The Secret History of Las Vegas

Thirty

The sunlight was filtered to a muted blue by the stained glass of the kitchen window. It was the only room in the house that had only one window — high up and small, like the opening in a monk’s cell.

Asia paused in front of the fridge, her reflection catching her by surprise. Long black hair, full lips still stained a little red from last night’s lipstick, a long lean neck, and a body taut from dancing. The pristine steel of the fridge door bothered her, and before she opened it to take out the eggs she made sure to smudge it a bit with her fingertips.

Normally Asia would be turning in after a long night. The only other time she was up this early was when she’d slept over with a client who’d paid for the whole night. Then she would wake and sneak off, unless of course there was breakfast. But everything was different when it came to Sunil. Even the money he still left in the Bible for her was now a mere formality for her. She took it and paid it into a bank account that she never touched. She only took it because it allowed her to maintain a certain distance to protect her heart. He’d called her late and asked her over, and even though he was a client she’d spent the night with, she was up making him breakfast. She never made breakfast for herself.

But there was something so ordinary and everyday about cooking for a loved one that left her breathless with anticipation. Coffee percolating in the pot, made from fresh, rough-ground beans and distilled water; toast burning slowly, held down twice in the toaster because he loved to scrape the burned crumbs off with a knife, the sound like metal on wood; and scrambled egg whites; and for her, a quartered grapefruit and green tea with honey.

It was like a curtain being pulled back on a magic show. The quotidian nature of other people’s lives was fascinating to her. She had grown up in the cold, crowded squash of Chicago and had loved nothing more than riding the train, staring into the lit windows of other people’s lives trying to read something about them from those brief glimpses. She came to believe that those lives were better than hers, the tease of those windows proof of the fact. Breakfast was just one of the ways she pursued the lives hidden from her.

And what might make a person desire another’s life so much? Someone perhaps whose real name was Adele Kaczynski, a biracial woman born on the east side who turned out darker than her white mother could live with, and was left on the steps of the Northwestern Teaching Hospital. Someone who had grown up on the South Side moving from foster home to foster home. Someone who fell in love with her last foster father and who began dancing in strip clubs at sixteen to pay for his drug habit and who finally left him and fled to Las Vegas to pursue her dream of becoming a real dancer. Someone who changed her name first to Egypt, then Nile, before deciding they were too common, finally settling on Asia; maybe that kind of person.

She had a couple of dance auditions in the afternoon for some new shows that would open in the New Year that she was excited about. It was tough competition, though, and with each year it got tougher as she got older and her competition grew younger, a ridiculous thing for a twenty-six-year-old to be worried about, but this was Vegas.

Landing a role in a show like Zumanity would mean she could give up prostitution. It was possible to make fifty, sometimes sixty thousand a year in a show like that, minus tips. Perhaps then she could give in to Sunil, give in to her own feelings. But until then, there was breakfast.

When she’d first shared her dream with Sunil, about dancing in a big show, he’d asked: Why not just dance in one of the strip clubs until then? That way you can give up prostitution. She’d never told him about her past, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. Sunil’s impression of her was the only one she cared about, and the fact that he thought she was a prostitute through some thoughtless action on her part felt unbearable. She wanted to tell him all of this. Instead she’d said: What would we have if I weren’t a prostitute? And although she’d been happy to see the look of shame cross his face, she regretted saying it.

Today there would be no real fight, just the pretense of one, the kind that added to her fantasy of domestic ordinariness. Things like — I wish you’d take your head out of your paper and look at me once in a while. Or — Why do you always leave burned toast crumbs in the butter? Or — That’s way too much milk. You should watch your cholesterol. And he would reply in safe, predictable ways. That kind of fight turned her on and she would make sure she got one this morning.

Hey, he said, kissing her on the cheek before reaching for a cup and pouring some coffee — black, two Equals. The casual manner of that peck on her cheek turned her on, made her sticky and breathless. He sat at the table and turned on his Kindle to read the New York Times.

Sleep well, she asked, pouring the whipped egg whites into the melted butter in the pan.

Not really, he said, sipping loudly on the hot coffee. You?

I always sleep well when you hold me, she said. But the muttered words seemed stirred into the sizzling contents of the pan, drowned by the scraping of the plastic spatula on the Teflon.

He looked up briefly and then returned to the Times. The little electronic pad wasn’t the same as actual paper, but it was just as good in different ways.

Eat while it’s hot, she said. She put the eggs onto a plate, laid the toast next to it, and gave it to him.

Thank you, he said, scraping the toast slowly. The black granules of burned bread gathered in a small pile in the corner of his plate. A few black crumbs missed the pile and flecked his eggs like pepper.

She had her back to him, cutting the grapefruit, releasing a zest of citrus into the kitchen. The sun was higher now and the earlier deep-blue light was now much lighter. He studied her. Every movement she made seemed calculated — no, not calculated, deliberate. As though she was in total control of every muscle in her body.

What, she asked, blushing as she turned into his gaze. She placed the bowl of grapefruit on the table opposite him and sat. There was something in your look, she said.

There was, he asked, looking up from his toast.

Yes, she insisted, spoon poised like a snake ready to strike. He thought he’d never seen her look so beautiful. The whistle of the kettle reprieved him.

Well, she asked, and dunked a bag of green tea in the hot water. The mist reached in a thin column for her face as though in caress. He watched intently, and while part of him wanted to smile, the other felt lost. He had never felt less certain about anything than he did now. The last few days had proved unsettling. In the early years of his internship in Europe he’d had a stint as a family counselor and he always asked his clients what kind of animal their relationship would be, if it were an animal. Now he found himself thinking the same thing about him and Asia. A startled colt came to mind, a colt trying to find its way out of a paddock on a cold winter day. At once terrified and thrilled by the moment and all that it had to offer.

I don’t know what you mean, he said, and his voice trailed off as he shoved some toast into his mouth.

In any other context she would have left the comment where he had, dangling. But this was breakfast and she had made it and it was, well, it was different. This was what couples did, she thought. Fought over nothing.

It sounds like there’s something, she said.

He shoveled the last of the eggs into his mouth, swallowed some coffee. Asia always made him feel this way. Like he had done something wrong, like if he wasn’t careful, he would break this thing between them. He wanted to tell her he loved her. But she knew that. He wanted to have a different life, but he couldn’t articulate what that would be. So he said nothing, gazing into his coffee with resolve. The cup was almost empty, but he didn’t think it was a good time to push back from the table and get some more.

You say you love me, but you keep things from me, she said.

This was getting ridiculous. Might as well get more coffee, he thought, standing.

This was such a nice breakfast, she said. Her grapefruit sat untouched, the cooling green tea clutched in her fist.

I love breakfast with you, he said, pouring coffee into his cup. He returned to the table, where he stirred the fine white powder from the Equal packets into the dark cup. Some of the sweetener spilled around the cup. He thought it looked too much like top-grade heroin and wondered if that was what they used in the movies — all those scenes where actors heaped fingers of uncut heroin into their mouths to test the drug. That much uncut heroin would probably kill a person, he’d said to Asia as they sat watching The French Connection one rainy Saturday. Shh, she’d said. It’s just make-believe.

You’re not eating, he said.

Not much of an appetite, she said, and stood up. At the sink she emptied the fruit down the garbage disposal and ran the tap. He wanted to tell her that the rinds would gum up the works, but the noisy whirring made it impossible and he thought it was probably just as well. He wasn’t sure why they were fighting, not sure if it was just what he’d said or if there was something else, something he would never guess at. Psychiatry wasn’t much use in a relationship.

She turned the garbage disposal off but left the tap running, playing her fingers through the water. With her back to him, Sunil couldn’t see the small smile forming on her lips. She was ridiculously, unaccountably happy. She loved him, that was true, but she loved these moments more, where she got to play at being normal, fights and all. The way it felt in her body. Like an itch that released deliciously under a slow scratch.

Asia, he said. I’m sorry.

She was so happy, she thought she would cry. Don’t be, she said. I’m just being foolish.

And then his cell phone rang. He looked at the display. It was Salazar calling to tell him he’d be late.

May I ask why, Sunil said.

Another batch of dead homeless men turned up at the city dump. I would ask you to come out, but it’s just the same as all the other times.

Identical to two years ago, Sunil asked.

Sunil remembered the bodies. No particular order. No particular ritual. Just tipped out in an untidy pile. He hadn’t been bothered by the fact of the bodies, by the putrefying smell of it all, everything turning to decay so quickly in the Vegas heat. What had bothered him was deliberately misleading Salazar. He was there when Salazar found the girl, and for the briefest moment he felt bad. But he had lost so much himself that the deception was easy to live with.

Identical, Salazar said. I’ll fetch you closer to ten or eleven. I’ll bring road-trip food.

Sure, why not. If you’re chewing, you can’t be talking, Sunil said.

Charming, see you soon.

Sunil hung up.

Asia, watching intently over the brim of her teacup, was smiling.

What is it, he asked.

I was just thinking, she said.

Listen, I’ve got to go get ready. Stay as long as you like.

Do you have a photo album, she asked.

He paused at the door, surprised.

What?

A photo album, she repeated.

No, he said.

So you have no photos of your family?

Where is this coming from, he asked. I thought we weren’t allowed to discuss family, your rules.

My family, she said, not yours. And a lady always reserves the right to change her mind. Lady, she repeated as he opened his mouth to say something.

No, he said. I don’t have any photos of my family. I’m not really the family type.

Let’s change that, she said.

What’s gotten into you, he asked.

Come here, she said.

He came over and she hugged him. She lifted her phone and took a picture of them.

See?

It was cute, cheesy almost, like something a teenager would do. It surprised him to find that he liked it.

You’re in a silly mood, he said, and walked to the bathroom.

The shower was already hot and the room steamy when she joined him.

I don’t have a condom, he said.

Shh, she said.

Later as the water drummed over them, she said: Let’s change the past. Let’s do that.

Yes, he wanted to say, with something akin to abandon. Instead he soaped her back.

Thirty-one

Telephone poles lined the road like a girder of wood and wire. It seemed like they were all that kept the road in a near-straight line, desert falling away on each side. Salazar drove so fast the poles blurred alternately into one, then back into a row like a serial crucifixion, becoming more presence than fact, more blur than thing, lurking always at the edge of consciousness, but then quickly and conveniently forgotten. With each slight turn or sway in the black thread of road, the sun shifted, alternately blinding, alternately bathing everything in a halo. Rocks and hills rose out of the brown scrubland like ancestors birthed from myth. Sunil could see why deserts inspired both the belief in God and the call to seek Him here. Wasn’t Jesus tempted in a desert such as this, forty days into a fast? And didn’t the jinn inhabit the dark caverns of caves and sand dunes? And who wouldn’t believe — especially lost or camped out here, in the time before this road and electric and telephone wires everywhere and cell phones and the noise of it all — that things were supernatural? He knew it made no rational sense, but he did believe in ghosts. Who wouldn’t after what he had seen in the death camp at Vlakplaas?

All the nuclear explosions held in underground aquifers here pointed to how hollow the desert really was. Even before the bombs, there had been the endless mining expeditions during the gold rush. It was easy to see the traces on the surface — ghost towns littered the desert — but it seemed that subterranean Nevada was left to legend. These legends, of an earth populated by spirits, were so rampant that even Herbert Hoover, thirty-ninth U.S. president, himself a onetime Nevada hard-rock miner, had written about them.

Did you know that this place is rife with myth and history, Sunil said to Salazar, who was stuffing a handful of orange Cheetos into his mouth.

Nope, he said, spitting crumbs everywhere.

Dusting the shower of orange crumbs from his arm, Sunil continued. The moon landing is believed to have been faked somewhere here, he said.

Bullshit.

Well, you know it won’t be the first hoax involving science and the moon, Sunil said. In 1835, Sir John Herschel, on the front page of the New York Sun, claimed to have found intelligent life on the moon. He described vast forests, seas, and lilac-colored pyramids, even herds of bison and blue unicorns.

Sounds like he could have a job out here designing hotels and themed attractions, Salazar said.

You see these telephone poles? They are only here because of lynching, Sunil said.

That’s fucked up.

People usually are. When they were first introduced into neighborhoods, Americans hated the poles so much they chopped them down. Made the landscape ugly, they said. But when someone discovered they could lynch blacks in the middle of town using the poles, they really caught on. Doesn’t hurt that they are shaped like crosses.

