Blessed Are the Dead

by Malla Nunn

  “I understand,” Shabalala said. “Your sister was with this Mr. Insurance Policy and paid no attention to the sun going down. That is why she came home late.”

  “No, inkosi.” The girl’s lips pursed to a perfect rosebud. “Amahle was left behind in the town by accident and it took many hours to find and return her to the kraal. It was on that night when she couldn’t fall asleep that she whispered his name and said, ‘He is the one that I have waited for . . .’”

  Emmanuel leaned a fraction closer to the girl and initiated eye contact. “Tell me everything that Amahle said about this man, little sister.”

  “Amahle did not speak of men often. She said they were like stepping-stones to be skipped over lightly until you reached the other side.”

  It was a deeply cynical point of view for a teenage girl, and one that might have led to her early death. Emmanuel knew that some men viewed being “skipped over” by a young beauty as a motive for murder.

  “Did your sister say what waited for her on the other side of the river?” Shabalala asked.

  “Life,” the girl said.

  Twigs snapped and stones rolled loose from the approach path as a calf stopped to nibble grass. The sound startled the girl, who was up and flying across the field before the word “wait” left Emmanuel’s mouth. He stood and watched her weave between the orange mountain aloes like a little springbok, the outline of her body soon absorbed into the landscape. Fleet as she was, she’d never be able to outrun the future. In three or four years she’d likely be married off in exchange for a herd of long-horned cattle.

  “I can catch her, but . . .” Shabalala cleared his throat, uncomfortable with having to explain his lack of action.

  “Let her be.” Emmanuel adjusted the rim of his hat. “She risked a lot by leaving the kraal without her parents’ permission. I don’t want her punished for helping us.”

  He did not want her punished, either, for having the heart of a lion—just like the girl his mother had requested.

  They swung by the Dlamini kraal and found a ransacked hut and two white-haired goats nibbling corn spilled from a broken clay jar. Chickens roamed the yard and a skinny cat dozed in the afternoon sun. Philani Dlamini and his mother were long gone.

  Emmanuel reread his notes out loud. “The mother told Chief Matebula that Philani didn’t come home from work on Friday. That’s the same night Amahle went missing. It can’t be a coincidence.”

  “We must find the gardener before Mandla and the impi,” Shabalala said. “They think this man is guilty of murder and they will punish him.”

  “What if he pays a fine of twenty cows?”

  “It is too late for an exchange of cattle, Sergeant,” Shabalala said. “Only blood washes blood.”

  “Great,” Emmanuel muttered. Was there one country, just one on earth, that did not demand blood for blood? Before striking out for the path leading down to the river he paused to study the terrain. A deep valley cut through a string of towering mountains covered in alpine grass and native forest. The sky stretched in endless blue over Mandla’s vast backyard.

  Two detectives looking for one gardener in all that landscape and they were getting tired. Emmanuel hoped Philani was getting tired, too.

  6

  EMMANUEL DRESSED AT dawn in a shaft of pale yellow light. Clouds the color of India ink broke the crests of the far mountains. Birds sang from the branches of the jacaranda trees in the hotel garden, too late to wake him.

  He left his jacket hanging in the stained pine wardrobe with mothballs piled in the corners and took the stairs to a side exit. A night watchman in a long overcoat and gum boots shone his torch across the garden and the patio. Emmanuel slowed and let the beam find him. He raised his hand in greeting and got a “Morning, ma’ baas” from the watchman.

  He thought of Shabalala, billeted for the night and for the remainder of the investigation five kilometers north of town in the black location. He had probably already left the back room of the cement-block dwelling with one window and an outdoor toilet and would be making his way to Roselet. By black location standards the local shop owner’s house where Shabalala was staying was deluxe, but it was many rungs below Roselet’s “Europeans Only” guesthouse and eight-room faux-Tudor hotel.

  Shabalala did not complain. He thanked Emmanuel for the lift when dropped off at the house late yesterday afternoon and declined a pickup for this morning. How many words and thoughts were sealed in the Zulu policeman’s mouth because all that was required in the presence of a majority of whites was a “Yes, ma’ baas,” “No, ma’ baas” and a “Thank you, ma’ baas”?

