My name is Eloria Bangana. I live in the DRC or Democratic Republic of Congo. I am 13 years old. When they killed my family I had a choice. I could be a prost.i.tute or pretend to be a boy and work in the coltan mines.

Lucky, I am very small for my age. Most people think I am 9 or 10. So, I choose the mines, because I can crawl into tight s.p.a.ces with my little bucket for sifting and my spade, although mostly I use my fingers. Sometimes my fingers get cracked and bleed from scratching in the dirt.

They say coltan makes cell phones. I do not know how you make cell phones from mud. Also computers and video games. All your technology runs on mud. Isn't that funny?

My cousin Felipe says he has played a video game in Kinshasa, he said you just press b.u.t.tons to fight, b.u.t.tons to walk or kick or punch. He said it was boring.

Felipe likes soccer more. I used to play soccer with him, but it wasn't really soccer. It's a game called 3 tin, because we only have tins to kick. The rules are similar. Maybe one day I can teach you. We don't play 3 tin anymore, because the rebels say there isn't time. We are here to work, not play. They shot my cousin Felipe in the back when he tried to run away. He died. It was very sad. We were very scared.

I get seven cents American for every kilogram of coltan. The rebels weigh it on the scales but they cheat. The lady at the mission station, Sister Mercia, says coltan is worth 100 times what they pay. She says they use us like slaves.

Sometimes it is hard to understand her because she is from America. She is helping me translate this because I speak French and my English is not so good. She is very helpful and very nice. She shows me how to use the computer. And she fixes my clothes and sometimes she gives me oranges.

Maybe you are wondering why I am emailing to you? Sister Mercia says we need to wake up the world about what is happening here. She says to tell you, don't worry, we are not asking for money. We are asking for help.

The orphanage where Sister Mercia works and I live now that the Vainglory Ministries rescued me, we have a problem. The rebels have cut off our phones and all our communication. We have one cell phone that we hide from them and it has WAP so we can send email, if you go stand at the top of the hill when the rebels aren't watching.

It is like a message in a bottle. We send it floating into the ocean and hope that someone finds it.

But this is not our real problem. The man who runs the orphanage, Father Quixote, has been kidnapped by the rebels and they want us to pay $200,000 for him to come back safe to us.

Father Quixote is very brave, but he is also very clever. He has locked all the orphanage's money away in his bank account in America. The rebels cannot get to it, but we can't either using just a cell phone with WAP.

We have the pa.s.sword and the authorisation (Sister Mercia says you will know what this means) which means a Good Samaritan could help us.

We need money to feed the other children here (there are many babies as well as little children, some of us wounded and sick) and to pay Father Quixote's ransom.

Please, can you help us? If you can access Father Quixote's bank account, you can wire transfer some of the money to us. Sister Mercia says we do not expect you to do this for nothing. She says we can pay you a fee of $80,000 for taking the risk to help us. She asks you to email her at directly at

Sister Mercia says we must pray for this message to find its way to someone who is good and kind and strong. I pray this is you.

Yours truly,

Eloria Bangana There are two things in the interrogation room with me and Inspector Tshabalala. The one is Mrs Luditsky's ring. The other is twelve and a half minutes of silence. I've been counting the seconds. One alligator. Two alligator. 751 alligator.

She's forgetting I've done jail-time. 766 alligator. That if you're smart, prison is just a waiting game. I can wait when I have to. I can wait like n.o.body's business. 774 alligator. Sloth is the one who gets fidgety. He huffs in my ear and shifts his b.u.t.t around. 800 alligator.

It's supposed to make me nervous. Nervousness hates a vacuum. 826 alligator. Nervousness will blurt right out with something, anything, to kill the silence. 839 alligator. Unless nervousness is kept busy doing something more useful. Like counting. 842 alligator.

The inspector's face is perfectly, studiedly neutral, like a 3-D rendering of a face waiting for an animator to pull the strings. 860 alligator. Watching her watch me gives me the opportunity to study her. She has a round face withcheeks like apples and baggy pouches under her eyes that look like they're settling in for the long haul. She wears her hair in braids tied back with a clip. Not exactly practical for ipoyisa ipoyisa, but then she's an inspector, not a patrol grunt. There is a tiny scar where she once had a nose piercing. 884 alligator. Maybe she still wears a diamante diamante stud off-duty. Maybe she has a whole secret life, a sideline in punk rock or a night-cla.s.s PhD in Philosophy. 902 alligator. stud off-duty. Maybe she has a whole secret life, a sideline in punk rock or a night-cla.s.s PhD in Philosophy. 902 alligator.

