James Mcclure - The Sunday Hangman

For twenty cents, you could buy a patch, presumably to sew on your jeans, that said Jesus Never Lets Me Down . At thirty cents, there was an American comic book called God’s Smuggler , which told the true story of a young Dutchman who said things such as: “One Bible could buy a cow now in Russia!” and was rewarded by having a sexy wife with massive bosoms. But Kramer’s chief delight was an American magazine entitled the Moody Monthly -in honor of some famous preacher, it seemed-which he very nearly bought for the Colonel’s secretary.

Then the salesman, an old gentleman in rimless glasses tinted slightly blue, asked what he could do to be of service, and examined the Bible most meticulously.

“Jiminy,” he said. “I’m afraid you couldn’t have picked on a commoner sort. I might have sold it, I might not. This is also the line carried by the ordinary trade, and so there’s no end of places it could have come from. I am sorry.”

“Are you sure, sir?” Kramer persisted.

“In 1975, South Africa became the largest distributor of complete Bibles in the world,” the salesman disclosed proudly. “I have in my office a United Bible Societies report. Would it help you in any way for your superiors to see it? Then I’m sure they’ll understand that you’ve done for them all you can.”

Kramer thanked him for his thoughtfulness, spurned the offer, and left, crumpling the free tract he’d been given. Bibles, next! — when the English-language press had already claimed that the Republic was a world leader in gun-owning, divorces, murders, assaults, road deaths, suicides, persons shot by the police, and of course, after all that, executions. The weight of statistics against his chances of success, even in the long term, was beginning to bear down intolerably, while luck, his only hope of relief, had clearly reneged on him. Like one other bitch he could mention.

Zondi had felt the younger children leave the bed they shared with him soon after their mother had done. When the smell of maize porridge began to drift in from the other room, he had heard the twins stir beneath the window, squabble in whispers over whose turn it was to stow away their mattress, and then go creeping out. For a long while following that, he’d heard and felt nothing, but had slept deep, where a man’s spirit was restored.

Now he was awake and watching Miriam through the doorway, touching his wife’s fine, straight-backed body with his eyes, and admiring the grace she brought to the humdrum tasks of the home. Once, however, she would have been humming softly-too softly to disturb him-and it was noticeable how silent she was. These were difficult times.

He yawned loudly, patting the sound as it came out, for a comical effect, and sat up.

Miriam smiled round at him. “I suppose you will be hungry now,” she said. “There is mealie meal on the stove, and hot water, too.”

“Hau! And I see my suit is neatly pressed. Is there a dress you have seen in some window?”

That made her laugh; it always did. Miriam had never thought to buy a new dress in her life, but she’d worked for a white family, where this catchphrase had originated. Her amusement was gone the next instant, when, unable to stop himself, Zondi flinched as he moved his leg and the rat woke up, too.

“Come, there is hot water,” Miriam repeated brusquely. “I will also put on the kettle and my big pot.”

He shuffled through to the other room, and found her zinc washing tub already positioned on some newspaper to protect the rammed-earth floor. With that grace he’d been watching, Miriam hefted an old paraffin tin off the stove and tipped four gallons of near-boiling water into the tub without spilling more than a drop. Then she carefully added a little cold from another tin, and nodded for him to get in. By wriggling about a bit, and by sticking his feet out straight, and leaning far back, Zondi found the right position again. He lapped the water over his thigh with his hand.

“It’s good,” he said.

Miriam went out to fill the kettle and pot at their tap next to the privy. While she was gone, Zondi gave his leg a ringing slap, to see what that might do, and thought it had worked for a moment. Then Mr. Rat recovered from his surprise and bit back.

“There is sweat on your lip,” murmured Miriam, pumping the Primus for the kettle.

“A hot day, woman-don’t you feel it?”

“Do you work this hot day?”

“Later.”

He knew she’d sigh.

“But the boss Erasmus is dead. Can you not now-”

“No,” said Zondi, who would debate this matter with no one-not even himself, come to think of it.

“You are always cross with the children,” she went on. “You don’t listen to why they think their education is not so good.”

“You have heard what happened in Soweto? I am the one who knows how to work with authority! With children it is always the same; they are too impatient. And they must tell me if they hear of agitators, because those men are very foolish.”

“Hau! You would talk of foolish men, is that so?”

The water was fast losing its warmth. Zondi soaped both his legs and cunningly massaged the right one. Then he sniffed, noted a strange aroma, and looked up to see what his wife was mixing in a cup.

“Yes, my husband,” she said, “I have been to the street of the witch doctors, and there I have paid good money for what you told my mother was rubbish for old savages. Now drink!”

Zondi drank. He was, very secretly, desperate. And besides, his gentle wife had the kettle poised over his genitals.

The unbelievable breakthrough came at almost exactly the same hour that the new man from Fingerprints had walked up to Kramer the previous day. It owed nothing to luck, and had very little to do with statistics, but had been preordained by the system.

Kramer was slumped alone in his office, with his feet on the window sill and his brain on a shelf, when fatherly Warrant Officer Henk Wessels, from Records, looked in.

“I’ve just been talking to the station sergeant at Witklip,” he said, taking Zondi’s stool from behind its deal table. “Maybe you know him-Frikkie Jonkers?”

For a moment there, Kramer wasn’t even sure that he knew where Witklip was, then he recalled a tiny dorp way up, practically in Zululand. On the other score he had to admit ignorance.

“Ach, Frikkie’s all right,” Wessels observed carelessly. “Got a chip on his shoulder, and isn’t what you’d call a mass of intelligence, but I think the pace of Witklip just suits him. Three stock thefts, a beer party, and that’s his week gone. Anyway, as I was saying, he gave me a tinkle.”

“Uh huh?”

“Just on the off chance, Frikkie said. You know, he’s got this big chum of his who runs a hotel there? Hotel? Christ, that’s a bloody joke! The bastard cheats townies into booking it for their holidays by advertising horseback riding and all sorts. You’ve got to break the bloody horses in first! Him.”

“You’ve been there?” asked Kramer, glad of the diversion, and already tasting the stolen vodka in this.

“My eldest did; nearly broke his heart, poor kiddie. On his honeymoon, too, it was. I wanted to sue. Anyway, seems they’ve had this bloke Tommy McKenzie staying there for quite some time, and then suddenly he vanishes. Two nights ago. So they look in his room and find his suitcase-a cheap job-and a few clothes-stuff nobody would worry about leaving behind. Not a large amount involved, Frikkie tells me, on the hotel bill, that is. And maybe he’ll be coming back tonight, but to be on the safe side, he wanted a check. The name wasn’t on our hotel-bilkers list, so I asked for a full description. Here, Lieutenant, old son-you take a look.”