Tom Lanoye

Fortunate Slaves

Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Tom Lanoye, 2013

English translation copyright © Michele Hutchison, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Corbis/HH

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Gelukkige slaven in the Netherlands in 2013 by Prometheus, Amsterdam

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-036-3

The translation of this book was funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren—www.flemishliterature.be)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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1. Buenos Aires

what would mr. bo xiang think of this? Tony wonders anxiously in San Telmo, as he presses the soles of his feet against the bedpost, bracing to give his labour of love more traction and depth. With good results. The hitherto polite, restrained panting of the matron beneath him turns into moaning. Something low and bestial. Unreserved.

In social intercourse, Mrs. Bo Xiang is the picture of reserve. The eternal smile that people ascribe to Orientals has been bestowed upon her. The grainy layer of pale make-up she smears on her face each morning, over her shaven eyebrows, shows more and more cracks as the day progresses, as fine as the veins in an antique tile. They follow a double pattern: her age lines and the craquelure of her smile. A double map, a palimpsest of an eventful life.

God knows what that poor thing has had to go through in that outsized country of hers, thought Tony, a little less than a week earlier, in the plane on the way over, as he observed his benefactress from close up. She lay next to him in her reclined seat, hanging crookedly in her seat belt, an insect caught in a web, her eyes closed, her small mouth obscenely open. From time to time, she snored or smacked her lips. The Boeing thundered through the freezing, anoxic atmosphere in a composed, almost noble manner.

It was Tony’s first opportunity to inspect Mrs. Bo Xiang undisturbed from this close up. There were several holes in her earlobes. Just before falling asleep, she’d removed her latest purchase—a pair of silver butterflies with a diamond on each wing—and put them away in her Louis Vuitton handbag, along with her rings, her bracelets, and her Breitling watch. What was she afraid of? Pickpockets in first class? Her breath smelled of peppermints and her teeth looked like ivory jacks that had seen too much use. Tony had to stop himself from putting his hand over the obscene, wrinkled mouth until the breathing stopped.

A hell of a life, he thought at the same time, not without compassion—to be born in China, shortly after the war, a woman. He inhaled through his mouth to escape the odour of peppermints. Starvation, refugees, propaganda. Days and days of banging on pots and pans until the sparrows fell out of the sky in exhaustion. Now and again, a purge, or a week of euphoria. How many bullet-riddled bodies had she seen, how many show trials and rapes? And still she carried on smiling from early in the morning until late at night. Perhaps she was already growing senile. And that’s the person giving me orders, that’s the person responsible for my fate. His hand itched again.

But he turned his gaze away from her and asked the stewardess for a gin and tonic. Bombay Sapphire, please. A double.

In daylight, observed from a distance, Mrs. Bo Xiang resembled a flawless porcelain doll, as white as gristle. She drew on new eyebrows, blacker than engine oil. She painted her lips with a red that shone like the bodywork of an Italian sports car. She had everything her heart desired. She bought her clothes in Paris, her shoes and handbags in Singapore, her smartphones and cameras in Tokyo. Plastic surgery was the only thing she didn’t subscribe to. The one time her smile vanished was when Tony cautiously enquired about it.

Four days ago, as they strolled along the widest boulevard on earth, the Avenida 9 de Julio, her countenance had already cracked by mid-morning. She had burst into peals of laughter. Just like that. All Chinese people had that affliction, Tony knew by now, and the women most of all. A high-pitched, hiccupping laugh with a vengeance. He wondered whether there was a reason for it. Usually, there wasn’t.

That same morning, during their very first breakfast on Argentinian soil, Mrs. Bo Xiang had explained her plans. This short trip would be no beach holiday, she’d warned. Idleness was the privilege of the young. She had no time to lose. She wanted to tick off as many sights as possible, with Tony as her guide. She was giving him a free hand. Wherever he went, she would go. It was all the same to her. Even so, she handed him a brochure with the top attractions circled in red pen. And, oh yes! Dear Tony! She laid her small, ringed hand on his. The claw was heavier than expected and felt cold and clammy—a bunch of wilted asparaguses just out of the fridge, pale against the Prussian-blue breakfast linen, the little vase containing a rose, the bowl of fresh strawberries. At the time, they were still staying in the Hilton on the Puerto Madero, the spectacularly modernized harbour district. Don’t worry, dear Tony! The claw gave a couple of soothing pats and then remained on his hand. She’d pay for everything! As though she didn’t always pick up the bill. There were more credit cards than banknotes in her purse, but there were a lot of banknotes, all the same. A whole range of currencies. She showed them off like a pimply boy with a handful of football stickers. Her complete collection—at home in Guangzhou—included a banknote in the largest denomination from every country she’d ever shopped in.

They don’t have the same sense of pride as we do, Tony thought, nodding amicably as he carefully extracted his hand from under the claw. They imitate us. They imitate everything. They are delighted to forsake who and what they are, and they don’t feel threatened for a second, because they are convinced they’ll win in the long run. We think in centuries, they think in millennia. We swear by the loner, they know better. They believe in hordes. In billions. No one is closer to the cockroach. He startled himself with his vitriol, but didn’t tone down his thoughts. He quickly stuffed two strawberries into his mouth and stood up, shoving his chair away with the backs of his knees.

When she started to laugh on the Avenida 9 de Julio, Mrs. Bo Xiang was hanging on his arm. Her chubby flank was pressed against him as she pointed, gasping like an overgrown adolescent, at the Obelisco—a tall, chubby memorial column which rose up pontifically in the middle of the boulevard, as misplaced as a strap-on penis on a child’s belly. Patriotic borders and lawns had been laid around the foot of the obelisk, full of flowers and dog shit. This was it, then, the famous Plaza de la República. The obelisk was not rounded off at the top, but crowned with a small, comical pyramid. If you felt compelled to worship a penis as a totem of your fatherland, Tony groaned—sullen and pale from the jet lag—at least do it right. Chop off that pyramid and put a proper bell end on top. He had woken up with a headache and a nauseated feeling, neither of which had subsided after the much-too-saccharine breakfast coffee, the strawberries, and the croissants that had been cloyingly sweet, too.

On either side of the Obelisco, hundreds of cars came and went along a full twenty lanes of traffic, most of them honking angrily. It wouldn’t take much more to turn his headache into a migraine. He had lived in Jakarta for a few years during his peregrinations, and in Cairo, and Bangkok, so he was used to infernal traffic, but this was different. This exuded menace. He didn’t belong here. He knew it, and this city knew it. It was already about to turn on him.

None of the hundreds of passers-by gave the unusual couple a second glance. Businessmen, young mothers, begging Falklands War vets, skateboarders, cops in short-sleeved shirts with sweat rings under their armpits and truncheons in their belts… No one gave anyone a funny look here, Tony chuckled to himself. Harried indifference is an asset. Or not. This was it, of course: the famous Argentinian cool. The gaucho’s unflappability, the baccy-spitting cowboy who still believed he was descended from the conquistadores. The Indian-killer with his bow legs and his unshaven chin, his leather hat, his metal yerba maté cup, his incomprehensible Spanish. Perhaps they’d learned from their cattle to wear that indifferent expression. Socializing or flirting was for later, for after work, after the heat, in the new heat of the wood fires in the grill rooms where they would devour half a bull each, just for starters.

After that, they’d withdraw, as pissed as newts, to their shady milongas, with their cheap wine, their sweaty accordion music, and their spastic dance steps, until daylight dawned. Ridiculous. What were tango dancers but a pair of tangled-up flamingos with epilepsy? Tony felt a surge of deep animosity, bordering on disgust. He’d already felt it the week before, when he’d opened his first tourist guide. ‘City of roasted sweetbreads with Malbec!’ ‘Mysticism and romance immortalized in timeless music!’ Each article came down to the same thing: glorified folk dancing and glorified barbecuing. Nobody mentioned the dictators and their coups, though they drooled all the more over their wives.

The only one on the Avenida who seemed bothered by this odd couple—a young gringo in designer jeans accompanied by a Chinese pygmy woman, hung with jewels and laughing like a lunatic—was a barking poodle. Clearly a creature with a pedigree. That’s just perfect, Tony groaned. As he’d predicted, this place was ‘Europe squared’. Even a dog was a status symbol. Yelpers like that didn’t go down well with Muslims or Asians. Let alone blacks. They knew what a dog was for: to ignore or kick. The beginning of all civilization.

