Dead Before Dying: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  He was silent. The cigarette had burned down to almost nothing.

  “I only remembered it when we buried her.”

  She wrote in the file. Joubert stubbed the butt in the ashtray and wiped a hand across his upper lip. He smelled the tobacco and smoke on his fingers, an unpleasant smell.

  “Maybe I was disappointed in her. Later. Because she never confronted my father. That she hadn’t left him because of his tyranny and abusiveness and drinking. She was so . . . passive. No. It was more than passive. She . . . On Friday evenings when my father was in the bar she never spoke about it. She never said: ‘Go and fetch your father from the bar for supper.’ She used to say: ‘Go and look for your father.’ As if he might have been somewhere else. And when I came back and said that he didn’t want to eat, it seemed as if she didn’t hear me. As if she had an inexhaustible capacity to deny reality, to create her own.”

  “How much of that did you inherit?” Her tone of voice was sharper, almost accusatory. He realized that it was the first psychological introspection she had expected of him.

  Joubert tried to consider it. But she released him, her voice gentle again. “Was it easy for you to take out girls? Later?”

  Somewhere in his head a soft alarm sounded. Where was this leading? His mother. His girls?

  “No.”

  He was reluctant to face that memory, the awkwardness, the gnawing uncertainties of puberty, the period he came to terms with with such difficulty. He saw Hanna Nortier’s frailness. How could she understand? “I was large, Doctor—even at school.” Not simply tall. Big. He knew he wasn’t as at ease with his body as other boys—the fly halves, the wings, the sprinters. Others pranced like high-bred racehorses; he, with heavy, dull movements, fought his war against gravity. He was convinced that it disqualified him from associating with girls. Eight years after matriculation he met a school friend who asked him whether he’d known that she was in love with him at school. He couldn’t believe it.

  “I never had a girlfriend. The one who went with me to the matric farewell . . . my mother and her mother fixed it. Like an arranged marriage.”

  “Did it bother you? That you didn’t have a girlfriend?”

  He thought about it.

  “I read.”

  She waited.

  “Books create their own reality, Doctor. In books there are no clumsy heroes. And there are always happy endings. Even when the hero makes mistakes, in the end he always gets the heroine. I thought that all I had to do was to be patient. And until then the books were enough.”

  “Your first girl?”

  Alarm bells rang. The process had been exposed. His mother, his girls, the way to Lara Joubert. And dear God, he didn’t want to talk about Lara.

  “Lara,” he said softly and looked at the hands in his lap, the thick fingers that twitched and struggled with one another. There were others, before Lara. The secret loves of his teenage years that made his heart beat and his palms sweat. A phys ed teacher, a new girl from another school, the dark, somber Greek girl with the strong scent in the café on the corner of Rhodes and Voortrekker.

  But they never knew about his passion, his dreams and fantasies. Lara did.

  He felt Hanna Nortier’s eyes on him. Then he heard her voice, soft, almost inaudible, deeply comprehending. “You don’t want to discuss her.” It was a question and a statement, a form of sympathy offered—and a challenge.

  He was touched by the emotion in her voice. He felt the weight of the memory of Lara that lay on his mind. His mind was shouting: Tell her, Mat Joubert. Throw off the black ballast that forces the prow of your soul to meet every gray breaker head-on. Open the hatches. Toss it overboard.

  He can’t tell her everything.

  He shook his head back and forth. No. He didn’t want to talk about Lara.

  “We can do it slowly.” Her voice still filled with comprehension.

  He looked up at her. He wanted to hug the frail body of Hanna Nortier with great gentleness, cover the etched shoulders with his big hands so that she didn’t look so vulnerable. He wanted to hold her against him with sympathy and care, like a bulwark, a lifebelt. He was filled with emotion.

  “How did you meet her?” The words were barely loud enough to reach his ears.

