by Tony Park
‘There is nothing to sign, it is all fine,’ the rental man said.
‘Really?’ Carmel, the lawyer, would have been appalled. This morning, however, she didn’t care. It was kind of liberating, she thought, to know they could get in this car and drive to Cairo if the mood took them, with no paper trail to track them down. Of course, it was highly unlikely the vehicle would make it that far.
‘Now that the formalities are over, shall we go?’ Henri asked.
Liesl put her backpack in the boot, where the speaker had been, and Henri loaded his and Carmel’s bags. Liesl had said little this morning, Carmel noted. She felt her cheeks colour a little. ‘Do you want to sit in the front?’ she asked the South African.
‘Ag, no, it’s fine. I’ll sit in the back. I’m tired, so I might snooze. Wake me if you want me to do some driving.’
Liesl hefted her camera bag into the backseat and climbed in beside it. Carmel got in the front next to Henri, who took the driver’s seat. She tried to look straight ahead, but she was acutely aware of his body. She’d seen all of it. Memories of its feel and tastes filled her head. She tried to force them away by studying the map of Kigali and Rwanda.
‘I remember the way,’ Henri said to her, smiling.
‘Oh, OK.’ She felt like a teenager, lost for words.
‘It will be fine.’
She nodded.
They waved goodbye to the rental man and set off out of the hotel gates. As quietly joyous as Carmel was over her night of passion, the reality of the mission ahead sobered her. They turned right and then left, heading down the hill into the maelstrom of Kigali’s morning traffic.
Motos beeped on either side of them, and Carmel felt again the slight disorientation of driving on the opposite side of the road. It seemed every oncoming vehicle was about to plough into them, and when Henri took a right onto a roundabout, it felt downright wrong. He weaved his way across several lanes and then exited right, towards the valley below. Carmel snuck a peak in the back and saw Liesl had already drifted off to sleep. Her head was lolled back and her mouth half open as she quietly snored. Just then a white Coaster bus with Omega painted on its side came close to sideswiping them and Henri was forced to use his horn to warn a pedestrian in a suit to hurry out of his way.
Despite her lack of sleep, Carmel was alert and aware of her surroundings – and of the man next to her. She focused on the passing traffic and scenery to stop from staring at Henri. Elections were coming around again in Rwanda and she spotted soldiers, in pairs, dressed in camouflage jumpsuits and carrying AK-47s, standing on street corners. As they descended into the valley she saw a full section of ten men in uniform patrolling the street. There had been criticisms of Paul Kagame, as president, for being too heavy-handed in dealing with political opposition, but Kagame had seen his country – his people – almost wiped out. Carmel wondered what repercussions there might be for the RPF at the polls if it was revealed that their leader, and not some radical Hutu, had shot down the former president’s aircraft, thus sparking the murder of nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Henri’s mobile phone rang and he answered it while he drove. ‘Hello? Yes, we’ll see you there.’ He ended the call. ‘That was Aston,’ he said to Carmel. ‘He will meet us at the turn-off to Ruhengeri. He’s been out doing some business this morning.’
‘Okay,’ Carmel said. She wasn’t sure how far they could trust the rotund, rather affable Zambian, but she stood by what she had told him – that she’d been impressed with the Zambian soldiers and officers she’d met. It was an amazing coincidence that he claimed to recognise the white man in the picture, perhaps too amazing. She wondered if he might be a con man who would ask them for money before revealing what he supposedly knew, then give them the slip, but she was prepared to take that risk.
Liesl stirred, but the phone call and their talking hadn’t fully woken her. Carmel was glad.
They reached the turn-off a short while later and Carmel could see Aston sitting on the bonnet of a silver Corolla. Henri pulled over and both he and Carmel got out.
‘You are ready?’ Aston asked. As he stood, the car rose a little as his weight was lifted from its front suspension.
‘As ready as we ever will be,’ Carmel said. ‘Who’s this?’ She pointed through the windscreen of the Corolla to another man.
