Acts of Faith

Man of All Races

IT WAS A disastrous rainy season that year in Sudan. Each afternoon cumulus would tower on the horizon and distant thunder would sound false rumors of relief. As the dry season approached, pastures darkened to burnt brown, water holes turned into bowls of cracked clay, and doura stalks took on the color of dried tobacco, growing no higher than a child’s head. The cattle began to show their ribs and shoulder blades. The drought was most severe in Bahr el Ghazal. Fitzhugh heard about what was happening from aid workers sent to that distant province to access the catastrophe. The Dinka had turned to the Masters of the Spear, who could speak to the ancestors, and through them, to the ancient tribal deity, Nialichi. The Masters of the Spear ordered white bulls to be brought to the sacred byres for sacrifice. The bulls’ horns were sharpened, for battle against the hostile spirits that had caused the drought; their throats were slashed and men and women danced around the carcasses, dipping spears into the bulls’ blood while the magic-men called to the ancestors, “Tell Nialichi that our lives have never been so hard, our children are dying. Tell him we must have rain.”

It seemed, however, that Nialichi had other matters to attend to, and his heedlessness sent some people to mission churches to implore the God of the gospels for deliverance; but it seemed that he also had other things on his agenda. Or perhaps he’d reverted to his Old Testament self, for in the hiss of the parching wind, the people heard the harsh pronouncement of his prophet Isaiah, “Woe to the land shadowing with wings beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.”

The elders conferred about what to do. They spoke to their chiefs, who sent urgent messages for food to the hawaga, the white men who flew the blue and white airplanes that had saved the Dinka from starvation in the past. The hawaga answered that relief would soon come, but first the people had to clear fields and mark them so the airplanes would know where to drop the sacks of grain and the tins of powdered milk. This was done. Now the villagers and the herdsmen in their cattle camps scanned the skies not for clouds and rain but for the blue and white airplanes—which never came. It appeared the hawaga too had more important things on their minds. The people in those isolated settlements had no way of knowing that the white men were prepared to help but couldn’t because the government forbade it. They had no way of knowing that the regime far to the north had seen an opportunity in their catastrophe to break the will of the infidels’ resistance in Bahr el Ghazal. They didn’t hear the mullahs preaching in the mosques of Khartoum that Allah had withheld the rains from the land of the gazelle expressly for that purpose. To fail to take advantage of such a providential event would be an offense to heaven, and so the government ordered the expulsion of the UN teams established in Bahr el Ghazal and decreed that the aid embargo, previously restricted to those parts held by the rebels, would be imposed on the entire province. The only planes that showed up were those sent to evacuate UN workers.

Yet rumors flew that the white men had established big camps, called feeding centers, in certain provincial towns. In their desperation, driven by a hunger that had long since passed from their bellies into their very cells, the people began to walk to the towns, some traveling as far as sixty or seventy miles under a tyrannical sun. The roads Fitzhugh heard, were as he had seen them in the previous famine: filled with emaciated men; with mothers whose breasts had run dry carrying infants with swollen bellies and heads that looked too big for their necks; with the aged and the sick, who sat in the scant shade of shriveled trees to wait for death. Unlike Nialichi and the hawaga and the God of the gospels, it did not keep them waiting for very long.

While the Masters of the Spear had been praying for rain, Fitzhugh had to face the inescapable truth that his own fortunes were now inversely proportional to the fortunes of the southern Sudanese. He was a junior partner in an enterprise that was as much a business as it was a cause (and maybe more the former than the latter). The calamity in Bahr el Ghazal—a sharp spike in the ongoing calamity that was Sudan—was the best thing that could have happened to Knight Air and thus to him.

The UN’s compliance with the embargo left relief entirely in the hands of the independent agencies. Tara Whitcomb’s airline, despite its fleet of fourteen planes, wasn’t able to handle the volume of business. Logisticians from various NGOs began to call on Fitzhugh, asking to charter the G1C and the Hawker. The company’s invoicing doubled and then tripled. One plane would fly out in the morning, the other in the afternoon. If that kept up, Fitzhugh’s five percent share of net profits would come to more than he’d earned in his four years with the UN. Those prospects brought him a joy that outweighed his pity for the starving victims, which shocked him, as a devoted son would be shocked to find his sorrow over the untimely death of a beloved father lightened by the discovery that he’d inherited a small fortune.

In six weeks Knight Air flew sixty-one missions, grossing almost half a million dollars. Rachel Njiru, the secretary and bookkeeper, deducted for expenses and salaries and declared that the company had netted two hundred thousand. The next day Fitzhugh flew to Nairobi to personally present a check to the South African from whom the G1C was being leased. Knight Air now owned the airplane free and clear.

In the meantime UN officials in Kenya pleaded with Khartoum to lift the embargo. After resisting for a time, the fanatics relented. UN Hercules and Buffalos began to make daily airdrops. Tara’s company was contracted to deliver smaller shipments, but Knight Air was left out because of an obscure regulation: to carry UN cargoes, an independent airline had to possess a UN radio call-sign. Douglas got a meeting with base officials and, deploying his persuasive charms, convinced them that in the present emergency, one should be issued to Knight Air.

Fitzhugh, Douglas, and Dare waited for a rush of new clients, but none came. The UN agencies continued to send their business to Pathways.

“Don’t have to think too hard to figure out what’s going on there,” Douglas declared one morning, after he’d returned from a flight. He and Fitzhugh were in the office. Douglas, polishing off a six-pack of Coke, seemed drawn to a high, fine edge, each gray eye cupped by a shadowy crescent as he twisted a pencil through his fingers. “She’s not sleeping with agency logisticians, so that leaves the alternative. She’s got them on her payroll. Ten percent of each flight’s charges goes back to them.”

“You don’t have any proof, and besides, I can’t picture Tara giving kickbacks to anyone.”

