Present Darkness (8 page)

*

“Wind up your window, Cooper,” Mason said. “I hate the smell of this place.”

Emmanuel complied. Dust whirled through the patched together shacks and faded buildings. Populated for the most part by Black Africans, Sophiatown also contained a smattering of Jews, Indians and mixed-race couples intent on breeding brown-skinned children. Sophiatown defied the racial segregation laws. The ruling National Party despised the township on principle. To Emmanuel, the place smelled alive with people, food, smoke and dreams. Fastidious whites, like Mason, found Sophiatown’s lack of proper sanitation offensive.

“You’ve worked here?” Emmanuel asked the Lieutenant and checked the rear-view mirror. Dryer and Negus followed almost bumper to bumper in the second black Chevrolet sedan, Dryer driving too close for fear of losing his way in Sophiatown’s back lanes. The third vehicle carried the undercover cops.

“We mostly raided illegal shebeens. We found a few marijuana storehouses and liquor stills. The usual.”

Mason had forgotten to add “and burning them down if they refused my protection”. Half of Emmanuel’s mind remained on the conversation while the other half-scrambled to find a calm spot to work out the next best move for Shabalala and his son. The tip-off about the Mercedes would prove to be bullshit. The investigation would find nothing: not a tyre or an ashtray. That would buy time.

“This is your town.” The Lieutenant looked out at the rough dirt sidewalk and the gang of sweaty boys playing soccer with a ball made from cotton rags and string. It sounded like an accusation.

“Used to be.” Emmanuel swung hard right into a rutted dirt lane strewn with garbage. “Not any more.”

He wasn’t going to volunteer anything else. Lieutenant Mason had read his files. That was enough disclosure for Emmanuel. Colonel van Niekerk, his current boss in Durban, and Lieutenant Piet Lapping of the Special Branch kept buried the one secret Mason could not uncover: Emmanuel’s voluntary resignation from the detective branch and subsequent racial reclassification from “European” to “mixed race” for close to a year. The missing pages were stowed away until such time as the Colonel or the faceless men at the Special Branch deemed them advantageous. Colonel van Niekerk kept his past quarantined from the likes of Mason. This protection came at a cost. Emmanuel owed the Afrikaner policeman his loyalty and remained in his debt. To Mason, his temporary boss, he owed nothing.

“You lost touch with your friends when you left the township?” Mason kept fishing for information.

“Yes. I did.” That was the truth, with a few major exceptions.

“Must have been hard, being cut off from your roots.”

“Not really,” he lied. Moving from the grit and pulse of Sophiatown to the brooding silence of the country had been hell for a teenaged boy. “I was young when I left here.”

“The Jesuits say, ‘Give me a boy till he’s seven and I’ll give you the man’.” Mason pointed at the wash of life on the street. A three-legged dog hunted for scraps outside an open-air butcher with a sheep’s head on the wooden table. Children played pick up sticks in the dust while men and women talked in front yards and on corners, trying to make sense of the world. “This township formed you, Cooper. Made you into the man you are today.”

The implications of Mason’s statement were too weighty to consider. He’d smoked his first joint on the back stoep of an illegal bar not ten minutes walk from this laneway. A twelve-year-old “white kaffir”, Emmanuel had spent his time with teenage gangsters and whores, making plans, all of them bad.

8.

That’s it.” Emmanuel pulled over to the curb two doors down from a brown building with the number 33 painted on the wall in yellow. A blue van with some native policemen inside parked on the verge.

“Sophiatown foot police,” Mason indicated the six black Constables who jumped from the van and stood on the sidewalk.

Their bull-necked white Sergeant leaned against the back door and smoked a cigarette. “We’re looking for a red car hidden somewhere in this area. Stay sharp and keep your eyes open. If you find the car, blow your whistle and a European officer will find you. Get busy.”

The native police spread out with bemused expressions. Did the white Lieutenant not see the rusted corrugated shacks riddled with holes and patched together with cardboard? If a car was left here, it was because the owner
wanted
it stripped for the insurance money.

