Dead at Daybreak

What’s with you?

He had sold his soul to Kara-An.

Did she want his soul?

No. But she was getting into his head, discovering the real person behind all the aggression and the useless fighting and the swearing. And now he was back behind all the barriers and she just couldn’t see herself starting again.

She got up. She must run. Things would start happening the next day and she didn’t know when there would be another opportunity to exercise.

She didn’t feel like it.

¦

In the glass measuring jug, he mixed the balsamic vinegar, the olive oil, the lemon juice, the finely chopped garlic (as always, he loved the aroma) and chilies, cumin, coriander, and a bay leaf. He ground black pepper into it.

Pavarotti, as Rigoletto, was singing:

Softly, your tears are useless,

Now you are certain that he lied.

Softly and let it be my task

To take revenge.

Soon. And deadly.

I’ll kill him.

He was hungry. And felt like food. He could taste the dish in his mouth, visualize the thick brown gravy. He had bought fresh bread to dip into the sauce when the chicken livers had been eaten.

He rinsed the livers, carefully cut out the membranes.

Hope. And Kara-An.

He put the livers in the marinade, took an onion out of the refrigerator, peeled and chopped it. The tears ran.

In Good Housekeeping he had read that if onions were kept in the refrigerator they wouldn’t affect the eyes when peeled. It didn’t always work.

Hope and Kara-An. The Laurel and Hardy of the female world.

Kara-An, the perverse.

It didn’t turn him on.

It was a first for him. A woman who wanted to be hurt.

Her intensity. Her beauty. The gods’ sense of humor. Give her everything. A body, Lord, that body, he had felt her, not too soft, not too firm, the breasts against his chest, her hips grinding into him.

Saucepan on the stove, melt butter in it.

A face in which each line was in perfect harmony with the other – a false front, like the buildings in Wild West movies, a beautiful optical illusion because behind the skin and tissue and muscles and the thick head of hair, under the bone of the skull, lay the gray matter, the synapses with their faulty wiring.

What had happened? How had Kara-An the child changed into a woman for whom physical pain, a scene in which two men knocked each other about, brought her to a high, ecstatic plateau?

Money. Plus beauty and prominent parents. And intelligence. That would do it. Would make life easy, would quickly change the simple pleasures into the boring, would make the appetite for stimulation ever stronger. Eventually wanting the forbidden, the strange, the deviant.

But it didn’t turn him on.

Onions in the butter, lower the flame so that they sauteed slowly.

And Hope? Good, faithful Hope, the bearer of the flame of justice.

Rigoletto:

Heavenly Father! She was caught

In the execution of my revenge.

Dearest angel! Look at me.

Listen to me!

The flame no longer burned so brightly. And it bothered him.

Fuck alone knew why.

He turned off the gas.

The chicken livers had to marinate. Then he would brown them with the onion, add the tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and the marinade, eventually the tot of brandy.

And eat.

When last had he been so hungry? Had such an appetite?

He would take his mother a bowlful.

Peace offering.

He walked to an armchair, sat down, closed his eyes.

Let the little livers absorb the flavors.

He listened to the music.

He would eat in a while.

Tomorrow things would start happening.

He gave a deep sigh.

? Dead at Daybreak ?

DAY 3

MONDAY, JULY 10

? Dead at Daybreak ?

28

I spent three months at Quantico, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s luxurious sprawl in Virginia. And two weeks respectively in Seattle and New York.

I won’t bore you with descriptions of abundant, bountiful America. I won’t comment on the hospitable, superficial, clever, generous people. (I’m becoming a self-conscious author. I’m seduced by the sensuality of the words in front of me begging to be used. I’m overeating at this banquet of self-description. I think it’s a natural process: once you start talking about yourself, once you’ve overcome the initial [typically Afrikaans] unwillingness to egocentrism, it becomes a furious machine, a monster feeding on itself, an irresistible seduction that adds more and more baroque decorations to the storyline, until the meanderings achieve a life of their own.)

So I must practice self-discipline.

At Quantico they taught me to use the media, showed me that television and radio and the newspapers weren’t the enemy of the police but an instrument. That you could harness a cart horse to the media’s insatiable hunger for sensation and blood (but that you had to hang on to the wagon if the horse took the bit between its teeth).

They taught me profiling, how to establish the psyche of serial killers and even deduce clothing and transport and age with an astonishing measure of accuracy.

I took a green exercise book with me, the nearest I could come to an official dossier, and I reopened the Baby Marnewick case, the private, unofficial version. My first witnesses were the SACs, the special agents in charge, members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit – and every analyzed serial killer in America.

And then I came back.

Wendy was at the airport – “Why didn’t you write?” – but she was ecstatic because her unwilling betrothed was eventually on his way to a doctorate. “Tell me everything,” while my head was in my green exercise book.