Tom Knox - The Marks of Cain

'You still don't see? This man is driven by his shameful urges, his Cagot cannibalism. Probably he has kept a hold on it for years, but as the syndrome worsens the most primal and evil of his desires are surfacing — '

'He bit the hand of the Cagot woman he killed in Gurs. Eloise's grandmother. The cop called it "experimental" — '

'There you are. In one. He's yielding to these base desires, at last, as he goes finally mad. The syndrome tightens and grips. You can overtake this car — we need to keep moving.'

It was the first vehicle they had seen in an hour. David sped by, the car driver was a big, German-looking man. Who flashed his headlights as they passed: two blinks of silver in the shimmering heat.

Angus continued: 'So you see, Miguel used our predicament as an excuse to…cook someone. He had his answer but his impulses were predominant. What he really wanted was human flesh. As much as possible. A chance to feed his worst urges. He couldn't help himself.'

'And now?'

'He will be after Eloise. He still has a job to do, after all. Destroy the experiments and stop our tests and then kill Eloise, the last of the Cagots.'

A terrible thought struck David.

'Angus…Is Eloise also mad?'

'No. Not every Cagot suffers these syndromes. She's fine. And plenty of Cagots are — or were — perfectly healthy. Especially at the beginning of their…isolation.'

'But then?'

'As the gene pool dried up, over centuries, the bad genetic stuff recrudesced, healthier Cagots became rarer, and so the poor mad Cagots were shunned with ever greater severity, as a pariah tribe, and so the vicious genetic circle tightened. They were forced to inbreed, due to lack of partners; perhaps they were reduced to incest. Thus creating more cannibals and cretins and web-toed rapists. We better get petrol.'

The fuel station was a sudden outpost of sophisticated business in the bleak empty desert. One minivan was decanting half a dozen nuns, black nuns with smiling black faces, laughing. A couple of motorbikers were sitting in the shade, pouring bottles of water over their sunburned foreheads.

Watered and refuelled, they bought nuts and wizened apples and sticks of biltong. Then they climbed back in. The endless black strip of the road unfurled through the wastes.

Angus was still talkative: it was as if he saw conversation as a way of avoiding any contemplation of what they had been through. David was happy to go along; he, likewise, didn't want to consider what they had so recently endured.

'So tell me. You two.' Angus sank some water. 'We need to know who betrayed us.'

'Yes…'

'I think it's pretty obvious. Don't you?'

David said: 'No.'

Angus tutted.

'You were obviously set up in Swakop. By that guy. Hans Petersen. He was waiting for you. Like you just bumped into him and he kindly drove you to see us? Och right. I had suspicions when you showed but I was a halfwit, got distracted, didn't do anything about it. Didn't think.'

David protested:

'I don't think he'd betray us — No — '

'Fuck that, it was him. The elephant man. He is known in Namibia, hates Nazis, any hint of racial science. They probably told him we were doing the Fischer experiments, he agreed to help — do a set up — I should have guessed.'

'We didn't tell him why we were going.'

'He knew already. They had someone in Swakop tell him, so he was ready to befriend you, so you would give away Eloise's whereabouts, lucky for us I moved her — ' Another slug of water. 'Anyfuckinghow, here we go. The City of the Bastards.'

They were driving into a largish town, ringed with fuel stations and metal bungalows. Telephone masts stood whitely on shallow dusty hills, the streets were wide and languid in the heat and blessed with German names: Bahnhofstrasse; Kaisersstrasse. Big dogs ran behind tall wire fences. Dark orange girls laughed outside a pink bungalow called Viljoen's Pool Hall. David rolled down the window and stared at the shoppers stepping inside one supermarket, Spar.

The people were strikingly beautiful. Like Alphonse. Coffee-coloured skin, slanting eyes, extraordinarily elegant cheekbones.

'So who are the Basters?'

Angus explained. 'The crossbred descendants of strapping Dutch settlers and petite khoisan tribesmen: the famous Bushmen of the kalahari. The Dutch and the Bushmen intermarried in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Cape Colony. Take a left here. This is where — ' His voice cracked for a second. 'This is where Alphonse's family live. I met him at Windhoek University. I needed an assistant. He was so beautiful, a beautiful bastard of Rehoboth.'

Amy glanced at David. Then she said: 'Angus, if you want to…be alone for while…we can…'

'No no no. I'm fine. I'm fine. Let me talk. Let me explain. Amy, the Basters were hated and despised from both sides because they were such unusual half castes, such extreme hybrids. The racial prejudice they faced drove them north, across the thirstland, into Namibia. So they settled here on the high plateau south of Windhoek. And they farmed cattle.' Angus gestured through the car window at a passing butcher's shop, with fiercely caged windows. 'They actually founded their own nation with its own flag and anthem. The nation of the bastards. That's what Baster means. Bastard.' Angus chuckled. 'And they're still here today. A precious genetic remnant. The unique inheritance of the Basters makes them rhapsodically beautiful — cocoa coloured, high cheekboned, sometimes blond yet simultaneously dark. Literally the most beautiful people in the world. As you can see — look at that girl there, by the post office. Stunning. They also like a drink, and they gamble. And they brawl. All the time, whenever they get drunk. Clock the fences. OK, here's the house. Alfie's mum. Five minutes.'

It was a bright blue bungalow, with a basketball hoop over the garage, and another tall wire fence around a neat if austere grass space. It could have been a house in America, but for the burning African sun and the acacia trees on the street and the strange slender beautiful cheekboned people laughing on the stoop of the Lutheran Church with the lurid green Le Palace gambling hall next door.

David and Amy said nothing. They sat in the car in the heat and she touched his hand and he squeezed her hand and they said nothing.

The Scotsman emerged.

'That was…fun.' He waved away any inquiries, and ordered David to drive on. 'Drive south. Let's just get there. Just get to the Sperrgebiet as fast as we can. Go!'

As they drove he talked — and talked. He talked of the Basters and Eugen Fischer. He spoke, it seemed, as a therapeutic measure. David listened to the mesmerizing babble of Angus's talk. Half soothed, half alarmed. The deserts were encroaching again, as they sped south along the straight back road at a hundred miles an hour. The road was so empty and straight and good and flat it felt like they were doing thirty, across the wilderness. They saw virtually no other cars.

'So you want to know why Fischer was here. In Rehoboth. In Namibia. Right? Yeah?'

David shrugged.

'I guess.'

'Simple answer. Because it's such a paradise for someone interested in genetics, like Fischer. There is more human genetic variation in Africa than anywhere else on earth. And there is maybe more in Namibia than anywhere in Africa. From the Nama to the Cape Malay to the purebred Boer. And I've sampled them all. I got them all. I've even sampled the khoisan, the Bushmen! Alfie's ancestors…They are very important, to the Fischer experiments. Now we need to go right, off road. Use the track.'

The wastes swallowed them, at once. The car growled along a dead valley, another vlei of dust and flattened salt. The dunes were smaller than before.

Angus went on: 'So what was Fischer doing here? Fischer believed that, technically, the Bushmen were a special kind of human. Certainly they are a unique adaptation to the dry desert lands. They are very small, and nimble, but they have all the necessary features, as it were. They have been cleverly miniaturized by evolution. Like Japanese electronics. I call them the Sony Bushman.'