by Deon Meyer
He hadn’t even discussed his father with Lara.
“But I think they were scared of him.”
He had never spoken about his father to Blackie Swart. Or to his mother or his sister. Did he want to talk about him with anyone?
“He had a racial slur for every hue, for every racial classification in the crazy country. The Malay people were not coloreds to him. He called them hotnots. To their faces. His hotnots. ‘Come along, my hotnot.’ And Xhosas and Zulus were not blacks. They were kaffers. Never ‘my kaffers.’ Always ‘bloody kaffers.’ In his time there were no black constables, only black criminals. More and more as they moved in from the Eastern Cape looking for work. He hated them.”
He saw himself in the black armchair, the big man with the folded arms, bowed head, and somewhat untidy hair, the brown jacket and trousers, the unpolished brown shoes, the tie. He heard himself speaking. As if he stood outside his body. Talk, Mat Joubert, talk. That’s what she wants. Give her the skeletons. Let her dissect the remains of your life with her learning. Bleed out the filth.
“I also did at first, because he did. Before I started to read and had friends whose parents had different views. And then I simply . . . despised my father, his narrow, simplistic point of view, his useless hate. It was part of a . . . process.”
For a moment it was quiet in the dungeons of his mind.
The pain pressed down on his shoulders. He was at his father’s grave and he knew he’d hated the man. And no one knew it. But his father had suspected it.
“I hated him . . . Doctor.” He deliberately added her title, creating a distance. She wanted to know. She wanted to hear what specters were wandering about in his head. He would tell her. He would fucking tell her. Before her techniques and her voice and her greater knowledge winkled it out of him . . . “I hated him because he was what I could never be. And because he resented it and threw it back in my face. He was so strong and . . . fleet-footed. On a Friday evening he would make the brown constables line up in the street behind the station. ‘Come, my hotnots, the one who reaches the lamppost before I do can go fuck this weekend.’ He was in his fifties and he always beat them. And I was slow. He said I was merely lazy. He said I must play rugby because that would make a man of me. I started swimming. I swam as if my life depended on it. In the water I wasn’t big and clumsy and ugly. He said swimming was for girls. ‘Girls swim. Men play rugby. It gives you balls.’ He didn’t smoke. He said it affected your wind. I started smoking. He didn’t read because life was the only book one needed. Reading was for girls. I started reading. He was abusive. To my mother, my sister. I spoke softly to them. He said ‘hotnot’ and ‘kaffer’ and ‘coolie.’ I addressed them all as ‘mister.’ And then he went and died on me.”
Emotions expanded from the inside, in his chest. His body shook, independently, so that his elbows landed on his knees, his head between his hands. He wondered how she, when he . . .
Suddenly he wanted to tell her about death. The longing to do so spread through him like a fever. He could taste it, the relief. Speak about it, Mat Joubert, and you’ll be free . . .
He straightened and put his hand in his pocket. He took out the cigarettes. His hands were shaking. He lit one. He knew she would say something to break the silence. It was her job.
“Why did you choose the same career?”
“The detectives were separate from the uniforms at Goodwood. There was a Lieutenant Coombes. He wore a hat, a black hat. And he spoke softly. To everyone. And smoked Mills out of a tin. And always wore a vest and drove a Ford Fairlane. Everyone knew about Coombes. He was mentioned in the newspapers several times, murders he’d solved. We lived next to the station. I was on the stoop, reading, when he came past from the detectives’ office on Voortrekker Road, probably on his way to see my father. He stopped at our gate and looked at me. Out of the blue he said, ‘You must become a detective.’ I asked him why. ‘We need clever people in the force.’ Then he left. He never spoke to me again. I don’t even know what became of him.”
Joubert killed the cigarette. It was half-smoked.
“My father said no child of his would ever work for the force. Coombes told me to become a detective. He was everything I wanted my father to be.”
Tell her she’s looking in the wrong place. This track leads nowhere. It wasn’t his father who’d fucked him up. It was death. The death of Lara Joubert.
“Do you enjoy your work?”
Now you’re getting warm, Doctor.
“It’s a job. Sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not.”
“When is it pleasant?”
When death is clothed in dignity, Doctor. Or when it’s completely absent.
“Success is pleasant.”
“When is it unpleasant?”
Ding! You’ve just hit the jackpot, Doctor. But she wouldn’t get the prize today.
“When they get away.”
Did she realize that he was hedging? That he was concealing, that he was too frightened now to open the sluice gates because he’d forgotten how much water had been dammed up behind them?
“How do you relax?”
“I read.” She waited. “Science fiction, mostly.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“You live alone?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t been here long,” she said and he noticed her nose—long and slightly pointed. It seemed as if the elements of her face didn’t belong together, but they formed a beautiful whole that began to fascinate him. Was it her fragility as well? He liked looking at her. And it gave him satisfaction that he found her attractive. Because she didn’t know it. That was his advantage. “And there are many things I still want to arrange. But one thing that is taking shape already is a social group—if one can call it that. Some of the people who consult me . . .”
“No thank you, Doctor.”
“Why not?”
