Zoo City Part 30

There is also another strangely anomalous message. Again, no return address. Maybe it is time to put up that firewall.

You said you would love me warts and all.

I forward the message to my personal address to add to the other one and nearly get bust by Vuyo, who has slipped into the chair opposite me. "Anything interesting?" he asks. He does not apologise for being late.

"Admin," I say.

He orders a black americano and waits for the waitress to leave before launching straight in.

"If someone has the item the item you're looking for, we don't know about it," Vuyo says. "But that item would be hard to miss. Hard to hide. You would have to be stupid." you're looking for, we don't know about it," Vuyo says. "But that item would be hard to miss. Hard to hide. You would have to be stupid."

"Bad things can happen even to famous people."

"Ah, but then someone would have to care. There is an insurance policy on that name, paid for by Moja Records. One point five.

"As in million?"

"And on the matching item. They come as a pair?"

"Twins tend to. Okay, what about the MXit account?"

"Sorry. Couldn't get in."

"What kind of slacker hackers are you using?"

"Hackers are Eastern Bloc scammers. The Company relies on good old-fashioned African business as taught to us by our colonial masters."

"Bribery and corruption?"

"So much more efficient."

"And the phone?"

"Yes, my friend at Vodacom looked it up for me for a small fee. That phone number hasn't made or received a call since Sunday 20th 02h36."

"Do you have a record of what number was dialled?"

"That will cost you extra. Luckily, I antic.i.p.ated that you would want this." He slides over a piece of paper folded in half. "One more thing," he says, before releasing the piece of paper. "You should see a friend of mine. At Mai Mai. Dumisani Ndebele. A sangoma sangoma. He might be able to help you in other ways."

"Am I paying extra for this as well?"

"Open the paper."

I unfold the note. There is an eleven-digit sharecall number. Underneath it is a handwritten scrawl that takes me a moment to decipher. It reads: "Hani Luxury Estates Format" and "Play along".

"What the" I start to say, but Vuyo is already standing to greet the sweaty j.a.panese salaryman with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist who has been directed to our table by the waitress.

"Ah, Mr Tagawa," Vuyo says, turning the charm all the way up to eleven, "I hope you're not too jet-lagged. This is my investment partner, Lebo Hani, daughter of the great communist leader. But don't worry, she's hundred per cent capitalist. Don't mind the animal."

"You really are something." Gio's voice on the other end of the line is a combo of admiring and p.i.s.sed off.

"h.e.l.lo yourself."

"So, I just had this call."

"Uh-huh."

"Dr Veronique Auerbach. About Mach Mach's journalist? Confirming that she's lined up some interviews for you. If you're actually doing a story, that is. She seemed sceptical. Suspicious even."

"Yeah, I'm in the middle of typing up my pitch. s.e.x, drugs, jet-set travel."

"I wouldn't have minded. Much. I mean, why would I expect anything less of you?" Gio says. The malice in his voice is justified. After all, I am the girl who stole his ATM card and eight grand out of his bank account, and blamed it on the cleaner.

"Only she didn't speak to me, she spoke to Montle, my editor. And I had to do a s.h.i.tload of explaining. So, congratulations."

"I got the job?"

"Almost at the cost of mine. h.e.l.luva way to pitch an a.s.signment, Zee. I need 1600 words in my inbox by April 23rd. Get some dirt, please. Something s.e.xy."

"I'm all about the s.e.xy dirt."

"And the reverse, if memory serves. So, what happens with the Sloth when you have s.e.x?"

"You want a matching bite somewhere else?"

"Kinky," he says, but I can tell he's still simmering. "Maybe you can show me sometime. Laters, sweets. I gotta go."

"Yeah, me too," I say, turning the Capri in a lazy arc under the highway and into Anderson Street and the parking lot of Mai Mai.

The healer's market is less popular than Faraday, which is conveniently close to a major taxi rank. It looks like a cheap tourist attraction from the outside, with its mudcoloured walls and the spread of herbs drying in the sunshine on the pavement outside the main entrance. Under a thatched deck, a man crouches on his haunches in front of a little urn on top of an open fire, wafting pungent smoke across the parking lot. A German tourist emerges from the toilets, forgetting to zip up his fly, and stops to talk to the guy carving up pieces of old tyre to make sandals.

The sky has taken on that bright translucent quality that pre-empts a thunderstorm. The air pressure has changed. There are clouds rolling in on the horizon, c.u.mulonimbuses that weigh down on the city. My mom used to insist we covered up the mirrors during storms to avoid drawing the lightning, scrambling round the house with towels and sheets at the first sign of a puffy cloud. It drove my dad crazy. "Superst.i.tious rubbish," he always said, sticking his nose back in his cinematography books. "This is what's holding the continent back." He was always way too narrow about his definitions of what modern Africa meant.

We never were hit by lightning. But all my mom's precautions slaughtering a goat for the ancestors in thanksgiving for the birth of Thando's kid, the ceremony when I got my matric results, the stupid sheets over the mirrors none of it helped a d.a.m.n against bullets.

As I get out of the car, a skinny boy, somewhere between twelve and nineteen, gets up from the shade of a scraggly eucalyptus tree at the edge of the parking lot and darts over, already hard-selling: "Lady, hey lady, look after your car, nice, lady. You want a car wash, lady?" He has buggy yellow eyes and an old knife scar in his hairline, like a side-parting. Sloth shrinks away from his breath.

"Not today, thanks."

"Cheap for you, sister! Special price!"

"Next time, my friend." He starts to slink back to his tree, where he's obviously sleeping rough. There is a tarpaulin precariously strung over the lower branches and a pile of rubble backing up against one of the highway support pillars. I can see the shadows of others huddled inside. "Wait, kid. Do you know where I can find Baba Ndebele?"

Yellow Eyes perks up immediately and prances towards the entrance. "This way, my sister. Come with me. I show you."