So he told her. About Anna. About his children. The drinking. Without plan or structure, he let it flow as it came into his head, his arm tight around her now, and his hand softly on the fullness of her breast. Her face against his, the fine hairs against his stubble.


He told her how he had been, in the days before the booze. He had been an optimist, an extrovert. A joker. He was the one who could make everyone laugh, at the funniest moments. In the parade room, when tensions ran high and tempers were stretched, he could spot the silly side of the matter and cut through all the crap with a phrase and leave them helpless with laughter. He was the one everyone phoned first when they wanted to throw some meat on the griddle for a

braai.

Two or three times a month he would join Murder and Robbery for an impromptu barbecue, a

braai.

Three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, just to relieve the never-ending pressure, at Blouberg or Silvermine or even at the office itself in Bellville South. Beer and meat and bread, laughter, chat and drink, he would be first on the list, because he was Sergeant Benny Griessel, instinctive investigator and unofficial, cynical chief clown who could ridicule the job and the bureaucracy and affirmative action but with compassion. So that they could all face up to it again.


Now, this side of the booze, they still had their

braais.

But no one called him. No one wanted him there, the sot who staggered and couldn’t string two coherent words together. The oaf who bumped into others, swore and fought and had to be taken home to a wife who opened the door reluctantly. Because she didn’t want that drunkard or the humiliation.


He told Christine he had been sober for eleven days now and he didn’t know the man this side of the booze.


Everything had changed around him. His children, his wife, his colleagues. Jissis, he was an old has-been amongst all the

Sturm und Drang

of the young policemen in the Service.


But the main thing was, he believed he

had

changed. He wasn’t sure how. Or how much. A strange fellow in his forties with a gaping hole in his life.


He told her all this and somewhere in the telling she asked: “Why do you want your wife back?” He wondered about that before he answered. He said the thing was, he had been happy then. They had. She was the woman he had begun his life with. They had nothing, just each other. Set up house together, suffered together. Laughed together. Shared the same wonder at the magic of Carla and Fritz’s births. Celebrated together when he was promoted. They had history, the sort of history that mattered. They were friends and lovers and he wanted that back. He wanted the bond and the camaraderie and the trust. Because that was a great part of who he had been, what made him what he had been.


And he wanted to be that again.


If he couldn’t get Anna back, he had fuck-all. That was it.


She said: “A person can never be like that again,” and before he could react, she asked, “Do you still love her?” It made no difference how long he thought about that one, he could not answer her. He wanted to talk shit about “what is love,” but he kept quiet and suddenly felt weary of himself, so he asked, “What about you?”


“What about me?”


“Why was it necessary . . . to become a prostitute?”


“A sex worker,” she said, but in quiet self-mockery.


She moved slowly and he slipped out of her. A small moment of loss. She turned over so her face was towards him and his hand was off her breast.


“Would you have asked me that if I was selling flowers?” There was no confrontation in her voice. Her words were flat and without emotion. She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s just a job.”


He drew a breath to answer, but she went on: “People think it’s this dreadful thing. Bad. Damaging. Your work brings you damage too. That’s what you just said. But it’s okay to be a policeman. Just don’t be a whore.”


He thought if she hadn’t been a sex worker, Sonia would have been safe at home, but he knew he could never say it.


“When I began, I also wondered what was different about me. All my clients ask the same thing. ‘Why did you become an escort?’ It makes you think there’s something wrong with you. Then you think, but why should it be something

wrong?

Why can’t it be something

right?

Why can’t it just be that I think further than most people? What is sex? Is it so bad? What makes it such a bad thing?”


She got up and walked away from him and he was sorry he had asked her. He didn’t mean to upset her. He should have thought. He wanted to say he was sorry, but she had disappeared down the passage. He became aware of his trousers still unfastened so he zipped them up.


She came back. He saw her shadowy figure moving and here she was, but this time she sat at his feet.


“Do you want a cigarette?”


“Please.”


She put two cigarettes in her mouth and clicked the lighter. In the light of the flame he could see her breasts and face and bare shoulders.


She passed one to him. He drew deeply.


“I was always different,” she said and blew a plume of smoke that cast a ghostly shadow on the opposite wall. “It’s hard to explain. When you are small, you understand nothing. You think there’s something wrong with you. My parents . . . I come from a good home. My father was in the army and my mother was mostly at home and they were okay with that. With their little world. With that kind of life. The older I got the harder it was for me to understand. How could that be all? How could that be enough? You go to school, you find a husband or a wife, you raise kids, you retire by the sea and then you die. You never upset anyone, you do the right thing. Those are my father’s words. ‘My child, you do the right thing.’ Whose right thing? The people’s? Who are they to decide what the right thing is? You pay your parking money and you never drive too fast and don’t make a noise after ten at night. And you do your duty. That’s another of my father’s classics. ‘People must do their duty, my child.’ To your family, to your town, to your country. What for? What did they get for doing their duty? My father did his duty to the army and he was dead before he took his pension. My mother did her duty to us and she has never been to Cape Town or Europe or anywhere. After all the duty, there was never money for anything. Not for clothes or cars or furniture or holidays. But it was okay for them, because people mustn’t be flashy, that’s not the right thing to do.


“Everyone wants you to be ordinary. Everything everyone teaches you, is just so you won’t be different. But I was different. I couldn’t help it. It’s the way I am. If my parents or the school or whoever said that is what you should do, then I wondered what it felt like to do the opposite. I wanted to see what it looked like from the other side. So I did. I smoked a bit and I drank a bit. But when you are fifteen or sixteen, almost all the rules are about sex. You mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that, because you must be a decent girl. I wanted to know why you had to be a decent girl. What for? So you could get a decent man? And a decent life, with decent children? And a decent funeral with lots of people? So I did things. And the more things I did, the more I realized the other side is the interesting one. Most people don’t want to be decent, they’ve all got this stuff inside that wants to be different, but they don’t have the guts. They are all too scared someone will say something. They are afraid they will lose all the boring things in their lives. There was this teacher, he was so dutiful. I worked on him. And I slept with him on the Students Christian Association camp at The Island. He said, God, Christine, I’ve wanted you so long. So I asked him why he hadn’t done something about it. He couldn’t answer me. And this friend of my father. When he came to our house he would look at me sideways but then go and sit next to his wife and hold her hand. I knew what he wanted. I worked on him and he said he liked young girls but that it was his first time.”


She stubbed the cigarette out and half turned to him.


“He was as old as you,” she said, and for a second he thought he heard scorn in her voice.


She leaned her back against his feet. She folded her arms below her breasts.


“Do you know why my parents sent me to university? To find a husband. One with education. And a good job. So I could have a good life. A good life. What does a good life help? What use is it when you die and you can say to yourself I had a good life? Boring, but good.


“At varsity this guy was visiting me, third-year medical student. His parents lived in Heuwelsig and they had money. I saw how they lived. I saw if you have money you don’t have to be dutiful and ordinary and good. Having money means more than being able to buy things. You can be different and no one says anything. Then I knew what I wanted. But how to get it? You could marry a rich man, but it’s still not your money. I got a job working weekends for a catering business. One night at a golf course I stood having a smoke and this man comes up to me. He had a car business in Zastron Street, and he asked me, ‘How much do you earn?’ When I told him he said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather make a thousand rand a night?’ and I asked, ‘How would I do that?’ and he said, ‘With your body, love.’ He gave me his card and he said, ‘Think about it.’ I phoned him that Monday. And I did it. In a flat, they were seven guys who had a flat in Hilton, and sometimes at lunchtime or sometimes in the evening they would phone me at the hostel and I would go.


“But then, just before final exams, I got pregnant,” she said. “I was on the pill, but it didn’t work. When I told them they said they would pay for the abortion, but I said no. So they gave me money and I came to Cape Town.”


38.


Orlando Arendse had a fixed routine every morning. In his large, pretty house in West Beach, Milnerton, he got up at six without the help of an alarm clock. He put on slippers and a burgundy dressing gown. He picked up his reading glasses from the kitchen table, left his wife sleeping and went to the kitchen. He put the spectacles on the kitchen table and ground a 5

0

/5

0

mix of Italian and Mocca Java coffee beans—enough for four large mugs. He filled the coffee machine with water and carefully poured in the ground coffee. Then he pressed the switch.


He walked to the front door, opened it and went out. He looked up to see what the weather was doing today, then crossed the paved driveway to the big, automatic security gate. He walked briskly erect, despite his 66 years, most of them lived on the Cape Flats. To the right of the gate was the postbox. He opened it and took out

Die Burger.


Without unfolding the newspaper he glanced at the headlines. He had to hold the paper at arm’s length, as he was not wearing his glasses.


He walked back to the house and just before he went through the door he looked left and right. It was instinctive behavior, no longer functional.


He spread the paper open neatly on the Oregon pine table in the kitchen. He put on his reading glasses. His right hand drifted down to the dressing gown pocket. It was empty and he clicked his tongue in exasperation. He no longer smoked. His wife and doctor were conspiring against him.


He only read the front page. By now the coffee machine ended its burbling with a final sigh. Orlando Arendse sighed with it as he did every morning. He got up and fetched two mugs from the cupboard above the machine and placed them on the counter. First he filled one cup and inhaled the aroma with pleasure. No milk or sugar. Just as it was. He poured the rest of the coffee into a flask so it would stay fresh. Mug in hand, he sat down at the paper again. He turned the page and inspected the small photo of the page-three editor, a lovely woman. Then he shifted his gaze to page two and began to read in earnest.


Usually at seven he would pour coffee from the flask into the other mug and take it to his wife. But at ten to seven, while he was reading the cricket report on the sports page, the electronic box in the entrance hall made its irritating noise.


Orlando stood up and crossed to the hall. He pressed a button and held his mouth close to the microphone. “Yes?”


“Orlando?”


He knew that deep voice, but couldn’t place it at the moment.


“Yes?”


“It’s Thobela.”


“Who?”


“Tiny. Tiny Mpayipheli.”

* * *

He ran down a green valley through knee-high grass, chasing a red balloon. He stretched out a hand to the string but stumbled and fell and it shot up into the air. He woke in Christine van Rooyen’s sitting room and smelt the sex on his body. What the fuck have I done?


He swung his legs off the couch and rubbed his eyes. He knew he hadn’t slept enough, could feel the lethargy in his mind and body, but that was not what lay so heavily. He didn’t want to think about it. He stood up a little unsteadily. He pushed his Z88 pistol and cell phone under the couch and took the little pile of clothes and shoes with him to the bathroom. He would have liked to brush his teeth, but that would have to wait. He got under the shower and opened the taps.


Jissis. Drunkard and adulterer. Whore-fucker. Fucking weakling who couldn’t control himself, telling her his entire life story. What the fuck was wrong with him? He wasn’t a fucking teenager anymore.


He scrubbed himself with the soap, washing his genitals two, three, four times. What was he going to do with her now? How far was Witness Protection? He would have to call them. How had the night gone for Bushy Bezuidenhout and company out at Camp’s Bay? While he lay in the embrace of a prostitute. With premeditation, that was the fucking thing—he had come here looking for it. Wanting her to touch him because he needed someone to touch him so fucking much. Because he thought a whore would find it easier to touch him. Because he couldn’t wait six fucking months for his wife, just maybe, to touch him.


He got out of the shower and toweled himself aggressively. Jissis, if only he could brush his teeth, his mouth tasted as if a mongoose had shat in it. He smelt his trousers. They still smelt of sex, he couldn’t go to work like that. Better phone Tim Ngubane and find out if Witness Protection could come and collect her.


Why did she have to come and lie with him? And then to tell him her story as if it was

his

fucking fault?


He was still standing like that holding his trousers up to his nose, when she opened the bathroom door and said in a frightened voice: “I think there is someone at the door.”

* * *

Arendse had last seen Tiny Mpayipheli five years ago. Sitting together at the Oregon table, he could see that the Xhosa had changed. Still a very big man with a voice like a cello. Still the pitch-black eyes that made him shiver the first time he looked into them. But the lines in the face were a bit deeper and the short-cropped hair had acquired a little gray at the temples.


“Tell me about Carlos Sangrenegra,” said his visitor, taking a swallow of his coffee.


Arendse looked down at the front page of the newspaper before him and then up at the big man. He saw absolute intent. He was on the point of saying something, asking a lot of questions, while the tumblers dropped slowly but surely. He looked down at the newspaper again, back at Tiny and it all became clear. Everything.


“Jesus, Tiny.”


The Xhosa said nothing, just looked back with that eagle’s eye.


“What happened?” asked Arendse.


Thobela looked at him for a long time, then shook his head, left and right, once only.


“I am retired,” said Arendse.


“You know people.”


“It’s all different now, Tiny. It’s not like the old days. They’ve marginalized us colored people. Even in the drug trade.”


No reaction.


“I owe you. That’s true.” Arendse stood and crossed over to the coffee machine. “Let me just take my wife her coffee or I’ll never hear the end of it. Then I’ll make a few calls.”

* * *

Griessel tried to pull his trousers on, but he was in too much of a hurry. He lost his balance while he was standing on one leg. In the fall he knocked his head against the edge of the washbasin with a dull thud. He swore, jumped up and got the trousers on and fastened the clip only and strode out of the bathroom to the couch under which his weapon lay.


As he bent to retrieve the Z88 he felt dizzy. He got a hand on the pistol and went to the door.


“Who’s there?” He pressed down the safety clip of the pistol.


At first he heard nothing and then only the sound of the footsteps of more than one person. Footsteps receding down the passage. He turned the key with his left hand, jerked the door open and swung the barrel of his pistol into the passage. To the right he saw a figure disappearing into the lift. He ran that way. His head was still not clear.


The door to the lift had closed. He hesitated just a fraction then ran for the stairs and down, two steps at a time.


Six bloody stories. With his left hand on the rail, firearm in the right, just his trousers on, down, down. On the third floor his legs couldn’t keep up and he slipped and it was only his hand on the stair rail that prevented a headlong fall. He saw a pair of legs in front of him and looked up. A very fat woman in a bright purple tracksuit stood staring with a mouth like an “O,” her face glowing with perspiration.


“Excuse me,” he said and dragged himself upright, squeezing past her and taking the next set of stairs.


“You’re bleeding,” he heard the fat woman say. Instinctively he touched a hand to his forehead to check and it came away wet, warm and red. Run. What was he going to do when he reached the bottom if there were more than one? His breath labored, chest burned, legs complained.


Second story, first story, ground.


He went in pistol first, but the entrance hall was empty. He jerked the glass door open and sprinted out into the morning sun just as below at the corner of Belle Ombre and Kloof Nek Road a white Opel turned the corner with screeching tires.

* * *

When the call came from Midrand, the detective had to find the file in a forgotten pile against the wall.


Then he began to remember the two who had shot the boy at the garage. And the father who had bought the contents of the file.


He tapped a middle finger on the cover of the file. He wondered if he would still be interested. Whether there might be another opportunity here.


He looked up the father’s details in the documents. He found a number with a Cathcart code. Pulling the phone nearer he keyed them in. It rang for a long time. Eventually he put the phone down.


He would try again later.

* * *

She had heard someone trying to open the door, she said as she cleaned the wound on his forehead with a warm, damp facecloth. His nose was full of the smell of Dettol. She stood up against him where he sat on the couch. She was wearing a thin dressing gown. He didn’t want her this close.


At first she hadn’t been certain. She had gone to put the kettle on in the kitchen while he was showering when she heard it. She saw the door latch move. That was when she went to the door and called: “Is anyone there?” It had been quiet a second and then someone had rattled the door. She had run to him in the bathroom.


“You have a bump and a cut.” She stepped back to view her handiwork.


She was gentler this morning, but he didn’t want to think about it.


“Witness Protection will be here soon,” he said. He had called them before she had started on the cut.


“I’ll get ready.”


“They will take you to a safe house. You must pack clothes.”


He looked up at her face. She was watching him with an unreadable expression. She stretched out a hand to his face, touched her fingertips to his chin. Softly. She stroked up across his cheekbone to the plaster she had put over his wound.

