by Tony Park
‘This is too deep a discussion to be having after too much red wine,’ Henri said. ‘A nightcap at the hotel, perhaps?’
‘I think the hotel bar is probably closed, and I didn’t buy any duty-free booze – more’s the pity given the price of wine in this country.’
Henri called for the bill and insisted on paying for all of it.
‘What about the lawyer? She should be putting it on expenses,’ Liesl said as Henri counted out a stack of Rwandan francs.
‘A gentleman always pays.’
‘Ja, well you’ve just seen how much I drink, so I hope you’ve got plenty more where those francs came from. But seriously, it’s on me next time. So, you and Carmel, what’s going on there? You two an item?’
‘A gentleman never tells.’
Liesl laughed out loud. She felt even more inebriated when she stood up and they began walking towards the gate, no doubt to the relief of the waiting staff.
‘But actually,’ he added quickly, ‘we are just friends.’
Interesting, Liesl thought.
*
Carmel was mad at Henri. It was silly, she knew, for her to allow the South African woman to get to her after all these years, but Carmel had bridled when Liesl had breezed in unannounced and forced Henri to buy another bottle of wine. He would have been fine with just one, she was sure.
I could use a drink right now, Carmel thought. In fact, she was craving it. The smell, above the food, of the red sloshing in their glasses; their carefree easy manner with each other; the red glow in Liesl’s cheeks as the alcohol quickly freed her. Carmel felt imprisoned by her sobriety right now, not uplifted by it. She felt miserable and denied rather than righteous and healthy, as she knew she should. She licked her lips.
Carmel went to the fridge and grabbed one of the three cans of Coke Light she’d ordered from room service – she hadn’t wanted the waiter coming backwards and forwards all evening. She had a fridge in her room but, thankfully, it wasn’t stocked. Sometimes, when travelling on business, she was fine to stay in a room for a night, or even a couple of nights, in the company of a full minibar, but at other times, like now, she would have to call housekeeping and have them remove all the alcohol. She didn’t want to fall off the wagon – not after so many years.
But she envied them. She envied the way the drug could allow two strangers to end up conversing as though they’d known each other for years. She envied Liesl, the bitch, her ability to flirt and distract Henri’s attention from Carmel, and the seriousness of the situation at hand.
And what, Carmel wondered, was she to do with Liesl now that she had stormed into Rwanda like a typical nosey journalist? It was not only inappropriate and irresponsible, it was downright dangerous.
Carmel leaned back in the chair, stretched, yawned and checked her watch. It was after two in the morning. She knew she should get some sleep as she would need her wits about her tomorrow morning. Although her laptop was open and her iPhone had a note-taking app, she’d always been a list maker. Writing out what she needed to do, on paper, was the best way to focus her thoughts, and she always gained a small frisson of pleasure from striking through a task once it was completed.
1. Meet Jean Paul at prosecutor’s office, Avenue de l’Armée, 10.00 am
2. Kigali Central Prison
3. Gorilla permits
4. Genocide Memorial – time permitting
Carmel tapped the pen against her teeth while she thought of what else she needed to do or, more importantly, what she could do in Kigali. She sighed. She really had no idea where this investigation was going. If the people who were trying to kill her, Liesl and Richard – presumably the same people who had killed Mike Ioannou – were Hutus, they may not even be in Rwanda at all. They could be in exile across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. If they were Tutsis – say, some extremist faction of the government – then her enquiries at the prosecutor’s office and central prison would soon filter back to them. Alternatively, it could all have been one long string of unrelated coincidences.
But she could feel it in her insides. It was what was keeping her up, functioning on adrenaline; it was what was jangling her nerves and tingling her fingertips. She was on the trail of something big here. It was bigger than her and bigger than the ICTR. She was the first to admit she was going outside the accepted channels and that she needed help and top cover, which made it even more frustrating that her superiors were not responding to her messages. She would call Arusha in the morning.
