Snake Read online

  She adjusted Clint’s position, and her gown began to slip open in the front. She let it fall how it pleased, aware her bosom was gradually pushing out. Soon both patches would be catching the light.

  “What sort of funny feelings?” he asked. “Do you think they’re like mine?”

  “How should I know?”

  “I—I can’t put mine into words,” he said.

  “Nor mine either,” she said, letting her knees slowly part.

  He gulped down what was left in his mug. Sweat seeped onto his brow. It must have felt like a wet dream coming true.

  Her breasts were out. Round and full, but not so heavy she got a heat rash under them, as some did. Tanned a deep orange like the rest of her. Every bit.

  “Something embarrassing you?”

  “No!” He looked away.

  Again, she knew what to do. She pulled Clint’s head around and guided him to slide down off her shoulders, parting her cleavage. This made the adhesive prickle and the patches feel as if they might pop off.

  “Christ,” he said, staring.

  She took Clint and redirected him so that he eased back up around her neck, his tongue flickering soft against her skin, his two little feet scratching as he twisted and used his belly scales. She moved as sensuously as the snake did, working him into a comfortable position, and then she held him there.

  “I told you about staring,” she murmured.

  “You actually … I mean, you really do get a.…”

  “Isn’t that why you came round here tonight?”

  “No, I didn’t.…”

  “The show? Didn’t turn you on, too? Or is it only us girls?”

  Clint was heading down between her breasts, running a sleek chin over her hard little belly. She let him think he was getting away, then clamped his head tight in her thighs, halting his slither, for just a second.

  He went pale.

  “Do you like the encore, baby?” she asked, parting her legs and allowing Clint to gain the floor. The python naturally went straight under the dressing table.

  “Pardon?” he said, coming down off tiptoe.

  “Does he make you feel jealous?” she asked, lolling back, an elbow in a mess of spilled powder. “That’s what most of them say. That Clint makes them jealous. Green, that’s the color they go.”

  He took a pace toward her and then said, “Will it stay there?”

  “My feelings are getting even funnier.”

  “But will the snake…?”

  “He’ll come if I whistle.”

  “Will you?”

  “What?” she asked, making her smile dirty.

  The gown slipped from her shoulders. She stood, ankles well apart, hands on hips, then began humming an opening number, lifting one shoulder at him and then the other.

  His eyes darted from her to the floor and back.

  “Touch,” she invited.

  He saw her mouth pout to whistle.

  “Come on, it’s not cold,” she said. And whistled very softly.

  He started back. “Jesus, Eve.…”

  She began thrusting with her hips, jiggling her bosom, but all very slowly and in time to the soft, soft whistle.

  Then turned her mouth into a big, welcoming smile.

  His hand reached out for her, but she swayed back, teasingly. To touch her, he would have to take another step forward. He looked at the foot of the dressing table, as if measuring the distance with his eye.

  “What’s the matter, baby? Haven’t you got?”

  And she imitated the rearing action of her other pet, spreading her hand like a hood, and laughing at how funny this was. Which rather shocked her.

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  He was pointing behind her. Clint must have peeped his head out.

  “Oh, so that’s what turns you on? I’ve got one like a little apple!”

  Old gags always found their uses. And she turned, standing now with her ankles together, and smiled at him over her shoulder. While tightening one thigh muscle and then the other, knowing this would make her bottom bunch and bounce.

  Bunch and bounce.

  He had to. He started toward her. She raised her arms slightly so that he could slip his hands around and cup her, squeeze her, grab her.

  As his sweating palms brushed her sides, she bent forward and dragged Clint out by the tail so his underneath rasped on the floor. This hurt him and he hissed.

  Behind her, kitchy-coo nearly fell over himself.

  “Eve, for God’s sake, put it in the basket!”

  She tugged at the bow on her bikini, removed the patches rather painfully, and confronted him again, with the python once more over her shoulders, hanging like a tape measure.

  “Come—and get it,” she said.

