STILL TREMBLING WITH rage and indignation, despite several hours of hard drinking with a solicitous cronie, Meerkat Marais made his way back to his flat above a dry-cleaning depot on the wrong side of town. It wasn’t much of a place, and he didn’t spend a lot of time in it—for the last eight days, until rudely awakened by that bastard Kramer, he had been sleeping with a nympho from the telephone exchange—but it was home of a sort. A bedroom, lounge, bathroom and kitchen he could call his own, and somewhere among the general chaos was a clean pair of trousers. He decided against going in through the shop, and took the fire-escape stairs instead, which led up from an empty lot on the far side of the building.
After eight days of fending for itself, Dynamite, his ginger tom with a white tail, was pleased to see him. “Prooouw!” it said, jumping down from the kitchen window-sill.
Meerkat booted Dynamite aside and prodded the lock with his Yale key. He never got to turn it, for the door simply swung inwards, and Dynamite darted in ahead of him.
“Careful!” hissed Meerkat, and felt instantly rather foolish.
Then he followed in Dynamite’s wake, treading every bit as softly, and snatched up a bread knife from the kitchen table before putting his nose into any of the other rooms. He was quite certain he’d not left the door unlatched like that.
Stealthily, he crept from the kitchen to the bathroom to the lounge and into the bedroom, but found no intruders present. He flung the bread knife into the bedroom door, and looked about him, trying to establish whether anything had been disturbed. His clothes were all over the floor, drawers were hanging out, a glass lay smashed on the dressing table, and somebody had scrawled on a wall in lipstick, Up yours, Marais!; it was all, in fact, very much as he’d left it.
“Proooouw!” said Dynamite, turning and making a dash for the fridge.
Meerkat took a closer look at the rumpled gray sheets on his divan, and found some semen stains he didn’t remember making. Of course, he said to himself, that was it: his landlord, Fat Solly Wynberg, king of the premature ejaculation, had been bringing girls up from the shop again, as per their agreement. Probably the skinny brunette with boobs like ice-cream cones, who’d reduced him to such a shambles that he’d just managed to stumble out, forgetting to pull the door tight shut behind him. All the same, Meerkat decided, it would be as well to check on his merchandise, and then to get rid of it pretty damn pronto.
Dynamite was waiting expectantly at the fridge door. “Prrrrouw!” said Dynamite, leaning ecstatically against his ankles. “Miaow?”
“Here, dammit!” snapped Meerkat, scooping out a curl of ancient luncheon meat, and then, very casually, he opened the ice compartment at the top. “Jeeeeeeesus!” The second ice-cube tray, which should have contained a .32 five-shot Smith & Wesson revolver, was gone. “I’ve been done, Dynamite! Bloody burgled, hey?”
Dynamite paused, eyeing Meerkat warily because of the soft voice he was using, and prudently dragged the luncheon meat out of reach beneath the sink unit.
“Bloody burgled.…” muttered Meerkat, stunned and hardly able to comprehend what this meant, although the act itself had been second nature to him since the age of nine. “But who would dare do such a thing to me, Dyna? How many were there? Where did they come from?”
The steady green eyes gave nothing away.
“Kids? Those kids from the flats opposite?” It was unthinkable that anyone aware of Meerkat’s violent reputation would attempt such an outrage. “Ja, it was them, am I right? Are you in the mood for some nice fresh meat? Because when I’m finished with those little.…”
Not a whisker twitched.
“But kids would have fed you from here, wouldn’t they? And what kids would ever think to look in a fridge? It couldn’t have been kids!—never in a million years. This was a real pro, hey, Dynamite?”
A slow blink.
“Doesn’t he know what I’ll do to him?”
Another slow blink.
“Kramer!” said Meerkat, grabbing at a roast chicken wrapped in silver foil. “So this is where that psychopathic dog turd got to while I had to sit all—” But even as he leapt to this inspired conclusion, he knew that the logic didn’t follow right the way through.
It wasn’t simply that he was at home and a free man, instead of in Boomplaas Street lock-up having his ribs kicked in; it was also the fact that his personal firearm, a 9 mm Walther PPK semiautomatic pistol, just like that cocky black shit Zondi carried, fell out of the roast chicken at the very first shake.
Trembling violently, now with almost ungovernable fury and in total confusion, Meerkat staggered through to his little gold-painted bar in the lounge, frantic for a stiff drink. Why anyone would want the .32 with its faulty barrel and doubtful ammunition, when they could just as easily have taken the super-efficient PPK—or both!—was more than he could imagine. Then he noticed something else.
The top was off the Johnny Walker bottle, its level had dropped at least three inches, and right beside it stood two tumblers with heeltaps of whisky in them. What was worse, he could plainly see greasy fingerprints on the tumblers gilded by a glint of fading sunlight coming in off the roof of a dry-cleaning van parked round the back. Fingerprints that mocked him, jeered and taunted him, egged him on to call in the cops, just as any other outraged citizen would do in a similar predicament.
With a snarl, Meerkat Marais dashed the tumblers to the floor, grabbed the bottle of Scotch by the neck, and took it through with him into the kitchen, there to calm himself down and plan his terrible revenge.