Zulu
David had always wanted to see the Africa that his grandfather had visited as a young man. He had photographs of men wearing leopard-skins and carrying spears. Girls with bare breasts and grass skirts stood beside them. David thought old Africa had died. It certainly wasn’t to be found in the cities. The nearest he had come to it was in rural slums where people lived in round houses and struggled to make a living.
To his surprise, old Africa was not completely dead. There were people who had pride in their ancient culture. He sat, cross-legged on a cowhide, in a Zulu kraal, and took in the scene. Beer was being served by girls in grass skirts. The beer wasn’t to his taste but the girls were.
Everything about the young ladies was stunning. Their skirts were made from lengths of grass, entwined into slender tassels held together with coloured beads. They hung down from a woven belt and swayed seductively as the girls swept forward with their bowls. Small beads decorated their headbands. Bigger beads hung about their necks and swung out from between their breasts when they bent down to fill the glasses.
David took the performance in his stride. Sipho was clearly embarrassed by the display of so much naked female flesh. Mario was enthusiastic at first then shrank back and pretended to stare into space when he noticed the look of extreme disapproval on Petra’s face.
She was neatly dressed in a high-necked blouse and a long skirt that Elizabeth had given her as a parting gift. The outfit was more than a bit severe. David was reminded of old films about schoolmarms in old-fashioned schools in the American Midwest. The skirt and blouse might be appropriate in some situations but definitely not here.
Petra’s disdain for Zulu customs didn’t go unnoticed. The girls identified Mario as her man and went out of their way to flaunt themselves in front of him. Their hips swayed and they showed more than a bit of leg when they danced forward to top up his glass. David caught tantalising glimpses of what lay below their swinging tassels. The young ladies evidently had an aversion to underwear. Mario could not have failed to notice that small detail.
The girls smiled and the men exchanged glances. There was something conspiratorial about the way they nudged one another and grinned. David guessed they were plotting something and wasn’t surprised when one of them got up and wandered off.
He was wearing a leather kilt when he left. He returned totally naked, apart from a straw hat and neatly-woven penis sheath. Petra riveted her eyes on the ground and shook. The girls giggled and the men roared with laughter.
If they knew of Petra’s connection with Xhosa royalty, they either didn’t care or they were going out of their way to insult her. David watched with a sense of foreboding. Their first day in a Zulu kraal wasn’t going well.
He was aware that the Zulus were very different from the Xhosas and Basutos. You didn’t have to be a student of human behaviour to work that one out. The Xhosas and the Basutos were a far gentler people. The Zulus were far more forthright. David felt an immediate affinity with them.
The same could not be said for Sipho and Petra. They were ill at ease from the start. Part of the difficulty was tribal but it went much further than that. There was a severe clash of temperaments. Sipho and Petra were intellectual types. The display of masculine virility and feminine allure turned them off.
David thought of Petra’s big sister and how she would have handled the situation. Anna would have revelled in it. A naked man with a penis sheath would have set her off. Anna would have cracked one joke after another and everyone would have loved her.
He struggled to get Anna out of his mind. She had distracted him when she was alive and she was distracting him now. Her horrible death continued to haunt him. He had to stop thinking about her. He had a mission to perform and he couldn’t do that properly if his mind was on other things.
He had to keep their hosts on side long enough for Kate to arrive and fly them out. He got on well with them even if they had no time for Sipho and Petra. They were Zulu traditionalists. David had come across people like them in America.
The American West was won in the late eighteen-hundreds. That wasn’t so long ago. David remembered his American grandfather talking about people, he knew, who were alive when Custer fought his last battle against the Sioux at Little Bighorn. The same went for the Zulus. They were fighting the British at about the same time.
David could imagine what it was like. White men in red uniforms, armed with rifles, fighting black men with spears. He pictured the two sides coming together. Then he was brought back to reality by the sound of a truck.
Keeping the past alive was one thing. Earning a living was another. His hosts made their living from trucking. That was the connection with Winston. One of his buddies was a guy who went under the name of Big John.
Winston didn’t think in terms of tribe. He was Basuto and Big John was Zulu. They were good buddies and that was part of the relationship. The other was politics. Neither liked the way things were going.
Winston provided a guide to take them down the pony trails into South Africa and Big John picked them up on the other side. After that it was a tedious drive through the night. Big John drove and David sat in the passenger seat beside him. Petra and the others lay on mattresses in the rear.
David got in very little sleep. At one point, they stopped and Big John said he had been driving for twelve hours without a break. He slumped on the wheel and they exchanged places. His only concern was that David should not make a wrong turn and get lost.
