Present Darkness (24 page)

“Clean fights don’t exist,” Emmanuel said. “Somebody always gets hurt.”

“Aaron was there when you talked of destroying trains?” Shabalala asked. The penalty for treason was life imprisonment with only annual visits from loved ones.

“He came to the planning meeting on Friday night. We studied a map and made a list of places to destroy the track.”

Fix withdrew the knife and tucked away the blade. “Heavy business,” he said. “Kicking the white man in the wallet. I like it.”

Bakwena wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and instantly soaked the thin cotton. “Better to kick the white man there than to kill his women and children,” he said.

Shabalala leaned across the desk edge so the funeral director had no choice but to meet him eye to eye. “Why would the boy join a group such as yours? He is from a good family with a good mother and father.”

“It was because of the father that he joined,” Bakwena explained. “The white hospital refused to treat his father’s lung sickness even though they have many machines and empty beds. The father offered money but the doctors sent him away. Now the father is dying far from home.”

“A great hurt made worse …” Fix mused. “That is the white man’s way.”

“This explains Aaron’s weak alibi,” Emmanuel said. “Telling the truth meant putting everyone else at the planning meeting in the dock for treason. Aaron limited the danger to himself.”

Would Bakwena have done the same?
Emmanuel wondered.

“I understand,” the Zulu detective replied. “He stayed quiet to save the others from prison.”

“How committed are you to the revolution?” Emmanuel asked Bakwena.

“The revolution is my life’s work.” The funeral director’s rich voice was perfectly suited to giving church sermons and delivering fiery speeches from the political stage. “I will not rest till every black African is given equal rights in all things. I am not alone in this. There are many, many more who feel as I do.”

“Good,” Emmanuel said. “You have a chance, right now, to turn your words into actions. Go to the Sophiatown police station and make a formal statement. Tell them that Aaron Shabalala came to your house on Friday night at around 9.30 and stayed for an hour. That’s all it needs to be. Sixty minutes. Give him an alibi.”

Bakwena said, “My politics are well known to the police. I myself am very well known here in Sophiatown. The police will use this opportunity to question my friends, my family … everyone that I know. The Call To Action Group will be in danger.”

“Tell them that Aaron came to discuss the cost of a funeral. His father is sick. It makes sense.”

What would it take to move this armchair revolutionary from behind a desk? A miracle, Emmanuel suspected.

“The risk is too great my friend,” Bakwena said. “One wrong word and the Sophiatown police will call in the Special Branch to investigate. Every chain has a weak link. The Special Branch will find that link and break it. All of us who were at the planning meeting will be condemned to life in prison. Better to sacrifice one life than five.”

“So long as that life isn’t yours.” Andrew Franklin’s cowardice and Bakwena’s ruthless self-preservation were symptoms of their broken country. “Aaron didn’t break during questioning but you, the great leader, can’t promise the same.”

“Shabalala is strong. He will keep his silence while we work to overthrow the government. We will achieve our goal and South Africa will be free. Shabalala’s sacrifice will be remembered in the history books. I gave him my word.”

“For what it’s worth,” Emmanuel said. The funeral director had the voice of a revolutionary but lacked the necessary courage to save one of his own men from the gallows.

Fix twirled the knife, ready to end this endless talk, talk, talk. “Five minutes,” he said. “I will make this man do as you please, brother.”

“I don’t doubt it but we can’t control him once he walks into the police station.” They needed a definitive solution to Aaron’s dilemma: one that didn’t call Lieutenant Mason’s attention back onto the Brewer case. A statement quietly lodged over the Christmas break would likely go unnoticed until well after Johan Britz had had the time to unpick the police investigation.

“
Two
minutes,” Fix begged. “Our dove will sing the right tune.”

“Mr Bakwena has no power but in words,” Shabalala observed. “First he will sing for us then he will sing for whoever has him trapped in a cage. He will exchange the lives of the others to save his own. Of this I am sure.”

