Why You Were Taken

BRIDE IN THE BATH ₇

Johannesburg, 2021

A well-built man in grimy blue overalls waits outside the front door of a Mr Edward Blanco, number 28, Rosebank Heights. He is on a short stepladder, and is pretending to fix the corridor ceiling light, the bulb of which he had unscrewed the day before, causing the old lady at the end of the passage to call general maintenance, the number which he had temporarily diverted to himself.

He would smirk, but he took himself too seriously. People in his occupation were often thought of as little brain-to-brawn ratio, but in his case it wasn’t true. You had to be clever to survive in this game, to stay out of the Crim Colonies.

Clever, and vigilant, he thinks, as he hears someone climbing the stairs behind him and holds an impotent screwdriver up to an already tightened screw. The unseen person doesn’t stop at his landing but keeps ascending.

The man in overalls lowers his screwdriver and listens. He is waiting for Mr Blanco to run his evening bath. If he doesn’t start it in the next few minutes he’ll have to leave and find another reason to visit the building; he has already been here for twenty minutes, and even the pocket granny would know that you didn’t need more than half an hour to fix a broken light.

At five minutes left he checks the lightbulb again and fastens the fitting around it, dusts it with an exhalation, folds up his ladder. As he closes his dinged metal toolbox he hears the movement of water flowing through the pipes in the ceiling. He uses a wireless device in his pocket to momentarily scramble the access card entrance mechanism on the door. It’s as simple as the red light changing to green, a muted click, and he silently opens the door at 28, enters, and closes it behind him. In the entrance hall of Blanco’s flat he eases off his workman boots, strips off his overalls to reveal his sleeker outfit of a tight black shirt and belted black pants.

The burn scar on his right arm is now visible. The skin is mottled, shiny. He no longer notices it; it’s as much part of him as his eyes, or his nose. Perhaps subconsciously it is his constant reminder as to why his does what he does. Perhaps not.

He stands in his black stockinged feet, biding his time until he hears the taps being turned off. Mr Blanco is half whistling, half humming. A small man; effeminate.

What is that song? the hefty man wonders. So familiar. Something from the 90s? No, a bit later than that. Melancholy. A perfect choice, really, for how his evening will turn out.

He hears the not-quite-splashing of the man lowering himself into the bath. Tentative. Is the water too hot, or too cold? Or perhaps it’s the colour of the water putting him off. Recycled water has a murkiness to it, a suspiciousness. Who knows where that water has been, what it has seen? The public service announcements, now planted everywhere, urge you to shower instead of bath, to save water. It does seem like the cleaner option. If you do insist on bathing, they preach, you don’t need more than five fingers. And then, only every second day. His nose wrinkles slightly at that. He takes his cleanliness very seriously.

Mr Blanco settles in and starts humming again. The man with the burnt arm glides over the parquet flooring and enters the bathroom. Even though his eyes are shut, the man in the bath senses his presence and starts, his face stamped with confusion. The scarred man sweeps Blanco up by his ankles in a graceful one-armed movement, causing water to rush up his nose and into his mouth. As he chokes and writhes upside-down, the man gently holds his head under the water with his free hand.

It’s a technique he learnt from watching a rerun on the crime channel. In the early 1900s a grey-eyed George Joseph Smith, dressed in colourful bow ties and hands flashing with gold rings, married and killed at least three women for their life insurance. He would prowl promenades in the evenings looking for lonely spinsters and pounce at any sign of vulnerability. His charisma, likened to a magnetic field, ensured the women would do as he told them: one of his wives even buying the bath she was to be murdered in. His technique in killing them was cold-blooded, clean: he’d grip their ankles to pull their bodies under – submerge them so swiftly that they would lose consciousness immediately – and they would never show a bruise. But where such care had been taken in the actual murders, Smith was careless with originality, and was caught and hanged before he could kill another bride in the bath.

A moment is all it takes, and soon Mr Blanco is reclining in the bath again, slack-jawed, and just a little paler than before. The man in black turns on the taps and fills the tub. Turns out five fingers is enough to drown in, but it would be better if it looked like an accident, or suicide.

Mr Blanco’s face is a porcelain mask; an ivory island in the milky grey water. Perhaps the person that finds him will think that he fell asleep in the bath. Which he did, in a way. He washes his hands in the basin, wipes down the room. He throws on the white collared shirt he had brought with him and within five minutes he is out of the building and walking to the bus station, dumping the dummy toolbox and overalls on the way. He manages to hop on a bus just as it is pulling out onto the road. He’s in a good mood, but he doesn’t show it. That was one of his easier jobs. He wonders if the other six names on the list will be as effortless.

He slides his hand into his pocket and pulls out the curiosity he lifted from Blanco’s mantelpiece: a worn piece of ivory – a finger-polished piano key. Engraved on the underside: ‘Love you always, my Plinky Plonky.’ It is smooth in his palm and retains the warmth of his skin. A melody enters his head. Coldplay: that’s what Blanco was humming. The man finds this very satisfying.