Bones Omnibus (30 page)

This meant that no one could easily see in through Qin’s windows or over his walls unless they wanted to climb the sheer cliff face that the back of the property abutted.

Even so, as Moqoma and Bones clambered out of Moqoma’s Land Rover, the detective could tell without looking that the backyard and house were filled with guests. Cars were parked three and four blocks away; the sound of children playing echoed over the walls; and, most peculiarly, the smell of gunpowder, the sight of smoke, and what sounded like low-caliber gunfire emerged from inside the compound.

Bones’s raised his nose, took a few sniffs, and then shook his head violently as dozens of thin, individual wisps of smoke clawed into the sky above the backyard.

“What the hell is all this?” Moqoma muttered, not expecting the shepherd to answer.

As they approached the house, two suited security-types moved to the edge of the driveway, clearly meaning to head them off. Moqoma held up his badge and ID card and made to push right past them. Both guards, large Asian men with heads like artillery shells, squared their shoulders and let Moqoma see the submachine guns hanging from their shoulders on bandolier straps. Only, this was South Africa. The armored car men picking up the week’s receipts from the neighborhood gas station carried more firepower, and there’d generally be twice as many.

Moqoma wasn’t intimidated.

When the detective’s smirk told the guards just that, they changed tack.

“Sir? May we ask your name and your business here?”

“My name is Lieutenant Inspector Leonard Moqoma. My business is with your master, Mr. Qin.”

He expected a rebuke, subtle or physical. But the guard merely bowed, as if having received a compliment.

“Today is a holiday, and he has guests here. I will inform him of your arrival, but it may take a couple of minutes. Would you mind waiting inside the house?”

“The dog comes with me,” Moqoma replied challengingly.

“Certainly.” The guard nodded.

The first man nodded to the second, who raised a phone to his lips and spoke a few words in Chinese. Moqoma assumed they were looking for Qin but didn’t want to leave the driveway unattended. A third guard, this one slightly older, emerged from the house, a stern look on his face. He gestured to Moqoma to follow him into the house. When he saw the German shepherd accompanying the investigator, his lack of reaction suggested he’d followed the exchange from just inside.

As the trio entered the home, Moqoma glimpsed the backyard festivities. Around a hundred well-dressed adults chatted and ate as their children ran around the yard, a merry afternoon garden party. But this party was accompanied by the setting off of fireworks and the burning of what looked like money.

“It is Qing Ming Jie,” the stern-faced functionary, who had given his name as Xiang, said. “Tomb Sweeping Day. We honor our ancestors by burning items they might find useful in the afterlife.”

“You’re kidding me,” Moqoma scoffed. “Like what?”

“Money, incense,” Xiang genially responded. “One of the families brought a large paper house to burn. My own son was able to purchase a paper iPad and cell phone to send to his grandmother this year.”

Xiang ushered the pair through the house’s large, two-story living room to a stairwell, Bones’s toenails clicking against the marble floor as they walked. Moqoma managed a second glance out the bay windows in back and could more clearly see the various items set to be burned.

“Where can you buy stuff like that?”

“China Town.” Xiang shrugged. “You can buy them in every stall this time of year. All variations of the same.”

They reached the second floor, and suddenly the décor became more ostentatious. There were a few paintings downstairs and a statue of a crane, not dissimilar to ones Moqoma saw in slightly higher-end gift shops. Tourist junk. The upstairs, however, took on the appearance of a museum of Chinese antiquities. Though hardly a customs officer, the investigator had seen more than his share of valuable property stolen from the wealthy and picked up a sixth sense for authenticity. The biggest surprise was how easily the rich were duped into buying into, and more importantly, paying insurance premiums on, fakes.

Xiang led Moqoma and Bones through a hallway lined with statuary and drawings dating back centuries. What really caught the detective’s eye was all the jade. He knew that much of it was strictly banned from export, and he assumed Xiang or Qin knew this before deciding where he was to be received. It occurred to him that they might be planning to kill him and the German shepherd right there, though he doubted it.

Qin’s study, in the corner of the second story of the house farthest from all neighbors, had a high ceiling, at least five meters.

