Zoo City

by Lauren Beukes

"It's in my file. My shavi–"

  "Your shavi is finding lost things."

  "And I found her body."

  "How?" she presses.

  "I followed a connection."

  "How did you know the victim?"

  "I didn't. I'd seen her on the street. She is, was, lekgosha. A sex-worker. But I don't think it was a client who did this."

  "You don't think? Were you involved with the killing?"

  "No."

  "Where were you on the morning of Tuesday 22nd March?"

  "Isn't that a different interrogation?"

  "You tell me. Where were you?"

  "As I said before, at the time Mrs Luditsky was stabbed

  to death, I was at home in my flat. Apartment 611, Elysium Heights, Zoo City, Hillbrow. Postal code 2038. With my boyfriend Benoît Bocanga, who I believe has made a statement corroborating such."

  "Benoît Bocanga. We've been reviewing his papers."

  "Which are in order."

  "But his refugee status application is due for renewal."

  "If you want to blackmail someone, blackmail me. I'm sure you can dig up something."

  "Indeed." She changes tack. "Ms December. You – and your magical shavi – have been peripherally involved in two murders in the last week. How would you explain that?"

  "Phenomenally bad luck, Inspector."

  "Do you own any knives?"

  "I have a kitchen. It's small and dirty, but it does come equipped with assorted cutlery."

  "Can we search your domicile?"

  "You'll need a warrant."

  "That can be arranged."

  "So can a lawyer, Inspector."

  30.

  It takes committed former addicts to drag their sorry asses out of bed at ten in the morning. Or, judging by the faces, perhaps people who don't know how to sleep anymore. Pass the Midazolam.

  I help distribute polystyrene cups of truly disgusting instant chicory-coffee mix to the patrons of today's early bird meeting at New Hope, using the opportunity to show round the photocopy of the burned man's ID at the same time.

  The problem is that all anyone wants to talk about is Slinger, and how he's not the real makhoya after all. They're passing round a copy of The Daily Truth.

  "Fo sho, darkie's Hyena was a fake," a very tall, very nervy guy says with telltale ringworm patches in his hair. He is carrying a funky old baseball cap upside-down with a Hedgehog curled up in it.

  "This whole time?" says a lanky redhead with drawnon eyebrows. "And no one noticed? Don't you people have a way of telling if an animal is real or not?"

  "'You people?' 'Real or not'?"

  "Ag man, you know what I mean."

  "It's not like being gay. We don't have some magic zoodar to detect other zoos."

  "I think it's sad. That man was doing a lot for zoo relations."

  "That man was doing a lot for his own publicity. Playing Mr Big Tough Gangster Zoo Guy to stir up controversy."

  "Can I see that?" I ask, indicating the newspaper. The guy with the Hedgehog thrusts it at me and launches back into lecture mode. "Man like that knows how to work the media and rile up parents. You check his album sales. Same with Britney Spears. And Eminem and that freaky vampire guy with the weird eyes? They're just going for a reaction."

  There are two photographs side-by-side dominating the front page under the headline CIRCUS ACT. The first is of Slinger holding an Uzi, posing tough with the diamondcollared hyena and a veritable posse of pussy in gold micro-bikinis with assault rifles of their own. It's contrasted with a harried man in a dark green tracksuit with a jacket over his head, fleeing the paparazzi towards an SUV with the door open to reveal a woman twisted round to hide her face.

  I flip through, past the page-three boobs and the story about the people who have been so hard hit by the recession that they're hunting house cats until I find the report on the Sparrow's murder. Dave promised it would be front page, but Slinger's dirty has pushed it to a narrow block on page six, just another police file item.

  The Daily Truth

  POLICE FILE

  Hate Crime Hack Job

  The body of an oulike young boynooi was found yesterday afternoon on one of the Crown Mine dumps in the deep dark south of the city. After a hot tip-off, our photographer was first to discover the hacked-up body. The victim, said to be a ladyboy of the night, had apparently had magical and surgical alterations done before the madman killer did a little altering of his own, cutting he/ she/it to bloody ribbons with a panga. Was it a hate crime – a dissatisfied customer complaint taken to the extreme? The Gauteng police say no comment.

  I have some comments of my own, but they don't involve homophobic intersex hate crimes. I don't think that's the story behind this at all, but so far I haven't received any mysterious emails from the beyond to explain otherwise.

  I stick around for the meeting, but no one recognises Patrick Serfontein from the photocopy of his ID, including the facilitators. I wasn't really expecting them to. After all, Kitsch Kitchen's leftovers aren't quite the same thing as "eating things from planes", although it did give me the idea. Along with the muti vision of a burning trolley laden with plastic forks.

  I spend the morning on the phone to the airlines under the cover of doing a story for Better Business Magazine on "giving back". It turns out only two national air carriers donate leftover meals to the needy. As FlyRite's Corporate Social Responsibility person said, "We live in a litigious society. I can understand that other airlines might be afraid of the possibility of a food-poisoning claim. But we stand by the quality of our food. Even when it's a day old." She adds brightly, "If it's good enough for our passengers, it's good enough for those in need!"

