“Good evening, boss!”
Stephen hadn’t replied, which was unusual. He loved chatting to complete strangers to exercise his powers of attraction. Those who knew him admired his simplicity. In actual fact, Stephen was a child, perhaps because he hadn’t had a childhood. That evening, his mind was elsewhere. He was probably thinking of his book on Yeats. He was not happy with the table of contents or his first chapter. Perhaps too he was thinking of something else. What? She would never know.
But perhaps the night watchman had not been surprised at all. Boss was used to wandering about in the middle of the night like a blood-sucking soukouyan. Sometimes he would go and drink a late-night beer at Ernie’s. The barman knew him well, for he was out of place among the young crowd. Yes, he was always alone. No, he never spoke to anyone. He would drink his Coors, pay, and leave.
In the Van der Haaks’ garden the scent of a frangipani hung heavy in the air, its fragrance accentuated by the night. Stephen had turned left onto the avenue. The storefronts were plunged in darkness, shutters lowered, neon lights extinguished. He had walked toward the lighted entrance of the Pick ’n Pay, open twenty-four hours. Seated on the sidewalk, wearing those same woolen bonnets pulled down to their eyebrows, a group of hoodlums on the lookout for mischief had watched him. A beggar, rolled up in his ragged blanket, had woken up to hold out his hand. The Pick ’n Pay was practically deserted. A few night owls were buying bottles of Coca-Cola and bags of peanuts. At this time of night, for security reasons, only one cash register was open. The blond girl in her striped overall uniform was chatting with one of the security guards, who was standing tall beside her for protection. When Rosélie approached, they turned and stared at her with an unfriendly look. She clearly discerned that fear which blacks, whatever they do, instill in whites: “Watch out for the Kaffir! What does she want?”
Yes, what did she want from them? To question them?
“Excuse me. Were you here on the night of February seventeenth? What exactly did you see?”
“Me, I know nothing about it. I was nowhere near here. At the time I was working at a Pick ’n Pay in Newlands. Nothing like here, believe me. A district of rich white folks. Private militia everywhere. Order. Discipline. No drug addicts quarreling over their magic powder. No squabbling drunkards. No homeless sleeping on the sidewalk.”
Realizing she was looking ridiculous, Rosélie beat a retreat.
What had happened that night?
Two scenarios were possible.
One of the hoodlums had approached him while the others artfully encircled him. Stephen was not the sort to hand over his wallet without a fight, even if it didn’t contain very much. He had put up a struggle. So they shot him. They were about to rob him when the security guards came running, brandishing their guns. It was then they had scampered off.
Or else, Lewis Sithole’s version, which was slowly worming its way into her mind. Someone was waiting for him, leaning against the wall, close to the entrance of the supermarket. Someone he knew. Who had the power to drag him out on a bitterly cold night, far from his thoughts on Yeats, at seventeen minutes past midnight. They had first talked quietly together, then they had quarreled. The other person had pulled out his revolver.
She didn’t know whom to turn to. Questions galloped around in her head like wooden horses on a carousel.
She walked back up Kloof Street, a black lake floating with pockets of light.
In detective stories, amateurs often play at being sleuths and pride themselves on solving the mystery. How do they go about it? They draw up a list of suspects, interrogate those who knew the victim, compare statements and photos. Through the ramblings of his mother, Rosélie had gathered that Stephen had been a typical, obedient little boy and teenager. She knew full well that beneath his quiet facade he hated Verberie and was deeply affected by the separation of his mother and father, by the impression that neither of them loved him. Some parents fight for the possession of a child. Not those two. They reached an agreement about him, the same way they did about the house on St. Nicholas Road, the furniture, and the old Vauxhall.
Reading University has kept no memory of him. No professor was struck by the promise of his future talent. A few photos of a performance of The Seagull show him as Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev, nothing remarkable, effeminate like young Englishmen often are. Likewise the university at Aixen-Provence has few memories of him. Some students recall he liked hiking and was a great nature lover. He would gather plants for his herb garden.
There was no premonition of the brilliant researcher, hotly fought over on university campuses, envied as a colleague, worshiped as a professor. Rosélie realized she would have to inquire elsewhere. Her sources would only give her the official picture, the obituaries and hagiographic articles of the Cape Tribune. She would have to explore the shadowy zones. She would have to discover what had excited him in London apart from the theater, once he realized the stage would never be within his reach. She was so used to admiring him that she had difficulty imagining him with Andrew, auditioning unsuccessfully among dozens of other boys and girls.
“Thank you very much. We’ll write to you. Next!” the examiners would scowl.
She had no idea whom he had flirted with or whom he had desired. He seemed to emerge from the famous London fog in a sudden halo of light. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what his life in N’Dossou had been like before she moved in with her two metal trunks, her canvases, and her lenbe. She knew that at one time he had taken in Fumio, who had left behind pictures of his mother and two sisters and the boxes of makeup he used to parody the Kabuki actors in his famous one-man show. Since then, like all rebels, Fumio had settled down and no longer did full frontals. Thanks to his father’s connections, he had been appointed director of the Japanese Institute in Rabat. Stephen and he kept up a correspondence, never missing a birthday or Christmas card. Rosélie had never bothered her mind about it. Now she had to imagine what interested Stephen when he was not with her. Amateur theatricals.
Chris Nkosi.
The name seemed to loom up all of a sudden. Yet she realized that ever since her first visit to the Steve Biko High School, during the rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the boy had caught her attention. His name had remained lurking in the folds of her memory, ready to emerge into broad daylight at the slightest call.
The tenth grade had been rehearsing at the Civic Center for Community Action. It was a kind of hangar where Arté had organized a book fair selling hundreds of copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, as well as a hip-hop festival. The teenagers were laboriously stumbling over Shakespeare’s lines. Except for Chris Nkosi, alias Puck, who sailed over his text, scaling new heights:
Through the forest have I gone,
But Athenian found I none,
On whose eyes I might approve
This flower’s force in stirring love.
He was handsome and arrogant, probably from receiving constant compliments. He wore his dreadlocks like a wig. She bitterly regretted not having asked Olu for his address. The very next morning she would go back to the school to get some answers out of him.