Devil's Peak

She only phoned again when Sonia was a week old, early in June, because then she had a great need to hear her mother’s voice.

Thobela was drinking a Coke at the Wimpy outside tables in St. Georges. He read the front-page article of the

Argus

that speculated about the death of Enver Davids. Sensationalized by an anonymous woman’s phone call.

Someone had seen him with the assegai. But had not reported him.

He had been too focused. No, he hadn’t been thorough enough, not entirely calculated. There had been a witness. He should have known there would be publicity. Media interest. Screaming headlines and speculation and accusations.

Could the killing of child rapist Enver Davids be the work of a female vigilante—and not the South African Police Services, as was previously suspected?

Strange consequences.

Would the police be able to trace the female caller? Would she be able to give them a description of him?

It didn’t really matter.

He turned the page. On page three there was an article on a radio station’s phone-in opinion poll. Should the death penalty be reinstated? Eighty-seven per cent of listeners had voted “yes’.

On page two were short reports of the day’s criminal activity. Three murders in Khayelitsha. A gang-related shooting took a woman’s life in Blue Downs. A man was wounded in Constantia during a car hijacking. A cash in-transit robbery in Montague Gardens: two security guards in intensive care. A seventy-two-year-old woman raped, assaulted and robbed in her home in Rosebank. A farmer in Limpopo Province gunned down in his shed.

No children today.

A waitress brought his bill. He folded the paper and leaned back in his chair. He watched the people walking down the mall, some purposefully, some strolling. There were stalls, clothes and artworks. The sky was blue above, a dove came down to land on the pavement with its tail and wings spread wide.

It was déjŕ vu, all this, this existence. A hotel room somewhere with his suitcase half unpacked, long days to struggle through, time to wait out before the next assignment. Paris was his place of waiting, another city, another architecture, other languages; but the feeling was the same. The only difference was that in those days his targets had been picked for him in a somber office in East Berlin, and the little stack of documents with photographs and pages of single-spaced typing was delivered to him by courier. His war. His Struggle.

A lifetime ago. The world was a different place, but how easy it was to slip into the old routines again—the state of alertness, the patience, the preparation, planning, the anticipation of the next intense burst of adrenaline.

Here he was again. Back in harness. The circle was complete. It felt as if the intervening period had never existed, as if Miriam and Pakamile were a fantasy, like an advertisement in the middle of a television drama, a disturbing view of aspirations of domestic bliss.

He paid for his cold drink and walked south to the pay phones and called the number again. “Is Professor Ackerman available now?”

“Just a moment.”

She put him through. He used the other name again and the cover of freelance journalism. He said he had read an article in the archives of

Die Burger

where the professor stated that a fixated pedophile always reoffended. He wanted to understand what that meant.

The professor sighed and paused a while before he answered. “Well, it sort of means what it says, Mr. Nulwazi.”

“Nzuluwazi.”

“I’m sorry, I’m terrible with names. It means the official line is that, statistically, rehabilitation fails to a substantial degree. In other words, even after an extended prison sentence, there is no guarantee that they won’t commit the same crime again.” There was weariness of life in the man’s voice.

“The official line.”

“Yes.”

“Does that differ from reality?”

“No.”

“I get the idea you don’t support the official line.”

“It is not a matter of support. It is a matter of semantics.”

“Oh?”

“Can we go off the record here, Mr. Nulwazi?”

This time he ignored the pronunciation. “Of course.”

“And you won’t quote me?”

“You have my word.”

The professor paused again before he answered, as if weighing the worth of it. “The fact of the matter is that I don’t believe they

can

be rehabilitated.”

“Not at all?”

“It’s a terrible disease. And we have yet to find the cure. The problem is that, no matter how much we would like to believe we are getting closer to a solution, there doesn’t seem to be one.” Still the desperate, despairing weariness. “They come out of prison and sooner or later they relapse, and we have more damaged children. And the damage is huge. It is immeasurable. It destroys lives, utterly and completely. It causes trauma you wouldn’t believe. And there seem to be more of them every year. God knows, it is either a matter of our society creating more, or that the lawlessness in this country is encouraging them to come out of the woodwork. I don’t know . . .”

“So what you are saying is that they shouldn’t be released?”

“Look, I know it is inhuman to keep them in prison forever. Pedophiles have a tough time in penitentiaries. They are considered the scum of the earth in that world. They are raped and beaten and humiliated. But they serve their sentences and go through the programs and then they come out and they relapse. Some right away, others a year or two or three down the line. I don’t know what the answer is, but we will have to find one.”

“Yes,” said Thobela, “we will have to find one.”

How tedious the clergyman’s day-to-day existence must be, because he was still sitting there with the same interest. He was still listening attentively to her story, his expression neutrally sympathetic, his arms relaxed on the desk. It was quiet in the house, outside as well, just the noise of insects. It was strange to her, accustomed as she was to the eternal sound of traffic, people on the move in a city. Always on the go.

Here there was nowhere to go to.

“I had no more money. If you don’t have money, you must have time, to stand in long queues with your child on your hip for vaccinations or cough medicine or something to stop diarrhea. If you have a child and you have to work, then you have to pay for daycare. If you are waitressing then you have to pay extra for someone to look after it at night. Then you have to walk back to your flat with your baby at one in the morning in winter, or you have to pay for a taxi. If you won’t work at night, you miss the best shifts with the biggest tips. So you buy nothing for yourself, and this week you try this and next week you try that until you know you just can’t win.”

“I couldn’t cope anymore—there were just too many things. Every Monday I read the

Times Job Supplement

and handed in my CV for every possible job: secretarial, medical rep, clerk. Then, if you were lucky they would invite you for an interview. But it is always the same. No experience? Oh, you have a child. Are you divorced? Oh. Sorry, we want experience. We want someone with a car. We need someone with book-keeping.

“Sorry, it’s an affirmative action position. I left the coffee shop because the tips were too small and it was still winter too and that’s off-season. I worked at Trawlers, a seafood place that opened up on Kloof Street, and one night a guy said, ‘Do you want to make real money?’ So I said, ‘Yes.’ Then he asked me ‘How much?’ and I didn’t click and I said, ‘As much as I can.’ Then he said, ‘Three hundred rand,’ and I asked, ‘Three hundred rand what—per day?’ Then he got this smile on his face and said, ‘Per night, actually.’ He was just an average guy, about forty, with spectacles and a little paunch and I said, ‘What must I do?’ and he said, ‘You know,’ and I still didn’t click. Then he said, ‘Bring me a pen and I will write down my hotel room for you,’ and at last I clicked and I just stood staring at him. I wanted to scream at him, what did he think I was, and I stood there so angry, but what could I do, he was a customer. So I went to fetch his bill, and when I looked again he was gone. He had left a hundred-rand tip and a note with his hotel number and he had written ‘Five hundred? For an hour.’ And I put it in my pocket, because I was afraid someone might see it.

“Five hundred rand. When your rent is six hundred and eighty, then five hundred is a lot of money. If you have to pay four-fifty for daycare and extra on weekends, because that’s where the tips are, five hundred fills a big gap. If you need three thousand to get through the month and you never know if you will make it and you have to save for a car, because when you have to pick up your child and it’s raining . . . then you take that bit of paper out of your pocket and you look at it again. But who understands that? What white person understands that?

“Then you think, what difference does it make? You see it every day. A couple come in and he wines and dines her and for what? To get her into bed. What is the difference? Three hundred rand for dinner or five hundred for sex.

“They hit on me in any case, the men. Even when I was pregnant, in the coffee shop, and afterwards, at Trawlers, even worse. The whole time. Some just give you these looks, some say things like ‘nice rack’ or ‘cute butt, sweetie’; some ask you straight out what you are doing on Friday night, or ‘are you attached, sweetness?’ The vain ones leave their cell phone numbers on the bill, as if they are God’s gift. Some chat you up with pretty little questions. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘How long have you been in Cape Town?’ ‘What are you studying?’ But you know what they really want, because soon they ask you, ‘Do you have your own place?’ or, ‘Jissie, we are chatting so

lekker,

when do you finish work, so we can chat some more?’ At first you think you are very special, because some of them are cute and witty, but you hear them doing it with everyone, even the ugly waitresses. All the time, all of them, like those rabbits with the long-life batteries, never stopping; never mind if they are sixteen or sixty, married or single, they are on the lookout and it never stops.

“Then you get back to your room and think about everything and you think of what you don’t have and you think there really is no difference, you think five hundred rand and you lie and wonder what it would be like, how bad could it be to be with the guy for an hour?”

17.

All day Griessel had been looking for a decoy, a middle-aged policewoman to push a trolley up and down Woolworths at the Waterfront on Friday night. Hopefully the bastard would choose her. Someone eventually suggested a Sergeant Marais at Claremont, late thirties, who might fit the bill. He phoned her and made an appointment to talk to her.

He took the M5, because it was faster, and turned off at Lansdowne in order to drive up to Main Road. At the off ramp, just left of the road, was an advertising board, very wide and high. Castle Lager. Beer. Fuck it, he hadn’t drunk beer in years, but the advert depicted a glass with drops of moisture running down the sides, a head of white foam and contents the color of piss. He had to stop at the traffic lights and stare at that damn glass of beer. He could taste it. That dry, bitter taste. He could feel it sliding down his throat, but above all he could feel the warmth spreading through his body from the medicine in his belly.

When he came to his senses, someone was hooting behind him, a single, impatient toot. He jumped and drove away, realizing only then what had happened and scared by the intensity of the enchantment.

He thought: what the fuck am I going to do? How do you fight something like this, pills or no pills? Jissis, he hadn’t drunk beer in years.

He realized he was squeezing the steering wheel and he tried to breathe, tried to get his breath back as he drove.

Before she even stood up from behind the desk, he knew the sergeant was perfect. She had that washed-out look, more lean miles on the clock than her year model indicated; her hair was dyed blonde. She said her name was André. Her smile showed a slightly skew front tooth. She looked as if she expected him to comment on her name.

He sat down opposite her and told her about the case and his suspicions. He said she would be ideal, but he could not force her to be part of the operation.

“I’m in,” she said.

“It could be dangerous. We would have to wait until he tried something.”

“I’m in.”

“Talk to your husband tonight. Sleep on it. You can phone me tomorrow.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll do it.”

He spoke to the station commander, to ask permission, although he did not have to. The big colored captain complained he didn’t have people to spare, they were undermanned as it was and Marais was a key person: who would do her work when she wasn’t there? Griessel said it was just Friday nights from five o’clock and her overtime would not appear on the station’s budget. The captain nodded. “Okay, then.”

He drove to Gardens late in the afternoon with the address to his flat on a slip of paper on the seat beside him.

Friend Street . . . what fucking kind of name was that? Mount Nelson’s Mansions. Number one two eight.

He had never lived in this area. All his life he had been in the northern suburbs, since school a Parow Arrow, apart from the year in Pretoria at the Police College and three years in Durban as a constable. Jissis, he never wanted to go back there, to the heat and humidity and the stink. Curry and dagga and everything in English. In those days he had an accent you could cut with a cudgel and the

Souties

and Indians teased or taunted him, depending on whether they were colleagues or people he had arrested.

Fuckin’ rock spider. Fuckin’ hairyback pig. Fuckin’ dumb Dutchman policeman.

Mount Nelson’s Mansions. There was a steel fence around it and a large security gate. He would have to park in the street at first and press a button on a sign that said Caretaker to get in and collect his keys and the remote control for the gate. A red brick building that had never been a mansion, maybe thirty or forty years old. Not beautiful, not ugly, it just stood there between two white-plastered apartment blocks.

The caretaker was an old Xhosa. “You a policeman?” he asked.

“I am.”

“That is good. We need a policeman here.”

He fetched his suitcases from the car and dragged them up one flight of stairs. One two eight. The door needed varnish. It had a peephole in the center and two locks. He found the right keys and pushed the door open. Brown parquet floor, fuck-all furniture, except for the breakfast counter with no stools, a few bleached melamine kitchen cupboards and an old Defy stove with three plates and an oven. A wooden staircase. He left the cases and climbed the stairs. There was a bed up there, a single bed, the one that had been stored in the garage, his garage. His former garage. Just the wooden bedstead and foam mattress with the faded blue floral pattern. The bedding lay in a pile on the foot of the bed. Pillow and slip, sheets, blankets. There was a built-in wardrobe. A door led to the small bathroom.

He went down to fetch his suitcases.

Not even a bloody chair. If he wanted to sit down, it would have to be on the bed.

Nothing to eat off or drink from or to boil water. He had fuck-all. He had less than when he went to police college.

Jissis.

In his hotel room, Thobela searched under “P” in the telephone directory. There was the name,

Colin Pretorius,

written just like that, and the address,

122 Chantelle Street, Parow.

He drove to the Sanlam Center in Voortrekker Road and bought a street guide to Cape Town in CNA.

As the sun disappeared behind Table Mountain, he drove down Hannes Louw Drive and left into Fairfield, right into Simone and, after a long curve, left into Chantelle. The even numbers were on the right. Number 122 was an inconspicuous house with burglar bars and a security gate. The neat garden had two ornamental cypress trees, a few shrubs and a green, mowed lawn, all enclosed by a concrete wall around the back and sides. No signs of life. On the garage wall above the door was a blue and silver sign:

Cobra Security. Armed Rapid Response.

He had a problem. He was a black man in a white suburb. He knew the fact that he was driving a pickup would help, keep him color-free and anonymous in the dusk. But not forever. If he hung around too long or drove past one time too many, someone would notice his skin color and begin to wonder.

He drove once around the block and past 122 again, this time observing the neighboring houses and the long strip of park that curved around with Simone Street. Then he had to leave, back to the shopping center. There were things he needed.

Griessel sat on the still unmade bed and stared at the wardrobe. His clothes could not fill a third of the space. It was the empty space that fascinated him.

At home his wardrobe was full of clothes he hadn’t worn in years—garments too small or so badly out of fashion that Anna forbade him to wear them.

But here he could count on one hand each type of garment she had packed for him, excepting the underpants—there were probably eight or nine, which he had piled in a heap in the middle rack.

Laundry. How would he manage? There were already two days’ worth of dirty clothes in a bundle at the bottom of the cupboard, beside the single pair of shoes. And ironing—hell, it was years since he had picked up an iron. Cooking, washing dishes. Vacuuming! The bedroom did have a dirty brown wall-to-wall carpet.

“Fuck,” he said, rising to his feet.

He thought of the beer advertisement again.

God, no, that was the sort of thing that had got him into this situation. He must not. He would have to find something to do. There were the files in his briefcase. But where would he work? On the bed? He needed a stool for the breakfast bar. It was too late to look for one now. He wanted coffee. Maybe the Pick and Pay in Gardens was still open. He took his wallet, cell phone and the keys to his new flat and descended the stairs to the bare living room below.

Thobela bought a small pocket torch, batteries, binoculars and a set of screwdrivers and sat down in a restaurant to study the map.

His first problem would be to get into the suburb. He could not park near the house as the pickup was registered in his name. Someone might write down the number. Or remember it. He would have to park somewhere else and walk in, but it was still risky. Every second house had a private security company’s sign on the wall. There would be patrol vehicles, there would be wary eyes ready to call an emergency number. “There’s a black man in our street.”

Chances were better by day—he might be a gardener on his way to work—but at night the risks multiplied.

He studied the map. His finger traced Hannes Louw Drive where it crossed the N1. If he parked north of the freeway, using the narrow strip of veld and parkland . . . That was the long, slow option, but it could be done.

In the case in which Colin Pretorius stands accused of child molestation and rape, an eleven-year-old boy yesterday testified how the accused called him to his office three years ago and showed him material of a pornographic nature. The accused locked the door and later began to fondle himself and encouraged the boy to do the same.

His next problem would be getting into the house. The front was too visible, he would have to get in the back where the concrete wall hid him from the neighbors. There were the burglar bars. The security contract meant an alarm. And a panic button.

The woman, whose name may not be made public, testified that her five-year-old son’s symptoms of stress, which included acute aggression, bedwetting and lack of concentration, obliged his parents to consult a child psychologist. In therapy the boy revealed the molestation over a period of three months by Pretorius, owner of a crčche.

There were two alternatives. Wait for Pretorius to come home. Or try to gain entry. The first option was too unpredictable, too hard to control. The second was difficult, but not impossible.

He paid for his cold drink. He was not hungry. He felt too much anticipation, a vague tension, a sharpening of his senses. He fetched his pickup from the parking area and left.

During his arrest, police seized Pretorius’s computer, CD-ROM material and videos. Inspector Dries Luyt of the Domestic Violence Unit told the court the quantity and nature of the child pornography found was the “worst this unit has yet seen.”

He flowed with the traffic.

He thought of being with Pakamile, the week before his death, in the mountain landscape of Mpumalanga beyond Amersfoort. On their motorbikes together with the six other students in the bright morning sun, between the pretty wooden houses, his son’s eyes fixed on the instructor who spoke to them with such fervor.

“The greatest enemy of the motorbike rider is target fixation. It’s in our blood. The connection between eyes and brain unfortunately works this way: if you look at a pothole or a rock, you will ride into it. Make sure you never look directly at the obstruction. Fighter pilots are trained to look ninety degrees away from the target the moment they press the missile-firing buttons. Once you have spotted an obstacle in the road, you know it’s there. Search for the way around it; keep your eyes on the line to safety. You and your motorbike will follow automatically.”

He had sat there thinking this was not just a lesson in motorbike riding—life worked like that too. Even if you only realized it late or nearly too late. Sometimes you never did see the rocks. Like when he came back after the war. Battle ready, cocked, primed for the New South Africa. Ready to use his training, his skills and experience. An alumnus of the KGB university, graduate of the Stasi sniper school, veteran of seventeen eliminations in the cities of Europe.

Nobody wanted him.

Except for Orlando Arendse, that is. For six years he protected drug routes and collected drug debts, until he began to notice the rocks and potholes, until he needed to choose a safer line in order not to smash himself on the rocks.

And now?

He parked beside Hendrik Verwoerd Drive, high up against the bump of the Tygerberg, where you can see the Cape stretched out in front of you as far as Table Mountain, glittering in the night.

He sat for a moment, but did not see the view.

Perhaps the motorcycle instructor was wrong: avoiding the obstacles of life was not enough. How does a child choose a line through all the sickness, all the terrible traps? Maybe life needed someone to clear away the obstacles.

