A Murder of Crows (12 page)

When he asked her for more specifics she ignored him.

* * *

Twice more in the next week they stopped in front of what Decker now knew were called Hindi figures. Each time Inshakha approached first and Decker found himself oddly reverential. The feeling of damp and cold was again present each time he put the money into the makeshift purse or basket.

Eventually they arrived at Wolwedans, where the sun comes up so fast on the east slope of the Losberg that there is no need for a morning wake-up call. It pierces the dawn gloom and brings the high sage and mountain contours to glorious light.

The weaverbirds sing as the dance of the high desert begins.

The cloudless April sky presents its ocean of blue to the land while in the mountains the leopards cover their eyes with their paws as the oryx and zebra and springbok are grateful to have made it through another dangerous night.

You see no old or sick oryx or zebra or springbok—the leopards see to that—nor are there any bits of kill left to fester, as the bat-eared foxes and omnipresent spotted hyenas go about their work with quiet efficiency.

The high red-tinted desert feels orderly. Things are in their place—as somehow they were meant to be.

Hot water is brought to the tent and Decker makes tea—he likes tea here in Africa, although he hates it back in the Junction. He dunks the rock-hard rusks that are so treasured in this part of the world into the hot liquid and savours their earthy flavour.

The walk to the base camp is about an hour. There is an Internet connection there, but he's unsure that he really wants to contact the outside world. He knows he doesn't want them to contact him.

For a brief moment he wonders if he could live here. A hard four-hour drive to Windhoek to get the flight to Jo'burg and then from there to anywhere his truth-telling business took him. And he could
use the Internet connection to supply the research for his CBC documentary,
At the Junction.
He wondered—and the moment stretched out.

Is he prepared to live as a foreigner in a country that clearly does not belong to him?

Or him to it?

But the Junction? Does that belong to him? Is that home?

Or is home just a sentimental idea? One that he should have long ago outgrown?

He thinks of Seth as a young boy. Those are his only real memories of him. Waking up each day with a smile on his face and announcing, “Pretty day, Daddy. Pretty day.” It was only later that Seth learned that “pretty day, Daddy” didn't mean “good morning.” Too bad. “Pretty day, Daddy” was a far better way of greeting the day—and it was Seth's alone.

Seth had been a willful but sensitive little boy who cried at films, but that sensitivity hardened into granite-like anger after his mother's death from ALS, when he saw the look of relief on Decker's face—and knew exactly what that was.

That was when the hatred had begun—and it had grown exponentially since.

Fourteen months ago, when Decker learned of his son's bladder cancer in his confrontation with the pharma CEO Henry-Clay Yolles, he immediately recognized it as the price of the gift the boy had inherited from him. Seth had the gift in its purest form. Unlike Decker, who could never tell if someone he cared about was telling the truth or not, Seth had no such restrictions. His gift was without boundaries; hence Decker assumed that's why the price was so high.

Decker remembered Seth removing his hand from his at the funeral. “You're glad Mommy's gone,” he'd accused.

“No, Seth, I'm not.”

Seth hadn't needed to put his head up into the pure jet stream. The boy lived in the jet stream. He didn't need to close his eyes to read his retinal screen and had simply said, “That's not true.” And had begun his withdrawal.

Since then he had gone to Eddie when he needed advice or counsel. He came to Decker when he needed money.

And now he was twenty-one and living somewhere in western Canada and refusing to communicate in any fashion with his father.

It was when Decker went to log off that he saw it—news of the terrorist attack at Ancaster College—and knew his life was about to change. Again.

THE BIG MAN MOVED SLOWLY IN THE MORNING HEAT. HE WAS A
fat white man in a thin black man's world.

No one remembered his coming—or a time when he wasn't there. That was just as well. Even rumours of his real age would have caused distress in the local population and no doubt parades of visiting Western scientists. But now people came to his kingdom, which consisted of a petrol station, a gift shop and of course his bakery for his apple pies. That was fame enough for the fat white man who called himself Moose.

