Changa

by Ian McDonald

  Check your source before you commit, Gaby. A thousand hacks in the welfare line will tell you impatience was their downfall.

  She displayed the list of names.

  Naomi Rukavindi, formerly of Moshi, in Kilimanjaro District of Tanzania; you will do for a start. There was a bad Photo-Me image of a startled-looking woman with nice hair and grinning teeth, there were statistics of age and physiology, several entry points that could be opened by password and sheets of antibody counts and lymphocyte activity curves and immune response deviations. At the top of the screen a number indicated that this was page 36 of 36. Three-weekly samples, Mombi had said. One hundred and eight weeks. Over two years monitoring the progress of a disease that killed in six months. Gaby clicked up find first and on a hunch spread it beside page 36. The counts and the ratios and the histograms and the curves matched exactly. She scrolled through the file, graph after graph. There was no discrepancy.

  ‘You should be dead, Mrs Naomi Rukavindi,’ Gaby whispered.

  She sampled other UNECTA referrals. The first file was forty-eight pages, the shortest three. None of them showed any deterioration in condition. Not one had died of the killer HIV 4.

  The face at the top of that most recent three-page file belonged to William Bi, wife’s sister-in-law’s nephew to Tembo.

  She glanced at her watch.

  Five minutes.

  Christ.

  She unwrapped the disc she had brought, carefully stuffing the cellophane wrapper into her bag as the PDU formatted it. Copy file, she commanded and watched the sands run through the digital hour-glass while she imagined Miriam Sondhai coming up Nkrumah Avenue, past the chain-link fence around the primary school. What if the traffic has been light? What if she has not been held up at the junction of the keepie-leftie? At any moment she might hear the pad of running soles on red brick.

  The copy completed. She checked the hard disc for fingerprints before shutting down. And don’t forget the rollscreen. Jesus, the thing’s still warm. She was out the door when she saw the Indian Erotic Art Birthday Book on the coffee table.

  Had the handbag been open or closed? Knowing Miriam, she bet on closed. The mahogany door shut heavily. She was halfway to the car when she remembered to reset the alarm. The armed light winked at her.

  Plus one minute. Into extra time. She got into the hired pickup, started it and as she glanced into the rearview to move off she saw Miriam Sondhai come around the corner in Nyrere Avenue. Go. Go. Go. She glanced into her mirror again at the turn into Ondaatje Avenue and saw Miriam swing off the footpath into her drive.

  Five cigarettes and a quarter of a bottle of Shepard’s sacramental Wild Turkey stopped her hands shaking enough to load the disc into her PDU and open up the stolen database. The icon unfolded in a list view. Fifteen thousand HIV 4 referrals, arranged alphabetically, starting with Aa, ending with Zy.

  Aa being for Aarons. Jake H.

  ~ * ~

  38

  She heard the first shot as she was jangling the wind-chimes outside the front door.

  Jake Aarons had a very beautiful front door. He had swopped it with a Makonde carver for his 4x4 down on the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. It was seven feet high and seven feet wide and he had brought it all the way back to Nairobi on the top of a matatu. Jake was very happy about the deal. A new 4x4 was easily bought. No one in Nairobi had as beautiful a door. But he was not answering it this morning.

  There was a second shot. Gaby gave up jangling and went around the side of the house. She found Jake Aarons standing knee-deep in the pool in the quadrangle between the house’s two wings. He was dressed only in a pair of shorts with a red maple leaf on the left flank. In his left hand was a bottle of tequila, in his right a revolver. On the pool edge stood a full-length mirror. Gaby watched Jake take a long pull from the bottle, raise the gun at the mirror and blow a hole through the reflection of his own head. There were two other holes in the mirror; at groin and chest height.

  ‘Jake.’

  He whirled, dropped the bottle, brought the gun to bear on the bridge of Gaby’s nose.

  ‘Jesus, Jake!’

  The tequila bottle bobbed twice and went down. Jake lowered the weapon with a sigh.

  ‘He’s gone, Gaby. The bastard left me. Took my money, took all my fucking money, the little bitch. He packed his things and went and took my money.’

  He grimaced like a silent scream and sat on the flagstone edge of the pool. The hand holding the gun dangled between his legs.

  ‘How did you find out, Gaby?’

  ‘Jake, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. What you are is well-placed for a good career move. Over to our Chief East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Rush around with commiserations and sympathy and brown-nose rich old uncle with the legacy.’ He brought the gun out and aimed it again at Gaby. It seemed too heavy for him to hold. ‘Unwise to contemplate blackmailing a man with a gun and absolutely nothing to lose by using it.’

  ‘What kind of person do you take me for, Jake?’

  ‘The most terrible of persons: the ignorant manipulator. You play with lives, you can’t help it. You are irresistibly drawn to those who are in a position to advance you. You don’t know this, of course, and it’s your complete innocence that makes you ultimately unrefusable. That poor bastard Shepard you’re banging; have you any idea the conflict of loyalties you’re costing him? Of course you don’t, you haven’t the first idea what a monster you are, honey, and because I’m a terminal old fruit who can say absolutely anything he likes, you’re going to have to listen to it and learn by it.’

