Zulu (16 page)

Janet Helms was only an intelligence officer.

“You mean I'm joining the captain's team?”

Her brain was boiling over, filled with ambition and dead stars.

Brian shrugged. “If you don't mind a Zulu calling you at all hours of the night, trying to bring justice to our beautiful country.”

“You mean he's a workaholic?”

“No, I mean he's an insomniac.”

Janet smiled to herself as he left the office. With one machete stroke, she had taken Dan's place.

 

 *

 

Brian found a place in the parking lot of the funeral home. Their friend's body was lying in a coffin for the wake, prior to being cremated. He left the Mercedes under an emaciated palm tree and walked toward the brick building. Neuman was waiting on the steps, lost in thought.

“Hello, Your Highness.”

“You're on time.”

“It does happen.”

They tried to smile, but everything—the blue of the sky, the peaceful shade that lay over the steps, their friendship—seemed false. They had barely seen each other since the tragedy. Neuman hadn't come to the hospital. He had left Brian to deal with Claire, and had vanished until the following day, without a word of explanation.

“What happened to Ramphele's brother?” Brian asked.

He had just heard the news.

“He was depressed, according to Kriek.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.”

“Kriek's a shit,” Brian said. “If a prison gang was responsible, he won't lift his little finger.”

“I'm sure you're right. They're conducting a postmortem, but it won't tell us anything.”

Dying in prison was a natural occurrence in South Africa.

“And what's Krüge saying?”

“For the moment, he's covering our backs,” Neuman replied. “It won't last.”

“We couldn't have known what was going to happen.”

“Men with guns, waiting for us, ready to kill us,” he said through clenched teeth. “That was no accident. They saw us coming, and one of them knew me. They lit that barbecue to separate us, and were quite prepared to wipe us out if things got complicated. We fell into a trap, Brian. It's all my fault.”

“Did you tell Krüge I was dirty dancing with a black girl while they were slicing you up?”

“What would be the point? Sonny Ramphele was killed because he told us about Muizenberg beach. The gang has contacts in prison and a bolt-hole in the townships. I met one of them in Khayelitsha. He was beating up a street kid named Simon Mceli, a kid my mother knows.”

Brian sat down next to him on the steps. “We're in this together, my friend, whether you like it or not.”

“I was in charge of the operation,” Neuman said, stubbornly.

“Stop it with the big chief crap.”

They weren't superior and subordinate, they were friends. They understood each other with a look.

“Right, what do our informants say?”

“Khayelitsha is outside our territory,” Neuman replied. “And no one seems to know anything about the trafficking at Muizenberg. Either Stan was the only dealer, or there's something we don't know.”

A sparrow was hopping on the marble flagstones. It stopped near them and gave them a sidelong look.

“There's an isolated house at the far end of the beach,” Brian said, “about half a mile after the straw hut. It seems to be abandoned, but no one knows who the owner is. Some kind of property speculation. There's also a dead guy in Simon's Town, a surfer from the coast. The guy was killed while committing a robbery, but, according to the autopsy, he was high on a
tik
-based cocktail. The same as our young couple.”

“So Nicole wasn't the dealers' only target. The network had widened.”

“Seems like it. I've put Janet Helms on the case . . .”

Brian left the sentence unfinished. Claire had just appeared on the steps of the crematorium. She was wearing a black dress that made her look thinner, and carrying a small vinyl purse. The family members came out after her, their grief concealed behind dark glasses.

Claire saw the two men on the steps, whispered something to her sister, and walked toward them. They stood up together, saw how crushed she looked, and put their arms around her. For a brief moment, she let herself go, before regaining her balance. She hadn't been sleeping, in spite of the medication, but she wouldn't crack. Not now.

“I need to talk to the two of you,” she said, freeing herself from their embrace.

Rain was falling in her Atlantic-blue eyes. They walked the short distance to the parking lot, in silence. Claire stopped in the shade of a palm tree and turned to Neuman.

“What did they do to his hands?” she asked, in a toneless voice.

Brian remained impassive, but you could see the cracks getting bigger.

“Nothing,” Neuman replied. “It all happened very quickly.”

Claire bit the inside of her mouth. Her eyes were flickering now behind dark glasses.

“Dan didn't have time to suffer, if that's what's worrying you. I'm sorry.”

He was lying, but what could he say to this bundle of grief? That he had had seen her husband being cut up alive, that Dan was weeping when he was put to death, and that he himself had not lifted a finger because he had a knife stuck through his ear and the barrel of a revolver pressed to his balls?

“It's all my fault,” he said.

