The Gloaming (25 page)

‘When was this?'

‘Coupla weeks ago, thereabouts.'

‘When did you last see her?'

‘At the club—the Yacht Club. Sounds very grand. But it's not. Just a nice, clean local place. Yachtees like it. Nice place to swim, cold drinks.'

‘When?' he repeated.

She exhaled loudly and rolled her eyes. ‘Two, three days ago. She was drinking with Harry Fonseca.'

Interesting, Strebel thought, that she'd given him a name. Harry Fonseca. He was careful not to let her know he'd picked up the hint. ‘How do you know she's gone? Not just traveling and coming back.'

‘How do I know she's not traveling and coming back? How do I know if she is? I don't know anything about her. I didn't say I know this or that.' She paused, looked Strebel over again, and went on, ‘Maybe she met some young guy, some hot young buck and she's gone to Zanzibar with him.'

Strebel refused the bait.

‘You went to the cottage. Why?'

‘Pay the
askari
. Watchman. End of the month, salary due. I noticed she wasn't there.'

‘Were you concerned?'

‘Why should I have been? There wasn't a hex drawn on the wall in blood or anything. Just an empty house.'

Somewhere dogs barked and Gloria stood up. She moved to the window facing the road and looked out expectantly. ‘I think that's them,' she said.

‘Them?'

‘My reasons for living.'

‘Just one more question. Please, Gloria.'

She turned back to him, her eyes scanning his shit-colored aura. ‘She's lovely, isn't she? The most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I'm not surprised you've come all this way for her.'

‘No…' he started to say, to deny. But why bother? There was the sound of a heavy vehicle approaching, a diesel with a missing muffler. He ploughed on: ‘Did you meet anyone called Ernst Koppler?'

But her attention was riveted elsewhere. He saw what she did: a decrepit bus full of children.

‘I don't know why Pilgrim Jones came.' She kept her gaze out the window. ‘I don't know why she left. Or where or how or who. In Tanga people come, they go. It's why the club doesn't run tabs. People go and sometimes they go without paying their bills. Pilgrim came, she went. Maybe she's coming back. I really hope she's okay. But that's it, as far as it goes for me. And I've never heard of the other fellow—Kaplin?'

‘Koppler.'

‘Koppler, right. No idea about him. We're done now.'

She was starting out the door. He watched her rushing, suddenly a nimble, glowing woman.

‘Good luck,' Strebel said. But she wasn't listening, she was running to the bus, her arms outstretched. He watched for a moment from the doorway, the tentative figures stepping out of the bus. They were all so small, so thin. She crouched down and touched their faces one by one, just a brush of her finger. She was speaking to them in Swahili, the reassuring clucking of a hen, so she didn't notice Strebel bypass her, get back into the taxi and drive away.

Her performance had been almost perfect, he thought, but for ‘Kaplin.' She hadn't misheard. She'd turned away from him as she lied.

 

Mr Tabu collected Strebel promptly at ten the next morning, and they drove to the Yacht Club. ‘Do you know Harry?' he asked Mr Tabu on the way.

‘Mr Harry, yes, yes. He like the club very much.' Mr Tabu laughed like a naughty child and then held his thumb to his mouth to suggest the tipping of a bottle.

The club's entrance was strewn with fallen bougainvillea blossoms, as if a wedding had just passed. Strebel trotted down the long flight of steps, confronting the sweep of the jade-colored bay. He'd almost forgotten about the sea. He had a Swiss ambivalence about it: the sea was an element of which he had no immediate or genetic experience, it frightened him; and yet he fancied the ocean's fluidity, how it took things somewhere else. Sailors or driftwood or an old plastic jug, lifted and taken to a cove a mile away or across a sea.

The bar was well kept, a bright, open design that welcomed rather than intimidated. It was empty but for a pair of old men and the Tanzanian bartender. Strebel debated how to approach: to slowly lubricate the conversation with alcohol, for clearly the men were drinkers; or to be simple and direct.

It probably wouldn't make a difference. Tanga was just another small town—a village if you were white, and in villages people didn't talk to an outsider. In those deep, dead-end mountain valleys of the Jungfrau where he'd started his career, the doors slammed in his face, mouths sealed shut. Eyes focused on a distant col. The dead child, the brutalized wife, the missing husband: no one would tell him a thing.

