The Water Man's Daughter (6 page)

She had received the call yesterday, not long after the pipes had been completely dug up from the main street in Phiri’s residential neighbourhood. Her boss had not sounded happy about being awake at six in the morning on a Tuesday. Zembe had been up already, boiling water for tea and deciding which skirt and jacket to wear to the office that day. She had unwrapped her hair and pressed the few wayward pieces back into the bun. She had been ready to pretend nothing had happened.

It surprised her that the provincial office was so involved in the disappearance of township property. Sipho’s voice on the other end of the phone had been deeper than usual. He had demanded to see her the next day in his office and said
she’d better have something to report. Zembe complied, clearing her schedule for this morning, making sure her rounds of the informal settlement were covered by one of the nine other officers, bringing her own vehicle to work so that the two functioning police buggies would be free for the duration of her absence.

As she is the chief officer for the Phiri police station, the responsibility for the lost pipes rests squarely on her shoulders. Their recovery would lead to a significant boost in her career, one that might catapult her past the glass ceiling that exists above the regional stations. Failing to find the steel will guarantee the end of Zembe’s advancement. Zembe has already resigned herself to this latter result, knew she was accepting it when she drove past the men and women with shovels in their hands – the women she talks to every day in the township market or at the community centre on Saturdays – and chose not to get out of the police car. She has also made a decision not to regret her actions. Zembe is a rational woman, and rational women can see that those pipes are strangling the life out of Phiri.

As on every morning, Zembe stops for a few moments in her church. It is in the corner of Phiri proper, a white building with a steeple that reaches higher than the two-storey flats next to it. It took her congregation twenty-five years to raise the money for the building, and Zembe remembers going door to door, looking for support with her father after classes at the police academy were done for the day. When the sun shines down on the white siding it glints,
not harshly as it does off the corrugated metal shacks, but diffused, like winking, a sun that flashes a slight recognition. Zembe is prouder of her church than she is of the detached brick house she bought for herself four years ago, prouder than she is of the Policewoman of the Year award she won in 2000. This building is the product of her family, her generation and the generation before hers.

When she walks in the church’s vaulted front door she becomes someone other than the police officer in charge of their township. She is Mama Afrika, daughter of Khaye Afrika, lifelong devotee of the Nazareth Baptist Church.

Today, it is quiet and Zembe needs only to nod at the pastor, who is reading in the near corner of the huge room. The weekday worshippers, those without jobs, are not here yet. They are still clearing away breakfast, getting their kids out the door for school. The morning trickle will not begin for another hour at least.

She sits in her seat, not kneeling on the rough floor, clasps her hands together, and begins to pray. She describes the anxiety in her stomach, the guilt she feels when she thinks of the lies she will have to tell Sipho, the man who has guided her career, kept her at the top of the service’s appointment list. Her God removes the knot in her stomach, absolving her as she presents each worry.

Zembe lets herself need Him in a way that she avoids with everyone else. She comes to church early every morning to pray alone, to garner His attention without any other distractions. She does not try to spread the word of God
like the other church members, preferring His word be kept for her. The people dragged into the station – tattered clothes, scraped knees from trying to run, bloody noses from the push to the ground – Zembe doesn’t share the teachings with these people. She doesn’t hand out church pamphlets in the station’s holding cell. She thinks of the blank eyes, as one sniffling young man blends into another, until Zembe can’t help but see as criminal all the boys in the township. She sees the guns they might buy next week, the drugs they will inhale tomorrow night. Even the rolling babies who play in the sawdust on the floor of the Phiri community centre are precursors to these hardened men. She starts to believe that God is the only good man. God and her father.

Zembe finishes just as the first congregants arrive for morning prayer. She smiles at the women as she leaves, and then begins assembling the checklist in her head of the day’s tasks.

T
HE
S
OWETO
R
EGIONAL
D
IRECTOR’S OFFICE IS IN
Johannesburg’s downtown, a full hour’s commute from where Zembe works and lives. The South African Police Service building is made of cream-coloured concrete with rows of black windows that stripe the exterior. It is magnificently tall and overshadows the smaller commercial buildings just outside of the central business district. Sipho’s secretary is perched at the mouth of the elevator bank on the thirty-fourth floor. She recognizes Zembe immediately and smiles.

