“At my age, it’s not about winning,” Rocco said.
She narrowed her eyes. “What is this about, Bob? Why you go to all the trouble and money to book a room with me, if you don’t want what most guys want? Are you in the wrong room? Do you want to get bucked tonight?”
“I’m not into men.”
“You like the ladies?”
“Yes.”
She sipped her champagne and pretended to pout. “But just not me.”
“Well, it’s just . . .”
“Let me guess.”
Rocco didn’t know what to make of Darlene. First, she was all friendly. But now that there was to be no sex, she was getting familiar.
“Okay, guess,” he said. He had time. It was only half past midnight. As long as he was out by one o’clock, he’d be fine.
“You’re a college teacher, and you’re writing a study about prostitutes in AfricTown,” she said.
“I’m not a college professor.”
“You’re a cop.”
“Nope.”
“You’re too old to be a student.”
“True.”
“You want to talk about your wife.”
“God. No.”
“Are you sure you don’t have a wife who doesn’t sleep with you anymore?”
“I’m divorced.”
“Sorry, Mr. Bob. So tell me what your thing is.”
“I want to know what happened to Yvette Peters.”
Darlene sat up in her chair. Her smile disappeared. “How you know about her?”
“It’s in the newspaper.”
“Are you a journalist? A TV reporter?”
“No, I am not. Do you see a notebook? A TV crew?”
“So what are you doing in a bathrobe in this bedroom?”
“I just want to know what happened to her.”
“Can’t tell you.”
“She was a friend of yours.”
“Now you sound like a cop.”
“I swear on my mother’s life that I am not a cop.”
“Sure, I knew her. We all knew her. She was here and then she was gone. What do you want me to tell you?”
“Why was she deported?”
“Talk to the government about that. Hell. That’s it. You is government. I got you now. Don’t I? Don’t I?”
“Yes, that’s what I am.”
“So you here to arrest me too?”
“I am not a cop, and I don’t arrest people. I want to know what happened to Yvette.”
“Well, you’ll have to ask someone else. Because I can’t help you.”
Darlene stood and walked to the bathroom. Then she turned and motioned to Rocco to follow her. Did she have kinky stuff in mind? He followed her into the bathroom, where she closed the door.
“She got it on with Mr. Big, and then out the door she went,” Darlene whispered.
“Yvette did?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s Mr. Big?”
“You’re government. Who is biggest?”
Rocco had trouble believing it. “You’re saying she slept with someone here in the Bombay Booty—someone powerful—and then she was deported? Why?”
“That’s all I can say. Who are you, anyway?”
“You’re not supposed to ask that question.”
“And you’re not supposed to pay for pussy and get an interview. On the way out, they gonna ask if you sexually satisfied. And if you say no, guess what happens to my paycheque? So you coming in here asking a lot of questions is hard on my budget.”
“Hey, Darlene, let’s get right to it. I need you to talk to me. How much would that take?”
She paused. “Five hundred dollars.”
“I don’t have five hundred in cash,” he said. “I can give you three hundred.”
“Where it at?”
Rocco stood up. His erection was gone like a groundhog into its hole. He walked out of the bathroom and over to the closet and riffled through the bills in his wallet. He fished out six fifty-dollar bills and put his wallet away. Then he returned to the bathroom and gave the money to Darlene.
She put it in her bra.
“So,” he said. “About Yvette?”
“She was gonna make some money and pay Lula to get her a citizenship card.”
“Why didn’t she have one?”
“Said she was born here, but never got one. Hey. Let me ask you something. Do you think I could be a accountant?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“I would like to hold people accountable. I reckon people have a lot of accounting to do for the things they done, to me and others.”
“Are you good with numbers?”
“I know that three hundred dollars is sixty percent of five hundred,” she said.
Rocco grinned. Perhaps he could funnel some money to her later, if she would tell him more about Yvette.
“You gotta help me, or I’m dead meat,” she said.
“Why?”
“I know too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something bad happened to Yvette, and it could happen to me too. If I get out of here, could you help me? I mean, help me hide?”
“What exactly are you talking about?”
“Help me hide.”
He felt for her. What could be the harm in giving her his number. “You’re good with numbers. Can you remember this?” He said his number and asked her to repeat it.
But Darlene said, “What’s that sound?”
“What sound?” he said.
“Shh!” she said.
He heard sirens. Police sirens. It sounded like a hundred of them, wailing. He whipped open the closet door and was dressed in a minute. Rocco was good like that.
“It’s a raid, Mr. Bob. Take the back door. I’ll show you. But when I call you later, you better pick up.”
Rocco felt his veins fill with adrenalin. He could not afford to get caught in AfricTown. Goddamn that Geoffrey Moore. Sending him here, setting him up. He would not let himself get caught.
There were back stairs. There was a basement. There was a secret underground tunnel. Getting out of there involved some crawling that ruined his clothes. He passed through two other buildings and came out in a grove of trees a few hundred metres away from AfricTown Road. He knew which way was north toward Clarkson, and there was a footpath parallel to the road, beaten by who knew how many hundreds of others who had fled just like him.
