by Deon Meyer
‘I don’t’
‘Of course you know, Martin. He was the one who gave you the message.’ He came closer. ‘What happened? Wouldn’t he tell you where the letter came from?’ Phatudi came right up to me. There was terrible anger emanating from him. Or was it hate? ‘So you pulled his fingernails out, didn’t you? Because he wouldn’t tell? You tortured him and shot him and threw him away in the Green Valley plantation.’
The black constables closed in, a cordon of suspicion.
‘Someone pulled his nails out?’
‘Did you enjoy that, Martin?’
I had to stay calm. There was an army of police. ‘Shouldn’t you call the SouthMed Hospital first, Jack, and check my alibi?’
He raised his arms and I thought he was going to hit me. I was ready for him. But his movement was just a gesture of frustration. ‘For what? Trouble? You are just trouble. You and that woman. Ever since you came. Wolhuter dead, Le Roux in hospital. And now this. You have brought us this trouble.’
‘Us, Jack?’ Mustn’t get angry. I took a deep breath. ‘Tell me, why didn’t you tell Emma about the masked men who shoot dogs and tie dead impala to people? Why didn’t you mention the Honey Badgers the day before yesterday when I told you that the men who shot Emma were in balaclavas? Don’t tell me you didn’t make the connection, Jack. You had trouble long before we turned up.’
If I thought I would calm him down with that, I was mistaken. He puffed up like a toad, struggling to form his words in his rage. ‘That is nothing. Nothing. Edwin Dibakwane … he has got children. He … You … Who does that? Who does that to a man? All he did was hand over a letter.’
I didn’t have many options. I was aware of the antagonism of the policemen surrounding me. Phatudi’s argument that Emma and I were responsible for Edwin’s death was not completely groundless. I held my tongue.
He looked at me with complete revulsion. ‘You …’ he said again, and then bit off his words and shook his head. He flexed his great hands. He turned and walked back towards the little house, stopped and glared at me. Then he came back to me, pointed a finger at me, put his hands on his hips and looked down the road towards the station. He said something in a native language, two or three bitter sentences, and then he directed himself to me again. ‘Order,’ he said. ‘That is my job. To keep order. To fight the chaos. But this country …’
He focused on me again.
‘I told you. You don’t know what it’s like here. We have troubles. Big troubles. This place. It’s like the veld in drought. Ready to burn. We beat out the fires. We run from one fire to the next fire and we beat out the flames. Then you turn up here and want to set everything on fire. I’m telling you, Martin, if we don’t stop it, the fire will burn so big and fast and far that everything will be burnt up. Everything and everyone. Nobody will be able to stop it.’
Some of the policemen nodded their heads in agreement. I was almost ready to see his side of it. Then he got personal.
‘You must leave. You and that woman.’ He spat out the words. With hatred. I could not let myself react. ‘You brought your trouble here.’ His index finger was a gun pointing. ‘We don’t want it. Take it and leave.’
I heard the anger rising in my voice. ‘It’s your trouble that came to her. She didn’t want it. It came and fetched her.’
‘Fetched her? She saw a photo on TV.’
‘She phoned you about it and two days later three men in balaclavas broke down her front door to kill her. What was she supposed to do, Jack?’
He came a step closer. ‘She phoned me?’
‘The same evening that it was on the TV news she phoned you and asked whether the man you were looking for might be Jacobus le Roux. Remember?’
‘Lots of people phoned. Lots.’
‘But she is the only one that was attacked because she phoned…’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Arrogant. Taunting. He wanted me to lose my temper, lose control.
I pulled my new phone out of my pocket and offered it to him. ‘Call your colleagues in Cape Town, Jack. Ask them if there is a case file. Monday, twenty-fourth December. Attack at the house of Emma le Roux at ten o’clock in the morning. Call them.’
He ignored the cell phone.
‘Come on, Jack, take the damn phone and call them.’
Phatudi’s deep frown was back. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’
‘She didn’t think it was necessary. She thought asking for help reasonably would be enough.’
‘She only asked about the photos.’
‘She also asked you about the vulture murders.’
