Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  She looked at the entrance to the adjacent hotel. After thinking for a second, she asked the others to wait and entered the building.

  She was only gone a couple of minutes.

  ‘I guessed as much,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the only place.’

  The hotel receptionist had told her that some of Mercury’s family had lived in the Zanzibar Gallery’s building at one time, but it wasn’t Freddie Mercury’s home.

  ‘They just marked a house on a main street with a connection to the Bulsara family so tourists would find it,’ Mari said.

  ‘They can’t do that,’ Lia huffed.

  This was Africa, Paddy reminded her. ‘That sort of thing is perfectly normal here. It’s just a way of making sales. And they probably think they’re doing the tourists a favour by not making them have to wander around looking for some out-of-the-way place.’

  Lia was shocked. Travellers were constantly coming to the island and taking pictures of this building as if it were Freddie Mercury’s childhood home. They had just seen people with cameras in front of the shop. Tourists took these pictures home and told their friends about the find they had made. Thousands of pictures were floating around of the birthplace of Freddie Mercury that wasn’t genuine.

  ‘Where is his house really?’ Lia asked.

  Following the directions she had received from the hotel, Mari led them away from Kenyatta Road. Here again was an old building, but the windows were closed. A sign hung on the main door: Camlur’s Restaurant.

  They couldn’t get into the restaurant to look around since it appeared to be closed, but one side door was open, and housed some sort of bar. Mari wanted to go in alone again. Lia thought this was strange until she grasped the reason.

  Mari thinks she’s going to recognise him. If the man is in there, Mari will notice him.

  ‘What do we do if he’s in there?’ Lia asked Paddy. Paddy’s gaze was steady and his voice was quiet.

  ‘Everything has been planned,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid. He doesn’t have any way of knowing who we are.’

  Mari returned and described the building. Of course after so many years and so many renovations, no signs remained of the building’s former residents. The bar staff were sick of hearing questions about Freddie Mercury. That was strange once you took into consideration that the building’s history was its only selling point and everyone sitting at the tables was a tourist. But they had brushed aside enquiries about the Mercury family’s connections with little more than shrugs.

  Rico thought he knew the reason why.

  ‘They don’t want to call attention to Mercury because Zanzibar is a Muslim area.’

  Having a famous gay artist’s fans constantly running around their city was a serious embarrassment for the island’s Islamic powers that be.

  ‘That’s why you hardly see anything about Mercury living here.’

  It was true, Lia realised. They had only seen that one sign on the wall of that one shop. The Camlur’s Restaurant building didn’t announce the fact even though the locals all knew the history. Down near the ferry terminal was a tourist bar named Mercury’s with pictures of the singer on the walls, but that building didn’t have anything to do with the Bulsara family.

  They walked to the shore and found a restaurant where they could sit outside in the muggy evening air. After a quick meal, they moved back to the hotel, finding their way by the beams of their small torches.

  Mari asked Lia to join her in her room for a moment before going to bed. Mari’s room was on the first floor. They sat near the wide-open window, the shutters turned out towards the night.

  If they had been in London, this would have been time for a nightcap, Lia thought. Alcohol wasn’t offered casually on the island though – the locals sold drinks to tourists but weren’t constantly forcing them on you.

  Interpol and the British police would come before long, but they didn’t know precisely when, Mari said, thinking out loud.

  ‘It could still be a while,’ she said. ‘They have to work their way through the bureaucracy.’

  Time was running out. More than a day had passed since they had arrived on the island.

  ‘Now we have to try to sleep,’ Mari said. ‘Tomorrow something is going to happen. It has to.’

  Mari had sensed Lia’s concern.

  ‘We’re prepared for lots of possibilities,’ Mari assured her. ‘And the police are coming.’

  They listened to the silence of the old stone city. Nights were so dark here they needed their own word, Lia thought.

  ‘Sysipimeä,’ she said.

