As it happened, he traveled all of eighty feet from the corner-missing the fire engine by a coat of red paint-before denting his radiator grille slightly on the stricken vehicle. It was amazing how his all-weather tires kept their grip through the great spread of fuel.
A fireman wrenched his door open.
“Jump, you stupid bastard! This lot could go up any second!”
Hendriks wobbled out on trembling legs and was hustled to safety.
“Has he got anyone in there?” asked the fire chief, being answered with a nod. “Then give us the bloody key, mate, and be quick!”
Hendriks felt in his pocket. Then in his other pocket. All three other pockets.
“ Ach, no! I forgot it when I had coffee,” he mumbled. “You see, you don’t need it to snap on-”
“Bolt cutters!” bellowed the fire chief, somewhat needlessly, as two of his men were already rushing towards the van with them.
The exhaust manifold on the police van ignited the vapor-or so it seemed, for the first explosion came from under its bonnet. There were nine others, and flames as high as the walls of hell.
Luckily for the pair with the bolt cutters, the initial blast knocked them flying before they got their boots wet. But although suffering severe injuries, they did not lose consciousness and were able to hear, as much as they tried not to, the sounds that Danny Govender made as he was roasted alive.
A horrible death for a boy-but pure accident.
11
If there was one thing that bored the pants off Kramer, it was a fire story. He picked up the evening newspaper, noticed BLAZE in the main headline, and dropped the whole shebang into the wastepaper basket.
Then he continued to pace the office, varying his stride only when he turned or had to step over Zondi’s outstretched legs.
On his desk lay the three pieces of tracing paper with their enigmatic inscriptions uppermost. All around them were crumpled leaves from the memo pad, each covered in various permutations of the letters. Three hours’ work had proved nothing more than the fact Pembrook was correct in his assumption that a code, rather than a cipher, had been used. A cipher required that each character of the alphabet be given a substitute symbol-even another letter would do; but Kramer had been able to find only twelve different letters anyway and you could not make up words from such a limited number.
“What I am wondering about,” said Zondi eventually, “is why Boetie was thinking in English when he wrote this thing.”
He pointed to a c in the bottom line of one sheet he had copied down. There was no such letter in Afrikaans.
“Yes, I noticed that, too, man. But I suppose it’s all part of making up a secret message-if you can do it in another language as well, so much the better.”
“And another matter, boss-who was he writing these messages to?”
“Himself, I’d say. Case notes. Information he had picked up but didn’t want known until he was certain. Kids like writing things down-I remember a bloke at school who used to make huge lists of birds he had seen, even though he remembered every last one.”
Zondi went over to the desk and examined the original.
“Did Boss Pembrook find anything hard in his room to write on?”
“Bugger all.”
“Boetie could have used this toffee tin lid.”
“I’ve tried that-it isn’t as smooth as it looks. Pencil picks up tiny bumps.”
Sighing, Kramer wandered over to the window. Suddenly he stiffened.
“Bring me a spare bit of tracing paper and a pencil,” he said.
They were in his hands in seconds. He pressed the paper against the pane and wrote. The effect was identical.
“As smooth as glass.” Kramer smiled. “He did it on his window because the light coming through made it even easier to trace.”
“But this paper is quite thin, boss.”
“Perhaps whatever he was tracing wasn’t too distinct, then. Come on, man, what could they have been? What is about that size and shape?”
No good-they had been through everything they could think of.
“What would this code thing have on it?” Zondi asked. “Just words?”
“I expect so.”
“Then wouldn’t it be just as hard to understand as these things-and mean, by itself, nothing at all?”
“Like a dictionary?”
“Yes, boss, you cannot find secrets in those books. They are quite safe.”
“So?”
“Why should he hide the code if he has hidden the message?”
“Christ, that’s a notion!”
“Thank you, boss.”
Kramer sat down and ate his pie, which had gone cold.
“Know something, Zondi? He could even have had the code on him for all that it mattered-I mean when he got the chop.”
“You said there was just rubbish in his pockets.”
“Let’s have another look, though. I’ve got the stuff here in my drawer.”
Kramer cleared a space before emptying the plastic bag. The penknife clattered out first, followed by the rubber eraser, which bounced away under the furniture. The khaki handkerchief was next and in its slipstream fluttered the three bubble gum wrappers.
“Big deal,” said Kramer.
Zondi retrieved the eraser and, after looking at it closely, put it back in the bag.
Kramer absently smoothed out one of the wrappers.
“Boss!” exclaimed Zondi.
But Kramer had already seen it was the same size and shape.
“Chewsy Super Bubble Gum,” he read out in English before turning over the wrapper. It was deep blue on the inside. There was also a joke printed on it in black.
He slipped one of the squares of tracing paper over it.
“Can’t see a bloody thing,” he grunted. “Let’s try the window.”
There the low sun made the sandwich of paper translucent enough to show the letters at least were the same height, and set across the same width. No sense could be made of them, however.
“There are a lot of c’s in that joke, boss, and one near the end like this other tracing here.”
Kramer substituted it for the first tracing, and held it against the glass.
Still no luck.
The third tracing was matched up.
“We’ve got it, man! Look!”
Zondi took a little longer to grasp what Boetie had done. And then he realized that all the letters in pencil were random and irrelevant-with the exception of a very few that coincided exactly with the initial letter of a printed word in the joke underneath.
What he saw was, in effect, this: A bad-tempered cobbler was sitting working on a shoe one day when a little boy pointed to some leather and asked him: “What’s that?” The cobbler snapped: “Hide! Hide! The cow’s outside!” “I’m not afraid of a cow,” the little boy laughed.
Chewsy Chuckle No. 113
“Write this down quickly,” Kramer said. “B-s-o-h-c-b. Hell, that doesn’t spell anything! Here we go again.”
Zondi peered over his shoulder.
“But if you read the whole word each time, it does make some kind of sense, boss. Bad-sitting-on-him-cow-boy.”
“Cowboy! One word, I bet you. The bad man was sitting on him-of course, on the American. You see, cowboy is the nearest he could-”
“Then why not underline this word and make it clearer by saying ‘the cowboy’?”
“True. It does seem to break there. What can he mean?”
“Like you said, he just writes down notes for himself, he doesn’t need the pieces in between.”
“Uhuh. Let’s try another and see if it works the same way first. I’ll have the other one with a c near the end and that tracing over there.” A very fat old man standing in the gutter was asked by a cheeky Girl Guide what he was doing there. “Would it be possible to see me across the busy street?” he said with a sigh. She grinned at him and replied: “I could see you a mile off, mister!” Chewsy Chuckle No. 57