by Mario Bolduc
“A sort of Aladdin’s lamp made of human flesh,” Max said.
“And in it we see the paradox of globalization. The specialists who study the continent believe it will let Africa catch up to the rest of the world and offer it the chance to modernize. But the exact opposite has happened. Globalization has helped spread customs and traditions from another age and culture that were once confined to a single region with no contact with the outside and sent them spinning out into the world.”
Max felt Valéria’s need to speak and free her mind from her disturbing thoughts. She’d taken him out to the middle of this lake to tell him of the struggle she’d been engaged in for years.
“Crimes of honour and arranged marriages — fifty years ago police in Paris or New York never had to deal with that plague. In this case, the families are complicit, just as neighbours and friends are, but witch doctors are at the heart of the trafficking. They’re the ones who make the profits and who continue despite the penalties faced by go-betweens.”
Valéria became thoughtful all of a sudden. She’d cut the motor and the boat was drifting. “I thought the death penalty would be the only punishment that would truly work. But the bastards multiply like rats. When one dies, others rush in. It never ends.”
Max understood that she didn’t want him to share his thoughts.
“In Kenya, Uganda, Burundi … even if they didn’t follow Tanzania’s example, crimes against albinos have increased. The most extreme measures don’t always give the best results.”
Max was surprised to hear her question what she’d been advocating for years, her favourite cause that had brought about so much controversy. She had understood that the death penalty wasn’t proving much of a deterrent.
“Who dies on the gallows? Small-time criminals, cheap traffickers who end up getting caught, who take the fall for the big fish safe in their palaces.”
Max nodded. For the albino trade, as with other rackets, it was the same pattern and the same victims on both sides of the equation.
Valéria pointed to a handsome manor on the shoreline. “A witch doctor lived in that house. People came from afar to get his advice. His name is Awadhi Zuberi.”
“And the police know that?”
“Yes, but they don’t do anything. Zuberi is the brother of the owner of Hotel Hillview. When the politicians and government officials from Dodoma and Dar es Salaam come to the area, that’s where they stay, and not at the Walkgard that’s much more comfortable. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s hiding a few albino fingernails and hair in some secret place in the hotel. To further his career, to make sure every room is rented, or to supply his customers when they ask. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Ironic, but more than that — tragic and hopeless.
“The house is empty these days, but Zuberi is still the owner.”
Zuberi used to be Samuel Musindo’s customer, she explained. Musindo killed Clara Lugembe, the albino daughter of the country’s future president, for Zuberi, though his links to the crime were never proved. Musindo was sentenced to death and executed.
“But Zuberi got little more than a slap on the wrist thanks to the prowess of his lawyer, Jason Chagula.”
“Who was also Musindo’s lawyer?”
“Right. After a few months in prison, he was freed, never to be seen again. Nothing left but an empty house.”
“I suppose he had connections with the police and the courts?” asked Max.
“Probably.”
Zuberi’s popularity began in the 1990s when he started marketing a drug he said cured AIDS. He sold a potion to vulnerable people for a few shillings. When dawn broke, in front of his house, a long line of cars and people who had come to see the healer and buy his miraculous mixture could be seen. Customers had to get it directly from the witch doctor, otherwise the medicine’s effect wouldn’t work.
“It was a terrible spectacle. AIDS victims who could hardly walk, dragged there by friends and family,” Valéria said. “A disgrace.”
Zuberi was arrested and his business broken up. An official from the Ministry of Health declared that his famous potion was nothing more than coloured water.
But Zuberi was soon back in business as a healer, this time undercover, but with the authorities’ blessing — they looked the other way. After Clara Lugembe was murdered, when the connection between Samuel Musindo and the healer were revealed, and then when Zuberi disappeared, the truth became too obvious to hide. Either Zuberi was involved one way or another with the death of the minister’s daughter and had fled, or he had nothing to do with it but understood he’d be the perfect scapegoat. Either way, he decided to melt away into the jungle.
“I swore I’d get that bastard,” Valéria had told Max.
Those words still echoed in Max’s ears. When he and Kilonzo reached the hospital, he turned to the inspector. “Zuberi, the medicine man. You should see what’s up with him. Find out what he was doing the night Valéria was murdered.”
Kilonzo didn’t seem surprised by the idea. He must have known all about Zuberi. “He’s lying low. He has nothing to do with this.”
“Do you know where he’s hiding?”
“He’s not hiding. He’s a recluse. It’s not the same thing. But I’m telling you — Zuberi isn’t responsible for these murders.”
“Did you question Jason Chagula?”
“The lawyer? He’s left the country.”
Kilonzo was strangely eager to declare the medicine man innocent. Every time Max wanted to move the investigation in a new direction, the inspector found a way to justify his inaction.
“It might be a good idea to pay a little visit to the pair,” Max said.
“You think Zuberi would risk killing two women with his own hands?”
“Maybe not. But he might be involved in some way. Indirectly. As the one who ordered the hit.”
Kilonzo gave Max a long look. “I know Valéria Michieka was very dear to you. But let me do my job. For now, nothing indicates the murders were linked to trafficking in albinos.”
