Those Who Love Night (20 page)

Yudel had the name of the school where Suneesha Patel worked, but finding it had not been a simple matter. In his hired car, he picked his way through the potholed roads of a city teeming with people and vehicles, neither of which seemed to recognize the usual rules of the road. Intermittently working traffic lights seemed to provide only a broad guideline to the city's motorists. If an opening existed, only a fool allowed a little matter like a red traffic light to hold him back.

He at last found the school in an apparently unnamed street. A middle-aged woman with tired eyes who manned the administration office directed him to apartments on Josiah Tongogara Drive where Krisj had lived with his wife. “She has a few days off,” the woman said. “Her husband was murdered four nights ago. You may have read about it.”

The once dignified-looking apartment block was in a part of town that had been dedicated to old African liberators—or dictators, depending on your point of view. Where street signs existed, they carried names like Kenneth Kaunda, Samora Machel, Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote, Kwame Nkrumah and Robert Mugabe.

From what Abigail had told Yudel about Patel, he had expected Suneesha to be a person more interested in principle than in practical matters. As soon as he saw her, he acknowledged inwardly that he had been wrong on that score. She came to the door, wearing an apron that was white with bread flour. Bits of dough still clung to her hands. She frowned at him. “Can I help you?”

“My name is Yudel Gordon,” he said. “I'm working with the advocate your husband was briefing on the seven people … the missing ones.”

Suneesha looked at him, unblinking, from an expressionless face. Eventually she sighed and indicated with a tilt of her head that he should follow her.

The apartment building was old and its rooms, including the kitchen, were large. On a counter, a bowl of dough awaited further attention. She had obviously been kneading it by hand. “You can sit over there,” she said, nodding toward a chair. “You don't mind if I go on with my work?”

“Please do,” Yudel said, sitting down on the chair.

“What can I tell you, Mr. Gordon?” She glanced at him as she resumed her kneading. “You look surprised. I know I'm not the typical grieving widow. That was what you were thinking, isn't it?”

“That's right. I was thinking that.”

“We haven't been close for years.” It was said almost defiantly. Could it be that the wife of this hero who had died in the cause of justice was not sorry he had died? To Yudel, she seemed to be daring him to challenge her right to admit that. “No, that doesn't state the position clearly. We were never close.”

“You married him, though.”

“Obviously.” She was kneading the dough as furiously as if it was to blame for the failure of her marriage. “You see what I'm doing?” she demanded. “I'm a schoolteacher, but this is how I've made our living for years—till late every night. There are still a few people who can afford home-baked bread, and I bake it for them. It's a living…” She paused to think over that statement. “… of sorts.”

“There was also the law practice,” Yudel suggested.

“Law practice?” Suneesha snorted extravagantly. “Sometimes what I earned from my baking had to pay the rent for his office. I never saw any money from that so-called law practice.”

“These are difficult times…”

“Difficult times?” she interrupted him with blazing eyes. “Yes, these are difficult times. They may have been easier for me, if I had only one mouth to feed. Other lawyers at least made some money.”

“Is that what drove you apart? That he did not contribute much to the household?”

“Oh, heavens, Mr. Gordon, that and a hundred other things, his friendships among them.”

“His friendships with these activists bothered you? Are you saying that?”

“Some of them bothered me, certainly. Oh, some of them did, all right.” Yudel heard a trace of bitterness in the laugh that followed.

“I don't understand.”

“Forget it, Mr. Gordon. I don't want to speak ill of the dead—not even of Krisj.” Suddenly all Suneesha Patel's anger seemed to melt away. “I loved the stupid bastard,” she said sorrowfully. “But sometimes I hated him.”

And now he's gone, Yudel thought. And you don't know what to feel.

“He was a clever man. Did you know that? He studied in South Africa, and he was in the top two percent of his class. Did you know he was that clever? He could have had a brilliant career if he had taken my advice and we had migrated south.”

