- Dead body
I joined the force at the age of nineteen and rose to the rank of sergeant by twenty-two and now at twenty-five, I’m being pulled from active inspector duty to become a detective inspector. Don’t get me wrong, the bump in pay is great and the benefits are super but for a government job in the police force? A little too super. I had hoped to be transferred to something prestigious like Major Crimes or even Vice. Now, I know the stereotype everyone has about a Vice cop or about Gangs and Guns. Most of the work is slog but when you bust a crime ring or liberate trafficked kids—instant yellow cross and fast track to top brass.
I’m being sent over to Special Crimes. That’s code for: woo woo and cold cases and you’ll probably never see the coveted magenta cross or even a yellow cross or blue cross. Just piles and piles of corpses that died thirty years ago and a backlog worse than the city’s budget. The Assistant Commissioner also told me that half our cases are classified so I shouldn’t discuss them with my romantic partner. If he wasn’t brass, I would have laughed in his face. Let’s face it, the last time I had a lover, Jim Bob was still president, and we hadn’t heard of the plague yet. I simply assented and saluted.
As I drive down the autobahn at two am, I think of my last lover. Kojo. He was Ghanaian with a healthy appetite for food and even healthier recipes. Kojo and I had a good thing going but then I was transferred to the 82nd precinct where murders are a dime a dozen and during our dinnertime sharing hours, I should have noticed the mounting horror on Kojo’s face after I recounted crime scenes. When K. finally left, I missed the delele recipe more than I missed him, which is pretty sad if you think about it.
What I’ll miss most about the 82nd, is my partner, Mumamba. Lighthearted, and fun but good at his job. He could analyse the worst blood splatter then still interview eight-year-old kids like they were his very own nephews. That kind of bedside manner is an asset on the job. Anyone can interview a lucid 40-year-old, but kids and geriatrics, that’s how you separate the long service detectives from the naturals. Unlike Mr. Sapeurs sitting beside me in a bright maroon suit and fedora. Who dresses that way anymore? Mr. Sapeurs, that’s who.
Ten minutes ago, he lit up a genuine tobacco cigarette and started smoking without a simple by the by. I, of course tried to send a hint by coughing a few times but then I realized he didn’t give a shit, and I switched tactics and automatically rolled down his window from my driving console. That’s what I get, isn’t it? My perfect partner catches a stray bullet in a gunfight, and I get an immediate promotion for surviving, the fine print being that I move to Special Crimes and my new partner lives in his own barren headspace. Believe me I tried my hand at small talk with him but that was a quick fail.
When I park my car five houses down from the location (the paps already got the scoop so there’s no closer spot) Mr. Sapeurs just walks out the car, slams the door without a ‘thank you’ and heads toward the scene. Rude much?
The crime scene itself doesn’t look far from the ordinary. There’s yellow tape and uniforms guard it. Simple. I show one constable my brand new Det Insp badge, and he lets me through. My eyes immediately survey the scene—there’s signs of struggle: an overturned chair, the smell of death, blood smeared on a wall and in the centre of a room, a body half covered with cloth. That’s unorthodox. Not sure if a witness covered the vic or one of the uniforms thought he was helping. I can say goodbye to the thought that the crime scene is pristine which means we’ll never catch the killer.
I expect the uniform to brief me, but instead he heads over to my flamboyant partner and speaks in whispered tones. Do I take that as a sign of sexism or ageism? Either way, I keep my distance, observing. Once I made the mistake of asserting myself, guns blazing, and that held me back a year, so now I play the long game.
I’d thought the promotion would come with the usual perks—higher pay, less work, more underlings, more glory but, ladies and gentlemen, promotions are just lies to keep us shackled to the man. It seems I’m a glorified bodyguard to some wunderkind consultant who listens to no one and dresses like a circus owner.
It’s not just the clothes, he’s also gaunt and severe, and when he finally removes his Ray Bans, I look into his eyes and they are whited over like cataracts, except the centers are still black. There’s something living yet dead about his aura. He removes his hat and lays it on a table then removes his gloves and puts those in his coat pockets. I smell grass and–
“Regulations say we can’t be high on the job. Besides, you’ll get ash on the body,” I tell him.
If he heard me at all he doesn’t respond, he simply crouches next to the body and holds the vic’s dead hand. What the fuck?
“Hey, you can’t just do that. Now we have to eliminate your DNA from the suspect list. Do you have any idea how pissed the CSU will be and how much paperwork we’ll have to file?”
Mr. Sapeurs doesn’t respond to me. He just stands to his full height and walks very slowly towards me. His expression is so tense, I believe he might slap me or something, but I stand my ground. He takes my gloved hand in his ungloved ones, and I am instantly transported to other places: my fourth birthday when my father went out to get me a birthday cake and returned home in a body bag, my sixteenth birthday when I sat alone on a sterile table having a fetus pulled out of me because how would I explain to my mother that I’d betrayed all her hard work and visions for my future by falling pregnant? The very last image that floats into my head is my partner’s death, the fact that the bullet came from my chamber and there was nothing stray about it. A big lump of pain sits on my chest, and I can’t breathe.
“How?” I ask, between heavy breaths and the sweat on my brow.
From far off I register a uniform walking in and announcing that the CSU team has arrived. Mr. Sapeurs grunts in assent as I’m currently unable to form a single coherent thought, then turns back to me and says, “Things are done differently in Special Crime.” Ya think?
- The Prophet
The boy’s clothes smelt the way clothes do when they’ve been freshly washed and pressed. The boy himself felt stiff and uncomfortable following his Maman as she walked farther than he had ever gone. All he knew from birth was the slum and now she had washed him, ordered a haircut, allowed him to wear his Sunday shoes and Sunday best. What was happening? Even Maman was wearing her expensive dress and wrapper.
