Devil's Peak: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  He studied the map. His finger traced Hannes Louw Drive where it crossed the N1. If he parked north of the freeway, using the narrow strip of veld and parkland . . . That was the long, slow option, but it could be done.

  In the case in which Colin Pretorius stands accused of child molestation and rape, an eleven-year-old boy yesterday testified how the accused called him to his office three years ago and showed him material of a pornographic nature. The accused locked the door and later began to fondle himself and encouraged the boy to do the same.

  His next problem would be getting into the house. The front was too visible, he would have to get in the back where the concrete wall hid him from the neighbors. There were the burglar bars. The security contract meant an alarm. And a panic button.

  The woman, whose name may not be made public, testified that her five-year-old son’s symptoms of stress, which included acute aggression, bedwetting and lack of concentration, obliged his parents to consult a child psychologist. In therapy the boy revealed the molestation over a period of three months by Pretorius, owner of a crèche.

  There were two alternatives. Wait for Pretorius to come home. Or try to gain entry. The first option was too unpredictable, too hard to control. The second was difficult, but not impossible.

  He paid for his cold drink. He was not hungry. He felt too much anticipation, a vague tension, a sharpening of his senses. He fetched his pickup from the parking area and left.

  During his arrest, police seized Pretorius’s computer, CD-ROM material and videos. Inspector Dries Luyt of the Domestic Violence Unit told the court the quantity and nature of the child pornography found was the “worst this unit has yet seen.”

  He flowed with the traffic.

  He thought of being with Pakamile, the week before his death, in the mountain landscape of Mpumalanga beyond Amersfoort. On their motorbikes together with the six other students in the bright morning sun, between the pretty wooden houses, his son’s eyes fixed on the instructor who spoke to them with such fervor.

  “The greatest enemy of the motorbike rider is target fixation. It’s in our blood. The connection between eyes and brain unfortunately works this way: if you look at a pothole or a rock, you will ride into it. Make sure you never look directly at the obstruction. Fighter pilots are trained to look ninety degrees away from the target the moment they press the missile-firing buttons. Once you have spotted an obstacle in the road, you know it’s there. Search for the way around it; keep your eyes on the line to safety. You and your motorbike will follow automatically.”

  He had sat there thinking this was not just a lesson in motorbike riding — life worked like that too. Even if you only realized it late or nearly too late. Sometimes you never did see the rocks. Like when he came back after the war. Battle ready, cocked, primed for the New South Africa. Ready to use his training, his skills and experience. An alumnus of the KGB university, graduate of the Stasi sniper school, veteran of seventeen eliminations in the cities of Europe.

  Nobody wanted him.

  Except for Orlando Arendse, that is. For six years he protected drug routes and collected drug debts, until he began to notice the rocks and potholes, until he needed to choose a safer line in order not to smash himself on the rocks.

  And now?

  He parked beside Hendrik Verwoerd Drive, high up against the bump of the Tygerberg, where you can see the Cape stretched out in front of you as far as Table Mountain, glittering in the night.

  He sat for a moment, but did not see the view.

  Perhaps the motorcycle instructor was wrong: avoiding the obstacles of life was not enough. How does a child choose a line through all the sickness, all the terrible traps? Maybe life needed someone to clear away the obstacles.

  When Griessel returned to the flat with both hands full of Pick and Pay bags, Dr. Barkhuizen was standing at his door, hand raised to knock.

  “I came to see if you were okay.”

  Later they sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, drinking instant coffee from brand new floral mugs, and Griessel told him about the beer advertisement. The doctor said that was just the beginning. He would begin seeing what had been invisible before. The whole world would conspire to taunt him, the universe encourage him to have just one little swallow, just one glass. “The brain is a fantastic organ, Benny. It seems to have a life of its own, one that we are unaware of. When you drink long enough, it begins to like that chemical balance. So when you stop, it makes plans to restore the balance. It’s like a factory of cunning thoughts lodged somewhere, which pumps the best ones through to your conscious state. ‘Ach, it’s just a beer.’ ‘What harm can one little drink do?’ Another very effective one is the, ‘I deserve it, I have suffered for a week now and I deserve a small one.’ Or, even worse, the, ‘I have to have a drink now, or I will lose all control.’”

