Deon Meyer - Blood Safari

‘You are under arrest,’ said the sergeant.

‘Get Jack Phatudi on the phone.’

‘Are you resisting arrest?’ he asked without much conviction.

‘Call Phatudi, and let the lady talk to him.’

He wasn’t a big man, twenty centimetres shorter than I am, and skinny. He was unhappy and I suspected he didn’t relish calling the inspector and explaining.

‘Just give me his number,’ said Emma, cell phone ready in her hand.

He preferred this option. He recited the number. Emma keyed it into her phone while I went over to the constable.

‘Let me help you with your nose,’ I said.

He stepped back. ‘I’m going to lock you up, you fu…’ He bit the word off and looked at Emma.

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Inspector?’ Emma spoke into her phone. ‘This is Emma le Roux. I’m standing beside the road near Klaserie with two of your men who say that you ordered them to follow us.’

She listened. I could faintly hear Phatudi’s voice, forceful and angry, but couldn’t make out the words.

‘Who?’ she asked eventually, worried. It became a one-sided conversation. Now and then Emma interrupted with questions and statements:

‘But how, Inspector? I haven’t …’

‘That is just not true.’

‘Why didn’t you inform us?’

‘Yes, but now one of them has a broken nose.’

‘No, Inspector. You were the one that had nothing to say this morning because it was sub judice.’

‘I am sure we will survive without your protection.’

‘Thank you, Inspector,’ with the same icy tone as when Wolhuter had called her ‘Emmatjie’. She passed the cell phone to the black sergeant. ‘He wants to speak to you.’

‘There are people who are angry with me,’ Emma said as we drove towards White River.

I had no idea what Phatudi had said to his sergeant. The conversation was in sePedi. When it was finally over, the black sergeant had looked away into the bushes and said, ‘You must go,’ with extreme dissatisfaction.

Now Emma sat with her legs tucked up, her feet on the passenger seat of the BMW, arms encircling her knees. ‘That’s what Phatudi said. There are people who have heard that Jacobus is my brother and that I have brought a lawyer to get him off. Can you believe it? He said he’s heard all sorts of rumours and he’s worried about our safety. One of the rumours is that I know where Jacobus is. Also that I want to lay the blame for the murders on others. That I’m working with Mogale to derail the land claim. So I asked him who was saying all these things and he couldn’t answer me. But he’s the only one who knows why I’m here.’

And all the people who’d been present in the charge office in Hoedspruit. She seemed to have forgotten them.

She shook her head angrily and looked at me. ‘Why does it have to be like this, Lemmer? Why is there still so much hate in this country? When are we going to move on? When will we get to a stage when it’s not about race or colour or what happened in the past, but just about right or wrong?’

When we are all equally rich or equally poor, I thought. When everyone has the same land and possessions. Or when nobody has anything …

She wasn’t finished. ‘But it’s no use talking to a brick wall. You’ve probably signed some clause that forbids you to talk about stuff like that.’ Her hands began to gesture angrily. ‘What’s your story, Lemmer? Are you always so sullen, or is it just that you don’t like me? I must be very boring after all the important and famous people you’ve looked after.’

I suspected the real source of her frustration was that her contrived cuteness was not working as it ought. Not on Phatudi, not really on Wolhuter, and also not on me. Welcome to the real world, Emma.

‘I appreciate that you’re angry,’ I said.

‘Don’t patronise me.’ She dropped her knees, turned her shoulders away from me and stared out of the window.

I kept my voice courteous. ‘To do my job, I have to keep a professional distance. That’s one of the fundamental principles of my vocation. I wish you would understand; this is an unusual situation. Ordinarily, the bodyguard would not even travel in the same vehicle as the client, we never eat at the same table, and we are never included in conversation.’

And I could tell her about Lemmer’s First Law.

She took a while to process this. Then she turned back to me and said, ‘Is that your excuse? Professional distance? What do you think I am? Unprofessional? I have clients too, Lemmer. I have a professional relationship with them. When we work, it’s work. But they’re human beings, too. And I had better see them as human beings and respect them as such. Otherwise, there’s no point in what I do. Last night we weren’t working, Lemmer. We sat at a table like two human beings and …’

‘I’m not saying …’

But she was on a roll. The anger made her voice deep and urgent. ‘Do you know what the trouble is, Lemmer? We live in the age of the cell phone and the iPod, that’s the trouble. Everyone has earphones and everyone lives in this narrow little world where nobody wants to hear anybody else, everyone wants to listen to their own music. We cut ourselves off. We don’t care about anyone else. We build walls and security gates, our world gets smaller and smaller, we live in cocoons, in tiny safe places. We don’t talk any more; we don’t hear each other any more. We drive to work, each in his own car, in his own steel shell, and we don’t hear each other. I don’t want to live like that. I want to hear people. I want to know people. I want to hear you. Not when you speak as the strong, silent bodyguard. As a human being. With a history. With opinions and perspectives. I want to listen to them and test my own against them, and change if I should. How else can I grow? That’s why people become racists, and sexists and terrorists. Because we don’t talk, we don’t listen, because we don’t know, we live only in our own heads.’ All that in complete, fluent sentences, and when she had finished she made a gesture of frustration with her small, fine hands.

I had to admit that she nearly had me. For a moment I wanted to submit to the temptation and say, ‘You’re right, Emma le Roux, but that’s not the whole story.’ Then I remembered that when it came to people, I was a disciple of the Jean-Patd Sartre school of philosophy and I merely said, ‘You have to admit that our work is somewhat different.’

She shook her head slowly and shrugged in despair.

We drove in silence for over an hour, through White River and Nelspruit, then the sublime landscape beyond the town – the mountains, the vistas, and the winding road up the escarpment to Badplaas, to the entrance of the Heuningklip Wildlife Preserve. No decorated entrance, just a tall wire gate in the game fence and a small sign with the name and a phone number. The gate was locked.

Emma called the number. It was a while before someone answered.

‘Mr Moller?’

Apparently it was. ‘My name is Emma le Roux. I would very much like to speak to you about Cobie de Villiers.’

She listened, said, ‘Thank you,’ and disconnected the call.

‘He’s sending someone to unlock the gate.’ She was irritated.

Ten minutes of silence passed before a young white man in blue overalls arrived in a pick-up. He said his name was Septimus. He had a squint in one eye. ‘Uncle Stef is in the shed. Follow me.’

‘Ah, my dear, I have to honestly say that it doesn’t look like Cobie,’ said Stef Moller, multimillionaire, apologetically and carefully, as he passed the picture back to Emma with grimy fingers.

He stood in a large corrugated-iron shed alongside a tractor that he had been working on when we entered. A muddle of tools, spares, drums, cans, steel shelving, workbenches, tins, paintbrushes, coffee mugs, empty Coke bottles, old tyres, a plate with breadcrumbs, the smell of diesel and lucerne. The standard farm shed. There was something that tugged faintly on my subconscious. Perhaps it was the contrast between expectation and reality. There was oil on Moller’s bleached T-shirt and jeans. He was close on sixty, tall and almost totally bald. Strong workman’s hands. His eyes were large and they blinked behind large gold-rimmed spectacles. His speech was painfully slow, like a tap dripping. He didn’t look like a rich man.