The Death of Rex Nhongo (10 page)

M
y youngest son is a cripple,” the man said. “Ten years old and he walks with a frame. The doctors say that, as he grows, maybe he will not be able to walk at all. You are a nurse, isn't it? What is that?”

“I don't know. Could be lots of things. Was he sick when he was younger?”

“No, he was not sick.”

Jerry shrugged. “I don't know.”

The man studied his face, as if checking whether he believed him. Then he said, “Genetic. That is what they say: a genetic disorder.” He drained the rest of his whisky. He spat out an ice cube.

He lifted a finger at the barman and an eyebrow at Jerry, who said, “I'm fine for the moment.”

The man took a second to consider whether this was acceptable. Then he nodded. “My wife found it very difficult,” he continued. “She believed people looked at him and thought we must have done something wrong. In the end, we took him to the
n'anga
. You know this word? It is what we call a spirit medium, like a traditional healer.”

“Sure.”

“We took him to the
n'anga
. We discovered the source of the problem. We made some sacrifices.”

“What was the problem?”

“What was the problem?” The man repeated the question and considered Jerry ruefully. “Issues in the family. The problem is always issues in the family. But we consulted the
n'anga,
we made some sacrifices and we solved the problem.” The man blinked, too slowly, in a manner that seemed to convey deep, albeit unknown, significance. “And do you think it has improved my son's legs?”

“Doubt it,” Jerry said.

“No. And yet we have solved the problem. Do you see?”

“Not really.”

The man gave a short, unamused chuckle and exclaimed, “Ah! You are very English, my friend!” Then he shook his head and sat back on his stool. “Come on, man, keep up. Everything about being an African is right there! You people? You are free to do what you want, for better or worse. But we are superstitious people. Africans are superstitious people, so we are always caught up in these webs of obligation and blame and, even if you run away, you can never escape, you know?” Now Jerry's companion leaned in and held his left forearm, thick fingers tight on the shirtsleeve. “Family, friends,
work
. You cannot see these…these…What are they? These
restraints
. But you feel them holding you back and rubbing you raw.”

“Even now?” Jerry said.

“What do you mean ‘even now'?”

Jerry freed his arm to lift his beer. “I mean even now. In 2011. This is a modern country.”

“Ha!” the man exclaimed. “Yes! Even now! You know, my boss, he's a very important guy. He is an important guy because he knows how to create a situation of duty and debt. He's a very clever guy, very modern. You think I could ever go against my boss? No way.”

His companion was looking at him so intently that Jerry felt he had no option but to be flippant. “Perhaps you need a new job,” he remarked.

The man stared at him momentarily, then smiled: those gums. Jerry was drunk. He found himself picturing Bessie, standing at the sink, efficiently gutting bream. He needed to eat something.

“You're right,” the man said at last. “Perhaps I need a new job.”

Jerry said he should go. The man nodded and slid off his bar stool. “Back to the wife,” he said.

“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Something like that.”

They walked outside together. Jerry found himself swaying slightly, struggling to avoid the pedestrians on the busy city street. He was drunker than he'd realized.

He was looking for Patson's cab, the navy blue Raum with “Gapu Taxis” in bright yellow on the side. He couldn't see it. He was now using the cab on an almost daily basis: to take him to and from the clinic, to take him to or from whichever bar—it was easier than arguing with April for use of the Land Cruiser. As a rule, he preferred it if Patson were driving, because when Gilbert—Bessie's husband, Patson's brother-in-law—had the wheel, he talked incessantly, telling Jerry his plans and, particularly, his business ideas with puppyish enthusiasm. Worst of all, he seemed to believe that Jerry might be prepared to advise or even invest. Patson, on the other hand, was largely silent. The downside was that the older man had a tendency to go AWOL if he got the offer of another job, even if he'd been asked to wait. And then they had to go through this whole rigmarole of lies as Jerry threatened to find another taxi and Patson swore he was only seconds away.

Jerry dialed and lifted the phone to his ear: “Where are you?”

“I am very close, Uncle,” Patson said. “I will be there just now.”

Jerry tutted and cut the call. He turned to his companion from the bar, who was looking at him quizzically. “Your driver?” the man asked.

“Cab,” Jerry said.

The man opened an arm into the street. “There are plenty of taxis.”

“I know this guy,” Jerry said. “I like him.”

