Devil's Peak bg-1

by Deon Meyer

  “I’ll say goodnight then.”

  “Goodnight, Benny.” She put the phone down and he held his cell phone to his ear for a little longer and he knew she did not believe he would make it.

  Perhaps she was right.

  * * *

  She saw that she had entranced him and said: “In Standard Nine I slept with a teacher. And with a buddy of my father.” But he did not react.

  “What do you think?” she asked. Suddenly she had to know.

  He hesitated for so long that she became anxious. Had he heard, was he listening? Or was he revolted by her?

  “I think you are deliberately trying to shock me,” he said, but he was smiling at her and his tone was as soft as water.

  For a moment she was embarrassed. Unconsciously, her hand flew up to her hair, the fingers twisting the ends.

  “What interests me is why you would want to do that. Do you still think I will judge you?”

  It was only part of the truth, but she nodded fractionally.

  “I can hardly blame you for that, as I suspect experience has taught you that that is what people do.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Let me tell you that counseling from a Christian point of view distinguishes between the person and the deed. What we do is sometimes unacceptable to God, but we are never unacceptable to Him. And He expects the same from me, if I am to do His work.”

  “My father also thought he was doing God’s work.” The words were out in reflex, an old anger.

  He grimaced as if in pain, as if she had no right to make this comparison.

  “The Bible has been used for many agendas. Fear too.”

  “So why does God allow that?” She knew the question was lying in wait and she had not seen it.

  “You must remember . . .”

  Her hands seemed to lose their grip, she seemed to have lost her footing. “No, tell me. Why? Why did He write the Bible like that so that everyone could use it as they please?” She could hear her own voice, the way it spiraled, how it carried the emotion with it. “If He loves us so much? What did I do to Him? Why didn’t He give me an easy road too? Like you and your wife? Why did He give me Viljoen and then allow him to blow his brains out? What was my sin? He gave me my father—what chance did I have after that? If He wanted me to be stronger, why didn’t He make me stronger? Or cleverer? I was a child. How was I supposed to know? How was I supposed to know grown-ups were fucked up?” The sound of the swear word was sharp and cutting and she heard it as he would and it made her stop. Angrily, she wiped the wet off her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  When he did react, he surprised her again. “You are in trouble,” he said nearly inaudibly.

  She nodded. And sniffed.

  He opened a drawer, took out a box of tissues and pushed it over the desk towards her. Somehow this gesture disappointed her. History—she was not the first.

  “Big trouble,” he said.

  She ignored the tissues. “Yes.”

  He put a big, freckled hand on the cardboard box. “And it has to do with this?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it has to do with that.”

  “And you are afraid,” he said.

  She nodded.

  * * *

  He pressed a hand over the man’s mouth and the assegai blade against his throat and waited for him to wake. It came with a jerk of the body and eyes opening wide and wild. He put his head close to the small ear and whispered, “If you keep quiet, I will give you a chance.” He felt the power of Davids’s body straining against the pressure. He cut him with the tip of the blade against the throat, but lightly, just so that he could feel the sting. “Lie still.”

  Davids subsided, but his mouth moved under the hand.

  “Quiet,” he whispered again, the stink of drink in his nostrils. He wondered how sober Davids was, but he could wait no longer—it was nearly four o’clock.

  “Let’s go outside, you and me. Understand?”

  The shaven head nodded.

  “If you make a noise before we are outside, I will cut you.”

  Nod.

  “Come.” He allowed him to get up, got behind him with the assegai under Davids’s chin, arm around his throat. They shuffled through the dark house to the front door. He felt the tension in the man’s muscles and he knew the adrenaline was flowing in him too. They were outside, on the pavement, and he took a quick step back. He waited for Davids to turn to him, saw the dragon’s raging red eyes, and took the knife from his pocket, a long butcher’s knife he had found in a kitchen drawer.

  He passed it to the colored man.

  “Here,” he said. “This is your chance.”

  * * *

  At quarter-past seven when Griessel entered the parade room of the Serious and Violent Crimes building in Bishop Lavis, he did not feel the buzz.

  He sat with his head down, paging aimlessly through the dossier on his lap, searching for a starting point on which to build his oral report. He was light-headed—thoughts darting like silver fish, diving aimlessly into a green sea, this way, that way, evasive, always out of reach. His hands were sweating. He couldn’t say he had nothing to report. They would laugh at him. Joubert would crap him out. He would have to say he was waiting for Forensics. Jissis, if he could just keep his hands still. He felt nauseous, an urge to throw up, vomit out all the shit.

  Senior Superintendent Matt Joubert clapped his hands twice and the sharp sound echoed through him. The voices of the detectives quieted.

  “You have probably all heard,” said Joubert, and a reaction ran through his audience: “Tell them, Bushy.” There was contentment in his voice and Griessel read the mood. Something was going on.

