long that might be.
Well, before the Chinese girls and their mother started working in the lucrative counterfeiting industry, their mother had run a dog cemetery right next to the white neighbourhood of Parktown West outside Johannesburg. Business was bad; dogs ate as well and as nutritiously as people generally did in that area, so they lived far too long. But then their mother realized that the big sister and the middle sister could increase their turnover by putting out poisoned dog food here and there in the surrounding parks, where the whites’ poodles and Pekinese ran free. At the time, the little sister was too young and might easily have got it into her head to taste the dog food if she got hold of it.
In a short time the owner of the dog cemetery had twice as much to do. And the family would probably still be making a good living today, if only they hadn’t become, to tell the truth, a bit too greedy. Because when there were more dead dogs in the park than living ones, those white racists had pointed straight at the only Chink in the area and her daughters.
‘Yes, that was certainly prejudiced of them,’ said Nombeko.
Their mother had had to pack her bags quickly, and she hid herself and her children in central Johannesburg and changed careers.
That was a few years ago now, but the girls could probably remember the various ways of dosing dog food.
‘Well, now we’re talking about eight dogs – and about poisoning them just enough,’ said Nombeko. ‘So they get a little bit sick for a day or two. No more than that.’
‘Sounds like a typical case of antifreeze poisoning,’ said the middle sister.
‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ said the big sister.
And then they argued about the appropriate dose. The middle sister thought that a cup and a half should do, but the big sister pointed out that they were dealing with large German shepherds here, not some little Chihuahua.
In the end, the girls agreed that two cups was the right amount to put the dogs in a dreadful condition until the next day.
The girls approached the problem in such a carefree manner that Nombeko already regretted asking for their help. Didn’t they realize how much trouble they would be in when the poisoned dog food was traced back to them?
‘Nah,’ said the little sister. ‘It will all work out. We’ll have to start by ordering a bottle of antifreeze, otherwise we can’t poison anything.’
Now Nombeko was twice as regretful. Didn’t they realize that the security personnel would figure out it was them in just a few minutes, once they discovered what had been added to their usual shopping list?
And then Nombeko thought of something.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything until I get back. Nothing!’
The girls watched Nombeko go in surprise. What was she up to?
The fact was that Nombeko had thought of something she’d read in one of the research director’s countless reports to the engineer. It wasn’t about antifreeze, but ethylene glycol. It said in the report that the researchers were experimenting with liquids that had a boiling point of over one hundred degrees Celsius in order to gain a few tenths of a second by raising the temperature at which critical mass would be reached. That was where the ethylene glycol came in. Didn’t antifreeze and ethylene glycol have similar properties?
If the research facility’s library was at its worst when it came to the latest news, it was at its best when it came to more general information. Such as confirmation that ethylene glycol and antifreeze were more than almost the same thing. They were the same thing.
Nombeko borrowed two of the keys in the engineer’s cupboard and sneaked down to the big garage and into the chemicals cupboard next to the electrical station. There she found a nearly full seven-gallon barrel of ethylene glycol. She poured a gallon into the bucket she’d brought along and returned to the girls.
‘Here you go – this is plenty, with some to spare,’ she said.
Nombeko and the girls decided that they would start by mixing a very mild dose into the dog food to see what would happen, and then they would increase the dose until all eight dogs were off sick without causing the guards to become suspicious.
Therefore the Chinese girls lowered the dose from two cups to one and three-quarters, upon Nombeko’s recommendation, but they made the mistake of letting the little sister take care of the dosing itself – that is, the one sister of the three who had been too little in the good old days. Thus she mixed in one and three-quarters cups of ethylene glycol per dog in the first, conservative round. Twelve hours later, all eight dogs were as dead as those in Parktown West a few years earlier. Furthermore, the guard commander’s food-sneaking cat was in a critical condition.
One characteristic of ethylene glycol is that it rapidly enters the bloodstream via the intestines. Then the liver turns it into glycolaldehyde, glycolic acid and oxalate. If there is enough of these, they take out the kidneys before affecting the lungs and heart. The direct cause of death in the eight dogs was cardiac arrest.
The immediate results of the youngest Chinese girl’s miscalculation were that the alarm was sounded, that the guards went on high alert, and that it was, of course, impossible for Nombeko to smuggle herself out in a rubbish bin.
It was only day two before the girls were called in for interrogation, but while they were sitting there and flatly denying involvement, the security personnel found a nearly empty bucket of ethylene glycol in the boot of one of the 250 workers’ cars. Nombeko had access to the garage, thanks to the engineer’s key cupboard, of course; the boot in question was the only one that happened to be unlocked, and she had to put the bucket somewhere. The owner of the car was a half-ethical sort of guy – on the one hand, he would never betray his country; on the other hand, as luck would have it, he had chosen that very day to swipe his department director’s briefcase and the money and chequebook it contained. This was found alongside the bucket, and when all was said and done, the man had been seized, interrogated, fired . . . and sentenced to six months in prison for theft, plus thirty-two years for an act of terror.
‘That was close,’ said the little sister once the three sisters were no longer suspects.
‘Shall we try again?’ the middle sister wondered.
‘But then we’d have to wait for them to get new dogs,’ said the big sister. ‘The old ones are all gone.’
Nombeko didn’t say anything. But she thought that her prospects for the future weren’t much brighter than those of the director’s cat, who had started having convulsions.
On a Good Samaritan, a bicycle thief and a wife who smoked more and more
Since Henrietta’s money was gone, Ingmar had to do most of his hitchhiking from Nice back to Södertälje without eating. But in Malmö, the dirty, hungry junior post office clerk happened to meet a soldier of the Salvation Army who was on his way home after a long day in the service of the Lord. Ingmar asked if the soldier could spare a piece of bread.
The Salvationist immediately allowed himself to be governed by the spirit of love and compassion, so much so that Ingmar was allowed to come home with him.
Once there, he served mashed turnips with pork and then settled Ingmar in his bed; he himself would sleep on the floor before the stove. Ingmar yawned and said that he was impressed by the soldier’s friendliness. To this the soldier replied that the explanation for his actions was in the Bible, not least in the Gospel of Luke, where one could read about the Good Samaritan. The Salvationist asked Ingmar if he would mind if he read a few lines from the Holy Book.
‘Not at all,’ said Ingmar, ‘but read quietly because I need to sleep.’
And then he dozed off. He woke the next morning to the scent of something baking.