The Gooseberry Fool Page 8

  “Who? Paula? She’d do the same for me. I mean me and Steve haven’t been neighbors all that long, we came in the fall—our fall, that is—but we’ve formed a real good relationship that I’m going to miss. Steve’s on a sabbatical.”

  Sabbatical? She did not look Jewish.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, and we’ve got to take in a few months at the Cape, so it’s pack up and go again pretty soon.”

  Kramer cruised the bookshelves and found what he wanted: a volume with library codes on the spine.

  “Mr. Wallace was a big reader?”

  “Phenomenal.”

  “One a day?”

  “Easily; the poor guy had chronic insomnia.”

  Tinkle went a fragile theory or two.

  “So you knew both the Wallaces well, lady?”

  “Please, I’m Alicia, Alicia Brown. Yes, all four of us were in and out of each other’s homes without knocking most of the time.”

  “Then is it all right if I ask you a couple of questions—save Mrs. Wallace the trouble?”

  “Hey, wait a minute. Depends what kind of questions. Our cops don’t go through all this for a car smash.”

  “Maybe not, Mrs. Brown, but we have our own ways of doing things in the Republic. But relax, please; only routine. For a survey we’re doing, if you must know—state of mind, et cetera.”

  “That sounds okay.”

  “How was he then, yesterday—Mr. Wallace?”

  She frowned but stayed pretty, taking it all very seriously. Kramer, who had ignored blond hair on principle since Lisbet, was weakening rapidly. He also liked her smell.

  “Now you mention it, not quite himself, I guess.”

  Poor bastard. Kramer knew the feeling.

  “What did you put this down to?”

  “His not sleeping, the goddamn awful heat. I was over just after breakfast with the mail, you see; one of theirs landed in our box by mistake. Just a card, so I could have waited, but that’s how things were between us. Mark was going through the pile, opening envelopes, and Paula was reading out names, y’know. I kind of busted it up for them, I guess. Still, Paula didn’t seem to mind. Went out back to the kitchen to see the cook fixed another coffee for me, and Mark just sat there.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not saying anything, staring. I had to kid him a little before he snapped out of it.”

  “And then?”

  “Made some joke, I forget. He left for the office pretty soon afterwards. Is that what you wanted? Doesn’t seem a big deal to me.”

  It was Kramer’s turn to become lost in thought—only he came around on his own.

  “And Mrs. Wallace?”

  “As always, a honey; chirpy as a chipmunk. Say, would you like some coffee—oops, tea?”

  “Coffee’s my people’s drink, same as yours,” Kramer replied, smiling. This was ideal; he wanted her out of the room for a minute. “But the servants are off, you said?”

  “It won’t bother me, Lieutenant.”

  Kramer took in all he could of the swing of the fine-pleated skirt and then moved quickly. He took out the library book, artfully eliminated the gap in the row, and pushed his loot into the waistband of his trousers around the back. It was all over in seconds and his posture much improved.

  Then he continued around the room, exhibiting the polite curiosity of a visitor admiring good taste, but finding none of the brittle ornaments to his liking. Out of sheer habit, he lifted the top crumpling of paper from the waste bin by the desk—and then hoisted an eyebrow. A Christmas card, torn into many small pieces, lay at the bottom. He had it out and luckily in his pocket just as Alicia Brown entered silently with the tray.

  There was a small shopping center half a mile back from Chestnut Road where Kramer was able to buy a roll of wide adhesive tape and the last copy of the Trekkersburg Gazette. Then he drove on to a small park and found some shade. The lawn there was like lawn everywhere in the suburb of Caledon: it was green. This did a lot for his soul. For a time he just looked at it, oblivious to the black nannies gossiping away their afternoon break, and to their little charges snatching at rainbows in the spray of the sprinklers. Grass; there had to be more square yards of good grass per head in Caledon than in the rest of the city put together, and all just for looking at or planting your bum on. Bloody marvelous.

