by Deon Meyer
I ran far enough that the building would no longer hide the Astra. I turned right again, towards the road. Jogged now, back to the edge of the bush. Had to check where they were.
The Opel was visible through the long grass and trees. It was parked across the road, a hundred and twenty metres from the petrol station. The doors were still shut, but vapour trailed from the exhaust pipe.
Two minutes.
I would have to cross the road behind them. I jogged back deeper into the trees, turned parallel to the road, zigzagging between tree trunks in the dense growth. I counted steps in time with the seconds. Anthills, thick grass, trees.
Do you remember that one we found in the anthill last month? That was Dick this morning, talking about the black mamba. It put a spring in my strides.
Three minutes, seventy metres.
I found a footpath. Cattle spoor. I accelerated. Ninety metres, a hundred, a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty. Heat and damp in my shoe. The cut was bleeding again. I swerved towards the road. Dropped back to a jog, then to a walk. Sweat ran down my face, down my chest, and my back.
The bush opened up suddenly. I stopped. The Astra was thirty metres to the right, its rear facing me. The engine idled. They were watching the filling station.
Momentarily, I hesitated, breathing as deliberately and slowly as possible.
Four minutes. They’d be getting restless.
The sound of a car approached from the left. I could use that. I waited for it and when it was directly in front of me, I bent over and ran across the road behind the vehicle. It was a pick-up with railings and a bored-looking brown cow on the back.
I turned right towards the Astra and ran alongside a fence, hopefully in the occupants’ blind spot. I wiped sweat from my eyes. Twenty metres, ten, five, and then the driver turned his head, a black man, he looked into my eyes, his mouth made an ‘O’, and he said something. The passenger door opened and then I was there and opened it wider. The R4 was swinging around, I grabbed the barrel with my left hand, the sight scraped deep into my palm, blood and sweat made it slippery, I got a grip and jerked violently up and away. I hit the white man on the nose with my right hand as hard as I could. It was a forceful blow, pain shot up my arm and I felt his cartilage break. His grip on the rifle slackened.
It was an R5, the shorter version of the R4.1 got both hands on it and jerked it from his grasp. He made a noise as I hit him above the ear with the folding butt.
I spun the weapon around, cocked it and pressed my thumb against the safety catch. It was on. I clicked it off and pointed the rifle at the driver.
‘Afternoon, kêrels,’ I said.
The white man brought his hand unsteadily up to his bloodied nose, now bent against his left cheek.
14
I called Emma. She answered in an anxious voice. ‘Lemmer?’
‘You can come now. I’m standing at the Astra, about a hundred metres left of the garage,’ I said, and then put the cell back in my pocket.
I saw her leave the café and jog in my direction. The men lay in the grass in front of me, side by side, face down in the dust, hands behind their backs. I kept the R5 pointed at the black man; the white would give us no trouble.
Emma approached. Her eyes widened as she took in the scene, the bloody crooked nose. I held an ID card out to her, the black sergeant’s. ‘They are policemen,’ I told her. ‘Jack Phatudi’s men.’
‘Police?’ She angrily wiped the sweat from her forehead and took the card.
‘You’re in deep shit,’ the white constable said.
‘Watch the language, buddy. You’re now in the presence of a lady,’ I said, and moved closer to him.
‘Why were you following us?’ asked Emma.
‘To protect you,’ said the black sergeant.
‘From what?’ Emma asked.
I had asked the same question – and received the same silence.
‘Get up,’ I said, and took out the R5’s magazine. They got to their feet, the constable with more difficulty than the sergeant. I turned the rifle around and passed it butt first to Crooked Nose. I put the magazine in my pocket. ‘Your pistols are in the car.’
‘You are under arrest,’ said the sergeant.
‘Get Jack Phatudi on the phone.’
‘Are you resisting arrest?’ he asked without much conviction.
‘Call Phatudi, and let the lady talk to him.’
