Slipping

by Lauren Beukes

  Hilda is quiet on the drive to the restaurant. But the question lurks in the tension of her shoulders, the clench of her jaw. When?

  “You have to be patient,” Laryea soothes her. “These things take time.”

  “These things take time. These things take time,” she parrots angrily. “This is what you always say, Laryea.”

  He imagines her telling off her water-cooler clients in the same tone, more fluently perhaps in her native Spanish, but no less bolshy. He imagines entire office complexes living in fear of Hilda Varone, employees willing to risk drinking Mexico City tap water rather than face her wrath.

  “This is the way third-world governments work,” he says, “This is what makes it all possible. You know that. Your mother—”

  “Leave my mamá alone.” She glares out at the hawkers selling superglue at the traffic lights.

  “You know what I’m saying, Hilda, if Pinochet hadn’t—”

  “I said to leave it. It was different in Chile. There was none of this . . . lawyers.” She spits the word out.

  “Of course not. She didn’t have time to set anything up when she fled the country.”

  “She leaves everything. Just pack up and go.”

  “Imagine if she had managed to hide her money away before she left; how hard it would be to get it out of the country? This is par for the course. You shouldn’t expect it to be easy. Have patience, señora. This is the last time, I promise.”

  He suspects it will have to be. They have taken her for $47,453 so far and he can’t see how they will squeeze any more juice from her.

  The secret is in not using round numbers. Round numbers are too much like a bribe, a ransom. All those gaping zeros like holes in a story. To short-circuit suspicion, you need the kind of numbers beloved by bureaucrats and auditors. Numbers that suggest fourteen per cent tax or built-in administration charges or adjustments for the exchange rate. Official numbers. Numbers that can keep clicking up, because there is always another cost, another agency fee, another unforeseen surcharge.

  “I can’t do this again,” she says, staring out the window as if the sweep of trees lining Jan Smuts Avenue requires her fullest concentration. “No puedo más.” Laryea pretends not to notice her dabbing angrily at her eyes.

  “The last time. I promise. Mr. Shaik is waiting for us at the restaurant. In half an hour, less, the last of the paperwork will be signed and sealed. If you want, we don’t even have to check into the hotel. You can get straight back on the plane and go home to Oscar and Gael. Sí?”

  “Yes, okay,” she sniffs. “But this Mr. Shaik is corrupt. I read the newspapers.”

  “Do you know a lawyer who isn’t? And his corruption, señora, is what we are counting on.”

  It is a fact that names in the news have more credibility.

  I know that this mail might come to you as a surprise as we have not met before, My name is Mrs. Grace Mugabe, the wife of Mr. Robert Mugabe the president of Zimbabwe. Our country is currently facing international saction all over the world and my effort to so speak peace into my husband prove abortive because he already have a wrong notion towards the western nations.

  As the first lady of our country i have been able to use my position to raise some money from contracts which i deposited with a European diplomatic security company the sum of US$35M (Thirty Five Million US Dollars) knowing fully that our government will soon be brought down by international communities because of the manner at which things are degenerating in Zimbabwe.

  I contacting you because I want you to go to the security company and claim the money on my behalf. I ask you to also pray for me to survive the internal threat i am experincing from my husband President Robert Mugabe because as i am sending you this urgent proposal tears flow from my eyes as i am living with a human monster.

  Laryea is not a monster. He is a student of human behavior. He admires Oscar and Hilda’s fortitude. They are not without resources. They borrowed the money he has extracted from family and friends. They could have used it to fly Gael to a private hospital in the United States. It would have paid for the specialist spinal surgery, at least. Instead, they’ve given it to Laryea’s syndicate. Is it the syndicate’s fault that the pair of them are so naïve and greedy as to believe a fairy tale about $12.5 million?

  It helps that the fairy tales are set in countries too far away to be able to check up on the details. It helps that Laryea’s format, his bait, is grammatical with none of the gross spelling mistakes or lazy typos endemic to the genre.

