The Wall

64

What a shitty stressful day. There’d been a fire in Palm Trees, and before the fire department could get there, the house’s roof had collapsed. They’d been lucky that in this heat other houses hadn’t caught on fire as well. The neighbors had dumped water on their own houses non-stop. When he’d asked one of them why he hadn’t spared at least one bucket of water to toss on the fire, things had gotten out of hand. And now the mess in The Pines.

Warren Kramer opened the door to the monitor room. “What’s going on?”

“They haven’t caught him, Boss,” Happiness said.

“How can that be? How many people are there now?”

“Six vehicles. Fifteen people. Even the Boss is there.”

“Gerrit?”

“Yes, Boss van Lange.”

“So why isn’t it working? It can’t be all that hard to catch that bastard. A tsotsi.”

“I don’t think so, Boss.”

“That it should be easy to catch him?”

“That he’s a tsotsi, Boss.”

“Show him to me.”

Happiness hit a couple of keys and zoomed in on the paused footage. “There, Boss.”

Kramer saw scruffy rags. Too muscular and fit for those trashy clothes, but so what? Clothes made the man, after all. And the guy looked like shit. “What are the cameras showing now?”

Happiness searched for other images of the boy. Ran the footage from the four cameras backward.

“Stop!” Kramer said. “Who’s that?”

With the press of one button, all four cameras stopped. “The two people there. Who are they?” An attractive man and a woman in a smock.

Happiness had never seen either one of them. But Boss Kramer shouldn’t know that. “Two people,” she said.

“Seen them before?”

“I think so,” she said, although the two of them were complete strangers to her. She would’ve noticed and remembered the man. She watched the two for a while. Kramer gradually lost interest, as hers increased. Not because the man was so handsome, though. Something wasn’t quite right about the way the two of them were behaving, though she had no idea what was bothering her. But they were chatting… as if they knew each other well. Really well. Only… why would a man in a fashionable suit and a domestic worker be on such friendly terms? Seem so familiar? Relaxed. Better not to say anything. She must have been watching other footage when they’d been out on the street. Or maybe asleep.

“They must’ve left a long time ago, don’t you think?” the Boss asked.

“Must’ve,” she agreed.