A Beautiful Place to Die (32 page)

Emmanuel made ready to sprint across the rock ledge if the boy’s fingers encircled Davida’s throat.

“Agghhh…” Hansie released a scandalized breath that traveled across the open space and bounced off the hard rock surfaces. He might as well have thrown a stone. Louis tensed and swung his rifle across his chest so it nestled firmly in his hands. His finger rested on the trigger and he aimed the gun’s barrel toward the bush.

“Come out,” he called in a voice that was close to friendly. “If you don’t, I’ll unload this chamber into the bushes. True as I stand here.”

“Don’t—” Hansie jumped to his feet, his hands raised in surrender. “Don’t shoot. It’s me. It’s Hansie.”

“Who’s with you?” Louis asked. “You’re not clever enough to have made it here on your own.”

“Not clever? What—”

Emmanuel and Shabalala stood up. Emmanuel didn’t want Louis to panic and send Davida on a shortcut to the Lord God via the sheer drop just two feet to his left. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Hansie Hepple conduct the negotiations for release of the hostage.

“Detective Sergeant Cooper.” Louis greeted him with a nod of his head as he would someone he’d met on the street corner or the church steps. “I see you got out of the jam I fixed for you. And you brought along Constable Shabalala for company. What brings the three of you out to the mountain?”

“We could ask you the same thing.” Emmanuel kept his tone friendly and noted the supremely self-confident way the bare-chested boy handled his rifle. He looked born to the ways of the bandit. Davida shivered next to him.

“This is a long way to come for a shower, isn’t it, Louis?” he said, and tried to appraise Davida’s condition. She stared at him with the mute shock he’d seen many times on the faces of civilians caught in the crush of two warring armies. Her eyes pleaded for rescue and restoration.

“I am acting on God’s command. I don’t expect you to understand what it is I do here today, Detective.”

“Explain it to me. I want to understand.”

“And He shall wash away the sins of the world.” Louis circled a hand around Davida’s arm and jerked her against his hip. “I have purged the dirt from her physical being with pure water and stones and now I will cleanse her soul of the sin that has made her an impure vessel.”

“Last time I checked, you weren’t the Lord God. You were Louis Pretorius, son of Willem and Ingrid Pretorius of Jacob’s Rest. What qualifies you to clean anyone’s soul but your own?”

“‘And He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.’”

In a trade-off of scripture verses, Emmanuel was sure he would lose out to Louis. The young Pretorius boy was so tightly wrapped in his holy vision that he didn’t even recognize that what he’d done to Davida and her grandmother was sin itself. For Louis, it was all holy visions backed up by a chorus of angels.

“But…” Hansie was having trouble keeping up with the conversation. “That girl is a darkie. What are you doing up here with one of them?”

The fire in Louis’s eyes was bright enough to rival his grandfather Frikkie van Brandenburg’s incendiary glare. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child and when I was grown I put away all childish things. You, Hansie, are one of those childish things.”

“What are you talking about?” Hansie asked. “You’re not supposed to be washing or doing whatnot with one of them. It’s against the law, and I know that your ma won’t be happy to see you standing so close, either.”

“My mission does not concern my earthly family or you. God called me and you are standing in the way of His works.”

“Let me get this straight.” Emmanuel tried to gauge the depth of Louis’s delusion. “God, the redeemer of souls, has called you to the theft of pornographic images, lies, assault, and the kidnapping of unclean women? When did you get this calling, Louis? At Suiwer Sprong or afterward, at the theological college?”

Louis’s pretty face seemed to distort. “Everything I do is in the service of the Lord.”

“Did the Lord call you to molest those women last year?”

“That was the work of the devil. I broke free of his chains and have been cleansed of all my sins.”

“Is this how they drove the sin out of you on the farm? With outdoor showers and fear?” Van Niekerk had listed “water therapy” as one of the cures being offered at the quasi-religious nut farm. What methods had the German-trained Dr. Hans de Klerk used to clean the sin from the Pretorius boy?

Louis blinked hard. “Everything that was done to me was in the service of the Lord. I was lost and now I am found.”

