Henry Alexander sauntered up to the table, picked up our single stack, weighed it in one hand and flapped it casually in our faces, highlighting its lack of substance. ‘Light on your feet, eh?’ He chuckled, shaking his head like a mother who has caught out a mischievous boy. ‘Bit of a rush job, Peabody? Or perhaps you’re short-staffed. I hear funds are tight.’
Winston looked at him impassively. ‘I think it was Niccolò Macchiavelli who said, “A wise man does at once what the fool does finally.” We thought we’d spare you the verbiage right from the start.’
The first person I met on entering the Japanese Room with my patent-leather clutch in hand was Brett Harris, dapper in black tuxedo and bow-tie.
‘I hadn’t expected to see you,’ I said.
‘Oh, everyone’s here tonight. It’s like the bar scene in Star Wars down there.’ He gave my black chiffon Valentino – a legacy from the Jake era – a critical once-over. It seemed to win approval but he pursed his lips. ‘You’re late.’
‘Some last-minute emailing.’
‘Well, everyone’s three drinks in. No bad thing as it means they’ve finally hit the tipping point where they stop talking crap and say what they really think.’
Including you, I thought, registering the slight sway and undiplomatic language.
If the Grand Hall of Justice was portentous and the Small Hall of Justice functional, the Japanese Room was simply lavish. Its walls were hung with six huge silk tapestries whose designs – delicate cherry trees, blood-scarlet blossoms and preening peacocks – clashed unashamedly with the swirling Turkish carpet. Maintaining the Oriental theme, two giant Chinese vases sat on either side of the vast doors. In the light from the gilt-edged chandeliers, every gilded, embroidered, brocaded and over-decorated surface seemed to glow.
Leaning closer than was necessary, Brett talked me through the guest list, his voice as camp as a gossiping hairdresser’s. ‘That’s our host, the Malawian head of the UN force and his Guatemalan general,’ he said, nodding to where a tall, handsome man was slapping a moustachioed Latin American in full military regalia on the back. Winston looked on, smiling politely. ‘Over there, my boss the ambassador, talking to the German and Israeli envoys.’ Familiar faces from the Italian Club, they looked thoroughly bored: no doubt all three met regularly in Lira and had nothing new to say to one another.
‘You haven’t met the Prez yet, have you? Now’s your chance.’ He tipped his head, but the gesture was unnecessary. The same shimmer of nervous excitement I’d seen travel the length of Liberation Avenue now formed a flurried halo around the two presidents deep in conversation with Kofi Annan. Commissioners awkwardly hovered around the holy trio, not daring to interrupt a conversation that might conceivably make their presence in The Hague superfluous. I was suddenly reminded of the shoals of fish – so tiny they are no more than eyes and black ticks of spine – that swarm just under the surface of shallow waters. Were Big Men born that way, I wondered, with the capacity to draw all eyes, or was the magnetism acquired with age, tribute to a series of brave or dreadful acts they had proved ready to commit? It must be the latter, I thought, remembering the hush that would fall on the secretaries in Grobart & Fitchum’s offices when Dan arrived in the morning. Dan was the most sweet-tempered of employers, yet his staff had wanted to feel the titillating thrill of fear around him. Charismatic leaders were created by subjects who needed to worship at the altar of someone more magnificent than themselves.
‘I wonder when those two last got to chew the fat,’ said Brett. ‘What I wouldn’t give to eavesdrop on that one.’
Abraham had told me that the two heads of state had once fought alongside one another, sharing rations, cartridges and even women in the gullies of the Grameen Mountains. They had gone their separate ways now, and the contrast was striking. Rotund and balding, Darrar’s president was wearing what looked like a very expensive tuxedo. Above the startling white of his shirt, his face was sleek and full. He looked well tended, a man whose days in the bush were far behind him, more at ease, now, in the world of canapés and national toasts. Our president was the only person in the room who had made no attempt to smarten up for tonight’s occasion. He had on the same short-sleeved safari jacket he famously wore to work every day, the outfit in which he had posed for his official photograph, pen poised over the affairs of state. From the look of it, he had not bothered combing his hair, and his beard could have done with a trim, yet he looked by far the more relaxed of the two. Perhaps that languid ease had something to do with the fact that he towered over his former comrade-in-arms by a good foot and a half. How mortifying it must be, I thought, to be forced to look up to the man you have come to hate.
