Читать книгу Agency Blue - Alex Smith - Страница 4

How Joe Blue, the miracle kid with

blue hands, started writing a comic about

a dead private investigator named Felix,

his deeply sad widow Elsa, his beautiful

daughter Kitty, an impossibly rude client

and other suspects in a rollicking mystery

about to unfold in Cape Town – all this

while listening to “Lonely Avenue” on his

MP3 player (a gift from the mobster pirate)

Joe Blue Siyengo ran his thumb over the snout of a snoring puppy, cleared his throat and read out from the latest issue of Love Africa magazine:

At the far end of our awesome Africa, in a mini-metropolis flanked by a mountain tall and flat, and a harbour full of ships and crimes, there’s a sixteen-year-old kid named Joe Blue Siyengo, who lives for the colours in his art box. This dreadlocked township prodigy works with brush pens from Japan. He labels each pen with a very specific colour name, and he keeps the pens tied up with elastic bands in colour-groups: eight shades of Edible Green, thirteen tones of Sky, six colours of Sun and ten of Earth …

Joe Blue pushed the magazine aside. “That’s me they’re talking about, monsters,” he said to the sleeping puppies, who were too busy chasing dream squirrels to respond.

That day Joe Blue’s sisters were at a 3D vampire movie and two puppies were asleep in his lap, and his own face stared up at him from the cover of the Love Africa magazine on his desk. And he should probably have felt happy or at least a bit proud about that, but lodged in the kid genius’s heart was an impossible sadness, the kind you feel when something bad happens to someone you love and you wish you could undo the bad, make it better, make it go away, but you can’t; you can only do what you can do to make a small offer of comfort.

Picking up a brush pen labelled Sky No. 15, Indigo Burn, Joe Blue wrote on the cover of a new artist’s notebook in his unique calligraphic style: Agency Blue / Dead Not Alone. Joe Blue outlined the letters of “Agency Blue” in black, and on the first page of the artist’s notebook, he wrote: For Kitty – I can’t say everything’s gonna be alright, but I can tell you you’re my best friend. I love you.

A phone called in his thoughts.

A story was beginning.

Joe needed to work. He pressed “mute” on the remote of a gargantuan flat-screen TV with surround sound, silencing the old musical Bugsy Malone. He’d watched the film so often he knew most of the dialogue by heart, as did his patron, Zachary Ellis. The film was about Chicago gangsters like Al Capone, but in Bugsy all the adults were acted by kids, including Jodie Foster, who was a teenager then. In the film she was called Tallulah. Joe took to calling his sister Tallulah, because she was stroppy and feisty just like the kid in the film. He loved the way those kids in Bugsy Malone knew everything; they were just as worldly and jaunty as Ellis. In fact, they were elegant.

In spite of being born in a shack and being struck by lightning, or maybe because he was born in a shack and was struck by lightning, Joe Blue had a great eye for elegance. That’s why he had an unlikely passion for old movies – his top two films of all time were Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Lawrence of Arabia – and a special fondness for suave adventures and neatly solved mysteries like the ones by Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and Zane Grey.

That phone just wouldn’t stop ringing in Joe Blue’s imagination. Bugsy flickered on in silence, and those pups’ paws twitched faster and faster. The images of the story’s plot were growing in Joe Blue’s head, and to get himself in the mood for creating, he turned on Stephen Marley’s “Lonely Avenue”, and then he drew the first “R” of . .

RRRRING! RRRRING! “Agency Blue, mbote.” Beatrice Basoko answered the phone in Lingala, the language most used by Congolese refugees in Cape Town.

Joe Blue filled in the colour of Beatrice’s overall first: Sky No.6, Dusk Coral. Miss Basoko stood with a feather duster in one hand amid piles of boxes stuffed with documents and compromising photographs, listening to the caller. She gave her employer, Madame Elsa Bleu, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Kitty Bleu, a distressed look. Joe Blue gave Miss Basoko’s skin the colour of Earth No.3, Good Black Earth.

Elsa and Kitty sat in an antique chair upholstered with damask, jute stuffing escaping from the armchair’s burst underparts. In the next room the TV murmured soap opera sounds. Kitty curled her long legs under her and rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. She was trying to pretend it was a normal day by re-reading Twilight (even though one of her best friends, a True Blood devotee, rolled her eyes whenever Kitty mentioned that “totally uncool vampire book”) because Twilight was full of longing and anticipation and the gorgeous aloof loner of a hero sparkled in the sun, and the good vampires triumphed and it made her happy. It was comforting.

