The boy agreed to speak with Mr Tabu and describe the other driver of the Usimba tribe. Mr Tabu nodded definitively, ‘Yes, yes, I know him.’
Strebel reached for his wallet to pay the boy, but Alice discreetly stayed him. ‘Do not turn him into a beggar. To speak is free, one person to another.’
Mr Tabu drove them to the bus station. A solitary bus trembled and shuddered under a canopy of mango trees.
As soon as Mr Tabu stopped the taxi, a swarm of ticket touts surrounded the car, offering Strebel passage — Morogoro, Dar, Pangani, Arusha, Mombasa. They leered at Alice, for they knew what she was: a pretty young black girl with a middle-aged white man. Malaya, Strebel heard, and he guessed at the meaning from the tone: whore.
He felt her fold herself in, as if she could stack her skeleton more tightly. She crossed her thin, dark wrists over her lap and gazed straight ahead, attempting the look of a duchess, impervious to their lewd chattering. Mr Tabu waved his arms and shouted at them and they sloped back to the shadowed interiors of the ticket offices. He then went off in search of the driver, Mr Peter.
But Mr Peter had taken a holiday; he had gone to see his family near Tabora. Despite this unfortunate news, Mr Tabu looked pleased with himself as he spoke to Alice. She translated: Mr Peter had been able to take this holiday because he had come into some money — a mzungu client who had paid him very well.
‘When?’
Mr Tabu consulted the group. ‘A few days ago.’
‘The thirtieth?’
More discussion. ‘Maybe beginning Wednesday.’
The twenty-ninth.
Strebel had left Zurich for Dar on the twenty-eighth. Today was the second of June. Koppler could still be around.
And the client? Strebel pushed to know — could Mr Tabu show them the photograph of Koppler? Mr Tabu went off with it and after a few minutes returned, tilting his head from side to side. ‘They are not sure,’ he said, through Alice. ‘They saw him only once. They say yes, maybe. They say maybe, maybe.’
‘But they don’t say “No”?’
Mr Tabu concurred, ‘They don’t say “No.”’
‘Do they know anything else?’ Strebel pressed. ‘Where Mr Peter took this man or, when he left, did he take a bus? Or a plane? To where?’
But there was nothing more. Only envy that Mr Peter had been so lucky.
Strebel sat back and felt the sweat along his spine. He knew he’d reached a dead end — unless he traveled to this Usimba place and found Mr Peter’s village. But he would not do that. This was far enough. He suddenly felt sour. He could smell himself, and he was ashamed that Alice could smell him, that she would see the smear of his sweat on the seat, the slow drip of it off his face.
At the opposite end of the bus station, a mother scolded her young child. Strebel could have no idea why she was angry, but he remembered the ways Ingrid had scolded Caroline: when she refused to hold her mother’s hand crossing the road, when she wanted ice cream for supper, when she would inexplicably, inconsolably, lie on the floor and sob. Strebel had been sure that her distress was existentiaclass="underline" an inexpressible need that therefore could not be fulfilled. It’s this rage and sorrow we carry in us forever, he’d thought — I need, I need, I need — the need a craving without object, an insatiable hunger that has nothing to do with food. Or love. Or sex. These were merely surrogates. He’d imagined the giant, gaping bill of a baby bird, whom nothing would satisfy, except perhaps to swallow the universe whole.
This thought led him to Ingrid. What if she found him like this, sweating in a taxi in a town on the edge of Africa, concocting an investigation with a young Swahili girl. Concocting, yes, because it wasn’t his business to be here. His work — his duty— stopped with a trial or an inquest; what people made of their lives after that was up to them. And sometimes, yes, he found the separation a little shocking, for he was so embedded, so intimately familiar with the emotional lives of the participants, and then it was over. He felt oddly abandoned, as if a best friend or lover had stopped returning calls. It was too abrupt, the end.
Too abrupt, always, the ‘Take care of yourself.’ Regardless of the softness of their skin or the curve of their dark eyebrows.
As for Pilgrim, he had failed to be objective. Professionally, he was beyond the pale. He had slept with a woman nearly half his age, a witness, vulnerable, traumatized.
If Ingrid found him, somehow, found him here, she would merely pity him. She would see the desperate machinations of a middle-aged man in need of antidepressants and a sports car. She would chide him as she had Caroline: You can’t have ice cream for supper; it’s not the way the world works. He would lie sobbing on the floor and Ingrid would firmly say: You can’t have the pretty girl, you can’t touch her and love her and have breakfast with her. It’s not the way the world works.
‘The hotel,’ Strebel said to Mr Tabu and he was sure he felt Alice flinch. But even to smile reassuringly would be to show his yellowing wolf teeth. So he sighed and let his head fall all the way back against the seat.
At first he didn’t understand the sound — that it was knocking. For it began in his dream: a suspect he’d interviewed many years ago, tapping a soda can on the table, a taunting Morse code, for he refused to speak, only to tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, and to smile. Refused to say what had happened to the child, where they might find the body, only tap-tap-tap, and that smile. Strebel opened his eyes and listened to the knocking, let it bring him into the still, hot, dark room in Tanga.
‘Just a minute,’ he said, and grappled with the sheet, pulling it around him. How could it be dark and so insanely hot? His first two nights he’d waited for the cool to seep in, a current of air to drift ashore. Like the cool fingers of a mother on the chest of her fevered child. But, no, the stubborn heat remained. Even on the balcony, he’d felt no relief. He’d seen a beggar down below, curled up in the open arcade of the market. The man had covered himself with a thick blanket and wore a wool hat.
Now he realized the knocking was urgent, a male voice saying, ‘Mistah Strebel! Mistah Strebel!’
‘Who is it?’ he asked, already opening the door.
Mr Tabu stood there, his excited face coated with moonlight. ‘Your friend! They have found him! The police! Come! I take you!’
Strebel’s heart seized. Then he paid attention to the words. Him. They have found him.
They drove through the dark, quiet town. None of the streetlights worked. Kerosene lamps illuminated the interiors of bars, cafés and street-side shops. Strebel was charmed — for the darkness hid the shabbiness, made it fairytale and glimmering, and the sounds were soft: a radio, people laughing, a bicycle bell.
Even the police station was without electricity. Mr Tabu took a flashlight out of his glove compartment. It was a cheap Chinese model with the power of a child’s night light, but sufficient to light their way up the cement steps. Excited voices came from the dark ahead of them. Within moments, they collided in the dark. There was a brief scuffle, a conversation in Swahili, then at last the flashlight took hold of an image. The officer wore a sharply pressed tan uniform.
‘I am Chief Constable Elias Kulunju.’ He held out his hand to Strebel. ‘I am sorry to inform you about the death of one of your countrymen. This man—’ he gestured offhandedly at Mr Tabu, ‘He says you know the deceased.’