Do you think anyone was lynched on one of these poles?

Hard to say, although I doubt it. These haven’t been here long enough. There is only one recorded lynching in Vegas history, which means there were probably less than a hundred actual ones. That’s racist math for you. Still, the thought of driving under them is disturbing.

Yeah, fucked up. There was awe in Salazar’s voice. Why do you like history so much if it always tells you that we’re a race doomed and full of shit?

I keep hoping to find out that we aren’t, Sunil said.

And are you guys in South Africa as fucked up as us?

At least, if not more, Sunil said.

Shit.

Yes, sir, shit.

The landscape alternated between sand and rocks, ghost buildings and dead-end exits and a barrenness that defied that particularly American notion of manifest destiny. They drove in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Sunil’s mind turned to the myths of the Nevada desert and the twins.

Everything old and telling about the human past is always buried, always submerged, in earth, in water, in language, in culture, one overlapping the other. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that humans couldn’t wait to escape the past, to escape from things no longer desired. Forgotten. Until a new generation, their wounds sufficiently blunted by time, arrives on the scene to begin excavations.

He wondered what some future generation or even an alien culture of anthropologists and archaeologists would make of the current city of Las Vegas if it became lost under the desert long enough. Would it be read as the perfect Earth culture, its acme? With representatives from all over the world building what could only be described as embassies? Each casino no longer the bizarre facade it was but rather coming together as the true United Nations? Or would it be seen as the home of world religion, each casino a representation of one group or the other? The temples were already here — pyramids, sphinxes, lions, Roman ruins, statues of liberty, all sainted icons, and the famous searchlight on the Luxor some beacon to an indifferent god? It was not without precedence — many a bizarre and crazed cult of holy people had journeyed here to flower and then die in the anonymity of the desert, only the strong surviving, like the Mormons.

With the push westward, the link to the civilizing European force grew weaker, and it wasn’t long before Las Vegas and her inhabitants developed a serious self-esteem problem. Nevada governors, businessmen, and newspapermen were all in search of a truth and an ancient mythology that would validate them, make them the cultural equal of the eastern United States, prove that this land and its recent arrivals weren’t so raw, that there was an antiquity here to rival Europe.

And soon, submerged and subterranean cultures began to play a flirtatious hide-and-seek with the fevered men who so desperately wanted these myths to be true. Before Lake Mead flooded towns and even cities in the 1930s, drowning out the Mormons still lingering on the fringes of Mammon, ancient civilizations were found that would be lost again to the waters of that blue fractal — but not before they fueled the lunacy of the Cascadian theory of human evolution.

Captain Alan LeBaron, amateur archaeologist, who explored much of Nevada and Utah from 1912 to 1930, claimed that the human race began here. The evidence piled up. In 1912, LeBaron claimed to have found Egyptian hieroglyphs on a rock in Nevada that dated back to before the Egyptian civilization. In 1924, LeBaron discovered the hill of a thousand tombs, each tomb exactly two square feet and concealed under stones fitted without the use of mortar. Then Babylonian and Mesoamerican heliographs, ideographs, and glyphs were discovered. Then caves covered in Chinese script and the skull of a man believed to be seven feet tall and whose cheekbones clearly identified him as Chinese but whose hair proved he was of Caucasian origin.

And on and on it went, one discovery after the next; proof that human life and culture, of all races in fact, began here in Cascadia and then spread to the rest of the globe. LeBaron contended that the colonization of America by whites was simply a result of the biological imperative to return to the land of their origins and reclaim it.

Sunil jerked back from his ruminations when Salazar pulled off the road into a gas station.

Are you all right? You looked lost there for a while, Salazar said, killing the engine.

I’m fine, Sunil said, yawning and stretching.

Salazar got out and headed for the convenience store. He returned with a new bag of junk food.

What have we got here, Sunil asked, opening the bag of food. There were more Cheetos, some Snickers, a bottle of water, a browning banana, a small Coke, and a fistful of Twinkies.

Wasn’t sure what you wanted, so I got a bunch of stuff, Salazar said, backing out of the gas station and merging back onto the main road at seventy without a glance at his mirrors.

You drive like an Egyptian taxi driver, Sunil said.

I’m the police, Salazar said.

What’s with all the junk food anyway, Sunil asked.

Great American road-trip tradition, Salazar said. You have to eat enough junk to gain a pound a mile.

But Twinkies?

What are you talking about? That’s bona fide American grade-A cuisine. Guaranteed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Shit, have you even had one?

Yes, I have, and I must say it was one of the most disappointing moments of my grown life.

What the fuck? Come on, you’re joking, right?

When I was a kid in Soweto, every comic book I read, from Batman to the Silver Surfer, all had amazing ads for Twinkies. It was sold literally as the food of superheroes. I could almost taste the creamy vanilla sinfulness of one of them. Oh my God, how I wanted one. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something as bad as that, except perhaps sea monkeys. I waited thirty years, until I got here. First thing I bought when I got off the plane was a Hostess Twinkie. I couldn’t believe how awful they tasted! Like sugary petroleum jelly. I was so mad, so fucking mad.

Salazar laughed. If it’s any consolation, they took us all in, he said.

Agh, man, you have no idea how disappointing it is to want something since you were a child so much you begin to develop a nostalgia for it, even when you’ve never had it. And then to finally eat it, and it’s like a mouthful of rancid grease.

Easy there, Doctor. It’s just a cake.

But it wasn’t just a cake. Not to me.

What about the sea monkeys? Fare any better there?

Fuck no! Magical families of smiling creatures with nice faces and crowns that would perform underwater stunts for you and keep you entertained? A child’s best friend, instant pets, all that shit. I sent off for them but all I got was a tank of dead brine shrimp.

Salazar was laughing so hard his eyes were watering.

Well, at least mine were alive, he said. But I can see how disappointing it might have been if you were expecting literal miniature underwater monkeys. You know what, Doctor? I’m going to buy you real live sea monkeys when we get back to town. Hand me a Twinkie, will you?

Thirty-two

Still daydreaming, Salazar asked Sunil.

They’d been driving for at least an hour in silence, punctuated only by the radio, which was on an easy rock station. It seemed to Sunil that he’d heard Boy George perform “Karma Chameleon” at least five times before Salazar shut the radio off to talk.

A little bit, Sunil said, sipping on some water.

We’ll be coming up to another town soon, Methuselah, I think. We can stop there for lunch and gas up again for the return trip. Apparently this town is farther out than you thought. Ghost towns, Salazar said, his tone dismissive. Can’t imagine why anyone would want to visit one, much less live out here in one.

It’s the desert, I think, Sunil said. You have to admit there’s something supernatural about it. For some people it’s like falling down the rabbit hole. Besides, ghost towns are perfect places to be invisible in America, drop off the grid, so to speak. You can squat in a ghost town for a very long time if it’s set back far enough from the road. You would have easy access to water, electricity, and good shade from the sun, and disguise from any overhead searches by plane or helicopter. I mean, there are roads, so you wouldn’t have to build any new infrastructure. Hell, there are even enough farms within a day’s hike to poach from.

A billboard flashed by announcing JESUS IS COMING. It wasn’t that there was a billboard in the middle of the desert announcing Jesus’s return that caught Sunil’s attention as much as the fact that someone had spray painted LOOK BUSY under it.

Strange name for a town, Salazar said, pointing to a sign by an exit.

Sunil read it: KING OF PRUSSIA. Again, it wasn’t the unusual name that surprised him as much as the fact that the exit looked blocked off with a sign that said NOT AN EXIT, and yet from where they were, it looked like a normal town spread out in desert-style adobe and wood-framed buildings. There was even an airstrip to one side of them.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live out here in a town like that, Salazar said.

This town, and many more like it, is part of something called the Nevada Test Site, Sunil said.

Where they exploded nuclear bombs back in the day?

Yes, but not just back in the day.

I’m forty and I have never seen the mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, so I would say yes, back in the day.

Of the fifteen hundred or so nuclear test explosions in Nevada, only three hundred were aboveground, so just because you’ve never seen one doesn’t mean there haven’t been any.

That’s some Mulder and Scully shit you got going on. I never pegged you for a conspiracy nut.

I won’t even dignify that with an answer.

In a couple of minutes the sign for Methuselah flashed by.

Well, here we are, Salazar said.

I for one would love to have a burger. Best thing about America is burgers and ketchup-soaked French fries and a cold drink, Sunil said.

Finally, something we can agree on.

They pulled into the lone gas station, one pump under an unsteady lean-to, and filled the tank. If there was an attendant, he was nowhere around.

Just off the road to their left was a paddock and couple of hungry horses standing listlessly around a trough full of rank water. One of the supports of the paddock was a bristlecone pine, all gnarled and twisted into a shape that belonged more in a nightmare than in the bright desert sun.

Odd tree, Salazar said, spitting.

Sunil wondered if that was some superstition or just bad manners.

It’s a bristlecone, he said. Oldest living organisms on the planet, I think. In fact, there is a bristlecone pine somewhere in Nevada that is perhaps the world’s oldest tree. It’s over five thousand years old.

No shit.

The tree was named Methuselah. I wonder if that’s what this town is named after. The location of the tree is a well-kept secret by the parks service, but maybe it’s around here somewhere.

What’s a Methuselah?

I figured you would know, being a Republican and quite possibly a hardline Christian.

Just tell me what the fuck it is, Salazar snapped.

It’s the name of the oldest man to have lived, at least according to the Bible, Sunil said.

Bible’s never wrong, Salazar said, walking over to the tree and peeing on it.

Is that some animal territory-marking ritual, Sunil asked.

Never seen a man pee on a tree before?

Sunil opened the door of the car and slid back in. There’s a bar-cum-diner over there called Cupid’s, he said. Let’s see if we can find a burger to fall in love with.

Salazar shook himself at the tree, inspected his work, and, satisfied, zipped up and returned to the car.

Thirty-three

Eskia had been waiting two hours and was already irritated when Asia arrived at his hotel, a little breathless, at ten thirty.

Sorry, she said as he let her in. I had to be somewhere. As always she laid out the Bible. He hurriedly stuffed some bills into it and barely let her undress before taking her roughly, bending her over the edge of the bed. He came quickly and as she straightened her clothes, he said, I’m not done yet.

Multiple pops count as multiple visits, she said, pointing to the Bible and walking into the bathroom to freshen up.

He walked over to his wallet and grabbed some more bills, which he stuffed into the Bible. The first time he found the ritual cute, but now it angered him. He guessed that part of Sunil’s attraction to this woman had to do with that Bible. That Asia was, in a way, a surrogate Jan. Even the Bible, that little detail, Sunil hadn’t overlooked. It wasn’t red, but one can’t have everything, Eskia mused.

While she was gone, he thought about Jan. How brave, single-minded, and so stubbornly sure of her convictions she had been — enough to risk everything. Jan had turned away from her upbringing as a racist Afrikaner, from her training and job as a spy for the South African Security Services in deep cover in a liberal South African university, to become an informer for the ANC. Although Eskia wanted to believe it was Jan’s love for him that turned her, he knew it wasn’t. The tipping point came the day she opened her father’s Bible. Eskia was there, saw her turn pale and let the book fall to the ground. He bent to pick it up and saw that her father had crossed out the handwritten dedication from President Botha, scrawling in red capital letters across it, the word “LIAR.” He saw the look that crossed her face, as if her entire universe was folding in on itself. There was a long moment when neither of them moved or spoke. They barely breathed. And then he let her kiss him. And make love to him.

Of course he fell, who can resist that kind of love, a love where you are needed desperately? Jan loved Eskia with a zeal he knew was driven by her fear of falling back into the old hate she’d been raised in. But in those dark times you took what comfort you could because in the end it was all grace.

Jan’s ring, which Eskia now wore on his thumb, was now the shape of his heart, hot and weighty with despair. It was all he had left of her. He lost track of Jan when she got arrested. She was gone long enough to accept, even beyond his verbal denials, that she was dead. In a way, his search, when it began, was not to find her, but rather to let her go properly. Working in the new government’s security services was a great help. That’s how he found out about the bodies turning up around the farm at Vlakplaas, and some in the river, too.