When Griessel returned to the flat with both hands full of Pick and Pay bags, Dr. Barkhuizen was standing at his door, hand raised to knock.

“I came to see if you were okay.”

Later they sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, drinking instant coffee from brand new floral mugs, and Griessel told him about the beer advertisement. The doctor said that was just the beginning. He would begin seeing what had been invisible before. The whole world would conspire to taunt him, the universe encourage him to have just one little swallow, just one glass. “The brain is a fantastic organ, Benny. It seems to have a life of its own, one that we are unaware of. When you drink long enough, it begins to like that chemical balance. So when you stop, it makes plans to restore the balance. It’s like a factory of cunning thoughts lodged somewhere, which pumps the best ones through to your conscious state. ‘Ach, it’s just a beer.’ ‘What harm can one little drink do?’ Another very effective one is the, ‘I deserve it, I have suffered for a week now and I deserve a small one.’ Or, even worse, the, ‘I have to have a drink now, or I will lose all control.’ ”

“How the fuck do you fight it?”

“You phone me.”

“I can’t do that every time . . .”

“Yes, you can. Any time, night or day.”

“It can’t go on like this forever, can it?”

“It won’t, Benny. I will teach you the techniques to tame the beast.”

“Oh.”

“The other thing I wanted to talk about was those voices.”

He sat in the deep night-shadows of neglected shrubs, in the parkthat bordered on Simone Street. The binoculars were directed at Pretorius’s home, three hundred meters down Chantelle Street.

A white suburb at night. Fort Blanc. No children playing outside. Locked doors, garages and security gates that opened with electronic remote controls, the blue flicker of television screens in living rooms. The streets were silent, apart from the white Toyota Tazz of Cobra Security that patrolled at random, or an occupant coming home late.

Despite these precautions, the walls and towers and moats, the children were not even safe here—it only took one intruder like Pretorius to nullify all the barriers.

There was life in the pedophile’s house, lights going on and off.

He weighed up his options, considered a route that would take him away from the streetlights through back gardens up to the wall of Pretorius’s house. Eventually he decided the fastest option was the one with the biggest chance of success: down the street.

He stood up, put the binoculars in his pocket and stretched his limbs. He pricked his ears for cars, left the shadows and began to walk with purpose.

“Doc, they are not voices. It’s not like I hear a babble. It’s . . . like someone screaming. But not outside, it’s here inside, here in the back of my head. ‘Hear’ is not even the right word, because there are colors too. Some are black, some are red; fuck, it makes me sound crazy, but it’s true. I get to a murder scene. Let’s say the case I am working on now. The woman is lying on the floor, strangled with the kettle cord. You can see from the marks on her neck that she has been strangled from behind. You begin to reconstruct how it happened—that’s your job, you have to put it all together. You know she let him in, because there is no forced entry. You know they were together in the room because there is a bottle of wine and two glasses, or the coffee things. You know they must have talked, she was at ease, suspecting nothing, she was standing there and he was behind her saying something and suddenly there was this thing around her neck and she was frightened, what the fuck, she tried to get her fingers under the cord. Perhaps he turned her around, because he is sick, he wanted to see her eyes, he wanted to watch her face, because he’s a control freak and now she sees him and she knows . . .”

He had to make a quick decision. He walked around the house and past the back door and saw that it was the best point of entry, no security gate, just an ordinary lock. He had to get in fast: the longer he remained outside, the greater the chance of being spotted.

He had the assegai at his back, under his shirt, the shaft just below his neck and the blade under his belt. He lifted his hand and pulled out the weapon. He raised a booted foot and, aiming for the lock, kicked open the door with all his strength.

The verdict in the case against crčche owner Colin Pretorius on various charges of child rape and molestation and the possession of child pornography is expected tomorrow. Pretorius did not testify.

The kitchen was dark. He ran through it towards the lights. Down the passage, left turn, to what he assumed was the living room. Television noise. He ran in, assegai in hand. Living room, couch, chairs, a sitcom’s canned noise. Nobody. He spun around, spotted movement in the passage. The man was there, frozen in the light of a doorway, mouth half agape.

For a moment they stood facing each other at opposite ends of the passage and then the prey moved away and he attacked. The alarm must be in the bedroom. He had to stop him. The door swung shut. He dropped his shoulder, six, five, four paces, the door slammed, three, two, one, the snick of a key turning in the lock and he hit the door with a noise like a cannon shot, pain racking his body.

The door withstood him.

He was not going to make it. He stepped back, preparing to kick the door in, but it would be too late. Pretorius was going to activate the alarm.

“The picture in my head, Doc . . . It’s like she’s hanging from a cliff and clinging to life. As he strangles her, as the strength drains out of her, she feels her grip loosen. She knows she must not fall, she doesn’t want to, she wants to live, she wants to climb to the top, but he squeezes the life out of her and she begins to slip. There is a terrible fear, because of the dark below; it’s either black or red or brown down below and she just can’t hold on anymore and she falls.”

He felt a moment of panic: the locked door, the sharp pain in his shoulder, knowledge that the alarm would sound. But he drew a deep breath, made his choices and kicked the door with his heel. Adrenaline coursed thickly. Wood splintered. The door was open now. The alarm began to wail somewhere in the roof. Pretorius was at the wardrobe, reaching up, feeling for a weapon. He bumped him against the cupboard, the tall, lean figure, bespectacled with a sloppy fringe. He fell. Thobela was on him, knee to chest and assegai against his throat.

“I am here for the children,” he said loudly over the racket of the alarm, calm now.

Eyes blinked at the assegai. There was no fear. Something else. Expectation. A certain fatalism.

“Yes,” said Pretorius.

He jammed the long blade through the man’s breastbone.

“It’s when they fall that they scream. Death is down there and life is up here and the scream comes up, it always comes up to the top, it stays here. It moves fast, looks like a . . . like water you throw out of a bucket. That is all that is left. It is full of horrible terror. And loss . . .”

Griessel was quiet for a while; when he continued, it was in a quieter voice. “The thing that scares me most is that I know it’s not real, Doc. If I rationalize it, I know it’s my imagination. But where does it come from? Why does my head do this? Why is the scream so shrill and clear and so loud? And so bloody despairing? I am not crazy. Not really—I mean, isn’t there a saying that if you know you are a little bit mad you are okay, because the really insane have no idea?

Barkhuizen chuckled. It caught Griessel by surprise, but it was a sympathetic chuckle and he grinned back.

He sprinted through the house as the alarm wailed monotonously. Out the back door, around the corner of the house to the lighted street. He swerved right. He could see the park over the way, the security of the dark and the shadows. He felt a thousand eyes on him. Legs pumped rhythmically, breath raced; instinctively he pulled his head into his shoulders and tensed his back muscles for the bullet that would come, his ears pricked for a shout or the noise of the patrol car as his feet pounded on the tar.

When he reached the shrubbery, he slackened his pace as his night vision was spoiled by the streetlights. He had to plot his course carefully and not fall over anything. He could not afford a twist or sprain.

“You know where it really comes from,” said Barkhuizen.

“Doc?”

“You know, Benny. Think about it. There are contributing factors. Your job. I think you all suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome—with all the murder and death. But that is not the actual source. It’s something else. The thing that makes you drink, too, that made me drink as well.”

Griessel stared at him for a long time and then his head bowed. “I know,” he said.

“Say it, Benny.”

“Doc . . .”

“Say it.”

“I am afraid to die, Doc. I am so afraid to die.”

He sat behind the wheel. He was still breathing hard, sweat dripped, his heart pounded. Jesus, he was forty—too old for this shit.

He pressed the key into the ignition.

There was one difference. His seventeen targets for the KGB . . . mostly he was detached, mechanical, even reluctant if it was some pallid pen-pusher with stooping shoulders and colorless eyes.

But not this time. This was different. When the assegai pierced the man’s heart, he had a feeling of euphoria. Of absolute rightness.

Perhaps he had, at last, found his true vocation.

18.

It was the following morning before she phoned him in his hotel room. From a public phone booth with Sonia on her shoulder.

“Five hundred rand,” was how she identified herself in an even voice that did not betray her anxiety.

It took only a few seconds for him to work it out and he said: “Can you be here at six o’clock?”

“Yes.”

“Room 1036, in the Holiday Inn opposite the entrance to the Waterfront.”

“Six o’clock,” she repeated.

“What is your name?”

Her brain seemed to stop working. She didn’t want to give her own name, but she couldn’t think of any other one. She must not hesitate too long or he would know it was a fabrication—she said the first word that came to her lips.

“Bibi.”

Later she would wonder why that? Did it mean anything, have any psychological connotation, some clue by which to understand herself better? From Christine to Bibi. A leap, a new identity, a new creation. It was a birth, in some sense. It was also a wall. At first thin, like paper, transparent and fragile. At first.

“I have thought about it a lot,” she said, because she wanted to get the story right this time.

“The money was a big thing. Like when you play the Lotto and think of what you would do with the jackpot. In your imagination you spend on yourself and your child. Sensible things: you aren’t going to squander your fortune. You are not going to be like the nouveau riche. That is why you will win. Because it’s owed to you. You deserve it.

“But the money wasn’t the main thing. There was another aspect, something I had since my school days. When I had sex with my father’s friend. And the teacher. How I felt. I controlled them, but I didn’t control myself. How can I explain it? I wasn’t

in

myself. Yet I

was.

”

She knew those were not the right words to describe it and made a gesture of irritation with her hands. The minister did not respond, but just waited expectantly, or maybe he was nailed to his seat.

She shut her eyes in frustration and said: “The easy one is the power. Uncle Sarel, my father’s buddy, gave me a lift one day when I was walking home in the afternoon. When I opened the car door and saw the look on his face, I knew he wanted me. I wondered what he would say, what he would do. He held the steering wheel with both his hands because he was trembling and he didn’t want me to see. That’s when I felt how strong I was. I toyed with him. He said he wanted to talk with me, just for a short while, and could we take a drive? He was scared to look at me and I saw how freaked out he was but I was cool so I said: ‘Okay, that would be nice.’ I acted like I was innocent, that’s what he wanted. He talked, you know, silly stuff, just talking, and he stopped by the river and I kept on acting and he told me how he had been watching me for so long and how sexy I was, but he respected me and then I put my hand on his cock and watched his face and the look in his eyes and his mouth went all funny and it . . . it excited me.

“It was a good feeling to know he wanted me, it was good to see how much he wanted me, it made me

feel

wanted. Your father thinks you are nothing, but they don’t think so. Some grown-ups think you are great.

“But when he had sex with me, it was like I wasn’t in my body. It was someone else and I was on one side. I could feel everything, I could feel his cock and his body and all, but I was outside. I looked at the man and the girl and I thought: What is she doing? She will be damaged. But that was also okay.

“That was the weirdest part of all, that the damage was also okay.”

She found someone to stand in for her at Trawlers. She spent the day with Sonia, rode her bike along the seafront as far as the swimming pool in Sea Point and slowly back again. She thought about what she would wear and she felt anticipation and that old feeling of being outside yourself, that vague consciousness of harm and the strange satisfaction it brought.

At four o’clock she left her daughter with the childcare lady and took a slow bath, washed and blow-dried her long hair. She put on a G-string, the floral halterneck, her jeans and sandals. At half-past five she took her bike and rode slowly so as not to arrive at the hotel out of breath and sweaty. This feels almost like a date, she thought. As she wove through the peak-hour traffic in Kloof Street, she saw men in cars turn their heads. She smiled a secret smile, because not one of them knew what she was and where she was going.

Here comes the whore on her bicycle.

It wasn’t so bad.

He was just a regular guy. He had no weird requests. He received her with rather exaggerated courtesy and spoke to her in whispers. He wanted her to stroke him, touch him and lie beside him. But first she had to undress and he shivered and said, “God, what a body you’ve got,” and trailed his fingers slowly over her calves and thighs and belly. He kissed her breasts and sucked the nipples. And then the sex. He reached orgasm quickly and groaning and with eyes screwed shut. He lay on top of her and asked: “How was it for you?” She said it was wonderful, because that was what he wanted to hear.

When she rode her bicycle home up the long gradient, she thought with a measure of compassion that what he had really wanted was to talk. About his work, his marriage, his children. What he really wanted was to expel the loneliness of the four hotel room walls. What he really wanted was a sympathetic ear.

When it became her full-time profession later, she realized most of them were like that. They paid to be someone again for an hour.

That night she just felt she was lucky, because he might have been a beast. In her little flat, while Sonia slept, she took the five new hundred-rand notes from her purse and spread them out in front of her. Nearly a week’s work at Trawlers. If she could do just one man a day, for only five days a week, that was ten thousand rand a month. Once all the bills were paid, there would be seven thousand over to spend. Seven thousand rand.

Three days later she bought the cell phone and placed an ad in

Die Burger’s Snuffelgids.

She carefully studied the other ads in the “adult services” section first before deciding on the wording:

Bibi. Fresh and new. 22-year-old blonde with a dream body. Pleasure guaranteed, top businessmen only.

And the number.

It appeared on a Monday for the first time. The phone rang just after nine in the morning. She purposefully did not answer at once. Then in a cool voice: “Hello.”

He didn’t have a hotel room. He wanted to come to her. She said no, she only did traveling. He seemed disappointed. Before the phone rang again, she thought: why not? But there were too many reasons. This was her and Sonia’s place—here she was Christine. Safe, only she knew the address. She would keep it that way.

A pattern was established. If they phoned in the morning, it was local men who wanted to come to her. In the late afternoon and evening it was hotel business. The first week she made two thousand rand, as she would take one call per evening and then switch off the phone. Thursday her daughter had not been well and she decided not to work. In the second week she decided to do two per day, one late afternoon and one early evening. It couldn’t be too bad and it would give her time to have a good bath, put on fresh perfume . . . It would double her income and compensate for evenings when there were no clients.

Clients.

That wasn’t her word. One afternoon she had a call, a woman’s voice. Vanessa. “We’re in the same trade. I saw your advert. Do you want to go out for coffee?”

That was her initiation into what Vanessa, real name Truida, called the AECW: the Association of Expensive Cape Whores. “Oh it’s like the Woman’s Institute, only we don’t open with scripture reading and prayer.” Vanessa was

Young student redhead, northern suburbs. Come and show me how. Upmarket and exclusive.

She recited her life story in a coffee shop in the Church Street Mall. A sharp-featured woman with a flawless complexion, a scar on her chin and red hair from a very expensive bottle. She came from Ermelo. She had so wanted to escape the oppression of her hometown and parents’ middle-class existence. She had done one year of secretarial at technical college in Johannesburg and worked in Midrand for a company that maintained compressors. She fell in love with a young Swede whom she met at a dance club in Sandton. Karl. His libido had no limits. Sometimes they spent entire weekends in bed. She became addicted to him, to the intense and multiple orgasms, to the constant stimulus and the tremendous energy. Above all she wanted to continue to satisfy him, even though every week it took a little more, a step further into unknown territory. Like a frog in water that was getting gradually warmer. She was hypnotized by his body, his penis, his worldly wisdom. Alcohol, toys, Ecstasy, role playing. One afternoon he called in a prostitute so they could make a threesome. A month later he took her to a “club”: a lovely big house on a smallholding near Bryanston. He was not unknown at the place, a fact she registered only vaguely. The first week she had to watch while he had sex with two of them, the second week she had to take part—four bodies writhing like snakes—and eventually he wanted to watch while she had sex with two male clients in a huge bedroom with a four poster bed.

When she heard for the first time what the girls at the Bryanston place earned, she laughed in disbelief. Six weeks after Karl dumped her, she drove to the club and asked for a job. She hoped she might see him there; she wanted the money, because she had lost all direction. But she was not so lost that she was blind to the inner workings. Too many of the girls were supporting men, men who beat them, men who took their money from them every Sunday to buy drink or drugs. Too many were dependent on the perks of cocaine, sometimes heroin, which was freely available. The club kept half of their earnings. Once she had got Karl out of her system, she came to Cape Town, alone, experienced and with a purpose.

“The trick is to save, so you don’t end up in ten years’ time like the fifty-rand whores on the street, hoping someone wants a quick blow job. Keep off the drugs and save. Retire when you are thirty.”

And: “Do you know about asking names?”

“No.”

“When they phone, ask who is speaking. Ask for his name.”

“What’s the point of that? Most of them lie.”

“If they lie, that’s good news. Only the married ones lie. I have never had trouble with a married one. It’s the ones who can’t get a wife that you have to watch. The secret is to use the name he gives you when you speak to him. Over and over. That’s how you sell yourself over the phone. Remember, he’s still window shopping and there are a lot of adverts and options and he can’t claim his five hundred rand from the medical aid. Say his name, even if it is a false one. It says you believe and trust him. It says you think he’s important. You massage his ego, make him feel special. That is why he is phoning. So someone will make him feel special.”

“Why are you giving me all these tips?”

“Why not?”

“Aren’t we in competition?”

“Sweetheart, it’s all about supply and demand. The demand from needy men in this place is unlimited, but the supply of whores who really are worth five hundred rand an hour is . . . Jesus, you should see some of them. And the men get wise.”

And: “Get yourself a separate place to work. You don’t want clients bothering you at home. They do that, turning up drunk on a Saturday night without an appointment and standing on your doorstep weeping: ‘I love you, I love you.’ ”

And: “I had a fifty-five thousand rand month once; shit, I never closed my legs, it was a bit rough. But if you can do a steady three guys a day, it’s easily thirty thousand in a good month, tax free. Make hay while the sun shines, because some months are slow. December is fantastic. Advertise in the

Argus

as well, that’s where the tourists will find you. And on

Sextrader

on the Internet. If he has an accent, ask for six hundred.”

And: “It’s their wives’ fault. They all say the same thing. Mamma doesn’t want to do it anymore. Mamma won’t suck me. Mamma won’t try new stuff. We’re therapists, I’m telling you, I see how they come in and how they go.”

Vanessa told her about the other members of the AECW—Afrikaans and English, white, brown, black and a tiny delicate woman from Thailand. Christine only met three or four of them and spoke to a few more over the phone, but she was reluctant to become involved—she wanted to keep her distance and anonymity. But she did take their advice. She found a room at the Gardens Center and set her sights higher. The money followed.

