He was obviously sensitive to the fact that she was anxious to read her letter from Russell all alone. He entered the clinic without looking back.
Natalie took the envelope from her pocket and slid her finger under the flap.
The letter occupied one sheet of paper only, though it was written on two sides. But there were two other typewritten sheets enclosed with it. A cursory glance told her it was a copy of the raw text for his article in the Los Angeles Times, which she had already seen. She put those sheets to one side.
Dear Natalie,
I’m at a loss how to start. I had planned to discuss just the enclosed article, which you may have already seen, or at any rate heard about. But, having received your letter, all that has changed.
I knew, I knew, when I left Kihara, that I shouldn’t go, that I should have put up more of a fight. I predicted that other discoveries would be made but you prevailed on me to leave. And now you, and her ladyship, have made the discoveries—a jaw, a skull, a construction even—that should have been mine, a whole new species, the ancient ancestor that first walked upright and created culture, that I should have found and named.
Forgive me, Natalie, but right now I’m feeling very bitter and yes, for the first time, some of it is spilling over on to you. We could have found this creature together, think how that would have cemented a relationship between us. As it is, my find—Daniel’s and Richard’s and my knee joint—will be overshadowed by the rest of your discoveries. I’ll be an also-ran alongside yet another Deacon-led triumph.
On top of everything, your letter was—or rather it wasn’t—the friendliest letter I have ever received. Have I not earned more warmth from you?
I will give you the benefit of the doubt until I receive your next letter, to give you the chance to explain yourself, and I hope I like what I read. But until then all the promises I made to help in your career are on hold—is that clear? You seem to have changed and I need to know that you have not. Give me your views as soon as you can, please.
If you haven’t had a visit yet from the Suttons you soon will. If they have been and gone you’ll know by now what a force of nature Richard Sr. is. To tell the truth, I didn’t altogether take to him. A little too controlled (and controlling) for my taste, but there’s no doubting his energy or his will. He’s not someone I would like to cross and I hope you are not planning to do so. I’d like you to reassure me on that point too, when you write.
Please make that soon. My LA Times article has aroused quite a bit of interest within the profession—most of it, I have to say, sympathetic to me and, partly on the strength of it, I have been offered a place on a big dig next year at Lake Rudolf, in the northern stretch of Kenya. You could probably join me if you wanted but that rather depends on … you know what it depends on.
I had wanted our letters to be more … well, softer, more intimate, cosier, not only professional, but it’s hard at the moment, with all that is happening. Your next letter is crucial, but I’m sure you sense that. I’ll be on edge till it comes. Don’t make me wait too long.
My personal feelings haven’t changed; I still recall our nights under the stars, and our illicit drinking. I am back in California now, writing this in my study overlooking the bay, and feel more than ever that you would fit in here perfectly among the pine trees and the pastel colors. I hope it’s not over between us, but that’s up to you.
Russell
Natalie looked up, to see Jack leaving the clinic and coming towards the Land Rover. She folded the letter back into its envelope. Jack threw the spectacles case onto Natalie’s lap as he climbed back into the driving seat. “Can you give those to Daniel, please, when we get back to camp? There are other things I have to do.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“How’s Russell?” Jack started the engine and put the vehicle in gear.
“Still wounded,” replied Natalie in a whisper. “Blessé. Still wounded.” She stuffed the letter into her pocket and added, half to herself, “And still dangerous.”
• • •
“Daniel? Daniel! Are you there?” Natalie stood outside Daniel’s tent, where was stored a variety of objects—what looked like spare parts for Land Rover engines, a box of maps on a table, some binoculars, an old typewriter he was repairing. There was, she knew, no end to Daniel’s talents.
He appeared, bending his frame as he ducked under the opening to his tent, then straightening up. “Miss Natalie.”
She had given up trying to persuade him to address her as, simply, Natalie. She held up his spectacles case. “These have been repaired. We collected them from the clinic.” She handed them across.
“Thank you,” he said, taking them from her.
“You are famous for your eyes, Daniel, for spotting things. Yet you need glasses.”
He nodded. “Growing up in a small village, in the bush … there was no electricity. As a boy, I used to read by the light of candles.” He grinned. “It wasn’t good for my eyes but my brothers and sisters loved the stories I read to them.”
“What sort of stories?”
He gestured for Natalie to sit down.
“Well, we didn’t have proper books. The missionary school wouldn’t let us take books away but we had what I heard Dr. Sutton one time call comic books. My brothers and sisters loved all the stories of children in faraway places, who were always winning against adults, sneaking into places that adults couldn’t get into.” He put on his spectacles, trying them out. “I liked the central pages of those comic books. They always had a cutaway drawing of some big piece of machinery—an aircraft carrier, for example, or a railway engine, or a massive tank—which showed how it worked inside. That’s how I got so interested in machines. Water?”
He handed across a bottle and she took it.
“But how did you come to be such a famous discoverer of fossils?”
He took off his spectacles again and carefully replaced them in his case. “How much do you know about the Luo, Miss Natalie?”
