The Gooseberry Fool (13 page)

“I see. Platonic love, was it?”

This made her mix in a giggle and Kramer was buggered if he saw why. Perhaps hysteria lurked in the offing. He had better get back to the facts.

“I mentioned a charge, Miss Simon, a serious charge, but you have not inquired as to its exact nature. Do I take it that you already know what it could be?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t care.”

“Like that, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Since?”

“Since he.…”

“Dropped you? Said he’d had enough? Went back to wifey? Is that the story?”

“Not the way he tells it.”

“Oh, no?”

“I mean we really had something going there, something special. You know what he said? Said he couldn’t afford it!”

“In what sense?”

“Exactly! That’s what I asked.”

Samantha tossed her hair aside and looked Kramer full in the face. Now she was angry, really mad.

“He said he couldn’t afford to mess up people’s lives—meaning hers, of course! But what he really meant was he couldn’t afford to lose his job and his ticky-tacky house and his all-American phallic symbol!”

“His what?”

“Car.”

Dear God, it had sounded much worse to Kramer, but then English was a dirty language at the best of times.

“In other words, Miss Simon, you’re saying he’d rather have his money and his comforts than run away with you?”

“Of course he would. Said the scandal in this dump of a town would finish him, he’d have to start again somewhere else, probably even without references. And at his age.”

“I was coming to that myself.”

“Then that just shows what sort of person you are. We loved each other, he was a bit older, so what?”

“Loved? Not love?”

“What do you think?”

“Ach, well, you know, like you say, I’m that sort of person.”

She snorted, amused.

“You think I might still love Mark? Well, you’re wrong. Now I love myself, see?—and hate what he’s done to me!”

“All without using his hands?”

“Christ. You’d never understand.”

She stood up and he thought he would have to tell her to sit down again, but she only wanted more coffee. She helped herself.

“Try me, Miss Simon. Tell me all about it.”

“Why have you gone off the Samantha bit? Technical reason, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t want you getting overexcited.”

“Oh, really? You’re quite human in your way, aren’t you? I thought the SAP preferred monsters with no necks plus hair on their biceps.”

“Ach, then I’m a master of disguise. Ta.”

She had refilled his cup as well.

“From where do I start?”

“From where he came into your life.”

“On a Monday morning when I was tidying Science Fiction. We saw each other through the case over the top of the fourth row. He was on the other side, New Fiction, and it happened just with the eyes. Don’t ask me what it was; it just was.”

“Then?”

I wondered all week whose eyes it had been, felt a fool because it all reminded me of one of those ghastly nursing stories—a nurse in the operating room who never saw under a junior surgeon’s mask till she—oh, you know.”

“Uh huh.”

“Then I was stamping books out on Friday and there they were—and I knew his name from the card. I made some remark about his choice of reading and he went all shy and shot off.”

“Back on the dot Monday?”

“He was. Combing the shelves for a title that would make me say something. Told me later. He chose Inorganic Chemistry, Part III, by the way.”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, don’t you think that was funny? Never mind. Then the titles became a bit more, well, pointed, you could say, and he asked me if I’d read any of them. To cut a long story short, we talked a lot about books and naturally said a lot about ourselves.”

“And the queue at the counter, meantime? How about Miss Finlay?”

“Bitch. Oh, no. By now we had a regular meeting place up in the gallery. Nobody much likes putting those books back, so it wasn’t hard to get myself landed with the job most days. And that’s all.”

“Hey?”

“You don’t have to do anything to have a love affair, do you? It is or it isn’t. Anyway, I thought it was just a beginning—that he’d sort himself out, be honest with himself, stuff convention. I thought it would work out because it was right. Know what I mean?”

If he did not; the Widow Fourie undoubtedly could. Only she had decided their little arrangement was not right. Had packed up and off to the Cape.

Kramer slipped back into context and put his feet up on a

“What happened to change your mind, Samantha?”

“My mind? Hell! Mark’s, you mean. I suspected something when he started some nonsense about being watched, only I pushed it aside.”

“Hey?”

“He said, all of a sudden one morning, that a man had his eye on us from the gallery over the other side.”

“Did you see this man?”

“There was one, but minding his own business, need I add. Anyway, Mark and I were not what you might call getting to grips with one another. I was up the ladder.”

“Showing leg?”

Kramer’s insight was perfect but his timing terrible. She stopped bending straws and frowned. Then smiled.

“Well, do you blame me?”

“Like hell,” Kramer said, throwing in an ogle.

“Then of course the same man has to be there the next day and Mark saw him.”

“Private detective?”

“God, I’d never thought of that!”

“Mark probably did.”

This made her quiet for a time, then anger began to feed into her fingers, making her twist the straws viciously and break them.

“He told you he’d have to pack it in, Samantha? Said he couldn’t afford it and all that?”

“That’s right, the bastard. I hate him—hate him.”

“For what he did to you?”

“And to himself! God, if only he’d let himself go he could really be something—live, be alive! Instead.…”

“You really don’t think he meant what he said about his wife?”

“How could he?”

“It’s possible.”

“Rubbish.”

“You’re a youngster still, Samantha. You may come to—”

“Don’t you start that bloody nonsense with me! Just you don’t! Oh, my God, I could kill him!”

“Interesting,” said Kramer, as she flung herself through the door to the Ladies.

