Devil's Peak (15 page)

* * *

“In the beginning Carlos was quite refreshing. Different. With me. I think it is more okay in Colombia to visit a sex worker than it is here. He never had that attitude of ‘what if someone saw me’ like most of my clients. He was a small, wiry man without an ounce of fat on him. He was always laughing. Always glad to see me. He said I was the most beautiful conchita in the world. ‘You are Carlos’s blonde bombshell.’ He talked about himself like that. He never said ‘I.’ ‘Carlos wants to clone you, and export you to Colombia. You are very beautiful to Carlos.’
“He had nice hands, that’s one of the things I remember about him. Delicate hands like a woman’s. He made a lot of noise when we had sex, sounds and Spanish words. He shouted so loud once that someone knocked on the door and asked if everything was okay.
“The first time he gave me extra money, two hundred rand. ‘Because you are the best.’ A few days later he phoned again. ‘You remember Carlos? Well, now he cannot live without you.’
“He made me laugh, at first. When he came to my place in the Gardens Center. Before I started going to him, before I knew what he did. Before he became jealous.”

* * *

Before Carlos she wrote the letter.
You were a good mother. Pa was the one who messed up. And me. That is why I am leaving Sonia with you.
She wanted to add something, words to say that her mother deserved a second chance with a daughter, but every time she scratched out the lines, crumpled up the paper and started over.
Late at night she would sit on the rim of the bath and stroke the knife over her wrists. Between one and three, alone, Sonia asleep in her cheerful bedroom with the seagulls on the ceiling and Mickey Mouse on the wall. She knew she could not let the knife cut in, because she could not abandon her child like that. She would have to make another plan with more limited damage.
She wondered how much blood could flow in the bath.
How great would the relief be when all the bad was out?

* * *

Carlos Sangrenegra, with his Spanish accent and his odd English, his tight jeans and the mustache that he cultivated with such care. The little gold crucifix on a fine chain around his neck, the one thing he kept on in bed, although they weren’t actually in the bed much. “Doggie, conchita, Carlos likes doggie.” He would stand with feet planted wide apart on the floor; she would be bent over the edge of the bed. From the start he was different. He was like a child. Everything excited him. Her breasts, her hair color, her eyes, her body, her shaven pubic hair.
He would come in and undress, ready and erect, and he wouldn’t want to chat first. He was never uncomfortable.
“Don’t you want to talk first?”
“Carlos does not pay five hundred rand for talking. That he can get free anywhere.”
She liked him, those first few times, perhaps because he enjoyed her so intensely, and was so verbal about it. Also, he brought flowers, sometimes a small gift, and left a little extra when he went. It was her perception that it was a South-American custom, this generosity, since she had never had a Latin-American client before. Germans and Englishmen, Irishmen (usually drunk), Americans, Hollanders (always found something to complain about) and Scandinavians (possibly the best lovers overall). But Carlos was a first. A Colombian.
That origin meant nothing to her, just a vaguely remembered orange patch on a school atlas.
“What do you do?” After his theatrical orgasm, he was lying with his head between her breasts.
“What does Carlos do? You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Everybody knows what Carlos do.”
“Oh.”
“Carlos is a professional lover. World heavyweight love champion. Every fuck is a knockout. You should know that, conchita.”
She could only laugh.
He showered and dressed and took extra notes from his wallet and put them on the bedside cupboard saying: “Carlos gives you a little extra.” In that rising tone, as if it were a question, but she was used to that. Then he put his hand back in his jeans pocket and said: “You don’t know what Carlos does?”
“No.”
“You don’t know what the number one export of Colombia is?”
“No.”
“Ah, conchita, you are so innocent,” he said, and he brought out a little transparent plastic packet in his hand, filled with fine white powder. “Do you know what this is?”
She made a gesture with her hand to show she was guessing. “Cocaine?”
“Yes, it is cocaine, of course it is cocaine. Colombia is the biggest cocaine producer in the world, conchita.”
“Oh!”
“You want?” He held the packet up towards her.
“No, thanks.”
That made him laugh uproariously. “You don’t want A-grade, super special number one uncut Colombian snow?”
“I don’t take drugs,” she said, a bit embarrassed, as if it were an insult to his national pride.
Suddenly he was serious. “Yes, Carlos’s conchita is clean.”

* * *

She ascribed the early signs to his Latin blood, just another characteristic that was refreshingly different.
He would ring and say: “Carlos is coming over.”
“Now?”
“Of course
now.
Carlos misses his conchita.”
“I miss you, too, but I can only see you at three o’clock.”
“
Tree
o’clock?”
“I have other clients too, you know.”
He said a word in Spanish, two cutting syllables.
“Carlo-o-o-o-s,” she stretched it out soothingly.
“How much they paying you?”
“The same.”
“They bring you flowers?”
“No, Carlos . . .”
“They give you extra?”
“No.”
“So why see them?”
“I have to make a living.”
He was silent until she said his name.
“Carlos will come tomorrow. Carlos wants to be first, you unnerstand? First love of the day.”

