by Malla Nunn
‘I see.’
‘Show me where the notebook was.’
Amal frowned, then tapped a finger to a spot. ‘It was about here.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Jâ, I picked it up when we were going to the car. I thought it might have something to do with Parthiv’s business.’
That was a surprise. The notebook had been located between the body and the section of alley that led back to the main road. Jolly must have cut and dumped it on his way towards the freight yard where he was killed. Why get rid of the book? Had he done it on purpose?
‘Look at the map again,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Did you see anything else in the alley that night? Think.’
‘There was something.’
‘Go on.’
Amal swallowed hard then whispered, ‘A small knife was near the boy’s hand. I… I was too scared to pick it up.’
‘It’s the job of the police to collect evidence,’ Emmanuel said. ‘You did the right thing by leaving it.’
‘And the notebook, is it yours, Detective?’
‘Yes. It is,’ Emmanuel lied. ‘Can we go and get it?’
‘If you drop me off at the school library after.’
‘I can do that.’
The door leading to the courtyard swung inwards and Parthiv appeared. His brow shot up to his hairline at the sight of Emmanuel and his little brother side by side.
‘You talk to him?’ Parthiv went straight for Amal.
‘No.’ Amal scooted back in his chair. ‘I said nothing.’
‘Hold on.’ Emmanuel addressed the older Dutta male calmly. ‘I dropped a notebook in the freight yards last night and Amal has it. That’s all.’
‘You dead meat.’ Parthiv moved in with a raised hand. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘Nothing.’ The boy ducked away. ‘I didn’t tell.’
Parthiv swooped and Emmanuel laid a firm hand on the padded shoulders of Parthiv’s blue silk suit. ‘Step back and leave him alone,’ he said. Like all policemen who’d worked the regular foot section of the force, he hated domestics. ‘Amal didn’t say anything.’
‘You think I’m stupid? If you’re not a policeman then you’re a spy, isn’t it? For Mr Khan.’
‘Don’t know who Mr Khan is.’
The veins on Parthiv’s neck stood out. ‘You’re Mr Khan’s man, isn’t it?’
‘Calm down and listen,’ Emmanuel said. The Indian man’s reaction was out of proportion to the apparent threat. Something else was going on. ‘I don’t work for Mr Khan, have never even heard his name before now.’
‘You’re a liar. First you say you are a police, then, sorry, not a police. Then you say I will never see you again but now you are here in my family place squeezing Amal for information to tell Mr Khan.’
‘That’s not why I’m here,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I came to find my notebook.’
‘You think you can walk in and out of this place like it is yours? I must just take that disrespect?’ Parthiv fumbled in a jacket pocket and extracted a bone-handled switchblade that flicked open with a click.
‘Put the knife down,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Or I will make you put it down.’
Parthiv lunged forward with the silver edge exposed. Emmanuel sidestepped the blade and slapped Parthiv’s forearm. The knife hit the concrete floor, clattered as it spun across the courtyard and came to rest against the side of a corn-oil can.
Emmanuel grabbed Parthiv’s arm. ‘Amal didn’t tell me anything, but I think you might have something to tell me. What do you say?’
‘No dice.’
He pinned Parthiv’s arm behind his back and pushed up until he was sure the pain had reached the shoulder socket.
‘Wait,’ Amal cried out. ‘Iâll tell.’
Emmanuel took a quick look at the boy and tried to ignore the shocked expression on his face. Over lunch they were almost friends. Now he was a violent stranger hurting his brother.
‘No,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Your big brother will tell me what happened on the docks last night.’
‘We were looking for a woman.’ Parthiv tried to tug free. ‘I already told you.’
‘What else?’
‘We …’
‘The quicker you tell me, the quicker your arm will start to heal.’
Without his detective’s ID, this altercation was a common assault. There was no way to dress up what was happening as a citizen’s arrest. A judge would determine that his prior knowledge of the law only made his actions more reprehensible. Emmanuel could see the headline in the Natal Mercury. ‘Ex-detective beats Indian in sari shop’.
‘We collected a package,’ Parthiv confessed. ‘From a steward on one of the passenger ships.’
