The Summoner: (22 page)

“Whenever I look at that photo, I feel ill. I was smiling while my father was…” she swallowed.

“God, Nya. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

He examined the photo again, and felt a disproportionate sense of relief. She was sitting right beside him on the floor, and he felt her body weight shift into his. He realized how aware he was of the prickle of heat from her touch.

But there were still questions, and he had to be sure. “I still don’t understand why you’re so quick to discount the possibility of Fangwa’s involvement, in spite of the Juju connection. Is there something I’m missing?”

Nya took a deep breath before speaking. “I’m going to tell you why I’m so involved in this case. I’ll tell you because I need your help, which means I need you to trust me. And because I want you to trust me.”

Grey waited, unsure what to expect. She said, “Before I left for the reception, my father was alive. I visited with him before I went. The coroner estimated time of death at nine p.m. I was at the reception from eight to almost midnight. And so was Doctor Fangwa. He was at that reception when—when it happened. It couldn’t have been him.”

“Fine, Fangwa was at the ceremony and not at your house, but what does your father’s death have to do with what we’re investigating? Why does it matter where Fangwa was that night?”

“Because the
N’anga
murdered my father.”

• • •

The trance-like state overcame her again. She stood and motioned for him to follow, and led him to an oak-paneled room with a chestnut desk. “My father’s study,” she said dully. “I found him here. His throat was slit. His hands and feet were bound. His…” she started to break down, but caught herself, “his heart and his eyes were missing.”

Grey started to speak, but his words faded away.

“I convinced the police to keep it quiet, and I kept the reporters away. According to the coroner he ingested something that was the cause of death. A toxin that caused his heart to stop. It’s called Resiniferatoxin, and it’s derived from the Euphorbia plant. The Euphorbia plant is native to northern Nigeria.”

“Juju,” Grey said softly.

“Resiniferatoxin varies by dosage, but the coroner estimated my father died between one and two hours after ingestion.” She moved to the center of the wood-floored room. “I found him here, stripped naked, hands and feet tied, on the floor.”

Grey couldn’t even comprehend finding something like that. He understood Nya’s woodenness; she had to separate herself emotionally.

“He was lying on his back. When I moved him, I saw something scrawled on the floor underneath his body. He’d broken the skin of his hands with his own nails, or rubbed them raw against the ropes. He wrote something in his own blood. It was smeared, but unmistakable. It was
N’anga
.”

“You’re sure that was the word?”

“Absolutely positive.”

“Did your father know him?”

“No.” She faltered. “At least not that I’m aware. There’s something else. Something no one knows except me. My father was Nigerian.”

“What do you mean no one knows but you? What about the rest of his family?”

“I’m all the family he had. He moved here from Nigeria as a very young man—as a boy, really, after his parents died in a car accident. An uncle sent him to live in South Africa, close to the Zimbabwean border. He found work as a laborer in a small village in Zimbabwe, and he stayed. He came to Southern Africa at such a young age that he lost his Nigerian accent. I knew he’d been born in Nigeria, but always considered him Zimbabwean. And so did he—he never talked about Nigeria.”

“Didn’t you think that was strange?”

“My father was a very closed man. I knew his parents had died, and that he didn’t like to discuss it. He came to Zimbabwe on his own, and that was that.”

“You don’t have siblings?”

“No.”

“You loved your father very much.”

“More than I can possibly describe.” She then asked, in a clumsy attempt to divert attention from her grief, “Is your father still alive?”

Grey didn’t answer, and she waited. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“I’m sorry if I-”

“It’s not your fault, it’s his. He’s a bastard.” Grey said it in a way that didn’t invite a response.

Grey concentrated on digesting the information he’d been given, unsure where to go with it. Nya was staring at a spot on the floor in the center of the study. Grey wondered if she’d found her father there.

“This wasn’t arbitrary,” she said. “It was too methodical. As Doctor Fangwa said, babalawos don’t act at random. The house was ransacked, but nothing was taken I’m aware of. That, combined with the torture… he was looking for something.”

