The stairs lead out into the back of a music studio. A fake back wall behind the mixing-desk, reinforced with foam soundproofing that nevertheless can't mute the smell. The glass doors are standing open onto the garden. Dawn streaks the sky with pale yellows and pinks.
I edge down the hill towards the pool, hugging the line of shrubs for cover. Amira and Mark are on the patio, Mark rubbing the red lines on his wrists from the cable ties. Amira is stroking the Bunny's head. It trembles violently in her arms. Underneath the upturned metal table, the Mongoose paces and snarls, throwing itself against the ironwork curlicues in fury. Amira's phone bleeps and she glances down at it. "Transfer's through," she says to Mark.
Huron emerges from the house, freshly showered, wearing a satiny bathrobe. In the distance, sirens howl. He stops to look at Carmen, slumped limply on the deck chair in a pool of blood.
"You did make a mess of little Carmencita," he says, with only the faintest smack of regret.
"She was no good to you," Mark scowls. "And now we can use her as bait." He tips the recliner up onto its wheels, to demonstrate, and carts Carmen towards the pool.
"I'll skip. There's been too much activity around here already." The sirens are getting louder. Sentinel finally catching a wake-up. I crouch in the shrubbery, wondering how to get the Mongoose out.
"We won't be long," Amira says as Mark tips the recliner, sending Carmen sliding into the water. She bobs up, floating limply, her back like a pale mushroom growing from the surface of the water, her blonde bob drifting in a halo around her head. "It should come right up-"
The Crocodile is already there, disguised under the leaves. It noses at her body. Odi leans over to look, despite himself. It's a simple matter for the Crocodile to just reach up and fold its jaws on him. It's almost gentle. But then it clamps down. Its teeth rip into his stomach. Huron screams like a slaughterhouse pig in a PETA video.
The sirens are getting louder. Lights flash between the trees at the bottom of the driveway. Huron fumbles for his gun. "Help me, you fucks!" he yells at Amira and Mark. But they don't move an inch.
Swearing, Odi manages to reach between the Crocodile's jaws to yank his gun out of the holster. He presses the muzzle to the Crocodile's eye and fires. It bursts in a gelatinous spray and the Crocodile jerks its head back in shock. Odi screams as teeth tear through his gut. A grey coil of greasy entrails is dragged from the wound. The Crocodile thrashes, slamming its tormentor against the side of the pool. Odi struggles, swapping the gun to his left hand. He reaches deep into the creature's mouth. There is a muffled bang.
The Crocodile goes slack. Its jaw unlocks. Huron starts pulling himself free, but the monster's weight is dragging
them both back into the water.
"Help me, Jesus, fuck, help me! Amira!" Huron extends a meaty hand.
"What do you think, sweetie? Should we help him?" Mark muses.
"I think our business is done," Amira says. "Goodbye, Odi."
"Please," he begs. The Crocodile slips further back into the pool, its shoulders disappearing into the water. "At least don't let me drown. At least give me that."
"It's been good working with you," says Marabou, stepping forward. She extends her boot, braces it against Huron's chest, and shoves. The tangle of man and Crocodile slides over the edge of the tiles and sinks into the water.
A muffled shout comes from the bottom of the driveway. "Armed response!"
"A pity to lose the Crocodile, but what can you do?" Marabou says, watching as Odi chokes and splutters and goes under. She starts to fray around the edges like the light is unravelling around her.
"Oh sweetie, there'll be other procurements," the Maltese says. Then he takes her hand and they simply vanish. A smudge of movement against the torchlight as footsteps thud up the driveway towards us.
Armed response finds me sitting slumped by the pool and the Mongoose bristling at my side, staring at the ripples on the dark water.
The Daily Truth
POLICE FILE
Crime Watch with Mandlakazi Mabuso
The day the music died
They said the music industry had teeth – but who knew they meant literally! Legendary music producer Odysseus "Odious" Huron got himself chowed last night by his secret animal, a moerse white Crocodile after slaughtering twin teen pop sensation iJusi in a gruesome muti murder! Turns out the man behind some of the finest talent in this country was also a bigtime tsotsi, running drugs, killing homeless zoos for muti, feeding others to his Crocodile and cultivating talent only so he could slice them open! Some 20 bodies so far have been recovered from a secret underground lake, including a woman's skeleton that police refuse to comment on, but let's just say my sources on the inside say the investigation into Lily Nobomvu's fatal car-crash is being re-opened! Yoh! Turn to our special eyewitness report on page 10 for all the verskriklike details!
