Bones Omnibus (28 page)

This was enough to silence the sergeant and two of the constables. It was the colored one who continued to look troubled. Moqoma returned his gaze with a hard stare of his own until the young man looked away. No time but the present to learn that, despite chunks of the chief warden of Pollsmoor’s neurocranium lying in pieces across a coroner’s table somewhere, protecting those who paid for the privilege still took priority. No one was going to bring Charles van Lagemaat back to life, but the fury of a parliamentarian caught with his willy in someone who wasn’t his wife or mistress? Could cost a man his career.

Five minutes later, Nyawuza exited the building.

“Everybody ready?” Moqoma asked.

Without waiting for a response, he pushed out the back door. As Moqoma was the only one not in uniform, Nyawuza glanced at him for only a second before turning back to his cell phone. When the four officers followed Moqoma up the sidewalk, the parliamentarian blanched and almost tripped.

“Colonel Kjölsrud suggests you get in your car and you drive away.”

“Y…yes, thank you,” Nyawuza stammered before scurrying to his vehicle.

Moqoma didn’t wait for the man to drive away before pounding on the frosted-glass front door of the brothel. Almost the entire ocean-facing side of the building was glass, affording its residents astonishing views, he imagined.

“Sibulele?! Are you in there?”

Moqoma caught the sergeant’s queer look at the lieutenant’s familiarity with the place, but he ignored it. He pounded his fist on the door a second time.

“Sibulele! It gets worse if we have to raise our voices.”

He saw the outline of someone approaching. She seemed to eye him through an unseen peephole. She was joined by a second person, who quickly waved them away. As the short and stout Sibulele, a colored woman from not just the same district, but the same
street
as Moqoma’s own mother, opened the door, the detective just glimpsed the departure up the stairs of a coltish young woman wearing nothing more than a G-string.

“What is it, Moqoma?” drawled Sibulele, affecting exasperation, though he knew she was less a madam and more a low-paid live-in caretaker for the girls, like a house mum in a dormitory.

“According to the chief warden’s phone records, one of your girls was with van Lagemaat last night. You missing anybody?”

Surprise wasn’t something Sibulele allowed herself that often, so it was hard for her to hide it when it came naturally.

“The papers said he was alone in the car.”

“The papers didn’t know one of his neighbors just installed security cameras on their outer wall. We checked, thinking he might’ve been tailed. Instead, it led us inside his house where it was obvious they’d just…well.” He paused, as if not wishing to be indelicate. “We checked his phone. He’d arranged for her through your boss, Mr. Knosi.”

Sibulele flinched. This visit had gone from an annoyance to one of grave portent.

“So,
Auntie
,” Moqoma continued, “I ask again. Did one of your little pigeons not come last night?”

At this point, Moqoma and his comrades were invited in and offered the unlikely name of “Li.”

“She’d only been here a few weeks, but we don’t get girls who stay for much longer than that,” Sibulele explained, leading the men to a room at the rear of the brothel’s first floor. “I don’t believe her English was very good, and she kept to herself.”

“She was Asian, then?”

“Yes, many of them are,” Sibulele continued. “But Chinese, Japanese, Korean? I don’t know.”

Moqoma nodded. He had a good idea which.

Sibulele led the group into the tiny room, two child-sized bunk beds, a chest of drawers, and a dresser the only furniture. There were no windows. Judging from the hook-ups Moqoma spied peering out of the back wall, this was designed to be a laundry room.

“Hers is the bottom one on the left,” Sibulele said, indicating one of the beds. A thin blue blanket rested over an empty mattress with a small off-white pillow at the top. “The second to lowest drawer of the chest was hers, and she kept a couple of dresses in the closet. I don’t remember her having too many personal belongings.”

Because she was probably kidnapped in the middle of the night
, Moqoma kept himself from saying.

As they’d walked through the house, the other constables had glanced up to the curious faces looking down at them from the second floor with the awe of adolescent boys. If they’d known that the prostitutes assumed they were there to be bribed with sexual favors, he wondered if they would have smiled back so broadly.

“Why they gotta pack ’em in here so tight?” one of the constables asked. “Must have a bunch of bedrooms upstairs, right?”

