Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

43

He was jolted awake from chaotic dreams, and the radio alarm next to the bed showed an unsympathetic 3:11.

The dreams had been about Schlebusch.

Dreams of escape and confrontation and fear, and he lay in the dark and realized that the accident, the moments on the road, and the man with the long blond hair and his threats were stuck in the cells of his subconscious, unprocessed. This was the first time that he had been both hunter and prey. And there was no protection, no SAPS net, not officially.

Rupert de Jager’s last three letters had brought no new insights, opened no new vistas, only confirmed the brooding, growing feeling that Bushy Schlebusch had taken the road to viciousness some twenty years ago. The signs of psychopathology there, a lack of emotion, an attraction to violence, an explosive personality. He was prepared to bet money – fuck, he didn’t have money – that Rupert de Jager/ Johannes Jacobus Smit hadn’t been the first victim.

The blowtorch. The threat. The curt words when he hung in the wreck of the Corolla.

Are you alive? Schlebusch had asked. With utter, uninterested contempt, the only reason for the question so that he wouldn’t have to waste his breath.

You have a mother, policeman. Do you hear me? You have a mother. I’ll burn her with a fucking blowtorch, do you hear me? You don’t know me, you pig, cunt, leave me alone or I’ll burn her.

He wasn’t the one under threat; it was his mother. The terrain was known to him, the pathology, the playing field of the serial killer, the woman as helpless victim over whom control must be exercised. And the love of fire. But Schlebusch was different, evidently not driven by a sense of inferiority. For him, killing wasn’t a relief mechanism, a leveling of the playing field. For him murder was an instrument, a final solution when the other means of persuasion didn’t do the job.

The reaction to the news stories. There was something to learn there. Calculation. He had followed Van Heerden, checked up on him, established his route, found out about his family, waited for the right moment, and attacked with a ruthless, cool effectiveness. No panic, no running away or hiding. A clinical operation to stay in control.

What did you do when you were hunting such an animal? What did you do if the prey didn’t flee or hide? What did you do if the hunted hunted you?

You got a camp karateka and a large black sniper and you packed a machine pistol and you shared your house with a woman who sometimes asked questions you didn’t want to hear because you were afraid you would answer her. He was prepared to be bad, to accept that he was evil and to live with that, but no one else must know the truth. He didn’t want to experience total rejection.

And then the night with Kara-An came and the fucking problem was he’d discovered he wasn’t as bad as he’d wanted to believe.

He knew it was her challenge, her implicit invitation. He knew it was her search for someone to share her world, to confirm her own self-disgust, to sink to the dregs with her. And he had been willing to chance the downward spiral with her, but then he had balked because he discovered that he didn’t have it in him and it made him feel…good about himself. Lord, it was a new experience.

And last night Hope’s flowers had touched him.

He had been annoyed with himself then, hadn’t wanted to feel the small stutter of emotion, the gratitude. No, it was something else. It was the nature of the present, the contrast. Kara-An had blown into his house on a wind of decadence, and Hope had brought flowers as if he was worthy of the gift.

He who had made an appalling fool of himself twice yesterday. The first was in the hospital room when he had spelled out his 1976 theory with so much self-confidence. Then he read the letters and they blew his neat theory to kingdom come. Schlebusch, De Jager, and Company hadn’t worked for Military Intelligence. They weren’t the execution squad – simply another Recce unit that had escorted supplies to Angola.

No question of dollars. No sign of American intervention.

Then what the fuck had happened in 1976? What had this valiant group been involved in that the authorities so badly wanted to hide and that had left death and dollars and riddles behind?

Schlebusch was the key. Schlebusch was the piece that wouldn’t fit into a puzzle of ordinary eighteen-year-old soldiers thrown together from a host of backgrounds and circumstances.

Damn. The frustration of loose ends. He wanted to know, wanted to yank down the great blanket hiding this thing, wanted to know. He and his mother were being hunted by an animal and he was desperate for a head start. The accident had opened a door to fear in his head and he wasn’t able to close it and it amazed him, he who had lived the last five years as if looking for a place to die, to be with death, to escape the memories in his head.

