A Beautiful Place to Die Part 10

Zweigman stilled. "Mr. King has a driver."

"I know that, but as I'm going out to King's farm, he thought I'd be a 'good fellow' and do him the favor of driving his staff back. 'Saves Matthew making two trips.'"

"I see." Zweigman busied himself picking pieces of string off the countertop.

"Well, are they here?"

"Of course." The German shopkeeper collected himself. "I will go out to the back and inform them that you will be providing them with transport."

"Thank you," Emmanuel said, and strolled over to the window that fronted the street. A throng of white men pa.s.sed across the corner of van Riebeeck on their way to the half-price drinks at the Standard Hotel. Groups of blacks drifted onto the kaffir paths that headed out to the location. The town was emptying.

He turned and found Zweigman at the counter with Davida, the shy brown mouse, and a graceful woman dressed in a black cotton dress teamed with a row of fake Indian shop pearls.

"This is Mrs. Ellis and her daughter, Davida, whom you have already met." Zweigman performed the introductions as though the task itself was distasteful to him.

"Mrs. Ellis. Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper."

"Detective." King's housekeeper gave a deferential bow, the kind reserved for white men in power. She was green eyed and brown skinned, her lips full enough to hold the weight of a weary man's head. Davida stayed in the background with her head bowed like a novice about to take orders. The tiger had given birth to a lamb.

"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Ellis," Emmanuel said, and fished out the car keys. "I'm afraid we have to get going."

"Of course." Mrs. Ellis hurried to the counter and Zweigman shooed her away while he and the shy brown mouse divided the parcels between them.

Emmanuel stepped outside. A skinny mixed-race woman with coa.r.s.e yellow hair walked a chubby toddler past the burned-out sh.e.l.l of Anton's garage. The wreckage reminded him of any one of a thousand French towns flattened in the march toward peace.

A cloudbank pa.s.sed overhead and a dark shadow crossed the street, followed by the blinding light of the sun as the clouds moved on toward the veldt. Emmanuel blinked hard in the changing light. Mrs. Ellis stood on the store veranda, and Davida and Zweigman stood face-to-face on the bottom. They were so close, Emmanuel could almost feel the breath move between them. White glare reflected off the car's bonnet, then died away to a soft shimmer.

"Headache bothering you again, Detective?"

"No, it's just the sun," Emmanuel said. He checked Mrs. Ellis for a reaction. She gave no indication that her daughter's honor might have been compromised in any way.

Emmanuel opened the car door and slid into the driver's seat. He didn't put much store in Mrs. Pretorius's lecherous Shylock story: her world was populated with crafty Jews, drunken coloureds and primitive blacks. It was the standard National Party bulls.h.i.t that poor Afrikaners swore by and educated Englishmen loved to mock while their own servants clipped the lawn.

The pa.s.senger doors closed and he switched on the engine. What he'd seen, so briefly, between Zweigman and the mute girl was not an offense under the Immorality Act. Had he imagined it?

"Where to?" he asked Mrs. Ellis, who was perched at the edge of the seat, as if she was afraid her weight might offend the springs.

"Take Piet Retief Street to Botha Drive, then turn left at the Standard Hotel and head out to the main road. Bayete Lodge is about thirty or so miles west."

"Is there any way out of town that doesn't take us past the Standard?" Emmanuel asked.

Every white man in the district would be there, the Pretorius brothers included. Driving by with two brown women in the backseat when he could be attending the formal reception was the quickest way to get doors slammed in his face.

"There's only one way in and out of town," the older woman pointed out. "We have to go past the Standard."

Emmanuel turned onto Piet Retief Street and slowed down. He glanced in the rearview mirror, uncomfortable. "I need to ask you both a favor."

"Yes," Mrs. Ellis said as her hands played nervously with the fake pearls around her neck. White men asking favors spelled bad news for nonwhite women.

"I'd like the two of you to lie down in the back before we get to the Standard. It would be better for the investigation if no one saw you." He said it all at once, without stopping: he'd never ask a respectable white woman and her daughter to do the same. "You can get back up once we clear town."

"Oh." Mrs. Ellis twisted the pink tinted pearls tighter. "I suppose that would be okay. Hey, Davida?"

Davida smiled at her mother and slowly laid her head down on the backseat, like a child playing a game she already knew the rules to. Mrs. Ellis copied the movement and lay next to her daughter.

Up ahead, groups of men stood on the pavement in front of the Standard Hotel. It was early afternoon and the crowd hadn't spilled out onto the street yet. Another hour or two and traffic would have to negotiate a slow crawl through the crush of mourners.

