The Secret History of Las Vegas

INFERNO

Midway through his life, Dante realized that he had strayed into the dark wood of error. From the look on your face I would say that you have just made the same realization.

Sunil turned to the person who had just spoken. He saw a middle-aged man with a bit of a paunch and large square glasses in thick plastic frames that he kept pushing up his sweaty and blotched nose.

Eugene, the man said, extending his hand.

Sunil.

They shook hands, Sunil trying not to pull away from Eugene’s strong but damp clutch.

I know, welcome to Vlakplaas. I am sorry that this was your welcome, Eugene said, waving at the group of men huddled around a barbecue pit on the hillside, drinking beer from bottles, smoking and razzing one another.

Sunil said nothing. He was struggling not to look at the dead man on the ground by the fire pit. The policemen he had ridden up with dragged him from the jeep and took his hood off, throwing it into the fire. Now he stared at Sunil with fish eyes.

Do you read much Dante, Eugene asked.

Sunil shook his head, taking in for the first time the well-read paperback copy of Inferno that Eugene clutched in one hand, a beer in the other.

You should, you know. Smart man, Dante; between him and the Bhagavad Gita, I have pretty much found the answers to most of my questions. But Dante holds a special place for me. That tortured descent, all that Catholic imagery of misery and suffering that passes for religiosity. It braces the spirit, enlivens one to the possibilities of life. Are you a philosophical man, Sunil?

Not particularly, Sunil said, taking a swig from the beer he’d been given. He couldn’t wrap his head around this bizarre conversation. An hour before he’d arrived at the dusty farm entrance, which was down an unpaved road that led to a dirty, mottled, once-white circular guard hut. Sunil had at first taken the big stain on the side to be a mud splatter, but it soon became evident that it was blood — a big spray of dry and now faded blood. Where had it come from?

The Land Rover he was traveling in also held two white plainclothes officers of C10, and a handcuffed, hooded black prisoner. He had sat next to the hooded figure for the one-hour drive from the police station in Pretoria, where he had been told to wait for pickup. All through the drive, the hooded man sniffled and moaned and cried out: jammer baas, jammer. The two officers in the front drank their beer and turned up the radio, as if no one was in the backseat. Occasionally one would yell over his shoulder, Agh, man, shut up! I don’t want any kak from you.

Now, through the gate, the Land Rover rolled into a compound with a paved road lined by trees and well-kept lawns. Several brick buildings with army regulation green doors and trimming sat behind hedgerows and flowerbeds. It was hard to imagine this place was a death camp so famous its name could make a full-grown man piss himself.

The Land Rover pulled up in front of what looked like the main building.

Listen, boy, go get set up there, one of the officers said to Sunil.

Sunil stepped out and shouldered his army regulation duffel bag. As he did a three-sixty and took the place in, flagpole and flag fluttering in the breeze, he wished that White Alice had never come into his life. Because of her he’d met Bleeker, who gave him the army scholarship to college. This he guessed was what they meant by serving the army in return for five years in an area they felt would benefit from his skills. Fuck this, his father had died fighting these people and now here he was working for them. Not for the first time, he was glad his mother was dead. Sunil had been requested especially by the commanding officer of Vlakplaas, a man whose nickname was Optimum Evil, to help reform the death camp. He couldn’t see the cells or torture rooms from where he was, but he knew they were there.

Vlakplaas in Afrikaans meant “the flat place”; a farm twenty kilometers from Pretoria, the capital, it served as the headquarters for the South African Police Counterinsurgency Unit, C10—a paramilitary hit squad that killed enemies of the state in neat, efficient operations, as far afield as Angola. Suspected terrorists were captured and brought to Vlakplaas to be tortured for information, and even turned. Those who couldn’t be turned were executed, their bodies disposed of somewhere on the beautiful grounds of this farm.

As Sunil came in the door, a pretty blond woman in khaki fatigues rose from behind a desk and approached him.

Dr. Singh, I presume, she said.

Yes, I am.