* * *

There was a foil-wrapped parcel at his door. He picked it up, unlocked the door and went inside. The room felt dead, as if no one lived there. He put the food on the counter and went up the stairs. His legs were stiff from the earlier exercise. He brushed his teeth long and thoroughly. Washed his face. He found clean clothes, dressed in a hurry and jogged down the stairs. He was out of the door when he remembered the food parcel. He went back. Charmaine had left a note again. It read:


Care of your food and living; and believe it,


My most honour’d lord,


For any benefit that points to me,


Either in hope or present, I’d exchange


For this one wish, that you had power and wealth


To requite me, by making rich yourself.


Timon of Athens


He hadn’t the faintest idea who that Greek was.

* * *

Bushy Bezuidenhout looked pointedly at his watch as Griessel entered the house opposite Sangrenegra’s.


“Sorry, Bushy. It’s been a rough morning.”


“Very rough, I see. What happened to your head?”


“It’s a long story,” he said and he could read the drunkenness question in his colleague’s bloodshot eyes.


“How’s it going here?”


“The other night-shift people have already gone. I’ve been waiting for you.”


He felt extremely guilty and for a moment considered telling him where he had been. But he had already given one version of his night over the phone to Matt Joubert. He didn’t want to go through it again. “Thanks, Bushy.”


“Nothing happened here. No suspicious vehicles, no pedestrians except an old girl taking her dogs for a walk this morning. Carlos’s last lights went off at a quarter-past twelve.”


“Any sign of him this morning?”


“Nothing. But he has to report to the police station before twelve, so he will probably start moving around soon.” Then, as an afterthought. “We should have bugged his phone.”


Griessel thought it over. The chances that the assegai man would phone him were slim. “Maybe.”


“I’ll be off then.”


“I’ll stay until eight tonight, Bushy.”


“No, it’s okay. I won’t be able to sleep that long anyway.”

* * *

Vaughn Cupido was on the third floor with a large pair of binoculars.


“

My moer,

Benny, what happened to your head?”


“It’s a long story.”


“I’m not going anywhere.”


Griessel put his dish of food on a chest of drawers and went to stand next to Cupido. He held out his hand for the binoculars. Cupido handed them over and Griessel aimed them at Sangrenegra’s house.


“There’s not much to see,” said Cupido.


That was true. Most of the windows had reflective glass. “He has to go to the police station.”


“Fielies will follow him in a car.” Cupido tapped the radio on his hip. “He’ll keep us informed.”


Griessel handed the binoculars back. “I don’t think he’ll come in daytime.”


“The assegai man?”


Griessel nodded.


Cupido sat in an armchair that had a view outside. “You never know. I try putting myself in his shoes, but I can’t. What’s in the package?”


Griessel leaned back against the wall. He would have preferred to lie down on the double bed behind them. “Lunch.”


“Are you back with the missus, Benny?”


“No.”


“Made it yourself?”


“Do I question you about your fucking eating arrangements, Vaughn?”


“Okay, okay, I’m just making conversation. Stakeout was never my idea of high excitement. So, tell me about the knob. Or is that also off limits?”


“I bumped my head on a washbasin.”


“Sure.”


“Jissis, Vaughn, what do you think? That I was pissed? Do you want to smell my fucking breath? So you can run to the papers and tell the fucking journalists what a fuck-up I am? Here, use my cell phone. Call them. Go on, take it. Do you think I care? Do you think it still bothers me?”


“Jeez, Benny, take it easy. I’m on

your

side.”


Griessel folded his arms. The radio on Cupido’s hip beeped. “Vaughn, its Fielies, come in.”


“I’m standing by.”


“Do we have someone in number forty-eight?”


“Not that I’m aware of.”


“There’s a man with a huge pair of binoculars on the second floor. I don’t think he knows I can see him.”


“Is he watching Carlos?”


“Yep.”


“Tell him I’ll check it out,” said Griessel.


“Wait,” said Cupido. “Here comes King Carlos.”


Griessel looked at Sangrenegra’s house. The door of the double garage was slowly opening. “Fuck,” he said, “give me the radio.” He took it from Cupido. “Fielies, this is Benny. Does the guy have

only

binoculars?”


“That is all that I can see.”


“Carlos is on his way. Look carefully at the window . . .”


“Only the binoculars. There, they’ve gone now . . .”


Please not a sniper, thought Griessel. “Is everyone on this frequency?” he asked Cupido, who nodded.


“Everyone, stand by.”


“The binoculars are back,” said Fielies.


“Follow Carlos, Fielies.” To Cupido: “Who is his back-up?”


“He’s on his own. You know we don’t have enough manpower for back-up.”


“Fielies . . .”


“Standing by.”


“Don’t lose him.”

* * *

When Carlos’s BMW disappeared down the road, Griessel left the house and crossed the street. It was hot outside and windless in the lee of the mountain. The heat reflected up from the ground and perspiration sprang out on his skin. He worried that the smells of last night would come out again. Number 48 was another rich man’s house, white-painted concrete filling the entire plot. Nowhere for children to play. A playground for adults only. He looked up at the windows of the second floor. There was a room overlooking the street and Sangrenegra’s house and the curtains were parted. There was no one there now.


He approached the front door and rang the bell. He couldn’t hear it ring. He never could understand why people didn’t make their doorbells audible. How were you supposed to know if it was working or not? You stand there pressing like crazy, and most of the time it’s out of order and you wait like a fool at the door, but no one knows you’re there.


Irritably he pressed again. Once, twice, three times.


Nothing happened. Not a sound.


Fielies had clearly seen something. The binoculars. Appearing and disappearing.


He hammered on the door with the base of his fist. Boom, boom, boom, boom, the sound echoed inside. Open up, fuckers.


No reaction, no sound of footsteps.


He took out his phone and looked up Boef Beukes’s number that he had called last night. Pressed the green key. It rang unanswered. Boef knew who was calling. And he probably knew why, because the chump with the binoculars up there had probably phoned his boss and said the SVC people were at the door.


He banged one last time on the door, more out of frustration than expectation.


Then he turned and left.


39.


He had fetched himself a chair from the luxurious sitting room, carried it up the stairs and positioned it next to Cupido’s. They watched Sangrenegra return and listened while Fielies reported. The Colombian had been to the police and directly home again.


They sat and waited and had meaningless chats. They tried to keep the attention of the team, the detectives down the street, and the others hidden in the veld behind the house.


It was 15:34 now and the sleepiness felt like lead inside him. He must have been asleep with his eyes open, because when Cupido said with an edge, “Benny . . . ,” he jumped in fright. Looking down at the street he saw a panel van parked at Carlos’s door. There was a big blue cross on the side.

First Aid for Pools. Intensive Care Unit.


A black man got out. Big. Blue overalls.


Griessel picked up the radio. “Stand by, everyone.”


The man walked around to the back of the panel van and took out pipes, nets and other paraphernalia.


“That’s their sign on the wall,” said Cupido, binoculars to eyes.


“What?”


“On the wall of Carlos’s house. There, beside the garage door. ‘Swimming-pool care by First Aid for Pools.’ And a number.”


The swimming-pool man approached the front door. He pressed the intercom and waited.


“The number is four eight seven double-o, double-o.”


Griessel called it and waited.


The door across the street opened. They could see Carlos. He held the door open. The black man picked up all his things and went in.


“The number you have dialed does not exist,” said the woman’s voice in his ear. “Fuck,” he said. “Are you sure of that number?”


“Four eight seven double-o, double-o.”


“That’s what I . . .” He realized he hadn’t added the Cape Town code and he swore and pressed

0

21 and then the number again. At the fourth ring a woman answered.


“First Aid for Pools, good afternoon. This is Ruby speaking. How may I help you?”


“This is Detective Inspector Benny Griessel here from Serious and Violent Crimes. Can you tell me whether you have a Sangrenegra on your books? Forty-five Shanklin Crescent in Camps Bay.” He tried to communicate urgency in his voice so she wouldn’t fuck around.


“I’m sorry, sir, we cannot give you that information over the telephone . . .”


He stayed calm with effort and said: “Ruby, this is a police emergency and I do not have the time to . . .” He wanted to say “fuck around” and had to think of other words. “. . . Please, Ruby, I’m asking you really nicely here.”


She was quiet at the other end and perhaps it was the desperation in his voice, because eventually she said: “What was that name again?”


“Sangrenegra.” He spelt it out for her. Across the street the front door was still shut.


He faintly heard Ruby tapping her keyboard. “We have no Sangrenegra on our records, sir.”


“Are you sure?”


“Yes, sir, I am. Our computer doesn’t lie.” Sharply.


“Okay. Now we have to be sure here. Do you have a forty-five Shanklin Crescent in Camps Bay?”


“One moment.”


“Postman,” said Cupido, pointing down the street. A man in uniform was riding a bicycle from postbox to postbox. At Carlos’s house all was quiet.


“Sir?”


“I’m here,” said Griessel.


“We do have a forty-five Shanklin Crescent, Camps Bay on our books . . .”


He felt extremely relieved.


“The client is a company, it seems.”


“Yes.”


“The Colombian Coffee Company.”


“Okay,” said Griessel. The tension began to ebb.


“Here he comes,” said Cupido. The big black man exited the front door. He was holding only a white plastic pipe.


“They seem to be good clients. All paid up,” said Ruby.


“He must be fetching something from the van,” said Cupido.


Griessel’s eyes followed the black man in the blue overalls. The clothes looked a bit tight on him. The man opened the driver’s side door.


“We service them . . .”


The man tossed the swimming-pool pipe into the front of the van.


“. . . on Fridays,” said Ruby.


The man got into the van.


“What?” said Griessel.


“Something’s not right,” said Cupido. “He’s leaving . . .”


“We service them on Fridays.”


“. . . and his tools are still inside.”


Griessel grabbed his radio: “Stop him! Stop the swimming-pool man, everybody!” He rushed down the stairs, phone in one hand and radio in the other. Ruby said “Excuse me?” faintly over the phone as he screamed into the radio: “Fielies, turn your car around and stop the swimming-pool man!”


“Are you there, sir?”


“I’m on my way, Benny.”


He nearly fell as he turned the corner on the last set of stairs and the thought crossed his mind that the world was a fucking funny place. For years you don’t climb stairs and then all of a sudden you are faced with more stairs than your fucking legs can manage. “Hello?” said Ruby over the cell phone. “He’s around the corner!” shouted Fielies over the radio.


“Go, Fielies, drive, man!”


Griessel sprinted across the street to Carlos’s house. He heard feet slapping behind him, and half turning he saw Cupido and two constables running across the tar.


“Sir, are you there?”


The postman on his bicycle was in front of him, wide-eyed and mouth agape. Griessel sidestepped and for a second he thought they were going to collide.


“Hello?”


His knee bumped the rear tire of the bicycle and he thought if he fell now the cell phone and the radio would be buggered. He regained his balance. He shoved the door open and ran in and saw the Colombian lying by the swimming pool, blood everywhere. He reached him, he lay on his face and Benny turned him over and saw he was stone dead, a huge hole in his chest. He said: “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” and Ruby said: “That’s it!” and the cell phone made three beeps and the three policemen behind him skidded to a halt and then everything went quiet.

* * *

On the corner of Shanklin and Eldon, Detective Constable Malcolm Fielies wondered whether the swimming-pool man had turned left or right. He turned left, guessing, and ahead saw the panel van turning right and he put his foot flat on the accelerator and the tires screeched.


He turned right down Cranberry after the man and he saw on the sign that it was a crescent and he thought, got you, motherfucker, let’s see you get out of this one! But the road ran straight as an arrow and he saw the brake lights go on ahead and the van turned left and Fielies cursed and shouted into the radio: “I’m after him!” but he knew they only worked over short distances and he didn’t know whether they heard him.


He threw the radio down on the seat beside him and turned left. Geneva Drive. He suspected it was the street leading up to Camps Bay Drive, the one leading into the city, and he changed the Golf down to a lower gear and listened to the engine scream as he drove.


He was catching up, slowly but surely he was catching the motherfucker, although this motherfucker could drive.


He grabbed the microphone of the police radio off its hook and called Control and said he needed back-up, but then Geneva curved sharply to the right, so fucking unexpectedly, and he felt the back of the Golf go and he grabbed the steering wheel with both hands. The tires screeched and he saw he was going to hit the curb. Look

through

the turn, that was what they were taught. He looked

through

the fucking turn. Too fast. There went the back end and he spun, 36

0

degrees, and the engine stalled on him. He said “motherfucker” very loudly. He turned the key and it whined and whined and then it took and the Golf and Detective Constable Malcolm Fielies pulled away with screaming tires. At the T-junction with Camps Bay Drive he stopped and looked left and right and left again, but there was no sign of the panel van.

* * *

The swimming-pool floor of the house was filled with policemen and forensic people. Griessel sat to one side with his cell phone in his hands. He felt he had robbed Christine van Rooyen of her last chance to know her daughter’s fate. He thought, if the child was still alive somewhere, they would never find her now.


He knew that Senior Superintendent Esau Mtimkulu and Matt Joubert, first and second in command of SVC, and Commissioner John Afrika, the provincial head of Investigation, were arguing about his future down there beside the pool. If they sent him down the tubes, it was only right, because he had continued to believe the assegai man was white, even after he had had good evidence to the contrary. That was why he had been so slow to react to the swimming-pool van. That was why he had phoned first.


His fault. Too much fucking faith in his instinct, too cocky, too self-assured—and now he would pay for it.


The phone rang.


“Griessel.”


“Inspector, the helicopter has found the swimming-pool company’s van on Signal Hill Road. We are sending a patrol vehicle.”


“And the suspect?”


“He’s gone. It’s just the vehicle.”


“Explain to me where it is.”


“It’s the road that turns off Kloof Nek Road to the lookout points on Signal Hill, Inspector. About half a kilometer in there is a clump of trees on the right-hand side.”


“No one goes near the vehicle, please. They must just secure the area.” He was on his feet and walking over to Cupido. “Vaughn, they found the van on Signal Hill. I want you to think carefully—was he wearing gloves?”


“No fucking way. I checked him out thoroughly.”


“So you’re sure?”


“I’m sure.”


Griessel crossed over to the three senior officers. They stopped arguing when he approached. “Superintendent,” he said to Joubert, “the helicopter has found the van on Signal Hill. We think we have a good chance of getting fingerprints. He wasn’t wearing gloves. I want to take Forensics immediately . . .”


He could see from the three faces that it was coming now.


“Benny,” said John Afrika, quietly so that only the four of them could hear. “You will understand if Superintendent Joubert takes over now?”


He fucking well deserved it, but it hurt and he didn’t want to show that. He said: “I understand, Commissioner.”


“You are still part of the team, Benny,” said Matt.


“I . . .” he began, but didn’t know what to say.


“Take Forensics, Benny. Call if you find something.”

* * *

They found nothing.


The assegai man had wiped the steering wheel and gear lever and the door catch with a cloth or something. Then Griessel recalled he had taken stuff out of the back and the forensic examiner sprayed his spray and dusted with his brush and said: “We have something here.”


Griessel came around to look. Against the outer panel of the rear door a fingerprint showed up clearly against the white paint.


“It’s not necessarily his,” said the man from Forensics.


Griessel said nothing.

* * *

He sat at the breakfast counter of his flat and ate some of the thinly carved roast leg of lamb from Charmaine Watson-Smith’s dish. But his mind was on the bottle of Klipdrift in the cupboard above.


Why not? He couldn’t think of a single good answer to his question.


He had no appetite, but ate because he knew he must.


Last night he had had big theories about why he drank. Griessel the philosopher. It was

this

and it was

that

and everything but the truth. And the truth was: he was a fuck-up. That’s all. Whore-fucking, wife-beating, drunken sot fuck-up.


Where was that jovial fellow who used to play the bass guitar? That’s where he had been last night and now he knew. That guy was already a fuck-up, he just didn’t know it. You can fool some of the people some of the time . . . But you can’t fool life, pappa. Life will fucking catch you out.


He stood up. So weary. He scraped the last of the food into the bin. He washed and dried the dish. He didn’t feel like taking it to the old girl now. He would leave it at her door in the morning with a note.


You can’t fool life.


His cell phone rang in his pocket.


Let the fucking thing ring.


He took it out and checked the screen.


ANNA.


