Present Darkness (51 page)

“I don’t work for
baas
Franklin. I am the yard boy for
baas
Allen.”

Emmanuel’s fingers relaxed. He patted Sipho’s shoulder. “No problem. We’ll call Mr Allen from the police lock-up.”

“Wait,” Sipho said. Stuck between white people’s private business and police business made it hard for him to breathe and puzzle a way out of trouble. The tall Zulu and the lean white man could, between them, break every bone and snap every tendon in his body before throwing what remained into a jail cell. “I am not
baas
Franklin’s boy but I have heard that there is fighting in the house. There is no money. The wife is worried for the child.
Baas
Franklin comes to visit the white teacher’s daughter when the sun goes down. I have seen him enter the hut three times. On two Fridays and then on a Saturday.”

“This last Friday night?” Emmanuel asked.

“I don’t know. That is for sure, for real. I stayed in my hut and did not come to tend my garden till now, now.”

Shabalala stood on tiptoe, dwarfing the gardener, and peered into the bush and trees. Then he crouched, taking in the low view towards the main house. “If the daughter was at the hut she could have seen who came through the back door to her parents’ home. The moon was full that night.”

“We get Andy to confess and then we’ll use his statement to break Cassie’s story.” Easier said than done. Andy had a family and a reputation to protect. Cassie was, in all likelihood, a release valve from the pressures of work, wife and baby, not his great love worth sacrificing everything for. “We’ll have to push him hard to get him to admit anything.”

“So it must be,” Shabalala said. His son’s life was like sand running through his fingers; to keep the grains safe he would have to make a fist and hold on as tight as he could.

“
Baas
Franklin is not at the yellow house. Sunday he goes to the home of his wife’s parents and they come back in the night. Seraphina, the house girl, has told me this.”

Emmanuel couldn’t stay till dark. Fatty Mapela’s dance-cum-potential brothel in the train yard started at six-thirty. He and Davida were due to leave the compound at dusk, that time of day when the failing light turned the two of them the same colour.

“You must find out about the car, Sergeant.” The Zulu detective read minds and tracks in the sand with equal skill. “We will come back tomorrow.”

“What time does Mr Franklin go to work on Monday?” Emmanuel asked Sipho, whose extra-curricular gardening gave him opportunity to keep a close watch on the neighbour’s movements. Cultivating a marijuana crop in spitting distance of the homes of white children and their decent, middle-class parents took a rat’s cunning.

“Eight in the morning. He works in the city in a tall, tall building. Seraphina has said so.”

“Six o’clock pick up tomorrow morning,” Emmanuel told Shabalala. Sophiatown was a good hour’s drive away from the house in Houghton.

“I will be ready, Sergeant.”

The fate of Sipho, gifted cannabis farmer and reluctant police informant, remained unresolved. Laying formal charges was out of the question. Police gossipped like fish wives; a compulsive need to exchange news and compare levels of badness became a key part of the job. If they booked Sipho, Mason would instantly learn of the
dagga
plantation found growing on his crime scene.

“The gardener knows how to keep a secret,” Shabalala said of Sipho, who stared at his blooming plants in mournful silence thinking of all he’d lost: job, shelter, money, and the delicious weight of Seraphina’s breasts cupped in his hands. The prison wouldn’t have a garden or a white madam who slipped him an extra pound of sugar on birthdays and at Christmas.

“If you tell anyone we were here, including other police, we will come for you,” Emmanuel said. “We won’t come right away. We’ll come later, when you think you’re safe and we’ve forgotten about you.”

“I will say nothing,
ma baas
. Nothing. I swear it on the ancestors.”

“Go.” Emmanuel gave the gardener a shove in the direction of the back gate. “And stay away from the
dagga
till after the holidays unless you enjoy being interviewed by the police.”

“I am gone,
ma baas
. No coming back.” Sipho started to walk away, resigned to the fact that the policemen would steal every plant and strip each sticky resin bud to fill their own pipes. No matter. He’d start again in the New Year with seeds smuggled back from where the whites had moved his people so they could make citrus farms on tribal land.

