Zulu (17 page)

She had been found by the riverside early in the morning, almost dead.

It was while visiting his mother at the dispensary that Neuman had seen her for the first time, lying in bed, surrounded by other patients. Her eyes were so swollen from the beating that she could barely blink. Was it the terrible marks on her body that had reminded him of his father's agony, her smile when he had squeezed her hand, her beautiful, helpless brown eyes that had drunk him in like a false elixir? That day, he had promised her that no one would ever hurt her again.

He had installed her in the largely colored township of Manenberg, in a small permanent house with real windows and a solid door, a door he'd knock at from time to time.

At first, Maia had wondered if this big cop with eyes like stone wasn't another one of those crazy men who were both fascinated and horrified by women's bodies—he could caress her for hours, and his hand on her body was like an ointment or a blade—but she had known a lot worse. Her new boyfriend could fondle her as much he liked, he could ask her to lift her ass like a lighthouse in order to rub ice cubes over it (code number three), or explore her anus with his fingertip (code number five), he could stuff her with whatever he wanted and she sometimes didn't want, Maia was not very particular. She survived in Manenberg as best she could—bartering, doing odd jobs, painting, occasionally sleeping with guys. Two years had passed since the beginning of their relationship, two years during which everything had changed. Today Maia waited for his footsteps, his knock at the door, his face, his hands on her body, as if she was his pet. Over time, it had stopped being a chore for her and become the sweetest of tortures. She had never been caressed like that before.

She had never been caressed at all.

 

It was after midnight when Ali knocked at the door that night. Maia woke with a start—he hadn't told her he was coming. She put on the short nightdress he had bought her the previous month, fought with sleep as far as the front door, lifted the latch, and saw him standing there, looking haggard.

Ali had a bandage over his ear, and in the moonlight his eyes looked sad. Something had happened, she knew that immediately. She lifted her hand to his cheek to comfort him, but he stopped her.

“I have to talk to you,” he said.

“Of course. Come in.”

She didn't know what to say, how to behave. They had never talked about love. Love had never come into the equation. It was enough of a miracle that he condescended to touch her. Deep down, Maia felt impure, soiled, dishonored, he came from an educated family, probably an important clan. Maia imagined all kinds of things—Ali didn't make love to her because he was afraid of lowering himself, compromising himself with a girl from the country, a colored girl who'd had lots of men and who he'd found in the gutter. She didn't know anything about his feelings, or understand his strange pleasures, but, in spite of everything, she still hoped, because that was her nature.

The man she loved didn't even bother to sit down. The look he gave her made her retreat to the couch.

“I won't be coming again,” he said abruptly.

“What?”

“We had an agreement. I'm releasing you from it.”

His voice wasn't the same. It came from the darkness, from a place where Maia had never set foot, a place she would never go.

“But. Ali. I don't want to be released. I want to stay with you.”

He said nothing. He was looking at the paintings proudly displayed on the living room wall, naive paintings scrawled on pieces of board, colorful images depicting scenes of township life—so brave, so pathetic, so bad.

“I'll still help you out,” he said, “if that's what's worrying you.”

Sitting on the couch to which he had driven her, Maia gritted her teeth. It wasn't about money anymore, he knew that perfectly well. Anger was welling up inside her. Even a good man like him was casting her out as if she was unclean. She really was nothing but a pet to him.

“You mean you don't want me anymore?”

“That's right.”

His harshness hurt her. Something had happened since last week. He couldn't just abandon her like this, without a word of explanation.

“Have you found another girl? Is that it? Have you found another poor tramp who thinks you're going to save her? Or do you have a few?” She was angry now. “A harem, that's what they call it, right?”

There was a sound in the distance, in the night, a gunshot, or a door being slammed.

“Shut up,” he said in a low voice.

“Do you fuck her?”

“Shut up!”

“Tell me!” she cried, with venom. “Do you fuck
her
?”

Ali raised his hand, and she instinctively shielded her face. The blow was so rapid that Maia felt the breath of it on her disheveled hair. His fist grazed her temple and crashed into the wall, which cracked under the impact. Maia let out a cry of astonishment. Ali kept raining down blows, with all his strength, destroying her paintings one by one, shattering the plywood wall with his bare hands. Wood flew across the room, splinters falling on her hair. She screamed for him to stop, but the blows kept coming endlessly. He was going to smash everything to pieces, her, the house, their life, with his fists.

