Devil's Peak (13 page)

* * *

When Griessel returned to the flat with both hands full of Pick and Pay bags, Dr. Barkhuizen was standing at his door, hand raised to knock.
“I came to see if you were okay.”
Later they sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, drinking instant coffee from brand new floral mugs, and Griessel told him about the beer advertisement. The doctor said that was just the beginning. He would begin seeing what had been invisible before. The whole world would conspire to taunt him, the universe encourage him to have just one little swallow, just one glass. “The brain is a fantastic organ, Benny. It seems to have a life of its own, one that we are unaware of. When you drink long enough, it begins to like that chemical balance. So when you stop, it makes plans to restore the balance. It’s like a factory of cunning thoughts lodged somewhere, which pumps the best ones through to your conscious state. ‘Ach, it’s just a beer.’ ‘What harm can one little drink do?’ Another very effective one is the, ‘I deserve it, I have suffered for a week now and I deserve a small one.’ Or, even worse, the, ‘I have to have a drink now, or I will lose all control.’ ”
“How the fuck do you fight it?”
“You phone me.”
“I can’t do that every time . . .”
“Yes, you can. Any time, night or day.”
“It can’t go on like this forever, can it?”
“It won’t, Benny. I will teach you the techniques to tame the beast.”
“Oh.”
“The other thing I wanted to talk about was those voices.”

* * *

He sat in the deep night-shadows of neglected shrubs, in the parkthat bordered on Simone Street. The binoculars were directed at Pretorius’s home, three hundred meters down Chantelle Street.
A white suburb at night. Fort Blanc. No children playing outside. Locked doors, garages and security gates that opened with electronic remote controls, the blue flicker of television screens in living rooms. The streets were silent, apart from the white Toyota Tazz of Cobra Security that patrolled at random, or an occupant coming home late.
Despite these precautions, the walls and towers and moats, the children were not even safe here—it only took one intruder like Pretorius to nullify all the barriers.
There was life in the pedophile’s house, lights going on and off.
He weighed up his options, considered a route that would take him away from the streetlights through back gardens up to the wall of Pretorius’s house. Eventually he decided the fastest option was the one with the biggest chance of success: down the street.
He stood up, put the binoculars in his pocket and stretched his limbs. He pricked his ears for cars, left the shadows and began to walk with purpose.

* * *

“Doc, they are not voices. It’s not like I hear a babble. It’s . . . like someone screaming. But not outside, it’s here inside, here in the back of my head. ‘Hear’ is not even the right word, because there are colors too. Some are black, some are red; fuck, it makes me sound crazy, but it’s true. I get to a murder scene. Let’s say the case I am working on now. The woman is lying on the floor, strangled with the kettle cord. You can see from the marks on her neck that she has been strangled from behind. You begin to reconstruct how it happened—that’s your job, you have to put it all together. You know she let him in, because there is no forced entry. You know they were together in the room because there is a bottle of wine and two glasses, or the coffee things. You know they must have talked, she was at ease, suspecting nothing, she was standing there and he was behind her saying something and suddenly there was this thing around her neck and she was frightened, what the fuck, she tried to get her fingers under the cord. Perhaps he turned her around, because he is sick, he wanted to see her eyes, he wanted to watch her face, because he’s a control freak and now she sees him and she knows . . .”

