“We did.”
“Had she left everything so you’d not break-”
“She had,” Kramer admitted. “Your compromise was?”
“To wait until Gysbert had left for the hotel this afternoon, and to remove his three precious books.”
“It would only have been a matter of time before-”
“I see that now, Lieutenant. I can see that nothing could really have stopped you reaching him, but I felt-I felt it was a chance worth taking. Then, of course, I had to spoil everything by choking Willie off in the bar.”
“Uh huh; why did you do that?”
“I
De Bruin sipped a little of his brandy. The cockroach still scuttled; the horse had possibly dozed off. Except for that one scratching noise, like the first grooves on an old record, the night was deathly quiet.
“Now I have to explain why I did this, and I only hope you’ll see some excuse for me. Gysbert and I have always been friends, dating right back to junior school. I was one of the quiet boys, and he was even quieter. This gave us something in common, understand? So when the war broke out, and we were wanted to help out with essential services in Durban, it was natural we should go together. We found a room to share in the house of a young Italian lady, whose husband had been interned. There were quite a few other lads there-from other parts, of course-and the atmosphere was very friendly. But Gysbert couldn’t adjust to city life. The girls made him even more shy than the ones back here, and he dodged getting in a crowd whenever he could. As far as I was concerned, having so many new people to meet was a pure pleasure, and I changed quite a lot. This meant poor old Gysbert got left on his own with his books a lot of the time-he’d always been a big reader, and the public library was the one place he would go to. The lady seemed to understand him and his reasons for being the way he was, and often invited him into her parlor. Actually, we were entitled to the use of it, but you know what I mean. We all loved that lady-she was like a big sister to us all, but I think Gysbert loved her like a mother, his own having never much liked him. One night, I remember, he came up to bed and he’d been crying; you could see how red his eyes were, and I’m sure she had comforted him, because he talked to me for a long while about how wonderful she was. I was in bed with the flu. Ja, that was it. Then the end of the war came and, one by one, we started packing up. I only had to give a week’s notice, but Gysbert’s was a month. Something like that. Well, he came home, and got on with his job on the farm. His parents died-very close to each other-and he was left with no one. I admit I was the one who put the idea of marrying Annie Louw into his mind. With some men, especially Gysbert’s sort, a widow can be ideal. But, man, he was so formal! Did his courting the old style, going round to her place and sitting at the table until the little candle he’d brought had burned down. Annie used to whisper to me on Sunday and say she wished she could put some saltpeter in it! They hit it off better than anyone had expected, and little Suzanne was born. Then came the first of the tragedies, when Annie died-must’ve got TB from one of the natives. We’ll never know. Gysbert went into a terrible depression.”
The cockroach stopped moving.
“Then, out of the blue, when Lettie and I were despairing, this lady arrived at the hotel to spend a long weekend, bringing her son along. She also had with her her husband and her brother. She and Gysbert had a long talk together in the first afternoon, and that did him all the good in the world. You know, I’ve often wondered if he’d written to her, asking for her help. Anyway, had she only told us they were coming, I wouldn’t have had to give old man Ferreira such a blasting. He didn’t-ach, it doesn’t matter. Years went by without us hearing from the family again, then all of a sudden, one Sunday when Gysbert and me were picking up the paper after church, there they were again-and in terrible trouble. Ja, the youngster I was telling you about.”
“What had he done?”
“The allegation was murder. He had just been brought up in the regional court to be sent for trial. Gysbert wanted to go rushing down there, then he decided this would be taking too much on himself. Finally, what he did was to offer to pay for the best defense in Natal, and I loaned him the money-all paid back now. But things went wrong and the boy was sent up to Pretoria. An appeal was useless, and there was nothing left but prayer. I used to go over to Swartboom three or four times a week with my Bible. That’s when his obsession began: he told me he had to know what kind of death the boy would suffer, whether it would be merciful and quick. He dwelled on this so much he started taking trips to bars which prison warders frequented-or rather, he’d do this when delivering his venison to order. We get a call, you see, if they’re going to have a special menu or whatever, and we shoot-”
“Please, carry on with this business of the bars,” Kramer asked him, wondering if the wall was thin enough for Mickey to hear all this.
“That was a terrible mistake. He must have heard stories like young Willie was telling, because one night I went over and found him beaten up badly. He’d attacked some man. If you don’t mind, I’m not going into the details.”
“I get the point, Mr. de Bruin.”
“I don’t know whose idea it was to try and find out from books-perhaps it was his. His very first one was a Benjamin Bennett-you know the Cape crime reporter? — and he gave a very good account which set Gysbert’s mind at ease. The day they hanged the boy, he spent the whole time by himself in the veld. We had him home that night, and he told us he had seen it happen, just like in a vision. It had been quick and clean; the boy had walked to the gallows singing ‘Ave Maria.’ He was at peace with himself for months after that. Then he came across, in some secondhand bookshop in Durban, the smallest of those books you found in my truck. Night after night I sat and argued with him, while he chewed over the shocking things that were in it. He withdrew into himself and there wasn’t anything I could do. That Bennett book was an old one, you see, and by then Gysbert knew all the figures. He said he had begun to believe what a prison warder had told him, and blamed this on the 600 percent increase in hangings between 1947 and 1970. Suddenly, he went very silent on the subject, which worried me. I tried to get some account to contradict what he’d heard, but-huh! — we come back to the Prisons Act. It was almost becoming an obsession with me, because all the time poor little Suzanne was suffering; weeks would pass and he’d hardly notice her. She so craved affection. Then Lettie had a letter back from a bookshop we’d written to months before, offering us the book you have on this desk here. We bought it on spec and it was one of the best things we ever did. Let me show you.”
De Bruin took up the book and turned to the preface, holding his finger against a paragraph he wanted Kramer to read:
“I operated, on behalf of the State, what I am convinced was the most humane and the most dignified method of meting out death to a delinquent-however justified or unjustified the allotment of death may be-and on behalf of humanity I trained other nations to adopt the British system of execution.”
“Got that.”
“And now, on page seventy-nine it should be-yes, just listen: ‘Travel today seems to imply only long journeys-to
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean-” Kramer began automatically, then stopped.
“Perhaps not, but the arguments are strongly in favor of it being the case, and Gysbert is able to take great comfort from the words of this man. They give him the authority to reject anything he finds unacceptable.”
Kramer was staring at the master hangman’s blurb on the back of the book, which De Bruin was still holding:
Suddenly, he’d had enough of books and of stories that didn’t quite match in all their details. There was some irony in knowing that Swanepoel was guilty, without having any real evidence to prove it, but the final solution seemed only a hair’s-breadth away now. He stood up.
“Do you believe me? Do you see what I’m trying to get across?” asked de Bruin.
“I believe what you’ve allowed yourself to believe, Mr. de Bruin. You have certainly told me most of the truth.”
“What is that supposed to mean, damn you!” de Bruin exploded. “I’ve put all my cards on the table; now what about yours? Have I your assurance that, having heard the full story, you will not pursue any pointless inquiries in that direction?”
The temptation was too much for Kramer-and the truth would emerge soon enough; he palmed his small
