by Deon Meyer
Griessel knew it wouldn’t help, but he kept up appearances. ‘Please.’
He turned and walked back to his office. While he waited for Nyathi and the SSA agent to finish talking, he wanted to bring his admin up to date. The file would have to be created. He must write an email to his team, remind them to forward him their interview reports and witness statements for Section A. Then he must write out his own interviews and notes, and in Section C, he must fill in the investigation journal on the SAPS5 form, a detailed, chronological history of the case.
It made him wonder: should he leave out the discussion with the Consulate entirely? Or just not mention the full content?
Nyathi called him within fifteen minutes.
‘They want to be kept in the loop,’ said the colonel. ‘So now I have to liaise with an SSA agent as often as I deem necessary.’
‘Sir, if we ask the SSA to look in their database for a hit man who engraves his shell casings . . .’
‘I did not tell him about the engravings, Benny. I had to tell them about Adair, because I don’t know what they might have eavesdropped on. But I told them no more than we told Graber.’
‘OK.’
‘Anything new?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Go and get some sleep, Benny. Tell Philip’s people to alert you only if they find something big.’
15
He drove home.
Alexa would still be awake.
She was a true creature of the night, staying up till all hours. In the evenings she answered emails and talked on the phone when he wasn’t there. She went over the figures from the record company while she listened to demo CDs of hopeful artists (‘One never knows . . .’), and she talked with him about his day when he eventually arrived home.
And she cooked for them. He suspected it was her method of suppressing the urge to drink, an attempt at a degree of normality, to create a homely atmosphere after the chaos of her first marriage, and the bohemian nature of her world. He also suspected that she thought that he expected it of her, even though he had denied it.
But Alexa was no chef. She had no natural aptitude for cooking, and she was easily distracted if a text or a call came in, so that she couldn’t remember which of the ingredients she had already added to the pot. And her sense of taste was decidedly suspect. She would carefully taste the pasta sauce, declare it perfect, but when she dished it up and began to eat, she would frown and say: ‘Something is not right. Can you taste it too?’
He would lie.
But these were insignificant untruths. White lies.
The big lie, the unmentionable, unshareable and increasingly unbearable lie, the fraud that assailed him now on the dark, silent N1 on the way to Alexa, was the one about sex.
He swore out loud in the car.
Life just never gave him a break.
If you drank as he used to drink, seven days a week, sex was not a big priority. When lust sometimes overcame him, his alcohol-soaked equipment wouldn’t cooperate anyway.
But then you dried out, and that had consequences. The biggest problem of being on the wagon was the desire for the healing powers of the bottle. Close on those heels was the return of the libido, at a time when you have way too much mileage on your middle-aged clock, and desirable women were not necessarily queuing up to accommodate you.
Which was what was so damn ironic. Six months ago he was head over heels in love with Alexa, and a big chunk of that was his desire to make love to her, good and proper. Look, he was a sucker for a beautiful mouth, and she certainly had one, broad and generous and soft. And like most guys, surely, he appreciated a royal pair of jugs – as Cupido, faced with an impressive bust measurement, would longingly, admiringly describe them.
And there was Alexa’s voice, and her attitude, and that look in her eyes, as if she knew what you were thinking, and she wanted you to keep on thinking just that. He had always had a thing for her, from way back, when she first hit the limelight and he was just one more nameless fan staring at the sexy singer on the TV screen, harbouring his unseemly secret thoughts.
He was crazy for her.
But then, after the chaos of the Sloet case, six months ago, it happened for the first time, and it was everything that Benny Griessel had dreamed of. Lord, that woman could kiss, and her body was just the right combination of soft and firm, even though she was closer to fifty than he was. She was so instantly responsive, her hands all over his body. Her eagerness, her spontaneity, she didn’t mind showing her pleasure, shouting, in her jubilant velvet voice: ‘Oh yes, Benny, yes. Good, Benny, so good, more, more, more,’ along with a few other things that you wouldn’t ever mention to anyone, but that were thrilling all the same.
Afterwards, he would lie beside her, spent and wet with perspiration, in love, lost, and so immensely pleased with himself and with her, and with them. He thought, fuck, finally life had given him a break, this sexy creature, this fabulous woman.
And from there on it only got better.
Between her busy scheduleand his unpredictable work, at least once a week – now and again two heavenly times – they would repeat the miracle in her big double bed. A couple of times in the sitting room, and once in the shower, soaking wet and slippery with soap. They learned more of each other’s tastes and bodies and pleasures, grew relaxed and easy, and Griessel was happy for the first time in he didn’t know how long.
And then he went and moved in.
‘It would be so nice to have just a little more of you, Benny. Even if it is a half an hour in the morning, or evening.’ That’s how Alexa brought it up.
He thought that, if it was so amazing when he saw her so seldom, it could only be better when he saw her more. Logical argument. In addition, it made economic and practical sense. She was alone in that rambling house, he was cooped up with his cheap furniture in his cramped bachelor fl at.
