‘But on this island no property is sold to a foreigner without me hearing about it. Me and the two big agencies. We hear about almost all of the bigger lettings to outsiders as well,’ he added.
Despite its hundreds of thousands of residents, in practice Zanzibar was just a small village spread out across a big island, Ngowi said.
‘So you would know if a foreigner had bought a flat in Freddie Mercury’s building, even if it happened through a local intermediary,’ Mari said.
It had become apparent to Ngowi that Mari was looking for information, not a flat.
‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘But there aren’t any foreigners living in the Camlur’s building.’
Mari nodded. They had probably found all the information they would get from this office. She stood up, thanking Omar Ngowi and walking to the door with Lia and Paddy following after.
‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ Ngowi asked.
‘We have a lot of things we need to look into,’ Paddy said congenially.
‘You tourists,’ Ngowi sighed. ‘It is like watching a nature programme. Always rushing from one thing to the next.’
They were already on their way out the door when they heard Ngowi speak again.
‘The Camlur’s building doesn’t have any foreign owners,’ Ngowi said. ‘But that isn’t Freddie Mercury’s family’s real home. They only lived there some of the time, and Freddie almost not at all. You probably don’t have time to hear about where the Bulsara family’s real house is located though.’
Freddie Mercury’s extended family had lived in several buildings in Stone Town. It was no wonder the information about them was confused and that it was misused to lure tourists in.
Once they were all sitting around his small table again, Omar Ngowi told them about all of the places. Taking out a well-worn map, he showed the location of each building as he described it.
There were a couple of places where Freddie Mercury had lived with his parents, when he was still little Farrokh Bulsara. There were several buildings where other family members had lived. At least one aunt had lived in the Zanzibar Gallery building, and right next to the square near the old post office was another similar building.
Further out of town, on Nyerere Road, was the Zoroastrian temple the family had attended. The Bulsara family was from India and were adherents of the teachings of the Prophet Zarathustra. The temple had deteriorated to the point of uselessness, but in its day it had been beautiful.
‘They say Freddie went there too,’ Ngowi said. ‘But there aren’t many who would really know, and their memories are beginning to be frail.’
The island was full of places with connections to the Bulsara family. Ngowi pointed out a place in Stone Town along the shore: the Shangani Street swimming beach where Freddie swam as a child with his friends. Outside the city was another similar place at a small cove.
‘Achatina Beach,’ Ngowi said.
That was a new name. Before it had never really had a name. For a long time it had been a popular swimming spot, and Freddie was known to have gone there often. The boys roamed the island, and of course only men and boys could swim freely with others watching, Ngowi pointed out. Nowadays swimming was not allowed on Achatina Beach because the whole area was protected. Nearby there were some caves where a rare mollusc named Achatina reticulata lived.
‘There aren’t any of the snails on the beach,’ Ngowi said. ‘But they still call it Achatina Beach. People think it is good that at least some of the beaches can’t have expensive hotels built on them even if it is for the sake of a snail that no one ever sees.’
The Bulsara family had been upstanding members of the community, and many older people remembered them well. But what little Farrokh had turned into was a more difficult matter to swallow. For Muslims, Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality was a complicated issue, and although the island no longer boasted a strong Zoroastrian religious community, Mercury’s entire public persona was at stark variance with that tradition as well.
People had tried running Freddie Mercury tours of Stone Town to give visiting foreigners a chance to walk in the singer’s footsteps. There were plenty of interested tourists, but the efforts tended to sputter because the more conservative locals frowned upon the idea. Once there had even been talk of a Freddie Mercury statue, just for the tourists, but the idea disappeared with a whimper rather than a bang.
‘I don’t understand what the big problem is,’ Ngowi said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the tourists we see around here all the time. Women wearing almost nothing and men holding hands. But we also have our Tanzanian traditions. And Muslim traditions.’
Freddie Mercury’s actual childhood home was located in the more rambling part of Stone Town, Shangani. The area was made up of tumbledown buildings, some of them more than a hundred years old, and the alleys that snaked between them. Mercury’s home was simple, a white, two-storey building with dark front doors made of thick timbers. The beautiful old doors were the only thing that differentiated it from all the others.
‘The building is not for sale,’ Ngowi rushed to point out. ‘I’ve checked many times.’
But the neighbouring building had been sold recently. Two years previously a foreign-owned company had purchased it.
‘Does the owner live in the building?’ Paddy asked.
Ngowi didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about the owner, but at the time of purchase he had heard rumours that the sale happened because it was next to the Bulsara family’s old house.
Zanzibar was like a small village, the agent repeated, but one could do almost anything to the buildings of Stone Town, any kind of renovation you wanted, without attracting any attention. If the owner stayed on the right side of the authorities, no one came snooping behind the thick walls of the houses to see what was going on inside.
‘Can you find out who owns the building?’ Mari asked.
Ngowi glanced to the side and thought. Even before he had his mouth open, Mari had the banknotes ready in her hand.