  Mari nodded. ‘It’s too beautiful a word for this though,’ she said.

  Coal black so thick the circles of light cast by candles and lamps seemed infinitesimal. A black moment with the feeling that an explosion could happen anywhere at any moment.

  ‘This place needs fire now,’ Mari said. Burning bonfires. The island needed enough fire to do away with the dark.

  45.

  No position was painless.

  Aldo Zambrano lay on the ground and let the pain be. He had to try to think of something else. He couldn’t think of this because if he thought of how much pain he was in, he would start to cry and his face would hurt.

  The conditions for human existence were simple. That was what his professor at home in Cosenza had taught. List the conditions for human existence, the professor had demanded, and they had listed them: oxygen, food, water.

  Those are not the conditions for your existence, the professor said. Two things make human life possible: civilisation and debate. Without these, man becomes an animal.

  He was wrong.

  The condition for survival was the lack of pain. There was nothing else but that, Aldo now knew. There was life without pain and life with pain, and talking about anything else was pointless as long as this kind of pain existed.

  Aldo stank of pain. He could smell it himself. The festering burns on his body reeked. The penetrating heat made the parts of his skin that could still be called skin sweat. The burned places swelled.

  If Aldo ever got out of here, if he ever got back home, he would teach his professor the true boundary conditions of existence. They depended on the amount of pain. There were two kinds: just bearable and excruciating. As long as The Man was not here, the pain was just bearable.

  But when The Man wanted to cause Aldo pain, mio Dio, the pain was excruciating and consumed him.

  No one could know that kind of pain existed. When The Man first chained him in place in his cell and brought the fire near, Aldo had stared at it in shock, horrified but at the same time strangely, fiercely curious. What would the fire do to him? How could The Man do that? How long could he do that? Would the man really burn him, or was he only threatening? What was going on?

  The Man held the fire near Aldo’s skin. The chains stopped Aldo from fleeing. He struggled but could not get away. The flame warmed a piece of Aldo’s skin. He felt the burning begin and the pain rising. Aldo broke into screams. He was a grown man who had screamed so long he almost went mad from the screaming alone. And when The Man took up the torch again, Aldo thought that now it would be over, and then he saw the man moving the flame to another spot on his body. Aldo began to shriek.

  The first time, The Man had burned him in five places. The fire scorched five holes in him. From then on Aldo was no longer able to understand how many times it happened. As his skin burned, he momentarily lost consciousness only to revive each time in the middle of that horrible agony. Sometimes The Man gave him water – Aldo didn’t understand why, why he didn’t just end it all. Maybe The Man wanted to keep him alive despite the torture.

  In his cell alone, Aldo looked at his burns. He had them on his thighs, his shins, his sides, his arms. He couldn’t see his back, but he had them there too. They looked smaller than he had imagined. The blackened, open, ragged burns were smaller than they felt.

  They hurt constantly. In every position Aldo tried.

  The are
a around the wounds was swollen, stretched and shrivelled skin, and in some places Aldo saw a thin foam. The moisture in his skin was welling out, red and yellow, a bloody froth that looked as if things inside him were trying to get out through the holes torn in his flesh. Aldo no longer felt human. He was only matter, incomprehensible pain and burned meat.

  The conditions for existence. That had been a course at the University of Calabria in Cosenza, during which a grey, slightly dishevelled professor talked for hour after hour on subjects he had spent years reading about. But the professor didn’t know anything about the subject. Aldo would go there and walk into the lecture hall in the middle of the class, interrupting everything. Everyone would stare. ‘Look what man can do to man,’ Aldo would say. ‘Look what the real necessary conditions for human existence are.’

  A sound came from somewhere.

  Aldo realised he was hearing a voice, several voices. The door opened. Steps. No words. Someone made a sound. Was it The Man?

  There were more than one of them. Aldo realised that The Man was talking to someone. The talking stopped. Aldo had definitely heard The Man talking, but now it was quiet.

