A Beautiful Place to Die (13 page)

“Where did you find him?” she asked curtly. Harry went walking almost every day. Most of the time he found his way home without trouble.

“Outside the police station,” Emmanuel said.

“The letters,” Harry wailed. “The letters.”

Angie crossed the stoep in five quick steps. “You talk about the letters? You say about the letters, you stupid man?”

Emmanuel rested a warning hand on her shoulder, then withdrew it. “He’s had a hit or two already. He doesn’t need any more.”

She saw the bruised flesh around her husband’s left eye. “Who hit you, Harry?”

“I want the letters,” Harry said. “I want the letters.”

She addressed Shabalala. “Who hit my Harry?”

“Madubele. He and his brothers.”

Angie took her husband’s arm and led him into the small cinder-block house. She looked back toward the gate, fearful of what lay beyond it in the gathering darkness.

“Inside. Quick,” she said to Harry, who shuffled in ahead of her.

Emmanuel followed without an invitation.

He signaled to Shabalala, who reluctantly stepped into the house and stayed with his back pressed against the closed door.

The cinder-block house consisted of two plain rooms joined together by a cracked seam of mud and plaster. The kitchen, a collection of mismatched pots and plates on a chipped sideboard, sat directly opposite a curtained alcove that contained a double bed and a small chest of drawers with a beveled mirror.

They were in the sitting area: four wooden chairs and a moth-eaten love seat that must have been transported by sea and bullock train from the mother country to the outer edges of southern Africa decades before. A round table with the diameter of a tin bucket displayed two photos in tarnished frames: one of Harry as a young soldier bound for the glory of the battlefield, the other a family portrait of Harry and Angie with a trio of white-skinned girls. The picture was identical in setup to the one he’d seen in the captain’s house, a family group formally arranged against a plain backdrop. The traveling photographer had done a good trade in Jacob’s Rest.

Harry sat on the edge of the double bed, his palsied hands resting unsteadily on his knees. Angie pulled the curtain closed around them. The clink of campaign medals was followed by the metal sigh of the springs as the old soldier lay down to rest.

Emmanuel picked up the family photo and motioned Shabalala over. “Where are the daughters?” he asked. There was no sign of them in the cinder-block house, not a ribbon or a hairpin.

“Gone,” Shabalala answered. “To Jo’burg or Durban. For work.”

The girls in the photo had taken after their father. Skinny and pale skinned with fair hair and freckles, they were a race classification nightmare. Pose them against the cliffs of Dover and they’d blend right in. They were white girls, pure and simple. Only someone who knew the family could say any different.

“What’s on their papers?” he asked Shabalala. “Mixed race or European?”

Shabalala looked at the floor. “I have not seen their papers.”

“Those are my girls.” Angie reentered the sitting area and took the photo from Emmanuel. She wiped the frame down with her sleeve, as if to clear it of germs.

“Where are they?”

Angie tilted the photo so the light hit it fully. “That here is Bertha, she lives in Swaziland. Then Alice and Prudence, they live in Durban now.”

“How long have they been gone?”

“Six months or so.”

“The letters Harry was asking for. Were they from Alice and Prudence?”

“No.” Angie put the photo down and angled it away from the room. “Harry doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The mustard gas, it’s made him imagine things.”

“He seems certain about the letters,” Emmanuel said.

“That one is certain about a lot of things. But that doesn’t make it so.”

Angie moved across his line of sight and blocked the photo from view. She was the lioness at the gate whose job it was to stand guard over the family secrets.

“Make sure Harry stays in until morning,” Emmanuel said. “Tonight’s not a good night for him to be wandering around.”

“I’ll make sure he stays right where he is.” The furrowed lines on Angie’s bulldog face softened and she showed them out the back door. “Thank you for helping my Harry home, Detective.”

Emmanuel and Shabalala left by the back gate. The moon was on the wane but its light still shone strong enough to see by. Out on the kaffir path, Emmanuel turned to the black policeman.

“Tell me about the letters,” he said.

“I have not seen any letters,” Shabalala replied simply.

Emmanuel studied the closed face of his partner.

“Did the captain see the letters?”

