The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The plane was an elderly twin-engined Beechcraft on U.N. charter with a rawhide fifty-year-old captain from Johannesburg and a burly African copilot with side whiskers, and one white cardboard lunch box on each of its nine torn seats. The airport was Wilson, next to Tessa's grave, and as the plane sweated and waited on the runway Ghita strained to catch sight of her burial mound through the window and wondered how much longer she would have to wait for her headstone. But all she saw was silverbacked grass and a red-robed tribesman with a staff standing on one leg over his goats, and a herd of gazelles twitching and grazing under blueblack cloud stacks. She had wedged her travel bag under her seat but the bag was too big and she had to splay her churchy shoes to make space for it. It was terribly hot in the plane and the captain had already warned the passengers that there could be no air-conditioning until the plane took off. In the zip compartment she had stowed her briefing notes and her credentials as the British High Commission's delegate from EADEC. In the main compartment, her pajamas and a change of clothes. I'm doing this for Justin. I'm following in Tessa's footsteps. I have no need to feel ashamed of my inexperience or duplicity.

The back of the fuselage was stuffed with sacks of precious miraa, a permitted, mildly narcotic plant adored by northern tribesmen. Its woody scent was gradually filling the plane. In front of her sat four casehardened aid workers, two men, two women. Maybe the miraa was theirs. She envied their gritty, carefree air, their threadbare clothes and unwashed dedication. And realized with a pinch of self-reproach that they were her age. She wished she could break the habits of learned humility, of drawing her heels together whenever she shook hands with her betters, a practice instilled in her by nuns. She peeked inside her box and identified two plantain sandwiches, an apple, a bar of chocolate and a box of passionfruit juice. She had barely slept and she was famished, but her sense of decorum forbade her to eat a sandwich before takeoff. Last night her phone had rung nonstop from the moment she returned to her flat as her friends one by one vented their outrage and disbelief at the news that Arnold was a wanted man. Her position in the High Commission required her to play the elder stateswoman to them all. At midnight, though she was dead tired, she attempted to take a step from which she could not retreat; one that, if it had succeeded, would have rescued her from the noman's-land where she had been hiding like a recluse for the last three weeks. She had delved in the old brass pot where she kept odds and ends and extracted from it a slip of paper she had secreted there. This is where you ring us, Ghita, if you decide you want to talk to us again. If we're not there, leave a message and one of us will always get back to you within the hour, I promise. An aggressive male African voice answered her and she hoped she had the wrong number.

"I'd like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please."

"What's your name?"

"I want to speak to Rob or Lesley. Is either of them there?"

"Who are you? Give me your name and state your business immediately."

"I'd like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please."

As the phone was slammed down on her she accepted without drama that she was, as she had suspected, alone. Henceforth no Tessa, no Arnold, no wise Lesley from Scotland Yard could spare her the responsibility for her actions. Her parents, though she adored them, were not a solution. Her father the lawyer would listen to her testimony and declare that on the one hand this, but then again on the other hand that, and ask her what objective proof she had for these very serious allegations. Her mother the doctor would say you're overheating, darling, come home and have a bit of R and R. With this thought uppermost in her bleary head she had opened up her laptop, which she did not doubt would also be cram-full of cries of pain and indignation about Arnold. But no sooner had she gone on-line than the screen popped and dwindled to nothing. She went through her procedures — in vain. She phoned a couple of friends only to establish that their machines were unaffected.

"Wow, Ghita, maybe you've picked up one of these crazy viruses from the Philippines or wherever those cyber-freaks hang out!" one of her friends had cried enviously, as if Ghita had been singled out for special attention.

Maybe she had, she agreed, and slept badly from worrying about the e-mails she had lost, the Ping-Pong chats she'd had with Tessa that she had never printed out because she preferred rereading them onscreen, they were more vivid that way, more Tessa.

