Snake

by James McClure

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then the Bantu female Martha said she was awakened in her kia by the young master knocking on her door. He wanted her to make him an early breakfast, so he asked for her clock to adjust it, set the alarm for six, and went inside again. As she was closing her kia door, she saw in the light from the yard that it was one minute or so after twelve-thirty. She got up at six, ran his bath at quarter past, gave him his food at seven, and saw him leave the property at seven-thirty.”

  “Haven’t they got a cook boy?”

  “She is the cook, sir; used to be the nanny. Why?”

  “Surely she would be up at six anyway.”

  “On Sunday in a lot of those houses, the people don’t get up until after the Jo’burg papers come, so the servants have it easy, too. The Dragon, for example—”

  “Hey?”

  “Mrs. Shirley, I mean—she was fast asleep until just before lunchtime. She doesn’t eat breakfast on Sunday but ‘keeps herself,’ so she puts it, for dinners with friends or at the club.”

  “Where’s the husband all this time?”

  “The ex-judge is away at Umfolozi Game Reserve.”

  “Ex-judge, hey?”

  “Late of the Appellate Division,” Marais said glibly.

  Kramer glared.

  It was a toss-up between kicking the bastard hard in the arse, or trying to get something into his thick skull. Less satisfyingly, better judgment had the coin land heads and not tails.

  “Sergeant, pull over Zondi’s stool and sit down. You and me are going to have a bit of a little talk. I want you to forget about the note for a moment. If Shirley is clean, it won’t have mattered; if he isn’t, then it can be an advantage to seem halfwitted while the other guy thinks he’s smart.”

  “Er—ta, sir.”

  “Good. Go on, sit. You seem impressed by this man.”

  “He is polite and friendly, even. Really listens when you talk.”

  “Have you met a coolie who don’t try to grease you like that?”

  “Hey?” said Marais, shocked.

  “And this part where you say he went out to the cook girl’s kia to get the clock and tell her about the morning—why didn’t he shout for her? Is he a liberal?”

  “Progressive party maybe—in his position he couldn’t be anything banned.”

  “Ach, we’re not talking political parties now! This isn’t Security! I asked you a straightforward question. Yes or no?”

  “He treats the girl—well, perhaps he is a bit liberal, not in the suspicious sense, though.”

  “Since when is liberalism not suspicious until proven otherwise?” Kramer asked, missing the ashtray. “Nine times out of ten you’ll find it’s a university poop who can’t make it with his own, so he uses liberalism to bring himself into the company of females who are automatically flattered by his interest. Ja?”

  Marais nodded, and then said with a hopeful smile, “It can’t be like that with the cook girl, Lieutenant. She’s built like a bloody postbox and old enough to—”

  “Look! We haven’t time for jokes! This is a murder investigation, man! We are looking for motivation and all that crap. Are you with me now?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “And in all this socializing you’ve been doing, have you met up with any young ladies that know this Shirley?”

  “Only the one. The others had already checked out. She said Shirley wasn’t her cup of tea; too like a cat, actually—only does what you want if it pleases him. She said she’d not even glanced his way more than once.”

  “Interesting this was a blind date he was waiting for.”

  “I was surprised, he talks like a ladies’ man but it seems he puts them off.”

  “And didn’t this Eve—Sonja Bergstroom—have a dark skin?”

  “It was—ja, a proper tan. But her identity—”

  “(Or is this too subtle for you?) We’re talking about how she seemed in his mind.”

  Kramer watched the dawn of insight spread pinkly up from Marais’s collar. The man was not such a bloody fool after all. Nor was that too bad on his part, given the facts.

  According to custom, the body of the butcher had been placed across one corner of the living room, screened off by a sheet. A saucer lay on the floor before it, already fairly well off for cash offerings toward the family’s welfare and the funeral.

  Zondi, who had called in not entirely out of respect, nonetheless placed a rand note with the rest and backed away.

