by Malla Nunn
“I’m single. How could I have children?”
Mason grinned. “Being single doesn’t mean anything in the world that we live in. And a man of your proclivities wouldn’t flash photographs of his half-caste offspring around the office. You could have a dozen little bastards stashed away.”
“I like non-white women.” Admitting to the lesser sin of fornication might camouflage the greater sin of unsanctioned procreation. “That doesn’t mean I’m ready to settle down and have a family with one of them … even if it was legal.”
“A man without a son leaves only bones when he dies. You waited too long, Cooper. Who’s going to bring flowers to your grave?”
“I’ll be buried on your land so I’m hoping you’ll do the honours once a year on my birthday. No carnations. Wildflowers are fine.”
“Here it comes …”
The punch lit up a constellation of stars behind Emmanuel’s eyelids. He fell back, breathing hard. Where was Shabalala?
“I did warn you.” Mason took a reasonable tone. “Now tell me what you’re doing on my farm.”
“Passing through, thought I’d say hello.” Emmanuel willed his muscles slack, like a drunk driver about to make impact with a wall. The Lieutenant’s fist connected with the weight of a brick thrown by a giant. Shabalala had better come soon.
“Tell me the truth,” Mason said, almost kindly. “Believe me when I say that beating you to a puddle gives me no pleasure.”
From the low vantage point of the floor, Emmanuel found that he believed Mason’s statement. The word “joyless” best described the Lieutenant’s attitude and perhaps the very fibres of his being. Happiness and humour were nowhere to be found, even outside the confines of this cell. Behind the dead-pools that were Mason’s eyes, Zweigman had glimpsed fear and sadness. Emmanuel saw only a void that couldn’t be filled. The years of boozing, violence and whoring had dug the pit deeper and made it impenetrable to light.
“Now that you’ve tracked me down, you’ve got nothing to say.” Mason rocked back on his heels, thinking. “Curious.”
“If you want my opinion, you could do more with this space, Lieutenant. Replace the broken window, get some curtains, put a rocking chair in the corner and you’ll have a nice reading room.” Every cut and bruise throbbed but he’d heard the soft crunch of a footstep in the gravel yard. Shabalala would enter the house soon, moving in the darkness; part of the darkness. Between them, he and the Zulu detective would take care of Mason. Somehow.
The Lieutenant remained still in the cell’s murky atmosphere. No fist, no slap, no reaction at all to the rocking chair comment. He spoke after a long pause. “When a person deliberately tries to provoke me to violence, I stop and ask why. Does that man enjoy being beaten or is he hoping, for example, to cover the sound of footsteps approaching the house? You brought friends with you.”
“I’m alone.”
“Are you sure about that, Sergeant Cooper? I hear a person moving around out there.”
“I came alone.” He emptied all thoughts of Shabalala from his mind. He imagined himself deep in a mountain stronghold and far from Mason’s probing gaze. Gravel hit the cardboard square pushed into the cell’s empty windowpane, killing the element of surprise.
“You’ve got no idea who’s creeping around the house perimeter?” Footsteps moved away from the front door and in the direction of the braai pit ringed by white stones. It didn’t sit right: Shabalala stumbling and raising noise. The first you knew of the Zulu detective was after he’d materialised from the air and stepped to your side. He didn’t stumble or go bump in the night.
“It’s probably your men,” Emmanuel said. “The ones in the Dodge.”
More footsteps crunched across the front yard and a male voice called out, “Quick, there’s one over there. Come round.”
Mason stood up and kept the Browning in a relaxed grip, as if he were shaking hands with a good friend. “Pick up the lantern and walk to the door slow. I’ll be right behind you. Run and I’ll put a bullet in your back. Understand?”
“Perfectly.” Run? He could barely stand. His bruises throbbed and his bones ached. Mason’s solid right hook had re-opened a cut sustained during the fight in Fatty Mapela’s bar last night. The wound pulsed in time to the beating of his heart and a trickle of blood ran down his cheek and onto the lapels of his shirt. A dry-clean job for sure.
“Move,” Mason said.
