by Giles Foden
Zayn looked at him, nodded gravely, then went into the bedroom to put on his shirt. Yousef, draping a towel over his shoulder, went down to the beach to wash.
Relieved, Khaled looked at the ear in his hand. It was changing colour, browning as cells popped, as blood oxidised in vessels. He was no scientist, but he knew what the matter was. Decaying flesh. Soon it would shrivel, turn leathery and hard. He had seen, every day, something similar in the upright racks of drying fish in his father’s village. But the picture that the severed ear raised in his mind right now came from another world entirely. The look of it made him think of a tiny hamburger. He had seen one of those once, normal-sized he supposed, in a place in Mombasa that tried to be American. It had had ice creams and – what do they call those machines? A jukebox.
He stared at the ear for a few seconds, ragged-edged in his palm. Then he went outside, walked a little way – up to the top of the beach, where he flung it into some bushes. There was no need to be pious. It was just a piece of flesh. The job was done.
Shortly afterwards the three of them squeezed into the little mosque and prayed. Then they came back to the fire for breakfast. Yousef – who from the start had taken the domestic role in the team – proceeded to cook some maize meal, together with a pot of coffee.
They ate in silence, all three conscious of what was to come. Everything was done now, more or less. They were ready to set off, more or less. All that remained – the task Zayn had not mentioned – was for Khaled and Yousef to draw lots. Concerning the driving of the truck that awaited them at the docks. Concerning death.
After the meal, they all went outside and walked up to the dunes on Zayn’s instructions. Telling them to wait there, he went over to some bushes, whereupon he bent over and broke off two small pieces of twig. Standing with his back to the others, he fiddled about with them.
Khaled looked out to sea. Further down, on the beach proper, he could see a strange structure of upright sticks.
There was a shout. Khaled turned and saw Zayn give a little jump. It was an almost comical movement for such a big person. He came hurrying back over, nodding his head and grinning oddly.
‘A snake. I saw a snake! Now …’
His voice trailed off suggestively. Khaled looked at Yousef. The diminutive Syrian smoothed his moustache with the back of his hand, and gave Khaled a shy smile. Trying to take his mind off what was about to happen, Khaled turned and looked again at the strange structure, trying to work out what it was. The morning sun, already a little too much to bear, screwed down on the three men, making short, squat shadows of their bodies in the sand.
Zayn spoke, finally. ‘Who is to pick first?’
Sweating, Khaled looked at his feet.
He heard his own voice. ‘I will.’
It was all over with very quickly. Zayn’s big fist was in front of his face, with the two brown ends of twig, evenly matched, sticking out. Without thinking, Khaled reached out and picked one.
He held it up. It looked very short indeed.
Zayn walked over to Yousef. The Syrian paused for a second, smoothing his moustache again. Then he pulled the remaining twig from Zayn’s bunched hand.
‘Now you measure,’ commanded the cell leader.
The two came close together, as if they were about to embrace. Already one was condemned, by devices arbitrary or natural. Already one was murmuring dry-mouthed devotions, trembling and shredding his twig in his hand. Already one was being both comforted and congratulated by the other. For was it not an honour to die like this? Was it not a prize beyond price to go into paradise?
22
P-p-peep.
Somewhere in the office, Miranda could hear an alarm going off. She wondered whose it could be. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and most people had not yet arrived for work at the embassy.
P-p-peepit!
She imagined the person, whoever it was, rummaging through their briefcase or daysack looking for the rogue machine.
With the slow dawn of recognition, she became aware that it was her alarm, her bag. She had thrown her coat – mornings in Dar-es-Salaam could be kind of chilly – over her bag, muffling the sound and making it seem further away. And now it was she who was rummaging around.
She pressed the button on the top of the little black square, remembering only then how she had set it for that time. She hated wearing a watch, and always tossed the clock into her bag before leaving for work. She was sure that she had cancelled it. It must have been jogged in the jeep, making the button come up again. She turned back to her computer and began typing, resisting the temptation to check her email program to see if Nick had replied. That kind of thinking wasn’t helpful. She hoped he understood from her tone that it would go no further. She could have written that it might have done, under different circumstances, but that was a hard thing to communicate without committing yourself. Still, he was the first thing she had thought of when she’d woken up that morning, very early.