The man raised an amused eyebrow. “And he is taking advantage,” he said. He offered Jerry his hand. “It was good talking to you.” The two men shook. “You were saying you were having trouble with your visa. Perhaps I can help. I can help with lots of things. I know some people.”

“Thanks,” Jerry said, “but I know people who know people. No luck so far.”

The man smiled. It was, Jerry thought, a sinister expression. He decided he didn't like the guy much. “Perhaps you know the wrong people,” the man said. “Or perhaps they know the wrong people.” He opened his arms—
Who knows?
“In this country, you need to know people. But I'm sure you understand that. I am lucky to know a lot of people and I would always be happy to help a visitor like yourself.”

“Thanks very much,” Jerry said. “That's kind.”

“What's your name?” the man said. “We have been talking all this time and I don't even know your name.”

“Jerry. Jerry Jones.”

“Mandiveyi,” the man said. “Albert Mandiveyi. Take my number.”

The two men shook hands again. They swapped mobile numbers. Mandiveyi made sure that Jerry entered his name correctly. He admired Jerry's iPhone. Jerry slurred some vague small-talk about how the iPhone wasn't all it was cracked up to be. They shook hands a third time. Mandiveyi said, “It was good to meet you, Nurse Jerry.”

“Likewise.”

Mandiveyi flagged down a taxi and was gone. Patson pulled up seconds later, profusely apologetic. They barely talked on the way out to Greendale.

The house was dark and silent. The guard—Petros?—was asleep. The Land Cruiser was in the driveway. Jerry checked his watch: eight—April was home early. For once, she wouldn't be able to complain of a lack of sleep. Jerry struggled with his keys. He stopped in the kitchen. There was no food out for him. He cut a piece of cheese and looked for bread. There was no bread. He ate the cheese with his fingers. He turned on the alarm and turned off the lights. He was about to go straight into the spare room, but saw the light under the master-bedroom door. He had an unlikely, drunken vision of his wife waiting up for him, eager for his return. He opened the door. April was sitting up in bed, reading. She didn't acknowledge his arrival. She turned a page. Jerry stripped off his jeans and exchanged one T-shirt for another. April's attention didn't flicker. Jerry climbed into bed. Without looking up, April said, “You're not going to brush your teeth?”

“No,” Jerry said.

“Are you drunk?”

“Yes.”

Jerry lay on his side, watching his wife. She kept reading until eventually he turned over. He closed his eyes. He could feel April's presence behind him and he couldn't relax. He imagined how it would feel if she buried a knife in his back. He was just drifting into inebriated sleep when she said, “I wanted to tell you something.”

Jerry opened his eyes. He found the room was slowly starting to move around him. He focused on the cupboard door to concentrate his mind. He said, “So tell me.”

“I can't talk to you when you're drunk,” she said.

“So talk to me when I'm sober.”

He heard her shut her book. She said, “Do I need to make an appointment?”

Jerry heard his wife slide out of bed. He didn't look up as the bedroom door opened and closed. April had gone to the spare room. He felt fleeting vindication, which even his drunken self couldn't ratify. He rolled over and switched out the bedside light. He spread himself on the bed as if this was what he'd wanted all along. The pitch darkness didn't stop the room spinning; quite the opposite. He slipped into unconsciousness but was awake again within minutes when he knew he was going to vomit. He stumbled to the bathroom and was sick. He tried to be sick quietly. He hoped that April wasn't hearing this.

W
hen Patson spotted the
murungu
emerging from the Jameson bar arm in arm with Mandiveyi, the CIO who'd dropped the gun in his cab, his heart stopped beating. The
murungu
scanned this way and that, looking for him. Patson slipped the car into gear and, without turning on the headlights, swung left along Samora Machel and ignored the angry horns until he could pull in a hundred meters further up the road. He then stopped, got out and lit a cigarette, which gave him a sharp pain in his chest. He held a palm to his sternum and his heartbeat was fast and irregular.

His phone rang in his pocket. He took it out and answered. “I am very close, Uncle,” he said. “I will be there just now.”

He moved onto the shadowed step of an office block from where he could just about see the two men. They were talking like old friends. This was just a coincidence—it had to be a coincidence. Harare was a small town and he was always going to run into Mandiveyi again at some point.

By the time he saw Dr. Gapu two days later to pay his weekly rental, he had removed the “Gapu Taxis” stickers from the car. He should have done it before. But he'd figured that, on the night of the incident, the CIO had been so drunk that he would surely remember nothing about the cab he'd taken or its driver. Only when Patson saw him again, in the flesh, did he understand with a sudden and breathtaking certainty that this was an assumption he couldn't afford to make.

