The Song Dog (3 page)

“Lieutenant,” Du Plessis said, cutting him short and glaring at the match flame, “Bokkie Maritz has served me well and true for the past eight, nine years, and I will not have my judgment questioned—especially not by someone who’s hardly been here five minutes!”

“My point exactly, Colonel. Why—”

“You heard what I said about not smoking in here?”

Kramer nodded, watching the match burn down toward his fingers. “But why send me, when I’m still a new poop? Why not someone with more rank, with more local knowledge and—”

“Listen,” said Du Plessis, intent on the flame, too. “I don’t know how your previous superior did business, but when I give an order, I expect—”

“I bet there could be more to this than meets the eye,” said Kramer, as the flame reached just above his thumb. “Has Captain Bronkhorst some special reason for not—”

“Never mind that!” exploded Du Plessis, poking a ruler angrily at the match. “Blow it out! Blow it out this instant!”

“On my way, Colonel …” said Kramer, taking note of
that curious little slip, and lit up, using the same match, as he stepped from Du Plessis’ office.

The Chevrolet, now down another hubcap, started up yet another steep ascent. But at least cattle had begun to give way to goats, and the sky ahead looked more interesting, being piled high with giant white clouds, heaped like the pillows in a hospital storeroom. Kramer had spent many happy minutes in just such a storeroom back in Bloemfontein, making friends with a student nurse who never gave her name nor wore underclothes. It surprised him how often he had been reminded of this lately, since his transfer to Trekkersburg.

The city that lived with its legs crossed.

“Tell me, Bok,” he said suddenly. “Where do you reckon the bodies will have been taken? They don’t usually have state morgues out in the bush—well, not where I come from. A hospital, maybe?”

Bokkie Maritz nodded. “Ja, a hospital’s more likely. I’d guess a nuns’ mission one.”

“Oh, wonderful,” said Kramer.

“Okay to talk now?” Maritz inquired cautiously. “Only I thought you’d like to get some proper background on poor old Maaties …”

“One of the best, Bok.”

“Oh, so you know that, do you? Ja, very definitely, one of the best.”

“And?”

“Well, always laughing and joking. Hell, Maaties had the typists at headquarters in fits by the time he left to go home again.”

“Bit of a ladies’ man, is that what you’re saying?”

“Hell, no! They liked him, that was all. He’d show the snapshots of his kiddies, and things like that.”

“What sort of wife did he have—a good-looker?”

“Hey? How should I know?”

“She was never in any of these snaps he showed round?”

Maritz frowned. “Can’t say I can remember one with her in it,” he admitted.

“Hmmmm,” said Kramer. “Look …”

They had just topped the rise, and beneath them lay a wide, green plain, given over almost entirely to sugarcane. So much green seemed unnatural after the barren, bread-colored landscapes Kramer was used to, making him think of mold to be scraped away with a knife.

“That must be Jafini—over to the far left,” Maritz exclaimed, motioning toward a smoky smudge some distance to the north. “Man, we’ve made excellent time, hey? The Colonel is going to be very impressed with us!”

“Bugger him for a start,” said Kramer.

I
T WAS A
good thing the brakes on the Chevrolet worked like dropping a battleship’s anchor. Without them, it could have proved all too easy to overshoot a dump like Jafini completely. Here one moment and gone the next; a brief blur of tacky shopfronts ending just before the red-brick, tin-roofed police station, half visible behind a high hedge of Christ-thorn, with a bleached South African flag drooping motionless from the stunted flagpole in its front garden.

Maritz, caught off guard by those brakes, became temporarily wedged beneath the dashboard. “Yirra, Lieutenant!” he gasped. “What happened? Did some kiddie run out in front of us or something?”

“Cigarettes,” Kramer said. “You go on ahead—I’ll catch you up in a minute …”

And he climbed out of the Chevrolet to look about him. Jafini’s one and only street seemed to have about a dozen businesses in all, run mostly by Indians. There was a bakery, too, and a hole-in-the-wall branch of Barclays Bank, manned on only Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus a small, red-brick Anglican church. A pair of distant petrol pumps suggested that Jafini boasted a one-mechanic garage, but he wasn’t about to take bets on that.

