Part 29 (1/2)
”What is it?”
”My wife she says this calendar is a woman's calendar.”
”It was the captain's. I found it at the stone hut on King's farm.”
”No.” Shabalala fidgeted like an awkward schoolboy. ”It is a calendar used by women to...um...”
Shabalala's wife stepped out from the kitchen and picked up the calendar.
”How silly can a grown man be?” she asked Shabalala with a click of her tongue. She pointed to the red-ringed days. ”For one week a month a woman flows like a river. You understand? This is what this calendar is saying.”
”Are you sure?”
”I am a woman and I know such things.”
Emmanuel was stunned by the simplicity of the explanation. It never would have occurred to him in a hundred years of looking. The calendar was about the woman and her cycle, not an elaborate puzzle of illegal pickup dates and activities. The camera, the calendar and the photos were all linked to the shadowy little wife, whoever she was.
”Thank you,” he said, then turned to Shabalala. ”We have to find the woman before the Security Branch beats a confession from the man in the cells and then throws all the other evidence out the window.”
”The old Jew,” Shabalala suggested. ”He and his wife also know many of the coloured people.”
”He won't speak,” Emmanuel said. ”But I know someone who might.”
Emmanuel crossed the street to the burned-out sh.e.l.l of Anton's garage and Shabalala set up watch in the vacant lot next to Poppies General Store. If Zweigman took flight during Emmanuel's talk with Anton, the black policeman had orders to follow and observe from a distance.
Emmanuel entered the work site and the coloured mechanic looked up from the wheelbarrow of blackened bricks he was cleaning with a wire brush. Slowly, a sense of order was being imposed on the charred ruins of the once-flouris.h.i.+ng business.
”Detective.” Anton wiped his sooty fingers clean with a rag before shaking hands. ”What brings you to these parts?”
”You know most of the coloured women around here?” Emmanuel didn't waste time with preliminaries. If he didn't get anything from the mechanic, then he'd move on to the old Jew.
”Most. This got to do with the molester case?”
”Yes,” Emmanuel lied. ”I want to find out what set the victims apart from the other coloured women in town.”
”Well...” Anton continued moving bricks to the wheelbarrow. ”They were all young and single and respectable. There are one or two women, I won't mention names, who are free and easy with their favors. Molester didn't go after them.”
”What about Tottie? You know anything about her private life?”
”She hasn't got one. Her father and brothers have her locked down so tight a man's lucky to get even a minute alone with her.”
”No rumors about her taking up with a man from outside the coloured community?”
The mechanic stopped his work and wiped drops of sweat from his top lip. His green eyes narrowed.
”What you really asking me, Detective?”
Emmanuel went with the flow. There was nothing to gain now from being shy or subtle.
”You know any coloured man who practices the old ways? A man who might take a bride-price for his daughter?”
Anton laughed with relief. ”No dice. Even Harry with the mustard gas would never swap his daughters for a couple of cows.”
It was highly likely that the deal, any deal with native overtones, was done in secret to avoid the scorn of a mixed-race community that worked tirelessly to bury all connection to the black part of the family tree.
”Has any coloured man come into money that can't be explained?”
”Just me.” Anton grinned and the gold filling in his front tooth glinted. ”Got my last payment a couple of days ago, but I don't have a piece of paper to prove where it came from.”
The secretive Afrikaner captain and the coloured man who'd bargained for s.e.xual access to his daughter were not likely to advertise their venture in any way. Only a traditional black man, steeped in the old ways, would talk openly about the bride-price paid for his daughter.
”Okay.” Emmanuel abandoned the line of questioning and backtracked. ”Have there been rumors about any of the women in town or out on the farms taking up with a man from outside the community?”
Anton carefully selected a charred brick and began scrubbing in earnest. ”We love rumors and whispers,” he said. ”Sometimes it feels like the only thing that keeps us together.”
”Tell me.”
”If Granny Mariah hears I repeated this, she will hang my t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es out to dry on her back fence. I'm not exaggerating. That woman is fierce.”
”I promise she won't get that information from me.”
”Couple of months back...” Anton chose to talk to the brick in his hand. ”Tottie let slip to some other women that she thought the old Jew and Davida were close. Too close.”
”Any truth in it?”
”Well, Davida was over at the Zweigmans' house all hours of the day and night. She walked in and out whenever she pleased and it didn't seem right, one of us being so comfortable with whites.”
”Did anyone ask her what she was doing there?” He couldn't connect the heated exchange of bodily fluids with the shy brown mouse and the protective old Jew. His relations.h.i.+p with her seemed paternal, not s.e.xual.
”Reading books, sewing, baking, you name it, she always had an explanation for being there.” Anton worked a lump of ash out of the brick's surface with his fingernail. ”I was sweet on Davida at the time. We went walking and I even got some kisses in but she changed, Davida did. It was like she went into a sh.e.l.l once the talking started. She wasn't like you see her today, all covered up and quiet. The girl had some spark back then.”
”Really?”
”Oh, yes. Beautiful wavy hair down to the middle of her back; all natural, not straightened. At socials she was the first one up to dance and the last one to sit down. Granny had her hands full with her, I'll tell you.”
The description didn't remotely match the cloistered woman hiding under a head scarf. But the fact that the shy brown mouse once had long black hair did make her a possible match for the model in the captain's photographs. What was her body like under the shapeless clothes that hung from her like sackcloth?
”What happened?” Emmanuel asked.
”I still can't figure it,” Anton said. ”She got through the molester thing okay and then one day the hair is all gone and she won't walk with me anymore.”
”When did this change take place?”
”April sometime.” Anton threw the damaged brick into a wheelbarrow. ”Zweigman and his wife nursed Davida through a sickness and when she came out, well, nothing was the same as it was before.”