The Song Dog

by James McClure

  “Ach, Christ, we haven’t got no time for that now, man. We’re hitting Mabata before Ma Suzman can raise the alarm or anything else happens. But I’ve got to ride with Terblanche so, here, grab these!”

  Zondi caught the Chevrolet’s keys and weighed them in his hand, an eyebrow raised. “Lieutenant?” he said.

  “Ach, you’ll think of something useful to do with them, kaffir, if you try hard enough, hey?”

  Then Kramer turned at the sound of a Land Rover over-revving, and tried a little stunt he’d just picked up: he did a half-vault over the wide windowsill, landed heels together, and covered the rest of the distance at a run.

  Very torn, Zondi watched the churned dust quickly settle out in the yard, and then looked back at the docket, which he had still clutched in his hand. If the investigating officer in this particular case of petty theft had his facts right, it looked as though there was now every chance of Matthew Mslope finally being made to pay the ultimate penalty.

  On the other hand, although the Lieutenant’s parting words had been strangely ambiguous, Zondi could not help feeling that he had, perhaps, an equal duty to travel up to Mabata, there to assist if necessary in the arrest of that psychopathic pervert, Sarel Suzman.

  Still in a dilemma, back Zondi went to the bulletin board in the Bantu CID office, where an efficient-looking, ballpoint Wanted notice demanded of Detective Sergeant Mtetwa’s fellow workers:

  INFORMATION REGARDING BANTU/ASIATIC MALE APPROX 28 YEARS APPROX 5’3” POOR CLOTHING NKOSALA AND JAFINI AREAS SAID TO VISIT CHURCHES SITTING STILL AND PRAYING FOR LONG HOURS UNTIL EVICTED OR DOORS CLOSED OFTEN LEAVES BEHIND SMALL BLUE WILD FLOWERS ONCE FOUND SLEEPING OVERNIGHT AND CHASED AWAY BY PRIEST ST AUGUSTINE’S RC NKOSALA WANTED FOR SUSPECT THEFT OF 1 PRAYER BOOK 1 SMALL CANDLE 1 BOX OF VICAR’S MATCHES FROM ANGLICAN CHURCH JAFINI—BDS MTETWA

  The Lieutenant, of course, would have been quick to point out that it was only through a lack of efficiency on Mtetwa’s part that the thing was still up there, and bound to catch Zondi’s eye as he entered the office, because the docket itself had Complaint Withdrawn scrawled across it. An attached note from the station commander, written two days earlier, had informed Mtetwa that the vicar of St. Peter’s had rung up to say his wife had found the missing objects in their small daughter’s dollhouse.

  The Lieutenant would have enjoyed that. Just as he would have smiled, too, at the Black Mass theory advanced separately by the church warden, who admitted to have been reading the Sunday papers his lodger took.

  But what would the Lieutenant have made of Mtetwa’s own statement, based on a large number of informal interviews he had conducted? These had built up a picture of a strange, haunted figure that people kept seeing in their churches, but could never describe too clearly, having dismissed it as simply dark-skinned, before it could excite their curiosity.

  Obviously, however, from the frequency of these sightings, this phantom of the pews had to be living somewhere fairly near both Nkosala and Jafini, and accordingly should not take too long to track down, especially if a close eye were kept on all places of worship.

  But before lifting a finger, the Lieutenant was bound to say: “You’re sure all this ‘approx’ bullshit gives us a close enough description to confirm that this is the bloody nun-shagger, kaffir?” At least Zondi had his reply ready: “Oh, without a doubt, boss. Most especially the little blue flowers, for Sister Theresa said she had been named thus, the Little Flower, and when we were piccanins, we would pick them on the way to school for her on many, many days, me and my cousin Matthew Mslope.”

  This sudden memory caused Zondi’s throat to hurt so much—it was as though a hangman’s noose had begun to crush his windpipe—he found his mind made up the very next instant.

  When the roller-coaster section of the road up to Mabata succeeded in checking Terblanche’s headlong rush, Kramer decided the time had come to do a little talking, to fill the man in, before reaching the mountain police station.

  He began by describing Maaties Kritzinger’s first uneasy suspicions about the Cloete affair, and then went on to the meeting with the old Bantu cane-worker, Bhengu. He skimped on only a little of the detail, but of the Pik Fourie case he said nothing.