  He was quiet for a long time. At first to get his emotions under control. Then he cat-footed through his memory banks, as if too heavy a tread would trigger the wrong recollection. The emotion was like a magnifying glass, an acoustic booster, multiplying the clarity of his memory. He saw the image in his mind’s eye, heard the sounds as if he were there. At first he had to draw back, then inch forward. Lara’s face in front of him, that first time. She opening the door, her short straight black hair, her black eyes, which blazed like searchlights with her lust for life, her smiling mouth, one eyetooth slightly askew, her body so lithe, so lively under the bright red dress. She had looked him up and down and said, “I didn’t order an extra large,” closed the door, then flung it open again with the laugh that flowed over him like music. Then she put out her hand and said: “I’m Lara du Toit.”

  “It was a . . .” Joubert searched for a more dignified word, found none. “It was a blind date.”

  He was looking at Hanna Nortier now, at her eyes, her nose, her mouth—his toehold in the precipice of memory.

  “Hans van Rensburg arranged it. He was a sergeant at Murder and Robbery. They shot him at a roadblock on the N1 in 1992. She was still a uniform then, at the Sea Point station, but Hans was investigating a murder there and met her. He said he’d seen just the right girl for me. One who would do all the talking. Because I was too useless and too scared of women to get anywhere, ever, he said. He phoned her and talked her into it. And so I drove to her flat. She shared a one-bedroom flat on Kloofnek with a girlfriend because they were both so poor. Lara slept in the sitting room, the other one in the bedroom, and men were only allowed in the kitchen. Then she opened the door and she was beautiful. Then she said we must walk to the flicks because it was a lovely evening. Walk, the whole way down Kloofnek to the Foreshore. We hadn’t even reached the street when she took my hand and said she liked being touched and people might think I was her brother if we didn’t hold hands. She laughed at my shyness and at the way I blushed. Then she became serious, because a man who could blush was a marrying man, and then she laughed again.”

  He heard the laughter of his dead wife, the laugh of that first day, and he remembered how they had walked back later that evening up the first rise of the mountain, the Cape night windless about them. Lara du Toit had spoken to him as if he mattered, as if it was worthwhile sharing her secrets with him. He feasted on her laughter, on the touch of her hand, which like some small animal was never still in his, on her eyes, her mouth, her deeply tanned skin, unblemished, shining like polished copper.

  He remembered how he’d climbed into his ancient Datsun SSS and later hadn’t been able to recall the trip home. How he, in the tree-lined street in Wynberg where he rented a room behind the main house, had lifted his head to the heavens and given one mighty shout because the joy in him was too much to contain.

  And then Mat Joubert wept for the first time in seventeen years—a wordless, soundless emotion, only the wetness dripping out of his eyes betraying it. He turned away from Hanna Nortier and wondered when the humiliation would end.

  18.

  Benny Griessel was shaking. His hands, his arms, his shoulders, his legs. “I know, Mat. That’s the worst. I know. I know what’s coming. It scares me so badly.”

  Joubert sat on the single chair in the small room, Griessel on the bed with its gray blanket. The walls were bare, plastered and painted white up to head height, then brown brick to the ceiling. Next to the bed stood a wooden table without a drawer. A red Gideon Bible lay on it. A cupboard stood against the wall next to the washbasin and lavatory.

  He looked for the old Benny Griessel, the witty, cynical man with the slight liquor breath. This one’s face was drawn with fear, his skin g
ray, his lips blue.

  “Tonight the demons will come, Mat, the voices and the faces. They tell me they’re hallucinations but I don’t know the difference when they come. I can hear them calling and I can feel their fingers and you can never get away because you’re too slow and there are too many of them.”

  Benny Griessel doubled over and a spasm shook his body.

  “I’ll find you another blanket, Benny.”

  “Blankets won’t stop them, Mat. Blankets won’t stop them.”

  He telephoned Gerrit Snyman when he got home.

  “Nothing, Captain. There are some that are so rusted that they’ll never shoot again. And the guy who lives in Table View has a helluva collection of weapons, Captain. His Mauser looks as if it was made yesterday. Oiled and polished. Almost too much, as if it could’ve been the murder weapon. But the man has an alibi for both murders.”

  Joubert said that he had found nothing either, thanked Snyman for his work, and said good-bye.

