A Beautiful Place to Die Part 41

"You'll make the deal for her?" Winston blushed at his own cowardice.

"I'll try," Emmanuel said, and placed the phone to his ear. "Now get out. Both of you."

Emmanuel pushed the cas.e.m.e.nt window up and leaned out to take a deep breath of fresh air. The sun was over the horizon and a golden light shone onto the meandering river and squat hills. It was going to be another fine day, full of wildflowers and newborn springbok. The office door opened behind him but he didn't turn around. He didn't have the heart or the stomach to face anyone right now.

"He won't exchange the evidence for my girl, will he?" Mrs. Ellis said.

"No," Emmanuel replied. "He won't."

Van Niekerk had been blunt to the point of insult. There was nothing in the proposal for him. No reason to exchange the ultimate blackmail tool for a frightened girl. He already had a maid and a cook. He had no use for another nonwhite female.

"They're not going to kill her." The major had been brutal in his summation. "I've seen the photographs and there's nothing those men can do to her that hasn't already been done. Disengage and walk away, for Christ's sake."

He could imagine van Niekerk doing just that. Walking away from a helpless human being without a second thought. That was his strength, and it would take him to the very top.

"What can I do?" The housekeeper was humble in her powerlessness. "What must I do to help my baby?"

Emmanuel heard the clink of cutlery and smelled the freshly brewed coffee. He checked his watch: 6:50 AM AM. He had three minutes left to make a decision. Go with van Niekerk and rise to the top of the pyramid of evil. Or stay here and go down fighting in defense of what was right.

He turned to Mrs. Ellis. She'd brought him a mug of coffee and a b.u.t.tered ham sandwich cut on the diagonal. It was enough to light a spark.

"What's in the pantry?" he asked.

"Everything," she said. "We're very well stocked. Mr. King insists on it."

G.o.d bless the greedy rich, Emmanuel thought as the spark struggled to become a workable idea.

"Meat?" he asked.

"Bacon. Boerewors sausages and wild game steaks."

"Sweet things?"

"I have some jam biscuits made up and a sponge cake for afternoon tea. Also some dried fruit and store-bought sweets."

"Is Constable Hepple still here?"

"He's out on the veranda waiting for you. He told Johannes and Shabalala that he couldn't go back to town with them. He couldn't desert his post."

"Bring Hansie, Elliot King, and Winston in here," he said. "We have to move fast."

Emmanuel limped back to the guest bedroom with the mug of coffee in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. He stood in the doorway and sipped at the drink. The hot liquid singed the cut inside his mouth, slid over the lump in his throat, and continued down to the aching knot of fear in his stomach.

Sunlight filtered into the room but the Security Branch officers and the Pretorius brothers retained a grayish cast, the result of too little sleep, too little food, and too much beer.

"Well?" Piet was lounging on the bed, no doubt keeping the s.p.a.ce warm in preparation for the woman's return. Cigarette b.u.t.ts littered the floor around him.

Emmanuel forced more coffee into his bruised mouth and went to check on Davida: scared stiff but holding up. He handed her the coffee, which she drank down in a few thirsty gulps. She reached for the sandwich but he kept that firmly in his hand. It was a long shot. Relying on a plain ham sandwich to save Davida's skin. He saw d.i.c.kie out of the corner of his eye. The big man was looking at the sandwich and at nothing else.

"Major van Niekerk wants more time to think about it. He's going to call back in half an hour with an answer." Emmanuel took a bite of the homemade bread and chewed it before continuing. "Can you wait that long?"

Piet stood up and flicked ash from his pants. "The answer is yes or no."

"What do you want most, Lieutenant? The photographs or the chance to drop your pants for your country?"

Piet flushed. "And what the f.u.c.k are we supposed to do while your major prances around?"

Emmanuel shrugged, and checked his watch. Any minute now, Mrs. Ellis was going to fire the opening salvo of the battle. He took a bite of the sandwich and felt the hungry gazes of d.i.c.kie and the Pretorius brothers follow the movement of his hands. He licked b.u.t.ter from his fingers.

"Where did you get that food?" d.i.c.kie blurted. "And the coffee?"

"This?" Emmanuel held the sandwich up. "Housekeeper gave it to me from the braai plate."

"What braai?" d.i.c.kie said, and sniffed the air like a hound dog. The smell of woodsmoke began to rise and mix with the aroma of bacon, onions, and fried sausage.

