Katt closed the book. 'Twins are tricky, Bob. You were raised Catholic. You recall Jacob and Esau."
"Do I?" said Robert. "Refresh my memory."
"The Old Testament, Bob. Genesis Three. Esau and Jacob were twin brothers who rivaled in the womb. First born, Esau was 'red and hairy/ 'Smooth" Jacob followed 'with his hand grasping Esau's heeP to pull him back. Firstborn son got the father's blessing, so to receive it in Esau's place, Jacob covered his arms with fleece so he would feel hairy. The old man, eighty and nearly blind, got sucked in.
"Rivalry, Bob. That's the key to the dynamics of twins. You're a historian. You know all about Romulus and Remus."
"Do I?" said Robert. "Refresh my memory."
"You're playing dumb."
"Perhaps," he replied. "You left out Castor and Pollux, the Gemini Twins. The reason many cultures hold twins taboo is they're seen as the workings of a supernatural force to be feared. The One and the Other, with the Other as a gate to the Other World. Castor was mortal, but Pollux was the son of Zeus. Light and darkness figure as the ultimate set of twins in mythology. Horus and Set, the embattled twins of Egypt. Balder and Hodus in Scandinavia. Combine light and darkness, and you get rw/light."
Katt got up and paced the room, bouncing ideas off the father she had never had. "Look what evil Hyde did to poor Jekyll. Look what cruel Dorian Gray did to his portrait. Look what the pinned voodoo doll does to its human double. The ultimate curse of twinning is the
scapegoat, Bob. The sacrificial double who suffers or dies in place of the twin. The ideal scapegoat must itself be free of guilt. That's what I think is happening here."
"So?" said DeClercq.
"So we find the twin."
"How do we do that?"
"Start at the start."
"Starting where?"
"Conception, Bob." Katt sat on his knee like a kid with Santa Claus. "Know a geneticist?"
"Cool," said Katt, taking in the clinical order of Biology Section's Examination Room at the RCMP Forensic Lab.
"Colin Wood. Cool Katt," DeClercq introduced them.
"Katt DeClercq," Katt said, shaking Wood's hand.
That shook DeClercq. This imp was a Rubik's Cube. "We have the makings of a future Member here. She wants to know—"
"I want to know how twins are conceived."
"I'm backup," said DeClercq. "She's the pointma . . . pointperson today."
Wood cupped his chin in his hand and gave Katt his attention. "You've studied biology?"
"In science," she replied. "Biology biology I take next year."
"DNA—you've been taught—is the master chemical directing all processes of life and death. Twinning is what DNA is all about, for it's made up of two threads twisted like twine. Working with it is RNA—DNA's twin acid—which replicates the genetic code by copying it. Messenger RNA carries the copy out of the cell nucleus to twin the cell. All life is replication. Of twinning are we born."
"I'm with you," said Katt, scribbling notes like a cop.
"In a normal single birth, an egg from the mother is fertilized by a sperm from the father to create the zygote, the human embryo. This slides down the oviduct and lodges in the womb, where the single cell develops into a baby.
"Twin births come from two variations.
"Identical twins also evolve from one egg and one sperm, but early in a pregnancy the zygote unnaturally
splits in two. Because they develop from one fertilized egg, such monozygotic twins gestate side by side in the same placenta, and later in life look alike since they share the same DNA. Siamese twins result where a zygote fails to split completely. Identical and Siamese twins are always the same sex/'
Wood fetched a text from a shelf on the wall, then thumbed pages to find a photograph of identical twins. Next to it was a black-and-white shot of Chang and Eng. the original Siamese twins joined at the waist. Born of Chinese parents in 1811, the twins were discovered by a British merchant as they were about to be put to death as taboo by the King of Siam, and acquired later by the circus magnate P.T. Barnum, who used them for years in his sideshow of freaks.
"Fraternal twins develop if two eggs are released from a mother's ovaries around the same time, and these are fertilized by different sperms. Two zygotes produce dizygotic twins, each in its own placenta and each with different DNA. Fraternal twins may both be boys, girls, or one of each, and may look no more alike than family siblings who aren't twins."
Wood flipped the page to a photograph of fraternal twins.
"Wow!" exclaimed Katt. "What happened there?" She tapped the picture beside the photo of normal fraternal twins.