Police have seized all assets, but I hear there's a moerse sum of money missing from his account. Just goes to show you never know who's a zoo. Rapper Slinger isn't. Odious Huron is. Who else is hiding an animal under their bed?
Meanwhile, a pretty boy journo has a lot to answer for. Seems one of lad-mag Mach's senior people has been running email scams from his office address! Tut-tut, skat. Don't you know when it comes to porn and fraud, you don't use your work email?
It's 4:30 am and the queue to the Beit Bridge border is already more than a thousand cars long, and that's on the South African side. Never mind the torrent of refugees trying to cross over from Zimbabwe. Barbed-wire fences barricade the dusty scrub on the riverbank from anyone stupid or desperate enough to try to swim across from Zimbabwe. After all, there are crocodiles in that river.
The high drone of cicadas rises with the heat as we inch forward one car at a time through the carbon-monoxide fug. There is a bus two cars ahead of me loaded down on its axles with bags and chickens and a cram of people. The tangle of lost things on that bus swarms like a cloud of spaghetti.
And even here, there's that Zoo City hustle going on. Maybe it's not peculiar to Hillbrow. Maybe it's South Africa. You do what it takes, you take the opportunities. Vendors walk up and down the line of cars selling warm cold-drinks and chips, single skyfs or packs of Remington Gold. Two girls in short skirts and dusty high heels lean in the window of a 4x4 flirtatiously. It's a 24-hour border post. People have 24-hour needs.
Sloth is hidden in a rattan bag full of clothes with a hole slashed in the side for him to breathe. The bag is stacked on the roof amid a jumble of other bags, loaded with the kinds of things returning Zimbabweans bring home for their families. Clothes and canned food, blankets, appliances, toilet paper, sanitary pads. I will dump these on the other side. They're only a cover while I'm still in South African territory. Still in Inspector Tshabalala's jurisdiction. Never mind Vuyo's.
The Capri has had a paint job. It's now black. The window has been fixed. It has new plates to go with my new Zimbabwean passport in the name of Tatenda Murapata, twenty-nine, full-time nanny going home for a holiday. D'Nice sourced the papers for me, to make up for pointing the cops in the direction of my apartment. But only after I threatened to frame him for Mrs Luditsky's murder. He doesn't need to know I already handed over the knife after I retrieved it from the drain along with the china kitten. He even got me a good exchange rate on my counterfeit notes. Just because they're fake doesn't mean they don't have value, particularly when dealing with border officials who don't look too closely.
Benoît is still in hospital. Critical condition, the doctors say. They speak in medical terms, but what I understand is broken ribs, a bruised heart, a punctured lung, nerve damage to his dislocated arm. He will need months of physiotherapy. He may never recover the full use of it. But the worst is the bite. It's the magic. Animal wounds take longer to heal, come with stranger side-effects. He sways between fevered moments of wakefulness and unconsciousness that's borderline coma, but with more erratic brain activity, like he's still fighting monsters in there. The Mongoose paces the corridors, looking thin and miserable.
There was nothing I could do there.
Eight days to Kigali if I keep to the tar, and don't hit any potholes or roadblocks I can't bribe my way out of.
Day one: Johannesburg to Harare
Day two: Harare to Lusaka
Day three: Lusaka to Mbeya
Day four: Mbeya to Dar es Saalam
Day five: Dar es to Nairobi
Day six: Nairobi to Jinja
Day seven: Cross into southern Uganda
Day eight: Mbasa to Kigali.
The place names sound like new worlds. I have only ever travelled to Europe. On a skiing holiday with my parents when I was eleven, when Thando broke his leg, not on the slopes but slipping on an icy pavement. On a working holiday to London when I was eighteen, which lasted a month before I decided to hell with living in a shitty apartment and working a bar and returned to the creature comforts of my parent's Craighall house with the pool and the gardener and the char lady who made my bed. Before I met Gio, before I killed my brother, before Sloth.
I have an amaShangaan bag full of fake cash. I have a bundle of photographs. I have print-outs of emails from a UN aid worker. I have Benoît's family's names and ID numbers and application papers for asylum in South Africa.
What I do not have is permission to leave the country in the wake of a multiple homicide/serial killer investigation.
Celvie. Armand. Ginelle. Celestin. It's going to be awkward. It's going to be the best thing I've done with my miserable life.
