Zulu

by Caryl Ferey

  “O.K.! No need to shout!”

  “Anyone would think you’re doing this on purpose. Look, the quicker we start, we quicker we finish.”

  Ruby agreed.

  “Are you in charge of this shoot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Assistant director?”

  “Production assistant.”

  “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  “Are you here to quibble about my job or to investigate a murder?”

  “How well did you know Kate?”

  “I knew her a bit.”

  “Had you worked together before?”

  “No, this was the first time.”

  “But you knew her socially?”

  “Kate sometimes came to dinner at the house, with other friends. That’s all.”

  “What kind of friends?”

  “Halfway between the opposite and the reverse of you.”

  “Showbiz people, I assume.”

  “Good people,” she said.

  “What time did you finish filming yesterday?”

  “Around seven. The sun was going down.”

  “When did you last see Kate?”

  “Around seven, as it happens. We went down together on the cable car.”

  “Was she meeting someone?”

  Ruby pushed back her hair ruffled by the wind. “I have no idea. Kate didn’t say.” Then something occurred to her. “She did say she was going to have an early night. We had a heavy day’s filming the next day.”

  “Was it your company that hired her as a designer?”

  “Yes. Kate started on the shoot yesterday, like everyone.”

  Ruby, who had quit smoking, had been methodically crushing a match she had taken from a box.

  “Did she have a close relationship with any members of the crew?” Brian asked.

  “No.”

  “Did she take drugs?”

  “How should I know?”

  “People in showbiz are heavily into coke, don’t tell me you don’t know that.”

  “I don’t work in showbiz,” Ruby said, irritably.

  “But you live with the dentist to the stars. You must have all kinds of fascinating guests to dinner, TV presenters, models, even PR people.”

  Ruby claimed to find money and most of the people who had it vulgar. “What are you getting at, Inspector Gadget?” Her eyes flashed wickedly.

  “Had Kate seemed different lately?” he went on.

  “No.”

  “Irritable? Impatient?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know if she had a boyfriend?”

  “No one special.”

  “What does that mean, that she often changed men?”

  “Like any girl of twenty-two who doesn’t fall in love with the first man that comes along.”

  Twenty-two. Ruby’s age when he had met her at the Nine Inch Nails concert. Another life.

  “Did Kate go for a particular type?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Black men?”

  “I told you I have no idea.”

  “Do you often have dinner with people you don’t know?”

  Ruby lifted a finely penciled eyebrow. That was her only reaction.

  “Well?”

  “Kate was twenty years younger than me,” she said, becoming heated, “and she was a nervous girl who didn’t give much away. Does everything have to be repeated ten times before you understand?”

  “Eighteen times,” he replied. “That’s John Cage’s theory.”

  “Are you taking an interest in conceptual art now?”

  They exchanged caustic smiles.

  “Did anyone phone Kate yesterday?” Brian resumed.

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about an ex-boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Or that she was meeting someone?”

  “No,” Ruby breathed. “I already told you, we had a hard day’s filming coming up. We said goodbye in the parking lot, I left to get the halters from the riding club, and that was the last I saw of her.”

  Brian shivered, even though the sun had come out. “Halters?”

  “You know, those big leads they put on horses to stop them from getting too excited,” she said, ironically.

  “Why?”

  “It’s in the script. ‘The four demons of the night are attacked by furies, who put halters around their necks and whip them to make them pull the queen’s carriage.’ Don’t you like death-metal imagery, lieutenant? But you like riding, don’t you?”

  A suspicion seized him. A huge one.

  Tara.

  Their unexpected encounter on the beach.

  Their wild night.

  Brian knew his devil well. That two-faced smile Ruby was wearing was too beautiful to be honest. She had hired Tara to seduce him, she’d bought a call girl to turn his head and then abandon him, like a sperm stain on the sheets.

  “Something wrong, lieutenant?” Ruby was still smiling, with the criminal indifference of a cat playing with a mouse.

  “Which riding club?”

  “Noordhoek.”

  Brian dismissed his hot sweats. Noordhoek—a long way from Muizenberg beach, where he had met Tara. Good God, this business was making him paranoid.

  “What car did Kate leave in?” he asked.

  “A Porsche coupé.”

  They had found the car on the coast road, a mile from her house. Standing in the wind, Ruby was looking at him with a stubborn air.

  “Is that all you can tell me?”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” she retorted.

  “It’s not very much, miss.”

  “Madam,” she corrected.

  “Really? Since when?”

  “You didn’t think I was going to invite you to my wedding, did you?” she said with relish.

  “I’d have brought you flowers,” he said, with an evasive look in his eyes. “Metal ones.”

  “You always did know how to treat a woman. Now, if you have an intelligent question to ask, ask it quickly, because I have four other specimens just like you to deal with, the rain has ruined the sets, and we’re behind schedule.”

  “The show must go on.”

  “What do you mean, ‘The show must go on?’” she repeated, imitating his voice badly.

  “You don’t seem all that upset about Kate’s death.”

  “I’ve lost a lot of things in my life.”

  A pearl of tenderness ran aground amid the breakers.

  “I’ll probably be back to ask you some more questions,” he said.