  First my Father was a king in our village before he died and left behind some Gold as the King of our town that God bless with Gold, he was enntitle to some quantity every end of the Month this was the way he acquired the quantities of Gold the family is having today. the only thing i want from you is either you buy the Gold from me or you help me for shipment of the gold to your destination and sell it on my behalf and get your own percentage.

  No, Laryea’s English is excellent. He has a talent for languages, a way with words. It’s why he was bumped up from catcher to guyman. Now, instead of fielding emails, he does fieldwork. He deals with actual clients, in person, face-to-face. This is not why his mother worked for forty years as a post-office administrator to pay for his university education. Still, he has been able to put his political science degree to some practical use. Current affairs make for topical lures. So do Hollywood movies.

  My name is Captain Andrew McAllister; I am an American Soldier and serving in the US Military in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiments, Patrols Tail Afar, in Iraq. I am desperately in need of assistance and I have summoned up courage to contact you. I am presently in Iraq and I found your contact particulars in an address journal. I am seeking your assistance to evacuate the sum of $1,570,000 (One million Five Hundred and Seventy Thousand US dollars) to the States or any safe country of your choice, as far as I can be assured that it will be safe in your care until I complete my service here. This is no stolen money and there are no dangers involved.

  Better that he had become a journalist. Like the photographer he had assisted in Ghana in 2005. Since then, he has seen his name around a lot, that photographer. He keeps an eye out for it, he sees it in the newspapers, sometimes on the cover of fancy art magazines. While he was waiting for a client in the lobby of the Sandton Sun once, Laryea picked up a flyer for the photographer’s new exhibition. His photographs were selling for 20,000 rand each. Easy money. Fame. And for what? Pointing and clicking? Now that’s a scam.

  The Zoo Lake Restaurant is a tourist destination, which means, Laryea supposes, that tourists don’t have to destine any further north. It’s just enough, a taste of the real Africa, diluted, exaggerated. A glamorous movie-land of ornate masks and hanging lamps of dyed leather and food tamed for feeble Western palates.

  “Did I ever tell you about the bees?” he asks as he pulls out Hilda’s chair for her. It’s a signature story in his repertoire. He uses patter to set clients at ease, to make them feel like they’re bonding. You aren’t supposed to use real stories, in case you reveal yourself in the details. But Laryea would take a bet, any amount you like, that the famous photographer doesn’t remember his name, let alone know how to find him.

  “The bees? No, I do not think so. Is Mr. Shaik coming pronto?” Hilda looks anxiously around the restaurant.

  “He’ll be here any minute, you just relax. Have a glass of wine. The food here is excellent. Really authentic.”

  “You know I have trusted you all this while, Laryea.”

  “I know, Hilda.”

  He has arranged a happy ending for her. Or the semblance of one. In return for the last outstanding $6,572, which is the absolute limit of her gullibility he reckons, she will receive 108 pages of paperwork from Mr. Shaik, filed in triplicate and stamped by the Reserve Bank as evidence of the transfer to her account in Mexico City.

  She will have about a week to enjoy the idea of her wealth before she realizes that it is all fake, that the money has not been depo
sited, that it never will be. By that time she will be 10,000 kilometers away, and Laryea will have switched to a new cellphone number, a new email address. It could be worse. Ask the Swiss guy who was kidnapped last year. Or the German who was murdered . . .

  Laryea has always thought of the syndicate like a swarm on the move. If the queen dies, you make a new queen, if a worker bee dies, you replace it with another drone. Their business is decentralized. Untouchable. The hive will always survive. And honey is one of the best ways to catch mugus, of course.

  Hi my friend,

  it’s nice and lovely for me to mail you and, I thank God that I find you, Am kristinacain female, 24 years of age and i am from USA . . . I will like us to be friends because friendship is like a clothes, without clothes one is naked and without friends one is lonely and to avoid loneliness we all need friends, i guess i am right?