Come in, come in, we’ve been expecting you. Did you have a nice ride over? It is a beautiful drive, even though I don’t get to do it enough. I just don’t like the city, you know, all that violence. She waved him to a chair by her desk. Please sit, sit. Drink?

No, thank you, he said.

Okay, well, here’s what we need, she said, putting a pile of papers in front of him. I need you to sign and initial everywhere you see a red mark; no need to read it all, it’s standard counterterrorist issue contracts and stuff like that. Life insurance — you know, if you get killed in the line of duty. Your family will get the money. You do have a family? No? What a shame, a nice young man like you should have a family. Oh well, maybe soon. Here’s a pen.

It took Sunil ten minutes just to wade through and find all the red marks to sign next to.

All done? Good, good. Leave your bag here and I’ll have it sent to your quarters. You will be sharing with the other blacks here; their quarters are at the back. But for now, you are to go to Shed 10, which is over there, she said, pointing, and join the officers you came in with. They will take you to meet Eugene. He runs this place and he is eager to meet you.

Shed 10 was easy to find. He just followed the screams and the subsequent three gunshots. As he got to the front of the shed, which was more like a barn, the two white officers were loading the body of the hooded man onto the front of a jeep, strapping him down like an antelope carcass.

There you are, one of them said. Get in. Eugene wants to meet you.

The Land Rover roared over the rough terrain, heading out behind the farm, across a stretch of hills littered with stubby grass and rocks. The compound fell away behind them, lost in a cloud of dust and debris. Sunil noticed the ribbon of water to his left. Idyllic willows, drooping gracefully over the river, lined the entire length of it.

Vlakplaas River, the driver said. Good, eh?

Yes, Sunil said to be polite.

And now here, over beers, Eugene was asking him if he was philosophical only ten feet away from the body of the hooded man.

You like the more practical things? Maybe love? Do you have a stukkie, Eugene asked.

No, I don’t have a girlfriend, Sunil said.

More of a one-night-stander then, eh, love them and leave them, Eugene pressed on. No judgments from me.

None of that, Sunil said, taking a swig of beer.

So what do you believe in then?

I don’t know, Sunil said.

The fire in the pit was going strong and the men were roasting kudu steaks on a grill placed at an angle over the fire. The gamey smell was nauseating to Sunil.

I like you; you’re an honest man. I can see we are going to get along. When I was a child, I used to believe in God, but as the Bible says, when you become a man you must give up your childish ways, Eugene said.

So what do you believe in now, Sunil asked.

Eugene put his weathered copy of Inferno down and scooped up a handful of dirt. As in much of Africa, it was red, like a handful of blood. Even in West Africa where the surface soil was a deep black loam, if you dug a little, the red turned up, underneath everything; like the very continent’s blood: everyone was buried in it and everyone came from it. If there was an Africa, this was it. Eugene was crumbling the earth into a fine red drizzle.

I believe in this, this fucked-up land we call Africa, he said. I’m a real Boer like that. Like the Zulu or the Ndebele, I live and die for this earth. I sleep it, I dream it, I taste it, I love it, hell, I even breathe it.

I see, Sunil said.

It was hot, and flies were beginning to buzz around the dead man and the stack of kudu meat, both raw and cooked. The men were eating, drinking, and generally joking around. The mood seemed light, like any picnic Sunil had attended.

Baas, you want some food, one of the men called to Eugene.

He shook his head, never taking his eyes from Sunil’s face.

See, I’m nothing like these barbarians, he said. That’s why I brought you in. These men care nothing for Africa, even the blacks among them. They care nothing for causes. They only care about having and using brutish power. Without thinkers like me, it will all be taken from them, because that kind of brutish power cannot survive for long. It begins to feed on itself.

That takes no great insight to realize, Sunil said, swatting at a fly. If you brutalize an entire people to have your way then you must always live with the fear of retaliation; it means you can never drop your menacing guard. We can only live like that for so long before we slip up. That’s what you do have in common with these men, Dante or the Bhagavad Gita notwithstanding.

