The Sunday Hangman kaz-5

by James McClure

  “Excuse me, Reverend,” Kramer said on impulse, blocking his path, “but if you wanted to know about Bibles, where would you go?”

  The minister responded warily, easing the dog collar around his plump throat, and clearing some phlegm there.

  “Is this to do with television?” he asked, glancing about.

  “No, sir; I’m from CID here, working on an investigation. This is the Bible we’ve got an interest in, you see, and we were hoping it’d give us a lead.”

  “Ah. Has it a bookshop label in it?”

  “Been removed.”

  “Mmmm. Then one wouldn’t really know where one should start. Not an authority on them myself, of course. Tell you what, though, there’s always the Christian bookshop up the road a bit. You must know it?”

  Having received his directions, Kramer set off at a brisk pace that gradually slowed down, adapting itself to a more sensible approach to a venture that held little promise. Quite soon he was half enjoying his walk, and the minor distractions it afforded him. The morning was muggy and warm, and the sky still the misty white of a bathroom mirror, which had brought out the housewives in their brightest of frocks. They darted from car to store like tropical fish-some were just as ugly-and flicked away from the gray-skinned beggar crabbing his legless way down the gray paving stones. If you did catch their eye, they never blinked. More interesting were the gawpers, blacks for the most part, whose fixed stares made them blink a good deal, as they stood outside shopwindows watching the miracle of the SATV test card. Every other bloody shop seemed to be selling sets, Kramer noted, and this included a hairdressing salon and, so far, two respectable jewelers’. The gawpers were interesting because you had to work out which were honest idiots, and which were pickpockets and bag-snatchers responding intelligently to the advent of television. Then came Toll Street and the dividing line between bustling commercialism and the sort of shop assistants who kept a good book under the till. He crossed over against the lights, to hold himself in trim, and started along a wide sidewalk that had little eddies of confetti in its gutter. Just about every denomination known to Trekkersburg had its main church between that set of traffic lights and the next: Baptist, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Mormon-and, at the far end, Lutheran, playing David and Goliath with the Bleeding Heart towering above it across the way. There was a funeral on there, and the undertakers were out having a smoke; Kramer gave old George Henry Abbot a wave, called out that he’d drop by soon, and took the next turning.

  He immediately recognized the long, low facade of the yellow-brick bookshop, but excused himself his oversight on the grounds that, with its total lack of people appeal in the sign-writing of Larkin and Sons, Ltd., and its air of complacent prosperity, he had always thought the place sold veterinary supplies to stock breeders. That just showed how much you could miss from a car.

  You could also miss quite a lot from the pavement. When Kramer went up the steps and into the showroom, he was astonished by what he saw there. Hell, never mind being Christian; Larkin’s looked the biggest bloody bookshop in town. There were thousands of glossy volumes on the wall shelves and on the display units that covered the vast, carpeted floor, together with an unimaginable number of knickknacks-like the molded relief map of the Holy Land, or the Sunday school blackboard-and some pretty weird stuff near the cash desk. He browsed through this while the salesman wrapped up something in brown paper for a nun.

  For twenty cents, you could buy a patch, presumably to sew on your jeans, that said Jesus Never Lets Me Down. At thirty cents, there was an American comic book called God’s Smuggler, which told the true story of a young Dutchman who said things such as: “One Bible could buy a cow now in Russia!” and was rewarded by having a sexy wife with massive bosoms. But Kramer’s chief delight was an American magazine entitled the Moody Monthly-in honor of some famous preacher, it seemed-which he very nearly bought for the Colonel’s secretary.

  Then the salesman, an old gentleman in rimless glasses tinted slightly blue, asked what he could do to be of service, and examined the Bible most meticulously.

  “Jiminy,” he said. “I’m afraid you couldn’t have picked on a commoner sort. I might have sold it, I might not. This is also the line carried by the ordinary trade, and so there’s no end of places it could have come from. I am sorry.”

  “Are you sure, sir?” Kramer persisted.