  He walked to the living room with a few pieces of fruit, a knife, and a plate and sat down in his reading chair. He quartered an apple, carefully cut out the cores.

  Two days, he thought. For two days the Benny-Griessel-coitus-interruptus had been his number-one humiliation. Now it had been supplanted. By his stupid blubbering in front of Hanna Nortier.

  She’s a psychologist, he told himself. She’s used to it.

  But he wasn’t. He wasn’t used to the humiliation.

  She had handled it well. She hadn’t said anything. She had stood up and walked around the desk, crossing the invisible divide between psychologist and patient, and come to stand next to him. She had put her hand on his shoulder. She stood like that until he, his head still turned away from her, had with one angry movement wiped the wetness off his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Then she had walked back, sat down, and waited until he was in control.

  “We’ll talk some more next time,” she had said softly. He had got up and walked to the door, forcing himself not to run.

  And now, with a quarter of an apple in his hand, he knew the humiliation in front of her was the greater of the two. Because if he placed Dr. Hanna Nortier and Yvonne Stoffberg next to each other on the scale of femininity, he was stunned. How could he have been so aroused? Now, compared with Hanna Nortier’s, Yvonne Stoffberg’s beauty had become shallow, her sensuality diminished.

  For a moment he felt sorry for Yvonne. Then he remembered the firmness of her back muscles, the texture of her breast in his mouth.

  Yes, set against the doctor she was common, ordinary. But she had made Mat Joubert’s blood race.

  Ferdy Ferreira hated his wife’s two dogs.

  Especially now at twenty to six in the morning, the sun barely up.

  One reason was that in his view their mobile home, the Plettenberg, was too small for two adults and two corgis.

  Another reason was the attention and love that Gail Ferreira gave the dogs. When she came home, late in the afternoon from the coal company’s offices where she was the bookkeeper, she greeted them first. Their names were Charles and Diana but she called them her angel faces.

  The main reason, however, for Ferdy’s hatred, was that he had to take the dogs for a walk on the beach every morning. “Before six, Ferdy, so that I can say bye-bye to them before I get the bus.” This, then, was the pecking order in the Ferreiras’ Plettenberg in Melkbosstrand’s Old Ship Caravan Park: first Gail, then the dogs, then Ferdy.

  “Ferdy, the dogs,” Gail said, busy dressing in front of her cupboard. She was a woman of average height and build, in her midforties, but her voice and her decisive attitude created the illusion of a big woman.

  Ferdy sighed and got out of his single bed, divided from Gail’s by a bedside table. He knew it was useless to argue. It only made things worse.

  And the corgis sat moodily at the bedroom door, as if they, too, weren’t looking forward to the walk.

  Ferdy dragged his left foot every morning.

  “Don’t drag your foot like that.”

  “It’s sore, Flash,” Ferdy said in a whining voice. Gail’s nickname at school, derived from “Jack the Flash,” referred to her speed and adroitness on the hockey field. He still called her that occasionally.

  “There’s not a thing wrong with it,” said Gail.

  Ferdy Ferreira had contracted polio as a child. His left foot was affected but only insofar as it needed a slightly thicker sole to his shoe and gave a subtle list to his walk. But Ferdy had learned to use it as a weapon, with only qualified success.

  Ferdy sighed, as he did every morning, and got dressed. He took the dogs’ leads out of the broom closet in the kitchen and walked back to the bedroom, the list heavily emphasized in a useless play for sympathy. The dogs were still sitting in the bedroom, their eyes fixed on Gail. Ferdy clipped the leads to their collars. Charles and Diana growled.

  “I’ll be going now.” He sounded hurt, his voice martyred.

  “Be careful with my angels,” was Gail’s reply.

  He walked down the mobile home park’s tarred road to the main gate on the west side. He greeted old Mrs. Atkinson, who lived in the park permanently on site seventeen with eleven cats. The corgis strained toward the cat smell. Ferdy jerked them back with satisfaction, using more force than was necessary. The corgis growled.

  He walked them through the gate. The black gatekeeper was probably still sleeping in the little wooden hut. They walked across the tarred road, over the empty piece of land that lay next to the Little Salt River, which flowed into the sea there.