"That b.a.s.t.a.r.d, King." Emmanuel shook his head. "He's got enough food in the kitchen to feed an army. Although I never had anything like that when I was marching through France. No boerewors or sponge cake in my ration pack."

d.i.c.kie's stomach gurgled and the Pretorius brothers stepped toward the smashed doorway. The sizzle of oil and meat called all men.

"Wait," Piet ordered. "This is a setup. Why would anyone light a braai at this time of morning?"

The lieutenant was a pure freak of nature, always on the lookout for danger. He didn't need food or sleep so long as the "work" remained unfinished.

"Practice..." Davida leaned forward in the chair with the empty coffee mug held close to her chest. "Mr. King is going to have a breakfast braai for the guests when the lodge opens. He likes to test the food and pick what he wants."

"What happens to the food he doesn't eat?" d.i.c.kie asked.

"He gives it to the workers," Davida said. "The ones building the huts."

d.i.c.kie groaned at the thought of all that white man's food going into the mouths of black workmen who were happy with a cob of roast corn and a piece of dried bread twice a day. He sniffed and thought he smelled brewed coffee amid the aroma of roast meat.

"Lieutenant..." d.i.c.kie begged. He was a big man. He liked six-egg breakfasts wiped up with a loaf of bread and washed down with a pot of black coffee. His stomach started to eat itself from inside. "Please..."

Piet eyed his men and saw the beginning of mutiny stirring. He'd been negligent; they hadn't had a real meal in forty-eight hours. He pulled the woman over to the bed and secured her to the frame with his handcuffs.

"Half an hour," Piet said.

Emmanuel handed Hansie a plate piled high with three kinds of meat and a fat slice of bread on top. The Security Branch crew hoed into the feast served up by Mrs. Ellis and King himself, who'd donned a servant's ap.r.o.n for the occasion. Winston served coffee and tea with the oily charm that melted the knickers off English girls and made men dig deeper into their pockets for a tip.

"Take this to the man guarding the bedroom," Emmanuel told Hansie. "Tell him the lieutenant said to eat it in the kitchen while you stand guard."

Hansie went off and Emmanuel waited. Everything was going according to plan but for Piet's restlessness. He ate and drank with his men but stopped every few minutes to check his watch and scan the area.

Emmanuel waited until Piet did his security check, then slipped into the house and bolted for the bedroom. He estimated he had two minutes. He pulled a set of keys out of his wrinkled pants and handed them to Hansie, who now stood guard outside the bedroom.

"You know what to do?"

"Of course," Hansie said, and grabbed the keys.

"Good..." Emmanuel checked the corridor. Empty. "Remember, don't stop until you get to Mozambique."

"Yes, Sarge." Hansie took off; the car keys jangled happily in his hands.

Emmanuel unlocked Davida's cuffs and set her free. Her wrists were marked with blood, but that was child's play compared to what Piet Lapping would take out of her if she was still here when he got back.

"We have to be quick. Go out the window and run straight to the night watchman's hut. Fast as you can."

She had to be out of the room and sprinting before Hansie fired up the sports car and drew the men to the front of the house. The window creaked open and Emmanuel lifted her in his arms.

"You?" she said.

"I'll be fine." He slid her out of the window. "Run-" he said.

She bolted across a patch of bush in her white cotton s.h.i.+ft. She ran hard and did not look back. A memory surfaced as her form flew away from the house...

Emmanuel's little sister ran fast down the alley, barefoot in her nightgown with the blue forget-me-nots embroidered on the collar. Emmanuel ran alongside her. He smelled wood fires in the air as they raced toward the light of the hotel on the corner. Fear blocked out the cold of the winter night. Anger burned in him at not being strong enough to stop the blade. When he was older, bigger, he'd stand and fight. Behind them, the screams of their dying mother chased them farther and farther into the darkness...

The sports car fired up with a roar and a spray of loose gravel as Hansie sped out onto the road. Emmanuel imagined the grin on Hansie's face as he revved the sleek Jag across the veldt. He heard the blast of a horn, then footsteps and voices raised in surprise. The Security Branch was taking the bait. Car engines turned over and wheels spun. The pursuit had begun.

He listened for Davida, but with luck she'd made it to the night watchman's hut and escaped. The plan was to transport her to a safe place known only to King and his faithful servants.

Emmanuel turned to leave. By all conventional standards this case was a failure. The wrong man beaten into a confession, the Security Branch triumphant, and van Niekerk set to blackmail his way up the ladder. Rescuing Davida would have to be the saving grace. It would have to be enough for him.

