A Beautiful Place to Die Part 21

The white noise of the sewing machines contrasted with the jagged beat of his heart. He read over the notes he'd made at the crime scene. Was Captain Pretorius's murder the corner piece of a bigger puzzle the Security Branch was working on?

Emmanuel acknowledged his surroundings. He was in a small tearoom annexed to the back of a sweatshop operating on the dark side of the color line. The Security Branch and their heavyweight political backers occupied the power seat while he trawled through the grubby entrails of the victim's private life. A feeling of doubt came over him and he closed his eyes to think. A needle of pain p.r.i.c.ked his eye socket.

"Jesus..." the sergeant major's voice whispered. the sergeant major's voice whispered. "What if those f.u.c.kers are right and the murder was a political a.s.sa.s.sination?" "What if those f.u.c.kers are right and the murder was a political a.s.sa.s.sination?"

Emmanuel pushed the voice away and revisited the basic laws of homicide investigation. Most murders are the result of ba.n.a.l and human impulses: a robber kills for money, a husband kills for revenge, and a misfit kills for s.e.xual release. Ordinary, sad, and confused human need lifted the hands of killers.

"The Security Branch doesn't operate in your ordinary world, laddie," the abrasive Scotsman said. the abrasive Scotsman said. "While you're sifting through underwear drawers and skiving on kaffir paths, they're shaping the "While you're sifting through underwear drawers and skiving on kaffir paths, they're shaping the map of South Africa and every country around it. You are a foot soldier and they are the general's personal aides." map of South Africa and every country around it. You are a foot soldier and they are the general's personal aides."

Emmanuel tried to ignore the sergeant major's comments, but couldn't. There was too much truth in what he said. Why would the Security Branch go after this murder so fast and so hard if they didn't already have evidence to back up their political revolution theory?

The words "neat" and "sniper-like" in his notes caught his attention as never before. Professional a.s.sa.s.sins targeted the head and the spine. Professional a.s.sa.s.sins left no traces behind. Had he misread the crime scene by looking for personal elements where none existed?

He dialed the number van Niekerk had given him.

"Cooper?" The major was out of breath and out of sorts when he answered on the second ring.

"It's me. Why the change in telephones?"

"The Security Branch has big ears and I'm not about to give them information for free," van Niekerk replied. "Are you calling from the police station?"

"I'm using a private telephone."

"Good. What's your news?"

"The Security Branch is going hard after the Communist link. They have a confidential file with lists of Party members and their affiliates. It seems Captain Pretorius's murder is tied in to an existing investigation."

"Operation Spearhead," van Niekerk said with the casual superiority that set half the detectives who worked homicide or robbery against him. "The National Party plans to break the back of the Communist movement by arresting agents crossing into South Africa with banned writings and pamphlets. They conduct raids at illegal border crossings and hope they net a Red fish to fry up on treason charges."

"Captain Pretorius was shot along a stretch of river used by smugglers," Emmanuel said. "The Security Branch may have been watching."

"This coming Thursday they were due to hit the Watchman's Ford crossing where Captain Pretorius was found, acting on a tip-off. The Security Branch wants to salvage that operation by finding a link between the murder and a specific Communist agent they've had under surveillance."

The depth of van Niekerk's political and social connections impressed Emmanuel and gave him pause. Was there any piece of information beyond the grasp of the ambitious Dutchman?

"Is the suspected agent a black graduate of Fort Bennington College?"

"Now it's my turn to be impressed," van Niekerk replied with a trace of humor. "That fact is known to less than a hundred people in the whole of South Africa. Are you sure you don't want to join the Security Branch? They're looking for bright young men."

"I'm not interested in redrawing the map of the world with a thumbscrew and a steel pipe."

"Have they gone that far?"

"Yes." The crippled miner's bruised arms and wild eyes came to mind.

"Has any of it come your way?"

"Not yet," Emmanuel said. "But it's just a matter of time."

"What have you got on Captain Pretorius?" Van Niekerk's voice took on a new urgency.

"Nothing conclusive. I'm chasing something now that could knock the captain off his pedestal, though."

He didn't mention the stolen evidence. That wound was too fresh to open in front of van Niekerk.

"Find it," the major said. "Information on Frikkie van Brandenburg's son-in-law is the only ammunition that will stop the Security Branch in their tracks if they come after you."

"You think I'll need to fight my way out of a corner here?"

"I'm talking to you from a filthy call box on a side street. You're calling from G.o.d knows where. We're already in a corner, Cooper."

"What do I do with the dirt when I find it?" The security arrangements he'd rigged up in Jacob's Rest weren't enough to stop a Security Branch raid. He needed a second net to catch him if he fell.

"Go to the local post office. I'll telegraph through what you need in half an hour."

The hum of the sewing machines began to wind down. It was almost lunch break for Lilliana Zweigman and the seamstresses.

"I have to go," he told the major as the sound of chairs pushing back filtered into the tearoom.

"Emmanuel..."

The use of his first name held him on the line.

"Sir?"

"There's an information satchel being sent by courier to the Security Branch tomorrow morning. One of the things in it is a personal dossier on you. I can't stop it. I'm sorry."

