by Deon Meyer
Then the photo of Ferdy Ferreira appeared on the screen with two telephone numbers next to it. The newscaster said: “Anyone with information that could assist the police in their investigation, can call . . .”
Margaret stared at the picture of Ferdy Ferreira. She knew she had seen him. But where? How?
Should she phone the detective?
No, not until she remembered.
On the thirteenth floor of an apartment building in Sea Point a thirty-two-year-old woman sat in front of the television.
Her name was Carina Oberholzer. Since the visuals of the Mauser murderer she had seen nothing else that was showing on the screen. She rocked back and forth in the armchair, ceaselessly, a human metronome. Her lips murmured one word, over and over again: “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord . . .”
Carina Oberholzer was reliving a piece of her past. The images she recalled would take her life before the night was over.
The forty-six-year-old man was watching the news bulletin with his beautiful wife. His name was Oliver Nienaber. His four sons, the eldest finishing up secondary school, the youngest in fourth grade, were somewhere in the large house, busy with their own affairs. Oliver Nienaber had spent the past three weeks in Pretoria. He too had been very busy. He hadn’t read the newspapers. The news visuals of the Mauser murder were like a hammer blow to his chest. But he stayed calm so that his wife wouldn’t notice.
He looked for solutions, weighed the implications, recalled incidents. Oliver Nienaber was intelligent. He could think fast even when fear gripped him like an evil spirit. That was why the man had made such a success of his calling.
He got up after the weather report. “I still have some work to do,” he said.
His wife looked up from her needlework and smiled at him. He saw the flawlessness of her blond beauty and wondered if he was going to lose her. If he was going to lose everything. If he was going to lose his life.
“Don’t work too late, darling,” she said.
He walked to his study, a large room. Against the walls hung the photographs, the certificates. His rise. His triumph. He opened his slender attaché case of real gray buffalo hide and took out a thin black notebook and a fountain pen. He made a list of names. Mac McDonald, Carina Oberholzer, Jacques Coetzee.
Then he skipped a few lines and wrote the name Hester Clarke. He put the notebook on his desk and reached for the new Cape telephone guide next to the telephone. He paged to M. His finger moved quickly down the columns. It stopped at MacDonald Fisheries. He underlined the number, then wrote it down. Then he paged to O, looked for Carina Oberholzer’s number, and wrote that down. He had trouble with Jacques Coetzee’s number because there were a great many J. Coetzees and he didn’t know the precise address. At Hester Clarke’s name he left only a question mark. Then he took a bunch of keys out of the attaché case, walked to a corner in the study, unlocked the safe, and took out the big Star 9 mm pistol. He checked the safety catch and put the pistol, the notebook, and the pen into the case.
Oliver Nienaber stood quite still, with the attaché case in his hand, his head bent, his eyes closed. He seemed to be praying.
Joubert knew he wouldn’t be able to read. The evening was hot and the southeaster made sad noises as it blew around the corners of the house. The front veranda faced north. There the wind was only audible in the trees. He sat down on the slate-tiled floor, his back against the wall, and lit a cigarette.
He wanted to laugh at himself.
Had he really thought he would be able to bury Lara?
Just because he had thought about the ripe body of an eighteen-year-old for a few days? Because he was “consulting” a psychologist?
It wasn’t the first time that he had heard the sounds torn out of Benny Griessel.
He knew those sounds. He had made them himself. Not with his voice but in his head. In that hazy past when he still hated the pain and the humiliation. Before he had become addicted to it.
Tell your psychologist, he thought. Tell her you’re as addicted to the darkness of your soul as Griessel is to the bottle. But there is a difference, Doctor. You can take Mat Joubert out of the dark, but you can’t take the dark out of Mat Joubert. It had become part of his flesh, his body had grown around it as a tree will take a length of barbed wire into its trunk to have it forever scratching and tearing and causing the sap to bleed.
