11

Johannesburg

Sawa Luhabe has an hour.

The second-year broker at Rosehall Fund Managers, a private equity firm conveniently located across from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, taps on the wheel of her nine-year-old Toyota Celica, waiting for a light to change. Every day, while her partners sneak out to grab lunch in some upscale Sandton eatery, Luhabe hustles to her car and drives the eight kilometers back to her flat in Alexandra (Alex) township all, traffic permitting, to spend a precious half hour with her three-year-old daughter.

When she first started at Rosehall, one of Johannesburg’s oldest and most respected firms, Luhabe’s coworkers laughed at her for being in such a rush to leave the most affluent section of the city to visit one of its most impoverished and dangerous townships. In fact, they didn’t understand why Luhabe still lived in Alex at all.

But they weren’t black, female, and single. They hadn’t grown up in a shantytown or had to scratch and hustle their way out of an overcrowded grammar school to a university scholarship. They hadn’t worked forty-hour weeks and a series of unpaid internships at banks and brokerage houses while taking a full course load. And they had never met her daughter, Wendy. Sure, it would be easy to get a fancy condo in Sandton, and if her fortunes at the fund continue to rise, it won’t be a problem at all. But still, it would be an extravagance, and in many ways a betrayal.

She is torn. She wants her girl to grow up and appreciate the heritage and culture of Alexandra, and of her family, but she doesn’t want her to fall in with the wrong crowd, or worse, to die young, a victim of senseless street violence, as have so many of Luhabe’s friends and extended family in Alexandra. Including her father, her brother, and her husband.

On the other hand, while a move to Sandton would be safer and more comfortable, she doesn’t want her daughter to be one of the only black faces in an enclave of material indulgence and white privilege. The final reason that Sawa Luhabe still lives in a modest home Alexandra and not Sandton is she can’t help but think that at any time someone or something will pull it all away from her: the job, the opportunity, the money. The future. Not an uncommon fear, she knows, for someone raised in a shack without a father, and whose husband was gunned down in the street three months after her wedding.

The light changes and the landscape transforms in a rush. One minute she’s passing the exclusive stores and restaurants of Nelson Mandela Square, and the next she’s making sure the windows are up and the door locks are down as she rolls through the crowded, trash – cluttered streets of Alex.

Plastic bags dangle from high wires like prayer flags. Men drinking home-brewed umqombothi, a traditional African beer, sit in front of tin-roofed squatter shanties, glaring until they see the color of her face. Then, unless they recognize her, their eyes shine with a different manner of resentment.

Luhabe is oblivious to any threat. For starters, it’s daylight, and she’s been passing through these neighborhoods as long as she can remember. It’s not as dangerous as it would be if say, she happened to be a white, drug-seeking stock broker visiting Alex after dark.

Normally she’d be anxious, but her Tuesday morning has been better than good. After the 8 A.M. call with the analysts, she spent the rest of the morning dealing with a money manager in Berlin representing an American client who was taking a number of short positions, each chopped into almost a thousand micro-transactions, all on American new media stocks. She’s never heard of some of the stocks, but then again just a couple of years ago she’d never heard of YouTube or Facebook or foursquare. Regardless, once she gets back to the office, once she checks on the progress of the ongoing transactions, she plans on looking into the numbers of the companies in play, the philosophy behind the mystery client’s picks, if not the mystery client himself. Despite the fact that the client requested that she not tell anyone about the moves, she feels obligated to look into them. She’s worked too hard to get here to have it all blow up over one client, no matter how wealthy he appears to be.

Plus, for Luhabe, every number tells a story, every transaction changes a life, and every moment is a new opportunity to learn.

She notices the white van trailing her when she’s within ten blocks of her house. Six blocks later, she follows her instincts and takes an abrupt left without using her signal. A peek in the mirror reveals the van breaking hard and making the same sharp left. Luhabe’s been followed before and robbed before, more times than she cares to remember. But never in the daylight, at lunchtime. Still, she knows that something is dangerous and odd about this van—perhaps they targeted her as a money mark coming out of Sandton?—so she responds accordingly.

At the next stop sign she taps the brakes, then races forward through another stop sign before swerving to the left. She’s already decided that she won’t go home for lunch this afternoon. In part because she was running late to begin with, but mostly because she’d never lead whomever this is anywhere near her home. She’ll call and let her mother know not to expect her as soon as she’s able to break away from the van, when she’s back on safer streets.

Before her wedding, when she first started working in Sandton, her husband-to-be bought her a gun. She doesn’t know what kind. Some kind of pistol. He wanted her to be able to protect herself. She responded with a tantrum, said that she would not carry a gun to work, and would not abide a gun in her house. He promised he’d take it back to the person from whom he’d bought it. But one day after his death, she found it in a bag with his soccer gear in their closet. Where it wasn’t going to do her very much good at this moment.

She glances in the rearview and sees the van dropping back. Stopping. To be safe, she makes another turn, a right down a street whose sidewalks are covered with bagged and unbagged refuse. Then another turn, a right onto a side road that runs parallel to the N-3 highway. She doesn’t remember being on this street before, but she’s fairly sure that if she hugs the highway it will take her back to Sandton. She comes to a complete stop at the next red light and takes a deep breath. No one will believe this in the office, and no one will think twice about it back in Alex, so why bother mentioning it to any of them?

Mom will be worried, she thinks. And Wendy will be disappointed. She wanted to perform a dance she’s been practicing. Luhabe leans across the passenger seat, reaching for her mobile with one eye trained on the light. Of course she won’t mention the van to them, either. She’ll simply tell them that she got caught up in the machinations of one of the biggest transactions of her career, which is true. And that perhaps as a result they’d soon be able to take a long weekend to visit Cape Town, or the relatives in Swaziland. It’s been too long since she’s taken them on vacation.

She’s still reaching for her phone when she sees the young man in the black woolen mask rounding the corner on the passenger side of the car. She knows instantly, before he locks in on her car, that the shooter is coming for her. As he drops into a firing stance, Luhabe rams her foot down onto the accelerator. Stretched halfway across the front seat, she drives blind, from memory, for her life.

Sawa Luhabe’s Toyota makes its way into the center of the intersection before the shooter locks in on his target and squeezes off a seventy-nine-bullet burst from a Tec-9 pistol on full-auto discharge.

The seemingly driverless car careers through the intersection and manages to swerve to the left onto a side street before crashing to a stop in a pile of bagged sidewalk trash. Smoke hisses from underneath the crumpled hood. Nothing else moves.

The gunman stares across the street at the silenced car for a moment, takes a half step toward it, then changes his mind. He lowers the pistol, turns, and runs back down the street from which he appeared.

Seconds later a young man on a fat-tired bicycle rolls to a stop alongside Luhabe’s car, leans to look inside the front seat, then continues on. He’s just curious, interested in neither the fate of the driver nor the gunman. In Alexandra, one of the worst townships in a country where more than fifty people are murdered every twenty-four hours, the scene is not out of the ordinary.