"What does it have?" He couldn't stop himself asking the question. He needed to know.

"Everything. That's all the more reason to collect whatever dirt you can on the Pretorius family. You're going to need it regardless of who catches the killer first."

"Thank you, sir."

He hung up the phone and reached into his pocket for a handful of magic white pills. Fear joined his feeling of doubt and he wondered how his life was going to keep from flying off the narrow rails he'd painstakingly built since returning to South Africa. He swallowed the pills with a gla.s.s of water from the tearoom tap. It was too late to stop the folder and too late to withdraw from the investigation.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself, for Christ's sake," the sergeant major said. the sergeant major said. "Get off your a.r.s.e and get to work. You still have a murder to solve." "Get off your a.r.s.e and get to work. You still have a murder to solve."

The women filed out into the back courtyard and Emmanuel made his way onto the kaffir path running toward the post office. A squadron of yellow-winged gra.s.shoppers flew into the air at his approach and settled on curved stalks of field gra.s.s. He didn't want to think about the personal dossier but it was on his mind.

"Dark, isn't she?" the sergeant major mused aloud. the sergeant major mused aloud. "What does it say about you, Emmanuel...the fact that Davida stirs you?" "What does it say about you, Emmanuel...the fact that Davida stirs you?"

"It means nothing," he said quietly.

"Really?" The sergeant major was amused. The sergeant major was amused. "Because it makes me wonder if what the jury said about your mother was true after all. What do you think about that, laddie?" "Because it makes me wonder if what the jury said about your mother was true after all. What do you think about that, laddie?"

Emmanuel didn't answer. The pills he had swallowed at Zweigman's would kick in soon. He shut the sergeant major out and locked the gate. Under no circ.u.mstances was he going to think about what the mad Scotsman had said.

Harry the sh.e.l.l-shocked soldier was sitting on the post office steps when Emmanuel emerged from the one-room building with van Niekerk's telegram safe in his pocket. It was early afternoon and the main street was bathed in shimmering springtime light. Down the road, a barrel-chested white farmer whistled a tune while his farm boys loaded his pickup truck with hessian sacks of fertilizer and seed.

"Little Captain"-Harry's voice was a rough whisper-"Little Captain..."

The jangle of medals and an insistent tugging at his sleeve let Emmanuel know that the veteran was talking to him and not a mustard gas phantom.

"I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper from Jo'burg," he reminded the old soldier. "You met me at Tiny's shop. Remember?"

"Little Captain." Harry paid no attention to what he said. "Little Captain."

Emmanuel didn't correct Harry a second time. He had to get off the main street before the Security Branch got wind of his whereabouts and decided to convey their displeasure at his questioning of Erich Pretorius.

"How can I help you, Harry?" he asked.

"Tonight?" Harry's bony hand curled around his wrist and held on. "Tonight, Little Captain?"

Emmanuel looked around to gauge how much attention was coming his way. None of the people walking along the street paid any mind to the unusual sight of an addled coloured man holding on to a white man's wrist. Harry was the village madman: no one expected him to behave like a normal resident of Jacob's Rest.

"Maybe tonight." Emmanuel answered Harry's question once he'd made sense of it. "Maybe tonight. I don't know yet."

"Good, good." Harry's smile lit up his face and revealed who he was before the war: a charming light-skinned man with his thoughts in the right order. "Good, Little Captain. Good."

"Go along. I'll come tonight."

"Good, good." The old soldier dropped his hand and turned in the direction of the police station. Emmanuel touched his shoulder and spoke close to his ear.

"Don't go to the station, Harry. Captain Pretorius doesn't live there anymore."

"Home," Harry said. "Home."

Harry shuffled his way along the street like a daylight specter. Where would he be without Angie the bulldog to watch over him and without his play-white daughters? The world was an unkind place for old soldiers.

"Are you friends with Harry?"

It was Louis. He had materialized like an apparition in the spring sunshine.

"I've met him a few times," Emmanuel said.

"He's a soldier, just like you. But that doesn't make him the same as you."

"That so?"

Louis must have picked up information about his stint in the army from the brothers.

"We have to be on guard against our feelings for them," the Pretorius boy said. "They can never be our spiritual equals, which is why we must remain separate and pure."

The glow in Louis's eyes made Emmanuel uncomfortable. This curbside sermon came out of nowhere and it reminded him of the hymn Louis sang behind Tiny's liquor store.

"Was your father in the army?" A "brothers in arms" bond might explain Captain Pretorius's decision to deliver the letters to Harry and to help the old man's daughters gain white identification.

"My father didn't fight in the English war." Louis seemed a lot like his mother: soft on the outside but with a diamond-hard core. "Two of my grandfathers were commando generals in the Boer War. Our family are true volk."

The blacks had it right. Louis and his mother shared an overwhelming pride in the family's Afrikaner bloodline and a taste for spiritual superiority. If pride comes before the fall, Emmanuel thought, then Louis and his mother were due for a nosebleed dive into h.e.l.l.

