by Mario Bolduc
Pastor Cousins went on. “Teresa knew Valéria and her daughter very well. She worked at their side for a number of years.”
Teresa was a woman in her forties, her hair pulled back and securely fastened with a barrette. She strode up to the microphone as the pastor made way for her.
Max turned and moved toward the front of the room.
16
Pushing his way through the crowd, Max followed Teresa Mwandenga outside and around the back, into an empty lot used for parking, a playground, and an all-purpose space. Teresa walked toward an elegant man standing by a Mercedes, smoking a cigarette. Max recognized him. He’d seen his photo on a calling card attached to a wreath next to the two coffins. The flowers were a gift of the Kagera Farmers Co-operative Bank.
The banker was a tall man with glasses. He wore a serious look, and it seemed to Max that he represented the new Africa that Jonathan Harris had told him about on board his yacht. A modern, enterprising, educated, motivated Africa, ready to lift the continent out of its immobility. For the past few years, men like the banker, rare birds when Max had first come to Bukoba, had sprouted up everywhere, ready to leap into action and shake up the old habits that kept the merchants and local entrepreneurs in their rut.
Had he helped Teresa with her embezzlement? Had he been her accomplice in cooking the foundation’s books?
Mwandenga returning to Bukoba to pay her respects to Valéria and her daughter might be surprising, but her absence would have set people thinking, and the police might have gotten interested in the accountant. She must have known that the two women had said nothing, afraid of damaging the foundation’s finances.
“Madame Mwandenga?”
The two of them turned in unison to look at Max, the banker sizing him up from his great height, above the fray.
“Robert Cheskin,” he said to Teresa. “I was a friend of Valéria and her daughter.”
“Two extraordinary women,” the banker replied. “Everyone in Bukoba loved them. I don’t understand what could have happened.”
“An ex-con, according to the police. He thought Valéria was keeping a lot of money.”
“From Dar es Salaam,” the man added, as if spitting. “No one from here would have lifted a hand against her.”
Except for the albino traffickers, Max thought bitterly. Then he turned to Teresa. “May I have a word with you?”
Teresa glanced at the banker, who threw his cigarette onto the ground, walked toward the hall, and went through the door, bending his head in the process. “What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I thought you were in the Emirates spending the foundation’s money.”
Teresa stared at him. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“You were sure Valéria wouldn’t say anything about the embezzlement. That’s why you came back. But you made a mistake.”
“What are you talking about? What embezzlement?”
“You disappeared with the cash. Maybe even with the help of your banker friend.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
As briefly as possible, Max told her about Sophie’s visit to Lamu shortly before she was murdered, though he kept quiet about how he’d swindled Jonathan Harris.
Teresa listened with rapt attention, seemingly astonished at first, then perhaps with more sadness than anger, not knowing how and why Sophie had invented a story like that. “I didn’t steal anything. I left Bukoba to visit my mother in Arusha, who’s sick. Ask anyone.”
“What about the suppliers who weren’t paid? And the debts that kept piling up?”
“The foundation isn’t rich, but we don’t owe anyone anything except for the usual current expenses.”
Suddenly, it dawned on Max: he’d been conned by Sophie. It was painful and humiliating to have been tricked like a rank beginner. He pictured Sophie in Lamu with her resigned smile, playing the go-between for an innocent fool who saw and heard nothing besides the purring of his own self-assurance. He imagined Sophie contacting Valéria the night she arrived, informing her that, of course, the idiot fell right into the trap, headfirst, without realizing that the ground had disappeared from under his feet. A naive, harmless fellow, so easy to manipulate. A shame they hadn’t thought of this before.
Had Valéria been in on the scam?
Max couldn’t imagine Sophie coordinating an operation like that without her mother’s approval. It would have been so simple for him to call Valéria and check her daughter’s information. But he hadn’t had the presence of mind to do a little investigating on his own.
A perfect amateur.
And a complete disaster that might have turned against the two women and led to their deaths.
Teresa was telling the truth, and that truth was devastating for Max. Until now he’d cherished the illusion that Sophie’s visit and her appeal for help might have been Max’s first step toward reconciliation with Valéria. But the opposite was true. The two women had conspired to swindle him with cold determination that now left him speechless, disoriented, lost.
Valéria’s revenge, he realized. She’d never forgiven him for not revealing the true nature of his “work” from the start, his “business” as a con man, his “vocation” as a professional fraudster. He remembered the sudden end of their relationship that day in Paris in a modest hotel off the Champs-Élysées where Valéria had offered to meet him. She was standing in the lobby in the midst of the students and retired people, packs on their backs, jet lag on their faces, waiting for a noisy room smelling of French cigarettes. In the narrow elevator, inches apart, she avoided his eyes as if he were a stranger she was forced to associate with.
In the room, Valéria relaxed a little, loosened her hair, offered him a drink. Max could feel the change, though he didn’t know why. She asked him how his trip had gone and didn’t wait for his answer. Her forced smile lacked the warmth of their previous encounters. Max understood that something had been broken, but he was in no hurry to discover what. Valéria couldn’t meet his eye, and just looking in his direction seemed to be hard work. Max wasn’t going to offer her a way out.
