It was some time before she answered. He saw the process in her face, the eyes narrowing, the lips thinning. ?So it?s not about Sonia,? she said.
?It
about her. All the indications are that he will lead us to her.? He tried hard to be convincing, but he felt guilty. He had told Sangrenegra what they were going to do. This morning in court he had looked Carlos in the eyes and reinforced the message: you are bait. He knew Carlos was going nowhere, because Carlos knew the police were watching him. The chances that the Colombian was going to lead them anywhere were nil.
?I don?t believe you.?
Could she hear from the tone of his voice that he was lying? ?My black colleague talked to the psychologist this morning. She said people like Carlos go back to their victims. I give you my word. It?s true. It?s a chance. It?s possible. I can?t swear it will happen, but it?s possible.?
Her face altered, the venom dissolved and he saw she was about to cry. He said: ?It?s possible,? again, but to no avail.
She put her face in her hands and said: ?Leave him. Let him kill Carlos.? Then her shoulders heaved. He couldn?t take it anymore. Guilt and pity drove him to her. He put a hand on her shoulder. ?I understand,? he said.
She shook her head.
?I have children too,? he said, and inhaled her smell, perfume and the faint scent of perspiration.
He sat on the arm of the chair. He put his hand behind her neck onto her far shoulder. His fingers patted her comfortingly. He felt a bit of an idiot because she was unyielding under his touch. ?I understand,? he repeated.
Then she moved and he felt her soften and she pressed her head against him. With her arm around his hip she wept.
37.
He thought many thoughts while she leaned against him, shrunken under his arm. For the first time since Anna had kicked him out, some sort of calm came over him. A kind of peace.
He looked around the flat. The sitting room and kitchen were one big room separated by a white melamine counter. A passage led off to the right behind him. To the bedrooms? He noted the large fridge and big flat-screen television. New stuff. A child?s drawings of multicolored animals were stuck up on the fridge with magnets. A crocodile and a rhinoceros and a lion. He noted the coffee machine in the kitchen, shiny chrome, with spouts and knobs. But the chairs at the counter were scuffed; one sitting-room chair was old and worn. Two worlds in one.
Leaning against the wall to the left of him was a painting. Large and original. A rural landscape, a blue mountain in the distance and a green valley, the grass in the veld growing high and verdant. A young girl was running through the grass. She was a tiny figure on the left, dwarfed by the landscape, but he could distinguish the blonde hair bouncing up behind. Four or five steps ahead of her there was a red balloon, with a string hanging down, a thin, barely visible black stripe against the blue of the mountain. The girl?s hand was stretched out to it. The grass bent away from her. It must be the wind, he thought. Blowing the balloon away from her. He wondered if she were running fast enough to catch it.
He had a partial erection.
She wouldn?t be able to feel it, as she wasn?t in contact there. Her breathing was quieter now, but he couldn?t see her face.
He crossed his legs to hide his state. He couldn?t help it; there were a lot of things affecting him here. Knowing that sex was her job. She was attractive. And vulnerable. Hurt. Something in him that responded to that. Something that somewhere in his brain did surveys and sent out primitive orders: take your chance, the time is right. He knew that was how his head worked. He?and the other members of his sex. Also the mentally ill, those for whom it was more than just an opportunity for sexual victory. Like serial murderers. They searched out the weak, soft targets for their dark deeds. Often prostitutes. Not always deliberately, with preconceived reasoning and planned strategy. Instinct. Somewhere, in the pre-alcoholic period a memory stirred, something he had worked out for himself. He was a good policeman because he understood others through self-knowledge. He could use his own weaknesses, his own fears and instincts, because he knew them. He could magnify them, amplify them like turning up an imaginary volume control to the level where they made other people commit murder or rape, lie or steal. As he sat there he realized it was one of the things that had made him start drinking. The slow realization that he was like them and they were like him, that he was not a better man. As he had felt last night or the previous, he couldn?t remember which, when he had seen Anna and her young, imaginary lover in his mind and the jealousy had turned on the switches with an evil hand and he had wanted to shoot. If he were to find them like that and he had his service pistol on his hip, he would shoot the fucker, between the eyes, no fucking doubt about that.
But that was not the main reason he drank. No. It was not the only reason. There were others. Large and small. He began to realize it all now. He was a rough stone and he was cut with a thousand facets and it was his bad luck that this shape fitted so well into the crooked hole of alcoholism.
The thing that he was had consequences. The way in which the fine wiring of his brain made connections, had implications. It enabled him to view a crime scene and
things; it also wakened an urge in him to hunt. It made the search sweet; inside his skull he experienced an addictive pleasure. But the selfsame wiring made him drink. If you wanted to hunt and search, you had to look death in the eye. And what if death frightened you? Then you drank, because it was part of you. And if you drank long enough, then the alcohol created its own wiring, its own thoughts, its own justification. Its own thick glasses through which you saw yourself and the world.
What do you do about it? What do you do about the consequences, the opposite sides of the coin, if it fucked up your life? Leave the police and go and drive a white Toyota Tazz for Chubb Security around Brackenfell?s streets at night and leave notes under people?s doors?
Or do you sit behind the small black-and-white screens of a shopping center?s closed-circuit television and watch the dolled-up mommies spending the daddies? money?
And you never hunt again and you die here inside.
He experienced a sudden feeling of despair, like someone trapped in a labyrinth. He needed to think of other things?of the woman leaning against him and the fact that it satisfied a need. The need to be held. That he needed to be touched. Ever since he had been thrown out of his house, he had an increasing need for it.
