by Malla Nunn
Emmanuel sidestepped the landlady and walked to the front door. He knew that the moment this week was up, Mrs Patterson was going to slip an eviction notice under his door. He’d committed the cardinal South African sin. A registered non-white, he had failed to express gratitude for being bullied by a white woman.
‘Lancelot. No. Bad boy.’
The landlady’s tone set Emmanuel’s teeth on edge. She talked to the dog the same way she talked to him.
A flicker of material at the downstairs window alerted him to the fact that Mr Woodsmith, the retired postman who rented the ground-floor flat, had witnessed the confrontation. He nodded in the direction of the curtain and the material dropped. One week and not a second more.
Inside the building, the oak banister of the staircase shone with a fresh application of wax. Mrs Patterson did run a clean house. Why the Scottish terrier had never seen a bath or a bar of soap was one of life’s little mysteries.
The walls of the flat were painted bright yellow; a cheery colour scheme that depressed Emmanuel every time he entered it. The room possessed a single bed no wider than a field cot, a two-ring gas burner and a wardrobe laced with mothballs that easily contained two suits, six shirts and three pairs of work pants. The private bath and shower squeezed into an alcove and separated from the rest of the room by a wraparound curtain cost him an extra pound each month.
A tenants’ phone in the hallway made it easy to call his sister in Jo’burg on the first Sunday of every month. The conversations were brief. He repeated the familiar lies that he’d told her while their parents fought in the kitchen: life was good and everything was fine. Lies kept them together.
Emmanuel reached into his trouser pocket and removed a postcard with a tinted photograph of misty hills and deep, silent valleys. On the back, in chicken-scratch writing, was an invitation to visit Zweigman’s medical clinic in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Doctor Daniel Zweigman, the old Jew who’d saved his life after a vicious beating by the Security Branch, was two hours’ drive away. Emmanuel laid the card gently on the bedspread. Maybe one day when he was less worn around the edges…
He stripped off his dirty suit and threw it into a small sisal basket in the corner. The young maid took in tenants’ laundry along with her other work. Emmanuel washed. He’d already planned to have the day off from the shipyards to rest and regroup after the night surveillance. But he would not sleep this morning. He would not sleep at all today.
He dressed in a clean suit and checked his reflection in the mirror. Five months at the shipyards had erased any trace of physical softness from his person. Impersonating a church minister or a gentle family man was now out of reach. Yet he enjoyed the hard labour of the yards; doing what most Europeans considered ‘kaffir work’. Hauling, lifting and hammering sapped his energy and left his mind empty. Sleep came like a force of nature, black and unstoppable. Dawn brought only a vague memory of having dreamt. Being too exhausted to think was the closest he’d come to happiness since leaving his old life and the detective branch back in Jo’burg.
He slipped Zweigman’s postcard into the jacket pocket of the clean suit and scooped up his driver’s licence. He left his ID card in the drawer. He retained the body language of a white detective and no one had so far dared question his right of entry to any venue, be it a Europeans-only restaurant or a non-white queue at the bank.
He collected the laundry basket. He was about to break a promise that he’d made to himself when he left the force: never hang around an official police investigation. He was going to go down to the freight yards and make sure the detective branch was at the crime scene. Then he was going to try to find out if the search had turned up Jolly Marks’s notebook. It was a quick ten-minute stop.
Where was the harm in that?
Striped police barricades fenced off the crime scene. A black Dodge mortuary van was parked on the street corner. Detectives in porkpie hats and loose cotton suits scribbled in notepads and searched for evidence. Photograph flashes burst from the alley and lit the crowd of shipping clerks and railway workers pushed against the barricades, hungry for a glimpse of the terrors that lurked behind Durban’s sedate facade. Further along Point Road a group of Onyati - black dockside labourers also known as Buffaloes - stood close together. A white supervisor kept them in check by smacking a baton against his thigh while he paced back and forth.
