The Sunday Hangman

by James McClure

  Dorothy Jele came into the yard with the hipless walk of a white woman. She wore a starched uniform, an immaculate white cap, and spotlessly white tennis shoes. Her skin was glossy with good living; her hands were not chapped. The other servants smiled up at her as if this would make their day easier.

  “The master said you wished to see me,” she said in accented English. “What is your business?”

  Zondi studied her broad face, noting the tightness of the small mouth. The puffy eyes gazed on him with the fixity of a slow mind imitating authority; the arms barricaded a flat chest.

  “Forgive me if I bring you from your work, my sister,” Zondi said humbly in Zulu. “Already I have heard how greatly valued you are by your employers.”

  “From my master?” she asked, her expression softening.

  “He instructed me to treat you with great respect.”

  This brought her hands down to smooth the sides of her uniform. She glanced over her shoulder at the other servants, frowned at a young housemaid who was looking their way, and took out a Yale key.

  “Come with me,” she said. “I have a more suitable place than this for our business. Is it more registration?”

  “A few particulars.”

  They started toward the far corner of the yard.

  “You are lame. I suppose that’s why you have been given this job.”

  Zondi smiled.

  And she nodded wisely, in the way stupid people do when well pleased with themselves.

  Dorothy Jele’s room was, he felt quite certain, very different from the others in the same row. Basically, it had the same cement floor, barred window, and whitewashed brick walls, and the electric light was possibly common to them all. There was nothing purely functional or improvised about its furnishings, however—and he thought fleetingly of his own packing-case dresser and of the lines Miriam had scratched in the rammed earth underfoot to simulate wooden boards. The carpet, bed, wardrobe, dressing table, table, chairs, easy chair, curtains, pictures, mirror, cabinet radio, and china ornaments all spoke of thirty years’ unbroken and devoted service, rewarded on an exceptionally lavish scale. Not only was nothing secondhand, but every item had been so cherished that it still looked brand-new—even the radio, which dated back to the fifties, and would have been among the first enticements chosen by her employers. This newness gave the room a shoplike unreality to add to its dreamy, contradictory feel; contradictory in the sense it didn’t have the sharp, acid smell of whites that you usually associated with such arrangements. Although, on closer inspection, the passage of time was evident in one corner, in a picture frame filled with the sort of postcard-sized, full-length portraits that families had taken of themselves at a stall in the Trekkersburg beer hall. In each of these Dorothy Jele stood alone against the painted backdrop of skyscrapers and thundercloud, and in each she was several years older.

  “My, this is a fine room,” Zondi exclaimed, bending to admire a two-bar electric fire. “Never have I seen one so complete and wonderful.” And that was true.

  “I am pleased.”

  “How fortunate you are, my sister! For most of us, there is little beauty in our lives.”

  He was watching her face now, a little sickened by her delight in his words—even by the way her fingertips stroked the polished tabletop, moving in little circles on its smooth mahogany skin.

  “Have you noticed the bedside lamp?”

  “Hau, I have indeed!” he responded, coming to the high point of his flattery: “And are all these riches truly yours?”

  “I hope so,” sighed Dorothy Jele.

  The wistful reply was so unexpected that Zondi needed a moment to grasp its implications; even then, he spoke before realizing them fully.

  “What? You do not know?”

  She shrugged, her face clouding.

  “If they have not said, why have you not asked them?”

  “I—I do not like to.”

  “Why?”

  “They may think me greedy.”

  “And so?”

  “Or that I am going from them,” she mumbled, looking down at her reflection. “It is better to wait and please them by working hard every day. When I am old, then they must tell me, because it is promised I will move into a hut that—”

  “Woman, is your life a deposit?”

  “That is insolent! You have no right to speak to me in such a way!”

  “Then how,” said Zondi appalled by what he had heard, “should I address the foolish wretch who took Mama—” But he stopped there, unable to see how anyone quite so stupid could have been quite so cunning when it had come to framing the witch doctor for the crime she had herself committed.

