The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  By 2008 ministers were literally buying brand-new Mercedes-Benzes for US$50.

  The great discrepancy between the two rates kept the chefs in Armani suits, flat-screen TVs, mansions, cocaine, Johnnie Walker Blue and Hummer limousines. Remittances exchanged on the black market kept millions of ordinary people alive – and my parents survived in a similar way.

  My sisters and I didn’t send them money – they were too proud for that – but the few thousand rands my father had left in South Africa from the sale of the Knysna home were now worth far more to him on the black market in Zimbabwe than they ever would be if my parents actually had to try to live on it in South Africa.

  It was the ultimate irony my friends in New York could never get their heads around.

  ‘Why don’t they just leave?’ they would ask me.

  ‘Because they’re better off where they are!’ I would say.

  They were stuck: Estragon and Vladimir, waiting for God knew what.

  The secret, of course, was finding a reliable money dealer. Foreign currency was a drug for the chefs, who needed it like locusts needed leaves, and they did anything to get their hands on it, especially raiding and arresting money dealers.

  My parents had a dealer, and they spoke of her in the reverential tones we might reserve for a movie star or a great musician. They rarely called her by her real name, but instead used code names. In addition to Miss Moneypenny, they called her Moneybags, Madame Bureau de Change or my favourite, the National Treasure.

  ‘She is a national treasure,’ Dad would say in wonder. ‘If anyone deserves to be buried at Heroes Acre when their time comes, it’s her.’ Heroes Acre was where they buried guerrilla veterans of the liberation war.

  I wanted to change US$200 into Zim dollars. I didn’t have US$200 on me, but that didn’t matter. Moneypenny had accounts in London and South Africa. All I would have to do was transfer the US$200 when I got back to New York. It was as simple as going to an ATM.

  Dad had his own business to discuss with Moneypenny.

  ‘She got in big trouble with the Reserve Bank,’ he told me.

  ‘What happened?’

  We were driving past Blue Star Motors now, a fuel station where a four-day queue of battered cars and rusty trucks stretched for several kilometres along a pavement and up a grassy shoulder. Street kids hired by the motorists to look after their vehicles dozed on bonnets and back seats. Eventually word would came through that a fuel shipment had arrived and the motorists would find their way back to their vehicles. It was better to have a donkey cart, and I saw that they were making a comeback: we stopped for one at a broken traffic light.

  ‘The government is so short of foreign currency that they run ads in the Herald encouraging people to inform on anyone who they believe is dealing in foreign currency. They offer a ten per cent reward on any money recovered. Although it’s illegal to own foreign currency, they pay this reward in foreign currency.’

  ‘The government advertises for spies?’

  ‘Yes. They encourage people to inform on their neighbours, friends, family – all in the cause of “national unity”, of course. Anyway, Moneypenny has a brother who emigrated to South Africa a while ago, and she managed to sell his house to a black Zimbabwean girl who lives in New York. This girl wanted it for her parents, who still live here. She paid US$110 000 for it into Moneypenny’s overseas account. But the girl’s brother lives here, too. He found out about the deal and informed the Reserve Bank. So the bank made Moneypenny return the US$110 000 and paid her out in Zim at the official Z$101 000 rate. It was either that or jail.’

  ‘Jesus. And what about the brother?’

  ‘Get this: he got his ten percent cut – US$11 000 – and now lives in the house!’

  ‘Christ, Moneypenny must be furious.’

  ‘You have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘So you’re going to give her some legal advice?’

  He thought about that for a moment.

  ‘Well, of a sort,’ he said.

  I was pleased my father was getting back into the law. I knew that with his experience he could help people.

  We came to a sprawling warehouse complex and a row of low-slung brick buildings in the industrial estates on the edge of town. The complex was surrounded by a high wire fence. A sign on the open gate read Latex: Balloons. Gloves.

  A tan sedan was parked on the grass outside. Two black men sat in it, one sleeping, the other smoking a cigarette. We drove in.

  ‘So this is it,’ said Dad. ‘Moneypenny’s lair.’

  ‘She makes balloons?’

  ‘Used to,’ said Dad. ‘Now she’s pretty much just a bank.’

