The Steam Pig

by James McClure

“Zondi has their mind, of course.”

  The cabin cruiser sank beneath his fist.

  “True, too.”

  Bubbles came up in a thin stream.

  “Why so quiet all of a sudden?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Can’t you see a connection between these two cases—is that what’s troubling you?”

  “Naturally, we wasted a whole night on it. I tell you it’s quite straightforward. Gershwin killed Shoe Shoe for some damn fool reason, you know what these wogs are, and now he’s trying to make a good story for the court. They always do, even if they know they’re going to hang.”

  “You mean this thing about getting a message from an unknown gang to kill his bloke or else?”

  “Yes, it’s either that line or the one about spirits whispering evil things in their ears. What made it sound wrong at the start was he didn’t know the gang’s name. We just didn’t give him a chance to make one up, that’s all.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Trompie, he could have heard something somewhere.”

  “A whisper you mean? Okay, so there’s a gang that makes small fry like Gershwin jump to attention and mess themselves. Let’s say the same lot’s behind Miss Whatsit’s murder. Is it likely that an outfit that uses a hired pro would delegate a job to a fumbler like Gershwin?”

  “Thought you said you were impressed by his m.o.? It was a fluke you found Shoe Shoe’s body so fast. It could have been there years and then do you think anyone would have bothered to even ask Gershwin about it? Not a chance. You didn’t do anything when he was stabbed. And that’s another point; if Shoe Shoe was found dead in an ordinary way, surely the chances would be that someone would look for a spoke hole?”

  “That’s my girlie, but it wasn’t a fluke that we got on to Shoe Shoe—it was a logical progression from the Le Roux murder. Zondi just followed it up.”

  “Ah, but they didn’t expect that to be discovered in the first place, did they? There’s your fluke.”

  Kramer began to soap his hair.

  “Have it your way,” he said. “But this is all theory. The only link it suggests is that a gang with a name we don’t know is going about knocking off white girls and black beggars. Take it from there, if you can.”

  The Widow Fourie went out and returned with a fresh packet of Luckies. Kramer had slid down to rinse his hair and so only his nose, mouth and knee-caps were above water level. It startled her mildly when the lips parted to speak.

  “I know for a fact that Gershwin Mkize murdered Shoe Shoe,” the lips intoned slowly, “and I know for a fact that even if what Gershwin said was true, there is nothing more he can tell us.”

  It was strangely impressive, rather like a scene from some ancient legend about a sub-aqua oracle. The Widow Fourie stood fascinated.

  But Kramer said nothing more. He surfaced with a great splash and grabbed for a towel. The Widow Fourie handed him one absently.

  “What about Shoe Shoe though?” she asked. “Surely he would know—you’d have thought he’d have said something when they were doing that to him.”

  “According to Gershwin he had a hell of a lot to say—but it was all nonsense. He must have cracked with the shock. Can’t say I’m surprised, it was the second time for him.”

  “What sort of nonsense?”

  “Just gibberish and it didn’t help matters that Gershwin tried to put it all into bloody English as usual. We pushed him hard on this but got nowhere. In fact Gershwin was beginning to go a bit himself by then and you couldn’t really tell one lot from another. Stuff about people who tipped him—Shoe Shoe, I mean—and those that didn’t and councillors and the mayor’s car and all the important things he knew about important people watching from in front of the City Hall all day. Ach, I can’t be bothered. We didn’t even try to write it down in the end, just let him run on until he keeled over.”

  “Do you remember any of it?”

  “No. I tell you most of it was real rubbish.”

  “Oh, just try to remember one thing. I think you’re so lucky to have an interesting job like yours is.”

  Kramer could see he had made her day. Come to think of it, it was high time he made her. So, simply to sustain the mood, he said: “The last thing he said was ‘the steam pig’.”

  “The Steam Pig,” she repeated slowly.

  Kramer looked up from her legs.

  “Come again?”

  She was puzzled.

  “The Steam Pig—the same as you said it.”

