A Beautiful Place to Die Read online

  Emmanuel swiveled and jumped for the open window. He was getting out with his liver, lungs and spleen intact. Iron hands pulled him back into the room and Lieutenant Piet Lapping began the lesson in earnest.

  Emmanuel tasted blood. It was dark. It was painful to breathe. He drifted in and out of consciousness on a tide controlled by pockmarked Piet. Piet’s blurred outline hovered over him and he thought: the Pretorius boys know nothing about administering a proper beating. Piet is right to give lessons.

  There was a dark smudge of movement behind Piet’s head and the smash of glass. The lieutenant went down. A splash of whiskey landed on Emmanuel’s cut lip and he struggled to sit up and concentrate.

  “You?” he wheezed.

  Johannes, the foot soldier in the Pretorius army, pulled him up and dragged him to the open window. Emmanuel’s muscles quivered and he tried to stand. No dice. He had the strength of a bowl of jelly.

  “Why?” Emmanuel grunted as the hulking Boer lifted him up and stuffed him out through the window like a sack of smuggled animal hides.

  “Found the photos under Louis’s bed when we took him home,” Johannes said. “Burnt them. Everything you said about Louis and my pa is true. Got to make things right.”

  “Oh…” Emmanuel slid over the sill and onto the strong width of a shoulder. A solid khaki uniform blocked his vision for a moment, then he caught flashes of bright yellow wildflowers, red dirt, and green tufts of veldt grass. He heard the singing of the trees and smelled the promise of spring rise up from the wet ground. He was moving across country on the shoulders of a giant. His eyes closed.

  Constable Samuel Shabalala and Daniel Zweigman sat side by side and watched the first light of day appear on the horizon. Shabalala pointed a finger at the sliver of pale pink that pushed through the curtain of night.

  “God’s light,” he said.

  “Yes,” Zweigman agreed. “I’d forgotten what it looked like.”

  Emmanuel forced his eyelids apart. The muddy outline of the two men filled the space at either side of him. He focused all of his energy on keeping his eyes open for one second longer.

  “Ahh…you are back with us, Detective.”

  Blurred faces, one white and the other black, leaned in close to examine him. He tasted a bitter liquid in his mouth and struggled to swallow it. Everything hurt.

  “A half dose of crushed pills mixed with wild herbs gathered by Constable Shabalala from the veldt,” the white face explained. “You are my first patient to be treated with this miraculous combination of German and Zulu medicine. You are a lucky man.”

  Zweigman. The name stuck with Emmanuel. Zweigman the shopkeeper and Shabalala the policeman. The two men who’d tipped van Niekerk off to his location and saved his skin.

  “How long?” Patches of sky winked through the branches of a thick-limbed tree. He was on the veldt somewhere, wrapped in blankets and lying on a thin bedroll.

  “Three days,” Constable Shabalala replied. “You went a long way away, but now you are back.”

  “Davida?”

  “Gone.” Zweigman pressed his fingers against the bruised muscles of Emmanuel’s torso. “Soon you will be well enough to travel. You have a fierce will to live.”

  “The lieutenant and his men are gone also,” Shabalala said. “They left in many cars with the Communist man in wrist irons. Many newspaper cameras followed after them. They are the indunas now.”

  Emmanuel felt himself gently lifted into a sitting position and tasted cool water in his mouth. He looked out from swollen lids. Veldt surrounded him on all sides in wide ribbons of green and brown. A dove cooed and the grass swayed in the early morning light. The landscape was golden and it hurt to look at, so he closed his eyes.

  “I came back…” Emmanuel mumbled. He could have stayed in England with his new wife and learned to tolerate the rain and the cold. But he’d come back, knowing how cruel the country was and how hard the God that ruled over it.

  “You love this fucking place, laddie.” The sergeant major put forward his opinion. “This is the country where you chose to stand and fight. Simple as that.”

  “Got my backside kicked. Lost the match,” Emmanuel said, thinking of the innocent man about to stand trial for Pretorius’s murder.

  “Delirium,” Zweigman said, and laid him down again on the thin mattress.

  “What about you?” Emmanuel continued his conversation with the Scotsman. “What are you doing here?”

  “You invited me,” the sergeant major said. “But I don’t think you need me anymore. You’ve got the German and the African, so rest easy, laddie. Rest awhile.”

  Zweigman took the detective’s pulse, then wrapped the blankets tightly around his bruised body. How Emmanuel survived the beating was a mystery but he would carry the scars, some visible and others hidden, to his grave.

  “One day,” the German shopkeeper said, “I will tell you how I came to be hiding in Jacob’s Rest. For now I will tell you this: my wife and I are leaving and that is a very good thing. I will open a practice and start again. I have decided to stand up and see if I am knocked down.”

  “Why?”

  “Feel the sorrow, yet let good prevail. What else can men like us do, Detective?”

  Emmanuel felt the rough ground underneath him and heard Shabalala’s deep baritone voice singing a Zulu song. His life was saved by a black man and a Jew, his physical being reawakened by a mixed-race woman, and his crushed body lifted to safety by a proper Afrikaner. It was a jigsaw of people that fit against each other despite the new National Party laws.

  He closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep. Shabalala’s voice carried him out of the dark cellar of his dreams and into the sunlight. He saw himself lying on the open veldt, beaten but not defeated. Zweigman was right. What else was there to do but get up again and take another swing at the world?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IF IT TAKES a village to raise a child, it takes two villages to raise a family and write a novel. These are the people of my village to whom I owe thanks.

  Imkulunkulu the great, great one. The ancestors. My parents, Patricia and Courtney Nunn, for love, hope, and faith. Penny, Jan and Byron, my siblings and fellow travelers on the dusty road from rural Swaziland to Australia.

  My children, Sisana and Elijah, lovely beyond compare. My husband, Mark Lazarus, who gave me time, space, and the use of his impeccable eye for story. You are the roof and the walls of my little hut. Many thanks also to Dr. Audrey Jakubowski-Lazarus and Dr. Gerald Lazarus for their generosity and support.

  Literary agents Siobhan Hannan of Cameron Creswell Agency and Catherine Drayton of InkWell Management, who bridge the gap between my writing desk and the world with focus and enthusiasm. I could not be in better hands.

  For historical and cultural help I send special thanks to Terence King, author, police and military researcher, and historian. Gordon Bickley, military historian. Audrey Portman of Rhino Research, South Africa. Aunty Lizzie Thomas for Zulu help. Susie Lorentz for Afrikaans help. Any errors or omissions are entirely my own.

  Thanks also to members of the Nunn and Whitfield clans for stories and memories, both light and dark, of life in southern Africa.

  To the Randwick “Gals” and the Kingsgrove “Gals” for being a great posse of women with whom to ride out the transition into motherhood. Kerrie McGovan for introducing me to the mysteries of the intrawebs and delicious restaurant-quality meals. Loretta Walder, Maryla Rose and Brian Hunt, who lit the path on the darkest nights.

  Members of the “Blind Faith Club,” an invaluable group of friends who, in the absence of proof, believed I would finish the book and that it would be published. They are Penny Nunn, the terrific Turks Yusuf and Burcak Muraben, Tony McNamara, Steve Worland, Georgie Parker and Paula McNamara.

  Double thanks to Atria Books and to Judith Curr for giving my book an American home. Emily Bestler, who simply made the book better and reinvigorated my belief in lucky stars. Laura Stern, Virginia McRae and a
ll the Atria staff.

  Ngiyabonga. Thank you all.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Acknowledgments