by Malla Nunn
‘Brother Jonah said, “They are not going to send a dogface on a mission to extract this Ivan .. .”’
A pause stretched out and Emmanuel lifted an eyebrow.
‘The language was not good,’ Miss Morgensen said.
‘I’ll give you a bob for every word I’ve never heard before.’ Emmanuel extracted his wallet and flipped it open. ‘Let’s see if you can make some money for the collection box, sister.’
Miss Morgensen hesitated then wrote the word ‘motherfucker’ onto the dusty surface of the chandlery window with the tip of her finger.
‘Well?’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Do you owe me a bob, Detective Sergeant?’
‘Afraid not,’ Emmanuel said. ‘It was a favourite of the
Yank GIs. First time I’ve ever seen it written down so neatly though.’
‘That must be worth a bob,’ she said. ‘For penmanship.’
Emmanuel paid up and switched the wallet for a notebook. He wrote down the unfinished sentence and read it back to the missionary who was slipping the coins into a breast pocket with a tiny smile.
‘They are not going to send a dogface on a mission to extract this Ivan .. . ?’ He tapped the word ‘motherfucker’ instead of saying it out loud in front of Miss Morgensen. ‘Ivan’ was a slang term for the Russian soldiers that had flooded across Europe in the wake of the Allied victory. ‘Dogface’ was the nickname given to the men of the US infantry. Together they made no sense. Was the American evangelist a soldier turned preacher?
‘Anything else?’ he said. Brother Jonah seemed to be in the middle of a military mission.
‘No. The nightwatchman came out of his shed and I ran out to the street. A moment later a big silver car drove by very slowly and there was a burning feeling here in my chest.’ She pointed to her heart. ‘Brother Jonah was in the car and he knew that I had followed him.’
‘You saw him?’
‘No. I felt him. Judging me.’
The sign of a well-trained Christian was the deep and certain belief that God saw all and judged all; almost always in the negative. Miss Morgensen knew her actions were wrong and, as promised in the book, God, in the form of Brother Jonah, had caught her red-handed.
‘Tell me about the car,’ he said.
‘It was Mr Khan’s Rolls-Royce.’
He cocked his head in surprise. ‘You know Mr Khan?’
‘He’s one of the local merchants who supports the Zion family with donations.’ A red tinge worked its way across her cheeks. ‘He supplies medicine for the sick.’
Dirty money washed clean through charity.
‘Maybe Brother Jonah gets his money from Mr Khan. Same as you.’
‘I do not take money from Afzal Khan.’ She tapped her cane against the footpath to emphasise the words. ‘Mr Khan supports Christian and Muslim organisations. Twice a year Zion gets a box of medicine. Bandages, headache tablets, cough syrup and disinfectants. Mr Khan’s very particular about the donations being given out to the poor. Brother Jonah gives out nothing but pamphlets.’
‘Was Mr Khan the man that Jonah was talking to at the scrapyard?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t say for sure. Brother Jonah was the one who did the talking.’
‘What do you think Brother Jonah was doing in Mr Khan’s car?’
If he’d been in the Roller at all: a fact yet to be established beyond the feeling that burned inside Miss Morgensen’s chest.
‘A man of God in Mr Khan’s limousine just before midnight? My thoughts on that subject are uncharitable so I will keep them to myself.’ She erased the swearword from the dusty window with a sweep of her palm. ‘After that, I put temptation behind me. But the feeling of being observed by Brother Jonah … that has not gone away. It’s stronger.’
The line in front of the kiosk had thinned and Emmanuel got a clear view to the end of the block. A man in a dark suit and dark hat stood on the corner with the Natal Mercury newspaper held open in front of him. Pale alabaster hands clutched the pages. Blood thundered in Emmanuel’s ears. Was the tradesman from the police interrogation room tailing him? Emmanuel stepped forward and the man on the corner turned and walked away.
‘Something wrong, Detective Sergeant?’
Fear spread once it was whispered out loud. The magic charm against it, in battle and in peacetime, was silence. Knowing when to shut the fuck up.
