Dead of Night

I accidentally, obviously, hit a car in the parking section of Bryanston Shopping Centre, in the Northern Suburbs of Johannesburg.

The car guard came running immediately with a notebook to get my details down. I duly obliged, then continued to park. I had assumed it was just another arbitrary citizen of the country.

Later, when I returned from grocery shopping, the car guard told me the man whose car I hit had waited for me for awhile. Then left. I'm glad we avoided each other. As will become clear later.

So, some time after returning home at my complex, I received a call from the guy. Things were immediately odd. I have bad cellular connection in my home. So, I asked him to call me on WhatsApp. Another interesting thing. He gave me an SA African name as his, but he spoke with an African accent from what I think is West Africa, or Central Africa.

Anyway, he tells me he doesn't have WhatsApp. Who doesn't have WhatsApp? Jesis. He also didn't have internet or email. I started getting suspicious. Who has a nice car but they don't even have a smartphone? I asked him what his phone was, and he said it was a Nokia. Double Jesis on the rocks.

I suddenly realised I was dealing with someone in the criminal underworld. South Africa is a country with a vast majority of its citizens very poor. But even cashiers and cleaning ladies have WhatsApp and my cleaning lady does her banking on her phone. And she takes a minibus taxi, the common form of transport for people in lower income groups, to work.

Our world, even in SA, even for those who are poor, operates through using smartphones to manage our lives. How does someone with a really nice car not have a smartphone? Because they're deliberately trying to avoid leaving digital footprints. A smartphone can be used to track you. An old-school Nokia, even though if they really want to (The Man, I mean) they can triangulate your signal.

But they can't easily locate you like with smartphones. It's why criminals use these "burner phones". In SA we also have something called RICA. I don't feel like googling what it stands for. But it is how you get your personal identity information connected to your number. It allows law enforcement to, with a warrant from a judge, to eavesdrop on your calls and have you monitored.

I bet half my house this gentleman whose car I hit has a SIM card that hasn't been Rica'd. And I hate to stereotype, but it is a fact that the Nigerians have cornered the illicit drug market in South Africa. Fact. So that led me to conclude this guy was an illegal immigrant who dealt in drugs, and thus part of the underworld.

Fuck.

Of all the gin joints in the world I had to crash into his.

So I try to have a conversation with him on the phone but it's basically impossible due to poor cellular connectivity. I also decide everything from here on out needs to have a written record. I told him I will only communicate with him via SMS and not answer his calls. He tries calling several times, before giving up.

I ask him for the information needed to process a claim through insurance so I could pay for his car repairs. This is a snippet of how successful a process that was:

So, it isn't exactly the most grammatically correctly written threat, but I think we can see the intention here. He wants me to pay no matter what, and expects insurance to process this, without the relevant information insurance companies require from claimants. Well. One can make an inference from this. One is, regarding my initial suspicions about this guy: "No shit, Sherlock."

Two is, he and I are at an impasse. I can't get the money to repair his car because I live in the upper world, where things like compliance, beaurocracy, and processes are required to be followed for things to get done. And he lives in the underworld, where staying off the radar and not revealing any information about yourself, is key to operating. For instance, I further suspect he either has an illegitimate driver's licence for roadblocks but wouldn't stand up to scrutiny of an insurance company. And he is here illegally, which insurance will also check, because if there's anything insurance companies hate doing, it's actually fucking paying out money.

And here, they have a good point. His vehicle shouldn't be on the road, it shouldn't be in places like shopping centres, used by him to transport himself from point A to point B. Because he's not legally allowed to travel that way. He shouldn't even exist in the space-time continuum of the South Africa region in the Fourth Dimension. He should be elsewhere doing other things with his life, like maybe taking bribes at Lagos airport.

So this is an inherently difficult situation to resolve. I pay insurance so when I fuck up, they bail me out. That's how things happen in the ordinary, upper world. It just so happened, like in The Witcher, there was a "conjunction of spheres" where a monster entered my world.

As you'd expect on receiving a message like that, I kind of fear for my life. It isn't that costly to hire a hit in South Africa. And if he's a drug dealer, he has the money, though I don't know specifics of how his money processing works. Like how does he take his fuck-ton of money made from selling drugs to junkies get processed into the banking system? I dunno.

But he's pretty angry, so he might just use the old-school briefcase system to pay whoever ends up parked outside my complex and then following me down the road with a small machine gun in their hands.

A word on anger: I reckon he could possibly order the hit, because, Jesis, brain studies show how blood flows from the executive centres of our brain to the limbic region, which is the very "I will rain holy hell down on you" region.

So my friends who've seen the message have said I don't have anything to worry about. But the criminal underground is like the Dark Web. It's scary and you know it's a bad place, but you don't know how extremely bad it is. Like, I know enough to know that in the same way he can't be tracked easily with his fucking burner phone, I can and possibly will be tracked on my phone. Which is a very nice, tidy iPhone, mind.

He probably already knows the complex I stay at, calling in favours. There are "private investigators" who use phone tracking technology to trace people, and they don't care who they give the information to if the price is right.

So I live under the gun now. I doubt they'll attempt to break into my complex to get at me. It's very secure, with a squad of security guards who all have panic buttons that summon within two minutes armed with assault rifles private security. The risk vs. reward ratio is skewed heavily in favour of risk. Like attempting a breach is likely to see you fail in your objective at the very least and at the most, you apprehended by armed private security.

Thus I'm pretty safe if I stay in the complex. These aren't like elite assassins or ninjas we're dealing with. Competent and not to be underestimated criminals, yes, but they wouldn't consider the risk of taking me out here worth it.

On the other hand, I step out the complex, and they're tracking me, then it's as simple as a drive-by by a bunch of dudes who give me a severe case of lead poisoning.

Still, it makes me want to extend my night owl habits, and sleep mainly during the day. Working at night. Cause, as soon as I hear the lock being fiddled with, I'll alert security with a panic button then pick up my cats, run to my room, and barricade it with the desk there.

You'd be surprised how fast I can flip a heavy desk when I'm in a panicked state. That's a story for another time.

But he also might just be pushing his luck, knowing he won't be able to carry through the killing, know that I've already taken precautions, knowing that he doesn't want the risk of killing me leading to him being caught, even if I don't know his actual identity, because his unRica'd number can still be traced through the system, and making a death threat on someone who then dies in a hit tends to make you the person the police search for.

The police might not take most murders that seriously in this country, but I have the privilege of being related to Ronnie Kasrils, former Minister of Intelligence under the Mbeki government. Who still has connections in government.

If I do get killed over a stupid accident that could and should have been sorted out by insurance, justice will be most likely done. If not, I'll just be one more statistic who faced the last darkness for no good reason at all.