by Adam Brookes
“ID,” he said, in English.
Mangan slowly reached into his breast pocket, took out his accreditation, passed it to the soldier.
“What you do here?”
“I am a journalist.”
“No, no. You go back.”
“Can I get out of the car?” He gestured. The soldier stood back a foot or so, and Mangan opened the door, gingerly, got out.
“Cigarette?” he said. He offered the pack. The soldier did not respond.
“I want to go a little farther down this road. Can I do that?”
“No, no. You go back.” The soldier gestured down the road the way he had come.
Mangan smiled, nodded.
“What are you guys here for? Is it dangerous down the road?”
“No, no. Not dangerous. No problem. But not permitted. You go back.”
“I just…” But the soldier was losing patience, stepped toward him, shoved him back toward the car, then leaned down and shouted at the driver in Amharic. The driver, very frightened now, nodded frantically.
Mangan sighed, got back in the car. The driver, without waiting for instructions, turned it around and started heading back up the road, muttering to himself.
Mangan lit a cigarette. Another pointless day, he thought. Another stretching of my reason for being here. Hardened correspondent Philip Mangan makes insipid attempt to get story, fails.
He looked out over a plain speckled with thorn bushes, the light lowering, turning to gold.
Feels persistent regret at loss of other, less respectable, line of work.
They headed back to Dire Dawa, Mangan stopping the car only once, in the evening, when he caught sight of a vast construction project, Chinese engineers with theodolites, high-visibility vests and helmets, the yellow dust billowing skyward. The new railway, China inscribing itself into the very ground of Africa.
That night, in the dim hotel bar, he made up his mind to take a run at the Americans. Just to see. They were sitting in a corner, the four of them. One had a laptop open. They seemed to be watching a football game. Mangan walked to the bar and ordered a beer, waited for a moment, then strode over to their table.
“Hi, guys,” he said.
They looked up at him blankly.
“Sorry for interrupting. Just wondered what the game was.”
There was a pause. Then the older man spoke.
“It’s recorded. Nothing recent.”
“Oh. Okay,” said Mangan, standing his ground. “Are you with the embassy?”
The man with the gold chain had taken off his sunglasses and was looking at him hard. He had sun-darkened skin, sunken cheeks, Mangan saw.
“Yes. We’re embassy. And you are?” he said.
“I’m a journalist. British. Just wondered what brought you all to town.”
“A little bit of official business,” said the older man, in a tone that said this conversation is ending. The two younger men had looked back down at the laptop and were murmuring to each other, pointing at the screen.
“Only, I’d heard the US military had something going on at the old air base outside town, and I wondered if you were part of it. All off the record and everything.”
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” said the man with the gold chain.
“Mangan. Philip Mangan.”
“Well, Philip, I’m sorry to say we have to draw our brief acquaintance to a close. We don’t mean to be rude, but we’re just not in a position to have that conversation right now. So, ah, goodnight to you.” He smiled and turned away.
Mangan raised his hands in an I’m-just-trying-to-be-friendly gesture, then walked back to the bar, sat on a stool, pulled on his beer, tamped down his annoyance.
“Interesting, aren’t they?”
The voice came from Mangan’s right, quiet, accented.
He turned. A man of Chinese appearance was sitting three stools away from him, holding a glass of whisky, looking straight ahead.
“You see,” the man went on, “they come to Africa, and they bring drones and bombs and monitoring bases. But China comes to Africa and brings railways, phones and hospitals. Don’t you find that interesting?”
“Have we met?” said Mangan.
The man turned to face him, put his drink down, the clop of his glass on the bar. He wore a white shirt and gray slacks. His hair was to the collar. His face had a strange cast to it, wide, high cheekbones, eyes with no whites to them, immobile, lacking affect. A broad, supple mouth. A startling face, shocking almost. Mangan thought of a marionette, of a clown.
“No, we have not met,” said the man. Then he stood and leaned towards Mangan, a fulsome smile, the eyes like coal.
“But perhaps we will,” he said. He walked from the bar. Mangan watched him cross the lobby and leave the hotel.
What was that? he thought.
Though somewhere in an earlier self—a clandestine self—he knew.
9
Oxford, United Kingdom
Fan Kaikai stumbled through the graveyard, as bidden. When he reached the requisite headstone, one which marked the plot of an obscure statistician, he stopped, and as club rules demanded, raised the silver cup to his lips. The concoction it held was of sickly liqueur topped with champagne to form a vile, frothing swill. In a circle around him stood a group of undergraduates, all male, shouting, jeering in the darkness. Some of them wore masks and tailcoats. He could hear the traffic going past on the street. Why am I here? he thought. What am I to them?
He drank, letting some of the liquid run down his chin and spill down his front. His stomach lurched. The club’s other members, all well lubricated themselves, yelled encouragement. Kai dropped the silver cup to the ground and walked away, bent over and heaved up a warm, foul gush.
He felt hands on his elbows amid inchoate laughter. They all spilled from the cemetery onto the street, reeled back to college in the darkness.