* * *

He had to make a quick decision. He walked around the house and past the back door and saw that it was the best point of entry, no security gate, just an ordinary lock. He had to get in fast: the longer he remained outside, the greater the chance of being spotted.
He had the assegai at his back, under his shirt, the shaft just below his neck and the blade under his belt. He lifted his hand and pulled out the weapon. He raised a booted foot and, aiming for the lock, kicked open the door with all his strength.
The verdict in the case against crčche owner Colin Pretorius on various charges of child rape and molestation and the possession of child pornography is expected tomorrow. Pretorius did not testify.
The kitchen was dark. He ran through it towards the lights. Down the passage, left turn, to what he assumed was the living room. Television noise. He ran in, assegai in hand. Living room, couch, chairs, a sitcom’s canned noise. Nobody. He spun around, spotted movement in the passage. The man was there, frozen in the light of a doorway, mouth half agape.
For a moment they stood facing each other at opposite ends of the passage and then the prey moved away and he attacked. The alarm must be in the bedroom. He had to stop him. The door swung shut. He dropped his shoulder, six, five, four paces, the door slammed, three, two, one, the snick of a key turning in the lock and he hit the door with a noise like a cannon shot, pain racking his body.
The door withstood him.
He was not going to make it. He stepped back, preparing to kick the door in, but it would be too late. Pretorius was going to activate the alarm.

* * *

“The picture in my head, Doc . . . It’s like she’s hanging from a cliff and clinging to life. As he strangles her, as the strength drains out of her, she feels her grip loosen. She knows she must not fall, she doesn’t want to, she wants to live, she wants to climb to the top, but he squeezes the life out of her and she begins to slip. There is a terrible fear, because of the dark below; it’s either black or red or brown down below and she just can’t hold on anymore and she falls.”

* * *

He felt a moment of panic: the locked door, the sharp pain in his shoulder, knowledge that the alarm would sound. But he drew a deep breath, made his choices and kicked the door with his heel. Adrenaline coursed thickly. Wood splintered. The door was open now. The alarm began to wail somewhere in the roof. Pretorius was at the wardrobe, reaching up, feeling for a weapon. He bumped him against the cupboard, the tall, lean figure, bespectacled with a sloppy fringe. He fell. Thobela was on him, knee to chest and assegai against his throat.
“I am here for the children,” he said loudly over the racket of the alarm, calm now.
Eyes blinked at the assegai. There was no fear. Something else. Expectation. A certain fatalism.
“Yes,” said Pretorius.
He jammed the long blade through the man’s breastbone.

* * *

“It’s when they fall that they scream. Death is down there and life is up here and the scream comes up, it always comes up to the top, it stays here. It moves fast, looks like a . . . like water you throw out of a bucket. That is all that is left. It is full of horrible terror. And loss . . .”
Griessel was quiet for a while; when he continued, it was in a quieter voice. “The thing that scares me most is that I know it’s not real, Doc. If I rationalize it, I know it’s my imagination. But where does it come from? Why does my head do this? Why is the scream so shrill and clear and so loud? And so bloody despairing? I am not crazy. Not really—I mean, isn’t there a saying that if you know you are a little bit mad you are okay, because the really insane have no idea?
Barkhuizen chuckled. It caught Griessel by surprise, but it was a sympathetic chuckle and he grinned back.

* * *

He sprinted through the house as the alarm wailed monotonously. Out the back door, around the corner of the house to the lighted street. He swerved right. He could see the park over the way, the security of the dark and the shadows. He felt a thousand eyes on him. Legs pumped rhythmically, breath raced; instinctively he pulled his head into his shoulders and tensed his back muscles for the bullet that would come, his ears pricked for a shout or the noise of the patrol car as his feet pounded on the tar.
When he reached the shrubbery, he slackened his pace as his night vision was spoiled by the streetlights. He had to plot his course carefully and not fall over anything. He could not afford a twist or sprain.

* * *

“You know where it really comes from,” said Barkhuizen.
“Doc?”
“You know, Benny. Think about it. There are contributing factors. Your job. I think you all suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome—with all the murder and death. But that is not the actual source. It’s something else. The thing that makes you drink, too, that made me drink as well.”
Griessel stared at him for a long time and then his head bowed. “I know,” he said.
“Say it, Benny.”
“Doc . . .”
“Say it.”
“I am afraid to die, Doc. I am so afraid to die.”

* * *

He sat behind the wheel. He was still breathing hard, sweat dripped, his heart pounded. Jesus, he was forty—too old for this shit.
He pressed the key into the ignition.
There was one difference. His seventeen targets for the KGB . . . mostly he was detached, mechanical, even reluctant if it was some pallid pen-pusher with stooping shoulders and colorless eyes.
But not this time. This was different. When the assegai pierced the man’s heart, he had a feeling of euphoria. Of absolute rightness.
Perhaps he had, at last, found his true vocation.