“Cooper, start at the end of the street and take the left-hand side. Work back in the direction of the van. Check every alley and backyard. I’ll interview the people in the house.”

“Will do,” Emmanuel said and moved off. Mason didn’t pair him up with another detective, presumably because the inhabitants of the township would recognise him as one of their own.

Shanties sprouted everywhere. A line of black girls sat cross-legged on the scrubby verge and braided each other’s hair into cornrows. Sullen boys with caps pulled low onto their heads loitered in doorways. Emmanuel searched dirt lanes too narrow for cars and neglected yards too small to lie down in. Mason was wasting time. The search proved how little he knew about township life.

A slight black boy, about eight years old and with a head doused in white louse powder, sat on the sidewalk and angled a mirror to catch the sunlight. Reflections rippled across the walls of a dilapidated tuckshop. Emmanuel crouched beside him.

“Can I see that?” he asked. “I’ll give it back.”

“Promise?” Twitchy fingers tightened their grip on the object and the boy’s brown eyes were large in his dirty face.

“Cross my heart.” Emmanuel held out his hand. The cracked mirror was encased in metal and weighed heavily in his palm. He turned it over. Flecks of silver brushed off the surface. “Where did you get this?”

“Just there,
ma baas
.” The boy pointed to a space between two dilapidated shacks. “I was walking, looking on the ground for money. I found it fair and square.”

“Keep it. It’s yours.” Emmanuel returned what was likely to be the side view mirror of a Mercedes Benz Cabriolet to the boy and took a closer look at the opening. Chest-high scrub was piled up as a barricade. He ran a fingertip across a streak of red paint scratched into the corrugated iron wall.

He stripped away the branches. Hot colour showed through the leaves. With a quarter of the barrier torn down, the curved lines of a car bonnet became visible. He pulled out more scrub and threw it onto the street. Four more big branches and he could see the whole car: a red Mercedes Benz Cabriolet with black leather seats and a missing side mirror.

Emmanuel opened the driver’s side door and leaned inside. The interior reeked of cigarettes. He flipped the ashtray: butts smoked down to the filter spilled onto the carpeted floor. The fuel gauge needle slumped near empty.

A Sophiatown Constable stopped at the alley entrance and blew his whistle to call the other European detectives to the scene. Emmanuel slid behind the wheel. The keys were still in the ignition. His knees hit the dashboard. The seat had been pushed forwards to allow contact with the foot pedals. The last person to drive the Cabriolet had short arms and legs, a description that didn’t match Aaron Shabalala.

“Make a path.” The rear-view mirror reflected the street. Mason broke through the crowd of pedestrians who’d gathered at the entrance to the alley. Dryer and Negus and the ring-ins from undercover operations appeared next to Mason. “Police business. Move back.”

Emmanuel got out of the car, still puzzled by its location. He’d known from the age of six which gangsters controlled the trade in stolen cigarettes, which ones did jewellery, and which ones could make cars disappear. Why was this car still here? At any given time there might be three or four buyers willing to pay cash for a ride like this.

“Good work, Cooper.” Mason tapped his fingers on the car bonnet. “How far are we from Saint Bartholomew’s school?”

“About a three-minute walk,” Emmanuel said. Cassie’s statement and the recovered Mercedes Benz put Aaron Shabalala on the lip of the volcano. He’d better provide a credible alibi or else get used to living out the remainder of his days in a cell with a bucket to squat over.

“The keys are still in the lock.” Dryer peered through the glass. “He must have been planning to come back for it later.”

Christ, Emmanuel thought, it’s a miracle the car is intact. Residents of Sophiatown lived
now
, in the moment. Leaving the Mercedes for later made no sense.

“Open the boot,” Mason instructed.

Dryer scrambled to obey: the silver Cabriolet keys dangling from his index finger allowed him a brief moment of ownership. He unlocked the boot and lifted the handle. Twigs and dried leaves covered the floor mat. Emmanuel moved closer. A seam of red dust filled the crack between the rubber seal and the metal body of the car. Sophiatown had paved roads and dirt lanes, which split into a labyrinth of paths, most of them packed hard by the traffic of carts and people. White Johannesburg largely enjoyed the benefits of loose gravel and tarred avenues. The red dust in the Mercedes’ boot didn’t belong to either Parkview or the township.

