The Steam Pig

by James McClure

  But at that moment he spotted Zondi making his way towards him through the flower stalls—and between them stood the Dodge. A robust housewife beckoned for a Bantu to take some oranges to the car park which lay further back. Zondi barged the other contenders aside and shouldered the bag, effectively masking his face with it as he passed the stooge.

  He dumped the bag not far from the taxi rank, accepted a coin with a humble smile, and approached on the stooge’s blind side. Kramer raised a hand to call him over, to tell him it was not worth it, then changed his mind. It could be amusing to see what happened next.

  Almost to order, two Cape Coloured tarts began a slanging match a few feet on the far side of the Dodge. The stooge slouched over and a small crowd of layabouts gleefully gathered. Cheers woke the driver, who got out to join his colleague. The obscenities were riveting, but Zondi hesitated. The men in yellow were still too close to the car.

  Then an Indian roadsweeper stopped his handcart beside Zondi. He obviously wanted to exchange droll remarks but found instead he was tucking the housewife’s coin into his turban and watching in some bewilderment as Zondi advanced on the mob with the hired broom.

  Kramer switched on the taxi’s engine, just in case. You never knew with Zondi. It could turn into a very unpleasant situation.

  Zondi walked swiftly up behind the stooge and driver, stopped a yard short, aimed the broom handle between them, and lunged with all his weight. He caught the bigger tart ’twixt buttocks—it was like being goosed by an ostrich. She reacted on reflex with a practised and devastating backhander. The buckle on her bag ripped across the stooge’s face even before her head could turn. And then the driver got his. They screamed and went for her. The other tart gave the rallying cry to every Coloured within half a mile and the fight was on.

  It was all action.

  Except over on the near side of the Dodge. There Zondi was displaying an almost supercilious calm as he opened the doors to examine the interior. He went over every inch of the upholstery, pried into every stub-filled cranny, tipped up the ashtrays which were empty. Something in the glove compartment finally caught his eye. He carefully closed the doors before crouching to inspect the underside of the vehicle.

  He came up smiling just as the market master arrived on the scene blowing frantically on a police whistle. It was definitely a situation in which you went by priorities—Kramer abandoned the taxi to its driver, and the fracas to an Indian constable wobbling up on his bicycle. Zondi had a lead.

  7

  THE JAZZY CHRYSLER had been exchanged for Kramer’s personal sedan, an enormous Chevrolet flat enough for a helicopter pad, which was parked half a block away in Library Lane.

  Zondi got in behind the wheel and Kramer tossed across the ignition key. He was pleased to have him drive, the glare had produced a stabbing headache.

  The Chev nosed its way out of the back streets and then headed north, picking up speed. Zondi had said not a word, but that was his way. Kramer wondered instead what he had done with his sun-glasses. He closed his eyes.

  But only for a second. Zondi was going it like a Free State farmer on his way to a Rugby international.

  They were straddling the centre line at close on sixty along one of the old streets calculated to take no more than three ox-wagons abreast. An oncoming bus lost its bluster, chickened out, and nearly stamped on a Mini Minor in its rush for the kerb. A sports car tried to hide under a five-ton lorry. A jaywalker paled, panicked, prayed, but was left virtually untouched, staring down at his opened fly in disbelief.

  “Must get the right wing-mirror adjusted,” Kramer said. Zondi remained pre-occupied.

  Up through the oldest part of town, with its jacaranda avenues and corrugated iron roofs and orange brick, past the squat prison, under the railway bridge and out on to the dual carriageway—no quarter was given or asked.

  Normally a good passenger, Kramer was relieved that the road would narrow again in less than three miles for the climb up the escarpment. In fact the fast section lasted only as long as the length of Peacehaven. It took the vulnerable white motorist through as quickly as possible, reducing the shacks and shanties to a colourful blur, and provided an excellent surface for the deployment of military vehicles in the event of a civil disturbance.

