Zulu (3 page)

The man shrank in his soccer shorts—the place stank of
dagga
, the locally grown weed.

“I told you I don't know her. I took over the house from my cousin, Sam.” He made a gesture with his head. “You'll have to ask him. I don't know anything. I'm not even sure when I was born!”

The woman chuckled, and the man followed suit.

“He's telling the truth!” she assured Neuman, calmly.

She was still swaying in the doorway. Pepper and honey—that was what her skin smelled of. He remembered that he hadn't told Maia he was coming.

 

Fortunately, Cousin Sam was more forthcoming. Nora and Simon had left about a year earlier. The
sangoma
wasn't well liked in the neighborhood. She was accused of making
muti
, magic potions, and casting spells. People even said that was why she had fallen ill, her powers had turned against her. As for her son Simon, he remembered a taciturn, sickly boy distrusted by everyone for reasons of superstition.

“They've never been back,” Sam assured him.

“Didn't Nora have any family?”

Sam shrugged. “She sometimes mentioned a cousin on the other side of the railroad tracks.”

The squatter camps.

The sun was chasing away the noon shade. Neuman was walking to his car when he got the call from Dan Fletcher.

“Ali. Ali, you'd better get over here.”

 

The clouds were flowing like liquid nitrogen from the top of Table Mountain down to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Neuman walked along the path without a glance at the bright yellow and white flowers in the borders. Dan Fletcher was waiting under the trees, his hands in his pockets, the only thing about him that gave an impression of calm. They exchanged friendly nods.

The breeze was cooler in the shade of the Fragrance Garden.
Wilde Iris
(
Dietes grandiflora
), said the sign. Neuman kneeled. There was a smell of pine and wet grass and other plants with learned names. The girl lay among the flowers. A white girl, almost hidden behind the grove of acacias. Quite a young girl, to judge by the morphology and skin texture.

“One of the municipal employees found her,” Dan said, standing over him. “Around ten-thirty. The gates open at nine, but this part is quite isolated. We've cleared the park of visitors.”

Her summer dress had been pulled up to her waist, revealing legs flecked with blood. A little cloud of insects was buzzing around her face. The poor girl had been hit so many times, you couldn't make out the bridge of the nose, or the arch of the eyebrows. The cheekbones and eyes, too, had disappeared in a mess of flesh, bone and cartilage. The mouth had been smashed in, the teeth driven down her throat, the forehead shattered in several places. She had been killed in such a way as to wipe out her features, eliminate her identity.

Dan couldn't look at the body. He was barely thirty, but had a fair amount of experience—he'd already been with Neuman for four years, which, according to him, counted double. He had seen drowned people, people who'd been burned alive, people riddled with shotgun shells. But this girl was going to give him sleepless nights.

“Any idea who she is?” Neuman asked.

“We found a video club membership card in the pocket of her cardigan,” he replied. “The name on it is Judith Botha, and there's an address in Observatory.”

The city's student district.

“No purse?”

“We're still searching the bushes.”

Deaf to the bustle of the crickets, Neuman seemed mesmerized by a bright red petal that had gotten stuck to the victim's hair. The sight of those fingers, retracted like newly squashed spiders, made his breath come in little gulps. He thought about the last moments of her life, the terror she must have felt, the fate that had led her here, to die surrounded by Wilde irises. A girl who wasn't yet twenty.

Dan still stood silently in the shade of the acacias. He'd wanted to tidy the house a little before Claire got back, but hadn't had time, four days without her had seemed an eternity, now the squad was in action and all these smells were making him feel dizzy—the only scent he liked was his wife's.

Neuman finally stood up.

“What do you think?” Dan asked.

“Where's Brian?”

“I called him on his cell phone, but there's no answer.”

The scents were becoming headier than ever. Neuman looked with a grimace at the girl's twisted body. “Call him again.”

