by Deon Meyer
“Do you know he was granted bail?”
She nodded.
“Do you know we arranged it?”
“They told me.” Her voice was toneless, as if she was beyond caring.
“We think he will lead us to Sonia.”
Christine just stared at the television, where a man and woman stood facing each other. They were arguing.
He said: “It’s a possibility. We have forensic psychologists helping us. They say the chances are good he will go to her.”
She turned her eyes back on him. She knows, he thought. She knows now.
“Would you like coffee?” she asked.
He considered a moment. He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Can I go and buy food? Take aways?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“When did you last eat?”
She didn’t answer.
“You have to eat. What can I get you? Even if it’s something small.”
“Whatever.”
He stood. “Pizza?”
“Wait,” she said and went into the kitchen. A Mr. Delivery booklet was stuck to the door of the big two-door fridge with a magnet. “They can deliver,” she said and brought the booklet to him. She sat down again. “I don’t want you to leave now.”
“Where are the two policemen that were at the door?”
“I don’t know.”
He flipped through the booklet. “What do you like?”
“Anything. Just not garlic or onion.” Then she reconsidered. “It doesn’t matter. Anything.”
He took out his cell phone, phoned and placed an order. He hesitated when asked for the address and she provided it. He said he had an official call to make and asked if he could go out on the balcony. She nodded. He slid the door open and went out. The wind was blowing. He closed the door behind him and found Ngubane’s number on the cell phone.
“Tim, are you aware that Organized Crime’s people aren’t guarding the mother anymore?”
“No. I haven’t been there today. I called, but she didn’t say anything.”
“Jissis, they’re idiots.”
“Maybe they think she isn’t in danger anymore.”
“Maybe they think it’s not their problem now.”
“What can we do?”
“I haven’t any spare people. My entire team is busy in Camps Bay.”
“I’ll talk to the sup.”
“Thanks, Tim.”
He gazed out over the city. The last rays of the sun reflected off the windows of the hotels in the Strand area. Was she in danger? His SVC team was watching Sangrenegra. His four henchmen were still in the cells.
Boef Beukes would know. He would know how big Sangrenegra’s contingent was. How many there were who did not live at the Camps Bay place. There had to be more. Local hangers-on, assistants, people involved: you don’t run such a big drug operation with only five people. He called SVC and asked if Captain Helena Louw was still there. They put him through and he asked her if she had Boef Beukes’s cell phone number.
“Just a minute,” she said. He waited until she came back and gave it to him.
“Thanks, Captain.” Could he trust her? With Domestic Violence part of the Organized Crime structure? Where did her loyalties lie?
He called Beukes. “It’s Benny, Boef. I want to know why you withdrew Christine van Rooyen’s protection.”
“It’s your show now.”
“Jissis, Boef, don’t you think you might have told us?”
“Did you tell us anything? When you decided to hang Carlos up for bait. Did you have the decency to consult with us?”
“You feel fuck-all for her safety?”
“It’s a question of manpower.” But there was something in his voice. He was lying.
“Fuck,” said Griessel. He ended the call and stood with his handset in his hand thinking, that’s the problem with the fucking Service, the jealousy, the competition, everyone had to fucking PEP, everyone was measured by Performance Enhancement Procedure and everyone’s balls were on the block. Now they were stabbing each other in the back.
Commissioner John Afrika had phoned him while he was on his way to Christine van Rooyen. Benny, are you sober? he had asked. He had said yes, Commissioner, and John Afrika had asked him, Are you going to stay sober and he said yes, Commissioner. Afrika said, I will get the people who ran to the papers, Benny. Matt Joubert tells me you are the best he has. He says you are on the wagon and that’s good enough for me, Benny, you hear? I will stand by you and I’m going to tell the papers that. But, fuck, Benny, if you drop me . . .
Because if he dropped the commissioner, then the commissioner’s PEP was blown to hell.
But he appreciated it that the man was standing by him. A colored man. He was thrown on the mercy of a colored man who had to swallow so much crap from the whites in the old days. How much mercy had John Afrika received, then?
He had said: “I won’t drop you, Commissioner.”
“Then we understand each other, Benny.” There were a few beats of silence over the air, then John Afrika sighed and said, “This backstabbing gets me down. I can’t get a grip on it.”
Griessel thought over his conversation with Beukes. Organized Crime were onto something. He knew it. That’s why they went to the papers. That’s why they withdrew the guard detail.
What?
He opened the sliding door; he couldn’t hang around out there forever.
Before he came in, while he was putting his phone away, he tried to think like Boef Beukes. Then he understood and he froze. Christine van Rooyen was OC’s bait. They were using her as an ambush. But for whom? For Sangrenegra?
His visit to Beukes’s office. The other detective there, the one in the suit and tie. Nobody dressed like that anymore. Who the fuck was that? The Scorpions, the special unit for the public prosecutor?
Never. Beukes and Co. would rather slit their wrists in the lavvy than work with the Scorpions.