  He didn’t see the orange of the eastern horizon or the blue-green of the Atlantic Ocean in front of him or the long stretch of white beach or the car parked on the empty piece of land. Because he was thinking of other things. George Walmer had acquired three new videos. Pure porn. He was bringing them later.

  Between the brown soil of the informal parking area and the stretch of beach there was a low dune—an irregular sandbank a meter or two high with occasional clumps of Port Jackson bushes or vygie ground cover.

  Ferdy aimed for his usual route to the beach, a pathway worn through the dune. The corgis wanted to smell a plant. He jerked them back. They growled.

  Ferdy saw the figure coming toward him but didn’t find it odd. There were people on the beach at that hour quite often. Some jogged, some walked, some stared at the sea.

  Ferdy only really saw the figure when the Mauser appeared from under the blue windbreaker. He assumed that it was a joke and wanted to laugh, but then the big pistol was aimed at him and he saw the face and fear gripped his guts in a painful grasp.

  “I’m a cripple,” he said, his eyes wild.

  The corgis growled at the figure in front of them.

  The Mauser, gripped in both hands, was aimed at his head. He saw the tension in the trigger finger, the set of the killer’s jaw, the purposeful eyes, and knew that he was going to die. Ferdy dropped the corgis’ leads and sprang forward in an effort to save his life.

  The shot thundered across the beach, an echo of the waves. The lead bullet broke his bottom right incisor, tore through his palate, just above his upper teeth, punched through the lower bone of his eye socket, and broke through the skin just in front of his left ear. He staggered back, then dropped down into a sitting position. Pain shot through his head. The blood dripped warmly down his cheek. His left eye wouldn’t focus.

  But he was alive.

  He looked up. His left eye. There was something seriously wrong with his left eye.

  But with his right eye he saw the big pistol in front of him again.

  “I’m a cripple.”

  He didn’t see the trigger finger tightening again. But he heard the mechanical metal sound.

  Jammed, he thought. The thing won’t shoot. Its innards have seized up. And Ferdy Ferreira thought he was going to live.

  The Mauser disappeared in front of him. He saw another pistol. Toy pistol, he thought, because it was so small.

  He saw th
e strangest thing. The corgis stood with trembling upper lips and bared teeth, growling at the executioner. Then Charles rushed forward. Ferdy heard a shot. Another shot.

  The dogs wanted to protect him, he thought, and he was overcome with emotion. The little pistol was in front of him, but he didn’t hear the last shot.

  Joubert drove to work from the swimming pool in his own car, a yellow Cortina XR6, one of the monuments to the days when he still competed with Gerbrand Vos. He worried about the fact that after exercising for a week, he still couldn’t swim more than four lengths before he was forced to rest.

  Perhaps I’m in too much of a hurry, he thought, and lit a Special Mild. His diet also had to get off the ground. On the seat next to him was a blue-and-white Pick ’n Pay plastic bag. In it was his lunch, which he had made himself that morning: whole wheat bread with low-fat spread, lettuce leaves, tomato, and cucumber slices. No salt.

  He stopped at Murder and Robbery and Mavis came running out. He knew there was trouble before he even heard what she was saying.

  The news editor at the SABC offices in Sea Point heard from the crime reporter of the radio team that the Mauser murderer had claimed a third victim.

  The news editor read the newspapers. He knew this saga had the local newspapers on the hop. He could just imagine what they would do with number three. Now there was irrefutable evidence that the Cape could boast a serial killer. And that was good enough for national television. So the news editor telephoned the television reporter at home and the cameraman at his flat. He gave them their orders.

  “If anyone had a motive for killing Ferdy it was me,” said Gail Ferreira.

  She sat in an armchair in the Plettenberg’s sitting room. Gerbrand Vos sat opposite her on a two-seater couch. He was on backup duty that week. Joubert sat next to him, the two large detectives squashed together on a couch that was too small. But there was no other seating.

  Each one held a cup of tea.

  “What do you mean, Mrs. Ferreira?” Vos asked and lifted his cup to his mouth.