She opened the window and stood there at length, her back turned, hesitating.
“What’s going on, Valéria?” he finally asked.
“You’re not Robert Cheskin.”
Back in Bukoba, in her house, he might have left a chequebook or a passport or a letter lying around. Valéria looked at him with cruelty in her eyes, horrified but filled with an unhealthy curiosity she could hold back no longer. “Just who are you, really?”
Max revealed his identity, the true one, the one he always kept hidden. He told her about his life as a con man, described the scams he’d mounted alone or with others, here and there around the world, following rich people’s money like those small fish that attached themselves to the hulls of ships on the high seas, feeding off the garbage jettisoned by the crew.
A tense silence followed.
And then, furious, Valéria spoke of the foundation, the importance of her work, her mission. And her obligation to maintain an exemplary attitude at all times. If she made a misstep, she wouldn’t be the only one to pay; all the albinos who depended on her initiatives would suffer, too. How could he have been so cruel, exposing her to such risk? What had he been thinking?
Max stepped closer to her. “I love you, Valéria. If you want me to stop doing this, if you —”
She wheeled around and slapped him as hard as she could. He drew back, surprised by her strength — she was as surprised as he was, as if her hand had taken on a life of its own beyond her control.
Before he could say or do anything, she threw open the door and dashed down the stairway, pushing through the grey-hairs and the backpackers as she went.
Max ran after her.
On the sidewalk, he searched for her. He was gasping for breath as if he’d almost drowned. Quickly, he ran to the Champs-Élysées and spotted Valéria among the crowds of pedestrians at the corner of the next stree
t.
When he caught up to her, she turned and spoke. “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have lied to me all these months.”
“Please try to understand.”
His love for her was the most precious thing in the world, he pleaded, his words tumbling one over the other in his haste to convince her. He lied to protect her. But now that things were out in the open, he realized his arguments were worthless. Could anyone trust a liar and a con man? His love for her could be no more than another fraud, a bait-and-switch, a mirage.
“Go away. Disappear. I don’t want to see you again, ever.”
In tears, Valéria disappeared into a crowd of onlookers, showing him what it meant to desert someone. When he boarded the plane to New York later that day, Max was good and drunk.
At JFK Airport, in a sodden, nauseated state, he came across a special issue of the Wall Street Journal featuring a battery of statistics about the “new Africa” that everyone was so eager to believe in. Instead of AIDS, famines, and dictators, another Africa was emerging, and the media were only just realizing it, an Africa of initiative and bold enterprise, the best-kept secret of the twenty-first century.
The usual media crap.
Max collapsed into the first taxi he found and was delivered to his apartment on Sixth Avenue. He had three different ones in Manhattan under three different names, a way of covering his tracks in case Interpol started catching up to him and his activities.
For days he stayed inside, a prisoner of himself. The blinds drawn, alone in the darkness but for a bottle of Johnny Walker, he tried and failed to get Valéria out of his mind. She slipped into every thought, loomed in his dreams, turning night and day into an endless nightmare he thought he’d never escape. Valéria … he still loved her, though he’d made her a victim of his lowdown conduct, his half-truths, his unbelievable inventions. He was the great con man, but she saw through him with amazing ease, and now he was shrinking into nothing, alone, in an anonymous room without a past, without a future.
Max brought his Jeep to a stop in front of a small house by the lake, outside the city. The water was choppy that day, and the waves broke against the barrier at the edge of the property. Teresa Mwandenga was standing at the front door. Max had requested a meeting with her after the funeral. She ushered him into her house. If she’d been guilty of embezzlement, she hadn’t found a way to spend the funds yet. The little house was clean and well kept and seemed on the new side, but it was no castle. In the kitchen where Max stood, the appliances were modest and showed no sign of being the lavish property of an ambitious schemer. Compared to most people in Bukoba, Teresa was doing well, but this wasn’t opulence by any means.
A man appeared in the doorway that led to the living room.
“This is Matthew, my husband,” she said.
Max tried to reassure him. He simply wanted to continue the conversation they’d begun after the funeral. Clear up a few things. And understand why Sophie had cooked up this incredible lie. What was the point, and was Valéria in on it?
“They arrested the guy who did it,” Matthew announced.
“Yes, they did.”
It was too soon to challenge Inspector Kilonzo’s competence.
Matthew sighed, then stepped aside as if giving Max permission to be alone with his wife and ask her questions. “Let’s just get it over with” seemed to be his attitude.
Loaded down with work during the day, Valéria often had to wait until evening before tending to the foundation’s administrative tasks. There was always a form to fill out, an official document to complete, a pressing demand from some self-important ministry, or from Harold Scofield in London, who always had priority.
Valéria had become increasingly involved in the foundation over the past few years, explained Teresa. The administrative part of her job was heavier than ever, forcing her to take more time away from her regular clients. Luckily, she could count on Sophie, who helped lighten the load. Before leaving the office in the evening, Teresa tried to wrap up as many files as possible with Valéria.
“On the day she was killed,” Max asked, “did you work with her as usual?”
“Yes.”
