This was a surprise, Hennie had conceded. He just had to accept the fact that Boetie wanted to be friends once more. They had had a very good afternoon. Boetie had not said anything out of the ordinary.
This was his story until Kramer discovered what had drawn the boy to the garage in the first place.
Hennie had been sitting with his back against the far wall, resting his head on his hands on the bumper of his father’s car. Later, while he was talking, Kramer had noticed first a black smudge on Hennie’s cheek and then black marks on the palms of his hands. He looked around and saw a crude brush on a long piece of thick wire, such as was commonly used for sweeping the chimney of a slow-combustion stove. It was soot Hennie had on him.
And there was more soot on the wall just beside the huge old wardrobe converted for storing car tools. Kramer had pressed his head against the wall and looked behind the wardrobe to see a toffee tin, bound carefully with an excess of insulation tape, hidden behind it in the corner.
Two simple assumptions later and Hennie confessed to having been bent on removing it when disturbed. He also divulged what else had transpired the afternoon before.
When they returned from shooting, Boetie told Hennie that he had carried straight on with his investigations up in Greenside-and had seen something that would shake the police solid if he was right about it. There was one more thing he had to do first, though, and he was going to check up on it that night.
“ Hau! What thing?” Zondi demanded, breaking his absorbed silence.
“That’s the bugger of it, man, we don’t know,” Kramer replied. “We’re dealing with kids, remember. They go in for secrets and all that crap in a big way. Hennie didn’t press him. You could almost say that would be bad manners. It was the same again when Boetie asked him to hide this for a while.”
Kramer tapped the tin.
“You’ve opened it, boss?”
“ Ach, yes. Hennie looked like he thought a bloody mamba was going to jump out. If I hadn’t got there when I did he would have chucked it in the fire. That’s why he was so scared, you see-there was a connection and what made it worse was that he couldn’t understand it!”
“But if-”
“Look for yourself, man.”
Zondi drew the toffee tin towards him and carefully prised off the lid. Inside it were four items: a membership card of the Detective Club made out to Boetie Swanepoel and three small squares of tissue paper.
Zondi took one. It was covered in closely packed lines of letters. There were no spaces between them-and no recognizable words in any of the three languages he spoke.
“They’re all much the same,” Kramer said.
“I have never seen such a thing. More children’s rubbish?”
“It’s called a coded message, you ignorant bloody kaffir, ” Kramer said kindly. “At least, I think it is.”
Bonita had remarked her brother loved puzzles.
Danny Govender became the Masked Avenger by the simple expedient of hitching the collar of his T-shirt up over his nose. Then, with a borrowed death ray clamped up to the front of his bicycle, he swooped.
Out of the yard behind his family’s tin shack, down the footpath strewn with broken glass and other fiendish obstacles, and along a tarred road mined by deep potholes that led eventually into Trichaard Street.
To the people thronging the thoroughfare it was just that-a street. At the very most, their street, because all the faces were dark. There was nothing else particularly remarkable about it. Neon can cost up to forty rand a foot so it lasted for only about thirty shop fronts, both sides, before the final flourishes in pink and blue. From there on down to the municipal beer hall, the less affluent Indian traders settled for big letters on bright backgrounds and plenty of wattage. All of them, however, had domestic neon strips flickering over the fruit, clothing, suitcases, and blankets stacked on the dusty pavements; this kind of light made the eyes dance and the color of their goods twice as vivid-a most important factor when you had customers who favored tartan suits and oranges with blood groups. It was a street: busy, crowded, friendly.
Danny saw it differently because he was twelve.
When he arrived at the top end, he assessed the situation carefully. Outside the beer hall, in the shadow of a sign that read BANTU LIQUOR OUTLET, his friend who delivered the Sunday papers was waiting. But that was half a mile away and between them Evil in all its most dreadful forms lurked ready to pounce. For, as any literate person knew, the prime function of Evil was to deal severely with any champion of righteousness who happened to pedal by.
The Masked Avenger remained calm. He was chewing on a wad of bubble gum that turned him invisible for short lengths of time. It was just the thing for getting through the Gauntlet of Death unharmed.
When the traffic light shone green he would be ready.
Green.
As the bicycle rattled and bounced down Trichaard Street, its rider noted with satisfaction that everyone looked right through him.
And then, with a quick tug, he became the mild-mannered newspaper boy Danny Govender again before Rampaul Pillay could discover his proud secret.
“Where have you been all day, Rampaul, man? I look for you every place.”
“Harvey Street Clinic.”
“What you doing by that side?”
“Privates.”
Danny stared rudely at Rampaul’s flies, wishing he could cheat and use his X-ray vision.
“Privates,” repeated Rampaul. “I am not telling you.”
“Then you are not my chum anymore.”
Rampaul thought about this.
“Okay,” he said. “I falling off my bike and hurt my knee.”
“And so?”
“If Chatterjee hears of this, he will be asking for my job on Sunday. My father he says to me, keep this very privates, Rampaul, or we lose money.”
“Who will ride for you?”
“My brother.”
“I do it, Ram. Easy.”
“How much?”
“Ten cents.”
“Five!”
“Seven!”
“Okay.”
They shook hands solemnly.
Then Danny relaxed, grew confidential, and spoke in Tamil, their mother tongue: “I’ll tell you why I left a message for you to be here tonight. I want to know what happened to that dog in Greenside-you know, Regina.”
“She’s dead.”
“But how?”
“The servant said she’d been killed by a burglar.”
“ Really? He didn’t tell me that.”
“The boss found it early in the morning and told him to bury it. He said there had been something round its neck. Like a wire.”
“I didn’t know the house had been robbed!”
“No, it wasn’t. The servant thought the bloke must have run away in case there was another dog.”
“When was this?”
“They found the dog on Sunday.”
“I thought so.”
“Is that all? It’s a funny question to ask, Danny. I thought it was something important. Let’s see if Gogol will give some old bananas.”
“Know something? I really got to like that horrible dog,” said Danny suddenly, as surprised by his outburst as Rampaul.
And it looked like a job for the Masked Avenger.
A thunderstorm of appalling ferocity was inevitable at the close of such a day.
Trekkersburg, which lay in a hollow on rising ground like the dent a head makes in a pillow, felt the final stages of the fever coming on just after seven. The weight of hot air pressing down on the town turned chill, then hot, then chill again. It started moving restlessly from side to side, setting weather vanes spinning. Strange, dislocated sounds were heard. Limbs of trees shivered. A thick, stifling blanket of black cloud was drawn up to blot out the bare bulb of the moon. The hallucinations began: it was as though, far above, a gigantic tin roof was being bombarded with boulders; as if each flash of lightning was a sear of pain through a reeling mind. A shuddering climax was reached. The rain came like a muck sweat.