Chapter 35

"How old were you when you met her?"

"Thirty-five."

Sara handed Brass a tumbler of whatever was on the cabinet. When Grissom has said those words about the turning point in his life she had felt the need to move about.

"But you were already successful then."

"Yeah I don't know how to explain it. I had been doing everything to be the exact opposite of my father. I was serious and hardworking. I didn't have a lot of friends. I wasn't the life of the party. Any of that signalled instability to me."

"I didn't have a mission as such but the antithesis of a mission and that's probably what Boer did before something happened. There probably was something, most likely racial since that's what he's angry with his parent about that caused him to decide that he was going to be the antithesis of his parents. His father is a man who bucked a system when he had everything to loose. He married a Black woman and helped fund what was basically war against oppression."

Gil thought for a second. His scared hand rubbed his temple.

"Tell me about his mother?"

"She is Yoruba royalty. She lives between Nigeria and Knotting Hill. Her family made a great deal of money in the oil business, not as much as her husband but nothing to sneeze at. She studied at Cambridge, 20th Century Poets, for a time she was an interpreter and local liaison for the peace keeping mission throughout Western Africa. Unlike a lot of rich Nigerians, she has not horded her wealth. She has opened three orphanages, financed polio vaccinations in the Nigerian mountains and built at least ten schools throughout the country. "

"Sounds like a saint."

"To her people she and her husband are saints. They crowned him when the couple married. They had never done that for any outsider let alone a white outsider. He takes his position seriously, goes to all the tribal council meetings, attends all the coming of age ceremonies, takes fatherless boys under his wing, the whole nine yards. He tried to get his son to take his position more seriously but he would have none of it."

Sara spoke again. "So he has become the opposite of what they are?"

"Gris is right. He hoards his money. He pays his employees as little as he can get away with. He doesn't go back to his family's village in Nigeria or his father's estate on the outskirts of Johannesburg. He gives almost no money to charity preferring to pay the taxes instead."

Grissom was keenly aware that Sara's thigh was touching his. "There's a woman, a woman that broke his heart at some point in the last decade. The stealing is for the thrill of it but the attacks on the romantic partners of men he deems his equal, that's personal. We know that he had issues with men he deemed great who became attached to women so if he did fall in love and it didn't work out he would be acutely affected because he was supposed to have known better."

A thought gave Sara's mouth a sour taste. "You have to find her Brass. She's in danger too."