Cobra

by Deon Meyer

  Tuesday,Wednesday, and Thursdays are OK, no great shakes, but you can work. Especially now that the clubs are pumping way into the night, lots of young people with lots of money, and you might argue you are helping, taking the money that would have been spent on cocaine.

  The seventh day is for rest,Tyrone, because Lord knows da’ ga’ niks aan nie, nothing at all, not even in the malls, except before Christmas, that was another story.

  And Mondays were also basically kak, thank you.

  So he made a loop through Greenmarket Square, just to check whether there might be a lost tour bus full of Europeans ooh-ing and aah-ing over the cheap merchandise with ‘African fl avours’ that actually came all the way from China.

  There wasn’t.

  He bought a meat pie on the corner of Long and Wale. Walked up Longmarket, past the home-made Frederick Street sign, probably not smart and grand enough a neighbourhood for the DA government to hang an official street sign. As bad as the ANC, they were ammal useless. The northwester was blowing kwaai, it was a long steep hike to his little outside room, in Ella Street, up in Schotsche Kloof, which he rented in the back yard of the rich Muslims’ grand house for four-fifty a month. One wall was kitchen counter and sink. One wall was built-in cupboards. He had a single bed and a bedside table. Tiny bathroom. At the outer door hung the intercom, a reminder that this was once the servants’ quarters. And now and then the eldest twenty-something daughter of the rich Muslims would buzz him. Nag him about the garbage, or because he hadn’t closed the front security gate properly. She hung around the house all day. She was a little fat, and lonely.

  Shame.

  He would listen to his 32GB iPod touch, the one he had stolen from a German backpacker in December, half the music was death metal, but the rest was OK.

  Time to ponder.

  10

  Doc Barkhuizen was seventy-one years old. He had thick glasses, wild eyebrows, and long grey hair that he tied back in a cheeky ponytail, usually with a light blue ribbon. He had a mischievous face that reminded Benny of one of the seven dwarves in Snow White, and a surgery in Boston where he – after a short-lived retirement to Witsand at the age of sixty-five – still saw patients every weekday as a general practitioner.

  And he was an alcoholic.

  ‘I am four hundred and twenty-two days sober, Doc,’ said Griessel promptly.

  ‘Do you want to drink?’

  ‘Yes, Doc. But not more than usual.’

  ‘So why are you keeping me away from Hot in Cleveland?’

  ‘Hot in Cleveland?’

  ‘It’s a sitcom, Benny. It’s the sort of thing that normal, elderly, rehabilitating men watch in the evening with their wives, to keep them from boredom and the lure of the bottle.’

  ‘Sorry, Doc,’ he said, though he knew Barkhuizen was only teasing him.

  ‘How are the children?’

  He would have to get through this first, it didn’t help to try to hurry Doc. His sponsor searched far and wide for danger signs, and he always wanted all the details. ‘Well, in general. Fritz has now decided that he wants to go to film school next year. Just because he has shot a few music videos with Jack Parow. Now he wants to “make movies” with a passion. And the AFDA tuition fees, Doc . . . I’ll have to take a bond on a house that I don’t have. But it’s probably better than no education. Or joining the police.’

  ‘And Carla? Is she still going out with that rugby player?’

  ‘Yes, Doc, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I can hear you still don’t like the boy.’

  It was the boyfriend Etzebeth’s tattoos that bothered Griessel most – that stuff was for prison gangs – but he knew Doc would say he was prejudiced. ‘He was kicked off the team for fighting, Doc.’

  ‘I saw that in the newspapers. But you must admit, it’s not bad to be already playing for the Vodacom team at the age of twenty.’

  ‘He’s aggressive, Doc.’

  ‘With Carla?’

  ‘I’ll lock the fucker up if he ever tries that.’

  ‘You mean on the field?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s his job, Benny.’

  Griessel just shook his head.

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked Doc.

  ‘Because my colleagues think I’m drinking again.’

  ‘What gives them that idea?’

  ‘Last night I slept in my office. Not for very long either. So I looked really bad today.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Last week there were two nights I slept in the office.’

