The Weight of Numbers (44 page)

Often, once they were rotated back to desks in Washington, these same staffers found themselves hankering after their old retinue, and this is where I came in. My operation, which was entirely above-board, exploited a legal loophole exempting foreign nationals from US labour law. By this means I was able to supply the apparatchiks of the UN, the World Bank and the IMF with cheap domestic labour. Better than that, I was pretty much able to guarantee the servants a goodish standard of living and a range of prospects far exceeding anything they'd find at home.

My eager young sub-Saharan jobseekers had all the right papers, and it amused me that the aid industry itself was the inadvertent conduit for their arrival in America.

It was the summer of 1996 before I let Noah Hayden catch up with me.

Nearly thirty years had passed since my lacklustre translations of Guy Debord's
La Societe du Spectacle
had graced the discussions of his New Left Reading Group, but Hayden was effusive. ‘Do you remember those marches?' he exclaimed. This was one of the first things he said to me when we met again. We were both hitting fifty by then, and where I had shrunk and hardened, Hayden had acquired some considerable padding.

We were sitting in the garden of the Mount Soche Hotel in Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi, Mozambique's small, landlocked neighbour. I was here arranging domestic servants for the wealthier delegates at the Southern Africa Development Conference.

‘Do I remember?' I thought I remembered. Voices like tides. The drunkard's walk we did: one miles-long, mutual jostle all the way to Grosvenor Square:
‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!'
These are the sorts of memories that manufacture themselves out of photographs, TV dramas, advertisements, celebrity reminiscences on
Desert Island Discs
; that widen the cracks between the flagstones of recall and smother them completely in the end. Cliché is a word we give to memories that don't need us to validate them any more. They have their own life.

I tried to show willing: ‘I remember writing admiring articles about “Great Leader and Teacher Jack Straw”,' I said. ‘As I recall, my magazine was called
Letter Bomb.'

Hayden grinned. ‘Maoist.'

It was all bluster, all nonsense. I was worried we might run dry, anxious in case he mentioned Deborah. I didn't want to have to act out all those old lies again, years after the event. So I was boisterous: ‘What the fuck's happened to Jack, anyway? Did he take something?'

‘I think the question we are here to discuss,' Hayden said, ‘is, have you?'

For years an industrious civil servant, Noah Hayden was now, by way of reward, a middle manager in the Department for International Development, with an impressive list of ‘interests' to do with New Labour's foreign aid strategy. I knew what he was doing here. The Third Floor wanted a familiar hand to tug my leash. Noah Hayden was their man.

He was here to close me down, or at least, make a show of closing me down. So it was hardly surprising that I had gone into this meeting with a less than level head, teeth gritted against Hayden's complacency, his cereal-packet convictions, his infallible New Labour ideas about right and wrong.

As I saw it, Mozambique had held out against Rhodesia, then South Africa, and weathered all the blandishments of the Cold War, only to lose its independence at last to a handful of western NGOs. Every move the government made had to be countersigned by them or it risked forfeiting its aid. All around the harbour at Beira, international relief organizations were snapping up cheap real-estate. From inside their gated compounds, Scandinavian engineers, sipping imported beer, looked out upon our devastation with a speculative eye.

Although FRELIMO had clung on to power after the civil war, misfortune had softened it up nicely. In following the advices of the World Bank, it had had to defer indefinitely its promise of free universal education. Marxism-Leninism was abandoned. In Maputo, meanwhile,
the UN operation ONUMOZ had revived the local economy so that the daughters of famous Lourenço Marques streetwalkers – girls of fifteen, girls of twelve – were trading out of their mothers' old trysting places along the bay and promenade. When I finally shook myself out of my torpor and took a good, hard look at what my adopted country had become, it seemed obvious what career I should pursue.

For months I had being watching from my glassless tenth-floor window as, one by one, my fellow
cooperantes
had abandoned Katalayo's dream of independence for menial jobs in the aid industry. I wasn't ready to buckle under, but there was obviously no future in education, still less in government service.