  “In 1975, South Africa became the largest distributor of complete Bibles in the world,” the salesman disclosed proudly. “I have in my office a United Bible Societies report. Would it help you in any way for your superiors to see it? Then I’m sure they’ll understand that you’ve done for them all you can.”

  Kramer thanked him for his thoughtfulness, spurned the offer, and left, crumpling the free tract he’d been given. Bibles, next! — when the English-language press had already claimed that the Republic was a world leader in gun-owning, divorces, murders, assaults, road deaths, suicides, persons shot by the police, and of course, after all that, executions. The weight of statistics against his chances of success, even in the long term, was beginning to bear down intolerably, while luck, his only hope of relief, had clearly reneged on him. Like one other bitch he could mention.

  Zondi had felt the younger children leave the bed they shared with him soon after their mother had done. When the smell of maize porridge began to drift in from the other room, he had heard the twins stir beneath the window, squabble in whispers over whose turn it was to stow away their mattress, and then go creeping out. For a long while following that, he’d heard and felt nothing, but had slept deep, where a man’s spirit was restored.

  Now he was awake and watching Miriam through the doorway, touching his wife’s fine, straight-backed body with his eyes, and admiring the grace she brought to the humdrum tasks of the home. Once, however, she would have been humming softly-too softly to disturb him-and it was noticeable how silent she was. These were difficult times.

  He yawned loudly, patting the sound as it came out, for a comical effect, and sat up.

  Miriam smiled round at him. “I suppose you will be hungry now,” she said. “There is mealie meal on the stove, and hot water, too.”

  “Hau! And I see my suit is neatly pressed. Is there a dress you have seen in some window?”

  That made her laugh; it always did. Miriam had never thought to buy a new dress in her life, but she’d worked for a white family, where this catchphrase had originated. Her amusement was gone the next instant, when, unable to stop himself, Zondi flinched as he moved his leg and the rat woke up, too.

  “Come, there is hot water,” Miriam repeated brusquely. “I will also put on the kettle and my big pot.”

  He shuffled through to the other room, and found her zinc washing tub already positioned on some newspaper to protect the rammed-earth floor. With that grace he’d been watching, Miriam hefted an old paraffin tin off the stove and tipped four gallons of near-boiling water into the tub without spilling more than a drop. Then she carefully added a little cold from another tin, and nodded for him to get in. By wriggling about a bit, and by sticking his feet out straight, and leaning far back, Zondi found the right position again. He lapped the water over his thigh with his hand.

  “It’s good,” he said.

  Miriam went out to fill the kettle and pot at their tap next to the privy. While she was gone, Zondi gave his leg a ringing slap, to see what that might do, and thought it had worked for a moment. Then Mr. Rat recovered from his surprise and bit back.

  “There is sweat on your lip,” murmured Miriam, pumping the Primus for the kettle.

  “A hot day, woman-don’t you feel it?”

  “Do you work this hot day?”

  “Later.”

  He knew she’d sigh.

  “But the boss Erasmus is dead. Can you not now-”

  “No,” said Zondi, who would debate this matter with no one-not even himself, come to think of it.

  “You are always cross with the chi
ldren,” she went on. “You don’t listen to why they think their education is not so good.”

  “You have heard what happened in Soweto? I am the one who knows how to work with authority! With children it is always the same; they are too impatient. And they must tell me if they hear of agitators, because those men are very foolish.”

  “Hau! You would talk of foolish men, is that so?”

  The water was fast losing its warmth. Zondi soaped both his legs and cunningly massaged the right one. Then he sniffed, noted a strange aroma, and looked up to see what his wife was mixing in a cup.

  “Yes, my husband,” she said, “I have been to the street of the witch doctors, and there I have paid good money for what you told my mother was rubbish for old savages. Now drink!”

  Zondi drank. He was, very secretly, desperate. And besides, his gentle wife had the kettle poised over his genitals.

  The unbelievable breakthrough came at almost exactly the same hour that the new man from Fingerprints had walked up to Kramer the previous day. It owed nothing to luck, and had very little to do with statistics, but had been preordained by the system.