“Keep up, Celestino,” she said at intervals but that was it.
As they continued to walk, the streets got cleaner, and the houses were bigger until they reached a fenced home with a black gate. Maman knocked and some boy Celestino’s age opened the gate. When Celestino and his maman entered first the yard and then the house, it was like he’d stepped into another world: the house was big and made of brick and completely painted over with no graffiti, there was freshly washed laundry hanging on a washing line and a healthy mango tree in the corner of the yard. Even the dog sitting near a kennel seemed peaceful and well-fed, perhaps more well fed than Celestino himself. How on earth would it growl at thieves if it wasn’t hungry? How grand it seemed then, although he realised later that it was just a house, and that it was his slum, and not the suburb, that was the anomaly of colonialist social engineering.
They crossed the threshold into the house and the same kid who opened the gate led them from one room to another until they finally reached a room with large, soft sofas in it.
“Maman, brother, take a seat, the bishop will be with you shortly,” the boy intoned.
There was no television. Celestino remembered that. He’d always watched football from the window of some bar back at home and assumed any rich person, any truly rich person would first buy a TV before buying something silly like a sofa or a dog or God forbid! a washing line.
“Maman Clotilde, is this the boy then?” the bishop said by way of greeting.
Maman fell to her knees and started crying, with gasps here and there about not knowing what else to do. From her bag, she produced her money purse and pushed all her money towards the prophet. She couldn’t have fished it out of her brassiere like she did on most market days, this was after all a man of God. She had to show some decorum. He patted her head soothingly, the way an unconcerned uncle might pet a sobbing toddler.
“Here now, trials are given to test our faith. Do you have faith, Maman Clotilde?” he asked, but his eyes were on Celestino, steadfast and unwavering.
Celestino looked down. It was not seemly to challenge a grown-up with one’s eyes.
“God willing, God willing, I have faith, monsieur.”
“Now, now, take a seat. Yves! Get some water for Mama Clotilde!”
Yves must be nine then, thought Celestino. It was easy to tell how old a boy or girl was by their name. Or at least that is what his maman said when she guessed everyone’s age: those born before Mobutu had French names, those born during Mobutu had Lingala or Swahili names and those born during Kabila had Catholic names. Going by Maman’s history-driven mathematics, Yves, therefore, was ostensibly nine years old. Celestino was still young enough to assume his own maman was completely infallible in her thinking.
By the time the boy named Yves walked in with a tray balanced in his hand, Maman and the prophet were discussing important matters, grown up matters that made them hush their voices and that seemed to upset Maman, although she had stopped crying. Celestino suspected they were talking about his dreams. At some point he caught fragments of the conversation that sounded like the prophet questioning his mother.
“Are you sure the boy has never taken a gris-gris before, never been given a fetish to fight well? Some of these healers get the recipe wrong or invoke the wrong spirit then we have a boy going mad or falling dead in the middle of the street.” The prophet’s derision of healers was clear.
Instead of soothing Maman, this had the opposite effect. Fat tears tracked down her face as she begged, “Please, Bishop he is just a boy, and I am a good Christian woman. I pray for him every morning and every night. I have never been to a healer in my life!”
“And his father? His family? It is easy to inherit a curse from one’s grandfather, up to the fourth generation. Even the Bible tells us this.”
Now this line of questioning must have been uncomfortable for Maman. Celestino had asked her several times where his father was when he was still snot nosed and little, she told him that his father was a travelling soldier putting everyone in Kinshasa in line and in order. When the neighbour women asked, she told them he’d moved to Brazzaville to try his luck at something but never wrote home. Of late when Celestino asked after this soldier father of his, this brave captain general, Maman just kissed her teeth and berated Celestino.
“Papa this, papa that but tell me have you finished washing your clothes and taken money to Papa Guy as I asked? No, you just want to know where Papa is but is Papa the one who cooks foufou for you at night or rubs salt in your palms when you scream at night? Children these days. I swear to God who is in heaven!”
And that would be that. Celestino would rush off to clean the house and Maman would continue pottering around the kitchen. A woman in a kitchen always had much to do. If it was not cooking it was cleaning and if there was no cleaning, she would sit by a candle and sew his old clothes back to respectability.
“Prophet,” Maman’s head dipped in embarrassment, “I was set upon by robbers on my way home from an errand. I know nothing of them… and I do not speak of it.” This last part Maman said with more force and authority than Celestino was accustomed to, “I came to Lubumbashi to spare my family the shame. As the eldest daughter they had different hopes for me, you see.”
Celestino was not sure what this meant. The older boys in the slum sometimes spoke lewdly of women and girls but when Celestino and his agemates were around, they switched the topic to football or teasing. The prophet nodded his head gravely.
“Discernment… yes, this may require prayer and fasting. The Bible speaks of this. Our Lord and Saviour also blessed his servant Joseph with dreams and his servant Daniel with wisdom. If anyone can figure it out, it is Bishop Prophet Mukenge, with God’s help of course.”
Maman crossed herself each time the prophet mentioned the Bible or the Lord and Saviour.
“The boy will have to remain here for a while. He will fast with me and pray with me and before you even miss his mischief, we would have figured out this mess.”
Celestino began to make sense of everything: all the visits and odd neighbours seemed to be about his dreams these days. The dreams and apparitions consumed all of Maman’s energy until she’d became a dry husk of the vibrant person she used to be. The wad of cash Maman had taken from her purse sat on a coffee table between Maman and the prophet, untouched. Celestino did not know why he noticed this at the time, but he did, his memory imbuing it in his synapses forever. Now the prophet turned to Celestino.
“Is it true that you dream, boy? Boy!”
Several minutes of awkward tension ensued before Celestino realised that it was he that the Bishop referred to for he’d trained himself to not listen too intently when adults were talking.
“Yes, sir, I dream.”
