by Deon Meyer
“The company books. The financial affairs. Who handles them?”
“Jan dealt with them. And the auditor.”
“Did you have any insight into them?”
“Yes, I helped balance the books every month.”
“Are the records available?”
“Yes. It’s all here.” Her eyes turned to the white cupboard behind her.
“May I see them?”
She nodded and got up. There was a certain absence in her, he thought.
She opened the cupboard door again, wider this time. “Here they are,” she said. He looked. Ledgers and hardcover files stood in neat rows covering two shelves, each one clearly marked with a felt-tip pen for each year since 1983.
“May I see the first lot. To ’eighty-six, perhaps?”
Carefully she took the files out and handed them to him. He opened the first one. Handwritten figures in columns between the narrow blue and red lines. He concentrated, tried to make sense, get a grip on it all. Entries of dates and sums, the figures not large, tens, a couple of hundreds, but obviously chaotic. He gave up.
“Could you explain how it works?”
She nodded. She took a long yellow pencil, using it as a pointer. “These are the debits and these are the credits. There —”
“Hang on,” he said. “Is this the income, the money he received?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s the money he spent?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the bank balance?”
She turned the page, pointed, using the pencil. “In August 1983 the balance in the books was minus R1,122.35.”
“Is that the amount he had in the bank?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“This amount shows that the business spent R1,122.35 more than it made. The bank balance could be more or less, depending on the original balance.” Patiently, as to a child.
“Hang on,” he said. He had never been stupid with figures. Only uninterested. “This isn’t the bank balance. Only the difference between income and expenditure.”
“Yes.”
“Where is the bank balance reflected?”
“It’s not reflected here. It would be in the bank statements.” She got up, fetched more ledgers from the cupboard.
“Do you have a bookkeeping background?”
“No,” said Wilna van As. “I had to learn. Jan showed me. And the auditor. It’s not difficult, once you understand.” She paged through, searching. “Here. The bank balance for August 1983.”
He looked at where the pencil was pointing. R13,877.65. “He had money in the bank but the business was losing money?”
She paged back in the bank statements. “Look at this. The opening balance of the bank account was R15,000.00. The figures with the minus sign were amounts that he paid out. If you compare it with the figures in the ledger, you’ll see that it’s the same as the debits. And the other figures are income that is entered in the ledger as credit. The difference between the two is R1,122.35. Subtract that from R15,000.00 and you get R13,877.65.”
“Aaaah…”
He pulled the ledger toward him again, paged to September 1983. The balance was minus R817.44; October: minus R674.87; November: minus R404.65; December: R312.05.
“He began making a profit in December 1983.”
“December is always a good month.”
He drew the following year’s ledger and bank statements toward him, studied them with his newfound knowledge. He made notes. The devil was in the detail. His credo. Nagel’s scorn. Wilna van As sat opposite him, her hands folded on the table, quiet. He thought briefly about what was going through the woman’s head. Later she offered tea. He accepted gratefully. She got up. He paged on. A business that grew conservatively: prices of cupboards and desks, tables and chairs, four-posters and headboards, rising steadily, a microeconomic picture of an era. In 1991 the ledger system changed to computer printouts that he had to decipher all over again, with the aid of Wilna van As.
“The houses. Is there no record of the sale of the houses?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you find out?”
“I’ll ask the bank.”
“I’d be most grateful.”
“What does this all tell you?” she asked, indicating the figures scattered in front of him.
“I don’t know yet. Something. Maybe nothing. But let me make sure first.”
“Something?” The fear in her voice again, in her eyes.
“Let me make sure first. May I take the ID?”
“Yes,” she said, but hesitantly.
On the way to Mitchell’s Plain he was in the foothills of that curious breakthrough euphoria, the Everest of insight still hidden behind mist and clouds, data stored in his head, in his notes. The columns of the investigation ledger didn’t balance yet: a theory, somewhere between the figures and the years and the information of Wilna van As the truth lay hidden. His heart now beating lightly, his head touching on this and that, he felt light as air. Fuck, fuck, fuck, it was like the old days. What was happening to him? Was it that easy? Release, liberation, freedom, walking the old roads with the compass of knowledge and procedures and instructions and senses and Nagel’s nagging voice in the back of your head?
Not likely…
Don’t think about it. Like a man climbing, don’t look down.
Did he want to climb up? Did he want to get up out of the safe, stinking shit of his existence?
Orlando Arendse’s house had been here five, six years ago. Things had changed.
Security wall with razor wire on the top, Fort Mitchell’s Plain. He stopped at the gate and got out. Behind the gate a man came walking up, large pistol holstered at his belt.
“What?”
“I’m looking for Orlando.”
“Who’re you?”
No respect anymore.
“Van Heerden.”
“SAP?” Spelling out the initials.
“Used to be.”
“Wait.”
SAP. They had always had the gift of smelling a cop, even if you were no longer official. Even if you didn’t look like a policeman. He looked at the extensive burglarproofing against the windows. Battlefield Mitchell’s Plain. Now there were gangs and Pagad—People Against Gangsterism and Drugs—and Chinese Mafia and Colombian and Nigerian cartels and Russian Mafia and solo flyers and an alphabet soup of splinter groups. No wonder the police couldn’t keep up. In his day there were only gangs—jittery teenagers and fucked-up jailbirds…
The man came back, opened the gate. “You’d better bring in the car.”
