The Hunter (8 page)

‘If I do find out the death certificate is fake, what then?’ he asked Dani.

‘There are two parts to this case,’ Dani began. ‘There’s the interest of the insurance company – the claim would be denied, of course – but there’s also Anna’s personal interest in the case. She really wants to find her sister, and find out what’s going on in her life that might have made her fake her death – if indeed it was faked.’

‘She wants to hire me to find Kate, if she’s still alive?’

‘I’ve given her your details, Hudson. Obviously if Kate is alive the insurance company, my client, will simply wash its hands of the matter and cancel the claim. But Anna just wants what’s best for her sister. I’ll leave it up to her to contact you with further instructions on her behalf.’

Brand had experienced many moments in the bush when he could sense that danger was close before it reared its horned head, snarling teeth or forked tongue. There was nothing mysterious or spooky about this extra sense; he reasoned it had developed simply because he was in nature’s grip day after day. If he couldn’t see a warning he might hear it, or smell it. The signs were there, one just had to let one’s existing senses hone themselves, over time. He heeded this ability, and exercised caution, but he savoured the tingling sensation in his fingertips and the tightening of his chest when the signs appeared. It was, he had to admit, part of what kept him in Africa.

Clients sometimes asked if he, as an American, had a love affair with Africa, but he would tell them he did not. ‘You cannot,’ he would reply, ‘love a place where poverty, crime, corruption and illness are so much a part of the fabric of day-to-day life. I am not in love with Africa, I am addicted to her.’ He felt the symptoms of that addiction now, coursing from his heart out to his fingertips, that sudden jolt of fear mixed with excitement and anticipation, masquerading as adrenaline. It was the same when he had hunted men, in Angola.

‘I’ll take the case,’ he said to Dani.

‘I knew you would.’

*

Brand awoke the next morning with a hangover that sharpened the residual pain of his beating. The pills and booze had given him temporary relief after Hannah left, but he had answered the call of nature in the middle of the night and been greeted with the sobering sight of blood in his urine.

He walked to the kitchen and even the soles of his gritty feet hurt. He tidied the litter from his evening’s excess. No orange juice had mysteriously appeared in the fridge overnight; instead he was faced with his last three bottles of Castle Lager and one of Miller Genuine Draft. He chose the Miller, as to his mind it was a better breakfast beer and, like him, an American Brand now owned by South Africa. He gulped down two Panado tablets from the kitchen drawer and found a banana that was bruised almost as badly as he.

Brand showered, sipping the cool beer as he let the hot water pummel his aching flesh. After he’d dried off and dressed he finished the second half of the banana and, reluctantly, set about closing all the curtains in his friend’s bush lodge, shutting out the sight of the river. He packed his duffel bag, turned off the gas hot water geysers and spread the dust sheets back over the bed, the lounge suites and the dining table, then closed and locked the door behind him.

He loaded the duffel into his battered Land Rover Defender. It was an old diesel model, slow compared to more modern vehicles, but reliable. He would travel north towards Zimbabwe through the Kruger Park, he decided, as the view was better and he wouldn’t have to worry about being overtaken by a continuous stream of traffic or being sideswiped by one of the kamikaze minibus taxis through Bushbuckridge.

The beer had awoken his craving for cigarettes, but fortunately he had none with him. He drove to the entrance gate to the Hippo Rock estate and told the Shangaan security guard, Solly, that he did not know when he would be coming back. As he turned right onto the R536 towards the Paul Kruger Gate, Brand thought about the last insurance investigation he had done for Dani; the one that had landed him in prison in Harare.

The alleged deceased was the son of a prominent politician from the ruling ZANU-PF party. Brand’s investigation had led him to the politician, a junior minister, and on confronting him Brand immediately realised the man was none too happy about him investigating the circumstances of his son’s untimely demise. He rightly feared that Brand exposing the boy’s sham death would rebound on him and his political aspirations.

Brand had been staying with friends in Borrowdale, a leafy suburb of Harare inhabited mostly these days by ageing white farmers who had been kicked off their lands. He’d been out to dinner with his friends, an old farming couple, but had become engrossed in a conversation with a thirty-something divorcee. His hosts had headed home but Brand had stayed, chancing his luck over a couple of Amarula Dom Pedros. Despite his best efforts, however, the woman got a call to say her youngest child was throwing up, so she cut short what could have been a beautiful thing and headed home.