Though the question was shot at Sibulele, Moqoma stepped forward, sparing her the explanation.

“Those are for the clients,” Moqoma remarked. “Different rooms, different themes. None of them include whore’s private bedchamber.”

This shut up the constable. Moqoma moved to the dresser and opened the drawer Sibulele had indicated as Li’s. Inside were a pair of pants, three thin cotton shirts, three pairs of panties, a single pair of socks, and a thin chemise. He went through the other drawers and discovered much the same thing in those. The uniformity of the clothes likely came from them being purchased all in the same place. He went to the closet and didn’t have much better luck. The dresses were the kind of interchangeably slinky nightwear that would only be considered suitable by trade or those desiring to appropriate their look.

“Send in one of her roommates.”

A moment later, a tall, thin woman of Asian descent whom Sibulele introduced as “Mai” entered. Rather than be cowed by the panel of official inquisitors, she affected nonchalance.

“Which dresses did Li wear?” Moqoma asked.

“This…and
this
,” the woman said in English, indicating first a short red dress, then an equally revealing white one.

The sizes jibed with the small stature of the woman seen in the security footage. Moqoma looked over the dresses, hunting for tags. The labels were in Chinese.

“Purchased in China?” Moqoma asked. “Was she here legally?”

Mai shrugged and glanced to Sibulele.

“They were probably bought on a shopping trip to one of the China Towns, either the one in Ottery or that newer one in Century City,” the non-madam suggested. “The girls go there all the time.”

The speed at which Moqoma crossed the room took everyone by surprise, particularly Sibulele, the object of the detective’s fury, who raised her arms defensively. Moqoma stopped, his face centimeters from Sibulele’s.

“You’ve decided to start lying?”

“I…I wasn’t sure…”

“
Bullshit
. You know the comings and goings of the girls. The
only
time they leave is on calls, and those require chaperones. Don’t sell me the fiction that they have the ability to come and go as they please. I know there’s a house full of armed men down the block right now waiting to see how long we’re in here before calling up Mr. Knosi’s boss. The girls take one step out of this building, and there’s a bullet waiting. Don’t treat me like I’m some kind of
doos.
”

Sibulele was trembling now. Moqoma knew she’d been a prostie herself decades earlier, but all that toughness melted away in an instant.

“Now, what I do know is that her passport is somewhere in this building.”

“If it’s not in this room, I don’t…”

Moqoma smacked his hand against the doorframe. The sound erased the rest of Sibulele’s sentence.

“You want the
skollie
cop?” Moqoma shouted. “These men all think I’m bent. You think they’ll care if I knock you around?”

Sibulele’s features hardened even as the angry gaze of the other officers burned into the back of Moqoma’s neck.

“Your mates don’t look so sure,” Sibulele remarked as bravely as she could.

“But you’ll notice that none have stepped forward,” Moqoma shot back.

Sibulele hesitated, then softened.

“Come with me, Moqoma. But only you. As you say, everyone knows you’re the
skollie
cop. Your word means nothing.”

Sibulele led Moqoma through the first level of the house. The living room, just off the foyer, ran almost the length of the residence and had twelve-foot ceilings, which gave it the appearance of a banquet room. As Moqoma had suspected, the view of the South Atlantic was unbelievable. But it occurred to him that he’d never seen a single soul in this room when watching from the street. Johns would enter the frosted glass front door, move directly up the steps to the bedrooms, also behind frosted glass, and the tableau went wasted except for Sibulele and, likely on rare occasions, the girls.

“Come along,” Sibulele snarked. “Don’t fall in love with the pretty vista.”

They passed through a large dining room and kitchen before arriving in what Moqoma realized was the current laundry room. Sibulele reached behind a dryer and felt around the back of it. After a moment, she came back with a stack of passports rubber-banded together. But before she could even take off the band, Moqoma had them in his hands.

“Oh, you know who you’re looking for, then?” Sibulele asked.

Realizing she was right, Moqoma handed them back with a scowl. Sibulele made a show of stripping off the rubber band and sorting through the passports, opening each carefully as she looked at the photos. She stopped at one with a maroon cover.

