Devil's Peak

Devil's Peak

Deon Meyer

English language translation copyright 2007 by K. L. Seegers

Also by Deon Meyer

Heart of the Hunter

Dead at Daybreak

Dead Before Dying

Dedicated to my wife, Anita

PART ONE

Christine

1.

The moment before the clergyman folded back the carton flaps the world stood still and she saw everything with a greater clarity. The robust man in his middle years had a diamond-shaped birthmark on his cheek that looked like a distorted pale rose teardrop. His face was angular and strong, his thinning hair combed back, his hands massive and rough, like those of a boxer. The books behind him covered the whole wall in a mosaic of alternating colors. The late afternoon Free State sun threw a shaft of light onto the desktop, a magic sunbeam across the box.

She pressed her hands lightly against the coolness of her bare knees. Her hands were perspiring, her eyes searching for clues in the slightest shift of his expression, but she saw only calm, perhaps some suppressed, benign curiosity about the content of the carton. In the moment before he lifted the flaps, she tried to see herself as he saw her—evaluate the impression she was trying to create. The shops in town had been no help; she had to use what she had. Her hair was long, straight and clean, the multicolored blouse sleeveless; a shade too tight, perhaps, for this occasion, for him? A white skirt that had shifted up to just above her knees as she sat down. Her legs were smooth and lovely. White sandals. Little gold buckles. Her toenails unpainted, of that she had made sure. Just a single ring, a thin gold band on her right hand. Her make-up was light, delicately downplaying the fullness of her mouth.

Nothing to betray her. Apart from her eyes and her voice.

He lifted the flaps, one after the other, and she realized she was sitting on the edge of the armchair, leaning forward. She wanted to lean back, but not now, she must wait for his reaction.

The last flap was folded back, the box open.

“Liewe Genade,”

he said in Afrikaans and half rose to his feet.

Sweet Mercy.

He looked at her, but he seemed not to see her and his attention returned to the contents of the box. He thrust one of his big hands in, took something out and held it up to the sun.

“Sweet mercy,” he repeated with his hands in front of him. His fingers felt for authenticity.

She sat motionless. She knew his reaction would determine everything. Her heart thumped, she could even hear it.

He replaced the object in the carton, retracted his hands, leaving the flaps open. He sat again, taking a deep breath as if he wanted to compose himself and then looked up at her. What was he thinking? What?

Then he pushed the carton to one side, as if he didn’t want it to come between them.

“I saw you yesterday. In church.”

She nodded. She had been there—to take his measure. To see if she would be recognized. But it was impossible, since she had attracted so much attention anyway—a strange young woman in a small town church. He preached well, with compassion, with love in his voice, not so dramatic and formal as the ministers of her youth. When she walked out of the church she was certain it was right to come here. But now she wasn’t so sure . . . He seemed upset.

“I . . .” she said, her thoughts scrambling for the right words.

He leaned towards her. He needed an explanation; that she well understood. His arms and hands made a straight line on the edge of the desk, from elbow to interlinked fingers flat on the desk. He was wearing a formal shirt unbuttoned at the neck, light blue with a faint red stripe. His sleeves were rolled up, forearms hairy where the sun caught them. From outside came the sounds of a weekday afternoon in a small town—the Sotho people greeting one another across the breadth of the street, the municipal tractor accelerating duh-duh-duh up to the garage, the cicadas, the clanging beat of a hammer alternating with the mindless barking of two dogs.

“There’s a lot I have to tell you,” she said, and her voice sounded small and lost.

At last he moved, his hands folded open.

“I hardly know where to start.”

“Begin at the beginning,” he said softly, and she was grateful for the empathy.

“The beginning,” she approved, voice gaining strength. Her fingers gathered the long blonde hair from where it hung over her shoulder and tossed it back with a rhythmic, practiced motion.

2.

It began for Thobela Mpayipheli late on a Saturday afternoon at a filling station in Cathcart.

Pakamile was seated beside him, eight years old, bored and tired. The long road from Amersfoort lay behind them, seven dreary hours of driving. When they turned in at the garage the child sighed. “Still sixty kilometers?”

“Only sixty kilometers,” he said consolingly. “Do you want a cold drink?”

“No thanks,” said the boy and lifted up the 500-ml Coca Cola bottle that had been lying at his feet. It was not yet empty.

Thobela stopped at the pumps and climbed out of the pickup. There was no attendant in sight. He stretched his limbs, a big black man in jeans, red shirt and running shoes. He walked around his vehicle, checked that the motorbikes on the load bed were still firmly strapped down—Pakamile’s little KX 65 and his big BMW. They had been learning to ride off-road that weekend, an official course through sand and gravel, water, hills, humps, gullies and valleys. He had seen the boy’s self-confidence grow with every hour, the enthusiasm that glowed within him like an ember with every “Look, Thobela, watch me!”

His son . . .

Where were the petrol attendants?

There was another car at the pumps, a white Polo—the engine idled, but there was no one in the car. Strange. He called out, “Hello!” and saw movement in the building. They must be coming now.

He turned around to unlatch the pickup bonnet, glancing at the western horizon where the sun was going down . . . soon it would be dark. Then he heard the first shot. It reverberated through the quiet of the early evening and he jumped in fright and dropped instinctively to his haunches. “Pakamile!” he screamed. “Get down!” But his last words were deafened by another shot, and another, and he saw them coming out of the door—two of them, pistols in hand, one carrying a white plastic bag, eyes wild. They spotted him, shot. Bullets slammed against the pump, against the pickup.

He shouted, a guttural roar, leapt up, jerked open the pickup door and dived in, trying to shield the boy from the bullets. He felt the little body shiver. “Okay,” he said, and heard the shots and the lead whining over them. He heard one car door slam, then another and screeching tires. He looked up—the Polo was moving towards the road. Another shot. The glass of an advertising display above him shattered and rained down on the pickup. Then they were in the road, the Volkswagen’s engine revving too high and he said, “It’s okay, okay,” and felt the wet on his hand and Pakamile had stopped shivering and he saw the blood on the child’s body and he said: “No, God, no.”

That is where it began for Thobela Mpayipheli.

He sat in the boy’s room, on his bed. The document in his hand was his last remaining proof.

The house was as quiet as the grave, for the first time since he could remember. Two years ago Pakamile and he had pushed open the door and looked at the dusty interior, the empty rooms. Some of the light fittings were hanging askew from the ceiling, kitchen cupboard doors were broken or just ajar, but all they saw was potential, the possibilities of their new house overlooking the Cata River and the green fields of the farm in high summer. The boy had run through the house leaving footprints in the dust. “This is my room, Thobela,” he had called down the passage. When he reached the master bedroom he had expressed his awe at the vast space in a long whistle. Because all he knew was a cramped four-room house in the Cape Flats.

That first night they slept on the big verandah. First they had watched the sun disappear behind the storm clouds and the twilight deepen over the yard, watched the shadows of the big trees near the gate blend with the darkness, and the stars magically open their silver eyes in the firmament. He and the boy, squeezed up against each other with their backs against the wall.

“This is a wonderful place, Thobela.”

There was a deep sense of comfort in Pakamile’s sigh and Thobela was eternally relieved, because it was only a month since the boy’s mother had died and he had not known how they would adjust to the change of environment and circumstance.

They spoke of the cattle they would buy, a milk cow or two, a few fowls (“. . . and a dog, Thobela, please, a big old dog”). A vegetable garden at the back door. A patch of lucerne down by the riverbank. They had dreamed their dreams that night until Pakamile’s head had dropped against his shoulder and he had laid the boy down softly on the bedding on the floor. He had kissed him on the forehead and said, “Good night, my son.”

Pakamile was not of his own blood. The son of the woman he had loved, the boy had become his own. Very quickly he had come to love the boy like his own flesh and blood, and in the months since they had moved here he had begun the long process of making it official—writing letters, filling in forms and being interviewed. Slow bureaucrats with strange agendas had to decide whether he was suitable to be a parent, when the whole world could see that the bond between them had become unbreakable. But, at last, after fourteen months, the registered documents had arrived; in the long-winded, clumsy language of state officialdom, these put the seal on his adoption.

And now these pages of yellow-white paper were all he had. These, and a heap of new ground under the pepper trees by the river. And the minister’s words, meant to comfort: “God has a purpose with everything.”

Lord, he missed the boy.

He could not accept that he would never hear that chuckling laugh again. Or the footsteps down the passage. Never slow, always in a rush, as if life were too short for walking. Or the boy calling his name from the front door, voice loaded with excitement over some new discovery. Impossible to accept that he would never feel Pakamile’s arms around him again. That, more than anything—the contact, the absolute acceptance, the unconditional love.

It was his fault.

There was never an hour of the day or night that he did not relive the events at the garage with the fine-tooth comb of self-reproach. He should have realized, when he saw the empty Polo idling at the pumps. He should have reacted more swiftly when he heard the first shot, he should have thrown himself over the child then, he should have been a shield, he should have taken the bullet. He should. It was his fault.

The loss was like a heavy stone in him, an unbearable burden. What would he do now? How would he live? He could not even see tomorrow, neither the sense nor the possibility. The phone rang in the sitting room, but he did not want to get up—he wanted to stay here with Pakamile’s things.

He moved sluggishly, feeling the emotion pressing against him. Why could he not weep? The telephone rang. Why would the grief not break out?

Inexplicably, he was standing with the instrument in his hand and the voice said: “Mr. Mpayipheli?” and he said: “Yes.”

“We’ve got them, Mr. Mpayipheli. We’ve caught them. We want you to come and identify them.”

Later he unlocked the safe and placed the document carefully on the topmost shelf. Then he reached for his firearms, three of them: Pakamile’s airgun, the .22 and the hunting rifle. He took the longest one and walked to the kitchen.

As he cleaned it with methodical concentration he slowly became aware that guilt and loss were not all that lay within him.

“I wonder if he believed,” she said, the minister’s full attention on her now. His eyes no longer strayed to the box.

“Unlike me.” The reference to herself was unplanned and she wondered for a moment why she said it. “Maybe he didn’t go to church or such, but he might have believed. And perhaps he could not understand why the Lord gave to him and then took away. First his wife, and then his child on the farm. He thought he was being punished. I wonder why that is? Why we all think that when something bad happens? I do too. It’s weird. I just could never work out what I was being punished for.”

“As an unbeliever?” asked the minister.

She shrugged. “Yes. Isn’t it strange? It’s like the guilt is here inside us. Sometimes I wonder if we are being punished for the things we are going to do in the future. Because my sins only came later, after I was punished.”

The minister shook his head and took a breath as if to answer, but she didn’t want to be sidetracked now; didn’t want to break the rhythm of her story.

They were out of reach. There were eight men behind the one-way glass, but he could only focus on the two for whom his hate burned. They were young and devil-may-care, their mouths stretched in the same “so-what” smirks, their eyes staring a challenge at the window. For a moment he considered the possibility of saying he recognized none of them and then waiting outside the police station with the hunting rifle . . . But he wasn’t prepared, hadn’t studied the exits and streets outside. He lifted his finger like a rifle barrel and said to the superintendent: “There they are, numbers three and five.” He did not recognize the sound of his own voice; they were the words of a stranger.

“You are sure?”

“Dead sure,” he said.

“Three and five?”

“Three and five.”

“That’s what we thought.”

They asked him to sign a statement. Then there was nothing more he could do. He walked to his pickup, unlocked the door and got in, conscious of the rifle behind the seat and the two men somewhere inside the building. He sat and wondered what the superintendent would do if he asked for a few moments alone with them, because he felt the compulsion to thrust a long blade into their hearts. His eyes lingered a moment on the front door of the police station and then he turned the key and drove slowly away.

3.

The public prosecutor was a Xhosa woman and her office was filled with the pale yellow dossiers of her daily work. They were everywhere. The desk was overloaded and the heaps overflowed to the two tables and the floor, so they had to pick their way to the two chairs. She had a somber quality and a vague absence, as if her attention was divided between the countless documents, as if the responsibility of her work was sometimes too heavy to bear.

She explained. She was the one who would lead the state prosecution. She had to prepare him as a witness. Together they must convince the judge that the accused were guilty.

That would be easy, he said.

It is never easy, she replied, and adjusted her large gold-rimmed spectacles with the tips of her thumb and index finger, as if they could never be wholly comfortable. She questioned him about the day of Pakamile’s death, over and over, until she could see the event through his eyes. When they had finished, he asked her how the judge would punish them.

“If they are found guilty?”

“When they are found guilty,” he replied with assurance.

She adjusted her spectacles and said one could never predict these things. One of them, Khoza, had a previous conviction. But it was Ramphele’s first offense. And he must remember that it was not their intent to murder the child.

“Not their intent?”

“They will attest that they never even saw the child. Only you.”

“What sentence will they get?”

“Ten years. Fifteen? I can’t say for sure.”

For a long moment he just stared at her.

“That is the system,” she said with an exonerating shrug.

A day before the court case was to begin he drove his pickup to Umtata because he needed to buy a couple of ties, a jacket and black shoes.

He stood in his new clothes before the long mirror. The shop assistant said, “That looks sharp, ” but he did not recognize himself in the reflection—the face was unfamiliar and the beard which had appeared on his cheeks since the boy’s death grew thick and gray on the chin and cheeks. It made him look harmless, and wise, like a stalwart.

The eyes mesmerized him. Were they his? They reflected no light, as if they were empty and dead inside.

From the late afternoon he lay on his hotel bed, arms behind his head, motionless.

He remembered: Pakamile in the shed above the house milking a cow for the first time, all thumbs, in too much of a hurry. Frustrated that the teats would not respond to the manipulation of his small fingers. And then, at last, the thin white stream shooting off at an angle to spray the shed floor and the triumphant cry from the boy: “Thobela! Look!”

The small figure in school uniform that waited every afternoon for him, socks at half-mast, shirt-tails hanging, the backpack disproportionately big. The joy every day when he drew up. If he came on the motorbike, Pakamile would first look around to see which of his friends was witness to this exotic event, this unique machine that only he had the right to ride home on.

Sometimes his friends slept over; four, five, six boys tailing Pakamile around the farmyard. “My father and I planted all these vegetables.” “This is my father’s motorbike and this is mine.” “My father planted all this lucerne himself, hey.” A Friday night . . . everyone in a Christmas bed in the sitting room, jammed in like sardines in a flat tin. The house had vibrated with life. The house was full. Full.

The emptiness of the room overwhelmed him. The silence, the contrast. A part of him asked the question: what now? He tried to banish it with memories, but still it echoed. He thought long about it, but he knew in an unformulated way that Miriam and Pakamile had been his life. And now there was nothing.

He got up once to relieve himself and drink water and went back to lie down. The air conditioner hissed and blew under the window. He stared at the ceiling, waited for the night to pass so the trial could begin.

The accused sat alongside each other: Khoza and Ramphele. They looked him in the eyes. Beside them the advocate for the defense stood up: an Indian, tall and athletically lean, flamboyant in a smart black suit and purple tie.

“Mr. Mpayipheli, when the state prosecutor asked you what your profession was, you said you were a farmer.”

He did not answer, because it was not a question.

“Is that correct?” The Indian had a soothing voice, as intimate as if they were old friends.

“It is.”

“But that is not the whole truth, is it?”

“I don’t know what . . .”

“How long have you been a so-called farmer, Mr. Mpayipheli?”

“Two years.”

“And what was your profession before you began farming?”

The state prosecutor, the serious woman with the gold-rimmed spectacles, stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. Mr. Mpayipheli’s work history is irrelevant to the case before the court.”

“Your Honor, the background of the witness is not only relevant to his reliability as a witness, but also to his behavior at the filling station. The defense has serious doubts about Mr. Mpayipheli’s version of the events.”

“I shall allow you to continue,” said the judge, a middle-aged white man with a double chin and a red complexion. “Answer the question, Mr. Mpayipheli.”

“What was your profession before you went farming?” repeated the advocate.

“I was a gofer at a motorbike retailer.”

“For how long?”

“Two years.”

“And before that?”

His heart began to race. He knew he must not hesitate, nor look unsure.

“I was a bodyguard.”

“A bodyguard.”

“Yes.”

“Let us go one step further back, Mr. Mpayipheli, before we return to your answer. What did you do before you, as you say, became a bodyguard?”

Where had the man obtained this information? “I was a soldier.”

“A soldier.”

He did not answer. He felt hot in his suit and tie. He felt sweat trickle down his back.

The Indian shuffled documents on the table before him and came up with a few sheets of paper. He walked to the state prosecutor and gave her a copy. He repeated the process with the judge and placed one before Thobela.

“Mr. Mpayipheli, would it be accurate to say you tend towards euphemism?”

“Objection, Your Honor, the defense is intimidating the witness and the direction of questioning is irrelevant.” She had glanced at the document and began to look uncomfortable. Her voice had reached a higher note.

“Overruled. Proceed.”

“Mr. Mpayipheli, you and I can play evasion games all day but I have too much respect for this court to allow that. Let me help you. I have here a newspaper report”—he waved the document in the air—“that states, and I quote: ‘Mpayipheli, a former Umkhonto We Sizwe soldier who received specialist training in Russia and the former East Germany, was connected until recently to a drugs syndicate on the Cape Flats . . .’ End of quote. The article refers to a certain Thobela Mpayipheli who was wanted by the authorities two years ago in connection with the disappearance of, and I quote once more, ‘government intelligence of a sensitive nature.’ ”

Just before the prosecutor leapt up, she glanced fiercely at Thobela, as if he had betrayed her. “Your Honor, I must protest. The witness is not on trial here . . .”

“Mr. Singh, are you going somewhere with this argument?”

“Absolutely, Your Honor. I ask for just a moment of the court’s patience.”

“Proceed.”

“Is that what this newspaper article is referring to, Mr. Mpayipheli?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me, I can’t hear you.”

“Yes.” Louder.

“Mr. Mpayipheli, I put it to you that your version of the events at the filling station is just as evasive and euphemistic as your description of your background.”

“That is . . .”

“You are a highly trained military man, schooled in the military arts, urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare . . .”

“I object, Your Honor—that is not a question.”

“Overruled. Let the man finish, madam.”

