A Beautiful Place to Die Read online

  “We got a confession last night,” he said. “The colonel is on his way from Pretoria to pose for photos. It’s going to be a big case. Everyone wants a piece of the action.”

  “He signed?” Emmanuel asked. Nobody, but nobody, in government was going to look too closely at the confession of a known Communist, least of all van Niekerk, whose ambition was to rise on the political tide. Piet and Dickie were bulletproof and Emmanuel himself was half naked.

  “Of course,” Piet said. “So you can imagine my surprise when I heard you had someone else in line for the murder. A murder that I have a written and signed confession for.”

  If he dropped it now and said he made a mistake about Winston King’s involvement, then apologized for the inconvenience he’d caused, maybe he’d get to fight another day. The Security Branch had outmaneuvered him and now a black man from Fort Bennington College was going to hang for crossing the river on a Wednesday instead of a Saturday.

  Piet smoked the rest of his cigarette in silence and blew smoke rings into the air schoolboy style. A bad sign. He walked over to the pile of clothes, picked up Emmanuel’s discarded jacket, and rifled through the pockets until he found what he was looking for.

  He held up Davida’s statement between thumb and forefinger.

  “Your evidence?” he said.

  “A statement.” Emmanuel didn’t give him any more. Nothing was going to stop Lieutenant Lapping from reading over the long list of damning allegations leveled at Captain Pretorius: adultery, manufacture of pornography, physical assault, and criminal misconduct as defined under the Immorality Act.

  Piet unfolded the paper and read the handwritten statement. He finished and looked to the corner where Davida huddled at Dickie’s feet.

  “You write this?” he asked.

  Davida pressed deeper into the corner, afraid to look up, afraid to answer. Dickie reached down and slapped her across the face with an open hand, drawing blood from the corner of her mouth. Fear kept her silent.

  “Answer,” Dickie said.

  “Yes.” She pressed her hand against her throbbing cheek.

  “Look—” Emmanuel got Piet’s attention. “You have your confession. This is nothing compared to what’s going on at the station.”

  Piet smiled. “I’ll leave after you have been punished for disobeying orders and for getting on my fucking nerves and not a moment before, Cooper.”

  The pockmarked lieutenant stepped away to reveal Henrick and Paul Pretorius standing side by side in the smashed doorway. He held the piece of paper up for them to see.

  “Know what this is?” Piet asked. “It’s a statement claiming that your father was a deviant and a liar who defiled himself by blood mixing. What do you have to say to that?”

  The Pretorius brothers moved toward Emmanuel in a rage. He blocked a punch from Paul and ducked under Henrick’s sledgehammer blow before a jab to the stomach sent him reeling back onto the bed. The wooden beams of the ceiling tilted at a crazy angle above him. Paul breathed down on him.

  “You’re going to pay,” he said. “For Louis and for the lies you’re telling about my pa.”

  “Every word, true,” Emmanuel said, and tried not to tense when the punches hit him from every direction. He tasted bile and blood and heard the wet smack of his flesh yielding to fists. So, this is what Donny Rooke felt like out on the kaffir path: a punching bag in the Pretorius family’s private gymnasium.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” Piet ordered. “You can’t take it out of him all at once like that. It’s dangerous. You have to slow down. Consider where you’re delivering the message and how.”

  Emmanuel struggled to sit up. If Piet was calling the shots, he was in deep, deep trouble. The Security Branch officer could keep him alive and in pain for days. Piet took off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up to the biceps.

  “Henrick. Hold him down and keep him down,” Piet instructed.

  “I’m a police officer,” Emmanuel groaned. “What you’re doing is against the law.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Piet said. “This is a private beating carried out by two men whose brother you killed and hid in an icehouse.”

  That did sound bad. Inaccurate, but a jury would think twice about punishing the Pretorius boys for taking out their anger on the man who Louis had said tried to molest him.

  “Now,” Piet continued. “Start with a slap. Openhanded. Not soft and not hard. Just enough to get his attention.”

  “You have my attention,” Emmanuel said, and Paul delivered a stinging hit across his cheek. Not too hard and not soft, either. The tin soldier was a natural.

