Deon Meyer (2 page)

 

 

The children’s voices became softer, the men’s louder. Stoffberg sent a courier to give the guests a call. The tempo of the party changed. The women called the children and walked out with plates laden with side dishes to where Stoffberg had started carving the lamb.

 

 

Joubert sucked at a Castle while he waited his turn. The alcohol had misted his senses. He wasn’t hungry but ate out of habit and politeness at a garden table with the other men.

 

 

Music started up inside, the teenagers rocked. Joubert offered cigarettes again. Women fetched men to dance. The music grew steadily older but the decibels didn’t. Joubert got up so as not to be left alone outside and grabbed another beer on the way to the living room.

 

 

Stoffberg had replaced the room’s ordinary bulbs with colored lights. Writhing bodies were bathed in a muted glow of red and blue and yellow. Joubert sat in the dining room, from where he had a view of the dancers. Wessels’s short body jerked spasmodically in imitation of Elvis. The movements of the teenagers were more subtle. Dancing past a red light, the body of Storridge’s pretty, slender wife was briefly backlit. Joubert looked away, saw the daughter of the house, Yvonne Stoffberg, her breasts bouncing youthfully under a tight T-shirt. Joubert lit another cigarette.

 

 

Myburgh’s fat wife asked Joubert for a traditional waltz. He agreed. She guided him skillfully past the other couples. When the music changed, she smiled sympathetically and let him go. He fetched another Castle. The tempo of the music slowed. Dancers moved closer to one another, entered the evening’s new phase.

 

 

Joubert walked outside to empty his bladder. The garden lights had been switched off. The coals under the remains of the lamb were still a glowing red. He walked to a corner of the garden, relieved himself and walked back. A shooting star fell above the dark roof of the Stoffbergs’ house. Joubert stopped and looked up at the sky, saw only darkness.

 

 

“Hi, Mat.”

 

 

She suddenly appeared next to him, a nymphlike shadow of the night.

 

 

“I can call you that, can’t I? I’ve done with school.” She stood silhouetted against the light of the back door, her rounded young curves molded by T-shirt and pants.

 

 

“Sure,” he said hesitantly, surprised. She came closer, into the protected space of his loneliness.

 

 

“You didn’t dance with me once, Mat.”

 

 

He stood rooted to the earth, uncertain, stupefied by seven Castles and so many months of soul-searing introspection. He folded his arms protectively.

 

 

She put her hand on his arm. The tip of her left breast lightly touched his elbow.

 

 

“You were the only man here tonight, Mat.”

 

 

Dear God, he thought, this is my neighbor’s daughter. He recalled the contents of the teenagers’ glasses on the porch.

 

 

“Yvonne . . .”

 

 

“Everybody calls me Bonnie.”

 

 

For the first time he looked at her face. Her eyes were fixed on him, shining, passionate, and purposeful. Her mouth was a fruit, ripe, slightly open. She was no longer a child.

 

 

Joubert felt the fear of humiliation move in him.

 

 

Then his body spoke softly to him, a rusty moment that came and went, reminding his crotch of the rising pleasures of the past. But his fear was too great. He didn’t know whether that kind of life had died in him. It was more than two years . . . He wanted to check her. He unlocked his arms, wanting to push her away.

 

 

She interpreted his movements differently, moved between his hands, pulled him closer, pressed her wet mouth to his. Her tongue forced open his lips, fluttered. Her body was against his, her breasts pinpoints of warmth.

 

 

In the kitchen someone called a child and alarms broke through Mat Joubert’s rise upward, toward life. He pushed her away and immediately started toward the kitchen.

 

 

“I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder without knowing why.

 

 

“I’ve done with school, Mat.” There was no reproach in her voice.

 

 

He walked to his house like a refugee, his thoughts focused on his destination, not on what lay behind him. There were cheers announcing the New Year. Fireworks, even a trumpet.