  The crew was setting up. Ruby shrugged. “If that’s what grabs you.”

  A gust of wind made them both sway. Brian shook his head. “Things still aren’t working out, are they?”

  *

  Sixty thousand sanghomas plied their trade in South Africa, including several thousand in Cape Province alone. Sacrifices, emasculations, kidnappings, and torture of children and the most abominable murders were regularly committed under the pretext that they would provide miracle cures, and it was usually these ignorant, barbaric incense burners who were behind it.

  The lock of hair and the nail clippings suggested that the killer had been trying to make a muti, a cure, or some kind of magic potion. A muti. To treat what? After the Minister of Health’s unfortunate statements about AIDS, this kind of story gave the whole of Africa a bad reputation.

  Neuman had searched in the Criminal Record Center, with a particular emphasis on ritual crimes. Several hundred officially, over the past ten years. In reality, thousands. Children mutilated, arms, sexual organs, heart torn out, sometimes when they were still alive to increase the effectiveness, testicles and vertebrae sold at exorbitant prices on the market for superstitions—the museum of horrors was in full swing, with a host of anonymous dupes as killers by proxy and the statistics constantly rising. He had found nothing.

  The forensics team had searched the Montgomery mansion without finding any evidenc
e of a break-in. The security system was working, and nothing had been stolen. So Kate hadn’t had time to go home after the day’s filming, or else she had brought the killer home with her, which was highly unlikely—they would have been caught on the surveillance camera at the entrance, and there was nothing on the tapes. Her Porsche coupé had been found at the side of the road, barely a mile from the house. As with Nicole, the killer had chosen an isolated spot, where nobody was likely to see anything. The coast road left Chapman’s Peak and wound amid vegetation before reaching the trendy village of Llandudno. The only prints in the car were the victim’s. The killer had stopped her on the road. Or Kate had stopped of her own free will and hadn’t suspected anything, like Nicole Wiese. According to the information gathered by Brian, Kate should have reached Llandudno around seven-thirty in the evening. She had been killed about ten. What had she been doing for all that time? Had the killer drugged her, to stop her from resisting? Two hours during which he had imprisoned her, in order to prepare his ololo, his sacrifice, we will kill you, “we” meaning the Zulus.

  Zaziwe: hope.

  Association of ideas, chance, coincidence? Neuman sensed a trap. There it was, in front of his eyes. A divine temptation, a call, whose echo seemed to have been resonating forever. A trap into which he was falling.

  Zina Dukobe had been an active member of Inkatha, and for the past ten years had been touring the continent with her group. She had not been involved with any political organization since the democratic elections but all her musicians were, or had been, in contact with Inkatha. Neuman drew up a list of the group’s tours in South Africa, the places visited and the dates, and compared them with the many unsolved murders that had taken place during those periods. After cross-checking in the files of the Criminal Investigation Department and the various security forces, he noted that six homicides had taken place in Jo’Burg during their stay there in 2003. One of the victims had been Karl Woos, warden of a high-security prison during apartheid, found dead in his house, poisoned with curare, probably by a prostitute.

  Neuman continued with his search and soon came across another unsolved murder: Karl Müller, a former police inspector from Durban, found in his car at the side of a minor road on January 14, 2005, with a bullet in his head—his revolver had been found beside him, but there was no suicide note. The group had been in Durban at the same time. They had played a week in the city’s clubs before leaving the day after the murder.

  Bamako, Yaoundé, Kinshasa, Harare, Luanda, Windhoek—Neuman widened his search to include all the cities where Zina’s group had performed. The data was non-existent or difficult to find. The last suspicious death he noted down had taken place in Maputo, Mozambique: Neil Francis, a secret-service officer under apartheid who had switched to the diamond trade, found at the foot of a cliff, his skull smashed.

  August 2007. Zina’s company had spent ten days in Maputo.

  Neuman was putting together all the little pieces lost deep inside himself when he received an e-mail from Tembo. The medical examiner had done a supplementary analysis on De Villiers, the junkie surfer killed in a holdup. According to the blood samples kept in stock, De Villiers had been HIV positive.

  The virus had developed only recently, but, as with Simon, in a spectacular way. Life expectancy: less than six months.

  Neuman’s intuition had been right, which wasn’t exactly comforting. What was in that drug—death? And what else?

  *

  As it had grown, the township had finally reached the sea.

  So the boys played soccer on the beach, much to the delight of the tourists in their minibuses, who, thanks to the tour operators, bought themselves an easy conscience on the cheap with a lightning visit to the townships. You didn’t see any of those tourists in Cape Town’s black clubs—the only ones where you were frisked at the door—or any whites at all, a fact that was resented by the local youth.

  It was here, on the edge of the dunes separating the beach from the squatter camps, that Winnie Got had seen Simon for the last time, with the other bums in his gang. Now that Simon was dead, those kids were the last witnesses in the case. Neuman parked his car at the far end of the track and walked toward the seething ocean. Boys’ shouts could be heard in the distance, carried on the wind. The sand on the beach was blinding white in the sun. A pack of kids in shorts was running after a partly devoured rubber ball. They didn’t have time to make passes, just general scrums at the four corners of the field, with loud cheers every time the ball was cleared. Each of the goalies moved from side to side between two sweaters thrown on the ground, and waited.

