Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

  He looked at her. Her eyes were on him, stunned: he was speaking to her, and he was speaking like an adult, like an intelligent, live human being.

  “And that is the core. I thought that we were all good. Most of us. And let me tell you, that was a giant step, a great achievement for a cop. I made the big mistake of believing we were all good because I was good. Inherently, naturally.”

  Then he was quiet. He sat in the worn chair in front of her and looked at her, moved his eyes over the contours of her face, familiar by now, saw the intensity with which she listened. He felt she was too near and he got up slowly, careful to keep his body turned away from her, avoiding physical contact. His mouth was dry. He took a few steps to the kitchen corner, switched on the kettle, turned. Her eyes were still fixed on him.

  “My mother is an artist. That’s her work.” He pointed to the wall. “She creates beautiful paintings. She looks at the world and she makes it more beautiful on canvas. I think it’s her way of distancing herself from the evil that is in all of us. She says one must look at our whole history if we want to understand people. She says we’re retrospectively shortsighted: we only look back to the Greeks and the Romans. Some even look back as far as Moses, but she says we must look back far further. She says that sometimes when she’s working in her studio and it’s quiet, she hears a sound and she feels all the tiny muscles in her ear contracting to turn the shell in the direction of the sound, like a cat’s. She says that’s her proof, her reminder that we mustn’t forget to look back as far as the animal world. But even my mother won’t admit that we’re bad. She cannot. Just like you. Because you believe that you’re good. And you are. Because you have never had the opportunity to let the evil escape, because life has never given you the choice.”

  The water boiled.

  He turned away, took out two mugs. Coffee, he thought. The planet around which his and Hope Beneke’s social contact revolved.

  She had courage, he thought. To come here. No one else had ever done it.

  “Sugar and milk?”

  “Only milk, please.”

  He took the carton out of the fridge, poured milk into her mug, carried the two coffees. She moved from the table to a chair opposite his. She wanted to say a thousand things, but she didn’t want to put this miracle of an eloquent, new, intelligent, other, strange Van Heerden at risk with the wrong phrase.

  He sat down. “You see, Hope —”

  The telephone rang. He looked at his watch, stood up, picked up the phone.

  “Van Heerden.”

  “Could I speak to Mike Tyson?” It was Kara-An.

  “Are you looking for Hope?”

  “No, Mike, I’m looking for you. I’m on the Morning Star road and I can’t find your house. I’m looking for directions.”

  What did she want? “I don’t know where you are.”

  “I’m in front of a gate. Next to the gate is a sign with the words TABLE STABLES. I presume it refers to the mountain, not a piece of furniture. Otherwise the owner should have his head examined.”

  “The turnoff is a hundred meters farther on.”

  “How will I know it when I see it?”

  “There are two white pillars. One on each side of the entrance.”

  “No cute little name?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so, Mike. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Come to the little house, not the big one.”

  “Not the one on the prairie, I trust.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, Mike, you’re a boxer, not an intellectual.” Then the line went dead. He replaced the phone.

  “That was Kara-An.”

  “Is she on her way?”

  “She’s here. Down the road.”

  Hope said nothing, merely nodded.

  “What does she want?” he asked.

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  Then they saw headlights approaching the gate.

  If she had a penchant for swearing, Hope Beneke thought, she would have employed one of Van Heerden’s words with a vengeance.

  24.

  The two letters arrived within a week of each other. One was an appointment to Brixton Murder and Robbery; the other offered new, unexpected crossroads.

  Dear Zatopek,

  I’m not sure whether you read the Careers section in the Sunday newspapers; therefore this letter is to inform you that the Department of Police Science has grown and the increasing number of students necessitates the creation of a post for a lecturer. Applications for the post are being considered.

  Best wishes,

  Cobus Taljaard (Prof.)

  PS: When are you coming to discuss your master’s?

  How does one make such a choice? Not based on salary, because there wasn’t a huge difference. Not by looking at the potential professional stimulus, because both posts offered unique challenges. Working conditions? It depends on what you like.

  I believe that I eventually made the decision I did because I could see myself as a lecturer, because it would make me feel even better about myself, the teacher (in contrast to the executive role), the cerebral world. The potential of a title with so much more weight than a rank. Doctor, one day. Still later, professor.

  During my studies in psychology, I developed the theory that most of the decisions we make, if not all, are to feed the ego. The choice of a car, clothes, a suburb, friends, favorite drinks—all are aimed at creating a specific image for the world, to announce This is who I am so that the world’s perception can become a mirror to reflect ourselves and, like Narcissus, make us love the reflection. I started working at the University of South Africa’s Department of Police Science in February 1989. At the same time I moved to a larger, better flat in Sunnyside. And changed my battered Nissan for an almost new Volkswagen Golf. I was unashamedly and irresistibly on my way to the top.

  All I still needed was the Big L.