Emmanuel checked faces on the drive past the hotel. His luck held good. No one from the Pretorius family camp was in the roadside throng. He took the left turn and gave the accelerator a tap. Soon he was out past the town boundary and heading west on the main road.

He slowed almost to a stop and looked over his shoulder at the women hidden in the backseat. Davida lay with her cheek against the warm leather, her arm thrown across the top half of her face. She breathed slow and deep, her mouth held open slightly. For a moment he thought she was asleep.

"We're clear," he said, and turned his attention back to the road. The veldt rolled out on either side of them in a tangle of wild fig trees and acacia bushes. Against the blur of the landscape he recalled the image of the girl fallen and fragile in the backseat of his car.

6.

WHAT DO YOU think?" Elliot King pointed to the half-finished construction perched above a riverbank. think?" Elliot King pointed to the half-finished construction perched above a riverbank.

Emmanuel knew there was only one correct answer to the question. "Very impressive," he said.

"This is going to be the finest game camp in the southern part of Africa. Five luxury lodges with views to the water hole, top-level trackers and rangers, private game drives on tap. The best food, the best wine, the biggest variety of animals. I have spent an absolute f.u.c.king fortune stocking this place, but then again people will pay a fortune to stay here, so it's only fair."

Emmanuel heard pride in the Englishman's voice: he was filled with the joy that comes from being supreme ruler of your own piece of Africa.

"This used to be the Pretorius farm," Emmanuel said, thinking of the captain's family, who also owned a giant slice of the Transvaal.

"Yes." King reached over and rang a small silver bell on the low table next to him. "Captain Pretorius sold it to me about a year ago when he realized Paul and Louis weren't going to take up farming."

"I hear there was some trouble over the sale."

"Oh, that." King smiled. "The problem was between Pretorius and his sons. They don't have their father's business ac.u.men...he was an intelligent man."

"Mr. King?" It was Mrs. Ellis responding to the bell. She had changed out of her black mourning clothes and was now wearing the lodge uniform, a tailored green shift with the words "Bayete Lodge" embroidered over the pocket. She still managed to look elegant.

"Tea," King said. "And some cakes, please."

"Right away." Mrs. Ellis dropped a half curtsy and disappeared into the cool interior of the house. Being in Elliot King's company was like slipping into the pages of an old-fashioned English novel. Any moment now they'd hear the beating of drums and a frantic call to defend the house against a native uprising.

"Intelligent?" Emmanuel repeated the word. They were talking about an Afrikaner police captain with a neck the size of a tree trunk.

"I know," King said, and smiled. "He looked the part of a dumb Boer, but under all that, he was a complex human being."

"How so?"

"Come with me." King stood up and entered the house, talking as he went. "Yes, this was the Pretorius family farm. The captain was the third generation to live out here. He only left when he got married and moved to town."

Emmanuel followed King into the house. The main living area contained soft, wide-backed sofas and animal skin rugs. Paintings of the English countryside teamed with family photographs on the whitewashed walls; Mrs. Ellis kept it all in impeccable order. Tribal masks, shields, and a.s.sagai spears added just enough of a primitive edge to place the room in South Africa instead of Surrey.

"Look at this." King pulled open a drawer in the office and took out a stack of yellowed envelopes. There was writing on each envelope, faint but still visible. "Read them and tell me what you make of them."

"'Full moon fertility. Sprinkle across mouth of kraal after midnight,'" Emmanuel read aloud.

"Keep going." King was obviously delighted by his find.

"'Spring rain creator. Dig into topmost field first day after seeding.'" Emmanuel flicked through the rest in quick order. All the labels had a mystical element to them. "They're black magic potions of some kind. The natives swear by them."

"Not just natives. We found these when we cleared the house. They belonged to old man Pretorius, the captain's father."

White Police Captain Dabbles in Black Magic: the English papers would have a field day.

"When I found these I asked my driver Matthew about Pretorius the Elder." King threw the envelopes in the drawer and started back toward the veranda. "He was widowed early and lived out here alone with his son. The other Boers thought he was insane and apparently steered clear of him. He believed the whole Boer 'white tribe in Africa' story without reservation."

"Lots of people do," Emmanuel said. Two-thirds of the present government, in fact.

"True, but how many of those people partner their son with a black companion so they can learn the ways of the natives? How many make their sons undertake the training of a Zulu amabutho between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and endure the pain that goes with it?"

"Pretorius did that?"

"He and Shabalala would apparently run barefooted from one end of the farm to the other five or six times without stopping, without drinking. Matthew says they were quite a sight. It brought tears to the eyes of those who remembered the old days. The sound of Zulu warriors, the impi, thundering across the veldt." King sat down in his chair with a nostalgic sigh.

