Dead at Daybreak

drinking. He was an athlete, he ran cross-country, he was second in the Free State. And then the call-up papers came for the First Infantry Battalion and he told his father he was going to try out for Reconnaissance Command. They didn’t know I was worried, didn’t know about the nights I lay awake. His father was so proud of him when he made the grade. His father always said how strict the selection was, and everyone had to listen, Sundays at the Springfontein church: ‘My son Rupert is a Recce – you know how tough the selection is. Rupert is in Angola. I shouldn’t really talk about it, but they’re giving the Cubans what for.’ ”

“Angola?”

“What Rupert did, he wrote letters but he never sent them because of the censors – they put thick black lines through everything, and it frustrated his father so much. He waited for the seven days’ and fourteen days’ leave and then he and his father would sit on the veranda and read, or on the ridge. His father kept this book, his notes when he reread the letters, when Rupert had left again, with cuttings from the Volksblad and Paratus, every single bit about the training in South West and Angola. And then in ’seventy-six they arrived on the farm, two officers in a long black car, the one with a fake bandage on his neck, and they said Rupert was dead and they handed us the small wooden chest with the medal and said he’d been brave but that they weren’t allowed to say what the circumstances were because it was national security but he had been very brave, he and his buddies, and the country would always be grateful to them and always honor them.

“His father took the medal and walked out without a word. There was a spot on the farm, a ridge where they always sat and looked out over the farm and talked until the sun went down, about farming and life. I found him there with the little chest on his lap and death in his eyes. His eyes were never the same again. And then the cancer came, oh, only a few months later the cancer came.”

It was his mother who wept soundlessly, he saw, not Carolina de Jager or Wilna van As, his mother who sat upright in her chair, clutching the armrest, and the tear that slowly trickled down her cheek, a thin, shining track. Carolina de Jager moved in her chair, physically dragged herself back to the present, looked at Wilna van As. “And now I want you to tell me about the Rupert you knew, Wilna. Now you must tell me everything.”

“Carolina,” he said softly, addressing her as she had asked him to do, “I’ll have to look at the letters.”

“And the photographs,” she said.

“There are photos?” Hope asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He took them for his father. At Reconnaissance Command in Natal. And then in South West and Angola. His father enjoyed them so much.”

¦

He asked Hope and his mother to join him in the kitchen. Leaving the two other women alone, they sat at the kitchen table. “Schlebusch threatened my mother, Hope, and I’m worried because I can’t always be here.”

“What did he say?” Hope asked.

“That he would hurt my mother if I don’t drop the investigation. I’m going to fetch help. I’m getting people to stay here until this affair is over.”

“What can he do to an old woman?” his mother asked.

“Ma, we’ve spoken about it. I’m not going to argue about it.”

“All right,” said his mother.

“He doesn’t even know what’s happening with the investigation. You should be safe for a day or two. But then…”

“Where will you find help?”

“I’ll see. But Ma, I want to use the pickup. Is that okay?”

“Yes, Zet.”

“Hope, is the answering machine still on in your office?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you please check? And I want you to prepare an urgent interdict, just in case.”

She nodded.

“And then you must come back. We have to work our way through the letters.”

She nodded again.

He got up. “I’ll come as soon as I can.”

“You be careful, Zet.”

“Yes, Ma.”

Hope walked with him to the garage, where the faded yellow Nissan 1400 stood next to his mother’s “decent car,” the Honda Ballade. The pickup, thirteen years old, was showing patches of rust.

“Where are you going?”

“There’s someone. I’m…looking for a firearm as well.”

He got in, started the engine.

“Zatopek,” said Hope Beneke, “get me one while you’re at it.”

? Dead at Daybreak ?

38

There’s another woman, isn’t there?” Wendy Brice had insisted, her mouth stiff, her body language ready to portray the betrayed woman.

And when I think back, in all honesty I can’t blame her. Because why should any right-minded man on the edge of a doctorate and a great career in academe, exchange it for Murder and Robbery in Cape Town? Why would anyone give up the status of university lecturer to join the derided ranks of the SAP?

I tried to explain it in the bloody summer heat of a December afternoon in Pretoria. I walked up and down and up and down in the small living room of our flat and talked about the way I’d found myself in the search for the Masking Tape Murderer, how I eventually discovered the hunter in me, my true calling flowering like a vision, explained over and over again my desire to exchange theory for practice, until I suddenly realized she didn’t want to understand, she didn’t want to be it, Wendy Brice didn’t want to be Mrs. Plod the Policeman’s Wife. Her dream, her vision of herself, didn’t allow it, and I had to choose between her and the work that Colonel Willie Theal had dangled in front of me like a challenge.

I made my choice. I was certain it was the right one. I walked to the bedroom, took a suitcase out of the cupboard. She heard the sounds and knew. She sat in the living room and cried while I packed her future with all my clothes. Wendy, who had invested so much energy, so many words in her dream.

Let me tell you a secret. Months after the death of Nagel, I wondered about all my choices – and the effects of my decision on her life and on my own life. And wondered what it would have been like and realized again the pain I had caused her. I got into my Corolla and drove to Pretoria to visit her, to give her the satisfaction of knowing that the scales of justice had been evenly balanced, that the way I had acted toward her had been revenged. “She doesn’t work here any longer,” they told me at English Lit, and gave me an address in Waterkloof, and I drove there and stopped in front of a house and simply sat and watched, and her husband in the Mercedes came home late in the afternoon and two toddlers, a son and a daughter, rushed out, “Daddy, Daddy,” and then it was Wendy wearing a pinafore and a smile with an embrace for them all, this family that disappeared into the big house with the syringas in the garden, and surely a swimming pool and a patio and a brick barbecue at the back, and I sat there in my Corolla, unemployed and broken and fucked up, and I didn’t even have it in me to cry for myself.

? Dead at Daybreak ?

39

There are dollars in it after all,” he said to Orlando Arendse in his fort in Mitchell’s Plain.

“How much?”

“I don’t know yet, Orlando. A million, at least, but I think it’s more,” and he knew he might be wrong but would have to press on. “It’s your transaction, if I get it, Orlando.”

“Let me get this straight, Van Heerden. You want me to believe that you’re going to steal dollars and bring