Dead at Daybreak

∨ 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 café’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.

What I did say had the same tenor, was the product of my feeling of guilt, my fear, my focus.

“How do we get rid of Nagel?” I asked, without thinking too deeply, without measuring the meaning of my words.