  “That is not all of it,” the widow said bitterly, her face hidden by a black cloth.

  The white priest from England, who had shown Zondi his permit to enter Peacevale, as if he cared, led her into another room, where the beds had been pushed aside to give the mourners standing space. There were many men there, mostly small traders with waistcoats and black armbands, each holding his hat to his chest and speaking in very low tones.

  They avoided Zondi’s direct look, and he felt angry—but whether at them or with himself he couldn’t be sure.

  “Stay well, my brothers,” he said.

  “Go well,” they answered in a mumble.

  This was no place for questions.

  Outside, by the light of the streetlamp on the corner, children were playing in the yard. He paused to watch them.

  “Ee-search, ee-search!” they shouted out, and ran off shrieking into the shadows, banging into tin fences and knocking over buckets and setting the fowls asquawk. Their panic had the full-bloodedness of make-believe. For some years yet he’d just be a bogeyman, and with such were the best night games played.

  Zondi growled and flapped his arms, sending them shrilling delightedly across five properties or more.

  Then he trudged up the smooth, worn bank to the gate where his car was parked, wondering where next to turn in his search for the identity of the third man, the one who had come from the car, the real killer. Because that was what his arithmetic made of the sole-print puzzle—and besides, Mpeta had not been a very convincing choice as a gunman.

  He saw two youths peering in through his driver’s window, and was about to send them packing with a boost of genuine fright when he recognized the taller of the two as Jerry, eldest son of Beebop Williams. He had been looking for him.

  “You like cars?” Zondi asked.

  “Very much, Sergeant!”

  “Who is this one, Jerry?”

  “His father is the dead man inside—his name is Thomas.”

  “You worked in your father’s shop, too?”

  “I am standard six,” Thomas replied proudly.

  “But these are school holidays, are they not? Or are you so educated that shopwork is not for you?”

  “He works for another man, by the deposit-down bazaar, doing all his sums for him.”

  “Once I did work for my father,” Thomas added, drawing numbers in the dust on the fender. “But he said I was not a white child who goes to school for free, and that I must earn the money for the fees and the books; he can use a stupid boy instead to ride the bicycle. I must go now. My greetings to your family, Jerry, and my thanks that you will walk with me tomorrow.”

  He meant at the funeral, and this caught his throat in a way that made him duck and run.

  “If you are not ashamed of being thought arrested,” Zondi said to Jerry, unlocking his door, “then you can ride with me—I will pass your house.”

  With a chortle of pleasure, Jerry slid across the seat, bounced on it to test its springs, and began fingering every knob and lever. He pulled at a steel ring on the underside of the dashboard and was bewildered to find it welded fast.

  “For cuffs,” explained Zondi, taking off slowly in case younger enthusiasts were underneath examining the substructure.

  And the uneven road, rutted by bus tracks during the recent rains, kept their speed down for the rest of the hill. The right moment was chosen carefully.

  “Tell me, Jerry, but where were you when Yankee Boy was with your father?” he said, dodging thre
e daredevils naked up to their belly buttons, and giving no hint of having heard of the beating. “I suppose it was with the girls across at the dress house. Or was it with the others who wash clothes in the stream?”

  “Hau!” the youth gasped.

  “Which?”

  “The dress house.”

  “Would you like me to drive round the top side?”

  “Please—that would be special!”

  “And on your way back, can you remember what you saw?”

  Jerry flopped an arm over to hang down behind the seat, crossed his bare legs, put a foot against the dashboard, and began to whistle between his teeth.

  “He cannot remember,” Zondi chided gently, not wanting to drive a dream away. “He who looks so smart and so clever, as if I was his chauffeur man and he Dr. Pentecost.”

  His passenger chortled again. “When the one Sithole asks me, he says I have a very clear sight of things but I talk too much.”

  “You try to escape me. The truth is your memory is very, very bad.”

  “Huh!”

