by Deon Meyer
“No.” The bare word, hanging.
“It’s an American rifle, Mike.”
“Military. The rifle of their infantry since Vietnam. Good weapon. Up to nine hundred fifty rounds per minute on fully automatic. Light. From less than three kilograms to just under four. Different models. M16, M16A1, M16A2, M4 carbine, La France M16K submachine gun, 5.56 caliber, the whole lot. That’s what makes it so odd because it’s not popular round here. R1 and AK-47 use 7.62; ammunition is freely available.”
“Who would use it, Mike?”
De Villiers looked at him, eyes open now. Nagel had never asked him to speculate.
“How would I know, Captain?”
“Did you wonder?”
The eyes closed again. “Yes.”
“And what did you think, Mike?”
De Villiers hesitated for a long time, his eyes closed. Then he opened them again.
“It’s not a good weapon for housebreaking, Captain. It’s big, even if it’s light. It’s a weapon for the battlefield, for the swamps of the Far East and the deserts of the Middle East. It’s a weapon for killing outside, not inside. How do you hide it under your jacket in a suburb? It’s not a good weapon for close work, in a house, Captain. A revolver would’ve been better.”
“What’s your opinion, Mike?”
The eyes, the strange, hypnotic eyes closed again. “There are a few possibilities, Captain. You want to intimidate, people are scared of a large weapon. M16 is in every movie. Or it’s your only unregistered weapon and you don’t want to leave a trail. Or you’re an American. An American soldier. Or…”
Eyes open. He shook his head slightly from side to side, as if he wanted to leave it.
“Or?”
“I don’t know…”
“Tell me, Mike.”
“Mercenary, Captain. M16 is just as available on the black market in Europe as the AK. Mercenaries. Many of them like it. But…”
“But?”
“What would a mercenary be doing in Durbanville, Captain?”
Martha de Villiers came out with the coffee and somewhere a Karoo Prinia long-tailed tit’s clear song sounded in the sunlight.
When he drove away, Mike and Martha de Villiers stood in front of the house, the buxom woman’s arm around her husband’s waist, a couple in Bothasig on a street with neat gardens and ugly concrete walls and children on bicycles and the low whine of lawn mowers using the sunlit gift of a winter morning, and he wondered why his life couldn’t have been like that, a woman and children and a small castle with its own little pub built on and a mongrel dog and a career and a home loan. That had been, somewhere in the past, a possibility.
What had driven him to take the wrong turns to nowhere, to seek the dead ends? The road signs had been so clear, so attractive.
Was that not what he wanted? he suddenly asked himself. Wife and children and a lawn mower?
Yes, he thought.
So fucking badly.
18.
Boet Marnewick found his wife’s kneeling body in the living room, her hands tied behind her back with masking tape, her feet bound with a silk stocking. Forty-six stab wounds, made with a sharp instrument, in her stomach and her back, her nipples sliced off, her genitals mutilated beyond recognition. Blood everywhere, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the living room. A murder that shook the community, caused fear and hatred, and was a subject of conversation for years to come. Stilfontein was rough, a town that knew and understood alcoholism and wife beating and immorality and adultery and assault. Even manslaughter. And, occasionally, murder. But not this kind of murder. The deadly blow in a hotheaded, drunken moment, after an excess of alcohol—that was possible to understand, once in a while.
But this was in cold blood, done by a stranger, an intruder, a thief who, taking his time and with malice aforethought, mutilated and murdered a defenseless woman.
I was in my room, busy with homework, when there was a knock at the door. My mother answered and I couldn’t hear the words, but the tone of her voice made me walk to the living room and there was my detective, my Louis L’Amour Samaritan, and suddenly my heart beat in my throat because my mother looked shocked.
“Sir… ,” I said, and swallowed, and then my mother said, “Baby Marnewick is dead, Zet.”
He pretended not to know me and it was only when he left that he squeezed my shoulder, looked at me, and gave me a small smile. But before that he asked his questions. Had we seen anything? Heard anything? What did we know about the Marnewicks?
And I sat there with my fantasies and my intimate knowledge and my voyeurism and merely affirmed my mother’s negative replies. We knew nothing.
We got the details later. From neighbors and the Klerksdorp Record and Die Vaderland and Die Volksblad and even the Sunday Times. A gruesome sex killing had made Stilfontein national news. I read the reports over and over again and listened with the closest attention to each bit of news a new source could supply.
The details upset me. Partly because of my own unclean thoughts about Baby Marnewick. And the fact that they, however slight the connection, linked me to the murderer who had cut and stabbed, driven by lust. Because I had lusted as well—even though our fantasies had been so dramatically different.
And partly because a human being, someone in Stilfontein, one of us, was capable of such a revolting deed.
They never found him. There were no fingerprints. There was semen on Baby Marnewick’s body, on her buttocks and on her back, but this was in the years before DNA testing and the long arm of the test tube that could reach past your race and sex and blood group to the imprint of your body, that could decipher a microscopic hair or thread from a piece of clothing and dissect you more thoroughly than a scalpel.