  I half expected a glamorous businesswoman in a Donatella Versace power suit barking orders into banks of cellphones and checking currency markets on a flat-screen TV hidden behind the walnut panelling of a plush, air-conditioned office. But Moneypenny sat on a wooden chair behind a chipped Formica desk littered with paperwork and dirty teacups. An old desktop computer that sounded like it was powered by steam whirred away on it. An electric fan scattered her papers. A set of ladies’ golf clubs leaned in one corner; a large, black metal trunk of the kind I used in boarding school was on the floor beside the desk.

  She was a plump, beaming, middle-aged redhead with a laugh as loud and ready as a foghorn, dazzling green eyes and a jumble of crooked white teeth. She wore a frumpy fifties-style floral dress. She reminded me of my old primary-school teacher.

  Dad greeted Moneypenny in the manner he greeted all his friends, male or female: boisterous pat on the back, jokey jab to the ribs and a loud ironic tone.

  ‘Miss Moneybags! I’ve missed you! How is the bureau de change?’

  ‘Morning, Lyn,’ she said, swinging her feet up on the desk. She looked at me and shook her head. ‘Your dad’s so full of shit.’

  Dad pulled out a three-iron from her golf bag and started practising his swing.

  ‘So, Lyn, did you see my friends at the gate?’ she asked.

  His follow-through made a dent in a pine wardrobe against the wall.

  ‘Oops, sorry about that… Ja, I saw two buggers sitting out there.’

  ‘My Charlie Tens. Just checking who comes and goes.’

  Charlie Tens? That was slang for the CIO – the secret police. I was horrified. And yet she sounded so cavalier about it. Dad didn’t seem too bothered about them, either. He put the three-iron back, pulled out a putter and introduced me.

  ‘So, Madame Bureau de Change, this is my son. He wants to bake two hundred gringos in a backie pie.’

  ‘Two hundred? Excellent. I think I can do that.’

  ‘And I’ll bake a thousand japies.’

  ‘Hmmm …’ She glanced at the metal trunk. ‘Not sure I have enough. I might have to send you to the vault in town. I’ll call Enoch.’

  They were speaking in code, but it wasn’t too hard to work out.

  Gringos were US dollars. Japies were South African rands – after a common Afrikaans Christian name. Backie was an abbreviation of her actual surname. A backie pie was the name they gave to a transaction. It was unlikely the office was bugged, but they had gotten into the habit of e-mailing and speaking to each other on the telephone in this way, and so they stayed in character. You could tell they quite liked the intrigue of it all, too.

  Moneypenny’s secretary, Faith, a beautiful twenty-something black girl in high heels and a miniskirt – she was the glamorous woman I had expected Moneypenny to be – brought us cups of strong Tanganda tea.

  ‘He also wants to ask you about the bureau de change business,’ Dad continued. ‘He’s writing a book about all us weirdos. Rosalind and I told him you’re our national treasure and that he should dedicate it to you.’

  I suddenly felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to compromise her safety.

  ‘Only if you’re not worried,’ I interrupted. ‘I won’t use your name.’

  She cackled loudly and slapped her thigh. ‘A little nervous, your boy, hey, Lyn?�
� She turned to me. ‘Listen, darling. I’ve got spies sitting outside my front gate. The Reserve Bank wants to send me to jail. Some son of a bitch has stolen US$11 000 from me and is living in my brother’s house. My name in your book is the least of my worries. Ask me what you want as long as you make me famous.’

  Dad stepped out to make a phone call. Moneypenny got up and kicked open the metal trunk. I saw it was filled with neat pink bricks of Z$20 000 notes, a million’s worth tied together at a time with rubber bands. She gathered a pile in her arms and I fired questions at her while she counted out US$200 worth at Z$300 000 to US$1, forming a cash mountain on her desk.

  Where to begin? How do you ask a sweet middle-aged lady to tell you how she became a money launderer? I felt as if I was asking my old primary-school teacher how she’d come to moonlight as a hooker. It didn’t seem right.

