When the call was done she returned to the gazebo and picked up her handbag.
"Miracles still happen, Detective," the Prophet said. "Our God is a powerful God."
"Hallelujah," his followers cried out in unison.
"You're most welcome to join my flock. You can be saved too, and we can remove the curse that's stopping you from getting a husband."
"It's been a pleasure meeting you all," said Detective Munatsi dryly, turning and walking away from them.
Even as she walked on the sloped grass, under the shade, she knew the details of today's encounter would be recalled among the faithful, and, in time, it would become part of the Prophet's legend, proof of his immense spiritual powers.
Detective Munatsi was met by a smug Detective Zvobgo when she walked into the CID offices in Morris Depot. He grinned, revealing fine yellow teeth.
"While you've been on a wild goose chase, we've been doing some real policing here," he said. "Never send a woman to do a man's job."
Munatsi ignored him and went down to the holding cells in the basement. She told the sergeant there to bring the prisoner to the interrogation room.
"You're wasting your time. I got a full confession and everything. Didn't even need to knock him around," Zvobgo said, taking a seat next to her. There was no way he was letting anyone else take credit for the bust.
The prisoner was a thin man with matted hair and a shaggy beard. The chains on his wrists jingled as he walked. He sat opposite the two detectives and smiled. He stank of urine and the streets.
"God himself told me to do it. Pastor Miracle was the Antichrist, 666, sent here to deceive the faithful and lead them astray. The end of days is nigh."
"What did you kill him with?" Detective Munatsi asked.
"A gun."
"Where is it?"
"I threw it away… into a storm drain."
"Cut and as dry as biltong," said Zvobgo standing up. "I have the rest of the confession on tape."
Munatsi took the folder from him and read it. The murderer was John Makoko, of no fixed abode. Why would he bother disposing of the firearm if he intended to turn himself in anyway? She wondered where a man like him could acquire a firearm. This was not South Africa where every Tom, Dick and Harry had a piece.
A fresh-faced cadet was leaving the office just as Detective Munatsi knocked on the door. Supt. Chiweshe asked her to come in. The carpet on the floor was threadbare and worn. There were dusty files on every available space along the walls. A small Zimbabwean flag sat next to the blue ZRP flag on his desk.
"Makoko didn't do it," Munatsi said.
"I know."
"He's a lunatic, but not a murderer. And guess whose church does outreach work and feeds him from time to time?"
"I know," said the older man. "But he's going down anyway. The Commissioner-General himself wants this case shut down. No ifs, no buts."
Detective Munatsi threw her badge on the desk. "Consider this my resignation."
"Where's your gun?" Supt. Chiweshe asked.
"You know I don't carry."
"Then you can't resign. I've watched enough American dramas to know you need both to quit." The superintendent stood up and went to the window. "They really got to you didn't they?"
Munatsi crossed her legs. She picked up a pen on the desk and twirled it with her fingers.
"Hear me out, the prosecutor owes me a favor. We'll fudge this thing—get Makoko committed to Harare Hospital as a psych case. It's bad, but nothing like prison or the death penalty. That's the best I can do." He turned to her with a shrug and sat back down. "In this line of work, you have to let the devil take his hindmost. I would offer you a few days off, but we're short of manpower as it is. You're the last good cop left in this department and don't let anything ever make you forget that."
Supt. Chiweshe opened a drawer in his desk and brought out a lunchbox. He reached down a second time and retrieved a bottle of vodka and two plastic cups, pouring a generous measure in each one. "Have a peanut butter sandwich," he said. They could hear the stomping of cadets drilling in the distance. The two of them ate and drank silently in that hot office.
"It's no consolation, but word from up top is we might get paid this Friday."
Red Scare
by J. M. Taylor
Crewman Blake was lonely. He'd been stationed at the Quincy base B-40 for four months, and still they called him Greenhorn. And he still couldn't get used to this damn New England winter. Other guys had families nearby, but Blake was only nineteen, just out of Ft. Bliss, and didn't know a soul.
