Dust Devils (28 page)

Inja stood naked under a thorn tree, all scrawny shanks and dangling eggplant-colored penis. Smoke boiled around him as an obese woman in a bra and skins threw herbs onto a wood fire. Her face, made ghostly by white paste, was lost in the fumes.

The woman bowed, handing Inja a clay gourd filled with shit-colored liquid. The smell burned his nose when he swallowed, the medicine as bitter as death. Immediately he felt dizzy and sank to his knees. A violent spasm seized his gut and puke spewed onto the sand. Sweat sprang from his body like morning dew and he spat strings of vomit. Fought for breath. Another spasm hit him and he heaved again. And again. Until he was empty. Purified.

The smoke cleared for a moment and Inja could see an ancient man, as furrowed as the eroded earth, squatting outside a mud hut. The skins of a monkey and a snake pegged above the doorway. A frayed red flag, the sign of a witchdoctor, dangled like a tongue from a wooden pole rising above the hut. The
sangoma,
dressed in hide and beads, muttered in Zulu, blessing a butcher's knife with a long, flat blade. He stood, the knife hanging heavy from his hand, and made his way to where Inja knelt beside the fire.

The
sangoma
sliced Inja twice, horizontally, across his bony chest. Shallow cuts, but blood ran down Inja's torso, pooling in his lap, dripping onto his thighs and knees. The witchdoctor chanted as he twisted open a metal shoe polish tin. Dipped his fingers into black paste made from charred herbs and animal fat. Battle medicine that could turn bullets to water, so they said. Smeared the mixture into the cuts on Inja's chest. Inja felt a sharp stinging, as if wasps were at his flesh.

The
sangoma
shouted an order and two youths emerged from the smoke, dragging a protesting goat, paws tied with baling wire. They manhandled the animal toward the tree and slung it, kicking and twisting, over a low branch above Inja's head. He felt the scrape of the goat's threshing hooves on his shoulders. The animal released its bowels in a fall of sour dung. The woman was chanting now, a high-pitched keening, in a duet with the goat which screamed its fear.

The old witchdoctor dragged the blade of the knife through the ash and used the blunt side of the steel to trace a black cross onto Inja's back. The woman's chant grew louder, her face swimming through the flame, eyes dipped back in ecstasy, yellow as gobs of fat. The
sangoma
grabbed the goat by its snout and exposed its neck. Slit its throat with one quick movement of his arm.

Hot blood geysered down onto Inja, running over his head, dripping down his body. He turned his face up toward the dying animal and opened his mouth to receive the blood. He drank and was filled. Inja saw his father and his father's father before him. His ancestors guiding him back to the river of power. Entering him through the liquid, giving him strength for the battle ahead.

At last the goat drooped lifeless over the branch. Bled out. Inja stood, his body crimson with gore, staring into the flames, the woman's chants louder and more frantic. Then her wails floated away with the smoke and she sank to the ground. Silent.

Inja lifted his eyes from the fire when one of his gunmen entered the yard and prostrated himself.

"Yes?" Blood caked Inja's tongue as he spoke.

"
Induna
, she is found," the man said, his forehead in the dust.

Sunday watched the old man with white hair coughing, his ribs heaving beneath his shirt as he crouched at the front of the cave. Rasping like a sick dog. His lips were drawn back in a grimace and she could see the blood on his teeth. Water dripping from his forehead, running into the deep grooves in his face. He lowered the binoculars and she looked into his faded eyes.

Sunday found the plastic bottle of water and handed it to him. He fought for breath, the loose skin on his throat almost mauve in color. Drank from the bottle, coughed water and blood onto the sand between his shoes, drank again. Wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

"Give me the glasses, grandfather," she said. He handed her the binoculars. "You rest. I will keep guard."

"Girl, you call me if you see anything. Anything. You hear?" Speaking her language well enough for her to understand in a cracked voice foreign to her ear.

She nodded and he sat with his back to the rock, the rifle cradled in his arms. The other man lay deeper in the cave. His eyes were closed but she knew he wasn't asleep.

Sunday lifted the glasses, rotated the grooved focus ring, and the landscape jumped at her. The sudden magnification didn't shock her this time. She swept the barren landscape, seeing her life spread out beneath her. The hill where her parents had died. The hut where she'd lived with her aunt. The town, lying like a pile of bricks baking in the sun.

Sunday moved the glasses over the sand road that led to the cultural village. Followed a taxi throwing up dust, thought she could hear the whine of its engine. She panned the glasses with a vulture as it hung in the air, almost level with the mouth of the cave.

An omen, she knew. As she watched the bird hover, she heard the man cough again, and she felt a breeze on the nape of her neck though there was no wind in this sheltered cave. She didn't look back, not wanting to see the spirits crowding around the old man, ready to take him to the shadowlands.

Zondi drove the rattling Ford over to the hospital. He parked near the entrance, not bothering to close the windows or lock the truck. Slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and went into reception. Asked for Dr. Lambert.

The Zulu woman behind the counter looked him up and down. "You are a friend of hers?"

"Yes."

"It is her afternoon off. She's out by the pool."

The woman directed him down a corridor and Zondi walked again through the ranks of the diseased, bodies withering away inside their striped pajamas, glazed eyes watching death approach with mute African passivity.