As they approached the gate, Kai saw her. She was standing under a street lamp in a long silver-blue gown, closing a purse. Waiting for someone? She saw him at the same time, regarded him from across the street.
He stopped and looked back at her. She turned away. He walked through the college gate, and then they were up in someone’s rooms, and there was more champagne and a lot of noise, shouting. And he looked up and there she was again in that incongruous gown that showed pale, slender shoulders. He considered for a moment, then went over to her, leaned into her, spoke in Mandarin, but felt the words thick and slurring.
“I’m Fan Kaikai,” he said.
“I know who you are,” she responded.
“And you are Madeline Chen. We should be friends,” he said.
She leaned away from him, as if from a bad smell, her eyes flickering down to his damp gown.
“We could,” he said. “We could, you know, get past all this stupid stuff.”
“What stupid stuff?” she said.
He gestured in a way that felt slightly wild. Someone had put music on, complicated, sinister-sounding, with a bass like an industrial roar. Kai tried to focus.
“All the… history. All the family history, the anger. It’s their fight. Not ours.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He blinked.
“What? Of course you know. We should talk about it. Couldn’t we do that?”
She was looking around herself, as if searching someone out. Who? he thought. A friend? A minder?
“Why would I want to talk to you about my family?” she said.
“I didn’t mean… I just…”
He stopped, took a breath.
“I’m sorry. We’re supposed to avoid each other, I know. We are supposed to mistrust each other. I just thought I would like to make my own decision, that we could make our own decisions.”
She was still leaning away from him, lips pursed, eyebrows arched. The music was a distended roar, a thumping in his chest.
He shrugged.
“Sorry,” he said, and ma
de to walk away. She spoke to his back.
“Are you always this earnest?”
He turned back, struggled to find something to say. She was looking at him as if he had just vomited a magnum of champagne. Which, come to think of it, he had.
“Only when I’m drunk,” he said. “I’m a sober sceptic.”
“Earnest drunks are the worst. What is this ridiculous drinking club you’re a member of?”
“It’s called ‘The Amnesiacs.’ I don’t know what it is, really. They just asked me to join. We have to wear these clothes.”
“And drink a lot.”
“And drink a lot.”
“They don’t want you in the club. They want your money,” she said. He felt as if she were testing him.
“I think you may be right.”
She was still looking at him askance. Neither of them said anything. Kai pondered the notion that she had creamy skin and elegant, wide eyes, and spoke a soft, educated Mandarin, like an actress. She was slight, elfin almost—not the harridan he had been warned about. She was rather beautiful, close up. Now she was speaking quickly.
“If they see me talking to you I’m in the shit.”
“What? Who? If who…”
“Do you have any idea why we are ordered not to talk to each other? Do you?”
“I know some of it. I think.”
She sighed, shook her head and, with a brief, disbelieving glance at him, was gone.
Kai returned unsteadily to his rooms, thinking about her, her self-possession. He walked up the darkened staircase. The door to his rooms was ajar.
He stood on the step, wondering. He pushed the door open. The room was dark.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“You ren ma?” Is anybody there?
Nothing, just the creaking of the wooden boards beneath his feet, a burst of drunken chatter from the quadrangle below.
He felt for the light switch, his hand fluttering against the wall.
The room was still. He walked to his desk. His laptop was gone, but they had left the power cord, for some reason. He felt sick, shaky. He looked quickly in the bedroom, which seemed untouched. But on the sink in the corner, his flannel was draped over a tap and his toothpaste tube was empty. He looked more closely, not trusting his senses. His shoes were jumbled up. And a textbook, Photonics: Principles and Practices, was closed, when he knew he had left it open at the section on Fresnel equations.
He went back down the staircase and crossed the quad to the porter’s lodge.
The police arrived in the form of two uniformed constables and a young, stocky detective constable in jeans and a sports jacket who chewed a piece of gum and looked at him quizzically. He introduced himself as DC Busby. Kai showed him where the laptop had been.
“Anything else missing?” said Busby, walking slowly around the room.
“No. No, but…”
The detective turned and looked at him.
“No but what?”
Kai found his English drying up, as it often did when he needed it most.
“I think, maybe, somebody search. Something.”
“Somebody searched the room?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Just, things maybe have been moved.”
“Hm,” said Busby. “And why might they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because, you see, in your room search usually, the thief, he’ll turn the room upside down. Pull out your drawers, turn your mattress over, that sort of thing.” The detective smiled, spoke deliberately. “He doesn’t tidy up.”
Kai nodded, and then one of the uniformed officers was standing in the bedroom doorway and dangling from his hand was a single latex glove.
And when DC Busby, a conscientious man who viewed the travails of drunken students as every bit as worthy of his attention as any other, returned to the station and entered the details of the case—burglary, accompanied by a search conducted to an almost professional standard, as evidenced by the presence of a discarded latex glove—on the Police National Computer, he was intrigued to see Fan Kaikai’s name return a ping. He leaned into the screen. The ping came from the intelligence services, who, it seemed, were possessed of an interest in Mr. Fan Kaikai, as they required immediate notification should he be in contact with the police.