He had a hard time finding Vlakplaas. Trauma messes with recollection; things that never existed become part of your memory of a place, and the very things that are absolutely vital to remembering are erased. He got lost several times, stopping always to ask for directions, careful to choose only blacks or coloreds or Indians because it seemed like whites would never tell him how to get there. But everyone pretended they had never heard of it. The most feared place in South Africa, and people who were mere miles from it couldn’t remember where it was, or how to get there.

When Eskia finally found the farm, there was a white Afrikaans family, with very young children, living there. How was it possible? Everyone knew what had happened there. The bars on the windows, bloodstains on the guardhouse, faded but still visible. All of it still there and these people bought it to grow food on? Brought children to live there?

He saw them, a couple of slight girls, blond and sprightly, swimming in that river that had held so many rotting bodies. It was unnatural, and perhaps that was worse even than what had really gone on there.

Farther back from the edges of the farm, up in the hills, a small group was digging for bodies, like people prospecting for treasure. They moved across the stubby grass of the hills, in bright red or black, prodding the ground with converted ski poles or sharpened sticks, feeling always for a looseness, a hollowness in the red earth, for a hint. The figures would straighten up, heads cocked into the wind, listening as though hearing their names. A couple would stop while the others moved on. Engaged in some beautiful ballet only they understood. Moving forward, slowly, but always forward. Leaving a legacy of holes behind them.

Eskia approached and greeted them softly in Zulu, Sawbona. They paused and looked up and that was when he realized they were mostly women. They smiled and returned to their digging, stopping only when they unearthed a body, or bones, or whatever fragment of a person they found. Then they lifted the remains reverentially out of the ground and laid them on a white plastic sheet, awaiting identification. There was a tenderness in this scene, the sheer sorrow that stills anger into a river of serenity, into a clarity so cold its brittleness is more threatening, quivering before shattering into a rage that can obliterate.

He sat on an outcrop of stone and took deep breaths, noticing for the first time the small crowd of people walking between the excavators, pausing by each set of remains, looking for something to identify a loved one, something as small as a tuft of hair or a birthmark. When someone was identified, there was a silence as the remains were gathered and carried back down the hill, past the farm to the road where cars were parked, as though any sound — a cry, a wail — would desecrate the delicate balance the excavators worked with.

Eskia came regularly for six years, joining the silent search, until he found, among a pile of bones, Jan’s ring, with the shimmering butterfly wing. Unlike the others, he took no remains, just the ring. There would be no mourning for him, no grieving. Just a vain hate, one that had no target, no focus, until he found, on a list of names of Vlakplaas personnel, Dr. Sunil Singh.

Asia came back into the room, startling him. With the practiced ease of a croupier, she counted the money in the Bible without seeming to look. She crossed to the middle of the room, stripped, and said: I’m ready.

He tied her to the bedposts with the belts from the hotel robes, and he fucked her until she cried out from an orgasm, then he dozed off beside her, only to awaken half an hour later with a scream.

Shh, she said, holding him with one arm, the other still tied.

Absently he wondered how she’d freed herself.

Are you okay, she asked.

Eskia gasped, coughing, the taste of rust on his tongue as he woke from the dream. It felt like he was back in it all.

Asia hugged Eskia from behind. Hush, she whispered, hush now.

Eskia leaned back into her, felt her full breasts pressed into his back. God, he thought, she smells so good.

Will it help to talk about it?

No, he said simply, no.

There was something in his voice that chilled Asia, made her want to recoil from him.

He reached behind him and ran his hand down her thigh, feeling her shiver. Are you cold, he asked.

Why?

He wanted to say, Because you’re shivering. Instead he looked at her, noting the orgasm-softened face, her eyes tender in spite of herself, and said: What do you think Sunil would say if he knew his friend made you come?

She scuttled back from him abruptly; face shocked as though he’d slapped her, one wrist still bound. What the fuck, she said.

Precisely, he said.

Fuck you, Asia said. Fuck you!

You just did. Multiple pops, remember? Although since you also popped you should refund some of that money.

She spat at him and struggled to untie her other wrist.

Eskia wiped his face and looked at her for a moment. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but instead he punched her full in the face and her neck snapped back, her head hitting the headboard. He swung at her again, but she recovered quickly and moved so he only caught her a glancing blow to her eye. Still it puffed up shut.

She knocked the phone from the beside table, hit the concierge button, and screamed as loud as she could. Eskia stopped midpunch. He could hear the concierge’s voice: Mr. Kent, is everything okay? Asia screamed again and passed out.

Eskia jumped up and dressed hurriedly. He had about three to five minutes before hotel security got to his room. Las Vegas casinos didn’t fuck around with the security of their guests. Safety was imperative for business.

He grabbed his small bag stuffed with cash and passports and walked out leisurely, heading for the elevators. In his thick glasses, he was invisible, and he only had to step aside as security guards barreled past him in the hallway headed for his room. As he stepped into the elevator he wondered why all casino security guards wore red jackets.

Outside the casino, Eskia walked a sweat-fueled pilgrimage down the Strip. Down heat-melted sidewalks, gum-stained, dirty, littered with fliers for escorts and shows, through the crowd of overweight sunburned tourists, past the drunks and homeless, past the partly inebriated gambling veterans, ever south.

Thirty-four

Outsider art guarded the exterior of the bar — horses, dinosaurs, and aliens shaped in everything from scrap metal and wood to plastic, concrete, and plaster. Inside, bras in every color and every size — dirty, tattered, stained, and gray from age and wear — drooped down from the ceiling like tired flags. Even though they were higher than head level, Sunil kept ducking, afraid to find himself trailing through the years of sad, pathetic drunken moments the bras represented. A disproportioned Buddha, an odd creature neither frog nor toad, and rabbits with cold maniacal plaster eyes guarded the edges of the bar.

The walls inside were made of wood and every surface was covered with old coasters sporting beer logos. The floor was a mix of cork, sawdust, bare concrete, and fraying rugs. Where the roof sloped at the back into what looked like an anteroom, two decrepit and rickety pool tables sat, their racked balls gathering dust in the gloom. Behind the bar, bottles of liquor struggled for ascendancy. There were two taps — Budweiser and Heineken. A small pug-faced dog squatted on the bar top drinking milk from a saucer.

It seemed like everything inside, even the air, was coated with grime, determined dirt that nothing would ever clean. Sunil instinctively reached into his pocket for his handkerchief.

Put that away, Salazar said, settling onto one of the barstools. You’re embarrassing me.

Sunil ignored him, dusting the barstool before sitting down.

The bar was far from full, but nowhere near empty. There were a few men and women littered around, drinking by themselves or with one another. Sunil guessed they were regulars.

Heineken for me, and whatever my friend is having, Salazar said to the barman.

Same, Sunil said.

We’ll also take two burgers with fries, Salazar added.

The barman, a sour-faced man about fifty with long, stringy, greasy blond hair balding at the crown, a faded denim shirt, and jeans stiff with dirt, dipped some glasses in water, shook them out, and pulled a draft for each man without saying a word.

Listen, Salazar, Sunil said. I want to ask you something personal.

What?

Have you ever been married? Any kids? Do you have a girlfriend?

No to all three, Salazar said.

May I ask why?

We’ve known each other two years and we never had this conversation before. Odd. I don’t do well with women. What about you?

No. I’ve never been married, but I do have a girlfriend of sorts, Sunil said.

A man, drinking by himself at a table in the corner, got up and walked over to them. He had the heavily muscled look of a recent ex-con and all the black spidery tattoos of prison.

We don’t get many new faces around here, he said.

You trying to violate your parole, Salazar asked. Fuckers like you are always on parole.

The barman came back with two burgers and fries. Salazar put a fry in his mouth, got up, and walked across the room to the jukebox. Selecting a Charley Pride record, he shoved some change in and came back to the bar. The music transported Sunil back to the shebeens of Soweto as he ate. Packed full of sweaty, desperate men and women drowning unspeakable sorrows in the homebrew so strong it could take your voice with one shot.

After White Alice left, Sunil picked up a job at a shebeen. It was owned by Johnny Ten-Ten’s uncle Ben, and Ten-Ten arranged it for Sunil out of sympathy, and for Nurse Dorothy’s sake, he said. Sunil went to school and came straight to work at the shebeen every day until about eight p.m., and then after a dinner of Bunny Chow with Uncle Ben, he went home to do his homework. The money from the bar helped him pay the rent and keep the house Dorothy had worked so hard for. He imagined she would get better and come home to live there with him. He was fourteen.

Three years passed like that. Sunil worked washing glasses, sweeping floors, and running errands. And then dinner with Uncle Ben, always Bunny Chow; he ate it so much he came to love it too — the way the lamb stew soaked its way through the hollow chamber of the loaf of bread. Bunny Chow and Cokes; he could have as many Cokes as he wanted, but no alcohol. Uncle Ben was strict about that.

Never drink this shit, Sunil, he would say, spitting through the holes where several teeth used to be. It will rot your liver, your brains, and your soul.

But you drink it, Sunil said.

So now you have proof of what I’m saying, Uncle Ben said, laughing.

Every day they played this game, and yet somehow Sunil never got tired of it.

One day, Ben asked Sunil to stay late and help him close up. Ben had never asked before, so Sunil stayed. He had never seen the bar this late. It looked different, felt empty, everything sounding hollow. The music was off, and what little sound there was, in the harsh lighting, was amplified: the swish of Sunil’s broom across the floor, the grating of metal chairs being pulled across concrete and then stacked, the insistent buzzing of flies around pools of spilled beer and bits of food, the tap running as the metal cups were washed by Ben’s wife, a dog in the distance barking to the ghosts of night, a Casspir rumbling by on patrol a few streets away.

But it was the two or three drunks who wouldn’t leave who fascinated Sunil. They sat, heads hung over the dregs of their drinks, holding on to the metal mugs as though drowning. Several times Ben came out and asked them to leave. Still they sat as though afraid of the night and the silence beyond it.

It’s like this every night, Ben said with a sigh. Usually Ten-Ten is here to get them out.

I’ll get them out, Sunil said.

Ben nodded.

Two of the drunks left easily enough when Sunil pried them up and gently shoved them out into the dark street. The third, a regular he knew only as Red, was harder to get out. Sunil could barely pry his fingers off the metal mug, and his butt seemed glued to the chair. Red was a small man and Sunil couldn’t figure out where he got the strength.

Please, Red begged. Please, it’s too damn lonely out there, bruh. You can’t send me out there.

Go home, please, we have to close, Sunil said.

No, no, you don’t understand, Red begged. They come every night, every night they come and I can’t, man, I can’t. I know you’re young, but surely you understand.

Go home, Red, Ben said from across the room. It’s the same every night. Go home.

Who comes every night, Sunil asked. The police?

My wife, Red sobbed. My wife and my boy, they come every night.

Go home, Red, Ben said. The boy doesn’t need your stories.

But he should hear them, Ben, then maybe he’ll understand.

Go home, sir, Sunil said.

I only informed on a couple of undesirables, Red babbled. Only a couple of times on criminals we all hated. Then I tried to stop, I did. I told the police I was no longer informing for them. So they told the ANC boys about me and they took my wife and my son to teach me a lesson. They just took them. I wasn’t there. I was here. I was here.

Go home, Red, Ben said again, this time crossing the room and pushing him gently to the door.

Where, Sunil asked. Where did they take them?

Red stood at the door of the shack, a bent shade of a man, bent even lower by the alcohol. He lifted a trembling finger and just pointed. Into the dark, man, into the night, he said.

Ben stepped up and gave him one last gentle but firm shove and shut the door. Finish up, he said to Sunil, and went back to the bar.

Finish up, Salazar said, nudging Sunil. We have to get back on the road.

Yeah, sorry, I was lost there for a moment, Sunil said.

Thirty-five

There was a quality to dusk that Sunil liked. There was something frenetic about it — a grouse disturbed from the brambles, or even a chicken with its brood struck by the shadow of a circling hawk. As though day, like Wile E. Coyote, had just run off the edge of a cliff and was winding his legs in space, desperately trying to keep moving before falling into night. But there was something else too, something besides the surprise. Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.

Ruins too held that tear in time, that melancholic yearning, when detritus clings obstinately to a past that can no longer be and yet is unable to fall into the disintegration of a new thing. A lonely feeling.