The poodle tugged, barking peevishly, at its incredibly long lead. The lead kept being pulled taut between the collar around its neck and the belt around the midriff of its escort: a sturdy, bespectacled girl barely twenty years old in a lemon-yellow top, lime-green hot pants, and dirty gym shoes. A princess from the upper middle classes, Tony guessed. Today a prissy student, tomorrow the petulant wife of an oil baron or a meat millionaire. She was wearing a pair of showy white headphones, the jewellery of contemporary youth, and her unbound breasts bobbed around boldly. There were four more leashed show dogs attached to her belt: the biggest was a pure-bred German shepherd, the smallest, a kind of chihuahua. It might also have been a rat. She was already the third of this type of dog walker they had encountered. Most of them were walking. This bespectacled girl was jogging, surrounded by her pack like a heavenly body with insane satellites. Only the poodle remained behind, barking angrily at Tony, bracing against the tugging lead each time: a mutineer, an Argentinian rebel, a four-legged gaucho.

It didn’t stand a chance and was dragged along, tug by tug, once almost choking, to the renewed merriment of Mrs. Bo Xiang, who, after the Obelisco, now pointed annoyingly at the animal. Chinese people point at absolutely everything, Tony sighed. Except other Chinese people.

The girl with the dogs bobbed off into the crowd and disappeared. Mrs. Bo Xiang shook her ornamental porcelain head and snickered something in Chinese. Tony nodded without asking what she meant. He was just glad she was still enjoying herself. The first attraction he’d wanted to take her to—a guided tour of the Teatro Colón, one of the largest opera buildings in the world—turned out to be closed due to a union protest. In front of the entrance, a delegation of enraged comrades was making a racket with cowbells, panpipes, Inca drums, and firecrackers. What was it with this city and its cacophony? He apologized to Mrs. Bo Xiang, but she seemed to find the carry-on quite normal, even enjoyable, as though Tony had planned it all. She radiated happiness. Perhaps, Tony shuddered, she sees it as an homage to her communist origins. He quickly coaxed her away, before she got it into her head to go and shake the hands of the entire delegation of strikers, or hand out money to them. That woman was capable of anything.

She willingly let herself be guided away on his arm, smiling gratefully. He was almost convinced he could hear the layer of foundation cracking.

Her good humour stayed afloat even in the graveyard, a few hours later, when it turned out that Tony had made a mistake. Evita Perón was buried somewhere else.

He should have known. It had taken them half an hour to get there. Taxis were so cheap and so abundant here that the chauffeurs were all too eager to misunderstand you so that they could rack up a few extra kilometres. Or was it a genuine misunderstanding? Tony had asked for ‘the cemetery with the famous dead people’ because he’d forgotten the name of the neighbourhood. Perhaps the driver had liked music more than politics when it came to cadaverous heroes.

There was no lack of heroes in this sweeping boneyard: a genuine park with broad lanes, each one cobbled, each one bordered with graves that looked like miniature houses. They even had windows and ornamental doors—mausoleums custom-made to the dimensions of an extinct bourgeoisie. All of them built in the most flashy of materials, from marble to granite, topped off with a frieze of angelic hosts or a bust of the departed. The richest had had themselves anchored full length to the world they should have left behind. Fossils of bygone glory and self-importance. There were soldiers, eternally saluting in their dress uniforms of bronzo bombarda, and there were musicians, seated on chairs with bandoneons on their knees, frozen in everlasting ambiance. Nostalgia on a pedestal.

The undisputed high point was the grave of Carlos Gardel, Tango King, singer-songwriter of ‘Mi Noche Triste’ and ‘Volver’, not to mention skirt-chaser, chain-smoker, and patron of Café Tortoni. He went down in a plane at the age of 45. His massively attended funeral disrupted traffic for an entire day. And that was in 1935. Tony remembered it all from his Michelin guide. He had still managed to hit a goddamn tourist jackpot!

And indeed, Mrs. Bo Xiang stood happily admiring the statue. Behold the eternally youthful, perpetually singing dandy, flaunting a bow tie and the smile of a Latin lover. He stared haughtily over their heads at the graves on the other side of the path, shining as though he had just been polished. There were fresh bouquets at his feet, and the wall behind him was adorned with copper plaques and enamel tiles covered in sayings, expressions of gratitude, and love poems written by admirers, most of whom had been born long after their idol’s plane had crashed. Someone had threaded a white carnation through his bronze buttonhole. A real cigarette butt smouldered between the brownish-green fingers of his right hand.

Mrs. Bo Xiang got her compact red titanium Sigma camera out of her Louis Vuitton, peered through the lens, and gestured frantically with her free hand for Tony to stand closer and closer to the statue. She wouldn’t calm down until he had climbed up onto the knee-high tomb and posed next to Gardel, mirroring his stance, right down to the cigarette in his left hand. Her gadget chirped like crazy—she had chosen an electronic bird sound for each snap. She had already taken shots of Tony at the gate of the Casa Rosada on the Plaza de Mayo, and next to the colourful houses on the Caminito in La Boca.

‘You look exactly like him,’ she crowed now.

Without breaking his pose, Tony shouted back that all Westerners were as alike as peas in a pod. To his irritation, Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t contradict him. No, she sank laboriously to her knees, so that she could take a picture of him and his doppelgänger from below.

Tony surveyed the boneyard as though it were a battleground. His headache finally seemed to be abating. He liked this peace and quiet. It made him long again for the sea, with its unbounded horizon. Three hundred and sixty degrees of nothing, as far as the eye could see. He missed the calm of the lengthy journeys on the cargo ships and cruise boats on which he’d been able to pass more than twenty years of his life unnoticed, sometimes with hard labour, sometimes with paid services of another kind, but always with total independence and a consoling insignificance. He had learned to live like a nomad, a compulsive tramp, a stowaway without a destination, and that life had suited him well.

He had left behind his home country with a bitter kind of pleasure. He went back sporadically just to keep the mass of paperwork at bay. What good are roots anyway, except as a way of wangling a valid passport? He had burned all his other bridges, starting with the frayed rope ladders that could have taken him back to his once-promising youth. He had nothing more to do with the scum and the provincial backwater that had spat him out. The spitting out was mutual. No one asked after him anymore; no one had anything to do with him. It felt like a kind of recognition. Tony had once been brought up to be successful, loved, an exemplary human being. He had become none of the three, and he flaunted it the way a fisherman shows off his catch.

His father’s legal practice, sold to a complete stranger? Good riddance. He may have been cheated out of his inheritance, but that was just one less thing to worry about. His only motto was one he’d hated as a child because his family had professed it so sanctimoniously, though he’d given it a different turn. ‘Live in the shadow, you’ll live happily there’ had become ‘Live in the shadow, less shit will rain down on you there.’ He didn’t need any other principles or tenets than that. He had learned to love emptiness, the overwhelmingly infinite world which surrounded his home soil like a desert around a sewage cover.

A man has to feel at home somewhere, even if it’s in the void.

‘Please concentrate!’ Mrs. Bo Xiang cried, her free eye shut. ‘And look at me!’ She kneeled down on the cobblestones before her idol, and it wasn’t Gardel. ‘Smile!’

Tony looked at the family standing behind her, waiting for her to finish taking pictures. He saw himself through their eyes. A hooligan with his feet on a beloved tomb, a barbarian posing next to a titan as an equal. The father of the waiting family coughed for the third time. He tightened his fists around the handles of a wheelchair in which an old man with a razor-sharp mouth and two cataract-filled eyes sat muttering away. The mother exhorted her two plump daughters, each of them blushing and holding bunches of flowers in her hand, to be patient. She didn’t raise her voice but her face spoke volumes. The encyclopaedia of scorn.

Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t notice. She carried on taking pictures. No angle was too bizarre for her. She didn’t quite go so far as to lie down on her side. Tony felt more and more ridiculous, and not only because of the designer jeans she’d bought for him during the stopover in Doha, which stretched grotesquely over his crotch and around his waist. What was she going to do with all these photos, he wondered. A slideshow with Ástor Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’ as accompaniment? Entertainment for her husband? They called each other every day, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Xiang. Intercontinentally, sometimes for half an hour at a time. They laughed together. What were they saying in that filthy Chinese of theirs? Were they talking about him? What were they plotting?

Mrs. Bo Xiang noticed Tony’s awkwardness. She let her Sigma drop and looked him in the eyes, tenderly, it seemed. It wouldn’t have taken much for her to climb up on the gravestone, too, pinch his cheek between her thumb and forefinger and softly shake it back and forth.

One of these days, Tony thought, I’ll wipe that smile off her porcelain face.

*===*===*

things turned out differently. By the end of the week, Mrs. Bo Xiang had even persuaded him to fuck her. No pain, no gain.

Tony had stopped resisting and given in. It had been on the cards for long enough. At a certain point, refusing became more dangerous than consenting. That was another thing he’d learned on the cruise ships he’d served on. Protecting your job security, and in some cases your hide, could take all kinds of forms. Love was the least objectionable. Love is always good, even though it’s rotten to the core.

During their walk, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang had discovered San Telmo and taken it into their hearts. The antiques shops and the charming covered vegetable market in crumbling art-deco style certainly had something to do with that. Fading glory lends itself more to romance than new buildings.