Douglas braced the pencil over his two middle fingers, hooking one around each end, as if he meant to break it in two. “That woman’s got everybody sold on the idea that she’s some sort of nun. The flying nun, but hey, you don’t get where she’s gotten without marking a few cards in the deck.” He pulled off his baseball cap and gave it a Frisbee toss across the room. “Talk to those people. You know them. Talk to ’em, see if you can get them to throw some business our way. Give ’em the sales pitch. Tara can’t do it all, and what she can do for nine thousand, we can do for eight.”

“I’ll try,” Fitzhugh said. “But you know, we don’t have the aircraft to handle much more than we do now.”

“Tony and I will do two turnarounds a day if we have to, and so will Wes and Mary.”

This was a different Douglas Braithwaite from the one Fitzhugh had met in Diana Briggs’s house last year. He was harder somehow, annealed by the pressures that had been on him, transforming Knight Air from an idea into a going concern, flying mission after mission in dangerous skies. In the process the old Douglas had not so much vanished as been overshadowed by another side to his personality, which displayed the defects of his virtues. Lately his resolve, passion, and drive manifested themselves in an obsessive quest to surpass Tara Whitcomb. “We’re playing Avis to her Hertz, but not forever,” he’d said, and more than once. Reversing that equation had become the focus of his energies. Tara had done nothing to earn the animosity he’d worked up for her. Was there some strand of hostile competitiveness woven into his American DNA that wouldn’t allow him to be content with second place?

“As far as equipment goes, I’m working on that,” he said now. “There’s a Russian guy in Nairobi looking to lease an Antonov-thirty-two. Tony found out about him. The deal comes complete with a five-man crew. Five-fifty an hour, with a sixty-hour-per-month minimum. The Russian pays the crew and insurance, we pay the rest.”

“So”—Fitzhugh took a calculator out of the desk drawer—“if it does just twenty turnarounds a month, we—”

“Gross about one-sixty,” Douglas cut in. He’d already done the arithmetic. “After lease fees, fuel, and operating costs, net seventy and change. But here’s the sweet thing. An Antonov carries seven and a half tons and cruises at two-twenty. That’s three tons more than one of Pathways’ Andovers and reduces block time by a factor of forty miles an hour. We deliver seven-odd tons, at a buck-thirty a kilo, she delivers four at a little over two bucks. Less for more. We’d be irresistible to any logistics guy trying to stay in budget. I’ll be talking to this Russian or whatever he is in a couple of days.” Douglas spread his arms out wide. “We’ve got the big mo, and if I learned anything from my dad, it’s that when you’ve got the big mo, you keep it rolling.”

“The big what?”

“Momentum.” He paused. “Try hard, Fitz, with those logisticians.”

Fitzhugh caught the subtext—he was being given the green light to offer commissions. Thinking, This is how we speak now, this is the language of the aid entrepreneur, he plopped himself down on the edge of the big steel desk. “Block time. Block speed. Per kilo rates. Lease fees. Momentum,” he said. “And commissions—kickbacks. Is this what we’re all about? Is this what we came here to do?”

Douglas frowned and made more weaving movements with the pencil. “Nope. It’s what we have to do to keep doing what we came here to do.” He got up suddenly and clutched Fitzhugh by both shoulders. That need of his to press the flesh, as though his words might not be heard without the amplification of his touch. “Fitz, my man! We’re not a nonprofit organization. If we weren’t in business, those Dinka in Bahr el Ghazal would be dying, the Nubans would still be rubbing sticks together to light their fires, that German doctor would still be slicing people open to find out what’s wrong with them. Did we cause the drought? We’re not firemen who turned arsonist to give themselves a paycheck. We’re fighting a fire someone else started.”

Douglas let him go and stood looking at the schedule board, with its grease pen notations on airstrip conditions. “Okay, assuming we get our hands on the Antonov, we’ll have a fleet with a total capacity of—” With the grease pen, he wrote “17” on the board. “And we can deliver those seventeen tons faster than Pathways, and faster means cheaper, and cheaper means the agencies come to us first.”

Tara again. All conversational roads led back to her.

“The Sudanese get food, they get their lives back, and the agencies save money, and we make it and stay in the game,” Douglas went on in an overcaffeinated rush. “Everybody benefits. It’s win-win, Fitz. Win-win all around.”

Steering Knight Air’s company car, a Toyota pickup with worn shocks and a pitted windshield, down a Loki side road, Fitzhugh felt a tad splenetic. Fitz, my man. Well, he was Douglas’s man, wasn’t he? The brown boy running an errand for the white boy, the Bahss. To keep the lid on his bubbling resentment, he reminded himself that the American, like it or not, was the Bahss and that it was part of his job as operations manager to negotiate agreements with NGO logisticians.

A few enterprising Turkana were peddling handicrafts outside the UN compound’s bright blue fence of corrugated steel. Wedging the pickup between two uniformly white Land Cruisers, he got out, conscious of the bulge in his midriff. He’d come back from the Nuba as lean and hard as he’d been in his soccer days, but the tailor of his appetites had since altered the Ambler into the man nearly everyone in Loki called “Big Bear.” I should have walked here, he thought. I should walk a mile every day and play more volleyball.

Well, he’d been doing his share of legwork today. There were forty agencies enlisted under the UN banner, and he intended to visit as many as he could. Going up a lane fenced by whitewashed rocks, past signs bearing inspiring slogans—DEFEAT AIDS, LET’S CONQUER POLIO IN SUDAN—he recalled that his old boss, the one who’d told him he possessed an insufferably Hebraic soul, had once termed the situation in Sudan “a permanent crisis.” The base’s appearance underlined the accuracy of that near-oxymoron. Everything here suggested perpetuity: buildings instead of tents, streets instead of paths, even street signs. The recolonization of Africa by the imperialism of good intentions.

He strode into the office of a small Dutch NGO, confident and commanding, dressed for the occasion in pressed khaki trousers instead of rumpled shorts, shoes instead of sandals, and in place of his usual T-shirt, a dark green polo displaying Knight Air’s name and emblem over his heart.

