Heart of the Hunter

by Deon Meyer

  “I wondered when you would get to the crux of the matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The question that you and the spooks must ask is why Tho-bela left Orlando. What changed? What happened?”

  “And the answer is?”

  “That is his Achilles’ heel. You see, his loyalty was always complete. First, it was the Business. The ANC. The Fight. And when it was all over and they left him high and dry, he took his talents and found someone who could use them. He served Orlando with an irreproachable work ethic. And then something happened, something inside him. I don'’t know what it was— I have my suspicions, but I don'’t know precisely. We were in the hospital, he and I, beaten and shot up, and one day just before six he came to my bed and said he’s finished with violence and fighting. I still wanted to chat, to pull his leg, the way we did, but he was serious, emotional, I could see it was something to him. Something big.”

  And that is his Achilles’ heel?”

  Van Heerden leaned forward and she wanted to retreat from him.

  “He thinks he can change. He thinks he has changed.”

  She heard the words, registered the meaning, overwhelmingly aware, too, of the subtext between them, and in that moment she understood the attraction, the invisible bond: he was like her, somewhere inside there was something missing, something out of place, not quite at home in this world, just like her, as if they didn’'t belong here.

  * * *

  And then the door opened and the bald man appeared, eyes blinking in the bright light of the street outside, and Thobela’s finger caressed the trigger and the long black weapon jerked in his hands and coughed in his ears, and a heartbeat later the blood made a pretty pattern on the wood. In the forty-seven seconds it took to dismantle the weapon and pack it away in the bag, he knew he could not wage war like this. There was no honor in it.

  The enemy must see him. The enemy must be able to fight back.

  * * *

  Miriam Nzululwazi knew there was only one way out. She had to climb, she had to get over the railing and hang from the lowest bar and then let herself drop the extra meter to the lower-story fire escape and then repeat the process till she was there where the sawed-off stairs resumed and zigzagged down to the ground.

  She pulled herself up over the rail. She did not look down but swung her leg over, then her body, seven floors above the dirty, smelly alley.

  * * *

  “Ma, you’re never home anymore,” said Lien, outside by the car.

  “Ai, my child, it’s not because I

  want

  to be at work. You know I sometimes have to work extra hours.”

  “Is it the motorbike man, Mamma?” asked Lizette.

  “You watch too much television.” Stern.

  “But is it, Mamma?”

  She started the car and said softly: “You know I can’t talk about it.”

  “Some people say he’s a hero, Mamma.”

  “Suthu says she battles to get you to go to bed. You must listen to her. You hear?”

  “When will we see you again, Ma?”

  “Tomorrow, I promise.” She put the car in reverse and released the clutch. “Sleep tight.”

  “Is he, Mamma? Is he a hero?” But she backed out, in a hurry and did not answer.

  * * *

  Quinn and Radebe ran, the black man ahead up the stairs, their footfalls loud in the quiet passage. How was it possible, how could she have escaped? It could not be her. They ran past the door of the interview room; he saw it was shut, which gave him courage. She must be there, but his priority was the fire-escape door. He bumped it open and at first saw nothing, and relief flooded over him. Quinn’s breath was at his neck, and they both stepped out onto the small steel platform.

  “Thank God,” he heard Quinn say behind him.

  * * *

  “As long as he believes it,” said Zatopek van Heerden, “things shouldn'’t get out of hand. They even have a chance to persuade him to turn back. If they approach him correctly.”

  “You sound skeptical,” said Allison.

  “Have you heard of chaos theory?”

  She shook her head. The moon lay in the east, a big round light shining down on them. She saw his hand lift from the table and hang in the air; for a moment she thought he was going to touch her and she wanted it, but the hand hung there, an aid in the search for an explanation. “Basically, it says that a minute change in a small local system can expand to upset the balance in another larger system, far removed from it. It is a mathematical model; they replicate it with computers.”

  “you’'ve lost me.”

  His hand dropped back and supported his position on the table. “It’s difficult. First, you have to understand who he is. What his nature is. Some people, most people, are passive bending reeds in the winds of life. Resignedly accepting changes in their environment. Oh, yes, they will moan and complain and threaten, but eventually they will adjust and be sucked along by the stream. Thobela belongs to the other group, the minority, the doers, the activators and the catalysts. When apartheid threatened his genetic fitness index, he resolved to change that environment. The apparent impossibility of the challenge was irrelevant. You follow?”

  “I think so.”

  “Now, at this moment he is suppressing that natural behavior. He thinks he can be a bending reed. And as long as the equilibrium of his own system is undisturbed, he can do it. So far it has been easy. Just his job and Miriam and Pakamile. A safe, closed system. He wants to keep it like that. The problem is life is never like that. The real world is not in balance. Chaos theory says in the balance of probability, something should happen somewhere to ultimately change that environment.”

