A Beautiful Place to Die Read Online Free PDF

spoonfuls of cod-liver oil to a row of ragged children while Hansie slept the dense sleep of the village idiot, with his head propped against the morgue door.
    My team, Emmanuel thought. He stepped out of the shade and the headache hit him again. The thatched roof of the hut bled into the sky and the grass merged with the white walls of the buildings so that everything resembled a child’s watercolor. He pressed his palm hard over his eye socket, but the blur and the pain remained. By nightfall the headache would be a sharp splinter of hot light that shut down the eye completely. After the examination of the captain’s body was set up, he’d get a triple dose of aspirin from the sisters. A double dose for now and a single one he could chase with a shot of whiskey before bed. At least he knew where the liquor store was.
    “Asleep on duty.” Emmanuel gave Hansie a sharp tap on the shoulder. “I could write you up for that, Hepple.”
    Hansie jumped to attention to prove his alertness. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was resting my eyes,” he said, then caught sight of Zweigman. “What’s he doing here? I thought you went to fetch the Pretorius brothers.”
    “We got lost.” Emmanuel sidestepped Hansie and pushed the door to the morgue open. It was cool and dark inside. He looked over his shoulder and saw Zweigman walk over to the sisters, who were flushed and uncomfortable in front of the man whose confidence they’d betrayed.
    “Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette.” The white-haired German gave no indication he’d been co-opted by the police. “Will you please assist me?”
    “Yes, Doctor,” Sister Bernadette said. “Excuse us while we prepare the necessary things.”
    The sisters marched the children toward the main building, where black and brown faces pressed up against the glass windows. The whites-only wing was empty. This afternoon the nonwhites would have something to tell their visitors. “The captain, ma big boss man Pretorius, he’s dead!”
    “Doctor?” Hansie was fully awake and glaring at Zweigman. “That’s the old Jew. He’s not a doctor. He sells beans to kaffirs and coloureds.”
    “He’s qualified to look at natives, coloureds and dead people,” Emmanuel said, and took refuge inside the darkened morgue. The pulsing behind his eye eased off a fraction but not enough. He switched on the examination light. Hansie and Shabalala stepped in and took up position against the wall. When the sisters got back, he’d ask for the painkillers right away. There was no way he’d make it through the examination with the harsh white light in the stifling mortuary.
    He pulled the sheet back to reveal the captain’s uniformed body. Zweigman looked ready to deposit the contents of his stomach onto the concrete floor. His knuckles strained white against the leather handle of his medical bag.
    “Were you friends with the captain?” Emmanuel asked.
    “We were known to each other.” Zweigman’s voice was half its normal strength, the guttural accent more pronounced than before. “An acquaintance that, it appears, has come to a most abrupt end.”
    Zweigman regained his color and started to clear a side counter with robotic precision. Was there the smallest hint of satisfaction in Zweigman’s comment about an abrupt end?
    “Not friends, then,” Emmanuel said.
    “There are few whites in this town that would claim me as a friend,” Zweigman said without turning around. He calmly rolled up his sleeves to his elbows and snapped open his medical kit.
    “Why’s that?”
    “I did not come here on the first Trekboer wagons and I do not understand how or even why one would play the game of rugby.”
    Emmanuel shaded his eyes against the naked light to get a clearer look at Zweigman. His headache pounded behind his eyeball. Zweigman had gone from shock to calm in the blink of an eye.
    “Where to, Doctor?” Sister Angelina entered the morgue with a huge bowl of hot water in her muscular arms. A