Dark Heart

by Tony Park

  Jan had set up a hide, a green ground sheet strung between two trees to provide shelter from the sun and rain, and camouflaged it with branches. He made a note on his phone of the time Nel left home, and scanned the grounds of the farmhouse for signs of the doctor and the woman. The man’s Discovery and the woman’s BMW X5 were both still parked on the lawn outside the garage.

  When the four-by-four was out of sight, headed in the direction of Letsitele, Jan scrolled through his contacts for Aston’s number and called him.

  ‘Yes?’ said the Inyanga.

  ‘They’re still in place. I checked the dogs last night, as well. I’ve confirmed their location and number. Security is not so tight in that part of the farm, not like the rhino and sable enclosures. Also, the dogs aren’t far from the main road. If you want to do it properly, there is an airstrip on the farm, so you could land an aircraft and fly them straight out.’

  There was a brief pause. ‘I want to do it properly. I’ll organise the vet and a helicopter.’

  Jan smiled. Proper meant costly. Costly meant more for him.

  *

  ‘You can get up now,’ Tokkie said.

  Thank God, Richard thought. He eased his cramped body up off the floor of the Land Cruiser, where he’d been sandwiched between the front and rear seats, hidden under a blanket. Behind him, Liesl was throwing off her cover from where she’d been curled up in the comparatively more comfortable flat cargo space of the vehicle.

  Richard saw a big tin-roofed shed and heard the increasingly high-pitched whine of a turbo engine. He looked around. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘This is Dad’s packing shed,’ Liesl said. There was fast-paced activity all around. Trucks were coming and going, bringing grapefruit from the orchards and leaving with cartons full of the produce.

  ‘I spoke to the police on the phone before we left,’ Tokkie said. ‘They’re going to send out patrols to keep an eye on us and try to track down whoever was driving that Land Cruiser. It’s a long shot, but if I hear anything I’ll let you know.’

  The vehicle rounded the end of the shed and Richard, now sitting upright, saw the blue Squirrel helicopter sitting on a concrete pad outside its purpose-built hangar. He shook his head in disbelief. Tokkie had told them he was going to fly them out of Letsitele, but Richard had assumed they would be going to an airstrip to get on a light aircraft. It seemed the farming business was going strong.

  ‘Who’s flying, Poppa?’

  ‘Marthinus.’

  Richard looked at her. ‘He’s one of my brothers,’ she said, ‘the one who owns the local Spar supermarket in town.’

  ‘Is there anything your family doesn’t own around here?’

  Liesl ignored Richard’s jibe as Tokkie stopped the car out of reach of the helicopter’s spinning blades. Its hot exhaust sent out a heat haze that whirled in the downwash. Richard smelled the burning fuel and it reminded him of helicopter rides in the army. He paused at the bumper and took Tokkie’s outstretched hand.

  Tokkie leaned close to Richard as he crushed his fingers in his hand. ‘I’m putting my only daughter in your care,’ he yelled into Richard’s ear. ‘I would rather have her with me, but you two have to lose yourselves just now. If anything happens to her I’ll hold you personally responsible and me and my four sons will find you.’

  Richard didn’t laugh. He knew it wasn’t a joke. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘My boy Marthinus will take you to Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria. We’ve got a house in the city, so you two can stay there until we get this thing sorted. Get her to put more stuff on that Facebook thing. I want whoever is after my daughter to try something so I can kill him.’

  Richard nodded. He knew the old man was serious.

  Tokkie said a few words into Liesl’s ear that Richard couldn’t hear, then the father and daughter hugged and kissed. Richard climbed into the back of the helicopter with Liesl, and Tokkie slammed the door shut behind them. Marthinus turned back to check on his passengers as Liesl handed Richard a headset. As they were buckling up, Marthinus lifted off.

  Richard looked down and saw the sunburned, lined face of the old farmer. He waved but he wasn’t smiling. Richard turned from the perspex window and saw Liesl was staring at him. She had her hand resting palm down on the middle seat that separated them. Richard put his hand over hers and gave it a squeeze.