Elsa had blocked the phone’s relentless ringing from her thoughts and was staring at a photograph of her husband, Felix Bleu. The picture had been taken on holiday at the Addo Elephant Park in a wilder part of “Paradise”. He always used to say, “Kitty, Cape Town is Paradise … in fact, South Africa is Paradise.”

Joe Blue glanced up from the sketch and at the graffiti on the wall over the TV: SA=Paradise? He’d done it in the stencil style of Banksy, one of his all-time favourite graff artists. TICKETY-TOCK-TICKETY-TOCK went an old mantle clock in the Agency Blue office. Time had run out for Felix Bleu. TICKETY-TOCK.

A peculiar detachment from body and thoughts had come over Elsa – it was as if she’d been administered a numbing injection to the heart. OUCH!

Kitty paused from reading to squeeze her mother’s hand. Joe Blue filled in Kitty’s dear lips the colour of Sky No.5, Evening Pink. Her lovely skin was Earth No.10, Macadamia Butter, and the damask chair was Edible Green No.3, Gem Squash Insides.

“Something’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense, mon ours bien-aimé,” said Kitty’s mother to the picture of the six-foot-four Frenchman. “After all we went through, I can’t believe you’d do this to yourself; they must be lying.” She’d fled the DRC with Felix when fighting broke out there in 1998. He was proportioned like a bear, a beloved bear. He had a gentle countenance and his skin was also Earth No.3, Good Black Earth. His name for Kitty was Tigress Queen. He said she had luteous eyes. That was the word he chose because he wanted Kitty to learn the best and most beautiful English words, not only the easy ones. He liked to read the dictionary and try out new English words and teach them to Kitty.

“What does it mean, Dad?” Kitty remembered asking.

“Luteous, Kitty, means yellow tinged with brown; like a tiger.” He had smiled, happy to have passed on a new word. “With your luteous eyes and fabulous afro do, you look nothing less than a Tigress Queen.”

No doubting it, tall and skinny Kitty was a beauty; a model scout had even invited her to Paris once, but Kitty wasn’t interested in being the empty smile in front of a camera; her big dream was more gung-ho – she wanted to be a warzone documentary maker, and was seldom without her digital camcorder.

Joe Blue chose Earth No.6, Clay Red, for the highlights in Kitty’s hair. As he filled in the colour, he wished he could wrap his arms around that sweet girl and hold her and tell her how much he adored her and that everything would be okay. His heart always hurt a bit when he thought of Kitty.

The phone had been ringing all morning. Pretending to be Elsa, Kitty had spoken to five clients, including a British Lord who had hired Felix to follow his anorexic Lady and her suspected lover, the owner of the Constantia Valley Pharmacy. There had also been three calls from an Italian mother, heiress to a fashion empire, who employed Felix to keep an eye on her son’s glamorous but acquisitive girlfriend.

“Just a moment,” said Beatrice, changing from Lingala to English with a voluptuous French-South African accent. She pushed the receiver into her apron-clad chest. “What should I say, Kitty? It’s another one of Monsieur Bleu’s clients.”

FWOOSH! The sound of Miss Basoko’s voice swirled down Elsa’s ear canals, but Elsa registered it only as one would the faintest of breezes. She could not pull her eyes away from those of Felix on the picture – such beautiful dark eyes, she thought, so kind. She kept expecting him to walk in and ask her: “Would you like some coffee, my lovely?” He was a coffee addict. A scent-memory of his skin passed through her nostrils: warm sandalwood and homemade corn-bread.

“Madame! There is a man named Reginald Pong on the telephone. Should I tell him what happened?”

Pong – the name was familiar to Kitty. She’d seen it on one of her Dad’s files. Pong, she recalled, was a Camps Bay jeweller. Son of a multi-millionaire Hong Kong marble dealer.

Joe Blue chuckled as he drew Reginald Pong, who as it happened was named after and looked like Reggie Pong, a sweet-natured, always-broke photography student, one of Joe Blue’s best friends at art school.

Reginald Pong was famous for his taste in Eastern-bloc models, his artistry with diamonds and his round-sterned teak junk powered by four Rolls-Royce engines, which was one of the finest vessels moored in the Alfred yacht basin. Kitty felt far too young, too confused about what had happened with her dad to deal with all of these files and too ingenuous to have to take on the likes of Reginald “three-blondes-at-a-time” Pong.