  ‘Hold on. T.P. doesn’t know about this?’

  He laughed.

  ‘Oh, I have given myself away, haven’t I? Nobody knows save thee, me, the hospital and that fucking faithless bastard who said he’d stay with me always and high-tailed it with his dick between his legs when he found out that Ol’ Bwana Jake had gone down with the Scourge.’

  Gaby cried out and covered her ears as Jake emptied the remaining chambers into the mirror. Birds rose from their roosts on the terracotta roof tiles with a clap of wings.

  ‘Do you want to know the irony of it? You probably don’t, but you’re going to hear it anyway. It didn’t even start as four. It started as a dose of three I reckon I picked up from some emergency dental work I had to get done over in Uganda a couple of years ago. Safe sex? I wrote the book on it. The condom kid, that’s me. Safe dentistry? They don’t tell you about that one. But what the hell, if you can afford the AZT, the interferon and the antibody transfusions, you won’t even get turned down for life insurance with a dose of three. The hospital keeps an eye on you and every other month or so takes a blood sample to make sure the HIV 3 virus hasn’t mutated into the HIV 4 variant. And everything was fine, until last month.’

  ‘Foa Mulaku.’ She had got the story because T.P. said Jake was sick. ‘T.P. did know about the HIV 3.’

  ‘T.P.’s known all along about the three. You misjudge him, Gaby. He may be the last honourable man in Broadcast Journalism. The hospital called me in: anomalous antibody proteins in my samples. You’re dead from the moment they say anomalous antibody proteins, but you can’t stop yourself hoping. You look for signs and wonders, like rainbows, or counting birds on power lines or monkeys on trees, or adding up bus numbers to see if they come to anything but thirteen: anything that seems like a promise of a yes. You bribe Jesus with prayers and candles; Allah too, if he’ll do the job. Even the Hindu gods down at the temple: just give me a sign. And then the letter arrives asking you to come see Dr Singh and they might as well tell you in the letter it’s four, you’re dead, because then at least you could work it out in your own private coming-to-terms, and not having to go through sessions with a Personal Trauma Counsellor sitting with her hands folded and that fucking cow-looking-over-a-gate expression that is supposed to radiate empathy and understanding. Jesus Christ!

  ‘And then the person you turn to for real empathy and understan
ding, because of all the times he’s told you he loves you, he cares for you, he’ll always be there for you, he’ll always help you and sustain you and empower you and carry you when the road gets too hard for you and all that Jonathan Livingstone Seagull/Personal Development shit, leaves you three lines on a sheet of file paper on the kitchen table saying he’s sorry, so sorry, but his life path is calling him on. Life path! Takes five thousand dollars of my money to help him down his yellow-brick life path!’

  Jake threw the gun at a glossy starling standing on the paving, staring at him with its head inclined. It leaped away into the sky with a squawk.

  ‘So, how did you find out?’ Jake asked.

  ‘I got into the Global Aids Policy Unit database.’

  ‘Not legally, you didn’t. Who hacked it for you? Haran?’

  He is in control here, Gaby thought. His sickness has given him mastery over guilt and sympathy and he knows he can make me do whatever he wants.

  ‘How long have you known about Haran?’

  ‘We all make deals with the devil. What’s he charging you?’

  ‘An eye for an eye. But Haran didn’t do the GAPU files. I did it myself. Stole the passwords from Miriam Sondhai.’

  Jake Aarons pursed his lips and nodded. It was a combination of gestures Gaby could read well; his professional curiosity was stirring. He could not stop it any more than a kleptomaniac could stop stealing. It was his hope of salvation.

  ‘Stay there.’ He went into the house, wrapped himself in a bathrobe and boiled a kettle in his blue and yellow kitchen. It looked like the kitchen of a man who eats out a lot.

  ‘Tea? Earl Grey? Tequila’s piss. Tea is thinkin’ drinkin’.’ He brought a tray with pot and cups to the side of the pool and invited Gaby to dangle her feet in the water beside him. ‘Now, talk. Talk to me of things newsworthy, because it stops me having to think about all the things these little chips of protein in my blood are taking away from me.’ He poured two bowls. The set was Japanese, decorated under the glaze with Buddhist prayers. Gaby kicked off her boots and told him about the blood samples from UNECTA, and about the vanished William Bi and Peter Werther and the place they had been vanished to. She did not tell him that the HIV 4 victims were alive long after the virus should have killed them. She did not want to give Jake a shot at a salvation she was not sure she believed in herself.

  Jake savoured his tea.

  ‘I think we are like the Trans-Canadian railroad builders who started at either coast and met up in the middle,’ he said. ‘Answer this: What’s the great UN lie about the Chaga?’

  ‘Anyone who goes deep never returns.’

