“Do they, Rra?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Do you think that everybody knows that? Everybody?”
Rops stopped his exercise. “No, I am exaggerating, Mma. I happen to know that because I remember everything I read in the newspaper. But I do not think that there will be all that many people who will remember that sort of thing.”
Mr. Molofololo, who had been following the exchange with interest, now interrupted. “Would the players know, do you think, Rops?”
Rops looked thoughtful. “No, probably not. The boys do not read the front part of the newspaper. They read the sports news, and by the time they have finished reading about football their eyes are too tired to read the other pages.”
Mr. Molofololo laughed. “They are football players, you see, Mma Ramotswe. And the heads of football players are usually just full of football. They do not have any space for other thoughts.” He paused, looking appreciatively at Rops. “Except for Rops, of course. Rops is not like that.”
Rops looked pleased with the compliment, and he gave a mock bow in the direction of Mr. Molofololo. “I do my best,” he said.
“And it is very good,” said Mr. Molofololo quickly. He gestured for Rops to sit down again, and then he indicated to an aide that he should take Puso out of the room. “Take the boy to the dressing room,” he said. “He can watch the players getting ready.”
Puso, star-struck silent but beaming with pleasure, was led away while Mma Ramotswe and the two men settled themselves around a table.
“Now, Rops,” Mr. Molofololo began, “I have told Mma Ramotswe about our problems. What I haven't told her is that you and I have talked and talked and talked and we have never got anywhere nearer a solution than when we started out. That's true, isn't it?”
Rops nodded his agreement. “We have, Boss. I agree with you in one thing. We have not been doing as well as we should. But I do not agree with you when you say that we have a traitor in the team. Who is this man? Can you point him out to me?”
This seemed to irritate Mr. Molofololo, who sat forward in his seat and began to drum his fingers on the table. “I am the one. It is me. Me. If I could point him out to you, then we would not be where we are today. We would have dealt with him. And I wouldn't have had to go to a detective agency to get help. No, I cannot point to the traitor because I do not know who he is. But that does not mean that he is not there.”
For a moment nobody spoke. Rops frowned, as if he was trying to disentangle Mr. Molofololo's message; Mma Ramotswe was silent because she was wondering about the significance of the words I am the one. It is me. It was as if he had suddenly decided to confess to being the traitor himself, which did not make sense. So what did I am the one mean, then?
Mma Ramotswe broke the silence. “Excuse me, Rra,” she said. “You said I am the one. What did you mean, Rra?”
Mr. Molofololo looked at her as if she had raised an irrelevance. “What did you say I said, Mma?”
“You said I am the one.”
He looked at Rops, who shrugged. Then he turned back to Mma Ramotswe. “I don't think I did, Mma. We were talking about finding this man who is letting the team down. We are looking for the jackal who has crept into the herd wearing the clothes of a goat. That is what we're talking about.”
Mma Ramotswe made a gesture of acceptance. “Very well, Rra. Let us talk about that.” She turned to face Rops. “Rra Thobega: Have you ever seen any of the players do anything that made you suspicious?”
Rops shook his head vehemently. “Never. Everybody plays with one-hundred-per-cent commitment. Commitment, Mma. Commitment.”
“Then why are we losing?” interjected Mr. Molofololo.
“Because somebody has to lose,” said Rops.
Mma Ramotswe thought this quite a reasonable thing to say. In any game where two teams were trying to win, one would be disappointed; that was the nature of competitive games. And there were, she imagined, teams that were not very good and would therefore lose consistently.
Mr. Molofololo, however, was not so impressed. “Yes,” he said. “Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. But when you have a strong team like ours, then you do not expect it to be the one who will always lose, do you? We should win some games and lose others. That is the way these things work, I believe.”
Mr. Molofololo stared at Rops, as if daring him to contradict such obvious logic. But the captain merely shrugged, looked at his watch, and announced that it was time for him to go to the dressing room and marshal the team.
“Then we must go and find our seats,” said Mr. Molofololo, standing up and straightening his tie. “I shall get somebody to fetch your little boy up from the dressing room, Mma, and bring him to our seats. We are all sitting together in my special place. You will have a good view from there.”
THE GAME BEGAN. For Mma Ramotswe the first few minutes were reasonably interesting, as Mr. Molofololo gave her a running commentary on who was who and how many goals they had scored-or failed to score-over the last season. He knew each of the players intimately, she thought; in fact, it rather reminded her of the way her late father, Obed Ramotswe, had known the cattle that made up his herd. He had known the strengths of each beast-its potential to grow, its lineage, its ability to withstand drought, and so on. Mr. Molofololo was like that with his players, and she expected at any moment that he would launch into a discussion of how to breed football players, but he did not; that would perhaps be taking it a bit too far.
For the first fifteen minutes or so, it seemed to her that nothing much was happening. The Kalahari Swoopers got possession of the ball and lost it from time to time to the Township Rollers. Then they got it again, and the action switched back where it had been before they lost possession. Then everything changed again.
“How are we doing?” she asked Mr. Molofololo at one point. And he replied, “Nothing is happening yet, Mma. You must be patient. This is not like cooking.”
She wondered whether to take objection to that remark, but decided not to. It was not just that Mr. Molofololo was the client, and one should not offend clients; there was something strange about Mr. Molofololo, something that she could not quite put her finger on. He had a tendency to make remarks that were just a little bit disconcerting-as if he was thinking about something quite different, or as if he saw a dimension to an issue that you did not.
Mma Ramotswe settled into her seat and watched the match unfold. From time to time Mr. Molofololo became animated and shouted out encouragement; at other times he groaned and sank his head in his hands. And others in the audience were behaving in a similar way as the fortunes of the match flowed this way and that. It was all new to Mma Ramotswe, and she reflected on how strange it was that things like this-football matches, with all their passion and complexity-had been taking place right under her nose in Gaborone and she had known so little about them.
Puso seemed to follow exactly what was happening. He was sitting next to Mr. Molofololo, and the great man occasionally leant over and discussed a point of tactics with him. At half-time, when the players went off the field and the Botswana Defence Force band marched out onto the field to play, Mma Ramotswe asked Puso how the match was going.
“Not very well,” Puso said. “The Swoopers are going to lose, I think. Unless Quickie Chitamba can do something.”
“Quickie Chitamba? Who is this Quickie Chitamba?”
Puso looked at Mma Ramotswe with the condescending tolerance of one explaining something to another who cannot possibly understand. This was men's business, he seemed to be saying. “Quickie Chitamba is a striker, Mma. It is his job to score goals.”
Mma Ramotswe nodded. She understood that goals were the object of the whole exercise, but could not any player score a goal?