Acts of Faith

BOOK ONE

Outlaws and Missionaries

 

PART ONE

Man of All Races

IN HIS EARLY twenties, after two undistinguished and troubled years at university, Fitzhugh Martin had achieved a modest celebrity as center forward for the Harambe Stars, which are to Kenyan soccer as the New York Yankees are to baseball. A sportswriter had nicknamed him “The Ambler,” because he never seemed to run very fast, his leisurely movements caused not by slow feet but by a quick tactical eye that allowed him to read the field in a glance and be where he needed to be with economy of motion.

He traveled with the club throughout Africa, to Europe, and once to the United States. He saw something of the world, and what he saw—namely the shocking contrast between the West and his continent—convinced him to do something more with himself than chase a checkered ball up and down a field. He’d heard a kind of missionary call, quit soccer, and became a United Nations relief worker, first in Somalia and then in Sudan.

That was the story he told, but it wasn’t entirely true: a serious knee injury that required two operations was as responsible for his leaving the sport as a Pauline epiphany. Or maybe the injury was the mother of the epiphany; sitting on the bench with his taped knee, he knew his career was as good as over and wondered what to do with the rest of his life. Of course, if he hadn’t had a social conscience to begin with, he would not have made the choice he did, and that conscience was formed by his ancestry. He had come to Kenya from the Seychelles Islands when he was eight years old, the eldest of three children born to a French, Irish, and Indian father and a mother who was black, Arab, and Chinese. The emigration took Fitzhugh from a place where tribalism was unknown and race counted for little to a land where tribe and race counted for everything. His family wasn’t poor—his father managed a coastal resort near Mombasa—but he came to identify with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, because he grew up on the margins of Kenyan society, a boy without a tribal allegiance or a claim to any one race, for all the races of the earth were in him. He was the eternal outsider who was never allowed to forget that he was an alien, even at the height of his athletic fame. His skin was brown, yet the white Kenyans, children and grandchildren of colonial settlers, were more accepted than he, a tribe unto themselves.

After he worked for a year in Somalia, the UN promoted him to field monitor and assigned him to its operations in Sudan. Now a corporal in the army of international beneficence, he wandered in southern Sudan for weeks at a time, stalking the beast of hunger and devising strategies to hold the numbers of its victims to some acceptable minimum. That vast unhappy region captured him body and soul; it became the stage where Fitzhugh Martin played the role he believed destiny had assigned him. “The goddamned, bleeding, f*cked-up Sudan,” he would say. “I don’t know what it is about that place. It sucks you in. You see some eighteen-year-old who’s been fighting since he was fourteen and can tell you war stories that will give you nightmares, but drop a piece of ice in his hands and he’s amazed. Never seen or felt ice before, never seen water turned to stone, and you get sucked in.” He meant to do all in his power to save the southern Sudanese from the curses of the apocalypse and a few the author of Revelation hadn’t thought of, like the tribalism that caused the southerners to inflict miseries on themselves. That was where his cosmopolitan blood became an advantage. He moved with ease among Dinka, Nuer, Didinga, Tuposa, Boya; the tribes trusted the tribeless man who had no ethnic axes to grind.

He loved being in the bush and hated returning to the UN base at Loki. It had the look of a military installation, ringed by coils of barbed wire. The field managers and flight coordinators and logistics officers—to his eyes a mob of ambitious bureaucrats or risk-lovers seeking respectable adventure—drove around like conquerors in white Land Rovers sprouting tall radio antennae; they lived and worked in tidy blue and white bungalows, drank their gins and cold beers at bars that looked like beach resort tiki bars, and ate imported meats washed down with imported wines. When Loki’s heat, dust, and isolation got to be too much, they went to Europe on R&R, or to rented villas in the cool highland suburbs of Nairobi, where they were waited on, driven, and guarded by servants whose grandparents probably had waited on, driven, and guarded the British sahibs and memsahibs of bygone days. They were the new colonials, and Fitzhugh grew to loathe them as much as he loathed the old-time imperialists who had pillaged Africa in the name of the white man’s burden and the mission civilisatrice.

When he wasn’t in Sudan, he who had grown up on the edge of things dwelled on the edge of the compound, in a mud-walled hut with a makuti roof and two windows lacking glass and screens; it wasn’t much better than the squalid twig-and-branch tukuls of the Turkana settlement that sprawled outside the wire, along the old Nairobi-Juba road. Inside were a hard bed under a mosquito net, a chair, and a desk knocked together out of scrap lumber. Fitzhugh’s only concession to modern comfort was electricity, supplied by a generator; his only bow to interior decoration, the posters of his heroes, Bob Marley, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela. Asceticism did not come naturally to him. Self-denial is easy for people with attenuated desires and appetites; Fitzhugh’s were in proportion to his size. He could down a sixteen-ounce Tusker in two or three swallows and inhaled meals the way he did cigarettes. He loved women, and when he came out of the bush, he would sweep through the compound, scooping up Irish girls and American girls and Canadian girls. (He stayed away from the local females, fearing AIDS or the swifter retribution of a Turkana father’s rifle or spear.) Inevitably, he would feel guilty about indulging himself and go on a binge of monkish abstinence.

He met Douglas Braithwaite exactly two months and eighteen days after the UN fired him, an encounter whose date he would come to recall with as much bitterness as precision. Years later he tried to persuade himself that he and the American had come together for reasons he couldn’t fathom but hoped to discover, hidden somewhere in the machinery of destiny or in the designs of an inscrutable providence. Who among us, when an apparently chance meeting or some other random occurrence changes us profoundly, can swallow the idea that it was purely accidental?

