The Sunday Hangman

by James McClure

  “This uncle could have been—” the Colonel began to say.

  “Looked like his sister, plus he had a passport. And wouldn’t old man Vasari have known a blood relative?”

  “You made other checks, just in case?”

  “Put it this way, sir: I’m quite satisfied there’s no bloody Italian anywhere near this place. All we’ve done is double-prove what we knew already. I don’t see this ex-POW as a suspect any longer either: paying the money was one thing, but carrying out a murder a whole year later doesn’t sound right anymore. A man like that wouldn’t take such a high risk, not in his position.”

  The Colonel said carefully, “Now—er—what if I suggested we brought in some more men on the job, and made sure you were right on that last—er—business? I hear you told Marais he could get back on the scissors case, which leaves only you and your Bantu.”

  “If you like,” Kramer sighed, leafing through the folios of Strydom’s message. Then he froze. On the last page was a postscript:

  PLSE DNT FORGET MEMO REQD

  B/SGT M. ZONDI MONDAY. C.S

  “But what’s the matter, sir? Have you lost faith in the efficiency of your subordinates? We sweat our guts out and—”

  “It’s not—”

  “Jesus, that’s what it sounds like!” Kramer snapped, goading the old sod, yet knowing he’d have to give in afterward.

  There was a shocked silence, then Colonel Muller spoke sternly and very coldly: “You do realize, Lieutenant Kramer, that your attitude is not necessarily in the best interests of the department?”

  “Uh huh,” acknowledged Kramer, making the most of this while it lasted, and remembering Strydom’s exact words. “It could have far-reaching effects.”

  “First you agree to a full-scale operation, and now you’re behaving like this? What’s going on, hey? You tell me!”

  “Ach, something’s just come in to change my mind.”

  “You bastard!” Colonel Muller laughed, with a warmth that surprised Kramer. “You bloody devious old bastard! For a while you were really giving me a bad time there; I thought you’d cracked. One day I’ll get you back, hey? That’s a promise! But you’d best get weaving now. Good luck!”

  And the line went dead, dropping a weight of trust on Kramer’s shoulders that made it impossible for him to lift the receiver again and call his own bluff.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  The light from outside became dimmer. He went over to the door to thumb the switch, nearly asked after Zondi, but returned to the desk and picked up the Telex. A subheading caught his eye: JUDICIAL HANGING AS SUICIDE.

  He slumped down and began to skim the annoying capitals.

  FM T NEW YORK TIMES O 6TH APRIL 1926. T ROOM WAS ABT 35FT HIGH, 25FT LONG AND 25FT WIDE. T WALLS WR PAINTED A LT GREEN. TWO HIGH-POWERED ELECTRIC LIGHTS WR SUSPENDED FM T CEILING AND ANOTHER BRILLIANT LT WAS ON T WALL. IN T FAR CORNER STOOD WARDEN SCOTT. BENEATH HIS FOOT WAS A PLUNGER SIMILAR TO THOSE ATTACHED TO GONGS ON T FRONT PLATFORMS O STREETCARS. (MISS A BIT. C.S.) IMMEDIATELY ON HIS RIGHT AS HE ENTERED IS A CLOSET WH CONTAINS T DEATH MECHANISM USED BY T STATE O CONNECTICUT IN HER EXECUTIONS. TO ONE END O T SOFT ROPE, WH GOES UP THRU A HOLE IN T CEILING, IS A WT CAREFULLY BALANCED, IN THIS CASE, AGST T 135LB O CHAPMAN’S FRAIL BODY. ON T OTHER END, INSIDE T DEATH CHAMBER, WAS T NOOSE, WH WAS HELD BY A HOOK IN T WALL AND, AS IT WAS BEHIND CHAPMAN AS HE ENTERED THE ROOM, IT WAS PROBABLY NOT SEEN BY HIM. T WT IS HELD 3FT ABOVE T FLOOR LEVEL (VARIES O COURSE. C.S.) AND IS CONNECTED BY A STEEL ROD TO T PLUNGER AT T POINT WHERE T WARDEN STANDS.

