by Mario Bolduc
“She talks about you sometimes,” Sophie now said.
Max was surprised. He doubted she was sincere. She must be buttering him up.
“She’s sorry about what happened.”
They walked in silence. Max had no desire to unearth the past. He’d moved on. With Sophie here beside him, it would be too easy to be shrouded in the heartbreak that had paralyzed him for so long — he’d done that much too often as it was. He was still madly in love with Valéria, but things hadn’t turned out for the best. Talking about it wouldn’t change anything. And neither would Sophie’s lies.
“Let’s talk about something else, okay?” Max told her.
He settled her on the porch, which he’d transformed into a guest bedroom of sorts. An enormous room covered with bamboo, without glass in the windows, which let the sounds from the main square below filter in. Donkeys braying as they passed, children shouting. In one corner stood a rigged-up shower, cold water only. Warm was unnecessary. The air blazed, even in the early morning. The nights were torrid and barely tolerable.
That evening Max invited Sophie to the Peponi, one of the few places in Shela where alcohol was served. The place was full of tourists, young people for the most part, noisy and demonstrative. Max couldn’t wait for dinner to be over. There were uncomfortable gaps in the conversation, as if they’d already started running out of subjects.
On the walk back, as he lit the way for Sophie with his flashlight — the village was completely dark — she took his arm. “Something’s happened …” The hazy moonlight was like a veil on her face. “Do you remember Teresa Mwandenga?”
Max had no idea who that was.
“The accountant. You must remember her. Very small, with a gravelly voice.”
He recalled having seen the woman with Valéria several times but didn’t know she was the accountant. A colleague from the Women’s Legal Aid Centre, he’d surmised. People were always visiting Valéria; it was hard to keep track. Every time he came over there were new faces.
“She took off recently, just disappeared into thin air with the foundation’s money,” Sophie said. “For months she’d been embezzling money and stuffing it in an account we knew nothing about.”
A month ago Teresa Mwandenga had asked for time off to visit an aunt in Kigoma but didn’t return the following week. Sophie called her cellphone — no answer. The aunt she’d gone to visit didn’t exist, and her phone number was fake. Suspecting something, Valéria checked the books, bank accounts, and other documents that were Mwandenga’s responsibility. She discovered that not only was the foundation broke, it was in debt in shillings the equivalent of several hundred thousands of dollars. Mwandenga had put off the creditors as a way of amassing still more money, then disappeared like smoke.
“Did you try to find her?” Max asked. “Did you call the police?”
“The police? That wouldn’t have helped. I did make a few phone calls. We even thought of hiring a retired detective to track her down, but we gave up on the idea.”
When they searched Mwandenga’s desk, Sophie and her mother discovered that their accountant had made several calls to Dubai. And purchased an airplane ticket for a flight from Dar es Salaam to the Emirates.
“We’re on the brink of closing down The Colour of Respect. I’m here to ask for your help. Valéria didn’t send me. She would have never agreed. She doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks I’m in Dar negotiating with the bank.”
Valéria, always prideful, wouldn’t accept such humiliation. Max imagined the picture very well.
“I’ll think about it,” Max said. Then they started walking toward the house again.
Sleep wouldn’t come that night. He paced the porch room while Sophie slept upstairs. Beneath his feet, the cool tiles would quickly turn as hot as coals once the sun came up. Before dawn he left the house and headed for the beach in front of the Peponi. The night was clear. Clouds of humidity rose, and he could see the waves breaking softly along the strand. He’d made up his mind, but he wanted to think it over a little more.
But what was the use?
When he returned home, before Sophie awoke, Max called Jayesh Srinivasan in Mumbai.
2
Rashid brought the boat to a halt at the foot of the ladder that hung down the side of the Sunflower, where a man in dress whites, a sailor from a kids’ comic book, waited for Max. He climbed the ladder and followed the man onto the bridge. Captain Robson, who looked like a British admiral from another century, an escapee from Mutiny on the Bounty perhaps, greeted him with a wide smile and a handshake dripping with humidity.
