The Illegal (32 page)

“I told you to get out of here.”

“I was trying to do that.”

“Well, try harder. But stay away from Freedom Gates. That’s where the police are concentrated.”

“Thank you.”

“Call me!”

He ran. She watched, and nobody caught him this time.

G
RAEME
W
ELLINGTON COULD NOT MEET
L
ULA AT
the Bombay Booty. Or in the Prime Minister’s Office. He suggested that they meet in the back of his limo, but she said that a black driver could not be trusted just because he said “yes sir, no sir.” She told him to meet her at Patty’s Doughnuts in downtown Clarkson.

He wore shades, although he knew that if anybody stopped to look, his tall frame would give him away. She wore tinted glasses and a sun hat that made it hard to look into her eyes unless you got close and stared. And nobody would. There was something about her that people didn’t mess with. It wasn’t that she was as unflinching as a rugby winger scoring a try. It wasn’t that she was as dark as night, and as hard to read. It wasn’t her voice, which rang out like a military commander’s. It was, as Graeme himself had said thirty years earlier, something to do with her aura.

He hadn’t been invited to enjoy that aura since she was young and beautiful and on the verge of creating an enduring business in AfricTown. Even when Lula drew him near, something about her exuded,
I dig you, baby, but if you double-cross me, I’ll tear you apart.

She was one of the only people who knew. And maybe the only living person. His parents had died long ago, and he had no siblings, and he had long ago cut off most ties to his past. He got by, saying that he spent a lot of time in the sun, playing rugby and tennis and all that, and that there were Italians in the family. Swarthy, he would say,
to anyone who asked. But long ago the media had stopped asking about his dark good looks. He had, after all, been in politics a long time. Grooming himself for office during decades in opposition. Even his own wife did not know.

Certainly, the rugby team that he had led to the world championships didn’t know. Three decades earlier, it was still a whites-only team. No mulattoes, quadroons or octoroons. He had passed over to the other side, and with flying colours.

Now Lula stirred her tea and said, “Graeme, I can’t have this.”

“We’ll come to an arrangement,” he said. “We always have before.”

“You’re all up in my business, raiding for real and arresting my own people.”

“Let’s just map out a peace treaty.”

“We better. Because you, Mr. Prime Minister, have as much to lose as I do.”

“I’m asking you to stop demonstrating.”

“And I’m asking you to stop raiding AfricTown. And I want goddamn electricity and water services, right to the south end. You keep denying us, and it will come right back in your face. Have you no shame?”

“None of that,” he said. “We agreed.”

“Okay. No more comments about your shame, wherever it is buried.”

“I mean it, Lula. I will walk out of here and send raid after raid, and your business will be shut down.”

“Political suicide,” she said. “I would tell the world where you’ve been at night.”

“Let’s not get personal.”

“You always say that. It
is
personal for me, Graeme.”

“If I call off all raids and commit to electricity and water services over, say, the next two years—”

“Two years?”

“Can’t do these things overnight, Lula. Anyway, if I commit
to that, I need some commitments from you. First, I need my ID back.”

“I might be able to help with that.”

“And I need the USB back.”

“What USB?”

“Don’t give me that poker look,” he said. “I know you, Lula. I know how you lie.”

“Of all the men I took into my bed, you’re the only one I regret,” she said.

“You didn’t mind it at the time,” he said.

“You had the equipment,” she said, “and you had some decent moves—not bad for an octoroon.”

He raised a finger to his lips, his expression firm. “One more word, and I’m out of here.”

“You can threaten all you want, but I know you’re not going to walk out that door till we’ve settled up,” she said.

“Not one more word,” he said.

“Fine, fine. Lay it on me, white boy.”

He stood up to leave. She grabbed his hand and pulled him down. “Okay already.”

“I want the USB, and you know what the hell I mean. I heard about it, and my source is good.”

“Saunders!” she said. “His days are numbered.”

“I want it, and I know who has it.”

Lula sat back and cracked her fingers. “And who, pray tell, is that?”

“The Roger Bannister fellow.”

“The runner,” Lula said, with a sudden smile. “Keita. You know him?”

“I do now. Why has every Freedom Statonian heard of this Illegal? Why is he not on a plane out of this country?”

She smiled and said nothing.

“I want the USB,” he repeated, “and I want him too.”

“Can’t give him to you quite yet,” Lula said.

“You’ve given me others, and we’ve paid you dearly. What’s the problem?”

“Not yet, I said.”

“Non-negotiable,” he said.

“He has my protection until the Clarkson Ten-Miler.”