  But Zondi was not going the full distance anyway, it seemed. He braked into the next curve, changed down and was in second by the time the turn-off broke clean in the straight. The car plunged down the dirt road and churned a high wake of red dust towards the old experimental farm which lay a mile or so beyond the last mud houses.

  Kramer remembered the place well. A year back there had been a culpable homicide there; one labourer had stabbed another in the neck with a penknife in a fight over an apple. But there was no one there now, the hybrids had failed and the Government had decided to cut its losses. The few buildings had been bulldozed in case homeless families took them over.

  The Chev’s sump clanged on a rock as it topped the last rise and slithered down into the overgrown yard. Kramer was about to suggest a quick check for oil leaks when he noticed a car had flattened a path through the weeds. He kept silent as Zondi took it.

  The trail ended a scant fifty yards further on at the start of another dirt road. Zondi continued along it without hesitation. On either side were vast untidy plots which retained their look of scientific symmetry only because each was given up exclusively to one variety of cereal—and weed-killer was still doing its work.

  Some forgotten fertilizer was not doing badly either, from the look of an immense field of kaffir corn coming up on the right. It was extraordinarily high and had a most curious reddish hue.

  Car tracks extended into it for about ten yards.

  Zondi stopped and switched off. It was deathly quiet. So quiet that when Zondi reached out and pulled a corn stalk, Kramer heard the squeal as it left its tight sheath of leaves.

  The hybrid was distinctive. No wonder the peasant farmer’s son had so readily recognised a sample caught in the Dodge’s substructure.

  Zondi pressed the glove compartment catch and it clattered open. Kramer saw the thin film of pink powder which lay over the road maps. Peacehaven dust could penetrate anything, even spectacle cases. This was not remarkable in itself.

  “I see, so the Dodge had been cleaned inside except for in there—that’s why you looked—”

  There was no point in talking to himself. Zondi was already making off across the field. He did not go far.

  As Kramer approached there was a sudden buzz like a bullet, so immediate and menacing that his fists clenched. Then a spangled pall rose above the kaffir corn, dithered a brighter blue against the sky, and disintegrated into zipping threads of belligerent flies.

  Five paces on sat Shoe Shoe, exactly where he had been left. Only now he appeared to be twice his normal size. Since dawn the sun had been urging life and growth in all living things. Shoe Shoe was dead; but millions of bacteria were multiplying and feeding in their host, breaking wind millions of tiny times and filling his body with gases which distended him horribly.

  Even so, the stink was not that bad and both Kramer and Zondi had seen it all before. This enabled them to ignore nature’s remorseless processes and search for any sign that man had played his sinister part. There was none. It was a natural death.

  That was if you ignored the fact that someone had taken a man, paralysed from the neck down, and dumped him out of sight and earshot in a deserted area surrounded by Keep Out signs. The sun and the ants and the beetles—even the bluebottles—had simply done as ordained.

  And while they toiled, Shoe Shoe must have broken his silence.

  Kramer replaced the handset of the dashboard radio and accepted Zondi’s offer of chocolate.

  “Bloody hungry,” he said, “what’s the time?”

  “Three.”

  “The meat wagon’s coming, Dr Strydom has one call to make on the way—police widow, or something. We should get back to town by four.”

&nb
sp; “Why didn’t you put out an alert for Mkize, boss?”

  “Gershwin? Because I want you to have him, my friend.”

  Zondi gave a grunt of deep satisfaction.

  “That’s the way we are playing this one, man, by ourselves. I told the Colonel and he’s dead scared about the tip-off he gave the killer.”

  “Better not make any slip-ups though.”

  “Ach, I’ll just blame my kaffir.”

  They laughed. The sound reached a crow about to settle in the kaffir corn and it flapped resignedly away again. Overhead larger birds with hooked beaks kept to their stacking column.

  “Shoe Shoe’s still got his eyes,” Kramer remarked.

  “Them flying up there? They are worried, they wait for Shoe Shoe to lie down. He does not look dead enough for them.”

  “What about the crow then?”

  “Oh, he just another damn fool black bastard.”

  “Watch it. How long have they waited, do you think?”