‘Coronation fever,’ he said, and pointed to a girl in a short cotton shift tying red, white and blue balloons to the points of a wrought-iron fence with the help of a maid only a few years older than herself.
‘Will you be celebrating?’ Miss Morgensen asked. ‘The newspaper says the buildings in town will be lit up like a fairyland.’
‘I’ll be working.’ Emmanuel closed the notebook at the mermaid sketch and shoved it into his pocket. His hands were steady but his heart raced. The night with Lana Rose had happened before the murders at the Dover. Why would anyone have been following him then?
‘Looking for Joe?’ Miss Morgensen asked.
‘Among other things.’
Like checking over his shoulder every five minutes to confirm that he was being tailed. His watch read 3.45 p.m. Time to head back to the passenger ship quay and try to find the Flying Dutchman.
‘Is Joe your only suspect?’ The prospect clearly worried the Norwegian missionary. How would she explain that someone who’d once been called ‘brother’ had committed the murder of a family member? The delicate bonds of trust that held the congregation together would break and the Zion Church would fracture.
Emmanuel mentally scratched together a suspect list. Flowers was a white man in a dark suit who moved fast and was known to Jolly. Joe also knew the docks, having pimped a variety of girls there. And now there was Brother Jonah, the possible ex-soldier turned preacher who worked the docks and talked to children. He wore a dark suit and had got close enough to the skittish Jolly to put an arm around his shoulder.
‘No,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Joe isn’t the only suspect.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A white DeSoto four-door with silver trim and white hubcaps was parked in the shadow of the ocean liner moored at the Southampton Street pier. A muscular black man in fresh blue overalls buttoned to the collar worked a cloth over the car’s wheel arch while a crew of Zulu stevedores loaded the ship’s cargo hold and chanted a work song. Sun-kissed passengers leaned over the railing and enjoyed the sound of black Africa at work.
The man acknowledged Emmanuel’s approach with the wide smile offered by servants to Europeans. Emmanuel did not disabuse him.
‘Greetings/ the man said and continued buffing the vehicle with long, even strokes the way a stablehand might groom a horse.
‘Nice car,’ Emmanuel said and pretended to study the silver chrome that ran along the vehicle’s side. Instead he studied the cleaner. His hands were smooth and his clean fingernails were clipped short.
‘Does the baas have a car also?’ the black man asked without looking up from his work. The weather, automobiles and the coronation of the English queen were all safe things to talk about with white men.
‘No car,’ Emmanuel said and caught sight of the two-tone leather shoes peeking from the bottom of the overalls. The soles were unworn and the laces new. They were not an employer’s throwaways. If this man turned out to be just a humble domestic then Emmanuel would eat the shoes for dinner.
‘I’d like to talk to the Flying Dutchman,’ he said.
That got the car cleaner’s attention. He glanced up. The wide smile contracted a fraction but he managed to hold it in place by force of will. ‘Hiya …’ He made a sound of regret. ‘I’m sorry, ma baas, but I do not know about this man. Sorry, ma baas. Sorry.’
‘You can cut the baas, sorry ma baas routine. Take a good look at me. I’m not a policeman. I just want to find the Flying Dutchman.’
The man twisted the cloth around his finger then slowly examined Vincent Gerard’s borrowed suit. The silk tie, the imported-quality fabric, th
e hand-sewn buttons …
‘What is it you want with the Dutchman?’ he said, still cautious.
‘I’ll tell him myself,’ Emmanuel said. ‘It’s private business.’
‘Private?’ The black man whistled. ‘That’s an expensive word in South Africa, ma baas. A man must pay and pay for these private things.’
‘I’ve got money,’ Emmanuel said. Van Niekerk’s bankroll was now ‘stay out of jail’ money. Twenty-five hours and both he and the stack of notes might be signed into police evidence.
‘Who told the baas about the Dutchman? I must give a name or he will not come.’
Mentioning Jolly Marks this early in the negotiations might scare the Dutchman away Dead children had that effect. Not giving a name would definitely send the Dutchman packing. He pulled out Jolly’s notebook and showed the mermaid sketch. ‘Will this do?’
