He shrugged. “It’s a possibility, assuming the perpetrator was positive. But the likelihood of infection is low. We’ll keep her on ARVs and test her again in six weeks.” He gave Zoe a compassionate look. “I bet you could use some sleep. Why don’t you go home?”
She stretched her arms and felt the ache of sleeplessness in every muscle. Still she hesitated.
“I’ll get my CD player,” he said, anticipating her concern. “She’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” Zoe conceded. “I’ll give you my mobile number in case anything happens.”
After giving the doctor her information, she took a last look at the child and slipped out of the hospital. She inhaled the dry Zambian air and smiled at the rising sun. Even after years of visiting Africa’s highland plateaus, she still found the near-perfect climate a gift.
She took out her phone and called Maurice Isaac, a driver for CILA who lived nearby. He dismissed her apology and promised to pick her up in ten minutes. She called Joseph next. He answered on the second ring.
“Did you sleep?” he asked, sounding groggy.
“Not a wink. What’s the plan for today?”
He hesitated. “The plan?”
“Your trip to Kanyama. I’d like to be part of the investigation.” When the silence lingered, she decided to press. “Look, I’m not Joy Herald, but I care about this girl. I can call Mariam if you like.”
“That’s not necessary,” he replied. “I’m just concerned about your safety. The compounds are unstable with the election coming up.” He took a breath and gave in. “All right. I’ll pick you up at fourteen hundred.”
With the shades drawn in her bedroom, Zoe managed to sleep until noon. She woke again to the ringtone on her iPhone—the chorus from U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” She shook her head and blinked a few times, seeing only the blur of her mosquito net. A curse of Fleming genetics, she had inherited her father’s near-sightedness. Without corrective lenses, she would have been legally blind.
She threw aside the net and found her contact lens case on the bedside table. As soon as she could see, she checked her phone. She thought the caller might have been Dr. Chulu, but instead she saw Mariam’s name on the screen. The field-office director had left a voicemail.
“Good morning, Zoe,” Mariam said. “Joseph told me you plan to accompany him to Kanyama. Be careful, please. We’ll have a response team meeting in the morning.”
Zoe pulled back the curtains from her second-story window and admired the red leaves of the poinsettia tree in the courtyard. The poinsettia had been her mother’s favorite African plant, a symbol of the continent’s exoticism and fecundity. She took a fast shower—there was never enough hot water in the tank for a long one—and dressed in jeans and a lavender Oxford shirt.
Heading to the kitchen, she fixed herself a breakfast of eggs, toast, and papaya and ate on the porch overlooking the gardens while rereading Proust’s Swann’s Way. It was a regular pilgrimage, the closest thing she had to religion after her years at Stanford. Like Proust’s narrator, she saw the past everywhere she looked, as if it were a layer of reality just beneath the present. In this, too, she was her father’s daughter. Along with his failing eyesight, she had inherited his extraordinary memory.
The text from Joseph came at quarter to two. She gathered her backpack off the dining-room table and crossed the courtyard to the gate. The guard—a recent recruit whose name she couldn’t recall—let her out onto the street. She saw the VSU officer behind the wheel of his truck, wearing aviator sunglasses and a jean jacket. As soon as she climbed in, Joseph pulled away from the curb, accelerating quickly down the tree-lined road. The sky was spotless, not a hint of cloud.
“How was your morning?” Zoe asked.
“Fine,” said Joseph.
“Do anything fun?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Why do you ask so many questions?”
She suppressed her annoyance. “I figured if we’re going to work together, we should be friendly. You seemed to have no trouble talking at the bar last night.”
He cleared his throat. “If you have to know, I spent the morning working on this truck. It is—what do you call it?—a money pit. I bought it from a cousin who’s a mechanic. I’m convinced he gave me a good deal because he knew it would be a steady source of income.”
She chuckled. “Glad to see you have a sense of humor.”
He gave her a sideways glance. “I have five siblings. You learn to laugh.”
She whistled. “Your mother must be a saint. What does your father do?”
“He owns a textile company.”