“Uhhh…” Shabalala cleared his throat nervously. “He saw them. Yes.”

“Who did the captain say they were from?”

“Those inside. The two youngest children of the old man.”

“Why was the captain collecting letters for Harry?”

“Uhhh…” This time, the black constable’s lips closed firm and sealed the words in.

Emmanuel watched him, saw the gates slam shut.

“Nobody else will know what you tell me tonight, Constable,” he said. “That is a promise.”

Shabalala took off his hat and turned it like a spinning wheel in his broad hands. The hat stopped spinning, and he breathed out.

“The old man’s daughters, they are living among the white people. They cannot write to their own people in case someone finds out.”

“How did they get white ID papers?”

“They are white, just like the Dutchmen. Captain said they must register in the city and if there was a problem he would say they were from a European family.”

“Captain tell you this?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he do it?” From all he’d seen, the Pretorius family were firmly in the racial segregation corner. In their world, race mixing wasn’t in bad taste; it was a crime.

“I do not know why he did it.” Shabalala put his hat back on and pulled it low on his forehead.

“If you knew would you tell me?” Emmanuel asked.

The constable spread his hands out in a conciliatory gesture. “I have told you all I can,” he said politely.

The black policeman would tell him all he could, not all he knew. Was it possible that the strong bond between black and white playmates, so common in childhood, had actually survived the transition to adulthood for Captain Pretorius and Constable Shabalala?

“Those men at the station,” Emmanuel said. “They won’t wait for you to tell them what they need to know. They will get information the fastest way. You understand that?”

“I understand fully.”

“They can do as they please.”

“I have seen this,” Shabalala replied.

Emmanuel turned to leave, then stopped. “You said Madubele and his brothers hit Harry. Who’s Madubele?”

“The third son of the captain and his wife.”

“Erich?”

“Yes. The third son has a temper. He is always exploding like a rifle shot. That is why he was given that name.”

“Tell me the others,” Emmanuel said. The names given to people by the natives always had a core of truth to them that was instantly recognizable.

Shabalala held his hand up like a schoolteacher and worked his way from thumb to little finger. “The first one is Maluthane. He deceives himself in thinking he is the boss. The second is Mandla because he is strong like an ox. Three is Madubele and fourth is Thula because he is quiet. Five is Mathandunina, meaning he is loved by his mother and he loves her.”

Each name was a thumbnail sketch of the Pretorius boys, each one broadly accurate in its content. Even Louis, the runt of the litter, was described not in his own right but in connection with his mother.

“What’s your name?” Emmanuel asked.

“It is long. You speak Zulu, but even you will not be able to pronounce it.”

Emmanuel smiled. It was the first time the black constable had made a joke in his presence. In five or ten years’ time Shabalala might come around to telling him the truth about the captain.

“Tell me what it is,” Emmanuel said.

“Mfowemlungu.”

Emmanuel did a quick translation. “Brother of the white man.”

“Yebo.”

“The captain was the white brother?”

“That is correct.”

Emmanuel thought of the people on the Pretorius family farm, their hearts soaring as the young Shabalala and Pretorius ran the length and breadth of the property like warriors in the Zulu impi of old.

“Mrs. Pretorius, what does she think of this name?”

“She believes we are all brothers in God’s sight.”

“You and the captain were like twins?”

“No,” Shabalala said. “I am always the little brother.”

Emmanuel sensed Shabalala’s resignation. Never the man, always the garden boy. Never the woman, always the cleaning girl.

“Did the captain think of you that way?”

“No.”

“You felt for him as one who is a true brother?”

“Yebo,” the constable said.

The leaders of the Afrikaner tribe made a great deal out of blood bonding. Their most secret organization, the Broederbond, meant “blood brothers.” What happened when the bond went across the color line, and tied black to white?

“I will find out everything,” Emmanuel said. “Even if it hurts you and the captain’s family, I will find it out.”

“I know this to be true.”

“Good night, Shabalala.”

“Hambe gashle. Go well, Detective Sergeant.”

Emmanuel followed the narrow kaffir path that led to the coloured houses and the shabby strip of businesses serving the nonwhite population. He needed a drink and the Standard Hotel was the last place he was going to look for one. Time to pay Tiny and his son an after-hours visit.