 

 

His house. He walked past trees and shrubs and flowerbeds that Lara had made, struggled with the lock, went down the passage to the bedroom. There stood the bed in which he and Lara had slept. This was her wardrobe, empty now. There hung the painting she’d bought at the flea market in Green Point. The jailers of his captivity, the guards of his cell.

 

 

He undressed, pulled on the black shorts, threw off the blankets, and lay down.

 

 

He didn’t want to think about it.

 

 

But his elbow still felt the unbelievable softness, her tongue still entered his mouth.

 

 

Two years and three months after Lara’s death. Two years and three months.

 

 

Recently, late in the afternoon, early evening, he stood in Voortrekker Road and looked up the street. And saw the parking meters that stretched for a kilometer or more, as far as he could see, on the arrow-straight road. The parking meters so senselessly and proudly guarding them all, were empty after the working day. Then he knew that Lara had made him into one— an irritation during the day, useless at night.

 

 

His body wouldn’t believe him.

 

 

Like a neglected engine it creaked and coughed and rustily tried to get the gears moving. His subconscious still remembered the oil that waited in the brain, chemical messages of the urge that sent blood and mucus to the front. The machine sighed, a plug sparked feebly, a gear meshed.

 

 

He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling.

 

 

A virus in his blood. He could feel the first vague symptoms. Not yet an organ that grew and strained against material with a life of its own. At first only a slow fever that spread through his body and slowly, like a tide, washed the alcohol out of his bloodstream, drove away sleep.

 

 

He tossed and turned, got up to open a window. The sweat on his torso gleamed dully in the light of a streetlamp. He lay down again, on his back, searched for a drug against longing and humiliation.

 

 

The yearning in his crotch and in his head was equally painful.

 

 

His thoughts were driven by a whirlwind, spilled over the barriers.

 

 

Emotion and lust and memories intermingled. Lara. He missed her and he hated her. Because of the pain. Jesus, but she’d been beautiful. Lithe, a crack of a whip, a tempest, a tease. A traitor.

 

 

The softness of a breast against his elbow. His neighbor’s daughter.

 

 

Lara, who’d turned him into a parking meter. Lara, who was dead.

 

 

Lara was dead.

 

 

His mind searched for an escape in the face of this, shunted his thoughts into the disconsolate safety of a gray depression in which he had learned to survive in the past months.

 

 

But for the first time in two years and three months, Mat Joubert didn’t want that as an escape hatch. The great drive-shaft had turned between the roughened ball bearings, the valves moved in their cylinders. The machine had forged an alliance with Yvonne Stoffberg. Together they were fighting the approaching grayness.

 

 

Yvonne Stoffberg fluttered in his mouth again.

 

 

Lara was dead. He drifted down into sleep. A duel without a winner, a new experience.

 

 

Somewhere on the borderline of sleep he realized that life wanted to return. But he crossed over before fear could overcome him.

 

 

 

3.

D
etective Sergeant Benny Griessel called the Murder and Robbery building in Kasselsvlei Road, Bellville South the Kremlin.

 

 

Benny Griessel was the one with the ironical sense of humor, forged in the fire of nine years of crime solving. Benny Griessel called the daily morning assembly in the Kremlin’s parade room the circus.

 

 

But this was a cynical remark made during the time of the ascetic Colonel Willy Theal, of whom fat Sergeant Tony O’Grady had remarked: “There but for the grace of God goes God.” O’Grady had laughed loudly and told no one that he had stolen the quip from Churchill. In any case none of the detectives had known it.

 

 

This morning was different. Theal, the commanding officer of Murder and Robbery, had taken early retirement on December 31 and was going to grow vegetables on a smallholding in Philippi.

 

 

Coming in his place was Colonel Bart de Wit. Appointed by the minister of law and order. The new black minister of law and order. As of January 1, Murder and Robbery was officially part of the New South Africa. Because Bart de Wit was a former member of the African National Congress who had resigned his membership before accepting the command. Because a cop must be impartial.