  Kramer was slumped alone in his office, with his feet on the window sill and his brain on a shelf, when fatherly Warrant Officer Henk Wessels, from Records, looked in.

  “I’ve just been talking to the station sergeant at Witklip,” he said, taking Zondi’s stool from behind its deal table. “Maybe you know him-Frikkie Jonkers?”

  For a moment there, Kramer wasn’t even sure that he knew where Witklip was, then he recalled a tiny dorp way up, practically in Zululand. On the other score he had to admit ignorance.

  “Ach, Frikkie’s all right,” Wessels observed carelessly. “Got a chip on his shoulder, and isn’t what you’d call a mass of intelligence, but I think the pace of Witklip just suits him. Three stock thefts, a beer party, and that’s his week gone. Anyway, as I was saying, he gave me a tinkle.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Just on the off chance, Frikkie said. You know, he’s got this big chum of his who runs a hotel there? Hotel? Christ, that’s a bloody joke! The bastard cheats townies into booking it for their holidays by advertising horseback riding and all sorts. You’ve got to break the bloody horses in first! Him.”

  “You’ve been there?” asked Kramer, glad of the diversion, and already tasting the stolen vodka in this.

  “My eldest did; nearly broke his heart, poor kiddie. On his honeymoon, too, it was. I wanted to sue. Anyway, seems they’ve had this bloke Tommy McKenzie staying there for quite some time, and then suddenly he vanishes. Two nights ago. So they look in his room and find his suitcase-a cheap job-and a few clothes-stuff nobody would worry about leaving behind. Not a large amount involved, Frikkie tells me, on the hotel bill, that is. And maybe he’ll be coming back tonight, but to be on the safe side, he wanted a check. The name wasn’t on our hotel-bilkers list, so I asked for a full description. Here, Lieutenant, old son-you take a look.”

  Kramer scanned the particulars and noted that they matched, in most respects, the particulars he had himself used to describe Tollie Erasmus. But what clinched the matter, on paper at any rate, was the green Ford with TJ number plates.

  Then he shook his head. “Tollie? In Witklip? You talk about a townie, man! Hell, the idea of going to a place like this would never enter his head.”

  7

  The white stone to which Witklip owed its name was actually a giant boulder, balanced on top of a high, black hill overshadowing the settlement. It looked as though one push of a child’s hand would bring the thing crashing down the fire-scorched slopes, and yet, by some miracle of brute inertia, it remained there.

  This was very different countryside from that found around Doringboom. A dung beetle entering a field plowed by oxen would not have encountered a greater variety of gradients, obstacles, and ragged skylines than had the Chevrolet over the past fifty minutes. The red soil showed like infantile eczema through the wispy blond grass, and supported a wide range of aloes and other hardy succulents, as well as dustings of wild flowers in oranges and purples. The sky, too, had a vivid quality, a deep varicose blueness, and Kramer was pleased that he had brought his sunglasses.

  They were making the final dusty descent of the journey, with loose stones rattling loudly off the underneath of the car, and Zondi dodging the biggest potholes whenever possible. Witklip now lay before them in its eleven or so distinct parts: four of these-a trading store, butcher’s, garage-cum-smithy and another trading store, in that order-were lined up on the right; the small police station stood behind a hedge of Christ thorn on the left, its faded flag not quite at the top of the pole; and the rest of the buildings, all presumably residential, were visible as brush strokes of whitewash between the cool, dark-green daub of wattle trees up ahead. As for the hotel described by W/O Henk Wessels, it was represented by a large hoarding, nailed to a blue gum and streaked with bird droppings, that read: SPA-KLING WATERS-HAPPINESS RESORT-ONLY 800 METERS.

  Kramer motioned for Zondi to ignore the arrow and to make the cop shop their first port of call. He had not, as he’d assured Wessels he would do, contacted Witklip about Erasmus after that little chat in his office. On second thought, it had occurred to him that too much hindsight on the sergeant’s part might introduce too many red herrings, and so, in the interests of an open mind, a small lapse of memory had seemed perfectly in order. This did mean, of course, that Frikkie Jonkers wasn’t expecting them.