The days and weeks formed a pattern. Mornings were Sonia’s, and weekends, except for the occasional one when she was booked for a hunting weekend, but the money made that worthwhile. She worked from 12:00 to 21:00 and then collected her daughter from the daycare where they thought she was a nurse.

Every third month she phoned her mother.

She bought a car for cash, a blue 1998 Volkswagen City Golf. They moved into a bigger flat, a spacious two-bedroom in the same building. She furnished it piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle. Satellite television, an automatic washing machine and a microwave. A mountain bike for six thousand rand just because the salesman had looked her up and down and showed her the seven-ninety-nine models.

A year after she had placed the first advertisement, she and Sonia went to Knysna for a two-week holiday. On the way back she stopped at the traffic lights in the town and looked at the sign board showing Cape Town to the left and Port Elizabeth to the right. At that moment she wanted to go right, anywhere else, a new city, a new life.

An ordinary life.

Her regular clients had missed her. There were a lot of messages on her cell phone when she turned it back on.

She had been nearly two years in Cape Town when she phoned home once more. Her mother cried when she heard her daughter’s voice. “Your father died three weeks ago.”

She could hear her mother’s tears were not for the loss alone: they also expressed reproach. Implying that Christine had contributed to the heart attack. Reproach that her mother had had to bear it all alone. That she had no one to lean on. Nevertheless, the emotion Christine experienced was surprisingly sharp and deep, so that she responded with a cry of pain.

“What was that noise all about?” her mother asked.

She didn’t really know. There was loss and guilt and self-pity and grief, but it was the loss that dumbfounded her. Because she had hated him so much. She began to weep and only later analyzed all the reasons: what she had done, her absence, her part in his death. Her mother’s loneliness and her sudden release. The permanent loss of her father’s approval. The first realization that death awaited her too.

But she could not explain why the next thing she said was about Sonia. “I have a child, Ma.”

It just came out, like an animal that had been watching the door of its cage for months.

It took a long time for her mother to answer, long enough to wish she had never said it. But her mother’s reaction was not what she expected: “What is his name?”

“Her name, Ma. Her name is Sonia.”

“Is she two years old?” Her mother was not stupid.

“Yes.”

“My poor, poor child.” And they cried together, about everything. But when her mother later asked: “When can I see my grandchild? At Christmas?” she was evasive. “I’m working over Christmas, Ma. Perhaps in the New Year.”

“I can come down. I can look after her while you work.” She heard the desperation in her mother’s voice, a woman who needed something good and pretty in her life after years of trouble. In that instant Christine wanted to give it to her. She was so eager to repay her debt, but she still had one secret she could not share.

“We will come and visit, Ma. In January, I promise.”

She didn’t work that evening.

That night, after Sonia had gone to sleep, she cut herself for the first time. She had no idea why she did it. It might have been about her father. She rummaged around in the bathroom and found nothing. So she tried the kitchen. In one drawer she saw the knife that she used to pare vegetables. She carried it to the sitting room and sat and looked at herself and knew she couldn’t cut where it would show—not in her profession. That’s why she chose her foot, the soft underside between heel and ball. She pressed the knife in and drew it along. The blood began to flow and frightened her. She hobbled to the bathroom and held her foot over the bath. Felt the pain. She watched the drops slide down the side of the bath.

Later she cleaned up the blood spoor. Felt the pain. Refused to think about it. Knew she would do it again.

She didn’t work the next day either. It was the beginning of December, bonanza month. She didn’t want to go on. She wanted the kind of life where she could tell Sonia: “Granny Martie is coming to visit.” She was weary of lying to the daycare or other mothers at the crčche. She was weary of her clients and their pathetic requests, their neediness. She wanted to say “yes” the next time a polite, good-looking man came up to her table in McDonald’s and asked if he could buy them ice cream. Just once.

But it was holiday season, big-money month.

She negotiated an agreement with herself. She would work as much as she could in December. So that they could afford to spend January with her mother in Upington. And when they came back she would find other work.

She kept to the deal. Martie van Rooyen absorbed herself in her granddaughter in those two weeks in Upington. She also sensed something about her daughter’s existence. “You have changed, Christine. You have become hard.”

She lied to her mother about her work, said she did this and that, worked here and there. She cut her other foot in her mother’s bathroom. This time the blood told her she must stop. Stop all of it.

The next day she told her mother she hoped to get a permanent job. And she did.

She was appointed as sales rep for a small company that manufactured medicinal face creams from extract of sea-bamboo. She had to call on chemist shops in the city center and southern suburbs. It lasted two months. The first setback was when she walked into a Link pharmacy in Noordhoek and recognized the pharmacist as one of her former clients. The second was when her new boss put his hand on her leg while they were traveling in his car. The final straw was her pay slip at the end of the month. Gross income: nine thousand and something. Net income: six thousand four hundred rand, sales commission included, after tax and unemployment insurance and who knows what had been subtracted.

She rethought her plans. She was twenty-one years old. As an escort she had earned more than thirty thousand rand a month and she had saved twenty thousand of it. After buying the car and a few other large expenses she still had nearly two hundred thousand in the bank. If she could just work another four years . . . until Sonia went to school. Just four years. Save two, two-fifty a year, perhaps more. Then she could afford a normal job. Just four years.

It nearly worked out. Except one day she answered the phone and Carlos Sangrenegra said: “Conchita?”

19.

He checked out of the Parow hotel. His requirements had changed. He wanted to be more anonymous, have fewer witnesses of his coming and going. He drove into the city center where he could pass the time without attracting attention. From a public phone in the Golden Acre he called the detective in Umtata to ask for news of Khoza and Ramphele.

“I thought you were going to catch them.”

“I’m not getting anywhere.”

“It’s not so easy, hey?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes,” said the detective, mollified by the capitulation. “We haven’t really got anything from our side either.”

“Not really?”

“Nothing.”

In Adderley Street he bought

Die Burger

and went into the Spur on Strand Street for breakfast. He placed his order and shook the paper open. The main news was the 2010 Soccer World Cup bid. At the bottom of page one was an article headed,

Gay couple arrest over child’s death.

He read that one. A woman had been arrested on suspicion of the murder of her partner’s five-year-old daughter. The child was hit over the head with a billiard cue, apparently in a fit of rage.

His coffee arrived. He tore open a paper tube of sugar, poured it into his cup and stirred.

What was he trying to do?

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

How would he achieve it? How would he be able to protect the children by his actions? How would people know: you cannot lay a finger on a child. There must be no doubt—the sentence of death had been reinstated.

He tested the temperature of the coffee with a careful sip.

He was in too much of a hurry. It would happen. It would take a little time for the message to get across, but it would happen. He must just not lose focus.

“It’s not going to happen,” said Woolworth’s head of corporate communication, a white woman in her early forties. She sat beside André Marais, the female police sergeant, in a meeting room of the chain store head office in Longmarket Street. The contrast between the two women was marked. It’s only money, thought Griessel, and environment. Take this manicured woman in her tight gray suit and leave her at the charge desk in Claremont for three months on a police salary and then let’s take another look.

There were six around the circular table: January, the Waterfront store manager, Kleyn—the communications woman, Marais, Griessel and his shift partner for the month, Inspector Cliffy Mketsu.

“Oh yes it is,” said Griessel derisively enjoying himself. “Because you won’t like the alternative, Mrs. Kleyn.” He and Mketsu had decided that he would play the bad cop and Cliffy would be the peace-loving, good cop Xhosa detective.

“What alternative?” The woman’s extremely red mouth was small and dissatisfied under the straight nose and over made-up eyes. Before Griessel could reply she added: “And it’s

Ms.

Kleyn.”

“McClean?” asked Cliffy, slightly puzzled, and slid her business card closer across the table. “But here it says . . .”

“

Ms.,

” she said. “As in neither Mrs. or Miss. It’s a modern form of address which probably hasn’t yet penetrated the police.”

“Let me tell you what has penetrated the police,

Ms.

Kleyn,” said Griessel, suspecting it would not be difficult to act mean with this particular woman. “It has penetrated us that this afternoon we are going to hold a press conference and we are going to tell the media there is a serial killer on the loose in the shopping aisles of Woollies. We are going to ask them to please warn the unsuspecting public to stay away before another innocent, middle-aged Woollies customer is strangled with a kettle cord. This modus operandi has penetrated the police,

Ms.

Kleyn. So don’t you tell me “it’s not going to happen,” as if I came to ask if we could hold trolley races up and down your aisles.”

Even through all that foundation he could see she had turned a deep shade of red.

“Benny, Benny,” said Cliffy in a soothing tone. “I don’t think we have to make threats. We must understand Ms. Kleyn’s point of view too. She is only considering the interests of her customers.”

“She is only considering the interests of her company. I say we talk to the press.”

“That’s blackmail,” said Kleyn, losing confidence.

“It’s unnecessary,” said Cliffy. “I am sure we can come to some arrangement, Mrs. Kleyn.”

“We will have to,” said January, the manager of the Waterfront branch.

“Did I say

Mrs.?

Oh, I am sorry,” said Cliffy.

“We can’t afford that kind of publicity,” said January.

“It’s strength of habit,” said Cliffy.

“I will not be blackmailed,” said Kleyn.

“Of course not,

Ms.

Kleyn.”

“I’m going,” said Griessel, standing up.

“Could I say something?” asked Sergeant Marais in a gentle voice.

“Naturally,

Ms.

Marais,” said Cliffy jovially.

“You are afraid something might happen to customers in the shop?” she asked Kleyn.

“Of course I am. Can you imagine what that publicity would mean?”

“I can,” said Marais. “But there is a way to remove the risk altogether.”

“Oh?” said Kleyn.

Griessel sat down again.

“All we want to do is to get the suspect to make contact with me. We hope he will initiate a conversation and get himself invited to a woman’s home. We can’t confront him in the shop or try to arrest him: there are no grounds. So really there is no risk of a confrontation.”

“I don’t know . . .” said Kleyn, and looked dubiously at her long red fingernails.

“Would it help if I was the only policeman in the supermarket?”

“Steady on, Sergeant,” said Griessel.

“Inspector, I will be carrying a radio and we know the supermarket is a safe environment. You can be outside, all over.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” said Cliffy.

“I don’t see why we should change good police procedure just because the Gestapo don’t like it,” said Griessel and got to his feet again.

Kleyn sucked in her breath sharply, as if to react, but he didn’t give her the chance. “I’m leaving. If you want to sell out, do it without me.”

“I like your proposals,” said Kleyn to André Marais quickly, so that Griessel could hear it before he was out the door.

Thobela was standing at the reception desk of the Waterfront City Lodge when the

Argus

arrived. The deliveryman dropped the bundle of newspapers beside him on the wooden counter with a dull thump. The headline was right under his nose, but he was still filling in the registration card and his attention was not on the big letters:

VIGILANTE KILLER TARGETS “CHILD MOLESTERS”

His pen stalled over the paper. What was written there—what did they know? The clerk behind the desk was busy at the keyboard of the computer. He forced himself to finish writing and hand the card over. The clerk gave him the room’s electronic card key and explained to him how to find it.

“May I take a newspaper?”

“Of course, I’ll just charge it to your account.”

He took a paper, and his bag, and headed for the stairs. He read.

One day before crčche owner Colin Pretorius (34) was to receive judgment on several charges of rape and molestation, he apparently became the second victim of what could be an assegai-wielding vigilante killer bent on avenging crimes against children.

He realized he was standing still and his heart was bumping hard in his chest. He glanced up, took the stairs to the first floor and waited until he was there before reading more.

The investigating officer, Inspector Bushy Bezuidenhout of the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit (SVC), did not rule out the possibility that the bladed weapon was the same one used in the Enver Davids stabbing three days ago.

In an exclusive report, following an anonymous phone call to our offices,

The Argus

yesterday revealed that the “bladed weapon” was an assegai . . .

How much did they know? His eyes searched the columns.

Inspector Bezuidenhout admitted that the police had no suspects at this time. Asked whether the killer might be a woman, he said that he could not comment on the possibility (see page 16: The Artemis Factor).

He opened his room door, put the bag on the floor and spread the newspaper open on the bed. He turned to page 16.

Greek mythology had its female protector of children, a ruthless huntress of the gods called Artemis, who could punish injustice with ferocious and deadly accuracy—and silver arrows. But just how likely is a female avenger of crimes against children?

“It is possible that this vigilante is a woman,” says criminologist Dr. Rita Payne. “We are ruthless when it comes to protecting our kids, and there are several appropriate case studies of mothers committing serious crimes, even murder, to avenge acts against their children.”

But there is one reason why the suspected modern-day Artemis might not be female: “An assegai isn’t a likely weapon for a woman. In instances where women did use a blade to stab or cut a victim, it was a weapon of opportunity, not premeditation,” Dr. Payne said.

However, this does not completely rule out a female vigilante . . .

He felt uncomfortable about this publicity. He pushed the newspaper to one side and got up to open the curtain. He had a view over the canal and the access road to the Waterfront. He stood and stared at the incessant stream of cars and pedestrians and wondered what was bothering him, what was the cause of this new tension. The fact that the police were investigating as if he were a common criminal? He had known that would happen, he had no illusions about that. Was it because the paper made it all sound so shallow? What did it matter if it was a woman or a man? Why not focus on the root of the matter?

Somebody was doing something. Someone was fighting back.

“Artemis.”

He spat out the word, but it left an unpleasant aftertaste.

Since she had told him about Sonia, the minister seemed to have grown weary. His thinning hair lay flatter on his scalp, smoothed by the big hand that touched it every now and then. His beard began to shadow his jaw in the light of the desk lamp, the light blue shirt was rumpled and the rolled-up sleeves hung down unevenly. His eyes were still on her with the same focus, the same undivided attention, but touched now with something else. She thought she saw a suspicion there, a premonition of tragedy.

“You were very convincing today, Benny,” said Cliffy Mketsu as they followed André Marais to the car.

“She pisses me off, that fucking

Ms.,

” he said, and he saw Sergeant Marais’s back stiffen ahead of him.

“Now you think I have a thing against women, Sergeant,” he said. He knew what was wrong with him. He knew he was walking on the edge. Jissis, the pills were doing fuck-all—he wanted a drink, his entire body was a parched throat.

“No, Inspector,” said Marais with a meekness that irritated.

“Because you would be wrong. I only have a thing about women like

her.

” He said in a falsetto voice: “

It’s a modern form of address which probably hasn’t yet penetrated the police.

Why must they always have something to say about the fucking police? Why?”

Two colored men came walking towards them down the pavement. They looked at Griessel.

“Benny . . .” said Cliffy, laying a hand on his arm.

“Okay,” said Griessel, and took the keys out of his jacket pocket when they reached the police car. He unlocked it, got in and stretched across to unlock the other doors. Mketsu and Marais got in. He put the key in the ignition.

“What does she want to be a

Ms.

for? What for? What is wrong with Mrs.? Or Miss. It was good enough for six thousand years and now she wants to be a fucking

Ms.

”

“Benny.”

“What for, Cliffy?” He couldn’t do this. He had to have a drink. He felt for the slip of paper in his pocket, not sure where he had put it.

“I don’t know, Benny,” said Cliffy. “Let’s go.”

“Just wait a minute,” he said.

“If I was her, I would also want to be Ms.,” said André Marais quietly from the back seat.

He found the paper, unclipped his seat belt and said: “Excuse me,” and got out of the car. He read the number on the paper and phoned it on his cell phone.

“Barkhuizen,” said the voice on the other side.

He walked down the pavement away from the car. “Doc, those pills of yours are not doing a damn thing for me. I can’t go on. I can’t do my work. I am a complete bastard. I want to hit everyone. I can’t go on like this, Doc, I’m going to buy myself a fucking liter of brandy and I’m going to drink it, Doc, you hear?”

“I hear you, Benny.”

“Right, Doc, I just wanted to tell you.”

“Thank you, Benny.”

“Thank you, Benny?”

“It’s your choice. But just do me one favor, before you pour the first one.”

“What’s that, Doc?”

“Phone your wife. And your children. Tell them the same story.”

20.

She sat looking at Sonia. The child lay on the big bed, one hand folded under her, the other a little dumpling next to her open mouth. Her hair was fine and glossy in the late-afternoon sun shining through the window. She sat very still and stared at her child. She was not looking for features that reminded her of Viljoen, she was not reveling in the perfection of her limbs.

Her child’s body. Unmarked. Untouched. Holy, stainless, clean.

She would teach her that her body was wonderful. That she was beautiful. That she was allowed to be beautiful. She could be attractive and desirable—it was not a sin, nor a curse, it was a blessing. Something she could enjoy and be proud of. She would teach Sonia that she could put on make-up and pretty clothes and walk down the street and draw the attention of men and that was fine. Natural. That they would storm her battlements like soldiers in endless lines of war. But she had a weapon to ensure that only the one she chose would conquer her—love for herself.

That was the gift she would give to her daughter.

She got up and fetched the new knife that she had bought from @Home. She took it to the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She stood in front of the mirror and lightly and slowly drew the blade over her face, from her brow to her chin.

How she longed to press the blade in. How she longed to cleave the skin and feel the burn.

She took off her T-shirt, unsnapped the bra behind her back and let it fall to the floor. She held the knifepoint against her breast. She drew a circle around her nipple. In her mind’s eyes she saw the blade flash as she carved long stripes across her breast. She saw the marks criss-crossed.

Just another two years.

She sat on the rim of the bath and swung her feet over. She placed her left foot on her right knee. She held the knife next to the cushion beside her big toe. She cut, fast and deep, right down to her heel.

When she felt the sudden pain and saw the blood collecting in the bottom of the bath, she thought: You are sick, Christine. You are sick, sick, sick.

“In the beginning Carlos was quite refreshing. Different. With me. I think it is more okay in Colombia to visit a sex worker than it is here. He never had that attitude of ‘what if someone saw me’ like most of my clients. He was a small, wiry man without an ounce of fat on him. He was always laughing. Always glad to see me. He said I was the most beautiful conchita in the world. ‘You are Carlos’s blonde bombshell.’ He talked about himself like that. He never said ‘I.’ ‘Carlos wants to clone you, and export you to Colombia. You are very beautiful to Carlos.’

“He had nice hands, that’s one of the things I remember about him. Delicate hands like a woman’s. He made a lot of noise when we had sex, sounds and Spanish words. He shouted so loud once that someone knocked on the door and asked if everything was okay.

