Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

Two attackers?

Or one. With a backpack and an M16.

Smit is startled, fear, recognition: after so many years the existence he had crafted with so much care is suddenly threatened. Great fear, adrenaline. But he’s unarmed. He steps away from the door. What do you want?

Oh, you know, Johannes Jacobus, the goodies you stole from me. Where are they, good buddy?

According to the pathologist there were no wounds to indicate that there had been a fight. Smit had put up no resistance. A lamb led to the slaughter. Sit, Smit, and we’ll see how long you can hang in there before you tell me where my goodies are .

Why hadn’t Smit put up any resistance? Had he known he would achieve nothing because there were two of them? Or was he simply too scared, terrified?

Force him into the kitchen chair, tie him down.

With an M16? How do you hold an M16 to a man’s head with one hand while tying his hands with binding wire and a pair of pliers with your other hand?

There had been more than one “visitor.”

Tell us, Smittie, where are the goodies?

Fuck you.

Ah, so pleasant to have cooperation. Light the blowtorch and strip him .

Torture him. The blue flame on his scrotum, on his chest, on his belly, on his arms. The pain must’ve been inhuman.

Why hadn’t he simply told them? His business was doing well. He didn’t need money, diamonds, drugs, weapons, to make more money. Why didn’t he just say, It’s in the safe, here’s the combination, take the stuff, and leave me alone ?

Reason: there was something else in the safe. Of no monetary value. Something else.

Reason: he’d known he was going to die if they found what they had come for.

Van Heerden sighed.

“What the fuck do the shoes of the victim have to do with anything? Except if the murderer’s blood is stuck to them” had been Nagel’s reaction. “The suspect, yes. His shoes. That’s what counts.”

He stared ahead, didn’t see the street, the big trees, the gardens. Didn’t see the clouds moving in from the mountain.

Nagel. Who was now thrusting his thin, sinewy arm from the grave. Nagel, he thought, had rested for long enough. Nagel was coming back.

He didn’t know how he would handle it.

He got out of the car.

Let the footwork begin.

♦

Like crystal , she thought. The sunshine days between the cold fronts. Clear as glass, windless, a beautiful fragility. Shining jewels in the dark dress of winter.

Hope Beneke was jogging next to the sea at Blouberg’s beach, somewhat self-conscious about the stares of passing motorists, a small price to pay for the stunning view of the sea and the mountain, the great towering mass of rock with its strange, world-famous shape that guarded the bay, a sentinel of calm, constancy, peace of mind, resignation. Some things always remained the same.

Even if she was changing.

Rhythmically, one running shoe following the other, she took pleasure in the fitness of her body, her breathing deep and even, her legs blissfully warm. She wasn’t always fit; she hadn’t always been so slender. There had been a time in her last year at university and the clerkship years when she had been ashamed of her legs, when she didn’t like her bottom, didn’t look good in jeans – the combination of university-residence food and long hours of study and a certain aversion to herself.

Not that Richard minded. He said he liked her Rubenesque curves. At the beginning. When everything was new in their relationship, when he ran his hands over her body for the first time, sighed deeply, and said, with a light shining behind his eyes, “Lord, Hope, but you’re sexy.” Richard, with his small bald patch and his laconic accountant’s view of life and his passion for news. Richard, who later, when everything was no longer new, would get up after making love to look at the latest news. Or would pick up Time , switch on the light, and read. Time !

Richard, who wanted to get married. No, who wanted to live like a married man long before she had finished with the romance and the eroticism of the game of love.

“You have a red mark on your cheek,” Richard had said without surprise, one summer’s night in the middle of the act of love, as if he was reporting the news to an audience without prejudice. After they had had sex for months.

“My whole body is glowing like fire,” she had said, filled with passion and empathy.

“Odd mark,” was his thoughtful reaction.

And when their relationship eventually became as dry as dust and died a quiet death, she had to take stock.

Just to realize that she had been equally to blame. Not that Richard possessed the same unbiased capacity for introspection. Some people dare not run the risk of self-criticism. He was different. He was so satisfied with himself that he never saw the need for it.

But she had to examine her life. And one of the conclusions she came to was that she wasn’t comfortable with herself. Not with her body, not with the way she was.

So she did two things. Left Kemp, Smuts, and Breedt. And started jogging. And here she was on Blouberg’s beach, fit and slender and Richard-less – and a forty-year-old dysfunctional ex-policeman (what was his real age?) was a vague interest, an impossible possibility.

Because he was so different from Richard? Because he was so unpredictable and wounded? Because his mother…

She should have her head examined.

The sun suddenly disappeared. She looked up. A dark bank of clouds over the bay, over the mountain. Another front. It was a cold winter. Not like last year’s. Like life. Always changing. Sometimes there wasn’t much sunshine, then rare crystal days in between the rain.

♦

He walked from house to house in Moreletta Street, like a door-to-door salesman, and asked his questions.

No one knew Johannes Jacobus Smit. “You know what it’s like – we all live our own lives.”

The houses on either side of the Smit-Van As house: “We sometimes had a chat across the fence. They were very quiet.”

No one saw or heard anything. “I thought I heard something like a shot, but it might have been something else.”

Everyone at each house, somewhat uncomfortable, their Saturday schedule disturbed, politeness without friendliness, curious. “Have you found anything?” “Have you caught anybody?” “Do you know why he was shot?” Because that was where the threat lay. Someone in their area had been cruelly murdered, too near their personal safety zone, a small breach in the bastion of their white middle-class security. And when he replied in the negative, there was a quick frown of worry, followed by a moment of silence as if they wanted Smit to have earned it in some way or another, because such things simply didn’t happen.

Then, before he was ready, he had finished, and he drove to Philippi to see Willie Theal.

Theal, who had phoned him to say, “Come and work with me.” Theal, who had comforted him when his life had burst open like an overripe, sick bloody pomegranate, and he accepted the comfort because he needed it, but his acceptance was deceit, the big deceit because he had always been trash, from the first time he stole, when he stole with his eyes and his mind through the wooden fence, when he stole from Nagel. The trash in him was always there, just under the surface, like lava, constantly smoldering, bubbling, waiting for a crack in the rock face, ready to break like a volcano through the soft crust of his world.

He braked, suddenly.

Too little time.

He realized it suddenly: five days. Not enough .

Say he spoke to Theal – fuck it, he wasn’t afraid. It wouldn’t make him better or worse. It wasn’t because he was afraid of the ghosts that Theal would call up.