Carmel heard voices in the corridor outside her room. The door of the room next door to her, Henri’s, opened and closed. She checked her watch again and silently tut-tutted his late return. She needed to go to the toilet anyway so she stood and stretched. There was laughter from the hallway; a mix of deep bass and a high-pitched girlish giggle, almost a shriek. Then the man spoke and Carmel moved to the peephole in the door.
As she looked out she saw Henri, his bulk magnified by the distortion of the peephole glass. He was lingering in the hallway, and not in his room as she’d thought. Perhaps he had stopped in there for something. His back was to her, but his left arm was bent across his body as though he was holding something she couldn’t see. Across the corridor a door was open. The light inside the opposite room came on and Liesl was standing there.
Liesl smiled, and Carmel swore it looked like she was coming on to him. She crooked her finger and although her voice was muffled through the door Carmel could read her lips. ‘Come in,’ Liesl said.
Henri entered Liesl’s room and the door closed behind him.
Carmel thumped the bathroom door and it swung back on its hinges hard enough to slam against the tiles.
20
Collette walked quickly up Elizabeth Street through Surry Hills, striding back to the sanctuary of her work and the life she had made for herself. The demons of her past were following her, just behind, reaching out their cold, dead hands.
She was scared.
Richard had asked her if she wanted him to send her a copy of the photograph so she could have a second look at it, but she didn’t need to. She knew all three people, at least by sight if not by name. Even before the genocide, their evil had touched her. The men had come to several meetings in her father’s country house at Gisokoro, in southwestern Rwanda, not far from the shores of Lake Kivu and the border with Zaire, which was now called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They’d thought her just a silly girl, but she was smart – the cleverest in her class – and she was curious. She’d lingered in the garden, by the open window under the bougainvillea, when the men drank their beer and smoked their cigarettes and talked in hushed tones, even that far from the capital.
She’d been there the day the photograph had been taken, in the forest near their home, where her father and his brothers and their friends sometimes hunted for bushmeat and live animals to trade with the white man.
A taxi driver stabbed his horn. Collette stopped short and took a step backwards onto the pavement again. She’d almost been run down crossing Devonshire Street. The shopping housewives and office workers spinning out their coffee and cigarette breaks milled around her, but Collette was in another world and another time. She wanted to escape it, but it was engulfing her.
She remembered the day in early 1994 – it must have been March sometime, just before the madness began; the camera’s flash going off, illuminating the gloom under the jungle canopy. It had been hot and wet in there on the edge of Nyungwe National Park, as oppressive as always. She feared the hills and the jungle and the animals that lived there – elephants, buffalo, and the wily chimpanzees that raided the banana crops and were hunted and killed for their meat and their body parts. Sometimes they were captured, especially the babies, and sold to the white man who came often to Collette’s father’s house.
The trade in wildlife had slowed as the talk of a Tutsi invasion and the litany of publicly broadcasted hate increased. Everyone spoke of the imminent invasion b
y General Kagame and his Tutsi army, the RPA. The radio broadcast a continuous cacophony of hatred and this filtered into people’s day-to-day conversations and attitudes. Collette had never needed to think much about Hutus and Tutsis. Her mother was a Tutsi, but Collette was classified as a Hutu like her father, and this made her happy – especially at school when the other children began picking on the few remaining Tutsis from the village, calling them cockroaches and snakes. When she’d told her mother what had happened at school her mother had told her not to be a part of such terrible behaviour. That, Collette thought, was easy for her mother to say. Better to be part of the majority than suffer the insults and beatings the Tutsi girls endured. It was hard enough being the brightest girl in school: Collette didn’t want to stand out from the crowd any more by sticking up for a few stems of ‘long grass’.
Collette screwed her eyes shut, to try to close out the terrible images from that time. The rapid pinging of the ‘walk’ signal brought her temporarily back to the here and now of Sydney. She had ten minutes to get to her meeting; plenty of time.
She remembered seeing the anti-aircraft missile launcher. She was smart enough as a child to know it was different to the weapons her father’s soldiers carried on the streets and around the barracks. But it wasn’t until the president’s aircraft had been downed, and she’d overheard her mother and father arguing, that Collette had put together the pieces of what she had seen.