18.

I
t was the following morning before she phoned him in his hotel room. From a public phone booth with Sonia on her shoulder.
“Five hundred rand,” was how she identified herself in an even voice that did not betray her anxiety.
It took only a few seconds for him to work it out and he said: “Can you be here at six o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“Room 1036, in the Holiday Inn opposite the entrance to the Waterfront.”
“Six o’clock,” she repeated.
“What is your name?”
Her brain seemed to stop working. She didn’t want to give her own name, but she couldn’t think of any other one. She must not hesitate too long or he would know it was a fabrication—she said the first word that came to her lips.
“Bibi.”
Later she would wonder why that? Did it mean anything, have any psychological connotation, some clue by which to understand herself better? From Christine to Bibi. A leap, a new identity, a new creation. It was a birth, in some sense. It was also a wall. At first thin, like paper, transparent and fragile. At first.

* * *

“I have thought about it a lot,” she said, because she wanted to get the story right this time.
“The money was a big thing. Like when you play the Lotto and think of what you would do with the jackpot. In your imagination you spend on yourself and your child. Sensible things: you aren’t going to squander your fortune. You are not going to be like the nouveau riche. That is why you will win. Because it’s owed to you. You deserve it.
“But the money wasn’t the main thing. There was another aspect, something I had since my school days. When I had sex with my father’s friend. And the teacher. How I felt. I controlled them, but I didn’t control myself. How can I explain it? I wasn’t
in
myself. Yet I
was.
”
She knew those were not the right words to describe it and made a gesture of irritation with her hands. The minister did not respond, but just waited expectantly, or maybe he was nailed to his seat.
She shut her eyes in frustration and said: “The easy one is the power. Uncle Sarel, my father’s buddy, gave me a lift one day when I was walking home in the afternoon. When I opened the car door and saw the look on his face, I knew he wanted me. I wondered what he would say, what he would do. He held the steering wheel with both his hands because he was trembling and he didn’t want me to see. That’s when I felt how strong I was. I toyed with him. He said he wanted to talk with me, just for a short while, and could we take a drive? He was scared to look at me and I saw how freaked out he was but I was cool so I said: ‘Okay, that would be nice.’ I acted like I was innocent, that’s what he wanted. He talked, you know, silly stuff, just talking, and he stopped by the river and I kept on acting and he told me how he had been watching me for so long and how sexy I was, but he respected me and then I put my hand on his cock and watched his face and the look in his eyes and his mouth went all funny and it . . . it excited me.
“It was a good feeling to know he wanted me, it was good to see how much he wanted me, it made me
feel
wanted. Your father thinks you are nothing, but they don’t think so. Some grown-ups think you are great.
“But when he had sex with me, it was like I wasn’t in my body. It was someone else and I was on one side. I could feel everything, I could feel his cock and his body and all, but I was outside. I looked at the man and the girl and I thought: What is she doing? She will be damaged. But that was also okay.
“That was the weirdest part of all, that the damage was also okay.”

