“It’s Schlebusch,” she said. He turned the picture over for a moment, read the inscription, turned it back, and stared at it for a long time and intently, as if he wanted to take the man’s measure.
Then he looked at her. “We’ll have to be careful,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
♦
The black man was a terrifying size, tall and broad, and on his cheek a zigzag scar ran down to his neck. Next to him stood a colored guy, short and painfully thin, with the finely chiseled features of a male model.
“Orlando sent us. I’m Tiny Mpayipheli. This is Billy September. The weapons are in the car,” said the black man, and he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder to a new Mercedes-Benz ML 320 at the front door.
“Come in,” said Van Heerden. They walked to the living room.
“Lord save us,” said Carolina de Jager when she saw Mpayipheli.
“And protect us,” said the big man, and he smiled, showing a perfect set of teeth. “Why don’t they write hymns like that anymore?”
“You know the old hymn book?” Carolina asked.
“My father was a missionary, ma’am.”
“Oh.”
Van Heerden introduced everyone.
“You’ll have to share the spare bedroom,” said Joan van Heerden. “But I don’t know if the bed is going to be long enough for you.”
“I brought my own bedding, thank you,” said Mpayipheli in a voice like a bass cello. “And we’ll sleep in shifts. I just want to know whether there’s an M-Net channel here.”
“M-Net?” said Van Heerden blankly.
“Tiny is a weird Xhosa,” said Billy September. “Likes rugby more than soccer. And on Saturday it’s the Sharks against Western Province.”
Joan van Heerden laughed. “I’ve got M-Net because I don’t miss my soaps.”
“We’ve died and gone to heaven,” said September. “I’m a Bold and the Beautiful fan myself.”
“Do you want to look at the weapons now?”
Van Heerden nodded and they walked to the car outside. September opened the trunk.
“Are you the weapons expert?” Hope asked the small guy.
“No, Tiny is.”
“And what’s your…speciality?” asked Van Heerden.
“Unarmed combat.”
“You’re not serious.”
“He is,” said Mpayipheli, and he lifted a blanket from the trunk of the Mercedes. “I didn’t bring a large assortment. Orlando says it’s window dressing because none of you can shoot.”
“I can,” said Hope.
“You’re not serious,” said September, a perfect echo of Van Heerden’s intonation.
There was a small arsenal under the blanket. “It’ll be better if you take the SW99,” he said to her, and took out a pistol. “Collaborative effort of Smith and Wesson and Walther. Nine millimeter, ten pounds in the magazine, one in the barrel. It’s not loaded. You can take it.”
“It’s too big for me.”
“Is there somewhere we can shoot?”
Van Heerden nodded. “Beyond the trees. It’s the farthest from the stables we can get.”
“You’ll see. It handles easily,” Mpayipheli said to Hope. “Polymer frame. And if you can’t handle it” – he took out another pistol, smaller – “this is the Colt Pony Pocketlight, .38 caliber. Firepower enough.” He turned to Van Heerden. “This is the Heckler and Koch MP-5. Fires from a closed and locked bolt in either automatic or semiautomatic mode. It’s the basic weapon of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and the SWAT units and it’s what you want when you work at close quarters and you’re not a good shot. Can you really not shoot?”
“I can shoot.”
“Without hitting anything,” said September, and giggled.
“With that mouth I sincerely hope you’re really good at unarmed combat.”
“You want to try me, Van Heerden? Do you want firsthand credentials, so to speak?”
“Zatopek,” said Hope Beneke.
“Come on, Van Heerden, don’t chicken out. Go for it.”
“Billy,” said Mpayipheli.
He measured the small man. “You don’t scare me.”
“Hit me, PI man. Show me what you got.” Mocking, tempting, challenging.
And then Van Heerden hit at him, open-handed, annoyed, and lost his balance, felt himself falling, and then he lay on the gritty gravel of his mother’s drive with Billy September’s knee on his chest and his pointed fingers lightly against his throat. And September said: “Japanese Karate Association, JKA, Fourth Dan. Don’t fuck with me,” and then he laughed and put out his hand to help Van Heerden up.
∨ 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.
∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧
41
Mavis Petersen, the receptionist at Murder and Robbery, said that Mat Joubert was out. “He’s on leave for personal reasons because he’s getting married on Saturday,” she said in a confidential tone. “To Mrs. Margaret Wallace, an English lady. Oh, we’re so pleased for his sake. We’re not made to be alone.”
“Then I’ll have to see Nougat, Mavis,” said Van Heerden.
“That one will never get a wife,” she laughed. “The inspector is in court. He has to give evidence.” She leafed through the book in front of her. “B court.”
“Thank you, Mavis.”
“And when is the captain getting married?”
He merely shook his head as he walked away. “Good-bye, Mavis.”
“We’re not made to be alone,” he heard her calling as he went out the door.
First his mother, and now Mavis.