Zulu (19 page)

 

 

 

I
s Daddy burning?”
“Yes, darling.” “Where's he going?”

“Daddy's going to make a pretty little cloud in the sky.”

Tom sighed, visibly skeptical. Eve, too, was finding it all a bit boring. As their bereavement passed through the ordeal of fire, Claire hugged the two of them and stared at the furnace that had swallowed Dan's coffin. Unhappiness was contagious, Claire knew, but she needed their strength to blot out her nightmare visions. The children didn't know what had happened to their father, just that he had been killed by criminals. Claire was shaking, wondering why they had cut off his hands, she would have liked to hear their explanations, the reasons that had led them to commit such evil, if there were any.

“What Will You Say” was playing through the lousy sound system, a song by Jeff Buckley that she had covered with Chris, her black guitarist. Dan had loved it. A voice like a suspended wave turning tragic, Jeff and his ethereal smile—he'd drowned himself in the Mississippi, one night when he was drunk. In spite of the sedatives, Claire wasn't feeling exhausted, just violent. The cancer, the radiation, her hair falling out in handfuls—she had faced all that with a courage she didn't know she had, but no one had prepared her for this.

Even when she was a little child, she only had to smile and her halo grew. To the people around her, Claire was the one who sailed through everything, the one nothing bad would ever happen to—she was so pretty. Nonsense. Deceit everywhere. No need to take a midnight swim in the Mississippi. The little blonde angel smiling in the photos didn't have a halo anymore, didn't even have any hair. Her husband was dead. Dead and gone.

 

Her sister Margo hadn't waited for the end of the cremation to take the children home. Collecting the ashes and attending to the final formalities would take hours and Claire needed to be alone with him, one last time.

She had waited for the family to go, then she had taken the urn and driven to their inlet, near Llandudno. It had been their place of pilgrimage as lovers, a place to meet from time to time, and now a place to say goodbye. The waves had rolled on the deserted beach, a twilit seascape on which to spread his human dust. Claire had hugged the urn to her heart and walked into the foam, as far as her legs would carry her. She had talked to him as she walked, her last words of love, before casting what was left of him on the waves. The ashes had floated for a moment on the surface, before the eddies carried them away. The urn had sunk, too, a terrified Titanic in the swirling water.

 

“Are you hungry?” Margo asked. “I made chicken with prunes.”

Their favorite dish when they were little. Claire had just come in. “No, thanks.”

Their eyes met. Compassion, distress. They would talk later, when the children were in bed.

“What happened to your dress?” Margo asked, trying to make conversation. “Didn't you notice?”

In drying, the salt had made rings on her black dress. Claire did not answer. At the kitchen table, the children were pushing shredded pieces of prune to the edges of their plates. Margo squeezed her younger sister's shoulder, even if it didn't help.

“Mummy,” Zoe said sulkily, “I don't like prunes anymore.”

Claire saw the box on the breakfast bar in the kitchen.

“Oh, yes!” Margo said. “A friend of yours dropped this package for you earlier. A tall brown-haired man, who looked as if he'd gotten out on the wrong side of the bed.” She turned to the children. “But prunes are
very
good
!”

It was a tin box, worth ten times its price in the shops on Long Street. Claire found photographs of herself inside—her and the children, her and Dan, her alone, surrounded by birds in Kruger Park. There was also a European travel brochure, Dan's case notes, which he had kept out of fear of computer viruses, two or three little things the kids had made at school, and some words on a folded white sheet of paper:

 

Dan kept almost nothing in his drawer—everything in his head. I thought you'd like to have these things. I don't know what to say, Claire. Best wishes? Kindest regards? Call when you can. Ali sends his love.

Brian

 

The words were like the man, beautiful and awkward.

 

 *

 

Tara showed up in Brian's office and, for the brief time the mirage lasted, the world turned Klein blue. She had replaced her riding clothes with a tight-fitting pair of jeans and an equally sexy T-shirt. Tara strolled around the untidy room as if they were visiting their first apartment, peered through the large window looking out on the Greenmarket Square flea market, then turned back to Brian, who'd been following her little game and letting his mind wander.

