by Mario Bolduc
“She’s going to wake up,” Valéria said.
Dickson pulled out his machete.
He grabbed the girl’s leg by the ankle.
And aimed just below the knee.
The child’s screams and whimpering pursued them for hours, when finally Valéria and her father made it back to their village, wild-eyed, exhausted, having spelled each other off to carry the tiny pale leg, white but stained with blood, their trophy, the talisman, the miracle cure that would save Evans from certain death. They’d left the little girl writhing in a bloody puddle of mud, paying no heed to her cries, fleeing in panic, their arms streaked with red, unable to speak or look at each other, accomplices in a crime that was bigger than they were, and from which they would never be free.
What had they really planned to do? To cure Evans — yes, but how? They would have to rub the leg on his knee in order to transfer the healing energy it contained. Either that, or something else. The superstition didn’t come with a user’s manual. They would have to improvise, or turn to a witch doctor. Time would tell.
When they reached the village, Maria was waiting for them in front of their shack. Evans had died. Valéria and her father were too late. Dickson collapsed on the ground, beating his forehead against the earth, cursing God and the entire world, offering his life to get Evans back, while Valéria, at a loss, not knowing what to do, ran through the brush, following the river, holding that ghostly white leg by the ankle. It had been of no use except to cast her farther into a hopeless night that would be her life from then on.
Squatting near the river, she closed her eyes. Along her leg she felt a thin stream of blood, her first menstruation. As if her blood could replace the dried blood and dead leg of the little albino girl. Disgusted, she threw the leg into the river, a grotesque trophy, a sullied fetish that disappeared with the current.
It was late. Sophie was asleep in the next room. Valéria fell silent, still haunted by the story she’d told. The story she’d lived with for all these years. Max put down his glass of Scotch — his third in the past hour — and held her close. She was crying silently.
10
At the Hotel Hillview, where Max had been staying since arriving in Bukoba, the staff dragged its feet with energy, as if trying to punish the floor for some ancestral insult. An indescribable and unpleasant odour arose from the kitchen hidden behind a filthy curtain. The only living beings that took their work seriously were the cockroaches, discreet yet fearsome as they did battle with customers and staff and emerged triumphant every time.
Max chose this palace to be as far as possible from Henry Kilonzo, who had his headquarters along with his sidekick, Shembazi, at the Walkgard, the region’s best hotel, even if the Hillview was the favourite haunt of state employees, at least according to Valéria. Swimming pool, breathtaking view, excellent dining, and other delicacies — the two police officers must have partaken liberally of those things at their accommodations.
For greater freedom of movement, Max had cut back on comfort. At first sight the Hillview seemed to aim for a Ugandan clientele. Did Zuberi the witch doctor’s brother slip his guests fragments of albino bodies as part of the welcome package? The place was a rest stop on the road to Mwanza that bordered Lake Victoria to the south, and bus passengers from Kampala took a break there. After changing buses in Mutukula, travellers were tortured by the bad road that led to Bukoba, often flooded in the rainy season. In the lobby, beat-up burlap or cardboard suitcases stood in a heap. Many women were among the guests who killed time in the lobby, resigned and in good humour, sucking on Coca-Colas. The men were dressed like Jehovah’s Witnesses: black-framed glasses and shiny suits, fashion, African-style.
At the front desk Max interrupted the clerk’s conversation to show her the toy truck he’d picked up at Valéria’s. He asked the clerk if he could find one like it in Bukoba. The question must have been common, since she told him right away where the supplier’s workshop was — at the edge of town.
“Do you want a taxi?”
“No thanks. I’ll find my way.”
Relieved, the woman went back to her phone.
A gasping elevator deposited Max in front of the door to his room. Inside, the light flooded in through large windows stained with bird droppings. A view straight down to the swimming pool two floors below. With it came a strong odour of chlorine.
Max placed the toy truck on the desk and opened the mini-bar. He needed something strong to help get his thoughts in order. Sipping the tepid whisky, he considered Valéria and her tragic destiny. Pain and sadness gave way to questions; to keep from surrendering to melancholy, he had to keep his mind occupied. Max wracked his brain. To find out who had committed the double murder, he’d need to sift through Valéria’s past and find the little thread that hung down, and when he pulled on it, make the entire garment unravel.
First, the albinos.
This lifelong cause she’d been fighting for stemmed from the crime she’d committed with her father. She’d confessed to Max, hoping to lighten her burden, but to no avail. Why had she chosen him to tell her story to? Her helping the albinos was a way of lessening the evil and undoing the horrible act she’d taken part in that day. She’d devoted herself entirely to the cause, giving unstintingly to it and pulling Sophie in with her. No wonder they neglected what was happening behind their backs at the foundation and hadn’t discovered the dishonest accountant’s plot.