  “How the fuck do you fight it?”

  “You phone me.”

  “I can’t do that every time . . .”

  “Yes, you can. Any time, night or day.”

  “It can’t go on like this forever, can it?”

  “It won’t, Benny. I will teach you the techniques to tame the beast.”

  “Oh.”

  “The other thing I wanted to talk about was those voices.”

  He sat in the deep night-shadows of neglected shrubs, in the parkthat bordered on Simone Street. The binoculars were directed at Pretorius’s home, three hundred meters down Chantelle Street.

  A white suburb at night. Fort Blanc. No children playing outside. Locked doors, garages and security gates that opened with electronic remote controls, the blue flicker of television screens in living rooms. The streets were silent, apart from the white Toyota Tazz of Cobra Security that patrolled at random, or an occupant coming home late.

  Despite these precautions, the walls and towers and moats, the children were not even safe here — it only took one intruder like Pretorius to nullify all the barriers.

  There was life in the pedophile’s house, lights going on and off.

  He weighed up his options, considered a route that would take him away from the streetlights through back gardens up to the wall of Pretorius’s house. Eventually he decided the fastest option was the one with the biggest chance of success: down the street.

  He stood up, put the binoculars in his pocket and stretched his limbs. He pricked his ears for cars, left the shadows and began to walk with purpose.

  “Doc, they are not voices. It’s not like I hear a babble. It’s . . . like someone screaming. But not outside, it’s here inside, here in the back of my head. ‘Hear’ is not even the right word, because there are colors too. Some are black, some are red; fuck, it makes me sound crazy, but it’s true. I get to a murder scene. Let’s say the case I am working on now. The woman is lying on the floor, strangled with the kettle cord. You can see from the marks on her neck that she has been strangled from behind. You begin to reconstruct how it happened — that’s your job, you have to put it all together. You know she let him in, because there is no forced entry. You know they were together in the room because there is a bottle of wine and two glasses, or the coffee things. You know they must have talked, she was at ease, suspecting nothing, she was standing there and he was behind her saying something and suddenly there was this thing around her neck and she was frightened, what the fuck, she tried to get her fingers under the cord. Perhaps he turned her around, because he is sick, he wanted to see her eyes, he wanted to watch her face, because he’s a control freak and now she sees him and she knows . . .”

  He had to make a quick decision. He walked around the house and past the back door and saw that it was the best point of entry, no security gate, just an ordinary lock. He had to get in fast: the longer he remained outside, the greater the chance of being spotted.

  He had the assegai at his back, under his shirt, the shaft just below his neck and the blade under his belt. He lifted his hand and pulled out the weapon. He raised a booted foot and, aiming for the lock, kic
ked open the door with all his strength.

  The verdict in the case against crèche owner Colin Pretorius on various charges of child rape and molestation and the possession of child pornography is expected tomorrow. Pretorius did not testify.

  The kitchen was dark. He ran through it towards the lights. Down the passage, left turn, to what he assumed was the living room. Television noise. He ran in, assegai in hand. Living room, couch, chairs, a sitcom’s canned noise. Nobody. He spun around, spotted movement in the passage. The man was there, frozen in the light of a doorway, mouth half agape.

  For a moment they stood facing each other at opposite ends of the passage and then the prey moved away and he attacked. The alarm must be in the bedroom. He had to stop him. The door swung shut. He dropped his shoulder, six, five, four paces, the door slammed, three, two, one, the snick of a key turning in the lock and he hit the door with a noise like a cannon shot, pain racking his body.

  The door withstood him.

  He was not going to make it. He stepped back, preparing to kick the door in, but it would be too late. Pretorius was going to activate the alarm.

