As he advanced toward it, the driver’s door creaked and swung open.
Yankee Boy Msomi, wrapped warm in his heavy overcoat with its fur-trimmed collar, sat very upright on the back seat, his smooth fingers curled over the top of his walking stick. He smelled of whisky and had two-thirds of a bottle propped next to him on a pile of magazines. Yet his big, soft-boiled eyes, with pouches beneath them like black egg cups, focused sharply on his visitor.
“Well?” asked Zondi, sitting sideways on the driver’s seat to keep his feet on the ground. “It was Lucky Siyayo’s turn today. What have you heard?”
Msomi shook his head mournfully from side to side.
“Nothing? All the drinking places? You’ve been at every shebeen? How are they spending their money?”
“Today,” said Msomi, “a little bird says they get just enough bread for the petrol.”
It was his idea of a joke. Still, it showed how good his sources of intelligence were, and that was what mattered.
“I now have another question, Msomi: these shopkeepers- is there anything that makes them brothers?”
“We are all brothers, man.”
“Something that ties them together. Get it? So these killings could be for another reason?”
Msomi blew a slow raspberry. Then got the giggles, rocking back and forward until Zondi grabbed him by the hair and held it a few seconds longer than was necessary.
“Cool it, baby, cool it,” protested Msomi, patting down his Afro. “No way, but no way is that how I read it. These guys may float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, but that’s it, man. They just ain’t got it together yet. Dig? This some white pig’s bullshit?”
“What you say?”
“Hey, man! I asked you, I said cool it. Or you don’t get no more.”
“Your mother’s arse!” flared Zondi in Zulu.
Msomi murmured two names.
An hour later, Zondi had both the young tsotsis in custody. Not progress exactly, but things were beginning to happen… at a price.
The Gazette crime reporter asked for a receipt to hand in with his expense sheet, and told the waiter to bring back two small brandies with it. Then he insisted that Kramer take a cheroot.
From the way he was carrying on, anyone would have thought they were dining at some posh place and not at Georgie the Greek’s, which sold more milkshakes than hard liquor, yet the kid obviously found enough in these surroundings to support a grander fantasy. It was his trade, after all. He had actually tugged the knot in his tie down to half-mast, just as they did in the comics, and his heavy-framed spectacles rested knowingly near the tip of his button nose.
“You leave it to me, Lieut,” he said in his deepest voice “Chief sub’s holding me a space on the front and tomorrow it’ll be there. I appreciate you taking me into your confidence. I mean that.”
Experience might someday teach him that people would tell him things in confidence to prevent him from publishing what he might have worked out for himself.
“Lieut?”
“Just see you keep it that way, Brian.”
“Keith,” said Kramer’s host.
“Ja, Keith, because the message must go between the lines.”
“I promise there’ll not be a word of how it might spread to Trekkersburg. Make it sort of a color story. How the free-milk ladies were in Peacevale at the time Lucky Seesaw was shot, unaware of what was going on in broad daylight. They, being a charity, make it a dead cert. Maybe get a quote from one of them: ‘No, I don’t think we need police protection. All the Africans are so grateful to us that I’m sure we won’t come to any harm.’ Something like that. Y’know.”
“Best you leave us right out of this.”
“Anything you say.”
Kramer’s sigh misted the inside of his raised wineglass. This was the third time he had tried to ensure that while the city’s white and Indian traders would be able to put two and two together, the gang wouldn’t be presented with ideas it had not-by some small chance-had already. His theory of another motive for the deaths had been pooh-poohed by the colonel, probably quite rightly.
The receipt and brandy arrived.
“Any way of seeing your article first?” Kramer asked.
“Er-that’s not usually… What if I read my copy over the phone to you? Give me your home number and-”
“No,” said Kramer firmly. “I’ll wait at the CID. That way, if it isn’t right, I haven’t far to come to kick your arse.”
The reporter concentrated so hard on his manly laugh that he tapped his ash into the butter dish.
“Quite a day,” he said after a while.
“Bloody chaos,” conceded Kramer. “But I suppose this Wigwam business was a good scoop for you?”
“Ah, the general public often gets that wrong,” the answer came, lightly dusted with patronage. “A scoop is something only one paper gets and no other. I could have killed Monty for that, after all the puffs I’ve given him.”
“Hey?”
“Puffs-boosts, free publicity; not ciggies!”
He would not have been so delighted by Kramer’s ignorance of newspaper slang if he had smelled hemp smoke in the misunderstanding.
“Ja, but what did Monty do?”
“Tipped off the whole of the rest of the crowd. Even the SABC was there, although they only made a par of it at the end of the regional summary. Durban evenings beat us to it, though-went like hotcakes here. Best I could manage was an exclusive-you know, an interview nobody else got, him telling it in his own words. Of course, the sodding editor now says it’s sub judice, except for the beginning and end, because of the inquest still to come.”
Kramer, who enjoyed hearing all this, grunted sympathetically.
“You should see the quotes I got! Good, hard stuff. News ed said it was a ball gripper of a story. How Monty grabbed the tart’s wrists, not thinking she could be dead, not wanting to believe she was dead-as if you could believe that!-and then finding her arms were like ‘sticks of cold wood, stiff with no hinges,’ which made him realize he was too late, Jesus, and then he knew. How he’d never forget her eyes and how she looked up at him, pleadingly, from the other side of the grave! All that.”
“What a waste.”
“Don’t think I didn’t tear him off a bloody strip! I did. Not half. That wasn’t all-I was supposed to be in chamber court at the Supreme for the divorces at eleven, and with him coming through at twenty to, I forgot to send a junior and there’s been all hell about that. Garbled messages, my backside-hear he pulled one on your lot, too. That bastard has the nerve of-”
He suddenly looked like someone who just might have accidentally said the wrong thing.
As far as Kramer was concerned, he had. If it hadn’t been for the abortive journey into Trekkersburg, the till would never have been tampered with. “Who told you this? Who’d you hear it from?”
“Steady, Lieut, it’s only what your sergeant explained to me after we’d been kicked out. I’m not necessarily saying Monty did anything deliberately.”
“You are.”
“Just an opinion, sort of slipped out. He is publicity mad, isn’t he? Who wouldn’t be with a dump like that? Especially when his opposition in the lane is so good-he’s imitating it with tent motifs and all.”
“I don’t get the connection.”
“Makes a better story, that’s all. You chaps coming tearing in. You should have seen them.”
“ You saw them?”
“Of course, we didn’t have so far to-er-come.”
The reporter smiled at his inadvertent echo of Kramer’s threat. But his eyes didn’t see the joke, and stayed worried like those of a gossip with no stomach for confrontation.
