Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

44

I rented a two-bedroom house in Brackenfell and neglected the garden and borrowed the lawn mower of my middle-class neighbors, the Van Tonders, every second Saturday, but I wasn’t home very often.

I developed my own unique weekly routine. Every day and most nights I worked with the same blind dedication as my colleagues. Sometimes, when the workload permitted, I attended the Thursday-evening symphony concerts in the city hall, often alone. On Saturday evenings there was a barbecue at someone’s house, a closed police gathering with unwritten rules about meat and alcohol contributions, where drunkenness was excused as long as it didn’t upset the women and children.

On Sundays I cooked.

I went on a culinary journey of all the continents – Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern. I would plan the dish during the week, shop for the final ingredients on Saturday, and spend Sunday in the kitchen, taking time and care, with a glass of red wine and opera on the hi-fi and a woman who was my sole, deeply impressed audience.

I might as well admit it – the more heartless the dossiers on my desk, the greater the yearning for the love of my life, for love in my life, for that mythical soul mate, someone who would welcome and embrace me in a warm bed in the small hours of the night. Someone who on Saturday nights would put down our contribution on the salad table, among other women there, someone to whom I could refer as “my wife” with the same loving, jealous possessiveness of Breyten Breytenbach’s eponymous poem. There was a loneliness in me, an emptiness, an incompleteness that grew over the months. It was as if the nature of my work deepened this lack, so that I searched for her with growing determination – the Cape is a mecca for the unmarried, middle-class man, the ratio of men to women in the Peninsula an attractive statistic, the network for playing find-a-girl-for-a-cop surely the best in the world.

For that reason there was often someone at my side at the barbecue on a Saturday night. And in my bed on a Sunday morning. An admiring assistant in the kitchen, where I proved my culinary superiority to my colleagues with the preparation of the seventh day’s festive meal for two. And after lunch, sleepy and full of good food, we tried to still that other hunger on the living-room couch or the bed.

Because on Monday it was back to work, back to the dark heart of the world where other basic instincts applied.

With Nagel.

Our relationship was odd. It sometimes reminded me of the way an old married couple spend their lives bickering – a never-ending conflict on the surface but with a deep underlying respect and love that could bear anything.

It was a relationship forged in the furnace of policing, the pressure cooker of violence and blood and murder. For two years we stood side by side in the firing line and investigated every possible crime committed by people against people and hunted the guilty with total dedication.

Nagel was an ill-educated man with no respect for book learning. He proclaimed that you couldn’t get on top of police work using a textbook or lecture notes. He had no patience with pretense, even less with the butterfly dance of humankind’s social interaction – the small white lies, the fake politeness, the striving for superficial status symbols.

“Shit, man” was his general, head-shaking reaction to anything that sounded to him like a senseless statement, and he used it often, that and the general applicable possibilities and unlimited declensions of the word fuck. It was Nagel who taught me to swear – not deliberately, but the man’s handiness with it was a revelation, and contagious, like a deadly virus.

Nagel was the only detective at Murder and Robbery who was untouched by the heartlessness of our work.

He accepted the criminality of our species as a given – and his role was simply to let justice be done, to hunt and corner the murderer and the rapist and the thief, without thinking about it, without introspection, without tormenting himself over what the sometimes horrifying crimes said about him as a member of the same species.

It wasn’t as if all this was merely the petrified crust over a soft center. Nagel was one-dimensional and because of that he was probably the best professional of the long arm of the law that I knew.

Bickering. About the nature and motive of the murder, about the psyche of the murderer, about the ghostly traces at the murder scene that indicated an investigative direction, about the course and priority of the investigation itself. He was aware of my impressive academic career but he wasn’t intimidated by it. Perhaps Colonel Willie Theal had known Nagel would be the only mentor for whom my background posed no threat. He was certain of his views, his methods.

In the solution of crimes he was sometimes right with his astonishing instinct and feeling – and sometimes my pages and pages of annotations, my precise notes, my endless study of detail, my methodology in psychology, which the Americans now so pretentiously refer to as forensic criminology, provided conclusive proof. Only to hear Nagel saying that “Lady Luck shat on your fucking front porch again.”

Within months we were the investigative team everyone talked about – the first team, the main men who were called in when others failed – but Nagel was the undisputed leader, the spokesman, I the assistant, the student once more, Tonto to his Lone Ranger, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. And it suited me because Nagel was my admission ticket to acceptance by Murder and Robbery. His frequently repeated alternative views soon made my doctorate seem just an incidental piece of paper to his colleagues. His constant teasing about my notes gave it an acceptable, eccentric color.

I was respected by my colleagues as I had been at the academy.

And what a narcotic the drug of positive feedback can be. It was more than enough to make me accept and enjoy my new lifestyle and what I had become.

I can’t say I was consciously happy, but I wasn’t unhappy and in this life that’s quite something.

But I still had the one desire, even if my status as bachelor caused so much envy among my colleagues – the desire to meet the One, to fall in love, totally and irrevocably.

I yearned. And wished.

You must be so careful what you wish for.