“The first time he gave me extra money, two hundred rand. ‘Because you are the best.’ A few days later he phoned again. ‘You remember Carlos? Well, now he cannot live without you.’

“He made me laugh, at first. When he came to my place in the Gardens Center. Before I started going to him, before I knew what he did. Before he became jealous.”

Before Carlos she wrote the letter.

You were a good mother. Pa was the one who messed up. And me. That is why I am leaving Sonia with you.

She wanted to add something, words to say that her mother deserved a second chance with a daughter, but every time she scratched out the lines, crumpled up the paper and started over.

Late at night she would sit on the rim of the bath and stroke the knife over her wrists. Between one and three, alone, Sonia asleep in her cheerful bedroom with the seagulls on the ceiling and Mickey Mouse on the wall. She knew she could not let the knife cut in, because she could not abandon her child like that. She would have to make another plan with more limited damage.

She wondered how much blood could flow in the bath.

How great would the relief be when all the bad was out?

Carlos Sangrenegra, with his Spanish accent and his odd English, his tight jeans and the mustache that he cultivated with such care. The little gold crucifix on a fine chain around his neck, the one thing he kept on in bed, although they weren’t actually in the bed much. “Doggie, conchita, Carlos likes doggie.” He would stand with feet planted wide apart on the floor; she would be bent over the edge of the bed. From the start he was different. He was like a child. Everything excited him. Her breasts, her hair color, her eyes, her body, her shaven pubic hair.

He would come in and undress, ready and erect, and he wouldn’t want to chat first. He was never uncomfortable.

“Don’t you want to talk first?”

“Carlos does not pay five hundred rand for talking. That he can get free anywhere.”

She liked him, those first few times, perhaps because he enjoyed her so intensely, and was so verbal about it. Also, he brought flowers, sometimes a small gift, and left a little extra when he went. It was her perception that it was a South-American custom, this generosity, since she had never had a Latin-American client before. Germans and Englishmen, Irishmen (usually drunk), Americans, Hollanders (always found something to complain about) and Scandinavians (possibly the best lovers overall). But Carlos was a first. A Colombian.

That origin meant nothing to her, just a vaguely remembered orange patch on a school atlas.

“What do you do?” After his theatrical orgasm, he was lying with his head between her breasts.

“What does Carlos do? You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Everybody knows what Carlos do.”

“Oh.”

“Carlos is a professional lover. World heavyweight love champion. Every fuck is a knockout. You should know that, conchita.”

She could only laugh.

He showered and dressed and took extra notes from his wallet and put them on the bedside cupboard saying: “Carlos gives you a little extra.” In that rising tone, as if it were a question, but she was used to that. Then he put his hand back in his jeans pocket and said: “You don’t know what Carlos does?”

“No.”

“You don’t know what the number one export of Colombia is?”

“No.”

“Ah, conchita, you are so innocent,” he said, and he brought out a little transparent plastic packet in his hand, filled with fine white powder. “Do you know what this is?”

She made a gesture with her hand to show she was guessing. “Cocaine?”

“Yes, it is cocaine, of course it is cocaine. Colombia is the biggest cocaine producer in the world, conchita.”

“Oh!”

“You want?” He held the packet up towards her.

“No, thanks.”

That made him laugh uproariously. “You don’t want A-grade, super special number one uncut Colombian snow?”

“I don’t take drugs,” she said, a bit embarrassed, as if it were an insult to his national pride.

Suddenly he was serious. “Yes, Carlos’s conchita is clean.”

She ascribed the early signs to his Latin blood, just another characteristic that was refreshingly different.

He would ring and say: “Carlos is coming over.”

“Now?”

“Of course

now.

Carlos misses his conchita.”

“I miss you, too, but I can only see you at three o’clock.”

“

Tree

o’clock?”

“I have other clients too, you know.”

He said a word in Spanish, two cutting syllables.

“Carlo-o-o-o-s,” she stretched it out soothingly.

“How much they paying you?”

“The same.”

“They bring you flowers?”

“No, Carlos . . .”

“They give you extra?”

“No.”

“So why see them?”

“I have to make a living.”

He was silent until she said his name.

“Carlos will come tomorrow. Carlos wants to be first, you unnerstand? First love of the day.”

“He phoned one day and he said he was going to send someone to pick me up. These two guys that I didn’t know came in a big BMW, one of those with a road map on a television up front, and they took me to Camps Bay. We got out, but you couldn’t see the house, it was up on the slope. You go up in a lift. Everything is glass and the view is out of this world, but there wasn’t really furniture in it. Carlos said he had just bought it and I must help him, as he wasn’t very good with decorating and stuff.

“Maybe that was the night I clicked for the first time. I had been there for half an hour when I looked at my watch, but Carlos was angry and said: ‘Don’t look at your watch.’

“When I wanted to protest, he said: ‘Carlos will take care of you, hokay?’

“We ate on the balcony, on a blanket, and Carlos chatted as if we were boyfriend and girlfriend. The other two who fetched me were around somewhere, and he told me they were bodyguards and there was nothing to be scared of.

“Then he asked me: ‘How much do you get in a month, conchita?’ I didn’t like to say. Lots of them ask, but I never say—it’s not their business. So I told him: ‘That’s private.’

“Then he came out with it. ‘Carlos do not want his girlfriend to see other guys. But he knows you must make a living, so he will pay what you make. More. Double.’

“So I said: ‘No, Carlos, I can’t,’ and that made him angry, for the first time. He smacked all the food around on the blanket and screamed at me in Spanish, and I thought he would hit me. So I took my handbag and said I had better go. I was scared; he was another person, his face . . . The bodyguards came walking out and talked to him and suddenly he calmed down and he just said: ‘Sorry, conchita, Carlos is so sorry.’ But I asked him, please, could they just take me home, and he said he would do it himself and all the way he was sorry and he made jokes and when I got out he gave me two thousand. I took it, because I thought if I tried to give it back he would be angry again.

“The next morning I phoned Vanessa and asked her what I should do, this guy thinks I am his girlfriend and he wants to pay me to be with just him and she said that is bad news, I must get rid of him, that sort of thing could ruin my whole business. So I said thanks and bye, because I didn’t want to tell her this guy is in drugs and he has a terrible temper and I haven’t a clue how to get rid of him.

“So I phoned Carlos and he said he was terribly sorry, it was his work that made him like that, and he sent flowers and I started to think it would be okay. But then they assaulted one of my clients, just outside the door of my room in the Gardens Center.”

The master bedroom of the Camps Bay house had a four-poster bed now. He had retained an expensive, well-known interior decorator who had begun with the bedroom and everything was in white: curtains, bedding, drapes on the bed like the sails of a ship. He showed off like a little boy, keeping his hands over her eyes all the way down the passage and then: “Ta-daaa!” and watched her reaction. He asked her four or five times, “You like the master’s bedroom?” and she said, “It’s beautiful,” because it was.

He dived onto the bed and said, “Come to Carlos,” and he was exuberant, even more boisterous than usual, and she tried to forget about the bodyguards somewhere in the house.

Later he lay beside her and softly traced little circles around her nipple with the tip of the little gold crucifix. “Where do you live, conchita?”

“You know . . .”

“No, where do you

live?

”

“Gardens Center,” she replied, hoping he would drop the subject.

“You think Carlos is stupid because he looks stupid? You work there, but where is your home, where is the place with your pictures on the fridge?”

“I can’t afford another place, you pay me too little.”

“Carlos pay you too little? Carlos pay you too much. All the time the moneyman is saying: ‘Carlos, we are here to make a profit, remember.’ ”

“You have a bookkeeper?”

“Of course. You think Carlos is small fish? Cocaine is big business, conchita, very big business.”

“Oh.”

“So you will take Carlos to your house?”

Never, she thought, never ever, but said, “One day . . .”

“You don’t trust Carlos?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Conchita, you can ask Carlos anything.”

“Did you have my client beaten up?”

“What client?” But he couldn’t carry off the lie and his eyes turned crafty. He is a child, she thought, and it frightened her.

“Just a client. Fifty-three years old.”

“Why do you think Carlos beat him?”

“Not you. But maybe the bodyguards?”

“Did he buy drugs?”

“No.”

“They only beat up people who do not pay for drugs, hokay?”

“Okay.” She knew what she wanted to know. But it helped not at all.

21.

Griessel and Cliffy sat in the fish restaurant a hundred meters beyond the entrance to Woolworths, each with a small earphone. They heard André Marais saying, “Testing, testing” for the umpteenth time, but this time with a tinny voice in the background calling, “Next customer, please.”

Cliffy Mketsu nodded, as he did every time. It irritated Griessel immensely. Marais couldn’t fucking see them nod, she was in the food section of Woolworths and they were here. She was only wearing a microphone, not earphones. One-way communication only, but Cliffy had to nod.

At a table opposite, a man and a woman were drinking red wine. The woman was middle-aged, but pretty, like Farrah Fawcett, with big, round, golden earrings and lots of rings on her fingers. The man looked young enough to be her son, but took her hand every now and again. They bothered Griessel. Because they were drinking wine. Because he could taste the dark flavor in his mouth. Because they were rich. Because they were together. Because they could drink and be together and what of him? He could sit here with Nodding Cliffy Mketsu, clever Cliffy, busy with his Masters in Police Science, a good policeman, but confused, hopelessly absent-minded, as if his head was in his books all the time.

Would he and Anna ever be able to sit and enjoy themselves like that? Sit holding hands and sipping wine and gazing into each other’s eyes? How did people do that? How do you regain the romance after twenty years of married life? Actually, it was fucking irrelevant, because he would never be able to sip wine again. Not if you were an alcoholic. You couldn’t drink a thing. Nothing. Not a fucking drop. Couldn’t even smell the red wine.

He had told Doc Barkhuizen he was going to get drunk, but the Doc had said: “Phone your wife and children and tell them,” because he knew Griessel could not do that. He wanted to smash his cell phone on the bloody pavement, he wanted to break something but he just screamed, he didn’t know what, not words. When he turned around, Cliffy and André Marais were sitting rigidly in the car pretending nothing had happened.

“Vaughn, are you receiving properly?” Cliffy asked the other team over the microphone. They were looking at Woolworths clothes on the second floor, the one above the food department.

“Ten-four, good buddy,” said Inspector Vaughn Cupido, as if it were a game. He and Jamie Keyter were the back-up team. Not

Yaymie

as the locals would say it, he called himself

Jaa-mie.

Nowadays everyone had foreign names. What was wrong with good, basic Afrikaner names? The men weren’t Griessel’s first choice either, as Cupido was careless and Keyter was a braggart, recently transferred from Table View Station after he had made the newspapers with one of those stories where facts do not necessarily interfere with sensation. “Detective breaks car-theft syndicate single-handed.” With his bulging Virgin Active biceps and the kind of face to make schoolgirls swoon, he was one of the few white additions to the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit. This was the team that had to protect André Marais and catch a fucking serial killer: an alcoholic, a braggart and a sloppy one.

There was another matter on his mind; two, three things that came suddenly together: were the older woman and the young man opposite married? To each other? What if Anna had a young man who held her hand on Friday nights? He couldn’t believe that she no longer wanted it, of that he was convinced. You didn’t just switch off her sort of warmth like a stove plate just because her husband was a fucking alky. She met men at work—what would she do if there was a young man who was interested and sober? She was still attractive, despite the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes—due to her husband’s drinking habit. There was nothing wrong with her body. He knew what men were like; he knew they would try. How long would she keep saying “no”? How long?

He took out his cell phone, needing to know where she was on a Friday night. He rang, holding the phone to the ear without the earphone.

It rang.

He looked across at Farrah Fawcett and her toy boy.

They were gazing into each other’s eyes with desire. He swore they were just plain horny.

“I thi . . . it’s tha . . . t,” said André Marais in the earphone.

“What?” said Griessel, looking at Cliffy, who merely shrugged and tapped his radio receiver with the tip of his index finger.

“Hello,” said his son.

“Hello, Fritz.”

“Hi, Dad.” There was no joy in his son’s voice.

“How are you?”

But he couldn’t hear the answer as the earphone buzzed in his ear and he only caught a fraction of what Sergeant André Marais was saying: “. . . can’t afford . . .”

“What are you doing, Fritz?”

“Nothing. It’s just Carla and me.” His son sounded depressed, and there was a dull tone to his voice.

“How’s your reception, Vaughn?” Cupido asked. “Her mike isn’t good.”

“Just Carla and you?”

“Mom’s out.”

“I usually just buy instant,” said André Marais clearly and distinctly.

“She’s talking to someone,” said Cliffy.

Then they heard a man’s voice over the ether, faintly: “I can’t do without a good cup of filter in the morning.”

“Dad? Are you there?”

“I’ll have to call later, Fritz, I’m at work.”

“Okay.” Like he expected it.

“What . . . name?”

“. . . dré.”

“Fuck,” said Cupido, “her fucking mike.”

“Bye, Fritz.”

“Bye, Dad.”

“We might be too far away,” said Jamie Keyter.

“Stay where you are,” said Griessel.

“Pleased to meet you,” said the policewoman below in Woolworths food hall.

“A fish on the hook,” said Cupido.

Cliffy nodded.

Mom’s out.

“Just keep calm,” said Griessel, but he meant it for himself.

Thobela made a noise of frustration in his deep voice as he rose from the hotel bed in one sudden movement. He had lain down at about three o’clock with the curtains drawn to shut out the sun, closed his eyes and lay listening to the beat of his heart. His head buzzed from too little sleep and his limbs felt like lead. Weary. With deliberate breathing he tried to drain the tension from his body. He sent his thoughts away from the present, sent them to the peaceful waters of the Cata River, to the mist that rolled like wraiths over the round hills of the farm . . . to realize only moments later that his thoughts had jumped away and were pumping other information through his consciousness to the rhythm of the pulse in his temples.

Pretorius reaching for the weapon in his wardrobe.

Eternity in the moments before he reached the man, and the alarm wailing, wailing, to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

A heavy woman towering above a little girl and the billiard cue rising and falling, rising and falling with demonic purpose and the blood spattering from the child’s head and he knew that was his problem—the woman, the woman. He had never executed a woman. His war was against men, always had been. In the name of the Struggle, seventeen times. Sixteen in the cities of Europe, one in Chicago: men, traitors, assassins, enemies, condemned to death in the committee rooms of the Cold War, and he was the one sent to carry out the sentence. Now two in the name of the New War. Animals. But male.

Was there honor in the execution of a woman?

The more he forced his thoughts elsewhere, the more they scurried back, until he rose up with that deep sound and plucked aside the curtains. There was movement outside, bright sunlight and color. He looked over the canal and the entrance to the Waterfront. Laborers streamed on foot towards the city center, to the taxi ranks in Adderley Street. Black and colored, in the brightly colored overalls of manual laborers. They moved with purpose, hasty to start the weekend, somewhere at a home or a shebeen. With family. Or friends.

His family was dead. He wanted to jerk open the window and scream: Fuck you all, my family is dead!

He drew a deep breath, placed his palms on the cool windowsill and let his head hang. He must get some sleep; he could not go on like this.

He turned back to the room. The bedspread was rumpled. He pulled it straight, smoothing it with his big hands, pulling and stretching it till it was level. He puffed up the pillows and laid them tidily down, one beside the other. Then he sat on the bed and picked up the telephone directory from the bedside drawer, found the number and rang Boss Man Madikiza at the Yellow Rose.

“This is Tiny. The one who was looking for John Khoza, you remember?”

“I remember, my brother.” The uproar of the nightclub was already audible in the background this late afternoon.

“Heard anything?”

“Haiziko. Nothing.”

“Keep your ear to the ground.”

“It is there all the time.”

He got up and opened the wardrobe. The stack of clean clothes on the top shelf was very low, the piles of folded dirty laundry were high—socks, underwear, trousers and shirts, each in their own separate pile.

He took the two small plastic holders of detergent and softener from his case, and sorted the washing into small bundles. The ritual was twenty years old, from the time in Europe when he had learned to live out of a suitcase. To be in control, orderly and organized. Because the call could come at any time. In those days he had made a game of it, the sorting of clothes according to color had made him smile, because that was apartheid—the whites here, the blacks there, the mixed colors in their own pile; each group afraid that another group’s color would stain them. He had always washed the black bundle first, because “here blacks come first.’

He did that now, just from habit. Pressed and rubbed the material in the soapy water—rinse once, then again, twist the clothes in long worms to squeeze out the water—until his muscles bulged. Hung them out. Next the colored clothes, and the whites could wait till last.

Next morning he would ring reception and ask for an ironing board and iron and do the part he enjoyed the most—ironing the shirts and trousers with a hissing, hot iron till they could be hung on hangers in the wardrobe with perfect flat surfaces and sharp creases.

He draped the last white shirt over the chair and then stood indecisively in the center of the room.

He could not stay here.

He needed to pass the time until he could attempt sleep again. And he must think through this matter of the woman.

He picked up his wallet, pushed it in his trouser pocket, took the key card for his room and went out the door, down the stairs and outside. He walked around the corner to Dock Road, where the people were still walking to their weekend. He fell in behind a group of five colored men and kept pace with them up Coen Steytler. He eavesdropped on their conversation, following the easy, directionless talk with close attention all the way to Adderley.

It was not André Marais’s fault that Operation Woollies descended into total chaos. She acted out her role as a lonely, middle-aged woman skillfully and with vague, careful interest as the man began to chat with her between the wine racks and the snack displays.

Later she would think that she had expected an older man. This one was barely thirty: tallish, slightly plump, with a dark, five o’clock shadow. His choice of clothes was strange—the style of his checked jacket was out of date, the green shirt just a shade too bright, brown shoes unpolished. “Harmless” was the word on her tongue, but she knew appearance counted for nothing when it came to crime.

He asked her, in English with an Afrikaans accent, if she knew where the filter coffee was, and she replied that she thought it was that way.

With a shy smile he told her he was addicted to filter coffee and she replied that usually she bought instant as she could not afford expensive coffee. He said he couldn’t manage without a good cup of filter coffee in the morning, charmingly apologetic, as if it were sinful. “Italian Blend,” he said.

Oddly, she explained to Griessel later, at that moment she quite liked him. There was a vulnerability to him, a humanity that found an echo in herself.

Their trolleys were side by side, hers with ten or twelve items, his empty. “Oh?” she said, fairly certain he was not the one they were looking for. She wanted to get rid of him.

