Carnival (25 page)

Another tragedy was the magician, who had left Germany and retreated to a small village in the Balkans. He lived in a modest house and ate what the villagers sold to him for a good price. Life was good until he made the wife of the baker disappear at night and reappear in the morning naked from behind the bushes, and until he transformed the daughter of the mayor into an adorable rabbit, hopping through the window every evening and into the meadow. After that, he packed his top hat, escaped, and flew with the help of his cape back to the city.

And then there was Mimi the dwarf, who got involved in an international diamond-trafficking ring. Mimi was provided with a fake passport stating a fake age and a fake name. She dressed up as a little girl and carried a doll in her hands. She was accompanied by another lady who pretended to be her mother. And then they crossed the ocean in fancy cruise ships, smuggling stolen diamonds inside Mimi’s doll. The so-called mother pretended to be a White Russian countess from the Cossack region. She was known as the Contessa Tambbar Koussa. She snubbed everyone as expected and spoke French in the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian writers such as Turgenev and Pushkin. She had schooled Mimi in manners and
le savoir-vivre
, and Mimi was always on her best behaviour in her bell-shaped dress and curly hair.

Mimi would curtsy to society ladies and men and she even played the piano and occasionally tap danced, but when the conversation became unbearably pompous, conservative, and dull, Mimi would throw a tantrum and kick the women in the ankles and punch the men in their groins. On deck, the Contessa Tambbar Koussa, whose main conversational tack was to reminisce about her two dogs and the cruelty of not allowing animals in the dining hall, would call out to Mimi, Precious, don’t get yourself wet! A coded phrase meaning: Don’t get too excited about the muscular sailors on board, about whom Mimi fantasized every night, masturbating under the sheets of the top bunk of their cabin.

But then one day, Mimi got very drunk and saw the handsome ship’s doctor, and her eyes were transfixed, her lips quivered, and her thighs wiggled against the lower metal ramps of the ship. She forgot the doll and her age and smiled, held her doll under her arm, lit a cigarette, and made rings of smoke sail above the ocean winds. Dolphins jumped inside the white hoops, to the delight of the passengers, and a few clouds magically descended to join the circle of smoky sighs trailing through the tropical heat.

The doctor, who saw Mimi’s provocative gestures, was alarmed and perturbed by his own desires for the little girl. He kept an eye on Mimi and followed her until, one day, he caught her standing in the engine room beneath the belt of the mechanic, giving him some steamy head. At first he thought it was a case of child molestation, but then, after conducting an investigation into the matter, he realized that Mimi was not the innocent child that she pretended to be, nor was the Contessa Tambbar Koussa a real White Russian. To make things even more insulting, this so-called Contessa was found to be an Arab, with a fabricated Arabic name that, translated, meant “the countess with the swollen vagina.” The Contessa was interrogated about her fake passport and her impersonation of an aristocrat, and she was threatened with prison. Fearing a long sentence, she made a deal with the authorities to reduce the charges against her by telling them of the diamond hidden in Mimi’s doll.

Mimi was arrested and sent to jail for life. In jail, she was harassed and beaten by the big women in the cell, who made her do the circus dance, as they called it, and walk a tightrope tied between two bed rails. In the showers, a pedophile guard molested her and called her names. Early one morning, when everyone was asleep and before the bell rang and the count of the prisoners was made, Mimi untied the rope that she had walked the night before, to the cheers, taunts, and laughter of her cellmates, secured it to one of the high bars of her cell, and hanged herself. That morning, there was no applause in the room, only silence and the faint squeaking of the rope, and the light, and the quiet swings of a small body.

HAT

WHEN I ARRIVED
home, I parked in the garage, then I opened my trunk and pulled out the quilt I’d found lying on the back seat. I took all the cash in my wallet and wrapped it inside my hat, and I neatly folded the quilt and placed it on the back seat with the hat on top.

I slept all morning.

In the afternoon I went down to my car. The quilt in the back seat was unfolded and the hat and the money were gone.

I took my car, left the lantern unlit, and decided to drive to nowhere. It was rush hour, and at that time a driver could pick up passengers easily, but I decided to leave the centre and seek the river. I drove until my wheels took me to the bridge where Otto had once dwelt and drunk and slept. The spot, he used to call it.