They drove through the desert, lost and turned around, for a couple of hours. Finally they pulled up to the outskirts of Troubadour. Sunil and Salazar were tense from the many unspoken things that haunted them both.

They edged past houses blown apart by time and neglect, and others held together by the obstinate will of a rusting hinge dangling a window, or a door leaning drunkenly against a lintel, while in places roofs collapsed politely like deflated soufflés. Past weeds that grew tall from floors, past rusted and stripped cars that still hugged driveways and street corners with the dogged belief of a Jehovah’s Witness awaiting the Rapture. They were both silent.

As the road they were on wound even farther away from the freeway, they rolled past a graveyard of signs — giant high-heeled pumps with CASINO printed on the side in pinks and garish purples, studded with holes where neon bulbs used to live; a blue-suited fat man with pince-nez glasses, ruddy cheeks, and a leering smile lying prone as though the giant doughnut in his hand had pulled him over; a rusting fairground ride with cracked teacups; a sign in chipped green glass with the legend CARLOS O’KELLY, AUTHENTIC IRISH MEXICAN FOOD under a shamrock from which a taco shell sprouted; a seven-foot-tall duckling mouth open in mid-squawk, wings spread wide, in a yellow so bright it hurt to look at, standing among a litter of dead trucks, like a bath toy thrown from a kraken’s bathtub; MOTEL, HOTEL, GOLDEN, LAS VEGAS, EMPIRE, fragments of signs lost in the glossolalia; and the creepiest thing either man had seen, a twenty-foot-tall corpulent king who seemed a cross between Santa Claus and Henry VIII, beckoning with one hand, maniacal eyes wide open and crazed, lips curled back to reveal large white enameled and rusting teeth.

What the fuck, Salazar said as they drove by.

It’s as if Vegas came here to die, Sunil said.

Well, I guess we are in the right place, Salazar said. Even the fucking art is about freaks.

The road veered right around a large rock, and when it opened up again, there was the town, spread out before them like a lingering death.

Fuck me, Salazar said.

Extending backward from Main Street was a town with a well-laid-out network of small streets, all lined by houses, or the remains of houses. A few tenacious trees hung around, but for the most part it was just desert chaparral. Some houses looked well maintained, even lived in, and several sprouted satellite dishes. Even from where they were, they could see an airstrip with a crashed plane covered in graffiti to one side. The faint sound of music came from the town, a solemn guitar strum and a plaintive voice. Salazar pulled to the side of the road under the WELCOME TO TROUBADOUR sign.

Do you hear that too, or is it just me?

I hear it, Sunil said. Why are we stopping?

I need a minute here. I mean, aren’t you creeped out by this? Plus, it’s getting dark.

All the more reason to press on and get out of here as soon as possible, Sunil said.

Okay, Salazar said, but he checked that his gun was loaded first.

Sunil smiled. It was always the loudmouths who were the cowards.

As they headed into town, the sky was an indescribable palette of colors that brought a lyrical tint to the reality below, so that the poverty appeared romantic, artistic, and chosen. It was an alchemy that made denial easy, an alchemy that Sunil was practiced in. How else could people live the way they did in South Africa when they were surrounded by the chaotic set designs of the townships and shanty towns that circled the hearts of cities like Johannesburg.

He was reminded for a moment of Eugene and his love for Dante and the circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell — the strange inverse sense of apartheid.

All the banks, businesses, and shops of any merit were at the heart of the circle. At one remove, the colored towns, a perfect ring of defense around the white heart. The coloreds were not white but overwhelmingly wanted to be, and even if it was not exactly white they wanted to be, they did want their privilege; and at least they were one up on the blacks. As in any free market, the coloreds were the middle classes, as it were — those who would give their lives to maintain the status quo, a life they knew they could never improve but which had meaning only because there were those who suffered worse; that in fact, a larger population suffered worse. Sunil knew of course that not all coloreds were middle class, but they could at least all dream and aspire to it. In the outer ring of hell, yet closer to the flames, in an orbit so cut off from the benevolence of the heart of apartheid, mired in a poverty they could never gain enough purchase to dream an escape from, were the blacks. And they had to bus into the heart every day to work for the whites, following only one or two access points, where they were policed and harassed to make sure they had the right passes and work papers. They spent 60 percent of their daily income on transportation alone, and since there were no legal supermarkets or shops in the third ring, they had to spend 20 to 30 of the remaining 40 percent on food in the white heart, or sometimes, and only sometimes, in the colored towns, where the prices were even higher but where there were more shops willing to take their money. Then they had to try to make it home from the heart, through the second ring that loved nothing more than to harass and degrade them, so that if they were lucky, they made it home with one-tenth of their income. Those who were more daring walked ten miles or more one way from Soweto to the outer rings of the second level and then rode buses in — a long column of ants carrying their misery on their heads wrapped with the workloads, trailing the side of the road, inhaling the dirt of the passing cars and the inclemency of the weather; all this to keep a tenth of the money they worked so hard for. And as they tried to make ends meet, the white heart grew wealthier and wealthier because almost none of the money ever left it; what spilled over, the second ring mopped up very quickly, long before it could even trickle out to the third.

While there were some rich and middle-class blacks in Soweto, they accounted for fewer than 3 percent of the township’s entire population, a population larger than the neighboring country of Zimbabwe.

The crazy thing was, the blacks made up 90 percent of South Africa’s population, which, as it turns out, the whites thought worked for them, because such a large population, kept so far removed from power and divided by hunger and fear, could never fully rise up in opposition. Turns out the whites were wrong. Sunil often thought about America and how the lie of the equality of material conditions would lead to big and violent rifts in the country. Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression — how long before the pot boiled over.

This variable of time is something those with power know well and learn to exploit with great measure. Sunil found from experience that the easiest way to do this was to corrupt slaves into tyrants, regardless of their race or imagined position. It worked well in South Africa, on the whites as well as on the blacks, because even though the whites thought they were free, they weren’t. In America, too, the improvement of material circumstances, and the gentle padding of minimal power, could seduce even the most cynical citizen. For the blacks the reward was even less: more work than their contemporaries. But work that affords only the essentials, no matter how much better than your neighbors it makes you, can never lead to freedom.

Why are you so fucking quiet, Salazar asked. You’re freaking me out.

They were at this point rolling down Main Street, speed cut to a crawl, looking out for signs of life. Even though most of the buildings were boarded up, some light came from the bar, the general store, and the pink building with the neon ANGEL’S LADIES sign. And then there was that music, the guitar and voice that seemed to be everywhere at once.

At least they’ve got the right businesses open, Sunil said. Food, liquor, and sex.

So?

So they can’t be all that weird, Sunil said.

Amen to that, Salazar said, relaxing for the first time since they’d turned off the freeway.

They parked just a few doors away from the bar, by an abandoned diner. Sunil peered through the window. Eerily there were still place settings and coffee in the pot on the counter. It looked open, except for the film of dust over everything and the big rat on the counter next to the coffeepot cleaning its paws.

Next door was the pink-painted bordello with the hissing neon sign, and Sunil wondered who Angel was, and why there was a bright-blue neon sign in a ghost town, five miles off a freeway. It wasn’t like anyone new would wander by and see it, and everyone who knew about it didn’t need the sign.

The bar was a low-slung building probably unchanged from when it was first built around the beginning of the last century. ROSE WALTER’S, a sign above it said. Sunil pulled the white door open and walked in, Salazar behind him. The place was empty, aside from the barman, who was older, with long unwashed hair and a tie-dyed rainbow shirt.

Welcome, name is Bob, he said. What can I fetch you gentlemen?

Sunil and Salazar settled at the bar.

Bob, you’re shitting me, Salazar said.

You wouldn’t happen to have any single-malt whiskey, would you, Sunil asked.

Sure do, Bob said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a bottle. He placed it before Sunil, fetched a rag, and wiped it clean of dust.

Sunil inspected it; good color, good odor. Fine sample, he said.

Bob laughed happily and poured generous amounts into three shot glasses. He toasted them and downed the whiskey, eyes watering. Sunil and Salazar drank it down too.

Really good, Sunil said, feeling the familiar warmth spread through him.

First one’s on the house, gentlemen, Bob said.

Where the fuck is everyone, Salazar asked.

They’ll be here. Some fly in from Vegas every night, land in the old airstrip where the crash is. Others come by bus and this place usually has about three thousand people by midnight, when the carnival starts. It’s been good for us, that carnival.

What’s the carnival called, Sunil asked.

Carnival of Lost Souls, Bob said.

Where can we find it, Salazar asked.

Just turn right by the whorehouse and follow the yellow brick road.

You’re shitting me, Salazar said.

Ain’t shitting you.

Fuck, Salazar said, getting up.

Sunil settled the tab.

The yellow brick road had no bricks, and it wasn’t particularly yellow, either. It was just a cracked and pitted tar road with orange paint splattered carelessly over it in a thin film, as if someone had driven up and down holding a paint can from an open window, splashing the road. Perhaps that was what made it extraordinary, because there was no denying that it was. That, and also, perhaps, the sudden blaze of a patch of California poppies to the side, and the weeds that flung back from the road into the houses, their heads bent from a gentle breeze. At the end of the road was a bristlecone pine laden with decaying shoes, hundreds of them strung up like dark lanterns.

Under the tree stood a woman.

She was at least six-three, with very short hair, almost a buzz cut, and a body that was cut and rippling with muscle. She was holding a clipboard in one hand, and a walkie-talkie in the other.

Salazar pulled up under the tree and got out. Sunil followed.

You can’t park here, Fred said, her voice deep and husky. Please follow the signs to the visitors’ lot.

You must be Fred, Salazar said.

And you are?

Detective Salazar, and this is Dr. Singh.

Well, all our permits are in order and I don’t recall calling the police.

And yet we are here to see you, Salazar said.

Has something happened?

Is there anywhere we can talk privately, Salazar asked.

Has something happened, Fred repeated.

We came a long way, Sunil chimed in.

Everyone who comes here does, Fred said, unimpressed.

We can talk here or back in Las Vegas, Salazar said.

Fred laughed. Does that ever work, Detective? I have to set up tonight’s show. You’re welcome to stay for it. Box office opens at nine. With that, Fred went back to giving instructions to someone over the walkie-talkie.

Sunil stepped forward. I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot, he said. We are here to talk to you about two of my patients. I believe they were performers in your carnival.

Fred shoved the walkie-talkie into her back pocket, where the bulge drew Salazar’s eyes. She cut him a dirty look and then brought impatient eyes to bear on Sunil.

He suddenly felt breathless. Fire and Water, he said, more in a croak than anything.

King Kong, Salazar added.

King Kongo, she said to Salazar, then turned to Sunil: You have the twins. Thank God. I was worried about them. I haven’t seen or heard from them in over two weeks. Yes, yes, by all means, let’s talk.

With that she turned and trudged off across a small patch of grass, headed toward a blue Victorian wood house, alone at the edge of a rise. It was so blue; the color was like a shout in the gathering darkness.

She led them up some steps, through the front door, crossing a living room in a soft yellow, and out onto a back porch that was all red. Four Adirondack chairs sat there looking out over a sheer drop of about fifty feet. Below them, spread out across the floor of what was clearly an abandoned quarry, lit up like a scene from a fairy tale, was a carnival. But instead of the usual carney organ music, a young man sat in a wheelchair in the middle of everything, lit by a giant spotlight, playing a guitar and singing into an old-school microphone.

Welcome to the Carnival of Lost Souls, Fred said.

Thirty-six

Eskia stared at the Kentridge on Sunil’s wall for a very long time. As he examined it from different angles, he smoked several cigarettes, taking pleasure in knowing that the smell would drive Sunil crazy. Eskia liked Kentridge, also Pieter Hugo. Their work was not invested in obscuring or blotting out the uncomfortable truths about apartheid.

He’d half expected to find Asia hiding out here, and wondered where she was. Normally he would be tracking her down; he hated to leave loose ends. But this was no normal case. He fully intended to kill Sunil on Monday and by Tuesday evening to be home in Johannesburg. Since he had no intentions of returning to the United States in the foreseeable future, she posed no real threat to him. He wouldn’t admit it, not even to himself really, but he was glad not to kill her. Asia had something that got under your skin very quickly, and not just because she was beautiful and could do things sexually he never knew were possible. There was a vulnerability to her that brought out the protective instinct in men. In a way he understood Sunil’s fascination with her; too bad it felt like such a fucking cliché.

