Zoo City - By Lauren Beukes Page 0,73

or a very plain church. His white suit has big lapels, she is holding a bouquet of pink roses and cosmos awkwardly. There is a faint wisp of attachment. Faded, fragile, hard to see in the light, but there. I've never worked with photographs before, unless the photograph was the lost thing in question. It never occurred to me to try to reach through the image. I get a flash of the World Trade Center again, which is frustratingly absurd.

"It's not fair," Mrs Luthuli sighs. "They lost them so young."

"May I borrow this?"

"I don't know if I have the negatives…" She looks uncertain. But I am already out the door, following the tenuous wisp like Theseus and his ball of string. Let's just hope there's not a Minotaur on the other side.

It turns out that a Minotaur would be a dramatic improvement on what I actually find, which is nothing. Benoît's phone rings as I drive in aimless circles, trying to catch the ghosts of threads that keep fading, like bad radio signals. It's hopeless. Songweza could be anywhere in the city: sipping a mochaccino in a Parkhurst café or tied to a chair in a dingy garage in Krugersdorp. If I could get close enough, I might be able to pick up the thread, but where the hell do I start? I glance at Benoît's phone, which is pumping out the first twenty seconds of Gang of Instrumentals' "Oh Yeah" on repeat. The display indicates that the incoming call is from a private number. I let the call go to voicemail, but it rings again, insistently, distracting me so that I miss the dead-end sign and head down a culde-sac. The third time, it's easier to answer – even if it's his bloody wife calling from Burundi – than to have to listen to "Oh Yeah" one more time.

"Hola," I say, squashing the phone to my ear with a hunched shoulder, as I yank the car through a three-point turn. Oh, for power steering.

"I don't have an exact address for you," Benoît says, "but I can tell you he lives in Hillbrow."

"You have no idea how much that means to me right now," I say, steering the Capri back towards the highway.

"Even if I got it from D'Nice?" he says.

"I don't care where you got it, my love."

"Okay, good. He says you owe him R200 for the information."

That sours my mood, but only slightly, because as I get closer to the city, I feel like I'm tuning in to the right channel at last. The wisp of thread solidifies, still delicate, but now actually leading somewhere rather than tapering off into nothingness.

When I see it, it's like a smack in the face. Not the World Trade Center. High Point. And the thread from the wedding photograph leads right to it. So close to home I could have tripped over it – if I'd bothered to look up, if I'd bothered to take the poison dream seriously.

I find parking two blocks away. The car guard does a double-take at the state of the Capri. "Hayibo, sisi."

"Just make sure it's still there when I come back," I say and walk down towards the twin towers of the apartment block.

If Hillbrow was once the glamorous crown of Johannesburg, High Point was the diamond smack in the centre of the tiara, with swinging bachelor pads and luxury apartments for young ambitious professionals and urbane cosmopolitan families.

The entrance is situated inside a pristine open-air mall, an island of consumerist sanctity with clothing stores and a fast-food eatery, pavements you could eat off and patrons not so desperate that they'd try. It's almost normal – practically suburban. I soon see why. The perimeters are tenaciously patrolled by boys built like bulldogs, with shaved heads and mace and bulletproof vests.

It's the broken windows model of law enforcement, the notion that smothering the sparks of civil entropy will help stomp out the embers that flare up into serious crime. No loitering, no littering, no soliciting – although it seems the sharply dressed dealers standing chatting on the corner have diplomatic immunity, as long as they stay out of reach, like the homeless sleeping in rotten sleeping bags across the road.

I head inside, up an escalator, and scout out the entrance to the apartment block. Four heavily trafficked security doors that open with a tag only. There is a caged security office beside the doors, and I try my luck.

"Hi, I'm a visitor. Flat 612," I say, making