Snake

3

Gardiner paid the sergeant behind the canteen bar for his two drinks and edged back through the tiny, crowded room, lethal with flying darts, to a corner table. The place was always packed, being open for only two hours from 4:30 P.M., but the booze was the cheapest in town and the company congenial. On most evenings, that was.

His companion, Klip Marais, sat hunched and glowering sourly at the wall, looking more than ever like a rough-hewn wrath of God. He had drawn in his upper lip, and was nibbling on his blond mustache, clearly not caring for the taste much.

Gardiner put down the rum and Coke at Marais’s elbow and squeezed into his own seat.

“Cheers,” he said, mixing his Coke with vodka.

“Huh.”

“ Ach, come on, Klip-what’s got your Tampax in a twist?” Gardiner demanded.

“It’s nothing,” he muttered, poking at the ice in his glass. “I’m just pissed off, that’s all.”

“Because of what Kramer did at the Wigwam?”

“That and other things. I mean, he did put me in a bloody spot, didn’t he? Left me holding the can? Chucking all those reporters out when he had no right. No crime had been committed-it was up to Monty to say whether they could be there or not. Private property. Then there was the duty officer not telling him. Oh, ja, bloody old typical Trekkersburg…”

Marais was a new man. With his recent promotion, he had had to accept a transfer down from Johannesburg. After life in the metropolis, he seemed to regard a city of even 100,000 as hardly bigger than a dorp where not a soul dared missed church more than once on Sundays.

“Lieut’s got a lot on his plate,” Gardiner said.

“It doesn’t stay there for long! All afternoon me and Zondi have been going through the Peacevale dockets trying to find some connection between the coons that got shot.”

“While…?”

“He runs around as usual, like a buffalo with its bum on fire.”

They had their first laugh then. Gardiner found it an apt description of Kramer’s short visit to the nightclub.

“How’s the guts?” he asked

“So-so… But he was pleased with the prints you got him off the inside of the till. Seems if we nail these tsotsis, then the other must belong to one of them.”

“Zondi looking yet?”

Marais consulted his fancy navigator’s watch.

“Ja, been out since four.”

“The sex-mad fool,” quipped Gardiner, imitating a catch phrase from The Goon Show.

But Marais, who did not go for this twenty-year-old BBC radio show, still popular in South Africa, gave him no encouragement.

Instead he tried some humor of his own: “I bet you’ll never guess where the Big White Chief is tonight!”

Zondi parked his vehicle, then checked his PPK automatic before getting out. It was dark and he might have a long way to walk.

He cut across the open ground that served Peacevale for a football pitch and then into long grass running beside a stream. His pace slowed as he took care not to rip his shins on the rusty tins and other rubbish hidden there.

But before the moon was out, he had arrived at a dwelling no higher than his waist and constructed haphazardly out of empty cement bags wired to the tube frame off the back of some old truck. A small fire was burning in front of the entrance, heating up whatever was in the jam tins.

“Mama Thembu,” he said quietly. “Where do I find your son tonight? It is a friend who asks.”

A bundle of rags slithered far enough out of the interior for the flames to catch the rheumy eyes of a raddled old crone. One winked at him.

He handed over a ten-cent piece and felt the scratch of her talons on his palm. Then waited patiently while she knotted the coin in the corner of a filthy head cloth.

“In Plymouth,” she said, and disappeared again, like something under its rock.

Zondi was relieved. His wife, Miriam, had gone back to KwaZulu for a funeral and the children were waiting at home to be fed. He hadn’t, as he had feared, far to go.

He continued along the bank of the stream until coming to an improvised bridge, where he crossed over. There were bushes, too, on the far side, thistles and stinkweed, fences that had become barbed-wire snares, and a lot of strange little noises. Rats, for the most part.

The moon-which was at only half strength-rose in time for the huddle of forgotten tin lavatories, each marked NATAL ROADS DEPARTMENT, to confirm he was on course. Way up at the top of the ridge he could see candlelight in the windows of the houses, and hear children shrieking their night games. He wondered what his own were doing.

Slipping through a gap in a wattle-plank wall, he entered the junkyard. It was really just a dump now, as nothing left in it was worth salvaging, and nobody ever went there on business-except the man he was hoping to contact. A secretive man who made secrets his business.

Zondi proceeded cautiously into a circle of old wrecks, his flashlight ready in his left hand, to leave his right free if need be. Oldsmobile, Dodge, Oldsmobile again, Studebaker, Ford, Ford, Ford… Plymouth.

As he advanced toward it, the driver’s door creaked and swung open.

