might from a rabbit’s foot.
It wasn’t there.
“The missus is coming,” said Martha.
“Look, is my boy round the back where I told him?”
“There is a man there.”
“Then go quickly and ask him to give the button to you-go on. And bring it here, che-che.”
“Oh, you’ve come to pry again, I see,” Mrs. Shirley said from the stairs. “And where do you think you’re going, Martha? You haven’t finished the dusting, have you?”
The tone she used on the servant instantly dispelled any idea of a liberalist bond between them.
“Look, Mrs. Shirley-”
“ Martha? ”
“He has a man at the back he told me to fetch a button from, madam.”
“ A man at the back? ”
“He’s only my boy,” Marais said hastily, “and he was thirsty so I sent him round to the kitchen to ask for water.”
Martha raised her brows slightly but said nothing to further embarrass him.
“Don’t stand about, girl!”
As Martha took her feather duster upstairs, Mrs. Shirley, more witchlike than dragonish in her long black house gown, came soundlessly off the bottom step.
“That servant is not here to be at your beck and call!”
“I’m sorry. Is she the only-” began Marais, before freezing at the folly of his abject words.
“What impertinence! You’re in this house five seconds and you’re trying to interrogate me!”
“No, honest, lady, I wasn’t getting at you or anything.”
“When my husband, Justice Shirley, takes his annual holiday and there is no entertaining to do, the general domestic staff take theirs. Martha is perfectly capable of seeing to the needs of Peter and myself-but not of the entire South African Police Force. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, lady. I’m sorry, hey?”
“And this is a perfectly ridiculous time to call. My son would hardly be in at midday.”
“That’s okay with me. I’ve only come to look at something.”
“Oh?”
“The lieutenant sent me. You can phone him if you like.”
Mrs. Shirley deliberated this for a moment.
“Well? Look at what?”
“It’s routine elimination-shirts-and we’re going to do it to everyone eventually.”
“Show me the search warrant.”
She moved to stand across the foot of the stairs; he had seen this done in westerns. It made him feel suddenly taller and more certain of himself.
“Search warrants, Mrs. Shirley, are only signed by a magistrate if there is positive evidence, or if we are hindered in carrying out a normal process of elimination for reasons that appear suspicious.”
Or something like that; but it worked. He could almost see her come down a peg or two.
“What sort of shirts? Surely not all of them?”
“No, the tuxedo kind.”
“Dress shirts, I suppose you mean?”
“Those. So I’ll just-”
“You, young man, are not setting a foot farther into this house. I am perfectly capable of bringing them to you.”
And she swept soundlessly up the stairs.
Leaving Marais flushed and confused, with a sinking feeling that sank even deeper when he shoved both hands into his pockets and found his left one close on the button.
“Oh, yirra,” he said, realizing then that Zondi must have dutifully slipped it into the jacket as it lay bunched on the car seat beside him-and that any hope of blaming the bastard for the boob he’d made had gone.
Which gave him the impetus he needed to race after Shirley’s mother and make sure she didn’t try anything.
Zondi and the dog regarded each other with a mixture of deep loathing and some respect.
They had been sitting like that, eye to eye, water dish to plastic cup, ever since Mrs. Shirley had come down to see they both stayed in the yard. She had handed Zondi the water without a word before disappearing again. It was a strange place.
Then Martha Mabile came back to join him.
“ Pooma! ” she said to the dog, and it slunk over to lie under a granadilla vine that screened the yard from the garage.
“So life goes,” said Zondi, recognizing in her all the signs of a good churchwoman.
“Is the young master in big trouble?” she asked.
“You think they tell me?” Zondi asked, laughing sourly. “Huh! I am that sergeant’s driver, that is all. Maybe he stole something.”
“Don’t you speak of the young master like that! What are you? A lazy donkey that carries other men on his back. I have been with the master since he was so high, like a small boy, and he is a kind man.”
“What is his name?”
“Master Peter. But he has been the young master many years now.”
Again Zondi smiled, amused by the convention that required nannies to cease calling a child by name once he had become a boy no longer to be ordered about.
Martha softened, and handed over half an orange.
“ Hau, hau, hau, but he was a real skabenga when he was small, that one. I am very glad that now he has grown up. Then he takes his pellet gun or the catapult and shoot, shoot everywhere. He climbs trees so he falls down and hurts himself, he is always hungry, a lot of work and trouble. And he is cruel with other children that come here to play and I have to smack him hard!”
“The madam let you hit him?”
“Shhhhh! She would go mad if she heard I touch him! But you know how I did it? I hit him underneath the foot so she would see no marks.”
Zondi applauded her cunning with a guffaw. “Did he never tell his mother you did this?”
“Of course, many times. But I would say, ‘Me, madam? You want to give me my notice?’ And she would say, ‘That’s another fib, Peter-get out of my sight.’ Fib is her word for an untruth.”
“And this child is now truly a good man?”
Martha giggled and spat out a pit.
“He is always with the young women,” she said. “Now it is peaceful.”
Then Marais shouted from the driveway, “Mickey! Come on, man, where the hell are you?”
“You should smack under his feet,” Martha confided in a whisper.
The memo lay on the colonel’s blotter, pinned down by the point of his paper knife like a venomous flatfish.
“The brigadier has gone so far as to put it in writing, Kramer.”
“Oh, ja?”
“I thought just a friendly phone call this morning would be enough for you to take a personal interest in the case.”
“In what way wasn’t it, Colonel?”
“In here the brigadier says he has just had a very unpleasant little conversation with a friend of the attorney general’s.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Mr. Justice Shirley, late of the Supreme Court, and the husband of a very upset lady, he says. The judge is driving down from Zululand now for an appointment with the brigadier at four-thirty. It seems one of your men has been to his house and made a real nuisance of himself.”