Strebel sat next to the men, introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Strebel from the Swiss Police, and put the two Swiss ID headshots on the bar. ‘Do you know them?'

One of the old men said, ‘What's this about?'

‘They're missing.'

‘Missing?' said the other.

‘Pretty. She your wife?' Then looking at Koppler's picture, added, ‘They run off together? He seems an unlikely choice.'

‘You can never tell with a woman. Joanie went off with you.'

They had a laugh. Strebel offered to buy them a drink, but it was complicated: he had to become a day member and buy a book of chits. Now he understood what Gloria had said about ‘tabs.'

‘Just give us the cash,' said the one who'd had it off with Joanie. When Strebel handed over ten bucks, he checked the date, slipped the bill in his pocket, shouted, ‘Mohemedi!
Naomba Tusker tatu
!'

Three beers came. Pink tickets bearing various denominations like Monopoly money were handed over.

‘The girl was here. She took up with Harry. Though not—sadly for Harry—in the way Harry would like to have been, er, taken up,' Joanie's swain said. A long, throaty chuckle.

Strebel felt a surprise flinch of jealousy. How, exactly, had she taken up with Harry?

‘And Harry, where could I find him?' Strebel sipped the beer. He saw the two men glance at each other and shrug in unison.

‘Harry? Hard to say. He's usually here.'

‘If he's not here, he could be anywhere.'

‘He's like that. Breezy fellow.'

‘The woman, Pilgrim,' Strebel said. ‘I think she might be in some kind of trouble.'

‘Oh, dear.'

‘That's why I'd like to find Harry.' He wanted to make it clear, Harry wasn't competition. ‘“Anywhere.” Do you think that's far?'

One scratched his beard, the other his hair; both looked doubtful. ‘Breezy fellow,' they said. ‘Hard to say.'

‘When did you last see him?'

The old men exchanged glances as if to give Strebel the impression they were consulting each other, but in fact they were silently corroborating.

‘Come to think of it, I only just realized he isn't here right now.'

‘Wasn't he here for Quiz Night?'

‘Come to think of it, I don't even know what day it is today!'

‘Sorry we can't be of more help!'

Strebel drank the beer and asked about the weather. They told him the rains would be coming soon, the southern monsoons.

 

‘I'll pay you,' he told Alice. ‘I need someone to translate for me.'

She looked unconvinced, carefully examining her neat manicure. Strebel knew she was trying to decide what he wanted—sex? Or a Swahili translator? She suspected the former. All these old white men wanted sex. They were no different from the old black men, the young black men, the German backpackers, the shuffling but surprisingly horny and solvent beggars in the market, the Goan sailors from the harbor. Strebel supposed the constant challenge to her morality exhausted her. She must hear the whores talk in the hotel bar, and know that once they had been the same as her. Girls from villages with few options. Prostitution was a way to make money—more than you did in a hotel reception or shop.

Strebel noted the small silver cross around her neck and suspected that she wore it like garlic against the vampires of his gender. But like garlic, Christ's power was constrained by human greed. He thought of Pilgrim, a kind of whore, who had given up her freedom and spirit for a wealthy man. And Alice, considering the cost of her manicure and her hair extensions and, very probably, a dress she had seen. She could have these and all she had to do was take her clothes off for this old white man.

Ingrid had never made such compromises. A physiotherapist with a happy childhood and a good family, she'd come to Strebel free and clear, voluptuous, soft, hungry. They both made almost the same salary and they split the bills evenly. They had never fought about money; they had fought very little. Perhaps, early on, she'd resented the hours he worked, the interrupted dinners, the 3 a.m. phone calls.

Perhaps, once or twice, she'd even threatened to leave him. Did he remember? One Christmas when Caroline was little? She'd said he treated the house like a hotel and her like a maid. Something about his clothes on the floor, the unmade bed. From his point of view, what did it matter if the bed wasn't made? The bared sheets wouldn't melt in the sun or get dirty from the air. Leave it unmade, he'd said. Or maybe shouted. He took care of the cars—changed the oil, took the snow tires on and off. He kept up his side of things. Putting up bookshelves. Fixing the toilet.