It was builders that had broken her sleep, not the alarm clock. In fact, she hadn’t really needed the alarm any day that week and now wondered why she’d set it at all. A group of labourers had lately begun work on a new house opposite her own in Oyster Bay. They started at five-thirty after sleeping amid the steel sticking out of the bare concrete. The foreman roused them by banging a stone on the metal ring of a tyre, and this was what had been waking her. Hung from a tree by a bit of old rope, it made a noise like a bell.
In truth, she didn’t mind. She liked getting up early in Africa, throwing back the patterned sheets she’d bought from an Indian draper in Dar. Then she would put on a towelling robe and step out onto the veranda while the air was still relatively cool. In those moments she could feel, just for half an hour or so, before the sun got truly up, that she was back home.
It wasn’t exactly homesickness. It was just that she liked to be able to measure things against an idea of home. Which mainly meant her father. And he was gone. Her mother, on the other hand, had never really been there at all. She wasn’t even with her as a ghost as he was – inmate, inhabitant, a guest in her mind – but lay somewhere beyond the reach of conception. It didn’t help that there were hardly any photographs. Miranda wondered if she had not been scarred by the absence of that deep, strong, inexhaustible force that she’d heard said was a mother’s love.
There were some things, however, that could be defined by their absence. Or suggested by it at least. She’d realised a strong idea of America since coming to Africa. It was not a positive idea – since the country was too vast and complicated to be thought of in that way – but a negative one. Those shacks roofed with plastic bags, those pastel-paint signs in Swahili and broken English, that smell of wood smoke from the breakfast fires of crouched old women – those things all told her: this isn’t home. This is far away. This is different.
The perimeter wall, the tubular-steel gates of the embassy’s inner sanctum, and the main guard booth with its buzz-cut marine inside – Corporal Rossetti that morning, sleeves rolled up high over his rifle-toting biceps – they weren’t home either. Although strictly speaking, they all stood, gates, booth and Corporal Rossetti alike, on what counted as US soil. The same went for the phalanx of heavy plate-glass windows in the three-storey concrete building and the titanium satellite dishes up above. ‘Cupcakes of the gods’, Ray called them, and like many things at the embassy they felt alien to her.
It was Ray whom she’d imagined looking for the alarm, his heavy moustache thrusting over his lip. He was usually in by now, his holdall slung over his shoulder and his considerable belly swinging along in front of him.
The office was weird without anyone in it, acquiring a sort of mystery – ordinary objects and fixtures demanding a different kind of attention when not surrounded by humanity. Some of the lights in the room had their own circuit. They hadn’t come on when she’d pressed the communal switch. In those parts, the blue circle behind the American eagle shone eerily in the gloom: the State De
partment screen saver. The machines were humming quietly. There had been a security directive about logging off before you went home, but few people took any notice of it. Dar was the furthest thing from a high-risk posting that could be imagined. Most people just used ordinary, unencrypted PCs. There were only a couple of the shielded ‘Tempest’ machines in the whole place, and these were rarely used. It hardly seemed likely there was a terrorist or foreign agent outside among the street traders, reading embassy computer screens by means of an electromagnetic emanation monitor, which was what the Tempest system prevented. You only had to look outside, at the chaos of Africa, to know how unlikely that was.
She went over to the coffee machine. After fetching out the jug from underneath, she crossed to the sink to pour away yesterday’s leftovers and fill it with water. Returning to the coffee machine, she tipped away the old grounds with their sodden skirt of paper and fixed a new filter. Then she opened a new foil packet of coffee with her teeth, shook its contents into the filter cone, poured the new water into the machine’s steel trap, and put the jug back underneath. The machine whirred. A green display said BREW.