  “Good.” Piet was impressed. “Now pose a question and wait for the answer.”

  “Why did you tell those lies about my pa?”

  “No lies,” Emmanuel said. “Your pa liked to fuck dark girls. Outdoors and from behind.”

  Paul hit him hard across the face and sent the blood and spit flying from his mouth. The skin above his left eye burned and he focused on the enraged Paul Pretorius, who was struggling against Piet Lapping’s hold.

  “Calm down,” Piet said. “That was too hard too early.”

  “He said—”

  “Cooper is testing you,” Piet pointed out with a scholarly fussiness. “The stronger prisoners will do that. Your job is to remain calm.”

  “I almost forgot—” Emmanuel blinked away the blood that ran from a cut in his eyebrow. “Louis was the one molesting those coloured women last year. Your pa sent him off to a crazy farm. Check if you don’t believe me.”

  “For Christ’s sake, shut up,” the sergeant major whispered as Henrick rose off the bed and hammered his fists indiscriminately into whatever patch of flesh he could find. Piet’s little talk on remaining calm clearly had no impact on Henrick.

  “Get him off,” Piet instructed Paul. “We don’t want a dead policeman on our hands.”

  Henrick’s weight lifted off him, but the pain remained and surged in waves from his toes to his cranium. His mouth was puffed and cut, which made taunting the Pretorius boys a linguistic challenge. He heard his own breath, ragged and defeated. An hour more and he’d be sausage meat.

  “You understand now, don’t you?” Piet said. “You are in shit up to your elbows.”

  Emmanuel shrugged. He knew he was in trouble: he could feel it in his face, his chest, and his stomach.

  “Bring the girl,” Piet instructed his partner, and Emmanuel sat up straight. He was scared: for himself and for Davida, who appeared slight and nymphlike in her white cotton nightdress. This morning was going to be bad for everyone. What was Mrs. Ellis going through, knowing her girl was locked away with armed and violent men? Even King must know that he’d opened his door to a force he could not control. “Don’t be frightened,” Piet said to Emmanuel when Davida was pushed roughly around the foot of the bed. “The physical work is done and now we move to a longer-term punishment. One that you have kindly handed to me in the form of this girl.”

  Emmanuel tried to stand but Henrick slammed him down. Davida’s face was streaked with tears but she didn’t make a sound.

  “Was she was worth it?” Piet asked. “I hope so, because you’re going to spend the next couple of years in jail wondering why you flushed your life and your career down the toilet for one night between the sheets.”

  Emmanuel worked his swollen tongue against the roof of his mouth until a semblance of feeling returned. He wanted Davida out of the room and out of harm’s way even if it meant going against van Niekerk’s orders about keeping the past hidden.

  “No law broken.” Emmanuel managed to get the three words out, slurred but recognizable.

  Dickie sniggered. “Have you forgotten what country you’re in? You’ve been caught with a nonwhite. You’re going to jail.”

  “Not white,” Emmanuel said, even as he thought about van Niekerk’s response to what he was doing.

  “I know she’s not white,” Piet said. “That’s why you’re going down.”

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p; “Not white,” Emmanuel repeated.

  Piet stared at him, dumbfounded. “Fuck off.” He grabbed a hand and checked the skin underneath Emmanuel’s fingernails for dark pigment. It was an old wives’ skin color test passing as science. He dropped the hand with a grunt. “You’re as white as me and Dickie here.”

  Emmanuel reached down and lifted one of his leather shoes onto his knee. He slid a finger under the inner sole and pulled out a single piece of paper.

  “The missing intelligence report…” Piet smiled. Most interrogations were intensely boring: the repetitive questions, the strangled denials, the hour-long beatings. There were no real surprises left on the job anymore.

  Piet opened the page and whistled low in response to the information.

  “Little Emmanuel Kuyper,” he muttered. “I remember the photographs of you in the newspaper. You and your little sister. You had the whole country crying.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dickie tried to keep up with the conversation. He didn’t read much, not even the lowbrow daily papers that carried more pictures than print.