What did she want? Can you fetch the kids on Sunday? Are you sober? Did she really care whether he was sober or not? Really? She didn’t believe he had it in him in any case. And she was right. She knew him better than anyone. She had watched the whole process, lived through it. She was witness number one. Life had caught him out and she had had a ringside seat. She knew in six months’ time she would phone an attorney and say let us put an end to this marriage with my alcoholic husband who still drinks. The six months were just to show the children she wasn’t heartless.


Let her call. Let her go to hell.


1 MISSED CALL.


1 MISSED LIFE.


The phone rang again. It was the number from work. What did they want?


“Griessel.”


“We’ve got him, Benny,” said Matt Joubert.


40.


They were all in the task team room at SVC when he walked in. He could feel the excitement, saw it in their faces, heard it in their voices.


Joubert sat beside Helena Louw where she was working on the computer. Bezuidenhout and his night team were there too. Keyter stood talking to a constable; the fucking camera he had borrowed was still hanging from his neck, zoom lens protruding.


Griessel sat down at one of the small tables.


Joubert looked up and saw him, beckoned him closer. He got up and went over. “Sit here with me, Benny.”


He sat. Joubert stood up. “May I have your attention, please?”


The room quieted.


“We have identified a suspect, thanks to fingerprints that Inspector Griessel and his team recovered from the vehicle of the swimming-pool company. His name is Thobela Mpayipheli. He is a Xhosa man in his forties from the Eastern Cape. His registered address is Cata, a farm in the Cathcart district. That is in the Eastern Cape. Earlier this year Mpayipheli lost his son during an armed robbery at a filling station. Two suspects were arrested, but escaped from detention during the trial. It seems as if that is where it all began. By the way, he owns an Izuzu KB pickup, which fits with the tire print that Inspector Griessel found, and we must assume that that is the vehicle with which he traveled to Cape Town and Uniondale. That is all the information we have at this time.”


Griessel’s cell phone rang again and he took it out of his pocket.


ANNA.


He switched it off.


“So,” said Joubert. “Since I am going to ask Griessel to go to the Eastern Cape, I will hold the fort at this end.”


He didn’t want to go anywhere.


“We are going to search the Cape with a fine-tooth comb for Mpayipheli. He must be staying somewhere. Benny will find out if he has any family or friends here, but in the meantime we will have to visit or contact every establishment that offers accommodation. We are waiting . . .”


Joubert’s eyes turned to the door and everyone followed suit. Boef Beukes had come in. Behind him was the man in the suit that Griessel had seen in Beukes’s office. Joubert nodded in their direction.


“We are waiting for good photos from Home Affairs and you will each get one, along with the best description we can compile. There already is a bulletin out for the pickup and we are putting up roadblocks on the N-one, N-two, N-seven, R-twenty-seven, R-forty-four and four places on the R-three hundred around Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha. We will also provide details to the media and ask the public to cooperate. In an hour or so we should have a timetable drawn up, so that you can begin phoning places of accommodation. Stand by until we are ready for you.”


Joubert came to sit beside Griessel directly. “Sorry about that, Benny. There was no time to warn you.”


Griessel shrugged. It made no difference.


“Are you okay?”


He wanted to ask what that meant, but he just nodded instead.


“We’ve booked you onto the nine o’clock flight to Port Elizabeth. It’s the last one today.”


“I’ll go and pack.”


“I need you there, Benny.”


He nodded again. Then Boef Beukes and Mr. Red Tie came up to them. The unknown man was holding a big brown envelope.


“Matt, can we have a word?” Beukes said, and Griessel wondered why he was speaking English.


“Things are a bit mad here,” said Joubert.


“We have some information . . .” said Beukes.


“We’re listening.”


“Can we talk in your office?”


“What’s with the English, Boef? Or are you practicing for when the

Argus

phones?” Griessel asked.


“Let me introduce you to Special Agent Chris Lombardi of the DEA,” said Beukes and turned to Red Tie.

* * *

“I work for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and I’ve been in your country now for three months,” said Chris Lombardi. With his bald pate and long fleshy ears, Griessel thought he looked like an accountant.


“Superintendent Beukes and I have been part of an interagency operation to investigate the flow of drugs between Asia and South America, in which South Africa, and Cape Town in particular, seems to play a prominent part.” Lombardi’s accent was strongly American, like a film star’s.


Three months, thought Griessel. The fuckers had been watching Carlos for three months.


Lombardi took an A4-size sheet of paper from his brown envelope and placed it on Joubert’s desk. It was a black-and-white portrait photograph of a clean-shaven man with dark curly hair. “This is César Sangrenegra. Also known as

El Muerte.

He is the second in command of the Guajira Cartel, one of the biggest Colombian drug-smuggling operations in South America. He is one of the three infamous Sangrenegra brothers, and we believe he arrived in Cape Town early this morning.”


“Carlos’s brother,” said Griessel.


“Yes, he is the brother of the late Carlos. And that’s part of the problem. But let me start at the beginning.” Lombardi took another photograph from the envelope. “This is Miguel Sangrenegra, a.k.a.

La Rubia,

or

La Rubia de la Santa Marta.

‘Rubia’ means ‘blond,’ and as you can see, the man isn’t blond at all. He is the patriarch of the family, seventy-two years old, and has been retired since nineteen ninety-five. But it all started with him. In the nineteen-fifties Miguel was a coffee smuggler in the Caribbean and was perfectly positioned to graduate to marijuana in the sixties and seventies. He hails from the town of Santa Marta in the Guajira province of Colombia. Now, the Guajira is not the most fertile of the Colombian districts, but it has one strange advantage. Due to soil quality and chemistry, it produces a very popular variant of marijuana, called Santa Marta Gold. It is much sought-after in the US, and the street price is considerably higher than any other form of weed. In the Guajira, they refer to Santa Marta Gold as

La Rubia.

And that is what Miguel started smuggling, hence his nickname.”


Lombardi took a map out of the envelope and unfolded it on the desk.


“This is Colombia, and this area, on the Caribbean coast, is the Guajira. As you can see, what the province lacked in soil fertility, it made up for in geographic location. Just look at this length of coastline. If you wanted to smuggle marijuana to the US, you either sent a boat to the Guajira coast, or you sent a cargo plane. Miguel knew the farmers who grew the stuff in the mountains, and he knew the coast like the back of his hand. So he became a

marimbero.

A smuggler of marijuana. The Colombians refer to it as

marimba.

Anyway, he made a killing in the seventies. But then, in the late seventies and eighties, cocaine became the drug of preference internationally. And the balance of drug power, the money, and the focus of law enforcement moved to central Colombia. To people like Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel. Carlos Lehder, the Ochoa brothers, José Rodríguez-Gacha . . .


“Miguel did not like cocaine, and he didn’t have the natural contacts for it, so he stuck to

marimba,

made good money, but he never reached the dizzy heights of wealth and power like Escobar or Lehder. However, in the long run, this was to his great advantage. Because when we started hunting the big cartels, Miguel was quietly going about his business. And in the nineties, his family stepped into the vacuum after the removal of the big guns.”


Another photograph came out of the brown envelope.


“This is Miguel Sangrenegra’s eldest son, Javier. He is short and stocky, like his mother. And we think he has the old lady’s brains and ambition too. He was the one who put pressure on his father to expand the family business into cocaine. Miguel resisted, and Javier sidelined the old man. Not immediately, but slowly and quietly retired him in a way that meant everybody’s respect remained intact.


“Now let’s talk about Carlos.” Another photograph, this time of the youngest brother. Grainy black and white. In a sunny street in a South American town, a younger Carlos was getting out of a Land Rover Discovery.


Griessel checked his watch. He still had to pack. He wondered what the point of this story was.


“Carlos was the runt of the litter. The least intelligent of the brothers, bit of a playboy, with a taste for young girls. He managed to get a fourteen-year-old girl from the neighboring town of Barranquilla pregnant and Javier shipped him off to Cape Town to avoid trouble. He needed someone here he could trust. To oversee his operations. Because, by 2 00 1, the Guajira Cartel, as they are now known, had gone truly international. And they had branched out into the whole spectrum of drugs.


“Carlos was doing okay. He kept out of trouble, managed his side of the business reasonably well with the help of a team very loyal to Javier—the four guys we have in custody. And then he got into the mess with the prostitute’s daughter. And now, as you know, Carlos is dead.


“Enter César Sangrenegra.

El Muerte.

The Death, they call him. If Javier is the brains of the cartel, César is its strong arm. He is a killer. Rumor has it that he has executed more than three hundred people in the last ten years. And we’re not talking about ordering the death of opponents. We’re talking about personally twisting the knife.”


The last photographs came out of the envelope. Lombardi spread them over the desk. Men with amputated genitals pushed into their mouths. The bodies of women with breasts removed.


“And this is the necktie method. See how the tongue is pulled through the slit throat.

El Muerte

is one sick puppy. He is big and strong and very, very fit. He is totally ruthless. Some say he is a sociopath. When his name is whispered in Guajira, people tremble.”


“So what’s he doing in Cape Town?” Matt Joubert asked.


“That’s why we’re here,” said Boef Beukes.


“You see, there is a simple code in the Guajira,” said Lombardi. “When someone takes from you—money, possessions or whatever—it is said that he walks with

culebras

on his back. It means ‘snakes.’ He walks with a snake on his back, a poisonous thing that can strike at any time, which keeps him looking over his shoulder in fear. The

guajiro

unconditionally believe in

justicia.

Justice. Revenge.”


“So what are you saying?” asked Griessel.


“I am saying that you, Inspector Griessel, will be held responsible for Carlos’s death. You, the spearman and the prostitute. You are all walking with

culebras

on your backs.”

* * *

The detective inspector with the snake on his back was going to be late. He packed his suitcase in too much of a hurry and when he reached the kitchen he grabbed the brandy bottle from the cupboard and put it in as well.


He tore a sheet of paper from his notebook and wrote a thankyou note to Charmaine Watson-Smith in an untidy scrawl. For a moment he thought that the only rhyme he knew began with, “There was a young man from Australia . . .” He couldn’t remember the rest, but it didn’t matter, as it wasn’t exactly relevant.


He put the clean dish down at her door and hurried to the entrance of the block of flats. As he walked he realized what was happening to Charmaine’s newspaper to make it disappear. He stopped in his tracks, turned and jogged back to her door and knocked. He picked up the dish.


It was a while before she opened.


“Why, Inspector . . .”


“Madam, I’m sorry, I have to catch a flight. I just wanted to say thank you. And I know what happens to your newspaper.”


“Oh?” she said and took the dish.


“Someone takes it when they are going out. They take it with them. In the morning.”


“My goodness . . .”


“I have to run. I will look into it when I get back.”


“Thank you, Inspector.”


“No, madam, thank you. That . . .” and for a moment he couldn’t think what the English word was. He wanted to say “sheep’s meat” although he knew it was incorrect. “. . . Lamb, that lamb was wonderful.” He jogged back to the front entrance and thought he had better hurry, because now he

was

late.

* * *

When the second brandy and Coke flooded through him like a heavenly heat wave, he leaned back in the seat of the plane and sighed deeply in pleasure. He was a fuck-up, a drunk, but that was that—he was born to drink, made for drink. That was what he did best, that was when he felt whole and right and one with the universe. Then the rhyme came back to him.


There was a young man from Australia


Who painted his arse like a dahlia.


The colors were bright,


And the look was all right


But the smell was a hell of a failure.


He grinned and wondered how many others he could remember, now that his brain was working again. He could rattle them off in his jokester days.

There was a young man from Brazil, who swallowed a dynamite pill

. . . Perhaps he should compose one about himself.

A detective inspector who drank.

. . .


He took another swallow from the bloody small plastic airline cup with its two blocks of ice and thought, no,


There was a dumb cop from the Cape,


Who let a black spearman escape.


The stewardess approached from the front and he held his glass up and tapped an index finger on it. She nodded, but didn’t seem extremely friendly. Probably afraid he would get paralytically drunk on her plane. She with her hair combed back and little red mouth, she could relax; he might be a wife-beating, whore-fucking fuck-up of a policeman, but he could hold his drink, daddio. That was one thing he could do with great, well-oiled skill.


He thought he was white,


And that’s not all right.


But what the fuck rhymed with “Cape” and “Escape”? All he could think of was “rape.” Maybe he should start over; here came the stewardess with his next drink.


On his back’s not a snake, but an ape.


“Sir, are you all right?” asked the woman at Budget Rent-a-Car with a slight frown and he said: “As right as rain,” and he signed flamboyantly next to every fucking cross she made on the document. She gave him the keys and he walked out into the windy evening in Port Elizabeth. He thought he ought to turn on his bloody cell phone, but, first, find the car. Then again, why turn on the phone? He was relieved of his responsibilities, wasn’t he?


They had given him a Nissan Almera, that’s what it said on the tag on the keys. He couldn’t find the fucking car. Suitcase in hand he walked down the rows of cars. The whole lot were white, almost. He couldn’t recall what an Almera looked like. He used to have a Sentra, a demonstration model he had bought at Schus in Bellville for a helluva bargain, never had any shit with that car. Jissis, it was a lifetime ago. Here was the fucking Almera, right here under his nose. He pressed the button on the key and the car said “beep” and the lights flashed. He unlocked the boot and put his suitcase away. Maybe turn on the phone, they might have caught the guy by now.


He had to lean against the car. He had to admit he was a bit tipsy.


YOU HAVE THREE MESSAGES. PLEASE CALL 121.


He pressed the tabs. A woman’s voice. “You have three new voice messages. First message . . .”


“Benny, it’s Anna. Where are you? Carla isn’t home yet. We don’t know where she is. If you are sober, phone me.”


What time had Anna phoned? It was sometime in the afternoon that he had switched the phone off. Why did she sound so panicky?


“This is Tim Ngubane. The time is now twenty forty-nine. Just wanted to let you know Christine van Rooyen is missing, Benny. Witness Protection called me. She walked out on them, apparently. They kept her in a house in Boston, and she’s just gone. Will keep you posted. Bye.”


She walked out on them?

Now why would she do that? He pressed seven to delete the message.


“Benny, it’s Anna. I talked to Matt Joubert. He says you have gone to PE. Call me, please. Carla is still not home. We have phoned everyone. I am very worried. Call me when you get this message. Please!”


There was despair in Anna’s voice that penetrated through his alcoholic haze, that made him realize this was trouble. He pressed nine and cut the connection. He leaned against the Almera. He couldn’t phone her, because he was drunk.


Where was Carla? Jissis, he had to get some coffee or something, he had to sober up fast. He got in the car. The driver’s seat was shifted right up to the steering wheel, he had to feel around for the lever underneath before he could get in. At last he got the car going.


Not so very drunk, he just had to concentrate. He pulled away, must get to the hotel. Drink some coffee. And walk, keep walking until the haze lifted, then he could phone Anna; she mustn’t hear he had been drinking. She would know. Seventeen fucking years’ experience—she would catch him out at the speed of white light. He should never have had those drinks. He had even packed the bottle. He was ready to start drinking full bore again and now Carla was missing and a suspicion began to grow in him and he didn’t want to think of it.


The cell phone rang.


He checked. It wasn’t Anna.


Who was phoning him at eleven at night?


He would have to pull over. He wasn’t sober enough to drive and talk.


“Griessel.”


“Is that Detective Inspector Benny Griessel?” The “g” was spoken softly and in a vaguely familiar accent.


“Yes.”


“Okay. Detective Inspector Griessel, you will have to listen very carefully now, because this is very important. Are you listening very carefully?”


“Who is this?”


“I will ask again: are you listening very carefully?”


“Yes.”


“I understand you are hunting the killer of Carlos Sangrenegra. This is so?”


“Yes.” His heart was racing.


“Okay. This is good. Because you must bring him to me. You understand?”


“Who are you?”


“I am the man who has your daughter, Detective Inspector. I have her here with me. Now, you must listen very, very carefully. I have people who work with you. I know everything. I know if you do a stupid thing, you understand? When you do a stupid thing, I will cut off a finger of Carla, you understand? If you tell other police I have your daughter, I will cut her, you understand?”


“Yes.” He forced out the words with great effort; thoughts were scrabbling through his brain.