* * *

“He phoned one day and he said he was going to send someone to pick me up. These two guys that I didn’t know came in a big BMW, one of those with a road map on a television up front, and they took me to Camps Bay. We got out, but you couldn’t see the house, it was up on the slope. You go up in a lift. Everything is glass and the view is out of this world, but there wasn’t really furniture in it. Carlos said he had just bought it and I must help him, as he wasn’t very good with decorating and stuff.
“Maybe that was the night I clicked for the first time. I had been there for half an hour when I looked at my watch, but Carlos was angry and said: ‘Don’t look at your watch.’
“When I wanted to protest, he said: ‘Carlos will take care of you, hokay?’
“We ate on the balcony, on a blanket, and Carlos chatted as if we were boyfriend and girlfriend. The other two who fetched me were around somewhere, and he told me they were bodyguards and there was nothing to be scared of.
“Then he asked me: ‘How much do you get in a month, conchita?’ I didn’t like to say. Lots of them ask, but I never say—it’s not their business. So I told him: ‘That’s private.’
“Then he came out with it. ‘Carlos do not want his girlfriend to see other guys. But he knows you must make a living, so he will pay what you make. More. Double.’
“So I said: ‘No, Carlos, I can’t,’ and that made him angry, for the first time. He smacked all the food around on the blanket and screamed at me in Spanish, and I thought he would hit me. So I took my handbag and said I had better go. I was scared; he was another person, his face . . . The bodyguards came walking out and talked to him and suddenly he calmed down and he just said: ‘Sorry, conchita, Carlos is so sorry.’ But I asked him, please, could they just take me home, and he said he would do it himself and all the way he was sorry and he made jokes and when I got out he gave me two thousand. I took it, because I thought if I tried to give it back he would be angry again.
“The next morning I phoned Vanessa and asked her what I should do, this guy thinks I am his girlfriend and he wants to pay me to be with just him and she said that is bad news, I must get rid of him, that sort of thing could ruin my whole business. So I said thanks and bye, because I didn’t want to tell her this guy is in drugs and he has a terrible temper and I haven’t a clue how to get rid of him.
“So I phoned Carlos and he said he was terribly sorry, it was his work that made him like that, and he sent flowers and I started to think it would be okay. But then they assaulted one of my clients, just outside the door of my room in the Gardens Center.”

* * *

The master bedroom of the Camps Bay house had a four-poster bed now. He had retained an expensive, well-known interior decorator who had begun with the bedroom and everything was in white: curtains, bedding, drapes on the bed like the sails of a ship. He showed off like a little boy, keeping his hands over her eyes all the way down the passage and then: “Ta-daaa!” and watched her reaction. He asked her four or five times, “You like the master’s bedroom?” and she said, “It’s beautiful,” because it was.
He dived onto the bed and said, “Come to Carlos,” and he was exuberant, even more boisterous than usual, and she tried to forget about the bodyguards somewhere in the house.
Later he lay beside her and softly traced little circles around her nipple with the tip of the little gold crucifix. “Where do you live, conchita?”
“You know . . .”
“No, where do you
live?
”
“Gardens Center,” she replied, hoping he would drop the subject.
“You think Carlos is stupid because he looks stupid? You work there, but where is your home, where is the place with your pictures on the fridge?”
“I can’t afford another place, you pay me too little.”
“Carlos pay you too little? Carlos pay you too much. All the time the moneyman is saying: ‘Carlos, we are here to make a profit, remember.’ ”
“You have a bookkeeper?”
“Of course. You think Carlos is small fish? Cocaine is big business, conchita, very big business.”
“Oh.”
“So you will take Carlos to your house?”
Never, she thought, never ever, but said, “One day . . .”
“You don’t trust Carlos?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Conchita, you can ask Carlos anything.”
“Did you have my client beaten up?”
“What client?” But he couldn’t carry off the lie and his eyes turned crafty. He is a child, she thought, and it frightened her.
“Just a client. Fifty-three years old.”
“Why do you think Carlos beat him?”
“Not you. But maybe the bodyguards?”
“Did he buy drugs?”
“No.”
“They only beat up people who do not pay for drugs, hokay?”
“Okay.” She knew what she wanted to know. But it helped not at all.

21.