“The what?”

“He has a big race he has to run. June 21. Right in Clarkson. For a road race, it’s the highest purse in Freedom State.”

“What’s the payout?” he asked.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars to win. Fifteen for second. And five for third.”

“Peanuts.”

“Not if you’re a refugee,” she said. “After the race on June 21, you’re welcome to him.”

“What are you advocating, Miss Support the Poor and Downtrodden?”

“I want peace again in AfricTown. No more raids. No more bullshit about taxation. No more deportations. I don’t care where you catch your other Illegals, but leave me alone in my own territory. And I need that electricity and water. I’m giving you two years. If it is not in place before your next election campaign, every citizen in this country is gonna know who yo mamma was.”

He stood to leave. “Lula. Always a pleasure. I believe we have an agreement.” He shook her hand. “Your skin was so soft, once.”

“Yeah, and you knew who you were, once. Was it worth it, Graeme? Are the silk sheets smooth out there in the white man’s world?”

“I guess you’ll never know.”

V
IOLA
H
ILL DID NOT WANT TO BE PART OF ANY
pack of journalists and felt best about a news story when she alone was writing it. Still, it offended her that nobody else seemed to care about the death of Yvette Peters. A black sex worker from AfricTown had been deported to Zantoroland, where she died in prison. Out of sight, out of mind. But not for Viola.

“Why should I send you to Zantoroland?” Bolton said. “Airfare, hotels! It’s not a page one story.”

“So this girl’s life and death only matters as a news story if it lands on page one?” Viola said.

“I have a limited travel budget. Why should I eat into it to get a couple of paragraphs that will end up buried on page twenty-three?”

“I want to find out who deported her, who killed her, and why. There had to be some sort of coordination between the governments of Freedom State and Zantoroland. That is a news story, and once I get it, every other media outlet in Freedom State will be chasing it.”

“I can give you airfare and two nights at a hotel in Zantoroland.”

“I need four nights.”

“Three, then. And you’d better file a page one story.”

Viola knew that Yoyo Ali had been killed for working on a similar story, and that the government of Zantoroland persecuted other dissidents. For security, she announced her travel plans to
every person or group that mattered: the Freedom State embassy in Zantoroland, Immigration Minister Rocco Calder, Amnesty International and PEN International. She told John. And in her car, which was retrofitted for a paraplegic driver, with accelerator and brakes activated by hand controls on the steering wheel, Viola drove to AfricTown to speak with Keita about her trip.

She found him running on the AfricTown Road, with a security car driving ahead of him and hundreds of children scattered along the roadside to cheer him on and offer him water. Viola waited for him to finish his run and then met him at his container.

While Keita untied his shoes, wiped the sweat off his face and drank, Viola told him she was going to travel to Zantoroland.

Keita put his bottle down and looked at her urgently. “Maybe you will get word of my sister. Maybe you can do something to help save her.”

“It should shake them up to find out that a journalist from Freedom State is onto her case.”

“Or maybe you will be in danger too,” he said.

Viola asked for more details on the story Yoyo had been writing at the time of his death.

“All I know is that it had something to do with officials in Freedom State bribing their counterparts in Zantoroland,” Keita said. “Go to my house. Look for the teapots on the kitchen shelf. My father kept notes on political stories in the yellow teapot.”

“How will I get into the house?”

“Easy. I will give you the key.”

The last thing Viola did before travelling to the airport was to use a paint scraper and olive oil to remove the
I dig dykes on wheels
bumper sticker from her wheelchair. Every bit had to disappear before she showed up in Zantoroland.

I
T OCCURRED TO
V
IOLA, AS SHE WAS BEING SERVED TEA AT
32,000 feet, that refugees on an overcrowded fishing boat might
take three weeks to travel the distance that she was covering in three hours. Three weeks for the refugees—if they made it at all. Viola wondered how bad it was in Zantoroland for people to risk their lives on those boats. You’d have to be convinced that you would die if you stayed home and had nothing to lose by trying to leave.

Viola had checked the numbers before she flew to Yagwa. According to Amnesty International, the Zantoroland authorities had executed at least twenty dissidents and had incarcerated dozens more in the year 2017 alone. In addition, the government or its mercenaries were killing members of the Faloo business class, and even friends of Faloos among the Kano majority. This had incited even more Zantorolanders to attempt the passage across the Ortiz Sea.

After landing at the Yagwa airport, Viola haggled successfully with a taxi driver and then checked into the Five Stars International Business Hotel. Soon after, she wheeled outside to look for another taxi. She had the name of Yvette Peters’ grandmother and the name of her neighbourhood.