"Nothing in science is ever black and white," said Wood.
The text above this photo read:
These twins were the subject of an unprecedented legal wrangle in 1978. The mother, a West German woman, launched a double paternity suit on the grounds she had ovulated twice in one day. having made love to a white German and a black American soldier within hours. There are similar cases recorded in Britain, Denmark, and the USA.
The photo below showed twin boys. One white. The other black.
BLACK COIF
"Blood!" shrieked Lyndon Wilde QC, pointing a fat finger at the cuff of Nick's Red Serge. "Blood!" echoed The Hatchet, pointing a bony finger at her Assize Court robes. "Blood!" cried the jury, pointing twelve fingers at Mom's corpse on the floor. Behind the dock in which he stood, "Blood!" barked the gallery, fingers pointing at him.
Hatchett wore the wig of an Old Bailey judge. Atop it, the court clerk placed a piece of black fabric. The black coif That grim sentencing relic which symbolized death.
"Nicholas Craven, after due deliberation by a jury of your peers, you have been found guilty of this foul matricide. Look not for pardon in this world, for yours is the most disgusting case I have ever tried, and it remains only for me to pass upon you the terrible and just sentence of the law: that you be taken immediately to a place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul"
A gallows pole had been erected in court. Nick was dragged up the steps to the scaffold platform. Here the hooded hangman bound his hands and feet, then tightened the noose about his neck. The hood the executioner wore was the last thing Nick saw before the trapdoor sprung and he dropped.
The hood was black.
Each time the hangman breathed in, it sucked tight to his face.
The face was Nick s.
The hanged man awoke in a sweat.
ZIMBABWE
Tuesday, March 1, 1994
March came in like a lion hunting spring lamb. The wind had teeth, and a roar that scattered fleecy clouds east to clear the hungry sky. Outside, sunrise bloodied wool in a fresh kill.
DeClercq was leaving Special X for the start of Nick's trial in New Westminster Supreme Court when Zinc Chandler caught him at his car. "Look what just came in from Scotland Yard."
Clipped to a photophone picture in the inspector's hand was a London Met Police fax:
Zinc—
My sergeant found this in an old Colonial Office file. It's from the preindependence Salisbury/Harare Herald Whether he's the Nigel Hammond who "went missing in Rhodesia in 1966, when ZANU guerrillas launched an attack on government forces at Chinhoyi on Chimurenga Day" is anybody's guess. That quote is from a contemporary BSAP report on file here. The Zimbabwe Police Force has no file on Hammond. That doesn't surprise me. On independence in 1980, the British South Africa Police of colonial Rhodesia became the Zimbabwe Police. As the new force was to be staffed with former ZANU guerrillas, the old white guard burned many files before going out the door. Needless to say, the new black guard burned more coming in. For some reason, all trace of Hammond went up in smoke. No birth record. No death record. Just this photo. Hilary p.s. The ruins in the background are Great Zimbabwe.
The "Lost City" of Great Zimbabwe is the stuff of myth. Zimbabwe, a Shona word, means "Houses of Stone." In 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed to Mozambi
que. Portuguese traders who followed heard Swahili rumors of a "City of Gold" inland. An early report to Europe said it was the "fortress of the King of Monomotapa, which he is making of stone without mortar." Soon hearsay grew to fantasy of biblical dimensions. Monomotapa became the custodian of King Solomon's mines and the mythic land of Ophir (I Kings 10:11). Brother Joas dos Boas wrote "these houses were in olden times the trading depots of the Queen of Sheba, and from these depots they used to bring her much gold."
The glint of gold was a lure that hooked soldiers of fortune. The first white to gaze upon the Lost City was German hunter Adam Render in 1871. He showed the ruins to geologist Carl Mauch, who promptly declared "the fortress on the hill [is] a copy of King Solomon's Temple." In 1885, H. Rider Haggard wrote King Solomons Mines, which both DeClercq and Chandler had read as boys.
