The Serpentine Road (22 page)

De Vries wakes, struggles to remember the image of the man, but there is nothing but darkness. He lays his head down again, dreams of beer, smells its aroma leak from the empty open bottles in front of him. He imagines the line of bottles in Marantz’s kitchen – a line which travels to an unseen horizon – the moment of anticipation as he picks one and releases the pressure from within it. It becomes clear to him: Marantz, as strange a relationship as they have, is important to him; he helps to release the pressure inside of him. From their meeting almost eight years before, they have each helped one another, gone beyond what some might consider reasonable, as if each required a greater proof of one another’s loyalty. But, what he values is a friend who understands the decisions, the pressure, the absolute cost of what he does. All his friends from before he joined the police are gone; none with whom he now works are friends – decent colleagues and good acquaintances, but nothing more.

He wakes, as he does routinely now, at 3.30 a.m., climbs the stairs heavily, eyes still shut, uses the bathroom and lies on his bed, fully clothed. There, he is conscious of unconsciousness overtaking him and submits to it, sleeping fitfully until 6.30 a.m. When he wakes, he is tired.

Four missed calls from the number that Mitchell Smith left for him. He dresses, refreshed from the cool shower. He sits on the bed to put on his socks, makes a decision; he calls him back.

‘I’ve been trying to call you.’ The voice is plaintive, desperate.

‘I know.’

‘I have to see you. It’s about you, and me. It can’t wait.’

‘Give me your address.’ He does not have a pen by him, but commits it to his yet-to-be coffee-stimulated brain. ‘I’ll be there just now.’

January 1994

As he walks from the Observatory station he sees Johan Esau waiting by the gates, head down, hands in his pockets. The rain has abated, but the oak trees across the road are still heavy with moisture; drops fall onto the shiny tarmac, snapping on the slick surface.

‘Constable?’

Esau looks up. His face is pale, eyes hollow. He breathes out a long trail of cigarette smoke, flicks the
stompie
across the street. De Vries stops, walks up to him.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Bad call.’

‘School friend of mine was in the Victoria Hall. I saw his body on the pavement. Why can’t these sick fuckers work it out? They’ve won. They’re getting everything. Why are they doing this?’

‘It’s the end of a war. Perhaps? Who knows?’

‘Where did you go, sir? Major Nel was screaming down the radio at you.’

De Vries speaks quietly.

‘The radios don’t work, Constable. You can’t hear anything out there. The moment we got out past Langer we were out of contact. We were ordered to guard the scene. That’s what we did. What happened at that first house? Who shot first?’

Esau recoils, shakes his head.

‘I wrote my report.’

‘What did it say?’

‘What the major said. He told us we speak to nobody, we say nothing. Not ever.’

‘I understand. You want to talk to anyone, you come find me.
Ja
?’

‘That’s all right, sir.’

De Vries stares at Esau. Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Into the army at eighteen, fighting on the border. Now he’s witnessed a massacre; maybe he shot them, maybe he just watched Nel’s rage spew bullets into an innocent family. Five dead in a tiny concrete room. He sees it in his head: the smoky charnel house; three generations of one family slain. He wonders what effect this war has had on all of them, what toll it is taking.

‘Fucking horrible night,’ De Vries says. He walks away, begins to jog towards his home, his first tiny home, towards his wife.

2015

His drive takes him against the main rush into the city, past the airport, heading off north-east over the Cape Flats towards the satellite suburb of Bellville. Voortrekker Road is congested; he inches forward centimetre by centimetre, scrabbles with the street atlas to find a short-cut, eventually turns off towards the more industrial railway district of Belrail. He finds De Houtman Street, dusty and deserted, coated with grime from the industrial units at its sides, and is immediately depressed. The houses are small and squat, tall pitched roofs on low single-storey structures, each surrounded by walls of grey concrete panels, gardens of cracked salmon-pink bricks, grass bleached yellow by the unending summer.

He parks on the deserted street, smells diesel in the air, urine on the pavement, and hears the clattering of trains on the light breeze from the south. The smog from the Cape Flats extends out here now, the air thick and heavy with the beginnings of a humid day. He tries to push open the rusted garden gate, resorts to a sharp kick, walks up the concrete path to the front door. Mitchell Smith’s house is heavily barred, the entrance itself protected by a steel gate in front of the wooden door. He presses the bell to no effect and knocks instead, fitting his hand through the steel bars to rap loudly.

When the door opens on Mitchell Smith, De Vries does not recognize him. He had been the youngest that night, barely more than a teenager. Now, his skin seems thin, eyes bulging. He has long sideburns, wispy and greying. He looks a lot older than De Vries, yet he knows Smith is ten years his junior.

‘Colonel de Vries?’

Vaughn holds up his ID.

‘You don’t remember me either?’

‘I remember you.’

Smith releases the chain on his front door, unlocks the steel gate and pushes it open. De Vries steps back, then enters. The interior is tatty and old; it smells of fried food, not just from the small, dark kitchen but from the walls themselves.

Behind him, Smith is re-locking the security gate, replacing the chain and locking the front door. Vaughn watches him, feeling increasingly claustrophobic. Smith wears his keys around his neck. It reminds De Vries of Father Jacobus and the ostentatious crucifix on his chest. Smith shuffles, clinking, back towards De Vries, leads him into the living room overlooking the bare yard. The three windows are barred too. He gestures for De Vries to sit at the dining table, once an elegant mahogany antique, now scratched and pocked with water marks.

‘You want coffee?’

De Vries looks up at him, shakes his head.