Claire was sounding him out, pale beneath the half-veil over her wig. At first she said nothing, searching for words. Ali and Brian had become her friends, that was why she was angry with them. Dan was afraid of physical violence. He didn't smell the same in bed the night before an operation. Claire had tried to talk to him, but Dan feigned indifference. He hadn't said much more to Neuman, because he knew that eventually Neuman planned to make him, and not the unconcerned Epkeen, his right-hand man. What angered Claire wasn't so much the fact that they hadn't been able to save him as the fact that they had been blind to how scared he was by this kind of operation. Neuman was right—it was all his fault.

“Dan wouldn't have liked us to be talking about him in the past tense,” she said, in a toneless voice. “So I'm going to keep quiet, and look after the kids as if my life had never happened. Thank you for the support you gave us when I fell ill, and for all you did for him. But I don't want your help.” She dug her small canines into her lips. “In any way, do you understand?” Only fragments were visible behind her dark glasses. “I'd prefer it if you didn't come to the cremation,” she added. “Not you, not anyone from the force.”

Claire lowered the black veil, which was flapping in the breeze, and turned to the crematorium. Brian made a gesture to hold her back.

“I know,” she said, cutting him off. “You're sorry. Goodbye.”

 

 *

 

“You look tired,” Tembo said.

“Not as tired as these guys,” Neuman replied.

The
tsotsis
from the beach were lying on the aluminum table, their open entrails giving off a vivid, sickly-sweet smell. One of them had a nasty wound in the temple—Epkeen's bullet had taken off half his cranium. This was Joey, the crippled twenty-year-old he'd first met on the construction site in Khayelitsha. His features and morphology weren't Xhosa, and certainly not Zulu. Among his many tattoos and scarifications, there was a design at the top of his triceps, a scorpion about to attack. The one who'd been called Gatsha had exactly the same tattoo. The design, which was clearly several years old, had nothing original about it, except for the initials TB. Neuman took some photographs of the tattoos before turning to the medical officer.

Tembo was conducting his macabre dance around an open abdomen, that of Charlie Rutanga. Several scars on the arms and thorax, souvenirs of old knife fights, but no scorpion tattoo.

“I took some fluid and tissue samples,” Tembo said, depositing some secretions on strips of glass. “There are the usual deficiencies associated with poor hygiene and deplorable living standards. I found a little homemade beer, maize porridge, bread, milk, dried beans, in other words, the staple diet of the townships. There are also a few insect bites, a broken humerus that had been badly patched up, some corns on the feet. The two younger ones are riddled with bullet holes. Half a dozen each, on different parts of the body. Old wounds.”

Ex-soldiers? Militiamen? Deserters? Africa was spewing out its killers on a production-line basis, like rivers of skeletons in the dry season.

“What about drugs?” Neuman asked.

“All three of them had consumed marijuana recently,” Tembo said. “I also found traces of crystals, less recent, but not our famous cocktail.”

The point of the business was to get the customer hooked, not to kill him. The
tsotsis
hadn't acted in a sudden fit of madness.

“How about
iboga
?”

Tembo shook his graying head. “None at all.”

 

 *

 

With the end of South Africa's apartheid-era isolation, criminal activity had become transnational (drugs, diamonds), and the country a place of transit to which criminals flocked from all over. Neuman had pursued his research in the impersonal office on the top floor of headquarters where he spent half his nights.

He began with the tattoos on the upper arms of the two
tsotsis
killed on the beach: a scorpion about to attack, and those initials, TB. He checked the available data on the gangs for which the SAP had records, but couldn't find anything similar. Widening his search, he found the information he was looking for on an army site. TB stood for ThunderBird, the name given to a militia of child soldiers that had fought in Chad but had originated in Nigeria. The Dashiki, the violence, the total absence of compassion . . . Gatsha and Joey had ended up in South Africa, like thousands of other rejects of history, and they had quite naturally mingled with the dropouts and known criminals waiting for them in the area. What was the connection with Nicole Wiese? Were they working with Ramphele? One detail continued to bother him: the
iboga
that Stan and Nicole had taken, those little flasks she'd had with her on the night of the murder, and the drug she had tried a few days earlier. Neuman hesitated, staring at the screen. Anxiety crept up his legs, pinning him for a moment to the desk. The same feeling of suffocation as always, eating away at his heart.

Beyond the tinted window of the office, night was falling. It would be a beautiful suicide.

He typed two words on the keyboard: Zina Dukobe.