The prophet stood and walked up to Celestino. A waft of some strong scent tickled Celestino’s nose. This is what money should smell like, Celestino thought. No one in the slum had quite that fragrance. At his full height, the prophet was impressive in his tailored safari suit and why not? Politicians often came to the slum wearing such suits and donating food when they wanted votes and even his own mother sewed the same type of outfit albeit with cheaper materials. Safari suits were all the rage in the country. Hadn’t Mobutu Sese Seko come to save the children of Congo from having to wear stiff three-piece suits in the heat of the equatorial summer, amongst other things?
Taking Celestino’s head in his hands, the prophet took time to examine him. If Celestino touched a single girl that way she would have howled murder, and her brothers would have beat him until he was a whimpering dog. The prophet pushed back Celestino’s eyelids and examined his eyes. He prodded his fingers into Celestino’s ears, making his heart beat faster, yet he did not know why he was afraid.
“Show me your tongue, boy,” the prophet said. Celestino stuck out his tongue.
“It is worse than I thought,” said the prophet.
- Woo woo
On the ride back to the 81st precinct, I am quieter than Mr. Sapeurs. The last few days have been a hell hole and whatever woo woo mind games he played on me earlier are 100% not cool. He just sits there cool as a cucumber smoking Madisons and not saying a single word to me. Fine.
“Please don’t tell anyone what you saw. At least not yet. I… I need to figure that out.”
“Okay,” he replies.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. I don’t snitch on partners. I’ve pinged you a location. You should drive us there.”
What does this man see me as? A professional chauffeur? Well, if all he needed was a driver, he should have hired one and not had me transferred from the 23rd precinct. I mean what type of fifty-year-old can’t drive?
“One that is epileptic, or at least one that has seizures,” Mr. Sapeurs answers.
Did he just read my thoughts?
“I told you; things work differently at Specials.”
For the rest of the drive, I don’t engage with him, just follow the GPS to whatever location he’s pinged into my handheld. I drive off the autobahn and bob and weave through a maze of avenues until I hit Freedom Square, formerly known as Nkrumah Square, then Mandela Square then Marley Square. The council since figured that since the Pan Afrikan Space Station is host to an entire Afrikan diaspora, there’s no use naming the square after any specific hero, but freedom was an abstract ideal that everyone could get behind. Besides, they also realised that every other day, the entire space station downs tools to celebrate some regional holiday or the other (including Caribbean and Afro-American) and that just killed productivity. Now Freedom Square is full of different national flags and food trucks bearing various cuisines.
“Park there,” he says, and I obey, too sleep-deprived to ask him to mind his tone. He steps out of the car, and I follow, annoyed at the muggy heat. Of all the temperatures, the Architects could have chosen for this square, someone with a nostalgia for New Orleans, of all places, they set our thermostat to hot and humid. My mother told me that the city fathers found it imperative to add different climates to the construct that is the space station, while everyone else says experimental plants in the test biospheres could only survive in different climates and so varied weather is the price we pay for having fauna on the station.
Mr. Saupeurs heads toward one particular food truck. I assume this is a confidential informant. Mumamba had those everywhere—drug pushers, sex workers, street urchins and even housewives. As I said earlier, he had a good bedside manner. I stand in the 4am cold behind a ten deep queue waiting to see the old lady selling foufou and lamb stew from a green food truck.
“Bonjour, Maman Eveline. You look beautiful as ever and green is the best colour on you, best colour!” He hands her a wad of cash without making an order and she falls into a narrative about the inclement weather and her clever son Georges who has passed his primary examinations. She beams with the glow of a proud mother before handing two take out boxes to Mr. Sapeur who thanks her profusely. He carries the food to an empty table and places the uppermost box in front of me before opening his own box to reveal… foufou and lamb!
I sit down and open my own takeaway box to find foufou and chicken then shake the serviettes Maman Eveline handed us and all that’s there is some packets of salt and pepper. What the—.
“I’m not Mumamba,” my new partner says, gauging my disappointment.
“So, what, we’re just here to eat?” I ask.
He chuckles, which sounds more like the rumble of a dying carburetor. “Eat your food, the shift is just starting.”
“I struggle to eat sadza when I’m not at home. There’s nowhere to wash one’s hands and even when there is, I need to wash my hands into a white basin with soap and hot water and see the dirt on my hands wash down the drain otherwise how do I know my hands are clean?”
He hands me a recycled spoon. Ostensibly from Maman Eveline. The PASS is really gung-ho about sustainability. “My name is Celestino Mukenge. I was born in Zaire—”
“You were born in the DRC,” I correct.
“I was born in Zaire, and don’t interrupt me. I’ve worked Special Crimes for a long time and if you want to survive this department, you need to forget everything they taught you at the academy and follow my lead. You’ll need to practice a nonchalant expression. You’ll see and hear things that will shock you. The trick is to convince everyone around you that you’re not shocked. You’ll also need to carry three different firearms—”
“I already have–”
“Two Glock 20s in your shoulder holster and a safety at your ankle. I know that. Don’t interrupt me. You need three distinct types of firearm. The perps we’re hunting won’t be dented by those Glocks.”
“I’ll have you know that saber rounds in a 20 can penetrate the titanium limbs on a mech.”
“If you say so,” he says, looking into my soul. What else could be out there? “I have a feeling you look down on Specials and would rather move to Major Crimes or Vice. If you do decent work here, I can recommend you for a transfer but only after three months. Until then, you’re stuck with me.”
Chided, I nod and get to eating my food. I really was hungry and by the time we finish eating, the coroner and CSU will have a preliminary report. The building caretaker gave a flimsy statement: no one noticed anything until he went to collect rent and the vic didn’t respond to the knock on her door. The door itself was ajar and the caretaker noticed a strange smell, so he let himself in and discovered that smell was death. I’m no coroner but I’d say that vic was deceased twelve hours to a day before her body was discovered. After a while, one gets a sixth sense for these things. Sad that such a thing could happen on a planet that holds ubuntu to be one of its central tenets.
