* * *
In the sultry late afternoon of a Highveld summer, at the New Road filling station between the old Pretoria Road and Sixteenth Avenue in Midrand, the stolen BMW 32
0
d stopped in front of the Quickshop. John Khoza and Andrew Ramphele got out and walked through the automatic glass doors. They walked casually up to the fast-food counter in the back of the shop.
While Ramphele ordered two chicken burgers, Khoza inspected the four corners of the large room. There was only one security camera. It was against the eastern wall opposite the cash register.
He murmured something to Ramphele, who nodded.
* * *
Griessels phone rang while they waited for the pizzas.
Benny, the boss says we can give her Witness Protection, but its going to take time, said Ngubane.
How much time?
Probably only tomorrow. Thats the best we can do.
Okay, Tim. Thanks.
What are you going to do? For tonight?
Ill make a plan, he said.
* * *
Khoza waited until the last of the four clients in the shop had paid and left. Then he walked up to the woman behind the cash register, shoved his hand in the back of his denim jacket and drew out a pistol. He shoved it against her face and said, Just open it up, sister, and give us the cash. Nobody will get hurt.
* * *
Ill have to sleep on your couch tonight, said Griessel.
Christine looked up at him and nodded.
We will place you in Witness Protection tomorrow. They are organizing it now, but it takes a little time.
What does that mean? she asked.
It depends.
There was a knock on the door. Griessel got up and took out his Z88 service pistol. That must be our pizzas, he said.
* * *
The Toyota Microbus of the South African Police Services Task Force Unit stopped at the filling station for petrol. The nine policemen were stiff from hours of sitting and thirsty. They had last stretched their legs at Louis Trichardt. They all got out. The young black constable, the sharpshooter of the team, knew it was his duty as the youngest to take the orders for cool drinks.
What do you want to drink? he asked.
That was when two men came out of the Quickshop, each carrying a pistol in one hand and a green, purple and red plastic bag in the other.
Hey, said the sharpshooter and dropped a hand to the firearm on his hip holster. The other eight members of the Task Force team looked instinctively at what the constable had seen. For a moment they could hardly believe their eyes. For a very short moment.
* * *
Just now, you said you did not want me to leave. Why? asked Griessel, but her mouth was full of pizza and she had to finish chewing before she answered.
You are the first person I have seen today, she said and left it at that. He could see she was struggling not to cry.
He understood. He visualized her day. Her child was missing, probably dead. The awful worry and doubt. Fear perhaps, because the guards were gone. Alone, between these four walls. Im sorry, he said.
You neednt be sorry. Its my fault. Only mine.
How can you say that?
She closed her eyes. If I wasnt a whore, I would never have met him.
The first thing that popped into his head was to ask her why she had become a whore. It doesnt work like that, he said. She just shook her head, keeping her eyes closed. He wanted to get up and go over and put his arm around her shoulders.
He stayed where he was. Its a psychological thing, he said. We see it often. Victims or their families blame themselves. You cant be responsible for someone elses behavior.
She didnt react. He looked down at the pizza on the plate in front of him and pushed it away and wiped his hands on a paper serviette. He looked at her. She was wearing jeans. She sat on the chair with her bare feet folded under her. Her long blonde hair was half covering her face. What could he say to her? What could anyone say to him if it had been his child?
I actually came to tell you about something else.
She opened her eyes. I dont want to hear bad news.
I dont think it is bad news. Its just that I think you have the right to know. You know about the Artemis affair the papers are writing about?
With a sudden movement of her head she tossed her hair back and said, Yes. And I wish he would come and kill Carlos. She said it with hate he could understand.
Its my case. The assegai man. I want to use Carlos to catch him.
How?
We know he picks his victims when the media writes about them. About their crimes. Today we gave the media a lot of information about Carlos. About how he . . . abducted Sonia. About his drug-dealing background. We think it will lure the assegai man.
And then?
Thats another reason were watching Carlos so carefully.
It was some time before she answered. He saw the process in her face, the eyes narrowing, the lips thinning. So its not about Sonia, she said.
It
is
about her. All the indications are that he will lead us to her. He tried hard to be convincing, but he felt guilty. He had told Sangrenegra what they were going to do. This morning in court he had looked Carlos in the eyes and reinforced the message: you are bait. He knew Carlos was going nowhere, because Carlos knew the police were watching him. The chances that the Colombian was going to lead them anywhere were nil.