‘Now, how would you summarise the subliminal messages of those sartorial choices?’ asked Brett, arching one eyebrow. ‘I believe our man is actually wearing open-toed sandals.’
‘Er … their side’s would be “I have successfully made the transition from rebel to world statesman and now take my rightful place among the luminaries of Africa. I can afford to buy my suits on the rue Saint-Honoré.”’
‘Yeah,’ snickered Brett, ‘our guy’s is simpler. “Fuck this shit. You may be the regional power everyone sucks up to, but I’m twice your size and I still know how to head-butt.”’
Henry Alexander, Reginald Watts and the youth brigade clustered behind the hovering commissioners. The youngsters seemed the only ones having a genuinely good time. One of the girls was bent double, champagne sloshing out of a flute, laughing at some witticism from the boy with the crew-cut. This was going to be the first stop of the evening, I guessed: later there would be a bar, a nightclub, and one of the girls would end up, slightly unprofessionally, in Crew-cut’s bed.
‘Now she,’ Brett indicated a portly woman standing near a column, ‘is the US deputy secretary of state for African affairs and she shouldn’t be left on her own like that. So, if you’ll excuse me, duty calls … Great dress, by the way. You’ve got a cuter ass than I expected.’ He timed the last so carefully that my wince of irritation was wasted on the back of his neck.
I wavered. At moments like this, facing a room of strangers, I missed Jake with fierce intensity. No shield, no ally. How glorious it would be to turn on my heel, retrieve my coat, run through the vast doors of the Peace Palace and out into the cool of the night, staggering in my unfamiliar heels down the drive to the safety of the main gate and beckoning taxi rank. ‘Unprofessional,’ I admonished myself. And suddenly there was a bald pate, so shiny it reflected the ceiling light, and a friendly face smiling quietly at me. ‘Dr Berhane! No one told me you’d be here. How lovely to see you.’
‘My friend Paula. You are quite right, I do not belong. You need only to look at my clothes,’ he gestured at a worn tweed jacket, ‘to see that. But I was in The Hague and the North Darrar ambassador, an old friend, ordered me to make up numbers. You, in contrast, look magnificent.’
He laid an avuncular hand on my arm. ‘You need a drink. Here, this lovely girl has what we need.’ He led me to a dark-haired waitress in a smart white jacket holding a silver tray with a selection of drinks. I took a glass of white wine.
‘You can tell that beautiful Mariam is one of us, can’t you?’ said Dr Berhane, as the waitress smiled. I realised he was right. I saw young women with her honey-coloured skin and painfully slender wrists and ankles every day on Liberation Avenue. ‘Second-generation immigrant. Her parents fled to the Netherlands during the 1970s,’ elaborated Dr Berhane. ‘A typical hardworking member of the diaspora. The only question is, which diaspora? Theirs or ours? It is impossible to tell, you know, whatever the maps say, because physically and linguistically we are so similar. I have been badgering her all evening but she will not say. She is very stubborn.’
Mariam flushed and lowered her eyes. ‘It is better not to talk politics, these days. Excuse me, there are guests without drinks.’ And she escaped into the crowd.
Dr Berhane gazed after her with a kind of mournful longing. ‘Her pa
rents are probably a mixed couple. That’s almost certainly why she is so careful. Those are the people who have been the worst hit by this new war. Their children find themselves rejected by everyone. It’s hard. Very hard.’ He shook his head with slow, exaggerated emphasis.
‘Are you OK, Dr Berhane?’
‘Yes, but my sheets are in the wind, as they say. I must apologise for that. An empty stomach, an open bar and an impoverished African academic – a fatal combination. I will go back to the ambassador’s residence soon. But I wanted to see for myself a little segment of history in the making. It’s what I do, after all. And I did learn something by coming tonight.’
‘What was that, Dr Berhane?’