“Let’s move,” Mr. Celestino says, stretching his frame to its full height. I follow him to the alleyway which is now devoid of any human life. This is where I parked my car and only the sound of rats scurrying about breaks the eerie silence. How the fuck did those follow us from earth? Celestino and I walk silently side by side, our footfall beating a staccato into the tarmac until he stops to tie his shoelaces. My mind is already constructing a list of tenants we should interview, fingerprints to look for…of course if our Jane Doe died hours before her body was discovered prints may be a dud but people tend to drop the strangest things at a crime scene and… just like the night Mumamba died, my body hijacks itself and my right arm automatically grabs a Glock from my shoulder holster and my feet pivot round in double quick speed to shoot at my new partner.
One minute I’m shooting off, next minute I’m standing in the middle of an alleyway hyperventilating. Most importantly, the partner I just shot isn’t in a heap on the floor. He has a revolver in his hand and he’s walking straight toward me, cool as a cucumber.
“I shot you! I’m sorry. I was just walking, and I don’t know, I—” what can I say, this will be the second partner I’ve shot in three weeks and now I think it’s time for me to retire and sign myself up for sectioning.
Celestino opens his suit coat and reveals a vest that clearly has an entry point in it, then undoes the button on his vest to show a maroon shirt with a blooming of crimson on it. He opens the shirt buttons and there is no wound at all but hanging from a chain is a small bottle full of bullets. He taps this bottle with his revolver.
“These nine bullets should have killed me many times. The gold one came from your mother’s firearm.” I look at his chest and true to God there are many wounds on it.
“I still shot you,” I say.
“I wasn’t tying my shoelaces. I was giving you a head start. To test a theory. If I shoot you in the back what will happen?” He unfurls my left hand and I’m holding a bullet. There’s a lot of blood there too and a little pain but the bones and sinews are already healing.
“You caught the bullet, and you fought back, just like what happened at the factory. You did not murder Mumamba, but you’ll have to figure out why he was trying to kill you, and your grieving will end when you accept what your subconscious is trying to tell you. Your partner was dirty and if you weren’t prévoyant, it would have been you and not him who died in that factory. You were not sent here as a punishment but for your own protection. Your mother needs evidence to convince the rest of the brass that you are not a liability to the force.”
“You could have killed me!” I retort, “If your test had failed, I would have died.
“The test was for you,” Celestino says, before swaggering off to my squad car.
- The Prophet’s Son
Bishop Prophet Mukenge was not a married man, but Celestino was soon to find out that did not hinder his life in any way for on every day of the week there came a Maman Pauline or Eveline or Claudette who was appreciative of the bishop’s prayers and was anxious to feed the man of God. Celestino soon realised that his daily food transmogrified from simple foufou and maniocs to everyday rice and everyday spaghetti and shrimp, for the ladies of First Baptist Church were not just anxious to see that the man of God was fed but also anxious to prove their gratitude by fashioning their favourite dishes for him.
Celestino soon learned that the sharp boy who’d opened the gate for him and his maman was not a houseboy or the prophet’s son but a distant relative whose parents had died early in his life and after being passed from one relative to another, The Lord had shown the bishop in a dream that such a vagabond existence would only serve to make the boy shiftless; he had to plant his roots somewhere and that somewhere would be the bishop’s own home. On top of that, the bishop realised that while Caleb had Joshua and Paul had Timothy, he himself had no torch bearer and whatever he achieved on this earth would be worth nothing if he had no one to pass his gifts to. Celestino learnt all this during the week as he helped the boy, Yves clean the house.
“The cleaning is not so bad you’ll see. Those same women who like to give Papa food, sometimes come, and do his laundry, but you and I are not men of God so we must do our own. The husbands at First Baptist are anxious to see Papa married so that their wives don’t cook or clean for Papa, but Papa himself told me that a prophet must be equally yoked. That means the prophet’s wife must have the same anointing as our good Papa.”
Celestino was a quiet boy, not dull but observant and hadn’t his mother taught him, “You see this here is a volatile country—one day it is the country of the Belgians, next day it is the country of Patrice Lumumba, next it is the country of Joseph Kasa-Vubu, after that it is the country of Mobutu. Next thing, we’ll hear that Laurent Kabila has taken it for himself. Listen to me, Celestino and listen to me well, sometimes it is good to be a Swahili and sometimes it is good to be a Lingala, but I have only one belief: if you want to live long, your ears must be louder than your mouth.”
So Celstino listened to what Yves said and what the Bishop Prophet said and every morning at 6am kneeled for morning prayers and at midday and at six pm and at midnight and when they were fasting, which was often, Yves pulled a grumbling Celestino from bed at 3am. He observed that these born agains prayed more than Muslims. A few years ago, everyone had been Catholique and now from nowhere the Holy Ghost had spread across the country and everyone was born again. But Celestino didn’t mind the praying and the fasting so much; in the first place his maman was not rich so he’d skipped meals before and in the second place, kneeling and praying beat being tied to a tree and having the ‘evil eye whipped out of him’ as some travelling medicine man had done before Maman had heard of Prophet Bishop Mukenge.
His mother left him at the Prophet’s home for just a few weeks when he was ten years old but by the time he was fifteen, Celestino was still at the home of Bishop Mukenge, fasting and praying for the stubborn spirit that sometimes gave him nightmares and sometimes gave him seizures and more importantly, gave him nightmares that came true. Each morning at eight am after early morning prayers and while the prophet ate the porridge Celestino and Yves took turns preparing, the prophet asked Celestino what he saw in his dreams and wrote it in a notebook.
