Mortals (71 page)

H
e was a bundle in a bakkie. He was being conveyed somewhere. He was blindfolded, his hands were cuffed behind him, he was a bundle bouncing on the naked metal bed of a bakkie. He could sit up, just. The cap affixed over the bakkie bed was low-rise. It was work trying to keep himself braced into one corner so that the bouncing around would be less violent. It was difficult. He hated his trick knee. His captors were driving at speeds that made him love Keletso all over again, love his moderation.

But if he was right, this wouldn’t go on for very long. He had a good idea of where they were taking him. Time would tell.

It should never be said that there’s no progress, he thought. Clearly, restraint technology was marching on. The cuffs were of a design new to him. His hands were bound under notched plastic strips secured in a keyless ratchet locking mechanism. The cuffs were firmly but not painfully cinched.

And his blindfold was also a novelty to him. It was a standardized manufactured product, obviously, made out of a hybrid fabric more like neoprene than cloth that had a propensity to cleave to human skin. Foam rubber pods were sewn into the eye-socket-covering segments of the blindfold. It was a successful design. He could see nothing down the sides of his nose. Someone had shaken the hand of the designer of the damned thing and said Well done!

What would it have taken for one of his captors to throw a blanket into the back, for cushioning? He was bruising up, with the jolting he was taking. They were brutes and he wasn’t. He thought, Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, by the living God that made you, I’m a better man
than they are Gunga Din. What was it about Kipling? He had more Kipling than he did Milton. Kipling was in the pores of his mind.

And while he was on the subject, how in hell could belted you and
flayed
you, by the living God that made you, et cetera, but
flayed
you, get into a poem taught in junior high schools all over the world?
Flaying
, for God’s sake, meant lifting strips of living skin off a living body. Was the narrator of the poem
flaying
somebody? Apparently so.

He had to remember that they were being gingerly with him so far, inflicting their indignities in a mannerly way. Someone had pitched his hat into the bakkie after him before locking him in. There was that. They had given him a little water to drink and they had invited him to urinate before cuffing him. And he had done that.

They had stowed him briefly in a hot tent, where he had devoted himself to listening heroically, or at least with heroic concentration, for leakages of information, anything. He hadn’t extracted much. He had counted voices as well as he could. He estimated that there were seven malefactors active in his aural vicinity. There was one Boer, who was addressed as Kaptein by the rank and file but as Quartus, twice, by Uno, when the two of them were presumably alone together. Quartus could be a nom de guerre, maybe having some reference to ranking position. It sounded numerical. But he did know that Quartus was an actual Boer Christian name, like Fanie or Bastiaan. In any case, it was a nugget.

They had broken into the weapons compartment in the Cruiser and Uno had come into the tent shouting questions about licenses, where might they be? In Botswana it was a serious offense to be found in possession of unlicensed weapons. It could get you eighty-sixed in a flash, gone, out of the country. Uno made that point. Ray had protested his ignorance about guns and licenses, both. He was improvising.

And worse, and genuinely surprising to him, too, they had found smoke grenades in the compartment, two of them. He was too worn out to be enraged at Boyle or whoever the quartermaster had been who had equipped the vehicle. The smoke grenades had been somebody’s idea of a useful extra. They hadn’t bothered to mention them to him. Of course, he hadn’t been as scrupulous about inventorying the gun compartment as he should have. He had been slipshod. He hated guns.

They had gotten him out of that tent not a moment too soon. The canvas was impregnated with insecticide and the fumes had been making him feel sick. Also, some solid creature in the soil under the tent floor had been trying to get into the tent, eat its way in. So it had been good to get out.

He had to compose himself as well as he could for the serious interrogation he knew was coming. Technically, all he was required to supply would be his name, rank, and serial number. This was a war zone, so the Geneva Convention applied, he would say. The difficulty was that he had no rank and no number other than his Social Security number, which they could have if they wanted it. Frame of mind was what was critical for interrogation. He had to be calm.