Eugene let the rest of the earth drizzle from his hands. Sunil became aware suddenly that the men by the barbecue had stopped talking. The only sound was Eugene dusting his hands off and the buzzing of flies. Then there was the unmistakable click of a hammer cocking on a gun. Sunil felt the hair on his neck rise to attention. Although he could not see who had the gun, because his back was to them, he knew it was pointed at him. Eugene looked from Sunil to the men behind him and shook his head. The hammer was released and just like that, the chatting and laughter resumed behind Sunil.

I like you, Sunil. I really need a man who speaks his mind, Eugene said, picking up his book and waving it at Sunil. So what else do you make of a man like me?

Professionally?

It would hardly be personal since you don’t know me.

And there won’t be a gun to my head?

No, no, of course not, Eugene said, smiling, eyes cold.

Sunil took a swig of beer. He knew this was a test, but he wasn’t sure how to pass it. There were a lot of metal clanking sounds coming from behind him but he didn’t turn around.

You are a man who strives for the power to control other people, he said.

But why do you think that is?

I would say it is because the striving and the power keep you from realizing just how helpless you really are. It protects you from facing the fact that others are manipulating you, that regardless of what you might claim, your philosophy is simply a way to rationalize what you do for others too afraid to do their own dirty work; that you are in a way also a victim of the apartheid state.

You are wrong about me, Sunil. Unlike men like you and even Dante here who have wandered into the dark forest of error unknowingly and who now desperately want to return to their joy, kept from it by your own demons, your ferocious beasts of worldliness, I came here to this hell by choice. Those beasts that are your terrors are my constant companions, sometimes my pets, sometimes my leaders, but never ever the source of terror. I have no terror, you see. I’m not like Dante, who has come upon the sign that asks all who enter to abandon hope. I came here to find hope. I know that I have done bad things, that I must continue to do bad things, but I do so for the ideal. For the utopia that this land was and will remain — we drove the blacks from it and we drove the British from it, and I will be damned if I will let any Afrikaner destroy it. Do you understand? This is the only thing that will last, this land, long after those fools and incontinent cowards and liars in Pretoria and Bloemfontein have been driven from power. Let me tell you, it is hard to tell sometimes who is being controlled and who is doing the controlling, and so the only way forward is to have purpose, and purpose is an ideal. That ideal can be found in heroes like Arjuna. Do you know what Arjuna means?

Sunil shook his head.

Do you know who he was?

Sunil shook his head again.

Your father, before he died, was Indian, right? You of all people should know about the hero of the Bhagavad Gita.

My father was Sikh.

Arjuna means light, white, shining, bright, Eugene continued, as though Sunil had not spoken. Arjuna is a peerless archer and a reluctant hero who doesn’t want to go to war at first because he loathes having to kill his own relatives who share a different ideology. But Krishna comes to convince him of his duty, the warrior’s duty. That was his code, which was the ideal that transformed everything Arjuna did to an act of God, to an act of the highest ethical order.

Do you think you are Arjuna, Sunil asked.

My friend, a tracker who taught me how to love this land, a Zulu, told me that there are two kinds of people in the world, farmers and warriors. You are clearly a farmer. Listen, I don’t think the blacks are savages like my friends over there by the fire. I think that they are honorable people, but in the hierarchy of food, they are wildebeests and we are lions. The lion doesn’t hate the wildebeest; he just knows he is the better. I’m not a racist, ja? Just a pragmatist.

Sunil said nothing.

Let’s get on with it! Eugene yelled at the men. Pack up the food first.

The sun was beginning to dip behind the hilltop to their west, by the river, as the men began to pack up for the night. The food was wrapped carefully, attentively even, and placed into coolers. Then more wood was gathered and the fire in the pit fed until it raged, more bonfire than barbecue. The earlier grill had been removed and from the grass a larger one had been picked up and erected over the fire.

Did you know, Eugene said, that Dante describes hell as a funnel-shaped cone that bores into the center of the Earth? Like a wormhole, no pun intended. I like that image, the idea of descending concentric rings of hell, each ring a different level of sin, each ring its own kind of torture populated by its own depraved souls, and, at the very center, Satan himself. Now that’s an interesting being, an angel with a sense of purpose. He doesn’t whine like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane when the hard thing has to be done. He just gets on with it. He knows that he is Jesus’s dark soul, his unconscious, and his id, that there is no meaning to any of this, no God, without him. Now, that’s a sense of purpose.

