Thirteen Hours (17 page)

'Where are you?'

'In Loop Street, on my way to arrest a gospel singer for
murder.'

'I have to come to the city. I'll buy you coffee when you're
finished.'

'To tell me what?'

'Benny ... I'll tell you when I see you. I don't want to do
it over the phone.'

Then Griessel knew what it was. His heart sank.

'Jissis
, Mat,' he said.

'Benny, I wanted to tell you in person. Call me when you're
done.'

Griessel climbed into his car and slammed the door hard. He turned
the ignition.

Nothing ever stayed the same.

Everyone went away. Sooner or later.

His daughter. Gone to London. He had stood beside Anna at the
airport watching Carla walk away through the guarded door to Boarding. Dragging
her suitcase on wheels in one hand and holding her ticket and passport in the
other, hurrying off on the Great Adventure, leaving him, leaving them. His
emotions threatened to get the better of him, there next to his estranged wife.
He wanted to take Anna by the hand and say: 'It's only you and Fritz left,
because Carla is gone now, into the grown-up world.' But he didn't dare.

His daughter looked back once just before she disappeared
around the corner. She was far away, but he could see the excitement on her
face, the expectation, dreaming of what lay in store for her.

And he always stayed behind.

Would he stay behind again tonight? If Anna didn't want him
any more? Would he cope with that?

What if she said: 'OK, Benny, you're sober, you can come home
again'? What the fuck would he do then? Over the past few weeks he had started
wondering more and more about that. Maybe it was a kind of rationalisation, a
way of protecting himself from her rejection, but he wasn't sure that it would
work - Anna and him together again.

His feelings about it were complicated, he knew that. He
still loved Anna. But he suspected he had been able to stop drinking precisely
because he was alone, because he no longer took the violence and death home to
his family every night, because he didn't walk in the front door and see his
wife and children and be stalked by the fear that they too would be found like
that, bodies broken, hands rigid in the terrible fear of death.

But that wasn't the whole story.

They had been happy, he and Anna. Once upon a time. Before he
began drinking. They had their little family world, just the two of them at
first; then came Carla and Fritz and he had played on the carpet with his
children and at night he had snuggled up to his wife and they had talked and
laughed and made love with heartbreaking ease, carefree, because the future was
a predictable Utopia, even though they were poor, even though they owed money
on every stick of furniture, and on the car and the house. Then he was promoted
to Murder and Robbery, and the future slipped between his fingers, from his
grasp, little by little, day by day, so slowly he didn't realise it, so subtly
that he got up from a drunken stupor thirteen years later and realised it was
all gone.

You could never get it back. That was the fuck-up. You could
never go back, that life, those people and those circumstances were gone, just
as dead as O'Grady, Theal and Vos. You had to start over, but this time without
the naivety, innocence and optimism of before, without the haze of being in
love.
You
were different, you were stuck
with the way you were now, with all the knowledge and experience and realism
and disillusionment.

He didn't know if he could do it. He didn't know if he had
the energy - to go back to where every day was judgement day. Eagle- eyed Anna
watching him when he came home at night, where had he been? Did he smell of
drink? He would come through the door knowing this, and he would try too hard
to prove his sobriety, he would play up to her, he would see her anxiety until
she was sure he was sober and then she would relax. It all felt too much for
him, a burden he wasn't ready to bear.

Then there was the fact that in the past two or three months,
he had begun to enjoy his life in the spartan flat, the visits of his children
before his daughter went overseas, when Fritz and Carla sat and chatted with
him in his sitting room or a restaurant like three adults, three ... friends,
not hamstrung by the rules and regulations of the conventional family. He had
begun to enjoy the silence of his home when he opened the door, nobody watching
and judging him. He could open the fridge and drink directly, long and deeply,
out of the two-litre bottle of orange juice. He could lie on the couch with his
shoes on and close his eyes and snooze till seven or eight o'clock and then
stroll down to the Engen garage on Annandale and buy a Woollies Food sandwich
and a small bottle of ginger beer. Or his favourite, a Dagwood burger at
Steers, then home to type an email to Carla with two fingers, a bite and a
swallow in between. He could play on his bass guitar and dream impossible
dreams. Or he could return the dish to seventy-something Charmaine Watson-
Smith at Number 106. 'Oh, Benny, you don't have to thank me, you're my charity.
My policeman.' Despite her years her eyes were full of life and her food was so
delicious, every time.

Charmaine Watson-Smith who had sent Bella around. And he had
taken advantage of Bella and, fuck it, he was an adulterer, but it had been
incredible, so terribly good. Everything has a price.

Perhaps Anna knew about Bella. Perhaps Anna was going to tell
him tonight that he might well be sober, but he was an unfaithful bastard and
she didn't want him any more. He wanted Anna to want him. He needed her
approval, he needed her love and her embrace and the safe haven of their home.
But he didn't know if that was the right thing for him now.

Jissis,
why did life have to be so complicated?

He was in Buiten Street and there was no parking and the
present, the reality of it all, felt to him as though someone had switched on a
powerful light. He blinked his eyes against its brightness.

'No,' said Inspector Mbali Kaleni with absolute finality.

Superintendent Cliffie Mketsu, station commander of
Bellville, did not react. He knew he must wait until she had fired her salvo,
his outspoken, principle-driven, stubborn female detective.

'What about the other women who have disappeared?' she asked,
her round face registering displeasure. 'What about the Somali woman nobody
wants to help me with? Why don't we call in the whole Service to work on
her
case?'

