Louder now. ‘What’s been going on here?’
The woman officer swivelled and looked back at me. She had a half-smile on her face, and I noticed that her eyebrows had been plucked entirely away, then redrawn in black pencil. ‘We had an information about you.’
I scrabbled at the taxi’s door handle, my hands suddenly shaking so violently I could hardly open it. I gabbled instructions and we headed downtown. Lira was beginning to stir. In a night-chilled courtyard, a first dog barked. The bark was taken up by the dog next door, and their joint yelping relayed from one neighbourhood to another, a widening chorus of syncopated alarm spreading to wake the reluctant, befuddled city.
I sat huddled in the corner of the taxi, trying to control a juddering that had now spread to my legs. One thought occurred. After all those months of velvet-glove treatment, I’d finally been paid the ultimate compliment. Paula Shackleton had been treated like a local.
2
‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’
That was the running gag of an unlikely friendship forged in a bar down an alley with the cabbagy reek of open drains, hidden away from the Horn of Africa’s punishing highlands light. There’s a long, meandering answer to the question, and then there’s the one-paragraph executive summary, easier to digest but lacking in nuance. I’m opting for the former, and that means jumping back a bit.
The Chicago law firm I worked for in 2004, Grobart & Fitchum – or ‘Grabhard and Fuckem’ as I liked to think of them – was involved in a complicated negotiation between a Swiss department-store chain raising capital to expand into Eastern Europe and a banking client who was running the deal out of their Boston headquarters. The job involved a huge amount of conference calling, and since the Swiss were our overlords, they got to arrange the schedule around their bedtimes. Grobart & Fitchum had flown in a five-man team, and as the days went by, we began to resemble a group of sleep-deprived inmates from Guantanamo Bay, pale-faced and pouchy-eyed. The mood between us was wary: we had been at it long enough to grasp who could stay lucid and keep powering through without enough sleep and who was becoming so loopy their workload would soon have to be added to ours.
Luxury is the knee-jerk consolation prize in this business and Dan, my immediate boss, had automatically booked suites at the Langham, housed in a former Federal Reserve building. There’s something uniquely depressing about being offered a range of services, from the however-many-metres swimming-pool to a range of ‘Chuan scrubs and wraps’ you know you will never get time to use, and the British puritan in me was disgusted by the extravagance. The carping refrain No wonder they’re all obese ran through my head every time I surveyed the breakfast buffet with its mountains of pastries and steaming trays of bacon. The Langham was just like every other gilded cage I’d stayed in, a fitting setting for my botched, interrupted, pointless demi-life.
On the morning in question I was sitting over a plate with a single bread roll placed defiantly in the centre – none of that greasy crap for me, thank you – staring into the middle distance, when a blur in my blind spot crystallised into the shape of a small black man. Compact, neat, a clipped corona of greying curls framing a high, round forehead, he wore a crumpled linen suit in an unusual shade of lemon custard. He stopped as he reached my table and gave me a very direct look from a pair of long-lashed, honey-coloured eyes. I noticed a distinctive spattering of moles around his nose, as though someone had taken a coffee stirrer and flecked espresso in his face.
‘It isn’t mandatory.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You look like someone trapped in Purgatory. Boredom and frustration aren’t obligatory. You could try something more stimulating.’
For a moment I thought he might be a Jehovah’s Witness and I was about to get the ‘Have you been saved?’ routine. My face assumed a rictus of polite refusal and I raised a palm in an instinctive fending-off motion.
He blinked those long lashes a couple of times, then gave me a shy smile of enormous sweetness. ‘You’re the British lawyer, aren’t you? Part of the Grobart & Fitchum crew?’
I nodded warily.
‘Paula? I noticed you all earlier in the lobby. I’m Winston Peabody. Dan and I go way back. We both did time at the Justice Department.’ We shook hands and he nodded at a signboard in the lobby. ‘I’m here for the seminar on my favourite topic, corporate sleaze. But I’ll also be giving a speech for the human-rights crowd. Can I tempt you? It’ll make a change from your usual fare. And sometimes I have work for people like you.’
