I had my speech ready. It invoked my esteem for him, my respect for his high principles, and it recalled the many times he had told me I should bring my worries to him rather than keep them bottled up inside me. But this was not the moment to deliver it.
“It's about the coup, sir. My assignment at the weekend. It's not in the national interest at all. It's about plundering the Congo.”
The green-tiled corridor was hung with student artwork.
The first two doors were locked. The third opened. At the other end of the classroom two desks faced each other, with my worst subject, algebra, on the blackboard behind them.
• • •
Mr Anderson has heard me out.
I have made my story brief which, as a talking man himself, is what he likes. He has kept his elbows on his desk and his hands clasped beneath his formidable chin and has never taken his eyes off me, not even when I approached the prickly moral labyrinth that is his own preserve: Individual Conscience versus Higher Cause. My copy of J'Accuse! lies before him. He puts on his reading spectacles and reaches inside his jacket for his silver propelling pencil.
“And this is your own title, is it, Salvo? You're accusing me.”
“Not you, Mr Anderson. Them. Lord Brinkley, Philip, Tabizi, the Syndicate. The people who are using the Mwangaza for their personal enrichment and sparking a war in Kivu to do it.”
“And it's all in here, is it? Written down. By you.”
“For your eyes only, sir. There's no copy.”
The tip of the silver pencil began its ponderous overflight.
“They tortured Haj,” I added, needing to get this part off my chest straight away. “They used a cattle prod. Spider made it.”
Without interrupting his reading, Mr Anderson felt constrained to correct me. “Torture is a very emotive word, Salvo. I suggest you use it with caution. The word, I mean.”
After that, I willed myself to calm down while he read and frowned, or read and scribbled himself a marginal comment, or tut-tutted at an imprecision in my prose. Once he flipped back a few pages, comparing what he was reading with some thing that had gone before, and shook his head. And when he had reached the last page, he returned to the first one, starting with the title. Then, licking his thumb, he examined the end once more, as if making sure he hadn't missed anything out, or been unfair in some way, before awarding his examiner's mark.
“And what do you propose to do with this document, may I enquire, Salvo?”
“I've done it. It's for you, Mr Anderson.”
“And what do you propose I do with it?”
“You take it right to the top, sir. The Foreign Secretary, Number 10 if necessary. Everybody knows you're a man of conscience. Ethical borders are your speciality, you once told me.” And when he said nothing: “All they have to do is stop. We're not asking for heads to roll. We're not pointing fingers. Just stop!”
“ We?” he repeated. “Who's we suddenly?”
“You and I, sir,” I replied, although I'd had a different “we” in mind. “And all of us who didn't realise that this project was rotten from top to bottom. We'll be saving lives, Mr Anderson. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Children too.” Now it was Noah I was thinking of.
Mr Anderson spread his palms flat over J'Accuse! much as if he thought I might snatch it back from him, which was the last thing I had in mind. He took a deep breath, which for my taste sounded too much like a sigh.
“You've been very diligent, Salvo. Very conscientious, if I may say so, which is no less than I would have expected of you.”
“I felt I owed it to you, Mr Anderson.”
“You have an excellent memory, as all who know your work are well aware.”
“Thank you, Mr Anderson.”
“There are extensive verbatims here. Are they also from memory?”
“Well, not entirely.”
“Would you mind in that case advising me what other sources you are drawing upon for this — accusation?”
“The raw material, Mr Anderson.”
“And how raw would that be?”
“The tapes. Not all. Just the key ones.”
“Of what exactly?”
“The plot. The People's Portion. Haj being tortured. Haj indicting Kinshasa. Haj doing his dirty deal. Philip spilling the beans over the satcom to London.”
“So how many tapes would we be talking about here, Salvo? In the aggregate, please?”
“Well, they're not all full. Spider does Chat Room rules. It's one intercept one tape, basically.”
“Just say how many, please, Salvo.”
“Seven.”
“Are we also talking of documentary evidence?”
“Just my notepads.”
“And how many of your notepads would there be?”
“Four. Three full. One half full. In my Babylonian cuneiform,” I added, for shared humour.
“So where would they all be, Salvo, tell me. At this moment in time? Now?”
I pretended not to understand him. “The mercenaries? Maxie's private army? Still sitting around, I suppose. Oiling their weapons, or whatever they do. The attack isn't due for another ten days, so they've got a bit of time to kill.”
But he was not to be diverted, which I might have guessed. “I think you know what I'm talking about, Salvo. Those tapes and notepads and whatever else you have feloniously obtained. What have you done with them?”
“Hidden them.”
“Where?”
“In a safe place.”
“That's a rather silly answer, Salvo, thank you. Where is the safe place in which they are hidden?”
My lips had closed, so I let them stay closed, not pressed tightly together in refusal but not activated either, apart from the electric current that was passing through them and making them tingle.
“Salvo.”
“Yes, Mr Anderson.”
“You were assigned to that mission on my personal recommendation. There's a lot wouldn't have taken you on, what with your temperament and irregular background. Not for work like ours. I did.”
“I know that, Mr Anderson. I appreciate it. That's why I've come to you.”
