Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

  “It got better but it was still pathetic. It was as if the guys couldn’t get their heads around this whitey game. You should’ve heard the remarks. All in the line of ‘It’s only the Boers who would be foolish enough to exchange a round ball and two nets for this stupidity.’ We wanted to dribble and kick, not pick up and pass. It seemed as if our whole nature was against the strange game. Not to mention the offside rule. But Moosa kept his head and Morape gave us courage, and on the Saturday one week before the match, we went out before sunrise for a secret practice in town, the two black teams against each other on an open piece of land next to the river, a kind of test game to choose the A team.

  “Pretty it wasn’t. Moosa lost his temper for the first time that day, threw his hands into the air, and said it was an impossible task—it simply wasn’t possible to change a crowd of black idiots from soccer fans to rugby winners. He stormed off the field and went to sit under a large tree, his head in his hands, and we stood there, our bodies steaming in the cold, and we knew he was right. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t tried. It was simply—the handicap. And our hearts. If you know you’re going to be beaten, it’s difficult to get your heart in the right positive spirit.

  “Morape went to sit next to Moosa and they talked for an hour or longer. And then they walked back to where we were sitting in a heap and Morape began to speak to us.

  “He was a Tswana. A man with a face like an eagle, not tall or big, not very clever, but there was something in Morape that made you listen. And that morning, at the ass end of the world, we listened. Morape spoke softly. Said the match wasn’t about keeping Mpayipheli out of jail. Which got me a few dirty looks. He said the match was about the Struggle. The match had come our way in a country that didn’t want us there, from people who didn’t think we were good enough. Just like at home. And even though we couldn’t choose the battleground and the strategy there to suit us, we could do it here. Must we look at our country and say no, the whiteys have more weapons, more money, better comforts, better technology, they hold the high ground, but should we surrender? If we surrendered, here in Holy Mother Russia, we could give up the Struggle, because then we would’ve lost before we started. It was about character. It was about the fighting spirit. It was about daring, about focus, about concentration, the unshakable belief that you could do anything if you believed in yourself and in the cause.

  “Sport, he said, is the poor man’s war. With the same principles. Us against them. Standing together against superior forces. Solidarity. Tactics and strategy and the same deep emotion. And just like war, sport eventually teaches us about ourselves. To test ourselves and our capabilities and our individual and collective character…

  “He wouldn’t mind if we lost the battle. It happened in war, it happened in sport, and it happened in life. But if we lost because we hadn’t done our best, then we weren’t the kind of people with whom he wanted to go to war. Then Morape got up and walked away across the green grass and left us there to think.

  “That Monday, Morape pinned the names of his first team against the notice board and my name was there as lock forward and my knees shook. But I wasn’t ‘Thobela’ any longer. Moosa had made me ‘Tiny’ Mpayipheli.

  “For the rest of the week we practiced every day. With Morape on the sideline as a silent reminder of his words, and Moosa, fly half and coach, who drilled us, and then the jerseys came on Thursday. The OC of the base had had them made in Moscow, green and gold with a Springbok on the chest, and Morape said, ‘Now you’re playing for your country,’ and the whole thing took on a dimension for which we weren’t prepared. We wanted to complain about the jersey of the oppressor when Morape asked, ‘What are the colors of the ANC?’

  “That Saturday the soccer stadium in Saraktash was packed with so many Soviet soldiers you couldn’t credit it. Each weekend pass had been withdrawn, every military soul had been called up to support their men, and when their team came out of the tunnel, it was a sea of red jerseys with a yellow hammer and sickle on the chest and the crowd went wild and for most of the game our small group of supporters were too scared to open their mouths.

