The Artful Egg (32 page)

There was one of those pauses where Kramer felt he was expected to clap, but he spent it instead putting a large cigar into the mouth of the jumping bean on his memo pad.

“You do see the difference between those two quotations, don’t you?” said Wilson, and there was the flare of a match. “ ‘Many wearing rapiers’ invites an immediate association with the actors, and the ‘goose-quills’ with—”

“The plays’ critic from the
Trekkersburg Gazette?
” said Kramer. “You see, Doc, much as I appreciate your efforts, it still doesn’t point to a motive, does it?”

“But aren’t you being a bit hasty when you say that?”

“Ja, maybe,” Kramer grunted. “I tell you what, I’ll sleep on it—OK?”

“Sleep on what, boss?” asked Zondi, handing him his tea as he put the receiver down.

“Bloody Act II, scene ii.”

“Hau, a very cunning scene, Lieutenant! This Boss Hamlet—”

“Not you as well, hey! Give us—”

“But I found a line in it, boss, that could have been spoken by Mrs. Stride in reference to Liz Geldenhuys.”

Kramer had a little tea first. “Oh ja, and what was that?”

“ ‘Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of your star,’ boss—which the father of the young madam Ophelia tells her, so she will not think of marrying with him. You know something also, boss? The last book Mrs. Stride was writing had such a story also. There is this university teacher with a daughter—”

“Mickey, enough!” protested Kramer. “My bloody head’s going round, and I can’t take another bloody clue, fancy theory, or anything else, understand? If it’s not straightforward,
I don’t want to know
.”

Zondi nodded and went back to his table, where he marked his place in
Hamlet
before dropping it into his jacket pocket. He started sharpening pencils.

“H’m, this should be straightforward enough,” murmured Kramer, reaching out for the slip of paper bearing Marlene Thomas’s address. “And your tea’s bloody terrible, so we might as well get going, hey?”

By the light of his torch, bright with fresh batteries, Zondi continued to pick his way through this very strange and tantalising story, many parts of which he just had to skip. Other parts were no harder than the Bible the nuns had given him when he’d left the mission school, which was how he knew words such as “harlot” and “delve,” having once looked them up in a dictionary long, long ago. There was also something vaguely Zulu about the elaborate greetings people kept giving each other, and he enjoyed trying to fill in the missing verbs, as in: “I must to England.”

Go to England? Sail? Travel?

He looked up. But it was not the Lieutenant who had come out on to the front veranda of the small bungalow. It was probably Mr. Thomas, father of the girl Marlene. The man lit a cigarette, looked at his watch, and began to pace back and forward, stopping occasionally to listen outside a softly lit window.

After another ten minutes of
Hamlet
, Zondi found his concentration wandering. It was really too difficult. So he began to skip whole sections, stopping only when the words were short. He gave a grunt. Often these lines carried a very strong, satisfying meaning: “I must be cruel to be kind.…” How well he understood that, and then, with a start, he seemed to
remember one of the old nuns having actually used those very words to him, the time he had been caned for not doing his homework. It made a bridge through the years he was afraid to step on.

There was a clatter from the veranda. The man had gone indoors again. A minute later, the Lieutenant emerged, walking slowly and sadly.

Zondi put
Hamlet
back in his pocket and started the car. He had acquired a taste for searching for those simple lines and, if the night wasn’t going to go on too long, he would search for some more.

Kramer sighed and took out his Luckies, lit two and put one in Zondi’s mouth for him, as he was driving. “Ja, Mickey,” he said, “it must be a terrible thing to know that you have been the cause of the death of your own mother.”

“Boss?” Zondi glanced at him. “Was Jannie there? Did he—?”

“I spoke just to his girlfriend, Marlene,” said Kramer, picturing her again as she sat hunched on a worn living-room sofa, her eyes swollen with crying. Not a pretty girl, but cuddlesome and plainly intelligent. “Jannie has been talking to her almost non-stop. About how much he hates his father, how terribly his mother had suffered each time he had one of his ‘mishaps’ then took it out on her, because he didn’t like the reprimands he got from his seniors. But what Marlene can’t understand is why, when Jannie has told her a hundred times his father made his ma slip, he first came to her and said: ‘Oh Jesus, Marlene—it was an accident, a terrible, terrible accident.’ And three times since then, when he’s been very upset and crying to himself, the word ‘accident’ has slipped out. Marlene didn’t spell it out for me, but I saw what was eating her up. Listen, Jannie runs in and says: ‘Oh Jesus, Marlene—there’s been an accident, a terrible, terrible accident.’ Fine, nothing to do with him. But if he says ‘it was a terrible accident’—”

“I’ve got it, Lieutenant. Hau, you mean he killed his mother by accident?”

