Lost Identity

By Simon Geschwindt

Marco Meyers wife, Suzanna, has left him for fellow journalist Karl Ngwenya. After Ngwenyas death, Marco, determined to outdo Ngwenya, takes over his investigation into exports of fake drugs from Amsterdam to African countries. From the outset, Marco finds himself hopelessly out of his depth, isolated in east Africa, with no one to trust. Eventually stripped of his dignity and his identity, Marco struggles to maintain his grip on the one hope that sustains himSuzanna.
This exciting and moving story follows the journalists struggle with love, betrayal, murder, and his own identity.
It was written in 1983 under the title Een Welkomen Dood before the advent of the Internet, mobile phone, and post-9/11 tightening of international security. It was produced by the author in English in 2008 under the title Lost Identity. The issue of exports of substandard and counterfeit chemicals and drugs to developing countries remains as current as when the novel was first written.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491891698

Simon Geschwindt

Simon Geschwindt is a freelance journalist specializing in corporate social responsibility and the environment. Simon holds a BA (hons) in humanities, majoring in philosophy of art and ethics, and has undertaken postgraduate study in ethics, business ethics and eastern philosophies. he worked for many years as a Benelux correspondent for 'Financial Times Business Information' (FTBI), and 'l’Agence Economique et Financière (l’Agefi) in Paris. He has been managing editor of London-based Environment Matters International since 1989, as well as head of communications for UK ethics consultancy, Dialogue Works. He is author of 'Am I Right or Am I Right? - an introduction to ethical decision making'. Simon, born 1949, is married with five children, and lives in Johannesburg.

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© 2014 Simon Geschwindt. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/21/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9168-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9169-8 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Simon Geschwindt is a journalist specialising in ethics, the environment and corporate social responsibility. He is author of Am I Right or Am I Right?—an Introduction to Ethical Decision Making, and Saving Saskia (forthcoming). Simon, born 1949, is married with five children, and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

For Karin, my children and grandchildren

This exciting and moving story follows a journalist’s struggle with love, betrayal, murder and his own identity. It was written in1983 under the title Een Welkomen Dood, before the advent of the Internet, mobile phone and post 9/11 tightening of international security. It was produced by the author in English in 2008 under the title Lost Identity. The issue of exports of substandard and counterfeit chemicals and drugs to developing countries remains as current as when the novel was first written. All characters are fictional.

1

Kenya, February 1981

Many of the survivors didn’t even hear the blast before it deafened them. Freelance journalist Marco Meyer felt only a tremor through his wiry frame. His hands gripped the edge of the table that had shielded him and his two companions as he cautiously opened his eyes to the prickly smoke, and gulped at the grey air that left a dry musty taste on his lips and tongue.

Still rooted to the spot, he watched the smoke clear to reveal the silent scene of hysteria and horror on the Nairobi street outside. It seemed entirely divorced from him as though the shattered windows formed the frame of a silent film. He shifted his vision to the centre of what was left of the café. Between the debris of splintered glass and shattered crockery, the lacerated remains of a boy-waiter twitched as though suffering a fit.

Then all was still; as though time had taken a deep breath to prepare for the screams that Marco could not hear through ears still deafened from the blast, but could see only too plainly on the agonised faces outside. His eyes focused on an elderly woman in the street clinging to a child’s broken shoe. Others around her crawled on broken glass from one dismembered body to another.

Marco’s head spun. He wanted to run. But his legs failed to obey. It was then that he became aware of a sharp pain that shot through the surface of his right calf. He looked down at a thin, dark red trickle running across one of his black, buckskin shoes, congealing quickly in the dry evening air. He pushed back his chairkthe first movement he’d made since the blast—and felt intrusive as though he’d broken the silence. He rolled up his grey flannel trouser leg and painfully extracted a small wedge-shaped piece of the ice-cream glass he’d been holding only a few seconds—or was it minutes?—before.

The café was empty except for the three of them who had been fortunate to have chosen a table at the back for their breakfast meeting. He suddenly felt faintly absurd. He should do something, help someone. He turned towards his two companions, South African journalist, Karl Ngwenya, and local businessman Joshua Jackson. Marco watched Jackson’s heavy, black hands carefully release their grip on each other to push down doubtfully on the table. The bitter dust that had stormed in from the street clung like black pepper to Jackson’s white cotton shirt, straining over his paunch. Marco was amazed to see Karl suddenly burst to his feet and force his way through the overturned and broken furniture to a woman who’d earlier been sitting at a table by the door, now on her back outside the doorway. Her eyes rolled, full of terror, as she took in her injuries. Marco found it difficult to recapture the memory of the tall beauty he had earlier cast an appreciative eye over.