Emmanuel rubbed the back of his neck, easing the tension there. If Lieutenant Mason or the Special Branch offered Bakwena a deal, he’d likely take it. The funeral director didn’t have the strength to pull Aaron from the fire. They had to find another way.

“The girl.” Zweigman spoke up for the first time. “She is the true weak link. We know that she lied. We have proof. Now we must get her to tell the truth.”

Mason would, sure as summer rain, present the red Mercedes Benz and Aaron’s school badge into evidence. If Cassie withdrew the statement naming Aaron, the Lieutenant had little more than a “receiving stolen goods” charge. Six months in a juvenile facility was preferable to waiting out a death sentence in the company of hard criminals. Johan Britz could whittle six months down to three if Cassie reneged on her statement.

“She’s our best chance,” Emmanuel agreed. Especially now that Andrew Franklin had confessed to their relationship.

“Shit, man.” Fix slid off Bakwena’s desk with a click of his tongue. “You are too soft. You must be tougher than your enemies and more cruel, or you will never win.”

“Remember that piece of advice when next you meet Lieutenant Mason,”
the Sergeant Major said.
“The prize for runner-up will be a free trip to the hospital or six feet under.”

“I’m going to be the last man standing,”
Emmanuel responded to the voice in his head. Aaron’s freedom and Davida and Rebekah’s safety depended on it. He gave Bakwena a last fleeting glance on the way to the door. That Shabalala’s son had lied to protect other people, no matter how unworthy they were of the sacrifice, was a small compensation and provided only cold comfort in the circumstances.

Bakwena slumped in his chair and patted a handkerchief to his sopping brow. He straightened his waistcoat and breathed deeply, slowly rebuilding the façade of a successful businessman with the courage to talk openly against the government and the police.

“We’re done here,” Emmanuel said and left the office. What they’d do next was none of Bakwena’s business.

“The daughter will speak?” the Zulu detective said when they’d regrouped on the cracked pavement outside the funeral home.

“We won’t give her a choice,” Emmanuel said. “Clearwater Farm is three, maybe four hours north of here, depending on how the road is. We’ll leave in an hour. Pack for an overnight stay, just in case.”

Fix held up pale palms like a man being robbed in daylight. “Me and the bush do not mix. There is too much quiet. A man needs noise to think and make plans. I will not set foot where the corn grows.”

“Then stay and keep Sophiatown in line while we’re away,” Emmanuel said.

Fix had once spent five days digging rocks from the fields and subsisting on a diet of thin porridge and a daily piece of bread after being illegally transferred from police custody to a dust bucket farm named Shiloh. It took Britz, the Dutch lawyer, three days to track Fix from the police lock-up to the slave labour farm.

Britz brought charges. The police officers involved were reprimanded and the farmer given a suspended sentence for “mistreatment”. Fix returned to the township with an abiding hatred for the countryside and a true measure of just how little the law cared for his interests.

“Go well, my brother.” Fix slapped Emmanuel’s shoulder and gave the traditional farewell. “Enjoy the countryside but remember to take your gun.”

*

An ugly yellow sun blazed above the stunted trees and red anthills. Parched land stretched out to the far horizon. The girl huddled in the shade of a boulder and licked her cracked lips. Her leg ached. She’d picked out all the glass she could find in the cut but there might be more buried where she couldn’t see: she imagined tiny shards encrusted with dirt, poisoning her blood.

No, she shook off the thought. The real problem was water, or rather, the lack of it. After kicking in the window she’d run into the night and kept running. She’d moved through brush and dried grass, spiked thorn bushes and stone outcrops until dawn. The grunts and growls of unseen animals prowling the dark had spurred her across the moonlit veldt.

She struggled to her feet and searched the surrounding area. She could sleep off the exhaustion of the long night but her dry mouth and raw throat needed water to heal. Three gentle hills broke the flat horizon. The distance to the hills was impossible to gauge but they called to her with the possibility of rock pools to swim in and groves of shade trees to sleep under. She’d be safe from the big man there. A day or two to rest and she’d move on to search for the road that led back to the city.

