It was dark when they arrived at the isolated two-storey farmhouse, darker than any place Ruari could remember. A dim glow from behind drawn curtains was the only light he could see in any direction. They heaved him from the car, dragged him inside, his legs still numb from the drug, his mind like treacle, and someone was trying to drive a chisel into his skull. A room, flagstones on the floor, with old wooden beams and rough plasterwork, and sparsely furnished – a table, a dresser, a mixture of ageing wooden chairs, little more. A wood fire was spitting in the corner. On the table Ruari could see dirty plates and empty beer bottles, along with a laptop computer. There were also several weapons, including an assault rifle. A smell of wood smoke and stale cooking fat hung in the air.
He counted seven men in total, the three who had brought him here and four others. As he struggled to regain his senses he quickly became aware of the order of things; five of them were dark-eyed with olive skins and a rough, wild look. They mostly spoke poor English and a language that Ruari didn’t understand. He thought it sounded a little like the Latin spoken by some Catholic priests; he later discovered it was Romanian. The two others were different, lighter in hair with fairer skin beneath the tans and accents that carried the unmistakable clip of South Africa. This pair – the red-haired de Vries, and Grobelaar, the pilot – were the men in control, the remainder the hired hands. Oil and vinegar.
Almost as soon as Ruari was dumped upon his chair one of the Romanians lifted up his chin and took a couple of photographs.
‘I am not happy,’ de Vries declared as the photographer finished his work and Ruari’s chin sank back onto his chest. ‘Damaged goods. You bought back damaged goods.’
‘It’s only a busted nose,’ said the gunman from the helicopter. His name was Cosmin. ‘You should see what I did to the others.’
He laughed, crudely, baring his teeth; the rest of the Romanians joined in, a great joke, but not de Vries.
‘So why did you break his nose?’
‘The little shit was trouble,’ the gunman replied, scratching at his dark stubble. ‘He threw away his phone.’
‘He had a phone? That would have been useful.’ The South African began prowling, walking behind Ruari’s chair. The boy became apprehensive; there was a sense of menace in this man, of anger seething just below the surface, and Ruari wondered if he was about to be on the end of it.
‘And he threw it away?’ de Vries continued.
‘Sure.’
The South African had finished circling and was back standing in front of Cosmin, rubbing his hand over the cropped hair of his skull, as though trying to slick back hair he no longer had. The gunman smiled, exposing large crooked teeth. That’s when de Vries hit him, very hard, on his nose, sending him crashing to the floor. The man began protesting, but the flow of blood and the hand that was trying to staunch it made his words incomprehensible. The other Romanians had stiffened in alarm, fingers flexing in agitation; at the margins of the affair a hand began moving towards one of the many weapons, but Grobelaar had beaten them to it. His gun was already covering them all.
‘You pillow-biters have to understand,’ de Vries said, in a relaxed tone that suggested this violence meant nothing to him. ‘You let him mess about with a phone. That makes me very unhappy. We all stand to make a considerable amount of money from this young man, so I don’t want you bringing back damaged goods. I don’t want him messing around with telephones. I don’t want him even breaking wind without my permission.’
Cosmin began mumbling through the pain and his leaking fingers, looking up from the floor like a dog. ‘But I thought—’
‘I don’t want you thinking,’ de Vries spat, standing over his victim, cutting off the protest but not raising his voice. ‘That’s the last thing I want from you. It’s not what I am paying you for. You want to think, you fuck off to university. Otherwise, you stay here and do what I pay you for. Is that clear?’
Ruari had watched the Romanian kill two people in cold blood. Now he saw him nodding in submission. This was a power play, not so much a battle of weapons as a struggle of wills, and there was not the slightest doubt who had won it. It was a lesson that everyone in the room understood. De Vries was a very dangerous man.
‘A pity about the phone,’ he continued, ‘but what the hell. We have the boy. He will give us everything we need.’
Ruari shivered. He wanted to throw up. Meanwhile, the photographer began downloading the photographs onto the laptop.
Chombo gazed from the window of Harare’s State House, out across the cricket ground with its jacaranda trees to the golf course that lay beyond. It was raining again, stifling hot, weather for hippos, and the air conditioning was working only fitfully. The electricity had failed yesterday, twice. Praise be to Comrade Mugabe.
On the windowsill lay a red leather-covered file, emblazoned with the title of ZIM-1. Its pages detailed the financial dealings of the late departed President, courtesy of the weevils who ran Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization, and the file was thicker than even Chombo could have imagined. The acting President was no saint, power in this godforsaken continent didn’t fall into the hands of the innocent, but even he had thought there were limits. The file said otherwise. Maybe, just maybe, Chombo thought, he could do a better job, if he managed to survive.