So you are both Arjuna and Satan, Sunil asked.

Yes, you could say that. They are both balanced between their human ideal and their animal baseness. Nature worships harmony. I told you, this land is my purpose. It has taught me everything; Dante and the Gita just provided the language. My father worked as a ranger in Kruger trying to protect wildlife from poachers. He taught me that the only people who really respect and understand this world are the Bushmen; they know everything must live in balance, in harmony with everything else. Have you seen a lion stalk a wildebeest? It does so with respect. It takes its time and tries to make its kills as elegant and efficient as possible. When it kills it doesn’t do so for sport or because its feelings have been hurt, it kills for hunger and protection, nothing more. And in this way it brings honor to its victims. And what it doesn’t eat of its kill, the land takes back, using scavengers from the four-legged kind down to the microscopic kind. Nature uses everything in a cycle of honor, each thing in its right place. I told you that I am different from these men. When I kill a man, or a woman, it is with regret and honor. I never dispose of their bodies; I return them to the honor of nature’s use. I feed their bodies to the scavengers; I grind their bones up and fertilize the flowers in the compound. I pray when I do this, not in a Christian way, but in the way of Bushmen, I say to the souls of the dead, You can leave this place now and return in another form because you have been honored. I am an elegant and efficient killer, and a warrior with the highest ideals; I take no joy in my work, except when it is done with honor. This in the end is the truth of this land.

Sunil swallowed. And these men, he asked. I can’t imagine what they would do that could be worse.

Watch, Eugene said.

The men had gathered axes and machetes and they were systematically chopping the hooded man into pieces, which they threw onto the grill.

They are not—

Going to eat him? No, they are disposing of him. They don’t care that he be returned; they care only that he not be identifiable. It will take about six hours to finish burning his body; highly inefficient, and what is worse is that there is no honor in this.

And yet you let it happen.

All great generals know that they must allow their men sport. All work and no play is bad for morale. This is their sport.

Sunil watched the policemen drinking as the hooded man burned, white and black together, united in this terror.

Do you know why that man died, Eugene asked.

I cannot imagine, Sunil said.

He wouldn’t give up information about the location of ANC terrorists that he was known to associate with. That’s why you are here. I want you to find ways with psychology and drugs to improve the interrogations. I don’t want to waste bodies. I want you to turn prisoners into informants. Only those who must die will die. I don’t enjoy the slaughter; I am a warrior, not a killer.

I traveled from Pretoria with that man, Sunil said. He begged for his life the entire journey.

He wasn’t a man to them, Sunil. It’s like this: every creation story needs a devil. For the Boer, the blacks are the demons.

The man never confessed, Sunil asked, the fire dancing off his eyes and skin, reflecting in Eugene’s glasses.

Never, Eugene breathed, something like respect in his voice.

Then I am just like that man, Sunil said.

How so?

Can I tell you a story?

Sure, Eugene said. I like stories. They help us bond.

Bertolt Brecht told of a European peasant caught by the Nazi invasion. An SS officer commandeers the man’s house and tells him, From now on, I will live here and you will serve me and attend to my every need, and if you do not, I will kill you. Do you submit to me? The peasant doesn’t answer but spends the next two years serving the SS officer in every way. Then the Russians come and liberate the town. They gather all the Nazis in the square, and just before they are shot, the peasant comes up to the officer and answers the question that he greeted with silence two years before. No, he spits at the officer, I will not submit to you. This is the end that awaits apartheid.

Perhaps, Eugene said, and if I am that officer in your story, I will go happy knowing that all I did was in service of a higher ideal and has already been transformed into God’s work. But for now, we need to end some of this killing. Will you help me?

No, but I will help men and women like him, Sunil said, pointing to the burning man. I don’t expect it to be transformed into God’s work, but only hope that mercy may find me before the end of my life.

Welcome aboard, Eugene said.

Together they stood in silence, for the next six hours, watching the burning man.