The Beechcraft had still not taken off so Ghita, as was her habit, gave herself over to the larger questions of life, while studiously avoiding the largest of them all, which was what am I doing here and why? A couple of years ago in England — in my Era Before Tessa, as she secretly called it — she had agonized about the injuries, real and imagined, that she endured every day for being Anglo-Indian. She saw herself as an unsavable hybrid, half black girl in search of God, half white woman superior to lesser breeds without the law. Waking and sleeping, she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambitions and her humanity, and whether she should continue to study dance and music at the London college she was attending after Exeter or, in the image of her adoptive parents, follow her other star and enter one of the professions.

Which explains how one morning she found herself, almost on an impulse, sitting an examination for Her Majesty's Foreign Service, which, unsurprisingly since she had never given a thought to politics, she duly failed, but with the advice that she should reapply in two years' time. And somehow the very decision to sit the exam, though unsuccessful, released the reasoning behind it, which was that she was more at ease with herself joining the system than staying apart from it and achieving little beyond the partial gratification of her artistic impulses.

And it was at this point, visiting her parents in Tanzania, that she decided, again on impulse, to apply for local employment by the British High Commission, and to look for advancement once she was accepted. And if she had not done this she would never have met Tessa. She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to — even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites — but, above all, an inherited belief, derived from both her parents and entrenched by Tessa, that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. Which brought her back to the largest question of them all. She had loved Tessa, she had loved Bluhm, she loved Justin still and, if she was truthful, a little more than was proper or comfortable or whatever the word was. And the fact that she was working for the system did not oblige her to accept the system's lies, as she had heard them only yesterday from Woodrow's mouth. On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the system back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth. Which explained to Ghita's total satisfaction what she was doing here and why. "Better to be inside the system and fighting it," her father — an iconoclast in other ways — would say, "than outside the system, howling at it."

And Tessa, which was the wonderful thing, had said exactly the same.

The Beechcraft shook itself like an old dog and lurched forward, bumping laboriously into the air. Through her tiny window Ghita saw all Africa spread itself below her: slum cities, herds of running zebras, the flower farms of Lake Naivasha, the Aberdares, Mount Kenya faintly painted on the far horizon. And joining them like a sea, the endless tracts of misted brown bush scribbled over with pocks of green. The plane entered rain cloud, a brown dusk filled the cabin. Scorching sunlight replaced it, and was accompanied by an almighty explosion from somewhere out to Ghita's left. Without warning the plane rolled on its side. Lunch boxes, rucksacks and Ghita's travel bag skeltered across the gangway to a chorus of alarm bells and sirens and a flashing of red lights. Nobody spoke except for one old African man, who let out a peal of laughter and bellowed, "We love you, Lord, and don't you go forgettin' that," to the relief and nervous merriment of the other passengers. The plane had still not righted itself. The engine note dropped to a murmur. The African copilot with side-whiskers had found a handbook and was consulting a checklist while Ghita tried to read it over his shoulder. The rawhide captain turned in his seat to address his craven passengers. His sloped, leathern mouth matched the angle of the plane's wings.

"As you may have noticed, ladies and gentlemen, one engine has cracked up," he said drily. "Which means we're going to have to go back to Wilson and pick up another of these things."

And I'm not afraid, Ghita noted, pleased with herself. Until Tessa died, things like this happened to other people. Now they're happening to me, and I can handle them.

Four hours later, she was standing on the tarmac at Lokichoggio.

* * *

"You Ghita?" an Australian girl yelled over the roar of engines and other people's shouted greetings. "I'm Judith. Hi!"

She was tall and red-cheeked and happy and wore a man's curly brown trilby and a T-shirt proclaiming the United Tea Services of Ceylon. They embraced, spontaneous friends in a wild roaring place. White U.N. cargo planes were taking off and landing, white lorries shunted and thundered, and the sun was a furnace, and the heat of it leaped up at her from the runway and the fumes of aircraft fuel shimmered in her eyes and dazzled her. With Judith to guide her, she squeezed herself into the back of a jeep amid sacks of mail to sit beside a sweating Chinese man in a dog collar and a black suit. Jeeps hurtled past them in the opposite direction, pursued by a convoy of white lorries headed for the cargo planes.

