The Marks of Cain (25 page)

‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’

David turned. A large blond man in a rugby shirt had sat down at the next table; he was staring at the roistering Germans.

He had a kind-of South African accent. David shrugged, not knowing quite what to say.

‘Sorry.’ The man burped. ‘But I overheard your conversation. The waiter is right. Those bastards are celebrating the Nazis. The ascension of Hitler to power.’

He ran fingers through the thick blond hair; he was tall, tanned, vigorous, about thirty-five.

‘And I am German! At least by descent,’ he said. He extended a manly hand. ‘Name is Hans. Hans Petersen. Only come here for the Tafel, best beer in Swakop.’ He smiled again. ‘My people are from Otasha. Cattle farmers.’

David offered his own name, and he introduced Amy.

‘So…’ David tilted a glance at the partying Nazis. ‘Why…do they do it? Is it a joke?’

‘For some of them, yeah.’ Hans swigged from his Tafel. ‘They fly here from Germany and make a big joke of it. They say it is…ironic. Shocking the bourgeois. But for others it
is no joke. Some of them are descended from Nazis, or Nazi families, who fled here after the war. Some are from old colonial families – they’ve been celebrating Hitler since 1933.’ He wiped the beer from his lips with a thickly muscled wrist. ‘So what about you?’

The Germanic singing had subsided; many of the ‘ironic’ Nazis were departing the bar, cold blasts of air slapping the room every time the door swung open.

‘We’re…trying to get a lift to Damaraland. To meet someone. Seems kind of…impossible.’

The German’s stare was almost unblinking.

‘You say Damaraland?’

‘Yes.’

He surveyed them.

‘Well, could be your lucky day.’

‘How?’

‘I can take ya. Maybe. I’m heading up there with some conservationists tomorrow, do some work with the ellies.’

‘The what?’

‘Desert elephants. S’what I do. I left the farm to my brother. Too boring.’ He chuckled. ‘I help ecologists, the government. Safaris for tourists, run a fleet of 4 by 4s. Namibia is not the easiest place to get around.’

Amy smiled, anxiously. ‘We noticed.’

Hans nodded and laughed and bought a beer. He asked a couple more searching questions, then a couple more questions – and then he stood and laid some Namibian dollars on the table, and waved at the waiter. ‘OK. Let’s call it a deal! Happy to give you a hand. Sounds like you need it.’ He walked and paused, at the doorway. ‘You’ll have to get up early though, guys. Seven a.m. start. It’s a long old drive.’

‘But…Where?’

‘Meet by the Herero Monument. You won’t miss us – we’ll be the guys with the DEP Land Rovers.’

David stared at Amy as Hans disappeared into the night. They had lucked out. They sighed their relief, paid the tab, caught a cab, and headed back to their hotel.

But their optimism was swiftly checked.

As they were passing the reception, the bashful, defeated face of Raymond appeared: barring the way to the elevators.

‘Hello.’

‘Raymond.’

The man was evidently concerned: he waved a hand across his mouth, indicating they should be very quiet. A second gesture beckoned them to a darker corner of the lobby.

He hissed. ‘Please please. Please come. Please listen.’

‘Raymond.’

He frowned in the shadows. ‘People are looking for you!’

‘Who?’

Amy’s eyes were wide with alarm. Raymond shrugged, still frowning. The entire hotel was darkened, and hushed.

‘A short man. Quite fat. Almost a beard. Accent Spanish.’

Amy whispered, David’s way: ‘Could it be…Enoka?’

David snapped the question: ‘What did he say? This man?’

‘Not much. He say he was just looking for a white couple. Your descriptions. I tell him nothing…but he is looking for you. Tattoo on his hand. Like a German…swastika.’

‘Enoka,’ Amy confirmed.

Enoka.

David felt like he was being force-fed a diet of terror. The burning images had never left him. Miguel’s servile accomplice in the witch’s cave, scuttling away. And then Miguel. Raping Amy. Not raping Amy.

Amy was already making for the lifts.

‘Let’s get inside.’

They fled to their room and double locked the door – and lay fully clothed on the bed – and barely slept.

When David woke, he had only the memory of a bad dream in his mind, like the bitter aftertaste of some sleeping pill. A dream with sexual elements. A dream of Amy and Miguel. He was glad he could not remember the details.