The information soon appeared on the screen. The dancer who had been performing at the Sundance wasn't in any SAP file, but he found what he was looking for on the Internet. Born in 1969 in the Bantustan of KwaZulu, daughter of an
induna
23
stripped of his position for refusing to collaborate with the Bantu authorities, the former Inkatha militant Zina Duboke championed Zulu culture—in decline thanks to evangelization and political unrest—through her group Mkonyoza, founded six years earlier.
Mkonyoza
meant “to fight” in Zulu, in the sense of “to crush by force.”

The group consisted of musicians and
amashinga
, fighters specializing in the Zulu martial art of
izinduku
, the traditional fighting stick, the names of which varied depending on the size and shape. According to Zina's statements,
izinduku
was a way of preserving Zulu identity. Taking it out of context and exploiting it for political ends, she argued, had given a false image of this art. She referred to Zulu protest marches during apartheid, when the members of Inkatha and their chief Buthelezi had claimed and obtained the right to carry the traditional sticks, previously forbidden by the regime—thereby provoking violent clashes with the ANC, most of whose members were Xhosa. With Mandela in prison, the Zulu opposition was legitimized. Divide and rule—a technique that had provoked a bloodbath.

For many,
izinduku
had become synonymous with violence, not with art, even martial art.
Umgangela
, those interethnic competitions that had once been so prized, were now only held in regions where there was little political tension. In fact,
izinduku
was intended to prepare the young for society and pass on the rules of the community, as well as being a way of mastering the body and the mind. The aim of the group's performances was to revive this lost aspect of Zulu culture while at the same time modernizing it, with video, electronic instruments, and sound effects. It was a question of building bridges between the traditional art and current trends in order to nourish a living culture.

Zina's character was starting to come into focus. Mkonyoza had been performing in Cape Town since the beginning of the festival, and was finishing its tour in city center clubs. He went back to the videos from the Sundance, and took another look at the tape from Wednesday, the night Nicole had not come back to Judith's. Eleven o'clock, midnight, five after midnight, six. Twelve minutes after midnight: there was Nicole, coming out of the club, alone, as he and Dan had seen the other day. Neuman let the tape run on.

The doorman was swaying from side to side, with his back to the camera, gray figures were going in and coming out. Four minutes had passed when a figure crossed the field of vision.

Neuman rewound the tape. He felt a tingling under his skin. It was a fleeting glimpse, but the figure was agile, and easily recognizable. Zina.

 

 

 

W
hen I kill a white, my mother is happy!”
To get out of the Bantustan into which the apartheid government had herded them, the South African blacks had had to have a pass, which regulated their travel to and from white areas. Taking advantage of interethnic and family rivalries, the powers that be had left the authority of the Bantustans to local chiefs, who were forced to cooperate if they did not want to be deposed. Some of them had not hesitated to use militias, vigilantes armed with clubs, who, where necessary, replaced the police within the enclave or the township. With the ANC banned, Chief Buthelezi had founded the Zulu Inkatha movement, a party that, while declaring itself to be against apartheid, had agreed to take control of the Bantustan of KwaZulu. Considering this collaboration a double game, Neuman's father, Oscar, had turned to the Black Consciousness movement led by Steve Biko, whose fiercely anti-apartheid speeches had revived a resistance movement seriously shaken by fifteen years of police repression.

“When I kill a white, my mother is happy!”

Biko had come out of the student environment, Oscar was a professor of economics at the University of Zululand. Biko's tone was radical. Contempt for blacks would be met with hatred for whites, it was time to forget the slave mentality. Biko proposed a union of students, boycotts to protest against cut-price education,
24
an active resistance movement. Oscar tried to make his students realize that their destinies belonged to them, that no one would help them. He had organized a forum for Biko at the university, despite the hostility of Inkatha. Because of its geographical situation inside the territorial borders of KwaZulu, it was from the university that the government of the Bantustan recruited its civil servants, its experts, its ideologues. Inkatha didn't need a hotheaded student leader calling for murder, what it needed was technocrats to lay the foundations for its own resistance movement. Oscar's meeting had been disrupted by fights, and the riot police had dispersed the crowd with purple rain.
25

Three months later, Biko died at the hands of those same police.

“When I kill a white, my mother is happy!”

Ali was five when the radio had announced the news. His father had been so shocked that his skin had partly lost its pigmentation. From that point on, Oscar would carry the mask of death, a portion of Steve Biko's corpse, the deathly complexion of the whites.

“When I kill a white, my mother is happy!”

Ali had never seen his father cry. Oscar was a kind of benevolent demigod who knew everything, in several languages, a calm-looking, bespectacled man with the air of an intellectual, a man who understood his enemy but never forgave him, a man who kissed his wife in front of everyone, and had already spent time in prison. What Neuman remembered most of all was when he took them with his hot, gentle hands, him and his brother, to see the stars from the roof of their house, and told them stories of Zulu kings, old monkeys, leopards, and lions.