 

 

When Joubert walked into the parade room at seven minutes past seven on the first of January, forty detectives were already seated on the blue-gray government-issue chairs placed in a large rectangle against the four walls. The muted buzz speculated about the new man, this Bart de Wit.

 

 

Benny Griessel greeted Mat Joubert. Captain Gerbrand Vos greeted Mat Joubert. The rest carried on with their speculations. Joubert went to sit in a corner.

 

 

At exactly quarter past seven the Brigadier, in full uniform, came into the parade room. Behind him walked Colonel Bart de Wit.

 

 

Forty-one pairs of eyes followed him. The Brigadier stood up front next to the television set. De Wit sat down on one of the two empty chairs. The Brigadier greeted them and wished them all a Happy New Year. Then he started a speech, but the detectives didn’t give it their full attention. Their knowledge of human nature, their capacity to evaluate others, was centered on the commander. Because their professional future was tied up with him.

 

 

Bart de Wit was short and slender. His black hair was thin in front and at the back on the crown. His nose was a beak with a fat mole on the border between organ and cheek. He wasn’t an impressive figure.

 

 

The Brigadier’s speech about a changing environment and a changing police force was nearing its end. He introduced de Wit. The commander stood up, cleared his throat, and rubbed the mole with a forefinger.

 

 

“Colleagues, this is a great privilege,” he said, and his voice was nasal and high-pitched, like an electric band saw. His hands were folded behind his back, his short body was stiff as a ramrod, shoulders well back.

 

 

“The Brigadier is a busy man and asked that we excuse him.” He smiled at the Brigadier, who took his leave as he walked to the door.

 

 

Then they were alone, the new commander and his troops. They looked at one another, appraisingly.

 

 

“Well, colleagues, it’s time we get to know one another. I already know you because I had the privilege of seeing your service files, but you don’t know me. And I know how easily rumors can spread about a commander. That’s why I’m taking the liberty of giving you a short résumé. It’s true that I’ve had no experience in local policing. But for that you must thank the apartheid regime. I was taking a course in policing through the University of South Africa when my political beliefs made it impossible for me to stay in my motherland . . .”

 

 

De Wit had a weak smile on his lips. His teeth were faintly yellowed but even. Each word was flawlessly rounded, perfect.

 

 

“In exile, among a valiant band of patriots, I had the privilege of continuing my studies. And in 1992 I was part of the ANC contingent that accepted the British offer for training. I spent more than a year at Scotland Yard.”

 

 

De Wit looked around the parade room as if expecting applause. The finger rubbed the mole again.

 

 

“And last year I did research at Scotland Yard for my doctorate. So I’m fully informed about the most modern methods of combating crime now being developed in the world. And you . . .”

 

 

The mole finger hastily sketched a square in the air to include all forty-one.

 

 

“. . . and you will benefit from that experience.”

 

 

Another opportunity for applause. The silence in the room was resounding.

 

 

Gerbrand Vos looked at Joubert. Vos’s mouth soundlessly formed the word
patriots
and he cast his eyes upward. Joubert stared at the ground.

 

 

“That’s all as regards my credibility. Colleagues, we’re all afraid of change. You know Toffler says one can never underestimate the impact of change on the human psyche. But at the end of the day we have to manage change. The first manifestation is for me to tell you what I expect of you. If I prepare you for change you can facilitate it more easily . . .”

 

 

Benny Griessel banged the palm of his hand against his head just above the ear as if he wanted to get the wheels turning again. De Wit missed the gesture.

 

 

“I expect only one thing from you, colleagues. Success. The minister appointed me because he has certain expectations. And I want to deliver the kind of input that will satisfy those expectations.”

 

 

He thrust his forefinger into the air. “I will try to create a climate in which you can achieve success— by healthier, more modern management principles and training in the latest crime- combating techniques. But what do I expect of you? What is your part of the contract? Three things . . .”