Mistress of the Game

Making love to her on the beach under the stars, Gabe began to believe it. So what if he didn't know what galleries she represented or the name of her first dog? Ruby was the most loving, sensual, incredible woman he had ever met. She had transformed South Africa from a nightmare into a dream. He should be grateful, not pestering her with questions.

The one-hour drive from Cape Town to Franschloek in the morning was the best part of Gabe's day. Rattling through the mountains and vineyards in his ancient Fiat Punto - determined not to waste a penny of Marshall's money, Gabe had bought himself the cheapest car he could find - he never failed to be moved by the breathtaking scenery. Franschloek means "French corner," named after the persecuted French Huguenots who first settled its steep slopes over three hundred years ago. They brought with them a culture and cuisine for which the town was still famous. Being a Scot, Gabe knew little of either culture or cuisine, but he still felt an affinity with the Huguenots. Like him, they were outcasts, come to this strange, distant place to make a fresh start. Most lunchtimes Gabe sat and ate his sandwich by the Huguenot monument at the top of the village. Main Street was packed with enticing coffee shops and restaurants offering some of the best food in the country, but Gabe always packed his own lunch. Until he had paid everyone back - Marshall, Claire, Angus Frazer - he had no right to indulge in luxuries.

This morning, Gabe parked the Punto as usual at the top of main street and walked the six blocks to his and Damian's development. They were building eight "executive homes," comfortable, ranch-style houses with pools and grassy backyards. The kind of house I wish I'd grown up in. Gabe knew it was foolish to feel an emotional attachment to a business venture. But now that they were starting to take shape, he was proud of the homes he and Lister were creating. He could picture the families who would live there, protected by the magnificent mountains on either side of them, secure within the strong, solid walls that Gabe had built.

I hope they're happy.

Turning the corner into the construction site, Gabe stopped. For a moment he just stood there, blinking, as if his eyes were deceiving him. The place was deserted. What should have been a hive of activity - men, drills, cement mixers, trucks full of gravel spinning their wheels in the summer mud - had been transformed into a desolate wasteland. It wasn't simply that no one was working. All the equipment was gone. The piles of sand and bricks. Even the foreman's office had been dismantled. All that was left were eight half-finished shells of buildings, their skeletal beams stretching up hopelessly toward the blue African sky.

Gabe's first thought was: We've been robbed.

He pulled out his cell phone, then remembered he hadn't charged it. He had to call Damian. And the police. Sprinting to the nearest house, Gabe knocked on the door, breathless, his heart pounding. A woman answered in a bathrobe.

"I'm sorry to disturb you so early. But could I possibly use your phone? It's an emergency."

The woman was middle-aged with short-cropped, bleached hair and a once-pretty face grown tired with the drudgery of motherhood. She looked at the Adonis-in-distress on her front porch and cursed the fact that she had not yet had time to put on her makeup. Straightening her hair and sucking in her belly, she gestured for Gabe to come in.

"I know you, don't I? I mean I've seen you around. You're the site manager of those Lister Homes."

Gabe nodded distractedly, looking for the phone. "I'm afraid we've been robbed. The site has been stripped bare."

The woman looked at him curiously. "But that was your guys," she said. "I thought it was strange, them showing up for work on a Sunday."

"My guys were here yesterday?"

"Yah, crack of dawn, with a load of trucks. My husband went out to complain, about the noise, you know? The foreman told him you and your partner had gone bankrupt and skipped town. They had six weeks of wages owing, so they took what they could carry and left." She pronounced it "lift."

Gabe felt weak at the knees. He sank down into an armchair and tried to think.

Why would they think we'd gone bankrupt? And why didn't Jonas, the foreman, call me?

Then he remembered his dead phone. He'd been unreachable all weekend. Ruby had persuaded him to accompany her on a boat trip and to leave his phone behind. It would just be the two of them, living in the moment. "The now," as Ruby liked to call it in that cute New Age American way of hers. They swam and fished and made love. It was a magical weekend.

Gabe dialed Damian's office number. There had obviously been some terrible misunderstanding.

After six rings, an automated voice announced dully: "The number you have called has been disconnected."

Panic rising in his chest, Gabe called Damian's cell. A single, long, no-such-number beep rang in his ears. He called the apartment, hoping to catch Ruby, but she wasn't home. He pictured their white cordless phone on the coffee table, ringing forlornly in the empty living room, and suddenly felt ineffably sad. Ruby's cell was switched off, too. Not knowing what else to do, Gabe finally contacted the police.

"And this is Gabriel McGregor I'm speaking to, is it?" The desk sergeant sounded excited, almost disbelieving, as if Gabe were some sort of celebrity.

"Yes, I've told you. I'm calling from a house across the street. My properties have been robbed, my partner seems to have gone missing - "

"Just stay where you are, Mr. McGregor. Someone will be with you very shortly, I promise."

While Gabe was on the phone, the lady of the house put on some lipstick and changed into a pair of frayed denim shorts and a pink Lab-att's Beer T-shirt that showed her nipples. Gabe didn't even register the changes. She made him a cup of hot, sweet tea, which he drank, his mind racing. After what seemed like an age, the doorbell rang.

"That'll be the police," said the woman.

"Thank God." Gabe got to his feet. Four uniformed officers walked into the living room. He extended his hand in greeting. "Boy, am I happy to see you."

"The feeling's mutual, mate," said the senior officer.

He slapped a pair of handcuffs onto Gabe's wrists.

Only a series of miracles kept Gabe out of prison for a second time.