He wasn’t a big man, twenty centimetres shorter than I am, and skinny. He was unhappy and I suspected he didn’t relish calling the inspector and explaining.
‘Just give me his number,’ said Emma, cell phone ready in her hand.
He preferred this option. He recited the number. Emma keyed it into her phone while I went over to the constable.
‘Let me help you with your nose,’ I said.
He stepped back. ‘I’m going to lock you up, you fu…’ He bit the word off and looked at Emma.
‘Suit yourself.’
‘Inspector?’ Emma spoke into her phone. ‘This is Emma le Roux. I’m standing beside the road near Klaserie with two of your men who say that you ordered them to follow us.’
She listened. I could faintly hear Phatudi’s voice, forceful and angry, but couldn’t make out the words.
‘Who?’ she asked eventually, worried. It became a one-sided conversation. Now and then Emma interrupted with questions and statements:
‘But how, Inspector? I haven’t …’
‘That is just not true.’
‘Why didn’t you inform us?’
‘Yes, but now one of them has a broken nose.’
‘No, Inspector. You were the one that had nothing to say this morning because it was sub judice.’
‘I am sure we will survive without your protection.’
‘Thank you, Inspector,’ with the same icy tone as when Wolhuter had called her ‘Emmatjie’. She passed the cell phone to the black sergeant. ‘He wants to speak to you.’
‘There are people who are angry with me,’ Emma said as we drove towards White River.
I had no idea what Phatudi had said to his sergeant. The conversation was in sePedi. When it was finally over, the black sergeant had looked away into the bushes and said, ‘You must go,’ with extreme dissatisfaction.
Now Emma sat with her legs tucked up, her feet on the passenger seat of the BMW, arms encircling her knees. ‘That’s what Phatudi said. There are people who have heard that Jacobus is my brother and that I have brought a lawyer to get him off. Can you believe it? He said he’s heard all sorts of rumours and he’s worried about our safety. One of the rumours is that I know where Jacobus is. Also that I want to lay the blame for the murders on others. That I’m working with Mogale to derail the land claim. So I asked him who was saying all these things and he couldn’t answer me. But he’s the only one who knows why I’m here.’
And all the people who’d been present in the charge office in Hoedspruit. She seemed to have forgotten them.
She shook her head angrily and looked at me. ‘Why does it have to be like this, Lemmer? Why is there still so much hate in this country? When are we going to move on? When will we get to a stage when it’s not about race or colour or what happened in the past, but just about right or wrong?’
When we are all equally rich or equally poor, I thought. When everyone has the same land and possessions. Or when nobody has anything …
She wasn’t finished. ‘But it’s no use talking to a brick wall. You’ve probably signed some clause that forbids you to talk about stuff like that.’ Her hands began to gesture angrily. ‘What’s your story, Lemmer? Are you always so sullen, or is it just that you don’t like me? I must be very boring after all the important and famous people you’ve looked after.’
I suspected the real source of her frustration was that her contrived cuteness was not working as it ought. Not on Phatudi, not really on Wolhuter, and also not on me. Welcome to the real world, Emma.
‘I appreciate that you’re angry,’
I said.
‘Don’t patronise me.’ She dropped her knees, turned her shoulders away from me and stared out of the window.
I kept my voice courteous. ‘To do my job, I have to keep a professional distance. That’s one of the fundamental principles of my vocation. I wish you would understand; this is an unusual situation. Ordinarily, the bodyguard would not even travel in the same vehicle as the client, we never eat at the same table, and we are never included in conversation.’
And I could tell her about Lemmer’s First Law.