She sat down, shaking her head, with a deep frown behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. “As it pleases the court,” she said, but her tone said otherwise.

“And a ‘bodyguard’ for the drug syndicate in the Cape for two years. A bodyguard.

That is not what the newspapers say . . .”

The state prosecutor stood up, but the judge pre-empted her: “Mr. Singh, you are testing the patience of the court. If you wish to lead evidence, please await your turn.”

“My sincere apologies, Your Honor, but it is an affront to the principles of justice for a witness under oath to fabricate a story—”

“Mr. Singh, spare me. What is your question?”

“As it pleases the court, Your Honor. Mr. Mpayipheli, what was the specific purpose of your military training?”

“That was twenty years ago.”

“Answer the question, please.”

“I was trained in counter-espionage activities.”

“Did this include the use of firearms and explosives?”

“Yes.”

“Hand-to-hand combat?”

“Yes.”

“The handling of high-pressure situations?”

“Yes.”

“Elimination and escape.”

“Yes.”

“And at the filling station you say, and I quote: ‘I ducked behind the petrol pump,’ when you heard the shots?”

“The war was over ten years ago. I was not there to fight, I was there to fill up . . .”

“The war was not over for you ten years ago, Mr. Mpayipheli. You took the war to the Cape Flats with your training in death and injury. Let us discuss your role as bodyguard . . .”

The prosecutor’s voice was high and plaintive. “Your Honor, I object in the strongest—”

At that moment Thobela saw the faces of the accused; they were laughing at him.

“Objection sustained. Mr. Singh, that is enough. You have made your point. Do you have any specific questions about the events at the filling station?”

Singh’s shoulders sagged, as if wounded. “As it pleases the court, Your Honor, I have.”

“Then get on with it.”

“Mr. Mpayipheli, did you forget that it was you who attacked the accused when they left the filling station?”

“I did not.”

“You did not forget?”

“Your Honor, the defense . . .”

“Mr. Singh!”

“Your Honor, the accused . . . excuse me, the witness is evading the question.”

“No, Mr. Singh, it is you who are leading the witness.”

“Very well. Mr. Mpayipheli, you say you did not charge at the accused in a threatening manner?”

“I did not.”

“You did not have a wheel spanner or some tool . . .”

“I object, Your Honor, the witness has already answered the question.”

“Mr. Singh . . .”

“I have no further questions for this liar, Your Honor . . .”

4.

I think he believed he could make things right. Anything,” she said in the twilit room. The sun had dropped behind the hills of the town and the light entering the room was softer. It made the telling easier, she thought, and wondered why.

“That is the thing that I admired most. That somebody stood up and did something that the rest of us were too afraid to do, even if we wanted to. I never had the guts. I was too scared to fight back. And then I read about him in the papers and I began to wonder: maybe I could also . . .”

She hesitated a fraction and then asked with bated breath: “Do you know about Artemis, Reverend?”

He did not react at first, sitting motionless, tipped slightly forward, engrossed in the story she was telling. Then he blinked, his attention refocused.

“Artemis? Er, yes . . .” he said tentatively.

“The one the papers wrote about.”

“The papers . . .” He seemed embarrassed. “Some things pass me by. Something new every week. I don’t always keep up.”

She was relieved about that. There was an imperceptible shift in their roles—he the small-town minister, she the worldly-wise one, the one in the know. She slipped her foot out of its sandal and folded it under her, shifting to a more comfortable position in the chair. “Let me tell you,” she said with more self-assurance.

He nodded.

“I was in trouble when I read about him for the first time. I was in the Cape. I was . . .” For a fraction of a second she hesitated and wondered if it would upset him. “I was a call girl.”

At half-past eleven that night he was still awake on his hotel bed when someone knocked softly on his door, apologetically.

It was the public prosecutor, her eyes magnified behind the spectacles.

“Sorry,” she said, but she just looked tired.

“Come in.”

She hesitated a moment and he knew why: he was just in his shorts, his body glistening with perspiration. He turned around and picked up his T-shirt, motioning her to take the single armchair. He perched on the end of the bed.

She sat primly on the chair; her hands folded the dark material of her skirt over her plump legs. She had an officious air, as if she had come to speak of weighty things.

“What happened today in court?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“He wanted to blame me. The Indian.”

“He was doing his job. That’s all.”

“His job?”

“He has to defend them.”

“With lies?”

“In law there are no lies, Mr. Mpayipheli. Just different versions of the truth.”

He shook his head. “There is only one truth.”

“You think so? And what one truth is there about you? The one where you are a farmer? A father? A freedom fighter? Or a drug dealer? A fugitive from the state?”

“That has nothing to do with Pakamile’s death,” he said, anger creeping into his words.

“The moment Singh brought it up in court, it became part of his death, Mr. Mpayipheli.”

Rage flooded over him, reliving the day of frustration: “All that Mister, Mister, so polite, and objections and playing little legal games . . . And those two sitting there and laughing.”

“That is why I have come,” she said. “To tell you: they have escaped.”

He did not know how long he sat there, just staring at her.

“One of them overpowered a policeman. In the cells, when he brought him food. He had a weapon, a knife.”

“Overpowered,” he said, as if tasting the word.

“The police . . . They are short of manpower. Not everyone turned up on shift.”

“They both got away.”

“There are roadblocks. The station commander said they won’t get far.”

The rage inside him took on another face that he did not wish her to see. “Where would they go?”

She shrugged once more, as if she was beyond caring. “Who knows?”

When he did not respond, she leaned forward in the chair. “I wanted to tell you. You have the right to know.”

She stood up. He waited for her to pass him, then stood up and followed her to the door.

There was doubt in the minister’s face. He had shifted his large body back and cocked his head sideways, as if waiting for her to qualify her statement, to complete the sentence with a punch line.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I find it . . . unlikely.”

Somewhere she felt emotion. Gratitude? Relief? She did not mean to show it but her voice betrayed her. “My professional name was Bibi.”

His voice was patient as he responded. “I believe you. But I look at you and I listen to you and I can’t help wondering why. Why was that necessary for you?”

This was the second time she had been asked that. Usually they asked “How?” For them she had a story to fit expectations. She wanted to use it now—it lay on her tongue, rehearsed, ready.

She drew a breath to steady herself. “I could tell you I was always a sex addict, a nymphomaniac,” she said with deliberation.

“But that is not the truth,” he said.

“No, Reverend, it is not.”

He nodded as if he approved of her answer. “It’s getting dark,” he said, standing up and switching on the standard lamp in the corner. “Can I offer you something to drink? Coffee? Tea?”

“Tea would be lovely, thank you.” Did he need time to recover, she wondered?

“Excuse me a moment,” he said, and opened the door diagonally behind her.

She remained behind, alone, wondering what was the worst thing he had heard in this study. What small-town scandals? Teenage pregnancies? Affairs? Friday night domestics?

What made someone like him stay here? Perhaps he liked the status, because doctors and ministers were important people in the rural areas, she knew. Or was he running away like she was? As he had run off just now; as if there was a certain level of reality that became too much for him.

He came back, shutting the door behind him. “My wife will bring the tea soon,” he said and sat down.

She did not know how to begin. “Did I upset you?”

He pondered a while before he answered, as if he had to gather the words together. “What upsets me is a world—a society—that allows someone like you to lose the way.”

“We all lose our way sometimes.”

“We don’t all become sex workers.” He motioned towards her in a broad gesture, to include everything. “Why was that necessary?”

“You are the second person to ask that in the past month or so.”

“Oh?”

“The other one was a detective in Cape Town.” She smiled as she recalled. “Griessel. He had tousled hair. And soft eyes, but they looked right through you.”

“Did you tell him the truth?”

“I almost did.”

“Was he a . . . what do you call it?”

“A client?” She smiled.

“Yes.”

“No. He was . . . just . . . I don’t know . . . lost?”

“I see,” said the minister.

There was a soft tap on the door and he had to get up to take the tea tray.

5.

Detective Inspector Benny Griessel opened his eyes to his wife standing before him, shaking his shoulder with one hand and urgently whispering, “Benny,” she said. “Benny, please.”

He was lying on the sitting-room couch, that much he knew. He must have fallen asleep here. He smelt coffee; his head was thick and throbbing. One arm squashed under him was numb, circulation cut off by the weight of his body.

“Benny, we have to talk.”

He groaned and struggled to sit up.

“I brought you some coffee.”

He looked at her, at the deep lines on her face. She was still stooped over him.

“What time is it?” His words battled to connect with his vocal chords.

“It’s five o’clock, Benny.” She sat next to him on the couch. “Drink the coffee.”

He had to take it with his left hand. The mug was hot against his palm.

“It’s early,” he said.

“I need to talk to you before the children wake up.”

The message borne on her tone penetrated his consciousness. He sat up straight and spilled the coffee on his clothes—he was still wearing yesterday’s. “What have I done?”

She pointed an index finger across the open-plan room. The bottle of Jack Daniel’s stood on the dining-room table beside his plate of untouched dinner. The ashtray was overflowing and a smashed glass lay in shards beside the overturned bar stools at the breakfast counter.

He took a gulp of coffee. It burned his mouth, but could not take the sick taste of the night away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry isn’t good enough anymore,” she said.

“Anna . . .”

“No, Benny, no more. I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice was without inflection.

“Jissis, Anna.” He reached a hand out to her, saw how it shook, the drunkenness still not expelled from his body. When he tried to put his hand on her shoulder, she moved away from his touch, and that’s when he noticed the small swelling on her lip, already beginning to turn the color of wine.

“It’s over. Seventeen years. That’s enough. It’s more than anyone could ask.”

“Anna, I . . . it was the drink, you know I didn’t mean it. Please, Anna, you know that’s not me.”

“Your son helped you off that chair last night, Benny. Do you remember? Do you know what you said to him? Do you remember how you cursed and swore, until your eyes rolled back in your head? No, Benny, you can’t—you can never remember. Do you know what he said to you, your son? When you were lying there with your mouth open and your stinking breath? Do you know?” Tears were close, but she suppressed them.

“What did he say?”

“He said he hates you.”

He absorbed that. “And Carla?”

“Carla locked herself in her room.”

“I’ll talk to them, Anna, I’ll make it right. They know it’s the work. They know I am not like that . . .”

“No, Benny.”

He heard the finality in her voice and his heart contracted. “Anna, no.”

She would not look at him. Her finger traced the swelling on her lip and she walked away from him. “That is what I tell them every time: it’s the work. He’s a good father, it’s just his work, you must understand. But I don’t believe it anymore. They don’t believe it anymore . . . Because it is you, Benny. It is you. There are other policemen who go through the same things every day, but they don’t get drunk. They don’t curse and shout and break their stuff and hit their wives. It’s finished now. Completely finished.”

“Anna, I will stop, you know I have before. I can. You know I can.”

“For six weeks? That is your record. Six weeks. My children need more than that. They deserve more than that. I deserve better than that.”

“Our children . . .”

“A drunk can’t be a father.”

Self-pity washed over him. The fear. “I can’t help it, Anna. I can’t help it, I am weak, I need you. Please, I need you all—I can’t go on without you.”

“We don’t need you anymore, Benny.” She stood up and he saw the two suitcases on the floor behind her.

“You can’t do that. This is my house.” Begging.

“Do you want us on the street? Because it is either you or us. You can choose, because we will no longer live under the same roof. You have six months, Benny—that is what we are giving you. Six months to choose between us and the booze. If you can stay dry you can come back, but this is your last chance. You can see the children on Sundays, if you want. You can knock on the door and if you smell of drink I will slam it in your face. If you are drunk you needn’t bother to come back.”

“Anna . . .” He felt the tears welling up in him. She could not do this to him; she did not know how dreadfully hard it was.

“Spare me, Benny, I know all of your tricks. Shall I carry your suitcases outside, or will you take them yourself?”

“I need to shower, I must wash, I can’t go out like this.”

“Then I will carry them myself,” she said, and took a suitcase in each hand.

There was an atmosphere of faint despair in the detective’s office. Files lay about in untidy heaps, the meager furniture was worn out and the outdated posters on the walls made hollow claims about crime prevention. A portrait of Mbeki in a narrow, cheap frame hung askew. The floor tiles were a colorless gray. A dysfunctional fan stood in one corner, dust accumulated on the metal grille in front of the blades.

The air was thick with the oppressive scent of failure.

Thobela sat on a steel chair with gray-blue upholstery and the foam protruding from one corner. The detective stood with his back to the wall. He was looking sideways out of the grimy window at the parking area. He had narrow, stooped shoulders and gray patches in his goatee.

“I pass it on to Criminal Intelligence at Provincial Headquarters. They put it on the national database. That’s how it works.”

“A database for escapees?”

“You could say so.”

“How big would this database be?”

“Big.”

“And their names just sit there on a computer?”

The detective sighed. “No, Mr. Mpayipheli—the photos, criminal records, the names and addresses of families and contacts are part of the file. It is all sent along and distributed. We follow up what we can. Khoza has family in the Cape. Ramphele’s mother lives here in Umtata. Someone will call on them . . .”

“Are you going to Cape Town?”

“No. The police in the Cape will make inquiries.”

“What does that mean, ‘make inquiries’?”

“Someone will go and ask, Mr. Mpayipheli, if Khoza’s family has heard anything from him.”

“And they say ‘no’ and then nothing happens?”

Another sigh, deeper this time. “There are realities you and I cannot change.”

“That is what black people used to say about apartheid.”

“I think there is a difference here.”

“Just tell me, what are the chances? That you will catch them?”

The detective pushed away from the wall, slowly. He dragged out a chair in front of him and sat with his hands clasped. He talked slowly, like someone with a great weariness. “I could tell you the chances are good, but you must understand me correctly. Khoza has a previous conviction—he has done time: eighteen months for burglary. Then the armed robbery at the garage, the shooting . . . and now the escape. There is a pattern. A spiral. People like him don’t stop; their crimes just become more serious. And that’s why chances are good. I can’t tell you we will catch them now. I can’t tell you when we will catch them. But we will, because they won’t stay out of trouble.”

“How long, do you think?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Guess.”

The detective shook his head. “I don’t know. Nine months? A year?”

“I can’t wait that long.”

“I am sorry for your loss, Mr. Mpayipheli. I understand how you feel. But you must remember, you are only one victim of many. Look at all these files here. There is a victim in every one. And even if you go and talk to the PC, it will make no difference.”

“The PC?”

“Provincial commissioner.”

“I don’t want to talk to the provincial commissioner. I am talking to

you.

”

“I have told you how it is.”

He gestured towards the document on the table and said softly: “I want a copy of the file.”

The detective did not react immediately. A frown began to crease his forehead, possibilities considered.

“It’s not allowed.”

Thobela nodded his head in comprehension. “How much?”

The eyes measured him, estimating an amount. The detective straightened his shoulders. “Five thousand.”

“That is too much,” he said, and he stood up and started for the door.

“Three.”

“Five hundred.”

“It’s my job on the line. Not for five hundred.”

“No one will ever know. Your job is safe. Seven-fifty.”

“A thousand,” he said hopefully.

Thobela turned around. “A thousand. How long will it take to copy?”

“I will have to do it tonight. Come tomorrow.”

“No. Tonight.”

The detective looked at him, his eyes not quite so weary now. “Why such a hurry?”

“Where can I meet you?”

The poverty here was dreadful. Shacks of planks and corrugated iron, a pervasive stink of decay and uncollected rubbish. Paralyzing heat beat upwards from the dust.

Mrs. Ramphele chased four children—two teenagers, two toddlers—out of the shack and invited him to sit down. It was tidy inside, clean but hot, so that the sweat stained his shirt in great circles. There were schoolbooks on a table and photos of children on the rickety cupboard.

She thought he was from the police and he did not disillusion her as she apologized for her son, saying he wasn’t always like that; he was a good boy, misled by Khoza and how easily that could happen here, where no one had anything and there was no hope. Andrew had looked for work, had gone down to the Cape, he had finished standard eight and then he said he couldn’t let his mother struggle like this, he would finish school later. There was no work. Nothing: East London, Uitenhage, Port Elizabeth, Jeffreys Bay, Knysna, George, Mossel Bay, Cape Town . . . Too many people, too little work. Occasionally he sent a little money; she didn’t know where it came from, but she hoped it wasn’t stolen.

Did she know where Andrew would go now? Did he know people in the Cape?

Not that she knew.

Had he been here?

She looked him in the eye and said no, and he wondered how much of what she had said was the truth.

They had erected the gravestone.

Pakamile Nzululwazi. Son of Miriam Nzululwazi. Son of Thobela Mpayipheli. 1996–2004. Rest in Peace.

A simple stone of granite and marble set in the green grass by the river. He leaned against the pepper tree and reflected that this was the child’s favorite place. He used to watch him through the kitchen window and see the small body etched here, on his haunches, sometimes just staring at the brown water flowing slowly past. Sometimes he had a stick in his hand, scratching patterns and letters in the sand—and he would wonder what Pakamile was thinking about. The possibility that he was thinking of his mother gave him great pain, because it was not something he could fix, not a pain he could heal.

Occasionally he would try to talk about it, but carefully, because he did not want to open the old wound. So he would ask: “How are things with you, Pakamile?” “Is something worrying you?” or “Are you happy?” And the boy would answer with his natural cheerfulness that things were good, he was so very happy, because he had him, Thobela, and the farm and the cattle and everything. But there was always the suspicion that that was not the whole truth, that the child kept a secret place in his head where he would visit his loss alone.

Eight years, during which a father had abandoned him, and he had lost a caring mother.

Surely that could not be the sum total of a person’s life? Surely that could not be right? There must be a heaven, somewhere . . . He looked up at the blue sky and wondered. Was Miriam there among green rolling hills to welcome Pakamile? Would there be a place for Pakamile to play and friends and love? All races together, a great multitude, all with the same sense of justice? Waters beside which to rest. And God, a mighty black figure, kingly, with a full gray beard and wise eyes, who welcomed everyone to the Great Kraal with an embrace and gentle words, but who looked with great pain over the undulating landscape of green sweet veld at the broken Earth. Who shook his head, because no one did anything about it because they were all blind to His Purpose. He had not made them like that.

Slowly he walked up the slope to the homestead and stood again to look.

