According to the Congolese government in Kinshasa, a Rwandan-backed putsch has been nipped in the bud, thanks to a brilliantly executed security operation based on first-class intelligence.
Kinshasa suspects French and Belgian complicity, but does not rule out other unnamed Western powers.
Twenty-two members of a visiting African football club are being held for questioning following the discovery of a cache of small arms and heavy machine-guns at Bukavu airport.
No casualties reported. The footballers' country of origin has not yet been ascertained. The Swiss Embassy in Kinshasa, asked about the four Swiss aviation experts, declines to comment at this stage. Enquiries regarding their travel documents have been passed to Berne. Thank you, Gavin. End of bulletin. End of any last lingering doubt.
Mrs Hakim's guest lounge is a regal place with deep armchairs and an oil painting of a lakeside paradise with houris dancing on the shore. In one hour from now it will be the haunt of hard-smoking Asian salesmen watching Hollywood videos on a television set as big as a Cadillac, but for the time being it has the sweetened silence of an undertaker's parlour and I am watching the ten o'clock news. Men in shackles change size. Benny has shrunk. Anton is bulky. Spider has grown nine inches since he passed out the plates in his improvised chef's hat. But the star of the show is neither the UN's Pakistani Commandant in his blue helmet, nor the colonel of the Congolese army with his swagger cane, but our skipper Maxie in fawn slacks with no belt and a sweat-soaked shirt minus one sleeve.
The slacks are all that is left of the go-anywhere khaki suit last seen when he was pressing a white envelope on me containing the seven thousand dollars' fee that, in the gallantry of his heart, he prised out of the Syndicate. His face, deprived of Bogey's enlarging spectacles, lacks the charisma that had cast its spell over me, but in other respects has grown into the part, being formed in an expression of gritty endurance that refuses to acknowledge defeat, no matter how many days it spends at the whipping post. The bulletproof hands are manacled in front of him and folded over one another like a dog's paws. He has one desert boot on, and one bare foot to match the bare shoulder. But it isn't the missing boot that's slowing him down, it's another set of shackles, short ones for a man of his height, and by the look of them too tight. He is staring straight at me and to judge by his vituperative jaw action he is telling me to go fuck myself, until it dawns on me that he must be telling this to the person who is filming him, not me personally.
On Maxie's uneven heels come Anton and Benny, chained to one another and their skipper. Anton has some bruising on the left side of his face which I suspect has been caused by impertinence. The reason Benny looks smaller than actual size is that his chains hunch him downward in a mincing shuffle. His grey ponytail has been cropped to stubble by a single sweep of someone's panga, giving the impression that they've got him ready for the guillotine. After Benny comes Spider, improviser of cattle prods and my fellow sound-thief, chained but upright. He has been allowed to keep his cap, which gives him a certain pertness. Being the acrobat he is, he doesn't have the same problem as his short-stepping mates. Together, the four of them resemble an incompetent conga-party, jerking back and forth to a beat they can't get the hang of.
After the white men come the footballers, some twenty of them in a receding line of miserable black shadows: veterans, no mavericks, best fighters in the world. But when I search nervously for a Dieudonne or a Franco, on the off-chance that somehow, in the mayhem of a failed operation, they have been caught up in the main affray, I'm relieved to see neither the hulk of the crippled old warrior nor the spectre of the haggard Banyamulenge leader among the prisoners. I didn't look for Haj because somehow I knew he wouldn't be there. A tidbit relished by commentators is that Maxie — known thus far only as “the alleged ringleader” — contrived to swallow his Sim-card at the moment of arrest.
I return to our bedroom and resume my study of Mrs Hakim's wallpaper. On the radio, a junior minister of the Foreign Office is being interviewed:
“Our hands are clean as a whistle, thank you, Andrew,” she informs her inquisitor in the feisty language of New Labour at its most transparent. “HMG is nowhere in this one, trust me. All right, so one or other of the men is British. Give me a break! I'd have thought you'd have had a bit more respect for us, frankly. All the signals we're getting say this was a botched, incompetent bit of private enterprise. It's no good saying, ‘Who by?’ all the time because I don't know who by! What I do know is, it's got amateur written all over it, and whatever else you may think we are, we're not amateurs. And I believe in free speech too, Andrew. Goodnight!”
