Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

I cut in: "If your ring was stolen, that's out of my jurisdiction. It's a whole different genre of magic."

"If you would be so kind as to let me finish?" the old lady snapped. "I hid in the bathroom and took all my jewellery off because I know how you people are – criminals, that is," she added hurriedly, "No offence to the animalled."

"Of course not," I replied. The truth is we're all criminals. Murderers, rapists, junkies. Scum of the earth. In China they execute zoos on principle. Because nothing says guilty like a spirit critter at your side.

"And what happened after you took it off?"

"Well, that's the problem. I couldn't get it off. I've worn it for eight years. Ever since the Bastard died."

"Your husband?"

"The ring is made with his ashes, you know. They compress and fuse them into the platinum in this micro-thin band. It's absolutely irreplaceable. Anyway, I know what happens when they can't get your rings off. When my neighbour's cousin was mugged, they chopped off her finger with a bloody great panga."

I could see exactly where this was going. "So you used soap?"

"And it slipped right off, into the sink and down the drain."

"Down the drain," I repeated.

"Didn't I just say that?"

"May I?" I said, and reached for Mrs Luditsky's hand. It was a pretty hand, maybe a little chubby, but the wrinkles and the powdery texture betrayed all the work on her face. Clearly botox doesn't work on hands, or maybe it's too expensive. "This finger?"

"Yes, dear. The ring finger. That's where people normally wear their rings."

I closed my eyes and squeezed the pad of the woman's finger, maybe a little too hard. And caught a flash of the ring, a blurred silver-coloured halo, somewhere dark and wet and industrial. I didn't look too hard to figure out the exact location. That level of focus tends to bring on a migraine, the same way heavy traffic does. I snagged the thread that unspooled away from the woman and ran deep into the city, deep under the city.

I opened my eyes to find Mrs Luditsky studying me intently, as if she was trying to peer into my skull to see the gears at work. Behind her bouffant hair, a display case of china figurines stared down. Cute shepherdesses and angels and playful kittens and a chorus line of flamenco dancers.

"It's in the drains," I said, flatly.

"I thought we'd already established that."

"I hate the drains." Call it the contempt of familiarity. You'd be surprised how many lost things migrate to the drains.

"Well pardon me, Little Miss Hygiene," Mrs Luditsky snapped, although the impact was diminished by her inability to twitch a facial muscle. "Do you want the job or not?"

Of course I did. Which is how I got a look-in to Mrs Luditsky's purse for a R500 deposit. Another R500 to be paid on delivery. And how I found myself shin-deep in shit in the stormwater drains beneath Killarney Mall. Not actual shit, at least, because the sewage runs through a different system, but years of musty rainwater and trash and rot and dead rats and used condoms make up their own signature fragrance.

I swear I can still detect a hint of it underneath the bleach. Was it worth it for R1000? Not even close. But the problem with being mashavi is that it's not so much a job as a vocation. You don't get to choose the ghosts that attach themselves to you. Or the things they bring with them.

I drop off a set of keys at the Talk-Talk phone shop, or rather the small flat above the shuttered store. The owner is Cameroonian and so grateful to be able to open up shop this morning that he promises me a discount on airtime as a bonus. A toddler dressed in a pink fluffy bear suit peeks out between his legs and reaches for them with pudgy grasping fingers. The same one, I'm guessing, who was chewing on the keys in her pram before gleefully tossing them into the rush-hour traffic. That's worth fifty bucks. And it's more in line with my usual hustle. In my experience, the Mrs Luditskys of the world are few and far between.

I walk up on Empire through Parktown past the old Johannesburg College of Education, attracting a few aggressive hoots from passing cars. I give them the finger. Not my fault if they're so cloistered in suburbia that they don't get to see zoos. At least Killarney isn't a gated community. Yet.

I'm still a couple of kays from Mrs Luditsky's block, just turning off Oxford and away from the heavy traffic, which is giving me a headache, the kind that burrows in behind your temples like a brain termite, when my connection suddenly, horribly, goes slack.

Sloth squeaks in dismay and grips my arms so hard his long claws draw little beads of blood. "I know, buddy, I know," I say and start running. I clamp my fist around the cold circle of metal in my pocket as if I could jump-start the connection. There is the faintest of pulses, but the thread is unravelling.

