by Malla Nunn
‘Sit down and rest against the wall,’ he said.
Amal sank to the ground and sucked breath in through an opened mouth. A panic attack was on the cards. ‘Are you going to … to … arrest us, Detective?’
Emmanuel took a small flask from his jacket pocket and unscrewed the lid. He handed it to Amal, who pulled back.
‘I don’t drink. My mother says it makes you stupid.’
‘Make an exception for tonight,’ Emmanuel said. ‘It’s mostly coffee, anyway.’
The teenager took a slurp and coughed till fat tears spilled from his eyes. Parthiv gave a derisive snort, embarrassed by his younger brother’s inability to hold liquor. Emmanuel pocketed the flask and checked the narrow alley between the warehouse wall and the goods train.
He had a body in the open, no murder weapon and two witnesses who, in all probability, had stumbled onto the crime scene. This was a detective’s nightmare - but also a detective’s dream. The scene was all his. There were no foot police to trample evidence into the mud and no senior detectives jockeying for control of the investigation.
Clumps of vegetation imbedded in the gravel shuddered in a sudden breeze. Beyond Jolly’s body, the butt of a hand-rolled cigarette blew on the ground. Emmanuel picked it up and smelled it - vanilla and chocolate. It was a special blend of flavoured tobacco.
‘You smoke, Parthiv?’ Emmanuel asked over his shoulder.
‘Of course.’
‘What brand?’
‘Old Gold. They’re American.’
‘I know,’ Emmanuel said. Half the Yank army had puffed their way across Europe on Old Gold and Camel. For a few years it had seemed that the smell of freedom was American tobacco and corned beef. Old Gold was a mass-market cigarette imported into South Africa. The vanilla and chocolate tobacco was probably made to order.
‘What about you, Amal? Do you smoke?’
‘No.’
‘Not even a puff after school?’
‘Only once. I didn’t like it. It hurt my lungs.’
Parthiv snorted again.
Emmanuel shone the beam on Jolly’s hands and face. Amal looked away. There were no defence wounds on the boy’s hands despite the open penknife. The killer had worked fast and with maximum efficiency. Maybe it was the night chill that made the murder read cold and dispassionate. The word ‘professional’ came to Emmanuel’s mind; hardly a description that fitted either one of the Dutta boys. He played the torchlight over the rough ground again, looking for hard evidence. Jolly’s order book was nowhere near the body.
A coupling creaked in the darkness. Parthiv and Amal focused on an object in the gloom of the freight yard behind him. Emmanuel swivelled and a black hole opened up and swallowed him.
CHAPTER TWO
Something powerful forced a sack over Emmanuel’s head and pulled it down hard over his shoulders. Rough hessian scraped against his face. He smelled rotting potatoes. Air hissed from his lungs and muscular arms tightened around his chest like pythons. He was lifted into the air and his feet dangled beneath him like those of a child on a swing.
He could feel a face pressed between his shoulderblades. The man holding him was small, with the strength of a troll. Emmanuel twisted to try to break the hold. The arms tightened a fraction, enough for Emmanuel to feel the slow crush of his own bones. He stopped struggling and listened to the angry chatter of voices talking in overlapping Hindi. He had no idea what was being said and couldn’t judge from the tone if it was good or bad news for him.
‘Shut up, Amal,’ Parthiv snapped in English. ‘Find our torch and make sure we haven’t dropped anything. I’ll get the car.’
‘He’s a policeman,’ Amal said. ‘We have to let him go.’
‘No chance. Not after you spilled our real names.’
‘What about the boy?’ Amal said.
‘Someone will find him in the morning. Now, move.’
Parthiv fired off a series of commands in Hindi, his voice distant by the final order. Emmanuel’s feet scraped over loose stones and the steel spine of the railway tracks. The darkness inside the sack was suffocating. He fought the urge to try to break free; a crushed rib was the only thing he would gain from the exercise. He heard Amal hyperventilating as if he were confined to a hessian sack of his own. A car pulled up, engine idling.
‘Geldi, geldi!’ Parthiv ordered. ‘Quick.’
