Zoo City - Lauren Beukes

The Daily Truth

POLICE FILE

Homefried Homeless.

I'm telling you straight. Some human scum burned a homeless ou to death on Tuesday. Patrick Serfontein lived under a Troyeville bridge in a cardboard box until he was beaten up and necklaced with a tyre over his head by one or more tsotsis who are still unidentified and walking around free and easy because no one saw anything.

The poor homeless ou's face was so badly burnt up that the cops had to identify him by what they hope is his ID book, which they found among some personal goeters in an old shopping trolley near the body. The SAPS refused to speculate on the motive behind the violent killing. Is this the first sign of another serial killer like Moses Sithole on the loose?

Other uglinesses that happened yesterday: The body of a missing nine year-old in Ventersdorp has been discovered, drowned in a farm dam. At least his parents can make peace because his body has been found. The number of people who just sommer go missing in this city never to be seen again is just sad, mense.

The rest is ripped off. I raise an eyebrow. "That's some quality reporting."

Dave shrugs. "I just take the photographs."

"Nothing about his having an animal."

"Not every person living on the edge of society has to

have an animal. What's this all about?"

"Patrick Serfontein is a hunch. Let's just say his death coincides with an email. Is there a Before photograph?"

"Just his ID. I got a photocopy of it for you from Mandla. She says if we find anything good, it goes under her byline. You can have an "additional reporting by"."

"I don't know if 'good' is the word I'd use," I say grimly.

"Where are we going?"

"To photograph a body that coincides with another email."

The ruby acrylic fingernail I recovered from Kotze Street lies on the dashboard. The thread that leads away from it is black and withered, but still traceable, if a vision dream of yellow sand dunes gives you a hint about where to start.

"You got a killer sending you emails? Do you know him personally? Some kind of gloating thing? They do that, right? Serial killers?"

"I don't know who the killer is. I think it's his victims sending me messages."

"But they're dead?"

"Exactly."

"Okay, whatever." Dave slumps back into his seat, fiddling with his camera.

I drive out south to where the last of the mine dumps are – sulphur-coloured artificial hills, laid waste by the ravages of weather and reprocessing, shored up with scrubby grass and eucalyptus trees. Ugly valleys have been gouged out and trucked away by the ton to sift out the last scraps of gold the mining companies missed the first time round. Maybe it's appropriate that eGoli, place of gold, should be self-cannibalising.

I pull off onto a dirt road lined with straggly trees and drive for exactly 3.8 kays. I measured the distance on my way back. As we get out of the car, a vicious little wind kicks up gritty yellow dust and stirs the trees to a disquieting susurrus. I haul the heavy blanket off the back seat and throw it over the barbed-wire fence. This time, I've come prepared, after shredding my jeans on my earlier foray. It was only after I got home that I noticed the gash in my pants, the dried blood on my leg.

"This is trespassing," Dave says as I lift Sloth over the fence.

"Don't worry. I was here earlier. It doesn't count as trespassing the second time round." I hold the ruby fingernail gently cupped in my hand. The thread is thicker now. We're close.

We scramble up the slope of the dump, the fine sand swallowing our feet to the ankle with every step. Away from the shelter of the trees, the wind is even more capricious. Eddies of dust whip and spiral around us, sandblasting exposed skin. I pull my hoodie up over Sloth, but it offers only scant protection. He ducks his head behind my neck and squeezes his eyes shut.

"Shit," Dave says. "I don't have the right lens protection for this."

"Here." I was hoping it wouldn't feel as bad the second time round. But the same mix of nausea and dread rises in the back of my throat. Dave raises his camera automatically and then lowers it again without taking a shot. "How did you find this?"

"It sort of found me."

The Sparrow boy/girl is sprawled akimbo on the sand, looking blankly up at the sky. There is dust embedded in every hollow and fold of her body, in the scooped palm of her hand, banked up against her lower eyelids like unshed tears, encrusted in the bloody gashes over her arms and legs and stomach and head. Her nails are broken, as if she'd tried to defend herself. Acrylic. Ruby-red with sequins. They must have matched her shoes.

