by Stav Sherez
‘Come in, sorry,’ he apologised. The baby began crying. Lee stroked his forehead and turned back into the corridor. Geneva followed him, trying to corral all the feelings welling up inside her, Lee settled down in North London, a baby in his hands, another woman, another life. This was work she told herself, only work.
Lee led her into the main drawing room then excused himself, taking the baby upstairs. She was glad for this momentary respite. She settled down into the worn brown sofa and put her earphones away. She was dying for a smoke but there were no ashtrays anywhere nor the smell of extinguished cigarettes. She remembered their first flat, the noise and damp and constant pall of smoke. Her smoking. Him puffing away non-stop as he worked another deadline through the night. The thought made her stomach twist and she felt suddenly dizzy. She wondered whether this was a good idea. Whether she should have just contacted someone at the university for the information, but before she could rush out of the house Lee came in with two steaming mugs of coffee and a smile that took her back to younger years.
‘Oh, Geneva,’ he said again, gently setting down the coffee. His hand brushed her shoulder and she felt a tremor in her bones but that was all. Too many years had gone by for them to kiss or hug or even shake hands.
He sat opposite her on a leather chair that was falling to pieces. It was falling to pieces fifteen years ago and she suddenly had a memorysnap of the two of them making love on it some evening in the mid-nineties and the insistent smell of leather and coffee was almost too much.
‘Still a cop, then?’ His voice sounded different, lower, drained of excitement and mystery.
She nodded. ‘Still a journalist?’
Lee’s eyes clouded. ‘Yes and no. Lifestyle journalism they call it.’ His voice took on a harder sheen, his eyes looked anywhere but at hers. ‘I write about IKEA houses and Belgravia dinner parties.’ He laughed and Geneva did too, though both knew there was nothing funny about it. ‘Believe me, society dinners can get every bit as brutal and savage as civil wars.’ And this time it was the genuine Lee laugh, the one that got him out of trouble too many times to count; the one that got him Geneva all those years ago.
She stared up at the framed photos on the wall. ‘You’re happy with the choices you made?’
Lee looked away, across the hall, then back at Geneva. ‘What kind of question is that, Genny?’
The use of her nickname startled her, she hadn’t heard it spoken in so many years. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘And you,’ he said, ‘what about your choices? Did you make the right ones?’
‘I’m happy being a cop.’
‘I meant Oliver.’
It was like a blow you expect and all the more painful for it. It was all the years collapsing into each other. That day on the platform at King’s Cross‚ saying goodbye. Lee crying. Her crying. Oliver waiting for her in his house up in the north. The end of childhood and the beginning of something else.
‘I didn’t leave you for him. Didn’t marry him because of you.’
‘I know, Genny, I’m not talking about that. Your mother told me what happened. The undercover work. Oliver and the other woman. I’m sorry, I don’t want to bring all this up, I just want to know you’re okay.’
She reached out her hand, met his halfway across the table. Their palms fell into each other like it hadn’t been ten years. ‘I’m okay now.’
‘And you’re happy?’
She gently pulled her hand away. ‘Now you’re the one asking stupid questions.’ And for a moment the years faded and disappeared and she was sitting here with the man she loved and this was their life ten years on, in a quiet suburb, in a nice house, a baby upstairs, a life fulfilled. But when the baby started crying and Lee got up, she suddenly remembered who she was again.
Suddenly the room felt intolerable. Suddenly she felt light-headed and sick. The dark, the smell of baby things, the look on Lee’s face as he came back in. This was all a mistake, she realised, one big fucking mistake. You can never go back.
‘You said you wanted to pick my brains about Africa?’
‘It’s . . . it’s a case I’m working on.’ She was relieved for the change in topic, reached down and pulled the notes from her bag.
‘The dead girl on YouTube?’
Geneva nodded. Everyone, it seemed, now knew Grace as the dead girl on YouTube. ‘I remember you spent a lot of time in the Congo, Uganda, Sudan.’
