Devil's Peak: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  Relief. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Memory like an elephant, my friend. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven, thereabouts, I still worked for Shakes Senzeni, God rest his soul. He had a chop shop in Gugs and I was his foreman. Orlando asked for a sit-down over division of territory, d’you remember? Big meeting in Stikland and you sat next to Orlando. Afterwards Shakes said that was clever, we couldn’t speak Xhosa among ourselves. Fuck, my friend, small world. I hear Orlando has retired, the Nigerians have taken over the drug trade.”

  “I last saw Orlando two or three years ago.” He could remember the meeting, but not the man in front of him. There was something else, a realization of alternatives — if he had remained with Orlando, where would that have left him now?

  “So, what do you do now?”

  He could keep to his cover with more conviction now. “I am freelance. I put jobs together . . .” What would he have done when Orlando retired? Operated a nightclub? Run something on the periphery of the law. How close to a potential truth was the story he was fabricating now?

  “A broker?”

  “A broker.” There was a time when it was possible, when it could have been true. But that lay in the past. What lay ahead? Where was he going?

  “And you have something for Johnny Khoza?”

  “Maybe.”

  Shouts rang out above the music and they looked around. The strong colored man was dancing on the table now with his shirt off. A dragon tattoo spat faded red fire across his chest while bystanders urged him on.

  Boss Man Madikiza shook his head. “Trouble brewing,” he said, and turned back to Thobela. “I don’t think Johnny is available, my friend. I hear he’s on the run. They got him in Ciskei for AR and manslaughter. He did a service station — Johnny never thinks big. So when the court case went wrong, it cost him big money to buy a key, you know what I’m saying. I don’t know where he is, but he is definitively not in the Cape. He would have come creeping in here long ago if he was. In any case, I have better talent on my books — just tell me what you need.”

  For the first time the possibility occurred to him that he might not get them. The possibility that his search could be fruitless, that they had crept into a hole somewhere where he could not get at them. The frustration pressed heavily down on him, making him feel sluggish and impotent. “The thing is,” he said, although he already knew it would not work, “Khoza has information on the potential job. A contact on the inside. Is there no one who would know where he is?”

  “He has a brother . . . I don’t know where.”

  “No one else?” Where to now? If he couldn’t find Khoza and Ramphele? What then? With an effort he shook off the feeling and concentrated on what the Boss Man was saying.

  “I don’t know too much about him. Johnny is small time, one of many who try to impress me. They are all the same — come in here with big attitude, throw their money around in front of the girls like they were big gangstas, but they do service stations. No class. If Johnny has told you he has a contact on the inside for a serious score, you should be careful.”

  “I will.” The farm was not an option. He could not go back. With this frustration in him it would drive him insane. What was he going to do?

  “Where can I get hold of you? If I hear something?”

  “I will come back.”

  The Boss Man’s little eyes narrowed. “You don’t trust me?”

  “I trust nobody.”

  The little laugh bubbled up, champagne from a barrel, and a marshmallow hand patted him on the shoulder. “Well said, my friend . . .”

  There was a crash louder than the music. The dancing dragon’s table had broken beneath him and he fell spectacularly, to the great enjoyment of the onlookers. He lay on the floor holding his beer glass triumphantly above him.

  “Fuck,” said the Boss Man and got up from the stool. “I knew things would get out of hand.”

  The colored man stood up slowly and gestured an apology in Madikiza’s direction. He nodded back with a forced smile.

  “He will pay for the table, the shit.” He turned to Thobela. “Do you know who that is?”

  “No idea.”

  “Enver Davids. Yesterday he walked away from a baby rape charge. On a technicality. Fucking police misplaced his file, can you believe it — a genuine administrative fuck-up; you don’t buy your way out of that one. He’s more bad news than the Financial Mail. General of the Twenty-Sevens. He got AIDS in jail from a wyfie. More cell time than Vodacom, and they parole him and he goes and rapes a baby, supposed to cure his AIDS . . . Now he comes and drinks here, because his own people will string him up, the fucking filthy shit.”

