like tropical fish-some were just as ugly-and flicked away from the gray-skinned beggar crabbing his legless way down the gray paving stones. If you did catch their eye, they never blinked. More interesting were the gawpers, blacks for the most part, whose fixed stares made them blink a good deal, as they stood outside shopwindows watching the miracle of the SATV test card. Every other bloody shop seemed to be selling sets, Kramer noted, and this included a hairdressing salon and, so far, two respectable jewelers’. The gawpers were interesting because you had to work out which were honest idiots, and which were pickpockets and bag-snatchers responding intelligently to the advent of television. Then came Toll Street and the dividing line between bustling commercialism and the sort of shop assistants who kept a good book under the till. He crossed over against the lights, to hold himself in trim, and started along a wide sidewalk that had little eddies of confetti in its gutter. Just about every denomination known to Trekkersburg had its main church between that set of traffic lights and the next: Baptist, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Mormon-and, at the far end, Lutheran, playing David and Goliath with the Bleeding Heart towering above it across the way. There was a funeral on there, and the undertakers were out having a smoke; Kramer gave old George Henry Abbot a wave, called out that he’d drop by soon, and took the next turning.
He immediately recognized the long, low facade of the yellow-brick bookshop, but excused himself his oversight on the grounds that, with its total lack of people appeal in the sign-writing of Larkin and Sons, Ltd., and its air of complacent prosperity, he had always thought the place sold veterinary supplies to stock breeders. That just showed how much you could miss from a car.
You could also miss quite a lot from the pavement. When Kramer went up the steps and into the showroom, he was astonished by what he saw there. Hell, never mind being Christian; Larkin’s looked the biggest bloody bookshop in town. There were thousands of glossy volumes on the wall shelves and on the display units that covered the vast, carpeted floor, together with an unimaginable number of knickknacks-like the molded relief map of the Holy Land, or the Sunday school blackboard-and some pretty weird stuff near the cash desk. He browsed through this while the salesman wrapped up something in brown paper for a nun.
For twenty cents, you could buy a patch, presumably to sew on your jeans, that said
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
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
