by Tony Park
Also, Carmel thought as she squeezed the conditioner into her palm and massaged it into her hair, she would hate it if this attractive, sensitive man with the mysterious tattoo turned out to be a crook. She was having too good a time already in his company. If he was in serious financial trouble she wondered how she might go about helping him get out of it. What would it be like, she mused as her eyes were once again drawn to the river, to live in a place like this?
*
Vite sweltered in a cage in the tin shed at the back of the village market.
Around him were the twitters, chirps, hisses and cries of other caged animals and birds. Some he dimly recognised from his short life in the wild, but their combination and proximity were driving him crazy. He shrieked and cried for his mother.
When he made too much noise the man came into the storage room and jabbed a pointed stick through the wire mesh of the cage. Vite yelped even louder at the pain the short, sharp stabs caused him, but he was smart. In time he learned that if he kept quiet the stick would not come into the cage, and the pain would be avoided.
He watched the man when he came and went, noting how he unlatched the cage opposite him, across the narrow corridor of beaten earth. The man reached in, and when Vite saw the sleepy python in his hands he cried in terror and shrank back against the bars of his cage. The man laughed at Vite’s fear as he dumped the snake into a bag, tied it shut and walked out of the storeroom.
Since the day he could first remember Vite had been terrified of serpents. Whenever one of his family had come across one, they would shout out an alarm call, letting them all know there was danger. Vite couldn’t be quiet until the thing was gone. When the room was empty he stared at the latch on the open cage.
Wiggling his hand through a gap in the mesh of his cage, Vite was able to easily reach the latch that held his door closed. He was still very young, but his arms were long and he would grow into them in time. He found the piece of wood wedged into the hole. Vite grabbed it in his fingers and tried to move it. It was knocked in tight. He heard a noise and pulled his arm in and shrank back to the rear of his cage.
The man walked back in, pausing in the doorway. He looked around, then turned and left, closing the door behind him.
In the darkness, Vite reached his hand out through the gap again and began worrying at the stick. After a while it started to move.
11
Richard raced along the R71 at a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, past a game farm enclosed by a high electrified fence to stop animals from trying to leap out. When he started encountering citrus farms, they too were protected by high-voltage fencing, though this was to keep monkeys and baboons out.
Richard passed the Gravelotte Hotel and knew from the directions he’d written on the back of an envelope that he was getting close to Liesl’s parents’ place. He pictured the farmhouse as a rather modest whitewashed place, lovingly tended to but a little run-down. Liesl had run away from this snoozing corner of the country in search of excitement, he remembered her telling him in one of their few conversations.
‘Fuck me,’ she’d said to him in the shower.
A half-hour later Richard crossed the Letaba River and knew he’d gone too far. She’d warned him about this. He pulled over to the side of the road and took out his mobile phone and the envelope. He was supposed to take a right turn to a place called Eiland Spa. He’d seen no such sign. He dialled the number.
‘Liesl, hello?’ she said.
‘It’s Richard. I’m geographically embarrassed.’
‘Ag, shame,’ she said. He told her he’d just crossed the river, so she told him to turn around and take the first left. Richard thanked her and hung up. He remembered the soap cascading down her spine as she arched her back.
When Richard got to the turn-off he saw the sign to Eiland Spa, but noted with some small satisfaction that it was only visible from this side. If there had once been a sign to the spa from the other direction, it had gone missing. In Zimbabwe, when he’d worked there, he’d found it difficult finding his way around Harare and had been told by a local that people stole the road signs and melted them down to make coffin handles. AIDS was the only growth industry in that part of Africa these days.
Richard drove the required number of kilometres on the road and came to the sign sponsored by a chemical company that announced, Red Star – Tokkie and Elize Nel. He turned left and was immediately surprised. Instead of the rutted farm road he’d expected he crunched along a gravelled drive flanked by an honour guard of tall palm trees. Off to his left were neat rows of grapefruit trees that stretched as far as he could see. Unfolding on the right was a lush tropical garden arrayed around a perfectly manicured lawn. A wayward sprinkler sprayed the right side of his dirty Discovery and a few drops splashed his face.
