Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes
a calligraphy pen and filled in with rich color. She proffers a hand and Katya feels the tips of enamelled nails touch her palm.
“Miss Grubbs? I’m Zintle.”
Katya is at once a kid with skinned knees and frogs in her pockets. Puppy-dog tails. She shouldn’t have worn the uniform; its powers are limited, in certain settings and with certain people. Zintle is tall, too. Being close to the ground has its advantages in Katya’s line of work (nippiness, ability to creep into small spaces), but now she feels cowed before this substantial woman. She misses Toby’s presence, pliant and wispy though it may be, by her side.
“Miss Grubbs,” Zintle says, finding resonant depths in the name that Katya had not known existed. “We’re so glad you came. Mr. Brand has been so enthusiastic about your work.”
Her eyes, in finely wrought settings of copper eye shadow, dart around Katya’s face, seeking data. She clasps Katya’s upper arm and walks her towards an office door, a gentle but insistent escort.
“I understand that you’ve worked for Mr. Brand before?”
“Yes.” She wants to say more – make something up, even. The woman seems so attentive.
But Zintle hustles them on briskly. “Lovely,” she says, swiveling on one heel, batting open the door and easing them through. It’s choreography.
Inside, it’s all light and sky. The far wall is glass. Beyond, Katya can see the steep side of Signal Hill, the mosques and the forehead of the mountain. The sky is flawless, but tinted that sad, gunmetal gray of double-glazing.
“Have a seat,” says Zintle, deftly installing Katya at one end of a leather couch. She sits too, flinging one silky leg over the other. “Well then, you know the outline of the project?”
“Well, no, actually. I don’t know much, is Mr. Brand not—”
“He’s in Singapore. Apparently.” Zintle leans back and rakes a hand through her hair, which rebounds perfectly into shape.
The leather of the couch is taut and slippery, and Katya feels her overalled buttocks sliding off the edge. Crossing one’s legs at the knee, she discovers, is not only ladylike but helps to lock one in position.
“You do...do extermination, right?” Zintle narrows her eyes and gives a teasing smile.
Katya appreciates this lady’s style. She has a skittish, theatrical way of speaking, as if they’re performing a slightly suggestive play. Katya is fluffing her lines, but that seems to be part of the fun. Zintle hasn’t winked at her yet but there’s a bit of a flick of butterfly eyelid in every syllable.
Still, Katya’s responses remain clipped. How else do you converse with such a person, but play stone to their paper, rock to their silver scissor-blades?
“Right,” she says. “Well, relocation, really.”
“Precisely. So.” Zintle leans forward confidentially. “We have a residential project which has been experiencing some problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Various. Not very nice ones, to be honest.”
“Cockroaches, rats, mites?”
“Well...let’s just say it’s a comprehensive pest situation.” She’s up on her feet again – when she moves she’s fast – and holding out a hand. “Here we are.”
There’s something laid out along one wall on a table, under spot lighting. It’s an architect’s model, showing several buildings and their surroundings. Everything is white, the only markings the patterns of edge and shadow.
The scale is hard to make out at first. Katya sees a complex of four or five flat-topped, tiered buildings – ziggurat-like – arranged at angles around a central plaza. Elaborate walkways and arches and courtyards connect them, and tangles of what she supposes are ornamental plants drape over the edges of the stepped roofs. They look like tufts of white hair pulled off a hairbrush. A fountain, ringed by tiny benches, marks the center point of the plaza. A long driveway, decorated with a double row of miniature palm trees, strikes off to the edge of the model, and the whole is contained by walls.
“This is Nineveh.” Zintle’s dark fingers with their scarlet tips are vivid against the cardboard. A gorgeous giantess, reaching down from the clouds.
“Nineveh?”
Zintle shrugs. “It’s just a name,” she says. “Sort of a theme. One of the early investors was from the Middle East, I think.”
Katya allows herself a moment to enjoy the calm of the miniature scene. There are model people down there, also colorless, frozen in attitudes of purposeful enjoyment: striding along a boardwalk, sitting at an outdoor table. A couple lean on a balcony railing. What they’re staring at, though, has not been included in the model. The ground breaks off just beyond the boundary wall, as if some other-dimensional cataclysm has swallowed up a chunk of reality. The architect’s manikins stare into the void – through the actual window, onto the vista of the real city beyond: full-color, blurred, gigantic. They look on the abyss with no discernible expression.
“It looks big,” says Katya. She’s never worked an entire estate before.
Zintle taps a nail on the roof of one unit. A smaller building on the border of the model, right up against the wall. “You’d have access to these, uh, servants’ quarters. Or shall we say, the caretaker’s lodge. It’s two units, for the maintenance staff. The other buildings are shut up.”
“Never used?”
“Not yet.” Zintle clicks her tongue, suddenly exasperated. “Such a shame. Beautiful accessories, all furnished and ready to go. Show flats! It was built over a year ago, you know? Was supposed to be filled with residents by now. Top residents. But there was a string of disasters. All the copper wire was stolen, for one. Half the reclaimed area collapsed into the bloody swamp. Excuse my language. This disaster, that disaster. The landscape gardening didn’t work out, everything got eaten by goggas. Had to redo all the interiors. It was a plague! We thought they were gone, the previous guy assured us... well.” She splays her palms in a let’s-not-go-there gesture. “Now the security staff tell us that they’re back. We can’t move anyone in until it’s sorted. Losing pots of money. You understand?”
“Goggas?”
“They bite. Like I say, we got a guy in to sort them out, but between you and me, he was useless. Made things worse, actually. Creepy old guy.” She crinkles her nose in remembered disgust, as if at a bad smell. “We had to get rid of him.”
“Yes, well. Some of these older companies, they’re very outdated. I have a different approach.”
“I would hope so.”
“You can’t be more specific about these...goggas? You’ve seen them?”
She holds her palm towards Katya and wiggles her fingernails, evoking scurrying legs. “Yugh.”
“Centipedes?”
“No, no. Here, sort of...” Zintle grabs a pen and pad from the desk and scrawls a few assured lines. A cartoon bug. A button body with spindly legs sticking out in all directions – three on one side and four on the other, Katya notes – and a bundle of antennae like cat’s whiskers. She’s surprised Zintle hasn’t included a pair of googly eyes.
“A beetle? Does it fly? Does it swarm?”
“Swarms. Eats the curtains, poos on the rugs. Nightmare.”
“I see.”
Zintle is suddenly brisk. “Well. Time runs short. I should just give you this dossier ...” She hands over a glossy cardboard file. “Perhaps you’d like to peruse that, and get back to us with a quote? It’s a fairly urgent situation.”
“Right then. I’ll have to go out there of course, check it out.”
Zintle