He wandered into the kitchen to open the fridge and poked around. He popped the top on a beer and drank deeply, then set it down on the counter and checked the freezer and every other inch of the fridge for hiding places, shaking every can, every box, opening the yogurt and running his fingers inside, even pulling the shelving panel away from the door frame. Nothing.

The bedroom was next. Bed frame, mattress, behind every picture, chest of drawers, wardrobe, and light fixtures, ceiling: nothing.

Bathroom: medicine cabinet, toilet tank, sink plinth, bathtub. He banged against the tiled walls checking for hollow spaces, emptied out soap and shampoo containers, squirted toothpaste down the sink, checked the floor for hollow tiles, especially in the shower, then the ceiling, and the laundry basket: nothing.

Back in the kitchen, Eskia imagined all the places he would hide a hard drive. He needed Sunil’s research. Killing him was personal, but the South African government would want Sunil’s research on psychopaths. Where had that fucker hidden it? He wouldn’t have it on him; that was too risky. Eskia had already gone over every inch of Sunil’s office at the institute. It seemed Sunil kept only one copy of his work on a portable drive. It had to be in his home somewhere. There was no safe, that much Eskia already knew. By the time he left the kitchen for the living room, the microwave, the coffee machine, toaster, stovetop, oven, cupboards — everything — had been taken apart: still nothing.

There would be no time to put everything back together, to make it look like no one had been here, not even with a team of men. That only happened in the movies. The best thing to do was to leave the place looking like it had been burgled or vandalized. Difficult in a secure building like this, so he would have to hurry up so he could hit a couple more apartments, reduce the suspicion. He didn’t want to spook Sunil before tomorrow. Being one of several apartments vandalized in a building was an unfortunate accident. If only his was robbed, it would be clear that it was deliberate. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was about five p.m.; Fred should still have them tied up out there in Troubadour.

From his spot on the couch, he stared at the Kentridge. It was a limited-edition print, numbered and signed. Surely Sunil wouldn’t have hid it there. It would be a shame to destroy something as good as that. He lit another cigarette and took a deep drag. He decided to leave the Kentridge for last, and started in on the couch, pulling stuffing out of cushions and cutting into the frame fabric. Another myth was that an experienced person could guess where someone was likely to hide something. People were too different and irrational for that kind of prediction to work more than occasionally. Shit, Eskia muttered. It wasn’t in the couch. Where the fuck was it? It had to be somewhere easily accessible since he took it to work and back home every day, but where?

He took a break to finish his beer, sitting amid the debris. Absently he tapped on a book while he smoked. Fuck, Sunil, he said out loud, are you really going to make me rip apart the Kentridge? Then he looked down at the book he’d been tapping: the Bible. Eskia laughed out loud, flipping the cover open. There in a perfect cutout sat the disk, in the one book most people wouldn’t touch even if they happened to come upon it.

Really, Sunil, Eskia said to himself. You are depressingly romantic. He stood up and stubbed his cigarette out in the middle of the white coffee table. Now to pretend to rob a couple more apartments. He looked at his watch. It was six.

Thirty-seven

Sheila wondered if she should go over. It wasn’t that late, not even seven. She had called Sunil several times already to check up on him, to see how he was taking the fact that the twins had their zoo MRI today. Three times, to be exact, she had called, and each time it went straight to his voice mail. She didn’t know if that was too many times, perhaps even excessive enough to qualify as stalking. Sheila was a proud woman and yet with Sunil she found all that pride had eroded as she subtly (she hoped) tried to woo him. She wasn’t very good at dating, and she had no girlfriends to call for advice. Working for the institute left little time for any relationships outside of work.

The thing is, she had been thinking of resigning from the institute for some time now. There were job offers across the world from universities who wanted her on faculty and although it would be a significant drop in salary, she didn’t care. In fact, her trip to Cape Town was part holiday, part job interview at the University of Cape Town. From what she could tell from the photos of the place, it looked like the south of France. Not a bad place to spend the rest of your days, especially if you had the right person with you.

Fine, then. That was it. She was going over to Sunil’s. Better people than her had made fools of themselves for love. If they hadn’t, the world wouldn’t be full of sad love songs and Fellini movies. Still, she thought, selecting a big pair of glasses and a giant scarf to cover her face and head, no need to be caught on his building’s security cameras doing it.

Thirty-eight

Asia pulled out of the Bellagio’s parking lot and made a left onto the Strip. In less than ten minutes she would be pulling up at Sunil’s apartment complex.

After the attack, she had woken up in an office deep in the bowels of the hotel. She was lying on a massage table with an IV drip attached to her arm.

Hey, a pleasant voice said.

Hey, Asia croaked through cracked lips. Her nose was burning and as she touched her face gingerly, she could feel it was swollen like a melon.

The woman with the pleasant voice came over. She was wearing white scrubs and a name tag that said Kim.

Hello, Adele, Kim said.

Asia flinched at her name, a name she used only for legal reasons. The name on her ID, the name from the past she was trying to escape. From the man who had turned out to be a traitor, a word she had tattooed on her arm when she got to Vegas. But the tattoo shop was less than reputable, and the guy who ran it spoke bad English, and so she had ended up with Trae Dah.

You took quite the beating there.

Asia nodded. It wouldn’t be the first time, she wanted to say, but she didn’t. Chicago would always remain in the past.

You were unconscious when we found you. Mr. Richie, head of security, thought it would be best if we dealt with this in-house. You understand?

Asia nodded again. Casinos went to great lengths to keep from getting bad publicity, especially in a depressed economy.

A doctor examined you, and it doesn’t look like you have a concussion, but you do need to be careful. He left some pain pills for you. Here, let me disconnect the drip. Can you sit up? Yes? I’ll help you. There.

Asia sat up and gasped as the room swam into focus.

Kim handed her the bottle of pain pills. Those are pretty strong. Use them carefully, she said.

Thank you.

Don’t thank me. Mr. Richie says he’s an old friend of yours. There was a bit of steel in her voice.

Asia nodded.

Do you want me to call someone to come get you?

Who could she call? Who did she want to call? She nodded, and when Kim passed her her bag, she fumbled for her cell, took a deep breath, and dialed Sunil’s number.

I’ll be back in a little bit, Kim said.

Five times over the course of an hour she called Sunil and each time it went to voice mail, and each time she left a message. Kim returned intermittently, and when Asia shook her head, she would leave. But each time she came, she brought something for Asia: tea, then water, finally a giant soda. The last time she came in, she had a regretful face and a clipboard in one hand.

I’m afraid Mr. Richie says you have to leave now, Kim said.

Asia nodded and stood up. She was a little light-headed and her face still throbbed but otherwise she was fine. The ice packs that Kim had pressed onto her face while she was out, and which she had renewed with every visit, had visibly reduced the swelling.

Mr. Richie also needs you to sign this, Kim said, pressing a pen and the clipboard into Asia’s hands. It’s a release for the hotel, you understand?

Asia nodded and signed. She hadn’t expected them to treat her as nicely as they were, even if she had given Mr. Richie a couple of complimentary dates. Fifteen minutes later, here she was, pulling out of the parking lot and heading for Sunil’s. She didn’t want to be alone. She wanted him to hold her. There were no other women in his life, she was sure, but still, it was a risk going to him uninvited.

Thirty-nine

Brewster gasped for air, choking silently. He moved quickly, replacing the oxygen tank in his pocket. In a few seconds his breathing returned to normal.

Brewster was sitting at his desk, studying the MRI image of the twins on his computer. He could see that a band of tissue connected the twins, but they didn’t share lungs or a heart or any major organs. They could very easily have been separated at birth. It’s confusing why they weren’t. Maybe their parents couldn’t afford the operation. But he knew so many surgeons would have performed the procedure for free, just to get papers out of it. Even more confusing was that on the little one there was no brain activity showing up. He appeared brain dead.

It would be interesting to hear Sunil’s take on all this. He was far more qualified on matters pertaining to brain scans. He’d have to make up for the whole zoo thing. Honestly, when were these blacks going to stop being so sensitive? Best to call and get it over. Brewster picked up his cell phone.

Forty

Fred held the cigar in her palm, barely moving her hand, as though gauging its weight. Then she let it roll up and down her palm a few times, watching it critically. Pinching it between forefinger and thumb, she brought it up to her nose and ran it across the ridge of her upper lip, inhaling deeply, eyes closed. Satisfied, she put the tapered end in a guillotine and deftly snicked the end off. She took out an old Zippo with the emblem of the Atomic Testing Commission on it, held the flame away from the rough edge of the tobacco leaves, and inhaled deeply as the cigar caught fire. The smoke ran out of her nostrils as she puffed. Satisfied it would stay lit, she leaned back in the Adirondack.

Gentlemen, help yourselves, Fred said through the smoke, pointing to the humidor.

Both Salazar and Sunil declined.

Best Cubans this side of the Mississippi, she offered.

No, thank you, though, Sunil said.

Well, cheers, Fred said, raising her beer bottle.

The men raised theirs. It was growing chilly on the porch, high up as it was, like a bird’s nest. A blue orb on the wall behind them attracted and zapped the whirling insects. Without it, the setting would have been almost bucolic.

So tell me, why do you have Fire and Water, Doctor, Fred asked. Are they hurt?

He’s a shrink, Salazar said. We got them undergoing psychological evaluation. We think they are serial killers.

Serial killers, Fred asked, sitting up. You have to be joking.

I should add that I am not sure yet whether they are guilty of a crime, much less whether they are serial killers, Sunil said.

They don’t have it in them, Fred said.

That’s what the neighbors of every serial killer say when the police come by, Salazar said. He was such a nice guy, blah, blah, blah.

I’m afraid he’s right there, Sunil said. Most serial killers are high-functioning people who go by unnoticed for a very long time.

And why are you here, Fred asked. You, Doctor, specifically. What is your interest?

Please call me Sunil.

Fine. So tell me, Sunil, what’s your stake in all this?

Freaks and serial killers are his specialty, Salazar said. Best in the country, that’s why I had him hold them for seventy-two hours. So I’m in charge here, so you talk to me.

Fred took a long drag from her cigar and blew smoke slowly into Salazar’s face. Turning her head, she said: Sunil?

Well, it is a rather delicate matter.

Why is that?

There are several parties interested in their incarceration — in prison or hospital. It would help me to have some background on them, something to help with a diagnosis.

Just so you know, Salazar said, I for one believe they are as guilty as fuck and there’s little you can say to prove otherwise. I am here because the doctor thinks you are key to this because one of the freaks is in love with you. He figures if they did this, whatever set them off is connected to you.

Fred smiled. Water?

Yes, Sunil said. Is there any truth to that?

I am just one of those women, Sunil. You know the kind.

No, I don’t.

The kind men want to possess but can’t, Fred said, and laughed deliciously.

You don’t seem that perturbed by all this.

All what, Fred asked. This little show you’re both putting on? If you had anything serious on the twins, would you be out here in the middle of nowhere asking for my help?

Sunil drained his beer. Why don’t I tell you what I think?

With that he launched into a recap of the twins’ arrest by the lake and everything that had transpired up till then. When he was done, he stood up and went to the bathroom while Fred went to freshen their drinks and get some snacks. They had an awkward moment at the door as they both reached it at the same time, but that was replaced by amazement when they stepped back onto the porch to find Salazar peeing over the edge.

Shit, he said. You came back faster than I expected. My bad. Old habit.

He zippered up and sat down. Fred passed him a new beer, careful not to touch him in the process.

What, he asked, picking up on her body language. You can work with freaks no problem, but a little public urination is a big deal.

Fred ignored him and turned to Sunil. First to address the love issue you brought up, she said. Yes, there was a time when Water and I were intimate. We were lovers for about a year until it became unclear to me which twin I was actually sleeping with. I mean, it was always Water’s body, but there were times when I thought I saw Fire in his eyes.

I understand, Sunil said.

But then I also began to notice Fire peering out at us from under his caul when we made love. The whole thing got too weird, so I ended it. Do you really think that somehow triggered a breakdown for them?

I don’t know. When did you stop seeing Water?

Eight months ago. But they continued to work here at the carnival all that time, until two weeks ago when they just left for Vegas.