22.

Emmanuel angled the sun visor to block the harsh light that hit the windscreen. Thirsty land, flat and brown, flashed passed the car windows. Spiked thorn trees, gnarled wild pears and yellow grass cried out for a ground-soaking thunderstorm.

“The rains are late,” Shabalala said of the dusty fields and the gaunt cattle huddling in the grey shade of the Acacia trees. “If they do not come soon there will be hard times.”

Emmanuel imagined the hard times had already begun for those without a permanent source of water on their property. A dry summer meant a lean and hungry winter.

“Five more miles to the turn off.” Zweigman checked the odometer and peered through the heatwaves that shimmered on the horizon. The blank sky and harsh terrain were alien to his European eye, yet he found a strange and powerful beauty in the blooming prickly pear trees and the blue, distant hills. One wrong turn, though, and you’d die of dehydration or loneliness.

“There …” The doctor pointed to a weathered signpost with an arrow that indicated a bumpy dirt road. Three properties shared the sign: “Welkom”, “Lion’s Kill”, and last on the list, “Clearwater Farm”.

“I hope that name isn’t wishful thinking.” Emmanuel turned onto the rough track. “We have no water on us. Or food.”

They had stopped to eat at a roadside café with a solitary non-whites table covered in a fine red dust. One mouthful of the “special beef stew” and they’d agreed, the three of them, that eating dirt might be a tastier option. They’d arrive at Delia Singleton’s house thirsty, hungry and with a long list of questions for her niece. The harried farmer’s wife would be well within her rights to turn them off the property before sundown; what were three grown men but just more mouths to feed in what looked like a time of deprivation?

The road dissected the veldt, brightened at intervals by flashes of green foliage and red aloe flowers. Five miles in from the main turn-off came a faded sign for “Welkom”, the first of the three properties to share the access road. At seventeen miles, another sign, painted in bright red pointed to the second property.

“Lion’s Kill,” Zweigman mused aloud. “That is a strange name for a farm.”

“I think it is a hunting reserve,” Shabalala said. “Rich men pay much money to hunt lions and buck.”

“The returns are better than planting corn, that’s for certain.” Emmanuel shifted to low gear to better navigate the washboard gullies and potholes. The road had not been graded or patched in a long while. A wire fence marked the beginning of a new property boundary line. An elegant wrought-iron sign pointed the way to “Clear Water”. A sprawling white farmhouse appeared two miles off the turn; the high silver roof peaked against the sky. The distance from the homestead, and the scope of the landscape around it, created the impression of a prosperous European estate growing out of the African bush.

Reality hit at the mouth of the gravel driveway. Tall weeds grew in the dusty garden at the front of the house and strips of rust ate away at the iron roof. Rows of withered corn rustled in a field to the east and the baked lawn spread out like a brown carpet.

“
Whoop … whoop … whoop …
” the sound came from a stand of mature mango trees planted on the right side of the drive. Emmanuel checked the branches. Four dirty white children hung from tree limbs and howled as the car drove by. A scraggy, red-haired teenager sat barefoot and shirtless on the front steps and whittled away at the end of a stick with a penknife. Emmanuel parked the car.

“Huh …” Shabalala made a sound that encapsulated their joint surprise. This vision of white ruin populated by feral white children was the last thing any of them expected when they’d turned off the tarred road at the signpost to Rust de Winter.

The boy on the steps stood up with the sharpened stick and the penknife held in opposing hands. He pushed thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and squinted at the multi-coloured passengers in the car through smudged lenses. “Who are you?” he asked in a polished English accent, which sounded odd coming from the mouth of an unwashed urchin.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Cooper, this is Detective Constable Shabalala and that man is Dr Zweigman.” Emmanuel made the introductions when they’d alighted from the car and stood facing the boy. “You are?”