Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

  And it wasn’t going to change. Theal would tell him how and where you could change dollars in the eighties. Or maybe not. And what then? Who would remember Johannes Jacobus X after fifteen years? He could visit Charles Nieuwoudt in Pollsmoor Prison or Victor Verster or whichever jail he might be in and ask whether he falsified the identity document, and what would he get?

  Nothing. Not in five days.

  Because Nieuwoudt’s brains had been scrambled by drugs and it had been fifteen years and he wouldn’t remember a thing.

  That was the problem. The case wasn’t ten months old. It was fifteen years old. Someone had known there was something in that safe worth killing for. He didn’t know what it was. He might as well admit it. He hadn’t the faintest idea what had been in that safe. He could speculate on the basis of a fucking slip of paper until he was blue in the face. He could formulate his clever theories until he died of boredom. It could have been anything. Krugerrands. Gold. Diamonds. Rand or dollars or fucking Monopoly money. It could have been nude photographs of Bill Clinton or the fucking Spice Girls. It could have been a map of pirate’s treasure and he would never know because the thing was as dead as a doornail and he couldn’t get it breathing with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or a heart-lung machine.

  He knew he was right. More than a thought-through conclusion. Instinct. Everything he had learned told him that it would take time. Weeks. Months of fine-tooth combing, of talking, of asking questions until something unraveled and gave you a thread you could tug, pull, wiggle.

  He pulled off at the Kraaifontein interchange, turned right over the bridge and right again back to the city on the N1. Where had she said she lived? Milnerton.

  Curious. He would have placed her near the mountain with her yuppie hairdo and her BMW, the fucking mountain that brooded. He hated that mountain, hated this place that had made him think he could stage a comeback overnight: Hi, sweetheart, I’m home, I’m a detective again, isn’t it great!

  She was busy digging compost into the oleanders when she heard the cell phone ringing. She pulled off the gloves as she walked, opened the sliding door, and answered the phone.

  “Hope Beneke.”

  “I want to see you.” His voice dark and abrupt.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Now.” He heard the irritating sympathy again, the I-understand-everything-now-and-can-be-patient-with-you tone in her voice.

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t know where you live.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Milnerton. At Pick ’n Pay.”

  She gave him directions.

  “Good,” he said, and put the phone down.

  “Good-bye,” she said, “Zatopek.” And smiled to herself. He wasn’t a ray of sunshine. What did he look like when he laughed?

  She walked to the bathroom, pulled a comb through her short hair, applied pale pink lipstick. She wasn’t going to change. The tracksuit was fine. She went to the kitchen, put on the kettle, took out the small white tray, put out the mugs, the milk jug, the sugar bowl. She should have bought something at the Home Industry. A tart. It was almost coffee time.

  She walked to the mini hi-fi. She didn’t really know much about classical music. Was he very knowledgeable? She had The World’s Greatest Arias. And The Best Classical Album Ever. And Pavarotti and Friends. The rest was a mixture from Sinatra to Laurika Rauch to Céline Dion to Bryan Adams.

  She put on the Dion CD. Universally loved. She turned the volume to low. Heard the kettle switching itself off. Stood at her sliding door and surveyed the small patch of garden, a postage-stamp oasis that she had created with her own hands, even down to planting the grass, the shrubs, and the flowers. Now she was preparing for spring.

  She felt raindrops and looked up. The clouds were heavy, the drops fine and light. She had finished just in time. She closed the door, sat down on a living-room chair, checked her watch. He should be here any moment now. Her eyes wandered over the pine bookcase that she had bought secondhand and painted herself when she was still a clerk.

  Did Van Heerden read? Richard hadn’t. Richard was a news fanatic. Newspapers and television news and Time and the Economist and radio bulletins, six o’clock in the morning. She had indulged him. A relationship was a question of give and take. For him it was a matter of being given to and taking from.

  Eventually he knocked on her door. She got up, peered through the spy hole, recognized him, and opened the door. He stood, again slightly damp from the rain, the face reflecting stormy weather. As usual. “Come in,” she said. He walked in, glanced at the open-plan kitchen, dining area, and living room, walked to the breakfast counter, took out his wallet, and removed bank notes. He placed them on the counter.

  “I’ve finished,” he said without looking up.

  She looked at him. He seemed so defenseless, she thought. How could she have been so intimidated initially? The vague purplish color around his eye accentuated his vulnerability, though the lip was now nearly healed.

  He placed the last note on the little pile. “We’re going nowhere. The thing is dead. It’s not ten months old. It started when Smit changed his name and it’s too long ago. You can do nothing about it.” He folded his arms and leaned against the counter.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she asked quietly.

  “The advance… yes, please.” Somewhat taken aback. She walked around him to the kettle, put it on again, put a teaspoon of instant coffee in each mug.

  “I have nothing to serve with the coffee. I’m not good at baking,” she said. “Do you bake?”

  “I… no.” Irritated. “The investigation…”

  “Won’t you sit down? Then we can discuss it.” Voice gentle. She suddenly wanted to laugh: he was so focused, so predictable, his body language an alarm siren, directed at confrontation. He was lost when it didn’t come.

