A KYLIE MINOGUE CONCERT was the last place I expected to see Manolo again. Monica had been given some free tickets, and she’d invited Simone and me along. I refused initially, saying why didn’t she take Simone and a friend, but I warned her that Simone might not want to go either − activities that reminded her that Roxy couldn’t be there were hard on her.
Monica was instantly suspicious. ‘You sound peaky, honey bunch. Are you pining over that man of yours? They still haven’t found him? Well, then it’s all right, isn’t it? He doesn’t deserve you. This is exactly what you and Simone need. I’m not letting you get out of it. Besides, when was the last time we did anything together?’
I lacked the energy to argue. It was Simone’s first pop concert, and it was Monica’s outing, so Simone tagged along without protest: anything Monica proposed was bound to be interesting. The excitement leading up to the event brought some colour to her cheeks but the rituals she’d put into place around Roxy’s absence were unvarying. Every day Simone checked all the online news channels, local and international, and every second day she made me phone Klaus, but there was no news. I prepared myself for the court summons from France but it didn’t come.
The concert turned out to be a Las Vegas type of stage show with grand moving staircases, a staggeringly loud sound system and neon-bright stage lighting. Kylie, more petite than in her press photographs, acted out the demigoddess fantasy, changing imperial costumes and crowns almost as fast as she changed her hunky male lead dancer, twisting a phalanx of hot-bodied dancers into panting knots with her dance moves and up-tempo beat. Simone even took some photos with her mobile, and Monica and I shared a private eyebrow-raised glance of disbelief.
Interval passed without incident. It was as we left the concert hall, part of the throng streaming out of the open doors, on our way towards the carpeted stairway that led to the downstairs area of Grand West Casino, that I spotted a group of young men and women leaning against the massive column close to the staircase, casually chatting and smoking. They were hard to ignore, those amused young people with their foreign clothes and features, like exotic birds that had landed in an African bird park by mistake. One of them called, and a figure leaning over the balustrade idly watching the casino patrons below swung around before joining his compatriots. I recognised Manolo instantly. The hip gaucho poncho accentuated the long-booted legs and effortless sinewy power of his body. Without warning of any kind, I was transfixed. It was the cruellest kind of enchantment, one I had no control over. I’d once almost betrayed my husband with this brazenly sexy man.
Under the soft leather hat, his arresting eyes took us in − the rabble of fans exiting the concert hall − in one derisory glance. I heard him respond to his friends in Spanish, his whole attitude suggesting one who was at home everywhere but was at that moment terminally bored.
Where does one such as you wish to be, Manolo?
For a moment I was back in a sunset scene that never happened, and Manolo the gigolo was asking ‘Where is your husband that he allows such a chica to be alone?’ as he ran slender fingers along my bare arm.
Monica and Simone noticed nothing; they were chattering away about the concert. We were borne past the group of fashionable foreign friends, who looked as if they might be linked to the concert in some way since they did not need to see it to the end but preferred to remain outside in the empty hallway. Perhaps they were even part of Kylie Minogue’s entourage.
I walked down the casino’s spiral staircase next to Simone and Monica, holding on to the gold banister both because I was no longer accustomed to evening high heels and because I felt slightly dizzy as we snailed down. Something made me look back, up toward the landing where I saw the apparition of Manolo surrounded by his ultra-hip compatriots. He’d gone back to his vantage point and picked me out in that huge mass of people. He tipped his funny gaucho hat at me, and smiled a sweet, intense smile that made my shaky knees buckle.
‘Hey honey bunch, watch what you’re doing,’ Monica said, glancing upward as she tucked her arm into mine and led me safely down.
‘I’ll drive,’ she offered. Simone sat next to her and I was left in peace on the back seat.
Manolo was back in town. I shivered, imagining that supple muscular body stirring the shadows of cityscapes like a predating cat in search of females.
Lust is as mysterious as love. We are biological creatures. I am a scientist. I cannot explain my body’s random responses to another body orbiting in my space any more than I can explain my mind’s need for the idea of forever.
The next day, a ticket is delivered to the P&P city office by a courier service. It’s a VIP ticket for a supper and music show given by the Ipanema Kidz at the Harbour Lookout in Kalk Bay, by invitation only. The Internet tells me the rest. It’s a South American band that travels round the world on the fringes of big rock concerts, giving underground parties where and when it suits them, usually with a minimum of notice, advertised by word of mouth and fan pages. I zoom in. There he is. Manolo. In the hip gaucho outfit, strumming a guitar. Looking very Argentinian and seriously hot. I consider not going. But that would be cowardly.