"She was a real nice lady!" Judith shouted from the passenger seat in front of her. "Very dedicated!" She was evidently talking about Tessa. "Why would anybody want to arrest Arnold? They're just plain stupid! Arnold wouldn't squash a fly. You're booked three nights, right? Only we got a bunch of nutritionists coming in from Uganda!"

Judith is here to feed the living not the dead, thought Ghita as the jeep clattered through a gateway and joined a strip of hard road. They drove past a camp followers' shantytown of bars, stalls and a facetious notice saying Piccadilly This Way. Tranquil brown hills rose ahead of them. Ghita said she'd love to walk up there. Judith said if she did she'd never come back.

"Animals?"

"People."

They approached the camp. On a patch of red dust beside the main gates, children were playing basketball with a white food bag nailed to a wooden post. Judith led Ghita to reception to collect her pass. Signing the book, Ghita leafed casually back, only to have it fall open at the page she was pretending not to look for:

Tessa Abbott, PO box, Nairobi, Tukul 28.

A. Bluhm, Medecins de l'Univers, Tukul 29.

And the same date.

"The press boys had a ball," Judith was saying enthusiastically. "Reuben charged them fifty U.S. a shot, cash. Eight hundred bucks total, that's eight hundred sets of drawing books and coloring crayons. Reuben reckons that'll produce two Dinka van Goghs, two Dinka Rembrandts and one Dinka Andy Warhol."

Reuben the legendary camp organizer, Ghita remembered. Congolese. Friend of Arnold's.

They were walking down a wide avenue of tulip trees, their fiery red trumpets brilliant against overhead cables and white-painted tukuls with thatched roofs. A lank Englishman like a prep-school master rode sedately past them on an old-fashioned policeman's pushbike. Seeing Judith he rang his bell and gave her a lovely wave.

"Showers and honey boxes across the road from you, first session tomorrow eight a.m. sharp, meet in the doorway to hut thirty-two," Judith announced, as she showed Ghita to her quarters. "Mosquito spray beside your bed, use the net if you're wise. Care to mosey down to the club around sunset for a beer before dinner?"

Ghita would.

"Well, look out for yourself. Some of the boys are pretty hungry when they come back from the field."

Ghita tried to sound casual. "Oh by the by, there's a woman called Sarah," she said. "She was some kind of a friend of Tessa's. I wondered whether she was around so that I could say hullo to her."

She unpacked her things and, armed with her sponge bag and towel, set out bravely across the avenue. Rain had fallen, damping the din from the airfield. The dangerous hills had turned black and olive. The air smelled of gasoline and spices. She showered, returned to her tukul and sat herself before her work notes at a rickety table where, sweating helplessly, she lost herself in the intricacies of Aid Self-Sufficiency.

* * *

Loki's clubhouse was a spreading tree with a long thatched roof under it, a drinks bar with a mural of jungle fauna and a video projector that threw fuzzy images of a long-dead soccer match onto a plastered wall while the sound system belted out African dance music. Shrieks of delighted recognition pierced the evening air as aid workers from distant places rediscovered each other in different languages, embraced, touched faces and walked arm in arm. This should be my spiritual home, she thought wistfully. These are my rainbow people. Their classlessness, their racelessness, their zeal, their youth are mine. Sign up for Loki and tune in to saintliness! Bum around in aeroplanes, enjoy a romantic self-image and the adrenalin of danger! Get your sex out of a tap and a nomadic life that keeps you clear of entanglements! No dreary office work and always a bit of grass to smoke along the way! Glory and boys when I come out of the field, money and more boys waiting for me on my R and R! Who needs more?

I do.