What exactly did they do as King Kong, Salazar asked. I mean, did they wear a monkey costume or what?

Both Fred and Sunil contemplated correcting him, but then chose not to.

They were fire wizards, Sunil said. At least Fire was, as I understand.

That’s correct, Fred said, shooting him a grateful smile.

Like I know what the fuck that is, Salazar said.

Well, one of their tricks, Fred said, was to set a very long pole on fire and then throw it in the air. As it dropped they would catch it and it would turn into an albino python. Stuff like that. The audience loved their show, but then Fire grew bored of the magic. They were working on something akin to walking on water. I think that’s why they may have been at Lake Mead.

Because Criss Angel walked across Lake Mead, Salazar asked.

So you’re not a total waste of space, Fred said.

How long have they been with the carnival, Sunil asked.

Since they were twelve, Fred said.

And they spent the last few weeks just developing their new Jesus act, Salazar asked.

Not exclusively; there are no free rides here. They helped out with the midget boxing matches—

The what now, Salazar interjected.

The midget boxing matches. Ferocious fighters. I wouldn’t want to tangle with them. Anyway, that’s what they did, but since the show only comes on at midnight, they didn’t need to make it back here until ten. For the rest of the time they were just gone.

Gone where, Salazar asked.

Just gone.

You’re not very good at giving alibis, are you, Salazar said.

I wasn’t aware that’s what I was supposed to be doing.

Sunil saw where that line of conversation was going and headed off the argument quickly. What do you know of their early life? Before they joined the carnival. Do you know what caused their mutation?

Everyone in the carnival is mutated in some way, Fred said, and we all come from within one hundred miles of each other.

Ah, Sunil said. Downwinders?

Yes, Fred said.

What the fuck are downwinders, Salazar asked. Some cult of farty mutants?

Downwinders are people adversely affected by the nuclear tests in Nevada because they lived downwind from the test sites, Sunil said. The wind literally blew the radiation through their farms, ranches, and towns, infecting them with radiation poisoning.

Of course, as soon as we began to complain, the government did everything they could to hush it up, Fred said.

I’m still not sure I’m buying this Mulder and Scully crap about the government and nuclear tests that can harm its own people, Salazar said. I mean, this is America, for fuck’s sake.

That’s partly how it works, Sunil said. The clinical term is cognitive dissonance, and trust me, a whole country can be infected with it.

So you’re telling me that radiation sickness from one bomb set off in Nevada in the fifties infected thousands of people, Salazar said. Give me a fucking break.

We aren’t talking about one bomb from the fifties. I don’t think you fully appreciate how extensive the testing is. Most of the current nuclear tests are conducted at five-thousand-foot depths right by the water aquifers that give this entire area its water — I mean, all the civilian populations, Indian reservations, farms, all of it, except the military base, which has its water brought in, to this day. This is the water most of us grew up drinking, bathing in, and watering our crops and livestock with. So you can imagine, Fred said.

The scale of it is staggering, Sunil said.

I still can’t believe the government would knowingly go along with this, Salazar said.

People magazine ran an article on the 1956 classic film The Conqueror that was filmed on location near St. George, Utah. Between 1956 and 1980, ninety-one members of the cast and crew came down with cancers, including Susan Hayward and John Wayne, Sunil said.

Which side are you on, Doc, Salazar said to Sunil. To Fred he said: Look, our nuclear power is part of what makes this country great.

As long as you don’t have to pay for it, Fred said. I grew up in a town within the danger zone. I remember seeing a mushroom cloud. I was playing in an abandoned mine with some other kids when we felt this wall of hot sand blow through the tunnel. We rushed for the exits. We’d been told not to look at the explosion because the intense light would make you blind. But I had to look, I just had to, and it was beautiful, the colors were unlike anything I’d ever seen before or since.

You shouldn’t have been playing in an abandoned mine. Where were your parents?

Fuck you, Detective.

Thank you for being so honest with us, Sunil began.

But?

He wanted to say, But I feel like you aren’t telling me the entire truth. I feel like you are holding something back. Instead he said, But nothing. I was wondering if you ever met Selah.

Yes, when I was twelve. My father used to run this carnival before me. He was deeply religious and he believed it was his divine mission to take care of the deformed, so wherever we traveled we tracked down locals with deformities and offered them a life of dignity with the carnival.

So your father took Fire and Water from Selah, Sunil asked.

Yes. She was in a bad way. She was dying of leukemia. She’d been exposed to radiation from an explosion, seen the cloud from within three miles of its epicenter.

So that’s why Water says she’s a tree? The mushroom cloud reminds him of a tree.

No, Fred said. The day after my father met Selah, we went to her cabin as agreed to collect the twins and put her in a hospice. We found the boys crying under a bristlecone tree a little up the trail from their house. It seemed Selah had hanged herself early that morning.

Forty-one

It was dark with the exception of one lamp on a table that cast a dim pool of light on the floor. In the gloom it seemed brighter than it really was. Water sat in a chair near the lamp, reading a copy of GQ, wondering if there would ever be a Hugo Boss suit or Dolce & Gabbana sweater designed with conjoined twins in mind. Beside him, under his caul, Fire snored.

The door was flung open and Brewster strode in, flicking the overhead fluorescent light on, bathing the room in harsh radiation.

Am I disturbing, he asked, and sat on the edge of the bed.

A very nervous nurse flitted by his elbow. They are Dr. Singh’s patients, he said. We should call him to come in before you ask them any more questions.

Brewster’s look shut him up.

Water put down the magazine. Fire shifted about under Water’s robe.

Why even bother reading a magazine like that, Brewster asked. Do you think with the right disguise you can fit in?

A completely blind chameleon still takes on the colors of its environment, Water said.

Is that what you are, a chameleon?

Water was silent.

I asked you a question, Brewster said. I’m not as soft as Dr. Singh, so answer me.

A vexillologist is an expert in the history of flags, Water said.

I know this is just an act you’re putting on, Brewster snarled.

Pope Pius II wrote an erotic book, Historia de duobus amantibus, in 1444, Water said.

I know you’re really the one in control here, Brewster said. I’ve seen your MRIs.

Michael Jackson holds the rights to the South Carolina state anthem, Water said.

Don’t play this game with me, Brewster said.

Black bears are not always black. They can be brown, cinnamon, yellow, and even white.

Do you know that I have the power to keep you here indefinitely?

A dog can hear frequencies that a human ear cannot, Water said.

And then before Brewster could speak again, Water began rocking and repeating facts, rapid-fire, leaving no room for Brewster to speak:

The infinity sign is called a lemniscate.

Take your height and divide by eight, that’s how tall your head is.

Pittsburgh is the only city where all major sports teams have the same colors: black and gold.

It is illegal to own a red car in Shanghai.

Zipporah was the wife of Moses.

Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy.

A baby eel is called an elver; a baby oyster is called a spot.

Paper bags are outlawed in grocery stores in Afghanistan. They believe paper is sacred.

Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark.

Shut up, shut up! Brewster said.

He was interrupted by the sound of Fire’s caul snapping open.

What the fuck is going on, he asked.

George W. Bush is related to every U.S. president from George Washington to Barack Obama, Water said. Barack and W are eleventh cousins.

Enough, Brewster said.

As soon as Dr. Singh comes in, I will be lodging a formal complaint, Fire said.

With that, he retreated under the caul, snapping it closed.

It’s just a matter of time, Brewster said, then you’re all mine.

Forty-two

From the small street off Fremont, the lights were close enough to touch. The sound of piped music was loud enough to make conversation hard, not that the group of boys, girls, men, and women strolling the short street was interested in talking. Even though prostitution was illegal in Las Vegas, the police never really bothered the workers there. They were pretty good at policing themselves, and at keeping drugs and violence, which was bad for business, out of their area.

Vegas, someone once said, was no different from any small American town, except that everything hidden and denied there was celebrated in Vegas. It was, effectively, America’s, and increasingly the world’s, darkest and brightest subconscious.

Horny Nick was bored. He polished his horns and lit a cigarette. He’d had no takers yet, but Sundays were quiet and drew a more conventional crowd less likely to go for a rent boy with filed teeth, tattoos, and implanted horns.

Farther down the street, Annie and Petrol worked a corner. Annie was having a great night, and who didn’t want to fuck an elf from Lord of the Rings? Petrol drew a class of men who wanted to dominate or be dominated. Horny Nick was an acquired taste but one that cost more, so he wasn’t worried. With only a few johns he could make what Petrol and Annie took twice as long to earn.

Peggy patrolled nearby, keeping a watchful eye on her friends, earning her keep as security. She was walking past Petrol and Annie when she saw a silver compact pass by, headed up the street. There was something off about it, she intuited, and for her that was enough. She began to run up the street shouting as Horny Nick leaned into the window.

Peggy was less than ten feet away as Nick opened the passenger door and got in. The car peeled away from the curb and joined the traffic with practiced ease. Too slow to draw attention, fast enough to get away quick.

I’m Horny Nick, Nick said.

The driver smiled and, turning to him, jabbed a Taser to his jugular. Nick was unconscious in three seconds, a wet patch forming on his jeans.

Outside, receding rapidly, Peggy hadn’t given up the chase.

She finally stopped in the middle of the street, breathless, where Petrol and Annie joined her.

What is it, Annie asked.

Nick is in trouble, Peggy said, dialing.

Who are you calling, Petrol asked.

Salazar.

Salazar’s phone went to voice mail.

Shit! Peggy screamed. She knew it wouldn’t help to call the regular police.

Forty-three

In the growing desert cold, the lights of the carnival were like sharp points. The man in the wheelchair still sat in the spotlight, singing, his only concession to the cold a blanket draped over his legs.

Fred, are you involved in any downwinder action groups, Sunil asked.

Salazar sat forward.

Do you think we’re eco-terrorists now, Fred asked.

Fire said he was a downwinder nationalist, Sunil said. That’s a direct-action group.

Even if that were true, you think I’m involved?

It bears thinking about, Sunil said. Given that you share a similar… I’m not accusing you of anything, just trying to understand.

No offense, but that’s just dumb. How would getting arrested at Lake Mead next to a blood dump help you commit an act of terrorism?

I don’t know, Sunil said.

Let me ask you something, she said.

Fair enough, Sunil said.

Where are you from? There’s an accent.

South Africa.

Well, since you share the fucked-up history of South Africa, have you ever killed anyone on either side of the political divide?

Sunil shifted. Killed someone, he said. No.

Fred smiled cruelly. Watched someone die, she asked.

Sunil looked away.

I’m not accusing you, Doctor, I’m just getting to know you.

So you think that Fire and Water are innocent of all charges and they aren’t crazy?

Yes, Fred said. Let me come and talk to them, she said. I will get them to open up. Get this whole thing cleared up by tomorrow afternoon.

That would be very helpful, Sunil said. You would do that?

For the twins? Sure, she said.

Hold up here, Salazar said. Now, wait just a fucking minute. They are my twins, my case. You get to help on one condition.

What is your condition?

That you come into the station voluntarily and that we run your prints and take a statement.

Fine. Can I talk to them, she asked Sunil.

Now? On the phone?

Any objections, Sunil asked Salazar.

Now you care what I think.

So?

Let her have her fucking phone call, Salazar said.

Sunil called the institute and asked the duty nurse to put the twins on.

What’s up, Doc, Fire said.

Hold for Fred, Sunil said, passing the phone.

Fred took it. Some privacy, she said.

Sunil looked at Salazar, who nodded. Fred left them on the porch and stepped back inside, closing the door behind her. She was on the phone for only a few minutes before she came back out and handed the phone to Sunil and thanked him.

Now you two need to leave, as I have a carnival to run, Fred said. She herded them to the door, taking their beer bottles.

So you’ll come by in the morning, Sunil asked.

Yes, I’ll meet you at the institute at ten.

She walked them back to their car. Two men sat in a golf cart beside it.

I see you have your own security, Sunil said.

It’s a ghost town. We need to keep it safe, she said.

Crowds were already beginning to mill about. The town suddenly looked alive, like a horror-film town, or a Stephen King novel, where everyone was dead in the daytime but came to life at night.

Where the fuck did all these people come from, Salazar asked.

All lost souls come to commune at the carnival, Fred said, laughing.

Fuck, Salazar said. He got into the car quickly and started the engine.

