“By jingo, you just think yourself lucky I am trying to emasculate the Mahatma! If that were not so, already your traitorous dog’s body would—betrayed again! O woe is Ramjut Pillay!”
Men in white had leaped up from nowhere, catching him completely off guard, so intent had he been on replying to treacherous Nurse Chatterjee.
“Ramjut Pillay?” he heard Dr. Schrink repeat after him. “What is going on? Pillay, Pillay, Pillay … rings a bell somewhere. Some sort of police notice we had circulated to us?”
“I have seen none, Doctor,” said Nurse Chatterjee. “Have you, Mooljum?”
“Typical of the organisation in this place,” grumbled Dr. Schrink. “I’m still waiting for those figures on drug dosages to surface again. Oh, well, what I propose is, unless something else happens, that we have another word with him in the morning, once the sedative has properly calmed him down, and then possibly get in touch with them. I’m curious to know who this Mrs. Kennedy could be.”
No, no, no! pleaded Ramjut Pillay.
But he could only do so by blinking, because he was again unable either to move or to utter, having been gagged and then strapped most cruelly into a straitjacket.
There was a whole shelf of books by Naomi Stride above Theo Kennedy’s stereo equipment, noted Kramer. The next shelf up was almost empty, apart from a road atlas, a dictionary and a few African ornaments.
“Vicki’ll be back in a minute,” said Kennedy, returning to the living-room. “That was Amanda. Bruce is looking after her, but she won’t go to sleep until she’s been kissed goodnight.”
“And you’re now included in the bedtime parade, hey?”
Kennedy nodded. “Mind you, as I think I mentioned to you before, Mandy and me have been friends for some time now. You got any kids?”
“Mine isn’t the job for them.”
“You don’t think it’d be right?”
“Have you ever been to a police funeral? They fire guns at the end.”
“The salute?”
“Uh-huh. You should see those bloody kids jump.”
Kennedy stared at him, then turned away slowly and went over to the bottle of Scotch. He poured himself another tot, put a dash more in Vicki Stilgoe’s tumbler, and came back to sit opposite Kramer. He offered him the peanuts.
“No, like I said, Theo, I’m doing fine, thanks.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Kennedy. “Putting two and two together. I can’t believe what I’ve come up with, but I’m going to have to ask you if I’m right. Are you forming some sort of theory that Liz Geldenhuys is mixed up in my—in what’s happened? Because, if you are, that’s crazy!”
“You can’t see there’s a possible motive?”
“In that she blamed my mum for our splitting up? Or even, if my worst two-and-two is right, for being behind those calls to the shop?”
“Look, Theo, I’ve satisfied myself your mum had nothing to do with them, but from Liz’s point of view she could’ve easily—”
“Stop! Please, just stop right there. You don’t know Liz, you’ve never even set eyes on her, or you’d realise how totally ridiculous the whole idea is.”
“Then maybe I’d better see her for myself, hey?”
“On what pretext?”
“Oh, any information concerning your ma that she can think of which could be relevant to our investigation. I’ll tell her we’re going round everyone who knew her, which is true.”
Kennedy took a sip of his Scotch. “Fine,” he said. “Well, I suggest you do that as soon as possible. You know where she lives?”
“Ja, Sweethaven Avenue, only she’s away up near Dundee at the moment,”
“Oh, yes, at Mooikop, her uncle’s place. She took me riding there a few times.”
“Well, then,” said Kramer, “perhaps I’d better—”
“At last,” said Vicki Stilgoe, with a mother’s sigh, as she rejoined them. “Some nights I could strangle Miss Moppet, but she’s asleep now. Sorry, am I intruding—?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Kennedy, getting up to bring her drink over. “I’ve just been persuading Tromp to get a bee out of his bonnet.”
“What I can’t understand—” she began.
“No, let’s hear,” said Kramer. “It’s often a help to have someone right on the outside give their opinion, and female intuition’s not always too far wrong.”
Vicke Stilgoe smiled at him, although her eyes still said he scared her, and sat down on the sofa. “What I find baffling is why so much time is being spent on Theo’s mother’s personal or, if you like, family side of life. Surely, this could all have happened because she was, first and foremost, a famous writer.”