She shook her head and handed back the water bottle. “Not much. I know you are not the Maasai, but that’s about it.”
He nodded. “We are very different from the Maasai—our language, our customs, our religion. We are different from the Kikuyu and the Itesu too, and from the Datoga and the Luhya. Our biggest difference, perhaps, is that we do not circumcise our young boys; instead we remove six teeth from the lower jaw. That is a big thing, but another big thing is that, according to our myths, we come from the north, where we were once great fisher people. According to white scientists our language is Nilotic—from the area of the Nile.” He took some water himself. “I grew up with those legends but then I went to missionary school and I was told about Christian legends.” He shook his head. “To be honest, I believed the Christian legends much less than the Luo legends, but I also loved those cutaway drawings of the machines white science had devised. So I figured it couldn’t be all bad, that white science was better than white religion.”
He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
“The first archaeologists and paleontologists who came to this area were not only examples of white science, looking at how early people had started, but they had automobiles and, soon, airplanes, all of which I loved. So I was attracted naturally.”
“But that doesn’t explain why you are so good at what you do.”
“Maybe I have been lucky.” He smiled.
“Eleanor doesn’t think so. Nobody thinks so.”
He let a pause go by. “I will tell you one other thing. I have a Christian name—Daniel—but it’s not the only name I have. One of my other names is Owino. It is our custom for people to be named after a good ancestor, an ancestor known for doing good deeds, or being a brave warrior—benefiting the tribe in some way. The Owino I am named for was a superb tracker of game, he could ‘read’ tracks in the thinnest sand, he could ‘read’ imprints left even on savannah grass and on gravel. Maybe I inherited some of his talent.”
/> He held up the spectacles case. “My eyes are not brilliant, Miss Natalie, but I have taught myself to see, through living my whole life in Kenya, here in the bush. So I can be good enough at something that, one day, the Luo will name their sons for me.” He paused. “Even so, I doubt that, had I been sitting outside your tent that night when Dr. Sutton was killed, I could have identified Mutevu Ndekei. How I wish it had been me who waited up that night, and not you.”
Natalie colored. What was Daniel saying? That she should pretend she hadn’t seen what she had seen? She couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t.
• • •
Three mornings later, Natalie came back from the gorge and, as she entered the camp, it was immediately clear that there were new visitors. Two men, one gray-haired, one dark, were seated with Eleanor outside her tent. But Natalie was tired. She hadn’t exactly done much today, save sift soil-sand through a sieve, watching the Maasai who were now, increasingly, patrolling the gorge. But the bucking of the vehicle on the drive back from where they had been digging, and the constant grime from kneeling among the dust and dung, had taken their toll. She needed a shower and she needed a rest. She also needed to reread Russell’s letter one more time, to see if there were any subtle messages she had missed. She’d no doubt meet the strangers at lunch and that was soon enough.
Mgina brought the hot water.
“Is all going well with the wedding?” Natalie asked.
“Yes, Miss Natalie. My sisters are making my wedding jewelry.”
“What is the jewelry made of?”
“Black stone, white stone, ostrich beads. Jewelry must come from the land, so you will remain here always.”
Not for the first time, Natalie remarked on the simple—but sensitive and sensible—iconography of Maasai customs. Most Maasai customs.
She changed, brushed her hair, put on her shoes, lighter than her boots, and tried a little lipstick. She always felt better after that.
As she approached the refectory tent, the men turned toward her.
With a start she realized that one was the deputy attorney general she had met in Nairobi—what was his name? The other man she didn’t know.
They stood up as she approached. The deputy attorney general was virtually unrecognizable out of his lawyer’s uniform of gown and wig. He wore an open-necked shirt and green-cum-khaki trousers. He was sweating. The other man, the dark-haired one, was more elegant, in a pale linen suit.
“Natalie,” said Eleanor, rising from her chair. “I am sure you remember Maxwell Sandys. And this is Peter Jeavons, he’s British minister of state for science. He’s here to see what we do.”
Natalie shook hands with them and then sat in her place. Sandys’s name had come to her just before Eleanor had mentioned it.
“You are a long way from court,” she said as she sat down. “Is this work or pleasure?”
Sandys opened a cardboard folder he was holding and took from it a newspaper. He handed it to Natalie. “We’re here because of this. It’s an editorial in the East African Gazette, and appeared three mornings ago. Will you read it please?”
The knot of foreboding that had been finding a regular home in Natalie’s stomach reformed itself in no time. She took the newspaper and read the article carefully, in her own time. It described a case where the judge had been John Tudor, and where a white security guard had beaten a black burglar fourteen times with an iron bar, so badly he was still in hospital and couldn’t attend his trial. Tudor had dismissed the charges against the security guard and freed him.
When she had finished reading the long editorial that attacked the judge’s behavior, she handed the paper back to Sandys.
“Jack was right about John Tudor being a racist. Fourteen blows is fourteen too many.”
