by Mario Bolduc
Each year on his birthday, Valéria went to see her son. They met in Prince Rupert or Prince George. Once they even got together in Vancouver.
Musindo was careful. He always drove with his shortwave radio tuned to the police channel. That was how he’d heard the call for help from the First Nations busboy and managed to save his father’s life.
In short, he, Sophie, and Valéria had carefully planned and carried out his disappearance. All would have gone smoothly if it wasn’t for Albert Kerensky going completely mad years later and deciding to hunt down Musindo to finish what he’d started. It would be his last execution. In his retirement home, he sat for months, bored, obsessively reviewing the details of his long career with the tie-down team. His thoughts turned to Samuel Musindo time and again. He couldn’t forget the execution that never happened. To quell his demons, the former executioner went hunting.
Just like President Lugembe.
“Where are we?” Musindo asked when he finished his story.
“Near Terrace,” Max told him, then explained his plan.
First, they’d abandon and destroy the car, then find another. Leave the area for good. After that he wasn’t sure. Improvise again maybe. At this point it had become his speciality.
Musindo didn’t agree. Kerensky’s murder had probably been discovered, or the bodies of the three Tanzanians. They had to get off the road as quickly as possible. Disappear for a bit until things died down. “I know the area well. Trust me.”
Max nodded.
They continued on the highway for a while, then Musindo told Max to turn right on a secondary road through the forest. After twenty kilometres or so, they reached a crossing. Musindo told him to go left, the track that looked in poorer shape. Two hours later, down a potholed path, they came to a crystalline lake.
Musindo indicated a cabin hidden by cedars.
“Where are we?” Max asked.
“Home.”
Musindo got out of the car without waiting for the others. He ran to the entrance. A young woman burst out of the door and threw herself into his arms. They were quickly joined by a young boy. When they separated, Max was startled. The woman was albino. Musindo turned to Max and Roselyn. “This is Clara. And Daniel, our son.”
At first, suspecting her father of having killed her twin sister, Clara wanted to denounce him publicly and try to drag him before the courts. Soon enough, she realized that would be a mistake. First, she had no concrete proof, though she was convinced Lugembe was guilty. But in Tanzania, you couldn’t accuse the president of a terrible crime without compromising the entire government. Especially if the accusation came from Lugembe’s daughter herself. If Clara went public with what she knew, the entire political class would get behind Lugembe, not only to protect him but to protect themselves. How many supposedly clean politicians had been involved with albino trafficking? How many of them still turned to witch doctors and bush healers in time of need?
Lugembe would simply retort that his daughter was as a mad as her mother, and Clara’s accusation would be reduced to background noise.
The affair would quickly be put under wraps, leaving Clara defenceless and vulnerable, at the mercy of her adoptive father. And she knew he wouldn’t think twice about eliminating her. An accident. Suicide, like her mother. A mysterious disappearance. The question wasn’t if but how.
Clara had managed to escape a first attempted kidnapping outside the university gates, forcing the institution to hire more security guards. But the young woman knew she wouldn’t be lucky twice. Her adoptive father had ordered a hit on her. According to Valéria, they needed to outsmart the man. He wanted his daughter’s death? Fine, Valéria would give it to him. A masquerade that would make him believe she was dead and gone. Samuel would replace her body with that of a patient who had died a few days earlier.
“But things didn’t go as planned,” Musindo explained.
He was arrested for murder.
After the fake execution, he joined Clara at Lake McFearn.
“Why here?” Max asked. “Why choose this place?”
Musindo glanced at the rain splashing on the rocks. “It’s one of the least sunny regions in North America. It’s always wet and cloudy in Prince Rupert. What better place for an albino who can’t stand the sunlight …”
35
In Huntsville the streets were congested with cars parked every which way, including in the schoolyard and behind the church, where an improvised paid lot had been set up. Max left his Grand Cherokee there after depositing a few dollars in the hand of a polite young man who suggested he use the side door to enter the church, what with all the congregants on the front steps. Max slipped among the cars, hurried, regretting his tardiness. He wanted to arrive after the beginning so he could blend in with the crowd, but this was too late indeed.
So far his presence in the United States hadn’t been noticed by the police. In Tanzania he was still being hunted for Zuberi’s murder, but Kilonzo would eventually be implicated in that killing, if ever someone decided to investigate it further. Max doubted that would happen. The authorities would find exactly what they needed in the official version: Valéria and her daughter had been killed by Zuberi, who’d been murdered in turn by Cheskin out of revenge. Cheskin, who’d now disappeared, had done a favour for the Tanzanians. He wouldn’t be missed much.
For Bruno Shembazi, Ferguson, and their strong-arm accomplice, it would be a bit more complicated. But it was unlikely that Thomas Musindo’s murder would be tied to Valéria’s. The bodies of the three men on that pier in northern Canada would surely raise a few eyebrows. But no one would find any answers. In short, Max wasn’t overly worried about either Canadian or American authorities.
In Tanzania, however, especially in the president’s inner circle, Shembazi’s failure to complete his mission might cause renewed interest in a search for Samuel Musindo. Lugembe was probably having trouble sleeping. He had considered Musindo easy prey, and now three men were dead. Shembazi and Ferguson had inspired fear in most people, yet they’d failed miserably.