  “This isn’t—”

  “Ach, don’t keep Clinty boy waiting, baby—he wants to jump into his own beddy, too.”

  “And—”

  She nodded at the divan.

  “All clothesy-wosies neatly folded.”

  His dilemma was a knockout.

  Up went the hands to his bow tie, but Clint’s head followed the movement, and they dropped away, shaking. She managed to get a hand to the basket and flipped back its lid. He started to tug his clothes off and a shirt button went ping against the wash basin without him noticing because he never took his eyes off her. Not once.

  “I’m ready!”

  “Look, Clint,” she giggled.

  He glanced down at himself, over the slight potbelly, and saw nothing was happening.

  “Oh, Jesus.…”

  “You’ll just have to show him, Clint, won’t you? Or Eve’s going to be a very frustrated lady.”

  The python went into the routine as if he knew it, but took his cues from the light touches she gave as her fingers fluttered and fondled. Clint was really a very, very dumb animal, but all the more lovable for it.

  “It must be the snake!” he said. “This has never—”

  “You’re not impotent, are you, my sweet? Not leading a girl on for nothing?”

  “Perhaps it’s because I’ve never thought of you this—”

  “Do I remind you of your mother?” She laughed.

  There was the gleam again.

  “What you’re doing to me isn’t bloody funny,” he pleaded.

  His additional little problem had not been part of her plan— it was possibly as much of a surprise to her—but it was well worth cultivating. She brought Clint up from the front way, taking ages over it and watching its effect.

  She must have overdone the last bit, because the problem suddenly disappeared.

  “You’re really ready, then, my sweet?”

  “Eve,” he begged in a whisper.

  “Let’s make it an orgy, hey? The three of us?”

  She had also dropped her voice very low.

  “Please! I’ll pay anything. Just—”

  That was the moment.

  “Pay? It’s free! Come on!”

  He stepped urgently toward her, stopping short.

  How she laughed. Rocked and wheezed and pouted kisses. Laughed and laughed. Very softly, laughed and laughed. Staggered a little, too, and had to wind Clint once around her neck for him to stay aboard. Which brought on a coughing fit.

  “Whore!” he snarled at her.

  “Worm!” she retorted.

  “I want!”

  “I don’t—not with you, baby.”

  “I will!”

  “No, you bloody won’t!”

  All this in whispers still.

  “You think I’m scared?”

  “Huh! I can see you are!” And she stuck out her tongue at him.

  Pa had always cautioned that one day she would go too far with one of her acts. Do something to a man she wouldn’t believe possible.

  Or upset a snake so much it would forget its manners and be forced to take advantage.

  As she lay strangling in a scarlet hurricane on the floor of the dressing room, she had to agre
e, for the first time in her life, that the no-good old drunkard had been right about one thing.

  Then her top plate fell out and she grimaced up at the ceiling like a Halloween lantern. One in which a candle guttered briefly before the pumpkin turned a dull rust color, all mottled and nasty.

  2

  MONDAY MORNING IN the morgue was hell for some, heaven for others.

  The NCO normally in charge, Van Rensberg, was on sick leave after an industrial accident—as the compensation papers called it—that had given him septicemia, and his place had been reluctantly taken by Sergeant Jacobus Kloppers, recently returned from Rhodesia’s northern border.

  Kloppers was having adjustment problems. First to the idea of being out of the firing line, which he had secretly not enjoyed, and then to the fact that his previous billet had been usurped by a Jew. He wasn’t particularly anti-Semitery, or whatever the word was, but it remained inescapably the Jewishness of the bloke that was causing the trouble. It didn’t seem long since he had seen a story in the papers saying, FIRST JEWISH RECRUIT GRADUATES AT POLICE COLLEGE, and now Trekkersburg had one all to themselves, with more press pictures to prove it. JEWISH CONSTABLE IN CHARGE OF BOOK OF LIFE, said the headline on a clipping his wife had posted to him, while the caption had been a lot of rubbish about loving your country whoever you were. But seeing that all white citizens had their Book was a most responsible job, Kloppers had argued on his return, not something to be left to a rookie. His superiors, however, whose enthusiasm for the new regulation had always seemed suspect to him, hadn’t seen it that way. Any fool could supervise personal particulars, they told him, not that Oppenheimer was anything like a fool, only very junior, and what they needed desperately, higher up, was a seasoned man good at paper work. Yes, hopefully as good at it as he was, and willing to work in quiet surroundings, largely on his own for most of the time. In effect, the candidate would be virtually in charge of a department. An important one. Run it his own way. Would he take it? Good! A very wise move. Only he must be careful and always wear his rubber gloves.…

