I’d like to say it was over when we grabbed her from the bar.
Or when Rikki insisted we used three hundred baboons as part of our exit plan.
Or when my machete got lodged in the femur of one of her three legs.
Truth is, it was over as soon as I agreed to start working with this lunatic group. And for what? Another trinket in a crate. More jewellery dropped in a volcano? Every day we thought we were saving the world, but everyday I lost a wedge of my sanity.
And they knew dropping things into blast furnaces or volcanoes wasn’t always the safe option. But so long as they were all busted up enough to stop anyone actually bothering to fix it again. Good enough, right?
Yeah, baboons, you heard right.
So two weeks ago, Joffrey called me into his office. Joffrey didn’t bother with dead drops anymore – said they were just a waste of time and we weren’t exactly hiding in the shadows anymore. His office was a secure tradecraft of sorts – he drove this white beaten-up taxi bus around Johannesburg and he picked you up, and you did business. Hiding in plain sight, but with the added value of being under the protection of the Randburg Taxi Association. In return, Randburg were quite happy for Joffrey to help with their gun running, drug trafficking, extortion, contract killings, yadda yadda. He told me it was just like being back in the CIA, but with more “vuvuzelas”, whatever they were.
So I was five clicks outside of Alexandra township, standing on the roadside for Joffrey to pick me up. Sticking out like a sore thumb, while simultaneously sticking out my sore thumb to hail this fake taxi. And when I say roadside – I meant on the emergency lane of the freeway. Not important but culturally interesting. There were a couple of locals who were standing with me, probably just clocked off work, keeping their distance, and side-eyeing me as if to say, “Yoh, what’s this umlungu doing here waiting for a taxi? Hai, this oke is either high on nyaope or he’s lost, shame. Either way, he’s moving funny — me, I just wanna get home and eat, no time for this funny vibe.”
A white Toyota minivan, yellow stripe down the side came into view and indicated to pull over to us. I saw it had a Sonic the Hedgehog soft toy on the dash. It was Joffrey.
A couple of peeps of his horn and he was up on us, “Yeah bo, Brian! Get in the front.”
The bus was piled full of customers. The two locals continued to be confused, but hopped in the side door and squeezed up. The bus tipped to the side and was laden low. I was sure the bus was driving on the arches before we got in.
I asked Joffrey if we were doing our business in the bus in front of the locals, and he said that he had “gotta do a few drops downtown first.”
He said that I had the right thumb signal, but I had no idea what he was talking about, and I started to wonder if he was getting into his new career a little too much.
So he just started talking – he had an exchange job for me – There was this French intelligence chick meeting with an intermediary in 48 hours, she had this fourth century amulet about the size of your palm with a big ruby in the middle – she was selling it to them. I asked who “them” was. Joffrey told me that he had no idea, but they were probably “the baddies.” Helpful intel as usual.
He said she was French Foreign Intelligence, but not the normal Sécurité Extérieure foreign intelligence, it was something more opaque like the Générale Extérieure de la Amuse Bouche Croque Monsieur or something. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that everyone crammed in the back of the taxi was now quiet as mice and were in rapture at Joffrey’s briefing, waiting on his next word.
Joffrey clocked the look on my face and told me that everyone in the taxi were his and paid actors, although I couldn’t believe he was that sophisticated. He was definitely more into the taxi thing than the saving-the-world thing.
So we were to slide in, get this amulet, slide back out, and return to sender. I mean, easy, right? What could possibly go wrong? Baboons, that’s what. It turned out they would eat almost anything, and anything they couldn’t get their teeth through, they would fight over, and would end up carrying parts of it off for miles!
I’ll get to the relevance of that later.
So two days later I rendezvous with Rikki, our man on the ground outside this bar / shabeen near Port Elizabeth. Before we arrived, I remembered this bar being a lively concrete shoe-box on the roadside, bright inside, lots of English football stuff, pool table, you know. Half full of bar flies and locals having a fun time. Oh well.
Rikki was solid - a Capey Indian, bit of a geeza, mainly into selling wholesale booze to the corner shops here, very well connected and most of all thought on his feet. He had a good story for everything. So he was all up in my face with excitement.
Plan was to wait in our truck outside until we had eyes on the amulet and then BLAM we would go in and hit the score.
So that’s what we did. We waited for this chick and her customer to arrive, and what do you know? The intel was bang on for a fucking change.
This woman was dressed super-smart – jacket, trousers, shoes – all suited and booted. Miles out of place but wasn’t attracting any attention from the locals in there whatsoever, I mean apart from Rikki and me through our binoculars. So she sat at a table, invited this guy to sit with her and they started talking – we couldn’t hear them but Rikki said he knew some lip reading and said that they were talking about eating a pie sandwich for dinner or something. It was highly improbable but not impossible that Rikki read their lips correctly.
