A Beautiful Place to Die (24 page)

Ahmed sobbed. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with gusto. “Thank you, Mr. Policeman. You have been my redemption. I will be faithful to my wife as the Creator intended. Please take this leather case as a token of my esteem.”

Emmanuel accepted the gift and slipped his envelopes inside. For Ahmed he was the redeemer; for the Pretorius family he might be the destroyer.

14

T
HE DARK BLANKET
of night had spread over Jacob’s Rest by the time Emmanuel arrived back from Lorenzo Marques. He parked in front of his room at The Protea Guesthouse and eased his aching body out of the driver’s seat. The Security Branch was conducting a raid in another part of the country and that left him free for the first time to use his own accommodation without fear of intrusion.

He limped to his room with the leather satchel in his hands and unlocked the door. Inside, he flicked the light on and pulled the drawers of the bedside table open. He checked the empty cavity, fingers sweeping into every corner in the hope that one magic pill had come loose from the pack.

The drawer was empty and Emmanuel calculated a window of perhaps half an hour before the pain burning along his calf worked its way to his shoulder, then up to his head—a half hour tops before he was limping along the kaffir path toward Dr. Zweigman’s modest brick bungalow.

Drops of sweat broke out on his top lip when he reached down and pulled the photos from the first envelope. His injured shoulder protested at the movement and he narrowed the window of rational function to fifteen minutes.

He opened the envelope and laid out numbers one to four. The photographs showed the cells, the desks, the table with tea and cups, and the back window. Harmless images that could have been taken by a keen twelve-year-old on a Voortrekker Scouts excursion. Numbers five to ten showed the station’s backyard. A tree. A chair. The circle of stones used for the braai fire.

A sense of panic welled up. Was Ahmed so desensitized by years of developing hard-core that only images of ordinary things turned him on? The urge to split the pack of photos and check the middle was strong but Emmanuel resisted. Maybe there was method to Ahmed’s madness.

He laid out numbers eleven and twelve and his luck took a turn. Photo number eleven was a sunlit boulder out on the veldt. Number twelve was the same rock, but with a young woman leaning back against it, her tanned arms crossed over her torso. She was fully clothed. An unremarkable image except for the fact that it was a photo of a mixed-race woman taken by a white man and the woman’s face was not shown.

Emmanuel laid the rest of the photos from the first package out in order and examined them one at a time. Each image was a fumbling, almost adolescent revelation of the woman’s body, the photographer a novice asking for just a little more in each frame. The woman’s dress, a plain cotton frock tailor-made for church hall revivals and family picnics, was undone two buttons at a time and the sleek curves of breasts, thighs and hips gradually revealed themselves. Then the modest covering was gone. The images contained brown skin, sunlight, dark, hard nipples and pubic hair.

The last photograph in the pack, number twenty-five, was the woman, face still unseen, leaning naked against the rock with her legs spread wide. She was a beautiful, sunlit invitation to bliss.

Emmanuel examined the slow-motion striptease. He could see why Ahmed loved the photos; they documented a shedding of innocence more profound than the removal of clothing. There was the sense in every shot that the woman and the photographer were moving slowly and inexorably to a place they had both never been before.

As evidence, there was a lot less to like about the images. There wasn’t one single element in the photographs to connect Willem Pretorius to the mystery woman. Anyone with access to the police station could have taken the first few shots and there was only Ahmed’s word that the Afrikaner captain was the one to hand over the undeveloped rolls for processing. A dark-skinned half-Arab Muslim pornographer was not a reliable witness in a South African court of law.

“Open the second envelope.”
The sergeant major slid into the room on a wave of pain and took his position at the head of the parade.
“You’ll not get the pills until you know exactly what you have, laddie.”

Emmanuel opened the envelope and pulled out a fresh stack of photographs. His shoulder ached with an intense throbbing that spread across his back and forced him to breathe through an open mouth.

He laid out the first five photos with shaking hands. Same woman in a different location: a bedroom with a wide wrought-iron bed and lace-edged curtains at the window. It wasn’t the stone hut with its narrow single cot. The room in the photos was a feminine space, possibly the woman’s own bedroom.

“The naked female is a wondrous thing, is it not, soldier?”
The Scotsman was in awe.
“Look at that arse. I could bounce a shilling off it, it’s so tight.”

