Devil's Peak: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  Father and daughter approached the next one. “And he?”

  She nodded. He aimed at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The second shot thundered through the night and the man fell. Shaven Head dived for his weapon. Thobela knew it would all happen now and he pulled the knife across César’s throat and let him fall. He knew where the nearest machine pistol lay, threw his body that way, heard another shot. He kept his eyes on the firearm. Hit the gravel, stretched out, heard another shot. Got his finger on the steel. Dizzy, a lot of blood lost. His left arm wouldn’t work. Rolled over. Couldn’t see well in the lights of the Nissan. Tried to get up, but had no balance.

  Got onto one knee.

  Shaven Head was down. César lay. Three others as well. Griessel had the Z88 trained on the last one. Carla was close to Thobela now. He saw her face. He knew in that moment he would never forget it.

  Her father turned to the last one.

  “And this one?”

  His daughter looked at the man and nodded her head.

  PART FOUR

  Carla

  47.

  Beyond Calvinia he saw the clouds damming up against the mountains, the snow-white cumulus towers in late morning sun, the straight line they formed over the dry earth. He wanted to show Carla. He wanted to explain his theory of how the contours of the landscape created this weather.

  She was asleep in the passenger seat.

  He looked at her. He wondered if it was a dreamless sleep.

  A huge plain opened up ahead of them. The road was as straight as an arrow, to Brandvlei — a pitch-black ribbon stretching to the point of invisibility.

  He wondered when she would wake up, because she was missing everything.

  The minister looked at the newspaper clipping. There was a photo of two people getting out of a helicopter. A man and a young woman. The man’s hair was dark and untidy, with a hint of gray at the temples. A somewhat Slavic face, with a severe expression. His head was turned towards the young woman in concern.

  There was a resemblance between them, a vague connection between brow and the line of the chin. Father and daughter, perhaps.

  She was pretty, with an evenness of feature below her black hair. But there was something about the way she held her head, how she looked down. As if she were old and unattractive. Maybe the minister got the impression because the jacket over her shoulders was too big for her. Maybe he was influenced by the headline of the report.

  ABDUCTION DRAMA ENDS IN BLOODBATH

  John Afrika, Matt Joubert and Benny Griessel were sitting in the spacious office at Serious and Violent Crimes. Keyter came in and greeted them. They did not reciprocate.

  “I am only going to ask you once, Jamie,” said Griessel, and his voice was quiet but it carried across the room. “Was it you?”

  Keyter looked back at them, nervously from one to the next.

  “Uh . . . um . . . What are you talking about, Benny?”

  “Did you give Sangrenegra the information?”

  “Jesus, Benny . . .”

  “Did you?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Where do you get the money, Jamie? For the clothes. And that expensive cell phone of yours? Where does the money come from?” Griessel had risen halfway from his chair.

  “Benny,” said John Afrika, his voice soothing.

  “I . . .” said Jamie Keyter.

  “Jamie,” said Joubert. “It’s better if you talk.”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said and his voice shook.

  “What is it?” asked Griessel, forcing himself to sit.

  “I moonlight, Benny.”

  “You moonlight?”

  “Modeling.”

  “Modeling?” said John Afrika.

  “For TV ads.”

  No one said a word.

  “For the French. And the Germans. But I swear, I’m finished with that.”

  “Can you prove it, Jamie?”

  “Yes, Sup. I have the videos. Ads for coffee and cheese spread. And clothes. I did one for the Swedes for milk, I had to take my shirt off, but that’s all, Sup, I swear . . .”

  “TV ads,” said John Afrika.

  “Jissis,” said Griessel.

  “Was this about my clothes, Benny? Did you suspect me just because of my clothes?”

  “There was a fax, Jamie. It was sent from here. From SVC’s fax machine. With Mpayipheli’s photo.”

  “It could have been anyone.”

  “You were the dresser, Jamie.”

  “But it wasn’t me.”