The fog had quite gone. They shoved their kit in their cases, gazed at the sea – now shining in the sun – and snuck out of the hotel and cabbed the few hundred metres to the Herero Monument. They sat low in the car seats as they drove. Frightened and cowering.

As promised, Hans and his cars were unmissable: two big ochre Land Rovers with ‘Desert Elephant Project’ stencilled on the side. The Land Rovers were piled high with equipment. Hans greeted them with another manly handshake, and gestured at the second Land Rover.

‘Second car is full. You better come with us.’ He took their bags and shunted them in the boot of the first car. Then scrutinized them with a wry smile. ‘You guys OK? You look…kinda rattled.’

‘We’re fine. Just…wanna get going.’

‘Least the fog’s gone AWOL, eh? Like I said, you’d better come with me and Sam. Unless you want to talk about zoology for twelve hours. Hey. My Herero lieutenant! Sammy!’

A young black guy turned and grinned. Hans jerked a thumb at Amy and David. ‘These guys are with us. Dropping them off past the Ugab. Gonna sit them with us.’ He turned to David. ‘OK, let’s saddle up.’

David and Amy immediately climbed in the Land Rover. They held hands. The seconds dragged past. The cars remained stationary.

‘C’mon,’ Amy was whispering, to herself, very quietly. ‘What’s the problem? Can’t we just go?’

They waited. And sweated. Trying to look as invisible as possible in the darkness of the car. Six minutes passed, then
six and a half minutes, then six and three quarter minutes, and then Hans vaulted on board and slammed his door and whistled loudly and the cars rumbled into life. They were doing it, getting out of town, trundling out of the Swakop suburbs; passing some red and blue painted bungalows, a hint of shanty town, the last dusty supermarket, a disused railway track: and then – then the desert.

The silence and vastness seemed to swallow them. David felt a headrush of relief. The cars had seemed big and important and all too conspicuous in the amiable Swakop streets; now they were two tiny specks in an austere immensity.

Good.

David and Amy were in the back, Sammy and Hans were chatting in the front. Speaking in Herero, or so David guessed: some tribal language anyway. Hans had the GPS coordinates given him by Amy. Every so often the German cross-checked them with his satnav, and nodded, apparently content.

The gravel road was nearly empty in the diagonal morning light. Occasionally a rusty truck or big new 4WD would pass them coming the other way, kicking up its own dust trail, making orange smoke signals in the empty blue air. Some pick-up trucks had black workers in grey overalls lying in the back, smoking, or sleeping. The glossy SUVs generally contained a solitary white man who lifted one lazy finger in acknowledgement as they passed.

David wondered: had Raymond really seen Enoka? Maybe it was just paranoia, a mistake, an innocent mistake? But the tattoo was unmistakable. He had seen Enoka.

The car was hot; he was sweating. David rubbed at his brow. Trying to work it all out. It was probable that Miguel and the Society had calculated where Eloise had gone. The Society was, self-evidently, well aware of the GenoMap connection. The Society had killed Fazackerly in London, precisely because he was connected to GenoMap. They knew
all about GenoMap, they were closing down GenoMap with extreme violence; just as they were killing anyone with a connection to Gurs, and the Cagots. At the church’s bidding?

So they were surely aware of the Namibian connection – the links with Fischer and Kellerman Namcorp.

Putting the simple sums together produced a fairly obvious answer: Nairn and Eloise were in Namibia. David and Amy too.
And Miguel had come after them.

David stared around, teetering on the edge of despair. Would they ever be safe? Violet-black mountains shimmered on the horizon. Mirages came and went: lakes of illusion, glimmering in the imperious sun. The heat was already impressive. Everyone in the car was drinking plenty of water.

The mountains reminded him of the Pyrenees. The Pyrenees reminded him of the map, still in his pocket, still folded and faded. David reached in his dusted jacket and pulled out the map. Amy was half asleep next to him.

He unfolded some of the soft paper leaves. Every star on the map had been explained, even the one near Lyon. But there was still that tiny line of writing on the back. He flipped the map over and looked. It was so faded, so barely legible, so small. Not his father’s handwriting. David squinted as close as he could: was that maybe a German word?
Strasse
? As in street?
Maybe?

Possibly. Or possibly it was just the Teutonic ambience of Namibia, leading him down that cognitive pathway.

Carefully, reverently, pensively, David folded the map. With its one last clue. And then he kissed Amy’s sweet, bare, sleeping shoulder, hoping she wasn’t dreaming of Miguel.

