Zulu (21 page)

Zina Dukobe had been an active member of Inkatha, and for the past ten years had been touring the continent with her group. She had not been involved with any political organization since the democratic elections but all her musicians were, or had been, in contact with Inkatha. Neuman drew up a list of the group's tours in South Africa, the places visited and the dates, and compared them with the many unsolved murders that had taken place during those periods. After cross-checking in the files of the Criminal Investigation Department and the various security forces, he noted that six homicides had taken place in Jo'Burg during their stay there in 2003. One of the victims had been Karl Woos, warden of a high-security prison during apartheid, found dead in his house, poisoned with curare, probably by a prostitute.

Neuman continued with his search and soon came across another unsolved murder: Karl Müller, a former police inspector from Durban, found in his car at the side of a minor road on January 14, 2005, with a bullet in his head—his revolver had been found beside him, but there was no suicide note. The group had been in Durban at the same time. They had played a week in the city's clubs before leaving the day after the murder.

Bamako, Yaoundé, Kinshasa, Harare, Luanda, Windhoek—Neuman widened his search to include all the cities where Zina's group had performed. The data was non-existent or difficult to find. The last suspicious death he noted down had taken place in Maputo, Mozambique: Neil Francis, a secret-service officer under apartheid who had switched to the diamond trade, found at the foot of a cliff, his skull smashed.

August 2007. Zina's company had spent ten days in Maputo.

Neuman was putting together all the little pieces lost deep inside himself when he received an e-mail from Tembo. The medical examiner had done a supplementary analysis on De Villiers, the junkie surfer killed in a holdup. According to the blood samples kept in stock, De Villiers had been HIV positive.

The virus had developed only recently, but, as with Simon, in a spectacular way. Life expectancy: less than six months.

Neuman's intuition had been right, which wasn't exactly comforting. What was in that drug—death? And what else?

 

 *

 

As it had grown, the township had finally reached the sea.

So the boys played soccer on the beach, much to the delight of the tourists in their minibuses, who, thanks to the tour operators, bought themselves an easy conscience on the cheap with a lightning visit to the townships. You didn't see any of those tourists in Cape Town's black clubs—the only ones where you were frisked at the door—or any whites at all, a fact that was resented by the local youth.

It was here, on the edge of the dunes separating the beach from the squatter camps, that Winnie Got had seen Simon for the last time, with the other bums in his gang. Now that Simon was dead, those kids were the last witnesses in the case. Neuman parked his car at the far end of the track and walked toward the seething ocean. Boys' shouts could be heard in the distance, carried on the wind. The sand on the beach was blinding white in the sun. A pack of kids in shorts was running after a partly devoured rubber ball. They didn't have time to make passes, just general scrums at the four corners of the field, with loud cheers every time the ball was cleared. Each of the goalies moved from side to side between two sweaters thrown on the ground, and waited.

Neuman's shadow fell on the featherweight guarding his invisible goalposts.

“I'm looking for two boys,” he said, showing him Simon's photograph. “Local boys, about ten or twelve.”

The little goalie took a step back.

“One of them's older, and wears green shorts. They were both hanging out with this guy, Simon. I've been told they used to play with you.”

The boy was looking at Neuman as if afraid Neuman was going to grab him by the throat. “I . . . I don't know, sir. You'll have to ask the others,” he said, pointing to the scrum.

There were thirty of them, happily thrashing each other in the sun.

“Who does the ball belong to?”

“Nelson,” the featherweight replied. “The one in the Bafana Bafana shirt.”

The national team, not in very good form apparently, even though the World Cup was looming.

There was such noise and excitement around the ball that Neuman had to grab it to make himself heard. He took Nelson to one side, and the other players immediately surrounded them. He explained what he was after, the boys crowding around him as if he had candies for them. At first, they made faces to indicate that they didn't know anything, but the photograph revived their memories. The gang had hung around the beach for a while, they had even tried to play soccer together, but those other guys liked to act tough, there was a risk they'd steal the ball.

