Blessed Are the Dead Read online

  “I can think of no other reason,” Shabalala said.

  Male mourners dragged their feet, children ceased fussing and young unmarried girls shielded their faces from the unfolding horror. The only people who appeared unaffected by the body were the great chief and his smug fifth wife, who stood up to get a closer look at Amahle’s corpse.

  “Old fool,” Sampie muttered in Afrikaans, and moved from one clump of white spectators to the next with the same message: “Go now. Leave the kraal.”

  The missionary women and the Reeds made for the exit. Three Zulu men armed with spears and battle-axes sprinted into the compound, blocking the way out. Emmanuel recognized them. They were members of the impi who’d stood guard over Amahle’s body.

  “Now there will be war,” Shabalala said, and unbuttoned his jacket.

  The invading impi rushed the grave and the gathered crowd dispersed in panic. Nomusa broke free of the arms holding her and flew at the great chief, whose praise singer had finally run out of superlatives.

  “This is native business,” Sampie Paulus shouted over the melee. “We must leave.”

  Mandla and his men moved to block the attack. Metal spear tips flashed in the sun. A surge of mourners running for the exit knocked an elderly woman to the ground and a child screamed in the crush.

  “Stay here,” Emmanuel said to Zweigman, and jumped the thorn fence. Shabalala cleared the barrier just after him and landed farther into the chaos. He pulled the old woman to her feet and pushed her clear of the warring men. The warriors pressed in on each other, the Zulu detective caught between the two sides.

  The noise was deafening as Emmanuel tried to extricate Shabalala. A fighter of the invading group staggered back, blood pouring from a stab wound to his torso. He fell to the ground. For Emmanuel time simultaneously sped up and slowed down. Everyone’s movements took on a dreamlike quality: limbs floated, mouths screamed, weapons sliced through the air. Sounds fragmented. The crash of spears against shields, the hard breath of the impi’s efforts and a baby’s cry provided a discordant sound track to the fight.

  “Fall back, soldier.” The Scottish sergeant major gave the command. “Grab Shabalala and the injured and retreat. Mandla and his men are too strong. You will be crushed.”

  Shabalala was trapped against the wall of Nomusa’s hut, ducking and weaving to escape the thrust of stabbing spears. A narrow space opened between two fighters. Emmanuel called out, “With me, Samuel!”

  The Zulu detective wheeled at the sound of his first name and jumped through the breach and into the clear. Emmanuel looked down and saw blood staining the dirt where the injured man had fallen, but the man was gone.

  “Move back.” Emmanuel gave the order to the elder who’d first greeted him and Shabalala on the hill path days ago. “Move back while you still have men.”

  The retreat was chaotic. Mandla and his impi pressed their advantage, the great chief nursed a scratched cheek like a teenage girl in a catfight, and Nomusa was again pinned to the ground by the other wives. Zweigman knelt by the injured man, who was lying near the spectators’ enclosure. Emmanuel realized that the doctor must have retrieved the man himself.

  Then Mandla’s men made another push. A spear flew through the air. A moment later, Shabalala lifted the injured man onto his shoulder and ran. Sampie Paulus stood guard at the mouth of the kraal with the stunned white spectators squeezed behind him. The missionary ladies clung together in fear.

  “Go,” Sampie said. “Get as far as you can. I’ll try to calm the chief.”

  “Run like the devil’s on your arse, soldier,” the sergeant major breathed. “Quick-time to that wooded area yonder.”

  Trees meant cover. Cover meant time to rest and regroup and figure out what the hell had just happened. Shouts came from inside the Matebula family compound. Emmanuel gave the order to move fast. The uninjured warriors set off across the field at a lope. Shabalala steadied the wounded fighter to his feet and shouldered his weight on the stumbling run for the grove. Zweigman tagged behind them, pale and covered in blood from the stabbed man’s wound.

  Brown birds flew up from the grass ahead of the human stampede. Emmanuel glanced over his shoulder, alert to the rising level of danger. Sampie still blocked the center of the entrance, arms spread wide like Christ crucified. Mandla and his impi would have to go through the Afrikaner farmer to leave the kraal.

  “Tough old bastard,” the sergeant major said with admiration. “He’ll hold them just long enough for you to disappear, Cooper.”

