A Beautiful Place to Die Page 23

  “You’re not going to do that,” the sergeant major cautioned. “The old Jew will fix you up and first thing tomorrow you’ll send this lot off to van Niekerk, fast post. This shit is going to save your life, soldier.”

  The sergeant major was right but that didn’t diminish the anger Emmanuel was feeling. It was the last photo. The satisfied look on Willem Pretorius’s face needled him into an incomprehensible rage. Emmanuel could almost hear the woman’s teasing voice coaxing the naked Dutchman to smile for the camera after she had arranged the sheet just so.

  Emmanuel clipped the satchel shut. He had to dream of a woman in a burned-out cellar while Pretorius got the real thing. The rage was sharpened by another emotion. He stopped short. He was blindingly, furiously jealous of the captain and the woman who’d spent the afternoon fucking and then shared a dangerous joke.

  The pain pushed Emmanuel onto the kaffir path toward the old Jew and his scarred leather doctor’s kit.

  Emmanuel knocked on the door a third time and waited. It was 10:35 PM and Jacob’s Rest was a small town: the residents had locked up for the night and it would take Zweigman a while to answer.

  “Yes?” the German asked through the door.

  “Detective Sergeant Cooper. I’m here on a personal errand.”

  The double lock clicked open and Zweigman peered out. His white hair stuck out at odd sleep-tossed angles but his brown eyes were sharp and focused. He was wearing plain cotton pajamas under a tatty dressing gown that sported a moth-eaten velvet collar.

  “You are injured,” Zweigman said. “Come this way.” He indicated a doorway immediately to his right and Emmanuel shuffled his aching body into a room barely large enough to house the leather sofa and armchair that stood at its center. There was a gramophone on an occasional table with a stack of records in paper sleeves resting next to it, but what dominated the space were the books. They lined the walls and jostled for room in the corners and at the ends of the sofa. There were more books than could be read in a lifetime.

  Zweigman picked up an old newspaper from the leather armchair and threw it aside, not caring where it landed.

  “Let us see what damage you have done,” he said.

  Emmanuel sank into the cracked leather chair and pushed his injured leg out with some effort.

  “Some aches and pains. Nothing that a few painkillers won’t fix.”

  “That is for me to decide,” Zweigman said, and gently lifted the torn trouser leg out of the way to examine the wound. He emitted a satisfied grunt.

  “Painkillers will help, but the wound is deep and needs both cleaning and stitching. May I see your shoulder, please?”

  Emmanuel didn’t ask the German how he knew about the other souvenir collected from the guard in Lorenzo Marques. Despite his current circumstance, Zweigman couldn’t shrug off the mantle of intellectual superiority that hung from his stooped shoulders. He had commanded respect in another life and Emmanuel imagined the good doctor’s expertise was once dispensed to gold-plated families in rooms with polished furniture.

  Emmanuel’s shirt was half unbuttoned when there was a knock at the door that started out as a soft tap and rapidly turned into a manic pounding when the call wasn’t immediately answered.

  “Liebchen?” The woman’s voice was husky with tears. “Liebchen?”

  “Please stay seated,” Zweigman said, and walked to the door and opened it gently. Lilliana Zweigman stumbled into the room in a pale silk dressing gown embroidered with dozens of purple butterflies in flight. Her hands reached out and patted her husband’s face and shoulders like a field medic searching for hidden injuries.

  “We have a visitor.” Zweigman gave no indication that his wife’s behavior was in any way unusual. “Would you be kind enough to make us a pot of tea to be served with your excellent butter cookies?”

  “Is he?” Lilliana mumbled. “He is?”

  “No, he is not. The detective is a book lover and we were discussing our favorite writers. Is that not so, Detective?”

  “Yes.” Emmanuel picked up the book closest to him and held it up. His shoulder screamed in protest but he didn’t let it show. “I was hoping to borrow this copy for a few days.”

  “Ahh…” Lilliana became bright as a welder’s spark now that the danger had passed. “Yes, of course. I will make the tea.”

