by Deon Meyer
‘Lemmer!’
He waited for a response.
‘This is Donnie Branca. We want to talk to you. There are only two of us.’
I didn’t look at them; I focused on the visible no man’s land.
There was nothing.
‘Lemmer, you’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t us. We would never harm Emma le Roux.’
Of course you wouldn’t. You are just innocent animal rehabilitators.
‘We can help you.’
They spoke to each other, not quietly, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
There was the sound of pick-up doors opening and closing.
‘Lemmer, we got out. We’ll just stand here by the pick-up. If you can see us, you will see that we’re unarmed. Have a good look. We’ll just stand here.’
Now was the time for the others to arrive; now that they believed they had my attention. I swung the barrel of the Glock from left to right, following with my eyes. No movement, no footsteps, not a twig cracking, just the silence and the insects.
‘We can understand why you would suspect us. We can understand that, we can see how it must look. I swear to God it wasn’t us.’
Ah, just swear to God? That will convince me.
Did they consider me a complete idiot?
But where were the others? Was there someone on the back of the pick-up? Were they creeping through the undergrowth to surprise me from behind? I turned around slowly and carefully. It would be tough to hear and see them. That would be brilliant, keep my attention and stalk me from the direction I least expect.
I heard their voices in discussion again, but devoted all my attention to the thickets around me. The front was now 360 degrees, it was getting more complicated, but they didn’t know where I was or even if I was really here.
‘H. B. stands for “haemoglobin”,’ another familiar voice said. I couldn’t place it immediately and then I recognised its slow measured cadence. Stef Blinking Moller of Heuningklip.
Stef? Here?
There was a long silence. I turned around, the Glock in front of me. There was nothing to see, just the silence of the bush.
They growled something at each other. Donnie Branca called, ‘We’ll be on our way, then,’ with disappointment. I heard one door open and I shouted, ‘Wait!’ and stood with my chest against a tree trunk to reduce the angles by 180 degrees.
36
‘Lie down in front of the pick-up, on the ground,’ I told them, and moved north in the direction of the homestead, immediately, then east, closer to them. I found another tree as partial cover.
‘We’re lying down.’
I moved again quickly. I wanted to approach the pick-up from behind to make sure there was no one on the back.
‘I’m coming,’ I called, and ran, dodging through the trees to make a difficult target. I saw the pick-up, a Toyota single-cab. I stopped for a second and swung the Glock west then north, and then I ran for the back of the pick-up, pointing the pistol at it. If they got up now I would blow them away, before they got me. I reached the vehicle; there was nobody, the back was empty. I kept running to where they lay in front of the pick-up. Stef Moller was on the left, Donnie Branca on the right, and I pressed the pistol to Moller’s chest and said, ‘The idea is for you to lie face down, Stef. Don’t you watch TV?’ and he said, ‘Oh! Urn, no, actually, sorry,’ and he turned over. I wanted to laugh from the mixture of adrenalin and anticlimax.
I put my knee on Moller’s back and pointed the Glock at the back of his head and said, ‘Where are the others?’
‘There’s no one else, just us,’ said Donnie Branca.
‘We’ll see,’ I said. ‘Put your hands where I can see them.’
He shifted his hands far out ahead. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Lemmer. It wasn’t us that attacked you.’
I began to search Moller for weapons. I found none. ‘Yesterday you talked about an accident, now suddenly it’s an attack.’
‘I wanted to express sympathy yesterday, it was just a word. My Afrikaans …’
I went over to Donnie Branca and patted him where I thought he might have a weapon concealed. ‘Your Afrikaans is good enough when it suits you. Put your hands behind your head and turn over. I want to see if you’re armed.’
He did as I asked. ‘We’re not armed. We’re here to talk.’
First I made sure, but he was telling the truth. ‘Lie on your belly.’ I sat down with my back against the front of the pick-up, between them.
‘All right, then, talk.’
‘What do you want to know?’ asked Branca.
‘Everything.’