‘People like me?’
He pursed his lips and gazed at me speculatively, like a tailor measuring his client for a suit. ‘Oh, people with that questing look in their eyes. The Unrooted, I call them. Take it as a compliment. Complacency’s not exactly attractive. Anyway, come along. I’m trying to rustle up an audience. Nothing more embarrassing than talking to an empty room.’ He scribbled the venue and time on the back of a business card, placed it on my table and walked off.
That last bit was one of his little jokes, of course. Winston Peabody III, the first black partner at the Washington firm of Melville & Bart and a celebrity on the human-rights circuit, did not need to beg strangers in hotels to attend his talks. When seats ran out, people would stand. He was one of those speakers adored by the media and envied by academics, who could popularise without dumbing down, rendering dry specialisms so accessible that listeners who had never dreamed of opening a law book found themselves wondering whether they had missed their calling. There are men who seem to change shape, to grow in stature when they climb onto a public platform. Behind a desk, over the phone, Winston was always formidable. On a podium or presenting in court, he became positively sexy, acquiring a town-hall charisma, the spiky, sardonic edge and instinctive timing of the stand-up comedian who knows how to play an audience. Had he wished to at that moment, he could have tapped almost any woman – and a fair number of the men – on the shoulder and they would have considered fucking him a privilege. But in the seconds it took him to step off the stage, he visibly shrank, folding, like an empty Coke can in a weightlifter’s fist, to become just a small, slightly paunchy man in a creased yellow suit whose salt-and-pepper halo of hair could not conceal advanced male-pattern baldness and a tendency to dandruff. Incredible Hulk to mild-mannered Bruce Banner in the blink of an eye.
I honestly can’t remember the details of Winston’s speech, hosted by a human-rights group that had hired a hall on Harvard’s campus for the purpose. Sheer exhaustion had brought matters to a head on the Swiss deal. My skills were not required for the final session with Zurich, and I found myself with a free afternoon. He must have spoken about the hunger for justice in societies emerging from war, how ending the climate of impunity held the key to peace. He probably talked about the debt the West owed developing countries for the horrors of slavery and colonialism and the cynicism of the Cold War. I do recall that he gave some gory examples, anecdotes from visits to East Timor and Cambodia, work done in Colombia and Sierra Leone. Members of the audience gasped at references to stairwells daubed with blood, defence attorneys disembowelled in their offices, human-rights campaigners pulled over on remote country roads and beheaded in the spotlights of their killers’ cars. I saw one girl, long brown hair falling to her waist, close her eyes and lean her head on the shoulder of her boyfriend, who put his arm round her in a manly gesture that signalled: it’s OK, I’m here. What impressed me, though, was not the heartrending stuff, or that Winston spoke in meticulously punctuated sentences – you could actually hear the semi-colons, dashes and quotation marks and when he told his audience: ‘I’ll come back to that point later,’ it wasn’t just a phrase, he really did return, topping and tailing his thought processes like a chef preparing green beans – no, it was the surgical coolness of his eye. This was an impassioned, angry man, but one who never allowed his emotions to interrupt a methodical taking of notes. On his deathbed, as his nearest and dearest gathered to weep, Winst
on Peabody would be calling, ‘Hush’, the better to analyse the timbre, tone and length of his own death rattle.
At the end, I dutifully took my place in the throng of acolytes gathering around him. Don’t ask me why. I think I wanted him to know I’d bothered. Waiting, I registered that I was a good decade older than the rest.
‘Mr Peabody, I just feel, like, what’s happening is just so awful. What can I do?’ twittered a pigtailed blonde, her cheeks flushed with emotion. She was almost pogoing with enthusiasm, flashing glimpses of a toned stomach and pierced navel. I spotted the gleam of metal in her mouth. Dear God, she was actually wearing braces. This was not the place for me. I turned to leave, but at that moment Winston caught my eye. He reached forward, the human Red Sea somehow parted before him, and placed a restraining hand on my sleeve. ‘Please. Don’t go.’
Fifteen minutes later, the flock of groupies had dispersed and we were in the campus canteen drinking coffee.