But the spot was not his discovery or Tammer’s, it was Fredao’s. Otto and Fredao used to spend nights there drinking and arguing and even, if one were to take them seriously, conspiring. And Tammer, while he waited for his mother to come back from her walks through the night, would sometimes stay awake with them, listening to them talk politics and power. Once Fredao pulled out his gun and showed it to Tammer. Here, son: I am not your fucking father just because I call you son, but I know who is. You are the bastard son of an Arab. Those Arabs were the first to come and enslave my people and sell us to the Portuguese. You, son, you are one part Spanish genocider and one part slave-driver. Bullshit, all that religious boasting about mercy to the slaves, it is all bullshit. A slave is a slave. There is no such thing as mercy to a slave like those books of revelations will tell you. Here, son, come over here. I want to teach you power so you will always be free. Now hold the gun like that, aim, and shoot the bottle.

The gunshots must have been heard by the sailors on the cargo boats, but either they didn’t give a damn or they, like those on the shore, were drunk, wobbling with the motion of the water and waiting with boredom for the departure of their ships.

On the weekends Tammer would watch these sailors from beneath the bridge, stumbling drunk, singing the same songs all together. It wasn’t their accents that surprised him most, nor the uniforms with the lost ties and crooked hats, but the fact that they all knew the same songs. No matter how drunk they were, they sang and conformed. Fredao would curse the sailors. Filthy white-trash bastards! he would say. A few hundred years ago, they would have been chasing me to put chains around my neck and obliging me to row their filthy, rat-infested boats.

Some of these sailors would have food in their hands and Tammer would look at them with envy and hunger. Meat, Tammer would say, they are eating meat. He would point, and Fredao would spit and say, Yeah, filthy cannibals, they would eat humans as well.

What are cannibals? Tammer asked.

Humans who eat other humans, Fredao replied.

BEFORE I ARRIVED
at the bridge, I stopped at a store and bought coffee and cakes. Then I drove down to the spot, parked, and got out. I saw two boys sleeping in a shelter of cardboard boxes and leaning against each other, sharing a blanket. It was Tammer and his friend Skippy the Bug. In a small barrel beside them, a few pieces of coal were glowing faintly beneath burnt pieces of wood. I stood there and waited, smoking and drinking my coffee. And then I moved closer. There were many empty beer bottles and a large bottle of Johnnie Walker, half gone. I was just about to kneel down and wake Tammer when I saw Skippy flip his side of the blanket open and point a gun at me.

Skippy, I said. It’s me, Fly, put your gun down.

He immediately began to giggle, and Tammer, as if he had anticipated everything in his dreams, also started to giggle from beneath the blanket.

Fly, do you have fifty bucks? Tammer said, his voice muffled, and they both laughed.

Wake up, I said to Tammer. And you, Skippy boy, point that thing away from me. Where did you get that gun? I asked him.

My inheritance, Tammer said. What’s up, Fly?

Drink your coffee and let’s go for a walk.

Too cold for a walk, man. Shit, I got to piss. Fucking booze, a massacre, motherfucking massacre that I have to piss out.

While he was pissing against a pillar, I asked him how his mother was.

Not good, he said. She’s still in the hospital. I’m going to visit her tomorrow.

I’ll come, I said. Which hospital is she in?

The one on the top of the mountain there, he said, and flicked himself, buckled up, and asked Skippy to imitate some lady’s voice again.

Skippy started to shout in a high-pitched voice, Leave those Coke cans alone, what are you doing here!

Hey, Fly, Tammer said as I turned to walk back towards my car, could you buy us some hamburgers? And Skippy repeated, Hamburgers.

Not today, I said. Got to go back to work.

THE NEXT DAY
I went to the hospital to see Linda. And there was Skippy, smoking and juggling rocks in the parking lot.

Is Tammer inside? I asked.

No, he went to buy cigarettes.

Did he already visit?

Yeah.

How is his mother?

Not good.

Did you go in?

No.

Where do you come from? I asked the bug.

The moon, he said, and laughed. I come from the moon.

You have the gun on you?

He laughed.

Is that why you waited outside?

Yeah, outside, he said. Tammer is coming. Tammer is coming, he said, and laughed.

How is your mother? I asked when Tammer had reached us.

He ignored my question. He just passed me and kept going and Skippy trailed along.

THE WORD ON
the street had it that Fredao, after damaging Linda, had lost the respect of his girls, and that they had rebelled against him. A new pimp had already taken over Fredao’s corner and no one had seen him for days. Rumour had it that he’d gotten ill and nostalgic and decided to go back to Angola with a suitcase filled with money.

