by Tony Park
Henri had been in Rwanda at the time of the genocide as well, and he knew what the experience did to people. He was sure that Carmel Shang did what she did, in her work and private life, because of what she had done or failed to do in that time of darkness.
A brace of Americans in matching greens and browns, floppy bush hats and unmuddied boots stumbled into the arrivals hall and were pounced on by a protective guide who shepherded them away from the pack of touts and taxi drivers who waited for each flight in the hope of bagging a stray independent tourist.
Henri saw her, and his breath caught in the back of his throat. She was attractive, and she was here. She pulled a carry-on wheelie bag with a laptop in a matching case slung around the handle. The sudden realisation that she was really here, in the flesh, excited him. He walked up to her, his hand extended. ‘Carmel?’
‘Hi. Henri?’
‘Bonjour. How are you?’ he took her hand in his and held it. ‘You’re much . . . forgive me, but you’re much younger than you look in your photo.’
She laughed. ‘And you’re taller than I thought you’d be, even though I couldn’t find any pictures of you on the net and your Facebook pic is a chimp!’
‘Ah, so you’ve been checking me out online, oui?’
He held onto her hand and took in her dark eyes. They were already flirting. He felt it in his heart again, the flutter of excitement. He was so very glad she had come to him.
*
Doctor Aston Mutale reread the article in The Citizen, the daily Johannesburg English-language tabloid. GIVE HER A MEDAL was the headline that had been plastered across the front page. Motorist runs down carjacker who tried to kill famous photographer, continued the shout line.
Aston threw the newspaper down on his desk in disgust. He had known there would be media coverage – the woman was not exactly a household name, but some of her photographs would have been reprinted along with her obituary, and the magazine she worked for was popular among whites. Carjacking was, he knew, a common enough offence for the story to be buried, but the twist in the bungled hit had propelled it to the front page.
Liesl Nel would be confused and worried now, and she would also be on her guard. She would be harder to kill. Aston picked up his mobile phone and tried Tryford’s number for the eighth time. Not available. There had been no SMS confirming that the British doctor in Skukuza had been killed. Aston had used Tryford before and considered him a good man, reliable. Both Tryford, who Aston had dispatched to kill the white doctor, and Lawrence, who had been run over by a passer-by before he’d been able to kill the Nel woman, had been good soldiers, dependable men. It was inconceivable to think they had both failed in what were fairly straightforward missions. His business partner in Rwanda would not be happy.
Aston had a good business of his own in the Johannesburg suburb of Roodepoort, running his traditional healing practice, but it was just a front for the real source of his income. Aston worked as the middle man in South Africa for an international syndicate that smuggled live animals out of the country, a particularly lucrative business. Mostly these were exotic animals – birds and reptiles – for the benefit of private wildlife collectors abroad. The latest boom market was the oil-rich Gulf states, in particular the United Arab Emirates. The traditional markets in Europe were still struggling to recover from the global financial crisis. Any mzungu with enough money to afford a private zoo had been burned in the GFC. Aston also did a nice sideline in protected plants, particularly cycads.
As well as using muti, traditional medicines made from herbs, plants and the various body parts of different species, to treat his patients, he also supplied his cures to a growing international clientele of wealthy Africans living abroad, and shipped the occasional rhino horn to China and Vietnam via his underworld contacts in Thailand.
Aston was a man who dealt in traditions, but the nature of his diverse business interests meant that he’d had to embrace technology. His laptop chimed, signalling a new email. It was from his long-time business partner, who used an email account with the ironic name of wildlifelover3231. Aston opened it. They were good friends, but the message was businesslike and coded as usual.
Have a line on that marmoset in Kg. Have a doctor who would like this one as a pet. Also, new request from collector has just come in. Where can we get some dogs that like to hunt?
Aston typed a reply, fast, with two fat fingers.
I can organise purchase of marmoset and transport to you if that suits. Dogs??? Are you joking my friend? Will keep my ears and eyes open.
A marmoset was a small monkey originally from South America that was legally available to trade and own in many countries. They made good pets, but Aston knew his partner was not really referring to a marmoset – there was no money in the legal trade in animals – but to a gorilla. This was particularly exciting news. Mountain gorillas did not come onto the market every day. In Rwanda and Uganda the remaining gorillas were monitored on a daily basis, but things were less controlled across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He’d read a media report recently about a female being shot by charcoal poachers and her baby presumably kidnapped. He assumed this was the animal in question, and that it had been smuggled across the border from the Congo to Rwanda.