‘He is my driver, Alphonse. I use him every time I come here on business. He knows the way.’
‘OK,’ Carmel said. ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’
Kigali was not a big city by African standards and they were soon following Aston’s Corolla out into the rural landscape. Carmel noted, as she had before, that there seemed to be not a single native tree left on Rwanda’s rolling hills. The hills themselves were mostly terraced, and what vegetation there was tended to be straggly banana plantations or stands of Australian gum trees. Ironic, Carmel thought, that this little piece of Australia was all that was keeping the soil of many of these hills from tumbling down into the creeks and rivers that wound through the rumpled landscape.
As they passed a roadside brick-making operation Carmel saw a toothless woman carrying a stack of eight house bricks on her head. The raw product was laid out in row after row on the ground, wet bricks drying in the sun before being finished off in a roadside kiln. The clay used to make them was blood red, and stained the hands and forearms of the boys who slopped mud into wooden moulds and then tipped them out. It was a timeless operation, she thought.
The villages clustered along the main road consisted of houses made, presumably, of the same mudbricks she’d seen the woman carrying, but the walls were rendered smooth and painted a pale khaki. The roofs were terracotta half-moon tiles, echoing the country’s European colonial history. It could have been, Carmel thought, a village in medieval Belgium, complete with architecture that was inspired by some faint memory of Roman invaders. Long-horned cattle roamed the roadside here and there, and dogs darted out of the way of the vehicles. The road was good for the most part, but the steepness of the hills prevented the traffic from reaching dangerous speeds, and the downhills, more often than not, led to the next village where blue uniformed police with AKs kept watch for speedsters.
Carmel saw a billboard promoting the Rwandan national cycling team and privately marvelled at how hard their calves must be, training in this rollercoaster topography. She imagined the strength and stamina of the farmers who climbed and descended their terraces every day and wondered, not for the first time, how such smiling, industrious people could have been whipped into such a frenzy of hate and killing. As long as she lived she knew she would never truly understand it.
These streams had been choked with bodies, the roadway drenched with blood at the checkpoints where the Interahamwe had carried out the ceaseless, tiring work of hacking apart their neighbours. The green fields in the valleys probably still held mass graves whose bones would appear during the seasonal rains, then be deluged in new flows of red topsoil. Remnants of the killing would be coming and going for years.
Liesl yawned loudly from the back seat. ‘What do we do when we find this guy?’ she asked, as she lifted one of her cameras and clicked off a rapid burst of frames as they passed a trio of smiling, waving children.
‘Firstly we identify him and learn as much as we can about him,’ Carmel said. ‘And then I’ll try and question him.’
‘You? Alone?’ Henri asked.
‘You don’t have any authority to question a potential witness or suspect in an ICTR investigation, Henri,’ Carmel said.
‘No, but this man, if he is the one who ordered the assassinations . . .’
‘If he is the man who was behind the attempts on our lives, then I’ll exercise every caution around him,’ she said.
‘I’m not sure, Carmel,’ Henri said.
She looked over her shoulder and saw Liesl had lost interest in the conversation and had put the white buds of an iPhone in her ears so she could listen to music. She showed no sign of b
eing able to hear them. ‘Henri. I can’t let what happened interfere with my work,’ Carmel said softly.
‘I don’t want to see you hurt.’
‘And neither do I, but we’ve come so far. This man, he’s like a ghost. We haven’t been able to find him, yet he’s been haunting us all along. This lead from Aston is the only concrete lead we’ve had since the colonel’s death to find out who is behind this thing. It’s my duty to find this man and to question him and, if needs be, to bring him to justice.’
Henri risked looking away from the winding road that climbed through the gum-covered hills to stare at her for a couple of seconds. ‘You don’t have an army or a police force on your side, Carmel. Is there any way you can forget this – drop this investigation and go back to practising law in Australia, or maybe somewhere else?’
‘Somewhere else?’
He shrugged and looked back out the windscreen. ‘Maybe Zambia.’