Ahead and to the left was a dam the size of a couple of football pitches. Richard slowed to check out what looked like incongruously placed granite boulders in the water. One of them submerged. When he stopped he saw a plume of spray exhaled, followed by the wriggling ears and whiskered snout of a hippopotamus.
‘Bloody hell.’ He counted a dozen of the massive creatures, bobbing up and down. A few sets of beady eyes turned to him and followed his progress as he cruised slowly along the driveway. A grey heron took flight from the grassy dam wall and flapped slowly across his path and into the sky. In his peripheral vision he caught a brief glimpse of a multicoloured little malachite kingfisher darting among the reeds at the edge of the water.
The house, when it came into sight, was like something out of Gone with the Wind. Although only one storey and whitewashed, it wasn’t the humble shack he’d envisioned. Far from it. A trellis woven with vines and dripping with fruit jutted out from the clean lines of the sprawling house and shaded a long dining table surrounded by what looked like a couple of dozen chairs. Flowers bloomed everywhere and he counted at least three African gardeners, all of whom waved to him.
At the end of the drive was a four-car garage with a Land Cruiser, a Mercedes sedan, a Hilux pickup and a BMW four-wheel drive. All of the vehicles looked new. Richard pulled off onto the grass and switched off the engine.
He leaned across to the front passenger seat to get his baseball cap and was startled by a rap at the window. He turned to see a blonde woman tapping on the glass. Where had she come from so quickly? He opened the door. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello, hello, hello! Welcome! You must be Richard, ja?’
‘Yes. How do you do?’ The woman was beaming and looked happy and healthy in a white tennis shirt and shorts. Her hair was cut short and streaked; she was older than he was, but she looked in terrific shape.
‘I’m Liesl’s mom, Elize.’
‘No,’ he said, and he was only half joking. ‘You’re far too young.’
‘Ag, you’re a smoothy all right. I can see we’re going to get on very well.’ Elize took his arm and led him from the Land Rover. ‘Come, come, Prudence will get your bags. Come inside.’
Richard let himself be led into the dark, cool hallway of the house. Rooms and more corridors fanned off the passageway. A man in a two-tone grey and khaki shirt, bush shorts and boots with long grey socks emerged from what appeared to be a home office. ‘This is my husband, Tokkie,’ Elize said.
Tokkie looked much older than his wife, his brick-red face lined from years in the sun, his eyes set in the farmer’s permanent squint – or was that distrust? Richard wondered.
‘Hello,’ Tokkie said, and his handshake was so firm it was a relief when the man let go.
‘Liesl’s showering,’ Elize explained. ‘She and I only just finished playing tennis. I’ll get the girl to make tea.’
Richard wished the woman hadn’t mentioned the word ‘shower’. Elize disappeared into the kitchen and started speaking to a maid in Fanakalo.
‘So, you knew my daughter in Rwanda?’ Tokkie said, and waved Richard into a velvet-upholstered armchair.
‘Umm, yes, briefly. I was there with the a
rmy.’
Tokkie raised his eyebrows. ‘Army. I thought you were a doctor.’
‘I was a doctor in the military. Parachute Regiment.’
Tokkie gave a grunt and Richard wasn’t sure whether it was disdain for Richard’s inability to carry on in some specialised field of medicine and open up an expensive Harley Street practice, or out of some kind of innate Afrikaner respect for military service. He’d found that when South Africans of his age or older found out he’d served in the army they opened up to him a little more. National service in the apartheid era had created a shared bond amongst the male population.
‘I didn’t want her to go to that place – Rwanda.’
