Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 (6 page)

“I want you to find out about these men,” said Mma Holonga.
“I want you to see which men are interested in my money and which are
interested in me.”

Mma Ramotswe clapped her hands in delight.
“Oh, this is the sort of work I like,” she said. “Judging
men! Men are always looking at women and judging them. Now we have the chance
to do some judging back. Oh, this is a very good case to take on.”

“I can pay you very well,” said Mma Holonga, reaching for the
large black handbag she had placed by the side of her chair. “If you tell
me how much it will cost, I shall pay it.”

“I shall send
you a bill,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is what we do. Then you can
pay me for my time.” She paused. “But first, you must tell me about
these men, Mma. I shall need some information on them. Then I shall set to
work.”

Mma Holonga sat back in her seat. “I am happy to
talk about men, Mma. And now I shall begin with the first of these
men.”

Mma Ramotswe looked into her tea cup. It was still
half-full of bush tea. That would be enough to see her through one man,
perhaps, but not four. So she reached forward, picked up the tea-pot, and
offered to fill Mma Holonga’s cup before attending to her own. That was
the old Botswana way of doing things, and that is how Mma Ramotswe behaved.
Modern people could say what they liked, but nobody had ever come up with a
better way of doing things and in Mma Ramotswe’s view nobody ever
would.

CHAPTER FIVE

MR J.L.B. MATEKONI HAS CAUSE TO REFLECT

I
T WAS some time before it dawned on Mr J.L.B. Matekoni that Mma
Potokwane may have thought that he was agreeing to her proposition. His own
recollection of what had happened was very clear. He had said, “I shall
think about it, Mma,” which is very different—as anybody could
see—from saying that one would definitely do something. It might have
been better had he refused her there and then, but Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was a
kind man and like all kind men he did not enjoy saying no. There were many who
had no such compunction, of course; they would refuse things outright, even if
it meant hurting another’s feelings.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
thought very carefully. After the initial bombshell, when Mma Potokwane had
revealed what she had in mind, he had remained silent for a moment. At first,
he thought that he had misheard her, and that she had said that she wanted him
to
fix
a parachute, just as she was always asking him to fix some
piece of equipment. But of course she had not asked him that, as there would
have been plenty of people around the orphan farm who would be much better
placed to fix a parachute than he. Fixing a parachute was a sewing job, he
assumed, and most of the housemothers were adept at that; they were always
sewing the orphans’ clothes, repairing rents in the seats of boys’
trousers or undoing the hems of skirts that were now a little bit too short.
These ladies could easily have stitched up a torn parachute, even if the
parachute would end up with a patch made out of a boy’s trousers. No,
that was not what Mma Potokwane could have had in mind.

Her next remark
made this clear. “It’s a very good way of raising money,” she
had said. “The hardship project did it last year. That man from the
radio—the well-known one with the funny voice—he agreed to jump.
And then that girl who almost became Miss Botswana said she would jump too.
They raised a lot of money. A lot.”

“But I cannot
jump,” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had protested. “I have never even been in
an aeroplane. I would not like to jump from one.”

It was as if
Mma Potokwane had not heard him. “It is a very easy thing to do. I have
spoken to somebody in the Flying Club and they say that they can teach you how
to do it. They have a book, too, which shows you how to put your feet when you
land. It is very simple. Even I could do it.”

“Then why
don’t you?” he had said, but not loudly enough to be heard, for Mma
Potokwane had continued as if he had not spoken.

“There is no
reason to be afraid,” she said. “I think that it will be very
comfortable riding down in the air like that. They might drop you over one of
our fields and I will get one of the housemothers to have a cake ready for you
when you land. And we have a stretcher too. We can have that close by, just in
case.”

“I do not want to do it,” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
had intended to say, but for some reason the words came out as,
“I’ll think about it.”

And that, he realised, was
where he had made his mistake. Of course it would be easy enough to undo. All
that he would have to do would be to telephone Mma Potokwane and tell her, as
unambiguously and as finally as he could, that he had now thought about it and
he had decided that he would not do it. He would be happy to give some money to
whomsoever she managed to persuade to do it for her, but that person, he was
sorry to say, would not be him. This was the only way with Mma Potokwane. One
had to be firm with her, just as he had been firm with her on the issue of the
pump. One had to stand up to a woman like that.

The difficulty, of
course, with standing up to women was that it appeared to make little
difference. At the end of the day, a man was no match for a woman, especially
if that woman was somebody like Mma Potokwane. The only thing to do was to try
to avoid situations where women might corner you. And that was difficult,
because women had a way of ensuring that you were neatly boxed in, which was
exactly what had happened to him. He should have been more careful. He should
have been on his guard when she offered him cake. That was her technique, he
now understood; just as Eve had used an apple to trap Adam, so Mma Potokwane
used fruit cake. Fruit cake, apples; it made no difference really. Oh foolish,
weak men!

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at his watch. It was nine
o’clock in the morning, and he should have been at the garage by eight,
at the latest. The apprentices had plenty to do—simple servicing tasks
that morning—and he could probably leave them to get on with it, but he
did not like to leave the business in their hands for too long. He looked out
of the window. It was a comfortable sort of day, not too hot for the time of
year, and it would be good to drive out into the lands somewhere and just walk
along a path. But he could not do that, as he had his clients to think of. The
best thing to do was to stop thinking about it, and to get on with the ordinary
business of the day. There were exhaust pipes to be looked at, tyres to be
changed, brake linings to be renewed; these were the things that really
mattered, not some ridiculous parachute drop which Mma Potokwane had dreamed up
and which he was not proposing to do anyway. That could be disposed
of—with a little resolve. All he had to do was to lift up the telephone
and say no to Mma Potokwane. He imagined the conversation.