Carmel was taken aback. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Carmel,’ he said as quietly as the vehicle’s small whining engine would allow, ‘how would you like to come and stay with me?’
‘For how long?’
He shrugged. ‘Indefinitely. I could protect you. I know people in Zambia. There would be work for you – I could arrange it. I am sure if we leave this man, if we leave this country now, you would be safe.’
It was a tempting fantasy. ‘What makes you think that whoever’s tried to kill us all would stop now?’
‘You don’t know who’s been trying to kill you, or why. It could all be one grand coincidence, Carmel. Come with me. I’ll take care of you. Leave this place of death now.’
She looked at him staring fixedly out at the road, his hands tight on the steering wheel. She remembered the feel of those hands on her body, strong when they’d needed to be and soft as a woman’s when their loving had called for it. ‘I don’t need protecting, Henri.’ She risked laying a hand on his arm for a moment. ‘But thank you. Perhaps when this is all over . . .’
‘That’s precisely what I’m worried about,’ he said, his voice cracking as he indicated to pass a slow-moving petrol tanker, ‘that it will soon be all over – for all of us.’
*
Liesl glanced up from the screen of her iPhone just long enough to see Carmel withdrawing her hand from Henri’s arm. Liesl felt Carmel’s eyes on her from the rear-vision mirror. She knew guilt when she saw it. Liesl was sure the pair had slept together last night.
Liesl wasn’t jealous – well, not overly. Henri was a good-looking guy and Liesl had noticed Carmel smiling to herself over breakfast, and then forcing a straight face when she’d seen Henri emerge from the elevator. It all made sense.
Instead of selecting music, Liesl had been SMSing Pierre, who was using his cellphone from a bed in Kigali Central Hospital. The colonel’s thugs had roughed up Pierre big-time, and he’d been battered and bruised and pissing blood when the police took him to hospital. He was in for another day at least, pending some tests. Liesl had stopped by to see him and told the attending physician she and Escape! magazine would be paying all of Pierre’s medical costs.
Liesl typed a message to Pierre as Carmel and Henri resumed their conversation. Any luck finding out who the white man is in the pic?
Her phone was on silent, so as not to attract Carmel’s attention. Liesl felt the ordeal in the prison had broken down part of the barrier between her and the frosty lawyer, but she also knew Carmel was not the type to share information. Carmel had taken her aside the previous evening and read her the riot act about passing on anything she learned that related to their investigation. ‘You should have told me you were going to the prison with Pierre,’ Carmel had said.
‘I never received a call or SMS from you telling me you were going to the prison either,’ Liesl had retaliated.
The phone vibrated and Liesl opened a new message from Pierre. Have emailed pic to a friend in Ruhengeri. If the man is a tour operator or lodge owner, my contact will know of him.
Liesl had messaged Pierre in hospital that morning and passed on the information they’d gleaned from Aston, that the white man was somehow connected with the tourist industry in the region around the Volcanoes National Park. The inference was that he would be involved in one of the lodges or tour groups that made their money organising trips into the park to track the mountain gorillas. She’d warned her journalist colleague to be careful who he sent the picture to, but Pierre seemed to have ignored that. Liesl felt bad enough that Pierre had been beaten, and she didn’t want to be responsible for more injuries or deaths, but she also thought Carmel’s by-the-book approach was doomed to fail. The man they were hunting did not play by the rules, and neither would Liesl.
She looked at her hand after she had sent the text and noticed the tremor. She checked her watch. It was ten in the morning. A little early, but by no means her earliest. She unzipped her daypack and found the half-jack of vodka she’d bought duty free at OR Tambo Airport. She unscrewed the cap. A glass would have been good. She raised the neck of the bottle to her lips and saw Carmel’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Liesl licked her lips as the fiery liquid radiated through her body. ‘Want some?’
‘No, thank you. Do you think that’s wise, given where we’re going?’
Liesl shrugged and removed the buds from her ears. ‘I thought I wasn’t invited to this party. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve got to sort out our accommodation today and I’m going on a gorilla trek tomorrow morning. This is pretty much a free day for me since you’ve no intention of letting me interview the man who’s trying to kill us.’
