by Tom Cain
‘Right then, that’s enough chit-chat,’ said Klerk. ‘Brianna, my dear, go and tell Jean-Pierre he can start cooking his precious souffles.’
‘Of course, my love,’ Brianna said, giving Klerk another little kiss before she left.
Klerk turned his attention to Zalika. ‘Gushungo,’ he said. ‘Hong Kong. Please continue.’
‘Last year, the President paid more than five million dollars for this bolt-hole in Hong Kong,’ said Zalika, snapping straight back into business mode. She’d been totally convincing in the role of Alice the sexy secretary. Now she was equally at ease as a serious, intelligent professional, delivering a well-prepared briefing with all the key facts at her fingertips. Carver had to admit that he’d underestimated her.
‘The location is no accident,’ she continued. ‘For the past fifty years, the Chinese have been working hard to extend their influence over post-colonial Africa, presenting themselves as fellow strugglers against Western imperialism. The deal is always the same. The African nations sell the Chinese the natural resources they can produce and in return the Chinese help install basic infrastructure: roads, railways, power supplies, ports, pretty much anything a modern nation needs, really.
‘Every year, thousands of African students go to Chinese universities. Of course, the irony is that the average Chinese is even more racist towards Africans than a white would be. They call the students “black devils”. Oddly enough, Gushungo doesn’t seem to mind. He’s spent years and years ranting about the evils of white people, but he’s never said a word against the Chinese. Why? Because they let him put his money in their banks and buy property on their territory. And they do something he likes even more than that: they buy his diamonds.’
Another series of images flashed up on the screen: hordes of men and women, carrying spades and pickaxes and caked in dust and grime, clustered in a series of giant open trenches.
‘This is the Chidange diamond field in eastern Malemba,’ said Zalika. ‘It’s an area of forest that’s potentially the single richest source of diamonds in the world. The stones are just lying in the dirt, right up to ground level. So it could be worth billions of dollars a year to the Malemban economy, but it’s never been properly mined or exploited. Until a few years ago, De Beers, the huge South African company that dominates the global diamond market, had the mining rights. They were planning a proper full-scale operation there. But in 2006 the rights were passed to an English company, and then, just a few months later, seized by the government.
‘Naturally, no government run by Henderson Gushungo could ever do something as complex as set up a diamond mine. So the diamonds just lay there, waiting for someone to take them away. Which is what happened. Thousands of people came to Chidange, hoping to make their fortunes. Well, Henderson couldn’t have that. He didn’t want anyone taking his rocks. So he sent in the troops. They went in without warning, firing from helicopter gunships, shooting to kill. No one knows exactly how many people died; dozens certainly, maybe even hundreds. The forests were littered with bodies for miles around. When the killing was over, the whole area was sealed off and all the survivors were forced to fill in all the holes they had dug. They weren’t given any food or water. If they died, they were just thrown into the holes. Anyone who was still alive after all that was then forcibly removed from the area and driven away for resettlement. Then, when no one else was left, Gushungo allowed a new group of diggers into the area – people he trusted, members of his political party. The operations started up again, and all the stones went straight to Henderson Gushungo and his closest associates.’
‘Including Moses Mabeki,’ Tshonga interjected.
‘So they’re blood diamonds,’ said Carver.
‘Exactly,’ said Zalika. ‘And one of the reasons Gushungo has bought a place in Hong Kong is that he thinks he can sell his diamonds there. He’s trying to put a deal together with the Chinese government. They have an almost unlimited need for industrial-quality diamonds. But the best stones, millions of dollars’ worth of uncut diamonds, he wants to sell separately. Well, I say “he” wants to sell them, but that’s not quite right. Because the real brains behind this scheme is not Henderson Gushungo at all, but his wife.’
The contrast between the images of the desperate, filthy prospectors at Chidange and the woman who now appeared on the screen could not have been more acute. She appeared first as a young bride, resplendent in a flowing, lacy white wedding dress, smiling and waving at the camera with Gushungo standing in formal morning dress beside her. Then came another image, evidently taken a few years later. The wedding dress had been swapped for a black outfit, and her face had hardened: her mouth was set in an expression of tight-lipped disdain, her eyes invisible behind dark glasses whose frames were studded with crystals.