Mrs. Bo Xiang, in particular, radiated joie de vivre once again. For anyone living in the lap of luxury, being confronted with deprivation is an unbeatable aphrodisiac. They instantly swapped the Hilton for a bed and breakfast in a ramshackle town house, cheerfully renovated on a tight budget in daring colours, and just by the Plaza Dorrego, the navel of San Telmo. This was the plaza where beggars and musicians held court from early in the morning, where every afternoon a flea market uncoiled, and where every evening an amateur dance display took place among the terrace tables of the many cafes and restaurants. Tango, tango—el amor!

Their own mating dance, on the second floor of the mansion, began staidly. In the tepid, heavy afternoon air, barely circulated by the ceiling fan, there was a wistfulness. Their journey home was approaching. Tomorrow they’d be checking out. Any kind of parting is sweet sorrow. The timid respect which with Tony had originally treated Mrs. Bo Xiang inhibited the intensity of their relationship.

But not for long. Intimacy breeds trust, and that trust increases as shame is reciprocally cast aside. Once Tony had braced his feet against the bedstead and slowly increased his tempo, a languid, noisy euphoria overcame Mrs. Bo Xiang and her worn-out bones.

Tony was embarrassed for her. The poor woman was lying prostrate and defenceless, her legs spread, one side of her face pressed into the pillow. Her whole body rocked backward and forward, assisted by her mild corpulence. Her face rocked along each time, as though she were trying to spread out the stiff pillow, using her head as a rolling pin. Just now she’d pulled the other pillow under her midriff to keep her hips raised without getting a cramp. When love comes knocking, you have to open your door to it. Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t take any persuading.

Just how old is she? Tony wondered. She smelled of violets and green tea. I really don’t get it, he groaned inwardly, without sacrificing momentum. What do all these old bags see in me? Some objects attract flies, or iron filings. I’m a magnet for the motherly type. Or even the grandmotherly type, of late. What does Mrs. Bo Xiang think I’m going to help her achieve, or recover? Or does she enjoy humiliating me? Is that the role I’m playing? Despite the heat, he systematically increased his pace.

The euphoria beneath him swelled just as systematically. ‘More,’ Mrs. Bo Xiang whispered in English, for the second time now, a little louder than the first time. ‘Yes. I want more.’

Why didn’t she say it in her own language if she was really that euphoric? Why did she use the lingua franca of the American porn industry? Did elderly women watch sex on the Internet nowadays, too? At each of Tony’s thrusts, Mrs. Bo Xiang’s shiny red lips poked out sideways between her squashed face and the stiff pillow. Her lipstick was coming off, her foundation, too. What she liked, she’d confided to him on one of the previous days, was being bitten in the scruff of her neck ‘during the act’.

Tony didn’t do it. On top of everything else, he was supposed to bite her? There were limits. ‘I want more,’ Mrs. Bo Xiang whispered, even louder this time. Tony was having more and more trouble empathizing. And the hardest part was still to come, he realized. The seduction and the foreplay were bearable; the action itself was a matter of not thinking too much and doggedly keeping at it. The aftercare, that was a terrible prospect. What could they possibly say after the deed? Two beings who were so different?

‘More, Tony. More.’

Outside, the metropolis was taking its siesta. Spray trucks were driving around to mist up the pavements and beat down the dust. The heat managed to penetrate everywhere all the same, air conditioning or no air conditioning. It clamped around you like a truss. A shortness of breath was stealing up on him. Tony pounded away, anyway. What was the problem? It was years since he’d taken so long. It wasn’t just the smell of violets and the creaking of the bed. It was also Mrs. Bo Xiang’s husband and the fortune that Tony owed him, of course. How could he have been so stupid? Roulette wasn’t his thing. He should have never allowed himself to be seduced. Not then, not now. Not ever.

‘More! More!’

Don’t you worry, my dear Tony, Mrs. Bo Xiang had said to him a week earlier, shortly before falling asleep next to him in the Boeing with her mouth obscenely open. She was drunk; she’d had one gin and tonic after the other. You’ll figure it out, you and my husband. He can be very generous and forgiving. If I ask him. And if you help me. Can you help me, Mister Tony? To avoid answering, he’d kissed her hand. She had pulled her hand away, giggling, and then kissed the back of it herself. Her own hand. With closed eyes, ardently, protractedly, not quite licking the place he’d kissed. It wasn’t the first trip she’d taken him along on. She’d dragged him to Monaco, and even to Dubai. He’d always managed to ward off her advances. But not anymore. He knew what was coming. Buenos Aires would be his Waterloo.

‘More!’

Just before falling asleep on the airplane, she’d stroked his cheek. She’d never done that before. It felt like he was being branded. ‘My Tony is a little damaged, that’s all’ she’d jabbered. It sounded like a verdict. ‘Damaged,’ as in damaged goods. As in ruined. What was she then? A perfect peach? An immaculate saint?

‘More!’

Stop whining, Tony thought, keep up the tempo and everything will come good. This is the fate of everyone who gets into debt; plenty of people are worse off than me. While thinking this, he looked at himself in the full-length mirror next to the bed. It was a shocking sight, the way he was mounting that hillock of flesh. Pale, veal-coloured, quivering flesh.

‘More!’

I should learn to keep my eyes shut, Tony thought. But he carried on watching, focussing on his own pumping hips. Where his belly had once been taut, all muscle, now, in shock, he counted three rolls. I should learn to close my eyes to everything, he thought, and I have to stop complaining about my life. I’m not important enough to complain. I’m a louse in other people’s bedsheets, nothing more. The traces I leave behind won’t survive the first wash. So what? What have lice got to complain about, except that they exist? Where there’s blood, there’s hope. No self-pity! Everyone has to pay. Everyone looks for a scapegoat and everyone longs for a saviour, there isn’t anything else to be said about life. Give up grousing and ejaculate.

But he didn’t ejaculate. His breathing grew frantic, his floundering took on a desperate note. Liberation was a long time coming.

Mrs. Bo Xiang, whose head was still pressed solidly into the pillow, didn’t take it personally. She began to help. She grubbed back up at him, harder and harder. The sounds she was making no longer resembled anything like words. The bed squeaked as though it were about to collapse. It was a long time since anyone had enjoyed themselves so much in Tony’s company, and thanks to him, too.

He tried to pay back her efforts by trying even harder, but alongside desperation, melancholia began to delay his climax. What was he doing here?

And what else could he do but give in to that melancholy? Perhaps, moving forward on autopilot, he’d be able to achieve what he couldn’t if he thought about it too much. Disassociation, the mind breaking free from the body, didn’t have to be all bad.

My God, he thought to himself—eyes closed, his body making love unabated—how wrong I was about this city! Buenos Aires is fantastic! The past week seemed like a month, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang had seen and done so much.

They had visited a theatre converted into a bookshop, with the flocked wallpaper and the gilded the ceiling intact. They’d attended an equestrian show in a distant suburb, and after that, a procession in a square clamped between an ominous-looking barracks and a stinking abattoir. The difference between the two buildings had been minimal, the fiesta after the procession ecstatic.

They had explored the collection of the practically empty Museo de Bellas Artes. Rembrandt, Renoir, and Jackson Pollock all hung within arm’s reach. You could stand with your nose pressed right up to them, no guards to tell you off. They had enjoyed the fantastic wines in the working-class cafés, with their stirring music and elderly waiters. Tony had seen an old conviction of his confirmed, there. If you wanted to know if a city was worth anything, you needed to look at the age of its waiters. The young studs and teenyboppers in Los Angeles and Sydney were after big tips and a different job, the sooner the better. An elderly waiter lived only for his profession. He knew people and their impatience. He had been serving drinks and the same dishes for thirty years; he’d been listening to the same sorrows and the same gossip for thirty years without scoffing or butting in. That took wisdom, and self-knowledge, and class.

This beautiful city had class in spades. After his initial crabby resistance, Tony had completely changed his mind about tango. They’d taken an actual lesson together, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang. Mad, carefree fun that he would have simulated in the past, but which he now actually experienced. All of the foreign students were bumbling around, laughing; only he and Mrs. Bo Xiang were complemented on their efforts by the teacher—a fat queen with a pointy beard and werewolf eyebrows, shrouded in baggy black drapes that resembled net curtains, but with steel-tipped cowboy boots sticking out under them.

After that, and indeed, all the way into the early hours, they, too, washed into the dance halls—the Porteños, as the inhabitants of the largest meat market in the world called themselves. Young and old, rich and poor, all of them together. They didn’t need lessons. Dignified and frenetic, they lost themselves in the music that Tony had whole-heartedly hated a week before, but which could now touch him to the bottom of the soul he thought he had lost long ago. What had happened? What had Buenos Aires done to him? Why had he succumbed here rather than in Monaco?

