“Why should he hide the code if he has hidden the message?”
“Christ, that’s a notion!”
“Thank you, boss.”
Kramer sat down and ate his pie, which had gone cold.
“Know something, Zondi? He could even have had the code on him for all that it mattered-I mean when he got the chop.”
“You said there was just rubbish in his pockets.”
“Let’s have another look, though. I’ve got the stuff here in my drawer.”
Kramer cleared a space before emptying the plastic bag. The penknife clattered out first, followed by the rubber eraser, which bounced away under the furniture. The khaki handkerchief was next and in its slipstream fluttered the three bubble gum wrappers.
“Big deal,” said Kramer.
Zondi retrieved the eraser and, after looking at it closely, put it back in the bag.
Kramer absently smoothed out one of the wrappers.
“Boss!” exclaimed Zondi.
But Kramer had already seen it was the same size and shape.
“Chewsy Super Bubble Gum,” he read out in English before turning over the wrapper. It was deep blue on the inside. There was also a joke printed on it in black.
He slipped one of the squares of tracing paper over it.
“Can’t see a bloody thing,” he grunted. “Let’s try the window.”
There the low sun made the sandwich of paper translucent enough to show the letters at least were the same height, and set across the same width. No sense could be made of them, however.
“There are a lot of c’s in that joke, boss, and one near the end like this other tracing here.”
Kramer substituted it for the first tracing, and held it against the glass.
Still no luck.
The third tracing was matched up.
“We’ve got it, man! Look!”
Zondi took a little longer to grasp what Boetie had done. And then he realized that all the letters in pencil were random and irrelevant-with the exception of a very few that coincided exactly with the initial letter of a printed word in the joke underneath.
What he saw was, in effect, this: A bad-tempered cobbler was sitting working on a shoe one day when a little boy pointed to some leather and asked him: “What’s that?” The cobbler snapped: “Hide! Hide! The cow’s outside!” “I’m not afraid of a cow,” the little boy laughed.
Chewsy Chuckle No. 113
“Write this down quickly,” Kramer said. “B-s-o-h-c-b. Hell, that doesn’t spell anything! Here we go again.”
Zondi peered over his shoulder.
“But if you read the whole word each time, it does make some kind of sense, boss. Bad-sitting-on-him-cow- boy.”
“Cowboy! One word, I bet you. The bad man was sitting on him-of course, on the American. You see, cowboy is the nearest he could-”
“Then why not underline this word and make it clearer by saying ‘the cowboy’?”
“True. It does seem to break there. What can he mean?”
“Like you said, he just writes down notes for himself, he doesn’t need the pieces in between.”
“Uhuh. Let’s try another and see if it works the same way first. I’ll have the other one with a c near the end and that tracing over there.” A very fat old man standing in the gutter was asked by a cheeky Girl Guide what he was doing there. “Would it be possible to see me across the busy street?” he said with a sigh. She grinned at him and replied: “I could see you a mile off, mister!” Chewsy Chuckle No. 57
“It bloody does work! Was-girl-doing-it-with-him? You can bet your socks she was, Boetie my lad. Hurry and get this all down.” A judge to the prisoner in the dock: “So we meet again. Aren’t you ashamed to be seen in court so often? I would be.” The old lag replied: “What’s good enough for you, m’lud, is good enough for me!” Chewsy Chuckle No. 317
Zondi added it to the other two on his slip of paper and handed it over.
“You made a mistake in this last one when I read it out. No, maybe you’re right after all-I’m certain Boetie meant that. One of the first things I learned about English was there were many words that sounded the same but were spelled different. It’s so stupid it sticks in your mind. Here he’s found a use for it.”
The slip read: “Bad sitting on him. Cowboy/Was girl doing it with him/To meet in wood good for me.”
Kramer was elated. He slapped Zondi on the shoulder and they each nearly broke a bone.
“See? This last one? He thought he would have it all wrapped up after this meeting in the wood.”
“A good time to kill him, boss?”
“You’re so right. What a fluke we did them in their correct sequence, although it wouldn’t have taken much effort to sort out anyway.”
An uneasiness stirred in Kramer as he said this-flukes were seldom to be trusted.
“Boetie must have worked hard to find good jokes.”
“Ones that would carry his message? Well, obviously he had more than three hundred of the buggers to choose from-and all the rubbish bins at school to find them in.”
“It is a shame.”
“What do you mean?”
“That he did not write these things another way. Have you noticed that not one of these papers has a word that connects the case with the foreign boy?”
“Except for cowboy.”
“But, boss, you said that-”
“ He, Andy, could have been the one doing the sitting.”
“Then why say ‘bad sitting on him’? Surely the man who is bad is the one that does the deed that is evil? I tell you it is not a plain matter at all.”
Zondi was right. The bastard.
Traveling at 400 mph toward the northwest, an agitated air stewardess reached the flight deck of the South African Airways Boeing 727.
“We’re flying as low as we can,” the first officer protested. “Who’ve you got in there that’s making such a fuss? This isn’t the first time we’ve lost a bit of cabin pressure, and never have I heard-”
“A policeman.”
“They’re as tough as bloody nails.”
“Shame, he’s got a bad head cold. Says his ears are giving him hell and he feels dizzy.”
“Look, tell your friend that we’re very sorry, but another two feet down and we’ll be plowed in as fertilizer. Okay?”
“Cure all our troubles,” muttered the navigator, a sour man.
So she returned to Pembrook’s seat beside the starboard wing. He appeared to have fainted.
Argyle Mslope had a bed in the passage at Peacehaven Hospital-the wards were too crowded for critically ill patients. The noise out there did not trouble him, as he was heavily sedated.
And quite unaware he had a visitor. Zondi used the bandaged head for a hatstand and then made himself comfortable in a stray wheelchair.
The blood dripped very slowly from the suspended bottle, about once every four heaves of the great chest beneath the sheet. Whether the tubes up the nose were going in or coming out was a moot point. There was a needle taped to the back of one hand, ready for the next syringe, and a label around the other wrist.
It was good to see Argyle still had both hands.
“Can I help you?” a woman said in brisk, affected English.
Zondi swung round in the wheelchair and there was an African staff nurse surveying him with arms akimbo. She had been trying to bleach her facial skin and it was a sickening color.
“Elizabeth Mbeta! It is a long, long time. When did you come down from Zululand?”
