De Bruin clinked his glass against Willie’s and they drank. It tasted very good, especially when you hadn’t stopped since early morning for anything. Perhaps the Land-Rover, which was a real heap, had broken down.
“Of course, you would have been even more welcome pitching up before the work was done,” de Bruin joshed him. “Us blokes have only just finished the obstacle course for the over-tens. Gysbert made some lovely fish out of bean tins for the magnet pool-did you see them?”
“Er-no. I’ll catch up on that later.”
“You’re coming tonight?” asked Swanepoel.
“Ja. Ja, I think I am.”
“I see; when the cat’s away …?”
Swanepoel’s witticism won an undeservedly loud laugh.
“You mean when the.…” Willie lost track of that. He had just realized that Jonkers and Ferreira were now both absent at the same time.
“Go on,” Swanepoel encouraged him. “I don’t mind what you call that fat little bastard.”
“Easy, man, easy,” said de Bruin.
George van der Heever and one or two others joined the half-circle; they nodded to Willie in a friendly way, making him feel very welcome. The whole idea of the mission seemed-no, he was under orders: it wasn’t his job to think.
“To what do we owe this honor?” asked Hendrik Louw, a man you didn’t see often himself.
“Celebration,” said Willie, ad-libbing. “A kaffir I caught during my training has just lost his appeal.”
“Never met one with any,” Swanepoel quipped, getting his laugh again.
“Which means?” de Bruin asked, frowning at the other man. “Ach, he gets the chop.”
“How does that make you feel?” a strange face inquired.
“I don’t mind so long as I don’t have to watch it. They pull their bloody heads off sometimes, hey?”
“Oh, ja? What happens to them exactly?” the stranger said, moving in a little closer, touching the wart on his cheek.
In a minute or two, Willie had such an attentive audience that he only wished he’d done something like this before. And he didn’t have to pay for his second-or third-lager either.
Kramer sat on a pile of beer crates in the bar’s scullery and willed his toes to uncurl. That’s what Willie’s clumsy feed line had done to them, and now his teeth were clenched at the sound of the increasingly tipsy full performance. Except for an occasional prompting, not another voice had penetrated the plywood partition in the time it had taken to smoke two and a half Luckies.
He passed the remaining half to the washing-up boy, who was enjoying this unforeseen break in his activities, and took another swill of the Lion ale he’d opened. Zondi had been muttering about Jackson when they had called briefly at the station house; there had not been the opportunity to hear him out-which might have been a mistake. Something about Jackson having the brains and the motive.
“They keep the coons in one big cell so they can sing together,” Willie was saying, “seventy or so at a time.”
“It’ll be less soon,” a light voice observed.
“How’s that?” Willie challenged.
“I saw in the Sunday Tribune that the Transkei has got its own two hangmen now-both wogs, need you ask.”
“Ja, and did you read what the official said?” a wheezy bass joined in. “They got applications for the job from all over the bloody country, but the four whites who applied weren’t given serious consideration. Christ, that makes you realize how independent we’re making them, hey?”
“Perfect job for a coon,” someone else said, laughing. “Good pay for unskilled labor you don’t even have to do every day! I’m glad none of my boys got to hear about it!”
“It’s not unskilled,” a voice said.
“Huh! That wasn’t what I read in my paper. When the official was asked whether they were getting any training for the work, he said, ‘No comment.’ ”
“He wouldn’t be authorized to comment on prison affairs of that nature,” said the voice. “Of course these men will be trained.”
The wheezy bass sniggered. “What with? Hundred-pound mealie bags?”
“They might use them to stretch the rope the night before. You’ve got to put some weight on it, or mistakes in the amount of slack will occur.”
“Mealie bags?”
“Filled with sand.”
“Ah! Now he tells us!”
There was a big laugh all round. Kramer placed his ear to the partition.
“Like I was telling you,” Willie said, reclaiming the limelight, “if it’s a white guy, then sometimes he gets a special program on the loudspeaker for a couple of hours the night before. There’s a convict who acts like a D.J., plays him hits, his own requests, passes on messages from the others-mostly just saying ‘Good luck.’ ”
“He can smoke, I suppose?” asked the light voice.
“Ja, he’s permitted tobacco the minute his appeal fails.”
“Like a sort of ration?”
“Not just any old amount, man! He’s there to be punished, remember. But I reckon they would let him save it up for the last night,” Willie explained.
“Where,” asked the neutral voice, “did you pick all this up, youngster? I notice that sometimes you are a little unsure of your facts.”
There was a brittle pause.
“Meaning?”
“I’ve heard differently, that’s all. How about another one in that glass of yours?”
Here the voice became lost in a boozy hubbub that came up as suddenly as a twist on a volume knob; nobody, it seemed, had enjoyed that surprisingly tense little moment. Kramer felt a tap on his shoulder; it was the washing-up boy, returning a favor by pointing out a small peephole in the plywood.
Kramer peered through it. Gysbert Swanepoel was unmistakable as he towered over Willie on the left! Behind the black beard-there was enough of it to stuff a pair of size 6 boxing gloves-was a strong face with high cheekbones. His complexion was coarse and unevenly tanned, like the skin of a rice pudding dusted with cinnamon, and the deep-set eyes had a bright sparkle. The nose was narrow, the eyebrows distinctive, and the ears very thin. He was smiling indulgently.
On the right side of Willie was a man of much the same age, short and tubby, wearing a porkpie hat and braces. He had a head like a pink lollipop topped with gray fluff from a schoolboy’s blazer pocket. His features had been licked smooth so that they tended to run into each other, leaving only the overhang of a long upper lip to stress the hard set of a mouth like a bite mark. He wore round spectacles with tortoise-shell frames over eyes that were a curious tawny. His expression was strained.
In between them, Willie stood twiddling his empty glass by the stem, trying to appear completely relaxed. But by the hitch of his shoulders, it was plain that he expected at any moment to have a noose dropped over him.
“Silly bugger,” said Kramer, not wanting the initiative to be taken from them. “Go and fetch Samson, my friend-tell him the sink’s blocked.”
A white shirt blocked his view for a few seconds. When it moved aside, Willie and the short man had gone. In came Samson on tiptoe.
“Forget it!” Kramer said, raising a finger to his lips, then dived through the door into the inner passage.
“Hello,” chirped the old lady with bandaged legs. “It is so nice to see you here again. Will you be staying long?”
He gave her a quick peck on the cheek and got by when she drew back in delighted surprise. The fly screen filling the doorway at the end of the passage gave him an ideal position from which to see without being seen. It wasn’t needed: Willie and de Bruin were standing in among the kids’ games with their backs turned to him, talking earnestly together.
“And these are the fish I was telling you about,” de Bruin said as Kramer came within earshot. “He’s very clever with his hands when he wants to be. Does that look like a bean can to you?”
Willie looked up at the tin fish spinning and glittering at the end of a short line. The magnet lost its grip and the fish fell. In picking it up, both men became aware of Kramer’s long shadow on the grass.