Emmanuel’s watch showed one-thirty and his breakfast aspirin had worn off. The pain in his head stirred, pulsing bright and hot behind his eyelids. Certain as summer rain, the pulse would bloom into a fist trying to break a hole through his skull. He needed a jug of water, a plate of hot, salty food and a double dose of painkillers—the good kind, laced with morphine; and soon.

“Is your sister-in-law back from visiting the hospital?” he asked Shabalala.

“Not yet.” Shabalala tugged a weed free from the tilled ground, his fingertips dark with soil. “My brother grows worse and I have not sent word about Aaron’s troubles.”

“Sorry to hear about your brother,” Emmanuel said. The stiff pride with which his Zulu partner shouldered the weight of his family’s problems was painful to witness. Shabalala carried his burdens as a traditional man should, alone and in silence. “I have to sit a while. Let’s drive to King’s place and have lunch.”

“Mr King …”

“Won’t mind. We’ll eat out in the garden.”

The garden, away from the big house, Emmanuel meant. The big house was where white men who supported the idea of racial segregation in public lived free of the rules in private.

“I will take some food.” Shabalala stood and dusted dirt from his fingers.

“Did you eat breakfast?”

“I was not hungry, Sergeant.”

“If you faint, I’m not dragging you to the car,” Emmanuel said and picked grass seeds from his trousers. He straightened the lapels of his jacket. Both he and Shabalala wore hand-tailored suits made by Lilliana Zweigman, the expensive material cut to fit them like their own skins. She’d expect to see her creations looking sharp.

“If that is so, I will walk to the car.”

“After you.” Emmanuel paused at the gate to the Brewers’ property, the hunting grounds of Andy Franklin, left to forage for thrills in a wild, suburban garden. The exhilarating chaos of the untamed vines, the hush of the wind in the branches and Cassie’s body must have been irresistible.

Emmanuel understood the addictive power of taking risks. He had felt the empty spaces in civilian life after experiencing the roar of Spitfire fighter planes cracking the sky and the boom of Howitzers spitting hot shells onto the earth; your blood sang with adrenaline and every colour became brighter, sweeter and more fierce in the aftermath of all that noise and chaos. Days, months and years later you paid the price for living so far from the ordinary. Andrew Franklin was about to be presented with a bill for the moments he’d stolen from his drab suburban life.

17.

Emmanuel handed the night guard twenty pence and expected no change. The guard, a fat black man with a pockmarked forehead said, “Go down, down to the marshalling yard. Park. Then you must get out and walk straight, straight to shed number twenty five.”

Emmanuel followed instructions; found six cars, a police wagon and a pick-up truck already parked in the gravel square adjacent to a line of dirty locomotives. A freshly painted maintenance repair shop bordered the eastern edge of the lot.

“Come.” He held Davida’s hand and navigated the darkening yards, keeping the grid of tracks to the right and walking straight in the direction of the machine sheds and smaller workshops. Davida’s fingers squeezed tight around his, holding onto the one familiar thing in the bleak industrial landscape. Odours of oil and diesel fuel and the crunch of dirt underfoot leeched romance from the soft twilight. “Next one,” he said. A long iron building riddled with rust stood up ahead, a large “25” painted on its side. Davida’s steps quickened at the sound of music coming from inside. She was ready to dance and enjoy her night of freedom. A balding European man in greasy overalls sat on an upended crate and peeled an orange with a penknife. He flicked the skin onto the ground and looked up. Emmanuel pegged him right away: poorly educated, Afrikaner, rewarded with a job for life on the railroads for being born white.

“
Ja
?” The man stabbed the blade into the flesh of the orange and juice ran over his oil-stained fingers. He addressed Emmanuel but studied Davida from head to toe before his stare returned to the soft, cherry red lipstick on her mouth.

“I’m here to see Fatty Mapela,” Emmanuel said in Afrikaans.

“Fatty is inside but this is my shed. I guard the door.” The man answered in Afrikaans. “How badly do you want to get inside, mister?”

