by Mario Bolduc
The house opened onto a patio where dusty plants grew in disorderly exuberance. According to Kilonzo, the murderer approached the house from the lake, entered through the patio, and came upon the two women in the living room. He must have fled the same way. An accomplice could have been waiting for him along the shore in an outboard.
“Were they alone when it happened?” Max asked.
“The office was closed. The accountant has been away for a few days. With her family, it seems. We’re trying to reach her.”
Teresa Mwandenga was living it up in the luxury of Dubai. Normally, Max would have told Kilonzo about the embezzlement, but the information would have raised awkward questions.
When he considered the police on duty around the house, he began to doubt Kilonzo’s expertise. He had the unpleasant feeling that the inspector and his team were putting on a show for Max’s benefit. That was why the policeman had come to the airport to pick him up in his official vehicle: to impress him, plain and simple.
That suspicion was confirmed by the crime site. The living room floor was covered in blood, and now that the blood had dried, it displayed footprints. The scene hadn’t been secured. Any number of people, including policemen, had come to see the bodies of the murdered mother and daughter, which had since been taken to the hospital morgue. People had pawed everything in sight, and the bodies had been moved before the so-called experts arrived. That was another of Kilonzo’s dubious initiatives.
Watching these Keystone Kops come and go through the house, Max felt the past and the privacy of these two women were being violated. The police were like a crowd of rubberneckers who showed up to rummage through this odd woman’s house, a woman about whom many vile things had been said. Defending albinos, all well and good. But how many of these policemen were clients of witch doctors and healers?
“Tell your men to leave the house.”
“Pardon me?”
Kilonzo glared at Max as if he’d insulted his mother.
“The bodies have been moved to the morgue. Your men have examined the premises. You have nothing more to do here.”
“On the contrary. Clues could be —”
“The hell with your clues. Get out of here!”
Kilonzo gave Max a long look. “Very well then.”
He gathered his little group. One after the other they filed out of the house but didn’t leave the property. Standing around their vehicles, they chattered like schoolgirls.
Max had no idea if Kilonzo had been chosen for his qualities as an investigator. Probably not. At least he hoped not. One thing was certain: Max could count on no one but himself to find the persons responsible for this double murder.
In the bedroom, the bed was unmade. Valéria had most likely been attacked as she slept. On the way in, he’d noticed the ripped-off hinges of the patio doors. A strange tack for a burglar to take. Instead of slipping in discreetly, without a sound, he must have made a great deal of noise, probably to create panic in the household. If he thought the place was unoccupied, he wouldn’t have used such a method.
Max glanced out the window and saw Valéria’s Land Cruiser, an indestructible four-wheel-drive vehicle that she hated. Sophie was the one who took the wheel. She was her mother’s de facto chauffeur. The Land Cruiser was parked at the same spot, very visible, the night before. The exact same spot. So the murderer had known Valéria was inside.
Right off, that eliminated theft as the motive. Kilonzo maintained that objects and money had been taken, but how could he have known? The intruder had come to attack Valéria and her daughter — Max was sure of it.
He picked up the sheet, then the pillow, and pressed both to his face. Valéria’s scent was still present, faint but enough to bring tears to his eyes. He had slept with her and made love with her in this bed. One morning, very early, he’d found her deeply absorbed in a file, at her desk, already at work before the sun rose. Another time they had breakfast on the veranda, then retreated inside when a hard, slanting rain chased them off the porch.
To be here among these familiar objects let him believe that Valéria was still alive, and this was just a bad dream from which he’d soon wake. Everything came back through memory, every move of her body, every word she spoke, her smile, her eyes, but those pictures were only anecdotes. He scolded himself for remembering things that way, in a hodgepodge of important events and insignificant details.
After they met in Toronto, and their incredible week in New York, Max saw Valéria in Europe several times. Then she invited him to visit her in Africa. When he arrived in Bukoba in April 2007, she was his guide and opened the doors to a continent he knew nothing about. He surrendered to the atmosphere, the landscape, the warmth of the people. With wide eyes, he gazed in wonder upon this new world — and mostly at Valéria, more beautiful than any landscape.
Max had never been to Africa. In his mind, he had a series of pictures that were more or less clichés and folklore interrupted by atrocity scenes. He expected to come to a continent full of future and present AIDS sufferers with empty eyes huddled alongside undernourished children with beach-ball bellies. A stink of shit hovering over a world of dust and dried mud. A thick fog full of mosquitoes infected by contaminated blood, where sweating, half-naked humans ran through the savannah, machete in hand, in a sort of morbid frenzy.
The reality was quite different and much less spectacular. Poverty was present on a daily basis, and fatalism seemed to weigh on people’s lives, but there was also an extraordinary turbulent energy and raw, unused power, the result of all the great projects that were promised but never happened, often wasted in irrational and gratuitous violence.
Valéria and he decided from the start never to speak of the future and live as intensely as possible in the present, as if the ground beneath their feet might open up at any moment and swallow them.
The past was cut off, too. Max’s history was full of false starts and dead ends. Valéria’s was surrounded by an air of mystery. At every turn they ran into a new lie. They preferred to avoid painful subjects and live their life together as if it were a gift from the heavens that neither deserved.