A door opened and Emmanuel was thrown into the back seat. His captor followed and rested an elbow in the small of his back, a light point of contact with plenty of threat behind it. Emmanuel lay still and breathed slowly. Did they plan to dump him in the mangrove swamp that lapped the harbour or bury his body in the bush scrub around Umhlanga Rocks? He should have listened to van Niekerk. Getting involved was a big mistake.
‘If Maataa finds out…’ Amal spoke between shallow breaths.
‘We’ll go in the side way.’ Parthiv’s tone suggested they were discussing nothing more important than breaking a family curfew.
‘Then?’
Silence followed Amal’s inquiry. Emmanuel imagined Parthiv’s heavy brow furrowed with concentration. Criminals with limited intelligence always resorted to the most obvious solution: get rid of the problem quickly and hope for the best.
The car took a corner and the suspension bounced. The elbow dug into Emmanuel’s back to stop him from rolling onto the floor. So far, the strong man hadn’t said a word.
‘Madar chod.’ Parthiv swore in Hindi but continued in English. ‘Keep calm, brother. They’re just driving by. They got no reason to stop us.’
‘Two cars,’ Amal panted. ‘Two cars.’
‘Keep calm. Keep calm,’ Parthiv said. ‘They are going somewhere else.’
Blue lights flickered across the interior of the car and penetrated the weave of the hessian sack. It was two police vans. Perhaps someone else had called in Jolly’s murder. The lights faded. It was just as well, Emmanuel thought. The police would greet the information in van Niekerk’s notebook with swinging batons and rhino-hide straps. He was probably safer with the Indians.
‘See?’ Parthiv was giddy with relief. ‘Piece of cake. Smooth going, no problems.’
The car picked up speed till the engine shifted into fourth gear. Emmanuel didn’t try to count the turns or listen for the faint cry of a bird found only in one park in the city. Outside of the movies, all forced rides had the same soundtrack: the rhythm of the tyres meeting the road and the abductee’s heartbeat.
He slid back against the leather seat when the car climbed up over a steep ridge then continued on a flat for at least fifteen more minutes. The car eased to a stop on a gentle incline and the engine cut.
‘You go in the front, quiet, quiet,’ Parthiv said. ‘If Maataa or the aunties or the cousins wake up, make nice talk. How are you doing today? The house, it looks lovely. I’ll take this one up the side to Giriraj’s kyaha.’
‘Okay.’ Amal sounded sceptical. The holes in the plan were obvious even to a teenager on the edge of a panic attack.
‘Be a man,’ Parthiv said. ‘We will deal with this problem on our own. No women.’
Emmanuel was bundled out of the passenger door and pushed along a pathway. The scent of flowers, sweet with a hint of decay, cut through the foetid potato smell in the hessian bag. The thump of his heartbeat slowed. He was in a garden, being led to a servant’s room, or kyaha. A metal door scraped open.
‘Feet up.’
Emmanuel stepped into the room and the iron man’s hands grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him into a chair. A match was struck against a box and there was the brief double hiss of cotton wicks being lit. The smell of paraffin filled the space. He waited a minute, till he was halfway sure that he sounded calm.
‘Parthiv …’ he said. ‘How about you let me go before your mother comes and finds out the mess you’re in?’
‘Tie him up,’ Parthiv said.
Emmanuel’s hands were pinned behind the chair and secured with a length of rough material. The sack was
whipped off and he sucked in a lungful of clean air. He was in a one-room house. The bedroom was a single cot pushed into a corner; the kitchen, a small gas burner balanced on a wooden crate stencilled with the words ‘SARIS & ALL’ along the side. Two sharpened butcher’s knives hung from hooks hammered into the side of the crate. A third hook was empty. A couple of chairs stood in the middle of the space. A newspaper clipping of an Indian dancer with beguiling eyes stared down from the bedroom wall.
Parthiv pulled up a chair and gave a dramatic sigh. The strong man stayed behind Emmanuel and out of view.
‘We got a problem,’ Parthiv stated. ‘You know what the problem is?’
‘I’m guessing it’s me,’ Emmanuel said.
‘Correct.’
‘You good at solving problems, Parthiv?’