I sit at my appointed place, surrounded by an echo chamber of vibrations that makes me want to move in time with this man who draws me to him with a strange power of the body. And the weight of loneliness that has pushed at me and pressed me down ever since Daniel disappeared out of my life shifts off me, receding with the waves that are done with battering the natural rock platform outside the tall glass window panes, as if they go all the way back out to sea, and different waves, new waves take up the struggle towards shore. The band plays infectious music that makes everybody feel alive and sexy until the early hours. Manolo separates himself from the others occasionally to sit with me at my VIP table and orders us a cocktail I’ve never heard of and then wanders back when they call him. He never asks me to dance. The soloist, a striking tall girl in a black leather waistcoat designed to show off her perfect breasts, sings to him, and Manolo strums for me, eyes gleaming in the booming darkness. I leave before the show is over.
The next day we sit next to each another on deck chairs on Boulders beach, far away from Camps Bay, each of us in dark sunglasses, although probably for different reasons. Monica is acting aunt for the day. This is as far as I have planned ahead.
Penguins scythe their way through the clear current in front of us. A young child approaches a penguin huddled in the shade of a rock and it does an evasive manoeuvre, flippers agitating, heading for the sea. My feet are covered in warm sand. Manolo has his gaucho hat on.
‘I feel old next to you.’
‘But you are not. You are a fascinating and desirable woman. Everything is in a woman’s eyes. You excite me.’
I’d forgotten just how seriously Manolo took his role of Don Juan.
‘That’s just because I didn’t accept your freebie last time.’
‘I was a boy then, still learning about women. You find me irresistible or you would not be here.’
‘Is the singer your girlfriend?’
‘Christella is beautiful, yes? We are like brother sun and sister moon. We make good music together. But she has someone, a woman who’s married. She makes Christella miserable. Sometimes she gets fed up and then she travels with us.’
‘Are you still with RMI? I never understood your connection to them.’
Manolo takes his time answering, the hat tilted over his eyes, his hands clasped over his flat chiselled belly.
‘In my country we believe in myths. RMI is like a myth. If you decide it is real, then you can find it everywhere. If I am introduced to a woman through RMI I never see her privately – I am strict about this. The money is top dollar. But these are short assignments with many, many rules. So I go where my guitar takes me, and when an interesting woman comes along and she wants to make love, why not?’
He grins at me with that ruffian sexual energy that is so hard to resist. Just another freelance contractor getting paid for a service.
‘I saw you accompanied Flora Arendz to her movie premier. That suit looked expensive.’
‘You saw that? Ralph Lauren. She had it couriered from Paris. Her husband is a wealthy Swiss banker who adores her. I consider her a good friend.’
‘Does her husband know about her good friend?’
‘Her husband concerns you? He has a mistress and two beautiful boys to continue his line. You should not be concerned for him.’ His hand reaches out and touches mine and under that hot sun I shiver.
We have a swim and return to our deck chairs. After a while Manolo gets up and wanders off. He is perfectly at home under this baking African sun among the beachgoers and penguins. When he comes back, he has brought us each an ice cream. We lick and watch distant tiny figures, male and female, leaping off a group of tall boulders and dive-bombing the flat turquoise ocean, their mating shrieks flying on the hot airwaves.
‘So what do we do now?’ I ask.
‘We may as well be lovers in the sun. It is a beautiful line, no? Not mine, but a beautiful line in a new song.’
A penguin waddles past in its dinner suit, determinedly headed for the sea, and I smile at nothing in particular. I hardly trusted myself coming to this beach with Manolo, accepting his invitation. I wasn’t certain how much outrage I felt about my situation, with Daniel gone – if I felt enough of it to abandon my body to what it wanted. Watching that penguin, free of existential complications, makes my mind up.
‘How long do you have to keep me away from home this time?’ I ask casually, still looking straight up at the sky from behind my sunglasses. I sense the cat muscles tense beside me. ‘Did you know they trashed my apartment last time? They were looking for something. I suppose you did me a favour, I could have got hurt. On the other hand, my blind neighbour Sharon spent the night in hospital with a stab wound after she went to investigate. Your friends weren’t very professional.’
‘You think I am here for RMI?’ he scoffs. ‘It was chance that we met. I could not have known you would be at that show.’