“Okay. I will call you. Every day. In the morning and in the afternoon, I will call you, for three days. You must find this man who kill Carlos, and you must bring him to me.”


“I don’t know where you are . . .” Panic overflowed into his voice, he couldn’t stop it.


“You are scared. That is good. But you must be calm. When I call you and you tell me you have this man, I will tell you where to go, you understand?”


“Yes.”


“Three days. You have three days to get this man. Then I will kill her. Okay, now I have to do something, because I know people. Tomorrow, you think you are more clever than this phone man. So I have to do something to let you remember tomorrow, okay?”


“Okay.”


“Carla is here with me. We take her clothes. Your daughter has a good body. I like her tits. Now, I will put this knife in her tit. It will hurt, and it will bleed. But I want you to listen. This is the thing I want you to remember. This sound.”


PART THREE


Thobela


41.


I will leave you to it,” said Sangrenegra and walked away from him.


Thobela said his name. “Carlos.” The lone word echoed around the interior of the large room. The Colombian turned.


Thobela swiftly and deftly drew the assegai by the shaft out of the white swimming-pool pipe. “I am here about the girl,” he said.


“No,” said Carlos.


He said nothing, just stepped closer to where the man stood beside the pool.


“She lie,” said Carlos walking backwards.


He adjusted his grip on the assegai.


“Please,” said Carlos. “I did not touch the girl.” He raised empty hands in front of him. Terror distorted his face. “Please. She lie. The whore, she lie.”


Fury washed over him. At the man’s cowardice, his denial, everything he represented. He moved fast, raised the assegai high.


“The police . . .” said Carlos, and the long blade descended.

* * *

Christine saw the minister’s eyes were red-rimmed and tired, but she knew she still held his attention.


She rose from her chair and leaned over the desk. When she stood like that, slightly bent over, arms stretched out to the cardboard carton, her breasts were prominent. She was aware of it, but also that it didn’t matter anymore. She pulled the box to her side of the desk and folded the flaps open.


“I have to explain this now,” she said and reached into the carton. She took out two newspaper clippings. She unfolded one. She glanced briefly at the photograph and article on it, specifically at the young girl emerging from a helicopter with a man. She put the clipping down on the desk and smoothed it with her hand.


“This is my fault,” she said, and rotated the article so that the minister could see better. She tapped a fingertip on the photo. “Her name is Carla Griessel,” said Christine.


While the minister looked she reached for the second clipping.

* * *

He came out of Sangrenegra’s front door and in the corner of his eye he spotted a movement. Opposite, in the big house, behind a window. The discomfort of Carlos’s reaction, the Colombian’s choice of words and the overwhelming feeling of being watched unfolded in his belly.


Something wasn’t right.

* * *

Five objects lay on the desk in an uneven row. The two newspaper clippings were on the far right. Then the brown and white dog, a stuffed toy with big, soft eyes and a little red tongue hanging out of the smiling mouth. Next the small white plastic container with medicinal contents. And last on the left, a large syringe.


Christine shifted the box to the left again. It was not yet empty.


“The next morning, after Carlos had seen Sonia for the first time, I phoned Vanessa.”

* * *

He braked with screeching tires next to his pickup, grabbed the white pipe holding his assegai and leapt out.


Slowly, his head told him. Slowly. Do the right thing.


He unlocked his pickup, tilted the backrest forward and put the pipe behind it. He unzipped his sports bag, looking for an item of clothing. He took out a blue and white T-shirt. He had bought it at the motorbike training center at Amersfoort. One each for himself and Pakamile. He walked back to the swimming-pool van.


A siren approached, he wasn’t sure from which side, not sure how close. Adrenaline made his heart jump.


Slowly. He wiped the panel van’s steering wheel with the T-shirt. The gear lever.


The siren was closer.


The inside door handle. The window winder.


What else?


Another siren, from somewhere in the city.


What else had he touched? Rear-view mirror? He wiped but he was in a hurry, didn’t do it properly.


Slowly. He wiped it again, back and front of the mirror.


His eye caught the speck of the helicopter in the blue sky where it came around Devil’s Peak.


They were after him.


When he raced away from Sangrenegra’s house, just before he turned the corner at the bottom of the street, he had seen something in the rear-view mirror. Or had he?


They were onto him.


He cursed in Xhosa, a single syllable. A walker came around the bend, down the slope from the Signal Hill side.


He took four long strides to get to his pickup.

* * *

“I didn’t know how the whole thing would end,” she said to the minister, to try and justify what she was yet to tell him. She listened to the lack of intonation in her voice. She was aware of her fatigue, as if she didn’t have the strength for the final straight. It was because she had gone through it so many times in her head, she told herself.


The first time she had seen the clipping, the eyes of Carla Griessel and the terrible knowledge that it was all her fault and also the relief that she still had the ability to feel guilt and remorse. After everything. After all the lies. After all the deception. All the years. She could still feel someone else’s pain. Still feel compassion. Still feel pity for someone besides herself. And the guilt that she felt that relief.


She took a deep breath to gather her strength, because this explanation was the one that mattered.


“I was afraid,” she said. “You have to understand that. I was terrified. The way Carlos looked at Sonia . . . I thought I knew him. That was one of the problems. I know men. I

had

to know them. And Carlos was the naughty child. Sort of harmless. He was nagging and possessive and jealous, but he wanted so much to please. He had my clients beaten up, but he never did the hitting himself. Up to that moment I still thought I could control him. That’s the main thing. With all the men. To be in control without them knowing it. But then I saw his face. And I knew, everything I had thought was wrong. I didn’t know him. I had no control over him. And I panicked. Totally.


“I . . . It wasn’t like I worked out a plan or anything. There was just all this stuff in my head. The Artemis guy and the stuff in Carlos’s house, the drugs and all, and the panic over the way he looked at Sonia. I think if a person is really scared, like terrified, then a part of your brain starts working that you don’t know about, it takes over. I don’t know if you understand that, because you have to

be

there.


“I phoned Carlos and said I wanted to talk to him.”

* * *

He drove with the radio on. He deliberately chose alternate routes and drove instinctively east, towards Wellington and through Bains Kloof, over Mitchells Pass to Ceres and via gravel roads to Sutherland.


At first he rejected the possibility that Sangrenegra might be innocent.


It was the other elements that came together first—the movement in the house opposite, the man he thought he saw running across the road in his rear-view mirror. The newspaper reports that taunted him. Carlos’s words, “The police . . .” He wanted to say something, something he knew.


They were waiting for him. They had set up an ambush and he had walked into it like a fool, like an amateur—unconcerned, overconfident.


He wondered how much they knew. Did they have a camera in that house across the street? Was his photograph on its way to the newspapers and television right now? Could he risk going home?


But he kept coming back to the possibility that Carlos was innocent.


His protestations. His face.


The big difference between Carlos and the rest, who welcomed the blade as an escape. Or justice.


Lord. If the Colombian was innocent, Thobela Mpayipheli was a murderer rather than an executioner.


Thirty kilometers west of Fraserburg, over a radio signal that came and went, he heard the news bulletin for the first time.


“A task team of the police’s Serious and Violent Crime Unit was just too late to apprehend the so-called Artemis vigilante . . . set up various roadblocks in the Cape Peninsula and Boland in an apparent attempt . . . a two-thousand-and-one model Isuzu KB two-sixty with registration number . . .”


That was the moment when self-recrimination evaporated, when he knew they knew and the old battle fever revived. He had been here before. The prey. He had been hunted across the length and breadth of strange and familiar continents. He knew this, he had been trained for it by the best; they could do nothing he hadn’t experienced before,

handled

before.


That was the moment he knew he was wholly back in the Struggle. Like in the old, old days when there was something worth protecting to the death. You see furthest from the moral high ground. It brought a great calm over him, so that he knew precisely what to do.

* * *

She met Carlos at the Mugg & Bean at the Waterfront. She watched him coming towards her with his self-satisfied strut, arms swinging gaily, head half-cocked. Like an overgrown boy that has got his own way. Fuck you Carlos; you have no idea.


“So how’s your daughter, conchita?” he said with a smirk as he sat down.


She had to light a cigarette to hide her fear.


“She’s fine.” Curtly.


“Ah, conchita, don’t be angry. It is your fault. You hide things from Carlos. All Carlos wants to do is to know you, to care for you.”


She said nothing, just looked at him.


“She is very beautiful. Like her mother. She have your eyes.” And he thought that would make her feel better?


“Carlos, I will give you what you want.”


“What I want?”


“You don’t want me to see other clients. You don’t want me to hide things from you. Is that right?”


“

Sí.

That is right.”


“I will do that, but there are certain rules.”


“Carlos will take good care of you and the leetle conchita. You know that.”


“It’s not the money, Carlos.”


“Anything, conchita. What you want?”

* * *

He drove from Merweville across the arid expanses of the Great Karoo to Prince Albert as the sun set in spectacular colors.


According to the radio they thought he was still in the Cape.


In the dark of night he crossed the Swartberg Pass and cautiously descended to Oudtshoorn. On the odd one-lane tarred road between Willowmore and Steytlerville he recognized that fatigue had the better of him and he looked out for a place to turn off and sleep. He shifted into a more comfortable position on the front seat and closed his eyes. At half-past three in the morning he slept, only to wake at first light, stiff-limbed, scratchy-eyed, his face needing a wash.


At Kirkwood, in the grimy toilets of a garage, he brushed his teeth and splashed cold water on his face. This was Xhosa country and no one looked twice at him. He bought take-away chicken portions at Chicken Licken and drove. Towards home.


At half-past ten he crossed the Hogsback Pass and thirty-five minutes later he turned in at the farm entrance and saw the tracks on the reddish-brown dirt of the road.


He got out.


Only one vehicle. Narrow tires of a small sedan. In. Not yet out. Someone was waiting for him.

* * *

“My daughter’s name is Sonia.”


“That is very beautiful.” Like he really meant it.


“But I will not bring her to your house, Carlos. We can go somewhere together. Picnic, or the movies, but not to your house.”


“But, conchita, I have this pool . . .”


“And you have these bodyguards with guns and baseball bats. I will not allow my daughter to see that.”


“They are not bodyguards. They are my crew.”


“I don’t care.”


“Hokay, hokay, Carlos will send them away when you come.”


“You won’t.”


“No? Why not?”


“Because they are with you all the time.”


“No, conchita, I swear,” he said, and made the sign of the cross over his upper body.


“When my daughter is with me, I don’t sleep with you and we don’t sleep over. That is final.”


“Carlos unnerstand,” he said, but couldn’t hide his disappointment.


“And we will take it slowly. I have to talk to her about you first. She must get used to you slowly.”


“Hokay.”


“So, tomorrow night, we will see if you are serious. I will come to your house and it will only be you and me. No bodyguards.”


“

Sí.

Of course.”


“I will stay with you. I will cook for you and we will talk.”


“Where will Sonia be?”


“She will be safe.”


“At the nanny’s place?” Pleased with himself, because he knew.


“Yes.”


“And maybe the weekend, we can go somewhere? You and me and Sonia?”


“If I see I can trust you, Carlos.” But she knew she had him. She knew the process had begun.


42.


Thobela left his pickup behind the ridges at the Waterval Plantation and walked along the bank of the Cata River towards his house, assegai in his left hand.


A kilometer before the homestead came into view he turned northeast, so he could approach from the high ground. They would be expecting him from the road end.


He sat watching for twenty minutes, but saw only the car parked in front of the house. No antennae, nothing to identify it as a police vehicle. Silence.


It made no sense.


He kept the shed between him and the house, checking that the doors were still locked. Crouching, he approached the house, below window level, to where the car was parked.


There was one set of footprints in the dust. They began at the driver’s door and led directly to the steps of the front verandah.


One man.


He ran through alternatives in his head while he squatted on his haunches with his back to the verandah wall. Something occurred to him. The detective from Umtata. Must have heard the news. Knew him, knew everything, from the start.


The detective had come for more money.


He stood, relieved and purposeful, and strode up his verandah steps and in at the front door, assegai now in his right hand.


The man was sitting there on the chair, pistol on his lap.


“I thought you would come,” said the white man.


“Who are you?”


“My name is Benny Griessel,” he said and raised the Z88 so that it pointed straight at Thobela’s chest.

* * *

Christine took the stuffed toy dog from the desk and held it in her hands. “I had a battle to get the right dog,” she said. “Every year there are different toys in the shops.”


Her fingers stroked the long brown ears. “I bought her one when she was three years old. It’s her favorite, she won’t go anywhere without it. So I had to get another and switch them, because the one she played with had her genetics on it. The police computers can test anything. So I had to take the right one along.”

* * *

He stood in front of the white man weighing up his chances, measuring the distance between the assegai and the pistol, and then he allowed himself to relax, because now was not the moment to do anything.


“This is my house,” he said.


“I know.”


“What do you want?”


“I want you to sit there and be quiet.” The white man motioned with the barrel of the Z88 towards the two-seater couch opposite him. There was something about his eyes and voice: intensity, a determination.


Thobela hesitated, shrugged and sat down. He looked at Griessel. Who was he? The bloodshot eyes, a hint of capillaries on the nose that betrayed excessive drinking. Hair long and untidy—either he was trying to keep the look of his youth in the seventies alive, or he didn’t care. The latter seemed more likely, since his clothes were rumpled, the comfortable brown shoes dull. He had the faint scent of law enforcement about him and the Z88 confirmed it, but policemen usually came in groups, at least in pairs. Police waited with handcuffs and commands, they didn’t ask you to sit down in your own house.


“I’m sitting,” he said, and placed the assegai on the floor beside the couch.


“Now you just have to be quiet.”


“Is that what we are going to do? Sit and stare at each other?”


The white man did not answer.


“Will you shoot me if I talk?”


No response.

* * *

“The pills were easy,” said Christine. She indicated the white medicinal container on the desk. “And the dress. I don’t have it; it’s with the police. But the blood . . . I couldn’t do it at first. I didn’t know how to tell my child I had to push a needle into her arm and that it would hurt and the blood would run into the syringe and I had to spray it on the seat of a man’s car. That was the hardest thing. And I was worried. I didn’t know whether the blood would clot. I didn’t know if it would be enough. I didn’t know if the police would be able to tell it wasn’t fresh blood. I didn’t know how they did all those genetics. Would the computer be able to tell the blood had been in the fridge for a day?”


She held the dog against her chest. She didn’t look at the minister. She looked at her fingers entangled in the toy’s ears.


“When Sonia was in the bath, I went in and I lied to her. I said we had to do it, because I had to take a little bit of her blood to the doctor. When she asked, ‘Why?’ I didn’t know what to say. I asked her if she remembered the vaccination she had at play school so she wouldn’t get those bad diseases. She said, ‘Mamma, it was sore,’ and I said, ‘But the sore went away quickly—this sore will also go away quickly, it’s the same thing, so you can be well.’ So she said, ‘Okay, Mamma’ and she squeezed her eyes shut and held out her arm. I have never drawn blood from someone before, but if you are a whore, you have your AIDS test every month, so I know what they do. But if your child says, ‘Ow, Mamma, ow,’ then you get the shakes and it’s hard and you get a fright if you can’t get the blood . . .”

* * *

“What are we waiting for? What do you want?” he asked. But the man just sat and looked at him, with his pistol hand resting on his lap, and said nothing. Just the eyes blinking now and again, or drifting off to the window.


He wondered whether the man was right in the head. Or on drugs, because of that terrible intensity, something eating him. The eyes were never completely still. Sometimes a knee would jerk as if it were a wound spring. The pistol had its own fine vibration, an almost unnoticeable movement.


Unstable. Therefore dangerous. Would he make it, if he could pull himself up by the armrest and launch himself over the little more than two meters between them? If he picked a moment when the eyes flicked to the window? If he could deflect the Z88?


He measured the distance. He looked into the brown eyes.


No.


But what were they sitting here and waiting for? In such tension?


He had partial answers later when the cell phone rang twice. Each time the white man started, a subtle tautening of the body. He lifted the phone from his lap and then just sat dead still, and let it ring. Until it stopped. Fifteen, twenty seconds later it beeped twice to show a message had been left. But Griessel did nothing about it. He didn’t listen to his messages.


They were waiting for instructions; that much Thobela gathered. Which would be delivered via the cell phone. The intensity was stress. Anxiety. But why? What did it have to do with him?