Valéria and Sophie did their best to hide the theft and save the foundation. Max understood why they acted carefully and discreetly. They didn’t panic, which was remarkable in itself. If the donors learned that the foundation had been victimized by an embezzler and that its finances had been overseen by a criminal for a number of years, they would have suspended their contributions and demanded a reckoning from Valéria. She’d always treated them with care, knowing that without the donors’ participation her work with the albinos would fail. Her campaign for capital punishment had cooled some of them — most notably the members of certain church groups — and Valéria had to work hard to reassure them all. She couldn’t afford a financial scandal that would imperil her organization.
The disappearance of Jonathan Harris’s million got Max thinking. The murderer was behind it, or so it seemed. The two women had been forced to provide the banking details needed to access the funds, just as Max had done with Harris. But the transaction had taken place more than two hours after the murders, according to Kilonzo’s evaluation. Normally, the killer should have waited to get his hands on the money before liquidating the two women. But what if the money had been cashed in by someone else, like Teresa Mwandenga, the accountant, now in Dubai? That might be. The murderer could have been her accomplice — that was a possibility, too.
At the Women’s Legal Aid Centre, where Max went after he returned from Kagondo, Désirée Lubadsa, a small, energetic woman with sparkling eyes, described Valéria’s deep involvement in the causes of Tanzanian women and the way she did everything in her power to help resolve the many problems they faced. Rapes, divorces, custody of children …
“Valéria might have angered a husband or a family member,” Max suggested.
Lubadsa shook her head. “Not very likely. To my knowledge, no one ever threatened her.”
“Do you have a list of the women she helped recently?”
“No. Everything was done informally. Every week, on Wednesdays, Valéria used one of these offices to talk with the women who would come to see her. That was all.”
“She didn’t use her volunteer work to recruit new clients?”
Lubadsa was scandalized by the insinuation. Valéria didn’t need any more work. On the contrary, she and her daughter had their hands full. Yet Sophie had told him in Lamu that her mother wanted to branch out and find new customers.
Max hadn’t picked up on that at the time.
“Valéria was the very definition of honesty,” Lubadsa said decisively. “She never took advantage of anyone. It was the other way
around, really. In Bukoba, everyone abused her generosity to the point that Dr. Scofield had to talk some sense into her.”
At the start, when she first became interested in the albino cause, Valéria had set up a London office presided over by Dr. Harold Scofield, a retired ophthalmologist. Max had found several emails addressed to him on Valéria’s computer. Each time Max visited, she had long conversations with the doctor.
From his room at the Hillview, Max called Scofield in Greenwich. He identified himself as an investigator from the Canadian police mandated by the High Commission to shed light on the double murder. Thanks to her marriage to Richard Stroner, Valéria and her daughter had Canadian citizenship.
“I’d be glad to help. What do you want to know, Mr. …?”
“Cheskin. Robert Cheskin.”
“We spoke to each other on a regular basis, but we haven’t seen each other for at least two years.”
“What exactly is your role?”
“Concerning the foundation?”
“Yes.”
“Essentially, I reassure donors.”
“Do they send the money to you?”
“At first they did, but not anymore. Valéria and her daughter administered the foundation directly from Bukoba. My job is to promote their work within my own circle which, to be honest, isn’t that wide.”
A year earlier, for example, at Valéria’s request, he’d helped finance the construction of a school on the eastern side of Ukerewe Island. A significant community of albinos had found safe haven there.
The population of the island had no use for the superstitions attached to albinos and didn’t hunt them down as happened elsewhere. Over the years, the place had become an oasis for them and had taken on the name Albino Island. It had the largest albino population in Tanzania.
“That’s why there’s such a great demand for schools and health services,” Scofield explained.
“And was this school actually built?”
“Yes. With foundation money.”
“Were the sums you raised sent directly to Valéria?”
“To her accountant.”
“Teresa Mwandenga?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to the school? Did you see it with your own eyes?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Are you certain it was built?”
“I saw the photos. What are you insinuating, Mr. Cheskin?”
“Nothing. Valéria and her daughter were murdered, and I’m trying to find out why. For now, their work with albinos seems to be the strongest angle.”
“Don’t overestimate the traffickers’ power and organizational abilities. They’re low-life types with no scruples, but they live hand to mouth with little idea of what they’re doing.”
In Scofield’s opinion, this wasn’t a structured business with a hierarchy like the drug or arms trade. On the contrary, it was the work of small, opportunistic operators.
Yet on the evening he travelled to Minziro, Max felt he was witnessing the work of an efficient organization. No one could kidnap a dozen albinos from different villages, kill them, dismember them, and ship their body parts across East Africa without some level of organization and a clear hierarchy with contacts in police forces throughout the region.
Max decided not to follow that line of inquiry just yet. Instead, he asked the doctor, “So you don’t think the traffickers are responsible for the death of the two women?”
“I have no idea. From my point of view, it’s difficult imagining them attacking Valéria and her daughter. What would they have to gain? Nothing.”
Scofield was right. Valéria’s actions in the political arena had made waves, but the traffickers’ schemes wouldn’t be made easier if she disappeared. The death penalty would remain, and so would the initiatives adopted by the Tanzanian government. And with the death of the two women, pressure might just mount on traffickers and their clients, the medicine men. The murder of Valéria and her daughter wouldn’t benefit the albino hunters.