And they loved each other.
So he gave up his flat, and took the furniture back to Mohammed ‘Love Lips’ Faizal’s pawn shop, and with the proceeds he took Alexa to her favourite restaurant, Bizerca, where he, SAPS Detective Captain, sat eating oysters in the knowledge that his constant struggle was over, life was good. That first moving-in night they fucked like teenagers, and he knew it had been the right decision.
The second night, when he came to bed, Alexa slipped her hand under the elastic of his pyjama bottoms and she stroked and teased and kissed him, and he njapsed her again.
The third night, the same thing. His soldier struggled to stand quite to attention, and his performance was not what you’d call first rate, but he pressed through.
And by night four he knew he was in trouble.
In his twenties, when he and his ex, Anna, were young and horny and newly married, he could do the deed two, three times a day.
But that was in the old days. A quarter century and a thousand litres of Jack Daniel’s ago.
Now it was altogether a different matter.
So, what did you do?
He couldn’t say to Alexa ‘no, fok weet, this is a bit much’. Not when she looked at you with those eyes full of love and compassion and sexual need, not when you had been njapsing her with such abandon for the past six months. Not if she had bought you clothes and an iPhone, and treated you like this big hero.
There was no way he could sit in front of a doctor and say ‘I want a prescription for Viagra’. His sexual prowess had nothing to do with anyone, he didn’t have that sort of courage, and he couldn’t swallow those pills every day. Then he would be addicted all over again to something new, walking around with a permanent Jakob Regop – a constant boner was trouble that he really didn’t need.
All he could do, was to sleep over at work. To get the lead back in his pencil.
Which meant he looked rough in the morning, and lied to all and sundry, and his boss and his colleagues thought he was drinking again.
He knew it couldn’t go on like this.
But what was he to do?
&
nbsp; He was fucked. He knew it.
She met him at the door, kissed him, clucked over him, led him to the kitchen ‘for lasagne, it didn’t come out exactly as I hoped, Benny, but you must be terribly hungry’. She sat with him in the kitchen. He ate, and told little white lies about the taste of the food. She asked about his day. He told her everything, except the part about Adair. She listened so attentively, was so impressed. Then she said: ‘My master detective. You’ll catch them.’
He asked about her day. She told him about the negotiations and recordings, about the battle to get publicity and time on air for her artists. ‘The market is getting a bit overcrowded.’
They went to the bedroom.
He brushed his teeth, put on his new pyjamas. She sat in front of the mirror chatting, taking off her make-up, told him she had left Woollies food in the fridge for while she was away in Johannesburg from tomorrow. She said she would miss him. And he must keep safe. And phone when he could, she had a horde of meetings and one appearance at Carnival City, but byThursday she would be back again.
He made the calculations. Two nights to recover, to reload his pistol.
She undressed, rubbed her body with creams and oils. She put on her nightclothes, switched off the light. She lay down close to him, held him tightly, her mouth against his neck.
‘I love you, Benny.’
‘And I love you too.’
Her hand moved to his belly, slipped under the pyjama bottoms.
‘Where’s that rascal?’ she asked playfully.
The ringing of his cellphone woke him.
He saw it was the DPCI number. It was 2.12 in the morning. He picked it up and walked out so as not to disturb Alexa any more. It was cold in the passage without the pyjamas that still lay bundled up somewhere under the sheets.
‘Griessel,’ he answered.
‘Benny, this is Philip. I’m sorry to wake you . . .’
‘No problem,’ he said, and tried to keep the sleepiness out of his voice.
‘I thought you should know: we have just received a call from Senior Superintendent Jean-Luc Bonfils from Interpol in Lyon. It’s about the snake on the cartridges.’
He went into the sitting room. There had been a heater on when he came in earlier.
‘Do they know something?’
‘Yes, “something” is probably the best description. He received our query, and he’s sending us everything they have within the next hour, but in the meantime he wanted to tell me: this is the sixteenth international murder that they know of with that “snake trademark”, as he calls it . . .’
‘Jissis,’ said Griessel. The heater in the sitting room was off, but the room was not as chilly as the passage. He turned it on, up to maximum while he listened and stood wide-legged over it.
‘I made a few quick notes,’ said van Wyk. ‘The details are not quite right, but here is what I have: the first crime scene where such a marked cartridge was found, was seven years ago in Portugal. I’ll come back to that just now. Most of the consecutive murders were in Europe – Germany, France, Spain, Holland, Poland, Belgium, and Italy. One was in Britain, one in New York, and one in Reykjavik, Iceland. He says there may be one or two in Russia, but these have never been officially handed over to Interpol. This one in Franschhoek is the first in the southern hemisphere.’
‘Each time the cartridges had the snake on them?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And the targets?’