“Are you in trouble?”


Griessel just stared at him.


“Can I help you in some way?”


The man glanced at the window, and back again.


“Do you mind if I sleep a bit?” asked Thobela. Because that was all he could do. And he needed it.


No reaction.


He made himself comfortable, stretched his long legs out, rested his head on the cushion of the couch and closed his eyes.


But the cell phone rang again and this time the white man pressed the answer button and said: “Griessel” and, “Yes, I have him.” He listened. He said: “Yes.”


And again: “Yes.” Listened. “And then?”


Thobela could hear a man’s voice faintly over the phone, but couldn’t make out any words, just the grain of a voice.


Griessel took the cell phone away from his ear and stood, keeping a safe distance.


“Come,” he said. “Let’s go.”


“I’m very comfortable, thank you.”


A shot thundered through the quiet of the room and the bullet ripped a hole beside him in the couch. Stuffing and dust exploded from it, falling back to the floor in slow motion. Thobela looked at the white man, who said nothing. Then he got up, keeping his hands away from his body.


“Easy now,” he said to Griessel.


“To the car.”


He went.


“Wait.”


He looked back. Griessel stood beside the assegai. He looked at it, looked at him, as if he had to make a decision. Then he bent and picked it up.


Thobela drew his own conclusions. The man didn’t want to leave any evidence. And that was not good news.

* * *

He was supposed to pick her up at half-past four, but at a quarter past there was a knock on the door; when she opened up, there stood Carlos with a big smile and a bunch of flowers.


He came inside and said, “So, conchita, this is where you live. This is your place. It is nice. Very nice.”


She had to remain calm and friendly, but the tension was overwhelming. Because the toy dog was lying in sight and the syringe of blood was still in the fridge.


She wanted to hide it in the shopping bags along with the ingredients for the meal she was going to cook. Sonia’s dress was folded up in her handbag. Carlos wanted to see where she slept, where her daughter’s room was. He was impressed with the big television screen (“Carlos will get you one like this, conchita. For you and Sonia”). He wandered over to her fridge. “Now dees ees a freedge,” he said in awe, and as he reached for the handle and pulled, she said, “Carlos,” sharply, so that the sound of her voice gave her a fright and he looked around like a child who had been naughty.


“Will you help me to get the groceries to the car, please?” She could send him down to the car with a few of the plastic bags.


“

Sí.

Of course. What are you going to cook for us?”


“It’s a surprise, so don’t open the fridge.”


“But I want to see how big it is.”


“Another time.” There wouldn’t be one.

* * *

The white man sat in the left back seat of the car and let Thobela drive.


“Go.”


“Where?”


“Just drive.”


Thobela took the farm road out. He couldn’t see in the rear-view mirror what was happening on the back seat. He turned his head, as if he had seen something outside the car. At the edge of his vision he saw Griessel with a roadmap on his lap.


He added up what he knew. He was reasonably certain Griessel was a policeman. The Z88, the attitude. The white man had known where the farm was and that Thobela would be on his way there. More important: no other policemen had shown up. The law considered the farm covered.


Griessel had waited for the right call to come over the cell phone.

Yes. I have him.

But that was not police procedure. Couldn’t be.


Who else was after him? To whom else did he have value?


“Go to George,” said Griessel. Thobela looked around, saw the roadmap was folded now.


“George?”


“You know where it is.”


“It’s nearly six hundred kilometers.”


“You drove more than a thousand yesterday.”


The policeman knew he had left the Cape yesterday. He had access to official information, but he wasn’t official. It didn’t make sense. He would have to try something. He could do something with the car on the gravel road because he was wearing a seat belt and Griessel was not. He could brake suddenly and grab the man when he was thrown forward. Try and get the pistol.


Not without risks.


Was the risk necessary? George? What was at George? If the policeman had been official they would have been on the way to Cathcart or Seymour or Alice or Port Elizabeth. Or Grahamstown. To the nearest place with reinforcements and cells and state prosecutors.


He was a high-profile suspect; he knew that. If you were SAPS and you caught the Artemis vigilante, then you called the guys with guns and helicopters, you didn’t get off your cell phone until you had your detainee in ten sets of handcuffs.


Unless you were working for someone else. Unless you were supplementing your income . . .


He considered the alternatives and there was only one logical conclusion.


“How long have you been working for Sangrenegra?” He turned the mirror with his left hand. Bloodshot eyes stared back. He got no response.


“That’s the problem with this country. Money means more than justice,” he said.


“Is that how you justify your murders?” said the policeman from behind.


“Murder? There was only one murder. I didn’t know Sangrenegra was innocent. It was you people who used him for an ambush.”


“Sangrenegra? How do you know he was innocent?”


“I saw it in his eyes.”


“And Bernadette Laurens? What did her eyes tell you?”


“Laurens?”


The policeman said nothing.


“But she confessed.”


“That’s what they all keep telling me.”


“But it wasn’t her?”


“I don’t think it was. I think she was protecting the child’s mother. Like others would protect their children.”


The unexpectedness of it left Thobela dumb.


“That’s why we have a justice system. A process. That is why we can’t take the law into our own hands,” said Griessel.


Thobela wrestled with the possibility, with rationalizing and acceptance of guilt. But he couldn’t tip the scales either way.


“So why did she confess then?” he asked himself, but aloud.


There was no response from the back seat.


43.


While they carried the shopping bags into Carlos’s kitchen, she could think of nothing but the syringe of blood.


The house was unnaturally quiet and empty without the bodyguards; the large spaces echoed footsteps and phrases. He embraced her in the kitchen after they had put the groceries down. He pressed her to him with surprising tenderness and said: “This is right, conchita.”


She made her body soft. She let her hips flow against his. “Yes,” she said.


“We will be happy.”


In answer she kissed him on the mouth, with great skill, until she could feel his erection developing. She put her hand on it and traced the shape. Carlos’s hands were behind her back. He pulled her dress up inch by inch until her bottom was exposed and slipped his fingers under the elastic of her panties. His breathing quickened.


She moved her lips over his cheek, down his neck, over the cross that hung in his chest hair. Her tongue left a damp trail. She freed herself and dropped to her knees, fingers busy with his zipper. With one hand she pulled his underpants down and with the other she pulled his penis out. Long, thin and hairy, it stood up like a lean soldier with an outsized shiny helmet.


“Conchita.” His voice was a whispering urgency, as she had never done this without a condom before.


She stroked with both hands, from the pubic hairs to the tip.


“We will be happy,” she said and softly put it in her mouth.

* * *

Thobela Mpayipheli and his white passenger, sitting in the back like a colonial property baron, drove past Mwangala and Dyamala, where fat cattle grazed in the sweet green grass. They turned right onto the R63. Fort Hare was quiet over the summer holidays. Five minutes later they were in busy Alice. Fruit vendors on the pavements, women with baskets on their heads and children on their backs who walked stately and unhurried across the road and down the street. Four men were gathered around a board game on a street corner. Thobela wondered if the policeman saw all this. If he could hear the Xhosa calls that were exchanged across the broad street. This was ownership. The people owned this place.


Thirty kilometers on was Fort Beaufort and he turned south. Four or five times he spotted the Kat River on the left where it meandered away between the hills. It had been one of his plans to bring Pakamile here: just the two of them with rucksacks, hiking boots and a two-man tent. To show his boy where he had grown up.


Thobela knew every bend of the Kat. He knew the deep pools at Nkqantosi where you could jump off the cliff and open your eyes deep under the greenish-brown water and see the sunbeams fighting against the darkness. The little sandy beach below Komkulu. Where he had discovered the warrior inside him thirty years before. Mtetwa, the young buffalo who was a bully, an injustice he had to correct. The first.


And far over that way, out of sight, his favorite place. Four kilometers from the place where it flowed into the Great Fish River, the Kat made a flamboyant curve, as if it wanted to dally one last time before losing its identity—a meander that swept back so far that it almost made an island. It was about ten kilometers from the Mission Church manse where he lived, but he could run there in an hour down the secret game paths around the hills and through the valleys. All so he could sit between the reeds where the chattering weaverbirds in brilliant color lured females to their hanging nests. To listen to the wind. To watch the fat iguana warming itself in the sun on the black rocky point. In the late afternoon the bushbuck came out of the thickets like phantoms to dip their heads to the water. First the grace of the does in their red glowing coats. Later the rams would come two by two, dark brown in the dusk, sturdy, short, needle-sharp horns that rose and dipped, rose and dipped.


He had wondered if they were still there. Whether he and his son would see the descendants of the animals he had waited for with bated breath as a child. Did they still follow the same paths through the reeds and bulrushes?


Would he still know the paths? Should he stop here, take off his shoes and disappear between the thorn trees? Search out the same paths at a jogtrot; find that rhythm when you felt you could run forever, as long as there was a hill on the horizon for you to climb?

* * *

While Carlos was seated in front of the TV with a glass and a bottle of red wine, she took the syringe of blood out of her handbag and hid it deep in a cupboard where pots and pans were stacked, bright, new and unused.


She looked for a hiding place for the toy dog before she took it out from under packs of vegetables in the shopping bags.


Her hands shook because she would not hear Carlos coming before he was in the room.

* * *

They drove in silence for two hours. Beyond Grahamstown, in the dark of early evening, he said: “Did you ever hear of Nxele?” His tongue clicked sharply pronouncing the name.


He did not expect an answer. If he did get one he knew what it would be. White people didn’t know this history.


“Nxele. They say he was a big man. Two meters tall. And he could talk. Once he talked himself off a Xhosa execution pyre. And then he became chief, without having the blood of kings.”


He didn’t care if the white man was listening or not. He kept his eyes on the road. He wanted to shake off his lassitude, say what this landscape awakened in him. He wanted to relieve the tension somehow.


“Exceptional in that time, nearly two hundred years ago. He lived in a time when the people fought against each other—and the English too. Then Nxele came and said they must stop kneeling to the white God. They must listen to the voice of Mdalidiphu, the God of the Xhosa, who said you must not kneel before Him in the dust. You must live. You must dance. You must lift your head and grab hold of life. You must sleep with your wife so we can increase, so we can fill the earth and drive the white man out. So we can take back our land.


“You could say he was the father of the first Struggle. Then he gathered ten thousand warriors together. Did you see where we traveled today, Griessel? Did you see? Can you imagine what ten thousand warriors would look like coming over these hills? They smeared themselves red with ochre. Each had six or seven long throwing spears in his hand and a shield. They ran here like that. Nxele told them to be silent, no singing or shouting. They wanted to surprise the English here at Grahamstown. Ten thousand warriors in step, their footsteps the only sound. Through the valleys and over the rivers and hills like a long red snake. Imagine you are an Englishman in Grahamstown waking up one morning in April and looking up to the hills. One moment things look as they do every day, and the next moment this army materializes on the hilltops and you see the glint of seventy thousand spears, but there is no sound. Like death.


“Nxele moved through them. He told them to break one of their long spears over their knees. He said Mdalidiphu would turn the British bullets to water. They must charge the cannons and guns together and throw the long spears when they got close enough. And they could throw, those men. At a range of sixty meters they could launch a spear through the air and find the heart of an Englishman. When the last long spear had been thrown, they must hold the spear with the broken shaft. Nxele knew you couldn’t use a long spear when you could see the whites of your enemy’s eyes. Then you needed a weapon to stab open a path in front of you.


“They say it was a clear day. They said the English couldn’t believe the way the Xhosa moved up there on the crest. Deathly quiet. But each knew exactly where his place in line was.


“Down below, the Redcoats erected their barriers. Up there, the red men waited for the signal. And when the whites sat down at their tables laid for midday dinner, they came down.


“From the time I first heard that story from my uncle I wanted to be with them, Griessel. They said that when the warriors charged, a terrible cry went up. They say that cry is in every soldier. When you are at war, when your blood is high in battle, then it comes out. It explodes from your throat and gives you the strength of an elephant and the speed of an antelope. They say every man is afraid until that moment, and then there is no more fear. Then you are pure fighter and nothing can stop you.


“All my life I wanted to be a part of them. I wanted to be there at the front. I wanted to throw my spears and keep the short assegai for last. I wanted to smell the gunpowder and the blood. They said the stream in town ran red with blood that day. I wanted to look an Englishman in the eyes and he must lift his bayonet and we must oppose each other as soldiers, each fighting for his cause. I wanted to make war with honor. If his blade was faster than mine, if his strength was greater, then so be it. Then I would die like a man. Like a warrior.”


He was quiet for a long time. A distance past the turnoff to Bushmans River Mouth he said: “There is no honor anymore. It makes no difference what Struggle you choose.”


Again silence descended on the car, but it felt to Thobela as if the character of the silence had changed.


“What happened, that day?” Griessel’s voice came from the back.


Thobela smiled in the darkness. For many reasons.


“It was a tremendous battle. The English had cannon and guns. Shrapnel shells. A thousand Xhosa fell. Some of them they found days later, miles away, with bunches of grass pushed into their gaping wounds to stem the bleeding. But it was a close thing. There was time in the battle when the balance began to swing in favor of the Xhosa. The ranks of Nxele were too fast and too many, the English could not reload quickly enough. Time stood still. The battle was on a knife edge. Then the Redcoats got their miracle. His name was Boesak, can you believe it? He was a Khoi big-game hunter turned soldier. He was out on patrol with a hundred and thirty men and they came back, on that day. At just the right time for the English, when the British captain was ready to sound the retreat. Boesak and a hundred and thirty of the best marksmen in the country. And they aimed for the biggest warriors, the Xhosa who fought up front, who ran between the men and urged them on. The heart of the assault. They were shot down one by one, like bulls from the herd. And then it was all over.”

* * *

She tried to grind the pills in a flour sifter, but they were too hard.


She took the breadboard and a teaspoon and crushed the pills—some pieces shot over the floor and she began to panic. She used more pills, pressed. The teaspoon banged on the breadboard.


Would Carlos hear?


She wiped the yellow powder off the breadboard into a small dish she had set on one side. Was it fine enough?


She set the table. She couldn’t find candles or candlesticks so she just put the place mats and cutlery on the table. She called Carlos to come to the table and then she brought out the food: fillet of beef stuffed with smoked oysters, baked potatoes and

petit pois.


Carlos couldn’t compliment her enough, although she knew the food wasn’t that special. He was still buttering her up. “You see, conchita, no crew. Just me and you. No problem.”


She said he must save room for dessert, pears in wine and cinnamon. And she was going to make him real Irish coffee and it was very important to her that he drink it because she had made it the way she had been taught, long ago when she worked for a caterer in Bloemfontein.


He said he would drink every drop and then they were going to make love, right here on the table.

* * *

Somewhere on the N2, fifty kilometers before Port Elizabeth, Griessel made him stop.


“Do you need a piss?”


“Yes.”


“Now’s the time.”


When they had finished, standing four meters apart, the white man holding his organ in one hand and the pistol in the other, they went on their way.


At the outskirts of the city they stopped for petrol without getting out of the car.


When they passed the turnoff to Hankey and the road began to descend down to the Gamtoos Valley, Griessel spoke again: “When I was young I played bass guitar. In a band.”


Thobela didn’t know if he should respond.


“I thought that was what I wanted to do.


“Yesterday night I listened to music my son gave me. When it was finished I lay in the dark and I remembered something. I remembered the day I realized I would never be more than an average bass guitarist.


“I had finished school, it was December holidays and there was a battle of the bands at Green Point. We went to listen, the guys from my band and me. There was this bassist, short with snow-white hair in one or other of the rock bands that played other people’s songs. Jissis, he was a magician. Standing stock-still, not moving his body in the slightest. He didn’t even look at the neck, just stood there with closed eyes and his fingers flew and the sounds came out like a river. Then I realized where my place was. I saw someone who had been born for bass guitar. Fuck, I could tell we felt the same. The music did the same inside; it opened you up. But feeling and doing are not the same thing. That is the tragedy. You want to be like

that,

so fucking casually brilliant, but you don’t have it in you.


“So I knew I would never be a real bass guitarist, but I wanted to be like that in something. That good. So . . . skillful. In something. I began to wonder how you found it. How did you start to search for the thing you were made for? What if there wasn’t one? What if you were just an average fucker in everything? Born average and living your average life and then you fucking die and no one knows the difference.


