I know nothing about it, m’dhara, I am just the middleman, said Clever by name and Clever by nature. I was too tired to argue, it did not matter who was to blame, because the long and short of it was that I had nothing for my trouble, and to add to this, I now had to walk all the way back to town.
I tried to call Shaky. The number you have dialled is not available at the moment, said the electronic Econet voice, please try again later. I called his Telecel and NetOne numbers, same message different voices. My mood soured even further as I trudged past an ostentatious private school in Tynwald that everyone said was run by a retired army general.
As I walked, I thought about following up on another fuel lead that another contact had told me about. Here is how it works: there are these new farmers who get fuel at give-away bottom dollar everything-must-go preferential government prices. The government will throw anything at the new farmers to make them produce: cheap fuel, free tractors, free seed, free fertiliser — even free labourers; they were using prisoners on farms at one time. Pity they can’t throw in a bit of free motivation because the thing about the new farmers is that they don’t use the cheap fuel for their free tractors; instead, they sell both tractors and fuel to people like me, and people like me sell them on to the vast majority of the unconnected non-preferential-rate-getting masses that can only get fuel on the black market.
It’s against the law, of course, this black market thing, but they may as well arrest every living person between the Limpopo and the Zambezi and have done with it. This is the new Zimbabwe, where everyone is a criminal. One of my best customers, His Worship, Mr Mafa, is a regional magistrate for Harare, and another, the Right Reverend Malema, is a stalwart of the Anointed Church of the Sacred Lamb. The last time I sold diesel to His Worship, he paid off a little of what he owed me in tomatoes — his office at Rotten Row is crammed with the vegetables he grows on a small plot of land along the Bulawayo Road at the edge of which the City of Harare has placed large rusting signs that say NO CULTIVATION: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Unlike those poor sods who have found that their cherished degrees are useless in this new economy, I at least have not fallen too far off my track. I am using the skills I honed as an insurance man in the eighties and nineties. My ex-brother-in-law used to say I could sell dental floss to his mother-in-law — the woman had fewer teeth than a hen.
It is not just fuel either. I am what you might call an all-commodity broker: if it can be bought, it can be sold, and if it can be sold, I am your man. I have bought and resold computers that the President donated to rural schoolchildren in Chipinge during the last election campaign — they don’t need them after all, their schools have no electricity. I have sold reconditioned cars from Japan and Singapore, flat-screen televisions from Dubai, sugar and salt and children’s toys from South Africa. I have even sold water-purifying chemicals from Malaysia to the City Council of Kwekwe. All goods processed, no questions asked. No guarantees, no returns, no refunds. No wire transfers, no credit cards — as the sign at the Why Not Hotel, Esigodini says, Mr Credit Was Killed By Mr Cash.
Last year, I sold my biggest item yet: a John Deere combine harvester which came down to me from some poor white bastard who had been compelled to donate his land for redistribution by the magnanimous Comrades. When the Comrades redistribute the land, they also make sure to redistribute any crops on the land, all machinery, any furniture, plates, knives and forks, and any whisky that might be in the house.
So that’s how a lucky Comrade got a free combine harvester and having no need for it in urban Warren Park, he sold it to me for only one and a half trillion. I sold it for at least a hundred times that amount, got US dollars too, which I sold on at a healthy profit, and that is how I was able to buy a third-hand RAV4 for the wife, pay three lots of school fees in one go and get the girlfriend a four-day weekend at Vic Falls and all the one hundred per cent human hair (made in Taiwan) that she could buy.
I was musing on all these deals as I crossed the field that divides Tynwald from Ashdown Park and walked to the corner of Eves and Ashdown Drive. I thought I might get a lift to town here. I bought an Everest from a vendor who had set up a stall at the corner. As I lit my cigarette, I was almost run over by a huge silver Prado that screeched to a halt beside me. The driver jumped out leaving his door open, and bought a couple of cigarettes from the vendor.
I was about to say something to him when I was distracted by the music coming from his car. I would know that riff even in the pits of hell. The Eagles. ‘Hotel California’. The music poured from his car and into Ashdown Drive. My rage went away in an instant. I laughed hard. The young man and the street vendor looked at me. They were joined in their curiosity by three men who had been waiting for transport to town. It is not every day a man goes mad at the corner of Eves and Ashdown Drive. Their baffled faces made me laugh harder, and buckled by the strength of my laughter, I doubled over.
Ko ndeipi blaz? the Prado driver asked.
You will not believe me if I tell you, I said.
Try me, he said.
Now here was an opportunity.
I will only tell you if you give me a lift to town, I said. I nodded towards the other three. Give all of us a lift and I will tell you the best story you have heard your whole life.
One mita each, he said.
I summoned the three who clambered into the car. I got into the passenger seat. We handed over a million dollars each to our driver and drove off in the final blasts of the Eagles. As we drove down Harare Drive, I told them about the time, back in the swinging nineties, when Zimbabwe was still Zimbabwe and I had spent a night at the Hotel California.
My hero as a child had been Paul Mkondo; that song from his money programme had been the theme song of my youth. He was everything I wanted to be, and so it was only natural that I associated the insurance business with money, and sought to make my fortune in that line. As an insurance salesman, I was successful because I had hit on the bright idea of sticking mainly to the small towns that most salesmen avoided. Not for me Harare and Bulawayo, or Gweru and Kwekwe, Mutare and even extended villages disguised as towns like Marondera. There were any dozen insurance sellers here. I frequently turned my Datsun Bluebird towards the small mining areas and tiny towns, not quite going to the rural areas, but skirting them, Kamativi and Karoi, Esigodini and Hwange.
I made a surprisingly steady sale; you would be amazed at the number of miners and small-town teachers in those days that had money stashed under pillowcases, and whom I managed to persuade to give a little of it to insurance. I sold protection in a suitcase, with just a signature on the dotted line, I secured futures, one copy for you, and two for the file. There was another bonus, the many lonely housewives I encountered. And there was nothing like driving the long lonely stretches of road with nothing but myself for company and the Bhundu Boys on the stereo.
On one such occasion, at about seven in the evening, I came to Kamativi. I thought I would surprise Mabel, one of my women. I had not seen her since I last came to Kamativi four months before this when her husband had been at his mine job. A bed for the night, and, if I knew Mabel, a half night of pleasure awaited me, and I was filled with anticipation. I scrounged around to see what I could bring her, and managed to find two warm bottles of lager in the boot of the Datsun. My condoms were in my briefcase as usual and I carried everything to the house, together with a couple of newspapers. That would have to do, and, parking my car, I made my way towards the house.