Emmanuel raised the lantern and darted a quick look into the corner, hoping to find a glint of silver in the gloom. Darkness stared back. The Webley might as well be invisible or locked in a gun safe for all the time it would take him to find it.
“You’d never make it to your weapon in any case,” Mason stated the fact. “Glad to see it crossed your mind, though. I had you down as one of those pretty army officers with no guts.”
“I was in the field not behind a desk,” Emmanuel said. Held at gunpoint, bloodstained and beaten, he still felt it necessary to clarify his position as a combatant: a fighter, a soldier who’d been in the mud at the business end of the war. His military vanity appeared to be resistant to fear.
“Eyes front. Make it fast, Cooper.”
Mason tapped the Browning’s barrel to a middle vertebra, pushing Emmanuel out of the cells. Noise increased in the yard; rushing steps overlayed with hard breathing and raised voices. Emmanuel gained the stairs, certain that the men from the dodge were chasing shadows.
“Into the lounge, Cooper. You know the way.”
He cut through the kitchen, turned into the corridor and stopped by the side of the decrepit sofa with the bible sunk into the arm. Dead animals stared from the wall with glassy eyes that absorbed the lantern glow. Not a family portrait to be seen.
“Sit,” Mason said.
Emmanuel sat. The front door slammed against the interior wall and the floorboards creaked under the weight of people entering the house. Two men at least; most likely the driver and the passenger from the wrecked Dodge.
“You can run but you can’t hide,” a man’s voice said. “I got you good this time, boy.”
“True, you got him good,” said another.
“In here,” Mason called and then moved directly behind the couch, ready to empty the Browning’s loaded barrel into the crown of Emmanuel’s head or into whomever walked through the door should they displease him; craftwork he’d learned working undercover operations. “Slowly.”
A small man entered first, grin strung from ear to ear like he’d just been given a puppy for Christmas in addition to the four-speed bike that he’d had on the top his list for two years running. Shabalala came next, arms raised to shoulder height, his face a blank canvas of skin stretched over bone. If the gun pressed to his neck gave him any bother it didn’t show. The last man in was tall, broad-shouldered and had blue eyes.
“Lenny and Crow,” Emmanuel said, surprised but not entirely. Meeting the big and the little man who’d ransacked the Brewers’ house and broken into Fatty’s club also felt like fate. “We weren’t properly introduced last night. I was too busy beating the shit out of you and your men.”
The tall one, Lenny, surged into the lounge, his face a patchwork of purple and blue bruises, his fist cocked. He landed a few punches but nothing compared to Mason’s right hook. The bible fell the floor, spilling tabs and fanning pages marked with red ink.
“That’s enough, Leonard,” Mason said. “Frisk the kaffir for weapons. Make sure to check the socks. They like to keep knives tucked in there.”
Lenny and Crow took opposite sides, each patting the Zulu detective down from shoulder to ankle. The paper with Cassie Brewers’ statement written out in a cramped hand rustled under Crow’s palms. Shabalala’s throat tightened, his Adam’s apple pushing against the skin to make a hard lump, but otherwise he seemed calm.
“Nice threads for a kaffir,” Crow said and ran baby fingers over the fine cotton. He reached into Shabalala’s jacket pocket and withdrew Cassie Brewer’s statement. Shabalala blin
ked hard and for a moment Emmanuel thought he might cry.
“Give that to me,” Mason said and motioned to the couch. “Sit him down next to Cooper.”
29.
Emmanuel met Shabalala’s gaze and telegraphed the question ‘How the hell did you end up sitting next to me in this crap-hole?” The Zulu detective sat down and looked to the window, giving an answer that Emmanuel didn’t understand. Out there lay churned gravel and acres of thorn bush and none of it worth dying for. Mason came around to the front of the couch, side-stepping the fallen bible.
“What are you doing on my farm, gentlemen?” He held Cassie’s statement between pinched finger tips, having read the contents. “You got the truth from the girl. Excellent job. Why risk it all by coming to Lions Kill?”
“We were in the area and thought we’d drop by. We should have called first,” Emmanuel said. “For that, I apologise.”
Mason would intimidate Cassie Brewer into withdrawing her statement. He’d walk Alice to a lonely spot and then bury her deep in a field. Harm the daughter of educated middle-class couple and the police station phones rang hot; one more missing whore, who’d notice?