  A surge of adrenaline and fear propelled Emmanuel to the safety of the woods. The stand of trees was dense but narrow. Dappled sunshine broke through the canopy and reached the leaf litter and ferns as twilight. Emmanuel wove between the dark trunks, his heartbeat thrumming in his chest and forehead. A few feet into the grove, the land fell away to a deep ravine. Shabalala, Zweigman and the retreating impi stood on the edge gazing down into the chasm.

  “You’re shit out of luck, soldier,” the sergeant major said.

  Emmanuel wiped sweat from his eyes and calculated the distance. With a solid run up and superhuman effort, the jump to the other side was possible. Shabalala might make it. The rest of them would end up littered across the floor of the chasm, too far down for help to reach them in the unlikely event they survived the fall.

  Emmanuel checked the woods, mentally running through a number of escape scenarios. All ended in death or serious injury. Twigs snapped and leaves crunched in the brush. He unclipped the Webley from its holster.

  A bedraggled white boy in a filthy school uniform appeared out of the gloom. Small, with a shock of black hair matted into tendrils, he might have stepped from a sorcerer’s catalog of forest spirits. His right eye was pale blue, his left eye dark brown.

  “Come,” he said.

  16

  GABRIEL REED, RUNAWAY, habitual thief and number one suspect in the Amahle Matebula murder case, jumped a trickling stream and jogged into the fold of a hill. Bony shoulder blades pressed against the fabric of his gray wool jacket, detailed at the cuffs and lapels with scarlet piping. Matching gray trousers hung loosely from his hips and the hems trailed in the dirt. The King’s Row College uniform probably cost more than Emmanuel earned in a month.

  Gabriel navigated a hairpin bend in the path and ducked under a tangle of branches. Behind the wooded barrier a wide rock platform jutted out from the mountain, and beyond it, on a higher level, the black mouth of a tunnel could be seen. A distinct four-syllable birdcall echoed in the leaf canopy and Gabriel peered into the overhanging tree branches.

  “Chrysococcyx cupreus,” he said. “The emerald cuckoo.”

  “Strange bedfellow indeed,” the sergeant major whispered. “How befok is he, do you reckon?”

  “Befok enough to know about this place,” Emmanuel answered. “For our purposes that makes him the good kind of crazy.”

  “Until you ask him about Amahle,” the Scotsman said. “This is the same boy who went batshit on Zweigman and Daglish. Don’t forget it, Cooper.”

  He would not. Gabriel was odd in the extreme and unpredictable, but till they were rested and ready to move on, this mountain hideaway was their port in a storm. He’d keep a watch on their host.

  Two members of the defeated impi squeezed into the hidden space, tired from the quick climb. The flood of adrenaline released during the fight in the kraal had drained away and they were running on empty. Emmanuel bent the branches back to allow the third member of the attacking group through. The injured fighter made it to the rock without assistance thanks to the painkillers and the thick cotton gauze dressing applied to the flesh wound by Zweigman during a rest stop half an hour ago.

  The German doctor ducked off the path with his medical bag held to his chest and his hair looking like exploding gray fireworks. His steps were slow and awkward, which Emmanuel found odd. Even when masquerading as a shopkeeper back in the town of Jacob’s Rest Zweigman had moved with purpose.

  The doctor shuff
led to the rock and slumped down. Bright red drops splattered the ground where he’d walked. Emmanuel went over and examined Zweigman’s pale face and dilated pupils. He pulled the medical bag from the doctor’s clutched hands. A metallic taste he associated with combat patrols into enemy territory flooded his mouth.

  “Lie down,” he said to Zweigman. “Gently, now.”

  Fresh blood soaked the doctor’s jacket and shirt and stained his leather medical kit. Emmanuel pushed the clothing aside, copying the actions of the medics who’d worked the battlefields.

  A wad of cotton wool was stuffed deep into a cut on the doctor’s upper right shoulder. It was a mirror opposite of the old bullet wound on Emmanuel’s left shoulder. He remembered the initial feeling after the bullet struck, a dull fist punched into the flesh, and then the real pain had set in, raw and unrelenting. He looked up; the Zulu detective had silently joined him.

  “Put pressure on the wound, Shabalala. I’ll check the kit.”

