by Malla Nunn
‘Some men do.’
Khan retrieved a wooden box from the floor and placed it on his knee. He clicked open the brass latch and Emmanuel noticed that the index finger on his right hand was severed at the middle joint.
‘I have a message for Parthiv. Pass it along for me, Mr Cooper.’
He did not want to be caught in the middle of a feud over hashish. Life was complicated enough and the clock was ticking down to his re-arrest.
‘I’ll pass the message on,’ Emmanuel said anyway. If Jolly Marks’s killer was found in the next forty-five hours, then maybe he’d swing by Saris & All. If not, he’d be in jail and Khan’s disappointment would be the least of his worries.
‘Tell Parthiv he is no longer in the hashish business. If I hear he is selling it anywhere, it will not go well for him. You understand?’
‘I’ll let him know,’ Emmanuel said.
Khan rapped on the glass privacy screen that separated the front from the back seats. The Rolls reversed out of the alley and swung back to the Point. Khan undipped the lid of the wooden box and pushed it open. The scent of tobacco and cannabis bud spiced the air. He selected a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette as thick as a baby’s wrist and offered it up.
‘What is it?’ Emmanuel said. The vanilla and chocolate butt at Jolly’s murder scene had probably come from a box like the one on Khan’s knee. He considered a connection between the Indian gangster and Jolly Marks but nothing seemed to fit.
‘This is a gift,’ Khan said. ‘Kentucky burley mixed with Swazi Gold and a sprinkle of Durban Poison.’
‘Thank you, but I’ll pass.’
Swazi Gold and Durban Poison were two of the most potent daggas on the market. Together they might be lethal. A few puffs and the night would be spent searching wardrobe corners for invisible enemies. Real life provided all the paranoia he could handle.
‘You don’t smoke?’
‘Not since I was a kid.’
All part and parcel of a slum childhood and an adolescence spent in a country boarding school long on discipline and short on fun. He had been wild until the army tamed him. The police force and the detective branch had harnessed his mental and physical energy. Even the Victory Shipyards kept him straight up. If he stepped off the path now he might end up exactly where his teachers had predicted: in jail.
‘Maybe next time,’ Khan said and Emmanuel’s jaw clenched involuntarily. The Indian gangster was not going to let him walk away from their acquaintance. Khan would know him from now till the end of time.
‘Maybe,’ Emmanuel said.
The Rolls came full circle and stopped at the intersection of Quayside Road and Old Station Street. The bullish white man who’d conducted the weapons search opened the passenger door and leaned in.
‘Walk Mr Cooper to his car and make sure he knows where he is going,’ Khan said.
‘Will do, sir.’
The message for Parthiv was supposed to be delivered tonight. Well, he needed something from this encounter.
‘Where can I find the Flying Dutchman if he’s not at the passenger quay?’ Emmanuel said. Knowing a criminal boss had to have advantages.
Khan smiled but again no emotion showed in the black eyes. ‘I can get you a woman,’ he said. ‘Any colour, any size. For the right price. Just say the word.’
The offer of free marijuana and now a woman had both been made with a smile, but Khan sat back watching Emmanuel like a spider, waiting for a weakness to show.
‘Not tonight.’
‘You should reconsider. The Dutchman left town Friday morning and won’t be back till tomorrow.’
‘Where can I find him tomorrow?’
The Indian man lit up the giant spliff and settled back into the leather seat. Smoke drifted from his mouth in a thick plume. ‘Try back at the quay in the middle of the afternoon. Sundays are slow and he’ll be trawling for tourists off the boat.’
‘Time’s up,’ the bodyguard said and laid a hand on Emmanuel’s shoulder.
Emmanuel shrugged off the heavy sausage fingers and climbed out of the car. The two men who’d earlier blocked him between the Rolls door and the pavement materialised from the shadows of a closed teashop. Khan’s voice reached out from the gloom of the passenger compartment.
‘I will see you again, Mr Cooper. Soon, I think.’
CHAPTER TEN
One forty-five. Electric streetlights lit the sleeping city. The tram lines were empty and the police cells full of drunks, bar-room brawlers and natives caught without the official passbook that allowed them to overnight in white urban areas.
