Zoo City Part 38

The air pressure dips, like before a storm. A keening sound wells up soft and low, as if it's always been there, just outside the range of human hearing. It swells to howling. And then the shadows start to drop from trees, like raindrops after a storm. The darkness pools and gathers and then seethes.

The j.a.panese believe it's hungry ghosts. The Scientologists claim it's the physical manifestation of suppressive engrams. Some eyewitness reports describe teeth grinding and ripping in the shadows. Video recordings have shown only impenetrable darkness. I prefer to think of it as a black hole, cold and impersonal as s.p.a.ce. Maybe we become stars on the other side.

I turn away as it rushes down the road in the direction of the running man. Mr Khan covers his daughter's eyes, even though it's her ears he should be protecting. The screaming only lasts a few awful seconds before it is abruptly cut off.

"Tsk," Mrs Khan says, to break the silence that's weighing down on us, like someone has turned up the gravity. "This city."

But I've thought of something else. "Where are your parents?" I murmur, remembering the poison hallucination, the shop a.s.sistant with the name badge Murderer! Murderer! Murderer! Murderer! Murderer! Murderer! bending over my five year-old dream self. bending over my five year-old dream self.

"The parents? Someone will have to tell them," Mrs Khan agrees. "Come you," she says to her daughter, hustling her away from the window, and all us rubberneckers too.

By morning, when I wake up groggy and grumpy from lack of sleep, the munic.i.p.al street-cleaning crew has already done the rounds. The blood has been hosed down. The Bear's corpse is gone. The only evidence that it was ever there is a black stain on the tarmac like a blast radius and the yellow police tape cordoning off the street.

If only the cleaning crew could do the same for my car. Benoit stares at it without saying anything. I wasn't the only thing that got knocked about yesterday the Capri got trashed too. Comprehensively. The door panels have been kicked in, the headlights smashed and a mostly illegible word, that might read "f.u.k" if you squinted at it right, has been carved into the paintwork on the bonnet in letters four inches high. The windscreen sags under fractal spiderwebs, caused by multiple blows from a metal object, like, oh, say the crowbar I found lying on the back seat. Which had also been used to gouge up the leather. The cherry on top was the smeared s.h.i.t human, judging from the smell on the bonnet. I guess I should be gratefulwhoever made the deposit didn't do it on the upholstery.

"Hazards of the job," I tell Benoit. But it's easy to be off-hand now. Yesterday, when the taxi I'd found to take me and my eau de drain eau de drain downtown from Sandton pulled in to Mai Mai, the market was already closed up, evening shadows stretching across the parking lot, deserted apart from the ruins of the Capri. I insisted the taxi driver stick around while I got the car started. I didn't know if they were still there, hunched under the tarp watching, or loose in the city somewhere, but I gave them the finger anyway. I should have left the car there, but I'm stubborn like that. Also: not about to be overly intimidated by a cl.u.s.ter of junkie tunnel rats. downtown from Sandton pulled in to Mai Mai, the market was already closed up, evening shadows stretching across the parking lot, deserted apart from the ruins of the Capri. I insisted the taxi driver stick around while I got the car started. I didn't know if they were still there, hunched under the tarp watching, or loose in the city somewhere, but I gave them the finger anyway. I should have left the car there, but I'm stubborn like that. Also: not about to be overly intimidated by a cl.u.s.ter of junkie tunnel rats.

Benoit looks at the bruises and scratches on my arm as I drive. They look worse today. If I'd thought about it, I wouldn't have worn a sleeveless dress.

"You should have called the police," he says.

"The police don't care, Benoit."

"Then you should let me come with you."

"Don't you have your own day job?"

"I'm quitting anyway."

"And you have travel arrangements to make."

"You could just say "no thank you", cherie cherie."

"You could do me one favour. It's dodgy, though."

He sighs. "I wouldn't expect any less from you."

"Hey, D'Nice is way worse than I am."

"But not nearly as cute."

"I'm telling your wife," I retort, but it's autopilot. Our easy banter is now laced with jagged edges.

"My polygamie polygamie offer is still open," he says, valiantly keeping up the facade. offer is still open," he says, valiantly keeping up the facade.

"I might consider it, if if you can get me the home address for one Ronaldo, bouncer at Counter Revolutionary, surname unknown. He works for Sentinel, same silly helmet on his badge." I flip a hand at the insignia on Elias's nametag. you can get me the home address for one Ronaldo, bouncer at Counter Revolutionary, surname unknown. He works for Sentinel, same silly helmet on his badge." I flip a hand at the insignia on Elias's nametag.

