as hostages had been too obvious a fabrication-he could quite easily shoot whom he liked and then escape by holding the rescue party at gunpoint until he reached the door. His dilemma was very similar to that faced by Kramer and would force him to the same conclusion: somehow he had to keep the chat going long enough for him to achieve his ends. It would have to be one hell of an engaging topic.
Kramer nudged Zondi.
“Well, I’m buggered if I’m going to stand around here all night,” he said. “This kiddo’s been too clever by half and it’s time he realised it. In fact, I bet he has already. So what do you say to our giving a little yell for the boys next door?”
Zondi opened his mouth.
“Want to know who did it?” Lenny blurted out desperately. “
Kill your sister? As if we didn’t already. Come on, kaffir, together now.”
“It wasn’t Jackson.”
“We know-he hired a spoke, but he did it all the same, legally.”
“No, he didn’t!”
“Someone did.”
“Sure. But how did you lot-”
“We all make mistakes.”
“Hey?”
“I suppose you must know or Jackson wouldn’t be trying to get you. He hates evidence lying about.”
“So that’s what you think?”
Zondi broke wind.
“He’s trying to waste time, boss,” he added.
“You’re right, man.”
Lenny made a quick check on Jackson’s position.
“For jesus’s sake, I did it!” he said.
And Kramer sighed. Honest to God, his sense of timing was inspired.
“I sodding did, you know!”
“Oh, piss off. Don’t try and act tough, it’s too late.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“How did you get the spoke man down here-smuggled him in a bike?”
“He got a job for the weekend in a furniture van.”
“You don’t say, that was clever.”
“Long distance removal, a whole house of things, Pretoria to Trekkersburg and back early Monday morning. The firm gets them the passes.”
“Name?”
“I don’t know. The wogs I fixed it up with didn’t say.”
“Description?”
“Never saw him. Wrote her address in the phone box by the City Hall.”
“Shoe Shoe saw you do this?”
Lenny faltered.
“No, he’d copped it before.”
“Why?”
“He tried to get money off Trenshaw-blackmail. He didn’t know what he was talking about but he was a security risk. We got Gershwin-”
“I know, but go on, I’m interested. How come a brother murders his own sister? Even for a gamaat, that’s pretty low.”
“I’m not a bloody-”
Lenny stopped short of his denial and in that moment Kramer knew he was winning: the poor bastard was going to any lengths to keep things going until Jackson appeared.
“She was a bitch, a whoring filthy bitch who thought she had a right to get out of this sodding country and leave us.”
“You and your mum?”
“Yes. Oh, she’d be okay anywhere with her bloody music and junk. That’s all she cared about.”
“But it seems you were helping her, sonny. Were you her ponce?”
Lenny laughed.
“I was her ponce all right. Knew Jackson wanted a dolly for the township job and lined her up. I never said who she was, mind.”
“But how did you find her in the first place?”
“She found me, man. Contacted me through an old schoolmate-”
Lenny paused.
“Durban High?” Kramer asked softly.
“Never you bloody mind. Anyway, she said she wanted my help to get a passport.”
“A forged one?”
“Natch-only I didn’t tell her that was out of my class.”
“And that’s why she did it? Not just for the money?”
“Ja, lay there on her back thinking of Merrie stuffing England.”
Whatever the Race Board said, Lenny didn’t talk like a Coloured, or think like one, either.
“The contact lenses were for the passport then?”
“Some bull I slung her to keep her happy. Make it more authentic.”
“Why kill her though? Jackson must have been pretty pleased with the set-up. And with you.”
“I’ll say.”
Then Lenny stiffened.
“The bastard’s just taken something out of his pocket,” he whispered.
“Boss!” Zondi said urgently.
“No, man, not now. I want to hear-”
“But boss…”
“He hasn’t started walking yet,” Lenny said, keeping his voice very low. “It went wrong you see. I got a big kick out of what those creepy council freaks did to her for their ten Rand and then, when it was all over, I checked in at Barnato Street one night when we had them, and said no-go on the passport. Hell, that bloody backfired, all right. She did her nut-weeping and yelling and saying she’d go straight round and tell you buggers all about it and take us all inside with her. I started to make promises, I promised a passport for Sunday night-then I fixed up with the spoke. I had to do something. Christ, I had to!”
“But I thought this was all Jackson’s idea? A bonus for the contracts was having her knocked off?”
“Huh! That’s a joke. Who said this?”
“Trenshaw.”
“No, man, that was Jackson trying to keep them happy. Got the bloody shock of his life when he saw it in the paper that she had died. He planned to have her around for years to pressure them. And then when he saw the article, he really went mad. He sussed it was something to do with me, me being the contact, and sent his boys down to Durban. They gave me the business but I saved it up for the end. I told him she was my sister.”
“But he’d have known that already from the papers he showed the councillors.”
“Passports I can’t fix-those things I can. They had Le Roux on them.”
“So Jackson didn’t see you doing your own sister?”
“He said he couldn’t, but he wasn’t sure. He told me to stick around, sent me to this place. I had to or it would have been suspicious. Something must have happened for him to twig.”
“I told you: we got Trenshaw-and the others.”
But Lenny was not really listening any longer. He was taking aim through the window “
Lenny, is Jackson the big shot in all this?” Kramer asked softly.
There was an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
“Then who is the bloody Steam Pig?”
