The Steam Pig (10 page)

“Yes, it's some repair work. Your man insisted I produce a letter from the lady but she is unfortunately dead.”

“Bless my soul, the poor creature. But have you the card?”

“I think it's been dropped behind the counter. Yes, here it is.”

“Extraordinary! If you will just come down to the strongroom, you can have it immediately. I lock up this sort of thing at night.”

Kramer followed him with a secret grin, elated by his corrective training and by the prospect of getting the ring. What a lead if the design was unusual.

“Here we are,” Mr Williams said, pointing into a shallow box holding an assortment of labelled articles.

Kramer reached out.

“No, not the ring.”

“Hey?”

“Number four-one-nine.”

“This?”

“No, officer, that very nice little locket.”

It was a nice little locket. A beautiful little locket. A little locket that sprang open to reveal two heart-shaped photographs. One portrait was of Miss Le Roux—and the other was not.

 

8

Z
ONDI WAS HAVING
his problems. Ordinarily there was nothing to a surveillance job in Trichaard Street. The Group Areas Act had placed it within Trekkersburg's sole non-white zone which meant it did the job of ten streets elsewhere in the town. So there were always plenty of people about from sunrise until curfew shortly before midnight, and plenty of them with nothing to do either except stand around. It was easy to remain unnoticed. You could submerge yourself in a jostling crowd around the game played with Coke bottle tops. Or you could sit on the kerb and shuffle your feet in the gutter with the others who never earned a glance from passers-by. You just took off your tie, turned your jacket inside out to show the satin lining like a farm boy, and went to work. It was a cinch, especially after twilight.

Unless it rained. It was now coming down all right. In torrents which sluiced the pavements clean of orange peel and turned the pot-holes into ponds. For two days a blazing sky had been sucking up every particle of moisture from the land to gorge its clouds until they had grown fat and heavy—it was as though an avenging claw had slashed their bellies open, for the drops were warm and as blinding as blood.

There was the sound of calico ripping and then a bolt of lightning caught Zondi, crouched in a shop front, in its flash. A curtain opened and closed like a shutter.

He started running. He hurdled the puddles. He slithered on the melon rind. He crashed through the door.

The thunderclap itself caught up with him as a tall Indian in a fez snatched up a knife and backed towards the cash register. His customer shrieked, tripping on her sari.

“Police!” Zondi barked.

The storekeeper recognised him and lowered his right hand.

“Shut up, Mary!”

Every Indian woman was Coolie Mary. She did.

“Who's that in your room upstairs?” Zondi demanded, crossing the floor. “Don't waste time, Gogol.”

“Moosa.”

“You're telling me the truth?”

“You can go look.”

Then Gogol shrugged indifference, picked up a cabbage and began trimming its stalk. Zondi kicked the knife out of his grasp.

“Listen to me, churra, it had better be Moosa—you hear?”

“Come,” Gogol mumbled.

Zondi followed him out into the hallway cluttered with fruit crates where the smell of curry was like a cushion against the face. The stairs were uncarpeted. The landing had a square of linoleum worn badly one way but not the other. They walked across the brighter pattern.

“In here,” Gogol said, opening the door.

A middle-aged Indian rose as far as he could—without his special shoes he came up to Zondi's shoulder. He was already in his pyjamas.

“Sergeant Zondi, what a pleasure,” he beamed.

“Sit, curry-guts—you, too.”

Always a man to oblige, Moosa sat. Gogol, his appointed patron, perched scowling on a shoe locker. The Muslims always looked after their own, unlike the Hindus who made up most of the Indian population, and you never saw a Muslim trader go down for good. Moosa had served six months for receiving stolen goods after a trial which had cost him every cent his general dealer's store was worth. When he came out, Gogol brought him home, gave him a room, and waited for him to reinstate himself. This was beginning to take an unnecessarily long time. Gogol had put it around that Moosa was quite happy to lie and stare at his bleached pin-ups of Jane Russell and do nothing. The Muslim community was sympathetic but pointed out what a shock prison could be for a man of Moosa's cultivation. It had, however, also agreed to share some of the expense even though Gogol was unmarried.

Lightning flashed again, this time the thunder was hard on its heels. Moosa flinched.

“What's wrong? Are you frightened?”

“I've never liked violence, you know that, Sergeant.”