  ‘Um, so how much do you deal in a day?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, this is Mutare, darling, we’re pretty low-key here. Harare, that’s where the big bucks are. I guess I change about US $4000 on average. The problem is getting enough Zim cash. The government has to print so much of it now since it’s basically worth toilet paper. But luckily I have a guy who drives to collect trunks of it for me near Harare. Someone from Harare meets him halfway at this lovely old tea shop on the Harare road. The Charlie Tens sitting outside my gate should go to that tea shop. That’s where the really big deals go down.’

  I knew the tea shop well. I would never look at it again in the same way.

  I wanted to know how the black-market rate worked – how it was decided what the local currency was to the US dollar. It seemed to fluctuate wildly from town to town and from day to day – Z$450 000 to US$1 in Harare, Z$300 000 here.

  ‘There’s a lot of us in the game,’ she explained. ‘We get a newsletter by e-mail from a guy in Harare who helps set it. Something to do with Old Mutual. They take a variant of Old Mutual shares in London and what the same share price is in Harare, and by dividing one by the other get the rate. Very complicated. There is a way to work out what the value to the dollar should be.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The egg rate.’

  ‘The egg rate? What, like a local equivalent of the Dow or the FTSE?’

  She cackled loudly. ‘No, darling. Go to a street dealer and ask him for seven boiled eggs. The price he charges is the rate of the Zim dollar to the US dollar on that day. It’s highly scientific.’

  I burst out laughing. ‘Come on, that’s bullshit.’ But it was, in fact, entirely true. A financial journalist in Harare named Jonathan Waters, a graduate of Prince Edward School and Rhodes University, had established a highly respected economics subscription service called Zfn. He e-mailed a daily guide to the markets and currency rates that included the Hard Boiled Egg Index, the HBEI. Everyone in business in Zimbabwe subscribed to his service, including Reserve Bank and Finance Ministry officials. It was easy to believe they learned more about the economy from Zfn than they did from actually running the economy.

  Moneypenny continued counting the cash on the desk, skimming through each brick with her fingers like a Vegas croupier counting a deck of cards.

  ‘Z$29million … Z$30 million … halfway there.’

  ‘So how on earth did you get into doing this?’ I asked.

  She laughed again.

  ‘Well, I didn’t set out to be a criminal, my dear. I studied accountancy at university. My parents had the rubber business here in town making balloons and gloves, and I came to work for them. That was in the 1980s. The business was pretty successful, and my brother and I eventually took it over. But then, by the late nineties, the government started controlling the US dollar rate and printing local currency like mad. The economy began to slide. The rubber business was kaput, and we had to adapt. I had all these clients with cash out of the country who needed cash here, and they didn’t want to put it through local banks, where they control what you take out. So I got into bureau de change. I take a small cut and I manage to get money out of the country. I learned the ropes pretty fast.’

  She gazed out the window at her now idle balloon factory. A pyramid of oil drums was piled high on top of a rusty old truck that had four flat tyres. A plume of smoke drifted over from a neighbouring factory. Somewhere out there, a wheel of industry turned.

  ‘Condoms,’ she muttered.

  ‘Condoms?’

  ‘Condoms. I told my brother once, if only we’d made condoms instead of gloves and balloons, I wouldn’t be doing all this Chinese accountancy bullshit today. There’s still a huge market in Africa for condoms. But balloons? Not so much. Z$39 million … Z$40 million …’

  ‘Aren’t you worried about being caught, though? I know about the Reserve Bank business and the problem with the guy who took your house.’

  I got a big smile. I could tell she liked speaking about her job.

  ‘Well, in the beginning, yes. I got raided a couple of years ago. Totally unexpected. Someone informed on me. These two guys from the Criminal Investigation Department [CID] came in. I had the trunk of Zim money, but they’re not really bothered about that, and all my US is in offshore accounts, so they wouldn’t find any actual cash. But I did have a shopping bag under my desk with paper printouts of transfers into my UK account by some Catholic priests in town I play banker for.’

  ‘The printouts had all your foreign account details?’

  ‘Ja – and theirs.’

  ‘Shit, did they find it?’