“So far, Vicki, we’ve no evidence to confirm that.”
“You haven’t?”
“Listen, anybody could have gone up to the University and taken that sword from under the stage. Second—”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “What about the bookish symbolism of the rosemary and the pansies? That reference to Act II, scene ii? Doesn’t that all point to the motive, or whatever you call it, being somehow connected with writing?”
But Kramer, who’d had some fine honey from bees in his bonnet in the past, merely thanked them both for their hospitality and went on his way again, armed with Liz Geldenhuys’s present address.
Zondi picked up the phone. “Lieutenant Kramer’s office. Yes, Dr. Wilson, will you hold on a minute, please—the Lieutenant has just walked in.” Then he cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and said: “Any luck, boss?”
Kramer nodded. “And you?”
“Both times. The father could have taken all the DH-136 he wanted from the rubbish at the abattoir, and Marlene Thomas’s address and telephone number are here on your desk.”
“But where is my tea?”
Zondi grinned and handed the receiver to him.
“You’ve got something for me, sir?”
“Ah, Lieutenant! ‘A hit, a very palpable hit’!”
“Oh ja?”
“But before I go into Act II, scene ii,” said Wilson with a chortle, “I have some intelligence for you.”
“You don’t think my IQ’s high enough as it is, Doc?”
Shrill donkey sounds. “Superb! Must remember that! But what I intended to convey is that one of my staff has told me that Naomi Stride was among the audience on the first night. Another of my staff, who must also remain nameless, has also informed me that Aaron Sariff—you met briefly, remember?—had sent a play he’d written to Stride for her opinion, and had not been terribly pleased with her response. Yet another colleague—”
“Hell, you’ve been busy, hey?”
“ ‘Not single spies, but in battalions,’ what?”
“Ja, what did this other bloke say?”
“Apparently, Aaron Sariff found out from a student who you were, and made a devil of a fuss about it, saying there were secret police everywhere, turning the University upside down and threatening the freedom of democracy. He also wanted to know, from me, whether you’d had a search warrant to look under the stage. Enormous fun all round.”
“Not that I can see why you’re telling me all this, sir.”
“You can’t? Thought it might amuse you—and Stride being here on the first night does establish a closer link with the play, doesn’t it?”
“Yes and no,” Kramer enjoyed saying. “From what I’ve read about her, Naomi Stride encouraged all the arts in the district, which would include seeing plays put on, not so? Can you get back to Act II, scene ii?”
“Ah, of course.” There was a shuffling of papers. “I’ve spent hours on it, mulling over the possible significance of the scenes within the scene. Tends to give your ‘mad girl’ a bit of a knock, of course. Ophelia’s perfectly sane at this stage—it’s Hamlet who’s acting up a bit, pretending idiocy. Oh, and while we’re touching on the significance of the pansies and the rosemary, I think I ought to point out that there is always the danger of being too literal in one’s interp
retations. Just because Ophelia spoke those words about ‘thoughts’ and ‘remembrances,’ it wouldn’t preclude a man from using them for his own ends. ‘Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven’—there, you could use that yourself, couldn’t you, but, again, those are Ophelia’s words, you see! And so—”
“And so?” prompted Kramer, doodling a jumping bean on his memo pad.
“Themes, themes, themes, none of which quite matched up—no wicked uncle et cetera, nothing to get one’s teeth into. What I ended up doing was going through it line by line, disregarding the context, seeking only something that had the sense of immediate and undeniable relevance. I was appalled.”
“Appalled, sir?”
“Devastated to think that I could have failed to see the one and only truly apposite line right at the start. The line that has got to be the one—it shrieks at you.”
“Ja, go on, sir—I’m ready to write it down.”
“Here goes, then, Lieutenant: ‘many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills.’ ”
“And?”
“What ‘and’ could there possibly be? There it is … Rapiers, rapiers, Lieutenant! Naomi Stride was killed by a rapier! The precise word, you see, not merely the rather vague word ‘sword,’ which embraces sabres, two-handed—”
“I see that, sir, but what has goose-feathers got to do with anybody?”