“So where are they?” He waited a moment, then went on as if he hadn't asked the question. “I have protected you, Salvo.”
“I know, Mr Anderson.”
“From the day you came to me, I have been your shield and protector. There were people inside the Chat Room and out of it who did not approve of your part-time appointment, your talents notwithstanding.”
“I know.”
“There were those who thought you were too impressionable. People in vetting section for a start. Too generous-hearted for your own good, they said. Not manipulative enough. Your old school thought you could turn rebellious. There was also the question of your personal preferences which I won't go into.”
“They're all right now.”
“I stood up for you come rain or shine, I was your champion. I never wavered. ‘Young Salvo is the tops,’ I told them. ‘There's no better linguist in the game, provided he keeps his head, which he will, because I'll be there to make sure he does.’ ”
“I realise that, Mr Anderson. I'm appreciative.”
“You want to be a father one day, don't you? You told me so yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Not all pleasure, by any means, children aren't. But you love them anyway however much they let you down. You stick by them, which is what I'm trying to do for you. Have you remembered where those tapes are yet?”
Fearing that by saying anything at all I might end up saying more than I meant to, I plucked for a while at my lower lip with my forefinger and thumb.
“Mr Anderson, you must tell them to stop,” I said finally.
Whereupon he picked up his silver propelling pencil in both hands and, having commiserated with it silently for a while, fed it back into the inside pocket where it lived. But his hand remained stuck inside his lapel, in the manner of Maxie's Napoleon.
<
br /> “That's final, is it? That's your last word to me on the matter. No ‘thank you’, no apology, no tapes or notepads. Just ‘tell them to stop’.”
“I'll give you the tapes and notepads. But only after you've told them to stop.”
“And if that's not what I'm going to tell them? If I have neither the inclination nor the authority to stop them?”
“I'll give them to someone else.”
“Oh? And who would that be?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him Haj, but prudence restrained me. “My MP or someone,” I replied, which elicited a contemptuous silence from him, and nothing more.
“So what precisely, in your frank opinion, Salvo,” he resumed, “is to be gained by stopping, as you call it?”
“Peace, Mr Anderson. God's peace.”
My hopeful mention of God had evidently touched the right nerve in him, for a look of piety at once suffused his homely features.
“And has it never occurred to you that it might be God's will that the world's resources, which are dwindling even as we speak, do better in the hands of civilised Christian souls with a cultured way of life than some of the most backward heathens on the planet?”
“I'm just not sure who the heathens are, Mr Anderson.”
“Well, I am,” he retorted, and stood up. As he did so, his hand emerged and it was holding a cellphone. He must have had to switch it off for his choir practice, because his large thumb was crooked over the top of it while he waited for the power to come up. His big body was moving to my left, I assumed in order to get between the door and myself. So I moved to the left too, on the way helping myself to the copy of J'Accuse!
“I am about to make a very crucial telephone call, Salvo.”
“I know that, Mr Anderson. I don't want you to.”
“Once made, it will have reverberations that neither you nor I can control. I would like you please to give me one reason, here and now, why that call should not take place.”
“There are millions of reasons, Mr Anderson. All over Kivu. The coup is a criminal act.”
“A rogue country, Salvo — a country that is incapable of settling to an orderly way of life — a country that abandons itself freely to genocide and cannibalism and worse, is not” — another step — “in my considered opinion, entitled to respect under international law” — my escape route now all but cut off — “any more than is a rogue element in our own society — such as yourself, Salvo — entitled to indulge his naivety at the expense of his adoptive country's best interests. Stay where you are, please, there's no need to come any nearer. You can hear what I have to say to you from where you are. I'll ask you one more time, and that's it. Where are the illegally held materials? The details can be attended to in a calm manner. In twenty seconds from now, I'm going to make my phone call, and at the same time or just before, I'm going to make a citizen's arrest. I'm going to put my hand on your shoulder as the law requires and say, ‘Bruno Salvador, I hereby arrest you in the name of the law.’ Salvo. I'll remind you that I am unwell. I am fifty-eight years of age and a late-onset diabetic.”
I had taken the phone from his unresisting hand. We were standing face to face and I was six inches taller than he was, which seemed to startle him more than it did me. Through the closed door, the Sevenoaks Choral Society was striving for greater outrage without the benefit of its leading baritone.
“Salvo. I will offer you a fair choice. If you will give me your word of honour, here and now, that you and I tomorrow morning — first thing — will go together to wherever these materials are hidden, and recover them — you can remain in Sevenoaks for the night as my guest, have a nice supper with us in the family, simple home cooking, nothing fancy, there's my elder daughter's bedroom, she's not living with us at present and in return for the recovered articles I will make it my business to speak to certain people and assure them — take care, Salvo, none of that now—”
The hand that should have been arresting me was raised to ward me off. I reached for the doorhandle, slowly so as not to alarm him. I took the battery from his cellphone and dropped the case back in his pocket. Then I closed the door on him, because I didn't think it right for people to see my last mentor in his diminished state.
