Zulu (33 page)

The asphalt was melting in the afternoon sun when Brian left the hospital. All he could see was a blurred filter behind his burning eyes, the rest was a complete mess. He felt nauseous, wanted to vomit. He bought a ten-rand pair of Ray-Bans from a stall in Greenmarket, and picked up a cell phone and his car from the basement of headquarters. The rear windshield was shattered, the front one was cracked from left to right, but the car started up at the first attempt.

 

And then, she . . . closed.

Her baby blue . . .

Her baby blue . . .

Oh . . . her baby blue . . . EYES!!!

 

The ash flew about in the passenger compartment of the Mercedes. Brian threw his cigarette out the window and climbed toward Somerset. His head still hurt terribly, and the conversation he'd had earlier had driven him over the edge. Krüge was covering up the case for reasons that escaped him, or rather, that were beyond him. But Brian wasn't fooled. Faced with competition from world markets, sovereign states could do very little to withstand the pressures of finance and globalized trade, unless they wanted to alienate investors and threaten their own gross national product. The role of states was now limited to maintaining order and security in the midst of a new world disorder controlled by centrifugal, supranational and elusive forces. No one genuinely believed in progress anymore, the world had become an uncertain, precarious place, but most decision makers were happy to let the pirates of this phantom system continue with their plunder and to take advantage of it themselves while hoping it would all blow over. The excluded were pushed farther out onto the periphery of huge cities reserved for the winners of a cannibalistic game in which, with no prospect of collective action, people's widespread frustration was channeled into television, sports, and celebrity culture.

Whether or not someone was exerting pressure on him, Krüge was a pragmatist. He wasn't going to risk frightening investors away from the country that was getting ready to organize a great sporting carnival, just for the sake of a few street kids, whose prospects boiled down to a bottleneck filled with
tik
or a stray bullet. Neuman was Brian's one hope—a hope that had vanished nearly two days earlier.

Brian coasted home and lay down wearily on the couch in the living room. Debeer's injection had sent him into a terrifying state, and the night he had spent delirious in a hospital bed had left him exhausted. Like a horse that had died in the mud. He lay there for a while, putting back the scattered pieces of himself. The atmosphere in the house suddenly felt sinister. As if it wasn't his anymore, as if the walls wanted to throw him out. The ghost of Ruby, a specter contaminated by the virus, coming to take her revenge on him? He dismissed his junkie visions, took two painkillers, and put on the latest Scrape. All the way—the crows will pick you clean. And indeed, a black veil soon fell over him as he lay on the couch. The music howled in the living room, loud enough to tear the skin from the sky. His thoughts gradually organized themselves. What did Janet Helms's betrayal matter? Ali had cut off contact with them in order to have a free hand. And the fact that he had chosen a sniper's weapon from the armory meant that he knew where the killers were.

Mzala—escaped.

Terreblanche—untraceable.

The American gang—wiped out.

The kids—a heap of bones.

Brian turned the mystery over a thousand times in his messed-up head, and at last understood. Zina.

 

 *

 

Rhodes House was the hip club in the City Bowl, where models and advertising personalities met between shoots—a lucrative activity due to the region's exceptional light.

A self-satisfied male clientele was pouring in that evening, selected by the well-dressed, muscular young bouncer—anyone without a tan and an open white shirt had few chances of getting in. With his bandaged head, his walk—like a rusty robot—and his red watery eyes, Brian Epkeen looked like someone at the end of his tether. He showed his badge to the bouncer and found a place at the bar, which overlooked the stage.

The show was just finishing. To the accompaniment of Zulu drums, a wall of electronic sound, and wildly flashing lights, Zina was tearing the strings from an incandescent guitar. Brian screwed up his eyes to calm his dizziness, his nerves in meltdown. A brief moment of harmony. When the earthquake was over, Zina went up in smoke, beneath a flood of sound and feedback.

After a moment or two, the lights went up, and they started playing elevator music to cover the voices. Brian tried to order a drink but the barman with his hair full of gel ignored him. Now that the evening's show was over, the models resumed their commercial break on the dance floor, where Casanovas in Versace flirted with their sulky shadows. Brian watched the stage door, in agony—the tritherapy was turning his stomach. Zina finally came out of her dressing room. Brian introduced himself, with all the noise around them, and drew her toward the bar. She was wearing a dress cut low at the back, but no shoes. A real beauty.

“Ali told me you were a former Inkatha militant,” he said, as they reached the bar. “Not an electronic maniac.”

“Ali told me you were a friend,” she retorted, “not a mummy.”