The first people Nick Jinks and I ever ‘trafficked' were families made homeless when the World Bank insisted on denationalizing Mozambique's rental market.

Hayden had neither the sophistication to understand nor the desire to conceal how angry and disappointed he was over my new line of work. ‘Have you?'

‘Have I what?' I said, teasing him.

‘Taken something.'

‘I'm sorry,' I smiled, leaving him shipwrecked on the shoals of metaphor, ‘I don't follow you.'

Hayden had his alibi for this ‘accidental' meeting already prepared, and when the direct approach guttered out, he treated me to the scenic route: ‘The F.O.'s getting rather jittery about the spread of the Congolese mafia. You know they run the bus concessions around here?'

‘I didn't know that,' I said. ‘No.'

Noah Hayden smiled. ‘But you have dealings with them.'

That my work so offended the sensibilities of men like Hayden wearied me. What would he rather I dealt in? Drugs? Diamonds? Ivory? Africa's export markets had been so spectacularly decimated, human beings were one of the few resources we had left to trade.

To trade in people? In Hayden's mind, I had fallen off the map in the
most spectacular fashion, abandoning FRELIMO and my principles. He couldn't see why I was so hostile to the charitable intervention he was here to promote. What was I kicking against? The truth – that I was still fighting Katalayo's revolution, shaking off the colonial yoke and flying the flag of liberty and self-determination when half FRELIMO had thrown in the towel – this was something Hayden didn't know how to respond to. If I was such an unreconstructed sixties throwback, how come I was so successful, travelling for business between my home in Beira, Maputo and the northern capital, Nampula; then abroad, as far as Kenya and Nigeria, Mali and the oil states of the Middle East? Or look at it the other way: how could a man claim political principles who provided under-fives as jockeys for camel-races in the United Arab Emirates one day, and rushed an ice-box full of human kidneys air freight to an exclusive clinic in Botswana the next? Of course Hayden didn't understand me. He imagined politics and crime were different things.

It pleased Noah Hayden to show himself to me. (Easy enough to imagine his home: cricket cups on the mantelpiece, music certificates framed in the bathroom.) It pleased him to know, from his extensive and industrious reading of the CIA
Yearbook
and who knew what other dryas-dust public sources, things about the region that I appeared not to know. In his mid-fifties, Noah Hayden was still a puppy, eager to please, pleased to impress. Was he dangerous? Certainly – as a man is dangerous who is set in motion by others; whose actions are innocent of their effects. A man like that cannot be read.

A waiter passed our table. Hayden waved him over and handed him back his steak sandwich: ‘Could you? The meat's a bit underdone. Thank you so much. Thank you.'

Hosting this year's Southern Africa Development Conference – the region's major annual political event – had thrown tiny, poor, lackadaisical Malawi into a tizz. Special SADC numberplates had been issued. Every bank in town had a dedicated SADC window, always open, for the negotiation of local currencies. Police and army
helicopters hovered precariously above the streets, trailing convoys of statesmen and dignitaries from the airport. Army checkpoints littered the streets in and out of major towns. In Blantyre, Christmas decorations cheered the only roundabout, and men in orange boilersuits were working around the clock to fill the worst potholes with sand and pitch. The town's hundreds of street traders had been banished to the derelict football ground.

Here we were, drinking gin and tonic in a country where life expectancy was plunging through the mid-thirties and the government had just voted to bury the country's former dictator in a gold coffin, and any minute now Hayden was going to start using words like ‘human rights'.

‘The trouble with you, Saul,' said Hayden, ‘is you're political to just the right degree to excuse your cynicism.'

I blinked at him.

‘I imagine you say to yourself: “They're better off where they're going than where they are now.”'

‘Not really,' I said, determined not to show a hit. Of course they were bloody better off.

‘Why then?' It was his big moment. ‘Why do you do what you do?'

Did he really think, for one second, that people like me were incapable of philosophy? That we had no idealism?

I didn't answer him. I had no wish to play politics, or to match his belligerence. And how else would it have come over? The world I live in. The world I have had a hand in shaping.

