The Steam Pig

by James McClure

  The question had Kramer across the room in two bounds. He grabbed her.

  “Why do you ask that?” he demanded.

  Mrs Johnson shook herself free, anger putting colour in her cheeks.

  “I’ve already told you that, young man—she had lovely skin.”

  Kramer was suddenly aware that she, too, had lovely skin, now there was a flush to give it life.

  And he noticed something else that stopped his breathing.

  When seen together, the girl on the tray and the old woman standing beside it were, not in general but in detail, uncannily alike.

  “You’re her mother?”

  The reply was proud: “I am.”

  Farthing waited, then replaced the sheet.

  “She was not marked, Mrs Johnson,” Kramer said softly.

  Gogol was not pleased to see Zondi again but Moosa was.

  He said that Thursday was quite the worst day of his week. It attracted far too many raucous people and noisy lorries to Trichaard Street—why, he could not imagine. Ordinarily he could tolerate the odd hoot of a car-horn or a pedlar’s cry, but on Thursdays it was all too distracting for him to continue his third careful reading of Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, pre-war edition. Although he had reached Ichthyology and was eagerly anticipating picking holes in Islam again, he sensibly opted for a pile of undemanding American comics on Thursdays.

  “Why not go out?” Zondi asked.

  Moosa took sudden umbrage that one of Gogol’s fruit flies should dare to invade his sanctuary. He zapped it with Batman.

  So Zondi just went ahead and disclosed the fate of Gershwin Mkize and his two henchmen. They were behind bars and this time for good.

  “Damn,” Moosa groaned, looking very sorry for himself. “Damn and blastings. Have you told Gogol yet?”

  “He doesn’t like kaffirs in his store who aren’t there to spend their money.”

  Moosa sighed.

  “A hard man, Sergeant,” he said. “A very hard man.”

  Zondi allowed him to dwell silently on the ruthless nature of the greengrocer. And then he observed philosophically: “There is work and there is work.”

  “What do you mean, Sergeant?”

  “That there are many different things a man may do to earn his money.”

  “Huh, money! That’s all that Gogol thinks is important. I tell him one, two hundred times, education is what makes a man. He just rubs his thumb.”

  “Hau!”

  “Yes, that’s the truth of it. He’s so mean that the other night I took one little bag of peanuts off the shelf downstairs and he wrote that down in his book, too.”

  “So he is expecting you to pay him back then?”

  This made Moosa laugh like a clown, one of the sad ones.

  “But does it matter where the money comes from, Moosa?”

  The Indian looked sideways at Zondi.

  “I’m not mixed up in anything,” he said darkly—and showed his hurt when Zondi chuckled.

  “You’re a man of education, right, Moosa?”

  “I apply myself to my studies.”

  “You have a quick eye and a good ear? You can think intelligently?”

  “I have always done so.”

  “Good. Then would you like a job where you decide your own hours—even what you’re going to do?”

  “This is very interesting, I must say, Sergeant. What is it?”

  “Ah, let us test your powers!” Zondi replied. “You guess.”

  Moosa spent some time on it. Then he got it in a flash when Zondi took two Rand notes from his wallet and pushed them into the row of encyclopaedias.

  “It’s good money and no tax either,” Zondi coaxed.

  “Too damn dangerous. I’m a man of intellect, not a man of action, Sergeant—thanks all the same.”

  “Rubbish, Moosa, you can take your time. Surely you don’t think a man with your mind is going to be outwitted by the types we’re interested in?”

  Moosa shrugged.

  “It happened once,” he said, flattered but wary.

  “And couldn’t happen again, not with all the reading you say you’ve done. How about it? You could even have a little revenge if we can fix it.”

  Moosa waddled over and examined the notes.

  “But what are these for?” he asked.

  “The tip-off about the Lesotho car.”

  “Did that help you then?”

  “Not so far—we need more about it and quickly. So you can call our small gift an advance if you like.”

  While he was talking, Zondi took out a paperback and admired its cover.

  “James Bond,” Moosa said. “Have you read any? Beautiful writing.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Zondi replied, casually handing the volume over.

  Moosa took a long look at the blonde in Bond’s arms.

  “Well, I must get back now,” Zondi said from the doorway. “We’re in a big hurry on this one. Maybe you could go out for a look this afternoon, Moosa?”

  The reek of the flowers was overpowering. It began to sicken Kramer as he sat, ankle-deep in bouquets and tributes, at Mrs Johnson’s side in the store room and waited for her to stop weeping.

  So he decided to go through and have a belated interview with Farthing. He might even take a statement.

  “Is she comfy in there?” Farthing asked as he approached the counter. “I was so surprised when you said the showroom wouldn’t do. She doesn’t look it, does she?”

  “Name?” Kramer asked gruffly.

  “Jonathan Farthing.”

  “Address?”

  “I live here, I’ve a little flat round the back.”

  “You took the girl from the cottage in Barnato Street?”

  “I did the removal, yes.”

  “By yourself?”

  “We’ve got one of these clever new-fangled things with wheels on and handles.”

  “I see. What can you remember of the occasion?”

  “Just it was very straightforward. Bundled her in and shot back here.”