The path skirted the grounds of the Sports Club. Farm families, overnighting in town after the funeral, were camped out in trucks, which were drawn into a circular formation like the wagon laagers of frontier times. Emmanuel ducked low to avoid being seen. He came up to his full height when the dark outline of the Grace of God Hospital became visible.

Past a stretch of vacant land decorated with scraps of windblown garbage, he entered the small grid of coloured people’s homes. The first house, set on a wide span of land, was well hidden behind a high timber wall and a row of mature gum trees. Emmanuel ran his hand along the fence. His fingertips brushed against the wood and the small gate that led into the garden. It was good to walk in the dark: silent and undetected.

This is how Captain Pretorius must have felt: free and godlike as he moved across every boundary in his small town. It was here, on this stretch of the kaffir path, that he beat Donny Rooke to a pulp. Out on the main streets, in the houses and the stores, the captain was a good man: moral and upright. But outside the grid, in the shadows of the kaffir path, who was he?

Emmanuel passed the burned-out shell of Anton’s garage, two more houses, and a small church. The path swung hard to the left to run along the edge of the vacant lot adjoining Poppies General Store. The next shop along was the fine liquor merchant’s. Emmanuel slowed at the gate but didn’t go in. A woman’s voice, shrill and liquored up, drifted out over the back fence.

“You bad, Tiny. You a bad, bad man.”

“How can I be bad when I make you feel so good, hey? How’s that?”

Emmanuel found a gap in the fence large enough to see through. He pressed his eye to the slit. Tiny and his son, both shirtless and drunk, were working the clothes off two well-used coloured girls. Emmanuel recognized the woman sliding herself over Tiny’s hardened stomach like a grease cloth. She was the one in front of Poppies, walking a toddler along the street.

“Mmm…Ja…” The coarse-haired woman gave a practiced groan and sucked on a hand-rolled dagga cigarette. “You bad, Tiny.”

“I’m about to get badder,” Tiny promised in a sodden voice. “Let me see some.”

The woman threw her unbuttoned shirt to the floor and lifted a drooping breast up for inspection. “This what you want?”

Tiny was on her nipple in a second. The wet sound didn’t bother Theo, who hammered away at a fat brown girl with two missing front teeth. The girl, built to absorb maximum thrust, managed to take deep sips from a whiskey bottle even as Theo worked his magic on her.

Emmanuel stepped back. No chance of a drink just at the moment, but Captain Pretorius was onto something. A night on the kaffir paths was worth twenty door-to-doors.

The split where he’d lost his late-night visitor was up ahead. The rustle of footsteps broke the peace. Someone else was out, skirting the town in the dark. Emmanuel retreated into the shadows.

Louis trotted past. Emmanuel waited until he got well ahead, then followed. The boy wasn’t lost; he walked as if he owned the kaffir path. The light from Tiny’s courtyard cut into the darkness. Louis moved in on it like a moth.

The boy stopped and knocked on the gate. The noises from inside drowned him out. He tried again.

Emmanuel slipped into the space between the liquor store and Khan’s Emporium. A shirtless Tiny opened the gate to Louis.

“What you want?” the coloured man asked. He was in a foul mood.

“Give me something small,” Louis said.

“No dice. I promised your father. Never again.”

“The captain’s gone,” Louis said.

“What about your brothers? What happens when they find out?”

“They won’t.”

“Ja, well…they better not,” Tiny said, and retreated into his courtyard before reappearing with a small bottle of whiskey.

“How about a smoke?” Louis asked, and slipped the bottle into his pocket.

“What? And get my business burned down when Madubele finds out?” Tiny waved the boy away. “Make tracks.”

“He won’t find out.”

“If he does? You going to make him pay compensation like the captain did for Anton? You lucky I gave you anything. Now get moving before someone sees you.”

“The captain’s gone to the other side,” Louis repeated. “There’s no one to see us.”

Tiny ended the conversation by closing the gate in Louis’s face. The boy unscrewed the whiskey bottle, took a long swallow, then raised his free hand to the sky with his palm held open. Another swig from the bottle and Louis’s clear voice graced the empty lot and the night sky.