Деон Мейер - Cobra

‘Of course.’

‘B. J. Fikter has a wife and child . . .’

Griessel said nothing.

‘I’ll try,’ she said.

At the Hawks’ offices on the corner of Landrost and Market Street in Bellville, he knocked on the frame of Zola Nyathi’s open office door.

The colonel waved him in, motioned him to sit.

With Nyathi’s eyes glued on him, he reported back precisely and fully.

‘Thank you Benny. Good work. But we have a media problem.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ve approved your strategy, but Cloete says they’re going nuts. The radio stations are already throwing around words like “massacre” and “bloodbath”, and are speculating about drugs and gang violence. I don’t know how long we can keep this under wraps.’

‘I’ll move as fast as I can, sir. The Consulate . . . If we can get hold of Morris’s family . . .’

‘The brigadier has spoken to our Deputy National Commissioner, who has asked Foreign Affairs to get involved. So we should soon see results.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Griessel stood up.

‘Benny, just a moment,’ said Nyathi, very seriously.

He sat down again. He knew what was coming.

‘Benny, I don’t want to pry. But you understand that your personal well-being is very important to me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Can I ask you a favour?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You have a mentor, at the AA—’

‘A sponsor, sir. But I can assure you—’

He stopped talking when Nyathi lifted his hand. ‘You don’t have to assure me of anything, Benny. We have a few hours before the cellular data and consular information comes in. I want to ask you to go home, take a shower, and speak to your sponsor. Would you do that for me, Benny?’

‘Yes, sir. But I want to—’

‘Please, Benny, just do that for me.’

He didn’t want to go home. As he drove, he phoned Alexa.

‘You must be totally exhausted,’ she answered with a voice full of sympathy.

‘I’m just coming for a quick shower and change,’ he said.

‘Ay, Benny, I understand. Is it the Franschhoek murders?’

‘It is.’

‘I heard about it over the radio. Do you want something quick to eat?’

‘Thanks, Alexa, but there won’t be time. See you in half an hour . . .’

And then he phoned Doc Barkhuizen, his sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous.

‘Doc, I want to come and talk to you.’

‘Now?’

‘Around six o’clock, Doc.’

‘Come to my consulting rooms. I’ll wait for you.’

Doc, who never reproached him. Was just always available.

But he would have to lie to him too.

The garden gate of Alexa’s large Victorian house in Brownlow Street, Tamboerskloof, didn’t squeak any more. Nearly seven months’ worth of restoration work completed, and the garden had been redone. Now it looked like the home of a veteran pop star.

She must have been waiting at the window, because she opened the door for him and hugged him.

‘I don’t smell good,’ he said.

‘I don’t care.’ She squeezed him tightly. ‘I’m just so glad you’re safe.’

‘Alexa . . .’

‘I know, I know . . .’ she let go of him, pulled him by the hand. ‘But that’s the way it is if you love a master detective. I made a sandwich, come and eat quickly.’

He didn’t like being called a ‘master detective’. He had at least persuaded her to stop introducing him that way to her friends.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said.

‘Pleasure. I will keep the surprise for later, after you’ve showered.’

The pickpocketing week has a very specific pattern. Fridays and Saturdays are prime time, people take to the streets, their thoughts are los and casual, Uncle Solly used to say, and they are flush, cash in pocket.

Tuesday,Wednesday, and Thursdays are OK, no great shakes, but you can work. Especially now that the clubs are pumping way into the night, lots of young people with lots of money, and you might argue you are helping, taking the money that would have been spent on cocaine.

The seventh day is for rest,Tyrone, because Lord knows da’ ga’ niks aan nie, nothing at all, not even in the malls, except before Christmas, that was another story.

And Mondays were also basically kak , thank you.

So he made a loop through Greenmarket Square, just to check whether there might be a lost tour bus full of Europeans ooh-ing and aah-ing over the cheap merchandise with ‘African fl avours’ that actually came all the way from China.

There wasn’t.

He bought a meat pie on the corner of Long and Wale. Walked up Longmarket, past the home-made Frederick Street sign, probably not smart and grand enough a neighbourhood for the DA government to hang an official street sign. As bad as the ANC, they were ammal useless. The northwester was blowing kwaai , it was a long steep hike to his little outside room, in Ella Street, up in Schotsche Kloof, which he rented in the back yard of the rich Muslims’ grand house for four-fifty a month. One wall was kitchen counter and sink. One wall was built-in cupboards. He had a single bed and a bedside table. Tiny bathroom. At the outer door hung the intercom, a reminder that this was once the servants’ quarters. And now and then the eldest twenty-something daughter of the rich Muslims would buzz him. Nag him about the garbage, or because he hadn’t closed the front security gate properly. She hung around the house all day. She was a little fat, and lonely.

Shame.

He would listen to his 32GB iPod touch, the one he had stolen from a German backpacker in December, half the music was death metal, but the rest was OK.

Time to ponder.

10

Doc Barkhuizen was seventy-one years old. He had thick glasses, wild eyebrows, and long grey hair that he tied back in a cheeky ponytail, usually with a light blue ribbon. He had a mischievous face that reminded Benny of one of the seven dwarves in Snow White , and a surgery in Boston where he – after a short-lived retirement to Witsand at the age of sixty-five – still saw patients every weekday as a general practitioner.

And he was an alcoholic.

‘I am four hundred and twenty-two days sober, Doc,’ said Griessel promptly.

‘Do you want to drink?’

‘Yes, Doc. But not more than usual.’

‘So why are you keeping me away from Hot in Cleveland ?’

‘ Hot in Cleveland ?’

‘It’s a sitcom, Benny. It’s the sort of thing that normal, elderly, rehabilitating men watch in the evening with their wives, to keep them from boredom and the lure of the bottle.’

‘Sorry, Doc,’ he said, though he knew Barkhuizen was only teasing him.

‘How are the children?’

He would have to get through this first, it didn’t help to try to hurry Doc. His sponsor searched far and wide for danger signs, and he always wanted all the details. ‘Well, in general. Fritz has now decided that he wants to go to film school next year. Just because he has shot a few music videos with Jack Parow. Now he wants to “make movies” with a passion. And the AFDA tuition fees, Doc . . . I’ll have to take a bond on a house that I don’t have. But it’s probably better than no education. Or joining the police.’

‘And Carla? Is she still going out with that rugby player?’

‘Yes, Doc, I’m afraid so.’

‘I can hear you still don’t like the boy.’

It was the boyfriend Etzebeth’s tattoos that bothered Griessel most – that stuff was for prison gangs – but he knew Doc would say he was prejudiced. ‘He was kicked off the team for fighting, Doc.’

‘I saw that in the newspapers. But you must admit, it’s not bad to be already playing for the Vodacom team at the age of twenty.’