“While I was searching I joined the police, because what I didn’t know is that you know without knowing. Something deep in your head directs you to what you

can

do. But it took me a while. Because I didn’t think being a policeman was something you could feel, like music.


“Also, it doesn’t happen just like that. You have to pay your dues, you have to learn, make your own mistakes. But one day you sit with a case file that makes no sense to any other fucker, and you read the statements and the notes and the reports and it all comes together. And you feel this thing inside. You hear the music of it, you pick up its rhythm deep inside you and you know this is what you were made for.”


Thobela heard the white man sigh. He wanted to tell him he understood.


“And then nothing can stop you,” said Griessel. “Nobody. Except yourself.


“Everyone thinks you’re good. They tell you. ‘Fuck it, Benny, you’re the best. Jissis, pal, you’re red hot.’ And you want to believe it, because you can see they are right, but there is this little voice inside you that says you are just a Parow Arrow who was never really good at anything. An average little guy. And sooner or later they will catch you out. One day they will expose you and the world will laugh because you thought you were something.


“So, before it happens, you have to expose yourself. Destroy yourself. Because if you do it yourself, then you at least have a sort of control over it.”


There was a noise behind, almost a laugh. “Fucking tragic.”


44.


He fell asleep at the table. She saw it coming. Carlos’s tongue began to drag more and more. He switched over to Spanish, as if she understood every word.


He leaned heavily on his place mat, eyes struggling to focus on her.


The scene played out as if she had no part in it, as if it were happening in another space and time. He had a stupid smile on his face. He mumbled.


He lowered his head interminably slowly to the tabletop. He put his palms flat on the surface. He said one last, incomprehensible word and then his breath came deep and easy. She knew she couldn’t leave him like that. If his body relaxed he would fall.


She rose and came around behind him. She put her hands under his arms, entwining the fingers of her hands with his. Lifted him. He was as heavy as lead, dead weight. He made a sound and gave her a fright, not knowing if he was deeply enough asleep. She stood like that, feeling she couldn’t hold him. Then she dragged him, step by step, over to the big couch. She fell back into a sitting position with Carlos on top of her.


He spoke, clear as crystal. Her body jerked. She sat still a moment, realizing he was not conscious. She rolled him over her with great effort, so that he lay askew on the couch. She squirmed out from under him and stood beside the couch, breath racing, perspiration sprung out on her skin, needing badly to sit to give her legs time to recover from their trembling.


She forced herself to continue. First she called a taxi, so they could arrive sooner; she didn’t know how much time she would have.


She made sure the plastic container of pills was in her handbag. She took the dog and the syringe and went down the stairs to the garage.


The BMW was locked. She swore. Went up again. She couldn’t find the keys. Panic overcame her and she was conscious of how her hands shook while she searched. Until she thought to look in Carlos’s trouser pocket and there they were.


Back to the garage. She pressed the button on the key and the electronic beep was sudden and shrill in the bare space. She opened the door. She shoved the toy dog under the passenger seat. Taking the syringe, she put her thumb on the depressor and aimed the point at the backrest of the rear seat. Her hand shook badly. She made a noise of frustration and put her left hand on her right wrist to stabilize it. She must get this part right. She squeezed the syringe quickly and jerked it from right to left. The dark red jet hit the material. Fine drops spattered back onto her arms and face.


She inspected her handiwork. It didn’t look right. It didn’t look real.


Her heart thumped. There was nothing she could do. She climbed out looking back one last time. She had forgotten nothing. Shut the door.


There were still a couple of drops in the syringe. She must get them on the dress. And put the garment somewhere in his cupboard.

* * *

He weighed up the policeman’s words. He assumed the man was trying to explain why he had become corrupt. Why he was doing what he was doing.


“How did they find you?” he asked later, beyond the turnoff to Humansdrop.


“Who?”


“Sangrenegra. How did you come to work for them?”


“I don’t work for Sangrenegra.”


“Who do you work for, then?”


“I work for the SAPS.”


“Not at the moment.”


It took a while for Griessel to grasp what he had said. He repeated that ironic laugh. “You think I’m crooked. You think that’s what I meant when I said . . .”


“What else?”


“I drink, that’s what I do. I booze my fucking life away. My wife and children and my job and myself. I never took a cent from anyone. I never needed to. Alcohol is efficient enough if you want to fuck yourself up.”


“Then why are we driving this way—why am I not in a cell in Port Elizabeth?”


It burst out and he heard the rage and the fear in the man’s voice: “Because they’ve got my daughter. The brother of Carlos Sangrenegra took my daughter. And if I don’t deliver you to them, they will . . .”


Griessel said no more.


Thobela had all the pieces of the jigsaw now and he didn’t like the picture they made.


“What is her name?”


“Carla.”


“How old is she?”


Griessel took a long time answering, as if he wanted to ponder the meaning of the conversation. “Eighteen.”


He realized the white man had hope, and he knew he would have, too, if he were in the same position. Because there was nothing else you could do.


“I will help you,” he said.


“I don’t need your help.”


“You do.”


Griessel did not respond.


“Do you really believe they will say, ‘Thank you very much, here is your daughter, you may leave?’ ”


Silence.


“It’s your decision, policeman. I can help you. But it’s your decision.”

* * *

Eleven minutes past seven in the morning he hammered on her door, as she knew he would. She opened up and he rushed in and grabbed her arm and shook her.


“Why you do that? Why?” The pressure of his fingers hurt her and she slapped him against the head with her left hand, as hard as she could.


“Bitch!” Carlos screamed and let go of her arm and hit her over the eye with his fist. She nearly fell, but regained her balance.


“You cunt,” she screamed as loud as she could and hit out at him with her fist. He jerked his head out of the way and smacked her on the ear with an open hand. It sounded like a cannon shot in her head. She hit back, this time striking his cheekbone with her fist.


“Bitch!” he shouted again in a shrill voice. He grabbed her hands and pulled her off her feet. The back of her head hit the carpet and for a moment she was dizzy. She blinked her eyes; he was on top of her now. “Fucking bitch.” He slapped her against the head again. She got a hand loose and scratched at him.


He grabbed her wrist and glared at her. “You like, bitch, Carlos see you like this.”


He pinned her down with both hands above her head. “Now you will like even more,” he said and grabbed her nightie at the bosom and jerked. The garment tore.


“Are you going to fuck me good?” she said. “Because it will be the first time, you cunt.”


He slapped her again and she tasted blood in her mouth.


“You can’t fuck. You are the world’s worst fuck!”


“Shut up, bitch!”


She spat at him, spat blood and saliva on his face and shirt. He grabbed her breast and squeezed until she shrieked in pain. “You like that, whore? You like that?”


“Yes. At least I can feel you now.”


Squeezed again. She screamed.


“Why you drug me? Why? You steal my moneys! Why?”


“I drugged you because you are such a shit lover. That’s why.”


“First, I will fuck you. Then we will find the moneys.”


“Help me!” she shouted.


He pressed a hand over her mouth.


“Shut the fuck up.”


She bit the soft part of his palm. He yelled and hit out at her again. She jerked her head away, screaming with all her might. “Help me, please, help me!”


One of her hands came free; she struggled and punched, scratched and screamed. A man’s voice came from somewhere outside, or down the corridor, she couldn’t be sure. “What’s going on?”


Carlos heard. He bumped her with both hands on her chest. He stood up. He was out of breath. There was a swelling on his cheek.


“I will come back,” he said.


“Promise me you will fuck me good, Carlos. Just promise me that, you shitless cunt.” She lay on the ground, naked, bleeding and gasping. “Just once.”


“I will kill you,” he said and stumbled towards the door. Opened it. “You take my moneys. I will kill you.” Then he was gone.

* * *

Beyond Plettenberg Bay he asked Griessel: “Where must you take me?”


“I will know when we get to George. They will phone again.”

* * *

She examined herself in the mirror before calling the police. She was bleeding. The left side of her face was red. It had begun to swell. There was a cut over her eyes. There were dark red finger marks on her breasts.


It looked perfect.


She took her cell phone and sat down on the couch. She looked up the number she had saved in the phone yesterday. Her fingers worked precisely. She looked down at the phone. She was rock steady.


She dropped her head, trying to feel the pain, the humiliation, the anger, hate and fear. She took a deep breath and let it out tremulously. Only a single tear at first, then another and another. Until she was crying properly. Then she pressed the call button.


It rang seven times. “South African Police Services, Caledon Square. How can we help you?”

* * *

The policeman’s phone rang while they were stopped at yet another traffic light in Knysna.


Griessel spoke quietly, swallowing his words, and Thobela could not hear what he said. The conversation lasted less than a minute.


“They want us to keep driving,” he said at last.


“Where to?”


“Swellendam.”


“Is that where they are?”


“I don’t know.”


“I need to stretch my legs.”


“Get out of town first.”


“Do you think I want to escape, Griessel? Do you think I will run away from this situation?”


“I think nothing.”


“They have your daughter because I killed Sangrenegra. It’s my responsibility to fix it.”


“How can you do that?”


“We’ll see.”


Griessel ruminated on that, then said, “Stop when you like.”


Seventy kilometers on, on the long sweeping curves the N2 makes between George and Mossel Bay, something dropped onto the front seat beside Thobela. When he looked down, the assegai lay there. The blade was dull in the lights of the instrument panel.


45.


First came police in uniform and she was hysterically crying and screaming: “He’s got my child, he’s got my child!” They got the information out of her and tried to calm her down.


More policemen arrived. They sent for an ambulance for her. Suddenly her flat was full of people. She wept uncontrollably. A first-aid man was cleaning her face while a black detective questioned her. He introduced himself as Timothy Ngubane. He sat beside her and she told her story between sobs while he wrote in his notebook and said earnestly: “We will find her, ma’am.” Then he called out orders and then there were fewer people around.


Later the two from Social Services arrived, and then a large man with a Western Province cap. He showed no sympathy. He asked her to repeat her story. He did not take notes. There came a moment in the conversation when she realized he didn’t believe her. He had a way of looking at her with a faint smile that only lasted a moment. Her heart went cold. Why wouldn’t he believe her?


When she had finished he stood up and said: “I am going to leave two men here with you. Outside your door.”


She looked at him in inquiry.


“We don’t want anything to happen to you, do we?”


“But didn’t you arrest Carlos?”


“We did.” The faint smile again, like someone sharing a secret.


She wanted to phone Vanessa to hear how Sonia was and she wanted to get away from here. Away from all the people and the fuss, away from the gnawing tension, because it was not over yet.


Another detective. His hair was too long and ruffled. “My name is Benny Griessel,” he said, and he held out his hand and she took it and looked into his eyes and looked away again because of the intensity in them. As if he saw everything. He took her out onto the balcony, and asked her questions in a gentle voice, with a compassion she wanted to embrace. But she couldn’t look him in the eye.

* * *

They turned off the N2 and drove into Swellendam. There was a filling station deep in the town, past a museum and guesthouses and restaurants with small-town Afrikaans names, deserted at this late hour.


When Griessel got out Thobela saw the Z88 was not in his hand. He got out too. His legs were stiff and there were cramps in the muscles of his shoulders. He stretched his limbs, feeling the depth of his fatigue, his red, burning eyes.


Griessel had the Nissan filled up. Then he came to stand next to Thobela, not speaking, just looking at him. The white man looked rough. Shadows around the eyes, deep lines in his face.


“The night is too long,” he said to Griessel.


The detective nodded. “It’s nearly over.”


Thobela nodded back.


“I want you to know we got Khoza and Ramphele,” said Griessel.


“Where?”


“They were arrested yesterday evening in Midrand.”


“Why are you telling me this?”


“Because no matter what happens tonight, I will make sure they don’t get away again.”

* * *

She lay on her bed and told herself she must suppress the urge to go and lie with the detective who was asleep on her couch, because it would be for all the wrong reasons.

* * *

Griessel’s cell phone rang and he answered and said, “Yes” and “Yes” and “Six kilometers” and “Yes” and “Okay.”


Then Thobela heard him say: “I want to hear her voice.”


Silence on the street in Swellendam. “Carla,” said Griessel. Thobela felt a hand squeeze his heart because of the awful emotion in the white man’s voice when he said: “Daddy is coming to fetch you, you hear? Daddy is coming.”

* * *

She needed to be held. She wanted him to hold her because she was afraid. Afraid of Carlos and of the detective in the rugby cap and afraid that the whole scheme was going to collapse in on her. Afraid that Griessel would see through her with those eyes of his, that he would expose her with that energy of his. It wasn’t right, because she wanted to lie with him to make him blind.


She must not do that.


She got up.

* * *

“Infanta,” said Griessel. “Six kilometers outside town the road to Infanta turns off. There will be a car there. They will drive behind us from there.”


They got back into the Nissan, Thobela in front and Griessel behind.


“Infanta,” he heard the man say, as if the name made no sense to him.


On the instrument panel the numbers of the LCD display of the clock glowed yellow.

0

3:41.


He drove out of town, back to the N2.


“Turn right. Towards Cape Town.”


Over a bridge.

Breede River,

the signboard read. Then he spotted the road sign.

Malgas. Infanta.


“This one,” said Griessel.


He put the left indicator on. Gravel road. He saw the vehicle parked there, chunky in the lights of the Nissan. A Mitsubishi Pajero. Two men stood beside it. Each with a firearm, shading eyes from the headlights with their free hands. He stopped.


Only one man approached. Thobela wound his window down.


The man did not look at him, but at Griessel. “Is this the killer?”


“Yes.”


The man was clean-shaven, including his head. There was just a small tassel of hair below his lip. He looked at Thobela. “You die tonight.”


Thobela looked back, into his eyes.


“You the father?” Shaven Head asked Griessel and he said: “Yes.”


The man smirked. “Your daughter has a nice little cunt.”


Griessel made a noise behind him and Thobela thought: not

now,

don’t do anything now.


Shaven Head laughed. Then he said: “Hokay. You ride straight. We will be somewhere behind you. First, we will look if you brought some friends. Now go.”


They were in control, he realized. Didn’t even look for weapons, because they knew they held the trump card.


Thobela pulled away. He wondered what was going on in Griessel’s head.

* * *

The two detectives from Witness Protection were carrying shotguns when they came to collect her.


She packed a suitcase. They accompanied her down in the lift and they all got in the car and drove away.


The house was in Boston, old and quite shabby, but the windows had burglar proofing and there was a security gate at the front door.


They showed her around the house. The master bedroom was where she could “make herself at home,” there were groceries in the kitchen, the bathroom had towels. There was television in the sitting room and piles of magazines on the coffee table, old issues of

Sports Illustrated, FHM

and a few copies of

Huisgenoot.

* * *

“That’s how they bring in the drugs,” said Griessel when they had been on the gravel road for half an hour.


Thobela said nothing. His mind was on their destination. He had seen the weapons of the two in the Pajero. New stuff, hand carbines, he guessed they were Heckler & Koch, family of the G36. Costly. Efficient.


“Infanta and Witsand. Every fucker with a ski boat goes there to fish,” said Griessel. “They are bringing the stuff in small boats. Probably off ships . . .”


So that was how the detective was keeping his mind occupied. He didn’t want to think of his child. He didn’t want to imagine what they had done to his daughter.


“Do you know how many there are?” asked Thobela.


“No.”


“You will want to reload your Z88.”


“I only fired one shot. In your house.”


“Every round will count, Griessel.”

* * *

She was in the sitting room when there was a knock on the door. The two detectives first looked through the peephole and then opened the series of locks on the front door.


She heard heavy steps and then the big man with the Western Province rugby cap stood there and he said: “You and I must talk.”


He came to sit on the chair closest to her and the two Witness Protection detectives hung around in the doorway.


“Let’s not make her nervous, chaps,” said Beukes.


Reluctantly, they retreated down the passage. She heard the back door open and close.


“Where is the money?” he asked when the house was quiet.


“

What

money?” Her pulse beat in her throat.


“You know what I’m talking about.”


“I don’t.”


“Where is your daughter?”


“Ask Carlos.”


“Carlos is dead, you slut. And he never had your daughter.

You

know it and

I

know it.”