'What Somali woman, Mbali?'

'The one whose body has been lying at Salt River mortuary for
the last two weeks, but the pathologists say it's not high priority, it could
just be natural causes. Natural causes? Because it was a wound that went
septic, because she died in a little shack of cardboard and planks, with
nothing? Nobody is prepared to help, not Home Affairs, not Missing Persons, not
even the stations, even after I sent them each a photo asking them to put it up
on the board. When I get there they all just shrug - they don't even know what
happened to the bulletin. But let an American disappear, everyone is suddenly
jumping through burning hoops.' She folded her arms across her chest. 'Not me.'

'You're right,' Cliffie Mketsu said patiently. His theory was
that Kaleni was her father's child. In a country where most fathers were
absent, she had grown up with two strong parents - her mother was a nurse and
her learned father was a school headmaster in KwaZulu, a leader in the
community, who had equipped his only child carefully and deliberately with her
own perspective, with good judgement, and the self-confidence to express it,
loud and clear. So he had to give her the opportunity. 'I know.'

'The Commissioner specifically asked for you.'

She gave an angry snort.

'It's in the national interest.'

'National interest?'

'Tourism, Mbali. It's our lifeblood. Foreign exchange. Job
opportunities. It's our biggest industry and our greatest leverage for
upliftment.'

He knew she was melting; her arms dropped from her chest.
'They need you, Mbali, to take charge of the case.'

'But what about all the other women?'

'It's an imperfect world,' he said gently.

'It doesn't have to be,' she said and stood up.

At ten past three in the morning, Bill Anderson sat on the
old two- seater leather couch in his study, his right arm around his sobbing
wife and a coffee mug in his left hand. Despite his apparent calm, he could
hear his own heart beating in the quiet of North Salisbury Street. His thoughts
were sometimes with his daughter - and the parents of her friend, Erin Russel.
Who would pass on the dreadful news? Should he call them? Or wait for official
confirmation? And what could he do? Because he wanted to, he had to do
something to help his daughter, to protect her; but where did he begin, he
didn't even know where she was right now.

'They should never have gone,' said his wife. 'How many times
did I tell them? Why couldn't they have gone to Europe?'

Anderson had no answer for her. He hugged her tighter.

The phone rang, shrill in the early hours. Anderson spilled
some of the coffee from his mug in his haste to get up. He answered.

'Bill, it's Mike. I'm sorry, it took a while to track down
the Congressman, he's up in Monticello with his family. I just got off the
phone with him, and he's going to get things moving right away. First off, he
says his thoughts are with you and your family ...'

'Thanks, Mike, thank him for us.'

'I will. I gave him your number, and he will call us as soon
as he's got more information. He's going to call both the US

Ambassador in Pretoria and the Consul General in Cape Town to
get confirmation and whatever facts are available. He also knows a staffer with
Condi Rice, and he will ask the State Department for all the help they can
give. Now, I know you're a Democrat, but the Congressman is a former military
man, Bill, he gave up his law practice on three days' notice to serve in the
first Gulf War. He gets things done. So don't you worry now, we are going to
bring Rachel home.'

'Mike, I don't know how to thank you.'

'You know you don't have to.'

'Erin's parents ...'

'I'm thinking the same things here, but we need it to be
official, Bill, before we say anything.'

'That might be best. I'm thinking of taking Chief Dombkowski
with me. I don't think I can do it alone.'

'I'll call the Chief as soon as we have more information.
Then we'll both go with you.'

The Sergeant walked out of Carlucci's Quality Food Store to
his patrol vehicle, opened the door and picked up the handset of the radio. He
called the Caledon Square charge office and spoke to the same Constable who had
sent him here. He reported that they had taken a statement, that a young woman
had been pursued by a white and a black man, but that there currently was no
sign of any of them.

'See if you can find something on the system, a white Land
Rover Discovery, registration number CA and the numbers four, one, six, that's
all he could see, but he isn't dead certain. We'll look around a bit,' he said,
and then he saw the second Metro Police car in minutes driving down Upper
Orange. He recalled the two foot patrols in Metro uniform that he had seen on
the way here. Why didn't they help with the march instead, he thought. Here
they were wandering around looking for traffic offenders. Or buyers for fake
drivers' licences.

His shift partner came out of the shop and said: 'If you ask
me, it's drugs.'

Vusi Ndabeni met the police photographer at the Cat &
Moose Youth Hostel and Backpackers Inn and asked them to fetch Oliver Sands and
his camera again.

When Sands walked into the entrance hall, he still looked
broken.

'I want to use that photograph of Erin and Rachel, please,'
said Vusi.

'Sure,' said Sands.

'Can we borrow your camera for a few hours?'

'I can just take the memory card,' said the photographer.

'OK. I need ... fifty prints. But quickly. Mr Sands, please
show our photographer which one is Rachel Anderson.'

'I'll get it back?' asked Sands.

'I can't get the prints to you today,' said the photographer.
,

Vusi stared at the man with his long hair and unhelpful
attitude.

You have to be tough
, Benny Griessel
had said.

But he wasn't like that. And he didn't know if he could be.
He would have to make another plan.

Vusi muffled a sigh. 'Tomorrow? Is tomorrow OK?'

'Tomorrow is better,' the photographer nodded.

Vusi took his phone out of his pocket. 'Just a minute,' he
said, and pressed a number in and held the phone to his ear.

'When you hear the signal,' said a monotonous woman's voice
on the phone, 'it will be ten ... seven ... and forty seconds.'