Appearances weren’t enough to persuade the Dutch to switch carriers; nor was his sales pitch. He also failed with CARE, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. It appeared that Knight Air wasn’t so irresistible after all, but he pressed on, agency to agency, extolling the virtues of the G1C and the Hawker over Tara’s sluggish Andovers. He made no offer of commissions, hoping to persuade his prospective clients through force of personality and the promised quality and economy of his company’s services. As he rattled on about block times and block speeds and per kilo rates, his tongue on automatic, his spleen bubbled up again. He bore Tara no ill will, and so long as he earned a decent living, he could not have cared less if Knight Air played Avis to Pathways’s Hertz till the end of time. Why, then, was he talking himself hoarse to help Douglas realize his ambition? Because he couldn’t let him down, that was why. As much as he might resent his role as Man Friday, he realized that it was perfect casting. There was something in his character that suited him for the work of the deputy, the same something that made his father an effective hotelier. He was born to oblige, to cater to others’ wishes, to be of service.

His next stop was a group bearing the cumbersome and redundant name of Global International Aid Services. It employed a multiracial, multinational staff that served to veil, somewhat, its Washington origins and the identity of its principal donor, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which some people believed was an arm of the CIA. Global’s logistics chief was a dour Belgian known as the Flemish Phlegm, a sobriquet whose shortened version, “Flemmy,” was used so often that the man’s real name had been forgotten. He had been Fitzhugh’s main informant during his private investigation into the UN’s practice of destroying surplus food. Though he’d scrupulously kept the source of his information secret, Flemmy had suggested afterward that Fitzhugh owed him something more than the protection of his anonymity.

After he’d listened, patiently and without expression, to Fitzhugh’s spiel, he presented the bill.

Chewing on an unlit pipe, Flemmy complimented him for landing on his feet after his dismissal from the World Food Program’s staff. “But,” he added, “you seem to be still learning the nuances of your new job. You haven’t convinced me to make any changes in our present arrangements. You need to—the American phrase is ‘toot your own horn’— a little more . . . loudly? No. Not loud. More sweetly. Has anyone else pointed that out to you?”

“No, you’re the first,” he answered. That Flemmy had not flatly turned him down and had taken the time to point out the deficiency in his proposals represented progress of a sort; but he elected to say nothing more. He would feel better about himself if he left it to the other man to make the proposition.

“We have a lot of stuff to move, and you with only two airplanes—” He wagged a hand scornfully. “Why, that could delay a shipment for days, whereas your competitor has the means to deliver it right away.” Flemmy paused and tapped his thumbnail with the pipestem. “On the other hand, we aren’t contractually bound to Pathways, and you make a good case that we could save a thousand dollars per flight with you. I think I could see my way clear to . . . oh, you know, every third delivery, perhaps every other delivery.”

Fitzhugh heard the emphasis on “think” and listened to the irritating tap-tap. “Whatever you feel comfortable with,” he said.

“That depends upon what you feel comfortable with,” the Belgian said softly. “Just to be sure we’re clear on that.” He wrote on a piece of paper and passed it across the desk for Fitzhugh’s inspection. “I believe that follows established custom?”

Aware that he wasn’t acting under duress of circumstance, that he was making a clear, conscious choice and a compromise that could lead to further compromises, he nodded.

Flemmy tore the paper into quarters and tossed the fragments into the wastebasket. “Of course we don’t need to shake hands.”

“Of course.”

“Excellent. I’ll be in touch soon. In the meantime, may I suggest that you need not be shy about offering the full . . . the full range of your company’s services to whomever else you speak to. I think you’ll get better results.”

Fitzhugh followed that advice, and the results were more favorable. By the end of the day he’d made arrangements with three NGOs similar to the one he made with Flemmy. He might have gotten more if his discomfort hadn’t been so obvious. During the proceedings, his mind became a kind of TV split-screen; a scene from the famine was projected on one half—skeletal kids grubbing in the dirt for spilled kernels of airdropped grain—and a picture of himself negotiating sleazy deals was projected on the other. The two dissonant images produced a physical sensation, as if he were coated in some sticky substance that had drawn ants to his body. Watching him squirm and grimace, it was apparent to the logisticians that he was disgusted with himself and with them and the whole business. Fitzhugh could tell that they could tell he was acting contrary to his scruples, which caused them to wonder if he would be stricken with an attack of those scruples later on and renege on his promises. They sent him on his way. He found that success came when he told himself that he was doing a small wrong thing in order to do a big right thing—a version of Douglas’s statement “We’re doing what we have to do so we can keep doing what we came here to do.” Those words banished the sticky, crawly sensation, and he would feel more confident and sound more convincing when he proposed to his customers that they would personally benefit from an association with Knight Air Limited.

He reported the outcome to Douglas that night in the Hotel California bar. It was the beginning of their transformation into co-conspirators, for they spoke in conspiratorial tones—three other customers were sitting at a nearby table, Quinette and her Irish roommates.

“You came through, knew you would,” Douglas said.

The compliment brought a delight that momentarily overcame Fitzhugh’s doubts about his actions, while the delight, like a pretty yacht towing a garbage barge, dragged into the harbor of his self-esteem a mortifying awareness that his friend’s opinion of him had a direct effect on his opinion of himself.

“I had to offer incentives,” he confessed reluctantly. “I tried to think of it as a marketing tool, yes?”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“I’m not sure how to tell Rachel how to handle these arrangements on the books.”

“I’ll take care of that.” With his Coke glass, he clinked Fitzhugh’s can of Tusker. “To the big mo.”

Three days later Douglas concluded the lease agreement with the owner of the Antonov-32. Soon afterward, with a decal of a green knight straddling an airplane pasted to her nose, she flew her first delivery into Bahr el Ghazal.