As Sunil turned to go, Fred touched his arm. Thank you for coming, she said. This is the closest thing the twins have to a home. I would like to bring them back. You understand, right? You lost your home too. Have you ever been back?

Sunil smiled. Good night, he said, and got in beside Salazar.

As they drove down the yellow brick road, Salazar said: You know she’s lying, right?

Of course she is, Sunil said. The question is, what is she lying about, and why?

The drive home was faster. Ten miles from the town, both of their cell phones began to beep.

Finally, some service, Salazar said.

Yes, Sunil said, looking at his phone.

Asia had called seven times. Sheila five. Brewster five.

Wow, he thought, busy night. He was curious about Asia’s calls, but Sheila and Brewster could wait. He tried Asia’s cell. There was no answer. As they hit the open road and gathered speed, Sunil thought back to Fred’s question: Have you ever been back?

He had been once: but not to J’burg, or Soweto, but to Cape Town. Thinking about it now, Sunil was reminded of one of those moments of uneasy grace that he’d found on a beach in Cape Town shortly after his return.

An overweight woman walked across the sand with one arm tucked close to her right side, body bent into a slightly angled sway. Sunil recognized the signs of a small shame, of a person used to an unkind gaze. The young woman sunbathing topless, spread to the glory of the sun with the abandon of the proud. Older women more modest with their bodies, but less with their envy, shot her disapproving glances.

An old white man slept in the sun: fully dressed and looking like an untidy pile of towels in the sand. A woman on her cell phone turned away from him, her muscled and uncovered back had a Ganesh tattoo spread like a rug across it. Kids of all colors and races clustered around an old black man selling ice cream from a blue-and-white cooler.

Returns are never what we expect them to be. The glory of old wins pales in the face of the reality of compromise. The Cape Town beach with whites, blacks, Indians, and coloreds fading into burnt sepia — the color of tolerance, a smudge over the sharp, angled pain that still struggled under the wash of it — was no different. There was no feeling of restitution in this. There should be more than giving back what was free and collective in the first place. He didn’t know what, but felt that there should be.

Near where he lay, a rock still held the rusting scar of a sign that used to declare THE DIVISION COUNCIL OF THE CAPE — WHITE AREA: BLANKE GEBIED. He’d stubbed his toe on it coming down to the sand. A Boer somewhere is smiling, he thought. Everyone on the beach seemed to be having a good time and he couldn’t understand at first why he was so angry. Then he realized what it was; the air was heavy with it — amnesia.

Restorative, isn’t it, a woman next to him said.

What is, he asked, always precise.

The water, she said, the water and the breeze.

They had water and a breeze on Robben Island, he said. I’m not sure how restorative that was.

She took off her sunglasses and looked at him, intrigued by his non sequitur. He returned her look, taking in details: she was of indeterminate race, probably colored, he thought, and young, maybe thirty, and attractive in an unusual way.

I like the way the breeze makes everything seem good, she said, choosing her words carefully, responding not to his statement but to something unsaid, something she sensed.

Like apartheid, he said, unable to help himself. I imagine all the whites lying here during apartheid, the breeze and the water making it possible for everything to seem good, he added.

Yes, she said. I suppose you are right. There was a smile behind her words.

You seemed amused by it, he said, offended.

Not by it, she said, stressing the syllables. I am amused by your tone.

Why?

You just came back, she said.

Yes, he said, wondering how she could tell. His accent?

Gone for a long time?

Ten years, he said.

She nodded. It is a long time, she said.

Yes, he said. Too long.

She bit down on her sunglasses and sighed. It is not just time, is it? That bothers you, I mean.

No, he said.

Lost people to the darkness?

He was simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by her description of that time. It was darkness — of the spirit, the heart — but why that word? Why was it always used in the negative? It had been whiteness, a lightness that made it hard for the perpetrators to see the limits of their souls, not blackness, that destroyed them all. He wanted to say that but was held back by his knowledge that it was only partially true. Mostly, but not completely, and as his mother used to say, quoting a Zulu proverb, You cannot eat meat you mostly caught, only meat you actually caught.

Yes, he said, instead. My mothers.

She nodded, eyes sad for him. If she noticed the plural and thought it odd, she didn’t say anything. Perhaps she knew that it took more than one mother to raise a child through those times.

Nobody could stop the sickness, she said. Not even Madiba. It had to run its course. There was no blame in the loss of those times.

It seemed to him that there was plenty of blame and he had a share in that. There is always blame, he said. There has to be. What is life without it?

She smiled and said: Good old South African guilt, shared by all races.

I shouldn’t have to feel guilty, he said. I didn’t do this.

If she wondered what he meant by “this,” she said nothing. Instead she said: I know, but we all do. It doesn’t help anything though.

He nodded and looked away, suddenly tearful.

Let the water restore you, the woman said, replacing her glasses and falling back onto her beach towel.

He closed his eyes and listened to the waves, feeling the spray on his face. It did feel good.

Without looking at him, the woman spoke: I know this seems wrong, not like justice, but here we take freedom day by day, moment by moment: What else is there?

She was right. What did he know? He’d been gone ten years. My name is Sunil, he said. It seemed important to state who he was.

She smiled, still not looking at him. Welcome home, Sunil, she said.

Thank you, he said.

What the fuck did you say, Salazar asked him.

Nothing. I was thinking about Cape Town, about the time I went back. I was having a coffee in this café and I saw Robben Island from the window. I said to the old waiter serving me, if the island was visible every day how come they pretended nothing was going on? He smiled and said, It was often quite foggy in those days, sir, the island was rarely visible.

It’s a skill, Salazar said. Like witnesses who can’t remember anything at a crime scene.

Selective blindness made Sunil think of White Alice.

White Alice got her name from the locals in Soweto when she moved there from Cape Town. Her name wasn’t a result of her complexion — she looked somewhere between colored and Indian, no different really from the thousands of biracial South Africans who were caught between apartheid’s denial of mixed unions and its fear of miscegenation. It wasn’t unusual for people to try to pass as white. Those who couldn’t pass settled for delusion: claiming to be white, which is what White Alice had done. She told anyone who would listen that she had been born white but had turned black after an illness. No one believed her, but no one minded either. This was Soweto.

White Alice was Dorothy’s best friend. The two women became inseparable, spending at least an hour or two a day over at each other’s house, drinking sweetened tea and eating biscuits, complaining about life and the difficulties of loss. White Alice talked about her three children in Cape Town, all white, whom she hadn’t seen since her husband took them away from her on account of her sudden and mysterious blackness. When Sunil asked his mother about White Alice’s condition, she told him White Alice was probably just a very light-skinned colored who had passed for white for much of her life, but, as Dorothy said, blackness will always exert its revenge, and Alice had just grown into her true shade. It made sense. Sunil found out in medical school that White Alice might have been telling the truth. He discovered a condition called hyperpigmentation, a result of Addison’s disease, which had been known to darken the skin of white sufferers enough to alter perception of their racial heritage. But by then, White Alice had betrayed him twice, and his discovery of her condition and the pain it must have caused her wasn’t enough to engender his sympathy or his forgiveness. Not even when, on his eighteenth birthday, a strange white man who identified himself as Colonel Bleek visited him with a generous scholarship package for college. What good would it have done to stare such a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak? He’d asked only one question: Why me?

Alice Coetzee spoke highly of you, Bleek said. She recommended you for this.

Oh, was all he said at the time. But Sunil had since lived with the regret of not asking more questions. Like what would the gift cost him? He thought it particularly poignant that while taking German at college to better understand Freud, he found out that the word “gift,” in German, meant poison. In many ways, it seemed that the Germans had a real philosophical handle on life.

He wanted to tell Salazar all this. Instead he said: I’m sure you’re right.

Forty-four

A blue sky but not night. An eerie dusk, an unearthly light. A blue mist alternately obscures and reveals a field of blue grass in the shadow of a darkening sky. Alone, in the middle of the field, a dark tree spreads its black foliage across the frame.

Water walks toward the tree in the middle of the field, but no matter how fast he moves or how much he tries, he can’t reach the tree. It never moves but it is always just out of reach. The blue sky gets bluer and the blue grass waves through the blue mist like blue algae in water. Still, Water can’t reach the tree.

And the blue tree morphs, shifting in agony as its trunk twists to form a bristlecone pine, standing in the middle of an empty muddy field.

Twisting slowly from a branch bent so low it seems like it can’t hold its terrible burden is a young woman, eyes closed peacefully, something close to a smile on her face.

Selah, Water calls, softly at first, then louder, Selah, until it is a scream.

He wakes abruptly; alone, Fire fast asleep under his caul, sitting in the chair by the window. If anyone heard his scream, they don’t respond. Reaching out, Water touches the cold glass of the window.

Selah is a cloud, he says, a star cloud, constellation of the dog.

Forty-five

The moment’s awkwardness when Asia answered Sunil’s door to find Sheila was compounded by the fact that Asia was wearing lacy underpants, sporting a black eye and a shirt that could only have been Sunil’s, two buttons keeping it on.

I’m sorry, Sheila said, not knowing what else to say.

About what, Asia asked.

Is, er, Sunil home, Sheila asked.

No, Asia said, not stepping away from the door but not shutting it either.

Asia was curious about Sheila, but not unduly worried. She knew she was the only one Sunil was sleeping with, and he’d never mentioned this woman. Still, the day had been full of surprises.

I’m Sheila. I work with Sunil. He hasn’t been answering his cell. I was worried.

Hello, Sheila, Asia said. I’m Asia.

Hi.

Asia didn’t like that Sheila had been calling Sunil on his cell and felt comfortable enough to come over, clearly unannounced. I haven’t heard from him either, she said. I thought he was at work.

No, I checked, Sheila said.

He’s never mentioned you, Asia said.

This is the first time I’ve come over. I’m really embarassed. Look, I’ll go, just tell him I came round, Sheila said.

You should come in, Asia said, stepping back and holding the door open. That is, if you want to.

Are you sure, Sheila asked.

Asia wanted to say, I don’t want to be alone. Not right now, not today. She wanted to say, I’m confused and terrified, because I found out that not only have I been sleeping with my lover’s best friend, but he also tried to kill me. And my lover is not really my lover, but my client. And I love him. I do, but now I don’t know why because I really don’t know enough about him. Instead she said: I’m sure.

Sheila walked in and stopped in the hallway as Asia closed the door. She followed Asia into the living room, where she felt herself stiffen and draw a sharp breath even though she hadn’t meant to. Were you robbed, Sheila asked.

Asia took in the ruined living room, feeling good at the implication that Sheila assumed she lived with Sunil. I don’t live here, she said.

Oh, I’m sorry, I just assumed, Sheila said.

Assumed what, Asia asked.

I’m sorry, Sheila said.

About what?

I’m not sure, Sheila said, acutely uncomfortable. About coming unannounced.

Yeah, that is kind of forward, Asia said, checking Sheila out. Thinking: late thirties, fashion still caught in the ’80s, tight body, cute face. Still, she thought, no competition.

So what happened here?

None of your business, Asia said.

So this has nothing to do with that, Sheila said, pointing at Asia’s black eye.

Like I said, none of your business.

Sunil didn’t — Sheila began.

Fuck you, Asia said softly. I thought you said you knew him.

Right, Sheila said, I’m sorry.

So do you have a message for Sunil, Asia asked.

What?

A message you’d like to leave for Sunil?

I’m sorry, but I’ve known Sunil for six years, Sheila siad, and I’ve never heard about you, Sheila said.

Asia smiled, but her eyes were cold. I’ve known Sunil for six years too and he’s never mentioned you, either.

They stood there, side by side, in the room Eskia had trashed, not looking at each other.

Have you called the police, Sheila asked.

If you have no message for Sunil, I’ll just tell him you came around then, Asia said.

Yes, thank you, Sheila said, I should go.

Asia nodded and pushed the door closed firmly, ending the conversation. She walked back into the living room and sat on the floor. For a long time she just sat there, and then she gave in to the release of tears.

Forty-six

It was a full moon. Heavy in the frame of the car window.

Sunil was lost in the memory of Jan, of the last time he saw her alive at Vlakplaas.

There was Eugene, Sunil, Constable Mashile, and Jan. Jan in the light-blue skirt, white blouse with lacy detail, long tanned legs, and her long lean toned arms unadorned except for the ring that sat on her thumb, too big for any other finger. The one Sunil had given her so long ago. He wondered why she’d taken it off the chain.

