The Secret History of Las Vegas (14 page)

E
skia had been waiting two hours and was already irritated when Asia arrived at his hotel, a little breathless, at ten thirty.

Sorry, she said as he let her in. I had to be somewhere. As always she laid out the Bible. He hurriedly stuffed some bills into it and barely let her undress before taking her roughly, bending her over the edge of the bed. He came quickly and as she straightened her clothes, he said, I'm not done yet.

Multiple pops count as multiple visits, she said, pointing to the Bible and walking into the bathroom to freshen up.

He walked over to his wallet and grabbed some more bills, which he stuffed into the Bible. The first time he found the ritual cute, but now it angered him. He guessed that part of Sunil's attraction to this woman had to do with that Bible. That Asia was, in a way, a surrogate Jan. Even the Bible, that little detail, Sunil hadn't overlooked. It wasn't red, but one can't have everything, Eskia mused.

While she was gone, he thought about Jan. How brave, single-minded, and so stubbornly sure of her convictions she had been—enough to risk everything. Jan had turned away from her upbringing as a racist Afrikaner, from her training and job as a spy for the South African Security Services in deep cover in a liberal South African university, to become an informer for the ANC. Although Eskia wanted to believe it was Jan's love for him that turned her, he knew it wasn't. The tipping point came the day she opened her father's Bible. Eskia was there, saw her turn pale and let the book fall to the ground. He bent to pick it up and saw that her father had crossed out the handwritten dedication from President Botha, scrawling in red capital letters across it, the word “LIAR.” He saw the look that crossed her face, as if her entire universe was folding in on itself. There was a long moment when neither of them moved or spoke. They barely breathed. And then he let her kiss him. And make love to him.

Of course he fell, who can resist that kind of love, a love where you are needed desperately? Jan loved Eskia with a zeal he knew was driven by her fear of falling back into the old hate she'd been raised in. But in those dark times you took what comfort you could because in the end it was all grace.

Jan's ring, which Eskia now wore on his thumb, was now the shape of his heart, hot and weighty with despair. It was all he had left of her. He lost track of Jan when she got arrested. She was gone long enough to accept, even beyond his verbal denials, that she was dead. In a way, his search, when it began, was not to find her, but rather to let her go properly. Working in the new government's security services was a great help. That's how he found out about the bodies turning up around the farm at Vlakplaas, and some in the river, too.

He had a hard time finding Vlakplaas. Trauma messes with recollection; things that never existed become part of your memory of a place, and the very things that are absolutely vital to remembering are erased. He got lost several times, stopping always to ask for directions, careful to choose only blacks or coloreds or Indians because it seemed like whites would never tell him how to get there. But everyone pretended they had never heard of it. The most feared place in South Africa, and people who were mere miles from it couldn't remember where it was, or how to get there.

When Eskia finally found the farm, there was a white Afrikaans family, with very young children, living there. How was it possible? Everyone knew what had happened there. The bars on the windows, bloodstains on the guardhouse, faded but still visible. All of it still there and these people bought it to grow food on? Brought children to live there?

He saw them, a couple of slight girls, blond and sprightly, swimming in that river that had held so many rotting bodies. It was unnatural, and perhaps that was worse even than what had really gone on there.

Farther back from the edges of the farm, up in the hills, a small group was digging for bodies, like people prospecting for treasure. They moved across the stubby grass of the hills, in bright red or black, prodding the ground with converted ski poles or sharpened sticks, feeling always for a looseness, a hollowness in the red earth, for a hint. The figures would straighten up, heads cocked into the wind, listening as though hearing their names. A couple would stop while the others moved on. Engaged in some beautiful ballet only they understood. Moving forward, slowly, but always forward. Leaving a legacy of holes behind them.

Eskia approached and greeted them softly in Zulu, Sawbona. They paused and looked up and that was when he realized they were mostly women. They smiled and returned to their digging, stopping only when they unearthed a body, or bones, or whatever fragment of a person they found. Then they lifted the remains reverentially out of the ground and laid them on a white plastic sheet, awaiting identification. There was a tenderness in this scene, the sheer sorrow that stills anger into a river of serenity, into a clarity so cold its brittleness is more threatening, quivering before shattering into a rage that can obliterate.

He sat on an outcrop of stone and took deep breaths, noticing for the first time the small crowd of people walking between the excavators, pausing by each set of remains, looking for something to identify a loved one, something as small as a tuft of hair or a birthmark. When someone was identified, there was a silence as the remains were gathered and carried back down the hill, past the farm to the road where cars were parked, as though any sound—a cry, a wail—would desecrate the delicate balance the excavators worked with.

