Deon Meyer (16 page)

 

 

“When last did you see him?”

 

 

“Lordy . . . Two years ago? At the airport. We were coming back from Durban after a match against Natal. His mother was on the same flight. We said hello, had a brief conversation. It was very . . . normal.”

 

 

“And you never saw him again?”

 

 

“No.”

 

 

“Mr. Zeelie, where were you last night between eight and eleven?”

 

 

“At Newlands, Captain.” Calmly, no bravado.

 

 

“Anyone able to confirm that?”

 

 

“It was a day-night match against Gauteng, Captain. I took two for twenty-four.”

 

 

 

15.

H
e was tired enough not to care what the other neighbors might say. He knocked loudly at the Stoffbergs’ front door. He heard her footsteps, then she opened the door. When she saw him her face changed. He knew he’d come to no purpose.

 

 

“Could we talk about last night?”

 

 

She stared at him with dislike, almost pity. Then the humiliation became too much for him. He turned and walked back to his house.

 

 

Behind him he heard her closing the door.

 

 

He walked home in the dusk of early evening but already felt shrouded in darkness.

 

 

He sat in his armchair in the living room but without a book. He lit a Winston and stared at the blue-gray smoke pluming to the ceiling.

 

 

Perhaps de Wit was right. Perhaps he was a loser. The Great Loser. The counterweight to success. Maybe he was the refuse tip of the gods, where all the dark thoughts and experiences, adversity and unhappiness, could be dumped like nuclear waste. Programmed to absorb the shadows like a sponge so that there could be light. Death, the Great Predator, was following the bloody tracks of Mat Joubert, saliva dripping from its fangs to fall onto the black soil. So that humanity could be free.

 

 

Like Charles Theodore Zeelie. He had walked out a free man. “You’ll keep your promise?” He’d made quite certain one last time.

 

 

“Yes.” Because even without promises Murder and Robbery didn’t like to expose their dead ends, their failures, in the media. Charles Theodore Zeelie had been relieved. The strong face had regained its color, the hands had relaxed, the frown smoothed from the forehead by the invisible fingers of innocence.

 

 

He quite understood why they had asked him to come. He wasn’t annoyed with them. If he could help . . .

 

 

Relieved. Friendly, almost lighthearted. Untouched by the death of a man who had made him experience self-hatred. And love.

 

 

Charles Theodore Zeelie had walked out free. But not Mat Joubert.

 

 

De Wit had made no comment, only directed that smile at Joubert. Had a smile of pity replaced the victorious one?

 

 

On the sixth floor of a block of flats in Sea Point that looked out over the vast, cold expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, he had visited Mrs. Joyce Wilson, the mother of Drew Joseph Wilson.

 

 

She replied calmly to Joubert’s questions, the grief firmly under control. A woman who cared for her appearance, tall and strong and impressive, her attractiveness arrived at by her own hand, not due to genetic factors. Gallant and straight-backed in her painfully neat flat. Yes, Drew, her beloved and only son, had been gay. But he had changed. It was more than six or seven years that he had let it go.

 

 

Tell her it’s wishful thinking, Mat Joubert. Tell her. Let her feel the darkness, too. Share it. Spread it around a little. But he’d said nothing. He left her alone to cry in her bedroom where no one could see her.

 

 

He’d been to see Margaret Wallace again as well. With the pain in her eyes that hadn’t yet disappeared. You’re almost there, lady. Open your heart. Leave the back door of your mind permanently open so that death can come in, the black wind can blow through your skull. You’re on the right road, lady. Life has disappeared from your eyes. Your skin, your mouth, look tired. Your shoulders are carrying a heavy load.

 

 

No, she had never heard of Drew Wilson. She didn’t know whether James had known him.

 

 

And her body language implied that she didn’t care.

 

 

And here sat Mat Joubert. The Great Loser. The man with the physician and the psychologist and the dietitian. He made a sound in the back of his throat, jeering at himself, at the thought, the concept, that a thirty-four-year-old captain and detective couldn’t seduce the eighteen-year-old daughter of an undertaker.

