by Deon Meyer
“So I said: ‘No, Carlos, I can’t,’ and that made him angry, for the first time. He smacked all the food around on the blanket and screamed at me in Spanish, and I thought he would hit me. So I took my handbag and said I had better go. I was scared; he was another person, his face . . . The bodyguards came walking out and talked to him and suddenly he calmed down and he just said: ‘Sorry, conchita, Carlos is so sorry.’ But I asked him, please, could they just take me home, and he said he would do it himself and all the way he was sorry and he made jokes and when I got out he gave me two thousand. I took it, because I thought if I tried to give it back he would be angry again.
“The next morning I phoned Vanessa and asked her what I should do, this guy thinks I am his girlfriend and he wants to pay me to be with just him and she said that is bad news, I must get rid of him, that sort of thing could ruin my whole business. So I said thanks and bye, because I didn’t want to tell her this guy is in drugs and he has a terrible temper and I haven’t a clue how to get rid of him.
“So I phoned Carlos and he said he was terribly sorry, it was his work that made him like that, and he sent flowers and I started to think it would be okay. But then they assaulted one of my clients, just outside the door of my room in the Gardens Center.”
The master bedroom of the Camps Bay house had a four-poster bed now. He had retained an expensive, well-known interior decorator who had begun with the bedroom and everything was in white: curtains, bedding, drapes on the bed like the sails of a ship. He showed off like a little boy, keeping his hands over her eyes all the way down the passage and then: “Ta-daaa!” and watched her reaction. He asked her four or five times, “You like the master’s bedroom?” and she said, “It’s beautiful,” because it was.
He dived onto the bed and said, “Come to Carlos,” and he was exuberant, even more boisterous than usual, and she tried to forget about the bodyguards somewhere in the house.
Later he lay beside her and softly traced little circles around her nipple with the tip of the little gold crucifix. “Where do you live, conchita?”
“You know . . .”
“No, where do you live?”
“Gardens Center,” she replied, hoping he would drop the subject.
“You think Carlos is stupid because he looks stupid? You work there, but where is your home, where is the place with your pictures on the fridge?”
“I can’t afford another place, you pay me too little.”
“Carlos pay you too little? Carlos pay you too much. All the time the moneyman is saying: ‘Carlos, we are here to make a profit, remember.’”
“You have a bookkeeper?”
“Of course. You think Carlos is small fish? Cocaine is big business, conchita, very big business.”
“Oh.”
“So you will take Carlos to your house?”
Never, she thought, never ever, but said, “One day . . .”
“You don’t trust Carlos?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Conchita, you can ask Carlos anything.”
“Did you have my client beaten up?”
“What client?” But he couldn’t carry off the lie and his eyes turned crafty. He is a child, she thought, and it frightened her.
“Just a client. Fifty-three years old.”
“Why do you think Carlos beat him?”
“Not you. But maybe the bodyguards?”
“Did he buy drugs?”
“No.”
“They only beat up people who do not pay for drugs, hokay?”
“Okay.” She knew what she wanted to know. But it helped not at all.
21.
Griessel and Cliffy sat in the fish restaurant a hundred meters beyond the entrance to Woolworths, each with a small earphone. They heard André Marais saying, “Testing, testing” for the umpteenth time, but this time with a tinny voice in the background calling, “Next customer, please.”
Cliffy Mketsu nodded, as he did every time. It irritated Griessel immensely. Marais couldn’t fucking see them nod, she was in the food section of Woolworths and they were here. She was only wearing a microphone, not earphones. One-way communication only, but Cliffy had to nod.
At a table opposite, a man and a woman were drinking red wine. The woman was middle-aged, but pretty, like Farrah Fawcett, with big, round, golden earrings and lots of rings on her fingers. The man looked young enough to be her son, but took her hand every now and again. They bothered Griessel. Because they were drinking wine. Because he could taste the dark flavor in his mouth. Because they were rich. Because they were together. Because they could drink and be together and what of him? He could sit here with Nodding Cliffy Mketsu, clever Cliffy, busy with his Masters in Police Science, a good policeman, but confused, hopelessly absent-minded, as if his head was in his books all the time.