Emmanuel unfolded the Natal Mercury newspaper and skimmed the columns in an attempt to distract himself. News of the coming royal coronation took up slabs of space. There were details of the cream satin gown and descriptions of the jewels embedded in the Sovereign’s Orb. Emmanuel found the whole thing exceedingly dull. News of Jolly’s murder was not in print yet, and when the story hit the stands tomorrow it would probably take second place to the city’s coronation celebrations.
Emmanuel looked over the crime scene. The detective branch was out in force. He could walk away with a clear conscience. But the energy radiating from the investigation team roped him in and drew him closer. He missed this: the intense focus on the task and the bending of individual will to the demands of the case. He moved through the crowd of onlookers until he stood next to an Englishman with busy eyebrows and a thin mouth.
‘White boy,’ the man said. ‘Cut to ribbons in the back alley.’
A beanpole redhead slouched next to an older detective with salt-and-pepper hair. Her purple sateen dress shone like discarded tinsel on a barbed-wire fence, the plunging neckline highlighted breasts the size of bee stings. Parthiv’s fussy prostitute, the one who didn’t sleep with Indians.
‘Charras!’ The prostitute’s shrill voice rose in frustration; yet another of the English migrants who’d come to South
Africa in search of a better life and had still found gas and electricity bills and impatient landlords. ‘All the charras look the same. Dark with greasy hair, flash suits. Two of them.’
‘That figures,’ said a bearded Afrikaner with hands that could crack walnuts. Emmanuel recognised the aggrieved tone. The fact that Indians, or charras as they were called in Durban, owned shops and restaurants, ran their own schools, and even built temples with spires and elephant-headed gods right in the middle of town was an open source of resentment.
‘Two of them,’ the Englishman added. ‘A criminal gang of some sort.’
A turbaned Indian clerk slipped into the entrance of Trident Shipping Company and closed the door behind him. Two coloured men followed, nervous at being mistaken for Indians. Further down the street, a black street sweeper swung a U-turn and worked away from the crowd.
A young detective emerged from the alleyway with an object laid out on a cloth and the crowd stretched as one to take a look. The front rank of onlookers eased back, disappointed by what they saw.
‘Flashlight,’ the Afrikaner informed the crowd behind him. ‘Probably belongs to the charras.’
No, Emmanuel thought, the torch does not belong to the charras. It belongs to me. It had fallen to the ground when Giriraj bagged him. The salt-and-pepper-haired detective dismissed the prostitute and joined the huddle of men around the torch. Emmanuel pushed forward to the first row of onlookers.
‘Good work, Bartel,’ the older detective said. ‘Where was it?’
‘Behind the wheel of one of the freight cars, sir.’
‘Must have rolled there,’ the senior detective speculated. ‘Anything else?’
‘Besides the soft-drink bottle, nothing, sir.’
The hand-rolled cigarette might have burned away but Jolly’s penknife was made of wood and steel. It should still be in the alley. The notebook normally attached to the boy’s pants had not been found either. That made two pieces of evidence not retrieved by the police. There was one logical place they might be.
Emmanuel stepped back and slowly made his way to the front doors of the Trident Shipping Company. He wanted to run but that would be a mistake. Innocent bystanders drifted away when the routine police work began. No bodies to see, no instant arre
sts .. . just a big silver torch with a broken light and a bottle of lemonade.
The entrance to the shipping office was decorated with a painting of Poseidon. He walked in under the curve of the sea god’s navel. Six open cubicles manned by a mix of Indian and coloured men took up most of the space. In a glass-fronted office in the back, a busty female in a green suit took dictation from the baas, a white man lounging behind a teak desk.
The turbaned Indian who’d slipped away from the crowd was seated at the second cubicle. Emmanuel walked straight up. He had to get in and out of the office quickly. An underfed coloured man with a pencil tucked behind an ear startled.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘No,’ Emmanuel answered and drew level with the Indian clerk. ‘Sir’ meant the clerks thought he was classified white and wouldn’t challenge him.
The turbaned man sprang to attention; another demobbed soldier of the empire ready to present arms. ‘I have nothing to do with the dead boy, sir. Nothing.’