  Emmanuel searched the medical bag for a morphine syrette or a bottle of painkillers. A single pill rattled in the bottom of a glass jar; on its own it was useless for severe pain. No medicinal brandy, either. Even the supplies of bandages and gauze were low. Zweigman had used them on the injured fighter, knowing there’d be nothing left to treat his own injury.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Emmanuel snapped the bag shut in frustration. He curled his hands into fists to stop them from trembling. Other emotions—anger, helplessness and terror at the thought of losing Zweigman—he pushed out of his mind.

  “Young man . . .” Zweigman motioned to the injured fighter, then back to himself. “Old man . . .”

  Gabriel stood at the tunnel entrance, a bedraggled angel backlit by afternoon sunlight. The three members of the impi had now left the rock sanctuary to circle back to their kraal, anxious to defend their homes and families from any revenge attack carried out by the Matebula clan.

  “Will he die?” Gabriel’s voice was devoid of any emotion other than curiosity. Like a malfunctioning flashlight, the schoolboy swung from intense focus to a diffuse emptiness in which his emotions appeared to have little connection with the outside world.

  “Not today,” Emmanuel said.

  Among the treasure trove of stolen goods stored in the tunnel he and Shabalala had unearthed a feather blanket, a bag of quilting rags and a bottle of peach brandy lifted from Covenant Farm. Zweigman’s wound was re-dressed with the fabric remnants, a bed made from the blanket and the pain in his shoulder dulled by the alcohol. It wasn’t enough, though. Not by a long way.

  Zweigman groaned in pain and Shabalala lifted the covering to check the wound. Blood soaked through the new dressings in the shape of a rose. “Not good,” he said.

  “I know. The bleeding has to be stemmed and the stab wound stitched.” That was a job for a trained medical professional with the right tools. Emmanuel swallowed the dull metallic taste flooding his mouth and scrambled for a plan, any plan to prevent Zweigman from dying on a cold dirt floor miles from his wife and new son. One person could help. “We can’t move him in his condition. I’ll have to bring Daglish here.”

  “She will come?”

  “I’ve got to try.” There was no other option. If not for this assignment, Zweigman would be safely in the Valley of a Thousand Hills dispensing cod liver oil and basking in the brilliance of his adopted child. The burden of guilt was on Emmanuel.

  He walked to the boy, who’d crouched to examine a black and yellow lizard sunning itself on a rock. Amahle was buried and the investigation stalled. Questioning the boy about the murder had to wait till Zweigman was well.

  “Pseudocordylus melanotus.” Gabriel whispered. “Drakensberg crag lizard.”

  The teenage boy had a mania for classification but defied it himself. The term befok wasn’t specific enough. At fifteen or sixteen years old he was still childlike. His different-colored eyes gave the clearest indication that he was a bizarre mix: fully sane one moment and off the air the next.

  “I left my car at the turnoff to Covenant Farm,” Emmanuel said to Gabriel. “Can you take me there?”

  “Why?”

  “My friend is sick. He needs help.” Simple phrases, expressed clearly, seemed to be the best way to communicate.

  “That man is bad.” Gabriel studied the lizard’s scales and long tail. “He took off Amahle’s clothing and cut her with a knife.”

  “Dr. Zweigman was conducting an examination of Amahle’s body to find out what killed her. He meant no harm.”

  Gabriel picked at the red piping on the lapels of his jacket with dirty fingers. “He didn’t have to hurt her. I could have told him what killed Amahle.”

  “Can you tell me?” Just one more minute, one more answer to satisfy the craving to know for certain who’d killed the chief’s daughter.

  “A witch put a spell on her,” Gabriel said. “And a wizard.”

  A whole minute wasted. Time to move on. The mission to secure Daglish had to be completed in daylight and it was already almost four in the afternoon. Gabriel continued to watch the lizard.

  “You are right, little baas. A witch used black muti to kill the chief’s daughter.” Shabalala placed Zweigman’s folded glasses next to the temporary bed and approached the tunnel mouth. He crouched by the schoolboy’s side. “The man in there under the blanket can help find this witch.”

  “Is he powerful?” Gabriel switched to Zulu and immediately sounded less stilted and formal.

  “Oh, yes. He is a healer who uses only good muti to heal the sick and fight evil wizards and witches.”