There were rumors. Boet Marnewick was a suspect but that was nonsense, he had been a kilometer underground at the time of the murder. There were rumors of the traveling murderer. Another story was of a man from her past, from Johannesburg, and there was even one about the Scot from whom Boet had taken her.
But they never found the killer.
Day after day I stared at the wooden fence and thought about the strangest things. If Betta Wandrag hadn’t interfered, would I have listened at the fence? Perhaps heard something that could have saved Baby Marnewick? Wondered why. How? How did someone do something like that? How do you murder so brutally and without conscience, so bloody and cruel? And who.
Who could have planned something like that? Because rumor would have it that he had brought the masking tape with him, that he had worn gloves. Premeditated, planned murder.
Toward the end of the year my mother put the application forms for Potchefstroom University in front of me, made herself comfortable, and said we had speculated about my plans for a long time. Now it was time to go to university and make my choices, because it was better to go to university first and then do the compulsory army training because graduates quickly became officers, even if I only wanted to become a teacher.
“I’m not going to university, Ma.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m joining the police.”
19.
Profiling.
Johannes Jacobus Smit had been bound, tortured, and then murdered because he had to supply the combination to a safe and afterward he was an unnecessary and unwelcome witness. The motive was known. The modus operandi clear. The profile simple. A single-minded thief. Someone who was capable of torture and murder. Psychopath, sociopath, at least some symptoms.
Behavior established personality. They had taught him that at Quantico. His three American months.
But the magical power of profiling lay in pinpointing the evidently motiveless, the serial killers, the rapists, the sex murderers who were driven by the demons of their pasts: the fucked-up family life, the violent father, the whoring mother. Not in exposing the simplicity of torture and murder committed to get at the contents of a safe. Robbery. Murder. With aggravating circumstances.
Planned robbery
. The wire had been brought to the murder scene. The blowtorch was part of the murderer’s equipment. Here are your sandwiches, love. And don’t forget the wire, the pliers, and the blowtorch. Is the M16 loaded? Have a nice day.
He, the murderer-robber, was known to Smit. Maybe. Probably. No sign of forced entry into the house. And the fact that Smit was shot execution-style. Another potential sign. No witnesses left behind.
Perhaps. Possibly. Conceivably.
He parked the Corolla under a tree at the bottom end of Moreletta Street and switched off the engine.
The blowtorch.
There was something about that blowtorch. The murderer knew he would have to torture, which meant that he knew Smit wouldn’t talk easily. Which also meant that he knew him. Which meant that he knew Smit possessed something that was worth stealing. Something that was hidden or locked away. But there were many ways to torture that caused pain, inhuman pain. Why use a blowtorch? Why not use the pliers to extract Smit’s nails, one by one? Why not beat Smit with the stock of the rifle until his face was unrecognizable and the pain of a broken nose and smashed mouth and cracked skull made him beg to confess, to tell where the documents or diamonds or dollars or drugs were?
Or whatever the fuck was in the safe.
The blowtorch said something about the murderer.
Arson was a primary warning sign of a serial killer in the making. Together with bed-wetting and torturing animals.
They liked fire. Flames.
He took out his notebook.
Crime Research Bureau. Blowtorch burglaries/crimes
He closed the book, put it into his jacket pocket with the pen.
“You must be able to put yourself in the shoes of the murderer and the victim,” they had said at Quantico.
Smit’s shoes. The perspective of the victim acquired from the crime scene, the forensic and pathology reports. Smit, alone at home, follows his usual routine: there’s a knock at the door—was the door locked, had he always kept it locked, habit of fifteen years, or was the door open and had the murderer simply walked in with his rifle and his blowtorch and his wire and his pliers? Here was something that didn’t make sense. There were too many things for one man to carry. Hold the door for a moment, Johannes Jacobus, I just want to get the torture equipment.
Two attackers?
Or one. With a backpack and an M16.
Smit is startled, fear, recognition: after so many years the existence he had crafted with so much care is suddenly threatened. Great fear, adrenaline. But he’s unarmed. He steps away from the door. What do you want?
Oh, you know, Johannes Jacobus, the goodies you stole from me. Where are they, good buddy?
According to the pathologist there were no wounds to indicate that there had been a fight. Smit had put up no resistance. A lamb led to the slaughter. Sit, Smit, and we’ll see how long you can hang in there before you tell me where my goodies are.
Why hadn’t Smit put up any resistance? Had he known he would achieve nothing because there were two of them? Or was he simply too scared, terrified?
Force him into the kitchen chair, tie him down.
With an M16? How do you hold an M16 to a man’s head with one hand while tying his hands with binding wire and a pair of pliers with your other hand?
There had been more than one “visitor.”
Tell us, Smittie, where are the goodies?
Fuck you.
Ah, so pleasant to have cooperation. Light the blowtorch and strip him.
Torture him. The blue flame on his scrotum, on his chest, on his belly, on his arms. The pain must’ve been inhuman.
Why hadn’t he simply told them? His business was doing well. He didn’t need money, diamonds, drugs, weapons, to make more money. Why didn’t he just say, It’s in the safe, here’s the combination, take the stuff, and leave me alone?
Reason: there was something else in the safe. Of no monetary value. Something else.