Emmanuel kept flipping, quicker now as the pain worked its way up toward his neck. In five minutes his head was going to be alive with the sound of jackhammers. The photos flashed in front of him in a blur of hard-core images. The woman naked on all fours, then naked from behind, thighs open to display every fold and detail of her shaved sex.

“Oh, yes, lad.”
The sergeant major was delighted.
“After food and water and whiskey, this is the stuff of life. Exactly what the doctor ordered, hey?”

“Unless I can tie these photos to Willem Pretorius,” Emmanuel said aloud, “the Security Branch will throw them out the window as unrelated to the case. Smut and Communist infiltrators don’t mix.”

“Not so fast. You’re missing all the good bits, lad. Can’t you take a moment to enjoy your work? Take a look at the last one.”

Emmanuel picked the photo up. The woman was lying naked on the unmade bed with her hips tilted upward and her hand buried deep between her legs. He backtracked and examined the preceding photo, which showed the woman lying on her side with her face masked by the fall of her long dark hair. A new element was added and he’d all but missed it. Around the woman’s neck was a necklace, an opened flower with a small diamond at the center.

“Pretty,”
the sergeant major cooed.
“I like the look of that.”

“The necklace or what it’s resting against?”

“Both. Jewelry on a naked woman is a sacred thing, my lad.”

“You’d say that if she had a tire iron around her neck,” Emmanuel said. The pack of photos thinned to nothing and he flicked the last two photos onto the bed. The woman’s identity was going to remain a mystery. The slim waist ruled out Tottie, and the long hair and bold physical presence of the woman’s body made Davida Ellis an unlikely suspect. Was the captain’s model someone from an outlying farm or hamlet? Emmanuel placed the last photo down and felt its mesmerizing power grab hold of him.

“Well, well,” he said. The pain in his body drained away and was replaced by an unassailable sense of well-being. Maybe he was going to win the war after all.

“What in hell makes a man do something so…unsavory?”
the sergeant major blurted out.

Emmanuel wiped the sweat from his forehead and examined the last photograph. A naked man lay on the unmade bed with his forearm thrown over his eyes in a playful parody of the woman’s efforts to hide her identity. A crumpled sheet was pulled low over his hips to expose an edge of wiry blond pubic hair. The hard shape of the man’s erect penis strained against the cotton sheet, proof of his readiness to go again, despite the fact that the smile on his mouth suggested he’d already spent a good deal of time thrusting his way to heaven.

“Jesus!”
The image made the cast-iron sergeant major ill at ease.
“It’s wrong for a man to parade himself like that.”

“She asked him to pose. And he said yes.”

“He did it to please her?”

“Yes.”

“Well…”
The Scotsman considered that fact for a moment.
“There’s not much a man won’t do for pussy.”

“There more to it than that,” Emmanuel said, and traced a finger over the broken nose and the unique gold-faced watch that clearly identified this slab of Afrikaner manhood as one Captain Willem Pretorius, moral defender of the town of Jacob’s Rest and enthusiastic amateur photographer. Pussy, as the sergeant major suggested, was only part of the reason for such a flagrant act of self-revelation. Willem Pretorius had taken a life-threatening risk by posing for the camera.

“He loves the fact she’s looking at him: seeing him for who he really is. Check the expression on his face. He’s not Captain Willem Pretorius, upholder of the sacred covenant with the Lord. He’s a bad man who’s spent the afternoon doing bad things to a woman his tribe says is unclean and he couldn’t be fucking happier.”

“Maybe it was love made him do it?”

“I doubt it,” Emmanuel said. The morphine-like sense of well-being ebbed away and the pain surged up to his jawline. “Forty-something pictures of her doing every imaginable thing for his pleasure and one photo of him looking like the king of cock hall. Being the white induna is what he loved.”

“The necklace cost a few pounds.”

“A trinket.” Emmanuel began packing the photos. His thoughts had taken a turn to a dark place. “A piece of insurance to gain her loyalty. You really think he’d stand by her if it affected his perfect Afrikaner family? He’d have her on a bus to Swaziland with ten pounds in her pocket or six feet underground with nothing.”