Each moonless night, hulks registered in Cambodia ply the seaways from Lebanon to Syria to Cyprus. Fishing boats from Somalia run aground on the beaches of Mocha. A whole mile from the Spanish shore, snakeheads throw children into the sea first so the women will follow; then they torch the ship.

The waiter came back with Hayden's sandwich; this time there was no steak in it. ‘You said you didn't want it,' said the waiter, nonplussed, when Hayden complained.

The waiter was local. The following week the conference got started, and the hotel laid off every waiter, cook, bell-boy and maid, and hired South Africans in their place.

That same week, in the northern Transvaal, irate, unemployed locals were throwing Malawian immigrant miners out of speeding trains. In France, meanwhile, an Iraqi Kurd died after leaping twenty feet from a bridge onto the roof of a goods train, only to slip and fall across an electrified rail; six Russians stole a speedboat from a Calais marina, gunned the engine so brutally it exploded, and found themselves having to row across one of the world's busiest shipping lanes; and a middle-aged Lithuanian couple spent ten hours floundering around in the English Channel on children's toy air mattresses. When the English coastguard picked them up barely five hundred yards from the Kent coast they were still, somehow, in possession of a set of matching luggage.

What Hayden couldn't or didn't want to see was that this ‘crime' he is so keen to stem is itself a kind of revolution. The vision of Franz Fanon and Jorge Katalayo is dead. Only has-beens like Mugabe believe in it now. So be it. The Third World's revolution – the
need
in the Third World for revolution – lives on.

This time, we are going to do things differently. There will be no attempt at, or expectation of, fair dealing. From our first meeting in 1992 to the operation's collapse in 1999, Nick Jinks and I arranged cross-border transportation for more than ten thousand men, women and children. Ten thousand pioneers, missionaries, merchant adventurers. Compared to the big distributed family networks, the trans-national combines, not to mention the refugee grapevines themselves, Nick and I were small beer.

Ten thousand mouths. The West wants to play by the market? Then so will we. It doesn't matter how many Noah Haydens there are in the world, chasing myopic agendas across continents they think still belong to them. We are going to eat the West, the way the West ate us.

*

‘So what went wrong?'

Stacey was scraping up the remains of a dish of yoghurt. There was a mouthful of eggs benedict left on the plate in front of me. Numbly, I scooped it up, chewed, swallowed. It didn't taste of anything.

Through the plate glass windows of the hotel room, the bright sky was dirtied here and there with scraps of last night's raincloud. For the first time in my life I was making confession.

‘Saul?'

I drank my coffee, and I told her. What the hell.

Friday, 12 March 1999. After nearly twenty-four hours of air travel, I booked into a Glasgow airport hotel, only to discover the circus had come to town.

Red Nose Day. For lunch, an unsatisfying encounter, interrupted by the maid. In the evening, Johnny Depp and Dawn French in a
Vicar of Dibley
charity special.

About ten to midnight, Nick Jinks finally phoned me. By his voice – it cracked like a crust of salt – I could tell he was crying.

He'd been supposed to call mid-evening, to tell me our consignment of fifty-eight men, women and children were safely delivered to the tender mercies of the Scottish casual labour market. Instead he was ringing me from a layby outside Carlisle to tell me he had killed them all.

And where the button was, to operate the fan on his T.I.R. trailer.

And where the levers were, to open the vents.

And where the vents were, which he closed before Portsmouth customs and forgot to re-open. On and on, round and around.

‘Open the doors.'

Fear had made him stupid.

‘Open the doors. Look inside.'

‘Fuck,' he said, between inhales. ‘Fuck you.'

‘The ventilation is on, yes?'

‘I'm not fucking looking.'

‘Is the ventilation on now?'

‘I'm not looking.'

‘Tell me you've turned the ventilation on.'

‘Fuck off.'

‘Nick, turn the ventilation on.' I went to the window with the mobile pressed to my ear, and I looked up into the sky.

‘Nick, listen to me, they could still be alive. Nick.'

There was nothing to see. No star shone fiercely enough to penetrate the airport's sodium glare.