On the street, while she waited, a group of eight boys surrounded her.

“Where are you from?”

“Give me money.”

“What happened to your legs?”

The boys started patting her stumps, touching her head and asking why she had no hair, and demanding American dollars.

As she wondered how she would get rid of them, a man who looked about twenty years old approached and smacked the boys, cursed at them and sent them running. Viola found herself looking into the clean-shaven, baby face of a man whose irises were so dark that they appeared to merge with his pupils.

“Victor Jones, at your service,” he said, shaking her hand. “And what is your name?”

“Viola Hill.”

“What does Madam fancy? A visit to the President’s Promenade? Lunch Chez Proust? A nice strong Zantoroland man to take you
into his private room and give you a little hah hah hah?” With this, Victor shook his hips suggestively.

“Hah hah hah?” Viola said.

“You don’t appreciate hah hah hah? Not to worry. What is your fancy?”

“I want to find someone named Henrietta Banks. She’s in her late fifties and lives in the Latin Quarter. Can you help me with that?”

“Victor can find anybody,” he said. “Twenty dollars, American.”

Already he was in the street, hailing her a taxi and berating the driver who pulled over until he reluctantly got out and opened his back door, muttering that there was no room for the lady and her wheelchair.

Viola pivoted into the back seat, grabbed her wheelchair, folded it flat and hauled it in with her.

“Room enough? Let’s go.”

The taxi driver demanded more money, but Victor launched into another tirade, so Viola got off with a two-dollar fare.

Once they reached the Latin Quarter, and she was sitting in her wheelchair on a potholed street lined with shacks bearing scribbled signs for Shoe Doctor, Witch Man and Crocodile Powder for Male Bone, Viola found herself surrounded by street urchins. Victor had disappeared. He came back a minute later and shooed away the crowd.

Victor pushed Viola along the potholed road—it was soft earth, and hard going, and Viola was pleased that she did not have to wheel herself alone.

She told him that she was a journalist and wanted to interview Mrs. Banks.

“Do you write for a famous newspaper?” he asked.

“The
Clarkson Evening Telegram
,” she said.

“The
New York Times
. The
Guardian
.
Le Monde
.
El País
. The
Clarkson Evening Telegram
. One day I, too, hope to write for one of the great newspapers of the world.”

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“You don’t think I am smart enough?”

“The
Telegram
’s not smart enough for you,” she said. “Get a job at one of the other papers you mentioned. And put in a good word for me.”

“Henrietta Banks lives on Snailpath Road.”

“You know her?” she asked.

“Everyone knows Mrs. Henrietta,” Victor said. “You want to ask about her granddaughter, right?”

Viola whipped out her notepad, but it was hard writing during the bumpy ride. She taped him instead. “You have heard of Yvette Peters?”

“All in Zantoroland have heard about her. Deported. Killed. We saw it online. Everybody goes to the Amnesty International website to find out about people getting killed in Zantoroland. We have a great, great country. Beautiful mountains. Fast runners. Kind citizens. But our government is corrupt—it kills people,” he said.

“Who is being killed?”

“Returnees, who are refugees who got sent back here. Dissidents. And Faloos and their sympathizers.”

“Is that why so many people are trying to leave in fishing boats?”

“Of course. I would leave too, but I have my brothers and sisters. And my grandmother. If I left, nobody would be here to look after them.”

Within a few minutes, they arrived at a wooden shack with a corrugated tin roof. The thin metal door hung on weak hinges.

“This is where she lives,” Victor said. “Shall I come in?”

“No, but meet me when I am done.”

“I shall be waiting,” he said.

H
ENRIETTA
B
ANKS LOOKED WORLD-WEARY AND WISE, BUT
she said she was only fifty-two. She pushed Viola’s chair into her house and said that she must be a very good journalist indeed.

Why was that? Viola said.

Because, Henrietta said, she was the first one to find her. And also, Viola was black and in a wheelchair, but still she had a good job writing for a newspaper in Freedom State.

Viola smiled.

“Would you like to see a picture of Yvette?” Henrietta asked.

“Yes.”

Viola spent an hour with the grandmother and then travelled with Victor to Keita’s house. She gave him the key. He seemed nervous, unlocking the door for her.

“This is the house of the slain journalist,” Victor said.

“How did you know?” Viola asked.

“Yagwa is a small city,” Victor said, “and he was well-known.”

They entered the bungalow.

“Small house,” Viola said. “One room with a kitchen.”