  Kristina

  Romance scams always seemed too cruel to Laryea—and too much trouble. Like catching a shark: easy to hook, but a struggle to reel in. Besides, there is too much typing involved with all the instant messages and emails that stand in for passion these days.

  Laryea takes a sip of wine—Warwick Trilogy 2006, because he likes to indulge his clients in these final meetings. He likes to think of it as an act of grace, although he notes with irritation that Hilda has barely touched hers. She is fiddling with her fork, tapping it nervously on the edge of the table. Rat-tattat. Rat-tat-tat. The restaurant is filling up, conversation and the clatter of cutlery relegating the Senegalese gospel album to ambient noise.

  “Now, this story,” he says, trying to recapture her attention. “It’s more about honey collectors than bees, really. I was working with a photographer, a famous one, you might have heard of him—”

  “Was this before or after you work in Burger King?”

  He had forgotten he’d told her about that. Why had he told her? About exactly where a political science degree will get a young man with big dreams and no work permit; not to the Economist, but the Burger King at Paddington Station, lost like the storybook bear with his red Wellington boots.

  “Before,” he says, trying to recover. “The photographer, he did these hyena photographs. You might have seen them?”

  “No.” She fishes a soft pack of smokes out the bowels of her bag and taps out a cigarette. Laryea pinches it from her lips before she can light it.

  “We’re in the non-smoking section,” he says, laying the cigarette on the table perfectly parallel to the woven placemat. Her mouth twists into a stony pout in its absence.

  “Anyway, I was translating for him.” This part is a lie. He was carrying the photographer’s equipment, all the lights and battery packs and loops of cable. It was only when the real translator, an environmental journalist for the UN, fell ill with gastroenteritis that Laryea had stepped in to untangle the local dialect.

  “It was about an hour and a half from Techiman, where the jungle runs right up to the highway, like it’s trying to swallow the road. The whole town was three houses. And also mashambas, you know, like mud huts? Maybe forty or fifty people living there, women pounding cassava or sitting with blankets spread out on the ground selling soft drinks, fruit, loose cigarettes, warm beer and gin. They call it gin, but it’s actually liquor they make themselves in Coca-Cola bottles.”

  “We have towns like this in Mexico.”

  “Maybe not quite like this, but close enough, I’m sure. So the women sell basic stuff and pound cassava and the men collect honey.”

  “Mmf,” Hilda says.

  “No, but it’s terrible, just listen. The way they do it. These are African bees. And African bees are crazy. Loco.”

  “I know what crazy is.”

  “They’re incredibly aggressive. They’ll attack at the slightest provocation. So what these guys do is smoke them out. They spend hours going through the jungle, sometimes days, trying to find the hives, and when they do, they tie cassava leaves and plastic bags around their heads and hands, because insects don’t like the smell, and then they set fire to the bush around the tree.”

  “And then the bees fly away and they get the honey.” Hilda is less than impressed.

  “The point is that it’s a disaster. They burn down half the forest in the process—and they ruin the honey. The smoke gets into everything”

  “You can see this in the honey, acaso?”

  “That golden glow? Poof!” He kisses off his fingertips. “Gone. It still tastes sweet, but it’s dusty with soot. So, they can only sell it on the local markets. It’s an economic tragedy. If they had hives, if they learnt how to cultivate the honey, they could sell it internationally. Organic, fair trade, all that stuff, they could make real money. But instead they’re trapped in this subsistence life, burning down the forest, destroying the trees where the bees make their hives, so every time they have to travel deeper into the jungle.”

  “This is very sad. But it is like this everywhere, no? All over the world there is tragedia. Refugees. Economics. Earthquakes. Genocidios.” Hilda fiddles with the cigarette, puts it down, exchanges it for the fork. Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.

  “I’m not comparing it,” Laryea says. “Not with what happened to our friend.” But he doesn’t like the echoing of his own thoughts. How does he explain that he was moved by the poignancy of this self-defeating cycle?