His land, as far as he could see.

He realized that he no longer wanted it. The farm had become useless to him. He had bought it for Miriam and Pakamile. It had been a symbol then, a dream and a new life—and now it was nothing but a millstone, a reminder of all the potential that no longer existed. What use was it to own ground, but have nothing?

6.

From the second-story flat in Mouille Point you could see the sea if you got the angle from the window right. The woman lay in the bedroom and Detective Inspector Benny Griessel stood in the living room looking at the photos on the piano when the man from Forensics and the scene photographer came in.

Forensics said: “Jesus, Benny, you look like shit,” and he answered: “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“What have we got?”

“Woman in her forties. Strangled with the kettle cord. No forced entry.”

“That sounds familiar.”

Griessel nodded. “Same MO.”

“The third one.”

“The third one,” Griessel confirmed.

“Fuck.” Because that meant there would be no fingerprints. The place would be wiped clean.

“But this one is not ripe yet,” said the photographer.

“That’s because her char comes in on Saturdays. We only found the others on Monday.”

“So he’s a Friday-night boy.”

“Looks like it.”

As they squeezed past him to the bedroom, Forensics sniffed theatrically and said, “But something smells bad.” Then he said in a lower voice, familiarly, “You ought to take a shower, Benny.”

“Do your fucking job.”

“I’m just saying,” he said, and went into the bedroom. Griessel heard the clips of their cases open and Forensics say to the photographer: “These are the only girls I see naked nowadays. Corpses.”

“At least they don’t talk back,” came the response.

A shower was not what Griessel needed. He needed a drink. Where could he go? Where would he sleep tonight? Where could he stash his bottle? When would he see his children again? How could he concentrate on this thing? There was a bottle store in Sea Point that opened in an hour.

Six months to choose between us and the booze.

How did she think he would manage it? By throwing him out? By putting yet more pressure on him? By rejecting him?

If you can stay dry you can come back, but this is your last chance.

He couldn’t lose them, but he couldn’t stay dry. He was fucked, totally fucked. Because if he didn’t have them, he wouldn’t be able to stop drinking—couldn’t she understand that?

His cell phone rang.

“Griessel.”

“Another one, Benny?” Senior Superintendent Matt Joubert. His boss.

“It’s the same MO,” he said.

“Any good news?”

“Not so far. He’s clever, the fucker.”

“Keep me informed.”

“I will.”

“Benny?”

“Yes, Matt?”

“Are you okay?”

Silence. He could not lie to Joubert—they had too much history.

“Come and talk to me, Benny.”

“Later. Let me finish up here first.”

It dawned on him that Joubert knew something. Had Anna . . .

She was serious. This time she had even phoned Matt Joubert.

He rode the motorbike to Alice, to see the man who made weapons by hand. Like their ancestors used to.

The interior of the little building was gloomy; when his eyes had adjusted to the poor light, he looked through the assegais that were bundled in tins, shafts down, shiny blades pointing up.

“What do you do with all of these?”

“They are for the people with tradition,” said the graybeard, his hands busy shaping a shaft from a long sapling. The sandpaper rasped rhythmically up and down, up and down.

“Tradition,” he echoed.

“They are not many now. Not many.”

“Why do you make the long spears too?”

“They are also part of our history.”

He turned to the bundle with shorter shafts. His finger stroked the blades—he was looking for a certain form, a specific balance. He drew one out, tested it, replaced it and took another.

“What do you want to do with an assegai?” asked the old man.

He did not immediately reply, because his fingers had found the right one. It lay comfortable in his palm.

“I am going hunting,” he said. When he looked up there was great satisfaction in the eyes of the graybeard.

“When I was nine, my mother gave me a set of records for my birthday. A box of ten seven-inch singles and a book with pictures of princesses and good fairies. There were stories on them and every story had more than one ending—three or four each. I don’t know exactly how it worked, but every time you listened to them, the needle would jump to one of the endings. A woman told the stories. In English. If the ending was unhappy I would play it again until it ended right.”

She wasn’t sure why she had brought this up and the minister said: “But life doesn’t work that way?”

“No,” she said, “life doesn’t.”

He stirred his tea. She sat with her cup on her lap, both feet on the floor now, and the scene was like a play she was watching: the woman and the clergyman in his study, drinking tea out of fine white porcelain. So normal. She could have been one of his congregation: innocent, seeking guidance for her life. About a relationship perhaps? With some young farmer? He looked at her in a paternal way and she knew: he likes me, he thinks I’m okay.

“My father was in the army,” she said.

He sipped his tea to gauge the temperature.

“He was an officer. I was born in Upington; he was a captain then. My mother was a housewife at first. Later on she worked at the attorneys’ office. Sometimes he was away on the Border for long stretches, but I only remember that vaguely, because I was still small. I am the oldest; my brother was born two years after me. Gerhard. Christine and Gerhard van Rooyen, the children of Captain Rooies and Mrs. Martie van Rooyen of Upington. The Rooies was just because of his surname. It’s an army thing; every other guy had a nickname. My father was good looking, with black hair and green eyes—I got my eyes from him. And my hair from my mother, so I expect to go gray early—blonde hair does that. There are photos from when they were married, when she also wore her hair long. But later she cut it in a bob. She said it was because of the heat, but I think it was because of my father.”

His eyes were on her face, her mouth. Was he listening, really hearing her? Did he see her as she was? Would he remember later, when she revealed her great fraud? She was quiet for a moment, lifting the cup to her lips, sipping, saying self-consciously: “It will take a long time to tell you everything.”

“That is one thing we have lots of here,” he said calmly. “There is lots of time.”

She gestured at the door. “You have a family and I—”

“They know I am here and they know it’s my work.”

“Perhaps I should come back tomorrow.”

“Tell your story, Christine,” he said softly. “Get it off your chest.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely.”

She looked down at her cup. It was half full. She lifted it, swallowed the lot in one go, replaced it on the saucer and put it down on the tray on the desk. She drew her leg under her again and folded her arms. “I don’t know where it went wrong,” she said. “We were like everyone else. Maybe not quite, because my father was a soldier, and at school we were always the army kids. When the

Flossies

flew out, those airplanes to the border, the whole town knew about it—our fathers were going to fight the Communists. Then we were special. I liked that. But most of the time we were like all the others. Gerhard and I went to school and in the afternoon our mother was there and we did homework and played. Weekends we went shopping and barbecued and visited and went to church and every December we went down to Hartenbos and there was nothing odd about us. Nothing that I was aware of when I was six or eight or ten. My father was my hero. I remember his smell when he came home in the afternoon and hugged me. He called me his big girl. He had a uniform with shiny stars on the shoulders. And my mother . . .”

“Are they still living?” the minister asked suddenly.

“My father died,” she said. With finality, as if she would not elaborate further.

“And your mother?”

“It’s a long time since I have seen her.”

“Oh?”

“She lives in Mossel Bay.”

He said nothing.

“She knows now. What kind of work I was doing.”

“But she didn’t always know?”

“No.”

“How did she find out?”

She sighed. “That is part of the story.”

“And you think she will reject you? Because now she knows?”

“Yes. No . . . I think she is on a guilt trip.”

“Because you became a prostitute?”

“Yes.”

“And is she to blame?”

She couldn’t sit still anymore. She stood up in a hurry, and walked over to the wall behind her to get more distance between them. Then she approached the back of the chair and gripped it.

“Maybe.”

“Oh?”

She dropped her head, letting her long hair cover her face. She stood like that, very still.

“She was beautiful,” she said at last, looking up and taking her hands off the chair-back. She moved to the right, towards the bookshelf, her eyes on the books, but she was not seeing them.

“They were in Durban on their honeymoon. And the photos . . . She could have had any man. She had a figure. Her face . . . she was so lovely, so delicate. And she was laughing, in all the photos. Sometimes I believe that was the last time she laughed.”

She turned to the minister, leaning her shoulder against the bookshelf, one hand brushing the books, caressingly. “It must have been hard for my mother when my father was away. She never complained. When she knew he was coming home, she would get the house in order, from one end to the other. Spring-cleaning, she called it. But never herself. Tidy, yes. Clean, but she used less and less make-up. Her clothes became looser, and more dull. She cut her hair short. You know how it is when you live with someone every day—you don’t notice the gradual changes.”

She folded her arms again, embracing herself.

“The thing with the church . . . that must be where it started. He came back from the Border and said we were going to another church. Not the Dutch Reformed Church on the base anymore; we would be going to a church in town, one that met in the primary school hall on Sundays. Clapping hands and falling down and conversions . . . Gerhard and I would have enjoyed it if our father hadn’t been so serious about it. Suddenly we had family devotions at home every day and he prayed long prayers about the demons that were in us. He began to talk of leaving the army, so that he could go and do missionary work, and he walked around with the Bible all day, not the little soldier’s Bible, a big one. It was a vicious circle, because the army was probably understanding at first, but later he began praying for God to drive the demons out of the colonel and the brigadier and said that God would open doors for him.”

She shook her head. “It must have been hard for my mother, but she did nothing.”

She walked back to her chair. “Not even when he started with me.”

7.

He drove the pickup to Cape Town, because the motorbike would be too conspicuous. His suitcase was beside him on the passenger seat. From Port Elizabeth to Knysna. He saw the mountains and the forests and wondered, as always, how it had looked a thousand years ago, when there were only Khoi and San and the elephants trumpeted in the dense bush. Beyond George the houses of the wealthy sat like fat ticks against the dunes, silently competing for a better sea view. Big houses, empty all year, to be filled perhaps for a month in December. He thought of Mrs. Ramphele’s corrugated iron shack on the sunburnt flats outside Umtata, five people in two rooms, and he knew the contrasts in this country were too great.

But they could never be great enough to justify the death of a child. He wondered if Khoza or Ramphele had passed this way; if they had driven this road.

Mossel Bay, past Swellendam and over the Breede river, then Caledon and eventually late in the afternoon he came over Sir Lowry’s Pass. The Cape lay spread out far below and the sun shone in his eyes as it hung low over Table Mountain. He felt no joy of homecoming, because the memories this place brought lay heavy on him.

He drove as far as Parow. There was a little hotel on Voortrekker Road that he remembered, the New President, where people stayed who wanted to remain anonymous, regardless of color or creed.

That is where he would begin.

Griessel stood in front of the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit building in Bishop Lavis and considered his options.

He could take the suitcase out of the boot and drag it past Mavis in Reception, around the corner and down the passage to one of the big bathrooms that remained after the old Police College became the new SVC offices. Then he could shower and brush his teeth and scrape off his stubble in the bleached mirror and put on clean clothes. But every fucking policeman in the Peninsula would know within half an hour that Benny Griessel had been turfed out of the house by his wife. That is the way it worked on the Force.

Or he could walk to his office just as he was, smelly and crumpled, and say he had worked through the night, but that story would only maintain the façade temporarily.

There was a bottle of Jack in his desk drawer and three packets of Clorets—two slugs for the nerves, two Clorets for the breath and he was as good as new. Jissis, to feel the thick brown liquid sliding down his throat, all the way to heaven. He slammed the boot shut. Fuck the shower; he knew what he needed.

He walked fast, suddenly light-hearted. Fuck you, Anna. She couldn’t do this; he would see a fucking lawyer, one like Kemp who didn’t take shit from man or beast. He was the fucking breadwinner, drunkard and all; how could she throw him out? He’d paid for that house, every table and chair. He greeted Mavis, turned the corner, up the stairs, feeling in his pocket for the key. His hand was shaking. He got the door open, closed it behind him, walked around the desk, opened the bottom drawer, lifted the criminal procedure handbook and felt the cold glass of the bottle underneath. He took it out and unscrewed the cap. Time for a lubrication, his oil light was burning red. He grinned at his own wit as the door opened and Matt Joubert stood there with an expression of disgust on his face.

“Benny.”

He stood transfixed, with the neck of the bottle fifteen centimeters away from relief.

“Fuck it, Matt.”

Matt closed the door behind him. “Put that shit down, Benny.”

He did not move, could not believe his bad luck. So fucking close.

“Benny!”

The bottle shook, like his whole body. “I can’t help it,” he said quietly. He could not look Joubert in the eyes. The senior superintendent came and stood next to him, took the bottle out of his hand. He let it go reluctantly.

“Give me the cap.”

Solemnly he handed it over.

“Sit, Benny.”

He sat down and Joubert banged the bottle down. He leaned his large body against the desk, legs straight and arms folded.

“What is going on with you?”

What was the use of answering?

“Now you are an abuser of women and a breakfast drinker?”

She had phoned Joubert. To kick him out was not enough—Anna had to humiliate him professionally too.

“Jissis,” he said with feeling.

“Jissis what, Benny?”

“Ah fuck, Matt, what is the use of talking? How does that help? I am a fuck-up. You know it and Anna knows it and I know it. What is there left to say? I’m sorry I’m alive?” He waited for some reaction, but none came. The silence hung in the room, until he had to know whether he would find some sympathy. He looked up carefully to see his commander’s expressionless face. Slowly Joubert narrowed his eyes and a red glow suffused his face. Griessel knew his boss was the hell-in and he retreated. Joubert grabbed him without speaking, jerked him out of the chair by his neck and arm and shoved him towards the door.

“Matt,” he said, “jissis, what now?” He felt the considerable power of the grip.

“Shut up, Benny,” hissed Joubert, and steered him down the stairs, the footfalls loud on the bare surface. Past Mavis and through the entrance hall, Joubert’s hand hard between his shoulders. Then they were outside in the bright sunlight. Never had Joubert been rough with him before. Their shoes crunched over the parking area gravel to the senior superintendent’s car. He said “Matt” again because he could feel pressure in his guts. This mood had never been directed at him before. Joubert did not respond. He jerked open the car door, his big hand pressing the back of Griessel’s neck, shoved him in and slammed the door.

Joubert climbed in at the driver’s side and turned the key. They shot off with screeching tires and this noise seemed to release a flood of anger inside Joubert. “A martyr,” he spat out with total disgust. “I catch you with a fucking bottle in your hand and that is the best you can do? Act the martyr? You drink and hit women and all I see is self-pity. Benny, Jesus Christ, that’s not good enough. In fourteen years, the fourteen fucking years I have worked with you, I have never seen a person so completely fuck-up his life without any help from outside. You should have been a bloody director, but where are you now, Benny? Forty-three and you’re an inspector—with a thirst as big as the Sahara. And you hit your wife and shrug your shoulders and say, ‘I can’t help it, Matt.’ You fucking hit your wife? Where does that come from? Since when?” Joubert’s hands were communicating too and spit sprayed against the windscreen while the engine screamed at high revolutions. “You’re sorry you’re alive?”

They drove towards Voortrekker Road. Griessel stared ahead. He felt the Jack in his hand again, the desire inside.

When it was quiet he said: “It was the first time, last night.”

“The first time? What kind of a fucking excuse is that? Does that make it all right? You are a policeman, Benny. You know that’s no fucking argument. And you’re lying. She says it has been threatening for months. Three weeks ago you shoved her around, but you were too drunk to do it properly. And the children, Benny? What are you doing to them? Your two children who have to see their drunkard of a father come home pissed out of his skull and assault their mother? I should lock you up with the scum, she should lay a fucking charge against you, but all that will achieve is more damage to your children. And what do you do? She throws you out and you run to a bottle. Just booze, Benny, that’s all you think about. And yourself. What the fuck is going on inside your head? What has happened to your brains?”

For an instant he wanted to respond, to scream: “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t want to be like this, I don’t know how I got here, leave me alone!” Because he was familiar with these questions, and he knew the answers—it was all pointless, it made no difference. He said nothing.

In Voortrekker Road the traffic was heavy, the traffic lights red. Joubert gave the steering wheel a slap of frustration. Griessel wondered where they were going. To the Sanitarium? It wouldn’t be the first time Joubert had dropped him off there.

The senior superintendent blew out a long breath. “Do you know what I think about, Benny? The whole time.” His voice had mellowed now. “Of the man who was my friend. The little sergeant who came here from Parow, green and full of go. The one who showed the whole bunch of arrogant detectives at Murder and Robbery how to do police work. The little guy from Parow—where is he, where did he go? The one who laughed and had a clever answer for everything. Who was a legend. Fuck, Benny, you were good; you had everything. You had instinct and respect. You had a future. But you killed it. Drank it up and pissed it away.”

Silence.

“Forty-three,” said Joubert, and he seemed to grow angry all over again. He wove through the cars ahead. Another red light. “And still you are a bloody child.”

Then only silence reigned in the car. Griessel no longer looked where they were going; he was thinking of the bottle that had been so close to his mouth. Nobody would understand; you had to have been there where he was. You had to know the need. In the old days Joubert had also been a drinker, partied hard, but he had never been to

this

place. He didn’t know and that’s why he didn’t understand. When he looked up again they were in Bellville, Carl Cronjé Street.

Joubert turned off. He was driving more calmly now. There was a park, trees and grass and a few benches. He pulled up. “Come, Benny,” he said and got out.

What were they doing here? Slowly he opened the door.

Joubert was striding ahead. Where were they going—was he going to beat him up behind the trees? How would that help? The traffic on the N 1 above droned and hissed, but no one would see a thing. Reluctantly he followed.

Joubert stopped between the trees and pointed a finger. When Griessel reached him he saw the figure on the ground.

“Do you know who that is, Benny?”

Under a heap of newspapers and cartons and an unbelievably grimy blanket a figure moved when it heard the voice. The dirty face turned upward, a lot of beard and hair and two little blue eyes, sunken in their sockets.

“Do you know him?”

“It’s Swart Piet,” said Griessel.

“Hey,” said Swart Piet.

“No,” said Joubert. “Meet Benny Griessel.”

“You gonna hit me?” the man asked. A Shoprite supermarket trolley stood parked behind his nest. There was a broken vacuum cleaner in it.

“No,” said Joubert.

Swart Piet looked askance at the big man in front of him. “Do I know you?”

“This is you, Benny. In six months. In a year.”

The man extended a cupped hand to them. “Have you got ten rand?”

“For what?”

“Bread.”

“The liquid version,” said Joubert.

“You must be psychic,” said the man, and laughed with a toothless cackle.

