Glittering Gallows

Chapter 11

85 C Chapter 11 is boots clattering on the wooden stairs, César Sergio Miguel parted a beaded curtain and descended into the basement of his rented house in Sunnyside, but the squeaky chat of rats in a closed basket he carried muffled the clatter. Under an armpit, he held a live hybrid chicken, white, vapid and unruffled. The rodents sounded as if they knew their fate and were accordingly saying their last words in a discordant orchestra. Outside it was getting dark. For César Miguel, darkness and its advent meant the opening of doors and opportunities. In the dark, people did all sorts of things; drugs moved, plots were executed, people were killed and people made money. He was thirty-five years old but looked ten years older from smoking, drinking, womanising and tactless bodybuilding and weightlifting. What else, he usually asked himself, could occupy a killer other than whores? His eyes had seen too much gore. His ears had heard many desperate pleas. He wasn’t a saviour; therefore he had taken lives according to his calling. South Africa was kind to him; many politicians and rich people had many enemies, which translated to Paradise for him. At the rate of an assassination or two a month, he was doing remarkably well and looked forward to retiring before he was forty-five, but not before he handled a jackpot job. In Madrid, where he was raised on poverty and second-hand marijuana smoke, he was by day a picador and a snake charmer at the age of nineteen, but moonlighted as an assassin. In the Spain of his knowledge, from Bilbao to Gibraltar, many people weren’t what they appeared; waiters were pimps, government ministers were drug barons, priests were assassins, safari tour guides were whores, whores were couriers and tools for unseating cabinet ministers, governors and presidents. Spain was a misleading canvas. H 86 Back home, his nocturnal payments had been meagre. Often, he had killed for as little as a hundred pesetas. Human life wasn’t an object to him. But the experience was worth it. By his hand, many men and women had fallen in Madrid and Barcelona. Using pistols, knives, poison and his bare hands, he killed them in their bedrooms, on beaches, and in car parks and brothels. Though no one suspected him, he was aware Spanish forensic experts were gathering clues against him. Then, taking a cue from Cecil John Rhodes, the nineteenth century British explorer and businessman, he sailed to South Africa as a stowaway. He was thirty then and vying to be rich, which meant sitting pretty and not having to call anyone his boss or landlord. Unlike Spain, South Africa was a giant awakening from years of slumber, isolation and socio-political retrogression. Some Boers were keen on maintaining the Apartheid era status quo, and major political parties were reeling from internal squabbling and mistrust among their top echelon members. Such rivalry and discontent was enough to give him jobs and keep him busy for many years. César was right in his assumption; it did. César Miguel’s day was beginning. It always began without variation in his small basement. Among the hiss and rattle of serpents, it began with a feeding ritual. On landing, he stood shirtless amid a score of baskets and ventilated wooden crates. Eagle, dragon and reptilian Indian-ink tattoos covered his skin, light ones on his cheeks and forehead. He thought they gave him a sophisticated look, especially during performances. Some people thought he looked like Antonio Banderas, the Spanish actor. He believed it was the actor who looked like him; not the other way round. On the rough floor lay a python, coiled, docile but staring at him. Unlike the other snakes in the basement, the five-metre python had the freedom of the house. At times he found it in the kitchen, other times in the bathroom when it was extremely hot, but its favourite spot was on his bed. For that reason, he closed and locked the main door only. 87 Having performed daring feats in schools and theatres in Pretoria, the Midrand and Johannesburg, people knew him as a snake charmer par excellence. But he was far from a snake charmer. It was beneath him to be one. The occupation, just like his picador job, was a façade camouflaging his livelihood. In his profession...