by Giles Foden
Leggatt finished scratching the end of the cartridge with the serrated edge of Nick’s fishing knife. Then he closed up the breech and took aim again. This time, a tongue of flame came out of the muzzle of the old gun – a tongue of flame and a phosphorescent projectile, not unlike a firework, but brighter. It whizzed across the water into the rigging of the dhow. Almost immediately, flames began to snatch at the ragged sails.
‘Ha!’ Leggatt shouted triumphantly as the strong wind fanned the flames. ‘That’ll give us a bit of breathing space.’
They drew away from the dhow. Its crew, fearing the loss of their ship, had dropped anchor and were trying to haul down the burning sails. Nick and Leggatt reached the yacht in the meantime, tying a line and boarding by means of the rope ladder that ran up the side.
As Nick climbed, he saw clearly, in front of his nose, the full name of the craft, which he had half glimpsed from the shore. Painted in blue on the yellow background were the words Winston Churchill, together with a little cartoon of a man with bullfrog eyes, smoking a cigar.
‘Right,’ said Leggatt, looking up at his tattered sails. ‘I’ll go and start the engine. She’s not going to sail anywhere now. Get that monkey out of the rigging before he does any more damage.’
Nick looked up at the boy. He was too high to jump, but too frightened to come down either. A little dubiously, Nick began climbing. They chased around – Nick cursing, the boy yelping – as the diesel motor chugged into life and the yacht began to move. They had left the island and the dhow well behind, before Nick, reaching across the rigging, could lay hands on him.
‘Please, bwana, please!’ cried the young African. He was anything between seven and eleven, and kept shouting and struggling as he was brought down. ‘Please …’
‘I’ve a good mind to whip the living daylights out of him,’ said Leggatt, once they joined him in the wheelhouse.
The boy clung to Nick’s shirt.
‘Let’s just take him to the police. Chikambwa.’
He looked at Leggatt’s bleeding face. ‘You need a doctor anyhow.’
‘I’ll be all right.’ The long-haired old man spat some blood out of the wheelhouse window.
‘Anyway,’ continued Nick, ‘what was going on out there? What were you doing with those eggs? Why were you digging them up?’
Ignoring him, Leggatt took out his pipe with a liver-spotted hand, lit it and – between puffs of smoke – began to question the boy in brusque Swahili. Nick looked out of the back window of the wheelhouse, where he could see his own little boat bobbing away on its line in the wake of the Churchill.
‘As I thought,’ Leggatt said to Nick after a while. ‘Chikambwa it is.’
‘So what do we do, take the boy to his office?’
The old man leant over from behind the wheel and spat more blood out of the window. Then he took a good suck on his pipe, as if hoping the smoke would staunch the bleeding. Finally he looked at Nick.
‘You still don’t understand, do you? These are Chikambwa’s men. It’s him that’s taking the eggs and, worse still, the shells.’
‘He’s a poacher?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Gamekeeper turned poacher. Policeman turned thief. The usual thing. Except that he’s still gamekeeper.’
‘There must be other police we can go to.’
‘My dear boy, this is Africa. They’ll be on the take as well, like as not.’
‘I don’t think like that.’
‘Think how you want, but take my advice. Keep your head down. Look to where you can make a difference. Zanzibar is in the process of being sold off. You ecologists are too late. Always too late. There’ll be hotels everywhere soon. Costa del Africa. Glad I’m too old to see the worst of it.’
Nick was confused. ‘So what were you doing with those eggs?’
‘Oh, moving them. I take them off Zanzibar and rebury them. They have a much greater chance of survival. Or would have done if that lot hadn’t rumbled me.’
He looked at the poachers’ boy, who had curled up in a corner of the wheelhouse.
Nick followed his gaze. ‘Do you think they’ll be back?’
‘Not for a while. But eventually, yes. Really it needs someone to guard the place. I’ve buried a lot more eggs on there. In fact, maybe that’s what you should do.’
‘What?’
