Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

  He had to protect his mother. He had to find Schlebusch before Schlebusch found them. He had to fight Military Intelligence’s court interdict.

  We should’ve burned the fucking will a long time ago.

  How did Schlebusch know about the will? Because it was among the stolen goods, among the dollars and the documents of Rupert de Jager/Johannes Jacobus Smit, and he had reached a conclusion?

  Or because Wilna van As had spoken to him?

  And if it was gone, why continue with the investigation?

  A gun against his head. Why hadn’t Schlebusch shot him?

  Had he seen other vehicles stopping? Or had it never been the aim to eliminate—merely to frighten?

  You have a mother, policeman. Do you hear me? You have a mother.

  His first responsibility was to protect her.

  He looked at her sitting in the chair next to the hospital bed.

  Had to protect her first.

  And then get Military Intelligence off his back. Which probably wouldn’t be too difficult.

  And then find Schlebusch.

  The man with the long blond hair running away, getting into the truck, but there was something…

  The left-hand drive…

  Perhaps he had lied about the will. Perhaps it was still somewhere. And if it no longer existed…

  There were dollars.

  We…

  Chaos.

  They were all there: Bester Brits and a new man, Brigadier Walter Redelinghuys, steel gray crew cut, square jaw, O’Grady and Joubert, Hope Beneke, his mother, the doctor. He came out of the bathroom dressed in the clothes his mother had brought and they were all there.

  “It’s a homicide, sir, and therefore it’s our case.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s our man who’s dead.” Staking out territory on the grounds of murder. As he walked in, everyone was quiet for a moment. He looked at Hope, hoping for an indication of the whereabouts of Carolina de Jager. She gave a small nod, knew what he wanted. Relief.

  “We want a statement, Van Heerden,” said O’Grady.

  “I forbid you to speak to them,” said Bester Brits, and he turned to Joubert: “You got your orders from high up. Why are you messing around?”

  Mat Joubert stood in the doorway, filling the space with his height. “The orders changed this morning,” he said calmly. “Speak to your boss.”

  “I’m his boss,” said Square Jaw, “Walter Redelinghuys,” extending his hand to Van Heerden. “Brigadier.”

  “Van Heerden.”

  “I know. How do you feel this morning?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” said the doctor, a startled young man with a mustache and a small beard and large pebble glasses, a different one from last night’s. “You’ll have to wait outside until I’ve finished the examination,” he said without conviction.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” said Van Heerden.

  “Then I want to take down a statement,” said fat Inspector Tony O’Grady.

  “No, you don’t,” said Bester Brits.

  “Stop it!” said his mother in a sharp and decisive voice, and a silence fell. “You’re like children. You should be ashamed of yourself. A man died yesterday afternoon and you’re squabbling like a lot of schoolboys. Have you no respect?”

  He saw Hope at that moment, her small, secret smile.

  “Tell me,” said Joan van Heerden, “did he have a wife and children?”

  “Yes,” said Walter Redelinghuys. “Three children.”

  “Who’s with them? Who’s looking after them? Who’s comforting them? I don’t know where you all fit in, but that’s where you should be now.”

  “Mrs. van Heerden,” said Redelinghuys, weightily and conciliatorily, “you’re right. But there is also a murderer out there and national security is involved and —”

  “National security? What an absurd concept. What does it mean, General…”

  “Brigadier,” said Bester Brits.

  “Be quiet,” said Joan van Heerden. “You and your big, empty words.”

  “It was Schlebusch,” said Van Heerden, and they all looked at him.

  “Doctor, you’ll have to excuse us,” said Bester Brits, and, taking the young man’s arm, guided him to the door, the eyes behind the pebble glasses huge, but he made no objection, allowed himself to be led out, and the door closed.

  “Who is Schlebusch?” asked Mat Joubert.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Brits. “Privileged information.”

