by Deon Meyer
Slowly. He wiped the panel van’s steering wheel with the T-shirt. The gear lever.
The siren was closer.
The inside door handle. The window winder.
What else?
Another siren, from somewhere in the city.
What else had he touched? Rear-view mirror? He wiped but he was in a hurry, didn’t do it properly.
Slowly. He wiped it again, back and front of the mirror.
His eye caught the speck of the helicopter in the blue sky where it came around Devil’s Peak.
They were after him.
When he raced away from Sangrenegra’s house, just before he turned the corner at the bottom of the street, he had seen something in the rear-view mirror. Or had he?
They were onto him.
He cursed in Xhosa, a single syllable. A walker came around the bend, down the slope from the Signal Hill side.
He took four long strides to get to his pickup.
“I didn’t know how the whole thing would end,” she said to the minister, to try and justify what she was yet to tell him. She listened to the lack of intonation in her voice. She was aware of her fatigue, as if she didn’t have the strength for the final straight. It was because she had gone through it so many times in her head, she told herself.
The first time she had seen the clipping, the eyes of Carla Griessel and the terrible knowledge that it was all her fault and also the relief that she still had the ability to feel guilt and remorse. After everything. After all the lies. After all the deception. All the years. She could still feel someone else’s pain. Still feel compassion. Still feel pity for someone besides herself. And the guilt that she felt that relief.
She took a deep breath to gather her strength, because this explanation was the one that mattered.
“I was afraid,” she said. “You have to understand that. I was terrified. The way Carlos looked at Sonia . . . I thought I knew him. That was one of the problems. I know men. I had to know them. And Carlos was the naughty child. Sort of harmless. He was nagging and possessive and jealous, but he wanted so much to please. He had my clients beaten up, but he never did the hitting himself. Up to that moment I still thought I could control him. That’s the main thing. With all the men. To be in control without them knowing it. But then I saw his face. And I knew, everything I had thought was wrong. I didn’t know him. I had no control over him. And I panicked. Totally.
“I . . . It wasn’t like I worked out a plan or anything. There was just all this stuff in my head. The Artemis guy and the stuff in Carlos’s house, the drugs and all, and the panic over the way he looked at Sonia. I think if a person is really scared, like terrified, then a part of your brain starts working that you don’t know about, it takes over. I don’t know if you understand that, because you have to be there.
“I phoned Carlos and said I wanted to talk to him.”
He drove with the radio on. He deliberately chose alternate routes and drove instinctively east, towards Wellington and through Bains Kloof, over Mitchells Pass to Ceres and via gravel roads to Sutherland.
At first he rejected the possibility that Sangrenegra might be innocent.
It was the other elements that came together first — the movement in the house opposite, the man he thought he saw running across the road in his rear-view mirror. The newspaper reports that taunted him. Carlos’s words, “The police . . .” He wanted to say something, something he knew.
They were waiting for him. They had set up an ambush and he had walked into it like a fool, like an amateur — unconcerned, overconfident.
He wondered how much they knew. Did they have a camera in that house across the street? Was his photograph on its way to the newspapers and television right now? Could he risk going home?
But he kept coming back to the possibility that Carlos was innocent.
His protestations. His face.
The big difference between Carlos and the rest, who welcomed the blade as an escape. Or justice.
Lord. If the Colombian was innocent, Thobela Mpayipheli was a murderer rather than an executioner.
Thirty kilometers west of Fraserburg, over a radio signal that came and went, he heard the news bulletin for the first time.
“A task team of the police’s Serious and Violent Crime Unit was just too late to apprehend the so-called Artemis vigilante . . . set up various roadblocks in the Cape Peninsula and Boland in an apparent attempt . . . a two-thousand-and-one model Isuzu KB two-sixty with registration number . . .”
That was the moment when self-recrimination evaporated, when he knew they knew and the old battle fever revived. He had been here before. The prey. He had been hunted across the length and breadth of strange and familiar continents. He knew this, he had been trained for it by the best; they could do nothing he hadn’t experienced before, handled before.
That was the moment he knew he was wholly back in the Struggle. Like in the old, old days when there was something worth protecting to the death. You see furthest from the moral high ground. It brought a great calm over him, so that he knew precisely what to do.
She met Carlos at the Mugg & Bean at the Waterfront. She watched him coming towards her with his self-satisfied strut, arms swinging gaily, head half-cocked. Like an overgrown boy that has got his own way. Fuck you Carlos; you have no idea.
“So how’s your daughter, conchita?” he said with a smirk as he sat down.
She had to light a cigarette to hide her fear.
“She’s fine.” Curtly.
“Ah, conchita, don’t be angry. It is your fault. You hide things from Carlos. All Carlos wants to do is to know you, to care for you.”
She said nothing, just looked at him.
“She is very beautiful. Like her mother. She have your eyes.” And he thought that would make her feel better?
“Carlos, I will give you what you want.”
“What I want?”
“You don’t want me to see other clients. You don’t want me to hide things from you. Is that right?”
“Sí. That is right.”