“How did she seem?”
At first Teresa kept silent. Then she glanced over at Matthew, who was pretending to read a newspaper by the window. “Anxious,” she admitted to Max, “as if she had a premonition. I told Kilonzo.”
So the policeman had questioned her, something he’d forgot to inform Max about. He must have caught up to Teresa at her mother’s house in Arusha.
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Had Valéria received any threats recently?”
“I don’t know. But she was worried. Since her trip to Ukerewe, she was absent-minded, didn’t seem to listen, spent her time daydreaming instead of concentrating on her work. When she heard a noise outside, she jumped. I’d never seen her so agitated.”
“Ukerewe? The Albino Island? What was she doing there?”
She went to discuss expanding the recently built school, the one Harold Scofield had mentioned. It was a last-minute trip, and she was gone only three days. Max asked Teresa if she remembered the exact date.
“Yes, it was at the beginning of the month.”
“How did she travel? By plane?”
“No.”
“With a driver, or with Sophie?”
“Alone. She took the Land Cruiser.”
Strange. Valéria didn’t like driving, and in Tanzania she was never alone at the wheel. It didn’t make sense, her insisting on making such a long trip without a driver. Teresa felt the same, which was why she’d been surprised.
“What did Sophie think about all that?”
“She never mentioned it.”
“Did you overhear any conversations? Was there tension between them?”
“No.”
Max had no idea why Valéria would have travelled to Ukerewe, but she went on her own and returned upset. It seemed unplanned and out of character, and Teresa was in the dark about it.
The trip must have been difficult, Max thought. More than four hundred kilometres on rough roads to Mwanza, then the ferry to Ukerewe. Valéria could have taken a plane, which she usually did when she went to Dodoma or Dar es Salaam to defend her cause in front of some bureaucrat. Yet she chose the Land Cruiser despite the long distance and the miserable road system. A person would really need a very good reason to make the trip that way.
“Wasn’t Sophie surprised that her mother decided to leave like that, on her own?” Max asked.
“If Sophie was worried, she didn’t tell me.”
Sophie had to know the reason for the trip. Otherwise she would have shared her concern with Teresa. And there was something else, too: Valéria’s quick trip took place just as Sophie was arriving in Lamu to make her appeal to Max.
Before he thanked Teresa, he asked her, “Did she ever talk to you about Daniel?”
“Daniel?”
“A little boy. She might have mentioned him to Sophie.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone by that name.”
17
Peter Sawyer sat behind his desk, holding the small plastic bag containing the two locks of hair — one brown, one blond — which Roselyn had found in her husband’s album. Peter studied them, as if he could, by some still-hidden property, discover their significance simply by fiddling with the bag. Roselyn had finished sharing the story of her discovery, and the worry that had grown in her since.
The first lock was tightly curled. More frizzy than curly, really, perhaps a black person’s hair. Short — likely a man’s. The other lock a long, fine strand. A woman’s?
“Did you know about the album?” Roselyn asked.
“No. Neither did Norah, I don’t think. She never mentioned it, at least.”
“Albert’s little secret.”
“A strange obsession, isn’t it?”
Roselyn frowned. “That’s what scares me. An ob
session.”
He’d chosen to live out his days in a room with a view of the penitentiary where he’d plied his trade as an executioner. Another sign of his obsession, one that Roselyn had missed, too focused on the separation he’d insisted on. She’d been turned in on herself, licking her wounds, and hadn’t noticed the deterioration of Albert’s faculties.
“And what about the victim’s parents?” she asked. “Anything new on their end?”
Peter shrugged. His theory wasn’t looking good these days. After having shared the relevant information with the police, he’d run out of steam. All his suspects had rock-solid alibis, or they’d become exemplary citizens. That had been a hard blow to Peter, though Roselyn had seemed relieved. It meant her husband hadn’t fallen prey to some madman out for vengeance.
“Let’s not celebrate too soon. It’s still possible — and you better believe I hope it isn’t the case — that whoever’s responsible for Albert’s disappearance is linked, one way or another, to these executions.” Peter kept fiddling with the plastic bag. “I could ask for a DNA analysis of the hair. At this point …”
Roselyn smiled. A few moments ago she’d asked Peter to conduct a DNA analysis. He’d given her a hard no. It was such an unusual procedure and was sure to raise a few questions. And it meant they’d have to hand over these “new” clues to Kenneth Brownstein, the officer in charge of the file. He wouldn’t be happy to see Roselyn conducting her own investigation, or that she’d kept relevant information from him.
Roselyn had told Peter that his colleague was unlikely to be deploying much effort to find Albert. In his eyes, this whole affair could be summarized by a confused, diminished old man out for a stroll, gone AWOL from his retirement home. Should the authorities really be giving this much importance to such a case when there were so many more urgent matters cluttering his desk?
Of course, for Roselyn, the only thing that mattered was finding her husband. Peter couldn’t give up on her now, especially with all these new leads, new avenues, opening up before her.
The results of a DNA test wouldn’t be available for a few days, anyway, Peter explained. He’d send the samples to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston. They’d compare the result with the FBI’s database.