“They are waiting for you.”

“They?”

“You thought the national office wouldn’t be in on this?”

“Hmm,” is all the response Zembe can manage. She surreptitiously straightens her suit and brushes dust from the township road off her stockinged calves. She marches past the desk into the large office.

The usually bored face of Zembe’s boss is wrinkled into a frown. He is sitting with two white men and a coloured man whom Zembe recognizes from teleconferences but has never met in person.

“Commissioner Woolmer, very pleased to meet you.” Zembe approaches him first, then officiously shakes the hands of the white men. She nods at Sipho and sits down.

“Ms. Afrika, we are just discussing the fast rate of disappearance of steel in the township.”

“Yes, I …”

The white man with brown hair to Zembe’s left cuts her off. “Ms. Afrika, do you have any leads on this?”

Zembe opens her mouth to speak, but Commissioner Woolmer jumps in again. “Do you know who might be responsible for the theft? Because if you do, we can authorize you to pick them up. All of them. We need to get on this fast, and protocol shouldn’t hinder your investigation.”

Zembe nods, stifling a snort. Woolmer has some township experience. He should know that the word “protocol” has little currency with her officers.

Sipho seems agitated. He fiddles with his tie, stares around at the white walls broken by huge windows, at the
framed photos that clutter the surface of every filing cabinet and the big, dark, wooden desk they are now gathered around … everywhere but at Zembe.

“Sir, I have no suspects at this time. I have informants in the black market who have been alerted regarding the pipes. I have officers randomly searching houses in the informal settlement where the anti-company sentiment is the strongest. But it is my opinion that this theft was motivated solely by financial concerns.” Zembe chooses her words carefully. “That will make the perpetrators much harder to find.”

Woolmer massages his forehead. The white men look scornful.

Zembe stares straight at Sipho, waiting for him to speak. He looks around at the table and then begins, “Ms. Afrika, is that your report?”

“It is, sir.”

“You have nothing else to tell us?”

“Not yet, but give me some time and I’ll have more for you.”

“Thank you, then. Will you wait in the lobby for the moment? I have a few more things I’d like to discuss when this meeting is finished.”

He’s punishing me
, Zembe thinks, but she stands and shakes the hands of each of the men.

As soon as she sits next to the secretary’s desk, the enormity of her lie settles in. This is going to be harder to pull off than she had originally thought.

—

I
T TAKES ANOTHER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES FOR THE
men to leave Sipho’s office. Woolmer nods at Zembe when he walks to the elevator, but the white men pass without a glance. They seem more agitated than when Zembe left them. That means Sipho’s mood will have gotten worse as well.

Sipho stands at the door of his office. He smiles warmly at his secretary, and then the smile ends and he waves Zembe inside. He begins berating her before she passes the door. “What was that bullshit you fed Woolmer? You know as well as I do that the
PCF
is responsible for the missing pipes.”

“I have no evidence of that. None. You wanted me to tell Woolmer something we couldn’t prove? He would have made me arrest the whole organization on a hunch from a guy who sits in a city office all day.”

“I may be in the city, but I’m not an idiot.”

“Are you calling me an idiot?”

Sipho takes a breath. He sits down. His skin gleams from sweating through the morning. The air conditioning is blasting and the sweat hasn’t dried. Zembe wonders how much stress it takes to cause that kind of perspiration. “Look, sis, we need this. Both of us. Just get me something to tell them. I don’t care what it is.”

Zembe’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She ignores it and lets it go through to voicemail. “I’m going to try. But there’s not a lot to go on.”

“You’ve made arrests on less.”

The phone rings again. Zembe quickly checks the screen. It’s the station. Both calls. She holds up a finger – “Maybe this is about the pipes?” – and then answers.