‘That was sub judice.’
‘Sub judice? Why? To protect your arse?’
‘What?’ He stepped closer.
‘Careful, Jack, there are witnesses here. She sees the TV news. Twenty-second of December. She phones you. You say Cobie de Villiers can’t be Jacobus le Roux because everyone knows him and he’s been here all his life. That’s enough for her. She drops the whole idea, doesn’t mention it to anyone. On the twenty-fourth of December they break into her house, and she’s lucky to get away. That afternoon someone phones her and says something about “Jacobus”. The connection is bad; she can’t hear properly. She hires herself a bodyguard and comes here. You know what happens here.’
‘So?’
‘So the only connection with the attack on her is you, Jack. The call she made to you.’
‘Masepa.’
‘What?’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Bullshit?’
‘I can’t even remember her phoning, Martin.’ But he was on the defensive now.
‘Who was with you?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Were the calls taped?’
‘We are the police, not the Secret Service.’
‘Did you tell anyone about her phone call?’
‘I told you, I can’t remember her phoning. There were … I don’t know, fifty or sixty … Most of the calls are nonsense.’
‘Why didn’t you tell her about the Honey Badgers? The other day at Mogale?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Why not?’
‘What are you saying, Martin? You want me to take responsibility for something?’
‘Yes, Jack. I just don’t know what it is yet, but you are part of this fuck-up, and I am going to find out. And then I’ll come and get you.’
‘You? You’re jailbird trash. Don’t talk to me like that.’ He came right up to me and we stood like two bantam cocks, chest to chest. I wanted to hit him, I wanted to let all my frustration and rage boil over and I wanted to take it out on the man in front of me. I wanted to go to that other place where time stood still, the room of the red-grey mist. The door was wide open and beckoning.
Afterwards I would wonder what held me back. Was it the army of police? Hopefully, I wasn’t a moron. Was I tempered by the knowledge that jailbird trash learned: that you have to come out the other side, back to reality, where you paid dearly for your pleasures? And that I couldn’t afford to pay the price again? Or was it the shadow of a woman standing with her face in the rain and arms stretched up to the heavens?
I stepped back from the abyss – and from Phatudi. Small, deliberate, reluctant steps.
And I turned away.
31
Phatudi’s troops laughed at me when I walked to the Audi.
As I got in I saw him standing with his chest expanded and a smile of self-satisfaction.
I turned the ignition and drove away.
Past the station I let my rage boil over and banged the car into low gear and stomped on the accelerator. The rear end slid too far around the gravel turn and I fought the wheel, brought it back, accelerated again, spinning the tyres. They found traction and shot the Audi forward, revs too high. I ran through the gears, wanted to stamp the accelerator through the floor, a hundred and fucking sixty, and there was the R40 junction up ahead. I had to brake and the car shuddered and for a while I didn’t know whether I was going to make it,
but I stopped in a cloud of dust. I saw that my knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
I opened the door and got out. A truck and trailer thundered past on the R40, loaded high with massive logs. I shouted at it, a meaningless cry.
A minibus taxi passed the other way, filled with black faces staring at me, a crazy white man beside the road.
I didn’t know where to go. That was my problem. It was the primary source of my frustration and rage.
Phatudi had baited, taunted and angered me, but I had handled that. I could wait for him, for the right time and the right place. But the fact that my choices had dwindled to nothing, I could do nothing about.
On the way to the house with the pink concrete wall, I had had three options. Edwin Dibakwane and the letter. Jack Phatudi and the phone call. Donnie Branca and Mogale. And now I had none.
Edwin Dibakwane was dead. Someone had tortured him and shot him and left his body in a plantation. The connection between the letter and its author was broken. Scrap option number one.
No, not entirely. Dibakwane would have told the people pulling out his fingernails where the letter came from. Somebody knew. But I didn’t. It was still no use to me.
Phatudi had been telling the truth. Despite everything, his surprise about the attack on Emma and the connection with the call to him was genuine. Scrap option number two.
That left me with the Mogale rehabilitation centre.
