Memories Hotel

Bonile Ngqiyaza

The door to the backrooms of the seedy hotel had old blue paint peeling off it, and the lock was broken. In front of him was a longish, dim passage that led to a dull light at the far end.

Walking past the other rooms along the passage, he entered the very last one. And that's where he found her. The woman had a wizened, weather-beaten face. An attempt to treat her tousled hair had not quite succeeded. And the leathery, rubbery face showed signs of the brutality of nights out. Scars and welts across one side of the face that a "client", or possibly a "rival", could have inflicted. And it was puffed up from much too much alcohol. A dull light flashed across her otherwise dead eyes when she saw him. It was not clear to him what exactly the expression on her face signified. It was a reflex that showed fear, or it could also have been a sign of relief. He watched her for the briefest of moments, noticed the fading blue-black mark under the left eye, and tried to work out what instrument had caused it. A shoe? Or a fist perhaps? But he contented himself with trying to work out what was going on in her mind at that particular moment. She stared back at him like a ghost, taking in his apparel - black leather jacket, black leather trousers. God, he must have made for an incongruent figure in that milieu.

"We cannot talk in here," she said suddenly, jumping up from a small, ruffled bed. He kept gazing at her. "We simply can't!" the woman said again, her voice a frog's croak and coming in spurts now.

Hurriedly, she put on a woollen jersey, which in its time had been a siren's red. But now was like everything there in that room, fading.

He turned and stepped aside to allow her to walk out. And almost flattened a short, muscular figure blocking his way. "Yes?" the other man inquired, arching his eyebrows.

"I'm sorry," he murmured back.

"Yes?" The other repeated, not looking at him at all, his suspicious gaze aimed like a spear at the woman, tormenting her. She froze, her hands and slight body quivering like a mouse would under the watchful eye of a snake.

"He wants us to go elsewhere," she said, indicating the man in black with a nod of her head. The sentence came out exactly like the lie it was. Silence. "Says he doesn't trust it here," the woman said, more to pad up and fill the deafening silence than anything.

"Then he'd better piss off," the muscular man said, looking at his adversary in black for the first time.

"There is no way I'm going to let one of my girls go just like that - anywhere. I have already lost a couple of my girls to respectable-looking figures like these," the man said, twisting his mouth in a contemptuous gesture, and waited. It was the clearest indication that he thought the matter had been concluded.

More silence.

There was nothing else for the man in black to do but to leave. He stepped out of the blue, peeling door and was hit immediately by a blast of noise. It was one of those cheap bars prevalent all over the desiccated suburb of Hillbrow. One of those with a large dance area and one or two snooker tables. The tables and the chairs, if you want to call them that, were spread all around the dance area.

There was smoke everywhere, and here and there he saw couples groping at each other. Some of the girls were giggling at some joke or other their partners had made. He guessed that at least a quarter of the women he saw in this bar area were less than sixteen. Almost everyone had alcohol either in their hand or on the tables in front of them.

There were four whites in a dark part of the room, in deep conversation with two hefty, well-groomed black men. Drug addicts, he guessed of the white contingent. One of the white kids started bobbing his head to a rap song as a DJ in a booth started cranking up the music.

He was still taking all this in when a young girl - hardly thirteen - sidled up to him from the dance floor. "Wanna dance, mister? I can give you a good time," she said, her eyes spaced out from whatever it was she had taken. One of the slips of her dress hung low against the upper part of her arm. Her face was ghostly white and her cheekbones so high that the effect of it all was that her eyes were set deep in her sockets. She looked deformed. He brushed past her and stumbled, nearly falling in his hurry to leave the godforsaken place. The girl laughed at him, a high-pitched kind of laugh. And as he made his retreat from her neighing, he felt a dozen eyes drilling holes in his back.

Sello Lebese's mission had taken him to various seedy parts of Johannesburg. It had taken him to dingy places filled with the stench of misery and misfortune. It had taken him to places where South Africa's future - its young - danced and drank its sorrows deep into the night. He saw places where the young of the country diced daily with death. And sold their bodies for a pittance in their self-contempt. Places where the city sniffed lines and lines of cocaine and God only knows what else, as they wallowed in self-pity. Others he met explained their dalliance with substances as their way of finding meaning to their existence and a way of trying to bring fulfilment to their dull, empty lives. Ephemeral excitement and false glitz and glamour ruled here.

These thoughts occupied Lebese's mind as he moved among these children of the night for whom the rah-rah and the razzmatazz of Johannesburg had proved too much of a seduction to resist. However, despite all of this, he could not pause to take it all in. He could not afford to waste time, because time was of the essence in his mission. And that mission was to try to find Louisa Mevane.

