by Deon Meyer
“Could you help them?”
“We don’t know how they got in. The police think they were lying in wait for him when he got home. But the neighbors didn’t notice anything.”
“What was gone, out of the house?”
“Only the contents of the safe.”
“His wallet? Television set? Hi-fi?”
“Nothing except the contents of the safe.”
“How long were you in Windhoek?”
“I spent the entire week in Namibia. In the countryside, mostly. I only flew to and from Windhoek.”
“How long had he been dead when you got back?”
“They told me it had happened the previous evening. Before I came back.”
“You didn’t telephone here on that day?”
“No. I’d phoned two days before from Gobabis, just to tell him what I’d found.”
“What did he sound like?”
“The same as always. He didn’t like telephones. I did most of the talking. I made sure that the prices I’d offered were correct, gave the addresses for the truck.”
“He said nothing strange? Different?”
“No.”
“The truck. Which truck?”
“It’s not our truck. Manie Meiring Transport, of Kuils River, fetched the stuff once a month. We let them have the addresses and the checks that had to be given to the sellers. Then he sent someone with a truck.”
“How many people knew you were out of town that week?”
“I don’t know… Only Jan, really.”
“Do you have a char? Gardener?”
“No. I… we did everything.”
“Cleaner at the office?”
“The police also asked me. Perhaps there was someone who knew I was away, but we had no other employees. They also wanted to know if I went out of town on a regular basis. But it was never precisely the same time in any given month. Sometimes I was away for only a night or two, sometimes for two weeks.”
“And then Jan Smit did his own laundry and cleaned the house.”
“There wasn’t much to clean, and there’s a laundry that does ironing as well on Wellington Street.”
“Who knew about the safe?”
“Only Jan and I.”
“No friends? No family?”
“No.”
“Mrs. van As, have you any idea of who could possibly have waited for him and murdered him, anyone who could possibly have known about the contents of the safe?”
She shook her head, and then, without any warning, the tears ran soundlessly down her cheeks.
“But I know you,” said Mavis Petersen when Van Heerden walked into Murder and Robbery’s unattractive brick building on Kasselsvlei Road, Bellville.
He hadn’t looked forward to his return. He didn’t want to count how many years had passed since he’d walked out through these same doors. Virtually nothing had changed. The same musty, wintry smell, the same tiled floors, the same civil service furniture. The same Mavis. Older. But as welcoming.
“Hallo, Mavis.”
“But it’s the captain,” said Mavis, and clapped her hands.
“Not anymore, Mavis.”
“And look at that eye. What did you do? How many years has it been? What is the captain doing these days?”
“As little as possible,” he said, uncomfortable, unprepared for the reception, unwilling to contaminate this woman with the sourness of his existence. “Is Tony O’Grady in?”
“I can’t believe it, Captain. You’ve lost weight. Yes, the inspector is here. He’s on the second floor now. Do you want me to buzz him?”
“No, thank you, Mavis. I’ll just walk up.”
He walked past her desk into the body of the building, recollections hammering at the door of his memory. He shouldn’t have come, he thought. He should have met O’Grady somewhere else. Detectives sat in offices, walked past him, strange faces he had never known. He climbed the stairs to the top floor, passed the tearoom, saw someone there, asked directions. Then he arrived at O’Grady’s office.
The fat man behind the desk looked up when he heard the knock against the door frame.
“Hi, Nougat.”
O’Grady’s eyes narrowed. “Jesus.”
“No, but thanks…”
He walked to the desk, extended a hand. O’Grady hoisted himself halfway up in his chair, shook hands, and sat down again, his mouth still half-open. Van Heerden took a slab of imported nougat out of his jacket pocket. “You still eat this?”
O’Grady didn’t even glance at it. “I don’t believe it.”
He put the nougat on the desk.
“Jesus, Van Heerden, it’s been years. It’s like seeing a ghost.”
He sat down on one of the gray steel chairs.
“But I suppose ghosts don’t get black eyes,” O’Grady said, and picked up the nougat. “What’s this? A bribe?”
“You could call it that.”
The fat man fiddled with the cellophane cover of the nougat. “Where have you been? We’ve even stopped talking about you, you know.”
“I was in Gauteng for a while,” he fabricated.
“In the Force?”
“No.”
“Jesus, wait till I tell the others. So what happened to the eye?”
He gestured. “Small accident. I need your help, Tony.” He wanted to keep the conversation short.
O’Grady took a bite of the nougat. “You sure know how to get it.”
“You handled the Smit case. Last September. Johannes Jacobus Smit. Murdered in his home. Walk-in safe…”
“So you’re a private eye now.”
“Something like that.”
“Jesus, Van Heerden, that’s not a fucking living. Why don’t you come back?”
He breathed deeply. He had to suppress all the fear and the anger.
“Do you remember the case?”
O’Grady stared at him for a long time, his jaws moving as he masticated the nougat, eyes narrowed. He looks exactly the same, Van Heerden thought. No fatter, no thinner. The same plump policeman who hid the sharp mind behind the flamboyant personality and the heavy body.