“Where are your wife and children, Swart Piet?”

“Long time ago. Just a rand? Or five?”

“Tell him, Piet. Tell him what work you used to do.”

“Brain surgeon. What does it matter?”

“Is this what you want?” Joubert looked at Griessel. “Is this what you want to be?”

Griessel had nothing to say. He only saw Swart Piet’s hand, a dirty claw.

Joubert turned around and headed for the car.

“Hey,” said the man. “What’s his case?”

Griessel looked at Joubert’s back as he walked away. He wasn’t going to hit him. All the way out here for a childish lesson in morality. For a moment he loved the big man. Then he grasped something else, turned back and asked: “Were you a policeman?”

“Do I look like a fool to you?”

“What were you?”

“A health inspector in Milnerton.”

“A health inspector?”

“Help a hungry man, pal. Two rand.”

“A health inspector,” said Griessel. He felt anger ignite inside him.

“Oh hell,” said Swart Piet. “Are you the guy from Saddles steakhouse?”

Griessel spun around and set off after Joubert. “He was a health inspector,” he shouted.

“Okay, one rand, my friend. A rand between friends?”

The senior superintendent was already behind the steering wheel.

Griessel was running now. “You can’t do that,” he shouted. Right up to the window. “You want to compare me with a fucking health inspector?”

“No. I’m comparing you with a fuck-up who can’t stop drinking.”

“Did you ask him why he drinks, Matt? Did you ask him?”

“It makes no difference to him anymore.”

“Fuck you,” said Griessel, the weariness and the thirst and the humiliation working together. “I won’t be compared with the cockroach patrol. How many bodies has he had to turn over? How many? Tell me. How many child victims? How many women and old ladies beaten to death for a cell phone or a twenty-rand ring? You want the old Benny? Are you looking for the fucker from Parow who was scared of nothing? I’m looking for him too. Every day, every morning when I get up, I look for him. Because at least he knew he was on the right side. He thought he could make a difference. He believed that if he worked long enough and hard enough, we would win, some time or other, to hell with rank and to hell with promotion; justice would triumph and that is all that mattered because we are the white hats. The guy from Parow is dead, Matt. Dead as a doornail. And why? What happened? What’s happening now? We are outnumbered. We aren’t winning; we are losing. There are more and more of them and there are less of us. What’s the use? What help is all the overtime and the hardship? Are we rewarded? Are we thanked? The harder we work, the more we get shat upon. Look here. This is a white skin. What does it mean? Twenty-six years in the Force and it means fuck-all. It’s not the booze—I’m not stuck in the rank of inspector because of the booze. You know that. It’s affirmative action. Gave my whole fucking life, took all that shit and along came affirmative action. Ten years now. Did I quit, like De Kok and Rens and Jan Broekman? Look at them now, security companies and making money hand over fist and driving BMWs and going home every day at five o’clock. And where am I? A hundred open cases and my wife kicks me out and I am an alcoholic . . . But I am still fucking here, Matt. I didn’t fucking quit.”

Then all his fuel was burnt and he leaned against the car, his head on his chest.

“I am still fucking here.”

“Hey!” shouted Swart Piet from the trees.

“Benny,” said Joubert softly.

He looked up slowly. “What?”

“Let’s go.”

“Hey!”

As he walked around to the other door, the man’s voice carried clear and shrill: “Hey, you! Fuck you!”

8.

Your father abused you,” said the minister with certainty.

“No,” she said. “Lots of call girls say that. The stepfather messed with me. Or the mother’s boyfriend. Or the father. I can’t say that. That was not his problem.”

She checked for disappointment in his face but there was none to see.

“Do you know what I would wish for if I had only one wish? To know what happened to him. I wonder about that a lot. What did he see to make him change? I know it happened on the Border. I know more or less which year, I worked it out. Somewhere in South West Africa or Angola. But what?

“If only I could remember more of how he was before. But I can’t. I only remember the bad times. I think he was always a serious man. And quiet. He must have . . . They didn’t all come back from the Border like that, so he must have been a certain kind of person. He must have had the . . . what is the word?”

“Tendency?”

“Yes. He must have had the tendency.”

She searched for something for her hands to do. She leaned forward and took the sugar spoon out of the white porcelain pot. It had a municipal coat of arms on the end of the curved handle. She rubbed the metal with the cushion of her thumb, feeling the indentations.

“The school held a fęte every year. On a Friday in October. In the afternoon there were Boeresport games and in the evening there were stalls. Tombola and target shooting.

Braaivleis.

Everyone would go, the whole town. After the games you would go home and dress up nicely—for the evening. I was fourteen. I borrowed some make-up from Lenie Heysteck and I bought my first pair of jeans with my savings. I had a sky-blue blouse on and my hair was long and I think I looked pretty. I sat in front of the mirror in my room that evening, putting on mascara and eyeshadow to match my blouse, and my lips were red. Maybe I used too much make-up, because I was still stupid, but I felt so pretty. That is something men don’t understand. Feeling pretty.

“What if I had taken my black handbag, walked into the sitting room and he had said, ‘You look beautiful, Christine.’ What if he had stood up, taken my hand and said, ‘May I have this dance, Princess?’ ”

She pressed the curve of the sugar spoon against her mouth. She felt the old and familiar emotion.

“That is not what happened,” said the minister.

“No,” she said. “That is not what happened.”

Thobela had memorized the address of Khoza’s brother in Khayelitsha, but he didn’t drive there directly. On the spur of the moment he left his original route two off ramps west of the airport and drove into Guguletu. He went looking for the little house he had lived in with Miriam and Pakamile. He parked across the street and switched off the engine.

The little garden that he and the boy had nurtured with so much care and effort and water in the sand of the Cape Flats was faded in the late summer. There were different curtains in the windows of the front room.

He and Miriam had slept in that room.

Down the street, childish voices shrieked. He looked and saw boys playing soccer, shirt-tails hanging out, socks around their ankles. Again, he remembered how Pakamile used to wait for him every afternoon on that street corner from about half-past five. Thobela used to ride a Honda Benly, one of those indestructible little motorbikes that made him look like a daddy-long-legs on it, and the boy’s face would light up when he came around the corner and then he would run, racing the motorbike the last hundred meters to their gate.

Always so happy to see him, so hungry to talk and keen to work in the front garden with its sunflowers, in the back vegetable garden full of runner beans, white pumpkins and plump red tomatoes.

He reached a hand out slowly to turn the key, reluctant to let go of the memories.

Why had everything been taken from him?

Then he drove away, back to the N2, and past the airport. He took the off ramp and turned right and Khayelitsha surrounded him—traffic and people, small buildings, houses, sand and smells and sounds, huge adverts for Castle and Coke and Toyota, hand-painted signboards for home industries, hairdressers and panel beaters, fresh vegetable stalls alongside the road, dogs and cows. A city apart from the city, spread out across the dune lands.

He chose his route with care, referring to the map he had studied, because it was easy to get lost here: the road signs few, the streets sometimes broad, sometimes impossibly narrow. He stopped in front of a house, a brick building in the center of the plot. Building materials lay about, an extra room had been erected to window height, an old Mazda 323 stood on blocks, half covered by a tarpaulin.

He got out, approached the front door and knocked. Music was playing inside, American rap. He knocked again, harder, and the door opened. A young girl, seventeen or eighteen, in T-shirt and jeans. “Yes?”

“Is this the home of Lukas Khoza?”

“He’s not here.”

“I have a message for John.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What sort of message?”

“Work.”

“John is not here.”

“That’s a pity,” he said, “he would have liked the job.” He turned to go, then stopped. “Will you let him know?”

“If I see him. Who are you?”

“Tell him the guy who gives good work tips was here. He will know.” He turned away again, as if he had lost interest.

“John hasn’t been here for ages. I don’t even know where he is.”

He sauntered towards the pickup and said with a shrug, “Then I will give the job to someone else.”

“Wait. Maybe my father will know.”

“Luke? Is he here?”

“He’s at work. In Maitland. At the abattoir.”

“Maybe I will go past there. Thank you.”

She did not say goodbye. She stood in the doorway, hip against the doorframe, and watched him. As he slipped in behind the wheel he wondered whether she spoke the truth.

She told the minister about the evening her father called her a whore. How he stood over her in the bathroom and made her scrub off the make-up with a face cloth and soap and water. She wept as he lectured her and said not in his house. There would be no whoring in his house. That was the night it began. When the thing happened inside her. As she recalled the tirade, she was aware of what was going on between her and the minister, because it was familiar territory. She was explaining The Reason and he wanted to hear it. They. Men looked at her, after she had done her job, after she had opened her body to them with gentle hands and caressing words and they wanted to hear her story, her tragic tale. It was a primitive thing. They wanted her really to be good. The whore with the golden heart. The whore who was so nearly an ordinary girl. The minister had it too—he stared intently at her, so ready to empathize with her. But at least with him, the other thing was absent. Her clients, almost without exception, wanted to know if it was also a sex thing—really good, but also horny. Their fantasy of the nympho myth. She was aware of all these things as she sketched her story.

“I’ve thought about it so much, because that is where it all began. That night. Even now, when I think about it, there is all this anger. I just wanted to look nice. For myself. For my father. For my friends. He didn’t want to see that, just all this other stuff, this evil. And then the religion thing just got worse. He forbade us to dance or go to movies and sleep over at friends and visit. He smothered us.”

The minister shook his head as if to say: “The things parents do.”

“I can’t get a grip on it. Gerhard, my brother, did nothing. We had the same parents and the same house and everything, but he did nothing. He just grew quiet and read books in his room, escaped into his stories and into his head. And me? I went looking for trouble. I wanted to become exactly what my father was afraid of. Why? Why was I built like that? Why was I made like this?”

The minister watched while she talked, watched her hands and eyes, the expressions that flitted in rapid succession across her face. He observed her mannerisms, the hair she used with such expertise, the fingers that punctuated her words with tiny movements and the limbs that spoke in an unbroken and sometimes deliberate body language. He placed it alongside the words and the content, the hurt and the sincerity and the obvious intelligence, and he learned something about her: she was enjoying this. On some level, probably unconscious, she enjoyed the limelight. As if, regardless of the trash that had been dumped on it, somewhere her psyche sheltered unscathed.

At twelve o’clock, hunger pangs drew Griessel’s attention away from the murder file he had been buried in. That was when he remembered that today there would be no sandwich, no lunch parcel neatly wrapped in clingfilm.

He looked up from the paperwork and the room loomed suddenly large around him. What was he going to do? How would he manage?

Thobela made an error of judgment with Lukas Khoza. He found him at the abattoir, in a blood-spattered plastic apron, busy spraying away the blood from the off-white floor tiles of the slaughterhouse floor with a fat red hosepipe. They walked outside so Khoza could have a smoke break.

Thobela said he was looking for his brother, John, because he had a job for him.

“What sort of work?”

“You know, work.”

Khoza eyed him in distaste. “No, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. My brother is trash and if you are his kind, so are you.” He stood, legs apart in a challenging stance, cigarette in hand, between the abattoir building and the stock pens. Large pink pigs milled restlessly behind the steel gates, as if they sensed danger.

“You don’t even know what kind of job I am talking about,” said Thobela, aware that he had chosen the wrong approach, that he had been guilty of a generalization.

“Probably the usual work he does. Robbery. Theft. He will break our mother’s heart.”

“Not this time.”

“You lie.”

“No lie. I swear. I don’t want him for a criminal purpose,” he said with spirit.

“I don’t know where he is.” Khoza crushed the butt angrily under the thick sole of his white gumboots and headed for the door behind him.

“Is there someone else who might know?”

Khoza halted, less antagonistic. “Maybe.”

Thobela waited.

For a long time Khoza hesitated. “The Yellow Rose,” he said, and opened the door. A high scream, almost human, rang out from inside. Behind Thobela the pigs surged urgently and pressed against the bars.

9.

Thobela drove to the Waterfront, deliberately choosing the road that ran along the mountain so that he had a view of the sea and the harbor. He needed that—space and beauty. The role he had played had disturbed him and he couldn’t understand why. Impersonation was nothing new to him. In his days in Europe it had been part of his life. The East Germans had coached him in it down to the finest detail. Living the Lie was his way of life for nearly a decade; the means justified by the goal of Liberty, of Struggle.

Had he changed this much?

He came around the bulging thigh of the mountain and a vista opened up below: ships and cranes, wide blue water, city buildings and freeways, and the coastline curving gracefully away to Blouberg. He wanted to turn to Pakamile and say: “Look at that, that is the most beautiful city in the world,” and see his son gaze in wonder at all this.

That is the difference, he thought. It felt as though the child was still with him, all around him.

Before Pakamile, before Miriam, he had been alone; he was the only judge of his actions and the only one affected by them. But the boy had moved his boundaries and widened his world so that everything he said and did had other implications. Lying to Lukas Khoza now made him as uncomfortable as if he had been explaining himself to Pakamile. Like the day they went walking in the hills of the farm and he wanted to teach his son to use the rifle with greater responsibility, a piece of equipment to treat with care.

The rifle had awakened the hunter in the boy. As they walked he pointed the unloaded rifle at birds, stones and trees, made shooting noises with his mouth. His thoughts went full circle until he asked: “You were a soldier, Thobela?”

“Yes.”

“Did you shoot people?” Asked without any macabre fascination: that is how boys are.

How did you answer that? How did you explain to a child how you lay in ambush with a sniper’s rifle in Munich, aiming at the enemy of your ally; how you pulled the trigger and saw the blood and brains spatter against the bright blue wall; how you slunk away like a thief in the night, like a coward. That was your war, your heroic deed.

How did you describe to a child the strange, lost world you lived in—explain about apartheid and oppression and revolution and unrest? About East and West, walls and strange alliances?

He sat down with his back to a rock and he tried. At the end he said you must only take up a weapon against injustice; you must only point it at people as a very last resort. When all other forms of defense and persuasion were exhausted.

As now.

That is what he would like to tell Pakamile now. The end justifies the means. He could not allow the injustice of his murder to go unpunished; he could not meekly accept it. In a country where the System had failed them, it was now the last resort, even if this world was just as hard to explain, just as complicated to understand. Somebody had to take a stand. Somebody had to say, “This far, and no further.”

That is what he had tried to teach the boy. That is what he owed his son.

He knocked on doors the whole afternoon, and by four o’clock Detective Inspector Benny Griessel knew the victim was forty-six-year-old Josephine Mary McAllister, divorced in 1994, dependable, unremarkable administrative assistant at Benson Exports in Waterkant Street. She was a member of the New Gospel Church in Sea Point, a lonely woman whose former husband lived in Pietermaritzburg and whose two children worked in London. He knew she was a member of the public library, favoring the books of Barbara Cartland and Wilbur Smith, owned a 1999 Toyota Corolla, had R18,762.80 in a current account at Nedbank, owed R6,456.70 on her credit card, and on the day of her death had booked a plane ticket to Heathrow, apparently planning to visit her children.

He also had, as with the previous two murders, not a single significant clue.

When he dragged his cases across the threshold of her apartment he understood the risk in what he was doing, but he told himself he had no choice. Where the hell should he go? To a hotel, where alcohol was one finger on the telephone away? Forensics had already been through here and there was no other key but the one in his pocket.

Josephine Mary McAllister’s flat had no shower, only a bath. He ran it half full and lay in the steaming water, watching his heart sending delicate ripples across the surface with each rhythmic beat.

The broad connection between McAllister, Jansen and Rosen was elementary. All middle-aged, living alone in Green Point, Mouille Point. No forced entry. Each strangled with an electric cord from the victim’s kitchen. How did the perpetrator pick his victims? On the street? Did he sit in a car and watch until he spotted a potential victim? And then just knock on the door?

Impossible. McAllister and Rosen’s apartment blocks had security gates and intercom systems. Women didn’t open up for strange men—not anymore. Jansen’s house had a steel gate at the front door.

No, somehow he befriended them. Then made a date for a Friday night and picked them up or brought them home. And used the electric cord, which he found in the kitchen. Did he take it into the sitting room or the bedroom? How did he manage to surprise them? Because there was not much sign of struggle—no tissue under fingernails, no other bruising.

He must be strong. Fast, and methodical.

The forensic psychologist in Pretoria said the fucker would have a record, possibly for minor offenses: assault, theft, trespassing, even arson. Most likely for sexual offenses, rape perhaps. “They don’t start with murder, they climb the ladder. If you catch him, you will find him in possession of pornography, sadomasochistic stuff. One thing I can tell you: he won’t stop. He’s getting more skillful and more and more self-confidence.”

Griessel took the soap and washed his body, wondering if she had sat in here before he fetched her. Had she prepared herself for the date, unknowing, a lamb to the slaughter?

He would get him.

Friday nights. Why Fridays?

He rinsed off the soap.

Was Friday the only night he was free of responsibilities? What professions were off on Friday nights? Or rather what professions worked on Friday nights? Only bloody policemen, that’s all—the rest of the world partied. And murdered.

He climbed out of the bath, walked dripping over to his cases and took out a towel. Anna had placed one neatly on top of the clothes. She had packed carefully for him, as if she cared. But now he rummaged around in the suitcases. He would have to hang the clothes up, or they would be wrinkled.

He had to find a place to stay. For six months.

He listened to the silence in the flat, suddenly aware that he was alone. That he was sober. He chose some clothes and dressed.

Despite her anger, Anna had packed his clothes with care. She would be in the kitchen now, still in her work clothes, clattering pots and pans, radio playing on the table. Carla would be sitting at the dining-room table with her homework books, twisting the point of the pencil in her hair. Fritz would be in front of the television, remote in hand, skipping channels continuously, searching, impatient. Always on the go. He was like that too—things must happen.

Jesus, what had happened to his life?

Pissed away. With the help of Klipdrift and Coke and Jack Daniel’s.

Alcoholics Anonymous, Step Ten: Continue to take personal inventory and when you are wrong, promptly admit to it.

He sighed deeply. Desire pressed against his ribcage from inside. He did not want to be here. He wanted to go home. He wanted his family back, his wife and his children. He wanted his life back. He would have to start over. He wanted to be like he was before—the policeman from the Parow station who laughed at life. Could one begin again? Now. At forty-three?