And now he was terrified of the black scythe. He had seen the face of Death under the long blond hair.

And then he had made an asshole of himself again by slapping at Billy September and his legs had been swept from under him and there he lay, and Hope and Tiny Mpayipheli and September had simply stood there, all too afraid to laugh, but he knew they’d wanted to. Then he smiled at himself. It must’ve been pretty funny. He sat up in bed, could no longer lie still, couldn’t get up to put on music and make coffee because Hope was sleeping in his living room, but he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts.

Because we owe you, Van Heerden. All of us.

Mat Joubert’s ironic words.

Why couldn’t he have the personal integrity and the righteous pain of the big detective? Joubert, who had lost his first wife some time ago, another casualty in the line of police duty. And through it all Joubert had fought the good fight and bit by bit put his life together again and now he was getting remarried, and here sat Van Heerden and what were his chances?

The debt Joubert had spoken about was based on a breathtaking misconception that might never be corrected. No one must know how bad he really was.

Joubert, who had a message for him. What message?

He would have to see if he could get hold of the bridegroom today. It was going to be a great day. Schlebusch. The photographs in Die Burger were going to arouse anger in that beast. Were two soldiers enough to guard the women against a psychopath with an American attack rifle and a calm, white anger?

He got up in one smooth movement, pulled on jeans, shirt and sweater and sneakers, looked at the figures on the alarm: 3:57. He opened the door very slowly, very softly, stood still, heard Hope’s deep, peaceful breathing, put his feet down carefully, closer and closer to her, the woman who had brought him flowers, about whom he had fantasized before Kara-An arrived with her champagne. Hope’s face was almost buried in the blanket, she lay on her side, and he saw the rapid movements of her eyeballs behind the lids, wondered what she was dreaming of – court edicts and crazy private investigators? He looked at the shape of her nose and her mouth and her cheek. There was something sad in her features. Was it because the sum total, the architecture, the final construction, formed an incomplete beauty, forcing the imagination to reconstruct it, rearrange it so that she could be breathtaking? There was something childlike there, something untouched. Did that evoke this strange feeling in him? Had that woken the aggression in him during the past week because he didn’t want to be reminded of innocence, because it was lost to him forever?

He closed his eyes. He had to get out of here.

He walked softly and carefully to the door. First switch on the outside light, warn Tiny Mpayipheli and Billy September that he was on his way. Pressed the switch, opened the door very, very carefully, closed it behind him, the click of the lock muffled, stood outside, the night quiet and cold, but never as cold as the biting, black-frost nights of Stilfontein. He stood in front of the door, hoping the soldiers had seen him, walked to the big house, looked up at the stars. A satellite winked its orbit to the north.

“Coming to inspect the guard?” Tiny Mpayipheli’s deep voice asked.

He hadn’t seen him, the black man in the dark coat in a corner of his mother’s garden, on the bench under the cypress.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Only you, or both of you?” Humor in the voice.

“Only me,” and there was far too much disappointment in his voice, and Tiny laughed softly.

“Sit down.” Mpayipheli moved over, made room for him.

“Thanks.”

They sat next to each other, staring at the night sky.

“Cold, hm?”

“I’ve been colder.”

Uncomfortable silence.

“Were you christened Tiny?”

Mpayipheli laughed. “I was named after the Springbok lock, Tiny Naude, if you must know. I was born Thobela Mpayipheli, which is a joke on its own.”

“Oh?”

“Thobela means ‘respectful, well-mannered.’ Mpayipheli is ‘the one who never stops fighting.’ My father…I think he wanted to work in a counterirritant.”

“I know the burden of names.”

“The problem with whites is that your names have no meaning.”

“Hope Beneke wouldn’t agree with you.”

“Touché.”

“Tiny Naude?”

“It’s a long story.”

“It’s a long night.”

The soft laugh again. “Do you play rugby?”

“At school. Socially a few times after that. I never really had the talent.”

