Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

  “Bullshit,” said Van Heerden loudly and clearly and angrily, and even the waiters came to a halt.

  “Your language!” said the doctor.

  “Fuck you,” said Van Heerden.

  “What does a policeman know about music?” said the doctor, red in the face, eyes widened.

  “As much as a doctor about intellectual depth, you cunt.”

  “Zatopek!” It was Hope’s voice, urgent, pleading, but it made no difference.

  “You Nazi,” said the doctor, halfway up, his napkin falling off his lap.

  And then Van Heerden hit him as he rose, right fist against the head, a glancing blow, not a direct hit. For a moment the doctor was off-balance, but he recovered quickly, swung toward Van Heerden, who was ready and hit him again, the businesswoman of the year shrieking and holding her head as she cowered between them. He struck the doctor full on the nose with a right, hit again, against the mouth, felt teeth breaking, more women screaming, Hope’s “No, no, no” shrill and high and despairing. The doctor staggered back against the wall, his foot hooked onto the chair, Van Heerden over him, lifting his arm for the last blow, white with anger, but then someone held his arm, a calm, coaxing voice behind him. “Steady on, slowly now,” murmured the cultural attaché, “slowly now, he was only a center.” He still pulled against the man’s firm grip, looked down at the bloody face below him, the glassy eyes. “Slowly now,” softly repeated, and he relaxed.

  Deadly silence. He dropped his arm, moved his foot to regain his balance, looked up.

  At the head of the table, almost upright, stood Kara-An Rousseau, an expression of complete sexual arousal on her face.

  22.

  Sergeant Thomas “Fires” van Vuuren was a caricature, a peripheral figure in my Sunnyside days, a brandy addict who exhibited the evidence of his passion with a map of blue veins on his face and a knob of a nose, which he wore gracelessly, a man in his late fifties with a vast belly, unattractive and obtuse.

  Of all the people at the station, he would have been the last on the list of my nominees of those who would have a lasting influence on my life. I hardly knew him.

  In the police, as in any government organization, there are a number of them, those rather pathetic people who get stuck at a certain rank because of some deficiency, sometimes blatant laziness or an unforgivable misdemeanor—the cannon fodder of bureaucracy who trundle down the slow track to retirement without haste or expectation. Sarge Fires was always around. I don’t think we exchanged more than five words in my first two years.

  I sat in the tearoom, cramming, my first set of questions for the promotion examination a month or so away. He came in, made himself coffee, dragged a chair to the table, and tinkled the spoon loudly against the cup as he stirred.

  “You’re wasting your time with the sergeants’ exam,” he said.

  I looked up, surprised, saw his watery little blue eyes watching me attentively.

  “Sarge?”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  I moved the books and folded my arms. “Why, Sarge?”

  “You’re a clever boy, Van Heerden. I’ve been watching you. You’re not like most of them.”

  He lit a cigarette, without filter, smelly tobacco, and checked the temperature of his coffee with a small sip. “I saw your service file. You were the top guy in the college. You read. You look at the shit in the cells and you see people and you think and you wonder.”

  I was astonished.

  He trickled the cigarette smoke through his nostrils, thrust his hand into his shirt pocket, and took out a creased piece of paper, then unfolded it and passed it to me across the table. It was a page from the police magazine Servamus.

  Boost Your Career Now!

  Enroll Now for the BA (Police Science) Degree at Unisa

  Since 1972 the SAP and Unisa have offered a degree that is specifically aimed at professionalizing your post with an academic background. This is a specialist three-year course with police science as a compulsory major subject—and one of the following as a second major subject: criminology, public administration, psychology, sociology, political science, or communication science.

  An address and telephone numbers followed.

  I finished reading and looked up at Sergeant Fires van Vuuren, at the red hair that he had allowed to grow long on one side to enable him to comb the strands over the ever-increasing bald patch.

  “You must do that,” he said through another mouthful of smoke. “These other little exams”—waving at my original reading matter—“are for policemen like Broodryk. And the like.”