  “It probably wasn’t the greatest rugby to watch, especially the first half. To our great surprise the Russians weren’t masters of the game. More experienced than we were, but no oiled machine. At half time they were ahead by eighteen to six after Moosa had kicked two drop goals, and then he said to us, ‘Guys, these Reds can be beaten, I can feel it. Can you feel it?’ Perhaps we were no longer intimidated. Maybe we thought it was going to be a superior force that would grind us, bleeding, into the grass, and when it didn’t happen, we had to admit that he was right. These guys could be beaten…

  “‘They’re slow,’ Moosa had said. ‘Get the ball to Zuma, doesn’t matter how. Get the ball to Zuma.’ Napoleon Zuma was our left wing, he was only nineteen, a Zulu, he was short, but he had a pair of thighs each of which you couldn’t encircle with two hands and he could run like the wind.

  “It took us fifteen minutes to get him away for the first time and then he scored a try, and then it was as if something happened on that field, as if those fifteen South Africans from the townships and the small-town locations and the villages of the Bantustans suddenly had insight into this strange, wonderful game. And we played. And the better we played, the quieter the Red Army crowd became and the louder our small band of supporters shouted on the pavilion steps, and Napoleon Zuma scored two more tries and suddenly the score was equal with only ten minutes of play left and then we wanted to win, we knew we were going to win. You should’ve seen those guys, Van Heerden, you should’ve seen them play—it was wonderful, it was indescribably beautiful.”

  And then Tiny Mpayipheli was silent and he looked at the faraway stars in the dark of a Cape winter and he shivered in his big, black coat.

  “Is that Orion?” he asked eventually, and pointed a finger at the east.

  “Yes.” They sat, staring at the morning star, but when the silence became too long, Van Heerden couldn’t help asking, “Did you win?”

  The black man smiled broadly in the dark. “The nicest thing was that the referee saw his posting to Afghanistan coming up, but his whistle couldn’t save the day, though he did his best. On the rugby field that day, South Africa won its only test against the Red Peril, thirty-six to eighteen.”

  44.

  I rented a two-bedroom house in Brackenfell and neglected the garden and borrowed the lawn mower of my middle-class neighbors, the Van Tonders, every second Saturday, but I wasn’t home very often.

  I developed my own unique weekly routine. Every day and most nights I worked with the same blind dedication as my colleagues. Sometimes, when the workload permitted, I attended the Thursday-evening symphony concerts in the city hall, often alone. On Saturday evenings there was a barbecue at someone’s house, a closed police gathering with unwritten rules about meat and alcohol contributions, where drunkenness was excused as long as it didn’t upset the women and children.

  On Sundays I cooked.

  I went on a culinary journey of all the continents—Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern. I would plan the dish during the week, shop for the final ingredients on Saturday, and spend Sunday in the kitchen, taking time and care, with a glass of red wine and opera on the hi-fi and a woman who was my sole, deeply impressed audience.

  I might as well admit it—the more heartless the dossiers on my desk, the greater the yearning for the love of my life, for love in my life, for that mythical soul mate, someone who would welcome and embrace me in a warm bed in the small hours of the night. Someone who on Saturday nights would put down our contribution on the salad table, among other women there, someone to whom I could refer as “my wife” with the same loving, jealous possessiveness of Breyten Breytenbach’s eponymous poem. There was a loneliness in me, an emptiness, an incompleteness that grew over the months. It was as if the nature of my work deepened this lack, so that I searched for her with growi
ng determination—the Cape is a mecca for the unmarried, middle-class man, the ratio of men to women in the Peninsula an attractive statistic, the network for playing find-a-girl-for-a-cop surely the best in the world.

  For that reason there was often someone at my side at the barbecue on a Saturday night. And in my bed on a Sunday morning. An admiring assistant in the kitchen, where I proved my culinary superiority to my colleagues with the preparation of the seventh day’s festive meal for two. And after lunch, sleepy and full of good food, we tried to still that other hunger on the living-room couch or the bed.

  Because on Monday it was back to work, back to the dark heart of the world where other basic instincts applied.

  With Nagel.