Over and over Fitzhugh would trace the succession of seeming coincidences that caused the path of his life to converge with Douglas’s. He never would have laid eyes on the man if he hadn’t lost his job; he would not have lost it if . . . well, you get the idea. If he could map how it happened, he would find out why.

Eventually Fitzhugh’s mental wanderings led him back to the day he was born, but he was no closer to uncovering the secret design. So he was forced to abandon his quest for the why and settle for the how, a narrative whose beginning he fixed on the day a bonfire burned in the desert.

The High Commissioners of World Largesse, as he called his employers, occasionally overestimated the amount of food they would need to avert mass starvation in Sudan. Blind screw-ups were sometimes to blame; sometimes field monitors deliberately exaggerated the severity of conditions, figuring it was better to err on that side than on the other; and sometimes nature did not cooperate, failing to produce an expected catastrophe. Surpluses would then pile up in the great brown tents pitched alongside the Loki airstrip, tins of cooking oil and concentrated milk, sacks of flour, sorghum, and high-protein cereal stacked on pallets. Once in a while the stuff sat around beyond the expiration dates stamped on the containers. It then was burned. That was standard procedure, and it was followed rigorously, even if the oil had not gone rancid or the flour mealy or the grain rotten.

Mindful that cremating tons of food would make for bad press, the High Commissioners had the dirty work done under cover of darkness at a remote dump site, far out in the sere, scrub-covered plateaus beyond Loki. Truck convoys would leave the UN base before dawn with armed escorts, their loads covered by plastic tarps; for the Turkana, men as lean as the leaf-bladed spears they carried, knew scarcity in the best of times and were consequently skilled and enthusiastic bandits.

And it was the Turkana who blew the whistle. One morning a band of them looking for stray livestock in the Songot mountains, near the Ugandan border, spotted a convoy moving across the plain below and smoke and flames rising from a pit in the distance. The herdsmen went to have a look. That year had been a particularly hard one for the Turkana—sparse rains, the bones of goats and cows chalking the stricken land, shamans crying out to Akuj Apei to let the heavens open. The bush telegraph flashed the news of what the herdsmen had seen from settlement to settlement: The wazungu were burning food! More than all the Turkana put together had ever seen, much less eaten.

The word soon reached Malachy Delaney, a friend of Fitzhugh’s who had been a missionary among the Turkana for so long that they considered him a brother whose skin happened to be white. Apoloreng, they called him, Father of the Red Ox, because his hair had been red when he first came to them. He spoke their dialects as well as they and was always welcome at their rituals and ceremonies. In fact, he was sometimes asked to preside, and anyone who saw him, clapping his hands to tribal songs, leading chants of call and response, had to wonder who had converted whom. Malachy had been reprimanded by the archbishop in Nairobi and once by the Vatican itself for his unorthodox methods.

A frequent topic, when Malachy and Fitzhugh got together over whiskey in one of the expat bars, was Fitzhugh’s employer. Although Malachy was a man of the Left, he once told Fitzhugh that he admired the American senator Jesse Helms, probably the only man on earth who despised the United Nations as much as he. It had encamped in the heart of Turkana land to lavish aid on the Sudanese while doing nothing for his parishioners. Hadn’t helped them dig so much as a single well.

When he learned that the UN was destroying food that could have filled Turkana bellies, he lived up to his nickname. His hair was gray now, but his broad, blocky face, scholarly and pugnacious at the same time, was scarlet when he appeared at Fitzhugh’s tukul to vent his outrage. Destroying it! And it looks like they’ve been making a practice of it, did you know that? Fitzhugh answered that he’d heard as much, but of course he’d never seen it and couldn’t prove it. Proof, if it’s proof you’re needing, here it is, Malachy fumed, producing a charred can of powdered milk from his daypack. The herdsmen had scavenged it from the ashes, he added, and sat down under the eave, on one of the crates that served as Fitzhugh’s veranda furniture.

“More in there if you care to see it. It won’t surprise me if some of the lads ambush a convoy one of these days and take the bloody stuff for themselves, and if they kill somebody in the process, I’ll by God give them absolution in advance.” Malachy looked out across the asphalt meadow of the landing field, toward the huts beyond the barbed-wire fence, their domed roofs leakproofed with green, white, and blue sheets of plastic. “Ah, Fitz, I just might nick a rifle and lead them to it myself.” Malachy had a martial streak; Fitzhugh thought that a part of him regretted joining the priesthood instead of the IRA.

After he’d cooled off, he came up with a sounder plan. He had friends on the staff of the Nation, Nairobi’s most influential paper, and at the Kenya Television Network. If he got advance word about where and when the next burn was going to be, he would see to it that reporters and cameramen were there to record it. A few of his Turkana lads could show them where to hide—it would be a kind of bloodless ambush. The whole sorry scene would be captured on film, and then the UN scoundrels would be shamed into stopping their unconscionable practice. Accurate intelligence would, of course, be critical to success.