  “Enver Davids,” said Thobela slowly.

  “Fucking filthy shit,” said the Boss Man again, but Thobela was beyond hearing. Something was beginning to make sense. He could see a way forward.

  His hands trembled on the steering wheel. They had a life of their own. He felt cold in the warm summer night and he knew it was withdrawal. He knew it was beginning — it was going to be a terrible night in the flat of Josephine Mary McAllister.

  He reached out to the radio, locating the knob with difficulty, and pressed it. Music. He kept the volume low. At this time of night Sea Point’s streets were alive with cars and pedestrians, people going somewhere with purpose. Except for him.

  They had made a circle around him once everyone was finished. They gathered around him, touched him as if to transfer something to him through their hands. Strength. Or belief? Faces, too many faces. Some faces told a story in the rings around their eyes and mouths, like the rings of a tree. Heartbreaking stories. Others were masks hiding secrets. But the eyes, all the eyes were the same — piercing, glowing with willpower, like someone in floodwaters hanging on to a thin green branch. He will see, they said. He will see. What he did see was that he was part of The Last Chance Club. He felt the same desperation, the same dragging floodwaters.

  The tremor ran through him like a fever. He could hear their voices and he turned the music up. Rhythm filled the car. Louder. Rock, Afrikaans, he tried to follow the words.

  Ek wil huis toe gaan na Mamma toe,

  Ek wil huis toe gaan na Mamma toe.

  Too much synthesizer, he thought, not quite right, but good.

  Die rivier is vol, my trane rol.

  He parked in front of the block of flats, but didn’t get out. He allowed his fingers to run down the imaginary neck of a base guitar — that’s what the song needed, more base. Lord, it would be good to hold a base guitar again. The trembling limb jerked to a rhythm all of its own and made him want to laugh out loud.

  ’n Bokkie wat vanaand by my wil le a . . .

  Nostalgia. Where were the days, where was the twenty-year-old little fucker who throttled a base guitar in the police dance band until the very walls shook?

  Sy kan maar le a, ek is ’n loslappie.

  Emotion. His eyes burned. Fuck, no, he wasn’t a crybaby. He banged the radio off, opened the door and got out fast, so he could get away from this place.

  11.

  The minister wondered if she was telling the whole truth — he searched between her words and in her body language. He could see the anger, old and new, the involuntary physical self-consciousness. The continuous, practiced offering of mouth, breasts and hair. Her eyes had a strange shape, almost oriental. And they were small. Her features were not delicate, but had an attractive regularity. Her neck was not thin, but strong. Her gaze sometimes skittered away as though she might betray something: a thirst for acceptance? Or was there something rotten? Or spoilt, like a child still wanting her own way, craving attention and respect, an ego feeding on alternating current — now brave, now incredibly fragile.

  Fascinating.

  He phoned his wife just after ten, when he knew she would have had her bath and would be sitting on their bed with her dressing gown pulled above her knees smoothing cream on her legs, and then turning to the mirror and doing the same to her face with deli
cate movements of her fingertips. He wanted to be there now to watch her do it, because his memories of that were not recent.

  “I am sober,” was the first thing he said.

  “That’s good,” she said, but without enthusiasm, so that he didn’t know how to continue.

  “Anna . . .”

  She did not speak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said with feeling.

  “So am I, Benny.” Without inflection.

  “Don’t you want to know where I am?”

  “No.”

  He nodded as if he had been expecting it.

  “I’ll say goodnight then.”

  “Goodnight, Benny.” She put the phone down and he held his cell phone to his ear for a little longer and he knew she did not believe he would make it.

  Perhaps she was right.

  She saw that she had entranced him and said: “In Standard Nine I slept with a teacher. And with a buddy of my father.” But he did not react.

  “What do you think?” she asked. Suddenly she had to know.

  He hesitated for so long that she became anxious. Had he heard, was he listening? Or was he revolted by her?

