by MP Miles
“She’s sick,” Danelle said spitefully. “She’s a dirty whore. I know about it. The dentist told me. I went for a polish. Dr van der Merwe said you can get it from blood. The Four H Club he called it… Haitians – well, that’s no surprise, is it?”
Snyman imagined that made perfect sense to Danelle. It would be no surprise to her that a new disease should originate there. Where else would you expect it to come from? Snyman differed to her in his attitude to apartheid. He had been brought up with mild hints to an orthodox religion. He knew of Jews who had become prominent in the anti-apartheid movement but he remained merely indifferent, his indifference entirely different to Danelle’s fear.
“And then there’s homos, hookers and heroin addicts,” she continued. “At least she was only two of the four. You brought her here. What if we all get it? What would your rabbi say about that?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
At times like this it came as no surprise to Snyman to hear that South African males had the highest incidence of stress-induced heart disease in the world, and the world’s highest per capita suicide rate. He wondered if they also had the greatest number of female psychiatric hospitals. He knew where another patient needed treatment – right there in his kitchen.
The doorbell rang and Danelle, staggering slightly and grateful of the opportunity to be acerbic and tarty, smiled at Nels and let him in.
“In here,” said Snyman.
Snyman showed Nels into his office. Danelle looked after them but Snyman forcefully shut the door.
“Does Elanza know anything?” he asked.
“Not much. He went north. I looked.”
“Did you find him?”
Nels had boxed his rifle and left the corral in the dark, driving slowly into town, but hadn’t seen him. From dawn until midday he’d driven the fifteen kilometres between Messina and Beitbridge six times, slowly at first, becoming quicker as he became angrier. Ralph had gone.
“No.”
“So, we’ll leave it to your contacts, then.”
“And when I find him? What do you want me to do?” asked Nels.
Snyman said nothing.
“I want twenty per cent of what you will have when Elanza dies.”
Nels took Snyman’s silence to mean he agreed and let Danelle show him out. She opened the door for him and let her ripped dress fall off her shoulder. Nels smiled at her and put his mouth close to her ear.
“I don’t want you when you’re drunk, sweetheart. I want you when you’ll remember,” he whispered.
Nels walked out of the door. He’d have her, but later. He thought of his share. Twenty-six million dollars. Yes, Danelle could wait.
Southern Africa
5th March to 12th April, 1982
Nine
Ralph arrived at the border with Zimbabwe, tired after ten days’ walking through the Far North, the Limpopo River and the crossing at Beitbridge in front of him.
He had been spooked two nights previously at a deserted corral, tin sheets banging and rattling around him. With the last of the twilight he’d crossed the main road and spent the night hidden below a riverbank, his bed the sandy bottom of a seasonally dry tributary. In the morning he’d looked around and seen the land bare and clear, as easy to walk on as the road. A direct route across country guided by a railway line would lead him to the border without having to go through the town of Messina, an ugly sprawling shanty already visible twenty kilometres away. It would save an hour. Heading due north around an escarpment he skirted the town by the edge of a hard-baked airport runway and re-joined the railway to Beitbridge, the sleepers echoing under his feet. His last night in South Africa had been spent miserably wet in another dry riverbed just three kilometres short of the border, which at four in the morning had filled with water after a shower and flooded him out, his belongings soaked inside his rucksack.
Over the bridge the road forked and Ralph had a decision to make. The road to the right led north and east to the Great Zimbabwe, a ruined city of five-metre-high stone structures standing without mortar and built by the Shona in the eleventh century. Ralph had picked up a tourist pamphlet at the border and read that it had taken three hundred years to complete. In the 1950s and ’60s Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government put political pressure on visiting archaeologists to deny that the Great Zimbabwe could have been built by African peoples. Ralph had read that, such was the prejudice of the time, Rhodesians needed to be reassured that black Africans couldn’t possibly have had an advanced flourishing community in the 1100s, trading gold and ivory with China and raising cattle on a commercial scale, or build unaided the largest ancient stone structures south of the Sahara. The road from the ruins then led onward through Umtali to Mount Inyangani, the tallest peak in Zimbabwe, before continuing through Harare, the only recently renamed capital, and finally into Zambia north of Kariba. Ralph’s guidebook said that from the top of Mount Inyangani one could look over beautiful red-leaved msasa trees and rocky hills full of wildlife and waterfalls far into Mozambique. Looking the other way, it had always been known for fantastic sunsets and called the ‘World’s View’.
To the left the road also ran north, but west through Bulawayo and into Zambia at Victoria Falls, over seven hundred and fifty kilometres away. Walking there would take nearly a month.