Reason: he’d known he was going to die if they found what they had come for.
Van Heerden sighed.
“What the fuck do the shoes of the victim have to do with anything? Except if the murderer’s blood is stuck to them” had been Nagel’s reaction. “The suspect, yes. His shoes. That’s what counts.”
He stared ahead, didn’t see the street, the big trees, the gardens. Didn’t see the clouds moving in from the mountain.
Nagel. Who was now thrusting his thin, sinewy arm from the grave. Nagel, he thought, had rested for long enough. Nagel was coming back.
He didn’t know how he would handle it.
He got out of the car.
Let the footwork begin.
Like crystal, she thought. The sunshine days between the cold fronts. Clear as glass, windless, a beautiful fragility. Shining jewels in the dark dress of winter.
Hope Beneke was jogging next to the sea at Blouberg’s beach, somewhat self-conscious about the stares of passing motorists, a small price to pay for the stunning view of the sea and the mountain, the great towering mass of rock with its strange, world-famous shape that guarded the bay, a sentinel of calm, constancy, peace of mind, resignation. Some things always remained the same.
Even if she was changing.
Rhythmically, one running shoe following the other, she took pleasure in the fitness of her body, her breathing deep and even, her legs blissfully warm. She wasn’t always fit; she hadn’t always been so slender. There had been a time in her last year at university and the clerkship years when she had been ashamed of her legs, when she didn’t like her bottom, didn’t look good in jeans—the combination of university-residence food and long hours of study and a certain aversion to herself.
Not that Richard minded. He said he liked her Rubenesque curves. At the beginning. When everything was new in their relationship, when he ran his hands over her body for the first time, sighed deeply, and said, with a light shining behind his eyes, “Lord, Hope, but you’re sexy.” Richard, with his small bald patch and his laconic accountant’s view of life and his passion for news. Richard, who later, when everything was no longer new, would get up after making love to look at the latest news. Or would pick up Time, switch on the light, and read. Time!
Richard, who wanted to get married. No, who wanted to live like a married man long before she had finished with the romance and the eroticism of the game of love.
“You have a red mark on your cheek,” Richard had said without surprise, one summer’s night in the middle of the act of love, as if he was reporting the news to an audience without prejudice. After they had had sex for months.
“My whole body is glowing like fire,” she had said, filled with passion and empathy.
“Odd mark,” was his thoughtful reaction.
And when their relationship eventually became as dry as dust and died a quiet death, she had to take stock.
Just to realize that she had been equally to blame. Not that Richard possessed the same unbiased capacity for introspection. Some people dare not run the risk of self-criticism. He was different. He was so satisfied with himself that he never saw the need for it.
But she had to examine her life. And one of the conclusions she came to was that she wasn’t comfortable with herself. Not with her body, not with the way she was.
So she did two things. Left Kemp, Smuts, and Breedt. And started jogging. And here she was on Blouberg’s beach, fit and slender and Richard-less—and a forty-year-old dysfunctional ex-policeman (what was his real age?) was a vague interest, an impossible possibility.
Because he was so different from Richard? Because he was so unpredictable and wounded? Because his mother…
She should have her head examined.
The sun suddenly disappeared. She looked up. A dark bank of clouds over the bay, over the mountain. Another front. It was a cold winter. Not like last year’s. Like life. Always changing. Sometimes there wasn’t much sunshine, then rare crystal days in between the rain.
He walked from house to house in Moreletta
Street, like a door-to-door salesman, and asked his questions.
No one knew Johannes Jacobus Smit. “You know what it’s like—we all live our own lives.”
The houses on either side of the Smit–Van As house: “We sometimes had a chat across the fence. They were very quiet.”
No one saw or heard anything. “I thought I heard something like a shot, but it might have been something else.”
Everyone at each house, somewhat uncomfortable, their Saturday schedule disturbed, politeness without friendliness, curious. “Have you found anything?” “Have you caught anybody?” “Do you know why he was shot?” Because that was where the threat lay. Someone in their area had been cruelly murdered, too near their personal safety zone, a small breach in the bastion of their white middle-class security. And when he replied in the negative, there was a quick frown of worry, followed by a moment of silence as if they wanted Smit to have earned it in some way or another, because such things simply didn’t happen.
Then, before he was ready, he had finished, and he drove to Philippi to see Willie Theal.
Theal, who had phoned him to say, “Come and work with me.” Theal, who had comforted him when his life had burst open like an overripe, sick bloody pomegranate, and he accepted the comfort because he needed it, but his acceptance was deceit, the big deceit because he had always been trash, from the first time he stole, when he stole with his eyes and his mind through the wooden fence, when he stole from Nagel. The trash in him was always there, just under the surface, like lava, constantly smoldering, bubbling, waiting for a crack in the rock face, ready to break like a volcano through the soft crust of his world.
He braked, suddenly.
Too little time.
He realized it suddenly: five days. Not enough.
Say he spoke to Theal—fuck it, he wasn’t afraid. It wouldn’t make him better or worse. It wasn’t because he was afraid of the ghosts that Theal would call up.
It wouldn’t make any difference. Because there simply wasn’t enough. Too little information, too little time.