He looked around himself but did not see what others saw. Where they saw a petrol station he saw a vestry. Where they saw a gift shop he saw a transept. Where they saw his bakery he saw an altar. And of course where they saw a stack of hubcaps he saw the boy dangling from the end of a rope.

It was the hung boy that had drawn the fat white man to this place 196 years ago.

Moose used the garage's compressed air hose to blow the dust from his hands and feet and entered his bakery. Instantly he was surrounded by the intense sweetness of apples and preserves, and he smiled. His church was ready for another day preparing for the arrival of the man from the Junction.

Moose thought for a moment of Inshakha and her admonition that the man from the Junction was being prepared.

He'd been sensing the change caused by the man from the Junction's approach for almost five months.

Awakening to the ostrich staring in the window of his tiny bedroom behind the bakery was the first of the signs.

The man from the Junction's approach confused the animals; so that packs of wild dogs could be seen at high noon and elephants drank from the foul end of the watering hole. Moose assumed that the man's approach was changing things as his world and this world tried to align.

Moose used the ancient can opener to cut around the rim of the large tin of preserved apple slices. The two-holed metal key bit into his pudgy fingers but he didn't care.

He was preparing himself to teach the one who approached.

He tilted the large tin can forward and allowed the sweet juice into a waiting jar. This was Africa, where nothing goes to waste, where human beings first stood and marvelled at the light, where one of the earth's divine portals is defended by a fat white man named Moose who made and sold deep-dish apple pies in a place called Solitaire, Namibia.

DECKER WAS WATCHING THE ANTS OF ETOSHA NATIONAL PARK
do their level best to unmake what man had so arduously made.

They teemed from cracks in the interlocked bricks on the patio of the immaculate grass-roofed cottage Inshakha had rented for them. Only twenty yards away a watering hole drew thousands of animals every day—and allowed the roar of lions almost every night to echo and re-echo through the desert air.

On some secret signal the ants all changed direction and headed abruptly for Decker's bare foot. As they did he heard a vehicle grind to a stop, then the slamming of doors.

Two minutes later Special Agent Yslan Hicks was standing not five feet from him, her translucent blue eyes still beautiful, but now clearly tired from travel.

A few steps behind her stood her partners in crime: Mr. T and Ted Knight.

“Mr. Roberts,” she began.

Decker held up his hand to stop her.

“No. Damn it, this is important.”

Decker pointed toward her feet.

“We're calling in our marker, Mr. Roberts.”

She stepped forward, onto a red ant hill.

Decker arched his eyebrows and once again pointed toward her feet.

“What? You don't think you owe us?”

“No,” Decker finally spoke, “it's not that.”

“Then what?”

“Your foot is on a red ant hill. I do believe they've already crawled up your boot and now have—”

She began to hop on one foot and swat at her pant leg.

“—gotten to your leg.”

Twenty minutes later Special Agent Yslan Hicks returned. She wore a different pair of pants and was more careful where she put her feet; Africa makes you watch where you step.

Mr. T and Ted Knight had not moved from their posts.

She looked over Decker's shoulder into the cottage and said, “Who's the whore?”

Decker called, “Inshakha, come meet Special Agent Hicks.”

Yslan was going to say something more but held her tongue as Inshakha stepped into the door frame. Her blue-black skin shone in the morning light and her long delicate features looked like a Modigliani painting—or rather Modigliani had done his best to paint the features that came naturally to the Herero tribe's pride and joy, Inshakha. And right now her black irised eyes bore holes into Yslan.

“I am no whore and I would suggest you watch your tongue. Words are important in Namibia—a curse once spoken cannot be rescinded.”

“I meant no—”

“That is not true, Special Agent Hicks. You intended slander and harm, but you have accomplished neither.”

“Right. I apologise.”

“Do not apologise to me, Special Agent Hicks. It was my man you insulted. Not me.”