Max would have to look elsewhere.
“Who sent you the photos of Ukerewe? Valéria?”
“The school principal, Naomi Mulunga.”
“When was your last conversation with Valéria?”
“Last week.”
“Did she seem preoccupied?”
“As always.”
“Did she ever talk to you about a boy named Daniel?”
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might.”
“She never mentioned that name,” Scofield told Max.
After a shower and a quick lunch, Max tried to reach Jason Chagula, the lawyer who had defended Awadhi Zuberi and done the same for Samuel Musindo. Max had learned in the meantime from Kilonzo that Chagula was working in Rwanda now, in Kigali, as a consultant for the Kagame government. Max left him a detailed message and asked him to call back as soon as possible but didn’t mention his relation with Valéria.
In the afternoon, Max headed for the address the desk clerk had given him. As he left Bukoba behind, he came upon a street bordered by stalls and restaurants, full of merchants, mostly Indian, their ears glued to their cellphones. They were businessmen chased out of Uganda by Idi Amin and his ethnic cleansing program in the 1970s. They’d stayed on in Tanzania after the dictator had been toppled thanks to Julius Nyerere’s intervention.
In his madness, Idi Amin took it into his head to invade Tanzania and aimed his aggression at the Bukoba region and the western shores of Lake Victoria. This followed years of provocation by the Ugandan dictator whose hatred for Nyerere was legendary.
The two men couldn’t have been more different. Idi Amin was a bloodthirsty brute who could scarcely read and write and whose cruelty was his trademark — he had even been accused of practising cannibalism. Nyerere was educated at the University of Edinburgh, a former teacher, an intellectual who happened to stray into the political arena. Yet in the recordings made public after his death, Idi Amin admitted to loving Nyerere with a passion as strong as the kind a woman has for a man.
Was Nyerere Idi Amin’s fantasy?
Whatever the case, the dictator’s fascination didn’t soften Nyerere. As soon as Ugandan troops bombed Bukoba and invaded northern Tanzania, he sent his army, equipped and funded by the Chinese, to fight Idi Amin’s troops, themselves equipped and funded by Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. The Tanzanians chased their rivals back to Kampala, forcing the dictator to flee to Libya where he found refuge. Later, in 2003, he died in exile in Saudi Arabia.
It was a spectacular operation, but it cast a shadow on Nyerere’s more important and daring policies. In the 1960s, as well as imposing his African version of socialism called ujamaa, he put forward a program to mix populations. The goal was to end social divisions based on tribal criteria and pursue his Marxist-Leninist ideal of equality of all people and the struggle against ethnic nationalism. Criticized at first, the policy produced a more mixed Tanzania, preventing outbreaks and epidemics of tribalism that had tarnished the independence of several African countries. No racial or religious conflict in Tanzania. No ethnic cleansing like elsewhere around Lake Victoria. The annexation of the island of Zanzibar, independent until 1964, was carried out calmly, a first for any African state.
Julius Nyerere went even further in his experiment. He made Swahili, one of the country’s minority languages spoken by no more than five percent of the population, the official language of Tanzania. It was all the more surprising since it wasn’t even his native tongue. The founder of the republic made that decision to prevent one of the more common languages — Sukuma, for example, in the Lake Victoria region — from becoming the dominant one, which would have left the impression that Tanzania was being governed by one particular ethnic group.
That decision encouraged the flowering of Swahili, a language from then on spoken along the eastern coast from the borders of Somalia to south of Zanzibar.
When Max showed a peasant the toy truck, the latter pointe
d out a dirt track that angled off toward the north. A workshop came into view a few minutes later, with a yard filled with objects of all kinds surrounding an old shed. He parked the Jeep and walked over to a man shovelling garbage into a bucket. The man straightened. An Indian with a round belly whose forehead dripped with sweat. He beckoned Max into the workshop. It was filled with toys of all kinds, all made of cast-off objects. Max showed him the little truck.
The man took out his glasses and inspected it. “It’s very well made,” he said, as if commenting on a Makonde sculpture.
“Does it come from your shop?”
“I doubt it. This kind of truck, a dump truck, I rarely see.”
“Did you know Valéria Michieka?”
“The lawyer who was killed? I know who she is, but I never met her. What happened is terrible.”
“Did Valéria come and buy this toy?”
“No.”
“Outside of you, who could she have gotten it from?”
“Everyone.”
These sorts of recycled toys had become all the rage for poverty tourists visiting the continent. These days they were found in every gift shop next to African sculptures, real and fake.
“This one probably comes from Mwanza or somewhere near. Look at this part.”
Max came closer and squinted.
“Right here, you see?” The man pointed out one of the sides of the dump truck. “It’s the logo of the Mwanza Brewery. A popular beer east of Lake Victoria. If you ask me, that’s where your artist lives.”
11
Roselyn had always liked her son-in-law, Peter Sawyer. Solid, honest, though a little too plain for her. After Norah died, she figured he would leave and pursue his career as a policeman elsewhere. But for whatever reason, he chose to stay in Huntsville and never remarried.