 

 

 

T
he world capsized into the ocean of night and Brian Epkeen fell deep into an abyss, then woke with a start. The noise of the sliding door had made a kind of click in his head. The noise came from downstairs, not loud but perfectly audible. After a while it stopped.

Brian rolled over in bed, narrowly avoiding the head on the pillow next to his, and retreated to take stock. The birds were chattering beyond the bedroom window, curly red hair peeped out from beneath the sheets, and someone had just entered the house.

Brian reached for his revolver, but it wasn't on the desk. He saw the head turned away from him, the tousled hair, but no clothes on the floor. He slid out of the sheets without a sound, grabbed the .38 from under the bed, walked naked across the carpet to the door, and softly opened it.

He felt woozy, he still didn't know where his clothes were, but there was definitely someone downstairs. He could hear footsteps heading out of the living room. The person was rummaging in the hall now. He crept down the stairs, rubbing his eyes, which were taking their time to focus. When he got to the foot of the stairs, he flattened himself against the wall. The intruder hadn't had to climb over the railings to get in—the gate had been left open.

Now completely awake, Brian gripped the handle of his gun. He didn't know why he had left everything open, but he had a good idea—the redhead upstairs. In any case, the house was too big for him, it wasn't just a matter of the security system anymore. He advanced toward the hall, gripped by contradictory feelings. Silence seemed to have seeped into the walls of the house, the birdsong had stopped. Brian crept around the corner and stopped for a moment in surprise. There was the thief, rifling through the pockets of his jacket, which by some miracle was actually hanging on the coat stand.

The intruder had just found two hundred-rand bills in the wallet when he sensed a presence behind him.

“Drop the money,” Brian said, in a hoarse voice.

Even though caught in the act, the other man didn't flinch. He was a young white, about twenty, dressed in the latest fashion—Gothic boots, baggy jeans, an extra-large T-shirt with a picture of a hardcore band on it—and with long light chestnut hair like his mother's.

“What are you doing here?” David retorted, staring at his father, the bills still clutched in his hand.

“I could ask you the same question,” Brian said. “This is my house.”

David did not reply. He put the wallet back in the jacket, but not the bills. There was no trace of remorse or shame on his corn-fed Brad Pitt face. The prodigal son seemed to be in a hurry.

“Is this all you have?” he asked, indicating the bills.

“I stashed the rest in the Bahamas.”

Brian hadn't moved, hoping that the revolver would hide his nudity, but David was looking with an air of disgust at his father's big dangling cock.

David was studying journalism. He smoked grass, was always broke, an idler. His mother's beloved son, their only son, their star, arrogant as could be and clever enough to have set up house at the home of his girlfriend's parents. He was a new-generation white who considered himself a leftist liberal, and not only spoke about the SAP
10
in insulting terms but called his father a fascist and a reactionary. It really hurt him to hear that, like a blow to the gut, but all the same, Brian loved his son—he'd been the same at his age.

This wasn't the first time David had come here to steal from him while he was asleep. The last time, he'd not only gone through his pockets but also the pockets of the girl who'd been sleeping upstairs.

“I need money,” he said.

“You're twenty years old, look after yourself.”

Brian tried to grab the bills, but David stuffed them in the extra-large pocket of his jeans and looked around for whatever else he could swipe.

“Did your mother send you?” Brian asked.

“You didn't pay her this month.”

“It's only the second, damn it.”

“It wouldn't make any difference if it was the tenth. How do you think she gets by?”

David had more than one insult in his armory. Brian grinned bitterly. He had borrowed money to keep the house, hoping that David would come and live here, with his girlfriend if he wanted, or his boyfriend, he really didn't care. But not only had his son not wanted to come, Ruby had continued to fill his head with lies.

“I hear your mother drives around in a BM coupé with that dentist of hers,” he said. “She should be able to survive till the end of the month, don't you think?”

“What about me?”

“Your school fees, the two thousand rand I send you every month, isn't that enough?”

Behind his grunge rebel hair, David was sulking. “Marjorie's parents have thrown us out,” he said.