  “So let me get this straight, Tromp,” said Terblanche, dropping the Land Rover into its lowest gear to cross a dry watercourse. “Maaties was sure the Cloetes had been murdered, but he couldn’t see any motivation?”

  “Well, can you? I still can’t—so that’s one of the things we’ll just have to ask Mr. Suzman! Ach, Maaties tried all sorts of ideas. He even ended up going to see a bloody witch doctoress! But that could in fact have been the big turning point for him.”

  “The songoma told him a name?”

  Kramer shook his head. “But I’m pretty sure she pointed him in the right direction. You see, Maaties probably felt he could talk freely to her—just an old kaffir woman, stuck up in the middle of nowhere—and she listened to him, listened carefully. Then she saw that, between the lines of what he was saying, lay a fear he was trying not to think about, and sensing what this was, she warned him of someone dangerous very near to him—which the bastard was, of course! And that tipped the balance.”

  “Sorry? I’m not with you.”

  “Ach, she made Maaties finally face facts and try a plaster cast of his own shoe to see how closely it resembled the one he found at the crash scene. I think that all along he had been preventing himself from recognizing a print made by police issue. You know, it was something so unthinkable he’d been looking for any excuse to pin the blame elsewhere.”

  “Too right!” agreed Terblanche. “I can see myself doing just the same, hey? When was this?”

  “We can only guess, but my belief is that Maaties didn’t make the connection with Suzman until maybe last weekend, or even as late as Monday morning. But when he did, that took him straight out to see little Annika, in case she knew of any reason for animosity between him and her parents. You know how Suzman became aware of this?”

  Terblanche stopped the Land Rover on the far side of the gully and shook his head.

  “I think the dirty bastard was up to his old tricks again!” said Kramer. “Playing at Peeping Toms from behind the cook boy’s hut. The moment he saw Maaties and Annika together, deep in conversation, he must have realized trouble could be brewing—there’s nothing like guilt for making bad bastards clairvoyant! Hans, are you all right, man?”

  Terblanche had begun looking very upset again, but in a different way: pale-faced and staring at nothing.

  “Tromp,” said Terblanche, “I have a confession to make, hey? I think I know the reason for animosity between the Cloetes and Suzman, and I would have spoken out before, only I hadn’t any idea it might be important.”

  “Ach, never mind that now!” said Kramer, switching off the Land Rover’s engine.

  “Well,” said Terblanche, shrugging, “I suppose it all started when Andries Cloete, little Annika’s pa, first came to see me semiofficially, wanting to lodge a complaint about Sarel. Like lots of young blokes around here, he’d tried his luck with little Annika before she got married, only to find she wasn’t that kind of girl, hey? In fact, for a time he was a big nuisance; always dodging off to her pa’s place when he was meant to be on patrol, all times of the night even, and giving her so many gifts it was embarrassing. Eventually, Andries Cloete told him he wasn’t welcome at the house any more, and to stop bothering her. That seemed to work, and then came the news of her engagement. Heavens, what a business that was! Suzman acted like a—well, the way he hates everyone who isn’t Afrikaner and Nationalist Party is bad enough, but English-speaking stuck-ups who went to private school—phew! He went across to the Royal bar at Nkosala for three hours, and then drove back to the Cloetes’ place, where he just walked straight in—no knock first, like he was on a kaffir raid!—and said he’d come to save Annika by making a formal offer of marriage. He had written it out on the back of a bar menu! Everyone was so amazed they ju
st sat, their mouths hanging open. He started talking about racial purity, the need to honor the Boer Nation in spirit and deed, and about how marrying tainted blood like young Gillets, who was half Jew, was as bad as getting in bed with a white kaffir, and things much worse than that. Finally, Andries interrupted and said: ‘All right, Sergeant, you tell me how you are any better. Let’s hear about how much schooling you’ve had, what your prospects are—oh, ja, and what was the last known address of your father?’ In his way, he was just as bad: he hit Suzman everywhere it hurt with words, and then, when Suzman got up and took a swipe at him, he punched him in the belly—so hard all that beer Suzman had been drinking at the Royal peed straight down his leg. ‘Now who’s worse than a kaffir?’ Andries is alleged to have said. ‘I’ve got raw coons down at the mill, and not one of them’s ever done a thing like that before! Sis, man! Get out of my house!’ Then I was called, because naturally big trouble was expected, but no, nothing! Suzman had gone straight home, it appeared, and although his ma rang the next day to say he was sick, the day after that he was back. I said nothing, he said nothing; he just got on with his work, which improved a lot. So I thought: Good! He’s learned his lesson, and is man enough to admit it in his own way. Not for a moment did I realize he was planning to take such a terrible revenge for the shame he had suffered!”