“Goose-quills, Lieutenant. Never heard of quill pens? Dear me, you must’ve. Even today, still a potent symbol of the writer, and so what this line means is—”
“The pen is a bigger bastard than the sword, sir?” said Kramer, wincing as another donkey joined the papal choir.
“At last. Lieutenant, you’ve pipped me to it! ‘Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword,’ Edward Bulwer-Lytton—I’ve just looked it up. And—would you believe it?—by some extraordinary coincidence those lines appear in Act II, scene ii, of his Richelieu!”
There was one of those pauses where Kramer felt he was expected to clap, but he spent it instead putting a large cigar into the mouth of the jumping bean on his memo pad.
“You do see the difference between those two quotations, don’t you?” said Wilson, and there was the flare of a match. “ ‘Many wearing rapiers’ invites an immediate association with the actors, and the ‘goose-quills’ with—”
“The plays’ critic from the Trekkersburg Gazette?” said Kramer. “You see, Doc, much as I appreciate your efforts, it still doesn’t point to a motive, does it?”
“But aren’t you being a bit hasty when you say that?”
“Ja, maybe,” Kramer grunted. “I tell you what, I’ll sleep on it—OK?”
“Sleep on what, boss?” asked Zondi, handing him his tea as he put the receiver down.
“Bloody Act II, scene ii.”
“Hau, a very cunning scene, Lieutenant! This Boss Hamlet—”
“Not you as well, hey! Give us—”
“But I found a line in it, boss, that could have been spoken by Mrs. Stride in reference to Liz Geldenhuys.”
Kramer had a little tea first. “Oh ja, and what was that?”
“ ‘Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of your star,’ boss—which the father of the young madam Ophelia tells her, so she will not think of marrying with him. You know something also, boss? The last book Mrs. Stride was writing had such a story also. There is this university teacher with a daughter—”
“Mickey, enough!” protested Kramer. “My bloody head’s going round, and I can’t take another bloody clue, fancy theory, or anything else, understand? If it’s not straightforward, I don’t want to know.”
Zondi nodded and went back to his table, where he marked his place in Hamlet before dropping it into his jacket pocket. He started sharpening pencils.
“H’m, this should be straightforward enough,” murmured Kramer, reaching out for the slip of paper bearing Marlene Thomas’s address. “And your tea’s bloody terrible, so we might as well get going, hey?”
By the light of his torch, bright with fresh batteries, Zondi continued to pick his way through this very strange and tantalising story, many parts of which he just had to skip. Other parts were no harder than the Bible the nuns had given him when he’d left the mission school, which was how he knew words such as “harlot” and “delve,” having once looked them up in a dictionary long, long ago. There was also something vaguely Zulu about the elaborate greetings people kept giving each other, and he enjoyed trying to fill in the missing verbs, as in: “I must to England.”
Go to England? Sail? Travel?
He looked up. But it was not the Lieutenant who had come out on to the front veranda of the small bungalow. It was probably Mr. Thomas, father of the girl Marlene. The man lit a cigarette, looked at his watch, and began to pace back and forward, stopping occasionally to listen outside a softly lit window.
After another ten minutes of Hamlet, Zondi found his concentration wandering. It was really too difficult. So he began to skip whole sections, stopping only when the words were short. He gave a grunt. Often these lines carried a very strong, satisfying meaning: “I must be cruel to be kind.…” How well he understood that, and then, with a start, he seemed to remember one of the old nuns having actually used those very words to him, the time he had been caned for not doing his homework. It made a bridge through the years he was afraid to step on.
There was a clatter from the veranda. The man had gone indoors again. A minute later, the Lieutenant emerged, walking slowly and sadly.
Zondi put Hamlet back in his pocket and started the car. He had acquired a taste for searching for those simple lines and, if the night wasn’t going to go on too long, he would search for some more.
Kramer sighed and took out his Luckies, lit two and put one in Zondi’s mouth for him, as he was driving. “Ja, Mickey,” he said, “it must be a terrible thing to know that you have been the cause of the death of your own mother.”
“Boss?” Zondi glanced at him. “Was Jannie there? Did he—?”