The struggle for Great Zimbabwe was the struggle for Africa. The mysterious ruins near Masvingo (site of Fort Victoria, Rhodesia's first white settlement) are the most significant man-made relics south of the Pyramids. On a continent dotted with buildings of wood, grass, and mud, massive dry-stone walls fashioned into labyrinths of corridors and chambers stood unique. If the White Man's Burden was to "civilize" black Africa—the pious spit shining the jackboots of colonial armies—how do you explain the complex social development inherent in such ruins? Obviously, wrote Theodore Bent, an amateur antiquarian hired in 1893 by Cecil Rhodes to solve the "Mystery of Zimbabwe," an "ancient Mediterranean race" built the Lost City. His candidates were Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Hebrews, or "the mythical Pelasgi who inhabited the shores of Greece." In other words, anyone but black Africans.
Reclaiming the ruins' black heritage was a hundred years' war. In 1905, archaeologist David Randall-Mclver concluded the relics were medieval and African-built. Journalist R.N. Hall, reflecting white outrage, blasted "Mclver's hazarded hypothesis of the natural and un-
aided evolution of the negroid." During the War Years that followed white Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, black liberation guerrillas coalesced their ideology around freeing Great Zimbabwe. By 1970. government censorship decreed no guidebook, textbook, newspaper, broadcast, or film could state the relics were an African creation. With black-majority Independence in 1980, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, and birdlike totems found in the ruins became the national symbol.
The Hill Enclosure is the oldest part. It resembles an acropolis in Ancient Greece or a Dark Ages castle atop a mount. This brooding, alien rubble probably housed the king and a spirit medium who communed with the shades. The photophone picture in Chandler's hand showed two men—white and black—posing in front of the ruins. CHpped from a sixties paper, the grainy image was reproduced with tiny clustered dots. Except for his bush beard, the white mirrored Stewart Granger as Allan Quatermain in King Solomon's Mines. Near thirty. he wore a safari hat with leopard-skin band, a khaki bush shirt and khaki shorts with a belted knife. Draped over his palm was a limp and bloody snake: a yard long with pale scales edged in black. The Mozambique spitting cobra, or VTfezi. lurks among Great Zimbabwe's ancient stones. If riled, a blunt head rises to spread a broad hood, then it spits a stream of venom at wide-open eyes. Causing flesh necrosis and instant agony, a 40mg squirt is fatal to humans.
The black resembled Wesley Snipes updating Granger's role. He, too, was near thirty and wore khakis like the white, but opted for the woolen cap of a British commando. Looped around two fingers spread in a V. a rubber sling was pulled back to re-create the stoning of the snake. A wicked ivory grin curled beneath aviator shades.
The cutline under the photo read: British Smith Africa Police seek Nigel Hammond (left) and Clive Moon to help with their inquiries into Wankie ivory poaching and black market trafficking in kaffir artifacts.
The man on the left was the black.
PART III
THIN RED LINE
Then it's Tommy this, arf Tommy that, an 1 'Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But its "Thin red line of "eroes" when the drums begin to roll.
-KIPLING
ZAMBEZI
Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe Thursday, March 3, 1994
From its source in the Zambian highlands near the border with Zaire, the Zambezi flows south to join the Chobe midcontinent where Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe meet, then turns east to mark the border between the last two Zs, plummeting over Victoria Falls along the way, pausing to top up man-made Lake Kariba behind the dam, before snaking the final part of its S-curve under British Airways Flight 53 descending Zinc into Harare, entering Mozambique to complete its 1,230-mile course at the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Livingstone ("I presume") watched the Money Man pass Devil's Cataract to tread the path along the lip of First Zambezi Gorge, closing on Danger Point to meet the Gray by the Falls.
Two million years before Livingstone (the man. not this statue in a Foreign Legion hat) "discovered" the falls November 16, 1855, Stone Age humans chipped tools around the precipice. Fleeing from conquest by Shaka's Zulu impi, Makololo refugees early last century swept north from Natal. This mfecane —"forced migration"—ended here, where they subjugated local tribes. The Makololo named the falls Mosi-oa-Tunya. "Smoke That Thunders," and later brought Livingstone in a dugout canoe. Sanctimonious, selfish, pigheaded, and presumptuous, the Scotsman renamed them Victoria Falls .for his queen. Even black independence couldn't shed the Colonial name.