His lips were against my ear. ‘Look around you. Tell me what you see.’
I scanned the room. ‘Presidents, foreign ministers, ambassadors, judges and lawyers, some UN officials, a few military men … and all the catering staff, of course. What’s your point?’
‘Tell me, how many of those faces are African? And how many Western? And which outnumber which? Screw up your eyes. That way you won’t focus on the detail and just see the colour. Tell me the ratio of brown to pinko-grey, as your Orwell called it.’
I didn’t need to screw up my eyes. Kofi Annan had only managed to keep the two presidents talking for a few minutes. Like magnets forced briefly together, they had bounced off one another and hurtled to opposite sides of the room, forming the nodal points of two African clusters. Isolated brown poles in an overwhelming sea of white.
Dr Berhane whispered, ‘No outsider, passing this room, would ever think an African process was taking place inside these walls, now, would they?’
‘I’m not sure that’s fair,’ I protested. ‘Most of the Westerners here are essentially technical advisers, like me. The decision-makers are all African. None of us would be here if we hadn’t been invited by your two governments.’
‘Ah, yes, but the invitations were the product of a system of universal justice hammered out in Washington, Paris and London, rooted in the deep scars left by your wars, wars of no relevance to Africa, a vision that our young governments felt obliged to endorse, assuming that was what all civilised nations did, only to discover their new partners were too old and wise to fall into that trap themselves.’
‘But what’s the alternative? It’s not perfect but surely it has to be an improvement on what came before.’
‘Oh, there is none now. It is too late to explore alternative methods of reconciliation and forgiveness. We are all singing off the page written by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and George Clooney. All toothpaste tastes the same wherever you go in the world. The few intellectuals who disagree end up sounding like collaborators with dictatorships, apologists for genocide. And, let’s be honest, often that’s exactly what they are. Still, I do not think this is healthy. I can recall too many wood-panelled rooms that looked exactly like this: chandeliers, tapestries, waiters in white jackets, a few token Africans being watched like hawks by powerful white men. The Berlin conference in 1884, Sykes-Picot in 1915, Laval-Mussolini in 1935.’
It was Winston who came to my rescue. ‘There you are, Paula. Greetings, Dr Berhane. I hope you won’t mind if I borrow your companion. I’d like to introduce her to the man who pays her salary.’ He grabbed my elbow and steered me purposefully to one of the two nodes we had been surveying. I had never learned how to cut in at cocktails, but Winston simply tapped the man in front of him on the shoulder, forcing him to interrupt an ongoing conversation. ‘Foreign Minister, you must meet Paula Shackleton, the woman who will be holding my hand as we go into battle. Paula, this is His Excellency Simon Gebreyesus, also known as Kennedy.’
Stocky, grizzled, the foreign minister had a bug-eyed look. I found my gaze shifting from one of his eyes to the other, trying to work out which he was using.
‘And this,’ said Winston, turning to the man Kennedy had been addressing, ‘is Buster, presidential assistant and government spokesman.’
‘“Buster”?’
‘As in Buster Keaton,’ said the presidential spokesman. ‘Fighters are simple people. They like nicknames. In my case, I was famous at the front for never smiling.’ He was not smiling now.
‘I see.’
‘So you are our new legal champion. You seem very young, Miss Shackleton, but Mr Peabody tells me you are tough.’
Then, as I was automatically muttering, ‘He flatters me,’ Buster introduced me to the president.
‘Sir, the young woman you were asking about.’
The president took his time. I suppose you can do that when you’re the boss, decide how long to stretch a pause while denying eye contact. I stood there awkwardly, wondering if he had heard. Mariam the waitress was at his elbow, holding a tray with the usual selection. He took a glass automatically, then stared at it with the incredulous disgust one might reserve for a bucket of elephant’s urine. ‘What is this shit?’
Mariam winced as though she’d been slapped. In the sudden silence, I heard a tinkling chorus: her hands, holding the tray of glasses, were shaking. ‘Pinot Grigio,’ she said, her face pale. ‘It is an Italian wine.’