The yellow light from the paraffin lanterns threw dark shadows across the Indian gangster’s face so it took on the menacing quality of a skull. It was an illusion. Emmanuel knew bad men; evil men who killed for pleasure and without hesitation. Parthiv was not in that league.
‘I’m the best.’ The Indian man leaned in and cracked his knuckles. ‘You took a turn into nightmare alley, white man. This room is where danger lives.’
‘What does that mean?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘I’m the public enemy; born to kill. I walk alone and brute force is my best friend.’
Emmanuel almost smiled. Where else did an Indian youth in subtropical South Africa learn how to be a gangster but at the Bioscope?
Emmanuel said, ‘That’s quite a bunch of movies you’ve seen. James Cagney in The Public Enemy, Burt Lancaster in I Walk Alone and I can’t remember who’s in Brute Force. The question is: who are you in real life, Parthiv? Robert Mitchum or Veronica Lake?’
Parthiv delivered a smack to the side of Emmanuel’s head. ‘You in big trouble,’ he said. ‘My man can snap you like a chicken bone.’
‘If you let me go now, Parthiv, you might get out of this without going to prison and belly dancing for your cellmate.’
‘Giriraj.’
The strong man stepped forward and positioned himself in front of Emmanuel. He was barely five foot five, but wide across the shoulders. His bald head was oiled and a waxed moustache twirled out to sharp points over full lips.
Parthiv waved a hand and the man stripped off his cotton shirt and hung it neatly on a hook at the foot of the bed. He returned to the centre of the room and stood in front of Emmanuel. Green cobras waged war across his chest in a tattooed scene that seemed to have been inked into his dark skin by a rusty nail; no doubt the work of a prison artist with limited tools, unlimited time and a subject with the capacity to absorb a lot of pain. Emmanuel noted recent scratch marks on the man’s right forearm. Possibly from fingernails? The strong man stepped closer and stretched his biceps. Parthiv was all talk but Giriraj was all muscle. Now was the time to confess all.
Emmanuel said, ‘Okay, there is something I have to tell you …’
‘Good, becauseâ’
The door scraped open before another overblown threat could be delivered. Parthiv jumped up as if his chair had caught fire. A torrent of Hindi gushed from him. He pointed to Emmanuel, then Giriraj, then back to himself in an effort to explain the situation. A flash of hot pink sari crossed Emmanuel’s eye line and a dozen glass bracelets chimed. An Indian woman in her fifties with sinewy greyhound limbs grabbed Parthiv’s ear and twisted till his knees buckled. She muttered insults under her breath and didn’t let go even while Parthiv was writhing on the ground.
More bodies squashed into the room. Emmanuel lost count at twelve. The Duttas weren’t just a family; they were a tribe in which females outnumbered males three to one.
The number and volume of the women’s voices shook the corrugated-iron walls of the kyaha.
Amal was shoehorned between a walnut-skinned lady and an old man with no teeth. He made eye contact with Parthiv and then looked down at the floor, ashamed at his failure to be a man.
Giriraj retreated to the wall and a young woman in a floor-length dressing-gown followed him and yelled straight into his face. ‘You grabbed a policeman? Is there even half a brain in that fat head of yours?’
The sinewy woman in the pink sari let go of Parthiv’s ear and collapsed into a chair. ‘We will lose everything,’ she said. ‘My sons. My shop. We will end up in a shack on the Umgeni River.’
‘No, auntie,’ the young woman in the long gown said. ‘It will be all right. The boy was already dead when Amal and Parthiv found him. They are innocent.’
‘They are Indian,’ a voice called from the doorway. ‘The police will make sure they are guilty.’
‘That is true,’ the woman in the pink sari said. ‘They will hang.’
The noise was sucked from the room. A life for a life was the law in South Africa. Two Indian men found at the scene of a white boy’s homicide would have a hard time convincing an all-white jury of their innocence. Under the National Party’s new racial segregation laws, Indians were classified ‘non-white’. They were ranked above the black population but still below the ‘Europeans’.
The walnut-skinned woman held Amal’s hand to her cheek and muttered quietly. Emmanuel spoke no Hindi but he understood every word. The sound of prayer was universal: he’d heard it in the battles and ruined towns of Europe.