Dave opens his mouth and closes it again. There's nothing to say. He takes cover behind the lens. The wounds are approximately three inches long, gaping like red mouths. It's hard work to hack someone to death. Ask the Hutu. Whoever did this had a lot of enthusiasm for the job.

"Notice anything missing?" I say as he stops to switch to a new memory card.

"I- No. I don't know. Is there something missing? Wait. There's not much blood. Which might mean she was killed somewhere else."

"And her animal isn't here."

"How do you know she had an animal?"

"She worked my street. It was a Sparrow."

"A Sparrow? That's tiny. You could miss that easily."

"Trust me. It's not here." I know this because I have searched this dune sideways and backwards for the corpse of a small brown bird with matchstick legs clenched up under its breast. But also because I can feel it. "It's lost."

When the cops finally rock up, only an hour and a half after I call them, they are pissy. It's the dust and the wind and the dead boy/girl staring up into the sky as if she's cloud-watching. It's the paperwork. The evidence. It's the fact that I'm involved at all.

They send me up to the interrogation room for another two-hour session with the good Inspector Tshabalala. This time she cuts straight to the chase.

"How did you know where to find the body?"

"It's in my file. My shavi-"

"Your shavi is finding lost things."

"And I found her body."

"How?" she presses.

"I followed a connection."

"How did you know the victim?"

"I didn't. I'd seen her on the street. She is, was, lekgosha. A sex-worker. But I don't think it was a client who did this."

"You don't think? Were you involved with the killing?"

"No."

"Where were you on the morning of Tuesday 22nd March?"

"Isn't that a different interrogation?"

"You tell me. Where were you?"

"As I said before, at the time Mrs Luditsky was stabbed

to death, I was at home in my flat. Apartment 611, Elysium Heights, Zoo City, Hillbrow. Postal code 2038. With my boyfriend Benoît Bocanga, who I believe has made a statement corroborating such."

"Benoît Bocanga. We've been reviewing his papers."

"Which are in order."

"But his refugee status application is due for renewal."

"If you want to blackmail someone, blackmail me. I'm sure you can dig up something."

"Indeed." She changes tack. "Ms December. You – and your magical shavi – have been peripherally involved in two murders in the last week. How would you explain that?"

"Phenomenally bad luck, Inspector."

"Do you own any knives?"

"I have a kitchen. It's small and dirty, but it does come equipped with assorted cutlery."

"Can we search your domicile?"

"You'll need a warrant."

"That can be arranged."

"So can a lawyer, Inspector."

30.

It takes committed former addicts to drag their sorry asses out of bed at ten in the morning. Or, judging by the faces, perhaps people who don't know how to sleep anymore. Pass the Midazolam.

I help distribute polystyrene cups of truly disgusting instant chicory-coffee mix to the patrons of today's early bird meeting at New Hope, using the opportunity to show round the photocopy of the burned man's ID at the same time.

The problem is that all anyone wants to talk about is Slinger, and how he's not the real makhoya after all. They're passing round a copy of The Daily Truth.

"Fo sho, darkie's Hyena was a fake," a very tall, very nervy guy says with telltale ringworm patches in his hair. He is carrying a funky old baseball cap upside-down with a Hedgehog curled up in it.

"This whole time?" says a lanky redhead with drawnon eyebrows. "And no one noticed? Don't you people have a way of telling if an animal is real or not?"

"'You people?' 'Real or not'?"

"Ag man, you know what I mean."

"It's not like being gay. We don't have some magic zoodar to detect other zoos."

"I think it's sad. That man was doing a lot for zoo relations."

"That man was doing a lot for his own publicity. Playing Mr Big Tough Gangster Zoo Guy to stir up controversy."

"Can I see that?" I ask, indicating the newspaper. The guy with the Hedgehog thrusts it at me and launches back into lecture mode. "Man like that knows how to work the media and rile up parents. You check his album sales. Same with Britney Spears. And Eminem and that freaky vampire guy with the weird eyes? They're just going for a reaction."