‘Concentrate your efforts there. It’s a pristine coral-rag island. Do you know how rare that is? A perfect reef ecology. Some of the most spectacular coral gardens to be found anywhere in the world. That’s something worth protecting. You see that buoy?’
Nick looked at the child on the floor.
‘The plastic thing, the red thing.’
‘Ah,’ said Nick, looking where it was hung in a swirl of rope on the wall. ‘We say boo-ey.’
Leggatt grunted. ‘It takes twenty years for a colony of coral of even that size to grow. Twenty years!’
‘I know that,’ said Nick. ‘I’m a marine biologist.’
The old man gave him a hard look. ‘You people have a lot to learn. Scientists …’
There was silence in the cabin, except for the chugging of the engine.
Eventually Leggatt spoke up. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not much cop at getting along with people. I owe you one. Where do you want me to take you?’
‘Macpherson, please.’
‘Right-ho …’
He changed course, then repeated his apology.
‘Forget it,’ said Nick. ‘So, how come Lyly has survived?’
‘It’s pronounced Lala. Swahili for sleep. Corrupted into English when we were here. The good old days. There’s a lullaby actually …’ He began to sing softly. ‘Lala, lala salama … Salama is peace. It means, sleep peacefully. More or less. It survived because of the Cold War. The pursuit of error sometimes leads to good. Happens all the time.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘It was part of a military zone. When the East German navy was here in the seventies and eighties. The fishermen weren’t allowed near the island.’
‘What about that house?’
Leggatt turned the wheel with his brown hands. ‘It was built for a British lighthouse-keeper … in the thirties.’
‘And the mosque?’
‘Much earlier. The Omanis ran Zanzibar for centuries. Before that Zanzibar, Kilwa, Mombasa, were all part of the Kingdom of Saba. What’s now the Yemen. That lasted from, oh, about 1000 BC to AD 300 … There’s lots of legends. Saba, so they say, was the kingdom that the Queen of Sheba came from to visit Solomon.’
‘As in King Solomon’s mines?’
‘That’s it. Anyway, even when we were officially in charge, when Britain took over from the sultan, it was still the Arabs’ show really. They hoped to keep control after independence. Then the revolution happened and the Africans rose up, killing the Arabs on the beaches. It was pure slaughter.’
‘So who does the island belong to now?’
‘Lyly?’
‘Yes.’
‘A rich Arab. A Saudi, not an Omani though, which is unusual. He doesn’t seem to bother with it. He bought it off the Africans, who took it over from the Omanis. The original Omani family fled to Muscat.’
‘So not all the Arabs were killed?’
‘They started coming back. They were needed for the economy. But there are rules about how long they can stay. Although, as a matter of fact, there was so much intermarriage over the years it’s hard to say who’s Arab, who’s African …’
Leggatt cut the engine. ‘Looks like we’re here.’
They had, indeed, reached Macpherson Bay. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The beach and hotel buildings were glaring in the sun. There was no one about. Da Souza would be having his siesta.
‘Well …’ said the Englishman. ‘I ought to thank you.’
‘It’s OK. What about him?’
They looked at the boy, who was rubbing his eyes.
‘I’ll see if he has any parents. If not, I’ll find him some job
s on my farm, try to work some sense into him.’
Leggatt restarted the engine as Nick climbed down into the dinghy.
‘Tell you what,’ shouted Leggatt, ‘why don’t you come round to my place on Sunday? Mtoni. Ask anyone, you’ll find it. Ten o’clock. We’ll have a wander round, then maybe I’ll get you some lunch.’
‘OK. Sure – see you there.’
Standing in the little boat, rocking from side to side and redistributing his weight accordingly, Nick watched the Winston Churchill move away. He could see Leggatt in the wheelhouse, one hand on the wheel as he turned the boat in the bay to face the open sea. There was a worrying amount of blood on the old man’s shirt. He really ought to see a doctor.
As he sat down and put out the oars, Nick realised why he felt so concerned. He started to pull. There was something about Leggatt that reminded him of his father; or how his father might have been if he had survived. Still, the old guy seemed to be OK.