The awkward manoeuvrings of two lovers were unimportant now. The memories would fade when there was no one to share them with. Max was immersed in sadness like a rushing tide, and had no more strength to fight. Better to surrender to this universe of pain.… He and Valéria had separated only a few months earlier — but had they really ever been a couple? The sight of all these objects, her things, the small items that made up her daily life, upset him, reminding him that her love was lost forever.
He took her hairbrush, pulled away a strand, and held it between two fingers like a schoolboy in love with his teacher or the neighbour’s wife, ridiculous and lost. Until the very end Max had hoped things would get better between them. But Valéria’s death ended that dream.
Now he bitterly regretted not taking the initiative, not acting when the time was right. He had played fast and loose with life and destiny, not understanding that when it came to fate, they were all pawns in the game and would never be the masters.
Max stood in contemplation. Any moment now Valéria would burst into view from the next room, her cellphone to her ear, motioning him to wait a minute more as she leafed through a file at top speed. Then it would be Sophie’s turn, as wound up as her mother, telling her to relax and make tea, a ritual for the women when the pressure of work became intolerable. They would sit facing each other on the little veranda they had turned into a greenhouse on the south side of the building and drink their tea, calmly commenting on the files at hand. Max had seen them doing that a few times and felt excluded from their world, which he respected, though with some regret.
Strangely, even if Valéria adored her daughter, the usual mother-daughter bond was absent. At times their discussions turned harsh. For an outsider like Max, it wasn’t easy to understand that attitude, as if Valéria refused, because Sophie was her daughter, to give the younger woman the smalle
st break or leeway. Sophie had no margin for error. Stranger still, she seemed to accept her mother’s severity.
A few years earlier, when she was a teenager, Sophie found herself involved in some business that could have gone very wrong when she was at boarding school in Dar es Salaam. One evening the phone rang in Bukoba. A policeman on the line informing Valéria that Sophie had been arrested for disturbing the peace, vandalism, and attempted murder.
Valéria immediately flew to the city with the bail money. Sophie spent one night in a cell at police headquarters on Sokoine Drive.
“What happened?” Valéria asked the policeman at reception.
During a fight in front of the Bilicanas, a fashionable bar, Sophie found herself with a bloody knife in her hand and suddenly realized, too late, that she had just crossed over to the wrong side of the law.
“What about the victim?” asked Valéria.
“Superficial wounds. He’s already out of the hospital.”
“I want to see my daughter.”
When the cell door swung open, Sophie threw herself into her mother’s arms.
“Mama, I’m so sorry …”
The attempted murder charge was the most serious and could have earned Sophie prison time, even if she was only sixteen. The same was true for her boyfriend.
“What boyfriend?” Valéria demanded, furious and disappointed because she knew nothing about any boyfriend.
Sophie’s answer was vague. Her explanations were nebulous. Which is what worried Valéria the most. Slowly, the truth came out. The boyfriend was a man in his twenties, a white man, an American sailor she’d met while out on the town with her friends.
“I’m in love, Mama. I want to go to America with him.”
Love had struck Sophie suddenly and would tolerate no compromises.
Valéria sighed and smiled at her daughter. Told her they would talk it over later, but the first priority was to get her out of jail. She promised herself she would give the boarding school authorities a real dressing-down for not keeping on eye on their charges.
“But forget about seeing that sailor again.”
“Is he going to prison, too?”
“I’ll look after his file if you promise to break it off with him.”
Sophie promised, though it killed her to do so. Valéria got in touch with a lawyer in Dar es Salaam who had looked after things for Richard in the past. She gave him carte blanche to get Sophie and her boyfriend out of the mess they’d put themselves in and bribe anyone who needed bribing to spare her daughter prison. After a substantial sum had been paid, the accused were sentenced to one year in prison. The sentence was then suspended, which was very clement treatment under the circumstances. The sailor went back to the States and Sophie returned to class. She was serious this time. In September 2004, she began her first year at McGill.
Why had Valéria and her daughter been attacked? Max had no idea. He continued searching the house. Opening drawers and closets, looking under the beds and the furniture in the futile hope of finding some clue, anything that might guide him. But he had nothing to go on outside of Kilonzo’s useless hypotheses.
Who had it in for the two women?
A dissatisfied client, or the victim of that client, frustrated at losing the case he or she had hoped to win and blaming the other party’s lawyer for the loss. Max would need to carefully go through the list of Valéria and her daughter’s past and present contracts, but he doubted he’d find anything relevant that way. The assailant’s violent entry continued to gnaw at him. The racket. The way the door had been destroyed. A regular invasion. Maybe the murderer hadn’t been alone. That was possible. Even if Kilonzo, in his infinite wisdom, thought the perpetrator had operated by himself.
A computer sat on the table. Max turned it on: letters, tables, budgets, and the usual documents. Kilonzo had gotten interested in Sophie’s cellphone and must have rummaged through its contents but without taking it away for more thorough investigation. The police inquiry was a mess from start to finish. The crime scene contaminated by curious onlookers, meaningless hypotheses, the outside door ripped to shreds …
If the police had been the murderers, they wouldn’t have acted any different. It was clear they wanted the case wrapped up as quickly as possible. Max was getting in the way of their investigation, which is why they’d prepared a show for him.
