18
THEY CHANCED THE main streets in the hope that the Pretorius boys were still prowling the kaffir path. All was clear as they eased onto Piet Retief Street and moved past the white-owned businesses. The garage was open, but under the temporary management of an old coloured mechanic who shouted orders at the black petrol pump attendants from his spot in the shade. No sign of Erich the flamethrower or his big brother Henrick at Pretorius Farm Supply, either.
A Chevy farm truck carting the wide, rusty discs of a plow provided enough cover to get them past the police station and onto the dirt road to The Protea Guesthouse. Emmanuel and Shabalala crossed the raked, tidy yard. Sun sparked off the silver hubcaps of the black Packard. A twig snapped and the Zulu constable tensed, catlike. Another twig snapped and the black policeman released a pent-up breath.
“There is someone behind the big jacaranda tree,” he said. “We must leave this place quickly.”
The car was parked beyond the jacaranda and there was no way to get to it without one of them being caught in the ambush. He couldn’t risk losing Shabalala.
Emmanuel checked their line of retreat. It was clear. He nodded at Shabalala and they ran fast and low toward the whitewashed fence and the dirt street freshly sprinkled with water to keep the dust down.
“Go, go!” Paul Pretorius was in full military mode, calling out orders to his second in command.
Johannes stepped out from behind the fence and took up position in the middle of the driveway. Emmanuel heard the sound of Paul’s boots crunching on the loose gravel behind him. Shabalala split off to the right of Johannes. Emmanuel split off to the left and together they ran a full press toward the startled fourth son. The Pretorius boys expected him to be alone and their haphazard ambush reflected the bone-deep belief that an English detective in a clean suit was easy prey.
“Stand your ground,” Paul Pretorius called out.
Brutal rounds of boarding school rugby training and bruising matches on forlorn country fields surged from the dark pit of Emmanuel’s memory as Johannes moved to block his path. Left hand out, he pushed hard against Johannes’s chest and heard the satisfying crunch of the fourth son’s body hitting the dirt road. It was the first time that the tutelage he had received at the heavy hands of Masters Strijdom and Voss had amounted to anything.
“This way.” Shabalala sprinted toward Piet Retief Street and across the sweating asphalt to the kaffir path opposite. A shout from the direction of Pretorius Farm Supply was enough to push them onto the grass path in record time. Now they had the whole Pretorius clan after them.
“Here.” Shabalala pulled back two loose palings in a splinter-faced row of pickets and they crawled into a squat yard with a smokehouse at its center. The garden boy, milky eyed with a bony face and ash white hair, looked up with a start.
Shabalala put his finger to his lips and the old man went back to weeding the flower bed as if nothing unusual were happening.
“Peter?”
“Yes, missus?” the garden boy answered, and Emmanuel and Shabalala moved behind the smokehouse for cover. They leaned against the corrugated iron wall and waited for the appearance of the Pretorius boys or the nosy white missus.
“What’s that, Peter? I thought I heard something.”
“Just the wind, missus.”
“Okay.” The voice grew fainter as the missus moved back into the sitting room. “You make sure those weeds are gone, hey?”
“Yes. All gone, missus.” Peter’s milky eyes darted up to check the position of the white detective and his third cousin by marriage, the police constable Samuel Shabalala.
“Keep going. Down that way.” The sound of Henrick Pretorius’s voice kept Emmanuel pinned against the smokehouse wall. One call from the gardener or the missus and that would be the end of the rescue mission. Shabalala rested easily against the smokehouse wall. Emmanuel took his cue from the black constable and relaxed his clenched jaw. The pounding of footsteps diminished, then disappeared as the Pretorius boys continued the chase.
“My car’s no good,” Emmanuel said. “If they have any brains, they’ve slashed the tires or left someone sitting on the bumper to guard it.”
“We must find another car. There is one close by.”
“Where?”
“The police station.”
“The police station? How are we going to manage that, Constable?”
Shabalala moved to the front of the smokehouse and indicated a brick dwelling with colored glass panels set into the front door and a wagon wheel fence along its wide stoep.
“The young policeman. He lives with his mother and his sisters. That is his house.”
“You want Hansie to get the car?”
“I can think of no other person who can get the police van from the front of the station.”
“God help us.”
Emmanuel crossed the street with Shabalala and knocked on the front door with two clear raps. Through the colored glass panels he saw the young policeman make his way down the corridor.