"I'll see what I can do," he says, as I pull up outside the bottling plant where Benoit has been a.s.signed to patrol today. Sentinel likes to shift security personnel around, so no one gets too comfortable, too familiar with the ins and outs, and sells the info on to someone like D'Nice. Who can be guaranteed to sell it to a gang of armed robbers.

"I don't have to do this," Benoit says, staying in the car. "They could live without a security guard for the day."

"What, and risk Elias's job?" I keep my hands on the steering wheel, the better to resist touching him.

"At least take my phone."

"I'll be fine. I'll stay away from storm drains and junkie tunnel rats with screwdrivers. Promise."

He looks pained. "I'll see you later, cherie cherie," he says, and leans across to kiss me chastely on the cheek.

It's only pulling into Mayfields golf estate half an hour later that I realise he seized the opportunity to slide his phone into the change tray under the handbrake. Sneaky b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Unfortunately, the smell of drains still lingers in my car and clings to me when I step into Mrs Luthuli's. She's polite enough not to say anything, and she makes me strong tea, adding milk and sugar without asking. I drink it while she hunts upstairs.

After about ten minutes, she comes back downstairs with a s...o...b..x. She puts on her gla.s.ses and starts removing the photos one by one. "What is it you're looking for, exactly?"

"I'll be able to tell when I see it. May I?" I up-end the box onto the counter and sift through the photos. Most of them are cold dead things.

I latch onto one and turn it over. It's a photograph of a white wedding. A man and a woman Song and S'bu's parents squint into the sunlight at the bottom of a set of steps that could lead up to a community hall or a very plain church. His white suit has big lapels, she is holding a bouquet of pink roses and cosmos awkwardly. There is a faint wisp of attachment. Faded, fragile, hard to see in the light, but there. I've never worked with photographs before, unless the photograph was the lost thing in question. It never occurred to me to try to reach through the image. I get a flash of the World Trade Center again, which is frustratingly absurd.

"It's not fair," Mrs Luthuli sighs. "They lost them so young."

"May I borrow this?"

"I don't know if I have the negatives..." She looks uncertain. But I am already out the door, following the tenuous wisp like Theseus and his ball of string. Let's just hope there's not a Minotaur on the other side.

It turns out that a Minotaur would be a dramatic improvement on what I actually find, which is nothing. Benoit's phone rings as I drive in aimless circles, trying to catch the ghosts of threads that keep fading, like bad radio signals. It's hopeless. Songweza could be anywhere in the city: sipping a mochaccino in a Parkhurst cafe or tied to a chair in a dingy garage in Krugersdorp. If I could get close enough, I might be able to pick up the thread, but where the h.e.l.l do I start? I glance at Benoit's phone, which is pumping out the first twenty seconds of Gang of Instrumentals' "Oh Yeah" on repeat. The display indicates that the incoming call is from a private number. I let the call go to voicemail, but it rings again, insistently, distracting me so that I miss the dead-end sign and head down a culde-sac. The third time, it's easier to answer even if it's his b.l.o.o.d.y wife calling from Burundi than to have to listen to "Oh Yeah" one more time.

"Hola," I say, squashing the phone to my ear with a hunched shoulder, as I yank the car through a three-point turn. Oh, for power steering.

"I don't have an exact address for you," Benoit says, "but I can tell you he lives in Hillbrow."

"You have no idea how much that means to me right now," I say, steering the Capri back towards the highway.

"Even if I got it from D'Nice?" he says.

"I don't care where you got it, my love."

"Okay, good. He says you owe him R200 for the information."

That sours my mood, but only slightly, because as I get closer to the city, I feel like I'm tuning in to the right channel at last. The wisp of thread solidifies, still delicate, but now actually leading somewhere rather than tapering off into nothingness.

When I see it, it's like a smack in the face. Not the World Trade Center. High Point. And the thread from the wedding photograph leads right to it. So close to home I could have tripped over it if I'd bothered to look up, if I'd bothered to take the poison dream seriously.

I find parking two blocks away. The car guard does a double-take at the state of the Capri. "Hayibo, sisi sisi."

"Just make sure it's still there when I come back," I say and walk down towards the twin towers of the apartment block.

If Hillbrow was once the glamorous crown of Johannesburg, High Point was the diamond smack in the centre of the tiara, with swinging bachelor pads and luxury apartments for young ambitious professionals and urbane cosmopolitan families.

The entrance is situated inside a pristine open-air mall, an island of consumerist sanct.i.ty with clothing stores and a fast-food eatery, pavements you could eat off and patrons not so desperate that they'd try. It's almost normal practically suburban. I soon see why. The perimeters are tenaciously patrolled by boys built like bulldogs, with shaved heads and mace and bulletproof vests.