Snake

by James McClure

  Kramer watched a bird fly up from the single rosebush to peck at the fruit on the palm tree. His cigarette grew a long ash, unheeded.

  “Hell, is there some personal involvement I don’t know about?” the colonel said, laughing softly and nudging him in the side. But his eyes gleamed shrewdly.

  “I drop this for the Bergstroom case until someone starts talking?”

  “Never. People are at risk with these lunatics running round—don’t get me wrong. Marais can carry on with the routine meantime. It seems a hard thing to say, but that was only a one-off when we come to choosing priorities. Plus I’ve got doubts now about that snake thing Old Stry—”

  “Two, if you count Stevenson.”

  “Man, you’re quibbling, hey? You’re still thinking too much. Let’s have some action. Tell Zondi to get his finger out and try and get something from the other side; that’s our only chance. And see you chase him.”

  “And who’s going to chase Marais?”

  “Not me,” said the colonel, walking off to his office.

  It hadn’t been bad sense after all.

  Wessels was waiting for Kramer with a photograph in his hand, taken from one of the books he had been told to go through.

  “I’ve got a possible here, sir,” he said eagerly.

  “Who’s he when he’s at home?”

  “Gosh Twala, Bantu male, aged forty-three.”

  “Never heard of him. Come.”

  They went the length of the corridor and into Kramer’s office. Zondi had his feet comfortably arranged up against the filing cabinet.

  “Hey! Wake up, you! Gosh Twala—know him?”

  “Small time, boss.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Stealing cars, got eight years in sixty-six for it—Sithole’s case.”

  “And recently?”

  “Last I know of him, he was working at the brickworks.”

  “That skabengas’ paradise! But that means he’s pretty washed up, then, in with the hard-case assaults and the rest.”

  Zondi nodded, and said, “Terrible work, that, many men getting hit with the blow back. But the trouble with Twala is that he tells Sithole who buys the cars from him and he took three others inside. Now nobody will buy from him; he is finished.”

  “Yet I’m almost sure it’s the same one as was driving the car,” said Wessels. “Had a longer look at him than the other, and there’s the same flatness to the back of the head, and the ears that stick out.”

  “Well, Zondi? Worth picking him up?”

  “He is a good driver, and has got many licenses.”

  “Need help?”

  Zondi shook his head, flipped his hat onto it, and sauntered out.

  “What do I do now, sir?” asked Wessels, as Kramer flopped back in his chair and stared at the wall.

  “I think it’s time you took that wig off and put on some clothes.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re the nearest we’ve got to an eyewitness, so I’ve fixed with the colonel for you to be transferred to us meantime. Okay?”

  “Fine, sir!”

  “Then report back in one hour. Go.”

  As Wessels sped from the room, the telephone rang. Kramer ignored it for a while and then lifted the receiver. A yellow Ford, NTK 4544, had been found abandoned not a quarter of a mile from the café, and Fingerprints were investigating.

  The lanes dividing the block behind the courthouse had once been what Marais liked best about Trekkersburg, if he had to like anything. They were like the windbreaks in a plantation, zigzagging here and there and crisscrossing, all without any apparent plan, yet leaving you sure there was one. While the plaster twirly-whirlies and pillars and hanging signs with fancy lettering, creaking on their brackets, made you think you were in a Three Musketeers film.

  But he had had a gutsful of superior bastards, and they had spoiled everything for him. They had spoiled his morning, his toasted cheese sandwich, and now they had done damage to his afternoon.

  There was nothing romantic about the lanes any longer; they were just grubby passageways between offices with empty, forbidding hallways, and shops that sold cracked vases and dirty spoons kept in glass cases, while the odd glimpse of a haughty typist painting her nails was about as off-putting as the unpleasant smell of duplicating ink.

  He stopped for a moment to watch an old black crone flattening out a cardboard carton she had taken from a stack of refuse awaiting removal. She stamped on it, crawled on it, and then added it to a pile already so big she would never lift it. The pile shifted and he saw she had a homemade wheelbarrow underneath. It was true what they said, some of them were beginning to use brains instead of backsides.

  Marais was stalling, although he would not admit it. He was trying to delay his entrance into the hallway of number 22, right opposite, by wondering if the crone was committing an offense, and then drifting into the dizzying legalities of how you established the ownership of rubbish between its disposal and its collection. No good, he would just have to get on with the job and have done with it.

  “Whoa—where do you think you’re going?” a voice boomed out behind him, making him slide on the coconut matting.

  It was Goldstein the lawyer, shouting down at him from his second-floor office on the other side.

  “I’m making inquiries,” Marais replied stiffly.

  “What, in his place? My boy, you don’t know the trouble you’re making! From two to four, my friend there is in special consultation.”

  “That’s not my worry.”

  “Tell me you’re joking! Tell me your heart is not so hardened against the world! Would you tear a man from the very bosom of his personal—”

  “Oh, do bugger off, Ben!” another voice called out, from somewhere directly overhead.

  Ben waved his cigar at whoever it was.

  “Who is the little twit down there anyway?” the voice above asked lazily.