I went up to Linda’s room. Her teeth were now completely gone. Her jaw was so damaged that she could hardly talk. I had to decode every word she said. When I told her that I had seen Tammer outside, tears went down her cheeks and she reached for my hand and squeezed it. Her eyes and her fingers stayed fixed in the same position for a long time.

Two weeks later, the body of Fredao would be found on the shore of the river. He had been repeatedly shot in the head. The news, in a small article on a back page, would report that three of his limbs were missing. The bites would be attributed to hungry stray dogs, though the report would go on to mention that there were knife cuts and pieces of missing flesh.

BIRDS

ON THE WAY
back from the hospital, I saw Zainab on the street, walking towards the bus station. I stopped my car and called to her from across the road. She barely waved at me and continued walking. I made a U-turn and drove up alongside her. I opened my window and asked her to get in. She hesitated, and then she opened the door and sat next to me. I’ll drive you to school, I said.

She was quiet. And then she said, There’s no need. I am leaving.

Home?

Where is home for us, Fly? My home was taken, occupied. I am moving to another city.

Gina, I said.

You saw us?

Yes. I didn’t know.

She was travelling in Jordan and we met and fell in love. And I had to leave. I left everything for her. A relationship like ours is not accepted everywhere.

But Zainab, that is the consequence of those religions you so defend and embrace. I don’t understand you.

Fly, religion is here and it will always be here.

Am I going to see you again? I asked.

I don’t believe so, Fly.

For once you don’t believe.

She smiled and said, Fly, what do you believe in? What do you live for?

What do the stars believe in, Zainab? Where do the dead horses go, what do the birds worship, and what do the rivers live for?

Take care of yourself, Fly.

She leaned over, kissed me, and left, and I’ve never seen her again.

ACT FIVE

CRIMES

NUMBER 6 WAS
found shot in the district of St. Lucas Island. His car was discovered six hours after his disappearance. The first alarm was given by his partner, Number 107. They shared the car in two twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. Every morning for the past ten years they would meet at the same taxi stand and exchange the car keys and a few words before the night driver went home and the morning driver started the day. When Number 6 didn’t show up after his night shift, his partner called the dispatcher, who repeatedly tried to reach Number 6, to no avail. At that point, the police were informed.

His car was spotted by a security guard who heard the repeated calling of the taxi dispatcher coming from the radio. Number 6 had been shot in the side of the head. The shot must have come from the front passenger seat: blood was splattered all over the front seat and the glass. The car was held as evidence and couldn’t be driven for months. After fifteen years of driving, Number 107, the partner of the deceased, gave up the taxi business and thought of opening a restaurant.

NUMBER 48 WAS
found on his knees, beaten by a rock, down by the train tracks. He was discovered by two hobos who said they heard the loud buzzing of the flies and saw a stray dog escaping with a human limb in its mouth. As they approached the car, they smelled and then saw the dead man. The police came and the newspapers went on a frenzy of photographing the crime scene. The hobos were asked to pose for a photo next to the car. They both smiled and everyone in the editorial office commented on their missing teeth.

Number 48 had a young wife and two young children. His wife, who had no other means of income and no family in this land, decided to go back to Algeria and live with her brother and his wife.

NUMBER 96 DIED
of a broken neck. His car was found in a hayfield by a farmer. The radio in the car had been left on and played loud music all night. In the early morning, the farmer took his shotgun and drove his pickup truck to the murder scene. The farmer later complained that the loud radio had echoed all the way back to the barns and scared the cows, depriving them of a good night’s sleep.

The victim’s four brothers, who were, like him, recent immigrants from the Eastern bloc, stayed up all night drinking. Two of them wanted to bury the body in the new country, as they called it, and the other two wanted to ship the body back to the victim’s place of birth. They argued, then they drank, sang, cried, and fist-fought among each other. The fight turned violent and the police came and arrested them all.

THE LAST TIME
Number 72, also known as the Sex Spider, was seen, he was walking into a hotel with a prostitute on his arm. He drove mostly in the evenings because he preferred the quiet night shift to the traffic jams of the daytime. He also had a few regular travellers whom he drove in the early mornings to the airport, which was always a good fare.

Every evening, Number 72 waited for a big, voluptuous lady at the door of a corporate headquarters and drove her back to her house. Through the years they had gotten in the habit of teasing one another and sharing sexual fantasies over the seats, and then she would leave him a big tip and get out of the car. Once, after many years of these erotic, sexless games, she invited him in to her apartment. She chained him to her bed and left. He was chained there for two days without food or water. When she came back, he was dehydrated and delusional. When he asked her why she’d done it, she simply replied: You asked for it.