She frowned. And you’ve spent the last ten years taking breadcrumbs from the government? “Why did you become a police officer?”
His answer was cryptic. “One has to start somewhere.”
She sensed a deeper truth beneath his vagueness, but she decided to leave it alone. “Where are we going?”
“To talk to Abigail. She’s going to introduce us to her neighbors.”
They entered Cathedral Hill and took Independence Avenue toward Cairo Road. Sunday traffic was light, but pedestrians were everywhere on the jacaranda-lined shoulders of the road. Zoe sat back and watched Lusaka pass by. Designed as a garden city in colonial times, its leafy boulevards, stately Edwardian architecture, and quiet bungalows had in the decades after independence suffered the encroachment of grit and urban decay. The poor had come from the villages in droves, and the wealthy had responded by barricading themselves behind walls rimmed with glass shards and razor wire.
Crossing Cairo Road, they skirted the edge of the bustling City Market before entering the ramshackle sprawl of Kanyama. Vendors stood on both sides of the dusty thoroughfare, hawking tires and tarpaulin and talktime for mobile phones. More established merchants tended booths set back from the road. Everywhere Zoe saw signs of the presidential election: banners, flags, T-shirts, and posters, almost all of them green—the color of the Patriotic Front. The air, too, was clogged with electioneering. Bands of young men prowled the lane with makeshift bullhorns, castigating President Banda and the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy.
One of the young campaigners gave Zoe an angry look before shouting something in Nyanja. “What is he saying?” she asked, feeling a twinge of nerves.
“Roll up your window,” Joseph said, inching forward through the mob.
She complied quickly. “Was he talking about me?”
Joseph nodded. “He doesn’t like foreigners.”
Eventually, they turned left onto a tributary lane crowded with shabby cinderblock dwellings, their corrugated roofs scaled with the rust of many rainy seasons. Children of all ages scampered about, pointing at the truck and staring at Zoe. A few old people sat on chairs, watching the children. Missing from the street were young adults—the parents of the children. Some were working, no doubt, but Zoe knew their absence conveyed a darker truth: many of them were dead.
They rounded a bend and Joseph slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding a head-on collision with a pickup truck swarming with young Zambians in green T-shirts. The driver of the truck—a young man wearing a green bandana—honked loudly while his comrades beat the sides of the truck like drums. Zoe caught a hateful look from a lanky youth standing in the flatbed.
“Muzungu! Muzungu!” he shouted.
She felt a surge of fear. “What are you going to do?”
Joseph nosed his truck to the side of the road. “If I were alone, I might teach them a lesson. But I’m not alone.”
As the vehicles edged past one another, the young hooligans pounded the roof of Joseph’s truck. Time dragged on amid the thunder of hands and shouts. Zoe felt the urge to yell at them, to put them in their place, but she knew it would only exacerbate the situation. At last, the other truck accelerated up the lane, leaving them in a cloud of dust.
“Bastards!” Zoe exclaimed. “Who do they think they are?”
Joseph glanced at her but didn’t respond. He made another turn a
nd took them deeper into the labyrinth of unmarked lanes. Most of the homes they passed had no doors or windows, and many of the alleys were piled high with burning trash. After a few minutes, Zoe lost all sense of direction. The undifferentiated mass of slum-like buildings was dizzying. Joseph, however, seemed to know exactly where he was going.
In time, he pulled the truck into an alley not far from a weather-beaten house graced with a flame tree in the front yard. Grabbing her backpack, Zoe stepped out of the truck and was instantly mobbed by bright-eyed children. They pulled at her shirt, begged her for kwacha, and asked her to take pictures of them. She patted their heads and greeted them in Nyanja. “Muli bwange? Muli bwange?” It wasn’t long before she forgot about the troublemakers in the pickup.
She followed Joseph down a breezeway lined with flowerpots toward the door of the house. Abigail was waiting for them behind a curtain of lace. She invited them in and gestured for them to take seats on a couch covered with a sheet. Abigail sat opposite them on a worn recliner. She spoke hesitantly in English, pronouncing the words with care.