The police were swarming AfricTown’s Bombay Booty. But they would not catch Rocco. He had the cover of night, and if push came to shove, he could always run.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
AFTER THE BUTTERSBY MARATHON, KEITA PAID for three more nights in Clarkson, switching motels every day. He didn’t want to keep spending money that he needed to save to help Charity, and worried that an overly scrupulous motel clerk might report him to the police. After visiting an Internet café and receiving an email from John Falconer, who said that Lula DiStefano had invited him to visit, Keita changed his strategy. He took a small knapsack with just enough clothes to keep him going for a few days, stuffed the rest back into his bus station locker, and began walking south.
He crossed railroad tracks that seemed to demarcate the city limits. The road passed an abandoned field and, up ahead, rounded a bend out of sight. There were no signs on it and few cars. A couple of hundred metres to the west of the road, a footpath led through a wide hole in a massive, barbwire fence. Wide enough for two people to pass each other on their way through. Every pedestrian was black or mixed. Almost everyone was carrying something: shoes in hands, bags on shoulders, knapsacks on backs, sacks of flour or rice on heads. Keita hadn’t seen many black folks on the streets of Clarkson, but there were hundreds here, passing through that hole at a steady pace.
Keita’s instructions had been to begin walking the footpath from Clarkson around noon. He was to look for an older man who answered to the name of DeNorval Unthank. Unthank would head north from AfricTown at the
same time that Keita left Clarkson, meet Keita on the walking path and escort him safely to AfricTown.
In the first kilometre, he saw no one who corresponded to the description of DeNorval Unthank, so he continued on. Most people greeted him. Hello. Good afternoon. Good day. Be with God. A boy tried to sell him bottled water. An adolescent carrying a duffle bag tried to sell him a pair of running shoes for ten dollars. A woman sat by a makeshift table selling watermelon and barbecued corn. One young man stopped him, pointed a gun at him and told Keita to turn over all his money. Keita was in the process of saying that he had no money (he did not mention his cheque or his cash, which was zipped into a secret pocket inside his shirt) when an older woman carrying a huge purse walked up and swung it at the man.
“Junior, leave him alone.” Then she looked at Keita. “Don’t pay him no mind. That ain’t real. It’s plastic. He ain’t right in the head. He tries this on everybody, till he gets to know them.”
Keita thanked the woman.
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Thank the Lord. But I’ll take five dollars for my troubles.”
Keita told her he had fallen on hard times and did not have any money to spare.
“Well then, next time,” she said. “Once you find a job, you can give me five dollars one day.”
“We’ll see,” he said. And he kept walking.
By the second kilometre, Keita saw a long line of shipping containers to the west of the path. Some were hooked up to electrical power lines that ran overhead, but the hookups looked makeshift. The containers were painted wild colours, just like the houses of Zantoroland: pink, purple, green, blue. Some were striped or polka-dotted. Some had murals depicting famous runners or cricket players. Most were single containers, but sometimes they were stacked two or three high. Keita watched a woman toss a rope ladder from a square hole cut into a third-floor container and lower herself to the ground. People sat in chairs outside the containers, watching the pedestrians pass. The containers appeared to be houses, drinking holes and places where women set up to wash clothes. Sometimes, in the gaps between them, Keita would see a patch of grass covered with clothes spread out to dry. Nearby, next to water taps popping out of the ground like mushrooms, women would be washing, wringing or spreading out clothes.
The public toilets were abysmal. The first one Keita visited was so disgusting that he turned away, choosing to wait. This place looked poorer than Zantoroland. In his own country, even villagers with no education and minimal income kept clean homes and outhouses. It was hard not to think of home as he walked south on the trail beside AfricTown Road. But Keita didn’t want to let his thoughts wander. He had to stay level-headed, and he had to find a way to get money as fast as he could to Charity’s captors.
A teenage boy sat by his father, whose eyes were clouded over and bluish, like marbles. A few pairs of shoes were laid out on a rug at their feet along with a sign that said Shoe Doctor.
“Mister,” the boy shouted to Keita. “Shoe polish? Shoe repair?”
Keita smiled apologetically and pointed to his new running shoes.
“But in your bag, surely you have a pair of nice shoes? Polish, just two dollars. Repair, more.”
Keita shrugged and kept walking.
Finally, after about three kilometres, he saw a tall, thin, silver-haired black man with a white goatee walking toward him on the path. A bright red cloth was slung diagonally across his chest and belly, and as the man drew closer, Keita could see, protruding from it, the head of a baby.
“Keita,” the man said, extending his hand.
Keita shook the hand, which was relaxed and gave his a friendly squeeze. It felt instantly comforting, like that of an uncle.
“You must be DeNorval Unthank,” Keita said.
“Sent by Lula DiStefano, and at your service. Sorry I couldn’t meet you at the start of the road. Been a busy day.”
“What’s your baby’s name?”
“Xenia,” DeNorval said. “Five months old. But she’s not my baby. I’m just helping out.”
The baby gurgled. She stared at Keita. Keita smiled at her, and she broke into a smile too. DeNorval patted her bum.
