Acts of faith (91 page)

“You astonish me,” Fitzhugh said. “You’re saying that because she called DCA on us, this is her fault? That she should have expected retaliation?”

Douglas replied that he wasn’t saying that at all. There had been no retaliation. The UN had done what it did for its own reasons. Tara had added two and two and come up with five, inventing an intrigue to explain her misfortune.

Fitzhugh had anticipated a denial like that; it dismayed him nonetheless. A UN Land Rover cruised by, throwing up a rooster-tail of fine dust.

“Douglas, please. Tara is a deliberate woman, she’s not the kind to jump to conclusions or make wild allegations. She said she wasn’t guessing, that she
knew.
”

“And you believe her?”

“I have a hard time thinking that it was coincidence.”

“Look, we’ve got bigger, faster planes that deliver more quicker and for less. My guess is that UN big shots figured there was no point any longer in her having a call sign. We’re the future, she’s the past. Nobody at Knight Air, including me, had anything to do with what’s happened to her, okay? It’s important to me that you believe me. We’ve come a long way together, from next to nothing to eight million last year, and we’re looking at ten for this year. Couldn’t have done it without you, my man.”

Fitzhugh had to actively resist the tingle this encomium sent through him: the narcotic of Douglas’s approbation. “For the same reason, I would like to believe you.”

“But, right? You would like to believe me, but,” Douglas said, now with an edge to his words. “Okay, here’s a but for you. It’s important to
you
to believe me, because I can’t have my operations manager thinking I’m some kind of crook. And I don’t think you’d be happy working for a guy like that.”

The remark wasn’t quite a warning, more a clarification of what was at stake for Fitzhugh. He didn’t think Douglas would have the nerve to sack him—he knew too much—but if he believed Tara, then he would be morally bound to quit, which he couldn’t afford, not with his wedding just ten weeks away. Believe Tara or believe Douglas—he resolved the dilemma by finding a sliver of gray in this black and white choice.

“What’s really important isn’t that I believe you, for your sake or mine,” he said. “The important thing is that Tara believes that you had nothing to do with it.”

“All right, counselor, how do I do that? Send her flowers?”

“You could ask Timmerman to do the opposite of what she says he’s done. Have him talk to his UN cronies and see what he can do about reinstating her call sign. Even if it didn’t work, the gesture alone would—”

Douglas stopped short and swatted the air. “The competition gets into a jam, and I’m supposed to help them out of it? To prove that I’m innocent? I have got to hear why.”

“Two reasons. Tara made a very clear threat. I have no idea what she has in mind, but if she has an inkling about—”

“Thought we agreed that she couldn’t know a damned thing about that,” Douglas interrupted.

“An inkling, I said. Things have a way of getting around. She wouldn’t need to make an airtight case, just dig up enough to raise suspicions in the wrong places. Is it worth the risk? You don’t have to do what I suggested, only do something to convince her.”

“So what’s the second reason?”

Fitzhugh paused, gazing toward the golden rim of the Mogilla range. “Diana and I are going to be married.”

Douglas regarded him with a neutral expression.

“She is seeing to the arrangements. Of course she’ll invite Tara, and I will invite you. I would like the wedding to take place in a—in a what? A tranquil atmosphere, not with some war between Tara and you.”

“You’ve thought this through?” Douglas asked, squinting at him.

“Thought it to death,” Fitzhugh answered, happy to be off the previous topic, however briefly. “We decided on the trip to Tsavo. You’re the first to know.”

Douglas pumped his hand and slapped him on the shoulder. “Then I’ll be the first to congratulate you. All right, I don’t want to spoil your wedding. I’ll talk to Timmerman, but I can’t make any promises beyond that.”

How sincere was he? Fitzhugh couldn’t judge.