  ‘From pressure of work?’

  ‘No, Doc.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or must I drag it out of you?’

  Griessel sighed.

  ‘It’s Alexa,’ said Doc Barkhuizen with certainty. He had advised strongly against Griessel’s relationship with her – he said two dodgy alcoholics together spelled trouble, ‘and if one is an artiste as well, then you have the recipe for a big mess’.

  ‘Alexa is one hundred and fifty days sober, Doc.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I’ve moved in.’

  ‘With her?’

  ‘Yes, Doc.’

  ‘Christ, Benny. When?’

  ‘Three weeks ago.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it’s difficult, Doc. Not to do with drink, I swear. We . . . it’s easier, she understands the craving, Doc, we help each other.’

  ‘You know I think that’s a crock of shit. But go on.’

  All the way here he had considered how he would lie; at the beginning of his rehabilitation Barkhuizen had caught him out every time – he knew all the sly evasions of an alcoholic so well. Griessel decided on half-truths, that was the safest. And now he couldn’t find the right words. ‘Jissis, Doc . . .’

  ‘Do you have trouble with commitment, Benny? Or are you still missing Anna?’

  ‘No, Doc. It’s just . . . I suppose it’s the commitment, sort of . . .’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘Doc, I got used to being on my own. For two years. Coming and going as I chose. If I wanted to drink orange juice out of the bottle in the morning, if I wanted to play bass guitar in the evening, if I just wanted to do fokkol . . .’

  ‘So what possessed you to go and move in with her? Wait, don’t tell me. It was her idea.’

  ‘Yes, Doc.’

  ‘And you felt too bad to say no.’

  ‘No, Doc, I wanted to.’

  ‘And now you’re sleeping at the office so you can be alone for a while?’

  ‘That’s more or less . . .’

  ‘Jissis, Griessel, you’re a moron.’

  ‘Yes, Doc.’

  ‘Did you give up your flat?’

  ‘Yes, Doc.’

  ‘A moronic ape.’

  ‘Yes, Doc.’

  ‘You know what the right thing to do is.’

  ‘No, Doc.’

  ‘You know, but you don’t want to know. You have to sit down and talk to her. Tell her you need your space. And then she’s going to feel threatened and insecure, because she is an artiste. And she will wonder whether you really love her. And she is going to cry, and resort to drink, and you will feel responsible. That’s the problem. You don’t want to face up to all those things. You’ve never been very good with conflict.’

  ‘Fok, Doc.’

  ‘So tell me, how long did you think you could continue sleeping at the office before it caused complications?’

  Griessel stared at the floor.

  ‘You didn’t think, did you?’

  ‘No, Doc.’

  ‘Why are you here, Benny? You knew exactly what I would say.’

  ‘My CO told me to come.’

  ‘Did you tell him you haven’t been drinking?’

  ‘I tried, but . . .’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know, Doc.’

  ‘You will have to do something.’

  ‘Alexa is going to Johannesburg to
morrow, until Thursday. I’ll think about it, Doc. When she comes back . . .’

  Doc Barkhuizen looked at Benny from under his bushy eyebrows. Then he said:‘You know that we are personally responsible for ninety-five per cent of the trouble in our lives.’

  ‘Yes, Doc.’

  ‘Do you want me to phone your CO?’

  ‘Please, Doc.’

  ‘OK. And don’t worry, I’ll be discreet.’

  His cellphone rang as he walked outside with Barkhuizen. An unknown number. He answered while Doc locked up the surgery. The wind was icy.

  ‘Captain, it’s Jeanette Louw.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Griessel, still unsure of how to address her.

  ‘I have spoken to the next of kin about your request. It’s going to be difficult. They have already notified family members, and some of them are already on their way to the Cape to support them, and for the funerals.’

  ‘I understand completely,’ he said.

  ‘They say they’ll try, but they can’t guarantee it won’t reach the media.’

  ‘It’ll give us a bit of time,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Captain, they are doing it because they want to help catch the murderers.’

  He didn’t react.