As that cruel dry season advanced, misfortune continued to be Knight Air’s ally. A very bad piece of bad luck was suffered by the crew of a Pathways Andover, flying sorghum and Unimix to a village near the Jur river. SPLA guerrillas surrounded the plane at the airstrip and began to offload its cargo onto lorries while the villagers watched helplessly. It was the third or fourth incident of rebel army theft since the famine struck, and the Andover’s captain—it was Tara’s senior pilot, the Ethiopian named George Tafari—was fed up. He told the rebel officer in charge that if his men didn’t turn over the food to the civilians, he was going to report the banditry to UN authorities. In the account that would later be given by the copilot, the officer replied that his troops were starving too and couldn’t be expected to fight on empty bellies. George persisted. The overstrung commander then drew his pistol and instructed George to speak not one word more and to clear out immediately.

The Andover wasn’t five hundred feet off the ground when the guerrillas opened fire with assault rifles and machine guns. A bullet through the head killed George instantly, and a Kenyan relief worker on board was wounded in the arm. The copilot, a devout Somali, would later say that the hand of Allah saved the plane from crashing; the hand of Allah kept his hands on the controls and gave him the strength and presence of mind to fly the crippled aircraft a thousand kilometers back to Loki, with the relief worker screaming in the back, the pilot-side windows blown out (making it impossible to pressurize the cockpit so that he had to fly the entire distance at six thousand feet), and with blood and brain matter sprayed all over the instrument panel.

Fitzhugh had monitored the distress calls on his own radio, and when he heard the Andover coming in, he went to the Pathways terminal to see if he could be of any help. He was inclined to believe the story of divine intervention after the Somali, bleeding from the fragments of George’s skull embedded in his cheek and temple, described what had happened. It also seemed miraculous that the man hadn’t taken leave of his senses.

Tara lost her composure when a Red Cross ambulance crew pulled George’s body from the cockpit. To see that iron woman fall to both knees beside the stretcher and weep would have moved Fitzhugh to tears himself if he hadn’t been struggling so hard against a wave of nausea.

Tara declared she was suspending Pathways flights into the stricken province until the SPLA high command assured her that George’s murderers would be found and punished and that every measure was being taken to prevent a similar incident.

Sudan, Sudan, Sudan, Fitzhugh thought as all this unfolded. Woe to the land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. The rebels were the best friends Khartoum could ask for.

Knight Air, having the field entirely to itself, was still flying. Clinging to the belief that the quality of one’s actions was affected by the quality of one’s motives, Fitzhugh struggled to stop thinking about what this would mean for the company’s revenues, and he was aided in this endeavor by the return of the old Douglas, defiant and impassioned. It appeared that events had summoned him out of hiding. At breakfast, on the morning after Tara announced her decision, he told Dare and Fitzhugh that he was going to try to talk her out of it.

Dare sopped up egg yolk with a piece of toast. “That makes a helluva lot of sense. The woman hands you a blank check and you want to give it back.”

“There’s a quarter of a million people out there starving to death. I think that takes precedence.” Douglas let a faint sigh slip, as if relieved to discover that he could still make a statement like that without a false note. “With only three airplanes, we can’t handle the volume.”

Asking Fitzhugh to come along, Douglas met Tara at her tukul in the Pathways compound, that sanctuary of floral-scented order. She was in her garden, pruning a rosebush with the single-minded concentration people devote to simple physical tasks to distract themselves from emotional turmoil. Her hair was unkempt, her makeup was off, and she was wearing, instead of her usual starched captain’s shirt and creased trousers, a dirty T-shirt and a pair of shorts that exposed her varicose veins. They judged her appearance a measure of her grief. Cordial as always, she offered tea, which they declined, and then listened attentively as Douglas pleaded with her to change her mind. He was unable to resist touching her arm as she stood there, holding the pruning shears in one gloved hand.

Tara let him know that she didn’t care for the physical contact by drawing back about a yard, to lean against the bicycle she pedaled to and from the terminal each day to keep fit. “Not one of my planes is going into Bahr el Ghazal until I get assurances from Garang himself that he’s going to crack down on those bloody renegades.”

Denied contact with another’s flesh, Douglas’s hands seemed not to know what to do with themselves. “Tara, people, thousands of people, are going to—”

“Do you suppose I haven’t considered that?” Her lips stretched and her jaw tightened. “But I have just spent the past two days arranging for George’s body to be shipped back to Ethiopia. I have written a letter to his wife. I do not wish to repeat that experience. I’ve got twenty other people flying for me, and my first responsibility is to them. And to their families.”

“But they know the risks, same as we all do.”

“Which are quite enough without the SPLA adding to them. The people who are supposed to be on our side.” She shook her head. “No, I would no more send one of my crews out there than I’d let them take off in a faulty airplane. Not until I get those assurances, and I will get them.” She seemed to close the discussion by stepping forward to clip an unruly stem. “George was with me from the very beginning. He and I flew the first relief missions out of here together. He wasn’t just an employee but a friend. When his daughter was born, he asked me to be her godmother.”

“Can I say something?”

“If you’re asking for forgiveness in advance for whatever it is you want to say, you don’t necessarily have it.”

“Okay, fine. I think the best way for you to pay tribute to George would be to keep your planes in the air. I think that’s what he’d want. I think you’re letting one bad incident get the better of you.”

“Douglas,” she said with a cold smile, “the day you see one of your pilots with half his head blown off and his brains splattered all over the cockpit is the day when you shall have earned the right to make a comment like that. Thanks very much, but I’d like to get on with my roses.”

“I guess that means I’m not forgiven,” Douglas muttered as they drove out of the compound. “Can you believe her? One guy gets killed, and she throws in the towel.”

“She’s not exactly throwing in the towel. I don’t think we’re in a position to judge her.”

“The hell we’re not.” Turning onto the main road, he popped the clutch, jammed the accelerator, and made gravel fly. “What does she expect? This is a war, for f*ck’s sake.”