The door swung open and Hansie peered out with a sullen expression on his face. His blue eyes were rimmed with red and his nose glowed a dull pink from constant blowing.
“I got the necklace.” He sniffled. “I got it back just like you said, Detective Sergeant.”
“Good work.” Emmanuel stepped into the corridor and forced Hansie back a few feet. Shabalala closed the door behind them. “I need you to get me one more thing, Constable.”
“What?”
“The police van,” Emmanuel said. “I need you to go to the station and collect the police van.”
“But Lieutenant Lapping gave me the day off. He said I didn’t have to come in till tomorrow.”
“I’m putting you back on duty.” Emmanuel made it sound like an instant promotion. “You’re the best driver on the force. Better than most of the detectives I work with in Jo’burg.”
“Honest?” The compliment perked the boy up enough to forget about the necklace and the day off.
“Honest.” Emmanuel looked directly at Hansie in order to gauge just how deeply his words were sinking in. “I want you to go to the police station, get the van, and drive it back here. Can you do that?”
“Ja.”
“If anyone asks you where you’re going with the van, tell them you are looking for a stolen…” His city knowledge hit against the reality of country life. What was there to steal in Jacob’s Rest?
“Goat,” Shabalala supplied. “You are looking for a stolen goat.”
“Have you got that?”
“I’m looking for a stolen goat.”
“Go straight to the police station and come straight back here with the van.” Emmanuel repeated the instructions, hoping some of the information stuck in Hansie’s muddled brain.
“Yes, Detective Sergeant.”
The boy straightened his uniform and quick marched toward the front door with wind-up-toy precision. Everything—Louis’s apprehension, Davida Ellis’s safe return and the service of justice—all rested in the hands of eighteen-year-old Constable Hansie Hepple. A feeling of dread assailed Emmanuel.
A skin-and-bones blond girl, her hands and apron covered in sticky bread dough, appeared. Blue eyes, darker and denser than her brother’s, glimmered with a faint internal light.
“That was a pretty necklace,” she said in Afrikaans. “Hansie cried when he had to take it back, and his sweetheart was angry with him. Ma’s gone to the store to get bicarb of soda to settle Hansie’s stomach.”
“We have got to find an alternate way out of here. This is no place for men like us to end,” Emmanuel said to Shabalala.
They pushed through the rough country, drawn on by the looming mass of towering rock and clouds. In an ancient time, long before the white man, the mountain must have had a spiritual significance. Emmanuel felt the pull of it as he struggled to keep tabs on Shabalala’s agile navigation through the monotonous blur of branches, thorns and termite mounds.
Fifty-five minutes and one brief break later, they reached the foot of the mountain and encountered a solid rock wall softened here and there by tufts of grass and stunted trees growing from crevices carved by centuries of wind and rain. As natural formations went, it had a handsome but unfriendly face.
“How do we get up?” Emmanuel leaned back against a sun-warmed boulder that nestled beside the mountainside like a schoolboy’s marble. It was good to have a break, to feel the air coming in and out of his lungs without the fiery afterburn caused by lack of oxygen.
“We go around and then up,” Shabalala said, and Emmanuel noted with satisfaction that the Zulu constable had broken a sweat on the cross-country trek.
“Is the goat on the mountain?” Hansie asked after drinking deeply from his water canteen. The boy policeman’s face had progressed from white to pink and then finally to a coal-fire red that rivaled a split watermelon for sheer depth of color.
“I hope so,” Emmanuel said, and followed Shabalala around the base of the massive rock outcrop. They walked for five minutes until they came to a deep crease in the mountainside. Shabalala pointed to a path that wound upward and disappeared behind a windblown tree with branches bleached like bones.
“Up here.” Shabalala led them onto the skinny dirt lane, slowing now and then to check a clump of grass or a snapped twig.
“Any sign of them?” Emmanuel asked as he scrambled over loose rocks and exposed roots. Louis and Davida could be a hundred miles in the opposite direction.
“There are three paths to the cave. I can say only that they have not come along this way.”
“Maybe they haven’t come here at all.” The fear that had tugged at him since speeding out of town and heading to the mountain was now lodged like a splinter in his gut. He’d made a meal of the scraps thrown to him throughout the investigation and now he was about to find out if all the hunches and conjecture amounted to anything.
