The Death of Rex Nhongo (17 page)

M
andiveyi traced a slow crisscross of the Sunningdale streets. He was driving his wife's aging Mercedes. It still had a problem with the timing and stalled on one corner in five, drawing attention to both car and driver. But, since he had little idea who he was looking for anyway, perhaps it made no difference.

He'd spoken to Chifura, the young operative who'd first collared the taxi driver for illegal parking outside the Central Intelligence Organization building. Mandiveyi approached the conversation warily because Chifura was one of the new breed: as brazenly ambitious as he was untrustworthy, brimming with meaningless Party rhetoric. He wondered whether Chifura's crass approach spoke only of inexperience or, in fact, a shift in the very culture of the Organization. It was, after all, a shift he'd witnessed throughout the establishment—as the ideologues had become criminals, so criminals became ideologues.

Mandiveyi chose his moment. He caught Chifura in the lift and made idle small-talk down to the ground floor. They exited the building together and went their separate ways before Mandiveyi stopped in his tracks and called his colleague back as if suddenly arrested by an afterthought. “Chifura!” he said. Then, when the young man turned, “Excuse me. I forgot. There is something I wanted to discuss.”

And he asked him about the taxi driver. He explained that he'd taken down his details because he'd thought he could be a contact worth cultivating, but the guy had given him a false name and number.

Chifura regarded him quizzically. He said, “He gave me his name as well, but I don't remember. It's weeks ago.”

“What about the car? Do you remember the car?”

Chifura shook his head. “I don't know. A Raum, Demio, Spacio. One of those.” Then, “Why are you so interested? What did he do to you?”

Mandiveyi kept his gaze steady. “He lied. He made a fool of me. I was drunk. I want to find him, show him how things are when I'm sober.”

Chifura smiled. It was, Mandiveyi considered, a grotesque expression that appeared to relish potential future cruelty: these young guys, the new breed—they scared even him. “I remember he told me he was from Sunningdale,” Chifura said. “But perhaps that was a lie too.”

“Sunningdale.” Mandiveyi shrugged, as if conceding defeat. “Not much to go on.”

“But if you find him you will teach him a lesson,” Chifura said, still smiling, eyes widening until Mandiveyi wondered whether delight in another's pain could ever be considered naïveté.

“You can count on it.”

Mandiveyi wouldn't be teaching anyone a lesson today. He'd been combing the streets since six a.m. and had seen plenty of Raums, Demios, Spacios and so on, but none that particularly jogged his memory. Frankly, he could barely remember anything about the taxi driver's appearance either: stocky, dark-skinned, middle-aged. The only thing he recalled with any certainty was the deep crease that bisected the man's forehead. He'd know that again if he saw it.

He stopped and bought a Coke from a tuck shop near the community center. It was just after eight. His phone rang: Phiri, demanding to know his whereabouts. “Just off the Airport Road,” Mandiveyi said vaguely. “I'm tracking down a source.”

“What source? Is this connected to the Chamber of Mines agenda?”

“I don't know. Just someone I'm trying to cultivate. I suppose it could be.”

As expected, Phiri gave him an earful.

The Central Intelligence Organization's current remit was all about addressing the blight of illegal dealing in precious metals. The 2006 Marange diamond rush had seen the country overrun by chancers of every nation, creed and hue. Now that the government had imposed some kind of order on the diamond fields, the chancers were looking elsewhere and the Organization was tasked with cracking down on the illicit trade in platinum and, above all, gold.

Phiri told him that an Untouchable was having a meeting at that very moment. He asked with unconcealed acidity whether Mandiveyi might trouble himself to investigate the lie of the land.

“Of course,” Mandiveyi said. He wasn't surprised Phiri was angry. After all, he'd intended his vagueness to be provocative: better Phiri's anger than having to field questions about his progress with the other matter.

“About the other matter,” Phiri said. “I want the gun.”

Mandiveyi answered slowly. He told him he was on it. But he'd had little time, with all the pressure being exerted by the Chamber of Mines.

“This is not the time to tell me lies, Mandiveyi. Don't forget, as it stands, I'm your friend in this situation. That's not something you want to change.”

Mandiveyi slid back behind the wheel of the Merc, phone wedged between ear and shoulder. He turned the ignition. For once it started first time. He considered Phiri's lie. Friends? Did the man not remember what he'd said outside Zim Café—that they were already on different sides? He assumed this inconsistency stemmed from Phiri's own fear. “I am not lying, sir,” he lied. “I know you are my friend and I appreciate that.”