But what choice did she have? Her mother was in a kind of trance of grief and tranquillisers, special tablets prescribed by the doctor to stop her from crying. All Elsa did was cry and watch soap operas and drink coffee and eat buttermilk rusks like Felix loved to do. Meanwhile Felix’s business was in crisis.

Kitty’s dad had started Agency Blue with money he’d scraped together working as a car guard in Kloof Street and moonlighting as a bodyguard for an entrepreneur art dealer named Zachary Ellis, a fine fellow, a rare man among men.

Here Joe Blue added a panel with a fabulous portrait of Zachary Ellis the Benevolent, smiling and handing out cash.

Felix had turned Agency Blue into a thriving business. So even if they could afford to close the agency down, the money wasn’t the point; Agency Blue was Felix’s life and his big dream.

Kitty studied Miss Basoko’s concerned face. Miss Basoko was also a refugee from the DRC. Years ago, like Felix, Elsa and Kitty, she had escaped the soldiers and the bodies strewn in the streets, and fled with no money and no identity papers.

Joe Blue drew in all those bodies and the bloody ground around, then he shaded the scene in Sun No.3, Red Paradise Sunset.

At that time Felix had been an archaeology Masters student. After a month of walking with almost no food, they found their way across the border of Paradise and down to the Coast of Good Hope. Kitty blinked, she could hear his voice again saying as he did every morning when he looked out and saw the mountain: “This is Paradise, Kitty.”

And if he thought he was in Paradise … “Why this, now?” wondered Kitty, not realising she’d spoken her thoughts out loud. SIGH! “He’d never do it. I can’t believe it.” She blinked, hoping for tears, but she had not been able to cry; she still could not believe what had happened to her dad.

Miss Basoko was staring at her. Miss Basoko and the indomitable girls of the African Kids’ Comic Club were Kitty’s best friends in all of Africa, in fact in the whole world and even the universe. Felix had once mentioned a half-brother, a retired Oxford professor who lived in Cairo, but Kitty had never met her Cairo Uncle Barré. She didn’t even know his first name. Joe Blue drew pyramids and the sphinx and filled them in the colour of Earth No.5, Desert Sand.

In a series of deft strokes, Joe Blue drew Kitty looking at the holiday picture of her parents.

She loved the story of how her mother and father met at a curry and spice stall near a flower market, both buying real vanilla pods. After the moment he promised to share his secret recipe for vanilla-honey pudding, Elsa and Felix were inseparable. They only stopped talking to laugh, to kiss and to eat, Elsa had told Kitty. The night she was due to fly home to Canada, Felix proposed marriage with a bunch of basil flowers and a round tin of chocolate fudge. They were huddled beneath a blue moon and a leaking umbrella. It was the ides of October.

Joe Blue made the moon Sky No.9, Morning Blue, and he filled in the basil leaves in Edible Green No.7, Lightly Cooked Peas.

“You better speak to the gentleman,” said Miss Basoko, handing the phone to Kitty. “He’s very angry.”

Kitty made her voice sound stern and grown-up. “Monsieur Pong, Elsa Bleu here, there’s something you should know …”

“Woman, don’t interfere,” said the betel-chewing voice on the other end. SPLORTCH! He spat out a wad of watery gunk, coloured with Sun No.3, Red Paradise Sunset. “Where the hell is Felix?”

The way Pong used the word “woman” when addressing her mother irritated Kitty. It was the first time in two days that she had felt anything. Despite her fury, she was grateful to this horrible Mr Pong for ousting her from a state of emotional paralysis.

“Here’s how it is, Mr Pong. I am taking over your case regarding …” She flicked open a file marked Pong Diamonds. “… the Baron and Baroness de Botton.”

“Impossible. I’ll try Felix’s mobile.” Reginald Pong ended the call.

BZZZZ BZZZZ! On the desk a sheet of paper began vibrating and Mozart’s famous composition Exsultate, Jubilate issued forth. Miss Basoko reached out to answer. As she leaned forward her striped undershirt showed between the buttons of her overall.

The stripes were filled in Sky No.4, Violet Before Moonrise.

“No. Wait, Beatrice,” said Kitty, thinking of all the things she’d overheard her father telling her mother about this man Pong. “I’ll answer.”