  “You can choose,” said Van Heerden, the old rage coming back. “You can stay here and bark like lapdogs and I’m going home, or you can shut up and listen. One interruption and I leave. One more reference to national security and I leave.” He pointed at Brits. “You’ve got something you want to cover up and I’m telling you I don’t want to know what it is. What happened in ’seventy-six doesn’t matter to me, and you can keep your secrets. But I have a job to do and I’m going to do it because I hold all the aces. Forget about your court interdict because you can’t stop this thing now. How are you going to keep Carolina de Jager quiet if she goes to the Sunday papers and starts asking questions about why, more than twenty years ago, she was informed of the death of her son and given a medal but he wasn’t dead? What are you going to do if Hope Beneke applies for an urgent interdict today to fight your gag and she invites every newspaper in the Cape to the hearing? Can you imagine the headlines?”

  Bester Brits was agitated, uncomfortable, and itching to speak.

  “I don’t want to hear a word, Brits, or I leave.”

  He looked up at them, and they looked down.

  “We know Johannes Jacobus Smit was Rupert de Jager. We know he and Bushy Schlebusch and another man did something for you in 1976 and I can only guess at the unholy shit that was involved. I don’t know where the Americans come in but somewhere along the line they have a finger in the pie. We know you paid De Jager in dollars and gave him a new identity. We know Schlebusch murdered De Jager. I suspect he was after the money. But it could be that you asked him to eliminate De Jager. Because he wanted to sing. I don’t know and I no longer care. All that matters is that we have one thing in common. We’re looking for Schlebusch. You, I assume, want to protect him or keep him quiet. Or stop him from murdering again. Murder and Robbery wants to lock him up. This conflict of interests is your problem. All we want is the will.”

  “Or his evidence about its existence and its contents,” said Hope Beneke.

  “Right,” said Van Heerden. “And let’s be honest: you have no idea where to find Schlebusch.”

  “Do you?” asked Redelinghuys.

  “No,” he said. “But I’ll find him.”

  “How?”

  “I know where to dig. And you’re going to leave me alone until I find him. And then you can argue again about jurisdiction and orders from higher up.”

  “You don’t know jack shit, Van Heerden. About ’seventy-six. You know nothing.”

  “I know enough, Brits. The detail doesn’t matter. I know enough. Yesterday afternoon Schlebusch ran us off the road and, while I hung in the wreck, held a weapon against my head and said I had to leave this whole thing alone, and now I’m wondering about two things, Brits. Why didn’t he shoot me? Because he could have. And why does he want me to stop the investigation? I’ll tell you why. He didn’t shoot me because he doesn’t want to cause more pressure. He didn’t know Mzimkhulu was dead and he didn’t want the official investigation to escalate due to another murder. Why not? For the same reason that he wants me to drop the case. Because he knows I’m close, Brits. Somewhere I hit a nerve in all the speculation and publicity that made him think I’m close. And he can’t run away because if he could, he would have. He has interests keeping him here and he’s nervous. He has dollars and a lifestyle and if the affair escalates, he loses everything. And I’m going to find him. I’m telling you here and now, I’m going to find him.”

  He saw Mat Joube
rt’s smile.

  “And one more thing. Yesterday afternoon, with a gun at my head, Schlebusch spoke about the will, and I can’t stop speculating how he knew about it. Because only we—and Murder and Robbery—know it’s the reason for the private investigation. And we didn’t talk.”

  Leave Wilna van As out of it.

  “Oh, no,” said Nougat O’Grady, and pointed a fat finger at Bester Brits. “They knew it, too. They’ve been talking to me since early Monday morning, very buddy-buddy, ‘we’re in this thing together,’ and now they’re trying to take it away, double-crossing bastards.”

  “Then, gentlemen, I wonder who informed Schlebusch: Military Intelligence or the SAPS?”

  The sunlight was blindingly bright outside, the sky cloudless and blue, the smell of sun on wet earth, the grass suddenly a deep green, the wind icy.

