exception, the cure, the escape hatch. It made a great impression on me. I carried her words with me as another guide in my search for that single great love that my parents’ romance and now Betta Wandrag’s philosophies forecast and promised and that I later believed life owed me.
I hadn’t realized that the Dark Thirst would become the crystal ball of my life. I didn’t know how finally, how dramatically, the morning of my life would spill me over the edge like so much flotsam.
But that lay in the future.
Much closer, far more immediate, was the last great event of my youth that fate so casually created as a detour.
Because barely a week later Baby Marnewick was gruesomely and sensationally murdered.
? Dead at Daybreak ?
17
Superintendent Leonard “Rung” Viljoen was a living legend. He was also a living, walking denial of the medical fact that too many knockout blows in the boxing ring can cause permanent brain damage.
There were four photographs in his office at the South African Narcotics Bureau. The first showed Viljoen in a fighter’s pose, taken years ago, a young man with only slight tissue damage around the eyes and a minor defect in the shape of the nose. But what drew the eye was Viljoen’s massive muscles, a body trained to the highest point of physical fitness. In the other three photographs the young, muscled Viljoen lay flat on his back. In each one another boxer stood over Viljoen, his arms raised triumphantly above his head. The three joyful boxers were heavyweights Kallie Knoetze, Gerrie Coetzee, and Mike Schutte, all our great white hopes, in that sequence, from left to right.
This knockout gallery was known as “The Three Tenners,” Viljoen’s clever-for-a-boxer play on words, because all three fights were scheduled for ten rounds but in each one he heard the “Ten!” knockout announcement and was unable to beat the ten-minute margin in any of them.
Below the photos, behind a desk, sat a man whose face looked like a battlefield but whose body, at the age of fifty-four, was in the best possible physical condition. “To reach the top as a heavyweight, you have to climb the ladder to the top. I was lucky to have been a rung on that ladder for so many successful boxers” were the self- ridiculing words heard in police pubs throughout the country whenever Viljoen’s name came up. It was also the origin of his legendary nickname.
“I know you,” said Rung Viljoen when Van Heerden knocked on the door frame on Saturday morning.
He walked in and extended his hand.
“No, don’t tell me.” He pulled his large hand over his scarred face as if he wanted to wipe off cobwebs.
Van Heerden waited.
“I must just place the face…”
He didn’t want to be remembered.
“Do you box?”
“No, Superintendent.” Involuntarily his hand went to his eye.
“Call me Rung. I give up. Who are you?”
“Van Heerden.”
“Used to be with Murder and Robbery?”
“Yes, Superintendent.”
“Hang on a second, hang on. Silva, that fucker who shot Joubert’s wife. Weren’t we on the task team together?”
“That’s it.”
“Thought you looked familiar. What can I do for you, colleague?”
“I’m working with a legal firm now.” Manipulating the truth, trying to avoid the PI remarks. “We’re investigating a case for a client that goes back a number of years. Early eighties. Drugs could be involved. Rumor is, if you want to know something about drugs, you ask Rung Viljoen.”
“Ha!” said Viljoen. “Flattery. Always works. Sit down.”
Van Heerden pulled out the old civil service chair and sat down on the worn leather seat. “We suspect that a big transaction took place in ’eighty-two or -three in which American dollars were involved, Superintendent.”
“Rung.”
He nodded. “I’m afraid that’s about the extent of our information.”
Viljoen’s frown carved deep scar tracks next to his eyes. “What do you want from me?”
“Speculation. For argument’s sake, let’s say there was a big drug deal in 1982. Let’s say dollars were involved. Who, typically, would have been the players at that time? What would they have smuggled? If I dig around, where do I start digging?”
“Shit,” said Rung Viljoen, and dragged the broken-knuckled hand over his face again. “Nineteen eighty- two?”
“Somewhere about then.”
“American dollars?”
“Yes.”
“The dollars don’t mean a thing. It’s the currency of the trade, any place on earth. Tell me, are there Chinese involved? Taiwanese?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it’s possible?”
“The deceased in the case is a forty-two-year-old white man from Durbanville, an Afrikaner by the name of Johannes Jacobus Smit. It’s probably not his real name. The age is more or less correct.”
“The deceased? How did he become deceased?”
“One shot in the back of the head from an American M16 rifle.”
“When?”
“Thirtieth of September last year.”
“Mmmmm.”
Van Heerden waited.
“M16?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t know it.”
“Nougat O’Grady says it’s an American army assault rifle.”
“The Chinese prefer smaller stuff. But one never knows.”
“Where do the Chinese come into it?”
“In 1980 there were a few routes. Number one came from Thailand. Heroin, mainly, if we’re talking big money in dollars. Through India and Pakistan, Afghanistan occasionally, and then the Middle East, four, five different agents, to Europe. Number two was Central America, which had just started doing their thing, through the Gulf of Mexico to Texas and Florida. But if you’re talking about us, it was probably the other route. Possibly heroin from the Golden Triangle to Taiwan and the Far East. In those years the Taiwanese triads slowly but surely became the big suppliers in South Africa. But we’ve never been a large market. Too few people with enough money for drugs. If you ask me, it could’ve been an export transaction. Marijuana, perhaps. Or Mandrax, imported. Makes no difference what it was – the amounts couldn’t have been much larger than a million dollars.”
“Why?”
“We’re a very small fish in a very big ocean, Van Heerden. We’re at the ass end of the world, the dope desert. In comparison with the trade in the USA and Europe, we’re not even a wart on the ugly face of international drug sales. In the eighties we were even smaller.”
“This guy had a walk-in safe built – too small for missiles and too big for a few hundred thousand dollars in notes. He had to have something he wanted to keep in it…”
“In Durbanville?”
“In Durbanville.”