“Nice view!”

“If you say so.”

Tara was as beautiful from behind as she was from the front.

“Thanks for coming,” he said, by way of preamble.

“If I can be of any help to the police,” she said, not believing a word he was saying. “Where should I sit?”

“Wherever you like.”

Tara pushed the files out of her way and parked her generous posterior on the edge of the desk. She sat there looking down at him, swaying in a playful way, clearly well aware of her charms. It made him feel slightly sick. He clicked on the icons.

“Will this take long?”

“That depends on what you remember.”

“I can hardly remember today's date,” Tara joked.

It was the eighth. The date of Dan's cremation.

“But I'll do the best I can,” she added. “I promise.”

“Right. I've prepared a selection of vehicles matching the description you gave me. Just say yes, no, or maybe.”

“O.K.!”

Brian wondered where this disturbingly gorgeous woman had emerged from, reduced the voltage of the electric current drawing him to her, and soon fell back to earth when four-by-fours started appearing on the computer screen. Tara shook her long brown hair to indicate no. She concentrated all her attention on what was in front of her, her cobalt eyes flashing in the light from the screen. The vehicles passed one after the other, dozens of them, some muddy, some clean, four-by-fours, six-by-sixes, with bull bars, kangaroo bars, models of all makes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

“Have you noticed?” she said after a moment. “It's only men driving in these pictures.”

“Women don't care for four-by-fours, do they?”

“They hate them.”

“You're great.” He turned to the screen. “Anything look familiar?”

Tara made a face at the next model that appeared. “No,” she replied. “Mine was a big thing, with high wheels.”

“Ugly?”

“Very.” She made a grimace of disgust.

Brian went straight to the Pinzgauers.

It didn't take long.

“That one!” Tara cried. “The Steyr Puch 712K!”

She was suddenly five and a half years old, and he felt his brain breaking up into little blue blocks.

“Are you sure it's this model?”

“If it isn't, it's one of its cousins.”

“But you were a hundred yards away.”

“I have good eyes, lieutenant.”

He impressed her, which was scary.

“A dark Pinzgauer Steyr Puch,” he said, writing it in his notebook. “Any other details?”

“What would you like to know?” she said, ironically. “The color of the tires?”

“I was thinking more of a driver, or someone you might have seen near the house.”

“Sorry. I didn't see anyone. I go by there early in the morning, maybe they were asleep.”

Brian made a face. Isolated as it was at the far end of the beach, the house was a secure hideout, and the track gave access to the road leading to the townships. There couldn't be a hundred thousand of that model of Pinzgauer in the province.

“Thank you. You've been a great help.”

“Don't mention it!”

Tara leaped down from the desk. She seemed to like bouncing up and down.

“Well, now,” she said with a smile, “I have to go.”

“Where?”

“None of your business, lieutenant!”

She grabbed her canvas bag from the desk, met his melting eyes, and thought for a couple of seconds.

“I have a few things to do before this evening,” she said, mysteriously. “I assume you're free?”

“As the wind,” he replied.

The adrenalin was pulsing in his veins. Tara smiled, then glanced at her watch.

“Hmm,” she said, “it should be fine. Seven o'clock at the bar on the corner of Greenmarket, how does that suit you?”

 

 *

 

The bodies found in the house at Muizenberg had been identified. Pamela Parker, twenty-eight, a drug addict well known to the police for her association with several of the township gangs. Arrested several times for soliciting on buses and in bus stations. No fixed abode. Suspended sentence for assault. Nothing on her for nearly a year. One sister, Sonia, current whereabouts unknown. Francis Mulumba, twenty-six, former Rwandan policeman wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for a number of rapes and murders. Mujahid Dokuku, ex-member of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a Nigerian rebel group specializing in the hijacking of petroleum belonging to the multinationals. Escaped two years earlier from prison, where he was serving twelve years for guerrilla activities. Suspected of having entered South Africa illegally, like thousands of other refugees, to swell the ranks of the gangs.

