Strebel noted the small silver cross around her neck and suspected that she wore it like garlic against the vampires of his gender. But like garlic, Christ’s power was constrained by human greed. He thought of Pilgrim, a kind of whore, who had given up her freedom and spirit for a wealthy man. And Alice, considering the cost of her manicure and her hair extensions and, very probably, a dress she had seen. She could have these and all she had to do was take her clothes off for this old white man.
Ingrid had never made such compromises. A physiotherapist with a happy childhood and a good family, she’d come to Strebel free and clear, voluptuous, soft, hungry. They both made almost the same salary and they split the bills evenly. They had never fought about money; they had fought very little. Perhaps, early on, she’d resented the hours he worked, the interrupted dinners, the 3 a.m. phone calls.
Perhaps, once or twice, she’d even threatened to leave him. Did he remember? One Christmas when Caroline was little? She’d said he treated the house like a hotel and her like a maid. Something about his clothes on the floor, the unmade bed. From his point of view, what did it matter if the bed wasn’t made? The bared sheets wouldn’t melt in the sun or get dirty from the air. Leave it unmade, he’d said. Or maybe shouted. He took care of the cars — changed the oil, took the snow tires on and off. He kept up his side of things. Putting up bookshelves. Fixing the toilet.
‘I want a translator,’ he said to Alice, summoning up his most paternal manner. Even then she didn’t quite believe him, but she nodded slowly. ‘How much?’
‘It’s important to translate exactly what I say, exactly what is said to me. Okay?’
She nodded again.
‘Someone may be hurt or in danger.’
‘Yes,’ she said, touching her crucifix.
‘I’ll pay you one hundred dollars.’
She looked down at her hands and again he felt her doubt. It was too much money. ‘You are a Christian?’
For a moment he was confused — then he understood: his namesake apostle. And what she was hoping for: reassurance. He considered an answer that was the least lie — the least awkward words to pronounce. ‘I believe in many of Jesus’s teachings.’
Mr Tabu had put a couple of foam pillows in the back of the taxi, an attempt to hide or compensate for the state of the seat. Strebel and Alice dutifully sat on these as Mr Tabu drove them out to the Raskazone peninsula. The road followed the headland for several lazy miles past mansions gently dissolving in the salt air. The ragged road, the overgrown gardens, the cows and goats grazing on the verges: Strebel almost laughed to think how many violations of Swiss law he might tally in a single minute’s drive. He wondered how it made him different from Alice and Mr Tabu, to live somewhere so neat and precise, so tidy and ordered.
For a moment, as they rounded the tip of the peninsula, a foul smell clogged the air, and he saw, to his left, a pipe extending into the sea spewing a brown smear of what could only be raw sewage. Less than half a mile away, back around in the bay, they had passed the public beach.
Now the road surrendered completely to sandy dirt, a narrow track. High security walls alternated with patches of scrub. A few hundred yards later, Mr Tabu stopped. ‘This the house.’
Alice turned to Strebel, testing her importance, ‘He says this is house.’
‘Yes, thank you.’ Strebel smiled appreciatively and got out. The wrought-iron gate was shut but not locked. ‘Hello?’ he called. He felt the emptiness, but said again, louder, ‘Hello? Is anyone here?’ No one answered. So he unlatched the gate and went in. The house in the yard was small and round with a roof of thatched palms. Several large trees with fat red blossoms shaded the front, and beyond them the shelf of land dropped to the dense green fleece of mangroves. Strebel imagined Pilgrim standing here as he did, and how the same sense of peace must have come to her. The wild twittering of yellow birds and the trees and the sea and green mangroves, the white house — the still, hot afternoon which held him softly in a cobweb of time, so that he felt if he went inside he would find a bed, and lie down and sleep until he wasn’t tired anymore. He would lie down and she would come and lie next to him and they would sleep in the heat, just their hands touching, their fingers intertwined.
The house, however, was locked; he should have asked Gloria for a key. He walked around, peering in — though there was nothing to see: a few pieces of old furniture, a basic kitchen, a pretty tiled bathroom, a bed secluded by a large mosquito net. He went back to the car and asked Alice if she could find a neighbor to talk to.
Together they walked down the lane to the big, new house and Alice knocked softly on the gate. A uniformed guard appeared and Alice spoke to him. She relayed to Strebel that the guard had only just started the job and anyway he couldn’t give them names as it was against company policy.
Strebel was about to head back to the car when Alice touched his arm, ‘What about him?’ She pointed to a boy in an oversized white shirt tending two fat brown cows in the scrub.
Alice admired the cows, touching them in a familiar way. Strebel surmised she had been around cows her whole life: a village girl who’d had to learn to wear shoes. She spoke to the boy like a sister, and he admired her instinct for gentleness. Strebel noticed the white shirt. What was the shirt for, he wondered. Dirty, torn in the back. Was it one step above the poverty of having no shirt at all?
Yes, the boy told Alice, he remembered the mzungu lady. She came only with a small suitcase, nothing valuable. She didn’t even have a car. She had a bicycle that looked like the kind you could rent at the market. Sometimes she even walked. He and Alice laughed.
‘Why is that funny?’ Strebel asked.
‘Because white people never walk. We think you can’t, that you are too weak. In my village, we even believed you didn’t have legs.’
Briefly, he recalled a toy Caroline had had — a little plastic bus with plastic people who bobbed up and down when you rolled the bus along the floor. The people were just white heads on round pegs. They looked straight ahead, up-down-up-down.
‘Did she have any visitors?’ he asked, and Alice translated for the boy. He squinted in thought before speaking. ‘The boy says Mama Gloria came sometimes. And there was a taxi with a white man inside. A few days ago only.’
Strebel took out the picture of Koppler. ‘Was this him?’
The boy looked at the picture and Alice translated. ‘He isn’t sure,’ she said, and added with no embarrassment: ‘You all look the same.’
Holding back a laugh, Strebel asked the boy to think again — was the man fat? Thin? Did he have a lot of hair? Or no hair? Did he have glasses? Was he old or maybe young — younger? Maybe, Strebel tripped over the thought Gloria had implanted in his head, maybe a hot young buck to go to Zanzibar with.
The boy studied Koppler. It was hard to tell, he explained, because he didn’t really see the man. The man never got out of the car. On the other hand, he would easily recognize the taxi driver; he was from the boy’s tribe, Usimba.
Alice felt she must note that Usimba were not local people. They were from the middle of the country, near Tabora. And they were a very old tribe. She had read in school how they made paintings on the rocks that scientists said were many thousands of years old, maybe thirty thousand. Strebel nodded as if this interested him.