The President’s barrel chest heaved, pumping up and down as he tried to clear his mind of his troubles. In a country almost starved to extinction Mugabe had built himself a palace in the northern suburbs of Harare that had cost more than the entire education budget. It had pillars of marble and taps of gold in its twenty-five bathrooms, with crystal chandeliers to decorate the ceilings in the bedrooms, even while half the population lived in shacks of corrugated tin and sheets of plastic without a single window. They had also discovered rooms in the basement whose stains told of unspeakable horrors. The man seemed to have taken a personal delight in inflicting suffering.
Such things troubled Chombo. His political ambitions were straightforward, but power was not, even if Comrade Mugabe had made it seem so. Chombo sincerely wished to do good for his many countrymen, but for that to happen he must first do good for himself. He had to win the forthcoming election, whatever it took, for without that he could do nothing, change nothing. So to serve his country, he had to serve himself – yes, whatever that might take. He turned from the window to where Takere was waiting.
‘You are sure?’ Chombo grunted.
‘They have sent a picture.’ He handed across a photograph, not very good, of a white boy with a busted face.
‘It is a very great deal of money they ask for,’ Chombo insisted.
‘They will not move another finger without it.’
The President sighed. Perhaps one day this photo with his fingerprints upon it would end up in another file, one like Mugabe’s, but he vowed his file would never be as thick.
‘Do the bugs you have inserted up the great British backside still work?’
The former colonial power’s new embassy on Norfolk Road was glass-fronted, never the most sensible option in a super-heated place like Harare. Its construction had incurred extraordinary cost overruns yet that hadn’t saved them from finishing it off in an unseemly and poorly supervised hurry, and this had provided Mugabe and his men with all sorts of opportunities for burying Bulgarian-supplied listening devices within its many cavities and miles of ducting.
‘It seems they have discovered most of them,’ Takere replied. ‘Either that or they have been eaten by termites. But we still have our more traditional sources of information.’
‘I need to know, do they truly mean it? Will they and their Western friends deny us what we need, just because we do not run our elections in the way that will allow them to sleep at night?’ the President demanded urgently.
‘Their bullying is like the summer rains. It passes, yet it always returns.’
‘They still wish to play the imperialist. These Englishmen, they all threaten and posture, when in
reality they are weak and mostly homosexuals.’
‘I think they mean what they say. Anyway, that is what our sources tell us.’
‘Our traditional sources?’
‘The woman who serves the Ambassador’s tea.’
Chombo snorted in contempt. The British took their servants for granted, as if they were invisible or stupid. ‘In your view, Takere, this matter with the boy. It is necessary?’
He was deliberately putting the man on the spot, intimidating him, making him responsible. It meant that if anything went wrong he would have someone to blame.
‘There is no other way.’
The President’s words, when they came, emerged softly. ‘Then let it be so.’
Takere nodded, unable to resist a smile of satisfaction, and Chombo noticed. He didn’t very much like Takere. He was a necessary man and his job was necessarily unpleasant, but he took too much pleasure in it. Why, look at the man, he was wearing a new uniform, one he’d designed himself, which bore enough braid to decorate a Christmas stall. And he was standing in a studied way that was too informal, not sufficiently subservient, as if he regarded himself as being almost a partner with the President. He would learn.
‘We have arrested a journalist,’ Takere continued, leading the conversation in a new direction. ‘We caught him near the border, trying to sneak back to South Africa. He has been running round asking questions about you, and your past.’ Ah, Chombo’s past, which Takere knew was a murky and sometimes moveable feast, which was why he raised the matter. Two could play this game of intimidation, it seemed.
‘What did he discover? What did he say?’
‘He is working for your enemies in the West. He claims he was only trying to add a little colour to the stories they will print about you at the election. Colour?’ Takere snorted. ‘I will give him colour, as much as he wants, until it trickles down his ankles and into the gutter.’
‘But what does he know?’ Chombo demanded, impatient.
‘The bastard says he knows nothing, of course, but I will encourage him to refresh his memory.’
‘And after you have finished with your . . .’ Chombo searched for an appropriately ambiguous word – ‘. . . discussions?’
Takere paused. This man might be President but he was slow, almost a dullard. He had to be led along gently, but give him enough time and he would get there eventually. They always did. ‘Those who paid him should be discouraged from sending another in his place.’
‘How?’
‘He is from South Africa.’
The President frowned, not picking up the other man’s meaning.
‘He entered our country illegally,’ Takere continued, ‘so he would be making his way back home in the same manner. Across the Limpopo. It is a great river. Very difficult to cross in the rainy season. A place of many tragedies.’
Ah, now Chombo understood. ‘A river of tears.’
‘If that is what you want, Mr President.’
Now it was Chombo who was on the spot, the place that all leaders in these parts came to eventually. He had never before been directly involved in ordering the killing of another man, a rare concession in Africa, but the concession was about to run out. A rite of passage, a page in his file. His chest heaved yet again, in uncertainty, then in reluctant decision. He nodded. A man condemned, a brother lost, one African life in exchange for so many futures. It was how it had to be. Yet it bothered him, and considerably more than the fate of a European boy in a faraway place, and that, to Chombo’s mind, was also how it should be. Outsiders who meddled with his country had to bear the consequences, no matter how painful. Such things were inevitable, in rough waters where so many crocodiles swam.
