by Deon Meyer
She stubbed the cigarette out and half turned to him.
“He was as old as you,” she said, and for a second he thought he heard scorn in her voice.
She leaned her back against his feet. She folded her arms below her breasts.
“Do you know why my parents sent me to university? To find a husband. One with education. And a good job. So I could have a good life. A good life. What does a good life help? What use is it when you die and you can say to yourself I had a good life? Boring, but good.
“At varsity this guy was visiting me, third-year medical student. His parents lived in Heuwelsig and they had money. I saw how they lived. I saw if you have money you don’t have to be dutiful and ordinary and good. Having money means more than being able to buy things. You can be different and no one says anything. Then I knew what I wanted. But how to get it? You could marry a rich man, but it’s still not your money. I got a job working weekends for a catering business. One night at a golf course I stood having a smoke and this man comes up to me. He had a car business in Zastron Street, and he asked me, ‘How much do you earn?’ When I told him he said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather make a thousand rand a night?’ and I asked, ‘How would I do that?’ and he said, ‘With your body, love.’ He gave me his card and he said, ‘Think about it.’ I phoned him that Monday. And I did it. In a flat, they were seven guys who had a flat in Hilton, and sometimes at lunchtime or sometimes in the evening they would phone me at the hostel and I would go.
“But then, just before final exams, I got pregnant,” she said. “I was on the pill, but it didn’t work. When I told them they said they would pay for the abortion, but I said no. So they gave me money and I came to Cape Town.”
38.
Orlando Arendse had a fixed routine every morning. In his large, pretty house in West Beach, Milnerton, he got up at six without the help of an alarm clock. He put on slippers and a burgundy dressing gown. He picked up his reading glasses from the kitchen table, left his wife sleeping and went to the kitchen. He put the spectacles on the kitchen table and ground a 50/50 mix of Italian and Mocca Java coffee beans — enough for four large mugs. He filled the coffee machine with water and carefully poured in the ground coffee. Then he pressed the switch.
He walked to the front door, opened it and went out. He looked up to see what the weather was doing today, then crossed the paved driveway to the big, automatic security gate. He walked briskly erect, despite his 66 years, most of them lived on the Cape Flats. To the right of the gate was the postbox. He opened it and took out Die Burger.
Without unfolding the newspaper he glanced at the headlines. He had to hold the paper at arm’s length, as he was not wearing his glasses.
He walked back to the house and just before he went through the door he looked left and right. It was instinctive behavior, no longer functional.
He spread the paper open neatly on the Oregon pine table in the kitchen. He put on his reading glasses. His right hand drifted down to the dressing gown pocket. It was empty and he clicked his tongue in exasperation. He no longer smoked. His wife and doctor were conspiring against him.
He only read the front page. By now the coffee machine ended its burbling with a final sigh. Orlando Arendse sighed with it as he did every morning. He got up and fetched two mugs from the cupboard above the machine and placed them on the counter. First he filled one cup and inhaled the aroma with pleasure. No milk or sugar. Just as it was. He poured the rest of the coffee into a flask so it would stay fresh. Mug in hand, he sat down at the paper again. He turned the page and inspected the small photo of the page-three editor, a lovely woman. Then he shifted his gaze to page two and began to read in earnest.
Usually at seven he would pour coffee from the flask into the other mug and take it to his wife. But at ten to seven, while he was reading the cricket report on the sports page, the electronic box in the entrance hall made its irritating noise.
Orlando stood up and crossed to the hall. He pressed a button and held his mouth close to the microphone. “Yes?”
“Orlando?”
He knew that deep voice, but couldn’t place it at the moment.
“Yes?”
“It’s Thobela.”
“Who?”
“Tiny. Tiny Mpayipheli.”
He ran down a green valley through knee-high grass, chasing a red balloon. He stretched out a hand to the string but stumbled and fell and it shot up into the air. He woke in Christine van Rooyen’s sitting room and smelt the sex on his body. What the fuck have I done?
He swung his legs off the couch and rubbed his eyes. He knew he hadn’t slept enough, could feel the lethargy in his mind and body, but that was not what lay so heavily. He didn’t want to think about it. He stood up a little unsteadily. He pushed his Z88 pistol and cell phone under the couch and took the little pile of clothes and shoes with him to the bathroom. He would have liked to brush his teeth, but that would have to wait. He got under the shower and opened the taps.
Jissis. Drunkard and adulterer. Whore-fucker. Fucking weakling who couldn’t control himself, telling her his entire life story. What the fuck was wrong with him? He wasn’t a fucking teenager anymore.
He scrubbed himself with the soap, washing his genitals two, three, four times. What was he going to do with her now? How far was Witness Protection? He would have to call them. How had the night gone for Bushy Bezuidenhout and company out at Camp’s Bay? While he lay in the embrace of a prostitute. With premeditation, that was the fucking thing — he had come here looking for it. Wanting her to touch him because he needed someone to touch him so fucking much. Because he thought a whore would find it easier to touch him. Because he couldn’t wait six fucking months for his wife, just maybe, to touch him.