Instead, he loped across the road and went into the Bombay Emporium, inhaling deeply. Kramer had always relished the
warm, prickly smells of trading stores—the only kind of shop he’d known until he was eleven—and still marveled at the sheer, mind-boggling variety of their contents. The Bombay Emporium did not let him down. It carried everything from hurricane lanterns to sewing machines, from miles of cheap cloth in great bolts to plows and battery radios, plus at least nine varieties of tinned sardines. On the crowded shelf of cigarettes and pipe tobacco, he saw, for the first time in years, the little cotton bags of shag his father had smoked to excess, so crude it came complete with tobacco stalks. Good stuff, that shag: it had given the old bastard the long, lingering, thoroughly horrible death he’d deserved.

“May I help you, sir?” the Indian storekeeper called out hesitantly, over the headdresses of the bare-breasted Zulu women first in line.

“Lucky Strike—make it a whole carton,” said Kramer.

The storekeeper looked agonized.

“Ach,” said Kramer, reminded that his mother tongue was rarely understood by nonwhites in this godforsaken province of Natal, and repeated himself in English. “A carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes—no, better make it two.”

The storekeeper wrung his hands, “Would it were possible, sir! Gracious me, yes! But you see, sir, the better brands are not often being requested, sir, so stocks—”

“Luckys, damn it!” said Kramer. “Many as you’ve got.”

As the shopkeeper hastened away into a back room, someone new joined the silent line of typical country bumpkins still waiting to be served. This latest arrival was a cheeky-looking Zulu that Kramer felt sure he’d seen somewhere before, and this bothered him, because that “somewhere” could only have been Trekkersburg, two hundred and more miles to the south. Impossible. After all, the whole point of the Pass Laws was to keep coons confined to particular clearly defined areas, and they weren’t meant to waltz round the country like they bloody
owned the place. Yet this one certainly did, sauntering in jauntily with his hands in pockets, like a bloody Chicago gangster, and as blacks weren’t permitted to watch such films, this alone suggested that Short Arse might be worth further investigation.

Short Arse: a good name for him, decided Kramer—until the bastard’s pass book revealed his correct particulars. Hell, he couldn’t be much more than five-six, well beneath his own shoulder height.

“Very sorry, sir—won’t be many more moments!” the Indian shopkeeper emerged to say, before disappearing again.

Kramer took another look at the waiting, silent line, straight off the local native reserve. Most were dressed in whites’ castoffs or, in the case of some females, in what now passed for traditional Zulu costume, it seemed: a bead-bedecked headdress, lots of copper anklets, even more crude, copper bracelets, a short, pleated skirt, and—if they bothered with a top at all—a plain, white singlet. Short Arse had on an old sports jacket, turned inside out to show off its satin lining, plus a pair of riding britches with a front flap, now outmoded. By way of contrast, the coon in front of him was wearing the pinstripes of a posh lawyer—or the public hangman, come to that, Kramer having seen him once—plus a pair of massive rugby boots. That was a point: unlike anyone else in the line, Short Arse’s footwear looked the right size, even though his were only cheap tennis shoes, and this set him subtly apart from the others. It also posed a few interesting questions: how fast was Short Arse on his feet, how often—and
why
?

Short Arse turned to stare at something back out on the street, tantalizing Kramer with only a rear view of that alert, cannonball head. He tried to will it to turn just enough to show that profile again. Contrary to what most people outside the SAP said—“They all look bloody alike to me!”—Kramer had never experienced any such difficulty. Hell, telling actual monkeys apart, that was different: you didn’t have the infinite
variations afforded by moustaches, beards, eye size, jawline, nostril width, and so on. But any breed of kaffir, to the trained eye, presented a few problems. Even so, the back off a head wasn’t much to go on, and then he began to have doubts about his initial reaction. He noted the two small pigtails braided from the close black curls above the left ear, and had to admit they rang no bells. He also failed to make anything of the yellow kitchen matches being used to keep open Short Arse’s pierced earlobes.

“Sir …? Your very generous purchase, sir,” said the Indian shopkeeper, placing a brown-paper bag on the counter in front of Kramer, too polite to hand it to him directly. “But first, is there anything else I can be doing for you, sir?”

There wasn’t, so Kramer paid him and left, lighting his first Lucky on the way out and forgetting to give Short Arse one final look. Not that this mattered anyway, he told himself—at worst, the coon was probably just some city kaffir’s country cousin.