Fitzhugh gave him his full attention. He’d returned the week before from the Sudanese province of Bahr el Ghazal, where he’d been sent to conduct a “needs assessment” after Khartoum mounted an offensive against the SPLA. The rebel army didn’t suffer much, but the people did. Villages leveled by Antonov bombers, fields set afire, livestock slaughtered. They were mostly Dinka tribesmen out there, a very tall people with little flesh and fat to spare. Thousands filled the dusty roads: dead men, dead women, and dead children who did not realize they were dead and so struggled on through the heat, past the prostrate forms of those who had acknowledged their doom; struggled on seeking the brief clemency of an acacia’s shade, the small mercy of a cup of water, a handful of sorghum. Each one of those dark, lofty figures looked as insubstantial as a pillar of smoke. My goodness, he thought, listening to Malachy, a tenth of the surplus that had been put to the match could have saved them all.

To abbreviate, his espionage was successful. So was Malachy’s media ambush. The story made the front page and led the nightly news on KTN. Images of sacks, tins, boxes—forty tons of food!—consigned to the flames. The Father of the Red Ox went on the air to condemn the UN in the most florid terms, and to plead for the surpluses to be distributed among his beloved Turkana if they could not be used in Sudan. The foreign press was quick to pick up on the story. Detachments of journalists assaulted Loki. UN officials, feverishly trying to control the damage, issued denials and half-truths. Things were quite exciting for a while, but predictably the scandal died down, the journalists left, and nothing was done. The only actions the High Commissioners took were to bar Malachy from the UN compound and to launch a quiet internal investigation to find out who had tipped him off.

Fitzhugh’s friendship with Malachy was common knowledge. He soon found himself undergoing a cordial but persistent interrogation in the security office. He told a few lies, thought better of it, and confessed, showing no contrition whatever. His supervisor, a Canadian woman, told him he was through. Naturally he did not merely nod and leave. He made a speech, detailing the UN’s sins. She heard him out and, when he was done, told him that he possessed an “insufferably Hebraic soul,” a reference not to his religious affiliation but to his judgmentalism. He expected too much of people and human institutions, she said. Not everyone could be a saint; nor was relief work a religion.

 

FITZHUGH HAD BEEN in the bush for so long that he’d forgotten the pleasant emotions the sea aroused in him. He had gotten used to living away from it but never stopped missing it. When he saw it again, from the balcony of his family’s flat on the coast, he felt as if he’d been reunited with a cherished friend. During his first week of unemployment he spent two or three hours a day staring at it, not a thought in his head. The cobalt vastness of the Indian Ocean, the advance and recession of the tides, the surf’s suck and draw, constant yet never monotonous, awakened vestigial memories of his island childhood. The salty winds cleared the oppressiveness that had been weighing on his soul. His work in Sudan had narrowed his vision and restricted his horizons; cut off from the rest of the world, caught up in the intense emotions fostered by bearing witness to war, starvation, and epidemics, he had almost lost the power to imagine places where people had futures that extended beyond the next day and had dreams of something more than finding a crust of bread. The sea’s breath, scented with the promise of new possibilities hidden beyond the seam of water and sky, assured him that such places still existed and encouraged him to believe that peace and plenty might one day come even to Sudan. At such moments the colors and dimensions of the sea, its sounds and smells, seemed to be those of hope itself.

He loved being back on the old Swahili coast, full of mongrels like himself, children of the sea’s human wrack. It was good to hear music and to wander Mombasa’s sultry and intricate streets; good not to listen for the drone of approaching Antonovs. Maybe it was too good. Fitzhugh’s tendency to swing between extremes kicked in. Having denied himself for so long, he now abandoned himself to the delights of Kenya’s answer to the Costa del Sol or Miami Beach. A few club owners remembered him from his star-athlete days and bought him rounds on the house. An old friend from high school, the son of a local political boss, knew a Nigerian who supplied him with prime-grade cocaine, and the two schoolmates would snort themselves into blabbering insomnia a couple of nights a week. Fitzhugh danced in the discos and slept with English and German and Scandinavian girls as if he’d spent the last six months on one of the trading dhows that sail the monsoons from Mombasa to India.

His conduct appalled his parents. Bad enough that he was thirty-three years old, out of work, and living under their roof. His father told him that he would roll up the welcome mat if he did not find something useful to do with himself, and quickly. Kenya is not an ideal country in which to find employment, so he thought Fitzhugh should go to work at his hotel, starting at the bottom, as a doorman. He was the proper size for that job. The doormen at the Safari Beach Lodge were costumed to look like something out of The Arabian Nights. Fitzhugh could not imagine himself got up like that, grinning at fat tourists, hailing taxis, hefting luggage for tips.

He was saved by something that approached divine intervention and inclined him to believe that his partnership with Douglas Braithwaite had been foreordained. Kenya’s phone service isn’t famous for its reliability, yet Malachy, calling from Nairobi one afternoon, got through on the first try. His ring came as Fitzhugh was leaving his parents’ flat to speak to his father at the hotel. Five seconds later, and he would have been gone.

Malachy had been summoned to the capital for what he called his semiannual dressing-down by the archbishop. During his visit (and here was another coincidence that didn’t seem coincidental to Fitzhugh in retrospect), he happened to bump into an old classmate from the seminary, John Barrett, who had told him about a job opportunity—

“I can’t get away from Irish priests!” Fitzhugh interrupted.

“This would be a former priest,” Malachy informed him. “A former Catholic priest. John was a missionary in Sudan for, oh, I would say fifteen years. It seems a Nuban woman persuaded him that celibacy was an unnatural state. He got some official or other to marry them. Pretty common arrangement in Africa, but the wrong people found out and John had to turn in his collar. So he switched. He’s now an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church of Sudan.”

“And what is the job opportunity? Altar boy? Do Episcopalians have altar boys?”