He cut the call and slipped the car into “drive.” It promptly stalled.

Twenty minutes later, he sat across the hotel restaurant from the Untouchable. “Untouchable” was a nickname operatives granted those at the heart of any investigation who were not to be questioned, arrested or in any way inconvenienced by the Organization. This status derived from the individual's relationship to power, whether bought, earned or inherited. On occasion, months of legwork had come to nothing when the prime suspect turned out to be Untouchable. On occasion, the prime suspect bought such status at the very moment the net was closing. Experienced operatives didn't allow such absurdities to irritate them. They were an inevitable by-product of negotiating the geography of this political, economic and legal landscape. Besides, experienced operatives generally understood this as a quid pro quo for the likelihood that one day they would need to be Untouchable themselves.

Mandiveyi ordered coffee, but the Untouchable's meeting was over before it arrived.

The Untouchable and his colleague, presumably likewise Untouchable, if only by virtue of proximity, remained in their booth, but the third man stood up and, after curt handshakes, made for the exit. Mandiveyi followed him outside into the car park where he stopped by a battered Isuzu truck and lit a cigar­ette. The CIO got into his own car and watched from behind the wheel as the man made a phone call and then, apparently given pressing news, quickly discarded the cigarette, leaped into the truck and reversed somewhat recklessly out of his parking space. The CIO was caught by surprise. Fortunately, the Merc started first time and he was able to follow at a cautious distance. The truck cut through town to the Avenues where it pulled into the car park of a clinic called Corporate Health.

Mandiveyi watched the man smoke another cigarette before entering Reception. He then sat back, preparing for a long day's surveillance. But after ten minutes, the man had reappeared with company. Mandiveyi sat forward. This was unexpected and interesting. He recognized the Englishman, the
murungu
he'd met at the Jameson, the nurse…What was his name? The CIO scanned the address book on his phone: Jones, Jerry Jones.

Mandiveyi watched the two men in conversation. They got into their respective vehicles and drove away. The CIO went into the clinic. He talked to the receptionist, who was so indolent that it was hard to regard his attitude as anything but deliberately obstructive. However, when Mandiveyi showed him his ID, the man soon provided a name: Appiah.

I
t was a week after the beating before Bessie managed to visit Gilbert in Sunningdale. This was partly because her sister-in-law, Fadzai, had told her that he was fine—“I am not going to lie to you,” she said. “It is serious. But he's going to be OK. We are taking care of him.” And it was partly due to the situation at work, where Mrs. Jones seemed to be spending more time out of the house than ever and Mr. Jones or, more to the point, Theo relied on her care.

After talking to Fadzai, of course Bessie was concerned and asked Mr. Jones for a day, even just a few hours, to go and see Gilbert. He listened attentively and appeared horrified by her description of the injuries Gilbert had sustained. At one point, he even mentioned that perhaps he should go to Sunningdale and, as a nurse, see the situation for himself. However, when Bessie raised the possibility of taking time off that afternoon, he looked almost panic-stricken. “Yes. No. Of course you must go,” he said. Then, “It's just I'm supposed to be in Epworth. But it's fine. I'll call Dr. Tangwerai. You must go. Have we organized supper? For Theo, I mean. No? OK. Don't worry. I'm sure I can sort something out.”

As he spoke, her boss shifted from foot to foot and wouldn't meet her eye, and it took Bessie a moment to decipher any meaning from what he was saying. She wondered, not for the first time, why he didn't simply speak his mind. She'd heard him talk like this to his wife. She wondered how Mrs. Jones put up with it. But no sooner did she think this than she remembered all the times she'd witnessed the woman wilfully misunderstand her husband's, admittedly obtuse, intent for her own ends:
Can you take Theo… / No. That's fine. I love spending time…You know I do…It's just… / Great. I'll see you two later. Around five.
If Mrs. Jones was frustrated by the stuttering style of communication her husband employed, she'd certainly learned to exploit it.

In the end, standing in the kitchen, her hands raised in rubber gloves dripping with dishwater, Bessie surprised herself by impatiently cutting through the prevarication. “Don't worry, sir,” she said. “My sister-in-law, she says that Gilbert is OK. I will go on my day off.”

“No. Sorry. I wasn't suggesting…” her boss blustered, before petering to a halt of resignation and no little relief. Then, “Thank you, Bessie.”

