LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

divers, keeping in cellphone contact with the merchant.

      At 10 pm, everyone was ready.

      With scuba tanks and torches the divers launched again, Shuhood holding the tiller. Saldanha Bay was a bright smear behind the hills; further to the left, the Langebaan peninsula was dark. As the shore receded, its lights playing over the water, Shuhood felt the engine stutter. He opened the throttle to avoid it cutting out. He knew from experience that this could lead to serious trouble, and had no intention of getting stuck in a faulty craft.

      The engine coughed again and he let it stall, dialling the merchant. ‘Ons kannie gaan nie,’ he said, whispering even though they were far from shore. ‘The motor’s fucked.’

      The first fish landed on the deck while he was speaking, bouncing and flipping at his feet. It was pale silver, slightly bigger than a sardine. Then the surface erupted and there were splashes all around them: harders, or mullet, trapped illegally by fishermen from Langebaan. A local staple, salted and dried into bokkoms, the species had been overfished, with strict catch limits imposed by the government. Locals had seen this as an attack on their livelihoods, and in defiance they had continued setting their nets.

      The men on the boat felt some solidarity with their fellow fishers, but were also alert to the opportunity of salvaging a wasted night. Honour between strangers runs thin in the abalone trade, with each failure a chance for someone else to get ahead. Clayton knew a man who would buy the fish from them, he said, and without hesitation they began pulling in the nets.

      The wide silence of the lagoon was broken by harders flopping onto the deck. Then a different sound floated across the water: the swish of oars as a wooden rowboat drew nearer. Someone swore at them. The vessel appeared from the darkness, with four fishermen pulling hard. ‘Who knows what they would have done had they caught us,’ Shuhood wrote. When they were metres away he yanked the engine once more, and it shuddered to life.

      The merchant was waiting for them at the slipway. They hooked the trailer to the minibus and drove off. On the road back to Vredenburg two policemen stopped them: the trailer’s lights weren’t working, and they radioed a traffic officer to come issue a fine.

      In the meantime, the cops ‘had a look around the boat’ and saw the ‘dive equipment and a few harders lying on the deck,’ Shuhood wrote. ‘They then shone the torches on the three of us at the back of the taxi.’ The divers had not even climbed out of their wetsuits, and were still wet. The policemen did not say anything: for catching fish, or whatever else the men had been doing, they seemed prepared to look away.

      Had they known it was perlemoen the men were after—one of the most criminalised substances in the Western Cape, trafficked for enormous profits by underworld cartels—it is unlikely they would have been as lenient.

      The traffic officer arrived, wrote a fine for R500, and escorted the men home.

      *

      The motor’s fuel pump had a hole in it. The next morning, a Sunday, the merchant had it repaired. From boats to diving rigs, much of the gear in the abalone trade is cobbled together from used or damaged parts. Entire economies exist for stolen engines. Wetsuits, from kneeling on sharp reefs to shuck abalone, wear out at the knee.

      At 5 pm the crew met at the slipway to launch again. The parking lot was thronging, with bakkies queuing to tow boats in and out of the water. The divers hid their gear beneath a large tarpaulin, sure that they had avoided scrutiny. Once more they passed the military buoys and rode into the cove, where they pulled on their rigs and jumped in.

      The water was clear and calm: perfect for diving. In every direction Shuhood could see abalone stuck like hubcaps to the rocks. It was a sight that he had once been used to, but not seen for a long time. The spots where he had started poaching had depleted fast as divers raced one another to pull sacks of the shellfish out. Here was what shallow waters once looked like right around the coast, wrapping from Saldanha Bay to the Eastern Cape: abalone as the dominant reef organism, feeding on algae and jostling slowly with its neighbours for space.

      Shuhood began working, popping the creatures loose with a lever. He and Shawn had decided not to shuck their catch underwater, instead planning to exit the military area and work more safely on the boat. Their pouch bags filled quickly, the abalone clinging to one another as they dropped inside. Some were older than ten years and had spent their entire lives on the same set of rocks. Their feet left circular patches as the divers lifted them off: negative images, outlined by algae and encrusting corals, that would inch inwards until another abalone slid over to claim the space.

      When Shuhood’s bag was full, he signalled a throat-cutting gesture to Shawn. Time to return to the top.

      They had gathered over 100 kg between them, worth R40 000 or more on the black market. Before diving any longer, they had to make sure that the merchant would uphold his side of the deal. Too many times Shuhood had been short-changed by buyers and accomplices, the cash slipping away without explanation. In the poaching economy this left no recourse other than violence, and Shuhood wanted no more of that.

      Dusk swept over the lagoon, lighting the sky amber, then purple. It was dark when they finished shucking, tossing the empty shells over the side. Shuhood’s wrists ached from the repetitive strain of prising loose the meat. On the horizon the storm broke, flickering behind the clouds. The men dived back in to rinse the slime from their bodies and turned back towards shore.

      ‘It was completely dark now and the little boat was helped along by the incoming tide,’ Shuhood wrote. ‘Neon lights could be seen in the distance and faint music could be heard coming from a local pub.’

      Waterproofed inside two condoms, his cellphone buzzed in a pouch on his wetsuit. It was the merchant, his voice difficult to make out through the rubber.

      ‘How far are you?’

      ‘Amper a kilometre. Is the taxi there?’

      ‘No. I’ll tell you when it arrives.’

      Shuhood cut the engine and drifted towards a small island opposite the slipway. Unknown to him, fifteen men with night-vision gear were watching from bushes beyond the parking lot: policemen, fisheries inspectors and bokkies, including one of the rangers who in 2002 had caught Shuhood in his first poaching bust.

      Shuhood felt his phone vibrate once more. The taxi pulled up to the ramp.

      He wanted to stash the abalone at the island and come back for it later, his usual method for evading arrest, but the merchant had arranged the pickup. There was no time to change the plan. Shuhood started the motor and crossed the channel, watching for signs of danger. Another boat was blocking the slipway and Shawn jumped into the water to run the bags ashore. Something was wrong: without warning the taxi sped away. The merchant reversed his car down to retrieve the boat; they would dump the abalone afterwards if necessary.

      As the poachers struggled to lift the vessel, two Afrikaans men in shorts and flip-flops sauntered over.

      ‘Makeer julle ouens help?’ (‘You guys need some help?’)

      Then there were torches in their faces and guns flashing in the glare. Watching the cops run onto the tarmac, Shuhood knew, he wrote later, that he was ‘fucked’.

      *

      Around the time of Shuhood’s arrest, I was finishing matric exams and preparing to begin a marine biology degree. It is difficult to imagine a life further from Shuhood’s, though our homes lay less than 10 km apart. People often say that Cape Town is a small city, though its population is close to four million. Rather, it is a big city composed of segments that seldom intersect, an apartheid vestige that produces strange distortions of time and space.

      The station-deck taxi rank is like a patch of the townships grafted onto the city bowl. Kalk Bay can feel closer to Tamboerskloof than to Langa, even though it is nearly three times as far away. Shuhood moved through many of the areas I frequented—Sea Point, Simon’s Town, Kommetjie—but his world was in most respects invisible to me. It was abalone, in the end, that brought us together.

      The abalone black market cuts through a

Скачать книгу