"The
police aren't interested in Nicolai. He's committed no crimes in South Africa.'
'This
is a national security matter.'
Bullshit.
With a silver spoon.
'Where's
the Security Branch?' Emmanuel kept an easy tone. 'They're in charge of
national security.'
A
baby's cry came from inside the clinic, weak at first and then much stronger.
'My
baby,' Nicolai said. 'I want to see my child.'
The
colonel pushed the gun barrel hard into the Russian's back. 'Let Dennis off the
floor and we'll leave peacefully, Cooper. If you don't, someone will get hurt.'
Dennis?
Dennis was a guy who went to the pub on Friday nights then staggered home to
listen to a BBC radio serial with a cup of hot Bovril. The newborn wailed again
and Emmanuel focused on Nicolai, who was still a valuable asset.
'Walk
to me, Nicolai,' Emmanuel said. 'The colonel needs you alive. I promise he's
not going to shoot.'
Nicolai
hesitated, torn between fear of death and the desire to hold his newborn child.
He took a halting step and then another towards the clinic. Fitzpatrick moved
to the side and aimed the gun at Emmanuel.
'You're
right. I'm not going to kill the Russian. He's too valuable. You and the
kaffir
are another matter.'
Sweat
trickled between Emmanuel's shoulderblades. A gun barrel aimed mid-chest was a
problem but of more concern was Lilliana Zweigman, who crept across the grass
with the wooden rolling pin held above her head. She had taken off her slippers
to move more quietly but her whole body shook. Stop, slip away and stay safe,
Emmanuel begged silently. Lilliana had survived a long and miserable war. She
could not die in the soft light of an African dawn.
'Look
-' The tradesman tried to shout a warning but Shabalala gagged him with a hand
and kept his pale head pinned to the stone floor of the veranda. Nicolai walked
slowly towards the stairs and his stumbling feet covered Lilliana's advance.
'Let
my man up,' the colonel said. 'Or I will shoot the
kaffir.'
Swing
wide, swing hard and inflict maximum damage. Emmanuel's instructions were loud
in his head but remained unspoken. Instead he stepped back and kept the
colonel's focus on the porch.
'There's
no need to hurt anyone,' he said. 'Lower the gun. You'll get what you came for.
Just put down the gun.'
Lilliana
whipped the pin through the air. The impact was bone crunching. A shot
thundered from the firearm and lodged in the wall of the storeroom as
Fitzpatrick toppled into the dewy grass. Emmanuel jumped the steps and stamped
on the colonel's hand till his grip on the gun weakened.
'Go,'
he said to Nicolai. 'Go and see your child.'
'Da.
Yes.' The Russian man climbed
the stairs, drawn on by the newborn's insistent wail. He hit his palm against
the door. 'Natalya. Natalya?'
Zweigman
opened the clinic door for Nicolai and checked for wounded on the
stoep
and in the garden. He saw his wife in the pre-dawn light, an avenging domestic
goddess with a rolling pin in her hand and an unconscious man at her feet.
'Lilliana.'
Zweigman closed the gap between them fast. 'Are you all right?'
'Yes.'
Emmanuel
pocketed the colonel's gun: a Browning Hi-Power that could easily have put both
Lilliana and Shabalala in the grave. He flipped the prone figure over and
slapped him hard on the cheek.
'Please.'
Zweigman kneeled beside the dazed man and completed a quick examination. 'An
egg-sized contusion and a hairline skull fracture. He will make a full
recovery.'
'Good,'
Emmanuel said. 'I need him alive and talking.'
'In
a short while, when the disorientation clears up,' Zweigman said and got to his
feet. He moved to Lilliana's side. 'Oh,
liebchen,
did you do that?'
She
nodded.
The
doctor took his wife in his arms and held her. 'I am so proud of you.'