Rereading the second request made Aston suck in a noisy breath through his teeth. ‘Eish,’ he said out loud in his surgery. It appeared that his partner had a client who wanted to buy some painted dogs – also known as the African wild dog or painted hunting dog. These animals had once roamed sub-Saharan Africa but there were now only about two and half thousand of them left on the continent. As an endangered predator and something of a cause célebre, they also tended to be intensively researched and monitored, which would undoubtedly pose a problem for Aston. The dogs were extremely efficient predators – far more so than lions, leopards and cheetahs – but as a result they were not popular in small private game reserves as they could quickly wipe out a stock of herbivores, such as impala, kudu, zebra and wildebeest. Despite education and conservation campaigns, there were still many cattle and sheep farmers who wanted a return to the days when the painted dog was considered vermin and could be legally shot on sight. Because of their huge home ranges the dogs often roamed outside of southern Africa’s national parks in search of food. It would be impossible, Aston thought, to capture a pack inside a national park, and almost as difficult to find and trap some outside on private land. On the upside, if there was some way they could track down and capture a pack and smuggle them offshore, then Aston and his business partner could probably ask any price they wished. There was no precedent for such an order, and no benchmark that Aston was aware of.
There was a knock on his door. ‘Yes?’
Elizabeth, his willowy Lozi receptionist, opened it. ‘Mr Musanga is here, Doctor.’
Aston forced a smile. Elizabeth had been his mistress for the past six months. She was tall, but a little too thin for his liking. He would have to keep an eye on her health. ‘Show him in.’
Musanga had the virus. But Aston didn’t tell his patient that he had HIV-AIDS and would probably die. No one could tell for sure, unless they took the test, and Musanga, understandably, did not really wish to know his status. It would bring shame to him if he had to tell his wife, who had recently given birth to their fourth son. No good could come of knowing you were going to die and could no longer support your family or look forward to your children supporting you into old age. As he entered Aston’s room, Musanga was beset with a coughing fit, and his lungs rattled with the aftershock. Aston noted the blood on the grimy handkerchief that Musanga stuffed back into his pocket.
‘Still bad I see, my brother,’ Aston observed. ‘Sit down.’ He checked Musanga’s eyes and put his hand on his back. ‘Breathe in for me. Did the pepper bark help?’
Musanga drew a breath. ‘A little, baba,’ he exhaled.
‘You will need more,’ Aston pronounced. He went to the line of small wooden drawers he’d had
built into one wall of his surgery. He took out a ten-centimetre length of grey bark, curled from where it had been stripped from the branch, whose diameter had probably been no more than one centimetre. This batch had come from the Kruger National Park, one of the last two remaining stands of the tree in the wild in South Africa. It was worth a small fortune. The dwindling resource had pushed the price up dramatically in recent years. Pepper bark had always been used to treat coughs and colds and other respiratory complaints and, as these were common in sufferers of the virus, the relief the ground-up bark, taken in a tea, gave them also provided them with hope. Aston told his patients that pepper bark was, in fact, a cure for the virus, which justified the huge mark-up he applied to the cost of the bark, which he sourced from poachers in Limpopo Province and Kwa-Zulu Natal.
Musanga nodded. ‘I will try the pepper bark again, but I don’t think it is strong enough muti. There must be something else I can take, something else I can do.’
Aston sat back down in his chair and interlocked his fingers across his ample belly. He nodded slowly then leaned forward conspiratorially. He lowered his voice. ‘Yes, you can do something else.’
‘Go on,’ Musanga said.
Musanga was like most of the patients who came to Aston looking for a miracle cure to the virus. If Aston had found himself in Musanga’s position he would have had himself tested and gone to a clinic. But he didn’t give Musanga this advice. Musanga was an ignorant taxi driver – a man of little schooling, but also one whose job demanded steel nerves and arrogance. Such men fought turf wars with AK-47s and risked life and limb on a daily basis. Musanga didn’t want to be told to do the sensible thing – to go to the clinic and have his life taken from him with the results of a simple blood test. He wanted the magic cure, whatever the risk or the crime involved – they all did. So many patients in Musanga’s situation paid the inyanga, the doctor, for justification.
Aston’s father and his father before him had been inyangas. Aston had, after completing his service in the army, gladly taken on the mantle of traditional healer, but by then he had already seen too much of the world and learned too much to believe in most of the cures his ancestors had peddled. Aston had learned that medicine was money. He supplied a service and commodities for which there was an escalating and limitless demand.
‘What must I take, baba?’ Musanga said, filling the silence that Aston had intentionally created.
Aston knew what he would do if he had the virus. He would go to the clinic and he would get the anti-retrovirals and he would watch his diet and try to stay fit and healthy. But he knew there was something else he would do – and Musanga wanted a green light to try that magic as well. ‘A child. A virgin. Take it, use it, cleanse yourself in its purity.’