Mason raised the Browning and swung down hard. Emmanuel again felt the fanning breeze of metal displacing air then heard the wet smack of metal finding flesh. Not his flesh this time but Shabalala’s. The impact threw Shabalala back and bounced his head off the sofa’s wood frame. Emmanuel stood up, hands balled into fists, driven by pure instinct. Mason swung around, pressed the Browning to his forehead and applied pressure. Emmanuel sat down, breathing hard.
“You told that constable at the crime scene that ‘Blood is blood. It looks, smells and stains the same no matter who’s doing the bleeding.’ Let’s put that theory to the test, Cooper. I will work on the kaffir and Leonard will work on you. We’ll see who bleeds the most before answering my questions. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?”
“Did you learn that in your bible?” Emmanuel said.
The Lieutenant snapped his fingers and called Leonard over like he was a drinks waiter at a fancy restaurant and he, Mason, in need of a refill. The smaller man, Crow, raised the lantern to shed a light on the experiment. Mason tucked Cassie’s statement into his breast pocket.
“You reap what you sow.” Leonard pushed close to Emmanuel’s face so their noses almost touched. Until the cuts and bruises faded, Leonard belonged to a new race group of “purple and blue” people. “I’m going to repay you for last night with interest, my friend. See how you like pissing blood.”
The fight at Fatty’s could have been five minutes ago or a year for all that Emmanuel remembered of the specific details. The evidence suggested that he’d beat Leonard with a scientific thoroughness. What fleeting memories remained were the rage that burned through him like a fever and the bright blue eye that showed through a hole in the stocking mask. There was something in the colour, a familiarity he couldn’t place at the time.
Mason stepped back and drove a fist into Shabalala’s shoulder. Leonard did the same to Emmanuel, putting weight into the punch, stepping into it like a professional boxer.
“Why are you on my farm?” Mason asked, only slightly winded from connecting with Shabalala’s body.
Emmanuel looked directly into a pair of eyes a lighter shade of blue than Leonard’s and saw the near identical shape of brow and jawline shared by the two men. He said to Mason, “We came to talk to your son about the break-in at the Brewers’ house, the manslaughter of Mr Brewer and the theft of a Mercedes Benz Cabriolet from the crime scene.”
“Bullshit,” Leonard said. “Nobody saw us. You’ve got no proof we were there.”
“I do now.”
Mason blanched the colour of sea foam and grit his teeth. “You and your kaffir friend won’t live to see the dawn let alone the inside of a police station.”
“Killing two detectives is a sure way for you and Lenny to end up sharing a cell and pissing in the same bucket. That’s until the hanging. A father and son execution will make The News of the World.”
Emmanuel took a hit to the stomach but felt it was worth the pain. He’d opened the door to Mason’s worst nightmare; two graves side by side, both bereft of flowers.
“What’s the alternative, Cooper? That I give up my son to save a black boy from the slums?” Mason turned, fixed Leonard with a hard stare. “My boy’s a killer, I know. But you’ve got to understand that everything he did was for my benefit. My prayers for his salvation have gone unanswered but my boy will be all that remains of me when I’m gone. No deals. Accept that you and your kaffir friend are dead.”
“This place is called Lion’s Kill yet there are no lions,” Shabalala said out of the blue. “Very little buck also.”
“What?” Mason was flummoxed.
“The house is filled with dead animals but the farm is empty of live ones,” Shabalala said. “What is there to hunt in this dead place?”
“Besides detectives, you mean?” Emmanuel said.
Shabalala laughed, drawing on the diamond hard reserves of a black man who’d seen through the pale skin of the “superior race” to their weak and cowardly hearts. Sound worked its way from Emmanuel’s stomach, up to his windpipe and out through his mouth in a chuckle.
“A hunting reserve with no animals to hunt. That is funny.”
“They killed all the animals,” Shabalala said.
“I’m going to let my boy work on you one at a time.” Mason mouth held a smile but his eyes filled with spite. “There’ll be no laughing then. I guarantee it.”
“I believe you,” Emmanuel said. Leonard tortured women for sport.
