“Good lad. Here’s money; I want you to go round to the pie cart and fetch two curry suppers, coffee, and ice cream-just the one. I’ll give you until I’ve finished reading through your bumf. Go.”
There was a message waiting, propped up against the telephone. It gave the Widow Fourie’s number and asked “Please ring.”
Kramer sat down and opened the docket. Resting his head on the first page of statements, he closed his eyes and dozed. Dreaming.
Lisbet stood before the wardrobe and considered her bare body from another angle. How strangely remote it seemed, caught cold as a cameo in the oval glass.
The last time she had done such a thing was the day she discovered that breasts had started to grow. What wonder there had been in the realization That’s me! Yet as she gazed at herself now, at a full-length profile far more varied in outline, she felt no sense of personal involvement at all. If that was her, so be it.
But there had to be some reason for the examination. She kept looking.
Lisbet twisted full-on.
Her face she knew of old. It was there every morning at the dressing table like a dollmaker’s first task of the day. All it needed was a steady hand and five touches of color. Then it disappeared for hours at a stretch, popping up now and then, just a section at a time, in the lid of her powder compact: details from a portrait of a pedagogue.
The neck did its job; lifting the head well clear of the trunk and providing secure mooring for a coil of pretty beads.
The shoulders could have been less square. They made her arms begin rather suddenly and not know quite where to finish up when she was flustered.
A deeply tanned skin was always attractive.
She stared at her breasts. They stared back, with an albino’s pink eyes through the white mask left by her bikini top. Neither blinked. The confrontation finally ended when, pressing them in at the sides to assess volume, she accidentally induced a squint.
Lisbet giggled. She and the image had communicated and now she felt self-conscious. It made her snatch up a petticoat.
Then her mood changed abruptly. She was entirely alone and yet had an audience. She would shock it a little.
By setting her legs well apart and having her hips experiment with a slow, clockwise motion. They balked, swung jerkily, then got rhythm with a grind that could clean tar barrels. The bump was born of a momentary loss of balance. Amused, she put the two together: three left, three right-bump! bump!
Her audience raised an eyebrow.
The petticoat came next. It had turned her from naked to nude and now suggested a few other sly little tricks. Like remaining smoothed over her without being held, solely by virtue of the static charge in the nylon, until a bounce too many brought it slithering down. To be caught at waist level and gradually gathered on either side into an ever-narrowing belt of lilac that sawed back and forth, lower and lower, becoming more opaque and yet less of a garment.
Three left… three right…
Up from some cerebral basement came strains of a boozy band steaming into a strutting number just made for the routine. The throbbing entered her and began to set its own pace, always progressively faster, although pausing intermittently to tease with a twang of silence before the downbeat. She abandoned herself to it. She was lifted to her toes and the petticoat fell away forgotten.
Lisbet was aware of only one thing: a sense of wonder as she looked into the mirror and realized That’s me.
Bump-bump!
God, yes, and she would share this discovery with the next man of her choice; an older man, a proper man who would rejoice with her-not shrink back startled and fearful of Sin.
Crash.
Her foot had snagged the cord to the table lamp. It lay on the floor with its china base shattered and its shade off but still working. The harsh light, striking upward, made her recoil.
Or rather the exaggerated shadows did, for they were vindictive in their illusion of aging; drawing muscle, sinew, and knobs of bone to the surface, while molding the swell of the stomach into a potbelly beneath the hollowed rib cage.
She barely recognized the face with its jutting chin, high cheekbones, and-
In that instant, Lisbet knew whose hard blue eyes had stared from the reflection all along, considering her body from every angle. They were his.
“I won’t change,” she whispered. “I’ll never change as much as this. Some people don’t.”
Knowing a lot about bodies, the eyes stayed steady.
Zondi wound up his gramophone and was reaching for the “Golden City Blues” when the twins came pelting in, shrieking something unintelligible. Miriam gave them a clout apiece and they calmed down enough to pant in unison, “Uncle Argyle is getting killed!”
Their father ran straight out into the night in his shirt and underpants without pausing to as much as slip on his shoes. There were no street lights so he had to rely on sound to indicate where the trouble was. That was easy, however, as short, weak blasts on a police whistle were coming from the next street.
He sprinted around the corner and found a crowd jibbering in high excitement outside the home of Nursing Sister Gertrude Dhalmini, an expensive whore when she was not on duty at the clinic advising on birth control.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
Everyone wanted to tell him, but by beginning at the beginning. He listened only for as long as it took him to push his way through. Even so, they conveyed a great deal.
Apparently Sister Gertrude had been entertaining an enormous witch doctor of incredible wealth-that was where his Lincoln had been parked-and unbridled savagery. All had been perfectly amicable until he had removed the trousers of his tweed suit, whereupon Sister Gertrude’s training alerted her to a definite public health hazard. She told him this and refused to run the risk of infection. Out of personal or professional pique, nobody was quite sure which, he had then beaten her brutally before leaving. Sister Gertrude, whose job gave her an extension line, rang the check-out gate and had him arrested for assault. She was just telling her neighbors about all this when the witch doctor returned on foot-having escaped custody with the declared intention of dissecting her. The neighbors had scattered. Argyle Mslope had gone in alone.
The whistling had stopped.
Zondi approached the door with one slight advantage: every house in Kwela Village was identical so he knew it would open into the living room and the bedroom would be to his left. The very nature of the case suggested he would find her-and the others-in the latter. He found her in both. The witch doctor had been as good as his word.
And was about to behead the reeling figure of Argyle with the same ax when Zondi leaped upon him from behind, clamping an elbow around the massive, fat neck. He could hardly encompass it.
Like a cheetah on the back of a maddened buffalo, Zondi realized that he had bitten into a lot more than he could chew. With a toss of his horned headdress, the witch doctor broke into a short charge, spun round, slammed backwards into the concrete-block wall.
Zondi collapsed with the breath knocked from him. He saw the ankles start to turn and grabbed them, leaping to his own feet and heaving. The witch doctor sprawled, letting the ax fly out through a window. A roar of delight came from outside.
Argyle blew his whistle and fell over a chair, dazed, bleeding badly. His spear was nowhere to be seen.
The quick glance around cost Zondi dearly. The witch doctor brought him down with a kick from the floor to the groin. Then tried to bite his nose off-the foul spittle pouring into Zondi’s own gasping mouth as he held him up and away.
Zondi was fighting for his life. It was not the first time, so he knew what to do. The problem was finding the right opportunity.
The prospect of which diminished almost entirely when the witch doctor relaxed his enormous weight, pinning him down as effectively as a pile of cement bags, and shifted his grip to the throat.