“John is at present unemployed as a minister,” Malachy replied. “He’s just been hired to direct relief operations in Sudan for a nongovernmental organization, International People’s Aid. He’s looking to hire someone with field experience, and I recommended you. Feel a bit responsible for your situation, don’t you know.”

Fitzhugh hesitated—he’d never heard of International People’s Aid.

“They’re fairly new on the scene, based in Canada, well funded I’m told, all nongovernmental sources. They are planning to take some bold steps. How soon can you get up here?”

Fitzhugh had read somewhere that the greatest happiness lies in living for others. The self and its appetites, the satisfaction of which only yields deeper hungers, are to the soul as mooring cables to an airship. To cut them willingly and without regret is to know true emancipation, the kind that cannot be granted by constitutions, proclamations, manifestos. Yes, he needed a job, but in speaking to Malachy, he realized that seeing hungry mouths fed and knowing that he’d done his bit to feed them had been more gratifying than anything else he’d done. Relief work was a religion, at least to his way of thinking. In a way it was an act of faith that infused his actions with spiritual value. He missed it and the freedom he found in it from the inner tyrant who kept demanding, I want, I want, I want.

He booked a seat on the next morning’s flight to Nairobi. One way.

 

THE REVEREND FATHER Malachy Delaney would have accused himself of speaking high treason if he ever uttered a civil, much less an admiring, word about English aristocracy. Inbred twits who could no longer manage even to be interestingly decadent, their antics fodder for Fleet Street tabloids, their sole achievement was the perpetuation of their titles and privileges decades after their class had outlived its relevance.

He made an exception of Lady Diana Briggs, partly because she was a Kenyan citizen, British by ancestry only, and partly because her title was conferred rather than hereditary, bestowed for her good works throughout Africa. An admirable woman, hardworking and selfless, was how Malachy described her as he and Fitzhugh drove from the airport to her house in Karen, the Nairobi suburb that remained a kind of game reserve for Caucasians. Lady Briggs had spent several years in refugee camps, laboring to repatriate displaced Africans, and when repatriation was out of the question, she helped them emigrate to whatever countries would take them in. She had sponsored scholarships for poor Kenyan children, served with the Red Cross in Rwanda, and had a genius for getting grant money. Now she was lending her expertise, her time, and some of her money to International People’s Aid.

Fitzhugh wasn’t sure how much time or expertise she had, but when he and Malachy got to her place, it was apparent that she didn’t lack for money. Two askaris opened a steel gate, admitting them to a world as remote from grimy, crumbling Nairobi as the land of her ladyship’s forebears. Acres of grass and garden, shaded by tamarind and eucalyptus; a rambling main house with white stucco walls, a clay-tile roof, and a veranda upon which wicker chairs practically begged you to sit down with a drink; a guest cottage; a carriage house with a Mercedes sedan and a Toyota Land Cruiser parked beside it; a small stable, an exercise ring. It was February, the beginning of the dry season, and the air at the foot of the Ngong hills was crisp and clear, scented by frangipani, hibiscus, mimosa. Fitzhugh recalled that perfume, and how it went immediately to his head, like good gin.

While a servant went to summon Diana, the two men waited in the foyer of the main house. Fitzhugh looked at Malachy and raised his eyebrows.

“Ah, now then, Fitz, I know your feelings about upper-crust do-gooders. Believe me, she’s different.”

“Different how?”

Malachy answered that her mind wasn’t the usual hatchery of idiotic schemes to uplift the dark-skinned downtrodden. Diana was practical, hard-headed. She knew what would work in Africa and what would not because she was as African as any Kikuyu, her family having been in Kenya for three generations.

Fitzhugh pointed at the sepia photographs on the foyer walls: brutal sahibs standing over lions they had shot, memsahibs wearing white muslin dresses and severe expressions—you could almost hear them ordering houseboys beaten for trying to clean tarnished silver plate by rubbing it with gravel.

“Atoning for her ancestors’ sins with all her charity work?”

“It isn’t charity,” replied Malachy. “And as for why she does what she does, well now, what difference does that make, so long as she does the right thing?”

“Apoloreng! You are late!”

Her tone was cheerfully scolding: a hostess greeting a habitually tardy but always welcome guest.

Malachy made a pretense of looking at his watch and pleaded heavy traffic. The bloody traffic in Nairobi got worse by the day.

“Everything in this country gets worse by the day,” she said, embraced him, and gave him each of her cheeks to kiss.

Malachy made the introductions. Diana Briggs took a half-step backward and extended her hand as she looked Fitzhugh up and down with the bluest eyes he had ever seen.

“I’d heard you were a footballer, and I must say, you look the part.”

Her smile fell on him like a gift, and her accent, thankfully, lacked the marbles-in-the-mouth mutter of the British upper classes. She spoke with the precision of a BBC news reader.

Fitzhugh was something of a sexist. To his mind, beauty forgave almost everything in a woman. Not that Diana Briggs was exceptionally beautiful; she only seemed so in comparison with the picture he had formed of a stout matron, Malachy having told him that she was in her early fifties. The body that suggested itself under a black cotton blouse and a pair of linen trousers, while it wasn’t slender, was a long way from matronly. If there was any gray in her blond hair, it had been artfully disguised. Only the cat’s whiskers at the corners of her eyes and the crescent furrows at the corners of her mouth betrayed her age, and you had to be within an arm’s length of her to see them; otherwise, you would have sworn she wasn’t beyond thirty-five. All this and the smashing smile made it impossible for Fitzhugh to dislike her, as he’d been prepared to do.