“Life leads one into strange ways, Van Heerden. I’ve considered writing the story of my life, you know, about that time when every single soul who was part of the Struggle wrote an autobiography to get a first-class compartment on the gravy train. But I’m afraid only one chapter would be fascinating. The rugby chapter.”

Tiny Mpayipheli was quiet, shifted into a more comfortable position. “It’s colder when one can’t move. But the whole point of guard duty is to sit still.”

He turned up the collar of his coat, put his weapon on his lap, and took a deep breath. “My father was a man of peace. Every time the hand of apartheid slapped him in the face, he turned the other cheek, said he loved the white man even more because that was what the Word told him. And his son, Thobela, was a man of hate. And violence and fighting. Not suddenly, but sympathetically, with every humiliation I saw my father enduring. You see, I loved him so much. He was a man of dignity, unbelievable, untouchable dignity…”

A night bird called somewhere, and a faraway truck droned against an upward gradient on the N7.

“I ran away when I was sixteen, looking for the Struggle. I couldn’t stay home any longer. I had enough hate to apply ‘one settler, one bullet’ myself and the channels were ready for me. I walked the road to Gaborone and Nairobi and eventually, when I was twenty, big and strong and full of fight, the ANC sent me to the Soviet Union, to a godforsaken place called Saraktash, in the south of Russia, about a hundred kilometers from the Kazakhstan border, a dusty base where their troops prepared for the war in Afghanistan. That was where some of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s people were trained. Don’t ask me why there, but on the other hand, I don’t think the struggle at the ass end of the Dark Continent was high on the USSR’s military agenda.

“I was a troublemaker. From the very first day I asked questions about method and content. I didn’t want to learn about Lenin and Marx and Stalin; I wanted to kill. I didn’t want to know about battle plans and tank warfare; I wanted to learn to shoot and slit throats. I didn’t want to learn Russian and I didn’t like the superior attitude of the Soviet troops, and the more my comrades told me I had to be patient because the road to war wound through a diversity of landscapes, the more I rebelled, until the day I and a sergeant in the Red Army, an Uzbek with shoulders like an ox and a neck like a tree trunk, locked horns in the NCO’s bar. I didn’t understand one word he was saying, but his hate was the white man’s hate and I couldn’t resist.

“They allowed us to fight. Eventually all the troops on the base were there. First we virtually demolished the mess and then we were outside. Fists, feet, elbows, knees, fingers in the eyes, I was twenty and I was big and strong and there were guys who said it was Ali against Liston, but it was bad, he hit me until my head stood still, he broke six ribs, and I bled in places where I hadn’t even known he had hit me.

“The difference, in the final analysis, wasn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. My hate was bigger than his. And my lungs were clean. He was a smoker, and those Russian cigarettes, they told me, were fifty percent donkey shit. It wasn’t a spectacular knockout. For more than forty minutes we had systematically broken each other down until he sank onto one knee, spat blood, and couldn’t get his breath, and he shook his head and the small group of South Africans cheered and the Russians turned away angrily and left their man who had brought shame on the world power, and it would all have been over if the Uzbek hadn’t had a heart attack, later that night, in his bed, dead as a doornail. They found him the following morning and they came to fetch me out of the sick bay, the military police, and I ask you, what chance does a Xhosa have of a fair trial in a country that feels nothing for him – especially when his attitude hardly shows deep remorse?

“The cell was small and hot, even in the Russian late autumn the sun made the corrugated iron crackle, and at night it was so cold that my breath made crystals against the metal, and the food was inedible, and they kept me there for five weeks, alone in a cell as big as an outhouse, and in my head I walked the hills of the Transkei and spoke to my father and made love to plump girls with huge breasts and when my ribs had mended I did sit-ups and push-ups and squats until the sweat literally pooled on the floor.

“While I waited for something to happen, other powers were at work to get me out. Odd how life sometimes goes. The officer commanding the base was a rugby fan – only later did I realize rugby wasn’t unpopular in the Soviet army, not nearly as popular as soccer but there were enough men who played rugby for Saraktash to be able to send a good team onto the field. They had come in second in the previous year’s Red Army championships and the league was on its way to playing again when the OC got it into his head that the South Africans, coming from the land of the Springboks, were just the people to give his team a good warm-up before the first league match against the previous year’s champions.