  Then he stood up, killed the cigarette in the ashtray, took his coffee, and walked out. I called, “Thanks, Sarge,” after him, but I don’t know whether he heard me.

  Over the years I would often think about that moment in the Sunnyside station’s tearoom. About Thomas van Vuuren and his mysterious interest and encouragement. The Broodryk to whom he had referred was an adjutant in the terminology of the old ranks, a big, brusque, ambitious man who would later acquire notoriety as one of the most merciless operators at the infamous Vlakplaas, who had, in Sunnyside, already shown his willingness to physically abuse those arrested.

  Fires van Vuuren never again tried to speak to me. Once or twice I tried to look him up after I had registered as a student at Unisa and started my studies, but he had withdrawn behind his rampart of obtuseness, as if our conversation had never happened. What had motivated him to draw my service file (without permission, more likely than not) and to tear out the magazine page carefully and bring it to me, I’ll never know.

  I can only speculate that the truth lay somewhere in the contrast he had drawn between Broodryk and me. Was Van Vuuren’s weakness that he saw criminals as human beings? Had his physical unattractiveness hidden a sensitivity that had to be deadened by brandy so that he could get through his daily task?

  He died a year or two later of a heart attack, alone in his house. His funeral was small and sad. A son was there, a single member of the family at the graveside, with a set face and a measure of relief, I thought. And the conventional wisdom of his colleagues was “It was the booze,” said with much shaking of heads.

  And the evening after my first graduation ceremony, I quietly drank a toast to him. Because he had given me two gifts: Direction. And self-respect. I know it sounds dramatic but one must draw the comparison accurately, rather like those kitsch slimming ads that use the “Before” and “After” pictures (often touched up) to convince. After two years in Sunnyside I was firmly on the road to nowhere, frustrated, unstimulated, professionally at sea, unwilling to admit that I had made a mistake in my career choice. The police, more than any other occupation, has a way of blunting one’s sensibilities, both by the endless routine and by the nature of the work—the constant exposure to the dregs, the scum, the aberrant, the socially and economically deprived, and, sometimes, the purely evil.

  Thomas van Vuuren had opened a door in this maze.

  As I advanced academically, the stimulation and focus would systematically act as the deus ex machina to haul me out of the professional quicksand. I started liking myself.

  Oh, the psychology of positive feedback.

  “Your essays show singular writing and dialectic skills. It is a pleasure to receive them.”

  “Your insight into this subject is impressive and considerably above the level of what is expected from an undergraduate. Congratulations.”

  What the lecturers didn’t realize and I, on a subconscious level, did, was that the course was a lifeline. I studied at every possible moment, read more than necessary, analyzed. I chose police science, criminology, and psychology as my main subjects, unwilling to give up any of the three. I achieved (not without self-satisfaction) distinctions in all three, every year. I was promoted, even though the promotion was due to my passing the sergeants’ examination, and transferred to the Pretoria station. The three stripes meant very little to me. I had far higher ideals.

  My
mother was overjoyed with her son’s newfound focus, with the fact that I was acquiring an “education.”

  DAY 4

  SUNDAY, JULY 9

  23.

  She knocked on his door at seven in the morning and when he opened it, his hair tousled and his eyes sleep-filled, she walked in out of the dark, the red mark on her cheek bright from lack of sleep and the anger in her, the powerlessness because she couldn’t understand him.

  She stood with her back against the gray wall while he remained at the open front door. “Shut the door,” she said. “It’s cold.”

  He sighed, closed the door, walked to a chair, sat down.

  “You’re my employer, Hope. You can fire me. It’s your right.”

  “Why did you hit him, Van Heerden?”

  “Because I wanted to.”

  She dropped her chin onto her chest. Slowly shook her head from side to side, silent.

  The silence spread through the room.

  “Do you want coffee?” he asked without any tone of hospitality.

  Her head was still moving from side to side. She looked at the running shoes on her feet, looking for words. “No, I don’t want coffee. I want answers.”

  He said nothing.

