Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

She smiled vaguely.

  “You must rest,” she said.

  “That’s what they all tell me.”

  The morning of his discharge from the hospital, while he was dressing and packing, he received a parcel, an old six-bottle wine carton covered in brown paper and broad strips of tape. He was alone when he opened it. On top, in a white envelope, there was a message in painfully neat handwriting on a thin page of notepaper.

  “I got a rand per dollar because the notes are so old. The diamonds did somewhat better. This is your half.”

  Just the “O” for Orlando at the bottom.

  Inside the carton, filling it and tightly packed, were masses of two-hundred-rand notes.

  He closed the carton again.

  Blood money.

  His house was clean and shiny. His curtains had been replaced with light material, white and yellow and pale green, which let the sun through. There were flowers on the table.

  His mother.

  He had to wash in the washbasin; a shower would wet the bandages. He dressed and walked slowly down to the garage, the keys to the pickup in his hand. He had to rest for a moment at the door. Light-headed.

  He drove.

  At the military hospital he had to wait while the male nurse went into Bester Brits’s room alone, then came out again. “He said you can come in, but you won’t be able to stay long. He’s still very weak. And he can’t speak. We’ll have to reconstruct his vocal cords. He can communicate with a notebook and a pen, but it’s very demanding work. So please, not long.”

  He nodded. The nurse held the door open as he walked in.

  Bester Brits looked like death. Pale, thin, his head in a brace, drip in the arm.

  “Brits,” he said.

  The eyes followed him.

  “I’ve read Vergottini’s statement. I think I understand. As much as I can understand.”

  Brits’s eyes blinked.

  “I don’t know how you got out of Botswana alive, but I can guess. Someone arrived in time, someone…”

  He saw the officer drawing a notebook toward him and writing. He waited. Brits turned the notebook so that he could read.

  “CIA team. In chopper. Twenty minutes.”

  “The CIA had backup?”

  Bester blinked his eyes once.

  “And when you recovered, your career was over, the money and the diamonds gone, the CIA mad as snakes, and the Boers looking like fools.”

  Eyes blinking. Angry.

  “And then you hunted them?”

  He wrote in the notebook.

  “Part-time.”

  “The authorities would’ve preferred to forget about it?”

  Blink. “Yes.”

  “Jeez,” he said in wonderment. Twenty-three years’ worth of hate and frustration. “I saw the media cuttings of the past two weeks. They still don’t know what’s going on. Know only parts of it.”

  He wrote. “And it’ll stay that way. Pressure from the U.S.”

  Van Heerden shook his head. “They can’t. What about Speckle Venter? He has to stand trial.”

  Brits’s face contorting. A grimace?

  “Never.”

  “They can’t let him walk.”

  “You’ll see.”

  They looked at each other. Suddenly he had nothing more to say.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I think I understand.”

  “Thank you.”

  And then he wanted out.

  To the city. Roeland Street. To the computer people. Asked for Russell Marshall, the man who had doctored the photo of Schlebusch.

  “Hey, man, you’re a hero,” Marshall said when he saw who it was.

  “You believe the media. That’s not cool,” said Van Heerden.

  “Have you brought more photos?”

  “No. I want to buy a computer. And I don’t know where to start.”

  “Avril,” Marshall said to the receptionist, “hold the calls. We’re going shopping.”

  He unpacked the computer and the printer, plugged it in according to Marshall’s instructions, waited for it to boot, and clicked the mouse on the icon with WORD below it.

  The white sheet of virtual paper lay clean and open on the screen. He looked at the keyboard. The same layout as the typewriter at the University of South Africa. He got up, put on a CD. Die Heitere Mozart. Light. Music for laughter.

  He typed a paragraph. Deleted it. Tried again. Deleted it. And again.

  He swore. Deleted it. Got up.

  Perhaps Beethoven would help. Fourth Piano Concerto. He made coffee, took the telephone off the hook, sat down.

  Where did one start?

  At the beginning.

  My mother was an artist. My father was a miner.

  60.

  Williem Nagel died in the hospital and I went back to my house in my bloody clothes.

  She wasn’t there. I drove to his house and she opened the door and saw the blood and my face and knew. I put my hands out to her. She pushed me away. “No, Zet, no, Zet, no.” The same despair in her voice as I had in my soul. The same hysteria, the same torment.

  She went into the house. She didn’t just cry; the sounds were far more heartrending than that. I followed her. She closed a door and locked it.

  “Nonnie,” I said.

  “No!”

  I stood in front of that door. I don’t know for how long. The sounds eventually subsided, much later.

  “Nonnie.”

  “No!”

  I turned and walked out.

  I was never given the opportunity to confess.

  I didn’t go to her that evening to take possession of her. I went to confess, to tell her that I had eventually been weighed as a man, as a human being, and found myself despicable. After so many years of hunting evil, I had discovered an infinity of evil in myself. And I deserved it because I had seen myself as above it all.

  But I cannot deny that I yearned for her forgiveness. I didn’t go to her to tell her that I didn’t deserve her. I sank far lower than that. I went to seek absolution.

  After that it was a combination of self-pity and the extrapolation of my personal discovery—that the rot is hidden in every one of us—that drove me.

  Despite my mother’s best efforts. She came to the Cape, bought the smallholding at Morning Star, and remodeled and rebuilt, and I moved in there, something like a tenant farmer, while she tried to keep me from the abyss with love and sympathy and compassion.

  This is who I am.

  61.

  He stood in front of Kara-An’s desk in the NasPers building with the manuscript in his hands. The view over Table Bay was seductive. She sat there with a small smile, as if she had known that he would come.

  “The agreement was that I would write the story of my life,” he said.

  “I can’t wait.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I never said I would give it to you.”

  The smile turned sour. “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it,” he said.

  He went down in the lift with a bunch of models. They twittered like sparrows and their soft, sweet perfume filled the space like an Eastern offering of incense. He walked out and crossed the Heerengracht to where the truck was parked on Adderley Street.

  Against a lamppost he saw a poster for Die Burger.

  MERCENARY

  COMMITS

  SUICIDE

  IN CELL

  He hesitated briefly at the door of the vehicle, key in one hand, manuscript in the other, and then walked on. Hope Beneke’s office wasn’t far away.

  He was making a seafood mixture for the pancakes—prawns and mussels and calamari and garlic, the aroma rising with the steam, The Magic Flute over the loudspeakers, when she opened the door and walked in without knocking. He turned. She was wearing a black skirt, a white blouse, and high-heeled shoes. The outfit of a professional woman. Her legs, in stockings, were gorgeous.

  She put the manuscript down on the coffee table.

 
; “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “Perhaps there’s some wickedness in each of us that lies dormant until the moment of truth. But in that warehouse you were willing to die to save my life. What does that tell you?”

  He stirred the seafood mixture.

  “Would you like to eat?” he asked.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Deon Meyer is an internationally renowned South African crime writer who also works as a journalist and an Internet consultant. He is the author of Heart of the Hunter, and he lives in Cape Town.