* * *

She found someone to stand in for her at Trawlers. She spent the day with Sonia, rode her bike along the seafront as far as the swimming pool in Sea Point and slowly back again. She thought about what she would wear and she felt anticipation and that old feeling of being outside yourself, that vague consciousness of harm and the strange satisfaction it brought.
At four o’clock she left her daughter with the childcare lady and took a slow bath, washed and blow-dried her long hair. She put on a G-string, the floral halterneck, her jeans and sandals. At half-past five she took her bike and rode slowly so as not to arrive at the hotel out of breath and sweaty. This feels almost like a date, she thought. As she wove through the peak-hour traffic in Kloof Street, she saw men in cars turn their heads. She smiled a secret smile, because not one of them knew what she was and where she was going.
Here comes the whore on her bicycle.
It wasn’t so bad.
He was just a regular guy. He had no weird requests. He received her with rather exaggerated courtesy and spoke to her in whispers. He wanted her to stroke him, touch him and lie beside him. But first she had to undress and he shivered and said, “God, what a body you’ve got,” and trailed his fingers slowly over her calves and thighs and belly. He kissed her breasts and sucked the nipples. And then the sex. He reached orgasm quickly and groaning and with eyes screwed shut. He lay on top of her and asked: “How was it for you?” She said it was wonderful, because that was what he wanted to hear.
When she rode her bicycle home up the long gradient, she thought with a measure of compassion that what he had really wanted was to talk. About his work, his marriage, his children. What he really wanted was to expel the loneliness of the four hotel room walls. What he really wanted was a sympathetic ear.
When it became her full-time profession later, she realized most of them were like that. They paid to be someone again for an hour.
That night she just felt she was lucky, because he might have been a beast. In her little flat, while Sonia slept, she took the five new hundred-rand notes from her purse and spread them out in front of her. Nearly a week’s work at Trawlers. If she could do just one man a day, for only five days a week, that was ten thousand rand a month. Once all the bills were paid, there would be seven thousand over to spend. Seven thousand rand.
Three days later she bought the cell phone and placed an ad in
Die Burger’s Snuffelgids.
She carefully studied the other ads in the “adult services” section first before deciding on the wording:
Bibi. Fresh and new. 22-year-old blonde with a dream body. Pleasure guaranteed, top businessmen only.
And the number.
It appeared on a Monday for the first time. The phone rang just after nine in the morning. She purposefully did not answer at once. Then in a cool voice: “Hello.”
He didn’t have a hotel room. He wanted to come to her. She said no, she only did traveling. He seemed disappointed. Before the phone rang again, she thought: why not? But there were too many reasons. This was her and Sonia’s place—here she was Christine. Safe, only she knew the address. She would keep it that way.
A pattern was established. If they phoned in the morning, it was local men who wanted to come to her. In the late afternoon and evening it was hotel business. The first week she made two thousand rand, as she would take one call per evening and then switch off the phone. Thursday her daughter had not been well and she decided not to work. In the second week she decided to do two per day, one late afternoon and one early evening. It couldn’t be too bad and it would give her time to have a good bath, put on fresh perfume . . . It would double her income and compensate for evenings when there were no clients.
Clients.
That wasn’t her word. One afternoon she had a call, a woman’s voice. Vanessa. “We’re in the same trade. I saw your advert. Do you want to go out for coffee?”
That was her initiation into what Vanessa, real name Truida, called the AECW: the Association of Expensive Cape Whores. “Oh it’s like the Woman’s Institute, only we don’t open with scripture reading and prayer.” Vanessa was
Young student redhead, northern suburbs. Come and show me how. Upmarket and exclusive.
She recited her life story in a coffee shop in the Church Street Mall. A sharp-featured woman with a flawless complexion, a scar on her chin and red hair from a very expensive bottle. She came from Ermelo. She had so wanted to escape the oppression of her hometown and parents’ middle-class existence. She had done one year of secretarial at technical college in Johannesburg and worked in Midrand for a company that maintained compressors. She fell in love with a young Swede whom she met at a dance club in Sandton. Karl. His libido had no limits. Sometimes they spent entire weekends in bed. She became addicted to him, to the intense and multiple orgasms, to the constant stimulus and the tremendous energy. Above all she wanted to continue to satisfy him, even though every week it took a little more, a step further into unknown territory. Like a frog in water that was getting gradually warmer. She was hypnotized by his body, his penis, his worldly wisdom. Alcohol, toys, Ecstasy, role playing. One afternoon he called in a prostitute so they could make a threesome. A month later he took her to a “club”: a lovely big house on a smallholding near Bryanston. He was not unknown at the place, a fact she registered only vaguely. The first week she had to watch while he had sex with two of them, the second week she had to take part—four bodies writhing like snakes—and eventually he wanted to watch while she had sex with two male clients in a huge bedroom with a four poster bed.