“How is the child?”
“She’s recovering,” Zoe said simply. “We need to find her family.”
Joseph took a digital camera out of his pocket and showed her the screen. “I have a picture of her. Perhaps it will help with the neighbors.”
Abigail stood, wrapping a shawl around her. “Come,” she said. She led them out the door and down the road to a shanty dwelling that barely resembled a house. “Agnes,” she called out.
An old woman appeared. Her skin was heavily wrinkled and most of her teeth were missing. She and Abigail exchanged words in Nyanja, and Joseph showed her the photograph of the girl. Agnes shook her head. She looked at Zoe and asked about the “muzungu”—foreigner.
Joseph chuckled. “She says your hair looks like gold. She wants to know if it’s real.”
Zoe smiled. In a country where almost all women wore wigs or hair extensions, she had been asked that question countless times. “Tell her I was born with it,” she said, leaning down so the old woman could touch it. “Does she know anything?”
He shook his head. “She’s never seen the girl before.”
Abigail bid Agnes goodbye and led them to the next house. A rotund woman was hanging clothes on a line. She smiled at Abigail but eyed Zoe with suspicion. The exchange between the women ended almost as quickly as it began.
“Her family was asleep at midnight,” Joseph explained.
Zoe thrust her hands in her pockets and took in her surroundings, trying to imagine the street as the girl had seen it. I bet it was almost deserted, she thought. In the compounds night was the handmaiden of violence. Those who were wise stayed indoors.
In the next half-hour, they spoke to two widows, a young mother nursing an infant, and a group of adolescent boys lounging under a tree. All of them denied having seen the child, and a couple of the youths made wisecracks about the girl’s appearance.
Zoe turned away, angered by their callousness. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Suddenly, a boy spoke up. “Hey, muzungu, why do you care what happens in Kanyama?”
She stared at him. “Where were you at midnight last night?”
He shrugged. “I was watching TV.”
“So you were awake?”
He elbowed one of his friends. “Do muzungus watch TV in their sleep?”
The joke elicited a chorus of guffaws.
She ignored them. “Did you see anything unusual? A person, a car you didn’t know?”
The boy glanced down the street, then crossed his arms. “I saw a truck.”
She caught her breath. “What color was it?”
“Silver. Like this.” He reached in his pocket and produced a foreign coin, no doubt the largesse of a tourist or an aid worker.
“Was it parked or driving?”
The boy flipped the coin in the air and caught it. “It was driving.”
She traded a look with Joseph. “Will you show us where you saw it?”
The boy considered this. “What’s it worth to you?”
She didn’t blink. In Africa everything had a price. “Fifty pin. But only after you tell me everything you know.”
The boy’s eyes lit up. Fifty thousand kwacha was the equivalent of ten dollars. He stood up and his friends joined him, their banter gone. “Bwera,” he said. “This way.”
He led them down the lane to a house with unpainted block walls and crumbling mortar. A gaunt woman wearing a sweat-stained shirt and chitenge skirt sat outside the door, holding a carton of cheap Lusaka beer. The boy pushed aside the curtain and sat down on a torn couch in the cramped living room, displacing a half-naked child who jumped up to make space for him.
“The truck drove by,” said the youth. “I was sitting here. I saw its lights.”
“What kind of truck was it?” Joseph asked.
“I think it was a Lexus. It went that way.”
“Was it an SUV?” Zoe asked, realizing the vehicle had been traveling toward Abigail’s house.
The boy nodded.
“What direction was the girl walking last night?” she asked Abigail.
The old woman pointed down the street in the same direction.
Zoe turned to the boy again. “You said you saw its lights. Did you see brake lights?”
He shook his head.
“What about the driver? Did you catch a glimpse of him?”
He gave her a blank look. “I saw nothing else.”
She examined his face and decided to believe him. Unzipping her backpack, she took out the money she had promised him. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Wisdom,” he replied.
“Wisdom is the finest beauty of a person. It’s a proverb. It applies as much to muzungu ladies and little girls with funny faces as it does to Zambian men. Think about it.”
