The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  ‘So what did he recommend?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, Moneypenny came out to the camp a while ago with a suitcase full of cash to meet him. We sat in one of the chalets. He wore a suit, spoke well, nothing exotic. It was a bit like going to a regular doctor. You tell him your problem and he suggests a remedy. Except he gives you several choices and tells you that the more you pay him, the better the results.’

  I still couldn’t believe they were going down this path, but I was quietly thrilled by it. It reminded me of my father’s growing the bush at the front of his land to hide the house; it was the same principle. You had to go back to Africa, back to the old ways, to survive. There was a mad genius to it.

  ‘So what were the options?’

  Moneypenny took up their tale.

  ‘Well, he asked me if I wanted my money returned in US or Zim dollars. I said gringos, of course. He told me what it would cost and said to pay him ten percent up front, the rest when I got my bucks back. He seemed pretty confident it would work. Then he asked what I wanted done to the guy, what kind of revenge. Did I want to scare him, make him sick or kill him? He had a menu.’

  ‘Christ, killing him was an option?’

  ‘Ja! Of course I don’t want to kill the bastard, but you know, I wouldn’t mind scaring the shit out of him a bit.’

  ‘So how would he do that?’

  ‘Well, there were two ways. First of all he said I could get a mirror and write the man’s name on the glass in tomato sauce or red lipstick. Then I should hammer a nail into the middle of the mirror and pour pig’s blood over it, put the mirror in a box, and post it to him. The idea is that he opens it and sees his face with a nail through his head and his name on it.’

  ‘That would scare the crap out of me.’

  Moneypenny nodded.

  ‘Ja. In fact, I was worried that that option might actually kill him.’

  ‘So what was the other suggestion?’

  ‘Well, that’s the one I went with. He just said that he needed to see the house. So I drove him past it one evening and he got a feel for it. Then he said he would go to the Save River, where the spirits live in the water, and they would speak to him and sort it all out. Anyway, he phoned me and said I would have my house and my money back on the twenty-fourth. That was a month ago.’

  ‘So it hasn’t worked?’

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘I went to Muranda and told him, ‘John, no more of these namby-pamby herbalists. Get me someone powerful. Someone who can do a proper job here.’ Anyway, I was speaking to someone down at the camp the other day, some guy I did some legal work for years ago, and he told me about another n’anga. Said he’s the most powerful witch doctor in the country. All the ministers go to him. He apparently helped win the liberation war.’

  ‘Jeez, who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, he lives up in the mountains near Chipinge and his name is – get this – the Destroyer!’

  I burst out laughing.

  Moneypenny chuckled and slapped her knee. ‘He sounds like just the man!’

  ‘The problem is, he’s hard to get hold of, and the guy who told me about him doesn’t have any access. But I’m working on it.’

  ‘Okay Lyn, I love it. Let’s find the Destroyer. And maybe in the meantime this other chappie’s little spell will work its magic. I live in hope.’

  The session of legal advice over, it was time to pack up my cash. I handed Moneypenny a paper bag I had brought from the car. She laughed at it. It wouldn’t be big enough.

  ‘No, my dear. You have a lot to learn.’

  She opened her wardrobe and pulled out a large blue nylon rucksack.

  ‘I’ll loan you a Zimbabwean wallet. Return it when you can.’

  She piled my fortune into it. Dad put back her putter and we said goodbye. The Charlie Tens were no longer waiting outside when we left. I wondered whether they had our licence plate number and were following us. I kept looking in the rear-view mirror and down side streets as we drove back to town. I found that I was chewing my nails.

  The vault was in a paint shop that Moneypenny owned in the centre of town. Enoch, the black floor manager, greeted us and led us to a shelf of paint tins lined against a wall. He drew a lever and the shelf pulled out to reveal an enormous steel security vault. He twirled the wheel on it, the vault opened, and we walked down into a well-lit cellar stacked with boxes of paintbrushes and tins of enamel paint. The shelves were lined with neat bricks of Zimbabwe notes in orderly piles of separate denominations. It looked like the vault of a bank.

  Dad’s ‘sixty litres’ – Z$60 million – was already counted out on a table.