  “Emmanuel Kuyper. That was his name before he changed it, probably to avoid the connection with his famous parents,” Piet explained. “Cooper here is the boy whose father was acquitted of manslaughter after the jury found he had good reason to believe a half-caste shopkeeper had fathered his children. A part-Malay, if I remember.”

  “Bullshit,” Dickie said. “There’s not a drop of Malay blood in him. Look at him. He’s white, white.”

  “That’s what caused the scandal.” Piet lit up again, lost in memory. “Half the country thought the father’s story was a pack of lies, while the other half thought the mother was a whore. During the trial, the father’s side of the family put the children up for adoption. An Afrikaner family who didn’t want them turned over to a coloured orphanage took in Cooper and his sister. You were brought up in a proper Afrikaner home till you left school, hey, Cooper? Probably threw a torch onto the bonfire with all the other Voortrekker Scouts at the Great Trek celebration.”

  The feeling in Emmanuel’s mouth returned. He was going to burn a couple of bridges in the next few moments but he didn’t care about the consequences. So long as Davida walked out unharmed and he could follow her.

  Piet squinted hard and flicked the intelligence report to the floor. “Your mother may have been fucking the Malay,” Piet said, “but there’s not a drop of brown blood in you.”

  “Prove it,” Emmanuel said.

  There was a pause while Lapping examined the problem from every angle.

  “Interesting,” he said. “We can’t charge you under the Immorality Act if you’re mixed race, but that doesn’t mean your life isn’t about to go down the drain if I pursue this claim and get you reclassified.”

  “Go ahead,” Emmanuel said.

  “You’ll lose your job,” Paul Pretorius joined in. “You’ll lose your home and your friends. Everything.”

  “He’s going to lose all that anyway once he’s charged under the act.” Lieutenant Lapping circled Davida, thinking aloud all the while. “This way he saves himself and the girl from a public court appearance and makes them both innocent parties, as they’ve committed no offense. Clever.”

  “He’s trying to weasel out of it.” Dickie was furious. “He’s changing the rules on us. Look at him. He’s white.”

  “I think he is,” Piet said mildly. “But there’s no way to prove it, which is why Cooper has chosen to give us this report. Claiming to be nonwhite is his easiest way out. No prison term and as much black snatch as he can poke. Right, Cooper?”

  Emmanuel shrugged. His life was spinning down the drain while Piet imagined him living it up in a shebeen full of black women. It didn’t surprise him. Blacks and coloureds laughed louder and longer…or so it seemed to whites. He was going to miss the job, his sister, and his life.

  “He gets to walk away.” Paul Pretorius couldn’t believe it. “Reclassification isn’t enough to pay him back for Louis.”

  Piet ground his cigarette butt under his heel and immediately lit another, as if it were oxygen and not nicotine that was poisoning his bloodstream. He sucked deep until the tip of the cigarette glowed hot and red.

  “Cooper is forgetting that a nonwhite man has little protection from the law.” The lieutenant handed the cigarette to Paul. “We will now be forced to make the punishment for what happened to Louis immediate and physical in the extreme.”

  Shit, Emmanuel thought. Was there no way out of Piet Lapping’s carnival of perpetual pain? The Security Branch officer in the doorway swung around and faced into the house, hand on his gun holster.

  “Speak—” The officer barked the command down the corridor.

  “Lieutenant Lapping?” Mrs. Ellis’s voice, sharp with fear, called out from the sitting room. “Lieutenant Lapping?”

  “Mummy—” Davida whispered before Dickie cupped his hand over her mouth.

  “Ja?” Piet pursed his bulbous lips. The sound of a female voice put a damper on the high he experienced during physical questioning: like having your mother walk in on you just before the climax.

  “Phone call,” the housekeeper said quickly, aware on a base, instinctual level that the men in the room were unused to a woman interrupting their dark business.

  “What?” Piet moved to the destroyed doorway and listened. He was ready to leap and strangle the housekeeper if she made a wrong move.

  “There’s a man on the phone. He asked to talk to a Lieutenant Lapping right away.”

  “The colonel?” Dickie asked.

