“Is this a church?”
“It was a Seventh Day Adventist dental clinic,” Ghita replied.
“Now it is converted into flats.”
The car park was a piece of low ground surrounded by razor wire and if she had been alone she would never have driven into it, but he was already heading down the slipway with his hand out for the key. He parked and she watched him while he stared back up the slipway, listening.
“Who are you expecting?” she whispered.
He led her past grinning groups of kids to the entrance and up the steps to the lobby. A handwritten notice said LIFT SERVICE SUSPENDED. They crossed to a grey staircase lit by low-watt bulbs. Justin climbed beside her until they arrived at the top floor which was in darkness. Producing his own pocket torch, Justin lit the way. Asian music and smells of oriental food issued from closed doors. Handing her his torch, Justin returned to the stairwell while she unchained her iron grille and turned the three locks. As she stepped into the flat, she heard her phone ringing. She looked round for Justin, to find him standing beside her.
“Ghita, my dear, hullo,” cried a charming male voice she couldn’t immediately place. “How radiant you looked tonight. Tim Donohue here. Wondered whether I might pop up a minute, have a cup of coffee with the two of you underneath the stars.”
Ghita’s flat was small, three rooms only, and all looking at the same run-down warehouse and the same bustling street with broken neon signs and honking cars and intrepid beggars who stood in their path until the last moment. A barred window gave onto an outside iron staircase that was supposed to be a fire-escape, though for reasons of self-preservation the tenants had sawn off the bottom flight. But the upper flights were still intact, and on warm evenings Ghita could climb up to the roof and settle herself against the wooden cladding of the water tank, and study for the Foreign Service examination that she was determined to sit next year, and listen to the clatter of her fellow Asians up and down the building, and share their music and their arguments and their children, and almost convince herself she was among her own people.
And if this illusion vanished as soon as she drove through the gates of the High Commission and put on her other skin, the rooftop with its cats and chicken coops and washing and aerials remained one of the few places where she felt at ease—which was why perhaps she was not unduly surprised when Donohue proposed that they enjoy their coffee underneath the stars. How he knew she had a rooftop was a mystery to her, since he had never, so far as she knew, set foot in her apartment. But he knew. With Justin warily looking on, Donohue stepped over the threshold and, holding a finger to his lips, threaded his angular body through the window and onto the platform of the iron staircase, then beckoned them to follow him. Justin went next and by the time Ghita joined them with the coffee tray, Donohue was perched on a packing case, knees level with his ears. But Justin could settle nowhere. One minute he was posed like an embattled sentinel against the neon strips across the street, the next squatting at her side, head bowed, like a man drawing with his finger in the sand.
“How’d you make it through the lines, old boy?” Donohue enquired above the rumble of traffic, while he sipped his coffee. “Little bird told me you were in Saskatchewan couple of days ago.”
“Safari package,” said Justin.
“Via London?”
“Amsterdam.”
“Big group?”
“Big as I could find.”
“As Quayle?”
“More or less.”
“When did you jump ship?”
“In Nairobi. Soon as we’d cleared customs and immigration.”
“Smart lad. I misjudged you. Thought you’d use one of the land routes. Slip up from Tanzania or whatever.”
“He wouldn’t let me fetch him from the airport,” Ghita put in protectively. “He came here by cab in the dark.”
“What do you want?” Justin asked from another part of the darkness.
“A quiet life, if you don’t mind, old boy. I’ve reached an age. No more scandal. No more lifting of stones. No more chaps sticking their necks out, looking for what isn’t there any more.” His craggy silhouette turned to Ghita. “What did you go up to Loki for, dear?”
“She went for my sake,” Justin’s voice cut in, before she had thought of a reply.
“And so she should,” Donohue said approvingly. “And for Tessa’s sake too, I’m sure. Ghita’s an admirable girl.” And to Ghita again, more forcibly, “And you found what you were looking for, did you, dear? Mission accomplished? I’m sure it was.”
Justin again, faster than before. “I asked her to check on Tessa’s last days up there. To make sure they were doing what they said they were doing: attending the gender seminar. They were.”
“And you agree with that version of events, do you, my dear?” Donohue enquired, back to Ghita.
“Yes.
“Well, good on you,” Donohue remarked and took another sip of his coffee. “Shall we talk turkey?” he suggested to Justin.
“I thought we were doing that.”
“About your plans.”
“What plans?”
“Precisely. For example, if it were ever in your mind to have a quiet word with Kenny K. Curtiss, you’ll be wasting your breath. I can tell you that for no fee.”
“Why?”
“His bully boys are waiting for you, that’s one reason. For another, he’s out of the race, if he was ever completely in it. The banks have taken his toys away. ThreeBees’ pharmaceutical interests will go back to where they came from: KVH.”
No reaction.
“My point being, Justin, that there’s not a lot of satisfaction to be had from firing bullets into somebody who’s already dead. If it’s satisfaction you’re looking for. Is it?”
No answer.