  There were women in my life. The brief interactions of the first years in Pretoria systematically changed to longer relationships. When I look back, I must admit, with a certain degree of shame, that, all in all, they were relationships of convenience. It wasn’t conscious exploitation, more a natural way to pass the time until the Damascene experience of Love happened to me, until that intense, wonderful moment when I would look at the face of a woman and know that she was the One.

  They all accused me of being afraid of being tied down. (Commit was a favorite word, taken, I think, from magazines like Cosmo and Femina, articles with headings like “Ten Ways to Make Your Relationship Last.”) And they were right. I tried to halt deepening relationships with weak excuses (“We don’t have to be in such a hurry. Can’t we get to know each other better?”) and their duration was often directly linked to the levels of patience.

  Was I wrong? Given the rules of the game of love, was it unethical of me to use the togetherness, the regular sex, the availability, without committing myself?

  I’m not always entirely sure. I never lied. I never promised eternal love, evidence of deeper devotion than I was prepared to give. Because not one of them was the One.

  But the one thing a woman wants to hear more than “I love you” are the words that pave the way to marriage.

  I’m not sexist. I grant women every possible right they want to appropriate for themselves. To be perfectly honest, I often and easily admit that women do many things much better than men. Especially in the professional field. They have more sympathy, more tact; they’re not burdened with the curse of testosterone-driven aggression; they have a natural talent for differentiating between problems in the workplace and the contaminating politics of ambition and (male) ego. But that they’re positively driven in the identification of a companion for life and the processing of a relationship through all its conventional stages to down-the-aisle-and-up-to-the-altar, I can attest to from firsthand experience.

  There was a woman I took to a drive-in on a first date, before I made sergeant, a pretty, d
ecent Afrikaans girl from some small town, Colesberg or Brandfort or Colenso. And halfway through the forgettable film we began necking and tested the physical milestones one after the other—held hands, arm around her shoulder, careful kissing to openmouthed, tongue-searing kisses, my hand on her breast, blouse unbuttoned, bra off, caressing of hard nipples, hand sliding down. And just there she stopped me with a firm hand and a breathless “No.” I could hear her ragged breathing, feel her galloping heartbeat—she was, to use the unworthy, chauvinistically popular word, hot.

  But the promised land under the elastic of the panties remained out of reach.

  “Why not?” I asked yearningly.

  “Because we’re not going steady.”

  Commitment. That would be my passport to paradise.

  I often speculated on the nature of women’s sexual morality because I didn’t think I’d ever understand it. But the aspects that would fascinate me above all were the conditions they attached to the granting of sex. Love’s social contract. I understood that it served as a defense mechanism against the overriding urge of the man, as my mother had put it, to sow his seed. But I’ll never forget Miss Colesberg’s or wherever’s choice of words. Not I don’t love you.

  “Because we’re not going steady.”

  Commitment was the currency, the toll to be paid on the road to intimacy. But the most interesting aspect of this conditional morality were the lines drawn. There were women, like the girl from Colesberg, who drew the line those few frustrating centimeters below the navel. Some even declared the breasts a no-man’s-land if there was no possibility of a long-term relationship. Others shifted the border lower and you were allowed to touch the garden of delights but not push your prick into it. You were allowed to kiss and caress and lick and give your fingers free play, but if you wanted the portals to open for Mr. Delivery, you had to show your passport.

  Commitment.

  Wendy.

  That’s where I should be going.

  With Wendy I at least thought she might be the One. Briefly.

  Cute Wendy.

  She came into my office at the University of South Africa while I was still unpacking my boxes, with her cute little body, her blond bob around her cute little face, a little bundle of bouncing energy, and she opened her little red mouth and spoke to me incessantly for four years.

  I think Wendy looked at me that day and decided that I was what she wanted.

  “We’re going to be neighbors, I’m in English Lit across the passage, you must be the new Police Science guy, my Afrikaans is not very good, I come from Maritzburg and I can tell you, Pretoria is a shock, my God, I haven’t introduced myself, I’m Wendy Brice.” She extended her small hand, gave mine a firm shake, and peeped at me from under her blond bob like a little girl, a gesture I would get to know very well in the following months and years.

  Wendy was an organizer. She constantly reorganized her own life. And she organized other people’s lives, often without their knowing it. She knew where she was heading; she was focused. Wendy was a realist. She knew her academic limitations, knew she was a woman in the male world of the university and that the glass ceiling of senior lecturer would be her highest step up the ladder. But her aspirations were higher. Different. I won’t say it was a conscious and calculated decision of If I can’t be a professor, I’ll marry a man who’ll become one, but Wendy had the larger details of her life mapped out. “I want to get married and have children, Zet. Your children” ended her hair-peeping plea in an endless series of arguments about my lack of commitment.

  The “Zet” she had heard from my mother and she had leaped on it, like an eagle pouncing on a rabbit.

  Wendy was mad about my mother, about her eccentricity, her status as an artist, her encouragement of me in my career. “I share your sentiments, Mrs. V.”

  My mother disliked the “Mrs. V.” She disliked Wendy, too, but as usual was too tactful to say so.