Maxie has acquired a name. One of his ex-wives spotted him on television. A sweet man who just wouldn't grow up, son of a parson. Sandhurst-trained, ran a mountaineering school in Patagonia, worked under contract to the United Arab Emirates, she says brightly. A Congolese academic calling himself the Enlightener is believed to be the mastermind behind the plot, but he has gone into hiding. Interpol is launching an enquiry. Of Lord Brinkley and his multinationally backed anonymous Syndicate and its designs on the Eastern Congo's resources, nothing. Of Lebanese crooks and independent consultants and their friends, nothing. They were all playing golf, presumably.
I lie on the bed, listening to Mrs Hakim's brass clock chiming out the halves and quarters. I think of Maxie chained to a whipping post. The morning dawns, the sun rises and I am still lying in my bed, unchained. Somehow it's seven o'clock, then eight o'clock. Somehow the quarters keep chiming. The rainbow phone is trilling.
“Salvo?”
Yes, Grace.
Why doesn't she speak? Is she handing the phone to Hannah? Then why doesn't Hannah take it? There's background garble. A man's name is being called by a commanding north country female voice. Who on earth is Cyril Ainley? I've never heard of a Cyril or an Ainley. Where are we? In hospital? In a waiting room somewhere? It's only seconds I'm talking of. Milliseconds, while I steal every scrap of sound I can get my ears on.
“Is that you, Salvo?”
Yes, Grace. This is Salvo.
Her voice is damped right down. Is she phoning from a place where phones are forbidden? I can hear other people phoning. Her mouth is crammed into the mouthpiece, distorting the sound. She's got a hand cupped over it. Suddenly the words are pouring out of her: a breathless, demented monologue that she can't stop even if she wants to, and neither can I.
“They've got her Salvo who they are God Himself only knows I'm at the police station reportin' it but I can't talk too much they took her clean off the pavement from beside me right outside the church we got rid of the kids and Amelia pretendin' to have a fit and her mum sayin' we spoiled her and Hannah and me we're goin' down the hill real cross at the ingratitude when this car stops and two fellows one black one white ordinary-lookin' fellows Salvo and a white woman driver who keeps lookin' straight out ahead of her through the windscreen never once turns her head the whole time they get out and the black one says Hi Hannah and puts his arm round her waist like he's an old friend and sweeps her into the car and they've gone and now this nice police lady she's askin' me what kind of car and showin' me pictures of cars hours it's taken Hannah never said a word to me she didn't have time and now the police are sayin' maybe she wanted to go with those boys maybe this was some guy she was already goin' with or thought she'd like to earn herself a few quid on her back with the both of them as if Hannah would do a thing like that they just snatched her off the street and the nice police lady is sayin' well maybe she's on the game and maybe you're the same Grace there's such a thing as wastin' the time of a police officer you know it's actually a crime Grace maybe you should be aware of that I lost my rag why don't you put a bloody notice up I told her no blacks taken seriously so now she's talkin' to everybody except me.”
“Grace!”
I said it again. Grace. Three, four times. Then I questioned her the way we question children, trying to calm her instead of scaring her. What happened? I don't mean now, I me
an in Bognor, while you were together. I mean the first night you were there, the night you told me she was at the movies with the big kids. That night.
“It was a surprise for you, Salvo.”
What kind of surprise?
“She was recordin' somethin' for you, a sound file, she called it, some piece of music she loved and wanted to give you. It was a secret.”
So where did she go to do that, Grace?
“Some place Latzi told her, back up a hill somewhere, no traffic. We called up Latzi at his studio. These music freaks, they got friends like everywhere, Salvo. So Latzi knew a guy who knew a guy in Bognor, and Hannah, she went up to see him, while I kept it secret and that's the whole of it. Jesus Christ, Salvo, what in high Heaven's name is goin' on?”