  WHEN IT WAS FIRST INSTALLED T CONDEMNED MAN UPON ENTERING T CHAMBER STOOD UPON A SMALL TRAP IN T FLOOR. HIS WT RELEASED A QUANTITY OF BUCKSHOT WH ROLLED SLOWLY DOWN A SLIGHT INCLINE UNTIL THEIR WT RELEASED T TRIGGER WH HELD T WEIGHT. IT WAS DECIDED, HOWEVER, TT THIS METHOD O EXECUTION WAS ILLEGAL, AS IT VIRTUALLY COMPELLED T PRISONER TO COMMIT SUICIDE, AND IT WAS ABANDONED FOR T PRESENT APPARATUS. FIFTEEN SECONDS AFTER CHAPMAN ENTERED T ROOM THERE WAS A SUDDEN CLICK AS T TRIGGER RELEASED T WEIGHT AND HIS BODY SHOT UPWARD. SAVE FOR T CLICK THERE WAS NOT A SOUND. T BODY HUNG SUSPENDED AT A HT OF 12FT. T NECK VERTEBRAE HAD SNAPPED AND DEATH HD BEEN PRACTICALLY INSTANTANEOUS.

  (IN WHAT WAY IS THIS DIFFERENT TO A MAN WHO TAKES T FIRST STEP TOWARD MURDERING HIS FELLOW BEING ANYWHERE? DOES NOT BUCKSHOT START TO ROLL FOR HIM TOO? I PUT THIS IN SO YOU CAN TELL HANS WHAT YOU THINK. C.S.)

  What Kramer thought as he finished the last page would not have pleased either of them, and came nowhere near touching on the philosophical point which Strydom had raised. Yet once his indignation had passed, and he’d rescued the crumpled sheets from the wastebin, he realized that the Doc had, however inadvertently, given him a nudge in a new direction. This brief description of an execution had evoked in him a sense of the cold, impersonal part played by the man with his foot on the plunger. He began to visualize a hangman, to dismiss the notion of revenge, and see that the role might be a form of fascination with power.

  Willie Boshoff looked up from the crate in the old storeroom and watched Ferreira returning in an apparent fury from the hotel across the yard.

  “What did I tell you?” the hotel manager stormed. “It was him! Him making bloody snide allegations. I’ll sue the bastard if he ever tries that again!”

  “Lieutenant Kramer?”

  “Who else? Didn’t I say he’d gone all po-faced when I told him about the wops this morning? Didn’t I say that the next thing would be him accusing me of bloody lying?”

  “Take it easy, hey?” soothed Willie, lifting out a stack of old 78’s in their paper covers. “Sarge Jonkers let it slip that this investigation, whatever it’s about, is pretty big.”

  “Then why the hell pick on me?” Ferreira demanded.

  “True, he must be getting a little desperate,” Willie joked—and then checked anxiously to see if he’d pushed his new-found friendship too far.

  But Ferreira was already intent on hurling everything out of a dusty washstand slumped in the corner. Metal mousetraps, light fittings, shoe boxes filled with brownish snapshots, two lampshades, a cigarette-card album, and a pile of piano music—half-eaten by termites—hit the floor.

  “I am going to find that register,” Ferreira muttered, tugging savagely at a pile of moldy rugs, trying to get at the squashed cardboard cartons beneath them. “I’m going to find it and stuff it right in his gob.”

  “Did you tell him we’d been looking for it?”

  “Why should I’ve?”

  “Well, I mean.…”

  “Huh! Then he’d have thought that he really had me on the bloody run! No, let him sweat a bit,”

  “Then maybe I—”

  “So you only came down here to rook a free lunch out of me?” cut in Ferreira, very sarcastically. “I’ll not forget that in a hurry the next time you offer to lend me a helping hand.”

  Then he gestured with two fingers, to show he didn’t mean what he’d just said, and calmed down. It was difficult, once you had got to know him better, to understand why he and Jonkers were such big pals: not only could he be quite witty, but he was a nice, generous bloke as well.

  Willie gave him a menthol king-size and they lit up.

  “What did the Lieutenant actually say, Piet?”

  “I didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything, my friend. All he got out was some crack about me doing favors for him ‘and who else?’ by remembering the woman. How do you like that?”

  “Ah,” said Willie. “I see. Still, he’s got to check every point, I suppose. You mustn’t take it personal.”

  They continued the search. When you had a suitable excuse for it, there were few things more interesting than rummaging about among other people’s belongings, and the ones they’d forgotten all about made the best goodie mines of the lot. There was also a sense of history and heritage to be found amid the cobwebs and mildew that made you envious of anyone with a heap of rubbish in their yard. Willie’s sole relic of his own past was an elastic belt with a twisted-snake clasp, n
ow barely big enough to fit round his thigh, never mind his waist, with which he’d been presented one Christmas at Underbrook Boys’ Home.