Monaco had proven to be a façade. Disneyland for billionaires, a cardboard cut-out skyline, an expensive cordon sanitaire for upstart proles, sanctimoniously clean and laughably chic, an architectonic neurosis for operetta walk-ons. This city, Buenos Aires, was a city. Unabashedly dirty, sincerely impure, stubbornly recalcitrant. She didn’t beg for compliments but swept you up into her orbit. Tony realized this as, in the middle of the night, rooted to the spot and increasingly drunk, he was watching a performance by El Afronte, an orquestra típica with one singer and ten musicians. Four bandoneons, three violins, a cello, a double bass, and a piano.

They played with the refinement of a symphony orchestra and the rhythmic passion of a heavy-metal band. Tony couldn’t explain why, but when the bespectacled singer—an anomalous cross between an angular existentialist from the Paris of May ’68 and a charming rocker from ’59, and yet every inch an Argentinian—when this anomaly began to sing, tears poured from Tony’s eyes, even though he didn’t understand most of the lyrics.

Mrs. Bo Xiang, who was no less drunk than he was, cleaned up his waterworks with paper tissues. Tony let her. He capitulated, there and then. He no longer begrudged the woman what she was looking for. She was quite sweet, really. He had obliged more repulsive women than her, obnoxious battle-axes who had looked down on him because they desired him. Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t look down on him. She must have been a fresh-faced beauty once. He had been wrong about her, too. She seemed more patient and generous than he’d thought. Had she always been like that, or had she been chastened by adversity along the way, by some kind of trauma, or a series of disasters?

It didn’t matter. She was who she was, here and now, and Tony felt neither judged nor mocked by her. To his surprise, he felt grateful, even moved. He kissed her two claws in the semi-darkness of the clammy, sweaty milonga. He stroked her neck and her pierced earlobes. Casanova for beginners. She giggled like a schoolgirl—no, like a drunken cocotte in an ancient opium den, her head cocked, her narrow eyes squinting even more.

No one gave them a second glance. Tony wasn’t the only man in the buoyant company of an elderly woman. No one asked any questions, no one gave them judgemental looks, no one hissed. People took the night as it came. Tony saw a bony man dancing with an overgrown teenager—his daughter, judging by her features. A long-legged beauty with a skirt that was too short and a tragic look in her eyes. They focussed only on each other as they danced. It was more like elegant wrestling, an intense duel. If they hadn’t been clothed, you might have suspected them of public incest. They only stopped to smoke, still gazing into each other’s eyes. Finally, they walked out into the early morning, entwined, and just short of kissing.

The following day, the Calle Defensa, San Telmo’s main artery, was transformed into an elongated flea market, just as every Sunday. And there was El Afronte again, this time in the open air, performing on the steps of a church the colour of a desert, with a silly little amp for the singer. Tony’s inexplicable tears returned and, again, no one took any notice. An elderly charmer of around eighty, dressed as a gaucho, was inviting passing women to dance on the tiny balata-wood floor of about a metre square in size. Mrs. Bo Xiang refused. She didn’t let go of Tony’s arm, except to buy him a CD that El Afronte had brought out themselves. She put ten times too much money into the collection basket, acting like she couldn’t hear the singer calling after her and trying to offer her change, and pulled Tony into a neighbouring parrilla. It was the only thing she’d chosen herself for the week’s sightseeing.

Tony had even grown to love this type of folkloric grill room, part Austrian Weinstube, part Wild-West saloon. Chequered tablecloths, broad-beamed ceilings, battered wainscoting, smoky plaster. On every free spot on the wall hung the preserved head of some kind of animal, with beady eyes and two horns or a set of antlers. There was a whole stuffed cow on the pavement by the entrance.

Anyone going inside had to pass not just the stuffed cow but also the circular grilling area. It was around two or three metres in diameter. The floor and the raised edge were covered in enamel tiles; a knee-high log fire smouldered in the centre. Various animals were arranged around the languid, intense glow, as though around a nocturnal campfire in olden times. Stripped of their skins, hooves, head, and innards, and attached to iron crosses. A coven of decapitated messiahs, confessing the sins of mankind in general, and this metropolis in particular, as they slowly cooked. Hissing and scorching, they took on all the unresolved pasts, and all of history’s sorrows, before being devoured by their faithful followers, the worshippers of the flesh.

Exhausted and pouring with sweat, Tony was finally able to let himself fall forward onto the bed, next to Mrs. Bo Xiang. It was done. He felt more drained than ever before.

Mrs. Bo Xiang seemed to have calmed down, too. Tony had pulled out just in time. He had caught the proof of his climax in his right hand. He wiped it off on the side of the mattress and rolled onto his back, still panting. The synthetic scent of violets had made way for more authentic body odours. The silence was deafening without the squeaking of the bed, even though the fan and the air conditioning were still whirring away frantically.

As always after the deed, Tony was hit by contrarian sadness. Why were they leaving this place tomorrow, already? He wouldn’t have minded staying a little longer. Mrs. Bo Xiang was enjoying herself, too, wasn’t she? A bizarre vision revealed itself, an image of a possible future. The most bizarre thing was that he didn’t feel humiliated by it.

He and Mrs. Bo Xiang should come here more often. A few weeks, a few months, the whole summer. Maybe they could buy a pied-à-terre. Mrs. Bo Xiang had enough money, and he no longer had any objections. Why shouldn’t he pursue the only thing he seemed to do well without too much difficulty? All right, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang would never be a perfect match. They hadn’t had a real conversation yet; he didn’t know what her interests were; this lack of understanding was clearly mutual, and the sex bordered on the problematic. But the same went for even the most straightforward marriages. If the frequency isn’t too high, anything is bearable.

Why shouldn’t he do it—become her permanent male companion? A male geisha offering her a lot of fun, and all kinds of titbits of information, plus the occasional furtive gratification. What was wrong with that? There were worse professions and crueller pacts with the devil. At his age and with his prospects, it wouldn’t be that hard to adapt to profound servitude. And it would amaze him if Mrs. Bo Xiang vetoed the plan. He knew her well enough, by now. He turned towards her.

She lay with her head turned away from him. The poor woman must be recovering, Tony thought. Not that crazy, is it? She had seemed like a mustang trying to throw off its rider. It would take a while to catch your breath after that. At the same time, a terrible presentiment was creeping up on Tony.

He could no longer hear her breathing.

He quickly rolled her onto her back, facing him. She felt clammy but already cold, brushed from top to toe by the cool breath of the fan, which continued to rotate its wings of death above them.

Tony called her name and shook her thoroughly. She didn’t respond at all. The layer of foundation had indeed disappeared. Her face, paler than ever, had a bluish sheen. The lipstick and the mascara had left red and black streaks around her mouth and her eyes. It hadn’t made her ugly or macabre. Her face seemed frozen in deep, delirious ecstasy. Never before had Tony seen anyone radiate such intense happiness. It felt like a betrayal.

He shook the happy corpse once again. He refused to believe what was happening to both of them, and the irrepressible smile on her lips made him angrier and angrier. It was as though she were laughing at him, yet again, once more. As though she’d planned this all from the start. Not just the trip to Buenos Aires, not just the dinners, the tango lessons, the Renoirs, the Jackson Pollocks, El Afronte—but this, too. Especially this. She had used him, tricked him.

He had to refrain from punching her in the face with his balled fists. Again he shook her, as furious as he was impotent.

But all of a sudden, the happy corpse moved. It belched out a cough that was more of a rattle. For a moment, Mrs. Bo Xiang opened her eyes—two strips of shining white were all that was visible, then they closed again. What she did do, without losing her disconcertingly blissful expression, was raise one hand. The trembling claw moved slowly towards Tony, but fell halfway onto the clammy sheet.

Quick, Tony thought, fumbling for his smartphone in panic. To hospital with her! Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he wouldn’t have to call his creditor, the most famous entrepreneur from Macau to Guangzhou, and tell him his wife had just died.

2. Mpumalanga

tony hanssen couldn’t bring himself to press the trigger. He didn’t know what was holding him back the most: his fear of failure, his fear of being caught, or his realization that he—yes, he!—was about to kill another living being.

Three times, already, he’d had the rhinoceros’ right eye in the exact centre of his cross hairs while the creature was barely moving. It stood there chewing lazily, staring into space with the slow, short-sighted gaze common to all herbivores. ‘The rhino is an armoured bovine’ a blogger had written on one of the sites Tony had consulted—a site that, ironically, warned against the scourge of poaching—“an armoured bovine with two unfortunate weak spots: its eyes.”

