Let the Dead Lie (3 page)

Parthiv
fired off a series of commands in Hindi, his voice distant by the final order.
Emmanuel's feet scraped over loose stones and the steel spine of the railway
tracks. The darkness inside the sack was suffocating. He fought the urge to try
to break free; a crushed rib was the only thing he would gain from the
exercise. He heard Amal hyperventilating as if he were confined to a hessian
sack of his own. A car pulled up, engine idling.

'Geldi, geldi!
' Parthiv ordered. 'Quick.'

A
door opened and Emmanuel was thrown into the back seat. His captor followed and
rested an elbow in the small of his back, a light point of contact with plenty
of threat behind it. Emmanuel lay still and breathed slowly. Did they plan to
dump him in the mangrove swamp that lapped the harbour or bury his body in the
bush scrub around Umhlanga Rocks? He should have listened to van Niekerk.
Getting involved was a big mistake.

'If
Maataa finds out...' Amal spoke between shallow breaths.

'We'll
go in the side way.' Parthiv's tone suggested they were discussing nothing more
important than breaking a family curfew.

'Then?'

Silence
followed Amal's inquiry. Emmanuel imagined Parthiv's heavy brow furrowed with
concentration. Criminals with limited intelligence always resorted to the most
obvious solution: get rid of the problem quickly and hope for the best.

The
car took a corner and the suspension bounced. The elbow dug into Emmanuel's
back to stop him from rolling onto the floor. So far, the strong man hadn't
said a word.

'Madar chod.'
Parthiv swore in Hindi but
continued in English. 'Keep calm, brother. They're just driving by. They got no
reason to stop us.'

'Two
cars,' Amal panted. 'Two cars.'

'Keep
calm. Keep calm,' Parthiv said. 'They are going somewhere else.'

Blue
lights flickered across the interior of the car and penetrated the weave of the
hessian sack. It was two police vans. Perhaps someone else had called in
Jolly's murder. The lights faded. It was just as well, Emmanuel thought. The
police would greet the information in van Niekerk's notebook with swinging
batons and rhino-hide straps. He was probably safer with the Indians.

'See?'
Parthiv was giddy with relief. 'Piece of cake. Smooth going, no problems.'

The
car picked up speed till the engine shifted into fourth gear. Emmanuel didn't
try to count the turns or listen for the faint cry of a bird found only in one
park in the city. Outside of the movies, all forced rides had the same
soundtrack: the rhythm of the tyres meeting the road and the abductee's
heartbeat.

He
slid back against the leather seat when the car climbed up over a steep ridge
then continued on a flat for at least fifteen more minutes. The car eased to a
stop on a gentle incline and the engine cut.

'You
go in the front, quiet, quiet,' Parthiv said. 'If Maataa or the aunties or the
cousins wake up, make nice talk. How are you doing today? The house, it looks
lovely. I'll take this one up the side to Giriraj's
kyaha.'

'Okay.'
Amal sounded sceptical. The holes in the plan were obvious even to a teenager
on the edge of a panic attack.

'Be
a man,' Parthiv said. 'We will deal with this problem on our own. No women.'

Emmanuel
was bundled out of the passenger door and pushed along a pathway. The scent of
flowers, sweet with a hint of decay, cut through the foetid potato smell in the
hessian bag. The thump of his heartbeat slowed. He was in a garden, being led
to a servant's room, or
kyaha.
A metal door scraped open.

'Feet
up.'

Emmanuel
stepped into the room and the iron man's hands grabbed him by the shoulders and
pushed him into a chair. A match was struck against a box and there was the
brief double hiss of cotton wicks being lit. The smell of paraffin filled the
space. He waited a minute, till he was halfway sure that he sounded calm.

'Parthiv
...' he said. 'How about you let me go before your mother comes and finds out
the mess you're in?'

'Tie
him up,' Parthiv said.