I need to understand why this mess was necessary in the first place. And why it's necessary now. I need to have the courage to say after Tessa at her most vituperative: "Loki sucks. It has no more right to exist than the Berlin Wall. It's a monument to the failure of diplomacy. What the hell's the point of running a Rolls-Royce ambulance service when our politicians do nothing to prevent the accidents?"

Night fell in a second. Yellow strip lights replaced the sun, the birds stopped chattering, then resumed their conversations at a more acceptable level. She was seated at a long table and Judith was sitting three down from her with her arm round an anthropologist from Stockholm, and Ghita was thinking that she hadn't felt like this since she was a new girl at convent school, except that at convent school you didn't drink beer or have half a dozen personable young men of all the world's nations at your table, and half a dozen pairs of male eyes assessing your sexual weight and availability. She was listening to tales of places she had never heard of, and exploits so hair-raising she was convinced she would never qualify to share them, and she was doing her best to appear knowledgeable and only distantly impressed. The spokesman of the moment was a surefire Yankee from New Jersey whose name was Hank the Hawk. According to Judith, he was a onetime boxer and loan shark who had embraced aid work as an alternative to a life of crime. He was holding forth about the warring factions of the Nile area: how the SPLE had temporarily kissed the asses of the SPLM; how the SSIM were beating the shit out of another set of letters, butchering their menfolk, stealing their women and cattle and generally making their contribution to the couple of million dead already notched up by Sudan's brainless civil wars. And Ghita was sipping her beer and doing her best to smile along with Hank the Hawk because his monologue seemed to be addressed exclusively at her as the newcomer and his next conquest. She was therefore grateful when a plump African woman of indeterminate age wearing shorts and sneakers and a London costermonger's peaked cap appeared out of the darkness, clapped her on the shoulder and yelled, "I'm Sudan Sarah, honey, so you got to be Ghita. Nobody told me you were so pretty. Come and have a cup of tea, dear." And without further ceremony marched her through a maze of offices to a tukul like a beach hut on stilts, with a single bed, a refrigerator and a bookcase filled with matching volumes of classical English literature from Chaucer to James Joyce.

And outside, a tiny veranda with two chairs for sitting under the stars and fighting off the bugs once the kettle boils.

* * *

"I hear they're going to arrest Arnold now," Sudan Sarah said comfortably when they had duly lamented Tessa's death. "Well, they should do that. If you've set your mind on hiding the truth, then the first thing you've got to do is give people a different truth to keep them quiet. Otherwise they'll start to wonder whether the real truth isn't out there hidden somewhere, and that will never do."

A schoolmistress, Ghita decided. Or a governess. Used to spreading out her thoughts and repeating them to inattentive children.

"And after the murder comes the cover-up," Sarah continued in the same benign cadences. "And we should never forget that a good cover-up is a lot harder to achieve than a bad murder. A crime, you can maybe always get away with a crime. But a cover-up is going to land you in jail every time." She was indicating the problem with her big hands. "You cover this bit up, then out pops another bit. So you cover that bit up. Then you turn round and that first bit's showing again. And you turn round again and there's a third bit, just sticking its toe out of the sand over there, sure as Cain ever killed Abel. So what should I be telling you, dear? I'm getting a feeling we're not talking about the things you wish to talk about."

Ghita began cunningly. Justin, she said, was trying to piece together a picture of Tessa's final days. He would like to be assured that her last visit to Loki had been happy and productive. In what way exactly had Tessa contributed to the gender awareness seminar, could Sarah say? Had Tessa delivered a paper perhaps, drawing on her legal knowledge or her experiences with women in Kenya? Was there a particular episode or happy moment that Sarah recalled and Justin would like to hear about?

Sarah heard her out contentedly, eyes twinkling under the brim of her costermonger's hat while she pecked at her tea and flapped a big loose hand at the mosquitoes, never ceasing to smile at passersby or call to them — "Hi there, Jeannie sweet, you bad girl! What you doing with that layabout Santo? You going write to Justin all about this, dear?"