“Yes, it’s very strong,” he said. “It keeps me alert when I am on the Flying Squad.”

She felt her guts contract, because she knew he was lying. She knew policemen, she could spot them a mile away and he was not one, she knew.

“Are you a policeman?” she asked, trying to sound impressed.

“Captain Johan Reyneke,” he said, putting out a rather feminine hand and smiling through prominent front teeth. “What is your name?”

“André,” she said, and felt her heart beat faster. Captains did not do Flying Squad—he must have a reason for lying.

“André,” he repeated, as if to memorize it.

“My mother wanted to use her father’s name, and then she only had daughters.” She used her standard explanation, although there was no question in his voice. With difficulty she kept her voice level.

“Oh, I like that. It’s different. What work do you do, André?”

“Oh, admin, nothing exciting.”

“And your husband?”

She looked into his eyes and lied. “I am divorced,” she said, and looked down, as if she were ashamed.

“Never mind,” he said, “I’m divorced too. My children live in Johannesburg.”

She was going to say her children were out of the house already, part of the fabrication she and Griessel had discussed, but there was a voice from behind, a woman’s voice, quite shrill. “André?”

She glanced over her shoulder and recognized the woman, Molly, couldn’t recall her surname. She was the mother of one of her son’s school friends, one of those over-eager, terribly involved parents. Oh God, she thought, not now.

“Hi,” said André Marais, glancing at the man and seeing his eyes narrow, and she pulled a face, trying to communicate to him that she would rather not have this interruption.

“How are you, André? What are you doing here? What a coincidence.” Molly came up to her, basket in hand, before she realized that the two trolleys so close together meant something. She read the body language of the man and the woman and put two and two together. “Oh, sorry, I hope I didn’t interrupt something.”

André knew she had to get rid of the woman, because she could see in the clenching of Reyneke’s hands that he was tense. The whole affair was on a knifepoint and she wanted to say: “Yes, you are interrupting something” or “Just go away.” But before she could find the right words, Molly’s face cleared and she said: “Oh, you must be working together—are you also in the police?” and she held out her hand to Reyneke. “I’m Molly Green. Are you on an operation or something?”

Time stood still for André Marais. She could see the outstretched hand, which Reyneke ignored, his eyes moving from one woman to the other in slow motion; she could actually see the gears working in his brain. Then he bumped his trolley forward in her direction and he shouted something at her as the trolley collided with her and she lost her balance.

Molly screamed incoherently.

André staggered against the wine rack, bottles fell and smashed on the floor. She fell on her bottom, arms windmilling for balance, then she grabbed at her handbag, got her fingers on it and searched for her service pistol while her head told her she must warn Griessel. Her other hand was on the little microphone that she held to her mouth and said, “It’s him, it’s him!”

Reyneke was beside her and jerked the pistol from her hand. She tried to rise, but her sandals slipped in the wine and she fell back with her elbow on a glass shard. She felt a sharp pain. Twisting her body sideways she saw which way he ran. “Main entrance!” she shouted, but realizing her head was turned away from the microphone, she grabbed it again. “Main entrance, stop him!” she screamed. “He has my firearm!” Then she saw the blood pouring from her arm in a thick stream. When she lifted up her arm to inspect it she saw it was cut to the bone.

Griessel and Cliffy leapt up and ran when they heard Molly Green scream over the radio. Cliffy missed the turn, bumping against a table where two men were eating sushi. “Sorry, sorry,” he said and saw Griessel ahead, Z88 in hand, saw the faces of bystanders and heard cries here and there. They raced, shoes slapping on the floor. He heard Marais’s voice on the microphone: “Main entrance, stop him!”

Griessel arrived at the wide door of Woolworths, service pistol gripped in both hands and aimed at something inside the store, but Cliffy was trying to brake and he slipped on the smooth floor. Just before he collided with Griessel, he spotted the suspect, jacket flapping, big pistol in his hand, who stopped ten paces away from them, also battling not to slip.

But Cliffy and Griessel were in a pile on the ground. A shot went off and a bullet whined away somewhere.

Cliffy heard Griessel curse, heard high, shrill screams around them. “Sorry, Benny, sorry,” he said, looking around and seeing the suspect had turned around and headed for the escalator. Cupido and Keyter, pistols in hand, were coming down the other one, but it was in fact the ascending escalator. For an instant it was extremely funny, like a scene from an old Charlie Chaplin film: the two policemen leaping furiously down the steps, but not making much progress. On their faces, the oddest expressions of frustration, seriousness, purposefulness—and the sure knowledge that they were making complete idiots of themselves.

Griessel had sprung up and set off after the suspect. Cliffy got to his feet and followed, up the escalator with big leaps to the top. Griessel had turned right and spotted the fugitive on the way to the exit on the second level. He heard Griessel shout, glanced back. Griessel could see the fear on the man’s face and then he stopped and aimed his pistol at Griessel. The shot rang out and something plucked at Cliffy, knocked him off his feet and threw him against Men’s Suits: Formal. He knew he was hit somewhere in the chest, he was entangled in trousers and jackets, looking down at the hole near his heart. He was going to die, thought Cliffy Mketsu, he was shot in the heart. He couldn’t die now. Griessel must help. He rolled over. He felt heavy. But light-headed. He moved garments with his right arm; the left was without feeling. He saw Griessel tackle the fugitive. A male mannequin in beachwear tottered and fell. A garish sunhat flew through the air in an elegant arch, a display of T-shirts collapsed. He saw Griessel’s right hand rise and fall. Griessel was beating him with his pistol. He could see the blood spray from here. Up and down went Griessel’s hand. It would make Benny feel better; he needed to release that rage. Hit him, Benny, hit him—he’s the bastard who shot me.

Thobela Mpayipheli was waiting for the traffic lights on the corner of Adderley and Riebeeck Street when he heard a voice at his elbow.

“Why djoo look so se-ed?”

A street child stood there, hands on lean, boyish hips. Ten, eleven years old?

“Do I look sad?”

“Djy lyk like the ket stole the dairy. Gimme sum money for bred.”

“What’s your name?”

“What’s

djor

name?”

“Thobela.”

“Gimme sum money for bred, Thobela.”

“First tell me your name.”

“Moses.”

“What are you going to do with the money?”

“What did I say it was for?”

Then there was another one, smaller, thinner, in outsize clothes, nose running. Without thinking Thobela took out his handkerchief.

“Five rand,” said the little one, holding out his hand.

“Fokkof, Randall, I saw him first.”

He wanted to wipe Randall’s nose but the boy jumped back. “Don’ touch me,” said the child.

“I want to wipe your nose.”

“What for?”

It was a good question.

“Djy gonna give us money?” asked Moses.

“When did you last eat?”

“Less see, what month is this?”

In the dusk of the late afternoon another skinny figure appeared, a girl with a bush of frizzy tangled hair. She said nothing, just stood with outstretched hand, the other holding the edges of a large, tattered man’s jacket together.

“Agh, fock,” said Moses. “I had this under control.”

“Are you related?” asked Thobela.

“How would

we

know?” said Moses, and the other two giggled.

“Do you want to eat?”

“Jee-zas,” said Moses. “Just my luck. A fokken’ stupid darkie.”

“You swear a lot.”

“I’m a street kid, for fuck’s sake.”

He looked at the trio. Grimy, barefoot. Bright, living eyes. “I’m going to the Spur. Do you want to come?”

Dumbstruck.

“Well?”

“Are you a pervert?” asked Moses with narrowed eyes.

“No, I’m hungry.”

The girl jabbed an elbow in Moses’s ribs and made big eyes at him.

“The Spur will throw us out,” said Randall.

“I’ll say you are my children.”

For a moment all three were quiet and then Moses laughed, a chuckling sound rising through the scales. “Our daddy.”

Thobela began to walk. “Are you coming?”

It was ten or twelve paces further on that the girl’s small hand clasped a finger of his right hand and stayed there, all the way to the Spur Steak Ranch in Strand Street.

22.

She sat staring at the window without seeing.

“I thought I was cutting myself because of my father, at first,” she said softly, and sighed, deeply, remembering. “Or because of Viljoen. I thought I was handling the work and that I was okay with it.”

She turned and looked at him, back in the present. “I never clicked it was the work that made me like that. Not then. I had to get out of it first.”

He nodded, slowly, but did not respond.

“And then things changed, with Carlos,” she said.

Carlos phoned early, just after nine, to say he wanted to book her for the whole night. “Carlos does not want money fight. Three thousand, hokay? But you must look sexy, conchita. Very sexy, we are having a formal party. Black dress, but show your tits. Carlos wants to brag. My guys will pick you up. Seven o’clock.” He put the phone down.

She waited for her anger to rise and fade. She sat on the edge of the bed, with the cell phone still to her ear. She felt the futility, knew that her anger was useless.

Sonia came up to her, doll in hand. “Are we going to ride bicycle, Mamma?”

“No, my love, we are going shopping.” The child skipped off towards her room as if shopping was her favorite activity.

“Hey, you.”

Sonia halted in the doorway and peeped over her shoulder mischievously.

“Me?” She knew her part in this ritual.

“Yes, you. Come here.”

She ran across the carpet, still in her green pajamas, into her mother’s arms.

“You’re my love,” Christine began their rhyme and kissed her neck.

“You’re my life,” giggled Sonia.

“And your beauty makes me shiver.”

“You’re my heaven, you’re my house.” Her head was on Christine’s bosom.

“You’re my only paradise,” she said and hugged the child tight. “Go and get dressed. It’s time to shop till we drop.”

“Shoptill hedrop?”

“Shoptill hedrop. That’s right.”

Three years and four months. Just another two years, then school. Just another two years and her mother would be done with whoring.

She phoned Carlton Hair and Mac for late-afternoon appointments and took Sonia along to Hip Hop across Cavendish Square. The sales people paid more attention to the pretty child with blonde ringlets than they did to her.

She stood in front of the mirror in a black dress. The neckline was low, the hem high, bare back.

“That is very sexy,” said the colored shop assistant.

“Isn’t,” said Sonia. “Mamma looks pretty.”

They laughed. “I’ll take it.”

They were too early for her hair and make-up. She took her daughter to Naartjie in the Cavendish Center. “Now you can choose a dress for yourself.”

“I also want a black one.”

“They don’t have black ones.”

“I also want a black one.”

“Black ones are just for grown-ups, girl.”

“I also want to be grown-up.”

“No you don’t. Trust me.”

The carer looked in disapproval at her outfit when she dropped Sonia off.

“I don’t know how late the function will finish. It’s best if she sleeps over.”

“In that dress it will finish very late.”

She ignored the comment, hugged her daughter tight. “Be good. Mamma will see you in the morning.”

“Tatta, Mamma.”

Just before the door closed behind her, she heard Sonia say: “My mamma looks very pretty.”

“Do you think so?” said the carer in a sour voice.

It was a weird evening. In the entertainment area of the house in Camps Bay, inside and outside beside the pool, were about sixty people, mostly men in evening suits. Here and there was a blonde with breasts on display or long legs showing through split dresses and ending in high heels. Like décor, she thought, pretty furniture. They hung on a man’s arm, smiled, said nothing.

Quickly she grasped that that was what Carlos expected of her. He was ecstatic over her appearance. “Ah, conchita, you look perfect,” he said when she arrived.

It was the United Nations: Spanish-speaking, Chinese, or Oriental at least, small men who followed her with hungry eyes, Arabs in togas—or whatever you called them—who ignored her, each with his mustache. Two Germans. English. One American.

Carlos, the Host. Jovial, smiling, joking, but she felt sure he was tense, nervous even. She followed his example, held a glass, but did not drink.

“You know who these people are?” he asked her later, whispering in her ear.

“No.”

“Carlos will tell you later.”

Food and drink came and went. She could see the men were no longer sober, but only because the conversation and laughter were a bit louder. Ten o’clock, eleven, twelve.

She stood alone at a pillar. Carlos was somewhere in a kitchen organizing more food to be sent. She felt a hand slide under her dress between her legs, fingers groping. She froze. The hand was gone. She looked over her shoulder. A Chinese man stood there, small and dapper, sniffing deeply at his fingers. He smiled at her and walked away. All she could think of was that Carlos must not see that.

Two Arabs sat at a glass table arranging cocaine in lines with credit cards and sharing it with a companion whose nipple showed above the neckline of her black dress. One of the men inhaled deeply over the table, leaned back in his chair and slowly opened his eyes. Languidly, he stretched out a hand towards her and took the nipple between his fingers. He squeezed. The woman grimaced. He’s hurting her, thought Christine. She was transfixed.

Late that night her bladder was full. She went upstairs looking for the privacy of Carlos’s en-suite bathroom. The bedroom door was shut and she opened it. A blonde in a blood-red dress was gripping one of the posts of the bed and her dress was rucked up to bare her bottom. Behind her stood one of the Spanish men with his trousers around his ankles.

“You want to watch?”

“No.”

“You want to fuck?”

“I’m with Carlos.”

“Carlos is nothing. You kiss my girl, yes?”

Quietly she closed the door and heard the man laugh inside the room.

Even later. Only a small group of guests remained in the swimming pool—two women, six or seven men. Extremely drunk. She had never seen group sex before and it fascinated her. Four men were with one of the women.

Carlos came and stood behind her. “What do you think?”

“It’s weird,” she lied.

“Carlos not for groups. Carlos is a one conchita man.” He put his arms around her, but they continued to watch. Small, rhythmic waves lapped at the edge of the pool.

“It looks sexy,” he said.

She put her hand on his crotch and felt it was hard. Time to earn her pay.

“First Carlos drinks,” he said, and went to fetch a bottle.

She didn’t know whether to blame the drink, but Carlos was different in bed—desperate, urgent, as if he wanted to prove himself.

“I want you to hurt me,” she said.

Maybe he did not hear. Maybe he did not want to. He just went on.

When he had finished and lay wet with his own perspiration beside her, head between her breasts, he asked: “Carlos was good for you?”

“You were great.”

“Yes. Carlos is a great lover,” he said in all seriousness. Then he was quiet, for so long that she wondered if he was asleep.

Suddenly he rose to his feet, crossed to where he had dropped his trousers on the floor and took out a packet of cigarettes. He lit two and passed one to her before sitting down beside her, with his feet folded under him. His eyes were bloodshot.

“These people . . .” he said with venom and a deep furrow of distaste on his forehead. She knew him well enough to know he was not sober.

She drew on the cigarette.

“They did not even thank Carlos for the party. They come, they drink and snort and eat and fuck and then they leave, no goodbye, no ‘thank you, Carlos, for your hospitality.’ ”

“It was a good party, Carlos.”

“

Sí,

conchita. Cost a lot of money, famous chef, best

licores,

best

putas.

But they have no respect for Carlos.”

“Carlos is nothing,” the man in his bedroom had said.

“You know who they are, conchita? You know? They are

banditos.

They are shit. They make money with drugs. Mexicans!” He spat out the word. “They are nothing. They are

burros, mulas

for the Yankees. Cubans. What are they? And the Afghans. Peasants, I tell you.”

“Afghans?”

“

Sí.

Those arses holes in the dresses.

Conchas!

”

So the Arabs were Afghans. “Oh.”

“And the China and the Thai, and the Vietnam, what are they? They are

mierda,

Carlos tell you, they have nothing but chickens and bananas and heroin. They fuck their mothers. But they come to Carlos, to this beautiful house and they have no manners. You know who they are, conchita? They are drugs. The Afghans and the Vietnam and the Thai, they bring heroin. They bring here, because here is safe, no police here. They take cocaine back. Then Sangrenegra brothers take heroin to America and to Europe. And the South Americans, they help supply, but little, because Sangrenegra brothers control supply. That is Carlos and Javier. My big brother is Javier. He is biggest man in drugs. Everybody know him. We take heroin, we give cocaine, we give money, we . . . we

distribuya.

We take to whole world. Carlos will tell Javier about the disrespect. They think Carlos is little brother, Javier is not here, so they can shit on me. They cannot shit on me, conchita. I will shit on

them.

” He squashed the cigarette disdainfully in the ashtray.

“Come, conchita, Carlos show you something.” He took her arm and drew her along. He picked up his trousers, took out a bunch of keys, took her hand and led her down the passage, down the stairs, through the kitchen, down more stairs to a pantry. The house was completely deserted by now. He opened a half-concealed door at the back of the pantry. There were three locks, each with its own key.

“Carlos show you. Sangrenegra is not small time.” He pressed a light switch. Another door. A small electronic number pad on the wall. He typed in a number. “Oh, eight, two, four, four, nine, you know that number, conchita?”

“Yes.” They were the first six numbers of her cell phone number.

“That is how much Carlos love you.”

It was a steel door that opened automatically. A fluorescent light flickered on inside. He pulled her inside. A space as large as a double garage. Shelves up to the ceiling. Plastic bags on the racks, from one end to the other, all filled with white powder.

Then she saw the money.

“You see, conchita? You see?”

“I see,” she said, but her voice was gone and it came out as a whisper.

They were in the pool, just Carlos and her. She sat on the step with her lower body in the water. He was standing in the water with his arms around her and his face against her belly.

“Conchita, will you tell Carlos why you become . . . you know.”

“A whore.”

“You are not a whore,” he said distastefully. “An escort. Why did you become an escort?”

“You don’t want to know the truth, Carlos.”

“No, conchita. I do. The real truth.”

“Sometimes I think you want me to be this good girl. I am not a good girl.”

“You are. You have a good heart.”

“You see, if I tell you the truth you don’t want to hear it.”

He straightened his arms so he could look at her. “You know what? That is not the way Carlos thinks. Look at me, conchita. I am in drugs. I have killed guys. But I am not bad. I have a good heart. You see? You can be good, and you can do things that are not so good. So tell me.”

“Because I like to fuck, Carlos.”

“Sí?”

“Sí,”

she said. “That is my drug.”

“How old were you? When you fucked first?”

“I was fifteen.”

“Tell Carlos.”

“I was at school. And this boy, he was sixteen. He was very beautiful. He walked home with me every afternoon. And one day he said I must come home with him. I was very curious. And so I went. And he said I had beautiful breasts. He asked if he could see them. And I showed him. Then he asked if he could touch them. And I said yes. And then he started to kiss me. On my nipples. He started to suck my nipples. And then it happened, Carlos. The drug. It was . . . It was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was

intense.

I liked it so much.”

“And then he fucked you?”

