The first shot of a rifle zinged the morning air. David slammed the gears – then another shot spat against metal, with a chiming crack. The car door swung open and Amy grabbed at Angus – who leapt into the back seat: David floored the pedal, churning the sand, and then at last the wheels got a grip and they lurched forward, picking up speed. Faster. And
faster.
The rear window smashed into a hundred shards as a bullet zapped the glass; Angus fired back, through the jagged void, random shots; one and two and three. One man seemed to fall, a squat figure: Enoka. Dead.
Angus screamed: ‘Go!’
Swinging the car, wildly, David shouted: ‘But where –’
‘There!’
They jerked over a hillock at speed, a tongue-chomping vault into the air – then crashed into the sand and raced onwards, rattling everyone and everything: sliding in the gravelly dust, fishtailing. David gripped the wheel as they veered left and right through the dry river plains – slaloming between the camelthorns –
‘David!’
Amy was screaming.
A huge elephant loomed ahead – they were going to crash into the elephant – the slow grey beast was crunching a branch in its mouth; it turned and looked at them, maudlin and pitying –
David tugged the wheel just in time and the car tilted, at speed, and he knew they were going to flip, right over, and pancake. They were going to be crushed, but then the car slammed back onto all four wheels and they raced ahead.
‘The river. Take the river!’
It was an order from Angus. David obeyed.
The car slashed down the mudslide and cracked along the river bed, the wheels churned and the ducks and geese and weaver birds squawked and flailed. David crunched at the gears and accelerated. The big white car was fast and new.
For ten, twenty, thirty, minutes they scythed down the river road. Oryx, drinking placidly from the water, looked up at the noise, and fled. Springboks pronked in fear as the car came splashing over boulders and careering around riverine bends, dangerously fast.
‘This way!’
Angus pointed; David took a fork along a dryer river bed. He grabbed the chance to check behind, once more – and his hopes climaxed: they really were doing it.
They’d escaped.
David felt an urge to sob in horror and scream in triumph at the same time. He did neither. He drove. Silent. The car was silent. They pulled over for a few minutes and Amy found ointment in the car’s first aid box, and she anointed his half-burned hand. As she did he looked at her. She was not crying, but her eyes were clouded, she was subduing her terror. The car started, they continued their escape.
The sun was up, already hot. David tried to get a grasp of his own fear, his own terror.
Why? Why was Miguel even
there
? Always he kept finding them. It was like they were being hunted by Death itself: sleek, brutal and merciless.
Otsoko
. The Wolf.
Relentless.
He thought of the smell of his own clothes burning. He was silent. Amy clutched his arm. Also silent.
An hour of river driving ended – Angus ordered a change of direction; David nodded, and spun the wheel hard to the right – and they growled up onto proper dry land. Rocks and sand. They drove on, and on. No one spoke.
They were driving due south. There wasn’t any road. The relative lushness of the Damara riverlands was devolving into pure and tormented aridity. Sand dunes rose on either side.
Angus was the first to properly speak. It felt like a day since anyone had really spoken.
‘We’re in the Namib Naukluft,’ he said. ‘We’re back in real desert. This stuff goes on for hundreds of miles.’
David gazed out at the enormousness of the wasteland. Great dunes, almost ice-creamy in consistency, were skirling dust from their soft and orangey crests; between them were flat dusty saltpans burned into eerie whiteness; and then, stark and black, the spars of dead trees. They looked like trees in a very bad dream.
Enough. David shivered himself out of his reverie. The
bad images crowding his mind were too awful to bear. And yet, amidst the cacophony of horror, something was rhyming: there was a harmony here, a frightening but authentic harmony.
He pieced together the images in his mind: Miguel eating the flesh of Alphonse. Old man Garovillo’s stuttering confession in the Cagot House: ‘Miguel bears the true shame of the Cagots.’ And then the horror of the body liquor in the cellars beneath the house.
What if the ancient, now liquified corpses had been sealed in an airtight vault, not to prevent infection, but…to store them?
As food?
Taking a sip of water, he asked the scientist. Straight.
‘Angus, were the Cagots…’
‘What?’
‘Were they…
cannibals
?
’
Amy stared across the car, white and horrified.
For a kilometre or more, Angus was silent. David tried again. More silence. For the third time, David asked the question. This time Angus cleared his throat and said, with an uncharacteristic tinge of nerves in his voice, like he was choked on desert dust:
‘What makes you say that?’
David didn’t want to say:
I saw Miguel cutting up your boyfriend.
