A Beautiful Place to Die (23 page)

Emmanuel was laughing out loud now. There weren’t enough doctors in the army psych unit to cure whatever Ahmed had.

“Who is this woman you’re marrying?” he asked.

“A poor one,” came the quick answer. “My mother found her in the countryside.”

“She has no idea what you do.”

“No,” Ahmed said as they crossed a dirt laneway and came to a stop behind the back entrance to the photo lab. “That is why I must make every attempt to rid myself of my little problem.”

Emmanuel checked the high walls crowned by coils of barbed wire and broken glass. The back gate was padlocked.

Ahmed’s madness wasn’t so funny anymore. “Why are the photos in the safe if they belong to you?” Emmanuel asked. This was the moment to walk away and leave the nervous assistant to do his own dirty work. Ahmed pulled a key from his pocket and slipped it into the padlock.

“They are in the safe for my own protection. After a year or two of working here I began to spend too much time with my friends.”

“Who?”

“The ones in the photos. I cannot tell you the hours I spent in solitary pleasure with them. Once I did not come out of my room for the whole weekend. Every Monday, I was exhausted after milking my body of its life fluids. Buckets—”

“Okay…” Emmanuel interrupted the nostalgic memoir. “You grew hair on your palms. What then?”

“No.” The assistant pulled the padlock open and held his sweaty palms out for inspection. “My palms remained normal but my mother began to worry. She talked to Mr. Fernandez, who came to my house and took my friends from me. He put them in the safe. I am allowed to see them twice a week for one hour at a time.”

The back gate creaked open a fraction. Walk away, Emmanuel told himself, that’s the smart thing to do. New evidence was sure to turn up in Jacob’s Rest.

He stayed put. “Go on,” he said. “Where’s the problem?”

Ahmed was shamefaced. “I have begun breaking into the safe when Mr. Fernandez is out. I fear there will be no life fluid left for my wife if my friends and I continue meeting.”

“What happens when you get the photos? You going to lock yourself in a room with your friends until you’re tapped dry?”

“No. I will destroy the photos. You and I together will burn them in a fire.”

“We’ll burn them?” Emmanuel stepped back. “What makes you think I’ll do any of this?”

Ahmed turned from crazy to cunning in a flicker. “You came to Mozambique alone and you have not asked the help of our local police even though you are also a lawman. Like my special clients, what you crave is not available to you legally.”

“I’m looking for evidence. That’s different from being one of your special clients.”

“Even so, I am the only one who can help you procure what you need.”

The word “procure” made him sound like a pervert haunting the streets after dark. It wasn’t too far from the truth. “How do I know the photos have anything to do with the policeman?”

Ahmed put his hand on his heart. “I offer no proof. I give only my word.”

“Your word may be gold in the tugger’s world, Ahmed, but I need more than that.”

The pornographer shook his head. “To speak of the photos cheapens the experience of seeing them, virgin, for the first time. I will not do that to myself or to you. I am sorry.”

Emmanuel patted the sweaty man’s shoulder. “Good luck with the break-in. I’m going to get myself a drink and head back to the border.”

He turned to leave. The assistant scuttled around him and held the empty satchel up like a stop sign.

“No images. No favorites. No order. Location. Yes. Location. I will give you a place.”

“Go ahead.”

“A police station with two cells, side by side. A desk with a chair, near the back door. Above the desk, a row of keys, a shambok and a knobkierie. That is all I will say of the photos. Push me no more!”

It was a clear description of the Jacob’s Rest police station. “What’s the combination to the safe?” Emmanuel said.

Ahmed pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “I give you this only because our cause is pure.”

“You’ve been in the business too long, Ahmed. We’re breaking and entering to steal a stash of hard-core. A judge will find another word to describe our cause.”

“There will be no judge. You will please go straight to the back door. Here is the key. The office is the first door on the left. The safe is hidden at the bottom of a long cupboard behind the desk. You may use this bag to put the envelopes in and leave the safe open in order to simulate a robbery. When you are done, come out to me.”

“Easy as that?” Emmanuel slipped the key and the safe combination into his pocket. It was too clean and too simple, but the description of the police station pushed him on. Twenty paces away was the envelope that dealt the dirt on the captain: fat with admissible evidence. He was no better than Ahmed’s special clients. He was ready to risk jail for a taste of the forbidden.