  “Tomorrow in A Court I take you apart a piece at a time,” Ben shouted across with massive mock confidence. “Don’t be late, you hear?”

  Then he puckered up, blew his unseen rival a kiss, and closed the window.

  Marais, who had other fish to fry, walked straight out and never went back.

  Beneath one of four towering chimney stacks, Zondi stood and waited impatiently. The brick dust was terrible; not only was the ground covered with it, but the air itself was gritty.

  Then the foreman came out of his office, shaking one sandal to dislodge a stone caught between his fat pink toes, and beckoned to him.

  “Next time you bring a chit with you, see?”

  “The lieutenant said all right?”

  “No, he bloody didn’t. He wasn’t there, but some other European knows you, so I suppose you can go ahead. It’s just I’m not having any damn wog coming here thinking he can do what he likes and starting trouble with my boys. Twala? Was that the one?”

  “Yes, please, sir. He is at work today?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know that? You ask his induna, he gives me the absentees list.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “The induna?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This delay was beginning to seriously worry Zondi. He had already felt long, sullen glares being made in his direction from the ragged men hand-pushing trucks of brick from the kilns. Many of them knew him, and soon the alert would have reached the farthest corner of the works.

  “Ach, I’m not here to do your work for you. Ask that keshla over there,” said the foreman, completing his scrutiny of Zondi’s identity card and handing it back.

  The old-timer was hardly any more cooperative. He pulled his torn jacket over the burn marks on his chest, which looked like splatters of tar, the scarring was so thick, and mumbled something about oven number 9.

  “Have I asked a simple man a simple question?” Zondi snapped.

  “Who do you seek?”

  “Twala.”

  “Hau! He is a bad one—you m
ust go carefully with him.”

  “Would you like to see that?”

  The keshla grinned, showing he still had three teeth in the front, and began to lead the way, skipping nimbly on his bowed legs over the rubble of spoiled bricks.

  They went under an overhead passageway and Zondi realized he was right beside the firing house itself, with the kiln entrances, round-topped and low, set in its curving wall at intervals of about twenty yards. The keshla explained that those that had been bricked up were awaiting the heat to give the bricks their hardness. The men sealing number 8 stopped work as Zondi approached and backed aside to allow him to pass, the cement sliding from their trowels unnoticed in their undisguised loathing for him. One face, hooded by a sack which was protecting the shoulders for carrying, turned quickly away—but not before Zondi had recognized a once notorious illicit liquor distiller, whom he had put behind bars and out of business. Truly, with all the fires and the dangers, the place was close to a hell itself, he thought soberly. Better to dig ditches all day in the sun.

  An electric cable had been run into the kiln to provide lighting while the bricks were stacked, and Zondi followed it alone, the keshla suddenly losing his lust for witnessing the confrontation.

  There was none. The induna, found dozing behind some completed work, swore that Twala had not turned up for work that morning, and called over his work team to verify this.

  How entirely true this was, they all agreed, and said what a shame it was that the policeman had come so far and found nothing. And on second thought, the Twala he described to them didn’t sound at all like the one they knew. Maybe he should try the aluminum factory or the car assembly plant.

  In this they totally overdid it.

  Zondi found his way out into the open again and looked around. Then he noticed that the entrance to number 8 was still short of its top six rows of bricks, and drew his pistol.

  “Build,” he said to the men Nobody moved.

  He caught one of them with his left hand, spun him around, and slammed him against the others.

  “Build!” he shouted.

  The kiln entrance was only five bricks wide, and took very little time to fill in, with nobody paying much attention to the niceties.

  A terrified Gosh Twala erupted through it not long after.

  From the railway up, the hillsides were a deep, lush green, and very few homes were visible from the road, although Marais could see rooftops here and there behind the hedges and bamboo thickets. Hibiscus grew on the broad lawns, and hydrangeas, their huge pale clusters of flowers as good as white stones, marked the entrances to many of the driveways. For its part in the luxuriant scheme of things, the municipality had planted thick-flamed cannas on the road islands and center strips.

  The other traffic was made up mainly of delivery vehicles from the best stores, liquor orders on motorcycles, and small English cars filled with dogs and children with pedigrees.

  Except for the usual nannies, playing with their charges out on the lawns where they could talk with friends, there was nobody about.

  Marais wished he had thought to bring a map. Then he saw a burglar alarms maintenance engineer in a van and stopped him for directions.

  The number of the place was 34 and it had a name as well, Glenwilliam, in wrought iron on the gate. The drive was long, bending round to the right under enormous fig trees, and it was not until Marais topped a rise in the straight section that the double-story house came into view between the silver flash of birch trees.

  Three vehicles stood in the doorless garage which had been burrowed into a high bank covered in desert plants. There was a white Jaguar, a plum Datsun coupe, and a conventional Land-Rover with a towing bar for the motorboat nearby, leaving one bay empty but with sump stains that suggested it had an occupant overnight. He looked at his watch: only four twenty-seven. Mr. Shirley couldn’t be home yet, so he would wait a couple of minutes. Houses that size tended to belittle him.

  Marais had hardly settled back when a middle-aged black girl came to rap at his window.

