Dictator

30

There was a time when Severn Road might easily have been a desirable neighbourhood in the stockbroker belt of Surrey. The substantial houses, set amid croquet lawns, tennis courts and shrubberies, had all been built in the 1930s. They had steeply gabled roofs, half-timbered mock Tudor facades and verandas on which privileged ladies, burdened neither by jobs nor household chores, could comfortably take their tea. The men who owned them had all been educated at the same small group of private boarding schools and shared identical, unquestioned assumptions about their innate superiority, the lesser status of anyone unfortunate enough to be black, brown, yellow or French, and the utter deviousness of Jews.

Yet Severn Road lay not in southern England but southern Africa, in what had once been a suburb of Fort Shrewsbury, capital of British Mashonaland. Its houses were built for the families of the colonial administrators, army officers and businessmen who ran this particular outpost of Empire, as well as the native servants who tended to their needs. For half a century, nothing changed. Then a civil war was fought and lost and British Mashonaland became the independent state of Malemba. Fort Shrewsbury changed its name to Sindele and the white inhabitants of Severn Road made way for a new governing class of African bureaucrats, lawyers and entrepreneurs. By and large, they kept on the servants who had once waited upon their country’s white masters. They even retained some of the old furniture, left behind as the whites fled for the old country. The new bosses were, in some respects, just the same as the old ones.

So another twenty years went by, and Severn Road remained as exclusive and comfortable as it had always been. Then Henderson Gushungo made his fateful decision to cleanse his nation of the white farmers and entrepreneurs he hated with such a burning passion. The economy promptly collapsed, the notionally democratic government became a tyrannical dictatorship, and Severn Road was changed beyond all recognition. The houses were stripped of their contents as the people who lived in them sold everything they could, simply to make a few instantly worthless Malemban dollars. Then they were subdivided as rooms were rented out. Families half-a-dozen strong were crammed into bedrooms intended for a single pampered child; grand living rooms became makeshift dormitories; floorboards were lifted for firewood; crude sheets of plastic were nailed over holes in roofs whose tiles had not so long before been kept in immaculate repair.

Mary Utseya and her baby son Peter had been sharing part of the old dining room at No. 15 Severn Road with three other women and their children for the past four months, ever since Mary’s husband Henry, a soldier in the Malemban army, was killed in action in the Congo. She had been forced to leave the married quarters where she and Henry lived. With the government in no shape to pay her a widow’s pension, Mary had no way of renting a place of her own and had counted herself fortunate that a friend had offered her a few square feet on the dining-room floor.

Within a week or two of Mary’s arrival at Severn Road there had been a presidential election. Loudspeaker vans filled with armed men had driven down the street warning the inhabitants of the terrible consequences of voting for the treacherous Popular Freedom Movement and its lying, unprincipled leader Patrick Tshonga (who was, they added, a notorious homosexual and soon to die from AIDS). Mary was not registered to vote at the nearby polling station and had no means of getting back to her old neighbourhood, so she did not vote. Had she done so, however, she would certainly have sided with the rest of Severn Road’s people, who overwhelmingly ignored the threats of Gushungo’s thugs and voted for Tshonga. They knew that they were wasting their time, since Gushungo would never accept the result. But they voted anyway.

Now, on a Friday night in May, with the ground still damp from an afternoon downpour, they were going to pay for their impudence.

The operation was carried out with a brutal ruthlessness honed by constant repetition: many, many people had already suffered the fate that awaited the people of Severn Road. The two ends of the road were blocked. Patrols were posted in neighbouring streets to catch anyone who tried to escape over back walls and garden fences. Then the military trucks arrived, one for every house. The trucks were organized in groups of four, three soldiers to a truck, each group under the command of a sergeant.

They did not bother to knock. Front doors were kicked or if necessary blown open. Warning shots were fired into the ceiling to cower the inhabitants, the muzzle flashes blazing in the gloomy interiors, where the only light came from the occasional gas or meths-fuelled lantern. Soldiers went in shouting at the tops of their voices and swinging their gun-butts with indiscriminate abandon. If they were lucky, the people crammed into the houses had time to grab a few belongings and even some food or water before they were herded at bayonet point on to the trucks, but many clambered into the bare open-topped cargo bays with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

Mary Utseya was relatively fortunate. She managed to sling a canvas bag across her shoulder and stuff it with a bottle of milk, a couple of biscuits and a clean nappy-cloth for baby Peter. All she kept for herself was a small framed picture of her dead husband Henry. It had been taken on his last leave home before he died. He was dressed in his army uniform, smiling proudly at the camera as he showed off the corporal’s stripes he had just been awarded.

It was only when one of the soldiers grabbed her upper arm and shoved her up on to the truck that Mary noticed that his uniform carried exactly the same regimental insignia as Henry’s. These men were his old comrades, his brothers in arms.

‘Did you know Henry Utseya?’ she babbled, hoping she might somehow get better treatment if the soldier knew her man had belonged to his unit. ‘Please! He was in your regiment. He was killed in-’

Mary was silenced by a slap to the side of her head. The blow sent her spinning across the floor of the cargo bay. She dropped Peter, who started crying, bawling with the banshee volume that even the tiniest baby can generate. Her face still stinging, her mind dazed and her vision blurred by the soldier’s slap, she scrabbled half-blindly around the truck, desperately trying to get to her baby before the soldier silenced him for good. She bumped into an old man, who lashed out at her with his boot. A woman started screaming. More people kept being shoved over the tailboard into the cargo bay, terrifying Mary, who felt sure her child would be trampled.

At last her outstretched hands felt Peter’s cotton blanket, tightly curled hair and soft, warm skin, and she clutched him desperately to her breast. Then the truck’s ignition key was turned, its engine coughed into life, and they rumbled off into the night.

A black Rolls-Royce Phantom was parked by the turning into Severn Road. It had been stretched to more than twenty-two feet in length and fitted with armour plating by Mutec, a specialist carriagemaker in Oberstenfeld, Germany. From behind tinted, bulletproof windows, its passengers watched as the trucks went by.

‘Let that be a lesson to them,’ said Faith Gushungo. ‘Have you allocated the properties yet?’

She was sitting in one of four passenger seats, arranged in two facing pairs behind the divider that separated them from the driver, guaranteeing total privacy.

Moses Mabeki gave a jerky twitch of his brutally distorted head. ‘Of course,’ he said, the last word dissolving into a drooling slur.

‘And the new owners are aware that the trucks will come for them, too, if they ever question their loyalty to our cause?’

Mabeki’s laugh was a hacking cough. ‘Oh yes, they know, and they believe it, don’t worry about that.’

‘And the diamonds: you have a buyer lined up?’

‘Yes. They’re offering ten million. I will make them pay twelve.’

‘Twelve million dollars,’ purred Faith Gushungo with something close to ecstasy. ‘All for us.’

‘It will almost double our holdings,’ said Mabeki.

‘You’re sure Henderson doesn’t know that we control the accounts?’

‘He does not know that we control the country. Why would he know about the accounts?’

Faith laughed. She reached out to stroke Mabeki’s face, feeling the hard, shiny knots of scar-tissue under her fingertips. His terrible ugliness appalled her. The drops of spittle that fell from his lips on to the palm of her hand disgusted her. Yet they thrilled her, too, and she felt herself melting with desire for him.

‘You are my beast,’ she whispered.

She ran her hands over the whipcord muscles beneath his suit and lowered her head over his body. Moses Mabeki’s face had lost all its beauty and his shoulder was a twisted wreck. But he was still a man, for all that.