  “I’m trying to understand, Van Heerden. Since you left me there last night with a bleeding man lying next to the table and simply walked out and drove off, I’ve been trying to understand how your mind works. You were —”

  “Is that why you’re angry? Because I left you there?”

  She lifted her eyes to his, silenced him with a look. When she spoke again, her voice was even softer. “You were a servant of justice, Van Heerden. According to all reports a good one. In the past few days I’ve had enough experience of you to come to the conclusion that you’re an intelligent man. Someone who understands causality. Someone who has the capacity to realize that action and consequence cannot be separated, cannot be restricted to those immediately involved. That’s what the whole legal system is about, Van Heerden. To protect the community against the wider implications. Because there are always wider implications.”

  “Have you come to fire me, Hope?”

  She didn’t hesitate for a moment, would not be driven off course.

  “What I can’t understand, Van Heerden, is that you give yourself the right to hit someone, to wreak your own infantile rage on a defenseless person without giving a thought to the other nineteen people there.”

  “Defenseless? He wasn’t defenseless. He was a provincial rugby player. And he was a cunt.”

  “Do you think it makes you more of a man if you swear, Van Heerden? Do you think it makes you strong?”

  “Fuck you, Hope. I never asked you to like me. I am what I am. I don’t owe anyone anything. You have no right to come into my house, to tell me how bad I am. I hit the cunt because he deserved it. He spent the entire evening looking for it. With his fucking superiority.”

  “I don’t have the right? Are you the one with all the rights? To go to someone else’s house as a guest, as someone who needs Kara-An’s help for your work, and then attack one of her friends like a barbarian because you didn’t like his attitude? Your fists told him how bad he was. That was your right. But when I do it to you in a reasonably civilized manner, you’re suddenly touchy. Where’s your sense of fairness, Van Heerden?”

  He sank back in his chair. “I told you. I’m bad.”

  And then the mark flamed bloodred, a glow that spread over her entire face. She leaned forward, away from the wall, her hands gesticulating as she spoke. “Ah, the great excuse, the answer to everything: ‘I’m bad.’ Extrapolate that, you coward. Just think for a moment about a community in which we all do as we please as long as we admit we’re bad. We can murder and rape and deceive and assault, because we’re bad. It explains everything, it justifies everything, it excuses everything.”

  He rested his chin on his hand, his fingers almost covering his mouth. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand. That’s the whole point. But I’m here because I want to understand. If I have insight into what you are, I can at least try to understand. To comprehend. But you don’t want to tell me anything. You live behind the barrier of your senseless excuses, your rationalization based on pathetic arguments. Speak to me, Van Heerden. Tell me why you’re like this. Then I’ll be able to understand. Or at least have some sympathy.”

  “Why do you want to know, Hope? What’s with you? What does it matter? Next week, when this Van As affair is over, you’ll be rid of me. Then you can carry on your practice for women, the sad victims of society, and you need never think of me again. So, what does it matter?”

  “Last night your behavior involved me and nineteen other people. You tainted my memory with an experience I didn’t ask for. You upset me. You humiliated me because the others assumed you were there with me. I was involved by association. I’m now part of your behavior. That is why, if you don’t have the courage to ask yourself questions, I’ll do it for you. Because I’ve been given the right to know, to try and understand.”

  He snorted, wrinkled his nose. “Your reputation as the great female attorney has been dented because you were there with me. And you don’t like that.”

  “You want to believe that, Van Heerden. That everyone is as selfish as you are.”

  She walked across to him, her feet soundless in the running shoes, sat on the coffee table in front of him, her face almost touching his, her voice urgent, her words boiling up, tumbling out of her.