“Welcome aboard the Sunflower, Mr. Flanagan.”
Max looked around. The sparkling whiteness blinded him. His head was spinning. Out of the aggressive, pushy light a man appeared, large and tanned, whose grey hair peeked out from under his panama hat, very elegantly placed on his head, as if he were about to pose for the cover of Yacht Living. A devouring smile, shining teeth. Wrinkled shirt, but done just right, with the initials J.H. on the pocket. In the furnace heat, this dandy looked as fresh as a rose.
He offered his hand to his visitor. “Jonathan Harris. Very happy to meet you.”
“Robert Flanagan,” replied Max, nodding ever so slightly.
Harris looked him over. My entrance exam, Max figured. But happily, the billionaire wasn’t wary. A slap on the back, a knowing wink, a convivial smile.
“Poor devils,” Harris remarked, pointing to the Somalis.
Harris and his Sunflower shared the bay of Zanzibar with other extravagant pleasure craft. That was business as usual, but this rickety dhow out of the jaws of hell belonged to another planet. It was like a cockroach on a wedding cake.
“They’ve been drifting at sea for a week,” Harris continued. “They slipped through the fingers of the Islamic militia, only to fall victim to Tanzanian bureaucracy.”
His comment was a little too well rehearsed to be sincere.
Where did his fortune come from? Harris was the president of Sunflower Media in Los Angeles, a company that built electronic devices, handed down to him from his father. The company invested in the development of smartphones when the iPhone and BlackBerry were still on the drawing board. After consumers discovered they couldn’t live without this kind of telephone, Harris was ready. His Stellar phone spread across the United States and Europe, but also into the farthest reaches of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Since then, Harris’s company had expanded, diversified its operations, tried its hand with touch screens — with less success, it turned out. The Stellar remained Sunflower Media’s milk cow.
Harris pointed toward the dhow again. “I talked to the harbour commissioner myself. I called him at his house, but he doesn’t want to lift a finger. That’s Africa for you. The bureaucrats think they’re the masters of the universe. As soon as they have a little power —”
“You should have offered him a bribe,” Max said.
Harris turned and threw him a hard glare. “That’s not how I do business, Robert — I can call you Robert? Corruption will get us nowhere. That message should come from us, the West. Do you follow me?”
Max understood he was displaying his principles at a very bad time. “A hundred dollars would have done the trick.”
Again, Harris took a long look at his guest. He was probably wondering just who the man before him was. Robert Flanagan, a maritime security specialist? Max knew Harris’s underlings would have done the necessary research. Robert Flanagan had his own website, of course, with all the right references. A member of the professional association of security experts and of a tennis club in Dubai. A virtual facade created in under a week, though solid enough to give the impression that Max was an old hand when it came to the region. Jayesh had done his homework. He’d even left scattered hints that behind the name Chris Mason — the maritime reporter who had been writing pieces about piracy in Aden News, a digital newsletter popular among skippers — was actually Robert Flanagan.
Despit
e the tight deadline, his false identity had been carefully assembled.
Harris smiled to put everyone at ease, as if excusing himself for having doubted his guest’s honesty. “Why don’t we go inside?”
A sliding door opened for Max. The other passengers had chosen to stay inside with the air conditioning. Lawyers, all of them, in cruise wear, the Lacoste and Hilfiger version of it, younger than their boss. They all rose when Max entered the room, a low-ceilinged salon with the obligatory maritime decoration supplied by a reader of Joseph Conrad adventures, with old compasses, antique sea maps, and shiny copper trim.
Behind the group, an enormous television bolted to the wall was showing CNN’s coverage of Obama’s visit to Tanzania. The choice of country was no accident, people were saying. Like Ghana and Kenya, Tanzania was a democracy, one of the few functional ones in Africa, even if the party in power — the Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the “Party of the Revolution” — had reigned uninterrupted since independence. Tanzania was an example for other nations grappling with bloodthirsty dictators, more or less mentally deranged, who considered their countries their private property, playgrounds for their most outlandish fantasies.