His car was found under a bridge with five bullets across the door and the windshield. The killer, the police deduced, must have stood outside the car and shot inside. At his funeral there were quite a few women, and most of the men in attendance were taxi drivers. The victim had no family and no one knew much about his life. Number 92 said, I wish we had asked. We were too busy listening to his sexual escapades. He was a funny man.

Earlier, however, at the wake, five transvestites and two women had shown up and surrounded the coffin. One, by the name of Larry, or Limo, wept the most. Limo stood up and walked into the middle of the gathering and said, Please, please, turn off all the lights. I will show you what Mani thought of us all. And she stood in front of the coffin and glowed. Little sparks of light began to appear on many of the attendees’ chests. Beside Limo, the two women glowed brightly, and, in the corner, a male taxi driver glowed lightly as well.

NUMBER 18 WAS
found floating in the city’s main river. His car turned up six miles north of the place where the body was spotted. The autopsy showed that he had been stabbed and then thrown into the river alive. The current carried him away from the original crime scene. The stabbing must have occurred on the boardwalk. Little patches of blood were noticed on the wooden deck, not too far from the car. He must have swum for a while before his wounds spilled too much blood and weakened him and he drowned. His cousin, Number 59, said that they had grown up on the Caribbean shores and they were both fishermen and good swimmers. The official death certificate stated death by drowning. The victim was a born-again Christian, and everyone at the church he had attended seemed to believe that his next life would be better.

ALL FIVE CRIMES
were committed over the course of two days. It was established that all the rides must have originated in the city, somewhere between downtown and the riverside.

The dispatchers’ records showed that none of the drivers had picked up the fatal call from a house or a specific address. Most likely the passenger or, more appropriately, the killer, had hailed the taxis off the street or off the stands. Which led the police to deduce that the killer must have chosen his victims at random.

YET THERE WERE
common threads. All of the victims were male and newcomers, also known as immigrants. They all worked the night shift, and none of them bore any marks of fighting or physical confrontation. As a matter of fact, it was thought that the victims must have conversed with their killer; each of the last cigarettes smoked by the drivers turned out to be the same brand, so it appeared that the killer had offered them a cigarette.

Another detail in common was that all the cars had their radios tuned to the same spot on the dial. The frequency in question was a hip hop station, which led one policeman to let slip that they suspected a young black man or men to be responsible for the killings. The odds, they reasoned, that five middle-aged immigrant men had all been listening to this station were slim.

The killings caused panic among the drivers. The taxi commission organized a protest drive through the city. About seven hundred cars drove through downtown, resulting in a great gridlock. Flags of the countries of origin of the victims, black ribbons, and photographs of the dead men dangled from taxi windows. The families of the deceased rode at the front of the parade, and some walked alongside the cars. Some of the victims’ children carried their father’s photographs. The kids were swamped by journalists and photographers.

Young black men suddenly found themselves unable to flag a taxi off the street. Some of the drivers who used to wait, at the end of the night, at the doors of bars and dance halls that played hip hop and R&B and even jazz didn’t wait there anymore. After two in the morning, when the public transport had stopped, and the dance clubs shut their doors, one could see black kids walking in the middle of the road, waving and blocking the path of taxi drivers, even banging on their windows and hoods to try to get a ride. The police were called in one night when, after a few young black men tried to force their way into a taxi, a small riot took place. Several arrests were made.

The taxi commission blamed the mayor for the murders, because he had refused to authorize glass buffers between the front and the back seats. A buffer would limit the passenger capacity to three, and since the mayor was all about attracting families and visitors to town, a four-passenger capacity was perceived as more hospitable. The anti-discrimination league accused taxi drivers and the taxi commission of discriminating against black men. A taxi driver from a Middle Eastern country was caught on camera saying that all the problems came from them, blacks. The footage was aired on the six o’clock news. When the taxi driver was confronted by activists and people from the black community, he stated that, as a Muslim, he never differentiated between races, since the Prophet, peace be upon Him, urged good Muslims to treat all races equally, but then the driver stressed that the young blacks in the city were dangerous and immoral.

During the funeral of Number 18, the church reverend accused the local radio stations of spreading hate and corrupting the youth, and said that such stations should not be allowed to broadcast violent music that called women bitches and whores.