“I will do that, but there are certain rules.”
“Carlos will take good care of you and the leetle conchita. You know that.”
“It’s not the money, Carlos.”
“Anything, conchita. What you want?”
He drove from Merweville across the arid expanses of the Great Karoo to Prince Albert as the sun set in spectacular colors.
According to the radio they thought he was still in the Cape.
In the dark of night he crossed the Swartberg Pass and cautiously descended to Oudtshoorn. On the odd one-lane tarred road between Willowmore and Steytlerville he recognized that fatigue had the better of him and he looked out for a place to turn off and sleep. He shifted into a more comfortable position on the front seat and closed his eyes. At half-past three in the morning he slept, only to wake at first light, stiff-limbed, scratchy-eyed, his face needing a wash.
At Kirkwood, in the grimy toilets of a garage, he brushed his teeth and splashed cold water on his face. This was Xhosa country and no one looked twice at him. He bought take-away chicken portions at Chicken Licken and drove. Towards home.
At half-past ten he crossed the Hogsback Pass and thirty-five minutes later he turned in at the farm entrance and saw the tracks on the reddish-brown dirt of the road.
He got out.
Only one vehicle. Narrow tires of a small sedan. In. Not yet out. Someone was waiting for him.
“My daughter’s name is Sonia.”
“That is very beautiful.” Like he really meant it.
“But I will not bring her to your house, Carlos. We can go somewhere together. Picnic, or the movies, but not to your house.”
“But, conchita, I have this pool . . .”
“And you have these bodyguards with guns and baseball bats. I will not allow my daughter to see that.”
“They are not bodyguards. They are my crew.”
“I don’t care.”
> “Hokay, hokay, Carlos will send them away when you come.”
“You won’t.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because they are with you all the time.”
“No, conchita, I swear,” he said, and made the sign of the cross over his upper body.
“When my daughter is with me, I don’t sleep with you and we don’t sleep over. That is final.”
“Carlos unnerstand,” he said, but couldn’t hide his disappointment.
“And we will take it slowly. I have to talk to her about you first. She must get used to you slowly.”
“Hokay.”
“So, tomorrow night, we will see if you are serious. I will come to your house and it will only be you and me. No bodyguards.”
“Sí. Of course.”
“I will stay with you. I will cook for you and we will talk.”
“Where will Sonia be?”
“She will be safe.”
“At the nanny’s place?” Pleased with himself, because he knew.
“Yes.”
“And maybe the weekend, we can go somewhere? You and me and Sonia?”
“If I see I can trust you, Carlos.” But she knew she had him. She knew the process had begun.
42.
Thobela left his pickup behind the ridges at the Waterval Plantation and walked along the bank of the Cata River towards his house, assegai in his left hand.
A kilometer before the homestead came into view he turned northeast, so he could approach from the high ground. They would be expecting him from the road end.
He sat watching for twenty minutes, but saw only the car parked in front of the house. No antennae, nothing to identify it as a police vehicle. Silence.
It made no sense.
He kept the shed between him and the house, checking that the doors were still locked. Crouching, he approached the house, below window level, to where the car was parked.
There was one set of footprints in the dust. They began at the driver’s door and led directly to the steps of the front verandah.
One man.
He ran through alternatives in his head while he squatted on his haunches with his back to the verandah wall. Something occurred to him. The detective from Umtata. Must have heard the news. Knew him, knew everything, from the start.
The detective had come for more money.
He stood, relieved and purposeful, and strode up his verandah steps and in at the front door, assegai now in his right hand.
The man was sitting there on the chair, pistol on his lap.
“I thought you would come,” said the white man.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Benny Griessel,” he said and raised the Z88 so that it pointed straight at Thobela’s chest.
Christine took the stuffed toy dog from the desk and held it in her hands. “I had a battle to get the right dog,” she said. “Every year there are different toys in the shops.”
Her fingers stroked the long brown ears. “I bought her one when she was three years old. It’s her favorite, she won’t go anywhere without it. So I had to get another and switch them, because the one she played with had her genetics on it. The police computers can test anything. So I had to take the right one along.”
He stood in front of the white man weighing up his chances, measuring the distance between the assegai and the pistol, and then he allowed himself to relax, because now was not the moment to do anything.
“This is my house,” he said.
“I know.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to sit there and be quiet.” The white man motioned with the barrel of the Z88 towards the two-seater couch opposite him. There was something about his eyes and voice: intensity, a determination.
Thobela hesitated, shrugged and sat down. He looked at Griessel. Who was he? The bloodshot eyes, a hint of capillaries on the nose that betrayed excessive drinking. Hair long and untidy — either he was trying to keep the look of his youth in the seventies alive, or he didn’t care. The latter seemed more likely, since his clothes were rumpled, the comfortable brown shoes dull. He had the faint scent of law enforcement about him and the Z88 confirmed it, but policemen usually came in groups, at least in pairs. Police waited with handcuffs and commands, they didn’t ask you to sit down in your own house.
“I’m sitting,” he said, and placed the assegai on the floor beside the couch.