“One thing’s for sure. It wasn’t a burglary.”
Max presented his thinking on the subject, which Kilonzo didn’t dismiss the way Max thought he would. But still, the policeman told him, politely enough, to mind his own business and stay out of the way. The investigation would take its own course. He would keep Max informed, naturally, but wouldn’t be ordered around by him.
“Please believe me, Mr. Cheskin, I’m extremely preoccupied by this affair. I want to catch the killer as much as you do. But I’ll work according to my methods and my priorities.”
Max chose to keep the peace.
The hospital was a series of low-ceilinged rooms arranged around a central courtyard, a little like a motel, where the large wards, common rooms, operating theatre, maternity wards, and administration were found. Farther along was a workshop where artificial limbs were made, many of them for albinos who had suffered amputation.
The morgue had its own space apart from the rest.
The two bodies lay side by side on tables, more like counters, really, and next to them were surgical instruments. As if some strange operation was about to begin, an attempt to bring them back to life. The corpses were draped with an oilcloth, part of which was still folded. Once again, haphazard work. It seemed to Max that Kilonzo was putting on a show again, despite what he’d told him in the truck, and its purpose was to demonstrate that the Tanzanian police were as qualified as their counterparts in the West.
The inspector stepped up to the first table and motioned Max to follow. Abruptly, he pulled away the sheet the way a waiter snapped off a tablecloth after a meal. He held it in his hands as Max examined Valéria’s body. She was still wearing the clothes she’d had on that night. A nightgown splattered with blood, especially around the shoulder on the right side. Kilonzo had told the truth: she was killed by a machete blow, probably after being thrown to the floor. Her knees and hands were scratched, and bruises were visible on her arms.<
br />
Then Kilonzo pulled away the cloth that covered Sophie’s body. She was wearing the same clothing, bathed in blood like Valéria’s. In death as in life, the two women were alike.
Trying to keep back the emotion that flooded over him, Max turned to Kilonzo. “When is the forensic expert getting here?”
Kilonzo hesitated, rubbed his chin. “You see —”
“Won’t there be an autopsy?”
“They wouldn’t let him travel. I was just now informed.”
“And in Bukoba?”
“There isn’t enough staff to take care of the living. The dead, you can imagine …”
Max sighed. If the double murder was a priority for Kilonzo, as he claimed it was, nothing in his attitude proved as much.
“In any case, the cause of death is clear enough. See for yourself. Now we’re trying to inform the family, but we haven’t found them.”
“She cut all ties with them.”
“An African woman doing that? Impossible!”
“I knew her, you didn’t. Her only family was Sophie. And the albinos.”
As he stepped out of the hospital, Max took a call on his phone. It was Vincent Kalitumba from the Bank of Baroda, who was sorry he’d waited so long to answer Max’s message. He’d been in a meeting with Chinese investors. Max asked him if Valéria Michieka had picked up the money he’d transferred to her account.
“Just a minute. I’ll check.”
Max heard Kalitumba’s fingers moving across the computer keyboard.
“Yes, it was done.”
“Do you have the exact time of the transaction?”
Once more, Kalitumba’s fingers went to work. “Sunday morning at two twenty-six a.m.”
Max hung up. It made no sense.
The million had been withdrawn shortly after the two women died. The murderer had had access to Valéria’s account. He’d disappeared with Jonathan Harris’s money after committing his terrible crime.
8
What did Roselyn find most intriguing in the Texas Prison Museum? The electric chair, Old Sparky, as it was called, was the highlight of the visit. Tourists who travelled to Huntsville always asked the curator, Glenn Forrester, for permission to be photographed strapped into the spot where prisoners once died. Glenn always refused. He thought of his museum as a sanctuary, not a theme park. At the Walls Unit, men had suffered and died. Most of them deserved it, but their memory should be respected, whatever their qualities, whatever their faults.
Glenn had placed the electric chair in a setting that recalled the execution room in service until 1964. The rest of the collection was anything but banal: reproductions of the cells, the warden’s office, the prison director’s office, the weapons used by the guards or the few inmates who tried to escape. There was artwork created by prisoners out of everyday objects such as toilet paper, cardboard, worn towels, and plastic utensils. As the seven penitentiaries were renovated, Glenn had picked up pieces that spoke of bygone eras.
In 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional, the states that still practised it abandoned their electric chairs, and most of them were simply thrown away. Glenn saved the one from the Walls Unit and set it up in his museum but had to give it back to the penitentiary in 1976 when the court overturned its initial decision. Meanwhile, the authorities searched for a way to execute people painlessly. Experiments using lethal injection had been going on for quite a while. In 1982, in the Walls Unit, this method was employed for the first time on Charles Brooks. The good old electric chair could go back to its room in the museum — this time for good.
In Texas all executions were carried out at the old Huntsville penitentiary, though death row was located in the Polunsky Unit.
Albert Kerensky was still a guard when capital punishment was reinstated, and he didn’t become an executioner until 1984. Roselyn didn’t recall when her husband had been promoted, probably because he’d asked her to avoid the subject in front of their daughter.