  * * *

  Vincent Radebe looked down just before he was about to go back through the fire door, and that’s when he saw her. She was suspended between heaven and earth below him. Their eyes met and hers were full of fear. Her legs were a pendulum swinging out over the drop and back over the lower platform.

  “Miriam,” he cried with utter despair, and bent to grab her arms, to save her.

  * * *

  “And then what?” asked Allison. “If this theoretical thing happens and he comes back to what he is?”

  “Then all hell will break loose,” said Dr. Zatopek van Heerden pensively.

  * * *

  Her reaction was to let go, to open her cramping fingers.

  The pendulum of her body took her past the platform of the sixth floor. She fell. She made no sound.

  Vincent Radebe saw it all, saw the twist of her body as it slowly revolved to the bottom. He thought he heard the soft noise when she hit the dirty stone pavement of the alley far below.

  He cried once, in his mother tongue, desperately to heaven.

  * * *

  Thobela Mpayipheli absorbed the world around him, the moon big and beautiful in the black heaven, the Free State plains, grass veld stretching in the lovely light as far as the eye could see, here and there dark patches of thorn trees, the path that the headlights threw out before him. He felt the machine and he felt his own body and he felt his place on this continent and he saw himself and he felt life coursing through him, a full, flooding river; it swept him along and he knew that he must cherish this moment, store it somewhere secure because it was fleeting and rare, this intense and perfect unity with the unI'verse.

  30.

  Janina Mentz’s cell phone rang twice as she drove back to Wale Street Chambers. The first caller was the director. “I know you are enjoying a well-earned rest, Janina, but I have some interesting news for you. But not over the phone.”

  “I’m on my way back now, sir.” They were both aware of the insecurity of the cellular network. “There are other things happening, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “I will fill you in.”

  “That is good, Janina,” said the director.

  “I will be there in ten minutes.”

  Barely three minutes later it was Quinn. “Ma’am, we need you.”

  She did not pick up the depression in his
voice at first. “I know, Rudewaan, I am on the way.”

  “No. It’s something else,” he said, and she now registered his tone. Worry and frustration colored her answer. “I am coming. The director wants me, too.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

  She ended the call.

  The children, the job. Eternal pressure. Everyone wanted something from her, and she had to give. It was always that way. Ever since she could remember. Demands. Her father and mother. Her husband. And then single parenthood and more pressure, more people, all saying, “give, more”; there were moments when she wanted to stand up and scream, “Fuck you all!” and pack her bags and leave because what was the use? Everyone just wanted more. Her parents and her ex-husband and the director and her colleagues. They demanded, they took, and she must keep giving; the emotions built up in her, anger and self-pity, and she looked for comfort where she always found it, in the secret places, the clandestine refuge where no one went but her.

  * * *

  He saw the helicopter silhouetted against the moon, just for a moment, a pure fluke, so quick that he thought he had imagined it, and then his finger reached feverishly for the headlight switch, found it and switched off.

  He pulled up in the middle of the dirt road and killed the engine, struggled with the helmet buckle, took the gloves off first, and then pulled off the helmet. Listened.

  Nothing.

  They had searchlights on those things. Perhaps some form of night vision. They would follow the roads.

  He heard the deep rumble, somewhere ahead. They had found him and he felt naked and vulnerable and he must find a place to hide. He wondered what had happened, what had tipped them off to look for him here. The petrol jockey? The traffic officer? Or something else?

  Where do you hide from a helicopter at night? Out in the open plains of the Free State?

  His eyes searched for the lights of a farmhouse in the dark, hoping for sheds and outbuildings, but there was nothing. Urgency grew in him— he couldn'’t stay here, he had to do something, and then he thought of the river and the bridge, the mighty Modder, it must be somewhere up ahead, and its bridge.

  Under the bridge would be a place to shelter, to hide away.

  He must get there before they did.

  * * *

  Quinn and Radebe waited for her at the elevator and Quinn said, “Can we talk in your office, ma’am,” and she knew there was a screw loose somewhere because they were grim, especially Radebe— he looked crushed. She walked ahead, opened the office door, went in and waited for them to close the door behind them. They stood, conventions of sitting irrelevant now. The two

  began to speak simultaneously, stopped, looked at each other. Radebe held up his hand. “It is my responsibility,” he said to Quinn, and looked at Janina with difficulty his voice monotone, his eyes dead, as if there was no one inside anymore. “Ma’am, due to my neglect, Miriam Nzululwazi escaped from the interview room.” She went cold.

  “She reached the exterior fire escape and tried to climb down. She fell. Six floors down. It is my fault, I take full responsibility.”

  She drew breath to ask questions, but Radebe forged ahead. “I offer my resignation. I will not be an embarrassment to this department anymore.” He was finished, and the last vestige of dignity left his body with those words.

