She sensed a deeper truth beneath his vagueness, but she decided to leave it alone. “Where are we going?”
“To talk to Abigail. She’s going to introduce us to her neighbors.”
They entered Cathedral Hill and took Independence Avenue toward Cairo Road. Sunday traffic was light, but pedestrians were everywhere on the jacaranda-lined shoulders of the road. Zoe sat back and watched Lusaka pass by. Designed as a garden city in colonial times, its leafy boulevards, stately Edwardian architecture, and quiet bungalows had in the decades after independence suffered the encroachment of grit and urban decay. The poor had come from the villages in droves, and the wealthy had responded by barricading themselves behind walls rimmed with glass shards and razor wire.
Crossing Cairo Road, they skirted the edge of the bustling City Market before entering the ramshackle sprawl of Kanyama. Vendors stood on both sides of the dusty thoroughfare, hawking tires and tarpaulin and talktime for mobile phones. More established merchants tended booths set back from the road. Everywhere Zoe saw signs of the presidential election: banners, flags, T-shirts, and posters, almost all of them green—the color of the Patriotic Front. The air, too, was clogged with electioneering. Bands of young men prowled the lane with makeshift bullhorns, castigating President Banda and the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy.
One of the young campaigners gave Zoe an angry look before shouting something in Nyanja. “What is he saying?” she asked, feeling a twinge of nerves.
“Roll up your window,” Joseph said, inching forward through the mob.
She complied quickly. “Was he talking about me?”
Joseph nodded. “He doesn’t like foreigners.”
Eventually, they turned left onto a tributary lane crowded with shabby cinderblock dwellings, their corrugated roofs scaled with the rust of many rainy seasons. Children of all ages scampered about, pointing at the truck and staring at Zoe. A few old people sat on chairs, watching the children. Missing from the street were young adults—the parents of the children. Some were working, no doubt, but Zoe knew their absence conveyed a darker truth: many of them were dead.
They rounded a bend and Joseph slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding a head-on collision with a pickup truck swarming with young Zambians in green T-shirts. The driver of the truck—a young man wearing a green bandana—honked loudly while his comrades beat the sides of the truck like drums. Zoe caught a hateful look from a lanky youth standing in the flatbed.
“Muzungu! Muzungu!” he shouted.
She felt a surge of fear. “What are you going to do?”
Joseph nosed his truck to the side of the road. “If I were alone, I might teach them a lesson. But I’m not alone.”
As the vehicles edged past one another, the young hooligans pounded the roof of Joseph’s truck. Time dragged on amid the thunder of hands and shouts. Zoe felt the urge to yell at them, to put them in their place, but she knew it would only exacerbate the situation. At last, the other truck accelerated up the lane, leaving them in a cloud of dust.
“Bastards!” Zoe exclaimed. “Who do they think they are?”
Joseph glanced at her but didn’t respond. He made another turn and took them deeper into the labyrinth of unmarked lanes. Most of the homes they passed had no doors or windows, and many of the alleys were piled high with burning trash. After a few minutes, Zoe lost all sense of direction. The undifferentiated mass of slum-like buildings was dizzying. Joseph, however, seemed to know exactly where he was going.
In time, he pulled the truck into an alley not far from a weather-beaten house graced with a flame tree in the front yard. Grabbing her backpack, Zoe stepped out of the truck and was instantly mobbed by bright-eyed children. They pulled at her shirt, begged her for kwacha, and asked her to take pictures of them. She patted their heads and greeted them in Nyanja. “Muli bwange? Muli bwange?” It wasn’t long before she forgot about the troublemakers in the pickup.
She followed Joseph down a breezeway lined with flowerpots toward the door of the house. Abigail was waiting for them behind a curtain of lace. She invited them in and gestured for them to take seats on a couch covered with a sheet. Abigail sat opposite them on a worn recliner. She spoke hesitantly in English, pronouncing the words with care.
“How is the child?”
“She’s recovering,” Zoe said simply. “We need to find her family.”
Joseph took a digital camera out of his pocket and showed her the screen. “I have a picture of her. Perhaps it will help with the neighbors.”
Abigail stood, wrapping a shawl around her. “Come,” she said. She led them out the door and down the road to a shanty dwelling that barely resembled a house. “Agnes,” she called out.