  “I think you are deliberately trying to shock me,” he said, but he was smiling at her and his tone was as soft as water.

  For a moment she was embarrassed. Unconsciously, her hand flew up to her hair, the fingers twisting the ends.

  “What interests me is why you would want to do that. Do you still think I will judge you?”

  It was only part of the truth, but she nodded fractionally.

  “I can hardly blame you for that, as I suspect experience has taught you that that is what people do.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Let me tell you that counseling from a Christian point of view distinguishes between the person and the deed. What we do is sometimes unacceptable to God, but we are never unacceptable to Him. And He expects the same from me, if I am to do His work.”

  “My father also thought he was doing God’s work.” The words were out in reflex, an old anger.

  He grimaced as if in pain, as if she had no right to make this comparison.

  “The Bible has been used for many agendas. Fear too.”

  “So why does God allow that?” She knew the question was lying in wait and she had not seen it.

  “You must remember . . .”

  Her hands seemed to lose their grip, she seemed to have lost her footing. “No, tell me. Why? Why did He write the Bible like that so that everyone could use it as they please?” She could hear her own voice, the way it spiraled, how it carried the emotion with it. “If He loves us so much? What did I do to Him? Why didn’t He give me an easy road too? Like you and your wife? Why did He give me Viljoen and then allow him to blow his brains out? What was my sin? He gave me my father — what chance did I have after that? If He wanted me to be stronger, why didn’t He make me stronger? Or cleverer? I was a child. How was I supposed to know? How was I supposed to know grown-ups were fucked up?” The sound of the swear word was sharp and cutting and she heard it as he would and it made her stop. Angrily, she wiped the wet off her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  When he did react, he surprised her again. “You are in trouble,” he said nearly inaudibly.

  She nodded. And sniffed.

  He opened a drawer, took out a box of tissues and pushed it over the desk towards her. Somehow this gesture disappointed her. History — she was not the first.

  “Big trouble,” he said.

  She ignored the tissues. “Yes.”

  He put a big, freckled hand on the cardboard box. “And it has to do with this?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it has to do with that.”

  “And you are afraid,” he said.

  She nodded.

  He pressed a hand over the man’s mouth and the assegai blade against his throat and waited for him to wake. It came with a jerk of the body and eyes opening wide and wild. He put his head close to the small ear and whispered, “If you keep quiet, I will give you a chance.” He felt the power of Davids’s body straining against the pressure. He cut him with the tip of the blade against the throat, but lightly, just so that he could feel the sting. “Lie still.”

  Davids subsided, but his mouth moved under the hand.

  “Quiet,” he whispered again, the stink of drink in his nostrils. He wondered how sober Davids was, but he could wait no longer — it was nearly four o’clock.

  “Let’s go outside, you and me. Understand?”

  The shaven head nodded.

  “If you make a noise before we are outside, I will cut you.”

  Nod.

  “Come.” He allowed him to get up, got behind him with the assegai under Davids’s chin, arm around his throat. They shuffled through the dark house to the front door. He felt the tension in the man’s muscles and he knew the adrenaline was flowing in him too. They were outside, on the pavement, and he took a quick step back. He waited for Davids to turn to him, saw the dragon’s raging red eyes, and took the knife from his pocket, a long butcher’s knife he had found in a kitchen drawer.

  He passed it to the colored man.

  “Here,” he said. “This is your chance.”

  At quarter-past seven when Griessel entered the parade room of the Serious and Violent Crimes building in Bishop Lavis, he did not feel the buzz.

  He sat with his head down, paging aimlessly through the dossier on his lap, searching for a starting point on which to build his oral report. He was light-headed — thoughts darting like silver fish, diving aimlessly into a green sea, this way, that way, evasive, always out of reach. His hands were sweating. He couldn’t say he had nothing to report. They would laugh at him. Joubert would crap him out. He would have to say he was waiting for Forensics. Jissis, if he could just keep his hands still. He felt nauseous, an urge to throw up, vomit out all the shit.

