Zoo City - By Lauren Beukes Page 0,9

are such assholes.

4.

The Daily Truth 22 March 2011

POLICE FILE

Crime Watch with Mandlakazi Mabuso

Mall Rats

Yoh, mense. Another nightmare day in dream city. Killarney Mall gets hit by armed robbers on Friday, and yesterday the same gang hits Eastgate! No one got killed but believe you me, the shoppers are plenty shook-up by having okes with AKs storming around. The tsotsis hit a jewellery store and emptied the tills at Checkers before clearing out while mall security twiddled their thumbs. Okay, maybe understandable when witnesses report that the gangsters had a lion with them. Makes me wonder if we don't need a pass system for zoos after all!

Jump over to Linden for a happy ending (for once). A young mom was hijacked on her way back from crèche yesterday, but the baddies took pity and dropped the baby off, still in his car-seat, by the traffic lights a couple of kays away. Ag voeitog. Even gangsters have a heart sometimes.

But maybe not a nose. Over in Cyrildene, the cops found several million rands worth of perlemoen rotting in a garage. The okie who owned the place was bust when the neighbours complained about the reek of vrot sea snot that's supposed to be a potent aphrodisiac – and a protected species! Tell that to the Triads shipping them off by the rotting bucket-load to China, my china.

And over in larney-ville Sandton-side, it turns out Bafana boy Kabelo Nongoloza is a good striker off the field as well as on. His long-time girlfriend and debutante, Queenie Mugudamani, laid charges of assault against the young soccer star on Tuesday and is sporting a nasty bruised and swollen face as Exhibit A. Sounds like time for another nose job for Queenie. Pity you can't get a makeover for your bad taste in men!

5.

People want to believe: you just have to feed them plausible constructs. The help-poor-widow-of-defunctgovernment-minister-get-$25-million-out-of-the-corruptcountry is so stale and overused that even my mother wouldn't fall for it. And I know from personal experience that my mother would fall for a lot. I brush the dusting of Mongoose fur and flea eggs off my laptop, and flick open the screen to see if the phish have been biting.

I've become a master builder in the current affairs sympathy scam. A broken levee and an old lady with a flooded mansion, desperate to sell her priceless antiques cheap-cheap. A Chechnyan refugee fleeing the latest Russian pogroms with her family's diamonds in tow. A Somali pirate who has found Jesus and wants to trade in his rocket launcher and ransom millions for absolution.

It's all topical. All rooted in the hard realities of the world. Ironic that Former Life I never watched the news. But then, lifestyle journalists don't have to. And normal people don't have to pay off their drug debts by writing scam letters for syndicates. Or hide their sideline from their lover, who would definitely not approve.

There are 2,581 replies waiting. Not a bad hit rate out of the 49,812 that I sent out on Monday, not including the tens of thousands that bounced off spam filters. There are 1,906 "out of office" replies, which at least marks the email addresses as active, 14 irritated missives that range from "fuck you, scamfucks" to "pull the other one". Add

292 kanji variations, 137 in French, 102 in German, 64 in Arabic, 48 in Spanish and 12 in Urdu, all of which I'll plug into my translation software later. This leaves six potentials, two responding with cautious interest and the rest with abject confusion. I forward them all on to Vuyo, who is my catcherman. If people would just read the damn email properly, they would have responded to him directly.

And then there's an anomaly that chokes my auto-filter. Two stark sentences that read as either nonsense or poetry, or both.

When you eat, you are eating things from planes. The plastic forks, they leave a mark on you.

There is no link. No return address. No point to the message at all. It makes me nervous.

There is also an email from the dentist, a friendly reminder that it's time for my six-month check-up, please contact Ms Pillay to make an appointment. I haven't been to a dentist since I went to jail three and a half years ago. This is code for "contact me immediately", which is worrying because I'm not due to report in until next week. I log in to Skype chat where Vuyo is already online. Probably talking to "clients" in other windows.

>>Vuyo: Yes?

He answers right