The expanse of sky and gentle hills, once native homeland, was now part of King's fiefdom. What was it about the British and their love of nations they'd conquered in battle?

"Constable Shabalala was his companion?"

"Yes. Shabalala's father was a Zulu. He trained them."

"Why did the captain's father do it?" Emmanuel asked. Most whites were happy to claim higher status as a birthright.

"This is the crackpot element." King obviously relished talking about the eccentricities of the Boers. "Old man Pretorius thought that white men should be able to prove themselves equal to or better than the natives in all things. He brought his son up to be a white induna, a chief, in every sense of the word."

Mrs. Ellis carried in a tea tray and placed it on the table between them. Her movements were spa.r.s.e and economical, the body language of someone born into the service of others. She handed King his tea. Why the high-toned Englishman talked as if the days of the white chiefs were over was beyond Emmanuel.

Mrs. Ellis, the perfect servant, vanished indoors.

"You know, Captain Pretorius could name every plant and tree on the veldt," King continued. "He spoke all the dialects, knew all the customs. Unlike the Dutchmen around here, he didn't need some paper shuffler in Pretoria to legislate his superior status."

"You knew him well?" Emmanuel asked. It was obvious the aristocratic Englishman believed that Captain Pretorius occupied the same "born to rule" category as himself. The rest of humanity, including police detectives, were mere servants.

"I got to know him a little while we were negotiating the sale and much better once he started building." King paused to select a cake from the tray. "As I said, he was actually very complex and intelligent, for a Boer."

"Building?" Emmanuel put his tea down. This was the reason he'd been given the note. He was sure of it.

"Nothing grand. Just a little stone hut on the allotment he kept for himself."

"He has a house out here?"

"More of a shack than a house," King said, and bit into his cake. He took his time chewing. "It looks like something out of the kaffir location, but he seemed to like it."

"Did he spend a lot of time here?" No one, not Shabalala or the Pretorius brothers, had mentioned a secondary residence of any kind.

"Not that I know of. He came out a few times during hunting season and then at odd times after that. It all seemed a bit random, but it was his land and his shack."

Captain Pretorius appeared to be a man of quiet habit and routine. Fishing on Wednesday, coach of the rugby team on Thursday, church every Sunday, and yet the word "random" kept coming up in connection with him.

"Where is the shack?" The weight of the car keys and the piece of paper with King's name scribbled on it suddenly became heavy against his thigh. Afternoon teatime was over.

"Ten or so miles back toward the main road. There's a giant witgatboom tree right at the turnoff. You pa.s.sed it on your way in."

The witgatboom tree was a good signpost, with its branches flung out to support a wide flat top. It was a quintessentially African sight.

"I'll need to go out there," Emmanuel said.

"It's not my place to give or deny permission. I have no say over that piece of land, so feel free to do as you wish."

Emmanuel stopped at the top of the veranda stairs. "I thought you bought this farm from Captain Pretorius."

"Most of it," King corrected. "He kept a small parcel. That's what his sons couldn't understand. The sale wasn't about money. Their father just wanted a piece of his old life back."

Emmanuel felt in his bones that the Pretorius brothers had no idea about the shack or their father's plans to resume his life as a white induna.

"I'll head straight back to the station after looking over the place," Emmanuel said. "Thank you for your help, Mr. King, and for the tea."

"Pleasure," King said as a red two-door sports car with rounded haunches and curved silver headlights pulled into the gravel driveway and stopped inches from the Packard's back b.u.mper. The driver's door swung open and a man in his twenties eased out of the scooped leather seat. Emmanuel caught the flash of his perfect white teeth.

"Winston..." Elliot King called out a greeting to the handsome boy making for the stairs. "I wasn't expecting you till tomorrow. Meet Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. He was just on his way out."

"An officer of the law." Winston smiled and shook hands. "Have you finally been able to bring charges against my uncle, Detective Sergeant?"

The King men laughed; the law was a servant to whom they did not have to answer.

The sleek sports car and the beachside tan irritated Emmanuel beyond reason, as did the simple elephant-hair bracelet worn by Winston to authenticate his "African-ness."

"Routine questioning," Emmanuel said.

"What happened?"

"Captain Pretorius." King went back to his seat and sat down. "He was murdered Wednesday night. Shot twice."

"Jesus..." Winston leaned against the railing. "Are you a suspect?"

"Of course not." King took a sip of tea. "I provided the detective with some background information. As a favor to the investigation."

Emmanuel edged toward the top stair. Stuck between King and his linen-clad nephew was the last place he wanted to be. The secret hut beckoned to him.