by Mario Bolduc
According to Chagula, the trial of Samuel Musindo, which was on the front page of every newspaper, helped Lugembe strengthen his position within his party and among Tanzanian citizens in general and build his reputation as a solid, trustworthy, rigorous man of state who wouldn’t hesitate to apply the law if he became president. The tragic death of his adopted daughter made him into a larger-than-life character.
“Do you think he might have been responsible for the crime?” Max asked. “Or that he could have ordered the murder?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But from the political point of view, the trial was very beneficial to him. He became president — to some degree he owes that to Clara’s death.”
At the airport Okambo was deep in conversation with a man in a wrinkled suit, a doctor the pilot was taking back to Bukoba. He sat in the back of the plane, his nose in the New Times. Max exchanged a few words with him and discovered that he shuttled between the two cities on a regular basis. There was a shortage of doctors in Kigali, what with the influx of people from the countryside streaming into the city searching for a better life. Whatever infrastructure the old regime had built wasn’t up to the task. A new hospital was being planned, though no one knew where the staff would come from. When he found out Okambo was flying back to Bukoba, he asked if he could come along for the ride.
As he stared down at the hills of this magnificent country, Max had the clear feeling that his lightning visit had been useless and that his investigation was going nowhere. The only thing he’d learned was that Valéria and Clara Lugembe likely knew their murderer.
The Cessna began its descent toward the Bukoba airport. Max turned around; the doctor was tapping him on the shoulder.
The man spoke into his ear but loudly enough to be heard over the engine noise. “I knew Valéria Michieka very well.”
He owned several houses just outside Bukoba and rented them to people working on contracts in the area. Over the years, some of his tenants caused him problems, and he had used Valéria’s services. For that, and other issues he didn’t expand on.
“I don’t share the conclusions of the police.”
“You mean about Valéria’s death?” Max asked, surprised.
“They’re trying to cover something up. That’s obvious.” He paused. “I’m the one who wrote the death certificates, you know.”
Max looked him in the eye. The doctor held his gaze. This plane ride might not be an accident, after all. “When did you sign the certificates?”
“A few hours after their deaths.”
Kilonzo hadn’t breathed a word about that.
“I was called immediately after the police found the victims.”
“Kilonzo called you?”
“He hadn’t shown up yet. When he found out I’d examined the bodies, he ordered me not to say anything to anyone.”
“Why would that be?”
“My conclusions were very different from the song and dance he made up for the media.”
When Kilonzo read the doctor’s report, he chose — no doubt with the approval of his superiors — not to make it public. A way of avoiding embarrassing questions most likely. But which ones?
“What was in your report?”
“Besides the wounds made by the machete, there was damage to the muscles of the thorax caused by an extreme and prolonged stretching of the victims’ arms. Probably they’d been tied behind their backs, which would have damaged their neuromuscular function.”
“They were tortured?”
“For several hours, the evidence shows. It’s called kandoya.”
According to the doctor, Valéria died quite some time after her daughter, as if the assailant had first attacked Sophie and forced her mother to watch to break her will and make her talk. The degree of rigor mortis wasn’t the same for the two victims.
Max had to close his eyes. The image was just too vivid, too painful: Valéria and her daughter, tortured. Seeing her own daughter suffer before her eyes, knowing it would end in death, and choosing not to shorten Sophie’s pain even if it was the best choice given the circumstances. Valéria had accepted that both she and her daughter would be martyred, but why?
“Kandoya is the unmistakable signature of the elite corps of the Ugandan army,” the doctor added. After Idi Amin took over in 1971, a number of men who’d opposed him crossed the southern border to safety, most of them around Kyaka. They formed a unit of fighters who were the avant-garde of the Tanzanian army when Nyerere ordered the invasion of Uganda.
They were a rebel faction of former soldiers whose patriotic fervour covered less honourable ambitions. In reality they were a ragtag party of thugs who engaged in pillaging and violence the minute they crossed back into their country. They were so out of control the Tanzanian army had to rein them in hard to keep them from running amok. They practised torture, using the same methods Idi Amin favoured. Among them, the kandoya.
During the war, mobilized by the Tanzanian army, the doctor had treated several such cases inflicted by the rebels against their own countrymen suspected of being allied with Idi Amin’s regime.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the man who killed them was part of that rebel group or knew its methods,” the doctor said.
“And the machete wounds?”
“To finish off the victims, no doubt.”
Max said nothing. The doctor’s revelations moved him deeply. Why such cruelty? A wave of anger rose within him, more intense than the nausea he felt. He would find and punish whoever was responsible for this horrible act. He had never killed a man, had always been able to master the violent impulses that had returned to haunt him throughout his life. But right then he wouldn’t have resisted the urge. He would kill the bastard who’d done this and without the slightest hesitation or remorse.
The plane touched down.
While the propellers were still turning, the doctor added, “Valéria and her daughter were doing admirable work, but they got on the wrong side of a lot of people. And the people who resented them weren’t necessarily the ones she challenged and denounced publicly.”
“What does that mean?”