‘Saris and All,’ Emmanuel said. ‘You know of a shop by that name?’ That was the brand stamped along the side of the wooden crate in Giriraj’s room, and Maataa had mentioned owning a shop. Two pieces of information that might lead back to the Dutta family.
‘Saris and All?’ The clerk repeated the name, surprised and relieved by the unexpected direction of the conversation.
‘Yes. Do you know where I can find it?’
The baas glared out of the glass window. He’d be out in a moment, Emmanuel figured; annoyed that someone other than him was bossing his workers around.
The Indian man said, ‘On Grey Street, I think, sir. Close to the Melody Lounge.’
‘Thanks.’
The baas emerged from the glass fortress to investigate and Emmanuel exited the front door. The crime-scene crowd was still five deep.
‘To the side,’ a rotund sergeant instructed the onlookers through a megaphone. ‘Make way for the van.’
The crowd split and the black Dodge van drove through a breach in the barricade. A balding man in a white double-breasted uniform opened the van doors and two attendants carried a canvas stretcher out of the alley. Jolly Marks’s body was a small lump under the sheet.
A dark-skinned Onyati with a broad face pulled off his woollen cap and the rest of the dockworkers did the same. They stood in silence until the van departed, and then the leader of the Onyati began to sing. His men joined in and the melody swept across the freight yards and Point Road.
‘Senzenina, senzenina …’ The voices rose in a powerful harmony. ‘Senzenina, senzenina. Siyo hlangane ezulwini. Siyo hlangane ezulwini…’
‘Kaffirs got no respect. This is no time for singing,’ the bearded Afrikaner man said.
‘It’s a funeral song,’ Emmanuel told him. ‘It says we will meet again in heaven. They are singing the boy away so his soul won’t remain trapped in the alleyway.’
Emmanuel had Constable Shabalala, the Zulu policeman on his last case, to thank for that piece of knowledge. Shabalala had taught Emmanuel something else, too: at some point today, out of the view of the white supervisor, one of the Onyati would pick up Jolly’s soul with the help of a small spirit twig and transport it to a better place. The life of an Onyati was hard enough without the angry ghost of a dead white boy to contend with.
The Afrikaner stared at the ground and listened to the second verse. The Onyati song finished and the street became quiet. After a moment, the black men made their way across Point Road and into the freight yards. Emmanuel moved through the thinning crowd.
‘Like blades of grass, we are cut down.’ A southern American voice cracked the silence left by the Onyatis’ seamless switch from singing to working. ‘Was the poor boy found here, on this very yard, prepared to meet his maker, oh Lord?’
Emmanuel eyed the wiry preacher who stood on a wooden box and held a Bible in the air. What ten-year-old boy was prepared to meet death? What idiot questioned the victim’s readiness to die instead of questioning God’s unwillingness to protect the innocent? And why, since winning the war, did Americans believe that rescuing the world was their next mission? Emmanuel felt his body tighten.
The preacher lowered the Bible and pointed a bony finger in his direction. He sniffed an unrepentant sinner in the crowd.
‘What troubles you, brother? Is there sin in your life? An error against God that you have not confessed to?’
‘A punch in the right direction would solve a few of my problems. Brother.’ Emmanuel emphasised the last word, tipped his hat and then turned towards the Seafarers Club where the Buick Straight-8, on loan from van Niekerk, was parked.
Uniformed police milled on the sidewalk and picked through garbage cans for evidence. Unmarked Chevrolets and blue Dodge police vans lined Point Road.
‘Keep up the good work, men.’ A tall colonel with mutton-chop whiskers marched through the ranks boosting morale. A sign that this murder was being taken seriously.
CHAPTER FOUR
Grey Street, wide and overhung by electric tram wires, was in the very heart of Durban’s Indian area. Brightly painted vegetarian restaurants jostled for space with spice emporiums and ‘Ladies frock and Gentlemen’s suit’ retailers. A gaggle of black women ambled down the sidewalk with bags of rice balanced on their heads. Shirtless Indian labourers hauled bamboo poles through the windows of the Melody Lounge, temporarily closed for renovations. The air smelled of roasted cardamom seeds and chilli.
