Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

“Not the investigation,” he said, irritated.

“Do have your coffee.”

He nodded, took the mug off the tray.

“What made you realize finally that the case was dead?” Her tone of voice was accepting, acquiescent.

He blew on the coffee, thought for a while. “I was at the Drug Squad this morning. And at the neighbors of Van As. I don’t know. I suddenly realized…There is nothing, Hope. And you’ll have to accept it. There is nothing you can do.”

She nodded.

“I…know Van As will be disappointed. But if they hadn’t had such an odd relationship…”

“I’ll talk to her. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried. Because there’s nothing…”

“That she can do.”

“That’s right.”

“Where did you learn to cook?”

He suddenly looked penetratingly at her. “What’s going on here, Hope?”

“What do you mean?”

“I come here to tell you that you and Van As can forget it and you talk about food? What’s going on?”

She sank back in the chair, put her running shoes on the table, rested the mug on her knees, spoke amiably. “Do you want me to argue with you about it? You gave your professional opinion and I accept it. I think you did a good job. I also have tremendous respect for the fact that you’ve returned the money. Someone with less integrity would have let the case drag on endlessly.”

He snorted. “I’m trash,” he said.

To which she had no reply.

“I think Kemp told you more.”

“What should he have told me?”

“Nothing.”

He’s like a child , she thought, watching him as he stared at nothing in the distance, drinking his coffee. She could see his mother’s genes, in and around the eyes. She wondered what his father had looked like.

“There was something in the safe. That’s the key.”

“It could have been anything,” she agreed.

“Exactly,” he said. “It would take a year to examine all the possibilities.”

“If you had more time?”

He tried to read her face for sarcasm. Found nothing. “I don’t know. Weeks. Months, perhaps. Luck. We needed luck. If Van As had remembered something. Or had seen something. If the safe had contained something more.”

You make your own luck , Nagel had said.

“Have you anything else you’re working on?” she asked.

“No.”

She so badly wanted to ask him about himself, his mother, about who he was, why he was the way he was. Tell him his front was so unnecessary, that she knew what hid behind it, that she knew he could again become what his mother said he once had been.

“I’m leaving.”

“Perhaps we’ll work together again one day.”

“Perhaps.” He got up.

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

20

Imust admit that I remain endlessly fascinated by the small crossroads of life, the forks in the road, seldom indicated, rarely a road sign. Only visible in retrospect.

I joined the police force because I peered through a wooden fence one Saturday afternoon. I joined the police because a detective gave me a second chance with firm warmth – a father figure? Did I join the Force because my father died young? Would I have joined the police if I hadn’t lusted after Baby Marnewick? Would I have joined if Baby Marnewick hadn’t been murdered?

There was a Gauloises advertisement at the movies in those days. A French artist who made clever charcoal or pencil drawings on paper. At first it seemed as if he was drawing a female nude – the sexy breasts, the hips, the waist. But as he drew on, the female figure became an innocuous Frenchman with a beret, a beard, and a cigarette.

The crossroads, the road signs, the milestones, were only visible when each picture was completed.

I joined the police.

With my mother’s blessing. I think she suspected that it had something to do with the Marnewick murder, but her perspective was speculative and wrong. I think she had had other dreams for me, but she…was my mother: she supported me.

What can I tell you about Police College in Pretoria? Rookies, young men from every level of society thrown together. We paraded and learned and carried on like young bulls in the evening. We argued and talked nonsense and laughed and dreamed of more sex and less physical effort. We paraded and perspired in classes without air-conditioning and made beds with perfect edges and learned to shoot.

Let me be honest. The rest of my intake learned to shoot. I shut my eyes and eventually, with the minimum number of marks, managed to stay on the course. From the start, firearms were my Achilles’ heel, my nemesis as a policeman. It was inexplicable. I liked the smell of gun oil, the glimmer of black metal, the cold, effective lines. I picked up the weapons with the same amount of bravado and the same feeling of power as did the other recruits, handled them, and fired them. But the projectiles I sent off by pulling the trigger, the physics I initiated, were always less effective than every other rookie’s. I was teased endlessly about it but it didn’t damage my ego, mainly because my achievements in the tests and examinations tipped the scales of mutual respect in another direction. In theoretical work, on paper, with a set of questions, I had no equal.

And then the training was over and I was a constable in a uniform and I asked for Stilfontein or Klerksdorp or Orkney, heaven only knows why, and got Sunnyside in Pretoria and for the next two years locked up drunken students and dealt with disturbing-the-peace complaints and smoothed down marital scraps in thousands of apartments and investigated burglaries from cars and served in the charge office and learned how to fill in SAPS forms, over and over and over again, adding to the tons of paper of the documentation of justice.

And was branded as the classical-music constable, the one who read (but couldn’t shoot worth a damn). For the Sunnyside office of the SAP I was what a teddy bear was for the center line of a high school rugby team: a kind of totem, a defense against the darkness of total cultural decline in a city area of gray crime.

Because that was our daily task: not the screaming colors of injustice committed in hatred, but the drab world of minor, white-collar transgressions, of human weakness on the colorless part of the police palette.

I lived in a bachelor pad with a single bed and a table and a chair that my mother gave me and I made a bookcase with bricks and planks and saved for three months for the deposit on a Defy stove and taught myself to cook from magazines and read virtually every book in the library and worked shifts that didn’t do much for romance or socializing, but I did manage, however, among the enormous number of lonely young girls in Sunnyside, to strike it lucky, one or two or three nights per month of wriggling, struggling, despairing sex. They were back scratchers, virtually without exception, as if they wanted to leave a physical mark that would outlast the brief flame of physical passion.

There were times when I could not remember why I was a servant of justice. I first had to think back to Stilfontein, to stand at the wooden fence of shame again, to drink at the fountain of inspiration.

It was temporary, everything, a purposeless existence, a rite of passage, marking time, wasted years, growing years, growing-up years.

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

21

You make your own luck.

He drove to Table View, the rain sifting onto the shallow lagoon, a discomfort within him, displeased with himself, with Hope Beneke. He knew she knew something, didn’t want to say anything. Kemp who probably still let the rumors live. That was what everyone thought, that he had seen Nagel die and it had fucked him up.