The duty wasn't too bad, despite the constant dangers. Why would they let a kid like him handle something called Red Fuming Nitric Acid? He was just a hayseed from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Climbing into the radar dome, he'd nearly slipped, not realizing how icy the metal steps could get—and standing guard duty with that wind coming off the ocean? Jeez, what kind of Red would be out on a night like this? Even the dogs snarled at him, as if they thought he was maybe a spy himself.
But then he remembered that in Russia, it was always winter. He guessed any kind of Red would be out on a night like tonight, and probably thinking of swimming at the beach, too.
During his twenty-four hours on, he kept busy enough to push away the loneliness. Even the other guys razzing him about his accent and his acne didn't get to him too much when he had to concentrate on attack drills. But when he was off the next twenty-four, he couldn't just sleep it all away. In the mess hall, he'd sit alone, nursing his watery coffee. Off base, there wasn't much to do. Most people around there worked as much as he did, mainly building ships or other factory jobs, and when they got off work, they hit the bars or their wives. Once, he'd joined a couple other guys in someone's DeSoto and went into Boston. He'd always heard about Scollay Square, even back home, but it was just a sad, seedy collection of bars. Instead of watery coffee, it was watery beer, but at least some of the waitresses were topless, and he had something to think about when…but he didn't want to think about that now.
Now, he had to think about clearing this God-awful snow from the launching area. He and Thompson were shoveling between two raised rails, trying not to imagine what they held. The snow was heavy and gritty, iced over with the wind that blew in from the sea. Blake would stand inside the trusses between monorails 2 and 4 and hack at the hardened drifts, while Thompson plowed the loosened stuff to the edge of the apron and pushed the piles over the earth berm. When they finished that, it was Blake's job to clamber onto the rail assembly and chip the ice that had accumulated on the erecting beam.
"You know what your problem is, Blake?" Thompson said. He was two or three years older than Blake, in his twenties, and he thought he knew everything there was to know.
Blake didn't want to hear what his problem was, especially when he was lying on a frozen steel girder underneath a tube full of death. But Thompson didn't wait for an answer.
"Your problem is that you're too uptight. When everyone else is joking around, you never join in, you don't even laugh."
"Maybe I don't think it's funny," Blake said. He couldn't admit that he just didn't understand what they were talking about. "We should be prepared to fight off the Reds every minute. That's what we're here for."
"What makes you so high and mighty?" Thompson continued. "No one wants a stick in the shit like you. Join in once in a while, get yourself laid."
"You can shut your mouth, Thompson."
"Oh, sorry. I didn't think you'd stood in front of the radiating antenna. Are your nuts glowing?"
Blake's eye flicked to his sidearm. Thompson caught the glance and backed off. "Forget it, Blake," he said. "I just thought I'd help you find a way to be happier in your work."
"I don't see how anyone can be happy living like this," Blake muttered, working a chunk of ice free from the forward idler wheel. He tapped at it with hesitant force, mindful that a wrong move would be deadly. "And where I come from, we look at a lady as someone that's good for more than just
sexual relations."
But Thompson's words stuck in him like an icicle. And when he had the chance the next day, he went off-base, changing into his ratty civilian clothes and walking a mile through the icy streets until he came to a tavern with a single tiny window casting a yellow spot on the snow. It was shoved between a barber's shop and a wallpaper store. Inside, he found it was warmer, but not much brighter than outside. The air was thick with smoke which flickered like a storm cloud while a boxing match played on the television that hung from chains in the ceiling.
Huddled along the bar was a series of hunched figures, still in their work overalls, looking like roughly-carved ogres. In front of each were beers and shot glasses and ashtrays. There were a few tables in the dim room, but all were taken. He would have to find space among the forbidding creatures at the bar.