  ‘You are going to catch them, Captain?’

  ‘I will do my absolute best.’

  She remained silent for a long time, before she said: ‘If there is anything that I can do. Anything . . .’

  11

  Griessel drove away, looking back in the rear-view mirror at the skinny, slightly bowed shape of Doc Barkhuizen standing under the street light. He felt a huge compassion for the man, for the generous heart hidden behind the strict, infl exible facade.

  His sins weighed heavily on him.

  Doc was the one person he did not want to lie to. It was a sacred relationship, the one with your AA sponsor, if you truly wanted to quit drinking. It was the cornerstone of rehabilitation, in the end, it was your only lifebuoy in the stormy sea of alcoholic thirst. If you couldn’t trust one another, you were basically fucked. For the past few years, Doc had been the one constant in his life, the one he shared everything with.

  Until today.

  That’s why unease stirred down in his gut: once you began telling half-truths and concealing the Big Problem, you quickly slid down the slippery slope of relapse. He knew. He had been there.

  If he couldn’t speak about the actual problem, why wasn’t he at least honest about the other things that haunted him?

  Because Doc would say: ‘You know what to do.’

  And Doc would be right.

  He would say to Doc: ‘I’m afraid Alexa will catch me out, I’m afraid that she will see through me some time or other. And then she will drop me. And though I’m looking for some room, I don’t want that. Because I love her, she’s actually all that I have. So, it worries me a lot, Doc.’

  He would at least be able to explain where the problem began, where the origin was. It was back when he met Alexa. He had been involved in the investigation into the murder of her husband. He was the one who recognised her as the former singing sensation, it filled him with nostalgia and admiration and a bittersweet longing. And then he was sympathetic about her drinking and he told her he was also an alcoholic. He was the one who believed from the beginning that she was innocent, he was the one who unravelled the whole mess, and the one who took her flowers afterwards in hospital and talked with her about music.

  And then she thought he was brilliant.

  He tried to tell her, several times, in different ways, that she was wrong. But he hadn’t made a very good job of it, half blinded as he was by who she was, her musical talent and her Story, and her determination to get back on her feet again. And her sensuality – fok weet, despite the damage, despite the years, she was a sexy, beautiful woman. And then he went and fell in love with her. And when you are in love, you put your best foot forward, you hide who you really are. And she only heard what she wanted to hear.

  And then, in the months since, something had developed: ‘a dynamic’ Doc Barkhuizen would call it. Alexa treated him as though he was a good, solid man. A hero. Confidant, advisor. Introduced him as her ‘master detective’, and to his dismay even once or twice as her ‘rock’.

  He, Benny Griessel, someone’s rock? Solid? A hero?

  He was an idiot and an ape, because despite his discomfort, despite his awareness of fraud, he loved it. That Xandra, the former star who could still bring people to a standstill in the street, thought he was OK. It was the first time in more than ten years that anyone except his daughter Carla thought and said he was OK, in any way. And he was weak, he didn’t want it to end.

  And now?

  Now he had been drawn in, and his sins had caught up with him.

  It wasn’t that he could no longer play the bass guitar in the evenings. It was that he was ashamed of what he wanted to play when he was practising.

  Last week, on the way home, he heard Neil Diamond’s ‘Song Sung Blue’ over the radio – the Hot August Night recording that began with just acoustic guitar, and where the bass guitar only kicked in halfway through the first verse, suddenly giving the song rhythm and depth and familiarity – and he thought he would like to play it as soon as he was home. Only to remember he lived with Alexa now, maybe she would think Neil Diamond wasn’t sophisticated enough, that he should rather practise something else, that he had an image to maintain . . .

  He had to be what he was not.

  And that was just the beginning, the tip of the iceberg.

  There was the money thing as well. Alexa had inherited well from her late husband – including his record company Afrisound, which brought in a constant stream of royalties. The firm was not in good shape, but she was rebuilding it with a natural, instinctive business acumen. Alexa’s own comeback album, Bittersoet, was doing better than expected, her concerts were fully booked again.