  “Ach, is that surprising?” said Kramer, hoping to do something to calm the station commander’s visible state of increasing agitation. “Hell, when the Cloetes were killed, it must have seemed—well, just an act of God.”

  “Rubbish!” snapped Terblanche. “Any fool could see that crash was the work of the Devil. God is who I go to avenge!”

  For which, in this context, read little Annika, thought Kramer, now alert to a young man’s recklessness in the station commander, who had probably been her most ardent lover since puberty, quite without knowing it.

  35

  A LONE BLACK crow flapped across the bloodstained clouds of sunset, its cawing impossible to hear above the bellow of the Land Rover’s engine as it charged, buffalo-like, up the other side of another steep dip in the road to Mabata. Kramer had taken over the wheel, Terblanche’s nerves being too jangled, he said, to concentrate properly on a track that skirted the tops of so many cliff faces.

  “Tromp,” he said, chain-smoking, lighting another Stuyvesant, “in a couple of minutes, we’ll be there …”

  “Then you’d best ask Mr. S. for an ashtray.”

  “You mean, we’ll just arrive, like normal?”

  “Uh-huh, and see how long things stay normal—that could be highly informative.”

  “But what happens then? What’s the plan?”

  “Given the choice, my friend, would you rather go to a symphony in the town hall, written two hundred bloody years ago, or to a night of squeeze-box around a campfire, where the more the peach brandy flows, the better and wilder grow the tunes, hey?”

  “Meaning what, man?”

  “I don’t read music,” said Kramer.

  For once, Terblanche’s response was immediate. He laughed, slapping his great thigh, and said: “So if he resists, we might have to chastise him before putting the cuffs on?”

  Oh, there’s more to it than that, thought Kramer, but, like Maaties Kritzinger before him, he doubted the wisdom of telling Terblanche everything. He might be deeply shocked, for instance, to learn that Kramer wholeheartedly agreed with Sarel Suzman over one thing: that a widow and four orphans most certainly deserved better than to have their precious illusions perhaps shattered by overzealous police work, done by the book in accordance with the highest Christian principles.

  In short, the bastard now faced summary execution, just as surely as Mickey’s mad, sad cousin did, but for reasons entirely different: not only for the evil he had already done, but for what he might yet do, if allowed to make a full and frank confession in public.

  “Greetings, my child,” said the old priest in Zulu, reining in his horse, his dog collar white enough to still stand out like an orange rind in the last of the daylight. “Your car has broken down? Do you need any help with it?”

  “Hau! I would be most grateful, boss!” said Zondi, close to being at his wit’s end, having just established that he’d broken a half-shaft, placing the Chev completely out of action. “Would it be possible for the master to assist me by holding this jack in place a moment?”

  “To be sure it would be possible for Father Tom O’Hara,” said the priest, dismounting, “but not for your master—only the Good Lord is that. ‘Father’ is what you call me, or nothing at all, if you’re not after having a heavy boot up your backside.”

  Zondi chuckled, touched by a nostalgic affection for such rough, kindly men as these, and said: “You are from a mission nearby?”

  “Over the hills there, St. Francis’s. Forgive me saying this, but you’re a fool of a man to bring a decent car along this road—something was certain to happen to it. Where’s that jack you spoke of?”

  “In here,” said Zondi, opening the trunk of the Chevrolet and reaching into it. “At the mission, you have a church?”

  “Of course! And a school and clinic too!”

  “Have you ever,” said Zondi, handing him the car jack, “seen a man who comes by himself to pray in your church, bringing with him some small blue flowers?”