  “What color was the car?”

  “Red, Sergeant. I remember when it stopped there because I thought there would be trouble if they entered my father’s shop and he wanted me to find a seventy-eight—the car was not so smart, you see? Then the stupid boy from next door, who works for Thomas, he comes up on his bike and says my father was shouting at the back for me.”

  “And so?”

  Zondi handed over one of two cigarettes he had just lit in his mouth, and Jerry lay back, taking quick sucks at it, and closing his eyes.

  “I cross the road and see one man in the car and I go sideways so my father can’t see me. There are two old women talking over there, and there is an old man with a donkey cart the other side. The bus has just been to take away people by the stop, and there is a woman with a baby on her back, packing her suitcase again because it broke open when dropped from the top of the bus.”

  “Hmmm. Your memory is not so wonderful, after all.”

  “Let me finish,” Jerry said indignantly, settling back again. “I am in the road. Then I go down the path very carefully, because maybe my father is again looking for me. So I am crouching low, just like a dog, through the weeds, round by the broken car. I take a peep. Hau! I see white shining and I know it is my father’s shirt. But next time I look, I see it is only one of those men who come from the hospital when the doctors are finished with them and throw them out. He is looking for food in the rubbish box, and I hide in case my father comes out to chase him away. Then, when he has gone to look in another place, I again go like a dog and I get right to the door, and I put my hand on the knob, turning it so quiet nobody can hear, and then in I go. Yankee Boy Msomi is there and I greet him and we talk together a little. He is a big friend of mine.”

  Zondi accelerated onto the divided highway and brought the needle up to the legal limit, then beyond, winding down his window to make the most of the rush of air. The arm swung around from behind the seat, and Jerry gripped the handle on the dashboard, pressed his forehead right against the windshield, and started clicking his tongue, urging them on even faster.

  He was half a kilometer late in noticing they had passed his turnoff.

  “Do we go somewhere else first?” he shouted hopefully.

  “If you are not afraid.”

  “Me? I am a man!”

  Someone else drove him home again from the mortuary, very subdued, if materially richer for his experience.

  Marais was still trying to justify his technique when Kramer left the building in response to Zondi’s honk from the street.

  “Look, man—first thing tomorrow we’ll make another start,” Kramer said. “I’m getting a lift from that bloke over there.”

  “All the best,” replied Marais, stopping to put on his bicycle clips.

  Kramer knew exactly who Zondi meant. “Uh-huh. You don’t get so many, but I’ve seen them,” he said as they started for home; both needed sleep badly. “The boys from the reserves and to-hell-and-gone who get discharged but haven’t the moola to get home again. Live off charity and bugger around in dirt bins until uniformed picks them up on vagrancy and pass charges.”

  “The same. Many with no shoes when they come, many without shoes when they go—they sell them to buy sweets and cold drinks in the hospital, and there are the black-bitch nurses who make men pay for their lavatory basins.”

  “Zondi, I like this.”

  “Where are these persons most commonly seen, boss? At the back of the stores where the rubbish is. How close does anyone look at them? Not close. It can make you feel ashamed inside, but you have not the money for the whole world. What if I tell you a young man tonight identified Mpeta as such a scavenger outside the butcher shop?”

  “Man, man, man!”

  “There is more; you wait. To double-check, I went first to the station commandant, and he says they have had no prisoner answering the same description in regard to height and so on. In truth, I think they are giving these men an easy time these days. To double-double-check, I saw three people at the scenes of other incidents, who now remember such a man, wearing big bandages on his arms, who they have not seen again. One said he didn’t notice dogs, so why ask such a strange question?”

  Zondi stifled a yawn and squeezed his eyes shut once to clear them. The tar ahead widened, forked, narrowed, swept in through the gates of the township and ended abruptly behind the superintendent’s office in a judder of potholed dirt. Then the trees gave out, too; there were just the endless rows of two-roomed Monopoly houses to show by their juxtaposition where the tracks lay. Kramer found he still counted each passing row carefully. A door opened and closed quickly across the way as they stopped outside 2137.