“You can imagine, among the one hundred and twenty of us, there were only colored guys who knew anything about the game. The rest were Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana and Sotho and Venda, and rugby was the sport of the oppressor and what we knew about it was just about nothing, but our Umkhonto leader was Moses Morape and if one of your men is in the cells and you see a gap, you take it. When the Russian OC came to issue the challenge, the guys had an indaba, and Rudewaan Moosa, one of the Cape Malays, a committed Muslim, who in any case hated the Russians because they were so godless, said he had been a fly half in the South African Rugby Federation setup and he would be their trainer because it was an opportunity to put the whiteys in their place.

“Morape went to negotiate. First suggested soccer as an alternative because we knew we could beat their Soviet asses hollow, but the OC wouldn’t hear of it. Then Morape said they would play rugby but that Mpayipheli must be freed. And the South African team must get the same equipment as the Russians.

“ ‘But Mpayipheli is a murderer,’ the OC said, and Morape argued that it had been a fair fight and the OC shook his head and said justice had to take its course and Morape said then there wouldn’t be a warm-up match, and for two weeks there was coming and going until the OC agreed, but there were two conditions. You have to win. And Mpayipheli must play, otherwise his troops wouldn’t accept the deal, and Morape said okay.

“I didn’t want to know. I said I’d rather go back to the cells, but the chief indunas explained the choices: either I play, or they would send me to Zambia, where I could be a pencil pusher in a supply store for the rest of the Struggle – if the Soviet army’s justice system had finished with me. They were sick and tired of me. I had to choose.

“Two days later we had our first practice. Two teams chosen according to size and height and potential talent. It was chaos. Like grade-one kids who gather around the ball and yell and run all over the place. The Russians who stood at the side of the practice field laughed so much that we couldn’t hear what Moosa was saying and we were so stupid that the writing was on the wall. Three weeks was far too little. We were cannon fodder.

“But Moosa was clever. And patient. The night after the first practice he spent in deep thought. Changed his strategy. Decided to shift the front to the classroom for starters, and for four long days we learned the theory of rugby on a blackboard, the rules, the involved, inexplicable, never-ending shower of rules, then analyzed every position, memorized every strategy, and on the fifth morning at six o’clock we were on the field, before the Russians got going. Moosa drilled us: the back line on one side, the forwards on another, line-outs, scrums, loose scrums, rucking, running, walking us through each step painfully slowly, quite literally at first.

“It got better but it was still pathetic. It was as if the guys couldn’t get their heads around this whitey game. You should’ve heard the remarks. All in the line of ‘It’s only the Boers who would be foolish enough to exchange a round ball and two nets for this stupidity.’ We wanted to dribble and kick, not pick up and pass. It seemed as if our whole nature was against the strange game. Not to mention the offside rule. But Moosa kept his head and Morape gave us courage, and on the Saturday one week before the match, we went out before sunrise for a secret practice in town, the two black teams against each other on an open piece of land next to the river, a kind of test game to choose the A team.

“Pretty it wasn’t. Moosa lost his temper for the first time that day, threw his hands into the air, and said it was an impossible task – it simply wasn’t possible to change a crowd of black idiots from soccer fans to rugby winners. He stormed off the field and went to sit under a large tree, his head in his hands, and we stood there, our bodies steaming in the cold, and we knew he was right. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t tried. It was simply – the handicap. And our hearts. If you know you’re going to be beaten, it’s difficult to get your heart in the right positive spirit.

“Morape went to sit next to Moosa and they talked for an hour or longer. And then they walked back to where we were sitting in a heap and Morape began to speak to us.