‘You said you knew everything.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
It was Stef Moller who began. ‘The sangoma and the vulture poachers were a mistake,’ he said.
‘You call that a mistake?’
‘We have rules. Principles. Murder is not part of them.’
‘We?’
‘Hb. Capital “H”, small letter “b”, no point in between. The Lowvelder got it wrong.’
‘What is The Lowvelder?’
‘The local paper in Nelspruit. They printed it as capital “H”, point, capital “B”, point. That’s why they talk about the Honey Badgers.’
‘But Hb stands for haemoglobin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘For many reasons. Haemoglobin is in our blood, in the animals’ too. It carries oxygen. We need it, the planet needs it. It is the opposite of carbon dioxide. It is invisible to the eye. It has four parts. So do we.’
‘And they are?’
‘Conservation, combat, communication and organisation.’
‘You sound like the Voortrekker Movement. Or the Broeder-bond.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Stef?’
‘You said you know everything,’ he said with extreme patience. ‘Now you know we won’t lie to you.’
‘The sangoma thing. It was you.’
‘It was Cobie.’
‘Cobie is one of you.’
‘Cobie got carried away. He’s unstable. We realised that too late.’
‘You lied to Emma about Jacobus. Both of you.’
‘Not about everything.’
‘Tell me from the beginning, Stef, so I can understand which parts you lied about.’
‘Can I sit up?’
I considered and then said, ‘You can both sit, but over there. I want to see your hands.’
They shifted two metres back and sat with their hands on their knees.
‘Talk,’ I said.
Moller’s eyes began to blink behind the thick glasses. ‘He started working for me in 1994, as I told Emma.’
‘Yes?’
‘I … We, Cobie and I, shared the same concerns. About ecology, conservation, the threats.’
‘Wait, slow down. Where did he come from?’
‘From Swaziland.’
‘But he wasn’t born there. He didn’t grow up there.’
‘That’s what he told me.’
‘You’re lying, Stef.’
‘Cobie de Villiers is not Emma le Roux’s brother.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I swear.’
‘Before God,’ I said sarcastically, but Moller didn’t get it.
‘Yes,’ he said solemnly. ‘Before God.’
‘Go on.’
‘When Cobie worked for me, we talked every single day for more than three years. We talked about the environment. Some times all night. Someone had to do something, Lemmer. I want you to understand one thing, we are not political, we are not racist, and we serve only one thing. Our natural heritage.’
‘Spare me the propaganda, Stef. Tell me about Cobie.’
‘That’s what I’m doing. Hb is Cobie. It’s what he lives for. It’s all he lives for. You have to understand that. When they poisoned those vultures, it was as though someone had murdered Cobie’s family.’
He sa
w me shake my head and said, ‘I’m not condoning Cobie’s behaviour. I’m just trying to explain that his intentions were good. He and I started Hb. We were very careful. At first we were only seven or so, five in Mpumalanga, two in Limpopo. We were informal, it was only communication to start with, the exchange of ideas. It’s a funny thing, Lemmer. Every month someone would join. Everyone said talking would not help any more. Something would have to be done, because we live in a world where people are everything and nature is nothing. Nobody talks about nature’s rights. Everything is going backwards. That’s how it started. Then Cobie disappeared. We were just getting organised. I couldn’t understand it. He was more driven than I am, he felt more strongly, put more energy into it, and suddenly he was just gone. To this day, I don’t know where he went. Three years later he turned up at Mogale. Maybe Donnie should tell you the rest.’
‘When Cobie left you, did Hb survive?’
‘It’s bigger than one individual. When Cobie disappeared, there were more than thirty of us. All across the country. In the Kalahari, KwaZulu, the Karoo. But we were only focused on conservation, communication and organisation. We only added combat in 2001, when we realised that we had no choice.’
‘But all that is happening, Stef, without the need for secret societies. What about WWF and Greenpeace? Why didn’t you join up with Greenpeace?’
He sighed deeply. ‘You don’t get it, do you,’ he said.
Branca couldn’t stay quiet. ‘We told you, Frank and I. It’s chaos.’
