The Tanzania Conspiracy

by Mario Bolduc

  By himself.

  An entire life together, and suddenly, overnight, he pushed her aside like a piece of old furniture.

  After Albert went to bed that night, Roselyn cried as never before, not even after Norah died, when she thought she’d never get over the pain.

  The day Albert moved, Roselyn had hoped, naively, that he would change his mind and ask her to come with him. The opposite occurred. Once he was ensconced at Stanford Hill, he ceased all communication with her. She considered moving up there to be closer to him but quickly abandoned the idea.

  They had little to do with each other, and when they did, it was Roselyn’s doing. Every Sunday morning, like clockwork, she would call Albert, and despite the fact that they had determined the hour ahead of time, she always felt she was bothering him. On some occasions, he’d even step out of his room on Sunday mornings and the phone would ring unanswered.

  Although it pained her at the start, Roselyn got used to the treatment. Her husband wanted to live out his days in the solitude of his memories, his eyes glued to the Walls Unit. He preferred being with Glenn Forrester instead of his wife — that was his problem. Roselyn wasn’t about to waste the last years of her life trying to convince a grumpy old man to keep her by his side.

  Yet she still loved him. She had never stopped loving him, despite the way he behaved. But she didn’t know how to act toward this enigmatic, mysterious husband of hers who lived far away, seemingly finding pleasure in cultivating the mystery at her expense.

  So Roselyn wasn’t wholly surprised when Mrs. Callaghan, the residence director, called her as she was hurrying to an important meeting at the Four Seasons where the annual show of the Wildlife Artists’ Association of Texas would take place. Roselyn had always been interested in painting, even before she met Albert. When he moved to Huntsville, she quickly rediscovered the passion of her younger days and joined a group of amateur artists who specialized in animal subjects. She was enthusiastic, dynamic, imaginative. Soon enough, she was elected to the board of directors.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Mrs. Callaghan said over the phone. “It’s about your husband.”

  Roselyn pulled over to the side of the road. “Is something wrong?”

  “This morning Albert didn’t come down to breakfast. Nothing new there. But when the nurse went to his room to bring him his medicine, she found the room empty. The bed hadn’t been slept in.”

  Roselyn stifled her anger. Albert had taken off without telling anyone, despite the residence authorities reassuring her that such an event was impossible. It certainly would have been at Woodbridge Manor or in any other higher-class home. In that slum of a place, the old folks came and went as they liked, security be damned.

  “Did you check with Glenn Forrester, his friend?”

  “He hasn’t heard from him.”

  If Glenn didn’t know what Albert was up to, then there was reason to be concerned.

  The director tried to calm her worries. “You know, at least his mind’s all there. No problems with his memory, either, not like some of our other residents.”

  The director’s words did nothing for Roselyn. All that meant was that Albert had carefully planned his escape and it would be harder to find him.

  “Is this something he’s done before — leave without warning?”

  “Never.”

  Albert kept to himself. He always refused everyone’s care and wanted people to act as though he wasn’t there.

  Still, something had to be done. The simplest thing would have been to drive all the way to Huntsville, but Roselyn hated driving at night, which she would have been forced to do on the way back. After making Mrs. Callaghan promise to inform her the moment something happened, she called her son-in-law at the Huntsville Police Department.

  Peter Sawyer, the son of a guard from the Wynne Unit, had married Norah right out of the Galveston Police Academy and had immediately been hired by the city. The two of them had met years earlier at Camp Connally in Big Thicket Park, a summer camp for the children of employees of the Texas penitentiary system.

  Peter did his best to reassure Roselyn. He would go over to the residence and check in on the situation, as he put it. And he’d have a chat with Mrs. Callaghan.

  Roselyn was back home when Peter called her.

  “For now, nothing strange outside of his disappearance. I checked with the area hospitals. I asked my men to be on the lookout for an old man on his own.”