But Max figured Lugembe wouldn’t cause too much trouble unless Samuel threatened or denounced him, which he had no intention of doing. Samuel wanted to protect Clara and would keep quiet.
Max entered the crowded church without attracting attention and stood behind the pews. A minister was speaking about Albert Kerensky with great emotion, explaining how they’d met years earlier. In a warm, powerful voice, he described a passionate, meticulous man who’d taken his difficult job seriously. Being responsible for another man’s death was an unbearable burden, the minister declaimed. The Bible said, “Thou shalt not kill,” but the state decided otherwise. And men like Albert Kerensky were needed to do this work day after day, year after year. It was easy to find reasons why Kerensky had overstepped, at the end of his life, the powers conferred on him. It was important to understand and forgive, to put oneself in the executioner’s shoes before judging him.
All around, the churchgoers nodded. What the minister said was directly relevant to their own lives. Most people here, those attending Kerensky’s ceremony, worked in similar fields: wardens, members of tie-down teams, prison doctors, and chaplains. The news of his death had sent a shock wave through the American penitentiary system. Unsurprisingly, executioners stood in solidarity with their former colleague. Many of them had come from far away to pay their respects. From Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, and more places still. Next to Max were dozens of killers, none of whom had to fear the long arm of the law. They worked for it.
As the minister continued his eulogy for Kerensky, Max observed the executioners. From his place in the back, he could see only the napes of their necks, their heads slightly bowed, contemplative, solemn. Max had expected the square-jawed, broad-shouldered appearance of a prison guard with a bulging stomach tucked into a too-tight shirt. There were some like that, but not the majority. Executioners came in all sorts of models. Some looked like brutes, others l
ike professors or civil servants. One of them would have been at home in a dentist’s office. That one there, on the left, looked as if he played bridge every Saturday night. A small man, a bit farther off, was almost delicate, fervently holding on to his wife’s arm.
Normal. All of them seeming like anyone else. And that was what made the atmosphere of the church so damn oppressing, at least to Max. Thousands of people, most of them criminals, the worst of the worst, had been sent to eternal sleep by the actions of these men who now gathered to pay homage to one of their own.
Max glanced at the front of the church. Kerensky’s casket, draped with the American and Texan flags. The Stars and Stripes next to the Lone Star. Roselyn sat in the front row alone. From this distance, Max couldn’t guess what she was thinking. Two days after they reached Samuel Musindo’s place, Roselyn’s son-in-law had called to tell her that the RCMP had found her husband’s body in a cabin in British Columbia. Peter had no idea Roselyn was nearby. He thought she was still in Chicago. Following Max’s advice, she had told him nothing about their meeting, or what they’d discovered on their way to Prince Rupert.
“What happened?” Roselyn had asked Peter.
“The police are investigating. They found three more bodies on a wharf a few miles away. The crimes could be connected.”
Roselyn asked him whether Albert’s body would be repatriated. According to Peter, that would be the case in the next few days, once the RCMP had concluded their inquest.
Before they left, Max had stopped at the Prince Rupert post office to pick up a general-delivery package Teresa Mwandenga had sent him. In it was the small toy truck Valéria had wanted to give Daniel.
Max learned from Mwandenga that Harold Scofield had landed in Bukoba to continue the foundation’s work.
On their last night in Prince Rupert, Max took Samuel aside. “Your mother was an incredible woman. Your sister, too.”
“I know. I’m the only one left now. I lost my two families. And I don’t even carry their names anymore, either one.” He stared into the distance, thoughtful. “What they did for me, especially Valéria … I’ll never forget it.”
“And now? What are you going to do?”
“Raise my son. Keep on living.”
Back in Huntsville, Roselyn had emptied her husband’s room at Stanford Hill with Peter’s help. Albert owned little. A few hours and everything was stuffed into boxes and placed in Peter’s pickup. That night, after dinner with Adrian, Peter took her aside and revealed that the Beretta that had killed Albert was registered in her name. He told the police that Albert had taken it out of a lockbox that his wife had in a storage facility in Houston.
“Your husband’s killer is still out there,” Peter added.
“Someone who was after Adrian. Because of his work.”
Peter nodded. It was his theory, after all. “Do you hope they find who did it?”
“Whoever killed him?” She hesitated, then added, “I think Albert went down a strange and torturous road. I don’t want to go down that same path.”
Peter didn’t answer. He was lost in thought, anxious. Roselyn felt he wanted to confess something but didn’t know how. “One day your husband came to my office. It wasn’t long after Norah had passed away. He seemed troubled. I wasn’t in great shape, either, you can imagine.”
Kerensky had launched into a speech about how much pain he was in, how powerless he felt. Peter endured the same thing. And then Albert told him how Norah’s illness and death weren’t a matter of bad luck but a consequence of what he’d done or hadn’t done. Peter didn’t understand and his father-in-law wouldn’t elaborate.