There are two photographs side-by-side dominating the front page under the headline CIRCUS ACT. The first is of Slinger holding an Uzi, posing tough with the diamondcollared hyena and a veritable posse of pussy in gold micro-bikinis with assault rifles of their own. It's contrasted with a harried man in a dark green tracksuit with a jacket over his head, fleeing the paparazzi towards an SUV with the door open to reveal a woman twisted round to hide her face.

I flip through, past the page-three boobs and the story about the people who have been so hard hit by the recession that they're hunting house cats until I find the report on the Sparrow's murder. Dave promised it would be front page, but Slinger's dirty has pushed it to a narrow block on page six, just another police file item.

The Daily Truth

POLICE FILE

Hate Crime Hack Job

The body of an oulike young boynooi was found yesterday afternoon on one of the Crown Mine dumps in the deep dark south of the city. After a hot tip-off, our photographer was first to discover the hacked-up body. The victim, said to be a ladyboy of the night, had apparently had magical and surgical alterations done before the madman killer did a little altering of his own, cutting he/ she/it to bloody ribbons with a panga. Was it a hate crime – a dissatisfied customer complaint taken to the extreme? The Gauteng police say no comment.

I have some comments of my own, but they don't involve homophobic intersex hate crimes. I don't think that's the story behind this at all, but so far I haven't received any mysterious emails from the beyond to explain otherwise.

I stick around for the meeting, but no one recognises Patrick Serfontein from the photocopy of his ID, including the facilitators. I wasn't really expecting them to. After all, Kitsch Kitchen's leftovers aren't quite the same thing as "eating things from planes", although it did give me the idea. Along with the muti vision of a burning trolley laden with plastic forks.

I spend the morning on the phone to the airlines under the cover of doing a story for Better Business Magazine on "giving back". It turns out only two national air carriers donate leftover meals to the needy. As FlyRite's Corporate Social Responsibility person said, "We live in a litigious society. I can understand that other airlines might be afraid of the possibility of a food-poisoning claim. But we stand by the quality of our food. Even when it's a day old." She adds brightly, "If it's good enough for our passengers, it's good enough for those in need!"

Two phone calls later and I have a list of all the welfare facilities catered to by FlyRite and Blue Crane Air. Based on Patrick's age, I eliminate the Bright Beginnings halfway house for juvenile offenders and the Vuka! underprivileged schools feeding programme, which leaves me with the St James Church soup kitchen in Alexandra township and the Carol Walters Shelter situated just off Louis Botha, a stone's throw – give or take an Olympian athlete doing the throwing – from Troyeville. Call it a guess, but I go there first.

The shelter is a graciously decrepit Victorian house with cornices and broekie lace and blue paint peeling off the walls like sunburn. The interior is deserted and resolutely clean, but all the Handy Andy and Windolene in the world can't scrub away the air of desperation that hangs over the building like mustard gas. A man with a mop directs me towards the administrator's office.

Renier Snyman is somewhere in his early thirties, young enough to still believe in making a difference, old enough that he's beginning to feel the weight of trying. He's friendly, but wary when I introduce myself as a journalist on a murder story.

"I can't promise I can help you. We don't keep records

of the people who come through here."

"Can you take a look at a photograph?" I unfold my photocopy and put it on the desk in front of him.

"Hmm. I have to say he doesn't look familiar. But that could be because this ID was issued in 1994. No one looks like their ID photo anyway, right, especially if they've been living rough for a few years. We could ask some of the long-termers. They're out at the moment. We cut them loose between ten and five, but a lot of them hang out nearby. Let's take a walk."

We head down to Joubert Park where the dealers are already out in force, as well as a few office workers taking an early lunch-break in the sun. Renier heads straight for the public toilets where a group of obviously homeless people are huddled passing round a silver foil papsak of cheap wine. They glare at us suspiciously, and a gnarled woman grabs at the arm of the old man standing next to her and draws against him for protection.

"Wass'matter, Captain?" the old man calls out as we approach. The lines in his face are set so deep you could go crevassing in there. "Something got stolen? That dief back again?"

"Nothing like that, Hannes. This young lady would like to talk to you and Annamarie about a man who may have stayed with us."

I show them the photocopy and they hand it round with the same seriousness as the papsak.

"Nee, man. I don't knows this okie," Hannes shakes his head.