It had been February, the middle of the wet southern African summer, and the lateness of the hour, the Land Rover’s weak headlights, the drizzle and a low fog that clung to the road combined to make visibility next to nothing as Brand had driven back to his friends’ house.

He’d taken it slow because the city’s roads were dangerous at night in the best of conditions. People walked on the ill-lit streets and, as the country’s numerous police roadblocks were only manned in daylight hours, illegal goods were moved in broken-down cars with no lights.

As he’d slowed at a blacked-out set of traffic lights, a man stepped from the darkness and waved his hands in front of Brand. He stood on the brake and stopped, just missing him. Before Brand could yell abuse at the man a gun was thrust through the open window beside him and into his temple.

‘Keep your hands where I can see them. Get out of the vehicle,’ said a man in a balaclava.

The man who had leapt out in front of the car like a startled impala came to the gunman’s side. ‘Search him, he’s probably armed,’ said the one with the pistol.

Now how could he have known that?
Brand had wondered. In South Africa it might be a fair assumption that a white man driving at night would be carrying, but in Zimbabwe the gun ownership rules were very tight and there weren’t many firearms on the street – one of the few benefits of living in a regime presided over by a paranoid dictator.

At the gunman’s insistence, Brand had got slowly out of the Land Rover and assumed the position, with hands on the car roof and legs spread. The decoy had now donned a balaclava too, but Brand reckoned he’d had a good enough glimpse of him in the headlights to identify him again, if he lived to inspect a line-up. He felt hands running under his armpits and around his waist. ‘He’s clean,’ the man said.

‘What now?’ Brand asked. The electricity was out in this part of Harare, par for the course at the time, so there were no streetlights and no passing traffic. ‘My keys are in the ignition. Take it, but I must warn you the injectors need servicing.’

‘Funny man,’ said the gunman, before pistol-whipping Brand on the side of the head. He staggered but didn’t fall. The gunman’s assistant pulled Brand’s hands behind his back and cable tied them together. The plastic bit into the flesh of his wrists. ‘Get in the truck.’

Brand had been led down the street to a shiny new black double-cab HiLux. The assistant opened the rear door and shoved him in. The gunman slid in beside Brand, keeping his pistol, a Russian Tokarev, jabbed against his ribs. The other got into the driver’s seat and dropped the clutch as he sped off.

‘What do you know about Tatenda Mbudzi’s death?’ pistol man asked him.

‘He died in a car crash, right?’ Brand said.

‘That’s not what you told his father, the comrade minister.’

It occurred to Brand that either this was a very dumb criminal, giving away the fact that he was in the employ of the politician Brand had interviewed, or that he had no intention at all of letting Brand live once he had gathered just how much he knew and, probably, who he had told about what he had learned.

‘I’ve emailed a full report to the insurance company that Tatenda had his policy with.’ In fact, he hadn’t got around to doing his electronic paperwork on the case and he had been unsuccessful in even connecting to the internet with his laptop for the week he had been in Harare.

‘Bullshit,’ said the man. ‘We’ve been monitoring your emails.’

‘Now you’re the one who’s bullshitting. We’re in Harare, not Houston.’

‘Your FNB cheque account is overdrawn again.’

This was getting worse, Brand thought. ‘Who are you, Charlie 10?’ Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation – CIO, abbreviated by locals to Charlie 10 – was the equivalent of American’s CIA.

The gunman chuckled. ‘Does it matter who we are? I’m the one with the gun.’

‘I also called the insurance company in England to tell them to contact the police here if I don’t check in every twenty-four hours.’

The gunman laughed out loud this time. ‘Your network’s been busy all day. We can’t even bug people in this country the phone service is so shit.’

They drove through the darkened city, the intermittent slap of the
bakkie
’s
windscreen wipers the only sound for a while above the soft purr of the engine. Harare was a jumble of shantytowns interspersed with suburbs of grand but fading colonial homes and ostentatious new mansions built as ziggurats of greed by the ruling political and business elite. They skirted the town centre and headed out on the southern road towards Masvingo and South Africa, past Coke Corner, named after the soft drink factory situated there. Beyond that they passed knots of soaked people thumbing hopelessly for a lift, and closed on the sprawling fields of graves Brand had often glimpsed on his way into and out of this crumbling city.