  The white constable on duty behind the charge office counter, who said his name was Boshoff and had a face like Elvis Presley’s, tried a stall when asked where the station commander could be found. Then he contrived to elbow some stolen property to the floor-to wit, a trussed chicken-and its owner added her own squawks to the lament. For just a few seconds there, it was all very noisy. While Zondi brought the prisoner back from the verandah, Kramer followed Boshoff to a door, had it knocked for him, and then went into the small office alone.

  Tubby Frikkie Jonkers rose at once from his chair behind the desk, where he had been apparently checking the station inventory, and responded to Kramer’s introduction with jerky alertness. His smile, beneath a hairline mustache, was most welcoming, and the bright, wide-awake glint of his slightly poppy eyes impressive. What betrayed him was the impression of his tunic cuff button, as plain as a dimple, in his right cheek.

  “Is this a social,” he asked, as they sat down, “or are you here in some way we can help you?”

  “I’m trying the whole area for information about a bloke we found hanging from a tree. We can’t get hold of the next of kin because he didn’t leave any papers, and the car number plates are causing some problems. You know how it is these days with computers.”

  Jonkers laughed, holding up his fingers. “That’s the only kind of computers we have got in Witklip, Lieutenant! For the really heavy stuff, we take off our socks as well.”

  “Have a look at this description anyway, and see if it means anything to you.”

  Kramer had heard somewhere that intelligence was curiosity mixed with an urge to join things together in patterns. If that was so, then Jonkers had just proved the other side of the argument, by grasping only what concerned him personally. It was fascinating to watch, but probably uneventful to live with.

  “Almighty God,” said Jonkers. “This is Tommy!”

  “You know him?”

  “Certainly! He’s been staying at a pal of mine’s place right nearby here. I tell you, this is a real shock to me. Only this morning I phoned Henk for a check because I was worried about him-which reminds me, he hasn’t called back yet.”

  “We’ll, here’s your answer,” said Kramer. “Will you be able to furnish the necessary particulars?”

  “Not really; his name, his home address from the register, which I haven’t bothered to find out yet. He was a mercenary, you know.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Oh, ja; he could tell you all about it. Some of the things those coons do, you could hardl
y believe! He had memories that were terrible. I know because once there was a bloke in the room next to his, heard him whimper in his sleep at night-sort of like a dog that thinks someone is trying to catch it to beat it? Like that. My wife had the right word for him: she said he was haunted. But not according to Tommy; he laughed in that way of his, and asked if we’d never heard of malaria. He was always okay again after a few drinks.”

  “Boozed a lot?”

  “Hell! I’ve never met a bloke who was better company in that department.”

  Then Tollie Erasmus must have been, Kramer reasoned to himself, either very rash or very relaxed, and the more Jonkers had to say, the more it would appear to have been the latter.

  “And you all liked him?”

  “Man, you can’t exactly say he was popular,” Jonkers admitted, with the proper hesitation that goes with speaking ill of the dead, “but you can say that every man respected him. It takes quite a nerve to go and fight Commies in the bush, ’specially when you’re working for bloody wogs who can’t be trusted-and although there’s good money in it, you can still see how all of us gain in the end.”

  “So he’d done all right?” Kramer said enviously, offering Jonkers one of his Luckies.

  “Unlike some he could tell you about. But he still had to make his pile, he used to say, and he was hoping to get something quite soon.”

  “Angola hadn’t put him off? The firing squad?”

  Jonkers snorted and replied, “Tommy? That’ll be the day! He was even trying to get me to go with him.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “That’s true,” Jonkers confirmed with unconcealed pride, while studying the back of his bear’s paw. “Said I would qualify for a top rank, maybe even colonel, at my age and with all my experience behind me. You know, the military training we get at college, and the attitudes I have formed. Could see I knew how to handle myself. Oh, ja, he really pestered me, Tommy did. You never know, it’s possible if.…”