Zondi exited the corridor and crossed a gravel courtyard toward a high wall and a gate marked SENIOR STAFF ONLY in English and Zulu. He went through the gate and found himself on a patch of dead yellow grass, ringed by aloes. Somebody's idea of a garden.

A small kidney-shaped pool of blue water lay like a mirage in the middle of the grass. He saw a dark shape under the water. As he approached the pool the blonde doctor broke the surface and stared up at him, wiping her eyes.

"Disaster Zondi." No surprise in her voice.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Doctor. I need a favor."

She pressed her hands down on the tiles and lifted herself out of the water in an easy motion. Walked across to the towel that lay on a plastic lounger. She wore a black one-piece Speedo. When the late sun caught a few tendrils of blonde hair escaping where the swimsuit cut high in her groin, Zondi forced himself to look away, over at the burning hills.

The doctor dried her face. "Are you unwell?" she asked.

Zondi looked back at her as she lifted the towel to her hair and he could see a shadow of blue stubble in her armpits.
Jesus.

"No. No. I'm fine. I just need access to the Internet. Maybe you can help me, Doctor?"

"Martine." He could smell chlorine and sweat and tanning oil on her skin. She wrapped the green towel around her body. "And what am I to call you? Please not Disaster."

He smiled. "Zondi will do."

"Zondi. Okay." She lifted a beach bag from beside the lounger, a stylized yellow sun and the word DURBAN stitched below the straps. "I have the Internet in my room. But it is like a snail. Come."

The doctor stepped into a pair of flip-flops and led him across the grass and into a low brick building, cool and dark after the heat outside. Wooden doors on either side of a polished stone corridor. She stopped at a door and unlocked it. Zondi followed her in.

She dropped the beach bag on the floor. "Please excuse the mess."

Mess was an understatement. He'd seen neater home invasions. Closet doors gaped, clothes spilled out like they were escaping their hangers. The bed an unmade tangle. Shoes, underwear, magazines, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays littered the room.

The doctor crossed to a small desk by the window and booted up a laptop. He heard the cricket warble of a dial-up connection as she went online. "It is very slow, so you must be patient." She took some clothes from a wooden chair and threw them onto the bed. Pointed to the chair. "Please." Zondi sat, lowering his duffel bag to the floor.

"I'll go shower," she said and disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door.

Zondi heard the spurt of water and had to quell images of her wet, naked flesh. As he slid the chair closer to the computer the butt of the gun in his waistband stabbed into his abdomen. He removed the weapon and put it on the table beside the keyboard.

The face of the computer was anonymous. No screensaver. Files neatly organized, in contrast to the room. Zondi called up Google. The Internet connection was as slow as the Belgian had promised but it didn't take Zondi long to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

As he suspected, the old man who'd gunpointed the girl was Earl Robert Goodbread. Just about recognizable from the photograph taken at his trial sixteen years ago. And the second man was his son, Robert Dell. The fugitive family murderer. Looking very different now from the mugshot on the monitor, where he was all long hair and patchy beard and wild eyes.

Zondi knew from the Ben Baker investigation that Dell's wife had worked for the fat man. Was screwing him on the side, in fact. It wasn't hard to join the dots. She'd known something that could incriminate the minister or his dog. Inja killed the woman and her children by smashing their car off a mountain road. Was sloppy in his work and left Dell alive. Then tried to cover his tracks by framing Dell. Goodbread broke Dell out of jail and they were coming after Inja. The girl was the bait. Easy for Zondi to figure out what had happened. No idea what he would do next.

Zondi shut down the search engine and deleted the browser history, erasing his tracks. He sat a moment and massaged his temples.

The bathroom door opened and the doctor emerged, followed by a tendril of steam and the smell of jasmine soap. She wore a white bathrobe, brushing her wet hair straight back from her face as she walked.

Her eyes flicked across to the gun lying beside the computer. "So what are you, Disaster Zondi? Some kind of a gangster, or some kind of a cop?"

He reached for the 9mm and made it disappear beneath his shirt. "I used to be in law enforcement. Now I'm just another citizen."

"You are sure?" She sat down on the bed, staring at him, unblinking.

"Yes."

She found a box of Gitanes beside the bed and lit one. Her eyes matched the blue of the pack. The room was very quiet and he could hear the cigarette paper ignite. Heard her inhale and exhale. Saw her eyes on his duffel bag beside the chair. "Where are you staying?"

"Nowhere."

"There is a room empty, next door. A doctor went back to Italy. His replacement arrives only in one week. I'm sure nobody will mind if you use it for a night or two." She scratched beneath the clutter on her bedside table, squinting through cigarette smoke, and found a key tied to a piece of card. "Here."

He stood and took the key. "Thank you."

The doctor shrugged. "It is nothing." She crossed her long legs, the bathrobe falling away. Looking at him with those clear blue eyes.

And there it was. He felt the room tip. Felt himself sliding toward her. Zondi pulled his eyes away from hers and grabbed the edge of the desk, to anchor himself.

"I appreciate your help, Martine."

She shrugged again, sucking on the cigarette. Inhale. Exhale.

Zondi shouldered his bag and walked toward the door, opened it, turned to her. She sat with her back to him, staring out the window at the sun low over the red hills. He went out and shut the door.