  “No,” Piet said, and unrolled his sleeves and buttoned them, careful of appearances outside the room. “He doesn’t know we’re here.”

  So—Emmanuel’s brain formed the thought with sluggish determination—Piet was keeping this excursion secret. He was determined to clear any obstacles that could throw doubts over the confession he’d extracted from the Communist last night.

  “Put the cigarette out and don’t do anything until I get back,” Piet said, and left the room to answer the phone.

  “Take a break.” Dickie stepped into the boss’s shoes and found them quite comfortable. “Cooper and his friend aren’t going anywhere.”

  The Pretorius brothers retreated to the window and fell into a whispered conversation while Dickie pushed Davida into a chair and stood over her. Emmanuel sank his throbbing head into his hands. It was his fault that Davida was here, in this room with men who stank of violence and hate. Their pleasure had come at a high price.

  “Look up.” Piet Lapping was back in the bedroom and he was not calm. “Look at me, Cooper.”

  Piet paced back and forth in front of the bed, his fingers flicking the flame of his cigarette lighter off and on like a lighthouse beacon. Something had set him off and destroyed the mystic calm he insisted was a mainstay of the “work.”

  “You’re really something,” Piet said through tight lips. “You and your sissy friend van Niekerk.”

  Emmanuel had no idea what he was talking about. Van Niekerk was in Jo’burg and unaware of the disaster with Louis or that the Security Branch interrogation was taking place at Elliot King’s game ranch. How the hell had van Niekerk tracked him down?

  “What happened?” Dickie asked.

  Piet ignored him and bent down in front of Emmanuel, his pebble eyes wet with rage.

  “Mozambique. That’s where you got them. Am I right?”

  Emmanuel lifted an eyebrow in response. Piet could go fish.

  “What?” Dickie walked to his partner’s side but kept plenty of space between them in case he needed to duck out of the way in a hurry. Lieutenant Lapping was unpredictable when he was angry and he was rarely this angry.

  “I should have known,” Piet mused aloud. “That day you left for Lorenzo Marques to question the underwear salesman. I smelled something was wrong…”

  “What underwear salesman?” Dickie was trying his best to get involved and be a genuine partner, not just a
muscleman.

  “Shut up, Dickie,” Piet said. “I need to get this straight so we don’t do anything foolish. I need to think.”

  Piet flicked the lighter on and off, the sound of it like gunfire in the tense atmosphere. A muscle jumped in the cratered skin of his cheek and Emmanuel held his breath.

  “He’s going to release the photos if we touch another hair on your pretty head,” Piet said after a long while. “He wants you to call him in ten minutes to verify that you’re safe, like a fucking virgin at her first dance.”

  Emmanuel stood up, his body stiff from the beating he’d taken. He didn’t care what the Security Branch threw at him. Van Niekerk had the photos and their power couldn’t be pissed away by slinging childish insults. He glanced over at Davida and saw that she understood. They were going to walk out of the room and then they were going to run.

  “You’re going to let him go?” Paul Pretorius pointed an accusing finger at the pockmarked lieutenant. “You promised us he’d get what was coming to him.”

  Piet caught Paul’s finger and twisted hard until the finger snapped out of its socket.

  “Ahhgg—” Paul Pretorius groaned, and sweat broke out on his forehead.

  “We are letting him go because your pa couldn’t keep his pants buttoned up and that slippery fuck van Niekerk has proof of it.”

  “That’s a lie.” Paul was red faced with pain. “He’s lying.”

  Piet let go of Paul’s dislocated finger and said, “I did consider the possibility that he was lying, but he has something, this van Niekerk. It was in his voice. I could hear it: the pleasure he takes in having power over us. Over me.”

  Dickie marshaled a decent thought and threw it into the ring. “Maybe he’s just a good liar.”

  “Consider the facts,” Piet said patiently. “Van Niekerk knows my fucking name, he knows where I am when even the colonel has no idea. This is not someone to be taken lightly and that is why I cannot take the risk that he is just playing with us.”

  Emmanuel limped past the bickering Security Branch men and held out his hand to Davida, who was perched at the edge of her chair, ready to make a run for it.