At length Hans turned, one hand on the wheel. He nodded at David.

‘Empty, right?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I said, Namibia is empty. You know why?’

‘No.’

‘My people did this. Emptied the damn country.’ He frowned. ‘The Germans. You ever heard of the Herero Holocaust?’

He apologized: no, he hadn’t.

Amy stirred on his left. Rubbing sleep from her eyes. And listening to Hans.

‘Incredible story.’ Hans glanced at Sammy. Who was silent. The big German driver turned and fixed his eyes on the potholed road, and gulped some more water from a little bottle, as he elaborated:

‘In 1904 the Herero people rebelled, and massacred dozens of German settlers. My great great great uncle nearly died.’ Hans suddenly pointed out of the window.

‘Ostrich!’

Amy and David craned to see: three or four large ungainly birds were running down the road in front of them. With their flustered big black and white behinds, they looked like alarmed Victorian spinsters fleeing a minor sex offender. The sight was comical. But Hans was not laughing.

‘Where was I? Yeah. The Germans saw this revolt as a serious threat to the potential of their diamond-rich colony, so they despatched a Prussian imperialist, Lothar von Trotha, to deal with the uprising.’ Hans drank some more water. ‘The Kaiser told von Trotha to “emulate the Huns” in his savagery. Von Trotha promised he would use “cruelty and terrorism”. Nice bunch of guys, the German imperial classes.’

Hans steered a left and a right. ‘And that’s exactly what happened. Cruelty and terrorism. And genocide. After several battles, where the Herero were slain in large numbers, lovely von Trotha decided to finish the job once and for all and destroy the entire Herero people. In 1907 he issued his notorious extermination order, or
vernichtungsbefehl.
He decided to kill them
in toto
. Every last one. An entire nation.
’

‘Jesus,’ said Amy.

‘Yah,’ said Hans. ‘So the Herero were driven west, into the Kalahari desert, to
die.
Guards were stationed at water-holes so the people couldn’t drink; wells were deliberately poisoned. You have to remember this was desert, searing desert, the Omahake. They had no food and water, an entire nation of people with no food and water. They didn’t last long. Some women and children tried to return, but they were instantly shot.’

He jerked the wheel to avoid a small gaggle of little birds.

‘And there are eye witness accounts of this holocaust. Unbearably harrowing. Hundreds of people just lying in the desert, dying of thirst. Children going mad amongst the corpses of their parents; apparently the buzzing of the flies was deafening, paralyzed people were eaten alive by leopards and jackals.’

Amy asked, quietly: ‘How many died?’

Hans shrugged. ‘No one’s entirely sure. Reliable historians estimate that maybe sixty thousand Herero were killed. That’s seventy to eighty percent of the entire Herero people.’ He laughed, very sourly. ‘Oh yes, the numbers, we do love our numbers, don’t we? Makes it all easier to bear for white men. A nice sensible percentage. Seventy-five point six two percent!’ He waved an angry hand, gesturing at the desert. ‘The slaughter affects Namibia’s demography to this day. Helps explain the emptiness.’

David was silenced – by everything – this horrible story, the stirring desolation of the landscape, the extraordinary heat – and the mighty sun. Namibia just seemed to dwarf…everything.

‘Uis. We’re nearly in Uis.’

The town of Uis, which had appeared to be significant on the map, turned out to be barely a village. A couple of caged liquor stores stood next to three petrol stations. A grey
concrete building, apparently a restaurant, advertised Snoek, Meat Pies and Greek Salad. Several iron shacks, a few big houses with big fences, and some huts and bungalows comprised the sunburned residential district.

There were lots of men sitting on their haunches around the petrol stations, staring into the burning emptiness, staring at the Land Rovers. Unpaved roads straggled off into half-hearted woodland. The shadows cast by men and buildings were stark, etched into the dust. Black black black then blazing white.

Hans stopped the car at one of the gas stations; the other Land Rover did the same. David and Amy got out to walk about for a moment, to stretch aching legs, but the heat of the scorching sun was punishing – driving them back towards shelter. Hans looked at the pair of them sceptically as he paid the petrol attendant.

‘You guys got hats?’

They both said no.

‘Guys! In Namibia there are three rules. Always wear a hat. Take every opportunity to refuel. And never drink whisky with a Baster.’ He laughed. ‘OK. We’re getting near – if your coordinates are right. Maybe another coupla hours.’