Where would you begin, to start over?

You don’t have to be a genius to work that one out.

He wasn’t sure whether he had said that out loud.

He must buy a newspaper and look for a place in the classified ads, because this fucking flat gave him the heebie-jeebies. But first he must phone. He found Mrs. McAllister’s phone directory in a drawer of the cupboard by the phone. He opened it near the front, and slid his finger down the list, turned a page, looked again until he found the number.

He would try one more time. One last fucking time.

He rang the number. It did not ring for long.

“Alcoholics Anonymous, good afternoon,” said a woman’s voice.

By chance Thobela bought the Argus.

It was something to do while he ate fish and chips from a cardboard carton, the seagulls waiting like beggars on the railing for alms. He spread the paper open on the table before him. First he read the main article without much interest—more political undercurrents in the Western Cape, allegations of corruption and the usual denials. He dipped the chips in the seafood sauce. That was when he spotted the small column in the right bottom corner.

COPS CALLED ““INCOMPETENT”—BABY RAPIST CASE DISMISSED

He read. When he had finished, he pushed the remains to one side. He gazed out over the quiet water of the harbor. Pleasure boats with sunburned tourists on board cruised out in a line to serve cocktails off Llandudno and Clifton when the sun went down. But he was blind to the scene. He sat there staring and motionless for a long time with his big hands framing the article. Then he read it again.

There was a knock on the study door and the minister said, “Come in.”

The woman who put her head around the door was in her middle years, her black hair cut short against her head and her nose long and elegant. “Sorry to disturb you. I have made some snacks.”

The two women summed each other up with a glance. Christine saw false self-assurance, subservience, a slim body hidden by a sensible frock. A busy woman with able hands that only labored in the kitchen. The sort of woman who had sex in order to have children, not for pleasure. A woman who would turn away stiffly if her husband’s mouth and tongue slid lower than the small, worn breasts. Christine knew her type, but she didn’t want to let on and tried to seem inconspicuous.

The minister stood up and crossed to his wife to take the tray from her. “Thank you, Mamma,” he said.

“It’s a pleasure,” she said, smiling tight-lipped at Christine. Her eyes said, for the tiniest moment, “I know your kind,” before she softly closed the door.

In a detached way the minister placed the tray on the desk—sandwiches, chicken drumsticks, gherkins and serviettes.

“How did you meet?” she asked. He had gone back to his chair.

“Rita and I? At university. Her car broke down. She had an old Mini Minor. I was passing on my bicycle and stopped.”

“Was it love at first sight?”

He chuckled. “It was for me. She had a boyfriend in the army.”

Why, she would have liked to ask. What did you see in her? What made you choose her? Did she look like the ideal rectory wife? A virgin? Pure. She imagined the romance, the propriety, and she knew it would have bored her to death at that age.

“So you stole her away from him?” she asked, but wasn’t really interested anymore. She felt an old jealousy rising.

“Eventually.” He smiled in a self-satisfied way. “Please, have something to eat.”

She wasn’t hungry. She took a sandwich, noting the lettuce and tomato filling, the way the bread was cut in a perfect triangle. She placed it on a plate and put it on her lap. She wanted to ask how he had managed to wait, how he had suppressed his urges until after the wedding. Did student ministers masturbate, or was that a sin too in their world?

She waited until he began to eat a drumstick, holding the leg bone in his fingers. He leaned forward so that he ate above the plate. His lips glistened with fat.

“I had sex the first time when I was fifteen,” she said. “Proper sex.”

She wanted him to choke on his food, but his jaw only stalled a moment.

“I chose the boy. I picked him out. The cleverest one in the class. I could have had anyone, I knew that.”

He was helpless with the chicken half eaten in his hand and his mouth full of meat.

“The more my father prayed about the demons in me, the more I wanted to see them. Every night. Every night we had to sit in the lounge and he would read from the Bible and pray long prayers and ask God to cast the Devil out of Christine. The sins of the flesh. The temptations. While we held hands and he sweated and talked till the windows rattled and the hair on my neck stood up. I would wonder, what demons? What did they look like? What did they do? How would it feel if they came out? Why did he focus on me? Was it something I couldn’t help? At first I didn’t have a clue. But then boys at school began to look at me. At my body.”

She didn’t want the plate on her lap anymore. She plonked it down on the desk and folded her hands under her breasts. She must calm down; she needed him, perfect wife and all.

Her father would inspect her every morning like one of his men. He would not let her out of the door until he had approved the length of her skirt. Sometimes he would send her back to tie up her hair or to wash off some barely visible mascara, until she learned to leave a little earlier and apply her make-up in the mirror of the school toilets. She did not want to forgo the newly discovered attention of boys. It was a strange thing. At thirteen she had been just one of the crowd: flat-chested, pale and giggly. Then everything began to grow—breasts, hips, legs, lips—a metamorphosis that made her father rabid and had an odd effect on all the men around her. Matric boys began to greet her, teachers began to linger at her desk, Standard Sixes began to look at her sideways and whisper to each other behind cupped hands. Eventually she twigged. It was during this time that her mother began to work and Christine became part of a group who went to a parentless house after school to smoke and occasionally to drink. And Colin Engelbrecht had said to her from behind the blue cloud of a Chesterfield that she had the sexiest body in school, it was now officially accepted. And if she would be willing to show him her breasts, just once, he would do anything.

The other girls in the room had thrown cushions at him and screamed that he was a pig. She had stood up, unbuttoned her shirt, unhooked her bra and exposed her breasts to the three boys in the room. She had stood there with her big boobs and for the first time in her life felt the power, saw the enthrallment in their eyes, the jaw-dropping weakness of lust. How different from her father’s terrible disgust.

That is how she came to know the demons.

After that, nothing was the same again. Her display of her breasts was talked about, she realized later, because the level of interest increased and the style of their approach changed. This act had created the possibility of wildness, the chance of getting lucky. So she began to use it. It was a weapon, a shield and a game. The ones she favored were occasionally rewarded with admission to her room and a long sweaty petting session in the midday heat of Upington, the privilege of stroking and licking her breasts while she watched their faces with absolute concentration and cherished the incredibly deep pleasure—that she was responsible for this ecstasy, the panting, the thundering heartbeat.

But when their hands began to drift downwards, she returned them softly but firmly to above the waist, because she wanted to control when that would happen, and with whom.

The way she wanted it, exactly as she fantasized when she lay in her bed late at night and masturbated, slowly teasing the devil with her fingers until she drove him out with a shuddering orgasm. Only to find the next night that he was back inside, lurking, waiting for her hand.

It was at the school sports day of her Standard-Eight year that she seduced the handsome, good and clever, but shy Johan Erasmus with his gold-rimmed glasses and fine hands. It happened in the long grass behind the bus shed. He was the one who was too afraid to look at her, who blushed blood red if she said hello. He was soft—his eyes, his voice, his heart. She wanted to give her gift to him because he never asked for it.

And she had.

10.

My name is Benny Griessel and I am an alcoholic.”

“Hello, Benny,” said thirty-two voices in a happy chorus.

“Last night I drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s and I hit my wife. This morning she kicked me out the house. I have gone one day without drinking. I am here because I can’t control my drinking. I am here because I want my wife and children and my life back.” While he was listening to the desperation in his voice, someone began to clap, and then the dingy little church hall resounded with applause.

He lingered in the dark outside the long, unimaginative building, instinctively taking an inventory of exits, windows and the distance to his pickup. The Yellow Rose must have been a farmhouse once, a smallholder’s home in the 1950s before the high tide of Khayelitsha pushed past.

Below the roof ridge was a neon sign with the name and a bright yellow rose. Rap music thumped inside. There were no curtains in the windows. Light shone through and made long tracks across the parking lot, joyful lighthouses on a treacherous black reef.

Inside they sat densely bunched around cheap tables. He spotted a few European tourists with the forced bonhomie of nervous people, like missionaries in a village of cannibals. He threaded his way through and saw two or three seats vacant at the pinewood bar. Two young black barmen busied themselves filling orders behind it. Waitresses slipped expertly up to them, each wearing a yellow plastic rose flapping from the thin T-shirt fabric above their chests.

“What’s your pleasure, big dog?” the barman asked him in a vaguely American accent.

Biehg dawg.

“Do you have Windhoek?” he asked in his mother tongue.

“Lager or Light, my friend?”

“Are you a Xhosa?”

“Yes.”

He would have liked to say, “Then speak Xhosa to me,” but he refrained, because he needed information.

“Lager, please.”

The beer and a glass appeared before him. “Eleven rand eighty.”

Eleven rand eighty? Alchemists Inc. He gave him fifteen. “Keep the change.”

He raised the glass and drank.

“I hope you will still feel like applauding when I have finished,” said Griessel when the ovation died down. “Because tonight I will say what I should have said in nineteen ninety-six. And you won’t necessarily like what you hear.” He glanced at Vera, the colored woman with the sympathetic smile who was chairing the meeting. A sea of heads was turned towards him, every face an echo of Vera’s unconditional support. He felt extremely uncomfortable.

“I have two problems with the AA.” His voice filled the hall as if he were there alone. “One is that I don’t feel I fit in here. I am a policeman. Murder is my specialty. Every day.” He gripped the back of the blue plastic chair in front of him. He saw his knuckles were white with tension and he looked up at Vera, not knowing where else to look. “And I drink to make the voices stop.”

Vera nodded as if she understood. He looked for another focal point. There were posters on the wall.

“We scream when we die,” he said, soft and slow, because he had to express it right. “We all cling onto life. We hang on very tight, and when someone pries our fingers loose, we fall.” He saw his hands were demonstrating this in front of him; two fierce claws opening up. “That is when we scream. When we realize it won’t help to grab anymore because we are falling too fast.”

The foghorn at Mouille Point mourned far and deep. It was deathly quiet in the church hall. He took a deep breath and looked at them. There was discomfort; the cheerfulness had frozen.

“I hear it. I can’t help it. I hear it when I walk in on a scene while they are lying there. The scream hangs there—waiting for someone to hear it. And when you hear it, it gets in your head and it stays there.”

Someone coughed nervously to his left.

“It is the most dreadful sound,” he said, and looked at them, because now he did want their support. They avoided his eyes.

“I never talked about it,” he said. Vera shifted as if she wanted to say something. But she mustn’t speak now. “People will think I’m not right in the head. That’s what

you

think. Right now. But I’m not crazy. If I were, alcohol would not help. It would make it worse. Alcohol helps. It helps when I walk in on a murder scene. It helps me get through the day. It helps when I go home and see my wife and children and I hear them laughing, but I know that scream lies waiting inside them as well. I know it is waiting there and one day it will come out and I am scared that I am the one who will hear it.”

He shook his head. “That would be too much to bear.”

He looked down at the floor and whispered: “And the thing that frightens me most is that I know that scream is inside

me.

”

He looked up into Vera’s eyes. “I drink because it takes away that fear too.”

“When last was John Khoza here?” Thobela asked the barman.

“Who?”

“John Khoza.”

“Yo, man, there are so many dawgs coming in here.”

He sighed and took out a fifty-rand note, pushing it with his palm over the bar counter.

“Try to remember.”

The note disappeared. “Sort of a thin dude with bad skin?”

“That’s him.”

“He mostly talks to the Boss Man—you’ll have to ask him.”

“When last did he come to talk to the Boss Man?”

“I work shifts, man, I’m not here all the time. Haven’t seen John-dawg for ages.” He moved off to serve someone else.

Thobela swallowed more beer. The bitter taste was familiar, the music was too loud and the bass notes vibrated in his chest. Across the room near the window was a table of seven. Raucous laughter. A muscular colored man with complex tattoos on his arms balanced on a stool. He downed a big jug of beer, shouted something, although the words were lost, and held the empty jug aloft.

It was all too hollow, too contrived for Thobela, this joviality. It always had been, since Kazakhstan, although that was a long time ago. A hundred and twenty black brothers in a Soviet training camp who drank and sang and laughed at night. And longed for home, bone-tired. Comrades and warriors.

The barman came past again.

“Where can I find the Boss Man?”

“It can be arranged.” He stood there expectant, without batting an eyelid.

He took out another fifty. The barman did not move. Another one. A palm swept the money away.

“Give me one minute.”

“The second problem is with the Twelve Steps. I know them off by heart and I can understand them working for other people. Step One is easy, because I fu . . . , I know my life is out of control, alcohol has taken over. Step Two says a Power greater than ourselves can heal us. Step Three says just turn over our will and our lives to Him.”

“Amen,” said a couple of them.

“The problem is,” he said with as much apology as he could put into his voice, “I don’t believe there is such a Power. Not in this city.”

Even Vera avoided his gaze. For a moment longer he stood in the silence. Then he sighed. “That is all I can say.” He sat down.

By the end of his second beer he saw the Boss Man approaching him from across the room, a fat black man with a shaven head and a gold ring on every finger. He would stop at a table here and there, almost shouting as he spoke to the guests—from the bar his words were drowned in the racket—until he reached Thobela. There were tiny drops of perspiration on his face as if he had exerted himself. Jewelry glittered as he offered his right hand.

“Do I know you?”

His voice was remarkably high and feminine and his eyes small and alert. “Madison Madikiza; they call me the Boss Man.”

“Tiny.” He used a nickname from the past.

“Tiny? Then my name is Skinny,” said the Boss Man. He had an infectious giggle that screwed up his eyes and shook his entire body as he hoisted it onto a bar stool. A tall glass materialized in front of him, the contents clear as water.

“Cheers.” He drank deeply and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, waving an index finger up and down in Thobela’s direction. “I know you.”

“Ah . . .” His pulse accelerated as he focused more sharply on the man’s features. He did not want to be caught unawares. Recognition meant trouble. There would be connotations, a track with a start and an end.

“No, don’t tell me, it will come to me. Give me a minute.” The little eyes danced over him, a frown creased the bald head. “Tiny . . . Tiny . . . Weren’t you . . . ? No, that was another fellow.”

“I don’t think—”

“No, wait, I must place you. Hell, I never forget a face . . . Just tell me, what is your line?”

“This and that,” he said cautiously.

The fingers snapped. “Orlando Arendse,” said the Boss Man. “You rode shotgun for Orlando.”

Relief. “That was a long time ago.”

“Memory like an elephant, my friend. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven, thereabouts, I still worked for Shakes Senzeni, God rest his soul. He had a chop shop in Gugs and I was his foreman. Orlando asked for a sit-down over division of territory, d’you remember? Big meeting in Stikland and you sat next to Orlando. Afterwards Shakes said that was clever, we couldn’t speak Xhosa among ourselves. Fuck, my friend, small world. I hear Orlando has retired, the Nigerians have taken over the drug trade.”

“I last saw Orlando two or three years ago.” He could remember the meeting, but not the man in front of him. There was something else, a realization of alternatives—if he had remained with Orlando, where would that have left him now?

“So, what do you do now?”

He could keep to his cover with more conviction now. “I am freelance. I put jobs together . . .” What would he have done when Orlando retired? Operated a nightclub? Run something on the periphery of the law. How close to a potential truth was the story he was fabricating now?

“A broker?”

“A broker.” There was a time when it was possible, when it could have been true. But that lay in the past. What lay ahead? Where was he going?

“And you have something for Johnny Khoza?”

“Maybe.”

Shouts rang out above the music and they looked around. The strong colored man was dancing on the table now with his shirt off. A dragon tattoo spat faded red fire across his chest while bystanders urged him on.

Boss Man Madikiza shook his head. “Trouble brewing,” he said, and turned back to Thobela. “I don’t think Johnny is available, my friend. I hear he’s on the run. They got him in Ciskei for AR and manslaughter. He did a service station—Johnny never thinks big. So when the court case went wrong, it cost him big money to buy a key, you know what I’m saying. I don’t know where he is, but he is definitively not in the Cape. He would have come creeping in here long ago if he was. In any case, I have better talent on my books—just tell me what you need.”

For the first time the possibility occurred to him that he might not get them. The possibility that his search could be fruitless, that they had crept into a hole somewhere where he could not get at them. The frustration pressed heavily down on him, making him feel sluggish and impotent. “The thing is,” he said, although he already knew it would not work, “Khoza has information on the potential job. A contact on the inside. Is there no one who would know where he is?”

“He has a brother . . . I don’t know where.”

“No one else?” Where to now? If he couldn’t find Khoza and Ramphele? What then? With an effort he shook off the feeling and concentrated on what the Boss Man was saying.

“I don’t know too much about him. Johnny is small time, one of many who try to impress me. They are all the same—come in here with big attitude, throw their money around in front of the girls like they were big gangstas, but they do service stations. No class. If Johnny has told you he has a contact on the inside for a serious score, you should be careful.”

“I will.” The farm was not an option. He could not go back. With this frustration in him it would drive him insane. What was he going to do?

“Where can I get hold of you? If I hear something?”

“I will come back.”

The Boss Man’s little eyes narrowed. “You don’t trust me?”

“I trust nobody.”

The little laugh bubbled up, champagne from a barrel, and a marshmallow hand patted him on the shoulder. “Well said, my friend . . .”

There was a crash louder than the music. The dancing dragon’s table had broken beneath him and he fell spectacularly, to the great enjoyment of the onlookers. He lay on the floor holding his beer glass triumphantly above him.

“Fuck,” said the Boss Man and got up from the stool. “I knew things would get out of hand.”

The colored man stood up slowly and gestured an apology in Madikiza’s direction. He nodded back with a forced smile.

“He will pay for the table, the shit.” He turned to Thobela. “Do you know who that is?”

“No idea.”

“Enver Davids. Yesterday he walked away from a baby rape charge. On a technicality. Fucking police misplaced his file, can you believe it—a genuine administrative fuck-up; you don’t buy your way out of that one. He’s more bad news than the

Financial Mail.

General of the Twenty-Sevens. He got AIDS in jail from a

wyfie.

More cell time than Vodacom, and they parole him and he goes and rapes a baby, supposed to cure his AIDS . . . Now he comes and drinks here, because his own people will string him up, the fucking filthy shit.”

“Enver Davids,” said Thobela slowly.

“Fucking filthy shit,” said the Boss Man again, but Thobela was beyond hearing. Something was beginning to make sense. He could see a way forward.