He heard Lara’s laugh again, the one he played over and over again on the tape recorder while he banged his head against the wall—over and over again until the blood ran into his eyes.
Griessel’s pain tonight had been a blessing in disguise. It had brought Joubert to his senses.
He should have realized it the day before, when Hanna Nortier asked her last question. When he’d realized that he would have to speak about Lara, when he’d realized that he would not be able to tell the doctor everything.
He was Lara Joubert’s captive. And the key to his cell was there, within reach, so invitingly within reach. Just tell the good doctor everything. The whole truth, nothing but the truth. Tell the doctor that part of Lara’s death which only he knew about—and he knew he would be freed. Share that hour with Dr. Hanna Nortier and he could shake off the burden, tear the dark curtain.
It was half past twelve when he had reached the tape recorder, down in the cellar, and pressed the button to turn the cassette. With the earphones illegally on his head, he’d looked round to check whether anyone could see him, certain of his right to break the law in this way. Press the button. Unsuspecting. In the execution of his duty.
PLAY.
He wouldn’t be able to tell Hanna Nortier.
Joubert leaned his head against the wall and shot the cigarette into the dark.
He couldn’t even tell it to himself, he thought. How many times hadn’t he tried to look at it anew. To look for excuses, mitigation, a way out. To consider other interpretations.
But nothing would work.
He had burned the cassette. But the voices were still on tape. In his head. And he could no longer press the PLAY button. Not even for himself. It was too fucking painful.
He leaned sideways to get his hand into his trouser pocket, took out his cigarettes, lit another one.
Come on, Dr. Hanna, he thought. Could you really sweep up the debris of a human being and fit it together, apply the wonder glue, and say that he was whole again? The cracks would be visible forever, so that only the lightest touch would be enough to shatter the whole into fragments once more.
What was the use of that, Doctor?
Tell me, Doctor, why shouldn’t I put the cool maw of my service pistol into my mouth and blow the last copy of the tape, together with all the ghosts collected up there, into eternity?
Carina Oberholzer sat at her dressing table, writing.
She wrote as the tears ran down her cheeks and dripped onto the blue notepaper.
Carina Oberholzer didn’t write why the Mauser murderer was busy sending people into eternity with one pull of the trigger. She didn’t want to. She couldn’t. All that her mind allowed her was to write We deserve it. And then she wrote that they musn’t stop the murderer. And that they mustn’t punish the murderer.
She wrote down a name and surname with a shaking hand, but it was quite legible.
She added the words Mama, forgive me, although her father was still living, and signed the letter: Carrie. Then she put the pen down next to the paper and walked to the window. She opened it wide, lifted her foot and put it on the sill. She hoisted herself up into the frame, balanced briefly, and then she fell.
She fell soundlessly, except for the fabric of her skirt, which fluttered softly in the wind, like a flag.
Later, when the wail of a siren sounded above the city’s roar, the wind shifted. It blew gently through the open window on the thirteenth floor and like an invisible hand picked up the single sheet of blue notepaper and let it slip down the thin dark space between dressing table and wall.
Joubert sat on his front stoop and looke
d up at the pale stars that glimmered above the suburban sky and didn’t know how to react to his newly found insight.
Yet he knew something had changed.
A week or two, a month, a year ago the concept of a pistol in his mouth had been so logical. Not a yearning, only a logical way out that would have to be used like a tool for a specific task. Now, when he thought about the moment of truth, when the hand had to pick up the gun and the lips had to open and the finger had to contract, Mat Joubert still wanted to live for a while.
And he briefly considered the reasons why things had changed. The Triumph of the Great Erection? The many aspects of Hanna Nortier?
But then his thoughts wandered.
He was going to be a cripple, he thought. The poor man’s Ferdy Ferreira. He would have to take Lara Joubert with him—if he couldn’t tell Hanna Nortier everything. He would have to drag the load of pain with him for the rest of his life.
Could he do it?
Perhaps.