  Thirty-six thousand people in Huntsville, a third of them behind bars. In other words, it was a village. Everyone more or less knew one another. Albert couldn’t have wandered with a lost look on his face more than five minutes without someone calling the police. That was what made his disappearance all the more surprising.

  “He took his medicine with him,” Peter added. “His supply was topped up the day before, so he’ll have enough for several days.”

  Albert was a diabetic, and sometimes his heart acted up, especially since his cardiac incident the year before. The residence’s doctor had prescribed him Coumadin.

  Meanwhile, Roselyn suffered from hypertension. When they lived together, man and wife would take their pills together. Often Albert would forget his dose; of the two, he was more negligent. Yet he’d had the presence of mind to take his backup supply of medicine when he walked away.

  “Along with his umbrella,” Peter pointed out.

  The next morning, after a sleepless night waiting in vain for another call from Peter, the director of the residence, or even Glenn, Roselyn got in her Mazda and headed for Huntsville. On the way, she called Brian Pallister, the president of her artists’ group, and asked him to replace her on the committee that was setting up the show. She was tight-lipped and said only that there had been a family emergency and that she’d keep him posted.

  As she drove, she found herself glancing at the side of the road into the bushes in the hope of spotting Albert. Of course, there was no one, not even a hitchhiker. Who would have picked up a stranger anywhere near Huntsville?

  Over the past few months, her visits had become less frequent, but Albert didn’t seem to notice. At the beginning she stayed with Peter, which was a way of seeing her grandson, Adrian, and she would walk to Stanford Hill, spending the day with Albert, watching TV, and eating dinner with him.

  Most of the residents were former employees of the prison system or their widows. No one seemed to grasp the irony of the situation. Sitting at long tables in a giant room, they differed little from the prisoners they had guarded all their lives. In the Walls Unit and the other penitentiaries of the town, prisoners the same age as these old guards were slurping down the same watery soup in the same lugubrious atmosphere.

  Those visits were always painful for Roselyn. She did it for her husband, who was very much aware of her discomfort. But as usual, he stayed inside his own world. No one sought out his company, Roselyn saw, and he seemed like he couldn’t care less about that.

  After a while, Roselyn put a stop to the painful visits and cut short the time she spent with Peter. She decided to make a visit at Christmas and once during the summer, and that would be that.

  The town’s strange atmosphere struck her more and more. Her father had been a prison guard in Huntsville — and so as a child, and as she grew into womanhood, she’d become used to this cohabitation with inmates. To those outside the prison town, it seemed strange, but for her and the other children of prison guards, it was ordinary, simply the way the world was. The town landscaping, the maintenance of parks, street cleaning, all these jobs were carried out by inmates judged not to pose an immediate threat by the authorities of the area’s seven penitentiaries.

  No one questioned the situation that had existed since the middle of the twentieth century. No parents, even the most careful, warned their children about the prisoners in their midst. The townspeople had complete trust in the authorities — and that was still the case. After all, they were family men, they lived in Huntsville, and they wouldn’t
do anything to endanger their fellow citizens.

  As she grew up, Roselyn often crossed paths with prisoners who had just been freed, their debt to society paid, walking toward the bus station, carrying a small standard-issue suitcase. Eleven o’clock in the morning was freedom hour, and nearly every day a recently freed man could be spotted. What would become of them now that they had the chance to start over and build their lives anew? Roselyn had no idea.

  She asked her father that question one day. Laconic as always, he answered, “Most of them will be back sooner or later. They’ve got prison in their blood.”

  From time to time, there would be an escape. The news travelled fast through the town, and the community circled the wagons. People stayed in their houses and locked their doors. If it happened on a Saturday, Roselyn would order Norah to stay inside. At school the students sat in their classrooms until the chief of police lifted the curfew, the fugitive had been caught, as was usually the case, or it was assumed he was far from Huntsville by then. The escapees were never free for long — a week at most. Sometimes the jailbreak ended violently, with gunfire or the death of the fugitive, but Roselyn never remembered any such tragic denouement in Huntsville itself.