“Lieutenant!” said Maritz, hotfooting it up the road from the police station, outside which the Chevrolet was now parked. “Lieutenant, the station commander wants to know where the hell you’ve got to!—his words, Lieutenant …”

“He can go shit in his shoes—
my
words, Bok,” replied Kramer. “After a long journey like that, the next thing a man must do is go bleed his dragon.”

I’m stalling, he told himself ten minutes later. Ja, there’s something very weird about this whole Jafini business that I don’t understand yet, and I don’t think I want to. Especially when it comes to my part in it. Stalling won’t help, though; I’d best get going, get the bloody job done and then get the hell out of here again, back to the Free State.

Yet, even after he zipped up, Kramer tarried, his gaze lowered in the corrugated-iron privy marked
WHITE MALES ONLY
behind Jafini police station. He was studying the state the floor was in. None of the white-males-only seemed to care much where they aimed, and had left five separate puddles. Moreover, a large patch of the cement floor was noticeably darker than the rest, as though perpetually damp, and this suggested such was the norm. Interesting, mused Kramer, for this in turn suggested one of two things about the station commander he was about to meet: either the man was a born pig, or else too gutless to insist on basic standards of decency among his subordinates.

And I bet I know which of the two it is, decided Kramer, as he crossed the parched lawn to the back door of the police station, where Bokkie Maritz was anxiously waiting for him.

“The station commander’s through here, Lieutenant …” Maritz said, leading the way.

Cracked brown linoleum stretched the length of the long corridor, passing between scuff-marked cream walls painted green to waist height, and from the ceiling dangled unshaded light bulbs, sticky with tiny fried insects. The linoleum showed its greatest wear about halfway, where a short side passage met it at right angles. The side passage led in turn to a heavy, brown-painted door that bore a sign, in both official languages, declaring the room beyond it to be the station commander’s office.

“In there,” said Maritz, pointing.

“Bok, you’re invaluable,” said Kramer. “But have you any idea where the CID does its business?”

Maritz nodded self-importantly. “Ja, of course! They’ve got two offices over the other—”

“Then bugger off and start going through Maaties’ desk, hey? I want a summary of all recent cases he was investigating, and when you’ve gone through everything with a fine-tooth comb, I want a full report typed out in duplicate—one for the Colonel.”

“The Lieutenant would entrust such a task to me?” said Maritz, so flattered he was barely able to contain himself.

“Hell, why ever not?” said Kramer, who couldn’t think of a quicker, yet more bloodless way of getting shot of the idiot.

Then, without knocking, he threw open the door to the station commander’s office and strode in.

“Who the—!” began a startled fifty-year-old in uniform, as he looked around, a telephone receiver pressed to his ear.

“Kramer, Murder and Robbery. You Terblanche?”

The station commander nodded, covering the receiver’s mouthpiece with his hand. “Find yourself a seat, hey?—I’ve got the Colonel on the line.” Then he turned away and said, “Sorry, Colonel! Ja, it was—just arrived. Thank you, I’ll remember that, sir.”

I’ll remember
what
, Kramer wondered, as he reversed an upright wooden chair, straddled it, and looked about him. Three gnawed chicken bones lay whitening on top of the one filing cabinet beside which slumped, on a slither of fresh black mud, a pair of filthy rubber boots. Half a packet of biscuits stood beside a cloudy water pitcher and its glass, and the window ledge was heaped with sun-faded dockets, shedding their contents. The only clean and tidy area in the room appeared to be the bottom of the large, wicker wastepaper basket.

Terblanche himself certainly wasn’t a further exception to this rule, Kramer noted. Jafini’s station commander had small balls of blanket fluff in his spiky, Brylcreemed hair, something similar stuck to the razor nicks in his double chin, and a streak of maize porridge running grittily all the way down his uniform tie. There was also a dead moth in his right trouser turnup, made visible by his sitting with his unpolished shoes propped on a corner of a desk so cluttered it would take a bulldozer to make an impression.

“Ja, Colonel, sir, all is arranged,” Terblanche was saying, and rose to his feet, almost to attention. “Very good, Colonel—I fully understand your orders, sir. Bye for now, hey? Bye …”

Kramer, watching him replace the receiver, asked: “What is all arranged, hey?”