Yankee Boy Msomi, wrapped warm in his heavy overcoat with its fur-trimmed collar, sat very upright on the back seat, his smooth fingers curled over the top of his walking stick. He smelled of whisky and had two-thirds of a bottle propped next to him on a pile of magazines. Yet his big, soft-boiled eyes, with pouches beneath them like black egg cups, focused sharply on his visitor.

“Well?” asked Zondi, sitting sideways on the driver’s seat to keep his feet on the ground. “It was Lucky Siyayo’s turn today. What have you heard?”

Msomi shook his head mournfully from side to side.

“Nothing? All the drinking places? You’ve been at every shebeen? How are they spending their money?”

“Today,” said Msomi, “a little bird says they get just enough bread for the petrol.”

It was his idea of a joke. Still, it showed how good his sources of intelligence were, and that was what mattered.

“I now have another question, Msomi: these shopkeepers- is there anything that makes them brothers?”

“We are all brothers, man.”

“Something that ties them together. Get it? So these killings could be for another reason?”

Msomi blew a slow raspberry. Then got the giggles, rocking back and forward until Zondi grabbed him by the hair and held it a few seconds longer than was necessary.

“Cool it, baby, cool it,” protested Msomi, patting down his Afro. “No way, but no way is that how I read it. These guys may float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, but that’s it, man. They just ain’t got it together yet. Dig? This some white pig’s bullshit?”

“What you say?”

“Hey, man! I asked you, I said cool it. Or you don’t get no more.”

“Your mother’s arse!” flared Zondi in Zulu.

Msomi murmured two names.

An hour later, Zondi had both the young tsotsis in custody. Not progress exactly, but things were beginning to happen… at a price.

The Gazette crime reporter asked for a receipt to hand in with his expense sheet, and told the waiter to bring back two small brandies with it. Then he insisted that Kramer take a cheroot.

From the way he was carrying on, anyone would have thought they were dining at some posh place and not at Georgie the Greek’s, which sold more milkshakes than hard liquor, yet the kid obviously found enough in these surroundings to support a grander fantasy. It was his trade, after all. He had actually tugged the knot in his tie down to half-mast, just as they did in the comics, and his heavy-framed spectacles rested knowingly near the tip of his button nose.

“You leave it to me, Lieut,” he said in his deepest voice “Chief sub’s holding me a space on the front and tomorrow it’ll be there. I appreciate you taking me into your confidence. I mean that.”

Experience might someday teach him that people would tell him things in confidence to prevent him from publishing what he might have worked out for himself.

“Lieut?”

“Just see you keep it that way, Brian.”

“Keith,” said Kramer’s host.

“Ja, Keith, because the message must go between the lines.”

“I promise there’ll not be a word of how it might spread to Trekkersburg. Make it sort of a color story. How the free-milk ladies were in Peacevale at the time Lucky Seesaw was shot, unaware of what was going on in broad daylight. They, being a charity, make it a dead cert. Maybe get a quote from one of them: ‘No, I don’t think we need police protection. All the Africans are so grateful to us that I’m sure we won’t come to any harm.’ Something like that. Y’know.”

“Best you leave us right out of this.”

“Anything you say.”

Kramer’s sigh misted the inside of his raised wineglass. This was the third time he had tried to ensure that while the city’s white and Indian traders would be able to put two and two together, the gang wouldn’t be presented with ideas it had not-by some small chance-had already. His theory of another motive for the deaths had been pooh-poohed by the colonel, probably quite rightly.

The receipt and brandy arrived.

“Any way of seeing your article first?” Kramer asked.

“Er-that’s not usually… What if I read my copy over the phone to you? Give me your home number and-”

“No,” said Kramer firmly. “I’ll wait at the CID. That way, if it isn’t right, I haven’t far to come to kick your arse.”

The reporter concentrated so hard on his manly laugh that he tapped his ash into the butter dish.

“Quite a day,” he said after a while.

“Bloody chaos,” conceded Kramer. “But I suppose this Wigwam business was a good scoop for you?”

“Ah, the general public often gets that wrong,” the answer came, lightly dusted with patronage. “A scoop is something only one paper gets and no other. I could have killed Monty for that, after all the puffs I’ve given him.”

“Hey?”

“Puffs-boosts, free publicity; not ciggies!”

He would not have been so delighted by Kramer’s ignorance of newspaper slang if he had smelled hemp smoke in the misunderstanding.

“Ja, but what did Monty do?”

