The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (12 page)

The General switched on the lights, and his face suddenly appeared. "Who were those
tsotsis?"
he demanded in a deep voice.

Arm shook himself loose from the spell. "They called themselves Fist and Knife. They were with an old woman called Granny."

"Where did they come from?"

"I don't know."

"Speak up, man!"

Arm cleared his throat. "People come and go through this suburb without leaving traces. They say everyone eventually passes through the Cow's Guts."

"Don't try to be funny. You!" General Matsika advanced on Mr. Thirsty, who dropped his dishcloth. The General grabbed him by the shirt and lifted him right off the floor. "You own this place. Tell me what you know if you don't want me to rip out the walls to see what you're hiding!" The bartender opened and shut his mouth, but no sounds came out.

"He's never seen them before either," said Arm. He was astounded at himself. Why was he lying? He didn't like to tell lies. The General let Mr. Thirsty slide to the floor and turned his attention to the rest of the room.

"Ah!" he cried, as though he had been struck. He dropped to his knees, and Arm hurried over to see what had been so startling. On the floor lay the knife the
tsotsi
had hurled at Eye. It was most unusual, with a gold-washed blade and red dragons curled around the handle. The blade was tipped with blood. Arm felt sick.

"Tendai's knife," said the General in a low voice. Arm looked sidelong at him and was amazed. All the power that had emanated from him in the doorway was gone. He looked like any other father who was desperately worried about his children. His eyes were filled with tears. Arm stepped back, but the General had sensed he was there and turned away. When he faced Arm again, his expression was again powerful and confident. His eyes seemed to have drunk up the tears.

"Go over this room with a microscope," he ordered the policemen clustered in the doorway. "Lift the fingerprints off this knife. Hold and question anyone you can catch — oh, and pour out the vat of
kachasu
in the back. I want to see how many dead dogs are at the bottom of it." Mr. Thirsty, moaning, was dragged out the door between two officers.

Arm looked out the window at the alleyway across the street. The beggars' camp fire had died down to embers. Bundles of rags huddled around it. Even the beer halls were unusually quiet, and Mr. Thirsty's was completely dark.

"Let's go over the clues again," he said. Ear drooped over a bowl of soybean stew on the table, and Eye lay on the sofa with his lids at half-mast. "It's Granny's birthday. She's about eighty years old and belongs to the Portuguese tribe. How many people are there like that on the city's computer?"

"A hundred and six." Ear yawned. "The police contacted all of them." Ear's head dipped so far, the lobe of one of his ears fell into the stew. He jerked himself awake.

"These
tsotsis
make their living selling illegal alcohol," Arm went on. "How many people do that?"

"More than you want to know," Eye said from the sofa.

"What about the
vlei?"

"There are hundreds of
vleis
around Harare."

Someone tapped at the door. The detectives immediately became alert. Arm reached for a Nirvana gun. "What do you hear?" he said in a low voice.

Ear extended his ear over the keyhole.
^:
'The door's in the way, but I think it's only one person." Arm undid the eight locks and left on the chain. He opened the door a crack.

Someone swallowed outside. "It's Mr. Thirsty," Ear whispered. Arm threw open the door to show the disheveled bartender with his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. He pulled the man inside with his long arm and slammed the door shut.

"Don't shoot!" cried Mr. Thirsty.

"As if we would harm you," Arm said as he hung the Nirvana gun on a hook. "You saved Eye's life."

 
'Yes, well' — the bartender swallowed nervously — "you saved
mine.
The General — ah — the General is a most forceful character. Most forceful. But he believed me because you backed me up."

"You don't have any information, do you?" said Arm.

"Well, ah, you see I
might
— only you mustn't tell anyone. My life wouldn't be worth a flattened flea. But I did hear — I won't say where — that the Masks are looking for children to adopt."

"I don't understand," Arm said.

"Oh, it's so complicated! They lost one of their members in a street fight. They want to train a new Mask, and it's better to start young, don't you think?"

"Go on."

"One of the She Elephant's little services is to provide children for people who can't have them."

"She's a filthy kidnapper!" shouted Ear, raising his fist. Mr. Thirsty backed away, and Arm placed himself between them.

"It's only a service," the bartender said. "What's a child or two? Anyhow, the Masks wanted two or three to round out their gang. A couple of backups in case the first one doesn't work out — don't hit me!" he cried as Ear raised his fist again.

"Who is the head of the Masks?" said Arm quietly.

Mr. Thirsty shivered. "No one asks that kind of question. Believe me, if they have the children, you can forget about them. But Matsika's kids might — I'm not promising anything — still be with the She Elephant."

"And you know where she lives," said Arm, trying not to look disgusted at the little man.

"Well, yes and no. I hear — this might be false — that she lives in Dead Man's Vlei."

"That's a toxic-waste dump!"

"It
was.
" Mr. Thirsty looked around nervously, checking the door, the window, the holophone. "A hundred years ago it was. But time has healed it. Hundreds of people live there now, mining the old trash, and the She Elephant is their queen. Don't think it will be easy to find her, though. The
vlei
is honeycombed with tunnels. People say you can walk two hundred miles, going up and down and round about. The She Elephant has ways of telling when danger's near. If Matsika went there, she'd take his kids down so far they'd never see the sun again."