  A gravel path cut through the formal garden to the rear of the hotel and led on to a smaller pathway signposted SCENIC WAY. This curled around the outer edges of town and ended at the mouth of Greyling Street. “For guests who enjoy a brisk walk after breakfast or before lunch,” the rotund receptionist had explained over a map of the hotel grounds and an exhaustive list of “things to do while in Roselet.” Investigating the murder of a Zulu girl was not one of the recommended activities.

  The Reed family were not home when he and Shabalala had called by Little Flint Farm late the day before. The essential facts of the investigation—time of death, last known sighting of the victim alive, suspects and motive—were still unconfirmed. But other worries, less obvious than the puzzle of the murder, had awakened him in the pitch-black of his hotel room.

  Clumps of sugarbush protea on either side of the path glittered with dew and the air was chilly. Goose bumps prickled Emmanuel’s skin and the knot of heat at the center of his chest slowly dissipated. It felt good to be cold; to wake from the tangle of images that surfaced only briefly and then disappeared into a void without knitting together into a fluid dream.

  Eight years out of his infantry uniform and he’d learned, in an incomplete way, to defeat the dead that visited him in his dreams. Wake up, switch on the light, breathe deep and name the place where your body lay wrapped in a patchwork quilt: Roselet. At the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains. South Africa.

  Last night was different. No firestorms or missiles or swollen rivers washing the dead out to sea broke his sleep. Instead, he remembered Sophiatown. The family shack with the corrugated iron roof held down by stones. His sister, Olivia, playing in the dirt street with Indira, the Indian shopkeeper’s daughter, the smoke from winter fires blanketing the sky above them. And his parents, sitting in the doorway of their crumbling home laughing at a joke he’d not heard. They were relaxed and beautiful, even in the dusty township light.

  Emmanuel walked on. He had unwittingly unlocked a forgotten memory of his mother and father happy and in love.

  The heat in his chest was in the exact spot where Baba Kaleni had laid his hands. The old man had smashed a hole in him and now ghosts and secrets were climbing out from the inside. The past bled into the present. He remembered his difficult adolescence. For six months after a staunch, God-loving Afrikaner family had adopted him and his sister he’d tried to be good. No fighting with the boys who called him unclean and his dead mother a whore, no talking back to the brutal teachers at the Fountain of Light Boarding School, no questioning the superiority of whites over blacks despite knowing English and Afrikaners who were thicker than mud.

  It was exhausting work. After six months cracks began to appear. By then he’d learned to exact revenge in cunning and insidious ways.

  Not now. Emmanuel stopped the past from breaching the walls punched in by Baba Kaleni. The damage was done, the cuts and bruises healed. All that mattered was now.

  The stars dimmed and a few hundred yards ahead the outline of houses became more distinct. Emmanuel skirted the edges of Roselet. Wide gardens and wood fences enclosed pretty cottages and a silver stream marked the border between the town and the countryside. He recognized the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of Dr. Daglish’s home.

  He walked past two more lots and the clustered buildings of the police station appeared. Yellow light shone from t
he yard.

  Curious about the source of the glow, Emmanuel jumped the water. He moved along the back wall of the station house, careful of twigs and loose stones, and edged around the corner.

  Constable Bagley sat on the rear steps of the station commander’s house, smoking a cigarette by the light of a paraffin lantern. He huddled against the cold, red hair spiked out at odd angles, the chilled mist of his breath mingling with exhaled tobacco smoke. If he’d slept at all the night before, it didn’t show. Spent butts littered the ground.

  A smudge of movement at the back window caught Emmanuel’s attention. He squinted and made out the figure of a woman in a white nightdress standing behind the glass. Bagley had no idea she was there, watching his nocturnal struggles tip over into day.