Emmanuel let himself into Chateau La Mer with the key that Hélène had too kindly given him in the afternoon and went straight for the guest bathroom. His shoulderblades and neck had begun to throb and the presence of the mad Scottish sergeant major hovered at the edge of the pain.
‘Please be here …‘Emmanuel pulled the medicine cabinet open. His luck had to change. The last few hours had been a waste. He’d ignored Khan’s errand and pushed ahead with the murder investigation. The Zion Gospel Hall was locked, and the Cat and Fiddle pub where Joe Flowers had knifed two men in a fight had gone out of business. Flashing Joe’s mug shot to lowlifes in every drinking hole on the Point had turned up nothing. No white DeSoto with white hubcaps and a mermaid picture in the window either. He knew no more about the Flying Dutchman than what Jolly’s sister had told him. In fact, all he’d managed to do was appear on Khan’s radar.
‘Christ above …’ Emmanuel shook his head. He was on a losing streak. The cabinet shelves were empty and wiped clean. He moved to the bedroom to continue the hunt.
A brown paper envelope lay on the quilted duvet. He upended the contents onto the bed and a pair of silver police-issue handcuffs and keys weighed down the luxurious cover. An official police ID card with his name, photo and detective sergeant’s rank came out to rest next to a freshly printed race-identification card. Just like that. Two small pieces of laminated paper and he was white again, a detective again.
The race-identification card wove a dark magic. People lied and cheated to get the word ‘European’ on this square of green paper. Others turned their backs on South Africa for lack of it. How could such a small thing - a plastic-covered piece of paper - control an individual’s whole world? One flimsy document and he could walk through the front entrance of Dewfield College, where his sister, Olivia, taught maths and science. He could sit in the manicured grounds, a stone’s throw from a dozen white schoolgirls, and not be considered a moral hazard.
He threw the cards down and pressed his thumbs to his temples. The presence of the Scottish sergeant major continued to search for a breach. Emmanuel headed for the kitchen. He’d chew on cloves and garlic if he had to. Anything to hold back the Scotsman and the splintering pain gathering force behind his eye socket.
He switched on the kitchen light and found the pantry. Glass tubs of goose fat, tall cans of peaches suspended in juice, cake flour and jars of raw sugar: Hélène Gerard was thin now but this was a fat person’s larder. He moved aside bottles of olive oil and checked behind them.
‘Mr Cooper?’ The French-accented voice was slurred. ‘Is that you?’
‘It’s me.’ Emmanuel stepped out of the pantry. ‘Sorry to wake you, Mrs Gerard.’
‘No matter.’ Hélène leaned her weight against the long oak table that ran across the middle of the room. ‘No matter.’
The gracious woman he’d met this afternoon had disappeared. In her place was a sloppy housewife with unpinned hair and a slack mouth. She straightened herself up in the overly dignified pose adopted by drunks trying to appear sober.
‘Please …’ She formed her words laboriously. ‘How can I help? I told the major I would help you.’
‘I’m fine. You should go to bed.’
‘No. Whatever you want I can find it for you. Then you can tell Major van Niekerk that I did everything that I promised.’
Emmanuel glimpsed the panic in her eyes. ‘Pain
killers,’ he said. ‘I have a headache. That’s all. Nothing the major has to know about.’
‘Aahhaa…’ Hélène sailed towards a ceramic tea canister like a rudderless ship and lifted the lid. She rifled inside and produced a bottle of pills. ‘Not ordinary painkillers, Detective Sergeant Cooper. The best. It’s morphine,’ she whispered. ‘For you.’
Morphine was a controlled drug. Was Hélène Gerard an opium eater as well as a drunk? Emmanuel checked her face, her eyes, and found none of the dreamy washout that morphine left behind. He knew the look from the war. He had seen wounded soldiers and even some of the doctors wrapped in those dreams.
‘Please.’ Hélène pushed the bottle into his hands. ‘Take them. There are only a few left. They are yours.’