“Here.” Emmanuel scooped coins from his jacket pocket and held out the payment.

“
Nie
.” The doorman chewed a slice of orange with an open mouth. “A kiss from your hoer will do the trick.”

Emmanuel kicked the crate hard twice and the railway man toppled to the ground. The orange rolled free, collecting dirt. He stepped around the broken crate and pushed the door open. A quick squeeze on the hand and Davida followed, leaving the leering doorman chewing gravel.

“Why did you do that?” she whispered.

“Didn’t like his attitude,” he said. Like most English South Africans, Davida spoke very little Afrikaans. She had no idea the doorman had called her a whore.

They walked a long corridor bordered by small cubicles, mostly empty. From behind a closed door came the sound of chatter and music. The interior door was locked. He knocked twice and waited.

“Yes?” a female asked in a gravelly voice.

“Fatty? Open up. It’s the police.”

A metal bolt slid back and Fatty Mapela appeared in a silver cocktail dress specially modified to fit her extra-wide hips. The tight cap of her hair was dyed platinum blonde, the ends of her false eyelashes sharp enough to pierce leather. She cupped Emmanuel’s face between her palms and planted him an open-mouthed kiss. Davida’s hand tugged free.

“How long, how long?” Fatty massaged his shoulders, digging stout fingers into the flesh.

“Too long,” Emmanuel gave the expected answer and reached for Davida before she sprinted for the exit. “Fix told you I was coming?”

“Of course, yes.” Fatty backed into a wide room with hurricane lamps set onto individual tables draped in white cloth. A chrome jukebox flashed yellow and blue light onto a small dance floor on which three couples swayed to a crooning love song. Half a dozen European men shared tables with women ranging in colour from ebony to very nearly white. In a far corner, set hard against the rear wall, a collection of girls with glossy mouths and powdered cheeks waited for customers. Fatty had thoughtfully provided a selection of black, mixed-race and Indian girls.

“My brother said you were coming. He did not say you were bringing a friend, Emmanuel.” Fatty turned to Davida with a tight pink smile. “And such a young one, too, just out of the nest.”

“This is Davida.” He kept hold of her arm, felt the tension in her muscles at entering an unfamiliar world. “Meet Fatty Mapela, an old friend from Sophiatown.”

“No, no.” Fatty wagged a diamante-ringed finger. “More than a friend. I was your first girlfriend.”

“True,” Emmanuel said. “But I was not your first boyfriend.”

“What can I say? The men, they have always loved a piece of Fatty.” She ushered them over to a small table on the edge of the dance floor. “Whisky and water for you and, I think, a cola with a straw for the little girl.”

She ambled over to a long wood trestle table holding a variety of drink bottles and deliberately bent over from the waist to give the room a panoramic view of her silk-encased behind.

“Don’t mind her,” Emmanuel said to Davida as they sat down on folding chairs. “She likes to poke fun. It’s mostly harmless.”

Until it wasn’t, and the pokes and jabs became physical.

“Was she really your girlfriend?” The idea that a white boy—any boy at all—would pair up with this enormous black female with a throaty, almost male voice, disturbed Davida. Men, she thought, gravitated to soft, feminine beauty. Fatty was a wrecking ball in high heels.

“Yes, she was my first but it didn’t last long. She was uh …” He tried to find the most polite description of the relationship. “She was much more advanced than I was. The things she wanted us to do scared the hell out of me. We broke up after one day, which was a record even for Fatty.”

“You were lucky to escape,” Davida said. “She would have crushed you if she’d decided to get on top.”

Emmanuel laughed and circled Davida’s wrist with his fingers, enjoying the feeling of being out in the world with her. She wore a simple green dress with a scooped neck and a hem that fell well below the knee. Chosen by her mother to cool lustful thoughts, he assumed. The plainness of the dress combined with the dark fall of her hair hanging loose around her shoulders had the opposite effect to that intended by Mrs Ellis. The sight of Davida’s body moving under that layer of thin cotton was tantalising.