The Steam Pig

by James McClure

  “The shop door is still open,” Gogol retorted. “I could be losing everything in the till while you jabber-jabber your nonsense.”

  “You had a customer.”

  “She’s gone a long time you bet, Zondi.”

  “Please, Gogol! Remember who this African gentleman represents.”

  “You get out,” Zondi said softly, “you go down and you lock up and you stay there.”

  Gogol slunk out, his tail between his teeth.

  “Yes, that’s enough of this rubbish talk, Moosa. I want to know who was in this room when the storm began.”

  “Just me.”

  “If you’re lying …”

  “In the name of Allah—”

  “I said no—”

  “There was nobody but me here. I implore you.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Listening to Springbok Radio.”

  “In a storm? With lightning?”

  “Oh, it crackles a bit but I—”

  Zondi reached out to touch the small wireless. It was cold. Moosa hunched himself up in the corner, brushing brilliantine from his gleaming hair over a favourite picture of a little white girl and two golden spaniels.

  “We are going to have to talk some more,” Zondi said, barely parting his lips.

  Moosa watched with growing apprehension as Zondi removed his jacket. The sight brought a tic to his right eye. He began breathing through his mouth.

  “That’s better,” remarked Zondi, slipping the jacket on again with the lining on the right side. He knotted his tie in the small mirror decorated with rose transfers. Then he sat down and put his feet up on Moosa’s lap.

  “Talk,” he said. “Tell me why you, who are so afraid of lightning, were watching me through the window.”

  “Was that—?”

  Zondi shook his head dolefully.

  “Yes, it was you, Sergeant, I won’t pretend I did not know.”

  “You had been watching long?”

  “Yes, but it was not until the flash that I saw who it was. It is very dark tonight.”

  “But why watch, Moosa? What is there to see?”

  “Things.”

  “Like?”

  “I was waiting for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Gershwin.”

  “More.”

  “Gogol wants to know why I don’t go out. Would you if you had that monster right next door by the school? Yes, you would, you are different to me. I am not a man of action. I am a—”

  “But you watch him.”

  “I can’t help it. It is like you would watch a snake. A mamba. I can’t keep my eyes off him. Someday I will know.”

  “What?”

  “Why he did that thing to me.”

  “That was the weak part of your story, wasn’t it, Moosa?”

  “But he told me he did it! Told me straight out. And he laughed right in my face.”

  Moosa was getting himself quite worked up again. Zondi stood up and peered between the curtains.

  “Why were you waiting, though? What have you heard?”

  Moosa giggled softly.

  “There was talk in the shop today.”

  “Yes?”

  “Gogol told me. He said there was talk that Gershwin was in trouble. With you people.”

  “And?”

  “The Dodge has not been back all day, not once.”

  He giggled again.

  “Then I must speak with Gogol.”

  “That’s all he knows. People do not like to be heard talking about Gershwin today.”

  Zondi had found this out for himself.

  “This is bad.”

  “If you ask me, Sergeant, you had better start looking for him on the Lesotholand border.”

  “Or Swaziland. It’s close, too.”

  “True. It’s just that maybe once a month a car comes by here for Gershwin with Lesotho plates on it.”

  Zondi took it as calmly as he could: Lesotho—a state without apartheid, in which all races could learn to trust one another, and the cradle of the spoke man.

  But all the same, his smile instantly transformed their relationship.

  “You’re a bright boy, Moosa. Who comes in this car?”

  “I’ve never seen properly, he drives it round the back.”

  “A white man?”

  Moosa was politely astonished.

  “I’d have noticed that, Sergeant!”

  Still, it was good enough for Zondi to leave immediately and sprint all the way back to CID headquarters. He was late as it was.

  It must have been the hundredth time Kramer had looked at the wall clock. He started on the pile of overseas photographic magazines again.