Sandys nodded. “We’re agreed there, Dr. Nelson. But this isn’t the first time Tudor has shown undue leniency towards white security guards when they have attacked and injured black robbers or burglars. He’s giving people—white people—license to ill-treat blacks if they catch them committing crimes. No one wants to condone robbery, of course, but Tudor is showing no sense of proportion and, as I am sure you can see, this only exacerbates a situation that is already very sensitive. Tudor, as I think you have been told, is to be the judge in the case where you will give evidence. It is fair to say that any case coming before Judge Tudor from now on, and which pits a black person against a white person, is going to be big news, the focus of potentially sensational newspaper coverage and will almost certainly stoke the political fires.”
He reached forward and lifted a water jug, filling their glasses one by one as he went on speaking. “Your case, of course, if I can phrase it in that way, your case is even more sensational, at least potentially, because of the defense Ndekei is running, that he was acting according to tribal law. That hasn’t reached the papers yet, but it will, it will.”
Natalie drank some water. It always smelled a little of the purification pills that were needed to keep it sanitary.
“However,” Sandys went on, “I am afraid we have been dealt another blow that I suspect you know nothing about.”
Natalie bit her lip. What was coming?
“We now have a date for the trial—February the twelfth.”
“Why is that significant?”
He drank some water himself and looked at Eleanor. “That is exactly one day before the opening of the independence conference in London. It couldn’t come at a worse time—black–white relations will be under intense scrutiny and if … if Tudor steps out of line, or makes one of his racist gaffes, who knows what will happen? The whole thing is a tinderbox.”
“Can’t you change the date, or change Tudor?”
Sandys shook his head. “Cases are set by rotation, Tudor has already been assigned to the case, and he refuses to back down—I actually think he’s looking forward to it.” He shook his head. “As for the date, he won’t hear of that being changed either. In any case, the Lord Chancellor’s Department, which administers the judges and the courts, has already begun its transition to independence—the deputy in that department is himself black, and is not about to do us any favors. I think he is looking forward to this case, too.”
Sandys shifted in his seat. “We also know that the American ambassador in Nairobi is taking a keen interest in the trial—Richard Sutton Senior went to see him while he was in town, and reminded him he was a big donor to the President’s campaign. That’s another reason this case is a tinderbox. There’s nothing to be done. The case goes ahead.”
Natalie said nothing. Why was Sandys here? She suspected she was about to find out.
“Tudor has seen the case papers—they are passed to the judge as a matter of routine once a date is set. So he knows the nature of the evidence against Ndekei, he knows that your evidence is the main plank in our case.”
He paused, sipped some more water.
“We all know, Natalie, that the only way this case will not go forward is if you withdraw your testimony—now, before you jump down my throat, let me finish.” He raised his hand as if to stop her physically attacking him, though she had no intention of doing so. “I know how committed you are to giving evidence, how you feel loyalty to Richard Sutton, and to Professor North. I know how you feel that you must tell the court what you saw. And I know from Eleanor here that you are from a religious family, and that too affects your attitude. But I want to mention one argument that will, I hope, persuade you to change your mind.”
He leaned forward in his chair.
“This latest outrage by Tudor, and the fact that Ndekei will be sentenced to hang, perhaps on the very day that the independence talks begin in London, means that we could see riots in Nairobi, riots in which people—maybe dozens of people—could be killed. Is that what you want?”
He shook his head. “I appeal to you as a scientist, a pragmatist. I ask you to consider that circumstances have changed. I know that Eleanor has used the argument that the work of the gorge is of m
ore importance than the life of one man. I happen to agree with her but I know you don’t and that’s not the argument I am using now. I simply point out that the situation has changed—with the appointment of Tudor as judge, following his behavior in this latest break-in case, with the date for the Ndekei trial being set when it is, and with the constitutional conference being set in London at the same time. All of which, taken together, means that this trial could be a major political event, it could inflame passions, it could set off riots, it could cause far more deaths than have occurred already.”
He wiped the palms of his hands with a handkerchief.
“All I’m saying is that, in the new circumstances, it would be natural for you to decide that you can’t be sure, anymore, of what you saw that night. You have already said that you didn’t see Ndekei’s face, but recognized him only from his shuffle. Anyone can make a mistake, read too much into what they saw in the night. If the figure wasn’t shuffling, it could have been anybody.”
Pause.
“But I did see him shuffling and in any case he has admitted the killing.”
“Yes, I know, we all know. But we all know too that he is not required to mount his defense until after the prosecution have presented their case. If there is no case to answer, he will not have to explain himself. The racial element, the tribal element, the tinderbox issue of skin color, will go away. By letting Ndekei go free, one individual, you may be saving many lives that will be lost if the case sparks rioting.”
A long pause.
Outside the shade of the tent, the sun beat down. The smell of diesel was strong today, so many vehicles had been used.
Natalie was sweating all over. Her shirt clung to her flesh, the damp, dark patches showing through. The cooling effect of the shower had quite worn off.
She wiped her brow with her sleeve.
She had rehearsed so many of Sandys’s arguments in her head over the days and weeks.
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