The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency)

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He looked to Mma Ramotswe for confirmation. She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve given Charlie a job,’ she said quickly. ‘You know how busy we’ve been.’

  Mma Makutsi’s mouth opened. She stared at Charlie and then transferred her gaze to Mma Ramotswe. ‘But we haven’t been busy,’ she said. ‘In fact, things have been rather quiet. You said so yourself, Mma, the other day. You said —’

  Mma Ramotswe interrupted her. ‘That’s not the point, Mma,’ she said. ‘You have to expand to get bigger. You said that, you know.’

  ‘I did not, Mma,’ Mma Makutsi protested. ‘It makes no sense to say that you have to expand to get bigger. You expand because you’re getting bigger. You bring in new staff when you start to get bigger. That’s how it works, Mma.’ She paused before addressing Charlie. ‘Sorry, Charlie, I know it’s hard for you to lose your job, but I don’t think Mma Ramotswe has worked all this out.’ There was another pause. ‘Maybe you could go to the post office for me. You can do that at least.’

  Charlie was disgruntled. ‘I am not an office boy.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Mma Makutsi, more firmly now. ‘These letters must be posted. They are ready to go.’ She reached into the tray on her desk, picking up three large envelopes and handing them to Charlie. The young man looked at Mma Ramotswe, who nodded her assent.

  Once Charlie had left, Mma Makutsi strode across the room to switch on the kettle on top of the filing cabinet. ‘This is a very big surprise for me, Mma,’ she said. ‘I am very shocked.’

  Mma Ramotswe sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Mma. Sometimes we have to act quickly. I was worried about Charlie. He was very upset. He went out and drank too much.’

  Mma Makutsi listened impatiently. ‘Young men often drink too much, Mma,’ she snapped. ‘It goes with being a young man. That is what they are like.’

  ‘And you heard what he said about not wanting to live.’

  Mma Makutsi shook her head. ‘They are always saying that. Young people lie in bed in the mornings because they are too lazy to get up. Then they say that they don’t want to go on living. Then they get up and go to parties. That is how they behave, Mma.’

  Mma Ramotswe pursed her lips. ‘I decided to give him a job,’ she said. ‘It was a decision I took. I shall be paying him out of my own account.’ She wondered whether to tell Mma Makutsi about the arrangement with Mma Potokwani, but deemed any mention of that would be inflammatory. Mma Potokwani and Mma Makutsi had never got on particularly well, and to bring the matron into this conversation would not help.

  Mma Makutsi tapped the kettle. This was a bad sign: Mma Ramotswe had seen her tap the kettle before, and on each occasion it had preceded an uncomfortable flare-up.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ Mma Makutsi began, ‘to take people on when there is nothing for them to do. I know that sometimes we might feel that we should give some unfortunate person a job – if they don’t have one. I know that, Mma. But if we did that all the time, then where would we be? There are many people who do not have a job. I am sorry for these people, Mma, but if we went out and said to them, “If you have no job then come quickly and we’ll give you one,” then we would be crushed in the rush, Mma. There would be very big crowds of people, all of them wanting a job, and there would be no room for us after a while.’ She shook her head in apparent disbelief. ‘There is a lot of suffering in the world, Mma, but we cannot put an end to all of it.’

  After she had finished speaking there was silence. Mma Ramotswe stared down at her desk. A shaft of midday sun was shining in upon it; there were tiny specks of dust floating in the light. ‘I haven’t given a job to the whole world,’ she muttered. ‘I have simply helped a young man who is… who is one of us.’

  ‘You should have asked me,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘What is the point of my being co-managing director if I am not consulted on something as important as staffing? What is the point, Mma?’

  Mma Ramotswe looked up in surprise. Co-managing director? ‘I do not think we used those titles, Mma,’ she said mildly. ‘I have made you a partner in the business – that is true – but I think that I am still the managing partner.’