Fitzhugh kept silent. In his delight with its return, he’d forgotten that the old-model Douglas came equipped with some unattractive features.

His prettier parts were on display that night, when he and Dare convened a meeting of Knight Air’s staff. Along with Fitzhugh, Tony, Mary, Rachel, Nimrod, and the flight mechanic, VanRensberg, the Antonov’s crew—whose roster read like the cast of characters in a Russian novel, Alexei, Sergei, Leonid, Vladimir, and Mikhail—shoehorned themselves into the tiny office. Dedicated smokers, the Russians joined with Fitzhugh to turn the room into a gas chamber. Whether it was to escape the smoke or to make himself appear more commanding, Douglas stood on the desk and, while Dare leaned back in the chair and pretended to be studying the shine in his snakeskin boots, presented his idea, summed up his meeting with Tara, and made his a-quarter-of-a-million-people-will-starve-to-death-if-someone-doesn’t-do-something speech.

“And right now, that’s us. It’s up to us.” He brushed a lock of hair from his eye, with a casual diffidence that offset his imposing stance. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t want what happened to George Tafari to happen to any of you. I can’t ask you to risk your necks any more than you are already. So it’s your call. We’ve got other places that need us, like the Nuba, although you know that’s no piece of cake either.”

“Me and Mary sure do,” Dare muttered, referring to their narrow escape, which had become legend in Loki.

Douglas then turned to Tony Bollichek, who said,”If you’re asking for volunteers, mate, I’m one.”

“Great. That’s great. Mary, what about you?”

“I’d rather be here than in Manitoba.”

“All right! So we’ve heard from Australia and Canada. Alexei,” he said to the Antonov’s captain, “what’s the word from Russia?”

There was a murmuring of Slavic consonants as Alexei, a short apple-cheeked man, conferred with his crew.

“Sure. Why not?” he answered with a fatalistic shrug.

“All right! All right! Old Fly-by-Knight is a team! So listen up, we’ll all be working our butts to the bone. Not just the aircrews but all of you. Wes and I decided that everyone gets a bonus at the end of the month. How much depends on how much we take in, but if we have to, we’ll forgo what we pay ourselves to make that promise good. I’ll see everyone at the bar. Drinks are on us.”

“And y’all can bet that last part was Dougie’s idea, not mine,” Wesley drawled to laughter.

As Douglas climbed down, Alexei applauded. Half a second later everyone but Dare joined in, and Fitzhugh could tell by the enthusiasm of the ovation that they were going to do whatever they had to not for the sake of a bonus, or even for the sake of the suffering multitudes hundreds of miles away, but for Douglas Braithwaite’s sake. No one wanted to let him down.

The Antonov made food drops, sometimes two a day, leaving Loki at dawn, returning by noon to refuel and take on another shipment, then departing once more and coming back at dusk. Wes and Mary in the Hawker, Doug and Tony in the G1C, flew daily for twenty-two days straight. They were often dangerously overloaded, and, the lifting of the embargo notwithstanding, there was the ever-present menace of ground fire or an encounter with a Sudanese MIG or helicopter gunship. Each flight was an act of faith, in Providence, in luck, in the rightness of the mission, and because self-dramatization is necessary if one is to continue taking such risks, the exhausted crews began to look upon themselves as embodiments of the company’s logo: airborne knights, rescuing the peasants from the twin dragons of starvation and war.

Fitzhugh, busy with flight schedules, invoices, and other minutiae, wasn’t able to cast any such chivalric light upon himself. The distasteful part of his job—taking care of the ten percenters—made him feel like a bagman, which brought on a relapse of the sensation that he was coated in a sticky substance swarming with ants.

The incantation “We do what we have to so we can keep doing what we came here to do” no longer was sufficient to exorcise this feeling. He needed to break out of the isolation imposed by his administrative duties and reconnect himself with the wretched humanity in whose name the pilots gambled with their lives and he compromised his principles. On two occasions he flew with Alexei and the Russians on airdrops over the parched immensities beyond the Jur. With Dare and Mary he landed at a place called Atukuel, where what looked like the population of a small concentration camp greeted them. All he saw was sharp angles—protruding ribs and collarbones, shoulder blades like wings, cheekbones, knee bones, thigh bones with a mere appliqué of flesh. Gangs of the living dead approached the plane, dragging plastic sheets and canvas tarps. Fitzhugh pitched in with the off-load. It felt good to sweat honest sweat, to use his muscles again, and to see a light switch on in the glassy eyes looking up at him. What was it but the light of hope? Hope in a twenty-five-kilo bag of sorghum. Hope. The human capacity for it astonished him. Hope and the will to go on, even when going on seemed pointless. If those people could have seen their futures as clearly as they did their present circumstances, they probably would have laid down on the spot and allowed themselves to starve to death. He watched the men on the ground drag the sacks into the sheets and tarps, which were fashioned into carriers by twisting each end into a makeshift rope. Two men would sling the ends over their shoulders and lug the loads to the edge of the airstrip. It amazed him that those skeletons, who looked barely capable of carrying their own shadows, could haul a hundred pounds any distance at all. He and the tall Norwegian working alongside him heaved out bag upon bag, and jerry cans of water and boxes of evaporated milk. More than five tons’ worth. He got careless once, giving one sack too hard a toss. It split open, its contents spilled out, and a vision from his mental split-screen became a reality as a crowd of kids, their hair hennaed by starvation, rushed forward to scoop the sorghum into wooden calabashes. They picked each grain up, like a flock of birds. Relief work—what a bland phrase, as if it were merely another form of labor. But it wasn’t. It reaffirmed the human bond. It was the marshaling of resources to organize compassion into effective action, for without action, compassion degenerated into a useless pity. It was what he’d come to do, and if to do it he had to trim a few moral corners, then he would trim them. In the face of so much misery, self-recrimination seemed a self-indulgence. Guilt was a worthless currency out here.