Marjorie was his girlfriend, a Goth with piercings everywhere—he'd seen her seen once or twice coming out of David's school.

“I thought her parents really liked you.”

“Not anymore.”

“You could come and live here.”

“Very funny.”

“Why don't you go to your mother's?”

“She has her new life now, I don't want to piss her off. No, what we need is an apartment in town, not too far from the faculty. We'd like to rent in the Malayan quarter, but you have to pay the first two months in advance, then there's food, and bills.”

“Don't forget taxis. Best way to get to the faculty, don't you think?”

“So what about it?” David said, impatiently.

Brian sighed again, touched by so much love.

It was then that David noticed the woman's dress hanging on the chair in the hall. “I see you're entertaining,” he said. “Do you know this one's name?”

“Didn't have time to ask. Now get the hell out of here.”

“And you, go wash your dick.”

David brushed past him, walked across the living room without a word, and slammed the door, leaving a deafening silence in his wake.

Brian wondered how the little boy who used to run after penguins on the beach could have become this skinny stranger who acted like some kind of mother superior, and was cynical about everything. What saddened him wasn't so much the fact that he'd found him rifling his pockets while he was asleep as the way he had of leaving without a word, just giving him that horrible look, always the same one, a mixture of contempt and bitterness, as if he was seeing him for the last time. Brian put down the revolver he was still holding—it wasn't loaded anyway—saw his crumpled clothes on the kitchen table, the purple blouse on the floor, the matching bra, and went glumly back upstairs.

It was hot in the bedroom. The woman with the curly red hair was still lying on the bed, the sheets now down below her buttocks. They were diaphanous, curvy, as fine and soft as wax. Tracy, the barmaid from the Vera Cruz. A thirty-five-year-old redhead with bleached bunches he'd been seeing for a while, small but hot stuff.

Sensing his presence, Tracy opened her apple-green eyes, and smiled when she saw him. “Hi.”

Her rumpled face still bore the marks of the pillow. He wanted to kiss her, to erase what had just happened.

“What time is it?” she asked, making no attempt to cover herself.

“I don't know. About eleven.”

“Oh, no!” she simpered, as if they had only just fallen asleep.

Brian sat down next to her, with one leg still out of the bed. The confrontation with his son had laid him low, he felt like some kind of creature washed ashore, being pecked at by seagulls and crows.

“What's the matter?” she asked, stroking his thigh. “You seem worried.”

“No, I'm fine.”

“In that case, get back in bed. We have plenty of time, before we go to your friend Jim's.”

“Who?”

Tracy's eyelids performed an arabesque. “Your friend. Jim. You told me we were going to spend Sunday by the sea. He gave you the keys to his villa.”

Brian did a double take—oh, God, he really should stop using the famous Jim. The last time he'd raved about this so-called friend, it had been to invite a young woman lawyer to come and play golf in his private club in Betty's Bay. What on earth possessed him to talk about the guy? He must have a sick mind.

Tracy pulled back the sheets, revealing two creamy breasts, which, if his memory served him well, were very sensitive. She smiled. “Come here, you.”

Brian let himself be drawn in by what her fingers were doing. They stimulated each other's senses for a while, worked themselves up into a frenzy, both came, although not at the same time, exchanged a few exhausted caresses, and finished it all off with a kiss.

A few moments later he disappeared into the bathroom and took a shower, wondering what he could say to sweet-talk Tracy, then looked at his image in the mirror and decided not to bother.

Brian Epkeen had been handsome, but that was in the past. There had been too many fuck-ups, too many missed opportunities. Sometimes he hadn't given enough love, sometimes he'd loved too much, or else gotten it all wrong. For forty-three years he'd been scuttling about like a crab, sometimes wandering far off course, sometimes making sudden sideward leaps.

He grabbed an unironed shirt, which, in the mirror, vaguely reminded him of himself, put on a pair of black pants, and strolled across the bedroom. Tracy, still lying on the bed, was asking him to tell her more about their Sunday by the sea when Brian switched on his cell phone.