Her navy suit has a food smear on the lapel. I'd venture tomato sauce. 911 alligator. Maybe blood. Maybe she beat up another suspect in another grey room just before she came in here. 922 alligator. I'd feel her out for her lost things, but cops and police stations are all equipped with magic blockers. It's regulation infrasound. Low-frequency sound waves below the range of human hearing, but which still resonate in your body, the kind that scientists use to explain experiences of haunted houses or the divine, usually brought on by something as mundane as an extraction fan or the low notes of a church organ. 932 alligator. That was before the world changed. It's a fragile state the world as we know it. All it takes is one Afghan warlord to show up with a Penguin in a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought thought they knew goes right out the window. 948 alligator. they knew goes right out the window. 948 alligator.

Inspector Tshabalala leans across the table to pick up the ring, idly rolls it between her fingers. 953 alligator. She takes a breath. 961 alligator. Caves.

"Hardly seems worth it," she says. Sloth startles with a hiccup, as if he'd just been dropping off to sleep, which is not unlikely. He sleeps around sixteen hours a day.

"You think?" I'm annoyed that I have to clear my throat.

"You could probably get a good price for it. R5000 if you had the certification. But let's a.s.sume you don't, which means you're looking at what, R800 max, at a p.a.w.nshop. You that hard up for cash, Zinzi?"

She flicks the ring over her knuckles and back, the kind of cheap magic trick you might use to impress girls in high school.

"I don't know how Mr Mr Luditsky would feel about that." Luditsky would feel about that."

"Feel about what?"

"Being p.a.w.ned. Bad karma. He might haunt me." I incline my head at Sloth. "And I'm haunted enough already."

"What are you talking about?"

"The ring? It's made with dead guy. Do your homework, Inspector."

She blinks, but just the once. "All right, so what were you planning to do with the ring?"

"Return it. It was a job. Like I told your guys outside her building. Repeatedly."

"Your fingerprints were all over the scene."

"I was in her apartment two days ago. She made me tea. It was undrinkable. You going to tell me how she died?"

"You tell me, Zinzi."

Sloth grazes my shoulder with his teeth, which is his way of kicking me under the table. I sort of specialise in social faux pas. faux pas.

"All right," I say, causing Sloth to bite down on my shoulder hard hard. I shrug him away. "Let's see. She died on the scene. In her apartment. Gunshot?" I'm imagining a retro number with the words Vektor printed down the side, even though that's ridiculous. "Stabbing? Blunt object? Choked on a piece of stale biscotti?"

Inspector Tshabalala flicks the ring, backwards, forwards, palms it. Then she reaches into her bag and places a brown cardboard police docket on the desk. After a moment, she flicks it open to reveal the photographs. She fans them out, hoping to get a reaction. "You tell me," she says again.

There is a woolly sheepskin slipper lying in the pa.s.sage by the front door. There is stripe of blood over the toe of the slipper that continues in an arc across the wall and a framed print of waterlilies.

There is a b.l.o.o.d.y smear against the wall, as if someone had fallen against it and sc.r.a.ped along, using the wall for support.

There is a black raincoat in the bathtub, a puddle of plastic and blood under the full blast of the shower. There are pink streaks down the bathroom sink.

The display cabinet is overturned. There are drag marks in blood across the floor. Someone trying to crawl away.

There is the shrapnel of china figurines everywhere. And I mean everywhere. A cherub's rosy b.u.t.tock in the TV room. Little Bo Beep smiling blandly up from the kitchen tiles, decapitated, among the splintered remains of her little lamb.

Mrs Luditsky is sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch, her legs splayed out in an A. Her head lolls backwards and to one side at an uncomfortable angle. If it weren't for the wrinkles and the wounds, she could be a sloppy drunk, a teenage girl at a house party after one alcopop too many. She is wearing a voluminous silk blouse soaked in blood. It gapes in the places where it has been sliced through, revealing a beige bra and b.l.o.o.d.y gashes. She is wearing one slipper. The toenails on her other foot are painted a dark plum. Her eyes are open, as cold and glossy as Little Bo Peep's. Her creme brulee creme brulee hairdo is half crushed against the arm of the couch. hairdo is half crushed against the arm of the couch.

"I'm going to venture it wasn't stale biscotti," I say. Nor gunshot. Tshabalala exhales through her teeth and glances at the door.

"That," she says, tapping the photograph, "is not your everyday burglary. Seventy-six stab wounds? That's personal."

"Was anything taken?"