Turning in through the gates in the ruined wire fence a security guard in an overcoat and woollen cap just nodded at the black
bakkie
as it bounced along the access road. Brand had the terrible feeling these two were regular visitors to the cemetery. Like other graveyards he had encountered in sub-Saharan Africa this one resembled the aftermath of some terrible battle. Beyond the older stone slabs and headstones were hectare after hectare of simple earthen mounds. Thanks to HIV/AIDS and every other ailment known to mankind the life expectancy of the average adult male in Zimbabwe was thirty-eight. Photos pinned to simple wooden crosses and the cellophane wrapping from bouquets of flowers were all that passed for markers and monuments here.

It took them some time to drive to the outer edge of the field of death, the rear of the truck fishtailing more than once on the slippery, muddy track. The driver finally stopped and got out. He dragged Brand out of the vehicle and held him while the gunman slid down from the new-smelling vinyl seat. ‘Get the shovel.’

The driver opened the cargo area of the truck and took out the tool. He came to Brand, turned him around and with a knife he produced from somewhere slit the plastic tie binding Brand’s wrists. His fingers throbbed in pain as the blood returned to them, making it agonising even to grip the shovel. His boots squelched in the mud and he felt that the damp had wet the hem of his long cargo pants. Brand wore shorts for maybe three hundred and sixty days of the year, and it was only because he was in Harare at night, on a rainy evening, that he had chosen trousers.

‘Keep well back from him in case he tries to hit one of us with the shovel,’ the gunman said. Damn, Brand thought, had this man seen all the same movies as him? ‘Dig.’

Brand chose a spot for his own grave next to that which was marked with a cross and a photo of a smiling young man in a white dinner jacket and black bow tie. He wondered if the photo had been taken at a wedding, perhaps the man’s own? Brand hoped the bride had not become infected with whatever had killed the groom, but that was why the cemetery was bursting at the seams. He started to dig, the blood-red clay sucking in the blade of the shovel then holding it fast.

‘Faster,’ said the gunman.

A jackal whined in the night nearby, and Brand tried not to think about what it was doing there. He shovelled the damp earth to the side and began working up a sweat in his long pants and long-sleeved T-shirt. He straightened for a moment and wiped his brow.

‘Don’t worry, you have eternity to rest.’ The gunman planted his boot between Brand’s shoulder blades and he had to use the shovel to stop from pitching forward. The gunman was getting cocky. Brand resumed digging. He could yell for help, but it had seemed to Brand the cemetery security guard would take his time responding, if he responded at all. No, this would have to end the other way. ‘Deeper,’ said the gunman.

Brand dropped to his knees. He stopped digging again, his hand in the small of his back. ‘I’m not as young as I used to be.’

The gunman laughed behind him and, as he had hoped, pushed him again with his foot, harder. Brand let the wooden shaft of the shovel slip from his grip as he tumbled forward onto his hands and knees. If the gunman was smart, Brand thought, he would finish it now and shoot him in the back of the head. Brand heard the man’s shoes talking to the sucking mud as he changed his stance, but he had deliberately fallen on the shovel.

‘Don’t you want the shovel back?’ Brand asked, not looking up. ‘It’s got your fingerprints on it.’

‘Pass it up, but stay down on your hands and knees,’ the gunman said.

Brand looked up. The other man, the one who had driven, was standing at his head, perched on the edge of the grave. Brand reached under his body and slid the shovel up, shaft first, for him to take. The man grabbed hold of the wooden handle.

‘No, get him to put it on the side,’ said the gunman behind him.

But he was too slow. Brand yanked on the blade and for the briefest moment the driver instinctively held on to the shaft. Brand saw him teeter and sprang up and snatched his trouser belt with his left hand. With all his strength he hauled the other man over and down on top of him. At the same time, Brand twisted his whole body, using his hand on the man’s belt as a fulcrum. Brand heard the silenced Tokarev’s muted bark and the bullet grazed across the upper part of his chest, from shoulder to shoulder, before thudding into the mud.