“Oh, it crackles a bit but I-”
Zondi reached out to touch the small wireless. It was cold. Moosa hunched himself up in the corner, brushing brilliantine from his gleaming hair over a favourite picture of a little white girl and two golden spaniels.
“We are going to have to talk some more,” Zondi said, barely parting his lips.
Moosa watched with growing apprehension as Zondi removed his jacket. The sight brought a tic to his right eye. He began breathing through his mouth.
“That’s better,” remarked Zondi, slipping the jacket on again with the lining on the right side. He knotted his tie in the small mirror decorated with rose transfers. Then he sat down and put his feet up on Moosa’s lap.
“Talk,” he said. “Tell me why you, who are so afraid of lightning, were watching me through the window.”
“Was that-?”
Zondi shook his head dolefully.
“Yes, it was you, Sergeant, I won’t pretend I did not know.”
“You had been watching long?”
“Yes, but it was not until the flash that I saw who it was. It is very dark tonight.”
“But why watch, Moosa? What is there to see?”
“Things.”
“Like?”
“I was waiting for someone.”
“Who?”
“Gershwin.”
“More.”
“Gogol wants to know why I don’t go out. Would you if you had that monster right next door by the school? Yes, you would, you are different to me. I am not a man of action. I am a-”
“But you watch him.”
“I can’t help it. It is like you would watch a snake. A mamba. I can’t keep my eyes off him. Someday I will know.”
“What?”
“Why he did that thing to me.”
“That was the weak part of your story, wasn’t it, Moosa?”
“But he told me he did it! Told me straight out. And he laughed right in my face.”
Moosa was getting himself quite worked up again. Zondi stood up and peered between the curtains.
“Why were you waiting, though? What have you heard?”
Moosa giggled softly.
“There was talk in the shop today.”
“Yes?”
“Gogol told me. He said there was talk that Gershwin was in trouble. With you people.”
“And?”
“The Dodge has not been back all day, not once.”
He giggled again.
“Then I must speak with Gogol.”
“That’s all he knows. People do not like to be heard talking about Gershwin today.”
Zondi had found this out for himself.
“This is bad.”
“If you ask me, Sergeant, you had better start looking for him on the Lesotholand border.”
“Or Swaziland. It’s close, too.”
“True. It’s just that maybe once a month a car comes by here for Gershwin with Lesotho plates on it.”
Zondi took it as calmly as he could: Lesotho-a state without apartheid, in which all races could learn to trust one another, and the cradle of the spoke man.
But all the same, his smile instantly transformed their relationship.
“You’re a bright boy, Moosa. Who comes in this car?”
“I’ve never seen properly, he drives it round the back.”
“A white man?”
Moosa was politely astonished.
“I’d have noticed that, Sergeant!”
Still, it was good enough for Zondi to leave immediately and sprint all the way back to CID headquarters. He was late as it was.
It must have been the hundredth time Kramer had looked at the wall clock. He started on the pile of overseas photographic magazines again.
Exasperation made turning each page no more than an exercise in self-control for nothing registered. He had been forced to wait for more than an hour for Sergeant Prinsloo to get back from the scene of a payroll robbery. And now the man had been in the darkroom for nearly twenty minutes without even getting through on the inter-com. On top of which, Zondi was overdue and he wanted to get out to Trudeau’s place right on eight.
The darkroom door slid open and Sergeant Prinsloo came across, wiping his hands on a towel. He saw Kramer had stopped at a page which had been windowed by the censor’s scissors.
“Yes, makes me bloody mad, that does,” Prinsloo said. “Okay, so we don’t want nudes all over the place making trouble-but I wanted to read that piece on the back about fine-grain developers.”
Kramer nearly hit him.
“Sorry, Lieutenant, nothing to offer you,” he went on, dipping into his apron pocket and taking out the second heart-shaped portrait. “This print is all shot to hell. I thought maybe there was some detail in it I could bring out, even by just holding a lamp behind it, but there’s nothing. It’s flat and that’s all there is to it.”
“That took you till now?”
“ Ach, no. I copied this and blew up some big contrasty prints.”
“What the hell for?”
Sergeant Prinsloo reddened. He threw the locket picture down in front of Kramer.
“I had to bloody try something. Look at it! All grey tones. A nearly black blob in the middle. Light little blobs in the background, blurring together. Grain like beach sand. It’s a proper balls-up.”
And so it was. Kramer had just hoped it could be made to reveal something of what was presumably a man standing near a hedge with the sun behind him. The face was so dark you could not even make out the line of the nose.
“Useless, don’t know why she didn’t throw the bloody thing away with everything else,” Kramer muttered, hinting an apology.
“Not useless.”
“How come?”
“You look in a snapshot album sometime,” Prinsloo said. “Half the pictures are as bad as that one. There’s Uncle Frikkie, they say, and all you see is a doughnut in a beach hat. You see when something is new, after that you recognise. Like it jogs the memory, makes a picture inside your head. And not just photos, it happens with me with my pa’s walking stick.”
Kramer suddenly saw the real significance of the picture: it was wholly intimate yet totally unrevealing. He was certain now that Miss Le Roux had been a girl with a past which she took pains to hide.
The lenses increased in importance.
Zondi met him on the stairs but Kramer shouted angrily and ran on ahead, refusing to listen until they were in the car headed for Greenside. Then he listened very carefully, saying nothing about having his orders disregarded. Zondi’s chief virtue was arrogance.
The fragrance of furniture-polish put Kramer at his ease in such unfamiliarly elegant surroundings. His grandmother, too, had believed furniture should be groomed daily until it shone like a racehorse’s flank. Of course, you had to have furniture like that which surrounded him to make it worthwhile. It was all imbuya or stinkwood from the Knysna forests and the designs solid Early Cape.
Kramer’s appreciation of the room ended at this point. He liked paintings to have lots of thorn trees in them