Toward the end of that month Tara received a message asking her to come to the Nairobi office of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, the rebellion’s political arm. There she was shown a copy of an order issued to all commands promising swift punishment to anyone who hijacked a relief plane’s cargo. Also documents recording the court-martial of the soldiers who’d shot at George Tafari’s Andover. Also photographs of the execution by firing squad of their commanding officer. She returned to Loki shaken by the photographs. She hadn’t expected an execution. It was a case of, Beware of what you ask for, you may get it.

But she had the assurances she’d sought, and she put her planes back into the operation. By that time many of her former customers, satisfied with its performance as well as with its under-the-table fringe benefits, decided to stick with Knight Air. If the company had had a larger fleet, it would have taken more of her business.

“We need to expand, big-time,” Douglas said one evening, drinking with Dare and Fitzhugh in the compound bar. “We need at least one more airplane, three or four if we can get them.”

“Maybe I got a solution,” Dare said. He had just returned from Nairobi, where he’d conferred with his lawyer about his lawsuit, in the hopes of breaking the legal deadlock and reclaiming his G1, still in mothballs at Wilson Field. “My hearing is way back on the docket, and even if the judge rules in my favor, he’s got to let Nakima have his day in court and rule on his countersuit, and then maybe, maybe the plane’s all mine again. Trouble is, the judge is in Nakima’s pocket, the idea being to keep delayin’ the thing till I wear out and quit. So I figured, as long as I was down there, to pay me a call on Hassan. He knows half the MPs and judges in this sorry-ass excuse of a country. Reckoned he might take the one on my case out to lunch, say a few words on old Wesley’s behalf.”

“Who the hell is Hassan?” Douglas asked.

Dare blew the foam off his beer. “I used to fly mirra for him.”

“What about helping you out with the G1? We could use that airplane, Wes.”

“Watch the ‘we,’ rafiki. I get the plane, we have the same arrangement with it as we got with my Hawker. I lease it to the company.”

Douglas frowned. “About time for you to develop a little trust, isn’t it?”

“Don’t take it personal. Half the time I don’t even trust myself. Anyhow, me and Hassan got to shootin’ the shit, he asked me what I was up to these days. I told him, and he said he’d like to talk to us.”

Fitzhugh swiped a finger across his damp forehead. “What does your court case have to do with us?”

“Not a damned thing, but I got the idea he might like to put some money into Knight Air. Kind of a venture capital thing.”

Douglas, who’d been bird-watching the hour before dinner, fanned the pages of the book lying on the table, Birds of East Africa—a show of disinterest that meant he was interested. “And he’s got the capital?”

“I think that Somali would need one of them supercomputers to count his money.”

“He’s a Somali?”

Dare’s glance made one of its sidelong, downward casts, as if he were embarrassed, though it was hard to imagine him embarrassed by anything. “I wouldn’t call a man a Somali if he wasn’t one. He’s not from Somalia. He’s what they call here an ethnic Somali, from eastern Kenya. Same difference, but he’s about the only Somali I care to deal with.”

“He’s someone you do trust?” Fitzhugh asked.

“Hell, no”—pulling the word hell like it was made of taffy. “Put it like this. He won’t stab you in the back, he’ll stab you in front with one hand and be shakin’ your hand with the other, and he’ll do it so quick, y’all won’t know you’ve been stabbed till you see the blood. I trust him in that sense.”

“What’re you saying, Wes? That we shouldn’t talk to him? We should? What?”

“He might be more disposed to go to bat for me if we did. I sure as hell would like to get that airplane back.”

They took a Kenya Airways commuter to Nairobi. On the way down Dare offered an informal background briefing on Hassan Adid, whom he described, with his usual disregard for Fitzhugh’s origins and sensibilities, as “way above, light-years away from your average bush-baby African hustler.” A one-man conglomerate, the cultivation and exportation of mirra was just one of his many enterprises, which included mining precious stones like tanzanite and tsavorite, construction, and cattle, Adid having inherited from his father one-third ownership of the Tana ranch—a million and a half acres of grazing land near Tsavo National Park. “A kind of African cowboy, you might say.”

In the 1970s and 1980s the Adid family had tripled its fortune in the illegal ivory trade. Somali poaching gangs had been trespassing on the ranch for years, using it as a base for their raids on the park’s elephant herds. Unable to keep the poachers off their sprawling property, the elder Adid and his two Arab partners decided to employ them and to turn their disorganized forays into an efficient industry.

“They brought Hassan into it after he got out of school. He got a fleet of trucks to haul out the ivory instead of havin’ it carried out on foot,” Dare said, standing in the aisle beside Douglas and Fitzhugh’s seats, his head bent under the small plane’s ceiling. “Must’ve needed the trucks to haul the money out. Those days ivory was goin’ for six thousand U.S. a kilo. Shoot one big bull carryin’ forty, fifty kilos in each tusk, and you’ve grossed half a mil to six hundred thousand and change, and those boys they had workin’ for ’em was shootin’ dozens, hundreds. Wouldn’t have been one elephant left if it wasn’t for Dick Leakey, y’know, the son of that famous scientist, some sort of ologist.”

“Paleontologist,” Douglas offered helpfully.

“Yeah, it was his son, Dick Leakey, who put a crimp in their operations when he got put in charge of the Kenya Wildlife Service. He formed up those antipoaching commando teams, and they and the gangs had them a regular war goin’ on down there in Tsavo. Then Leakey lobbies for a worldwide ban on ivory, and he gets it, and pretty soon the Adids are back in the cattle business. I met Dick once. He was a pilot, y’know—”

Fitzhugh interrupted, saying that yes, he knew, and that one day Leakey’s plane developed mechanical trouble in midair and crashed, and some said it was no accident.

“Yup. Crippled up Dick Leakey for life. He had him a helluva lot of enemies, and the Adids were at the top of the list. Anyhow, the old man sent Hassan to graduate school in the U.S. Hassan got him an MBA from—the University of Florida, I think it was—and after the poaching party was over with, he went legit, bought a couple hundred thousand acres near Mount Kenya, and went into the mirra trade, ivory to dope, and then he got into everything else.”