“As to the murder of your wife, much as it pains me to have to tell you this, Kenny K was not, repeat not, complicit, as we say in court. Neither was his sidekick Mr Crick, though I’ve no doubt he’d have leaped at the opportunity if it had been offered to him. Crick was under standing instructions to report Arnold’s and Tessa’s movements to KVH, naturally. He made ample use of Kenny K’s local assets, notably the Kenyan police, to keep an ear and an eye out for them. But Crick was no more complicit than Kenny K. A watching brief doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“Who did Crick report to?” Justin’s voice asked.
“Crick reported to an answering machine in Luxembourg that has since been disconnected. From there, the fatal message was passed down the line by means that you and I are never likely to establish. Until it reached the ears of the sensitive gentlemen who killed your wife.”
“Marsabit,” Justin said, from nearby.
“Indeed. The celebrated Marsabit Two, in their green safari truck. They were joined en route by four Africans, bounty hunters like themselves. The purse for the job was a million dollars to be divided at the discretion of their leader, known as Colonel Elvis. All we can be sure of is that his name is not Elvis and he never rose to the dizzy rank of colonel.”
“Did Crick report to Luxembourg that Tessa and Arnold were heading for Turkana?”
“That, dear boy, is a question too far.”
“Why?”
“Because Crick won’t answer it. He’s afraid. As I could wish you were. He’s afraid that if he is too liberal with his information, and with the information of certain friends of his, he’ll get his tongue chopped out to make room for his testicles. He may be right.”
“What do you want?” Justin repeated. He was crouched at Donohue’s side, staring into his blackened eyes.
“To dissuade you from doing whatever you intend to do, dear boy. To tell you that whatever it is you’re looking for, you won’t find it, but that won’t prevent you from getting killed. There’s a contract out on you as soon as you set foot in Africa and here you are in Africa with both feet. Every renegade mercenary and gang boss in the business dreams of getting you in his sights. Half a million to
make you dead, a million to make it look like suicide, the preferred way. You can hire yourself all the protection you want, it won’t do you a blind bit of good. You’ll probably be hiring the very people who are hoping to kill you.”
“Why does your Service care whether I live or die?”
“At the business level, it doesn’t. At the personal level, I’d prefer not to see the wrong side win.” He took a breath. “In which context, I’m sorry to tell you that Arnold Bluhm is as dead as a dodo and has been for weeks. So if you’re here to save Arnold, I’m afraid that, once again, there’s nothing to save.”
“Prove it,” Justin demanded roughly, while Ghita swung silently away from them and buried her face in her forearm.
“I’m old and dying and disenchanted and I’m telling you tales out of school that would get me shot at dawn by my employers. That’s all the proof you can have. Bluhm was knocked senseless, shoved in the safari truck, driven into the empty desert. No water, no shade, no food. They tortured him for a couple of days in the hope of finding out whether he or Tessa had thought to make a second set of the disks they’d found in the four-track. I’m sorry, Ghita. Bluhm said no, they hadn’t made a second set, but why should anybody take no for an answer? So they tortured him to death to be on the safe side and because they enjoyed it. Then they left him to the hyenas. And that, I am afraid, is the truth.”
“Oh my dear God.”
It was Ghita, whispering into her hands.
“So you can cross Bluhm off your list, Justin, together with Kenny K. Curtiss. Neither of them is worth the journey any more.” He rode on remorselessly. “Meanwhile, hear this. Porter Coleridge is fighting your corner in London for you. And that’s not just top secret. That’s eat before reading.”
Justin had disappeared from Ghita’s vision. She searched the darkness and discovered him close behind her.
“Porter is calling for Tessa’s case to be reassigned to the original police officers, and for Gridley’s head to be placed on a charger next to Pellegrin’s. He wants the relationship between Curtiss, KVH and the British government to be the subject of a cross-party enquiry and he’s chipping away at Sandy Woodrow’s feet of clay while he’s about it. He wants the drug to be assessed by a team of independent scientists, if there are any left in the world. He’s discovered there’s something called the Ethical Trials Committee of the World Health Organization that might serve. If you go home now, you might just be able to tip the balance. So that’s why I came,” he ended happily and, having drained the last of his coffee, stood up. “Getting people out of countries is one of the few things we still do well, Justin. So if you’d rather be smuggled out of Kenya in a warming-pan than brave the hells of Kenyatta airport a second time, not to mention Moi’s watchers and everybody else’s, have Ghita give us the wink.”
“You’ve been very kind,” said Justin.
“That was what I was afraid you’d say. Goodnight.”
Ghita lay on her bed with the door open. She was staring at the ceiling, not knowing whether to weep or pray. She had always assumed that Bluhm was dead, but the vileness of his death was worse than anything she had feared. She wished she could return to the simplicities of her convent school, and recover her belief that it was God’s will that man should rise so high and stoop so low. On the other side of the wall, Justin was back at her desk, writing by pen because pen was what he liked although she had offered him her laptop. The plane to Loki was due to leave Wilson at seven which meant he would be gone in an hour. She wished she could share the rest of his journey, but knew that no one could. She had offered to drive him to the airport but he preferred to take a taxi from the Serena Hotel.
“Ghita?”
He was knocking on her door. She called, “It’s all right,” and rose to her feet.