“It’s good for Zantoroland. Clean. Nice beds. Pots and pans. Good people lived here. You can tell.”

Viola looked at the two typewriters on Yoyo’s desk, the family photo showing Keita and Charity at about eight and nine years old, the old running shoes arranged in a neat line under Keita’s bed, and the kitchen shelf with all the teapots.

“Hand me the yellow teapot, Victor,” Viola said.

She took it from his hands, placed it on her lap and fished inside. She came up with folded notes, which she opened and scanned. Yoyo had a source. He’d given him, or her, a code name: Twain. Yoyo’s notes said Twain had given him information on payment for the most recent batch of dissident refugees to be removed from Freedom State and deported back to Zantoroland: for eleven refugees sent back in February, twenty-two thousand U.S. dollars were carried by a mule from Freedom State to Zantoroland and delivered to George Maxwell in the Ministry of Citizenship. Of the eleven, four were red-caned and seven killed. Twain said Zantoroland enlisted spies on the ground in Freedom State to find out where refugees were hiding. The only ones Zantoroland really wanted back were the dissidents.

Viola considered stuffing the papers into her bag. But if she were caught, she could be in trouble. So she read the key details quickly into her tape recorder.

Victor interrupted her. He had seen a man looking in the window. What man? she asked. He was gone now, Victor said. But she feared that they had been followed. The taxi driver who had promised to wait was also gone. Viola and Victor wheeled and walked together to the Fountain of Independence and the Pâtisserie Chez Proust before they saw a taxi.

“It is a beautiful fountain,” Viola said.

“Nobody touches it or goes near,” Victor said, “because this is where the dead are left. After Yoyo Ali died, people began calling it the Fountain of Blood.”

Viola shuddered. She bought a madeleine and tea for Victor and herself at Chez Proust, paid him and tipped him extra, and said goodbye. Then she took a taxi to her hotel and began writing.

The story, along with her photo of the bereaved grandmother, ran the next day on page one of the
Telegram
.

G
RANDMOTHER
N
EVER
M
ET
H
ER
M
URDERED

G
RANDDAUGHTER

Henrietta Banks says she would rather have died than learn that her seventeen-year-old granddaughter died in prison in Zantoroland a day after being deported from Freedom State.

Banks, 52, who lives alone in a one-room shack in the Latin Quarter of Yagwa, Zantoroland, never saw her granddaughter until her body turned up at the Fountain of Independence in Yagwa. The victim was naked and had a bracelet on her wrist identifying her:
Yvette Peters. Prostitute. Belongs to Henrietta Banks, Latin Quarter.
Banks knew only from photos what her granddaughter looked like. Peters was the only child of Banks’ only daughter, who lives in Freedom State but with whom Banks has lost touch.

Banks said that Peters was born and raised in Freedom State and had never set foot outside the country until she was deported to Zantoroland. After Peters died, Banks said, neighbours carried the girl’s body to Banks’ home. She had been garroted, which, according to Amnesty International, is a common method used in Zantoroland to kill prisoners and intimidate their families and acquaintances.

Banks buried her granddaughter in a tiny plot of land behind her home.

“How dare they write that awful word on her wrist,” Banks said. “I was so hurt, so hurt, so hurt. Even if it was true, did she deserve to die in prison and be dumped like a criminal in the square? The girl was seventeen years old. If she sold her body to get by, somebody made her do it. Why did Freedom State hate her? Why did they deport her? And why did they kill her here? People are afraid to talk in Zantoroland when these things happen. But I am not afraid. I am too old for fear. If it is true that my granddaughter was a prostitute, who was the last man she saw in Freedom State? What does he know about her?”

The Zantoroland Office of the Attorney General did not return Banks’ telephone calls. This reporter was escorted from the premises when she showed up at the building—nicknamed the Pink Palace, and widely reputed to be a place where political prisoners are tortured—where the attorney general, the minister of citizenship and other cabinet ministers work.

Freedom State Immigration Minister Rocco Calder declined comment other than to say that he would “look into the matter” and to insist that he never issued or signed a deportation order for Yvette Peters.

G
RAEME
W
ELLINGTON WAS PANICKING NOW.
H
IS PEOPLE
had expended a great deal of effort and money to set up the return of significant numbers of Zantoroland refugees. It was particularly gratifying to turn them around and send them back home before
they’d even landed in Freedom State and begun sucking life out of the economy. But all this nonsense over Yvette Peters was threatening the whole operation. If Graeme’s Zantoroland contacts got nervous, or if the world press cottoned on to this story, there could be trouble.