But he felt he had no choice. Prefacing his answer with a warning, he told the Scotsman. About Miguel in the night. And then the events in the Cagot House. The body liquor of the stored and decomposed bodies.
Angus stared out of the car window, at the desolation of the great Namib. Then he said, without turning:
‘Yes, of course. And that’s why the smoke trick worked.’
Amy interrupted.
‘Sorry? What?’
‘It seems…somehow cruel. Discussing it. The Cagots are almost dead. Why heap this ordure on their grave?’
‘But –’
‘But now you’ve guessed. Now you’ve actually…witnessed…I might as well be fucking honest. Yes it’s true.
Miguel is cannibalistic.
Because he’s a Cagot
. Part of their cursed genetic inheritance.’ He leaned forward. ‘The Cagots were cannibals.’
Amy shook her head.
‘Please…
please explain.’
‘They were accused in early medieval times of eating human flesh, and the reputation stuck. Of course it could have been nonsense, like the Jewish blood libel – yet it was true. They really were…the Serpent Seed, the Curse of Cain. A race apart, a breed of cursed people.
All of it true.
’
‘How? I don’t get it!’ Amy was pale with anger; her white face framed by the yellow sands of the Naukluft, through the window. ‘Eloise? She is no madwoman. And she never said any of this?’
‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she?’ Angus spat out his sarcasm. ‘It’s the great wild shame of the Cagots, not something you mention to the neighbours – why don’t you pop round for a dinner, bring a fat friend –’
‘But what’s the science?’ David steered the car between two dead and spiky trees. ‘Cannibalism? How the hell does that…evolve?’
Angus frowned. ‘It’s because of the inbred isolated nature of the Cagots. Take their syndactyly, webbed toes and feet. This is typical of mountain peoples, with small gene pools. Syndactyly is associated with many chromosomal disorders. Some of them lead to psychoses, violence, strange sexual urges – who knows – you see?’
Any flashed a glance at David, then at Angus.
‘Miguel was highly…sexual.’
‘Excess libido, yep.’ Angus was actually smiling. ‘Hypersexuality, satyriasis. And the hypersomnia.’
‘He always fell asleep after sex.’
‘Typical man. What can you do.’ Angus gazed at nothing, then went on: ‘So, I suspect, Miguel has some obscure
combination of Klein Levin and Hallervorden-Spatz syndromes, not unknown to the average Cagot. This syndrome will get worse over time. And one of the psychosexual symptoms can be anthrophagy. Cannibalism! I realized he had cannibalist urges when I saw him sniffing the smoke…last night.’
David checked the mirror: there was some obvious and shocking sadness in the Scotsman’s aggressive humour, his determined smile.
Amy said: ‘So that’s why the euphorbia worked.’
‘Exactly. After I watched him with poor Alfie, I knew he would want to sniff the smoke again, the smell of burning…human flesh. I realized he would do that when they started to toast you, David. Wouldn’t be able to resist.’
‘And euphorbia?’
‘
Euphorbia virosa.
Also known as Bushman’s poison. Eating the leaves will kill you quickly. The woodsmoke can kill over time and knock you out very quickly. My gamble was that Miguel would step forward and inhale, try and smell the delicious scent.’
David felt a profound queasiness, like vertigo:
‘But Angus. If Miguel hadn’t stepped forward and…inhaled…the euphorbia smoke would have killed
me.’
‘Yes, well. I figured you wouldn’t mind dying quicker by poison rather than waiting to be chargrilled.’
The car was quiet. The old dirt track turned onto a proper road. Black and tarmacked and murderously straight: like a fine needle of jet pointing due south. The sun was azimuthal in the sky, the shapes of running ostriches spotted the far and desolate horizon. David thought of his frail grandfather, back at the hospice in the desert:
desolada, desolada, desolada.
The sadness and shame of his grandfather; the terrible fate of his parents.
Amy spoke: ‘Where are we going?’
‘Rehoboth. City of the Bastards.’
‘Sorry?’
David checked in the mirror, Angus was still wearing that odd, cocky smile.
‘I’m going to see Alphonse’s mother, just for a minute. To tell her what happened. Alphonse was a Baster. A Bastard. His mother lives in Rehoboth and we need to get there
soon
because Miguel is not dead and his men will find a way out of the desert and they will come to the Sperrgebiet, they
will
come for Eloise –’
Amy interjected: ‘Why didn’t he believe you? When you told him Eloise was in the Forbidden Zone? Why did he continue to…do what he did? He had his answer.’