Emmanuel's
hands were pinned behind the chair and secured with a length of rough material.
The sack was whipped off and he sucked in a lungful of clean air. He was in a
one-room house. The bedroom was a single cot pushed into a corner; the kitchen,
a small gas burner balanced on a wooden crate stencilled with the words
'saris & all
' along the side. Two sharpened
butcher's knives hung from hooks hammered into the side of the crate. A third
hook was empty. A couple of chairs stood in the middle of the space. A
newspaper clipping of an Indian dancer with beguiling eyes stared down from the
bedroom wall.

Parthiv
pulled up a chair and gave a dramatic sigh. The strong man stayed behind
Emmanuel and out of view.

'We
got a problem,' Parthiv stated. 'You know what the problem is?'

'I'm
guessing it's me,' Emmanuel said.

'Correct.'

'You
good at solving problems, Parthiv?'

The
yellow light from the paraffin lanterns threw dark shadows across the Indian
gangster's face so it took on the menacing quality of a skull. It was an
illusion. Emmanuel knew bad men; evil men who killed for pleasure and without
hesitation. Parthiv was not in that league.

'I'm
the best.' The Indian man leaned in and cracked his knuckles. 'You took a turn
into nightmare alley, white man. This room is where danger lives.'

'What
does that mean?' Emmanuel asked.

'I'm
the public enemy; born to kill. I walk alone and brute force is my best
friend.'

Emmanuel
almost smiled. Where else did an Indian youth in subtropical South Africa learn
how to be a gangster but at the Bioscope?

Emmanuel
said, 'That's quite a bunch of movies you've seen. James Cagney in
The Public Enemy,
Burt Lancaster in
I Walk Alone
and I can't remember who's in
Brute Force.
The question is: who are you in
real life, Parthiv? Robert Mitchum or Veronica Lake?'

Parthiv
delivered a smack to the side of Emmanuel's head. 'You in big trouble,' he
said. 'My man can snap you like a chicken bone.'

'If
you let me go now, Parthiv, you might get out of this without going to prison
and belly dancing for your cellmate.'

'Giriraj.'

The
strong man stepped forward and positioned himself in front of Emmanuel. He was
barely five foot five, but wide across the shoulders. His bald head was oiled
and a waxed moustache twirled out to sharp points over full lips.

Parthiv
waved a hand and the man stripped off his cotton shirt and hung it neatly on a
hook at the foot of the bed. He returned to the centre of the room and stood in
front of Emmanuel. Green cobras waged war across his chest in a tattooed scene
that seemed to have been inked into his dark skin by a rusty nail; no doubt the
work of a prison artist with limited tools, unlimited time and a subject with
the capacity to absorb a lot of pain. Emmanuel noted recent scratch marks on
the man's right forearm. Possibly from fingernails? The strong man stepped
closer and stretched his biceps. Parthiv was all talk but Giriraj was all
muscle. Now was the time to confess all.

Emmanuel
said, 'Okay, there is something I have to tell you ...'

'Good,
because
—
'

The
door scraped open before another overblown threat could be delivered. Parthiv
jumped up as if his chair had caught fire. A torrent of Hindi gushed from him.
He pointed to Emmanuel, then Giriraj, then back to himself in an effort to
explain the situation. A flash of hot pink sari crossed Emmanuel's eye line and
a dozen glass bracelets chimed. An Indian woman in her fifties with sinewy
greyhound limbs grabbed Parthiv's ear and twisted till his knees buckled. She
muttered insults under her breath and didn't let go even while Parthiv was
writhing on the ground.

More
bodies squashed into the room. Emmanuel lost count at twelve. The Duttas
weren't just a family; they were a tribe in which females outnumbered males
three to one.

The
number and volume of the women's voices shook the corrugated-iron walls of the
kyaha.

Amal
was shoehorned between a walnut-skinned lady and an old man with no teeth. He
made eye contact with Parthiv and then looked down at the floor, ashamed at his
failure to be a man.