“I spoke just to his girlfriend, Marlene,” said Kramer, picturing her again as she sat hunched on a worn living-room sofa, her eyes swollen with crying. Not a pretty girl, but cuddlesome and plainly intelligent. “Jannie has been talking to her almost non-stop. About how much he hates his father, how terribly his mother had suffered each time he had one of his ‘mishaps’ then took it out on her, because he didn’t like the reprimands he got from his seniors. But what Marlene can’t understand is why, when Jannie has told her a hundred times his father made his ma slip, he first came to her and said: ‘Oh Jesus, Marlene—it was an accident, a terrible, terrible accident.’ And three times since then, when he’s been very upset and crying to himself, the word ‘accident’ has slipped out. Marlene didn’t spell it out for me, but I saw what was eating her up. Listen, Jannie runs in and says: ‘Oh Jesus, Marlene—there’s been an accident, a terrible, terrible accident.’ Fine, nothing to do with him. But if he says ‘it was a terrible accident’—”
“I’ve got it, Lieutenant. Hau, you mean he killed his mother by accident?”
“You wouldn’t know this, Mickey, because I never told you all the details but, thinking back, I’ve known all along that Zuidmeyer was the first to use the bathroom every morning. Then, for once, he doesn’t use it, he goes off to sulk in the garage, and it’s his wife who steps into that shower. A shower which, as I see it, Jannie has made lethal before going off with the dog. He comes back expecting his pa to be dead, but who’s lying there in the bathroom?”
“The Lieutenant is sure that—”
“So far, the facts fit, and once I’ve had a little chat with him I think you will find they fit even better.”
Zondi dropped speed. “Sorry, I was not thinking, boss—did you want to go and talk with Jannie now, back there in Acacia Drive?”
“Actually, he was there at Marlene’s, out cold in their spare room. I—ach, tomorrow, Mickey, tomorrow. He’s old enough to do the rope dance, so one more night with young
Marlene.…”
As if endorsing this view, Zondi put his foot down.
“One good thing, though, Mickey!”
“What’s that, Lieutenant?”
“The look on Zuidmeyer’s face when I tell him.”
17
THAT NIGHT, ZONDI dreamed very little. His sleep was so deep that when he awoke the next day his first thought was to wonder where he was. For years, there had been splintery rafters and corrugated asbestos roofing above him, walls of unplastered red brick on four sides, and a damp, stamped earth floor to make his bare feet sting on a winter’s morning. But now, as he lay there, alone in the big bed that he and his wife Miriam had once shared with two of their children, it was like being in a neat whitewashed box with a flat lid, and when he rolled over he could see its warm green carpet. The Widow Fourie had sent him that, the same week as he’d shifted the family from Kwela Village to Hamilton. She had apologised, saying it was a little old and worn in places, but Miriam, who’d never owned any sort of carpet before, had been moved to tears.
“Wife!” Zondi called out, sitting up in bed. “Wife, how is the time?”
Miriam put her head round the bedroom door. “It is still early,” she said. “I am ironing your suit, so you stay there a few minutes until it is finished. What was your big hurry yesterday, that you threw it into the corner all crumpled up? And whose was the blood?”
“Oh, just a road accident—and then I had to go quickly on a job for the Lieutenant.”
Miriam disappeared again, and soon he heard her humming away to herself and the thump of her iron. He looked back at the carpet, smiling as he recalled how, in the old days at Kwela Village, she had scored lines across the stamped earth to simulate the planking of a wooden floor. A very houseproud woman, was Miriam Zondi, and it was the greatest pleasure of his life to know that now she had a house to be proud of.
Admittedly, the place had only three rooms in place of two, a cement floor, and there was still no bathroom or separate kitchen, but at least the outside lavatory had a proper door on it, instead of the wooden flaps provided at Kwela Village, and everything looked new, having recently been slotted together. Who knows? In a few years, they might even have electricity, and then some of the Widow Fourie’s other presents—the secondhand steam iron, for example—could come into use, too. He began to daydream. To imagine things that he might buy in the meantime. A small black-and-white television set, perhaps, like the people next door already owned, running it off a twelve-volt car battery. No, a paraffin refrigerator would please Miriam more. It was going to be a hot day again.
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