  Two phone calls later and I have a list of all the welfare facilities catered to by FlyRite and Blue Crane Air. Based on Patrick's age, I eliminate the Bright Beginnings halfway house for juvenile offenders and the Vuka! underprivileged schools feeding programme, which leaves me with the St James Church soup kitchen in Alexandra township and the Carol Walters Shelter situated just off Louis Botha, a stone's throw – give or take an Olympian athlete doing the throwing – from Troyeville. Call it a guess, but I go there first.

  The shelter is a graciously decrepit Victorian house with cornices and broekie lace and blue paint peeling off the walls like sunburn. The interior is deserted and resolutely clean, but all the Handy Andy and Windolene in the world can't scrub away the air of desperation that hangs over the building like mustard gas. A man with a mop directs me towards the administrator's office.

  Renier Snyman is somewhere in his early thirties, young enough to still believe in making a difference, old enough that he's beginning to feel the weight of trying. He's friendly, but wary when I introduce myself as a journalist on a murder story.

  "I can't promise I can help you. We don't keep records

  of the people who come through here."

  "Can you take a look at a photograph?" I unfold my photocopy and put it on the desk in front of him.

  "Hmm. I have to say he doesn't look familiar. But that could be because this ID was issued in 1994. No one looks like their ID photo anyway, right, especially if they've been living rough for a few years. We could ask some of the long-termers. They're out at the moment. We cut them loose between ten and five, but a lot of them hang out nearby. Let's take a walk."

  We head down to Joubert Park where the dealers are already out in force, as well as a few office workers taking an early lunch-break in the sun. Renier heads straight for the public toilets where a group of obviously homeless people are huddled passing round a silver foil papsak of cheap wine. They glare at us suspiciously, and a gnarled woman grabs at the arm of the old man standing next to her and draws against him for protection.

  "Wass'matter, Captain?" the old man calls out as we approach. The lines in his face are set so deep you could go crevassing in there. "Something got stolen? That dief back again?"

  "Nothing like that, Hannes. This young lady would like to talk
to you and Annamarie about a man who may have stayed with us."

  I show them the photocopy and they hand it round with the same seriousness as the papsak.

  "Nee, man. I don't knows this okie," Hannes shakes his head.

  "Are you sure? He might not look the same anymore." Definitely not after being burned to charcoal, but I won't show them that set of photographs. "His name was Patrick Serfontein."

  "Sê weer?" asks the old lady clinging to his arm.

  "Patrick Serfontein. He was fifty-three years old. From Kroonstad."

  "No, lady,'' Hannes says again, shaking his head.

  The old woman smacks his shoulder. "Jong! Dis Paddy! Jy onthou!" She grabs the photocopy with shaky hands, either Parkinson's or the drink. "Ja, okie with a beard, nè. En dinges wat daar woon." She makes a scrabbling gesture at her chin as if scratching at lice. "You remember, Mr Snyman. With the Miervreter, mos."

  "So he did have an animal?" I say.

  "I do remember him." Snyman shakes his head. "That damn Aardvark used to get its tongue into everything, especially the sugar. It drove our cook crazy."

  "And he used to feed it baby cockroaches, Mr Snyman. You remember?" She holds her finger and thumb two inches apart to demonstrate.

  "That's not a baby cockroach," a sullen man with a strong German accent corrects. He's leaning on a shopping trolley loaded with the remains of a single mattress.

  "It is around here!" boasts the old lady, slapping her thigh, and even the sullen German and Snyman laugh.

  "When did you last see him?" I ask.

  "Must have been a few weeks ago," Snyman muses. "Maybe even a month. He came and went a lot, if I recall correctly."

  "He was his own man," Hannes says, approvingly. "The shelter isn't for everybody, hey. Some people like their freedom. They can't be dealing with other people's rules all the time." He gives the old biddy on his arm a little warning nod.

  "Jy! Don't make me laugh," she says.

  Snyman says, "A lot of our residents come and go. They'll live on the street until it gets cold – our highest occupancy is in winter – or something happens. A fight, a beating, an accident. It's ugly out there."

  "Is there anyone else you haven't seen in a while? Anyone with an animal?

  They exchange looks and shake their heads.

  "How would we know?" says the sullen German guy.

  Exactly what the killer is counting on.

  31.

  Mandlakazi is not just fat, she's enormous. Her belly rolls have belly rolls. She's chewing her way through a bag of vegetarian samoosas, one hand on the steering wheel, the other dipping into the bag and back to her mouth like an assembly line, as she drives us through to Cresta to meet the Witness. Sloth takes to her immediately, although perhaps that's just the butternut samoosas she keeps plying him with.

  The Witness phoned this morning while I was checking out airline charity cases, claiming to have seen the whole thing. Dave phoned me to let me know, and I've insisted on coming along.

  "Dave said you been hanging out with the juicy babies," Mandlakazi says through a mouthful of samoosa. It takes me a second to figure out that she's talking about iJusi.