He got out of the shower and toweled himself aggressively. Jissis, if only he could brush his teeth, his mouth tasted as if a mongoose had shat in it. He smelt his trousers. They still smelt of sex, he couldn’t go to work like that. Better phone Tim Ngubane and find out if Witness Protection could come and collect her.
Why did she have to come and lie with him? And then to tell him her story as if it was his fucking fault?
He was still standing like that holding his trousers up to his nose, when she opened the bathroom door and said in a frightened voice: “I think there is someone at the door.”
Arendse had last seen Tiny Mpayipheli five years ago. Sitting together at the Oregon table, he could see that the Xhosa had changed. Still a very big man with a voice like a cello. Still the pitch-black eyes that made him shiver the first time he looked into them. But the lines in the face were a bit deeper and the short-cropped hair had acquired a little gray at the temples.
“Tell me about Carlos Sangrenegra,” said his visitor, taking a swallow of his coffee.
Arendse looked down at the front page of the newspaper before him and then up at the big man. He saw absolute intent. He was on the point of saying something, asking a lot of questions, while the tumblers dropped slowly but surely. He looked down at the newspaper again, back at Tiny and it all became clear. Everything.
“Jesus, Tiny.”
The Xhosa said nothing, just looked back with that eagle’s eye.
“What happened?” asked Arendse.
Thobela looked at him for a long time, then shook his head, left and right, once only.
“I am retired,” said Arendse.
“You know people.”
“It’s all different now, Tiny. It’s not like the old days. They’ve marginalized us colored people. Even in the drug trade.”
No reaction.
“I owe you. That’s true.” Arendse stood and crossed over to the coffee machine. “Let me just take my wife her coffee or I’ll never hear the end of it. Then I’ll make a few calls.”
Griessel tried to pull his trousers on, but he was in too much of a hurry. He lost his balance while he was standing on one leg. In the fall he knocked his head against the edge of the washbasin with a dull thud. He swore, jumped up an
d got the trousers on and fastened the clip only and strode out of the bathroom to the couch under which his weapon lay.
As he bent to retrieve the Z88 he felt dizzy. He got a hand on the pistol and went to the door.
“Who’s there?” He pressed down the safety clip of the pistol.
At first he heard nothing and then only the sound of the footsteps of more than one person. Footsteps receding down the passage. He turned the key with his left hand, jerked the door open and swung the barrel of his pistol into the passage. To the right he saw a figure disappearing into the lift. He ran that way. His head was still not clear.
The door to the lift had closed. He hesitated just a fraction then ran for the stairs and down, two steps at a time.
Six bloody stories. With his left hand on the rail, firearm in the right, just his trousers on, down, down. On the third floor his legs couldn’t keep up and he slipped and it was only his hand on the stair rail that prevented a headlong fall. He saw a pair of legs in front of him and looked up. A very fat woman in a bright purple tracksuit stood staring with a mouth like an “O,” her face glowing with perspiration.
“Excuse me,” he said and dragged himself upright, squeezing past her and taking the next set of stairs.
“You’re bleeding,” he heard the fat woman say. Instinctively he touched a hand to his forehead to check and it came away wet, warm and red. Run. What was he going to do when he reached the bottom if there were more than one? His breath labored, chest burned, legs complained.
Second story, first story, ground.
He went in pistol first, but the entrance hall was empty. He jerked the glass door open and sprinted out into the morning sun just as below at the corner of Belle Ombre and Kloof Nek Road a white Opel turned the corner with screeching tires.
When the call came from Midrand, the detective had to find the file in a forgotten pile against the wall.
Then he began to remember the two who had shot the boy at the garage. And the father who had bought the contents of the file.
He tapped a middle finger on the cover of the file. He wondered if he would still be interested. Whether there might be another opportunity here.
He looked up the father’s details in the documents. He found a number with a Cathcart code. Pulling the phone nearer he keyed them in. It rang for a long time. Eventually he put the phone down.
He would try again later.
She had heard someone trying to open the door, she said as she cleaned the wound on his forehead with a warm, damp facecloth. His nose was full of the smell of Dettol. She stood up against him where he sat on the couch. She was wearing a thin dressing gown. He didn’t want her this close.
At first she hadn’t been certain. She had gone to put the kettle on in the kitchen while he was showering when she heard it. She saw the door latch move. That was when she went to the door and called: “Is anyone there?” It had been quiet a second and then someone had rattled the door. She had run to him in the bathroom.
“You have a bump and a cut.” She stepped back to view her handiwork.
She was gentler this morning, but he didn’t want to think about it.
“Witness Protection will be here soon,” he said. He had called them before she had started on the cut.
“I’ll get ready.”
“They will take you to a safe house. You must pack clothes.”
He looked up at her face. She was watching him with an unreadable expression. She stretched out a hand to his face, touched her fingertips to his chin. Softly. She stroked up across his cheekbone to the plaster she had put over his wound.