He spoke as though picking up an interrupted conversation. ‘So, since 1997 I’ve been working pro bono for the government of North Darrar, in the Horn of Africa. I don’t expect you’ve heard of it?’
‘Well, actually …’
His eyebrows shot up in query.
‘I’ve heard of Darrar, that’s all.’
‘That’s more than most people can say. Good. In many ways North Darrar encapsulates the problems faced by traumatised post-conflict nations. A breakaway state that has just come through the second of two wars with its neighbour and former occupier, and finds itself having to negotiate its border – prove the country’s right to exist, in essence – in The Hague. They’re trying to build a democracy from scratch, but their best people were either killed or fled into exile during the independence struggle so the last thing they need is this kind of international court case. They weren’t rich to start off with – the last war bankrupted them and there’s only so much you can make exporting badly cured hides and potash to the Middle East – and the other side hires the best.’
‘And?’
‘Well, up till now I’ve been fighting this battle virtually single-handed, juggling the job with my paying clients. Melville & Bart help out on the practical side, preparing documents, making our evidence look halfway presentable. But that’s just basic drudgery. We’re reaching a crucial stage. This is complex, sophisticated stuff, and I simply can’t do it alone. I need a deputy. Will you help?’
I blinked. I’d been wondering where the preamble was leading, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this might be its destination. ‘Look, I really don’t understand why you think any of this is my business … Why don’t you get one of your admirers to pitch in? I’m sure one of those kids would jump at the chance.’
He sighed. ‘Sadly, experience proves that the eager intern is more hindrance than help. The first had an attack of the runs, decided he’d caught cholera and insisted on being medevaced out. The second went mountain biking, hit a camel and broke her wrist – no more typing. I can’t play nanny – I’m temperamentally unsuited to it. I spend all my free time in Lira, but I need someone based there to keep the show on the road during my necessary absences. Are you interested?’ He was spooning sugar into his cappuccino as though determined not to acknowledge my disbelieving eyes.
‘This is nuts. We’ve barely met. You don’t know anything about me.’
‘Well, I know what I saw in your face the other day. I’ve rarely seen a bleaker expression. And actually,’ he took a slurp and shot me a look over the cup’s rim, ‘I know slightly more than you think. As I said, Dan and I go way back. He briefed me on your, er, personal circumstances over lunch a few months ago. I knew we’d bump into each other one of these days. Dan suggested Grobart & Fitchum was no longer the right place for you. Oh, he had nothing but praise for the quality of your work but he thinks you’d do better – be happier – elsewhere.’
I flushed. ‘How very considerate of him.’
There was a pause. He took another slurp and said slowly, ‘My own policy is to welcome kindness when I see it, however clumsy or awkward a form it takes. It’s a rare commodity, especially in our profession.’
I looked away, my eyes pricking. ‘I think I heard you use the phrase “pro bono”. I need to eat. Grobart & Fitchum pay extremely well. My savings account looks pretty healthy these days.’
‘Well,’ he leaned forward to hold my gaze with those sorrowful, honey-coloured eyes, ‘your savings account may look healthy, but you certainly don’t. In any case, you’d get a decent salary. The North Darrar government can afford to pay one international lawyer’s stipend – I’ve persuaded them they have to. It took some doing, believe me.’
I was beginning to feel cornered. I’d met this man only two days ago, and already he had arrogated a say over my future. It was absurd. ‘You said this was a border case? That’s totally out of my area of expertise. I do corporate law.’
‘Nothing you can’t handle, believe me. Dan assures me you’re one of the smartest lawyers he’s ever employed. I’ll hold your hand, and they do say that I’m a born teacher. I notice you wrote your thesis on –’ he took out a card ‘– “Challenges of peace: when former Latin American guerrilla organisations turn law-makers”. So it seems you already have some interest in the developing world.’
