A SONG IN THE MORNING Read Free

arsehole.
    Because of his initials James Carew had always been Jeez.
    He rather fancied it. He used that name on the telephone, used it to anyone who knew him marginally. He'd had the name since the time he left school, since he was in the army.
    The name was his possession, his style, like kids who had a ring in their ear, or a tattoo. He was Jeez, had been for more than years.
    He heard the siren.
    Shit . . . Jeez saw the traffic in front of him swerving for the slow lane, and that told him that the bells and the whining were behind, and his ears told him the bastards were closing.
    Nobody had told him who he would be driving. Hadn't said it was a getaway. Just that four kids who were a bit hot needed picking up on the corner of Pritchard and Delvers and needed dropping off at the station. When he'd seen them earlier, he'd thought: bright lads, these, not piling into the van straight off. They'd have been checking for a tail.
    Well, now they had a tail all right.
    He'd been on the road of bells and sirens before, more than twenty years before, but the memory was still sharp, not the sort of sound that any bugger ever forgets. What was sharpest was the same dingy old thought, that when he heard the sirens and saw the uniforms then there wasn't a hell of a lot of point in beating your guts out and running faster.
    A bloody shambles the clowns had dropped him in. Shit up to his nose.
    In the back was a babble of screaming for more speed.
    He looked into the side mirror. The unmarked car had the bell going, and the yellow police wagon had the blue light going and the siren . . . right up to his bloody nose and down his bloody nostrils. When he looked again through his front windscreen he saw the police jeep that was slewed across the road a bit over a hundred yards ahead. There were no side turnings between him and the police jeep. Back to the mirror. The car and the wagon weren't trying to get past him, didn't have to, were sitting on his arse, shepherding him.
    The poor bastards were frantic in the back, spittle on his neck the way they were shouting through the close mesh grille.
    You win some and most often you lose, that's what Jeez reckoned.
    He eased his foot onto the brake pedal. He changed down.
    He could see that there were pistols aimed at him from behind the cover of the police jeep. Down again to second, and his foot harder onto the brake and stamping.
    "Sorry, boys," Jeez said softly.
    If they hadn't been making such a hell of a rumpus they might have heard the genuine sadness in his voice. He brought the Combi to a halt. He took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them out of the window, onto the roadway. He looked into the side mirror. The policemen were spilling out of the unmarked car and out of the wagon, crouching and kneeling and all aiming their hand guns at the Combi. Nobody had told Jeez what the hell he was into.
    Silence in the van.
    "Let's have a bit of dignity, boys." An English accent.
    "Let's not give the bastards the pleasure of our fear."
    Jeez opened his door. He stepped down onto the street.
    He clasped his hands over the top of his head.
    In front of him and behind him the policemen began to run warily forward.
    Johannesburg is a hard city. It is a city where the Whites carry guns and the Blacks carry knives. Not a city where the pedestrians and shoppers cower on their faces because the police have drawn revolvers and have blocked off a Combi and are handcuffing four kaffirs and a kaffir lover. A crowd had gathered inside the minute that it took the police to hustle their five prisoners towards the wagon and to kick them up and slam the doors on them. There was something to see. The White guy was the something to see. Must have been more than forty, could have been more than fifty, and wearing decent slacks and a decent shirt. The crowd wondered what the White guy was doing with those Black bastards, what the hell he was at.
    Four long blocks away a cloud of slow moving smoke was settling