  “There are sixteen in that place,” Zondi said, smiling. “They think old Mr. Tchor-tchor is paying them a visit.”

  Kramer winced at the evocative name for the bustling superintendent, and muttered, “But what are your thoughts?”

  “Exactly that, boss—a lookout. These stores are not white stores with a padlock on the back, but places where the children run in and out, boys forget to close doors, men go and stand in them for the sun. So there is this danger, if you do a raid, that someone will come in the back entrance and see you. But if you put a lookout there, who can beg from those that may wish to enter, then it is safe. That man can just run away by himself.”

  “Huh! Half-baked, man.”

  “Maybe, boss, but the yeast is blood.”

  Candlelight came to warm the window of 2137, drawing Zondi’s hand to the door handle. His stomach rumbled.

  “Bloody cannibal,” said Kramer.

  And drove away confident that the whole thing could be reshaped in the morning—along with a few destinies, if need be. Fatigue has its own euphoria.

  12

  THURS DAY’S CHILD WAS a great improvement on the rest of the week. Piet was out shooting with his new air rifle before the sun was properly up.

  “Just listen to that,” the Widow Fourie said, as Kramer brought in their coffee and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Another swinging bottle burst at the end of its string in the old barn.

  “How was he last night?” asked Kramer, whom nothing could have wakened.

  “Got much more sleep, but still a bad dream now and then during the early part. I wish you’d listen so I had your opinion.”

  Kramer pretended to leave the room and she threw a pillow at him.

  “You tell me, then,” he said, stretching out, already fully dressed, beside her.

  A praying mantis on the windowsill crossed from one side to the other.

  “Well, it’s these books.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You see, the more I read them, the more I think Piet has got Oedipus.”

  “Hoo!”

  “No, you wait. Doctors aren’t always right!”

  “Okay, okay. You’ve got all morning until eight o’clock.”

  The Widow Fou
rie tucked the pillow back behind her head and looked up at the high, old-fashioned ceiling with its plaster trimmings, just like a wedding cake, and tried to find the right words.

  “It’s like this: Piet was at the age when it happened—y’know?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s what the books call becoming fixated by a trauma event. Bereavement is all you need for it to happen. Now, it was natural at that age for Piet to be jealous of—y’know.”

  “His dad.”

  “Ja, and it was also natural he should want rid of Pop with death wishes and the like.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “You haven’t heard all this before, because it’s a new part I found in The Rib Cage. It says that the child realizes that if his father found out how he feels, then there would be big trouble. That the father would punish the son—which is easy to do because he’s so much bigger. The kiddie mixes two things, you see, this pash for his mum and this fear his dad will cut off his—y’know “

  “Tondo?”

  “Hell, the words Mickey teaches you!”

  “That’s right, blame a poor kaffir,” he said, nudging her.

  “Tromp, seriously, man, listen to my reasoning. So, in the classic examples, the kiddie tries to be very nice to his dad, to sort of make up for wanting him dead. They say you can see this in a normal boy when he switches over to worshiping his dad at a later stage.”

  “So if he gets stuck at this point, he develops a phony attitude of liking his dad while really he—”

  “Hey! We’re talking about Piet here, so that’s beside the point.”

  “Piet,” affirmed Kramer.

  “And you know what I think is the matter with him? He thinks he’s a murderer!”

  The coffee spilled hot down Kramer’s shirt as he sat bolt upright.

  “What bloody nonsense is this?”

  “And that’s why you have an effect on him the doctors are always talking about. They don’t understand it, but I do. Piet knows who you catch—and what happens to them in Pretoria.”

  “You mean…?” Kramer went over and stripped off the stained shirt, replacing it with another taken from his suitcase in the wardrobe. Then he turned on her.