Towards the end of the counter he found a space where he could squeeze between two silent men huddled up as if to ward off a blow. The bartender, as talkative as the rest of them, nodded at Blake's upraised hand and poured a beer at the tap. He shoved it in front of Blake, and the foam—sitting on top of only a half an inch of beer—sloshed over the sides. So this is having fun around here, he thought.
He'd tasted the foam a few times before one of the men next to him growled, "You got a lot of guts comin' in here, kid. This bar's not for outsiders."
"Leave him alone," croaked the other. "He's defending us against the Reds. Can't you see his haircut?"
"A pipsqueak like him against the Russkies? What's the world coming to?"
They laughed, and Blake said nothing. Finally, the first guy said, "You know, boy, it's rude not to talk to your hosts. Where you from?"
He felt that this was something clear he could respond to. "Outside Bowling Green, Kentucky."
"A southern boy. I hear down your way they sleep with their sisters. You got a sister, country boy?"
He put his glass down with a thud. "I do have a sister, sir. She's ten years old. You want to see a picture?" He hoped it sounded as threatening as he meant it. His mind raced with what he'd learned in hand-to-hand combat training. But he had no doubt that anything he started would be finished by the dozen witnesses who were watching with fiery eyes.
Before he needed to take a stand, a light hand rested on his shoulder and a blond head appeared in front of the other man. "Leave him alone, Walt," she said. "You're lucky he left his gun at home." She turned to Blake and said, "He's all bark and no bite. Why don't you come sit with me?"
Confused by the quick change in the situation, Blake followed her to a corner table underneath the television. Covered as she was in winter clothes, it was hard to tell how old she was, but definitely older than him, maybe her late twenties. Her hair had been freshly done, but was already becoming disheveled. When they sat down, he had a chance to see her up close. She was pretty, with a small nose in the center of a heard-shaped face and a bow-shaped mouth. She was tired, though, and Blake recognized his own loneliness in her eyes.
"What's your name, hon?" she asked. Her face was rough with smoking, and as if to prove it, she lit another cigarette.
"Rufus," he said. "Rufus Blake."
"Mine's Margaret. You can call me Peggy."
"Thanks, Peggy. I didn't mean anything by coming in here. I thought I was going to be in the middle of a fight."
"Those guys were just blowing off steam. But they're old and tired, and I'm sure a healthy young man like you would have been fine. You have all sorts of training that I'm sure you just didn't want to show off, don't you?"
Blake grinned, hoping it didn't come off as being shy.
"I thought so," Peggy said. "I hear you have missiles over at that base. Are they atomic ones?"
"Uh, I couldn't say," he answered. "You know, 'loose lips' and all."
Peggy beamed, and the years seemed to fall off her face. "Oh, you think I might be a Soviet spy. Do I look like a spy, comrade?" She giggled, and Blake's worry began to melt away. It was absurd to think a spy would be here in this factory town. Then again, those union workers weren't too far off from being Communists. He shook it off.
"What do you do?" he asked, trying to get off the topic quick. "I guess I don't belong here, but it seems a lady like you wouldn't either."
Peggy laughed. "Hon, anyone can come in here. Walt there is just a Puritan. You know, back in the olden times, there was a settlement here, Merrymount, where the Pilgrims who wanted to have a bit of fun got up to all kinds of wildness. It didn't last, though. They came in and arrested them, sent 'em off home. Since then, it's been a pretty bleak place." She drank from the highball glass she had in front of her. "So what I do, is I spend all day at the counter of a grocery store. When it's quitting time, I do my own shopping, then head home to my husband. Tonight's his poker night, so that's when I head out with my own friends."
He looked around. "I didn't mean to interrupt," he said.
"Who's interrupting? I got my friends right here." She raised her glass in one hand and the cigarette in the other. He noted that she wasn't wearing a wedding ring.
Life on the base got no easier, but over the next few weeks, Blake became a regular at the dark, nameless tavern. He didn't have any more run-ins with Walt or his buddy, nor did he become any more friendly with the unchanging array of gray faces that drank and smoked with grim purpose. But he did become one of them, and his arrivals were greeted with mute acceptance.