  She floated out of the room and Emmanuel wondered at the capacity of the human mind to mold reality to its will. He was seated in Zweigman’s house with bloodied trousers, an unbuttoned shirt, and a copy of A Field Guide to Spores and Fungi in his hand, and Lilliana had willed herself into believing it was a social call.

  “The shoulder,” Zweigman continued as if they had not been interrupted. “Let me see it, please.”

  Emmanuel removed his shirt slowly and hot pain coursed through his muscles. The guard would be able to tell Mr. Fernandez, the Portuguese land whale, that he’d given the thief a taste of suffering.

  “An old bullet wound overlaid with a new bruise. I will not ask how you acquired such aggressive injuries.” Zweigman pressed his fingers around the edge of the bruise. “Arnica to take down the swelling and painkillers to take away the pain. Nature will do the rest in its own time.”

  The doctor found his medical kit among the chaos, snapped it open, and rifled through the contents. He pulled out a container of pills and shook four into the palm of his hand.

  “Swallow these with your tea,” Zweigman instructed before digging into his bag to extract a tub of cream. “Please rub this into your shoulder while I arrange for the washing bowl and sterilize a needle from my wife’s sewing kit.”

  Emmanuel scooped ointment out of the jar and spread it over his shoulder as the doctor left the room. Zweigman was right. The nightstick had brought the pain of his old injury back to life.

  Zweigman reentered the room and set up the bowl next to the gramophone. He moved with such certainty that Emmanuel wondered again what had landed the old Jew and his wife in Jacob’s Rest.

  “How did the captain know you were a doctor?” he asked.

  The German dipped a cloth into the washbowl and started cleaning the cut. “You asked me once before and I have told you that I do not know.”

  “Something happened back in April that tipped him off. What was it?”

  “I recall no such incident, Detective.” Zweigman reached up for a pair of tweezers and began digging into the cut. “Hold still, please, I have found the source of your discomfort. There.” He lifted the tweezers to show a jagged piece of clear glass. “Once again I will not ask how you came by this.”

  “Very kind of you. But I can’t return the favor.”

  The doctor didn’t respond to the statement and set about preparing the sewing kit. At some point during his fall from grace, the German had learned to keep his mouth shut. He would not volunteer any information.

  “Which one of the coloured women was the captain close to?” Emmanuel asked the question straight out.

  “‘Close’?” Zweigman gave a top-notch impression of a penniless migrant hearing the English language for the first time. “What does this mean, Detective?”

  “It means close enough to stick his tongue in her ear and a few other places besides,” Emmanuel said, and the doctor flushed.

  Zweigman said nothing for a moment. “If you repeat that accusation outside this room, even in jest,” he warned, “it will take a team of surgeons to sew you together and I am not sure they will succeed.”

  “Was it one of the women in your shop?” Emmanuel asked as the German threaded a needle and tied a knot into the surgical thread. His hands were steady, but there was an odd tilt to his head, as if he was trying to get as far from the conversation as possible.

  “Tottie or maybe Davida?”

  “I’m afraid that I cannot help you,” Zweigman said, and closed the cut. He stitched the flesh together with the quick skill of a surgeon used to mending much deeper wounds. Emmanuel was sure that the old Jew knew more than he was telli
ng, but unlike the Security Branch, he preferred confessions to be voluntary.

  “You know what’s strange?” he said to Zweigman after the thread was tied off and the sting in his flesh had subsided. “You didn’t tell me I was mistaken about the captain. The suggestion that a morally upright white policeman might be fooling around with a coloured girl didn’t get a response from you. No surprise. Nothing at all.”

  Zweigman carefully packed everything back into his wife’s sewing kit. He looked old and worn out, his shoulders pushed down by a heavy weight.

  “We are men of the world, Detective. We have been through a war and seen cities burn. Does an affair really have the power to shock either of us?”

  “Maybe not. But the rest of the town and the country will see it differently. The Immorality Act is the law, and the fact that it was broken by a policeman will shock plenty of people.”