  Still, in the 1970s, she took a class in the handling and use of firearms given to the wives of prison employees. A program offered by the city council, it was shuttered soon after she graduated.

  To the right of the Walls Unit, at the end of the main street, was a smaller road shaded by oak trees. Farther along was Stanford Hill Residence, where she parked her car. Mrs. Callaghan was waiting by the door, having been alerted to her arrival. A woman in her fifties, smiling, stiff of manner. A former nurse at the Walls Unit, she had poured her savings into this old folks’ home after she left the penitentiary.

  “No further news, I’m afraid. But a policeman called a while back.”

  “That would be Peter.”

  “I told him you were coming. He wants to see you.”

  Roselyn went down the hallway as the senior citizens nodded in her direction. The place was clean, the residents seemed to be well treated, but she had never cared for the atmosphere.

  To get a view of the Walls Unit, Albert had traded in a bit of comfort. The room was smaller than most in the residence, and to Roselyn it seemed loaded down with furniture: a large TV on one side, an enormous La-Z-Boy on the other. A sink on the right, and a small fridge where Albert kept his stock of Canada Dry.

  Roselyn opened it. It was empty. Not a can left. He really had planned his escape and left nothing behind.

  On the wall was a painting she had given him when he moved in.

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” Roselyn asked for the tenth time.

  Mrs. Callaghan shrugged. “He’s very reserved, you know. He never confided in anybody.”

  As the director looked on from the doorway, Roselyn went over to the little desk. With the La-Z-Boy and the TV, it was the only thing Albert wanted to bring with him after they sold the house. Back then that was where he kept the phone and electricity bills and the tax returns. She checked the contents of the drawers: nothing but old menus from the dining room that he’d kept for some obscure reason. Roselyn read them over.

  “He’d lost his appetite lately,” Mrs. Callaghan re­­marked.

  “Did he complain about the food?”

  “Never.”

  “What does Dr. Taylor have to say?”

  “He’ll be here this afternoon. You can talk to him.”

  Roselyn glanced at the menus again. Every day Albert had drawn a red circle around his preferred dish. Pork chops, smoked turkey, jambalaya …

  Things he had never liked before. Strange.

  His eight records were in their usual place, one reassur­­­ing detail. Albert’s musical choices had never gone beyond American popular tunes with a preference for Johnny Cash, which made sense. Songs about prison pulled on his heartstrings. Albert had no interest in Elvis Presley — a “puppet,” he said, “a singer for the ladies.” Cash was another story.

  The residents of this place found all sorts of hobbies to occupy them between meals. But Albert preferred to stay in his room, sit in front of the window, and stare at the penitentiary. Sometimes he played one of his eight records too loud. Or Glenn Forrester would call, but his visits were very rare.

  Little by little, Albert had isolated himself.

  Roselyn went to the window. Beyond the trees was the Walls Unit, the Huntsville prison. It had gotten its name from the red-brick wall that surrounded the central courtyard. Why did Albert find pleasure watching this lifeless scene day after day, never growing tired of it?

  He’d left the big city of Houston to return to this smaller place, and not just anywhere: directly in front of the prison, with a view of the main building, the walls, and the barbed wire.

  A lifetime spent within the penitentiary walls might have affected his mind. “They’ve got prison in their blood,” her father had said of former inmates. Albert’s situation was exactly the same. Once he was freed from his job, he was still unable to leave it behind. But neither could he talk about it. He was like a soldier who had seen the horrors of war and fallen into silence once he was back in civilian life. He knew no one could understand what he’d been through.

  “Are there any others like him here?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Other executioners.”

  Mrs. Callaghan hesitated. “He’s the only one.”

  Roselyn gazed at the Walls Unit again. Her husband had applied his craft there on many men over his long career. For twenty-three years, before his retirement, as a member and later head of the tie-down team, as the execution crew was called, Albert Kerensky had given the gift of death to two hundred and thirty-four men.