She handed the boy the kwacha.
“We need to find someone near Abigail who saw the truck,” Joseph said.
She nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”
They retraced their steps, questioning the people they had met and a few others who appeared on the street. None had seen the silver SUV. Zoe checked her watch. It was nearing five o’clock. From the way Abigail was walking, it was clear she was growing tired. Zoe was about to suggest that they take her home when Joseph led them toward Agnes’s shanty and knocked on the door. The old woman appeared, and Joseph spoke a few words in Nyanja. Agnes scratched her head and blinked a few times, then replied in the same language.
“What did she say?” Zoe inquired.
Joseph ignored her and asked Agnes another question. The old woman nodded and walked around the corner of her house, showing them an alleyway strewn with loose stones and litter. She gestured toward the road and spoke again in Nyanja.
“She heard a vehicle outside her house,” Joseph said. “It stopped for a minute or two, and then it left. She didn’t think about it until now.”
Zoe felt a chill. “Did she hear any voices?”
He put the question to Agnes. “She didn’t hear people,” he interpreted, “but she heard something that reminded her of a drum.” The woman spoke again, and Joseph clarified: “Two drumbeats. Perhaps they were car doors being shut?”
Zoe left the alley and stood in the lane, staring at Abigail’s house thirty feet away. She imagined Kanyama huddled against the night, its narrow streets lit by porch bulbs and the glow of the moon. Then headlamps appeared in the darkness, followed by the flash of an upmarket SUV and the sound of an engine. The driver had pulled into the alleyway beside Agnes’s house and left the girl. It explains why no one has seen her before. She’s not from around here.
Her eyes wandered the scene and focused on a group of children playing a game in the dirt. They were the same children who had showered her with curiosity when she got out of Joseph’s truck. She had an idea. She asked Joseph for the camera and walked toward the children. They looked up from their game. Ther
e were five of them, and they were seated around a circle drawn in the dirt. At the center of the circle was a pile of rocks.
“How do you play?” she asked the oldest boy while Joseph translated.
Instead of speaking, the boy gave a demonstration. He threw a ball into the air, grabbed a few rocks with his fingers, dragged them outside the perimeter of the circle, and caught the ball again with the same hand. The second time he threw the ball into the air, he moved all but one rock back into the circle, and placed the orphaned rock in a pile beside his knee.
“Chiyanto,” Joseph said. “I played it when I was a kid.”
Zoe held up the camera, showing it to the children. “Can I take a picture of you? I’d like to show it to my friends back home.”
They began to talk excitedly. “Photo,” said the oldest. “Muzungu lady take photo.” They wrapped arms around each other, smiling and waiting for the camera to flash.
She laughed. “They’ve done this before.” She captured the moment in the digital frame and showed the picture to the kids. The oldest boy asked her to take a photo of him alone, which she did. It was then that Zoe brought the camera down to the level of the youngest and displayed the picture of the girl. The children crowded around and stared at it without speaking.
“Have you seen her before?” Zoe asked. “She was on this street last night.”
The oldest boy tilted his head and shrugged. He looked around, seeking confirmation. All of them shook their heads—except one. The child was no more than seven years old, and his eyes were too large for his head. He smiled at Zoe shyly. The oldest boy pushed him and said something in Nyanja, but the child continued to stare at Zoe.
“Girl,” he said, nodding.
Zoe took a sharp breath. “Will you translate?” she asked Joseph.
“I’ll talk to him,” he replied.
He sat down beside the child and spoke to him softly. When the child responded, Joseph bobbed his head and smiled. Joseph’s performance had the intended effect. The boy spoke without restraint, using his hands to emphasize his words.
Eventually, Joseph looked up at Zoe. “His name is Dominic. He lives there.” He pointed at a green-painted house close by. “Last night he was in bed. But he had to use the latrine. He saw the truck when it stopped. He saw a man with the girl. The man got back into the truck and drove away. The girl walked toward Abigail’s house. She looked like she was crying.”
The Garden of Burning Sand Page 3