She took a while to process this. Then she turned back to me and said, ‘Is that your excuse? Professional distance? What do you think I am? Unprofessional? I have clients too, Lemmer. I have a professional relationship with them. When we work, it’s work. But they’re human beings, too. And I had better see them as human beings and respect them as such. Otherwise, there’s no point in what I do. Last night we weren’t working, Lemmer. We sat at a table like two human beings and …’
‘I’m not saying …’
But she was on a roll. The anger made her voice deep and urgent. ‘Do you know what the trouble is, Lemmer? We live in the age of the cell phone and the iPod, that’s the trouble. Everyone has earphones and everyone lives in this narrow little world where nobody wants to hear anybody else, everyone wants to listen to their own music. We cut ourselves off. We don’t care about anyone else. We build walls and security gates, our world gets smaller and smaller, we live in cocoons, in tiny safe places. We don’t talk any more; we don’t hear each other any more. We drive to work, each in his own car, in his own steel shell, and we don’t hear each other. I don’t want to live like that. I want to hear people. I want to know people. I want to hear you. Not when you speak as the strong, silent bodyguard. As a human being. With a history. With opinions and perspectives. I want to listen to them and test my own against them, and change if I should. How else can I grow? That’s why people become racists, and sexists and terrorists. Because we don’t talk, we don’t listen, because we don’t know, we live only in our own heads.’ All that in complete, fluent sentences, and when she had finished she made a gesture of frustration with her small, fine hands.
I had to admit that she nearly had me. For a moment I wanted to submit to the temptation and say, ‘You’re right, Emma le Roux, but that’s not the whole story.’ Then I remembered that when it came to people, I was a disciple of the Jean-Patd Sartre school of philosophy and I merely said, ‘You have to admit that our work is somewhat different.’
She shook her head slowly and shrugged in despair.
We drove in silence for over an hour, through White River and Nelspruit, then the sublime landscape beyond the town – the mountains, the vistas, and the winding road up the escarpment to Badplaas, to the entrance of the Heuningklip Wildlife Preserve. No decorated entrance, just a tall wire gate in the game fence and a small sign with the name and a phone number. The gate was locked.
Emma called the number. It was a while before someone answered.
‘Mr Moller?’
Apparently it was. ‘My name is Emma le Roux. I would very much like to speak to you about Cobie de Villiers.’
She listened, said, ‘Thank you,’ and disconnected the call.
‘He’s sending someone to unlock the gate.’ She was irritated.
Ten minutes of silence passed before a young white man in blue overalls arrived in a pick-up. He said his name was Septimus. He had a squint in one eye. ‘Uncle Stef is in the shed. Follow me.’
‘Ah, my dear, I have to honestly say that it doesn’t look like Cobie,’ said Stef Moller, multimillionaire, apologetically and carefully, as he passed the picture back to Emma with grimy fingers.
He stood in a large corrugated-iron shed alongside a tractor that he had been working on when we entered. A muddle of tools, spares, drums, cans, steel shelving, workbenches, tins, paintbrushes, coffee mugs, empty Coke bottles, old tyres, a plate with breadcrumbs, the smell of diesel and lucerne. The standard farm shed. There was something that tugged faintly on my subconscious. Perhaps it was the contrast between expectation and reality. There was oil on Moller’s bleached T-shirt and jeans. He was close on sixty, tall and almost totally bald. Strong workman’s hands. His eyes were large and they blinked behind large gold-rimmed spectacles. His speech was painfully slow, like a tap dripping. He didn’t look like a rich man.
Emma took the photo without a word. She couldn’t hide her disappointment. The day had begun to take its toll.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Moller sincerely.
‘It’s OK,’ said Emma. She didn’t mean it.
So we stood in silence in the gloom of the shed. The zinc roof creaked in the heat. Moller’s eyes blinked as he looked from me to Emma, and back to me.
Rather reluctantly, she asked: ‘Mr Moller, how long did he work for you?’
‘Just Stef, my dear.’ He hesitated as if it were a weighty decision. ‘Perhaps we should have something to drink up there.’ He pointed a dirty fingernail towards the house.
We went out and I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I had seen something vital.
