The Marks of Cain

31

It took three days for them to arrange flights to Namibia. At last they headed out of the hotel for their furtive evening flight to Frankfurt. From Germany they made the nightflight eight thousand miles south.

Across the equator, across all the darkness of Africa – to Namibia.

They remained quiet and subdued, even with each other. Even when they were safely on the plane to Africa they hardly spoke, as if the momentousness of what they were doing barely needed explaining. Flying into the unknown.

While the plane traversed the vast and lightless Sahara David wondered what they would find in Africa – would they locate Angus Nairn and Eloise? What if something had happened to them? What if they couldn’t find them? What then? Just hide on a beach? Forever? That’s if they survived any infection they had caught. From the corpses in the cellar.

He tried to stifle his fears. Whatever their fate, this mystery needed to be resolved – so seeking out the centre of the mystery was the right thing to do. If they were being chased they may as well try and outflank their pursuers, get to the solution first. Another reason to take the gamble, to fly to Namibia.

Amy was dozing next to him. David picked up the inflight magazine and flipped to the atlas pages: Namibia was a huge country. A big orange rectangle. He scrutinized the names of the few towns indicated.

Windhoek. Uis. Luderitz. Aus. Very German. Relics of the German Empire. But there were so few towns? A big empty nothingness.

For most of the twelve-hour flight, Amy slept. Sheer exhaustion. David watched her beloved face, and draped her with an airline blanket to keep her warm. Her breathing slowed into deeper unconsciousness.

Eventually David, too, shut his eyes, and waded into sleep.

The next time he woke, the sun was blazing hot through the opened portholes, and they were landing in an airport the likes of which he had never seen before.

It was desert. Even the airport was desert. A couple of pathetic palm trees fringed the grey dusty runway, but immediately beyond the tarmac huge sand dunes rose, like frozen orange tidal waves, with wisps of dust whipping off the top.

The groggy passengers descended the ladder – into the furious heat. The African sun burned as soon as it touched the skin. Amy lifted a magazine to shield her face, David turned up his shirt collar to protect his neck. The airport – the island of baking asphalt in a sea of hot sand – was so tiny they could walk to the terminal in two minutes.

Passport control was three impassive guys apparently speaking English; ten minutes later they were on Namibian territory. A smiling black taxi driver approached them as they exited the terminal building into the starkly sunlit car park. Where did they want to go?

Their furtive researches in the cybercafes of Biarritz had yielded some results: Swakopmund, the place Eloise was directing them, was on the coast, in the centre of the Namibian littoral. It was also, it seemed, where they might find people willing to take them into the deserts and the mountains. Trekkers and outfitters.

David said to the cab driver, ‘Swakopmund. Please?’

‘OK! Swakop!’

The bags were thrown casually in the boot. The taxi spun out of the car park and onto a road that cut through the desert. Through the dazzle of the clear African air, David could see a thin horizon of blue.

‘Is that the sea?’

‘Yes sir!’ the taxi driver said. ‘Walvis and Swakop by the sea. By the sea with many many flamingoes. But do not make schwimmen, very jellyfish and many many sharks.’

The car swerved, they were being buffeted by a fierce wind. The driver laughed.

‘You come wrong season!’

‘We have?’

‘Winter is cold. Windy and maybe even rain.’

‘Cold?’

‘Yes sir. But Swakop always windy. But cold now. Benguela current.’

David stared out at the endless enormous undulating dunes; they were a harsh yellow-white in the remorseless sun. Sand was blowing across the road – orange snakes of dust, writhing and dissolving.

Now they were here, the desire to find Eloise seemed a rather forlorn decision, almost quixotic. They were in a land of nothingness, a country of mighty desolation, with a population of barely two million scattered across a sun-crushed vastness the size of France and Britain combined; they were looking for one man and one woman. In the wilderness. Would this hotel even exist?

The cab driver was pointing. ‘Swakop!’

David stared at the cityscape as they rolled down the streets. The sense of dislocation was profound. Looming suddenly from the sand was a pastiche Bavarian town: gingerbread houses, spired German churches, little Teutonic shops with curlicued Gothic signs for German newspapers and Becks bier. Yet the pavements were busy with black people, and orangey-beige people, and a few couples that looked American or maybe Australian, as well as obviously German people wearing…lederhosen?

The cab driver took them to the hotel Eloise had named; he approved of their choice because of his brother who had once stayed there and ‘had so many oysters he was sick’. The hotel was big, white, scruffy and the paint was blistered by the wind but it was right on the sea, overlooking the pier and the wild, blue-grey ocean.