  “The picture in my head, Doc . . . It’s like she’s hanging from a cliff and clinging to life. As he strangles her, as the strength drains out of her, she feels her grip loosen. She knows she must not fall, she doesn’t want to, she wants to live, she wants to climb to the top, but he squeezes the life out of her and she begins to slip. There is a terrible fear, because of the dark below; it’s either black or red or brown down below and she just can’t hold on anymore and she falls.”

  He felt a moment of panic: the locked door, the sharp pain in his shoulder, knowledge that the alarm would sound. But he drew a deep breath, made his choices and kicked the door with his heel. Adrenaline coursed thickly. Wood splintered. The door was open now. The alarm began to wail somewhere in the roof. Pretorius was at the wardrobe, reaching up, feeling for a weapon. He bumped him against the cupboard, the tall, lean figure, bespectacled with a sloppy fringe. He fell. Thobela was on him, knee to chest and assegai against his throat.

  “I am here for the children,” he said loudly over the racket of the alarm, calm now.

  Eyes blinked at the assegai. There was no fear. Something else. Expectation. A certain fatalism.

  “Yes,” said Pretorius.

  He jammed the long blade through the man’s breastbone.

  “It’s when they fall that they scream. Death is down there and life is up here and the scream comes up, it always comes up to the top, it stays here. It moves fast, looks like a . . . like water you throw out of a bucket. That is all that is left. It is full of horrible terror. And loss . . .”

  Griessel was quiet for a while; when he continued, it was in a quieter voice. “The thing that scares me most is that I know it’s not real, Doc. If I rationalize it, I know it’s my imagination. But where does it come from? Why does my head do this? Why is the scream so shrill and clear and so loud? And so bloody despairing? I am not crazy. Not really — I mean, isn’t there a saying that if you know you are a little bit mad you are okay, because the really insane have no idea?

  Barkhuizen chuckled. It caught Griessel by surprise, but it was a sympathetic chuckle and he grinned back.

  He sprinted through the house as the alarm wailed monotonously. Out the back door, around the corner of the house to the lighted street. He swerved right. He could see the park over the way, the security of the dark and the shadows. He felt a thousand eyes on him. Legs pumped rhythmically, breath raced; instinctively he pulled his head into his shoulders and tensed his back muscles for the bullet that would come, his ears pricked for a shout or the noise of the patrol car as his feet pounded on the tar.

  When he reached the shrubbery, he slackened his pace as his night vision was spoiled by the streetlights. He had to plot his course carefully and not fall over anything. He could not afford a twist or sprain.

  “You know where it really comes from,” said Barkhuizen.

  “Doc?”

  “You know, Benny. Think about it. There are contributing factors. Your job. I think you all suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome — with all the murder and death. But that is not the actual source. It’s something else. The thing that makes you drink, too, that made me drink as well.”

  Griessel stared at him for a long time and then his head bowed. “I know,” he said.

  “Say it, Benny.”

  “Doc . . .”

  “Say it.”

  “I am afraid to die, Doc. I am so afraid to die.”

  He sat behind the wheel. He was still breathing hard, sweat dripped, his heart pounded. Jesus, he was forty — too old for this shit.

  He pressed the key into the ignition.

  There was one difference. His seventeen targets for the KGB . . . mostly he was detached, mechanical, even reluctant if it was some pallid pen-pusher with stooping shoulders and colorless eyes.

  But not this time. This was different. When the assegai pierced the man’s heart, he had a feeling of euphoria. Of absolute rightness.

  Perhaps he had, at last, found his true vocation.

  18.

  It was the following morning before she phoned him in his hotel room. From a public phone booth with Sonia on her shoulder.

  “Five hundred rand,” was how she identified herself in an even voice that did not betray her anxiety.

  It took only a few seconds for him to work it out and he said: “Can you be here at six o’clock?”

  “Yes.”

  “Room 1036, in the Holiday Inn opposite the entrance to the Waterfront.”