  Much later that morning, just as Willie and Zondi arrived back in the station commander’s office, Kramer’s call to Central Prison, Pretoria, was returned. The prison had insisted on ringing back, being understandably concerned that he should be who he said he was, and it had probably been checking on the Witklip telephone number, among other things. This did not mean, however, that the captain delegated to pass on their reply to his queries was particularly forthcoming. He sounded like a man who wouldn’t give you a cup of sand in the desert.

  “Captain Theron here. Your answer is no.”

  “That’s all? What about those other connections I asked you blokes to—”

  “No,” Theron repeated.

  Kramer looked, at Willie, who was standing with Zondi on the far side of the desk, and asked, “I have a few questions about hanging techniques I’d like to have verified, if possible. Could you tell me what procedure is followed?”

  “Exactly as laid down.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “The judge says, ‘You will be hanged by the neck until you are dead,’ and we do it.”

  Theron put his phone down.

  “Bugger me,” said Kramer, “that was a great help. What have you to report? Zondi?”

  “Dorothy Jele says many white bosses spoke to her about the sighting of Izimu. It would be impossible to—”

  “But I’ve got something, sir!” blurted out Willie. “I was talking to my landlord—old Mr. Haagner—just casually, like you said I must do it, and he mentioned that Mr. de Bruin had been among those who were away during the war. He knows it wasn’t fighting, but it had something to do with the government.”

  “You didn’t push it too hard?”

  “Hell, I hope not, sir. Also, I’ve been down to Spa-kling and all the committee’s there already. De Bruin, Van der Heever, Swanepoel, Crowe, Wantenaar, Fouche—the whole lot of them. They’re making up games for the kids, and George said it would take all afternoon.”

  “Piet?”

  “Er—he isn’t back yet.”

  Kramer got up and adjusted the wall clock to synchronize with his own watch: it was now one o’clock exactly. He turned and was stricken to see Zondi’s leg shuddering in spasm—this had been hidden by the desk before.

  “We move in one hour, so get Mamabola and Luthuli on standby. Show them your drawing. Is there anyone who can mind the shop?”

  “Nyembezi, who’s on nights. Actually, he’s more use than old Goodluck.”

  “Wake him and swap them round. Try the hotel and see if Piet’s back.”

  “But I’ve only just—”

  “Ring him, damn it! And you, Sergeant—outside.”

  Zondi’s exit was painful to watch. Once in the area behind the charge office counter, Kramer steered him into the half-empty storeroom, closed the door behind him, and raised a fist.

  “This is what you deserve, Mickey!”

  “For, boss?”

  “For behaving like a half-witted kaffir, you stupid bastard! What the hell are you doing to yourself? I’m phoning the DS at Brandspruit and Mamabola’s taking you in—and I don’t want any arguments. I don’t want to know. Got it?”

  They looked at each other.

  Kramer said, “All right, but here you’ll stay until this thing is over. I’ll get them to fix it up for yo
u before we go. More brandy?”

  “Hau, please not for me!”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “You would not think that, boss,” Zondi murmured slyly, as he slid slowly down the wall, “if you had my headache.”

  With a lopsided smile, Kramer left the room and gave instructions to Luthuli for a mattress and some blankets to be found somewhere. And then, realizing there’d be no red tape involved, he also told him to send for a good witch doctor.

  “Sir?” interrupted Willie, displaying agitation. “Piet isn’t back and his barman wants to know about closing time.”

  “Why ask me, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Well—um—Sarge is on the committee, too, see? And when all the blokes have to be there for the afternoon, he sort of tends to look the other way, if you—”

  “Fine,” said Kramer. “I’m not looking.”

  Not there at any rate, and the happier the committee stayed for the afternoon, the better.

  17

  ZONDI KNEW HE was dreaming. He’d meant to say many things to Dorothy Jele, and now he was saying them. He chided her for thinking that a careless mother was necessarily an uncaring one. He reminded her of the sweet fever turning to delirium as the search had drawn closer. He laughed at her virtues as a true Christian woman, a woman who couldn’t be made to tell a lie. She shrieked back that it wasn’t her, wasn’t her. She shrieked and shrieked and coughed and whispered and there was someone standing over him.

