The Song Dog

by James McClure

  Cognizant of the fact I was transferred from Bloemfontein to your Division in Natal only twenty-three days ago, I nonetheless hereby make application for an immediate further transfer. Never, in all my born days in the South African Police, have I met such baboons as you and your little band of arse-creeping half-wits—and as for Trekkersburg itself, God knows what our forefathers thought they were doing, fighting the bloody English for it! Three weeks in Trekkersburg should become, in my opinion, the new sentence for aggravated child molestation.

  So far, so good—even if it did have a few rough edges, he thought, and looked forward to seeing the expression on Du Plessis’ face.

  Bastard!

  Inadvertently, Kramer had just caught a glimpse in his mind’s eye of the Colonel standing where he had first seen him at five thirty that morning: scratching his bum over by the big window in his office at divisional headquarters.

  “Ja, Colonel?” Kramer had said, walking in without knocking. “What’s the problem—apart from the fact some stupid bugger’s just woken my landlady to tell her you wanted me down here, chop-chop …?”

  Du Plessis turned, his shriveled neck protruding like a turtle’s from the oversize collar of his uniform tunic. “Ah, Lieutenant!” he smarmed. “So good of you to be so quick! Poor Captain Bronkhorst has been worrying that you would find it difficult to adjust to our little ways, but your promptness leaves me no cause for complaint—none whatsoever. Promptitude is what I like to see in an officer! That, and loyalty, too, of course. Loyalty and promptitude.”

  “Ja, ja, but why did the Colonel send for me?” asked Kramer, already growing edgy in the buffoon’s presence. By the sound of it, Du Plessis wasn’t so much in need of a homicide detective as of a devoted spaniel with a bloody alarm clock.

  “Terrible tidings!” said Du Plessis, suddenly very grave, and left the window to move behind his huge desk. “Terrible, terrible tidings,” he repeated, slowly lowering himself into his seat in what Kramer had come to think of as the hemorrhoid crouch. “From afar,” Du Plessis added, wincing as his weight settled.

  “How far?” asked Kramer.

  Du Plessis opened out the brown docket on his blotter. “From Jafini, way up in Northern Zululand,” he said. “There’s been a double murder some fifteen miles farther east at a place called Fynn’s Creek. Two adult persons, both white, one male and one female; explosive device suspected, motive as yet unknown.”

  “Uh-huh … When?”

  “Just after midnight. Or twelve-eighteen this morning to be exact, because that’s when the station commander at Jafini heard a loud detonation and went out to investigate. It took him until four-ten to pinpoint the scene of the explosion, and by then he—”

  “Ja, but you still haven’t told me what’s so terrible about it. Colonel,” Kramer interrupted, impatient with detail at this stage. “Were the deceased known personally to you or something?”

  “Astute, very astute,” murmured Du Plessis, with a smile as fleeting as a nun’s wicked thoughts. “Yes—and no, I think is the answer to that. The male personage butchered in this despicable, cowardly fashion was none other than Maaties Kritzinger …”

  Kramer shrugged. “And so?” he said, aware that a very much stronger reaction was being expected of him, but at a loss to know why.

  “Detective Sergeant Martinus Kritzinger?” prompted Du Plessis. “Head of the CID at Jafini? Who once played fullback for your own home province, the Free State?”

  “Oh, a cop—now I get it,” said Kramer. “Never heard of the bugger. Who was his lady friend?”

  Du Plessis bristled. “A fellow officer dies in the line of duty and that’s all you can say?”

  “At present, ja,” confirmed Kramer. “There’s plenty of cops I wouldn’t leave a lame cat alone with, so I tend not to prejudge.”

  “Prejudge?” echoed Du Plessis, and swallowed hard before giving an unhappy chuckle. “Ja, Captain Bronkhurst has informed me you, er, have inclinations to be a bit of a freethinker on the quiet. But, take my word for it, Maaties Kritzinger was one of the best. In fact, I can’t remember an occasion when he didn’t bring me a nice piece of fresh venison on his visits here to headquarters, never mind the season. And once it was a whole, entire box of mussels that he’d gone and got off the rocks personally!”

  “Shit, Colonel.”

