Detective Kubu 01; A Carrion Death

by Michael Stanley

  Red Beard hadn’t been born the day before, or even the day before that. It was his turn to laugh. “Sure. Very good. I take all risk, you get what you want. Maybe I get money, maybe not. You know what I think? I think this is bullshit. I think this job’s blown, Mr Friend. Maybe cops know already, maybe not. But you know. That’s already too many people. You get your package back right now. With bullet in his head. Look for him tomorrow.” Deliberately, but smiling this time, he hung up.

  As he expected, the phone rang again almost immediately. “All right,” said the upper-class English voice. “Two fifty up front. Two fifty after the funeral. But if you screw up, I come after you. And I bring the police with me. I think they’d be very interested in meeting you.”

  “Okay. But you give me a name. No name, no deal.”

  “If you insist. My name is Daniel.” Red Beard sensed that that was the best he was going to get. He didn’t like it, but half a million dollars was a lot of money.

  “Where do we meet so you can give me the money?”

  “No meeting. That’s absolutely not negotiable. You’ll get the money.” And suddenly Red Beard was listening to a dialling tone, wondering if he had played this hand too well or not well enough. The money would be nice—if he got it—but this Daniel was a loose end. He didn’t leave loose ends. Not ever.

  The next morning a text message from his bank in Lisbon reported that his account had received an electronic funds transfer from a bank he had never heard of in Bermuda. He was disturbed that Daniel knew where to send the money. The amount was two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars. He was tempted to take the money and run. But he didn’t. He had one big weakness. He was greedy, extremely greedy. But he was also careful, extremely careful.

  ∨ A Carrion Death ∧

  CHAPTER 23

  The room was comfortable enough. It could have been mistaken for a hotel room in one of Botswana’s cheaper establishments. A metal-frame bed with a spring base and inner-spring mattress stood in the corner farthest from the door. The mattress could have been firmer, but the linen was clean and changed every few days. There was a small table with a battery-powered reading light. In the centre of the room a work table doubled as the dining table, with two plain-varnished pine chairs. The table was dressed in a cloth that looked as though it had been retired from an Italian restaurant, judging by its faded pattern of Chianti bottles and dried vegetable bunches. An easy chair, whose insipid red clashed with the tablecloth, was in the far corner. A large wardrobe’s open doors revealed a sparse mixture of clothes.

  Off the main room was a small bathroom. A shower was mounted on the tiles over the bath, surrounded by a stained plastic shower curtain. On the wall above the hand basin clung a small medicine cabinet with an open sliding-mirror door, revealing an electric razor, toothbrush and toothpaste, male deodorant and hairbrush. A hurricane lamp hung over the cabinet, with an asbestos fire shield above it. The windows in the bedroom had been bricked up, and the bathrooms window had been covered with a sheet of plywood attached to the window frame with heavy screws.

  The room was comfortable enough, but it was a prison.

  The prisoner was sitting at the table, carefully studying a pile of newspapers he had been given. He had first looked through the headlines in all the sections and then, disappointed, settled in to absorb everything to be found in the text. There was a copy of last week’s Botswana Gazette, and three days’ worth of the government Daily News from earlier in the week. He spent nearly an hour going through them. With no ventilation, the room was stuffy and hot. He was sweating.

  There was a perfunctory thump on the door, and a huge man came in with a lunch tray. Being so large, it was not surprising that the others called him Sculo, an abbreviation of minuscule in Portuguese. The hulking man didn’t seem to mind. He was big, but not fat, and very black. He was sometimes willing to talk if things were going well, and he seemed to have no animosity towards the man he guarded.

  “Hey, man,” he said by way of greeting, “they were generous today! Told the cook to make you some real chow for lunch. Hamburger. Potato chips. Cold beer.” He laughed as he set the tray on the table, pushing the newspapers aside. Then he dumped himself on one of the wooden chairs, which protested as he leant back.

  “You’ll be out soon now. We get our money. You go home.” He seemed to mean it. This was an opening gambit in an ongoing conversation, and the prisoner took his cue. “You’re not part of this Bushman People’s Liberation Movement nonsense, Sculo. You certainly don’t fit the Bushman template. About ten sizes too large! Not that anyone has ever heard of this BPLM before anyway. How the hell did you get mixed up in this?”