“Tipped off the whole of the rest of the crowd. Even the SABC was there, although they only made a par of it at the end of the regional summary. Durban evenings beat us to it, though-went like hotcakes here. Best I could manage was an exclusive-you know, an interview nobody else got, him telling it in his own words. Of course, the sodding editor now says it’s sub judice, except for the beginning and end, because of the inquest still to come.”

Kramer, who enjoyed hearing all this, grunted sympathetically.

“You should see the quotes I got! Good, hard stuff. News ed said it was a ball gripper of a story. How Monty grabbed the tart’s wrists, not thinking she could be dead, not wanting to believe she was dead-as if you could believe that!-and then finding her arms were like ‘sticks of cold wood, stiff with no hinges,’ which made him realize he was too late, Jesus, and then he knew. How he’d never forget her eyes and how she looked up at him, pleadingly, from the other side of the grave! All that.”

“What a waste.”

“Don’t think I didn’t tear him off a bloody strip! I did. Not half. That wasn’t all-I was supposed to be in chamber court at the Supreme for the divorces at eleven, and with him coming through at twenty to, I forgot to send a junior and there’s been all hell about that. Garbled messages, my backside-hear he pulled one on your lot, too. That bastard has the nerve of-”

He suddenly looked like someone who just might have accidentally said the wrong thing.

As far as Kramer was concerned, he had. If it hadn’t been for the abortive journey into Trekkersburg, the till would never have been tampered with. “Who told you this? Who’d you hear it from?”

“Steady, Lieut, it’s only what your sergeant explained to me after we’d been kicked out. I’m not necessarily saying Monty did anything deliberately.”

“You are.”

“Just an opinion, sort of slipped out. He is publicity mad, isn’t he? Who wouldn’t be with a dump like that? Especially when his opposition in the lane is so good-he’s imitating it with tent motifs and all.”

“I don’t get the connection.”

“Makes a better story, that’s all. You chaps coming tearing in. You should have seen them.”

“ You saw them?”

“Of course, we didn’t have so far to-er-come.”

The reporter smiled at his inadvertent echo of Kramer’s threat. But his eyes didn’t see the joke, and stayed worried like those of a gossip with no stomach for confrontation.

“Not that he was any more explicit when he rang us,” he added hastily. “Didn’t have to be, really, because our diary had bugger all on it worth a lead. But don’t take my word on any of this-you could say I’m feeling a bit biased.”

“I won’t,” said Kramer, throwing down enough to cover his share of the meal and a tip.

“Look, this was on me,” the reporter protested, also getting to his feet. “This was our first-ever get-together, I’ll see to it, and you the next.”

Kramer ignored him. He was checking to see that he had his lighter.

“Er-you won’t mention I said anything, Lieutenant Kramer? And about that copy, it’s early yet so it should be ready for first edition and I’ll ring you as-”

“You do that, Clive,” said Kramer, storming out.

Last rounds were being bought. The small black boy in bare feet, who slipped into the canteen every now and then to remove empties, his eyes never lifting above table level, was doing very well out of partly consumed soda waters and Cokes overtaken by fresh orders. If the tone of the general conversation wasn’t high, its volume was, and in the hearty hubbub Marais had mellowed considerably.

“Poor bastards,” he said, indicating two Portuguese guests sipping beers. “How would you like the kaffirs to kick you out of your country and have to start all over again from bottom?”

“Who brought them in?” asked Gardiner, blinking as non-smokers do in a fug. He had not lit one for three days.

“I don’t know. Lots of the blokes feel sorry for them. Can’t do enough for you. Want you to know how much they like it here, in the Republic, I mean. That big one’s from LM, small one from Beira; got a tearoom up near the college.”

“Got every bloody tearoom these days,” said a young constable who overheard them. “Worse than the coolies.”

Their glasses were empty.

So Gardiner led the way out, pausing to question a uniformed sergeant who was drinking an orange squash in the doorway because he was on duty, and firearms weren’t allowed in the canteen anyway.

“Who’s the pushy little poop, Sarge?”

“One just talking to you? Oppenheimer.”

“Oh, ja,” said Gardiner, and then he and Marais walked down the wide passage and out into the yard, making for the latrine. Which had batwing doors like a Wild West saloon for some amusing, if obscure, reason.

“Well, here’s what I think of you,” said Marais, careful to aim at Trekkersburg between the bowls because the pipes into the gutter were missing and otherwise he’d soak his moccasins. “Now for the popsie and the back row at the drive-in. Pity Mickey’s made work for you or-”

The batwing doors clattered wide.

“Okay, Sergeant Marais, to my office,” Kramer said softly, his hands on his hips.

Gardiner tarried to rinse out his left stocking.