Of course, Gapu was none too pleased to discover that the stickers he'd had custom made by Starlight Adhesives Msasa (PVT Ltd) had been so recklessly abandoned. However, Patson pointed out that the doctor hadn't paid for a municipal taxi license. Consequently, Patson was consistently pulled over by the cops and forced to spend half an hour arguing his poverty or otherwise pay a fine. “It is better this way, Uncle,” he told Gapu. “This way I just use clients on the phone. It is much, much better.” Any doubts the cab owner had about Patson's argument were mollified when the driver paid not just the two hundred dollars' weekly rental, but a further twenty towards his long-standing arrears.

Patson was home in Sunningdale by seven thirty. This was his new routine. Four nights a week, he ate with Fadzai, Gilbert and the kids, before Gilbert took the car out again for the night shift. Patson was loath to admit it, but his brother-in-law was proving a blessing, with a seemingly limitless work ethic that belied his feckless reputation. Gilbert helped at Fadzai's kitchen from Monday to Thursday before taking the cab out in the even­ings, then drove the day shift in the taxi on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It was no exaggeration to say that Gilbert's contribution had revolutionized the household—Patson's taxi was making almost double money, and Gilbert's loyalty scheme seemed to have eliminated Fadzai's competition, letting her clear up to a hundred and fifty dollars at the end of each week.

Most of all, something had shifted between the married couple, a shift of which Patson had long given up hope. Where for years they had moved in separate orbits—around the house, around their children—Patson and Fadzai now, suddenly, found synchronicity. There were little things that signaled this—the way she served his food and made his tea, for example, or the fact he now allowed her to bathe before him in the morning and felt no inconvenience. But there were big things, too: they now sat on the veranda when Chabarwa and Anashe were asleep and the silence was companionable and his wife would even light a match for his last cigarette of the night.

And, of course, there was the rekindling of their sex life. So recently the act of going to bed each night had been a statement of war, whoever made the first move seemingly saying, “You see? This is what I think of you.” Now they seemed to melt beneath the blankets simultaneously, silently folding into one another, and within seconds it was as if each didn't know which limb, which mouth, which hand was their own; and all was hot, lubricious and unidentifiable sweat and spittle and juice.

On one occasion, afterwards, Patson said to Fadzai, “We are like newlyweds again.” Fadzai said nothing, then murmured a vague but conclusive affirmative. In that instant, Patson understood his wife perfectly. Because they both knew that it hadn't been like this at all when they were newlyweds. Where their sex life as a young couple had been frequent and urgent—brief and memor­able acts of explosive copulation—it was now of a different order entirely: soft, slow and strangely, dizzily, all-consuming. Fadzai's murmur, therefore, was one of assent, but it also told him not to talk further. Because she understood—and, now, he understood too—that this new synchronicity was a magical thing, which shouldn't be explained, analyzed or discussed for fear of breaking the spell.

Secretly, Patson considered he might know the source of the magic, and early the next morning, when his wife was bathing, he went to the chest of drawers and took out Mandiveyi's gun. He tried to grip it, to see how it felt in his hand. He read and re-read its mysterious inscription: “SIG SAUER, Sig Arms Inc., Herndon VA.” He then buried it at the very back of the drawer and vowed not to look at it again.

Since the first night he and Fadzai had discussed his options, Patson had turned them over in his mind again and again and he had quickly concluded that his wife's position on the matter made little sense. She had told him not to dispose of the gun in case Mandiveyi came looking and he was left with no bargaining chip. But Patson knew that, if the CIO came looking, admitting he'd had it all along was less bargaining chip than admission of guilt. What was more, Patson felt his subconscious working through a terrifying equation that he didn't dare allow to crystallize. He knew the rumors surrounding Rex Nhongo's death: about those in government who would benefit, about the gunshots heard before the fire. But he reassured himself that there was no reason to assume a connection and he ignored the concomitant implication that there was also no reason to assume none. Either way, it was surely better to throw the weapon into the river as he'd originally planned and, if it came to it, deny any knowledge of its existence. And yet he couldn't bring himself to do it. Because Patson had come to believe that it was the gun that had transformed his marriage, its magic the magic of fear that bound the two of them clinging together in the unspoken thrill of a shared threat that could take away everything they had. And all they had was each other.