Shabalala stopped at the intersection of three paths that joined up into one and examined the ground and the surrounding loose stones.
“They are here,” he said.
A moment of relief washed over Emmanuel and then he moved quickly up the path, his exhausted muscles fed by adrenaline. Louis had a good three-hour lead on them, and God knows what had happened to Davida Ellis in that time.
The grass trail ended at a wide, flat rock ledge that jutted out over the steep fall of the mountainside and offered a breathtaking view of untamed country running to all points of the compass. A martial eagle, white chest feathers flashing starkly against the pale sky, circled on a warm air current in front of them. Far below on the plain, a watering hole sparkled in the late-afternoon sunlight. It was as Shabalala said, a place to stir the heart.
“There.” The Zulu constable pointed across the ledge to the dark mouth of the cave hollowed into the rock face.
“Detective Sergeant—”
“Shh…” Emmanuel silenced Hansie. “Wait behind this bush and guard the path. If anyone comes, call out to me. Understand?”
“Ja. Call out.”
“Good.” Emmanuel unclipped the holster at his hip, the first time he’d done so since arriving in Jacob’s Rest, and pulled out his .38 Standard Webley revolver. With Shabalala at his side, he ran low and fast across the rock ledge with his ears straining for the sound of voices or the click of a rifle bolt sliding back. An eerie silence followed them into the cave.
Emmanuel did a visual sweep of the interior. The cave was a scooped-out oval, large enough for a Voortrekker Scout troop to hold an all-night sing-along inside. Diffused afternoon light illuminated an unsettling domestic scene. A thin bedroll made up of a sheet and gray blanket was laid out in the middle of the space and next to it was a lantern and a bucket of water. A container of rusks, strips of dried beef, and two enamel plates and cups lay on a flat stone. An open Bible, a box of candles, and a coil of rope were placed on an empty rucksack that served as an altar. Emmanuel holstered his weapon.
“Where are they?” he said. The cave was set up as a living place, a place to sleep and eat and do who knows what with the Bible and the rope. The teenager had every intention of spending the night and possibly longer holed up in his private chapel.
“I will see.” Shabalala checked the tracks on the floor and stepped out of the cave to investigate further. He returned quickly.
“They have gone along the narrow way to a place with a waterfall. It is spring. The water will be flowing.”
“Can we follow?”
“It is narrow. There is space for only one person to walk at a time. I can take you.”
“Let’s go,” Emmanuel said. “I don’t want to take the chance of finding a second corpse in the water.”
Emmanuel swung in behind his colleague and they approached the mouth of the pathway, which disappeared like the tail of a snake into the mountainside. A low, sweet voice singing an Afrikaans hymn stopped them at the entrance. A few swift steps and he and Shabalala were crouched behind a spiked bush with the teenaged constable, who was hot cheeked and flustered.
“What is it?” Hansie asked.
“Whoever steps out from that pathway, you are not to make a sound,” Emmanuel said. “Understand? Not even a whisper.”
Davida Ellis stumbled onto the flat rock ledge in her bare feet with her arms wrapped protectively around her midriff. She was soaking wet and her pale green dress clung to her brown skin. Drops of water splashed onto the rock surface and formed a small puddle at her feet. She shivered despite the mild spring heat.
Louis Pretorius appeared, stripped naked to the waist with a rifle slung across his shoulder like a native scout. He continued singing and dried his face and hair with a handkerchief, which he returned to the pocket of his damp jeans. The words of the Afrikaans hymn circled high into the clouds, as if on a fast track to the Almighty. Louis had the face and the voice of an angel.
He finished his song and laid his hand lightly on Davida’s shoulder. She flinched but he didn’t seem to notice her reaction to his touch. He spoke close to her ear. “‘I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.’ Ezekiel 36:25. It feels good to be cleansed and made new, doesn’t it?”
His hand moved to her neck, his fingers brushing the delicate ridges of her trachea. “God hears better if we speak out loud and raise our voices to Him.”
Emmanuel made ready to sprint across the rock ledge if the boy’s fingers encircled Davida’s throat.
“Agghhh…” Hansie released a scandalized breath that traveled across the open space and bounced off the hard rock surfaces. He might as well have thrown a stone. Louis tensed and swung his rifle across his chest so it nestled firmly in his hands. His finger rested on the trigger and he aimed the gun’s barrel toward the bush.