She let it ring several times before answering, and when she did she said: “In my experience, Mr Pong, few things are truly impossible. Who would imagine, for example, that a fisherman from Macao might find his boat blown off course and end up in Persia, where he discovers a vast and unknown string of quarries, source of the finest marble in the world? Some would have laughed if that fisherman ever predicted that he would become one of the wealthiest men in Hong Kong.”

“That is ts’ui and feng working together, it has nothing to do with possibilities. Where’s Felix?”

“Chen, I suppose, is what it is,” said Kitty. She knew quite a bit about Chinese culture because at the time of the Beijing Olympics she’d done a school project on the I Ching, the great classic of Chinese spiritual literature. Ts’ui and feng were hexagrams of great fortune. Her attention drifted out of the second-storey window to the view of the antique market below.

“What are you saying, woman?”

“My name is K— Elsa. If you want your situation with the de Bottons resolved then kindly refrain from referring to me as ‘woman’.”

Pong chortled on the other end. “I know how you liberated lovelies think, I went to Oxford – your type always has too much to say …”

“And Eastern bloc blondes don’t?”

“Ha, ha. Actually that’s true – I like them best when they’re young and only speak Russian or whatever other heathen language, then I can hear but don’t have to listen. They’re like my pretty little budgies, chirping.”

Joe Blue gave Pong thoughts of a bed with satin sheets in Sky No.2, Purple Before Night. Stretched out in the sheets was a melancholy naked woman with hair the colour of Sun No.5, Sun On Wheat.

Joe Blue paused mid-sketch, picked up the Love Africa magazine from his desk, and read more of the article out to the demon pups:

Once upon a rainy day in Khayelitsha, two schoolboys were arguing about magic, love and miracles. One of the boys, Ebenezer Siyengo, a sensitive poet type, was in love with a girl who didn’t love him back, and he was bitter with disappointment, and so he shouted in a fury at his friend who did believe in love: “Get real, you idiot, there’s no magic in the world, love is a useless addiction worse than smoking or tik, and miracles never, ever, ever happen!”

At that instant, a baby boy who would come to be called Joe Blue was born in an overcrowded shack, and at the very moment of his birth, SWOOSH!, a bolt of brilliant blue lightning surged through the roof of the shack and hit Joe Blue’s hands. His hands turned bluish, but they weren’t burned at all. People in the neighbourhood said: “WOW! It’s a miracle that baby’s hands weren’t burnt!” But the real miracle of that day was only revealed when, at the age of two, Joe Blue found a sheet of cheap white paper, picked up a pencil in his blue hands and drew his big brother, Ebenezer, with all the skill of a professional artist. Then the people in the neighbourhood said again, this time with dropped jaws: “Wow! The baby drew that? Wow! Hayibo! WOW!” Actually that’s all they could say, over and over, because they were so amazed and flabbergasted.

Time went by as it always does, faster every year, and Ebenezer became an ace shoeshine superman in the City Bowl. SHIMME CHA-CHING! Out of the money Joe Blue’s brother made polishing the two thousand shoes of a big-time criminal, a con-man from Germany, he paid for Joe Blue to have lessons at the University of Cape Town Art School. Joe Blue was ugly, scrawny, his ears stuck out, he was shy and his hands were blue. So he wasn’t much of a hit with the girls, but Joe Blue had talent like magic, buckets of it, and real magic is rarer than phoenix feathers. That’s why Joe Blue’s big brother worked his fingers to early arthritis shining all those shoes to pay for art lessons and the very best art equipment too, because Joe Blue was growing up to be a modern-day Michelangelo …

“She’s right about my ears.” The pups still hadn’t woken. Joe Blue shrugged, bemused by the article; the journalist had used plenty of artistic licence. He put his pen to work again and sketched Reginald Pong with a phone in one hand and a half-gnawed lobster claw dripping with pink sauce in the other.

CRUNCH-CRUNCH. Pong finished a mouthful of lobster, dabbed his lips with a silken napkin and said: “Very well, Madame Bleu. Tell me then, what is this chen?”

The scene in this frame exhausted almost all of Sky No.11, Blue Before Dark, because Joe Blue filled in everything – even the whites of Kitty’s eyes – in that colour. “Chen … The violent thunder that makes change and moves heaven and earth.” Kitty was lost again, watching the clouds above the market. “I’m sorry, Mr Pong, but my fath— my husband, Felix, is dead.”