  Neuman’s shadow fell on the featherweight guarding his invisible goalposts.

  “I’m looking for two boys,” he said, showing him Simon’s photograph. “Local boys, about ten or twelve.”

  The little goalie took a step back.

  “One of them’s older, and wears green shorts. They were both hanging out with this guy, Simon. I’ve been told they used to play with you.”

  The boy was looking at Neuman as if afraid Neuman was going to grab him by the throat. “I . . . I don’t know, sir. You’ll have to ask the others,” he said, pointing to the scrum.

  There were thirty of them, happily thrashing each other in the sun.

  “Who does the ball belong to?”

  “Nelson,” the featherweight replied. “The one in the Bafana Bafana shirt.”

  The national team, not in very good form apparently, even though the World Cup was looming.

  There was such noise and excitement around the ball that Neuman had to grab it to make himself heard. He took Nelson to one side, and the other players immediately surrounded them. He explained what he was after, the boys crowding around him as if he had candies for them. At first, they made faces to indicate that they didn’t know anything, but the photograph revived their memories. The gang had hung around the beach for a while, they had even tried to play soccer together, but those other guys liked to act tough, there was a risk they’d steal the ball.

  “When were they last here?” Neuman asked.

  “I don’t know. Two or three weeks ago.”

  Nelson had his eyes firmly on the ball Neuman was holding under his arm—it was his, and they didn’t have another one.

  “How many kids were there with Simon?”

  “Three or four.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “I remember a tall guy in green shorts. The others called him Teddy. There was another one, shorter, in an army shirt.”

  “You mean a khaki shirt?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Er . . .”

  The kids were playing around behind his back, and passing remarks in slang.

  “Did they have any unusual marks?” Neuman insisted. “Anything on their faces, a tattoo?”

  Nelson thought hard about this. “The smaller one,” he said, “the one in the army shirt, he had a scar on his neck. Here,” he said, pointing to the top of his own skinny trapezius muscles. “It looked like he’d stitched it himself!”

  The others laughed, slapping their thighs and jostling one another.

  “Anything else?” Neuman asked.

  “Hey!” Nelson laughed. “I’m not a Divix camera.”

  The only thing the kids were interested in was the rubber ball. Neuman kicked it as hard as he could, and it soared over their heads. The boys immediately ran off, screaming as if they had all scored goals.

  *

  Neuman walked all over the sandy, scrub-covered open spaces known to be the refuge of criminals. He came across a few spectral figures, rejects from the townships or the squatter camps, but didn’t learn anything more about the boys. The wind sweeping the zone blotted out everything, even the memory of the dead.

  Neuman walked toward the bare dunes. Nothing here but empty Coke cans, plastic wrappers, and bottle necks used as pipes for getting high on tik or Mandrax. The place was empty, disturbing, a lunar landscape where eve
n the dogs didn’t roam, afraid of being eaten. The rest of the gang must be around here somewhere. They had fled the squatters’ camp and the beach three weeks earlier, and no one had seen them again. Simon had taken refuge in the nearby township, where he had lived before, but he’d been alone. The gang must have split up. They had fled to escape the dealers—Neuman had met two of them on the construction site. Brian had killed Joey, but his partner, the one who limped, hadn’t been among the bodies found in the cellar.

  Neuman returned to the path that led along the side of the no-man’s land. His car was waiting for him on the hot stones, mirages shimmering on the hood. He opened it with the remote control.

  At that moment, a boy emerged from the nearby ditch. A young black, about twelve years old, with a dirty T-shirt and rubber shoes. Causing a small landslide as he came up out of the ditch, he took a step toward Neuman, but kept his distance. His frizzy hair was gray with dust. He was twisting a length of barbed wire in his dirty hands, and brushing away the flies crawling around his eyes.

  “Hello.”

  Sick eyes, with yellowish crusts around them where they had run.

  “Hello.”

  The boy, strangely, did not ask for coins. He stood there close to the ditch, looking over at Neuman and fiddling with his barbed wire. Neuman had a vague feeling of unease. The boy reminded him of a rabbit suffering from myxomatosis, stuck there without moving, waiting for death.

  “Do you live here?” Ali asked.

  The boy nodded. The calves of his jogging pants were torn, and he wasn’t wearing a cap. Neuman took out Simon’s photograph. “Ever seen this kid?”

  The boy moved the flies away from his eyes, and shook his head.

  “He’s part of a street gang. There’s also a tall boy in green shorts, and a shorter boy in an army shirt, with a scar on his neck.”

  “No,” he said. “Never seen them.”

  His voice hadn’t changed, but the look he gave him wasn’t a child’s anymore.

  “Twenty rand, sir.” He put his hand on his pants. “Twenty rand for a blow job, how about it, sir?”

  *

  Josephina was one of the “mothers” of the Bantu Congregational Church, a congregation of the Churches of Zion established in the township. They didn’t go in for the ready-made prayers of the Europeans, preferring lots of loud singing and constant dancing.