Saris & All was a narrow shop that sold ‘English Rose’ skin-lightening creams, loose tobacco, shoelaces and bulk dried goods under a waterfall of silk and cotton saris that hung from wooden bars bolted to the ceiling. A tall Indian man in a white cotton suit and open-necked shirt approached Emmanuel.
‘What may I get you on this fine day, sir?’ The shop steward indicated the laden shelves and burlap sacks of dried lentils and rice.
‘Parthiv or Amal,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Are they in?’
‘Mr Dutta and Mr Dutta junior. That is who you would like to see?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please.’ The tall man fiddled with the top button of his shirt. ‘I cannot help you. It is lunchtime and past that door I cannot go.’
‘What door?’
‘Behind the purple sari. This is very private. For the Dutta family, no one else.’
Emmanuel swung the shimmering curtain aside and pushed the hidden door open. He stepped onto an outdoor porch sheltered by a woody bougainvillea vine with sparse pink blooms. A row of re-used corn oil tins were planted with seedlings tied to slender bamboo poles.
Amal sat at a table with a book in one hand and a samosa in the other. Silver bowls of curry, pickles and rice were spread out on a table in front of him. He was so absorbed in his book he didn’t look up until Emmanuel pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him.
‘Detective.’ A well-thumbed science text dropped to the floor. Pieces of paper with scribbled formulae scattered. ‘Detective Sergeant.’
‘It’s just Emmanuel.’
‘But… how…’
‘Relax, Amal. I want to ask you something.’
‘Am I in trouble?’
‘No.’ Emmanuel motioned to the bowls of food. ‘Finish your meal.’
Amal collected the book and papers and placed them on the table. He fiddled with the tablecloth, too nervous to eat. Emmanuel nodded at a fried curry puff.
‘Mind if I have one?’
‘No. Please.’
Emmanuel took the spicy pastry and bit into it. Then he selected a samosa and a scoop of chutney, which he placed on a white plate. He ate that, then served himself some chicken biryani with sliced cucumber and a warm disc of roti. The confrontation with the dragon landlady, Mrs Edith Patterson, had put him off breakfast. He’d eaten nothing since the night before.
‘You like Indian food?’
Emmanuel glanced at Amal, who was observing him in the same way a child might observe a sword swallower working in a circus tent.
‘I do,�
�� he said. ‘You should have some before I finish it all.’
Amal scooped food onto his plate, still wary but beginning to relax. Emmanuel waited until the boy was halfway through a plate of rice and chicken curry.
‘When we left the alley last night,’ Emmanuel made it sound like a mutual decision that Giriraj cart him away in a sack, ‘what did you pick up as you left?’
Amal threw a nervous glance towards the courtyard door, then pushed a grain of rice around the rim of his plate with a spoon. The silence dragged out. Emmanuel leaned forward.
‘This conversation is between you and me,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell Parthiv or Maataa or anyone else what we’ve talked about.’
‘True?’ Amal looked up.
‘True,’ Emmanuel repeated. ‘That is a promise.’
‘I picked up my torch.’
‘What else?’
‘A small notebook.’
Jolly’s notebook.
‘There are two strings tied to the spiral. One string has a pencil attached to the end,’ Amal said.
‘Have you got it?’
‘Not here. It’s at home in my bedroom.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No.’ Amal shifted uncomfortably and went back to toying with the rice grain. ‘I didn’t see anything.’
Emmanuel knew his torch had rolled under a rail carriage, which explained how Amal had missed it. What had happened to the penknife was anyone’s guess. A police search of the freight yards should have found it. A vital piece of evidence had either disappeared or Amal had lifted it and was now too scared to admit it.
Emmanuel tore a piece of work paper from the science textbook. ‘Can I borrow a pen?’
Amal extracted a ballpoint from his pocket and watched Emmanuel draw a rough sketch of the crime scene with the shunting yards and Point Road labelled. Sometimes the long way around was the quickest way to get information.
‘This is the alley where the body was found.’ He indicated the map. ‘The X marks the location of the body. You and Parthiv were standing about here against the wall.’