“Please wait here,” Xiang said, before turning on his heel and quickly disappearing back down the hall.

Moqoma was surprised to be left alone among the most valuable pieces, which dotted this room, but he considered that it was to appeal to his lesser angels. Maybe being surrounded by all this finery would be like dropping Ali Baba in the cave of the Forty Thieves. He would decide that some of it should come home with him and, while left waiting, would calculate the bribe he would attempt to extort from Qin.

But Moqoma wasn’t in the mood. He turned his attention from the most valuable pieces to the more curious decorative choices, which included several shelves of old books, more Chinese relics, but a cache of African trinkets as well. Though he had no doubt as to the value of the Chinese artifacts, the African ones keeping them company suggested a collector who wanted only to represent the most extreme examples from his adopted continent. There were masks and skins, but the masks were a ragtag blend of the completely sacred and the child’s toy, while half the skins were fake.

All the hallmarks of an émigré paying lip service to a place he had no interest in understanding or adapting to.

“
Soutpiel
,” Moqoma sneered.

“What’s that mean?” came a voice from behind him.

Moqoma turned to find a young Chinese woman in the doorway. She was in her thirties and, though dressed casually, carried herself with a professional demeanor. A guest at the backyard party, Moqoma presumed.

“It is a rude thing,” Moqoma admitted. “I should not have said it.”

“You think I will blush?” the woman asked, already sounding exasperated. Though her accented English suggested that she’d learned the language in China, it was already inflected with enough Africanisms that Moqoma knew she’d been in RSA a while already.

“You might at that,” he said, almost flirtatiously.

“Then I can’t wait to hear it,” she demanded. “Please, go on.”

“‘Soutpiel’ is Afrikaans for ‘salt penis.’” Moqoma shrugged.

“Explain?”

“It refers to someone who has one foot in South Africa and another in their country of origin, leaving their penis to hang down into the ocean. As I said, a rude term.”

“You think Mr. Qin is a
soutpiel
?”

Moqoma stared at the woman for a beat. If she was at Mr. Qin’s party, she was likely acquainted with the man and could be baiting the detective into saying something he’d regret. But the casual way she asked the question made him think she was simply curious as to how he might answer.

“I have never met the man face to face. But this…” Moqoma indicated the room, “…is symptomatic of a case.”

The young woman scoffed, but she seemed to do so in order to hide a smile. Moqoma was intrigued.

“My name is Nina Zhu. I’m a member of the Ministry of State Security.”

Moqoma was taken aback. She had pronounced the name of China’s vast foreign intelligence service, the equivalent to Israel’s Mossad, Great Britain’s MI6, or the United States’ CIA, as casually as one might announce their employer as British Airways or Coca-Cola.

“Leonard Moqoma, South African Police Service.”

“And how have you and your companion come to serve us today, Leonard Moqoma?” The question was carved from ice.

“Well, there are two things, one that was brought to my attention and one that was brought to the attention of, as you say, my companion,” Moqoma began, feigning obsequiousness. “First, your Mr. Qin owns several properties, I believe. One these includes a beautiful oceanfront house in Clifton. We have discovered, I mean, the South African Police Service has discovered, just this morning that it is being used as a brothel.”

The Chinese agent seemed genuinely surprised by this, but maybe she was just a good actress.

“We were sure that Mr. Qin would want to be advised personally of this before word might slip out and potentially ruin his good name.”

“And the other thing?” Nina Zhu asked.

“The way we learned was in following the clues surrounding the assassination of Charles van Lagemaat, of which you surely have heard,” Moqoma continued. “When he was killed, he was in the process of driving one of the prostitutes back to this residence. She has since gone missing, and, for reasons that should be self-evident, we would like to find her in hopes she might prove useful to our investigation. Now, to my friend here.”

He indicated Bones.

“He was given her scent at the brothel. Do you know what it means for a detection dog to ‘alert’ to something?”

“I don’t know the term, but I can deduce,” Zhu replied, piqued.

“Well, he has spent the last ten minutes ‘alerting’ to traces of the missing girl’s scent in this room, in the hallway, and in the lobby. Though it’s different from dog to dog, some suggest animals can follow a trail even five days old. I would submit that it’s a lot less, maybe as much as twenty-four hours, little more.”

