Chris Abani - The Secret History of Las Vegas

Which was true. Sunil was very dark, near black, with kinky hair, but still, he was pretty sure he looked Indian enough. After all, there were plenty of dark-skinned Indians.

But when Brewster first said it, Sunil had wondered if he was referring to the fact that he didn’t look Native American, and felt his anger rise. But he realized years ago that it never helped to go down that path, so he explained that he didn’t look Indian because he was half Zulu, and no, they didn’t have Zulus in India, at least not that he knew of, but they did have them in South Africa. And yes, he added, there were a lot of South African Indians. Mostly in Durban, thank you very much, even though Sunil was from Johannesburg. Well, I’ve never met an Indian like you before, Brewster had insisted. What kind of Indian doesn’t have a lilt in their voice or talk with their hands and head? In that moment Sunil had been glad the man was over seventy; otherwise he might have given in to his urge to hit him.

There was something else about Brewster that bothered Sunil. He reminded him of the old guard of apartheid: privileged and smug in their power, but even worse, carrying a deep conviction in their own rightness. Sunil liked his job, though, so he tempered his response. But that’s the thing with fights; if you fold too early, you keep folding.

I don’t really know that much about conjoined twins, Sunil said. How their biology might affect their psychology.

That’s okay, Brewster said. I will have the research department put a file together for you and have it delivered to your doorman tonight. It’ll be there before you finish at the hospital.

Fine, Sunil said. He had to admit to himself that he was curious.

Just make sure to sign the papers so we can have them for at least seventy-two hours, Brewster said. Here, at the Desert Palms, not County.

This isn’t the way I like to work.

Just go get me those monsters. With the weekend, we might get away with holding them for five days, Brewster said.

Sunil returned to his office to get his stuff. The elevator took only a moment to get to him.

As he stepped into the lobby and walked briskly to the front door he passed the usual Halloween decorations. There was one new addition this year: a hanging skeleton. He paused for a moment to regard the lynched figure and wondered if it was inappropriate before heading outside, where he heard the peacocks that roamed free through the grounds screeching. He paused by his car and inclined his head up at Brewster’s window, throwing a malevolent look in the dark. He never noticed the car seven spaces down, from which Eskia watched his every move.

Eskia started up his engine and pulled out of the institute’s parking lot, tailing Sunil. He had been waiting all day in his car, and he was hot and irritable. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and reached forward to turn up the air and the music. Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing in the Grass” filled the car, and Eskia whistled along. Tailing Sunil right now was not really necessary; it was more for the fun of it. Having intercepted Sunil’s phone call from Salazar on the cell-cloning software he was running on his laptop, he knew Sunil was heading to County to interview conjoined twins suspected of being serial killers. It would probably be quicker just to meet him there, but Eskia was a dedicated hunter, trained for years to follow his prey until he had secured the kill, and in this case he intended to do just that.

Eskia was an operative of South Africa’s Security Services based in a clandestine unit that didn’t officially exist. The clandestine units still operated the same as they had under apartheid — assassinations of enemies of the state, spying on politicians, stealing secrets from other countries, starting wars in other countries, carrying out renditions for other governments for a price, and more. But he wasn’t here in Vegas in an official capacity. This was personal.

Eskia had joined the security arm of the African National Congress while still in college. You could say it was a family tradition. His father, Isaac, had been a weapons expert for the ANC. He built bombs and trained others to build bombs. A chemist, and later a chemistry teacher, trained in Moscow, he returned in the ’50s to an oppressive state. Six weeks after he came back, he was assigned a house in Soweto and an all-black school to teach in. It seemed he was content to do nothing more than teach young blacks chemistry and try to live a quiet life. That was until the Sharpeville incident when the police had fired on and killed young schoolkids peacefully protesting. As he watched the tear gas fly, the Casspirs tear through the crowds, and the children fall in bloody masses, he felt himself change. A couple of weeks later he joined the ANC and sought out the armed units. While he adored Mandela and believed in the need for a peaceful transition to self-rule, he couldn’t stomach what he had seen. His soul ruptured that day, a rupture that would never fully heal. He turned to violence and, in turn, violence turned itself to him.

Eskia’s mother was in labor with him the day Isaac decided to build his first bomb. It was an experiment he wasn’t sure would work, and he hadn’t told anyone about it.

It was 1965 and a mild day in Johannesburg when the gentle mannered Isaac stood on the edge of that downtown street and stared at the small rivulet of water running at the edge of the concrete. Across the street history awaited; taking a deep breath, he stepped off and crossed quickly to the small chemist shop. He emerged a few minutes later with a package wrapped in brown paper: ordinary household chemicals that were harmless on their own but volatile when mixed. They were forbidden in Soweto and it was illegal for a black person to be in possession of them. As he walked, he tried really hard to appear nonchalant. It was the days of the pass laws and he couldn’t afford to be stopped by the police. Ahead, two policemen demanded passbooks from a black couple, and Isaac pressed into the shadows of an alley to wait.

Passbooks, known in those days as dompas, controlled everything. They laid out your race, where you lived, where you were allowed to travel. Passbooks, carried only by blacks, Indians, and coloreds (the light-skinned non-whites who were a mix of races, and the Indians), made them guest workers in their own country.

Isaac stepped back onto the pavement. The policemen moved on. Isaac trotted over to the taxi rank and got aboard a taxi bus headed back to Soweto. If he got caught now, he would go to prison for bomb-making, having never made his first bomb. But it was his lucky day.

It was also the last day he built bombs himself, from then on restricting himself to teaching others. But it wasn’t enough for him. A veteran of the Second World War, he missed the rust of blood. So he began hunting for Boer, as he put it, laughing at the pun. His old Lee-Enfield rifle was his weapon of choice. And with time, Eskia became its constant companion.

Eskia pulled up to the hospital and studied the façade. Sunil would be in there for much of the night. Eskia hacked into the hospital records. His fingers moved fast over the keyboard of his laptop. Thank God for broadband Internet cards; it made spying such a breeze these days. He didn’t know the names of the twins, but it would be easy searching under “conjoined.” How many could there be? Sure enough, their record popped up — it was still pretty blank. It had their names and the date. Even their vitals hadn’t been added. Eskia was bored.

There was nothing interesting happening here, so he decided he would break into Sunil’s office tonight and steal his hard drives. All Sunil’s research should be on them and he could sell that for a lot of money. Or at the very least the research could be used as a bargaining chip. What for was not clear yet, but then he’d only arrived a few days ago, plenty of time to get into trouble. He started his car. The only question was whether to stop by his hotel first, so he flipped a coin.