  *

  Carmel sat in the main lounge area of Henri’s house with her laptop on her knees, typing an email to her superior at the ICTR in Arusha, outlining what had happened to her, Liesl and Richard, and asking what protection the tribunal could offer.

  Two detectives from Livingstone and a posse of uniformed Zambian police had been trampling around Henri’s place throughout the morning. Henri spoke with them now, in Lozi, on the verandah. It seemed to Carmel they were nearly done. An undertaker had already taken away the body of the gunman.

  Henri shook the detectives’ hands and escorted them out to the gravel driveway. He came in as Carmel was hitting ‘Send’.

  ‘That didn’t go too badly,’ he said.

  She closed the laptop. ‘You seemed to get on well with them.’

  ‘I know most of the local cops. They’re good men, and not as corrupt as people might think. Also, they know the dead guy.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘He was a petty criminal and sometime poacher. He’d done a couple of stretches in prison. The police are convinced he was here to rob or assault you.’

  ‘But I told them about the Rwanda connection, and the attacks on my two witnesses,’ Carmel said.

  Henri shrugged. ‘Like I said, they’re not bad guys, but neither do they want to increase their case load unnecessarily. It’s much easier for them to close the case off – one criminal caught in the act of breaking and entering, and killed. Nice and simple, n’est ce pas? They’ve offered, reluctantly, to put a man with an AK-47 out front for the next few nights while you’re still here, but that’s more a favour to me. I’ll end up having to transport him to and from town and feed him. I’m happy to do so, but . . .’

  ‘But you don’t think that’s enough?’

  He shrugged again. ‘You tell me, Carmel. If you think there is a gang out there trying to assassinate you and your star witnesses because of a picture, and something you all may or may not know, then what do you think we need to do about it?’

  She thought about his question. He didn’t really need to do anything at all about it – it wasn’t Henri’s problem, but he had already offered to assist her investigations in order to identify the men in the photograph. She wondered if he was looking for an excuse to get back to the country of his birth, and perhaps a bit of adventure.

  ‘I need to get back to work as soon as possible. I’m sorry, Henri, but I’m going to have to cut short my visit. I can’t be sightseeing while people are in danger. I need to work out a way to get to Richard and Liesl quickly, and I need to find out who is in the photo and why it’s so important.’

  ‘D’accord. Then I want to come with you, to Rwanda. Allow me to volunteer my services to your tribunal. It’s high time I did something to help my birth country. It would be my honour.’

  Carmel was touched by his sense of chivalry, and she owed Henri her life, but the lawyer in her was already finding a hundred reasons to refuse his offer.

  ‘Whatever you say, Carmel,’ he said before she could reply, ‘I am going to Rwanda. I have business there, as of this morning.’

  ‘You do? What’s so important that you all of a sudden want to go back?’

  ‘I received an email from an animal welfare group we work with in Rwanda. Someone came across a baby chimp in a market in Gisokoro, near Nyungwe National Park. He’s been taken to a refuge in Ruhengeri, but he can’t stay there because they don’t have a large enough enclosure for him, and he can’t be returned to the wild. It appears the little fellow was stolen from his troop by a trader, who probably planned to sell him as a pet or, worse, for medical experiments.’

  C
armel frowned. ‘And do you go and personally collect every rescued chimp that ends up in your rehabilitation centre?’

  Henri spread his hands. ‘Ah, you are too good an investigator. You have caught me out. No, the truth is I usually just oversee the shipments and leave others to do the dirty work, but I do want to get back to Rwanda to meet the people from this rescue organisation. And I have, in the past, personally transported chimps. And I am concerned about your safety, and whether you think you need me or not, I know I can help you identify the people in the picture.’

  Carmel let what Henri was proposing sink in. She was still shaky from the aftershock of what had nearly happened to her last night. She felt out of her depth with this investigation and she wished Mike Ioannou was still alive and that she was going about her normal business of prosecuting génocidaires who were already in prison. She was comfortably zealous dealing with crimes that happened seventeen and eighteen years earlier, but she had never had someone point a gun at her.