So much time had passed since then, and she’d tried hard to put all those memories and the nightmare that followed out of her head. Now was not the time, she chided herself as she checked her watch. She always made sure she was five minutes early for a client meeting. A woman was walking towards her leading a little girl by the hand. Collette thought the child was not much younger than she had been when she had lost her mother. This girl, maybe ten, clearly didn’t want her mother to be dragging her. She wriggled in her parent’s grasp, a look of stubborn annoyance on her little face. If only the girl knew, Collette thought, how fragile such bonds were.
They had been in Kigali when Habyarimana’s Dassault Falcon executive jet had been downed. Collette remembered, vaguely – for there was so much in the days after to cloud such a seemingly small recollection – a noise like a clap of thunder, and looking outside to see fire lighting the night sky.
‘It has happened,’ her mother said, looking accusingly at her father.
He studied the carpet. ‘It has.’
‘How?’
‘It was always going to happen,’ her father said. He was dressed in his uniform, his pistol in the canvas holster at his side. ‘We need to leave.’
‘My sister . . . her children,’ Collette’s mother said.
Collette thought of her Aunt Cecile and her cousins, Jean Paul, Gregoire and little Angelique, and was worried. The baby was like a little doll, and Collette loved playing with her. Uncle Alphonse was Tutsi, as was Aunt Cecile, and he had been killed a year earlier, just before Angelique was born, in one of the regular outbreaks of anti-Tutsi violence.
‘No, Yvonne,’ her father said to her mother. ‘We leave tomorrow. I will be back in the morning. Do not leave the house, whatever you do.’
Collette’s father left their home and got into his army Land Rover. The shooting started not long after, along with the sound of shouted male voices and women screaming. The killing began, and ever since Collette had wondered what part her father had played in it.
Her mother tried calling Aunt Cecile, but the telephone was not working. ‘Mama, what’s happening? Are the Tutsis invading?’ Collette asked.
‘No!’ Her mother ran a hand through her bouffant hairdo and then dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry, chérie. No, not yet. I think this is worse than civil war or an invasion. I think this is very bad, what is happening. Chérie, Mama has to go out for a little while, but I want you to stay here and wait for Papa. D’accord?’
‘No, Mama, I don’t want to be left alone.’
‘Shush, shush, chérie,’ her mother said as she fetched her coat and belted it on. ‘I have to go to Aunt Cecile’s place. I’m going to get her and the kids. I won’t be more than an hour.’ Her mother took Collette’s face in her hands and kissed her. ‘I love you, chérie.’
‘I love you too, Mama, but please –’
‘Be brave, my good girl. I will be back soon, I promise.’
That was the last she had seen of her mother, and she never again saw her aunt and cousins alive. All were butchered.
Collette cursed herself and blinked away the tears. She had a meeting to get to. She took out a tissue and blew her nose. She switched her iPhone to silent so it wouldn’t bother her during her discussions with her client.
*
‘Are you serious, Uncle?’ Tran said into his phone as he walked along Elizabeth Street, keeping the woman in sight.
‘I’m not the joking kind,’ Minh said tersely.
‘Yeah, but all the same – in broad daylight, in the middle of downtown Sydney?’
‘The man said soon as possible. Tran, listen to me, boy. There is more money on offer for this deal than we can make in six months.’
Tran thought about it. As much as he wanted to protest the insanity of kidnapping a woman off the street in the busiest city in Australia, he was also excited by the prospect. He’d snapped a picture of the woman with his phone and sent it as an SMS to his uncle and had expected to be told to keep an eye on her for the rest of the day; to find out where she worked and where she lived and so forth. But then he’d got lucky. He’d got close to her and been within eavesdropping distance when she’d received a call and answered it.
‘Hello, this is Collette,’ she’d said into the phone. Tran had quickly followed the picture message with a text to his uncle which said, First name Collette.