  “No, it wasn’t!”

  “For God’s sake, Trompie, there’s no need to snap like that over a little thing.”

  The Widow Fourie had reached the door before Kramer could speak again.

  “You see,” he said quietly, “you say it like it’s the name of something.”

  She turned and understood. And shivered.

  Van Niekerk had made a most satisfactory start. For years he had gone about with a platoon of ballpoint pens ranged at the ready in his breast-pocket. One wrote in mauve ink, the others in red, black, green and the conventional blue. The thing was that he seldom felt justified in using them all in a single engagement, but this time he had.

  And nobody could dispute how much such diversity had helped to clarify the complicated case sheet he had drawn up from his notes. Colonel Du Plessis, who had wandered in to ask casually after the Lieutenant, had done him the honour of staring at the finished job for fully five minutes.

  He was alone again now, having moved into the Lieutenant’s delightfully spick-and-span office with all the paraphernalia he could possibly imagine his duties would require. He had pinned a large street map of Trekkersburg on the wall and marked various pertinent addresses with coloured drawing pins. He had spread the crime sheet on a card table borrowed from the sergeants’ mess. And he had placed the sparse collection of reports in a yellow basket labelled “PRIORITY”.

  Which somehow forced him to read them all again even though they contained very little information. The one from Fingerprints on the cottage was a complete waste of time.

  So he picked up two lists prepared from the Yellow Pages and debated whether to begin on the dispensing opticians or the electronic organ retailers.

  A spin of a coin decided him on the latter. Soon he was copying down immense lists of improbable names read over to him, somewhat irritably in most cases, from invoice books. As the traders pointed out, this check failed to take into account the cash sales; but his reply to this was to the effect that the class of person he was interested in would hardly be likely to indulge in such vulgarity. This was also the reason he gave himself for omitting the two large cash-and-carry bazaars in the main street. The old women in Barnato Street had been most emphatic that the men they had seen going for lessons had been well dressed, prosperous-looking types.

  As it was, Van Niekerk lost a lot of his early enthusiasm when he totted up the results and found he would have to check out one hundred and seventy-three names. They could wait. The opticians might provide an immediate lead.

  But an hour later, and with two names still to contact, he was looking exceedingly sourly at Kramer’s name scrawled on the telephone directory cover. The opticians had been astounded by his inquiry—some had had to have the whole thing explained twice to them. Cosmetic contacts were definitely still a thing of the future in Trekkersburg, if not the entire Republic, and most of them doubted very much if they would ever catch on. He shuddered at the thought of going on to make a list of possibilities in Durban.

  Thankfully the coffee arrived just then and, combined with a dozen brisk press-ups, restored something of his former vigour.

  In fact he was actually reaching for the telephone again when Mr Abbott came through.

  The undertaker had asked specifically to be connected to Lieutenant Kramer’s office so he wasted no time on formalities. He spoke briefly in a hurried whisper and rang off.

  Van Niekerk shook his head sharply to clear it. Then he looked down at his shorthand note of the mess
age:

  “Got someone in the parlour asking questions about the deceased girl. Come quick. Not sure I’ll be able to keep them without a fuss.”

  The mild-mannered co-ordinator took his cue. He was up and away and streaking for the street before it occurred to him to call the Lieutenant. But then this was a matter of extreme urgency and everyone knew how difficult it was at times to contact him. He could be anywhere.

  Kramer was four blocks away in the cells of the Trekkersburg Magistrate’s Court, talking to Pop van Rensberg, the sergeant-in-dcharge.

  “Anything for you, Trompie old son,” Pop was saying, keeping an eye on the Bantu prisoners tiptoeing up to the tap outside his office door to fill tins with drinking water.

  “Hey, Johannes, you old skelm,” Pop bawled. “Don’t tell me you’ve been at the ntombis again?”

  A lanky prisoner looked up from the tap and smiled bashfully.

  “Greetings, my father,” he said respectfully in Zulu.

  Pop waved an affable paw.