  Despite her fear, she knew she could dig deep and see this investigation through, but right now, as she looked at the handsome Gallic bear of a man waiting for her to accept his offer of help and protection, she knew that she wanted him beside her.

  ‘Rwanda’s what passes for a free country in Africa these days. I can’t stop you from travelling there,’ Carmel said.

  ‘Then I’ll take that as a yes.’

  15

  Jan had watched the farmhouse all day and noted the extra security patrols and the police cars cruising past the farm every three hours. The police and the undertrained security guards couldn’t help but fall into a pattern. It would still be easy enough to get what he wanted.

  He’d had little time to get bored. He had been on his mobile phone so much that he’d needed to pull the portable roll-out solar panel from his pack to charge it.

  Jan had spoken to the vet whose contact number Aston had given him. The man had dismissed him at first and said that he might call Jan back. The vet had been cautious, and had obviously called Aston to check out his credentials, and then phoned him back. When Jan had told him he needed him to be available with his dart gun, enough M99 to tranquillise a dozen small animals, and possibly an aircraft within two days, the vet had said, ‘Not possible.’

  ‘Talk to the man in Joburg,’ Jan had said, meaning Aston. ‘Ask him how much money’s involved.’

  Again the man had called him back after just a few minutes. ‘OK. I can do tomorrow. I have to be at an anti-poaching seminar in the Kruger Park the day after, so tomorrow would be better for me.’

  ‘And the aircraft?’

  ‘I’ve used a helicopter in the past. I’ve checked with the pilot, he can also do tomorrow.’

  *

  Aston got off the phone to the vet, again. The white animal doctor was a nervous man, as well he should be, Aston thought. The risks, but also the rewards, were higher for him than if Aston had been using one of the gangs of Mozambican poachers he sometimes employed.

  The vet needed to be repeatedly assured that security was tight and that the money would be worth him betraying his profession. In the eyes of many South Africans the vet would be considered a far worse criminal than a poorly paid black poacher armed with an AK-47. But Aston had to pay the vet far more to use a dart than he would have paid the hunter who used a bullet.

  The vet and his tame helicopter pilot – someone else many whites would have gladly lynched, even though it was they who had nearly wiped the rhino out through big-game hunting by the early twentieth century – had delivered five rhino horns to Aston so far. The vet had begun his foray across the line into crime by shooting a white rhino in the Letaba Ranch game reserve, on the northwestern border of the Kruger Park. He’d used a dart full of the opiate-derivative drug M99 from the helicopter and had then landed and sawn off the horn. Afterwards the vet had administered Naltrexone, the antidote to the M99, and the rhino had lurched to its feet, little worse for wear, as the helicopter had taken off.

  Aston had later told the vet he had been foolish, but the man had been indignant, claiming that it was better to leave the rhino alive. The action had salved the man’s conscience and, as he had pointed out, it made sense from a commercial point of view as the rhino would eventually regrow its horn and they could target it again in the future.

  ‘You have betrayed yourself,’ Aston had said.

  The man had not understood his foolishness, so Aston had had to explain it to him, with the patience of a father talking down to a smart but naive child. ‘It is not new, taking down a rhino with M99 in a dart gun. It is done by others because it is quieter than a bullet. By reviving the rhino, though, you have told the landowners and the police and the national parks’ criminal investigations division that the person who darted that rhino cares for animals. Who cares for animals yet knows how to load and fire a dart filled with potentially deadly drugs? A veterinarian. You have narrowed the police’s search for you, and established a modus operandi by which they will find you.’

  The white man had suddenly grown paler.