  He had still to be dreaming. The man wore a lounge suit and there were inflated pigs’ bladders in his hair. His squint transfixed you, his breath was aromatic. Herbs. He was gone again.

  Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy Jele.

  Someone else in the room.

  “Have I woken you?” whispered Goodluck Luthuli, “Are my eyes not closed?” Zondi snapped, noticing he’d succumbed to the peevishness of an invalid. “I am sorry, my brother. What time is it? Is the Lieutenant—”

  “They have been away the whole afternoon, Sergeant. There is no sign of their return yet. I heard you were restless, so I brought you this.” Luthuli held out a small horn with a wooden stopper. “It is the medicine left by Jafini Bhengu. He was most painstaking in its preparation, and ground up the ingredients to a special fineness. He says it would be better if you went to the nuns’ clinic, but this will bring you relief until then.”

  Groggily, Zondi took the horn, uncorked it, and saw that it contained a gray powder. “All afternoon, you say? Then the sun is going down?”

  “Soon. Is there anything else you would have brought to you?”

  Zondi’s attention had been taken by the way Luthuli was tamping down the tobacco in his cheap black pipe. He glared at the pipe, annoyed by the insistence of its detail: it was the kind with a perforated metal cap which fitted over the bowl, and there was a little silver chain, attached at one end to the pipestem, to keep this cap from getting lost. When he began to hate the pipe, his own delirium seemed not far off.

  “A farm is not hard to search. The workers will know all the far corners, and they will also know where they have been forbidden to go. If I—”

  “Mamabola is helping your boss, and he is a bright one,” Luthuli said, replacing the silver cap. “Perhaps they visit many farms.”

  “Mamabola! That puppy!”

  With a grunt, Zondi tried to rise—only to discover he hadn’t the strength to take a grip on the ammunition box beside him … His head reeled and he slumped back.

  “You must sleep,” Luthuli coaxed gently, pulling up the blankets again. “I will be in the charge office.”

  The door closed. Zondi felt for his gun; it had been taken from him. He went limp. He thought about Dorothy Jele, and remembered how thin the walls of her room had been. Soon he was dreaming again, hopping frantically, seeing his children running fleet down a straight path to the barricades.

  “Lieutenant!” shouted Zondi, this time waking himself up.

  He fumbled for the medicine horn, tipped the whole lot into his mouth, and turned to the wall. Then his mind became lucid and he began to smile. A moment or two later, he was laughing.

  His sophisticated taste buds had just revealed to him the secret of Jafini Bhungu’s success. That gray powder was nothing other than wood ash and aspirin.

  “I don’t get it,” said Kramer, as he and Willie finally boarded the Land-Rover. “That place definitely had a feel to it that wasn’t natural.”

  “Where’s Nyembezi?” Willie asked Mamabola, who was sitting on the floor in the back.

  “He is coming now, boss; he just sprung a leak.”

  “Did you get the same impression, Willie?”

  They looked back at the wide, low bungalow, at the barn and tractor shed and scattering of outbuildings. The large disused water tank had caused a brief flutter of hope. So had the milking parlor, with its pit between the machines, but by then things had been verging on the ridiculous.

  “Can’t say I did, sir. That old cookboy was a bit funny, but otherwise it seemed normal to me. I don’t think he believed we were looking for an escaped prisoner.” And Willie laughed. “How did Mrs. de Bruin take to you going inside?”

  “She didn’t bat an eyelid, went on doing her knitting. Of course, what I said was that I wanted to use the bog. Look, she’s still there now; bet she’s watching us.”

  A lumpy figure in a black frock went on knitting and swinging gently on a cushioned bench suspended from the verandah rafters. Tortoise-shell spectacles gave a glint.

  “Ja, took it all in her stride, asked no questions about the man we were looking for, whether he was a rapist or what. But it was little things, like the keys.”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant?”