Emmanuel turned the glass bottle over and the pills rattled. He didn’t trust himself. Four white beauties and he’d sail through the window and stretch out on a cloud till midday. And that was the problem with good drugs. They worked so long as you kept taking them. And if they were good, that’s all you wanted to do: keep taking them.
He opened the bottle and shook out four pills, thought better of it and returned one to the container. Two for now and one against the possibility that he didn’t crack the case; that’s when he’d need calm. He screwed the aluminium top back in place and read the label. The pills were prescribed for a Vincent Maurice Gerard. Two months ago.
‘Your husband?’ he asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘Doesn’t he need the morphine any more?’ Emmanuel was curious. There was no evidence of Vincent Gerard in the house. In fact, there were no family photographs of any kind on display.
‘He copes without the pills.’ Hélène took the bottle and replaced it in the tea canister then filled a glass with water and gave it to Emmanuel. ‘You’ll tell the major I helped?’
‘Of course.’
‘Don’t forget.’ She tottered out of the kitchen on unsteady pins. A chair toppled over in the hallway and Emmanuel heard a soft curse. Why was the French-Mauritian so desperate to please van Niekerk?
He swallowed two pills and slipped the spare into the breast pocket of his jacket. Not his jacket. It was Vincent
Maurice Gerard’s property and on loan to him, along with the police ID, for a shrinking period of time.
Emmanuel climbed into the wide expanse of the provincial-style bed, safe in his morphine lifeboat. He drifted over rusted corrugated-iron roofs and chimneys breathing wood smoke into the air. A dirt lane ran behind a row of ragged shops. His mother sat on the back steps of the All Hours general store and shared a cigarette with a dark-skinned Sotho woman. Emmanuel rushed towards her. A hand gripped his shoulder and dug into the flesh.
‘Do you see,’ his father’s voice was angry, ‘how careless she is?’
The scrape of a chair leg against the bedroom floor cut across the liquid play of memory and Emmanuel pulled himself upright. The solid shape of a man was perched on the edge of the bench in front of the mirrored vanity.
‘Who are you?’ Emmanuel said.
The outline wavered. There was someone in the room, within an arm’s length. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, muddled by the morphine and disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings.
‘You’re the man who was outside Lana’s flat,’ he said. ‘You’ve been following me.’
The male figure stood up and floated to the door. Emmanuel struggled from under the quilt and the boom of his heart drowned out the warm hush of the morphine. ‘Wait…’ His feet hit the floor and he stumbled after the retreating figure. A tree branch scraped against the window and night shadows flickered across the walls.
The bedroom door opened and the man disappeared into the hallway.
Emmanuel lunged forwards and bumped the sharp edge of the dressing bureau with his hip. The police-issue handcuffs skated across the wood surface and the ID cards and clothes thumped to the floor.
‘Shit…’
He steadied himself against the furniture and checked the door. It was closed. The fog in his head shifted and ebbed. Morphine took the edge off the fear but not enough. He switched on the bedside lamp and checked the room. The windows were locked and the corners were empty. He was alone. He collected the cards and clothes strewn across the floor and restacked them.
Zweigman’s battered postcard had fallen from the inner pocket of the stained crime-scene jacket, which Hélène had neatly folded on the bureau. Emmanuel picked it up and turned it over. A dried spot of the dead maid’s blood coloured the handwriting scratched onto the back of the card and made the script appear ancient. In the small hours of the morning, the bloodstain foretold violence and death. Emmanuel flipped the card and studied the pristine beauty of the misty hills and kloofs. Were the Zweigmans in danger?
Don’t worry, the morphine whispered. The drop of blood doesn’t mean anything. Go to the deep valley. Listen to the waterfalls.
Emmanuel laid his head down in the nest of pillows and rested the postcard on his chest. The morphine opened a door to the past and he stepped through it into a landscape of mud ditches and burned trees. The steel ribs of a bridge twisted at an impossible angle and plunged into a swollen river. Emmanuel crouched in the dirt and rested. The air smelled of spent aviation fuel and shredded lemon trees: the scent of spring in wartime. Tracer fire lit the night sky with bright lines of green, blue and white and he marvelled at how beautiful death looked.