  5

  The Bukoba airport was little more than one long strip of beaten red earth, next to which had sprouted a rudimentary hangar like a random growth. Local officials had tried to maintain the facility over the years, but it was so fragile it looked as though a strong wind might blow it into nearby Lake Victoria. The structure served as the waiting room and shelter for passengers during the rainy season in the spring when the landing strip was often unusable. Great streams of muddy water made takeoff impossible and landing risky. A few years ago, the pilot explained, a Tanzanian army plane had hit a tree on its final approach and crashed into a hospital a little farther on.

  “How convenient,” Max remarked.

  At the controls of the Cessna, Roosevelt Okambo evaluated the landing strip, which seemed to drop into the lake. The pilot had been born the day the father of the New Deal died, which explained his name, and he belonged to the lost generation of African aviators. For a time — one not entirely over — travellers had preferred white faces in the cockpits of puddle jumpers across Africa. More often than not, these men were former mercenaries. Okambo had to settled for a career as a bush pilot, mostly in the Kagera region, carrying mail and sometimes passengers. Max had used his services before. He was a reckless flier who liked the sound of his own voice but was a master of his Cessna.

  As he began the descent, Okambo pointed to a police vehicle by the landing strip. “Inspector Kilonzo!” he shouted over the racket.

  The lead investigator who’d announced the double murder to Max had come two days earlier from Dar es Salaam.

  “You know him well?” Max asked.

  “Mostly his reputation.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “He’s a policeman,” Okambo answered darkly.

  Henry Kilonzo had travelled to the region once when he was in the army. He had told Okambo as much, but no more. A short, powerfully built man with the rigid bearing of a military man, he seemed to be angry with everyone, as if his bad mood was part of his uniform along with his badge and epaulettes.

  Still, Kilonzo’s face brightened as Max climbed down from the plane and shook hands with him. “Welcome to Bukoba, Mr. Cheskin. I’m sorry the circumst
ances couldn’t be better.”

  Max nodded.

  “Come, we have to talk.”

  Kilonzo opened the door to his truck so Max could sit inside. The policeman took the passenger seat. The driver’s seat was occupied by his assistant, Lieutenant Bruno Shembazi, a big man who exuded energy, younger than Kilonzo. Max was squeezed into the back with his bag.

  Compared to the heat and humidity of the coast, the cool air of this region did Max good. For a time, as Shembazi drove toward Bukoba proper, Kilonzo talked about everything except the murders. Then he got around to explaining that he had been sent by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations in Dar es Salaam to solve the crimes. Normally, an officer from the Kagera Regional Police would have taken care of the file, but Valéria Michieka’s reputation and the controversies she’d been in the middle of over the years had moved the government to send someone from the capital.

  “Despite the fact that the crime rate in Dar es Salaam keeps us busy enough already. Just goes to show how important the ministry considers this investigation. And that includes the president.”

  “Lugembe sent you here?”

  “It is said he is much affected by the murder of his friend.”

  His friend?

  Max knew they had always been on good terms. The defence of albinos had united Lugembe and Valéria because of his two daughters, Faith and Clara, who had met a tragic end. But friends? Certainly not. Unless the friendship was recent.

  From the very beginning of her involvement in the albino issue, Valéria understood that the solution to their problems had to come from the government. At the time Lugembe held a strategic position — he was minister of home affairs — and was President Komba’s confidant, so he was an essential ally for Valéria. His support was indispensable. He had shown himself to be sympathetic to the cause, especially since the problem was widening in scope. Over the past twenty years, Tanzania had changed. The country had been setting aside the socialism imposed by Julius Nyerere, the father of independence, whose economic meas­ures had impoverished the country. The new leaders embraced capitalism in all its triumph. The return of the multi-party system, the desire to cut red tape, encouraging tourism in order to compete with neighbouring Kenya … there was just one dark spot: the traffic in albinos gave Tanzania the image of a backward place mired in bloody, barbarous traditions that people thought had been left behind.