Lee nodded. She could see a part of him slip away to God knew what horrors and frights in jungles and deserts‚ but it was a look of sad remembrance, not relief or happiness.
‘I’m having trouble with the background on this case. Grace was involved in East African politics. She was writing a thesis on insurgency in post-colonial Africa. She was from Uganda. I was at this meeting yesterday and I didn’t understand half of what they were saying. It was all acronyms, NRA, LRA, SPLA. I remembered you used to cover the region,’ she continued, hoping Lee didn’t catch the stumble in her voice. ‘What can you tell me about Ugandan politics? Especially radical stuff.’
‘Radical?’ Lee laughed. ‘It’s all pretty radical compared to what we call politics here. Where do you want me to start?’
He told her of the missionaries spreading through Uganda in the 1870s, the first whites to expand into the land. The formation of the Uganda protectorate in 1894 under the aegis of the British East Africa Company. The long bitter years of colonialism then the shock of the new world order. The Obote coup in the 1960s. Counter-couped in 1971 by Idi Amin, the years of torture, repression and economic collapse. Then the Tanzanian invasion in 1979, the deposing of the paranoid Amin and the return of Obote. Obote’s deposing by another general and his subsequent removal six months later in the bush war by Museveni’s National Resistance Army.
‘Museveni’s seen by the West as some kind of paragon. In African terms at least. But he’s not that much better than those who came before. A virtual one-party state. Torture and intimidation. Your basic African politics.’
‘What about Joseph Kony? They kept talking about taking arms against the government and against Kony.’
Lee leant back and laughed. ‘Kony’s a true character. Something only Africa could have produced. And within that, something only Uganda could have come up with. There’s something about that country which drives people to extreme religious outpourings. It’s like Jerusalem except without any historical antecedents. Cults and religious groups have always flourished there. Kony’s only the last in a long line of self-appointed mystics and leaders. In the end though, there’s no heaven on earth, no peace and goodwill, there’s only severed ears, abducted children and mass rape.’
‘My victim was looking at the use of torture as policy. How does that link with all this?’ She felt better talking about these far-flung worlds as if after all these years apart they could only talk through a barrier, like inmates in a prison.
‘Everyone uses torture and terror. It’s a way of life out there. But no one wants to admit to it. It’s all being done behind closed doors, in cells and dungeons far away in the jungle. This is no longer the time of Idi Amin where the secret police’s torture cells were located on Kampala’s main street, the windows always left open so that women on their way to market, kids coming back from school, could hear the screams twenty-four hours a day. It’s all hidden now. There’s too much at stake. Massive loans from the IMF, development grants, foreign aid – all that money disappears when allegations of torture and human rights abuses come up. They’re learning to play the game, to hide what the West doesn’t want to see and cash their cheques. The IMF and aid agencies, they don’t really care, out of sight and all that, they just don’t want to hear the screams while they’re partying. So, yes, anyone who was going to expose any of this, especially government torture, well you can imagine . . .’
She could see the faraway look in his eyes, the hunger for action and danger. It was what had attracted her to him in the first place but what happened when you could no longer
achieve those goals? What happened to your life when you voluntarily gave in?
‘Now Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army are a whole different thing.’
‘We’re still talking Uganda, right?’
Lee nodded. He got up and walked over to his laptop. Unplugged the power cord and brought it back to the table. ‘Northern Uganda. Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army’s been operating there since 1987. If you want to understand Uganda you need to understand Kony.’
They sat side by side on the sofa. Lee was close but not touching. ‘It begins with Alice Auma, a native Acholi from northern Uganda, a Catholic convert who worked as a medium. One day she’s contacted by the Holy Spirit who tells her it is her God-given duty to overthrow the Ugandan government, the government that since Museveni took over has been persecuting her people, the Acholi. She starts the Holy Spirit Movement. She’s well respected and her powers are venerated. Many join. It’s a strange army, led by this woman, part saint-mystic, part holy warrior. They suffer terrible defeats at the hands of the Ugandan army. They bless stones so that they’ll turn into grenades when the enemy soldiers walk over them. They rub anointed oil on their bodies to protect themselves from bullets. They march in cross formation singing hymns. This is a popular uprising turned into holy war. The government clamps down hard and Alice is exiled, the movement splits into many splinter groups – among those is one led by Joseph Kony who says he is a cousin to Alice and that he too has received a message from the Holy Spirit.