  “Just one of my old friends,” he explained to Kramer. “I tease him about the girls, say he’s a rapist—he thinks it’s helluva funny.”

  Kramer glanced at the man.

  “What is he then?” he asked.

  “Buggered if I know, but he does it often enough. Now who was it you wanted in the end cell by himself?”

  “Gershwin Mkize—he’s just been remanded.”

  “Of course, Mr Banana. I’ve got names for them all you know. You see he—”

  “Wears yellow. Will you get it moving, Pop?”

  The sergeant took it good humouredly and waddled out into the hall bawling orders. His staff shepherded all the stray prisoners into their cells and took a yellow figure into one in the far corner.

  Zondi came in through the grille from the court corridor and joined Kramer.

  “Nice timing,” Kramer remarked. “He’ll have a week now to become a pretty boy again before he comes up in front of a court. But why wasn’t the remand earlier?”

  “Big round-up last night for pass offenders. I gave your note to Mr Oosthuizen and he put Gershwin through in between cases.”

  “Uhuh. Sam Safrinsky turn up to represent him?”

  “Not a chance, boss.”

  Pop returned to greet Zondi warmly.

  “Hello, Cheeky,” he said. “Is this the way you want it?”

  “Too quiet,” Zondi observed.

  “He’s right,” Kramer agreed.

  “Damn right,” Pop echoed, “you never know who you’ve got in here these days. Come on you lot, I want to hear you talking.”

  His staff took up the cry, translated it, and immediately there was a babble of voices. After half a minute or so, it settled down.

  “Fine,” Kramer said, and he and Zondi walked shoulder to shoulder down to the end cell.

  Pop retired to where he could overhear nothing incriminating and joked with Ephraim, another old favourite. They enjoyed some good laughs.

  Kramer had the broad piece of plaster ready in his hand before they entered the cell—the gauze which had kept it sterile was back in Pop’s wastepaper basket. And he applied it to Gershwin’s mouth before he could utter a single whimper.

  They closed the door.

  “Listen to me, Gershwin,” Kramer said. “I have come here this morning to ask you one question. When I take that plaster off I want just to hear your answer—nothing else.”

  Gershwin nodded vigorously, clasping his handcuffed hands before him.

  “No, we haven’t time to have a rehearsal,” Kramer went on. “Or to talk all day, too. Sergeant Zondi and I are going to give you half of something—if you lie, we’ll let you have the other half later.”

  Gershwin cringed, trying to protect his head.

  “First, the question,” Kramer went on. “Last night you used the words ‘the steam pig’. What we want to know is: was this some nonsense of yours—or was it something that Shoe Shoe said?”

  Gershwin was mouthing frantically as Zondi took up his position behind him.

  They concentrated on the soft parts of the body, the areas where there was no backing of bone to fracture or aggravate capillary damage through excessive resilience. One soft part was particularly favoured for its extreme sensitivity and relative isolation from vital organs.

  They did it all with the fingers, never with the fist.

  She kept her eyes on him all the time, which made Van Niekerk feel even more of a fool when he had to replace his revolver in its holster before leaving.

  And she had such frightened eyes, that poor little old lady perched on the edge of the sofa in Mr Abbott’s showroom. Small wonder when you considered the way he had come in off the street.

  Mr Abbott was hovering about waiting for him at the front counter.

  “Any good?” he asked.

  “I want words with you,” Van Niekerk growled. “What the hell do you mean making phone calls like that and having me think you had a bloody tiger around here?”

  “Steady on, I said nothing about tigers.”

  “You said you ‘couldn’t keep them’ without a fuss—what was I to think?”

  “But you always fuss old ladies if you spring things on them. I didn’t want her upset. This is a business, after all! I thought you’d know how to handle it better than I.”

  There was quite a considerable pause.

  “Thanks, anyway,” Van Niekerk conceded. “It could have been something big. You never know.”

  And with that he left Mr Abbott to console the old dear and send her on her way.