The homestead was without character, a white house, bleached corrugated-iron roof, built in the unimaginative seventies, perhaps, and fixed up a bit later. We sat on a veranda made of paved cement blocks. I satisfied my hunger from a big bowl of biltong and drank three glasses of Coke. Moller apologised for bringing the refreshments himself on a tray. ‘There’s only Septimus and myself, no other labour. I’m afraid there’s only Coke, will that do?’
‘Of course,’ Emma replied.
He related his story for Emma. I could see that he liked her in a shy, apologetic way.
He said that he remembered Cobie de Villiers well. ‘He turned up here in ninety-four, March, I think, in a beat-up old Nissan 1400 pick-up.’ He spoke in a measured, unhurried way, like a man dictating to a dim secretary. ‘In those days I didn’t lock the gate. He came knocking on the door.’
When Moller answered the door, he found a young man standing with his baseball cap in his hand who said, ‘Oom, I hear you are making a game reserve,’ using the unique Afrikaans term of respect for elders.
Moller said that was so.
‘Then I would really like to work for you.’
‘There are lots of game farms with jobs for game rangers …’
‘They want guides to take the tourists around, oom. I don’t want to do that. I want to work with the animals. That is the only thing I can do. I heard you don’t go in for tourists.’
There was something about Cobus, a simple determination, and a strong conviction, which appealed to Moller. He invited him in, and asked for references.
‘Sorry, oom, I don’t have any. But I have two hands that can do anything and you can ask me anything about conservation. Anything.’
So Moller asked him whether it would be a good thing to plant ilala palms on the reserve.
‘No, oom.’
‘Why not? They are good food. For the fruit bats. And the monkeys and elephants and baboons like the nuts too …’
‘That’s true, oom, but it’s a Lowveld tree. It’s a bit too high above sea level here.’
‘And tamboti?’
‘Tamboti is good, oom. This is its area. Plant them near the rivers, they like water.’
‘Are they good for the game?’
‘Yes, oom. Guinea fowl and francolin eat the fruits and the kudu and nyala like the leaves that drop off.’
He put him to the final test. ‘Tamboti makes good firewood.’
‘Just don’t barbecue on it, oom. The poison makes people sick.’
He had heard enough. That night Cobie de Villiers moved into a renovated labourer’s cottage and for three years worked harder than Stef Moller had ever seen anyone work before – from dawn till late at night, seven days a week.
‘He knew just about everything about nature. I learnt from him. A lot’
‘Did he ever talk about his past? Where did he get all that
knowledge?’
‘Ah, my dear …’ Stef Moller took off his glasses and began to polish them on his dirty T-shirt. His faded blue eyes seemed vulnerable without the protection of the thick lenses. ‘People.’ He put the glasses back on. ‘They come here, but they’re not interested in how we healed the veld. They ask other questions. Where did I come from? How did I make my money? I don’t like that. You shouldn’t judge a man by how many mistakes he’s made in his life, you should judge him by how much he’s learned from those mistakes.’ He stopped, as if he had answered her question.
Emma took it to mean that he had not. ‘Why did he leave?’
Moller blinked rapidly. ‘I don’t know …’ He shrugged. ‘He didn’t say. He asked for two weeks’ leave. And then he left. He didn’t even take all his things. Maybe …’ He looked away into the distance, where the sun hung low over the green hill.
‘Maybe what?’ Emma prompted him.
‘The girl,’ Moller said quietly. ‘It might have had something to do with the girl. The last few weeks before he left…’ His thoughts drifted off, then he pulled himself back. ‘That’s when he came to ask for leave. The first time in three years. I thought he wanted to take her somewhere, but then she came looking for him a while later. We didn’t see him again …’
‘Where did he go?’
‘He didn’t tell me. He didn’t tell anyone.’
‘When was this?’
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Ninety-seven. August.’
Emma sat still, as if the information was enlightening. Then she opened her handbag and took out a pen and a sheet of paper. It was the web page printout of the Mohlolobe Private Game Reserve. She turned it over on the table and wrote something on the back. She looked up at Moller again.
‘I would like to talk to the girl.’