“What the hell are you so angry about? I only meant that he gave her presents and made sure no one knew who she was. He protected her, didn’t he?”

“He protected himself,” Emmanuel said, and returned the pictures to the leather satchel as quickly as he could without damaging them. He needed the pills. He needed something to stop him from limping over to the captain’s house and shoving the feast of hard-core down Mrs. Pretorius’s lily-white throat.

“You’re not going to do that,”
the sergeant major cautioned.
“The old Jew will fix you up and first thing tomorrow you’ll send this lot off to van Niekerk, fast post. This shit is going to save your life, soldier.”

The sergeant major was right but that didn’t diminish the anger Emmanuel was feeling. It was the last photo. The satisfied look on Willem Pretorius’s face needled him into an incomprehensible rage. Emmanuel could almost hear the woman’s teasing voice coaxing the naked Dutchman to smile for the camera after she had arranged the sheet just so.

Emmanuel clipped the satchel shut. He had to dream of a woman in a burned-out cellar while Pretorius got the real thing. The rage was sharpened by another emotion. He stopped short. He was blindingly, furiously jealous of the captain and the woman who’d spent the afternoon fucking and then shared a dangerous joke.

The pain pushed Emmanuel onto the kaffir path toward the old Jew and his scarred leather doctor’s kit.

Emmanuel knocked on the door a third time and waited. It was 10:35
PM
and Jacob’s Rest was a small town: the residents had locked up for the night and it would take Zweigman a while to answer.

“Yes?” the German asked through the door.

“Detective Sergeant Cooper. I’m here on a personal errand.”

The double lock clicked open and Zweigman peered out. His white hair stuck out at odd sleep-tossed angles but his brown eyes were sharp and focused. He was wearing plain cotton pajamas under a tatty dressing gown that sported a moth-eaten velvet collar.

“You are injured,” Zweigman said. “Come this way.” He indicated a doorway immediately to his right and Emmanuel shuffled his aching body into a room barely large enough to house the leather sofa and armchair that stood at its center. There was a gramophone on an occasional table with a stack of records in paper sleeves resting next to it, but what dominated the space were the books. They lined the walls and jostled for room in the corners and at the ends of the sofa. There were more books than could be read in a lifetime.

Zweigman picked up an old newspaper from the leather armchair and threw it aside, not caring where it landed.

“Let us see what damage you have done,” he said.

Emmanuel sank into the cracked leather chair and pushed his injured leg out with some effort.

“Some aches and pains. Nothing that a few painkillers won’t fix.”

“That is for me to decide,” Zweigman said, and gently lifted the torn trouser leg out of the way to examine the wound. He emitted a satisfied grunt.

“Painkillers will help, but the wound is deep and needs both cleaning and stitching. May I see your shoulder, please?”

Emmanuel didn’t ask the German how he knew about the other souvenir collected from the guard in Lorenzo Marques. Despite his current circumstance, Zweigman couldn’t shrug off the mantle of intellectual superiority that hung from his stooped shoulders. He had commanded respect in another life and Emmanuel imagined the good doctor’s expertise was once dispensed to gold-plated families in rooms with polished furniture.

Emmanuel’s shirt was half unbuttoned when there was a knock at the door that started out as a soft tap and rapidly turned into a manic pounding when the call wasn’t immediately answered.

“Liebchen?” The woman’s voice was husky with tears. “Liebchen?”

“Please stay seated,” Zweigman said, and walked to the door and opened it gently. Lilliana Zweigman stumbled into the room in a pale silk dressing gown embroidered with dozens of purple butterflies in flight. Her hands reached out and patted her husband’s face and shoulders like a field medic searching for hidden injuries.

“We have a visitor.” Zweigman gave no indication that his wife’s behavior was in any way unusual. “Would you be kind enough to make us a pot of tea to be served with your excellent butter cookies?”

“Is he?” Lilliana mumbled. “He is?”

“No, he is not. The detective is a book lover and we were discussing our favorite writers. Is that not so, Detective?”

“Yes.” Emmanuel picked up the book closest to him and held it up. His shoulder screamed in protest but he didn’t let it show. “I was hoping to borrow this copy for a few days.”

“Ahh…” Lilliana became bright as a welder’s spark now that the danger had passed. “Yes, of course. I will make the tea.”