I dont believe you.
Could she hear from the tone of his voice that he was lying? My black colleague talked to the psychologist this morning. She said people like Carlos go back to their victims. I give you my word. Its true. Its a chance. Its possible. I cant swear it will happen, but its possible.
Her face altered, the venom dissolved and he saw she was about to cry. He said: Its possible, again, but to no avail.
She put her face in her hands and said: Leave him. Let him kill Carlos. Then her shoulders heaved. He couldnt take it anymore. Guilt and pity drove him to her. He put a hand on her shoulder. I understand, he said.
She shook her head.
I have children too, he said, and inhaled her smell, perfume and the faint scent of perspiration.
He sat on the arm of the chair. He put his hand behind her neck onto her far shoulder. His fingers patted her comfortingly. He felt a bit of an idiot because she was unyielding under his touch. I understand, he repeated.
Then she moved and he felt her soften and she pressed her head against him. With her arm around his hip she wept.
H
e thought many thoughts while she leaned against him, shrunken under his arm. For the first time since Anna had kicked him out, some sort of calm came over him. A kind of peace.
He looked around the flat. The sitting room and kitchen were one big room separated by a white melamine counter. A passage led off to the right behind him. To the bedrooms? He noted the large fridge and big flat-screen television. New stuff. A childs drawings of multicolored animals were stuck up on the fridge with magnets. A crocodile and a rhinoceros and a lion. He noted the coffee machine in the kitchen, shiny chrome, with spouts and knobs. But the chairs at the counter were scuffed; one sitting-room chair was old and worn. Two worlds in one.
Leaning against the wall to the left of him was a painting. Large and original. A rural landscape, a blue mountain in the distance and a green valley, the grass in the veld growing high and verdant. A young girl was running through the grass. She was a tiny figure on the left, dwarfed by the landscape, but he could distinguish the blonde hair bouncing up behind. Four or five steps ahead of her there was a red balloon, with a string hanging down, a thin, barely visible black stripe against the blue of the mountain. The girls hand was stretched out to it. The grass bent away from her. It must be the wind, he thought. Blowing the balloon away from her. He wondered if she were running fast enough to catch it.
He had a partial erection.
She wouldnt be able to feel it, as she wasnt in contact there. Her breathing was quieter now, but he couldnt see her face.
He crossed his legs to hide his state. He couldnt help it; there were a lot of things affecting him here. Knowing that sex was her job. She was attractive. And vulnerable. Hurt. Something in him that responded to that. Something that somewhere in his brain did surveys and sent out primitive orders: take your chance, the time is right. He knew that was how his head worked. Heand the other members of his sex. Also the mentally ill, those for whom it was more than just an opportunity for sexual victory. Like serial murderers. They searched out the weak, soft targets for their dark deeds. Often prostitutes. Not always deliberately, with preconceived reasoning and planned strategy. Instinct. Somewhere, in the pre-alcoholic period a memory stirred, something he had worked out for himself. He was a good policeman because he understood others through self-knowledge. He could use his own weaknesses, his own fears and instincts, because he knew them. He could magnify them, amplify them like turning up an imaginary volume control to the level where they made other people commit murder or rape, lie or steal. As he sat there he realized it was one of the things that had made him start drinking. The slow realization that he was like them and they were like him, that he was not a better man. As he had felt last night or the previous, he couldnt remember which, when he had seen Anna and her young, imaginary lover in his mind and the jealousy had turned on the switches with an evil hand and he had wanted to shoot. If he were to find them like that and he had his service pistol on his hip, he would shoot the fucker, between the eyes, no fucking doubt about that.
But that was not the main reason he drank. No. It was not the only reason. There were others. Large and small. He began to realize it all now. He was a rough stone and he was cut with a thousand facets and it was his bad luck that this shape fitted so well into the crooked hole of alcoholism.
The thing that he was had consequences. The way in which the fine wiring of his brain made connections, had implications. It enabled him to view a crime scene and
see
things; it also wakened an urge in him to hunt. It made the search sweet; inside his skull he experienced an addictive pleasure. But the selfsame wiring made him drink. If you wanted to hunt and search, you had to look death in the eye. And what if death frightened you? Then you drank, because it was part of you. And if you drank long enough, then the alcohol created its own wiring, its own thoughts, its own justification. Its own thick glasses through which you saw yourself and the world.