She stood for a moment, watching the first brown drops come through. It was PX coffee of course, not local. All the good stuff was exported, apparently. The packets laid out for sale on the pavements of the bustling streets outside the compound were just factory-floor sweepings. Ray had told her this.
It was a strange city, Dar-es-Salaam. African, yes, but shot through with its Arabic past. Haven of peace. That’s what the words meant in Arabic and Swahili. It sounded nice, and sure, some bits of the town were OK. But the history was not so great. It was called that because in those old days it was a good port for slave ships. She remembered the caves on Lyly.
Her long hair over one shoulder, Miranda leaned against the smooth concrete pillar next to the coffee machine’s stained table. She thought of Nick. In some ways she was glad there had been no reply when, feeling lonely, she had rung him yesterday. It was just a momentary blip. She didn’t want to get into a big relationship. She hoped he didn’t feel led on, or that she’d consolidated anything by letting him kiss her in the garden like that: it was just one moment, in which she didn’t want to dwell, wanting instead to make her way.
It would take work, she knew it would. Her father had taught her that. She often remembered something he had said, when, as a girl, she’d complained about the difficulty of some her book reports. Of course it’s difficult. That’s the point. What do you think they should do with you? Put you in a glass case and throw sugar at you?
There was movement on the other side of the office. It was Clive Bayard coming in. He waved at her before heading for his desk. Clive was the embassy’s only black face – African–American that is, as opposed to the Foreign Service nationals. That was the term for the local personnel whom it was her job to manage. Clive was the embassy archivist. Officially his title was Research and Documentation Provider. His role was to make sure that all paperwork in the embassy was properly sourced, stored and secured. Ray called him the paper boy, even though he was over fifty. Clive had a paper shredder by his desk. A good deal of his work consisted of destroying papers with high-classification dockets pinned to them. The shreds had to be burned in a furnace afterwards, just for good measure.
It used to be Nisha Ghai’s job to do the burning, but a directive had recently come over the wires that only American nationals could handle high-classification remnants. It now fell to Miranda herself to do it. Nisha had been pretty upset about this reduction in her responsibilities, thinking that it was somehow her fault. It had taken all of Miranda’s charm to persuade her that it wasn’t.
‘It’s just one of those DS directives,’ she had said.
She remembered how Mrs Ghai had anxiously twisted the large ruby ring she wore and looked at her, fierce and frowning.
‘It is nothing to do with your work,’ Miranda added. ‘We’re entirely happy with that. It’s just that the documents have to be kept secret.’
‘It is hardly as if you yourself are proper secret service,’ the proud Asian lady had replied, before walking out.
Only one member of chancery was. The big embassies, like London, where Miranda hoped to work one day, were said to be thick with intelligence staff. But here there was just one guy. His main tasking, currently, was dealing with issues arising from the presence of Congolese rebels on Tanzania’s north-west border. There was a messy war in this region, in which the US had potentially lucrative mineral interests. The guy’s objective was to secure future mining concessions with possible successors to Laurent Kabila, who the previous year had ousted the awful Mobutu Sese Seko – another client of the US in his time. Since there were some twenty rebel groups there, all with shifting alliances between themselves and neighbouring countries, he had quite a job on his hands. Hardly ever in chancery, Lee Denham kept a low profile. Ray, who had once dined at his house, said he kept a large collection of bowie knives in a glass cabinet. Miranda smiled to herself as she remembered the horrified, theatrical whisper her friend had adopted to convey this information. Yet Ray also said he found Denham kind of desirable, despite this disturbing sign of a violent personality. Or perhaps because of it. His greatest passion was for the crewcut Corporal Rossetti, whom he said had more virility than any man he knew – and, possibly, the best physique. But then, Ray often said such things.
The coffee pot was almost half full. Taking a polystyrene cup from the box next to the machine, she held it under the drips with one hand while pouring from the jug with the other. On the way back to her desk, she switched on the photocopier. It began to chug. She could never understand why it took so long to warm up.