  Silence settled over the room.

  “You may go, Jamie,” said Joubert.

  The detective constable dallied. “I thought, Benny . . .”

  They looked at him impatiently.

  “I thought about how they got your daughter’s address. And your cell phone number. All that stuff . . .”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “They must have phoned him. Carlos’s brother. Not just sent faxes.”

  “Yes?”

  “He must have had a cell phone, Commissioner. The brother. And you get missed calls and received calls and dialed numbers.”

  It took them a while to grasp what he meant.

  “Fuck,” said Griessel and got up.

  “Sorry, Benny,” said Keyter and ducked, but Griessel was already past him, heading for the door.

  By 12:30 they had reached Brandvlei and he decided to stop at a café with a concrete table under a thatched roof. Colored children played barefoot in the dust.

  Carla woke up and asked him where they were. Griessel told her. She looked at the café.

  “Do you want to eat something?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s have something to drink.”

  “Okay.”

  He got out and waited for her. It was boiling hot outside the car. She put on trainers before getting out, stretched and came around the car. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse and bleached jeans. His lovely daughter. They sat at one of the concrete tables. It was slightly cooler under the thatch.

  He saw her watching the colored children with their wire cars. He wondered what she was thinking.

  “How far is it to Upington still?”

  “About a hundred and fifty to Kenhardt, another seventy to Keimoes and then maybe fifty to Upington. Just under three hundred,” he quickly added up.

  A colored woman brought them single-page menus. At the top of the white laminated page was printed Oasis Café. There was an amateurish palm tree alongside the words. Carla ordered a white Grapetiser. Griessel said: “Make that two.”

  As the woman walked away he said, “I’ve never had Grapetiser before.”

  “Never?”

  “If it didn’t go with brandy, I wasn’t interested.”

  She smiled, but it didn’t extend further than the corners of her mouth.

  “This is another universe, here,” she said and looked up the main street.

  “It is.”

  “Do you think you will find something in Upington?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But why, Dad? What’s the use?”

  He made a gesture with his hand that said he didn’t know himself. “I don’t know, Carla. It’s the way I am. That’s why I am a detective. I want to know the reasons. And the facts. I want to understand. Even if it won’t necessarily make a difference. Loose ends . . . I don’t like them.”

  “Weird,” she said. She put out her hand to him and wiggled her fingers under his. “But wonderful.”

  He called the numbers on César Sangrenegra’s received calls list on the speakerphone in Joubert’s office. With the first three he got voice mailboxes in Spanish. The fourth rang and rang and rang. Eventually it switched over to a cell phone messaging service.

  “Hello, this is Bushy. When I’ve caught the crooks, I will phone you back.”

  “I won’t go to hell for Carlos,” said Christine. “Because I saw the look in his eyes when he saw Son
ia. And I know God will forgive me for being a sex worker. And I know he will understand that I had to draw the blood. And take the money.” She looked at the minister. He didn’t want to assent to that.

  “But He punished everyone for Carla Griessel.” She opened the second newspaper clipping. The headline read: MASSIVE COP CORRUPTION SCANDAL.

  “Carlos’s brother and his bodyguards. The Artemis man. All dead. And these policemen are going to jail,” she said, and tapped the two photos with the report. “But what about me?”

  “I didn’t even know them,” said Bushy Bezuidenhout.

  “But you gave them the information,” said Joubert.

  “For money, you piece of shit,” said Griessel.

  Joubert put his big hand soothingly on the inspector’s arm.

  Bezuidenhout wiped the perspiration from his forehead and shook his head. “I’m not going down alone for this.”

  “Give us the others, Bushy. You know, if you cooperate . . .”

  “Jissis, Sup.”

  “Give me five minutes alone with this cunt,” said Griessel.

  “Jissis, Benny, I didn’t know what they were going to do. I didn’t know. Do you think I would —?”

  Griessel shouted him down. “Who, Bushy? Tell me who!”