Karl was crouching beside her, his hands suspended in the air as though unsure of what to do, or perhaps terrified of hurting her. The woman’s eyes seemed to seek for something on which to focus, and then closed as she lost consciousness. Karl looked desperately about him, but Jackson grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him to his feet. Jackson turned to Marco and beckoned him to follow. Grateful for guidance, and gripping his briefcase, Marco rose to his feet cautiously, as if testing the firmness of the floor, and followed Jackson who gently but firmly steered Karl through the doorway. Marco paused for a second to take in his own reflection in a mirror cracked down the middle. Two gaunt half-faces stared back wide-eyed and bloodshot.

The three men stepped outside into the chaos of people rushing among the bodies, faces mingled expressions of helplessness and fear. The smoke and dust had cleared enough to be able to pick out the crumbled remains of the supermarket on the opposite side of the dusty street. Police in shorts and knee-length stockings were erecting barricades around the pavement and part of the road facing the bombed-out building. A white woman doctor and two African male nurses were attending the wounded, while onlookers drove stray dogs from the dead.

Despite Jackson’s attempts to urge him through more quickly, Karl had slowed his pace, his eyes transfixed on events occurring on the opposite pavement, his fists clenched in frustration at his own uselessness. Marco rubbed the dust from his eyes with his sweaty fist and followed Karl’s gaze. He was staring at a little girl lying on the pavement opposite. Her matted and sticky black baby-curls covered her face. A tiny hand, surprisingly clean and soft with pink palms, protruded from beneath the remains of her cotton dress. The blast had taken away her left foot, and a male nurse was hurriedly binding her thin calf just above the spouting wound.

Marco clutched his briefcase even more tightly as the girl’s terrified scream thrust violently at his ears that had abruptly regained their hearing. That scream above the crescendo of misery shook him to the core. He just stood and stared at the little girl’s agonised face as a policeman’s huge brown hands gently lifted her onto a stretcher. The policeman in his enormous army boots strode alongside her, her tiny hand in his, until they reached an ambulance.

Marco staggered after Jackson and Karl, carefully picking their way across the wreckage beyond the limit of the cordoned off area to where Jackson’s white Range Rover was parked. They sat inside, in silence for a moment and Marco stared at the patch of blood on his trouser leg.

His first words were, ‘I think I need stitches’. He felt Karl start from his disturbing thoughts and stare at him incredulously. Karl’s own face was gashed deeply and blood was still forming thin, worm-like, red trails across the fine dust on his dark cheeks. Jackson swivelled in his seat and glanced down at Marco’s leg.

‘We’ll sort you out as best we can at the office, but you won’t get seen by any doctor today.’ His voice was steady.

Marco’s abrupt return to practical matters seemed to jolt the others out of their introspection. With Jackson behind the wheel, the vehicle, perfect for visiting out-of-the-way customers and giving Western company reps a taste of safari, eased its way into a stream of rush hour traffic on the rock garden roundabout joining Museum Hill to Nairobi’s Uhuru Highway.

The beauty of the January morning contrasted sharply with the ugliness they had left behind as they headed away from the city along the Chiromo road, its borders ablaze with acacia and bougainvilleas, whose movement in the light breeze contrasted with the hustle and hooting of traffic struggling towards the city centre.

As if attempting to return to some degree of normality, Jackson, owner of Tiga Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Supplies in Nairobi, told his passengers they were heading for his quiet office out of town, paid for by the Swiss chemicals producer for whom he held the country’s sole franchise. He pulled into the drive of what had once been a British colonial country house, now divided into offices, and parked opposite the front doorway in the shade of tall jacaranda trees.

Nodding to the receptionist, a toothless, bald Kikuyu in a grey suit many sizes too big for him, he led the way down the short corridor to the four neat rooms of his modest ground-floor office. Jackson’s secretary entered. She was a tall Indian woman, evidently slender beneath the figure-clinging, traditional dress. Her mouth was pressed into an expression of concern, as her eyes steadily scanned the injured visitors.

‘I heard about the bomb,’ she stated in a businesslike way.

Jackson eased his large frame into a leather chair behind his vast mahogany desk and he struck Marco as suddenly appearing more relaxed, safe, in charge.