All the forensics team had found in the cellar was the shit on the walls, blood belonging to the victims, and two kitchen knives that had been used for the slaughter, with their prints on the handles. No firearms, or drugs, even though they had been pumped full of the same
tik
-based cocktail, in doses close to those that produce insanity, according to Tembo's protocol. Had they taken shelter in the house to escape the police roadblocks? Had they killed each other while under the influence of the drug, or had they been helped the way Stan Ramphele had been helped? Was it their squat, a hideout from which they sold the drug? Neuman had seen Joey, the youngest of the gang, the other day on the construction site in Khayelitsha. Why was he attacking Simon? Where was his associate, the guy with the limp?

Neuman had been all over the area around the gymnasium site, but hadn't found out much. Street kids like Simon Mceli were two a penny in the township. He'd been sent from waste grounds to soccer fields. Some people had told him to fuck off back to the whites. Overcrowding, AIDS, violence—the fate of street kids from an endlessly overcrowded camp didn't interest anyone.

The postmortem report on Simon Mceli came in mid-afternoon. The animals living in the pipes on the construction site had eaten away much of the child's body, but the lesions on the proximal part of the third metacarpus were insect bites dating from a week earlier, the approximate date of death. There was no bullet hole, or any visible wound on the parts of the body that were still intact. The few objects found near him—candles, matches, water, food, blanket—indicated that Simon had taken a basic survival kit with him. No needle marks. The child had been suffering from severe nutritional deficiencies, calcium, iron, vitamins, proteins, he'd been lacking in everything, except toxic products: marijuana, methamphetamine, and that same molecule the lab couldn't identify.

So Simon had been on drugs, too. In fact, he'd been completely hooked. That might explain his scrawny state, the attack on his mother, but not the cause of death. Simon had died of blood poisoning, but it wasn't an overdose that had killed him. It was something much more devastating.

He had died of AIDS.

 

 

After violence, HIV was the second great scourge of South Africa. Twenty per cent of the population carried the virus, one woman in three in the townships, and the outlook was alarming. Two million children would lose their mothers in the coming years, and life expectancy, which had already decreased by five years, would go down another fifteen years, falling to only forty by 2020. Forty.

The government had taken the pharmaceutical industry to court for refusing to supply generic drugs to those infected. It was only with the help of the international community and after a virulent press campaign that access to antivirals had finally been conceded, but the subject remained controversial. To the South African government, a nation was like a united, stable, nourishing family, self-disciplined and only able to function if fully healthy. The president had ignored the statistics of HIV infection, deaths from AIDS, and sexual violence—all of which, according to him, were private matters. He had put the blame on the political opposition, AIDS activists, the multinationals and the whites, who were always ready to stigmatize the sexual practices of blacks—by speaking of a new “black peril,” they were reviving apartheid. Because of this, AIDS had been proclaimed a simple disease linked to poverty, malnutrition, and hygiene, but not to sex. The consequences had been disastrous, especially as far as male behavior was concerned. Following the logic of this argument, the government had first attempted to contain the scourge by advocating garlic and lemon juice after sexual relations, the taking of showers, and the use of lubricating ointments. The rejection of condoms—in spite of free distribution—as being unmanly and an instrument of the whites had made an already desperate situation even grimmer.

Jacques Raymond, the Belgian doctor who worked at the dispensary in Khayelitsha for Mèdecins sans Frontières, was a seriously angry man. Vaccines, screening, home visits, an education center—Raymond had been active in the township for three years and had lost count of the dead. Neuman had asked to consult Simon Mceli's file and the doctor hadn't raised any objection. Violence, disease, drugs—the life of street kids wasn't worth anything on the open market, not even a Hippocratic oath.