  Yet he stayed in the car, as he had now a little work to do. First he checked through the newspaper and saw that the fatality had been reported but without naming names. Fine. Then he began tearing off strips of tape, which he stuck to the car window so each one slightly overlapped, along the lines of a closed slat blind. When he had completed a rectangle about eight inches by six, he stuck more strips at angles across it and built up a backing. Once this was thick enough, he was able to peel the whole lot away and tape it, sticky side up, on his map book cover.

  All set, he carefully took out the torn greeting card and spread it over the passenger seat. It did not take a genius to work out that the plain white bits, which of course also had type and ink lines on them, belonged to the inside. He gathered all these together and pushed the others aside. His luck was in: one diamond-shaped scrap had a small s on the left, a gap, then a capital C on the right: Kers-fees—gap—Christmas. A bilingual card with the two official languages side by side, presupposing they had been centered there by the printer.

  Kramer stuck this in the middle of the prepared area and looked for more. Almost immediately he found a very nearly intact Happy that fitted above perfectly. Then good fortune gave way to perpetual difficulties and it was an hour before he had got as far as the rest of the manufacturer’s trite message: Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year. But already he had come across something unusual—the word “Prosperous” in the English version had been underlined four times.

  This spurred him on to sort out the handwriting section and very soon he had a man’s name: Sam. Sam Smith? Sam Jones? Sam van der Merwe? That was the jackpot question, but all he had toward it were an a on one piece and an anth on another. To complicate matters further, the torn edges were so straight they could fit together in almost any order. Damn; he must have missed a few more scraps in that bin. Bugger it.

  Unless, of course, there was such a.…

  He called the duty officer on the radio and asked him if there were any messages from Zondi.

  “Not a thing, Tromp. You know how these Kaffirs are—probably sleeping it off someplace.”

  “Ach, too true.”

  “Anything else I can do, hey?”

  “And why not? Ever heard of Samantha, Koos?”

  “Bing Crosby, wasn’t it?”

  “Again?”

  “I mean he sang it, in a film. High Society? Princess Morocco was the popsy, you remember. Why?”

  “I thought maybe you were playing requests this afternoon, that’s all. You call this a radio?”

  Koos laughed, made a rude noise, and signed off.

  It did not all flood back into Kramer. He disliked visiting the bioscope and disliked Hollywood musicals most of all. But at least he knew now that Samantha was a real name and could carry on from there.

  Trying to fit together all of the white pieces was virtually impossible so he simply stuck them down haphazardly and, by noting the area they covered, satisfied himself that nothing of the card was missing.

  “Prosperous” underlined and the single word “Samantha”; not a lot there, but Mark Wallace must have thought so. You do not usually tear up Christmas cards, especially if it is your custom to display them.

  But Kramer decided to shelve hypothesis and try a shortcut. He had a strong feeling he knew where to find this Samantha, and she could bloody well supply the explanations.

  Zondi had decided to spend the time as profitably as possible and dozed off. Food was unnecessary and water could wait, but going without sleep for more than thirty-six hours was another thing: it reduced his state of alertness and made his ears ache. It also impaired his capacity for attention
to detail—as he realized upon a rude awakening.

  The woman with flies in her nose was kicking at his shoe, calling him names.

  “GG spy!” she hissed. “Spy, where are your sticks?”

  Zondi sprang to his feet, reassured himself that so far these allegations had not attracted attention, then poked her hard in the voice box with one finger. She gasped and went down in a heap. Nobody noticed. He grabbed her arms and dragged her into her tent. Not a fly followed.

  “You say GG one more time and I’ll kill you, my sister.”

  A croak pledged her silence.

  “And when you can talk, you will say you are very sorry for this. Have you a man?”

  The bowed head managed a shake.

  “I will wait.”