“Godspeed,” Ahmed whispered, and Emmanuel slipped into the backyard. Two garbage cans stood flush against the back wall of the studio.

Twelve steps to the back door. He inserted the key and entered the building. On the left was the door Ahmed had described. A dim light fell in through a window. Night was falling.

He moved quickly into the office. His breath was hard in his chest as he kneeled down next to the safe and dialed the numbers Ahmed had given him. He felt a click beneath his fingers, the door eased open, and he reached in. The thick wad of files neatly bound in brown cardboard felt like gold in his hand.

He stuck the files into the satchel and sped toward the yard. It was time to skip and run. A short sprint and the file was his. It was as easy and clean as Ahmed promised. He stepped outside.

A white shaft of light hit him full in the face.

He caught a fist flat against the head, fell hard and looked up, dazed. The security guard, a lean black man, came at him like a pickax. Pain shot through his rib cage, then along his jawbone as the guard took the cruel-to-be-kind approach with his heavy boots.

Emmanuel rolled and a second kick went wide. He felt the weight of the envelopes as he struggled to his feet and judged the odds. Not good. The guard took up the whole doorway and he wasn’t going anywhere.

Emmanuel waited for the guard to move. The black man stared him down, nostrils flared with the scent of wounded prey. Emmanuel faked a move to the left and the guard came at him fast. He crouched low, tipped the guard’s legs from under him, and heard a wet smack as the guard’s body landed on the hard concrete.

The guard pulled himself up to a kneeling position. Emmanuel legged it to the fence. He wasn’t too proud to run from a foe seconds away from beating the crap out of him.

He reached the gate. It was closed. He hammered his fist against the steel.

“Open up!”

“You must go over the fence,” Ahmed instructed him calmly from the other side. “I cannot let you out this way.”

“Open the fucking door!”

“You must go over the fence. Over the fence.”

The top of the fence was too high to jump over, the surface too smooth to get a toehold. The guard came toward him with his nightstick raised. The weight of the files tugged at his shoulder and his plan fell into place. First beat the living hell out of the guard, second get a garbage can and climb out, third beat the living hell out of Ahmed. Not up to the scale of the D-Day invasion, but it would do.

Emmanuel let the guard get close enough to taste victory, then dodged to the right. The nightstick swung down and grazed his shoulder but he kept moving. He was at the garbage can in two seconds flat. He picked up the half-filled container and turned to get a close view of the nightstick making a comeback. This time it landed square against his arm and sent the garbage crashing down.

Emmanuel scooped up the lid and held it over him like a shield. The nightstick worked double time, each hit making a dull metal clank in the night air. An alley cat howled as Emmanuel rolled the can toward the fence. He steadied it against the wall and turned his attention to the guard, who was hammering away at the lid with grim precision.

He crouched low, reached out from behind the safety of the lid, grabbed the guard by the ankles and pulled. The guard fell hard a second time. The nightstick rolled free and Emmanuel threw it over the fence. That was one less thing to worry about. He jammed the lid in place on top of the can, then stripped off his jacket and threw it over the coil of barbed wire along the top of the fence. He placed a foot on the lid, and the night watchman hit him square between the shoulder blades.

Emmanuel turned, ducked a blow, then landed a solid punch against the guard’s jaw. The man wobbled unsteadily. Emmanuel hit him with his right fist, then again with his left, and the guard went down for good. Emmanuel quickly climbed onto the garbage can and scrambled over the wall. A shard of broken glass sliced into his calf as he hauled himself over. He landed in the alley, bruised and bleeding, and saw Ahmed waiting. He picked up the nightstick.

Ahmed ran.

Emmanuel caught the sweaty lab assistant and swung him hard against the wall of an empty shop.

“You are angry. I understand this.”

Emmanuel slammed Ahmed back again.

“I am mildly annoyed,” Emmanuel said. “Angry is when I break both your kneecaps with this nightstick.”

“The guard, of course. I had every confidence you would deal with him efficiently.”

“Did you?” Emmanuel made sure Ahmed felt the full press of his thumbs as he dug them deep into the tender muscle of his shoulders.

