Dead Before Dying: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  Copyright © 1996 by Deon Meyer

  Translation copyright © 1999 by Madeleine van Biljon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: February 2008

  First published in English in 1999 by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline, and in Afrikaans by Quiellerie in 1996.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02905-6

  Contents

  PURGATORY

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also by Deon Meyer

  Heart of the Hunter

  Dead at Daybreak

  Tutta la vita è morte

  —Giuseppe Verdi

  PURGATORY

  He grimaced in the dark but he didn’t realize it. His hands were shaking, hanging next to his body, his eyes were still closed.

  “That’s the problem, when you can’t get out of your own head. You think you’re so clean. Because Silva was so dirty. We think in terms of black and white. Silva was a killer, dirty and black as sin. And I was the clean, white light of justice. And they encouraged me. Get him. They made me even cleaner. Get Silva for the girls, the two women he had thrown away on a rubbish tip like so much human garbage. Get him for the cop of Murder and Robbery with the hole in the forehead. Get him for the drugs, for his invulnerability, for his dirty, black soul.”

  Joubert looked back and saw that he had made progress on the thin wire.

  He took a longer step . . .

  1.

  IN THE AFTERNOON HUSH of the last day of the year, Mat Joubert thought about death. Mechanically his hands were busy cleaning his service pistol, the Z88. He sat in his sitting room, leaning forward in the armchair, the parts of the pistol lying on the coffee table in front of him among rags, brushes, and an oil can. A cigarette in the ashtray sent up a long, thin plume of smoke. Above him, at the window, a bee flew against the glass with monotonous regularity, in an irritating attempt to reach the summer afternoon outside, where a light southeaster was blowing.

  Joubert didn’t hear it. His mind wandered aimlessly through memories of the past weeks, among chronicles of death, his bread and butter. The white woman on her back on the kitchen floor, spatula in her right hand, omelet burnt on the stove, the blood an added splash of color in the pleasant room. In the living room, the boy, nineteen, in tears, 3,240 rand in the pocket of his leather jacket, saying, over and over, his mother’s name.

  The man among the flowers, an easier memory. Death with dignity. He recalled the detectives and the uniformed men on the open industrial site between the gray factory buildings. They stood in a circle, knee-deep in the wildflowers thrusting up yellow and white and orange heads. In the center of this judicial circle lay the body of a middle-aged man, small in stature. An empty bottle of meths was gripped in one hand, he was facedown, cheek against the soil.

  But his eyes were closed. And his other hand clutched a few flowers, now faded.

  It was the hands that Mat Joubert remembered most vividly.

  On Macassar beach. Three people. The stench of burning rubber and charred flesh still hanging in the air, the group of the law and the media forming a barrier downwind against the horror of multiple necklace murders.

  The hands. Claws. Reaching up to the heavens in a petrified plea for deliverance.

  Mat Joubert was tired of living. But he didn’t want to die like that.

  Using thumb and forefinger, he placed the fifteen stubby 9 mm bullets into the magazine one by one. The last one flashed briefly in the afternoon sun. He held the bullet at eye level, balanced between thumb and forefinger, and stared at the rust-colored lead point.

  What would it be like? If you pressed the dark mouth of the Z88 softly against your lips and you pulled the trigger, carefully, slowly, respectfully. Would you feel the lead projectile? Pain? Would thoughts still flash through the undamaged portions of the brain? Accuse you of cowardice just before the night enveloped you? Or did it all happen so quickly that the sound of the shot wouldn’t even travel from gun to ear to brain?

  He wondered. Had it been like that for Lara?

  What was it like—her light being switched off and watching the hand on the switch? What did she think about in that last fleeting moment? Life? Him? Perhaps she felt remorse and wanted to give a last mocking laugh?

  He didn’t want to think about it.

  A new year would start the following day. There were people out there with resolutions and dreams and plans and enthusiasm and hope for this new era. And here he sat.

  Tomorrow everything at work would be different. The new man, the political appointment. The others could talk about nothing else. Joubert didn’t really care. He no longer wanted to know. Either about death, or life. It was simply one more thing to survive, to take account of, to squeeze the spirit out of life and lure the Great Predator even closer.

  He banged the magazine into the stock with the flat of his left hand, as if violence would give his thoughts a new direction. He thrust the weapon into its leather sheath. The oil and the rags went back into the old shoebox. He dragged on the cigarette, blew the smoke in the direction of the window. Then he saw the bee, heard exhaustion diminishing the sound of the wings.