  A flopping sound. A fall. What fell?

  The pain made Aldo’s hearing more sensitive. For a fleeting moment he thought about screaming. Should he scream for help? But The Man was there. The Man would bring the flame again.

  Aldo listened to something heavy being dragged across the floor. Squeaks. Something opening. A door? A cell door? Small sounds he couldn’t understand.

  And then: a groan. Someone made sounds of pain.

  The Man was torturing someone else. Aldo had heard that before.

  Aldo heard a faint sound from somewhere, and he realised it was his own raspy breathing. Instinctively he had been holding his breath trying to hear what was happening.

  What was happening nearby was over quickly. He heard a door close. The Man was near.

  Aldo caught movement out of the corner of his eye, a fluctuation of light and shadow. A flame. It was moving again.

  Was it coming towards him? It was.

  Aldo closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see.

  He heard the man’s footsteps. Although he squeezed his eyes shut, he could sense the flame of the torch The Man was holding. The smell of smoke. Again.

  ‘Don’t,’ he pleaded.

  He knew it was pointless, but still he pleaded. He had to look. He couldn’t not.

  The Man opened the door and came to him.

  ‘Your turn,’ The Man said.

  ‘No,’ Aldo begged. ‘Don’t… Let me –’

  The man grabbed him, and Aldo howled in pain.

  The Man grabbed him and dragged him to the chains and shackled him to the wall. Again.

  Aldo looked at The Man. Aldo hurt so much he couldn’t think any more. Everything was spinning, but he looked at The Man.

  At least he looked for a moment.

  ‘If you try to talk to the other one, I’ll kill you instantly,’ The Man said.

  Aldo couldn’t make a sound. Everything went blank inside. The Man went to the door and took up the torch. Then he returned to Aldo.

  ‘Soon you will be ready,’ The Man said.

  Aldo stared at the burning torch in the man’s hand.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked. ‘For what?’

  ‘For the pictures,’ The Man said and pushed the torch so it almost touched Aldo’s foot.

  As he began to scream, Aldo knew that another prisoner was close who was hearing all of this. The Man wanted them both to hear what he did to them but not be able to speak to each other. The Man wanted Aldo to scream and the other victim to hear.

  46.

  The text message came sometime after five in the morning. Lia woke up to the alert sound. She had been having a hard time sleeping.

  The text was from Peter Gerrish.

  ‘Ring me. I heard from your work that you’re travelling. Ring me now.’

  The time difference from London was three hours. Gerrish had sent the message in the middle of the night. The police in London were working the case around the clock.

  Lia didn’t ring. She stood up, quickly showered and went to knock on Mari’s and Rico’s doors. She didn’t bother with Paddy’s door – she imagined he had spent the night in Mari’s room.

  ‘It’s good you haven’t rung Gerrish,’ Mari said when they met in the breakfast room. ‘There isn’t any reason to let the police know you’re in Zanzibar,’ she carried on, keeping her voice low enough that the waiter wouldn’t hear.

  He was a little surly at having them wake up so early, but he still made coffee and tea and then went to get fresh bread.

  Lia looked at Mari.

  ‘Did you sleep at all?’ she asked.

  ‘A little,’ Mari said.

  During the night she had had an idea. Several, actually, she said. The most important one was that they might have a way to find out where the killer was staying.

  ‘If he came here to be close to his idol, he might be staying somewhere near where Mercury used to live,’ Mari said.

  ‘In the Camlur’s Restaurant building?’ Lia asked.

  The previous evening the building had looked rundown and rambling. But maybe there were flats there – the restaurant and bar only made up part of the space.

  Lia, Mari and Paddy set out early. Rico stayed at the hotel: he was having problems with battery charging. The charger from the mainland seemed to be working, but the Topo and a couple of other machines’ batteries still didn’t seem to be charging.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ Rico said.

