Devil's Peak bg-1

by Deon Meyer

  Silence.

  “Forty-three,” said Joubert, and he seemed to grow angry all over again. He wove through the cars ahead. Another red light. “And still you are a bloody child.”

  Then only silence reigned in the car. Griessel no longer looked where they were going; he was thinking of the bottle that had been so close to his mouth. Nobody would understand; you had to have been there where he was. You had to know the need. In the old days Joubert had also been a drinker, partied hard, but he had never been to

  this

  place. He didn’t know and that’s why he didn’t understand. When he looked up again they were in Bellville, Carl Cronjé Street.

  Joubert turned off. He was driving more calmly now. There was a park, trees and grass and a few benches. He pulled up. “Come, Benny,” he said and got out.

  What were they doing here? Slowly he opened the door.

  Joubert was striding ahead. Where were they going—was he going to beat him up behind the trees? How would that help? The traffic on the N 1 above droned and hissed, but no one would see a thing. Reluctantly he followed.

  Joubert stopped between the trees and pointed a finger. When Griessel reached him he saw the figure on the ground.

  “Do you know who that is, Benny?”

  Under a heap of newspapers and cartons and an unbelievably grimy blanket a figure moved when it heard the voice. The dirty face turned upward, a lot of beard and hair and two little blue eyes, sunken in their sockets.

  “Do you know him?”

  “It’s Swart Piet,” said Griessel.

  “Hey,” said Swart Piet.

  “No,” said Joubert. “Meet Benny Griessel.”

  “You gonna hit me?” the man asked. A Shoprite supermarket trolley stood parked behind his nest. There was a broken vacuum cleaner in it.

  “No,” said Joubert.

  Swart Piet looked askance at the big man in front of him. “Do I know you?”

  “This is you, Benny. In six months. In a year.”

  The man extended a cupped hand to them. “Have you got ten rand?”

  “For what?”

  “Bread.”

  “The liquid version,” said Joubert.

  “You must be psychic,” said the man, and laughed with a toothless cackle.

  “Where are your wife and children, Swart Piet?”

  “Long time ago. Just a rand? Or five?”

  “Tell him, Piet. Tell him what work you used to do.”

  “Brain surgeon. What does it matter?”

  “Is this what you want?” Joubert looked at Griessel. “Is this what you want to be?”

  Griessel had nothing to say. He only saw Swart Piet’s hand, a dirty claw.

  Joubert turned around and headed for the car.

  “Hey,” said the man. “What’s his case?”

  Griessel looked at Joubert’s back as he walked away. He wasn’t going to hit him. All the way out here for a childish lesson in morality. For a moment he loved the big man. Then he grasped something else, turned back and asked: “Were you a policeman?”

  “Do I look like a fool to you?”

  “What were you?”

  “A health inspector in Milnerton.”

  “A health inspector?”

  “Help a hungry man, pal. Two rand.”

  “A health inspector,” said Griessel. He felt anger ignite inside him.

  “Oh hell,” said Swart Piet. “Are you the guy from Saddles steakhouse?”

  Griessel spun around and set off after Joubert. “He was a health inspector,” he shouted.

  “Okay, one rand, my friend. A rand between friends?”

  The senior superintendent was already behind the steering wheel.

  Griessel was running now. “You can’t do that,” he shouted. Right up to the window. “You want to compare me with a fucking health inspector?”

  “No. I’m comparing you with a fuck-up who can’t stop drinking.”

  “Did you ask him why he drinks, Matt? Did you ask him?”

  “It makes no difference to him anymore.”

  “Fuck you,” said Griessel, the weariness and the thirst and the humiliation working together. “I won’t be compared with the cockroach patrol. How many bodies has he had to turn over? How many? Tell me. How many child victims? How many women and old ladies beaten to death for a cell phone or a twenty-rand ring? You want the old Benny? Are you looking for the fucker from Parow who was scared of nothing? I’m looking for him too. Every day, every morning when I get up, I look for him. Because at least he knew he was on the right side. He thought he could make a difference. He believed that if he worked long enough and hard enough, we would win, some time or other, to hell with rank and to hell with promotion; justice would triumph and that is all that mattered because we are the white hats. The guy from Parow is dead, Matt. Dead as a doornail. And why? What happened? What’s happening now? We are outnumbered. We aren’t winning; we are losing. There are more and more of them and there are less of us. What’s the use? What help is all the overtime and the hardship? Are we rewarded? Are we thanked? The harder we work, the more we get shat upon. Look here. This is a white skin. What does it mean? Twenty-six years in the Force and it means fuck-all. It’s not the booze—I’m not stuck in the rank of inspector because of the booze. You know that. It’s affirmative action. Gave my whole fucking life, took all that shit and along came affirmative action. Ten years now. Did I quit, like De Kok and Rens and Jan Broekman? Look at them now, security companies and making money hand over fist and driving BMWs and going home every day at five o’clock. And where am I? A hundred open cases and my wife kicks me out and I am an alcoholic . . . But I am still fucking here, Matt. I didn’t fucking quit.”