“You didn't agree with his politics, then?”

“Of course I agreed with him. Every sane person agrees. We can all see what they've done to the country. But you can dissent without getting yourself killed. You don't have to present yourself as a red flag to a bull. You don't have to set yourself up as a target.”

“There's something else you might be able to tell me. It has to do with a bomb they exploded.” Abigail had asked Yudel to see if he could discover anything about it. “Did your husband know anything about that?”

“Yes, he knew about it. It was a year ago. But he never planted it. A certain Tony Makumbe did. He seems to be the craziest of them all. That damned husband of mine would have done anything for him. He would have done much more for him than for me.”

That was the name Yudel least expected to hear in connection with the bomb blast. To his knowledge, it was not the sort of thing writers usually did. “Was Makumbe arrested for it?”

“No.” The word was accompanied by a decisive shake of the head. “At least, not until the other day. And we don't know if they picked him up for that.”

“Do you know why your husband wasn't arrested? They certainly knew where to find him.”

“No.” Again, the quick shake of the head.

“Did you know this Makumbe?”

“Slightly, not as well as my husband.”

Yudel knew there must be a reason that Suneesha's answers were becoming shorter and more abrupt, but she was a strong personality who would only tell him what she wanted him to know. “Enemies?” Yudel suggested. “Did he have personal enemies?”

Suneesha Patel looked at him, as if he had so far managed to misunderstand their entire conversation. “Only the entire ruling party, the president, the cabinet, the police, the
CIO
, the armed forces—search for the culprit among their members. That should be just under half the population. Did anyone hate him for any other reason? No. Only me.”

“Just one more thing, Mrs. Patel. Have the police been to question you?”

“No.”

“The
CIO
?”

“No. You're the only one.”

*   *   *

Yudel drove back to the hotel by a more direct route. Abigail was sitting in the lobby when he came in. She had been resting in an armchair, her eyes unfocused, looking up at the ceiling. She saw him out of the corners of her eyes and sat up as he approached. “Did you learn anything?”

“Only that the police haven't questioned her.”

“Not at all?”

“No.”

Abigail felt the involuntary twitch of her head as she tried to clear her thinking. “I suppose it's because they already have a suspect.”

“No doubt,” Yudel said.

“The
CIO
people are on their way here. They're going to allow me to be present when they take his statement. He's already confessed.”

“That was easy.”

She looked thoughtfully at Yudel. There was something about his manner that was adding to her own discomfort. “You have doubts?”

“I haven't seen the suspect yet. I'll come with you.”

“No, Yudel, I don't think so.” It was said too quickly. She was aware that she had averted her eyes. “I am an officer of the court here, but you have no standing. I don't think we should take the chance.”

Not take the chance? Yudel wondered. Was this Abigail speaking? By her standards this was no chance at all.

“Here they are,” she said. A strongly built African man in a dark suit had stopped in the doorway of the hotel. He was looking at Abigail with an intensity Yudel had often seen in men when looking at a desirable woman. No doubt there had been times when he had looked at women that way himself. The way this man looked at Abigail was no surprise to Yudel. What did surprise him was the hurried, almost frantic way she rose and crossed the lobby to meet him. “I'll see you later,” she murmured.

Yudel followed as far as the glass doors. When he reached them, Chunga had opened the door on the passenger side for her. Abigail hesitated a moment, momentarily looking up into Chunga's eyes, before she got in. Yudel saw something surprisingly self-conscious about her movements, something he had never before seen in her. Damn, he thought, this is not going to make things any easier.

27

The police cells to which Jonas Chunga took Abigail were on the southeastern side of town. The cells served more than one township, some shack settlements and a number of suburbs. They had to pass through a spreading tangle of simple dwellings to reach them. An assortment of street vendors plied their trade along streets where buses, minibus taxis and the occasional battered car stirred up the dusty surface. Some of the houses were coated in a layer of reddish dust that was probably a permanent part of their appearance now.

