She paused, watching the effect of her words on Mma Makutsi. It was difficult to tell what she was thinking, with those glasses.
“So I am going to have to do something,” she went on. “If I do nothing, then we shall be put under judicial management or the bank manager will come and take the office from us. That is what happens to businesses that do not make a profit. It is very bad.”
Mma Makutsi was staring at her desk. Then she looked up at Mma Ramotswe and for a moment the branches of the thorn tree outside the window were reflected in her glasses. Mma Ramotswe found this disconcerting; it was as if one were looking at the world as seen by another person. As she thought this, Mma Makutsi moved her head, and Mma Ramotswe saw, for a moment, the reflection of her own red dress.
“I am doing my best,” said Mma Makutsi quietly. “I hope that you will give me a chance. I am very happy being an assistant detective here. I do not want to be just a secretary for the rest of my life.”
She stopped and looked at Mma Ramotswe. What was it like, thought Mma Ramotswe, to be Mma Makutsi, graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College with 97 percent in the final examination, but with nobody, except for some people far away up in Bobonong? She knew that Mma Makutsi sent them money, because she had seen her once in the Post Office, buying a postal order for one hundred pula. She imagined that they had been told about the promotion and were proud of the fact that their niece, or whatever she was to them, was doing so well in Gaborone. Whereas the truth was that the niece was being kept as an act of charity and it was really Mma Ramotswe supporting those people up in Bobonong.
Her gaze shifted to Mma Makutsi’s desk, and to the still-exposed picture of Dr Leakey holding the skull. Dr Leakey was looking out of the photograph, directly at her. Well Mma Ramotswe? he seemed to be saying. What about this assistant of yours?
She cleared her throat. “You must not worry,” she said. “You will still be assistant detective. But we will need you to do some other duties as well when we move over to Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni needs help with his paperwork. Half of you will be a secretary, but half of you will be an assistant detective.” She paused, and then added hurriedly, “But you can call yourself assistant detective. That will be your official title.”
For the rest of the day, Mma Makutsi was quieter than usual. She made Mma Ramotswe her afternoon tea in silence, handing the mug over to her without saying anything, but at the end of the day she seemed to have accepted her fate.
“I suppose that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s office is a mess,” she said. “I cannot see him doing his paperwork properly. Men do not like that sort of thing.”
Mma Ramotswe was relieved by the change of tone. “It is a real mess,” she said. “You will be doing him a very good service if you sort it out.”
“We were taught how to do that at college,” said Mma Makutsi. “They sent us one day to an office that was in a very bad way, and we had to sort it out. There were four of us—myself and three pretty girls. The pretty girls spent all their time talking to the men in the office while I did the work.”
“Ah!” said Mma Ramotswe. “I can imagine that.”
“I worked until eight o’clock at night,” went on Mma Makutsi. “The other girls all went off with the men to a bar at five o’clock and left me there. The next morning, the Principal of the College said that we had all done a very good job and that we were all going to get a top mark for the assignment. The other girls were very pleased. They said that although I had done most of the tidying they had had the more difficult part of the job, which was keeping the men from getting in the way. They really thought that.”
Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “They are useless girls, those girls,” she said. “There are too many people like that in Botswana these days. But at least you know that you have succeeded. You are an assistant detective and what are they? Nothing, I should think.”
Mma Makutsi took off her large spectacles and polished the lenses carefully with the corner of a handkerchief.
“Two of them are married to very rich men,” she said. “They have big houses over near the Sun Hotel. I have seen them walking about in their expensive sunglasses. The third went off to South Africa and became a model. I have seen her picture in a magazine. She has got a husband who is a photographer for that magazine. He has plenty of money too and she is very happy. They call him Polaroid Khumalo. He is very handsome and well-known.”
She replaced her glasses and looked at Mma Ramotswe.
“There will be a husband for you some day,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And that man will be a very fortunate man.”
Mma Makutsi shook her head. “I do not think there will be a husband,” she said. “There are not enough men in Botswana. That is a well-known fact. All the men are married now and there is nobody left.”
“Well, you don’t have to get married,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Single girls can have a very good life these days. I am single. I am not married.”
“But you are marrying Mr J.L.B. Matekoni,” said Mma Makutsi. “You will not be single for long. You could …”
“I didn’t have to marry him,” interrupted Mma Ramotswe. “I was happy by myself. I could have stayed that way.”
She stopped. She noticed that Mma Makutsi had taken her spectacles off again and was polishing them once more. They had misted over.
Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment. She had never been able to see unhappiness and not do something about it. It was a difficult quality for a private detective to have, as there was so much unhappiness entailed in her work, but she could not harden her heart, however much she tried. “Oh, and there’s another thing,” she said. “I didn’t tell you that in this new job of yours you will be described as Assistant Manager of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. It is not just a secretarial job.”
Mma Makutsi looked up and smiled.
“That is very good,” she said. “You are very kind to me, Mma.”