It was these virtually blind, unprotected peepers, deeply embedded in a vortex of skin folds, that unsettled Tony and caused his finger to freeze around the trigger. He saw innocence in that gaze, and a heart-rending plea for mercy. Horses looked like that when they had just been wounded or beaten, as Tony had once been forced to witness in Provence, not far from his former holiday home. Two men were flogging a worn-out draught horse that stoically put up with the rain of blows. All of a sudden, they’d had enough, and raced off, arguing.

Tony had been so aghast that he hadn’t tried to stop the brutes, something he would feel guilty about for years. At crucial moments, he was clearly less decisive than he would have expected himself to be. He’d walked guiltily up to the horse, which had remained rooted to the spot, only its flanks quivering. He spoke soothingly to the animal without touching it, so as not to frighten it even more.

The horse neither started nor moved. It gave Tony a sad, human look. He felt doubly conscience-stricken. Would anyone—would he?—be capable of braving such torment without collapsing in pain, or going crazy with anger? This broken, tortured nag embodied something so noble, it was almost offensive. A sober heroism that Tony doubted he would ever be capable of.

Now, in Krokodilspruit, placing his finger back on the trigger, he tried to convince himself that such considerations were just mere projections, based on a deep longing for kinship. Show a man a stray cat, a cumulus cloud, or a weeping willow, and he will find something of himself in each of them. And each time it will be baloney.

And a rhinoceros was especially far from being human. A sea lion’s brain was a hundred times more sophisticated than the grey matter of this stinking colossus, which should have become extinct thousands of years ago, along with the dinosaurs and the mammoth. It was an oversight of nature that it was still wandering around, serving the tourist industry. In the Middle Ages, knights had scoured the Old World looking for unicorns—elegant white stallions that could charm virgins with the twisted horn on their foreheads. In the modern Middle Ages, the era of globalization, Joe Sixpack could lay his eyes on the unicorn’s cumbersome grey kinsman in any zoo in the world. Few people, virgins or otherwise, fainted at the sight of its squat double horns. If the rhinoceros possessed any charms, they were hidden beneath its robust hideousness, its surprising girth, its threatening, primordial strength. A primitive tank on four legs; it was hard to believe it would let itself be taken out by a single person with the right gun and a steely set of nerves.

Before the arrival of men with guns, rhinos hadn’t even had any natural enemies. Wherever they weren’t hunted, they thrived and flourished. They were the only species of tropical animal not to suffer from the Arctic winters and eternal nights of the menageries in the Far North, as long as they had creature comforts and a decent roof above their heads.

In that respect, they were only too human. All the rest was sentimental fantasy.

Tony had no time for sentiment. There was a knife at his throat. He had to bring off this appalling job or go under, himself, dragging everything he loved down with him. He wanted his family back, his reputation, and his old life. That creature, there, was the key. Backing out was no longer possible, anyway. He was already guilty of fencing, breaking and entering, and attempted poaching, plus illegal arms possession and forgery. And that was just the South African stuff.

It wasn’t fair, though. This animal was simply unlucky enough to be the first rhinoceros to turn up at the watering hole. ‘But hey, that’s life! Things are tough for everyone!’ The head of the trading floor had shouted that at the first furious clients who had telephoned to complain about Tony, and the inexplicably falling prices of the stocks recommended to them on the basis of his prognoses.

‘When the prices inexplicably rise, you lot never call. Drop dead, you bunch of losers!’ For a whole week, he’d had to maintain his defensive line of scorn and threat.

Then he’d begun to telephone Tony himself to complain about his own shrinking portfolio. He, too, called Tony a conman and a leech. Another week later, something happened that no investment fund, ministry, or rating agency had wanted to consider. The bank went bankrupt and pulled all its foreign affiliates down into the black hole with it. A fortune larger than the budget of some European industrial powers disappeared into the void, leaving behind as much of a footprint as a fart in outer space.

The night before, Tony had gone into hiding. Disappeared off the radar, along with his laptop and his twelve memory sticks. They contained encoded company secrets from throughout the years. Activities that had been kept off the balance sheets. Toxic investment products, cut with clean ones and then oversold as reliable derivatives. A list of demanding clients and their exotic bank-account numbers. A demanding client—and this could be a person, a fund, a country, or another bank—didn’t like to share where the money came from or where it was going next, but demanded the highest interest rates and, if they didn’t get them, put their eggs in the competition’s basket.

The memory sticks were supposed to be a private database, nothing more—a way of keeping track in the growing rat’s nest of data. Tony only consulted them when his laptop was offline, that was how worried he was about hackers and extortionists. He had installed all the firewalls possible, but didn’t trust any of them completely. He had never wanted to use the sticks for criminal purposes. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. His loyalty and sense of duty were too great for that. Now, in retrospect, he could no longer imagine it, but as long as he’d worked for the bank, gratitude for his job had won out over doubts about his role. He had shown respect because he thought he was respected. Extremely proud was how he had felt about his career, his salary, and his domestic happiness, even though he seldom got home before eleven at night and usually left again by seven in the morning. His weekends were one day long—unless there was a crisis, then they lasted an afternoon. His holidays in Provence were never longer than seven days, one of which was spent travelling there and another getting back. For ten years, he’d begged his wife to be patient. Just before she turned forty, he’d granted her a pregnancy. After the birth of their daughter, he’d had himself sterilized.

The more blood he shed on the altar of his profession, the more fanatically he took up its defence. He even protected his employer from slander on Internet forums, albeit under a false name. He didn’t want be known as a toady. Toadies didn’t survive in investment banks. Indispensability depended on hard figures, not on soft-soaping.

On the Net, he had used ten pseudonyms in rotation to attack each new critic. He had the nine other usernames give his first alias the thumbs up, accompanied with little commentaries that attacked the details in the post but backed up the general gist. Sometimes the discussions between his aliases were longer than their collective brawls with the slanderers. This was how he conducted his chorus of swelling counter-voices to a climax: the detractors would grow tired of the unexpectedly large blowback and go and mouth off elsewhere, about some other financial mastodon.

Their departure filled him with more disappointment than triumph. He didn’t have any other hobbies.

Now he, too, had departed. He was in exile. He took his incriminating memory sticks and his laptop with him in a sports bag bearing the bank’s logo. He wasn’t intending to do any harm with them. He wasn’t a rancorous person; he found revenge barbaric. But he didn’t feel like paying for what was on his sticks. They would be his life insurance, nothing more.

His real life insurance would be shut down a few days after his disappearance, he was certain of that. Not everyone found revenge repulsive. He had many superiors, and the urge to retaliate increased the further up the food chain you went. His good name would be dragged through the mud, his bank accounts and his credit cards blocked, his shares, warrants, and options would be confiscated or forfeited. Whatever value they still had.

He stamped his BlackBerry to smithereens in the main station in Brussels, right after he’d used the phone one last time to say goodbye to Martine, his shocked wife. He hadn’t had Klara, their six-year-old daughter, on the line. She was still with the mother from the babysitting co-op, Martine sobbed. Tony didn’t know whether to believe his wife or whether she wanted to spare Klara the trauma of two tearful parents. Klara was a hypersensitive child.

But Tony was the person who would have been able to calm her down. He and Klara often talked on the phone. They mainly talked on the phone. But there wasn’t time to convince Martine. He wouldn’t be surprised if his BlackBerry were already being tapped. I’m sorry, darling! Keep thinking of me, and tell Klara that Daddy will be back as soon as he can! He left the broken pieces and the battery in a corridor where there were no security cameras. He might be acting overly cautiously, but prevention was better than being arrested. A little fear of being followed wasn’t unhealthy for a man in hiding with a controversial record.

Next, he took the metro to the terminus of line 5, Herrmann-Debroux station. It was a twenty-minute walk from there to his hideout on the Tervurenlaan, which bisected one of the prettiest neighbourhoods in the European capital. He hadn’t dared take a taxi. He might just stumble on the one ex-Yugoslavian driver who had inherited a photographic memory from his partisan family. Or what if the Belgian security services, or who knows, even the CIA, kept lists of anyone arriving by taxi at what was supposed to be his safe haven?

No, no taxis for him. In Brussels, Tony figured, you’d stand out least as a pedestrian with a sports bag in a sweater. A sweater whose hood you could pull right over your head. He’d purchased the item especially for this purpose from a grubby little shop near the Fontainasplein. A low-key disguise. And even then, after leaving the Herrmann-Debroux, he’d be better off taking the quiet minor roads that would take him past Castle Hertoginnedal’s gardens. Pleasant footpaths, pastoral greenery on either side, almost deserted at dusk. The fewer people who noticed him, the better.

He would miss Klara and Martine like crazy. He felt no remorse about the rest. They should have checked his work more thoroughly. But they weren’t even capable of it. That was the essence of the collapse. It was also the reason that all of his peers had long been fired and he hadn’t. Nobody in the world, except for himself and a handful of confrères, understood the details, let alone the scope, of the newest generation of econometric computer models.