His hands trembled on the steering wheel. They had a life of their own. He felt cold in the warm summer night and he knew it was withdrawal. He knew it was beginning—it was going to be a terrible night in the flat of Josephine Mary McAllister.

He reached out to the radio, locating the knob with difficulty, and pressed it. Music. He kept the volume low. At this time of night Sea Point’s streets were alive with cars and pedestrians, people going somewhere with purpose. Except for him.

They had made a circle around him once everyone was finished. They gathered around him, touched him as if to transfer something to him through their hands. Strength. Or belief? Faces, too many faces. Some faces told a story in the rings around their eyes and mouths, like the rings of a tree. Heartbreaking stories. Others were masks hiding secrets. But the eyes, all the eyes were the same—piercing, glowing with willpower, like someone in floodwaters hanging on to a thin green branch. He will see, they said. He will see. What he did see was that he was part of The Last Chance Club. He felt the same desperation, the same dragging floodwaters.

The tremor ran through him like a fever. He could hear their voices and he turned the music up. Rhythm filled the car. Louder. Rock, Afrikaans, he tried to follow the words.

Ek wil huis toe gaan na Mamma toe,

Ek wil huis toe gaan na Mamma toe.

Too much synthesizer, he thought, not quite right, but good.

Die rivier is vol, my trane rol.

He parked in front of the block of flats, but didn’t get out. He allowed his fingers to run down the imaginary neck of a base guitar—that’s what the song needed, more base. Lord, it would be good to hold a base guitar again. The trembling limb jerked to a rhythm all of its own and made him want to laugh out loud.

’n Bokkie wat vanaand by my wil le a . . .

Nostalgia. Where were the days, where was the twenty-year-old little fucker who throttled a base guitar in the police dance band until the very walls shook?

Sy kan maar le a, ek is ’n loslappie.

Emotion. His eyes burned. Fuck, no, he wasn’t a crybaby. He banged the radio off, opened the door and got out fast, so he could get away from this place.

11.

The minister wondered if she was telling the whole truth—he searched between her words and in her body language. He could see the anger, old and new, the involuntary physical self-consciousness. The continuous, practiced offering of mouth, breasts and hair. Her eyes had a strange shape, almost oriental. And they were small. Her features were not delicate, but had an attractive regularity. Her neck was not thin, but strong. Her gaze sometimes skittered away as though she might betray something: a thirst for acceptance? Or was there something rotten? Or spoilt, like a child still wanting her own way, craving attention and respect, an ego feeding on alternating current—now brave, now incredibly fragile.

Fascinating.

He phoned his wife just after ten, when he knew she would have had her bath and would be sitting on their bed with her dressing gown pulled above her knees smoothing cream on her legs, and then turning to the mirror and doing the same to her face with delicate movements of her fingertips. He wanted to be there now to watch her do it, because his memories of that were not recent.

“I am sober,” was the first thing he said.

“That’s good,” she said, but without enthusiasm, so that he didn’t know how to continue.

“Anna . . .”

She did not speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said with feeling.

“So am I, Benny.” Without inflection.

“Don’t you want to know where I am?”

“No.”

He nodded as if he had been expecting it.

“I’ll say goodnight then.”

“Goodnight, Benny.” She put the phone down and he held his cell phone to his ear for a little longer and he knew she did not believe he would make it.

Perhaps she was right.

She saw that she had entranced him and said: “In Standard Nine I slept with a teacher. And with a buddy of my father.” But he did not react.

“What do you think?” she asked. Suddenly she had to know.

He hesitated for so long that she became anxious. Had he heard, was he listening? Or was he revolted by her?

“I think you are deliberately trying to shock me,” he said, but he was smiling at her and his tone was as soft as water.

For a moment she was embarrassed. Unconsciously, her hand flew up to her hair, the fingers twisting the ends.

“What interests me is why you would want to do that. Do you still think I will judge you?”

It was only part of the truth, but she nodded fractionally.

“I can hardly blame you for that, as I suspect experience has taught you that that is what people do.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Let me tell you that counseling from a Christian point of view distinguishes between the person and the deed. What we do is sometimes unacceptable to God, but we are never unacceptable to Him. And He expects the same from me, if I am to do His work.”

“My father also thought he was doing God’s work.” The words were out in reflex, an old anger.

He grimaced as if in pain, as if she had no right to make this comparison.

“The Bible has been used for many agendas. Fear too.”

“So why does God allow that?” She knew the question was lying in wait and she had not seen it.

“You must remember . . .”

Her hands seemed to lose their grip, she seemed to have lost her footing. “No, tell me. Why? Why did He write the Bible like that so that everyone could use it as they please?” She could hear her own voice, the way it spiraled, how it carried the emotion with it. “If He loves us so much? What did I do to Him? Why didn’t He give me an easy road too? Like you and your wife? Why did He give me Viljoen and then allow him to blow his brains out? What was my sin? He gave me my father—what chance did I have after that? If He wanted me to be stronger, why didn’t He make me stronger? Or cleverer? I was a child. How was I supposed to know? How was I supposed to know grown-ups were fucked up?” The sound of the swear word was sharp and cutting and she heard it as he would and it made her stop. Angrily, she wiped the wet off her cheeks with the back of her hand.

When he did react, he surprised her again. “You are in trouble,” he said nearly inaudibly.

She nodded. And sniffed.

He opened a drawer, took out a box of tissues and pushed it over the desk towards her. Somehow this gesture disappointed her. History—she was not the first.

“Big trouble,” he said.

She ignored the tissues. “Yes.”

He put a big, freckled hand on the cardboard box. “And it has to do with this?”

“Yes,” she said, “it has to do with that.”

“And you are afraid,” he said.

She nodded.

He pressed a hand over the man’s mouth and the assegai blade against his throat and waited for him to wake. It came with a jerk of the body and eyes opening wide and wild. He put his head close to the small ear and whispered, “If you keep quiet, I will give you a chance.” He felt the power of Davids’s body straining against the pressure. He cut him with the tip of the blade against the throat, but lightly, just so that he could feel the sting. “Lie still.”

Davids subsided, but his mouth moved under the hand.

“Quiet,” he whispered again, the stink of drink in his nostrils. He wondered how sober Davids was, but he could wait no longer—it was nearly four o’clock.

“Let’s go outside, you and me. Understand?”

The shaven head nodded.

“If you make a noise before we are outside, I will cut you.”

Nod.

“Come.” He allowed him to get up, got behind him with the assegai under Davids’s chin, arm around his throat. They shuffled through the dark house to the front door. He felt the tension in the man’s muscles and he knew the adrenaline was flowing in him too. They were outside, on the pavement, and he took a quick step back. He waited for Davids to turn to him, saw the dragon’s raging red eyes, and took the knife from his pocket, a long butcher’s knife he had found in a kitchen drawer.

He passed it to the colored man.

“Here,” he said. “This is your chance.”

At quarter-past seven when Griessel entered the parade room of the Serious and Violent Crimes building in Bishop Lavis, he did not feel the buzz.

He sat with his head down, paging aimlessly through the dossier on his lap, searching for a starting point on which to build his oral report. He was light-headed—thoughts darting like silver fish, diving aimlessly into a green sea, this way, that way, evasive, always out of reach. His hands were sweating. He couldn’t say he had nothing to report. They would laugh at him. Joubert would crap him out. He would have to say he was waiting for Forensics. Jissis, if he could just keep his hands still. He felt nauseous, an urge to throw up, vomit out all the shit.

Senior Superintendent Matt Joubert clapped his hands twice and the sharp sound echoed through him. The voices of the detectives quieted.

“You have probably all heard,” said Joubert, and a reaction ran through his audience: “Tell them, Bushy.” There was contentment in his voice and Griessel read the mood. Something was going on.

Bezuidenhout stood against the opposite wall and Griessel tried to focus on him, his eyes flickering, blink-blink-blink-blink. He heard Bushy’s gravely voice: “Last night Enver Davids was stabbed to death in Kraaifontein.”

A joyful riot broke out in the parade room. Griessel was perplexed. Who was Davids?

The noise droned through Griessel, the sickness growing inside. Christ, he was sick, sick as a dog.

“His pals say they went drinking at a shebeen in Khayelitsha and came home to the house in Kraaifontein about one a.m., when they went to sleep. This morning, just after five, someone knocked on the door to say there was a man lying dead in the street.”

Griessel knew he would hear the sound.

“Nobody heard or saw anything,” said Inspector Bushy Bezuidenhout. “It looks like a knife fight. Davids has slash wounds to the hands and one on the neck, but at this stage the fatal wound seems to be a stab through the heart.”

Griessel saw Davids fall backwards, mouth stretched wide, the fillings in his teeth rusty brown. The scream, at first as thick as molasses, a tongue slowly sticking out, and the scream growing thin, thinner than blood. And it came to him.

“They should have cut off his balls,” said Vaughn Cupido.

The policemen laughed and that made the sound accelerate, the long thin trail scorched through the ether. Griessel jerked his head away, but the sound found him.

Then he vomited, dry and retching and he heard the laughter and heard someone say his name. Joubert? “Benny, are you alright? Benny?” But he was not fucking alright, the noise was in his head, and it would never get out.

He drove first to the hotel room in Parow. Davids’s blood was on his arms and clothes. Boss Man’s words repeated in his head:

He got AIDS in jail from a

wyfie.

He washed his big body with great concentration, scrubbed down with soap and water, washed his clothes afterwards in the bath, put on a clean set and walked out to his pickup.

It was past five when he came outside—the east was beginning to change color. He took the N1 and then the N7 and the Table View off ramp near the smoking, burning refinery where a thousand lights still shone. Minibus taxis were already busy. He drove as far as Blouberg, thinking of nothing. He got out at the sea. It was a cloudless morning. An unsettled breeze still looking for direction blew softly against his skin. He looked up to the mountain where the first rays of the sun made deep shadows on the cliffs, like the wrinkles of an old man. Then he breathed, slowly in and out.

Only when his pulse had slowed to normal did he take from the cubbyhole, where he had stowed it yesterday, the

Argus

article, neatly torn out.

“Does someone want to harm you?” asked the minister.

She blew her nose loudly and looked at him apologetically, rolling up the tissue in her hand. She took another and blew again.

“Yes.”

“Who?” He reached under his desk and brought out a white plastic wastepaper basket. She tossed the tissues into it, took another and wiped her eyes and cheeks.

“There is more than one,” she said, and the emotions threatened again. She waited a moment for them to subside. “More than one.”

12.

Are you sure he is guilty?” he had asked Boss Man Madikiza, because ideas had materialized in his head out of nowhere and his blood was boiling.

The fat man snorted and said Davids had been in his office before the drinking began. Boastful and smug. The police had his cum, in their hands, the dee-en-ay evidence, they could have nailed him right there with a life sentence with their test tubes and their microscopes and then they

moered

the bottle away, thick as bricks, and so the prosecutor came up to the judge dragging his feet and said dyor onner, we fucked up a little, no more dee-en-ay, no more rape charge. Did that judge

kak

them out, my bro’, like you won’t believe. “What kind of person?” the Boss Man asked Thobela with total revulsion, “what kind of person rapes a baby, I ask you?”

He had nothing to say.

“And they’ve gone and abolished the death penalty,” the Boss Man said as he got up.

Thobela said goodbye and left and went and sat in his pickup. He put his hand behind the seat and felt the polished shaft of the assegai. He stroked the wood with his fingers, back and forth, back and forth.

Someone had to say, “This far, and no further.”

Back and forth.

So he waited for them.

When the minister moved away from her and sat on the edge of the desk, she knew something had altered between them, a gap had been bridged. Maybe it was just on her side that a certain anxiety had subsided, a fear allayed, but she could see a change in his body language—more ease.

If he would be patient, she said, she would like to tell the whole story, everything. So that he could understand. Perhaps so she could also understand, because it was hard. For so long she had believed she was doing what she had to, following the only course available. But now . . . she wasn’t so sure.

Take your time, he said, and his smile was different. Paternal.

The last thing Griessel could remember, before they took him to Casualty at Tygerberg Hospital and injected him with some or other shit that made his head soft and easy, was Matt Joubert holding his hand. The senior superintendent, who said to him all the way in the ambulance, over and over: “It’s just the DTs, Benny, don’t worry. It’s just the DTs.” His voice bore more worry than comfort.

She went to university to study physiotherapy. The whole family accompanied her on a scorching hot Free State day in January. Her father had made them all kneel in her hostel room and had prayed for her, a long dramatic prayer that made the sweat pop out on his frowning forehead and exposed the wickedness of Bloemfontein in detail.

She remained standing on the pavement when the white Toyota Cressida eventually drove away. She felt wonderful: intensely liberated, a floating, euphoric sensation. “I felt as though I could fly,” were the words she used. Until she saw her mother look back. For the first time she could really see her family from the outside, and her mother’s expression upset her. In that short-lived moment, the second or two before the mask was replaced, she read in her mother’s face longing, envy and desire—as if she would have liked to stay behind, escape as her daughter had. It was Christine’s first insight, her first knowledge that she was not the only victim.

She had meant to write to her mother after initiation, a letter of solidarity, love and appreciation. She wanted to say something when her mother phoned the hostel for the first time to find out how things were going. But she never could find the right words. Maybe it was guilt—she had escaped and her mother had not. Maybe it was the new world that never left time or space for melancholy thoughts. She was swept up in student life. She enjoyed it immensely, the total experience. Serenades, Rag, hostel meetings, social coffee-breaks, the lovely old buildings, dances, Intervarsity, men, the open spaces of the campus’s lawns and streams and avenues of trees. It was a sweet cup and she drank deeply, as if she could never have enough of it.

“You won’t believe me, but for ten months I didn’t have sex. I was one hundred per cent celibate. Heavy petting, yes, there were four, five, six guys I played around with. Once I slept the whole night with a medical student in his flat in Park Street, but he had to stay above the belt. Sometimes I would drink, but I tried to only do that on a girls’ night out, for safety.”

Her father’s letters had nothing to do with her celibacy—long, disjointed sermons and biblical references that she would later not even open and deliberately toss in the rubbish bin. It was a contract with the new life: “I would do nothing to make a ba . . . a mess of it.”

She would not tempt fate or challenge the gods. She vaguely realized it was not rational, since she did not perform academically, she was constantly on the edge of failing, but she kept her part of the deal and the gods continued to smile on her.

Then she met Viljoen.

In sharp criticism of the state’s handling of the case, Judge Rosenstein quoted recent newspaper reports on the dramatic increase in crimes against children.

“In this country 5,800 cases of rape of children younger than 12 years old were investigated last year, and some 10,000 cases where children between 11 and 17 years old were involved. In the Peninsula alone, more than 1,000 cases of child molestation were reported last year and the number is rising. “What makes these statistics even more shocking is the fact that only an estimated 15 per cent of all crimes against children are actually reported. And then there is the matter of children as murder victims. Not only are they being caught in the crossfire of gangland shootings, or become the innocent prey of pedophiles, now they are being killed in this senseless belief that they can cure AIDS,” he said.

“The facts and figures clearly indicate that society is already failing our children. And now the machinery of the state is proving inadequate to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. If children can’t depend on the justice system to protect them, to whom can they turn?”

Thobela folded the article up again and put it in his shirt pocket. He walked down to the beach, feeling the sand soft beneath his shoes. Just beyond reach of the white foaming arcs spilling across the sand he stood, hands in pockets. He could see Pakamile and his two friends running in step along the beach. He could hear their shouts, see their bare torsos and the sand grains clinging to their skins like stars in a chocolate firmament, arms aloft like wings as their squadron flew in formation just above the waterline. He had taken them to Haga Haga on the Transkei coast for the Easter weekend. They camped in tents and cooked over a fire, the boys swam and caught fish with hand lines in the rock pools and played war games in the dunes. He heard their voices till late at night in the other tent, muffled giggling and chatting.

He blinked and the beach was empty and he was overwhelmed. Too little sleep and the after-effects of excess adrenaline.

He began to walk north along the beach. He was looking for the absolute conviction he had felt in the Yellow Rose, that this is what he must do; as if the universe was pointing the way with a thousand index fingers. It was like twenty years ago when he could feel the absolute rightness of the Struggle—that his origins, his instincts, his very nature had been honed for that moment, the total recognition of his vocation.

Someone had to say, “This far.”

If children can’t depend on the justice system to protect them, to whom can they turn?

He was a warrior and there was still a war in this land.

Why did it all sound so hollow now?

He must get some sleep; that would clear his perspective. But he did not want to, did not feel attracted to the four walls of the hotel room—he needed open space, sun, wind and a horizon. He did not want to be alone in his head.

He had always been a man of action, he could never stand by and watch. That is what he was and what he would be—a soldier, who faced the child rapist and felt all the juices of war flood his body. It was right, regardless how he might feel now. Regardless that this morning his convictions did not have the same impregnability.

They would start to leave the children of this land alone, the dogs, he would make sure of that. Somewhere Khoza and Ramphele were hiding, fugitives for the moment, invisible. But some time or other they would reappear, make contact or do something, and he would pick up their trail and hunt them down, corner them and let the assegai do the talking. Sometime or other. If you wanted to get the prey, you had to be patient.

In the meantime there was work to do.

“I was clueless about money. There was just never enough. My father put a hundred rand a month in my account. A hundred rand. No matter how hard I tried, it would only last two weeks. Maybe three if I didn’t buy magazines or if I smoked less or if I pretended I was busy when they went to movies or to eat out or chill . . . but it was never enough and I didn’t want to ask for more because he would want to know what I was doing with it and I would have to listen to his nagging. I heard they were looking for students at a catering business in Westdene. They did weddings and functions and paid ninety rand for a Saturday night if you would waitress or serve, and they gave you an advance for the clothes. You had to wear black pantyhose and a black pencil skirt with a white blouse. I went to ask and they gave me a job, two sweet middle-aged gays who would have a huge falling out every fortnight and then make up just in time for the next function.

“The work was okay, once you got used to being on your feet for so long, and I looked stunning in the pencil skirt, even if I say so myself. But most of all I liked the money. The freedom. The, the . . . I don’t know, to walk down Mimosa Mall and look at the Diesel jeans and decide I wanted them and buy them. Just that feeling, always knowing your purse was not empty—that was cool.

