CHAPTER ONE
ROACH HOTEL
THE MASSEREY-VAN BULTS were coming in all the dry way down the Ogooué Road, and, as Hotep would say, there was much rejoicing. They came in a real motorcade, big cars with windows so tinted they were like black mirrors, the back ends corrugated with heat sink fins so that M. and Mme. and all the little Masserey-Van Bults, could slide untouched through the killing heat of mid-afternoon. People turned out for them. As their fleet of cars grumbled down the Ankara’s one maintained road, everyone spilled from their factories and repair shops, an impromptu half hour holiday from whatever it was put food on the table. The kids jumbled out from their shacks and shanties, from all the hand-built homes that had gathered around the Anchor like junk washed up on a high tide, never to see the sea again. They all cheered, waving scraps of cloth for flags—didn’t matter the colour so long as it was bright, bright enough to see through that dark glass! They whooped and stamped, all of them, and Nguyễn Sun Mao waved and hollered just like all the rest of them because this was how you did it, at Ankara Achouka. You did it whenever the new guests arrived at the Roach Hotel, because this was the only time you’d see them. They check in, but they don’t check out, which was some ad from long-back. Anyway, it wasn’t Roach Hotel, not really, not to the face of the people who got to stay there, however briefly. Not to the face of the wabenzi who ran the Ankara town, controlled the jobs and who got fed. It had a fancy French name in twenty-foot gold letters that loomed over everything in the township, just like the Ankara cable loomed over them and everything, going up forever.
The motorcade was approaching the big gates of the Roach Hotel now. The first couple of cars just went in, past the guards and the guns, up the gravel drive; past the dusty space where there’d been lawns in Mao’s dad’s day, before the owners acknowledged that even they couldn’t waste water on that kind of conspicuous consumption. Mao’s dad had got to see the place pristine new, before time and dust and the heat cracked the façade. Mao’s grandad had helped build it, one of that wave of labour that had converged on all three Ankara points long-back—they had locals, yes, but they got in strong backs and keen minds from all over, and it so happened there’d been plenty out of Vietnam who’d needed somewhere that wasn’t underwater right about then.
The crowd’s jubilation was ebbing. For a moment it looked like the Masserey-Van Bults were going to screw tradition and just pass through that gate from which no soul returned. Then, after three cars had cruised on, the fourth stopped and more men with guns got out, the private soldiers of the corporate compound noun that was the Masserey-Van Bults. And after them, some flunkies in suits, already pink and sweating in the seconds after leaving the vehicles’ AC. Mao shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he kept waving his little flag because he had parents and siblings and they got hungry just like everyone else.
They had little baskets, like they were giving out lucky money for New Year: stacks of notes, a king’s ransom. Sullenly, sourly, the flunkies began chucking the cash into the crowd, flashing the sweat-stains spreading like plague zones across the armpits of their shirts. The crowd whooped. Children ran up and down the line, gathering it all up. The wabenzi would redistribute it later and plenty would stick to their fingers in the process. It would all go to buy just a little less than the last, because even these good old American bucks, these sterling pounds and roubles and euros and rand, bought less and less of the less and less there was to buy.
Children, because it looked better to the guests of the Roach Hotel if it was happy kids rushing around to grab their bundles of old notes. Because nobody wanted real desperate adults slugging it out for handfuls of cash. That might suggest that they weren’t happy with what they’d got.
Mao’d thought the flunkies were it, but there was a special treat in store for all the lucky people of Ankara Achouka. Mao saw some kind of argument going on within that great big space within the car, bigger than the room he shared with two sisters and a brother. The flunkies were protesting: no, go back, really ma’am, not appropriate. And then she appeared, a woman white-going-on-pink, with a broad-brimmed hat already wilting on her head. Her hair was like gold, like hair you only saw in adverts. Her sunglasses looked like poured mercury. She was waving back, basking not in the killing sun but in the adulation, listening to the crowd go barmy because some daughter of the Masserey-Van Bults had graced them with a personal appearance.
She threw something into the crowd—artless, awkward, but it reached the front ranks, almost brained some old boy, in fact. Not a wad of cash, this: something heavy. A plastic bottle, rich man’s water, the pure stuff. The inside of the car was probably lined with them.
There was a fight, after that. The half-brained old boy had the bottle, his neighbours wanted it, the people next to them… Then the gendarmes had just turned up out of nowhere in their riot suits and were whaling into the crowd and cracking heads, because this sort of unruly disorder before the eyes of the guests just would not do. And Mao was bitterly sure that the chief of police was going to nurse a long cool drink of rich man’s water this evening on his nice veranda, and that old boy was going to nurse nothing but a headache.
Then he looked at the Masserey-Van Bult girl, and she looked so stricken. She’d done a nice thing, hadn’t she? She’d shown the proper noblesse oblige. Except it had all gone wrong and now her day was ruined. He thought she’d actually stamp her little foot. But then she was back inside the car with her flunkies so the cool air could get flowing again, and the rest of the motorcade was passing the gates, and everyone went back to work or back to not having work, and then Balewa turned up and punched Mao in the shoulder. Balewa and Mao had grown up together, meaning they’d hated each other from ages five to fifteen. Then Mao had gone Firewalker and Balewa’s dad had pulled strings somehow to get his boy the coveted position of errand runner for Contrôleur Attah. In which role, inexplicably, Balewa had turned out to be a good friend, and to fondly remember all those times he and Mao had tried to beat the living shit out of each other. Which meant when Attah wanted a Firewalker crew, Balewa tried to get the word to Nguyễn Sun Mao.
“Attah wants you.”
“Wants me, or wants someone?” Mao asked, abruptly reviewing what he might or might not have done.
“Wants you, he says.” Balewa shrugged. “Between you and me, guy, Attah is on the plate with the Sonko up in the Hotel. Got bizna for you. Name your price.”
Mao clapped him on the shoulder, feeling the soft there, where once there’d just been the skinny. Attah’s business was feeding Balewa and his family well. Attah’s business was keeping Mao’s people full, too. Always happy to do business for M. le Contrôleur.
ATTAH JEAN JACQUES was one of the old wabenzi; his family been running Achouka a hundred generations, to hear him tell it—and he would. He was a short man, bald, fat: not fat-fat, but prosperous-fat. He’d gone away to Cape Town for his education, come back to find his Assistant Contrôleur’s shoes ready for him. And there were worse bosses, Mao knew. Like Attah’s own superiors, he reckoned. Attah answered to the men inside the Hotel, who answered to men on the other end of the Anchor cable, who answered to nobody at all, not even God. When things went wrong, it was Attah and his fellow Contrôleurs who felt the lash, and most of his peers made sure their underlings caught it twice as hard. Attah had an eye for talent, though. Screw up and he wouldn’t even shout at you: you’d be out on your backside and never get a decent job in the township again. Do well, and he’d give you the slack to get the work done. No tantrums, from him; no belittling his people, screaming at them, taking out all the many and varied frustrations of a busy man. Mao reckoned he got better results that way, being the buffer between the shit and the ground.