  “Exactly! As I say, one of the best—it’s just too bad you two can’t ever come face-to-face now, because then you could see yourself what a great bloke he was.”

  “Ach, we’ll come face-to-face all right, never fear, sir,” said Kramer. “What mortuary’s he in?”

  “No, no, I meant really get to know him!” Du Plessis turtle-snapped, and raised a pointing finger. “And you do prejudge, you know! That remark of yours regarding his ‘lady friend’ was quite uncalled-for. God Almighty, man, the fellow was married and he leaves four poor little kiddies, not to mention a police widow. I’m going to get a memorial fund started, it’s such a tragic case.”

  “Then who was the white female involved?” asked Kramer.

  Du Plessis glanced at his notes. “Annika Gillets, wife of the game ranger at Fynn’s Creek,” he said, “who was absent at the time. Hans Terblanche, the station commander at Jafini, is still trying to get in touch with him, to tell him what’s happened.”

  “Perhaps he knows already, Colonel.”

  “Sorry? You mean the husband?”

  “Uh-huh. How old was this Annika?”

  “She’d just turned twenty-two, the same as my—ach, no! You’re not starting that nonsense again! Listen hard and get this into your thick head: Maaties died in the line of duty, like I told you. There was no hanky-panty involved. Understand? Anyway, his body was found miles away, his gun still in his hand.”

  “No hanky-panty,” Kramer repeated with as straight a face as possible, adding the phrase to his small collection of Colonelisms. “Only how many miles away was his body found? Must’ve been one hell of an explosion to—”

  “Ach, you know damn well what I mean, Lieutenant! She was inside the house and Maaties was outside the house, making his approach, gun in hand, obviously aware that things were—”

  “He was alone?” asked Kramer.

  “Of course—Maaties always preferred to work that way.”

  “He didn’t even take a boy with him?”

  “No, never. Maaties said a Bantu was more trouble than he was worth, and besides, he himself was fluent in Zulu, so what was the need?”

  “Hmmm,” murmured Kramer.

  “Just who are you criticizing, hey?” Colonel Du Plessis demanded. “Captain Bronkhurst tells me you’re a definite loner yourself—and you won’t even work with white fellow officers unless you’re forced to comply. What kind of attitude is that?”

  “Hell, my Afrikaans and my English are fluent, Colonel,” replied Kramer, taking a cigarette from the Lucky Strike packet in his shirt pocket, “so, as you say, what’s the need?”

  “I hope you’re not going to light that,” Du Plessis said sternly. “I’ve a strict no-smoking rule in my office—I’m a church elder.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Kramer, placing the cigarette in a corner of his mouth. “But as I was about to say, it seems—”

  “No, as I had already started to say, Lieutenant, I have decided to send you forthwith up to Jafini to take charge of this investigation. It’s high time you got to know the full extent of the division, not so? Besides, I’m happy to report that Captain Bronkhurst speaks very highly of your deductive powers.”

  “Sir?” said Kramer, who had just spent three weeks in Trekkersburg having the arse bored off him by routine inquiries that needed no deductive powers whatsoever. “I’m amazed.”

  “Modesty is also something I value in an officer!” said Du Plessis, showing his dentures. “The full details will be made available to you when you reach Jafini, so I need detain you no longer—it’s quite a drive there. Bokkie Maritz is already waiting with a car in the vehicle yard.”

&
nbsp; “Bokkie, Colonel?” said Kramer. “What’s that fat idiot got to do with anything?”

  “I’m sending him with you to assist, of course. Pretoria will expect the paperwork to be kept up-to-date, and while one does that, the other can be out—”

  “But Maritz’s a total clown, Colonel!” objected Kramer, lighting a match. “The bloody last thing I need is a—”

  “Lieutenant,” Du Plessis said, cutting him short and glaring at the match flame, “Bokkie Maritz has served me well and true for the past eight, nine years, and I will not have my judgment questioned—especially not by someone who’s hardly been here five minutes!”

  “My point exactly, Colonel. Why—”

  “You heard what I said about not smoking in here?”