An appeal to a mute and deaf God. The woman in the pink sari dropped her face into her hands. A girl, dark-haired and tiny and still too young to understand what was happening, began to cry. The Dutta family had started to unravel.
‘I’m not a policeman,’ Emmanuel said.
The woman in the long gown turned. She was in her early twenties with a thick rope of black hair that fell to her waist. Light glinted off the silver petals of her nose ring.
‘What was that?’ she said.
‘I’m not a police detective,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I used to be but I’m not any more.’
‘No,’ Parthiv said. ‘He’s a lawman. A detective sergeant. I heard it in his voice.’
‘Quiet.’ The gowned woman waved four female elders closer. They leaned in, head to head, and whispered. The circle broke but the female council remained tightly bunched. They turned their attention to Emmanuel. The young woman in the long gown stepped forward.
‘I’m Lakshmi,’ she said politely. ‘And you are?’
‘Emmanuel Cooper.’
‘You’re a policeman?’
‘Not any more.’
‘What is it you do now?’
‘I work at the Victory Shipyards on the Maydon Wharf.’ It was the truth in part. He couldn’t tell them he was also on a surveillance mission for Major van Niekerk, doing an unofficial investigation of police corruption at the Point freight yards. That fact was not for public discussion. ‘I’m a shipbreaker.’
The Victory Shipyards employed only veterans of the armed forces. All skin colours were folded into the shipyard ranks and together they constituted the full array of the British Empire’s fighting forces: mixed-race soldiers from the Malay and Cape corps; Hindu and Muslim soldiers from the Indian army; and European soldiers from the Royal Marines and the Welsh infantry All were now surplus to the needs of a world at peace and cut loose from the purse strings of a shrinking empire.
‘Ahh …’ One of the aunties called Lakshmi over and the women chattered in quiet voices that were accompanied by wild hand gestures and the vigorous shaking of heads.
‘You’re an old soldier,’ Lakshmi said when the council had reached a conclusion. ‘My auntie knows this Victory Shipyards. Her brother was in the 4th Indian Division.’
An interjection was shouted from the gallery and Lakshmi sighed before relaying the message. ‘My uncle was at the Battle of Monte Cassino. Have you heard of it?’
‘Of course,’ Emmanuel said. ‘The Indians fought like lions to get the Germans off that hill,’
The aunties nodded their approval of his answer and signalled for Lakshmi to continue.
‘What were you
doing at the docks?’ she said.
‘I was lonely. I was looking for a woman to keep me company.’ Emmanuel used his ready-made excuse. It was the only believable explanation for being out in the freight yards after dark.
‘Oh…’ Lakshmi was taken aback at the answer and looked to the female elders for help.
The woman in the pink sari lifted her face from her hands. ‘Out, out, out,’ she said. ‘Lakshmi, you stay.’
Aunties, uncles and cousins left the room in single file. Parthiv tried to go with them but was stopped dead by a pointed finger. He retreated to the edge of the cot. Giriraj sank down by his side; both men miserable.
‘You said you were a detective.’ Lakshmi frowned. ‘Why did you lie to Amal and Parthiv?’
‘Habit.’
And a longing to be a detective again. Six months ago his job was to speak for the dead. Other occupations seemed inconsequential. He was, in his bones, still a detective.
‘Did you get the sack from the police?’ Lakshmi asked.
‘I was discharged.’
‘Why?’
‘I didn’t have a choice,’ Emmanuel said. He’d gone up against the powerful police Security Branch on his last official case and lived to tell the story. That should have been enough. He should have been grateful to have his life back, almost intact.
Lakshmi nodded and waited for him to say more.
Emmanuel shifted against the wooden backrest. He didn’t want to remember how careless he had been. Major van Niekerk was right when he’d said, ‘Fucking with the Security Branch out in the boondocks is one thing, Cooper. Fucking with them here in Jo’burg where everyone can see … that’s slapping them in the face.’
And that’s what Emmanuel had done. He had maligned the most powerful law-enforcement body in South Africa by delivering a letter to the mother of a black man wrongly accused of murdering an Afrikaner police captain. The young man, a member of the banned communist party, had hanged himself in his jail cell on the eve of the trial. Or so the papers said.