“What! How? When?”

Kitty could not bring herself to tell him. It was too hurtful even to think about.

“Details are not important, Mr Pong.”

“I imagine he had many enemies, your husband.”

Kitty ignored Pong and continued. “What’s important is that I am familiar with your case and I will be able to help you.” This was a lie. She had given the case files on her dad’s desk a cursory glance. Except for the one on the Framboise family and their global patisserie chain – that she had read with some fascination.

Like everyone else, Kitty had seen films about these kinds of things, but what did she know about running a private detective agency? Would she be able to help Reginald Pong and the others? She remembered that in the Pong file, Felix had written: “Must meet with P to tell him about XL, EE and D. NB account o.d.”

“Felix wanted to meet with you,” said Kitty to Pong. “He had something important to tell you.”

“Indeed. I’m at the Leopard Lounge at the Twelve Apostles Hotel right now waiting for him. Dead! Most inconvenient. Damn it.”

“Let’s make it tomorrow at twelve, same place.” Kitty wondered how she was going to come up with something to tell Pong by twelve the following day. She was tall for her age. She guessed, with a bit of make-up and the right clothes, she could get away with pretending to be a young Mrs Bleu.

“Fine. And it better be good, Madame Bleu.”

As the call on Felix’s mobile ended, the landline on the desk rang and Miss Basoko answered. Kitty mouthed No more calls for me and set about examining the Pong file.

“Mademoiselle Mashamba,” Miss Basoko said. “Mbote. Sango nini?” FISH-SWISHEE! She did some cursory dusting while she spoke into the receiver. The feathers Joe Blue sketched on the long-handled duster were the same colour as the basil plant: Edible Green No.7, Lightly Cooked Peas.

“Ça va bien, merci. Malamu, as you say it, Beatrice. Tu va bien? Ozali?”

“Malamu.”

“Please can I speak to Kitty? It’s urgent.”

Beatrice shook her head. “Kitty is not taking calls. You understand the situation.”

“I’ve got to speak to her. Is she there? How is she?” This required a close-up of lips the colour of Sun No.3, Red Paradise Sunset Red.

“Yes, she’s here … but so much work to do and so sad. Not eating for two days.”

“It’s the shock. But she’s got to eat and I have to talk to her. Please, Beatrice, please.”

“I try. Nakeyi, Mademoiselle Mashamba.” Miss Basoko held out the telephone to Kitty, who had stopped looking at the Pong file and was staring through the window at a dismal stretch of cumulonimbus clouds.

“Et nous baignerons, mon amie,” mumbled Kitty, thinking of a French poem.

Miss Basoko tapped her on the shoulder. “Mademoiselle Mashamba says it’s an emergency.” Miss Basoko held the phone to Kitty’s ear.

“Kitty? … I can hear you breathing,” said Angel Mashamba, eldest member and leader of the African Kids’ Comic Club (the AKCC for short). “Kitty, I need to see you. I’ve called an emergency meeting of the AKCC and Grace’s brought a prime stash of First Girl.”

“I can’t c—”

“You must. We’re all here and waiting for you at La Petite Tarte.”

The thought of the French patronne’s laughing insistence that deserts were not an indulgence but a necessity, and of her hot-chocolate house filled with exotic scents of tea, cakes, sweet and savoury croissants and other patisseries cheered Kitty. La Petite Tarte was her dad’s favourite café in Cape Town and it was the weekly meeting spot of the AKCC because it had the best hot chocolate and French toast in the city.

“You’ve got to get out, Kitty. You’ve got to eat. I have something important I need to show you.”

SQUEAL! An unoiled sash window on the Georgian building diagonally opposite opened.

A woman in a nightgown stood at the window.

That woman is beautiful, but not as lovely as my mom, Kitty thought.

When she was not mourning, Elsa was a mathematician, a lecturer in statistics, a specialist in the “difference in dimensionalities of parameter spaces”, and she sidelined in French literature to ease the tedium of those explications of one-way ANOVAs and quadratic form. But for now that brilliant woman was so stunned and sad, she just sat in a chair staring at a wall, saying nothing except to ask for more coffee and another buttermilk rusk.

“Alright.” SIGH! “I’ll come for a short time.” Joe Blue decided to make Kitty’s eyes wide and worried. He took special care with those eyes. He adored Kitty; she was his first true love.