  ‘Now listen to a story,’ Jake said. ‘Back in the early days, before the UN effort found its feet and most of the evacuation and containment strategies were left to the national governments, the Tanzanians set up camps at Moshi on the southern side of the mountain to take the Wa-chagga people who had been cleared from the higher slopes. There was a common belief then that the growth would stop when it reached the bottom of the mountain. Of course, it didn’t, so not only did the Tanzanians have several tens of thousands of Wa-chagga to evacuate from the resettlement camps, they also had eighty thousand residents of Moshi and God knows how many from the surrounding district. It’s no surprise that in the chaos they managed to lose a couple of hundred Wa-chagga. In fact, it’s a miracle they didn’t lose more. Officially, everyone from the camps is present and correct, but a little magendo buys a lot of truth. When you find out that half a tribe has got lost, you get to thinking about what else may have disappeared as well.’

  ‘Or been disappeared.’ Not one word of this conversation was going according to Gaby’s game plan. We have roles to play, she thought. You are the embittered, dying man seeking reconciliation with the world, I am the offerer of comfort, sympathy, solidarity and trawling for a career move. You should not be talking to me about lost tribes. You should not have that I-Spy-Story glint in your eyes.

  ‘Thank God the UN and WHO keep records of those they process into their camps, or I would never have found the pattern. What I found out about Unit 12 is that everyone who gets disappeared there has been in contact with the Chaga.’

  Still Gaby did not tell him what she suspected about that place.

  ‘I got curious about where this lost tribe went when they slipped out of Moshi camp,’ Jake continued. ‘They went back to their ancestral lands. To Kilimanjaro. Into the Chaga. In deep. And they’re still there. The Black Simba safari squads have had contact with their far patrols. They’re living, deep in there, and they’re thriving. The Chaga is looking after them. And I’m going in there to find them and prove that the UN has been lying to us about what it is really like in there.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Like you said, we all make our deals with the devil. I didn’t fancy the watekni’s terms on my soul. I like simple cash transactions. So do the Tacticals.’

  ‘Jesus, Jake.’

  ‘Posterity will show who was wise and who was not, Gaby. The posses are finished. Every day the Chaga snips a little bit more off them. The Tacticals aren’t interested in information as commodity. They’re not interested in commodity at all. They’re interested in their future. They know the Chaga will disinherit all current vested interests. All but theirs.’

  Jake Aarons poured more tea.

  ‘Civil war?’

  ‘In the end, yes. But not a Rwandan-style tribal slaughter-fest. Nor even Somali war-lordism. When it comes, and it’s coming sooner than the government thinks, it’ll be a war for and against the Chaga. To stay, or to be let go. The future and the past. While the politicians are starting to question the United Nations’ article of faith in indefinite evacuation, out in the townships there are powerful factions - my own Black Simba cartel among them - in favour of mass migration into the Chaga. Their safari squads bring more than goodies back from beyond terminum. The fact that they go back and forth so readily already proves UNECTA’s obsession about decontamination as a lie.’

  It’s a blind to check for HIV 4, Gaby thought.

  ‘You’re taking me, Jake,’ she said aloud.

  ‘I detect steel in your voice, Gaby. This time that red-haired Celtic charisma is just going to have to fail you. My plans are made, they have been for months. If anything, the Slim diagnosis just gave me the impetus to take my courage in both hands and do it. Strangely enough, those plans don’t include you.’

  ‘I’ll tell T.P.’

  Jake went into the house and returned with a cellphone.

  ‘Tell T.P. that his Chief East Africa Correspondent has Slim? I’ll tell him myself.’ He punched in the first eight digits of T.P. Costello’s direct line. ‘He ought to know.’

  ‘I’ll tell him about your little expedition into the heart of darkness.’

  Jake’s finger hovered over the final number.

  ‘Old newshounds never die, he’ll say. He wouldn’t refuse his most faithful reporter and best buddy the chance to ride into pissed old hack’s Valhalla, least of all with the story of the decade attached. Your move.’

  The words came in a rush, like starlings from a shaken tree.

  ‘I’ll tell Shepard.’

  Jake stared at Gaby for many moments. He lifted his finger from the button and set the cellphone on the tray next to the Japanese tea-pot.

  ‘You would too, you bitch. So, Jake, went the day well? Sure; I look for support from the man who tells me he’d lay down his life for me because I find out I’ve six months to live, and three of them as an incontinent, incompetent, gah-gah skeleton hooked into a life support unit and he runs off with five thousand dollars. Then my business colleague blackmails me. Best of days, world.’

  ‘You’ll have my complete silence. The exclusive will be yours, I don’t want any credit. I just want to go in there, Jake. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

  ‘And the words Chief East Africa Correspondent under your face on the Ten O’clock News.’

  In time you will stop feeling g
uilty about what you have done, Gaby told herself. It will be just another lump of pink scar tissue from the bad you have had to do to make good. She picked up the cellphone.

  ‘So, do I call Shepard?’

  ‘I’ll call for you tomorrow, about eight,’ Jake said. ‘I’ll introduce you to the team, I’ll put your case, but the decision about whether you go or not is theirs. Whatever they decide, you will keep silent. If you betray the Black Simbas, not all the favours in Haran’s bag will save you from them. You understand me?’

  ‘I understand you.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Eight.’

  ~ * ~

  39

  Gaby’s text diary

  Day One.

  I write this diary sitting against the great baobab that is all that remains of the world I understand.