Pimenta’s big breakthrough came with the dogs. He had the idea one evening when he was visiting the brothel run by his good friend Senhor Vaz. It was shortly after Felicia had started to work there: Pimenta soon became a regular customer of hers, visiting her once every week, always on Tuesday evenings.
On one of his visits there was a man of about his own age sitting waiting for the woman he had just booked, hoping she would soon finish her session with her current client. He and Pimenta started talking. The man, who came from South Africa, ran a business selling guard dogs.
‘Fear is an excellent employer,’ he said. ‘Especially in South Africa where the whites shut themselves away in compounds surrounded by high fences, and their need for guard dogs is never-ending. They would really prefer to have bloodthirsty, starving wolves, but I provide them with German shepherd dogs trained in Belgium and some kennels in the south of Germany. When they are fully trained to attack black people, they are sent on boats to Durban or Port Elizabeth. My customers queue up and are prepared to pay a small fortune for the strongest and most aggressive dogs.’
The man tipped the ash off his cigar and burst out laughing.
‘The only drawback with the dogs is that they are not white,’ he said. ‘If they were, they would be worth twice as much.’
Pimenta didn’t understand at first what he meant.
‘White sheepdogs?’
‘Yes, it would be perfect if one could breed white sheepdogs — albinos, for instance. White dogs, just as white as their owners. They would scare the blacks even more. And hence make their owners feel more secure.’
Pimenta nodded and said that was a fascinating idea, of course. But what he didn’t say was that he knew a man, a Portuguese veterinary surgeon, who had a few white sheepdogs in his garden.
The following day Pimenta went to see the vet, who was in his sixties and had begun to think about moving back to Portugal before he became too old. He had lived in Africa for over forty years, and on several occasions had suffered serious bouts of malaria that had almost killed him. He was convinced that his inner organs were vulnerable to attacks by bacteria, worms and amoebae. No doctor had been able to solve the problem and they didn’t even think it was worth trying to cure him. Pimenta proposed that he should take over the pair of sheepdogs and their recent litter of puppies, all of them as white as snow, in return for a sum of money that would greatly assist the old vet to undertake the journey back home to Portugal. They reached an agreement, and a few months later Pimenta waved goodbye to him from the quay in Lourenço Marques harbour as a regular passenger liner set sail for Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Lisbon.
By that time Pimenta had already bought some land outside the town with the utmost secrecy, and he had a large complex of kennels built on it. His brother Louis, the one who could read and write, took over responsibility for it. After two more years, he had a collection of over thirty white sheepdogs. By then Louis had grown tired of the African heat and returned home. And so Pimenta took over control of everything himself. With the help of a retired Portuguese cavalry officer the dogs had been trained to go on the attack the moment a black person approached. Pimenta had paid the commander of the fort to allow his dogs to practise on a group of black miscreants who were being held in the military jail. In order not to appear excessively brutal, Pimenta had supplied the black prisoners with thick fur coats that the sheepdogs were unable to bite through.
Pimenta travelled to Johannesburg and placed an advert in the biggest national newspaper announcing that sensational white sheepdogs, trained as guard dogs, were for sale, albeit only in limited numbers at present.
He had rented a suite in one of Johannesburg’s leading hotels. Before long the desperate hotel manager was forced to employ extra staff to cope with the long queue of prospective buyers.
Pimenta had taken two of the puppies with him to Johannesburg, a dog and a bitch. They were two of the most intelligent of the dogs he had bred. To demonstrate their aggressiveness he called a black bellboy to his room: the dogs immediately began straining at their leashes, snarling and growling frantically.
He sold the dogs for amounts that made it clear he had the equivalent of top-grade diamonds in his kennels. When he went back home he had with him orders and down payments for over fifty dogs, and had increased his fortune just like a successful gold prospector — without ever having so much as touched a spade or a wash pan.
Pedro Pimenta had become an entrepreneur in fear. He knew how he was going to exploit his knowledge. As far as he was concerned, the fear some people had of others was purely and simply a brilliant business opportunity.
47
The day after the meeting at the brothel, Hanna paid to borrow Andrade’s car and chauffeur in order to visit Pedro Pimenta’s estate outside Lourenço Marques.
Pimenta had built an enormous house next to his dog kennels. He had created a large garden around it, and dug out several ponds in which he fattened up crocodiles before sending their skins to tanneries in Paris where they were made into shoes and handbags. The crocodile eggs were collected from sandbanks further up the River Komati. He had also employed oarsmen to capture newly born crocodiles from the water next to the sandbanks where the mothers were lying on guard. They didn’t hesitate to attack if anybody tried to steal their eggs or the youngsters they had carefully carried down to the river in their mouths. On one occasion a large crocodile had succeeded in overturning one of the flimsy rowing boats. Both men had fallen into the water and desperately attempted to swim to the riverbank. One of them had succeeded, but had had been forced to watch as his friend struggled as far as the bank and dug his fingers into the wet sand in order to haul himself up: but as he tried to do so a crocodile seized him by the leg and dragged him down into the water again. His head had appeared once more before the crocodile pulled him back down under the surface for good, and lodged the body in among the tangled roots of the trees near the bank. The body would rot away there until it was ready for eating.
Hanna had heard that story from Felicia, and had no doubt that it was true. She couldn’t just dismiss it as yet another of the thousands of yarns told by the men sitting in the brothel, chatting to their whores.
Pedro Pimenta was religious. Felicia had shown her the memorial stone he had erected in the municipal cemetery in memory of the man who had been eaten by the crocodiles. There had been no body to bury. The dead man’s clothes had been placed in a beautifully carved wooden coffin. The only word on the memorial stone was the name Walibamgu: Pimenta didn’t know the man’s surname. He had simply turned up one day at the crocodile pools, looking for work, and Pimenta had recruited him without further ado. As far as Pimenta was concerned it didn’t matter that the man had no surname and no past. He was just one of the vagrants from the interior of Africa who only existed for one moment, a Walibamgu with no date of birth — but a date of death.
Pimenta believed in God and attended the cathedral regularly. He donated money for the purchase of new candlesticks, and had also paid for the repair of some pews that had been damaged by termites.
Now he was sitting in the shade on his large veranda with views of the river and beyond that the mountains that seemed to melt away into a permanent mist. Hanna knew that Pimenta very rarely left his home. The only excursions he made were to the brothel and to the cathedral. He turned down all the invitations he received. Not even the Portuguese governor was able to tempt him to attend any of the dinners the rest of the white colonial elite fought among themselves in order to be present at. Pimenta preferred to sit on his veranda, keeping watch on his crocodiles as they grew bigger and fatter in their ponds, and on the white sheepdogs whose aggression was being built up in the extensive kennels. In a pond next to his veranda he kept a few baby crocodiles and fed them himself with small fish and frogs.