Page 4 of The Triangle

“Sir! Get down!”

I don’t.

And I know that gives the impression to everyone currently cocked up in this unnecessary gunfight that I’m tough or possibly crazy. Which is just fine by me, because it’s to my great advantage in life to have people believing that I’m both tough and crazy. And I can be. But the actual reason I don’t get down now is that we’re in a dusty warehouse and this is the first time I’ve worn my new suit, and I’m not keen to get it all filthy just yet.

I figure it like this: If I die, it won’t matter. But if I live, I’ll have to keep wearing this suit for at least the next few hours and I don’t want it to be all mucky. I need to maintain the respect of the people who work for me and seeing your boss in a mucky suit that got that way because he was cowering for his life don’t seem like it’s likely to garner a lot of admiration.

Also, it’s a fokken lekker suit and the thought of ruining it over someone else’s proper craziness makes me wince.

Shit.

This didn’t have to happen this way. This should have been a simple exchange. We hand over diamonds to you, you hand over money to us, we all smile, laugh, pat each other on the backs, and head off on our merry ways.

But Americans. Eish, Americans love to shoot their fokken guns, man.

Right now, I’m depending very much on something my father once told me: If, in the face of mortal danger, you look like you’re not frightened, it will cause the other oke to take up that fear in compensation. And then you will hold the advantage and he will be made weak and vulnerable.

It does occur to me, however, that it may have just been another in the long litany of bullshit things my dad said to me over the years that appeared useful at the time but turned out to just be poor parenting.

I reckon I’ll be finding out shortly.

Oof, the bullet that just winged by me was a mite too close. Perhaps I should reconsider how much I like this suit.

But I don’t have to, because as if on command, a deus ex machina of sorts arrives in the form of my ringing mobile. I’m able to glance at the screen and see that it’s Lars ringing. Deus ex Lars. My concern, however, is that Lars usually only ever rings when something’s gone wrong. If everything’s fine, I’ll just receive a text saying so. And the fact that he’s my point person on the thing with Christine makes this particular perturbation feel even more amplified than it otherwise would in my current state.

“Yeah?” I answer as I spin behind a column of metal boxes which may or may not contain explosives, and which, in turn, may or may not have just served to make my life worse. I wink at the laaitie who was worried for my safety. I don’t really consider the action, I just do it. It seems to give him courage or embolden him or something because he pops his head up and caps off two of the guys shooting at us. Good for him. I like this lad.

“Howzit, bru?” replies Lars. “Can you talk?”

“Yeah, bru, not too busy. What izit?” The sound of metal hitting metal ricochets off the boxes guarding me. Not explosives, I suppose. Good times.

“Problem.”

“I guessed. What happened?”

Just then someone starts up with a goddamn machine gun. One of the Americans.

“Fok is that, bru?” asks Lars.

“Hold on,” I say. And when the blast of machine-gun fire dies down long enough for someone to replace a clip, I seize the opportunity to shout, “Fok is your problem, man? How the fok did this get so cocked up?”

My American counterpart, Wallace, shouts back at me in his thick American accent, “Fuck you, you cracker-ass motherfucker! Racist piece a’ shit! Trying to cheat me out of my ice, cocksucker? Who the fuck you think you dealing with? Dirty-ass blood-diamond-dealing son of a bitch!”

Does Wallace not see the irony in impugning my integrity for selling this particular type of diamond when he is, in fact, the one buying this particular type of diamond? Apparently not. “Racist? Bru, I’m coloured!”

“Colored? That’s some racist shit right there, motherfucker!”

“No! That’s what I am! There’s white, Zulu, Swazi, coloured… The list goes on, boet! My great-grandad was a Zulu oke! Technically, I’m mixed-race, bru! Coloured!” This is an odd time to be offering someone a lesson in South African ethnology, but…

“I ain’t give a fuck what you call it! You look white to me, motherfucker! And you still a racist, cheating, blood-diamond-dealing motherfucker! Motherfucker!”

I can’t help but ruminate, Bru, you knew the diamonds had conflict when you agreed to buy them. That’s why you wanted them. Quality, purity, and at a portion of the cost of lesser diamonds mined more… legitimately.

But, I suppose, the racist accusation isn’t completely without some rationale. Illogical though it may be. Wallace heard one of my guys call him a kaffir last month when we were all in New York putting this deal together on paper. Which is not OK. And I get why he might still be upset. I mean, I beat the living fokken daylights out of a schoolmate once when he used that word in reference to me when he found out I had mixed blood.

But, I mean, fok, man… That particular employee of mine who said it is now dead. Quite dead. I’m certain. I killed him myself. And I did that as a show of good faith and as an apology for his unconscionable behavior.

Jesus, Wallace.