  “I think I’ve got it!” Ferreira announced triumphantly, upsetting a box of dented Ping-Pong balls as he pulled at something on top of the tool cupboard. “It’s in with all the old invoices in this sodding ruddy case under this pile of crap here.” He heaved at the case’s handle and it snapped off.

  “Need some help, Piet?”

  “Ta, but I’ll manage, thanks.”

  Willie reached back into the bottom of the crate and took another look at the small magazines he had just uncovered there. They were called Lilliput, after some kids’ story he had heard about in General Knowledge, and yet didn’t seem very childish when you tried to read the English they were written in. He flicked through a less buckled copy, searching for cartoons without captions, and was startled by the sight of a naked woman who had allowed herself to be photographed. She was beautiful.

  “Come on, Willie, I’ve got the book open,” Ferreira called to him. “Let’s see what their names were, and show that clever bugger how to investigate.”

  So beautiful it scared him so that he trembled. Then Constable Willie Boshoff did a terrible thing.

  Distracted by the suddenness and ferocity of the storm lashing Witklip, Kramer abandoned his ruminations, rose from the desk, and went through into the charge office to borrow a match—a pretext, he knew, for asking again if there was any news of Zondi. Perhaps he should have sent someone out to look for him, yet it had seemed a course of action fraught with unpleasant possibilities, whether or not the little idiot had got himself into trouble.

  “Sergeant Zondi is coming,” Mamabola informed him, turning from a window steamed up by the fug of police, public, and a goat.

  “About bloody time! Is the young boss with him?”

  Mamabola flinched as lightning struck close by. “No, sir. Goodluck suggests he may be at the hotel and has been captured there by the floodwaters. Hau, this is happening so quickly!”

  “Ja, at least God doesn’t bugger around,” said Kramer, all too aware of the time that had been wasted that day.

  He opened the door and stepped out onto the verandah, goose-pimpling in the hail-chilled air, and catching his breath as another fork of lightning blazed and banged. The raindrops were falling so hard they misted the lawn with splashes and the dirt pathway danced pink. Anything more than twenty yards away was lost in a luminous, swaying grayness, while water sheeted from the glutted gutter overhead, obscuring his view of the gate.

  Walking through all this, really taking his time and soaked to the skin, came Zondi.

  “Run, you fool!” bellowed Kramer.

  Then, having moved to where he could see better, the truth of the situation came home to him. Mickey was dragging that leg a pace at a time, shuddering uncontrollably as his weight came upon it, clenching his fists tighter, and coming on. He staggered.

  Kramer flicked his cigarette aside. “Wait, Mickey!”

  “No, boss; men would see.”

  As faint as these words were, a hiss in the hissing of the rain, they halted Kramer like a shout.

  He backed away from the verandah’s edge. Zondi veered to the left, cutting across the grass beneath the flagpole, missing the path to the steps by miles. Then his faltering course made sense: he was trying to avoid the window.

  His collapse came just as he reached to pull himself up by one of the posts supporting the verandah roof. But he didn’t fall: Kramer grabbed the outstretched hands and swung him up, let go and altered his hold, cradling the poor bloody idiot in his arms.

  “Mick?”

  Zondi murmured, “No, boss.…”

  Kramer took a step toward the door with him. Then he retreated to where Zondi had tried to climb up, and laid his burden down very gently beside a puddle on the verandah floor. After dabbing away the blood from a bite mark on the lower lip, he went inside.

  “Hey, you two!” he said, beckoning to Mamabola and Luthuli. “Something is the matter with Sergeant Zondi—you’d best fetch him into my office. He’s lying out there like a drunk.”

  They carried him in and Luthuli clucked gravely.

  “Where we put a boy in here?” he asked.

  “On those dagga sacks,” Kramer directed, pointing to the bulky marijuana haul lying labeled in the corner. “Have you got any brandy?”

  Mamabola nearly had his supercilious smile punched off him, but came up with the answer nonetheless. “Sergeant Jonkers usually procures it from that drawer, sir.”

  “Get me a mug.”

  While the tin cup was being fetched, Luthuli fussed about, arranging Zondi comfortably on the bags of dried leaf. The patient seemed not too bad; it was always difficult to gauge the color.

  “Here,” Kramer ordered presently, handing half a cup of Oude Meester to Luthuli. “Start getting that down him.”

  Zondi choked and sat up, pressing the cup away.

  “Drink it, Sergeant!” said Kramer from behind the desk.

  So Zondi drank it, coughed, beat his chest with one hand, and subsided. He thanked the men for their help, and added, as they withdrew, some Zulu witticism with un-Zulu squeaks in it.