So after a few minutes she started unbuttoning her blouse – again not attracting the slightest bit of attention – apart from Rikki whose instant Pavlovian reaction was to drool “woof woof.” She unbuttoned enough to reveal a large round medallion hanging around her neck against her chest – gold, fancy looking with a big red stone in the centre.
Rikki stopped barking, and we both readied our heat – checked mags, checked chambers, and racked our guns and exited the truck for the bar.
Rikki had got us a couple of rubber masks for the stick-up, one of Nelson Mandela and a Halloween zombie one. Both as sweaty as the other.
So the Black Pimpernel and Joe Biden walked calmly into the shabeen flashing our heat – we had done this before – in and out – made it look like a regular robbery. Zombie covered the exit scanning the whole room with my gun, and Mandela went straight to the bar and told the owner to empty the cash drawer.
This French woman just watched us work. Like we were normal punters or something.
Rikki Mandela stuffed the cash in his hoodie, then went over to our French Chick, and in his broad Indian accent pointed his pistol at her amulet. He smacked his piece around the head of her companion, and he was out cold.
She was as cool as a fucking cucumber.
This was where, even by my own standards, it got a bit weird.
Rikki pointed at the amulet and leaned in for a closer look. What he mouthed to himself next didn’t require a high level of lip-reading ability.
The amulet was embedded in her chest, set in fucking folds of her skin, it wasn’t on her, it was in her.
So she slammed her hand on her jewellery and let out this weird scream – intense and deafening, like ultrasonic or something – it wasn’t just a loud noise — it felt like a weapon, it was scrambling my head. And she was oh so calm while doing it.
The screaming stopped abruptly after Rikki brought his pistol down on the back of her neck. We dragged her out to the truck and dumped her in the flatbed. I Zombie jumped in the back to tie her up, and Madiba jumped in the front to get us out of there.
If only it had been that simple.
Thank you for reading!
One of those seemingly endless false story promises. The outline for this was written maybe two years ago (I forget). You just leave these things to fester and like all corpses, after a while it’s teaming with life, bubbling with it.
I had sat down to write a different short called “Fold” about a guy folding things. But the life feeding on the body of “The Bridge” was far more stinky.
Superfans will remember that The Bridge was promised in March 2024 and you can still eneter the BABOON POLL HERE
Piddling around with the site artworks a bit - still creating using pen and paper through inkspace through the bamboo slate but taking a little more time to compose the overall image first in pixelstyle (basically a poor person’s photoshop) before sketching it out. Some post in pixelstyle, then mess it all up in MOSH LITE.
NOTABLE PHYSICAL HIGHLIGHTS
Thanks to Rob Wicks for dragging me out of my home with him to CONdammed TTRPG con in Amsterdam. So overdue, both for seeing him in the flesh, but also getting out in Holland. Such a warm, and fun group of human beings. I’ve going to start tapping up wifey to get involved for next year. 🤔
NOTABLE VISUAL HIGHLIGHTS
Phenomenal B1M documentary about the Grenfell Tower Disaster. So close to where I worked that morning, and so close to where we used to live.
Youtube Algorythm seems additced to amazing ancient videos like PORKINS DESTROYS THE DEATH STAR and GOOD TIMES and this.
Thinking I can watch the Infantino World Club Cup but end up writing about Rikki and Babboons.
NOTABLE AUDIO HIGHLIGHTS
Recommended to me by Killingworth, so I can recommend to you - The Coming Storm and Things Fell Apart and This Is Actually Happening. The later’s serendipidy is weirding me out a bit as the last two episodes have exactly reflected two very unique moments in my life this month. Yes, the “worms” one and the “lost dogs” one.
Julian Simpson’s Lovecraft Investigations: Crowley was successfully funded and that definitely a thing I can’t do without.
NOTABLE DIGITAL HIGHLIGHTS
As with Balatro, I had to delete Youtube from my devices, as things got out of hand. This is a regular series. Join me next month where I proudly announce I’ve regressed to using a Nokia 3310.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. I left this paragraph in because I feel bad for deleting the copy everytime. Brave Sir Lorem. Did you know that this phrase is a nonsense version of a passage from "De finibus bonorum et malorum," a philosophical work by Cicero written in 45 BC.
Bye for now and as ever. I’m blessed you scroll to the bottom of these. If you know someone who might enjoy Between The Cracks (or if you would like to collaborate on projects), then do share on them there socials, or email them.
This original content is human made. Tools are used for research and helping correct the god-awful use of my mother tongue FFS.
Excellent