  Mma Makutsi tapped the kettle again. ‘Managing partner? We have never discussed that, Mma. I do not remember ever talking about managing partners.’ Her fingernails drummed on the kettle. ‘I do not remember seeing any signs around here saying Managing Partner. Maybe I have not been looking in the right place.’

  Mma Ramotswe took a deep breath. She sensed that this was the moment when something important needed to be established. ‘Mma Makutsi,’ she began, ‘I am the person who started this business. It is therefore my business. I am grateful to you for all that you do for the business and very happy to have you as a partner in it. But I am the one who has the final say in all matters. I shall always consult you —’

  ‘But you did not,’ interjected Mma Makutsi. ‘You did not ask me whether we should take Charlie on. You just did it.’

  ‘That was an emergency decision. Sometimes I shall have to decide things without asking you. That is the way it is: it simply is. That is it, Mma.’

  The kettle had now boiled, and Mma Makutsi busied herself with pouring the water into the teapot. Mma Ramotswe watched her. ‘You know something, Mma Makutsi?’ she said quietly. ‘When I took you on right at the beginning, I did so even though I could not really afford it.’

  Mma Makutsi replaced the kettle in its cradle; she said nothing.

  ‘I did it because I could not turn you away,’ continued Mma Ramotswe. ‘I could have said that there was no work – and there really was not much, Mma. But I did not want to do that – and I am grateful that I did not.’

  The silence continued.

  ‘So,’ concluded Mma Ramotswe, ‘that is why I have done what I have done with Charlie. And I did it because it is my business when all is said and done. You are my partner in that business, but every business has junior partners and senior partners. That is just the way it is, Mma. I am the senior partner because I am older than you. I am also the founder of the business.’

  Mma Makutsi poured out the tea. Her anger, quite visible before, now seemed to have evaporated. ‘Don’t think I am ungrateful, Mma – I am not.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘And I know that you are the senior partner. I know that, Mma.’

  ‘Good. I thought you knew it, Mma. Now you have told me and I don’t think we need to talk about that matter again.’

  Mma Makutsi passed Mma Ramotswe her cup of tea. ‘What is Charlie going to do?’

  Mma Ramotswe smiled with relief; disagreements with Mma Makutsi tended to end as abruptly as they started.

  ‘We shall use him on the Sengupta case,’ she said. ‘I have had an idea.’

  Chapter Nine

  Botswana Was a Good Place

  It was rare for Mma Ramotswe to be without any idea of how to proceed, but it did happen, and this was one such occasion. Her philosophy of detection had always been simple; moulded, in part, by the sage and level-headed advice of Clovis Andersen – whom she and Mma Makutsi now considered a friend – and in part by common sense. To that mixture might have been added a pinch of the old Botswana morality, which could be used to good effect when appealing for help; if people were sheltering others, or were reluctant to talk, the invocation of the old Botswana morality could be just the thing to shift the log-jam. You have to help, Rra, because that is what is expected of you. What would your father/grandfather/great-grandfather have said if they saw you staying silent while some worthless person got away with his bad behaviour…?

  That sort of appeal, made directly and in all sincerity, could work wonders, as it had in the case of the hotel manager who had frightened his staff into concealing his wrongful removal of guests’ lost property. That had been a difficult case until one of the maids, shamed by the reference to the old Botswana morality, blurted out the manager’s secret. She revealed that guests were always leaving their watches and earrin
gs and such things in the bathroom of their rooms, and then phoning, in panic, from the airport or from their homes to enquire as to whether their property had been found. It had usually been dutifully handed in by the maids, but the hotel staff were instructed to deny it. This they did, although they knew full well that the missing items would soon appear on the shelves of the manager’s own second-hand goods store near the bus station.

  With the maid’s statement in hand, Mma Ramotswe had confronted the manager, whose response had been to run away immediately, leaving his own property behind. This was an odd collection – a radio, a couple of pens, and a rather smart briefcase made out of zebra skin – but all of this had been handed over to the maid who had ended the manager’s lucrative scheme.

  ‘I hear that he has left the country,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘And so he will not be needing these things.’ She paused. ‘I suppose he has gone off to be bad somewhere else.’