“Do you like my bandage?”

Zina looked at his scabs and pulled a face. “Is it for decoration?”

“Actually, I'm in terrible pain.”

She raised an eyebrow, her face bright in the spotlights. “You're quite funny for a white,” she said.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“No.”

In any case, the barman with the slicked-back hair was literally under siege.

She leaned on the damp counter. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“No one's heard from Ali since yesterday,” Brian said. “I'm looking for him. It's really urgent, if you must know.”

The room was throbbing with bass. Zina's face did not betray the least emotion.

“You don't seem surprised,” he said. “He came to see you, didn't he?”

She forgot about his bandages and looked into his sea-green eyes. “Yes, we talked.”

“About Terreblanche?”

She nodded.

“This is important,” he said, his pulse beating faster. “Do you have any information?”

A veil of melancholy fell over her face. “I know Terreblanche bought a farm in Namibia,” she said at last. “Two years ago, through a bogus company. A former training camp in the middle of the Namib Desert. Your friend seemed interested. I wasn't.”

Brian didn't see the tears well in her eyes. Namibia. By cutting off all contact, Ali had cut himself off from the law. The adrenalin came flooding back. He noted down the information on his cigarette pack and turned back to Zina, who was still leaning on the bar.

“Any chance we can see each other again?” he asked.

Surrounded by the clubbers, Zina smiled. “Sorry, Prince Charming. It was the Zulu king I loved.”

A lovely smile, as lovely as she was, and just as fractured.

 

 

 

A
cattle truck screamed past the windows of the Mercedes. A mechanic had put on some insulating tape to mend the rear windshield, but the sun beat down on the driver's side. Brian Epkeen had been driving for hours on the N7, which ran due north to the Namibian border. He had crossed the Veld, Afrikaner country, three hundred miles of yellow hills and barren plains where nothing grew except vines, and there were just a few scattered farms flung down here like men thrown overboard into the sea. The image of a contaminated Ruby returned as the dotted lines on the asphalt sped past. What if the tritherapy didn't work, what if the mutant virus resisted shock treatment? He saw himself back in the bedroom, trembling for her when Terreblanche had aimed his gun at her face, and then groggy, lying on top of her bloodstained body.

He reached Springbok in the early hours of the morning, exhausted.

Springbok was the last stopping-off point before the Namibian border. The golden age of mining had passed, all you saw now were gaudy Wimpy restaurants, churches, a few businesses supplying deer hunters, and a collection of semi-precious stones displayed in the window with pride by Joppie, the owner of the Café Lounge. Brian parked the Mercedes outside the café, the only place open on the deserted main street at this hour.

A
boeremusierk
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tune was playing softly. Wedged behind a counter overloaded with badges and empty cigarette lighters used purely for decoration, Joppie was talking in Afrikaans to another redneck, weighing about three hundred pounds, who was as graceful as a cow shitting itself. Heads of springboks and oryx adorned the walls, frozen forever in an expression of supreme indifference.

“What can I do for you?” the boss asked, in a surly tone.

Even his voice wore a check shirt. Brian asked him, in English, for a coffee, and went and sat down on the terrace that looked out on the main street. He drank the coffee—more like hot water colored black—and waited for the gun shop to open its doors so that he could buy a hunting rifle and a box of cartridges.

When the assistant saw his police badge, there were no problems. “Was it a springbok that did that to you?” the man joked, winking at his scabs.

“Yes, a female.”

“Ha ha!”

A group of blondes encased in flounce dresses was coming out of church as Brian put the rifle in the trunk of his car. The coffee was still in his stomach, like the atmosphere of this godforsaken city. He set off again, bidding farewell to the fat majorettes with a cloud of dust.

After another forty miles, he reached the Namibian border. He parked his car by the huts that served as a border post and stretched his body shaken by the road.

There weren't many tourists here in summer, when the sun burned everything. He left the elderly German couple in safari suits by the immigration desk, presented his request to the constable in charge of stamping documents, and consulted the register of arrivals. Neuman had crossed the border two days earlier, at seven in the evening.

 

Bits of punctured tires, a smashed car, a truck across the road, a body under a blanket—the B1 that crossed Namibia was particularly dangerous, despite all the work done on it in the past few years. Brian filled up with water and gas at the service station in Grünau, ate a sandwich in the noon shade and shared a cigarette with the mango vendors dozing under their cotton sunhats. The temperature climbed the farther he got into the red desert. The sheep had taken shelter under the few trees, the truck drivers were napping in the shade of the axles. He called Neuman for the first time that morning. Still no network.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Brian was talking to himself. Men on their own always talk too much, or keep silent like carp. That was a line from a film. Or a book. He couldn't remember. He left behind the vendors from the village of cinderblock huts that bordered the highway and continued on his way to Mariental, two hundred and fifty miles in a straight line across plateaus and mesas scalped by the wind.

