“What age is he?”
“Around fifty, the same as Gysbert, although you’d never guess it. A bloody good farmer-in fact, maybe our best. Him and his son have made pots of it, but they’re not the kind of people to let it show. Hell, I see what you’re driving at.…”
Kramer looked at the white stone through the facets of his whisky glass, making it bulk and shrink as he turned the thing slowly in his hand. His stomach was expanding and contracting in much the same way: a sure sign of breakthrough fever in the intuitive male. He switched his gaze suddenly to Ferreira.
“I can’t imagine it, Lieutenant. A more law-abiding-”
“Interesting, Piet, very interesting. Tell me, did he take on Gysbert Swanepoel all by himself, or was his son also present?”
Ferreira shrugged. “They’ve always been on good terms, despite the differences now between them, so it wasn’t really-”
“He’s a churchgoer?” Kramer asked.
“Er-ja. Nearly all the Afrikaner ones are. You know how-”
“Prisons? Connections with warders?”
“Not that I know of,” replied Ferreira, frowning a little.
Kramer began to tread, toe to heel, along the edge of the verandah between the two pillars. One false move would have him in mud up to the ankles-one false move and he’d be in something similar, although a lot nastier, up to his nose, for Karl de Bruin was obviously a highly respected member of the community.
“I’m going to start with the search,” Kramer said, returning to the table to finish his drink. “That way I stay winning whether we find anything or not. The subtle stuff can come later.”
“Start searching right now?” Ferreira gasped.
“I’d prefer it to be in daylight while he’s away from home,” admitted Kramer. “Does de Bruin play bowls or do anything like that at the weekends?”
“Um-no. Tell you what, though: the barbecue committee will all be here tomorrow afternoon, fixing up the kids’ holiday special. He’s the chairman.”
Such a long delay had little appeal for Kramer, then he remembered Zondi’s condition and decided he might need the time for other things. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in touch again in the morning. Meantime, don’t say a word about any of this, but keep your ears open.”
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant! I don’t want to go on anybody’s black list!”
“Ach, when did you ever kill someone and get away Scot-free?” Kramer reassured him jokingly and, with a mock salute, took his leave by jumping down into the garden.
A look on Ferreira’s face, glimpsed just as he turned from the verandah, made him regret very much having said that.
That was the start of a dark mood which became darker and darker until, deciding he was achieving nothing by sitting up alone in the station commander’s office, Kramer took the pathway to Jonkers’s bungalow, passing close to the hut where Zondi was quartered. Although there was no light showing, he paused and listened for a while, hearing not a sound.
Kramer moved on, lethargic with a sense of absurdity. Exactly what he found absurd, he wasn’t sure; perhaps it was the idea of having an early night. Or it could have been the fault of the Widow Fourie, who’d just accused him on the telephone of having had another woman; a more absurd conversation, based on a wild assumption made over a range of three hundred kilometers, was difficult to imagine.
The bungalow stank of floor polish, stale beer, and mail-order perfume. He pushed the door shut behind him, left the lights off, and followed the passage down to the end; on the right, the maid had said, was the guest room and his bed. A weak moon, shining in through the burglar-proofed window, dimly outlined a lot else: an ironing board, a sewing machine, a dressmaker’s dummy on a stand, rows of melon preserve, cardboard boxes. He picked his way across, stripped to his underpants, and lay back on the coverlet. It was, in fact, a long time since he’d slept in a strange bed, let alone one with a stranger in it. Silly bitch.
He closed his eyes and his thoughts drifted, swirled, and became caught up in an eddy of too much drink and no food. He saw tiers of prisoners in brightly colored uniforms behind silver bars upsetting their water dishes.
He opened his eyes and took a fix on the far wall. The giddiness left him; he began to feel floppy, warm, and drunk. It was a good feeling, and eased away his anxiety over what might happen to poor bloody Zondi. It couldn’t be ending.…
That was a pretty little dress on the dummy. Short sleeves but a high-buttoned front; a teaser if ever there was one. He rolled onto his feet and bent to look at it. There was a scrap of paper, scribbled over with measurements that didn’t make sense, pinned to the collar; Suzanne was the name across the top of it. Little Suzanne Swanepoel, who hadn’t a mother to make her a pretty party dress, so kind Mrs. Jonkers helped out. Between tumbles with Tollie and frolicking with Frikkie, the woman had a heart of gold. Trouble was, with a dress like that, you could never be sure of what lay underneath. Not unless you undid the round buttons, starting at the neck, one by one. All the way down to the waist and then drew back the two sides and had a look. Like that. Too dark, much too dark to see a thing. Feel, then. Run the fingertips up over the patent adjustable form and fill your palm with such a pleasing small shape. Linger. Think about the search tomorrow. Yawn, button up, and go to bed. Trying to be filled with self-disgust, but failing.
16
Mr. Rat died that night. By Saturday morning, he no longer gnawed on the bone, nor did he squirm, twist, and scrabble. Instead, giving off heat and bloating rapidly, Mr. Rat decayed. Zondi could just feel the swelling.
But uppermost in his mind, as he drove through the early morning mist toward the farm where Dorothy Jele worked, was the story of Mama Buza’s baby. It had seemed a perfectly good story when told by a virtuous man like Absalom Mkuzi, and yet, within minutes of Zondi’s leaving the headman’s kraal, his instincts had taken him on that long trek to talk to Mama Buza’s former neighbors. They had said nothing to alter the crucial fact that all of Witklip believed in Izimu’s guilt as a child-stealer; they had, however, enlarged on one or two details that troubled an outsider unused to God’s taking part in police work. Details such as the baby’s miraculous condition-which could, as one old hag had observed, have been attributed to Izimu’s foul designs, along the lines of the fatter the better. Then again, Zondi had seen his own infants restored to bouncy well-being overnight at the end of a lean week on staple rations. Notwithstanding any of this, it still seemed to him rather peculiar, and he was eager to hear what Dorothy Jele might be able to tell him.
The Chevrolet rattled over the cattle grid and followed the drive around to the front steps of the huge white house, which had very small, narrow windows. Two lion dogs rushed out, barking savagely, to be followed by Mr. Jackson, the farmer.
He was a big man with a red wobble under his sharp chin like a turkey. His bluey-gray eyes were the color of a dead sheep’s and his nose was pointed, making him resemble the sort of white man a child would crayon at school, yet his voice was low, deep, and almost friendly.
“Yes, boy?” he said, noting the official look of the car. “What is it you want here?”
Zondi replied in respectfully murmured Zulu: “I wish to speak a little with your servant Dorothy Jele, master.”
“Dorothy is helping the madam with her hair,” Mr. Jackson told him, switching to Zulu himself. “You’d better go round and wait in the yard for a while-but first I will have to know what this is all about.”
It was a pity he was bilingual; often a fluent burst of gibberish and a few clicks of the tongue would deflect an awkward question such as this without further ado.
“There is a new ordinance, sir,” Zondi lied earnestly, building on a truth, “similar to the one which makes all Xhosa people into citizens of the new nation of the Transkei, irrespective of their place of birth. It requires registration of those-”