Some white guys were fishing off the pier, in thick anoraks and jumpers. Bloodstained buckets of oily fish showed their success. They were talking in German and laughing. They were munching black cake.

When David saw the fish in the pail he thought of the elvers that José had cooked: his last meal. Then the gunshots, the suicide, the obscene blurt of blood on the wall. The body liquor squelched across the cellar floor.

They bought fleeces at the hotel shop. Then they showered and changed and began their quest. At once. They were tired, to the point of exhaustion – but the need to find Eloise was urging them on. Driving the weariness away with two strong coffees, each, they attempted to do what they had come for. Find safety, find Eloise, find an answer.

Their ‘contact’ was a deputy manager at the hotel: Raymond. After a few minutes’ searching they located him, a small, rather sad looking Namibian, peering at an aged computer screen in the office behind Reception.

He took one quick look at them – a white man and a white woman asking for information about Eloise – and he nodded, gravely. Then he said:

‘I know what you have come for. But first you must tell me.’ He almost bowed. ‘What was Eloise doing the moment you first saw her?’

David came right back with the answer:

‘She was in her house, with a shotgun, pointed at us.’

A knowing nod was their response. Raymond turned, and reached down to the drawer of his desk to retrieve, and hand over, a slip of paper. Written on it was a row of digits and letters. David recognized the style.

‘GPS coordinates.’

‘Yes.’

‘But where?’

The deputy manager shrugged.

‘Damaraland? The bush. That is all I know…Now please I work, I am sorry – we are very busy. Swiss tourists.’

He glanced at them – with a sharp, wary expression. He obviously wanted these worrying people with these strange arrangements out of his office. This was fair enough, but it didn’t leave Amy and David much better off than before. A bunch of coordinates, pointing them into the wilderness? David knew from his reading that Damaraland was a truly vast expanse of desert and semi desert, north and east of Swakop. How could they find someone, one or two people, in the middle of that? Even with GPS?

They got straight to work, finding someone to take them in-country. But it was hard; it was impossible. They stepped into travel shops, car hire companies, outfitters for treks. When they explained their requirement, the shop managers and outdoorsmen openly laughed. One Australian guy, in shorts despite the cold, threw a manly arm around David’s shoulder, and said: ‘Listen, mate, Damaraland? There are no roads. You need an expedition. You need two or three fourbys, and a fucking bunch of guns. This isn’t Hyde Park. Try kitesurfing.’

And so it went, and so it continued, and then the fog came. They’d been there for two days of increasing anxiety and it was windy and cold throughout; and then the weather worsened. The Swakopmund fog descended: the infamous mists of the Skeleton Coast.

It was like Scotland in December: thick and dismal, shrouding the gay little cakeshops in dankness, sending the lederhosened German tour groups into their warm snug hotels, veiling completely the black factory boats that floated inert on the cold Namibian sea; only the yellow-orange men sitting on their haunches seemed impervious: narrowing their sunburned eyes, and sitting in their cardigans and holey jeans, staring at the grey damp nothing. They looked like the Basque men, in berets, staring at the mountain fog in the villages of the high Pyrenees.

On the foggiest night of all, as they were getting truly desperate, when they were shivering their way along Moltkestrasse, they found a bar they hadn’t seen before: Beckenbauer Bar.

It was tiny and gabled and Bavarian-looking, and it was noisy, even from fifty metres away. Keen to escape the shrouding dampness they stepped inside the bar, which was giddy and packed; people were singing in German and ordering steins of lager and clashing the steins together. Chortling.

Amy and David found a table in the corner and sat down, warm at last. A black waiter came over and he asked them, above the noise of the singing German voices, if they wanted anything.

David said, hesitantly: ‘Ein bier…?’

The man smiled. ‘It’s OK. I speak English. Tafel or Windhoek?’

‘Ah,’ said David, slightly blushing. ‘Tafel, I guess.’

Amy was staring, with an expression of perplexity, at the exuberant and warbling German men. She motioned to the barman as he turned to go.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Why…’ She was talking quietly. ‘Why are they so happy?’

The waiter half shrugged.

‘I think it is Ascenscion Day. I believe.’

Amy frowned.

‘Ascension Day, that’s forty days after Easter, isn’t it? Usually in May.’ Her frown deepened. ‘This is September.’

The waiter nodded.

‘No, not Jesus. Hitler.’