*
Richard drove north through the Kruger National Park and tried to let the animals and birds he encountered on the way take his mind off the events of the past twenty-four hours, and of seventeen years earlier.
But those years were never really far from his mind, and no matter how hard he tried to numb his brain, once night fell and he slept, the images would return: the blood, the bodies, the fear in people’s eyes. Most harrowing was when the faces of the children he witnessed orphaned rose up, in distress just like Collette, the girl whose father had died that terrible day at Kibeho. He took some comfort from the fact that Collette had made it out, but he wondered how many of those other terrified children had survived.
It would have been quicker for him to exit the park at the Paul Kruger gate and make his way through Hazyview to the R40 and drive north outside the park. However, the heavy January rains had damaged the road through Bushbuck Ridge, and traffic control points at the works sites and the usual risk of collision with a kamikaze minibus taxi convinced him to take the scenic route instead.
He stopped at the Tshokwane picnic site on the road between Skukuza and Satara and got out to eat the apple and drink the Coke he’d salvaged from his near empty refrigerator before leaving. The normally bustling pit stop had been gutted by the floods and was still closed to the public. Whether as a result of mother nature or mankind, Africa always seemed to do things the hard way.
Back on the road he saw some impala and a breeding herd of elephant on the drive north to Satara, and slowed to negotiate a traffic jam of game viewers and private cars that were jockeying for better positions to see four sleeping lionesses. Cameras flashed in the greyness of the morning when one of the cats rolled onto her back. Richard weaved through the vehicles and planted the accelerator again.
Liesl.
He wondered how she had aged. She’d been a bloody good-looking girl when he’d met her. The memory of her stirred him as he savoured the details of their one night together, starting in the shower. He’d had many women since, but few of the situations had matched the intensity of that time with her. The encounter had come to nothing – he had lost touch with her as soon as he’d left Kigali – and it had ended the parallel relationships he’d been leading with Carmel and Juliet.
Funny, he thought. He’d been on the verge of writing to Juliet from Rwanda, to end it with her because of Carmel. He had loved Carmel, he knew that now – or he had at least been as close to finding true love as he had before then or since. There was something about Carmel that he missed more than all the other women who’d passed through his life. She’d been totally devoted to him and it could have been this virtue that had scared him. He hadn’t really been ready to settle down back then, and now, given the mess he had made of his life, no one would want to domesticate him. He didn’t miss Juliet at all, but he still felt bad about hurting Carmel.
Around Satara the bush thinned to more open savannah. The summer rains had prompted the annual mini migration of herds of zebra and wildebeest from one side of the narrow national park to the other. It wasn’t a patch on the massive movements of animals across the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Masai Mara in Kenya, but the high densities of game were a lovely sight. Much of Kruger was bushy so it was nice to be able to see across greater distances and take in the sight of long lines of animals slowly on the move. The scene helped him justify his own nomadic ways, which he was resigned to these days. It was time for him to move on again, once he’d sorted this business with Liesl and worked out who had tried to kill them.
As he came into mobile phone range again his phone beeped. He checked it and opened the SMS. RU OK? It was from Janine. It was nice of her to ask, but Richard seriously hoped she wasn’t already trying to rekindle something with him now that she had presumably calmed her husband down. He pulled over. Fine. Going away for a week, he lied.
An hour later, Richard stopped to refuel the Discovery at Satara Camp. Tourists milled around outside the camp shop, checking the large map of the area and the coloured magnetic discs that signified animal sightings. Inside he weaved between people shopping for souvenirs and campfire meals and bought another Coke for the road before continuing north to Letaba.
As he drove he thought that he probably should have shaved before meeting Liesl’s parents. No, he corrected himself. He wasn’t there to impress them with his prospects – he had none bar his qualification, and few assets other than the battered Land Rover he was driving and some cash in the bank that was dwindling fast. His mother had died three years after his father, and the sale of the family home had not come at a good time in the market’s cycle. What money he did inherit from the sale, after the mortgage was paid, was long gone, spent on nearly fifteen years of boozing and womanising.
He was making good time, so he bypassed Letaba Camp, turning left at the crossroads, and headed towards Phalaborwa Gate. A kilometre down the road he rounded a bend and stamped on the brake pedal.
A male lion stood defiantly in the middle of the road, not moving as the four-wheel drive skidded to a halt and stopped no more than a metre away. He glared at Richard in silent reproach at the speed he’d been doing; Richard shuddered involuntarily at the creature’s piercing yellow eyes.
Richard carried on, keeping his speed down, and made his way back up north to the Phalaborwa Gate, situated about halfway up the western border of the national park. The security guard at the boom checked his ID and waved him through.