It could hardly be difficult to get a doctorate in psychology. All you had to know was how to turn all remarks into questions. Especially questions that started with why.
“I see enough crazy policemen at work.”
“They’re not . . .” Then she smiled, slowly. “They’re not crazy and not all of them are men and not all of them are in the service.”
He didn’t react. Because he’d seen her face before she smiled. You, Doctor, are human like the rest of us.
“I’ll let you know about our activities. Then you can decide. But only come along if you want to.”
Ask her whether she is part of this “social group.” And a part of his head was amazed at his interest. For more than two years sexual urges had only come to him in vaguely remembered dreams in which he had uncomfortable intercourse with faceless women. And the real, living women who came his way were no more than sources of information that allowed him to do his work and go home to shelter between the pages of a book.
And now he had . . . an interest in Doctor Hanna. Well, well, well, Mat Joubert. The small, frail woman with the elusive beauty woke the man in you, the protective urge, the urge to possess.
“I’ll think about it.”
9.
On his way home he drove past the municipal swimming pool. The supervisor was a black man. “You can come and swim in the morning, sir. With the business club. In summer I’m here by half past five.”
“The business club?”
“Businessmen. Last year they asked the council whether they could swim early in the morning, before work. Work too hard the rest of the day. Then the council says okay and gives the early birds a name. Business club. From five-thirty on weekdays, from six-thirty on Saturdays, and the seventh is a day of rest. Ninety rand a season, September to May. You can pay at the cashier, sir. The lockers are twenty rand extra.”
He fetched his checkbook from the car and paid. Then he walked to the swimming pool. He stared at the blue water, unaware of the shouting, splashing mass of kids. He smelled the smells and remembered. Then he tu
rned away. At the door he threw the red pack of Winstons into a trash can.
He stopped at the café. The owner knew him and took Winstons off the shelf.
“No,” Joubert said. “Benson & Hedges. Special Mild.”
At home no envelope had been pushed under the door. He fried himself three eggs. The yolks broke and ran. He ate them on toast. Then he sat down in the living room with the William Gibson and finished the book.
Before going to bed he dug his swimming trunks out of a cupboard. He rolled them up in a towel and put it on the chair at the door.
In the past few years he had come to hate weekends.
Saturdays weren’t so bad because then Mrs. Emily Nofomela, his Xhosa cleaning lady, came in and the sounds of the washing machine, clattering dishes, and vacuum cleaner replaced the deathly silence of the house.
To be on duty also helped because it kept the boredom and the aimlessness of the weekend at bay.
When the alarm went off at a quarter past six, he got up purposefully, without realizing that it was a milestone.
He was the only member of the business club who was utilizing the Saturday morning. The changing rooms were quiet and empty and he could hear the big pump of the swimming pool outside. He pulled on his Speedo and realized it had become too small. He would have to buy a new one that morning. He walked out to the pool through the footbath and the smells and sounds released memories, fragments from his youth, and it felt good to be back again.
The water stretched smoothly ahead of him. He dived in and started swimming, freestyle. It took exactly thirty meters to exhaust him.
An older, more experienced policeman would have bundled Hercules Jantjies out the front door of the station, more like than not assisted by a hefty kick in the backside.
The problem was that vagrants often came in on a Saturday morning to complain about the joys and sorrows of their co-oppressed after the drunken bouts of the Friday evening. And if you had worked at the Newlands charge office for long enough, you eventually came to the conclusion that the best solution was to get rid of the appalling smell and the verbal assault on your ears, which generally made no sense.
But the white constable’s uniform was crisp and new, his enthusiasm still fueled by the college lecturer who had said that the police served everyone in South Africa.
He forced himself not to move away instinctively from the odor of an unwashed body and recycled methylated spirits and looked straight at Hercules Jantjies—at the small, brown eyes that skittered all over the place, the bluish red of the skin, which showed millions of tiny cracks inflicted by life, the toothless mouth, the stubble of beard.
“Can I help you?”
Hercules Jantjies stuck out his hand from under the worn, faded jacket. It held a piece of newspaper. He put it down on the table and smoothed it with a dirty hand. The constable saw that it was a front page of the Cape Times, a few days old. The headline read MAFIA KILLING? in large letters. Hercules Jantjies pressed a forefinger on the letters.
“Your Honor, I came about this thing.”
The constable didn’t grasp the import. “Yes?”
“I want to give evidence, Your Honor.”
“Yes?”
“’Cause why, I was there.”
“When it happened?”
“Just so, Your Honor, just so. An eyewitness report. But I want police protection.”
He hung on to the side of the swimming pool. He was breathing heavily and his lungs were burning. A deep fatigue invaded his limbs and his heart was a rapidly pulsing worry in his chest. He had completed two lengths. He heard a voice and lifted his head, his mouth still open to gulp in air more quickly.
“Sir, inside there’s a beeper which is beeping terribly.” It was the supervisor. He looked worried.
“I’m coming,” said Joubert and pressed his hands down on the edge to haul himself out of the water. He came halfway and then lay there, half in and half out of the water, too tired to make another effort.
“Are you awright, sir?”
“I don’t know,” said Joubert, surprised at the deterioration of his body. “I honestly don’t know.”