We've never lost a thread. Even when a lost thing is out of reach forever, like when that wannabe-novelist guy's manuscript blew out across Emmarentia Dam, I could still feel the taut lines of connection between him and the disintegrating pages. This feels more like a dead umbilical cord withering away.

There's an ambulance and a police van outside Mrs Luditsky's block, strobing the dusty beige of the wall with flicks of red and blue. Sloth whimpers.

"It's okay," I say, out of breath, even though I'm pretty damn sure it's anything but, falling in alongside the small cluster of rubber-necking pedestrians. I guess I'm shaking, because someone takes my elbow.

"You okay, honey?"

I'm obviously not remotely okay, because somehow I missed these two in the crowd – a gangly angel with huge dark wings and a dapper man with a Maltese Poodle dyed a ludicrous orange to match the scarf at his neck. It's the man who has attached himself to me. He's wearing expensive-looking glasses and a suit as sharp as the razored edge of his chiskop quiff. The Dog gives me a dull look from the end of its leash and thumps its tail half-heartedly. Say what you like about Sloths, but at least I didn't end up with a motorised toilet-brush. Or a Vulture, judging by the hideous bald head that bobbles up and down behind the woman's shoulder, digging under its wing.

The woman falls into the vaguely ageless and androgynous category, somewhere between 32 and 58, with a chemotherapy haircut, wisps of dark hair clinging to her scalp, and thin overplucked eyebrows. Or maybe she just tries to make herself look ugly. She's wearing riding boots over slim grey pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It's accented by leather straps crossing over her chest from the harness that supports the weight of the hulking Bird on her back.

"You know what's going on?" I say to the Dog guy.

"There's been a mur-der," the man stage-whispers the word behind his hand. "Old lady on the second floor. Terrible business. Although I hear she's terribly well preserved."

"Have they said anything?"

"Not yet," the woman says, her voice, unexpectedly, the malted alto of jazz singers. Her accent is Eastern European, Russian maybe, or Serbian. At the sound of her voice, the Bird stops grooming and a long neck with a wattle like a deflated testicle twists over the woman's shoulder. It drapes its wrinkled head over her chest, the long, sharp spear of its beak angled down towards her hip. Not a Vulture then. She lays one hand tenderly on the Marabou Stork's mottled head, the way you might soothe a child or a lover.

"Then how do you know it's murder?"

The Maltese smirks. You know how most people's mashavi and their animals don't line up?" he says. "Well, in Amira's case, they do. She's attracted to carrion. Mainly murder scenes, although she does like a good traffic pile up. Isn't that right, sweetie?"

The Marabou smiles in acknowledgement, if you can call the faint twitch of her mouth a smile.

The paramedics emerge from the building with a stretcher carrying a sealed grey plastic body bag. They hoist it into the ambulance. "Excuse me," I say and push through the crowd. The paramedic shuts the double doors behind the stretcher, signalling the driver to kill the lights with a wave of his hand. The dead don't need to beat the traffic. But I have to ask anyway.

"That Mrs Luditsky in there?"

"You a relative?" The paramedic looks disgruntled. "'Cos unless you are, it's none of your business, zoo girl."

"I'm an employee."

"Tough breaks, then. You should probably stick around. The cops are gonna want to ask you some questions."

"Can you tell me what happened?"

"Let's just say she didn't pass in her sleep, sweetheart."

The ambulance gives one strangled whoop and pulls out onto the road, taking Mrs Luditsky with it. I grip the ring in my pocket, hard enough to embed the imprint of the sapphires into my palm. Sloth nuzzles into my neck, hiding his face. I wish I could reassure him.

"Ugly business," the Maltese tuts, sympathetically. "Like it's any of yours."

I'm suddenly furious. "You with the cops?"

"God, no!" He laughs. "Unfortunately for this one," he says, nodding at the Marabou, "there's no real money in ambulance chasing."

"We're sorry for your loss," the Marabou says.

"Don't be," I say. "I only met her the one time."

"What was it that you were doing for the old lady anyway? If I may ask? Secretarial? Grocery runs? Nursing?"

"I was finding something for her."

"Did you get it?"

"Always do."

"But sweetie, what a marvellous coincidence! Oh, I don't mean marvellous, like oh, how marvellous your employer just died. That's ghastly, don't get me wrong. But the thing is, you see-"

"We're also looking for something," the Marabou cuts in.

