He considered the alternatives and there was only one logical conclusion.
?How long have you been working for Sangrenegra?? He turned the mirror with his left hand. Bloodshot eyes stared back. He got no response.
?That?s the problem with this country. Money means more than justice,? he said.
?Is that how you justify your murders?? said the policeman from behind.
?Murder? There was only one murder. I didn?t know Sangrenegra was innocent. It was you people who used him for an ambush.?
?Sangrenegra? How do you know he was innocent??
?I saw it in his eyes.?
?And Bernadette Laurens? What did her eyes tell you??
?Laurens??
The policeman said nothing.
?But she confessed.?
?That?s what they all keep telling me.?
?But it wasn?t her??
?I don?t think it was. I think she was protecting the child?s mother. Like others would protect their children.?
The unexpectedness of it left Thobela dumb.
?That?s why we have a justice system. A process. That is why we can?t take the law into our own hands,? said Griessel.
Thobela wrestled with the possibility, with rationalizing and acceptance of guilt. But he couldn?t tip the scales either way.
?So why did she confess then?? he asked himself, but aloud.
There was no response from the back seat.
43.
While they carried the shopping bags into Carlos?s kitchen, she could think of nothing but the syringe of blood.
The house was unnaturally quiet and empty without the bodyguards; the large spaces echoed footsteps and phrases. He embraced her in the kitchen after they had put the groceries down. He pressed her to him with surprising tenderness and said: ?This is right, conchita.?
She made her body soft. She let her hips flow against his. ?Yes,? she said.
?We will be happy.?
In answer she kissed him on the mouth, with great skill, until she could feel his erection developing. She put her hand on it and traced the shape. Carlos?s hands were behind her back. He pulled her dress up inch by inch until her bottom was exposed and slipped his fingers under the elastic of her panties. His breathing quickened.
She moved her lips over his cheek, down his neck, over the cross that hung in his chest hair. Her tongue left a damp trail. She freed herself and dropped to her knees, fingers busy with his zipper. With one hand she pulled his underpants down and with the other she pulled his penis out. Long, thin and hairy, it stood up like a lean soldier with an outsized shiny helmet.
?Conchita.? His voice was a whispering urgency, as she had never done this without a condom before.
She stroked with both hands, from the pubic hairs to the tip.
?We will be happy,? she said and softly put it in her mouth.
Thobela Mpayipheli and his white passenger, sitting in the back like a colonial property baron, drove past Mwangala and Dyamala, where fat cattle grazed in the sweet green grass. They turned right onto the R63. Fort Hare was quiet over the summer holidays. Five minutes later they were in busy Alice. Fruit vendors on the pavements, women with baskets on their heads and children on their backs who walked stately and unhurried across the road and down the street. Four men were gathered around a board game on a street corner. Thobela wondered if the policeman saw all this. If he could hear the Xhosa calls that were exchanged across the broad street. This was ownership. The people owned this place.
Thirty kilometers on was Fort Beaufort and he turned south. Four or five times he spotted the Kat River on the left where it meandered away between the hills. It had been one of his plans to bring Pakamile here: just the two of them with rucksacks, hiking boots and a two-man tent. To show his boy where he had grown up.
Thobela knew every bend of the Kat. He knew the deep pools at Nkqantosi where you could jump off the cliff and open your eyes deep under the greenish-brown water and see the sunbeams fighting against the darkness. The little sandy beach below Komkulu. Where he had discovered the warrior inside him thirty years before. Mtetwa, the young buffalo who was a bully, an injustice he had to correct. The first.
And far over that way, out of sight, his favorite place. Four kilometers from the place where it flowed into the Great Fish River, the Kat made a flamboyant curve, as if it wanted to dally one last time before losing its identity?a meander that swept back so far that it almost made an island. It was about ten kilometers from the Mission Church manse where he lived, but he could run there in an hour down the secret game paths around the hills and through the valleys. All so he could sit between the reeds where the chattering weaverbirds in brilliant color lured females to their hanging nests. To listen to the wind. To watch the fat iguana warming itself in the sun on the black rocky point. In the late afternoon the bushbuck came out of the thickets like phantoms to dip their heads to the water. First the grace of the does in their red glowing coats. Later the rams would come two by two, dark brown in the dusk, sturdy, short, needle-sharp horns that rose and dipped, rose and dipped.