“This heat is something!” Harris exclaimed as he slid the door closed. “On days like this, I envy my son.” He turned to one of the passengers. “Barney, you remember Jim? Little Jim?”
A man nodded sleepily.
“Last year he took it into his head to seek enlightenment in a monastery in Nepal in the middle of the Himalayas. He drinks tea and yak’s milk, walks around in monk’s robes all day, and wears a shaved head. Yoga and meditation, a little levitation now and then, in one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. He sent me photos. The rocky peaks, snow year-round …”
Harris smiled, moved by his own words and encouraged by the benevolent glances of his passengers. During this interlude of paternal love, Max observed the group. The crème de la crème of the new American society, Obama’s version of it. The passengers intended to use their stopover in Mombasa to make a lightning visit to Kendu Bay where the president’s father was born. The excursion was sure to be extraordinary, especially for the youngest of the group, a ravishing black woman from Atlanta who radiated unshakable confidence in the future of America.
A door swung open onto a gangway, and a hugely imposing man, a mountain of muscle, stepped out of the cabin and swayed over to the group. Black and dressed in black from head to toe, shaved head, glistening with sweat, wary eyes, a small ring in his ear, and a chain around his neck. A wide scar cut across his face, just missing his nose. His T-shirt, much too tight, stretched across his hypertrophied chest. He bent to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling, which made him look like a starving predator about to leap on the nearest antelope. The central-casting bodyguard that the rich couldn’t live without. The kind that shouldn’t be provoked — or so he wanted others to think.
But experience had taught Max that these oiled-up, taciturn, steroid-pumped brutes exhibiting their battle scars relied on appearances. Lacking real competition, they sometimes didn’t train as hard as they should. When push came to shove, they often revealed themselves to be soft and vulnerable.
“This is Ferguson,” Harris introduced him. “My guardian angel, I call him. He thinks I’ve made a mistake hiring you. He’s an intimidating specimen, you have to admit. I’ll send him up on the bridge if any pirates show up, and the scarves and turbans will fly!”
The muscle man revealed a timid smile, completely fake. A gold tooth flashed between his lips — of course.
According to Jayesh, he was to be avoided. Extremely dangerous.
Harris told his strongman to serve drinks — iced green tea, lattes, and a few virgin mint cocktails. The era of hard liquor and cigarettes had come and gone. But Max was thirsty: why not play up his role as a mercenary from another time?
“How about some Scotch instead?”
“Then you’ll have the privilege of tasting my single malt, Robert. I order it directly from Edinburgh.”
Max settled into a comfortable armchair, separated from the group by a low table loaded with contracts and other legal documents, while Ferguson played around with the dishes behind the bar with his ham hands. Harris stood straight, leaning on an old rudder wheel with a patina of years. Out the porthole, off to the right, the Somali refugees baked in the sun. Harris had forgotten all about them.
“I looked into a number of protection agencies,” Harris said. “Yours seems to be the most solid.” He broke into a wide smile and added, “Of course, your prices are steep.”
“It’s dangerous work.”
“You’re right to demand what you’re worth. I keep telling my colleagues never undersell yourself. That’s what Africa has done … until now. Finally, things are changing.”
On the screen, as if to back him up, Obama was reviewing the Tanzanian military guard, accompanied by President Joseph Lugembe. A brilliant economist educated in England, at the head of the country since 2005, Lugembe was slightly older than Obama, but had inspired the same hopes.
