Dead at Daybreak

“Thank you very much,” he whispered, and put the phone down.

That didn’t help much.

But what was W.A. doing so far from home? Why was he hanging around the Cape’s southern suburbs?

He leaned back in the chair, tried to make sense of the day’s events, tried to slot the new information into what he had.

So many dead. And now only Venter and Vergottini remained.

Bester Brits had been the messenger of death then. Involved from the start. But not involved enough to know everything. Like who the protagonist behind it all was.

One of them would telephone at 14:00, one of them wanted to come in and talk, one of them said he wasn’t part of the thing.

And the other one had sent four men to shoot his mother.

What kind of man…what was so big, so important, so wicked that he needed to send four armed henchmen? Was it the money, the huge stack of American dollars? Or was it because he wanted to cover up the evil of twenty- three years ago at all costs?

Schlebusch. Why shoot your erstwhile team leader if he was on your side?

And if Schlebusch wasn’t the evil behind the whole thing, who the hell was?

The timing.

Brits had said it was because Schlebusch’s picture had been in the newspaper that he was shot. But the timing was too tight. Between five, six o’clock when Die Burger appeared and the phone call, there had been too little time to commit a murder, develop a strategy to lure him, Van Heerden, to Hout Bay, and send troops to Morning Star.

It hadn’t worked that way.

Shit, he didn’t know how this thing worked, but he had one thin string he could pull on to see what unraveled. The contents of the wallet.

He looked at his watch. 13:12. Still time to drive to Observatory before the 14:00 call came. He would have to call Tiny. He replaced the contents of the wallet, snapped it shut, put it back in his pocket. Walked to the door. The Heckler & Koch stood against the wall next to the door. He looked at it. The thing was too big. Too unwieldy. Too obvious.

He paused.

Perhaps it was time?

No.

What had Mat Joubert told Bester Brits? Unload the burden.

A moment’s doubt, the old, familiar tug in his stomach when he thought about the Z88, and then he walked to the bedroom, opened the cupboard door, shifted the sweaters in front of the small safe, turned the combination lock, and clicked it open. He took out the old police service pistol and magazine, banged the magazine into the grip – Don’t think, he didn’t want to think – pushed the gun into his belt at the back, pulled his sweater over it, walked to the front door, picked up the Heckler & Koch – he must give it back to Tiny – opened the door.

“Hallo, Zatopek,” said Kara-An Rousseau, her hand in the air, about to knock. She looked at the machine pistol. “Still love me?”

? Dead at Daybreak ?

50

We were standing next to the body of the Red Ribbon Executioner’s first victim when Nagel said: “If anyone ever messes with my wife, I’ll shoot him. Like a dog.”

Unprovoked. He had bent over the middle-aged prostitute and studied the red ribbon with which she had been strangled and suddenly straightened and looked me in the eye and his Adam’s apple had bobbed with each word. And then he looked away again and studied the crime scene.

And my heart skipped a beat and my palms sweat, and, terrified, I wondered how he knew, because he couldn’t know, we were so incredibly careful. After the second time I didn’t even park my Toyota near the Nagel house – I left it two blocks away in a cafe’s parking lot and walked, stooping, like a suspect, like a criminal.

I, who, despite my minor sins of self-satisfaction and selfishness, had made the conscious decision to strive for integrity, to live with honesty and self-control. I, for whom each crime scene brought a new determination to range myself on the side of the good, to fight and to tame the evil and the bad, the monster that crouched in others.

Then, and in the years thereafter, I turned that moment over and over like a piece of evidence in my hands and examined it from all sides for clues to Nagel’s words.

Had my attitude toward him changed when he came back from De Aar? I thought I’d hidden it so well; we still bickered, joked, argued as we’d always done, but perhaps the thin light-headedness of guilt when I met his eyes was visible, tangible.

Or was it Nonnie’s subtly altered behavior when he came home? Had he perhaps found her in the kitchen, softly singing, and had she said, or not said, something?

Or was it the famous Nagel instinct, the extra sense that, despite all his shallowness, he was blessed with?

Was it Jung who said that there was no coincidence? Had Nagel sent me purposely or subconsciously- consciously to Nonnie that first day? I even considered that possibility, but the psychological byways formed a maze of speculation in which I quickly became trapped.

To my deep shame I must admit that his words, his throwing down of the gauntlet as it were, gave an extra element of excitement and adrenaline to our secret relationship. It was a factor that bound us more closely in our deceit, tightened the bonds of our love. In our stolen moments, in her house, in Nagel’s bed, when we lay in each other’s arms, we would speculate conspiratorially about his suspicions, we would discuss our behavior, looking for moments in which we might possibly have betrayed ourselves – and each time we came to the conclusion that he had no reason to suspect.

The time we could spend together was so heartbreakingly limited: sometimes an hour or two in a day, when the slow-moving judicial system held him captive as a witness in a court case; when he made himself comfortable on a barstool for an evening’s “serious drinking”; and the oh-so-rare, sweet days and nights when he had to leave the Cape to stretch the long arm of the law into the countryside.

In those months Nonnie Nagel became my whole life. I thought about her from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning until, with painful longing, I eventually went to sleep at night. My love for her was all-encompassing, all-prevailing, a virus, a fever, a refuge.

My love for her was right, just, good. Nagel had rejected her, and I had discovered her, embraced and cherished her, made her my own. My love for her was pure, beautiful, gentle. Therefore it was right, despite the terrible daily deceit. I rationalized it for myself, every hour of every day, told her he had had choices, had made his decisions. Together we elevated our relationship to a crusade of love and justice.

Why didn’t she just leave him?

I asked her that once and she simply looked at me with those beautiful, gentle eyes and made a gesture of infinite helplessness and I came to my own conclusions. I suspected she was, like many abused women, the victim of a destructive relationship in which one word of praise was the dependency-inducing lifeline in a stormy sea of criticism. I suspected that she didn’t think she could stand on her own any longer, that she didn’t believe she was capable of a life without him.

I didn’t ask again, knew I would have to take the lead.

But perhaps it was also the very nature of our relationship that allowed so little time for discussion of the future, perhaps it was because we wanted to be sure, or perhaps we didn’t want to dilute the excitement of the forbidden so soon. We never really spoke about the way in which she should leave her marriage.

And one afternoon (he was in court again), when we had let the sweat of lovemaking dry on our bodies, I uttered the words that would change so much.

What I should have said was, Nonnie, I love you. Marry me.