When she heard for the first time what the girls at the Bryanston place earned, she laughed in disbelief. Six weeks after Karl dumped her, she drove to the club and asked for a job. She hoped she might see him there; she wanted the money, because she had lost all direction. But she was not so lost that she was blind to the inner workings. Too many of the girls were supporting men, men who beat them, men who took their money from them every Sunday to buy drink or drugs. Too many were dependent on the perks of cocaine, sometimes heroin, which was freely available. The club kept half of their earnings. Once she had got Karl out of her system, she came to Cape Town, alone, experienced and with a purpose.
“The trick is to save, so you don’t end up in ten years’ time like the fifty-rand whores on the street, hoping someone wants a quick blow job. Keep off the drugs and save. Retire when you are thirty.”
And: “Do you know about asking names?”
“No.”
“When they phone, ask who is speaking. Ask for his name.”
“What’s the point of that? Most of them lie.”
“If they lie, that’s good news. Only the married ones lie. I have never had trouble with a married one. It’s the ones who can’t get a wife that you have to watch. The secret is to use the name he gives you when you speak to him. Over and over. That’s how you sell yourself over the phone. Remember, he’s still window shopping and there are a lot of adverts and options and he can’t claim his five hundred rand from the medical aid. Say his name, even if it is a false one. It says you believe and trust him. It says you think he’s important. You massage his ego, make him feel special. That is why he is phoning. So someone will make him feel special.”
“Why are you giving me all these tips?”
“Why not?”
“Aren’t we in competition?”
“Sweetheart, it’s all about supply and demand. The demand from needy men in this place is unlimited, but the supply of whores who really are worth five hundred rand an hour is . . . Jesus, you should see some of them. And the men get wise.”
And: “Get yourself a separate place to work. You don’t want clients bothering you at home. They do that, turning up drunk on a Saturday night without an appointment and standing on your doorstep weeping: ‘I love you, I love you.’ ”
And: “I had a fifty-five thousand rand month once; shit, I never closed my legs, it was a bit rough. But if you can do a steady three guys a day, it’s easily thirty thousand in a good month, tax free. Make hay while the sun shines, because some months are slow. December is fantastic. Advertise in the
Argus
as well, that’s where the tourists will find you. And on
Sextrader
on the Internet. If he has an accent, ask for six hundred.”
And: “It’s their wives’ fault. They all say the same thing. Mamma doesn’t want to do it anymore. Mamma won’t suck me. Mamma won’t try new stuff. We’re therapists, I’m telling you, I see how they come in and how they go.”
Vanessa told her about the other members of the AECW—Afrikaans and English, white, brown, black and a tiny delicate woman from Thailand. Christine only met three or four of them and spoke to a few more over the phone, but she was reluctant to become involved—she wanted to keep her distance and anonymity. But she did take their advice. She found a room at the Gardens Center and set her sights higher. The money followed.
The days and weeks formed a pattern. Mornings were Sonia’s, and weekends, except for the occasional one when she was booked for a hunting weekend, but the money made that worthwhile. She worked from 12:00 to 21:00 and then collected her daughter from the daycare where they thought she was a nurse.
Every third month she phoned her mother.
She bought a car for cash, a blue 1998 Volkswagen City Golf. They moved into a bigger flat, a spacious two-bedroom in the same building. She furnished it piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle. Satellite television, an automatic washing machine and a microwave. A mountain bike for six thousand rand just because the salesman had looked her up and down and showed her the seven-ninety-nine models.
A year after she had placed the first advertisement, she and Sonia went to Knysna for a two-week holiday. On the way back she stopped at the traffic lights in the town and looked at the sign board showing Cape Town to the left and Port Elizabeth to the right. At that moment she wanted to go right, anywhere else, a new city, a new life.