  ‘There are many places for bad men,’ said the maid, shaking her head.

  Mma Ramotswe had thought about this. There are many places for bad men… yes, the maid was right; there were many such places. But there were also good places, and if we tried hard enough we could make more of these good places, or make the places that were already good a bit larger. Botswana was a good place – it always had been – and Mma Ramotswe knew that she would fight to keep it that way. She would fight against the people who wanted to make it exactly the same as everywhere else – which meant to make it as corrupt as the rest of the world. No, she would not allow that – or, rather, she would do her utmost to prevent it happening. There was not all that much that one person could do; it was not possible for one woman to hold back the tide of greed and self-centredness that seemed to be sweeping across the world, but she would do whatever lay within her powers to do. And Mma Makutsi, she knew, felt the same and would do whatever she could – which was a bit more now that she was married to Mr Phuti Radiphuti and had the Radiphuti name and means to help her in their crusade.

  Grace Radiphuti! That was the most extraordinary development, Mma Ramotswe reflected. That a person from Bobonong – a person with very little in this life – could come down to Gaborone, take the Botswana Secretarial College by storm, climb up the ranks of a business (even if the business only had one employee) and then, to top it all, marry into a furniture-selling and cattle-owning family; that was surely a miracle that defied all those who said that it was impossible to make something of one’s life if one started poor. Nonsense! she thought. One might start with nothing and end up with everything, if one had the right attitude and was prepared to work hard. It was also true, of course, that one might start off with nothing and end up with nothing; or start off with very little and end up with even less; but these were not possibilities that one should dwell on before one started. There was no point in thinking of the bottom when one wanted to get to the top.

  In the case of the dishonest hotel manager Mma Ramotswe had been able to deal with the issue quickly and conclusively, but now, in the Sengupta case, she simply had no idea where to begin. There was no point in interviewing Mrs again because it seemed that she had nothing to say. And even if they imagined that she might throw some light on her situation, Mma Ramotswe was under the impression that Miss Rose did not want her guest troubled by the sort of insistent questioning that would be required to uncover it. And if she could not do that, then she wondered where on earth she could possibly start.

  It was something that Clovis Andersen had said, and it came back to her rather suddenly, triggering the rush of excitement that can accompany the solution to a tricky problem. Clovis Andersen had written that in cases where there did not appear to be any obvious way forward, the best thing to do was to follow the principal suspect. If you have no leads, he wrote, watch your most likely suspect and that person will lead you to the leads. Of course this was not a case in which there was a suspect as such, but there was no doubt that Mrs was the principal object of interest in this case. If they watched her, it was possible she might do something that could give them a clue as to who she was. This was not to suggest that she was concealing anything; it was perfectly possible that what she did would be the result of things in the back of her mind, memories that she did not know she had but which might cause her to act in a particular way. She had heard that people could go back to places they had forgotten they knew; that there was something deep in their memory that drew them back. Could this be the same with this poor woman who had lost her memory?

  It would be difficult for Mma Ramotswe or Mma Makutsi to follow Mrs, as she had met them both, and would think it a bit odd if she saw Mma Ramotswe sitting in her tiny white van outside the Sengupta gates.

  ‘Hello, Mma,’ she might say. ‘What are you doing parked here?’

  And Mma Ramotswe would have to affect surprise and answer: ‘Oh, I see that I am in front of Mr Sengupta’s house – so I am! I had just parked to have a bit of a rest after a long drive – you know how it is, Mma.’

  To which Mrs might say, ‘But wouldn’t it be better to drive back to your own house, Mma Ramotswe? It is not far away, after all, and then you could get out of your van and go and have a rest on your comfortable bed.’

  It would be difficult to argue with that, and Mma Ramotswe would have to say, ‘You know, Mma, that’s a sensible suggestion. I shall do that immediately.’

  Of course it would be a bit different if Mma Makutsi were to be seen watching the Sengupta house. That would lead to an entirely different meeting, thought Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘So, Mma, you are sitting outside our house.’