Nick rowed back to the hotel in a little ecstasy of athletic precision, trying to make all the energy go into the stroke – not into the splash, or the eddy, or the noise of the rowlocks. It wasn’t just the stroke itself he enjoyed, it was the way everything connected: arm and ocean, wood and water, the tug the oars made in the muscles of the back – they all came together in a single action. Then, what was also pleasurable, came the putting up of oars, like a bird folding its wings. Followed by a smooth coasting into the beach, the glide of it so sweet, so carefully judged, that the keel touched the sand with barely a sound.
After pulling up the boat, he picked a mango from one of the trees in the hotel courtyard, and went to his room to eat it. The air conditioning, which gave off a faint smell of stagnant water, had broken down, but when he turned on the ceiling fan, it began to revolve, slowly at first, then gathering speed. He drew the curtains. Lying on the bed in the darkened room, he ate the mango as if it were stolen fruit and he the boy eternal. It tasted good. He sucked the fibres on the stone. Despite the fan, it was still, so still.
Once the stone was dry, he reached over, put it on the bedside table, and promptly fell asleep. There he remained, as the white horses of the sea rode so, and so, still so – until, lulled by the spell of their own resumption, they became the horses of the night.
8
Executive Assistant (Logistical and Security). It is not a glamorous position in the Foreign Service, and not a lucrative one either. Starting salaries range from $33,000 to $45,911, depending on qualifications and location of assignment. Miranda was right at the bottom of the scale.
The post in Tanzania entailed work as a security specialist in the areas of facility protection, investigation, information management, and retention and training of local staff. The core of the job was ensuring protection for embassy facilities and personnel from technical espionage, acts of terrorism and crime.
She hoped, before long, to move on to the DS training scheme for special agents, who pursued counter-intelligence, antiterrorist and other investigations from US embassies worldwide. In the meantime, she spent much of her time checking electronic and electromagnetic security systems, filling in forms and a daily security register (called the day book), making sure the local staff were performing their functions – and, in the evenings, going to parties, of which there were many.
With her long dark hair and green eyes, Miranda attracted much male attention at the round of diplomatic functions which substituted for a social life in a posting like Dar. The African diplomats, many of whom preferred the direct approach (‘Do you have a husband?’ – ‘Will you marry me?’), often just startled her. She found it troublesome coping with their physical frankness, but also faintly amusing. She felt a little guilty about this, but it couldn’t be helped. It was just one of the many ways in which the colour bar continued to operate subliminally.
Nobly, she allowed herself to feel a slight thrill, not sexual exactly, but something approaching it, about Abdi, the tall Somali deputy ambassador, who followed her across the room at parties like a long brown greyhound.
‘Never was anything better named,’ Ray had remarked drily, on first observing this now familiar scene, ‘than a cocktail party.’
At first she hadn’t understood what he meant, then flushed with embarrassment when he’d explained.
‘Cocks tailing tail. Not mine, I’m afraid. Larry Durrell.’
Miranda didn’t know who Larry Durrell was, but she had got to know Ray Delahoya pretty well in those first few months of her posting. Big, plaid-shirted Ray was the embassy comms man, the communications specialist who maintained the forest of satellite dishes and other aerials that covered the roof of the building. He had a little moustache and was excitably inquisitive, with a habit of asking personal questions. Ray wasn’t regarded as a team player by the more senior members of chancery. He encouraged her to take her training – especially the intelligence, ‘tradecraft’ side of it – with a pinch of salt.
‘You don’t want to get too overawed by the mystique of all that,’ he said one morning, when they happened to arrive together at the embassy car park.
They were walking across the lawn in front of the chancery, along a path scattered with chipped bark. Either side, rows of oleander and agapanthus broadcast their blossom, vivid pinks and blues.
‘If you do, you’ll end up seeing things. Threats in every corner. Truth is, most of our job here is just routine management.’
The path was sodden with sprinkler water. In the flower beds, she noticed, translucent droplets beaded the spear-like leaves of the agapanthus. Holding their position, as if they might never fall, they fixed hypnotically on the eye, making one want to stand and stare.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked. Feeling light-headed, she chided herself for not having had enough for breakfast.