He had twelve messages.

 

 *

 

Cape Town lay at the foot of Table Mountain, the magnificent massif that towered three thousand five hundred feet above the South Atlantic. The Mother City, it was called. Brian Epkeen lived in Somerset, a gay area full of trendy bars and clubs, some open to everyone, without restrictions. European colonists, Xhosa tribesmen, Indian and Malayan coolies—Cape Town had had a mixed population for centuries. It was the country's flagship city, a little New York by the sea, but also the place where Parliament was located, which meant that it was here that the apartheid policy was first applied. Brian knew the city by heart. It had both inspired strong emotions in him and just as often made him nauseous.

His great-great-grandfather had come here as a ragged, illiterate farmer who spoke the kind of degenerate Dutch that would become Afrikaans, believed in an eye for an eye, and wielded the Old Testament in one hand and a rifle in the other. He and the Boer pioneers with him had found a barren land peopled by Bushmen with prehistoric customs, nomads who couldn't tell the difference between a game animal and a domestic one, who pulled the legs off cows and ate them raw while they mooed to death, Bushmen they had driven out like wolves. The old man didn't spare anyone—if he had, there was a good chance his family would have been slaughtered. He refused to pay taxes to the English colonial governor who left them alone to face the hostile natives, clear the land and survive as best they could. The Afrikaners had never depended on anyone or anything. That was the blood that Brian had in his veins, the blood of dust and death—the blood of the bush.

Whether out of some ancestral memory, or some sense of being a dying race, the Boers were the eternal losers of history—following the war that took their name when British conquerors burned their houses and their land, twenty thousand of them, including women and children, had died of hunger and disease in the English concentration camps into which they had been herded—and the establishment of apartheid had been their greatest defeat
11
.

In Brian's opinion, the reason his ancestors had established apartheid was because they were shit scared. Fear of the black man had taken over their bodies and minds with an animal force that recalled the old reptilian fears—fear of the wolf, the lion, the eaters of white men. That wasn't the basis on which to build anything. Phobia of the other had destroyed their powers of reason, and although the end of the despised regime may have restored some dignity to the Afrikaners, fifteen years weren't enough to wipe out their contribution to history.

Brian drove past the quaint old buildings in the city center, then the colorful facades of the colonnaded houses on Long Street. The avenues were largely free of traffic, most people had gone to the beach. He climbed toward Lions Head, managing to get a little coolness by putting his hand through the open window—the air-conditioning in his Mercedes had long since given up the ghost. A collector's item, just like him—Tracy had said that, and he had taken it as a compliment. He wasn't thinking about her as he drove, or about the weekend with “Jim.”

David's intrusion had left a bitter taste in his mouth. They had hardly spoken for six years, and when they had it had been so unpleasant it would have been better to keep quiet. Brian hoped that things would work out, but David and his mother still bore him a grudge. He had cheated on her—that was true—mostly with black women. Brian was faithful only to his beliefs, but when you came down to it, it was all his fault. Ruby had always been a tragic, deeply wounded fury, and he'd been a complete idiot—it was plain as could be that the woman was a force-ten storm warning. They had met at a Nine Inch Nails concert during a festival in support of the release of Mandela, and the way she had been exploding in the middle of that electronic din should have made him sensitive to the cyclones to come—a girl who bounced up and down to the riffs of Nine Inch Nails was obviously pure dynamite. Brian had fallen in love, an encounter of two parallel lines suddenly converging, a hot beam of love making straight for her crazy eyes.

In Constantia, Epkeen narrowly missed the colored with the bandaged head zigzagging in the middle of the road, and stopped at the red light. The man, his shirt torn and bloodstained, walked on a little way, then collapsed, and lay there in the sun with his arms out. Other down-and-outs were sleeping it off on the sidewalks, too befuddled with alcohol to hold out their hands to the few passersby.