by Deon Meyer
He looked at Ngubane, at the neat suit, the white shirt and red tie, at the man’s ease with himself. In the back of his mind a light began to shine.
“Are there other properties, Tim? These drug guys, they have more than one place. They have contingency plans.”
“Right.”
“Talk to Beukes. They must have known about Sangrenegra. They will know about other places.”
“Right.”
“Has Forensics been to the mother’s place?”
He nodded. “They got his prints there. And they drew the mother’s blood. For DNA comparison with the blood in the car. They say that way they can tell if it belongs to the kid.”
“I don’t think she’s alive, Tim.”
“I know.”
They stood in silence a moment. “Can I go and see the mother?”
“Sure. Are you going to use this guy as bait?”
“He’s perfect. But I have to talk to the mother. And then we’ll have to talk to the sup, because Organized Crime is involved, and I can tell you now, they won’t like it.”
“Fuck them.”
Griessel chuckled. “That’s what I was thinking too.”
When he drove through the city towards Tamboerskloof, his thoughts jumped between Boef Beukes and Timothy Ngubane and the children he saw in Long Street. At half-past eleven at night there were children everywhere he looked. Teenagers on a fucking Monday night at the top end of Long Street, at the clubs and restaurants and cafés. They stood on the pavements with glasses and cigarettes in their hands, small groups huddled beside parked cars. He wondered where their parents were. Whether they knew where their children were. He realized he did not know where his own children were. But surely Anna knew. If she were at home.
Beukes. Who had worked with him in the old days. Who had been a drinking partner. When his children were small and he was still whole. What the hell had happened? How had he progressed from drinks with the boys to a full-blown alcoholic?
He had started drinking when Murder and Robbery was still located in Bellville South. The President in Parow had been the watering hole, not because it was anything like a presidential hotel, but there would always be a policeman leaning on the long mahogany bar, no matter what time of the day you turned up there. Or that other place beyond Sanlam in Stikland that made those delicious pizzas, the Glockenberg or something, Lord, that was a lifetime ago. The Glockenburg. There was a Spur Steak Ranch there now, but in those days it had been a colossal tavern. One night, thoroughly drunk, he had climbed on the stage and told the band they must cut the crap and play real rock ’n’ roll and give me that bass, do you know “Blue Suede Shoes”? His colleagues at the big table had shouted and kicked up a row and clapped and the four-piece band had nervously said yes, they knew it, young Afrikaner fuckers with soft beards and long hair who played “Smokie” and he put the bass around his neck and got behind the mike and sang “One for the money . . .” and they were off and rocking, between the commotion from the floor and the orchestra’s relief that he was not hopeless. They were cooking; they thrashed that fuckin’ song and people came in from the bar and from outside. And that Benny Griessel had run his fingers up and down the neck of the bass guitar and he laid down a fucking carpet of bass for the rock ’n’ roll and when they had finished everybody screamed for more, more, more. So he let rip. Elvis songs. And he sweated and played and sang till who knows what time, and Anna came looking for him, he saw her at the back of the Glock. At first angry with arms folded tight, where was her husband, look at the time. But the music melted her too, she loosened up and her hips began to sway and she clapped too and screamed: “Go, Benny, go!” because that was her Benny up there on the fucking stage, her Benny.
Lord, that was a lifetime ago. He hadn’t been an alky then, just a hard-drinking detective. Like the rest of them. Just like Matt Joubert and Boef Beukes and fat Sergeant Tony O’Grady, the whole damn lot of them. They drank hard because, hell, they worked hard, back then in the late eighties. Worked like slaves while the whole world shat on them. Necklace murders, old people murdered, gays murdered, gangs, armed robbery wherever you turned. It never stopped. And if you said you were a policeman, the room would fall silent and everyone looked at you as if you were lower than lobster crap, and that, they always said, was as low as you could go.
Then he had been as Tim Ngubane was now. At ease with himself. Lord, and he could work. Hard, yes. But clever. He nailed them, murderers and bank robbers and kidnappers. He was ruthless and enthusiastic. He was light of foot. That was the thing — he had danced when the others plodded. He was different. And he thought he would be like that always. But then all the shit had a way of overwhelming you.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the booze only got the dancers; look at Beukes and Joubert, they don’t drink like fish, they plod along still. And he? He was fucked. But there in the back of his mind the germ of an idea remained that he was better than them all, that he was the best fucking detective in the country, end of story.
Then he laughed at himself there behind the steering wheel, at the top end of Long Street near the swimming baths, because he was a wreck, a drunkard, a guy who had bought a bottle of Klippies an hour ago after nine days of sobriety and only half an hour ago had lost control with the Colombian because he was carrying so much shit around with him and here he was, thinking he was the be-all and end-all.
So what had happened? Between Boef Beukes and the Glockenburg and now? What the fuck happened? He had reached Belle Ombre Street and there was no parking so he pulled half onto the pavement.
Before he opened the door, he thought about the body tonight in Bishop Lavis. There had been no death screams in his head. No dreadful voices.
Why not? Where had they gone? Was it part of his drinking; was it the alcohol?