  ‘Thanks, Enoch,’ he said as he shovelled the money into his own rucksack.

  Flush with cash – ‘We’re multimillionaires! We could buy this place and install a jukebox,’ I cheered – we walked out onto the street and went off to spend the stuff.

  I needed to purchase food and booze for our boat trip. Grace was arriving in ten days’ time. We would meet her in Harare and drive on to Lake Kariba, where we’d join Piet and Mienkie on their houseboat. Kariba was my favourite place in Zimbabwe, and I was sure that being on the water, seeing the sunsets and listening to the cries of the fish eagles would ease Grace into the country, the calm before the storm of my parents’ world. It would be good to see Piet and Mienkie again, too. Dad said Piet still had not got his cattle back, but he had told him that he had met up with a soldier in the Zimbabwe National Army, a staff sergeant, who claimed he could help. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ Dad muttered.

  We returned to the Indian section to stock up on meat and seafood at Salim’s, a butchery owned by a former classmate of mine whose family were local tycoons. Like all the Indian traders in town, they seemed to stay in business no matter the circumstances. Salim smuggled fresh prawns in from Mozambique and sold six-inch kings for less than US$20 a box. For my parents, finding such fine seafood in this flailing landlocked town was a gift, a minor miracle – and another chapter for Mom’s Recipes for Disaster cookbook.

  We stocked up on biltong, too It was virtually impossible to get hold of biltong now since the country’s beef herds had all been slaughtered and butcheries were going out of business because of the power failures. But somehow Salim’s freezers worked and he had rows of the tasty strips hanging from steel ceiling hooks behind the counter. Dad reckoned he knew how he got it.

  ‘You still poaching, Sal?’

  I squirmed when he said it.

  Salim was standing behind the counter. I remembered him from primary school as a shy, skinny academic. Now he was plump, prosperous and totally bald. He was still shy, though, or maybe he was just like that in front of my dad.

  ‘I am not a poacher, Mr Rogers,’ he said guiltily, eyes down.

  ‘But weren’t you caught on Droppie’s farm with a spotlight and a twenty-two?’ Droppie was a white farmer in the west of the valley, still on his land.

  I jabbed my father in the ribs. ‘Leave him alone, man.’

  ‘That wasn’t me, Mr Rogers,’ said Salim, looking away.

  Sal had lost all the hair on his head, but he had grown a long, thick beard, black and shiny as shoe polish, and Dad gave him a hard time about that, too.

  You joined the Taliban now, Sal?’ he said.

  It was getting embarrassing. My dad had no filter.

  ‘Not the Taliban, Mr Rogers. Just a good Muslim.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Dad, ‘well, how about a discount on these samosas, then? I promise I won’t tell Droppie you’ve been shooting his animals again and I won’t tell the Americans you’re with the Taliban.’

  Dad’s approach seemed to work. The samosas were warming in a glass box behind the counter, and Salim piled a dozen of them into a bag and said they were on the house. We were devouring them before we left the shop.

  The supermarkets weren’t completely empty. Mom had given me a shopping list, and I bought a bottle of brandy and a cucumber at Spar. Cucumbers were one of the few veget
ables my parents didn’t grow or buy from the roadside traders. It was the last one left. I paid half a million for it and walked onto the street in triumph, holding it aloft like a bat, as if I’d just scored a century at Lord’s. Sadly, Dad wasn’t watching. He was distracted in the parking lot, haggling with a street vendor over the price of a bag of sugar and some rice. They came to a compromise and Dad handed the kid a brick of cash. Then the kid ran off down an alley without handing over the goods.

  ‘Jeez, what now?’ I blurted out. ‘He’s taken your bloody money!’

  ‘Watch this,’ Dad said calmly, and we drove slowly away. Suddenly the boy appeared, jogging by the side of the car in the face of oncoming traffic, innocently tossing bags of sugar and rice through the open window onto the back seat. Once the goods were safely in the back, Dad hooted and sped off, and the kid, acknowledging the hoot with a quick thumbs-up, wheeled away. This was a well-practised method of not getting caught dealing. ‘Really,’ said Dad, ‘you’d think I was buying crack.’ Outlaw characters rolled forth like a scene from a mad Western. Mutare once had been a town for newlyweds and nearly deads; now only the nearly deads remained. Most of my school friends had long gone, but their parents were still here. It was astonishing to see how many friends Mom and Dad still had left. Spending most of my time on the farm, I was under the impression that they and their few refugee tenants were the last, the diehards. But now I found others popping up all over town, the last of the bittereinders, forgotten by history.