The storm stopped suddenly.

Maia was huddled on the couch, moaning softly, not daring to move. She risked a glance through her terrified fingers. Ali was standing over her, his fist clenched, full of scratches and splinters, his eyes sparkling with anger.

A growl rose from deep within him, a sound that froze her blood.

“Shut up.”

 

 

 

A
red dress crossed his field of vision. With one hand, the woman was holding down the straw hat that was threatening to blow away to the ends of the earth, with the other she balanced gracefully on the immaculate beach. Brian Epkeen was just passing the apparition when a gust of wind blew sand in his face.

He had walked past the colored wooden huts along the promenade, the first-aid post, the scattered beach umbrellas, and the few toothless men selling trinkets from the nearby township. The farther he walked along the ocean, the more deserted Muizenberg beach became. Dust and sand stirred by the wind rose and vanished in the shimmer of noon. He turned, but the girl was now just a red spot in the heat haze. The resort was almost out of sight. He continued walking, struggling in the soft sand, spitting up cigarettes and alcohol.

Last night, Brian had gone to the bar on Long Street where Tracy worked. He had wanted to have a serious talk with her, but she kept going into raptures over her young colleague juggling three cocktail shakers behind the bar. If something like that got her so excited, then they might as well call it a day, O.K.? Tracy was taken aback. Brian's words had hit home, but she hadn't really grasped what he was trying to say. He was no good at breaking up. He didn't know how to go about it. His heart wasn't in it. Dan's death had made him lazy. Disappointment, bitterness, sadness—they had parted without hope of a relapse.

Brian saw the site of the straw hut, then the barbecue in the hollow of the dunes, the worm-eaten hut. There were still traces of burned sand, a few spilled lumps of charcoal. A shiver went down his spine. When the colored girl had come on to him, wiggled her hips at him, she was already planning to kill him. She and the guy he had slashed would have done to him what they had done to Dan. They might have cut him in pieces and grilled him. He licked his lips, tasted the salt of the nearby ocean, and dismissed the fear that was preventing him from thinking.

The beach stretched all the way to Pelikan Park. The house he was looking for couldn't be far. He adjusted his dark glasses, climbed to the top of a dune, swayed in the wind. Hovering in the sky, the seagulls stared at him with their mad eyes. He saw the railroad line in the distance, then the start of a wire fence running behind bushes that bent in the sea wind. The M3 was barely a mile away, along a bumpy track. Brian went down the slope to the main gate, which had a big padlock on it. A sign on the fence, half eroded by salt, said that this was private property and that there was no entry—hardly a threat to anyone except the butterflies. He clambered over the fence, cursed as he scratched his wrist on the wire, and fell to the sandy front yard. Seagulls rose, squawking. It was then that he saw a woman trotting along the path toward him on horseback.

He was still by the fence when the woman hailed him. She was riding a black Friesian glistening with sweat.

“Hello!”

She was a brunette, about thirty-five, a tall woman with incredible laughing blue eyes. “Lost something?” she asked.

“Let's say, looking for something.”

“Oh, yes?” she said, feigning surprise. “What exactly?”

“That's what I'm trying to find out.”

She tugged at the horse's bridle. The horse was clearly desperate to gallop straight to the ocean.

“Do you often ride this way?” he asked.

“Sometimes. I keep my horse stabled at the riding club next to the park.”

Pelikan Park, the nature reserve situated a few hundred yards away. Brian forgot the ocean glittering like pearls on the other side of the fence and turned toward the house. “Do you know who lives here?”

The woman shook her head, imitated—curiously—by her horse. “No.”

“Ever seen anyone around?”

She shook her head again.

“Any vehicles?” he insisted.

The Friesian pulled on the bridle. She made him do an elegant little pas de deux, then her face slowly lit up, as if the memories were coming back to her in flashes of blue sky.

“Yes, I saw a four-by-four here once, very early in the morning, going through the gate. I sometimes cut across the dunes, but usually I follow the beach. Why do you ask?”

“What kind of four-by-four?”

The woman leaned forward in the saddle to relax her posterior. “Let's see, it was big, dark, a recent model, the kind that'd really tear up the dunes. To be honest, I barely saw it. Not like you. You did notice this is private property?”

