by Deon Meyer
“Benny, if they do know something . . . I can’t believe it.”
“I know. I’m also having trouble with it. But see it from their point of view. They are messing about with Nigerian syndicates distributing crack in Sea Point when suddenly they come across something a hundred times bigger. Something that makes them look like real policemen. Colombia. The Holy Grail. There was a shithouse full of drugs in that storeroom. If it were me, I would have gone to the national commissioner and made a stink about jurisdiction. But they just sit there. Why? They know something. They’re busy with something. And I think they have been busy with it for quite some time.”
“Geeeeez,” said Ngubane.
“But we’ll have to see.”
“I’ll go talk to the captain.”
“Tim, the number of that shrink . . . do you still have it?” asked Griessel.
“The one who was down here from Pretoria? The profiler?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll text it.”
35.
Faizal said the bass guitar was not in the market; the rapper from Blackheath had paid up and collected it. Griessel said what he was looking for now was a CD player, nothing fancy, just something for listening to music at home.
“Car, portable, or hi-fi component?” asked Faizal.
Griessel thought about it and said portable, but with good bass.
“Portable with speakers or portable with headphones?”
Headphones would be better in the flat. Faizal took a Sony Walkman out and said: “This is the D-NE seven-ten, it can also play MP threes, sixty-four-track programmable, but the most important thing is, it has an equalizer and bass boost, the sound quality is awesome, Sarge. Great headphones. And just in case you are chilling in the bath and it falls off the soap dish, it’s waterproof too.”
“How much?”
“Four hundred, Sarge.”
“Jissis, L.L., that’s robbery. Forget it.”
“Sarge, this is brand new, slightly shop-soiled, no previous owner. Three fifty.”
Griessel took out his wallet and held two hundred-rand notes out to Faizal.
“Think of my children, Sarge,” groaned the shopkeeper. “They must eat too.”
He stood in the street beside his car with his new CD player in his hand and felt like going home, locking the door and listening to the music his son had lent him.
Because they were going to pull him off the case. He knew it. It was too political to keep an alky in charge. Too much pressure. The image of the Service. Even though he and the other dinosaurs like Matt Joubert talked about the Force, it was the Service now. The politically correct, criminal-procedures-regulated, emasculated and disempowered Service, where an alcoholic could not be the leader of a task team. Don’t even talk about the fucking constitutional protection of criminals’ rights. So let them pull him, let them give the whole fucking caboodle to someone else, one of the Young Turks, and he would watch from the sidelines as chaos descended.
He unlocked his car and got in. He opened the box of the CD player, shifted the plastic flap and pushed in the batteries. He leaned across and took the CD out of the cubbyhole. He scanned the titles on the back of the jewel case. Various artists performing Anton Goosen’s songs. He knew almost none of them. “Waterblommetjies.” Lord, that took you back. Twenty years? No. Thirty! Thirty years ago, Sonja Herholdt sang “Waterblommetjies” and the whole country sang along. He had a crush on her, then. A vague teenage desire. I will cherish-and-protect-and-regularly-service-you. She was so . . . pure. And innocent. Darling of the people, the Princess Di of the Afrikaners before the world knew Princess Di. With those big eyes and that sweet voice and the blonde hair that was so . . . he didn’t know what the style was called, but it was seventies cool, if anything could be “cool” back then.
He had been sixteen. Puberty in Parow. All he could think about in those days was sex. Not always about the deed itself, but how to get some. With the girls in Parow in the seventies it was well nigh impossible. Middle-class Afrikaners, the iron grip of the Dutch Reformed Church and girls who didn’t want to make the same mistakes as their mothers, so that the best a guy could do was perhaps some heavy petting in the back of the bioscope. If you were lucky. If you could draw the attention of one. So he began to play bass guitar to get their attention, since he was no athlete or academic giant, he was just another little fucker with a sprinkling of pimples and an ongoing battle with school rules to grow his hair long.
In Standard Nine at a garage party there was this four-man band, guys of his age from Rondebosch. English-speaking Souties, not very good, the drummer was so-so and the rhythm guitarist knew only six chords. But the girls didn’t care. He saw how they looked at the band members. And he wanted to be looked at like that. So he talked to the leader when the band took a break. He told him he played a bit of acoustic and a bit of piano by ear, but the guy said get a bass guitar, china, because everyone played six-string and drums, but bass guitarists were hard to find.
So he began to look into it and he bought a bass for a knockdown price from an army guy in Goodwood whose Ford Cortina needed new rings. He taught himself in his room, with the help of a book that he bought in Bothners in Voortrekker Road. He dreamed dreams and he kept his ear to the ground until he heard of a band in Bellville that was looking for a bass. Five-piece: lead, rhythm, drums, organ and bass. Before he knew what happened he was on the stage of an English-medium primary-school hall laying down a foundation of Uriah Heep’s “Stealin” and he sang the fucking song — he, Benny fucking Griessel, stood in front of the teen girls in an undersized T-shirt and his Afrikaans haircut and he sang, “Take me across the water, ’cause I got no place to hide, I done the rancher’s daughter and it sure did hurt his pride,” and they all looked at him, the girls looked at him with those eyes.