If Timmerman did speak to his former UN colleagues, his effort wasn’t successful. Thirty-four days later Pathways Limited went under, and not entirely, Fitzhugh was forced to admit, because Tara had lost her UN contracts. Her skills as a pilot weren’t matched by her skills as a businesswoman. The company, which to all outward appearances was built on rock, turned out to rest on the unstable sands of borrowed money. Its marginal profits, after paying off staff salaries, leases, and monthly charges on bank loans, had gone into building and maintaining the plush Pathways camp, which didn’t earn enough to sustain itself. With more prudent management and substantial financial reserves, she could have weathered the blow. She had to cancel her leases and return the planes to their owners. Those registered to Pathways were sold. Over the next month company pilots, with Jepps aviation maps tucked under their arms, took off to deliver the aircraft to their buyers in Europe, Russia, and elsewhere in Africa. Douglas, who at times was tone deaf in personal relations, offered to buy one of her Cessnas for full market value. He considered this a generous, if not a chivalrous, gesture and was shocked when she told him he was lucky she didn’t slap his face and that she wouldn’t sell him the plane for twice its worth.

The Pathways terminal, that pocket of order and cleanliness amid Loki’s dirt and disarray, was closed down. A Kenyan businessman bought the compound for a song but allowed Tara to remain in her bungalow for a modest rent. She was left with one employee, her assistant, Pamela Smyth, and one Cessna Caravan that she owned outright and flew on short hops for the independent agencies. In one month and four days, after a decade of hard effort and risk, she had been thrown back to where she’d begun—one woman and one small airplane.

She had been ruined but not defeated and bore up under her ordeal with stoical grace. She maintained her erect, purposeful carriage; she took care of her appearance, protecting the asset of her beauty from the demands of its creditor; and she vowed to start over, though at fifty-eight it was doubtful she could.

By this time her version of events had become accepted by almost everyone in Loki—she was the victim of a dirty trick. Douglas continued to assert, to anyone who would listen, that he hadn’t engineered her downfall. Its swiftness proved that Pathways had been badly run and would have gone under eventually without a push from him. Fitzhugh urged him to keep his mouth shut. His commentaries on Tara’s mismanagement came off as gloating, while his repeated protests of innocence suggested guilt. For his part, suffering from a bad conscience, Fitzhugh could not face Tara. He dreaded the chance that he would round a corner one day and there she would be before him, unavoidable, her very presence a reproach.

But soon another matter commanded his and Douglas’s attention. The SPLA had failed to pay Yellowbird for two arms deliveries to the Nuba mountains. SPLA representatives in Nairobi and Kampala, from where the weapons shipments originated, promised to come up with the money, but after a full week passed without its appearance, Wesley declared that he was not going to fly another mission until he saw it. He and Mary were on strike. Douglas, whose zeal for the Nuban crusade had not diminished, appealed to him to call off his work stoppage. Michael Goraende was about to launch his dry-season offensive and needed every rifle and bullet he could get. A great deal was at stake, and that was more important than Wesley’s share of the unpaid charter fees, a mere eighteen thousand dollars. Wesley was unmoved. He wasn’t about to risk his and Mary’s necks for nothing. The disagreement degenerated into an argument, the argument into a scene, with Fitzhugh acting, unsuccessfully, as referee. He might as well have tried to mediate a fight between a long-married couple who hated each other. There in the cramped hotbox of the office, the two men said things best left unsaid. They never had been compatible, but the harshness of their words hinted at a deeper difference: a fundamental antagonism that they had repressed for the sake of the company and that now erupted.

It almost came to a fistfight when Douglas stated that the older man had lost his nerve and was using the nonpayment as a convenient excuse to put himself out of harm’s way. Thrusting out his chest, Wesley bulled him into a corner of the room. “I was taking ground fire when you were still shittin’ your britches,” he said, and with a sneer, tugged at the bill of Douglas’s cap. “You’re one to talk about nerve. I got the lowdown on your air force record a while back. Ran into a guy named Mendoza. Ring a bell?”

Douglas was silent.

“Yeah, it does. Ding dong. You’re worse than a fool and a hypocrite, you’re a goddamned fraud.” He gave Douglas’s cheek a contemptuous pat and left.

“What was he talking about, your air force record?” Fitzhugh asked.

Douglas stood rooted in the corner, looking at the door as if he could still see Wesley’s back passing through it. “No idea,” he replied.

The humiliated expression on his face said otherwise, but Fitzhugh did not press the issue.

