James Mcclure - Snake

Gardiner nodded and got on with the job, suddenly absorbed in what he was doing. Should have been an artist.

Kramer was trailed across to the tin church by a raggle-taggle of big eyes and round potbellies who were hoping for a glimpse of his gun. One was rescued by its mother, who pounced with a squawk like a brown hen.

The windows were the proper pointed shape, but had been glazed with ordinary glass, some of it now broken and all of it so dusty it was difficult to see through. Kramer found a convenient hole and peered in.

Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi was holding court, with his snap-brim hat set very straight on his head. He sat at the minister’s table on the low, shaky platform, cool and dapper in his silver-thread suit despite the heat, and listened solemnly as a weeping woman, on a bench placed below him, gave her statement.

He was a terrible man for dramatic effects.

Yet Kramer could see that his improvisation was being received with due respect and, more importantly, might even be getting some real results at last. So he decided to have a smoke until there was a break in the proceedings.

Zondi stepped out of the building only a few seconds later. His eyes had always been quick.

“Well?”

“Same as before, boss. They hide when they hear the gun go off. When they look up, all they see is a red car driving away.”

“Was a blue one last time.”

Zondi shrugged. “The shop was empty-at least, nobody was inside when they came. They all say it was very quick.”

“Uh-huh. Not just a bit frightened, you think? Don’t want to get in trouble with the gang?”

“ Aikona, these are very simple people, and the minister is a good man, much respected. You heard he chased those boys?”

“Where were you, man? Hey?”

“Busy,” said Zondi, his flip manner subsiding. “Lucky’s wife is very, very sad that this happened. She came in a taxi and I talked with her over the other side.”

“Oh, I thought maybe she was the-”

“Boss, she says that Lucky cashed up last Friday.”

“Uh-huh?”

“She is educated, so she helped him with the books. She swears to God there was at most five rand in the shop, mostly very small change because the people here have very little money anyway. Perhaps one note.”

“ Five rand? Christ, would Lucky put up a fight for that? Why the hell shoot him?”

Zondi shrugged and suggested, “To keep their faces unknown?”

“Huh! Would he have informed on them for five rand either? Never, man-that’s crazy. It’s crap.”

They stared at each other for what seemed a very long time.

Before Kramer said, “Are we sure these are robberies? Not murder?”

Because ever since going into town, he had felt very strongly that somehow he had got hold of the wrong end of a stick.

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.