  The bastards.

  It wasn’t the Book of Life he held in his hands. Just the opposite, and woefully short on personal particulars it was, too In fact, Kloppers couldn’t even put a name to half his problems, and had given them labels marked with the letters of the alphabet for the time being.

  They were everywhere. The fridge had been full by Saturday night, and so all four tables had been used up, with the leftovers going in the sink—two babies, Bantu—and on trays on the floor.

  Kloppers felt again the mild panic he had known when given his first filing job in the office of a very untidy lieutenant. He just didn’t know where to start. But he did know there was far too much for the district surgeon to get through in one morning, and he’d have to arrange some sort of order of priority. There were no whites among them, so bang went his first theory. He could try going on down through the classes of citizenship—Colored, Indian, and Bantu—but that seemed like splitting hairs. He could, of course, divide them according to whether death was suspicious or accidental. Yes, that was it. Providing he could tell … Man, it was going to be a bugger. A nightmare. And Dr. Christiaan Strydom was bound to come chuckling in very shortly.

  “Ach, start with A,” he mumbled to himself, leaving his stuffy little office and almost tripping over K.

  While his black assistant, N2134 Nxumalo, sat outside in the sun and baked comfortably in his constable’s uniform, charging up warmth against the chill indoors, and much enjoying this unprecedentedly slow start to the day. A great advantage of his position was that he was believed incapable of any initiative, and was expected to wait until he had been told what to do. Usually, old Sarge Van Rensberg would have had him running round in circles by now, threatening to take the bone cutters to his tondo if he didn’t get down out of his bloody tree and do some work.

  “You’s a idle kaffir!” Nxumalo mimicked fondly, shaking his head at the memory of their four years together. Now, when this one could justly call him an idle kaffir, he didn’t. Mad!

  And bad at his job, which Nxumalo felt he could have done blindfolded. Still, that was not his worry.

  Nxumalo coughed and sneezed. The consequence of trying to laugh with a lungful of smoke. The funniest thing about his new boss, Kloppers, was that he obviously thought the weekend was over. That there would not be any more bodies landing on the doorstep to spoil his lovely lists. Whereas there would have to be one at least, if not two or half a dozen, to add to his troubles before nightfall.

  He would see. It was the way.

  His name had been Songqoza Sishanagane Shepstone Siyayo. Everyone called him Lucky. He was dead. Not all of him, but enough for a working definition.

  If his blood still moved, this was thanks to gravitation rather than circulation, and the mass of cells still alive would be getting the news by and by, so it was only a matter of time. Although, with their communications center all shot to hell, this would possibly amount to no more than grim rumor before their own sudden disintegration began. Dust to dust, potassium to potassium.

  Lucky’s other dependents were, however, being informed directly of his murder. And asked to come down without delay to the small store off the Peacevale road. Where parts of them would die also. Because, as swiftly as the bullet traveled, it would nonetheless take a little while to get around to them all and realize fully its powers of destruction.

  Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad straightened up, popped another peppermint into his mouth, and backed off three paces.

  Death was never pretty, but this time it came damn close to it.

  Lucky had died against the shelves that held his stock of sweets, up near the single dusty display window where the light was good. Now that the torn canvas awning had been raised, this light came pure and unimpeded from the sky and, by way of reflection, off the glaring dirt road and the paintwork of the two vehicles parked outside, to put a sparkle into each wide-mouthed glass jar.