Louisa's story was a most peculiar one. She had mysteriously disappeared one evening without trace. Not a word to anyone - parents, relatives or friends. It was only after she had not been returning calls to her cellphone that people, her folks first, started getting worried. They sent someone to check her flat in Yeoville. Indications there were that she had not been into her flat for days. For her parents, the next few days were full of fretful anxiety and worry, according to the media.

The parents - a former parliamentarian father who had left politics for business, and the mother, the director of her own communications company, pooled their resources to ensure maximum publicity of the disappearance, the media said. A huge manhunt was launched, something extraordinary even in post-apartheid South Africa. Many still complained that police and law enforcement agencies and the media got serious in cases like these only if the person involved was white.

So had started Lebese's seemingly innocuous hunt, one that - unbeknown to him - would leave him with so much wisdom from the street experiences he would witness. He was to discover the bitterness and the bile, the appalling misery and self-disgust thrown together around the trio of city centre suburbs Yeoville, Berea and Hillbrow. And discover, too, that it was like a magnet - that lately it had an allure all of its own - even to the children of those ensconced in the northern suburbs.

Immediately after the manhunt had been launched, a hotline was established and police started combing through every clue they received. They got phone calls, they received faxes, and there were e-mails. And on occasion, people claiming to have clues paid personal visits to the police station where the search team was based.

And, to top all of this, there was rumour after rumour.

Rumour claimed that Louisa had been seen in a bar in Hillbrow with a group of Nigerian drug dealers. Some people said she had been kidnapped by people intent on avenging some grievance her family had caused them. And yet others said she had been kidnapped so that the kidnappers could get her father to pay for a loan someone had advanced him. But more worrying for her parents was the nagging suspicion that she might have fallen victim to some serial killer or other. The trend of serial killing (some said its prominence was a result of police successes against this crime) was gaining ground.

Sello Lebese had stumbled by chance on the case, but was to find himself being carried inexorably by an inexplicable current right to the epicentre of the storm.

He had just arrived in the country from the Great Lakes region, where he had been sending one harrowing dispatch after another to his newspaper in South Africa. His reports on the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, and to a lesser extent on Burundi, had received wide acclaim, and he was seized with a desire to put together a book based on those articles and his experiences there.

So, on an afternoon, while they were having a quiet afternoon drink in a restaurant in Melville, a colleague had told him about the story and he knew there and then that he wanted to get involved. He had contacted Louisa Mevane's parents.

When he arrived for the interview, Lebese did not find Louisa's parents, only the kitchen help, Lucy Batyi, who was more than willing to talk. They sat in the garden of the palatial house. Like many properties of the new black middle class it contained trappings of crass opulence.

"So you say the police have ruled out the boyfriend?" Lebese asked, winding up the interview with a distraught Batyi.

She nodded assent.

"And they have also ruled out all these other claims as unfounded?" he said, suppressing a yawn. She nodded again.

"But," said Batyi with a sniffle, "these other claims of sexual assault have dogged the family for years. It's just that we have been successful in keeping the secret within the family. In that sense, I think we have also been accomplices in this great sin, this great crime."

They engaged in small talk for a while before Sello Lebese asked to be allowed to leave.

The interview had been the last one before his deadline that Friday afternoon. On his way back, he thought about what he had heard about the homestead. He realised now that he had stumbled on a gory truth, a dark secret - that the father of Louisa was not really her father. He was her stepfather, a sadistic man who constantly beat both Louisa and her mother. But of the two women, Louisa - perhaps because of the adolescent's rebellious streak - resisted the most. "There were physical fights between the two of them," Batyi had continued.

"I remember one morning Louisa somehow had got hold of his gun and threatened to kill him. You know? Finish him once and for all. She paid for that. She was beaten black and blue a few days later for that. Poor girl even tried to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping tablets."

But to Lebese the beatings and Louisa's screams just did not sound real. He was not a practitioner of yellow journalism, had never been and was not about to start descending to that level now. What if the domestic worker was embellishing things? However, the nagging doubts remained at the back of his mind. He resolved to come back to explore this dark, harrowing tale at some stage in his investigation.

Lebese found that with the progress of the case, when the police reached what appeared to be a brick wall, there were more calls coming into the newsroom than police reported news of the disappearance. It was at this juncture that he took a decision to leave the security of the newsroom and hit the streets again.

After two weeks of nothing but agony of his own he got yet another phone call. "Venus," the voice at the other end said; "just call me Venus." The woman on the phone had a husky voice.

"So, where can we meet?" he had asked her.

"Memories," she had said, "a hotel called Memories, in Hillbrow" as she replaced the receiver.