“She’s dry, and she’s been fed, so we might as well keep walking and get you where you’re going.” DeNorval turned to join Keita on the walk south.
Keita didn’t think he had ever seen a man carrying a baby on his back or chest in Zantoroland.
“I trust that nobody’s given you a hard time so far?” DeNorval asked.
Keita told him about the man who brought out the plastic pistol and the old lady who stopped him. DeNorval laughed and said they worked as a team. The man threatened, and she intervened, and half the time they made off with five or ten dollars in thank-you money.
“So where is the child’s mother?” Keita asked.
“Studying math. She’s just seventeen. We have a little school in AfricTown. Not much. But she can’t go there, because she has no papers and sometimes police raid the school. But we have people in AfricTown who give lessons, so on Thursday mornings she studies with them. On the other days, she cleans houses in Clarkson.”
“And you?”
“I’m just an all-around helper. Since I wasn’t doing anything for a few hours, except walking out to meet you, I offered to take Xenia. I don’t mind. Lovely baby. And anyway, babies and I understand each other.”
They walked for a while in silence. Up ahead, on the right, Keita saw two men working to make a connection between the top of a shipping container and an electrical wire. A stepladder was perched on the container roof. One man steadied it, while the man on top looped a cable around the electrical wire.
“Dangerous work,” DeNorval said. “People die every year trying to siphon off electricity. But they need it for lights, refrigeration, fans.”
Keita asked if DeNorval worked for Lula DiStefano.
“I’m in AfricTown at her pleasure. Occasionally, when she requires services in addition to my usual work, I comply. Today she wanted someone to get you reliably to the Pit, so here I am.”
“The Pit?”
DeNorval explained about the Pit and the Bombay Booty. He said that all visitors to AfricTown were supposed to check in with Queen DiStefano or her representatives. She liked to meet distinguished guests.
“Distinguished?” Keita asked.
“Don’t kid yourself. The whiz kid, John Falconer? He’s your friend, right?”
“We met on the bus and spoke for a few hours.”
“He mentioned you had won the Buttersby Marathon. Word spreads fast around here. So, yes, Lula wishes to meet you.”
Keita nodded his appreciation. He was curious and asked about the shipping containers. DeNorval said thousands of people lived in them in AfricTown. Cut holes for ventilation, stacked them end to end, side by side or one on top of the other if they could afford it. Lula DiStefano obtained used shipping containers from port authorities in Freedom State and Zantoroland, DeNorval said. She had them hauled to AfricTown and rented them out. And occasionally she prevailed on the authorities to install more public water taps.
“So what do you do in AfricTown?”
“We don’t generally ask what people do in AfricTown,” DeNorval said. “You can safely assume that most of it is not what someone would want written down and shown to anyone.”
“I see,” Keita said.
“But confidentially,” DeNorval said, “I greet newcomers sometimes. I am sometimes asked to house guests for a short time in my premises. Baby Xenia and her mother are staying with me, for a while. And I’m a health adviser.”
“What is that?”
“Got a cut? An infection? A broken finger? A tooth that needs pulling? I can deal with minor emergencies.”
“You are a doctor.”
“I was trained in Zantoroland. For a time, I was chief of the ER at Yagwa Hospital. But I had to flee and I have no certification here. So I just call myself a heath adviser.”
DeNorval Unthank was not a
fast walker, and it took an hour to cover the rest of the way to AfricTown. But Keita did not mind. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do except meet Lula DiStefano. Unthank was a good conversationalist. If he had been a physician in Zantoroland, he must have had reason to flee. Keita wished his own father had fled while there was still time. This man who was greying and gaunt—perhaps he could become a friend. An ally. But never a father. Parents could never be replaced. When they departed, they left a hole that never went away. Keita tried to imagine what his father would advise him in this new situation. Be aware. Stay alive. Help your sister.
DeNorval steered Keita off the main path. “A little detour, to the Red Square.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see. We’ll be there in a minute. I have to drop off Xenia with her mother.”
A few hundred metres to the west of the main footpath, they came to a series of shipping containers, painted bright red and forming four sides of a square. Outside were water taps and a stand with a soap dispenser. What looked like a hundred men, women and children were lined up outside, waiting patiently by a sign marked In. Near another sign marked Out, people exited the square in ones and twos and walked away. DeNorval stepped to the front of the queue. People moved aside and let him by with smiles and greetings.
“Hello, DeNorval. Good afternoon, DeNorval. Good day, DeNorval.” One young man called him Dr. Unthank, but Unthank corrected him.
“It’s just DeNorval, please,” he said. “You can wash your hands here,” DeNorval said to Keita, going first. He soaped his hands thoroughly, rinsed them and shook them dry.
Keita did the same. Then they stepped into a courtyard formed by the containers. Inside, in five long rows of folding chairs, people sat with plates on their laps. On those plates, Keita saw rice or macaroni, Brussels sprouts and scoops of chili. All along one side of the courtyard, a team of men and women served food from huge cooking pots suspended over firepits with red coals. At the exit was a barrel filled with apples. Each person took one on the way out.