He drove in. Got out.
“Come,” said pistol-on-the-hip.
“Aren’t you going to search me?”
“Orlando says I don’t have to because you can’t hit a double-door shithouse at two yards.”
“It’s always nice to be remembered.”
In at the front door. The living room was furnished like an office. Home industry of organized crime. In the corner sat three more soldiers, while Orlando sat at a large table. Older than he remembered, gray at the temples, looking like a headmaster now, still fond of cream-colored three-piece tailor-made suits.
“Van Heerden,” Orlando said, unsurprised.
“Orlando.”
“You want something from me.” The soldiers in the corner busy with paperwork, ears pricked, ready for action.
He took the identity book out of his pocket, handed it to Orlando.
“Sit,” said Orlando, waving him to a chair. He opened the booklet, put the reading glasses that hung around his neck on a string on his nose, pulled the lamp nearer, switched it on, held the book under the light.
“I don’t do IDs any longer.”
“What do you do now, Orlando?”
“You’re not official anymore, Van Heerden.”
He grinned for a moment. So fucking true.
Orlando closed the book. “It’s old. And it’s
not my work.”
“But it’s forged.”
Orlando nodded. “Good job. Could be Nieuwoudt’s.”
“Who’s Nieuwoudt?”
Orlando put the ID down on the table, flicked it deftly across the surface to him. “You come in here, Van Heerden, unannounced, as if I owe you. You’ve been out of the Force for five, six years. Rumor has it you’re a bottom-feeder going down. Where’s your negotiating power?”
“I don’t have negotiating power.”
Orlando stared at him, a man with brown skin and the features of a Xhosa, the unsympathetic genes of his legendary white wine-farmer father and his servant mother. “You were always honest, Van Heerden, I’ll give you that. A straight shooter as long as it’s not with a firearm.”
“Fuck you, Orlando.”
The hands of the soldiers in the corner grew still.
Orlando folded his hands in front of him, gold rings on each small finger. “You still touchy about Nagel, Van Heerden?”
“You know fuck-all about Nagel, Orlando.” His voice was high, hands shaking. He sat on the edge of the chair.
Orlando rested his chin on his folded hands, his eyes black and glistening. “Relax,” he said quietly. Soldiers holding their breath.
Steady on, struggling, can’t lose control, not now, not here, red tide slowly receding, a deep breath, felt his heart beating, slowly, slowly.
Orlando’s voice was gentle. “You’ll have to let go, Van Heerden. We all make mistakes.”
Breathe, slowly.
“Who’s Nieuwoudt?”
Orlando’s eyes and hands were quiet for a long while, measuring, thoughtful. “Charles Nieuwoudt. Boer. White trash. Been riding the slow train for ten years, even missed Mandela’s birthday-bash amnesty.”
“Forger.”
“One of the best. An animal but an artist. But he got sloppy, too much work, too much money, too much weed, too many women. Tried to make a fortune, so he made six millions’ worth of twenty-rand notes without the watermark and dumped the printer in the Liesbeek River with a hole in the head to get his hands on his part of the profit as well. So they got him for the murder and the money.”
Soldiers started moving papers around again.
“And this is his work?”
“Looks like it. He was the king of the blue books. The blues were easier to fake. The seventies and early eighties were good years…”
“One more question, Orlando.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s 1983. I have dollars. American. Many dollars. I want to buy a house and start a legal business. I need rand. What do I do?”
“Who’re you working for, Van Heerden?”
“An attorney.”
“Kemp?”
He shook his head.
“So now you’re a PI for an attorney?”
“Freelance, Orlando.”
“It’s lower than shark shit, Van Heerden. Why don’t you go back to the Force? We need all the opposition we can get.”
He ignored it. “Dollars in ’eighty-three.”
“It’s a long time ago.”
“I know.”
“I was small-time in ’eighty-three. You had to take thirty or fifty cents to the dollar. But if you’re looking for names, I can’t help you.”
Van Heerden got up. “Thank you, Orlando.”
“Are there still dollars in this thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe, though.”
“Maybe.”
“Dollars are big money now.”
He only nodded.
“You owe me one, Van Heerden.”
12.
Aunt Baby Marnewick.
Every time I hear about a new movie in which fearless American heroes save us all from a virus, meteorites, or enemy aliens threatening humankind, I wonder why they are so completely unaware of the far more interesting, small, yet life-altering suburban intrigues.
The Marna Espag love affair didn’t survive our first clumsy and incomplete sexual effort. There was no sudden dramatic ending, simply a systematic cooling off, aided by my disappointment in my performance and her shame because she hadn’t been able to hide her own frustration.
But at sixteen, seventeen, the soul and the body heal amazingly fast, and we remained friends, even when she started dating the head boy, Lourens Campher, during the July of our senior year. I’ll wonder forever whether she and Lourens managed it successfully and if he gained the trophy of her virginity and restored her faith in men.
