Part 19 (1/2)
Aggie stopped in front of a closed door and rummaged in her ap.r.o.n pocket. It took her an age to fit the key into the lock and turn it with her arthritic hands. She pushed the door open and motioned him in without a word. Emmanuel wondered if the black maid was mute as well as deaf.
He viewed the room before he disturbed the contents. It was a large, pleasant s.p.a.ce with a neatly made bed, bedside table, dark wooden wardrobe, and writing desk positioned by a window that looked out over the front garden. It was another example of the clean, ordered s.p.a.ces Captain Pretorius specialized in.
Emmanuel moved to the bedside table and pulled the drawer open. It contained a black calfskin-covered Bible and nothing else. He picked up the Bible and examined the well-thumbed pages. The good book wasn't just for show. Captain Pretorius read the words of the Lord on a regular basis. There was no Bible at the stone hut, however-just a camera stolen from a sniveling pervert and an envelope with something worth p.i.s.sing on a man for.
Emmanuel turned the Bible upside down and gave it a shake to see if anything fell out.
”Ayy...” It was the maid, Aggie, scandalized by his rough treatment of The Word. Seems she wasn't mute or blind, just reluctant to use her dwindling energy stores on talking. Emmanuel gently closed the Bible and turned it the right way up. With the old maid looking on, he flipped through the pages as if he were a preacher seeking pearls of wisdom for an upcoming sermon.
Emmanuel put the Bible back into the drawer. There was nothing in the book but the word of the Almighty. The bed was made up with a plaid blanket over clean yellow sheets. He lifted the pillow. A pair of blue cotton pajamas nestled underneath. The maid gave another soft gasp and Emmanuel replaced the pillow exactly as he'd found it. The room already had the feel of a shrine, with everything in it destined to remain untouched until the captain returned on Judgment Day.
The wardrobe was a handsome piece of furniture with double doors and mother-of-pearl handles. Two ironed police uniforms on wooden hangers hung side by side. Two pairs of s.h.i.+ny brown boots glowed with polish and waited for the captain's size-13 feet to fill them.
”Patience,” Emmanuel told himself. The room was locked for a reason. He opened the writing desk's top drawer and his heart began to pound. Inside, a fat police file lay next to a slim hardcover book. He undid the tie and flicked the file open. The first page was an incident report filed in August '51 in which the luscious Tottie James was subjected to a gasping noise coming from outside her bedroom window. No surprises there. Emmanuel guessed that most men made gasping noises when she was in the immediate vicinity.
He flipped to the end of the reports and failed to find a humorous angle in the description of Della, the pastor's daughter, who had been grabbed from behind in her own room and held facedown on the floor while the perpetrator ground his hips against her backside. Peeping Tom implied distance, a furtive individual coveting the desired object from afar. Physical a.s.sault resulting in bruising and a cracked rib was another matter entirely.
Tonight he'd read the file in detail and try to get some idea of the man who committed the offenses and why the captain and his lieutenant failed to find and apprehend him.
Emmanuel put the police file down and examined the hardcover book in the drawer. Small enough to fit into a jacket pocket, the slim volume was a high-cla.s.s item. He felt the smooth leather cover. The t.i.tle intrigued him: Celestial Pleasures. Celestial Pleasures.
He opened the hand-cut pages at random and skimmed a couple of lines: Plum Blossom stretched out on the plush sedan, her only covering a red and gold ta.s.sel that hung from her exquisite neck. Wisps of opium smoke escaped her parted lips and rose up into the air. Plum Blossom stretched out on the plush sedan, her only covering a red and gold ta.s.sel that hung from her exquisite neck. Wisps of opium smoke escaped her parted lips and rose up into the air.
Curiosity got the better of him and he skipped to the middle. There was a line drawing of a naked Oriental girl with downcast eyes kneeling on a cus.h.i.+on. Cla.s.sy, Emmanuel thought, and edging on literary, but a stroke book nonetheless. He slipped it into his pocket.
”Hmmm...” Aggie was alerting him to the fact she'd seen him take the book.