“How can you

say

that?” She began to weep.


“Save the fucking tears. They won’t work on me. You should just be fucking grateful I was following him yesterday morning. If it had been one of the others . . .”


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


“Let me tell you what I’m talking about. The team that was on duty day before yesterday said you went to his house in his BMW. And in the middle of the fucking night you take a taxi from the front of his house and you have all these Pick and Pay bags and you’re in a helluva hurry. What was in the bags?”


“I cooked dinner for him.”


“And took everything home again?”


“Just what I didn’t use.”


“You’re lying.”


“I swear.” She wept and the tears were genuine, because the fear was back.


“What I don’t know is where you went with the fucking taxi. Because my fucking so-called colleagues didn’t think to send someone after you. Because their job was to watch

him.

That’s what you get when you work with the policeman of today. Fucking black rubbish. But yesterday was another story, because I was in the saddle, my dear. And Carlos drove out of there as if the devil was on his tail, straight to your little flat. Ten minutes later he comes out with this big red mark on his face, but there’s no child anywhere. But the next minute the whole fucking radio is full of Sangrenegra and before I could do anything the Task Force was there and SVC and who knows what. But one thing I do know: your child was not with him. Not the night before last, and not yesterday morning. Of all the money in that strong room of his, there is a shithouse full of rands missing. Only rands. Now why, I ask myself, why of all the dollars and euros and pounds would someone only take South African rands? I guess it was an amateur. Someone who doesn’t want to bother with foreign exchange. Someone who had time to think about what she wanted to steal. What she could use. That she could carry in Pick and Pay shopping bags.”


She realized something and without further thought she asked: “How do you know there are rands missing?”


“Fuck you, whore. I’m telling you now; this thing is not over yet. Not for

you,

anyway.”

* * *

Griessel’s cell phone rang. He answered and told Thobela: “They say we must drive slower.”


He reduced speed. The Nissan rattled on the dirt road. Behind them the Pajero’s headlights shone dim through the cloud of dust. The lights of Witsand twinkled on the Breede River off to the left.


“He says we must turn left at the road sign.”


He slowed even more, spotted the sign that said

Kabeljoubank.

He put on his indicator and turned. The road narrowed between two boundary fences. It ran down to the river. In the rear-view mirror he saw the Pajero was behind them.


“Are you calm?” Thobela asked the detective.


“Yes.”


He felt the fizz inside him, now that they were close.


In the headlights he saw three, four boats on trailers. And two vehicles. A minibus and a pickup. Figures moving. He stopped a hundred meters away from the vehicles. He turned the key and the Nissan’s engine fell silent. He deliberately kept the lights on.


“Get out and hide that pistol of yours,” he said, and picked up the assegai, pushed it down behind his neck, under his shirt. There was barely enough room in the car, the angle was too tight. He heard the blade tear the material of his shirt, felt the chill of the blade against his back. It would have to do. He opened the door and got out. Griessel stood on the other side of the Nissan.


Four men approached from the minibus—one was tall and broad, considerably bigger than the others. The Pajero pulled up behind them. Thobela stood beside the car, aware of the four in front, the two behind. He heard their footsteps on the gravel, smelt the dust and the river and the fish from the boats, heard the waves in the sea beyond. He felt the stiffness throughout his body, but the weariness was gone, his arteries were full of adrenaline. The world seemed to slow down, as if there were more time for thinking and doing.


The quartet came right up to him. The big one looked him up and down.


“You are the spearman,” he said as if he recognized him. He was as tall as Thobela, with long straight black hair down to his massive shoulders. He wasn’t carrying a firearm. The others had machine pistols.


“Where is my daughter?” asked Griessel.


“I am the spearman,” said Thobela. He wanted to keep the attention; he didn’t know how stable Griessel was.


“My name is César Sangrenegra. You killed my brother.”


“Yes. I killed your brother. You can have me. Let the girl and the policeman go.”


“No. We will have

justicia.

”


“No, you can—”


“Shut the fuck up, black man.” Spit sprayed from César’s lips, the drops making shiny arcs in the light from the Nissan. “

Justicia.

You know what it means? He made the trap for Carlos, this policeman. Now I have to go back to my father and say I didn’t kill him? That will not happen. I want you to know, policeman, before you die. I want you to know we fucked your daughter. We fucked her good. She is young. It was a sweet fuck. And after you are dead, we will fuck her again. And again. We will fuck her so long as she can be alive. You hear me?”


“I will kill you,” said Griessel, and Thobela could hear his breaking point was close.


He laughed at Griessel, shaking his head. “You can do nothing. We have your kid. And we will find the white whore too. The one who tells lies about Carlos. The one who steals our money.”


“You are a coward,” Thobela said to César Sangrenegra. “You are not a man.”


César laughed in his face. “You want me to attack you? You want me to lose my temper?”


“I want you to lose your life.”


“You think I did not see the spear you put behind your back? You think I am stupid, like my brother?” He turned around, to one of his henchmen. “

De¨me el cuchillo.

”


The man drew a knife from a long sheath on his hip. César took it from him.


“I will kill you slowly,” he said to Thobela. “Now take out that spear.”


46.


When Superintendent Boef Beukes had gone, she went to the bedroom where her things were.


She opened her handbag, took out her identity document and put it on the bed. She took out her purse, cigarettes and a lighter. She clipped the bag shut and lifted up her dress. She pushed the ID book and the purse down the front of her panties. She carried the cigarettes in her hand.


She walked to the front of the house and said: “I’m going outside for a smoke.”


“At the back,” gestured the one with the mustache. “We don’t want you to go out the front.”


She nodded, went through the kitchen and out the back door. She closed it behind her.


There were fruit trees in the backyard. The grass was long. A concrete wall surrounded the property. She walked straight to the wall. She put her cigarettes on the ground and looked up at the wall. She drew a deep breath and jumped. Her hands gripped the top of the wall. She pulled herself up, swung one leg over. The top of the wall felt sharp against her knee.


She dragged her whole body up onto the wall. Beyond was another garden. Vegetables in tidy rows. She jumped, landing in the mud of a wet vegetable bed. She got up. One of her sandals stayed behind in the mud. She pulled it out and put it on again. She walked around the house to the front.


She heard the animal’s paws on the cement path before it appeared around the corner. A big brown dog. The animal barked deeply and feinted back a little, as much in fright as she was. She kept her hands protectively in front of her. The dog stood square, growling, exposing big sharp teeth.


“Hello, doggy, hello,” she said.


They stood facing each other, the dog blocking her way around the house.


Don’t look scared, she knew, she remembered that from somewhere. She let her hands drop and stood up straight.


“Okay, doggy.” She tried to keep her tone caressing, while her heartbeat rocked her.


The animal growled again.


“Easy, boy, good dog.”


The dog shook his head and sneezed.


“I just want to come past, doggy, just want to come past.”


The hairs on the dog’s neck dropped. The teeth disappeared. The tail gave one uncertain wag.


She took one step forward. The dog came closer, but didn’t growl. She put out her hand to his head.


The tail wagged more vigorously. He pressed his head against her hand. The dog sneezed again.


She began to walk slowly, the dog following. She could see the front garden gate. She walked faster.


“Hey,” came a voice from the front verandah.


An old man stood there. “Can I help you?” he asked.


“I’m just walking through,” she said, one hand on the gate. “I’m just passing through.”

* * *

He reached for the assegai behind his neck and César Sangrenegra’s movement was subtle and rapid and the long knife cut through Thobela’s shirt and across his ribs, a sharp, red-hot pain. He felt the blood run down his belly.


He took a step back and saw the grin on the Colombian’s face. He held the assegai in his right hand and bent his knees for better balance. He moved to the right, watching César’s eyes; never watch the blade, there are no warnings there. César stabbed. Thobela jumped back and the knife flashed past in front. He stabbed with the assegai. César was no longer there. The knife came again. He jerked back his arm, the blade sliced over his forearm. Another step back. The man was fast. Light on his feet, ten kilograms lighter than he was. Moved again, this time to the left, César feinted right, moved left. Thobela dodged, up against the front of the Nissan, he must not be trapped against the car, three, four short steps to the right, the knife flashed so fast, it missed him by millimeters.


Thobela knew he was in trouble; the big man with the long hair was skilled. Faster than him. Lighter, younger. And he had another great advantage—he could kill, Thobela could not. Carla Griessel’s life depended on him not killing César.


He must use the length of the assegai. He adjusted his grip, held it by the end of the shaft and swung it with a whooshing noise through the night, back and forth, back and forth. He felt the wound in his arm; saw an arc of blood spray as he swung. César moved back, but calmly. The henchman widened the circle. One made a remark in Spanish and the other four laughed.


The opponents looked into each other’s eyes. The Colombian darted forward, the knife flashed, then he was back.


The man was toying with him. César was aware of his superior speed. Thobela would have to neutralize that. He would have to use his power, his weight, but against a knife that was impossible.


The Colombian’s eyes betrayed his attack. Thobela pretended to move back, but came forward, he must keep the knife away, forward again, within the sweep of the knife arm, stabbed with the assegai. César grabbed at it, grasping the blade in his left hand and unexpectedly jerked it towards him, Thobela lost his balance. Saw the blood on César’s hand where the assegai had cut deeply, here came the knife, jerked his own left hand up to block it, got hold of Cesar’s arm, forced it back. César adjusted his grip on the assegai, getting his hand on the shaft.


They stood locked in that grip. The knife bowed down, the point entered Thobela’s biceps, deep. The pain was intense. He would have to move his grip close to the wrist. Would have to do it swiftly and efficiently. He shifted suddenly; the knife cutting through his biceps saved him, because it kept the hand static for a split second. He knew the injury was serious. He had César’s wrist, all his strength behind it. His forearm shrieked. Brought up his knees, kicked César as hard as he could in the belly. Saw in his eyes it was a good contact.


Would have to finish now, in this moment of slight advantage. Pushed the knife hand back. His left arm would not last; the muscle was deeply cut. Shifted his point of balance, jerked the assegai free from the grasp, let it drop in the dust. Both hands on the knife-arm, bent it behind César’s back. Lord, he was strong. Straining, he kicked him at the back of the knee and César began to fall; he twisted the arm the last centimeters and César made a sound. The henchmen called out. Swinging weapons from their shoulders, they moved too late. He twisted the arm until something popped and the knife came free from the fingers.


His right hand pressed César’s arm against his back, the left hand had the knife, arm around the throat, pressing the point into the hollow of the neck. Deep. César screamed and jerked and struggled. Strong. Would have to neutralize that. Turned the arm another bit, until ligaments tore. César’s knees buckled. He kept the man upright, as a shield in front of him.


He pressed the point of the knife deeper into the neck. Felt the blood run over his hand. He felt his own pain shrill in his arm. He didn’t know how much blood he was losing. His entire left side was soaking, warm.


“You are very close to death,” he said softly into César’s ear. The henchmen had carbines and machine pistols aimed at them.


The Colombian was frozen against him.


“If I move the knife, I will cut an artery,” he said. “Do you hear me?”


A noise.


“Your men have to put down their weapons.”


No reaction. Was it going to work? He thought he understood the hierarchy of the drug industry. The autocracy.


“I will count to three. Then I cut.” He tightened the muscles of his arm as if in readiness but it didn’t work so well. He knew there were sinews cut.


“One.”


César jerked again, but the arm was bent too far back, the pain must be dreadful.


“Two.”


“

Coloque sus armas.

” Practically inaudible.


“Louder.”


“

Coloque sus armas.

”


The henchmen did nothing, just stood there. Thobela began to move the knife point slowly, deeper into the throat.


“

ĄAhora!

”


The first one moved slowly, putting his weapon carefully down on the ground. Another one.


“No,” said one of the Pajero men, the one with the shaven head.


He stood beside Griessel, the Heckler & Koch against the detective’s temple. “I will shoot this one,” said Shaven Head.


“Shoot,” said Thobela.


“Let César go.”


“No.”


“Then I shoot this one.”


“Do I care? He is a policeman. I am a murderer.” He turned the knife in César’s throat.


“ĄAhora!”

The cry was hoarse and high and desperate and he knew the blade had scraped against something.


Shaven Head looked at César, back at Griessel and spat out a word. He threw the carbine in the dust.


“Now,”

said Thobela in Afrikaans. “Now you must get your daughter.”

* * *

At a stop sign in Eleventh Avenue she knocked on the window of a woman’s Audi and said: “Please, ma’am, I need your help.”


The woman looked her up and down, saw the mud on her legs and drove off.


“Fuck you!” Christine yelled after her.


She walked in the direction of Frans Conradie Avenue, looking back often. By now they must know she was gone. They must be looking for her.


At the traffic lights she looked left and right. There were shops across the street. If she could just get there. Unseen. She ran. A car braked and hooted at her. She kept on running. Oncoming traffic. She stood on the traffic island waiting. Then it was clear. Jogged across. The sandals were not made for this sort of thing.


Turned left, up the hill. Not far now. She was going to make it. She must phone Vanessa. No taxis. They would follow those up; know where she was dropped off. Vanessa would have to fetch her. Vanessa and Sonia. Take them to a station. Catch a train, anywhere. Get away. She could buy a car, in Beaufort West or George or wherever. She must just get away. Disappear.

* * *

Griessel crossed in front of him where he held César in an embrace. The policeman walked slowly, with empty hands. Thobela wondered where the pistol was. Wondered what the expression in the white man’s eyes meant.


Griessel walked to the minibus.


He opened it. Thobela saw movement inside. He heard Griessel speak. Lean inwards. Saw two arms encircle Griessel’s neck.


He looked at the henchmen. They stood still. Uneasy. Ready, their eyes on César.


He made sure of his grip on the Colombian. He didn’t know whose blood was running over him. Looked back at the minibus. Griessel stood half in the minibus, his daughter’s arms around him. He thought he heard the detective’s voice.


“Griessel,” he said, because he didn’t know how long he could hold out.


A henchman shuffled his feet.


“You must be quiet. I will cut this man’s throat.”


The man looked at him with an unreadable expression.


“Shoot them,” said César, but the words came out with blood, unclear.


“Shut up, or I will kill you.”


“Shoot them.” More audible.


The henchmen inched closer. Shaven Head stepped towards his firearm.


“I will kill César

now.

” The pain in his upper arm reached new heights. There was a buzzing in his head. Where was the policeman? He looked quickly. Griessel stood there, with the Z88, and his daughter, hand in hand.


They all looked at Griessel. He shuffled up to the first henchman.


“Did he?” he asked his daughter.


She nodded. Griessel raised the pistol and fired. The man flew over backwards.


Father and daughter approached the next one. “And he?”


She nodded. He aimed at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The second shot thundered through the night and the man fell. Shaven Head dived for his weapon. Thobela knew it would all happen now and he pulled the knife across César’s throat and let him fall. He knew where the nearest machine pistol lay, threw his body that way, heard another shot. He kept his eyes on the firearm. Hit the gravel, stretched out, heard another shot. Got his finger on the steel. Dizzy, a lot of blood lost. His left arm wouldn’t work. Rolled over. Couldn’t see well in the lights of the Nissan. Tried to get up, but had no balance.


Got onto one knee.


Shaven Head was down. César lay. Three others as well. Griessel had the Z88 trained on the last one. Carla was close to Thobela now. He saw her face. He knew in that moment he would never forget it.


Her father turned to the last one.


“And this one?”


His daughter looked at the man and nodded her head.


PART FOUR


Carla


47.


Beyond Calvinia he saw the clouds damming up against the mountains, the snow-white cumulus towers in late morning sun, the straight line they formed over the dry earth. He wanted to show Carla. He wanted to explain his theory of how the contours of the landscape created this weather.


She was asleep in the passenger seat.


He looked at her. He wondered if it was a dreamless sleep.


A huge plain opened up ahead of them. The road was as straight as an arrow, to Brandvlei—a pitch-black ribbon stretching to the point of invisibility.


He wondered when she would wake up, because she was missing everything.

* * *

The minister looked at the newspaper clipping. There was a photo of two people getting out of a helicopter. A man and a young woman. The man’s hair was dark and untidy, with a hint of gray at the temples. A somewhat Slavic face, with a severe expression. His head was turned towards the young woman in concern.


