The Red Die

by Alex MacBeth

  The low, fake asbestos ceiling made it unbearably hot. They had been reluctant to plug in the fan for fear of attracting attention. Felisberto stood up and walked to the door, gesturing to his colleague to follow him. Then the Comandante’s attention was drawn to a photo on the wall. “Look, chefe! It’s him,” said Samora. “It’s the dead man.”

  The photo showed the dead man shaking hands with a Chinese and a Caucasian businessman. All were wearing crisp suits and shiny shoes. The photo looked like it had been taken shortly after sealing a business deal or a partnership. All three men seemed keen to communicate their commitment to each other with warm smiles. The dead man stood to the side while the Chinese and Caucasian businessmen shook hands. Felisberto was about to grab the photo when Samora snapped a picture of it on his smartphone and walked out.

  “Who are you calling now?” Felisberto demanded, annoyed at Samora’s use of technologies he, the boss, didn’t understand.

  “Collecting evidence, Comandante,” replied Samora, already halfway down the stairs. Before Felisberto could leave, another photo caught his attention. It was Alberto Frangopelo, the country’s new minister for oil and gas. And right next to him was the dead man again. This time Felisberto took the photo and walked out.

  Chapter Three

  Felisberto stepped into the car without saying much to Samora, who was busy playing with his phone again. As they drove back to Mossuril, the Comandante cast the occasional disapproving glance at his deputy; the kind of elder’s stare that patronises the behaviour of a generation it doesn’t understand. He revisited the facts of the case so far.

  A white man in a nice suit washes up dead in his district, with nothing but a soggy card and a red die in his pocket. The same man has links to a Chinese company but also to Minister Frangopelo. He hoped that His Excellency Frangopelo wasn’t involved. He, Felisberto, had already lost so much with the Palma Affair and he couldn’t handle another high-profile case. The Comandante decided he would keep the connection to the minister private until it was absolutely necessary to reveal it. And that would hopefully be never or at least sometime after his retirement, which, according to today’s count, was just over twelve years away, or more precisely in 4406 days.

  Samora’s phone rang and Felisberto watched his deputy talk to a video of somebody on his screen. The Comandante leaned in towards the screen before jerking away after seeing his own face. He tried to read the strange word sitting in a blue cloud: Skype. Samora hung up and turned to his boss.

  “I had the men in the photo identified by the Chinese Embassy in Maputo,” said Samora. Felisberto didn’t understand how. “The two men are Li Le Tian and Jao Ze Zhao, both Chinese citizens, with investor visas. They’ve been here nearly four years.” The Comandante tried not to look impressed. “Let’s see what we can do with it,” he said.

  As he approached the Mossuril crossroad at Monapo, Felisberto drove on straight towards the port of Nacala. Half an hour later they pulled up beside the brand new police comando in the centre of town. All Felisberto could do was marvel. The former fishing village was becoming a city. “Looks like we are getting our own Vegas,” gasped Samora. New cement blocks were being erected everywhere. Entire streets had turned themselves into construction malls selling cement, spades and iron girders. Traffic had arrived. Men in suits on mobile phones peered out of cars with tinted windows. Sports cars had even started to make an appearance in the city, a sure sign that there was money to be wasted, mused Felisberto.

  The Comandante stepped into the brand new Nacala comando and couldn’t help but feel a tint of jealousy. The benches in the waiting room – in itself a luxury – had cushions. There was air-conditioning everywhere. The furniture was clean and round. Felisberto approached the reception screen and had to talk through a sheet of glass. On the other side he could see young officers in crisp uniforms, men and women, beating their fingers on the keyboards of fancy new computers screens. Why didn’t his comando have such luxuries?

  After ten or so minutes a plump middle-aged man with big eyes greeted Felisberto. “I’m Comandante Antonio,” he said, “come in, please.” Felisberto followed him through a labyrinth of corridors in the large building until they reached his office. The air-con is brand new, thought Felisberto. There was even an espresso machine by the windowsill.

  “Coffee?” offered Comandante Antonio. “It’s the good stuff, from Italy.”

