Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

40

Nagel.

Captain Willem Nagel, South African Police, Murder and Robbery.

The first sound I heard him make was a fart, an impossibly long, endless, flat sound as I was coming down the passage on my way to his office. It carried on when I walked in and he looked up and went on farting and it was only when the sound had ended that he put out his hand.

He was always and unashamedly flatulent, but that was probably the least of his socially unacceptable traits.

Nagel was shameless. Nagel was a sexist, a racist, a womanizer, constantly on the lookout for a new “piece,” a braggart, a liar, a show-off.

Nagel was a painfully thin man with a hopping, bobbing Adam’s apple and a deep voice and a love for that voice and everything it uttered. Nagel dressed tastelessly and lived tastelessly, ate Kentucky Fried Chicken “because my fucking old lady can’t cook to save her life,” until his whole office stank of a mixture of farts and the reek of the Colonel’s chicken, as did the Ford Sierra we shared as a squad car, and the stench became part of my daily existence.

Nagel was my mentor within the system run by Colonel Willie Theal, and I came to love him like a brother.

He listened to Abba and to Cora Marie (“That woman can make me cry, Van Heerden”) and said: “Jesus, your classic shit drives me crazy,” and all he ever read was “Advice to the Lovelorn” in a women’s magazine he’d discovered in a doctor’s consulting room. He spent his evenings in his favorite bars with “the boys” and told tall tales about the number, variety, and type of extramarital sex acts he had performed and would soon perform again, and then, late at night, drunk but upright, he had to go back to the “chains” of his marriage.

Willem Nagel. Wonderful, eccentric, politically incorrect Nagel. With a legendary detective brain and phenomenal arrest statistics.

I wish I had never met him.