Most spectacular now with the river in full spate, the Falls—a mile wide and 300 feet sheer—thundered millions of gallons of green-white water a minute into the chasm below, billowing clouds of sun-dazzled spray alive with ethereal rainbows. Glazed pink at dawn and metal-
lie blue at dusk, the slow-moving Zambezi beyond flowed around palm tree islands like stepping-stones approaching the Falls, the lip islands of which were sacred sites where headmen once worshiped spirits. Drenched by deluges, the Money Man walked the precipice to Danger Point, the full force of ambush showers jumping him opposite Main Falls where the path broke unprotected. The vertiginous drop to his left was unfenced, with just an occasional thornbush as a barrier.
In his journal, Livingstone gushed: On sights as beautiful as this, Angels in their flight must have gazed.
Devils, too, for on the Point waited the Terrible Ones.
Common to southern Africa, the garbage line spider is easily overlooked. Reversing a pair of binoculars as a bush microscope reveals this tiny predator lurking in its web. Legs extended forward and back or hunched for camouflage, it waits in the center of its garbage line. Four main guy lines suspending it in place, the radial web is strung in a bush or tree. Stretched across the meshed hub is the stabilimentum: the garbage line. Hung along this like garbage bags are the silk-wrapped corpses of prey and empty egg sachets. Insects see in ultraviolet, so the UV-reflective garbage line shines like a landing strip. A happenstance of nature, the markings on back of the abdomen of the garbage line spider form a human skull.
That skull was tattooed on the palms of the Black and the White.
On their killing hands.
The Gray was the joint code name under which they worked, a secret whispered mouth to ear along the seedy garbage line of mercenary bars. Who they were and where they came from was best ignored, for the Gray— Black & White—was reputed to be the coldest killing team for hire. Where the Black couldn't go, the White could. And where the White stood out, the Black moved easily. Gray mixes Black & White to mask their true colors, or lack of color, truth be known.
In 1951, the Land Husbandry Act advanced Rhode-sian apartheid, dividing "Native Reserves" to make space for thousands evicted from white-designated lands. The farm settled by the White's father was worked by
"kaffirs" bossed by the Black's dad. One night, while the youths camped "on safari" in the bush, African Voice marauders burned the farm and hanged both men from a baobab tree. Next day, the sons took a blood oath to exact revenge. Hunting, castrating, and lynching six, the Garbage Line Spiders fled to th
e hinterland.
Alias "Nigel Hammond" and "Clive Moon," the color-blind pair came of age as soldiers of fortune. Elephant poaching for ivory earned them cash, followed by travel around the globe in 1956 to recover artifacts sacred to African tribes stolen last century by Victorian Imperialists. Bartered for hundreds of elephant tusks poached by tribal blacks, the pair returned the relics to their rightful owners. The next eight years saw them killing crocs in Bechuanaland, harvesting 13,000 from what is now the Okavango Delta of Botswana, exporting the hides to Europe for handbags, belts, and shoes.
In 1959, Rhodesia's African National Congress was banned. The ANC had organized urban boycotts and rural resistance. A state of emergency was declared, 500 members were jailed, and legislation was introduced to crush black demands. Black protest turned violent, so white troops shot blacks, killing eighteen and wounding hundreds. Inciting sabotage and the torching of white farms, Robert Mugabe (now President of Zimbabwe) formed the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). When Rhodesia broke from Britain two years later with UDI—the Unilateral Declaration of Independence announced by Prime Minister Ian Smith—ZANU responded with the Second Chimurenga, the "liberation war" commencing April 28, 1966, when seven freedom fighters engaged white Rhodesian forces at Chinoyi.
The ZANU guns were supplied by the White through the Black.
Strictly business.
By mercenaries.
The Rhodesian War Years (1966-80) saw the pair in Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia. "Clive Moon" and "Nigel Hammond" were wanted for "Wankie ivory poaching and black market trafficking in kaffir artifacts" by the BSAP: British South Africa Police. When the Great Zimbabwe photo of them appeared in The Herald, the pair shed those aliases and assumed two new ones.
The guns they sold to ZANU rebels were bought by Prosper Vumba. Vumba coined their code names the White, the Black, and the Gray. In the final years of the Rhodesian Bush War, when the white government hired 10,000 mercenaries, Vumba hired the White through the Black to assassinate whites, a white mercenary moving through white mercenaries the ideal cover.
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