‘Of course we will compensate you for your trouble,’ Mari said.
‘That isn’t necessary,’ Ngowi said.
With his eyes he counted the total Mari was holding.
‘But it is true that I will need a little help to get this information,’ he said. ‘A little more help.’
Mari added a couple more notes from her wallet. The agent gave no indication he had seen any of this.
‘I need to make a few phone calls,’ he said. ‘It will take time. Here you can’t always get people on the phone instantly, unlike me.’
An hour later they had one address and two telephone numbers.
Lia stared at the piece of paper in Mari’s hand. When Omar Ngowi had rung his contacts, none of them had understood the Swahili conversations or even realised he had found the numbers until he started writing them on the paper before their eyes.
One of the phone numbers belonged to a man who had killed five people and maybe more. The other belonged to the local man who served as the intermediary for the purchase of the building.
‘Why are these numbers important to you?’ Ngowi asked.
There was no suspicion in his eyes. He was not looking for more money, Lia realised. He was interested because three foreigners had appeared in his office asking strange questions. A temporary bond of secrecy had developed between them and Ngowi, and he wanted to help them achieve their goal, whatever it was.
Paddy looked at Mari without answering Ngowi’s question. Lia didn’t know what to say.
‘You know that most people in the world are good and decent,’ Mari said to Ngowi. ‘And then there are those who aren’t. And a small number of them are truly sick.’
Ngowi froze. He looked at Mari silently and then nodded almost imperceptibly.
‘This address,’ Mari said, looking at the piece of paper. ‘Next to Tippu Tib’s house in Shangani?’
That was how the addresses of the old buildings went sometimes, Ngowi explained – r
elative to known landmarks.
‘In Stone Town there are many alleys with no names. Or if they have a name, it is only Swahili and not written anywhere.’
Tippu Tib was an important person in the history of the island, a notorious slave trader who lived in the 1800s. His beautiful house was on the verge of collapse. No one kept it up, although some families did live in it. Next to it, on an unnamed side street, was the Bulsara family’s old home.
Mari asked Lia and Paddy to follow her outside for a moment.
‘We can’t ring these numbers directly,’ Mari said once they were out of the office.
The killer would realise instantly that something strange was going on if he received a call from a foreigner. They had to contrive some way of approaching him, of luring him out of the house in such a way that he wouldn’t have time to suspect anything.
‘Do you still want me to look for a flat for you?’ Omar Ngowi asked from the door.
‘No,’ Mari said. But she did still have one more request.
‘If I want to make contact with this foreign owner through his local intermediary, how would I go about it? What could be an urgent reason for the intermediary to ring the owner?’
The question surprised Ngowi.
‘Do you mean something like a problem with the plumbing?’
Nothing so directly tied to the structure itself, Mari said. Something more like red tape, a permit issue requiring immediate attention.
The agent thought for a moment.
Recently a huge property hullabaloo had taken place in Stone Town, he said. A state official had come from the mainland demanding a census of all residents living in buildings older than the 1980s.
‘The lists are never right,’ Ngowi said. ‘They’re always missing all manner of information. Someone in Dar es Salaam got it into his head that old buildings have to be protected and so all of the resident lists had to be checked. No one in the government wants to put a shilling into restoring the buildings, but they had to pretend to do something.’
The government representative had demanded that the Zanzibari property officials immediately visit all of the old buildings, list the residents and take their signatures for the archive. A terrible row ensued, mainly because people were afraid of getting caught for under-the-table lease arrangements and because most regulations from the mainland were viewed as unwelcome fiats as a matter of course.
‘But people obeyed. Everyone was listed,’ Ngowi said. ‘And a week later the lists were behind the times again. No one reports anything to the authorities here that they can get away without reporting.’
Mari thanked Ngowi for his help.
‘What would it cost for you to forget we were ever here?’ Mari asked.
Ngowi picked a wood block up off the ground next to the building and wedged the door to his office open for easy customer access.
‘I’ve already forgotten,’ he said. ‘I watch you tourists like a nature programme, and then forget you when it is done.’
47.
They had to keep moving as long as they had daylight, Mari said.
They were gathered in her room at the hotel again. The generator was chugging away somewhere – they had asked the hotel to turn it on even though it was daytime because they had to have the ceiling fan. It was still hot though.
Lia stared at the piece of paper on Mari’s desk. It burned in her mind. The killer’s address and telephone number.
Of course even people like that have flats and phone numbers. They have parents, maybe jobs, maybe friends.
Although probably not this man. At least not any more.
Knowing the man’s address and telephone number felt frightening. The thought of ringing the number was even more frightening.
They had to prepare quickly. While Mari was polishing her plan, Rico and Paddy went and used a fake identity to hire them a van. Then they rechecked their gear. All Lia needed was for Paddy to bring along a weapon she could use if the need arose. She didn’t want to think any further ahead than that.