An ordinary life.
Her regular clients had missed her. There were a lot of messages on her cell phone when she turned it back on.
She had been nearly two years in Cape Town when she phoned home once more. Her mother cried when she heard her daughter’s voice. “Your father died three weeks ago.”
She could hear her mother’s tears were not for the loss alone: they also expressed reproach. Implying that Christine had contributed to the heart attack. Reproach that her mother had had to bear it all alone. That she had no one to lean on. Nevertheless, the emotion Christine experienced was surprisingly sharp and deep, so that she responded with a cry of pain.
“What was that noise all about?” her mother asked.
She didn’t really know. There was loss and guilt and self-pity and grief, but it was the loss that dumbfounded her. Because she had hated him so much. She began to weep and only later analyzed all the reasons: what she had done, her absence, her part in his death. Her mother’s loneliness and her sudden release. The permanent loss of her father’s approval. The first realization that death awaited her too.
But she could not explain why the next thing she said was about Sonia. “I have a child, Ma.”
It just came out, like an animal that had been watching the door of its cage for months.
It took a long time for her mother to answer, long enough to wish she had never said it. But her mother’s reaction was not what she expected: “What is his name?”
“Her name, Ma. Her name is Sonia.”
“Is she two years old?” Her mother was not stupid.
“Yes.”
“My poor, poor child.” And they cried together, about everything. But when her mother later asked: “When can I see my grandchild? At Christmas?” she was evasive. “I’m working over Christmas, Ma. Perhaps in the New Year.”
“I can come down. I can look after her while you work.” She heard the desperation in her mother’s voice, a woman who needed something good and pretty in her life after years of trouble. In that instant Christine wanted to give it to her. She was so eager to repay her debt, but she still had one secret she could not share.
“We will come and visit, Ma. In January, I promise.”
She didn’t work that evening.
That night, after Sonia had gone to sleep, she cut herself for the first time. She had no idea why she did it. It might have been about her father. She rummaged around in the bathroom and found nothing. So she tried the kitchen. In one drawer she saw the knife that she used to pare vegetables. She carried it to the sitting room and sat and looked at herself and knew she couldn’t cut where it would show—not in her profession. That’s why she chose her foot, the soft underside between heel and ball. She pressed the knife in and drew it along. The blood began to flow and frightened her. She hobbled to the bathroom and held her foot over the bath. Felt the pain. She watched the drops slide down the side of the bath.
Later she cleaned up the blood spoor. Felt the pain. Refused to think about it. Knew she would do it again.
She didn’t work the next day either. It was the beginning of December, bonanza month. She didn’t want to go on. She wanted the kind of life where she could tell Sonia: “Granny Martie is coming to visit.” She was weary of lying to the daycare or other mothers at the crčche. She was weary of her clients and their pathetic requests, their neediness. She wanted to say “yes” the next time a polite, good-looking man came up to her table in McDonald’s and asked if he could buy them ice cream. Just once.
But it was holiday season, big-money month.
She negotiated an agreement with herself. She would work as much as she could in December. So that they could afford to spend January with her mother in Upington. And when they came back she would find other work.
She kept to the deal. Martie van Rooyen absorbed herself in her granddaughter in those two weeks in Upington. She also sensed something about her daughter’s existence. “You have changed, Christine. You have become hard.”
She lied to her mother about her work, said she did this and that, worked here and there. She cut her other foot in her mother’s bathroom. This time the blood told her she must stop. Stop all of it.
The next day she told her mother she hoped to get a permanent job. And she did.
She was appointed as sales rep for a small company that manufactured medicinal face creams from extract of sea-bamboo. She had to call on chemist shops in the city center and southern suburbs. It lasted two months. The first setback was when she walked into a Link pharmacy in Noordhoek and recognized the pharmacist as one of her former clients. The second was when her new boss put his hand on her leg while they were traveling in his car. The final straw was her pay slip at the end of the month. Gross income: nine thousand and something. Net income: six thousand four hundred rand, sales commission included, after tax and unemployment insurance and who knows what had been subtracted.