‘We were fortunate,’ he responded unemotionally, glancing at a piece of paper she’d placed before him. ‘These men,’ he gestured to Marco and Karl, ‘need their wounds seeing to. See to it, will you?’

Nodding, she disappeared into the next room and returned with two leather-upholstered chairs for the two men and then glided away again to return with a bowl of warm water and cotton wool. She dabbed a wad into the water and gently squeezed it. She prepared to clean Marco’s wounds first but he flinched aggressively. She hovered for a moment, uncertain of what to do, before Marco, realising the discomfort he’d caused her, smiled sheepishly.

‘Sorry, I’d prefer to do it myself.’

She nodded, handed Marco the cotton wool and turned to Karl who submitted more gratefully to her nursing.

‘Anybody ring?’ Jackson asked her.

‘Dr Kareithi from the hospital,’ she told him in her reserved, professional tone. ‘He wants to speak to you urgently.’

‘Oh God! I know what that means.’ He paused for a moment to think, his face slightly anguished. ‘Ring him back, and tell him I’ll not be in until tomorrow morning. Ask him to ring me. No. Say I’ll ring him.’

Having finished seeing to Karl’s wounds, the secretary picked up the bowl and left, supposedly to make the phone call.

‘What a luxury!’ Marco’s voice, still parched from the dust of the explosion, sounded like sandpaper. ‘What I couldn’t do with a secretary like that.’

He tried to force a laugh but just croaked. He looked at Karl, expecting at least a wry smile, but Karl, registering complete disinterest, just stared at Marco through the rimless glasses that grew out of his mop of tight, black curls.

Jackson searched Marco’s expression for innuendo, and then broke the silence. ‘Feroza?’ He lowered his voice a fraction. ‘I couldn’t do without her. Been with me two years now. Her American husband left her with their baby girl, so she’s got to work. She’ll never marry again. She’s got everything—well-educated, good-humoured, considerate, nice to look at. It all counts for nothing. A failed marriage is unforgivable among her kind, whatever the cause.’

Marco reflected momentarily on how fortunate Western women were to live in a liberal society, and he thought of his own ex-wife and her re-marriage. He dabbed at his leg and as he righted himself his pulse thumped a steady rhythm inside his skull.

‘I’m going to call it a day,’ he announced, pushing himself wearily to his feet. ‘Head’s killing me. You coming, Karl?’

Karl looked up and shook his head.

‘I’ve got your number,’ said Marco. ‘Where are you staying Karl?’

Karl handed Marco a crumpled business card from a hotel with an Indian name.

‘If I don’t see you before, I’ll see you back in Amsterdam,’ Karl said, lifting a hand in a half wave, and returning his attention to Jackson.

The short, but painfully slow taxi ride back to the Nairobi Hilton, where he was covering an international conference of experts on emerging markets for agricultural chemicals, gave Marco time to think; to examine the images of the explosion and to relive his sensation of helplessness overlaid by blind fear. He managed to force the images away only for them to be replaced by different gut-wrenching thoughts—of Karl.

He’d heard from Joshua Jackson that Karl, his ex-wife’s husband was in town. When he rang him, he had seemed reluctant to meet up, but finally invited Marco to a breakfast meeting with Jackson, on the basis, he said, that Marco’s knowledge of the chemical industry might prove useful.

Marco rummaged through his jacket for Karl’s hotel card. He couldn’t turn his eyes away from it, or his mind away from everything Karl was, and that he knew he could never be—a real investigative journalist, with Karl’s worldliness and his air of integrity and self-sufficiency. Karl’s life was a far cry from the neat, safe, air-conditioned world of a trade magazine hack. Marco worked for British and French trade journals as a Dutch freelance on environmental issues, which meant a great deal to him. He cared passionately about the environmental effect caused by multinational producers of farm chemicals and fertilisers, as well as the oil industry. He also wrote for third world and environmental publications on a pro bono basis on issues about which he felt genuinely passionate. How developing countries seemed to be making the same environmental mistakes as industrialised countries had, particularly with the misuse of pesticides, and the way that shoddy, substandard goods were supplied to the third world, paid for with government aid from the west.

He was proud of his writing skills, and particularly his ability to translate complex technical issues into everyday language that ordinary people could understand. And he could do this in three languages, for which he had to thank his German father, who taught him Dutch but not German, and French mother. He had acquired British nationality via his father who was granted British citizenship after escaping from Germany when the Nazis seized power.