A fleck of gravel hit the window, soft enough that it might have been blown by the wind. Crow jumped. Lenny put a hand into his jacket pocket and gripped something there. A knife, Emmanuel thought; the same one that had dispatched Vickers, the Afrikaner railway man, to the great train yard in the sky.
“It’s the whore,” Crow blurted. “I told you she’d come back.”
“Shut it.” Leonard broke a sweat and wiped a hand across his forehead. “It’s the wind, you idiot.”
Mason stood at ease; shoulders loose, arms hanging by his side. A face peering through the window would see a calm man, a man in total control of his emotions. You’d have to move closer, pay attention to the deepening lines at the side of his mouth and the narrowing of his eyes to recognise the rage building under the impassive expression. Emmanuel had experience. He could read the signs. Mason’s fuse was burning fast.
“Crow, cover our visitors while I talk to my son,” Mason said in a gentle voice that was worse than shouting.
“Yes, sir.” Crow put the lantern onto the map unfurled on the table and fumbled a snub-nosed revolver from his jacket pocket. He held it in unsteady hands.
Mason placed his palm on the crown of Leonard’s head; a loving touch, but all wrong in the details. His fingers tightened. He jerked Leonard back by the roots of the hair and slammed him to the floor. Emmanuel winced at the sound. He remembered Davida being dragged across Fatty’s club with Leonard’s fingers twisted through her hair. Lenny had learned the technique from the master.
Mason worked two punches into Leonard’s side; finding the kidneys. Emmanuel checked the exit to the corridor, calculated the distance. Shabalala’s body coiled tight, ready to make a run. Crow’s hand shook. Mason kept a firm hold on the Browning.
At this range either man could hit a vital organ or nick an intestine. Emmanuel and Shabalala exchanged a look. Too dangerous, they decided, but the odds of living were better than ten minutes ago. Something was changing.
“You disobeyed my instructions,” Mason said to Leonard who lay dazed on the floor. “How long did you keep her after I gave the order?”
“A day.”
“How long was it really, Crow?”
Crow rolled over without resistance. “Two days, sir. I told Lenny what you said but he wanted to keep the girl for a bit longer.”
Mason patted Leonard’s c
heek and found a bruise. “You disobeyed me, boy. Under normal circumstances I’d turn you black and blue but Sergeant Cooper got to you first.” He leaned closer. “Have you got any idea where she is now?”
“I … I don’t know.” Leonard spoke through clenched teeth. “She ran off. It’s summer. There’s no water for miles. I figured she’d make her own grave.”
Mason looked up and caught Emmanuel in a predatory gaze. “You found the whore,” he said. “You and the black.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”
“Sorry, Pa.” Lenny flipped and found a foetal position. “I’m sorry I disobeyed you.”
“Shh … quiet now. I need to think.” Mason got a chair from the table and placed it directly in front of Emmanuel. He sat with his arms resting across the top rail, the Browning hanging loose in his right hand. “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Lenny’s friend.”
“Don’t know.”
“Bullshit. She’s at Clearwater. I’ll stake my life on it.”
“You mean you’ll stake Leonard’s life on it,” Emmanuel said. “After the Pretoria police dig up that orchard he’s the one who’s going to swing. And you’ll swing with him, Crow.”
Crow’s hand shook, sent the gun barrel jigging right to left. “I’m clean. Getting those girls was Lenny’s idea. He kept them to himself.”
So Alice was right. More than one girl had occupied the cell before her.
“Shut it,” Mason said. “Cooper is lying but not well enough to fool me. Ten years working undercover, I can sniff out a liar blindfolded.”
“Is that why you read over my files … to catch me out in a lie? And how many times did that happen, Lieutenant? Not once, I’m guessing. I’m from Sophiatown, I was born lying to men like you.”
A flicker of emotion crossed Mason’s face. Fear, followed by the determination to export that fear to others.
“Clever will get you just so far, Cooper. You are in my house now. It’s not like any place you’ve been before.” He nudged the tip of his shoe into Leonard’s ribs. “Get a chair and sit next to me, Lenny.” He waited for his son to take a seat directly opposite Shabalala. “Where did you first encounter these two men?”
