Snake Read Free Page B

secretly not enjoyed, and then to the fact that his previous billet had been usurped by a Jew. He wasn’t particularly anti-Semitery, or whatever the word was, but it remained inescapably the Jewishness of the bloke that was causing the trouble. It didn’t seem long since he had seen a story in the papers saying, FIRST JEWISH RECRUIT GRADUATES AT POLICE COLLEGE, and now Trekkersburg had one all to themselves, with more press pictures to prove it. JEWISH CONSTABLE IN CHARGE OF BOOK OF LIFE, said the headline on a clipping his wife had posted to him, while the caption had been a lot of rubbish about loving your country whoever you were. But seeing that all white citizens had their Book was a most responsible job, Kloppers had argued on his return, not something to be left to a rookie. His superiors, however, whose enthusiasm for the new regulation had always seemed suspect to him, hadn’t seen it that way. Any fool could supervise personal particulars, they told him, not that Oppenheimer was anything like a fool, only very junior, and what they needed desperately, higher up, was a seasoned man good at paper work. Yes, hopefully as good at it as he was, and willing to work in quiet surroundings, largely on his own for most of the time. In effect, the candidate would be virtually in charge of a department. An important one. Run it his own way. Would he take it? Good! A very wise move. Only he must be careful and always wear his rubber gloves.…
    The bastards.
    It wasn’t the Book of Life he held in his hands. Just the opposite, and woefully short on personal particulars it was, too In fact, Kloppers couldn’t even put a name to half his problems, and had given them labels marked with the letters of the alphabet for the time being.
    They were everywhere. The fridge had been full by Saturday night, and so all four tables had been used up, with the leftovers going in the sink—two babies, Bantu—and on trays on the floor.
    Kloppers felt again the mild panic he had known when given his first filing job in the office of a very untidy lieutenant. He just didn’t know where to start. But he did know there was far too much for the district surgeon to get through in one morning, and he’d have to arrange some sort of order of priority. There were no whites among them, so bang went his first theory. He could try going on down through the classes of citizenship—Colored, Indian, and Bantu—but that seemed like splitting hairs. He could, of course, divide them according to whether death was suspicious or accidental. Yes, that was it. Providing he could tell … Man, it was going to be a bugger. A nightmare. And Dr. Christiaan Strydom was bound to come chuckling in very shortly.
    “ Ach , start with A,” he mumbled to himself, leaving his stuffy little office and almost tripping over K.
    While his black assistant, N2134 Nxumalo, sat outside in the sun and baked comfortably in his constable’s uniform, charging up warmth against the chill indoors, and much enjoying this unprecedentedly slow start to the day. A great advantage of his position was that he was believed incapable of any initiative, and was expected to wait until he had been told what to do. Usually, old Sarge Van Rensberg would have had him running round in circles by now, threatening to take the bone cutters to his tondo if he didn’t get down out of his bloody tree and do some work.
    “You’s a idle kaffir!” Nxumalo mimicked fondly, shaking his head at the memory of their four years together. Now, when this one could justly call him an idle kaffir, he didn’t. Mad!
    And bad at his job, which Nxumalo felt he could have done blindfolded. Still, that was not his worry.
    Nxumalo coughed and sneezed. The consequence of trying to laugh with a lungful of smoke. The funniest thing about his new boss, Kloppers, was that he obviously thought the weekend was over. That there would not be any more bodies landing on the doorstep to spoil his lovely lists. Whereas there