  Senior Superintendent Matt Joubert clapped his hands twice and the sharp sound echoed through him. The voices of the detectives quieted.

  “You have probably all heard,” said Joubert, and a reaction ran through his audience: “Tell them, Bushy.” There was contentment in his voice and Griessel read the mood. Something was going on.

  Bezuidenhout stood against the opposite wall and Griessel tried to focus on him, his eyes flickering, blink-blink-blink-blink. He heard Bushy’s gravely voice: “Last night Enver Davids was stabbed to death in Kraaifontein.”

  A joyful riot broke out in the parade room. Griessel was perplexed. Who was Davids?

  The noise droned through Griessel, the sickness growing inside. Christ, he was sick, sick as a dog.

  “His pals say they went drinking at a shebeen in Khayelitsha and came home to the house in Kraaifontein about one a.m., when they went to sleep. This morning, just after five, someone knocked on the door to say there was a man lying dead in the street.”

  Griessel knew he would hear the sound.

  “Nobody heard or saw anything,” said Inspector Bushy Bezuidenhout. “It looks like a knife fight. Davids has slash wounds to the hands and one on the neck, but at this stage the fatal wound seems to be a stab through the heart.”

  Griessel saw Davids fall backwards, mouth stretched wide, the fillings in his teeth rusty brown. The scream, at first as thick as molasses, a tongue slowly sticking out, and the scream growing thin, thinner than blood. And it came to him.

  “They should have cut off his balls,” said Vaughn Cupido.

  The policemen laughed and that made the sound accelerate, the long thin trail scorched through the ether. Griessel jerked his head away, but the sound found him.

  Then he vomited, dry and retching and he heard the laughter and heard someone say his name. Joubert? “Benny, are you alright? Benny?” But he was not fucking alright, the noise was in his head, and it would never get out.

  He drove first to the hotel room in Parow. Davids’s blood was on his arms and clothes. Boss Man’s words repeated in his head: He got AIDS in jail from a wyfie. />
  He washed his big body with great concentration, scrubbed down with soap and water, washed his clothes afterwards in the bath, put on a clean set and walked out to his pickup.

  It was past five when he came outside — the east was beginning to change color. He took the N1 and then the N7 and the Table View off ramp near the smoking, burning refinery where a thousand lights still shone. Minibus taxis were already busy. He drove as far as Blouberg, thinking of nothing. He got out at the sea. It was a cloudless morning. An unsettled breeze still looking for direction blew softly against his skin. He looked up to the mountain where the first rays of the sun made deep shadows on the cliffs, like the wrinkles of an old man. Then he breathed, slowly in and out.

  Only when his pulse had slowed to normal did he take from the cubbyhole, where he had stowed it yesterday, the Argus article, neatly torn out.

  “Does someone want to harm you?” asked the minister.

  She blew her nose loudly and looked at him apologetically, rolling up the tissue in her hand. She took another and blew again.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?” He reached under his desk and brought out a white plastic wastepaper basket. She tossed the tissues into it, took another and wiped her eyes and cheeks.

  “There is more than one,” she said, and the emotions threatened again. She waited a moment for them to subside. “More than one.”

  12.

  Are you sure he is guilty?” he had asked Boss Man Madikiza, because ideas had materialized in his head out of nowhere and his blood was boiling.

  The fat man snorted and said Davids had been in his office before the drinking began. Boastful and smug. The police had his cum, in their hands, the dee-en-ay evidence, they could have nailed him right there with a life sentence with their test tubes and their microscopes and then they moered the bottle away, thick as bricks, and so the prosecutor came up to the judge dragging his feet and said dyor onner, we fucked up a little, no more dee-en-ay, no more rape charge. Did that judge kak them out, my bro’, like you won’t believe. “What kind of person?” the Boss Man asked Thobela with total revulsion, “what kind of person rapes a baby, I ask you?”