“You said early in the morning. About what time?”

“Six o'clock. I like to ride in the morning, when the beach is deserted.”

Right then and there, so did he. He'd just have to find a depressive horse that liked to drink.

“When was this?”

“I don't know.” She shrugged her shoulders beneath her tight-fitting T-shirt. “About ten days ago.”

“Anyone since then?”

“Only you.” Her blue eyes went through him like he was antimatter.

“If you were shown a list of similar vehicles, do you think you'd be able to identify the four-by-four?”

“Are you a policeman?”

“Sometimes.”

The Friesian was chewing at his bit and stamping his hooves. The woman turned him right around to face the other way.

“Do you work at the riding club?” Brian asked, when the maneuver was over.

“No, I just ride. He's three years old,” she said, patting the horse's neck, “and still mettlesome. Do you like horses?”

“I prefer ponies,” he said.

She burst out laughing, which made the animal even more nervous. “I told myself you didn't look like someone with a feel for horses.”

“Really?”

“You're looking at me—he can sense that you're afraid of him. Someone with a feel for horses would have done the opposite.”

“Can I at least have your cell-phone number?”

She nodded. He took out his notebook, and she gave him her number. The Friesian was still stamping irritably, his big eyes turned toward the sea.

“My name is Tara,” she said, and held out her hand over the fence. “Can I give you a ride?”

“Another time, maybe. We could go somewhere.”

She gave a devilish smile. “Never mind!”

She turned the animal's bridle and, with her heel, set his trapped energy free. They soon vanished, swallowed by the sky and the sea spray. Brian stood there by the fence, looking after them skeptically, before coming back to reality.

The wind blew through the front yard. The sun was high and overpowering, the seagulls like lookouts. Brian turned toward the building, which stood isolated among the pines.

With its closed shutters and rusted antenna, the house Janet Helms had discovered looked like a disused weather station. He walked up to the reinforced door, checked the front of the building. No upper floor, no security protection, just a sloping roof and a barred basement window covered with cardboard. Everything seemed padlocked, abandoned. But the woman's sighting of a four-by-four was strange. He went around to the other side.

Brian didn't have a warrant. What he did have was a small crowbar in his revolver pocket. He was expecting to have to force open the back door of the house, but it wasn't closed. A squat? He grabbed his .38 and pressed himself against the wall. He loaded his gun, gently opened the door, and peered inside. Air rushed in through the open door, disturbing the flies. He aimed his gun into the semi-darkness. There was a musty smell in the house, and something else, something strange, stirred by the wind from outside. He went into the next room, which was empty. He found the meter—the electricity was working—and a third room that looked out on the front yard, with boarded-up windows and a concrete floor. There was a paint-smeared wooden table, brushes with hardened hairs, bits of wallpaper torn from the wall, and flies zigzagging madly around him. That unpleasant smell was still hovering.

A door led to the cellar. Brian peered down the steps, and immediately lifted his hand to his face. This was where the smell came from. A smell of shit. A deadly smell of human shit. He switched on the light and held his breath. The cellar was alive with flies, thousands of flies. He walked down the steps, finger tensed on the trigger. The cellar stretched the whole length of the building, a room with every opening blocked, the scene of an apocalypse. Shuddering, he made out three corpses beneath the swarm of flies: two males, one female. Their state recalled that of Tembo's rats. Scalped, limbs torn off, they lay in a lake of congealed blood, lost beneath a sea of flies. The bodies were shapeless, eviscerated, the faces lacerated, toothless, unrecognizable. A battlefield in an enclosed space. A cage. He looked up, and saw that the walls were covered in excrement. Shit had been smeared all over the room, at the height of a man.

Brian breathed through his mouth, but it didn't help. He walked through the cloud of insects, protecting himself with his hands. There was a wash basin at the far end of the room, and a tiled work surface onto which guts had been emptied. Two knives lay on the ground, the handles still sticky. The strident buzzing and the smell of shit and blood made him nauseous. He bent over the corpses, and with the flat of his hand brushed away the flies swarming over their faces. One of the blacks had a big cut on his left cheek, and tattoos on his arms. Even disfigured, he recognized the guy from the straw hut, the one who had followed him behind the dunes, the one he had whipped with his knout. The maimed girl beside him must be Pam. Half her scalp was missing. Unable to breathe, Brian went back upstairs, slammed the cellar door behind him, and stood there for a moment with his back to the wall.