If Tony were honest, he had to admit that he had found it hard to keep a handle on them, himself. They had outgrown the human brain, so to speak. It wouldn’t be long before they became independently operating cancerous growths, autonomous digital organisms, spurred on algorithmically to ever-greater speeds, until they achieved perpetual motion with unprecedented purchasing power and no inhibitory mechanism at all. In virtual reality, where there were no days or nights and the free markets stayed open forever, the most diverse products could be purchased fully automatically and then immediately resold, even if they had long ceased to exist in the tangible world. Sometimes they had never existed in the first place. The market for financial derivatives was already ten times larger than the real-life global economy. The end of the tumescence was still not yet in sight.

The concept that a product must exist in order to be traded has long been outmoded. Just as old-fashioned is the idea that money should exist before you can spend it. In a career barely spanning two decades, Tony, as key witness in the front row, had been able to observe this natural progress on his ever-thinner, ever-higher-resolution computer screens. Trading had definitively freed itself from its two fetters, merchandise and money. The earth’s produce and the bargaining chips to obtain it with? They had quite simply become superfluous. Just as art for art’s sake had come into existence, now there was trading for the sake of trading. After the poet and the conceptual sculptor, now the banker and the stockbroker had entered the era of pure lyricism, in which you didn’t have to take anyone else into account, least of all the public. Lucre became hermetic poetry. Even property could be a soap bubble.

At some point a real bill would be presented, for real money. Material money, old-fashioned money. They all knew that only too well. Fearful of being the first to be cast out of the pecuniary pecking order, they had all just carried on speculating and cashing in. This schizophrenia didn’t even prove to be that unpleasant. When repression takes hold of a closed group of insiders, an enjoyable collective intoxication ensues. Especially if the concrete salaries and bonuses continued to rise in tandem with the phantom rates.

Intoxication becomes addiction, and addiction is the new Order of the Garter’s badge of honour—honi soit qui mal y pense. In no time, a newfangled nobility had risen up, a coterie of untouchables, dancing on the lid of a cesspool that gained the allure of a blocked volcano as more and more yeast and toxic gasses escaped from the underground river of global crap. Its eruption had been a surprise, nevertheless, and was felt across the globe.

On Tony’s memory sticks there were constructions and trajectories that undeniably fingered him as the architect and route planner. But why should he put on the hair shirt? He had been an errand boy, nothing more. He had followed his masters’ marching orders without insubordination. If they’d been hoping he’d be the get-out clause that would ensure their collective impunity, they had the wrong man. For the first time in his life, he was going to categorically follow their beloved principle: ‘Help yourself, no one else will.’

They had tried to hammer in the unwritten rule—‘the Law’—from his first workday onwards. Each employee, they had warned him, would be judged on his quarterly results, not on the vague feelings of satisfaction of some client or other. This was neither cheating nor negligence, they thought. In the long term, it was the client in particular, each client, who was better off with a stronger bank. That was how it worked, the Invisible Hand, the tentacle that governed the free market better and more rationally than God his Creation. Help yourself, and the whole world would be better for it.

Tony hadn’t openly protested, even though the Law clashed with his ethics as a programmer, his principles as a dyed-in-the-wool democrat, and his sense of duty as a spouse, and later, a father. And, above all, he didn’t like to be forced to do anything he didn’t believe in one hundred percent.

This internal conflict was the only thing that irritated him about his job. Ostensibly, he had submitted meekly to the banking uniform—a tie and designer labels. Internally, and that was what counted, he had continued to see himself as some kind of rebel. A latent anarchist. However fiercely he defended his corporatist pride to the outside world, it didn’t prevent him feeling on the inside that he was a missing link. An autonomous pivot between the normal tribe he came from and the master race of high finance to which he would never be admitted.

And which he’d never wanted to belong to, in the first place. He was neither one nor the other. He was himself. And that secret feeling of honour was something no one could take away from him.

His latent resistance had turned into overt revolt shortly after his department head had called him a leech and a conman down the phone. The heads of other departments had come to threaten him, too, all the way to his office, which they had never set foot in before. One of them, a red-faced brute in a double-breasted suit, foaming at the mouth, had unexpectedly taken a swing at him with a balled fist covered in rings. The fellow was probably still coked up, too. Once one party drug wears off, you need another.

Tony had been able to turn his face away in a bewildered reflex. The punch had grazed his jaw without doing any visible damage, but his cheek was still sore a week later. A humiliating phantom pain that only let up when Tony made up his mind what to do. You couldn’t even call it rebellion. It was more about finding an antidote for the poison.

From now on, he swore—as he emptied his drawers and collected his memory sticks, packed his laptop in the sports bag, not forgetting his framed photo of Martine and Klara—from now on he would live life the way he’d been brought up. Help yourself? You could say that again. He didn’t just know the programmes for embellishing bank balances and pimping up long-term government budgets.

He also knew the paths a person of flesh and blood could take to go up in smoke.

And even here, Tony thought—sweating on this hilltop in Mpumalaga at the foot of God’s Porch—even here, the Law worked. Even here, I and I alone am the master of my own destiny. He wiped his sweaty palms on his cotton safari trousers and shouldered his gun again. He hadn’t been a bad marksman during his military service. According to his training officer, he possessed all the qualities you needed to become a sniper in urban combat. Accuracy plus patience, patience, patience.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you could forget. It was a gift. The only thing you had to do was pull the trigger at the right moment. What could go wrong? There was hardly any wind; there wasn’t a single reason to believe that the bullet would miss its target. Its head had been notched with a cross so as to burst behind the eye socket on impact. The animal would die instantly with a minimum of suffering. It sounded cruel but it was humane.

For minutes on end, Tony stood there, trying to gird his loins, but again he didn’t manage to pull the bloody trigger. He was forced to watch helplessly through his scope as the rhino cow turned her head away again. She revealed the contours of her magical, majestic double horn, the price of which, per kilo, exceeded that of gold. She sniffed around suspiciously, her head back, her nose in the air. Then she bent down toward her baby. He was standing next to her, panting away after frolicking in the mud of the watering hole. The place where his own horn would grow was marked only by a small bump. How old was this calf? A few weeks? Months?

Tony let his gun drop. He couldn’t do this. His right leg was shaking, sweat was running into his eye again. His armpits stank. Thank God the light breeze was blowing in his direction, away from the watering hole; otherwise his presence would have been betrayed long before. He rested his back against the pickup and rolled his shoulders around to relax them, breathing deeply in and out. A zebra stallion brayed in the distance, a family of warthogs trotted toward the waterline at a respectable distance from the rhinos, the wading birds were still pecking away like crazy, and the colossal red sun sank ever deeper into the horizon. How much time was left until darkness fell? Which escape route should he choose?

And what would happen if he missed the eye, and the animal was only wounded? That wasn’t an option. He had to hit his target with the first shot.

He pulled himself together and aimed again.

His heart winced. The endearingly clumsy rhino calf was searching between its mother’s back legs for a nipple. It wasn’t easy, with all those skin folds and layers of fat. The calf just kept on feeling around, searching.

The rhino cow didn’t interfere. She stood there with her legs wide apart, somewhat peevishly—or was that more silly anthropomorphism? A little bird with a red beak was sitting on the cow’s hunched back, pecking away at parasites. The cow just let it all happen.

Again, Tony had her right eye in his sights; again, his finger failed him. Now he was paralyzed by the thought of the suckling calf. What would happen to a calf like that in the African night? He shuddered to think. Next to a corpse that would attract scavengers from kilometres and kilometres away? God, he wasn’t about to sentence one living being to death, but two. He could picture it already. The baby would be snatched and dragged off by a crocodile because it had dared to venture too close to the water’s edge. Or it would be attacked in the middle of the night by hyenas with slimy, already-bloodied maws. Or by a pack of Cape hunting dogs. In ten minutes they could tear an impala to bits. They might need slightly longer for such a thick-skinned baby.

He wiped the sweat off his top lip with his wrist. Should he shoot twice, then, so as to grant the baby a merciful death, too? That would be even harder for him. He was no brute. Two shots would result in lost time and a racket, with all the attendant risks. The fight against poaching had been drastically stepped up in recent years. You could read all about that online, too. The government and the game managers were co-operating more closely. As well as night vision goggles and reconnaissance planes, they now possessed the most modern forms of communication, and had even gone so far as to acquire munitions, recently—the poaching gangs were becoming so foolhardy. In the Umfolozi game reserve, the former hunting ground of King Shaka Zulu, there had been a bloody clash between a poaching gang and a surveillance patrol, with deaths on both sides and a fuss in the international press.