“Come out,” he called in a voice that was close to friendly. “If you don’t, I’ll unload this chamber into the bushes. True as I stand here.”
“Don’t—” Hansie jumped to his feet, his hands raised in surrender. “Don’t shoot. It’s me. It’s Hansie.”
“Who’s with you?” Louis asked. “You’re not clever enough to have made it here on your own.”
“Not clever? What—”
Emmanuel and Shabalala stood up. Emmanuel didn’t want Louis to panic and send Davida on a shortcut to the Lord God via the sheer drop just two feet to his left. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Hansie Hepple conduct the negotiations for release of the hostage.
“Detective Sergeant Cooper.” Louis greeted him with a nod of his head as he would someone he’d met on the street corner or the church steps. “I see you got out of the jam I fixed for you. And you brought along Constable Shabalala for company. What brings the three of you out to the mountain?”
“We could ask you the same thing.” Emmanuel kept his tone friendly and noted the supremely self-confident way the bare-chested boy handled his rifle. He looked born to the ways of the bandit. Davida shivered next to him.
“This is a long way to come for a shower, isn’t it, Louis?” he said, and tried to appraise Davida’s condition. She stared at him with the mute shock he’d seen many times on the faces of civilians caught in the crush of two warring armies. Her eyes pleaded for rescue and restoration.
“I am acting on God’s command. I don’t expect you to understand what it is I do here today, Detective.”
“Explain it to me. I want to understand.”
“And He shall wash away the sins of the world.” Louis circled a hand around Davida’s arm and jerked her against his hip. “I have purged the dirt from her physical being with pure water and stones and now I will cleanse her soul of the sin that has made her an impure vessel.”
“Last time I checked, you weren’t the Lord God. You were Louis Pretorius, son of Willem and Ingrid Pretorius of Jacob’s Rest. What qualifies you to clean anyone’s soul but your own?”
“‘And He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.’”
In a trade-off of scripture verses, Emmanuel was sure he would lose out to Louis. The young Pretorius boy was so tightly wrapped in his holy vision that he didn’t even recognize that what he’d done to Davida and her grandmother was sin itself. For Louis, it was all holy visions backed up by a chorus of angels.
“But…” Hansie was having trouble keeping up with the conversation. “That girl is a darkie. What are you doing up here with one of them?”
The fire in Louis’s eyes was bright enough to rival his grandfather Frikkie van Brandenburg’s incendiary glare. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child and when I was grown I put away all childish things. You, Hansie, are one of those childish things.”
“What are you talking about?” Hansie asked. “You’re not supposed to be washing or doing whatnot with one of them. It’s against the law, and I know that your ma won’t be happy to see you standing so close, either.”
“My mission does not concern my earthly family or you. God called me and you are standing in the way of His works.”
“Let me get this straight.” Emmanuel tried to gauge the depth of Louis’s delusion. “God, the redeemer of souls, has called you to the theft of pornographic images, lies, assault, and the kidnapping of unclean women? When did you get this calling, Louis? At Suiwer Sprong or afterward, at the theological college?”
Louis’s pretty face seemed to distort. “Everything I do is in the service of the Lord.”
“Did the Lord call you to molest those women last year?”
“That was the work of the devil. I broke free of his chains and have been cleansed of all my sins.”
“Is this how they drove the sin out of you on the farm? With outdoor showers and fear?” Van Niekerk had listed “water therapy” as one of the cures being offered at the quasi-religious nut farm. What methods had the German-trained Dr. Hans de Klerk used to clean the sin from the Pretorius boy?
Louis blinked hard. “Everything that was done to me was in the service of the Lord. I was lost and now I am found.”
Emmanuel felt an unexpected stab of pity. Louis had been brought up by his mother to believe he was the light of the world, but he’d inherited his father’s taste for life outside the strict moral code of the volk. He was torn in two, lost, and made more dangerous by a spell of “realignment” deep in the Drakensberg Mountains.
“Was your father an impure vessel, Louis?” Emmanuel asked. He was interested in Louis’s attitude to the captain’s hypocrisy.
“Pa was led astray by the work of the devil, same as me.” The boy looked over at the Zulu constable. “My pa was a good man, hey, Shabalala? A godly man.”
“I believe it.”
“I’m not disputing your pa’s goodness,” Emmanuel said. “I’m just wondering how hard he struggled with the devil. You went away to the farm and conquered the devil, but your father stayed on, and, well…he let the devil win a few nights a week. For almost a year.”