“Do you think your father was involved in Juju?”

Her eyes flew to meet his. “
Never
. My father was deeply Catholic. In the village where he grew up in Zimbabwe, there was a Jesuit mission. My father was highly intelligent. A priest recognized his potential and arranged for my father to attend a Jesuit university on scholarship. He became a surgeon. He was eternally grateful—he worshipped the Church. He had more faith than anyone I’ve ever known. He wasn’t involved in Juju. That’s not possible.”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Not that.”

“Then it creates quite a mystery.”

“There’s no mystery as to who did this. My father told me it was the
N’anga
, and he’s going to account for it.” She said this with such icy calm, such certainty, that Grey was taken aback. Any doubts he had as to her involvement with the
N’anga
dissolved. Her all-consuming purpose, her hate for the man who had tortured and murdered her father, tumbled out of her.

Nya began to tremble, and Grey went to her. He put his arm around her and she sank into him. “Did you show the police what your father had written?”

“They did a rote investigation and issued a report stating there were no clues. Our police force is underpaid, understaffed and generally incompetent. I didn’t expect anything from them. I’ve thought of everything—the only connection I can think of is Nigeria. But it must be a mistake. He was a
boy
when he moved here, and he never went back. What could he possibly have had that the
N’anga
wanted?”

“Is there anything your father kept from Nigeria?”

“Only a chain around his neck with a small, ornamental wooden locket attached to it. He never took it off. I asked him about it once, and he said it was his father’s, the only piece of Nigeria he had left. When I searched the room I found the chain at his desk. The wooden locket had been smashed.”

“Could there have been something inside?”

“It couldn’t have been anything valuable,” she said in resignation. “It’s too small even for a diamond of any size. I’m sure it just had sentimental value.”

“Did you take it into evidence?”

“The shards showed a trace amount of the same toxin. It must have dribbled down when the
N’anga
forced it into my father’s—”

She started to choke up, and she turned away and rubbed her own shoulders. “I never come in this room alone.”

“Why do you stay?” He said gently.

“I moved back in after it happened. It’s my home. My father’s home. I couldn’t let it… someone has to take care of it.”

“I can’t imagine how hard it must be.”

“It’s my life now. I just-” She turned away from him again. This time he reached around her from behind and held her.

“I can’t believe I’m alone,” she whispered.

“I know something about being alone.”

She reached back and cradled the back of his head. He let his head rest on the gentle curve of her neck, and she began to stroke his cheek. They rocked back and forth until she turned to face him. She ran a hand through his hair and they pressed together and kissed, passion mingling with the bitter intensity of her sadness.

Grey disengaged and ran a finger across the moistened curve of her lips. She returned his gaze with tender eyes, but they couldn’t mask the turmoil below.

“I didn’t kiss you because I’m vulnerable,” she said.

“I didn’t kiss you because I thought you were.”

Grey drew her close again, and this time the kiss lingered and evolved.

Nya pulled away. “It’s very late.”

Grey nodded.

“You should stay.”

“Your living room is comfortable-”

“You should stay with me,” she said, her voice husky.

He pulled her back in.

34

A
musement creased the hard lines around Nigel Drake’s eyes. “It’s always a pleasure to do business with my most enigmatic customer. And that is quite a distinction in a business like mine, Professor.”

Viktor did not return the expression.

“Will it be the usual, then? Ya, ya,” Nigel smirked, “I believe she has your number, she does. Did you finish off what I gave you already? She’s a killer, you know. And hard to find, here in darkest Africa. Unfortunately the price has increased ten percent.”

“That’s fine,” Viktor said evenly. “I have another request today as well.”

Nigel leaned back and spread his arms. “I’m here to serve.”

“I believe you recently assisted two associates of mine.”

“I see many people. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“A young man and a young woman. Seeking information about a practitioner of Juju.”