“I was in a river and Papa Guy was drowning,” Celestino would say.
“Mmmm, mmm,” the prophet would say.
At the First Baptist Church, the different ladies would squeeze his cheeks affectionately and comment on how fat he’d grown and how gaunt he’d been originally. Sometimes he saw his own mother in the crowd and sometimes he did not. In any case, he had to attend to his duties, catching those who fell during altar call, helping when a choir member was absent, straightening the chairs after services.
One day, word reached him that his maman was unwell. This was on Good Friday, the busiest time of the year. He asked the good Prophet Bishop for permission to go see her. The Bishop rubbed his chin, “Of course you can go, I will work alone and Yves will have so much to do but if your mother is more important than the entire flock of the First Baptist Church then, of course, you must hurry.”
Celestino weighed his options. It would be unkind to let Yves, his older brother, do all the work yet a premonition hit him of a needle piercing his maman’s heart. Should he ignore or obey the prophet? In the end, he resolved to stay and help, after all he could go back to the slum after the service but the special service that Saturday dragged on and on. Ladies kept falling and the choir kept singing and singing and as often as Celestino looked at his watch; he knew only that time was not on his side. By and by he began to forget the premonition altogether. He only remembered days later when the whole business was over, then he woke up in a great sweat and hurriedly slapped on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and ran out of the gate and into the Lubumbashi morning. He navigated the maze of homes in the slum, hoping he would reach his mother in time. By the time Celestino knocked on the familiar blue door that looked more threadbare than when he’d last seen it, an unfamiliar face greeted him.
“Ah! You must be Celestino. The landlord said you might come one day,” the man said to him. Let me take you to your mother. A vile emotion rose like a vice and gripped Celestino’s heart. The world seemed like a distant place and Celestino was not surprised when the man dragged him in the direction of the cemetery.
- Investigation 101
Back at HQ, my fellow prévoyant and I descend to the lowest floor of the precinct basement, below CSU and below the morgue even. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I called it the sunken place with a proverbial swinging light that flickers on and off until someone steadies it. One desk is overflowing with case files and old evidence and the other desk is clinically bare.
“Your old partner left in a hurry?” I quip.
“He died on the job.” Nothing more nothing less.
“It looks like CSU has released the vic’s effects to us already.” That’s the fastest time I’ve ever seen in PASS-PD history.
“I told you this department is different from every other department,” he says, motioning me round to his side of the table where the orange dashiki our victim wore is now overflowing from a cardboard box. He takes it and hands it to me. “Take this. Sniff it, taste it. Tell me what you know of this woman.”
I look at him askance. I mean I could sniff it for drugs or a murder weapon but tasting? Come on.
“Close your eyes,” he says further, “drown the sounds of the whispers upstairs.”
The man looks really expectant and strange things have happened lately, so I do as he says, I close my eyes and let my nose descend into her clothes. Instantly, a tightness lodges itself in my chest and I can’t breathe, someone is pulling me from behind yanking my dreadlocks and then my throat. If only I can get to my desk, pull out my knife, but he is taller stronger, larger. I claw at everything around me then it all becomes a blur. I fall to my knees choking and that’s when I hear the voices:
“Help me!”
“Tell Mulalo I loved her.”
“Noooo!”
Celestino shakes me. “What did you see?”
I struggle for a breath then sit cross-legged on the floor. “The perp was a man, big guy. He had a strong scent, like lemongrass. His arms were…real thick. Like he lifted weights or something. There was something in the desk drawer worth protecting. She knew someone would come for it, but it happened too fast.”
“Good job. Now you must listen to me. The work we do here… you close your ears and open your memory, comprehend?”
I nod my head. I bet he’s about to tell me that I drifted out because I listened to the voices upstairs. The dead bodies in the morgue, all of them dead with a cry on their tongue but that cry coming all too late. Celestino takes a different object from the box and breathes heavily before crouching before me.
“The victim’s effects may be hard to read but sometimes the perps are harder to pin down. The easiest are the dumb thugs, they have no dangerous thoughts, but the first time I read a rape kit, I had seizures for weeks. It is important to read the intent on the item but to not be subsumed by it. Comprehend?”
I nod again. This time, he doesn’t hand the talisman to me immediately but assesses my face and waits for me to be at some kind of equilibrium before handing the perp’s pendant to me. On the outside, I try to look cool calm and collected but what does that help if the man can read minds of bodies dead or alive. The thing is, I’m freaking out; that weird shoot out in the back alley of Freedom Square was not the first time I realized I was prévoyant. It was sometime earlier. I may have been four or five. My grandfather had just died and so my aunt and uncle supervised me for the entire day. Mother was distraught and couldn’t see to me.
“Sekuru says he can’t breathe,” I said to my Maiguru Danai just after I finished eating frozen yoghurt sometime between the burial and the drive home, “Sekuru can’t breathe.”
While my Maiguru had been interested in this strange utterance, my Babamukuru had quickly silenced me. He’s traditional and they don’t speak of the dead unless you want to invite bad spirits. Thing is, now that I’m old enough to read family records, I know my Sekuru drowned so my odd words weren’t so far from the mark. Sometimes I’d feel the scorch of heat or the bite of cold on a mild day. The weather on the space station is regulated so there’s no reasonable explanation for that.
When my mother bought secondhand furniture from auctions or vintage clothes from the thrift store, I had unbearable nightmares. By the time I was ten years old my mother had disavowed her Green Oath, gotten rid of all the secondhand shit in our house and all its baggage, and somewhere between weekly visits a kindly old lady who must have been a n’anga or an elderly therapist had come to visit me. The nightmares abated and the voices stopped whispering, but I know something Celestino knows that my mother knows too–the night Mumamba died, something was reborn in me. Now I know why the Zoloft I got from the precinct psychologist didn’t work. It wasn’t grief that caused my nightmares. Whatever psionic frequency my five-year-old self used to commune with the past has been reignited.