Eskia came regularly for six years, joining the silent search, until he found, among a pile of bones, Jan's ring, with the shimmering butterfly wing. Unlike the others, he took no remains, just the ring. There would be no mourning for him, no grieving. Just a vain hate, one that had no target, no focus, until he found, on a list of names of Vlakplaas personnel, Dr. Sunil Singh.

Asia came back into the room, startling him. With the practiced ease of a croupier, she counted the money in the Bible without seeming to look. She crossed to the middle of the room, stripped, and said: I'm ready.

He tied her to the bedposts with the belts from the hotel robes, and he fucked her until she cried out from an orgasm, then he dozed off beside her, only to awaken half an hour later with a scream.

Shh, she said, holding him with one arm, the other still tied.

Absently he wondered how she'd freed herself.

Are you okay, she asked.

Eskia gasped, coughing, the taste of rust on his tongue as he woke from the dream. It felt like he was back in it all.

Asia hugged Eskia from behind. Hush, she whispered, hush now.

Eskia leaned back into her, felt her full breasts pressed into his back. God, he thought, she smells so good.

Will it help to talk about it?

No, he said simply, no.

There was something in his voice that chilled Asia, made her want to recoil from him.

He reached behind him and ran his hand down her thigh, feeling her shiver. Are you cold, he asked.

Why?

He wanted to say, Because you're shivering. Instead he looked at her, noting the orgasm-softened face, her eyes tender in spite of herself, and said: What do you think Sunil would say if he knew his friend made you come?

She scuttled back from him abruptly; face shocked as though he'd slapped her, one wrist still bound. What the fuck, she said.

Precisely, he said.

Fuck you, Asia said. Fuck you!

You just did. Multiple pops, remember? Although since you also popped you should refund some of that money.

She spat at him and struggled to untie her other wrist.

Eskia wiped his face and looked at her for a moment. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but instead he punched her full in the face and her neck snapped back, her head hitting the headboard. He swung at her again, but she recovered quickly and moved so he only caught her a glancing blow to her eye. Still it puffed up shut.

She knocked the phone from the beside table, hit the concierge button, and screamed as loud as she could. Eskia stopped midpunch. He could hear the concierge's voice: Mr. Kent, is everything okay? Asia screamed again and passed out.

Eskia jumped up and dressed hurriedly. He had about three to five minutes before hotel security got to his room. Las Vegas casinos didn't fuck around with the security of their guests. Safety was imperative for business.

He grabbed his small bag stuffed with cash and passports and walked out leisurely, heading for the elevators. In his thick glasses, he was invisible, and he only had to step aside as security guards barreled past him in the hallway headed for his room. As he stepped into the elevator he wondered why all casino security guards wore red jackets.

Outside the casino, Eskia walked a sweat-fueled pilgrimage down the Strip. Down heat-melted sidewalks, gum-stained, dirty, littered with fliers for escorts and shows, through the crowd of overweight sunburned tourists, past the drunks and homeless, past the partly inebriated gambling veterans, ever south.

O
utsider art guarded the exterior of the bar—horses, dinosaurs, and aliens shaped in everything from scrap metal and wood to plastic, concrete, and plaster. Inside, bras in every color and every size—dirty, tattered, stained, and gray from age and wear—drooped down from the ceiling like tired flags. Even though they were higher than head level, Sunil kept ducking, afraid to find himself trailing through the years of sad, pathetic drunken moments the bras represented. A disproportioned Buddha, an odd creature neither frog nor toad, and rabbits with cold maniacal plaster eyes guarded the edges of the bar.

The walls inside were made of wood and every surface was covered with old coasters sporting beer logos. The floor was a mix of cork, sawdust, bare concrete, and fraying rugs. Where the roof sloped at the back into what looked like an anteroom, two decrepit and rickety pool tables sat, their racked balls gathering dust in the gloom. Behind the bar, bottles of liquor struggled for ascendancy. There were two taps—Budweiser and Heineken. A small pug-faced dog squatted on the bar top drinking milk from a saucer.

It seemed like everything inside, even the air, was coated with grime, determined dirt that nothing would ever clean. Sunil instinctively reached into his pocket for his handkerchief.

Put that away, Salazar said, settling onto one of the barstools. You're embarrassing me.

Sunil ignored him, dusting the barstool before sitting down.

The bar was far from full, but nowhere near empty. There were a few men and women littered around, drinking by themselves or with one another. Sunil guessed they were regulars.

Heineken for me, and whatever my friend is having, Salazar said to the barman.

Same, Sunil said.

We'll also take two burgers with fries, Salazar added.

The barman, a sour-faced man about fifty with long, stringy, greasy blond hair balding at the crown, a faded denim shirt, and jeans stiff with dirt, dipped some glasses in water, shook them out, and pulled a draft for each man without saying a word.

Listen, Salazar, Sunil said. I want to ask you something personal.

What?