It only brought him one sexual experience while he was at school. What he hadn’t known was that while the band played, the guys who were dancing had the advantage. By the time the party broke up, all the girls had to go home. But it had given him the music. The deep notes he picked off the strings and via the amplifier, resonating through his whole body. The knowledge that his bass was the basis of every song, the substructure, the defining foundation from which the lead guitarist could deviate or the organist could drift away, always to return to the steadfast form that Benny laid down. Even though he knew he would never be good enough to go pro.
Unlike the police work. He knew from the start that was his thing. That was the place where all the connections came together, that was how his brain was wired.
Now they were going to pull him off the assegai case and he put the CD down and took out his phone, because he wanted to talk to the psychologist before they posted him. He wanted to test a few of his theories before they took him off.
She met him at the Newport Deli in Mouille Point, because she was “mad about the place.” They sat outside on the pavement at a high, round table.
Captain Ilse Brody, Investigative Psychology Unit, Serious and Violent Crime, Head Office, he read on the card she passed across the little table. She was a smoker, a woman in her thirties with a wedding ring and short black hair. “You’re lucky,” she said. “I fly back tonight.” Relaxed, self-assured. Accustomed to the man’s world she worked in.
He remembered her. He had been on a course she presented two or three years ago. He didn’t mention it, as he couldn’t remember how sober he had been.
They ordered coffee. She ordered a flat biscuit with chocolate on top and nuts underneath with some Italian-sounding name that he didn’t quite catch.
“Do you know about the assegai murders?” he asked.
“Everyone down here is talking about them, but I don’t have the details. I hear the media first speculated that it was a woman.”
“Couldn’t be a woman. The weapon, the MO, everything . . .”
“There’s another reason too.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll get to that. Tell
me everything first.”
He told her. He liked the intense way she listened. He began with Davids and finished with Uniondale. He knew she wanted details of the crime scene. He gave her everything he knew. But two things he withheld: the pickup and the fact that the suspect might be black.
“Mmm,” she said, and turned her cigarette lighter over and over in her right hand. Her hands were tiny. They made him think of an old person’s hands. There were fine gray hairs between the black at her temples.
“The fact that he confronts them in their own homes is interesting. The first deduction is that he is intelligent. Above average. And determined. Orderly, organized. He has guts.”
Griessel nodded. He agreed with the guts part, but the intelligence was a surprise.
“It will be difficult to determine a vocational group. Not a laborer, he’s too clever for that. Something that allows him to be alone so he doesn’t have to explain how he spends his time. He can drive to Uniondale without anyone asking questions. Sales? His own business? He must be quite fit. Reasonably strong.”
She took a cigarette from a white packet with a red square on it and put it in her mouth. Griessel liked her mouth. He wondered what effect her work had on her. To use the gruesomeness of death to paint a mental picture of the suspect, until she could see him, vocation and all.
“He’s white. Three white victims in white neighborhoods. It would be difficult if he wasn’t white.” She lit the cigarette.
Exactly, he thought.
“In his thirties, I would say.” She drew on the cigarette and blew a long white plume into the air. It was windless here where the mountain blocked the southeaster. “But what you really want to know is why he is using an assegai. And why he is killing people.”
He wondered why he was so conscious of her mouth. He shifted his eyes to a point on her forehead, so that he could concentrate.
“I think the assegai is one of two things. Either he is trying to convince you he is not white, to put you off the trail. Or he is looking for media sensation. Is there any indication that he has made contact with the media yet?”
Griessel shook his head.
“Then I would go with the first option. But I’m guessing.”
“Why doesn’t he just shoot them? That’s what I’m wondering.”
“I think it must be connected to the why,” she said, and drew again on the cigarette. There was a masculine manner to her smoking, probably because she always smoked with men. “It definitely isn’t because he was molested or abused himself. In that case the victims and the MO would have been very different. That’s another reason it has to be a man. When men are damaged, if they are abused or molested, they want to do the same to others. Women are different. If there is damage from a young age, they don’t do it to others. They do it to themselves. Therefore not a woman. If it had been a man who was damaged, his target would have been children. But this one is going for the ones who are doing the damage. And he is psychologically strong. What makes more sense to me is that a child of his has been a victim. Or at least a close member of his family. A younger sister or brother perhaps. A personal vendetta. A pure vigilante. They are rare. In our country it is usually a group with a very specific dynamic.”
“And the assegai?”
“I have to admit the assegai bothers me. Let’s think about stabbing versus shooting. Stabbing is much more personal. Intimate and direct. That fits a personal loss. It makes him feel that he himself is exacting retribution. There’s no distance between him and the victim, he isn’t acting on behalf of a group, he represents only himself. But he could have done that with a knife. Because he is smart, he knows a knife can be messy. Also less effective. He wants to get it over quickly. There is no pathology of hanging about at the scene. He leaves no messages. But maybe he wants to intimidate them with the assegai; maybe it’s a tool to gain immediate control, so that he can do his work and be done with it. Now I’m speculating freely, because I can’t be sure.” She stubbed out the cigarette in the small glass ashtray.