Lilliana's
strange hiccuping laughter turned to sobs that shook her body. A woman's cries
normally chilled Emmanuel. Yet now, only a few feet away from Lilliana's
heartbreak, he felt no need to run. He would have given his life to bring his
own mother back but the past could not be bargained with or changed. He had
spent hours, weeks and years picking apart his memory of that night in
Johannesburg to find the moment when the twelve-year-old Emmanuel could have
stopped her death. No one's life should be held ransom to the past while the
world kept spinning. Lilliana was in pain but alive and here to see another
day.
The
colonel swore and Emmanuel checked his condition. Sweaty and thin-lipped but
with a spot of crimson on the cheeks.
'Shabalala,'
Emmanuel called. 'Bring that one to the doctor's house and we'll secure both of
them.'
'Yebo.'
Shabalala hauled the tradesman
to his feet and led him down the stairs and across the plateau to the
Zweigmans' stone dwelling. Lana appeared at the corner of the kitchen garden
with the last remnant of the colonel's ragtag army in tow: a nervous youth with
greased hair and heavy jowls who'd been left to search the Zweigman house.
'Are
you hurt, Emmanuel?' Lana said. 'I heard shots.'
'I'm
fine. Who's he?'
'This
is Stewart.' The young man mumbled hello. 'He owes Mr Khan twenty pounds, which
he was told he could work off if he gave him a hand tonight. He says he didn't
know about the guns or the Russians.'
'Mr
Khan told us it was a parcel pick-up,' Stewart said. 'It was supposed to be
easy.'
Emmanuel
hit the colonel between the shoulderblades. 'A national security matter and you
recruit boys with gambling debts.'
'I
didn't recruit anybody,' the colonel said. 'Dennis was in charge of that.'
'Oh,
I understand.' Emmanuel pushed the colonel in the direction of the main house.
'You're not responsible for this fuck-up. The men under your command are the
problem.'
'What
about them?' Lana indicated the Zweigmans, still locked together.
'They'll
be all right,' Emmanuel said. In truth he couldn't remember seeing the couple
so close.
The
doctor turned to his wife. 'Come,' he said. 'Let us go and meet the baby. He
has white hair and big lungs.'
So,
Nicolai has a son, Emmanuel thought and he prodded the colonel into the big
house. Jolly Marks and Mbali, the Zulu maid, had been someone's son and
daughter. Their deaths and that of the landlady had to be accounted for.
'Sit,'
Emmanuel said to the colonel when they entered the small kitchen where
Shabalala already had the tradesman handcuffed to a chair. The wood-fire stove
crackled. Lana filled a kettle and placed it on a burner while Stewart, the
hapless gambler, slouched in the adjoining room and pretended to read one of
Zweigman's medical tomes. Emmanuel pushed Fitzpatrick into a chair and secured
his hands with ties taken from the curtains. The colonel sat with a stiff back
and a stiff upper lip.
'Check
the Dodge, Shabalala,' Emmanuel said. 'See if there are any more weapons
hidden.'
'Yebo.'
The constable went out the side
door and cut towards the black car. A rooster crowed and a golden light brushed
the treetops.
'I
can't wait to see van Niekerk,' the tradesman said. 'I'm going to tell him how
you fucked up tonight and then I'm going to tell him you fucked his girlfriend.
You'll be lucky to keep your teeth.'
Lana
tensed but set up a row of teacups on a sideboard. Her escape route to Cape
Town, funded in part by van Niekerk's generous financial contribution to her
everyday expenses, was now in doubt.
'Why
would the major believe a word you say?' Emmanuel asked.
'Because
I saw you with my own eyes. Van Niekerk won't be happy paying for something
that's being handed out for free. If you uncuff me now, he'll never have to
know.'
'You
followed me to Lana's flat and then to the Dover the next morning,' Emmanuel
said. The man leaning against the wall of the hardware store with the newspaper
hadn't been a civilian waiting for a bus. 'But first you had to tail me from
the bar to Lana's apartment. Why follow me at all?'
'Van
Niekerk's orders. He doesn't trust you.'
'No,
that's not it.' Emmanuel was certain. For all his faults, the Dutch major had
always shown absolute trust and faith in him. The tradesman had tailed him long
before van Niekerk was involved in the investigation. 'You were in the freight
yard on the night of Jolly's murder. That's how you knew to follow me. You were
there. And you probably had Brother Jonah on lookout as well.'