  “You don’t seem to take your profession very seriously.”

  “Frankly, Lieutenant, I’m not very interested in that side of things. I’m more—”

  “I’m not interested, Mr Farthing. Tell me what you saw at the cottage.”

  “Well, it was all very tasteful, wasn’t it? Lovely curtains in the bedroom, I’ve been trying to find some of that material ever since.”

  Kramer sighed and hoped his breath was bad.

  “So sorry, I’m sure. The girl? It struck me she was very peaceful; the bedclothes were not disturbed or anything, apart from what the doctors had moved. Oh, yes, I’d almost forgotten—I switched off her bedside lamp.”

  “Still burning?”

  “Yes, but it was the only one. After that I noticed whether the others were out.”

  “You didn’t leave any fingerprints—how was that?”

  “The little difference between the old and the new schools, you might say. I always wear gloves.”

  “Uhuh.”

  Kramer closed his notebook.

  “That seems to be all, Mr Farthing. But tell me one thing: why didn’t you fix up Miss Le Roux yourself and not leave it to Mr Abbott?”

  “Oh, there’s no hurry once they’re in the fridge. Besides which—”

  “What?”

  “I personally prefer—not to do females.”

  “And Mr Abbott?”

  But just then three off-duty postmen of roughly the same height arrived to change into their pall-bearer suits and earn an afternoon’s beer money. They apologised on behalf of the other corner who could not come as he had the hiccoughs.

  Kramer left Farthing panicking quietly at the thought of finding a replacement, and went back down the passage to see how Mrs Johnson was getting on. He found her sitting up very straight, her eyes dry and her hat off.

  “Somebody killed my little girl,” she said as he entered.

  “Yes, they did. Now, are you going to
help us find out who?”

  “If I can.”

  “Thank you, Mrs Johnson.”

  “The name is really Francis, sir. Johnson was my maiden name.”

  “But Gladys stays the same?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, Gladys, that’s the style. Was your daughter trying for white?”

  Mrs Francis smiled wanly.

  “She was trying for white, as they say.”

  “She made a good job of it,” Kramer remarked. “There wasn’t a trace of her past anywhere in her flat. A spy couldn’t have done better. The only thing I found was one tiny photograph.”

  “Oh? Where was that?”

  “In a heart-shaped locket.”

  She bit her lip.

  “That was Mr Francis, her dad.”

  “Look, Gladys, maybe it would be better if we went back right to the very beginning.”

  “Must we?”

  “It could help me a lot in understanding.”

  This obviously appealed to her.

  Kramer sat down on the other chair that Farthing had provided from the chapel and prepared to write.

  “You were born in the Cape?”

  Her scornful laugh brought his head up sharply in surprise.

  “Why do you people always think Coloureds are all born in the Cape?”

  Again, that curious over-reaction on her part.

  “Where then?”

  “Durban.”

  “And—?”

  Kramer’s ballpoint hovered, ready to set the date down. But the pad slid unheeded from his knee a moment later.

  “And I was born white,” Mrs Francis said. “We were all born white. The whole family. And we lived white, too.”

  11

  OVER THE YEARS Kramer had taken down a great variety of formal statements. They had ranged from long, rambling allegations about neighbours’ dogs to short, pitiful admissions by parents who had failed to keep a proper eye on baby in his bath. More than once he had snatched his tiny cramped words from a dying breath.

  This should have prepared him to function professionally under any circumstances but he abandoned the idea after the first ten pages. He just let Mrs Francis talk and jotted down what he could. His brain was bruised from doing somersaults, it needed a rest.

  Not that he got it.

  “We moved into a flat behind the Esplanade about a year after we got married,” Mrs Francis explained. “Palm Court it was called—one of those skyscraper things with sea sand all over the verandahs at the back. Always lots of children around, noisy but nice.

  “Tessa was our first. She was a good baby even if she cried a lot at nights. Pat said ‘No more,’ what with him just working on the buses, you see. Leon—he happened to us, if you know what I mean, and somehow we still managed.

  “Up till their teens, that was. Then they started wanting all sorts of things. It was Tessa, really. She had such a gift for music, we had to get her a piano. That’s when I started dressmaking to help with the extras.

  “Well, Tessa went from strength to strength with her playing. Her teacher, a Mrs Clarke, came up to me in town one day and said it was time our Tessa got herself another teacher.

  “I was shocked. I asked, why on earth? What had Tessa done? This Mrs Clarke laughed and said, didn’t I know? Tessa had passed so many of her Royal College certificates she was now as well qualified as she was!”

  “You mean she could teach music?” Kramer asked.

  “Yes, that was it. Mrs Clarke, the dear old thing, had taken Tessa right up to where she was. She couldn’t take her further, could she? So anyway I told Tessa what had happened and she said the best person was some Belgian or other in the orchestra—municipal, I mean.

  “The next day we went along to see him and he said all right if we could pay the fees. They were steep, I can tell you.

  “Pat and I talked it over and we decided we must give her the opportunity. I would take in more work, sack the girl, and Pat would try for overtime.”

  “And you did that?”

  “Yes. Then Lenny—Leon—started to give us trouble.”

  “Oh?”

