by Deon Meyer
‘So you offered your services.’
‘That is correct.’
‘So you could get into their good graces.’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘Although it would be murder?’
‘Murder? Mr Lemmer, we were at war. Samora Machel was a communist, an atheist waging a civil war on the people of his own country with the help of the Soviets. He was detaining, torturing and executing his own subjects without benefit of trial, a dictator harbouring terrorists, so he could destabilise the entire region while Russia sat and waited.’
‘Now those same “terrorists” are members of the board.’
‘The fall of communism changed everything.’
‘I see. And what about Jacobus le Roux? He was neither a communist nor an atheist.’
‘He was there. My heart goes out to him; it was all unnecessary, a tragic clash of circumstances. Sometimes, Mr Lemmer, the fate of nations takes precedence over the individual. Sometimes one has to make difficult decisions, very difficult decisions, in the interest of the greater good.’
‘Or the greater profit,’ I said.
He came away from the window and walked past me to the desk. He crossed his arms and said, ‘Who are you to judge?’
‘I suppose you’re right, Quintus.’
He nodded and went to his chair. ‘What else do you want to know?’
‘Where were you when the plane crashed?’
‘On Mariepskop. At the radar station.’
‘And when they murdered Johan and Sara le Roux?’
‘It was a car crash.’
‘Where were you?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Really?’
‘That’s right. Is there anything else, Mr Lemmer?’
‘I think I understand the rest. What I don’t understand is why you are prepared to leave Jacobus now, to let him talk.’
‘He won’t want to talk now.’
‘Oh?’
‘Mr Lemmer, the day he walked into the witch doctor’s hut and gunned down those people, he ceased to be a threat.’
‘Then why attack Emma?’
‘We were just lucky.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘At that stage we were not monitoring her calls. We didn’t feel that it was necessary any more. When we heard that Cobie had murdered a witch doctor, we started listening to the police telephones, mostly to keep up with events. We heard Emma phoning. We knew then that she would be the new risk, if she should succeed in tracking down Jacobus.’
‘But are you prepared to guarantee her safety now?’
‘It depends on what her brother tells her. Or you. Should she recover fully, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Her safety is in your hands.’
‘Unless I break your neck now.’
He looked up at the video camera. ‘I think that would be very foolish.’
I got to my feet. ‘Quintus, I want you to understand me very well. If the case against Jacobus does not go away, I will be back. If anything happens to him or Emma, ever, I will be back. I will show you, then, what kind of a coward I am.’
He nodded, not impressed. Then he leaned forward and swivelled the laptop so I could see the screen. ‘Mr Lemmer, keep one thing in mind. Should anything happen to me, the following material will be handed over to the authorities.’ He clicked a key and an image appeared on the screen in high resolution. I was standing in front of him with my back to the camera and I hit him. He fell back against the glass and sank to the ground.
Jeanette moved in between us and shoved me away. ‘Leave him.’ Her voice was as clear as glass.
‘I’m going to kill him.’
Wernich froze the image on the frame, leaving me standing over him and Jeanette restraining me.
‘Good sound quality,’ I said.
‘Our technology is top drawer.’
I had been leaning against the Porsche for ten minutes before Jeanette strolled up and unlocked the door. ‘Let’s go.’
Only once we were both seated did she take a DVD out of her pocket and drop it casually on my lap. ‘There you are,’ she said.
‘Did you have any difficulty?’
‘There’s nothing like a nine-millimetre against a man’s head to make him listen,’ she said.
‘You’re wilder than a wild dog.’ I plagiarised Dr Koos Taljaard’s phrase.
She merely laughed, started the Porsche and drove off. Then she described it.
She had waited until I went into Wernich’s office before asking Louise where the video control room was. At first Louise wouldn’t cooperate. Jeanette threatened to break her fingernails. ‘Her eyes were this big. Like I was some kind of barbarian.’
Louise reluctantly led her to the room to the rear of the building, the door unmarked. The secretary merely pointed a finger and walked away with huge dignity.
Jeanette had opened the door. The room was half dark, not very big. There was a bank of television screens encircling a man behind a control panel. The man was broad and strong with a bushy moustache; the hair that touched the top of his ears and collar was grey at the temples. She pointed the Colt at him and said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Loock.’ He looked her up and down and said, ‘You are Louw.’
‘Only when I’m not high.’
He wasn’t amused. ‘What do you want?’
‘Turn up the sound a bit, so we can hear what the men are saying.’ She gestured at the screens that displayed Wernich and me in his office.
They listened to our exchange and watched silently in the twilight of the room up to the point where I left. ‘I want a copy of that, please,’ she said
He had snorted with disdain. She shot a hole through the first monitor.
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I said.
‘His place is soundproof and dustproof. Probably waterproof too. Well, not any more. I had to damage the roof as well before he would make that DVD.’
She had shot three screens and a hole in the roof before he unhurriedly and mechanically burned a copy of the recording on a DVD. Then she hit him on the cheekbone with her Colt as hard as she could. His head jerked back and blood ran down his moustache.