  Then all his fuel was burnt and he leaned against the car, his head on his chest.

  “I am still fucking here.”

  “Hey!” shouted Swart Piet from the trees.

  “Benny,” said Joubert softly.

  He looked up slowly. “What?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Hey!”

  As he walked around to the other door, the man’s voice carried clear and shrill: “Hey, you! Fuck you!”

  8.

  Your father abused you,” said the minister with certainty.

  “No,” she said. “Lots of call girls say that. The stepfather messed with me. Or the mother’s boyfriend. Or the father. I can’t say that. That was not his problem.”

  She checked for disappointment in his face but there was none to see.

  “Do you know what I would wish for if I had only one wish? To know what happened to him. I wonder about that a lot. What did he see to make him change? I know it happened on the Border. I know more or less which year, I worked it out. Somewhere in South West Africa or Angola. But what?

  “If only I could remember more of how he was before. But I can’t. I only remember the bad times. I think he was always a serious man. And quiet. He must have . . . They didn’t all come back from the Border like that, so he must have been a certain kind of person. He must have had the . . . what is the word?”

  “Tendency?”

  “Yes. He must have had the tendency.”

  She searched for something for her hands to do. She leaned forward and took the sugar spoon out of the white porcelain pot. It had a municipal coat of arms on the end of the curved handle. She rubbed the metal with the cushion of her thumb, feeling the indentations.

  “The school held a fęte every year. On a Friday in October. In the afternoon there were Boeresport games and in the evening there were stalls. Tombola and target shooting.

  Braaivleis.

  Everyone would go, the whole town. After the games you would go home and dress up nicely—for the evening. I was fourteen. I borrowed some make-up from Lenie Heysteck and I bought my first pair of jeans with my savings. I had a sky-blue blouse on and my hair was long and I think I looked pretty. I sat in front of the mirror in my room that evening, putting on mascara and eyeshadow to match my blouse, and my lips were red. Maybe I used too much make-up, because I was still stupid, but I felt so pretty. That is something men don’t und
erstand. Feeling pretty.

  “What if I had taken my black handbag, walked into the sitting room and he had said, ‘You look beautiful, Christine.’ What if he had stood up, taken my hand and said, ‘May I have this dance, Princess?’ ”

  She pressed the curve of the sugar spoon against her mouth. She felt the old and familiar emotion.

  “That is not what happened,” said the minister.

  “No,” she said. “That is not what happened.”

  * * *

  Thobela had memorized the address of Khoza’s brother in Khayelitsha, but he didn’t drive there directly. On the spur of the moment he left his original route two off ramps west of the airport and drove into Guguletu. He went looking for the little house he had lived in with Miriam and Pakamile. He parked across the street and switched off the engine.

  The little garden that he and the boy had nurtured with so much care and effort and water in the sand of the Cape Flats was faded in the late summer. There were different curtains in the windows of the front room.

  He and Miriam had slept in that room.

  Down the street, childish voices shrieked. He looked and saw boys playing soccer, shirt-tails hanging out, socks around their ankles. Again, he remembered how Pakamile used to wait for him every afternoon on that street corner from about half-past five. Thobela used to ride a Honda Benly, one of those indestructible little motorbikes that made him look like a daddy-long-legs on it, and the boy’s face would light up when he came around the corner and then he would run, racing the motorbike the last hundred meters to their gate.

  Always so happy to see him, so hungry to talk and keen to work in the front garden with its sunflowers, in the back vegetable garden full of runner beans, white pumpkins and plump red tomatoes.

  He reached a hand out slowly to turn the key, reluctant to let go of the memories.

  Why had everything been taken from him?

  Then he drove away, back to the N2, and past the airport. He took the off ramp and turned right and Khayelitsha surrounded him—traffic and people, small buildings, houses, sand and smells and sounds, huge adverts for Castle and Coke and Toyota, hand-painted signboards for home industries, hairdressers and panel beaters, fresh vegetable stalls alongside the road, dogs and cows. A city apart from the city, spread out across the dune lands.

  He chose his route with care, referring to the map he had studied, because it was easy to get lost here: the road signs few, the streets sometimes broad, sometimes impossibly narrow. He stopped in front of a house, a brick building in the center of the plot. Building materials lay about, an extra room had been erected to window height, an old Mazda 323 stood on blocks, half covered by a tarpaulin.