  “Beukes, fuck it. Beukes with his bloody cap brought me this shitload of money in a fucking brown envelope . . .”

  Matt Joubert’s voice was sharp in the room. “Benny, no. Sit. I will not let you go.”

  Fourteen kilometers beyond Keimoes he saw the sign and turned right to Kanoneiland. They crossed the river that flowed peaceful and brown under the bridge, and between green vineyards heavy with giant bunches of grapes.

  “Amazing,” said Carla, and he knew what she meant. This fertility here, the surprise of it. But he was also aware that she was observing, that she was less turned in on herself, and it gave him hope again.

  They drove up the long avenue of pines to the guesthouse and Carla said, “Look,” and pointed a finger at his side of the road. Between the trees he could see the horses: big Arabians, three bays and a magnificent gray.

  When Christine van Rooyen walked down the street in Reddersburg, the sun came up over the Free State horizon, a giant balloon breaking loose from the hills and sweeping over the grassland.

  She turned off the main street, down an unpaved street, past houses that were still dark and silent.

  She looked intently at one of them. The babysitter said a writer lived here, a man hiding away from the world.

  It was a good place for it.

  The secretary at the high school shook her head and said she had only worked here for three years. But he could ask Mr. Losper. Mr. Losper had been at the school for years. He taught Biology. But it was holidays now; Mr. Losper would be at home. She gave him precise directions and he drove there and knocked on the door.

  Losper was somewhere in his fifties, a man with smoker’s wrinkles and rough voice who invited him in, since it was cooler in the dining room. Would he like a beer? He said no thanks, he was fine.

  When they were seated at the dining-room table and he asked his question, the man shut his eyes for a moment, as if sending up a quick prayer to heaven, and then he said, “Christine van Rooyen.” Solemnly, he put his arms on the table and folded his hands together.

  “Christine van Rooyen,” he repeated, as if the repetition of the name would open up his memory.

  Then he told Griessel the story, regularly inserting admissions of guilt and rationalization. Of Martie van Rooyen who lost her soldier husband in Angola. Martie van Rooyen, the blonde woman with the big bosom and the small blonde daughter. A woman the community gossiped about even when her husband was still alive. Rumors of visits when Rooies was away on training courses, or on the Border.

  And after Rooies’s death there was very soon a replacement. And another. And another. She lured them home from the ladies’ bar at the River Hotel with red lipstick and a low neckline. While the child wandered around the yard with a stuffed dog in her arms, an object that later became so filthy it was scandalous.

  The gossipmongers said the substitute for Rooies used to hit Martie. And sometimes played around with more than just the mother. But in Upington, many watch but few act. Social Welfare tried to step in, but the mother sent them packing and Christine van Rooyen grew up like that. Sad and wild. Earned a reputation of her own. Loose. Easy. There was talk when the girl was a teenager. About an old friend of her father’s who . . . you know. And an Afrikaans teacher. There were goings-on at the school. The child was difficult. Smoking and drinking with the rough crowd, the school had always had one, it was a funny town, this, with the Army and all.

  Losper had heard the story that when Christine had finished school she walked out of the house with a suitcase while her mother was in bed with a substitute. Went to Bloemfontein, apparently, but he didn’t know what became of her.

  “And the mother?”

  She had also left, he had heard. With a man in a pickup. Cape Town. Or the West Coast: there were so many stories.

  She walked past. Three houses down she turned in at a garden gate that creaked on opening. It needed oiling.

  The garden was overgrown with weeds. She took the box and put it down on the verandah. It was light now.

  In the minister’s study she had pulled it towards her one last time and taken out the cash. Four hundred thousand rand in one-hundred-rand notes.

  “This is a tenth,” she said.

  “You can’t buy the Lord’s forgiveness,” he had answered wearily, but couldn’t keep his eyes off the money.

  “I don’t want to buy anything. I just want to give. It’s for the Church.”