  “The Immorality Act.” Zweigman snorted. “The forces of nature are more powerful than any law made by men.”

  The door to the lounge cum library opened and Lilliana Zweigman backed into the room carrying a tray containing a teapot, cups and a plate of butter cookies cut into the shape of snowflakes.

  “Here.” Zweigman took the tray from his wife and balanced it on the wide arm of the sofa. “You are a marvel, liebchen, a true wonder. You have earned a rest. Why don’t you go to bed now while we talk?”

  Lilliana didn’t move. She sensed something not quite right about the detective’s presence in her house.

  “Please help yourself to tea and one of my wife’s cookies.”

  Emmanuel bit into a pale yellow disk of pastry sprinkled with sugar. It was delicious and he hadn’t eaten for hours. He finished the cookie in two bites and reached for another one.

  “You see?” Zweigman touched his wife’s arm. “You have not lost your touch. I’m sure our visitor would appreciate a small tin of your pastry to take home.”

  “Yes.” Lilliana backed out slowly. “I will pack him some in the container with the red roses on the outside.”

  “The ideal choice,” the doctor said, and gently closed the door behind her.

  “Please excuse my wife, Detective. She’s not comfortable with members of the police.”

  “No offense taken,” Emmanuel said, and swallowed the painkillers with a mouthful of tea.

  Zweigman sat down and rested his teacup on his knee. A wealth of past sorrows seemed to surround the doctor and the melancholy reached out and embraced Emmanuel like an old friend. Men of the world, Zweigman had called them. Men formed by war and cruelty—and unexpected kindnesses.

  Emmanuel picked up a book to break the morbid spell and ran his fingertips over the smooth calfskin cover. City of Sin was embossed on the spine. It was the same size and style as Celestial Pleasures, the slim volume he’d found in the captain’s locked sanctuary. In a town the size of Jacob’s Rest, the book of erotica could only have come from this room.

  “Did Pretorius borrow any of these books?”

  “He never honored me with such a request,” Zweigman said. “I believe the Bible was his mainstay.”

  “Do you lend books from here?”

  “Everyone is welcome, Detective.”

  Emmanuel breathed out in frustration. “No specific names to give me, I suppose. No clue as to who borrowed a book entitled Celestial Pleasures.”

  “I have no memory of that particular book and no idea who may see fit to read it.”

  Emmanuel finished his tea and pushed himself out of the deep folds of the leather armchair. The painkillers surged through his blood and he felt just fine.

  “When Constable Shabalala avoids telling me something, I know it’s to protect Captain Pretorius. Who are you protecting, Doctor?”

  “Myself,” Zweigman answered without hesitation. “Everything is done to protect my soul from further onslaughts of guilt and blame.”

  “I was hoping for something as simple as a name,” Emmanuel said, and turned to leave. He needed sleep. Tomorrow he had to try to identify the woman in the photos and hope that she would lead him to the man who’d stolen the evidence from the stone hut.

  “Detective.” Zweigman held the jar of ointment out. “Apply this to your shoulder once every two to four hours. It will help reduce the swelling.”

  “Thanks. I also need more painkillers. I’m out.”

  Zweigman’s brown eyes made a close study of the wounded detective before he answered.

  “You received a three-week ration less than one week ago. What has happened to the rest?”

  “Gone,” Emmanuel said, conscious of how that must sound to a medical professional. “I don’t normally run through them so quickly.”

  “What made you lift your dosage?”

  The sergeant major’s voice and the memory of running through the smoke of wood fires were not things he was prepared to share with anyone, even a highly qualified surgeon. The town of Jacob’s Rest opened all the cages he normally kept locked and he couldn’t find a reason for that.

  Zweigman went to his medical kit and returned with a half-filled container of white pills.

  “These are for physical pain. They will not cure the pain you are feeling in your heart or your mind. That pain can only be cured by feeling it.”

  “What if the pain is too much to bear?” Emmanuel asked. The army psych unit was big on drugging the pain away: on the patient not feeling anything that ruled out a return to active duty. Fit enough to pull the trigger meant fit enough to return to the killing fields.