Intrigued, the detective filled out the brief explainer form and hit Send. He wondered where the message would go, to whom, what strange unseen mechanism he was setting in motion.
10
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Mangan took a late evening taxi to Piazza. Hallelujah was at a jazz bar attached to a decrepit hotel, a big group squeezed around a candlelit table littered with beer bottles and plates of French fries. The band played vibraphone, horns and hand drums, a pulsing, melancholy Ethio-jazz. Hallelujah waved him over and pulled out a stool. The group was made up of a couple of researchers, one or two expats, but mostly glum Addis journalists, battered by newspaper closures, arrests. Those without jobs were struggling, here selling the odd piece to a website, there doing some translation work, living with friends, making their beer last. The conversation slipped between English and Amharic.
“Listen, everybody,” said Hallelujah to the table. “It seems that, in addition to his bold coverage of our many insurrections, Mr. Mangan has been stalking the Chinese.” He turned to Mangan. “So Philip, what did you find? Are we saved? Is China going to finance the African renaissance?”
“I can announce that there will be a railway,” said Mangan. “A big one.”
“Think of that, ladies and gentlemen,” said Hallelujah. “We are to enter the age of the locomotive.”
“We are to enter the age of China.” This from tall, bespectacled Abraha, who worked in an agricultural institute. “They’ll run everything here soon.”
“We had colonizers before,” said Hallelujah. “Didn’t turn out well for them.”
“Is that what the Chinese are?” said Mangan. “Colonizers?”
“I don’t know what they are,” said Abraha, “but they are everywhere. You’ve seen! Building railways, laying fiber, God knows what else. Next, they’ll bake injera and sell it to us.”
The club was dim and loud.
“You know, I heard a funny story,” said Abraha. “When the Chinese companies first turned up a few years ago, all the huge road projects starting up, they hired Ethiopian workers. Of course. Then they trained them in how you dig a ditch, build a wall, the Chinese way.”
“Very quickly, and so it falls down a week later,” said someone, to laughter.
“As opposed to the Ethiopian way,” said Hallelujah, “where completion of the wall, or ditch, remains a beautiful dream.”
Abraha, chuckling, sought to wrest back control.
“No, no, listen. This is all true. So the Chinese noticed that the Ethiopians used shovels with very long wooden handles. Always this long handle. So they watched a bit and they saw that the Ethiopians would dig for a minute or two, then stop digging. Then the Ethiopians would stand and cross their forearms on the end of the handle and rest their chin on their forearms and talk, or just close their eyes. All over the site, workers leaning on their long shovels, full of bliss. So what do you think the Chinese did?”
Everyone looked at each other.
“They took the shovels away? But then, how would they dig?” said someone.
Abraha looked pleased, wagged a finger. “No. They went around at night with a saw and cut one foot off every handle! So the next day…”
The table was laughing, holding up imaginary shovels, miming the workers’ falling over when they tried to rest on them.
Mangan looked up to the door. Maja was there, walking toward the table. She wore a white cotton dress, her hair unruly on bare shoulders. He waved.
Hallelujah waved at her, too.
“Oh, yes, Philip, here is Maja. She is a Danish.”
“A Dane,” said Mangan.
“Yes, yes, a Dane,” said Hallelujah. He was animated now, Mangan saw, a bit drunk, happier, but still wound tight. “Maja, come and sit here.”
Maja picked her way to the table, where Hallelujah made room for her, and she leaned over to give him a brief embrace. As she sat, she laid a hand on Mangan’s shoulder, and he felt the touch as if hyper-sensitized to it. He caught her eye, and she broke into a great big grin. She looked like someone who had just emerged from incarceration. Hungry for experience, fun. Hallelujah gestured to the waitress for more beers.
“Maja, Maja, how is the poor Ogaden?” he said.
“It is poor and unhappy, as you know, Hal. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Yes, yes, but the babies are safe because you are there.”
“Not really,” she said. “The babies are dying at an alarming rate. And the mothers.”
“Really?” said Mangan.
She looked at him, adopting a weary tone.
“Yes, really.”
“Why? I mean, more than usual?” he said, genuinely curious.
She shook her head.
“You journalists are truly horrible people. Do you know that?”
“Of course we are,” said Mangan. “But what’s happening with the mortality rates?”
She took his beer from him, took a long pull before speaking.
“Well, you name it. Forced marriage, genital cutting, disease. And the women are malnourished, so their pelvises don’t develop properly. And all their life they carry weight on their heads, which we think deforms the pelvis. So vaginal birth can be very hard. And they die.”
Mangan took his beer back.
“Sorry,” said Maja, “but you asked.”
“I did. I’m wondering if there’s a story there.”
She gave a tired smile.
“A story.”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“Do I? Please can we just talk about food, or football or something?”