‘A few land claims and a golf estate don’t sound like chaos to me.’
Branca made a gesture of futility. Stef Moller sighed and said, ‘That’s just the ears of the hippo. A million species, Lemmer. Do you know how many that is? How many animals and plants it represents? Have you any idea? That’s how many are going to go extinct in the next forty years, just from global warming.’
I had heard this old wives’ tale before. I shook my head in disbelief.
‘You can shake your head. You’re just like the rest of mankind. You don’t want to believe it. But someone must, because it’s a fact.’
‘And you’re going to stop global warming by sending letters and shooting dogs?’
‘No. We do what we can, here. We can only try to prepare for the mess that’s coming.’
‘Tell me about Cobie. In 2000 he turns up again suddenly. This time at Mogale. With Wolhuter.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where had he been?’
‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t say.’
‘Stef, I don’t believe you.’
‘Truth is stranger than fiction, Lemmer,’ said Donnie Branca. ‘We’re not lying. Cobie started working for Frank and he and I talked. He was very careful. It took nearly six months before he started to recruit me for Hb. Only then did he ask me to take a message to Stef. He asked me to tell Stef that he couldn’t talk about where he was, that he was sorry, but he had to protect Hb, that was why he went back to Swaziland.’
‘But Frank Wolhuter didn’t want to be part of Hb.’
‘We tried. Frank was old school. He was a game ranger in Natal. He worked within the system, didn’t see the necessity of, shall we say, alternative action. We tried, but Frank believed our work at Mogale was good enough. We never told him directly about Hb, because we could sense that he wouldn’t condone it.’
‘I thought so. Let me tell you what happened, Donnie, when Emma showed you and Frank the photo of Cobie. Two things. You got scared. You sat there in Frank’s office worrying about what threat it posed for Hb, because you didn’t know whether Emma’s story was true or not. Who was she really? What did she want? You sent her in Stef’s direction so he could help assess her. So you could make a decision. You phoned him after we left. You warned Stef that we were coming. Am I right?’
‘In a way.’
‘The second thing that happened was that Emma’s photos and story made Frank even more suspicious. He must have had his suspicions about you and Cobie anyway. Even though he told us Cobie hadn’t committed the vulture murders, he wasn’t sure. When Emma turned up he had to do something. He unlocked Cobie’s place and searched it. He found the stuff. The photos and other proof, about Hb. I don’t know what it was, but I know it wasn’t in the bookshelf in the kitchen, was it?’
‘No.’
‘Where did Cobie hide it?’
‘In the ceiling.’
‘So he phoned Emma and left the message, but before she could phone back, he confronted you about Hb. He wasn’t happy about it. He threatened to go to the police, or something. So you threw him in the lion camp.’
‘No! Frank was my friend.’ Passionate, arms waving. ‘I’d never do that. I don’t know what happened, I swear to you. I only looked in the safe the day after Frank died.’
‘Because you had to hide the rifles you used to shoot the dogs.’
‘Yes. OK. I had no choice. But when I opened the safe, I saw the blood. And I found Cobie’s documents. And those photos I showed Emma. I took the album to Cobie’s house and I put it on the bed, and then I searched the place to make sure there was nothing else. There was this box in his ceiling, but it was empty. I can only assume, you know, that Frank found it there, and took the contents, and put them in the safe.’
‘You said Frank’s death was no accident. You had a motive, Donnie.’
‘Jesus, Lemmer, how can you think that? I loved the man. I respected him more than any other. It wasn’t me.’
‘Who, Donnie? Who?’
‘Someone who didn’t want Emma to see the photo.’
‘What photo?’
‘The one that was missing from the album.’
I looked at them, at Stef Moller and Donnie Branca, with their righteous frowns, the sincerity carved deeply on their faces in the light of the half-moon, and slowly shook my head.
‘No, you’re lying to me. Tomorrow I’m going to the Beeld newspaper with everything. You can try and tell your tall story to the journalists.’
Branca began to speak but Stef Moller stopped him with a hand in the air. ‘Lemmer, please, what can I do to convince you?’ he said slowly.