“After Samuel Musindo’s execution, the rumours started flying. What a strange coincidence — the death of the albino girl occurred just as The Colour of Respect Foundation was urging the government to reinstate capital punishment. Convenient, isn’t it?”
“Valéria engineering the kidnapping and murder of the girl? That’s insane!”
“I agree, but the rumours won’t go away.”
“What does Lugembe think about that?”
The doctor had no idea. “But imagine if someone was able to prove that the minister had been manipulated in the death penalty affair,” he added. “What would be his reaction if Valéria or someone else in the foundation had sacrificed one albino to ensure the safety of all the others?”
And what if he discovered, as Chagula had insinuated, that Valéria and Musindo knew each other, and that with Zuberi’s complicity, she’d used Musindo to kidnap and kill the minister of home affairs’ daughter?
14
Every autumn it was the same ceremony. Albert Kerensky and his friend Glenn Forrester took a week off to go hunting at Lake Amistad along the Rio Grande on the border with Mexico. And during the summer, from time to time, they loaded up for feral hogs in the Bosque River area. This was their unchangeable ritual, and Roselyn had to live with it. Other than Glenn, Albert had no human contact. What he liked was to sit and watch television, a beer in hand, underneath the great set of antlers that had belonged to a moose he shot in 2003 in the Glass Mountains. Fixing up the house, gardening — no thanks. He didn’t care for baseball, either, a sport Roselyn loved.
There was always Frank Cosgrove, a little younger than her husband and a member of the tie-down team for a number of years. He was from Dallas and had been transferred out of Houston at the beginning of his career. They weren’t best friends, but Cosgrove had come over for dinner a few times.
&nb
sp; Shortly after she arrived in Huntsville, Roselyn decided to pay him a visit. She remembered him as a big man, overweight, with a strong, resounding voice. Whenever he walked into a room, Cosgrove was the centre of attention, unlike Albert, whom nobody noticed.
All these years later Cosgrove had lost nothing of his charisma. A few months from retirement, he looked after administrative duties at the Walls Unit.
“I heard about what happened,” Cosgrove answered when Roselyn explained why she’d come. “I hope you’ll find Albert, and especially that nothing bad has happened to him.”
She summed up what the police had done so far, and revealed Peter’s suspicions about the families of men Albert had executed.
Cosgrove shrugged. He didn’t have much use for that trail. He’d never heard of a case of revenge against an executioner and his team, not in any of the American states where the death penalty was in force.
Cosgrove walked ahead of Roselyn down the narrow corridor whose windows, very high up, let light filter in but gave no view of the outside world. Strange, but in all these years she’d never been inside the penitentiary, never seen the place where Albert had plied his trade.
“What was Albert’s attitude at work?”
Cosgrove stared at her as if he didn’t understand her question.
“Did he like what he did?”
“It’s not the kind of job where you go home after the day is done and tell your wife, ‘Honey, I had a good day at the office.’”
She couldn’t help but smile.
“Some executions are harder than others.”
A number of the men slated for execution were drug addicts, hooked on heroin, and their arms were covered with tracks, their veins sclerotic from abuse. Sometimes it was complicated finding the vein needed to carry out the execution. In those cases, the needle was inserted into the leg. An inexperienced worker could miss his mark and inflict intolerable pain. That happened at times but never with Albert. At least as far as Cosgrove knew.
Once again, it was confirmed: her husband was very good at his job. He was conscientious. Maybe a little too much.
They came to a room filled with filing cabinets and violently lit by fluorescent tubes.
“The department still hasn’t finished computerizing its records,” Cosgrove explained.
He walked over to a young woman sitting behind a desk. Her name was Margaret. She’d never met Albert — she’d been hired at the Walls Unit after he retired. Handing over Albert’s file, she found them a spot in an empty office next door.
Each executioner had a personal logbook, a record of the technical details of how each execution was performed, and he passed it on to the warden afterward. Cosgrove paged through his old colleague’s book. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he declared. “Albert was a professional in every sense of the term.”
And a conscientious worker who had once interrupted his vacation to return to Huntsville and carry out an execution. Roselyn remembered the time that happened. They had gone to the Baja Peninsula in Mexico with Norah. It wasn’t their first time. In the early years of their marriage, Albert rented an RV, crossed the border at El Paso, and drove all the way down to Cabo San Lucas, a resort spot where Californians liked to go.
That year he was true to his habit. Then a call came from the director of the Walls Unit. The head of the tie-down team had gotten sick, everyone was on vacation, and there was no one to turn to. Albert agreed to cut short their time away, which touched off a spirited argument with Roselyn. He had never compromised a hunting trip with Glenn Forrester, but he didn’t mind sacrificing a family vacation to execute some bum who’d been wasting away in prison for years. The atmosphere was heavy for weeks afterward, but the lesson had been learned. The following year, when the same situation arose again, Albert turned down the warden.
Cosgrove paged through the record book. “Now that’s strange. Did you know Albert was treated for burns to his hand?”
Roselyn had no idea. “When was that?”
“November 2006.”
A few weeks after Norah’s death. And a few months before he retired.
“In the report, it says the injury was caused by a firearm. That’s what Albert declared to the insurance company.”
