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“The shop was empty—at least, nobody was inside when they came. They all say it was very quick.”
    “Uh-huh. Not just a bit frightened, you think? Don’t want to get in trouble with the gang?”
    “ Aikona , these are very simple people, and the minister is a good man, much respected. You heard he chased those boys?”
    “Where were you, man? Hey?”
    “Busy,” said Zondi, his flip manner subsiding. “Lucky’s wife is very, very sad that this happened. She came in a taxi and I talked with her over the other side.”
    “Oh, I thought maybe she was the—”
    “Boss, she says that Lucky cashed up last Friday.”
    “Uh-huh?”
    “She is educated, so she helped him with the books. She swears to God there was at most five rand in the shop, mostly very small change because the people here have very little money anyway. Perhaps one note.”
    “ Five rand? Christ, would Lucky put up a fight for that? Why the hell shoot him?”
    Zondi shrugged and suggested, “To keep their faces unknown?”
    “Huh! Would he have informed on them for five rand either? Never, man—that’s crazy. It’s crap.”
    They stared at each other for what seemed a very long time.
    Before Kramer said, “Are we sure these are robberies? Not murder?”
    Because ever since going into town, he had felt very strongly that somehow he had got hold of the wrong end of a stick.

3
    G ARDINER PAID THE sergeant behind the canteen bar for his two drinks and edged back through the tiny, crowded room, lethal with flying darts, to a corner table. The place was always packed, being open for only two hours from 4:30 P.M. , but the booze was the cheapest in town and the company congenial. On most evenings, that was.
    His companion, Klip Marais, sat hunched and glowering sourly at the wall, looking more than ever like a rough-hewn wrath of God. He had drawn in his upper lip, and was nibbling on his blond mustache, clearly not caring for the taste much.
    Gardiner put down the rum and Coke at Marais’s elbow and squeezed into his own seat.
    “Cheers,” he said, mixing his Coke with vodka.
    “Huh.”
    “ Ach , come on, Klip—what’s got your Tampax in a twist?” Gardiner demanded.
    “It’s nothing,” he muttered, poking at the ice in his glass. “I’m just pissed off, that’s all.”
    “Because of what Kramer did at the Wigwam?”
    “That and other things. I mean, he did put me in a bloody spot, didn’t he? Left me holding the can? Chucking all those reporters out when he had no right. No crime had been committed—it was up to Monty to say whether they could be there or not. Private property. Then there was the duty officer not telling him. Oh, ja, bloody old typical Trekkersburg.…”
    Marais was a new man. With his recent promotion, he had had to accept a transfer down from Johannesburg. After life in the metropolis, he seemed to regard a city of even 100,000 as hardly bigger than a dorp where not a soul dared missed church more than once on Sundays.
    “Lieut’s got a lot on his plate,” Gardiner said.
    “It doesn’t stay there for long! All afternoon me and Zondi have been going through the Peacevale dockets trying to find some connection between the coons that got shot.”
    “While…?”
    “He runs around as usual, like a buffalo with its bum on fire.”
    They had their first laugh then. Gardiner found it an apt description of Kramer’s short visit to the nightclub.
    “How’s the guts?” he asked
    “So-so … But he was pleased with the prints you got him off the inside of the till. Seems if we nail these tsotsis, then the other must belong to one of them.”
    “Zondi looking yet?”
    Marais consulted his fancy navigator’s watch.
    “Ja, been out since four.”
    “The sex-mad fool,” quipped Gardiner, imitating a catch phrase from The Goon Show.
    But Marais, who did not go for this twenty-year-old BBC radio show, still popular in South Africa, gave him no encouragement.
    Instead he tried some humor of his own: “I bet