G
riessel and Cliffy sat in the fish restaurant a hundred meters beyond the entrance to Woolworths, each with a small earphone. They heard André Marais saying, “Testing, testing” for the umpteenth time, but this time with a tinny voice in the background calling, “Next customer, please.”
Cliffy Mketsu nodded, as he did every time. It irritated Griessel immensely. Marais couldn’t fucking see them nod, she was in the food section of Woolworths and they were here. She was only wearing a microphone, not earphones. One-way communication only, but Cliffy had to nod.
At a table opposite, a man and a woman were drinking red wine. The woman was middle-aged, but pretty, like Farrah Fawcett, with big, round, golden earrings and lots of rings on her fingers. The man looked young enough to be her son, but took her hand every now and again. They bothered Griessel. Because they were drinking wine. Because he could taste the dark flavor in his mouth. Because they were rich. Because they were together. Because they could drink and be together and what of him? He could sit here with Nodding Cliffy Mketsu, clever Cliffy, busy with his Masters in Police Science, a good policeman, but confused, hopelessly absent-minded, as if his head was in his books all the time.
Would he and Anna ever be able to sit and enjoy themselves like that? Sit holding hands and sipping wine and gazing into each other’s eyes? How did people do that? How do you regain the romance after twenty years of married life? Actually, it was fucking irrelevant, because he would never be able to sip wine again. Not if you were an alcoholic. You couldn’t drink a thing. Nothing. Not a fucking drop. Couldn’t even smell the red wine.
He had told Doc Barkhuizen he was going to get drunk, but the Doc had said: “Phone your wife and children and tell them,” because he knew Griessel could not do that. He wanted to smash his cell phone on the bloody pavement, he wanted to break something but he just screamed, he didn’t know what, not words. When he turned around, Cliffy and André Marais were sitting rigidly in the car pretending nothing had happened.
“Vaughn, are you receiving properly?” Cliffy asked the other team over the microphone. They were looking at Woolworths clothes on the second floor, the one above the food department.
“Ten-four, good buddy,” said Inspector Vaughn Cupido, as if it were a game. He and Jamie Keyter were the back-up team. Not
Yaymie
as the locals would say it, he called himself
Jaa-mie.
Nowadays everyone had foreign names. What was wrong with good, basic Afrikaner names? The men weren’t Griessel’s first choice either, as Cupido was careless and Keyter was a braggart, recently transferred from Table View Station after he had made the newspapers with one of those stories where facts do not necessarily interfere with sensation. “Detective breaks car-theft syndicate single-handed.” With his bulging Virgin Active biceps and the kind of face to make schoolgirls swoon, he was one of the few white additions to the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit. This was the team that had to protect André Marais and catch a fucking serial killer: an alcoholic, a braggart and a sloppy one.
There was another matter on his mind; two, three things that came suddenly together: were the older woman and the young man opposite married? To each other? What if Anna had a young man who held her hand on Friday nights? He couldn’t believe that she no longer wanted it, of that he was convinced. You didn’t just switch off her sort of warmth like a stove plate just because her husband was a fucking alky. She met men at work—what would she do if there was a young man who was interested and sober? She was still attractive, despite the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes—due to her husband’s drinking habit. There was nothing wrong with her body. He knew what men were like; he knew they would try. How long would she keep saying “no”? How long?
He took out his cell phone, needing to know where she was on a Friday night. He rang, holding the phone to the ear without the earphone.
It rang.
He looked across at Farrah Fawcett and her toy boy.
They were gazing into each other’s eyes with desire. He swore they were just plain horny.
“I thi . . . it’s tha . . . t,” said André Marais in the earphone.
“What?” said Griessel, looking at Cliffy, who merely shrugged and tapped his radio receiver with the tip of his index finger.
“Hello,” said his son.
“Hello, Fritz.”
“Hi, Dad.” There was no joy in his son’s voice.
“How are you?”
But he couldn’t hear the answer as the earphone buzzed in his ear and he only caught a fraction of what Sergeant André Marais was saying: “. . . can’t afford . . .”
“What are you doing, Fritz?”
“Nothing. It’s just Carla and me.” His son sounded depressed, and there was a dull tone to his voice.
“How’s your reception, Vaughn?” Cupido asked. “Her mike isn’t good.”
“Just Carla and you?”
“Mom’s out.”
“I usually just buy instant,” said André Marais clearly and distinctly.
“She’s talking to someone,” said Cliffy.
Then they heard a man’s voice over the ether, faintly: “I can’t do without a good cup of filter in the morning.”
“Dad? Are you there?”
“I’ll have to call later, Fritz, I’m at work.”
“Okay.” Like he expected it.
“What . . . name?”
“. . . dré.”
“Fuck,” said Cupido, “her fucking mike.”
“Bye, Fritz.”
“Bye, Dad.”
“We might be too far away,” said Jamie Keyter.
“Stay where you are,” said Griessel.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the policewoman below in Woolworths food hall.
“A fish on the hook,” said Cupido.
Cliffy nodded.
Mom’s out.
“Just keep calm,” said Griessel, but he meant it for himself.