Sheerluck Holmes and the case of Comrade Carl

I lit up a Cuban cigarillo and blew smoke rings towards the dirty window.

I couldn’t afford the real deal full-size cigars any more … not after Tito had whacked another R6.73 in excise tax on each one. And the days of whisky were long gone … especially now that the collapsing rand had put Johnnie Walker beyond my reach.

Maybe I should have become the EFF’s token honkie when they asked me to a couple of years ago after Kim Heller bailed out on them.

I did think about it, but I knew I would be ducking for cover every time Julius pulled out a gat to show how much of a main oke he was.

Still, I had a lot to be thankful for.

I had changed the name of the agency from Maltese Falcon to Sheerluck Holmes just in time, before the rioting crowds thought I was a foreigner from Malta, just because I rented the office above the Bangla Deshi spaza shop. (Also it had enabled me to employ an assistant by the name of Watson … You could never have too much insurance or too many connections.) And, of course, I still had those ANC connections.

I don’t support the okes, understand, but business is business and it’s good because they don’t trust each other, the cops or their own security services. And I still am the best private dick on the East Rand, china, white boy or not…

So, I wasn’t surprised when Carl Niehaus sidled up to the main door and rang the bell.

I knew it was him, who else would be wearing a brown fedora hat, sunglasses and a winter overcoat in Benoni on a Tuesday afternoon in summer? Clearly, he was trying to get away from that CIA hitman, Chris Vick.

“Howzit, boet,” I started, to put him at ease.

“I’m not your boet, I am fighting for radical economic transformation. You still stink of apartheid…”

I jumped in: “And I love you, too, Carl. How’s your mom?”

He glared.

“I need your help in finding the secret camp for the coronavirus people coming back from China.”

I ran a few scenarios through my head.

“So you can bum petrol money from your comrades to go and see your sick mother there?

“Or, so that you could sneak Jacob Zuma in at some stage and score another 21 days sick leave for him?”

Carl shook his head so vehemently the fedora almost slid off his head.

Then I knew, it wasn’t even his. He’d nicked it out of Bheki Cele’s hat room, where the police chief kept his collection of 674 head pieces, guarded 24/7/365 by the task force.

Hats off (ha ha) to Carl for sneaking in there …

“As a former uMkhonto weSizwe operator, I have been assigned by Comrade Ace to determine the exact location.”

I chipped in: “But doesn’t Ace know everything about the Free State?”

“The person in the tenders department is a Cyril man. And we need to get moving straight away. We have two trucks full of face masks for R76,432.17 each that we got from Iqbal Surve’s Chinese friends, and we need to get them to the camp.

“We can sign and backdate the tenders later, after we have sorted out the Cyril man.”

I looked at him.

“I’m on it, boet. I’ll be all over this like a rash … I mean a virus.”

Brendan Seery.

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