He paused a few moments longer and then pushed open the door, because he had no answers. The building had ten or twelve floors so he took the lift. There were two black policemen in civilian clothes at the door, each with a shotgun. Griessel asked who they were. One said they were from Organized Crime and that Boef Beukes had sent them, since she would be a target now.
“Did you know about Sangrenegra before this happened?”
“You should talk to Beukes.”
He nodded and opened the door. A young woman jumped up in the sitting room and came over to him. “Did you find her?” she asked, and he could hear the hysteria just below the surface. Behind her on the couch sat two police officers of the gentler sort, smaller and thinner, with caring hands folded sympathetically on their laps. Social Services. The members of the Force who appear on the scene when all the shit is already cleared away. A man and a woman.
“Not yet,” he said.
She stood in the middle of the room and uttered a sound. He could see her face was swollen and there was a cut that someone had treated. Her eyes were red with weeping. She balled her fists and her shoulders drooped. The colored woman from SS got up and came over to her and said: “Come and sit down, it’s better if you sit.”
“My name is Benny Griessel,” he said and held out his hand.
She shook it and said, “Christine van Rooyen.” He thought that she didn’t look like your usual whore. But then he smelt her, a mixture of perfume and sweat; they all smelt like that, it didn’t wash out.
But she looked different from the ones he knew. He searched for the reason. She was tall, as tall as he was. Not scrawny, strongly built. Her skin was smooth. But that wasn’t it.
He said he worked with Ngubane and he knew it was a difficult time for her. But perhaps there was something she knew that could help. She said he must come through and she went over to a sliding door and pushed it wider. It led onto a balcony and she sat on one of the white plastic chairs. He got the idea that she wanted to get away from the SS people and that said something. He joined her on another of the chairs and asked her how well she knew Sangrenegra.
“He was my client.” He noticed the unusual shap
e of her eyes. They reminded him of almonds.
“A regular client?”
In the light from the sitting room he could only see her right hand. It was on the arm of the chair, finger folded into the palm, the nails pressing into the flesh.
“At first he was like the rest,” she said. “Nothing funny. Then he told me about the drugs. And when he found out I had a child . . .”
“Do you know what we found at his house?”
She nodded. “The black man phoned.”
“Did Carlos ever take you to other places? Other houses?”
“No.”
“Have you any idea where he would have taken . . . er . . . your daughter?”
“Sonia,” she said. “My daughter’s name is Sonia.”
The fingers moved in her palm, the nails dug deeper. He wanted to reach out to her. “Where would he have taken Sonia?”
She shook her head back and forth. She did not know. Then she said: “I won’t see her again.” With the calm that only absolute despair can bring.
In the early hours it was only five minutes’ drive from Belle Ombre to his flat. The first thing he saw when he switched on the light was the brandy bottle. It stood on the breakfast counter like a sentry watching over the room.
He locked the door behind him and picked up the bottle and turned it in his hands. He examined the clock on the label and the golden brown liquid within. He imagined the effect of the alcohol in his fibers, light-headedness, and effervescence just under his skull.
He put down the bottle as if it were sacred.
He should open the bottle and pour the brandy down the sink.
But then he would smell it and he wouldn’t be able to resist it.
Get control first. He rested his palms on the counter and took deep breaths.
Lord, it had been close, earlier that evening.
Only his hunger had stopped him getting drunk.
He took another deep breath.
Fritz was going to phone him to find out if he had listened to the CD and he would have been drunk and his son would have known. That would have been bad. He considered his son’s voice. It wasn’t so much the boy’s interest in his opinion about the music. Something else. A craving. A longing. A desire to make contact with his father. To have a bond with him. We never had a father. His son wanted a father now. So badly. He had been so close to fucking it up. So close.
He drew another deep breath and opened a kitchen cupboard. It was empty inside. He quickly picked up the bottle and put it inside and shut the door. He went upstairs. He didn’t feel so tired anymore. Second wind, when your brain gets so busy you just keep on going, when your thoughts jump from one thing to another.
He showered and got into bed and shut his eyes. He could see the prostitute and he felt a physical reaction, tumescence and he thought, hello, hello, hello? He felt guilty, as she had just lost her child and this was his reaction. But it was odd because whores had never done it for him. He knew enough of them. They were in a profession that was a magnet for trouble; they worked in a world that was just one small step away from serious crime. And they were all more or less the same — regardless of the fee they charged.
There was something about Christine van Rooyen that set her apart from the others he knew. But what? Then when he lined her up against the rest he identified it. Prostitutes, from the Sea Point streetwalkers to the few who serviced the tourists for big money in the Radisson, had two things in common. That distinctive bittersweet smell. And the damage. They had an atmosphere of depression. Like a house, a neglected house, where someone still lives, but you can see from the decay that they don’t really care anymore.
This one was not like that. Or less so. There was a light still burning.
But that wasn’t what was giving him an erection. It was something else. The body? The eyes?
Hell, he had never once been unfaithful to Anna. Except by boozing. Maybe Anna reasoned like that: he was unfaithful to her because he loved alcohol with an all-encompassing passion. So she was justified in looking elsewhere. His head said she had the right, but the green monster sprang to life, made him writhe in the bed. He would pulp the fucker. If he caught them. If he should walk into his house and bedroom and they were busy . . . He saw the scene too clearly. He turned over violently, pulled up the sheet, thrust his head under the pillow. He did not want to see. Some or other handsome young shit pumping his wife and he could see Anna’s face, her ecstasy, that small private sublime smile that told him she was in her own little world of pleasure and her voice, he remembered her voice, the whispering. Yes, Benny, yes, Benny, yes, Benny. But now she would be saying someone else’s name and he leapt up and stood beside the bed and he knew: he would shoot the fucker. He had to phone her. Now. He had to drink. He must get the bottle out of the kitchen cupboard. He took a step toward the wardrobe. He clenched his fist and stopped himself.
Get a hold of yourself, he said out loud.
He felt the absence below. His erection was gone.
No fucking wonder.
It was an old stone house with a corrugated iron roof. He climbed a sagging wire boundary fence and had to deviate around the carcass of a Ford single cab pickup on blocks before he could make out the number on one of the pillars of the verandah. The seven hung askew.
It was dark inside. Thobela retraced his steps to the back door. He turned the knob. It was open. He went in, closing the door quietly behind him, assegai in his left hand. He was in the kitchen. There was an odor in the house. Musty, like fish paste. He allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the deeper dark inside. Then he heard a sound from the next room.
Once the two from the police force’s Social Services had gone, she took a big flask of coffee and two mugs to the armed men on guard outside her door. Then she locked the door and went out onto the balcony.
The city lay before her, a creature with a thousand glittering eyes that breathed more slowly and deeply in the depths of night. She gripped the white railing, feeling the cold metal in her hands. She thought about her child. Sonia’s eyes pleading with her.
It was her fault. She was responsible for her child’s fear.
From the sitting room he heard a snore like the grunt of a boar: short, crude and powerful.
Thobela peered around the doorframe and saw the man on the couch under a blanket.
Where was the woman?
The Scholtzes. Their two-year-old son had died in hospital in Oudtshoorn two weeks ago from a brain hemorrhage.
The district surgeon had found lesions on the tiny organs and thin fragile ribs and ulna, cheekbones and skull. From them he had reconstructed a jigsaw of abuse. “The worst I have seen in fifteen years as coroner,” the Sunday paper had quoted his testimony.
He walked closer to Scholtz over the bare floor. In the dark the silver half-moons of rings gleamed in the visible ear. Across the bulky arm was a spider web of black tattoo, the pattern unclear without light. The mouth was open and at the peak of every breath he made that animal noise.
Where was the woman? Thobela smoothed the cushion of his thumb over the wooden shaft of the assegai as he slipped past, deeper into the house. There were two bedrooms. The first one was empty; on the wall hung a child’s drawings, now without color.
He felt revulsion. How did these people’s minds work? How could they display the child’s art on his bedroom wall and moments later smash his head against it? Or batter him until the ribs splintered.
Animals.
He saw the woman in the double bed of the other room, her shape outlined under the sheet. She turned over. Muttered something inaudible.
He stood still. Here was a dilemma. No, two.
Christine let go of the railing and went back inside. She closed the sliding door behind her. In the top drawer in the kitchen she found the vegetable knife. It had a long narrow blade, slightly curved with a small, sharp point. It was what she wanted now.
He didn’t want to execute the woman. That was his first problem.
>
A war against women was not a war. Not his war, not a Struggle he wanted to be involved in. He knew that now, after Laurens. Let the courts, imperfect as they were, take responsibility for the women.
But if he spared her, how would he deal with the man? That was his second problem. He needed to wake him. He wanted to give him a weapon and say: “Fight for your right to crack a two-year-old skull, and see where justice lies.” But the woman would wake up. She would see him. She would turn on lights. She would get in the way.
Christine sat on the edge of the bath after closing the bathroom door. She took the cap off the bottle of Dettol and dipped the blade of the little knife into the brown fluid. Then she lifted her left foot onto her right knee and chose the spot, between her heel and the ball of her foot. She pressed the sharp point of the blade gently against the soft white skin.
Sonia’s eyes.
He walked around the door of the bedroom where the woman lay, right up close. That’s when he saw the key in the lock and knew what he must do.
He pulled the key out of the lock. It made a scraping sound and he heard her breathing become shallow. Quickly he closed the door. It creaked. He pushed the key in from the outside. In haste he struggled to get it in.
He heard her say something in the room, a bleary, unrecognizable word.
At last the key went in and he turned it.
“Chappie?” called the woman.
The man on the couch stopped snoring. Thobela turned towards him.
“Chappie!” she shouted, louder now. “What are you doing?”
The man sat up on the couch and threw the blanket aside.
“I am here about the child,” said Thobela.
He noted Scholtz’s shoulders. A strong man. It was good.
“There’s a kaffir in the house!” the man shouted to his wife.
She jabbed the blade into her foot, as hard as she could. She could not help the cry that fell from her lips.
But the pain was intense. It burned the hurt away; it covered over everything, just as she had hoped.