"You think you know pain?" Piet stood in the doorway, calm as a cobra eyeing a field mouse. "A bullet wound and a few bruises? They are nothing. The scribbling of a child on your body."

Emmanuel swiveled and jumped for the open window. He was getting out with his liver, lungs and spleen intact. Iron hands pulled him back into the room and Lieutenant Piet Lapping began the lesson in earnest.

Emmanuel tasted blood. It was dark. It was painful to breathe. He drifted in and out of consciousness on a tide controlled by pockmarked Piet. Piet's blurred outline hovered over him and he thought: the Pretorius boys know nothing about administering a proper beating. Piet is right to give lessons.

There was a dark smudge of movement behind Piet's head and the smash of gla.s.s. The lieutenant went down. A splash of whiskey landed on Emmanuel's cut lip and he struggled to sit up and concentrate.

"You?" he wheezed.

Johannes, the foot soldier in the Pretorius army, pulled him up and dragged him to the open window. Emmanuel's muscles quivered and he tried to stand. No dice. He had the strength of a bowl of jelly.

"Why?" Emmanuel grunted as the hulking Boer lifted him up and stuffed him out through the window like a sack of smuggled animal hides.

"Found the photos under Louis's bed when we took him home," Johannes said. "Burnt them. Everything you said about Louis and my pa is true. Got to make things right."

"Oh..." Emmanuel slid over the sill and onto the strong width of a shoulder. A solid khaki uniform blocked his vision for a moment, then he caught flashes of bright yellow wildflowers, red dirt, and green tufts of veldt gra.s.s. He heard the singing of the trees and smelled the promise of spring rise up from the wet ground. He was moving across country on the shoulders of a giant. His eyes closed.

Constable Samuel Shabalala and Daniel Zweigman sat side by side and watched the first light of day appear on the horizon. Shabalala pointed a finger at the sliver of pale pink that pushed through the curtain of night.

"G.o.d's light," he said.

"Yes," Zweigman agreed. "I'd forgotten what it looked like."

Emmanuel forced his eyelids apart. The muddy outline of the two men filled the s.p.a.ce at either side of him. He focused all of his energy on keeping his eyes open for one second longer.

"Ahh...you are back with us, Detective."

Blurred faces, one white and the other black, leaned in close to examine him. He tasted a bitter liquid in his mouth and struggled to swallow it. Everything hurt.

"A half dose of crushed pills mixed with wild herbs gathered by Constable Shabalala from the veldt," the white face explained. "You are my first patient to be treated with this miraculous combination of German and Zulu medicine. You are a lucky man."

Zweigman. The name stuck with Emmanuel. Zweigman the shopkeeper and Shabalala the policeman. The two men who'd tipped van Niekerk off to his location and saved his skin.

"How long?" Patches of sky winked through the branches of a thick-limbed tree. He was on the veldt somewhere, wrapped in blankets and lying on a thin bedroll.

"Three days," Constable Shabalala replied. "You went a long way away, but now you are back."

"Davida?"

"Gone." Zweigman pressed his fingers against the bruised muscles of Emmanuel's torso. "Soon you will be well enough to travel. You have a fierce will to live."

"The lieutenant and his men are gone also," Shabalala said. "They left in many cars with the Communist man in wrist irons. Many newspaper cameras followed after them. They are the indunas now."

Emmanuel felt himself gently lifted into a sitting position and tasted cool water in his mouth. He looked out from swollen lids. Veldt surrounded him on all sides in wide ribbons of green and brown. A dove cooed and the gra.s.s swayed in the early morning light. The landscape was golden and it hurt to look at, so he closed his eyes.

"I came back..." Emmanuel mumbled. He could have stayed in England with his new wife and learned to tolerate the rain and the cold. But he'd come back, knowing how cruel the country was and how hard the G.o.d that ruled over it.

"You love this f.u.c.king place, laddie." The sergeant major put forward his opinion. The sergeant major put forward his opinion. "This is the country where you chose to stand and fight. Simple as that." "This is the country where you chose to stand and fight. Simple as that."

"Got my backside kicked. Lost the match," Emmanuel said, thinking of the innocent man about to stand trial for Pretorius's murder.

"Delirium," Zweigman said, and laid him down again on the thin mattress.

"What about you?" Emmanuel continued his conversation with the Scotsman. "What are you doing here?"