  “What makes that noise?” Kramer asked.

  “Igundane.”

  “Never heard of it. But tell me, what in God’s name happened to you today, old son?” Kramer asked as he went over and half knelt by the dagga sacks.

  “Much happened, boss,” Zondi replied drowsily, his eyes closing. “Today I established that Izimu the witch doctor had committed a capital offense right here in.…”

  “Witklip? Who was involved?”

  “A baby. He stole the child of Mama Buza.”

  “Sleep, you old drunkard,” growled Kramer. “That is more than enough for now.”

  Then he rose and damn nearly danced for joy.

  15

  “KIDNAPPING?” WILLIE BOSHOFF said to Kramer, “is that the capital crime you have in mind, sir?” And he handed his glass back across the bar at Spa-kling Waters for a refill.

  Ferreira took the glass and snorted. “Ach, come on, Willie! Who the hell’s going to pay two cents’ ransom for a bloody piccanin?” He poured the tot. “Here, you put your own ice in. I’m doing you another double, Lieutenant, okay?”

  “Child-stealing,” said Kramer, before giving a nod.

  The squirt of the soda-water siphon made an amusing sound effect to go with the sudden infusion of blood that turned Willie’s face crimson.

  “Still got a lot to learn,” Ferreira stage-whispered wittily, passing Kramer his drink. “But he tries hard, Lieutenant, so you mustn’t be too tough on him, hey?”

  “I—I forgot for a moment, sir,” Willie stammered. “There’s so many of them and—”

  “Ja, enough to force old Jonkers into taking both his socks off,” Kramer said, then realized that not everyone might have heard of the Witklip computer. “You were just unlucky you didn’t join the force when I did, youngster. Then there were only the three: murder, rape, and treason—all straightforward.”

  “When was that?” Ferreira asked.

  “Mid-50’s or so.”

  “Really?” said Willie, much impressed.

  There the briefing lost impetus for the first time since Kramer had come bursting in, drenched by the last of the storm and tracking mud, about twenty minutes earlier. After an acrimonious start, caused by some indignity Ferreira felt he’d suffered, and remedied by a hearty slap on the back for initiative, it had seemed nothing would halt the reasoned flow. But now that the moment had arrived to actually make something of Zondi’s breakthrough, Kramer faltered. It wasn’t that he lacked material; his mind was sharp with new ideas, glittering theories, and a pricking of temporary oversights. It was simply that any attempt to think them into shape became like trying to arrange pins with a magnet—one move and the whole bloody lot leaped up in a willy-nilly clump, proving basic compatibility without achieving a sodding thing.
Eventually, on the basis of things being easier said than done, Kramer decided to gibber on and see what came of it.

  Willie was tapping ingenuously on the moldy, termite-ravaged hotel register that had so far been ignored as a remarkable piece of evidence, unearthed by sheer guts and determination.

  “Ja, let’s have a look,” obliged Kramer, clearing a space on the counter before him. “Not that I doubt your word, of course, gentlemen. That one name was enough.”

  & Master G. J. Vasari, Flat 27, 3 Bys St., Durban ignor A. C. F. Santelia, Via Civitavecchia 102, Milano

  He read each line twice, solely for the pleasure of seeing it down in black and white, and then allowed the book to flop shut.

  “Sorry the white ants ate the date and the room numbers off,” Ferreira apologized. “But coming first on the line, right by the edge, it was bound to happen, hey? Still, we’ve got an approximate date, I suppose.”

  “Doesn’t matter that much, man.”

  “What!” exclaimed Willie. “You’re not interested in these Italians anymore?”

  Kramer smiled. “Not to the same extent, now we’ve found another road to Rome that isn’t so full of blind alleys and bloody pitfalls.”

  “Christ, it makes your bloody head spin, doesn’t it?” remarked Ferreira, coming round to join them on the high stools. “Who could ever imagine such a thing? No wonder you first thought it was political!”

  “Hey?” said Willie, frowning. Of his many lapses that evening, this was the most forgivable.

  “Time we chuck out what’s irrelevant and see where we go from here,” Kramer suggested, as much to himself as to anyone else. “But before I do that, is there anything that strikes you immediately, gentlemen?”

  “Ja; you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by asking me about Izimu in the first place,” Ferreira answered with affected pique. “I did very good business out of that search, I can tell you! You should have been here, Willie, man; we all—”

  “Was it reported in any newspapers?” Kramer asked, not wanting to have this thrust down his neck again, but needing the information to wind up the first part of his argument.