  Gabriel fixed Shabalala with an intense stare. “He should have used his power to break the spell over Amahle. He should have given her new breath.”

  “Ahh . . .” Shabalala made a sound of regret. “Only the great, great one is capable of breathing life into someone. We must accept that the ancestors have built a hut for Amahle and that is where she will stay from now on.”

  “She will never come back to this cave and play?”

  “No, little baas. Never.”

  Gabriel looked away and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his wool jacket. He gripped his knees and pulled them close to his chest. The hard stone surfaces of the tunnel amplified the wet sound of his sobbing. Emmanuel stepped back. Gabriel’s guilt or innocence in relation to Amahle’s murder was irrelevant. With the talk of wizards and witches and his unnatural intensity, young Reed would be found not fit to stand trial and transported from police lockup in a padded wagon.

  Shabalala stayed by Gabriel’s side and waited for the tears to stop. He did not speak. Like a river, the boy’s grief would find its own course.

  The lizard scuttled into the leaves and Gabriel raised his face to the sky. He sat perfectly still and watched white clouds form against the blue. “Cumulus mediocris. Low to middle clouds.” The joy had gone out of the naming game. He turned to Shabalala, lost. “Must I help the sick healer?” he asked.

  “If you are able, little baas.”

  “My name is Gabriel. My father and my brother are the bosses.”

  “And I am Samuel. This other man is called Emmanuel.”

  It was a smart idea, putting them all on a first-name basis. For good or ill, the odd schoolboy had now become a part of the effort to save Zweigman.

  Gabriel stood up and pointed to the valley floor. “Sampie Paulus. The Voortrekker. He lives at Covenant Farm. Three miles due east.”

  “That’s the place,” Emmanuel said. “The car is on the main road. Just by the turnoff.” The Afrikaner farm was connected to the outside world by an eroded mud track strangled with kaffir weeds and thornbush. Fine for a team of oxen to navigate but not a Chevrolet.

  “That’s where it was parked yesterday. A matte-black 1951 Chevrolet Fleetline Deluxe.” Gabriel jumped from the mouth of the tunnel to the rock ledge below, ready to head off. That he’d slashed the front tire of said Fleetline Deluxe with a knife seemed a detail not worth mentioning.

 
“Exactly the same place,” Emmanuel said. He suddenly remembered the knife, sharp enough to cut hardened rubber. The boy might still be armed. And while he was tired from crying and malleable now, that could change at any time.

  Emmanuel jumped down a level and turned to Shabalala standing guard at the tunnel entrance. Words failed him.

  Shabalala said, “I will take care of the doctor till you get back. Hamba kahle, Sergeant. Go well.”

  “Sala kahle, Constable. Stay well.”

  Emmanuel followed Gabriel’s agile movements through the forest as best he could. The boy paused every few minutes for him to catch up. Just when Emmanuel was sure the same protea bush crowded with yellow butterflies had been circled three times and they had crossed the grove of sycamore trees once before, they stepped onto the main road a foot away from the Chevrolet.

  “Can I sit up front?” Gabriel sprinted to the passenger door. “Can I sit in the front seat, Emmanuel?”

  “Of course.” Emmanuel dug out the car keys. The truth was he hadn’t thought about what to do with Gabriel after they got to the Chevrolet. Dragging a thief into a town where he had robbed every shop was not part of the plan. Then he remembered that only Gabriel knew the way back to the rock tunnel and to Zweigman. “Get in,” he said, and unlocked the door.

  The sun dipped lower. The dirt road cut into the hills and mapped the contours of the valley floor. Gabriel wound down the window and leaned out to smell the air. Emmanuel kept the Chevrolet at sixty, high for the potholed road but he needed to make up time.

  He drove with hands tight on the wheel. Gabriel called out the scientific names of plants and animals followed by their common nomenclature. Emmanuel stopped listening and rehearsed his approach to Daglish. The town doctor respected Zweigman’s medical knowledge and expertise. That would help. This morning’s long walk down Greyling Street in a nightdress and dressing gown would not.

  They hit the edge of town and Emmanuel slowed down. At the side of the road, a hefty black woman sold freshly grilled corn from a stand. Two young children hunched in the shade her body cast and played with rusty bottle tops.