But the show hadn’t convinced him.
That was when he noticed something in a closet. A paper bag holding a toy truck made out of bits of metal and plastic, the kind seen everywhere in Africa. Little masterpieces of imagination and recycling built out of the garbage the consumer society left behind. This truck was particularly well done, and everything was there: the cabin, the open-box bed, even a tiny steering wheel. The windows were fashioned from pieces of mica cut from water bottles. Side-view mirrors smaller still, screw heads for lights in front, wire bumpers … a magnificent work made with remarkable determination and an enlightened eye.
In Valéria’s handwriting, a note was attached to the toy: “For you, darling Daniel, with all my love.”
Daniel.
Which Daniel was that?
Who was the child? Who was meant to receive this gift?
7
“Cheskin! Over here!” Surrounded by his phalanx of policemen, Inspector Kilonzo waved him over nervously. Max went over. Squatting down, Shembazi was examining something on the ground. “Move over, Shembazi.”
The officer got up awkwardly, unhappy at the way his superior had stolen his thunder.
“Look what we found.” The inspector was radiant. He pointed at tire tracks in the soft earth. “He came in a four-by-four.”
“I thought his accomplice was waiting along the shore in an outboard,” Max said.
“We must investigate all clues. And this one seems more promising than the rest. Isn’t that true, Shembazi?”
The officer gave his pro forma agreement.
Max pointed to Valéria’s Land Cruiser.
“We checked it,” said Kilonzo. “Not the same kind of tire. A newer vehicle. A Mitsubishi maybe. And probably not from the region, maybe even from Uganda. We’re checking with the authorities to see if such a vehicle has been stolen recently.”
Max sighed. “I want to see Valéria.”
The two women’s bodies had been brought to Kagondo Hospital, south of Bukoba. Max wanted to go alone, but Kilonzo insisted on accompanying him.
On the way there, Max had the growing conviction that the double murder was linked to the accountant’s embezzlement, even if nothing seemed to point in that direction. As soon as Kilonzo stopped trailing him, he would start looking into that possibility. Another theory was that through their work for the albinos, because of their involvement and government support, Valéria and Sophie had riled up a lot of people. They were interfering with an underground business that enriched any number of low-lifes and charlatans. Maybe the women had pushed one of them a little too hard.
When he first visited Bukoba in 2007, the day after he arrived, Valéria took Max down to the port where she rented a boat for the day from a fisherman. Two lovers adrift on Lake Victoria, or so Max had anticipated. Out on open water, she pushed the boat to top speed, steering skillfully. It was clearly not the first time she’d done this.
Valéria cast her eyes on Max. His surprised look made her smile. “My husband taught me.”
From time to time, they would cross paths with a fisherman. Valéria said a few words to him in Kihaya, then picked up speed again. She avoided rocks and put the engine through its paces. Sitting on the bow, Max watched her with the eyes of a suitor discovering that the woman he loves can jump out of a plane with a parachute or break down a Kalashnikov. He realized how little he knew about her.
Little by little, through their conversations, through hints, words she let slip, incomplete sentences, Max learned she’d come from a very poor rural family. Valéria escaped the usual fate thanks to an Anglican pastor who had opened a schoo
l in a nearby village. Reverend Wellington had founded a choir with his wife’s help as a way to pull on the heartstrings of charitable souls in Britain. Valéria had joined it as a teenager.
She’d even sung for a record produced by the missionary. Her voice couldn’t be heard among all the other girls, but her impact of the record on potential donors must have been remarkable.
After a while, Valéria reduced her speed. This part of the lake wasn’t as busy, and the shoreline was different. Instead of huts and wooden piers thrown together, Max saw solid houses, some of them quite luxurious, hidden in the dense vegetation.
“Albinos aren’t just hunted by traffickers, but their families, too,” Valéria said. “Sometimes even their parents. If you’re looking for where this repugnant business began, you have to start with the families.” She paused for a moment. “Did you know we set aside part of our budget for the Bukoba cement works?”
“Why cement?”
“To make thick heavy blocks we can give the families of deceased albinos so traffickers won’t raid the graves of their relatives. And that includes greedy cousins and brothers-in-law.”
Max had no reply.
“The trafficking in albinos reveals Africa’s contradictions,” she added, as if giving a class or attempting to convince donors.
A barbaric custom, the legacy of a time when witch doctors and medicine men dominated society. Yet it was still alive and well today.
“At the Amsterdam airport, three years ago, customs officers stopped a trafficker. In a secret compartment in his suitcase, they found twelve albino penises. The man was going to London to supply Tanzanian dealers living there. Do you know how much an albino penis is worth in Britain?”
Max had no idea.
“A lot. Way too much.”
Valéria went on with her exposé about the origins of the fascination for albinos. These “white Africans” were conceived on full moon nights, or so it was said, either that or they were the cursed offspring of diabolical beings. Yet paradoxically they could bring good luck and let people realize their most outlandish dreams.