  “You will go mad.” Zweigman smiled. “Or you will transform yourself into a new being, one that even you will not recognize.”

  “Is that what you’ve done? Transformed yourself?”

  “No.” The old Jew looked ancient as Jerusalem stone. “I am merely hiding from who I used to be. A sad and cowardly end in keeping with the rest of my life.”

  “You stood up for Anton. You protect your wife and the women in your care. How is that sad and cowardly?”

  “Rearguard actions to keep the past at bay.” Zweigman opened the front door and let fresh air into the room. “Come to the store tomorrow. I will check on your injuries and give you my wife’s tin of cookies. It appears she has been delayed.”

  Quiet sobbing came from the back of the house, and Emmanuel stepped out into the sleepy embrace of Jacob’s Rest.

  “Thank you,” he said, and limped to the front gate. It seemed to him that the German refugee and his wife had run from the past only to find they had brought it with them to a distant corner of southern Africa.

  Zweigman watched the injured detective slip away into the night, then rushed to the kitchen tucked at the back of the small brick house. His wife stood at the table with the tin of butter cookies held tightly to her chest.

  “That man…he will take what we love from us.”

  “No, liebchen.” Zweigman tried to remove the rose-covered tin from his wife’s hands but found her grip impossible to loosen. He touched her cheek. “I promise that will not happen to us again.”

  Emmanuel was halfway back to The Protea Guesthouse when the singing began. It was a popular tune rendered almost unrecognizable by a high-pitched voice that broke on every fifth word and then started up again like a scratched record. He located the drunken songbird behind the coloured church.

  “Hansie.” Emmanuel greeted the tottering figure. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Sarge, howzit?” The teenaged policeman held up two bottles of whiskey triumphantly. “See? Louis said he wouldn’t give it, but he did when he saw the uniform. My uniform.”

  “Tiny gave you those bottles?” One of them was already half empty. Hansie was having the time of it.

  “Won’t give any to Louis. But he gives to me because of the uniform.”

  “Where are you going with the bottles, Hansie?”

  “Louis bet me I couldn’t but I did.” Hansie thumped his chest. “Because I am the law and people respect the law.”

  “Yo
u going back to Louis’s house?”

  “The shed.” The boy squinted out across the dark veldt, then turned in an unsteady circle. “Louis said take the kaffir path but I don’t know…where…where’s the way back?”

  Emmanuel put his arm around Hansie’s shoulder. He was interested in how the lion of God managed to talk his friend into shaking down a coloured merchant for liquor.

  “I’ll show you,” he said, and turned Hansie in the direction of the nonwhite houses in order to get more time to “interrogate” him. “Why didn’t Louis get the bottles? He knows the kaffir path better than you, doesn’t he?”

  “See.” Hansie held the bottles up. “I got them. Me.”

  “Good job.” Emmanuel tried another tack. “Does Louis normally get the bottles?”

  “Ja. But he sent me this time.”

  “Why?” It was hard to stop himself from smacking some sense into the idiot constable.

  “He went, but Tiny said no, no, no dice.”

  “Why?”

  “Captain found out about the drinking. He sent Louis away to a farm in the Drakensbergs…long way away up in the mountains.” Hansie gave a full-bodied burp that echoed across the empty veldt. Up ahead, the light from the captain’s work shed punctuated the darkness.

  “That’s the shed. Go in but don’t tell anyone you saw me. Understand?”

  “Ja.” The drunken Afrikaner lurched forward, eager to show his spoils.

  Emmanuel spun Hansie around to face him and leveled the police boy a severe glance, the kind used by headmasters about to hand out a “six of the best” caning.

  “Forget you saw me. That’s an order, Hepple.”

  “Yes, sir, Detective Sergeant, sir.”

  Emmanuel launched Hansie toward the light with a gentle push. The inebriated boy stumbled toward the open door with the bottles held aloft like the conquering hero. A chorus of cheers greeted his entrance. Louis wasn’t the only one waiting for the whiskey river to start flowing.