“Here she is,” Sibulele announced. “Li, Hui-Ling.”

Growing up, Moqoma had only occasionally encountered the small population of Chinese immigrants who had settled in the Cape. When he’d joined the SAPS, he was informed that most of the illegal abalone smuggling originating from South African ports was done by the Chinese.

Though mostly ignored by locals, abalone was a valuable delicacy in Asia. Since democratization and the beginning of the post-apartheid era, the Chinese interest in South Africa had grown exponentially. Only a few years on, there were formal trade agreements between the government, mining concessions originally granted to European companies passed to the Chinese, and immigration had exploded. The last time Moqoma had flown into Johannesburg, half the tourist bureau ads in Tambo were in Chinese and showed Asian people happily taking in safaris, the wineries, or sailing out in Algoa Bay.

Moqoma turned the passport over in his hand. Little was written in English, other than “People’s Republic of China” and “Passport” on the cover. On the identity page, however, he found two dates he thought useful. One, three years in the future, seemed to be when the passport expired. The other, seventeen years in the past, he took for Li’s birthday.

“I’m taking this with me.”

Sibulele said nothing, having expected as much. Moqoma turned to exit, but then heard the woman slipping the rubber band back around the stack. He did a silent calculation.

“How many girls you got here?” When Sibulele didn’t respond, Moqoma whipped around, lip turned up in a snarl. “How many
girls
?”

Before she could respond, the detective’s hand flashed forward, grabbing the remaining passports from her hand.

“Just a minute!” Sibulele yelled, suddenly realizing, despite her initially cavalier attitude, that she’d made a grave error in judgment.

But Moqoma was already into the kitchen, stripping away the rubber band and opening one passport after another. Having cased the brothel quite a few times before, he had known the answer to his question before he asked it. An alarm had sounded in the back of his head when Sibulele didn’t fight him for taking the passport, but he’d let it slide, figuring she’d conceded once he threatened her. But it was the sound of the rubber band stretching around about twice the number of passports as there were girls that stopped him in his tracks.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” Sibulele roared, chasing after him. “Now it’ll be me calling up Mr. Knosi and giving him your name!”

Moqoma was halfway through the stack when he found the first double. A short-haired girl with the last name of Zheng appeared in a Chinese passport, aged eighteen, only to appear again in a blue-jacketed American one under the name Wong. In this one, her birthday had been pushed back three years, and her birthplace was given as Vancouver, British Columbia.

He found two more doubles in the red jackets of Great Britain, but it was within the familiar forest-green cover of a South African passport (the newly updated coat of arms of SA always throwing Moqoma for a loop) that he found Li staring back at him. Only now she was Ana Leung, she’d been aged up to nineteen years, and her birthplace was listed as Durban, South Africa.

The fury on Moqoma’s face when he returned to the foyer took the waiting officers by surprise.

“We’re going to need a dog.”

I
n Moqoma’s mind, the presence of the Chinese passport was far more worrying than that of the South African one. When he’d been at his previous job with the DSO, South Africa’s first attempt at a modern FBI-style national enforcement agency, the then-inspector came across his share of human trafficking cases. For the most part, they were as seedy as the media enjoyed indicating: Girls were lured from their home cities and villages with the promise of cash, thrown on a boat, nearly starved in the crossing, then dropped into a new level of hell and degradation when they landed on foreign shores. Plied with drugs and informed of how disposable they were every step of the way, the women either OD’d, were killed when they were no longer serviceable to even the lowest-paying client, or, in some cases, took their own lives. A handful, and it was debatable to say that these were the lucky ones, might escape into the night and end up on the street somewhere, almost inevitably tricking again, but for themselves.

Very few had any type of happy Hollywood ending, and none made it back home.

But the first thing a trafficker did was burn any documentation that would allow their girls the chance to get back home. A second set of IDs would then be established, typically one that ginned up a story “proving” that the girl was a local or from some other country who’d come to, in this case, South Africa looking for legitimate work and had ended up in the sex trade. If arrested, the result of an indictment would likely be a fine and, for foreigners, deportation. The girl would then be packed on a plane and sent “home,” where a trafficker would be waiting at the airport to squire her to the next destination.