“When were they last here?” Neuman asked.

“I don't know. Two or three weeks ago.”

Nelson had his eyes firmly on the ball Neuman was holding under his arm—it was his, and they didn't have another one.

“How many kids were there with Simon?”

“Three or four.”

“Can you describe them?”

“I remember a tall guy in green shorts. The others called him Teddy. There was another one, shorter, in an army shirt.”

“You mean a khaki shirt?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“Er . . .”

The kids were playing around behind his back, and passing remarks in slang.

“Did they have any unusual marks?” Neuman insisted. “Anything on their faces, a tattoo?”

Nelson thought hard about this. “The smaller one,” he said, “the one in the army shirt, he had a scar on his neck. Here,” he said, pointing to the top of his own skinny trapezius muscles. “It looked like he'd stitched it himself!”

The others laughed, slapping their thighs and jostling one another.

“Anything else?” Neuman asked.

“Hey!” Nelson laughed. “I'm not a Divix camera.”

The only thing the kids were interested in was the rubber ball. Neuman kicked it as hard as he could, and it soared over their heads. The boys immediately ran off, screaming as if they had all scored goals.

 

 *

 

Neuman walked all over the sandy, scrub-covered open spaces known to be the refuge of criminals. He came across a few spectral figures, rejects from the townships or the squatter camps, but didn't learn anything more about the boys. The wind sweeping the zone blotted out everything, even the memory of the dead.

Neuman walked toward the bare dunes. Nothing here but empty Coke cans, plastic wrappers, and bottle necks used as pipes for getting high on
tik
or Mandrax. The place was empty, disturbing, a lunar landscape where even the dogs didn't roam, afraid of being eaten. The rest of the gang must be around here somewhere. They had fled the squatters' camp and the beach three weeks earlier, and no one had seen them again. Simon had taken refuge in the nearby township, where he had lived before, but he'd been alone. The gang must have split up. They had fled to escape the dealers—Neuman had met two of them on the construction site. Brian had killed Joey, but his partner, the one who limped, hadn't been among the bodies found in the cellar.

Neuman returned to the path that led along the side of the no-man's land. His car was waiting for him on the hot stones, mirages shimmering on the hood. He opened it with the remote control.

At that moment, a boy emerged from the nearby ditch. A young black, about twelve years old, with a dirty T-shirt and rubber shoes. Causing a small landslide as he came up out of the ditch, he took a step toward Neuman, but kept his distance. His frizzy hair was gray with dust. He was twisting a length of barbed wire in his dirty hands, and brushing away the flies crawling around his eyes.

“Hello.”

Sick eyes, with yellowish crusts around them where they had run.

“Hello.”

The boy, strangely, did not ask for coins. He stood there close to the ditch, looking over at Neuman and fiddling with his barbed wire. Neuman had a vague feeling of unease. The boy reminded him of a rabbit suffering from myxomatosis, stuck there without moving, waiting for death.

“Do you live here?” Ali asked.

The boy nodded. The calves of his jogging pants were torn, and he wasn't wearing a cap. Neuman took out Simon's photograph. “Ever seen this kid?”

The boy moved the flies away from his eyes, and shook his head.

“He's part of a street gang. There's also a tall boy in green shorts, and a shorter boy in an army shirt, with a scar on his neck.”

“No,” he said. “Never seen them.”

His voice hadn't changed, but the look he gave him wasn't a child's anymore.

“Twenty rand, sir.” He put his hand on his pants. “Twenty rand for a blow job, how about it, sir?”

 

 *

 

Josephina was one of the “mothers” of the Bantu Congregational Church, a congregation of the Churches of Zion established in the township. They didn't go in for the ready-made prayers of the Europeans, preferring lots of loud singing and constant dancing.