He was going to be calm. He should be able to be. He was fairly sure he knew where he was being taken. So there were unlikely to be surprises in that respect. It was the logical place, and if he had it right this little period of conveyal, which was not a word, conveyance was what he meant, would be over in less than an hour, at these speeds. He was all right. He was riding on events. Aside from the jolting he was taking, he didn’t mind the feeling. It was the polar opposite of entrepreneurship. There were drivers and passengers in the world, more of the latter than the former. And in his obscure and secret way he had been among the drivers. Whether or not Iris or anyone had ever fully appreciated it, he had lived a consequential life of more or less permanent effort, exertion, listening and matching and watching and putting two and two together. So he didn’t mind the feeling of reposing on events. It felt all right. Who was it, someone important in Africa, Livingstone, who had described relaxing into a sort of bliss when the jaws of a lion closed on his leg? And then the lion hadn’t eaten him. And if he remembered correctly it was because when he went limp he appeared dead to the lion and lions abhor carrion. He didn’t know if he was making that up. He forgot why the great man hadn’t been eaten.

There was a vehicle closely following. He knew the sound of its engine by heart. It was the Cruiser. And that was favorable because it meant that it was still conceivable that they would dismiss him, tell him to drive off. With the Cruiser available, that could happen, that should calm him.

They were changing direction, which fit with his notion of their destination. He had three tasks, to sum up. First, to remain calm. Second, to retain what he could about anyone who laid a hand on him or anyone else so he could give evidence against them, not that it would ever happen. These bastards were finished in this part of Africa anyway. He wondered if they knew it. This was their last roundup. Mandela was coming. Mandela was going to rule and these bastards would have to get out. Nobody would have them except warlords and other scum farther north. But that was number two, to be ready to testify. And his third task was to get hold
of
Strange News
again. He could do it. He would consider violence to get it. No he wouldn’t. But he would get it.

It made sense that the koevoet command center would be set up at Ngami Bird Lodge. That was the way they were headed. There was a lurid tale connected to Ngami Bird Lodge. It had failed. It was bankrupt. The facility was shuttered and empty but not derelict. It was in litigation. But the infrastructure was intact, the generators, food stores, and so on. And, ah yes, it had a landing strip.

It was famously grandiose. Iris had wanted to see it, the mock-Moorish buildings, the rock gardens done by a famous landscape artist, date palms, chalets so-called, a zoo, if he remembered correctly. It had been built on the edge of a famous pan where flocks of birds came and the migrating wildebeests and the others. And then the drought had come. The pan had dried up. There was no birdwatching to be done. Pink marble facing had been trucked in from South Africa for the main building, he remembered.

There was more to the story. His knowledge of it was a cartoon, though. An English lord, the last of a noble lineage, had blown his patrimony on Ngami Bird Lodge and on a celebrity tart, a Coloured lounge singer supposedly then the toast of the Cape Town demimonde. He had brought her into the Kalahari to be the lodge’s chatelaine. Then he had proceeded to drink himself into irrelevance as the project failed. There were remarkable things about the woman, the main one being that she had had devil horns strategically tattooed on her lower belly so that they appeared to be emerging from the top of her pubic escutcheon, had been the story. English eccentricity had come into it too. The earl had commissioned the creation of something called a sand fountain, a monumental device and the only one of its kind in the world. It had never been constructed. Aside from the drought, the lodge had been affected by the accelerating collapse of apartheid. The idea had been to create a mini-rival to Sun City that ethical tourists and gamblers and birdwatchers could visit in good conscience. But apartheid had faltered spectacularly. There had been a shooting, the earl was having a prolonged recovery somewhere in Dorset, and the woman had escaped justice and gone back to singing in bars in South Africa.

So, finally, he would get to visit Ngami Bird Lodge. Unfortunately he was going to be blindfolded during his visit. But that was life.

H
e was where he had predicted to himself he would be, on the grounds of the Sand Castle, that being the original name for what became Ngami Bird Lodge. It had been abandoned when one of the backers of the project had pointed out the negative associations the name carried.