The midmorning crowd at the Café Noir were totally different from the smartly-dressed breakfast bunch who munched through their croissants, gulped down their coffee and glanced at the newspaper headlines before dashing off to work. The clientele, at 11 am, was mainly mums with babies. No one looked as if they were in a hurry to go anywhere.
There was, however, one familiar face. The woman who spoke bad French with a strong Spanish accent arrived shortly after them. Kirstin was onto her in a flash.
‘She’s here again, Humphrey.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘She usually comes for breakfast.’
Kirstin peered over her coffee.
‘Have you noticed that she’s wearing a hearing aid?’
‘Lots of people wear hearing aids.’
‘Yes. But she keeps fiddling with hers.’
‘If you are worried about her speak in Danish or French, Mother. Hers is appalling. I doubt if she can do much more than order a coffee and cream bun.’
‘I am speaking Danish.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
Humphrey continued to read his newspaper.
Kirstin glanced at her watch.
‘When did Olaf say he would be here?’
‘Eleven o’clock.’
‘It’s twenty-past. Are you sure you’ve got the right place?’
‘I suppose so …’
‘Suppose so?’
‘He was speaking Danish.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘He translated it into Danish … called it the Black Coffee.’
‘And you took that to mean Café Noir.’
‘That’s what black coffee is in French.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you that he could have been inviting us to drink black coffee with him? I hope you’ve not screwed this whole thing up. We’ve spent the best part of a week waiting for him to put in an appearance and now this has happened.’
A movement caught Kirstin’s eye. A man was gesturing at them. He stood beside an old-fashioned urinal of the sort that was once common in France but now rarely seen. At first she thought he was adjusting his clothing. Then she wondered if he was doing something rude. Finally, she decided that he was trying to attract Humphrey’s attention.
He was overweight and about the same age as Humphrey. It struck her that they looked very much alike. Both had chubby faces and sandy-coloured hair. Humphrey wore his short and the gesticulating man wore his long. It protruded from beneath his woolly hat.
That was the giveaway. It was identical to the one she had souvenired from Louise Magnusson’s apartment. Olaf Magnusson was hiding behind the urinal. Kirstin figured he had chosen that position because they could see him but he couldn’t be seen by the woman with the Spanish accent.
She prodded Humphrey’s arm.
‘It’s time for a wee-wee.’
‘What was that?’
‘Olaf has arrived. He’s standing beside a place where no woman is allowed to go. I’ll deal with the bill. You go out there and speak to him before he decides to go away.’
Kirstin settled the bill and went outside. Humphrey was talking to the strange person. She watched from a distance and followed the pair to a car park. They walked from row to row. She guessed that Olaf couldn’t find his car. Eventually, the lights on a small Renault flashed. She joined them and was ushered into a rear seat.
The Renault was a hire car. Kirstin noticed that Olaf was having trouble finding the gears. Words poured from him as he tried to explain why he wasn’t driving his own car and why he had not gone into the café. He spoke in Danish and kept up a nervous chatter.
‘She keeps following me.’
‘The woman in the suit?’
‘Yes. I can’t shake the bitch off. She’s a journalist. She wants to know about our latest project and that’s simply not on. We have to keep the location secret until it is properly secured.’
‘You mean the cave paintings?’
‘Yes. That’s the only way to protect them. They are priceless gems from the past. They go back over thirty-thousand years …’
Kirstin decided not to tell Olaf that the woman in the suit had been following them for days. She didn’t believe his explanation about her and she didn’t believe his explanation about the hire car. He said his car had been involved in an accident but was very hazy about the details. Humphrey regarded Olaf as a mathematical genius. That could be true but he was a very poor liar.
He eventually got around to the purpose of the meeting. If Olaf was to be believed, Humphrey possessed the right mathematical insights to help him in his work. He was recording paintings that went back to the earliest days of cave art in Europe. He would take Humphrey to see them. They would enter by a secret back entrance so as not to give the location away. Kirstin resolved to speak to Humphrey about the hazards of embarking on an underground mission with a mass murderer.
The lemurs liked Mozambique. Their new cage was spacious and they were dashing around it enthusiastically. Kate wasn’t so happy. David was little more than an hours’ flying time away. He had given his precise coordinates and sent a photograph of a small airstrip where she could land. It looked perfect. The only fly in the ointment was Rodriquez. The bastard had flown off. Someone had offered him a lucrative contract and the sod had taken it. Rodriquez said he would be back in a few days. Kate wasn’t prepared to wait that long. There were other men with planes. She would tempt them with her charms and do whatever was required to rescue David.