And after that? Maybe I'll get lost for a while.
Acknowledgments
Making the fantastic seem credible is hard work. I was lucky to have co-conspirators.
Special thanks to Johnson Sithole of JBS Security, who was my fixer in Hillbrow and Berea (special thanks for not bringing your gun), and to photographer Marc Shoul for recommending him.
Thanks to Lindiwe Nkutha for taking me to Mai Mai and Faraday healers' markets and for getting bounced from the Rand Club with me when we weren't appropriately dressed. I'm grateful to the management of High Point and their passionate young security team, who gave me a complete tour of the building and really did catch a rapist.
Nechama Brodie's fine pop-culture history of the city, The Jo'burg Book, became my bible, and Nechama sent me additional personal recommendations, annotated maps and provided general fact-checking. Thanks also to my great friends Georgi Guedes and Ter Hollman for playing host.
My music industry insiders/informers were Esther Moloi, Jason Curtis, Gabi le Roux, Shamiel Adams and music journalist Evan Milton, who insisted on being allowed to interview Odi Huron, albeit for a fictional magazine. Thanks to you all, and to travel writer Justin Fox for helping me plot Zinzi's travel arrangements.
Thanks also to Charlie Human and Sam Wilson who were roped in to write additional materials for this book, the psychological paper on the Undertow and the prison interviews respectively. Both pieces added a depth to my story and provided perspectives I wouldn't have thought of on my own.
Dr Meg Jones and Cape Medical Response paramedic Chris de Meyer were invaluable in providing expert medical opinions on fictional conditions and injuries.
I'm very grateful to Jamala Safari, who shared his journey from the DRC to South Africa (hopefully soon to be a novel), unravelled acronyms and the tangle of conflicts over resources that has resulted in an estimated 5.4 million deaths in the Congo since 1998. James Bocanga, another DRC émigré who runs his own security firm in my neighbourhood, patiently explained slang and daily life, and provided translations for me.
Bishop Paul Verryn invited me to visit the Central Methodist Church, where, at the time, over three thousand refugees were living in terrible, dehumanising conditions – that were nevertheless better than sleeping on the street. It was a shocking and humbling experience that has stayed with me, even though I couldn't find a way to fictionalise it. The church offered shelter during the xenophobic attacks of 2008, and continues to offer support and assistance even as many try to ignore the dire situation of refugees in South Africa. There's been ongoing controversy about it, especially recently, but the people I met there were courageous and empathetic, and doing the best they could in the worst possible circumstances.
Tim Butcher's Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart provided a great perspective on the DRC, while Jane Bussman's book The Worst Date Ever: War Crimes, Hollywood Heart-Throbs and Other Abominations was a brilliant, awful and very funny resource on the LRA, specifically their actions in Uganda.
Other books that proved invaluable include Bongani Madondo's Hot Type; Kgebetli Moele's sad, funny, gorgeous Hillbrow novel Room 207; Melinda Ferguson's harrowing autobiographical account of addiction, Smacked; Kevin Bloom's devastating Ways of Staying; and especially Penny Miller's riveting and sadly out-of-print Myths and Legends of Southern Africa – which haunted my childhood with its wonderful stories and distinctly disturbing illustrations.
Matt Weems's fantastic website warlordsofafghanistan.com was such an intriguing and wonderful reference, I was tempted to abandon this book and write about that instead.
Friends on Twitter leapt to help me with research questions on anything from storm drains to good places to dump a body (only a little creepy, guys). Thanks especially to @6000 and @ghostfinder for medicinal advice, @mattduplessis, @brodiegal, @gussilber and @louisgreenberg for general Joburg advice. And to everyone else who tweeted back about different species of gun or how easy it would be to lever a gate off its hinges.
Various 419 scammers were very helpful in sending reference material direct to my inbox (you're welcome to contact me to claim a percentage of my royalties, although there may be a small administrative cost involved), but I owe greater thanks to the good people of 419eater.com and ScamWarners.com, the South African 419 Unit of the SAPS, and the victims I interviewed for Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan stories for their insight into scams and scamming syndicates.
Thanks to my meticulous and highly critical readers: Sarah Lotz, Sam Wilson, Zukiswa Wanner, Lindiwe Nkutha, Verashni Pillay, Nechama Brodie, Charlie Human, Louis Greenberg and my husband, Matthew Brown – you all helped make this book what it is.
