Thirteen Hours

Chapter 14

They sat outside a coffee shop on the corner of Shortmarket and Bree Street, five policemen around a table for four. Cloete sat a little apart, beyond the shade of the red umbrella, cigarette between his fingers, talking quietly on his cell phone, pleading for patience from some determined journalist. The rest had their elbows on the table and their heads together.

John Afrika's deep frown showed that his burden of responsibility was weighing heavily on him. 'Benny, it's your show,' he said.

Griessel had known that was coming, it always did. The men at the top wanted to do everything except make the decisions.

'Commissioner, it's important that we utilise the available manpower as efficiently as possible.' He listened to his own words. Why was he always so pompous when he spoke to important people?

Afrika nodded solemnly.

'Our main problem is that we don't know where the Barnard murder took place. We need forensics from the scene. There were exit wounds, there would have to be blood, bullets ... and then we need to place Greyling at the scene ...'

'Geyser,' said Fransman Dekker, still sullen.

He ought to have remembered that, Griessel thought. What was the matter with him today? 'Geyser', he burned it into his memory. 'I'll have them brought in to the station, the man and his wife. We need to talk to them separately. Meanwhile Fransman can go to AfriSound ...' He glanced at Dekker, uncertain whether he had the company name right. Dekker did not react. '... the record company. We need to know about Barnard's day. Where was he last night, and with whom? How late? Why? We have to build this case from the ground up.'

'Amen,' said Afrika. 'I want a rock-solid case.'

'We need a formal statement from Willie Mouton. Fransman?'

'I'll handle it.'

'Did anyone else see or hear Geyser yesterday? Who saw Geyser's wife when she went to Barnard's office?'

'The Big Bang,' said Cloete in disgust, his conversation over. Then his phone rang again. He sighed and turned away.

'As far as Vusi's case is concerned - he needs help, sir, someone to coordinate the stations, someone with authority, someone who can bring more people in from the southern suburbs, Milnerton or Table View ...'

'Table View?' said Dekker. 'That lot couldn't find their own arses with a hand mirror.'

'The chopper can help us in an hour's time. Benny, you'll have to coordinate. Who else is there?' said John Afrika, feeling uncomfortable.

Griessel's voice became quiet and serious. 'Commissioner, this is someone's child out there. They have been hunting her from the early hours of the morning ...'

Afrika avoided the intensity of Griessel's gaze. He knew where this was coming from, he knew the story of Benny's daughter and her abduction, six months ago.

'True,' he said.

'We need feet on the ground. Vehicles, patrols. Vusi, the photo the American boy took - the one of the missing girl - we need prints. Every policeman in the Peninsula ... the Metro people ...' and Griessel wondered what had come of the Field Marshal and his street search.

'The Metro people?' said Dekker. 'Fucking glorified traffic cops...'

John Afrika gave Dekker a stern look. Dekker gazed out at the street.

'It makes no difference,' said Griessel. 'We need all the eyes we can get. I thought we should bring Mat Joubert in to coordinate, sir. He's fairly free at the PT ...'

'No,' said Afrika firmly. He raised his eyebrows. 'You don't know about Joubert yet?' 'What about him?' Griessel's phone rang. He looked at the screen. The number was unfamiliar. 'Excuse me,' he said as he answered, 'Benny Griessel.'

'This is Willie Mouton.' The voice was self-important.

'Mr Mouton,' Griessel said deliberately, so the others would know.

John Afrika nodded. 'I gave him your number,' he said quietly.

Mouton said: 'I phoned Josh Geyser and told him to come to the office, I have something important to say to him. He will be here in ten minutes, if you want to arrest him.'

'Mr Mouton, we would have preferred to bring him in ourselves.' Griessel did his best to disguise his frustration.

'First you complain that I won't cooperate,' said Mouton, touchy now.

Griessel sighed. 'Where is your office?'

'Sixteen Buiten Street. Go through the ground-floor building - our entrance is through the garden at the back. There's a big sign on the wall. Ask for me at reception on the ground floor.'

'We'll be there now.' He ended the call. 'Mouton asked Geyser to come to his office. He'll be there in ten minutes.'

'Jissis,' said Dekker, 'what an idiot.'

'Fransman, I will talk to Geyser, but you have to find the wife ...'

'Melinda?' Cloete still had trouble believing it. 'Pretty Melinda?'

'I'll get their home address from Mouton, then I'll call you. Commissioner, none of this helps Vusi. Is there no one who can help him?'