But hardly surprising. All the classic angles of the three-sided figure were there, and one of its sharp points had cut open this little girlie’s heart. If she did not come back out of the bog in two minutes, he would have to break down the door.

She was back in under ninety seconds, pretty pert and showing she was the other sort, the kind that cauterizes a wound with hot hate and fights on. Or so she was trying to make herself believe—possibly by taking certain lines of action, innocent in terms of physical violence but as nasty as a bomb out of a blue sky. The trouble was that excess emotionalism often led to the consequences being overlooked; an atomic blast for the sake of the bang, with not a thought for the shock wave or fallout. And Samantha Simon was standing right in the way of some fallout at that very moment, unaware of what her amateur Nagasaki had yet to do to her.

“I’d like to go now—I’ve told you everything. You can ask him the rest.”

“That he prefers being well off to love in one room in Greenside?”

“Yes; ask him.”

“Then just one more question, miss. I want you to take a look at something I’ve got here.”

She came over to the table and perched on the edge of her chair, making it plain she would be detained only a moment or so.

Kramer drew out the reconstituted Christmas card and slid it across.

“This arrived in the post at the Wallaces’ house yesterday morning,” he said. “Does it bear your name?”

“It—but it isn’t.…”

“And can you tell me what word is underlined on this card?”

“Pros—prosperous?”

“That’s right; you wish him a prosperous new year. A year with lots of money. In other words, a year when he can afford what he likes. But not his little library assistant.”

“I—did—not—send—this—card,” Samantha said quietly, each word spoken with separate emphasis. She had gone white, bright white the way a decapitated corpse goes.

Kramer shook his head.

“Sorry, Samantha; that’s not how I see it.”

Now she was trembling, trying to stand.

“All right: what is this about?”

He shrugged.

“What’s the charge?”

“No charge.”

“I—I can go?”

Kramer waved a hand at the door. Her eyes went narrow, her mouth curled into a small sneer.

“And no punishment?”

“Ach, read about it in the papers.”

“Don’t be funny.”

Funny? He was being hilarious. The day after Boxing Day, the Trekkersburg Gazette would have the full details of the fatal accident—including the name Mark Clive Wallace. In three days, to put it another way, Samantha Simon would know what despair can do to a man pushed too far. The line of print would jerk like a rope.

But there was good in everything. Kramer was now free to give old Zondi a hand.

8

Z
ONDI LAY BLEEDING
into his handkerchief on the hill overlooking Jabula. A sharp flint had torn into his temple as he fled the mob, another stone had done something bad to his back, but otherwise he was at least still in one piece.

In the moonlight the distance he had run seemed far shorter than it had been. He noted the dried-up stream where most of his pursuers had dropped back, exhausted. He realized with a shudder that the remainder, who must have been recent arrivals, and still in good condition, had almost reached the slope before stopping, too. They were the bastards who had thrown the stones in a desperate bid to bring him down. Now there was nobody out in the veld and no sign of life except for the flicker of a few fires.

The wound hurt, but in no way approximated the pain he felt deep inside: the pain of his failure. Now it would take a hundred armed policemen to get anywhere near Jabula—and every one of those hundred would inevitably come to hear of how he, Mickey Zondi, had run, tail between his legs, from a crowd of shouting women. Never mind what the truth of the matter had been; the joke would soon spread to the farthermost station. And when the laughter reached the ears of the lieutenant, that would be the finish of Mickey Zondi, whatever had gone before.

Zondi had not made any effort to leave the hill, simply because he could think of nowhere to go. The thought of driving back to Miriam had crossed his mind, but lasted no longer than it took to picture himself explaining what had happened. Also, the children might overhear, for all the family slept in the same small room.

He smiled thinly. It seemed now, ironically, that he and Shabalala shared a dilemma—they were both fugitives from the law, both without a sanctuary, both without hope this side of the grave. The only peace they would ever find was in, yes, death. Deep in a grave where the earth was moist and no sound could penetrate the sunbaked crust. Deep, deep down.

He looked across at the graves on the far slope, testing the authenticity of his unfamiliar mood, seeing if he really felt unable to live on with the cross of what he had done. It was in such times, he acknowledged with self-disgust, that weak men return to the God-talk of their childhood and remember words such as “cross.” As it happened, his feelings remained unchanged by an appraisal of the graveyard. That, in a strange way, made him feel stronger. At least strong enough for one more squeeze on the trigger. He had three bullets left.

Two too many, while Shabalala would have none. The man would find a tree and tie his belt to it. Put the belt around his neck and slip from the branch. Die with his eyes staring and his tongue sticking out at the moon. A little later, his bowels would open and empty themselves down his trouser legs. As the lieutenant had often said, a noose was the world’s best laxative. As the lieutenant.…

But this was nonsense. Shabalala would not want to die; they would have to tie him to a stretcher with the sixty or seventy other condemned men in the big cell looking on, singing their hymns, waiting their turn.

Zondi’s injuries were making him feverish; soon he would not be able to think straight, to do what had to be done. He took the pistol from under his arm and felt the brute weight of it.

His eyes moved back to the graves, calculating from the grid pattern how many had already been filled in, and then beginning, but not completing, a count of the open holes. Black holes, secret holes, open-mouthed for their single ration of man. They did not frighten him. He wanted a place where he could—

The pistol slipped from Zondi’s hand. His taut body sagged. Light blazed in his mind, leaving him exalted.