The Mission Song (29 page)

We’ve done coffee and paid the bill out of Maxie’s converted dollars. In a minute it will be time to go home to Mr Hakim’s. Hannah has helped herself to one of my hands and is examining the palm, thoughtfully tracing its lines with her fingernail.

‘Am I going to live for ever?’ I ask.

She shakes her head dismissively and goes on examining my captive palm. There were five of them, she murmurs in Swahili. Not nieces really. Cousins. But she thinks of them as her nieces even now. Born to the same aunt who looked after her in Uganda and is currently looking after Noah. They were all the children the aunt had. No sons. They were aged six to sixteen. She recites their names, all Biblical. Her eyes are lowered and she is still talking to my hand and her voice has flattened to a single note. They were walking home along the road. My uncle and the girls, in their best clothes. They had been to church and their heads were full of prayer. My aunt was not well, she had stayed in bed. Some boys came up to them. Interahamwe from across the border in Rwanda, doped out of their minds and looking for entertainment. They accused my uncle of being a Tutsi spy, cut the girls’ tendons, raped them, and tossed them into the river, chanting
butter! butter!
while they drowned. It was their way of saying they would make butter out of all Tutsis.

‘What did they do to your uncle?’ I ask of her averted head.

Tied him to a tree. Made him watch. Left him alive to tell the village.

In some kind of reciprocity, I tell her about my father and the whipping post. I have never told anybody but Brother Michael until now. We walk home and listen to Haj being tortured.

She sits upright across the room, as far away from me as she can be. She has put on her nurse’s official face. Its expression is locked. Haj may scream, Tabizi may rant and taunt him, Benny and Anton do their worst with whatever Spider obligingly ran up for them from his toolbox, but Hannah remains as impassive as a judge with eyes for nobody, least of all for me. When Haj pleads for mercy, her expression is stoical. When he pours scorn on Tabizi and the Mwangaza for cutting their dirty deal with Kinshasa, it barely falters. When Anton and Benny wash him under the shower she emits a muted exclamation of disgust, but this in no way transmits itself to her face. When Philip appears on the scene and starts to talk Haj round with sweet reason, I realise she has been sharing every living second of Haj’s agony, just as if she were ministering to him at his bedside. And when Haj demands three million dollars for selling out his country, I expect her to be at the very least indignant, but she merely lowers her eyes and shakes her head in sympathy.

‘That poor show-off boy,’ she murmurs. ‘They killed his spirit.’

At which point, wishing to spare her the final mockery, I am about to switch off the tape, but she stays my hand.

‘It’s just singing from now on. Haj tries to make it better for himself. He can’t,’ I explain tenderly.

Nevertheless on her insistence I play the tape to the end, starting with Haj’s tour of the Mwangaza’s drawing room, and ending with the slap of crocs as he stomps defiantly along the covered way to the guest suite.

‘Again,’ she orders.

So I play it again, after which for a long time she sits motionless.

‘He’s dragging one foot, you heard that? Maybe they damaged his heart.’

No, Hannah, I hadn’t noticed him dragging his foot. I switch off the tape but she doesn’t stir.

‘Do you know that song?’ she demands.

‘It’s like all the songs we sang.’

‘So why did he sing it?’

‘To cheer himself up, I suppose.’

‘Maybe it’s you he’s cheering up.’

‘Maybe it is,’ I concede.

Hannah is practical. When she has a problem to solve she makes for the root of it and works her way from there. I have Brother Michael, she has her Sister Imogène. At her Mission school Imogène taught her everything she knew. When she was pregnant in Uganda, Imogène sent her letters of comfort. Imogène’s Law, never to be forgotten in Hannah’s view, argues that since no problem exists in isolation, we must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn. Only when we have truly done this—and not until—will God point us the right way. Given that this was Hannah’s
modus operandi
, both in her work and in her life at large, I could not object to the somewhat bald interrogation to which, with all due gentleness and occasional reassuring caresses, she now subjected me, using French as our language of clarity.

‘How and when did you steal the tapes and notepads, Salvo?’

I describe my final descent to the boiler room, Philip’s surprise appearance, and my narrow escape.

‘During the flight back to Luton, did anybody look at you suspiciously or ask you what was in your night-bag?’

Nobody.

‘You are sure?’

As sure as I can be.

‘Who knows by now that you have stolen the tapes?’

I hesitate. If Philip decided to return to the boiler room after the team’s departure and take a second look inside the burn-bag, they know. If Spider, on his arrival in England, checked his tapes before handing them over for archival purposes, they know. Or if whoever he handed them over to decided to check them for themselves, they know. I’m not sure why I adopted a patronising tone at this point, but it was probably in self-defence.