He became aware that Christine had got up and was standing watching him.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said. But would she be okay?
In the sultry late afternoon of a Highveld summer, at the New Road filling station between the old Pretoria Road and Sixteenth Avenue in Midrand, the stolen BMW 320d stopped in front of the Quickshop. John Khoza and Andrew Ramphele got out and walked through the automatic glass doors. They walked casually up to the fast-food counter in the back of the shop.
While Ramphele ordered two chicken burgers, Khoza inspected the four corners of the large room. There was only one security camera. It was against the eastern wall opposite the cash register.
He murmured something to Ramphele, who nodded.
Griessel’s phone rang while they waited for the pizzas.
“Benny, the boss says we can give her Witness Protection, but it’s going to take time,” said Ngubane.
“How much time?”
“Probably only tomorrow. That’s the best we can do.”
“Okay, Tim. Thanks.”
“What are you going to do? For tonight?”
“I’ll make a plan,” he said.
Khoza waited until the last of the four clients in the shop had paid and left. Then he walked up to the woman behind the cash register, shoved his hand in the back of his denim jacket and drew out a pistol. He shoved it against her face and said, “Just open it up, sister, and give us the cash. Nobody will get hurt.”
“I’ll have to sleep on your couch tonight,” said Griessel.
Christine looked up at him and nodded.
“We will place you in Witness Protection tomorrow. They are organizing it now, but it takes a little time.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It depends.”
There was a knock on the door. Griessel got up and took out his Z88 service pistol. “That must be our pizzas,” he said.
The Toyota Microbus of the South African Police Services Task Force Unit stopped at the filli
ng station for petrol. The nine policemen were stiff from hours of sitting and thirsty. They had last stretched their legs at Louis Trichardt. They all got out. The young black constable, the sharpshooter of the team, knew it was his duty as the youngest to take the orders for cool drinks.
“What do you want to drink?” he asked.
That was when two men came out of the Quickshop, each carrying a pistol in one hand and a green, purple and red plastic bag in the other.
“Hey,” said the sharpshooter and dropped a hand to the firearm on his hip holster. The other eight members of the Task Force team looked instinctively at what the constable had seen. For a moment they could hardly believe their eyes. For a very short moment.
“Just now, you said you did not want me to leave. Why?” asked Griessel, but her mouth was full of pizza and she had to finish chewing before she answered.
“You are the first person I have seen today,” she said and left it at that. He could see she was struggling not to cry.
He understood. He visualized her day. Her child was missing, probably dead. The awful worry and doubt. Fear perhaps, because the guards were gone. Alone, between these four walls. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“You needn’t be sorry. It’s my fault. Only mine.”
“How can you say that?”
She closed her eyes. “If I wasn’t a whore, I would never have met him.”
The first thing that popped into his head was to ask her why she had become a whore. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. She just shook her head, keeping her eyes closed. He wanted to get up and go over and put his arm around her shoulders.
He stayed where he was. “It’s a psychological thing,” he said. “We see it often. Victims or their families blame themselves. You can’t be responsible for someone else’s behavior.”
She didn’t react. He looked down at the pizza on the plate in front of him and pushed it away and wiped his hands on a paper serviette. He looked at her. She was wearing jeans. She sat on the chair with her bare feet folded under her. Her long blonde hair was half covering her face. What could he say to her? What could anyone say to him if it had been his child?
“I actually came to tell you about something else.”
She opened her eyes. “I don’t want to hear bad news.”
“I don’t think it is bad news. It’s just that I think you have the right to know. You know about the Artemis affair the papers are writing about?”
With a sudden movement of her head she tossed her hair back and said, “Yes. And I wish he would come and kill Carlos.” She said it with hate he could understand.
“It’s my case. The assegai man. I want to use Carlos to catch him.”
“How?”
“We know he picks his victims when the media writes about them. About their crimes. Today we gave the media a lot of information about Carlos. About how he . . . abducted Sonia. About his drug-dealing background. We think it will lure the assegai man.”
“And then?”
“That’s another reason we’re watching Carlos so carefully.”
It was some time before she answered. He saw the process in her face, the eyes narrowing, the lips thinning. “So it’s not about Sonia,” she said.
“It is about her. All the indications are that he will lead us to her.” He tried hard to be convincing, but he felt guilty. He had told Sangrenegra what they were going to do. This morning in court he had looked Carlos in the eyes and reinforced the message: you are bait. He knew Carlos was going nowhere, because Carlos knew the police were watching him. The chances that the Colombian was going to lead them anywhere were nil.
“I don’t believe you.”
Could she hear from the tone of his voice that he was lying? “My black colleague talked to the psychologist this morning. She said people like Carlos go back to their victims. I give you my word. It’s true. It’s a chance. It’s possible. I can’t swear it will happen, but it’s possible.”
Her face altered, the venom dissolved and he saw she was about to cry. He said: “It’s possible,” again, but to no avail.
She put her face in her hands and said: “Leave him. Let him kill Carlos.” Then her shoulders heaved. He couldn’t take it anymore. Guilt and pity drove him to her. He put a hand on her shoulder. “I understand,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I have children too,” he said, and inhaled her smell, perfume and the faint scent of perspiration.
He sat on the arm of the chair. He put his hand behind her neck onto her far shoulder. His fingers patted her comfortingly. He felt a bit of an idiot because she was unyielding under his touch. “I understand,” he repeated.
Then she moved and he felt her soften and she pressed her head against him. With her arm around his hip she wept.
37.
He thought many thoughts while she leaned against him, shrunken under his arm. For the first time since Anna had kicked him out, some sort of calm came over him. A kind of peace.
He looked around the flat. The sitting room and kitchen were one big room separated by a white melamine counter. A passage led off to the right behind him. To the bedrooms? He noted the large fridge and big flat-screen television. New stuff. A child’s drawings of multicolored animals were stuck up on the fridge with magnets. A crocodile and a rhinoceros and a lion. He noted the coffee machine in the kitchen, shiny chrome, with spouts and knobs. But the chairs at the counter were scuffed; one sitting-room chair was old and worn. Two worlds in one.
Leaning against the wall to the left of him was a painting. Large and original. A rural landscape, a blue mountain in the distance and a green valley, the grass in the veld growing high and verdant. A young girl was running through the grass. She was a tiny figure on the left, dwarfed by the landscape, but he could distinguish the blonde hair bouncing up behind. Four or five steps ahead of her there was a red balloon, with a string hanging down, a thin, barely visible black stripe against the blue of the mountain. The girl’s hand was stretched out to it. The grass bent away from her. It must be the wind, he thought. Blowing the balloon away from her. He wondered if she were running fast enough to catch it.
He had a partial erection.
She wouldn’t be able to feel it, as she wasn’t in contact there. Her breathing was quieter now, but he couldn’t see her face.
He crossed his legs to hide his state. He couldn’t help it; there were a lot of things affecting him here. Knowing that sex was her job. She was attractive. And vulnerable. Hurt. Something in him that responded to that. Something that somewhere in his brain did surveys and sent out primitive orders: take your chance, the time is right. He knew that was how his head worked. He — and the other members of his sex. Also the mentally ill, those for whom it was more than just an opportunity for sexual victory. Like serial murderers. They searched out the weak, soft targets for their dark deeds. Often prostitutes. Not always deliberately, with preconceived reasoning and planned strategy. Instinct. Somewhere, in the pre-alcoholic period a memory stirred, something he had worked out for himself. He was a good policeman because he understood others through self-knowledge. He could use his own weaknesses, his own fears and instincts, because he knew them. He could magnify them, amplify them like turning up an imaginary volume control to the level where they made other people commit murder or rape, lie or steal. As he sat there he realized it was one of the things that had made him start drinking. The slow realization that he was like them and they were like him, that he was not a better man. As he had felt last night or the previous, he couldn’t remember which, when he had seen Anna and her young, imaginary lover in his mind and the jealousy had turned on the switches with an evil hand and he had wanted to shoot. If he were to find them like that and he had his service pistol on his hip, he would shoot the fucker, between the eyes, no fucking doubt about that.
But that was not the main reason he drank. No. It was not the only reason. There were others. Large and small. He began to realize it all now. He was a rough st
one and he was cut with a thousand facets and it was his bad luck that this shape fitted so well into the crooked hole of alcoholism.
The thing that he was had consequences. The way in which the fine wiring of his brain made connections, had implications. It enabled him to view a crime scene and see things; it also wakened an urge in him to hunt. It made the search sweet; inside his skull he experienced an addictive pleasure. But the selfsame wiring made him drink. If you wanted to hunt and search, you had to look death in the eye. And what if death frightened you? Then you drank, because it was part of you. And if you drank long enough, then the alcohol created its own wiring, its own thoughts, its own justification. Its own thick glasses through which you saw yourself and the world.
What do you do about it? What do you do about the consequences, the opposite sides of the coin, if it fucked up your life? Leave the police and go and drive a white Toyota Tazz for Chubb Security around Brackenfell’s streets at night and leave notes under people’s doors? You left your window open. Your alarm went off. Or do you sit behind the small black-and-white screens of a shopping center’s closed-circuit television and watch the dolled-up mommies spending the daddies’ money?
And you never hunt again and you die here inside.
He experienced a sudden feeling of despair, like someone trapped in a labyrinth. He needed to think of other things — of the woman leaning against him and the fact that it satisfied a need. The need to be held. That he needed to be touched. Ever since he had been thrown out of his house, he had an increasing need for it.
He wondered about her.
Why had she found it necessary to become a whore? An Afrikaner girl. Not as beautiful as a model. Attractive rather, sexy.
Did all women have this potential? Did it lie hidden until circumstances arose? Or was it, like his own polished facets, connected to a specific combination of angles and surfaces?
It hadn’t been necessary for him to come around here tonight. But it had been in the back of his mind all day: he wanted to look in.