  Outside Frank Meglic’s plumbing shop Dad hooted at a demure white lady crossing the street, an old friend who was also in the backpacker business.

  She grinned. ‘How are your prossies, Lyn?’

  Everyone seemed to know about Drifters and its prostitutes. Dad quite liked the notoriety it gave him.

  ‘Ah, Anne, why don’t you join the game? It’s the way forward!’

  ‘I’m leaving that to you, Lyn. It’s my own house we’re talking about.’

  They gossiped for a while about the backpacker lodge at the top of the main street that was now a full-time brothel, doing a booming lunchtime trade.

  ‘Wall-to-wall prossies,’ said Anne. ‘He’s raking it in.’

  ‘I told you, my dear. Join us! Give it a go!’

  My parents really admired Anne Bruce. They told me she helped bereaved people arrange cremations for the newly dead nearly deads. Zimbabwe’s crematoriums no longer functioned because there was no gas to fire the furnaces, and the cemeteries in Mutare were too full because so many people had died of AIDS. But Anne had made friends among the Hindu community in the Indian quarter, and she had learned how to use their traditional wood pyre. Mutare’s deceased white Christians were going out as Hindus.

  A black man in a suit waved the car down. Dad stopped, wound down the window. It was Collius Chitakatira, a schoolteacher and a sometime golf partner of his.

  ‘Lyn, I haven’t seen you for a while. Did my superior game scare you away?’

  ‘What crap, Collius. I’m giving my game a rest, let you brush up on your technique.’

  My father hadn’t played golf in years now. Couldn’t afford fuel for the trip to town, the green fees, the caddy, or the cost of a round of drinks after. But he wasn’t going to let Collius know that.

  ‘Just call me when you’ve learned to hit the fairway, Collius.’

  He waved at a white couple exiting the Meikles department store. The woman was a slender, attractive brunette, the man a tall, broad-shouldered farmer type with a handsome mop of thick salt-and-pepper hair. Dad pulled over.

  ‘Wendy, Speros, how are the jailbirds?’

  I had heard about Wendy and Speros Landos. They’d once had a farm next to the De Klerks. It was invaded, and Speros was attacked by a gang of war veterans one evening during a dispute between the veterans and his workers. He was knocked to the ground outside his gates and set upon with rocks, clubs and daggers. He had a licenced pistol under his shirt, and he fired a round off, killing one of the attackers instantly. Witnesses said the war vets got the pistol and tried to shoot him, but the weapon jammed. Speros was beaten unconscious and left for dead. He woke up in a hospital bed with two broken arms, shattered wrists, a pierced kidney, a broken nose, cracked teeth and bruises and lacerations all over his body. Although he couldn’t move, he was shackled to the bed and had a 24-hour armed guard. After five weeks in hospital, he spent four months in Mutare’s Remand Prison, awaiting trial for murder, a white man in a dangerous-prisoners’ cell with fourteen black men. I’d expected him to describe the time with anger and depression. Instead, he spoke as if he had been on a spiritual journey.

  ‘It was a very humanising experience,’ he told me one evening up at the house. ‘There were about fifteen of us in a five-by-four-metre cell. A lot of them were in for minor stuff. They just can’t afford bail. I got my lawyer to bail some of them out. It freed up a bit of space.

  ‘The first thing the hard-core criminals did was to tell the others to leave me alone. I speak Shona, so that helped. My arms were in plaster and I couldn’t walk. The other prisoners took turns nursing me. They would wash me at shower time, undress me in the late afternoon when the dangerous criminals had to strip for inspection. It was very humbling.

  ‘The toilet was in a corner of the room. They would carry me to it when I needed to go. Mutare had a problem with its water supply so the toilet didn’t flush. But I worked out a system. Water would flow through our cell from the women’s cells showers behind us, so I dammed it up and we used that to flush.