  “There was snow on the mountains,” his mother said as he drove home with her on the N7, the river at Vissershok broad and gleaming. She said Carolina de Jager was safe at her house with Hope, that they would be waiting for him, and she asked if he was really all right. He said yes, only bruises.

  “I met Kara-An Rousseau last night,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “She came to the hospital.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is there something I don’t know about?”

  “No.”

  She was silent for a long time until they turned in at the gate. “I think Hope is wonderful,” she said.

  She stopped in front of his house.

  “Here are your keys. They brought them to me,” she said, opening her handbag.

  “Ma…”

  “Yes, my son?”

  “There is something I must talk to you about.”

  “Yes, Son?”

  “Yesterday afternoon… Schlebusch. He threatened me, Ma. He said he’ll… come and hurt you if I don’t drop the inves-tigation.”

  He looked at her, watching for fear in her face. There was none.

  “I’m getting help today. I’ll get the best there is. I promise you.”

  “But you’re not going to drop the investigation?”

  “I’ll… get the best, Ma —”

  She silenced him with a gesture. “Maybe it’s time for me to tell you something, Zet. I went to see Hope. Last Friday. After you’d dropped the job. I went to speak to her. About you. To give you another chance. I’m not going to apologize for it because I’m your mother and I did it for you. I did it because I believed the only thing that could heal you was for you to work like you used to work. I still believe it. I don’t want you to drop it. I just want you to be careful. If you want to get someone to look after me, that’s fine. But who is going to look after you?”

  “You went to speak to Hope, Ma?”

  “I asked you who is going to look after you, Zet.”

  “I… No one. I…”

  “Will you be careful?”

  He opened the car door. “I can’t believe you went to speak to Hope.”

  She put the car into gear. “Water under the bridge. And I’m not going to apologize.”

  He got out, almost closed the door, suddenly remembered something.

  “Ma.”

  “Yes, Zet?”

  “Thank you. For last night.”

  She smiled at him, moved the car forward. He slammed the door and she drove off to her big house.

  He stood in the sunlight, his keys in his hand. He saw the daisies, suddenly in flower, a sea of white and orange stretching from his door as far as the gate. He saw the blue sky, the jagged line of the Hottentots Holland peaks in the east.

  His mother had gone to speak to Hope. No wonder they had had such a cozy conversation the day before yesterday.

  He shook his head, unlocked the door, drew the curtains in front of the windows, saw white panels of sunshine illuminating his house like spotlights.

  He looked through his CDs until he found the right one, turned up the sound to full volume, and sat down in a warm patch of sunlight. First the foundation laid by the orchestra, the prologue to the divine, then the voice of the soprano, so sweet, so heavenly sweet, Mozart’s Agnus Dei from Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento. He sat bathed in the sound, let it flow over him, into him, followed the singer’s voice through each note until it released a deep well of emotion in him; listened to more than six minutes of music and knew that it was the closest he would come to expressing his gratitude for being alive.

  Then he had a long, hot, pleasurable shower.

  “He was a Recce,” said Carolina de Jager. “And he was immensely proud of it, he and his father, and when we were told of his death, it broke his father. I still claim it was where the cancer originated. His father died in 1981 and I let the farm and moved to town and I don’t know what I’m going to do with the land—there is no one to inherit.”

  She sat in the sunlight that fell through the windows of his mother’s house, a big black writing pad and a cardboard box on her lap, and she spoke to Joan van Heerden, not to him, and he thought he understood. Wilna van As sat opposite her, next to Hope, a box of tissues next to her, expectantly, four women and him.

