concerned: he waved a hand across his mouth, indicating they should be very quiet. A second gesture beckoned them to a darker corner of the lobby.
He hissed. ‘Please please. Please come. Please listen.’
‘Raymond.’
He frowned in the shadows. ‘People are looking for you!’
‘Who?’
Amy’s eyes were wide with alarm. Raymond shrugged, still frowning. The entire hotel was darkened, and hushed.
‘A short man. Quite fat. Almost a beard. Accent Spanish.’
Amy whispered, David’s way: ‘Could it be…Enoka?’
David snapped the question: ‘What did he say? This man?’
‘Not much. He say he was just looking for a white couple. Your descriptions. I tell him nothing…but he is looking for you. Tattoo on his hand. Like a German…swastika.’
‘Enoka,’ Amy confirmed.
Enoka.
David felt like he was being force-fed a diet of terror. The burning images had never left him. Miguel’s servile accomplice in the witch’s cave, scuttling away. And then Miguel. Raping Amy. Not raping Amy.
Amy was already making for the lifts.
‘Let’s get inside.’
They fled to their room and double locked the door – and lay fully clothed on the bed – and barely slept.
When David woke, he had only the memory of a bad dream in his mind, like the bitter aftertaste of some sleeping pill. A dream with sexual elements. A dream of Amy and Miguel. He was glad he could not remember the details.
The fog had quite gone. They shoved their kit in their cases, gazed at the sea – now shining in the sun – and snuck out of the hotel and cabbed the few hundred metres to the Herero Monument. They sat low in the car seats as they drove. Frightened and cowering.
As promised, Hans and his cars were unmissable: two big ochre Land Rovers with ‘Desert Elephant Project’ stencilled on the side. The Land Rovers were piled high with equipment. Hans greeted them with another manly handshake, and gestured at the second Land Rover.
‘Second car is full. You better come with us.’ He took their bags and shunted them in the boot of the first car. Then scrutinized them with a wry smile. ‘You guys OK? You look…kinda rattled.’
‘We’re fine. Just…wanna get going.’
‘Least the fog’s gone AWOL, eh? Like I said, you’d better come with me and Sam. Unless you want to talk about zoology for twelve hours. Hey. My Herero lieutenant! Sammy!’
A young black guy turned and grinned. Hans jerked a thumb at Amy and David. ‘These guys are with us. Dropping them off past the Ugab. Gonna sit them with us.’ He turned to David. ‘OK, let’s saddle up.’
David and Amy immediately climbed in the Land Rover. They held hands. The seconds dragged past. The cars remained stationary.
‘C’mon,’ Amy was whispering, to herself, very quietly. ‘What’s the problem? Can’t we just go?’
They waited. And sweated. Trying to look as invisible as possible in the darkness of the car. Six minutes passed, then six and a half minutes, then six and three quarter minutes, and then Hans vaulted on board and slammed his door and whistled loudly and the cars rumbled into life. They were doing it, getting out of town, trundling out of the Swakop suburbs; passing some red and blue painted bungalows, a hint of shanty town, the last dusty supermarket, a disused railway track: and then – then the desert.
The silence and vastness seemed to swallow them. David felt a headrush of relief. The cars had seemed big and important and all too conspicuous in the amiable Swakop streets; now they were two tiny specks in an austere immensity.
Good.
David and Amy were in the back, Sammy and Hans were chatting in the front. Speaking in Herero, or so David guessed: some tribal language anyway. Hans had the GPS coordinates given him by Amy. Every so often the German cross-checked them with his satnav, and nodded, apparently content.
The gravel road was nearly empty in the diagonal morning light. Occasionally a rusty truck or big new 4WD would pass them coming the other way, kicking up its own dust trail, making orange smoke signals in the empty blue air. Some pick-up trucks had black workers in grey overalls lying in the back, smoking, or sleeping. The glossy SUVs generally contained a solitary white man who lifted one lazy finger in acknowledgement as they passed.
David wondered: had Raymond really seen Enoka? Maybe it was just paranoia, a mistake, an innocent mistake? But the tattoo was unmistakable. He had seen Enoka.
The car was hot; he was sweating. David rubbed at his brow. Trying to work it all out. It was probable that Miguel