He saw Peggy only once in a while, but when she stepped into the bar, they always ended up in the corner table under the television as they shared stories of the drudgery that was common to a grocery store and a cold military base. He learned her husband was named Vic, and he worked, like just about everyone in the city, at the shipyard, working a crane twelve hours a day. Blake had seen those cranes across the water from the base, looming like huge monsters. Vic had had to sell their car to make the house payments, and her wedding ring to make the car payment. "Tell me about Kentucky," she said one night. "I'd do anything to get out of here. I always wanted to go someplace warm. Are the beaches nice?"
"We don't have beaches, least not ocean beaches. Got some lakes." He couldn't remember the last time he'd been warm enough to go swimming, though. The winter seemed to have taken a permanent hold of the base. The icy wind whipped off the gray sea, and shoveling became as normal as brushing his teeth, or thinking about Peggy while he sat in the latrine, wondering what she might look like in a bathing suit, or out of it.
Not that she would ever do anything with him besides have a chaste drink in the company of her neighbors. He came to know the soap opera of the A&P, the petty schemes among the cashiers and stock boys and the manager that reminded Blake of his own CO. He told her inconsequential stories from the base, like when he ate or slept, what some of his non-weapons duties were. He never told her about the Nike missiles that were always aimed at the sky over Boston Harbor. He never told her that her first guess had been right, that the Nike-Hercules was, in fact, an atomic missile. But it was enough that she thought he was a real man—more than the others that drank here—to be in charge of them.
Still, having at least one friend lightened the load, and even Thompson got off his back about being a stick in the shit. Peg dreamed of traveling, and even though Bowling Green seemed like a backwater to him (now that he'd come to Quincy, Massachusetts—a city that bordered another city), it was like a foreign country to her. And so he told her tales of schoolyard hijinks, or of his family. When she heard his mother had had four boys before his sister Katie came round, her eyes widened. "You must be Catholic with all those siblings," she said.
"No, ma'am," he said, slightly offended. Catholics were almost as bad as Commies, even if they didn't like each other. "We're good Southern Baptists."
"That's why I know I can trust you," she said. "If I needed your help some time, you'd give it to me, wouldn't you?"
It sounded like she had something in mind already, but he was too happy to have someone besides his mother to talk to, to let it
sit badly with him. And when she put her hand on his, it was like an apology, and a promise.
It was after the New Year, and the tavern still had its meager Christmas decorations up—some garland, an electric Santa that lit up and moved its present-grasping hand—more out of laziness than an attempt to draw out the Yuletide spirit. Blake sat with Peggy in the space that had become their own. Even in the dim light, he could see that her jaw was bruised, and she hadn't set her hair in days. Her eyes were bloodshot, and beyond their usual pretty sadness.
"What happened to you?" he said, putting a highball before her.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said through a tight smile. But her hand shook and he had to light her cigarette for her. They both ignored the fact that she had one going in the ashtray already.
"Just one of those things, you know?"
"Your husband do that to you?"
"This?" She touched her jaw gingerly. "Of course not. Walked into a door while I was doing the laundry."
She put on a brave face, and they drank a few highballs, speaking more in glances and raised eyebrows than with words. Blake got the idea that she was worried about going home, which she confirmed when she drained her glass with finality and said, maybe too loudly, "Rufus, honey, I had too much. Take me home." She leaned drunkenly on him as he dropped a few dollars on the bar and they staggered into the night.
The cold hit Blake like a slap. It seemed to have affected Peggy the same way. Before they'd walked half a block, she had straightened up and walked with firm footing, even on the ice and salt that crunched under their feet. "You can never mind about taking me home, Rufus," she said, squeezing his hand. "I live all the way in the other direction. Get back to base. Your leave must be almost over. I'll see you next time." Before he could say a word, she turned and disappeared down a dark road.
THUGLIT Issue Twenty Page 7
