The Song Dog Read Online Free

brakes on the Chevrolet worked like dropping a battleship’s anchor. Without them, it could have proved all too easy to overshoot a dump like Jafini completely. Here one moment and gone the next; a brief blur of tacky shopfronts ending just before the red-brick, tin-roofed police station, half visible behind a high hedge of Christ-thorn, with a bleached South African flag drooping motionless from the stunted flagpole in its front garden.
    Maritz, caught off guard by those brakes, became temporarily wedged beneath the dashboard. “Yirra, Lieutenant!” he gasped. “What happened? Did some kiddie run out in front of us or something?”
    “Cigarettes,” Kramer said. “You go on ahead—I’ll catch you up in a minute …”
    And he climbed out of the Chevrolet to look about him. Jafini’s one and only street seemed to have about a dozen businesses in all, run mostly by Indians. There was a bakery, too, and a hole-in-the-wall branch of Barclays Bank, manned on only Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus a small, red-brick Anglican church. A pair of distant petrol pumps suggested that Jafini boasted a one-mechanic garage, but he wasn’t about to take bets on that.
    Instead, he loped across the road and went into the Bombay Emporium, inhaling deeply. Kramer had always relished thewarm, prickly smells of trading stores—the only kind of shop he’d known until he was eleven—and still marveled at the sheer, mind-boggling variety of their contents. The Bombay Emporium did not let him down. It carried everything from hurricane lanterns to sewing machines, from miles of cheap cloth in great bolts to plows and battery radios, plus at least nine varieties of tinned sardines. On the crowded shelf of cigarettes and pipe tobacco, he saw, for the first time in years, the little cotton bags of shag his father had smoked to excess, so crude it came complete with tobacco stalks. Good stuff, that shag: it had given the old bastard the long, lingering, thoroughly horrible death he’d deserved.
    “May I help you, sir?” the Indian storekeeper called out hesitantly, over the headdresses of the bare-breasted Zulu women first in line.
    “Lucky Strike—make it a whole carton,” said Kramer.
    The storekeeper looked agonized.
    “Ach,” said Kramer, reminded that his mother tongue was rarely understood by nonwhites in this godforsaken province of Natal, and repeated himself in English. “A carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes—no, better make it two.”
    The storekeeper wrung his hands, “Would it were possible, sir! Gracious me, yes! But you see, sir, the better brands are not often being requested, sir, so stocks—”
    “Luckys, damn it!” said Kramer. “Many as you’ve got.”
    As the shopkeeper hastened away into a back room, someone new joined the silent line of typical country bumpkins still waiting to be served. This latest arrival was a cheeky-looking Zulu that Kramer felt sure he’d seen somewhere before, and this bothered him, because that “somewhere” could only have been Trekkersburg, two hundred and more miles to the south. Impossible. After all, the whole point of the Pass Laws was to keep coons confined to particular clearly defined areas, and they weren’t meant to waltz round the country like they bloodyowned the place. Yet this one certainly did, sauntering in jauntily with his hands in pockets, like a bloody Chicago gangster, and as blacks weren’t permitted to watch such films, this alone suggested that Short Arse might be worth further investigation.
    Short Arse: a good name for him, decided Kramer—until the bastard’s pass book revealed his correct particulars. Hell, he couldn’t be much more than five-six, well beneath his own shoulder height.
    “Very sorry, sir—won’t be many more moments!” the Indian shopkeeper emerged to say, before disappearing again.
    Kramer took another look at the waiting, silent line, straight off the local native reserve. Most were dressed in whites’ castoffs or, in the case