Dead Before Dying

Perhaps de Wit was right. Perhaps he was a loser. The Great Loser. The counterweight to success. Maybe he was the refuse tip of the gods, where all the dark thoughts and experiences, adversity and unhappiness, could be dumped like nuclear waste. Programmed to absorb the shadows like a sponge so that there could be light. Death, the Great Predator, was following the bloody tracks of Mat Joubert, saliva dripping from its fangs to fall onto the black soil. So that humanity could be free.

Like Charles Theodore Zeelie. He had walked out a free man. “You’ll keep your promise?” He’d made quite certain one last time.

“Yes.” Because even without promises Murder and Robbery didn't like to expose their dead ends, their failures, in the media. Charles Theodore Zeelie had been relieved. The strong face had regained its color, the hands had relaxed, the frown smoothed from the forehead by the invisible fingers of innocence.

He quite understood why they had asked him to come. He wasn'’t annoyed with them. If he could help . . .

Relieved. Friendly, almost lighthearted. Untouched by the death of a man who had made him experience self-hatred. And love.

Charles Theodore Zeelie had walked out free. But not Mat Joubert.

De Wit had made no comment, only directed that smile at Joubert. Had a smile of pity replaced the victorious one?

On the sixth floor of a block of flats in Sea Point that looked out over the vast, cold expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, he had visited Mrs. Joyce Wilson, the mother of Drew Joseph Wilson.

She replied calmly to Joubert’s questions, the grief firmly under control. A woman who cared for her appearance, tall and strong and impressive, her attractiveness arrived at by her own hand, not due to genetic factors. Gallant and straight-backed in her painfully neat flat. Yes, Drew, her beloved and only son, had been gay. But he had changed. It was more than six or seven years that he had let it go.

Tell her it’s wishful thinking, Mat Joubert. Tell her. Let her feel the darkness, too. Share it. Spread it around a little. But he’d said nothing. He left her alone to cry in her bedroom where no one could see her.

He’d been to see Margaret Wallace again as well. With the pain in her eyes that hadn't yet disappeared. You’re almost there, lady. Open your heart. Leave the back door of your mind permanently open so that death can come in, the black wind can blow through your skull. You’re on the right road, lady. Life has disappeared from your eyes. Your skin, your mouth, look tired. Your shoulders are carrying a heavy load.

No, she had never heard of Drew Wilson. She didn't know whether James had known him.

And her body language implied that she didn't care.

And here sat Mat Joubert. The Great Loser. The man with the physician and the psychologist and the dietitian. He made a sound in the back of his throat, jeering at himself, at the thought, the concept, that a thirty-four-year-old captain and detective couldn't seduce the eighteen-year-old daughter of an undertaker.

How pathetic.

Benny Griessel’s face rose in his mind again. At the moment when Yvonne Stoffberg appeared in the doorway, a fanfare of flesh, his late-night dessert.

Benny Griessel’s face.

Joubert smiled. And suddenly saw his self-pity from another perspective— at first only a glimpse, then with disillusion. And he smiled at himself. And at Benny Griessel’s face. Joubert looked at his burning cigarette and saw himself as he was at that moment— in his reading chair, staring at a cigarette, and with a smile meant only for himself— and he knew he had another chance.

He stubbed the cigarette and got up. He fetched his diet sheet and the recipe book the dietitian had given him. He walked to the kitchen: 60 grams of chicken (no skin), 60 milliliters fat-free meat sauce, 100 grams baked potato, 150 grams carrots, broccoli. Two units of fat.

Jesus.

He took out pots and pans, started the preparations, his head rethinking the two murders. Eventually he sat down at the table, ate the food slowly.

Chew food slowly. This allows the stomach to signal the brain when it is full,

said the diet sheet. But the telephone rang twice before his plate was empty.

The first time he answered, it was with his mouth full of broccoli. “Wawert.”

“Captain Joubert, please.” A man’s voice.

Joubert swallowed. “Speaking.”

“Good evening, Captain. Sorry to bother you at home. But that colonel of yours is a terror.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, Captain. Michaels here, at the laboratory. It’s about SAP3 four slash two slash one slash ninety-five. The Wallace murder.”

“Yes?”

“The weapon, Captain. It’s not—”

“Are you calling from Pretoria?” Still trying to get a grip on what was going on.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Which colonel are you talking about?”

“De Wit, Captain.”

“What has he got to do with this?”

“He phoned us, Captain, this afternoon. And crapped on our heads from a dizzy height. Said his people were working their fingers to the bone while we sat on our hands.”

“Bart de Wit?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Joubert chewed on the information.

“In any case, Captain, that Tokarev of yours—”

“Yes?” But he was still amazed by de Wit’s call and the fact that the commanding officer had told him nothing about it.

“It’s not a Tokarev, Captain. I don’t know who thought that one up. It’s a Mauser.”

Suddenly Joubert was part of the conversation again. “A what?”

“A Mauser, Captain. But not just any old Mauser. It’s a Broomhandle.”

“A what?”

“It’s a pistol, Captain.” Michaels’s voice had taken on the patient tone of a teacher. “The Mauser military model, M96 or M98, I’d guess. Seven point sixty-three caliber. The cartridge cases are typical. Rimless with a bottleneck. I can’t imagine why you thought it was a Tokarev. The—”

“The caliber.” Joubert defended Griessel’s guess.

“No, Captain. Sorry, but hell, there’s a huge fucking difference. In both cases it should make your job much easier.”

“Oh?”

Michaels became impatient. “The Mauser, Captain. It’s old and it’s rare. There can hardly be that many people in the Cape who own one. Firearm records.”

“How old?”

“Almost a hundred years, Captain. Eighteen ninety-six or ’ninety-eight. Most beautiful thing the Germans ever made. But you’ll know it, Captain. Broomhandle. Slender wooden stock. Boer officers carried it. Long barrel, magazine in front of the trigger.”

Joubert tried to visualize the weapon, and somewhere an image stirred, a vague memory. “Looks almost like a Luger?”

“Luger’s grandfather, Captain. That’s the one.”

“Where would they find ammunition for it? After a hundred years?”

“It shoots Tokarev but it could hurt it. Pressure ratios differ. But the guy still has a supply, Captain. Your murderer. Even his cartridges are old. ’Ninety-nine. Maybe 1900. You must get him. He’s fucking shooting museum pieces to hell and gone.”