pulled myself together and began reading with concentration. I had to get moving before anything relevant slid out of sight forever.
A little later it was pretty clear what had happened here. A huge government contract had been given to a consortium to build a large shopping mall outside Thokoza. These were people with serious political connections, of course. Not like Lesego, who diligently and almost perversely evades political patronage. Everyone had been happy, champagne and smiles all round.
But then, unaccountable delays and complications ensued. Licences of all kinds were not secured, building materials not delivered, labour not paid. Overseas partners pulled out, some of the local subcontractors vanished. The money was a point of endless dispute. Fingers had been pointed in different directions, allegations made against various people but nothing much had seemed to come out of all this. There was that hollow, uncomfortable feeling that no one really wanted to find out anything, however sharp and indignant everyone sounded.
The whole thing had been a vague sensation in the newspapers, I now remembered. I had read about it without much interest.
And now the mall was a half-finished monstrosity; like the abandoned gold-mine dumps, it blighted the landscape. A monumental insult erected by Sandile Nkosi, who was right in the middle of the fiasco.
Chapter 4
“He is an interesting individual, for sure. If only because he is such a common type today, almost normal,” Ditoro said quietly.
“Vicious, vain, vulgar and ignorant, and the people love him,” Thekiso said in a whispery monotone, as distant as if it was coming from the next room.
“But he has brains and is as slippery as ten sewer rats,” Ditoro, who knows about sewer rats, continued. He had been chasing them for much of his former life as a policeman. Although he spoke quietly, he was a big man whose presence inspired respect and apprehension. On his off days he sometimes broke out in bright colours and a joyful liveliness, but here at work he slumped into dark, shapeless clothing and something like hopeless gloom.
We were sitting in Thekiso’s office, where he was inspecting his favourite wall for fresh and interesting blemishes. Wednesday is never a good day here for starting new business. People want to get on with what they were already doing and hopefully conclude before the weekend. But I had requested this meeting and I think they were glad that I was showing a bit of the old enthusiasm, and were therefore willing to accommodate me.
“I thought it would take you a few days to take it all in,” Thekiso said with none of the same haste he had urged the day before.
“I knew some of it beforehand. It was a hot topic in certain sections of the media for a few days or weeks, then died down.”
“That’s right. So what do you do now?”
“I wanted to know if you could give me some background about the people involved here, especially Nkosi. I will then have my old comrade, the friendly journalist with the Jozi Journal, tell me a few things that were not in the public domain, things they did not publish. The rest I can find out by going into their back copies online.”
“You still see her?”
“In the normal course of my duties, yes.”
“As I have said before –”
“I know,” I interrupted him. “We should never trust journalists completely. They can turn around and make us their big story. But I want to look at everything from all possible angles.”
He grunted and shrugged, like the damage had already been done. Disconcerting, but I let it pass.
“All right, let me get on then,” Ditoro said with some impatience and got to his feet. He disliked the repetitious arguments that went on between Thekiso and me. “He was a common street thug in his youth. He is forty-four now. Married but separated.”
“Separated?” I asked sharply. “That woman who was there when Lesego . . .”
“That was her,” Thekiso said softly when I faltered. “She is a mother. They have lived apart for some years now and she’s not part of this.”
“Then why not divorce?”
“I can’t answer that; there are many other couples in the same situation and their reasons are all different. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I told them and my trembling inner self.
“Anyway,” Ditoro jumped in, in a rush to get over the awkward moment, “he had two known living children – one is now dead – and four others unacknowledged. A thief definitely, a rapist probably, and maybe even a murderer. Some suspect he was an informer for the previous government, but nothing can be proven. He was definitely arrested a few times but was never charged. He always seemed to be able to slip through the prison bars.”
“A slippery individual,” I said encouragingly. I was free to hate the man being described.
“He reinvented himself though, together with many others, just before the change of government. He became a loud noise in the street marches and political rallies,” Ditoro went on.
“No one said anything, questioned his past?”
“What was there to say and who was to say it? It was in the middle of the liberation euphoria. The release of prisoners, return of exiles and so on. It was the time of forgetting and forgiving. He’s smart. But he got involved in some crooked deals all the same, like a shady pyramid scheme that collapsed, as expected. He managed to get away from that one while his partners got arrested – very intelligent.”
“He is not intelligent,” Thekiso objected from his solitude. “He has only grasped the basic tools of surviving in a particular society at a particular period in history. The animals we keep as pets can do the same. It’s no indicator of intelligence or even foresight.”
“Maybe of animal cunning,” I said aloud, going along with Thekiso. Seeing how we humans have mismanaged our affairs so far, it might not be such a bad thing to have a bit of animal cunning, as a backup.
Ditoro ignored us and paced the room as if matching his words to his heavy steps.
“Anyway, he re-emerged as someone new a little time later. Had a lot of money from sources unknown but probably from his share in the pyramid scheme. He became the benefactor and patron saint of his community.” He stopped, cleared his throat and followed Thekiso’s gaze to the wall. “The local-bad-boy-does-good type of thing,” he continued in his usual unflappable tone. “Built small parks for children, Christmas parties for them and the aged, feeding schemes, a few bursaries here and there, but still finds time to run a nightclub that serves as a late-night strip joint and brothel.”
“He never changes,” I said with grim satisfaction. “Remind me. How does this pyramid thing work?”
“Why should he? It works for him. He had been so successful that naturally he began to believe in his own special star,” Ditoro said with unusual vehemence and resumed his pacing. “About the pyramid scheme, some call it the Ponzi scheme. Don’t ask me why.”
“Charles Ponzi,” Thekiso said.
“What? Who is he?” both Ditoro and I asked almost simultaneously,