“He was a Tswana. A man with a face like an eagle, not tall or big, not very clever, but there was something in Morape that made you listen. And that morning, at the ass end of the world, we listened. Morape spoke softly. Said the match wasn’t about keeping Mpayipheli out of jail. Which got me a few dirty looks. He said the match was about the Struggle. The match had come our way in a country that didn’t want us there, from people who didn’t think we were good enough. Just like at home. And even though we couldn’t choose the battleground and the strategy there to suit us, we could do it here. Must we look at our country and say no, the whiteys have more weapons, more money, better comforts, better technology, they hold the high ground, but should we surrender? If we surrendered, here in Holy Mother Russia, we could give up the Struggle, because then we would’ve lost before we started. It was about character. It was about the fighting spirit. It was about daring, about focus, about concentration, the unshakable belief that you could do anything if you believed in yourself and in the cause.

“Sport, he said, is the poor man’s war. With the same principles. Us against them. Standing together against superior forces. Solidarity. Tactics and strategy and the same deep emotion. And just like war, sport eventually teaches us about ourselves. To test ourselves and our capabilities and our individual and collective character…

“He wouldn’t mind if we lost the battle. It happened in war, it happened in sport, and it happened in life. But if we lost because we hadn’t done our best, then we weren’t the kind of people with whom he wanted to go to war. Then Morape got up and walked away across the green grass and left us there to think.

“That Monday, Morape pinned the names of his first team against the notice board and my name was there as lock forward and my knees shook. But I wasn’t ‘Thobela’ any longer. Moosa had made me ‘Tiny’ Mpayipheli.

“For the rest of the week we practiced every day. With Morape on the sideline as a silent reminder of his words, and Moosa, fly half and coach, who drilled us, and then the jerseys came on Thursday. The OC of the base had had them made in Moscow, green and gold with a Springbok on the chest, and Morape said, ‘Now you’re playing for your country,’ and the whole thing took on a dimension for which we weren’t prepared. We wanted to complain about the jersey of the oppressor when Morape asked, ‘What are the colors of the ANC?’

“That Saturday the soccer stadium in Saraktash was packed with so many Soviet soldiers you couldn’t credit it. Each weekend pass had been withdrawn, every military soul had been called up to support their men, and when their team came out of the tunnel, it was a sea of red jerseys with a yellow hammer and sickle on the chest and the crowd went wild and for most of the game our small group of supporters were too scared to open their mouths.

“It probably wasn’t the greatest rugby to watch, especially the first half. To our great surprise the Russians weren’t masters of the game. More experienced than we were, but no oiled machine. At half time they were ahead by eighteen to six after Moosa had kicked two drop goals, and then he said to us, ‘Guys, these Reds can be beaten, I can feel it. Can you feel it?’ Perhaps we were no longer intimidated. Maybe we thought it was going to be a superior force that would grind us, bleeding, into the grass, and when it didn’t happen, we had to admit that he was right. These guys could be beaten…

“ ‘They’re slow,’ Moosa had said. ‘Get the ball to Zuma, doesn’t matter how. Get the ball to Zuma.’ Napoleon Zuma was our left wing, he was only nineteen, a Zulu, he was short, but he had a pair of thighs each of which you couldn’t encircle with two hands and he could run like the wind.

“It took us fifteen minutes to get him away for the first time and then he scored a try, and then it was as if something happened on that field, as if those fifteen South Africans from the townships and the small-town locations and the villages of the Bantustans suddenly had insight into this strange, wonderful game. And we played. And the better we played, the quieter the Red Army crowd became and the louder our small band of supporters shouted on the pavilion steps, and Napoleon Zuma scored two more tries and suddenly the score was equal with only ten minutes of play left and then we wanted to win, we knew we were going to win. You should’ve seen those guys, Van Heerden, you should’ve seen them play – it was wonderful, it was indescribably beautiful.”

And then Tiny Mpayipheli was silent and he looked at the faraway stars in the dark of a Cape winter and he shivered in his big, black coat.

“Is that Orion?” he asked eventually, and pointed a finger at the east.

“Yes.” They sat, staring at the morning star, but when the silence became too long, Van Heerden couldn’t help asking, “Did you win?”

The black man smiled broadly in the dark. “The nicest thing was that the referee saw his posting to Afghanistan coming up, but his whistle couldn’t save the day, though he did his best. On the rugby field that day, South Africa won its only test against the Red Peril, thirty-six to eighteen.”