Planning the phone calls took the most time. Mari and Lia tried to learn what they could online about Tanzanian housing officials and regulations – the task would have been easier, but almost everything available was in Swahili.
They looked up information about the two phone numbers they had. They quickly found the second man, the go-between in the house purchase, in several different registries and business records. Audax Mkapinga was what the Zanzibari called papasi, a tick. One of those small-time businessmen and hustlers who were always trying to sell all sorts of services to anyone who came to the city and who were hard to get rid of.
The other number didn’t turn up any public information. Not the name of the killer, not any other contact information.
They spent time weighing the risks associated with the task ahead.
‘There could be anything in that building,’ Mari said. ‘Other people. Traps. Explosives.’
But Mari and Paddy were working on the assumption that the killer was acting alone. They would have to look for possible traps when they went in.
Lia realised they weren’t talking about what else they might find in the building. The bodies of two men, Theo Durand and Aldo Zambrano.
They went through the plan over and over again.
How they would travel. Which of them would do what. What things they couldn’t let the killer do no matter what.
The plan was to get him out of the house momentarily, overpower him and take the building. They didn’t know who was in the house, and he might have help.
During these hours and conversations, Lia learned some new things. The Studio had never just been the exciting bunch of do-gooders she had thought. It was a strike team. When necessary, their skills and determination could combine in dangerous displays of power. The Studio was Mari’s weapon. All of their abilities were at Mari’s disposal against the enemies she chose.
Mari, Paddy and Rico spoke of what was ahead of them in a way that told Lia volumes. They had faced frightening adversaries before.
When a knock came at the door and a strange man appeared, Lia wasn’t even surprised. Broad-shouldered and silent, Ron was only introduced to her. The others already knew him.
Ron was one of Paddy’s most experienced associates, a former bodyguard whom Paddy had trained as a private investigator.
‘You didn’t think I was going to let you run around this island without any security, did you?’ Mari asked Lia when the others weren’t listening.
Lia didn’t have any answer for that. Yes, that was what she had thought, but now that Ron stepped into the light, having a bodyguard felt natural. Mari had hired Ron to protect them from a distance. He had been with them the whole time, keeping an eye on the hotel’s security, watching whether anyone was following them.
Ron knew what kind of man they were looking for. What he hadn’t known was that the plan was actually to catch him, but the thought didn’t faze him.
‘There aren’t very many of us,’ he said, glancing at Paddy and Rico.
‘Mari knows quite a bit,’ Paddy said. ‘And so does Lia.’
‘Still,’ Ron said.
They went over the plan one more time with him. That was enough for Ron.
‘You don’t know what’s going to happen there once you have him,’ was his only comment for Mari. He knew who was in charge of the operation.
‘No, we don’t know,’ Mari admitted.
‘It doesn’t matter much though,’ Ron said. ‘We have to take this maggot out. Let’s get to work.’
They located Audax Mkapinga simply by ringing him. Rico routed the call through an online service so Mkapinga wouldn’t be able to tell where it was coming from. He picked up immediately.
‘Hello,’ Paddy said. ‘I’m looking for Audax Mkapinga.’
‘I’m him!’
‘Where are you right now?’
Near the House of Wonders, Mkapinga said in surprise.
‘Thanks,’ Paddy said and
rang off.
‘Won’t he be suspicious since the call ended so abruptly?’ Lia asked.
‘We aren’t going to give him time for that,’ Mari said.
Everyone in Stone Town knew the House of Wonders, Beit al Ajaib. It was one of the most famous buildings in the city, a palace built in the 1880s. It was the first building in Zanzibar to get electricity, the first building in East Africa with a lift, and once it had been inhabited by a sultan who kept wild animals chained in the courtyard. Its unusual history had given the building its name. Once it had also functioned as a government building with British officials working there – including Freddie Mercury’s father, Bomi Bulsara. Some time ago it had been turned into a cultural museum.
Although the building was decaying and a herd of papasi on the prowl for tourists roamed outside instead of the wild animals, there was still something special about the building, Lia thought as they arrived.
The House of Wonders Past.
A noisy surge quickly surrounded them. The peddlers could easily provide anything from taxi rides to drugs.
Where was Audax Mkapinga? Paddy quietly asked one of them. The man motioned towards the building.
Mkapinga did not have a reputation on the island as an actual criminal. They had checked that much, but they had no way of knowing what kind of man he was beyond that. That was why they didn’t go straight inside to find him, instead waiting until they came across him leading a group of three tourists.
Mkapinga did whatever jobs he could find in Zanzibar. Which included feeding made-up stories to visitors in the House of Wonders.
‘The Sultan would ride into the building on an elephant,’ they heard him telling the travellers. ‘That was why the main doors were built so wide.’
Lia and Rico followed Mkapinga and his tour group from a distance. Mari and Paddy just made sure they got a good look at him and then went to wait outside.
Ron was inside but hidden, ready at his post.
Black Noise Page 29
