The door to the Bantu Eating House was being bolted and locked. A second later the lights went out. Almost in panic, Tsotsi looked around the street. I’ve lost him, he thought. He’s got away. He ran very quickly back the way he had come. There was no sign of the cripple. At the side street where the cripple had escaped behind the car, Tsotsi stopped. Why have I come back—maybe he’s gone forward. He was out of breath, but ran back even quicker to the Bantu Eating House and then beyond it. When he saw him, his relief escaped in a small, hysterical laugh.

My man. I nearly lost you. I have found you back. My poor, slow man. I’m sorry. I tell you I’m sorry my poor slow man. But what can I do?

There was nothing he could do, but drop back again into the shadows, and follow, waiting for the right moment. It was inevitable, like sunrise, or sunset. You chose a man, and you kept after him until it was over. His new-found sympathy regretted this. It pained him to see the tired and slow way the beggar moved, thinking that he was at last safe. But what could Tsotsi do. He had chosen and this was his man. With each step, each drag nearer their appointed meeting, his sympathy cut deeper until the time came when it felt as if his feet and his heart were pointing in opposite directions and that no one way was forward for all of him. There was no conflict. It wasn’t a question of should I or shouldn’t I. That didn’t exist. He was resigned to the inevitable, watching it unfold as doctors would the last stages of a disease in a patient who is beyond help.

Tsotsi waited with painful anticipation for the moment when Morris Tshabalala would realize again that he was being followed. It seemed it would never come. Either because he was tired or not caring or feeling completely safe, the cripple did not look back once. It reached a point where Tsotsi could no longer stand the strain. He made noises. He coughed, he whistled, and when Morris Tshabalala started crawling past the loading bays, Tsotsi came the closest he had been since Terminal Place.

At last it happened, and from that moment—the cripple looking back white-eyed at Tsotsi who paused under a lamp—the last minutes before their meeting exploded as violently as the preceding hours had been slow, slow in their torture and accumulation of terror.

First the money, piled by the cripple into a careful heap in the light. This was the justification—of everything. Of the choice on the crowded pavement of Terminal Place, of a terror that had broken a man’s spirit more surely than his body had been halved by a falling beam in the chaos of a mineshaft, of useless sympathy burning now like a small candle where darkness would have been better, and Morris Tshabalala had put it down, the lustrous heap of it, as if, like a full stop in the middle of the night, it would end the rhythm of Tsotsi’s feet and cancel what was yet to come. It was cheap. Death would have been a bargain at that price, and now it was trying to buy life. A sense of outrage at its belittlement of all that had happened gripped Tsotsi. He kicked it flying into the night, and it was not just for his own sake but for the other man’s as well.