  “When I was going through the rooms, checking the floorboards like you suggested, I noticed that there was a key in every keyhole of every chest, cupboard—or else the thing was open. What I’m getting at is that nothing was locked; I could have gone digging in anything I liked.”

  The back door slammed and Nyembezi’s weight settled heavily on the metal seat. Kramer started up the Land-Rover and drove out slowly to the gate, turned left, and began the descent to Witklip. They passed a sign reading M. R. JACKSON—PRIVATE. The next sign they came to was outside Gysbert Swanepoel’s place. Kramer swung in there, just missing a gatepost.

  “Hey?” said Willie.

  “Best we do one other,” Kramer explained, knowing damn well what he was up to. “If we just do de Bruin’s, that’s a bit of a giveaway.” It was like being in rut.

  “But Jackson’s is in between!”

  “He’s also at home this afternoon, in all probability, my friend. And not a very nice man, by the sound of it.”

  “Hell, I.… Must I come in with you?”

  The drive was relatively short and ended at the foot of some concrete steps ornamented with small palms set in tubs made from car tires.

  “Must I, sir?” Willie repeated, very jittery, as the Land-Rover’s engine was switched off.

  “We’ll make this a quickie,” said Kramer, now committed. “You take the outside, me the in. Tell Mamabola to see the head boy, the induna, and Nyembezi had better stay here with the van. Same prisoner story as before. Got that?”

  “Fine; will do.”

  “Then spread out, Willie, spread out.”

  The door was opened by a shuffling crone with a face straight out of a prune packet.

  “Boss Swanepoel not home,” she said, deeply apologetic. “Little missus she lie down.”

  “That’s okay, auntie. You see my boy down there?”

  “Hau, hau! Po-eesie?”

  “Uh huh, police, But you’re not in any trouble. Just you go to him and he’ll explain.”

  She hurried off. It was as well Zondi wasn’t around.

  Kramer stepped into the house and took a glance into the living room. It had large sash windows and an enormous fireplace. The furniture was old, and so was the carpet; the effect was very homely. A muzzleloader hung over the man
tel, pointing at the head of a dead buffalo on the same wall, and, above a homemade bookcase, was a faded world map. There wasn’t a photograph of her anywhere.

  The house was very quiet. Every door onto the long passage stood ajar except one. He listened, tried the handle carefully, and found it was locked. But the key was on the outside, so he turned it, waited five seconds, then went in.

  A low, green light, filtering through the drawn blinds, transformed a scene of mild chaos into the natural untidiness of a forest clearing. Scattered panties made vivid crinkles of fungi on the tree stump of a stool and around it; tights hung like torn spider web from chairback and mirror; other clothing and pop cuttings littered the floor underfoot, crackling and yielding. There was a faint, fecund forest fragrance, the sickly sweetness that tempts flies into fleshy petals, and the trapped, heavy air was sweat-prickle humid. Over on the far side, on a bank of mussed bedding, a slender figure was lying face down. Kramer circled the end of the bed. Her face was hidden by a fall of blond hair the right length for pigtails. Her arms were straight down at her sides and her hands underneath her. Her skin was tanned to the color of a young doe and there was a sprinkle of freckles on the near shoulder. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse, a denim skirt which reached to midthigh, and was barefoot. Her legs were long and strong and very smooth. He wanted to touch them.

  —

  Willie kept as far as he could from the house. He expected the girl to come running out at any moment, followed by the Lieutenant, to accuse him of all the things he’d so often imagined doing to her. It didn’t matter how irrational he knew this notion to be—that’s what he felt. It had him scared and excited and sick to the stomach. He slunk into the vehicle shed and tried to get himself together.

  There had been a time, way back in the home when the only rides he ever took were on buses, when he’d been mad keen on motor transport of any sort and had known all the names. But this chance of inspecting a diesel Mercedes saloon at close quarters was one he had no interest in taking. He pushed a finger along its dusty flank and wiped the muck off on an old refrigerator truck.