 

 

How pathetic.

 

 

Benny Griessel’s face rose in his mind again. At the moment when Yvonne Stoffberg appeared in the doorway, a fanfare of flesh, his late-night dessert.

 

 

Benny Griessel’s face.

 

 

Joubert smiled. And suddenly saw his self-pity from another perspective— at first only a glimpse, then with disillusion. And he smiled at himself. And at Benny Griessel’s face. Joubert looked at his burning cigarette and saw himself as he was at that moment— in his reading chair, staring at a cigarette, and with a smile meant only for himself— and he knew he had another chance.

 

 

He stubbed the cigarette and got up. He fetched his diet sheet and the recipe book the dietitian had given him. He walked to the kitchen: 60 grams of chicken (no skin), 60 milliliters fat-free meat sauce, 100 grams baked potato, 150 grams carrots, broccoli. Two units of fat.

 

 

Jesus.

 

 

He took out pots and pans, started the preparations, his head rethinking the two murders. Eventually he sat down at the table, ate the food slowly.
Chew food slowly. This allows the stomach to signal the brain when it is full,
said the diet sheet. But the telephone rang twice before his plate was empty.

 

 

The first time he answered, it was with his mouth full of broccoli. “Wawert.”

 

 

“Captain Joubert, please.” A man’s voice.

 

 

Joubert swallowed. “Speaking.”

 

 

“Good evening, Captain. Sorry to bother you at home. But that colonel of yours is a terror.”

 

 

“Oh?”

 

 

“Yes, Captain. Michaels here, at the laboratory. It’s about SAP3 four slash two slash one slash ninety-five. The Wallace murder.”

 

 

“Yes?”

 

 

“The weapon, Captain. It’s not—”

 

 

“Are you calling from Pretoria?” Still trying to get a grip on what was going on.

 

 

“Yes, Captain.”

 

 

“Which colonel are you talking about?”

 

 

“De Wit, Captain.”

 

 

“What has he got to do with this?”

 

 

“He phoned us, Captain, this afternoon. And crapped on our heads from a dizzy height. Said his people were working their fingers to the bone while we sat on our hands.”

 

 

“Bart de Wit?”

 

 

“Yes, Captain.”

 

 

Joubert chewed on the information.

 

 

“In any case, Captain, that Tokarev of yours—”

 

 

“Yes?” But he was still amazed by de Wit’s call and the fact that the commanding officer had told him nothing about it.

 

 

“It’s not a Tokarev, Captain. I don’t know who thought that one up. It’s a Mauser.”

 

 

Suddenly Joubert was part of the conversation again. “A what?”

 

 

“A Mauser, Captain. But not just any old Mauser. It’s a Broomhandle.”

 

 

“A what?”

 

 

“It’s a pistol, Captain.” Michaels’s voice had taken on the patient tone of a teacher. “The Mauser military model, M96 or M98, I’d guess. Seven point sixty-three caliber. The cartridge cases are typical. Rimless with a bottleneck. I can’t imagine why you thought it was a Tokarev. The—”

 

 

“The caliber.” Joubert defended Griessel’s guess.

 

 

“No, Captain. Sorry, but hell, there’s a huge fucking difference. In both cases it should make your job much easier.”

 

 

“Oh?”

 

 

Michaels became impatient. “The Mauser, Captain. It’s old and it’s rare. There can hardly be that many people in the Cape who own one. Firearm records.”

 

 

“How old?”

 

 

“Almost a hundred years, Captain. Eighteen ninety-six or ’ninety-eight. Most beautiful thing the Germans ever made. But you’ll know it, Captain. Broomhandle. Slender wooden stock. Boer officers carried it. Long barrel, magazine in front of the trigger.”

 

 

Joubert tried to visualize the weapon, and somewhere an image stirred, a vague memory. “Looks almost like a Luger?”

 

 

“Luger’s grandfather, Captain. That’s the one.”

 

 

“Where would they find ammunition for it? After a hundred years?”