He returned it to the tray. ‘I know what Pinot Grigio is. Get me a man’s drink. Johnnie Walker.’ He made a pinching gesture with his thumb and forefinger, indicating how much he wanted, a generous two inches. ‘This much. No ice, no water.’
Then he finally deigned to look at me and smiled. It was the smile of a man in a mood for public jousting. ‘Ah, our female Perry Mason. Our very expensive female Perry Mason. I had my doubts when Mr Peabody suggested hiring a woman, but he tells me in the US now they are just as good, if not better, than the men. So, tell me, why did you choose the law?’
‘I have a mathematical mind. I enjoy solving puzzles.’
‘So justice is a puzzle, then, like Sudoku? Not a noble pursuit, a guarantor of inalienable human rights? What do you say to that, Mr Peabody? I think your young colleague is older and more cynical than you.’
Mariam was back at his elbow. He took the tumbler of amber liquid off her tray and swallowed an inch with the smooth ease of a heavy drinker.
‘It can be both,’ said Winston, diplomatically. ‘A mathematical puzzle and something deeper.’
The president ignored him. ‘Did you know that I studied law at the University of Darrar, Miss Shackleton?’
‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘I had no idea.’
‘As a youngster I, too, liked solving puzzles. And it seemed to me, as a nationalist, that many of my people’s problems could be solved if only our occupiers at the time, the government of Darrar, were forced to apply the letter of the law. That was certainly what our lecturers seemed to imply. Then came the first-year exams. I did very badly. All of the students from what was then called Northern Province did. It was quite shocking how stupid we turned out to be. Has that ever happened to you, learning to your amazement that you are a lazy idiot?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘So we broke into the dean’s office one night. We opened his filing cabinets, we found our real marks – we had done well, distinctions in many cases – and the letter from the Negus telling the dean it was important the students from up north be kept in their place. So we went to the dean’s house. We got him out of his bed, we stripped him naked, glued our exam papers to his body, and whipped him through the campus in front of the staff and students. Then, before the police had time to arrive, we left for the bush. We had completed our education. We exchanged our pens for AK-47s. We had understood that they would never let us compete on equal terms. We had to bring the whole thing tumbling down.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘Do you know the Malcolm X quote – “Nobody can give you equality or justice. If you’re a man, you take it”?’
It was not, perhaps, the most appropriate anecdote to tell a lawyer, whose job was to assure the world your country will uphold its legal commitments, at a cocktail party thrown to emphasise the seriousness of an unfolding judicial process. Rea
ding my mind, he smiled again. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Shackleton. Even at our most hot-headed, the Movement always upheld international law. Our record on the treatment of prisoners of war has been much praised. Just ask Mr Peabody – no African country puts international rulings into effect more swiftly than we do.’
Judge Mautner was approaching, a man with a mission. The president nodded in closure: my moment in the sun was over. But before moving away he turned and murmured quietly, ‘Don’t spend too long in Sumbi’s Café, Miss Shackleton. Lira has better bars than that.’
Then the node and its shoal of hangers-on moved away, sucking Winston and Buster in its wake but leaving the foreign minister behind. I realised my mouth was half open and closed it.
‘What is it?’ Kennedy asked, noticing my expression.
‘I’m impressed that the president knows which café I patronise.’
‘It’s a small town, Lira. Everyone knows everything.’
‘So I keep being told.’
My mind was racing. Was I being watched? If so, who was the spy and how detailed was the monitoring? Were they listening to my telephone conversations, reading my emails, or just tracking my movements?
Suddenly, sanity returned. It didn’t take much surveillance to establish that I hung out in Sumbi’s. By dropping that one detail into the conversation, the president had created the impression of an all-seeing, all-knowing state. The intention was to rattle me. A classic technique, it had been entirely successful.
The foreign minister yawned and rubbed one eye, so vigorously that I realised it must be glass – another war injury? Hence the wandering focus.
‘Tired?’
‘When he is like this, he can go all night,’ he confided. ‘And so we, too, must go all night. I will rest when I get back to Lira,’ he said, more to himself than me. ‘Let us just hope that the pretty waitress obliges.’
‘The waitress?’ I was disconcerted. ‘Mariam?’
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