A Lancaster bomber swooped over the river. A group of boys sat in the limbs of a bare, burned tree and their hands reached out to try to touch the plane as it flew just above them. One of the boys turned to Emmanuel. He had Jolly Marks’s face. He pointed upwards.
‘Look,’ he said.
The bicker of mynah birds awoke Emmanuel and he rolled out of bed. The morphine had taken him to the briny deep but daylight brought real problems and serious consequences for failing to solve them.
Zweigman’s bloodied postcard was placed neatly on the bedside table. Last night it had been on his chest. He checked the room quickly. A pale lemon two-piece suit hung from the back of the chair where yesterday’s cream silk jacket had been.
Emmanuel crossed the room. The police ID, van Niekerk’s money, the morphine tablet, the Buick car keys and the new race ID card were arranged in a neat row along the top of the oak dressing bureau.
Hélène Gerard had been into the room. The idea of being observed while asleep made Emmanuel uncomfortable. Angry also. The dawn intruder could easily have been Detectives Fletcher and Robinson. Or maybe someone else? He still couldn’t be sure if the man sitting by the dresser last night had been real or a drug phantom.
No more morphine then.
The IDs were laid out in the same manner as the contents of an evidence folder awaiting a signature to verify that all was present and accounted for. Hélène Gerard had not stolen or tampered with a thing but Emmanuel was sure that she’d looked over the cards.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Zion Gospel Hall was a grey demountable thrown down between a scrapyard and a tuckshop with chicken wire over the windows. The first verse of the hymn ‘Arise, My Soul, Arise’ drifted out of the open church door. Emmanuel looked in. Many of the congregation had their arms in the air and swayed from side to side as if caught in a strong cross-current. Black and white limbs, skinny and malformed by poverty, reached like saplings towards the ceiling.
Three more verses to go, Emmanuel thought. He knew the song by heart. Five years of mandatory prayer meetings and weekly services at boarding school had left an imprint.
He backtracked along the length of the chain-link fence separating the scrapyard from the Gospel Hall and absently pulled up a chunk of kaffirweed on the way. The bitter scent lingered on his hands and brought back memories of endless Saturdays spent weeding the gardens alongside the Ndebele labourers; standard punishment for being unruly and wild at Ligfontein Kosskool: the Fountain of Light boarding school. His offer to weed the gardens on Sundays a
s well was refused. He reached the street and turned back to the Gospel Hall. The dying notes of the hymn drifted out followed by a loud chorus of ‘Amen’. The congregation filed out of the demountable and gathered around the front entrance; black, brown and white all mixed together. They looked at Emmanuel, curious about the stranger loitering in their yard. A grey-haired white woman approached with squared shoulders. She wore no jewellery, no make-up, no stockings and no adornments in her plaited hair. Emmanuel couldn’t imagine a way to improve her.
‘Can I help you?’ Wary blue eyes matched her Scandinavian accent.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a few questions about Jolly Marks if you don’t mind.’
‘You weren’t with the other detectives at the morgue. I’ve never seen you before.’
‘Transfer from Johannesburg. It’s my first week.’
‘All the same, I’ll be seeing some identification first,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll take the next step.’
‘Of course.’ Emmanuel withdrew the brand-new ID from his pocket and handed it over. The plastic cover was pristine and the ink fresh. He wondered if the woman would notice.
‘Never met a policeman that looked the way you do.’ She gave the ID back after reading it and made a point of studying the dark silk tie and the pale citrus-coloured suit with the delicate mother-of-pearl buttons hand-sewn down the front of the jacket.
‘Never met a woman preacher before,’ Emmanuel said. ‘So that makes us even.’
‘Miss Bergis Morgensen.’ She introduced herself with a nod. ‘I’ve got to get back to my family and give them a parting blessing. Wait here. I’ll answer your questions when everyone has gone. Jolly’s passing has shaken people’s faith so we’ll keep this quiet, if that’s all right.’
Emmanuel was happy to step back. He wanted to stay on the right side of Miss Morgensen, but more than that, he wanted to keep a safe distance from the broken members of the missionary woman’s congregation.