‘What was in it?’
Parthiv stopped talking. Emmanuel shoved his elbow higher.
‘Hashish!’ The Indian man’s shoulders sagged. ‘You smoke it.’
‘I know what hashish is,’ Emmanuel said and let go. He stepped away from the puddle of silk that was Parthiv, collected the knife, pressed the switch to unlock it and folded the blade back into the ivory handle. Grinning skulls were carved into the sides. It was the kind of weapon an unpopular twelve year old might buy to impress classmates.
‘You like knives, Parthiv?’
‘Jâ, sure. If they nice like that one.’ The Indian man rubbed his arm to get the circulation flowing and concentrated on the cracks in the concrete floor. His gangster pride was dented.
‘Do you have any other blades?’ Emmanuel asked. He remembered the sharpened butcher’s knives in Giriraj’s kyaha, the empty third hook.
‘You only need one to do the job,’ Parthiv said.
‘Really? And what’s the job of a knife?’
‘To frighten people.’
‘Did you have this knife on you last night?’
Parthiv blinked rapidly, his humiliation pushed aside by fear. The connection between a switchblade and a sliced open child was obvious.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t touch that boy.’
Emmanuel pressed the raised switch on the handle and the blade snapped out again. His own distorted reflection played across the silver metal surface. The skulls grinned. The knife looked almost unused; there wasn’t a scratch on the steel or a speck of dried blood in the grooves of the handle. Emmanuel closed it.
‘Was Jolly Marks a customer of yours?’ he said. Maybe Jolly distributed more than food and drinks to the night women and their customers.
‘Jolly who?’ Parthiv said.
‘The boy in the alley. Was he meeting you to buy hashish?’
‘No ways.’ The Indian man shook his head. ‘I ain’t stupid.’
‘Why did you lie about knowing him last night?’
Parthiv’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed and he blinked rapidly. Emmanuel was all too familiar with this facial dance, had seen it performed a hundred times before. It was the desperate search for a new lie to cover an old one. This was one part of being a detective sergeant that he did not miss. Everyone lied. Some were better at it than others. Parthiv was an amateur.
‘Just tell me,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Then we can all go home.’
‘I don’t know him. I have seen him. Around the docks and the like: running around to make deliveries. That’s the truth. It doesn’t pay for an Indian to get friendly with a white boy so I never asked him to fetch me anything.’
That was the plain truth. If Parthiv was on the docks to pick up hashish, he’d never risk a conversation with a European boy. It would have just elicited more attention. Emmanuel moved on.
‘What did you do after you picked up the package?’
‘Took it back to the car and hid it in the glove box.’
‘Then what?’
‘It’s like I said. I took Amal to find a woman.’
‘Where was Giriraj?’
‘At the car.’
‘No he wasn’t,’ Emmanuel pointed out. ‘He was in the alley with the two of you.’
Parthiv pul
led on an earlobe. ‘I said to stay and keep guard. Plenty crooks on the docks.’
‘Did you tell him to keep a lookout for you?’
‘No. I told him to keep eyes out for police. Police take your stuff, you can’t steal it back; it’s gone and gone.’
Emmanuel slipped the knife into his jacket pocket. Giriraj’s strength and speed were impressive. He hadn’t heard him lurking in the alley; wouldn’t have looked behind him if the brothers hadn’t tipped him off with a look over his shoulder.
Why was Giriraj in the alley instead of at the car, and how did he get the scratches Emmanuel had seen on his arm last night?
Best to concentrate on one thing at a time and take small steps along a path that he would abandon come sunrise tomorrow.
‘The notebook,’ he said to Amal, who was pressed against the wall. ‘Let’s get it.’
The boy peeled himself away and they turned to the exit. Maataa stood in the doorway, an unlit clove cigarette in one hand and a box of matches in the other. Emmanuel nodded to her. She’d witnessed the whole scene with Parthiv, he was sure. Seen it and done nothing.
He let her make the first move. He was sure that if Maataa came at him with a knife, she’d find a major artery and the courtyard would be spray-painted a nice shade of ‘blood from a reclassified white man’.