The man’s dark brown eyes studied the picture, weighing up the potential risks and rewards of taking on a new client. ‘Wait here and I will see.’ The black man shoved the cleaning cloth into a pocket and disappeared behind a row of sheds at the side of the two-storey passenger terminal. Emmanuel rested against the DeSoto. The sun was still well above the horizon line.
‘Union Jack flags. Union Jack buttons …’ An Indian street vendor carted a bucket of coronation decorations along the pier. The sunshine was warm on Emmanuel’s skin but he could not enjoy it. Seeing the pale man hidden behind the newspaper had brought back the big question: Why had he been released from police custody? He had a feeling that the real reason for the forty-eight-hour deal was more complex than van Niekerk had said.
A black man in a dark green suit, white shirt and green tie stepped out from behind the storage sheds and walked quickly along the planks of the wharf. Blue overalls were folded neatly over his arm. Emmanuel squinted into the afternoon light. The man opened the boot of the DeSoto, threw in the overalls and retrieved a dark grey fedora with a green satin trim. Three minutes behind the sheds and the servant in overalls had become a ‘town Jack’, street-wise and sharp, who had never hoed a field or herded cows back to the kraal at dusk.
‘You?’ Emmanuel said. The wild-haired mermaid winked from an illustrated cardboard square neatly stowed in the clean boot. Faint clip marks bit into the top edge of the sign.
The black man angled the brim of the fedora so his expression was unreadable. ‘Don’t I look Dutch, ma baas?’
‘Like windmills and tulips,’ Emmanuel said.
And maybe that was the point of the name. Here was a black man whose ambition ignored the colour barrier.
‘Do you want to go to the same place as your friend?’ the man asked after he’d locked the boot and wiped his own fingerprints off the chrome with a handkerchief.
Emmanuel drew a blank. What friend?
‘The one who came to me with the boy’s picture. Do you want to go to the same place that I took him?’
The boy’s picture . .. Jolly had given the sketch to someone else to use as an introduction to the cagey Dutchman.
‘Jâ. The same place,’ Emmanuel said. ‘How much to take me?’
‘Two pounds for transport there and back. Cash upfront.’
That was nearly a month’s rent. A jail cell, on the other hand, was free. He crossed the man’s palm with two portraits of the king and wondered where the ride would take him.
‘What’s your proper name?’ he said. ‘I can’t have someone called the Flying Dutchman knowing my secrets.’
‘It is Exodus.’ The man rustled the pound notes between his thumb and forefinger before tucking them carefully into his breast pocket. He pulled the door open and waved Emmanuel inside. ‘That is my church-given name. We Basotho had to leave our land and come to the city just like the people in the Bible.’
Maybe that was true but Emmanuel doubted it. Multiple names gave multiple covers to hide behind. It might take the police weeks to unravel the connection between Exodus and the Flying Dutchman.
The polished leather interior of the DeSoto smelled of fresh beeswax and the plush carpets were springy underfoot. Two metal clips were glued above the passenger window. That’s how Jolly’s sister, Susannah, had seen the mermaid. Her picture was hung against the glass: a coded invitation to Durban’s underworld.
Exodus reversed out of the parking space and drove along Quayside Road towards town. Rows of wide-fronted warehouses gave way to Art Deco apartment buildings and balconied hotels with dress-circle rooms facing the Esplanade and Natal Bay. Golden veins of sand threaded the water. A solitary grey heron fished the shallows while men with buckets, spades and turned-up trousers mined the tidal shoreline for worms. The Bluff headland, covered in wild green, protected the harbour from the open sea.
‘So…’ The Basotho man tilted the rear-view mirror to get a better view of the passenger seat. ‘Is the baas married? Got a girlfriend maybe?’
Emmanuel wasn’t bothered by the scrutiny Vincent Gerard’s high-class suit was better than a clown disguise. The reflection in the mirror was a million miles from the reality of his life.
‘A girlfriend,’ he said. Memories of Lana Rose were still fresh while the wedding ring indentation on his finger was now faint. Three years had not been a long enough time for the weight of the gold band to leave a permanent mark.
Dark fingers drummed against the steering wheel. ‘And she is a good woman?’