  Eventually Janina said, “She is dead.”

  Quinn nodded. “We carried her up to the interview room.”

  “How did she get out?”

  Radebe stared at the carpet, unseeing. Quinn said, “Vincent thinks he did not lock the door behind him.”

  Rage welled up in her, and suspicion. “You think? You think you didn’'t?”

  There was no reaction from him, which fueled her rage. She wanted to snarl at him, to punish him; it was too easy to stand lifelessly and say he thought he hadn'’t locked the door— she had to deal with the consequences. She bit back a flood of bitter words.

  “You may go, Vincent. I accept your resignation.”

  He turned around slowly, but she was not finished. “There will be an inquiry. A disciplinary hearing.”

  He nodded.

  “See that we know where to find you.”

  He looked back at her, and she saw that he had nothing left, nowhere to go.

  * * *

  Dr. Zatopek van Heerden walked her to her car.

  She was reluctant to leave; the nearing deadlines called, but she did not want to be finished here.

  “I don'’t entirely agree,” she said as they reached the car.

  “About what?”

  “Good and evil. They are very often absolute concepts.”

  She watched him in the moonlight. There was too much thought in him; perhaps he knew too much, as if the ideas and knowledge built up pressure behind his mouth and the outlet was too small for the volume behind. It caused strange expressions to cross his face but found some release in the movements of his body. As if he wrestled to keep it all under control.

  Why did he turn her on?

  Ten to one he was a bastard, so sure of himself.

  Or was he?

  She had always been sensual, deep inside. She saw herself that way. But a woman learned with the years that that was only a part of the truth. The other part lay outside, in the way men saw you. And women, who measured and compared and helped put you in your place in the long food chain of love play. You learned to live with that, adjusted your expectations and dreams and fantasies to protect a sensitive heart whose wounds of disappointment healed slowly. Until you were content with the now and then, the sometimes reasonable intensity of stolen moments with a bleached policeman, someone else’s husband. And here tonight, she wished she were tall and slim and blond and beautiful, with big breasts and full lips and a cute bottom, so that this man would propose something improper.

  And what did she do?

  She challenged him intellectually. She. Who was so average— in everything.

  “Name me someone evil,” he said.

  “Hitler.”

  “Hitler is the stereotypical example,” he said. “But let me ask you: Was he worse than Queen Victoria?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Who fed Boer women and children porridge with glass in it? What about the scorched-earth policy? Maybe it was her generals. Maybe she had no idea. Just like P. W. Botha. Denying all knowledge, and therefore good? What of Joseph Stalin? Idi Amin? How do we measure? Are numbers the ultimate measure? Is a sliding scale of the numbers of victims the way we determine good or evil?”

  “The question is not who is the worst. The question is, Are there people who are absolutely evil?”

  “Let me tell you about Jeffrey Dahmer. The serial murderer. Do you know who he is?”

  “The Butcher of Milwaukee.”

  “Was he evil?”

  “Yes.” But there was less assurance in her voice.

  “The literature says that for seven or nine years, I can’t remember, let’s say seven years, Dahmer suppressed the urge to kill. This broken, fucked-up, pathetic wreck of a man kept the nearly inhuman drive bottled up for seven years. Does that make him bad? Or heroic? How many of us know that sort of drive, that intensity? We who can’t even control basic, simple urges like jealousy or envy.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t agree. He murdered. Repeatedly. He did terrible things. It does not matter how long he held out.”

  Zatopek smiled at her. “I give in. It is an endless argument. It rests ultimately on so many personal things. I suspect it rests ultimately on the undebatable. Like religion. Norms, values. The way you see yourself, the way you see others and what we are. And what you have experienced.”

  She had no answer to that and just stood there. Her face was expressionless, but her body felt too small to contain all she felt.

  “Thank you,” she said to break the silence.

  “Thobela Mpayipheli is a good man. As good as the world allows him to be. Remember that.”

  * * *

  He was busy putting the R 1150 GS down when he heard the drone of the
helicopter coming closer.

  He had battled to negotiate the steep bank of the river down toward the water, then he had ridden it up with spinning rear wheel through the grass and bushes directly under the concrete of the bridge. It would be difficult to spot there. Neither the side stand nor the main stand would work there, and he had to lay the bike on its side. It was difficult, the secret was to turn the handles up and hold the end, let your knees do the work, not your back. The big engines of the helicopter were ever nearer. Somehow or other they must have spotted him.

  He placed the helmet on the petrol tank, removed the jacket and trousers— they were too lightly colored for the night. He tried to see where the aircraft was, and when he looked around the edge of the bridge, he saw it was only thirty or forty meters away, not far off the ground. He could feel the wind of the great rotors against his face, saw the red and white revolving lights, and saw through the open door of the Oryx four faces, every one beneath an infrared night sight.