  Joubert got up, pulled the lace curtain aside, and opened the window. The bee felt the warm breeze outside but still tried to find a way out through the wrong panel. Joubert turned, picked up an oily rag, and carefully swiped it past the window. The insect hovered briefly in front of the opening, then flew outside. Joubert closed the window and straightened the curtain.

  He could also escape, he thought. If he wanted to.

  Deliberately he let this perception fade as well. But it was enough to have him make an impulsive decision. He’d walk across to the neighborhood barbecue this evening. Just for a while. For the Old Year.

  2.

  The first step in the rebirth of Mat Joubert was physical. Just after seven o’clock that evening, he walked across the tree-lined street of the middle-class Monte Vista to the Stoffberg home. Jerry Stoffberg of Stoffberg & Mordt, Funeral Directors, in Bellville. “We’re in the same business, Mat,” he liked saying. “Only different branches.”

  The door opened. Stoffberg saw Joubert coming into the house. They said hello, asked the ritual questi
ons.

  “Business is great, Mat. Profitable time of the year. It’s as if many of them hang in there until just after the festive season,” he said as he put the beer that Joubert had brought into the refrigerator. The undertaker wore an apron announcing that he was THE WORLD’S WORST CHEF.

  Joubert merely nodded, because he’d heard it before, and uncapped the first Castle of the evening.

  The kitchen was warm and cozy, a center of enthusiasm and laughter. Women’s voices filled the room. Children and men traffic-patterned their way easily past female conversations and the ritual of preparations. Mat Joubert navigated his way outside.

  His consciousness was internalized, his perceptions withdrawn like the retracted feelers of an insect. He was untouched by the warmth and the domesticity.

  Outside, the children moved like shadows through pools of light and darkness, divided into squads according to age but united in their carefree exuberance.

  On the porch teenagers sat in an uneasy, self-conscious no- man’s-land between childhood and adulthood. Joubert noted them briefly because their clumsy attempts to appear at ease betrayed them. They had transgressed. He concentrated until he realized what they were trying to hide: the glasses on the porch table were filled with forbidden contents. Two, three years ago he would’ve smiled about it, recalled his own stormy adolescent years. But now he simply withdrew the feelers again.

  He joined the circle of men around the fire. Each one’s passport to the group was a glass in the hand. Everyone stared at the lamb that, naked and without dignity, was turning on Stoffberg’s spit.

  “Jesus, Mat, but you’re big,” Wessels, the press photographer, said when Joubert came to stand next to him.

  “Didn’t you know he’s Murder and Robbery’s secret weapon?” Myburgh, Bellville’s traffic chief, asked from across the fire. His luxuriant mustache bounced with each word.

  Joubert’s facial muscles tightened, showed his teeth in a mechanical smile.

  “Ya, he’s their mobile roadblock,” said Storridge, the businessman. They laughed respectfully.

  Casual cracks and remarks were tossed back and forth across the sizzling lamb, all of it aware of and careful about Joubert’s two-year-old loss—brotherly, friendly, fruitless attempts to rouse his quiescent spirit.

  The conversation took a quiet turn. Stoffberg turned the spit and injected the browning meat with a secret sauce, like a doctor with a patient. Sport, quasi-sexual jokes, communal work problems. Joubert shook a Winston out of a packet in his shirt pocket. He offered it around. A lighter flared.

  Members of the circle at the fire came and went. Stoffberg turned the spit and checked the progress of the meat. Joubert accepted another beer, fetched another a while later. The women’s kitchen activities had decreased. They had spilled over into the adjacent television room.

  Outside, the conversation was geared to Stoffberg’s lamb.

  “No use giving it another injection, Stoffs. It’s dead.”

  “I’ve got to eat before sunrise, Stoff. I have to open shop tomorrow.”

  “No way. This liddle lamb will only be ready in February.”

  “By that time it’ll be mutton dressed as lamb.”

  Joubert’s eyes followed the conversation from face to face but he took no part. Quiet, that’s how they knew him. Even before Lara’s death he hadn’t been a great talker.

  The children’s voices became softer, the men’s louder. Stoffberg sent a courier to give the guests a call. The tempo of the party changed. The women called the children and walked out with plates laden with side dishes to where Stoffberg had started carving the lamb.

  Joubert sucked at a Castle while he waited his turn. The alcohol had misted his senses. He wasn’t hungry but ate out of habit and politeness at a garden table with the other men.

  Music started up inside, the teenagers rocked. Joubert offered cigarettes again. Women fetched men to dance. The music grew steadily older but the decibels didn’t. Joubert got up so as not to be left alone outside and grabbed another beer on the way to the living room.