While the voice on the other end of the line speaks, Sipho taps his fingers with increasing speed. Zembe can see her boss’s anger rising, and it almost distracts her from the young officer’s report. When she hangs up, her face is starting to sweat, too.

“They found a body in the lok’shini of Phiri, right in the centre of downtown.” Sipho starts to interrupt, but Zembe continues. “A white man.”

He closes his mouth. Pauses.

“Go back there. I’ll call the national office. Don’t touch anything until reinforcements arrive, and whatever you do, keep your incompetent officers away from the scene.”

Zembe wants to remind him that he gave her those incompetents, asked her to make a team out of them, teach them how to interrogate, make arrests, and process scenes. But he is right. There will be too much scrutiny on this.

She is already calling the station back when she gets out the front door. She drives with one hand, steering with her knee and shifting violently up to cruising speed while giving orders into the phone. Troubling as this body is, part of her is grateful for something to distract Sipho from the missing pipes.

W
HEN
Z
EMBE ARRIVES AT THE SCENE, ONE OF HER
junior officers gives her the report.

“We were doing rounds when we found the body. It was dropped in this yard. Looks like the 28s.”

Zembe turns. “The 28s? Why do you suspect them?”

The 28 gang is part of a network of numbered gangs that thrive in South Africa’s prisons. The Numbers run the inside, dictating who eats, where each prisoner sleeps, who lives and who dies. The Numbers’ network also operates on the outside. Boys join for protection and to make extra money in the drug market. The 28s are perhaps best known for their practice of removing and – rumour has it – eating the hearts of their victims. They are the toughest Numbers, the best organized, and the hardest to control. Zembe has not seen a 28 killing in Phiri for over three years.

The officer leads Zembe to the secluded spot where they found the body. The white man is arranged carefully. His arms are neatly stretched to either side, his legs slightly parted but positioned straight down from his body. He is wearing a business suit, now torn and covered in dirt from the road, and the top of the shirt is open. His chest underneath is bursting. The flesh is split apart, revealing coagulated mounds of blood and tissue.

An officer in plain clothes is leaning over the body. He stands up as Zembe approaches.

“Good morning, Zembe.”

“What can you tell me?” Her voice is hard.

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Out with it. Please. We’ve got to get this site contained.”

“The heart is missing. Cut out. Probably by a rough-edged knife.”

Zembe starts to worry. A 28 killing is bad enough, but with a white man as the victim? She cannot imagine worse.

The man’s wallet hangs out of the jacket pocket. Zembe takes a piece of cloth from her bag and uses it to open the leather. Inside are four or five credit cards and a green
I.D
. card with holograms shimmering over the lettering. He is not from here.

She steps away from the body. The skin looks plastic, shiny, and too white. His eyes are blue, one closed, the other open. She takes a deep breath and turns to see that detective services have already sent down two uniformed officers. The older one informs Zembe that the national office has also requested that provincial crime intelligence pull men onto the case. White deaths cause trouble, forcing government attention onto her district, a place they are otherwise content to ignore. The national officers will ask her why there weren’t more police patrolling the streets. They will demand to know how a white businessman managed to get into the township without Zembe’s knowledge. She will point to her aging buggies. She will complain about gas allowances and sprawling shantytowns that expand her district but justify no extra funding for law enforcement. But she knows her answers won’t satisfy them. And they will be looking for someone to blame.

I
T TAKES ALL DAY FOR THE CORONER AND IMPORTED
officers to finish at the scene. The sun intensifies and then wanes, slipping below the horizon. The small side yard
changes colour, from yellow to deep orange to a delicate purple reflection of the evening sky. By eight, Zembe is exhausted. The morning meeting feels like a lifetime ago. The energy it takes to investigate a scene, keep the stomach still while they prod and shift and finally remove the body, train the eyes on another small square of sand, surprises Zembe every time. By the time they are ready to seal the scene for the day Zembe still knows very little: the dead man is Peter Matthews, fifty-two years old, from Toronto, Canada. Here on business with Amanzi’s parent company. A water man. Zembe warns her officers to keep this to themselves and then threatens with only one last dark look that lets them know she is serious.