He couldn’t resist complimenting her looks. She responded with a toss of her head and a short, self-deprecatory laugh before telling the servant, in flawless Swahili, to bring in a fresh pot of tea.

They followed her through a hall decorated with ancestral memorabilia—crossed elephant tusks, the hide of a leopard that appeared to have been slain back in the days when Denys Finch-Hatton and Isak Dinesen were loving it up. Diana’s loose trousers flowed about her hips and legs as she walked, and the swirl of linen over flesh would have been erotic if it weren’t for her brisk, straight-backed stride, like a sergeant major’s on parade. They entered a study—a lot of old books, more old photographs and moth-eaten skins, a Masai buffalo-hide shield hanging over a fireplace, in front of which two men sat, backs to the door.

“John, Doug, the circle for our seance is now complete,” Diana said.

The pair stood. One was in his forties, going bald, and stood five-six at the tallest. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his complexion was the color of uncooked oats. This was John Barrett. When, with a kind of reflexive respect, Fitzhugh called him “Father Barrett,” he grinned tightly and reminded him, in a brogue less pronounced than Malachy’s, that he had lost claim to that title.

“It’s just plain John,” he said.

The other man was about Fitzhugh’s height, with thick hair hued like khaki, a slim frame, and a long, thin nose, slightly hooked, giving him the aspect of a handsome raptor. He might have been thirty, though he easily could have passed for an undergraduate. Straight away Fitzhugh knew he was an American. It wasn’t the cowboy boots and Levi’s that declared his nationality, nor the scrubbed, healthy complexion, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower after a game of pick-up basketball. It was the way he stood, chin cocked up, shoulders slouched just a little, projecting the relaxed belligerence of a citizen of the nation that ran the world. Fitzhugh imagined that a young Englishman would have struck a similar stance out in India a century ago, or a young Roman in the court of some vassal Gaul.

“Doug Braithwaite,” he drawled, shaking Malachy’s hand, then Fitzhugh’s, gripping his forearm with his other hand, as though they were old comrades, reunited.

“Fitzhugh Martin.” He flexed his arm after a moment to signal Braithwaite to let it go.

“Great to meet you. Been hearing a lot about you.”

If it’s possible for eyes to embrace another person, his embraced Fitzhugh. They had that effect on everyone, creating an instant intimacy. Clear and gray, giving off the appealing gleam of artificial pearls, they flattered you the moment they fell on you, the directness of their gaze making you feel that he was interested only in you.

“It’s all been good,” he went on. “We’ve got something in common. We’re both on the UN’s shit list.”

“Doug used to fly for the UN out of Loki,” Diana interjected.

“I prefer to say that I flew for an airline contracted to the UN. PanAfrik Airways. Copilot on Hercs mostly,” he added, turning again to Fitzhugh. “I’m surprised we never ran into each other. It’s a big operation out there, but not that big.”

“Evidently it’s big enough for us not to have run into each other. I was in the field most of the time.”

“Got the heave-ho a couple of weeks ago.” There was an undertone of pride rather than shame in the statement. “Ran afoul of regulations. You know what I mean, Fitz.”

Actually, he didn’t quite but was somehow embarrassed to say so. He asked whom Braithwaite was flying for now.

“Myself, if I can ever get my hands on an airplane,” he answered, with a smile that looked a little forced.

“So what regulations did you run afoul of?”

“It would be quicker to tell you which ones I didn’t, Fitz,” came the evasive answer. “Sorry. Is Fitz okay, or do you prefer Fitzhugh?”

The American had very nice manners. Fitz was fine. Braithwaite insisted that he call him Doug.

“Brilliant,” Diana said, displaying her brilliant teeth for emphasis. “Now that we’re all on a first-name basis, shall we get on with things?”

“Things” turned out to be a kind of job interview, with Diana and Barrett asking what exactly Fitzhugh had done for the UN for how long and why he’d left. Malachy had told them all about that, but now apparently they needed to hear it from Fitzhugh himself. Barrett looked elfin, but there was nothing elfin about his manner. Pitched forward in a green leather armchair—the kind you see in men’s clubs—he fired his questions like a prosecutor. There seemed to be an anger in him; he was a regular little kettle on perpetual boil, though the source of the flame wasn’t immediately clear. Whatever, the man’s intensity compensated for his size; it forced everyone to pay attention to him, and (Fitzhugh doing some psychologizing) maybe that was the reason for it.

The servant came in, quietly served tea, and stole out again. The nature of the questions changed. What did Fitzhugh think the southern Sudanese were fighting for? Independence? Autonomy? A unified Sudan under a secular government? No idea, he replied. He wasn’t sure if they knew any longer. Sometimes he had the impression that the rebels were fighting out of sheer habit. After all, they had been at it, off and on, for thirty years.

“Out of habit, you say?” Barrett leaned farther forward, so that his body was bent like a stubby hairpin. “Oh, I cannot agree with that, not at all. They’re fighting because those butchers in Khartoum don’t give them any choice. Fight or die—it’s that simple, and make no mistake about it.”

“I suppose that’s true.” Fitzhugh, feeling a bit like a pupil who has given the wrong answer, glanced sidelong at Malachy for help, but he gave none; nor did Douglas Braithwaite, sitting directly across, long legs outstretched while he chewed on the tips of his aviator’s sunglasses and looked as if he were weighing Fitzhugh’s every word.