  “Six o’clock,” she repeated.

  “What is your name?”

  Her brain seemed to stop working. She didn’t want to give her own name, but she couldn’t think of any other one. She must not hesitate too long or he would know it was a fabrication — she said the first word that came to her lips.

  “Bibi.”

  Later she would wonder why that? Did it mean anything, have any psychological connotation, some clue by which to understand herself better? From Christine to Bibi. A leap, a new identity, a new creation. It was a birth, in some sense. It was also a wall. At first thin, like paper, transparent and fragile. At first.

  “I have thought about it a lot,” she said, because she wanted to get the story right this time.

  “The money was a big thing. Like when you play the Lotto and think of what you would do with the jackpot. In your imagination you spend on yourself and your child. Sensible things: you aren’t going to squander your fortune. You are not going to be like the nouveau riche. That is why you will win. Because it’s owed to you. You deserve it.

  “But the money wasn’t the main thing. There was another aspect, something I had since my school days. When I had sex with my father’s friend. And the teacher. How I felt. I controlled them, but I didn’t control myself. How can I explain it? I wasn’t in myself. Yet I was.”

  She knew those were not the right words to describe it and made a gesture of irritation with her hands. The minister did not respond, but just waited expectantly, or maybe he was nailed to his seat.

  She shut her eyes in frustration and said: “The easy one is the power. Uncle Sarel, my father’s buddy, gave me a lift one day when I was walking home in the afternoon. When I opened the car door and saw the look on his face, I knew he wanted me. I wondered what he would say, what he would do. He held the steering wheel with both his hands because he was trembling and he didn’t want me to see. That’s when I felt how strong I was. I toyed with him. He said he wanted to talk with me, just for a short while, and could we take a drive? He was scared to look at me and I saw how freaked out he was but I was cool so I said: ‘Okay, that would be nice.’ I acted like I was innocent, that’s what he wanted. He talked, you know, silly stuff, just talking, and he stopped by the river and I kept on acting and he told me how he had been watching me for so long and how sexy I was, but he respected me and then I put my hand on his cock and watched his
face and the look in his eyes and his mouth went all funny and it . . . it excited me.

  “It was a good feeling to know he wanted me, it was good to see how much he wanted me, it made me feel wanted. Your father thinks you are nothing, but they don’t think so. Some grown-ups think you are great.

  “But when he had sex with me, it was like I wasn’t in my body. It was someone else and I was on one side. I could feel everything, I could feel his cock and his body and all, but I was outside. I looked at the man and the girl and I thought: What is she doing? She will be damaged. But that was also okay.

  “That was the weirdest part of all, that the damage was also okay.”

  She found someone to stand in for her at Trawlers. She spent the day with Sonia, rode her bike along the seafront as far as the swimming pool in Sea Point and slowly back again. She thought about what she would wear and she felt anticipation and that old feeling of being outside yourself, that vague consciousness of harm and the strange satisfaction it brought.

  At four o’clock she left her daughter with the childcare lady and took a slow bath, washed and blow-dried her long hair. She put on a G-string, the floral halterneck, her jeans and sandals. At half-past five she took her bike and rode slowly so as not to arrive at the hotel out of breath and sweaty. This feels almost like a date, she thought. As she wove through the peak-hour traffic in Kloof Street, she saw men in cars turn their heads. She smiled a secret smile, because not one of them knew what she was and where she was going. Here comes the whore on her bicycle.

  It wasn’t so bad.

  He was just a regular guy. He had no weird requests. He received her with rather exaggerated courtesy and spoke to her in whispers. He wanted her to stroke him, touch him and lie beside him. But first she had to undress and he shivered and said, “God, what a body you’ve got,” and trailed his fingers slowly over her calves and thighs and belly. He kissed her breasts and sucked the nipples. And then the sex. He reached orgasm quickly and groaning and with eyes screwed shut. He lay on top of her and asked: “How was it for you?” She said it was wonderful, because that was what he wanted to hear.