  It was almost as if the refined machines didn’t want to work, in protest at being brought to the hot, damp island, he mused. Batteries were often the weak link in machines. Maybe the problem was in the uneven current. As his last resort, Rico had a power inverter they could plug into the cigarette lighter of a car.

  ‘They aren’t very efficient, but nearly every car in the world has a lighter plug. It’s the only universal power outlet.’

  As they were touring the city, Mari had seen a street-level office advertising flats. The office hadn’t opened yet when they returned to it, but in the window, next to the letting photographs, was a phone number.

  Omar Ngowi arrived ten minutes later, very quickly considering they were in Zanzibar. Ngowi was a slender man approaching sixty whose face always bore a fascinating, odd expression, a combination of a forbearing smile and a dreamy distance from the here and now.

  Ngowi opened his office door, asking them in and encouraging them to sit around a small table. He didn’t have many brochures or the like. His was a small company.

  ‘If I wanted to buy a flat here, what should I do?’ Mari asked immediately after the introductions.

  Curiosity flitted across Ngowi’s eyes.

  ‘You want to buy a flat here at eight in the morning?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Mari said. ‘How would I go about it?’

  ‘Do you have a specific place in mind? A specific flat?’ he asked.

  Not yet, Mari replied. First she wanted to know how to buy or rent a flat on the island.

  ‘Your agency is the only one I’ve seen here,’ Mari noted. ‘Where are all the others?’

  Ngowi shrugged.

  ‘There aren’t many. Only two really, foreign owned, big ones.’

  Selling properties and buildings in Tanzania was a veritable jungle of red tape that cut foreigners off from some rights. In Zanzibar the markets were regulated with even more care because the authorities realised how attractive the sandy beaches of the archipelago were to foreign investors.

  Foreigners couldn’t buy any land or homes in Zanzibar without a local go-between. Frequently people had to found entire corporations with Zanzibari owners to do it. These would serve as a front for the foreign owner and handle all the bureaucracy. Renting had its rules too, but getting around them didn’t require as much creativity.

  ‘This is a place where almost anything is possible,�
�� Omar Ngowi said.

  ‘Are foreign owners’ names recorded somewhere though?’

  ‘Names?’ Ngowi said, leaning back in his chair in amusement. ‘Sometimes the names are known, sometimes they aren’t. Names are relative. If necessary they become commodities as well.’

  Mari smiled back.

  ‘Your real name isn’t Omar,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he admitted openly.

  ‘You use it because it’s easier for foreign business partners to remember and say,’ Mari continued.

  Ngowi nodded. ‘Because they don’t care what my parents thought when they were naming me a lifetime ago. Here in Zanzibar we have many cultures: African and Zanzibari. Then Islamic culture brings its own dimension. And then the strange, rich world of the tourists. Endless excitement. Like a nature programme you can watch hour after hour.’

  Mari laughed.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Ngowi asked.

  When they introduced themselves they had only told him their names and hadn’t mentioned their nationalities.

  ‘Britain,’ Paddy said.

  ‘You are,’ Ngowi said to Paddy. ‘But these ladies, them I would have placed somewhere else. In Europe, yes. Germany? No, not Germany. Scandinavia.’

  ‘We are all from London,’ Mari said, settling the matter. ‘Omar,’ she continued, leaning forward. ‘What would you say if I wanted to buy a flat on Kenyatta Road, in the building with Camlur’s Restaurant?’

  Ngowi did not bat an eyelash.

  ‘I would say you aren’t the first person to ask. People ask occasionally. Maybe once a year. A person will come in who wants to buy Freddie Mercury’s boyhood home and make money on it.’

  Who owns the building, Mari asked.

  Ngowi did not know for certain. He had never found out because there were no flats for sale in the building. Everyone who lived there was local, most of them renting. They weren’t much interested in who used to live there a long time ago. Ngowi only investigated the ownership arrangements of the buildings where flats came on sale. Otherwise doing so was just extra work.