Zondi handed over the keys of the Chev Commando, which was better than new now, and borrowed his bus fare off Kramer. Then he walked around Marais, gave a quick smile behind his back, and left for home.

“Look, sir,” Marais began stiffly, having been given time by the interruption to prepare his defense.

“No, you look,” Kramer contradicted him, and indicated he should take a seat. “I’ll accept what you say about the papers in Jo’burg listening in on our radio and getting to the scene of crime just as quick. I’ll accept all that.”

Marais perched on the edge of Zondi’s little table, relaxing slightly.

“If I hadn’t been at the Wigwam, too, then it would have been a very different matter, Marais. Then I would expect you to take it personally- very personally. But, as it was, I had the same chances as you. The main point is this: it seems to me that there’s a definite case for thinking we’ve been buggered about by this arsehole who runs the club. The police, that is. I want this fully investigated. And if there is anything in it, I want charges brought against him. False information, obstruction-”

“Perjury? I’ve got his statement already, sir.”

“Hey? First class-let me see it right now.”

The prodigal left the room like there was veal on the menu, and Kramer used the delay to ring the Widow Fourie and say he would be later than planned. And yes, he had told Mickey that his help would be needed for the move to the house. He realized it could not keep being put off. He would see her.

Marais had just returned, bearing the docket, when the Gazette reporter rang through with his story.

“That’s not bad,” Kramer said, with a half smile of relief at the end of it. “Except you don’t get a fusillade with five shots set days apart, hey? I do appreciate it’s in English, but… Ja, that’ll be fine. Perfect. Uh-huh, and I’ll scratch yours.”

He glanced across for a reaction, but Marais was too engrossed in scribbling something.

“Oh, ja? Never! ‘Bye.”

The receiver’s weight cut the rest dead.

“I’ve listed them,” Marais announced.

“Go ahead-read.”

“ One -suspect’s report to duty officer logged at ten-thirty; for press to be there at ten-forty, calls must have been made immediately afterwards.”

“Or before?”

“Hmmm. Two -suspect’s abusive manner on finding press had been asked to wait outside.”

His diplomacy was acknowledged by a curt nod.

“ Three -suspect’s response to learning that exhibit A was being removed from the premises. By that I mean his offer to save police time and put it in his pig bins.”

“Come again?” Kramer asked, tossing over a lighted Lucky Strike.

“Ta, sir. Well, I thought Monty was just arse-creeping at the time, but obviously, now we’ve got this publicity angle, he hoped the snake could go in the newspaper pictures. It would have looked good, and if you can print crash pictures, I don’t see why not.”

“Uh-huh. Sharks-they publish killer sharks. And?”

“ Four -suspect’s excited manner. Warrant Gardiner was telling me tonight that once Monty found a junkie dead in his bog and-”

“Hey!” interrupted Kramer. “What about number five? Now, that really interests me.”

Marais had no fifth point listed. He looked up, slightly off balance

“Sir?”

“When you’re on night duty, man, what time do you get up after a night off? Early? Or late, like after the nights you’ve been on?”

“You-um-get into a sort of cycle, really. So it’s usually late like the others. If you don’t, by the time… Oh, I get you. Ten seems early for him?”

“Gives him a fifteen, sixteen-hour working day.”

“Ja, but-hell, that’s a nasty allegation!”

“But what?”

“According to his statement, he always comes in at ten to see the post, fix cabaret bookings, order drink and grub, and let the cleaner in.”

“How do you make a reservation, then?”

“That’s done through his home number-his wife sees to that. Let me see…”

Marais nipped a statement sheet out of the docket.

“Here it is. ‘I always go into the club for a couple of hours in the morning, returning home to sleep at around noon. I had no appointments, so this was my intention until a report was made to me by Bantu Male Joseph Ngcobo, in my employ as a part-time-’”

“Never mind the pieces you wrote,” said Kramer. “Just tell me where you took over.”

His insight tickled Marais, who put a finger on the third line down. “From ‘until a report’ onwards, sir. Hell, he tried to make it a bloody book and wanted to put in hearsay.”

“They all do, old son. That was a nice thought while it lasted. You were saying? Four?”

“ Ach, just that Monty didn’t seem so easily shocked before. Very cool, the warrant said. But four isn’t such a big deal because, I suppose, with a female and a bloody snake like that wrapped around her neck, it must have-”

“Still there, was it?”

“Here’s the photos-Kisten did a quick job.”

Kramer played patience with them for a while.

“How come if she knocked its brains out on the wall it was still round her neck?”