‘He forms the Lord’s Resistance Army in 1987, a band of Christian guerrillas who want to implement a theocratic state based on the ten commandments. Many join. Kony is charismatic and charming. What’s more, under his leadership they start winning decisive battles against the Ugandan army. They had up to three thousand soldiers at one point, some say even more.’
‘Villagers?’
‘No, the villagers were sitting on the fence. They feared the LRA and they feared the government troops. Kony’s speciality was abduction. Ninety per cent of his soldiers were child abductees. They abduct boys and teach them to fight. They make them rape and kill, often their own families, to bond them to the LRA. Then they give them a gun and send them out to battle. The government soldiers have families back home; they’re doing it for the money in a country where unemployment is disastrously high. The child soldiers kill because that is all they know. The villages are in between. Kony’s men come and take food and abduct their children, then the government troops accuse them of helping the LRA and burn down their huts, ship them off to a refugee camp for their safety. They also do their fair share of raping, looting and killing. There’s nearly two million people still living in filthy refugee camps since 1996 when the government forcibly evicted them. These poor bastards are caught between. No one cares. It’s not Rwanda or Bosnia. It’s too complex, there’s no good guys and no way to see a resolution. It’s one of those wars that goes on for so long that the reason no longer becomes its meaning, only the cycle of retribution and blood. It’s the closest we humans have come to creating a perpetual-motion machine.’
She thought back to Gabriel’s impassioned speech the previous night. The call to arms. She could understand his position, her mother would even donate time and money, but Geneva couldn’t see how more guns could help. She looked up at Lee and there he was, the twenty-two-year-old boy she met at university again, his face younger, his eyes bright. She blinked away the thoughts swirling through her head and took out Grace’s notes and essay plans. ‘There’s a lot of references to something called the Black-Throated Wind. I think Grace was concentrating on that from the look of things. Do you know anything about them?’
Lee’s face became tight, his lips almost disappearing. He looked away. ‘It’s not a them, it’s a him.’
Geneva felt her skin tingling at the word ‘him’. ‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Lawrence Ngomo but he called himself the Black-Throated Wind. He had many other names too.’ Lee shook his head. ‘I met him once . . . Shit, Genny, you still smoke?’
She nodded, took out her pack of Lucky Strikes. ‘You allowed to smoke in the house?’
Lee shook his head. ‘No. Haven’t touched one of these for seven years.’ He took two cigarettes out of the pack and put them both in his mouth, lighting them simultaneously before passing one to her. It was a gesture she remembered well and something in her chest felt like it was popping. Her hands shook as she took the cigarette. ‘Shouldn’t we go outside?’
Lee stood up and opened the window. ‘Fuck it, I haven’t done this in too long.’
He sat back down next to her. ‘Ngomo’s a piece of work,’ he continued, coughing, taking deep drags on the cigarette. ‘He’s belligerent, violent, paranoid, and holds grudges for ever. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions when I interviewed him. When I asked him why he agreed to do the interview he told me he fancied killing a white man today but that he’d changed his mind.’
Geneva smiled. ‘Nice. Who is he?’
‘He was one of Kony’s lieutenants. Then he split off, set up his own splinter faction. Called himself the Black-Throated Wind. There’s a lot of rumours and not much fact. People saw him as some kind of religious saviour. They say he modelled himself on Savonarola, the medieval Florentine monk who created the bonfire of the vanities. Ngomo didn’t burn luxuries, though, he burned villages – he believed that the land was cursed by blood and that only through fire, by clearing the land and starting again, could peace come.’