  Felisberto managed to decline the offer.

  “How can I help you then?”

  Felisberto explained why he was there, although he substituted the corpse for a stolen container belonging to a certain Chinese businessman.

  “How do you know it is this Li fella you mentioned?” asked Comandante Antonio.

  “We found a business card in the pocket.”

  “The pocket?”

  “The glove compartment,” Felisberto corrected himself. “And these.” Felisberto pulled out the receipts with the Nacala port duty stamp and showed them to his counterpart. Comandante Antonio put on his glasses and studied the pile. “It’s in Chinese, can you read it?” he chuckled to himself.

  “We have a lot of Chinese businessmen operating here,” Comandante Antonio continued, fiddling with the Air-Con remote. “The name, or in fact the faces, mean very little to me, that is part of the problem. The Chinese have, as you probably know, adapted to us much faster than we have to them.”

  Felisberto sensed he wasn’t going to get much more. He did want a coffee though. “I’ll check with the director of the port and get back to you,” said Comandante Antonio. Felisberto stepped outside the comando, where Samora was chatting up a young secretary on the steps.

  “I’ll definitely call you,” said Samora, typing the girl’s number into his phone.

  Felisberto shook his head and walked towards the car. At 6pm Felisberto asked Samora to text his mother, Dona Paola, to say he would not be home for dinner. Mossuril’s two most senior police officers arrived back at the comando – the police station – at around 8.15pm. The flickering handful of streetlights that lined one of the town’s two main thoroughfares created a few clusters of public space. As they drove into town, men who had come to sell bamboo at the market carried a few dozen unsold poles home on their heads.

  On a shaded bench under the newly painted sign Policia da Republica de Moçambique, two trainee officers, João and Amisse, were chatting away with Agent Albertina on the veranda of the comando. João had been undergoing a long courtship with the police station’s manager. It annoyed him when Amisse casually flirted with her just to pass the time. Amisse would have flirted with anyone; João loved Albertina.

  Both cadets tied their bootlaces and straightened their grey shirts as Felisberto approached. They outdid each other to stand stiff as the Comandante walked past them and into his office, not acknowledging either the greeting or the sartorial dedication of his cadets. Felisberto turned on an old rusty Chinese fan and lit a damp cigarette that was hanging in his pocket like a half-burnt piece of rope.

  The fan reminded him of the case. Was Comandante Antonio telling the truth? Or was he protecting somebody? More importantly, why had the man in the three-piece tweed washed up in his bay? Was it a love feud? The dead man still had a whiff of aftershave when they found him, but the Comandante knew that men in suits wear expensive perfumes even when not trying to impress a woman. No, this wasn’t a fight gone wrong over some girl.

  There was a reason why the man in the suit had washed up at Quissanga Bay on a Tuesday. Felisberto knew that the tides took the few fishermen who drowned further down towards Chocas Mar. Sometimes the bodies never washed up at all. The Comandante lit a cigarette and shuddered, then closed his eyes tightly to banish a painful memory. The dead man hadn’t washed up though; he’d been dumped there. The corpse showed none of the signs of drowning. The dead man was wet but his tweed suit was dry from the waist up. Felisberto felt it was safe to presume that the corpse had found its way to its final resting place via land.

&n
bsp; Still, the body had no reason to be there. Had the murderer(s) wanted to dispose of the body in a quiet place at the most mundane of times and deflect any inquiries away from Pemba? Or was it Nacala? Had the perpetrators been as thorough as they were imaginative, they would have also searched their victim’s back pocket and removed the incriminating card, thought Felisberto.

  But he didn’t remain entirely convinced of his own theory. If the killer(s) had wanted to get rid of the body quietly and without trace, why not leave the corpse for wild animals to eat deep in the bush? And why leave him in his clothes? Any officer worth a handful of meticais would know that a corpse dressed in a tailor-cut suit wasn’t from these parts.

  The butt end of his cigarette began charring his fingernails. He placed what remained in the ashtray and leaned out for the shiny remote control of the new TV. The Provincial comando had recently sent it down as the station’s bonus for dismantling a local racket of electrical wiring thieves.