It had been a question hard to resolve. After bagging the highest peak in South Africa with the bearded Zac, the temptation to climb Mount Inyangani proved difficult to ignore, if he forgot about the very real risk of stepping on a land mine while walking anywhere near the Mozambique border.
Ralph turned left, unable to give up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of seeing the Zambezi River fall over a hundred metres at the world’s largest sheet of falling water, Victoria Falls.
*
Angel had been given an office of his own in the basement of the Comitia building. Roux said that no one would see him and if they did they would think he worked as a cleaner. He didn’t care. Roux had installed a phone, and Angel had lined the walls with maps stolen during night-time forays to other departments. The Heining, named after the Afrikaans word for a fence or hedge, wouldn’t come down to the basement. They were a counter-intelligence division known for raiding other government departments looking for classified files left lying about, or even NIS’s own offices after hours checking to see if desks had been properly cleared of secret documents.
Ralph’s route from Johannesburg to Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe–Zambian border hung on the wall in different scales and detail. A sleeping bag sprawled on the floor. Despite his South African citizenship, and NIS being his employer, Angel had been racially classified as ‘Coloured’, the only non-white person working in the National Intelligence Service. He lived in a unique and complex legal situation. He was a South African citizen by virtue of two years’ national service in the South African Defence Force, a black man who had volunteered to join a white man’s army. He was also a British citizen thanks to his place of birth, his British education and language skills the assets that had attracted his employer. This dual nationality made him an ‘honorary’ white person, but a foreigner would never have been employed by the state in such a sensitive position. Angel had to forego the significant privileges that his tatty blue British passport would provide him, not the least being that, thanks to The Group Areas Act, a Coloured person had to live in an area separated from white people. Angel had come to accept it. He liked his home fifteen kilometres east of where he worked, not that he saw much of it. The other Coloured people were friendly, hospitable. His NIS identification gave him authority to travel wherever he liked around the country, but where he lived remained controlled, making it easier to stay at the office. His white colleagues at work sympathised.
He hesitated before picking up the phone.
“Hey, Zelda. Angel.”
“Hey, honey. Thought you’d been arrested.”
“Angel, honey, I’m sorry. No hard feelings, right?”
They had been recent and spirited lovers. Angel vividly remembered how he’d felt at the time Zelda had left him – brief feelings of anger and hate that led quickly to a long lonely emptiness.
“You’ll be okay. I mean, you’re a good-looking man.”
He’d never thought about it. Tough military training had sculpted his body into a hard angularness that hadn’t worn off over time, like a creased origami figure. His face, finer than it should have been and stretched so that his big chin and forehead seemed too far apart, looked like a cartoon of a cowboy or a boxer.
“And so adventurous. You’ll soon find a nice girl.”
“A nice Coloured girl?” he asked.
“Angel, it could never have worked. You know that. We had some fun. A lot of fun. You are a strikingly powerful man.”
“Enough, Zelda, please.”
Angel knew she was right but that only made it more painful. It could never have worked – as well as being illegal. The Immorality Act banned sexual relations between white people and non-whites. Both of them could have gone to jail for seven years. He needed to put it behind him and concentrate on work.
“Do you have contacts at other airlines?” he asked.
“Maybe. What have you got?”
“I’ve got a name. And a route. Sometime in the next two or three months.”
“That’s a lot of tickets to look through.”
Angel thought that if Ralph had planned on seeing Africa before he flew home, it was probably safe to assume he didn’t imagine he could do that in less than two months. His flight back had to be sometime after two months and in time for the short British summer. That would tie up with a six-month visitor visa being issued to him on his arrival in December.
“Phillips R. Joburg to London. Start looking in May. Won’t be after the end of June.”
“You want the date of travel?”
“Yes. And Zelda… cover your tracks on this one.”
“And what do I get?” she asked suggestively.
“More work.”
Angel put the phone down. It rang immediately.
Roux sounded tired. Angel had no idea what he spent his time working on but it wasn’t doing him any good. Zelda, who had a documented record of having sex with anyone she felt needed cheering up, would probably find a way to help him relax, he thought bitterly.
*
Angel went to Elanza’s house and found her in the kitchen.
“Can you manage like this?” he asked.
“I have some help in the day. I need to try when I can.”
She stood making a sandwich. She had a bowl of honey but while searching for a knife she knocked it over. She put both hands on the table and Angel worried she would cry. She looked very thin.
“I have some news,” said Angel. “Ralph crossed at Beitbridge.”
Roux had passed on the message. A flag that Angel had asked to be put on Ralph’s name had surprisingly been acted upon by an observant immigration officer, but stupidly they had let him leave before consulting with NIS.
“I’ve asked them to let me know when he comes back through.”
NIS requests were often ignored. He held out little hope that he’d be lucky twice.