Detective Inspector Hunter Richards, the officer in charge of the case, saw something in Gabriel McGregor's sad gray eyes that he trusted. The lad had been a fool. He'd lost millions of rand, played straight into Damian Lister's hands. But DI Richards did not believe he had intended to defraud anyone, even if he was an ex-con. The Franschloek locals spoke glowingly of Gabe's character. As the investigation continued, and more and more victims of con artists Ruby Frayne and Damian Lister came to light, the case against Gabe gradually began to unravel.

Ruby and Damian had been lovers and partners for over a decade. There was no art dealership, no imprisoned brother, no wholesome, small-town family back in Wisconsin. Every ounce of Gabe's happiness during the last six months had been built on lies. It was his first taste of the betrayal his London girlfriends must have felt when they discovered he was using them for their money. The irony was not lost on Gabe.

Not everyone was convinced of Gabe's innocence. For a terrifying few months, he lived with the threat of prosecution hanging over him. But any court case was going to be lengthy and expensive. In the end, the police decided it would be more cost-effective to focus on Lister and Frayne. At the end of the day, they were the ones with the money. Gabe had nothing.

The day the case against Gabe was formally dropped, he went back to the bar where he'd first met Ruby and drank himself unconscious. Even after everything that had happened, he still missed her. He couldn't help it. When he woke the next morning, he was lying in the street, laid out next to the trash cans like a lump of human refuse. Someone had stolen his shoes. There was nothing else to take.

This is it. Rock bottom. I can go back to the drugs, back to the streets. Or I can pick myself up and fight back.

It wasn't an obvious choice. Gabe was tired of fighting, tired to his bones. He blamed himself entirely for what had happened.

I can't become like my father, blaming other people for my own misfortunes. It's my own stupidity that got me here.

But in the end, Gabe told himself, he didn't have an option. Too many people had believed in him, Marshall Gresham most of all. What right did he have to give up before he had paid his debts? Until then, Gabe reasoned, his life was not his own to throw away.

I'll pay Marshall back. Then I'll decide if I've anything left to live for.

The first year was hell. Marshall Gresham generously assured Gabe he was in no rush to get his money back, but Gabe's own pride drove him on. He had to start earning money. With his record, no one was going to give him a white-collar job in real estate. His only option was manual labor, working on construction sites till he earned enough money to get back into developing.

I've done it before and I can do it again. I'm not afraid of hard work.

But this wasn't London. It was Africa. Nothing had prepared Gabe for the backbreaking work, hauling bricks and mixing cement in the hundred-degree heat, bitten to death by mosquitoes and sand flies. Often he found he was the only white man on a crew, which was lonely and dispiriting. The blacks all spoke Swahili to one another, laughing and joking as they lifted huge slabs of stone with no more effort than a mother lifting a baby. Gabe had always considered himself strong and physically fit. But at thirty, with a white man's muscle tone, he was no match for the nineteen-year-old local boys. Every night he crawled back to his filthy single-room apartment on Kennedy Road and collapsed on the bed, his body screaming with pain. For the first six months, before his skin hardened, Gabe's hands would blister and bleed so badly he looked like he had stigmata. Worst of all was the loneliness. It followed him everywhere, like a stalker, even into his dreams at night. Sometimes he could go an entire week without talking to anyone other than the foreman who paid him his wages. Gabe had to make a conscious effort not to slide into depression and despair.

I got through heroin. I got through prison. I can get through this.

And slowly, as the months rolled into years, he did get through it. Giving up drinking was the first step, not so much a choice as a physical necessity. Gabe's body was already stretched to the limits of endurance. There was no way he could work with a hangover. With the booze out of his system, he started sleeping better. His mood and energy levels began, imperceptibly, to lift. Once he raised his head and smiled at the black men working beside him, he found that they were not so standoffish after all. The thought struck him that perhaps it was he who had kept himself isolated, not them.

He made friends with a man named Dia Ghali. Dia was a joker, sunny-natured, with a deep, booming laugh that erupted frequently and incongruously from his skinny body. Dia was a foot shorter than Gabe, and as black as Gabe was white. Standing side by side, they looked like a comedy act. But Dia was every bit as serious as Gabe about making something of his life.

"I grew up in Pinetown. You know what happened last week, in the street where I lived? A baby girl, four months old, was killed by a rat. Killed. By a rat."

Gabe looked suitably horrified.

"The city refuses to collect the trash so the bloody rats are everywhere. They say the shack dwellers are 'illegals' and not entitled to services. As if we choose to live that way. Well, it's not happening to my child. No way. I'm getting out."

By pooling his money with Dia, Gabe was at last able to afford to move out of his single room. Together the two men rented a minuscule two-bedroom apartment downtown. It was a shoe box, but it felt like the Ritz.

"You know what we should do?" Gabe emerged from his first hot shower in a year and a half to find Dia watching cricket on their secondhand TV. "We should go into business for ourselves, in Pinetown. That's the problem in South Africa. There are shantytowns and mansions, but nothing in between. Low-cost, cooperative housing my friend. It's the future."

Dia nodded absently. "Fine. But you know what we should do first?"

"What?"

"Get laid."

Gabe hadn't had a woman since Ruby. Alcohol had deadened his libido. Since he gave up drinking, he'd begun, slowly, to notice women again. But he was too poor, and too exhausted, to spare much thought for dating. Cruising the bars of the Victoria and Albert Waterfront with Dia, watching the girls in their miniskirts and heels dolled up for a night out, Gabe felt like a tortoise emerging from hibernation. His first few attempts to chat up women were met with blunt rejection.

Gabe couldn't understand it. He'd always found flirting so easy.

"It's because you're with me," Dia told him. "Women don't trust a white guy who hangs out with a native."

"A native?" Gabe laughed. "Come on, Dia. Apartheid's been over for years."

Dia raised an eyebrow. "Really? Where have you been the past two years, brother? In a cave?"