It could actually be considered a miracle, Tony realized, that he hadn’t already been caught red-handed. The risks he was running were outrageous. That was why he’d cooked up the plan on his own, without any nosy parkers or potential snitches, leaving no loose ends, no helpers who could turn against you on the way back. A life wasn’t worth much in this part of the world. You saw plenty of stories in the papers. A single horn sold for enough money on the Vietnamese black market to ensure a dozen families a generous standard of living for several years. It didn’t do much for his spirits. The one chance I have, Tony thought, is to act fast. I shoot, I drive over, I get out the axe, I strike, and I hurry back to the hole in the fence. The night and the unlit access roads will hide my retreat. That’s the way it has to happen. Forget that calf!

He beat off a few mosquitoes and took aim.

To his dismay, he saw the zebra stallion he’d just heard braying many times appear some way behind the hunched back of the rhinoceros cow. The stallion was the first to descend a low ridge; the herd followed in his footsteps, in dribs and drabs, in a messy line. A family of giraffes ran along with them at a slow gallop, thirsty, majestic. Tony had been so focussed on his prey, he hadn’t seen them coming. He suppressed an expletive. What else was about to turn up? A herd of gnus? A watering hole like this could be incredibly busy at this time of day, and that made all of the animals nervous. They were venturing into treacherous terrain. Lions often lay in wait here. Tony needed to strike before the rhino cow cleared off. Rhinos liked their privacy; it wasn’t in their nature to share a lair or a watering hole. There you go! The cow was getting restless. Her large pointed ears turned in all directions; she sniffed for hostile odours again. Stepping backward, she began to rock her massive head to and fro.

Tony cursed and followed her with his gun. He couldn’t get the eye cleanly in the cross hairs anymore. I should have pulled the trigger just now, he muttered. At the same time, he was overwhelmed by the hefty grace of his prey. Her nervous stamping carried all the way over to him; he saw quivers run across her dusty flanks. In her neck, under her legs, and in her groins there were folds like an old leather armchair, her armoured skin stretched between them, pockmarked like magnified, concrete-coloured orange peel. He saw the shaking of her heavy, hanging belly, the curling of her short but powerful tail. What an awe-inspiring, beautiful creature she was! Millions of years of precarious evolution and an irrepressible survival instinct.

Tony’s own Klara flashed through his mind; he’d only spoken to her a couple of times in the past year. Surreptitiously and briefly, via Skype and all kinds of false accounts and digital back doors. His wife and his daughter were the bait he would have chosen, himself. Not only the government would be looking for him. The bank had a different name by now—its relaunch had been generously subsidized by the government—and it had hired not only most of the old bank directors but most of the researchers, too. Those Judases were good at their jobs. They had given Tony hushed-up information about clients often enough, or insider knowledge that bordered on the illegal. He couldn’t be too careful.

But it was also high time he took the step toward his potential deliverance, towards rehabilitation, however bloody and difficult that step had to be. His odyssey had lasted long enough. His life’s course couldn’t just end here. He’d already given up too much, invested too much for that. He had the right to a second chance. A future, just like everyone else.

He determinedly took aim again, gritting his teeth with determination. And at last a crisp shot rang out at the foot of God’s Porch.

Tony was surprised. He wasn’t the one who had fired it. He let his gun drop and looked at the rhino in disbelief. One of her temples had been blown away, eye and all. Blood gushed out. An expert shot.

For the moment, the cow remained on her feet, shuddering. She bellowed briefly but dolefully, stamping her back legs truculently as the wading birds rose up above her, the zebras and giraffes fled around her in disarray, and the echo of the shot rumbled behind her, ever deeper and higher into the ravine.

Then she fell with a dull thud. In the distance, a songbird made its presence known again.

*===*===*

it wasn’t a large gang that had stolen a march on him, as Tony feared for a split second—his heart skipping a few beats at the thought that he had accidentally found himself face to face with half a dozen poachers. Imagine if he had been the first to shoot, and they’d fired at him after that! With their superior numbers and undoubtedly automatic weapons! He could have been dead by now. Helplessly riddled with bullets, left behind to disappear without a trace, twelve thousand kilometres from home, eaten by vultures and worms, a carcass of uncertain origin.

But soon his panic ebbed away. It was replaced by a cautious sense of relief. His opponent turned out to be a lone man, just like himself. And, judging by his bold act, he hadn’t even noticed Tony.

Even before the shot had died away, a safari jeep raced to the watering hole with a shadow at the wheel. The canvas protecting the back seat instead of a door featured the same logo as the bonnet: a graphic representation of a springbok, with the words Nasionale Krugerwildtuin underneath it.

For a moment, Tony thought that his opponent was simply better prepared than he was. This fellow hadn’t bought a stolen four-by-four in Jo’burg; he’d carjacked one in the vicinity. An entirely appropriate vehicle, which no one would frown at if it were spotted, parked on the forbidden byroads of a neighbouring safari park. Brilliantly planned.

But when the man got out, surrounded by the cloud of dust his abruptly braking jeep had thrown up, Tony’s mild admiration turned into enmity. This wasn’t fair. It was Tony’s right to be standing there, he thought, down there in that dust cloud, down there by that water. His right—after all the trouble he’d gone to to get this far, a foreigner in a remote, unpredictable country, and a numbers person at that, which meant he rarely came into contact with animals, and certainly not in order to kill them. His opponent, on the other hand, was a professional park guide. That was much easier.

Tony watched the man through his telescopic sights with increasing dismay. A black giant of around 50 with a gammy leg and bloodshot eyes, creamy white teeth, grey stubble, and a grimace that looked as gloomy as it was grim, he was wearing the uniform that came with the job: sturdy shoes, knee-high green socks, a dark pair of shorts with pockets on the thighs, and a khaki-coloured shirt with breast pockets and green epaulettes on which the reserve’s emblem was repeated in miniature.

Tony remembered that uniform only too well. He had admired it, not two years ago, during his stay in Africa’s largest wildlife park with Martine and Klara. They may even have met this man in his capacity as guard.

That possibility made Tony’s blood boil.

For ten days, they had exchanged their converted barn in Belgium for a country as big as Western Europe. They hadn’t nearly enough time—they’d realized that right away. They hadn’t seen much more than the Kruger Wildlife Park, two vineyards in Franschhoek, and the view of Table Mountain from Cape Town.

But what a staggering panorama that had been! The bright-blue bay with its V&A Waterfront, the lattice of the busy streets in the City Bowl, wedged between Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, the elongated Parade with its palm trees, the smoggy patches on the northern horizon… After the immense, ever-changing landscape that he and Martine had admired from the hire car for hours on end, this lavish vista made them feel even more regretful. They resolved to return as soon as possible and do this magnificent country justice.

Nothing ever came of their resolution. They just didn’t have time. The ten-day trip was one of the very few real trips Tony had ever allowed himself. Martine had pressed for it for so long, and the bank, back then, seemed to be heading toward double-digit profit growth. They could, briefly, do without him. For once, he even accepted the risk that, while he was gone, the newly recruited whiz-kids would steal his niche. These days they were snatched from university even before their finals and given a five-year contract straight off, in exchange for that period in their lives when they didn’t yet have a time-consuming family, but did have the endurance of an athlete. Those pups could work for two nights in a row without losing any of their enthusiasm. Well, just let them try it, the suckers. Let them muddle along without him for once. Just to play it safe, he’d stowed away a few files behind double passwords. There were others he’d failed to mention during the briefing. They’d just have to get on with it. He’d had to do that, too, when he joined the bank.

Klara had just turned four back then, during their jaunt, but two years later she still remembered the herd of elephants and the one lion they’d seen close up, not to mention the family of amusing meerkats, and the warthog with eight piglets. And the hippos! Once Klara got going about them? Their wide-open mouths with birds in, pecking between their teeth? And her very own pink Hello Kitty binoculars, used to spot everything? After that, Tony could just sit back and listen for a few minutes. Klara would rattle on endlessly to oblige Daddy.

At least it had once been that way. At home and on the phone. And recently, again, though much more briefly, on Skype. There was hardly time to talk about anything else; Tony didn’t dare to speak to her or his wife for longer than ten or twelve minutes at a time.

Maybe it was better that way—Klara talking about the trip again. He wouldn’t have known what to say if she had pestered him with questions like she usually did. He was already feeling sick about the fact that, in the space of three minutes and with her prettiest pout, she’d twice asked him when he was coming home, at last.

One consequence of Klara’s extended safari story was that Martine barely had the chance to break into the conversation. As a mother, she clearly considered it more important that their sensitive daughter got to talk to her father than that she unburdened her sorrows as a wife. When Tony had cautiously sounded her out on the progress of the investigation, Martine had reacted strangely. She had gone white as a sheet, stuttered, stumbled over her words, and been completely incomprehensible. Was this his Martine? Where was her self-control, the sangfroid he’d always admired? From the dismal sob in her voice and the sidelong, fearful glances she’d cast at her daughter, only visible to him, Tony concluded that she and Klara were still under surveillance, and that they were trying to track him down through his family. They were being tapped, watched, downright spied upon.