‘That’s the funny thing. He says they have no doubt it is a hired assassin, but there is no specific pattern, except for the engraving, of course. In Poland, Spain, and France, the victims were definitely organised crime. The one in New York was a woman of eighty-two, a multimillionaire and an art collector. In Germany it was a young dotcom entrepreneur, and the other a very pretty teacher in her thirties. They were not connected in any way, and the murders were fourteen months apart. I could go on. Bonfils said their theory was that he works for anyone who is prepared to pay. And apparently he charges a lot. A hundred thousand euro per victim, at least.’
‘Do they know who he is?’
‘They have a few interesting theories, really just based on a single informant who doesn’t know the whole story either. Bonfils says the snake on the cartridges is most probably the Mozambican Spitting Cobra, and the letters NM stand for Naja mossambica, the Latin name for the snake. Apparently very poisonous, and deadly accurate . . .’
He struggled to link a European hit man with an African snake. ‘Mozambique? That’s . . . odd?’
‘Indeed. And that’s where the story gets interesting. The hit man is known as the Cobra, and Interpol think he is Mozambican. Bonfils says the reasons for that are all in the report, but it starts with the first murder, in Portugal.’
‘He’s sending it now?’
‘That’s what he promised.’
‘I’m coming in . . . You should get some sleep, Phil.’
‘I will, as soon as I have read the report.’
Griessel rang off and stood there, cellphone in hand.
A Mozambican. A British professor. On a Cape wine farm belonging to a German.
Where were the days when this land was the polecat of the world, when no one came here? When at least you knew the suspect would be a local fokker?
Then he grew aware of the musky scent of sex rising along with the warm air from the heater. He looked down at his penis, now small and shrivelled.
Rascal.
In the big dark room he laughed quietly, mockingly at himself.
16
Just past three in the morning, in the perfect silence of his cramped office beside the IMC hall, van Wyk gave Griessel the print-out of the email and said: ‘Read this first . . .’
He took the page and read.
Jean-Luc Bonfils
To:[email protected]
Re:Cobra (Cobra/B79C1/04/03/2007)
Dear Captain van Wyk
It was a pleasure talking to a fellow law enforcement officer on the graveyard shift, albeit a continent and hemisphere away, and under these circumstances.
Allow me to start with the most important:
1. I am not the Interpol officer assigned to the Cobra dossier. This is Supt. Marie-Caroline Aubert, and she will be very anxious to assist you in any way. I will share all our communications with her later today.
2. May I respectfully request a copy of your investigation records for our database as soon as your schedule allows? If you could please also keep me informed, should you make positive progress (or, of course, an arrest). Interpol is keenly interested in this subject, especially given the fact that this is the first reported homicide committed by the Cobra in the southern hemisphere.
3. Please find attached twenty-one (21) documents, which is the full complement of available material at Interpol, and includes notes on all the known Cobra dossiers.
4. Please allow me one clarification: you will notice that the Légion étrangère (L.E. or French Foreign Legion) photograph is of very low resolution, and that the information supplied by the L.E. is limited. This is not an omission on the part of Interpol. Usually the L.E. does not release any information on their enlistments to law enforcement (not even French authorities). However, they do screen all applicants for serious crimes through an agreement with Interpol before acceptance. It was this connection we leveraged for the little information on Curado that was released (unofficially, as a favour).
Please let me know if we can be of assistance in any way, and best of luck with your investigation.
Jean-Luc Bonfils (Superintendent)
INTERPOL
200, quai Charles de Gaulle
69006 Lyon
France
‘OK,’ said Griessel.
Van Wyk pressed his finger on a bundle of documents. ‘This pile contains summaries of all the relevant murder investigations in the northern hemisphere,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anything new, but the cartridges are there every t
ime. The only interesting thing is that the Cobra began using a new Heckler & Koch MK23 in 2009 and 2011. But it seems as though he acquires the latest model every two years . . .’
Van Wyk pushed more print-outs across to Benny. ‘Read these first. That’s how they put two and two together.’
Griessel picked up the top page.
INTERPOL
General Secretariat
200, quai Charles de Gaulle
69006 Lyon
France
Intelligence report: Cobra/B79C1/04/03/2007/19/03/2009
Report date: 2 May 2010
Report submitted by: Stefano Masini, Procura della Repubblica presso il Tribunale di Milano
Interview by: Stefano Masini, Procura della Repubblica presso il Tribunale di Milano
Interview with: (Name withheld, paid informant, Bari.)
Interview venue: Bari, Italy
(Edited Transcription, translated by M.P. Ross, Interpol, 19 May 2010)
SM: The shell casings found on the scene of the Carnevale killing are engraved with a snake, and the letters N and M. Do you . . .
X: (Expletive.) That’s bad, man.
SM: Have you ever heard of such markings?
X:Yes, yes, I’ve heard the rumours, lots of rumours. It’s the Cobra. Very dangerous guy.
SM: Does he work for ‘ndrangheta?
X: No, (expletive) no, he’s a freelancer, he works for anybody, he’s a gun for hire. Very expensive, hundred thousand euros for a hit, but they say he never misses, he always delivers. If the Cobra takes a contract on you, you’re (expletive) dead, man. For sure.