“At first I just did Saturdays, and then Fridays too and the occasional Wednesday. Just for the money. Just for the . . . power, you could say.

“Then in October we did the Schoemans Park golf-day party. I went outside for a smoke after the main course, and Viljoen was standing on the eighteenth green with a bottle in his hand and such a knowing look on his face. He asked me if I wanted a slug.”

They must have injected him with something, because it was morning when he woke, slowly and with difficulty, and he just lay with his face to the hospital wall. It was a while before he realized there was a needle and a thin tube attached to his arm. He was not shaking.

A nurse came in and asked him questions and his voice was hoarse when he answered. He might have been speaking too loudly, because she sounded far away. She took his wrist and in her other hand held a watch that was pinned to her chest. He thought it was odd to wear it there. She put a thermometer into his dry mouth and spoke in a soft voice. She was a black woman with scars on her cheeks, fossil remnants of acne. Her eyes rested softly on him and she wrote something on a snow-white card and then she was gone.

Two colored women brought him breakfast, shifting the trolley over the bed. They were excitable, chittering birds. They put a steaming tray on the trolley and said: “You must eat, Sarge, you need the nourishment.” Then they disappeared. When the doctor arrived it was still there, cold and uneaten, and Griessel lay like a fetus, hands between his legs and his head feeling thick. Unwilling to think, because all his head had to offer was trouble.

The doctor was an elderly man, short and stooped, bald and bespectacled. The hair that remained around his head grew long and gray down his back. He read the chart first and then came to sit beside the bed.

“I pumped you full of thiamin and Valium. It will help with the withdrawal. But you have to eat too,” he said quietly.

Griessel just lay there.

“You are a brave man to give up alcohol.” Matt Joubert must have talked to him.

“Did they tell you my wife left me?”

“They did not. Was it because of the drink?”

Griessel shifted partially upright. “I hit her when I was drunk.”

“How long have you been dependent?”

“Fourteen fucking years.”

“Then it is good that you stopped. The liver has its limits.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“I also felt like that and I have been dry for twenty-four years.”

Griessel sat up. “You were an alky?”

The doctor’s eyes blinked behind the thick lenses. “That’s why they sent for me this morning. You could say I am a specialist. For eleven years I drank like a fish. Drank away my practice, my family, my Mercedes-Benz. Three times I swore I would stop, but I couldn’t keep my balance on the wagon. Eventually I had nothing left except pancreatitis.”

“Did she take you back?”

“She did,” said the doctor and smiled. “We had two more children, just to celebrate. The trouble is, they look like their father.”

“How did you do it?”

“Sex played an important role.”

“No, I mean . . .”

The doctor took Griessel’s hand and he laughed with closed eyes. “I know what you mean.”

“Oh.” For the first time Griessel smiled.

“One day at a time. And the AA. And the fact that I had hit rock bottom. There was no more medication to help, except disulfiram, the stuff that makes you throw up if you drink. But I knew from the literature it is rubbish—if you really want to drink, you just stop taking the pills.”

“Are there drugs now that can make you stop drinking?”

“No drug can make you stop drinking. Only you can.”

Griessel nodded in disappointment.

“But they can make withdrawal easier.”

“Take away the DTs.”

“You have not yet experienced delirium tremens, my friend. That only comes three to five days after withdrawal begins. Yesterday you experienced reasonably normal convulsions and, I imagine, the hallucinations of a heavy drinker who stops. Did you smell strange scents?”

“Yes.”

“Hear strange things?”

“Yes.” With emphasis.

“Acute withdrawal, but not yet the DTs, and for that you should be thankful. DTs is hell and we haven’t found a way to stop it. If it gets really bad, you could get

grand mal

seizures, cardiac infarction or stroke, and any one of the three could kill you.”

“Jesus.”

“Do you really want to stop, Griessel?”

“I do.”

“Then today is your lucky day.”

13.

She was a colored woman with three children, and a husband in jail. She was the receptionist at the Quay Delta workshop in Paarden Island and it was never her intention to send the whole thing off at a tangent.

The

Argus

came at 12:30 every day, four papers for the waiting room so that clients could read while they waited for their cars to be finished. It was her habit to quickly scan the main news headlines of the day. Today she did this with more purpose because she had expectations.

She found it on the front page just below the fold in the newspaper. The headline already told her that all was not right.

POLICE LINKED TO KILLING OF ALLEGED CHILD RAPIST

Quickly she read through the article and clicked her tongue.

The South African Police Services (SAPS) might have been responsible for the vigilante-style murder of alleged child rapist Enver Davids last night. A spokesperson for the Cape Human Rights Forum, Mr. David Rosenthal, said his organization had received “sensitive information from a very reliable source inside the police services” in this regard. The source indicated that the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit (SVC) was involved in the killing.

HIV-positive Davids, who was freed on charges of murder and child rape three days after the SVC had misplaced DNA evidence pertinent to the case, was found stabbed to death on a Kraaifontein street early this morning.

Senior Superintendent Matt Joubert, head of the SVC, vigorously denied the allegation, calling the claim that two of his detectives tracked down Davids and killed him “malicious, spurious and devoid of all truth.” He admits that the unit was upset and frustrated after a judge sharply criticized their management of the case and then dismissed it . . .

The woman shook her head.

She would have to do something. This morning when she went into her dark kitchen to get the bottle of Vicks for her child’s chest she could see the movement from her window. She had been a witness to the awful dance on the pavement. She had recognized Davids’s face in the streetlight. Of one thing she was absolutely sure. The man with the short assegai was not a policeman. She knew the police; she could spot a policeman a mile away. She had had plenty of them on her doorstep. Like this morning when they had come to ask if she had seen anything and she had denied any knowledge.

She looked up the telephone number of the

Argus

on their front page and dialed it. She asked for the journalist who had written the article.

“It wasn’t the police who killed Enver Davids,” she said without introduction.

“To whom am I speaking?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“And how do you know this, madam?”

She had been expecting the question. But she could not say or they would get her. They would track her down if she gave too much information.

“You might say I have first-hand knowledge.”

“Are you saying you were involved in this killing, madam?”

“All I want to say is that it wasn’t the police. Definitely not.”

“Are you a member of Pagad?”

“No, I’m not. It wasn’t a group. It was one person.”

“Are you that person?”

“I am going to put the phone down now.”

“Wait, please. How can I believe you, madam? How do I know you are not a crank?”

She thought for a moment. Then she said: “It was a spear that killed him. An assegai. You can go and check that.”

She put the phone down.

That is how the Artemis story began.

Joubert and his English wife came to visit him that evening. All he could see was the way they kept touching each other, the big senior superintendent and his red-headed wife with the gentle eyes. Married four years and still touching like a honeymoon couple.

Joubert told him about the allegation that the unit was responsible for Davids’ death. Margaret Joubert brought him magazines. They talked about everything but his problem. When they left Joubert gripped his shoulder with a big hand and said, “Hang in there, Benny.” After they had gone he wondered how long it had been since he and Anna had touched each other. Like that.

He could not recall.

Fuck, when last had they had sex? When last did he even want to? Sometimes, in the semi-drunken state of his day, something would prompt him to think about it, but by the time he got home the alcohol would long since have melted the lead in his pencil.

And what of Anna? Did she feel the need? She didn’t drink. She had been keen in the days before he began drinking seriously. Always game when he was, sometimes twice a week, folding her delicate fingers around his erection and playing their ritual game that had begun spontaneously and they had never dropped. “Where did you get this thing, Benny?”

“Sale at Checkers, so I took four.”

Or: “I traded with a Jew for nine inches of boere sausages. Don’t be afraid, he’s bald.” He would think of something new every time and even when he was less ingenious and more banal she would laugh. Every time. Their sex was always joyous, cheerful, until her orgasm made her serious. Afterwards they would hold each other and she would say, “I love you, Benny.”

Pissed away, systematically, like everything.

He yearned. Where were the days, Lord, could he ever get them back? He wondered what she did when the desire was on her? What had she done the past two or three years? Did she see to herself? Or was there . . . ?

Panic. What if there was someone? Jissis, he would fucking shoot him. Nobody touched his Anna.

He looked at his hands, clenched fists, white knuckles. Slowly, slowly, the doctor had said he would make emotional leaps, anxiety . . . He must slow down.

He unclenched his fists and drew the magazines closer.

Car.

Margaret Joubert had brought him men’s magazines but cars were not his scene. Nor was

Popular Mechanics.

There was a sketch of a futuristic airplane on the cover. The cover story read,

New York to London in 30 Minutes?

“Who cares,” he said.

His scene was drinking, but they don’t publish magazines for that.

He switched off the light. It would be a long night.

The woman at the Internet café in Long Street had a row of earrings all down the edge of her ear and a shiny object through her nostril. Thobela thought she would have been prettier without it.

“I don’t know how to use these things,” he said.

“It’s twenty rand an hour,” she said, as if that would disqualify him straight away.

“I need someone to teach me,” he said patiently, refreshed after his afternoon nap.

“What do you want to do?”

“I heard you can read newspapers. And see what they wrote last year too.”

“Archives. They call them Internet archives.”

“Aaah . . .” he said. “Would you show me?”

“We don’t really do training.”

“I will pay.”

He could see the synapses fire behind her pale green eyes: the potential to make good money out of a dumb black, but also the possibility that it could be slow, frustrating work.

“Two hundred rand an hour, but you will have to wait until my shift is over.”

“Fifty,” he said. “I will wait.”

He had taken her unawares, but she recovered well. “A hundred, take it or leave it.”

“A hundred and you buy the coffee.”

She put out a hand and smiled. “Deal. My name is Simone.”

He saw there was another shiny object on her tongue.

Viljoen. He was not tall, barely half a head taller than she was. He was not very handsome, and wore a copper bracelet on his wrist and a thin gold chain around his neck that she never much liked. It was not that he was poor—he just had no interest in money. The Free State sun had bleached his eight-year-old 464 pickup until you would be hard pressed to name the original color. Day after day it stood in the parking lot of the Schoemans Park Golf Club while he coached golf, or sold golf balls in the pro shop or played a round or two with the more important members.

He was a professional golfer. In theory. He had only lasted three months on the Sunshine Tour before his money ran out because he could not putt under pressure. He got the shakes, “the yips,” he called them. He would set up the putt and walk away and line up and set himself up again but always putted too short. Nerves had destroyed him.

“He became the resident pro at Schoemans Park. I found him that night on the eighteenth green with a bottle in his hand. It was weird. It was like we recognized each other. We were the same kind. Sort of on the sidelines. When you are in a hostel, you feel it quickly—that you don’t quite belong. Nobody says anything, everyone is nice to each other and you socialize and laugh and worry together about exams, but you are not really ‘in.’

“But Viljoen saw it. He knew it, because he was like that too.

“We began to talk. It was just so . . . natural, from the beginning. When I had to go in, he asked me what I was doing afterwards, and I said I had to catch a lift back to the hostel, so I couldn’t do anything and he said he would take me.

“So when everyone had gone, he asked me if I would caddy for him, because he wanted to play a bit of golf. I think he was a little drunk. I said you can’t play golf in the dark, and he said that’s what everyone thinks, but he would show me.”

The Bloemfontein summer night . . . She could smell the mown grass, hear the night sounds, and see the half moon. She could remember the way the light from the clubhouse verandah reflected off Viljoen’s tanned skin. She could see his broad shoulders and his odd smile and the expression in his eyes and that aura about him, that terrible solitariness he carried around with him. The noise of the golf club striking the ball and the way it flew into the darkness and him saying: “Come, caddy, don’t let the roar of the crowd distract you.” His voice was gentle, self-mocking. Before every shot they would drink from the bottle of semi-sweet white wine still cold from the fridge. “I don’t get the yips at night,” he said, and he made his putts, long and short. In the dark he made the ball roll on perfect lines, over the humps in the greens, till it fell clattering into the hole. On the fairway of the sixth hole he kissed her, but by then she already knew she liked him too much and it was okay, absolutely okay.

“He played nine holes in the dark and in that time I fell in love,” was all she told the minister. She seemed to want to preserve the memories of that night, as if they would fade if she took them out of the dark and held them up to the light.

In the sand bunker beside the ninth hole they sat and he filled in his scorecard and announced he had a 33.

So much—she teased him.

So little—he laughed. A muted sound, sort of feminine. He kissed her again. Slowly and carefully, like he was taking care to do it right. With the same care he stretched her out and undressed her, folding each piece of clothing and putting it down on the grass above. He had knelt over her and kissed her, from her neck to her ankles, with an expression on his face of absolute wonder: that he had been granted this privilege, this magical opportunity. Eventually he went into her and there was intensity in his eyes of huge emotion and his rhythm increased, his urgency grew and grew and he lost himself in her.

She had to drag herself back to this present, where the minister waited with apparent patience for her to break the silence.

She wondered why memories were so closely linked to scent, because she could smell him now, here—deodorant and sweat and semen and grass and sand.

“At the ninth hole he made me pregnant,” she said, and reached out a hand for the tissues.

14.

Barkhuizen, the doctor with the thick spectacles, his long hair in a cheeky plait this time, came around again the next morning after Griessel had swallowed his breakfast without enthusiasm or appetite.

“I’m glad you’re eating,” he said. “How do you feel?”

Griessel made a gesture that said it didn’t matter.

“Finding it hard to eat?”

He nodded.

“Are you nauseous?”

“A bit.”

The doctor shone a light in his eyes.

“Headache?”

“Yes.”

He put a stethoscope to his chest and listened, finger on Griessel’s pulse.

“I have found you a place to stay.”

Griessel said nothing.

“You have a heart like a horse, my friend.” He took the stethoscope away, put it in the pocket of his white coat and sat down. “It’s not much. Bachelor flat in Gardens, kitchen and living room below, wooden stairs up to a bedroom. Shower, basin and toilet. One two per month. The building is old but clean.”

Griessel looked away to the opposite wall.

“Do you want it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’s that, Benny?”

“Just now I was angry, Doc. Now I don’t give a fuck.”

“Angry with whom?”

“Everyone. My wife. Myself. You.”

“Don’t forget it’s a process of mourning you are going through because your friend the bottle is dead. The first reaction is anger at someone because of that. There are people who get stuck in the anger stage for years. You can hear them at the AA, going off at everyone and everything, shouting and swearing. But it doesn’t help. Then there is the depression. That goes hand in hand with withdrawal. And the listlessness and fatigue. You have to get through it; you have to come out the other side of withdrawal, past the rage to resignation and acceptance. You must go on with your life.”

“What fucking life?”

“The one you must make for yourself. You have to find something to replace drink. You need leisure, a hobby, exercise. But first one day at a time, Benny. And we have just been talking about tomorrow.”

“I have fuck-all. I’ve got suitcases of clothes, that’s all.”

“Your wife is having a bed delivered to the flat, if you want the place.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“I did. She wants to help, Benny.”

“Why hasn’t she been here?”

“She said she believed too easily last time. She said this time she must stick to her decision. She will only see you when you are completely dry. I think that is the right thing.”

“You have all worked this out fucking beautifully, haven’t you?”

“The

Rooi Komplot,

the great conspiracy. Everyone is against you. Against you and your bottle. It’s hard, I know, but you’re a tough guy, Benny. You can take it.”

Griessel just stared at him.

“Let’s talk about your medication,” said Barkhuizen. “The stuff I want to prescribe . . .”

“Why do you do it, Doc?”

“Because the drugs will help you.”

“No, Doc, why do you get involved? How old are you?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“Fuck, Doc, that’s retirement age.”

Barkhuizen smiled and the eyes screwed up behind the thick lenses. “I have a beach house at Witsand. We were retired there for three months. By then the garden was lovely and the house was right and the neighbors met. Then I began to want the bottle. I realized that was not what I should do.”

“So you came back.”

“To make life difficult for people like you.”

Griessel watched him for a long time. Then he said: “The medication, Doc.”

“Naltrexone. The trade name is ReVia, don’t ask me why. It works. It makes withdrawal easier and there are no serious contraindications, as long as you stick to the prescription. But there is a condition. You must see me once a week for the first three months and you must go to the AA regularly. That is not negotiable. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition.”

“I’ll take it.” He had no hesitation.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes, Doc, I am certain. But I want to tell you something, so you know what you are letting yourself in for,” he said, and he tapped an index finger on his temple.

“Tell me, then.”

“It’s about the screaming, Doc. I want to know if the medication will help for the screaming.”

The minister’s children came to say goodnight. They knocked softly on the door and he hesitated at first. “Excuse me, please,” he said to her and then called, “Come in.” Two teenage boys disguised their curiosity about her with great difficulty. The older one was maybe seventeen. He was tall, like his father, and his youthful body was strong. His lightning glance assessed her chest measurement and her legs as she sat there. He spotted the tissue in her hand and there was an attentiveness about him that she recognized.

“G’night, Dad,” they said one after another and kissed him.

“Night, boys. Sleep well.”

“G’night, ma’am,” said the younger one.

“G’night,” said the other, and when his back was turned to his father, he looked into her eyes with undisguised interest. She knew he saw her hurt instinctively and the opportunities that offered, like a dog on a blood spoor.

She was annoyed. “Goodnight,” she said and turned her eyes away, unavailable.

They closed the door behind them.

“Richard will be head boy next year,” said the minister with a certain pride.

“You have these two boys?” A mechanical question.

“They are a handful,” he said.

“I can imagine.”

“Do you need anything? More tea?”

“I should go and powder my nose.”

“Of course. Down the passage, second door on the left.”

She stood up. Smoothed down her skirt, front and back. “Excuse me,” she said as she opened the door and walked down the passage. She found the toilet, switched on the light and sat down to urinate.

She was still annoyed with the boy. She was always aware that she gave off a scent that said to men, “Try me.” Some combination of her appearance and her personality, as if they knew . . . But even here? This little twerp. A minister’s son?

She became conscious of the loud noise of her urine stream in the stillness of the house.

Didn’t these people play music? Watch television?

She was sick of it. She didn’t want to smell like that anymore. She wanted to smell like the woman of this house, the faithful wife: an I-want-to-love-you woman. She had always wanted to.