‘Sure.’ Two lies in a row and the ride was five minutes old. A man in this kind of job couldn’t expect the truth from his customers. ‘Tell me,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Will the right amount of money get me anything I want?’
A fine suit and a fine car were two things normally out of reach of a black man. Money made it all possible. And Jolly Marks was somehow hooked into this operation. The cigarettes and sweets were not charity; they’d been earned.
Exodus shook his head. ‘There are those who work the docks who will help scratch any itch. I am not one of those men. I do not do the young boys and the girls. Also, the man who likes to draw blood from a woman with his fists, I cannot help. These are my rules.’
That criminals and thugs loved rules and chivalrous codes had always amused Emmanuel. Firebomb a restaurant, murder a police informer, terrorise an entire community: that was all right as long as no children or dogs or old ladies were harmed. The rules were, in Emmanuel’s experience, the laziest way a man had to convince himself of his own worth. In any case, the rules were fiction. They all came with a dozen out clauses.
‘Story around the docks is that you did business with that kid Jolly Marks,’ he said and waited for the car brakes to slam. A conversation about a dead European child was dangerous territory for a man in Exodus’s position.
“That boy is good with the numbers, like a machine,’ Exodus said with a smile. The easy two-pound payment had put him in a good mood. It was more than most non-whites made in a month. ‘For him to keep track of five different hands in a poker game, that is nothing.’
Exodus used the present tense and Emmanuel realised why. He’d left town on Friday morning and had only just returned. The Basotho man didn’t know Jolly was dead.
‘You use him as a card counter?’
‘For card games at Europeans-only parties. Better money than working the docks. Safer also.’
Durban, the most English of all South African cities, appeared easygoing, but influx-control gates at every major entry road kept most black people corralled in the sprawling township of Cato Manor. It was not possible for a native man to stumble upon the mathematical talents of a white child by accident.
‘How did you know Jolly was good with numbers?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘My mother’s sister. She is a cleaner at one of the houses on Point Road, the one run by the fat Irishwoman who wears the men’s clothing. You know it?’
‘No.’
‘The boy’s father brought him into the house to do card tricks for the cat women and their customers. This is how my aunty knew about the numbers.’
It w
as always behind closed doors that race groups mixed.
The DeSoto slowed to a crawl along a deserted stretch of Edwin Swales Drive. A drunk slept off a hard night in the doorway of a ship repair yard. Out here, it was a dead quiet Sunday afternoon.
‘I took this boy Jolly to three parties only.’ The black man glanced over his shoulder, suspicious. ‘How is it that the baas knows these things unless he is a policeman?’
The ‘baas, ma baas’ would come thick and fast while Exodus planned an escape strategy.
‘I’m not a policeman,’ Emmanuel said.
‘How do you know this boy worked for me?’
‘Give me two pounds and I’ll tell you,’ Emmanuel said. If he didn’t stem the panic, Exodus might swing a U-turn back towards town.
‘And why must I do that?’
‘Because my sources are private and private is an expensive word in South Africa. A man must pay and pay for these private things. Right?’
Exodus laughed and said, ‘I think that maybe you are not a policeman.’
‘No, but I am in a hurry. My girl wants me back in time for the coronation lights.’ A few more hours on this job and lying would come easier than breathing.
The industrial buildings thinned and a mangrove swamp grew up, thick and tangled, along the water’s edge. A gang of juvenile boys with jutting elbows and scraped knees sprinted across the road with home-made fishing rods over their shoulders. The bridge spanning the Umhlatuzana Channel was a slender umbilical cord connecting the Bluff to the more cosmopolitan confines of Durban town.
‘Are we crossing over the bridge? Or heading back to the passenger terminal?’ Emmanuel asked. “That’s the two-pound question.’
The DeSoto rumbled across the bridge. He had his answer. The road sloped upwards towards the spine of the headland. Small houses occupied the cusp of land overlooking swamplands and the harbour wharfs. European women gossiped over low fences while men in overalls tinkered with car skeletons or burned off the weekly rubbish in tin drums perforated with oxygen holes. The windblown petals of a kaffirboom tree painted the dirt verge red.