“There’s no supposin’ either,” said Barrett. His pallid face glowed. “It’s jihad for the Arabs, and there’s no quarter given in a jihad. Allah gives his stamp of approval to mass murder.” Barrett sat back and took a sip of tea, the color fading from his cheeks. “This war isn’t like these other African dust-ups. It’s a continuation of the Crusades. The crescent versus the cross. Comes down to that, wouldn’t you say?”

The war was nowhere near as clear-cut as that, but a voice in the back of Fitzhugh’s head cautioned him not to voice such an observation. Gray did not appear to be Barrett’s favorite color.

“Pardon me,” he said, wondering if it had been a mistake to buy a one-way ticket. “I’ve come all the way from the coast, thinking you were going to talk to me about a job.”

“And that is what we are doing. Isn’t that what we are doing?”

Barrett glanced at Diana, sitting alongside him, her legs crossed, hands clasped over a knee, hair aglow in the dazzle slicing through the casement windows.

“You’ve wandered a bit far afield,” she said in a voice tinged with exasperation. Soothing the scrapes caused by Barrett’s abrasiveness was probably something she did fairly often. “Your questions seem to be making Fitz uncomfortable.”

Fitzhugh remarked that he did not feel uncomfortable so much as baffled. It was as if Barrett were examining him not for his qualifications and experience but for his political correctness. He said that as a relief worker he had devoted himself to filling empty bellies, not to politics. “An empty belly is an empty belly, and what I think about the politics of the situation doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

“On the contrary. Politics has everything to do with it.”

“That isn’t what I said!” Fitzhugh’s voice broke, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s, as it usually did when he got angry. “I said that what I think about the politics has nothing to do with it.”

“A Jesuit is what you should have been, John Barrett,” Malachy said. “Why are you being so argumentative?”

“And look who’s talkin’. Malachy, there’s no man as contentious as you. I’m not arguin’. It’s dedicated people we’re lookin’ for, committed people. For when the goin’ gets rocky, as rocky it is bound to get.” Barrett removed his glasses, blew on the lenses, and wiped them deliberately with a handkerchief. “Relief work is full of dilettantes. Nice people lookin’ to do some good in the world so they can feel good about themselves. They hand out a few chocolate bars and go home.”

Fitzhugh offered a none-too-amiable smile. “What is it you’re suggesting?”

Barrett, returning his glasses to his face, was about to reply when Douglas made a sound—not a sigh, an exhalation rather, long and slow. It was almost inaudible, yet it had the same effect as a judge’s gavel in a noisy courtroom. The conversation stopped, everyone turned to him. Fitzhugh would always remember that moment distinctly, because it was the first time he’d observed the American’s peculiar power to draw all eyes and ears to himself with nothing more than a vague gesture, a change of expression, or a breath. It was a kind of magnetism, too effortless to have been learned.

“Fitz doesn’t seem like any dilettante to me,” he said in his pleasing drawl. “Seems all right to me, and I’m the one who’ll be working with him. So how about we end the inquisition and tell him what the job is?”

“Splendid suggestion.” Diana, rising, moved in a whisper of cotton and linen to a desk, one of those old campaign things with brass handles and corner brackets, and withdrew a large map, folded up with its printed side out. “Stuffy in here,” she murmured, and cranked a window open. Immediately the intoxicating scent from her gardens filled the room.

Diana spread the map over a table: a pilot’s chart, Fitzhugh saw by the black vector lines fanned across the green of equatorial swamps, the reddish browns and yellows of highlands and arid plains.

He shook a cigarette from his pack and asked Diana if she minded.

“Not at all, now that the window’s open. You are familiar with this neck of the woods?”

A lacquered fingernail fell on one of the brown patches toward the upper edge of the map, marked Jebel al-Nubah in transliterated Arabic, the Nuba mountains. The years that did not show in Diana’s face, Fitzhugh observed, were revealed in the fissured skin of her hands. They disappointed him somehow.

“Never been there,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has, oh, not for some time. No one from the outside.”

“Fitz, I’m gettin’ to be fond of your voice. There’s a smile in it.”

He looked at Barrett, leaning into the table, both sets of knuckles resting on the map, like a general planning a campaign.

“A smile?”

“Your voice smiles, even when you don’t. I believe it’s the cheeriest voice I’ve ever heard.”

“I’m told it’s boyish.”

“I delight in the sound of it.”

“Does that mean I’m hired?”

Barrett made an impatient gesture. “We know you could not have been in the Nuba mountains. We’re wonderin’ if you’re familiar with the situation up there.”

“Not much news comes out of there. Very isolated, very backward. I’m told the Nubans go about naked as Adam and Eve, some of them.”

“And not entirely by choice,” Barrett said.

“I did hear the government’s been bombing up there.”

“And two reasons for it.” His fingers spread into a V. “One ideological, the second more down to earth, under the earth in fact.” He folded one finger and with the other traced a road leading southward from the mountains to a town near the confluence of the Bahr el Ghazal river and the White Nile.

“Bentiu,” Fitzhugh said. “There’s oil there.”

“And lots of it,” said Barrett.

Then there was something about an international consortium, in partnership with the Sudanese state petroleum company, something more about building a thousand-mile pipeline all the way to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea.

“Construction’s well under way,” Barrett went on. “That gets done, and Sudan joins the club of big-time oil-exporting countries.”

“And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the government plans to buy with the revenues,” Douglas added.