‘This is Faith Gushungo, Henderson’s second wife,’ said Zalika. ‘And there’s no point getting rid of him if you don’t get her as well.’
Carver didn’t like the way the conversation was heading. ‘Just how many people am I supposed to be hitting? First we had Gushungo, then Mabeki, now the wife. Who’s next? Any kids you want me to get rid of? Pets, maybe?’
Klerk looked to the heavens and sighed. He pulled out a BlackBerry and pressed a speed-dial letter. ‘Terence, it’s Mr Klerk. Tell Jean-Pierre to take his souffles out of the oven. We could be a little late for dinner. Tell Jean-Pierre, if he’s got a problem, take it up with Miss Latrelle. She can deal with it.’
Klerk put the phone away. ‘Carry on, Zalika. You were about to tell Sam about Faith Gushungo. Fascinating woman. Let us hope she’ll soon be burning in hell, hey?’
‘She doesn’t believe she will,’ said Zalika. ‘She’s Faith by name and faith by nature: a devout Christian, just like Henderson. They spend six days a week doing nothing but evil, then they say their prayers on Sunday, take communion and think that everything’s forgiven. They make their bodyguards do it, too. The whole household comes to a standstill. It’s so hypocritical it makes me sick. This is a woman who’s ordered the construction of a new presidential palace, which will cost at least twenty million dollars. She goes on shopping trips to London, Paris and Milan, blowing hundreds of thousands more at a time when the country is desperately short of foreign currency to buy food or oil for its people. And she’s got the nerve to claim that she’s religious.’
‘So Mrs Gushungo’s Africa’s answer to Imelda Marcos,’ said Carver. ‘It isn’t pretty, but it’s hardly a capital offence.’
‘Imelda Marcos… and Lady Macbeth,’ Zalika countered.
‘Perhaps I can explain,’ said Patrick Tshonga. ‘You understand, Mr Carver, that Henderson Gushungo is a very elderly man. His ability to retain command of the country is remarkable, but still he is mortal and his faculties are diminished. Faith, however, is still a young woman, in the prime of life. She is filled with energy. She is also filled with hatred, spite and malice. These days, when the veterans seize property or attack people who are deemed to be opponents of the government, as like as not they are doing it on Mrs Gushungo’s orders, not the President’s. She has built vast estates from all the farms she has appropriated. And in every case, it is not just the white owners who have been forced to flee. All the people who worked for them are evicted also, their possessions are seized and their homes are given to Mrs Gushungo’s supporters. And you will note that I say “Mrs Gushungo’s supporters”. These people owe their loyalty to her, not her husband. She has built up an entire power-base of her own. She knows that her man will soon be gone, either because he dies or is finally removed from office. And when that day comes, she does not intend to go with him. No, Faith Gushungo will stay and fight for power for herself.’
‘So where do Hong Kong and the diamonds fit into all this?’ asked Carver.
‘Simple,’ said Zalika. ‘They’re Faith’s Plan B. If it all goes wrong and she gets kicked out along with her husband, then she’s got somewhere to go and a very large amount of money, she hopes, to keep her in comfort and
idleness when she gets there.’
‘And what does it all have to do with us?’
Zalika smiled. ‘Well, the Gushungos have a hard time getting any bank to take their business. So when they’re in Hong Kong they keep their diamonds at home. Now, what if someone tried to steal those diamonds?’
‘The robbery might go wrong, people might get hurt and no one would suspect a political motive,’ said Carver. ‘It’s an excellent idea…’
‘Thank you,’ said Zalika, giving an ironic little bow.
‘… but I might have one that’s even better.’
‘Really? What might that be?’
She looked him straight in the eye, challenging him.
‘I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you when I get it.’
‘So, Sam,’ said Klerk, cutting through the growing tension, ‘you will accept my offer?’