“So what’s your interest?”
“His mistress is looking for a will that was in the safe.”
“And you must find it?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “Private dick. Shit. You used to be good.”
Van Heerden took a deep breath. “The will,” he said.
O’Grady peered at him over the slab of nougat. “Ah. The will.” He put down the confectionery, pushed it aside. “You know, that was the one thing that never really figured.” He leaned back, folded his arms over his stomach. “That fucking will. Because at first I was sure she did him. Or hired somebody. It fitted the whole damn case. Smit had no friends, no business associates, no other staff. But they got in, tortured him until he gave them the combination, cleaned out the safe, and killed him. Took nothing else. It was an inside job. And she was the only one on the inside. Or so she says.”
“Tortured him?”
“Burned him with a fucking blowtorch. Arms, shoulders, chest, balls. It must have been murder, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Did she know that?”
“We didn’t tell her or the press. I played it close to the chest, tried to see if I could trick her.”
“She says she knew the combination, Nougat.”
“The blowtorch could have been for effect. To take suspicion away from her.”
“Murder weapon?”
“Now there’s another strange thing. Ballistics said it was an M16. The Yank army model. Not too many of those around, are there?”
Slowly Van Heerden shook his head. “Just one shot?”
“Yep. Execution style, back of the head.”
“Because he’d seen them? Or knew them?”
“Who knows these days? Maybe they shot him just for the fun of it.”
“How many were there, do you think?”
&nbs
p; “We don’t know. No fingerprints inside, no footprints outside, no neighborhood witnesses. But Smit was a big man, in reasonable shape. There must have been more than one perp.”
“Forensics?”
O’Grady leaned forward, pulled the nougat toward him again. “Sweet Fanny Adams. No prints, no hair, no fibers. Just a fucking piece of paper. In the safe. Found a piece of paper, about the size of two matchboxes. Clever guys in Pretoria say it was part of a wrapping. For wrapping little stacks of money. You know, ten thousand in fifties, that sort of thing…”
Van Heerden raised his eyebrows.
“But the funny thing is, according to the type and all that shit, that they’re pretty sure it was dollars. U.S. dollars.”
“Fuck,” said Van Heerden.
“My sentiments exactly. But the plot thickens. It was the only thing I had to go on, so I put a lot of pressure on Pretoria through the colonel. Forensics has a money expert. Claassen, or something. He went back to his books and his microscope and came back and said the paper indicated that it was old money. The Americans don’t wrap their money like that anymore. But they used to. In the seventies and early eighties.”
Van Heerden digested the information for a moment. “And you asked Wilna van As about that?”
“Yep. And got the usual answer. She doesn’t know anything. She never took dollars as payment for that old-fart furniture, never paid with it. Doesn’t even know what a fucking dollar bill looks like. I mean, shit, this woman lived with the deceased for a fucking decade or more, but she’s like the three little monkeys—hear, see, speak no evil. And that little sexpot lawyer of hers is all over me like a sumo wrestler every time I want to ask some straight questions.” O’Grady took a frustrated bite of nougat and sank back in his chair again.
“No American clients or friends she knew about.” It was a statement. He already knew the answer.
The fat detective spoke with his mouth full but managed to utter each word clearly. “Not one. I mean, with the rifle and the dollars, it just makes sense that there is some kind of Yank involvement.”
“Her attorney says she’s innocent.”
“Is she your new employer?”
“Temporarily.”
“At least get her into bed. Because that’s all you’re going to get from this one. It’s a dead end. I mean, where’s the fucking motive for Wilna van As? Without the will she apparently gets nothing.”
“Unless there was a deal that she would get half of the haul. In a year or two when things had cooled down.”
“Maybe…”
“And without her there were no other suspects?”
“Zilch. Nothing.”
Time to eat humble pie: “I would like to see the dossier very much, Nougat.”
O’Grady stared fixedly at him.
“I know you’re a good policeman, Nougat. I have to go through the motions.”
“You can’t take it with you. You’ll have to read it here.”
6.
The earthquake woke me, late at night, the deep, rolling thunder from the depths of the earth that made all the windows shiver and the corrugated roof of the mine house creak. I cried and my father came to comfort me, took me in his arms in the dark and said that it was only the earth moving itself into a more comfortable position.
I had fallen asleep again when the telephone rang, an hour or so later. To call him out.
The rest of the tale was told to me by my mother, patched together from the official announcements, the stories of my father’s colleagues, and her own imagination.
He led one of the rescue teams that had to bring out the fourteen men trapped a kilometer underground after one of the tunnels had collapsed.
It was hot and confused down there. Other rescue teams were already at work when they got there, taken down the shaft in the rattling, shaking cage, carrying their shovels and their pickaxes, first-aid kits and bottles of water. No one wore the regulation hard hat; it only got in the way. They all, black and white, folded down the top half of their overalls to work in the heat with naked torsos that gleamed in the glaring electric spotlights, shining brightly in one place and casting deep shadows in another. The black men’s rhythmical singing provided the universal tempo to which everyone worked—the diggers, the soil removers, side by side, the usually rigid divisions drawn between races and trades suddenly forgotten because four of the trapped men were white and ten were black.