One evening, when she was a teenager, Norah asked her father, “What do they say to you, the men who are going to die?”
“Nothing. They talk to their lawyer and have their last meal.”
“Are you the last person they see?”
“No. The chaplain and the prison director are there.”
Standing by the prisoner, the director gave the execution order to Albert and his tie-down team.
Back then Roselyn, like her daughter, pictured a whole team of executioners working like a firing squad. All were armed with rifles shooting blanks, except for one, who didn’t know it. His bullet would kill the condemned man. Later Roselyn understood that the team her husband was directing wasn’t designed to dilute the executioner’s responsibility but to support him. Each man had a particular responsibility. Albert’s job was to inject the famous lethal chemical.
On execution days, he left early for the penitentiary to get there before the witnesses arrived. At first they were the representatives of the state and the condemned man’s family. Albert escorted them to a room from which they watched the execution. Later, under pressure from victims’ families, they, too, were given the right to be represented at the procedure. The two groups came in through separate doors and never saw each other, for they were confined to different rooms.
By arriving early, Albert hoped to avoid contact with a third group: the demonstrators, a handful of opponents of capital punishment who showed up in Huntsville on execution days. They were always the same people with the same signs, which made the day seem like a well-oiled ceremony, a ritual wherein the participants played their roles without asking themselves too many questions.
Roselyn’s husband played his with strict professionalism. No botched execution took place on his watch as head of the department, the way it happened in other states. On the evening of an execution — they always occurred at 6:00 p.m. — he would come home late and would keep to himself. For the first few years, Roselyn waited for him. She fixed his dinner and watched him eat before going to bed.
One evening, on her way back from visiting a friend at the hospital, she spotted Albert coming home, though he didn’t see her. She decided to follow him. He turned left onto a street in the opposite direction from the house. She trailed him, growing more anxious, his footsteps echoing on the pavement ahead. Albert moved forward without looking around, not suspecting his wife was right behind him. He kept his head down, and it seemed to her that he, too, was walking to the gallows.
A few blocks farther, still without glancing back, Albert entered a church. Strange. He never prayed and had no interest in religion.
Roselyn was too shaken to let him know she was there, and she didn’t speak about what she’d seen when he returned.
In the middle of the night, he got up. She followed a few minutes later and found him in the kitchen. “Is something wrong?”
“No.”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing. Go back to bed,” he told her gruffly.
Albert never wavered. Solid as a rock. But this time Roselyn felt he was about to crack. She didn’t know why. The pressures of his job perhaps. That evening was the third straight execution in as many days. But then her husband quickly pulled himself together. He never had another moment of weakness.
Glenn Forrester hadn’t spoken to his old friend for a week. He and Albert didn’t spend as much time together now that they no longer hunted together. Albert was distancing himself from Glenn, too, Roselyn realized. She had assumed he was growing estranged with her, his wife, but he was doing the same with everyone. Roselyn was wrong to think she held a special place in his life.
“It’s good to see you,” Glenn said. “A shame the circumstances aren’t …”
“Maybe nothing’s happened.”
“You’re right. With Albert there’s no sense worrying.”
Although Albert was taciturn, Glenn was a fountain of words. At the museum he took personal charge of every visitor, wa
nting every visit to be special. When he wasn’t answering the phone, he was busy making urgent calls, but that was only a facade. Albert had chosen to live out his old age in contemplation, whereas Glenn needed action. He would die in this room, Roselyn thought, busy doing his accounts, dusting off his hunting trophies, bawling out a supplier over the phone, as he was doing when she arrived.
“It’s not the first time,” Roselyn told him.
“The first time for what?”
“You said it — no sense worrying.”
Glenn sighed. “I never told you, but at the beginning, when Albert was chosen to join the tie-down team, I didn’t think he’d be up to it.”
The two men had been guards at the Walls Unit and had met when their careers were young. Albert alone answered the warden’s call.
“He came to see me at home the evening before he was supposed to start,” Glenn continued. “He told me he’d never be able to do the job. That he’d never be able to go through with an execution.”
Glenn had poured him a double bourbon to stiffen his resolve.
“And yet he managed to do it?”
“Yes.”
The team Albert had been part of, the same one he’d eventually lead, numbered a dozen members. His first execution had been Lewis Autry. Guilty of having shot a grocery store cashier and a witness in the head after a disagreement over the price of a six-pack. Autry had been the beginning of a long list. Initially, Albert was too nervous to sleep, but then slowly things got easier.
His new responsibilities changed him little by little, and a greater transformation occurred once he took over leadership of the execution team. He’d always been reserved and discreet; now he became secretive, even with the other guards and with Glenn. The latter figured that, after Albert retired, he’d once again become the man his old friend had known. But that never happened.
“His job marked him the way it marks all of us,” Glenn now said. “It was just deeper for him.”
According to Glenn, Albert could have asked for a transfer out. No doubt the administration would have moved him to another unit. Yet he refused every chance for a promotion.