  “It wasn’t serious, not then. You see, he wanted to be a pilot but his maths were terrible. He asked his Dad if he could have extra lessons, and he said yes. Tessa was having them, wasn’t she?”

  “Was he jealous of his sister?”

  Mrs Francis hesitated.

  “He said cruel things at times but brothers and sisters are like that.”

  Kramer underlined the word “jealous” three times.

  “Go on—what happened? Did he pass?”

  “He never got the chance.”

  “Why? What school was he at?”

  “Durban High. But that’s got nothing to do with it. Pat got sick with all the long hours he was working and not getting the proper food either, he was in such a rush. I nagged at him until he went to Addington and the doctors there said it was TB.”

  Mrs Francis stopped talking abruptly. Fearful that she would not carry on, Kramer broke off a carnation and handed it to her.

  “Nice smell,” he said.

  “Funny, that,” Mrs Francis murmured. “It was always carnations in the hospital—I suppose it was because of all those Indian kids selling them outside.

  “What was I saying? Oh, yes. Well, Pat went in for what they call observation and the next thing I knew was they sent us a card saying he had been transferred to another hospital. I remember reading it and running in to our neighbours to ask if I could use the phone.”

  “But why?”

  “I thought there had been a mistake. I said to the girl at Addington that I wanted to know where my husband was. She asked for my name and then she was away from the phone for a long time. When she came back she asked if I hadn’t been sent a card. That’s why I was ringing, I said—the card said Pat had been sent to a native hospital.”

  There was nowhere Kramer could look except straight at her.

  “By this time my neighbour was getting all excited, she was right next to me you see, and she grabbed away the phone and started to give the girl a bit of her mind.

  “All of a sudden she stopped talking. She went as white as a sheet and put the thing down. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked her. I was crying by then—I don’t know why. She started to cry, too. It was terrible, the two of us in the hall like that. Every time I asked her what they had said, she just shook her head.

  “Then her man came home and he asked her. She said that—”

  “Yes?”

  Mrs Francis regained control of herself.

  “While Pat was in hospital the doctors had noticed something. I don’t know what, I’ll never know. But what happened was that he had been reclassified Coloured.”

  Kramer knew something of what she felt—it had happened to a school friend of his. Quite a bombshell. But laws were laws, so he put an official edge to his voice.

  “You were later informed of this through the proper channels?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you go before the classification board?”

  “Me and the children did. We were reclassified, too.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “He killed himself in the hospital with a rubber bandage.”

  There was a perfunctory rap on the door and Farthing trotted in.

  “Sorry to disturb,” he said, scooping up the flowers. “The old man’s back if you want to see him, Lieutenant.”

  Kramer shook his head and waited for the silly bugger to get the hell out again.

  “You know that neighbour?” Mrs Francis asked. “She never spoke to me again, she didn’t. We were Coloureds now.

  “Oh, well, then we packed up our things and went out to live in Claremont. Everyone there was very nice to us except the usual one or two. I managed to keep on my old customers—I didn’t tell them, you see—and found some new ones.”

  “But wasn’t there anything about this in the papers?”

&nbs
p; “A little piece, months after, when there was the inquest on Pat. Not so you’d notice it.”

  That would be right. The Press did not attend inquests but picked up their stories when the records were filed at the Attorney General’s office.

  “And what about the children?”

  She drew her fingertips hard down her cheeks.

  “It was terrible. I did everything I could but it didn’t work.

  “They had to leave their schools for a start. That didn’t matter so much to Tessa, she had her music, but Lenny had still a way to go.”

  “They have schools in Claremont.”

  “He wanted to be a pilot, though. Job reservation broke his spirit.”

  This line did not ring true to Mrs Francis’s way of talking—or thinking. She was bitter but not political. It sounded very much like the sort of thing a Jew lawyer would say.

  “Lenny got into trouble, did he?”

  “How do you know that, sir?”

  “Never you mind. Just tell me about it.”

  “He stole from people on the beachfront—in a gang that would go down from Claremont. They didn’t catch the others, just him. I told the magistrate all about it and so did Mr Golder. That magistrate! He said he would be lenient but he sent Lenny to a reformatory.”

  “Well, he could have been given cuts, too,” Kramer objected.

  “Yes, sir, I suppose that’s true.”

  “Of course it is. But what happened to Tessa meantime? Did she go on with her lessons?”

  “That bloody Belgian really had me fooled!”

  The sudden, totally unexpected profanity was a tonic for both of them. Mrs Francis even managed a smile which did not mean anything else. Kramer leaned forward.

  “I suppose if it hadn’t been for him, then none of this would ever have happened.”

  “Then I must know.”

  She nodded.

  “You will understand, sir, it is very difficult to say these things when your daughter …”

  He waited.

  “I went to this man and said that Tessa could not come any more because there was not enough money. He was very shocked, he said, that such a thing should happen. And then he said that he would give Tessa her lessons for nothing. I knew that like most foreigners he was a liberal but this seemed to be too much to ask. Then he told me it was his duty as a musician not to neglect a talent like Tessa’s. He even said there were things more important than money. I’ve thought about that often. Oh yes, more important to him, maybe.”