  "Yeah. I was doing an article on them."

  "Past tense? Too bad, koeks. Dave tell you I was the gossip columnist past tense for the Sunday Times?"

  "He mentioned it."

  "He mention why I got fired? I got so big I filled up the social pages all by myself." She roars with laughter. "No, I'm kidding. I got sick of it. That stuff is cancer. All that celebrity bullshit, it'll eat you alive if you let it."

  "And the crime beat won't?"

  "Way I figure it, covering the celebrity beat is like dying from a nose job turned gangrenous. Or cancer of the arse. Just a stupid way to go. Give me a good headshot or a fatal stabbing. At least that's worth something. So what's your thinking on this unholy mess? Someone with an anti-animal vendetta and a panga to grind?"

  "It's muti murders."

  "If only! Screw Slinger and his fake puppy dog, we'd be riding the front page for a week. How do you figure?"

  "Two murders in the space of the week. Both animalled. Both bodies found with no trace of their animal in sight."

  "And you know these two murders are related because…? I mean, on the one hand we got your homeless guy, necklaced. On the other, we've got a very nasty case of the stabs. Doesn't sound like the same M O to me, and baby, believe me, I got the hots for the serial killers."

  "I got an email."

  "From the killer?"

  "From the victims. Ghosts in the machine. Their own special brand of lost things."

  "Which is your bit, right? The lost things thing?"

  "It's my bit," I confirm.

  "But how do you know it's not just sick for kicks?" Mandlakazi wipes her fingers on her jeans.

  "I met some junkie kids behind Mai Mai with a Porcupine. They'd cut off its paw to sell it for muti. They offered to do the same with Sloth. Someone's buying." But then, someone's always buying in this city. Sex. Drugs. Magic. With the right connections you can probably get a twofor-one deal.

  "Muti from zoos?" Dave whistles appreciatively. "That's got to be expensive."

  "Killing kids for muti is expensive," I correct him. It doesn't happen a lot, but every year there are a handful of cases that make the papers: prepubescents murdered and harvested for body parts. Lips, genitals, fingers, hands, feet. The more they scream, the more powerful the muti, although the morgues have a brisk backdoor business going too. A hand buried under your shopfront door will bring you more customers. Eating a prepubescent boy's penis will cure impotence.

  "People miss kids. Zoos, especially homeless ones, streetwalkers, the ones nobody will miss, probably won't even notice they're gone. I don't know if that's expensive."

  "Risky though," Dave says.

  "Probably worth it," Mandlakazi says. "People pay a pretty penny for rhino horn or perlemoen, and that's before you add mashavi in to the equation. Animals are already some heavy magic shit. Mix that up with muti and who knows what you can do? I sure don't. But it would be a great story, let me tell you."

  We meet the Witness at an airy coffee shop on the lower level of the mall. She is sitting right at the back, curled up miserably in a booth. She's tiny, barely fifteen, with hunched shoulders that speak of a lifetime of making herself as unobtrusive as possible.

  "You Roberta?" Mandlakazi asks, sticking out her hand to shake.

  The girl gives a little nod so quick you'd miss it if you blinked. She doesn't extend her hand. She points at me and says, "Just her."

  "Baby, I'm the reporter, you want to talk to me. I can send these other people away if you want to keep it private."

  She shakes her head. "Just her."

  "Zoos got to stick together, huh. Fine. We'll be at the table outside." She hands me her Dictaphone, disgruntled. "It's the red button on the right."

  "Like riding a bicycle."

  I emerge forty minutes later and take a seat at Mandla and Dave's table. "Okay, first up, she says no police. Not yet. Maybe you can talk her round. Second: she's badly scared. Too scared to go home. I need one of you to put her up for a couple of nights."

  "Why can't you?" Mandlakazi says.

  "Because I live in her neighbourhood. Where the murder happened. To her friend, who happened to be a prostitute like her."

  "She can stay at my place. For the night, at least. We can make a plan tomorrow. The paper can put her up in a hotel if this story is going to go somewhere. What did she say about the murder?" Mandlakazi is practically choking on her eagerness.

  "You should probably hear it for yourself. I made a note of the timecode on the most useful quotes for you," I pass her a napkin annotated with a ballpoint pen I borrowed from the waiter.

  "Well look at you, intrepid girl reporter."

  "Worth more than an "additional reporting" credit?"

  "Depends on what's on the tape."

  I skip to 05:43 on the Dictaphone.
They have to lean in to hear Roberta's voice, barely a whisper, over the grind of the espresso machine, the clank of cups.

  ZINZI DECEMBER: Okay, I just want to go back a minute. What exactly do you mean, "like a spook"?

  ROBERTA VAN TONDER: I'm telling you! Like there was no one there. One minute she's bending down to fix her shoe, that heel was giving her trouble all night, and then Pah! Pah! Pah! Pah!

  In the coffee shop, she stabbed at the air, her face contorting unconsciously.