A Beautiful Place to Die Read online

  “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 hell.

  “You coming to collect the part for your motorbike?” Emmanuel asked. He remembered the mechanical rattle he’d heard at the stone hut before passing out. Could it have been a motorbike engine?

  “It hasn’t come yet,” Louis said.

  Dickie 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.

  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 assaults. 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 Summary

  28 December 1951

  After 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…” The captain had anticipated 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 African–born 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 passing 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.”

  “Please…to…” The fragile woman stumbled over the words. “Wait…”

  Lilliana Zweigman disappeared into the front of the store and returned with her husband, whose hand rested on her
arm.

  “I need to talk to Davida and Tottie,” Emmanuel said. The hum of the machines died down and an expectant silence took its place.

  “I will accompany you. Davida and Tottie, come with me, please. Angie, could you take care of the counter?”

  “Yes, Mr. Zweigman.” Angie pushed her chair back and went to take her place at the front of the shop. The sewing machines whirred to life and the two remaining women went to work attaching sleeves to half-made cotton dresses.

  Emmanuel motioned the women over to a table positioned beneath the shade of the lemon tree. He ignored the shy brown mouse. He couldn’t afford to expose her and the information she had about the calendar to anyone. Zweigman stood at the back window of the store with his nose pressed against the glass. He showed an almost paternal concern for the women in his wife’s care. Or was it more than that? Captain Pretorius certainly thought so.

  “Sit down,” Emmanuel instructed Tottie and Davida, and slid two pieces of blank paper and two pencils across the table. “I want you to draw me a map of your houses. Label the rooms. Draw the windows and doors. Mark the room where the Peeping Tom made his appearance.”

  “Yes, Detective.” Tottie gave him a smile guaranteed to pop the buttons off a grown man’s fly. The coloured beauty didn’t care how many moths got burned against her flame.

  Davida was bent over her paper with intense concentration. She drew the outline of a house with a small servant’s room out the back.

  “Detective?” Hot Tottie was thrown into confusion by an uncharacteristic lack of male attention. “Is this what you want?”

  Emmanuel made sure to maintain eye contact before looking down at the map, which was hastily drawn but adequate for the task at hand.

  “It’s exactly what I want,” he said, and smiled.

  The shy brown mouse slid her finished map across the table without a word. She didn’t look up once. Emmanuel placed the drawings side by side and studied them, paying particular attention to the location of the rooms where the Peeping Tom struck.

  He tapped a finger to Tottie’s map. “Your room is here at the back of the house?”

  “It used to be.” The beauty flicked a strand of dark hair over her shoulder to give a clearer view of her exposed neckline. “My daddy moved me to the front room after it happened the second time.”

  “Your room is here, separate from the house?” he asked Davida.

  “Yes. My room is the old servant’s quarters.”

  “Do you live with Granny Mariah?”

  Her gray eyes flickered up in surprise. “Yes.”

  Emmanuel wanted to ask why she didn’t live in the house with her grandmother but concentrated on the maps again. Both Davida’s and Tottie’s bedrooms were at the very back of the house, with windows facing the kaffir path. Was that a common element in all the crime scenes?

  “Do either of you know the layout of Anton’s house?” he asked.

  “You know where the bedrooms are in Anton’s house, don’t you, Davida?” Tottie said, and almost purred with satisfaction when Davida blushed two shades darker.

  Davida didn’t rise to the bait, just pulled a piece of paper across the table and drew a quick sketch.

  “Mary’s bedroom is in the back.” She slid Anton’s house plans back over to him. “Della’s bedroom is also in the back of the house.”

  “Does the kaffir path run close to the rear boundary of all the houses?”

  “I don’t know anything about the kaffir path,” Tottie said. “My daddy only lets me use the main streets. You have to get Davida to answer that question for you, Detective.”

  Emmanuel took stock of Tottie. The curvy beauty was a spoiled little miss who liked to take a cheap shot. She’d as good as called her workmate a kaffir by implying that respectable girls, girls with a daddy to look out for them, didn’t go near the native byway. Why was the shy brown mouse a target for Tottie?

  “The path runs by them all,” Davida said without moving her attention from the tips of her fingernails.

  The connection between the rooms and their proximity to the kaffir path was too obvious to miss. How had the attacker managed to evade the captain, who policed the path and the streets most days of the week? Then a radical thought occurred to him.

  “The attacker? Was he a big man like Captain Pretorius?”