  He was furious. Furious with himself as much as with her, for he should have remembered that nobody would go on a journey without his two hardwood sticks, one for fending off blows and the other for striking. Occasionally you would see a man with a single stick, but certainly never a man empty-handed—just as in cowboy films, where every white man had a revolver. Little wonder her suspicions had been aroused and possibly, as he slept, she had spotted his gun. She was the type not to be frightened by such a discovery but to react with rash indignation. The others he had met earlier had simply been too involved in the argument to notice. Which brought him back to his other reason for anger: the fact that his cover had been destroyed and now he would have to do things the hard way.

  He sprawled on a grass mat in the back of the tent, patted his pockets for his cigarettes, and took a light from a box of her matches. The woman, who had been weeping very quietly, tried to edge to the opening.

  “Stay. I wish to hear why you think I am a GG spy.”

  Her first words in reply were lost, then she regained a degree of audibility.

  “Shabalala,” she whispered. “He comes to Jabula.”

  Zondi was jolted upright. At last, something to vindicate his actions—something to charge his being with a proper sense of purpose again.

  “When is this?”

  “In the night.”

  “Last night?”

  “He was with his wife this morning.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “No.”

  “You know why he is here?”

  “No.”

  “His wife said nothing?”

  “Just asked me not to say to anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  The woman shrugged and began to sob.

  “Why? You had better answer me—quick!”

  “Maybe his pass. GG very strict”

  So that was it, and a natural enough assumption on her part to suppose that the policy with regard to the movement of Africans in and out of white areas could make Shabalala’s unsanctioned homecoming a hazardous undertaking. Zondi knew that at the stroke of a clerk’s pen, a man could be endorsed out of a city in which he was born to a homeland hundreds of miles away—and that this applied even to such a man as the business tycoon who headed an official township council but was officially classified as casual laborer. Yes, it was quite possible she was telling him what she truly thought

  “But I am not GG, I am CID,” Zondi said.

  “Hau!”

  “Yes, and this Shabalala is a very bad man. You are not safe with him near to your place.”

  “In what way?”

  Zondi drew a thumb across his throat

  “Hau! You must catch him!”

  “You must help me.”

  “I am frightened.”

  “Then just tell me where he is.”

  “But he is gone.”

  “When?”

  “Not long ago—just before you come.”

  And she shrank back terrified as Zondi showed his new rage. For a whole two hours he had slept while the killer made good his escape, no doubt cutting across country and heading for—Now that was a point. Zondi could think of nowhere Shabalala would be better off than back in Jabula. It was the woman’s mention of pass books that had brought this to mind. Without the proper papers for traveling, Shabalala had already been very lucky to get so far without being picked up in one of the constant checks made by the uniform branch—and he was unlikely to risk his neck again without good reason. All he had to do was hide until the law had gone.

  “My sister,” Zondi said, now in friendly fashion. “You say Shabalala goes just before I come. Where does he go?”

  “Through this part, up by the huts.”

  “What was he doing before this? Was he watching that hill?” Zondi nodded his head in the direction of the hidden Anglia.

  “He stood outside looking, looking. I see that, but I don’t see where he looks.”

  Shabalala must have looked and seen a stranger approaching who carried no sticks. If only the woman had been even slightly educated, then Zondi could have asked her to estimate the timing more exactly; but she had lived all her life without knowing that time was divisible, like a bowl of porridge between her children, into a number of small and exact parts. Still, there were other ways.

  “Shabalala goes and I come,” he said. “Between these two things happening, what did you do? Fold your blankets? How many blankets?”

  “That I did this morning.”

  “But you understand my question.”

  “I did nothing. What is there to do in this place? Should I clean the dirt from the dirt?”

  Perhaps schooling would have been quite the wrong thing for her and the world had been spared much trouble. Zondi despised those of his people who could not stay proud.

  “No. Clean your nostrils, my sister.”

  She spat, so she despised him, too. At least she was Zulu enough to have courage—and that he could respect.