“When I kill a white, my mother is happy!”

Neuman knew that Zulu chant. Biko and his activists had made it their war cry, a way of saying to the defenders of apartheid that they had no weapons but that they would still be dangerous even after they died. After Biko was killed, the banned ANC had adopted the same chant.

“When I kill a white, my mother is happy!”

The voices echoed beneath the brick vaults of the Armchair. Neuman was standing in the middle of the audience, staring spellbound at his totem. Those grimacing old monkeys were coming back to the surface.

“When I kill a white, my mother is happy!”

On the smoke-filled stage, Zina and her Zulus were dancing the
toi
, the war dance of the townships. Their feet hit the ground, raising clouds of dust just as they had in the enclaves into which they had been herded, the drums grew ever more intense, the spotlights flashed, images of bloodstained demonstrators appeared on a screen at the back of the stage, and the members of the group stamped on the spot, cradling imaginary AK-47s in their arms, just like in the old days, and still chanting:

“When I kill a white, my mother is happy! Drrrrrrr!”

Zina was the first in the group to fire a burst at the packed crowd. The dust whirled on the stage, the drums thundered. It was now that she spotted Neuman's face in the crowd, a head taller than the others. With a smile, she decapitated him.

 

 *

 

“What are you doing here?”

“You missed me just now,” Neuman said, his eyes twinkling in the corridor leading to the dressing rooms.

“You moved,” she said. “Otherwise, you wouldn't be here.”

Zina was barefoot, covered in dust and sweat. The cop had been waiting for her to come offstage, she felt electric, confused, vulnerable.

“You didn't tell me everything the other day,” he said.

His air of knowing a lot put her on the defensive. “Maybe you didn't ask the right questions.”

“How about this one? There's a camera at the entrance to the club, did you know that?”

“I'm not especially interested in electronic surveillance,” she replied.

“Neither am I, but it can sometimes come in useful. Is there somewhere quiet we can talk?”

The musicians were just coming offstage, clapping their hands. Zina opened the door to her dressing room.

“What happened to your ear?” she asked as they went in.

“Nothing.”

Neuman was staring at her, gripped by contradictory feelings. Zina took a colored shawl from the dressing table and wrapped it around her, then looked him up and down, all six feet of him.

“You have those snake eyes of yours,” she said. “What's up?”

“We don't know where Nicole Wiese slept three days before she was murdered,” he said. “According to the club's security tapes, she left here that night at twelve minutes after midnight. Four minutes later, you came out. We don't know where Nicole spent the night, or who with. Four minutes—enough time for you to pick up your things from the dressing room and join her. What do you have to say to that?”

“I prefer up-and-coming politicians, without children, but I don't say no to a little candy from time to time. What is this crap?”

The dust had made gray craters on her skin, which was starting to crack.

“Nicole was a girl who'd led a sheltered life and was so eager to become liberated that she was skipping the stages, collecting sex toys and erotic experiences. Nicole took
iboga
that Wednesday, and I think you spent the night together.”

Their eyes met, two wild animals. He was bluffing.

“Bring me a warrant,” she retorted, “and I'll open my nest.”

Neuman removed a hair from the sweat on her shoulder. “Will you talk now, or do you prefer to wait for the lab report?”

Zina's black eyes flashed. “I didn't smash Nicole's head in,” she said through clenched teeth.

“No, you're much too smart. But you did lie to me.”

“Just because I don't tell you what you want to hear doesn't mean I'm a liar.”

“Then I suggest you tell me the truth.”

Zina pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Nicole came up to me at the bar after the show on Wednesday,” she said. “She said she'd liked the show. It didn't take me long to see that she liked me, too. She wanted to see life through rose-tinted spectacles, so I initiated her into
iboga
.”

Neuman nodded—it was as he had feared.

“Were you alone?”

“Why not? We were both adults.”

“Where did you spend the night?”

“In the room I've been renting during the tour, not far from here.”

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“I'm not an
impimpi
,” she said.

An
impimpi
was someone who passed on secrets to the whites.

“What secret are we talking about?”

“My grandmother was a herbalist,” she said with a touch of pride. “She passed on some of her talents. Preparing
iboga
is part of them. We're not in the habit of divulging our little formulas.”

“A simple love potion,” he said. “Hardly worth making such a mystery over.”

“I wasn't born yesterday. I'm one of the last people to have seen Nicole alive, and we spent the night together three days before she was killed. I didn't want the police prying into my private life.”

“Have you done so many things you regret?”

“Apart from meeting you, no.”

Silence fell in the dressing room.

“Well?” he insisted.