  Stoffberg had replaced the room’s ordinary bulbs with colored lights. Writhing bodies were bathed in a muted glow of red and blue and yellow. Joubert sat in the dining room, from where he had a view of the dancers. Wessels’s short body jerked spasmodically in imitation of Elvis. The movements of the teenagers were more subtle. Dancing past a red light, the body of Storridge’s pretty, slender wife was briefly backlit. Joubert looked away, saw the daughter of the house, Yvonne Stoffberg, her breasts bouncing youthfully under a tight T-shirt. Joubert lit another cigarette.

  Myburgh’s fat wife asked Joubert for a traditional waltz. He agreed. She guided him skillfully past the other couples. When the music changed, she smiled sympathetically and let him go. He fetched another Castle. The tempo of the music slowed. Dancers moved closer to one another, entered the evening’s new phase.

  Joubert walked outside to empty his bladder. The garden lights had been switched off. The coals under the remains of the lamb were still a glowing red. He walked to a corner of the garden, relieved himself and walked back. A shooting star fell above the dark roof of the Stoffbergs’ house. Joubert stopped and looked up at the sky, saw only darkness.

  “Hi, Mat.”

  She suddenly appeared next to him, a nymphlike shadow of the night.

  “I can call you that, can’t I? I’ve done with school.” She stood silhouetted against the light of the back door, her rounded young curves molded by T-shirt and pants.

  “Sure,” he said hesitantly, surprised. She came closer, into the protected space of his loneliness.

  “You didn’t dance with me once, Mat.”

  He stood rooted to the earth, uncertain, stupefied by seven Castles and so many months of soul-searing introspection. He folded his arms protectively.

  She put her hand on his arm. The tip of her left breast lightly touched his elbow.

  “You were the only man here tonight, Mat.”

  Dear God, he thought, this is my neighbor’s daughter. He recalled the contents of the teenagers’ glasses on the porch.

  “Yvonne . . .”

  “Everybody calls me Bonnie.”

  For the first time he looked at her face. Her eyes were fixed on him, shining, passionate, and purposeful. Her mouth was a fruit, ripe, slightly open. She was no longer a child.

  Joubert felt the fear of humiliation move in him.

  Then his body spoke softly to him, a rusty moment that came and went, reminding his crotch of the rising pleasures of the past. But his fear was too great. He didn’t know whether that kind of life had died in him. It was more than two years . . . He wanted to check her. He unlocked his arms, wanting to push her away.

  She interpreted his movements differently, moved between his hands, pulled him closer, pressed her wet mouth to his. Her tongue forced open his lips, fluttered. Her body was against his, her breasts pinpoints of warmth.

  In the kitchen someone called a child and alarms broke through Mat Joubert’s rise upward, toward life. He pushed her away and immediately started toward the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder without knowing why.

  “I’ve done with school, Mat.” There was no reproach in her voice.

  He walked to his house like a refugee, his thoughts focused on his destination, not on what lay behind him. There were cheers announcing the New Year. Fireworks, even a trumpet.

  His house. He walked past trees and shrubs and flowerbeds that Lara had made, struggled with the lock, went down the passage to the bedroom. There stood the bed in which he and Lara had slept. This was her wardrobe, empty now. There hung the painting she’d bought at the flea market in Green Point. The jailers of his captivity, the guards of his cell.

  He undressed, pulled on the black shorts, threw off the blankets, and lay down.

  He didn’t want to think about it.

  But his elbow still felt the unbelievable softness, her tongue still entered his mouth. />
  Two years and three months after Lara’s death. Two years and three months.

  Recently, late in the afternoon, early evening, he stood in Voortrekker Road and looked up the street. And saw the parking meters that stretched for a kilometer or more, as far as he could see, on the arrow-straight road. The parking meters so senselessly and proudly guarding them all, were empty after the working day. Then he knew that Lara had made him into one—an irritation during the day, useless at night.

  His body wouldn’t believe him.

  Like a neglected engine it creaked and coughed and rustily tried to get the gears moving. His subconscious still remembered the oil that waited in the brain, chemical messages of the urge that sent blood and mucus to the front. The machine sighed, a plug sparked feebly, a gear meshed.

  He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling.

  A virus in his blood. He could feel the first vague symptoms. Not yet an organ that grew and strained against material with a life of its own. At first only a slow fever that spread through his body and slowly, like a tide, washed the alcohol out of his bloodstream, drove away sleep.

  He tossed and turned, got up to open a window. The sweat on his torso gleamed dully in the light of a streetlamp. He lay down again, on his back, searched for a drug against longing and humiliation.

  The yearning in his crotch and in his head was equally painful.