He had dug up the bodies of militants killed by the special services, zombies rotting in dungeons, bodies burned by Inkatha vigilantes or ANC comrades,
27
people without skin, their faces grinning as if in gratitude, and he had never felt pity—that wasn't his job. Today, all he felt was disgust. He ran to the door and threw up everything he had inside him.

 

 *

 

The Harare police station was a red brick building surrounded by barbed wire, with a view of the new law courts. A constable stood at the gate, sweating under his cap. Neuman left him to the flies, avoided the drunks being shoved into cells, and announced his name to the girl at the desk.

Walter Sanogo was waiting for him in his office, mopping himself beneath the sluggish fan. He was drowning under the number of cases in progress, and Neuman's request had led nowhere. The three blacks killed on Muizenberg beach didn't have records. The photographs had done the rounds of Khayelitsha, without success. They hadn't established any links to a gang, old or new. Most of the homicides he dealt with were due to rivalries between gangs, many people had no papers, there were thousands of illegals. For his own sake and that of his men, Sanogo was quite happy to let them kill each other, to keep it in the family, so to speak.

“I met one of these guys ten days ago, near the gymnasium site,” Neuman said, pointing to the photograph of the youngest man. “He called himself Joey.”

Sanogo made a face like an iguana. “These guys usually invent stupid nicknames for themselves: Machine Gun, Devil Man.”

“There was another young guy with him, who limped.”

“What makes you think he's still in the area?”

Neuman changed tack. “These tattoos,” he said, indicating the photographs he himself had taken. “Mean anything to you?”

Scorpions about to attack, and the two letters TB, with faded ink. Sanogo shook his head.

“Thunderbird,” Neuman said. “A militia that used to operate in Chad, but had its origins in Nigeria. They killed one of my men, and they're dealing drugs on the peninsula. Something new, like
tik
but worse.”

“Listen,” Sanogo said, in a fatherly tone. “I'm sorry about your officer, but I have only two hundred men here, for tens of thousands of people. I rarely have enough men to deal with clashes between the taxi collectives, and sometimes they turn on us. I also lost an officer last month—shot down like a rabbit, on the street, for his service pistol.”

“Keep the gangs under control, and your men will be safer.”

“We're not in the city,” Sanogo replied. “It's a jungle out here.”

“Then let's try to do something about it.”

“Oh, yes? And what are you planning to do—find every gang leader and ask him if he can tell you who killed your man?”

“Oh, I'm not going alone,” Neuman said, icily. “You're coming with me.”

Sanogo shifted on his plastic chair. “Don't count on it,” he said, as if there was no room for discussion. “I have more than enough work with the current cases.” His eyes wandered over the heaps of files.

“Joey had an almost new Beretta M92,” Neuman said. “The serial numbers had been scratched out, but it was definitely police issue. Would you prefer us to take a close look at your stocks?”

The number of weapons declared lost went beyond acceptable limits, as Neuman had already ascertained. Weapons here had a tendency to get up and walk.

Sanogo was silent for a moment—he knew which of his constables was involved in the traffic, and he himself regularly got his “Christmas box.”

Neuman looked him up and down, contemptuously. “Call your men together.”

 

 *

 

The establishment of whites-only areas had caused massive population shifts, scattered communities, and destroyed the social fabric. Cape Flats, where the blacks and coloreds had been herded, was divided into territories, each controlled by a different gang with its own activities. It was an old tradition, and had even been unionized—using the argument that gangsterism was a product of apartheid, one thousand five hundred
tsotsis
had demonstrated outside Parliament, demanding the same amnesty as the police. Some gangs were employed by the owners of
shebeens
—illegal drinking joints—or by the drug barons, to protect their territory. Others formed pirate groups, stealing from other gangs to keep themselves supplied with drugs, alcohol, and money. There were gangs of pickpockets who operated on the buses, collective taxis, and trains, the Mafias who specialized in protection, and last but not least the prison gangs, who ran life inside (smuggling, rapes, executions, escapes), and to which every prisoner belonged, voluntarily or involuntarily.