I know I don’t have to take the pendant at all. I could literally just unclip my badge from my belt, place my service weapons on the ground and walk on home to my spartan apartment but my mother is a cop and her mother before her was a cop and so on and so forth, generations and generations of women who chose to wear the uniform so they could protect other women and now someone’s daughter, sister, mother has been murdered in her own home. I take offense at that, and it is this offense and this dreadlocked victim who could have been my classmate at school or a fellow recruit at the academy that motivates me to grasp the amulet. I may not have much faith in my own washed-up career, with hushed whispers about killing my partner in a shootout and low odds of having half the career my mom did, but this vic deserves justice.
- Set a thief
His mother’s grave was probably the saddest in the cemetery. All that was there was a mound of fresh turned and packed earth and a wooden cross with the name ‘Clotilde’ carved clumsily into it. The new tenant of his childhood home handed him a shoebox.
“Once her things were sold off to pay for the burial and her doctor’s fee, Papa Jean kept this for you.” Papa Jean was their landlord.
“Merci,” is all the boy said, because reckoning that there had been medical debts at all and that she’d been behind on rent did not sit well with him. Didn’t Prophet Bishop Mukenge give out free food and accoutrements to his parishioners? Celestino lapped all of it up like a well-fed dog and here was his own mother dead alone in a pauper’s cemetery. He knew how such things were handled. Some kind man would offer to pay a group of ne’er do wells to dig a grave and a carpenter would be commissioned to fashion a cheap coffin from someone’s unwanted wardrobe or dinner table. The service itself would be brief, after the body was buried, someone would say a short prayer and a neighbour woman of the kindly variety might place a few flowers on the mound but that was all.
At the end of the day, when the men retired to their lagers and spirits, whispers could be heard about shameful neglectful family members and what great evil the world was coming to. Celestino would have written to his family in Kinshasa about this great travesty but the only word on his mother’s cross was Clotilde, there was no surname. Was he to conclude then that in his entire life nobody had ever pried it from her lips? Celestino looked into the shoebox. There were a few pictures of him and his maman in their Sunday best, from before his nightmares and seizures. After that there had been no money for luxuries, just appointments with pastors and medicine men all across Lubumbashi, but never a cure. There was a necklace or two and a hairbrush and that is all that remained of Clotilde of Lubumbashi who had no family and no surname.
Celestino did not cry then as he stood at her final resting place but something like hate lodged itself into his heart and he knew he could not return to the home of the Bishop Prophet who had delayed him from visiting his mother’s death bed. When he walked from that grave site, it was not in the direction of the First Baptist Church or the prophet’s home but in the direction of the bus station and of Kinshasa and anything that would remove him from the ugly feeling that followed him all the way from his mother’s graveyard until the day he would die.
- Special crimes
What makes a victim special? Or a crime? Or a crime scene? Is it the manner of death, the victims themselves or the perpetrator. A forgotten talisman is the only part of the perpetrator that I have to go on. Was it really forgotten in haste or confidence or is this the calling card of a new serial killer. If I touch this necklace, will I go batshit crazy or see clarity and nail the bastard? There’s only one way to find out.
Reaching out to take the pendant from Celestino should feel like some monumental task but its oddly underwhelming. The string itself feels like nothing and I quirk the side of my lip up to quip about something but that’s when I touch the round metal disc with strange glyphs embedded on it.
- Celestino
He ran to Kinshasa, not because of his maternal links there but because it was the capital city and as any country goes the advice is to always go to the capital if you want to see real money. The bus ride may have been ill-advised, with so much fighting in the country who was to say they wouldn’t be waylaid by robbers or worse? But Celestino had suffered a great loss and people who suffer great loss seem to lose their sense of self-preservation for unknown intervals of time.
By the time he landed in Kinshasa, everything was bright and bold and too loud. Not that the city was different from Lubumbashi, but he’d become accustomed to Prophet Bishop Mukenge’s home which was in a well-to-do suburb and therefore quiet. The kinds of visions that often frightened him were often drowned out by Yves’ incessant chattering or prayers, which Celestino did not always believe in but now found comfort in in some grounding, ritualistic way, so that the other street urchins that resided with him in a back alley began to mock him.
“Muslim!” they called him, because he prayed five times a day and when some intrepid gambler discovered that he was a good hand at every card game known to man, he dragged Celestino into gambling halls and casinos and bet at long odds.
“Look here, boy. Take this money and play a game. Yield the first few hands and then win at the end, when you get the money, pay me three quarters and you can keep the rest.”
This was a heavenly proposition to someone who was homeless but by and by that became old and besides, none of the hosts would let him play anymore—the house was supposed to win but he made them lose each damn time. And so on to telling fortunes and crossing over to Congo Brazzaville and when that situation got hairy, he moved to Kenya and on to Tanzania where the owner of some cruise ship experience hired him as a resident novelty act. First there was Joe telling jokes to warm the crowd up and then there was Cele, the magician telling people their fortunes and sometimes their pasts and this was quite the sensation until the internet hit and tarot readers on Tik Tok became a dime a dozen, he sold online readings for $300 a session and life was good and meaningless until the day he came across a dead body on the white sands of Zanzibar. Morbid curiosity led him to look into its eyes. He had seen in a movie once that if you diffract the pupils of a corpse, you can find an image of its last sight. Celestino thought that was all hogwash, but he looked, nonetheless.
- Prévoyance
“To answer your question, there are different things that make a crime scene special, but what do you remember about this one?”
I’m simply flummoxed. What do I remember? It was raining when we arrived on scene, the uniforms had secured the area and the victim’s body was covered from the waist down.
“You can get all that from photographs and witness statements. What did you notice? Forget the police training.”