  He laughed and she laughed and then it was time to begin the search. It had occurred to him that the old crone who waylaid him just might have been part of a deliberate attempt to divert the course of justice.

  7

  KRAMER WAS HURRYING past the Albert Hotel when he remembered he had agreed to meet Scott there at five. It was ten after the hour according to the clock on Trekkersburg City Hall. He turned back and pushed his way into the saloon bar.

  It was so crowded with jolly businessmen bracing themselves to play Santa that another three minutes had to be added to his apology when he finally found the lieutenant drinking orange squash.

  “Hell, man, but I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Think nothing of it. What’s yours?”

  “Not now, hey.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Look, John, I’ll be back in a sec—must hurry before it closes.”

  “What?”

  Kramer felt he had slipped up, but improvised glibly.

  “The shop, of course. Present.”

  “You’d better run then, man—and don’t worry, I’ll wait.”

  A certain sourness on Scott’s face could not be missed. Kramer quite enjoyed having put it there.

  He hastened back into the street and found himself shoulder deep in closing-time shoppers moving at the speed of the frailest legs among them. His immediate attempt to reach the roadway and dodge through the traffic jam was frustrated by the sheer weight of numbers packed so tightly together. One thing was for sure: every beggar, all the way down to the post office, had long since crawled away to avoid being trampled to mush. There was good in everything if you looked for it.

  “Excuse,” he said, trying to barge through the crush sideways.

  “Watch it, son!” snapped an old turtle, lifting his scaly bald head from its tweed jacket shell. “Let’s have some manners while we’re about it.”

  “Murder Squad,” Kramer replied, and won an advance of two yards before being trapped again.

  “Murder Squad,” said Kramer.

  “It is,” grumbled a fat lady who had set up a human barrier on either side of her by having her four kids hold hands. “And my feet, they’re murder, too.”

  Christ, this was how a ger
m must feel, the way Doc Strydom described it, when trying to get down a vein with all those bloody cells having a go. What an inspired thought.

  “I am a doctor!” Kramer said with considerable success—and he kept saying it as often as was necessary until he reached the library steps. A notice pinned over the schedule on the notice board announced that it was closing at six, earlier than usual for a weekday, but that borrowers would be welcome till then.

  He took out the book lifted from the Wallace house and went in. Not surprisingly, there were few members of the public about; mostly pensioners trying to find themselves a little Christmas cheer that was free, something to occupy their minds in lieu of their stomachs. Very sad.

  But the entire staff seemed to be present and quite animated for a change. Several of the women actually had a bright color discreetly positioned on their dresses, and one had undone her bun. Then he noticed, through the glass doors to the junior section, which had closed at four, the low tables covered with eats and glasses. Of course; they were all set for a wild party, at the height of which the head librarian would distribute banned books he had withdrawn, each in its pretty gift wrappings. The consequences were unimaginable—if the censors knew their job.

  Cinderella, however, did not look as if she was going to make this ball. She stood a little behind the two dumpy ladies dealing briskly with an old couple’s returned books, her face hidden by long blinkers of soft straight hair. It was bright black hair, in the same way a gun barrel could be bright black, and made a sharp contrast with the coarse weave of her smock.

  Kramer hesitated and looked around for something more like what he was after. But a sharp remark from one of the others had the girl come forward to take the book.

  “But this … ” she said.

  “Yes, miss?”

  “Nothing.”

  She opened it to show its date-stamp insert and then began picking through the wide tray of card holders on the counter. She found the right one and pulled out a card that had on it in block letters: MR. M. C. WALLACE, 9 CHESTNUT ROAD, CALEDON, TREKKERSBURG, and in printing: “For Fiction Only. This Card Cannot Be Transferred.”

  That brought her head up, too fast for the hair, and Kramer could see she was wishing she could turn into a pumpkin. He was also aware of looking at a girl who was, in her very own way, not pretty but possibly beautiful. He had never been sure about these things since meeting the Widow Fourie.