  “He was at Grey College in Bloemfontein and he wasn’t an excessively clever child, and he would come to the farm. He was strong because he and his father worked side by side on the farm. He was a good kid, no smoking or drinking. He was an athlete, he ran cross-country, he was second in the Free State. And then the call-up papers came for the First Infantry Battalion and he told his father he was going to try out for Reconnaissance Command. They didn’t know I was worried, didn’t know about the nights I lay awake. His father was so proud of him when he made the grade. His father always said how strict the selection was, and everyone had to listen, Sundays at the Springfontein church: ‘My son Rupert is a Recce—you know how tough the selection is. Rupert is in Angola. I shouldn’t really talk about it, but they’re giving the Cubans what for.’”

  “Angola?”

  “What Rupert did, he wrote letters but he never sent them because of the censors—they put thick black lines through everything, and it frustrated his father so much. He waited for the seven days’ and fourteen days’ leave and then he and his father would sit on the veranda and read, or on the ridge. His father kept this book, his notes when he reread the letters, when Rupert had left again, with cuttings from the Volksblad and Paratus, every single bit about the training in South West and Angola. And then in ’seventy-six they arrived on the farm, two officers in a long black car, the one with a fake bandage on his neck, and they said Rupert was dead and they handed us the small wooden chest with the medal and said he’d been brave but that they weren’t allowed to say what the circumstances were because it was national security but he had been very brave, he and his buddies, and the country would always be grateful to them and always honor them.

  “His father took the medal and walked out without a word. There was a spot on the farm, a ridge where they always sat and looked out over the farm and talked until the sun went down, about farming and life. I found him there with the little chest on his lap and death in his eyes. His eyes were never the same again. And then the cancer came, oh, only a few months later the cancer came.”

  It was his mother who wept soundlessly, he saw, not Carolina de Jager or Wilna van As, his mother who sat upright in her chair, clutching the armrest, and the tear that slowly trickled down her cheek, a thin, shining track. Carolina de Jager moved in her chair, physically dragged herself back to the present, looked at Wilna van As. “And now I want you to tell me about the Rupert you knew, Wilna. Now you must tell me everything.”

  “Carolina,” he said softly, addressing her as she had asked him to do, “I’ll have to look at the letters.”

  “And the photographs,” she said.

  “There are photos?” Hope asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He took them for his father. At Reconnaissance Command in Natal. And then in South West and Angola. His father enjoyed them so muc
h.”

  He asked Hope and his mother to join him in the kitchen. Leaving the two other women alone, they sat at the kitchen table. “Schlebusch threatened my mother, Hope, and I’m worried because I can’t always be here.”

  “What did he say?” Hope asked.

  “That he would hurt my mother if I don’t drop the investigation. I’m going to fetch help. I’m getting people to stay here until this affair is over.”

  “What can he do to an old woman?” his mother asked.

  “Ma, we’ve spoken about it. I’m not going to argue about it.”

  “All right,” said his mother.

  “He doesn’t even know what’s happening with the investigation. You should be safe for a day or two. But then…”

  “Where will you find help?”

  “I’ll see. But Ma, I want to use the pickup. Is that okay?”

  “Yes, Zet.”

  “Hope, is the answering machine still on in your office?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you please check? And I want you to prepare an urgent interdict, just in case.”

  She nodded.

  “And then you must come back. We have to work our way through the letters.”

  She nodded again.

  He got up. “I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “You be careful, Zet.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  Hope walked with him to the garage, where the faded yellow Nissan 1400 stood next to his mother’s “decent car,” the Honda Ballade. The pickup, thirteen years old, was showing patches of rust.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There’s someone. I’m… looking for a firearm as well.”

  He got in, started the engine.

  “Zatopek,” said Hope Beneke, “get me one while you’re at it.”

  38.

  There’s another woman, isn’t there?” Wendy Brice had insisted, her mouth stiff, her body language ready to portray the betrayed woman.

  And when I think back, in all honesty I can’t blame her. Because why should any right-minded man on the edge of a doctorate and a great career in academe, exchange it for Murder and Robbery in Cape Town? Why would anyone give up the status of university lecturer to join the derided ranks of the SAP?