Adid’s degree was from the University of Miami, not the University of Florida. He must have been proud of it; it was the sole object on the wall behind his desk, positioned to catch the light from the window overlooking traffic-fumed Kenyatta Avenue. It appeared that he treasured his privacy and liked to keep a low profile. A simple plastic sign reading THE TANA GROUP hung on the door to a spare reception room, where a stout woman announced the three visitors on an intercom, then led them through two doors with electronic locks and into Adid’s private office, which was smaller and more modestly furnished than the lavishly appointed acreage Fitzhugh had pictured. The man himself, studiously casual in open-neck shirt and raw silk sport jacket, looked to be in his early forties. He was a little under six feet tall, with coat-hanger shoulders, a slender, almost delicate frame, a small head, and very dark, very piercing eyes—miniature black holes that took everything in and let nothing out.

He was an ardent soccer fan, and when he learned that Fitzhugh was the Fitzhugh Martin, he spent several minutes tossing him bouquets of praise and reminiscing about the Ambler’s glory days on the Harambe Stars.

“It’s an honor to meet you, truly it is.”

Fitzhugh squirmed in his seat and made a dismissive gesture.

“But I see I must be embarrassing you. You’re a man who is humble about his achievements. Would it embarrass you more if I asked for your autograph? I would like to give it to my son. He plays with a club.”

Fitzhugh replied no, it would not embarrass him, for it wasn’t the laudatory comments that made him uncomfortable but Adid’s gaze, which seemed to bore through his skin. There was a weird disconnect between it and what he was saying. While the tongue flattered, the eyes studied, and Fitzhugh got the disconcerting impression that Adid knew everything about him, or at least as much as he needed to know. He’d been sized up.

A pen and notepad were pushed across the desk. He wrote, “To Hassan Adid, My Very Best Wishes,” and signed his name, adding “The Ambler” as a flourish.

“Thank you, my son will be thrilled,” Adid said in his low, adenoidal voice, then turned his attention to Douglas and apologized for wasting time.”You didn’t come all this way to listen to us talk about soccer,” he said, and spread his hands on the desktop, his long fingers like the ribs of a fan. “So I think I could be of some benefit to you, and of course you to me. I’m always looking to diversify.” He gestured at the photographs on a side wall, showing the many facets of the Tana Group: an office building under construction, a mining operation, a sloping field abloom with mirra. “And lately I’ve taken an interest in aviation. Actually, it’s an old interest of mine. I took some flying lessons when I was in the U.S. There are some excellent flight schools in Florida. Where did you learn, Mr. Braithwaite?”

“The U.S. Air Force.”

“You can’t ask for a better school than that. What did you fly? Were you a”—he mimed a pilot jockeying a joystick—“top gun?”

“Not quite. I flew A-tens. Warthogs.”

Dare did a theatrical double-take and said, “All this time and you never mentioned you were a Hog jockey.” It was also the first time Fitzhugh had heard anything specific about Douglas’s military career.

Responding to Adid’s puzzled frown and looking pleased to display his technical knowledge, Dare explained that a Warthog was a ground attack plane. “It’s used mostly to bust up tanks and armored vehicles.”

Adid turned back to Douglas. “And did you, ah, ‘bust up’ any tanks?”

“Yeah. In the Persian Gulf. Iraqi convoys, too. The last day of the war, when the Iraqis were pulling out of Kuwait—they were in commandeered taxis, city buses, dump trucks, private cars, anything that had wheels and gas in the tank, making off with the stuff they’d looted—my squadron blew the shit out of them. There were guys on fire running out of the vehicles, and we strafed them with cannon fire. They never had a chance. Sometimes I think that’s why I got into what I’m doing now, flying humanitarian aid. We weren’t shooting up an army but a rabble, and it wasn’t war, it was bloody murder. It made me sick.”

This speech—which sounded more like something that would be said in a bar after one too many, and which was so off the point and so unlike Douglas, who hardly ever revealed anything about his past—left everyone speechless.

Leaning over to slap Douglas’s knee, Dare broke the silence. “My partner’s got him a bleeding heart, Hassan. It had been me, I’d have shot the shit out of those Eye-raqis and gone lookin’ for more.”

Adid said nothing, perplexed by the outburst. So was Fitzhugh. Why pick such an inappropriate moment and setting to tell a stranger what you’d withheld from your friends? He thought Douglas had disclosed more about himself than he should have, for all the while, Adid was subjecting the American to his CAT scan gaze, as if he were making exposures of his psychic interior, pinpointing his strengths and weaknesses, the places where he was sound, the places where he was unsound, soft, vulnerable. Douglas too was being sized up. Someone who’d cut his baby teeth in the world of commerce by selling contraband ivory must have learned how to make quick judgments about other people, and make them accurately.

“Perhaps we should turn to what you’re doing now,” Adid said finally. “I have a few questions.”

“This ought to tell you what you need to know.”

Douglas removed from his briefcase a financial statement that Rachel had typed up on the desktop. The one-man conglomerate read it carefully, a finger moving down the columns of assets and liabilities, and said that he hadn’t expected so thorough an accounting of Knight Air’s condition.

“I guess I learned a few things from my father,” Douglas said with a shrug of modesty. “I worked for him a couple of summers in college. He was my business school.”

“So was mine. What does your father do, Mr. Braithwaite?”

“It’s what he did, and make that Douglas or Doug. He died when I was in college. Heart attack. He was a developer. Golf courses, condominiums, that kind of thing.”

“Did your father teach you about business plans?” Adid asked. “One thing I don’t find in here is a business plan. I assume you have one?”

“Sure. It’s to stay in business.”

A pause.