“Yes. But he was not experienced. He came too quickly. He was so excited. I didn’t have an orgasm. So afterwards, I wanted more. But not with boys. With men. So I seduced my teacher . . .”

“You fucked your teacher?”

“Yes.”

“And who else?”

“A friend of my father. I went to his home when his wife was away. I said I wanted to talk to him. I said I was very curious about sex, but I cannot talk to my parents about it, because they are so conservative. And I know he is different. He asked if I would like it if he showed me. I said yes. But you know what, Carlos? He was just as excited as the boy. He could not control himself.”

“Who else?”

“I fucked a lot of guys at university. For free. And then one day I thought, why for free? And that is how it happened.”

“Look,” said Carlos and pointed at his erection. “Carlos likes your story.”

“Then fuck me, Carlos. I love it so much.”

Wasserman, the acclaimed playwright, Professor of Afrikaans and Nederlands. Fifty-three years old, with a soft body, bushy beard and a beautiful, beautiful voice. At the start of every session she would have to lie in the bath so he could urinate on her, or else he could not get an erection. But from there on he was normal, except for the reading glasses—the better to see her breasts. He would come once a fortnight at three in the afternoon, as he had a younger wife who “might want something too.” He needed time to recharge before the evening. But his young wife would not let herself be pissed on, that was why he came to Christine.

They were waiting for him at precisely four o’clock. When he opened the door to leave her place at the Gardens Center, they hit him with a pick handle, breaking his teeth and jaw.

She heard the commotion and grabbed a dressing gown. “No!” she screamed. They were wearing balaclavas, but she knew they were the bodyguards. One looked her in the eyes and kicked Wasserman where he lay. Then they both kicked him. Seven ribs broken.

“I will call the police!” One of them laughed. Then they dragged him by the feet to the stairs and down two flights and left him there, bleeding and moaning.

She grabbed her cell phone and ran down to him. She bent over him. The damage made her nauseous. She touched his broken face with her fingertips. He opened his eyes and looked at her. There was a question through the agony.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” she said, holding his hand while she spoke.

He made a noise.

“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I can’t stay here.” There would be police. Questions. Arrest. She, Sonia could not afford that.

He just moaned, lying on his side in a pool of blood around his face.

She heard doors opening.

“The ambulance is on its way.” She squeezed Wasserman’s hand and then ran upstairs to her room and locked the door behind her. Feverishly she dressed herself. Carlos. What was she to do?

When she went out quietly, she went down first. She saw there were security personnel with Wasserman at the foot of the stairs. They did not see her. She walked up one flight of stairs, trying to keep calm. She walked slowly so as not to attract attention. She pressed the button for the lift, waited. Voices below. The lift took an eternity to arrive.

Carlos.

She phoned him once she reached the street. He did not answer his phone.

She went to her flat, sat on a chair in her sitting room with her phone in her hand. What was she going to do?

Later she phoned the ambulance services. They had taken Wasserman to City Park. She phoned the hospital. “We can’t give out information.”

“This is his sister.”

“Hold on.”

She had to listen to synthesized music, sounding tinny in her ear.

Eventually Casualty answered. “He’s in Intensive Care, but he should be okay.”

Carlos. She phoned again. It just kept on ringing. She wanted to get in her car and drive to his house. She wanted to hit him, smash his skull with a pick handle. He didn’t have the right. He couldn’t do this. She wanted to go to the police, she wanted to blow him off the earth. Rage consumed her. She looked for her telephone book and got the number of the police.

No. Too many complications.

She wept, but from frustration. Hate.

When she had calmed down she went to fetch Sonia. When she crossed the street holding her daughter’s hand, she saw the BMW on the other side, back window rolled down. He sat there watching, but not her. His eyes were on the girl and there was a strange expression on his face. It felt as if someone had their fist around her heart and were squeezing her to death.

The BMW pulled up alongside her when she was helping Sonia into her car.

“Now I know everything, conchita.” He looked at Sonia, looked at her child. If she had had a gun at that moment, she would have shot him in the face.

PART TWO

Benny

23.

Griessel was never uncomfortable with the bosses, mainly because he could drink them under the table singly or as a group. Or outwork them. He maintained a higher case solution rate than any one of them had in their days as detectives, alcoholic or not. But tonight he was not at ease. They stood in the little sitting room outside the Intensive Care Unit of City Park Hospital, although there were chairs available: Senior Superintendents Esau Mtimkulu and Matt Joubert, first and second in command of SVC, Commissioner John Afrika, the provincial head of detection, and Griessel. Cupido and Keyter sat just out of hearing. Their ears were pricked but they could not hear anything. When a member lay in Intensive Care, the big guns spoke in muffled tones.

“Give me that Woolworths man’s number, Matt,” said Commissioner Afrika, a colored veteran who had come up through the ranks in Khayelitsha, the Flats and the old Murder and Robbery Units. “I hear they are running to the minister, but to hell with them. I’ll deal with him. That is the least of our problems . . .” Here it comes, thought Griessel. He should never have hit the bastard, he knew that; never in his life had he carried on like that before. If they were to throw out the case because he had lost control, if a fucking serial murderer were to walk because Benny Griessel was angry at the entire world . . .

“Benny,” said Commissioner Afrika, “you say it was the tackle that caused his face to be injured like that?”

“Yes, Commissioner.” He looked into the man’s eyes and they knew, all four of them in the circle, what was happening now. “There was this shop mannequin standing just in the wrong place. Reyneke’s face hit the face of the mannequin. That’s where the cuts came from.”

“He must have hit it fucking hard,” said Superintendent Mtimkulu.

“When I tackled him, I held his arms down because he had a firearm. So he couldn’t shield his face with his hands. That’s why he hit it so hard.”

“And then he confessed?”

“He lay there bleeding, and then he cried, ‘I can’t help it, I can’t help it,’ but with Cliffy wounded my attention was . . . er . . . divided. Only later under interrogation did I ask him what he meant. What it is that he can’t help.”

“And what did he say then?”

“At first he didn’t want to say anything. So . . . I asked Cupido and Keyter to leave, so that I could talk to him alone.”

“And then he confessed?”

“He confessed, Commissioner.”

“Will it stand up in court?”

“The whole sequence in the interrogation room is on video, Commissioner. I just asked to be alone with the suspect and, once they had left, I just looked at him. For a long time. Then I said: ‘I know you can’t help it. I understand.’ And then he began to talk.”

“Full confession.”

“Yes, Sup. All three of the women. Details that were not in the newspapers. We’ve got him, whoever he gets as his lawyer. And there’s a previous conviction. Rape. Four years ago in Montagu.”

“And the only witness of the mannequin incident is Cliffy Mketsu?”

“That’s right, Matt.”

All four looked across at the double doors that led to the ICU.

“Okay,” said the head of Investigation. “Good work, Benny. Really good work . . .”

The double doors opened. A doctor approached them; such a young man that he looked as if he should still be at university. There were bloodstains on his green theater overalls.

“He will be alright,” said the doctor.

“Are you sure?” asked Griessel.

The doctor nodded. “He was very, very lucky. The bullet missed nearly everything, but badly damaged the S4 area of his left lung. That is the tip of the upper lobe, anterior segment. There is a possibility that we will have to remove it, just a small piece, but we will decide once he has stabilized.”

We,

thought Griessel. Why did they always talk about

us,

as if they belonged to some secret organization?

“That’s good news,” said the commissioner without conviction.

“Oh, and we have a message for a Benny.”

“That’s me.”

“He says the guy fell badly against the cash register.”

All four stared at the doctor with great interest. “The cash register?” asked Griessel.

“Yes.”

“Do me a favor, Doc. Tell him it was the mannequin.”

“The mannequin.”

“Yes. Tell him the man fell against the mannequin and the mannequin fell on the cash register.”

“I will tell him.”

“Thanks, Doc,” said Griessel, and turned to the commissioner, who nodded and turned away.

He bought a Zinger burger and a can of Fanta Orange at KFC and took them home. He sat on his “sitting-room” floor eating without pleasure. It was the fatigue, the after-effects of adrenaline. Also, the things waiting in the back of his mind that he did not want to think about. So he concentrated on the food. The Zinger didn’t satisfy his hunger. He should have ordered chips, but he didn’t like KFC’s chips. The children ate them with gusto. The children even ate McDonald’s thin cardboard chips with pleasure, but he could not. Steers’s chips, yes. Steers’s big fat barbecue-seasoned chips. Steers’s burgers were also better than anything else. Decent food. But he didn’t know where the nearest Steers was and he wasn’t sure if they would still be open at this time. The Zinger was finished and he had sauce on his fingers.

He wanted to toss the plastic bag and empty carton container in the bin, but remembered he didn’t have a bin. He sighed. He would have to shower—he still had some of Reyneke’s and Cliffy’s blood on him.

You have six months, Benny—that is what we are giving you. Six months to choose between us and the booze.

Would you buy furniture for just six months? He couldn’t eat on the floor for six fucking months. Or come home to such a barren place. Surely he was entitled to a chair or two. A small television. But first, get out of these clothes and shower and then he could sit on his bed and make a list for tomorrow. Saturday. He was off this weekend.

Terrifying. Two whole days. Open. Perhaps he ought to go to the office and get his paperwork up to date.

He washed his hands under the kitchen tap, put the carton and the can and the used paper serviette into the red and white plastic packet and put it in a corner of the kitchen. He climbed the stairs while unbuttoning his shirt. Thank God they didn’t have to wear jacket and tie anymore. When he started with Murder and Robbery it was suits.

Where was Anna tonight?

The plastic shower curtain was torn in one corner and the water leaked onto the floor. It had a faded pattern of fish. He would have to get a bathmat as well. A new shower curtain too. He washed his hair and soaped his body. Rinsed off in the lovely hot, strong stream of water.

When he turned off the taps he heard his cell phone ringing. He grabbed the towel, rubbed it quickly over his head, took three strides to the bed and snatched it up.

“Griessel.”

“Are you sober, Benny?”

Anna.

“Yes.” He wanted to protest at her question, wanted to be angry, but he knew he had no right.

“Do you want to see the children?”

“Yes, I would very—”

“You can collect them on Sunday. For the day.”

“Okay, thank you. What about you? Can I also—”

“Let’s just keep to the children, for now. Ten o’clock? Ten to six?”

“That’s fine.”

“Goodbye, Benny.”

“Anna!”

She did not speak, but did not cut him off.

“Where were you this evening?”

“Where were you, Benny?”

“I was working. I caught a serial murderer. Cliffy Mketsu was shot in the lung. That’s where I was.” He had the moral high ground, a little heap, a molehill, but better than nothing. “Where were you?”

“Out.”

“Out?”

“Benny, I sat at home for five years while you were drunk or out and about. Either drunk or not at home. Don’t you think I deserve a Friday night out? Don’t you think I deserve to watch a movie, for the first time in five years?”

“Yes,” he said, “you deserve that.”

“Goodbye, Benny.”

Did you watch the movie alone? That’s what he wanted to ask, but the moral contours had shifted too quickly and he heard the connection go dead in his ear. He threw the towel to the floor and took a black pair of trousers from the cupboard to put on. He fetched pen and paper from his briefcase and sat down on the bed. He stared at the towel on the floor. Tomorrow morning it would still be lying there and it would be damp and smelly. He got up and hung the towel over the rail in the bathroom, went back to the bed and arranged the pillow so he could lean against it. He began his list.

Laundry.

There was a laundromat at the Gardens Center. First thing tomorrow.

Rubbish bin.

Iron.

Ironing board.

Fridge?

Could he manage without a fridge? What would he keep in it? Not milk—he drank his coffee black. On Sunday the children would be here and Carla loved her coffee; always had a mug in her hand when she did her homework. Would she be content with powdered milk? The fridge might be necessary, he would see.

Fridge?

Shower curtain.

Bath mat.

Chairs/sofa.

For the sitting room.

Bar stools.

For the breakfast nook.

How the hell was he going to support two households on a police salary? Had Anna thought of that? But he could already hear her answer: “You could support a drinking habit on a police salary, Benny. There was always money for drink.”

He would have to buy another coffee mug for the children’s visit. More plates and knives, forks and spoons. Cleaning stuff for dishes, dusty surfaces, the bathroom and the toilet.

He made fresh columns on the page, noted all the items, but he could not keep the other things in his head at bay.

Today he had made a discovery. He would have to tell Barkhuizen. This thing about being scared of death was not entirely true. Today, when he charged at Reyneke on the top level of Woolworths with the pistol pointed at him and the shot going off, the bullet that had hit Cliffy Mketsu because Reyneke could not shoot for toffee . . .

That is when he had discovered he was not afraid of dying. That is when he knew he wanted to die.

He woke early, just before five. His thoughts went to Anna. Did she go to the movies alone? But he didn’t want to play with those thoughts. Not this early, not today. He got up and dressed in trousers, shirt and trainers only, and went out without washing.

He chose a direction; three hundred meters up the street he saw the morning, felt the languor of the early summer, heard the birds and the unbelievable silence over the city. Colors and textures and light of crystal.

Table Mountain leaned towards him, the crest something between orange and gold, fissures and clefts were pitch-black shadows against the angle of the rising sun.

He went up Upper Orange Street, turned into the park and sat on the high wall of the reservoir to look out. To the left Lion’s Head became the curves of Signal Hill, and below a thousand city windows were a mosaic of the sun. The sea was deep blue beyond Robben Island, far off to Melkbos Strand. Left of Devil’s Peak lay the suburbs. A 747 came in over the Tyger Berg and its shadow flashed over him in an instant.

Fuck, he thought, when had he last seen this?

How could he have missed it?

On the other hand, he pulled a face; if you are sleeping off your hangover in the morning, you won’t see sunrise over the Cape. He must remember this, the unexpected advantage of teetotalism.

A wagtail came and perched near him, tail going up and down, dapper steps like a self-important station sergeant. “What?” he said to the bird. “Your wife left you too?” He received no reply. He sat until the bird flew up after some invisible insect, and then he rose and looked up at the mountain again and it gave him a strange pleasure. Only he was seeing it this morning, nobody else.

He walked back to the flat, showered and changed and drove to the hospital. Cliffy was resting, they told him. He was stable, in no danger. He asked them to tell him Benny had been there.

It was just before seven. He drove north with the N1, on a freeway still quiet—the Cape only got going by about ten o’clock on a Saturday. Down Brackenfell Boulevard and the familiar turnoffs to his house. He drove past the house only once, slowly. No sign of life. The lawn was cut, the postbox emptied, the garage door closed. A policeman’s inventory. He accelerated away because he did not want his thoughts to penetrate the front door.

He drank only coffee at a Wimpy in Panorama, because he had never been one for breakfast, and waited until the shops opened.

He found a two-seater couch and two armchairs at Mohammed “Love Lips” Faizal’s pawnshop in Maitland. The floral cover was slightly bleached. There were faint coffee stains on the arm of one chair. “This is too much, L.L.,” he said over the R600 price tag.

“For you, Sarge, five-fifty.”

Faizal had been in Pollsmoor for eighteen months for trafficking in stolen goods and he was reasonably certain three-quarters of the car radios had been brought in by the drug addicts of Observatory.

“Four hundred, L.L. Look at these stains.”

“One steam clean and it’s good as new, Sarge. Five hundred and I don’t make a cent.”

Faizal knew he was no longer a sergeant, but some things will never change. “Four-fifty.”

“Jissis, Sarge, I have a wife and kids.”

By chance he saw the bass guitar, just the head protruding from behind a steel cabinet of brand new tools.

“And that bass?”

“You into music, Sarge?”

“I have tickled the neck of a bass in my day.”

“Well bless my soul. It’s a Fender, Sarge, pawned by a wannabe rapper from Blackheath, but his ticket expires only next Friday. Comes with a new Dr. Bass times two-ten-b cabinet with a three-u built-in rack, two-two-fifty watt Eminence tens, and a LeSon tweeter.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“It’s a bloody big amp, Sarge. It’ll blow you away.”

“How much?”

“Are you serious, Sarge?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s a genuine pawn, Sarge. Clean.”

“I believe you, L.L. Relax.”

“Do you want to start a band now?” The suspicion was still there.

Griessel grinned. “And call it Violent Crimes?”

“So what then?”

“How much are you asking for the guitar and amp, L.L.?”

“Two thousand, for sure. If the wannabe doesn’t return the ticket.”

“Oh.” It was too much for him. He had no idea what these things cost. “Four-fifty for the sitting-room suite?”

Faizal sighed. “Four seventy-five and I’ll throw in free delivery and a six-piece coaster set with tasteful nudes depicted thereupon.”

He got the three bar stools at the place in Parow that sold only pine furniture and he paid R175 apiece, a scary amount, but he loaded them in the car, two on the back seat and one in front, and took them to his flat, because tomorrow his kids would be here and at least there was something for them to sit on. By eleven he was sitting with a newspaper at the laundromat, waiting for his clothes to be clean and dry so he could pack them in his new plastic laundry basket and iron them on his new ironing board with his new iron.

Then Matt Joubert phoned and he said: “I know you are off, Benny, but I need you.”

“What’s up, Boss?”

“It’s the guy with the assegai, but I’ll explain when you arrive. We are at Fisantekraal. On a smallholding. Come via Durbanville on Wellington Avenue, right on the R three-one-two and just opposite the railway bridge go left. Phone me when you get there and I will direct you.”

He checked the cycle on the washing machine. “Give me forty,” he said.

It was an equestrian establishment.

High Grove Riding School. Riding lessons for adults and children. Outrides.

He drove past the stables before he reached the house. Everything was in a state of partial dilapidation, as all these places were, never enough money to fix everything. Police cars, a SAPS van, Forensics’ little bus. The ambulance must have left already.

Joubert stood in a circle of four other detectives, just two from their unit, the other two probably from Durbanville station. When he stopped there were dogs, barking, tails wagging, two little ones and two black sheepdogs. He got out to the smell of manure and lucerne hay.

Joubert approached him with outstretched hand. “How’s it going, Benny?”

“Sober, thank you.”

Joubert smiled. “I can see. Are you suffering?”

“Only when I don’t drink.”

The commander laughed. “I respect your tenacity, Benny. Not that I ever doubted . . .”

“Then you must be the only one.”

“Come, so we can talk first.”

He led him to an empty stable and sat on a bale of hay. The sun projected perfect round dots on the floor through holes in the corrugated iron roof. “Sit down, Benny, this will take some time.”