‘I want a translator,' he said to Alice, summoning up his most paternal manner. Even then she didn't quite believe him, but she nodded slowly. ‘How much?'

‘It's important to translate exactly what I say, exactly what is said to me. Okay?'

She nodded again.

‘Someone may be hurt or in danger.'

‘Yes,' she said, touching her crucifix.

‘I'll pay you one hundred dollars.'

She looked down at her hands and again he felt her doubt. It was too much money. ‘You are a Christian?'

For a moment he was confused—then he understood: his namesake apostle. And what she was hoping for: reassurance. He considered an answer that was the least lie—the least awkward words to pronounce. ‘I believe in many of Jesus's teachings.'

Mr Tabu had put a couple of foam pillows in the back of the taxi, an attempt to hide or compensate for the state of the seat. Strebel and Alice dutifully sat on these as Mr Tabu drove them out to the Raskazone peninsula. The road followed the headland for several lazy miles past mansions gently dissolving in the salt air. The ragged road, the overgrown gardens, the cows and goats grazing on the verges: Strebel almost laughed to think how many violations of Swiss law he might tally in a single minute's drive. He wondered how it made him different from Alice and Mr Tabu, to live somewhere so neat and precise, so tidy and ordered.

For a moment, as they rounded the tip of the peninsula, a foul smell clogged the air, and he saw, to his left, a pipe extending into the sea spewing a brown smear of what could only be raw sewage. Less than half a mile away, back around in the bay, they had passed the public beach.

Now the road surrendered completely to sandy dirt, a narrow track. High security walls alternated with patches of scrub. A few hundred yards later, Mr Tabu stopped. ‘This the house.'

Alice turned to Strebel, testing her importance, ‘He says this is house.'

‘Yes, thank you.' Strebel smiled appreciatively and got out. The wrought-iron gate was shut but not locked. ‘Hello?' he called. He felt the emptiness, but said again, louder, ‘Hello? Is anyone here?' No one answered. So he unlatched the gate and went in. The house in the yard was small and round with a roof of thatched palms. Several large trees with fat red blossoms shaded the front, and beyond them the shelf of land dropped to the dense green fleece of mangroves. Strebel imagined Pilgrim standing here as he did, and how the same sense of peace must have come to her. The wild twittering of yellow birds and the trees and the sea and green mangroves, the white house—the still, hot afternoon which held him softly in a cobweb of time, so that he felt if he went inside he would find a bed, and lie down and sleep until he wasn't tired anymore. He would lie down and she would come and lie next to him and they would sleep in the heat, just their hands touching, their fingers intertwined.

The house, however, was locked; he should have asked Gloria for a key. He walked around, peering in—though there was nothing to see: a few pieces of old furniture, a basic kitchen, a pretty tiled bathroom, a bed secluded by a large mosquito net. He went back to the car and asked Alice if she could find a neighbor to talk to.

Together they walked down the lane to the big, new house and Alice knocked softly on the gate. A uniformed guard appeared and Alice spoke to him. She relayed to Strebel that the guard had only just started the job and anyway he couldn't give them names as it was against company policy.

Strebel was about to head back to the car when Alice touched his arm, ‘What about him?' She pointed to a boy in an oversized white shirt tending two fat brown cows in the scrub.

Alice admired the cows, touching them in a familiar way. Strebel surmised she had been around cows her whole life: a village girl who'd had to learn to wear shoes. She spoke to the boy like a sister, and he admired her instinct for gentleness. Strebel noticed the white shirt. What was the shirt for, he wondered. Dirty, torn in the back. Was it one step above the poverty of having no shirt at all?

Yes, the boy told Alice, he remembered the
mzungu
lady. She came only with a small suitcase, nothing valuable. She didn't even have a car. She had a bicycle that looked like the kind you could rent at the market. Sometimes she even walked. He and Alice laughed.

‘Why is that funny?' Strebel asked.

‘Because white people never walk. We think you can't, that you are too weak. In my village, we even believed you didn't have legs.'

Briefly, he recalled a toy Caroline had had—a little plastic bus with plastic people who bobbed up and down when you rolled the bus along the floor. The people were just white heads on round pegs. They looked straight ahead, up-down-up-down.