The question unsettled Ghita. Was it good or bad that she should be proposing to write to Justin? Was there innuendo in all? In the High Commission Justin was an unperson. Was he one here as well?

"Well, I'm sure Justin would like me to write to him," she conceded awkwardly. "But I'll only do that if I can tell him things that will put his mind to rest, if that's possible. I mean I wouldn't tell him anything that was going to hurt him," she protested, losing her direction. "I mean Justin knows that Tessa and Arnold were traveling together. The whole world knows by now. Whatever was between them, he's reconciled to that."

"Oh, there was nothing between those two, darling, believe me," Sarah said with an easy laugh. "That was all newspaper talk. There was just no way. I know that for a fact.

Hi, Abby, how you doing, darling? That's my sister Abby. She's had more than many. She's been married almost four times."

The significance of both statements, if there was any, passed Ghita by. She was too busy shoring up what sounded increasingly like a silly lie. "Justin wants to fill in the blanks," she struggled on bravely. "Get the details shipshape in his mind. So that he can piece together everything she did and thought about in her last few days. I mean, obviously — if you told me something that was going to be, well, painful to him — I wouldn't dream of passing it on. Obviously."

"Shipshape," Sarah repeated, and shook her head again, smiling to herself. "That's why I always loved the English language. "Shipshape" is a right word for that good lady. Now what do you think they did when they were up here, darling? Spooning around like honeymooners? That wasn't their way at all."

"Attending the gender workshop, obviously. Did you attend it yourself? You were probably running it or something grand. I never asked you what you do here. I should know. I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize, darling. You're not sorry. You're just a little bit at sea. Not quite shipshape yet." She laughed. "Yes, well, now I remember. I did attend that workshop. Maybe I led it too. We take it in turns. It was a good group, I remember that. Two bright tribeswomen from Dhiak, a medical widow woman from Aweil, a bit pompous but receptive despite her pomposity, and a couple of paralegals from I don't know. That was a good team, I'll say that straight. But what those women will do when they get home again to Sudan, that you can never tell. You can scratch your head and you can wonder as much as you will."

"Maybe Tessa related to the paralegals," Ghita put in hopefully.

"Maybe she did, dear. But a lot of those women never rode in an aeroplane before. A lot of them get sick and scared, so we're obliged to cheer them up before they'll talk and listen, which is what they're brought here to do. Some of them get so afraid they never talk to anyone at all, just want to go home to their indignities. Never get into this business if you're afraid of failure, darling, I tell people. Count your successes is Sudan Sarah's advice and don't even think about the occasions when you failed. D'you still want to ask me about that workshop?"

Ghita's confusion increased. "Well, did she shine at it? Did she enjoy it?"

"Now I don't know about that, darling, do I?"

"There must be something you remember that she did or said. Nobody forgets Tessa for long." She sounded rude to herself, and didn't mean to. "Or Arnold."

"Well, I won't say she did contribute to that discussion, dear, because she didn't. Tessa did not contribute to that discussion. I can say that with certainty."

"Did Arnold?"

"No."

"Not even read a paper or anything?"

"Nothing at all, darling. Neither of them."

"You mean they just sat there, silent? Both of them? It's not like Tessa to keep quiet. Nor Arnold for that matter. How long did the course last?"

"Five days. But Tessa and Arnold didn't stay in Loki five days. Not many people do. Everyone who comes here likes to feel they're going somewhere else. Tessa and Arnold were no different from the rest." She paused and examined Ghita, as if measuring her suitability for something. "Do you know what I'm saying, darling?"

"No. I'm afraid I don't."

"Maybe it's what I'm not saying that you know."

"I don't know that either."

"Well, what the hell are you up to then?"

"I'm trying to find out what they did. Arnold and Tessa. In their last few days. Justin wrote and asked me to particularly."