She seemed out of place here, like a woman on her way to a picnic who had taken a wrong turn, casual in her smile as though the most dangerous thing she faced were whether ants would get into the jam or not. Incongruous in this place, this stark white room with bare cement floors. The paint here always smelled new, because fresh coats were applied frequently.

Eugene loved the pristine whiteness, the way it would show up blood from the more intense interrogations, the patterns on the wall forming a red puzzle. How much pain before that one capitulated. How much before this one informed on everyone — even the innocent. What was most effective on whom — teeth extracted with pliers; good old-fashioned fist work; the cut inner tube of a car tire pulled down over the face to suffocate in controlled measure. But of course, this was an imprecise science, lungs often filled with liquid and sometimes blood, and so on. The point no longer the information, no longer saving the state, but for nothing more than the hunger, the desire to know the body in all its savage beauty.

All of it happened in this room, Eugene’s favorite.

The windows opened onto a vista of hills and scrub and low scudding clouds that drew shadows across the stubby rise. Sometimes there were zebus lowing in the heat, driven by a boy trying to find pasture for them to graze before being driven off by gun-toting policemen for trespassing.

Not the usual view from an interrogation room.

Jan sat facing Eugene, a table between them, a slow-moving ceiling fan above them turning the heat over like a blanket drying on a stove, not cooling anyone, just moving the humidity around evenly.

Sunil sat on a stool between the windows trying not to look at Jan or Eugene. Instead he focused on the bowl of fruit that sat between them on the table, noticing the details: three pears, a knife, and an oddly shaped and heavily ornamented silver object, which could have been anything but looked decidedly Victorian.

Constable Mashile was staring intently at Eugene, trying to keep the look of discomfort from his face.

Would you care for a pear, Eugene asked Jan. No? Well then, I’m sure you won’t mind if I have one. He reached over and tested each one, finally selecting the one that met his standards. Pears are most delicious at the midpoint of ripeness, between too firm and too soft, he continued.

No one else spoke.

You know, before they get really ripe? The flesh has some bite to it and yet the juices are sweet, Eugene said to no one in particular. He rubbed the pear against his khaki bush shirt and picked up the knife, cutting slowly, deliberately, into the fruit. Everyone watched him pare it into quarters. He let them fall apart and lie there on the table like flower petals. He picked one up, held it to his nose, inhaled, and then with a smile, he placed it in his mouth and bit down on the grainy flesh, his smile widening. He chewed slowly, quietly, and then spoke: Perfect, just perfect. This should really have been the fruit to tempt Adam, don’t you think? The apple shows a singular lack of imagination on the part of that particular Bible author, whoever he was. I wonder if Moses was a composite, you know, like Shakespeare? He poked at the three quarters that were left with the tip of the knife, as though testing for the optimal one. He speared one on the tip of the knife and ate it with delight, smacking his lips and looking so lost in his pleasure that everyone else looked away in embarrassment from that particular intimacy. Eugene put the knife down and rubbed his hands together and said: That was good, reminds me of my childhood. My moeder would cut up pears for me, a rare pleasure on that farm so far inland where fruit rarely did well. Memories, eh?

Turning to Sunil, he said: Any luck with your psycho mumbo-jumbo on this suspect? Did the Lady Jan here speak to you?

Sunil glanced at Jan, caught her eye, and, looking away quickly, shook his head. No, he said.

Jan, Jan, Jan, Eugene said. You really should open up to Dr. Singh here. His methods have proven quite effective in turning people such as you. I hate to use violence, particularly on someone who can be reasoned with. It’s much better to become an askari without the violence.

Jan stared at him intently, with an almost forensic intensity, but she said nothing.

Are you familiar with the Swahili word askari? Like Lindiwe over there, these are members of a conquered indigenous people helping their conquerors maintain the status quo. That’s not a literal meaning of course, but it’s true to the spirit of things. Do you know who came up with it? The British, those fokkers who tried to turn the Boer into teefs. Now you conspire with that scum over your people, and to help whom? Kaffirs? You can ask Sunil here, I’m not racist, but there is an order to things, a way the universe runs, and men like me, we are the ones who keep things in place, keep things running the way they should. I take no pleasure in the decisions I have to make, but I make them, I must make them. That is my role. Just as this is the role you’ve chosen. Mine is destiny, yours is weak-willed. I am here to offer you the chance to be strong.

Why all this performance, Jan asked. Her voice startled Sunil, the venom of it, the hard edge of strength, like a finely tuned wire holding everything in place. This was not the shy Jan he’d known.

Performance, Eugene asked, eyebrows raised, reaching for another lobe of pear.

Why don’t you just get on with the torture, with the extermination of the resistance to your white power, she spat.

Eugene chewed thoughtfully, and then with an expression of regret on his face said: I abhor torture. I abhor brutality. These methods, exterminating the native, to borrow your words, are not only barbaric, they are not effective in the long term. The real power lies in securing the cooperation, even the alliance, of the native if we are to hold up this system, and it is not, as you put it, about white power. At least, not for me. I feel more Zulu than white, myself. No, no, it’s about law and order. We represent civilization, law, order, and the march of progress, and for better or worse, this must be defended and moved forward at all costs. I more than any am sorry about the cost. And torture makes me sad, it is regrettable when I have to use it.

Jan spat at him, the gob of spittle landing on the last piece of pear.

Eugene regarded it with a strange smile. I am a visionary, he said. That’s why I brought Dr. Singh here on board. His job is to use a mix of persuasive chemicals and conversion to bring enemies into the fold, into an understanding of the way.

Gaan naai jou Ma, Jan said, softly, so softly that Eugene had to lean in to hear her properly.

Sunil was shocked at the language; the Jan he knew would never have told anyone to fuck his mother. More than the shock was his fear for her. But if Eugene was upset, his body didn’t register it. Instead he leaned forward and picked up the piece of pear with the glistening pearl of spittle on it. He studied it for a moment, then put it in his mouth and, never taking his eyes off Jan, he chewed slowly, thoughtfully.

Talk to Sunil, Eugene said, getting up. Don’t make me come back here.

I’ll talk to him as much as you want, but nothing will change, Jan said, her eyes glued to Sunil’s face, the look in them heavy with pity and disgust.

Eugene paused. He returned to the table and picked up the silver ornamented object.

Remember the Victorians, he asked. They loved to collect the strangest things. This is a working reproduction of a medieval torture device. It belonged to my grandfather, who loved the fact that something so beautiful could inflict so much pain. Do you know what they called this? It’s called the Pear because there is this ornamented pearlike extension on the end of this handle, do you see? Do you know how it works? I’ll show you.

And he did. Holding the handle in the middle, he turned the knob at the bottom. As he did so, the metal pear opened up into four perfect quarters, spreading like the metal petals of a flower.

You see, it’s quite ingenious really. You insert the pear into someone’s mouth, and then you twist the bottom here until it begins to open. You keep twisting it and pretty soon it breaks the teeth, dislocates the jaw, even begins to rip the cheeks apart. Of course, the trick is to do it little by little, pausing occasionally to let the victim catch their breath while you wait for the confession you want.

Everyone watched the metal pear as it opened wider and wider.

Of course, Eugene said, if you go at it long enough, you will eventually kill the victim, but only after a very long time and pain that is unimaginable, even for me. Now, the great thing about this, as I found out once, is that it works on any human orifice. Any.

Eugene put the open pear down on the table in front of Jan.

This is a very rare and expensive piece. I don’t use it often, but for you, only the best will do. So please, talk to Sunil. Don’t make me come back here. I didn’t lie when I said I don’t enjoy torture, but as you now know, I really enjoy pears.

The door closed behind him and Constable Mashile gently, almost politely.

Jan, Sunil said.

Sunil, Jan said.

Harvest moon, Salazar said, as they drove through the silent desert.

What?

The moon, Salazar said, pointing. It’s called a harvest moon.

Ever seen a harvest, Sunil asked.

It’s just an expression, Jesus, Salazar said.

Sunil looked out the window. In the dark, the landscape looked like home, like the brush of the grasslands, the heat of the Namibian desert that seemed determined to creep down into South Africa, the hills like those of Cape Town and the gold silts of Jozi.

Why did you become a policeman, Sunil asked.

Always wanted to be a hero, Salazar said.

Everybody does, but was there any one thing that made you want to do that as a policeman?

I don’t follow.

Well, you could have been a surgeon or a fireman, but you chose policeman. And don’t tell me it’s about the gun. In all the time I’ve been with you, you’ve never used it, never even pulled it out, or even acted like you have it.

Maybe I’m old-school, Salazar said. Maybe I like to settle a fight with my fists. Maybe I’ve used my gun too many times already.

Maybe.

All right. My dad was a man who worked hard his whole life in a job he hated. A job that cut him off from his first love, the sea. He gave everything up for me, my sister, Ana, and my mom. He and Ana died in a robbery in a 7-Eleven that went bad. But because he was an immigrant, a Cuban, a brown man, nobody took his death, or Ana’s, seriously. The police, it seems, didn’t care. The case was closed in a week. Insufficient leads, they said. My mom moved us to Vegas, where she could be as far from that memory as possible. But I never forgot, and I decided to join up when I could and make a difference. I wanted to show that every life is valuable, has meaning, must be honored.

Salazar, I’m fucking impressed. You are some kind of hero, Sunil said.

Yeah, well, twenty years on the force changes you. Teaches you that it’s all about compromise, about gray areas, about difficult moral things. Mostly I just want to make it through the day without having to kill anyone. And trust me, I’ve used my gun plenty. I don’t know why the crazies always turn up on my watch.

I know the difficulty of trying to make moral decisions in the face of immoral moments. I know that there is no moral way to take a life, but sometimes life hands you very difficult choices. Still, you always want to do the right thing, he said.

There was a moment of silence.

That’s why the dead girl haunts you, she reminds you of Ana, Sunil said.

The worst part of being a cop, Salazar said, is that everyone hates you, and yet as soon as some shit goes down, they call 911 and want you to risk your life to protect them.

Sunil laughed. You should have been a fireman, he said. Much less complicated.

Damned right. And what about you? Why did you become a shrink and not a surgeon?

Sunil took a deep breath. Fair is fair, he thought. My mother was mentally ill, he said. But she died before I could help her, and that, Detective, is why I became, as you like to say, a shrink.

Salazar was silent for a moment. He took a silver flask from his jacket pocket and, without speaking, passed it to Sunil.

Been holding out on me, I see, Sunil said. He drank deeply, the alcohol burning through him, then passed the flask back to Salazar, who took a swig and returned it to his jacket pocket.

Isn’t drinking while driving illegal, Sunil asked.

I’m the fucking police.

Sunil laughed.

Do you think anything ever changes, Salazar asked. That we can make a difference? That we will become a better species?

I don’t know, I’m not sure if it even matters. I think all that matters is that we don’t shrink away from the truth and that we keep trying, Sunil said.

I like that. Push the stone up the fucking hill because we should.

Yes, Sunil said. There is merit in that, grace even. Maybe that’s what makes us deeply human. Pushing ever against the inevitable. I think the world might just be saved that way.

Fuck, this is some heavy shit. Makes me want to tell a dirty joke as a palate cleanser.

I love dirty jokes, Sunil said.

Okay, here’s one. A man wakes up in the emergency room and the doctor says, You’ve been in an accident. Do you remember anything? The man shakes his head. So the doctor says, Well, we’ve got good news and bad news for you. All right, says the man, tell me the bad news. The bad news is that your penis was severed in the accident, the doctor said, and it arrived too late to reattach it. So what’s the good news, the man asked. The good news is that we can rebuild it, but it will cost a thousand dollars an inch. We found a savings book in your briefcase with nine thousand dollars in it, so you should talk to your wife about this. If you spend three thousand but she’s used to six, then it will be dissappointing, but if you spend all nine thousand and she’s used to three, well then, that won’t be good. So talk to her and I’ll check in with you in the morning. The next day the doctor calls the man and asks what he and his wife have decided to get. Well, the man said, she decided we should get the expensive granite countertop for the kitchen that she’s always wanted.

The two men drove through the night, their laughter trailing behind them, lighting the way for Eskia’s car.