Barrett said, “For years, Khartoum has been trying to clear people out of Bahr el Ghazal and other places in the south, as you well know. But now they’ve redoubled their efforts. You know, dryin’ up the sea of people the guerrilla fish swim in. And why? Amulet Energy—that’s what the consortium calls itself—wants to make sure the pipeline route is secure, and of course, so does the Sudanese government.”

Fitzhugh was momentarily distracted by his cigarette ash, about to fall on the map. He tapped it into his cupped hand, then went to the window and brushed it into a hibiscus shrub outside.

“I feel like I’ve walked into a military briefing. What does all this high-flown strategy have to do with me?”

“Part of the pipeline will pass near the Nuba,” Barrett said, his finger now tracking along the western border of the mountains. “Khartoum wants to make sure the area is firmly under its control. And so, yes, they’ve bombed. And also stirred up Arab tribes to raid Nuban villages. Those who weren’t killed outright were driven out of their homes, and those who didn’t die of starvation or disease were herded into internment camps and forced to convert to Islam. Would that jibe with what you’ve heard?”

Fitzhugh nodded, then thought to qualify his answer: What he’d heard about the Nuba wasn’t any different or worse than what he’d seen elsewhere in Sudan.

“But it could well get worse. This is where the first reason, the political and religious one, comes in.” Barrett, his face gone florid again, flattened one hand to cover the reddish-brown swath on the map. “What you’ve got up here are brown Arab tribes and black Nuban tribes livin’ more or less cheek by jowl. Some of the Arabs support the government, some don’t, some don’t care one way or the other. And the blacks, some of ’em sympathize with the SPLA and some don’t. Anyway, up until recently this mixed lot—Christians, Muslims, ancestor-worshippers, whatever else—more or less got along. Yeah, the odd tribal dust-up now and then, but mostly live and let live, and that mob of fundamentalists in Khartoum can’t tolerate that sort of toleration. Want everybody to be reading the Koran, everybody to follow Islamic law. Makin’ that bloody oil pipeline secure gives ’em a perfect excuse to do what they’ve been wantin’ to do for a long time.”

“But worse. You said it could get worse,” Fitzhugh said. “Like I said, what you’re telling me doesn’t sound any worse than—”

“Because the Nuba is so isolated,” Barrett said, cutting him off. “No pryin’ eyes to report on what’s goin’ on up there. Khartoum has declared that the whole bleedin’ place is a no-go zone, thirty thousand square miles, a million people. A few Nuban meks—that’s what they call their big chiefs up there—somehow got word to the UN and appealed for ’em to send in some assistance. A couple of NGOs were ready to, but those outfits are under the UN umbrella, and the UN muckety-mucks said no.”

“Another excuse to do nothing,” Douglas interjected. “Sometimes you have to take sides.”

He gave Fitzhugh a glance whose meaning was ambiguous.

“I have no problem taking a side, if I think it’s right. I believe I’ve shown that.”

Douglas eked out a thin smile that hovered between arrogant and self-assured. “Fitz, if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

They were through testing him, if that’s what they’d been up to, and at last clued him in. Barrett said he had presented the board of International People’s Aid a plan for delivering assistance to the Nuba. Obviously the group would be operating independently, off the UN reservation. Barrett’s strategy was to provide disaster relief at first and then development aid to rebuild bombed-out roads and devastated farms and above all St. Andrew’s mission, where, after his conversion to Protestantism, he had preached as a guest minister.

There had been nothing like it in all the Nuba, he said, with its fine church of brick and granite quarried from the surrounding hills, with its clinic and primary and secondary schools, its guest house for visiting clergy, its training center where agriculture, carpentry, and tailoring had been taught. A lodestar of progress and education, a refuge for the sick. A prosperous town, called New Tourom, had grown up around it, and so the fanatics had had to erase it from the map. Bombed it first with cluster bombs, armed and incited a tribe of Baggara Arabs from the plains to raid it. The minister, the canon, and three teachers were killed, along with sixteen schoolchildren and an unknown number of townspeople. More were captured, to be taken to the camps or sold into slavery. Others fled deep into the bush.

Barrett had returned there a month ago to inspect what was left and was sickened and outraged by what he’d seen. He must have delivered electrifying sermons, for he painted a vivid scene of biblical desolation. The town that had once harbored twenty-five hundred souls now counted under a thousand. Houses had been devoured by red ants. Terraced farm fields had gone back to scrub. The ruined church was a nest for rats and snakes.

“The only bright spot,” he went on, “is that the SPLA has opened up a Nuban front—War Zone Two, they call it. They’ve moved troops into the mountains and the rebel headquarters are near New Tourom. A full regiment, nearly a thousand men. Man in charge is a Nuban himself, Lieutenant Colonel Goraende. Splendid soldier. He’ll provide you with security.”

Fitzhugh wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Me?”

“Who else would I be talkin’ about? Rebuildin’ the mission, that’s our long-range goal, but for the meantime there’s more immediate needs to be addressed. IPA’s board has to have an estimate of what those needs are and their costs. I can’t give ’em the costs without knowin’ the extent of the needs, and that’s where you come in.”

Fitzhugh was beyond incredulous. “You want me to assess what they are? I’m to go into the Nuba mountains? Alone?”

Everyone was silent for a moment or two; then Diana turned sharply to Malachy, who raised both hands in a mock plea for forgiveness.

“Told him you were planning to take some bold steps, that was all. Didn’t seem prudent to say anything more on the phone, and once he got here, well now, I thought it best he heard it from you.”