“Captain Pretorius wasn’t in league with the devil!” Hansie’s voice rose three octaves. “You didn’t know him. He was clean inside and out.”
“No man is clean inside and out.” Emmanuel returned his attention to Louis and kept his tone even and nonconfrontational. “You know what it is to struggle with the devil, don’t you, Louis? You want to be holy and yet here you are on top of a mountain with a terrified woman, a gun, and a piece of rope coiled on your Bible.”
“This woman is the root of all the problems.” Louis curled his hand tightly around Davida’s forearm until she gasped in pain. “She is the one who needs to be cleansed of her carnal nature.”
“Like you cleansed your father at the river?” Emmanuel tested the connection between the molester and the murderer. An unbalanced boy with a sighted rifle and delusions of godhead was a dangerous animal. “That’s what you did, isn’t it? You arranged a face-to-face meeting with the Almighty and then you dragged his body to the water to cleanse him of sin. Is that how it happened?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You killed your father to cleanse him, didn’t you, Louis?”
“Of course not.”
“You knew he wasn’t going to stop sinning, so you helped him break free of Satan’s trap. I understand that. I understand how it happened.”
Louis loosened his grip on Davida’s arm and leveled a damning stare at the English detective. “I loved my father. When the devil had me in his claws, my father prayed with me and together we found a way out. I would never raise a hand to him. He saved me.”
“You didn’t shoot him at the river?”
“No. Honor your mother and your father so your days may be long on the earth. That’s God’s promise.”
“But you spied on your father when he was alive. That wasn’t an honorable thing to do, was it?”
“Witnessing.” Louis let go of Davida’s arm and pushed the messy blond hair from his forehead. “I had to witness the depth of his wrongdoing to understand just how far he’d strayed from the path of righteousness.”
“You didn’t enjoy it?” Emmanuel saw Davida slump back against the rock face and draw great mouthfuls of air into her lungs. She was still shivering and probably in shock. “You got no pleasure from watching your father having sex with one of the women you’d messed with the previous December? How many times did you witness your father straying from the path, Louis?”
“I can’t remember,” the boy muttered.
“Surely once was enough? You see your father with a brown-skinned woman and you know, don’t you? You know that a sin is being committed without having to come back a second and a third time.”
“I was witnessing. I didn’t enjoy what I saw.”
“Truly?” Emmanuel had the tiger by the tail and he had every intention of shaking it until it coughed up a lung. “I think you were doing something that began with W, but it wasn’t witnessing. You got as much pleasure as your father did, only from a distance.”
“Shabalala.” The bare-chested boy appealed to the black policeman. “You know my family. We are from pure Afrikaner blood. You are from pure African blood. This business has come about because of those with impure blood among us. Is that not so?”
“Your father was pure. The woman is pure. When they were together, there was no wrong in them.”
“You can’t believe that.” The boy was thrown by Shabalala’s calm and forgiving statement. “She’s the reason my father went astray and was killed. The fault is in her.”
“That one there. She was your father’s little wife, and I tell you again, there was no wrong in them. The captain made the arrangement for her in the old way and did not intend any disrespect to come to her during his lifetime and even now after he has gone.”
Louis blushed at the Zulu constable’s criticism but didn’t lower his weapon. “Your native ways are not for the volk to live by. Our God does not permit the tainting of our bodies or our blood with those from a lesser sphere. It is written so.”
Davida, still shaking, had inched her way along the rock wall and was now out of arm’s reach of the teenage prophet.
Emmanuel stepped forward and drew Louis’s attention to him. “Did you ever offer your father the chance to come here and cleanse his sins in the waterfall?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There was never a good time to bring it up. I didn’t know how to tell him that I knew what he was doing.”
“Well…” Emmanuel said. “How about after he’d finished and both of you were satisfied and feeling good about the world? You could have met him out on the kaffir path and exchanged notes before praying together.”
“You are a foul-minded Englishman. It’s a pity my brothers didn’t catch you and teach you a lesson.”
Emmanuel shrugged and stared over the rock ledge to the vast sweep of country. Davida was inches from the cave mouth and safety. “‘By their deeds shall ye know them.’” He dragged out a biblical quote from the deep vaults of memory. “What’s a jury going to make of an Afrikaner boy out here with a kidnapped coloured girl? Do you really believe your brethren will understand that you washed her body to cleanse her and spied on your father having sex with her in order to bear witness to the Lord?”