Mr. Thirsty looked up at Arm, and his Adam's apple bobbed. The detective knew he was a crook who saw nothing wrong with stealing children or selling whiskey brewed in a toxic-waste dump, but a decent impulse had put out a feeble shoot in the man's heart.

He put his hands on Mr. Thirsty's shoulders. The man winced, but just as quickly a pleased expression crossed his face. Arm felt a kind of energy flow from him to the ratlike bartender. He glimpsed, briefly, a home far from the Cow's Guts where three daughters waited for their father to return from work.

"I feel
happy"
Mr. Thirsty said in wonder. "Oh, my, so this is what goodness feels like. Who would have known? Oh, my." Arm removed his hands. Mr. Thirsty stood there with a bemused smile as the detective unlocked the door. The bartender scurried out into the night, turning once to wave before the door was closed.

"That never happened before," murmured Arm. "I saw into his mind."

"Ugh," said Ear.

"And somehow I woke up something decent in him."

"It'll wear off," said Eye.

"Maybe. Anyhow, we have work to do. The She Elephant will certainly know if General Matsika's coming — he can't seem to go anywhere without sirens — but she isn't expecting
us.
"

"Us? Go to Dead Man's Vlei? At night?" Eye sat back down on the sofa and looked faint.

"I'm scared," Ear said.

"So am I." Arm strapped on his Nirvana gun. "Unfortunately, that doesn't change a thing."

Twelve

Much earlier that day, before Granny discovered the fly in her
caldo verde,
Tendai was slaving away in the She Elephant's
shebeen.
Of all the jobs he was given, this was the worst. The stench of fermenting fruit made him dizzy. The fire under the
kachasu
vat devoured oxygen and raised the temperature unbearably. If the chamber hadn't been close to the surface, he would have passed out from lack of air. The only consolation was that he wasn't chained.

Not that this gave him an opportunity to escape. Unlike the other rooms underground,
this
chamber was connected to only two tunnels: one leading down to a pool of water and another going up to the air. The She Elephant sat in a chair blocking this exit.

Tendai raked out a load of pineapple peels from under the wine vat. He grimaced as a tide of cockroaches swarmed over his hands. It isn't fair, he thought. I should be outside at this time of day, but Fist and Knife aren't around to watch me. I hope Granny has a rotten time.

And she would, he thought. Knife could take her to the Starlight Room in the Mile-High Macllwaine, and Granny would still find something to grumble about. "Why couldn't she stay here? She'd be just as miserable," he muttered.

The She Elephant wasn't all that watchful at the moment. She sprawled over the chair with a bottle of
kachasu
cradled in her arms. Her eyes were glazed, but they hadn't closed yet. Now and then they twitched in Tendai's direction. "Fetch water," said the big woman in a slurred voice. She rolled a bucket toward him with her foot.

Tendai took it gratefully and started down the tunnel to the water. The air became much fresher. He shone a flashlight on the dark path. It went down and down until he passed the level of packed garbage and came to natural earth and rock. The trail stopped descending, and astonishingly, the light began to grow. Soon he was able to switch off the flashlight. He arrived at a deep dark pool. It lay at the bottom of a grotto, like a bubble in the earth. In the low ceiling was a shaft that led up to the sky.

Tendai guessed it was an old well. The sides of the shaft were lined with stone, and the light fell from the distant sky to fill the chamber with a ghostly radiance. Tendai often wondered whether he could use it to escape, but the water was very deep. If he swam out, his hands would only reach a third of the way to the opening.

He filled the bucket and sat down to rest. If he waited too long, the She Elephant would beat him. On the other hand, she might fall asleep. And then, oh, then . . .

The rage for freedom struck him most forcefully when he was deep underground. It was almost as though a voice called to him:
Run! Run now!
He rubbed his hands against the walls of the chamber to quiet his nerves. He felt something hard under the soil. A rock, he thought, and almost passed on, but a patch of white caught his attention.

He shone the flashlight on it. It had an unusual luster, so he worked it loose. It was a flat ridged disk perhaps two inches in diameter, and it was thick, like the bottom of a drinking glass. Tendai's heart began to race with excitement. He washed it in the pool. The dirt came off, although the ridges were stained with vegetable matter.

It was an
ndoro. Ndoros
were still worn by spirit mediums, but they were made of porcelain. The really old ones came from the shell of a sea mollusk. They had always been extremely rare. This one was formed of a heavy spiral of white shell and had a hole bored at the center to allow it to be hung around the neck. Tendai had seen one in a painting of Monomatapa.

He cupped it in his hands, feeling it the way its original owner had done. He saw the unknown ancestor standing in a forest clearing, smelting red ore in a beehive oven. The man hammered out metal on a rock, making a ringing sound through the trees. He fashioned a spear shaft from a young tree and fastened the leaf-shaped blade to it with a neat coil of copper wire. The ancestor balanced his weapon, feeling how it became part of his arm, and he touched the
ndoro
to send a prayer to the spirit world —

"You fool!" roared .the She Elephant down the tunnel. Tendai jumped up so fast, he knocked over the bucket. He hastily buried the
ndoro
in the mud at the edge of the pool and plunged the bucket into the dark water. He dragged it up the tunnel as fast as he could manage. But as he got nearer, it became clear the She Elephant was not shouting at him. He stopped near the
shebeen
and listened.