“And I have his return flight details. I’ll follow him to the airport.”
Without doubt Nels would be there as well, he thought.
“He has a budget ticket. No changes allowed to the date of travel. No refunds. Elanza?”
She started crying. He went to her and she put her head on his chest. He’d had little physical contact with white women, just fleetingly with Zelda, and he wondered if simply holding her was breaking the law. He’d ask someone at work. They’d probably laugh. Nervously he held her until she stopped.
“Hope does not kill,” said Angel.
She listened to him curiously.
“You smell odd too. You talk like a fucking baby and smell like one.”
Angel had heard students at university and secretaries in the office saying, while considering him to be an exception, that black people smelt differently to white people. He wondered why.
*
On the road to Bulawayo there were few cars. A man wearing a creased tanned face and a business suit had stopped his vintage Jaguar to give Ralph a lift, but he had declined, enjoying the freedom of walking. He didn’t want to hear the man’s opinions on anything; he had some idea of how the conversation would go.
Zimbabwe had been an independent country for just two years, since April 1980. Ian Smith had gone and Robert Mugabe replaced him. It wasn’t yet peaceful, even though the war between them had been declared over, and tension still existed between the two rival former guerrilla armies of the Shona and the Ndebele. A Methodist minister, Canaan Banana, became President. It was a ceremonial role. The real power resided with the Prime Minister, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Mugabe had quickly established a one-party state and used a North Korean trained security force, The Fifth Brigade, to crush his political rival J Nkomo. Rumours of ethnic cleansing and mass graves of Nkomo’s followers from the Ndebele tribe in Matabeleland abounded. Ralph thought an ex-Rhodesian sports car owner, probably on his way back from a meeting with his stockbroker in Johannesburg, wouldn’t have an impartial view of the situation.
He walked on alone towards Gwanda, the capital of Matabeleland, a sprawling rural town of about five thousand people along a railway line. It was cattle country, an agricultural trading town. A factory made clay bricks from the heavy red soil. In size, shape and economic activity it resembled Ralph’s hometown. The Mtshabezi River could have been the River Stour as it wound through Gillingham in Dorset, twelve thousand kilometres away.
An hour and a half walk out of the town, where the railway ran parallel to the Bulawayo road, a sandy track led west towards the river two or three kilometres in the distance. It looked like a good place for the night. The straight road led to a dusty crossroads with a simple square farm building, then onward to the river and beyond to the Matubo Hills and the Matubo National Park.
Ralph stopped at the farm building and looked around. It appeared deserted. A rough wooden door, swinging on one hinge, flapped against its frame. A sound like a muffled saw, or a cloud of flies, came from inside.
A man came from around the building and looked at Ralph, the whites of his eyes yellow in his black face. He carried a thick stick, knurled into a heavy knob at one end.
Ralph thought a cheerful honest approach might be the best.
“Hi. I wonder if you can help me please. I was looking for a place to camp tonight.”
The man looked at him blankly, unspeaking, the club lying motionless against his leg. Another man, bare to the waist, came and stood by the man with the club, his white hands and forearms blooded red. He wiped them clean on a grey towel that said ‘Sun City’.
“Did you look inside?” the white man a
sked.
Ralph realised he’d made a mistake. He shouldn’t have stopped at the farm building but continued on to the river. He’d need to be more cautious in future. He deliberated running but the building stood at a crossroads of straight tracks with nowhere obvious to hide. A shiny new Toyota Land Cruiser parked by the side of the building had its engine running to keep the cab cool.
“Did you walk from Gwanda?”
“From Naboomspruit.”
The man stopped cleaning blood from his arms and glared at him. It wasn’t a look of friendly curiosity.
“It’s a town 215 kilometres north of Joburg. I walked from there,” Ralph explained.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
Ralph said nothing.
“Did you look inside the building?” he repeated.
The man walked towards him, still wiping his white hands.
“You know the conservationists want to protect them, to protect the ‘environment’. But hey, we’re part of the environment too, right?”
He glanced back at the black man with the club.
“We’ve hunted these animals for generations, for food and to protect our crops. Now we should save them? For who? For the recreation of a few privileged tourists?”
He looked at Ralph, his faded rucksack, his dusty boots and frayed shorts.
“Present company excepted.”
He stood in front of Ralph now.
“You know the only way to conserve Africa’s wildlife is to link it all together. The needs of the wildlife, the environment,” he hesitated, “and the people.”
He put his hand on Ralph’s rucksack.
“Do you have a camera? Did you take any pictures?”
Ralph pulled the rucksack away.
“Of course not.”
He needed a way out now; a camp somewhere down the road, anywhere but here, was suddenly very appealing.
The man looked at him curiously.
“Did the sight of blood upset you?”