“God is my guide and my staff. It is not for man to pass judgment on what I have done.”
“Things are different now, Louis. When you got rid of your father you got rid of the one person who was willing to break the law to protect you.”
Louis’s finger was tight on the trigger. “I had no hand in what happened to my father. He was struck down before his time and I pray to the Almighty that he sees into Pa’s heart and forgives his transgressions.”
“Louis…” Hansie’s vacant blue eyes brimmed with tears of frustration. “Tell the detective sergeant this is all a mistake. You didn’t touch those coloured women and Captain didn’t do like what he says…with the sex and the devil and the little wife.”
Louis smiled, truly the most beautiful of God’s angels. “You know what my pa told me once, Hansie?”
“No.”
“That you cannot know God until you have wrestled with the devil and the devil has won.” He turned to Davida to illustrate his point and found her gone. The rifle swung easily in the boy’s hands and he raised it to his eye and took aim at the cave mouth, where the woman appeared as a dark fleeting shape. His legs were spread in the classic marksman pose that gave stability to the torso and increased the likelihood of hitting the mark.
“Drop the weapon, Louis!” Emmanuel shouted across the rock ledge, handgun squarely on target. “Drop it or I will shoot you.”
The shadow disappeared from the cave mouth and Louis slowly lowered his rifle to his hip. His fingers twitched around the barrel but the gun stayed put.
“Do not move.” Emmanuel’s voice was clear and authoritative as he closed the distance between them. “Drop the gun to the ground and kick it toward me. Now.”
Louis loosened his grip and the rifle clattered across the ledge, where Constable Shabalala picked it up and swung it across his back. The captain’s youngest son sank down into a crouch and stared out across the miles of brown-and green-speckled veldt. It was midafternoon and the light had a soft and yielding quality that made the scrub appear hand-painted on the canvas of the earth.
“Now,” Louis said, “she will never be saved.”
Emmanuel signaled to Shabalala to stand guard while he checked the cave.
“Davida.” He called out her name and stepped into the interior of Louis’s bizarre mountain home. She sat near the cave entrance with her knees drawn up tightly underneath her. Emmanuel crouched next to her but didn’t touch her despite the fact that her body shook with a bone-rattling intensity. She’d had enough of white men trying to help her for a lifetime.
“It’s okay. You’re safe now,” he said. Her skin was scratched with fine red lines from the wash-down Louis had given her with rocks and pure spring water. “Did he hurt you anyplace that I can’t see, Davida?”
“Not like you think. Not that way.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“No, not now. Did you find my granny?”
“Zweigman is with her. He says she’s injured, but she’s going to be all right. You know he’ll take good care of her.”
“Good. Good.” She started to cry and Emmanuel retrieved the gray blanket from the made-up bedroll. He held it out for her to see.
“Can I put this on you? You need to get dry and warm before we make a move.”
“Outside. I’ll put it on outside. I don’t want to stay in here.”
They left the cave and she huddled near the entrance, her instincts telling her to stick close to shelter. Emmanuel wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and noticed that she didn’t look across to where Louis was under guard.
“It smells of him,” she said. “Like flowers on a grave.”
“You’ll need to keep it on until you’re warm, then we’ll head back to Jacob’s Rest.”
“I’ll go when you go,” she said, and rested her chin on her knees to watch long wisps of white cloud stretch across the sky. Emmanuel walked over to Shabalala and stood by his side. The Zulu constable looked weary, as if this end to things was more terrible than he had imagined.
“What now?” Louis asked over the sound of Hansie’s sniveling. “Are you going to arrest me?”
“I’ve got no choice,” Emmanuel said. “You are charged with assault and kidnapping. Both are criminal offenses and you will have to stand trial.”
“My mother…” There was a glimmer of fear in Louis’s eyes. “She’ll know all the ways the devil has led me astray.”
“Most likely, yes.” Emmanuel checked the position of the sun. It was time to get moving if they wanted to make it back to Jacob’s Rest before nightfall. The police station was still out of bounds. They’d have to use Zweigman’s store as a holding cell for Louis at least until Davida Ellis was safely returned home. After that he’d have to make a dash for Mooihoek with the captain’s youngest son in custody. The Pretorius boys would skin him alive and boil his bones for soup if they caught him in the company of their sweet little brother.