Neuman made his way through the crowd and found his mother in front of the platform with other singers transported with love. Josephina was shaking her huge paunch and praising the Lord fervently, as was the preacher performing this evening. The ecstatic audience repeated everything in chorus. Neuman stood for a moment watching his mother, her forehead bathed in sweat, smiling into the blue void. She seemed happy. He felt a sudden rush of tenderness, like a pang in the heart. He remembered April 27, the day of the first democratic elections, when they had gone together to the Khayelitsha polling station. He saw again the line of blacks and coloreds, all dressed up as if for a wedding, asking those coming out of the voting booth if they had had any problems—they were afraid of choosing the wrong candidate (there were ten on the list), not putting the cross in the right place, or letting it go outside the square, which would invalidate the vote, they were worried about the ink on their fingers
29
, the fingerprints they might leave on the voting paper, which some people said could give them away—if they voted for the ANC, who was to say that the authorities wouldn't throw them in prison? He remembered Josephina entering the booth with the list of candidates, shaking all over, and her cry of horror when she realized she had made a mistake, she had ticked Makwthu's box, because he was the first on the list of candidates and with his gray hair he looked like Madiba
30
. They had calmed her cries of despair and given her another paper, which Josephina had been careful to fill in properly, without going outside the box, but she had gone over her cross so many times that she had made a hole in the paper. He remembered the faces, the people clutching their identity cards so tightly that their fingers turned white, the people who wept as they voted, those who seemed drunk as they emerged from the booths, and the indescribable party that had followed the election results, when even old women had come out onto the streets in their blankets to join in the dancing while car horns blared.

That stubborn old Josephina was right. Simon had died among the animals, clutching his mother's picture. Their destiny was part of his own, that share of Africa for which his father and he had fought.

He waited for the service to finish, and drew her outside.

People in their Sunday best nodded to them with a slightly comical respect as they came out of the church on Gxabala Street, arm in arm.

“I heard the news on the radio earlier,” Josephina said in a confidential tone. “About the new murder, and the marks on the body. Is it true what they're saying about that Zulu?”

“Yes—just like the death of Kennedy.”

She laughed, but Neuman muttered to himself. The information had gotten into the media. How had they found out?

Hanging on his arm as if it was a hook, Josephina aired her long white dress. They talked about Simon, and the street became a lot darker. Neuman told her about the circumstances of his death, the AIDS, the powder that had poisoned him, the rest of the gang still at large, needing to be found. His mother listened and nodded, but she was thinking about something else.

“Yes,” she said after a whole. “Simon must have been feeling very weak to attack someone like me. He knew I deal with the disadvantaged. It was a cry for help.”

“A strange way to ask for help.”

“He was dying, Ali.” There were two big lines on her forehead.

“The kids who were with him were seen on the edge of the squatter camp,” he said. “Probably immigrants. The older one has green shorts, his name's Teddy. The other one wears a khaki shirt and has a nasty scar on his neck. They've vanished, and I think they're hiding somewhere in the township. One of your friends may have seen them.”

The congregation dealt with AIDS patients who were hidden—for fear that the news would get out and the family would be cursed—and just left to rot. Josephina and the other women had contacts all over Cape Flats, people would talk to them more easily than to the police.

“I'll spread the word,” Josephina assured him. “Yes, I'm going to take care of this right away.”

“I'm asking you to tell your friends,” he said, “not to run all over the township. Have you got that?”

“Why don't you just say it?” she said, taking offense. “You think I'm sick!”

“You are sick, Ma. And old.”

She laughed.

“I'm serious. Simon was hooked, and so are these kids. I'm sure they're sick, too, but they mustn't be approached, do you understand? I just want to locate them.”

Josephina smiled and stroked his face, as she used to do when he was little, to soothe him. “Don't worry about your old mother, I'm in fine form!” she said, her cracked hands traveling over him. “You, on the other hand, should get more sleep. You look feverish and there are rings under your beautiful eyes.”