Zondi caught the allusion and smiled meanly.

“Still say those radios were planted, Moosa?”

“I do.”

Zondi looked into the cupboard, inspected the wall decorations.

“Who was it, you said? It's a long time since I was in Housebreaking.”

“Gershwin Mkize.”

Zondi stared right through Miss Russell and went on staring until his eyes lost their focus. Then he snapped his fingers.

“Of course, I'd forgotten.”

“So you would have, Sergeant. All water under the bridge.”

“Not your bridge,” Gogol muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, Sergeant, my landlord and provider can be a little sour at times, may Allah reward him.”

“The shop door is still open,” Gogol retorted. “I could be losing everything in the till while you jabber-jabber your nonsense.”

“You had a customer.”

“She's gone a long time you bet, Zondi.”

“Please, Gogol! Remember who this African gentleman represents.”

“You get out,” Zondi said softly, “you go down and you lock up and you stay there.”

Gogol slunk out, his tail between his teeth.

“Yes, that's enough of this rubbish talk, Moosa. I want to know who was in this room when the storm began.”

“Just me.”

“If you're lying …”

“In the name of Allah—”

“I said no—”

“There was nobody but me here. I implore you.”

“What were you doing?”

“Listening to Springbok Radio.”

“In a storm? With lightning?”

“Oh, it crackles a bit but I—”

Zondi reached out to touch the small wireless. It was cold. Moosa hunched himself up in the corner, brushing brilliantine from his gleaming hair over a favourite picture of a little white girl and two golden spaniels.

“We are going to have to talk some more,” Zondi said, barely parting his lips.

Moosa watched with growing apprehension as Zondi removed his jacket. The sight brought a tic to his right eye. He began breathing through his mouth.

“That's better,” remarked Zondi, slipping the jacket on again with the lining on the right side. He knotted his tie in the small mirror decorated with rose transfers. Then he sat down and put his feet up on Moosa's lap.

“Talk,” he said. “Tell me why you, who are so afraid of lightning, were watching me through the window.”

“Was that—?”

Zondi shook his head dolefully.

“Yes, it was you, Sergeant, I won't pretend I did not know.”

“You had been watching long?”

“Yes, but it was not until the flash that I saw who it was. It is very dark tonight.”

“But why watch, Moosa? What is there to see?”

“Things.”

“Like?”

“I was waiting for someone.”

“Who?”

“Gershwin.”

“More.”

“Gogol wants to know why I don't go out. Would you if you had that monster right next door by the school? Yes, you would, you are different to me. I am not a man of action. I am a—”

“But you watch him.”

“I can't help it. It is like you would watch a snake. A mamba. I can't keep my eyes off him. Someday I will know.”

“What?”

“Why he did that thing to me.”

“That was the weak part of your story, wasn't it, Moosa?”

“But he
told
me he did it! Told me straight out. And he laughed right in my face.”

Moosa was getting himself quite worked up again. Zondi stood up and peered between the curtains.

“Why were you waiting, though? What have you heard?”

Moosa giggled softly.

“There was talk in the shop today.”

“Yes?”

“Gogol told me. He said there was talk that Gershwin was in trouble. With you people.”

“And?”

“The Dodge has not been back all day, not once.”

He giggled again.

“Then I must speak with Gogol.”

“That's all he knows. People do not like to be heard talking about Gershwin today.”

Zondi had found this out for himself.

“This is bad.”

“If you ask me, Sergeant, you had better start looking for him on the Lesotholand border.”

“Or Swaziland. It's close, too.”

“True. It's just that maybe once a month a car comes by here for Gershwin with Lesotho plates on it.”

Zondi took it as calmly as he could: Lesotho—a state without apartheid, in which all races could learn to trust one another, and the cradle of the spoke man.

But all the same, his smile instantly transformed their relationship.

“You're a bright boy, Moosa. Who comes in this car?”

“I've never seen properly, he drives it round the back.”

“A white man?”

Moosa was politely astonished.

“I'd have noticed
that,
Sergeant!”

Still, it was good enough for Zondi to leave immediately and sprint all the way back to CID headquarters. He was late as it was.

It must have been the hundredth time Kramer had looked at the wall clock. He started on the pile of overseas photographic magazines again.