  “I voted for the National Party, Van Heerden. Before ’ninety-two. In two elections. Because I believed separate development was right. Fair. Believed like my father and my mother. Like my friends. And their parents. Like my teachers and lecturers. Like the whole white population of Bloemfontein. I believed the local Afrikaans newspaper. And Afrikaans radio and TV. I questioned nothing because I saw blacks as we all saw them. As people who believed in witchcraft and the tokoloshe and the spirits of their forefathers, who worked in the house and garden and fetched the rubbish and smelled of Lifebuoy soap. I accompanied my father when he took Emily to the location and I looked at the dirty streets and the small, gardenless houses and I knew separate development was right because they were so unlike us. Why didn’t they garden? How could people have so little pride? Homelands. If they murdered so easily, let them do it in Thaba Nchu or Mafikeng or Umtata. I shuddered every time they planted a bomb or shot people in a restaurant. I was angry… shake your head as much as you like, Van Heerden, but now you’re going to listen. I was angry with the rest of the world every time they applied sanctions or criticized us because I thought they didn’t know, didn’t understand. They didn’t know our black people. They thought ours were like theirs, Sidney Poitier and Eddie Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg. Ours were different. Destroyers and wreckers, always angry and unfriendly. Ours spoke languages that no one understood. Theirs spoke the same American English as they did. And wore beautiful clothes and played Othello in the movies. And then ’ninety-two arrived and I was scared, Van Heerden, because now they would take everything and make a mess of it so that the entire country looked like dirty townships. My fear made me search for reasons why it shouldn’t happen. No logical thought, no open-mindedness, no sense of fairness. Fear. And then I found a book about Mandela, an old biography, written by some Dutch woman or other, and I read it and it was like being reborn. Do you know what it feels like to change your opinion of yourself, your views, your people, your parents, your leaders, your background, your history—all within two days? To realize everything you believed, and believed in, was wrong, twisted, without insight, even evil? But I’m proud of one thing, Van Heerden. That I had the ability to do it. To open my mind to truth. To see, after being blind for so long. And after I’d assimilated and processed the guilt and the humiliation, after working through my own anger and the anger I felt against all the whites who had assisted in my seduction, I came to a decision. Never again would I make a judgment based on a lack
of exposure and knowledge and insight and comprehension. I would search for truth. I wouldn’t judge people because of their color, beliefs, or actions before I understood why they were like that. And if you think that I’m going to drop it, that I’ll believe your infantile excuses, that I’ll be thrown off course by your fencing and flight, you’re making a big mistake.”

  She sat in front of him, her finger emphasizing each point, centimeters away from his nose, and then she laughed at herself, a short, derisory sound.

  Slowly she released her breath.

  “Talk to me.” The first word almost pleading.

  He looked blankly at the wall.

  “Our view of the world differs too much, Hope.”

  “How do you know? You don’t know me.”

  “I know enough, Hope. I know enough of your kind to know. You think life is fair. You think that if you try hard enough, try to live a good life, everything will be fine. You think it’s contagious. You think if you try, others will do the same, one after another, a wave of goodness that will cover all the evil in the world. I know you because I was like that once, Hope. No, I was better. I reached my lucidum intervallum long before ’ninety-two. At three in the morning I looked through the bars of the Pretoria police station cell and among the fifteen or sixteen black people in there, drunks and knife wielders and rapists and burglars, I saw a man sitting on the edge of the steel bench with a book of Breyten Breytenbach poetry open in his hands. A black man. I was the lieutenant, Hope—I was second in command. I had him taken out and brought to my office. I closed the door and talked to him. About poetry at first. He was a teacher in the black township Mamelodi. His Afrikaans was better than mine. He was arrested because he was on foot in a white suburb after midnight, on his way to the railway station, twelve kilometers away. He’d been visiting a professor who taught at the University of South Africa. By invitation. Because he had to discuss the progress of his thesis for his master’s degree on Breyten. They locked him up because what was a black man doing in a posh white suburb at that time of night? That was my moment of truth. It changed me. And suddenly I was the poor man’s Afrikaner Gandhi who wanted to bring the message of passive resistance to the tearoom, the bedroom, and the living room. In a civilized manner. I made a point of starting conversations with petrol attendants, office cleaners, and road-café waiters. Joking and sympathetic, I focused on them as people. I knew we differed culturally, but different isn’t wrong; different is merely different. Basically we’re all human, Hope. I knew that.”