  ‘They were looking in the wardrobe, going through everything very slowly, moving on to the desk. I told them I had to make a call and I buzzed Faith and said, ‘You know the thingamajig for Father O’Reilly? Can you come in and get it?’ She knew what I was talking about. She came in and I gently kicked the bag under the table with my foot. She bent down, picked it up, and walked out, cool as a cucumber. Ja, that was a bit scary.’

  It must have been terrifying, but she giggled now at the thought of it. I knew it was small victories like that that kept many people sane.

  ‘Okay, but what about now? You have those guys waiting by the gate. Isn’t the government more desperate? Isn’t it worse?’

  Her green eyes sparkled.

  ‘Yes, but now, darling, I have my own informers. Ha-ha! You must understand, everyone is a criminal in this country. You have to be. These days I deal cash for guys in the police and the CID. Just the other day this CID chappie whose friend is one of my clients phoned him to tell me he was typing a warrant to search my house and office and that he should make sure I cleared things away fast before his crew arrived. So they warn me, which is nice. The first raid was the big one – like a rite of passage. You have to stay calm and polite. After it happened I got so many calls from other dealers saying, “Now there, that wasn’t so bad. We’re all thinking of you. You’ve had your baptism.”’

  She made it sound like they were a needlework group or a netball team, all in it together, part of a club. It was heartening.

  ‘Also, this place might look shabby, but I keep it this way on purpose. You don’t want to look flush. I’m pretty careful, too. When I make calls to my overseas bank, for example, I drive up to the Vumba. There’s a turn on the road in the cliffs up there where your cellphone switches to a Mozambique signal. They can’t listen in on that. So I do a lot of my work in the mornings up the mountain. It’s a nice view, but shit, it’s bloody cold in winter.’

  I was still amazed she was so calm about everything. Then I remembered something Dad had told me in the car: Look at her fingernails. I looked as she counted the cash and I saw they were chewed to the quick, the cuticles blood-red half-moons. She was highly stressed, but her personality – all dynamism and gusto – hid it so well. Being able to laugh at the absurdity of their situation was a trait all Zimbabweans picked up; if they didn’t, they all would have had heart attacks.

  So I asked her why she didn’t just leave. Unlike my parents, she had a decent amount of money out of the country and a brother w
ith a business in South Africa. She could live well there. For the first time she seemed vulnerable, unsure of herself.

  ‘But what about my golf?’ she said.

  Dad had told me she was a passionate golfer. She wasn’t a brilliant player, but she loved the game, and Dad said it helped her relax. Her house overlooked the twelfth hole at Hillside, and she played all the time. She also got to meet new clients at the club. Her black book was full of golfers.

  ‘But you can play golf in South Africa, too,’ I pointed out.

  She shook her head. She wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘I don’t think so, darling. They have so many good players down there. I would just feel too intimidated on their courses.’

  So Moneypenny hung around partly for the sake of her golf game.

  My sixty million was a high mound on the table, a beautiful pink volcano. Dad came back in, twirling the putter. Moneypenny made a quick phone call.

  ‘Enoch? Hi, listen, Mr Rogers is coming round. Can you give him sixty litres? Any colour … Thanks. And let me know when the trunks arrive.’ She turned to him.

  ‘Okay, Lyn, your bucks are at the vault. Now let’s talk revenge.’ She beamed, leaned back, and took a sip of tea from a chipped mug.

  ‘Revenge?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s the latest with this witch doctor business?’ she said to Dad.

  Seeing my puzzled look, she laughed. ‘You haven’t told him? Oh, my, you have to hear this. It’s brilliant. We’re putting a spell on the chappie who took my house!’

  I stared at my father. He looked at me and shrugged.

  ‘I didn’t say I was offering her conventional legal advice.’

  ‘You hired a witch doctor? From where?’

  ‘Muranda found him,’ said Dad. ‘Some old bugger in the valley.’

  I wondered whether it was the old man Dad had called in all those years ago when they first opened. Before she accepted the job as manager at Drifters, Maude Magondweni had insisted Dad first bring in a n’anga to bless the property. She wouldn’t take the job without it. Then again, maybe it was the Political Commissar’s nephew doing a bit of freelancing. Everyone seemed to be into sorcery these days. You either were a traditional healer or you needed one.