“You wouldn’t know this, Mickey, because I never told you all the details but, thinking back, I’ve known all along that Zuidmeyer was the first to use the bathroom every morning. Then, for once, he doesn’t use it, he goes off to sulk in the garage, and it’s his wife who steps into that shower. A shower which, as I see it, Jannie has made lethal before going off with the dog. He comes back expecting his pa to be dead, but who’s lying there in the bathroom?”

“The Lieutenant is sure that—”

“So far, the facts fit, and once I’ve had a little chat with him I think you will find they fit even better.”

Zondi dropped speed. “Sorry, I was not thinking, boss—did you want to go and talk with Jannie now, back there in Acacia Drive?”

“Actually, he was there at Marlene’s, out cold in their spare room. I—ach, tomorrow, Mickey, tomorrow. He’s old enough to do the rope dance, so one more night with young Marlene.…”

As if endorsing this view, Zondi put his foot down.

“One good thing, though, Mickey!”

“What’s that, Lieutenant?”

“The look on Zuidmeyer’s face when I tell him.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, Z
ONDI
dreamed very little. His sleep was so deep that when he awoke the next day his first thought was to wonder where he was. For years, there had been splintery rafters and corrugated asbestos roofing above him, walls of unplastered red brick on four sides, and a damp, stamped earth floor to make his bare feet sting on a winter’s morning. But now, as he lay there, alone in the big bed that he and his wife Miriam had once shared with two of their children, it was like being in a neat whitewashed box with a flat lid, and when he rolled over he could see its warm green carpet. The Widow Fourie had sent him that, the same week as he’d shifted the family from Kwela Village to Hamilton. She had apologised, saying it was a little old and worn in places, but Miriam, who’d never owned any sort of carpet before, had been moved to tears.

“Wife!” Zondi called out, sitting up in bed. “Wife, how is the time?”

Miriam put her head round the bedroom door. “It is still early,” she said. “I am ironing your suit, so you stay there a few minutes until it is finished. What was your big hurry yesterday, that you threw it into the corner all crumpled up? And whose was the blood?”

“Oh, just a road accident—and then I had to go quickly on a job for the Lieutenant.”

Miriam disappeared again, and soon he heard her humming away to herself and the thump of her iron. He looked back at the carpet, smiling as he recalled how, in the old days at Kwela Village, she had scored lines across the stamped earth to simulate the planking of a wooden floor. A very houseproud woman, was Miriam Zondi, and it was the greatest pleasure of his life to know that now she had a house to be proud of.

Admittedly, the place had only three rooms in place of two, a cement floor, and there was still no bathroom or separate kitchen, but at least the outside lavatory had a proper door on it, instead of the wooden flaps provided at Kwela Village, and everything looked new, having recently been slotted together. Who knows? In a few years, they might even have electricity, and then some of the Widow Fourie’s other presents—the secondhand steam iron, for example—could come into use, too. He began to daydream. To imagine things that he might buy in the meantime. A small black-and-white television set, perhaps, like the people next door already owned, running it off a twelve-volt car battery. No, a paraffin refrigerator would please Miriam more. It was going to be a hot day again.

“Hau!” he heard her exclaim in great surprise.

“What is it, wife?”

“Come! Come and see this! Will you be angry with me?”

Zondi sprang out of bed and went through into the parlour. His suit, sponged and pressed, hung neatly over the back of a chair. On her ironing-board, Miriam had a sheet of blank paper.

“I found it in your jacket pocket,” she said. “I thought it was for a letter you wanted to write, so I decided to put the iron on it to take out the creases. Then, straight away, there was this writing! Like a magic trick! Like witchcraft.” And she shuddered.

“Let me see,” said Zondi, reaching her side and looking down.

Sure enough, what had previously looked like a blank sheet of paper was now covered in pale-brown script under the heading:
Highly Secretive Thoughts With Reference Most Untimely Decease Of Late Naomi Stride (Professional Name)
.