Not many people lived in the Namibian furnace—descendants of Germans who had massacred the Herero tribes at the beginning of the previous century, and were now shopkeepers or hoteliers, and a few nomadic tribes, like the Khoikhoi. All the rest belonged to nature. The Mercedes crossed the arid plain beneath a fiery sun.

According to Zina's information, Terreblanche had established his base in a reserve near the Sesriem dunes. He would be there before nightfall. An old locomotive dragging dismembered wagons belched black smoke on the way out of Keepmanshoop, and disappeared into the stony terrain. The miles flew past, a permanent mirage in the heat haze above the asphalt. Brian's throat was dry in spite of the gallons of water he had drunk, and his eyes felt as if they were under an electric dryer. The border police had his description, which meant he could get a reprimand from Krüge for acting without authorization, but he didn't give a damn. For the moment, the Mercedes, although running at full throttle, was holding up. After miles of this furnace, Brian turned off the potholed highway onto the road to Sesriem.

The only things he passed were tame-looking springboks in the shade of scrawny trees, a big kudu that bolted at his approach, and a boy on a bicycle carrying a bottle of boiled water on his rack. He reached the gates of the Namib in the first glimmer of twilight.

The Sesriem post was ghostlike at this time of year. After stretching his legs in the yard, he talked to the affable official who was distributing entry tickets to the reserve, but there was no record of any Neuman having passed through here.

“I've only seen the odd tourist,” he said, consulting his register. “All of them white.”

Brian again filled up with water and gas before plunging into the desert. Terreblanche's farm was some thirty miles, somewhere in Namib Naukluft Park. He threw the rest of his sandwich on the floor of the car and smoked a cigarette to calm down.

A magpie was disemboweling a jackal that had been run over when the Mercedes left the tarred section of the road. The Sossusvlei dunes were among the highest in the world. Red, orange, pink, and mauve—the colors varied depending on the angle of vision and the position of the sun. A Dantesque landscape he barely noticed, with his nose in the map. He followed the main trail for about eight miles, turned west, and after a while came to a metal fence and slowed down.

A sign in several languages forbade access to the site, and the fence clearly ran for miles. Brian smashed through it, and continued driving along the bumpy trail.

There was a sudden storm, like a storm at sea, and lightning streaked across the sky. Ali had a head start of almost two days. What had he been doing all this time?

Angry clouds threw veils of rain over the thirsty plain. At last, Brian saw a building in the shade of the dunes, a farmhouse with a prefabricated hut as an extension.

The handful of oryx lazing on the plain fled when he stopped his vehicle on the side of the trail. In the distance, the farm seemed empty. He took the binoculars from the glove compartment and inspected the site. The farm swayed for a moment in his sights—the wind had burned his eyes. He couldn't see any movement. Falcons were whirling in the orange sky. Then he saw a patch on the trail. A man. Lying motionless. A corpse. There were others close to the prefabs, at least six, being fought over by the magpies. And another one in the yard.

 

 *

 

Neuman and Terreblanche had waited in the shade of the burned-out vehicles, but nobody had come. The carnage at the farm, the shots, the exploding gas tanks, the burning vehicles, had all passed unnoticed. The giant dunes must have hidden the flames, and the darkness the trail of smoke. The sun had climbed, a sun that stung the skin and baked sheet metal, making it impossible to stay in one place for too long, and still they were waiting and nothing came. No reconnaissance plane crossing the sky, no cloud of dust raised by a ranger's patrol car. The horizon remained a pure, hopelessly empty cobalt blue.

A yellow lizard took shelter beneath the burning sand.

“We're going to fry here,” Terreblanche predicted, his back against the blackened side of the Toyota.

The blood had stopped flowing from his wound, but long ravines had appeared in his crimson face. The poison from the spider bite had spread through his body and was starting to paralyze his limbs. The heat showed no sign of abating. His cracked lips were encrusted with sand, and a sickly light hovered at the back of his eyes—thirst.

“Save your saliva for your trial,” Neuman said.

“There won't be a trial. You have no evidence.”

“Except you. Now shut up.”