  “Yes,” he said, and sat on the edge of a living-room chair. He was so unbelievably uncomfortable, she thought.

  “How do you like your coffee?”

  “Black and bitter.” As an afterthought: “Thank you.”

  “I appreciate your honesty about the investigation.”

  “You’ll simply have to accept that the case is dead.”

  “It was worth trying.”

  “And there is nothing you can do about it.”

  “I know.”

  “I just came to tell you.”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  “What did Kemp tell you?”

  “Kemp knows nothing about the investigation.” She poured boiling water into the mugs.

  “About me. What did he tell you about me?”

  “He said that if there was someone who would be able to find the will, it would be you.” She carried the coffee on her small white tray, put it down on the glass table. “Help yourself,” she said.

  He took a mug, put it back on the tray.

  “How could he have said that if he knows nothing about the investigation?”

  She bent forward, added milk to her coffee, stirred it. “Of course he knows I have a client who is looking for a will that was lost in a burglary. He knows it’s a sort of criminal investigation. That’s why he recommended you. He said you’re the best.” For a moment she wanted to add, Difficult, but the best, but she left it at that, raised the mug to her lips.

  “What else did he say? About me?”

  “That’s all. Why do you ask?”

  “I just want to tell you, I don’t need your sympathy.”

  “Why would you need my sympathy? If you say the investigation is dead, then…” She wanted to provoke him; she knew she was doing it deliberately.

  “Not the investigation,” he said, irritated.

  “Do have your coffee.”

  He nodded, took the mug off the tray.

  “What made you realize finally that the case was dead?” Her tone of voice was accepting, acquiescent.

  He blew on the coffee, thought for a while. “I was at the Drug
Squad this morning. And at the neighbors of Van As. I don’t know. I suddenly realized… There is nothing, Hope. And you’ll have to accept it. There is nothing you can do.”

  She nodded.

  “I… know Van As will be disappointed. But if they hadn’t had such an odd relationship…”

  “I’ll talk to her. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried. Because there’s nothing…”

  “That she can do.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where did you learn to cook?”

  He suddenly looked penetratingly at her. “What’s going on here, Hope?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I come here to tell you that you and Van As can forget it and you talk about food? What’s going on?”

  She sank back in the chair, put her running shoes on the table, rested the mug on her knees, spoke amiably. “Do you want me to argue with you about it? You gave your professional opinion and I accept it. I think you did a good job. I also have tremendous respect for the fact that you’ve returned the money. Someone with less integrity would have let the case drag on endlessly.”

  He snorted. “I’m trash,” he said.

  To which she had no reply.

  “I think Kemp told you more.”

  “What should he have told me?”

  “Nothing.”

  He’s like a child, she thought, watching him as he stared at nothing in the distance, drinking his coffee. She could see his mother’s genes, in and around the eyes. She wondered what his father had looked like.

  “There was something in the safe. That’s the key.”

  “It could have been anything,” she agreed.

  “Exactly,” he said. “It would take a year to examine all the possibilities.”

  “If you had more time?”

  He tried to read her face for sarcasm. Found nothing. “I don’t know. Weeks. Months, perhaps. Luck. We needed luck. If Van As had remembered something. Or had seen something. If the safe had contained something more.”

  You make your own luck, Nagel had said.

  “Have you anything else you’re working on?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She so badly wanted to ask him about himself, his mother, about who he was, why he was the way he was. Tell him his front was so unnecessary, that she knew what hid behind it, that she knew he could again become what his mother said he once had been.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Perhaps we’ll work together again one day.”

  “Perhaps.” He got up.

  20.

  I must admit that I remain endlessly fascinated by the small crossroads of life, the forks in the road, seldom indicated, rarely a road sign. Only visible in retrospect.

  I joined the police force because I peered through a wooden fence one Saturday afternoon. I joined the police because a detective gave me a second chance with firm warmth—a father figure? Did I join the Force because my father died young? Would I have joined the police if I hadn’t lusted after Baby Marnewick? Would I have joined if Baby Marnewick hadn’t been murdered?

  There was a Gauloises advertisement at the movies in those days. A French artist who made clever charcoal or pencil drawings on paper. At first it seemed as if he was drawing a female nude—the sexy breasts, the hips, the waist. But as he drew on, the female figure became an innocuous Frenchman with a beret, a beard, and a cigarette.

  The crossroads, the road signs, the milestones, were only visible when each picture was completed.

  I joined the police.

  With my mother’s blessing. I think she suspected that it had something to do with the Marnewick murder, but her perspective was speculative and wrong. I think she had had other dreams for me, but she… was my mother: she supported me.

  What can I tell you about Police College in Pretoria? Rookies, young men from every level of society thrown together. We paraded and learned and carried on like young bulls in the evening. We argued and talked nonsense and laughed and dreamed of more sex and less physical effort. We paraded and perspired in classes without air-conditioning and made beds with perfect edges and learned to shoot.