  “Since Shoe Shoe come here—one, maybe two days. You can see he was in the sun a long time.”

  “And Gershwin said that he had gone to the mountains on Saturday. Funny that, he only became important to us three days after Dr Strydom found the spoke wound. You could say this is a fluke.”

  “Boss?”

  “Yes, has nothing to do with the Le Roux case. This is just a little private affair of Gershwin’s. No one was ever meant to know about the girl—why look for trouble by chopping a witness in advance who would never be called anyway?”

  Zondi spread out the chocolate wrapping and licked it clean. Then he made a small silver ball of it which he flicked at a passing butterfly. It missed.

  “Not a witness, boss,” he said, “informer.”

  “Hey? Shoe Shoe was your mate but he never told you a damn thing.”

  “Perhaps if he heard what they were going to do to the little missus.”

  “Warn us, you mean? Why should he?”

  “Oh no, boss—wait until afterwards. Then he would come by and offer information if we kept him in a safe place. He would just stay there until they were hanged. I think he would like that very much, boss.”

  Kramer lit a Lucky Strike in slow motion.

  “But it wouldn’t be the same mob, would it? This spoke man was from Jo’burg.”

  “That’s what Dr Strydom says, maybe Shoe Shoe know different.”

  “And even if he didn’t, it would be a spoke man and that’s what really mattered to him?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “And he would get Gershwin, too?”

  “It seems like it, boss.”

  Zondi borrowed the Lucky Strike to light his Texan off it. His expression was slightly sulky.

  “Ach, it’s good thinking, Zondi man—but why didn’t Shoe Shoe pull this one when they first got him four years ago? Why wait all this time?”

  “Because they did not kill him, boss,” Zondi reminded Kramer, as tactfully as possible. “The most for assault would be fifteen years inside and then they would come back for him. Or maybe their friends would do it meantime.”

  Kramer sat up. “Friends? Then this time he had to put everyone in the bag to make it safe!”

  “That’s right, boss. Your white fellow, too.”

  Jesus, with stakes that high it was a wonder they had been so confident that the exposure treatment would work. Zondi read his gaze out of the window.

  “They probably left a man here to watch that Shoe Shoe died without any trouble,” he said.

  “Okay, so you win. And if it hadn’t been for kaffir corn under the Dodge, we’d really have been buggered. Never even begun.”

  The meat wagon arrived as if making deliveries in a district ravaged by rabid dogs. Every week Sergeant Van Rensberg handled on average a dozen bodies mangled in road accidents and his frenzied motoring was some sort of inverted reaction. As Kramer had once remarked, you could only feel safe with Van Rensberg if you were already on one of the two trays under the curious pitched roof which covered the back of the Ford pick-up.

  The mortuary sergeant came coughing and hawking out of his dust cloud, trying to find a handkerchief. He was a colossal man. The combination of banana fingers and thighs that stretched trousers taut made the search quite something.

  Kramer cuffed the grin off Zondi’s face and then the pair of them got out, averting their eyes.

  Van Rensberg reached them, turned his broad back on Zondi, and saluted Kramer. A very excellent salute that should have been available for all recruits to study. A text book salute slow enough for Kramer to note the wide gleam down Van Rensberg’s right forearm. So he had not found what he sought after all.

  “Hear you’ve got a real farty one for me, sir.”

  “Sorry, Sergeant. He’s been out in the sun for a day or so.”

  “That’s all right, sir—I’ll get your Bantu to put him on the tray.”

  Kramer glanced over his shoulder.

  “Sergeant Zondi’s not a big man.”

  “Ach, he can roll him, sir.”

  “Fine, but just wait for the doctor first, hey?”

  “Okay, sir.”

  It was a long wait. Kramer and Zondi spent it on the humdrum of investigation; measuring the distance between the road and the body, calculating the wheelbase of the car which had left the tracks, making rough sketches and compiling notes. Van Rensberg followed them about, talking with inordinate nostalgia of his days on the beat down in Durban where, it appeared, he had done little else than solve famous cases. It soon became obvious that a flash of executive genius had given him the dead for company.