  Kramer nodded, watching the match burn down toward his fingers. “But why send me, when I’m still a new poop? Why not someone with more rank, with more local knowledge and—”

  “Listen,” said Du Plessis, intent on the flame, too. “I don’t know how your previous superior did business, but when I give an order, I expect—”

  “I bet there could be more to this than meets the eye,” said Kramer, as the flame reached just above his thumb. “Has Captain Bronkhorst some special reason for not—”

  “Never mind that!” exploded Du Plessis, poking a ruler angrily at the match. “Blow it out! Blow it out this instant!”

  “On my way, Colonel …” said Kramer, taking note of that curious little slip, and lit up, using the same match, as he stepped from Du Plessis’ office.

  The Chevrolet, now down another hubcap, started up yet another steep ascent. But at least cattle had begun to give way to goats, and the sky ahead looked more interesting, being piled high with giant white clouds, heaped like the pillows in a hospital storeroom. Kramer had spent many happy minutes in just such a storeroom back in Bloemfontein, making friends with a student nurse who never gave her name nor wore underclothes. It surprised him how often he had been reminded of this lately, since his transfer to Trekkersburg.

  The city that lived with its legs crossed.

  “Tell me, Bok,” he said suddenly. “Where do you reckon the bodies will have been taken? They don’t usually have state morgues out in the bush—well, not where I come from. A hospital, maybe?”

  Bokkie Maritz nodded. “Ja, a hospital’s more likely. I’d guess a nuns’ mission one.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” said Kramer.

  “Okay to talk now?” Maritz inquired cautiously. “Only I thought you’d like to get some proper background on poor old Maaties …”

  “One of the best, Bok.”

  “Oh, so you know that, do you? Ja, very definitely, one of the best.”

  “And?”

  “Well, always laughing and joking. Hell, Maaties had the typists at headquarters in fits by the time he left to go home again.”

  “Bit of a ladies’ man, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Hell, no! They liked him, that was all. He’d show the snapshots of his kiddies, and things like that.”

  “What sort of wife did he have—a good-looker?”

  “Hey? How should I know?”

  “She was never in any of these snaps he showed round?”

  Maritz frowned. “Can’t say I can remember one with her in it,” he admitted.

  “Hmmmm,” said Kramer. “Look …”

  They had just topped the rise, and beneath them lay a wide, green plain, given over almost entirely to sugarcane. So much green seemed unnatural after the barren, bread-colored landscapes Kramer was used to, making him think of mold to be scraped away with a knife.

  “That must be Jafini—over to the far left,” Maritz exclaimed, motioning toward a smoky smudge some distance to the north. “Man, we’ve made excellent time, hey? The Colonel is going to be very impressed with us!”

  “Bugger him for a start,” said Kramer.

  3

  IT WAS A good thing the brakes on the Chevrolet worked like dropping a battleship’s anchor. Without them, it could have proved all too easy to overshoot a dump like Jafini completely. Here one moment and gone the next; a brief blur of tacky shopfronts ending just before the red-brick, tin-roofed police station, half visible behind a high hedge of Christ-thorn, with a bleached South African flag drooping motionless from the stunted flagpole in its front garden.

  Maritz, caught off guard by those brakes, became temporarily wedged beneath the dashboard. “Yirra, Lieutenant!” he gasped. “What happened? Did some kiddie run out in front of us or something?”

  “Cigarettes,” Kramer said. “You go on ahead—I’ll catch you up in a minute …”

  And he climbed out of the Chevrolet to look about him. Jafini’s one and only street seemed to have about a dozen businesses in all, run mostly by Indians. There was a bakery, too, and a hole-in-the-wall branch of Barclays Bank, manned on only Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus a small, red-brick Anglican church. A pair of distant petrol pumps suggested that Jafini boasted a one-mechanic garage, but he wasn’t about to take bets on that.

  Instead, he loped across the road and went into the Bombay Emporium, inhaling deeply. Kramer had always relished the warm, prickly smells of trading stores—the only kind of shop he’d known until he was eleven—and still marveled at the sheer, mind-boggling variety of their contents. The Bombay Emporium did not let him down. It carried everything from hurricane lanterns to sewing machines, from miles of cheap cloth in great bolts to plows and battery radios, plus at least nine varieties of tinned sardines. On the crowded shelf of cigarettes and pipe tobacco, he saw, for the first time in years, the little cotton bags of shag his father had smoked to excess, so crude it came complete with tobacco stalks. Good stuff, that shag: it had given the old bastard the long, lingering, thoroughly horrible death he’d deserved.