On the other hand, I didn’t date on a permanent basis again while at school, just some heavy petting here and there. Because Aunt Baby Marnewick would cross the path of my sexual—and later professional—education.
She and her husband lived in the house behind ours. He was a big, strong miner, like 90 percent of Stilfontein’s male inhabitants a shift worker, a rough diamond who dedicated his Saturdays and Sundays to the installation of a three-liter V6 engine into a Ford Anglia. He had to move the whole instrument panel and gearbox back and lengthen the driveshaft and the transmission, which made the basic reason for this task—to give other Anglia drivers a very unpleasant surprise at stoplights—useless. Simply by looking through the window, any idiot would immediately have noticed that Boet Marnewick’s car wasn’t standard.
Suburban legend had it that he had to win Baby with his fists, way back in Bez Valley, that stewing pot of a suburb in Johannesburg, when he wanted to take her away from a sturdy Scotsman. She stood on the front veranda of the house and watched the two men snorting and bleeding like two bulls proving their genetic superiority to win her hand.
Because Baby Marnewick was a good-looking woman. Tall and slender with thick, red hair, a full, broad mouth—and formidable breasts. It was her eyes, small and sly, that gave her a touch of sluttishness that, I suspected, men couldn’t resist—possibly because it created the impression that she was easy, and was also a clue to her real nature.
For years I was barely aware of the neighbors behind us. (Why are neighbors “behind” us so much more mysterious, lesser neighbors?) The high wooden fence between the two houses probably contributed to it. But for a sexually awakening teenage boy, the sight of Baby Marnewick in her Saturday outfit at the shopping center was unforgettable. And my awareness of her grew, my interest pricked by vague rumors and the blatancy with which she flaunted her sexuality.
In the early spring of my last year at school, on a perfect warm afternoon, bored, Marna-less, and curious, I peered through a thin crack in the steadily decaying fence, not for the first time, but still a coincidence, an opportunistic moment of wishful thought.
And there in the backyard of the Marnewicks’, Aunt Baby lay on an inflatable mattress, naked and glistening with suntan oil, dark glasses covering her sly eyes, and a playful hand and calm fingers with painted nails fondling the paradise between her legs.
Oh, the sweet shock.
I stood there, too frightened to move, too frightened to breathe, light-headed, mindless, utterly randy, discoverer of the pleasures of voyeurism, the chosen of the gods, placed there at just the right moment.
I don’t know how long it took Aunt Baby Marnewick to achieve orgasm. Twenty minutes? More? For me the time flashed by—I couldn’t get enough—until she eventually, with a low, deep groan through her open mouth and heavenly little movements of stomach and legs, gratified herself.
Then she got up slowly and disappeared into the house.
I stood staring at the mattress for a long time, hoping she would return. Later I realized it was not to be my destiny and went to my room to give expression to my own overriding desire. Again and again and again.
And the next afternoon I was at my spy hole in the fence again, ready to resume the wonderful one-sided relationship with Baby Marnewick.
She didn’t masturbate in her backyard every afternoon. She didn’t lie in the sun, slick and nude, every day. To my great disappointment there was no routine of time or day. It was a game of di
ce and of yearning, visual theft. I sometimes wondered whether she did it in the morning when I was in school: I even considered being “ill” for a few days to test the theory. But occasionally, one day a week, sometimes once in two weeks, my avidity was rewarded with some enchanting scene.
I fantasized about her. Obviously. I would walk round (climbing over the fence was too undignified), stand next to her, and say: You need never use your hand again, Baby. Then I would undress and she would welcome me into her with a Yes, yes, yes, yes, and after I had taken her to unknown sensual heights on the inflatable, we would lie next to each other and discuss how we would run away and be happy for ever and ever.
Fantasy number one.
With variations on the theme.
How different and more interesting than the fantasies would be the reality, the small, life-changing reality.
13.
Rush-hour traffic from Mitchell’s Plain. He took the N7, in a hurry to get home, still had to phone Wilna van As.
He was amazed at the world in which he lived. He and Kemp and he and Orlando and who owed whom, the mechanisms of social and professional interaction, the eleventh commandment: be the one who is owed. Kemp: You’re trash, Van Heerden. O’Grady: Jesus, Van Heerden, that’s not a fucking living. Why don’t you come back? Orlando: A bottom-feeder going down… It’s lower than shark shit, Van Heerden. Why don’t you go back to the Force? General consensus about his life, but they didn’t know, they didn’t understand, they had no insight. They had no understanding of his sentence: he had to serve it, a life sentence, and then, in a moment of investigative euphoria, he had wondered whether he would be released, would receive amnesty. How absurd, fuck, like a man in a cell, dreaming he was outside, only to wake in the morning.
He pulled off at a petrol station for fuel, saw the telephone booth, phoned Wilna van As.
“The bank says they never held mortgages on the properties. I found the deeds of conveyance and the letters of the attorneys, but I don’t understand all of it.”
“Who were the conveyancers?”
“Please hold on.”
He waited, saw in his mind’s eye the woman walking to the melamine cupboard in her office for the documents.