Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

His head was dancing the rhythmless dance of the sleepless, thoughts jumping, unfocused, without depth. It was going to be a long day. A shallow tiredness pervaded his body. Why had he phoned the fucking number again? He knew the humiliation would scorch him, as it had before. Why had they pushed the fucking pamphlet under his windshield wiper? Another great lie, just one more great lie like all the other lies to extend and tighten the world’s web of deceit.

That first time. Lord, he had phoned the number with so much expectation, so much consuming loneliness because Natasha wants to listen and he had to speak to someone, he wanted to speak to someone, he wanted to tell someone, someone had to embrace him even if it was only with words, had to say, “You’re okay, Zet, you’re okay, Van Heerden,” but he wasn’t, he was weak, he was trash, he was as big a lie as Natasha and the rest of fuckin’ humankind.

He sighed.

And Johannes Jacobus Smit. What the fuck was his lie, his deception?

He knew his leap from one scrap of dollar-wrapping paper in a walk-in safe was very big. Too big. But why do you build such a safe? If you were a normal, law-abiding citizen. You might buy a small gun safe or a jewel safe. Law-abiding citizens didn’t bother with false identity documents. Smit-whatever-his-name-might-be was a man who wanted to hide a great deal. Who he was. And whatever the fuck was in the safe.

Not stones.

Stones are small.

Stones are hot. You get them and you sell them fast. You don’t amass them in a small town with a steel door.

Not drugs. Drugs weren’t a Boer game.

Not weapons. Weapons were too big.

Documents?

Dollars?

Documents.

What fucking kind of documents?

Secret documents.

Secret. God knows this country has enough secrets to fill a warehouse. Documents of death and torture, of chemical weapons and nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and murder lists and secret operations. Documents of deceit. People deceiving one another on national and international levels. The Great Deceit. Important documents. Documents that would make people commit murder with an attack rifle and a blowtorch.

Documents…

But the dates of Smit’s new identity and the hiding of secrets didn’t work. If Smit had been Secret Service or BSB or MI or whatever unholy acronym it might have been, the nineties would have been a good time for a new identity.

Not the early eighties.

Documents?

An M16 and a blowtorch?

Not your standard “Kill a Whitey and Steal the Television Set.”

On the Modderdam interchange to Bothasig. Middle-class. Police suburb.

He remembered the route vaguely, found it easily. Mike de Villiers’s house. He stopped in the street, walked to the front door. The garden was simple, neat. Knocked at the front door, waited. Mike’s wife opened, didn’t recognize him, a wide, waddling body, dishcloth in her hand.

“Is Mike here, Mrs. de Villiers?”

Broad smile, a nod. “Yes, he’s busy at the back. Come in.” Put out her hand, a woman satisfied in her home.

“Are you well?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He followed her – the house was shining and neat and smelled of cleaning materials, laundry on the table – out of the back door.

Mike de Villiers stood in the backyard, screwdriver in his hand, next to the lawn mower, wearing his blue police overall, his bald head reflecting the sunlight. He looked up, saw Van Heerden, showed no emotion, as usual, shifted the screwdriver to his left hand, wiped the right hand on the overall, extended it.

“Captain…”

“No longer, Mike.”

“Superintendent?”

“I’m out of the Force, Mike.”

De Villiers merely nodded. It had never been his place to ask questions. Least of all of officers.

“Coffee?” Martha asked from the kitchen door.

Mike waited for Van Heerden. “That would be nice,” he said.

“Still at the armory, Mike?”

“Yes, Captain.” Old habits. The eyelids. Which blinked from the bottom up like a lizard’s. “Let’s sit down.” He put the screwdriver in the tool chest and walked to the white plastic furniture under the peppertree. Square and neat in the sunlight, each chair in its precise place.

“I’m working on a case, Mike.”

Eyelids blinked, waiting, as always, like years ago.

“M16.”

They sat.

“Assault rifle,” said Mike de Villiers. The eyes closed. How many years had it been since he saw it at the armory for the first time, since Nagel had told him, “I’m going to show you the biggest secret weapon in the Force,” and they had gone to the armory and looked for Mike de Villiers and fed requests for arms information into the man as if into a computer and stood and watched the wheels turning behind the closed eyes and the information coming out, precise and systematic. Sometimes here, in this house, Nagel, who made Martha laugh with his slim body and his deep voice and his charm and then the ritual, You’re our secret weapon, Mike , drawing on the knowledge and then leaving again, like traveling salesmen who came to quickly use a whore. He was always slightly uncomfortable, wondered what de Villiers thought, if he ever minded.

“The Smit case,” de Villiers said.

“You heard.”

An almost invisible nod.

“Did they speak to you?”

“No.” The bare word, hanging.

“It’s an American rifle, Mike.”

“Military. The rifle of their infantry since Vietnam. Good weapon. Up to nine hundred fifty rounds per minute on fully automatic. Light. From less than three kilograms to just under four. Different models. M16, M16A1, M16A2, M4 carbine, La France M16K submachine gun, 5.56 caliber, the whole lot. That’s what makes it so odd because it’s not popular round here. R1 and AK-47 use 7.62; ammunition is freely available.”

“Who would use it, Mike?”

De Villiers looked at him, eyes open now. Nagel had never asked him to speculate.

“How would I know, Captain?”

“Did you wonder?”

The eyes closed again. “Yes.”

“And what did you think, Mike?”

De Villiers hesitated for a long time, his eyes closed. Then he opened them again.

“It’s not a good weapon for housebreaking, Captain. It’s big, even if it’s light. It’s a weapon for the battlefield, for the swamps of the Far East and the deserts of the Middle East. It’s a weapon for killing outside, not inside. How do you hide it under your jacket in a suburb? It’s not a good weapon for close work, in a house, Captain. A revolver would’ve been better.”

“What’s your opinion, Mike?”

The eyes, the strange, hypnotic eyes closed again. “There are a few possibilities, Captain. You want to intimidate, people are scared of a large weapon. M16 is in every movie. Or it’s your only unregistered weapon and you don’t want to leave a trail. Or you’re an American. An American soldier. Or…”

Eyes open. He shook his head slightly from side to side, as if he wanted to leave it.

“Or?”

“I don’t know…”

“Tell me, Mike.”

“Mercenary, Captain. M16 is just as available on the black market in Europe as the AK. Mercenaries. Many of them like it. But…”

“But?”

“What would a mercenary be doing in Durbanville, Captain?”

Martha de Villiers came out with the coffee and somewhere a Karoo Prinia long-tailed tit’s clear song sounded in the sunlight.

♦

When he drove away, Mike and Martha de Villiers stood in front of the house, the buxom woman’s arm around her husband’s waist, a couple in Bothasig on a street with neat gardens and ugly concrete walls and children on bicycles and the low whine of lawn mowers using the sunlit gift of a winter morning, and he wondered why his life couldn’t have been like that, a woman and children and a small castle with its own little pub built on and a mongrel dog and a career and a home loan. That had been, somewhere in the past, a possibility.