  Exasperation made turning each page no more than an exercise in self-control for nothing registered. He had been forced to wait for more than an hour for Sergeant Prinsloo to get back from the scene of a payroll robbery. And now the man had been in the darkroom for nearly twenty minutes without even getting through on the inter-com. On top of which, Zondi was overdue and he wanted to get out to Trudeau’s place right on eight.

  The darkroom door slid open and Sergeant Prinsloo came across, wiping his hands on a towel. He saw Kramer had stopped at a page which had been windowed by the censor’s scissors.

  “Yes, makes me bloody mad, that does,” Prinsloo said. “Okay, so we don’t want nudes all over the place making trouble—but I wanted to read that piece on the back about fine-grain developers.”

  Kramer nearly hit him.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant, nothing to offer you,” he went on, dipping into his apron pocket and taking out the second heart-shaped portrait. “This print is all shot to hell. I thought maybe there was some detail in it I could bring out, even by just holding a lamp behind it, but there’s nothing. It’s flat and that’s all there is to it.”

  “That took you till now?”

  “Ach, no. I copied this and blew up some big contrasty prints.”

  “What the hell for?”

  Sergeant Prinsloo reddened. He threw the locket picture down in front of Kramer.

  “I had to bloody try something. Look at it! All grey tones. A nearly black blob in the middle. Light little blobs in the background, blurring together. Grain like beach sand. It’s a proper balls-up.”

  And so it was. Kramer had just hoped it could be made to reveal something of what was presumably a man standing near a hedge with the sun behind him. The face was so dark you could not even make out the line of the nose.

  “Useless, don’t know why she didn’t throw the bloody thing away with everything else,” Kramer muttered, hinting an apology.

  “Not useless.”

  “How come?”

  “You look in a snapshot album sometime,” Prinsloo said. “Half the pictures are as bad as that one. There’s Uncle Frikkie, they say, and all you see is a doughnut in a beach hat. You see when something is new, after that you recognise. Like it jogs the memory, makes a picture inside your head. And not just photos, it happens with me with my pa’s walking stick.”

  Kramer suddenly saw the real significance of the picture: it was wholly intimate yet totally unrevealing. He was certain now that Miss Le Roux had been a girl with a past which she took pains to hide.

  The lenses increased in importance.

  Zondi met him on the stairs but Kramer shouted angrily and ran on ahead, refusing to listen until they were in the car headed for Greenside. Then he listened very carefully, saying nothing about having his orders disregarded. Zondi’s chief virtue was arrogance.

  The fragrance of furniture-polish put Kramer at his ease in such unfamiliarly elegant surroundings. His grandmother, too, had believed furniture should be groomed daily until it shone like a racehorse’s flank. Of course, you had to have furniture like that which surrounded him to make it worthwhile. It was all imbuya or stinkwood from the Knysna forests and the designs solid Early Cape.

  Kramer’s appreciation of the room ended at this point. He liked paintin
gs to have lots of thorn trees in them and not just one big thorn. He also preferred even a tasteful vase of plastic flowers to an old wine bottle with dead grass stuck in it at all angles.

  Mr Trudeau stepped warily across the waxed parquet flooring with a drink for him. Kramer took it and went on looking out over Trekkersburg through the picture window. The storm had passed and it was a fine moonlight night. He saw the glint of a large swimming pool below on the lawn.

  “Like it, Lieutenant? We do. Wonderful view; all those lights like necklaces on black velvet, or so Susan always says.”

  “It’s a nice house,” said Kramer.

  “You think so? We’re pleased with it. Got ourselves an excellent cook-boy now—he was the gardener before, funnily enough. Wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world.”

  “Very nice,” said Kramer, downing his brandy in one.

  “Thought you chaps—er, didn’t on duty?”

  “We don’t.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, what has brought you careering out here then? Susan says it sounded important.”

  Kramer told him and Mr Trudeau’s whisky-and-soda voice went flat.

  “Murdered, you say?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I cannot divulge any details at this stage.”