  ‘And what of it, Mma?’ she would reply. ‘Is this not a free country? Is this not a place in which people may sit exactly where they please? Perhaps I am old-fashioned – perhaps it is no longer the case that we can sit where we like on a public road; perhaps we now have to ask permission from the people who live in houses nearby and say, “Do you mind if we sit in the public road? Do you mind if we park near your house?” Perhaps the sky is no longer the property of all of us, but has been sold by the government to this person and that person and we have to ask for permission to sit beneath particular bits of sky.’

  No, it would not be possible for either of them to watch Mrs – that would have to be done by somebody whom she had never seen before and would not notice. If she and Mma Makutsi had an assistant, then she could be sent to shadow Mrs… or he could… There was Charlie – of course there was Charlie. Nobody noticed a young man – unless, naturally, you were a young woman (before you grew out of noticing young men, which, in the case of some people, took rather a long time). For most of us, thought Mma Ramotswe, young men were just… young men, and one did not pay particular attention to the question of who these young men you saw about the place were. It would never occur to Mrs that the young man sitting in a van on the other side of the road was anything but a young man sitting in a van.

  When Charlie came back to the office, Mma Ramotswe called him over to her desk and gave him his instructions.

  ‘We have a very delicate job for you, Charlie,’ she said. ‘It is a bit of important detective work.’

  Charlie beamed with pleasure. ‘That is what I am now, Mma. I am a detective. At your service.’

  Mma Ramotswe could see Mma Makutsi looking disapproving. She hoped that there would not be an intervention from that quarter, but there was.

  ‘Oh, so you’re a detective already,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘That’s quick.’

  Charlie sniggered. ‘I’m a quick learner, Mma.’

  Mma Makutsi shook her head. ‘A quick learner? I don’t think so, Charlie. No, you are an apprentice detective, Charlie – just as you were an apprentice mechanic.’ She paused. ‘I hope that you will not be an apprentice all your life – I really hope that. It would be awful if you ended up as an apprentice old man. Hah! That would be very odd.’

  Mma Ramotswe gave Mma Makutsi a look that was halfway between a warning and an imprecation. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘We a
re all working together now. Charlie has to learn somewhere, and this is where he will start.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘All I’m saying is that he is an apprentice detective. You cannot be a detective on the first day – just like that. That is not the way it works, Mma.’

  Charlie looked at Mma Ramotswe anxiously. ‘I don’t mind, Mma. If she wants me to be an apprentice detective, then I am happy to be that.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘If everybody’s happy, then I am happy too. Now I can tell you what I want you to do.’ She paused. ‘There is this woman, you see.’

  Charlie grinned. ‘I know about women, Mma Ramotswe. I am the man for this job: the number one expert in women.’

  Mma Makutsi’s glasses, catching the light, sent a threatening signal across the room. Mma Ramotswe closed her eyes; she did not like the bickering that sometimes took place between Mma Makutsi and Charlie. At heart they were fond of one another, but the problem was that they were too similar, at least in their tendency to make remarks that they must have known would stir people up. Charlie did it with his bright and breezy comments; Mma Makutsi did it with her sensitivity to insult – one only had to mention Bobonong in anything but tones of hushed admiration and she would accuse you of being indifferent to the people of Bobonong, or of implying that Bobonong was a backwater. And the same thing applied to any mention of the Botswana Secretarial College. There had been a very awkward incident recently when a client had made a reference to a niece of his who had failed to get into the university and had been forced to enrol in the Botswana Secretarial College. ‘Still,’ he had said, with an air of philosophical acceptance, ‘half a loaf is always better than no bread at all, I suppose.’ That had brought a predictable outburst from Mma Makutsi, and Mma Ramotswe had been worried that the client would simply rise to his feet and walk out of the office. He did not, as it happened, but meekly accepted the tirade directed against him and apologised profusely for the slight. Some men, thought Mma Ramotswe, become supine when faced with a strong woman.