‘He lifted his head and looked at me like a python at a spring-hare.’
‘Thanks, Jeanette.’
‘No, Lemmer, I’m the one who should say thank you,’ she said, and grinned in self-satisfaction.
I phoned B. J. Fikter. He said Jacobus le Roux had been talking to Emma for the past two hours. The police guard had been withdrawn.
‘I’ll come and relieve you tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Thank God,’ he said, and ended the call.
‘What now?’ Jeanette asked.
‘Now we are going to get your lovely receptionist, Jolene Freylinck, to make us a copy of this DVD.’
‘Only one?’
‘That’s all we need.’
‘Lemmer, I don’t agree. We ought to give one to each prospective member of his BEE board.’
‘Why? So they can fire him?’
‘It’s a start.’
‘But not a good ending.’
‘I suppose you have a better idea?’
‘I do. It will cost you a plane ticket.’
‘To Nelspruit?’
‘No. A little farther than that,’ I said.
‘What’s your plan?’
‘I think it’s better if you don’t know.’
She thought it over and I suppose she agreed, although she wasn’t happy about it. She banged the Porsche down a gear and floored the accelerator. The G-forces pressed us against the seats with an invisible hand.
The office looked out over the sea, but the antique air conditioner made too much noise for us to hear the breakers.
I faced a man the colour of dusk. He was deep in his sixties, hair snowy white, but the scar that stretched from the corner of his mouth to his ear was just as clear as when I had met him for the first tim
e ten years earlier. His eyes were still vacant, as though the person behind them had died inside. He was a man who no longer cared about feeling pain and who felt a certain pressure to dish it out.
I slid the DVD case across the desk towards him.
‘You will need an interpreter,’ I said.
‘For which language?’ His accent was strong.
‘Afrikaans.’
‘You can translate for me.’
‘I think we would both prefer an objective translation.’
‘I see.’ He reached for the holder and opened it. The disc gleamed, silver and new. ‘May I ask you why you are doing this?’
‘I would like to say it is because I believe in justice, but that wouldn’t be true. It’s because I believe in revenge.’
He nodded slowly and closed the case.
‘I know,’ he said, and put out his hand. ‘We are like family.’
As I walked out into the oppressive heat of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, at noon, my cell phone beeped above the hiss of the Indian Ocean. I took it out of my pocket and beckoned a taxi. I checked the message.
Three words only: EMMA IS AWAKE.
49
I must confess that I had expectations about the moment I would walk into Emma’s hospital room.
Not unreasonable expectations, such as Emma opening her arms and embracing me, whispering her gratitude and love in my ear. More along the lines of me sitting on the bed and she taking my hand and saying, ‘Thank you, Lemmer.’ That would have been good enough for me, a start, and a prelude to future possibilities.
But Jack Phatudi deprived me of that.
On Friday, 4 January he sent Black and White, the pair who had followed Emma and me a lifetime ago, to arrest me. The white one’s swelling around the nose and eyes was not totally gone yet. They arrested me with great ceremony at the Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport for ‘murder, attempted murder and defeating the ends of justice’. They allowed me to make one telephone call before locking me in the unbearable heat of the Nelspruit police cells, among a selection of colourful and antagonistic men.
B. J. Fikter came round on Saturday afternoon for what he called ‘cell visitation’. After getting in a few wisecracks about my dilemma, he told me that Emma was being flown to Cape Town on Saturday on a SouthMed Health Care plane. Also that Jeanette said not to worry, she was working on ‘my circumstances’.
By Monday morning there were threats about an additional charge of assaulting a fellow detainee, but I knew they would have difficulty finding credible witnesses. Then Black and White came to fetch me, cuffed my hands and feet, and took me to the magistrates’ court for a bail hearing. They were unnecessarily rough when they shoved me into the back of their Astra.
The holding cells were below the courtroom, in the basement. A young white lawyer with a fat gold ring came to introduce himself as Naas du Plessis. He would be representing me at the request of Jeanette Louw. ‘I will do what I can, but you have a former conviction,’ he said gloomily.
I was the last one to be called, but the two uniforms didn’t take me to a courtroom. They pushed me, shuffling to accommodate the chains and with my hands cuffed behind my back, into a tiny office where Jack Phatudi waited. They shut the door before leaving.
There were a couple of chairs, a table and a steel filing cabinet. I sat down. Silently, Phatudi directed a scowl of hatred at me. Then he punched a deep dent into the filing cabinet. The windows rattled. He came and stood in front of me holding his sore knuckles. His face was only centimetres from mine. For the first time I saw him sweat. The drops trickled down his dark skin, down the tree trunk of a neck into the snow-white collar of his shirt. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he would love to repeat the blow, this time against my head.
‘You …’ he said, but could not go on. He seemed to choke on the words massing behind his tongue. He turned around and kicked the cabinet. Another dent. He came back and grabbed my face with his right hand, fingers over my jaw and cheeks, and he squeezed with frightening force while he stared into my eyes. Then he shoved me backwards, making the chair topple over and my head hit the floor hard.