  Bezuidenhout stood against the opposite wall and Griessel tried to focus on him, his eyes flickering, blink-blink-blink-blink. He heard Bushy’s gravely voice: “Last night Enver Davids was stabbed to death in Kraaifontein.”

  A joyful riot broke out in the parade room. Griessel was perplexed. Who was Davids?

  The noise droned through Griessel, the sickness growing inside. Christ, he was sick, sick as a dog.

  “His pals say they went drinking at a shebeen in Khayelitsha and came home to the house in Kraaifontein about one a.m., when they went to sleep. This morning, just after five, someone knocked on the door to say there was a man lying dead in the street.”

  * * *

  Griessel knew he would hear the sound.

  “Nobody heard or saw anything,” said Inspector Bushy Bezuidenhout. “It looks like a knife fight. Davids has slash wounds to the hands and one on the neck, but at this stage the fatal wound seems to be a stab through the heart.”

  Griessel saw Davids fall backwards, mouth stretched wide, the fillings in his teeth rusty brown. The scream, at first as thick as molasses, a tongue slowly sticking out, and the scream growing thin, thinner than blood. And it came to him.

  “They should have cut off his balls,” said Vaughn Cupido.

  The policemen laughed and that made the sound accelerate, the long thin trail scorched through the ether. Griessel jerked his head away, but the sound found him.

  Then he vomited, dry and retching and he heard the laughter and heard someone say his name. Joubert? “Benny, are you alright? Benny?” But he was not fucking alright, the noise was in his head, and it would never get out.

  * * *

  He drove first to the hotel room in Parow. Davids’s blood was on his arms and clothes. Boss Man’s words repeated in his head:

  He got AIDS in jail from a

  wyfie.

  He washed his big body with great concentration, scrubbed down with soap and water, washed his clothes afterwards in the bath, put on a clean set and walked out to his pickup.

  It was past five when he came outside—the east was beginning to change color. He took the N1 and then the N7 and the Table View off ramp near the smoking, burning refinery where a thousand lights still shone. Minibus taxis were already busy. He drove as far as Blouberg, thinking of nothing. He got out at the sea. It was a cloudless morning. An unsettled breeze still looking for d
irection blew softly against his skin. He looked up to the mountain where the first rays of the sun made deep shadows on the cliffs, like the wrinkles of an old man. Then he breathed, slowly in and out.

  Only when his pulse had slowed to normal did he take from the cubbyhole, where he had stowed it yesterday, the

  Argus

  article, neatly torn out.

  * * *

  “Does someone want to harm you?” asked the minister.

  She blew her nose loudly and looked at him apologetically, rolling up the tissue in her hand. She took another and blew again.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?” He reached under his desk and brought out a white plastic wastepaper basket. She tossed the tissues into it, took another and wiped her eyes and cheeks.

  “There is more than one,” she said, and the emotions threatened again. She waited a moment for them to subside. “More than one.”

  12.

  Are you sure he is guilty?” he had asked Boss Man Madikiza, because ideas had materialized in his head out of nowhere and his blood was boiling.

  The fat man snorted and said Davids had been in his office before the drinking began. Boastful and smug. The police had his cum, in their hands, the dee-en-ay evidence, they could have nailed him right there with a life sentence with their test tubes and their microscopes and then they

  moered

  the bottle away, thick as bricks, and so the prosecutor came up to the judge dragging his feet and said dyor onner, we fucked up a little, no more dee-en-ay, no more rape charge. Did that judge

  kak

  them out, my bro’, like you won’t believe. “What kind of person?” the Boss Man asked Thobela with total revulsion, “what kind of person rapes a baby, I ask you?”

  He had nothing to say.

  “And they’ve gone and abolished the death penalty,” the Boss Man said as he got up.

  Thobela said goodbye and left and went and sat in his pickup. He put his hand behind the seat and felt the polished shaft of the assegai. He stroked the wood with his fingers, back and forth, back and forth.

  Someone had to say, “This far, and no further.”

  Back and forth.

  So he waited for them.

  * * *

  When the minister moved away from her and sat on the edge of the desk, she knew something had altered between them, a gap had been bridged. Maybe it was just on her side that a certain anxiety had subsided, a fear allayed, but she could see a change in his body language—more ease.

  If he would be patient, she said, she would like to tell the whole story, everything. So that he could understand. Perhaps so she could also understand, because it was hard. For so long she had believed she was doing what she had to, following the only course available. But now . . . she wasn’t so sure.

  Take your time, he said, and his smile was different. Paternal.

  * * *

  The last thing Griessel could remember, before they took him to Casualty at Tygerberg Hospital and injected him with some or other shit that made his head soft and easy, was Matt Joubert holding his hand. The senior superintendent, who said to him all the way in the ambulance, over and over: “It’s just the DTs, Benny, don’t worry. It’s just the DTs.” His voice bore more worry than comfort.

