental journalist. He swept his fringe out of his eyes, pushed his thick-lensed glasses higher up his nose and flipped open his notebook.

      ‘Yes, it’s an outrage,’ said Natasha. ‘And the worst part is that the mastermind is sitting high and dry somewhere, planning the next poaching expedition.’

      ‘Precisely. We don’t have a hope in hell of winning this war.’

      Natasha nodded and sighed. The poachers might be getting off lightly, but at least they’d be out of circulation for a while. And the fact that these four had been arrested as a result of information IESA had gathered was another reason the Americans might reconsider the budget cuts. She wanted to overwhelm them with success stories. She’d sent her recommendations about how the rangers could improve their operations to SANParks last night and had cc’d Tim and the donors. They needed to know the full extent of IESA’s contribution. She had a suspicion that Werner Erwee hadn’t passed all her reports on to the Americans in the past.

      ‘What do you want to talk about today?’ she asked Karel.

      ‘Vietnam.’

      ‘Fine with me.’

      The journalist could be a pain sometimes and he took up a lot of her time, but what he wrote was good publicity for IESA. These past few months he’d been working on a series of pieces about rhinos for his little Afrikaans newspaper. It had a limited readership, of course, but he translated his stories into English and sent them to various international conservation magazines for extra income. Through him, IESA and the rhino crisis were getting regular international exposure.

      ‘Just as background for the readers: how long were you in Vietnam?’

      ‘I was there for a month, but at that point I was still with the Conservation Act Trust. That was four years ago.’

      Karel wrote, adjusted his glasses. ‘Why the great interest in rhino horn in Vietnam? Have they always been the big market?’

      ‘No, China was always the biggest culprit. Rhino horn has been an integral part of their traditional medicine for almost two thousand years. Until 1993, they were the biggest users of horn. Hong Kong dominated the rhino-horn market at one stage, mostly for Chinese use. Taiwan was another major end-user, mostly supplied by South Africa. But China introduced some stringent laws against horn trade in the mid-nineties, which made the numbers drop drastically. They’re still big users, but they let the Vietnamese do the dirty work for them now.’

      ‘When did they jump on the bandwagon? And why them?’

      ‘Since 2003, rhino poaching has increasingly been traced back to them. The main reason is Vietnam’s unusually strong economy, together with a widespread revival in the belief that rhino horn is a miracle cure not just for cancer but for a host of other things.’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘Anything under the sun … arthritis, back pain, headaches, convulsions, fever, infection, hangovers, poisoning. The idea is that it improves the quality of your blood. The problem is many of the state hospitals and medical centres endorse the use of traditional medicine. I recently read that adverts on Vietnamese websites recommend rhino horn for more than seventy medical conditions. The demand seems to grow by the day.’

      ‘What do people pay for rhino horn?’

      ‘Ridiculous money … up to forty thousand dollars per kilogram. And on the Chinese