“Too true!”
“And what does a boxing champ do before his first big fight?”
“I see! He works his way up on small purses.”
“ Ach, no. He gets himself some bloody sparring partners and works on his weaknesses. You think about it.”
Strydom had not moved much when Kramer glanced back at him through the cafe window.
10
But the colonel found Kramer’s notion fanciful, and suggested some good sense of his own.
“Now listen, Tromp, you know how their mind works. If a man is white, then he is automatically rich. It doesn’t matter whether you and me can see he couldn’t find two cents to pay the rent with; as far as they are concerned, white is the color of money.”
“True,” Kramer conceded, flicking his match into the CID courtyard below. “But that’s with your petty criminal.”
“And what are these? Okay, so they can shoot, and they can drive, and they can run bloody fast, but what else can you say about them? They’re bloody stupid, like all the rest. I tell you what did me good today: I had lunch with the brigadier and we discussed this matter. ‘Hans,’ he says to me, ‘what do you blokes think you’re doing? Just stop a moment and see this in its true perspective. Tell me how many cases of armed robbery on small businesses you’ve dealt with, and how many times you found one eyewitness to help solve who did it.’ Then I had to admit that in all my years it was only twice, and both times a European came forward. All the other times we acted on information received once the bastards started spending their money or getting drunk and boasting in the shebeens. ‘That’s how it is with robbery investigation,’ the brigadier said, and I tell you that made me feel a fool.”
“In other words, sir?”
“With murder, you look for a motive,” the colonel said, his tone becoming circumspect, “but with robbery, it is staring you in the face. They want money, so they kill and rob for it-every day, all over the country. Life? Life matters nothing to them. Yet now you start trying to read something new into this, as if it was a specific case where you were asking, Why kill this man?”
Kramer watched a bird fly up from the single rosebush to peck at the fruit on the palm tree. His cigarette grew a long ash, unheeded.
“Hell, is there some personal involvement I don’t know about?” the colonel said, laughing softly and nudging him in the side. But his eyes gleamed shrewdly.
“I drop this for the Bergstroom case until someone starts talking?”
“Never. People are at risk with these lunatics running round-don’t get me wrong. Marais can carry on with the routine meantime. It seems a hard thing to say, but that was only a one-off when we come to choosing priorities. Plus I’ve got doubts now about that snake thing Old Stry-”
“Two, if you count Stevenson.”
“Man, you’re quibbling, hey? You’re still thinking too much. Let’s have some action. Tell Zondi to get his finger out and try and get something from the other side; that’s our only chance. And see you chase him.”
“And who’s going to chase Marais?”
“Not me,” said the colonel, walking off to his office.
It hadn’t been bad sense after all.
Wessels was waiting for Kramer with a photograph in his hand, taken from one of the books he had been told to go through.
“I’ve got a possible here, sir,” he said eagerly.
“Who’s he when he’s at home?”
“Gosh Twala, Bantu male, aged forty-three.”
“Never heard of him. Come.”
They went the length of the corridor and into Kramer’s office. Zondi had his feet comfortably arranged up against the filing cabinet.
“Hey! Wake up, you! Gosh Twala-know him?”
“Small time, boss.”
“Doing what?”
“Stealing cars, got eight years in sixty-six for it-Sithole’s case.”
“And recently?”
“Last I know of him, he was working at the brickworks.”
“That skabengas’ paradise! But that means he’s pretty washed up, then, in with the hard-case assaults and the rest.”
Zondi nodded, and said, “Terrible work, that, many men getting hit with the blow back. But the trouble with Twala is that he tells Sithole who buys the cars from him and he took three others inside. Now nobody will buy from him; he is finished.”
“Yet I’m almost sure it’s the same one as was driving the car,” said Wessels. “Had a longer look at him than the other, and there’s the same flatness to the back of the head, and the ears that stick out.”
“Well, Zondi? Worth picking him up?”
“He is a good driver, and has got many licenses.”
“Need help?”
Zondi shook his head, flipped his hat onto it, and sauntered out.
“What do I do now, sir?” asked Wessels, as Kramer flopped back in his chair and stared at the wall.
“I think it’s time you took that wig off and put on some clothes.”
“Sir?”
“You’re the nearest we’ve got to an eyewitness, so I’ve fixed with the colonel for you to be transferred to us meantime. Okay?”
“Fine, sir!”
“Then report back in one hour. Go.”
As Wessels sped from the room, the telephone rang. Kramer ignored it for a while and then lifted the receiver. A yellow Ford, NTK 4544, had been found abandoned not a quarter of a mile from the cafe, and Fingerprints were investigating.
The lanes dividing the block behind the courthouse had once been what Marais liked best about Trekkersburg, if he had to like anything. They were like the windbreaks in a plantation, zigzagging here and there and crisscrossing, all without any apparent plan, yet leaving you sure there was one. While the plaster twirly-whirlies and pillars and hanging signs with fancy lettering, creaking on their brackets, made you think you were in a Three Musketeers film.
But he had had a gutsful of superior bastards, and they had spoiled everything for him. They had spoiled his morning, his toasted cheese sandwich, and now they had done damage to his afternoon.
There was nothing romantic about the lanes any longer; they were just grubby passageways between offices with empty, forbidding hallways, and shops that sold cracked vases and dirty spoons kept in glass cases, while the odd glimpse of a haughty typist painting her nails was about as off-putting as the unpleasant smell of duplicating ink.
He stopped for a moment to watch an old black crone flattening out a cardboard carton she had taken from a stack of refuse awaiting removal. She stamped on it, crawled on it, and then added it to a pile already so big she would never lift it. The pile shifted and he saw she had a homemade wheelbarrow underneath. It was true what they said, some of them were beginning to use brains instead of backsides.
Marais was stalling, although he would not admit it. He was trying to delay his entrance into the hallway of number 22, right opposite, by wondering if the crone was committing an offense, and then drifting into the dizzying legalities of how you established the ownership of rubbish between its disposal and its collection. No good, he would just have to get on with the job and have done with it.
“Whoa-where do you think you’re going?” a voice boomed out behind him, making him slide on the coconut