“Now you just have to be quiet.”
“Is that what we are going to do? Sit and stare at each other?”
The white man did not answer.
“Will you shoot me if I talk?”
No response.
“The pills were easy,” said Christine. She indicated the white medicinal container on the desk. “And the dress. I don’t have it; it’s with the police. But the blood . . . I couldn’t do it at first. I didn’t know how to tell my child I had to push a needle into her arm and that it would hurt and the blood would run into the syringe and I had to spray it on the seat of a man’s car. That was the hardest thing. And I was worried. I didn’t know whether the blood would clot. I didn’t know if it would be enough. I didn’t know if the police would be able to tell it wasn’t fresh blood. I didn’t know how they did all those genetics. Would the computer be able to tell the blood had been in the fridge for a day?”
She held the dog against her chest. She didn’t look at the minister. She looked at her fingers entangled in the toy’s ears.
“When Sonia was in the bath, I went in and I lied to her. I said we had to do it, because I had to take a little bit of her blood to the doctor. When she asked, ‘Why?’ I didn’t know what to say. I asked her if she remembered the vaccination she had at play school so she wouldn’t get those bad diseases. She said, ‘Mamma, it was sore,’ and I said, ‘But the sore went away quickly — this sore will also go away quickly, it’s the same thing, so you can be well.’ So she said, ‘Okay, Mamma’ and she squeezed her eyes shut and held out her arm. I have never drawn blood from someone before, but if you are a whore, you have your AIDS test every month, so I know what they do. But if your child says, ‘Ow, Mamma, ow,’ then you get the shakes and it’s hard and you get a fright if you can’t get the blood . . .”
“What are we waiting for? What do you want?” he asked. But the man just sat and looked at him, with his pistol hand resting on his lap, and said nothing. Just the eyes blinking now and again, or drifting off to the window.
He wondered whether the man was right in the head. Or on drugs, because of that terrible intensity, something eating him. The eyes were never completely still. Sometimes a knee would jerk as if it were a wound spring. The pistol had its own fine vibration, an almost unnoticeable movement.
Unstable. Therefore dangerous. Would he make it, if he could pull himself up by the armrest and launch himself over the little more than two meters between them? If he picked a moment when the eyes flicked to the window? If he could deflect the Z88?
He measured the distance. He looked into the brown eyes.
No.
But what were they sitting here and waiting for? In such tension?
He had partial answers later when the cell phone rang twice. Each time the white man started, a subtle tautening of the body. He lifted the phone from his lap and then just sat dead still, and let it ring. Until it stopped. Fifteen, twenty seconds later it beeped twice to show a message had been left. But Griessel did nothing about it. He didn’t listen to his messages.
They were waiting for instructions; that much Thobela gathered. Which would be delivered via the cell phone. The intensity was stress. Anxiety. But why? What did it have to do with him?
“Are you in trouble?”
Griessel just stared at him.
“Can I help you in some way?”
The man glanced at the window, and back again.
“Do you mind if I sleep a bit?” asked Thobela. Because that was all he could do. And he needed it.
No reaction.
/> He made himself comfortable, stretched his long legs out, rested his head on the cushion of the couch and closed his eyes.
But the cell phone rang again and this time the white man pressed the answer button and said: “Griessel” and, “Yes, I have him.” He listened. He said: “Yes.”
And again: “Yes.” Listened. “And then?”
Thobela could hear a man’s voice faintly over the phone, but couldn’t make out any words, just the grain of a voice.
Griessel took the cell phone away from his ear and stood, keeping a safe distance.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m very comfortable, thank you.”
A shot thundered through the quiet of the room and the bullet ripped a hole beside him in the couch. Stuffing and dust exploded from it, falling back to the floor in slow motion. Thobela looked at the white man, who said nothing. Then he got up, keeping his hands away from his body.
“Easy now,” he said to Griessel.
“To the car.”
He went.
“Wait.”
He looked back. Griessel stood beside the assegai. He looked at it, looked at him, as if he had to make a decision. Then he bent and picked it up.
Thobela drew his own conclusions. The man didn’t want to leave any evidence. And that was not good news.
He was supposed to pick her up at half-past four, but at a quarter past there was a knock on the door; when she opened up, there stood Carlos with a big smile and a bunch of flowers.
He came inside and said, “So, conchita, this is where you live. This is your place. It is nice. Very nice.”
She had to remain calm and friendly, but the tension was overwhelming. Because the toy dog was lying in sight and the syringe of blood was still in the fridge.
She wanted to hide it in the shopping bags along with the ingredients for the meal she was going to cook. Sonia’s dress was folded up in her handbag. Carlos wanted to see where she slept, where her daughter’s room was. He was impressed with the big television screen (“Carlos will get you one like this, conchita. For you and Sonia”). He wandered over to her fridge. “Now dees ees a freedge,” he said in awe, and as he reached for the handle and pulled, she said, “Carlos,” sharply, so that the sound of her voice gave her a fright and he looked around like a child who had been naughty.