Dead at Daybreak

of men to women in the Peninsula an attractive statistic, the network for playing find-a-girl-for-a-cop surely the best in the world.

For that reason there was often someone at my side at the barbecue on a Saturday night. And in my bed on a Sunday morning. An admiring assistant in the kitchen, where I proved my culinary superiority to my colleagues with the preparation of the seventh day’s festive meal for two. And after lunch, sleepy and full of good food, we tried to still that other hunger on the living-room couch or the bed.

Because on Monday it was back to work, back to the dark heart of the world where other basic instincts applied.

With Nagel.

Our relationship was odd. It sometimes reminded me of the way an old married couple spend their lives bickering – a never-ending conflict on the surface but with a deep underlying respect and love that could bear anything.

It was a relationship forged in the furnace of policing, the pressure cooker of violence and blood and murder. For two years we stood side by side in the firing line and investigated every possible crime committed by people against people and hunted the guilty with total dedication.

Nagel was an ill-educated man with no respect for book learning. He proclaimed that you couldn’t get on top of police work using a textbook or lecture notes. He had no patience with pretense, even less with the butterfly dance of humankind’s social interaction – the small white lies, the fake politeness, the striving for superficial status symbols.

“Shit, man” was his general, head-shaking reaction to anything that sounded to him like a senseless statement, and he used it often, that and the general applicable possibilities and unlimited declensions of the word fuck. It was Nagel who taught me to swear – not deliberately, but the man’s handiness with it was a revelation, and contagious, like a deadly virus.

Nagel was the only detective at Murder and Robbery who was untouched by the heartlessness of our work.

He accepted the criminality of our species as a given – and his role was simply to let justice be done, to hunt and corner the murderer and the rapist and the thief, without thinking about it, without introspection, without tormenting himself over what the sometimes horrifying crimes said about him as a member of the same species.

It wasn’t as if all this was merely the petrified crust over a soft center. Nagel was one-dimensional and because of that he was probably the best professional of the long arm of the law that I knew.

Bickering. About the nature and motive of the murder, about the psyche of the murderer, about the ghostly traces at the murder scene that indicated an investigative direction, about the course and priority of the investigation itself. He was aware of my impressive academic career but he wasn’t intimidated by it. Perhaps Colonel Willie Theal had known Nagel would be the only mentor for whom my background posed no threat. He was certain of his views, his methods.

In the solution of crimes he was sometimes right with his astonishing instinct and feeling – and sometimes my pages and pages of annotations, my precise notes, my endless study of detail, my methodology in psychology, which the Americans now so pretentiously refer to as forensic criminology, provided conclusive proof. Only to hear Nagel saying that “Lady Luck shat on your fucking front porch again.”

Within months we were the investigative team everyone talked about – the first team, the main men who were called in when others failed – but Nagel was the undisputed leader, the spokesman, I the assistant, the student once more, Tonto to his Lone Ranger, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. And it suited me because Nagel was my admission ticket to acceptance by Murder and Robbery. His frequently repeated alternative views soon made my doctorate seem just an incidental piece of paper to his colleagues. His constant teasing about my notes gave it an acceptable, eccentric color.

I was respected by my colleagues as I had been at the academy.

And what a narcotic the drug of positive feedback can be. It was more than enough to make me accept and enjoy my new lifestyle and what I had become.

I can’t say I was consciously happy, but I wasn’t unhappy and in this life that’s quite something.

But I still had the one desire, even if my status as bachelor caused so much envy among my colleagues – the desire to meet the One, to fall in love, totally and irrevocably.

I yearned. And wished.

You must be so careful what you wish for.

? Dead at Daybreak ?

45

Just after six in the morning, he and Hope drove to her office, and he kept looking back but only saw the lights of other vehicles, unidentifiable in the dark.

“What do you think he’s going to do when he sees the Burger story?”

“Schlebusch?”

“Yes.”

He thought for a while. “It wasn’t clever of him to show himself on the N7. He’s not patient. He’s a doer, not a thinker. The right thing would’ve been to sit back, lie low, go away, even out of the country, until this whole thing is over. Why didn’t he? Because he couldn’t suppress the urge to hit back? Because he’s been conditioned to solve all his problems with violence?”

“Ahh,” she said, “the poor man’s Zatopek van Heerden?”

There was gentle teasing in her voice, but for a moment the comparison unnerved him. “If he’s hopelessly stupid, he’ll shoot. If he wants to survive, he’ll negotiate.”

“Will you ever go back to the police force, Zatopek?”

“I don’t know.”

She chewed on it. “And the academy?”

“I don’t know.”

Then she was quiet, and when they passed Ratanga Junction on the N1, he said: “One day, perhaps, I’ll have to find something else to do. Maybe I can’t go back to either of the two.” And then he turned and looked back again.

At the office building he held the Heckler & Koch under his windbreaker until Hope had unlocked the doors. While Hope went to make coffee, he walked straight to the small room with the phone, arranged his notepad and his pen, sat down.

Notepaper and guns. He had always preferred the former.

Hope came back with two mugs. “Are there going to be a lot of useless calls again?”

“There always are.”

“Why do you think people do it?”

“There’s so much damage in the world, Hope. We do things to one another…”

She sat opposite him, her face gentle, and looked at him, eyes searching his face. Then she asked him, softly, “How much do we do to ourselves?”

The telephone rang, the first call of the morning.

“Hallo.”

“Is that the help line of that Schlebusch guy?”

“That’s right.”

“I want to remain anonymous.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“I think I’m one of his neighbors.”

“Oh?”

“He lives on a smallholding. Here, in Hout Bay.”

“Do you know what kind of car he drives?”

“A large white truck. I think it’s an old Chevrolet.”