  Like most beautiful women, Wendy was also a manipulative operator who couldn’t resist the power of her curves. She used them and her pouty little mouth and her fringe-peeping look and her little-girl attitude. Never so flagrantly that it could be pinned down. But subtly, like a pickpocket.

  Despite all my retrospective cynicism about Wendy, I was in love for the first few months of our relationship. Because she was so cute and the first woman with whom I could discuss poems and books—from whom I could learn. And Wendy shared her English lit with more enthusiasm than she shared her body.

  Our sex life was peculiar.

  At first there was a cerebral relationship, an intellectual discovery, but I must admit that I was attracted to the little body from the start, the hourglass shape of little breasts and waist and hips, the cute little rounded bottom, her legs faultless miniature sculptures—she was small, but a perfect pocket-size Venus.

  Unfortunately, the promise that her body held would remain just that—a promise.

  Even now I don’t know whether it was manipulation or a real lack of interest in sex. I had to work for every penetration, had to pay dearly for every orgasm. An hour’s foreplay sometimes led to nothing, and when she made the full sacrifice, she followed it up almost immediately after my climax with a discussion about my career—generally the lack of progress, Wendy yakking away, never a direct attack but a traffic jam of speech that took the longest possible time to get from point A to point B.

  But the biggest frustration was her control during the sexual act, her determined clinging to the civilized side of total surrender, her sounds small and cute and premeditated. She never fell into the abyss of passion to lose herself in the primitive, the animal pleasure of it.

  I would only understand the full story behind the Brice interest some years after our first meeting. She had heard, before I joined Police Science, of the academic wunderkind who was on his way. Professor Cobus Taljaard made no secret of his admiration for my ability and evidently often aired these views to his neighbor in English Lit. Which also made me wonder with how much calculation she had planned that first chatty entry into my life.

  The fact of the matter was that my career wasn’t on hold. It advanced—quickly, according to me. I found my feet in the preparation of lectures that had to be sent to extramural students, the reading and correcting of papers, the giving of occasional lectures. Carefully and under the watchful eye of the prof, I started to publish and tackled my master’s degree. But Wendy thirsted for titles, (wife of) a doctor, a professor. And a master’s degree was a long way from either.

  So she concentrated on two things. Engagement. And work. All our conversations, all her statements and opinions and little parables, eventually came around to one or both of these themes. It was a game, it was the engine room that supplied the energy for our relationship, the dynamo that kept us together for four years—me fencing and delaying and parrying, her accusing and teasing and slowly, systematically closing the pincers, demolishing the excuses one after another.

  And yet, it wasn’t her putting her foot down or making an ultimatum that ended our relationship. The last straw had nothing to do with her. It was the ghost of Baby Marnewick that came to seduce me.

  25.

  Kara-An Rousseau wore jeans, a white shirt, and a blue sweater and looked as though she had had eight hours’ sleep.

  “The doctor is on the warpath, Mike. He wants to take you to court. He’s after your blood. His ego, my friend, was hurt far more than his face.”

  “Mike?” Hope Beneke asked.

  “Didn’t he tell you? Like in Tyson.”

  “Forget it. Hope has already tried the crapping-from-on-high bit.”

  “He even sounds like Tyson, don’t you think?” she said to Hope. Then she turned to Van Heerden. “I take it that an apology is out of the question?”

  “A woman with insight. A first.”

  Hope Beneke saw that he was back in the aggressive shell, the drawbridge raised. She wanted to weep.

  “Didn’t think you were the type for whom s
orry was an easy word. That’s why I like you so much. But you have two problems, Mike. And I’m the only one who can help you with both.”

  He snorted deep in his throat.

  “Number one—I believe that I’ll be able to convince the good doctor to drop his litigation plans. Not only will I remind him that it will entail very unwelcome publicity for both of us, which we don’t need as professional people. But as a last resort I can also remind him of the night he arrived on my doorstep raging drunk and without his wife’s knowledge, to tell me how much he wanted me. That should heal the physician, don’t you think?”

  “Your second problem is that of publicity in a certain murder investigation. If you are still able to cast your mind that far back, Mike, you’ll remember that I’m the one who was approached for help. Two good reasons for loving Kara-An.”

  He looked at her, appraisingly, surprised by the change in her from last night’s good hostess to this… phenomenon, totally in control. Why, he wondered, this sudden demonstration of power? He made calculations, adding the Kara-An of this morning to the last sight he’d had of her before he left the previous evening, the beautiful woman in the red dress, intensely stimulated by a fistfight, a shadow that passed quickly, fleetingly.

  Premonitions of evil.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Ha, predictable to the last. I didn’t expect you to fall on your knees, Mike. Your ego is too brittle for that. That’s why I’ve come to sow a little thought. Both the doctor and the media have a price. The story of your life, in writing, when this business of the will is over, in exchange for peace on the medical front. And front-page copy tomorrow morning.” She walked to the door, opened it. “I don’t suppose I have to remind you that time isn’t necessarily on your side.” She walked out. “Bye, Hope,” were the last words they heard before the door closed.