But whilst he recognised his superior skills as a writer, he never considered himself to be a real journalist. He rarely left his office, did most interviewing by phone and never put himself in any situation that was the slightest bit dangerous. He felt that whilst Karl couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag, Marco could never match his investigative skills.

He cast his mind back to Karl’s reaction to the blast, his open passion, his depth of emotion, compared with Marco’s own numbness. He also cast his mind further back to his former wife, Suzanna, and the time Karl first met her almost three years ago, and how quickly he managed to insinuate his way into their marriage. It hadn’t taken him long to get what he wanted. Within a year, Marco and Suzanna were divorced, and within another year she and Karl were married. Marco felt a pang of the usual undiluted jealousy to add to his constant envy of the man.

Karl was a foreign correspondent for a left wing magazine on African affairs, published in London. Marco first met him at a press conference. The two of them had nothing in common professionally or personally, but Karl lived nearby and often came to Marco and Suzanna’s flat for a drink or a meal. Karl had moved to Holland when he was deported from South Africa for allegedly being a ‘liberal’ and ‘communist sympathiser’. Although he was Zulu, he spoke excellent Dutch, and despite Marco’s foreign accent, they understood each other perfectly.

But fondness was something he’d never felt for Karl. A close relationship with him, even normal conversation or small talk, seemed unachievable. He felt Karl was always out of reach, as though he were hiding something, a fact he at first put down to culture barriers. He would appear to be curious, always asking questions about friends and colleagues, but in a distracted, almost professional way, as though merely going through the motions while thinking about something else more important. Marco remembered how quickly he came to resent his company, and the effect it had on him and Suzanna; how his visits brought an atmosphere of cynicism, his air of superiority somehow throwing light on the cracks in what Marco hitherto regarded as the perfect marriage.

Even now, despite a burning resentment, Marco seemed reluctantly drawn towards Karl by a fascination for everything about him that was different—his colour, his nationality, his exile status, his independence, his worldliness, and—his wife.

As the taxi pulled into the Hilton, Marco’s reflections returned to the shattered remains of the Nairobi café. One moment enjoying breakfast; the next the quake and the dust—and through the dust the memory of Suzanna’s face.

Two days later, after a Hilton breakfast large enough to feed a village, Marco browsed through the Kenyan papers. They all said a group calling itself the Ugandan Liberation Army had claimed responsibility for the blast, which left eighteen people dead and enough injured to stretch the local casualty wards to their limit. The supermarket had qualified as a suitable target because it apparently sold alcohol and luxury goods to high-ranking army officers from neighbouring Uganda. These generals and colonels were said to have crossed the extremely difficult border with Kenya to do their regular shopping in Nairobi. The ULA had added that more of the same could be expected while Kenya’s Moi government continued to support the new Ugandan government of Milton Obote, recent successor to the tyrannical regime of the deposed Idi Amin.

He tossed the papers onto his bed, and grabbed the phone.

‘Is that you, Karl?’

‘Marco.’ His voice sounded flat.

‘I’m flying out this weekend—any chance of a beer?’

Karl hesitated.

‘Er… Sure. I’m in room 301. Third floor. Get here around ten. There’ll be no one on reception, so come straight up.’

2

The Netherlands

The loud jangle of the telephone dragged Marco from the sofa where he’d been trying to sleep. Stumbling to the phone, he hesitated for a moment before yanking the receiver from its cradle. It was Olga, Suzanna’s sister. It did not surprise him and yet the sound of her voice made his heart stop momentarily, before it raced, pounding in his ears.

‘Karl is dead.’

He’d been living this moment since getting back to Holland, and yet all preparations for an appropriate response fluttered away beyond reach. He felt like saying ‘I know. I killed him,’ but he just stood there.

‘Marco?’

His skull felt as though it were shrinking.

‘Yes, Olga, sorry,’ he spluttered, ‘It’s just, it’s… er… I’m so sorry."

The muscles around his mouth were drawn tight.

‘I know.’ There was a momentary silence as Olga seemed to hesitate, ‘Suzanna needs you.’

He could barely remember the rest of the conversation. Another hand held the receiver; another voice reassured her and promised to drive over immediately. ‘Suzanna needs you.’ What could he honestly offer her? How would he be able to put his arm around her, console her?

He launched himself at the drinks cabinet. Pouring himself a generous glass of gin, he put Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue on the record deck, and nestled himself into the threadbare cushions. Clutching his gin glass, he struggled to focus on the clear liquid and the sunlight that stole in through a gap in the curtains and reflected on its surface. He tried to listen intently to every note of the melancholy trumpet, but Karl’s sneering voice cut through, stabbing deep into Marco’s stomach until the pain and the anger became too much.