‘Don’t be smart, Liesl,’ Carmel said.
‘I can’t help it.’
Henri gave a small laugh and Carmel looked at him admonishingly. ‘What?’ his return glance seemed to ask her.
Liesl rolled her eyes. ‘This is bizarre. I don’t know what I’m doing tagging along with you guys. I should just head off somewhere safe, like Afghanistan.’
But she did know why she was here. Above and beyond the need to find out who was trying to kill them, Liesl sensed she was on to the biggest story about Rwanda since the genocide. She needed to be there, and she needed to get the story first, even before Carmel and the ICTR, or the Rwandan police. It would be dangerous, but she didn’t care. She took another slug of vodka then replaced the cap. That would have to do for now, she thought, though it was like saying goodbye to an old and trusted friend when she slid the bottle into her bag. When she checked into her room at the guesthouse she would make a show of needing to sleep. Carmel wouldn’t miss her for the rest of the day, which would give Liesl the opportunity she needed to quietly slip out and find their man – assuming Pierre came through with a name.
Liesl’s phone vibrated and she opened the new SMS. It was from Richard. Liesl hadn’t told Carmel they’d been in touch again, but was beginning to think she should come clean. He’d messaged her from Australia, apologising for his sudden departure. He’d assured her he was following up a lead over there, but could tell her no more. She’d wondered, briefly, if he was delusional as well as being a coward and a cad.
Just landed in Joburg. Have a name for our man. Karl Hess, the message read.
Liesl looked at the back of Carmel’s head. She would tell her the news, in good time. This Aston was supposedly taking them to the man. The more she thought about the Zambian’s timely arrival, with his offer to take them to find Hess – or whatever his name was – the more she thought it was too coincidental. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and found the crumpled card Aston had given her last night. Aston Mutale listed his occupation as Traditional Healer and Chief Executive Officer, Best Imports, Private Limited. The address listed was in Roodepoort, Johannesburg. Liesl SMSed Aston’s name, occupations and details to Richard, with the addendum, Check this oke out.
Will do. Be careful, Richard messaged.
You too.
*
As soon as they cleared customs and immigrati
on, Richard found a seat in the arrivals area and sat down, grateful for the chance to take the weight off his wounded leg. There was a stain on his jeans where a little blood had seeped through and he knew he would have to change the bandage again.
‘I need to go to the bathroom, and I’ll get us some coffee as well,’ Collette said.
Richard nodded as he scrolled through the contacts on his cellphone. ‘There’s a Mugg and Bean upstairs. Make mine a double shot.’
Collette left and Richard dialled Sannie van Rensburg. Sannie was a former detective inspector who lived on a banana farm at Hazyview, near the Kruger National Park. Richard had delivered her third child, an emergency breech birth, when she had gone into labour during a game drive in the Kruger National Park. The last time he’d seen Sannie she’d told him she’d gone back into the police, as a reservist, having heeded a nationwide call for experienced officers to return to the ranks. Many whites had taken early retirement or been made redundant in the push to Africanise the police force, but the authorities had recently realised they were suffering from losing so many experienced officers.
‘Sannie, hello?’ she said.
‘Hi, it’s Doctor Richard Dunlop.’
‘Richard! Good to hear from you. Are you all right? I heard about the problem at your house, hey.’
‘Yes, I’m fine thanks. And you, and your son?’
‘Ja, lekker thanks, and little Tommy’s doing fine thanks. He turns two next week.’
‘That’s great. Sannie, are you working today?’
‘Ja, I’m doing a shift in Nelspruit, covering for a guy whose wife is having a baby.’
‘I know this is unusual, but I need some help. I need you to check out a couple of names for me – a criminal record check.’
There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘Richard, it’s not like the movies, hey. We’re not allowed to give out information on people’s records to just anyone.’
‘This is really important. It’s related to the shooting – the guy who tried to kill me at my home.’