There was a resemblance between them, a vague connection between brow and the line of the chin. Father and daughter, perhaps.


She was pretty, with an evenness of feature below her black hair. But there was something about the way she held her head, how she looked down. As if she were old and unattractive. Maybe the minister got the impression because the jacket over her shoulders was too big for her. Maybe he was influenced by the headline of the report.


ABDUCTION DRAMA ENDS IN BLOODBATH


John Afrika, Matt Joubert and Benny Griessel were sitting in the spacious office at Serious and Violent Crimes. Keyter came in and greeted them. They did not reciprocate.


“I am only going to ask you once, Jamie,” said Griessel, and his voice was quiet but it carried across the room. “Was it you?”


Keyter looked back at them, nervously from one to the next.


“Uh . . . um . . . What are you talking about, Benny?”


“Did you give Sangrenegra the information?”


“Jesus, Benny . . .”


“Did you?”


“No. Never.”


“Where do you get the money, Jamie? For the clothes. And that expensive cell phone of yours? Where does the money come from?” Griessel had risen halfway from his chair.


“Benny,” said John Afrika, his voice soothing.


“I . . .” said Jamie Keyter.


“Jamie,” said Joubert. “It’s better if you talk.”


“It’s not what you think,” he said and his voice shook.


“What is it?” asked Griessel, forcing himself to sit.


“I moonlight, Benny.”


“You moonlight?”


“Modeling.”


“Modeling?” said John Afrika.


“For TV ads.”


No one said a word.


“For the French. And the Germans. But I swear, I’m finished with that.”


“Can you prove it, Jamie?”


“Yes, Sup. I have the videos. Ads for coffee and cheese spread. And clothes. I did one for the Swedes for milk, I had to take my shirt off, but that’s all, Sup, I swear . . .”


“TV ads,” said John Afrika.


“Jissis,” said Griessel.


“Was this about my clothes, Benny? Did you suspect me just because of my

clothes?

”


“There was a fax, Jamie. It was sent from here. From SVC’s fax machine. With Mpayipheli’s photo.”


“It could have been anyone.”


“You were the dresser, Jamie.”


“But it wasn’t me.”


Silence settled over the room.


“You may go, Jamie,” said Joubert.


The detective constable dallied. “I thought, Benny . . .”


They looked at him impatiently.


“I thought about how they got your daughter’s address. And your cell phone number. All that stuff . . .”


“What are you trying to say?”


“They must have phoned him. Carlos’s brother. Not just sent faxes.”


“Yes?”


“He must have had a cell phone, Commissioner. The brother. And you get missed calls and received calls and dialed numbers.”


It took them a while to grasp what he meant.


“Fuck,” said Griessel and got up.


“Sorry, Benny,” said Keyter and ducked, but Griessel was already past him, heading for the door.

* * *

By 12:3

0

they had reached Brandvlei and he decided to stop at a café with a concrete table under a thatched roof. Colored children played barefoot in the dust.


Carla woke up and asked him where they were. Griessel told her. She looked at the café.


“Do you want to eat something?”


“Not really.”


“Let’s have something to drink.”


“Okay.”


He got out and waited for her. It was boiling hot outside the car. She put on trainers before getting out, stretched and came around the car. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse and bleached jeans. His lovely daughter. They sat at one of the concrete tables. It was slightly cooler under the thatch.


He saw her watching the colored children with their wire cars. He wondered what she was thinking.


“How far is it to Upington still?”


“About a hundred and fifty to Kenhardt, another seventy to Keimoes and then maybe fifty to Upington. Just under three hundred,” he quickly added up.


A colored woman brought them single-page menus. At the top of the white laminated page was printed

Oasis Café.

There was an amateurish palm tree alongside the words. Carla ordered a white Grapetiser. Griessel said: “Make that two.”


As the woman walked away he said, “I’ve never had Grapetiser before.”


“Never?”


“If it didn’t go with brandy, I wasn’t interested.”


She smiled, but it didn’t extend further than the corners of her mouth.


“This is another universe, here,” she said and looked up the main street.


“It is.”


“Do you think you will find something in Upington?”


“Perhaps.”


“But why, Dad? What’s the use?”


He made a gesture with his hand that said he didn’t know himself. “I don’t know, Carla. It’s the way I am. That’s why I am a detective. I want to know the reasons. And the facts. I want to understand. Even if it won’t necessarily make a difference. Loose ends . . . I don’t like them.”


“Weird,” she said. She put out her hand to him and wiggled her fingers under his. “But wonderful.”

* * *

He called the numbers on César Sangrenegra’s received calls list on the speakerphone in Joubert’s office. With the first three he got voice mailboxes in Spanish. The fourth rang and rang and rang. Eventually it switched over to a cell phone messaging service.


“Hello, this is Bushy. When I’ve caught the crooks, I will phone you back.”

* * *

“I won’t go to hell for Carlos,” said Christine. “Because I saw the look in his eyes when he saw Sonia. And I know God will forgive me for being a sex worker. And I know he will understand that I had to draw the blood. And take the money.” She looked at the minister. He didn’t want to assent to that.


“But He punished everyone for Carla Griessel.” She opened the second newspaper clipping. The headline read: MASSIVE COP CORRUPTION SCANDAL.


“Carlos’s brother and his bodyguards. The Artemis man. All dead. And these policemen are going to jail,” she said, and tapped the two photos with the report. “But what about me?”

* * *

“I didn’t even know them,” said Bushy Bezuidenhout.


“But you gave them the information,” said Joubert.


“For money, you piece of shit,” said Griessel.


Joubert put his big hand soothingly on the inspector’s arm.


Bezuidenhout wiped the perspiration from his forehead and shook his head. “I’m not going down alone for this.”


“Give us the others, Bushy. You know, if you cooperate . . .”


“Jissis, Sup.”


“Give me five minutes alone with this cunt,” said Griessel.


“Jissis, Benny, I didn’t know what they were going to do. I didn’t know. Do you think I would—?”


Griessel shouted him down. “Who, Bushy? Tell me who!”


“Beukes, fuck it. Beukes with his bloody cap brought me this shitload of money in a fucking brown envelope . . .”


Matt Joubert’s voice was sharp in the room. “Benny, no. Sit. I will not let you go.”

* * *

Fourteen kilometers beyond Keimoes he saw the sign and turned right to Kanoneiland. They crossed the river that flowed peaceful and brown under the bridge, and between green vineyards heavy with giant bunches of grapes.


“Amazing,” said Carla, and he knew what she meant. This fertility here, the surprise of it. But he was also aware that she was observing, that she was less turned in on herself, and it gave him hope again.


They drove up the long avenue of pines to the guesthouse and Carla said, “Look,” and pointed a finger at his side of the road. Between the trees he could see the horses: big Arabians, three bays and a magnificent gray.

* * *

When Christine van Rooyen walked down the street in Reddersburg, the sun came up over the Free State horizon, a giant balloon breaking loose from the hills and sweeping over the grassland.


She turned off the main street, down an unpaved street, past houses that were still dark and silent.


She looked intently at one of them. The babysitter said a writer lived here, a man hiding away from the world.


It was a good place for it.

* * *

The secretary at the high school shook her head and said she had only worked here for three years. But he could ask Mr. Losper. Mr. Losper had been at the school for years. He taught Biology. But it was holidays now; Mr. Losper would be at home. She gave him precise directions and he drove there and knocked on the door.


Losper was somewhere in his fifties, a man with smoker’s wrinkles and rough voice who invited him in, since it was cooler in the dining room. Would he like a beer? He said no thanks, he was fine.


When they were seated at the dining-room table and he asked his question, the man shut his eyes for a moment, as if sending up a quick prayer to heaven, and then he said, “Christine van Rooyen.” Solemnly, he put his arms on the table and folded his hands together.


“Christine van Rooyen,” he repeated, as if the repetition of the name would open up his memory.


Then he told Griessel the story, regularly inserting admissions of guilt and rationalization. Of Martie van Rooyen who lost her soldier husband in Angola. Martie van Rooyen, the blonde woman with the big bosom and the small blonde daughter. A woman the community gossiped about even when her husband was still alive. Rumors of visits when Rooies was away on training courses, or on the Border.


And after Rooies’s death there was very soon a replacement. And another. And another. She lured them home from the ladies’ bar at the River Hotel with red lipstick and a low neckline. While the child wandered around the yard with a stuffed dog in her arms, an object that later became so filthy it was scandalous.


The gossipmongers said the substitute for Rooies used to hit Martie. And sometimes played around with more than just the mother. But in Upington, many watch but few act. Social Welfare tried to step in, but the mother sent them packing and Christine van Rooyen grew up like that. Sad and wild. Earned a reputation of her own. Loose. Easy. There was talk when the girl was a teenager. About an old friend of her father’s who . . . you know. And an Afrikaans teacher. There were goings-on at the school. The child was difficult. Smoking and drinking with the rough crowd, the school had always had one, it was a funny town, this, with the Army and all.


Losper had heard the story that when Christine had finished school she walked out of the house with a suitcase while her mother was in bed with a substitute. Went to Bloemfontein, apparently, but he didn’t know what became of her.


“And the mother?”


She had also left, he had heard. With a man in a pickup. Cape Town. Or the West Coast: there were so many stories.

* * *

She walked past. Three houses down she turned in at a garden gate that creaked on opening. It needed oiling.


The garden was overgrown with weeds. She took the box and put it down on the verandah. It was light now.


In the minister’s study she had pulled it towards her one last time and taken out the cash. Four hundred thousand rand in one-hundred-rand notes.


“This is a tenth,” she said.


“You can’t buy the Lord’s forgiveness,” he had answered wearily, but couldn’t keep his eyes off the money.


“I don’t want to buy anything. I just want to give. It’s for the Church.”


She had waited for his response and then he walked her to the door and she could smell the odor of his body behind her, the smell of a man after a long day.


She came back off the verandah and stooped to pull out a weed. The roots came free of the reddish soil and she thought it looked fertile here.


She went over to the steps. She reached for the sign to the right of them, the one that said

Te Koop/For Sale.

She pulled. It had been hammered in deep and had been there a long time. She had to wiggle it back and forth before it slowly began to shift and eventually came out.


She carried it up, put it down on the verandah. Then she took her keys out and quietly unlocked the door. On the new couch the large black babysitter was reclining. She was fast asleep.


Christine went down the passage to the master bedroom. Sonia lay there in a fetal position, her whole body curled around the toy dog. She lay down gently beside her daughter. Later, when they had finished breakfast, she would ask Sonia if she would like to exchange the stuffed animal for a real one.

* * *

Griessel thought about Senior Superintendent Beukes as he drove back to the guesthouse. Three weeks ago, they confronted him.


They would not allow him to be present at the interrogation—Joubert had put his foot down. He had to sit with the disillusioned American, Lombardi. Tried to explain to him that not

all

the police in Africa were corrupt. But afterwards Joubert came to tell him. Beukes would admit nothing. Right till the end when they got his bank statements through a court order and spread them out in front of him. And Beukes had said, “Why don’t you try and find the whore? She’s the one who stole money. And lied about her daughter.”


He didn’t know whether it was true or not. But now, after Losper’s story, he hoped it was. Because he recalled the words of the forensic psychologist.

Women are different. When there is damage at a young age, they don’t do to others. They do to themselves.


He only hoped she used the money well. For herself and her daughter.


His cell phone rang while he was driving up the avenue of pine trees. He pulled over.


“Griessel.”


“This is Inspector Johnson Mtetwa. I am phoning from Alice. I wonder if you could help me?”


“Yes, Inspector.”


“It’s about the death of Thobela Mpayipheli . . .”


“Yes?”


“The trouble is, I had some people here. The missionary priest from the Knott Memorial between us and Peddie.”


“Yes?”


“He told me the strangest thing, Inspector Griessel. He said he saw Mpayipheli, yesterday morning.”


“How strange.”


“He said he saw a man walking, from the Kat River hills to near the manse. He went out to see who it might be. When he came close, the man turned away. But he could swear it was Mpayipheli, because he knew him. In the old days. You see, Mpayipheli’s father was also a missionary.”


“I see.”


“I went out with the people from Cathcart station to Mpayipheli’s farm. They have to deal with things there. And now they tell me there is a motorbike missing. A . . . Hang on. . . . A BMW R eleven-fifty GS.”


“Oh?”


“But the people in the Cape say you were a witness to his death.”


“You must request the file, Inspector. They did search the river for his body . . .”


“Strange,” said Mtetwa, “that someone would steal only the motorbike.”


“That’s life,” said Griessel. “Strange.”


“That’s true. Thank you, Inspector. And good luck there in the Cape.”


“Thank you.”


“Thank

you.

”


Benny Griessel put the cell phone back in his breast pocket. He put his hand out to the ignition key but, before starting the car, he saw something that made him wait.


Between the trees, there in the horse paddock, Carla stood by a large gray. She was leaning against the magnificent beast, her face in the horse’s mane, her hand gently stroking the long muzzle.


He got out of the car and went over to the fence rail. He had eyes only for her, and a tenderness that might just overwhelm him.


His child.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


More than any of my previous books,

Devil’s Peak

is to a great extent the product of the astounding goodwill, unselfishness, readiness to share knowledge—and unconditional support of a large number of people.


I wish to thank them:


Even now I don’t know her real name, but as a sex worker she went by the name of “Vanessa.” In two long morning interviews she talked intelligently, openly and honestly about her work and life. When I had finished the book, I tried to contact her to thank her. The message on her cell phone said “I am no longer in the business . . .” May all her dreams be realized.


The three other nameless sex workers who made time to talk to me in coffee shops and tell me their stories.


The personnel of Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in Cape Town, and specifically the director, Ms. Jayne Arnott.


Ms. Ilse Pauw, a clinical psychologist, who shared hours of her knowledge of and insight into sex workers.


Captain Elmarie Myburgh of the South African Police Service’s Psychological Investigation Unit in Pretoria. Her incredible insight, experience and knowledge of the psychology of people in general and specifically crime and criminals, her enthusiasm for the project and many hours of patience left me deeply in her debt. She is any author’s research dream and a wonderful ambassador for her unit and the SAPS.


Inspector Riaan Pool, SAPS Liaison Officer in Cape Town.


Superintendent Mike Barkhuizen of the SAPS Serious and Violent Crimes Unit in Cape Town.


Gerhard Groenewald of Klipbokkop, for his knowledge of tires.


Dr. Julie Wells of Rhodes University History Department, for the background of the Xhosa stabbing assegai.


All the wonderful curio-shop people of Cape Town city center who provided information on assegais so freely, even when they knew I did not wish to buy.


Professor Marlene van Niekerk of the Department Afrikaans and Nederlands of the University of Stellenbosch, for her compassion, understanding, patience, great knowledge, intellect and creativity. She is a national treasure, in every sense of the word.


All the members (the veterans and the young ones!) of the US MA class in Creative Writing. That dinner is coming . . .


My editor, Dr. Etienne Bloemhof, for his eagle eye, his enthusiasm, support and depth of knowledge.


My agent Isobel Dixon, to whom I owe so much—and all her colleagues at Blake Friedmann, especially David Eddy and Julian Friedmann.


My wife, Anita, who gets up and has coffee with me before dawn and never stops supporting and believing and reading and loving. And the children who wait so patiently for the writing door to open.


The ATKV, for the financial support that made so much of the research possible.

* * *

One of the great joys of researching a manuscript is finding and reading relevant books—and hunting down relevant information on the Internet. I am grateful for the following:


Smokescreen

by Robert Sabbag, Canongate, London, 2

00

2.


Killing Pablo

by Mark Bowden, Atlantic Books, London, 2

002

.


With Criminal Intent,

Rob Marsh, Ampersand Press, Cape Town, 1999.


Frontiers

by Noel Mostert, Pimlico, London, 1992.


www.alcoholicsanonymous.org.au


www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk


www.fda.gov


www.digitalnaturopath.com


www.heckler-koch.de


www.dieburger.com


www.iol.com


Translated by K. L. Seegers, October 2005


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Deon Meyer is an internationally renowed crime writer who also works as a journalist and brand consultant. He is the author of

Heart of the Hunter, Dead at Daybreak,

and

Dead Before Dying.

He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

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