'Well, it sounds as though the Barnard affair is sorted out. If the case against Geyser is strong enough, lock him up and go and help Vusi. We can tie up the loose ends tomorrow.'

Afrika saw the look on Benny's face and he knew it wasn't the solution he had hoped for.

'OK. We can bring in Mbali Kaleni temporarily until you are free.'

'Mbali Kaleni?' Dekker was taken aback.

'Shit,' said Vusi Ndabeni. Immediately he added: 'I'm sorry ...'

'Nee, o fok,' said Dekker.

'She's clever. And thorough,' said the Commissioner, on the back foot for the first time.

'She's a Zulu,' said Vusi.

'She's a pain in the gat,' said Dekker. 'And she's at Bellville, her SC won't release her.'

'He will,' said John Afrika, in control again. 'She's all I have available, and she's on Benny's mentor list. She can coordinate from Caledon Square - I'll ask them to arrange something for her.'

He saw no relief on Vusi and Fransman Dekker's faces.

'Besides,' said Afrika with finality, 'it's only temporary, until Benny can take over.' As an afterthought he added reproachfully: 'And you should be supporting our efforts to develop more women in the Service.'

Easy and athletic, the young black man jogged through the trees of De Waal Park, from the Molteno Reservoir end to the waiting Land Rover Defender in Upper Orange Street.

'Nothing,' he said as he got in.

'Fuck,' said the young white driver. He pulled away before the door was even properly shut. 'We have to get out of here. He would have called the cops. And he saw the Landy.'

'Well, then we'll have to get our own cops here too.'

The white man took his cell phone out of his breast pocket and passed it to the black man. 'Call them. Make sure they know exactly where she disappeared. And get Barry down here as well. He's no use up the fucking mountain any more. Tell him to go to the restaurant.'

Griessel and Dekker walked to Loop Street together. 'What have you got against Inspector Kaleni?' Griessel asked.

'She's the fat one,' said Dekker, as if that explained everything. Griessel remembered her from last Thursday: short, very fat, with an unattractive face, severe as the sphinx, in a black trouser suit that sat too tight.

'And ...?'

'We were at Bellville together and she irritates the living shit out of everyone. Fucking bra-burning feminist, she thinks she knows everything, sucks up to the SC like you won't believe ...' Dekker stopped. 'I'm this way.' He pointed down the street.

'Come to AfriSound when you're finished.'

Dekker wasn't finished yet: 'She has this moerse irritating habit of appearing out of nowhere, like a fucking bad omen. She sneaks up, quiet as a wet dream, on those little feet and all of a sudden there she is, always smelling of KFC, though you never see her eating the fucking stuff.'

'Does your wife know?'

'Know what?'

'That you have the horny hots for Kaleni?'

Dekker growled something indiscernible and irascible. Then he threw back his head and laughed, a deep bark that echoed off the building across the road.

Griessel thought about fat policemen as he walked to his car, of the late Inspector Tony O'Grady. Fat Englishman, smartass know- it-all, always chewing nougat with his mouth half open. Didn't bath quite as often as he should. Could drink with the best of them, one of the guys, never unpopular. It was because Kaleni was a woman; the detectives weren't ready for that.

Where were the days of Nougat O'Grady?

Then Griessel had been sober, keen and fearless. Always sharp, he could make a parade room of detectives roar with laughter, every fucking Monday morning. The days of Murder and Robbery, of the ascetic Colonel Willie Theal, already three months in his grave now from cancer, of Captain Gerbrand Vos, later Superintendent, with his bright blue eyes, shot dead in front of his house by a Cape Flats syndicate. And Mat Joubert ... which reminded Griessel of what the Commissioner had said. He took out his phone and called.

'Mat Joubert,' said the familiar voice.

'I suggested to the Commissioner that we bring the Senior Superintendent in, because we need help and he says: "Don't you know about Joubert yet?" ...'

'Benny ...' Apologetic.

'What don't I know yet?'

'Where are you?'

'In Loop Street, on my way to arrest a gospel singer for murder.'

'I have to come to the city. I'll buy you coffee when you're finished.'

'To tell me what?'

'Benny ... I'll tell you when I see you. I don't want to do it over the phone.'

Then Griessel knew what it was. His heart sank.

'Jissis, Mat,' he said.

'Benny, I wanted to tell you in person. Call me when you're done.'

Griessel climbed into his car and slammed the door hard. He turned the ignition.