Would he and Anna ever be able to sit and enjoy themselves like that? Sit holding hands and sipping wine and gazing into each other’s eyes? How did people do that? How do you regain the romance after twenty years of married life? Actually, it was fucking irrelevant, because he would never be able to sip wine again. Not if you were an alcoholic. You couldn’t drink a thing. Nothing. Not a fucking drop. Couldn’t even smell the red wine.
He had told Doc Barkhuizen he was going to get drunk, but the Doc had said: “Phone your wife and children and tell them,” because he knew Griessel could not do that. He wanted to smash his cell phone on the bloody pavement, he wanted to break something but he just screamed, he didn’t know what, not words. When he turned around, Cliffy and André Marais were sitting rigidly in the car pretending nothing had happened.
“Vaughn, are you receiving properly?” Cliffy asked the other team over the microphone. They were looking at Woolworths clothes on the second floor, the one above the food department.
“Ten-four, good buddy,” said Inspector Vaughn Cupido, as if it were a game. He and Jamie Keyter were the back-up team. Not Yaymie as the locals would say it, he called himself Jaa-mie. Nowadays everyone had foreign names. What was wrong with good, basic Afrikaner names? The men weren’t Griessel’s first choice either, as Cupido was careless and Keyter was a braggart, recently transferred from Table View Station after he had made the newspapers with one of those stories where facts do not necessarily interfere with sensation. “Detective breaks car-theft syndicate single-handed.” With his bulging Virgin Active biceps and the kind of face to make schoolgirls swoon, he was one of the few white additions to the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit. This was the team that had to protect André Marais and catch a fucking serial killer: an alcoholic, a braggart and a sloppy one.
There was another matter on his mind; two, three things that came suddenly together: were the older woman and the young man opposite married? To each other? What if Anna had a young man who held her hand on Friday nights? He couldn’t believe that she no longer wanted it, of that he was convinced. You didn’t just switch off her sort of warmth like a stove plate just because her husband was a fucking alky. She met men at work — what would she do if there was a young man who was interested and sober? She was still attractive, despite the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes — due to her husband’s drinking habit. There was nothing wrong with her body. He knew what men were like; he knew they would try. How long would she keep saying “no”? How long?
He took out his cell phone, needing to know where she was on a Friday night. He rang, holding the phone to the ear without the earphone.
It rang.
He looked across at Farrah Fawcett and her toy boy.
They were gazing into each other’s eyes with desire. He swore they were just plain horny.
“I thi . . . it’s tha . . . t,” said André Marais in the earphone.
“What?” said Griessel, looking at Cliffy, who merely shrugged and tapped his radio receiver with the tip of his index finger.
“Hello,” said his son.
“Hello, Fritz.”
“Hi, Dad.” There was no joy in his so
n’s voice.
“How are you?”
But he couldn’t hear the answer as the earphone buzzed in his ear and he only caught a fraction of what Sergeant André Marais was saying: “. . . can’t afford . . .”
“What are you doing, Fritz?”
“Nothing. It’s just Carla and me.” His son sounded depressed, and there was a dull tone to his voice.
“How’s your reception, Vaughn?” Cupido asked. “Her mike isn’t good.”
“Just Carla and you?”
“Mom’s out.”
“I usually just buy instant,” said André Marais clearly and distinctly.
“She’s talking to someone,” said Cliffy.
Then they heard a man’s voice over the ether, faintly: “I can’t do without a good cup of filter in the morning.”
“Dad? Are you there?”
“I’ll have to call later, Fritz, I’m at work.”
“Okay.” Like he expected it.
“What . . . name?”
“. . . dré.”
“Fuck,” said Cupido, “her fucking mike.”