  “May I help you, sir?” the Indian storekeeper called out hesitantly, over the headdresses of the bare-breasted Zulu women first in line.

  “Lucky Strike—make it a whole carton,” said Kramer.

  The storekeeper looked agonized.

  “Ach,” said Kramer, reminded that his mother tongue was rarely understood by nonwhites in this godforsaken province of Natal, and repeated himself in English. “A carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes—no, better make it two.”

  The storekeeper wrung his hands, “Would it were possible, sir! Gracious me, yes! But you see, sir, the better brands are not often being requested, sir, so stocks—”

  “Luckys, damn it!” said Kramer. “Many as you’ve got.”

  As the shopkeeper hastened away into a back room, someone new joined the silent line of typical country bumpkins still waiting to be served. This latest arrival was a cheeky-looking Zulu that Kramer felt sure he’d seen somewhere before, and this bothered him, because that “somewhere” could only have been Trekkersburg, two hundred and more miles to the south. Impossible. After all, the whole point of the Pass Laws was to keep coons confined to particular clearly defined areas, and they weren’t meant to waltz round the country like they bloody owned the place. Yet this one certainly did, sauntering in jauntily with his hands in pockets, like a bloody Chicago gangster, and as blacks weren’t permitted to watch such films, this alone suggested that Short Arse might be worth further investigation.

  Short Arse: a good name for him, decided Kramer—until the bastard’s pass book revealed his correct particulars. Hell, he couldn’t be much more than five-six, well beneath his own shoulder height.

  “Very sorry, sir—won’t be many more moments!” the Indian shopkeeper emerged to say, before disappearing again.

  Kramer took another look at the waiting, silent line, straight off the local native reserve. Most were dressed in whites’ castoffs or, in the case of some females, in what now passed for traditional Zulu costume, it seemed: a bead-bedecked headdress, lots of copper anklets, even more crude, copper bracelets, a short, pleated skirt, and—if they bothered with a top at all—a plain, white singlet. Short Arse had on an old sports jacket, turned insid
e out to show off its satin lining, plus a pair of riding britches with a front flap, now outmoded. By way of contrast, the coon in front of him was wearing the pinstripes of a posh lawyer—or the public hangman, come to that, Kramer having seen him once—plus a pair of massive rugby boots. That was a point: unlike anyone else in the line, Short Arse’s footwear looked the right size, even though his were only cheap tennis shoes, and this set him subtly apart from the others. It also posed a few interesting questions: how fast was Short Arse on his feet, how often—and why?

  Short Arse turned to stare at something back out on the street, tantalizing Kramer with only a rear view of that alert, cannonball head. He tried to will it to turn just enough to show that profile again. Contrary to what most people outside the SAP said—“They all look bloody alike to me!”—Kramer had never experienced any such difficulty. Hell, telling actual monkeys apart, that was different: you didn’t have the infinite variations afforded by moustaches, beards, eye size, jawline, nostril width, and so on. But any breed of kaffir, to the trained eye, presented a few problems. Even so, the back off a head wasn’t much to go on, and then he began to have doubts about his initial reaction. He noted the two small pigtails braided from the close black curls above the left ear, and had to admit they rang no bells. He also failed to make anything of the yellow kitchen matches being used to keep open Short Arse’s pierced earlobes.

  “Sir …? Your very generous purchase, sir,” said the Indian shopkeeper, placing a brown-paper bag on the counter in front of Kramer, too polite to hand it to him directly. “But first, is there anything else I can be doing for you, sir?”

  There wasn’t, so Kramer paid him and left, lighting his first Lucky on the way out and forgetting to give Short Arse one final look. Not that this mattered anyway, he told himself—at worst, the coon was probably just some city kaffir’s country cousin.

  “Lieutenant!” said Maritz, hotfooting it up the road from the police station, outside which the Chevrolet was now parked. “Lieutenant, the station commander wants to know where the hell you’ve got to!—his words, Lieutenant …”