The
tradesman's eyes were cold. 'You're a drowning man, Cooper.'
Shabalala
entered the kitchen with the same dented toolbox the tradesman had brought with
him to the interrogation room. He rested it on the tabletop.
'No
guns,' the Zulu constable said. 'Just this.'
The
metal box, for all its plainness, exerted a strange power over the occupants of
the kitchen. No one moved. Then Lana stepped back, anticipating an unpleasant
surprise.
Emmanuel
undipped the box and opened the lid. The scent of chocolate and
vanilla-flavoured tobacco wafted out of it. He removed three hand-rolled
cigarettes.
'A
gift from Mr Khan,' he said. 'He helped you recruit your little army. An unstable
preacher and a group of unlucky gamblers who don't know one end of a gun from
the other.'
Next,
Emmanuel pulled out a rusty penknife. The white paint from the handle flaked
off in his hands.
'Jolly
Marks's knife, taken from the crime scene. You heard my name and my old police
rank on the night of the first murder. You've been chasing me ever since.
Waiting for me to find the Russians.'
'Why
would I remove a piece of incriminating evidence from the scene?' the tradesman
said. 'That makes even less sense than your other theories.'
Emmanuel
considered the child's weapon for a moment. Keeping it made sense if you
discounted common sense and went deeper.
'There
was a private in my platoon,' he said. 'A quiet lad from Liverpool, ordinary.
Or that's what I thought until another soldier found a necklace made from human
teeth hidden in his rucksack. The private claimed it was a harmless souvenir
but he enjoyed looking at the necklace the same way a dog enjoys digging up old
bones to chew on. You kept the penknife for the same reason.'
'You're
sick, Cooper,' the tradesman said.
Emmanuel
foraged under layers of newspaper stuffed into the box to keep the contents
snug and touched a handle. He withdrew a scalpel with dried blood splattered
over the edges of the silver blade. Very much a grown-up's weapon.
'No
theories or conjecture,' he said. 'I'll leave that to the judge and the jury.'
The
colonel sat bolt upright at the mention of a trial. 'The mission was to find
the Russians and secure them. He's the one who lost them in the freight yard
and then killed the boy for his notebook. That went against my direct orders. I
said no civilian casualties.'
'Mrs
Patterson and her maid, Mbali?' Emmanuel pressed for more information.
'Same
thing,' the colonel said. 'Get the notebook and get out. That was the plan. He
turned the whole exercise into a bloodbath, in direct contravention of my
orders.'
'You
are responsible for your men, Colonel.'
'I'm
not in charge,' Fitzpatrick said. 'MI5 wanted the Russians but they didn't want
to ask the National Party for help . . . not with Malan in London talking about
a republic run by Afrikaners. They decided to take an informal approach. They
recommended Dennis and assigned me to get the job done.'
Informal
approach? The job? The British security agency had used the colonel to do their
dirty work. If the mission succeeded, the glory was theirs; if it failed, they
could deny any knowledge and leave Fitzpatrick to hang.
'Three
people died,' Emmanuel said.
'Against
my direct orders.'
If
the colonel mentioned his 'orders' one more time Emmanuel would have to kill
him. There was more to leadership than barking commands down a phone line.
'Stop
talking, Fitzpatrick.' The pale-skinned killer was unnaturally calm in the face
of the colonel's attempt to dump full responsibility for the failed mission
into his lap. 'Make excuses up the chain of command, not down. The word of an
ex-detective, a
kaffir
and a barmaid? Save your
breath.'
The
tradesman was right, Emmanuel knew. Unless Major van Niekerk backed him, the
allegations of three murders and an international conspiracy to capture a
member of Stalin's inner circle would not stand. Jolly Marks's death was
already neatly pinned on Giriraj, and even with the scalpel there was no real
evidence to link the double homicide at the Dover to the tradesman. The
contents of the metal box would look like nothing more than a desperate attempt
by a reclassified ex-detective to clear his name.