“And there will be more money,” said Mma Ramotswe, throwing caution aside. “Not much more, but a little bit more. You will be able to send a bit more up to those people of yours up in Bobonong.”
Mma Makutsi appeared considerably cheered by this information, and there was a zest in the way in which she performed the last tasks of the day, the typing of several letters which Mma Ramotswe had drafted in longhand. It was Mma Ramotswe who now seemed morose. It was Dr Leakey’s fault, she decided. If he had not come into the conversation, then she might have been firmer. As it was, not only had she promoted Mma Makutsi again, but she had given her, without consulting Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, a pay raise. She would have to tell him about that, of course, but perhaps not just yet. There was always a time for the breaking of difficult news, and one had to wait for one’s moment. Men usually let their defences down now and then, and the art of being a successful woman, and beating men at their own game, was to wait your moment. When that moment arrived, you could manipulate a man with very little difficulty. But you had to wait.
CHAPTER TWO
A BOY IN THE NIGHT
THEY WERE camped in the Okavango, outside Maun, under a covering of towering mopani trees. To the north, barely half a mile away, the lake stretched out, a ribbon of blue in the brown and green of the bush. The savannah grass here was thick and rich, and there was good cover for the animals. If you wanted to see elephant, you had to be watchful, as the lushness of the vegetation made it difficult to make out even their bulky grey shapes as they moved slowly through their forage.
The camp, which was a semipermanent collection of five or six large tents pitched in a semicircle, belonged to a man they knew as Rra Pula, Mr Rain, owing to the belief, empirically verified on many an occasion, that his presence brought much-needed rain. Rra Pula was happy to allow this belief to be perpetuated. Rain was good luck; hence the cry Pula! Pula! Pula! when good fortune was being celebrated or invoked. He was a thin-faced man with the leathery, sun-speckled skin of the white person who has spent all his life under an African sun. The
freckles and sun-spots had now become one, which had made him brown all over, like a pale biscuit put into the oven.
“He is slowly becoming like us,” one of his men said as they sat round the fire one night. “One day he will wake up and he will be a Motswana, same colour as us.”
“You cannot make a Motswana just by changing his skin,” said another. “A Motswana is a Motswana inside. A Zulu is the same as us outside, but inside he is always a Zulu. You can’t make a Zulu into a Motswana either. They are different.”
There was silence round the fire as they mulled over this issue.
“There are a lot of things that make you what you are,” said one of the trackers at last. “But the most important thing is your mother’s womb. That is where you get the milk that makes you a Motswana or a Zulu. Motswana milk, Motswana child. Zulu milk, Zulu child.”
“You do not get milk in the womb,” said one of the younger men. “It is not like that.”
The older man glared at him. “Then what do you eat for the first nine months, Mr Clever, Mr BSc? Are you saying that you eat the mother’s blood? Is that what you are saying?”
The younger man shook his head. “I am not sure what you eat,” he said. “But you do not get milk until you are born. I am certain of that.”
The older man looked scornful. “You know nothing. You have no children, have you? What do you know about it? A man with no children talking about children as if he had many. I have five children. Five.”
He held up the fingers of one hand. “Five children,” he repeated. “And all five were made by their mother’s milk.”
They fell silent. At the other fire, on chairs rather than logs, were sitting Rra Pula and his two clients. The sound of their voices, unintelligible mumbling, had drifted across to the men, but now they were silent. Suddenly Rra Pula stood up.
“There’s something out there,” he said. “A jackal maybe. Sometimes they come quite close to the fire. The other animals keep their distance.”
One of the clients, a middle-aged man wearing a widebrimmed slouch hat, stood up and stared into the darkness.
“Would a leopard come in this close?” he asked.
“Never,” said Rra Pula. “Very shy creatures.”
A woman sitting on a canvas folding stool now turned her head sharply.
“There’s definitely something there,” she said. “Listen.”
Rra Pula put down the mug he had been holding and called across to his men.
“Simon! Motopi! One of you bring me a torch. Double quick!”
The younger man stood up and walked quickly over to the equipment tent. As he walked across to give it to his employer, he too heard the noise and he switched on the powerful light, sweeping its beam through the circle of darkness around the camp. They saw the shapes of the bushes and small trees, all curiously flat and one-dimensional in the probing beam of light.
“Won’t that scare it away?” asked the woman.
“Might do,” said Rra Pula. “But we don’t want any surprises, do we?”
The light swung round and briefly moved up to illuminate the leaves of a thorn tree. Then it dropped to the base of the tree, and that is where they saw it.
“It’s a child,” said the man in the slouch hat. “A child? Out here?”
The child was on all fours. Caught in the beam of light, he was like an animal in the headlights of a car, frozen in indecision.
“Motopi!” called Rra Pula. “Fetch that child. Bring him here.”
The man with the torch moved quickly through the grass, keeping the beam of light on the small figure. When he reached him, the child suddenly moved sharply back into the darkness, but something appeared to slow him down, and he stumbled and fell. The man reached forward, dropping the torch as he did so. There was a sharp sound as it hit a rock and the light went out. But the man had the child by then, and had lifted him up, kicking and wriggling.