‘He had followers for this?’ She was always amazed at how people fell so willingly for anyone who promised a return to some mythic former age.
‘Many. You have to realise that someone like Ngomo makes the world very simple and a lot of people are drawn to that. They believed him a saint, something more than human, sent down from heaven to purge the land. Many people claim to have seen him walking across the surface of Lake Albert. They say he recreated the Eastern Wall of the Jerusalem temple in the bush, stone by stone; that he translated the Bible into Luganda, changing a word here, a word there, until it’s meaning had changed too.’ Lee took a deep breath, crushed out his cigarette. ‘There’s substantial evidence he was involved in the murder of those aid workers back in 1990, you remember that?’
She shook her head.
‘Four British girls on their gap year, trying to do something meaningful rather than just getting drunk and sunburned, working for one of the food-aid NGOs. One was the daughter of a backbench MP, one was a doctor’s daughter . . . good girls from good families. When they didn’t turn up at their base in Gulu, a massive search entailed but it was fruitless. A few weeks later a video began turning up in West African markets and backroom shops. The video showed the girls praying, then cut to a shot of them dead on the ground. There were always rumours that an unedited version existed but it was never found. There was a lot of noise in the British press at the time, a speech in parliament, but the Ugandan government insisted that the girls’ killers were themselves dead, the result of army gains in the north.’
She scribbled it all down feeling something in her blood fizz and jump. ‘What happened to Ngomo?’
‘He disappeared around seven years ago. Some of those closest to him said he’d had a revelation in the bush, saw God, renounced the sword; others say his body is rotting in the long grass, shot by an eight-year-old near the town of Baringo.’
‘What do you think?’
Lee’s face creased into a grin she knew well. ‘I think he’s a lot closer than that.’
She looked across the room and their eyes met. ‘Lee?’
He stared down at his shoes, ‘I think he got out when he could. There was an international warrant for his arrest that was rescinded seven years ago; they’ve never done that before. I think he gave up names and positions in return for immunity.’
‘You think he’s living here?’
Lee got up, went upstairs, came back down with an old dusty file. He flicked through it then stopped and p
ulled out a yellowed copy of the Daily Mail from two years ago. He sat down and opened the paper, turning to the centre spread. WAR CRIMINALS LIVING LARGE IN LONDON, the headline ran, eight grainy black-and-white photos underneath. Lee’s finger hovered over the second from last, an old man with grey hair and a black moustache, the name Lawrence Ngomo in 10-point type under it. ‘I think he made a deal, got some kind of immunity and residence here,’ he stopped and looked at her, something flickering behind his eyes. ‘It makes you wonder though‚ what he could have given them that was worse than the killing of the aid workers.’
16
The interview room was cold and damp. It hung in their nostrils and crept through their clothes as they sat across from Gabriel Otto, watching him strip a packet of cigarettes to fine cardboard streamers.
‘What are you going to make out of that?’ Carrigan leant forward, his breath heavy with coffee and fatigue, the exertion of the arrest having taken its toll. ‘A key to get out of this room?’
Gabriel continued stripping the pack, ignoring the two detectives, his eyes focused intently on the object in his hands.
‘You missed one,’ Geneva said and Gabriel looked up, his lips slowly peeling into a smile.
‘You could be halfway pretty if you tried.’
Geneva felt Carrigan tense, a slight shift in the room’s pressure. She looked at him, shook her head and turned back to the suspect.
‘Why did you kill her, Gabriel?’ Her voice was cold and uninflected. ‘Or should I call you Derek?’ She stared into his eyes, forcing herself not to smile.
His head snapped up, a look of pure malevolence in his eyes. ‘No one calls me that.’
Geneva pulled a sheet of paper from her file, slid it across the desk. ‘Your parents did, at least according to your birth certificate.’
Gabriel dropped the shredded cigarette pack and stared directly at Geneva. She could feel the skin on her arms contract, a tiny burst of panic deep down in her gut.