• • •
Of my movements and actions over the next hours I have little awareness, nor had I at the time. I know I walked, then walked faster, down the school drive, that I stood at a bus stop and, when no bus came soon enough for me, crossed the road and caught one going in the opposite direction, which is no way to appear inconspicuous; and that thereafter I backtracked and zigzagged across country, as much to shake off the memory of Mr Anderson as my real or imaginary pursuers; and that from Bromley I caught a late train to Victoria, thence by one cab as far as Marble Arch and a second to Mr Hakim's, courtesy of Maxie's generosity. And from Bromley South railway station, with twenty minutes to wait before my train arrived, I had called Grace from a phone box.
“You want to hear somethin' totally crazy, Salvo?”
Politeness required that I did.
“I fell off of a donkey, that's what! Flat on my butt, with all the kids watchin' and screamin'! Amelia, she stayed on and I fell off. And that donkey, Salvo, it took Amelia all the way down the beach to the ice-cream stall, and Amelia bought the donkey a 99p cornet and a chocolate flake with her pocket money, and the donkey ate that whole cornet and it ate the chocolate, and it brought Amelia all the way back! I ain't fibbin' to you, Salvo! And you're never goin' to get to see 'em, but I've got bruises on my butt you wouldn't believe, both halves, and Latzi's goin' to laugh his crazy head off!”
Latzi, her Polish boyfriend in the music business, I remembered fleetingly. Latzi who would give Hannah a good price.
“You know somethin' else, Salvo?”
At what point did I sense she was stringing me along?
“There was this Punch and Judy show, okay?”
Okay, I agreed.
“And the kids, they died for it. I never saw so many happy kids so scared in all my life.”
Great. Kids love to be scared, I said.
“And that café on the way down, Salvo — the place we stopped at after the other place wouldn't have us because we were golliwogs? — they were just dandy. So we don't care about a single thing.”
Where is she, Grace?
“Hannah?” — as if she'd only now remembered her — “Oh, Hannah, she's taken the big ones to a movie up the road, Salvo. She said to say, if Salvo calls, she's goin' to call you back right soon. Maybe tomorrow mornin', because of the time. Me and Hannah, we're with different families, see. And I've got to hang onto my mobile for Latzi.”
I see.
“Because if Latzi can't reach me, he goes apeshit. And Hannah's family, well, they got a house phone but it's complicated, so best not try to call her there. It's in there with the family and the TV. So she'll call you just as soon as she can. Anythin' particular on your mind, Salvo?”
Tell her I love her.
“Now have you passed that information to Hannah already, Salvo, or is this breakin' news that I'm hearin'?”
I should have asked what movie Hannah was seeing with the big ones, I thought when I had rung off.
• • •
I had not realised how swiftly our little back bedroom had become home, supplanting in a few days all my years at Norfolk Mansions. I entered it and smelled, as if she were still there, Hannah's body, no perfume but her own. I greeted in comradely acknowledgement our unmade bed with its battered air of triumph. No detail she had left behind escaped my guilt-ridden gaze: her Afro-comb, the bracelets abandoned in favour of a circle of elephant hair in the last minutes of her delayed departure, our half-empty teacups, the photograph of Noah on the flimsy bedside table, put there to keep me company in her absence, and her rainbow cellphone, entrusted to me to receive her messages of love and inform me of her estimated time of return. Why would I not carry it on my person? Because I wished for nothing that could in
criminate her in the event of my summary arrest. When could I expect her to reclaim it? Parents had been told to be at the church at one o'clock lunchtime, but it only took one naughty kid like Amelia to hide, she had warned me, or a bomb scare, or a roadblock, and she might not make it back till evening.
I listened to the ten o'clock news and cruised the Most Wanted list on the Internet, expecting to see my mugshot staring at me above a politically correct description of my ethnicity. I was logging off when Hannah's cellphone trilled out its birdsong. Grace had given her my message, she said. She was in a phone box with too little change. Immediately, I called her back.
“Who've you been running away from?” I asked, struggling for a jocular tone.
She was surprised: why should I think she'd been running?
“It's just how you sound,” I said. “Breathless.”
I was already hating this call. I wished we could stop it right now, and start again when I had some coherent thoughts in my head. How could I tell her that Mr Anderson had failed me exactly as Lord Brinkley had, but with greater sanctimony? That he was another Brinkley exactly as she had foreseen?
“How are the kids?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“Grace says they're having a really great time.”
“It's true. They are very happy.”
“Are you?”
“I am happy because I have you in my life, Salvo.”
Why so solemn? So terminal?
“And I'm happy too. To have you in mine. You're everything to me. Hannah, what's going on? Is there someone in the box with you? You sound . . . unreal.”
“Oh, Salvo!”
And suddenly, as if on a signal, she was talking passionate love to me, vowing she never knew such happiness existed, and how she would never do anything in her life to harm me, however small or well meant, for as long as she lived.
“But of course you won't,” I cried, fighting to overcome my mystification. “You could never harm me, nor I you. We'll protect each other always, through thick and thin. That's the deal.”
And again: “Oh, Salvo!”
She had rung off. For a long time I stood staring at the rainbow cellphone in my palm. We Congolese love colour. Why else had God given us gold and diamonds and fruit and flowers, if not to please our love of colour?