“Please.” Ahmed winced in pain. “You must listen to me. We must hurry to complete our plan.”

“It’s your plan, Ahmed. My plan was to get the photos and walk out the back door.”

“The photos. They are yours now.” The assistant was unbalanced enough to sound enthusiastic. “You can take them across the border if you allow me to guide you.”

Emmanuel eased the pressure of his thumbs on Ahmed’s shoulders.

“Another stunt like the one you just pulled and you will get a taste of this nightstick. That’s a promise.”

“Follow me and we will complete our mission,” Ahmed said, and slid into the dark with the certainty of an alley rat. They followed a dusty back lane and turned into a wide tree-lined boulevard fronted by white stucco colonial buildings in the Portuguese style.

Ahmed picked up his pace and they walked past a group of older men playing cards outside a brightly lit café. They cut across the center of a night market offering monkeys in cages, racks of cotton suits and fiery bowls of chili prawns for sale. After ten minutes trudging steadily upward, they stopped at a wooden gate hanging off its hinges. Ahmed squeezed through the entrance and motioned Emmanuel into an overgrown garden bisected by a zigzag pathway leading to a small tumbledown shack.

“My house,” Ahmed announced with pride, and led the way to a cleared corner of the garden where there was a circle of stones filled with dry leaves and kindling. A can of petrol lay next to the hearth.

“You were expecting me?” Emmanuel said.

“Every week I say to myself, ‘Ahmed, burn the filth and be done,’ but I have not had the strength to do so. Now, with your help, I will say good-bye to all my friends.”

The smell of petrol was strong in the air as Ahmed doused the dry leaves and dropped a lit match onto the incendiary mix. There was a
whoosh
when the fire ignited the leaves.

Emmanuel placed the satchel on the ground. Ahmed was welcome to do what he wanted with his “friends” but he needed the captain’s photos and he needed to get the hell out of Mozambique. He kneeled down to unpack the stash of pornography, and his leg and shoulder spasmed with pain. The cut from the broken glass was raw, the hit from the nightstick throbbed.

“Give me my photos,” he said. “I need to get back to SA before the border closes.”

Ahmed removed the envelopes from the leather bag and laid them out on the ground at evenly spaced intervals. His index finger stroked every envelope before stopping two from the end of the row.

“This is yours.” He picked up two identical envelopes but made no move to relinquish them. “You must promise me to look at the photos in order. This is very important. It cannot be done any other way. It must not be done any other way.”

“What for?” Emmanuel asked with as much patience as he could muster.

“You must promise,” Ahmed insisted. “You must look at them one at a time and lay them out on a table in order.”

“How do I know the correct order?” Emmanuel said, humoring Ahmed, who was now hugging the envelopes to his chest like a cherished loved one.

Ahmed reached into the first package and carefully withdrew two photos. “I have numbered them,” he said, and laid the prints down next to the fire. “You must arrange them just so.”

Photo number one was a picture of the cells at the Jacob’s Rest police station. Photo number two was of the desks in the front office. Light from the fire flickered over the banal images. Despite the pain and the difficulty of obtaining the photos, Emmanuel was intrigued. He’d been beaten and pissed on at the captain’s hut for whatever was in the envelopes Ahmed was holding.

“I promise to look at them in order,” Emmanuel said. He’d promise his firstborn if that made Ahmed hand over the goods sooner.

“You will not regret it.” Ahmed replaced the photos and reluctantly surrendered the package. “You are a very lucky man. I am filled with envy at your joyous introduction to this special friend.”

The worn skin of the envelope rested softly in Emmanuel’s palm. He was one step closer to the truth about Willem Pretorius and hopefully one step closer to catching the killer. He turned to leave.

“Mr. Policeman,” Ahmed said. “Please stay a moment. I need you to make sure I complete my task.”

“Go ahead,” Emmanuel said, and Ahmed pulled the photos from their envelopes and threw them onto the fire. Heat blistered and distorted grainy images of naked blondes, brunettes, black women, white women, twins and couples arranged in every imaginable configuration. Ahmed’s collection ranged far and wide. Within minutes, all that remained of the mad pornographer’s “friends” was a pile of gray ash on the glowing twigs.