The Song Dog Read Free Page B

Jafini, so I need detain you no longer—it’s quite a drive there. Bokkie Maritz is already waiting with a car in the vehicle yard.”
    “Bokkie, Colonel?” said Kramer. “What’s that fat idiot got to do with anything?”
    “I’m sending him with you to assist, of course. Pretoria will expect the paperwork to be kept up-to-date, and while one does that, the other can be out—”
    “But Maritz’s a total clown, Colonel!” objected Kramer, lighting a match. “The bloody last thing I need is a—”
    “Lieutenant,” Du Plessis said, cutting him short and glaring at the match flame, “Bokkie Maritz has served me well and true for the past eight, nine years, and I will not have my judgment questioned—especially not by someone who’s hardly been here five minutes!”
    “My point exactly, Colonel. Why—”
    “You heard what I said about not smoking in here?”
    Kramer nodded, watching the match burn down toward his fingers. “But why send me, when I’m still a new poop? Why not someone with more rank, with more local knowledge and—”
    “Listen,” said Du Plessis, intent on the flame, too. “I don’t know how your previous superior did business, but when I give an order, I expect—”
    “I bet there could be more to this than meets the eye,” said Kramer, as the flame reached just above his thumb. “Has Captain Bronkhorst some special reason for not—”
    “Never mind that!” exploded Du Plessis, poking a ruler angrily at the match. “Blow it out! Blow it out this instant!”
    “On my way, Colonel …” said Kramer, taking note ofthat curious little slip, and lit up, using the same match, as he stepped from Du Plessis’ office.
    The Chevrolet, now down another hubcap, started up yet another steep ascent. But at least cattle had begun to give way to goats, and the sky ahead looked more interesting, being piled high with giant white clouds, heaped like the pillows in a hospital storeroom. Kramer had spent many happy minutes in just such a storeroom back in Bloemfontein, making friends with a student nurse who never gave her name nor wore underclothes. It surprised him how often he had been reminded of this lately, since his transfer to Trekkersburg.
    The city that lived with its legs crossed.
    “Tell me, Bok,” he said suddenly. “Where do you reckon the bodies will have been taken? They don’t usually have state morgues out in the bush—well, not where I come from. A hospital, maybe?”
    Bokkie Maritz nodded. “Ja, a hospital’s more likely. I’d guess a nuns’ mission one.”
    “Oh, wonderful,” said Kramer.
    “Okay to talk now?” Maritz inquired cautiously. “Only I thought you’d like to get some proper background on poor old Maaties …”
    “One of the best, Bok.”
    “Oh, so you know that, do you? Ja, very definitely, one of the best.”
    “And?”
    “Well, always laughing and joking. Hell, Maaties had the typists at headquarters in fits by the time he left to go home again.”
    “Bit of a ladies’ man, is that what you’re saying?”
    “Hell, no! They liked him, that was all. He’d show the snapshots of his kiddies, and things like that.”
    “What sort of wife did he have—a good-looker?”
    “Hey? How should I know?”
    “She was never in any of these snaps he showed round?”
    Maritz frowned. “Can’t say I can remember one with her in it,” he admitted.
    “Hmmmm,” said Kramer. “Look …”
    They had just topped the rise, and beneath them lay a wide, green plain, given over almost entirely to sugarcane. So much green seemed unnatural after the barren, bread-colored landscapes Kramer was used to, making him think of mold to be scraped away with a knife.
    “That must be Jafini—over to the far left,” Maritz exclaimed, motioning toward a smoky smudge some distance to the north. “Man, we’ve made excellent time, hey? The Colonel is going to be very impressed with us!”
    “Bugger him for a start,” said Kramer.

3
    I T WAS A good thing the