‘We just have to keep the machine rolling. The great machine of state.’
She gathered herself, businesslike. ‘But there are dangers, Ray. That’s why I’m here, that’s the point of my job. America has only five per cent of the world’s population but is the subject of thirty-six per cent of terrorist attacks.’
Another bloom caught her eye. Red, long-stemmed and voluminous, it was one of a distinct variety of hibiscus planted in the embassy gardens. Again her mind dissolved – into Gauguin, South Pacific, the love flower in the hair of Polynesian girls – such totemic maidens, determined by men for their pleasure, as she knew she never could be.
‘Nifty numbers, baby. I don’t know. Sometimes I think the administration needs to have enemies in order to function.’
They had reached the entrance to the chancery. Forgetting about the red spray as suddenly as it had gripped her, Miranda found herself bristling at his cynicism.
‘We have to defend our way of life. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
She paused at the electronic turnstile. Both searched for their pass cards.
‘Really got to you in training, didn’t they?’ Ray chuckled, as they passed through.
They stopped on the other side. ‘Listen,’ he said. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket with a flourish and began cleaning his spectacles. ‘… you’ll be disappointed with a career in foreign service if you go about thinking you’re a mixture of George Washington and Mata Hari.’
‘I don’t think like that! I just want to take my job seriously.’
‘Hey, take it easy.’ Ray replaced his spectacles. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. Sorry – guess I’m just getting my own anxieties off my chest. You know, I’ve wanted to work in foreign service ever since I could tell time. Now I am, and it doesn’t really live up to all I hoped. It doesn’t help my being …’
He dried up.
Miranda smiled and patted him on the arm. ‘Come on, let’s get some coffee.’
They began climbing the stairs, past windows which, cut like tombstones in the concrete, cast long, thin slices of light on the opposite wall.
*
Delahoya was funny, and most of the time sh
e liked being round him. She enjoyed the way Ray would suddenly surf off on the wave of his own conversation. Like a conjuring trick – some sleight of hand with a tin tray and handkerchiefs – it would whisk the two of them out of the pious diplomatic environment. There was nobody else at the embassy with whom she could conceivably find herself talking Pocahontas action-figure dolls, Starbucks or the Olsen twins.
She and Ray often went shopping together at the PX, as the embassy store was called: it was a military acronym for ‘Post Exchange’, generally a store on a military base, which the embassy counted as, because of the presence of the Marines.
Ray was promiscuous in his cultural references. She couldn’t keep up. ‘The dons live well in the kawledge,’ he’d say, whenever their trolleys bumped in the aisles of the PX, between racks filled with everything from vacuum-packed steaks to track shoes and the latest CDs. It was a line of poetry, apparently, that he told her always came into his head when he saw all the products on the shelves.
If there was profusion inside the compound, the opposite was true outside. They were in one of the poorest countries in the world. She had seen the beggars on the streets: the aged ones a pile of rag and limb on the sidewalk, the children lifting filthy hand to filthy mouth as they ran beside her car. She had grown accustomed to carrying the thick wads of bills that signified gross inflation. She had seen (though never tasted) the bowls of white maize meal that was most people’s daily diet. Only a few were fortunate enough to supplement it with bits of meat, goat mostly, a horrid brown stew stirred up over charcoal fires in a ragged oil tin.
Sure, there was industry here – local products such as soap, paint, cigarettes – but only a tiny percentage of the population could afford them. Most were peasant farmers, eking out a fragile existence on their shambas, as these little farms were called in Swahili. A bad harvest or a natural disaster – flood one year, drought the next – could mean the difference between life and death.
Yes, Miranda knew all about it. It was a vicious circle. The worse things got, the more the farmers abandoned the production of cash crops – the coffee and sisal and groundnuts which represented Tanzania’s main chance to earn foreign exchange. The less foreign money there was, the slimmer the country’s chance of climbing out of poverty. For that, no conjuring trick, no poetry, nothing but an entire overhaul in the system of things, would suffice.