  These days, when the vet shot a rhino with M99, he didn’t revive it. Aston knew that once men crossed the line that separated criminals from law-abiding citizens there was no going back, and there was no such thing as degrees of right and wrong. It was the same as being an Inyanga who was prepared to deal in the strongest muti. Some traditional healers, particularly the female Sangomas, who were spiritualistic diviners and healers rather than physicians and herbalists like Aston, would publicly deplore many of the treatments Aston prescribed. Other Inyangas stopped short of prescribing illegal cures. But Aston knew that many of those same healers who expressed revulsion at the rape of a child to cure AIDS, or the killing of wild vultures, or the removal of a person’s eye or internal organs while they were still alive, were secretly envious of his decision to cross those particular lines. The whites decried the killing of vultures – repugnant birds in Aston’s mind – but everyone knew that sleeping with a dead vulture’s head under one’s pillow gave one the ability to foresee next week’s lottery numbers, thanks to the vulture’s extraordinary eyesight in life. Likewise, there was no muti stronger than that made from human body parts – especially when taken from the donor while they still lived. The power was in their pain, and in their screams, as an eye was gouged from their face, or in the last minutes of life as their belly was slit or their chest cleaved.

  What Aston thought was criminal was the actions of Inyangas who resorted to digging up bodies from cemeteries or paying mortuary assistants for body parts. Aston had held the beating heart of an albino boy in his hand and the tortured screams of the child had filled the organ with immense power. There was no substitute for harvesting the proper way – from a live donor.

  Aston had seen worse things in Rwanda during his time there as a soldier and peacekeeper. The Rwandans had killed because of jealousy and because they were incited to rage and murder by short-sighted, greedy politicians. Aston could not countenance killing for such trivial reasons. If he killed an albino it was to ensure a Mozambican fishing village’s catch was better this year than last; if he took an eye from a child it was to help a big man, an important man, recover from a disease. If a paying customer could cure his AIDS by screwing a girl a few years earlier than her uncle or father would have done anyway, then what was the problem?

  Aston checked his watch. By now he should have heard from Robert Banda, his paid assassin in Livingstone. He dialled the man’s number, but the call went through to voicemail. He scrolled through his phone’s address book and found the number for a detective inspector at Livingstone Police Station. The man was a valuable business contact who had overseen the movement of ivory from elephants killed in the villages along the Zambezi River through to Mozambique where it found its way, via Aston’s networks, onto Chinese ships in Beira harbour.

  ‘Ensha, how are things in Zambia, my friend?’

  ‘Ensha, Aston. Ah they are fine, and are you well in e-goli, the
land of gold, my friend?’ the policeman chuckled.

  ‘Ah yes, I am fine. I was just calling to see how things are going in Livingstone. Have you been busy lately?’

  There was a pause while the inspector deciphered Aston’s question. ‘Ah yes, my friend. Very busy. Just last night a man was killed while trying to break into the Bousson property, upriver from the falls. Do you know it?’

  ‘Ah, the crazy do-gooder Frenchman who runs a private zoo? I have heard of him.’

  The detective laughed again. ‘Yes, he is the one. Although he calls his place a “rehabilitation centre”. The intruder was armed with a gun and it appears he was trying to break into the room of one of the Frenchman’s guests, to rob her or maybe rape her. Bousson shot and killed him.’

  ‘I see,’ Aston said. He felt the anger rise in him, until it seemed to grip his heart and squeeze it. ‘Thank you, my friend. I am sure Livingstone is better off without this criminal.’

  More laughter. ‘Indeed, my friend, indeed. Is there anything more I can help you with?’

  Aston thought about the offer. ‘No, thank you.’ It was clear, from the succession of failures by the imbeciles he had employed, that if he wanted this thing done properly he would have to dirty his own hands.

  No matter, he thought to himself. He remembered looking down at the albino’s heart and feeling the warm blood that soaked his own hands and arms. It was time for him to regain control, and to feel that power once again: the power that came from the scream.

  He knew the woman, the Australian lawyer, would be heading to either Arusha or Rwanda next. He hoped it was the latter. It would be poetic justice to end this thing where it began. He recalled the once grassy hillside in Kibeho, where the Hutu refugees had died in their thousands, and the streets of Kigali and every other town and village across the country, littered with dead Tutsis. It was in Rwanda that Aston had first heard the scream, where he had first crossed the line.