  She was a rich woman. And he was a policeman.

  She had bought him the iPhone. And a new amplifier for his bass guitar. And clothes – a jacket, and expensive shirts that he didn’t want to wear to work, because he knew that colleagues like Vaughn Cupido would tease him mercilessly. Not to mention the new winter pyjamas. They were an embarrassment to him – he felt like a baboon in fancy dress. What was wrong with an old pair of tracksuit pants and a T-shirt? But when he put on the new pyjamas and stood there in front of Alexa like a moron, she said, with a big, appreciative smile, ‘Come here, Benny,’ and she held him tightly and kissed him until his knees buckled . . .

  What would it help to share it all with Doc?

  That’s why he avoided all mention of the Big Problem. He could never tell Barkhuizen about that. Or anyone else, that was the big fuck-up. He would have to sort it out himself, but he couldn’t, not at all – he didn’t even know where to begin.

  And as if that wasn’t enough to complicate his life, Alexa added another dilemma this afternoon.

  When he had showered and was putting on fresh clothes in their bedroom, Alexa had come to sit on the bed, excited, as though she couldn’t keep the ‘surprise’ to herself any more. She said bass guitar player Schalk Joubert was going to perform with Lize Beekman at Die Boer in Durbanville next Friday night. ‘But Schalk has to rush to New York for a gig, and I said to Lize, what about Benny? He knows all your music off by heart and he’s not only a master detective, he’s grown amazingly as a musician. And then she said that’s a brilliant idea. Benny, you’re going to play with Lize Beekman – I’m so proud of you . . .’

  At first he felt relief that it was not the surprise he had suspected.

  And then the knowledge dawned on him: he was not in that league, no matter how hard he practised with Rust, his foursome of amateur-veterans. They did covers of time-worn hits, played every now and then at golden and silver wedding anniversaries in front of middle-aged audiences. But this was Lize Beekman, the singer who, the one or two times he’d been in her presence, h
ad left him tongue-tied and dumbstruck by her immense talent and her quiet beauty and her aura.

  What was he to do? Alexa sat there in joy and expectation, waiting for his response to the great gift. He had forced a smile and said ‘Sjoe,’ an innocuous exclamation that he fokken never used. He said: ‘Thank you, Alexa, but I don’t know if I’m good enough,’ and knew exactly what her reaction would be.

  ‘Of course you are good enough. I didn’t start singing in bands yesterday, Benny. You’ve grown so much in your music the past year.’ One of her typical artistic expressions that he struggled to handle. ‘Lize is emailing me the repertoire, and you have to go and rehearse a few times, but that’s only next week, you’ll be able to arrange that with work . . . Put on your new blue shirt, you look so good in it.’

  So he put the blue shirt on.

  He was fucked. In at least two ways.

  He found his team members at IMC, the Hawks’ Information Management Centre.

  ‘You look a bit better, Benna,’ said Cupido when he looked up from the computer screen he was staring at, along with the other Violent Crimes detectives. ‘Nice shirt, partner . . .’

  The whole room gawped at him.

  ‘We got the two-oh-five subpoena quickly,’ said Captain Philip van Wyk, IMC commanding officer, referring to the Hawks’ responsibilities according to article 205 of the Criminal Procedure Act when obtaining cellphone records. ‘Seems like this has really caught the attention higher up . . .’

  ‘’Cause why, it’s a foreigner,’ said Cupido reproachfully.

  ‘. . . But it’s the data from three cellphone towers that’s relevant,’ said van Wyk. ‘And weekends are prime time in Franschhoek. It’ll take time to analyse everything.’

  ‘And I can tell you now, there are going to be lots of international calls,’ said Cupido. ‘Half of those wine farms are in the hands of foreigners.’

  ‘The logs of the Internet service provider to La Petite Margaux show there were seven computers and three iPads on that IP address since Friday. We’ll have to identify and isolate the computers and traffic belonging to the farm personnel before we know what Morris’s activities were.’

  Griessel tried to remember what van Wyk had taught him. ‘That means we’ll have to go and collect their computers.’