Abigail had seen it all before in other parts of the continent. The food being sold along the road was of the simplest kind, each vendor displaying only a small assortment of vegetables or a few live chickens in cages. The advantage of selling live chickens was that your stock needed no refrigeration. If you made no sales that day, your produce would not go bad overnight.

The police building suited the area. It was an old house, also colonial in style, but nothing like the clubhouse of Saturday night. Like so much of the city, the building had been kept immaculately clean. Porch, floor and windows showed no sign of dirt. It was clear that even the daily dust from the street was swept or washed away regularly. Finding the budget to replace anything that had broken was another matter. Whatever signage may once have proclaimed the existence of a police unit in the building had long since disappeared. So had the front gate, leaving only the rusted frame that once held it.

Chunga asked her to wait in the charge office, while he passed through a door into the back of the building. Two officers behind the desk and a small line of local people, waiting to receive attention, all turned to look at her with undisguised curiosity. A young constable brought a hard-backed wooden chair from behind the counter that separated the staff from the public. “Would you like to sit down, ma'am?” he asked, making only the briefest, most deferential eye contact.

Abigail smiled at the policeman and accepted the chair. Sitting on it was a problem though. One of the people in the line was a woman who may have been eighty or more. Abigail carried the chair to where she was standing. “Sit down, mother,” she said. The old woman looked uncertainly at the constable who had offered Abigail the chair. “It's all right, mother,” Abigail told her. “You sit down.”

The constable was frowning at Abigail, but more in puzzlement than annoyance. The old woman sat down and Abigail returned to where she had been standing at the counter. She smiled at the constable, more as a protection for the old woman than as a gesture of friendliness. He tried to smile back at her. His confusion only lasted a moment. Abigail saw him bend over. When he straightened up he was carrying another chair. This time Abigail had no choice but to sit down.

She reflected on the drive to the police station. She had expected it to be quiet; for Chunga to feel at least some degree of awkwardness after Saturday night. Instead, it could have been that nothing had passed between them.

He told her how pleased he was that they had made an arrest and that they believed the man they were holding was the culprit. He was one of the class of criminals who could not stay out of jail. Before this, he had been convicted of other violent crimes for a variety of motives. He had killed Patel in revenge. Chunga explained how the suspect had been represented by Patel some years before on an armed-robbery charge, but had been sent to jail. Apparently, he had harbored a grudge against Patel ever since. He was a volatile, unstable character and he had been boasting about the killing in a township tavern. An informer had turned him in.

Chunga's reappearance interrupted Abigail's thoughts. He led her to a room in the back of the police station. A man wearing a suit and tie, whom Abigail took to be one of Chunga's men, and a uniformed policeman with a pen and writing pad were seated on one side of a large table. Opposite them was another man in civilian clothes, but he wore no tie or jacket. At the far end, a small, hard-eyed man looked suspiciously at Abigail. He was wearing the sort of khakis that a farmer might give his laborers as work clothes. He had been shackled, both hands and feet. Across from him were two empty chairs. Chunga showed Abigail to one and took the other himself.

“Who this lady is?” The accused man had not turned his head toward Abigail. Only his eyes had moved.

“Shut up. We ask the questions,” the man in the suit said. He was not a tall man, younger than Chunga, but stocky, almost as powerful a figure. He was not nearly as well dressed. A collar on the verge of fraying strained to encompass a thick neck that merged almost imperceptibly into broad, sloping shoulders. Only his tie, a glossy, bright scarlet, looked as if it had been bought in the last year. “Does the director want us to begin?” he asked.

“Thank you, Agent Mpofu,” Chunga said. He nodded to the other man in civilian clothes. “Please go ahead, Inspector Dzuze.”

“I want to know who is the lady.” The prisoner's eyes were traveling back and forth between Chunga and Abigail.

“What you don't want is to make us angry,” Mpofu said.