Bessie did speak to Gilbert on the phone a couple of days later, but that did nothing to allay her anxiety. His voice sounded strong enough, but there was something in his tone that disquieted her: an emptiness, a removal—she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

Before Bessie met Gilbert the first time, she'd heard talk of him. Her friends, the kind who courted male attention, described a guy who was charming and funny and smart, but way too big for his boots. They repeated stories of the things he'd said and done, his attempts to impress, his continuous boasting that would have been unbearable but for the glint in his eye that suggested he might be in on the joke. He appeared to be one of those boys whom girls discuss while constantly bemoaning the very fact they're discussing him.

“Why are we even talking about him?” one would say. “He does not deserve our time.”

“And wouldn't he love to think he is the subject of our conversation?” said another.

“So arrogant!” declared a third and fourth simultaneously.

Eventually Bessie saw him for herself at the school gates. He was at the heart of a gang from the local business college, she on the fringes of a group of the more precocious high-school girls. He was engaged in an elaborate explanation of his future plans, which involved university in the States, Harvard Business School and something called “intellectual property.” “That is my future,” he announced. “In Africa, do we not have good ideas? Of course. But we have not learned how to protect them.”

Bessie had never heard this expression—“intellectual property”—before, but to judge by the looks on the other faces, even those nodding enthusiastic agreement, nobody else had either. But Gilbert didn't seem to mind and he expanded with enthusiasm and a limber articulacy, which Bessie could appreciate if not follow.

“In the past, wars were fought over land,” he said. “In the future, wars will be fought over ideas. In fact, it's already happening.”

It was at this moment that he glanced at Bessie for the first time and his grandiloquence waned. His features arranged themselves into an expression that seemed to suggest he was puzzling to answer a question she hadn't posed. His friends saw an opportunity in his sudden reticence and began to fill the silence with stories of their own. But Gilbert just looked at Bessie. Later, he told her, “For me, the clocks stopped.”

When she fell pregnant, Bessie was inevitably the subject of school gossip. When it emerged that Gilbert was the father, the students responded knowingly: wasn't this always the outcome when a boy with too much confidence charmed a girl with too little?

They speculated freely that Gilbert would deny paternity or simply run away. But such considerations never occurred to Bessie. Because, though she recognized the brittle pride, recklessness and ambition that defined Gilbert for other people, the essential quality he'd shown her from the first moment he'd looked her way was devotion, and it was deep-rooted and unfaltering.

In fact, Bessie sometimes wished Gilbert's devotion were slightly less consistent, since being the object of such passion resulted in a constant barrage of demanding flattery, requiring resourceful response. In fact, once, recently, he'd declared, “I will always have enough love for us both.” And she'd told him that wasn't how it worked and, seeing his crestfallen expression, immediately regretted her unkindness. His love for her burned like high sun and it never dimmed, and she knew she should be grateful and for the most part she was.

All these thoughts and memories returned to haunt her when she spoke to him on the phone after the beating at the hands of Chipangano. He told her he was fine. He told her exactly what had happened and why. He told her that he would be back driving the taxi within the week, because what else could he do? He asked this last, rhetorical, question with a suggestion of bitterness.

Unsure how to respond, she said that he was lucky to be alive, that he must be careful, that she was praying for him every night and every morning.

“You are praying for me?” he said. Then again, “You are praying for me?”

They concluded their conversation soon afterwards. But she couldn't shake this last repeated question from her mind. His voice hadn't held any particular intonation. He hadn't, for example, disparaged her. Nonetheless, to Bessie, that very lack of intonation spoke eloquently of his fury. He was so angry and, for the very first time since she'd known him, that anger had subsumed his love for her. She needed to know the source of his anger—the beating, those who'd done it to him, his impotence, his whole situation, a broad disappointment in his circumstances, or God? And, now she thought about it, weren't all of these truly anger with God? And didn't such anger always have terrible consequences?

Bessie worked to the end of the week. She cooked and cleaned and bathed and played and washed and scrubbed and washed and scrubbed. She kept the white family going. They were having problems of their own. In quiet moments over the stove, Mr. Jones told her about their friend, a Zimbabwean, who was in the hospital, and that was why Madam was out so much, between working and checking on the husband and child. In her every spare moment Bessie prayed. She prayed for the love of God, because she knew that only God's love can heal a person. When Gilbert had said that he had enough love for them both and she had contradicted him, this was in fact what she'd meant—only God has enough love. She wished she'd explained herself. She would explain when she visited on her day off.