‘I don’t think any of us particularly wanted to go there. It was . . .’ Even though people had been asking him about Rwanda for seventeen years he still hadn’t come up with the right words to describe the madness and the horror, but also the frankly fascinating array of injuries he had treated and the procedures he had performed in the field. He’d had more trauma-surgery experience in those few weeks than an emergency room specialist might encounter in a lifetime. ‘It was . . . an experience.’
‘She volunteered to go. To take pictures. Those people . . . what they did to each other in that country . . .’
Richard nodded. He imagined Tokkie had seen service on the border, in Namibia – the old South-West Africa – or perhaps Angola. He would know about death, and about the people who revelled in it.
‘It changed her, you know,’ Tokkie continued. ‘She came back like some of my soldiers did. That place took her innocence away.’
Richard wondered why the old man was confiding in him like this. Perhaps he couldn’t with his bubbly, attractive wife who had kept the home fires burning while her man had been away fighting the communists.
Elize came back into the room. ‘Richard is a doctor, Tokkie. Did Liesl tell you that?’
Tokkie harrumphed. ‘In the British Army.’
‘Yes,’ Richard said, ‘but I promise not to mention the war.’
Tokkie stared at him.
‘The Anglo–Boer war, that is.’
‘I understood the joke. My grandmother died in a concentration camp, along with two of her children.’
‘Right.’
‘My grandfather was a commando. He was one of the “bitter-enders” who never gave up. When the English finally caught him, they hanged him.’
‘Right.’
The maid walked in, carrying a silver platter. ‘Tea is served,’ Elize said. They all settled into armchairs around a glass-topped coffee table while Elize poured, forcing a big smile.
‘Howzit, Richard?’
Richard turned his head at the sound of the woman’s voice, and stood at the same time. His elbow collided with the china teacup Elize was passing him. The cup clattered off the saucer and fell onto the carpet. ‘God, sorry.’
‘Prudence!’ Elize called.
Liesl smiled. ‘Nice to see you again, Richard. No blaspheming here, either, please.’
Richard looked at the spilled tea, the scowling father, the mother’s strained smile, and the woman who had just entered. ‘Sorry, again.’ He’d seen her picture in the magazine she worked for, but her headshot was very small, and black and white. It didn’t do her justice. ‘Liesl, hi.’
They shook hands. Her grip was firm, like her father’s. When he’d tried to remember how she looked when they’d had their encounter in Rwanda, he’d found her twenty-something face wouldn’t come to him. The magazine photo had her in sunglasses and a bush hat, almost as though she was wearing a cheesy disguise. When he’d thought of her over the years, the memory had been more visceral than visual. He could recall the heat of her breath on his neck; the feel of her fingers on him; the glory of her gripping his body with hers; the pure, illicit thrill of surrendering to his own weakness; the intense arousal of the way it had unfolded – her taking the initiative. He could recall many of the details, but not her face. He studied it now.
She gave a small, patient smile. ‘You haven’t really changed. Your hair’s still too long for a soldier.’
‘Lucky I’m not a soldier any more.’
Her hair was different – longer; her body seemed lean, muscled even. He’d remembered her as soft – not chubby, but carrying a mix of remnant baby fat and a young person’s disregard for alcohol and foods forbidden later in life. This Liesl looked like she worked out in a gym. Where there once had been girlish curves there were now chiselled, perhaps even brittle edges.
‘We need to talk,’ she said.
‘Tea, my girl?’ Elize asked.
‘No thanks, Mom. Richard and I need to chat in private. We’ll take a walk in the garden.’
Elize had started refilling a fresh cup, brought in by the maid who was now on all fours, dabbing at the stain. Elize looked up at Richard.
‘Thanks, Mrs Nel.’ He took the cup carefully and added milk and two sugars. He excused himself, taking a sip as he followed Liesl out the open French doors into the lush garden.
‘I see you’ve made a good first impression on my folks,’ she said.
He snorted a laugh. ‘I think your father wants to shoot me.’
‘His bark’s worse than his bite – although you were a British soldier . . .’