Lebese had put on his jacked and walked briskly to the newsdesk. "I'm going to the Brow," he'd said to the news editor, Jack Sibau.

"What's happening there? I want you to go to Shell House. There's a big demonstration I want you to cover. May be a big story with the Zulu traditionalists' march tomorrow. I want to look at how the CNA is dealing with the security arrangements. Threats on both sides flying thick and thin as to what will happen on the day of the march."

"I'll do that on my return from the Brow. I've got a feeling about my meeting with my source. Meeting's in an hour's time."

"As long as I get my story," the newsdesk man had said gruffly. Lebese had resisted an urge to tell the bugger off. Sibau treated him as if he was still a junior reporter.

Lebese was now seated in a bar across the road from the Memories Hotel, his mind in a whirl after his unceremonious ejection earlier from the establishment. Doesn't look to be my day today, he thought as he finished a double gin and tonic. May as well drive to downtown Johannesburg and do that other story, his thoughts raced as he waved to the waitress. Just then his contact, Venus, the woman with the wrinkled face and the husky voice from Memories, darted into the room. She slipped him a piece of paper on which was written simply: "Eros - 10pm". She ran out again, leaving Lebese bemused. He shrugged, went to the counter, paid and stepped outside to his car. Shell House beckoned.

Just before ten o' clock Lebese went to the Eros nightclub. He was well prepared with a picture of the woman they now called in the media "The Phantom Lady". And unbeknown to the club's owners, he also had the woman's parents and plainclothes policemen waiting nearby.

The Eros nightclub was very well known by many as an establishment of ill repute, a gentleman's club, offering strip shows for the edification of businessmen and other high-flyers on a day-and-night basis.

Venus had earlier called Lebese to say Louisa was working there against her will and wanted very much to escape. She wanted her father to come and rescue her. The place was expensively and expansively furnished, with red leather chairs, where well-dressed patrons - a few in formal executive suits - sat very close to the largish stage. Above, suspended from the ceiling, were those twirling, round lights for when the show was in progress.

Lebese moved away from the bar towards the stage. He had been seated hardly a minute when the lights went down. A woman carrying a red bucket and wearing red flowing garments stepped out of the shadows from the far end of the stage. "I want tonight to be special," she announced to the club, putting the bucket down. A current of anticipation electrified the chiefly male patrons. Shouts of "Lilac! Lilac!", which appeared to be the performer's stage name, emanated from some of the men. "Her stage prop," Lebese thought of the bucket.

"This chick!" someone else wondered in a stage whisper loud enough to break a beer glass. "What tricks has she got up her sleeve today?" The tables around him broke into light laughter.

And then the music started, and with some graceful moves, teasingly, the woman started gyrating - some kind of sensuous belly dance - and peeling off her clothes. But she had hardly started when Lebese heard some commotion at the back. "You will stop what you are doing and follow us …!" The rest of the utterances were lost under the din made by the music and the crowd. A few heads turned to see the speaker. Lebese saw a bald man run towards the stage. It was Louisa's stepfather, Lebese saw, his own mind slightly delirious from the booze and caught up in the excitement of the club.

And then it happened. Without losing her calm and grace, Louisa scooped up the red basin and tipped it over her. The smell of petrol threaded through the room. "Stop!" her stepfather spoke up again, lunging towards the stage. There were screams as people moved in confusion, some bolting for the door, while others foolishly, and in some kind of daze, dashed towards the stage area. No one knows if theirs was to calm the possessed man or not. The bald man jumped on to the stage and Louisa took him in her arms in a gesture that looked like an embrace. The whole stage exploded into a ball of fire. Someone later said he had noticed her take a match from a table nearby and light it.

Sello Lebese finished writing his news story and sent it through. He stepped up to the newsdesk and found Sibau smiling.

"Nice work, Sello," he said, a hack's reaction even in tragic circumstances.

"What's so nice about death?" he asked coolly, not waiting for an answer.

He went back to his desk, put on his hat and jacket, and stepped out of the building. The business of news, he thought, shaking his head incredulously. In a space of just twelve hours he had covered death, smelled death.

"Why am I in this prickly mood?" Lebese wondered aloud, although he knew exactly what the answer to that question was.

He climbed into his car. Shell House was beckoning.

Bonile Ngqiyaza is an award-winning journalist who also writes short stories and poetry. He has worked for the financial daily newspaper Business Day for more than nine years and has done work for the Business Times (the Sunday Times supplement) as well as the Sowetan Sunday World. He is a Rhodes University graduate and is currently a sub-editor for Enterprise magazine and the South African Airways publication Sawubona. Photo by Rapula Ramasoga

LitNet: 05 July 2005

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