Zina grinned provocatively. “Well, Nicole was a pretty little blonde doll who, as it happens, was delighted at the prospect of spending the night with me. She liked the experience, but I'm too old to play nanny, so we left it at that. That was Wednesday. On Saturday evening, Nicole dropped by my dressing room to say hello and pick up the flasks I'd made for her. She'd asked for them—and what better farewell gift could there be than a love potion?” Her eyes gleamed, but not with joy.

“Did she pay you?”

“I'm not a charity.”

“So you do this to supplement your income?”

“It's vulgar to talk about money, Mr. Neuman, and vulgarity doesn't suit you.”

“Did Nicole tell you who she was planning to share her precious flasks with?”

“We didn't talk much, to tell the truth.”

“Not even pillow talk?”

“We girls don't need words.”

“The silence must have been deafening.” He took his hand from his pocket. “Stan Ramphele. Mean anything to you?”

Zina peered at the photograph he showed her—a black, about twenty, quite good-looking.

“No,” she said.

“Nicole and Stan were both high when they died, on a highly toxic
tik
-based substance that modifies behavior.”

“I only use natural ingredients, my friend.
Iboga
has a subtler effect. Want to try it?”

“Maybe in another life.”

“You're making a mistake,” she assured him. “My secrets are quite harmless.”

“I'm not so sure of that.”

“I'm a dancer,” she said, looking him straight in the face, “not a serial killer.”

He noticed the little scar just above her lips. “Who said anything about other killings?”

“I can see it in your eyes. Or am I wrong?” She was looking at him as if she knew him well.

Neuman changed tack. “Why haven't you cooperated with the police?”

“I'm getting pissed off with your questions.”

“I'm getting pissed off with your answers.”

Zina's face, close to his now, grew sharper. An abrupt change of direction. “Listen to what I'm going to tell you, Ali Neuman, and listen carefully. I saw policemen stamp on my mother's stomach when she was pregnant, I can still hear her screaming, and my father saying nothing. Yes, I can still hear him saying nothing! Because that was the only thing those poor niggers were entitled to do! The child she was expecting didn't live, and that killed my mother. And when my father tried to report it, they laughed in his face—my father, the
induna
! One day, the police came and told him he'd been stripped of his position, because of insubordination to the Bantu authorities. Then more police came and threw us out and bulldozed our house. And it was the police who fired into the unarmed crowd during the Soweto uprising, killing hundreds of us. So just because times have changed and you can fuck a white girl without getting a
kaffirpack
26
doesn't mean I'm going to throw myself into your arms.”

“That's not what I'm asking you to do.”

“Oh, but it is,” she hissed. “The reason I haven't cooperated with the police is because I don't trust them. None of them. Nothing personal, as you may have noticed, unless you're as blind as you're stubborn. Now I'd like to be alone, so I can take a shower. That doesn't mean I don't feel sick about what happened to Nicole. And stop looking at me with those snake eyes of yours, I have the impression you think of me as a fucking guinea pig!”

She was nothing like Tembo's rats. But there was murder in her eyes.

“You were a member of Inkatha,” he said.

“A long time ago.”

“To fight the whites?”

“No,” she said, angrily. “To fight apartheid.”

“There were less violent ways.”

“Did you come here to talk about my past or about Nicole's killer?”

“Have I touched a raw nerve?”

“It killed my mother. Don't you think that's reason enough?” Her aristocratic manner returned, but he sensed that he had hurt her.

“I'm sorry,” he said, more gently. “I'm not very used to pestering women.”

“You must feel alone.”

“Like a dead man.”

Zina smiled, her face covered in powder. “My Zulu name is Zaziwe,” she said.

It meant “hope.”

But her eyes were as black as night.

 

 *

 

Ukuphanda
: the word meant, literally, scratching the ground for food, like chickens in a farmyard.

In the context of the townships, phanding—the English word that derived from it—meant, if you were a woman, looking for a boyfriend for the purpose of obtaining money, food or accommodation. It wasn't just a question of getting material security in exchange for sex. It was also a matter of finding someone to look after you, someone who'd make it possible for you to escape the brutality of everyday life. A quest embarked on by many young women, which led in most cases to their being exposed to violence or contaminated by AIDS.

Maia had been no exception to the rule. She had been competed over by men who considered her, at best, as their property. Her last boyfriend, believing the gossip a drunken neighbor had fed him, had taken Maia to the river bank, stripped her, smeared her with dish soap, and ordered her to wash in the brackish water, to teach her not to whore with other men. After which, he had taken a leather strap and beaten her for hours, six, eight, ten, Maia couldn't remember. Then he had raped her.