  Our relationship was odd. It sometimes reminded me of the way an old married couple spend their lives bickering—a never-ending conflict on the surface but with a deep underlying respect and love that could bear anything.

  It was a relationship forged in the furnace of policing, the pressure cooker of violence and blood and murder. For two years we stood side by side in the firing line and investigated every possible crime committed by people against people and hunted the guilty with total dedication.

  Nagel was an ill-educated man with no respect for book learning. He proclaimed that you couldn’t get on top of police work using a textbook or lecture notes. He had no patience with pretense, even less with the butterfly dance of humankind’s social interaction—the small white lies, the fake politeness, the striving for superficial status symbols.

  “Shit, man” was his general, head-shaking reaction to anything that sounded to him like a senseless statement, and he used it often, that and the general applicable possibilities and unlimited declensions of the word fuck. It was Nagel who taught me to swear—not deliberately, but the man’s handiness with it was a revelation, and contagious, like a deadly virus.

  Nagel was the only detective at Murder and Robbery who was untouched by the heartlessness of our work.

  He accepted the criminality of our species as a given—and his role was simply to let justice be done, to hunt and corner the murderer and the rapist and the thief, without thinking about it, without introspection, without tormenting himself over what the sometimes horrifying crimes said about him as a member of the same species.

  It wasn’t as if all this was merely the petrified crust over a soft center. Nagel was one-dimensional and because of that he was probably the best professional of the long arm of the law that I knew.

  Bickering. About the nature and motive of the murder, about the psyche of the murderer, about the ghostly traces at the murder scene that indicated an investigative direction, about the course and priority of the investigation itself. He was aware of my impressive academic career but he wasn’t intimidated by it. Perhaps Colonel Willie Theal had known Nagel would be the only mentor for whom my background posed no threat. He was certain of his views, his methods.

  In the solution of crimes he was sometimes right with his astonishing instinct and feeling—and sometimes my pages and pages of annotations, my precise notes, my endless study of detail, my methodology in psychology, which the Americans now so pretentiously refer to as forensic criminology, provided conclusive proof. Only to hear Nagel saying that “Lady Luck shat on your fucking front porch again.”

  Within months we were the investigative team everyone talked about—the first team, the main men who were called in when others failed—but Nagel was the undisputed leader, the spokesman, I the assistant, the student once more, Tonto to his Lone Ranger, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. And it suited me because Nagel was my admission ticket to acceptance by Murder and Robbery. His frequently repeated alternative views soon made my doctorate seem just an incidental piece of paper to his colleagues. His constant teasing about my notes gave it an acceptable, eccentric color.

  I was respected by my colleagues as I had been at the academy.

  And what a narcotic the drug of positive feedback can be. It was more than enough to make me accept and enjoy my new lifestyle and what I had become.

  I can’t say I was consciously happy, but I wasn’t unhappy and in this life that’s quite something.

  But I still had the one desire, even if my status as bachelor caused so much envy among my colleagues—the desire to meet the One, to fall in love, totally and irrevocably.

  I yearned. And wished.

  You must be so careful what you wish for.

  45.

  Just after six in the morning, he and Hope drove to her office, and he kept looking back but only saw the lights of other vehicles, unidentifiable in the dark.

  “What do you think he’s going to do when he sees the Burger story?”

  “Schlebusch?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought for a while. “It wasn’t clever of him to show himself on the N7. He’s not patient. He’s a doer, not a thinker. The right thing would’ve been to sit back, lie low, go away, even out of the country, until this whole thing is over. Why didn’t he? Because he couldn’t suppress the urge to hit back? Because he’s been conditioned to solve all his problems with violence?”

  “Ahh,” she said, “the poor man’s Zatopek van Heerden?”

  There was gentle teasing in her voice, but for a moment the comparison unnerved him. “If he’s hopelessly stupid, he’ll shoot. If he wants to survive, he’ll negotiate.”