  Emmanuel heard a footstep and turned to check the field sloping down to the stream. Shabangu, the older of the two Roselet native policemen, hesitated on the path to the station, also caught by surprise. He quickly stepped aside to give the visiting city detective right-of-way, then remained perfectly still, face turned away, eyes to the ground. Questioning the actions of a white man caught spying at dawn was unwise. Playing the silent and obedient native was the safest option.

  Emmanuel slipped past the Zulu policeman and continued in the direction of Greyling Street. He hit the top of the main street and followed the line of unlit shops and country cottages. The next twenty-four hours were critical to the investigation. He and Shabalala had to generate a list of suspects before the trail went cold.

  Empty parking lot, empty yard and empty station. The rustle of the giant sycamore tree provided the only movement at the Roselet police command.

  “So much for ‘Anything we can do to help,’” Emmanuel said, looking around the unmanned station. The room was unchanged from yesterday afternoon but for the position of the telephone on the station commander’s desk. At some point Bagley had made or received a phone call.

  “There could have been an emergency, Sergeant.” Shabalala stopped to examine a map of the world hanging from a nail in the wall. The pink stain of the British Empire spread over several continents.

  “What kind of incident takes three grown men to bring it under control, Detective? A multiple cow theft or a cat stuck up a jacaranda tree?”

  “Maybe it is both,” Shabalala said, deadpan, and Emmanuel smiled.

  He walked to the window and contemplated the wide grasslands and the steep mountain peaks.

  “It’s odd, don’t you think . . . a station commander stepping back from a murder in his own district? We’re not the Security Branch. We didn’t demand control over the investigation.”

  “Strange, yes.” Shabalala circled around to the window and gazed out. “Maybe the commander does not care about the death of a Zulu girl.”

  “A murder is a murder. Solving a homicide is the closest we come to being heroes. You’d have to be lazy or stupid to give up the chance.”

  “Then we are alone,” Shabalala said.

  “As always.” Emmanuel checked his watch. Eight-fifteen. “We’ll let the doctor know her substitute is on the way and then head back out to the Reeds’ farm.”

  “Just so, Sergeant.”

  With hat brims tilted low to block out the sun, they stepped out into the dirt yard. Bagley’s daughters peered through the back window, their noses flattened to the glass as they studied Emmanuel and Shabalala. The older girl rapped her knuckles against the wood frame, demanding attention. Shabalala lifted his hat in greeting. The girls squealed with delight and the hand of an unseen person yanked them away from the window.

  “Dr. Daglish?” Emmanuel knocked on the front door of the cottage a third time, harder, and got no response. “It’s the police. Open up.”

  Shabalala peered through the window and into the front room. The curtains were open to let in daylight and a small reading lamp shone on the mantel. A paperback novel lay facedown on an oak side table.

  “Someone is home,” the Zulu detective said. “But there is no movement inside.”

  “Around the back. The doc might have skipped town and the lights are just a bluff.” Emmanuel skirted the hydrangea bushes and walked quickly. He shouldn’t have let the doctor off so easily yesterday afternoon. With a little more pushing Daglish might have agreed to conduct the examination right away. Now she could be anywhere in the province of Natal.

  They took the path to the rear of the house and to the root cellar where Amahle’s body lay on a retired examination bed. The door to the basement room was ajar, held open by an old typewriter with rusted keys. The clinical scrape of surgical steel broke through the music of birds and insects hidden in the dense garden foliage.

  “Doctor . . .” Conducting an impromptu autopsy on a body she was too scared to examine twenty-four hours ago was beyond the realm of the possible. “Doctor?”

  “One minute, Detective Cooper.” Daglish soon appeared in the cellar doorway, her dark hair held in a fine net. She was gloved and gowned and ready for surgery. “This cellar is like a bomb shelter and sound bounces right off the walls. I didn’t hear you coming.”

  “What are you doing?” Emmanuel asked.

  “Assisting the police surgeon,” Daglish said. “A car dropped him off at the front fifteen minutes ago. I didn’t expect him to get here so fast.”

  “Neither did I.” Roselet was four hours’ drive from Durban, putting the doctor’s departure at around four o’clock that morning. “Constable Shabalala and I will say our hellos and head out to the valley.”