I ring off. Of course, Grace. Thank you. And having made the sound file from tapes five and six, she popped it into a computer, no doubt Latzi's friend had one, and sent it to Haj's e-mail address for his greater edification, to help him reason with his father whom he respects so much, but as it happened she needn't have bothered, because by then the operation was going up in smoke, and the listeners and watchers and all the other people I had once mistaken for my friends were gathering round her for the kill.
• • •
To catch a sinner, Brother Michael used to say, you must find the sinner in yourself, and in the space of a few moments, that's what I had done. I walked to the wardrobe where my leather jacket was hanging. I fished out my own cellphone, the one I had forbidden myself to use except for messages, and I switched it on. And yes, as expected, I had one new message. But it wasn't from Penelope this time, or Barney, or Hannah. It was from Philip. And Philip was speaking not in his nice beguiling voice but in the iceberg version I was counting on:
I have a number for you to call, Salvo. It's night or day. I also have a deal to propose to you. The sooner you ring, the more comfortable everyone will be.
I rang the number and got Sam. She called me Brian, just like old times. Got a pencil, Brian dear? And a notepad? Of course you have, bless you. Here's the address.
19
I will confess at once that my actions over the next ten minutes were not fully rational, veering as they did between the manic and the administrative. I do not recall violent feelings of rage or anger, although there is later evidence that these and related emotions were simmering below the waterline. My first thought — one of many first thoughts — was for my host and hostess the Hakims, with whom Hannah and I had struck up a warm personal relationship which extended to their two children, a tearaway lad called Rashid who was the apple of Hannah's eye, and the more reticent Diana who spent much time hiding behind the kitchen door on the off-chance that I might pass. I therefore put together a sizeable wad of my ill-gotten wealth and handed it to the bemused Mrs Hakim.
My next first thought, based upon the assumption that I would not be setting foot in the house again for some while, if ever, was to make sure we had left everything as shipshape as possible in the circumstances. Being of an obsessively tidy disposition — Penelope under Paula's guidance had termed it anal — I stripped the bed of its sheets, removed the pillowcases, puffed up the bare pillows, added the towels from the bathroom and made a neat bundle of laundry in a corner of the room.
Of particular concern to me was what to wear. In this regard I had at the forefront of my mind the fate recently meted out to Maxie and his men, who were self-evidently obliged to make do with a single outfit for many years to come. I settled therefore on a pair of stout corduroy jeans, my faithful leather jacket which had a good few miles left in it, sneakers, my bobble hat, and as many spare shirts, socks and underpants as I could cram into my rucksack. To these I added my most treasured personal items, including the framed photograph of Noah.
As a final act I removed the fateful shoulder-bag from its hiding place behind the wardrobe and, having once more checked the contents and reconfirmed the absence of the two tapes — because sometimes in the passage of the last forty-eight hours fantasy and reality had developed a way of changing places behind my back — I closed the door on our short-lived corner of Paradise, mumbled my last farewells to the mystified Hakims and stepped into the minicab that was waiting to convey me to the address in Regent's Park whither I had been bidden by Sam.
My reconstruction of what follows is as faithful as memory permits, given the disadvantages under which my vision and other faculties were labouring at the time. Drawing up at an elegant house in Albany Crescent, NW1 — a couple of million pounds would not have secured it — I was greeted by the sight of two young men in tracksuits tossing a medicine ball back and forth in the front garden. Upon my arrival, they stopped playing and turned to eye me. Undeterred by their interest, I paid off my driver — careful also to add a handsome tip and advanced on the front gate, at which point the nearer of the two boys enquired jauntily whether he could be of assistance.
“Well, perhaps you can,” I replied, equally jauntily. “It so happens I have come to see Philip on a private matter.”
“Then you've come to the right place, mate,” he replied, and with elaborate courtesy took possession of my rucksack while the second boy helped himself to my shoulder-bag, thereby leaving me unencumbered. The first boy then proceeded down the gravel path to the front door and pushed it open to facilitate my passage, while the second boy, whistling a tune, fell in behind us.