"You got his letter with you then, by any chance, dear?"

Ghita produced it with a trembling hand from a new shoulder bag she'd bought for the trip. Sarah took it into the tukul to read it by the overhead light bulb, then stood by herself before returning to the veranda and sitting herself down in her chair with an air of considerable moral confusion.

"You going to tell me something, dear?"

"If I can."

"Did Tessa tell you with her own sweet mouth that she and Arnold were coming up to Loki for a gender workshop?"

"It's what they told all of us."

"And you believed her?"

"Yes, I did. All of us did. Justin did. We still do."

"And Tessa was a close friend of yours? Like a sister, as I heard. But all the same she never even told you she had some other reason to come up here? Or that the gender workshop was a straight pretext, an excuse, same as Self-Sustainment is a pretext for you, I expect?"

"At the beginning of our friendship, Tessa told me things. Then she became worried for me. She thought she'd told me too much. It wasn't fair to burden me. I'm a temporary employee, locally employed. She knew I was thinking of applying for a permanent post. Sitting the exams again."

"You still thinking along those lines, dear?"

"Yes, I am. But that doesn't mean I can't be told the truth."

Sarah took a sip of her tea, tugged at the brim of her cap and sat herself comfortably in her chair. "You going to stay here three nights is my understanding."

"Yes. Back to Nairobi on Thursday."

"That's nice. That's very nice. And you will have a good conference. Judith is a gifted practical woman who takes no shit from anybody. A little sharp with the slower-witted ones, but never deliberately unkind. And tomorrow evening, I shall introduce you to my good friend Captain McKenzie. You never heard of him?"

"No."

"Tessa or Arnold never mentioned a Captain McKenzie in your hearing?"

"No."

"Well, the captain is a pilot here with us at Loki. He flew down to Nairobi today so I guess you and he crossed each other in the air. He had some supplies to pick up and a little business to attend to. You will like Captain McKenzie very much. He is a nice-mannered man with more heart to him than most people have body, and that's a fact. Very little takes place in these parts that escapes the notice of Captain McKenzie, and very little escapes his lips either. The captain has fought in many unpleasant wars but now he is a devoted man of peace, which is why he's here in Loki feeding my starving people."

"Did he know Tessa well?" Ghita asked fearfully.

"Captain McKenzie knew Tessa and he thought she was a fine lady, and that was that. Captain McKenzie would no more presume on a married lady than — well, than Arnold would. But Captain McKenzie knew Arnold better than he knew Tessa. And he thinks the police in Nairobi are all mad to be going after Arnold like that, and he's proposing to tell them so while he's there. I would say that is one of the pivotal reasons for his making the journey to Nairobi at this time. And they won't like what he is going to tell them because, believe me, Captain McKenzie speaks his mind without let or hindrance."

"Was Captain McKenzie here in Loki when Tessa and Arnold came up for the workshop?"

"Captain McKenzie was here. And he saw a lot more of Tessa than I did, dear, by a long chalk." She broke off for a while and sat smiling at the stars, and it seemed to Ghita that she was trying to reach a decision in her mind — such as whether to speak out or keep her secrets to herself, questions that Ghita had been asking herself these last three weeks.

"Now, dear," Sarah went on finally. "I've been listening to you. And I've been watching you and thinking about you and worrying about you. And I came to the conclusion that you're a girl with a brain in your head, and you're also a good, decent human being with a well-developed sense of responsibility, which I value. But if you're not that person and I have misread you, between us we could get Captain McKenzie into a whole heap of trouble. This is dangerous knowledge I'm about to acquaint you withand there's no way, once you have it, to get it back in the bottle. So I suggest you tell me now whether I am overjudging you or whether I have read you accurately. Because people who talk out of turn, they never reform. That's something else I've learned. They can swear on the Bible one day and the next day they're at it just like before, talking out of turn again. The Bible didn't make a whit of difference to them."

"I understand," said Ghita.