“I’d like you, please, to post this for me, Ghita,” Justin said, handing her a fat envelope addressed to a woman in Milan. “She’s not a girlfriend, in case you’re curious. She’s my lawyer’s aunt”—a rare smile—“and here’s a letter for Porter Coleridge at his club. Don’t use the Field Post Office, if you don’t mind. And no courier service or anything. The normal Kenyan mails are quite reliable enough. Thank you immeasurably for all your help.”
At which she could restrain herself no longer, and threw her arms round him, and herself against him, and held him as if she were holding onto life itself until he prised himself free.
23
Captain McKenzie and his co-pilot Edsard sit in the Buffalo’s cockpit, and the cockpit is a raised platform in the nose of the Buffalo’s fuselage, with no dividing doors to shield the crew from their cargo— or the cargo, for that matter, from the crew. And directly below the platform, one step down from it, some thoughtful soul has provided a low russet-coloured Victorian armchair of the sort an elderly family retainer might pull up before the kitchen fire on a winter’s evening, and clamped its feet to the deck by means of improvised iron shoes. And that is where Justin sits, with a headset over his ears and frayed nylon ribbons like a child’s walking harness round his belly, while he receives the wisdom of Captain McKenzie and Edsard and occasionally removes his headset to take questions from a white Zimbabwean girl called Jamie who has made herself comfortable amid a tethered mountain of brown packing cases. Justin has tried to offer her his chair but McKenzie has stopped him with a firm, “You’re here.” At the tail end of the fuselage, six Sudanese women in robes crouch in varying attitudes of stoicism or stark terror. One of them is vomiting into a plastic bucket kept handy for the purpose. Quilted panels of shiny grey line the plane’s roof, red launch-lines dangle from a cable beneath them, their metal-lined tips dancing to the thunder of the engines. The fuselage grunts and heaves like an old iron horse dragged back for one more war. There is no sign of air-conditioning or parachute. A blistered red cross on a wall panel indicates medical supplies. Below it runs a line of jerry-cans marked “Kerosene” and tied together with twine. This is the journey Tessa and Arnold made and this is the man who flew them. This is their last journey before their last journey.
“So you’re Ghita’s friend,” McKenzie had observed, when Sudan Sarah brought Justin to his tukul back in Loki, and left them alone together.
“Yes.”
“Sarah tells me you had a travel document issued to you by the South Sudanese office in Nairobi, but you’ve mislaid it. That right?”
“Yes.”
“Mind if I take a look at your passport?”
“Not at all.” Justin hands him his Atkinson passport.
“What’s your line of country, Mr Atkinson?”
“Journalist. The London Telegraph. I’m writing a piece on the UN’s Operation Lifeline Sudan.”
“That’s a real pity just when OLS needs all the publicity it can get. Seems silly to let a little piece of paper stand in the way. Know where you lost it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“We’re ferrying mostly cases of soya oil today. Plus a few care packages for the boys and girls in the field. Pretty much the normal milk round, if you’re interested.”
“I am.”
“Do you object to sitting on the floor of a jeep under a pile of blankets for an hour or two?”
“Not in the least.”
“Then I think we’re in business, Mr Atkinson.”
And thereafter McKenzie has clung doggedly to this fiction. On the plane, as he might for any journalist, he describes the workings of what he proudly calls the most expensive anti-starvation operation ever mounted in the history of mankind. His information comes in metallic bursts that do not always rise above the din of the engines.
“In South Sudan we have calorie rich, calorie middle, calorie poor and plain destitute, Mr Atkinson. Loki’s job is to measure the hunger gaps. Every metric tonne we drop costs the UN thirteen hundred US dollars. In civil wars, the wealthy die first. That’s because, if someone steals their cattle they can’t adjust. The poor stay pretty much the way they were. For a group to survive,
the land around it has to be safe to plant. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of safe land around. Am I going too fast for you?”
“You’re doing admirably, thank you.”
“So Loki has to assess the crops and measure where the hunger gaps will appear. Right now, we’re on the verge of a new gap. But you’ve got to get the timing right. Drop food when they’re due to harvest, you mess with their economy. Drop it too late, they’re already dying. Air’s the only answer, by the way. Transport the food by road, it gets hijacked, often by the driver.”
“Right. I see. Yes.”
“Don’t you want to take notes?”
If you’re a journalist, behave like one, he is saying. Justin opens his notebook as Edsard takes over the lecture. His subject is security.
“We have four levels of security at the food stations, Mr Atkinson. Level four means abort. Level three is red alert, level two fair. We got no zero-risk areas in South Sudan. OK?”
“OK. Understood.”
McKenzie comes back. “The monitor will tell you when you arrive at the station what level they’ve got today. If there’s an emergency, do what he tells you. The station you’re visiting is in territory technically controlled by General Garang, who gave you the visa you lost. But it’s under regular attack from the north as well as rival tribes from the south. Don’t think this is just a north–south thing. The tribal groupings change overnight and they’d as soon fight one another as fight Muslims. Still with me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Country of Sudan is basically a fantasy of the colonial cartographer. In the south we’ve got Africa, green fields, oil and animist Christians. In the north we’ve got Arabia and sand and a bunch of Muslim extremists intent on introducing shariah law. Know what that is?”