He told her he also thought the suspect was white. And he still thought so, but there was evidence to the contrary. He told her about Uniondale and the fact that the child abuse report only appeared in Rapport. She pressed the tip of a finger on the biscuit crumbs in her plate and licked them off. She did it again. He wondered if she knew it made him think of sex, and then he was faintly surprised that he was thinking of sex at all and eventually he said: “If he is black, you have much bigger problems.”
A third time the finger went to the plate and then to her mouth and he looked at her mouth again. An eyetooth, just the one, was canted to the inside.
“I would also put more check marks against intelligence and motivation. And that puts another light on the assegai. Now we start to talk of symbolism, of traditional values and traditional justice. He’s sophisticated, at home in a city environment. He’s not a country boy — it takes too much skill to execute three white victims in white neighborhoods without being seen. He reads Afrikaans newspapers. He is aware of the police investigation. That’s possibly why he went to Uniondale. To divide attention. You should not underestimate him.”
“If he’s black.”
She nodded. “Improbable but not impossible.” She looked at her watch. “I will have to finish up,” she said and opened her handbag.
Quickly he told her about Sangrenegra and asked if she thought the ambush would work.
She held her purse in her hand. “It would have been better if you could have set your trap outside Cape Town. He feels the pressure here.”
“I’m paying,” he said. “But will he come?”
She took out a ten-rand note. “I’ll pay half,” she said and put the money under the saucer with the bill. “He will come. If you play your cards right with the media, he will come.”
He drove along the coast, because he wanted to go to Camps Bay again. He saw the new developments on the sea front in Green Point. Big blocks of flats under construction, with advertising boards romantically depicting the finished product. From R1.4 million. He wondered if it would revive this part of the city. What would they do with the bergie hobos that lived on the commonage behind? And the old, dilapidated buildings in between, with paint peeling off in long strips and the rooms rented out by the hour?
That made him think of Christine van Rooyen and that he should tell her what they were planning, but he would have to pick his words carefully.
Along Coast Road through Sea Point. It looked a lot better here by the sea. But he knew it was a false front — further inland was erosion and decay, dark corners and dirty alleys. He stopped at a traffic light and saw the scaffolding on a sea-front building. He wondered who would win this battle. It was Europe against Africa — rich Britons and Germans against Nigerian and Somalian drug networks, the South Africans marginalized as spectators. It depended on how much money poured in. If it was enough, the money would win and crime would find another place, southern suburbs, he thought. Or the Cape Flats.
The money ought to win, because the view was stunningly beautiful. That’s what money did. Reserved the most beautiful for the rich. And shunted policemen off to Brackenfell.
At the traffic circle he turned left in Queens, then right in Victoria, all along the sea, through Bantry Bay. A Maserati, a Porsche and a BMW X5 stood side by side in front of a block of flats. He had never felt at home here. It was another country.
Clifton. A woman and two young children walked over the road. She was carrying a big beach bag and a folded umbrella. She was wearing a bikini and a piece of material around her hips, but it blew open. She was tall and pretty, long brown hair down the length of her back. She looked down the road, past him. He was invisible to her in his middle-class police car.
He drove on to where Lower Kloof Street turned up left and then took the road round the back, to Round House. He drove up and down three times and tried to assess it as the assegai man would. He couldn’t park here, it was too open. He would ha
ve to walk a long way, above maybe, from the Signal Hill Road side. Or below. So that, when he had finished with Sangrenegra, he could flee downhill.
Or would he choose not to come through the bushes? Would he chance the street?
He has guts, Ilse Brody had said. He has guts and he’s clever.
He phoned Bushy Bezuidenhout and asked him where he was. Bezuidenhout said they had found a house diagonally opposite Sangrenegra’s. Belonged to an Italian who lived overseas. They had got the keys from the estate agent. They were not allowed to smoke in the house. Griessel said he was on his way.
His cell phone rang almost immediately. “Griessel.”
“Benny, it’s John Afrika.”
The commissioner.
Fuck, he thought.
36.
He wanted to shower, eat and sleep.
Thobela was driving down York Street in George when he spotted the Protea Forester’s Lodge. It was nameless enough for him. He parked in front of the building and had already put a hand on his bag when the newsreader began to talk about the Colombian and the child over the radio.
He listened with one hand still on the carry straps of his bag, the other on the door latch and his eyes on the front door of the hotel.
He sat like this for three or four minutes after he had heard everything. Then he let go of the bag, started the pickup and put it in reverse. He made a U-turn and drove down York Street, turned right into C.J. Langenhoven Street. He headed for the Outeniqua Pass.
The policemen who should have been guarding Christine van Rooyen’s door were not there. Griessel knocked and assumed they would be inside.
“Who’s that?” her voice sounded faint from the other side of the door. He gave his name. The guards were not inside, or she would not have answered. As the door opened he saw her face first. It didn’t look good. She was pale and her eyes were swollen.
“Come in.” She was wearing a jersey, although it wasn’t cold. Her shoulders were hunched. He suspected she knew she would not see her child again. She sat down on the couch. He saw the television was showing a soapie, the sound muted. Is that how she got time to pass?