  Sculo just shrugged. “Man,” he said, “I started off in Angola with Savimbi’s assholes. Then it was the National Angola Army of Reconciliation or some nonsense like that. Their generals didn’t know which end of a gun the bullets came out. They were just there to keep the MPLA in power to get their hands on the diamonds and other good stuff. When they actually tried fighting, I went off on my own.”

  “You’re a mercenary, then?”

  “Ja. You could say that. If you’re in the army, they send you to stinking places. You eat garbage, sleep in mud, and people try to kill you all day. And you get paid shit. As a mercenary, they send you to stinking places. You eat garbage, sleep in mud, and people try to kill you all day. But you get paid like you’re a king!” He laughed as though this was a really good joke. The prisoner smiled and took a sip of his beer.

  “You better eat that lunch before it gets cold,” said Sculo. So the prisoner started on the hamburger. He was hungry, and it didn’t taste bad.

  “Ja. Out of here soon. The Boss told me. Your guys are busy raising the money.” The Boss was the bearded Portuguese man who seemed to be in charge. The prisoner thought of him as Red Beard. He had two Angolan shadows who communicated only in Portuguese.

  “Red Beard doesn’t have anything to do with the Bushmen either. It’s just a scam to shake money out of the company,” he told Sculo. But Sculo wasn’t going to let his good mood be disturbed as he scavenged a few chips that had been left on the plate, dipping them into the sauce.

  “Maybe, man. Who cares? They pay us the million. I get my share. We all go home.” Sculo nodded to emphasise the happy ending. He seemed very relaxed, and the prisoner thought it was worth a chance to try to buy help.

  “If you help me, you could get a lot more money than your share here,” he responded. “How about all of it? The whole million?” For a moment Sculo just looked at him, but then he laughed as though it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a long time.

  “That’s good. That’s a real good one. A million dollars all to myself. Could get out of this business. Go live in a nice place in South America with nice girls. No AIDS. Only problem is, I get real dead along the way.”

  This last thought seemed to rather spoil the joke, and he stopped laughing.

  “Well, you finished?” He replaced the empty plate, glass and beer bottle on the tray, which he carried out without another word. The prisoner heard the lock turn. He called out, “Tell Red Beard I want to see him.” There was no response, and he wasn’t sure that Sculo had heard.

  He picked up a newspaper and moved to the easy chair. He admitted to himself that he was very worried. When he had been taken, he was frightened, of course, and then Sculo had knocked him out. When he came round, he was alone in this room on the bed. But once they told him they wanted a million dollars in ransom, he almost relaxed. That wasn’t a really large sum of money and should have been raised in a few days. But that was over a week ago. Why had it taken so long? Had the company brought in the police? There was nothing in the newspaper—there never was. He couldn’t just disappear for two weeks. Someone must have noticed.

  He was now sure he was here for a purpose other than the ransom, and that he was not likely to leave alive once that purpose—whatever it was—had been achieved. Sculo might believe it, but he no longer did. His o
ne hope was that he had discovered where he was, and help was not too far, if only he could get out of this building.

  Red Beard came to see him after supper. His most striking feature was his bushy ginger beard, which flowed off his craggy and sunburnt face. It was the only growth on an otherwise bald head. He spoke English with a strong accent and, from time to time, used Portuguese words when he couldn’t be bothered to find the appropriate English ones.

  “You want talk to me?” he said. He didn’t sound happy. “What you want?”

  “I want to know what’s happening. You said you’d keep me informed. Have you got the ransom? They should have paid it by now. When do I get out of here?”

  “Money comes soon.”

  “That’s not good enough! Let me talk to them myself!”

  “Vai se foder! Do like you told and you okay. Don’t make me mad, or I make you real sorry.”

  He walked up to the prisoner and glared at him, faces a few centimetres apart. He turned and walked out, slamming the door. The prisoner heard the lock click. He was convinced now that the ransom was irrelevant to his situation. What sense did this conversation make? They should be ranting and raving at him about the money, not the other way around. He should be pleading for his life on tape, or bits of his anatomy should be being delivered in anonymous parcels. Yet his captors seemed calm and relaxed, as if everything was going to plan. He decided he had to take the initiative, whatever the risk.