  “No, no, quite right. You just want me to say what I can about the contacts. You’ve got them on you?”

  Kramer handed over the envelope.

  “Good Lord, these are unusual little chappies.”

  “Why so surprised, sir?”

  “Never thought I’d come across a pair outside a film studio. You see, they are simply cosmetic cornea lenses, no optical qualities at all. Worn just for effect.”

  “Never medically?”

  “Well, we do have a version of this type of thing for certain conditions involving hypersensitivity, but these aren’t them.”

  “I see, sir. Where would someone get a pair like this?”

  “Overseas, I should think. The States, Germany—possibly London. Did she travel much?”

  “Not in the Republic?”

  “No demand I’ve ever heard of before. It would be possible to send the prescription over, I suppose.”

  “This would have to be done by an eye specialist like yourself?”

  “Oh, no. Any proficient optician can take a cast of the eyeball—a little local anaesthetic and there’s nothing to it.”

  “In Trekkersburg?”

  “Quite possibly. Yes, I don’t see why not.”

  “Any names spring to mind, sir?”

  The specialist became wary—professional ethics and all that. “Sorry, Lieutenant, not one, I’m afraid.”

  “Can you tell me any more about these then?”

  “Hmmmm. Handpainted of course—you can see how it’s done, just leaving the pupil area translucent. The pupil’s quite small, actually, showing it was made for use in bright sunlight. That’s the trouble with these things, doesn’t allow the wearer’s eyes to adapt to conditions. You’d need a hole about four units larger in poor light.”

  “Like a cat’s eyes get bigger?”

  “That sort of thing, Lieutenant.”

  “And what would they cost—a lot?”

  “Around fifty guineas. Perhaps fractionally more, what with postage and so on.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “What more can I say? If it wasn’t for the painted iris they would be the same as any other contact. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Some people take to them, some don’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “I mean some eyes get so irritated, the things have to be discarded. While with others, after a little practice, they can be worn for up to eight hours a day—even longer.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Oh, yes, practice is most important. Everyone has tears streaming down their face to begin with. The old eye thinks it has a foreign body to dislodge. Some learn, others don’t.”

  He was beginning to repeat himself—and this was what Kramer had hoped for: some sign he had come off guard again.

  “No doubt science will find a way round it sooner or later, sir. Just one other thing: have you a patient called Theresa le Roux?”

  He lobbed the name carelessly across. Mr Trudeau met it with a smashing backhander.

  “Don’t try that sort of trick with me, Kramer. There’s a good fellow.”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re very certain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Le Roux’s not an uncommon name—you must have a lot of patients on your books.”

  “Hardly rare, as you point out. It was my mother’s maiden name, I have always been particularly sensitive to it.”

  “So I see,” Kramer said, thanked him, and left through the french windows.

  Zondi had gone to sleep in the car.

  First things first. There was an old wog saying that it was better to fill your belly with the meat of a bushpig before seeking out the buck whose droppings were dry. They would start by running Gershwin Mkize to ground.

  Kramer had rejected Zondi’s suggestion that they radio headquarters and initiate the search right away. He wanted to see to it himself—that way it would be done properly, or, more exactly, his way. Give the Colonel half a chance and the Republic would be roadblocks from Skeleton Coast to Maputoland. He had a somewhat more subtle plan in mind. Of course he had lost an hour but that could not matter much.

  Anyway, they were already back at the central police station and making for the charge office to get the name of the duty officer.

  They went in on the white side and the place seemed deserted. So Kramer looked around the high partition plastered with Wanted notices and bilharzia warnings and found Sergeant Grobbelaar leaning on the non-white counter, reading a newspaper. He ignored their arrival and went on sucking his pencil over the children’s crossword.

  “Bloody English,” he said suddenly, scoring the puzzle across. Every time he patted the blond crown of his crew-cut head like that, Kramer expected it to bounce like a tennis ball. He wished it would. He hated the slob’s guts.