"You coming to collect the part for your motorbike?" Emmanuel asked. He remembered the mechanical rattle he'd heard at the stone hut before pa.s.sing out. Could it have been a motorbike engine?

"It hasn't come yet," Louis said.

d.i.c.kie lumbered out onto the front porch of the police station and lit a cigarette.

"Maybe today's your lucky day," Emmanuel said. It was time to make for the kaffir path. The afternoon was slipping away and he still had to retrieve the files and read them over.

"Detective..." Louis called to him. "I almost forgot. My brothers are looking for you."

"They'll find me soon enough," Emmanuel said, and hurried by the stretch of white-owned businesses on Piet Retief Street. He had to get onto the kaffir path before drawing level with Pretorius Farm Supply, Moira's Hairstyles, and the garage. The captain's family was everywhere.

Emmanuel paused at the entrance to the path. Louis stood on the post office stairs and watched him with the intensity that his mother had used when she fixed her gaze on the police files. The teenager waved good-bye and disappeared into the building where the coffee-colored Miss Byrd and the pink-skinned Miss Donald boxed the mail by race grouping and sold stamps.

Out on the kaffir path Emmanuel thought about Louis. There must have been tension in the Pretorius household over the boy and his future. Mrs. Pretorius saw in Louis a holy prophet. A pragmatic realist like Willem Pretorius would have seen something different.

12.

SUNLIGHT FILTERED THROUGH the branches of the lemon tree in the backyard of Poppies General Store and threw a patchwork of shade over the police incident reports of the attacks on the coloured girls. Six months of violence and perversity with no result. the branches of the lemon tree in the backyard of Poppies General Store and threw a patchwork of shade over the police incident reports of the attacks on the coloured girls. Six months of violence and perversity with no result.

Emmanuel checked the dates again. There were two distinct stretches of time during which the molester was active. The first was a ten-day blitz in late August when he spied through windows at women. Then, in December '51, he went on a two-week spree of increasingly bold physical a.s.saults. Each report read darker than the last.

The perpetrator began the December stretch peeping through windows and in fourteen days had progressed to an attack involving broken ribs and deprivation of liberty. A white man found guilty of such crimes was, in the view of the courts and the public, a deviant and a traitor to his race. Paul Pretorius laughed off the idea that his father's murder was connected to an unsavory case involving nonwhite women, but a European man, especially, might be inclined to use drastic measures to keep his shameful secret hidden.

Emmanuel picked up the last report, written in Afrikaans by Captain Willem Pretorius himself.

Molestation Case Summary28 December 1951After re-interviewing the women concerned I believe the likelihood of an arrest remains unlikely for the following reasons.1. None of the women is able to identify the offender, as the attacks occur at night and the victims are grabbed from behind.2. The racial group of the offender remains unknown.3. The offender's accent suggests he is a foreigner who may come into South Africa undetected for the purposes of attacking women outside his home territory. Our border location makes Swaziland and Mozambique the offender's most likely place of origin.4. Due to the high likelihood that a foreign national or a vagrant camping along the border is committing the attacks, apprehension of the offender remains difficult.5. The case files will be reopened if and when new attacks occur.Signed,Captain Willem Pretorius Fast work. Two days after the last attack and Pretorius had the case summed up and the files tucked away in his private room. "If and when new attacks occur..." "If and when new attacks occur..." The captain had antic.i.p.ated a cessation to the attacks despite every sign the molester was sliding into serious and compulsive criminal behavior. A week after the captain's intervention, the activity stopped. No fresh sightings. Nothing but a sweet country silence where there'd been the sound of breaking ribs the week before. The captain had antic.i.p.ated a cessation to the attacks despite every sign the molester was sliding into serious and compulsive criminal behavior. A week after the captain's intervention, the activity stopped. No fresh sightings. Nothing but a sweet country silence where there'd been the sound of breaking ribs the week before.

Emmanuel drummed his fingers on the incident report. A foreign national or a vagrant camping on the veldt: who could have guessed Pretorius had such a lively imagination? Putting on an accent was presumably beyond the capability of a South Africanborn male. The flimsy summary didn't feel right. Had the captain found the attacker and tightened the reins without laying charges?

At the back of the file was a list of suspects interviewed by the captain during his investigation. Anton Samuels, the mechanic, and Theo Hanson were both questioned twice with no result. At the end of the list was a Mr. Frederick de Sousa, a traveling salesman from Mozambique pa.s.sing through Jacob's Rest with a suitcase of cheap undergarments. He was in town during two of the attacks but couldn't be tied to any others.

De Sousa was all the excuse Emmanuel needed to cross the border into Mozambique and visit the photo studio that had advertised on Captain Pretorius's calendar. He'd face off with the Security Branch in the morning and then pretend to limp off to Lorenzo Marques to continue his vice work.

Emmanuel pushed the police report away. There was no excuse for the total disregard for the job evidenced in the shoddy files. He believed in the law and the difference it made to people's lives. He got up and walked to the back of Poppies General Store.

"Mrs. Zweigman?" He stuck his head into the workroom and attracted her attention as gently as possible. "Can I talk to Davida and Tottie? It's police business."