He not only cut the connection immediately, he logged off completely and left the Internet café without paying, disappearing into the ambling crowds in Istanbul’s Old City. Two hours later, he had checked in at Atatürk airport, completing his stopover of almost a full day. Two hours later, and he was taking off in a Turkish Airlines Airbus A330 to O.R. Tambo airport, Johannesburg.

The uniformed black giant had hardly looked around as he got out, maddeningly calm, as though any cause for concern were unimaginable. He threw back the canvas of his jeep, tossed his safari hat onto the back seat, and still with the same air of appalling unflappability, got out a chainsaw. The rhino cow lay convulsing on her side next to the jeep. Blubber welled out of the hole in her head while her fat legs continued to move, slowly struggling as though making their way sideways through a sea of clotting mucus. The bottom of the sun touched the horizon. A sickly smell reached Tony’s nostrils, carried on the evening breeze. Birds hovered high in the sky; Tony wasn’t sure if they’d already been circling before, or not.

The birds flapped away when the man set off his chainsaw with a tug of the starter cord. The hysterical roar of the machine not only cleaved the newly regained Arcadian silence with just a few bird and insect sounds, it also cut Tony’s heart in two. He no longer knew what he felt, watching motionlessly from his hiding place. Outrage? Jealousy?

Or was he simply angry?

Even as a student, he’d had a predilection for black people. Their history was deeply tragic; it seemed to cry out for vengeance. The nice thing was—and this country was a wonderful example of that—that the black masses, despite all the injustice done to them over the centuries, were able to forgive. At least as long as they had a leader like Nelson Mandela.

Unfortunately, they had also proved, in other African countries, that they knew what genocide was. They thought nothing of large-scale acts of revenge. Nor did they shrink from other major atrocities. But if you had the stomach to look at things from a historical perspective, the Europeans could hardly boast. They hadn’t managed much better, even in just the twentieth century, even amongst themselves. And you didn’t need to have studied economics to be shocked by the lasting havoc Europe had caused beyond its borders, primarily in its former fiefdoms.

Improving the local schools and infrastructure did little to lessen the responsibility, no, the liability, of the Old World. It was going to take generations for the West to even slightly redeem itself. That couldn’t be said often enough, flying in the face of all that Eurocentric cynicism. What’s more, Tony, like Martine, considered the black man to be more handsome and noble by nature than, well, representatives of all the other races. Race was a word they didn’t like to use, but there was no other way to describe it. If you disregarded the unfortunate high number of dictators—their existence frequently playing a part in Europe’s continuing interference—blacks were simply more photogenic and more likeable than the other inhabitants of the planet. This was something he and Martine had been able to experience during their admittedly brief stay.

The wealthy tourist received a warm welcome in every holiday paradise in the world, but the genuine, good-humoured geniality to which Tony and his family were treated for ten whole days? Even on the street? And by all the South Africans—not just the blacks, but also the coloureds, and even the whites? Their love of life was almost unsettling. Certainly when you returned to the self-proclaimed navel of the world, that country of your birth, where you were re-confronted with all those snarling voices and sour faces, for whom a friendly word seemed equal to an insult, which could only be answered with a real insult. Even Klara—who, with her blond curls and her freckles, had been the centre of attention for ten days, treated to cries of admiration and tickling games by adoring strangers—seemed to sense it. “When are we going back to all the smiley black people again?” she’d pouted one evening at bedtime. And to friends and family, to anyone who had wanted to listen, Martine and Tony had been full of praise for the overwhelming country of their dreams, where, sure, inequality hadn’t quite been eliminated, sadly enough, which they’d travelled to with a sense of apprehension, yes, that, too—but where, from the first day onward, they’d been treated like royalty and friends, and where the motorways, hear this, were better than those in Belgium.

And it wasn’t as dangerous as you thought. But now Tony was being forced to watch a black man take advantage of a uniform aimed at tourists to commit a crime against the resources and the progress of his own country. He knew that he was ill-placed to lecture others, but it made him seethe. Everything that went wrong in Africa, everything that made its future look so hopeless, came together in this spectacle, this tragedy in a nutshell.

What had got into the man’s head? In a region and a time of towering unemployment, you finally get offered a decent job, expenses and housing included, clothes on your body and a car beneath your ass, in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and in a sector where the visitors’ tips alone equalled the basic income of three quarters of your less-fortunate compatriots—and what do you do? You take them for a ride. You start poaching, too, thus increasing the damage perpetrated by those international gangs. You saw off the branch you are sitting on. How stupid could you be? And this, too, was Africa, with its epidemic skulduggery, its short-sightedness, its corruption at every level that just couldn’t be stamped out. The ease with which you could buy a stolen pickup here, a rifle, even ordnance. Just like that! On the street, no questions asked. Tony kept a roll of South African rands in the glovebox of his pickup, brand-new notes in the highest denomination, now featuring a picture of Nelson Mandela, if you please. Notes he’d use to bribe customs so that his luggage, horn and all, would be set on the conveyor belt unchecked. Prior contact wasn’t necessary; guts and canniness about human nature at the crucial moment were enough. This was something else he’d found out during his ten-day stay. Traffic fines? Half the money as a backhander to Mr. Friendly Policeman, and he’d tear up your ticket. No authorities ever needed to know. A wink and a mutual nod sufficed. The rituals of corruption were pathetically simple and catastrophically efficient. And then they were shocked that their rainbow nation remained a sunless mess.

But Tony’s anger cut deeper than that. It had to do with the man himself. The man was acting in total cold blood. It was surely not the first time he’d got up to something like this. Everything about him was arrogant, focussed, and offensively authentic. Tony’s safari outfit was a parody; the guard’s was the real thing. He was a professional; Tony was a hobbyist, a miserable impostor, even in deceit. Without realizing it, the man was holding up a shaming mirror to Tony. He saw that clearly, now, and it shocked him. This was what he had wanted to do. This was how far he’d sunk.

But, in spite of this, he still felt a primitive envy of this part-time poacher, and it made his blood boil.

The uniformed brute didn’t wait until the rhino’s legs had stopped thrashing. He hobbled over to the dying animal, stood with his legs wide apart, and placed the roaring chainsaw against the root of the largest horn. Tony had to stop himself from screaming. The bastard! At least put the creature out of its misery first!

The man braced himself. The chainsaw’s roar changed into a bellow, softer and yet warlike, triumphant. It sliced through Tony like a knife. The chutzpah of it—the man daring to use a chainsaw rather than an axe! You could hear the racket for miles. And he sawed deeper than necessary, too, not wanting to miss a scrap of horn. Drops of blood and bits of bone flew into the air. Tony loathed the man from the bottom of his heart. A faint smell of burning hair and hot bone reached him. He felt his teeth grate; he gagged in disgust. The man got ready to remove the second, smaller horn.

And then it happened. Still clearly visible despite the looming darkness—half of the sun had disappeared now—the rhino calf charged.

Tony had lost sight of the animal. It had probably run off with the zebras and only just returned. In any case, it charged desperately, with its still-virgin nose low to the ground. This was how it reached the giant, sideways from behind, not head-on. But it was still enough to send the man with the bad leg pitching forward.

Deafened by the roar of his saw, the giant hadn’t heard the calf approaching. In order not to fall, he had to make a clownish jump, chainsaw in his hands, over the mutilated head of the rhino cow. His swearing was audible above the singing of the saw.

He regained his balance and turned around angrily to face the calf, who began a second charge from close by. Then the giant did something he shouldn’t have. He raised the chainsaw, ready to mow down the calf. And Tony shot him.

In a fraction of a second, he had aimed and pulled the trigger, all signs of paralysis gone, and just as accurate a shot as ever. It was a gift, and Tony possessed it, even though he was a programmer and number cruncher by trade. He could see the result through the gun’s sights. His shot had hit the giant below the neck, not far above his heart. Interrupted in his counter-attack, the man let out a gurgling scream, head back, mouth and eyes wide open in pain and astonishment. The chainsaw slipped out of his hands and fell across his knee, separating his thigh from his lower leg. Blood spurted out, mixing with that of the rhino cow. The man himself toppled theatrically, away from his amputated limb. For the second time that evening, the crack of a shot echoed deeper and deeper through the rocky crevice.

The howling of the chainsaw had stopped. It stood upright in the loose sand, like a knife in a tabletop.

The remorse would come later, along with the shame and the permanent dent in his self-image. (‘Am I really capable of something that monstrous?’)

For the time being, Tony felt none of that—aside, perhaps, from the adrenaline coursing through his veins. The only thing he did think was: I should have done this much sooner.