“Oh dear, Fitz, we’re awfully sorry.”

The clear, steady blue eyes, the smashing smile, the face that belonged in a garden party in the London suburbs. She started to say more but stopped herself at some vague sign from Douglas.

“You won’t be by yourself,” he said. “I’ll be going with you.”

“A tough business, and risky, I know,” Barrett chimed in. “You won’t, of course, be expected to cover all the Nuba, just as much as you can in a fortnight. That would give us a picture of the whole. The board’s given me the okay to offer you five thousand U.S.”

Fitzhugh shook his head.

“Not enough?” asked Diana, frowning.

“Oh, no. Fine and dandy. Much more than the UN would have paid for a fortnight’s work. But you see—” He broke off, silently questioning Malachy’s assessment of Diana as a woman whose head wasn’t a hatchery for mad schemes. Maybe she didn’t hatch this one, but she sure was part of it. His glance moving to the window and the trellis outside, with its cascades of red and purple bougainvillea, he recalled that he’d read or heard somewhere that the air in the Kenyan highlands had caused the early European settlers to lose their senses, filling them up with grandiose visions. Evidently it had not lost its power to addle the white mind.

“The Nuba is a thousand kilometers from Loki,” he said, starting over. “How do we get in there, and what’s more, out?”

Diana gave him a quizzical look. “We’ve chartered Tara Whitcomb. She’s not averse, if the occasion demands it, to fly on the dark side. And she knows Sudan better than any pilot in Africa. She’ll fly you and Douglas in, same as she did John. You know Tara, don’t you? At least heard of her?”

He nodded.

“To reduce the risk of the wrong people finding out where you’re going, she will file a false flight plan,” Diana continued, a sudden chill in her voice. “As she did with John.”

“And we didn’t have a wink of trouble,” Barrett added by way of assuring him. “Khartoum makes a lot of threats, but they haven’t got the means to carry the half of them out.”

Fitzhugh wanted to say that it was the other half that concerned him, but he kept silent on that point, going straight to the crux of the issue and of his confusion. As far as he knew, there were no landing fields in the Nuba mountains capable of handling cargo planes. How, then, did the well-meaning Canadians of International People’s Aid propose to deliver tons of aid to the Nuban people? Were they going to build airstrips? Use airdrops? With Arab raiders on the ground and government planes in the sky? He asked these questions one after the other, bim, bam, boom, not so much to elicit answers as to show how crazy and impossible the entire enterprise sounded to him.

“It’s going to work this way,” Douglas answered. “I’ve incorporated an air charter company, Knight Air Services. All the red tape’s been taken care of. Like I said, all I need is an airplane.”

“An essential piece of equipment, I’d say,” Fitzhugh remarked drily.

“I’ll get one, and once I do, IPA is going to be my first client. I won’t be playing Mother May I? with Khartoum. It’ll be nothing but flying on the dark side.”

“Running the blockade,” Fitzhugh murmured. An excitement, tinged with fear, spread through his chest.

The American’s eyebrows lifted and dropped, quickly.

“While you’re doing what you’ve got to do, I’ll be looking for drop zones for airdrops, I’ll be looking for suitable sites for landing strips. We’re going to need more than the one Tara landed at. Good hard ground, room for bigger planes to land and take off. And yeah, we’ll get them built. I know we can do this. It’s a place where a few people can make a big difference.”

Fitzhugh didn’t share his confidence; he was all but certain that they could not do it. The plan had the quality of a behind-enemy-lines operation that seemed to call for commandos, not a cargo pilot and an aid worker with a bum knee. Astonishing himself, he stuck out his hand and told Douglas and the others that they could count him in. He wondered if the heady highlands atmosphere had affected the vulnerable Caucasian part of his brain, for at that moment he had a sensation of being split in two. His dark-skinned half, skeptical, sober, wise, stood off to the side, as it were, and frowned at his light-skinned half, shaking hands and announcing that he could be counted in. Sleep on it, think it over, you might regret this, the dark warned the light, but the light had the upper hand. Much later the clarifying beam of hindsight would show that it wasn’t any hundred-proof air that had undermined his better judgment; it was Douglas and Douglas’s remark: “It’s a place where a few people can make a big difference.” Fitzhugh wasn’t immune to the desire that’s in most people to spray graffiti on the cold rock of the world and say “I was here and what I did counted for something.” For someone of his temperament, the mere notion of undertaking a dangerous endeavor on behalf of a desperate people held an irresistible appeal. But there was still more to it: He felt that he would have disappointed Douglas if he’d said no. He could have said it to Barrett or Diana but not to him. He didn’t know why. There was something about the American that made you not want to let him down.

He wasn’t, however, so drunk on the idea that he was ready to pack his bags then and there and fly off blindly into the unknown. “You are sure that this lieutenant colonel—what was his name?”

“Goraende. Michael Archangelo Goraende.”

“You are sure he will provide us with security?”

“He’ll have a detachment of his best lads to look out for you,” Barrett assured him. “Should give you some comfort. Michael the Archangel is the patron saint of warriors, the Roman Catholic version of Mars.”

Fitzhugh said he would be grateful for any help he and Douglas could get.

“Would you be a Catholic yourself?” asked Barrett, in as friendly a manner as he’d shown all afternoon. “Malachy tells me you’ve a bit of Irish in you.”

“Only a bit.”

“But enough to put the smile in that voice of yours. Comes from the Irish, make no mistake about it.”