His thoughts tumbled through the bottom of the gin glass to that defining moment when he’d hurled himself at Karl, then balanced on the balcony’s edge, cautiously peering through the darkness to the broken body below.

The record ended with a click—then silence. He closed his eyes and tried not to breathe. He pressed the glass into his forehead until it hurt. He could not begin to comprehend the insanity of it. It stole into every moment like a dark shadow. Yet he could not see it or feel it with anything like the substance and clarity he longed for.

He concentrated on the black wall behind his eyes and saw Suzanna. She was touching his face as she always used to, in the good old days before Karl—holding his jaw tenderly before kissing him, and he was letting her hair run through his fingers. But it was so far away, over and beyond the black wall, and the harder he climbed to reach her, the higher the wall became. Then he felt a hand in his and there she was, lying beside him, only her body was that of the woman in the wreckage of the café, rolling her eyes in pain and losing consciousness.

He filled his glass to the brim, lit a Gitanes and sank into the old sofa. As the heavy smoke thumped his chest and his head lightened, his mind flashed back to Karl’s hotel in Nairobi—a dingy dump with no lift. The poorly-lit stairs to the third floor smelled of curry and urine. He felt sick as he recalled the dull thud above the sound of distant traffic, reggae music from another room and the high pitched drone of cicadas. The events between first pushing open Karl’s door and seeing his lifeless body were firmly locked away in Marco’s mind, beyond immediate recall.

It was getting on for lunchtime and Marco was still unshaven. He freshened up his tall, thin body with a shower and liver salts, shaved, rearranged his mousy-brown spiky hair, and stalked back into the living room. One more for the road—one more Gitanes.

Marco went back to the bathroom, threw his toiletries and a change of clothes into a plastic bag, slammed the front door behind him, and picked his way across the muddy yard to his battle-scarred, black Alfa.

Suzanna’s flat in Amsterdam was 200 kilometres from Marco’s apartment, which was on the outskirts of a small village in South Limburg, the southernmost Dutch province. In the old Alfa, the trip took three very long hours.

It was gone one when he left home. He desperately wanted to hurry but couldn’t, and swore for the umpteenth time to invest in a newer model. On the motorway there was little to keep him occupied. The gearbox was too noisy for the radio. He felt a hollow feeling in his chest as his thoughts drifted ahead to Suzanna; what he would say to her, and how she would greet him.

He clawed the steering wheel and began picking at a loose piece of rubber. Had he sounded shocked enough on the phone? Sympathetic enough? Had he reacted as though he hadn’t already known? Asked the right questions? Looking back at the conversation and the way his voice had broken and trembled, it could quite easily have been interpreted as shock, which, in a way, it was.

He rolled his shoulders back. This would be the hardest part, but when this was over and Karl had become just a memory, everyone could move on and maybe, with Karl gone, Marco and Suzanna would have a second chance to make things work.

As the clapped-out engine droned on he recalled Suzanna’s marriage to Karl last spring. The massively imposing church completely dominated the tiny village outside Amsterdam. Suzanna was dressed in a light cotton frock that made her seem even more fragile than usual. Moccasin-style sandals added to the impression, giving an overall effect of someone far younger than 26. Her headgear was a disaster. A wide-brimmed straw bonnet, perched on her waist length chestnut hair, was obviously there only to abide by the church’s rule that women cover their heads.

The close vocal harmonies of an album called—inappropriately—Déja vu heralded the end of the mass and the signing of the register. The song was called Teach your children well; not that they ever had any, or intended to, as far as Marco knew.

Friends and relations were allowed on whichever side of the aisle they wished, which must have been a relief for Karl. His side would otherwise have been pathetically sparse, and the scene would have a resembled a remarkably uncharacteristic case of apartheid in liberal Holland. Only his parents, brother and sister had been able to afford the trip from South Africa. He had few real friends in the Netherlands: whereas it was as if half the province had turned out for Suzanna, her vast number of relations making up for her lack of friends.

Apart from Suzanna, none of those around Karl would have expected his death to have any profound effect on their lives and surely she’d recover eventually. The one exception was Marco. He knew there would be a price to pay, but meanwhile he would manage to close his mind to the possible details.

After parking with some difficulty in Amsterdam’s Vondelstraat, he stepped