  She had waited for his response and then he walked her to the door and she could smell the odor of his body behind her, the smell of a man after a long day.

  She came back off the verandah and stooped to pull out a weed. The roots came free of the reddish soil and she thought it looked fertile here.

  She went over to the steps. She reached for the sign to the right of them, the one that said Te Koop/For Sale. She pulled. It had been hammered in deep and had been there a long time. She had to wiggle it back and forth before it slowly began to shift and eventually came out.

  She carried it up, put it down on the verandah. Then she took her keys out and quietly unlocked the door. On the new couch the large black babysitter was reclining. She was fast asleep.

  Christine went down the passage to the master bedroom. Sonia lay there in a fetal position, her whole body curled around the toy dog. She lay down gently beside her daughter. Later, when they had finished breakfast, she would ask Sonia if she would like to exchange the stuffed animal for a real one.

  Griessel thought about Senior Superintendent Beukes as he drove back to the guesthouse. Three weeks ago, they confronted him.

  They would not allow him to be present at the interrogation — Joubert had put his foot down. He had to sit with the disillusioned American, Lombardi. Tried to explain to him that not all the police in Africa were corrupt. But afterwards Joubert came to tell him. Beukes would admit nothing. Right till the end when they got his bank statements through a court order and spread them out in front of him. And Beukes had said, “Why don’t you try and find the whore? She’s the one who stole money. And lied about her daughter.”

  He didn’t know whether it was true or not. But now, after Losper’s story, he hoped it was. Because he recalled the words of the forensic psychologist. Women are different. When there is damage at a young age, they don’t do to others. They do to themselves.

  He only hoped she used the money well. For herself and her daughter.

  His cell phone rang while he was driving up the avenue of pine trees. He pulled over.

  “Griessel.”

  “This is Inspector Johnson Mtetwa. I am phoning from Alice. I wonder if you could help me?”

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  “It’s about the death of Thobela Mpayipheli .
. .”

  “Yes?”

  “The trouble is, I had some people here. The missionary priest from the Knott Memorial between us and Peddie.”

  “Yes?”

  “He told me the strangest thing, Inspector Griessel. He said he saw Mpayipheli, yesterday morning.”

  “How strange.”

  “He said he saw a man walking, from the Kat River hills to near the manse. He went out to see who it might be. When he came close, the man turned away. But he could swear it was Mpayipheli, because he knew him. In the old days. You see, Mpayipheli’s father was also a missionary.”

  “I see.”

  “I went out with the people from Cathcart station to Mpayipheli’s farm. They have to deal with things there. And now they tell me there is a motorbike missing. A . . . Hang on. . . . A BMW R eleven-fifty GS.”

  “Oh?”

  “But the people in the Cape say you were a witness to his death.”

  “You must request the file, Inspector. They did search the river for his body . . .”

  “Strange,” said Mtetwa, “that someone would steal only the motorbike.”

  “That’s life,” said Griessel. “Strange.”

  “That’s true. Thank you, Inspector. And good luck there in the Cape.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Benny Griessel put the cell phone back in his breast pocket. He put his hand out to the ignition key but, before starting the car, he saw something that made him wait.

  Between the trees, there in the horse paddock, Carla stood by a large gray. She was leaning against the magnificent beast, her face in the horse’s mane, her hand gently stroking the long muzzle.

  He got out of the car and went over to the fence rail. He had eyes only for her, and a tenderness that might just overwhelm him.

  His child.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  More than any of my previous books, Devil’s Peak is to a great extent the product of the astounding goodwill, unselfishness, readiness to share knowledge — and unconditional support of a large number of people.

  I wish to thank them:

  Even now I don’t know her real name, but as a sex worker she went by the name of “Vanessa.” In two long morning interviews she talked intelligently, openly and honestly about her work and life. When I had finished the book, I tried to contact her to thank her. The message on her cell phone said “I am no longer in the business . . .” May all her dreams be realized.