“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 cafe, 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 must 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.