"Now are you going to advise me that I have misinterpreted what I have seen and heard and thought of you? Or shall I tell you what I have in my mind and you bear that heavy burden of responsibility for ever after?"

"I'd like you to trust me, please."

"That's what I thought you'd say, so listen to me. I'll say it quietly, so bring your ear a little closer to me." Sudan Sarah gave a tug to the brim of her hat so that Ghita could get alongside her. "There. And maybe the geckos will favor us with some loud burping, I hope. Tessa never came to that workshop, nor Arnold neither. As soon as they were able, Tessa and Arnold got into the back of my friend Captain McKenzie's jeep and drove quietly and sedately out to the airstrip with their heads down. And Captain McKenzie, as soon as he was able, he put them in his Buffalo aeroplane and flew them up north without benefit of passports or visas or any of the normal formalities imposed by South Sudanese rebels who can't stop fighting one another and haven't got the spirit or intelligence to unite themselves against those bad Arabs in the north who seem to think Allah forgives everything even if his Prophet doesn't."

Ghita thought Sarah had finished and was about to speak, but she had only begun.

"A further complication is that Mr. Moi, who couldn't manage a flea circus with the assistance of his entire Cabinet, even if there was money in it for him, has taken it into his head that he's got to have the managing of Loki airstrip, as you will have noticed. Mr. Moi has a very limited affection for NGO'S but a great appetite for airport taxes. And Dr. Arnold was very particular that Mr. Moi and his people did not take cognizance of their journey to wherever they wished to go."

"So where did they go?" Ghita whispered, but Sarah rolled straight on.

"Now I never asked where that place was, because what I don't know I can't end up saying in my sleep. Not that there's anyone to hear me these days, I'm too old. But Captain McKenzie knows, that stands to reason. Captain McKenzie brought them back early next day from wherever he took them to, discreetly, the way he took them out the day before. And Dr. Arnold, he says to me, "Sarah," he says, "we never went anywhere except here to Loki. We were attending your gender workshop twenty-four hours a day. Tessa and I are grateful to you for continuing to remember that important fact." But Tessa's dead now, and she's not likely to be grateful to Sudan Sarah or anybody else anymore. And Dr. Arnold, if I know anything, he's worse than dead. Because that Moi has his people everywhere, and they kill and steal to their hearts' content, and that means a lot of killing. And when they take a man prisoner with the intention of extracting certain truths from him, they abandon all compassion, and that's a fact you'd do well to remember on your own account, my darling, because you are treading in very deep waters. Which is why I've decided it is essential that you get into conversation with Captain McKenzie, who knows things I'd rather not. Because Justin, who's a good man from all that I hear, he needs to have all the information that's available on the subject of his dead wife and Dr. Arnold. Now is that the right way for me to be thinking, or is there a better way?"

"It's the right way," Ghita said.

Sarah drained her tea and set down the cup. "Very well then. So you go and eat and get your strength up and I'll stay here for a little while, dear, because this place is talk, talk, talk, as you will already have appreciated. And don't touch the goat curry, darling, however much you like goat. Because that young Somali chef, who is a gifted boy and will one day become a fine lawyer, has a blind spot where goat curry is concerned."

* * *

Ghita never knew how she got through the first day of the focus group on Self-Sustainment, but by the time the bell sounded for five o'clock — though the bell was only in her head — she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had not made a fool of herself, had spoken neither too much nor too little, had listened with humility to the opinions of older and more knowledgeable participants, and had taken copious notes for yet another unread EADEC report.

"Glad you came?" Judith asked her, cheerfully grabbing her arm as the meeting broke up. "See you down the club, then."

"This is for you, darling," said Sarah, emerging from a staff hut to hand her a brown envelope. "Enjoy your evening."

"You too."

Sarah's handwriting came straight out of a school copybook.