Terreblanche fell silent. His forearm had swollen to almost twice its size. The hole had necrotized, the skin around the bite had first turned yellow and was now blue. Neuman had handcuffed him to the bodywork, but he was in no state to escape. The shadows of the clouds passed over the ridges of the unreal dunes.

There was nothing to hear, only the immortal silence over the motionless desert.

They waited some more, under their makeshift shelter, without exchanging a single word.

They were steaming.

Nobody would come.

Their existence, even inside the reserve, was a secret. No one would report them missing. Joost Terreblanche didn't even exist, he had melted into the chaos of the world. He had set up his Namibian base with the complicity of people who took great care to keep their noses out of his affairs, a retreat where he could play dead until things sorted themselves out. No one cared about their fate. They had been left in this valley of sand, this ocean of fire, to die of thirst.

Evening fell.

Neuman had razor blades in his throat. He lifted his aching carcass and took a few steps. In the shade of the Toyota, Terreblanche barely reacted. His mouth was like a wrinkled apple, his features those of a recumbent statue. He had lost too much blood on the road. He had no more saliva left. His arm was misshapen.

Neuman shook him with his foot. “Stand up.”

Terreblanche opened one eye, as misty as the other. The sun had disappeared behind the ridge. He tried to speak but emitted only a barely audible wheeze. Neuman took off the handcuffs and helped him to his feet. Terreblanche could hardly stand. He looked at Neuman wild-eyed, as if he was no longer of this world.

Neuman turned toward the east. “We're going to take a little walk,” he announced.

Eighteen miles across the dunes. They had a chance to get to the farm before dawn—a chance in a thousand.

 

 *

 

Brian had searched the buildings and the corpses that littered the ground. Nine around the farmhouse, four more in the dormitory. All paramilitaries, killed by high-caliber bullets. 7.62s, to judge by the piece of steel extracted from a wound. From a Steyr rifle. He was on the right track, but neither Terreblanche nor Mzala was among the victims. Had they escaped? Brian had checked the surroundings, but the wind and the storm had wiped out any tracks.

He gave up his search at dusk.

He informed the local authorities of the carnage at the farm and found shelter in Desert Camp, a lodge on the edge of the reserve.

As it was summer, the place was almost empty. He parked his heap of dust in front of the vast plain and negotiated his keys from the young Namibian girl at reception. From the tiny ceramic swimming pool there was a view of the red desert. The tents were top of the range, cleverly made, with outside kitchens, Moroccan bathrooms, and lots of windows with views of the surroundings. Brian took a cold shower and drank a beer as he watched night fall. The savannah was an unreal expanse stretching all the way to the jagged mountains of the Namib. Ali was out there, somewhere.

Brian left the terrace and took a few steps into the desert. An ostrich passed in the distance. Exhausted, he stretched out at the foot of a dead tree. The sand was soft to the touch, the silence so total it swallowed the vastness. He thought of his son, David, who had gone to have a wild time in Port Elizabeth, then of Ruby, who must be languishing in her hospital bed. He didn't know if they were saved, if the virus would mutate, if she bore him a grudge. Ali's face took up all the space. Why hadn't he informed him? Why hadn't he said anything?

A hundred, a thousand stars appeared in the sky. With much flapping of wings, an owl came to rest on the branch of the dead tree beneath which he lay. A night bird with carefully folded white feathers, staring at him with intermittent eyes. The night was black now. Swarms of stars jostled one another along the Milky Way, shooting stars crisscrossing the sky.

Brian lay there, arms outstretched on the warm orange sand, counting the dead—a procession floating, like him, in the nebula.

“Where are you?”

Up on his scraggy perch, the owl did not know. He was looking down stoically at the human being.

A brief moment of fraternity. At the far end of despair, Brian fell asleep by the light from a stick of Durban Poison that sent him down to the bottom.

 

 *

 

The moon had guided them toward the sleepy horizon, a mute witness to their stations of the cross. Terreblanche had been wandering for a while in a semi-coma, his complexion ever paler under the white moon. The wound on his arm was now covered in a yellow crust. He was walking like a lame puppet, his eyes lost in the mists of time. Finally, after four hours of this forced march across the dunes, he collapsed.

He wouldn't get up again. After the blood he had lost, the spider poison, the day he had spent in this sauna, and the walk, he was completely dehydrated. They had only covered a few miles. It was still a long way to the farm, somewhere at the other end of the night. Neuman made hardly any attempt to talk to him. His throat was so dry that all that came from his mouth was a thin wheeze. Terreblanche, at his feet, was like a little old man now. He tried to revive him, in vain. There was no reaction. But his lips, cracked by the heat, were moving.