“Something on your mind, Cooper?” Mason asked. He stood in the lane with the stillness of an eagle watching a mouse.

“No sir. Just relieved the anonymous call came in before the tyres and the seats were stripped from the car.”

“A religious man might see the hand of God in it, Detective Sergeant. We now have enough circumstantial evidence to charge Shabalala with the manslaughter of Principal Brewer and with robbery.” Mason shut the boot and wiped dirt from his hands with a handkerchief. “The Commissioner will be pleased.”

“A good result,” Emmanuel agreed. Keeping a low profile was one of today’s goals but the dried mud and grass seeds embedded in the tyre treads so clearly pointed to a drive across country that he couldn’t stay quiet. “Looks like the car went off the tar and into the bush for a while.”

Mason glanced at the evidence. “The rougher the ride, the bigger the thrill. That’s how these tsotsis think. Consequences don’t matter. They just want to feel powerful.”

“True,” Big Ears from undercover backed up the Lieutenant’s theory. “The township grows them wild, and is it any wonder? The men drink, the women whore, and there’s only one shithouse for a hundred people.”

Big Ears might have been describing Emmanuel’s own childhood except that Colonel van Niekerk had also removed all written references to his mother’s murder and his father’s accusations of infidelity and miscegenation. The official record stated, “Mother deceased. Cooper leaves Sophiatown to attend ‘Fountain of Light’ boarding school.”

“When a Zulu gets his blood up, anything can happen,” Eagle Nose added. “That’s the way of it.”

Aaron’s transformation from schoolboy to budding gangster was swift. The press and the public had a clear mental picture of these lawless boys: little more than animals, they acted out of impulse and violent instinct. Every piece of physical evidence from the clogged tyre treads to the cigarette butts would be explained away with a, “You know what these people are like.”

“Split up,” Mason addressed the group. “Cooper, Negus and Dryer collect the usual ‘I didn’t see anything’ statements from the people in the shacks. The rest of the team and I will examine the car.”

What Emmanuel heard was, “Go away and leave me and my boys alone.” He exited the alley under orders. The pile of scrub cleared from around the Mercedes Benz had thinned: scooped up by women for use as kindling and floor sweepers. On impulse, Emmanuel broke off a leafy twig and shoved it into his jacket pocket. Shabalala would identify it at a glance when he arrived in town in a few hours.

“I’ll take the first five street numbers,” he said to Dryer and Negus. “You two take the next ten houses between you.”

They split up and moved out. A crowd of locals had gathered opposite the alley, each craning over the other to catch the police action. The native Constables from the Sophiatown station formed a human chain to keep the pedestrians off the road. Three scruffy boys with distended stomachs threw stones at a yellow tomcat on the next corner.

Emmanuel talked to the ten inhabitants of the building adjoining the alley. From the buckled-over woman wearing men’s boots, to the smooth-skinned boy with a slick of chemically straightened hair, none of the residents had seen or heard anything unusual the night before. The pattern repeated itself: each house populated with deaf, blind and dumb residents, some of whom had trouble recalling their own names.

Emmanuel had lied to the police and to welfare officers with impunity when he’d lived in Sophiatown. The police were just another armed gang. Talking to them upset the local gangs who, in reality, controlled the township streets. They too had weapons: knives, machetes and clubs.

A whistle sounded once and then again. The crowd had doubled in size by the time Emmanuel reached the lane. Ragged children squatted in front of the adults, their size allowing them the best view. An arthritic woman, balancing on two canes, sold bags of greasy fat cakes to the spectators.

Dryer leaned against the Mercedes’ bumper, grinning like an idiot. Mason, Negus and the undercover operations twins bunched in a semi-circle, gazing at an object cupped in Mason’s palm. Light refracting off the corrugated iron walls gave the alley a red hue.