His home, for the time being, was a storage room twenty by twenty laterally by eight or so feet floor to ceiling. He was obligated to think about escape possibilities, even though he had just arrived, and he was sorry to have to say that the possibilities looked dim. The zinc panels forming the ceiling were laid over gum tree pole joists and securely fastened to the joists via wire lashings run through perforations in the metal. This was a solid structure. The walls were cement block. He had stamped on the softwood planking of the floor. It was chewed up and featured a display of standing splinters here and there, but it was in good shape. The planking had been pressed directly into the concrete footing. Clearly, heavy equipment had been stored in this space. There were oil and grease stains in the flooring.

It’s roomy, at least, he thought.

The place was windowless but a pittance of light came in through nine vent slots irregularly distributed along the tops of the walls. It would be possible to push an arm through, assuming he could get up that high. He had managed to get a look into the one over the double doors to the shed by climbing up the cross braces on the inside of the doors while hanging on to a ringbolt set into the lintel. He had just gotten his eyes level with the opening, discovering that crushed wads of fine-mesh screening had been jammed into the slot to discourage ingress by animals and the heavier,
more ungainly insects. So now he knew that much. There were hooks and other ringbolts screwed into the walls at shoulder level in no particular pattern.

His furnishings were basic, limited to a red plastic bucket lacking a lid or cover of any sort, and his pallet, a twin-size canvas sack filled with chopped maize husks. In fact there were three more pallets, so it was possible that he should be expecting company. He wouldn’t mind company. No blanket had been provided, but the pallets were wide and could, he supposed, be doubled over if it got cold. He would see. He understood why it was that his captors didn’t want him to have a blanket. They were afraid he might do something untoward with it.

They were still treating him acceptably, he would say. They had given him a plastic water bottle, half full, and a Cadbury chocolate bar, hazelnut, the jumbo.

He wanted to wash up. Tomorrow he would see if they’d allow it. He wanted his toothbrush. He would ask about that tomorrow, too. He’d try to present his requests all at the same time. It was a good idea to group his requests together, to avoid bothering them repeatedly.

He wanted his belt back, which they had taken. But that was delicate. There was a hyperthin carbon steel saw blade sewn into it. They were unlikely to discover it. But he didn’t want them handling his belt unnecessarily. He truly needed his belt. His jeans were loose about the waist. He was losing weight. He would have to improvise something. He had known they would take his belt. It was standard procedure.

He was in his stocking feet. They had taken his boots. It was the laces, primarily, that they wanted him not to have. They could have unlaced his boots, or de-laced them, but it was easier for them to simply take them. Well, they were busy.

He had made one pleasing discovery. If he pressed hard enough against the closure line of the massive double doors to the shed he could create a slit of a view. There was a deadbolt lock on the doors, but there was enough play in the wood and the hinges and enough slippage along the bolt to allow him to see … another wall, the wall of another building a couple hundred feet away, a pinkish wall.

It was almost night. He hated it to be night so soon after he’d been liberated from his blindfold. He would be in pure and total darkness until morning came. But there was nothing he could do. And logic told him that the blindfold would be back.

Night had come. He was tired of listening for anything that might tell
him something. There were voices but they were too far away. Nothing was happening. Vehicles were coming and going. A generator had been started up and was chuffing along.

He had eaten half of his chocolate bar. He had a back tooth that was sensitive to sweets. Rinsing his mouth out sparingly hadn’t helped. He had scrubbed his teeth with the tail of his shirt. That was the best he could do. At last his sensitive tooth was quieting down.

He was facing a trial, tonight. It was minor, but it was real to him. He was lying down, his arms folded on his chest, considering how he could slide toward sleep with nothing to read. What he had for a pillow book was
Strange News
, if he could get it back from these villains. It was somewhere here on the grounds of this madhouse. He almost felt like escaping for the sole purpose of getting hold of it and a flashlight. And having them, he would be willing to creep back into his cell and not complain for a while. Of course if he asked outright, they would be more convinced than ever that his brother’s manuscript was sinister.