"Precisely. Thank you," the Maltese says. "And, if that's, you know, your talent? I'm guessing that's your talent? Then maybe you could help."

"What sort of something?"

"Well, I say something, but really, I mean someone."

"Sorry. Not interested."

"But you haven't even heard the details."

"I don't need to. I don't do missing persons."

"It's worth a lot to us." The bird on Marabou's back flexes its wings, showing off the white flèchettes marking the dark feathers. I note that they're clipped, and that its legs are mangled, twisted stubs. No wonder she has to carry it. "More than any of your other jobs would have paid."

"Come on, sweetie. Your client just turfed it. Forgive me being so frank. What else are you going to do?"

"I don't know who you are-"

"An oversight. I'm sorry. Here." The Marabou removes a starched business card from her breast pocket and proffers it between scissored fingers. Her fingernails are immaculately manicured. The card is blind embossed, white on white in a stark sans-serif font:

Marabou amp; Maltese Procurements

"And procurements means what exactly?"

"Whatever you want it to, Ms December," the Marabou says.

Sloth grumbles in the back of his throat, as if I need to be told how dodgy this just turned. I reach out for their lost things, hoping to get anything on them, because they obviously have something on me.

The Maltese is blank. Some rare people are. They're either pathologically meticulous or they don't care about anything. But it still creeps me out. The last person I encountered with no lost things at all was the cleaning lady at Elysium. She threw herself down an open elevator shaft.

My impressions of the Marabou's lost things are weirdly vivid. It must be the adrenaline sharpening my focus – all that hormone soup in your brain messes with mashavi big time. I've never been able to see things this clearly. It's strange, like someone switched my vaselineslathered soft-focus perspective for a high-definition paparazzi zoom-lens.

I can make out the things tethered to her in crisp detail: a pair of tan leather driving gloves, soft and weathered by time. One of them is missing a button that would fasten it at the wrist. A tatty book, pages missing, the remainder swollen with damp, the cover half ripped off. I can make out sepia branches, a scrap of title, The Tree That-. And a gun. Dark and stubby, with retro curves, like a bad prop from a '70s sci-fi show. The image is so precise I can make out the lettering on the side: Vektor.

Oblivious to me discreetly riffling through their lost things, the Maltese presses me, grinning. His painted Dog grins too, pink tongue lolling happily between its sharp little teeth. "We really need your help on this one. I'd even say we can't do it without you. And it pays very, very well."

"How can I say this? I don't like people knowing my business."

"You advertise," the Marabou says, amused.

"And I don't like your attitude."

"Oh don't mind Amira, she comes off mean, but she's just shy, really," the Maltese says.

"And I don't like small dogs. So thanks, but you know, as far as I'm concerned, you should go fuck the carcass of a goat."

The Maltese squinches up his face. "Oh, that's disgusting. I'll have to remember that one," he says.

"Hang onto that," the Marabou indicates the card. "You might change your mind."

"I won't."

But I do.

2.

From: Livingstone Mission House [mailto: [email protected]]

Sent: 21 March 2011 08:11 AM

To: Undisclosed Recipients

Subject: A message in a bottle.

To whom it may concern,

My name is Eloria Bangana. I live in the DRC or Democratic Republic of Congo. I am 13 years old. When they killed my family I had a choice. I could be a prostitute or pretend to be a boy and work in the coltan mines.

Lucky, I am very small for my age. Most people think I am 9 or 10. So, I choose the mines, because I can crawl into tight spaces with my little bucket for sifting and my spade, although mostly I use my fingers. Sometimes my fingers get cracked and bleed from scratching in the dirt.

They say coltan makes cell phones. I do not know how you make cell phones from mud. Also computers and video games. All your technology runs on mud. Isn't that funny?

My cousin Felipe says he has played a video game in Kinshasa, he said you just press buttons to fight, buttons to walk or kick or punch. He said it was boring.

Felipe likes soccer more. I used to play soccer with him, but it wasn't really soccer. It's a game called 3 tin, because we only have tins to kick. The rules are similar. Maybe one day I can teach you. We don't play 3 tin anymore, because the rebels say there isn't time. We are here to work, not play. They shot my cousin Felipe in the back when he tried to run away. He died. It was very sad. We were very scared.