Recoil

4

All I got was voicemail.

‘It’s Nick, I’m sorry too. Please call me. I miss you.’

For the first time in years I cared enough about someone to feel upset. Had she really gone? Didn’t she like me any more?

I logged on to Hotmail. Nothing yet.

I picked up my mobile again and dialled the Mercy Flight office. I knew the guy on the desk. We’d bumped into each other a few times when I’d picked her up after work. On the phone, he’d always gob off in French till he realized who I was, then switch to fluent English at the drop of a hat. Silky could do the same. German, French, English, Italian. It was all the same to her.

I got Étienne’s voice, but it was only on answerphone. My French wasn’t great. In fact, it was virtually non-existent, but I got the drift. The office wouldn’t be open again until nine a.m.

Fuck that. Maybe she really was working; maybe they’d turned the phones to voicemail. Étienne often did when he was busy. I grabbed my bomber jacket and headed downstairs.

It was cold on the moped as I weaved in and out of the evening traffic, but I felt a whole lot warmer when I swung intoVia Zurigo and saw that the lights were still on in Do Good Land.

I rang the doorbell. Nothing happened. I rangagain, longer this time, until Étienne appeared behind the glass door. He looked tired, but more than that – surprised.

‘Silke still here?’

His brow furrowed even more. ‘She left three or four hours ago.’

‘Where to?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Course I fucking don’t. I wouldn’t be here, would I?’

He started to look really worried. I didn’t want that: he was one of the good guys.

‘I’m sorry, mate. I’m a bit confused. Where’s she gone?’

Maybe Étienne had seen this before. Did I know anything about her?

‘Come on through. Let me get you some coffee.’

We walked past the battered sofa and coffee-table they called Reception and along a corridor into an open-plan area. One corner was piled with boxes. I perched on the edge of a desk. Appeal posters were pinned to the wall in front of me. The photographs and shoutlines gave me the same uncomfortable feeling I’d had earlier, by the lake, every time I saw them.

Over a close-up of a young girl’s face, her eyes staring and empty:Ester is 8 years old. Yesterday she walked 30 kmsto our clinic. For water? For food? For medicine?No, for rape counselling.

Over a similarly bleak shot of a young boy staring into the camera:Byron is 9 years old. Yesterday he had to kill twopeople in his own home. Burglars? Kidnappers?Armed intruders? No, his parents.

There were another couple of desks with telephones, and that was about it.

‘We run on a shoestring. We get the cash towhere it’s needed.’ Étienne lifted a jug from a coffee machine. ‘But the coffee’s pretty good. Well, usually. I mean, it’s late, and—’

‘Where is she, Étienne?’

He nodded at one of the posters. A medic was bandaging a stump where a small African boy’s hand should have been. ‘Tim runs the camp in DRC, near the Rwanda border. Silke’s been working on his aid campaign. She organized everything, even wrote the posters.’ He smiled. ‘You must be proud of her.’

‘Yes. Very.’ Fuck, she’d probably told me all this stuff and it had gone in one ear and straight out the other.

Étienne stared at the posters, lost in another world. ‘Tim’s operating in impossible conditions. I expect she told you – in the last twelve months alone there’ve been two thousand cases of rape, mutilation and summary execution, just in Ituri province. That’s where our camp is.’

His hand shook as he poured the coffee. It might be outrageous stuff but these guys had to be conditioned to get past that shit to operate. Things must be grim out there if they’d got to him like this.

‘I was out there myself a month ago. When we took our mobile clinic to places where there were roads, we passed burned-out houses, one village after another completely destroyed and abandoned. It was terrible.’

His hand shook more as he thought about what he had seen. ‘She talks about you a lot, Nick.’

‘That’s nice. But where is she?’ I’d already got there, but I needed to hear it confirmed.

‘She’s on our relief plane to Kinshasa.’ He shifted his gaze from the posters at last. ‘Today was the tipping point. On top of everything else, there was an earthquake, just a minor one but it’s devastated the village we’re based in. Tim’s overrun. We’ve never heard him sound so desperate.’ He put down his cup. ‘She felt she couldn’t stand by while—’

‘Where did they fly from?’

‘Geneva. A charter, non-stop to Kinshasa, with as much aid as we could buy. It’s emptied the bank account. Then it’s trucks east to the road head and after that on foot.’

‘They must have a radio or something – sat phone?’

‘Sat phones are a luxury we can’t afford . . . There’s one at the camp, but—’

‘When will she get there? Are they part of a relief convoy from Kinshasa?’

‘Tim phones us every couple of days, or if there’s an emergency – which is most of the time at the moment.’ He tore the top sheet off a memo pad and scribbled a number.

I counted twelve digits. It must be an Iridium.

‘Please don’t use this unless you absolutely have to. They’re swamped by casualties. I’m sure she’ll contact you as soon as she can.’

‘You’re right.’ I swigged the dregs and put the cup down on the desk. ‘But will you ask Tim to remind her anyway?’

He nodded.

‘And I need the exact location of this camp, mate. You got a map reference or the name of the village?’

Étienne didn’t ask why I wanted to know so much as he wrote down the details. Just as well because I wasn’t going to tell him. How could I, when I wasn’t sure myself?

He walked me to the door. We shook, and he kept his grip as he looked me in the eye. ‘Nick, I’m not going to bullshit you. It’s a horrible, dangerous place. I’m still having nightmares, but she obviously felt she had to go. All I can say is our camps have never been attacked. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and pray it stays that way.’