“Do you know what it means?” asked Miriam, putting her iron back on the stove to heat up again.

The Widow Fourie brought Kramer breakfast in bath, as she called it. The doughnuts went in the soap-rack, and the ginger beer in the tooth-mug. Then she stood in front of the mirror and dragged a brush through her head of thick blonde hair, tugging hard to get all the knots out. He liked to watch her doing this, as it made her heavy breasts bob gently, almost in slow motion.

“It’s just as well it’s another hot day already,” she murmured, her hair-clasp held between her teeth. “If it wasn’t, you’d have this mirror all steamed up. I don’t know how you can stand water that a cook could boil eggs in.”

“So you’ve guessed my little secret, hey?” he said, reaching for the tooth-mug. “But, let me tell you, it’s a lot cheaper and less embarrassing than a vasectomy.”

The Widow Fourie smiled and glanced back at him. “That last sleep did you good,” she said. “Was it a nightmare that woke you up?”

“It was you shaking me, my girl, so don’t start trying to establish alibis.”

“You were already almost on your feet, Trompie. I’ve never seen you so upset. What was the dream about?”

“Ach, some court or other.”

“I tried to guess, but all you kept saying was ‘It was the father, the father, not the son!’ And you were crying for your ma.”

“Ach, rubbish,” said Kramer, and submerged himself.

The Widow Fourie stepped away from the splash this made, and put her clasp back in her hair. The soap in the water began
to sting Kramer’s eyes, so he sat up again, wiped his hand on a towel, and took a doughnut.

“Ma!” came a voice from the passage.

“Oh, for a life without kids.…” the Widow Fourie grumbled good-humouredly. “What is it, Piet?”

“Ma, Uncle Trompie’s office is on the phone!”

“I’ll go,” she said, unbolting the door. “See you don’t get jam on the sponge again, hey? You made little Suikie think she was starting her first period.”

Kramer lay back and watched for his toes. They surfaced and stared back at him, the nails as blank-faced as an identity parade. The one he’d stubbed didn’t stand a chance of course, having turned a nasty black. He remembered the nail missing from Naomi Stride’s left foot, and his fists clenched. Like Tess Muldoon had said, for all her faults, a good woman. Tess Muldoon with the biggest spice-rack he’d ever seen. Rosemary.

“Ach, that was just Mickey,” said the Widow Fourie, coming back into the bathroom with a mouthful of toast. “He must have done one of his impersonations for Piet. How long has he been playing tricks on the telephone? It’s new, isn’t it?”

“But he never usually rings me here. What’s the message?”

“He says he’ll be over in fifteen minutes to pick you up, Tromp. He’s got some paper that he says makes all the difference to the Stride affair.”

“Oh ja? Then you’d better bolt the door again.”

“For why?”

“You said my last sleep did me good, hey? Fifteen minutes is just time for another.”

Nurse Chatterjee removed the gag and began unstrapping Ramjut Pillay. “Good morning, Peerswammy,” he said, “and what a bright beautiful morning it is! Can I take it that all is now forgiven and forgotten?”

“Forgotten?” said Ramjut Pillay hopefully, still groggy with the effect of an injection in his bottom.

“Quite so,” said Nurse Chatterjee. “Even your curious reference to one Ramjut Pillay.”

“Oh, good, good. He’s a most terrible fellow, that.”

“So you know him?”

Something warned Ramjut Pillay that somehow he was discussing matters he had resolved to ignore, but his feeling of euphoria, induced no doubt by a very clear conscience, made him say: “Oh, only very slightly in passing.”

“A big fellow, strongly built, tall, aged thirty-one?”

“True, very true.”

“And a postman?”

“He—” Ramjut Pillay stopped.

“Why won’t you confirm or deny? What are you hiding?”

“It is indeed a bright and beautiful morning, Nurse Chatterjee. It reminds me of a morning when my uppermost—”

“Then perhaps the police had better see you after all,” said Nurse Chatterjee. “I have already told the doctor there would be no need, but maybe you have inside information and can assist them in their endeavours.”

Information did not come more inside
, reflected another, truly transcendental side to Ramjut Pillay.

Zondi stopped the car a kilometre back down the road from the home of the Widow Fourie and handed Kramer the sheet of paper that Miriam had ironed for him. “This I found in the Indian postman’s room out at Gladstoneville, boss.”