Dead at Daybreak

Joubert and Brits stood virtually head-to-head like two elephant bulls, Joubert slightly shorter, the shoulders somewhat broader.

“Come and talk to us, Brits,” said Van Heerden. He wanted to add, Please, but stopped himself. He wanted information. Badly.

O’Grady: “Our cocks are longer than yours, Brits. Face it.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“How many photos must I still publish, Brits?”

“I’ll gag the press.”

They laughed as one – Van Heerden, Joubert, O’Grady, and Petersen.

“Look there, Brits.” Van Heerden pointed over Brits’s shoulder.

The panel van of eTV turned in at the gate.

“Those men are hungry,” said Petersen.

“You’re surrounded,” said O’Grady.

“Custer’s last stand,” said Petersen.

“At Little Little Horn.”

Then the two detectives chuckled and Van Heerden recalled Brits’s and Steven Mzimkhulu’s mocking. What goes round comes round.

The inner turmoil in Brits ended. “Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all you’re getting.”

“Thank God you’re not a lawyer. It would’ve cost us a fortune.”

¦

“We have eight members of First Reconnaissance Command who ran a supply route from South West to Angola, Brits.” He closed his eyes, trying to recall the names; his notebook was at Hope’s. “Schlebusch, Verster, De Beer, Manley, Venter, Janse van Rensburg, Vergottini, and Rupert de Jager.” He opened his eyes. Brits was pale, trying to hide the shock of the names, but his face betrayed him. “And then two officers appeared on De Jager’s parents’ farm and told them he had died in the service of his country, but more than twenty years later he lived again as Johannes Jacobus Smit with a false identity document and a safe full of American dollars dating from the previous decade. And he was shot with an M16 and I’m reasonably certain it was Schlebusch, the noncommissioned officer who led the group in ’seventy-six.”

He looked up. Brits evaded his eyes.

“You’re doing everything in your power to manipulate the investigation, to get it stopped. Which means that you know what happened in ’seventy-six and you want to suppress it at all costs. Which means it was bad, wet work or chemical warfare or some unholy operation.”

Brits snorted contemptuously.

“You can snort all you like, Brits, but your secret is going to come out. Now Schlebusch is also dead, after his picture appeared in the paper. But I have all the photographs, Brits, and I’m giving them to the newspapers and television and I’ll sit back and watch all hell break loose. And I’ll tell them about your efforts to undermine the investigation and see how you handle that.”

They sat in Van Heerden’s house in the dark living room, his couch and his dining-room chairs filled to capacity, Petersen, O’Grady, Mat Joubert, Brits, and Tiny Mpayipheli, whom he had merely introduced as a colleague.

Brits stood up slowly, his face contorted as if he were in severe pain. He walked down the passage and back again, the others watching him, down the passage and back again, then looked at Van Heerden.

“I can’t,” he said.

He walked back and forth again, the others quiet, aware of his inner struggle. “I can’t. I’ve lived with this thing for twenty-three years, but I can’t talk about it. It’s bigger than…” His hands embraced the group in the living room. “Than this.”

He walked, thought again, sat down, gestured with his hands, looked for words, breathed out with a sharp exhalation, then slumped back in the chair. “I can’t.”

A silence fell: there was nothing to say. Bester Brits leaned his head back, as if the weight of the past was too much for him. And then his voice, almost inaudible. “So many dead,” he said. And whispered: “Manley.”

Breathed out. In.

“Verster.”

Out. In.

“De Beer.”

Again the breath, as though he could hear a shot with every name.

“Van Rensburg.”

Van Heerden’s heart was beating, hammering in his chest, too scared to breathe, too scared that he wouldn’t be able to hear, but the officer’s voice had stopped. He waited for the last two names, but they didn’t come.

Then, whispering as well: “What about Venter and Vergottini?”

Brits closed his eyes as if he was tired to the bone. “I don’t know, Van Heerden, I don’t know.”

“How did they die?” Almost inaudible, but the moment had passed. Bester Brits sat up again.

“It doesn’t matter. It was – ” He bit off the word sharply.

“It matters, Brits.”

Brits started to rise. “It doesn’t matter to you, Van Heerden. It has absolutely nothing to do with you. Take my word for it. They’re dead.”

“Who shot Schlebusch, Brits?”

“I don’t know.”

“Vergottini? Verster?”

“I fucking well don’t know. I don’t know, are you deaf?”

Mat Joubert said softly: “It must be hard, Brits, to live with this for twenty-three years.” He wanted him in memory mode again, Van Heerden thought.

“It is.”

“And to pray it’ll never come again.”

Brits dropped his head into his hands. “Yes.”

“Unload it, Brits, the whole burden. Lay it down.”

He sat like that for a long time, the big hands moving slowly over his eyes and his nose and his forehead, rubbing, rubbing as if comforting himself. Then he got up with difficulty and his body shivered. “Do you know how much I’d like to? All these years. Do you know how close I sometimes came? Do you know how close I came just now?” Brits walked to the front door, opened it, and looked out. He looked back once at the men, who remained seated, then shook his head as if saying no to himself and walked out. They listened to his footsteps on the path and then there was only silence.

? Dead at Daybreak ?

48

Perception. And reality.

The perception of Nagel’s “chains”: a large battleship with curlers in her hair and a permanent frown, a complaining, nagging millstone, a sloppy television addict, a caricature of a wife in a suburban comic strip.

The reality: this dream woman, this beautiful, gentle, laughing miracle who walked ahead of me through a painfully neat house filled with books, to the small garden at the back, an enchanted spot created with her own hands.

Why had he hidden her? Why, over so many months, had he created the false impression? So that we – I – should have sympathy with his chronic extramarital wanderings, his drinking with the boys?

He had telephoned from De Aar, where he’d gone to investigate a serial rapist case, to say that he had left his service pistol at home. “I know my fucking wife – she’ll let the thing go off and someone will get hurt and then it’s a disciplinary hearing and I don’t know what other shit, so can you fetch the fucker and keep it with you until I get back?”

I phoned his house first and her voice hadn’t prepared me; there was politeness, but the technology hadn’t