“You’re going to put him in prison?” Hansie was shocked.
“That’s generally where people accused of assault and kidnapping end up, Hepple. That is the law.”
“But it’s not right putting a white man in jail over one of them. It’s not decent.”
“What’s decent or not is for a judge to decide. Collect the evidence, complete the docket, and present the case in court. That’s my job. And yours, too.” Emmanuel checked Davida to see if she’d stopped shivering. The long march back to the car was going to be difficult with Hansie, Louis, and a traumatized woman in tow.
“I’ll get her,” he said to Shabalala. “You get Mathandunina.”
They split off to their separate duties but didn’t get far. The distinct sound of a safety catch releasing caught them midstep. Emmanuel turned to see Hansie standing, tearstained and snot-faced, with his Webley revolver aimed right at his midsection. A bullet in the gut administered by a dull-minded Afrikaner boy was a lousy way to die.
“Constable Hepple.” He used the title to remind the teenager that he was an officer of the law. “Put the gun down, please.”
“No. I won’t let you take Louis to jail.”
“What should we do with your friend, Constable Hepple?”
“Let him go.”
“Okay,” Emmanuel said, and left Hansie to fill the sudden power void.
“Go,” the boy policeman urged his friend. “Go. Run.”
The bare-chested prophet was crouched down, staring out across country, as if mesmerized by the colors of the veldt spread out below him.
“Louis.” Hansie’s voice was loud and raw in the arena of rock and cloud. “What are you doing? Go.”
The teenaged boy stood up and walked to the very edge of the rock platform, where he spread his arms out wide to feel the wind blowing in from the bush lands. He turned back to face the cave, his hair bright as a halo.
“This is a holy place. Can you feel it, Detective? The power of God so close.”
“I can,” Emmanuel said.
“You’re right, Detective. I should have brought my father here and tried to save his soul. If I’d done that he’d be alive today.”
“It wasn’t your job to save him.” Emmanuel could feel the pull of gravity dragging on Louis’s heels, threatening to suck him over the edge and into the void. “A man is responsible for the health of his own soul. You did nothing wrong.”
Louis smiled. “The sin is that I didn’t try. I left him adrift in a sea of iniquity.”
“It’s hard for sons and fathers to talk. You said yourself that it was difficult to bring up the topic of what your father was doing.”
“I didn’t want him to stop. You know there were evenings when, right after Pa had finished, I’d lie out on the grass and look up at the stars. What happiness I felt inside, knowing that he and I were alike. I was my father’s son, not Mathandunina.”
Hansie lowered his revolver so it was now aimed somewhere between Emmanuel’s pelvis and his kneecaps. There was still no room to make a sudden move toward Louis, who remained perilously close to the cliff. Constable Hepple was too dull of mind to see that the threat to his boyhood friend came entirely from within.
“Remember, Shabalala?” Louis switched to Zulu. “When I was a child the people would say, ‘Look at this one. Whom does he belong to? Can he really belong to that man there?’”
“Your father knew well that you were his son,” Shabalala said. “He had you close in his heart.”
“That’s why it pains me that I did nothing to save him.”
“You were not at the river.” Shabalala threw out a lifeline in the hope that it reached the boy’s hands. “The man who shot your father is the one who is at fault in this matter.”
“The wages of sin is death. I knew that and yet I did nothing because what Pa did gave me pleasure also. My mother will hear of this but she will not understand. She will never forgive.”
“Your mother loves you also.”
“She will be in disgrace because of me. Her family will cast her out if I go to jail.”
“You are loved by her.” Shabalala walked slowly toward the boy. “She will take you back into her arms. It is so.”
The wind rising up from the veldt was cold on Emmanuel’s face. Even Shabalala, with his breathtaking physical speed, would not be able to reach the melancholy boy in time to stop him from testing his angel’s wings.
“You’ll tell her I’m sorry, hey, Shabalala? You’ll say to her that I know we will meet one day on the beautiful shore.”
“Nkosana…” Shabalala sprinted toward the boy he’d seen stumble and fall as a child. His hands were outstretched with the mute promise: “Hold on to me and I will keep you safe from harm.”
“Stay well,” Louis said, and stepped backward off the cliff and into the Lord’s embrace. There was the dry snap of branches, then the breath of the wind as it stirred the silence.