  “Come in.” Daglish retreated into the root cellar, pulling off her gloves. The wrist bandage was gone. A bruise darkened her skin but otherwise it seemed she’d staged a remarkable overnight recovery.

  Emmanuel and Shabalala ducked under the low eaves. The air in the dugout room was chilly, the gloom lifted by the glow of two naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling. Glass jars of yellow and pink fruit added a block of color to the bare walls.

  “Jesus Christ.” Emmanuel was caught by surprise. “You.”

  A man, on first impression a mix of mad wizard and wise professor, pressed inquisitive fingers into the back of Amahle’s skull, seeking out what secrets lay below the skin. Gold-rimmed glasses resting on the tip of his nose defied the laws of gravity.

  “You’re thinking of another Jew, crucified two thousand years ago by the Romans,” Dr. Daniel Zweigman replied. “As you can see, I am alive and well.”

  “Colonel van Niekerk said . . .” Emmanuel didn’t bother with the rest of the sentence. He should have known better than to believe the crafty Dutchman’s promise to find another doctor. It had been given all too easily. The colonel wanted the old Jew on the case and the colonel always got what he wanted.

  “Yebo, sawubona.” Shabalala greeted the German physician with a fingertip touched to the brim of his hat and a smile. Amahle was in the best hands. In a private moment, when the room was empty, he’d tell the girl to let this good and kind man uncover things that she kept hidden from others.

  “Shabalala.” Zweigman thumbed the glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose. “Your wife sends her best. My wife also.”

  The lack of a personal greeting from the wives to him didn’t worry Emmanuel. He was the unpredictable single man who dragged their husbands from their safe, domestic worlds into the embrace of a violent and often dangerous one. While Lilliana and Lizzie liked him personally, he knew it would be just fine with them if they never heard from him again.

  “Did van Niekerk strong-arm you?” Emmanuel asked. He didn’t want his friends to be pressed into service as part of the Dutch policeman’s private militia.

  “Colonel van Niekerk is too cultivated to issue threats,” Zweigman said. “He bribed me.”

  “The colonel doesn’t have anything you want,” Emmanuel pointed out. After spending three years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Zweigman cared nothing for money, social status or appearance.

  “True, but Lilliana wishes to start another tailoring business, like
the one she ran in Jacob’s Rest. The colonel placed an advance order for ten dresses for his bride, to be made when they return from honeymoon. Money to be put aside for Dimitri’s schooling.”

  Dimitri, a white-blond Russian baby boy, was born at the Zweigmans’ medical clinic during a counterintelligence operation gone wrong. His father had been an ailing Russian general captured by the South African secret police, and his mother, Natalya, was a young, beautiful actress. Two weeks after giving birth, Natalya discarded Dimitri. A child would slow her down in her quest to find a new man, drink champagne and see the rest of the world beyond Moscow. The Zweigmans believed Dimitri’s abandonment at the clinic was an act of God. Their own three children had been killed in the German death camps and the orphaned Russian boy gave them a miraculous opportunity to love like that again. Dimitri was now their adopted son. For those with the patience of stone, the German couple had a list of the baby’s outstanding qualities memorized and ready to be repeated ad nauseam.

  “How did van Niekerk know Lilliana’s plans?” Emmanuel asked.

  “The usual way. Via a direct line to the devil,” Zweigman replied drily. “It hardly matters, Detective Cooper. My wife is happy and I am here. With Dr. Daglish’s help the postmortem examination to determine time and cause of death will be complete by lunch.”

  “Anything interesting so far?” Emmanuel asked. The puncture wound on Amahle’s back and the small amount of blood at the crime scene made determining the murder weapon difficult.

  “The injury to the girl’s spinal cord is highly unusual. I’ve never seen one like it before.” Zweigman bent close to Amahle, who was propped on her side and covered by a white sheet, like a child sleeping through a hot night. He touched the base of her skull tenderly. “There’s also a red-purple color stretching from the wound all the way up to her hairline. Fascinating.”