Ah, yes, my thesis. An eccentric pimple on the bland epidermis of an otherwise unremarkable post-graduate degree. Fuelled by the sheer lust I’d harboured towards Gavin, the sole Caribbean student on our LSE course and the only one who brought books by Chomsky and Che Guevara into lectures. A sudden mental image. Gavin dashing into the sea one miraculously mild October weekend in Dorset. A dark Michelangelo’s David, nipples erect in the chill, pulling off a pair of jeans as I watched from the shingle. I’d wanted to impress him, hence the thesis; its drafting had outlasted the relationship.
‘Regard this as the equivalent of a further degree in international law, prepared under expert guidance,’ Winston continued. ‘I’ll be expecting you to do some of the presentations, so you’ll get priceless experience. I know lawyers in their mid-forties who are still waiting for their law firm to grant them permission to stand up in a courtroom and argue a case. They’re not even halfway up a chain twenty links deep. Put in a few years and you’ll come out of this with a whole new skill set. All courtesy of the North Darrar government. I’d call that a pretty attractive offer.’
I sat in silence, surprised I had allowed the conversation to go on as long as it had.
Winston picked up his briefcase and turned his head slowly from side to side, uncricking a stiff neck and carrying out a panoramic survey of the café, with its gaggles of chatting students, the odd loner hunched over a laptop and a muffin. He was considering what form to give his closing remarks. Had he chosen the bombastic – anything on the lines of ‘doing something worthwhile with your life’, or ‘helping millions of poor Africans who never had your chances’ – I would have slipped off his gleaming hook, like a sliver of jelly off a fork, consigning the whole episode to the surreal-encounter-best-ignored category as swiftly as I left campus.
‘Look, Paula. One of the great satisfactions I’ve discovered, working in Africa, is being able to have a disproportionate impact per hour of effort put in. Call it big-fish-small-pond syndrome, call it stroking my own ego, whatever. I’m not, despite appearances, the world’s brightest lawyer. But there is – and I’m not boasting here, just stating the facts – no one in that entire country who has my skills. They’ve been fighting for nearly three decades, they know how to repair Kalashnikovs and make a handful of lentils and a gourd of water last a week. They’re confident they can build a socialist Utopia, but they can’t do this. And I can. I cannot describe to you the professional satisfaction that brings. You may never experience it anywhere else ever again.’
It was a deft, manipulative appeal. But I was ready to be manipulated, pining to be told what to do. I was so tired of being master of my fate.
We met on the ice.
A woman on the cusp of thirty, with a muss of brown hair, sits on a bench by the side of the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink in New York in mid-February 1999. Having laced up her hired skates, she stands with wobbly care. It’s been a long time since she had these on, but she is determined to see this through. Hitchens, the firm where she works as a transactional lawyer, crossing the legal t’s and dotting the i’s on bond deals, overlooks the sunken rink and she has been watching the skaters from her office window for weeks, envying their fluid grace.
These two, though, she does not envy. They are graceless and comic. A bearded, middle-aged man in grey jeans and a lumberjack shirt, flailing and juddering on his skates, and a ponytailed brunette, all white cleavage and heavy eye-liner, draped, giggling, on one arm. Her eyes skim over them – she assumes they’re a couple. The buxom girl must be wife number two or three. Only she is not going to be allowed to ignore them. Because just as she ventures warily onto the ice the two career towards her. There is a loud scream, the girl falls, showing even more of that milky cleavage and still laughing, and the woman is knocked violently back. Her skates slide out from under her and she finds herself half lying, half sitting on the ice with the man sprawled on top. For a split-second, his eyes, grey-blue, are locked on hers. As, arms flailing, he attempts to right himself – ‘God, I’m so sorry’ – he briefly places a hand on her left breast.
‘Straight for my tits. What a lech,’ she will chide him later on. The episode is something they both enjoy examining, returning to.
‘Only way of getting your attention,’ he will reply, looking absurdly pleased with himself. And then he will usually kiss the top of her head as you might a child’s.
‘The custom, where I come from, is to shake hands,’ is what she says at the time. On his second attempt to get up, the man is careful to place his hand on the ice for leverage. His hands are the most atypical thing about him, she will come to know. They are a peasant’s hands, stubby-fingered and as wide as paddles.
Borderlines Page 2