Ghita dear. Captain McKenzie occupies Entebbe tukul, which is number fourteen on the airstrip side. Take a hand torch with you for when the generators are switched off. He will be happy to receive you at nine o'clock after your dinner. He is a gentleman so you need have no fear. Please give him this note so that I can be sure it has been sensibly disposed of. Take very good care of yourself now and remember your responsibilities as regards discretion. Sarah

* * *

The names of the tukuls read to Ghita like regimental battle honors in the village church close to her convent school in England. The front door to Entebbe was ajar, but the mosquito door inside it was wedged tight. A blue-shaded hurricane lamp burned and Captain McKenzie sat in front of it, so that as Ghita approached the tukul she saw only his silhouette, bowed over his desk while he wrote like a monk. And because first impressions counted greatly with her, she stood a moment observing his craggy look and extreme stillness, anticipating an unbending military nature. She was about to tap on the door frame but Captain McKenzie had either heard or seen her or guessed her, because he sprang to his feet and made two athletic strides to the mosquito door and pulled it back for her.

"Ghita, I'm Rick McKenzie. You're bang on time. Got a note for me?"

New Zealand, she thought, and knew she'd got it right. Sometimes she forgot her knowledge of English names and accents, but this was not one of the times. New Zealand and on closer inspection nearer to fifty than thirty, but she could only guess this from the hairline cracks on the gaunt cheeks and the silver tips to the trim black hair. She handed him Sarah's note and watched while he turned his back on her and held the note to the blue lamp. By the brighter glow she saw a sparse, clean room with an ironing board and polished brown shoes and a soldier's bed made the way she was taught to make her bed at convent school, with hospital corners and the sheet folded over the blanket at the top, then folded back on itself to make an equilateral triangle.

"Why don't you sit yourself over there?" he asked, indicating a kitchen chair. As she moved toward it, the blue lamp moved behind her, to settle on the floor at the center of the doorway to the tukul. "That way nobody gets to see in," he explained. "We've got fulltime tukul watchers here. Take a Coke?" He handed it to her at arm's length. "Sarah says you're a trustworthy person, Ghita. That's good enough for me. Tessa and Arnold didn't trust anyone except each other in this. And me because they had to. That's the way I like to work too. You came up on a Self-Sustainment jag, I hear." It was a question.

"The Self-Sustainment focus group was a pretext. Justin wrote to me asking me to find out what Tessa and Arnold were doing in Loki in the days before she died. He didn't believe the story of the gender workshop."

"He's damn right. Got his letter?"

My identity paper, she thought. My proof of good faith as Justin's messenger. She passed it to him and watched while he stood up, pulled on a pair of austere steel-framed spectacles and stepped obliquely into the arc of the blue lamp, keeping himself out of the eyeline of the door.

He handed the letter back. "So listen up," he said.

But first he turned on his radio, anxious to establish what he pedantically termed the level of acceptable sound.

* * *

Ghita lay on her bed, under a single sheet. The night was no cooler than the day. Through the netting that surrounded her she could watch the red glow of the mosquito coil. She had drawn the curtains but they were very thin. Footsteps and voices kept passing her window and every time they passed she had an urge to leap out of bed and shout "Hi!" Her thoughts turned to Gloria, who a week ago, to her confusion, had invited her to a game of tennis at the club.

"Tell me, dear," Gloria had asked her, having trounced her six games to two in each of three sets. They were walking arm in arm toward the clubhouse. "Did Tessa have some kind of crush on Sandy, or was it the other way round?"

At which Ghita, despite her addiction to the altar of truth, lied straight and fairly into Gloria's face without even blushing. "I am quite sure there was nothing of the kind on either side," she said primly. "Whatever makes you think that, Gloria?"

"Nothing, darling. Nothing at all. Just the way he looked during the funeral, I suppose."

And after Gloria, she went back to Captain McKenzie.

"There's this crazy Boer who runs a food station five miles west of a little town called Mayan," he was saying, keeping his voice just below Pavarotti's. "Bit of a God-thumper."