  * * *

  She went to university to study physiotherapy. The whole family accompanied her on a scorching hot Free State day in January. Her father had made them all kneel in her hostel room and had prayed for her, a long dramatic prayer that made the sweat pop out on his frowning forehead and exposed the wickedness of Bloemfontein in detail.

  She remained standing on the pavement when the white Toyota Cressida eventually drove away. She felt wonderful: intensely liberated, a floating, euphoric sensation. “I felt as though I could fly,” were the words she used. Until she saw her mother look back. For the first time she could really see her family from the outside, and her mother’s expression upset her. In that short-lived moment, the second or two before the mask was replaced, she read in her mother’s face longing, envy and desire—as if she would have liked to stay behind, escape as her daughter had. It was Christine’s first insight, her first knowledge that she was not the only victim.

  She had meant to write to her mother after initiation, a letter of solidarity, love and appreciation. She wanted to say something when her mother phoned the hostel for the first time to find out how things were going. But she never could find the right words. Maybe it was guilt—she had escaped and her mother had not. Maybe it was the new world that never left time or space for melancholy thoughts. She was swept up in student life. She enjoyed it immensely, the total experience. Serenades, Rag, hostel meetings, social coffee-breaks, the lovely old buildings, dances, Intervarsity, men, the open spaces of the campus’s lawns and streams and avenues of trees. It was a sweet cup and she drank deeply, as if she could never have enough of it.

  “You won’t believe me, but for ten months I didn’t have sex. I was one hundred per cent celibate. Heavy petting, yes, there were four, five, six guys I played around with. Once I slept the whole night with a medical student in his flat in Park Street, but he had to stay above the belt. Sometimes I would drink, but I tried to only do that on a girls’ night out, for safety.”

  Her father’s letters had nothing to do with her celibacy—long, disjointed sermons and biblical references that she would later not even open and deliberately toss in the rubbish bin. It was a contract with the new life: “I would do nothing to make a ba . . . a mess of it.”

  She would not tempt fate or challenge the gods. She vaguely realized it was not rational, since she did not perform academically, she was constantly on the edge of failing, but she kept her part of the deal and the gods continued to smile on her.

  Then she met Viljoen.

  In sharp criticism of the state’s handling of the case, Judge Rosenstein quoted recent newspaper reports on the dramatic increase in crimes against children.

  “In this country 5,800 cases of rape of children younger than 12 years old were investigated last year, and some 10,000 cases where children between 11 and 17 years old were involved. In the Peninsula alone, more than 1,000 cases of child molestation were reported last year and the number is rising. “What makes these statistics even more shocking is the fact that only an estimated 15 per cent of all crimes against children are actually reported. And then there is the matter of children as murder victims. Not only are they being caught in the crossfire of gangland shootings, or become the innocent prey of pedophiles, now they are being killed in this senseless belief that they can cure AIDS,” he said.

  “The facts and figures clearly indicate that society is already failing our children. And now the machinery of the state is proving inadequate to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. If children can’t depend on the justice system to protect them, to whom can they turn?”

  Thobela folded the article up again and put it in his shirt pocket. He walked down to the beach, feeling the sand soft beneath his shoes. Just beyond reach of the white foaming arcs spilling across the sand he stood, hands in pockets. He could see Pakamile and his two friends running in step along the beach. He could hear their shouts, see their bare torsos and the sand grains clinging to their skins like stars in a chocolate firmament, arms aloft like wings as their squadron flew in formation just above the waterline. He had taken them to Haga Haga on the Transkei coast for the Easter weekend. They camped in tents and cooked over a fire, the boys swam and caught fish with hand lines in the rock pools and played war games in the dunes. He heard their voices till late at night in the other tent, muffled giggling and chatting.

  He blinked and the beach was empty and he was overwhelmed. Too little sleep and the after-effects of excess adrenaline.

  He began to walk north along the beach. He was looking for the absolute conviction he had felt in the Yellow Rose, that this is what he must do; as if the universe was pointing the way with a thousand index fingers. It was like twenty years ago when he could feel the absolute right
ness of the Struggle—that his origins, his instincts, his very nature had been honed for that moment, the total recognition of his vocation.

  Someone had to say, “This far.”

  If children can’t depend on the justice system to protect them, to whom can they turn?

  He was a warrior and there was still a war in this land.

  Why did it all sound so hollow now?

  He must get some sleep; that would clear his perspective. But he did not want to, did not feel attracted to the four walls of the hotel room—he needed open space, sun, wind and a horizon. He did not want to be alone in his head.

  He had always been a man of action, he could never stand by and watch. That is what he was and what he would be—a soldier, who faced the child rapist and felt all the juices of war flood his body. It was right, regardless how he might feel now. Regardless that this morning his convictions did not have the same impregnability.