He sat.

“The victim is Bernadette Laurens. She was released on Thursday on bail of fifty thousand rand. Charged with the murder of her partner’s five-year-old daughter. They lived together as a couple. Partner’s name is Elise Bothma. Last weekend the child was hit on the head with a billiard cue, one blow . . .”

“Lesbetarian?”

Joubert nodded. “Last night the dogs began to bark. Laurens got up to see what was going on. When she did not return to bed, Bothma went to look for her. Fifteen meters from the front door she found the body. One stab wound to the heart. I am waiting for the pathology report, but it could be the assegai man.”

“Because she killed a child.”

“And the stab wound.”

“The papers say it is an assegai woman.”

“The papers are full of shit. There’s no way a woman could have murdered the previous two victims. Enver Davids was a jailbird, well built, strong. According to the scene, Colin Pretorius had time to defend himself, but he didn’t stand a chance. Laurens was a strong woman, round about one point eight meters tall, eighty kilograms. And women shoot, they don’t stab with a blade. In any case, not multiple victims. As you know, the chance that a woman is involved in multiples is one per cent.”

“I agree.”

“One of the sheepdogs is limping this morning. Bothma believes it might have been kicked or hit in the process. But apart from that, not much. The Durbanville people will come and help to question the neighbors.”

Griessel nodded.

“I want you to take charge of the whole investigation, Benny.”

“Me?”

“For many reasons. In the first place, you are the most experienced detective in the unit. In the second, in my opinion, you are the best. Third, the commissioner mentioned your name. He’s very pleased with your work yesterday and he knows big trouble when he sees it. We have a circus on our hands, Benny. With the media. An avenging murderer, punishment for crimes against children, death penalty . . . you can imagine.”

“And fourth, I have the time, now that I no longer have a wife and kids.”

“That was not part of my reasoning. But I must say this: I thought it might help—keep you too busy to think of drink.”

“Nothing could keep me that busy.”

“The last thing that made me ask you is that I know you enjoy this kind of thing.”

“That’s true.”

“Are you in?”

“Of course I’m fucking in. I was in the moment you said ‘assegai.’ You could have saved the rest. You know that ‘positive feedback’ shit never worked with me.”

Joubert stood up. “I know. But it had to be said. You must know you are appreciated. And, oh, the commissioner says you have all the manpower you need. We must just let him know where we need help. He will do the necessary. For the present, Keyter is your partner. He’s on his way . . .”

“Not a fock.”

“Cliffy is in hospital, Benny, and there is no one else available full-time . . .”

“Keyter is an idiot, Matt. He is a little braggart station detective with an attitude and a big head. He knows fuck-all. What happened to the manpower you just promised me?”

“For foot work, Benny. I can’t spare men from the unit. You know everyone is snowed under with work. And Keyter is new. He has to learn. You will have to mentor him.”

“Mentor him?”

“Make an investigator of him.”

“It’s times like this,” said Griessel, “that I know why I’m an alcoholic.”

24.

Griessel, Keyter and the dogs sat in Elise Bothma’s sitting room. Keyter, in a loose white shirt, tight jeans and new bright blue Nike Crosstrainers, asked the questions as if he were the senior investigator. “What sort of dog is this, ma’am? Looks like a Pomeranian cross, but don’t they bark a lot at night? I hear they bark so much, the genuine Pomeranians . . . looks like there is a bit of Dachshund in this one. You say you heard the dogs and then Miss Laurens went out to look?”

She was a fragile woman. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her voice gentle and she hadn’t been expecting the question at the tail end of the dog speech. “Yes,” she said. She sat hunched up and did not raise her head. Her fingers were entangled in a tissue. The room smelt strongly of dogs and rooibos tea.

“Do you know what time that was?” asked Keyter.

She said something, but they couldn’t hear it.

“You need to speak louder. We can’t hear a word you say.”

“It must have been just before two,” said Elise Bothma, and sank back, as if the effort was too great.

“But you are not sure?”

She just shook her head.

“Do we know what time she phoned the station?” Keyter asked Griessel.

He felt like getting up right there and taking the little shit outside to ask him who the fuck did he think he was, but this was not the time.

“Two thirty-five,” said Griessel.

“Okay,” said Keyter. “Let us say the dogs began barking just before two and she got up then to look. Did she take something with her? A weapon? Snooker stick or something?”

Bothma shuddered and Griessel decided this was the last one he would stand before taking Keyter outside. “A revolver.”

“A revolver?”

“Yes.”

“What revolver?”

“I don’t know. It was hers.”

“And where is the revolver now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did anyone find a revolver with the body?”

Griessel just shook his head.

“So the revolver is missing now?”

Bothma nodded slightly.

“And then, when did you get up to go and look?”

“I don’t know what time it was.”

“But why did you go out? What made you?”

“She was too long. She was gone too long.”

“And you found her lying there?”

“Yes.”

“Just as she was when we came?”

“Yes.”

“And nothing else?”

“No.”

“And then you phoned the station?”

“No.”

“Oh?”

“The emergency number. One zero triple one.”

“Oh. Then you waited in the house until they came?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” said Keyter. “Okay. That’s the story.” He stood up. “Thank you very much and sorry for the loss and all that.”

Bothma made the slight nod of her head again, but still no eye contact.

Griessel stood and Keyter moved towards the door. He was taken aback when he saw Griessel sitting down on the sofa next to the woman. He didn’t turn back but stood there in the doorway looking impatient.

“How long were you together?” Griessel asked her, gently and sympathetically.

“Seven years,” said Bothma, and pressed the tissue against her cheeks.

“What?” said Keyter from the door. Griessel looked at him meaningfully and held a finger to his lips. Keyter came back and sat down.

“She had a temper.” A statement. Bothma nodded.

“Did she sometimes hurt you?”

Nod.

“And sometimes hurt your child?”

The head said “yes” and tears ran.

“Why did you stay?”

“Because I have nothing.”

Griessel waited.

“What could I do? Where could I go? I don’t have a job. I worked for her. Did the books. She looked after us. Food and clothing. She taught Cheryl to ride. She was good with her most of the time. What could I do?”

“Were you angry with her over what she did to Cheryl?”

The thin shoulders shook.

“But you stayed with her?”

She put her small hands over her face and wept. Griessel put a hand in his pocket and took out a handkerchief. He held it out to her. It was a while before she saw it.

“Thank you.”

“I know it’s hard,” he said.

She nodded.

“You were very angry with her.”

“Yes.”

“You thought of doing something to her.”

Bothma paused before she said anything. On the carpet a sheepdog scratched itself. “Yes.”

“Like stabbing her with a knife?”

Bothma shook her head at that.

“The revolver?”

Nod.

“Why didn’t you?”

“She hid it.”

He waited.

“I didn’t kill her,” said Elise Bothma and looked up at him. He saw she had green eyes. “I didn’t.”

“I know,” said Griessel. “She was too strong for you.”

He waited until Keyter was in his car and then he stood at the window and he talked quietly, because there were still other policemen in the yard. “I want you to understand a few things fucking well,” he said, and Keyter looked up at him in surprise.

“Number one. You will not open your mouth again during questioning, unless I give you permission. Do you understand?”

“Jissis. What did I do?”

“Do you understand?”

“Okay, okay.”

“Number two. I did not ask for you. You were given to me. With the instruction that I must teach you to be a detective. Number three. To learn, you will have to listen. Do you understand?”

“I

am

a fucking detective.”

“You are a fucking detective? Tell me, mister fucking detective, where do you start a murder investigation? Where is the first place you look?”

“Okay,” said Keyter reluctantly.

“Okay what, Jaaa-mie?”

“Okay, I get it.”

“Get what?”

“What you said.”

“Say it, Jaaa-mie.”

“Why do you keep calling me, Jaaa-mie? I get it, okay? First you look near the victim.”

“Did you look there?”

Keyter said nothing, just held his steering wheel in the ten-to-two position.

“You are not a wart on a detective’s backside. Two years at Table View Station says nothing. Burglaries and vehicle theft don’t count here, Jaaa-mie. You button your lip and listen and learn. Or you can go to Matt Joubert now and tell him you can’t work with me.”

“Okay,” said Keyter.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I won’t talk.”

“And learn.”

“And learn.”

“Then you can get out again, because we are not finished here.” He took a step back to make room for the door. Keyter got out, shut the door and folded his arms on his chest. He leaned back against his car.

“Are we sure that she didn’t do it?” asked Griessel.

Keyter shrugged. When he saw that was not sufficient, he said “No,” cautiously.

“Did you hear what I said inside there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she could have done it?”

“No.”

“But she wanted to?”

“Yes.”

“Now think, Jaaa-mie. Put yourself in her shoes.”

“Huh?”

“Think the way she would think,” said Griessel, and suppressed the impulse to cast his eyes heavenwards.

Keyter unfolded his arms and pressed two fingers to his temples.

Griessel waited.

“Okay,” said Keyter.

Griessel waited.

“Okay, she is too small to stab Laurens.” He looked at Griessel for approval. Griessel nodded.

“And she can’t get her hands on the revolver.”

“That’s right.”

The fingers worked against his temples.

“No, fuck, I don’t know,” said Keyter with an angry gesture and straightened up.

“How would

you

feel?” said Griessel, patience dragging at his voice like lead. “Your child is dead. And it’s your lover who did it. How would you feel? You hate, Jamie. You sit here in the house and you hate. She is sitting in the police cells and you know she will get out on bail, sometime or other. And you wish you could beat her to death for what she has done. You imagine it in your head, how you shoot her, or stab her. And then on the radio you hear about this man who has his knife in for people who mess with children. Or you read the papers. What do you do, Jamie? You weep and you hope. You wish. Because you are small and weak and you need a superhero. You think: what if he comes with his big assegai? And you like thinking about it. But the week is too long, Jamie. Later you start thinking: what if he doesn’t come? Bothma said the revolver was hidden. So ten to one she had looked for it. Why, Jamie? In case the assegai man didn’t come. And then, what is the next logical step? You look for the assegai man. And where do you begin to look? Where do you look for someone who has it in for Laurens just as much as you? Because she had a temper. A hard woman. Where do you look?”

“Okay,” said Keyter and kicked at a clump of grass with a Nike Crosstrainer. “Okay, I get it. You look here, on the plot.”

“There’s hope for you, Jamie.”

“The laborers?”

“That’s right. Who cleans the stables? Who cuts the feed? Who did Laurens shout and swear at when they came to work late? Who will do a little favor for five hundred rand?”

“I get it.”

“I want you to go and talk, Jamie. Watch the body language, look at the eyes. Don’t make accusations. Just talk. Ask if they saw anything. Ask if Laurens was a difficult employer. Be sympathetic. Ask if they have heard of the assegai man. Give them a chance to talk. Sometimes they talk easily and too much. Listen, Jamie. Listen with both your ears and your eyes and your head. The thing with a murder investigation is, first you look at it from a distance, look at everything. Then you come a step closer and look again. Another step. You don’t charge in—you stalk.”

“I get it.”

“I’m going in to the office. We need the other case files. I am going to ask the investigating officers to tell me everything about Davids and Pretorius. Phone me when you are finished, then you come in.”

“Okay, Benny.” Grateful.

“Okay,” he said, turning to go to his car and thinking: fuck, I’m starting to talk like him too.

25.

He was still in conference with the other two investigating officers when Cloete, the liaison officer, phoned and said the media had heard there was another Artemis murder.

“A what?”

“You know, the assegai thing.”

“Artemis?”

“The Argus started that crap, Benny. Some or other Greek god that went around stabbing with a spear or something. Is it true?”

“That a Greek god went around . . .”

“

No, man,

that the Laurens woman who beat the child to death is the latest victim?”

The media. Fuck. “All I can say now is that Laurens was found dead outside her house this morning. The post mortem is not finished yet.”

“They will want more than that.”

“I don’t have more than that.”

“Will you phone me when there is more?”

“I will,” he lied. He was definitely not intending to feed information to the press.

Faizal phoned him just before he went to the mortuary, to ask if he could deliver the sitting-room suite. He drove to the flat to open up and then raced to Salt River where Pagel was waiting for him.

He heard the music as he closed the door of the state mortuary behind him and it made him grin. That is how you could tell Professor Phil Pagel, chief pathologist, was at work. For Pagel played only Beethoven on his ten-thousand rand hi-fi system in his office, as loud as was necessary.

“Ah, Nikita,” said Pagel with genuine pleasure when Griessel looked in his door. He was seated behind a computer and had to get up to turn the music down. “How are you, my friend?”

Pagel had been calling him “Nikita” for twelve years. The first time he had met Griessel he had remarked: “I am sure that is how the young Khruschev would have looked.” Griessel had to think hard who Khrushchev was. He had always had immense respect for highly educated and cultured people, he who had only his matric and police examinations. Once he had said to Pagel: “Damn, Prof, I wish I were as clever as you.” But Pagel had looked back at him and said: “I suspect you are the clever one, Nikita, and you have street smarts, too.”

He liked that. Also the fact that Pagel, who featured so often on the social pages, Friends of the Opera, Save the Symphony Orchestra, Aids Action Campaign, treated him as an equal. Always had. Pagel didn’t seem to age—tall and lean and impossibly handsome, some people said he looked like the star of some or other television soap that Griessel had never seen.

“Well, thank you, Prof. And you?”

“Splendid, my dear fellow. I have just finished with the unfortunate Miss Laurens.”

“Prof, they have given me the whole show—Davids, Pretorius, the works. Bushy and them tell me you think this is also an assegai.”

“Not think. I am reasonably sure. What is different about you, Nikita? Have you cut your hair? Come, let me show you.” He walked ahead down the passage and opened the swing doors of the post mortem laboratory with a deft thump of his palms. “It’s a long time since we saw an assegai—it’s no longer a weapon of choice. Twenty years ago it was more common.”

There was the smell of death and formalin and cheap air freshener in the room and the air conditioning was set quite low. Pagel unzipped the black body bag. Laurens’s remains lay there naked, like a cocoon. There was a single wound in the middle of her torso between two small breasts.

“What was not present with Davids,” said Pagel as he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, “is the exit wound. Entry wound was wide, about six centimeters, but there was nothing behind. My conclusion was a very broad blade, or two stabs with a single, thinner blade—most unlikely, however. But I didn’t think ‘assegai.’ With Pretorius we have the exit wound, two point seven centimeters wide, and the entry wound of six point two. That’s when the penny dropped.”

He turned Laurens’s body on its side. “Look here, Nikita. Exit wound right behind, just beside the spinal column. I had to cut the entry wound for chemical analysis, so you can no longer see, but it was even wider—six point seven, six point seven five.”

He lowered the body carefully on its back again, and covered it again.

“It tells us a couple of things which you will find interesting, Nikita. The blade is long; I estimate about sixty centimeters. We see a great deal of stab wounds inflicted with butcher’s knives—you know, the kind you can buy at Pick and Pay, about a twenty-five centimeter blade. Those wounds display clearly only one cutting edge and sometimes an exit wound, but never wider than a centimeter. Entry wounds usually three, occasionally four centimeters. Here we have two cutting edges, much like a bayonet, but wider and thinner. Considerably wider. A bayonet also does more damage internally—designed for it, did you know? So we have a blade sixty centimeters long, with a narrow piercing point growing steadily wider towards the back where it is just under seven centimeters. Do you follow, Nikita?”

“I’m with you, Prof.”

“It’s the classical assegai, nothing else approaches that description. Not even a sword wound. Sword wounds are naturally very rare, I think I have seen two in my life. Swords have a much wider exit wound and the wound widths are much more uniform. But that is not the only difference. The results of the chemical analysis produced a few surprises. Microscopic quantities of ash, animal fats and a few compounds we could not identify at first, but had to go through the tables. It appeared it was Cobra. You know, the polish people use to shine their floors. Animal fats were of bovine origin. You don’t find that on swords. I began to look around, Nikita, as it has been a long time since we had an assegai, one tends to forget. Let’s go to my office, the notes are there. Something different about you. Wait, let me guess . . .” Pagel went ahead to his office.

Griessel looked down at his clothes. Everything was as usual, he couldn’t see anything different.

“Sit, dear fellow, and let me get my story straight.” He removed a black lever-arch file from the shelf and paged through it.

“The ash. They use it to polish the blade, the blacksmiths. I suppose they are assegai smiths as they only make those. Ancient method, they used it to polish Cape silver in the old days, sometimes you see pieces in the antique shops, the wear is distinctive. This tells us the assegai was made in the traditional way. But we will come back to that. The same applies to the beef lard and the Cobra polish. That is not for the blade but for the shaft. The Zulus use it to treat the wood, to make it smooth and shiny. To preserve the wood and prevent warping.

“All very well, you will say, but that isn’t much help in catching the fellow—with Cobra polish? I made some calls, Nikita, I have some friends in the curio business. They say there are three kinds of assegai on the market today. The ones we can ignore are the ones they sell at the flea market on Greenmarket Square. Those come from the north, some from as far away as Malawi and Zambia—poor workmanship, with short, thin blades and metal shafts and lots of African baroque wirework. They are made for the tourists and are replicas of some or other ritual assegais of various African cultures.

“The second kind is the so-called antique or historical spear or assegai—either the short stabbing assegai or the long throwing spear. Both have blades which match our wound profile, but there is one major difference: the antique assegai blade is pitch black from ox-, sheep’s or goat’s blood, as the Zulus use it for slaughtering. To kill the animal. The ash residue will also be visible under the microscope in much greater quantities. Do you know, Nikita, they sell the old assegais for five or six thousand apiece? Up to ten thousand if there is good evidence of age.

“But none of your victims had traces of animal blood, which means your assegai is either antique but very well cleaned, or it is one of the third kind: exactly the same form and manufacture as the antiques, but recently made. And the rust tells us it is the latter. I asked them to look for oxidation deposits in the wound under the spectrometer and there were practically none. No rust, no age. Your assegai has been made in the last three or four years, more likely in the last eighteen months.

“Oh, and one more thing: I suspect the assegai is not thoroughly cleaned after every murder. We found traces of the first two victims’ blood and DNA in Laurens’s wound. Which means it is the same weapon and most likely the same murderer.”

There went his theory that Bothma had been involved with the murder of Laurens. He nodded at Pagel.