What do you do about it? What do you do about the consequences, the opposite sides of the coin, if it fucked up your life? Leave the police and go and drive a white Toyota Tazz for Chubb Security around Brackenfells streets at night and leave notes under peoples doors?
You left your window open. Your alarm went off.
Or do you sit behind the small black-and-white screens of a shopping centers closed-circuit television and watch the dolled-up mommies spending the daddies money?
And you never hunt again and you die here inside.
He experienced a sudden feeling of despair, like someone trapped in a labyrinth. He needed to think of other thingsof the woman leaning against him and the fact that it satisfied a need. The need to be held. That he needed to be touched. Ever since he had been thrown out of his house, he had an increasing need for it.
He wondered about her.
Why had she found it necessary to become a whore? An
Afrikaner
girl. Not as beautiful as a model. Attractive rather, sexy.
Did all women have this potential? Did it lie hidden until circumstances arose? Or was it, like his own polished facets, connected to a specific combination of angles and surfaces?
It hadnt been necessary for him to come around here tonight. But it had been in the back of his mind all day: he wanted to look in.
Was it coincidence that he had recalled his first experience of sex with such clarity on his way here? At the same time he had been wondering how alcohol and memory interacted. He had a mental image of synapses submerged in brandy; while he stayed sober the level kept dropping and, like a dam drying up, exposed old, rusty objects.
Not all the memories were pleasant, but he focused on those from long ago: the one of the girl with the gold chain around her neck and her name in gold letters against her throat. YVETTE. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with blue-and-white horizontal stripes and she had used too much perfume. But it smelt heavenly.
There were odd details that he had remembered this afternoon. They had a gig in Welgemoed against the Tygerberg at the sixteenth birthday party of some or other rich mans son. They set up beside the swimming pool on imported ceramic tiles. The rich wanker had kept hanging around and asking, Have you got rubbers for the feet of the drums? When he was a distance away, the drummer said, I have rubbers for your daughter, and they all laughed. The rich wanker, one of those men who dress as if they were still sixteen too, stopped and asked, What did you say? The drummer said: I said I have rubbers, but with a smirk. The rich man stood there knowing he was making a fool of himself, but there was not a lot he could do about it.
When they played, the girl was there. She moved at the edge of the big group, half in the twilight. She wasnt truly part of it. Or didnt want to be. Sometimes she danced on her own. She looked at him and he noticed her eyes first, big brown eyes that looked sad. Long straight brown hair. Then he noticed her neat little breasts and pretty round bottom and he saw a potential opportunity and began to play to her.
The prospect was nearly too much for him. He was afraid his hopes were unrealistic. He waited until late that night, until their very last break. He went over to her and said Hi and she said Hi and looked at him with that lost smile as if to say I know what youre thinking. Then the strangest thing happened. She took his hand and led him past the house into the shadows. She opened a door low down at the side of the house. It was a storeroom of sorts. She closed the door and it was pitch-dark. He could see fuck-all. Then she was against him, hands around his neck and kissing him. He tasted alcohol on her tongue and Spearmint Beechies and smelt her perfume. Lust took hold of them in the dark, they kissed and undressed each other with searching hands and he felt her bodyhe ran his palms over her face and neck and breasts and hips and bottom. They bumped into invisible garden tools and somehow or other found a place to lie, a canvas tarpaulin over some sacksnot soft, but not as hard as the floor. He remembered the smell of turpentine and old paint, but above all, her perfume. The only sounds were their breathing and urgency. She took his dick and put it in her mouth. Lord, he would never forget that. For a moment she was nowhere to be found and then her hand was around his thing and then there was something warm and wet around it and it hit him like a sledgehammer, his dick was in her mouth. The realization of every masturbatory dream. He wanted to see it. He wanted terribly to capture it in his mind, so that he could know what it looked like and remember, but there was no light, absolutely none. He groaned partly from frustration and partly from ecstasy and he stretched out his hand until he found her bush, slid his finger in and felt her heat like glowing coals inside.
Afterwards she opened the door for light so they could find their clothes and dress. He watched her silhouette faintly etched against the little light from outside. That was the last he saw of her. He went back, self-conscious and worried he hadnt dressed properly in the storeroom. He hadnt been missed. He looked around for her, but she was gone.
Yvette.
That was all he knew. That night he had lain in bed with a strange melancholy. Her smell was on his fingers and on his body. But the next morning it was gone. Just like her.