“Bye, Fritz.”
“Bye, Dad.”
“We might be too far away,” said Jamie Keyter.
“Stay where you are,” said Griessel.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the policewoman below in Woolworths food hall.
“A fish on the hook,” said Cupido.
Cliffy nodded.
Mom’s out.
“Just keep calm,” said Griessel, but he meant it for himself.
Thobela made a noise of frustration in his deep voice as he rose from the hotel bed in one sudden movement. He had lain down at about three o’clock with the curtains drawn to shut out the sun, closed his eyes and lay listening to the beat of his heart. His head buzzed from too little sleep and his limbs felt like lead. Weary. With deliberate breathing he tried to drain the tension from his body. He sent his thoughts away from the present, sent them to the peaceful waters of the Cata River, to the mist that rolled like wraiths over the round hills of the farm . . . to realize only moments later that his thoughts had jumped away and were pumping other information through his consciousness to the rhythm of the pulse in his temples.
Pretorius reaching for the weapon in his wardrobe.
Eternity in the moments before he reached the man, and the alarm wailing, wailing, to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
A heavy woman towering above a little girl and the billiard cue rising and falling, rising and falling with demonic purpose and the blood spattering from the child’s head and he knew that was his problem — the woman, the woman. He had never executed a woman. His war was against men, always had been. In the name of the Struggle, seventeen times. Sixteen in the cities of Europe, one in Chicago: men, traitors, assassins, enemies, condemned to death in the committee rooms of the Cold War, and he was the one sent to carry out the sentence. Now two in the name of the New War. Animals. But male.
Was there honor in the execution of a woman?
The more he forced his thoughts elsewhere, the more they scurried back, until he rose up with that deep sound and plucked aside the curtains. There was movement outside, bright sunlight and color. He looked over the canal and the entrance to the Waterfront. Laborers streamed on foot towards the city center, to the taxi ranks in Adderley Street. Black and colored, in the brightly colored overalls of manual laborers. They moved with purpose, hasty to start the weekend, somewhere at a home or a shebeen. With family. Or friends.
His family was dead. He wanted to jerk open the window and scream: Fuck you all, my family is dead!
He drew a deep breath, placed his palms on the cool windowsill and let his head hang. He must get some sleep; he could not go on like this.
He turned back to the room. The bedspread was rumpled. He pulled it straight, smoothing it with his big hands, pulling and stretching it till it was level. He puffed up the pillows and laid them tidily down, one beside the other. Then he sat on the bed and picked up the telephone directory from the bedside drawer, found the number and rang Boss Man Madikiza at the Yellow Rose.
“This is Tiny. The one who was looking for John Khoza, you remember?”
“I remember, my brother.” The uproar of the nightclub was already audible in the background this late afternoon.
“Heard anything?”
“Haiziko. Nothing.”
“Keep your ear to the ground.”
“It is there all the time.”
He got up and opened the wardrobe. The stack of clean clothes on the top shelf was very low, the piles of folded dirty laundry were high — socks, underwear, trousers and shirts, each in their own separate pile.
He took the two small plastic holders of detergent and softener from his case, and sorted the washing into small bundles. The ritual was twenty years old, from the time in Europe when he had learned to live out of a suitcase. To be in control, orderly and organized. Because the call could come at any time. In those days he had made a game of it, the sorting of clothes according to color had made him smile, because that was apartheid — the whites here, the blacks there, the mixed colors in their own pile; each group afraid that another group’s color would stain them. He had always washed the black bundle first, because “here blacks come first.’
He did that now, just from habit. Pressed and rubbed the material in the soapy water — rinse once, then again, twist the clothes in long worms to squeeze out the water — until his muscles bulged. Hung them out. Next the colored clothes, and the whites could wait till last.
Next morning he would ring reception and ask for an ironing board and iron and do the part he enjoyed the most — ironing the shirts and trousers with a hissing, hot iron till they could be hung on hangers in the wardrobe with perfect flat surfaces and sharp creases.