  He got ready for bed as usual, brushing his teeth, putting on sleep shorts, dousing the storm lantern in the bathroom. Then he climbed into bed and pretended to read his newspaper again. He didn’t know if they watched him, but he didn’t want to take unnecessary chances. After about fifteen minutes, he turned off the reading lamp and tried to rest. He knew he’d wake when the time came, but he was tense and thought he wouldn’t sleep.

  When he woke abruptly from a deep sleep, it was pitch dark and still. He knew it was time. He lay with his eyes open for a while, listening in the dark, but he could hear no sounds. He carefully stood up and made a crude image of himself in the bed with the pillows. He groped around in the open wardrobe for his tracksuit and pulled it on over the sleep shorts. He put on his running shoes, not bothering with socks. He didn’t take anything else. He believed safety was only about ten kilometres away. He tiptoed into the bathroom and as quietly as possible closed the door. It creaked a bit, and he stood breathless for a few seconds, listening. He heard nothing. He stuffed a towel at the base of the door where the gap would show light. He fumbled for the box of matches by the basin and lit the storm lantern over the cabinet. This was the riskiest part, but he had no choice. He couldn’t do what had to be done in the pitch dark.

  He took down his toilet bag and rummaged for a now-bent five-thebe coin. He had snapped the nail file on the first day, but the coin had proved more resilient. It had amused him that the classic escape tool had been so useless. He fitted the coin into the head of one of the screws holding the plywood panel and easily unscrewed it. It was loose, because he had taken all the screws out before. He repeated the process for the other nine screws. When the panel came away from the wall, it revealed the window. The bottom section was solid frosted glass, but the upper part was a ventilation window that hinged upward. The opening was large enough for a man to fit through with some difficulty. He couldn’t remove the glass in the lower panel because the putty was too hard for his makeshift tools. Breaking the glass was out of the question.

  He climbed on to the toilet and carefully pulled himself up to the top section of the window. He had heard that if you could get your shoulders through an opening, you could get your whole body through. After some uncomfortable wriggling, his shoulders were free. He could see the area below, dark and quiet. It would be quite a jump from the window to the ground, but with luck he would be off and running for the unlit and unguarded gate within seconds of landing. It seemed easy. But then he heard the bathroom door open.

  “Fuck!” yelled Sculo behind him. “What the fuck? “

  He pulled himself desperately forward, trying to dive out of the window, overlooking the fact that with no head start, he had litde chance of getting far.

  A huge hand closed on his ankle and pulled him back, grazing his shoulders on the window. “Where the fuck you think you’re going?” He grabbed the window frame, as much to stop himself falling as to fight back. He kicked out hard with his free leg almost by reflex. It was sheer luck that his shoe collided with Sculo’s face with a satisfying thud. For a moment, he was free and pulling himself out of the window again. Then both legs were grabbed, and he was yanked back. This time he couldn’t hold on to the window and he collapsed on top of Sculo. He kneed Sculo hard in the crotch. Although Sculo screamed and doubled up for a moment, the fight was over. Sculo of the swollen eye and battered genitals was now angry, very angry. He smashed his fist into his tormentor’s face as hard as he could. His victim flew back against the bath. If his head had hit the tiles, he would have been concussed. As it was, it hit the makeshift shower mount, smashing his skull and breaking his neck.

  Red Beard and his bodyguards pushed into the bathroom. Red Beard glared at Sculo but said nothing until he had examined the prisoner.

  “You killed him, you load of cow shit. Why you so fucking stupid?”

  “He was trying to escape,” Sculo said, but given his size advantage over the dead man, it sounded lame even to him. Red Beard felt like killing the black man immediately, but he already had one inconvenient corpse to deal with. Punishment could wait. A bullet in the head in a slum area of Gabs would be much more convenient. He looked forward to doing it himself.

  Red Beard was silent for a few minutes, thinking, while the others waited. At last he turned to Sculo. “Get his clothes off. Then you stay here. No move!”