Richard lengthened his stride and fell into step with her, spilling a little of his tea. She was taller than he remembered. Still a cracking good sort. She wore jeans and gym shoes, and a simple white V-necked T-shirt.
‘So, Richard, someone tried to kill you too?’
‘Yes.’ A near-death experience was one way to stop him thinking about sex, he supposed. ‘An African man dressed in black, with a silenced assault rifle. Hardly your garden-variety South African home invasion. He had a bag of cocaine on him, which I suspect he was going to plant at my place, to make it look drug related. The kids in Nelspruit go mostly for Mandrax and weed. Coke’s a bit out of the bush league.’
She stopped under a knob-thorn tree. ‘Would planting drugs on you have been a plausible way to cover up the real reason for your death? Would the cops consider you part of a drug deal?’
‘If I said yes, would you think less of me?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think of you. Do you always make jokes at inappropriate times?’
‘Always. Is it true a good journalist never asks a question she doesn’t know the answer to?’
‘Yes. But I’ve also done some things over the years I’m not proud of. I know what it’s like to look for a way out.’
He didn’t ask for more information. He was in no mood for group therapy. He’d been there, done that. It hadn’t worked, although he had slept with a fellow addict. The sex had been rubbish, but that hadn’t really mattered. It had fed one of his addictions for an hour, and that was all that mattered to him at the time. ‘You’re convinced you weren’t just the victim of a botched car-jacking?’
‘It’s why we’re here now, isn’t it?’ she replied.
‘Point taken.’
‘We’re here because of that war crimes investigator, Mike Ioannou, the one looking into the Rwandan war crimes, aren’t we?’ she said.
‘I can’t think of another connection,’ Richard admitted. ‘He told me he would be in touch with you – that he wanted to see if you had copies or negatives of the pictures you’d taken. I take it he did?’ He sipped his tea. He wished it was Scotch.
‘Yes,’ Liesl said. She folded her arms across her body. ‘That was about two weeks ago. He seemed very insistent. He emailed me then called me at work in Cape Town. He said he would get a warrant, from the war crimes tribunal or whatever it is, if I didn’t comply. He was quite pushy. I told him all my old files of prints and negs were at my parents’ house, and that I was off to Namibia on assignment the next day and wouldn’t be able to get back here to Letsitele for two weeks. I was hoping it would all just go away, but then a few days ago the subpoena came.’
Richard recalled his own phone conversations – two of th
em – and the emails from Mike Ioannou. ‘He was a man on a mission, all right.’
‘What did he ask you? And how did he find you?’
Liesl motioned to a wooden bench under a jacaranda tree. They sat and Richard rested an arm on the seat back and turned to her. He told her that Ioannou had been reviewing old media coverage of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the massacre of the Tutsis, and the follow-up revenge attacks by Tutsis against Hutus. Ioannou had come across two of Liesl’s photos in an old edition of Newsweek, the picture of the RPF soldier holding his pistol to the head of the woman, just before he shot her – this had been on the magazine’s cover – and, inside, a much smaller image of the old man holding out a photograph to Liesl’s lens while Richard tried to treat him.
‘He googled me and tracked me down. Not easy, considering the number of jobs I’ve had. He wanted to know what the man had said to me, and who was in the picture.’
Liesl nodded. ‘I remember that shot. You couldn’t really see who was in the photo he was holding – it was too small – but it was the dying man’s eyes, wide and crazy, that made the picture. I remember some subeditor supposed that the picture was of his slaughtered family and made up the accompanying caption.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Richard nodded. ‘It made no sense. If you think about it, why would he have been holding out a picture of his dead relatives? The men being shot and hacked up that day were the perpetrators of the initial genocide. Ioannou said he’d had the same thought. I got the feeling that he knew the identity of the man holding the picture, but when I asked him he was evasive. He said something like, “I can’t confirm that.” He wanted to know if I could remember what was in the picture.’