“Don’t fight me, little one,” he said in Setswana. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The child kicked out and his foot caught the man in his stomach.
“Don’t do that!” He shook the child, and, holding him with one hand, slapped him hard across the shoulder.
“There! That’s what you’ll get if you try to kick your uncle! And there’ll be more if you don’t watch out!”
The child, surprised by the blow, stopped resisting, and went limp.
“And here’s another thing,” muttered the man, as he walked over towards Rra Pula’s fire. “You smell.”
He put the boy down on the ground, beside the table where the Tilley lamp stood; but he still held on to the child’s wrist, in case he should try to run away or even to kick one of the white people.
“So this is our little jackal,” said Rra Pula, looking down at the boy.
“He’s naked,” said the woman. “He hasn’t got a scrap of clothing.”
“What age is he?” asked one of the men. “He can’t be more than six or seven. At the most.”
Rra Pula now lifted up the lamp and held it closer to the child, playing the light over a skin which seemed criss-crossed with tiny scars and scratches, as if he had been dragged through a thorn bush. The stomach was drawn in, and the ribs showed; the tiny buttocks contracted and without flesh; and on one foot, stretching right across the arch, an open sore, white rimmed about a dark centre.
The boy looked up into the light and seemed to draw back from the inspection.
“Who are you?” asked Rra Pula in Setswana. “Where have you come from?”
The child stared at the light, but did not react to the question.
“Try in Kalanga,” Rra Pula said to Motopi. “Try Kalanga, then try Herero. He could be Herero. Or a Mosarwa. You can make yourself understood in these languages, Motopi. You see if you can get anything out of him.”
The man dropped to his haunches so as to be at the child’s level. He started in one language, enunciating the words carefully, and then, getting no reaction, moved to another. The boy remained mute.
“I do not think this child can speak,” he said. “I think that he does not know what I am saying.”
The woman moved forward and reached out to touch the child’s shoulder.
“You poor little thing,” she said. “You look as if …”
She gave a cry and withdrew her hand sharply. The boy had bitten her.
The man snatched at the child’s right arm and dragged him to his feet. Then, leaning forward, he struck him sharply across the face. “No,” he shouted. “Bad child!”
The woman, outraged, pushed the man away. “Don’t hit him,” she cried. “He’s frightened. Can’t you see? He didn’t mean to hurt me. I shouldn’t have tried to touch him.”
“You cannot have a child biting people, Mma,” said the man quietly. “We do not like that.”
The woman had wrapped a handkerchief around her hand, but a small blood stain had seeped through.
“I’ll get you some penicillin for that,” said Rra Pula. “A human bite can go bad.”
They looked down at the child, who had now lain down, as if preparing for sleep, but was looking up at them, watching them.
“The child has a very strange smell,” said Motopi. “Have you noticed that, Rra Pula?”
Rra Pula sniffed. “Yes,” he said. “Maybe it’s that wound. It’s suppurating.”
“No,” said Motopi. “I have a very good nose. I can smell that wound, but there is another smell too. It is a smell that you do not find on a child.”
“What’s that?” asked Rra Pula. “You recognise that smell?”
Motopi nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It is the smell of a lion. There is nothing else that has that smell. Only lion.”
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Rra Pula laughed.
“Some soap and water will sort all that out,” he said. “And something on that sore on his foot. Sulphur powder should dry it out.”
Motopi picked up the child, gingerl
y. The boy stared at him, and cowered, but did not resist.
“Wash him and then keep him in your tent,” said Rra Pula. “Don’t let him escape.”
The clients returned to their seats about the fire. The woman exchanged glances with the man, who lifted an eyebrow and shrugged.
“Where on earth has he come from?” she asked Rra Pula, as he poked at the fire with a charred stick.
“One of the local villages, I expect,” he said. “The nearest one is about twenty miles over that way. He’s probably a herd boy who got lost and wandered off into the bush. That happens from time to time.”
“But why has he got no clothes?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes the herd boys just wear a small apron. He probably lost his to a thorn bush. Perhaps he left it lying somewhere.”
He looked up at the woman. “These things happen a lot in Africa. There are plenty of children who go missing. They turn up. No harm comes to them. You aren’t worried about him, are you?”
The woman frowned. “Of course I am. Anything could have happened to him. What about the wild animals? He could have been taken by a lion. Anything could have happened to him.”
“Yes,” said Rra Pula. “It could. But it didn’t. We’ll take him tomorrow into Maun and leave him with the police down there. They can sort it out. They’ll work out where he’s come from and get him home.”
The woman seemed thoughtful. “Why did your man say that he smelled like a lion? Wasn’t that rather an odd thing to say?”
Rra Pula laughed. “People say all sorts of odd things up here. They see things differently. That man, Motopi, is a very good tracker. But he tends to talk about animals as if they were human beings. He says that they say things to him. He claims that he can smell an animal’s fear. That’s the way he talks. It just is.”