The papers on her desk were mostly contracts for local staff. It was part of her job to recruit them and check them out for security. Every dimension of embassy support, from laundry to gardening to the outer, first-ring guards in the perimeter booths – who were supplied by a local security firm – came under her aegis. In practical terms, all this made her quite an important person in the embassy, even though officially the position she held was relatively junior. Too junior, she felt.
As well as its own generator, motor fuel and food supplies (in case of siege, as had happened in Khomeini’s Iran), the embassy had its own emergency water supply. The tanks had recently been tested. Their contents had turned out to be brackish – the supplier had clearly used sea water for at least one top up – and a new firm was now being tried out. Its tanker was due in at ten-thirty, and she hadn’t even prepared the contract yet. She moved her mouse, dislodging the screen saver, and started to type …
It was probably the noise of her fingers scampering over the keyboard that stopped her from hearing anyone come up behind her. A pair of hands grabbed her shoulders suddenly, and she almost jumped right off the chair.
She whirled round – only to find not an intruder but the moustache and twinkling eyes of Ray Delahoya.
‘Got you,’ he sniggered.
‘Don’t do that!’ she said, clasping a hand to her chest. ‘You know I hate it.’
‘Couldn’t resist. What are you doing in so early anyway?’
She swung back round on her swivel chair and started typing again, refusing to answer.
‘Oh, be like that,’ Ray said in mock disdain, and walked off.
The open-plan room where the lower grades of chancery worked began to fill up as staff filtered in. She carried on typing. It was clearly going to be a bad day. She could already feel the dull ache in her back which she tended to get while working on the computer.
A little later, Ray brought over a doughnut and another cup of coffee.
‘Peace offering.’ He put them down on her desk.
Smiling, she swivelled round. ‘It’s OK, I’m just a bit edgy. I haven’t been sleeping too well.’
‘Know why that is …?’ He winked at her, then wandered back to his desk.
Shaking her head in half-amused desperation, Miranda returned to her
work. She had, eventually, confided in Ray about Nick, and now she was wondering whether it had been a good idea. Like the kiss itself. It wasn’t that their embrace hadn’t been pleasurable. It had, very much so, and that was the problem: she was afraid it would distract her.
At ten-twenty, with the newly completed contract in her hand, she made her way down to the motor pool, nodding at colleagues as she passed them on her floor. Denying herself the lift as usual, she took the three staircases briskly. A mop and bucket stood on the last step. George the cleaner’s. Another one of her charges, he was missing as usual. She went out into the sunlit car park. It was full now, mainly of four-by-fours: approved-for-access stickers on their windscreens, dust on the covers of their back-door tyre mounts. Beneath the dust she could make out the logos of the US shippers: Brunner GM, Chicago; Hober Mallow, Philadelphia’s Premier Ford Dealership. All parked in the alien corn here, she thought, all a long way from God’s own country.
As she crossed the motor pool, she thought again about Nick, alone himself, out there on Zanzibar. The past few days she’d been feeling regretful she hadn’t made love to him while on the island. But – he wasn’t right for her, and that was that. He was, she reasoned, the sort of person who would keep building sand-castles even though he knew the tide was coming in. A dreamer.
Corporal Rossetti gave her something between a wave and a salute from the guardhouse. She took a path across the lawn, over the woodchips, which – it occurred to her – looked like some kind of breakfast cereal. The sprinkler was whirling round again. She felt the drops on her open-sandalled feet. Where she was headed was a booth. A booth and a vehicle boom. A point of entry and exit.
The gate was one of two in the second, lower perimeter wall. Alternating concrete pilasters with metal pickets, this outer wall separated the embassy grounds from the street. Manned by local staff, the booths at the two gates in this wall were really just mild deterrents to keep away curious townsfolk. The real protection, which came under the direction of the Marine Security Guard and was nothing to do with her, happened further in. Having a setback/standoff zone between two lines of defence like this was an important part of security strategy at all US embassies. Going by the book, at less than a hundred feet this one wasn’t quite wide enough – but in most ways the security systems and procedures at Dar exceeded the standard requirements.