He crumpled the photograph of Ruari in his fist and threw it in the waste bin.
CHAPTER FIVE
Switzerland is a country of order. Matters move at a prescribed and regular pace, like their cuckoo clocks, and it was some time before anyone began to wake up to the fact that there was a tragedy in the making. Initially neither the helicopter nor its pilot was missed. It was Friday, the weekend was fast approaching, and the heli-skiing had been the last trip on the programme. The pilot was divorced, a solitary bugger, and he spent many weekends up in his mountain hut, which he reached using the helicopter. The aircraft’s owners weren’t expecting to see either him or it until the following week. No one fretted, not even Mattias’s wife, who was visiting her sick mother down the valley in Aigle, while at the college it was the end of term, the Christmas party, an evening full of distractions. In any event Casey’s closest confidantes thought they knew the reason for her absence only too well. The college declared its brief to be ‘experiences beyond the classroom’, and Casey had whispered her intention to follow it to the full.
Even when it became clear the following morning that neither Casey nor Ruari had slept in their beds their friends covered for them, and when the college house-parents eventually discovered their absence it was at first met with little more than mutterings about teenagers and distracted musings about appropriate punishments. It was only as the day wore on and Ruari failed to turn out for the last ice-hockey match of the term that the first shoots of real concern began to emerge. A conversation took place between the college bursar and his friend the police inspector in his office further down the Avenue Centrale, a quiet word, strictly informal, nothing made official, no black mark recorded against the college. But enquiries began to be made and by mid-afternoon a picture began to appear that placed matters on a far more serious footing. None of those involved in the heli-skiing could be traced, and the helicopter was missing, no radio traffic, no radar contact. It should have been noticed earlier, but even inside Swiss clocks sometimes the cuckoos go off song. Inevitably fears of a tragedy began to take hold but by that time it was too late, and too dark, for anything but a perfunctory search. The serious stuff would start at first light the following day, Sunday – except a warm front came over and the weather closed in, leaving fog clinging stubbornly to the sides of the valleys and making flying impossible.
It was Monday before the search got underway. That was also when the college principal, after a desperate and utterly sleepless night, picked up a telephone that was growing heavier with every hour and made calls to the two families. He said only ‘something has happened’. He didn’t want to give vent to his inner fears, to leave the families without hope. It was entirely possible, he reassured them, that Ruari and Casey were cold and hungry, sitting in a disabled helicopter and complaining how long it was taking to rescue them.
Monday was also the day that Pieter de Vries had it confirmed that the second tranche of his fee had been deposited.
Ruari woke in the bedroom at the back of the farmhouse that had become his cell. He had nothing but an old mattress on a metal-framed bed, which had neither sheets nor cover, not even a pillow. They had taken his bloodstained ski suit from him, but at least the place was well heated. The pain from his nose was still ferocious, but it was as nothing compared to the agonies he felt inside. Fear, anger, self-loathing, nausea, frustration, grief, resentment; they were like demons leaping out from every shadow to pierce him and snatch away any last shred of resistance. Every time he closed his eyes, every time he tried to escape within himself, the images of what had happened came floating back on a floodtide of guilt. There was Mattias, his face staring quizzically at Ruari, his lips twisted in indictment, demanding an explanation for what he had done. Why had he done this? Got him killed? His fault! The face was drained and ghostly, the cheeks sunken, the eyes large and burning with the injustice of it all, then slowly they fell to the hole in his chest, which seemed to be growing like a spider’s web until it had all but eaten the rest of Mattias away. Ruari tried to drag his own gaze away to another corner, but there was no escape. Mattias was everywhere, lurking in every corner, waiting to accuse him.
So Ruari closed his eyes, screwed them firmly shut, looking for comfort, and there was Casey. Beautiful, wonderful Casey, the gi
rl he loved so much and lusted after still more, who had led him to the brink of manhood and whom he had so disastrously let down – no, not let down. Betrayed. That was the word, the only word. He shook his head, trying to free himself from his overwhelming sense of guilt, but still she was there, her face twisted in horror, pleading for him to save her, her soft lips frozen in a silent, endless scream.
He tried to hide still deeper within himself but they pursued him without respite – Casey, Mattias, Cosmin, de Vries, the other guards, all screaming, pounding away at him. They wouldn’t let him go. He curled himself into a foetal ball and in the recesses of his mind he caught distant glimpses of his mother, flitting between the shadows. He shouted at her, calling for her to come closer, but she didn’t seem to hear him so he raised his voice, louder and still louder, until he found himself whimpering upon his rank, stinking mattress, crying out for her. ‘Mummy, Mummy . . .’