She finished, wiped, flushed, opened the door and put off the light. She walked back to the study. The minister was not there. She stood in front of the bookshelf, looking at the bookends packed thick and thin beside each other—some old and hardbacked and others new and bright; all about God or the Bible.

So many books. Why did they have to write so much about God? Why was it necessary? Why couldn’t He just come down and say, “Here I am, don’t worry.”

Then He could explain to her why He had given her this scent. Not just the scent, but the weakness and the trouble. And why He had never tested Missus Fucking Prude here with her sensible frock and able hands? Why was she spared? Why did she get a dependable carthorse for a husband? What would she do if the elders of the church came sniffing around her with those hungry eyes that said, “My brain is in my penis”?

Probably catch her breath in righteous indignation and hand out tracts all round. The scene playing out in her head made her laugh out loud, just one short, unladylike laugh. She put her hand over her mouth, but too late. The minister was standing behind her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded and kept her back turned until she had control.

The extent of it nearly overwhelmed Thobela.

The girl with the earrings first gave him a basic lesson on the workings of the Internet, and then she let him click the mouse on the screen. He battled because the coordination between his hand and the mouse and the little arrow on the screen was clumsy. He improved steadily, however. She showed him connections and Web addresses, boxes he could type words in and the big “Back” arrow if he got lost.

When at last she was satisfied he could manage on his own and he had solemnly handed over the agreed amount, he began his search.

“

Die Burger

and IOL have the best online archives,” she said, and wrote down the www-references for him. He typed in his key words and systematically refined his search. Then came the flood.

At least 40 per cent of all cases of child rape can be ascribed to the myth that it cures AIDS.

People who exploit children for sex in many parts of the world are more likely to be local residents looking for a “good-luck charm” or a cure for AIDS than a pedophile or sexual tourist, rights activists told a UN conference on Thursday.

Thousands of schoolgirls in South Africa and the Western Cape are daily exposed to sexual violence and harassment at schools.

From April 1997 to March this year, 1,124 children who had been physically and sexually abused were treated by the TygerBear Social Welfare Unit for Traumatized Children at Tygerberg Hospital. This is only children who were brought to the hospital: the actual number is much greater.

Sexual molestation and the abuse of young children is reaching epidemic proportions in Valhalla Park, Bonteheuwel and Mitchells Plain. A spokesperson reports that 945 cases of sexual molestation and child abuse have been reported to their office.

Children as young as three years old watch social workers at the TygerBear Unit of the Tygerberg Hospital with wary eyes. Barely out of nappies, these victims of sexual assault have already learned that adults are not to be trusted.

The two domestic violence units on the Peninsula are working on more than 3,200 cases, of which the majority are complaints of serious sexual and other crimes against children.

Of every 100 cases of child abuse in the Western Cape, only 15 are reported to the police, and in 83 per cent of these cases the offender is known to the child.

Once an offender has been diagnosed as a “confirmed pedophile,” there will always be a chance that he will express his pedophilic tendencies again, said Professor David Ackerman, clinical psychologist at the University of Cape Town.

One report after another, a never-ending stream of crimes against children. Murder, rape, maltreatment, harassment, assault, abuse. After an hour he had had enough, but he forced himself to continue.

A three-year-old girl was locked in a cage while her grandparents allegedly sexually assaulted her and failed to provide for even her most basic needs, Mpumalanga police said on Wednesday. Sergeant Anelda Fischer said police recently received a tip-off from a traveling pastor that a child was being incarcerated in a compound outside White River.

Fischer said that when police went to investigate they found the girl had already been removed from the cage. However, she said there was evidence the child had been battered with sticks or other weapons and had been sexually assaulted. It also seemed the child had no clothes of her own and had to beg naked for food. She slept on bits of plastic in the cage.

Colin Pretorius, the owner and head of a crčche in Parow, is being charged on the grounds that he sexually assaulted eleven boys between the ages of six and nine years over a period of four years. He was released on bail of R10,000.

At last he stood and walked unsteadily to the desk to pay for his use of the Internet.

Viljoen and she had three months together before he blew his brains out.

“At first I was just angry with him. Not heartbroken—that came later, because I truly loved him. And I was scared. He left me with the pregnancy and I didn’t know what to do or where to go. But I was dreadfully angry because he was such a coward. It happened a week after I told him I was pregnant, on a Monday night. I took him to the Spur and told him there was something I had to tell him and then I told him and he just sat there and said nothing. So then I said to him he didn’t have to marry me, just help me, because I didn’t know what to do.

“Then he said: ‘Jissis, Christine, I’m no good as a father—I am a fuck-up, a drunken golfer with the yips.’

“I said he didn’t have to be a father, I didn’t want to be a mother yet, I just didn’t know what to do. I was a student. I had a crazy father. If he had to find out about the baby, he would go off the deep end. He would lock me up or something.

“Then he said let him think about it, make a plan, and the whole week he didn’t phone, and Friday night, just before I had to go to work, I decided I would phone him one last time and if he still tried to avoid me, well, then, fuck him, excuse me, but it was a very difficult time. And then they said there had been an accident, he was dead, but it wasn’t an accident. He had locked the pro shop and sat down at a little table and put a revolver against his head.

“It took me two years to stop being angry and remember that those three months with Viljoen were good. It was when I began to wonder what I would tell my child about her father. Sometime she would want to know and—”

“You have a child?” asked the minister; for the first time he was taken aback.

“. . . and I would have to decide what to tell her. He didn’t even leave a note. Didn’t even write anything for her. He didn’t even say he was sorry, it was depression, or he didn’t have the guts or anything. So I decided I would tell her about those three months, because they were the best of my life.”

She was quiet then and sighed deeply. After a pause the minister asked, “What is her name?”

“Sonia.”

“Where is she?

“That is what my story is about,” she said.

15.

Griessel almost missed it. Two nurses came around early in the morning with the meal trolley, when he was already dressed and packed and ready to be discharged. His mind was elsewhere and he was not listening to their chatter as they approached his hospital room.

“. . . so then when she found out it was an old trick of his, he confessed. She says he had worked out that all the middle-aged girls go and buy comfort food at the Pick and Pay on Friday nights because they will be sitting in front of the TV all evening and that’s when he pushes his trolley down the aisles and picks the prettiest one to chat up. That’s how he got Emmarentia. Oh, hallo, Sarge, up already? Cheese omelet this morning, everyone’s favorite.”

“No thank you,” he said, taking his suitcase and heading for the door. But he stopped and asked, “Friday nights?”

“Sarge?”

“Say that again about Emmarentia and Pick and Pay?”

“Hey, Sarge, you don’t have to be so desperate, you’re not bad looking,” said one.

“There’s something of the Russian noble in you,” said the other. “Such sexy Slavic features.”

“No, that’s not—”

“Maybe sometimes a bad hair day, but that can be fixed.”

“Anyway, that’s a wedding band I see, isn’t it?”

“Wait, wait, wait.” He held up his hands. “I’m not interested in women . . .”

“Sarge! We could have sworn you were hetero.”

He was starting to get cross, but he looked hard at their faces and saw their deliberate mischief. He laughed helplessly with them, from his belly. The door opened and his daughter Carla stood there in her school uniform. She was momentarily confused by the scene—then relieved. She embraced her father.

“I hope that’s his child,” one nurse said.

“Can’t be, he’s queer as a three-rand note.”

“Or his boyfriend in drag?”

They had Carla laughing with her head on his chest and eventually she said, “Hallo, Pa.”

“You will be late for school.”

“I wanted to know if you were alright.”

“I’m alright, my child.”

The nurses were leaving and he asked them to explain again about Emmarentia.

“Why do you want to know, Sarge?”

“I’m working on this case. We can’t work out how the victims are selected.”

“So the sarge wants to consult us?”

“I do.”

They sketched a verbal picture as an alternating duet. Jimmy Fortuin picked up an occasional score at the Pick and Pay on a Friday afternoon, because by then it was crawling with single women.

“But middle-aged. The young ones still have the guts to fly solo in the clubs, or they gang up, strength in numbers.”

“They buy food for Friday night and the weekend: treats, you know, to spoil themselves a bit. Comfort food.”

“Between five and seven, that’s hunting season for Jimmy, ’cause they’re all on the way home from work. Easy pickings, because Jimmy is a motor mouth, a charmer.”

“Just at Pick and Pay?”

“That’s just

his

convenience store, but Checkers would also work.”

“There’s something about a supermarket . . .”

“Kind of hopeless . . .”

“Desperation . . .”

“The Lonely Hearts Shopping Club.”

“Last stand at the OK Bazaars.”

“Sleepless in the Seven-Eleven.”

“You know?”

Laughing, he said he understood, thanked them and left.

He dropped Carla off at school with the car that Joubert had left for him.

“We miss you, Daddy,” she said as they stopped at the school gates.

“Not as much as I miss all of you.”

“Mommy told us about the flat.”

“It’s just temporary, my child.” He took her hand and pressed it. “This is my third sober day today,” he said.

“You know I love you, Daddy.”

“And I love you.”

“Fritz too.”

“Did he say that?”

“He didn’t have to say it.” She hurriedly opened her case. “I brought you this, Daddy.”

She took out an envelope and gave it to him. “You could pick us up at school sometimes. We won’t tell Mommy.” She grabbed him around the neck and hugged him. Then she opened her door.

“ ’Bye, Daddy,” she said with a serious face.

“ ’Bye, my child.”

He watched her hurry up the steps. His daughter with the dark hair and strange eyes that she had inherited from him.

He opened the envelope. There were photographs in it, the family picture they had taken two years ago at the school bazaar. Anna’s smile was forced. His was lopsided—not quite sober that night. But there were all four of them, together.

He turned the picture over.

I love you, Daddy.

In Carla’s pretty, curving handwriting, followed by a tiny heart.

“That December I worked, pregnant or not. I phoned home and said I would be staying. I wasn’t going home to Upington, or with them to Hartenbos. My father was not happy. He drove through to Bloemfontein to come and pray for me. I was petrified he would see that I was pregnant, but he didn’t; he was too busy with other things in his head. I told him I would stay in an outside room at Kallie and Colin’s place, as I was helping them with all the year-end functions, weddings and company do’s for employees and there weren’t so many students to help. I wanted to make good money, so that I would be more financially independent.

“That was the last time I saw him. He kissed me on the cheek before he left and that was the closest he ever came to his granddaughter.

“Kallie caught me throwing up one morning in January. He had brought my breakfast to the outside room and he stood and watched me vomiting in the toilet. Then he said: ‘You’re preggies, sweetheart,’ and when I didn’t reply he said, ‘What are you going to do?’

“I told him I was going to have the baby. It was the first time that I really knew it myself. I know it’s weird, but with Viljoen and my father and everything . . . Until that moment only I knew. It was kind of unreal. Like a dream, and maybe I thought I would wake up, or the baby would just go away on its own or something. I didn’t want to think about it, I just wanted to go on.

“Then he asked if I would put the baby up for adoption, and I said I don’t know but I said I was going to Cape Town at the end of the month, so would they please give me all the shifts they could? So he asked me if I knew what I was doing and I said no, I didn’t know what I was doing, because it was all rather new to me.

“They saw me off at Hoffman Square, with a present for the baby, a little blue babygro and booties and little shoes and bibs and an envelope for me—a Christmas bonus, they said. And they gave me a few names of gay friends they had in Cape Town in case I needed help.

“I cried that day, all the way to Colesberg. That was when I felt Sonia kick for the first time, as if to say, that’s enough, we must pull ourselves together, we would be okay. Then I knew that I would not give her up.”

Griessel found what he was searching for in the three lab reports. He walked over to Matt Joubert’s office and waited for the senior superintendent to finish on the telephone.

“The forensic report does not exclude an assegai,” Joubert was saying into the instrument, “but they are doing more tests, and it will take time. You will have to call back in a day or two. Right. You’re welcome. Thanks. ’Bye.”

He looked up at Griessel. “It’s good to have you back, Benny. How are you feeling?”

“Frighteningly sober. What was that about an assegai?”

“That Enver Davids thing. Suddenly the

Argus

has all these questions. I can see trouble coming.”

Griessel put the lab reports down in front of Joubert and said, “The bastard is picking them up at Woolworths. Friday afternoons. Look here, I missed it because I didn’t know what I was looking for, but Forensics analyzed the trash cans of all three victims and in two of them there are Woolies bags and till slips and in the third one just a till slip, but all three were there, at the one on the Waterfront on the Friday of the murders between . . . er . . . half-past four and seven o’clock.”

Joubert examined the reports. “It’s thin, Benny.”

“I know, but this morning I heard expert witnesses, Matt. Seems to me only old married people like us think a supermarket is a place to buy groceries.”

“Explain,” said Joubert, wondering how long this light would keep burning in Griessel’s eyes.

Thobela found a public phone in the Church Street Mall that worked with coins and thumbed through the tattered phone book for the number of the University of Cape Town Psychology Department. He called and asked for Professor David Ackerman.

“He is on ward rounds. In what connection is this?”

“I am researching an article on crimes against children. I have just a few questions.”

“With which publication are you?”

“I am freelance.”

“Professor Ackerman is very busy . . .”

“I only need a few minutes.”

“I will have to phone you back, sir.”

“I’m going to be in and out—can I call tomorrow?”

“To whom am I speaking?”

“Pakamile,” he said. “Pakamile Nzuluwazi.”

16.

At first the Cape was not good to her.

For one, the wind blew for days on end, a storm-strength southeaster. Then they stole her only suitcase at Backpackers in Kloof Nek, where for a hundred rand a night she was sharing a room with five grumbling, superior young German tourists. Flats were scarce and expensive, public transport complicated and unreliable. Once she walked all the way to Sea Point to check out a possible place, but it was a disappointing dump with a broken windowpane and graffiti on the walls.

She stayed in Backpackers for two weeks before she found the attic room in an old block of flats in Belle Ombre Street in Tamboers Kloof. What had once been a boxroom had been converted into a small, livable space—the bath and toilet were against one wall, the sink and kitchen cupboard against the other; there was a bed and table and an old rickety wardrobe. Another door opened onto the roof, from where she could see the city crescent, the mountain and the sea. At least neat and clean for R680 per month.

Her biggest problem was inside her because she was afraid. Afraid of the birth that drew nearer every day, the care of the baby afterwards, the responsibility; afraid of the anger of her father when she made the call or wrote the letter—which, she had not yet decided. Above all, afraid of the money running out. Every day she checked her balance at the autobank and compared the balance against the list of the most essential items she would need: cot, baby clothes, nappies, bottles, milk formula, blankets, pan, pot, two-plate stove, mug, plate, knife, fork and spoon, kettle, portable FM-radio. The list continued to grow and her bank balance continued to shrink until she found work as a waitress at a large coffee shop in Long Street. She worked every possible shift that she could, while she could still hide the bump under her breasts.

The numbers on the statements ruled her life. They became an obsession. Six eight zero was the first target of every month, the non-negotiable amount of her rent. It was the low-water mark of her book-keeping and the source of unrest in her dreams at night. She discovered the flea market at Green Point Stadium and haggled over the price of every item. At the second-hand shops in Gardens and in Kloof Street she bought a cot, a bicycle and a red and blue carpet. She painted the cot on the roof with white, lead-free enamel paint, and when she found there was paint left over she gave the old yellowish-green racing bike with narrow tires and dropped handlebars a couple of coats as well.

In a

Cape Ads

that someone left in the coffee shop she found an advertisement for a backpack baby carrier. And she phoned, argued the price down, and had it delivered. It would allow her to ride the bicycle with the baby on her back along the mountain and next to the sea at Mouille Point, where there were swings and climbing frames and a kiddies’ train.

Every Saturday she took twenty rand to play the Lotto and she would sit by the radio and wait for the winning numbers that she had marked on the card with a ballpoint pen. She fantasized about what she would do with the jackpot money. A house was top of the list—one of those modern rebuilt castles on the slopes of the mountain, with automatic garage doors, Persian carpets on the floor and kelims and art on the walls. A huge baby room with seabirds and clouds painted on the ceiling and a heap of bright, multicolored toys on the floor. A Land Rover Discovery with a baby seat. A walk-in wardrobe filled with designer labels and shoes in tidy rows on the floor. An Espresso machine. A double-door fridge in stainless steel.

One afternoon, about three o’clock, she was sitting on the roof with a cup of instant coffee when she heard the sounds of sex drifting up from the block of flats below. A woman’s voice, uh-uh-uh-uh, gradually climbing the scales of ecstasy, every one a little higher, a little louder. In the first minutes the sound was meaningless, just another noise of the city, but she recognized it and was amused at the odd hour. She wondered if she were the only listener, or whether the sound reached other ears. She felt a small sexual stimulus ripple through her body. Followed by envy as the sounds accelerated, faster, louder, higher. The envy grew along with it for all that she did not have, until the shrill orgasm made her get up and bend her arm with the nearly-empty mug back in order to throw it at everything that conspired against her. She didn’t aim at any specific target, her rage was too general. Rage against the loneliness, the circumstances, the wasted opportunities.

She did not throw it. She lowered her arm slowly, unwilling to pay for a new mug.

Early in March she could postpone the call no longer. She rode all the way to the Waterfront for a public phone, in case they traced the call. She phoned her mother at the attorneys’ office where she worked. It was a short conversation.

“My God, Christine, where are you?”

“I dropped out, Mom. I’m okay. I’ve got a job. I just want to—”

“Where are you?” Her voice was tinged with hysteria. “The police are looking for you too now. Your father will have a stroke, he phones them in Bloemfontein every day.”

“Mom, tell him to drop it. Tell him I am sick and tired of his preaching and his religion. I am not in Bloemfontein and he won’t find me. I am fine. I am happy. Just leave me alone. I am not a child anymore.” She couldn’t tell where the anger came from. Had fear unleashed it?

“Christine, you can’t do this. You know your father. He is furious. We are terribly worried about you. You are our child. Where are you?”

“Mom, I’m going to put the phone down now. Don’t worry about me, Mom, I am fine. I will phone you to let you know I am okay.” Afterwards she thought she should have said something like, “I love you, Mom.” But she had just slammed the phone down, got on her bike and ridden away.