There was a foil-wrapped parcel at his door. He picked it up, unlocked the door and went inside. The room felt dead, as if no one lived there. He put the food on the counter and went up the stairs. His legs were stiff from the earlier exercise. He brushed his teeth long and thoroughly. Washed his face. He found clean clothes, dressed in a hurry and jogged down the stairs. He was out of the door when he remembered the food parcel. He went back. Charmaine had left a note again. It read:
Care of your food and living; and believe it,
My most honour’d lord,
For any benefit that points to me,
Either in hope or present, I’d exchange
For this one wish, that you had power and wealth
To requite me, by making rich yourself.
Timon of Athens
He hadn’t the faintest idea who that Greek was.
Bushy Bezuidenhout looked pointedly at his watch as Griessel entered the house opposite Sangrenegra’s.
“Sorry, Bushy. It’s been a rough morning.”
“Very rough, I see. What happened to your head?”
“It’s a long story,” he said and he could read the drunkenness question in his colleague’s bloodshot eyes.
“How’s it going here?”
“The other night-shift people have already gone. I’ve been waiting for you.”
He felt extremely guilty and for a moment considered telling him where he had been. But he had already given one version of his night over the phone to Matt Joubert. He didn’t want to go through it again. “Thanks, Bushy.”
“Nothing happened here. No suspicious vehicles, no pedestrians except an old girl taking her dogs for a walk this morning. Carlos’s last lights went off at a quarter-past twelve.”
“Any sign of him this morning?”
“Nothing. But he has to report to the police station before twelve, so he will probably start moving around soon.” Then, as an afterthought. “We should have bugged his phone.”
Griessel thought it over. The chances that the assegai man would phone him were slim. “Maybe.”
“I’ll be off then.”
“I’ll stay until eight tonight, Bushy.”
“No, it’s okay. I won’t be able to sleep that long anyway.”
Vaughn Cupido was on the third floor with a large pair of binoculars.
“My moer, Benny, what happened to your head?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Griessel put his dish of food on a chest of drawers and went to stand next to Cupido. He held out his hand for the binoculars. Cupido handed them over and Griessel aimed them at Sangrenegra’s house.
“There’s not much to see,” said Cupido.
That was true. Most of the windows had reflective glass. “He has to go to the police station.”
“Fielies will follow him in a car.” Cupido tapped the radio on his hip. “He’ll keep us informed.”
Griessel handed the binoculars back. “I don’t think he’ll come in daytime.”
“The assegai man?”
Griessel nodded.
Cupido sat in an armchair that had a view outside. “You never know. I try putting myself in his shoes, but I can’t. What’s in the package?”
Griessel leaned back against the wall. He would have preferred to lie down on the double bed behind them. “Lunch.”
“Are you back with the missus, Benny?”
“No.”
“Made it yourself?”
“Do I question you about your fucking eating arrangements, Vaughn?”
“Okay, okay, I’m just making conversation. Stakeout was never my idea of high excitement. So, tell me about the knob. Or is that also off limits?”
“I bumped my head on a washbasin.”
“Sure.”
“Jissis, Vaughn, what do you think? That I was pissed? Do you want to smell my fucking breath? So you can run to the papers and tell the fucking journalists what a fuck-up I am? Here, use my cell phone. Call them. Go on, take it. Do you think I care? Do you think it still bothers me?”
“Jeez, Benny, take it easy. I’m on your side.”
Griessel folded his arms. The radio on Cupido’s hip beeped. “Vaughn, its Fielies, come in.”
“I’m standing by.”
“Do we have someone in number forty-eight?”
“Not that I’m aware o
f.”
“There’s a man with a huge pair of binoculars on the second floor. I don’t think he knows I can see him.”
“Is he watching Carlos?”
“Yep.”
“Tell him I’ll check it out,” said Griessel.
“Wait,” said Cupido. “Here comes King Carlos.”
Griessel looked at Sangrenegra’s house. The door of the double garage was slowly opening. “Fuck,” he said, “give me the radio.” He took it from Cupido. “Fielies, this is Benny. Does the guy have only binoculars?”
“That is all that I can see.”
“Carlos is on his way. Look carefully at the window . . .”
“Only the binoculars. There, they’ve gone now . . .”
Please not a sniper, thought Griessel. “Is everyone on this frequency?” he asked Cupido, who nodded.
“Everyone, stand by.”
“The binoculars are back,” said Fielies.
“Follow Carlos, Fielies.” To Cupido: “Who is his back-up?”
“He’s on his own. You know we don’t have enough manpower for back-up.”
“Fielies . . .”
“Standing by.”
“Don’t lose him.”
When Carlos’s BMW disappeared down the road, Griessel left the house and crossed the street. It was hot outside and windless in the lee of the mountain. The heat reflected up from the ground and perspiration sprang out on his skin. He worried that the smells of last night would come out again. Number 48 was another rich man’s house, white-painted concrete filling the entire plot. Nowhere for children to play. A playground for adults only. He looked up at the windows of the second floor. There was a room overlooking the street and Sangrenegra’s house and the curtains were parted. There was no one there now.
He approached the front door and rang the bell. He couldn’t hear it ring. He never could understand why people didn’t make their doorbells audible. How were you supposed to know if it was working or not? You stand there pressing like crazy, and most of the time it’s out of order and you wait like a fool at the door, but no one knows you’re there.