Emmanuel felt an unexpected stab of pity. Louis had been brought up by his mother to believe he was the light of the world, but he’d inherited his father’s taste for life outside the strict moral code of the volk. He was torn in two, lost, and made more dangerous by a spell of “realignment” deep in the Drakensberg Mountains.

“Was your father an impure vessel, Louis?” Emmanuel asked. He was interested in Louis’s attitude to the captain’s hypocrisy.

“Pa was led astray by the work of the devil, same as me.” The boy looked over at the Zulu constable. “My pa was a good man, hey, Shabalala? A godly man.”

“I believe it.”

“I’m not disputing your pa’s goodness,” Emmanuel said. “I’m just wondering how hard he struggled with the devil. You went away to the farm and conquered the devil, but your father stayed on, and, well…he let the devil win a few nights a week. For almost a year.”

“Captain Pretorius wasn’t in league with the devil!” Hansie’s voice rose three octaves. “You didn’t know him. He was clean inside and out.”

“No man is clean inside and out.” Emmanuel returned his attention to Louis and kept his tone even and nonconfrontational. “You know what it is to struggle with the devil, don’t you, Louis? You want to be holy and yet here you are on top of a mountain with a terrified woman, a gun, and a piece of rope coiled on your Bible.”

“This woman is the root of all the problems.” Louis curled his hand tightly around Davida’s forearm until she gasped in pain. “She is the one who needs to be cleansed of her carnal nature.”

“Like you cleansed your father at the river?” Emmanuel tested the connection between the molester and the murderer. An unbalanced boy with a sighted rifle and delusions of godhead was a dangerous animal. “That’s what you did, isn’t it? You arranged a face-to-face meeting with the Almighty and then you dragged his body to the water to cleanse him of sin. Is that how it happened?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You killed your father to cleanse him, didn’t you, Louis?”

“Of course not.”

“You knew he wasn’t going to stop sinning, so you helped him break free of Satan’s trap. I understand that. I understand how it happened.”

Louis loosened his grip on Davida’s arm and leveled a damning stare at the English detective. “I loved my father. When the devil had me in his claws, my father prayed with me and together we found a way out. I would never raise a hand to him. He saved me.”

“You didn’t shoot him at the river?”

“No. Honor your mother and your father so your days may be long on the earth. That’s God’s promise.”

“But you spied on your father when he was alive. That wasn’t an honorable thing to do, was it?”

“Witnessing.” Louis let go of Davida’s arm and pushed the messy blond hair from his forehead. “I had to witness the depth of his wrongdoing to understand just how far he’d strayed from the path of righteousness.”

“You didn’t enjoy it?” Emmanuel saw Davida slump back against the rock face and draw great mouthfuls of air into her lungs. She was still shivering and probably in shock. “You got no pleasure from watching your father having sex with one of the women you’d messed with the previous December? How many times did you witness your father straying from the path, Louis?”

“I can’t remember,” the boy muttered.

“Surely once was enough? You see your father with a brown-skinned woman and you know, don’t you? You know that a sin is being committed without having to come back a second and a third time.”

“I was witnessing. I didn’t enjoy what I saw.”

“Truly?” Emmanuel had the tiger by the tail and he had every intention of shaking it until it coughed up a lung. “I think you were doing something that began with
W,
but it wasn’t witnessing. You got as much pleasure as your father did, only from a distance.”

“Shabalala.” The bare-chested boy appealed to the black policeman. “You know my family. We are from pure Afrikaner blood. You are from pure African blood. This business has come about because of those with impure blood among us. Is that not so?”

“Your father was pure. The woman is pure. When they were together, there was no wrong in them.”

“You can’t believe that.” The boy was thrown by Shabalala’s calm and forgiving statement. “She’s the reason my father went astray and was killed. The fault is in her.”

“That one there. She was your father’s little wife, and I tell you again, there was no wrong in them. The captain made the arrangement for her in the old way and did not intend any disrespect to come to her during his lifetime and even now after he has gone.”

Louis blushed at the Zulu constable’s criticism but didn’t lower his weapon. “Your native ways are not for the volk to live by. Our God does not permit the tainting of our bodies or our blood with those from a lesser sphere. It is written so.”