He got up off the stoop’s cold floor, stretched his arms, and felt the muscles of his back and his shoulders, the vague, pleasurable lassitude of muscles that had been exercised in a swimming pool.
Perhaps, he thought.
He turned, walked into the house, locked the door behind him, and walked to the spare bedroom, looking for something to read. The paperbacks lay in an untidy heap.
He would have to put up bookcases, he thought, and stood in the doorway for a moment, staring, contemplating. He was aware of an urge to set the books in order, to arrange them according to authors, each one neatly in its allotted space.
He walked into the room, went down on his knees next to the pile and picked up the top one.
21.
Dr. Hanna Nortier lay on a sofa. He sat next to her on a chair. He stroked her colorless hair with soft, mechanical movements. His heart was filled with love and pity for her. He spoke to her. He emptied his heart. The tears poured down his cheeks. His hand shifted to her breast, small and soft as a bird, his fingers kneaded the tissue carefully under the material. He looked at her. He saw that she was pale. He realized that she was dead. But why was he hearing shrill sounds emanating from her? The alarm. He opened his eyes. The green figures of the instrument said 6:30.
He got up immediately and drove to the swimming pool. He swam seven purposeful lengths before he needed to rest. When he felt better he did two more lengths, slowly.
Joubert bought a newspaper when he stopped for a packet of Special Milds mainly because of the front-page headlines. TELLER LIVES IN FEAR OF MAUSER the biggest one read. And a smaller subheading: IS SWEETHEART ROBBER THE SERIAL KILLER?
He read the reports in the car in front of the café. The main news was the bank robber’s reference made to Rosa Wasserman, but there were also other, smaller reports about the crimes. In one the reporter, using dates, tried to trace a connection between the murders and the bank robberies. In another he quoted a Dr. A. L. Boshoff, “well-known Cape criminologist and lecturer in criminology at the University of Stellenbosch,” on the psyche of the serial killer.
Joubert finished reading and folded the newspaper. His mouth thinned. He had never worked on a case that had engendered so much ongoing publicity. There had been the kidnapping of a deputy minister’s child in ’89. The case was solved within hours but the press had had a two-day orgy. And the axe murderer of Mitchells Plain in ’86. The newspapers wrote for weeks. But chiefly on the inside pages because the victims were not white.
He switched on the engine and drove to Bellville, to the big hardware shop on Durban Road.
Why did he find the reporter’s copy about the dates and the similarities between the crimes so unacceptable? Was it simply a premonition, an opinion honed by experience?
No. It was the differences that the reporter had ignored. The bank robber was an exhibitionist. He played for the audience with his dramatic disguises and showy dialogue, the pet name and the questions about perfume. The bank robber was a coward who kept his gun hidden under his coat and relied on the fear of women.
The Mauser murderer was cool and clinical.
It couldn’t be the same man.
Or could it?
He was annoyed by his own indecisiveness. “Fighting crime is like playing golf, Matty,” Blackie Swart had said once. “Just as soon as you think you’ve got it made, it sideswipes you again.”
He had made a casual drawing for his bookcase the previous evening. He explained briefly to the salesman what he was looking for. The salesman was enthusiastic. He showed Joubert the various kinds of do-it-yourself bookcase kits on the market. Some sets were packed in such a way that the buyer could assemble it in five minutes without drilling a single hole, sawing one plank, or hammering in one nail.
Joubert wanted to do more with his hands. He had developed a certain dedication to the task since the previous evening. He wanted to smell sawdust and use the electric drill that had been gathering dust in the garage for almost three years. He wanted to sweat and measure and fit and make pencil marks on the wall and on the wood.
He and the salesman decided on a more primitive design. Long metal strips had to be screwed to the wall vertically. Metal struts hooked horizontally onto the strips. The wooden shelves, which Joubert would have to measure and saw, rested on the supports.
He bought bits for the drill and screws and plastic anchors to help the screws hold in the plastered walls. Sandpaper, varnish, paintbrushes, a new tape measure, and a three-point plug completed his purchases because he couldn’t remember whether the electric drill still had a plug.