Within fifteen minutes the word had come back, from wherever his uncle’s client was, that they had been offered a contract to kidnap the woman. ‘OK, Uncle. Your son is with the Anglo man. I’ll need him to do the job – he’s got my car.’
‘Just do it. The man said as soon as possible, Tran. These are not people we fuck with, OK?’
‘OK, Uncle. What’s my cut?’
His uncle’s laugh was like glass being ground underfoot. ‘We’ll talk about that later on, boy. For now, you do job and don’t fuck up.’
Tran turned instinctively when he heard the hoot of a car behind him. It was Nguyen in the WR-X. Nguyen pulled into the bus lane and Tran jumped in. ‘Why are you so stupid, man?’
‘What do you mean? I came as soon as I got your text. What’s up, Cuz?’
‘I’m following the bitch and you go honking your horn. You’re lucky she didn’t make us.’
‘Make us, Cuz? You been watching too much Hawaii 5–0.’
‘Whatever. Your dad wants us to grab her.’
‘All right!’ Nguyen thumped the steering wheel.
‘Settle, dude. She’s up ahead. Lucky the traffic’s slow, so just stay with it.’
‘OK, but how we gonna do this? We can’t just pull over and grab her, Cuz. There’s like a million fucking witnesses and probably security cameras everywhere.’
Tran had already thought about all that. His cousin was right. It was all very well for Uncle Minh to dangle the prospect of promotion and money, but he and Nguyen were the foot soldiers who were expected to risk their own arses putting the general’s crazy plan into action. Tran reached across, under his cousin’s legs.
‘You trying to blow me, Cuz?’
‘Just keep driving, smart mouth.’ Tran felt for the angular weight of the pistol and pulled it out.
‘Awesome. I didn’t know you had that under there. Cool.’
Tran held the pistol low and pulled back the slide and let it go, chambering a round.
‘Look, she’s turning down that alley, man,’ Nguyen said, pointing at the woman. ‘Perfect.’
Tran slipped the 9mm pistol into the waistband of his jeans in the small of his back and
pulled his T-shirt down over it. ‘Follow her in. It looks quiet.’
Nguyen checked his rear-view mirror and indicated to the left. The laneway veered off so that a second after they’d made the turn the woman went around to the right, past a rubbish skip, and they lost sight of her. That was good, he thought, as they wouldn’t be seen from the main road. ‘Stop just around the corner.’
The woman had increased her stride and checked her watch, as though she was late for an appointment or something. Tran noted from the clock on the dashboard that it was 10.54 am. If she had an eleven o’clock then she was close to her destination. He could follow her to wherever she was going, but if she’d taken the laneway as a short cut she might be less inclined to use it after her meeting. No, it was time to act now. Tran’s black bomber jacket was on the back seat of the car; he reached behind and grabbed it. Nguyen stopped the car and Tran got out. He closed the door softly so as not to alert the target.
He scanned the doorways and windows above him as he moved. He could see no cameras and there were no other people about. There was a broken beer bottle on the ground and a patch of dried vomit. Further along he smelled piss. This was where people came in the city when they needed to disappear for a while. Perfect. Tran quickened his pace and closed the gap between him and the woman. His basketball hi-tops were silent on the pavement.
As he walked Tran did up the zip of his jacket, without putting it on. He came up behind the woman, lifted his arms, and slipped the zipped jacket down over her head. She screamed and flailed as her face was covered, but Tran was ready for this. He wrapped his left arm around her neck from behind and pushed his knee in behind hers, causing her to buckle. As she fell he reached around and slid the pistol from his jeans. The woman reached back and before Tran could get the barrel of the weapon into her temple her thumb was in his eye. He screamed.
From behind them came the noise of an engine revving and the squeal of slick tyres. Tran saw stars, but managed to swipe across at the woman’s covered head with the butt of the pistol and smashed it into her. She was writhing in his weakened grip, though, and clawing at the jacket. The car door slammed and Nguyen leapt out. He kicked her hard and fast in the ribs and she sagged in Tran’s grasp.