Exasperation made turning each page no more than an exercise in self-control for nothing registered. He had been forced to wait for more than an hour for Sergeant Prinsloo to get back from the scene of a payroll robbery. And now the man had been in the darkroom for nearly twenty minutes without even getting through on the inter-com. On top of which, Zondi was overdue and he wanted to get out to Trudeau's place right on eight.

The darkroom door slid open and Sergeant Prinsloo came across, wiping his hands on a towel. He saw Kramer had stopped at a page which had been windowed by the censor's scissors.

“Yes, makes me bloody mad, that does,” Prinsloo said. “Okay, so we don't want nudes all over the place making trouble—but I wanted to read that piece on the back about fine-grain developers.”

Kramer nearly hit him.

“Sorry, Lieutenant, nothing to offer you,” he went on, dipping into his apron pocket and taking out the second heart-shaped portrait. “This print is all shot to hell. I thought maybe there was some detail in it I could bring out, even by just holding a lamp behind it, but there's nothing. It's flat and that's all there is to it.”

“That took you till now?”

“
Ach,
no. I copied this and blew up some big contrasty prints.”

“What the hell for?”

Sergeant Prinsloo reddened. He threw the locket picture down in front of Kramer.

“I had to bloody try something. Look at it! All grey tones. A nearly black blob in the middle. Light little blobs in the background, blurring together. Grain like beach sand. It's a proper balls-up.”

And so it was. Kramer had just hoped it could be made to reveal something of what was presumably a man standing near a hedge with the sun behind him. The face was so dark you could not even make out the line of the nose.

“Useless, don't know why she didn't throw the bloody thing away with everything else,” Kramer muttered, hinting an apology.

“Not useless.”

“How come?”

“You look in a snapshot album sometime,” Prinsloo said. “Half the pictures are as bad as that one. There's Uncle Frikkie, they say, and all you see is a doughnut in a beach hat. You
see
when something is new, after that you
recognise.
Like it jogs the memory, makes a picture inside your head. And not just photos, it happens with me with my pa's walking stick.”

Kramer suddenly saw the real significance of the picture: it was wholly intimate yet totally unrevealing. He was certain now that Miss Le Roux had been a girl with a past which she took pains to hide.

The lenses increased in importance.

Zondi met him on the stairs but Kramer shouted angrily and ran on ahead, refusing to listen until they were in the car headed for Greenside. Then he listened very carefully, saying nothing about having his orders disregarded. Zondi's chief virtue was arrogance.

The fragrance of furniture-polish put Kramer at his ease in such unfamiliarly elegant surroundings. His grandmother, too, had believed furniture should be groomed daily until it shone like a racehorse's flank. Of course, you had to have furniture like that which surrounded him to make it worthwhile. It was all imbuya or stinkwood from the Knysna forests and the designs solid Early Cape.

Kramer's appreciation of the room ended at this point. He liked paintings to have lots of thorn trees in them and not just one big thorn. He also preferred even a tasteful vase of plastic flowers to an old wine bottle with dead grass stuck in it at all angles.

Mr Trudeau stepped warily across the waxed parquet flooring with a drink for him. Kramer took it and went on looking out over Trekkersburg through the picture window. The storm had passed and it was a fine moonlight night. He saw the glint of a large swimming pool below on the lawn.

“Like it, Lieutenant? We do. Wonderful view; all those lights like necklaces on black velvet, or so Susan always says.”

“It's a nice house,” said Kramer.

“You think so? We're pleased with it. Got ourselves an excellent cook-boy now—he was the gardener before, funnily enough. Wouldn't live anywhere else in the world.”

“Very nice,” said Kramer, downing his brandy in one.

“Thought you chaps—er, didn't on duty?”

“We don't.”

“Ah, I see. Well, what has brought you careering out here then? Susan says it sounded important.”

Kramer told him and Mr Trudeau's whisky-and-soda voice went flat.

“Murdered, you say?”

“Yes, I'm afraid I cannot divulge any details at this stage.”

“No, no, quite right. You just want me to say what I can about the contacts. You've got them on you?”

Kramer handed over the envelope.

“Good Lord, these are unusual little chappies.”

“Why so surprised, sir?”

“Never thought I'd come across a pair outside a film studio. You see, they are simply cosmetic cornea lenses, no optical qualities at all. Worn just for effect.”