“The thing is, Nikita, there are not many people making traditional assegais anymore. Demand is small. The craft mostly survives in the rural areas of KwaZulu where the traditions are still practiced and they still slaughter oxen in the old way. Where they still use beef lard for the shafts and buy Cobra to polish their

stoeps.

I also don’t believe we are dealing with the long throwing spear. The entry angle of the wound is not high enough. I think this is a stabbing assegai, made by a blacksmith somewhere on the Makathini plains, in the past year. Naturally the question is, how on earth did it get from there to here, in the hands of a man who has a bone to pick with people who do harm to children? An odd choice of weapon.”

“A man, Prof?”

“I believe so. It’s the depth of the wound. To push an assegai through a breastbone is not so hard, but to thrust one right through the body, breaking a rib on the way and protruding four or five centimeters out the back takes a lot of power, Nikita. Or a lot of rage or adrenaline, but if it is a woman, she is an Amazon.”

“It’s a good choice of weapon, Prof. Quiet. Efficient. You can’t trace it like a firearm.”

“But even the assegai is not small, Nikita. Meter and a half, maybe longer.”

Griessel nodded. “The question is: why an assegai? Why not a big hunting knife or a bayonet? If you want to stab there is plenty of equipment.”

“Unless you want to make a statement.”

“That’s what I’m thinking too, but what fucking statement? What are you saying? I am a Zulu and I love children?”

“Or maybe you want the police to think you are a Zulu while all the time you are a Boer from Brackenfell.”

“Or you want to attract attention to your cause.”

“You can’t deny, Nikita, that it’s a good cause. My first impulse is to let him go his way.”

“No, fuck, Prof, I can’t agree with that.”

“Come on, you must admit his cause has merit.”

“Merit, Prof? Where’s the merit?”

“Much as I believe in the justice system, it is not perfect, Nikita. And he fills an interesting gap. Or gaps. Don’t you think there are a few people out there who will think twice before they hurt their children?”

“Prof, child abusers are lower than lobster shit. And every one I ever arrested I felt like killing with a blunt instrument. But that’s not the point. The point is, where do you draw the line? Do you kill everyone that can’t be rehabilitated? Psychopaths? Drug addicts who steal cell phones? A Seven-Eleven owner who grabs his forty-four Magnum because a manic-depressive kleptomaniac steals a tin of sardines? Does his cause have merit too? Shit, Prof, not even the psychiatrists can agree on who can be rehabilitated or not; everyone has a different story in court. And now we want every Tom, Dick and Harry with an assegai to make that call? And this whole thing about the death penalty . . . Suddenly everyone wants it back. Between you and me, I am not by definition against the death penalty. I have put fuckers away who more than deserved that. But about one thing I can’t argue, it was never a deterrent. They murdered just as much in the old days, when they were hanged or fried in the chair. So, I see no merit in it.”

“Powerful argument.”

“Chaos, Prof. If we allow bush justice. It’s just the first step to chaos.”

“You’re sober, Benny.”

“Prof?”

“That’s what’s different about you. You’re sober. How long?”

“A few days, Prof.”

“Good heavens, Nikita, it’s like a voice from the past.”

26.

Before he reached his car, Jamie Keyter phoned to report, and without thinking Griessel said, “Meet me at the Fireman’s.” As he drove down Albert Street in the direction of the city his thoughts were on assegais and murders and the merits of a vigilante.

“Powerful argument,” the prof had said, but where had it all come from? He hadn’t stopped to think. Just talked. He could swear a part of him had listened in amazement to his argument and thought, “What the fuck?”

Suddenly he was this great crime philosopher. Since when?

Since he had given up the booze. Since then.

It was like someone had adjusted the focus so he could see the past five or six years more clearly. Was it possible to have stopped thinking for so long? Stopped analyzing things? Had he done his work mechanically, by rote, according to the rules and the dictates of the law? Crime scene, case file, footwork, information, handing over, testimony, done. Alcohol was like a golden haze over everything, his buffer against thought.

What he was now and the way he thought, wasn’t how it had been in the beginning. In the beginning he had operated in terms of “us” and “them,” two opposites, two separate groups on either side of the law, sure in his belief that there was a definite difference, a dividing line. For whatever reason. Genetic, perhaps, or psychological, but that was how it was; some people were criminals and some were not and it was his job to purify society of the former group. Not an impossible task, just a huge one. But straightforward mostly. Identify, arrest and remove.

Now, on this end of the alcohol tunnel, in his rediscovered sobriety, he realized he no longer believed in that.

He now knew everyone had it in them. Crime lay quiescent in everyone, a hibernating serpent in the subconscious. In the heat of avarice, jealousy, hatred, revenge, fear, it reared up and struck. If it never happened to you, consider it luck. Lucky if your path through life detoured around trouble so that when you reached the end and the worst you had done was steal paperclips from work.

That was why he had told Pagel that a collective line must be drawn. There had to be a system. Order, not chaos. You couldn’t trust an individual to determine justice and apply it. No one was pure, no one was objective, no one was immune.

Albert Street became New Market became Strand and he wondered when he had begun thinking like that. When had he passed the turning point? Was it a process of disillusionment? Seeing colleagues who had given in to temptation, or pillars of the community that he had led away in handcuffs? Or was it his own fall? Discovery of his own weaknesses. The first time he had realized he was drunk at work and could get away with it? Or when he raised his hand to Anna?

It didn’t matter.

How do you catch a vigilante? That mattered.

Murder equals motive. What was the assegai man’s? The why?

Was there even a simple motive here? Or was he like a serial killer, motive hidden somewhere in the short circuits of faulty neural wiring? So that there was fuck-all, no spoor leading to a source, no strand you could twiddle with and tug on until a bit came loose and you get hold of it and start unraveling.

With a serial murderer you had to wait. Examine every victim and every murder scene. Build a profile and place every bit of evidence alongside the rest and wait for a picture to form, hoping it would make sense, hoping it would reflect reality. Wait for him to make a mistake. Wait for his self-confidence to bloom and for him to become careless and leave a tire track or a smear of semen or a fingerprint. Or you were just lucky and overheard two nurses chatting about supermarkets. You took a big gamble and the very first Friday you put out the bait, hit the jackpot.

In the old days they used to talk about Benny’s Luck, shaking their heads: “Jissis, Benny, you’re so fuckin’ lucky, my friend,” and it would make him fed up. He was never “lucky”—he had instinct. And the courage to follow it. And in those days he had been given the freedom to do so. “Carry on, Benny,” his first Murder and Robbery CO, Colonel Willie Theal, had said. “It’s the results that count.” Skinny Willie Theal, of whom the late fat Sergeant Nougat O’Grady had said: “There but for the grace of God, goes Anorexia.” In those days the Criminal Procedure Act was a vague sort of guideline that they used as it suited them. Now O’Grady was buried and Willie Theal in Prince Albert with lung cancer and a police pension and if you didn’t read a scumbag his rights before you arrested him they threw the fucking case out of court.

But it was part of the system and the system created order and that was good; if only he could create order in his life, too. That ought to be easy, as the Criminal Procedure Act of the alcoholic was the Twelve Steps.

Fuck. Why couldn’t he just follow it blindly? Why couldn’t he become a disciple without thinking, without a feeling of despair in the pit of his stomach when he read the Second Step which said you must believe that a Power greater than yourself is going to heal your drinking madness?

He turned right in Buitengracht, found parking, got out and walked in the early evening to the neon sign:

Fireman’s Arms.

The southeaster plucked at his clothes as if trying to hold him back, but he was through the door and the tavern opened up before him, the safe, warm heart, musty with the smell of cigarette smoke and beer that had been spilt drop by drop on the carpet over the years. Camaraderie in the bowed shoulders hunched over glasses, television in the corner showing the Super Sport cricket highlights. He stood still a moment, allowing the atmosphere to settle over him.

Homecoming. He felt the yearning to sit at the wooden bar counter with its multitude of stains. The yearning to order a brandy and Coke. To settle in for the first deep draught and feel the synapses in his brain tingle with pleasure and the warmth glide through him. Just one drink, his head said to him, and then he fled, banged open the door and strode out. A tremor traveled through his body, because he knew that chorus: just one drink. He walked hastily to his car. He had to get in and lock the door and leave. Now.

His phone rang. He gripped it in a hand already shaking. “Griessel.”

“Benny, it’s Matt.”

“Jissis.” Out of breath.

“What?”

“Good timing.”

“Oh?”

“I . . . uh . . . I was just on my way home.”

“I am at the provincial commissioner’s office. Could you come by here?” His tone of voice said: Don’t ask, I can’t talk now.

“Caledon Square?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be there now.”

He phoned Keyter and said something had come up.

“Okay.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Okay, Benny.”

There were four people in the commissioner’s office. Griessel only knew three of them—the provincial commissioner himself, head of investigations, John Afrika, and Matt Joubert.

“Inspector, my name is Lenny le Grange and I am a member of Parliament,” said the fourth with an outstretched hand. Griessel shook it. Le Grange had on a dark blue suit and bright red tie like a thermometer. His grip was cool and bony.

“I am truly sorry to bother you at this time of the evening—I hear you’ve had a long day. Please sit down; we won’t detain you long. How is the investigation proceeding?”

“As well as can be expected,” he said, glancing at Joubert for help.

“Inspector Griessel is still familiarizing himself with the case files,” said Joubert as they all found places around the commissioner’s round conference table.

“Naturally. Inspector, let me go straight to the point. I have the dubious privilege to be the chairman of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee of Justice and Political Development. As you may have gathered from the media, we are busy developing a new Sexual Offenses Bill.”

Griessel had gleaned nothing from the media. But he nodded.

“Very good. Part of the bill is a proposed Register of Sexual Offenders, a list of names of everyone who has been convicted of a sexual offense—rapists, sex with minors, you name it. Our recommendation is that the register be made available to the public. For instance, we want to prevent parents handing their child over to a pedophile when they enroll the child in a crčche.

“To be honest, this aspect of the new bill is controversial. There are people who say it is a contravention of the constitutional right to privacy. It is one of those cases that create division across party lines. At this stage it looks as if we are going to push the bill through, but our majority is not large. I am sure you’re beginning to understand why I’m here.”

“I understand,” said Griessel.

The MP took a white sheet of paper from his jacket pocket.

“Just to make matters more interesting, I would like to read an extract from

Die Burger

of two weeks ago. I gave a press conference and they quoted me thus:

‘If there are consequences for the sexual offender, such as vigilante attacks on him or inability to find work, then let it be so. A sexual offender forfeits the right to privacy. The right to privacy is not more important than a woman or child’s right to physical integrity,’ the chairman of Portfolio Committee for Justice and Political Development, Advocate Lenny le Grange, said yesterday.”

Le Grange looked pointedly at Griessel. “Me and my big mouth, Inspector. One says these things because one believes with such passion that our women and children must be protected. One says it out of reaction to what one perceives as far-fetched scare stories dreamt up by the Opposition. I mean, a vigilante . . . Perhaps I thought it would never happen. Or if it did happen, it would be an isolated incident where the police would rapidly step in and make an arrest. One never foresees . . . not what is going on at the moment.”

Le Grange leaned over the table. “They are going to make me eat my words. But that goes with the job. It’s the risk I run. I don’t care about that. But I do care about the bill. That’s why I am asking you to stop this vigilantism. So we can protect our women and children.”

“I understand,” he said again.

“What do you need, Benny?” asked the commissioner, as if they were old friends.

He hesitated before answering. He looked from the politician to the Western Cape chief of police and then he said: “The one thing that is no longer available, Commissioner. Time.”

“And apart from that?” His tone said that was not the answer he had wanted.

“What Benny is saying is that this sort of case is complicated. The problem is lack of an obvious motive,” said Matt Joubert.

“That’s right,” said Griessel. “We don’t know why he is doing it.”

“Why would anyone do it?” asked le Grange. “Surely it’s to protect children. That’s obvious.”

“Motive,” said John Afrika, “is usually an identifier, Mr. le Grange. If the assegai man’s motive is purely to protect children, that identifies him as one of about ten million concerned men in this country. Everyone wants to protect children, but only one is committing murder to do so. What makes him different? Why did he choose this way? That is what we need to know.”

“There are a few things that would help,” said Griessel.

Everyone looked at him.

“We need to know if Enver Davids was the first one. As far as we know, he is the first in the Western Cape. But crime against children is everywhere. Perhaps he started somewhere else.”

“What would that help?” asked le Grange.

“The first one could be significant. The first one would be personal. Personal vengeance. And then he decides he likes it. Maybe. We must consider it. The second thing that could help is other assegai murders or attacks. It’s a unique weapon. The state pathologist says they don’t see them anymore. You don’t buy a new assegai at the Seven-Eleven. Why did he go to the trouble of getting one? Then there is the question of where he got it. Professor Pagel says Zululand. Could our colleagues in Durban help? Do they know who makes and sells them? Could they ask the questions? And the last thing we can do is draw up a list of all the reported crimes against children in the past eighteen months. Particularly those where the suspects have not been apprehended.”

“Do you think he’s taking revenge?” asked Advocate le Grange.

“Just another possibility,” said Griessel. “We must consider them all.”

“There are hundreds of cases,” said the commissioner.

“That is why Benny said time is the one thing he needs,” said Matt Joubert.

“Damn,” said le Grange.

“Amen,” said John Afrika.

The southeaster was blowing so hard they had to run doubled over to their cars.

“You did well in there, Benny,” shouted Joubert above the roar of the wind.

“So did you.” And then: “You know, if you drank more, you too could have been an inspector now.”

“Instead of a senior superintendent that has to deal with all this political shit?”

“Exactly.”

Joubert laughed. “That’s one way to look at it.”

They reached Griessel’s car. “I’m going to look in on Cliffy quickly,” he said.

“I’m coming too. See you there.”

Gently he pushed open the door of the hospital room and saw them sitting there—the woman and two children around the bed, all bathed in the yellow pool of the bedside lamp. Mketsu’s wife holding his hand, the children on either side, their eyes on their wounded father. And Cliffy lying there with a soft smile, busy telling them something.

Griessel stopped, reluctant to intrude. And something else, a consciousness of loss, of envy, but Cliffy saw him and his smile broadened and he said, “Come in, Benny.”

On the threshold of his flat was a small glass vase with a single, unfamiliar red flower. And a small note under the vase, folded twice.

He picked it up, opened the letter and hope welled up in him. Anna?

Welcome to our building. Pop in for tea when you have the time.

At the bottom.

Charmaine. 106.

Fuck. He looked down the passage in the direction of 1

0

6. All was quiet. Somewhere he could hear a television. He unlocked his door quickly and went in, closing it softly. He placed the vase on the breakfast bar. He read the note again, crumpled it up and tossed it in his new rubbish bin. Not the sort of thing he wanted his children to see lying around tomorrow.

His sitting-room suite. He stood back and inspected it. Tried to see it through his children’s eyes. The place looked less barren at least, more homely. He sat down in a chair. Not too bad. He stood up and went and lay down on the couch with a faint stirring of pleasure. He felt weary, felt like closing his eyes.

Long day. The seventh since he had last had a drink.

Seven days. Only a hundred and seventy-three to go.

He thought of the Fireman’s Arms and his mind cajoling him: just one drink. He thought about Cliffy’s family. The fucking thing was that he couldn’t be sure his family would ever be like that again. Anna and himself and Carla and Fritz. How did you get that back? How did you build that sort of bond?

That made him remember the photo and he got up on impulse to find it. He found it in his briefcase and went and lay down again with the light on. He studied the photo. Benny, Anna, Carla and Fritz.

Eventually he got up, went up to the bedroom and put it on the windowsill above the bed. Then he took a shower. His cell phone rang when he was lathered with soap. He made a wet trail to the bed and answered it. It might be Anna.

“Griessel.”

“It’s Cloete, Benny. The Sunday papers are driving me crazy,” the liaison officer said.

“Well, tell them to go to hell.”

“I can’t. It’s my job.”

“What do those vultures want?”

“They want to know if Laurens is Artemis.”

“If

she

is Artemis?”

“You know, whether it was Artemis that murdered her.”

“We don’t know what the fucker’s name is.”

Cloete was annoyed. “Is it the same murder weapon, Benny?”

“Yes, it’s the same murder weapon.”

“And the same MO?”

“Yes.”

“And I can tell them that?”

“It won’t make any difference.”

“It will make a hell of a difference in

my

life,” said Cloete. “Because then they will stop fucking phoning me.” He put the phone down.

27.

At three minutes to ten he knocked on the door of his own house like some stranger. Anna opened up and then she asked, “Are you sober, Benny?” and he said, “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

He looked in her eyes to let her know the first “yes” was enough. She was looking pretty. She had done something with her hair. It was shorter. Her face was made up, lips red and shiny.

She took her time before reacting. “I’ll get the children.” When he lifted a foot to enter, she shut the door in his face. He stood there dumbstruck and then the humiliation descended on him. He lowered his head in case the neighbors were outside and saw him like this. Everyone would know he had been kicked out. This street was like a village.

The door opened and Carla charged at him, threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him saying, “Daddy,” like she did when she was little. Her hair smelled of strawberries. He held her close and said, “My child.”

He saw Fritz in the doorway with a rucksack in his hand.

“Hi, Dad.” Uneasy.

“Hello, Fritz.”

“Bring them back at six,” said Anna who stood behind her son.

“I will,” he said.

She closed the door.

Why was she looking so nice? What was she planning today?

Carla talked too much, too gaily, and Fritz, sitting in the back, said not a word. In the rear-view mirror, Griessel could see the boy gazing out of the car window expressionlessly. In Fritz’s profile he saw echoes of Anna’s features. He wondered what Fritz was thinking. About that last night his father had been at home and had hit his mother? How could he fix that? And Carla babbled on about the upcoming Matric Farewell and the intrigues of who had asked whom to go with them, as if she could make a success of the day single-handed.

“I thought we might eat at the Spur,” he said when Carla stopped for breath.

“Okay,” she said.

“We’re not at prep school anymore,” said Fritz.

“The Spur is a

family

restaurant, stupid,” said Carla.

“The Spur is for little kids,” said Fritz.

“Well, you choose, Fritz,” said Griessel. “Anywhere.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

As they walked up the stairs to his flat, he thought it would be awful for the children. This small bare space: Dad’s penitentiary. He opened up and stood aside so they could enter. Carla disappeared up the stairs straightaway. Fritz stood in the door and surveyed the place.