Quintus ushered them from the office, grumbling. “I don’t know how you find anything in this place.”

“We’ve always managed,” Anna said. “But I don’t suppose we’ll manage now.”

Her voice was cool. Quintus shook his head. He spoke in Afrikaans to his colleague. Enough’s enough, he seemed to be saying. The men trooped out. They were left alone, with their papers scattered about the Mission House, as if a gale had blown through, or some apocalyptic wind.

The same day, late afternoon, Quintus turned up with a truck. “Got something for you,” he said, smiling as if he had not seen them earlier that day.

Two black boys leapt down from the back of the truck, and maneuvered onto the stoep a large filing cabinet, battered and scratched, dark green in color. “Just what you need, eh?” Quintus said.

“Oh, Quintus, a donation,” Anna said. She smiled, as if deeply touched.

Quintus did not know the difference between affectation and reality. “No need to thank me, man,” he said modestly. “It’s just scrap metal. We were throwing it out. A drawer fell out and broke the brigadier’s toe, that’s why.” He addressed Ralph. “So you take care and don’t be rough when you pull it out.”

“Cup of coffee?” Anna said. Like Ralph, she felt a sneaking pity for the man. Quintus sat down at the kitchen table. He said, “I know you don’t like me coming round here. But we’ve been told to keep an eye on you. Look, there are worse people in the force.”

“I know. We’ve met him,” Ralph said. The sergeant sat brooding over his cup. “Hell, man, you think I like my job? A man’s got to earn a living.”

“I get tired of hearing that,” Anna said. “There are other ways, surely?”

The sergeant reached into a pocket of his uniform, took out his wallet. To Ralph’s deep embarrassment, he drew from it a family snapshot. “My girls,” he said.

Ralph looked at it. Three daughters. Twelve, ten, and eight they might be. Graded by height, the arms of one sister around the waist of the next, blond heads leaning back onto the shoulder of a woman slighter, more modest than they, scarcely taller than the eldest girl. Filaments of hair escaped from their plaits, and stood out like halos as they smiled into the sun. Hitler’s wet dreams, he thought. He handed the photograph to Anna. “Beauties,” he said. “Your wife, Quintus, she looks a lovely girl.”

“When you’re a family man you’ll understand a lot you don’t understand now,” the policeman promised. “You think about them all the time, Jesus, you worry. What sort of a world are they going to grow up in? Are they going to marry kaffirs?”

“We don’t use that word here.”

“Oh, words,” the sergeant said. “That’s what gets to me about you people. Words.”

He didn’t explain his objection; he stood up, said he must be going. “Next time we come,” he said, indicating the filing cabinet, “you’ll have everything in the one place for us?” Tentatively, he touched his uniformed chest and winced. “Mrs. Eldred, could I trouble you? Have you got anything to take the acid off my stomach?”

“Quintus wants to be human,” Anna said, when he left.

“He must get another job then.”

That evening Koos came to the back door. Just for a few minutes; he wouldn’t eat with them. Couldn’t, really, he said. His jaw was swollen. He had lost two teeth. The police had called on him too. They had smashed their way through the front of his surgery, smashed in the windows—though everybody knew he slept in the room at the back. They said they wanted to talk to Luke Mbatha, the dispenser. They’d given Luke’s shack a going-over, and taken Luke away in a van.

Koos wanted Ralph to come down to the station, bringing what money he had by him, to try and bail Luke out. “God knows he’s no innocent,” Koos said. “But you know what happens to black men in police cells.” He had, he explained, no money of his own. The matter was urgent, he said, looking away. Otherwise he would not have come. They might have taken Luke Mbatha down the hill to Pretoria by now, and perhaps they would never find him again.

“Why didn’t you come before?” Ralph said.

“Because I can’t walk when I’m unconscious,” Koos said. His pale eyes were bloodshot, and his hands shook. One of the policemen had hit him in the face with a pistol butt, and then presumably hit him on the head, because he had come to at the house of one of his patients, lying on a pallet and covered with one of Anna’s knitted blankets. “A good blanket,” he said. “Very warm. Thank you, Anna.” He couldn’t remember much of what had happened. The policeman who hit him had called him a white kaffir. That sergeant, he said—not van Zyl. The thin one. The other. Quintus Brink.

They realized, over the next few days, that it was no longer safe to make telephone calls. They knew there was nothing seditious in their conversation. But anything could be twisted, and would be, and they knew that there were listeners on the line.

Van Zyl came by again—just visiting, he said—and it went badly. He stared at the filing cabinet as if he knew it from somewhere. “Any visitors last night?” he said.

“No.”

“You surprise me. You’re sure no visitors after dark?”

“I’m quite sure.”

“Any visitors in your servants’ quarters?”

“I can’t help you there. But I’m sure no one was on the compound whom you would be interested in.”

“Luke Mbatha has given them the slip,” Anna said from the doorway. She spoke derisively. Van Zyl was not pleased.

“Where did you hear that rubbish?”

“It’s not rubbish. I heard it on the street. Everybody knows it. How did he get away, Sergeant? Did he bewitch you? Did he bewitch the brigadier?”

Van Zyl got up from his chair, and tossed his paunch threateningly. “Tell your woman to watch her mouth,” he

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