  ‘I had to find ways to pass time. There was nothing to read. People used to be educated in prisons. Mugabe was jailed by the Rhodesians for eleven years. He passed three university degrees inside. Now you could never do that. Publications have to be vetted for incriminating material, and they don’t get through. But Wendy started bringing so many boxes of reading material that they couldn’t cope with vetting them all. Reader’s Digest. Car magazines. Bibles.

  ‘I handed them out. I read to pass time. The black guys read to learn. They would have discussions for hours about the cars they read about in the magazines; the benefit of one vehicle over the other. One guy said he had stolen a Toyota twin-cab five years ago and it was rubbish. Debates would go on for hours. Then it would go quiet. We had passed time.

  ‘I read the Bible. I lent it out. I asked one of the hardened criminals to be in charge. He was very efficient. He would say, “I need it back at such and such a time,” and it would be returned. The best debates were about the Bible. They would debate the meaning of the stories, the characters. They argued about Samson. The book of Job. The relevance of these stories to our lives. You realise people’s humanity.’

  Incredibly, many of the prisoners Speros was in jail with were farm invaders: war vets, youth militia, exactly the kind of men he had lost his farm to – and killed. Yet he didn’t blame them, and they didn’t blame him.

  ‘These guys were told to do these things by politicians, police, soldiers. They did them for money or for food. The real criminals are the ones who told them to do this.’

  If Speros’s prison story was remarkable, his legal journey was just as astonishing. After four months in D Block he was granted bail, and he spent the next twelve months awaiting a trial date, reporting three times a week to the police station. But if the country’s economy was in a shambles, by 2005 the judicial system appeared to be heading the same way. By the end of 2005 still no date had been set. It was then that my father casually suggested a wild gambit to Speros.

  ‘This has been going on long enough. When you next see the magistrate, tell him they must either set a date or drop all charges.’ Speros did so, and incredibly the magistrate agreed. A month later, all charges were dropped. By 2006 he was a free man.

  Now, he says, when he walks down the street in Mutare, complete strangers come up to him to say hello. He doesn’t recognise them. They say: ‘We were on the inside together. You brought us books.’

  TWELVE
r />   The Rally

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Dad woke me with a cup of coffee. ‘Brian James just called. He wants to know if you want to go to a rally.’`

  ‘A rally? Jeez. Okay, when?’

  I was groggy, clearing away the rust of a cheap hangover. I’d spent a late night down at the camp catching up with the two Johns and Naomi, drinking beer and smoking some of their marijuana supply. Dad had dug up his dagga crop at Mom’s insistence months before, and the Murandas had the remains stored above the rafters of their house. They were going through it fast, Naomi medicating her ‘blood pressure’ with liberal doses. It was great to see the three of them again. I gave them a wind-up radio I had brought from New York that didn’t need batteries, and we tuned in to SW Radio Africa and Studio 7, a Voice of America station broadcasting from Botswana. We listened as a full moon, round and veined as a peeled grape, floated across the black sky.

  The three were holding up well; Drifters, not as well. Dawson Jombe was struggling, unable to afford stock for the bar, so the shelves and fridges were empty. Often he didn’t open the place at all. Sydney, his barman, had left and taken his music with him. Although there was eighty per cent unemployment in Zimbabwe now, it was strangely hard to hire anyone to work. The security guard had disappeared, too – no one knew where to. Dawson was applying for work with some Western NGOs who were trying to set up rural farming schemes in the area, but he and Patricia were increasingly reliant on her diminishing teacher’s salary.

  Yet the brothel thrived. More men in ever-sleeker motorcars drove out with their prostitutes, mistresses, small houses. They brought their own drinks with them now and would park their BMWs and twin-cabs in front of a chalet, turn the car stereos to a low hum, and drink in the dim glow of the passenger-seat lights as if at a drive-in theatre before staggering into a chalet for a quick session on the mattress. I watched these shadowy assignations from the warmth of the wood fire, and it made me depressed. The camp had become an open-air brothel, the scent of cheap perfume mingling with the tang of marijuana and wood smoke.