“There were signs of struggle but… no forced entry.”
“Oui.”
A thought is forming in my head as I process something, like a memory that wants to be glanced at but is too shy to come to the fore, “The victim and the perpetrator… they had similar energy. She didn’t want to die but… she opened the door herself. He… he didn’t want to hurt her, but he did so anyway.”
I feel my forehead creasing. That doesn’t even make sense. I keep clutching the talisman, hoping something else will be revealed. This is the only artefact the perp left at the crime scene, unless I touch the victim’s dreadlocks, but then I‘d read too much.
Mr. Sapeurs sighs heavily and heavily sits in what must be the most uncomfortable chair in the world. He removes his shades and those cataracts swirl like a storm brewing.
“Before all this modern technology, people used to do studies whenever there was a pandemic. Take bloods sputums, all that. There was an outbreak of Ebola once, when I was still in Lubumbashi. Some of those scientists took blood samples. They were supposed to be making a cure or something, a vaccine. Some… superstitious people believed they wanted to steal our blood to commit witchcraft and I thought that was silly… but that was East Congo and some of these scientists conducted research with no ethics.
“There were rumours about guerillas in the jungle who could take bullets and not die, street urchins who could tell fortunes… Someone must have caught wind and used Ebola as an excuse to round us up. He was drawing my blood when I saw the world turn to dust.”
“What did they do to you?” I ask, transfixed.
“Nothing, at the time, but later in Tanzania, some men tried to hunt me down, but I always felt them approach first. I changed my identity several times and when the Pan Afrikan Space Station was finally built, I thought I could escape them on earth by coming here but they’d already done something worse.”
“What could be worse than hunting people down for their biology?”
“When gene sequencing and splicing finally became viable, they used our DNA to reverse engineer prevoyants in test tubes. They got the formula wrong and created something that could be more dangerous.”
“They don’t see, do they? Whoever killed that woman, they plant ideas!”
“We call it compelling.”
I don’t ask about the bullet wounds on his chest or the intricacies of reverse engineering someone’s biology—nowadays rich folk splice the weirdest genes into their DNA. It started out as cancer research and trials to cure genetic illnesses but now we have transgenic folk putting wombat DNA into themselves so they can be more curmudgeonly. There are more important questions.
“When last did you have a partner, Celestino?”
“Three years ago.”
“So, you’ve brought me on because a) this isn’t the first compelled victim you’ve found and you’re under resourced or b) you’re losing your woo woo.” I refuse to call it magic.
“C. all of the above, but it’s not quite that I’ve lost my sight, I can’t see myself and they made compellers out of my blood. And yes… this is officially the first murder victim of this kind but, other researchers have been found dead in their apartments, apparent suicides but when I read them, there was no pain relief in their last breath.”
There is a question that still tickles the back of my mind. If Celestino’s genetics are so valuable to some shadow syndicate, then why are there eight bullets in a vial around his neck? Who would be trying to kill him.
“Ah, not my hunters, la petit! There are those who hired me to investigate on their cheating partners and let’s just say the spouses did not enjoy being followed.”
There is almost a chuckle accompanying that, but what’s stranger is that his lips have not moved. Huh. I must be doing it too.
- Awake
It was urchins that found him behind a dumpster in downtown Uhuru. If he had been cognisant, he would have found it ironic but even then, he was bewildered, wondering if he was dead, if this was the heaven Prophet Bishop often spoke of. It did not smell heavenly as he did not suppose God had much use for scurrying rats and vermin—several rodents had investigated his personage already and he was too tired, too hungry, too paralysed to push them away.
“Bogey man, what do you think he is?”
“Ayi, I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out either….”
“Hey, what are you boys doing there?”
“Nothing, officer, we just found him. We didn’t even search his pockets or nothing. He looked dead then he opened his eyes.”
Celestino raised his head a fraction and saw what looked to be a cop, but he couldn’t recognise her uniform. Not Zairean, not Tanzanian, not Rwandan, and even the air was strange, heavier…
“Sir, I’ll need you to open your eyes for me? Good. Good. Blink twice if you hear me. Sir, how many fingers am I holding up? Four? Good. Sir, who is the President of the PASS?”
“Laurent Kabila.”
At that her eyebrows knotted into something tough and complex, and she spoke not into her radio but into her wrist, “Control, this is Eleven-Delta-November. I have a concussed man on Sankara Street possible 315. Request immediate ambulance and CSU.”
“No hospital. No hospital,” he tried to croak but figured she didn’t hear him.
She lay a hand on his forehead and then on his chest. “Control, be advised. This may be a partial cryo-mergence case. Come prepared.”
She looked young, but by then everyone was young in his eyes. Eyes that had seen his own mother’s grave and Laurent Kabila march on Kinshasa and the mad scuffle after his death. Eyes that had seen what was East Congo turn into an irreparable warzone. And now it cost just as much for a shuttle to space as it did to travel to Brussels or America. Now he remembered. He’d been a stowaway on one of those rockets and perhaps if he wasn’t touched by the gods, the journey may have killed him but now he was frozen over at the back of an alley in some planet he didn’t recognise. Another suitcase, another world.
- Evidence
“It was your great grandmother who found me in a back alley that night, cold and alone. She worked with me here in Special Cases for a long time after that, then your grandmother, then your mother…”
“Decided she didn’t believe in superstition and walked away from a calling she didn’t choose.”
“She wanted to break the glass ceiling, to run a precinct. Instead, she runs a city. She thought you’d follow in her footsteps, then your partner died, and you started dreaming again…”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
“You should have died in that warehouse, the fact that you didn’t puts a target on your back. If we find the compeller, we may make you safe, then you’re free to go back to top brass track.”
By now, the erstwhile empty table is full of photographs from different crime scenes and a dusty but empty box sits on the chair, all the files now strewn on one surface or another. If I’m in danger, then what if my mom’s in danger, too? I need to catch these killers.