And then, in the course of a televised debate, a music producer replied to the accusations of a campaigning politician by stating that hip hop was listened to by everyone, regardless of race, and he cited sales statistics to prove his point. When the politician condemned the violent language, the producer reminded him that none of the lyrics was any more or less violent than those of the colonial song “Rule Britannia.”

It came to light that one of the victims, when he first entered the taxi business, had driven illegally for years. Having failed the taxi commission’s written exam because of poor language comprehension, the victim had resorted to using his cousin’s licence. Their similarity in looks could easily have fooled any inspector. At last, only six months before his death, he had finally passed the exam and been assigned the number 48. In the aftermath of his death, the taxi union representative raised the issue of exclusion and demanded that taxi permit exams be permitted in many other languages.

At the taxi stands, drivers were urged to look out for each other and to be leery of customers who hailed them from the streets. Many of the drivers decided to stop working the night shift and switched to mornings. Of course, the owners of the cars hiked the rental fees for morning shifts. The Carnival was still on and some taxis refused to take people with masks on. Those who did made sure to look at the skin colour of the passenger’s hands before unlocking the doors. A gay couple who were dressed in matching cowboy suits and hats were refused entry to a cab because of the plastic guns that rested at the sides of their exposed hips. When they complained to the commission, the driver stated that he had also refused them for hygienic reasons: one of the cowboys wore leather pants that left his ass completely bare in the middle.

Headlines such as Are Taxi Drivers Racists? flashed across the news. “The Newcomers Who Discriminate,” a special report, was repeatedly aired on various radio stations. “Should We Tolerate Those Who Don’t?” was another variation on the same theme. The only woman taxi driver in the city, a butch named Baby, was pursued by three different producers to be interviewed.

Is taxi driving dangerous for a woman? she was asked on air.

Not if the doll is riding with me, honey, Baby answered, and laughed.

And then a young graduate from the creative writing department of the local university, who had driven a taxi for two years, was contracted by a publishing house to gather taxi stories. The book was to appear in the fall, in time for the national awards season. The title of the book was
Taxi Stories
.

INDEED THE TAXI
killer, as he was called in the news, triggered a new interest in the romantic and dangerous side of the taxi profession. Journalists and producers would hire a taxi for a whole day for a flat fee, or simply let the meter run while they asked the driver questions or rode with him through so-called dangerous neighbourhoods. Taxi drivers were ushered into the labyrinths of the TV stations for interviews. They were offered cups of water from the cooler and called by their last names, which were mispronounced by secretaries and producers alike. The anchors would often come out of their glass rooms and shake the drivers’ hands, and they would ask them the correct pronunciation of their names, repeating it to themselves many times on their way back to their high chairs and microphones. In many sound studios, wires were passed underneath the drivers’ jackets, all the way up their necks, and down inside their ears. Sudden voices saying things like Can you hear me, sir? elicited fierce head shakes by some South Asian drivers, which made it hard for the technicians to detect the meaning of the answer as a yes or a no. Makeup was applied to the drivers’ foreheads and below their eyes to cut the flare and shine. Some drivers, though, refused to wear makeup, stating that it was a woman’s affair.

Nearly overnight a reality TV producer introduced a new show,
The Longest Ride
, which consisted of celebrities driving taxis equipped with hidden cameras. The show was almost cancelled after a passenger attempted to mug a celebrity driver at gunpoint. The television crew that was following the taxi in a separate car saw the gun in the kid’s hand and alerted the police. It could well have escalated into a hostage-taking situation if the celebrity hadn’t informed the mugger that he was without cash because, he said, This is
The Longest Ride
! The mugger, who happened to be an admirer of the show, was ecstatic to discover that he was on television, and he agreed to sign a modelling contract before he surrendered to the police.

CRIMES (AGAIN)

MORNING. AFTER THE
burial of the latest victim of the taxi killings, a psychiatrist was slain inside his clinic as he was about to leave his office. The doctor’s coat was found hanging behind the door. According to the police report, the patterns of blood on the coat suggested that the killer had worn it while he slashed the doctor’s throat.

Many of the patients who were being treated by the psychiatrist got sick reading the news. A computer was missing, as well as a radio, two hundred dollars, and a box of Cuban cigarillos, but the rest of the place was untouched except for the blood that had splattered all over the room. The police confiscated all the doctor’s files as part of the investigation. Patients and privacy advocates protested, stating that the police were violating citizens’ rights to privacy.