The son of a small businessman, he had made his way slowly through the structure of the party in power with the blessing of President Komba, his mentor and former teacher at the University of Dar es Salaam. In 1982 he married Myriam Ikingura, who had two little girls, Faith and Clara. Albino twins, an exceptional phenomenon. Albinos were the fruit of a deficient gene in both parents, who weren’t necessarily albinos themselves. The mother had one chance in four of giving birth to an albino, and it was possible, though very rare, to have albino twins. That was Myriam Ikingura’s situation. A friend of her husband for years, Lugembe met Myriam at a political meeting. When her husband died, he grew closer to the young woman and ended up marrying her.
The relationship didn’t last long. Grappling with overwhelming mental health problems, Myriam was sent to Mirembe Hospital in Dodoma, the only psychiatric facility in Tanzania. She committed suicide in 1986, a few months after her daughter, Faith, was kidnapped and murdered by albino traffickers. In 2002 Clara disappeared in the same circumstances.
Enraged, grief-stricken, Lugembe turned to the police. He promised gifts, bonuses, and other favours to anyone who might bring back his older daughter safe and sound. For a week, fuelled by his desire for vengeance, he appeared on every public forum. His efforts soon produced results. Samuel Musindo, a nurse who worked at a dispensary in Dodoma, had been seen with Clara the evening before she disappeared. An investigation revealed that Musindo had used his job to pass albino children to the region’s witch doctors. He’d been caught prowling around the clinic’s nursery just before albino newborns disappeared, but until now, no one had been able to link him to the events or incriminate him in any way.
Musindo came from one of Dar es Salaam’s wealthy families. His father, Thomas, owned the Bahari Beach golf club, whose members counted some prominent figures in Tanzanian society, only adding to the complexity and the horror of what had occurred. Tanzanians were ready to believe that some half-naked illiterate fresh off the savannah could commit such a crime, but by every account, Musindo was a proper young man. The only dark mark on his record was having abused ephedra for his allergies.
The police intercepted him as he was about to cross the border into Kenya. Interrogated, he finally admitted to having thrown Clara’s body into the industrial dump in Dodoma but couldn’t remember exactly where. His mind clouded by ephedra, he recalled digging all night long but didn’t know where he’d buried the victim. Nor could he explain why he’d hidden the body instead of dismembering it the way traffickers usually did.
For a week the police searched for Clara everywhere, fearing the worst. They finally discovered the girl’s swollen corpse at the dump.
While the authorities were interrogating the suspect, a devastated Joseph Lugembe took refuge in his Dodoma residence. Anger gave way to sadness. For days journalists stood guard outside the property, waiting for a statement. It ended up coming from President Komba. To sho
w his sadness and his support for his friend and political heir, he announced the reinstatement of capital punishment for the murder of albinos.
On November 14, 2002, despite the defence attorney Jason Chagula’s best efforts, the defendant was found guilty. At the Ukonga Prison in Dar es Salaam, death row was reopened, with Samuel Musindo as its first customer. He was soon joined by other traffickers. The young nurse was executed in July 2003 as President Komba, Lugembe, and Chagula looked on. Musindo’s parents hid in a hotel, avoiding journalists wanting to profile the parents of the first man to be executed in Tanzania in years.
3
Jonathan Harris puffed out his chest, his chin tilted upward, face glowing with the self-confidence that had helped him on his way to the position he now held. He had made no false steps; his trajectory was faultless. His flair and intelligence were praised. His emotional capital, one journalist claimed, had developed along with his bank account.
Harris practised alternative capitalism and was ready to shake up the traditional methods. Compassion had become a virtue in an ever more deregulated market, and Harris signalled his by investing as much in charitable ventures as the NASDAQ and other playgrounds of today’s lofty entrepreneurial elites. It was no surprise that Africa had pulled on his heartstrings. He had missed the great Asian awakening — it was all over by the time he took over the business — but he wasn’t about to overlook the marvellous business opportunities offered by the new middle class that would soon begin emerging from the African cesspool. Even the despots and their bloody kingdoms would soon collapse. And Harris would be there in a front-row seat, poised to profit from the smoking ruins.