  Felisberto flicked over to the late news on TVM, the national broadcaster. Mozambique’s economy was growing at a rate of 7.5 per cent a year, said the news anchor. The Comandante imagined an animal with thousands of mouths developing a new fold in its stomach year-on-year. Representatives from the three parties will meet on Friday to discuss how seats will be allocated on the new electoral commission. A convoy had been attacked with no fatal injuries on the N1. The same old news.

  The Comandante was about to switch channel when an image caught his attention. It was the minister for oil and gas, Alberto Frangopelo, the same man Felisberto had seen in the photo with the dead man. Felisberto pulled the purloined photo from a drawer under his desk to confirm. It was definitely the same man, Alberto Leonardo José Frangopelo.

  “The security convoy of His Excellency Minister Alberto Frangopelo came under attack from armed gunmen today on the N1 outside Maputo,” began the news anchor. “His Excellency the minister escaped with minor injuries, but his driver and bodyguard were killed in the attack. Chief Superintendent Joaquim Namialo of the Maputo Special Squad said no suspects have yet been apprehended.” The news ended with a commercial for the Palma Foundation.

  Felisberto turned off the TV, fearing it might continue to haunt him with disturbing images. First a man washes up dead in his district. Then two Chinese ‘engineers’ run away from him. Now the minister pictured with the dead man had come under attack from armed gunmen. Could it all be linked? Felisberto exhaled towards the portrait of the country’s president hanging above his desk. The President’s eyes bore down on the Comandante and he felt his own eyes become heavy. Suddenly he was on a sinking fishing boat in a storm at sea. The President’s portrait flew beside him laughing.

  It was about 12.15am when Felisberto awoke in his spinning chair in his office. The fan had gone off and he was sitting in the dark. Another power cut? Felisberto felt his way to the electricity metre on the wall. The police station this time, not the State, was to blame; the electric meter had run out of energy credit again. It was the cadet João’s job to top-up, but Felisberto knew he was too busy flirting with Agent Albertina.

  Felisberto grabbed his key, locked the police station, tipped his hat to the night guard, João, and walked home. The streets were empty except for a few wild dogs and a solitary drunk. A biscuit wrapper was being blown down the high street towards a new resting place. Felisberto looked at it and wished he were tucked up in the empty wrapper, on his way to a safe haven far from his current afflictions.

  The Comandante lived in a mud hut in the expanção, the informal settlements where straw, zinc, mud, bamboo and recycled junk met to accommodate 25,000 people. Felisberto walked in the dark past a mosque, a church, three shops, two bars and dozens of homes – all in the dark – until he felt the lick of his dog Rambo at his front door. He took off his boots and fed Rambo a puto, a thumb-sized flour and sugar pastry popular in the region, and patted Rambo’s ragged fur. It was bunched across his body like hairs in a balding man’s scalp. The dog made puppy eyes to the Comandante and was rewarded with a second pastry. Felisberto’s children were asleep. So was his mother, Dona Paola. He checked if she was still gone. She was.

  Felisberto took off his jacket, washed and lay down beside his offspring. He dozed fitfully under the luxury of his mosquito net. He was exhausted from the Pemba trip and the nasty possibilities it had spawned but he nevertheless dreamed he was caught in a gun battle with strangers. A man in a suit lay in his arms. Minister Frangopelo was waving to him from a distance. Felisberto wasn’t sure whom to shoot but kept on firing amidst the spray of bullets. A skyscraper squirted sooted liquid from its windows until a giant with a face like a child began to drink the skyscraper. The building then collapsed to the ground and spun like a die beside Minister Frangopelo, who continued to wave at Felisberto. When the Comandante looked closer, the minister had turned into the dead man in the suit. Out of nowhere the two Chinese ‘engineers’ emerged and shot Frangopelo and then the suited man.