  “I don’t know,” Tottie announced with a triumphant smile. “That man didn’t lay a finger on me. My daddy and my brothers made sure I was safe.”

  A teaspoonful of Hot Tottie went a long way. Emmanuel had enough of a taste to last a full week.

  “You can go back to work,” he told her. “I have a few more questions for Davida.”

  “You sure, Detective?”

  “I don’t want to embarrass you with the sordid details of the attacks. You shouldn’t have to hear such unpleasantness.”

  “Of course,” Tottie said. She looked disappointed at missing the good stuff.

  He waited until she sashayed into the shop before he turned to Davida.

  “Was the attacker big like Captain Pretorius?” he asked again.

  “He was bigger than me but not as big as the captain.”

  “How can you be sure?” The connection between the captain and the molester was too strong to dismiss. Willem Pretorius traveled the kaffir paths with impunity day and night and he had the power to pull the plug on the investigation when things got too hot. Was he protecting himself all along?

  “Did you know the captain well enough to be certain that he wasn’t the man who grabbed you?”

  “Captain Pretorius was very tall with wide shoulders. Everyone in town knew that.” She moved her hands from the table to her lap so he couldn’t see them. “The man who grabbed me wasn’t so tall.”

  “You think it was a white man?”

  “It was dark. I didn’t see him. He had a strange accent. Like a white man from outside South Africa.”

  “Could he have been a Portuguese?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  Emmanuel noticed the old Jew still had his nose pressed hard against the back window of the store. So, Hot Tottie wasn’t Zweigman’s fancy. It was the shy brown mouse he had an eye for.

  “You sure you’re not used to being touched by one of my kind?” Emmanuel asked straight out. Maybe the gray-eyed girl was keeping his secrets and a few more besides.

  She shifted in her chair but didn’t look up. “Just because I don’t have a daddy doesn’t mean I run around.”

  “What about Anton? Did you run around with him?” He wanted to know if he’d been mistaken in his judgment that she was a silent and watchful woman who kept to herself.

  “I saw Anton a few times but it didn’t work out.”

  “Have you told me the truth about everything, Davida?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He had a perverse desire to pull her head covering off and unbutton her shapeless cotton shift so he could search for the hidden places he sensed below the surface. She glanced upward suddenly and he had to look away.

  “You can go back to work.” He pretended to shuffle the reports into place and then watched her disappear into the back room of the store. Was Davida hiding something or was he simply revisiting the shameful sense of power he’d felt over her outside the stone hut?

  Emmanuel deviated off the path and swung past the post office before making his way to the police station’s back entrance. He rested against a tree and waited for Shabalala to appear on his bicycle. It was sunset and the kaffir path was busy with blacks funneling back to the location for the night.

  “They have been looking for you,” the constable told him after they’d exchanged greetings.

  “Are they still looking?”

  “There were many phone calls from Graystown and now they are not looking for you anymore.”

  “Phone calls about what?”

  “A man. A Communist,” Shabalala said. “That is all I heard.�
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  “And how did you hear that?” Emmanuel asked. How did a six-foot-plus black man move in and out of a Security Branch investigation without drawing attention to himself?

  “Tea.” Shabalala gave a straight-faced answer. “My mother. She taught me how to make good tea.”

  “Ahh…” The invisible black servant was etched into the white way of life. Shabalala had used that to its full advantage.

  They moved along the rear property line of the houses on van Riebeeck Street and soon drew level with the captain’s house. The shed door was open and the sound of contented humming drifted out onto the kaffir path.

  Inside, Louis was at work on the Indian motorcycle, which was close to fully assembled. The boy’s overalls were covered in grease, his leather work boots splashed with oil and dirt. Did the contents of a hymnbook get Louis humming out loud with happiness?

  “That one.” Emmanuel pointed back in Louis’s direction once they’d passed the captain’s house. “He is going to be a pastor?”

  “The madam has told everyone that it is so.”

  “You don’t see it?”

  “I see only that he is different.”

  “I see this also,” Emmanuel said, and they continued along the narrow path. The icy Mrs. Pretorius was aware that Louis was not like her other sons, but she chose to interpret this as a sign of his greatness.

  “I’ve been thinking…” Emmanuel stayed with the Afrikaner family for a moment. “When did Captain Pretorius tell you the old Jew was a doctor?”

  “Before the middle of the year,” Shabalala said. “I think in April.”