Davida, still shaking, had inched her way along the rock wall and was now out of arm’s reach of the teenage prophet.

Emmanuel stepped forward and drew Louis’s attention to him. “Did you ever offer your father the chance to come here and cleanse his sins in the waterfall?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There was never a good time to bring it up. I didn’t know how to tell him that I knew what he was doing.”

“Well…” Emmanuel said. “How about after he’d finished and both of you were satisfied and feeling good about the world? You could have met him out on the kaffir path and exchanged notes before praying together.”

“You are a foul-minded Englishman. It’s a pity my brothers didn’t catch you and teach you a lesson.”

Emmanuel shrugged and stared over the rock ledge to the vast sweep of country. Davida was inches from the cave mouth and safety. “‘By their deeds shall ye know them.’” He dragged out a biblical quote from the deep vaults of memory. “What’s a jury going to make of an Afrikaner boy out here with a kidnapped coloured girl? Do you really believe your brethren will understand that you washed her body to cleanse her and spied on your father having sex with her in order to bear witness to the Lord?”

“God is my guide and my staff. It is not for man to pass judgment on what I have done.”

“Things are different now, Louis. When you got rid of your father you got rid of the one person who was willing to break the law to protect you.”

Louis’s finger was tight on the trigger. “I had no hand in what happened to my father. He was struck down before his time and I pray to the Almighty that he sees into Pa’s heart and forgives his transgressions.”

“Louis…” Hansie’s vacant blue eyes brimmed with tears of frustration. “Tell the detective sergeant this is all a mistake. You didn’t touch those coloured women and Captain didn’t do like what he says…with the sex and the devil and the little wife.”

Louis smiled, truly the most beautiful of God’s angels. “You know what my pa told me once, Hansie?”

“No.”

“That you cannot know God until you have wrestled with the devil and the devil has won.” He turned to Davida to illustrate his point and found her gone. The rifle swung easily in the boy’s hands and he raised it to his eye and took aim at the cave mouth, where the woman appeared as a dark fleeting shape. His legs were spread in the classic marksman pose that gave stability to the torso and increased the likelihood of hitting the mark.

“Drop the weapon, Louis!” Emmanuel shouted across the rock ledge, handgun squarely on target. “Drop it or I will shoot you.”

The shadow disappeared from the cave mouth and Louis slowly lowered his rifle to his hip. His fingers twitched around the barrel but the gun stayed put.

“Do not move.” Emmanuel’s voice was clear and authoritative as he closed the distance between them. “Drop the gun to the ground and kick it toward me. Now.”

Louis loosened his grip and the rifle clattered across the ledge, where Constable Shabalala picked it up and swung it across his back. The captain’s youngest son sank down into a crouch and stared out across the miles of brown-and green-speckled veldt. It was midafternoon and the light had a soft and yielding quality that made the scrub appear hand-painted on the canvas of the earth.

“Now,” Louis said, “she will never be saved.”

Emmanuel signaled to Shabalala to stand guard while he checked the cave.

“Davida.” He called out her name and stepped into the interior of Louis’s bizarre mountain home. She sat near the cave entrance with her knees drawn up tightly underneath her. Emmanuel crouched next to her but didn’t touch her despite the fact that her body shook with a bone-rattling intensity. She’d had enough of white men trying to help her for a lifetime.

“It’s okay. You’re safe now,” he said. Her skin was scratched with fine red lines from the wash-down Louis had given her with rocks and pure spring water. “Did he hurt you anyplace that I can’t see, Davida?”

“Not like you think. Not that way.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“No, not now. Did you find my granny?”

“Zweigman is with her. He says she’s injured, but she’s going to be all right. You know he’ll take good care of her.”

“Good. Good.” She started to cry and Emmanuel retrieved the gray blanket from the made-up bedroll. He held it out for her to see.

“Can I put this on you? You need to get dry and warm before we make a move.”

“Outside. I’ll put it on outside. I don’t want to stay in here.”

They left the cave and she huddled near the entrance, her instincts telling her to stick close to shelter. Emmanuel wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and noticed that she didn’t look across to where Louis was under guard.