  Felisberto awoke sweating, squeezed between Sofia and Germano. The sun was rising over the salt plains in the distance and a flock of flamingos had settled in a paddy where it had rained overnight. Life had begun in Mossuril; women were collecting water, men were sharpening their tools. Schoolchildren took advantage of the emerging light to finish their homework. Felisberto opened the window and saw Agent Albertina buying coconut oil at the local store to rub into her hair and body.

  Half an hour late, the Comandante sat at his desk, with Samora beside him slowly beating his phone.

  “You’d think police work began when they invented mobile phones,” said Felisberto.

  “It just got better since then, Comandante,” retorted Samora. “Shut up,” said Felisberto relighting an old cigarette.

  “Before you or your mobile were even born, I’d fought in a war,” continued the Comandante. “All we had sometimes was rat meat and camaraderie. Ever eaten rat meat?”

  “No, chefe.” said Samora.

  “Well, it’s food. Nothing that piri piri can’t wash down.”

  Felisberto lifted his t-shirt and pointed to a scar on the left side of his lower abdomen. “See this?” asked Felisberto.

  “I know boss, it’s where you were shot defending the Dona Ana Bridge over the Zambezi in ‘84,” supplied Samora, now having lifted his head and put down his phone.

  “To you lot it’s history but we made it happen,” continued Felisberto. “Without a single mobile phone. Yesterday you said you spoke to the Chinese Embassy with your video game thing. Well, you obviously like calling the city so I’m going to make it a habit for you. I want you to call Immigration in Nampula and get a list of all work and resident visas granted to foreign nationals working in Nampula Province in the last six months, No, in fact make that in the last year.”

  “Should I say what it’s for, chefe?”

  “Tell them you are checking local district residency certificates with national records. But don’t worry about why anyway. Just call this number and speak to Nequeias Naissone. Tell him Felisberto from Special Squad told you to call.”

  Chapter Four

  It took Felisberto about six hours this time to drive back to Pemba. He enjoyed not having to exchange pleasantries with Samora. He drove past fields of manioc and corn similar to those he’d run in as a boy; the same fields in which he’d flicked fluorescent bugs, killed snakes, made plastic cars out of old butter containers and raced tires with his friends.

  The road became blurred and Felisberto pulled up to drink some tea from a flask. A nearby billboard advertised a forthcoming nature reserve. “They will one day forget,” said a huge poster of two guerrillas shooting at elephants. The park would return wildlife to Mozambique’s north, said its manifesto. The large electric fence seemed to the Comandante an unnecessary expense just to protect a few herds of elephants and hippos.

  He drove on and pulled into Pemba at around 3.15pm. He stopped to buy a Coke at a bucket store and drank it in one gulp, as he always did, before head
ing back to the offices of Xin (and possibly Hua).

  When he got there, the door was still wide open but the lights were off. The curtains lay in a heap on the ground. Felisberto walked tentatively up the stairs to the second floor and found the room he’d been in looted. A few stray cables were the only things left behind. The Comandante was about to leave when the photo of the dead man and the two businessmen jumped out at him again. He took a closer look at it and confirmed that the dead man was the odd one out. He was in the photo, but he wasn’t the focus of it. Just an accessory. For once the Comandante wished Samora was here with his fancy phone. But needing answers then, Felisberto stole his second picture frame in twenty-four hours and returned to the car.

  He’d read that Mozambique has 4.5 trillion cubic feet of confirmed natural gas reserves. Felisberto had no idea how much that was and how anyone else could be sure there was that much. The area where the gas had been found now had a new name, Ruvuma Area Offshore Basin 1. By 2020 Mozambique would export gas to the world, Minister Frangopelo often repeated on TV. To Felisberto it could all be true but meant nothing and the Comandante decided it was time for him to get closer to the truth.

  He pulled up at a casino on the beach and parked the battered police Jeep at a distance from the newly painted cars outside the foyer. Felisberto could see the ‘o’ in ‘Policia’ peeling off the side of his car. He would be happy to disown the vehicle momentarily. Ernesto – a journalist from the country’s largest newspaper Noticias and the Comandante’s undercover alias for the night – would never own such a car.