The levity of our exchanges is quickly explained. These were the same two blond boys who, attired in tightly buttoned blazers, had stood behind the reception desk of the house in Berkeley Square. Accordingly, they knew me as submissive. I was the meek man who had been delivered to them by Bridget. I had checked in my night-bag with them as ordered. I had sat up on the balcony where I was told to sit, I had been led away by Maxie. In the psychology of their trade, they had me down as a toothless underdog. This gave me, as I now believe, the element of surprise that I required.
The leading boy was a good four feet ahead of me as we entered the living room, and he was hampered by my rucksack. As a naturally cocky fellow, he was light on his feet, not braced. One thump was enough to send him flying. The boy behind me was at that moment engaged in closing the front door. In Berkeley Square I had observed a surly reluctance in his attitude. It was evident now. Perhaps he knew that, in gulling my shoulder-bag from me, he had landed first prize. A well-aimed kick to the groin put an end to his complacency.
My line of access to Philip now stood wide open. I was across the room in one bound and my hands were instantly round his throat, wrestling with the baby-fat of his chins. What larger intention I had in mind I don't know, and didn't then. I recall the oatmeal-coloured brickwork of the fireplace behind him and thinking I might smash his handsome white head against it. He was wearing a grey suit, white cotton shirt and an expensive necktie of watered red silk which I attempted, unsuccessfully, to use as a garrotte.
Could I have strangled him? I certainly had the madness on me, as my dear late father would have said, plus the power to match, until one of the boys switched it off with whatever he carried: a blackjack or similar, I never saw it. Three months on, I've still got, amid other abrasions, the pullet's-egg on the rear left side of my head. When I came round, Philip was standing safe and sound in front of the same brickwork fireplace, next to a venerable grey-haired lady in tweeds and sensible shoes who even before she had said, “Brian dear,” could never have been anyone but Sam. She was all the lady tennis umpires you ever saw sitting on the top of their ladders at Wimbledon, advising players six feet beneath them to watch their manners.
Such were my first impressions on waking. I was puzzled by the absence of the two blond boys at first, until by turning my head as far as it would go I located them through the open doorway, seated across the passage from us, watching television without the sound on. It was Test Match time and the Australians were losing. Turning it in the other direction, I was surprised to register the presence of a recording angel in the room, for as such I construe
d him, male. He was ensconced at a desk in the bay window, which I briefly confused with the bay window in our bedroom at Mr Hakim's. Sunlight was streaming over him, making him divine, despite his bald patch and spectacles. His desk was Uncle Henry's campaign table, with crossed legs you could fold up before hurrying to your next battle. Like Philip he wore a suit, but a shiny one like a chauffeur's, and he was crouching over his table in the manner of a Dickensian clerk afraid of being caught slacking.
“And that's Arthur from the Home Office, Brian dear,” Sam explained, observing my interest. “Arthur's kindly agreed to sort things out for us at the official level, haven't you, Arthur?”
Arthur didn't presume to answer.
“Arthur has executive powers,” Philip elaborated. “Sam and I haven't. We're purely advisory.”
“And Hannah is in excellent hands, in case you feared otherwise,” Sam went on, in her genial tone. “She'll be in touch with you just as soon as she gets home.”
Home? What home? Mr Hakim's? The nurses' hostel? Norfolk Mansions? Home as a concept understandably confused me.
“We're very afraid Hannah overstepped the terms of her visa,” Sam explained. “That's why Arthur's here. To confirm everything, aren't you, Arthur? Hannah came to England to nurse, and pass her exams, bless her. And be useful to her country when she gets back. She didn't come here to take part in political agitation. That was never in the job description, was it, Arthur?”
“No way,” Arthur confirmed, speaking in a nasal twang from his eyrie in the window bay. “It was ‘nurse only’. If she wants to agitate, do it at home.”
“Hannah marched, Salvo,” Sam explained, in a commiserating tone. “More than once, I'm afraid.”