‘I checked with Monica. The tickets were dropped off anonymously for her at the real estate agency where she works. It was a long shot but it worked. She invited Simone and me, and there you were.’
‘It blows my mind. Why do you do this, Paola? I am not that kind of man.’ He throws his arms up in an extravagant gesture of helplessness and his deck chair almost topples over.
‘What kind of man are you, Manolo? Are you perhaps concerned about my husband’s whereabouts? Is RMI trying to track the famous author down? They say his book is flying off the shelves − all those saucy revelations … I’m assuming he’s gone rogue, and now that he’s a fugitive they’ve got every one of you out looking for him. You’re nothing but a bounty hunter.’
‘I am here for a good shag, is that a sin now? It is not good for a woman to be so uptight, not healthy.’
‘Cut the bullshit, Manolo. Let’s be grown up about this. What would you like to know?’
Manolo relaxes a little. He sticks a hand in the cooler box for a fresh beer and offers it to me, and then takes it for himself when I shake my head.
‘They want to know where your husband is, that’s all I know.’
‘Bullshit.’
Manolo gives me a bitter smile. He has started to perspire; the sheen that I found so attractive has turned into the sweat of anxiety.
‘All we have to do is bring them information. They say he has copies of confidential client files but they don’t know where they are. They think perhaps he has left them with you.’
‘Let’s play a game …’ I say sweetly, softening my voice.
He waits.
‘Take off your shades and close your eyes,’ I instruct, and he obeys reluctantly.
I take his tawny-skinned hand and turn it over and then touch it with mine as if my fingers are feathers, and I let myself feel the erotic charge of my cool woman’s hand against his smooth foreign male skin. ‘Don’t move,’ I whisper and then slide my fingers across his hand one last time, leaving behind the photo that I’ve slipped out the side pocket of my handbag.
‘You can look now.’
His pupils dilate as he looks down at Roxy’s laughing sea-green eyes, her sun-streaked fair hair catching the sunlight, and his hand jumps back as if a cobra has sunk its fangs into it. For a moment it looks as if he might leap up and run off the penguin beach.
I pick the photo up off the sand and dust it off with the towel.
‘Did you know that she’s won quite a few surfing competitions? Her dream was to ride the big waves in Hawaii some day.’
‘Take it easy,’ Manolo says, holding up his slender hands to placate me. ‘I am not a kidnapper. I’ve done nothing, I swear.’ He shakes his head and mumbles in Spanish, reaching for his shirt as if he wants to flee from me, but he is in the end a man who prefers to slink away.
‘You’ve got contacts, right? Just keep your ears open. If you can get me a name for who’s behind the abduction of Roxy Vermaak, I’ll give you the Limbo files, and you can claim whatever reward you like from your bosses. Nobody needs to know that we’ve made an arrangement.’
I’ve thought about this long and hard. Manolo is connected to RMI and he is a favourite at all the high society parties where sex is merchandise; he knows how to move his supple body through the shadows of seduction and intrigue, leaving only his scent behind. I’m banking on there being one thing he values more than his stud reputation: a big fat purse of gold.
‘I don’t know anything about this girl except that she is missing. But there may be someone who knows someone else−’
‘I thought so.’
I stand up and survey the beach, with swimmers paddling around the boulders and penguins cutting underneath them. I walk away without looking back.
On my way to the parking area, up the winding footpath that skirts around bushes and penguin burrows, my mind, loosened from its moorings by desire, confabulates an entire alternative ending, with me as a different type of woman: less stubborn, more flexible.
‘We may as well be lovers in the sun,’ Manolo says. Then he takes my hand and says, ‘Shall we go?’ and my heavy limbs succumb to his urgency and fold up towels and pack up and follow him around the boulders, past other entranced sandy lovers, off the beach, to a holiday flat attached to a whitewashed and sun-kissed Cape Dutch beach mansion.
‘Manolo …’
‘What, chica?’
‘Did they send you to find out if I knew where Daniel was?’
He lifts himself up on one elbow and gazes at me earnestly. ‘It does not matter. I will tell them you know nothing, that you are a heartbroken woman who has no idea where her husband is, and that I have done what I can to comfort you.’
‘Could you carry on comforting me?’
When I reach the boardwalk I look down to the beach. A sun-hatted toddler is playing on the wet sand, rivulets washing up around her, while her parents keep a watchful eye out for sea monsters. There is no sign of my almost lover.