  The reality is that Laryea is as much a mugu, a believer in false promises, as Hilda, carried along by his worthless degree and a British Airways flight to London, only to end up washing dishes in a Lebanese restaurant in King’s Cross, flipping patties at Burger King, cleaning the public toilets at an outdoor rock festival. Disappointment is the reek of shit and teenage vomit in a plastic Portaloo on an August afternoon, with guitars buzzing like sick bees in the background.

  He was made an offer to move to Johannesburg. He took it. Dealing in dreams seemed easier than drugs.

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  The waitress comes over to the table to let them know that their friend has arrived. “He’s just on the phone. He said he’ll be with you in a minute.” She indicates a tall man in a crisp dark suit with a cellphone clamped to the side of his head, pacing up and down in the foyer and talking loudly in Algerian French. Another deal on the go. Another mugu biting.

  This is a business proposition. I represent an independent investment consultancy and brokerage. We have recently been asked to invest funds outside Scotland and have decided to seek partners outside Scotland to cooperate with us in investing the available funds.

  “He doesn’t look like his foto in the newspapers,” Hilda says, staring across the restaurant at the man. “And I heard he was sick.”

  “You must have him confused with someone else,” Laryea reassures her.

  Hilda stops fidgeting with her fork. She drapes an arm over the back of the chair, and takes a deep swig of her wine, which is no way to appreciate a good vintage. But it’s as if the question mark knotting up the muscles in her neck and shoulders has dissolved away.

  “You know, Laryea, I like your story very much. Now I want to tell you a story.”

  “Don’t you want to wait for Mr. Shaik?”

  “This is personal. Just for you.”

  “All right,” he says, intrigued.

  “I know you think I am stupid.”

  “Hilda! I’ve never thought that for a moment.”

  “Because my English is not so good, you believe I cannot think so well. But this is not true.”

  “Of course not. I’m hurt that you would even sa
y—”

  “Will you listen? You know why I have ask you here? To this restaurant?”

  “Because of the ostrich. You said you wanted to try the ostrich.”

  “I had a phone call. From the police.”

  Laryea pushes his chair away from the table.

  “Sit down. It is too late.”

  In the foyer, two men approach Mr. Shaik, who is really Mr. Dansua, politely but firmly remove his phone from his hand and wrest his hands behind his back.

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  There are three more men in plain clothes crossing the restaurant towards their table. Laryea had seen one of them in the gift shop on the way in, had even noted the slovenliness of his clothes, ill-fitting, creased, like the man had more important things to do than ironing.

  “The police?”

  “I thought you were trying to help us.”

  “I was. I am.”

  LET US DO A GOOD WORK AND HELP THE LIVES OF THE SUFFERING, MY NAME IS Dr. Kenneth Dickson FROM NEW ZEALAND. RECENTLY MY DOCTOR GAVE ME VERY BAD NEWS WHICH IS VERY DISTURBING TO MY EARS, HE SAID THAT IN ABOUT THREE MONTHS TIME THAT I WILL SOON DIE OF MY ILLNESS. I HAVE SURRENDERED MY LIFE TO GOD AND I AM NOW A BORN AGAIN, I WANT TO DO A GOOD DEED BEFORE I DEPART. I WILL WANT TO SET UP ORPHANAGES IN MY NAME AND ALSO DONATE THE REST OF MY WEALTH TO THE MISSIONARY OR CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS.

  “Come, señora. I don’t know what kind of lies they have been telling you, but we can sort this out.”

  “You are the one with the lies, Laryea. But this is not the story I want to tell you.”

  “Then what?”

  “I lied also.”

  “You?” He is trying to understand, but it is like struggling through thick and scratchy jungle to find the road he was walking only a minute ago.

  “There is no Gael. No cripple son. No accident.” Hilda grins, revealing the skewed incisor that Laryea has always found endearing, until now. It is the first time she’s smiled since she stepped off the plane.