…JOHANNESBURG…
Niemand parked near the Chinese wholesaler’s barred premises in a filthy side street near the market square. Two street boys appeared, danced around him, offered all manner of services. He gave them several notes to guard the car, opened his jacket to show them the gun and threatened them with certain death. To get to the door, he had to step around papers, car bits, cartons, bottles, food containers, pieces of styrofoam, a new pile of human excrement with a filter cigarette stubbed out in it.
The guard, a huge man, knew him.
‘Where’s the Chinaman?’ said Niemand in Zulu. He called the Chinaman uChina.
‘Deliveries,’ said the Zulu. He was behind a steel gate. A shotgun was leaning against the wall, an old Remington, grip polished with hand sweat.
The Chinaman supplied Soweto hawkers, met them on the fringe to hand over goods, payment in cash, not one cent of credit. Niemand and Zeke had ridden shotgun for him for a few months before the escort service job came up. They had been held up four times: Chinaman 4, hijackers 0.
The guard opened the gate. Niemand crossed the storeroom, walked down the aisles of packaged goods that reached to the ceiling. Substandard, damaged, dangerous, mislabelled, overcooked, undercooked, production mistakes, very old, the Chinaman’s stock came mostly from Eastern Europe and Asia.
At the doorway of the back room, Niemand pushed aside the curtain. The Chinaman’s new wife was sitting in an armchair covered in tigerskin plush velvet, one of four arranged in a row in front of the television set. She heard the sound of the curtain rings, looked over her shoulder, barked his name and went back to watching an advertisement for miracle kitchen knives. A man with a bad hair transplant was sawing slices off a broom handle. Then he went to work on a piece of cheese, processed cheese, sliced off squares of yellow rubber.
‘Try that with your favourite knife and see how far you get,’ said the salesman.
The camera showed the audience clapping. Many of the people did not look like kitchen-knife buyers. They looked like people recruited from the street to applaud men with irregular hair. The camera showed the set of knives on offer. Eight knives. One of them looked like the weapon in the hand of the man who’d dropped from the ceiling.
‘Cutting, chopping, slicing, dicing, they’ll never be the same again,’ said the salesman.
‘Jackie,’ said Niemand. ‘I’ve got a video I need to watch.’
The Chinaman had told Niemand that he imported Jackie through an agency in Macau and that his resentful son, sent to take delivery of her at the airport, was screwing his father’s new companion within days.
‘She says she was a model,’ the Chinaman had said. ‘I think she model without her clothes on, know what I mean?’
Jackie used the remote to kill the knife man, went to an empty channel, just electronic fizz. ‘Put it in,’ she said.
Niemand went to the set. There was a video in the slot, something called The Wedding Singer. He plugged in Mr Shawn’s cassette.
Jackie got up, her nylon dressing gown slid like water, showing a length of thin thigh. She handed over the remote and went to the back door. ‘Come and have drink when you finish,’ she said, staccato.
‘No one to talk to here. Boring.’
Niemand sat on the edge of a chair and found the Play button. Static. It became an aerial view of wooded sub-tropical country, late in the day, shadows. Taken from a helicopter, Niemand thought, probably from the co-pilot’s seat, the colour the result of filming through darkened glass.
Then the photographer was descending and Niemand wasn’t sure what he was looking at, a fire, fires, an African village burning, thatched huts on fire, perhaps two or three dozen, cultivated ground around them… The camera went left and another helicopter could be seen, a Puma, no markings visible. Now they were on the ground and the filming was being done through the open door of the helicopter, a dark edge visible.
There were bodies everywhere, dozens and dozens of bodies. Black people.
The camera zoomed in on a group, at least a dozen people near what looked like a water trough made of steel drums sliced vertically and welded together. Black people, poorly dressed, most of them women and children, a baby, lying on the ground, hands held to their faces, some face down as if trying to kiss the packed dirt.
Men in uniform came into view, white men in combat gear carrying automatic weapons. Niemand recognised the firearms, American weapons. The soldiers were Americans. Niemand knew that because of their boots, American Special Forces boots, he’d once owned a pair.
The soldiers were standing around, five or six of them, they weren’t alert, weapons cradled. The camera moved, three people in coveralls, probably civilians, talking to a tall soldier, the only one without headgear. The camera zoomed in on the group, the soldier was talking to one of the civilians, a man with a moustache. The soldier took off his dark glasses, wiped his eyes with the knuckle of his index finger. The man with the moustache said something to the person next to him, a man, short hair, a mole on his cheek. He shook his head, gestured, palms inward. The group broke up, the soldier was turning towards the camera, the screen went dark.
When the picture came back, the tall soldier was standing at the bodies lying around the water trough.
He moved a man’s head with his boot.
The man was alive, he lifted his arm, his fingers moved.
The soldier shot him in the head, gestured to the other soldiers in the background.
Niemand watched the rest of the film, another two minutes, rewound it and watched it again. He retrieved the cassette and left without seeing Jackie, drove to his place and packed his one bag.
Two hours later, he was in a British Airways business class seat. Johannesburg fell away beneath him, the flat, featureless townships smoking as if bombed, smoking like the village on the film.
Could be Mozambique, he thought. Could be Angola, could be further north.