Douglas sat down. “If I could fire that son of a bitch, I would.”

“What is going on with you?” Fitzhugh slapped his palm on his desk. “Are you trying to see how many enemies you can make around here?”

“Nope. But it looks like I’m going to have to take the next load in.”

“You will do no such thing. It would take one mishap, one small mishap, to have a plane registered to Knight Air discovered with weapons aboard. What we need to do is to get the SPLA to pay up and Wesley flying again.”

“Any ideas?”

He suggested they enlist Barrett’s aid. Barrett had high-level contacts in the rebels’ political arm in Nairobi. Possibly a word from him would convince them to convince their military brethren to pay the debt.

Combative as ever, Barrett was delighted to assist in any way he could. When, however, his discussions with his contacts produced nothing more substantial than more promises, he decided to play a direct role, offering to pay the sum in arrears out of his agency’s funds. That suited Wesley. As long as it wasn’t counterfeit, he didn’t care where the money came from. Thirty-six thousand dollars was then transferred from International People’s Aid to Knight Air’s account. Wesley withdrew his half and the next morning took off for the Uganda border to pick up a shipment of antiaircraft and mortar ammunition.

Now Barrett had to account for the expenditure. He arrived in Loki one afternoon to work alongside Fitzhugh to make sure that his books and Knight Air’s agreed, in the event his were audited by his agency’s board in Canada. They invented humanitarian aid flights, fabricating dates, destinations, manifests, cargo weights, and fees until the full amount was covered, on paper. Fitzhugh, now party to embezzlement, had the uneasy feeling—it was almost premonitory—that with each strand he wove into the ever-expanding web of deception, he was trapping himself.

“Does this trouble you at all?” he asked Barrett, who replied that it did, a “wee bit,” and then rationalized: His role was to deliver aid to Sudan, and guns were merely another form of aid.

When they completed their creative work, they went to the Hotel California bar for a restorative. There Barrett revealed that the secret of Fitzhugh’s and Diana’s wedding was out—a week ago she’d asked him to perform the service.

“First Quinette and Michael, now you and Diana. I’m specializin’ in odd pairings.”

“Because you are oddly paired yourself.”

“I am, sure enough. Heard about Tara’s troubles, by the way. Bloody shame.”

A bloody shame, Fitzhugh agreed. The former priest of Rome stirred his whiskey and soda and looked off at two aid workers who, in sandals and ragged T-shirts, resembled itinerant hippies. “Diana’s quite upset about it. Spoke to her only yesterday. She invited Tara to the nuptials and she got a regrets, with a full explanation. It might be a good idea if you talked to her. Call that a bit of advice from your minister.”

“Advice?” asked Fitzhugh, with a buzz of apprehension.

Barrett’s glance moved back to him. “I’m fond of you both. Take a day or two off, have a talk with her.”

She was taking hurdles in the ring when he arrived, a sight that always moved him. Her poise, crouched over the horse’s neck, booted legs bent, the beauty of mount and rider flowing over a bar as one, and the danger of a balk or fall combined to arrest his breath in fear and admiration. Focused on what she was doing, she didn’t notice him, standing outside the rail, until she cantered toward the barrier nearest him, a wall of straw bales. She reined up sharply, the horse tossing its head as if confused by the sudden halt. She patted its neck and walked it to the rail, looked down at Fitzhugh with a cool, remote expression, and in a voice that matched, said she wasn’t expecting him.

“I thought to surprise you. I saw John up in Loki. He suggested we ought to talk about . . . well, I’m not sure what.”

“And you needed him to tell you that? What would you have done if you hadn’t seen him?”

His apprehensions were confirmed—this wasn’t going to be a pleasant visit. “He told me you were upset.”

“ I have to cool her down. I’ll see you in the garden in ten. Ask Faraj to make you some tea.”

She strode into the garden like a Prussian, boots clacking on the fieldstone walk, and without a touch or word, sat across the round table from him, creating a physical symbol for her emotional distance. She placed an envelope on the table, opened it, and removed a wedding announcement and a letter, filled out on both sides.