“What kind of resources do these people have?”
“They operate in the shadows, so I can’t give you a figure just that they can pay to make their own mutantes in the lab.”
“No pressure.”
We go through the rigmarole of reading through case files until the lines blur across my eyes.
“Maybe we should hit the streets, talk to witnesses, this isn’t adding any value to our investigation.”
“In Specials we read objects, that’s all.”
“But these are exceptional circumstances. Someone is hunting me down, probably you as well! They’re targeting scientists. Who knows what horrors they could be manufacturing in a test tube somewhere? Maybe we could read surfaces just as well, find her lab. Maybe pieces of what’s in that notebook exists across the other work files.
By the time we return to Anna Maria’s house, the cleaning crew have been here and apart from a hellish stain on her bedroom floor and the faint smell of copper in the air, one wouldn’t guess a woman was dead and alone for a day before she was found. Could that mean her body was harder to read? I duck under the “DO NOT ENTER TAPE” and sit on her bed, my palms flat on her comforter then move to her desk where I realise she must have done most of her thinking. Yes, she was investigating Mutation A419 and came across a file of Celestino. I open the drawer she so badly tried to protect on the day she died and glyphs and numerals spin around my head. How big is this?
I move to her cupboard and inhale the scent of her clothes, remembering the day she bought her graduation dress and how she wanted to discover something that mattered. I get a whiff of a dress thrown to the back of her cupboard, worn for one terrible date, and never looked at again. I pick up her pencils, curious about what I’ll find there and involuntarily, I begin to write a list of names and equations, allowing the knowledge to flow through me. What could this possibly be?
When I come to, Celestino is reading the list while noisily munching on an apple. How long have I been out for?
“It’s quarter past three,” he says out loud.
Wow! “Say, did you practice reading minds, or are you just more gifted than I am?”
“I wouldn’t call it a gift,” is his only answer. Bugger! Can the man not just learn to answer a question straight?
They say homicide is the worst beat because people tend to die outside the circadian rhythm, and I totally agree because it is only the stiffness in my shoulder and the gravel in my eyes that reminds me, I’ve been up for more than 32 hours. I stand to stretch and then I feel it—the hair on the nape of my neck rises and I feel the odd sensation of déjà vu, like I am falling off a ledge and my heart hammers faster than usual. By the time the door bursts open and a gunman with a Kalashnikov sprays lead across the room, Celestino has already positioned himself in front of me, his body absorbing every bullet that may have killed me a second ago.
As if my body has its own mind, I unholster my own Sig Sauer and fire one shot towards the gunman’s head before I even process the thought. His semi fires several last bullets as his shocked eyes register death. I hear five shell casings land on the floor and kick the semi-automatic away from him. In the distance I hear sirens. That racket ought to have diverted all uniformed units in this direction. Out of habit I check the man’s pulse, and he is gone as I suspected. What I did not expect was the vacancy in his expression. He was compelled.
What I also do not expect is the torrent of flashbacks that assail me the minute my fingers make contact with his neck—I see the shadowy eyes of a glassy eyed man his intent keen on the asset he lost. Some clerical type who, to this day has not yet died. A prophet or bishop something. I cannot make it out at once but the whirring fan in the background and the sound of classical Papa Wemba tell me our quarry has been hiding in plain sight all along.
I let out a screech of shock, thrashing and screaming when a hand lands on my shoulder.
“Who is the compeller?” Mr. Sapeurs asks. How the hell is he not dead?
“It’s a man not known to me. He’s not their leader but he’s pretty higher up. Some bishop or prophet who considers you his ‘asset.’ He was sitting in a broad room with a fan and music in the background. He is not far from Eveline’s food truck. If we go now, we might catch him.”
“No. I’ll radio your mother. If I go, he’ll see me a mile away.”
“What is it that you have that is so valuable to him?” I ask once he’s pinged the cavalry the killer’s location and I’ve put pressure on all his gaping wounds.
“I can truly see, and he cannot. That is always tough for a man who considers himself gifted.”
“Hmmm.”
- Ice
On the slab of cold ice, Celestino’s prone body turns blue before my eyes, the blood turning to solid, and a rudimentary tag fastened to his big right toe.
“He is not dead,” Mother says, reassuringly.
I turn to her.
“He signed your release forms and we’ve taken care of the unauthorised elective mutants…mostly. You have your pick of departments now—Vice, Special Victims, Major Crimes, Homicide. The brass has agreed to seal your file from Mumamba’s death. You can put that behind you and in no time, you’ll be a commissioner.
I look into my mother’s eyes, care worn but earnest. She’s carved a fine career for herself on the force but maybe I should pick my own path.
“If he’s not dead, why’s he frozen.”
“In the first place, if he’s near dead none of the compellers can find him. That’s how he escaped Earth. Secondly, he’s told me he has unfinished business on the Mother Planet, as he calls it but a desperate fear of flying. He’d like to travel in the cargo hold.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, indeed. Would you like a minute with him?”
“Yes. Yes, I would. I’ve also picked my path. Thank you for sealing Mumamba’s death record. I’d like his children to grow up believing the best of him, but I won’t be going to Vice or Major Crimes. My place is here, with the magic.”
I do not know what my mother’s full reaction to this is for I am not facing her when I say it but cradling the head of someone who took twenty bullets for me. By the time I hear Mother’s boots tread heavily toward the door, I have already laid my palm on Celestino’s head and allowed my consciousness to travel back into his time. What I see is an Earth that is broken, yet still has greenery. What I see is green valleys and forests and the staccato sound of furloughed soldiers and guerillas burning off steam by firing bullets into a ndombolo fueled night. It is not a perfect image, but it is familiar. It is Lubumbashi and it is beautiful.