He made a sound of frustration and rage and said, ‘Let me tell you just one thing. Just one thing.’ He plucked me upright by my clothes and held me in front of him and said, ‘They couldn’t buy me.’ We stood like that, Jack Phatudi and I, and I knew Wernich and his people had made Phatudi an offer which he had refused. And I knew nothing I could say would make any difference.
So I just asked, ‘What do you mean, Jack?’
He let me go, so that I lost my balance and staggered backwards against the wall.
He turned his back on me. ‘They came with money. They said I should drop all charges. Against the one you shot. Against Cobie de Villiers. I refused. They said my people would win their land claim, and they would give money. How much did I want? I said no. So they just went over my head. They bought someone else up the chain of command, I don’t know who. But let me tell you now, I won’t leave it here. I will get you. And de Villiers and Kappies. I’ll get you.’
He turned on his heel and stalked past me without looking at me again. He opened the door and went out, barking some order down the passage in sePedi. The two uniforms came and unlocked the shackles and told me to go; the case against me had been withdrawn.
Emma had a room with a view of Table Mountain. When I arrived the door was open and the room was filled with people gathering around her, Jacobus le Roux, Carel the Rich and some of his children, Stoffel the Advocate, others I did not know. Peace-loving, attractive, successful people. The space was filled with friendship and joy. I stopped in my tracks before they saw me and stole one look at Emma in profile. Her face was thinner, but the lines were so unmistakably beautiful when she smiled, and I turned away and scribbled a note that I left with the flowers at the nurses’ station.
I had to fetch my Isuzu from Hermanus. And then go to Stodels for the herb seedlings.
She phoned me the following day.
‘Thank you for the flowers,’ she said.
‘It’s a pleasure.’
‘You should have come in, Lemmer.’
‘There were so many people.’
‘How can I ever thank you?’
‘I was just doing my job.’
‘Ai, Lemmer, you’re back in your shell again. Where are you?’
‘In Loxton.’
‘What’s the weather like?’
‘Hot.’
‘The wind is blowing here in Cape Town.’
‘I’m glad you’re better, Emma.’
‘I have you to thank for that.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I’ll come and visit you. When I’m well again.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Thanks, Lemmer. For everything.’
‘It’s a pleasure.’
Then we said goodbye, awkwardly, and I knew that the odds were ten to one that I would never see her again.
It was raining when I read about the deaths of Quintus Wernich and Christo Loock.
It was 14 February and I was sitting at my table reading the paper with thunder rumbling outside above the drum of fat raindrops on the corrugated-iron roof. The front-page article in Die Burger told the story of the suspected carjacking at Stellenbosch and a renewed outcry against the atrocious levels of crime.
I read it twice and then sat staring out of the kitchen window at the bright pools forming in my herb garden and thought about the man with the scarred cheek. Raul Armando de Sousa.
I saw him in 1997, just once, during government talks in Maputo. He called all the bodyguards together in a conference hall to discuss the procedures for the banquet on the final evening. By his eyes I recognised him as a brother-in-violence, but there was more to his dusk-coloured façade – a burden, an invisible weight he carried on his shoulders.
I asked about him circumspectly. They told me that he had been the man who guarded Samora Machel. He had b
een in the Tupolev 134A when it flew into the side of the Lebombo mountains. He was one of the ten they took out of the wreckage alive. I understood then. I wondered what it must feel like to wait your whole life to be defined, only to find when the crucial moment arrived that there was nothing you could do. Was it not preferable to remain invisible and incomplete?
It was of him that I had thought when Jacobus le Roux told me his story under a tree on Heuningklip. By then I knew how Raul Armando de Sousa must feel. And that sometimes there is a way out.
That was how I knew with total certainty that he had been there the previous night in Stellenbosch. De Sousa had pulled the trigger.
I read the rest of the paper without concentration. Until I spotted the small report on an inner page, a single column beside a Pick ’n Pay advertisement. Conservation groups have expressed their concern about the manner and extent of the settlement of the Sibashwa tribe’s land claim in the Kruger National Park.
When I had finished, I took a walk around the garden to savour the divine smell of a wet Karoo. I thought about Jack Phatudi, son of a Sibashwa chief.
At five o’clock I went jogging on the Bokpoort road at a speed calculated to get me home in time to watch 7de Loan on television.
There is a spot on this route, a rise beyond the last stock gate at Jakhalsdans, where millions of years of geological forces have piled massive rocks on top of one another like beacons. On either side the Karoo lies open, and I go and stand there to gain perspective of our place in the universe. We are all small, insignificant, invisible if you draw back, away from the earth, the solar system, the Milky Way.
But jogging back through town, sparkling and clean after the rain, people greeted me: Conrad at the Repair Shop, De Wit locking up at the Co-op, Antjie Barnard from her veranda, Oom Joe van Wyk pulling weeds in the garden.
‘Afternoon, Lemmer. Nice rain, hey?’
Far down the street, right on the edge of town, was my house. I saw a green Renault Mégane, a cabriolet, parked in front of it, and I began to run faster.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Authors are often asked, ‘What inspired you to write this book?’