 

 

“It shoots Tokarev but it could hurt it. Pressure ratios differ. But the guy still has a supply, Captain. Your murderer. Even his cartridges are old. ’Ninety-nine. Maybe 1900. You must get him. He’s fucking shooting museum pieces to hell and gone.”

 

 

“The ammunition is also a hundred years old?”

 

 

“Unbelievable, isn’t it.”

 

 

“And it’s still effective?”

 

 

“In those days they built to last, Captain. Occasionally you’ll get a misfire. But most of them are still in working order. The guy can wipe out the whole of Cape Town.”

 

 

“You think it’s a man?”

 

 

“Definitely, Captain.”

 

 

“Oh?”

 

 

“Mauser kicks like a fucking mule, Captain. Takes a man on a horse.”

 

 

 

16.

H
e swam with enjoyment for the duration of one length. When he turned, kicking against the wall of the pool and swam back, fatigue sent its feelers through his muscles again.

 

 

He strove for the weightlessness, the efficiency. He swam more slowly, then faster, rested, tried again, but it evaded him.

 

 

When he climbed out of the water he was hopeful about the swimming for the first time.

 

 

* * *

On that Thursday, the tenth of January, the chief subeditor of
Die Burger
had a small stroke of luck. Subs, the people who, among other things, have to think up the headlines in a newspaper, occasionally like an alliteration or a play on words to jazz up their work and, as his luck would have it, the words
Mauser, murder,
and
maniac
all started with the same letter.

 

 

That apart, the newspaper had decided to devote the main story on the front page to the murders. There were two reasons for that decision. The first was that the usual sources of information had nothing of note to offer that morning. No more people than usual had died in the townships, the various colors of the political rainbow had made no new serious references to one another, and the government wasn’t involved in a new scandal. On the international front it was quiet too, even in the Middle East, eastern Europe, and Ireland.

 

 

The second reason was the murder weapon. The Mauser Broomhandle.

 

 

After he had seen the photographs of James J. Wallace and Drew Joseph Wilson lying on his desk the previous evening, the crime reporter of
Die Burger
had started playing around with a theory.

 

 

Both had black hair and black mustaches. They vaguely resembled each other. Both were in their late thirties.

 

 

The reporter had also telephoned Lieutenant John Cloete of the SAPS Department of Public Relations and asked whether it might be possible that the service was dealing with a mass murderer who had his knife— his Tokarev— out for mustachioed, black-haired men this side of forty.

 

 

It was Cloete’s duty to keep the service in the media’s good books. And if a crime reporter had some stupid theory or other, Cloete listened to it and promised that he would come back to him.

 

 

And so Cloete had called Mat Joubert away from a slice of skinless chicken breast, carrots, potato, and broccoli to ask him whether the reporter was onto something.

 

 

Joubert was fully aware of journalists’ habit of grabbing at straws and he sympathized with Cloete.

 

 

“We’re exploring all avenues,” he’d said because he knew that that was what Cloete wanted to tell the reporter.

 

 

Cloete had thanked Joubert.

 

 

“There’s something else, John,” Joubert said before Cloete could put the phone down.

 

 

“Yes, Captain?”

 

 

“The murder weapon.”

 

 

“Yes, Captain?”

 

 

“It’s a Mauser Broomhandle.”

 

 

“A what?”

 

 

Joubert had told him. As much as he could remember.

 

 

“Keee-rist,” Cloete had said because he knew the press. And he knew—

 

 

“And then there’s another thing, John.”

 

 

“Yes, Captain?”

 

 

“Don’t let the newspapers refer to me as ‘one of the Peninsula’s top detectives.’ ”

 

 

Cloete had laughed, promised, and returned the reporter’s call. “Captain Mat Joubert says they’re exploring all avenues.”

 

 

Then Cloete told him about the Mauser.

 

 

Sensation, the reporter knew, was often contained in the minor details of a story. The condition and color of a pair of underpants, for example. The color of a couple or the difference in color. Or, as in this case, the age of the murder weapon.