Have you ever been married? Any kids? Do you have a girlfriend?

No to all three, Salazar said.

May I ask why?

We've known each other two years and we never had this conversation before. Odd. I don't do well with women. What about you?

No. I've never been married, but I do have a girlfriend of sorts, Sunil said.

A man, drinking by himself at a table in the corner, got up and walked over to them. He had the heavily muscled look of a recent ex-con and all the black spidery tattoos of prison.

We don't get many new faces around here, he said.

You trying to violate your parole, Salazar asked. Fuckers like you are always on parole.

The barman came back with two burgers and fries. Salazar put a fry in his mouth, got up, and walked across the room to the jukebox. Selecting a Charley Pride record, he shoved some change in and came back to the bar. The music transported Sunil back to the shebeens of Soweto as he ate. Packed full of sweaty, desperate men and women drowning unspeakable sorrows in the homebrew so strong it could take your voice with one shot.

After White Alice left, Sunil picked up a job at a shebeen. It was owned by Johnny Ten-Ten's uncle Ben, and Ten-Ten arranged it for Sunil out of sympathy, and for Nurse Dorothy's sake, he said. Sunil went to school and came straight to work at the shebeen every day until about eight p.m., and then after a dinner of Bunny Chow with Uncle Ben, he went home to do his homework. The money from the bar helped him pay the rent and keep the house Dorothy had worked so hard for. He imagined she would get better and come home to live there with him. He was fourteen.

Three years passed like that. Sunil worked washing glasses, sweeping floors, and running errands. And then dinner with Uncle Ben, always Bunny Chow; he ate it so much he came to love it too—the way the lamb stew soaked its way through the hollow chamber of the loaf of bread. Bunny Chow and Cokes; he could have as many Cokes as he wanted, but no alcohol. Uncle Ben was strict about that.

Never drink this shit, Sunil, he would say, spitting through the holes where several teeth used to be. It will rot your liver, your brains, and your soul.

But you drink it, Sunil said.

So now you have proof of what I'm saying, Uncle Ben said, laughing.

Every day they played this game, and yet somehow Sunil never got tired of it.

One day, Ben asked Sunil to stay late and help him close up. Ben had never asked before, so Sunil stayed. He had never seen the bar this late. It looked different, felt empty, everything sounding hollow. The music was off, and what little sound there was, in the harsh lighting, was amplified: the swish of Sunil's broom across the floor, the grating of metal chairs being pulled across concrete and then stacked, the insistent buzzing of flies around pools of spilled beer and bits of food, the tap running as the metal cups were washed by Ben's wife, a dog in the distance barking to the ghosts of night, a Casspir rumbling by on patrol a few streets away.

But it was the two or three drunks who wouldn't leave who fascinated Sunil. They sat, heads hung over the dregs of their drinks, holding on to the metal mugs as though drowning. Several times Ben came out and asked them to leave. Still they sat as though afraid of the night and the silence beyond it.

It's like this every night, Ben said with a sigh. Usually Ten-Ten is here to get them out.

I'll get them out, Sunil said.

Ben nodded.

Two of the drunks left easily enough when Sunil pried them up and gently shoved them out into the dark street. The third, a regular he knew only as Red, was harder to get out. Sunil could barely pry his fingers off the metal mug, and his butt seemed glued to the chair. Red was a small man and Sunil couldn't figure out where he got the strength.

Please, Red begged. Please, it's too damn lonely out there, bruh. You can't send me out there.

Go home, please, we have to close, Sunil said.

No, no, you don't understand, Red begged. They come every night, every night they come and I can't, man, I can't. I know you're young, but surely you understand.

Go home, Red, Ben said from across the room. It's the same every night. Go home.

Who comes every night, Sunil asked. The police?

My wife, Red sobbed. My wife and my boy, they come every night.

Go home, Red, Ben said. The boy doesn't need your stories.

But he should hear them, Ben, then maybe he'll understand.

Go home, sir, Sunil said.

I only informed on a couple of undesirables, Red babbled. Only a couple of times on criminals we all hated. Then I tried to stop, I did. I told the police I was no longer informing for them. So they told the ANC boys about me and they took my wife and my son to teach me a lesson. They just took them. I wasn't there. I was here. I was here.

Go home, Red, Ben said again, this time crossing the room and pushing him gently to the door.

Where, Sunil asked. Where did they take them?

Red stood at the door of the shack, a bent shade of a man, bent even lower by the alcohol. He lifted a trembling finger and just pointed. Into the dark, man, into the night, he said.

Ben stepped up and gave him one last gentle but firm shove and shut the door. Finish up, he said to Sunil, and went back to the bar.

Finish up, Salazar said, nudging Sunil. We have to get back on the road.

Yeah, sorry, I was lost there for a moment, Sunil said.