“No,
Mma. That’s all: no.”

“No what?”

“No. I’m not doing it.”

“What do you mean
no?”

“By no, I mean no. That’s what I mean.
No.”

“No? Oh.”

That, at least, was the
theory. When it came actually to speaking, it might be considerably more
difficult than that. But at least he had an idea of what he might say and the
tone he would adopt.

MR J.L.B. MATEKONI,
trying—and largely succeeding—not to think of parachutes or
aeroplanes, or even the sky, started the short journey from his house to
Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. It was a journey that he had made so often that he
knew every bump in the road, every gateway past which he drove, and,
extraordinarily, the people whom he would often see standing at much the same
place as they always stood. People like their places, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
reflected. There was that rather ragged man who used to walk about the end of
Maratadiba Road, looking as if he had lost something. He was the father, he
believed, of the maid who worked in one of the houses there and she had given
him the spare room in her quarters. That was the right thing for a daughter to
do, of course, but if Mr J.L.B. Matekoni were that man, or the daughter for
that matter, he would think that the best place for a father who was slightly
confused would be back in the village, or even out at the lands or at a cattle
post. In the village he would be able to stand in one spot and watch everything
happen without his moving about. He could watch cattle, which was very
important for older people, and a good hobby for older men. There was a great
deal to be learned just by watching cattle and noting their different colours.
That would have kept that man busy.

And then, just round the corner,
on Boteli Road, on Fridays and Saturdays one might see a very interesting car
parked under the shade of a thorn tree. The car belonged to the brother of a
man who lived in one of the houses on Boteli Road. He was a butcher from
Lobatse, who came up to Gaborone for the week-ends, which started, for him, on
Friday morning. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had seen his butchery store down in Lobatse.
It was large and modern, with a picture of a cow painted on the side. In
addition, this man owned a plastering business, and so Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
imagined that he was a fairly wealthy man, at least by the standards of
Lobatse, if not the standards of Gaborone. But it was not his prosperity which
singled him out in the eyes of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni; it was the fact that he had
such a fine car and had clearly taken such good care of it.

This car
was a Rover 90, made in 1955, and therefore very old. It was painted blue, and
on the front there was a silver badge showing a boat with a high prow. The
first time he had driven past it, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had stopped to examine it
and had noted the fine red leather seats and the gleaming silver of the gear
lever. These external matters had not impressed him; it was the knowledge of
what lay within: the knowledge of the 2.6-litre engine with its manual
transmission
and its famous free wheel option
. That was something one
would not see these days, and indeed Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had once brought his
apprentices to look at the car, from the outside, so that they could get some
sense of fine engineering. He knew of course that there was very little chance
of that, but he tried anyway. The apprentices had whistled, and the older one,
Charlie, had said, “That is a very fine car, Rra! Ow!” But no
sooner had Mr J.L.B. Matekoni turned his back for a moment than that very same
apprentice had leant forward to admire himself in the car’s wing
mirror.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had realised then that it was hopeless.
Between these young men and himself there was a gulf that simply could not be
crossed. The apprentice had recognised that it was a fine car, but had he
really understood what it was that made it fine? He doubted that. They were
impressed with the spoilers and flashy aluminium wheels that car manufacturers
added these days; things which meant nothing, just nothing, to a real mechanic
like Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. These were the externals, the outside trim designed,
as often as not, to impress those who had no knowledge of cars. For the real
mechanic, mechanical beauty lay in the accuracy and intricacy of the thousand
moving pieces within the breast of the car: the rods, the cogs, the pistons.
These were the things that mattered, not the inanimate parts that did nothing
but reflect the sun.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni slowed down and gazed at the
fine car under the thorn tree. As he did so, he noticed, to his alarm, that
there was something under the car—something that a casual observer might
not notice but which he would never miss. Drawing up at the side of the road,
he switched off the engine of his truck and got out of the cab. Then, walking
over to the blue Rover, he went down on his hands and knees and peered at the
dark underbelly of the car. Yes, it was as he thought; and now he went down on
his stomach and crawled under the car to get a better view. It took him only a
moment to realise what was wrong, of course, but the sight made him draw in his
breath sharply. A pool of oil had leaked out onto the ground below the car and
had stained the sand black.

“What are you doing, Rra?”

The sound surprised Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, but he knew better than to lift his
head up sharply; that was the sort of thing that the apprentices kept doing.
They often bumped their heads on the bottom of cars when the telephone rang or
when something else disturbed them. It was a normal human reaction to look up
when disturbed, but a mechanic learned quickly to control it. Or a mechanic
should learn that quickly; the apprentices had not done so, and he suspected
that they never would. Mma Makutsi knew this, of course, and she had once
rather mischievously called out Charlie’s name when he was underneath a
car. “Charlie,” she had cried, and there had followed a dull thump
as the unfortunate young man had sat up and hit his head on the sump of the
car. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had not really approved of this little joke, but he had
found it difficult not to smile when he caught her eye. “I was just
checking up that you were all right,” shouted Mma Makutsi. “Be
careful of your head down there. That brain needs to be looked after, you
know.”