Maataa lit her cigarette and threw the matches onto the floor. She walked over to a corn oil can that contained a fruiting aubergine and pulled a bamboo stick loose from the soil. Another puff of her cigarette and she swished the stick through the air to test its soundness.
‘Giriraj!’ she called. ‘Giriraj!’
Amal pressed to the wall again and slid down to a crouching position, smaller targets being harder to hit. Parthiv searched, in vain, for a magical way to break through the walls and escape.
With a rustle of sari silk from the partition, Giriraj appeared in the courtyard. A tap on the floor with the bamboo stick told him where to stand.
‘Down,’ Maataa said.
Parthiv and Giriraj kneeled side by side with blank faces. Maataa laid the bamboo stick lightly on Parthiv’s shoulder and then on Giriraj’s shoulder, as if knighting them into a secret society.
The bamboo gained height and whistled through the air before smacking against Parthiv’s and Giriraj’s shoulders and legs. And then all over. Emmanuel inched forwards then thought better of it. Not his fight. Both men absorbed the blows, their bodies like stiff toy soldiers arranged on the battle line.
Emmanuel crouched next to Amal and whispered, ‘What’s going on?’
‘They are being punished.’
‘I can see that. What for?’
“The package. They were not supposed to pick it up.’
‘Did the package belong to someone else?’
‘No, but Mr Khan, he controls the amount of packages coming into Durban. He does not like others to bring in more packages than him.’
‘Who’s Mr Khan?’ Emmanuel asked. The whack of the bamboo cane hitting flesh was distracting. Parthiv had accused him of being a spy for Khan moments before.
‘A Muslim,’ Amal whispered. ‘He is in business.’
‘What business?’ Emmanuel asked, but he already knew. It would be a legitimate enterprise - a dress shop or garage - backed up by prostitution, hashish smuggling and anything else that made money.
‘Taxis and restaurants and ah … many other things.’
‘Is your mother in the same business?’
‘No. Sometimes she lends money, and when the people don’t pay, then Parthiv and Giriraj collect it. That is all. Mr Khan is big. My mother is small.’
Clearly Parthiv wanted more of Durban’s criminal action and his mother was not happy about that. Maataa stopped and flicked ash from her clove cigarette. She pointed the bamboo stick towards Emmanuel and Amal. They stood up.
‘You will tell Mr Khan they have been disciplined, yes?’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Emmanuel said. Another lie, but there seemed to be no other answer.
‘Go,’ Maataa ordered.
Emmanuel and Amal were out of the courtyard in less than five seconds. Emmanuel had the keys in the ignition of the Buick in under a minute.
The waves of the Indian Ocean curled blue against the long sweep of South Beach. Landlocked Dutch farmers and holidaying Rhodesians splashed in the water or sheltered under a canopy of striped umbrellas. A recently erected sign was cemented into the sand: ‘Under section 37 of the Durban by-laws this bathing area is reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group’. The message was repeated in Afrikaans and in Zulu so there was no misunderstanding.
A black vendor in a high-collared uniform moved among the sun worshippers with a tray of ice-creams slung from his neck by a wide leather strap. The law did not apply to those whose job it was to service the Europeans.
Emmanuel drew level with a bench. A sign painted on the wood read ‘Whites Only’. Like hell. He sat down and sipped his lemonade. There was between a zero and nought per cent chance that he was going to walk miles to the non-white section of the beach just to take a rest. Guilt stirred at the sight of the black ice-cream vendor trudging across the sand. There was no place for him to take a load off or dip his feet into the ocean when the heat got too much.
A child, all blonde pigtails and chubby thighs, chased a ball past the bench. Emmanuel retrieved Jolly’s notebook, which he’d picked up from Amal’s house in Reservoir Hills. It fitted in the palm of his hand. Two strings were attached. One had a pencil at the end, while the other was cut clean, not frayed or snapped. That explained the penknife. It was used to sever the notebook from the boy’s khaki pants, not in self-defence.