  Van Niekerk was still smarting when he reached the office and found the Lieutenant and Zondi there making a mess of his crime sheet by writing in some nonsense all over the place.

  “What’s all this?” he said, as brusquely as he dared.

  “That’s what they’re saying down in Housebreaking,” Kramer chuckled. “Fanie Brandsma swears you were touching thirty by the time you passed their window.”

  “I mean this ‘steam pig’ business,” Van Niekerk muttered.

  “Oh, that? Well it just could be a lead.”

  “Really?”

  Kramer nodded. Now it was plain why he was in such unusual spirits.

  “We’ve just paid a little call on our friend Gershwin Mkize,” Kramer explained. “We wanted to check on something he said last night, these three words.”

  “And?”

  “It seems that Shoe Shoe used them not once but often after realising why he was out there playing at scarecrows. In fact he kept saying to Mkize it was because of the Steam Pig that he was being done in.”

  “He shout it many times,” Zondi quoted from his notebook. “He says all this trouble is trouble from the Steam Pig. It is a bad thing. It make even the white baas much frightened. He hear white baas telling friend that the Steam Pig will mean the end of his days.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yes, the link, Willie. These cases are definitely connected.”

  “Did this Mkize say under whose orders?”

  “He still says he didn’t know then. But thinking about it now he wonders if the Steam Pig wasn’t behind it.”

  “So it’s a gang, Lieutenant?”

  “Seems like it. Or somebody running a mob. What else could it be?”

  “Dunno. But I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You shouldn’t have if it’s any good.”

  “True.”

  “All the same, I want checks made. Zondi here will go round his informers. But I want you to be careful, hey? We don’t want to give any warnings.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  “You, Willie, you’re to check the name out in Records—see even if you can find some bunch with the same initials.”

  “Just two things, sir: why didn’t Gershwin come out with this before—”

  “Because he thought it was rubbish.”

  “And did he say what white men were heard talking?”

  “No, Gershwin just imagined that Shoe
Shoe overheard things said from where he sat at the side of the City Hall steps. He must have done, come to think of it—it’s the sort of place that people speak their minds, especially coming away from meetings when they’ve had to bottle it all up.”

  “You’re saying that Shoe Shoe got this off city councillors and that, are you, sir?”

  “No, I’m not, just giving an example—be sensible, man. I’m talking about what Gershwin thought. Shoe Shoe could have picked it up round the back in his wheelbarrow—the car park’s right by his sleeping place.”

  “Europeans often say private things in front of Bantu,” Zondi chipped in. “They do not expect men like Shoe Shoe can speak their language, either.”

  Kramer suddenly realised that he had spoken critically to Van Niekerk in front of Zondi. He hastened to make amends.

  “Tell me, old mate,” he said, “where were you off in such a hurry to? Get a hot tip on the geegees?”

  He knew Van Niekerk’s weakness, but it misfired. The man squirmed and frowned for a reply.

  “I’ve just had an idea, sir,” he said with recruit-like eagerness. “This expression, for want of a better word, is in English. Now I know there is an English saying ‘pig iron’—do you think that ‘steam pig’ is another of these sayings?”

  “It’s worth a check,” Kramer agreed. “Now come on, man, what has been happening round here?”

  “Well, to cut a long story short, I did get a tip-off, sir, but from Georgie Abbott. He rang to say somebody was on his premises asking after Miss Le Roux.”

  “For God’s sake, man! Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I’ll see them right away.”

  Van Niekerk swallowed hard.

  “I let her go, sir.”

  Only Zondi’s presence saved Van Niekerk from castration. Anything less drastic held no interest for Kramer, so he simply asked: “Why?”

  “Because, because there wasn’t much to it, sir. She said that she was a dressmaker, that she had made two or three frocks for Miss Le Roux about two years ago. She remembered her because she was such a nice, polite young lady.”

  “Why wasn’t she at the funeral?”

  “She didn’t know her that well, sir. She says she thought she’d be sort of intruding.”

  “Into what? Did she know if the girl had a family?”