The urge to go there now and thrash Donnie Branca until he told me what was going on was consuming me. I wanted to punish somebody. For Emma.
I wanted to bash someone’s skull against a wall or a rock or a clay floor, over and over again, make the brain bounce back and forth against the sides of the cranium, coup and fucking contrecoup, until his cerebral cortex was a fucking pulp. That is what I wanted to do. I wanted to twist the arms of the two masked wonders at the railway track until they popped out of their joints and I heard the ligaments snap and the bones splinter. I wanted to get that sniper, take his rifle, jam it through his teeth, put my finger on the trigger, look him in the eyes, say ‘goodbye, motherfucker’ and then blow his brains all over the wall.
But who were they? And where could I find them?
Branca was my last hope. What would I do if he refused to talk? What was left if I hit him and he still wouldn’t speak? Because he couldn’t risk it, the whole affair had gone too far – a woman in a coma, a gate guard tortured and murdered, a man dead in a lion pen and mad Cobie de Villiers couldn’t take responsibility for all that. It was one thing to send threatening letters to farmers, to shoot dogs and burn down buildings. Quite another story to go to jail for life.
Scrap option number three.
I walked down the road away from the Audi and then I walked back again. I still had no idea what to do.
I opened the car door and got in. Started the car. Turned right on the tar road, in the general direction of Hoedspruit, Mogale and Mohlolobe.
I just drove. I had nothing else to do.
Past the turn-off to the Kruger National Park, the R351,1 saw the handmade advertising board. WARTHOG BUSH PUB. COLD BEER!!!!! AIRCON!!! OPEN! For the first time it meant something. I thought it over for a kilometre, reduced speed and stopped. Waited for oncoming traffic to pass and then I turned around.
Time to think. Cool down. Let me go and see where they tried to recruit Dick-the-dude.
It was not a place for international tourists. One big building and six or seven small ones between the mopane trees and dust. Whitewashed walls, weathered grey thatch asking for maintenance. Three well-used Land Cruisers, an old Toyota 4×4 single-cab, two big old-fashioned Mercedes sedans, a new Nissan double-cab and a Land Rover Defender of indeterminate age. Three had Mpumalanga number plates, the rest were from Limpopo Province.
Local watering hole.
From the biggest building a cracked panel hung slightly askew. A lifetime ago someone with no remarkable artistic talent had carved out the word ‘Warthog’ and a caricature of the same on the dark wood. A sign in the form of a vehicle number plate was screwed below: BUSH PUB. A white-painted plank fixed neatly square to the wall promised in red letters: PUB LUNCHES! A LA CARTE DINNER! GENUINE GAME DISHES! TRY OUR MIXED GRILL! WARTHOG BURGERS!
In the window beside the large wooden door was a small faded advertisement stuck up with sticky tape like an afterthought. CHALETS AVAILABLE. I opened the door. The air conditioning was working. There was a long bar the length of the building. Wooden tables and benches filled the rest of the room. All were set. A silver banner hung from the open rafters, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!! The management was into exclamation marks.
The bleached wall was covered with graffiti. Jamie & Susan were here. Eddie the German. Morgan and the Gang. Olaff Johanssen. Save the Whale, harpoon a fat chick. Free Mandela – with every box of Rice Krispies. Semper Fi. Naas Botha was hier. Seker omdat Morné nie kom nie. Make Love, Not War – Steek, Maar Nie Met ’n Mes Nie. Cartoons, illegible signatures.
At five tables there were people in groups of eight or more. From the volume of the conversation I gathered they had begun the New Year celebrations. Behind the bar a woman was unpacking glasses from a plastic crate. When I sat down at the long bar she came over.
‘What would you like?’
‘Dry Lemon and ice, please.’
‘On New Year’s Eve?’ Amused laughter lines. She was on the wrong side of forty, but not unattractive, her nose and mouth worked well together. Her eyes were light, more grey than green, hair long and curled in brown waves to her shoulders. Earrings in the shape of the moon and stars. A sleeveless faded orange T-shirt covered her large breasts. Blue jeans with a dramatic belt buckle, African beads around her neck, a cascade of bangles, pretty hands with too many rings. Long nails painted green.