“Doc Strydom says they’ve got funny nervous systems; probably locked in a spasm. You know how the wogs say that a snake can’t die till sunset, doesn’t matter what you do to it.”

“Cut its head off with a spade and it still jumps around hours later, you mean?”

“Ja. Doc’s going to check with the snake park for more details to put in the thing he’s writing.”

The photographs were tossed aside. They were irrelevant to the matter in hand, and Kramer was niggled at being thwarted. He had a very clear picture of the manager and an equally clear idea of what he would like…

“ Six!” he said. “What is today in Trekkersburg? And don’t give me bloody Monday!”

“Wash day?” Marais postulated, with pleasing swiftness.

“Spot on. Think how the bugger was dressed. It all looked new to me. Even if it wasn’t, tell me who doesn’t wear his best casuals at the weekend? On Saturday arvie, or Sunday? Who goes to the trouble to posh himself up for the postman and a bloody coon boy? He didn’t have any appointments. For two hours, hey? Who goes near a nightclub in the daytime? When exactly was Mr. Joseph Ngcobo admitted to the premises? With wine bottles all over the place? Dead bugs in the passage?”

Marais began to pace about, clicking his thumb against his front teeth. Then he stopped suddenly.

“What are we saying, sir?” he asked, very solemnly.

“Just this: that Monty ‘Publicity Stunt’ Stevenson may have reached the club before Ngcobo, checked to see if the girl had pinched anything maybe-and saw certain advantages of a commercial nature in the situation.”

“Christ! You’d have to be cool to do that!”

“And what did your pal Gardiner have to say about him?”

Marais slapped his thigh in self-recrimination. “But I didn’t bother with times when I interviewed Ngcobo! I’m sorry, but it seemed-”

“No longer it isn’t. But you got times from Stevenson?”

“Under oath.”

“And Ngcobo’s address? Bantu Men’s Hostel?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“The night is young,” Kramer observed lightly.

Sergeant Kloppers and his clipboard barged into Strydom in the post-mortem room, almost dashing a jar of lungs to the floor. His night was over.

“I’m for home!” he declared defiantly.

Strydom looked round at the clock over his bifocals and frowned. “You were off most of the afternoon, so what nonsense is this? You can’t expect every week to run smooth as the last. We’re having a heavy run, that’s all-and that’s why I took the trouble of offering you a break while I was detained at Peacevale. You were gone three hours.”

“Peacevale I heard about!” snapped Kloppers.

“We can’t all spend our day worrying to tell you-”

Kloppers began to stab rudely at his list.

“The Peacevale coon, okay. But then? White female in a G-string. A white abortion. A-”

“Term miscarriage!” Strydom corrected, goaded into uncharacteristic pedantry.

“A whatsit. But then? A coon full of glass. And now-”

“ Ach, for crying out loud, who said we were going to try and get through them all tonight?”

“Ah,” said Kloppers, “ah, but you just come and see what else I find in my fridge!”

Strydom stalked through into the other room. “That happens to be mine,” he said coldly. “And I agree, you had better go home. What’s more, tomorrow I’m having a word with your superiors-you’re not fit for the job!”

“Suits me fine!” Kloppers shouted from the door.

And Nxumalo, who had taken the python in his stride, wondered if Sergeant Van couldn’t possibly come back soon.

Gardiner laid the prisoners’ sole prints and his originals on the desk in front of Kramer, who had just made a start on Stevenson’s statement.

“One fits,” he said, “the other doesn’t. Could have been one of Lucky’s biggest boys. I could-”

“Whoa, there! What’s the prisoners’ story?”

“Real skelms, those two. Saw a chance and took it. Zondi had been held up by an informer ringing, so he gave them the brush and they admitted. He’s handed the case over to Sithole and told him to ask for a remand to keep the thing quiet meantime.”

“And the prints in the till?”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but the one that wasn’t Lucky’s belongs to one of these. Him.”

“And we don’t keep sole prints on file.”

“Some, but this other one doesn’t match. We forget them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bet you the gang will hit again tomorrow,” Gardiner offered as a parting remark. “I would, if I was that good but only got myself peanuts.”

It did not help to have the obvious put into words. Kramer was plunged into bleak thought so overwhelming that he almost missed hearing what Marais returned to report.

“The cleaner Ngcobo was himself early this morning,” he told Kramer. “And he went into the club actually with Stevenson before ten. Wine bottles are for the Indian waiters to collect when they come on. He isn’t paid to clean the passage. But he did say one thing: in his belief, the boss has been bluffing all along that he didn’t know Zulu, because when Ngcobo went to tell him about the sick missus, for once the boss knew straight away what he meant.”