‘I don’t have much time.’

Smith sits next to him, opens a green plastic folder, begins to pull out sheets of paper, newspaper cuttings. There seems no order to them. He shuffles them momentarily, then turns to De Vries.

‘In January 1994, seven of us went after the Victoria Drinking Hall suspects. Do you ever think about that night?’

De Vries looks down at the sheets, turns back to Smith.

‘I think you do.’

‘You know what? I did for months afterwards. Then, it went away. All the new challenges, new personnel, new officers. I didn’t have time for it. I had my wife and my job.’

De Vries looks around the room.

‘What happened?’

Smith pauses.

‘Things didn’t work out. My wife left me, left the country. They got me out of the SAPS. They wanted me out and they did it. They did it to most of the white guys. Wouldn’t promote me, made shit up about me. I’d taken this, or lost that; put me on all the shit assignments, made me train those lazy bastards and then watch as they’d fuck it up. They got me out.’

De Vries has heard this story before. Many times.

‘What did you do then?’

‘Do? There’s nothing to fucking do, ’cos there’s no work.’ Smith is shouting now through his small, constricted mouth. ‘Not for me. Not for white guys when there are fifty people looking for anything to do, and if one fucking black comes along wanting work, they give it to him.’

He is shaking, sweat on his brow and under his bottom lip.

‘Why do you need to see me? You said three officers were dead.’

‘None of us are with the SAPS any more. There’s no place for us.’

‘Tell me what’s happening.’

Smith pulls a half page from a newspaper from his file, and pushes in front of De Vries.

‘There’s an article like that every week in every newspaper around the country. In some places every day.’

Smith stares at De Vries, searches through the papers on the table, picks one out and pushes it across to him. Then, he scratches his head with both hands, fingers digging into his scalp so that De Vries can hear the nails on his flesh.

Smith takes a deep breath and says, with forced calmness: ‘Joe Swanepoel went back to live with his family in Middelburg, in the Karoo, a few years back. He was unemployed and did jobs for his father’s business, trying to scrape together a living. He stayed in a room on the second floor of his family’s house. Look.’

‘I kept in contact with Johan Esau. You remember him? He phoned me two weeks ago to tell me that both of them had been killed. Then he sent these clippings. When I tried to phone him, there was no answer. I called the police in George on Friday, and they told me that Johan had been murdered. Knife attack in his yard. Maid found him in the morning when she came in to work.’

Smith is speaking fast now, mouth twitching. De Vries tries to avoid looking at him directly; Smith’s anxiety is making him nervous too.

‘It’s not coincidence. It can’t be.’ Mitchell Smith is gabbling. ‘Three of the men who were with Kobus Nel. Each of them murdered, with knives, in under a month.’

De Vries feels slightly dizzy, finds himself staring at the table, scrutinizing the newspaper clippings for something which might distinguish one attack from the other.

‘What did you tell the police in George?’

‘Nothing. I told them nothing.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘You have to find Mike de Groot – he was the other guy in Nel’s van. You have to warn him. You have to tell him what’s happening.’

‘Why can’t you contact him?’

‘It’s gone bad for Mike,’ Mitchell Smith says. ‘He couldn’t cope, man. He seemed okay, carried on like the rest of us. Did the new training, the courses. Worked okay with the new black guys, the fat, lazy, coloured fucks, even when they were promoted past him. Then, one day, Johan and I were driving to Forries for beers. We saw Mike under the freeway ramp, over by Settler’s Way, just standing on the island between the carriageways . . .’

‘Doing what?’

‘Nothing, man. Just standing, talking to himself. We called out to him, but he looked straight through us. We stopped, got him into the car, but he was gone, man. Something in him was gone. Didn’t even know where he was. Week later, he was out of the force.’

‘Where is he now?’

Smith shrugs.

‘Someone said they saw him over by Table View at the traffic lights, holding up a fucking sign, selling wooden beads.’

‘You know if . . . ?’

‘If he’s still alive? No. I don’t know that.’

Smith looks around his hot, stench-filled room. De Vries sees peeling paint, stained carpet, empty bottles and upturned glasses under the tatty sofa; he wonders what Smith sees.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I don’t know. I’m scared. Who knew we were there? Who even knew who we were?’

‘No one,’ De Vries says firmly. ‘No one knew. No one said anything or did anything for twenty-one years . . .’

‘Except for Kobus Nel.’

‘What interest would he have?’

‘He’s a rich guy now,
ja
? Made his fortune. Lives the highlife, but they say the money isn’t legitimate; that he’s connected to the mafia people, the gangs, maybe the Russians.’

‘It doesn’t mean he has anything to do with this.’

‘Who else knows?’

De Vries sighs, finds himself scratching his head hard and wonders whether it could be fleas from Smith, whether he spreads this contagion of misery and filth.

‘Perhaps it should have come out at the time.’ He looks up at Smith, speaks quietly. ‘I doubt there would have been an investigation. It would have been swept away, but at least we would have done our duty. Nel made it pretty clear what would happen if we did speak out. I’m talking about our jobs, our safety, our family. You didn’t mess with him . . .’

‘I can’t sleep,’ Mitchell Smith says. ‘I can’t think about anything else.’

De Vries stands up.

‘There’s not much I can do. There’s no viable threat to you. Even if you tell someone the story, I doubt they’ll act.’ He gestures at the front door. ‘You have your security looking tight. Remain alert. I’ll do what I can.’

‘I thought . . . I thought I could go away . . . ?’

‘You could. Might have to be for some time . . .’