‘Yes, thank you.’
I watched as she went to a fridge with a sliding door. She looked good in the jeans. On the back of her shoulder she had a tattoo, an Eastern letter or sign. She took out a can of cool drink – a small one.
‘Two of those, please.’
She took out another, put both side by side, took a beer glass and filled it with ice. She brought them all to me. ‘Do you want to run a tab?’
‘Please.’
She snapped open the cans. I saw hundreds of visiting cards stuck to the shelves of bottles in long rows. Near the ceiling hung a row of baseball caps. Tractor and car logos. Currie Cup teams. Just another country pub in search of character.
‘Tertia,’ she said, and put out a beringed hand. The name did not suit her.
‘Lemmer,’ I said, and we shook hands. Hers was cool from the cans and her eyes were curious.
‘You don’t look like a tourist.’
‘What does a tourist look like?’
‘Depends. The foreigners wear safari outfits. The Gautengers, from Johannesburg and Pretoria, bring the wife and children. They put their cell phone down first, then a fat wallet beside it. Want to show off a bit, and not miss a call.
You’re working. You came in here for a reason. Waiting for someone? Could be, the way you looked around.’
Then she looked into my eyes. ‘Mercenary.’
I knew what she was doing. She was waiting for me to blink, the subtle narrowing of my eyes, the downward glance. I showed nothing. ‘Consultant. Military consultant.’ Nothing. ‘Smuggler.’
She knew then she wouldn’t get it. ‘OK,’ she said reluctantly. ‘The drink is on the house.’
‘Not bad,’ I said, and emptied my glass.
‘How close was I?’
‘Lukewarm.’
‘You think you can do better, that’s what.’
‘May I have another?’ I pushed the glass towards her.
‘Come on, show me what you’ve got.’ She went to fetch two more cans.
‘Do you have biltong? Or nuts or something?’
‘Maybe.’ She put the cool drinks down in front of me. ‘If you can do better than me.’
‘Tersh,’ someone ca
lled from a table. ‘More wine.’ A chorus of similar requests echoed around the room.
‘Coming,’ she said to them, and softly to me, ‘It’s going to be a long night.’
She went to get their wine. I poured for myself again. Watched the skill of her movements. She had the body of a younger woman and she knew it.
Another group came through the door, twelve white people, six men and six women, in their late thirties to mid-fifties. Greeting rang back and forth. There was a festive atmosphere and an air of expectancy.
Tertia fetched an order book and went to stand at the new table. She laughed along with them, touching a man’s shoulder here, a woman’s hand there. Acquaintances, but her body language was slightly defensive, an unconscious statement of ‘I don’t really belong here’. An ‘outlander’, Melanie Posthumus would have called her.
I thought about the game Tertia wanted to play. Wondered how many hundred-rand notes she had won from travelling salesmen. It was easy if you had enough experience of people and knew how to ask your questions and make your statements. I could do better, because I knew them. I had met women like her in the Cape, when Parliament was in session and I could wander around Long Street and St George’s Mall and Green-market Square. They all had the same basic story. I had formulated a Law. Lemmer’s One-Night Law of Quasi-Artistic Women. More than one night and you became an insect in a spiderweb.
She was from the country, within a radius of two hundred kilometres of here at best. Lower middle-class Afrikaans. Intelligent. Rebellious at school.
After school she left for the city with a feeling of euphoria. To Pretoria, to flee her childhood home and position, not knowing that she would carry it with her. She lived in a tiny single flat somewhere in the city centre, took a clerical position with a big company, temporary only, as she fostered vague ideas of studying art. She began to read Oriental philosophy, study astrology.
She reassessed her life. Resigned from her job, packed her Volkswagen Beetle and drove alone to Cape Town. Moved into a commune in Obs or Hout Bay and made quasi-art pieces to sell in Greenmarket Square, wore loose dresses, sandals and coloured bandannas in her hair. Called herself Olga or Natasha or Alexandra. Smoked a bit of pot, slept around a little. She did not feel fulfilled.