“His Winchester?”
“No. A handgun, according to the doctor.”
Roselyn didn’t remember her husband having a revolver, except for the service pistol when he was a guard, an eternity ago. “Was he treated here in Huntsville?”
“No. Galveston.”
He was sent to the University of Texas medical school where the sick and wounded prisoners from the Huntsville penitentiaries were treated.
Roselyn didn’t have to ask. Cosgrove picked up the phone and punched the number in Albert’s file. After being transferred a number of times, he reached Dr. Maxwell, who had looked after Albert. Cosgrove described the wound and gave the doctor the file number. Maxwell remembered the incident involving the executioner.
The mishandling of a firearm was to blame for the injury. That sort of thing happened frequently among neophytes. Albert must have acquired the weapon recently and didn’t know how to use it correctly. He must have bought it for a particular reason: to defend himself. He felt threatened, had been attacked. He used the gun, but in his panic, mishandled the weapon and suffered a burned hand. The wound wasn’t serious, but enough to involve a doctor.
Roselyn wondered how it was that she hadn’t noticed anything. As far as she could remember, Albert had never been hospitalized anywhere, let alone Galveston. He could have gone to the Memorial Hospital in Huntsville. Why hadn’t he said anything about the revolver and his burned hand?
“What was the date?” she asked Cosgrove.
“November seventeenth.”
Where was she that day? And why did he hide the incident from her? Where was the gun now? What had Albert done with it? When he left, did he carry it with him, and why?
Those questions tormented Roselyn. She was thoughtful and perplexed when she exited the Walls Unit after thanking Frank Cosgrove for his help. Over these past few days, her husband’s portrait, once so clear and transparent, had begun to blur. His attitude had been strange and disconcerting, to say the least. The purchase of a revolver and the injury he’d treated in another city troubled her. If he hadn’t disappeared, she would have never discovered those things about him.
In the car, she called Brian Pallister, her friend from the Wildlife Artists’ Association. “I have a big favour to ask you.”
After the sale of the house, a few bulky items had been placed in storage in a Houston warehouse. Roselyn asked Brian to look for a particular box that sat on an old chest of drawers, if her memory served.
“What do I do with it?”
“Bring it home with you and call me right away.”
Back at Peter’s house, Roselyn asked him if he knew about the events that were recorded in Albert’s logbook. Peter was as surprised as she’d been.
“I didn’t notice a thing,” she admitted. “It’s incredible.”
Peter kept all his old datebooks. He consulted the one that corresponded to November 2006.
“On November seventeenth, you weren’t here. You were in Biloxi with Adrian and me.”
A vacation for three in Mississippi. Roselyn had been feeling a sense of loss then, and like Peter, she couldn’t seem to get back into the stream of life. She needed a break, a cutting off from the past, a change of pace. Peter volunteered to accompany Adrian’s school group on its trip to the Mississippi coast. On an impulse, Roselyn offered to go along and help out. The teacher in charge of the excursion was overjoyed; it was difficult to convince parents to get involved in field trips. Before they left, she made Peter promise not to talk about Norah. He agreed. He needed to move on, as well.
So Albert stayed behind in Huntsville and managed to wound himself in the hand with a firearm. He’d gone to Galveston for treatment. But why so far?
She hadn’t even noticed t
he burn. Wait … she’d picked up on something. She remembered now. When she returned from Biloxi, Albert told her he’d hurt himself fixing the car. If it was the same injury, he’d hidden the real reason why.
Once Adrian was tucked away in bed, and Peter had his eyes glued to a basketball game, Roselyn announced she was going out for a walk and that she needed to think. Peter grunted a noncommittal reply. She walked all the way to Stanford Hill Residence. At that late hour a number of residents were asleep, but a few hard-core cases were in one of the common rooms by the entrance, locked into a game of poker. Mrs. Callaghan had gone home, leaving a young woman in charge at reception.
“I’d like to see my husband’s room,” Roselyn said in her most convincing voice.
The young woman knew about Albert’s disappearance. She gave in to Roselyn’s request even if, according to the rules, she should have told her to come back tomorrow, after a discussion with Mrs. Callaghan. At the higher-class establishments like Woodbridge Manor and Brighton Lodge, Roselyn wouldn’t have been able to waltz into her husband’s room.
The young woman moved away, and Roselyn closed the door behind her. Leaning against the doorknob, she took in the room with a treasure-hunter’s eye. Where was the revolver? It was essential, though she couldn’t say why, or justify the need, but she absolutely had to get her hands on the gun. Albert used it three years ago. Maybe he’d gotten rid of it. Maybe not. Roselyn counted on Albert’s innate tendency to keep everything, even useless stuff.
Methodically, she searched all the places a firearm might be concealed: the drawers, closets, under the sink, even in the tank over the toilet, just the way she’d seen characters do on TV. Behind the curtains, under the bed, between the mattress and the box spring. Inside the shade of a floor lamp that opened like a flower. Underneath the coat rack where a loose floorboard might lie. Behind the mirror to the left of the door. And behind the painting she’d given him as a present.