  By narrowing the eyes, a variety of colorful impressions was possible. The most strongly suggested of these—if the least appropriate—seemed the gem-studded wall of a fairytale cavern.

  It was all there, from the uncut glow of fruit gums to pink pearls of sugar-coated peanuts, silver nuggets of foil-wrapped nougat, amber slabs of toffee brittle, jade lozenges in lemon and lime flavors, and, spilled out below, the penny trappings of playground sovereignty lollipop scepters and a great wealth of gold coins.

  Over which twinkled a prodigious scattering of rock-candy diamonds and hard-boiled emeralds—and as many, if not more, blood rubies so thickly strewn that only the smallest pendants no longer glistened.

  Amid which sprawled, like the errant guardian of a treasure trove who had just nodded off, a brightly dressed figure in brown sandals. The peppermints lay over him like a gentle fall of peach blossom.

  In the ten minutes, Lucky’s skin color had lightened from plain to milk chocolate, he had begun to give off a sickly smell, and the surprised expression on his face had almost completely melted away.

  “Christ, ja, but it’s hot,” said Kramer, turning to the white sergeant in khaki overalls at his side. The grease marks on the man’s flat, solid features made him think of a workshop manual.

  “Not so lucky—hey, Lieutenant?”

  “Better than cancer.”

  “They get cancer?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Man, you live and learn.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Kramer murmured dryly, confirmed in a belief that Bokkie Howells owed everything to heredity, including his engineering genius—same as a weaver bird. “Now back to business. What if—”

  “The gun, sir—thirty-two or thirty-eight?”

  “Eight. Bull’s-eye at close range.”

  “Not two shots?” queried Bokkie, pointing.

  “That’s the exit wound.”

  “And you say it’s the same method as before?”

  “Uh-hu
h. Number five. Till cleaned out. Car used for getaway. Talking of same, what about my shocks, then? How long will it take?”

  Bokkie was from the police garage; the pair of them had been road-testing Kramer’s new Chev Commando when the call to Peacevale came through. The suspension was altogether too soft for dirt.

  “Could have it ready for you by tomorrow, say five o’clock.”

  “Two days for four shocks?”

  “Have a heart, sir. Got to order the spares. Make out the requisitions. Hey, he’s starting to pee in his pants.”

  “It’s legal.”

  “Could try—and I mean try, mark you—to get something done by tonight. But I’d have to take it now.”

  “Fine with me. Uniformed has put up roadblocks, and Zondi is here anyway with his own vehicle. You go when you want.”

  The sergeant seemed in no hurry. He looked around the store and then out over the heads of the crowd at the shanties ranged opposite.

  “Not much of a place,” he sniffed.

  “True,” agreed Kramer, glancing at his watch.

  “Can’t have been much in the till either, this being a Monday.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Kramer picked up an interesting piece of mud, which bore the clear imprint of an unusual rubber sole. The damned thing proved within seconds to have come off the dead man’s left sandal.

  “Five in two weeks is bad,” Bokkie conceded, “but they must have all been in Peacevale—haven’t seen a thing about them in the papers. What’s so special?”

  Irritation made Kramer bite through the dissolving peppermint and hurt his tongue.

  “The papers?” he snapped, tasting blood. “Reporters? Those bastards can’t see what’s under their noses—and their values, so called, are all up to kak!”

  Bokkie flinched. He could be an insensitive sod in many ways, and intellectual words were wasted on him, but his ear never missed a grated gear change.

  “Hey, sir, I didn’t mean to—”

  “What’s news to them? You tell me. Another coon killed in Peacevale? Hell, no. That happens all the time—that’s not news. But let a Monday Clubber lift a bottle of sherry in a supermarket, and they bloody crucify her on headlines so wide.” Kramer lifted his arms.

  “Fair’s fair, sir. They do put wog death sentences in—I’ve seen them.”