stands that hawked single mangoes and oranges. A Mercedes Benz in that environment would not last long. If they found a metal carcass, they’d be lucky.
*
“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
*
“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
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