  With that he stalked out, slamming the door. Sculo pulled off the bloodied tracksuit, shorts and shoes, leaving them oozing in the tub. After that he wasn’t sure whether he shouldn’t move at all or whether he shouldn’t leave the room. Eventually he sat down on the toilet.

  A few minutes later, the door swung open and Red Beard returned, his face flushed the colour of his whiskers. A tall black man followed him with a plastic ground sheet and some tools. He wore blue jeans, but his shirt was that of a bush guide. Without a word, Red Beard pushed the naked body flat in the bath and with a hammer and screwdriver smashed out the teeth. Then he started slicing off the fingertips with a sharp meat cleaver. Sculo’s blackness took on a tinge of green.

  “Oh, this is nothing, man,” Red Beard said sarcastically. “More fun if he’s still alive! Get the Landy ready. Me and the guide take a little bush trip.”

  Then he turned back to the mess in the bath. He looked down at the body for a few minutes after Sculo left. Then he smiled. He lifted an arm and pulled it over the edge of the bath. Using the cleaver, he hacked down just above the elbow, feeling the blade bite the bone. After a few blows he changed his mind. More carefully he cut through the sinews of the elbow, sawing to the bone. With a sudden movement, he put his knee on the arm and leant all his weight on it. The forearm broke off with a crack and dangled towards the floor, held only by a few sinews. One tug detached it from the rest of the body. Noticing a heavy gold ring on the prisoner’s other hand, he pulled it off and pocketed it. Then he walked out, taking the arm with him. He was painted with blood, a nightmare from The Masque of the Red Death.

  ∨ A Carrion Death ∧

  PART FIVE

  False Thieves

  “A plague upon it, when thieves cannot be true to one another!”

  Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part One, Act II, Scene 2

  MARCH 2006

  ∨ A Carrion Death ∧

  CHAPTER 24

  Sunday was the only day when Kubu and Joy were still in bed after six-thirty in the morning. Normally, they both left for work around seven. On Sundays, Kubu would get up when he woke, wrap himself in a large dressing gown, fetch the Sunday Standard from the dri
veway, put some food in Ilia’s bowl, pour two glasses of juice, and return to bed, followed shortly thereafter by Ilia, who always found a comfortable valley in which to snuggle.

  As far as possible, Kubu maintained Sunday as his family day. Every Sunday morning, he and Joy would visit his parents at their home on the outskirts of Mochudi, twenty-five kilometres north of Gaborone. This day was no exception. At about ten a.m., the three of them set off on the thirty-minute drive. Joy always drove, Kubu relaxed, and Ilia stood on the back seat with her nose pushed out of the gap made by a slightly lowered window. Traffic was relatively light, but taxis, bicycles and pedestrians kept the speed down to a fast crawl until they reached the highway. As they turned on to his parents’ street, Ilia started yapping with excitement. There was no doubt that she recognised the street, Kubu thought. He wondered how much more went on in the dog’s head. Were dogs relatively stupid compared to humans, or were they smarter in ways that humans just couldn’t comprehend?

  Kubu’s parents lived on a sandy plot in a rectangular house that had two small bedrooms, and a living space that included kitchen, dining area and lounge. The walls were made from a combination of mud and brick, and the roof was the ubiquitous corrugated iron. At the front of the house was a small lean-to veranda, which Kubu had given his parents as a present when he was promoted. They spent most of the day there, sheltering from the hot sun.

  The garden was arid. Several aloes grew at the side of the house, and a straggly acacia tree at the back only partially obscured the outhouse.

  Behind the house were carefully tended beds containing squash and carrots and potatoes, which Kubu’s mother, Amantle, tended with almost religious care. Next to them was a collection of other plants, some in small beds of their own and some in earthenware pots. It was an eclectic selection of small shrubs, herbs and succulents, and these Amantle would never touch. Kubu’s father, Wilmon, had spent years on a cattle post in the Kgalagadi and had learnt much natural lore from the Bushmen and others. He made no pretence of magic, but his herbal remedies were highly sought after in the town, especially for rheumatic pains. Many sufferers attested to the rapid relief brought about by Wilmon’s rubs.