Dead at Daybreak

With variations on the theme.

How different and more interesting than the fantasies would be the reality, the small, life-changing reality.

? Dead at Daybreak ?

13

Rush-hour traffic from Mitchell’s Plain. He took the N7, in a hurry to get home, still had to phone Wilna van As.

He was amazed at the world in which he lived. He and Kemp and he and Orlando and who owed whom, the mechanisms of social and professional interaction, the eleventh commandment: be the one who is owed. Kemp: You’re trash, Van Heerden. O’Grady: Jesus, Van Heerden, that’s not a fucking living. Why don’t you come back? Orlando: A bottom-feeder going down…It’s lower than shark shit, Van Heerden. Why don’t you go back to the Force? General consensus about his life, but they didn’t know, they didn’t understand, they had no insight. They had no understanding of his sentence: he had to serve it, a life sentence, and then, in a moment of investigative euphoria, he had wondered whether he would be released, would receive amnesty. How absurd, fuck, like a man in a cell, dreaming he was outside, only to wake in the morning.

He pulled off at a petrol station for fuel, saw the telephone booth, phoned Wilna van As.

“The bank says they never held mortgages on the properties. I found the deeds of conveyance and the letters of the attorneys, but I don’t understand all of it.”

“Who were the conveyancers?”

“Please hold on.”

He waited, saw in his mind’s eye the woman walking to the melamine cupboard in her office for the documents.

“Merwe de Villiers and Partners.”

He didn’t know the firm. “Could you fax the documents to Hope?”

“Yes,” said Wilna van As.

“Thank you.”

“The identity book. Did you discover anything?”

“I’m not sure.” Because it was Hope Beneke’s job to bring the bad news. He was merely the hired help.

“Oh.” Thoughtful, worried.

“Good-bye,” he said, because he didn’t want to hear it.

He paged through his notebook, found Hope Beneke’s number, put in another coin, and dialed.

“She’s in consultation,” said the receptionist.

Like a fucking doctor, he thought.

“Please give her a message. Wilna van As is going to fax her the deeds of conveyance for Jan Smit’s two houses. I want to know if there were mortgages on the houses. She can phone me at home.”

When he got out of the car and looked up, he saw the sun going down behind the next cold front coming in from the sea, the mass of clouds heavy and black and overwhelming.

¦

He sauteed the garlic and parsley lightly and slowly in the big frying pan, the aroma escaping and rising with the steam, filling the room, and he inhaled it with pleasure and a vague, passing surprise that he could still do it. Verdi on the small speakers. La Traviata. Music to cook by.

Jan Smit wasn’t Jan Smit.

Well, well, well.

Sometime during or before the year of our Lord 1983 the man formerly known as X acquired American dollars. Illegally. So illegally that he needed a new identity. For a new life. As Johannes Jacobus Smit. A life of classic furniture, life within the law, a private, hidden existence.

Conjecture.

He opened the tin of tuna, poured the brine carefully down the drain of the sink.

You sold a fistful of your dollars on the black market to acquire the house and the business premises, to buy the first pieces of furniture. The business does well. You don’t need the rest of your dollars. You build, or have built, a walk-in safe for the rest. How much was left? A great deal. If you needed a walk-in safe. Or did you need to put something else in the safe? America – the wellspring of drug sales, the source of all dollars. Had you wanted to build a safe to hold your little white packets of heroin or cocaine, neatly stacked on the shelves, next to the dollars? Retailer, wholesaler, middleman?

Arms trade. Another reliable source of large amounts of dollars. In ’82 or ’83 – the flourishing years of South Africa’s Armscor and its thousand obscure affiliations and the rest of Africa with its terrorist acronyms and insatiable hunger for weapons.

The walk-in safe wasn’t quite big enough. Maybe not arms.

Why? If the business in classic furniture was thriving, why didn’t you simply burn the incriminating evidence?

He added the tuna to the garlic and parsley. He chopped the walnuts, added them as well, switched on the kettle.

Fifteen years later Jan Smit, formerly known as X, died. Finis. American assault rifle, one shot, execution style, back of the head.

The return of the original owner of the dollars? A renewed effort to sell the little white parcels – what went wrong?

Put all the little pieces together, Van Heerden. Form a picture in your head, create a story, concoct a theory. Adapt it with every new fragment. Speculate.

Nagel.

Boiling water in the pasta pot. Light the gas. Wait until it boiled again. Spaghetti ready. Cut the butter in pieces. Slice a lemon in half. Grate the parmesan. Ready.

Jan Smit alone at home. Knock at the door? Open. Hallo, X, long time no see. I’ve come to have a little chat about my dollars.

He heard something above the music.

A knock at the door.

His mother didn’t knock. She simply came in.

He walked to the door, opened it.

Hope Beneke. “I thought I’d pop in. I live in Milnerton.” The first, nervous flurry of the cold front blew her short hair in all directions. She had a briefcase in her hand.

“Come in,” he said.

He didn’t want her in his home.

“It’s going to rain,” she said as he closed the door behind her.

“Yes,” he said uncomfortably. Nobody came here, except his mother. Quickly he turned down the volume of the music.

“My goodness, something smells delicious,” she said. She put the briefcase down on a chair and opened it.

He didn’t say anything.

She took out the documents. She looked at the gas burners. “I didn’t know you could cook.”

“It’s only pasta.”

“It doesn’t smell like ‘only pasta.’ ” There was something in her voice…

“How did you know where I live?”

“I phoned Kemp. I phoned here first but there was no reply.”

Sympathy in her voice, a patience that hadn’t been there before. He recognized it. The reaction of people who knew, who knew the public part of Van Heerden’s history. Kemp. Kemp had told her. Fuck Kemp, who couldn’t keep anything to himself. He didn’t need her sympathy.