He paid by check and did a quick sum in his head to see how much he’d saved by not buying one of the luxury do-it-yourself models. Two black men helped him carry the stuff to his car. He tipped them five rand each. Some of the planks and the metal strips were too long for the interior of the car or the trunk. He let them stick out the window.
He drove to the Bellville Market to replenish his stock of fruit and vegetables and ate an apple as he drove home.
When he arrived Emily was already doing the laundry. He went to say hello to her, and asked after her children in the Transkei and her husband in Soweto. He told her the spare bedroom would soon be a very tidy room. She shook her head in disbelief.
His enthusiasm for the task was great. He opened the garage door and chose the tools. Everything, except a few screwdrivers and the lawnmower, was covered in a thick layer of dust.
Some of the tools had belonged to his father. His father, who had used them hastily but with precision and impatience. “No, they must teach you at school how to use these things. Here you’ll just get hurt. And your mother will be cross with me.”
Joubert walked to the second bedroom again to use his new tape measure. He made a new sketch on paper. He fetched another apple in the kitchen and went to fetch the drill and the metal strips. The electric drill had no plug. He put on the new one with a feeling of deep satisfaction. He measured where the holes for the screws had to be made. Then it occurred to him that he needed a spirit level.
No, he wasn’t going to drive out again. He would measure carefully, using the corner of the room as a guideline. He started working.
When he had drilled all the holes, he fetched the portable radio out of Lara’s nightstand. There were always new batteries in her drawer. He looked. They were still there. He slotted them into the radio and switched it on. He turned the tuner past a few music stations until he found RSG, the Afrikaans station. Two men were delivering a cricket commentary. He carried the radio to the garage because he had to do the sawing.
The radio played a cut of pumping concertina, the rhythms of boeremusiek. It recalled memories. His father never listened to cricket. But in the time before television he listened to rugby commentaries on a Saturday afternoon. And swore at the commentators and the players and the referee when Western Province lost. After the game, before they switched to other stadiums for summaries, there was always a snatch of boeremusiek or a band. That was the si
gnal for his father to go and have his Saturday-evening drink in the bar of the Royal. And Joubert had to lay the fire because on Saturday evenings they had a barbecue. Sometimes he had to keep feeding the fire with rooikrans logs until late at night because his father allowed no one else to barbecue the meat. “It’s a man’s job.”
At the start he had enjoyed fetching his father in the bar. He had liked the warmth of the place, the camaraderie, the good-natured friendship, the respect the people there had for his father.
He started sawing. The sweat ran down his forehead. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and left a dirty mark on his face.
Over the sound of the saw he heard the commentator say: “Zeelie from the opposite side. He’s at the wicket now. And Loxton plays that one defensively back to the bowler . . .”
Zeelie, the great white hope as suspect. He had never asked Gail Ferreira whether her husband had known Zeelie. But he was reasonably certain what the answer would be.
Three inexplicable murders. With nothing in common. A family man, a gay, and a cripple. A promiscuous heterosexual, a conservative homosexual, and a blue movies addict. Married, unmarried, married. Businessman, goldsmith, unemployed.
There was no connection.
There was one connection—the bare fact that there was no connection.
A murderer who without any pattern, without rhyme or reason, in the late afternoon, early morning, or middle of the night, pulled the trigger and took a life. How did he choose his victims? Eeny, meeny, miny, mo . . . Or did he see someone in the street and follow him home because he didn’t like his face or clothes?
It had happened before. Here. Overseas. It drove the media crazy because people wanted to read about it. It woke a primitive fear: death without reason, the most fearful of all fates. And the police were powerless because there was no pattern. The great crime prevention machine’s fuel was the observable pattern, like an established modus operandi or a comprehensible motive. Like sex. Or avarice. But if the observable pattern was missing, or its octane too low, the great machine came to a sighing halt. Its tank empty. It had trouble in restarting.