  Dr Strydom stepped out to a warm welcome from him.

  “So we meet again, Doc?”

  “You’d think once a day was enough, Sergeant. What is it this time, Lieutenant?”

  “Bantu male, a cripple.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your old friend Shoe Shoe.”

  “What has he been up to?”

  “Nothing. For too long.”

  “I must see this.”

  And away he trotted, blinding himself by pulling the rubber apron over his head and nearly falling right over the corpse. He took a long look.

  “It’s not often these things affect me, but I must say Lieutenant this really gets my goat. It’s the most bloody inhuman …”

  Obscenities failed him.

  “I’d say the girl had it easy by comparison,” Kramer murmured.

  “Too right you are. Quick and clean. Nothing in this axilla but bugs.”

  “What?”

  “Armpit,” Van Rensberg explained smugly. That was another thing about him: he had all the irritating traits of medicine’s sucker fish.

  “Fetch the tray, Sergeant Van Rensberg,” Kramer ordered.

  “Come,” Van Rensberg ordered Zondi.

  “Yes, there’s not much more I could tell you now,” Dr Strydom said. “I think you’re right, it’s exposure. I’ll do a check for poison and anything else I think of. No bruises of course, no need to be.”

  “The important thing is: how long?”

  “Oh, at least three full days out here—today’s Wednesday—make it Saturday.”

  Zondi slouched up, dragging the tray behind him.

  “Are we finished now, Doctor?”

  “He’s all yours, Van Rensberg. I’ve just got an internal check to do tomorrow.”

  “Right you are, Doctor. Hear that, Zondi? You can use your foot to push him over. Just lay the tray alongside—like so. Now shove hard, man.”

  Shoe Shoe went over slowly with a long belch like a reveller leaving his bench for the straw. A group of startled dung beetles, suddenly exposed in the middle of a round damp patch on the ground, scuttled for cover.

  Kramer felt suddenly much happier about missing his lunch; one of the beetles had gone up his trouser leg.

  “Shall we leave it to the experts?” Dr Strydom suggested.

  “Fine,” Kramer replied, stamping the intruder free on the way back t
o the road.

  “By the way, were the lab reports satisfactory on the girl, Lieutenant?”

  “Not bad.”

  “And you’ve seen Matthews?”

  “Yes, we had our little talk. Quite a good bloke actually. Careless.”

  “We all are some time or another.”

  “No, I mean he even had her eye colour down wrong in his file—which he only bothered to fill in after you rang.”

  “They’re brown.”

  “Yes, but he swears they’re blue. Although I bet he never looked before yesterday.”

  “How extraordinary! Old Georgie Abbott does, too.”

  Kramer stopped short.

  “It’s more than that then, it’s bloody peculiar. Now I just took a look through the slits and saw brown—did you open them properly?”

  “Yes, in the prescribed manner.”

  “Which is?”

  “Are you doubting my word, Lieutenant?”

  “No, man, don’t get in a knot. I just wanted to know.”

  “Like this then; fingertips on the temples, thumbs facing in on the eyelids, a gentle push up.”

  “I see.”

  “Where does that get you?”

  “Nowhere, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, man.”

  Kramer kicked at a stone.

  “How about that stained-glass of Georgie’s? Could that have affected observation?”

  “The theatre light was on. I don’t know, it might I suppose. But isn’t this a rather trivial point?”

  “Yes, but strange.”

  “Let’s have another look, shall we? I’ve got time before punishment.”

  “What’s it, four o’clock?”

  “Twenty past.”

  “That’s pushing it. Like you said, it’s a small point.”

  “Please yourself.”

  Kramer helped him off with the apron as Zondi came over smelling his hands gingerly.

  “Perhaps you have some tissues in your bag for my sergeant,” Kramer asked.

  Dr Strydom looked a little surprised but began to rummage about.

  “He’s driving my car, you see.”

  “Ah, of course. What about some TCP? That should do the trick. And spirits to dry it off.”