Emmanuel kept his back turned. He was leaving the Pretorius house with the police file and the book no matter how outraged the deaf servant might be.
The rest of the drawers revealed the captain's love of starched unders.h.i.+rts, plaid pajamas and olive drab socks. He moved back to the bed, checked underneath it, and found not a speck of dust.
Emmanuel approached the generously padded black maid, who was resting her weight against the doorjamb. It was nine-thirty in the morning and she looked ready for a nap.
”What do you do in the house?” he shouted in Zulu. Holding a conversation in English was likely to send the maid into a coma.
”Clean,” she replied in her native language. ”And keep the key.”
”What key?”
She rummaged in her ap.r.o.n pocket and pulled out the key to the spare room. She displayed it in the palm of her hand but didn't say anything.
”You keep the key to this room?”
The maid nodded.
”How did the captain get in?”
”He asked for the key.”
Aggie the trusted servant was the gatekeeper, but how did Willem Pretorius gain access when he came home late from fis.h.i.+ng?
”Did he wake you and get the key when he came home after dark?”
”No. He said where I must leave the key.”
”You left the key on a table,” Emmanuel said. ”Somewhere like that?”
”He said where I must leave the key,” she repeated, and waved him out of the room impatiently. She was ready to move on.
Emmanuel stepped into the corridor.
”Where did you leave the key?” he asked.
”In the flowerpot, behind the sugar sack, in the teapot. Wherever he said I must put it.”
”Really?” Emmanuel marveled at the captain's relentless need for secrecy. He acted like an undercover policeman whose real ident.i.ty was his greatest liability.
”Why do you think he changed the place for the key?” he asked while Aggie pushed the key into the lock with her gnarled hands.
The worn-out old woman gave a shrug that implied she'd long since given up trying to understand the mysterious ways of the white man.
”The baas says, 'Put it in the teapot,' I put it in the teapot.”
That was the end of the matter as far as the maid was concerned. A servant didn't question the master or try to make sense of why the missus needed the s.h.i.+rts hung on the line a certain way.
”Aggie!” Mrs. Pretorius called from the back veranda. ”Aggie?”
The black maid didn't hear the missus. She was busy turning the key in the lock with as much speed as her brittle fingers allowed.
”I will go outside and have tea with the nkosikati,” Emmanuel said, and walked through to the back of the house. If he waited for Aggie it would be lunchtime when they finally made it outside.
He stopped by the display cabinet running along the side of the large sitting room and picked up the picture of Frikkie van Brandenburg and his family. He was used to seeing the dour clergyman, the Afrikaner oracle, as an older man with a furrowed brow and fire in his eyes but even in his youth the unsmiling Frikkie looked ready to set the world to rights.
What would van Brandenburg make of his daughter's family? Dagga-smoking Louis, Erich the arsonist and Willem the deceiver were all tied to him by blood and marriage. Would Frikkie be proud or would he doubt, for just a moment, that the Afrikaner nation was set on a higher plane than the rest of humanity?
Emmanuel replaced the photograph and continued toward the kitchen, where a younger black maid set up the tea service on a silver tray.
”Sawubona...” He said good morning to the girl and stepped onto the vine-covered veranda. Mrs. Pretorius waved him over to a table overlooking a small vegetable garden. A garden boy, a squat man in his thirties, weeded the rows and turned the earth with a hand fork.
Emmanuel sat down opposite Mrs. Pretorius and placed the police file on the ground. He kept the book in his pocket. The young black maid came out with the tea service and set it down on the table before she disappeared back into the house.
”How do you take your tea, Detective Cooper?” Mrs. Pretorius asked.
”White, no sugar,” he replied, and studied the late Willem Pretorius's wife. She was beautiful in a refined way. There were no rough edges to her despite the steel he sensed within.
”You have a lovely garden,” Emmanuel said, and accepted his tea. This would be his first and only chance to get a bead on the captain's home life.
”My father was a gardener. He believed that with G.o.d's help and hard work, it was possible to create Eden here on earth.”
”I thought your father was a minister. An exceptionally well-known one.”