  “Busy, Grobbelaar?”

  “Always. How’s it, Friday?”

  Zondi looked away.

  “Not so busy you can’t listen to serials on Springbok, hey?”

  The transistor set was poorly concealed between the files above the fireplace.

  “What do you want, man?”

  Some of the blokes in uniform were like this. They resented the CID so strongly that it was as if they believed all that pulp in their lockers about randy blondes and racing cars. They overlooked the long hours which made a two-to-ten shift sound like a sinecure for pensioners. And they overlooked the fact that most of them had attempted to join the CID, only to fail on probation. Sergeant Grobbelaar was a case in point. He had panicked when a manacled suspect had tried to escape from the interview room. The bullet had put him back into blue.

  “The duty officer—who is it tonight?”

  “Captain Johns.”

  “Then ring him.”

  “He won’t like this, he’s got a cold and he’s still staying in the Buttery. He was going to bed early.”

  “Ring him. Now.”

  The idea amused Kramer not a little. The Buttery was a private hotel over a restaurant right in the centre of town; it took commercial travellers and served business lunches, but its main income came from a twitter of decrepit widows who sat until all hours in the lobby watching life go by and waiting for the worms. They would get one hell of a kick out of Captain Johns shambling to the guests’ telephone box in his raincoat, hiding his face in a handful of tissues.

  Grobbelaar turned from the phone: “It’s engaged.”

  “Then hold on.”

  Kramer spun the newspaper round. It was the Daily Post, once the Colonists’ weekly source of Government news and now an evening rag not worth putting in the cat’s sand-box. He checked the headlines carefully. Good, the Colonel had resisted temptation
. Not a line about the case. He glanced over the inside pages, stopping at the sports section. Then he thought of the Stop Press on the back. He flipped the Post over and grinned.

  Zondi moved to his side.

  “Look at that, man!”

  Zondi looked and saw a small item which read:

  MARKET RIOT

  Fifteen non-whites arrested in Trekkersburg market at noon following fracas. Policeman injured.

  “You can try yourself,” growled Grobbelaar, dropping the receiver with a clatter. He was plainly annoyed at being excluded from the merriment.

  “Give me the OB,” Kramer said.

  Grobbelaar made no move towards the Occurrence Book, which lay on the table with the typewriter.

  “What you want to know?”

  “This business in the market—did you see who they got?”

  “Ach, no, a lot of kaffirs. Khumalo booked them.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Khumalo!” Grobbelaar yelled.

  The door to the verandah opened and Bantu Constable Khumalo put his head in.

  “Yes, my Sergeant?”

  “Come, CID wants to speak to you.”

  “Suh, I have got five prisoners for the train out here.”

  Kramer held up his hand.

  “Just tell me, Khumalo, who did you book from the market?”

  “All rubbish.”

  “Who? You bloody baboon!”

  “Lily Francis, Bop Jafini, Trueman Sithole, Gershwin Mkize, Banana—”

  “OB, make it quick this time.”

  Grobbelaar could not help himself. The Occurrence Book slammed down in front of Kramer, open at the right place.

  “By the bottom here,” Zondi said, “it says the Dodge was taken to the pound.”

  Kramer read down to the entry, through the list of names. Then he looked up at Grobbelaar, who was trying to do the same upside down.

  “Get me this man Mkize.”

  “Khumalo is busy,” Grobbelaar replied. “Get him yourself.”

  But he wisely threw the cell keys to Zondi.

  Then, after a moment more of Grobbelaar’s company, Kramer decided to leave, too. He caught up with Zondi in the long corridor leading to the yard. It was unlit but its gloss-painted walls reflected the orange tungsten glow at the far end like a flare path. Their footfalls locked and echoed off the high ceiling. The headquarters had been built in the days of the old mounted police and the architect had apparently made whimsical allowance for a platoon to gallop through with lances elevated.