‘When was this?’
‘Coupla weeks ago, thereabouts.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘At the club — the Yacht Club. Sounds very grand. But it’s not. Just a nice, clean local place. Yachtees like it. Nice place to swim, cold drinks.’
‘When?’ he repeated.
She exhaled loudly and rolled her eyes. ‘Two, three days ago. She was drinking with Harry Fonseca.’
Interesting, Strebel thought, that she’d given him a name. Harry Fonseca. He was careful not to let her know he’d picked up the hint. ‘How do you know she’s gone? Not just traveling and coming back.’
‘How do I know she’s not traveling and coming back? How do I know if she is? I don’t know anything about her. I didn’t say I know this or that.’ She paused, looked Strebel over again, and went on, ‘Maybe she met some young guy, some hot young buck and she’s gone to Zanzibar with him.’
Strebel refused the bait.
‘You went to the cottage. Why?’
‘Pay the askari. Watchman. End of the month, salary due. I noticed she wasn’t there.’
‘Were you concerned?’
‘Why should I have been? There wasn’t a hex drawn on the wall in blood or anything. Just an empty house.’
Somewhere dogs barked and Gloria stood up. She moved to the window facing the road and looked out expectantly. ‘I think that’s them,’ she said.
‘Them?’
‘My reasons for living.’
‘Just one more question. Please, Gloria.’
She turned back to him, her eyes scanning his shit-colored aura. ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she? The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I’m not surprised you’ve come all this way for her.’
‘No…’ he started to say, to deny. But why bother? There was the sound of a heavy vehicle approaching, a diesel with a missing muffler. He ploughed on: ‘Did you meet anyone called Ernst Koppler?’
But her attention was riveted elsewhere. He saw what she did: a decrepit bus full of children.
‘I don’t know why Pilgrim Jones came.’ She kept her gaze out the window. ‘I don’t know why she left. Or where or how or who. In Tanga people come, they go. It’s why the club doesn’t run tabs. People go and sometimes they go without paying their bills. Pilgrim came, she went. Maybe she’s coming back. I really hope she’s okay. But that’s it, as far as it goes for me. And I’ve never heard of the other fellow — Kaplin?’
‘Koppler.’
‘Koppler, right. No idea about him. We’re done now.’
She was starting out the door. He watched her rushing, suddenly a nimble, glowing woman.
‘Good luck,’ Strebel said. But she wasn’t listening, she was running to the bus, her arms outstretched. He watched for a moment from the doorway, the tentative figures stepping out of the bus. They were all so small, so thin. She crouched down and touched their faces one by one, just a brush of her finger. She was speaking to them in Swahili, the reassuring clucking of a hen, so she didn’t notice Strebel bypass her, get back into the taxi and drive away.
Her performance had been almost perfect, he thought, but for ‘Kaplin.’ She hadn’t misheard. She’d turned away from him as she lied.
Mr Tabu collected Strebel promptly at ten the next morning, and they drove to the Yacht Club. ‘Do you know Harry?’ he asked Mr Tabu on the way.
‘Mr Harry, yes, yes. He like the club very much.’ Mr Tabu laughed like a naughty child and then held his thumb to his mouth to suggest the tipping of a bottle.
The club’s entrance was strewn with fallen bougainvillea blossoms, as if a wedding had just passed. Strebel trotted down the long flight of steps, confronting the sweep of the jade-colored bay. He’d almost forgotten about the sea. He had a Swiss ambivalence about it: the sea was an element of which he had no immediate or genetic experience, it frightened him; and yet he fancied the ocean’s fluidity, how it took things somewhere else. Sailors or driftwood or an old plastic jug, lifted and taken to a cove a mile away or across a sea.
The bar was well kept, a bright, open design that welcomed rather than intimidated. It was empty but for a pair of old men and the Tanzanian bartender. Strebel debated how to approach: to slowly lubricate the conversation with alcohol, for clearly the men were drinkers; or to be simple and direct.
It probably wouldn’t make a difference. Tanga was just another small town — a village if you were white, and in villages people didn’t talk to an outsider. In those deep, dead-end mountain valleys of the Jungfrau where he’d started his career, the doors slammed in his face, mouths sealed shut. Eyes focused on a distant col. The dead child, the brutalized wife, the missing husband: no one would tell him a thing.
Strebel sat next to the men, introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Strebel from the Swiss Police, and put the two Swiss ID headshots on the bar. ‘Do you know them?’
One of the old men said, ‘What’s this about?’
‘They’re missing.’
‘Missing?’ said the other.
‘Pretty. She your wife?’ Then looking at Koppler’s picture, added, ‘They run off together? He seems an unlikely choice.’
‘You can never tell with a woman. Joanie went off with you.’
They had a laugh. Strebel offered to buy them a drink, but it was complicated: he had to become a day member and buy a book of chits. Now he understood what Gloria had said about ‘tabs.’
‘Just give us the cash,’ said the one who’d had it off with Joanie. When Strebel handed over ten bucks, he checked the date, slipped the bill in his pocket, shouted, ‘Mohemedi! Naomba Tusker tatu!’
Three beers came. Pink tickets bearing various denominations like Monopoly money were handed over.
‘The girl was here. She took up with Harry. Though not — sadly for Harry — in the way Harry would like to have been, er, taken up,’ Joanie’s swain said. A long, throaty chuckle.
Strebel felt a surprise flinch of jealousy. How, exactly, had she taken up with Harry?
‘And Harry, where could I find him?’ Strebel sipped the beer. He saw the two men glance at each other and shrug in unison.
‘Harry? Hard to say. He’s usually here.’
‘If he’s not here, he could be anywhere.’
‘He’s like that. Breezy fellow.’
‘The woman, Pilgrim,’ Strebel said. ‘I think she might be in some kind of trouble.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘That’s why I’d like to find Harry.’ He wanted to make it clear, Harry wasn’t competition. ‘“Anywhere.” Do you think that’s far?’
One scratched his beard, the other his hair; both looked doubtful. ‘Breezy fellow,’ they said. ‘Hard to say.’
‘When did you last see him?’
The old men exchanged glances as if to give Strebel the impression they were consulting each other, but in fact they were silently corroborating.
‘Come to think of it, I only just realized he isn’t here right now.’
‘Wasn’t he here for Quiz Night?’
‘Come to think of it, I don’t even know what day it is today!’
‘Sorry we can’t be of more help!’
Strebel drank the beer and asked about the weather. They told him the rains would be coming soon, the southern monsoons.
‘I’ll pay you,’ he told Alice. ‘I need someone to translate for me.’
She looked unconvinced, carefully examining her neat manicure. Strebel knew she was trying to decide what he wanted — sex? Or a Swahili translator? She suspected the former. All these old white men wanted sex. They were no different from the old black men, the young black men, the German backpackers, the shuffling but surprisingly horny and solvent beggars in the market, the Goan sailors from the harbor. Strebel supposed the constant challenge to her morality exhausted her. She must hear the whores talk in the hotel bar, and know that once they had been the same as her. Girls from villages with few options. Prostitution was a way to make money — more than you did in a hotel reception or shop.