Under her breath Yslan hissed, “You want an apology, Roberts? Then get your ass in gear before I apologise you all the way to a jail cell in America.”

“This is Namibia,” Decker said.

“And that should mean what to me?” Yslan demanded.

“Namibia is not America.”

“More than two hundred people died in a terrorist event at a college graduation. Such niceties as borders don't mean all that much to me when all those people have been murdered.”

Decker took a deep breath and said, “And you want my help.” It was not a question.

“No,” Yslan said. “Like I said, I'm calling in my marker. You owe me, Mr. Roberts. You are going to assist me in this investigation or you are going to jail. It's really that simple.”

“Does Namibia have an extradition treaty with the United States of America?”

Yslan smiled as she said, “Who fucking cares?”

* * *

Decker rolled the last of his shirts and put it into the side of his small duffel bag beside his copy of
Love and Pain and the Dwarf in the Garden.

Inshakha had been in the bathroom for a long time.

“You okay?” he asked.

No response.

He asked again and slid the door open. Inshakha was sitting on the side of the tub, naked except for a cloth around her waist, her beautiful skin almost completely covered in red clay.

She looked up at him.

Their eyes locked as she reached into the tub, took a handful of the red clay and pressed it slowly into the skin of her face. As she did, the sophisticated, intellectual Inshakha disappeared behind a mask. Then she said the oddest thing. “Do you like apple pie?” And before he could answer she added, “Well, you will learn to—you will learn to.”

For the briefest moment she smiled at him—or he thought she did. Then she was on her feet, an untouchable African woman striding out of his cabin—out of his life.

* * *

The drive in the Land Rover from Etosha to Windhoek took four hours, and neither Yslan nor Decker spoke a word that whole time. Nor did a word come from Mr. T or Ted Knight squished together in the backseat.

Decker stared out the window and wondered if he'd ever see Africa again. Africa, where ancient aquamarine-coloured sinkholes
dot the land and salt forms take advantage of the baking sun, where the simple topography is only periodically broken by mushroom explosions of rocks and humpback hills slanting west to east, brown whales on the desert ocean.

* * *

They boarded the small plane shortly after they arrived at the airport, and as the plane took off Decker leaned his forehead against the window and took in the world beneath him.

Africa from the air.

The Namibian desert, like a vast stretched cow's hide, is broken only by folds of upshot rocks and creases of riverbeds that hold only the promise of water.

The sheer size of something with so little hope of vegetation or water plagues the mind and presents a stark challenge to those who think they are brave and capable—and willing to challenge God, who had clearly signalled to one and all that this place, this land, was not for human habitation.

Across the vastness of sand and jutting rock a single two-lane road—the Trans-Kalahari Highway—dares car and driver to ante up, to bet your life on a crossing.

But there is a purity here, and not that Lawrence of Arabia crap. There's nothing much clean about clots of dust in your hair or up your nose or filling the tiny air pockets of your lungs. But there is a feeling of it all being sanitary, probably because sweat evaporates before it can dampen your clothes or accumulate in your pits or crotch, and your chest always feels dry, and there is no odour—none.

The Comair stewardesses were dressed British Air proper—and were just as haughty—but they were young and firm and black with names like Khabo, not young and firm and white with names like Patricia.

Around Decker the guttural snark of Afrikaans and the harsh crunch of German filled the air.

And outside the plane's skin, the sun beat down unhindered by cloud or hint of rain: 26, 29, 33, 39, 42 degrees Celsius. What clearer sign does the Almighty need to give that this is no place for humans?

Yet men survive here—hearty, ingenious men—and have done so since well before recorded time. They have left their marks on flat stones: giraffes for rain, lions for courage, zebra for food.

Prayers on rocks.

As the plane approached Jo'burg, lush green valleys spread out like spiders' legs from the city and belie the real wealth of the great blue funnels that rocket diamonds to the surface and Johannesburg to the map.