Giriraj
retreated to the wall and a young woman in a floor-length dressing-gown
followed him and yelled straight into his face. 'You grabbed a policeman? Is
there even half a brain in that fat head of yours?'

The
sinewy woman in the pink sari let go of Parthiv's ear and collapsed into a
chair. 'We will lose everything,' she said. 'My sons. My shop. We will end up
in a shack on the Umgeni River.'

'No,
auntie,' the young woman in the long gown said. 'It will be all right. The boy
was already dead when Amal and Parthiv found him. They are innocent.'

'They
are
Indian
,'
a voice called from the doorway. 'The police will make sure they are guilty.'

'That
is true,' the woman in the pink sari said. 'They will hang.'

The
noise was sucked from the room. A life for a life was the law in South Africa.
Two Indian men found at the scene of a white boy's homicide would have a hard
time convincing an all-white jury of their innocence. Under the National
Party's new racial segregation laws, Indians were classified 'non-white'. They
were ranked above the black population but still below the 'Europeans'.

The
walnut-skinned woman held Amal's hand to her cheek and muttered quietly.
Emmanuel spoke no Hindi but he understood every word. The sound of prayer was
universal: he'd heard it in the battles and ruined towns of Europe.

An
appeal to a mute and deaf God. The woman in the pink sari dropped her face into
her hands. A girl, dark-haired and tiny and still too young to understand what
was happening, began to cry. The Dutta family had started to unravel.

'I'm
not a policeman,' Emmanuel said.

The
woman in the long gown turned. She was in her early twenties with a thick rope
of black hair that fell to her waist. Light glinted off the silver petals of
her nose ring.

'What
was that?' she said.

'I'm
not a police detective,' Emmanuel said. 'I used to be but I'm not any more.'

'No,'
Parthiv said. 'He's a lawman. A detective sergeant. I heard it in his voice.'

'Quiet.'
The gowned woman waved four female elders closer. They leaned in, head to head,
and whispered. The circle broke but the female council remained tightly
bunched. They turned their attention to Emmanuel. The young woman in the long
gown stepped forward.

'I'm
Lakshmi,' she said politely. 'And you are?'

'Emmanuel
Cooper.'

'You're
a policeman?'

'Not
any more.'

'What
is it you do now?'

'I
work at the Victory Shipyards on the Maydon Wharf.' It was the truth in part.
He couldn't tell them he was also on a surveillance mission for Major van
Niekerk, doing an unofficial investigation of police corruption at the Point
freight yards. That fact was not for public discussion. 'I'm a shipbreaker.'

The
Victory Shipyards employed only veterans of the armed forces. All skin colours
were folded into the shipyard ranks and together they constituted the full
array of the British Empire's fighting forces: mixed-race soldiers from the
Malay and Cape corps; Hindu and Muslim soldiers from the Indian army; and
European soldiers from the Royal Marines and the Welsh infantry All were now
surplus to the needs of a world at peace and cut loose from the purse strings
of a shrinking empire.

'Ahh
. . .' One of the aunties called Lakshmi over and the women chattered in quiet
voices that were accompanied by wild hand gestures and the vigorous shaking of
heads.

'You're
an old soldier,' Lakshmi said when the council had reached a conclusion. 'My
auntie knows this Victory Shipyards. Her brother was in the 4th Indian
Division.'

An
interjection was shouted from the gallery and Lakshmi sighed before relaying
the message. 'My uncle was at the Battle of Monte Cassino. Have you heard of
it?'

'Of
course,' Emmanuel said. 'The Indians fought like lions to get the Germans off
that hill,'

The
aunties nodded their approval of his answer and signalled for Lakshmi to
continue.

'What
were you doing at the docks?' she said.

'I
was lonely. I was looking for a woman to keep me company.' Emmanuel used his
ready-made excuse. It was the only believable explanation for being out in the
freight yards after dark.