  “The missus asks if the master wouldn’t like to come inside, please,” she said in a soft, unafraid voice.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have made tea specially for you coming. Do not be afraid of the dog. He only bites persons he does not know—never persons who I take into the house.”

  “Huh!” said Marais, not liking the way it growled deep in its wolfish chest, yet getting out before he remembered to check his hair in the rear-view. He did this in one of the car windows and then followed her across.

  More servants should work in places like these and then there would be less complaining, he thought, amused by the fold of fat above each swinging elbow and by her waddle.

  There were bulrushes on the wooden chest in the hall, and a mat that didn’t stick too well to the highly polished floor.

  The room he was shown into was also a disappointment, no oil paintings on its walls, no huge, soft armchairs and highwayman’s pistols. Just some cane seats painted cream, one big table with flowers heaped on it, and some pots to arrange them in. The girl went out.

  And her mistress entered a moment later, holding out a ringed hand with a straight arm. Her age baffled him: the wrinkled throat was like an old tree, but the face itself was as smooth as a wood carving—one that had been given a coat of almost pure white with no underseal, so it showed up gray in the incised lines down either side of the mouth.

  “Oh, Martha has managed to coax you in. I’m so glad.”

  The handshake was a touch.

  “I’m his mother.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Shirley. You knew I was coming?”

  “Peter phoned, wretched child, just as I was getting ready to go out to bridge. Insisted I should be here in case he might be a minute or two late.”

  “Ach, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. One can’t treat guests in a cavalier fashion. Although you’re not quite a guest, are you?”

  “Not exactly, but I don’t think you could call it business either.”

  “I most certainly wouldn’t have one of his clients here, and he has tried that one on, Mr.… ?”

  “Sergeant Marais.”

  “What squad? I once met a colonel or something at a dinner—my husband is a retired judge, by the way.”

  “Murder and Robbery, madam.”

  “Do sit down, Sergeant. You’re making me quite wilt at the sight of you.”

  Wilting was exactly what Marais felt he was doing; this was nothing like the reception he had imagined. Mrs. Shirley started to stick flowers onto the spikes in a round piece of lead.

  “And this is all because of that horrid little man and his dreadful affairs? What on earth could he have done to her that we’re being fed these gruesome stories about puff adders or whatever it was?”

  “That’s our job to find out,” Marais said, seating himself on the edge of a chair that squeaked.

  “But is it really necessary?” she asked, taking up garden scissors to snip the heads off some roses.

  “The law must be upheld, Mrs. Shirley.”

  “Good heavens, you’re trying to tell me what the law must or mustn’t do? When I’ve been married to it thirty years? I meant is it really necessary, required of you, to hound Peter in this fashion?”

  “Hey? I’m only doing what I was told—to get the accounts of movements by all members present in the club that night. Your son, Mr. Shirley, is just unfortunate that so far we haven’t been able to contact anyone who saw him leave—or, in fact, verify what happened to him after midnight.”

  “Is that all?” Mrs. Shirley said testily.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m sure Martha and I have distinct memories of his arrival home on Saturday night.”

  “Oh, ja?”

  “Or are you solely interested in what he has to say?”

  Marais rose slightly to look out the window. No other car had arrived yet.

  “If it’s not
any trouble, I’ll appreciate it,” he said, taking out his notebook to reinforce this impression. “The more the merrier, as they say.”

  Her cold stare went in through his eyes and all the way down his back.

  This simply wasn’t his day somehow.

  The door was locked and Zondi came to open it in his shirtsleeves, half smiling when he saw who it was.

  “Any joy?” asked Kramer, entering the interrogation room and taking a look at what stood against the wall.

  Gosh Twala had changed a lot since his last picture, as if it had been taken by one of those swanky crooks in the main street and now the retouching had come off. His cheeks were hollowed and his eyes had no brightness in them, while his skin had that dull look, like a blackboard not wiped properly, which was a sure sign of a really poor coon.

  “He swears he was not absent on the days in question and says the induna will swear to this also.”

  “Is that right, Twala?”

  “Hau, yes, please, my master! True’s God!”

  “This induna I know to be a liar,” Zondi said.

  “So he could have been sneaking off?”

  “It is possible.”

  But Kramer knew from the way Zondi said it that little interest or conviction went with it.

  “Why bring him in?”

  “There were difficulties, boss. The foreman is a very formal man.”

  “Oh, ja?”

  “Also I want to know why he hides from me. He says it is because his name is being shouted at the office and the other boys tell him I am there.”

  “I am fright!” said Twala, raising hands like a beggar.

  “Pockets?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And of course he denies any knowledge of the robberies themselves?”

  Zondi nodded.

  “What about Constable Wessels? Has he seen him?”

  Again Zondi nodded. The apathy was on its way again— still nothing positive. There had not been a single trace of a fingerprint or anything else in the yellow Ford.

  “Have you made him do the jumps yet?”

  “No, boss,” answered Zondi, and had Twala leap about so as to drop anything he might have secreted inside himself, a prison trick with tobacco readily adapted to hide dagga as well.