Angus scoffed.
‘You still don’t see? This man is driven by his shameful urges, his Cagot cannibalism. Probably he has kept a hold on it for years, but as the syndrome worsens the most primal and evil of his desires are surfacing –’
‘He bit the hand of the Cagot woman he killed in Gurs.
Eloise’s grandmother.
The cop called it “experimental” –’
‘There you are. In one. He’s yielding to these base desires, at last, as he goes finally mad. The syndrome tightens and grips. You can overtake this car – we need to keep moving.’
It was the first vehicle they had seen in an hour. David sped by, the car driver was a big, German-looking man. Who flashed his headlights as they passed: two blinks of silver in the shimmering heat.
Angus continued: ‘So you see, Miguel used our predicament as an excuse to…cook someone. He had his answer but his impulses were predominant. What he really wanted was human flesh. As much as possible. A chance to feed his worst urges. He couldn’t help himself.’
‘And now?’
‘He will be after Eloise. He still has a job to do, after all. Destroy the experiments and stop our tests and then kill Eloise, the last of the Cagots.’
A terrible thought struck David.
‘Angus…Is Eloise also mad?’
‘No. Not every Cagot suffers these syndromes. She’s fine. And plenty of Cagots are – or were – perfectly healthy. Especially at the beginning of their…isolation.’
‘But then?’
‘As the gene pool dried up, over centuries, the bad genetic stuff recrudesced, healthier Cagots became rarer, and so the poor mad Cagots were shunned with ever greater severity, as a pariah tribe, and so the vicious genetic circle
tightened.
They were forced to inbreed, due to lack of partners; perhaps they were reduced to incest. Thus creating more cannibals and cretins and web-toed rapists. We better get petrol.’
The fuel station was a sudden outpost of sophisticated business in the bleak empty desert. One minivan was decanting half a dozen nuns, black nuns with smiling black faces, laughing. A couple of motorbikers were sitting in the shade, pouring bottles of water over their sunburned foreheads.
Watered and refuelled, they bought nuts and wizened apples and sticks of biltong. Then they climbed back in. The endless black strip of the road unfurled through the wastes.
Angus was still talkative: it was as if he saw conversation as a way of avoiding any contemplation of what they had been through. David was happy to go along; he, likewise, didn’t want to consider what they had so recently endured.
‘So tell me. You two.’ Angus sank some water. ‘We need to know who betrayed us.’
‘Yes…’
‘I think it’s pretty obvious. Don’t you?’
David said: ‘No.’
Angus tutted.
‘You were obviously set up in
Swakop
. By that guy.
Hans Petersen.
He was waiting for you. Like you just bumped into him and he kindly drove you to see us?
Och right.
I had suspicions when you showed but I was a halfwit, got distracted, didn’t do anything about it.
Didn’t think.
’
David protested:
‘I don’t think he’d betray us – No –’
‘Fuck that, it was him. The elephant man. He is known in Namibia, hates Nazis, any hint of racial science. They probably told him we were doing the Fischer experiments, he agreed to help – do a set up – I
should have guessed.
’
‘We didn’t tell him why we were going.’
‘He knew
already
. They had someone in Swakop tell him, so he was ready to befriend you, so you would give away Eloise’s whereabouts, lucky for us I moved her –’ Another slug of water. ‘Anyfuckinghow, here we go. The City of the Bastards.’
They were driving into a largish town, ringed with fuel stations and metal bungalows. Telephone masts stood whitely on shallow dusty hills, the streets were wide and languid in the heat and blessed with German names: Bahnhofstrasse; Kaisersstrasse. Big dogs ran behind tall wire fences. Dark orange girls laughed outside a pink bungalow called Viljoen’s Pool Hall. David rolled down the window and stared at the shoppers stepping inside one supermarket, Spar.
The people were strikingly beautiful. Like Alphonse. Coffee-coloured skin, slanting eyes, extraordinarily elegant cheekbones.
‘So who are the Basters?’
Angus explained. ‘The crossbred descendants of strapping Dutch settlers and petite khoisan tribesmen: the famous Bushmen of the kalahari. The Dutch and the Bushmen intermarried in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Cape Colony. Take a left here. This is where –’ His voice
cracked for a second. ‘This is where Alphonse’s family live. I met him at Windhoek University. I needed an assistant. He was so beautiful, a beautiful bastard of Rehoboth.’