Nothing ever stayed the same.

Everyone went away. Sooner or later.

His daughter. Gone to London. He had stood beside Anna at the airport watching Carla walk away through the guarded door to Boarding. Dragging her suitcase on wheels in one hand and holding her ticket and passport in the other, hurrying off on the Great Adventure, leaving him, leaving them. His emotions threatened to get the better of him, there next to his estranged wife. He wanted to take Anna by the hand and say: 'It's only you and Fritz left, because Carla is gone now, into the grown-up world.' But he didn't dare.

His daughter looked back once just before she disappeared around the corner. She was far away, but he could see the excitement on her face, the expectation, dreaming of what lay in store for her.

And he always stayed behind.

Would he stay behind again tonight? If Anna didn't want him any more? Would he cope with that?

What if she said: 'OK, Benny, you're sober, you can come home again'? What the fuck would he do then? Over the past few weeks he had started wondering more and more about that. Maybe it was a kind of rationalisation, a way of protecting himself from her rejection, but he wasn't sure that it would work - Anna and him together again.

His feelings about it were complicated, he knew that. He still loved Anna. But he suspected he had been able to stop drinking precisely because he was alone, because he no longer took the violence and death home to his family every night, because he didn't walk in the front door and see his wife and children and be stalked by the fear that they too would be found like that, bodies broken, hands rigid in the terrible fear of death.

But that wasn't the whole story.

They had been happy, he and Anna. Once upon a time. Before he began drinking. They had their little family world, just the two of them at first; then came Carla and Fritz and he had played on the carpet with his children and at night he had snuggled up to his wife and they had talked and laughed and made love with heartbreaking ease, carefree, because the future was a predictable Utopia, even though they were poor, even though they owed money on every stick of furniture, and on the car and the house. Then he was promoted to Murder and Robbery, and the future slipped between his fingers, from his grasp, little by little, day by day, so slowly he didn't realise it, so subtly that he got up from a drunken stupor thirteen years later and realised it was all gone.

You could never get it back. That was the fuck-up. You could never go back, that life, those people and those circumstances were gone, just as dead as O'Grady, Theal and Vos. You had to start over, but this time without the naivety, innocence and optimism of before, without the haze of being in love. You were different, you were stuck with the way you were now, with all the knowledge and experience and realism and disillusionment.

He didn't know if he could do it. He didn't know if he had the energy - to go back to where every day was judgement day. Eagle- eyed Anna watching him when he came home at night, where had he been? Did he smell of drink? He would come through the door knowing this, and he would try too hard to prove his sobriety, he would play up to her, he would see her anxiety until she was sure he was sober and then she would relax. It all felt too much for him, a burden he wasn't ready to bear.

Then there was the fact that in the past two or three months, he had begun to enjoy his life in the spartan flat, the visits of his children before his daughter went overseas, when Fritz and Carla sat and chatted with him in his sitting room or a restaurant like three adults, three ... friends, not hamstrung by the rules and regulations of the conventional family. He had begun to enjoy the silence of his home when he opened the door, nobody watching and judging him. He could open the fridge and drink directly, long and deeply, out of the two-litre bottle of orange juice. He could lie on the couch with his shoes on and close his eyes and snooze till seven or eight o'clock and then stroll down to the Engen garage on Annandale and buy a Woollies Food sandwich and a small bottle of ginger beer. Or his favourite, a Dagwood burger at Steers, then home to type an email to Carla with two fingers, a bite and a swallow in between. He could play on his bass guitar and dream impossible dreams. Or he could return the dish to seventy-something Charmaine Watson- Smith at Number 106. 'Oh, Benny, you don't have to thank me, you're my charity. My policeman.' Despite her years her eyes were full of life and her food was so delicious, every time.

Charmaine Watson-Smith who had sent Bella around. And he had taken advantage of Bella and, fuck it, he was an adulterer, but it had been incredible, so terribly good. Everything has a price.

Perhaps Anna knew about Bella. Perhaps Anna was going to tell him tonight that he might well be sober, but he was an unfaithful bastard and she didn't want him any more. He wanted Anna to want him. He needed her approval, he needed her love and her embrace and the safe haven of their home. But he didn't know if that was the right thing for him now.

Jissis, why did life have to be so complicated?

He was in Buiten Street and there was no parking and the present, the reality of it all, felt to him as though someone had switched on a powerful light. He blinked his eyes against its brightness.