‘I don’t know that, either,’ said Carver. ‘I’ll give you my answer tomorrow afternoon, right here, seventeen hundred hours. You happy with that?’
‘It sounds like I don’t have a choice. Ja, I can live with tomorrow afternoon. Before the meeting we will go shooting. Then we will talk. Meanwhile, let’s eat.’ He glared at Carver and Zalika. ‘You two can sort out your differences over Jean-Pierre’s damned truffle souffles.’
30
There was a time when Severn Road might easily have been a desirable neighbourhood in the stockbroker belt of Surrey. The substantial houses, set amid croquet lawns, tennis courts and shrubberies, had all been built in the 1930s. They had steeply gabled roofs, half-timbered mock Tudor facades and verandas on which privileged ladies, burdened neither by jobs nor household chores, could comfortably take their tea. The men who owned them had all been educated at the same small group of private boarding schools and shared identical, unquestioned assumptions about their innate superiority, the lesser status of anyone unfortunate enough to be black, brown, yellow or French, and the utter deviousness of Jews.
Yet Severn Road lay not in southern England but southern Africa, in what had once been a suburb of Fort Shrewsbury, capital of British Mashonaland. Its houses were built for the families of the colonial administrators, army officers and businessmen who ran this particular outpost of Empire, as well as the native servants who tended to their needs. For half a century, nothing changed. Then a civil war was fought and lost and British Mashonaland became the independent state of Malemba. Fort Shrewsbury changed its name to Sindele and the white inhabitants of Severn Road made way for a new governing class of African bureaucrats, lawyers and entrepreneurs. By and large, they kept on the servants who had once waited upon their country’s white masters. They even retained some of the old furniture, left behind as the whites fled for the old country. The new bosses were, in some respects, just the same as the old ones.
So another twenty years went by, and Severn Road remained as exclusive and comfortable as it had always been. Then Henderson Gushungo made his fateful decision to cleanse his nation of the white farmers and entrepreneurs he hated with such a burning passion. The economy promptly collapsed, the notionally democratic government became a tyrannical dictatorship, and Severn Road was changed beyond all recognition. The houses were stripped of their contents as the people who lived in them sold everything they could, simply to make a few instantly worthless Malemban dollars. Then they were subdivided as rooms were rented out. Families half-a-dozen strong were crammed into bedrooms intended for a single pampered child; grand living rooms became makeshift dormitories; floorboards were lifted for firewood; crude sheets of plastic were nailed over holes in roofs whose tiles had not so long before been kept in immaculate repair.
Mary Utseya and her baby son Peter had been sharing part of the old dining room at No. 15 Severn Road with three other women and their children for the past four months, ever since Mary’s husband Henry, a soldier in the Malemban army, was killed in action in the Congo. She had been forced to leave the married quarters where she and Henry lived. With the government in no shape to pay her a widow’s pension, Mary had no way of renting a place of her own and had counted herself fortunate that a friend had offered her a few square feet on the dining-room floor.
Within a week or two of Mary’s arrival at Severn Road there had been a presidential election. Loudspeaker vans filled with armed men had driven down the street warning the inhabitants of the terrible consequences of voting for the treacherous Popular Freedom Movement and its lying, unprincipled leader Patrick Tshonga (who was, they added, a notorious homosexual and soon to die from AIDS). Mary was not registered to vote at the nearby polling station and had no means of getting back to her old neighbourhood, so she did not vote. Had she done so, however, she would certainly have sided with the rest of Severn Road’s people, who overwhelmingly ignored the threats of Gushungo’s thugs and voted for Tshonga. They knew that they were wasting their time, since Gushungo would never accept the result. But they voted anyway.
Now, on a Friday night in May, with the ground still damp from an afternoon downpour, they were going to pay for their impudence.
The operation was carried out with a brutal ruthlessness honed by constant repetition: many, many people had already suffered the fate that awaited the people of Severn Road. The two ends of the road were blocked. Patrols were posted in neighbouring streets to catch anyone who tried to escape over back walls and garden fences. Then the military trucks arrived, one for every house. The trucks were organized in groups of four, three soldiers to a truck, each group under the command of a sergeant.