Amy glanced at David. Then she said: ‘Angus, if you want to…be alone for while…we can…’
‘No no no. I’m fine. I’m
fine
. Let me talk. Let me explain. Amy, the Basters were hated and despised from both sides because they were such unusual half castes, such extreme hybrids. The racial prejudice they faced drove them north, across the thirstland, into Namibia. So they settled here on the high plateau south of Windhoek. And they farmed cattle.’ Angus gestured through the car window at a passing butcher’s shop, with fiercely caged windows. ‘They actually founded their own nation with its own flag and anthem. The nation of the bastards. That’s what
Baster
means. Bastard.’ Angus chuckled. ‘And they’re still here today. A precious genetic remnant. The unique inheritance of the Basters makes them
rhapsodically
beautiful – cocoa coloured, high cheekboned, sometimes blond yet simultaneously dark. Literally the most beautiful people in the world. As you can see – look at that girl there, by the post office. Stunning. They also like a drink, and they gamble. And they brawl. All the time, whenever they get drunk. Clock the fences. OK, here’s the house. Alfie’s mum. Five minutes.’
It was a bright blue bungalow, with a basketball hoop over the garage, and another tall wire fence around a neat if austere grass space. It could have been a house in America, but for the burning African sun and the acacia trees on the street and the strange slender beautiful cheekboned people laughing on the stoop of the Lutheran Church with the lurid green Le Palace gambling hall next door.
David and Amy said nothing. They sat in the car in the heat and she touched his hand and he squeezed her hand and they said nothing.
The Scotsman emerged.
‘That was…fun.’ He waved away any inquiries, and ordered David to drive on. ‘Drive south. Let’s just get there. Just get to the Sperrgebiet as fast as we can. Go!’
As they drove he talked – and talked. He talked of the Basters and Eugen Fischer. He spoke, it seemed, as a therapeutic measure. David listened to the mesmerizing babble of Angus’s talk. Half soothed, half alarmed. The deserts were encroaching again, as they sped south along the straight back road at a hundred miles an hour. The road was so empty and straight and good and flat it felt like they were doing thirty, across the wilderness. They saw virtually no other cars.
‘So you want to know why Fischer was here. In Rehoboth. In Namibia. Right? Yeah?’
David shrugged.
‘I guess.’
‘Simple answer. Because it’s such a paradise for someone interested in genetics, like Fischer. There is more human genetic variation in Africa than anywhere else on earth. And there is maybe more in Namibia than anywhere in Africa. From the Nama to the Cape Malay to the purebred Boer. And I’ve sampled them all. I got them all. I’ve even sampled the khoisan, the Bushmen! Alfie’s ancestors…They are very important, to the Fischer experiments. Now we need to go right, off road. Use the track.’
The wastes swallowed them, at once. The car growled along a dead valley, another
vlei
of dust and flattened salt. The dunes were smaller than before.
Angus went on: ‘So what was Fischer doing here? Fischer believed that, technically, the Bushmen were a special kind of human. Certainly they are a unique adaptation to the dry desert lands. They are very small, and nimble, but they have all the necessary features, as it were. They have been
cleverly miniaturized by evolution. Like Japanese electronics. I call them the Sony Bushman.’
‘In what way? How are they different?’
‘The Bushmen have distinct genetics and physiognomy. Take the…steatopygia –’
‘Steato – what?’
‘The enormous buttocks. They are an adaptation to climatic harshness and regular famine. Like a camel’s hump. And the women also have something called a Hottentot apron. Francis Galtony the great eugenicist, called it hypertrophy of the nymphae. Which is very delicate. He actually examined the women’s vaginas with a sextant.’
‘Are you saying,’ Amy asked, her voice tremulous, ‘that the women of the Bushmen, the Hottentots or whatever, that they have different…
genitals
?
’
‘Yes. They do. Different labia. They are distended and slightly askew. If the Bushmen were, like, seagulls, a taxonomist would probably put them in their own category. A subspecies.’ Angus smiled in the car mirror at David’s appalled and astonished face. ‘Incidentally isn’t it weird that Eugen Fischer, the greatest eugenicist after Galton, was called
Eugen
? It’s like Charles Darwin’s parents calling him
Evolute
Darwin instead of Chas.’ He paused. ‘Not that Fischer was the most consistent racist. He wasn’t. When he was here he befriended the Kellermans. He liked nice cultured intelligent millionaire Jews in Johannesburg and Cape Town – with beautiful Jewish wives. He was less keen on Zulus. OK where are we?’