‘However,’ I insist, resorting to the style of the long-winded barristers I am occasionally obliged to render, ‘whether or not they know, there is little doubt that
technically
I am in serious breach of the Official Secrets Act. Or am I? I mean how
official
are these secrets? If I myself am deniable, then so presumably are the secrets. How can an interpreter who doesn’t exist be accused of stealing secrets that don’t exist when he’s acting on behalf of a no-name Syndicate which, by its own insistence, doesn’t exist either?’

But Hannah, as I might have guessed, is less impressed than I am by my courtroom oratory.

‘Salvo. You have robbed powerful employers of something that is precious to them. The question is whether they will find out, and if they catch you, what will they do to you? You said they will attack Bukavu in two weeks. How do you know this?’

‘Maxie told me. On the plane home. It’s about taking the airport. Saturday’s a football day. The white mercenaries will arrive by Swiss charter, the black mercenaries will pretend to be a visiting football team.’

‘So now we have not two weeks but thirteen days.’

‘Yes.’

‘And not certainly but possibly, you are a wanted man.’

‘I suppose I am.’

‘Then we must go to Baptiste.’

She takes me in her arms and for a time we forget everything but one another.

We are lying on our backs, both staring at the ceiling, and she is telling me about Baptiste. He is a Congolese nationalist who is passionate for a united Kivu and has recently returned from Washington where he was attending a study forum on African consciousness. The Rwandans have sent their thugs several times to track him down and kill him but he is so smart that he has always outwitted them. He knows all the Congolese groups including the bad ones. In Europe, in America, and in Kinshasa.

‘Kinshasa where the fatcats come from,’ I suggest.

‘Yes, Salvo. Where the fatcats come from. Also many good and serious people like Baptiste who care about the Eastern Congo and are prepared to take risks to protect us from our enemies and exploiters.’

I want to agree unconditionally with everything she says. I want to be as Congolese as she is. But the rat of jealousy, as Brother Michael used to call it, is gnawing at my entrails.

‘So even though we know that the Mwangaza has cut a dirty deal in Kinshasa,’ I suggest, ‘or Tabizi has, or his people have, you still think it’s safe to go to the Mwangaza’s representative here in London and blow the whole story to him? You trust him that much.’

She lifts herself onto her side and stares down at me.

‘Yes, Salvo. I trust him that much. If Baptiste hears what we have heard and decides that the Mwangaza is corrupt, which I do not yet believe, then Baptiste, because he is honourable and dreams of peace for all Kivu as we do, will know who to warn and how to prevent the catastrophe that is round the corner.’

She flops back and we resume our study of Mrs Hakim’s ceiling. I ask the inevitable question: how did she meet him?

‘It was his group who organised the coach trip to Birmingham. He is Shi as the Mwangaza is, so it was natural that he saw the Mwangaza as the coming man. But that does not blind him to the Mwangaza’s frailties.’

Of course not, I assure her.

‘And at the last minute, just before our coach departed, completely unexpectedly he jumped aboard and gave an impressive address on the prospects of peace and inclusiveness for all Kivu.’

To you personally? I ask.

‘Yes, Salvo. To me personally. Out of thirty-six people in the coach, he spoke only to me. And I was completely naked.’

Her first objection to my preferred champion, Lord Brinkley, was so absolute that it smacked to me of Sister Imogène’s fundamentalism.

‘But Salvo. If wicked people are dragging us into war and stealing our resources, how can there be grades of guilt among them? Surely each one is as evil as the next, since all are complicit in the same act?’

‘But Brinkley’s not like the others,’ I replied patiently. ‘He’s a figurehead like the Mwangaza. He’s the kind of man the others march behind when they want to do their thieving.’

‘He is also the man who was able to say yes.’

‘That’s right. And he’s the man who expressed his shock and moral outrage, if you remember. And practically accused Philip of double-dealing while he was about it.’ And as a clincher: ‘If he’s the man who can pick up the phone and say yes, he can also pick it up and say no.’

Pressing my case harder, I drew on my wide experience of the corporate world. How often had I not observed, I said, that men at the helm were unaware of what was being done in their name, so preoccupied were they with raising funds and watching the market? And gradually she began nodding her acceptance, in the knowledge that there were after all areas of life where my grasp exceeded hers. Piling on the arguments, I reminded her of my exchange with Brinkley at the house in Berkeley Square: ‘And what happened when I mentioned Mr Anderson’s name to him? He hadn’t even heard of him!’ I ended, and then waited for her response, which I sincerely hoped would not include any further advocacy for Baptiste. Finally I showed her my letter, thanking me for my support:
Dear Bruno
, signed,
Yours ever, Jack
. Even then she didn’t totally give up: