“You have a red mark on your cheek,” Richard had said without surprise, one summer’s night in the middle of the act of love, as if he was reporting the news to an audience without prejudice. After they had had sex for months.
“My whole body is glowing like fire,” she had said, filled with passion and empathy.
“Odd mark,” was his thoughtful reaction.
And when their relationship eventually became as dry as dust and died a quiet death, she had to take stock.
Just to realize that she had been equally to blame. Not that Richard possessed the same unbiased capacity for introspection. Some people dare not run the risk of self-criticism. He was different. He was so satisfied with himself that he never saw the need for it.
But she had to examine her life. And one of the conclusions she came to was that she wasn’t comfortable with herself. Not with her body, not with the way she was.
So she did two things. Left Kemp, Smuts, and Breedt. And started jogging. And here she was on Blouberg’s beach, fit and slender and Richard-less – and a forty-year-old dysfunctional ex-policeman (what was his real age?) was a vague interest, an impossible possibility.
Because he was so different from Richard? Because he was so unpredictable and wounded? Because his mother…
She should have her head examined.
The sun suddenly disappeared. She looked up. A dark bank of clouds over the bay, over the mountain. Another front. It was a cold winter. Not like last year’s. Like life. Always changing. Sometimes there wasn’t much sunshine, then rare crystal days in between the rain.
♦
He walked from house to house in Moreletta Street, like a door-to-door salesman, and asked his questions.
No one knew Johannes Jacobus Smit. “You know what it’s like – we all live our own lives.”
The houses on either side of the Smit-Van As house: “We sometimes had a chat across the fence. They were very quiet.”
No one saw or heard anything. “I thought I heard something like a shot, but it might have been something else.”
Everyone at each house, somewhat uncomfortable, their Saturday schedule disturbed, politeness without friendliness, curious. “Have you found anything?” “Have you caught anybody?” “Do you know why he was shot?” Because that was where the threat lay. Someone in their area had been cruelly murdered, too near their personal safety zone, a small breach in the bastion of their white middle-class security. And when he replied in the negative, there was a quick frown of worry, followed by a moment of silence as if they wanted Smit to have earned it in some way or another, because such things simply didn’t happen.
Then, before he was ready, he had finished, and he drove to Philippi to see Willie Theal.
Theal, who had phoned him to say, “Come and work with me.” Theal, who had comforted him when his life had burst open like an overripe, sick bloody pomegranate, and he accepted the comfort because he needed it, but his acceptance was deceit, the big deceit because he had always been trash, from the first time he stole, when he stole with his eyes and his mind through the wooden fence, when he stole from Nagel. The trash in him was always there, just under the surface, like lava, constantly smoldering, bubbling, waiting for a crack in the rock face, ready to break like a volcano through the soft crust of his world.
He braked, suddenly.
Too little time.
He realized it suddenly: five days. Not enough.
Say he spoke to Theal – fuck it, he wasn’t afraid. It wouldn’t make him better or worse. It wasn’t because he was afraid of the ghosts that Theal would call up.
It wouldn’t make any difference. Because there simply wasn’t enough. Too little information, too little time.
And it wasn’t going to change. Theal would tell him how and where you could change dollars in the eighties. Or maybe not. And what then? Who would remember Johannes Jacobus X after fifteen years? He could visit Charles Nieuwoudt in Pollsmoor Prison or Victor Verster or whichever jail he might be in and ask whether he falsified the identity document, and what would he get?
Nothing. Not in five days.
Because Nieuwoudt’s brains had been scrambled by drugs and it had been fifteen years and he wouldn’t remember a thing.
That was the problem. The case wasn’t ten months old. It was fifteen years old. Someone had known there was something in that safe worth killing for. He didn’t know what it was. He might as well admit it. He hadn’t the faintest idea what had been in that safe. He could speculate on the basis of a fucking slip of paper until he was blue in the face. He could formulate his clever theories until he died of boredom. It could have been anything. Krugerrands. Gold. Diamonds. Rand or dollars or fucking Monopoly money. It could have been nude photographs of Bill Clinton or the fucking Spice Girls. It could have been a map of pirate’s treasure and he would never know because the thing was as dead as a doornail and he couldn’t get it breathing with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or a heart-lung machine.
He knew he was right. More than a thought-through conclusion. Instinct. Everything he had learned told him that it would take time. Weeks. Months of fine-tooth combing, of talking, of asking questions until something unraveled and gave you a thread you could tug, pull, wiggle.
He pulled off at the Kraaifontein interchange, turned right over the bridge and right again back to the city on the N1. Where had she said she lived? Milnerton.
Curious. He would have placed her near the mountain with her yuppie hairdo and her BMW, the fucking mountain that brooded. He hated that mountain, hated this place that had made him think he could stage a comeback overnight: Hi, sweetheart, I’m home, I’m a detective again, isn’t it great!
♦
She was busy digging compost into the oleanders when she heard the cell phone ringing. She pulled off the gloves as she walked, opened the sliding door, and answered the phone.
“Hope Beneke.”
“I want to see you.” His voice dark and abrupt.
“Of course,” she said.
“Now.” He heard the irritating sympathy again, the I-understand-everything-now-and-can-be-patient-with-you tone in her voice.
“Fine.”
“I don’t know where you live.”
“Where are you?”
“Milnerton. At Pick ’n Pay.”
She gave him directions.
“Good,” he said, and put the phone down.
“Good-bye,” she said, “Zatopek.” And smiled to herself. He wasn’t a ray of sunshine. What did he look like when he laughed?
She walked to the bathroom, pulled a comb through her short hair, applied pale pink lipstick. She wasn’t going to change. The tracksuit was fine. She went to the kitchen, put on the kettle, took out the small white tray, put out the mugs, the milk jug, the sugar bowl. She should have bought something at the Home Industry. A tart. It was almost coffee time.
She walked to the mini hi-fi. She didn’t really know much about classical music. Was he very knowledgeable? She had The World’s Greatest Arias. And The Best Classical Album Ever. And Pavarotti and Friends. The rest was a mixture from Sinatra to Laurika Rauch to Céline Dion to Bryan Adams.
She put on the Dion CD. Universally loved. She turned the volume to low. Heard the kettle switching itself off. Stood at her sliding door and surveyed the small patch of garden, a postage-stamp oasis that she had created with her own hands, even down to planting the grass, the shrubs, and the flowers. Now she was preparing for spring.
She felt raindrops and looked up. The clouds were heavy, the drops fine and light. She had finished just in time. She closed the door, sat down on a living-room chair, checked her watch. He should be here any moment now. Her eyes wandered over the pine bookcase that she had bought secondhand and painted herself when she was still a clerk.