He draped the last white shirt over the chair and then stood indecisively in the center of the room.
He could not stay here.
He needed to pass the time until he could attempt sleep again. And he must think through this matter of the woman.
He picked up his wallet, pushed it in his trouser pocket, took the key card for his room and went out the door, down the stairs and outside. He walked around the corner to Dock Road, where the people were still walking to their weekend. He fell in behind a group of five colored men and kept pace with them up Coen Steytler. He eavesdropped on their conversation, following the easy, directionless talk with close attention all the way to Adderley.
It was not André Marais’s fault that Operation Woollies descended into total chaos. She acted out her role as a lonely, middle-aged woman skillfully and with vague, careful interest as the man began to chat with her between the wine racks and the snack displays.
Later she would think that she had expected an older man. This one was barely thirty: tallish, slightly plump, with a dark, five o’clock shadow. His choice of clothes was strange — the style of his checked jacket was out of date, the green shirt just a shade too bright, brown shoes unpolished. “Harmless” was the word on her tongue, but she knew appearance counted for nothing when it came to crime.
He asked her, in English with an Afrikaans accent, if she knew where the filter coffee was, and she replied that she thought it was that way.
With a shy smile he told her he was addicted to filter coffee and she replied that usually she bought instant as she could not afford expensive coffee. He said he couldn’t manage without a good cup of filter coffee in the morning, charmingly apologetic, as if it were sinful. “Italian Blend,” he said.
Oddly, she explained to Griessel later, at that moment she quite liked him. There was a vulnerability to him, a humanity that found an echo in herself.
Their trolleys were side by side, hers with ten or twelve items, his empty. “Oh?” she said, fairly certain he was not the one they were looking for. She wanted to get rid of him.
“Yes, it’s very strong,” he said. “It keeps me alert when I am on the Flying Squad.”
She f
elt her guts contract, because she knew he was lying. She knew policemen, she could spot them a mile away and he was not one, she knew.
“Are you a policeman?” she asked, trying to sound impressed.
“Captain Johan Reyneke,” he said, putting out a rather feminine hand and smiling through prominent front teeth. “What is your name?”
“André,” she said, and felt her heart beat faster. Captains did not do Flying Squad — he must have a reason for lying.
“André,” he repeated, as if to memorize it.
“My mother wanted to use her father’s name, and then she only had daughters.” She used her standard explanation, although there was no question in his voice. With difficulty she kept her voice level.
“Oh, I like that. It’s different. What work do you do, André?”
“Oh, admin, nothing exciting.”
“And your husband?”
She looked into his eyes and lied. “I am divorced,” she said, and looked down, as if she were ashamed.
“Never mind,” he said, “I’m divorced too. My children live in Johannesburg.”
She was going to say her children were out of the house already, part of the fabrication she and Griessel had discussed, but there was a voice from behind, a woman’s voice, quite shrill. “André?”
She glanced over her shoulder and recognized the woman, Molly, couldn’t recall her surname. She was the mother of one of her son’s school friends, one of those over-eager, terribly involved parents. Oh God, she thought, not now.
“Hi,” said André Marais, glancing at the man and seeing his eyes narrow, and she pulled a face, trying to communicate to him that she would rather not have this interruption.
“How are you, André? What are you doing here? What a coincidence.” Molly came up to her, basket in hand, before she realized that the two trolleys so close together meant something. She read the body language of the man and the woman and put two and two together. “Oh, sorry, I hope I didn’t interrupt something.”
André knew she had to get rid of the woman, because she could see in the clenching of Reyneke’s hands that he was tense. The whole affair was on a knifepoint and she wanted to say: “Yes, you are interrupting something” or “Just go away.” But before she could find the right words, Molly’s face cleared and she said: “Oh, you must be working together — are you also in the police?” and she held out her hand to Reyneke. “I’m Molly Green. Are you on an operation or something?”