“I felt as if he was debating with himself.” For Albert, Norah’s death was punishment for having contravened the most basic principles of his work. Death was a distinct entity, a being in itself, with its codes, laws, requirements. Those who worked with death, and collaborated with it, handed it to others — they couldn’t let it down. Mistreating death was something you simply didn’t do. Yet Albert had done just that. He’d cheated death, and in turn, furious at the betrayal, it had gone after his daughter, whom he loved more than anything. Norah’s illness, her demise, that was his fault. His personal punishment.
“He felt responsible for what had happened,” Peter said.
“You really think so?” Roselyn asked, surprised.
“I don’t know. Your husband believed in God, even if he sometimes stood at a distance from religion. His faith was a little twisted, let’s say. But he followed his own code and was guided by his own rules. Norah’s death shook his world, the tidy little universe he thought he dominated.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Peter?”
He cleared his throat. “Before he left my office, your husband told me, calmly, as if he was saying good morning or good night, that Norah’s death had made him realize his life wasn’t his own but was tied to every other life, including those lives he’d put an end to. All those men and women.”
Roselyn looked away from Peter. Albert had used that same strange vocabulary with Glenn Forrester. Her husband had been sick in the head, she told herself. A stranger even to her. He’d admitted those bizarre feelings to her son-in-law, and to a friend, but not to his wife. That just demonstrated again the extent to which their marriage had been a failure, an illusion. Roselyn regretted not having been witness to his descent into madness. She could have done something, intervened before it was too late. But, she thought, would I really have reacted better than Glenn or Peter? Perhaps not.
“Peter,” Roselyn finally said, “let’s never talk about any of this again.”
At the end of the ceremony, six men walked to the casket according to a ritual as old as death. Prison guards, thought Max. Kerensky’s colleagues. The oldest man among them might be Glenn Forrester, whom Roselyn had mentioned. A tall fellow with a full head of grey hair. The six of them raised the casket and carried it out of the church, soon followed by Roselyn, Peter, Adrian, and the rest of the attendees, falling in behind the procession in silent disorder, heavy with emotion.
Max caught up with the group behind the cemetery.
Kerensky would be buried next to his daughter.
While the prayers were being recited, Max’s thoughts turned to Valéria, who had worked so hard to ease her conscience by defending the rights of albinos. He regretted that she’d kept him so distant from her secrets but couldn’t begrudge her that. His own life was hardly a shining example of transparency. He had no lessons to give anyone.
Once all was said and done, Valéria herself had played a game with death. She had tried to speed past it, overtake it on the right, but death had caught up with her, just as it had Kerensky. By trying to save her son, she’d set off a chain reaction that had come back around and hit her square on when she was least expecting it.
Max was surprised when he realized he wasn’t angry at Kerensky, whose madness had been the match that had set this hidden pyre aflame. He couldn’t help seeing Kerensky as a victim of fate, of his ego and his pain. His life had dwelt in death. It had become his sole reference, his home and hearth, his miracle solution.
Once the casket was lowered, Max said his goodbyes to Roselyn Kerensky, who introduced him to Peter and Adrian.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again. You were there for the ceremony?”
“Yes.”
“There were as many people as for Norah’s funeral.” Then she added, “I’m happy you came.”
As he meandered through the streets of Huntsville, Max caught a glimpse of the Walls Unit. In this penitentiary, and others like it, thousands upon thousands of prisoners paid their debt to society. And yet, in the very streets he was walking, men and women lived their lives as if nothing at all was happening, stopping at red lights, waiting for the bus, reading a newspaper. Teenagers staring down at their phones. A child, his face covered in ice cream. A policeman writing a ticket. A normal life for normal people who’d made death on command an industry like any other, bereft
of anger or emotion. Clean and painless, handed down coldly, without remorse or second thoughts.
Valéria came to mind, that time in Bukoba, during his first trip there.
“Come. You’ll love it,” she’d told him after they kissed. He had just stepped off the small plane that had taken him from Mwanza, the last of the puddle jumpers he’d taken to cross Africa.
“Let’s go home,” Max said. “I want you all to myself.”
Falling into bed with her, somewhere, anywhere, was something he’d been dreaming of since he left the United States a century earlier.
Valéria burst out laughing and ran along in front of him down a narrow path. Max followed her like a zombie, his clothes smelling of stale airplane air, wondering where she was leading him and why it was so urgent when there were so many other things to do — and he could suggest one in particular.
Before seeing the fishermen, he could hear their song, their voices riding the wind blowing through the trees. And then they appeared, all of a sudden, in tight formation, standing in their boats, a breathy, chanted song rising from their throats all together as they paddled toward the pier in unison. It seemed like a well-orchestrated choreography. Twenty small boats or more, all coming back heaped with fish. They slid swiftly over the flat water. The sun was setting behind them, part of this idyllic picture of an Africa that existed only in the minds of tourists or photographers who specialized in the exotic.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“What are they singing? Do you understand the words?”
Valéria smiled again. “No idea. But it’s beautiful.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank the following people for their help in writing this novel.
Don Sawatzky, director of operations for Under the Same Sun, answered my questions and gave me access to documentation concerning the fate of people with albinism, in Tanzania in particular. More information on the work done by the organization can be found at www.underthesamesun.com.