‘Tell the truth, Stef.’
‘That’s what we’ve been doing the whole time.’
‘No, it isn’t. Cobie is Emma’s brother. Donnie said the photo that disappeared – someone didn’t want Emma to see it. Why wouldn’t you want Emma to see it? Why would Frank phone Emma about it? Why do you still insist that he’s not Emma’s brother?’
‘Because we asked him,’ said Stef.
‘When?’
‘Three days ago. Saturday. Cobie de Villiers said he had never heard of her.’
37
I had to restrain myself. I wanted to get up and grab Stef by the throat and shake him. ‘So why are you lying to me about where Cobie is?’ But he must have known what my reaction would be.
‘We don’t know where he is, Lemmer. He phoned out of the blue. He said that he’d heard that Frank Wolhuter was dead. We must be very careful, because the people who did it are very dangerous. We must take precautions; we must arm ourselves and make sure we are never alone. I asked him where he was and he said it didn’t matter. I asked him about Emma and he said he had no family, he didn’t know anyone like that.’
‘Did you ask him why he shot those people?’
‘I didn’t need to. We know it was him.’
‘But Frank and Donnie swore it wasn’t him.’
Donnie Branca half rose indignantly. ‘What did you expect, Lemmer? Be realistic, for Christ’s sake. Frank didn’t believe it was Cobus. What did you want me to do? Go tell everybody, “Yes, Cobie shot them in cold blood, the bastard”? I mean, Jesus.’
‘Sit down, Donnie.’ But it didn’t help. He was angry. He got up, walked a circle in the dark and came back to stand in front of me.
‘Fuck you, Lemmer. What are you going to do? Shoot me? I’m sick and tired of you. If there’s something that proves Cobie is Emma’s brother, it’s not our busi
ness. The stupid fuck went and shot innocent people and put twelve years’ work at risk. Twelve fucking years. That’s how long Stef worked to get Hb going, to make it work. You shake your fucking head when we talk about the threat to the environment. You’re just like everybody. The media, the government, the fucking public, everybody is in denial. You have no idea what’s happening, Lemmer. All over the world. It’s a fucking mess. I dare you, go do your homework. Go look at the facts. Go read the scientific material. All of it.
Not just climate change. Everything. Loss of habitat, deforestation, population growth, pollution, land abuse, urban sprawl, development, poaching, smuggling, poverty, globalisation. And then come back and tell me that there’s no crisis. Go to the media. Expose us. See if you can stop it.’
‘Donnie,’ Stef Moller placated him.
‘Jesus, Stef, I’ve had enough of this fucking fool. Read my lips, Lemmer. We did not touch Frank or Emma. And if you don’t believe that, you can go fuck yourself.’ He stalked off to the side of the pick-up, opened the door and said, ‘Come on, Stef, let’s go,’ slammed the door and started the engine.
Stef Moller slowly got up and walked past me. ‘He’s right,’ was all he said. He got into the pick-up and I had to move out of the way, because it didn’t seem as though Donnie Branca was going to stop for me.
I’d believed that Emma was lying to me and I’d been wrong. My belief in my built-in lie detector had been shaken. I stood in the dark and watched the red lights of the Toyota disappear in the distance and I thought Donnie Branca was telling the truth and that Stef Moller was still hiding something.
If you want to know whether someone is lying, look at his eyes. It was difficult with Moller because of the constant blinking and the thick lenses. That night I couldn’t see his face in the dark and I had to listen to his voice, its rhythm and intonation. He wasn’t telling the whole truth.
Or was it my imagination?
I went back to my nest.
Tall Stef Moller with his bald pate and glasses and his slow, solemn way of speaking. I thought he was harmless the day we’d met him. Even though something had bothered me in the shed, something I had missed.
Tall, dispassionate men are not high on a bodyguard’s list of threats. The assassins of history have been short, busy little men. Lee Harvey Oswald, Dmitri Tsafendas, John Hinckley, Mark David Chapman.