Emmanuel flipped the pages one by one. Lists of orders for pies, cool drinks, boerewors rolls, hollowed-out loaves of bread filled with curry called bunny chow, and beer. Where did an eleven-year-old child get beer? The next page wasn’t a list but a portrait sketched in pencil. A girl with wisps of feathery hair stared up from the paper with ancient eyes. He flicked another page to get free of the girl’s dark gaze.
The contents of the notebook fell into a rough pattern: eight or so pages of orders for a variety of takeaway foods followed by a chilling portrait of a child. The children - boys and girls, blacks and whites - might have been ghosts for all the warmth they had in them. They stilled his heart, made him wonder what Jolly had experienced in his short life to be able to draw such desolate children.
‘Ice-cream. Ice-cream,’ the vendor called out. It was late afternoon and this would be the last run of the day. The baas wanted only empty boxes at sundown. ‘Vanilla. Chocolate ice-cream.’
Emmanuel flipped and found an uneven edge where another page had been. He ran a finger over it then across the surface of the next blank page. Ridges teased his fingertips. He lightly feathered the tip of the attached pencil across the blank page. An image of a bare-breasted mermaid with a fishtail curled beneath her appeared. One eye was closed, the other wide open. A winking mermaid. The image was innocent yet somehow salacious.
‘This taken?’ a white girl, about fifteen, in a pink dress asked. She had a pretty Dutch boy in tow.
‘Not if you qualify,’ Emmanuel said.
The girl frowned, uncertain.
Emmanuel pointed to the sign on the bench. The girl laughed, a pretty sound in keeping with everything else about her. She sat down, pulled the boy close and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Isn’t it perfect?’ she sighed.
‘The best,’ the boy agreed and traced circles on the girl’s bare shoulder with gentle fingertips.
Light shimmered on the water. The black ice-cream vendor struggled up the stairs from the beach with his wooden box. His polished shoes were covered with fine grains of sand.
‘Here.’ The girl waved her arm in the air. ‘Here, boy.’
The vendor approached, a half smile on his mouth, his gaze a fraction to the left of the couple, mindful always to not make eye contact with the little baas and the little madam.
‘What is it?’ The girl pointed to the lone tub in the box.
‘Vanilla, missus. One bob. Very good.’
The boy dug into the pockets of his shorts and handed over some coins. The vendor handed back the ice-cream and the change.
‘Check it,’ the girl demanded. ‘Pa says the ones who live in the city cheat you blind.’
The boy counted the coins while the vendor concentrated on the row of brightly painted buildings in the background.
‘It’s all here.’
‘Go.’ The girl waved the ice-cream vendor away with a flick of her hand. Her fingernails were painted a frosted pink, the colour of the sky in fairytale books. She placed her head back on the boy’s shoulder. He pulled open the top of the tub then began to spoon tiny paddles of vanilla into her mouth.
An ocean breeze ruffled Jolly’s notebook and wrapped the pages around Emmanuel’s fingers. He scribbled the pencil along the bottom edge of the page and two words emerged from the grey: ‘Please help’.
Emmanuel felt a chill come over him in the sunshine.
CHAPTER FIVE
The sun was down but a trace of heat lingered. A breeze tousled the trees, lifted hems and stirred up the exhaust fumes from cars cruising the slow lane of West Street. Lines of smartly dressed couples snaked down the pavement and waited for the Empire Cinema’s late Friday night movie session to open. Suits, ties, ironed dresses and gloves, the occasional corsage pinned to a tulle ruffle. The nine o’clock double feature was ‘dress formal’: Where the North Begins followed by Tarzan’s Desert Mystery.
In the afternoon, Emmanuel had had a haircut and shave followed by a shoeshine at the corner stand. He’d bought coffee, milk and bread for the week. None of these routine domestic tasks had taken his mind off Jolly Marks’s notebook.
He drove past the Central Post Office. The trunk of a Natal mahogany, known as ‘dead man’s tree’, was plastered with white funeral notices edged in black. Jolly Marks would have an announcement posted there soon.
At the Point, he parked the Buick a block down from the bus stop. The place he was looking for didn’t advertise.
The lights from a moored passenger liner, Pacific Pearl, twinkled like a miniature city at the harbour mouth.