Hour after hour in the eternal dark to move a mountain.
On the surface, relatives of the white men had begun to gather, waiting for news with the usual support of the community, friends, and colleagues, as well as families of the rescue teams because they, too, weren’t safe.
My mother painted during those hours, Schubert’s lieder playing tinnily on the radiogram. Calm, she thought my father was invincible, while I knew nothing of the tension of an entire town.
Just before his team was due to return to the surface at the end of their shift, they heard muffled cries for help, exhausted moans of pain and fear, and he encouraged them, the thin edge of the wedge that bit by bit moved rock and stone and earth, to excavate a narrow tunnel, the opportunity for rest suddenly forgotten in the adrenaline high of success in sight. Emile van Heerden was in the lead, his lithe body drawing on the fitness of a lifetime to reach the trapped men.
His team had broken through to the small opening that the survivors had dug with bare hands and bleeding fingers.
The news that there were voices down there quickly spread to the surface, and the people in the small recreation hall clapped their hands and wept.
And then the earth shook again.
He had pulled out the first three on his own with muscled, sinewy arms and loaded them onto the wood-and-canvas stretchers. The fourth one was trapped up to his chest, a black man with smashed legs who suppressed the pain with superhuman effort, the only signs the sweat pouring off him and the shaking of his upper body. Emile van Heerden dug frantically, the soil around the man’s legs moving with the effort of my father’s own fingers because a shovel was too big and too clumsy. Then the earth, once again, moved into a more comfortable position.
He was one of twenty-four men they brought out of the shaft three days later wrapped in blankets.
My mother cried only when she pulled the blanket aside in the mortuary and saw what the pressure of a ton of rock had done to the beautiful body of her husband.
7.
Van Heerden wasn’t the kind of man she had expected.
Kemp had said he was an ex-policeman. “What can I tell you? A bit… different? But he’s damn good with investigations. Just be firm with him.”
Heaven knew, she needed “good with investigations.”
She hadn’t known what to expect. Different? Perhaps an earring and a ponytail? Not the… tension. The way he had spoken to Wilna van As. Tension wasn’t the right word. He was difficult to handle. Like an explosive.
They had decided on two thousand rand per week. In advance. She would have to pay it out of her own pocket at first if Van Heerden found nothing. Too much money. Even if Wilna van As paid it in installments later. Money the firm couldn’t afford. She would have to phone Kemp. She reached out for the telephone.
He stood in her doorway.
“I’ll have to speak to Van As again.” His lean body and his black eye and his fuck-you attitude, a brown envelope in his hand, leaning against the door frame. She realized that she had been startled and that he had seen it, her hand stretched toward the telephone. Her aversion to the man was small, but germinating, like a seed.
“We’ll have to discuss that,” she said. “And perhaps you should consider knocking before you come in.”
“Why do we have to discuss it?” He sat down in the chair opposite her again, this time leaning forward, his body language antagonistic.
She took a deep breath, forced patience into her voice, and firmness. “Wilna van As, purely as a human being, can justifiably expect our compassion and r
espect. Added to that she was exposed to more trauma in the past nine months than most of us experience in a lifetime. Despite the little time at our disposal, I found your attitude toward her this morning upsetting and unacceptable.”
He sat in the chair, his eyes on the brown envelope that he tapped rhythmically against his thumbnail.
“I see you’re only two women.”
“What?”
“The firm. Female attorneys.” He looked up, gestured vaguely at the offices around them.
“Yes.” She understood neither the drift nor the relevance.
“Why?” he asked.
“I can’t see what that has to do with your insensitivity.”
“I’m getting to it, Hope. Are you deliberately a women-only firm?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the legal system is a man’s world. And out there are thousands of women who have the right to be treated with sympathy and insight when they are prosecuted or want a divorce. Or are looking for wills.”
“You’re an idealist,” he said.
“You’re not.” A statement.
“And that is the difference between us, Hope. You think your women’s groups, your all-female practice, and a regular contribution to the street children’s fund and the mission washes your heart as white as snow. You think you and other people are inherently good when you get into your expensive BMWs to go to the Health and Racquet Club and you’re so fucking pleased with yourself and your world. Because everyone is basically good. But let me tell you, we’re bad. You, me, the whole lot of us.”
He opened the envelope, took out two postcard-size photographs. He shot them across the desk.
“Have you seen these? The late Johannes Jacobus Smit. Tied to his own kitchen chair. Does that fill you with understanding and sympathy and insight? Or whatever other politically correct words you want to dish out. Someone did that to him. Tied him down with wire and burned him with a blowtorch until he wished they would shoot him. Someone. People. And your untouchable angel, Wilna van As, is in the middle of this mess. Fat Inspector Tony O’Grady of Murder and Robbery thinks she was a part of it because a whole lot of small things don’t add up. And when it comes to murder, statistics are on his side. It’s usually the husband, the wife, the mistress, or the lover. Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s wrong. But if he’s right, what happens to your idealism?”