Dead at Daybreak

He shook his head.

“You’re a good person, Van Heerden.”

He said nothing. He would have to phone Mat Joubert. But first, the dollars.

It was all getting too much.

? Dead at Daybreak ?

54

Nonnie Nagel had phoned, just after five that afternoon. “He’s going to a meeting about the Red Ribbon affair. He told me he wouldn’t be home until after twelve. Fetch me. At eight o’clock. We’re going out.”

We never went out. We were either at the Nagel house or at mine, but we never went out because we were too frightened that someone would see us. Our love, our togetherness, was between four private, clandestine walls, but we hadn’t seen each other for more than three weeks and there was excitement in her voice, a playfulness, a recklessness. I wanted to refuse, we shouldn’t have chanced it, but the longing was too great, the possibility that she might announce, tonight, that she was ready to leave him.

“Where to?” I asked when she got into the car two blocks away from their home.

“I’ll explain.”

I wanted to ask her why – why this evening, why were we going out, and what about when we went back, what if he was at home by then? But I said nothing, just drove, with her hand on my thigh and that secret smile on her face.

It was a dance hall in Bellville, just off Durban Road, not a nightclub, a place for ballroom, packed, the music loud, the light subdued. There was festivity in the air, she looked beautiful in a simple white dress, sleeveless, and white sandals, and when we walked in she took my arm and we moved over the floor and she threw her head back and laughed, deeply, with joy and abandonment, and the bass of the loudspeakers throbbed through our bodies.

I have never been a good dancer. My mother taught me in the living room in Stilfontein but she was no expert. I could get along well enough not to make a fool of myself.

That evening, with her, the music moved me. We stayed on the floor for the first hour, one tune after another, pop from the seventies, sixties, eighties, Afrikaans rock. We kept dancing, dripping with perspiration. My shirt, her dress, clung to our bodies, her eyes glowed, her laughter, her joy shone, there for everybody to see.

And then she wanted a beer and we dodged through the crowd to a bar counter and swallowed our ice-cold beers and ordered two more, looked for seating and drank the second beer more slowly, our eyes on the other dancers. A thin little guy in black pants and a white shirt and a black waistcoat asked her to dance and she looked questioningly at me and I nodded. She rose and went to dance with him and I watched her with a lightness in me, light-headed with love and tenderness, watching her as she glided expertly over the floor with him, remembering at that moment Van Wyk Louw’s poem “The Hour of the Dark Thirst.” I heard Betta Wandrag’s voice again, reciting those sadly beautiful words: At eleven o’clock your body was/ A hunger and thirst in me…

And then she came to fetch me again and we danced and at ten o’clock she looked at her watch and said, “Come,” and pulled me to the car, to my house, and we threw off our clothes from the front door to the double bed in our feverish haste to reach skin and flesh and love, and Betta Wandrag was right, because love with the One was different, so divinely different.

At one o’clock your hair,

caught my hand in an evil web,

your body like black, still water,

your breath a little sob.

Sometime after eleven we lay in each other’s arms, whispering as we always did, whispering to safeguard the secret of our togetherness, a laughing, pointless conversation, when he hammered at my door, a deep dhom, dhom, dhom of his fist on my door, and we lay there, petrified. I pulled on shorts. “Don’t open,” she’d said, whispering, urgent, despairing, begging. I walked out. “Please,” I heard her say as I walked down the dark passage. Dhom, dhom, dhom against my front door, I opened it, and Nagel stood there, fire in his eyes.

“Get dressed. We know who Red Ribbon is.”

Facing each other, on the threshold of my house, we knew he knew she was inside, and there was hatred between us, deep, black hatred until he turned away.

“I’ll wait in the car.”

? Dead at Daybreak ?

55

Speckle Venter, he thought, the only one left. “And then they allowed us to sleep. We were very tired but then Speckle took out his guitar. His real name is Michael Venter. He’s very short, Pa, and he has a birthmark on his neck. So they call him Speckle. He comes from Humansdorp. His father is a panel beater. He wrote a song about his town. It’s quite sad…”

A guitar-playing country boy. Behind all this?

He punched a number into the cell phone.

“Murder and Robbery, Mavis Petersen speaking.”

“Mavis, it’s Zatopek van Heerden. Tony O’Grady has just been shot in Cafe Paradiso, on Kloof Street. You must get hold of Joubert. And tell De Wit as well.”

“Good Lord,” she said.

“Mavis…”

“I hear, Captain. I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you, Mavis.” He cut the call. All hell was going to break loose. But before that happened…“We’ll have to get a map of Cape Town,” he said to Tiny Mpayipheli.

“There’s one in the glove compartment.”

He opened it, took out the map book, looked for Solan Street in the index, found the reference, turned to the map.

“It’s just below us.”

“But are we fetching the attorney first?”

“And James Vergottini.”

Then this whole affair would be sliced open, this Pandora’s box, this can of worms.

At last, a live witness.

Mpayipheli let the Mercedes ML 320’s tires scream around the corner of Kloof Street and the corner Hope had mentioned. An ambulance stood in front of Cafe Paradiso, a white Opel with blue police lights. They saw Hope’s BMW farther up the street, drove nearer, stopped next to the car.

There was no one near the car.

“Fuck,” said Van Heerden.

“You should become a writer,” said Mpayipheli. “Such a gift for language.”

Van Heerden said nothing. He felt exhausted. Too little sleep. Too much adrenaline. Too much struggling.

Tiny’s cell phone rang again. He answered, listened. Eventually, slowly, he put the phone down.

“That was Orlando. Billy September is dead.”

“Too many,” said Van Heerden. “Too many.”

“Someone will pay,” said Mpayipheli. “Now someone will fucking pay.”

¦

They drove up Solan Street. Warehouses, engineering works, panel beaters, a clothing factory, a Vespa