  “Now, how would you be knowing that?” said the priest, very surprised. “There was just such a poor fellow with us only yesterday, and as I said to Brother Bernard—oi, just a minute, you young rascal, what do think you’re up to?”

  Astride the priest’s horse, Zondi said, as he dug his heels in: “Forgive me, Father, but I know what I’m doing.”

  “Hold it!” said Kramer, when the Bantu constable behind the charge office counter at Mabata leapt up, ready to rush through and announce their arrival. “There’s no need for that. Tell him to sit down and take it easy, Hans—we can do the necessary ourselves, hey?”

  The constable said something in Zulu to Terblanche, who translated it as: “The boy says he thinks the boss is asleep and would not be pleased if he did not give him some warning of visitors.”

  “Asleep? I’m not bloody surprised, after running round the beach half the night, taking potshots!”

  “Tromp?”

  “Ach, later, Hans. Tell the boy it’s okay, that you’re expected and the boss said just to walk straight in.”

  Then, with a glance at three primitive-looking Zulus seated on a narrow, wooden bench near the door, waiting patiently to tell the constable their problems, Kramer motioned Terblanche to follow him, and they entered a short corridor.

  “On second thoughts, Hans,” he said softly, pausing after a couple of paces, “two of us suddenly pitching up here at once could be one too many. Why don’t you go in first on your own, and we’ll see what transpires? Do you think you could handle that?”

  Until that moment, Kramer had always supposed that the lions kept by the Romans, to consume Christians as a public diversion on otherwise dull afternoons, must have been a mangy, cowardly lot, stupid enough to have been trapped and caught in the first place, and then degenerate enough to live in captivity content in the knowledge that a feeble half-roar would bring hot dinners crashing down on their knees all around them. Then he saw a glint in Hans Terblanche’s eye that reversed all this, suggesting those Coliseum lions must have been the toughest, roughest, gutsiest, most foolhardy sons of bitches in the whole Roman Empire.

  “Lieutenant!” said Suzman, hoarse with sleep, pausing to give an abrupt, chesty cough. “What’s happened? What’re you doing here?”

  “Ach, I’ve come to relieve you,” said Terblanche.

  “Hell, that’s really nice of you, hey?”

  “Think nothing of it,” replied Terblanche. “You’re a good bloke, Sarel, uncomplaining.”

  Kramer, straining to hear every sound being made in the room, noticed something very insincere about the way Terblanche had said that, and wondered if Suzman would, too.


  “Lieutenant?”

  “Ja?”

  “Your voice sounds a bit funny—why’s that?”

  “Er, could be tiredness, I suppose!”

  “Lieutenant Kramer’s had you on the hop?”

  “Not especially. Why?”

  “Ach, I just wondered what he’s been doing today—I thought you could have become involved, sir, that’s all.”

  “Er, no. He’s been going his own sweet way, as usual.”

  “Huh! I heard he teamed up with some kaffir.”

  “Oh, ja, you mean the secondment? He has this new theory, you see, that the mission boy we were looking for last year is somehow mixed up in Maaties’ being murdered and—”

  “Wasn’t murdered!” cut in Suzman angrily. “Maaties’ death was entirely accidental, caused by trying to save poor Annika from—”

  “Bullshit!” said Terblanche.

  Which was shocking enough, coming from him, but his next sentence left Kramer convinced he had to intervene instantly, by creating one hell of a distraction, if he wanted to get anything further out of Suzman before the end came. He reached inside his jacket.

  “Bullshit,” repeated Terblanche. “Maaties was murdered by you, you cold-blooded, perverted little bastard, just as you murdered Andries Cloete and—great heavens!”

  Kramer had touched a dynamite fuse to the glowing tip of his Lucky, seen the quick fizz of sparks, and tossed the thing into the station commander’s office.

  “Look out!” shouted Suzman, leaping back, breaking a windowpane with his elbow. “Someone’s—shit, what’s this, some kind of bloody joke?”

  “No, a bloody broomstick, Sergeant,” said Kramer, suddenly in the room. “Funny, I thought you’d recognize it.”

  Suzman just stood there, staring at him, the fuse still fizzing, and gave a cough, then another.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Terblanche. “Are your nerves so shot you’ve been smoking far too much? How my heart bleeds for you!”