He made a grand gesture of checking his watch.

“So, if she was in this room before or after last night’s incident, it would be useful for us to know why. Would you not agree?”

The agent’s mouth opened, but no words escaped. As she looked from Moqoma to Bones, the detective could tell that what had been, in her mind, only a dog moments before had attained new status.

“I need to make a phone call.”

“Please do. We will wait here.”

A nod. But then the special agent was gone.

M
oqoma and Bones were made to wait half an hour. The shepherd took up a position alongside the windows, allowing himself a nap in the sun. Despite the occasional explosion of fireworks from the backyard, the dog never woke.

For his part, Moqoma strolled to the bookshelves. What first caught his attention was a shelf full of H. Rider Haggard novels. Of all the imperialist/colonialist adventure writers, Haggard was somewhere below Conrad and Kipling, closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and guilty of presenting a less-than-nuanced view of “the dark continent” to the world that created perceptions and stereotypes that lasted into the twenty-first century. Moqoma believed his government’s embrace of China had at least something to do with them positioning themselves as “a fellow post-colonial power.”

Moqoma had just pulled what appeared to be a first edition of Haggard’s
Elissa, The Doom of Zimbabwe
from the shelf when Special Agent Zhu returned with Cordell Hofmyer, the Regional Head of the Department of Justice and the likely successor to the current Deputy Minister. Moqoma was most alarmed to see that Hofmyer was smiling.

“This is an amazing piece of detective work you’ve assembled, Lieutenant Moqoma,” Hofmyer began. “The kind of thing that makes us very proud of the Service.”

“Thank you, sir,” Moqoma replied automatically.

“As you surmised, Mr. Qin was completely unaware of what was happening in his house in Clifton, primarily because it was a rental property,” Hofmyer divulged. “We have traced the renters back and identified a connection to Roogie Mogwaza’s Yankee Boys.”

“Oh?” Moqoma asked.

“This coincided with a report just delivered that the ammunition used in the shooting of van Lagemaat matched a load of armor-piercing rounds the Yankee Boys took possession of in a hijacking last year.”

That’s convenient
, Moqoma thought.

“Due to the complexities of our relationship with the People’s Republic, it was very wise of you to use discretion and bring this directly to Mr. Qin.”

Moqoma allowed his gaze to flit toward the window. The party had carried on outside, uninterrupted by the news he’d delivered in the study.

“What of the missing girl?” he asked.

Hofmyer looked annoyed, as if hoping the detective would simply nod and exit. But Zhu handed Moqoma a printout of the identity page from Li’s Chinese passport. The first thing the lieutenant noticed was that the date it was set to expire was different from the one he’d seen in Clifton. This one would expire in only a couple of months.

“She was here, yesterday, in fact. She wanted Mr. Qin’s help in arranging a visa for herself to travel to Macau to see her mother.”

“Mr. Qin arranged such things?” Moqoma asked, receiving a quick look of reproach from Hofmyer.

“Among the many parts he plays in your country, some are official,” Zhu replied. “In his role as a consular attaché here in Cape Town, he would be someone to see about a visa.”

Moqoma couldn’t tell from Zhu’s facial expression whether she was frustrated with answering a local cop’s insipid questions or simply didn’t enjoy lying. But Moqoma knew he’d pushed things as far as they could go.

“It sounds as if everything is in order, then,” Moqoma said, reaching for Bones’s leash. “I’ll make sure the two of you receive copies of my report.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Moqoma,” Hofmyer replied. “But please direct it to the Deputy Public Prosecutor. I think it’s going to be a big day for them, and once the dust settles, they’ll need to start pulling all the pieces together and make sure it’s all airtight.”

Moqoma pulled up short. It was as if a pile of numbers that had been bouncing around in his head suddenly had begun to form an equation. The answer was still murky, but he saw clearly where the unknown quantities were yet to be filled in.

“Why’s it a big day for them?” he asked.

“You hadn’t heard? They think they’ve finally got enough on Mogwaza to take down his entire operation, soup to nuts.”