matting.
It was Goldstein the lawyer, shouting down at him from his second-floor office on the other side.
“I’m making inquiries,” Marais replied stiffly.
“What, in his place? My boy, you don’t know the trouble you’re making! From two to four, my friend there is in special consultation.”
“That’s not my worry.”
“Tell me you’re joking! Tell me your heart is not so hardened against the world! Would you tear a man from the very bosom of his personal-”
“Oh, do bugger off, Ben!” another voice called out, from somewhere directly overhead.
Ben waved his cigar at whoever it was.
“Who is the little twit down there anyway?” the voice above asked lazily.
“Tomorrow in A Court I take you apart a piece at a time,” Ben shouted across with massive mock confidence. “Don’t be late, you hear?”
Then he puckered up, blew his unseen rival a kiss, and closed the window.
Marais, who had other fish to fry, walked straight out and never went back.
Beneath one of four towering chimney stacks, Zondi stood and waited impatiently. The brick dust was terrible; not only was the ground covered with it, but the air itself was gritty.
Then the foreman came out of his office, shaking one sandal to dislodge a stone caught between his fat pink toes, and beckoned to him.
“Next time you bring a chit with you, see?”
“The lieutenant said all right?”
“No, he bloody didn’t. He wasn’t there, but some other European knows you, so I suppose you can go ahead. It’s just I’m not having any damn wog coming here thinking he can do what he likes and starting trouble with my boys. Twala? Was that the one?”
“Yes, please, sir. He is at work today?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know that? You ask his induna, he gives me the absentees list.”
“Where do I find him?”
“The induna?”
“Yes, sir.”
This delay was beginning to seriously worry Zondi. He had already felt long, sullen glares being made in his direction from the ragged men hand-pushing trucks of brick from the kilns. Many of them knew him, and soon the alert would have reached the farthest corner of the works.
“ Ach, I’m not here to do your work for you. Ask that keshla over there,” said the foreman, completing his scrutiny of Zondi’s identity card and handing it back.
The old-timer was hardly any more cooperative. He pulled his torn jacket over the burn marks on his chest, which looked like splatters of tar, the scarring was so thick, and mumbled something about oven number 9.
“Have I asked a simple man a simple question?” Zondi snapped.
“Who do you seek?”
“Twala.”
“ Hau! He is a bad one-you must go carefully with him.”
“Would you like to see that?”
The keshla grinned, showing he still had three teeth in the front, and began to lead the way, skipping nimbly on his bowed legs over the rubble of spoiled bricks.
They went under an overhead passageway and Zondi realized he was right beside the firing house itself, with the kiln entrances, round-topped and low, set in its curving wall at intervals of about twenty yards. The keshla explained that those that had been bricked up were awaiting the heat to give the bricks their hardness. The men sealing number 8 stopped work as Zondi approached and backed aside to allow him to pass, the cement sliding from their trowels unnoticed in their undisguised loathing for him. One face, hooded by a sack which was protecting the shoulders for carrying, turned quickly away-but not before Zondi had recognized a once notorious illicit liquor distiller, whom he had put behind bars and out of business. Truly, with all the fires and the dangers, the place was close to a hell itself, he thought soberly. Better to dig ditches all day in the sun.
An electric cable had been run into the kiln to provide lighting while the bricks were stacked, and Zondi followed it alone, the keshla suddenly losing his lust for witnessing the confrontation.
There was none. The induna, found dozing behind some completed work, swore that Twala had not turned up for work that morning, and called over his work team to verify this.
How entirely true this was, they all agreed, and said what a shame it was that the policeman had come so far and found nothing. And on second thought, the Twala he described to them didn’t sound at all like the one they knew. Maybe he should try the aluminum factory or the car assembly plant.
In this they totally overdid it.
Zondi found his way out into the open again and looked around. Then he noticed that the entrance to number 8 was still short of its top six rows of bricks, and drew his pistol.
“Build,” he said to the men Nobody moved.
He caught one of them with his left hand, spun him around, and slammed him against the others.
“Build!” he shouted.
The kiln entrance was only five bricks wide, and took very little time to fill in, with nobody paying much attention to the niceties.
A terrified Gosh Twala erupted through it not long after.
From the railway up, the hillsides were a deep, lush green, and very few homes were visible from the road, although Marais could see rooftops here and there behind the hedges and bamboo thickets. Hibiscus grew on the broad lawns, and hydrangeas, their huge pale clusters of flowers as good as white stones, marked the entrances to many of the driveways. For its part in the luxuriant scheme of things, the municipality had planted thick-flamed cannas on the road islands and center strips.
The other traffic was made up mainly of delivery vehicles from the best stores, liquor orders on motorcycles, and small English cars filled with dogs and children with pedigrees.
Except for the usual nannies, playing with their charges out on the lawns where they could talk with friends, there was nobody about.
Marais wished he had thought to bring a map. Then he saw a burglar alarms maintenance engineer in a van and stopped him for directions.
The number of the place was 34 and it had a name as well, Glenwilliam, in wrought iron on the gate. The drive was long, bending round to the right under enormous fig trees, and it was not until Marais topped a rise in the straight section that the double-story house came into view between the silver flash of birch trees.
Three vehicles stood in the doorless garage which had been burrowed into a high bank covered in desert plants. There was a white Jaguar, a plum Datsun coupe, and a conventional Land-Rover with a towing bar for the motorboat nearby, leaving one bay empty but with sump stains that suggested it had an occupant overnight. He looked at his watch: only four twenty-seven. Mr. Shirley couldn’t be home yet, so he would wait a couple of minutes. Houses that size tended to belittle him.
Marais had hardly settled back when a middle-aged black girl came to rap at his window.
“The missus asks if the master wouldn’t like to come inside, please,” she said in a soft, unafraid voice.
“Are you sure?”
“I have made tea specially for you coming. Do not be afraid of the dog. He only bites persons he does not know-never persons who I take into the house.”
“Huh!” said Marais, not liking the way it growled deep in its wolfish chest, yet getting out before he remembered to check his hair in the rear-view. He did this in one of the car windows and then followed her across.
More servants should work in places like these and then there would be less complaining, he thought, amused by the fold of fat above each swinging elbow and by her waddle.
There were bulrushes on the wooden chest in the hall, and a mat that didn’t stick too well to the highly polished floor.
The room he was shown into was also a disappointment, no oil paintings on its walls, no huge, soft armchairs