  “Will you ever go back to the police force, Zatopek?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She chewed on it. “And the academy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then she was quiet, and when they passed Ratanga Junction on the N1, he said: “One day, perhaps, I’ll have to find something else to do. Maybe I can’t go back to either of the two.” And then he turned and looked back again.

  At the office building he held the Heckler & Koch under his windbreaker until Hope had unlocked the doors. While Hope went to make coffee, he walked straight to the small room with the phone, arranged his notepad and his pen, sat down.

  Notepaper and guns. He had always preferred the former.

  Hope came back with two mugs. “Are there going to be a lot of useless calls again?”

  “There always are.”

  “Why do you think people do it?”

  “There’s so much damage in the world, Hope. We do things to one another…”

  She sat opposite him, her face gentle, and looked at him, eyes searching his face. Then she asked him, softly, “How much do we do to ourselves?”

  The telephone rang, the first call of the morning.

  “Hallo.”

  “Is that the help line of that Schlebusch guy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I want to remain anonymous.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “I think I’m one of his neighbors.”

  “Oh?”

  “He lives on a smallholding. Here, in Hout Bay.”

  “Do you know what kind of car he drives?”

  “A large white truck. I think it’s an old Chevrolet.”

  “Yes,” he said, his heartbeat increasing. He bent forward, his pen quiet on the paper. Hope heard it in his voice, put her coffee down, tense. “Could you explain where the smallholding is?”

  “Do you know Huggies Animal Farm?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a farm zoo for children. You know, city kids can stroke a lamb and milk cows and ride a pony.”

  “Oh.”

  “And that Schlebusch guy lives next door. The place is pretty neglected, plot forty-seven. It’s on the Constantia Neck road. The turnoff is just beyond the local authority’s nursery.”

  “Are you sure about the truck?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s in front of the house now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, I can see it.”

  “Are you sure you want to remain anonymous?”

  But then there was a click and the line was dead, and he sat with the receiver in his hand and the adrenali
ne pumping and said, “Hope, I want to borrow your car and your cell phone,” and he got up, taking the machine pistol.

  “A smallholding,” she said.

  “At Hout Bay.” He looked at his watch. “We can still catch him in bed. Unless he’s an early riser.”

  “You can’t go alone.”

  “That’s why I want the cell phone. I want to phone Tiny. As soon as I’ve established that it’s not a false alarm.”

  “Come,” she said, and walked ahead of him down the passage to her office, found the keys and phone in her handbag.

  “You must answer the phone while I’m away.”

  “I… ,” she said reluctantly.

  “It could be a false alarm. Someone must stay here.”

  She nodded. “Be careful,” she said.

  Already the traffic to the city was a frustrating, sluggish stream, but he drove in a different direction, worked the gears and the clutch and the accelerator, and rode the BMW hard, wondered if Hope ever used the power of the engineering to its full capacity. De Waal Drive, it was dark, fucking winter, past the university and the botanical gardens, right at Constantia Neck, down to Hout Bay. He vaguely remembered where the nursery was, drove past it, had to turn. He was slightly anxious, had to breathe deeply, found the large board that read HUGGIES FARM with paintings of children and farm animals cartoon-style, realized it was getting light, cloudy morning, and then he stopped, Heckler & Koch under the jacket, cell phone in his pocket, looked at the faded wooden sign with FORTY-SEVEN on it, the gravel path turning off, many trees, little light. He walked down the path, his trainers crunching on the surface, put the machine pistol’s strap over his shoulder, took off the safety, his breathing shallow, his heart beating, fucking coward. Hope saying, How much do we do to ourselves? Funny time to think about that. He saw a light down there. He could see the house, then suddenly the truck when he jogged around the corner, just the outline in the gray dawn. He crouched behind a tree, breathing hard, everything quiet down there, only a light above the front door, the overwhelming sound of birds in the early morning. He narrowed his eyes—it was the truck, it was his truck—took the cell phone out of his pocket, punched in the number, waited.