Hercules Jantjies had the total attention of the three senior policemen in the office of the Newlands commanding officer, Adjutant Radie Donaldson. Joubert and Donaldson sat against the one wall on old brown wooden chairs, Benny Griessel leaned against the wall. Jantjies was a reeking island against the other wall.
Donaldson still belonged to the old school of crime fighters who tackled all potential breakers of the law without kid gloves, irrespective of race, color, or political persuasion. That’s why he directed a warning finger at Hercules Jantjies and said: “If you’re talking shit, you’re dead.” Then, more suspiciously: “Are you drunk?”
“Your Honor, Your Honor,” Jantjies said nervously, as though the moment had become greater than he’d anticipated.
“These men are from Murder and Robbery. They’ll cut your balls off if you talk shit. Understand me?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
His brown eyes glanced at the three policemen, his head slightly bowed. “I saw the whole thing, Your Honor. But I want police protection.”
“If you’re not careful you’ll get police brutality,” Donaldson said.
“I was lying in the bushes, Your Honor, between the parking and Main Road.”
“Were you pissed?”
“No, just tired, Your Honor.”
“And then?”
“Then I saw her appear, Your Honor.”
“Her?”
“The one with the gun, Your Honor.”
“And then?”
“And she waited in the shadow and then the deceased came, God rest his soul, and he saw her and he got a fright and he put up his hand, Your Honor. But she shot him and he dropped like a stone.”
“And then?”
“Then it was all over, Your Honor.”
“Where did the murderer go then?”
“No, then she jus’ disappeared.”
“A woman? Do you mean to tell me it was a woman?”
“Not jus’ an ordinary woman, Your Honor.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the angel of death, Your Honor.”
Silence reigned in the office.
“’Cause why I’m looking for police protection, Your Honor. Because now she’s coming to fetch me.”
“What did she look like?” Joubert asked but his voice betrayed his disappointment.
“This long, black cloak, like Batman. And black boots and black hair. The angel of death. She came to me last night and she called me, like this, with her finger. Your Honor, I know my rights in the new South Africa. I want police protection.”
Each and every cop knew the visions induced by Blue Train, not from firsthand experience but from countless previous witnesses and accused. Despite the signs, they had remained hopeful up to now.
“Bastard!” said Donaldson and went straight for Hercules Jantjies. Joubert stopped the station commander in the nick of time.
Early on Sunday morning Lieutenant Leon Petersen phoned. “I think I have the fuckers who raped the girl, Captain. In Mitchell’s Plain. But it’s a gang thing. Fourteen of them. And they’re not talking.”
Joubert drove there to help with the interrogation, compare alibis. Hours of listening to lies, sparring with teenage bravado and blatant provocation. But at 17:22 Lieutenant Petersen’s patience eventually ran out. In interrogation room number two of the Mitchells Plain station he lost his temper and hit the youngest gang member on the nose and eye with his clenched fist. Blood spurted onto the table.
The brown child started sobbing. “My ma’s going to kill me, my ma’s going to kill me,” he wept and began an admission that slowly bubbled up like a pot boiling over. In the corner Constable Gerrit Snyman sat with his notebook, scribbling as fast as he could.
10.
Twenty-three fucking kilograms, Mat. He’s got rocks in his head. Do you know what
he said to me? I’ve got six months for every five kilos. He’s fucking crazy.” Captain Gerbrand Vos’s red cheeks were scarlet with indignation. Joubert merely shook his head sympathetically. He was still waiting for his physical health session with de Wit.
“Jesus, Mat, I’ve always been heavy. It’s part of me. How can a skeleton be a cop? Can you imagine it? In any case, fuck de Wit. He can’t enforce it.”
Joubert smiled. “He can, Gerry.”
“No way.”
“Police regulations. OC must see to it that all his people are fit and well at all times, and ready for action. Black on white. You can check it.”
Vos was quiet for a moment. “We’re Murder and Robbery, Mat, not a bunch of constables in a show-off unit. How fit must one be? I won’t be able to run the Comrades Ultramarathon, but hell . . .”
Joubert remembered his swimming session of a few hours ago. It was no better than Saturday’s: the stitch in his side after fifty meters of slow freestyle, the cigarette tar in his lungs which seemed to catch fire. After a hundred meters he’d clung to the side again, gasping for breath. He said nothing.
“Twenty-three fucking kilograms. I’ll have to have my lips sewn together.”
He shuffled through the door of Premier Bank’s branch in the Heerengracht. Slow, deliberate steps, the walking stick tightly grasped in the left hand, the eyes fixed in deep concentration a meter beyond his feet. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth were multiple, the contours of age.
He moved to the counter where the forms were kept, put his hand into an inner pocket, and slowly and patiently took out a spectacle case. His hands trembled slightly when he opened the flap and unfolded a pair of black-framed reading glasses. He perched them on his nose. The hand went slowly back to the pocket and extracted a fountain pen.
He unscrewed the top, reached out a careful hand and picked up a withdrawal slip. With an uncertain hand he wrote letters and figures in the columns on the white paper with its mauve strip at the top.