They did not bother to knock. Front doors were kicked or if necessary blown open. Warning shots were fired into the ceiling to cower the inhabitants, the muzzle flashes blazing in the gloomy interiors, where the only light came from the occasional gas or meths-fuelled lantern. Soldiers went in shouting at the tops of their voices and swinging their gun-butts with indiscriminate abandon. If they were lucky, the people crammed into the houses had time to grab a few belongings and even some food or water before they were herded at bayonet point on to the trucks, but many clambered into the bare open-topped cargo bays with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
Mary Utseya was relatively fortunate. She managed to sling a canvas bag across her shoulder and stuff it with a bottle of milk, a couple of biscuits and a clean nappy-cloth for baby Peter. All she kept for herself was a small framed picture of her dead husband Henry. It had been taken on his last leave home before he died. He was dressed in his army uniform, smiling proudly at the camera as he showed off the corporal’s stripes he had just been awarded.
It was only when one of the soldiers grabbed her upper arm and shoved her up on to the truck that Mary noticed that his uniform carried exactly the same regimental insignia as Henry’s. These men were his old comrades, his brothers in arms.
‘Did you know Henry Utseya?’ she babbled, hoping she might somehow get better treatment if the soldier knew her man had belonged to his unit. ‘Please! He was in your regiment. He was killed in-’
Mary was silenced by a slap to the side of her head. The blow sent her spinning across the floor of the cargo bay. She dropped Peter, who started crying, bawling with the banshee volume that even the tiniest baby can generate. Her face still stinging, her mind dazed and her vision blurred by the soldier’s slap, she scrabbled half-blindly around the truck, desperately trying to get to her baby before the soldier silenced him for good. She bumped into an old man, who lashed out at her with his boot. A woman started screaming. More people kept being shoved over the tailboard into the cargo bay, terrifying Mary, who felt sure her child would be trampled.
At last her outstretched hands felt Peter’s cotton blanket, tightly curled hair and soft, warm skin, and she clutched him desperately to her breast. Then the truck’s ignition key was turned, its engine coughed into life, and they rumbled off into the night.
A black Rolls-Royce Phantom was parked by the turning into Severn Road. It had been stretched to more than twenty-two feet in length and fitted with armour pl
ating by Mutec, a specialist carriagemaker in Oberstenfeld, Germany. From behind tinted, bulletproof windows, its passengers watched as the trucks went by.
‘Let that be a lesson to them,’ said Faith Gushungo. ‘Have you allocated the properties yet?’
She was sitting in one of four passenger seats, arranged in two facing pairs behind the divider that separated them from the driver, guaranteeing total privacy.
Moses Mabeki gave a jerky twitch of his brutally distorted head. ‘Of course,’ he said, the last word dissolving into a drooling slur.
‘And the new owners are aware that the trucks will come for them, too, if they ever question their loyalty to our cause?’
Mabeki’s laugh was a hacking cough. ‘Oh yes, they know, and they believe it, don’t worry about that.’
‘And the diamonds: you have a buyer lined up?’
‘Yes. They’re offering ten million. I will make them pay twelve.’
‘Twelve million dollars,’ purred Faith Gushungo with something close to ecstasy. ‘All for us.’
‘It will almost double our holdings,’ said Mabeki.
‘You’re sure Henderson doesn’t know that we control the accounts?’
‘He does not know that we control the country. Why would he know about the accounts?’
Faith laughed. She reached out to stroke Mabeki’s face, feeling the hard, shiny knots of scar-tissue under her fingertips. His terrible ugliness appalled her. The drops of spittle that fell from his lips on to the palm of her hand disgusted her. Yet they thrilled her, too, and she felt herself melting with desire for him.
‘You are my beast,’ she whispered.
She ran her hands over the whipcord muscles beneath his suit and lowered her head over his body. Moses Mabeki’s face had lost all its beauty and his shoulder was a twisted wreck. But he was still a man, for all that.