“Those two. Ya, I remember them. What’s the name of the bloke they were looking for?”

“
N’anga
.”

“What a silly
Kaffir
name. Don’t tell me you want to know where he is as well?”

“I do.”

“
Voetsake
,” he muttered. “A silly
Kaffir
name, but a dangerous one. As I told your associates, that’s one of the few pieces of information in this country I don’t possess.”

“Then I need the same information that you gave them.”

“A ceremony?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t need him figuring out who’s been supplying free tickets to his parties. It’s bad for business. I’m going to have to decline this request.”

“Because it’s bad for business or bad for your sleep?”

Nigel chuckled deep in his throat and rolled up his sleeves, revealing corded forearms criss-crossed with scars. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. “There’s no longer anything in this world that causes me to lose sleep.”

“And the next world?”

“That concerns me even less. There is only good for business and bad for business. And this man and his attentions would be bad for business. That is all. There will be no information.”

“I’ll double the price.”

“The price for this is already quite expensive.
Quite
.”

“How much?”

“Doubled, ten thousand American dollars.”

“That’s absurd.”

“That’s the price.”

“I’ll need it today.”

Nigel guffawed. “A man of means, is it? I’ve never had a customer bargain the price upwards. But as I’m want to say, everything has its price.”

35

G
rey awoke with a start. His eyes roved the room with that dazed feeling that comes from not recognizing one’s environment.

Then he remembered.

He checked his bandages and gently flexed his wounded hand. He was in rough shape, but nothing debilitating.

He dressed and took a quick glance around the soft blue, white-curtained room. Her bedroom was simple: a bed, a nightstand with fresh sunflowers, a dresser and a closet. Two framed posters from the Harare International Arts Festival hung on one wall, a child-like painting of a lake on another. Various other pieces and objects, closer to the heart than to art, provided decoration. This must be her childhood room, he thought. She hasn’t really moved back in.

He moved into a hallway, avoiding a large specimen of Zimbabwe’s ubiquitous flat wall spiders that never failed to unnerve him. He abhorred spiders, and they kept these damn things like pets in Harare.

He walked down the carpeted hallway, where batiks and better art covered most of the wall space. There were pictures everywhere—on every table, leaning in every window frame, stuck in nooks and crannies. Nya smiled back from many of them, from every age imaginable, beside what could only be her parents—a handsome, bespectacled African man with a sagacious presence, and a silver-haired woman with pale skin and a warm countenance. Grey felt the hollow pang he always got in his gut when confronted with a happy family.

He passed a closed door and the guest bathroom, then found himself in the study again. French doors at the other end opened wide into a cozy flagstone courtyard surrounded by a kaleidoscope of foliage.

Nya sat at a low table, her back to Grey, toes curled on the sun-dappled flagstones. The scent of dewy freshness wafted to Grey’s nose, and birds chattered from the garden.

She set down her tea and embraced him. “Sleep well?”

“Very.”

She motioned to a chair. “I’ll bring tea.”

“Do you have coffee?”

“You’re in luck. I keep some on hand in case a handsome, green-eyed American should stop by.”

“I hope the bag’s unopened.”

She laughed and rose. Grey picked up a copy of the
Daily News.
The day’s headline:
‘President Asks Populace for Donations for Birthday Bash.’

Unbelievable.

Nya returned and they looked at each other across the table. “I’m glad you stayed,” she said.

“Me too.”

“I have to ask, last night in the bedroom,” she blushed slightly, “when you were massaging me… it was extraordinary. I’ve never felt so relaxed.”

“My Jujitsu teacher was an expert in Shiatsu massage, and he required me to learn that also. He wanted me to know how to heal as well as harm.”

“He taught you well,” she murmured.

Grey found her even more striking in the morning. Her mussed hair, usually drawn back in a tight bun, fell in light waves around her oval face, adding warmth and depth to her sculpted features.

“There’s something you need to understand,” she said.

“That the only thing that matters in your life right now is finding your father’s murderer.”