  He got out, approached the front door and knocked. Music was playing inside, American rap. He knocked again, harder, and the door opened. A young girl, seventeen or eighteen, in T-shirt and jeans. “Yes?”

  “Is this the home of Lukas Khoza?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I have a message for John.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What sort of message?”

  “Work.”

  “John is not here.”

  “That’s a pity,” he said, “he would have liked the job.” He turned to go, then stopped. “Will you let him know?”

  “If I see him. Who are you?”

  “Tell him the guy who gives good work tips was here. He will know.” He turned away again, as if he had lost interest.

  “John hasn’t been here for ages. I don’t even know where he is.”

  He sauntered towards the pickup and said with a shrug, “Then I will give the job to someone else.”

  “Wait. Maybe my father will know.”

  “Luke? Is he here?”

  “He’s at work. In Maitland. At the abattoir.”

  “Maybe I will go past there. Thank you.”

  She did not say goodbye. She stood in the doorway, hip against the doorframe, and watched him. As he slipped in behind the wheel he wondered whether she spoke the truth.

  * * *

  She told the minister about the evening her father called her a whore. How he stood over her in the bathroom and made her scrub off the make-up with a face cloth and soap and water. She wept as he lectured her and said not in his house. There would be no whoring in his house. That was the night it began. When the thing happened inside her. As she recalled the tirade, she was aware of what was going on between her and the minister, because it was familiar territory. She was explaining The Reason and he wanted to hear it. They. Men looked at her, after she had done her job, after she had opened her body to them with gentle hands and caressing words and they wanted to hear her story, her tragic tale. It was a primitive thing. They wanted her really to be good. The whore with the golden heart. The whore who was so nearly an ordinary girl. The minister had it too—he stared intently at her, so ready to empathize with her. But at least with him, the other thing was absent. Her clients, almost without exception, wanted to know if it was also a sex thing—really good, but also horny. Their fantasy of the nympho myth. She was aware of all these things as she sketched her story.

  “I’ve thought about it so much, because that is where it all began. That night. Even now, when I think about it, there is all this anger. I just wanted to look nice. For myself. For my father. For my friends. He didn’t want to see that, just all this other stuff, this evil. And then the religion thing just got worse. He forbade us to dance or go to movies and sleep over at friends and visit. He smothered us.”

  The minister shook his head as if to say: “The things parents do.”

  “I can’t get a grip on it. Gerhard, my brother, did nothing. We had the same parents and the same house and everything, but he did nothing. He just grew quiet and read books in his room, escaped into his stories and into his head. And me? I went looking for trouble. I wanted to become exactly what my father was afraid of. Why? Why was I built like that? Why was I made like this?”

  * * *

  The minister watched while she talked, watched her hands and eyes, the expressions that flitted in rapid succession across her face. He observed her mannerisms, the hair she used with such expertise, the fingers that punctuated her words with tiny movements and the limbs that spoke in an unbroken and sometimes deliberate body language. He placed it alongside the words and the content, the hurt and the sincerity and the obvious intelligence, and he learned something about her: she was enjoying this. On some level, probably unconscious, she enjoyed the limelight. As if, regardless of the trash that had been dumped on it, somewhere her psyche sheltered unscathed.

  * * *

  At twelve o’clock, hunger pangs drew Griessel’s attention away from the murder file he had been buried in. That was when he remembered that today there would be no sandwich, no lunch parcel neatly wrapped in clingfilm.

  He looked up from the paperwork and the room loomed suddenly large around him. What was he going to do? How would he manage?

  * * *

  Thobela made an error of judgment with Lukas Khoza. He found him at the abattoir, in a blood-spattered plastic apron, busy spraying away the blood from the off-white floor tiles of the slaughterhouse floor with a fat red hosepipe. They walked outside so Khoza could have a smoke break.

  Thobela said he was looking for his brother, John, because he had a job for him.

  “What sort of work?”

  “You know, work.”

  Khoza eyed him in distaste. “No, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. My brother is trash and if you are his kind, so are you.” He stood, legs apart in a challenging stance, cigarette in hand, between the abattoir building and the stock pens. Large pink pigs milled restlessly behind the steel gates, as if they sensed danger.

  “You don’t even know what kind of job I am talking about,” said Thobela, aware that he had chosen the wrong approach, that he had been guilty of a generalization.

  “Probably the usual work he does. Robbery. Theft. He will break our mother’s heart.”

  “Not this time.”

  “You lie.”

  “No lie.
I swear. I don’t want him for a criminal purpose,” he said with spirit.

  “I don’t know where he is.” Khoza crushed the butt angrily under the thick sole of his white gumboots and headed for the door behind him.

  “Is there someone else who might know?”

  Khoza halted, less antagonistic. “Maybe.”