  Let me be honest. The rest of my intake learned to shoot. I shut my eyes and eventually, with the minimum number of marks, managed to stay on the course. From the start, firearms were my Achilles’ heel, my nemesis as a policeman. It was inexplicable. I liked the smell of gun oil, the glimmer of black metal, the cold, effective lines. I picked up the weapons with the same amount of bravado and the same feeling of power as did the other recruits, handled them, and fired them. But the projectiles I sent off by pulling the trigger, the physics I initiated, were always less effective than every other rookie’s. I was teased endlessly about it but it didn’t damage my ego, mainly because my achievements in the tests and examinations tipped the scales of mutual respect in another direction. In theoretical work, on paper, with a set of questions, I had no equal.

  And then the training was over and I was a constable in a uniform and I asked for Stilfontein or Klerksdorp or Orkney, heaven only knows why, and got Sunnyside in Pretoria and for the next two years locked up drunken students and dealt with disturbing-the-peace complaints and smoothed down marital scraps in thousands of apartments and investigated burglaries from cars and served in the charge office and learned how to fill in SAPS forms, over and over and over again, adding to the tons of paper of the documentation of justice.

  And was branded as the classical-music constable, the one who read (but couldn’t shoot worth a damn). For the Sunnyside office of the SAP I was what a teddy bear was for the center line of a high school rugby team: a kind of totem, a defense against the darkness of total cultural decline in a city area of gray crime.

  Because that was our daily task: not the screaming colors of injustice committed in hatred, but the drab world of minor, white-collar transgressions, of human weakness on the colorless part of the police palette.

  I lived in a bachelor pad with a single bed and a table and a chair that my mother gave me and I made a bookcase with bricks and planks and saved for three months for the deposit on a Defy stove and taught myself to cook from magazines and read virtually every book in the library and worked shifts that didn’t do much for romance or socializing, but I did manage, however, among the enormous number of lonely young girls in Sunnyside, to strike it lucky, one or two or three nights per month of wriggling, struggling, despairing sex. They were back scratchers, virtually without exception, as if they wanted to leave a physical mark that would outlast the brief flame of physical passion.

  There were times when I could not remember why I was a servant of justice. I first had to think back to Stilfontein, to stand at the wooden fence of shame again, to drink at the fountain of inspiration.

  It was temporary, everything, a purposeless existence, a rite of passage, marking time, wasted years, growing years, growing-up years.

  21.

  You make your own luck.

  He drove to Table View, the rain sifting onto the shallow lagoon, a discomfort within him, displeased with himself, with Hope Beneke. He knew she knew something, didn’t want to say anything. Kemp who probably still let the rumors live. That was what everyone thought, that he had seen Nagel die and it had fucked him up.

  Ha.

  Discomfort about the whole investigation. There was something he’d missed, he knew it, there was something, somewhere. Something Van As had said, something in O’Grady’s file.

  You make your own luck.

  Uncomfortable. He wasn’t a loser. With his life, yes, but that was different, you couldn’t battle the odds, but this thing was dead, just another murderer who had joined the hordes of the unarrested, just another statistic. It happened, he knew it; sometimes there wasn’t enough evidence or enough luck.

  He needed a great deal of luck with this case, he needed an explosion, a piece of fucking dynamite that could blow away the cobwebs of fifteen years, blow open the secrets of Johannes Jacobus Smit,
blow away the dust so that the bones and the fossils—the facts—could be distinguished from the rocks.

  How the fuck could he make his own luck with this thing?

  How could he gain more time?

  Gain time.

  You must be able to go back in time.

  If he could only…

  Hang on.

  No, it wouldn’t…

  Quantico. What had they said?

  No.

  Yes.

  Jesus.

  He braked, suddenly and hard, swearing as a car behind him complained with a blast of the horn, missing him by inches, and he turned, drove over the central ridge in the road, heard the Corolla’s undercarriage flattening the shrubs, let the wheels kick up wet sand, turned back to Hope Beneke because he had a fucking idea, he had a bomb, he had a plan to blow away the spiderwebs.

  She simply sat, coffee mugs still on the table, unwilling to think about the full implications of his visit, her thoughts random, disappointed.

  She had no choice: she had to accept that he had been right, that they wouldn’t get any further. The police had achieved nothing, either; he had at least achieved a bit more, discovered a false identity. He’d been so positive with his theories last night, and she’d been so hopeful, excited that they were going to solve the problem, but he wasn’t only…

  She’d been pleased with herself earlier, with her handling of him, her calmness, her avoidance of potential conflict. She’d thought she’d discovered the key to Zatopek van Heerden, the mystery: Simply defuse every explosive situation. Don’t react. She had hidden her disappointment well, she had been so brave when she said that she would tell Wilna van As, but she would find it hard. She knew she would be brokenhearted.

  Disappointment. Because Van Heerden was out of her life. Better that way. He was, despite the hurt and the defenselessness, trouble. With a capital T.

  Was there really nothing else he could do?

  No. She had to accept that. He had even returned the advance. She looked at the little pile of notes on the breakfast counter. The testimony of her detective.