“If that’s it, you won’t,” Adid warned, sharply. “Grow or die, the fundamental axiom. The most valuable lesson I took from there.” He motioned at his degree. “So you could perhaps tell me the prospects for growing, the impediments? Do you have competition, and who are they, and what’s their share of the market, and what’s yours? Do you have a vision of where you’d like your company to be in two or three years? My thought is to invest in it, but naturally I need some idea of what the prospects for a return are. I’m not a charity.”

“We aren’t either.”

“Yes. You fly for charitable organizations.”

“I wouldn’t call it that. We’re not just any old cargo haulers. There’s a point to what we’re doing. Beyond just making a few bucks is what I’m saying.”

“Of course. Of course. But could you tell me please something about the making of the few bucks?”

Business plans. Grow or die. Market share. Whatever Hassan Adid had learned from his ivory-poaching father, it wasn’t this. This argot had come straight from his graduate school days in the United States. Fitzhugh, feeling that he and Dare were more eavesdroppers than participants, listened to Douglas describe Knight Air’s prospects for growth, its present share of the market, and his vision of its golden future: a fleet of twenty planes, flying aid not only into Sudan but to Somalia and the Congo and other African basket cases as well. It would provide a shuttle service for relief workers traveling between Nairobi and Lokichokio; and in the unlikely event that the Sudanese civil war ended, it would be on hand to deliver materials and workers for the country’s reconstruction.

Adid occasionally jotted on a legal tablet, his round chin in his free hand, his expression betraying nothing of his thoughts. Suddenly he grimaced and, throwing his head backward, pinched the bridge of his nose. Douglas fell silent.

“Forgive me,” Adid pleaded as he removed a bottle of nasal spray from a desk drawer. He squeezed it into both nostrils. “A sinus condition. Please, continue.”

Douglas did, and when he was finished, Adid solemnly shook hands and suggested they reconvene at dinner that evening.”How does the Tamarind sound? The best seafood in town. If you like seafood.”

“I’m a brown food man,” Dare said, “but I’ll go along.”

Under a thin layer of gunmetal clouds, they walked back to the Norfolk Hotel. Douglas had insisted they stay there, despite the rates, or rather because of them. He didn’t want Adid to think they were required to accept budget accommodations. He asked Dare what he thought—the one-man conglomerate was a hard guy to read.

“Sure is. Askin’ us to dinner, that’s a good sign. But count on it, if he does bet on us, it won’t be a helluva lot. Hassan’s got it to burn, but that doesn’t mean he likes to burn it. He’s no gambler, strictly a percentage player.”

They crossed Kenyatta toward Muindi Mbingu. Sooty pythons coiled from buses, cars, garishly painted matatus, and secondhand London taxis to slither through the palms lining the middle of the boulevard. Toxic as it was, mile-high Nairobi’s air felt bracing after Loki’s empyrean noons.

“If you ask me, I think we should stay away from him,” Fitzhugh said, pausing to contribute to a band of village kids who were singing and drumming, their begging bowls set out. J. M. Kariuki, the great Kenyan socialist, had predicted this years ago—a country of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. “I don’t like him.”

“What don’t you like?”

“He’s what we used to call a wabenzi. That was a word for fat-cat profiteers who drove Mercedes-Benzes.”

“Who the hell cares what he drives?” Dare said.

“He’s out of our league, yes?”

“The idea is, he helps us get out of the league we’re in.” Erect, confident, ball cap pulled low over his forehead, Douglas strode through the crowds swarming around the pungent city market: an English lord in nineteenth-century Bombay, a Roman in some provincial Gallic town. “With an outside investor backing us, we can expand a lot faster than we ever could out of cash flow. Another lesson from my dad. Never do with your own money what you can do with someone else’s.”

“Kwenda huto!” In Texas-accented Swahili, Dare dismissed a hustler who was after their money, although what he was offering in exchange wasn’t exactly clear. The phrase was repeated several times as they passed the Jeevanjee Gardens, where AIDS orphans popped out of bushes reeking of human excrement to pluck at the sleeves of the two mzungu and their darker-skinned companion. A sprint across University Way brought them to Harry Thuku Road, separating the central police station from the University of Nairobi campus. Fitzhugh had always believed the placement wasn’t accidental: the university, generator of political dissent; the police right across the street, poised to quell student demonstrations.

At the entrance to the Norfolk, that relic of empire, its Tudor facade some nostalgic colonial’s re-creation of an English country house, safari vehicles were dropping off or picking up passengers weighted down with camera gear and dressed up like Out of Africa extras in multipocketed bush jackets and wide-brimmed hats with fake leopard-skin bands. More tourists, along with a few expatriates, were lunching on the Delamere Terrace, the same wood-beamed platform from which long-vanished sahibs and memsahibs, taking high tea, watched gazelle grazing on the plains—the view considerably altered now to one of smog-shrouded concrete and brick. The three entrepreneurs of aid found a free table, and just as he sat down to look at the menu, Fitzhugh was seized by a sudden longing, accompanied by a dread of spending the dinner hour in Adid’s company. He declared that he was opting out of the evening’s engagement, unless his presence was absolutely required, and he doubted it was.

Douglas twitched his head in surprise. “What would get you to turn down a free meal?”

“An old girlfriend,” he lied.

“Right. I guess that would.”

The longing persisted all through his lunch of fish and chips and beer. He was surprised by how firmly it gripped him, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t so surprising. She’d been dwelling in the back of his mind ever since he’d seen her, and he was always delighted to see her again, the rare times she showed up in Loki. The only cure was to act. Resolute, like a soldier, he went to his room, got his address book from his overnight bag, sat on the bed, and dialed. The housekeeper answered.

“Halo, Bibi Di—“ he began, then cleared his throat, deciding on a more formal, businesslike approach. “Nataka kusema na Lady Briggs tafadhali. Ni mimi Bwana Martin.”

“Bwana Martin, okay. Subiri kidogo.”

He waited, long enough to feel his nerve failing him. Then:

“Fitz! So sorry to keep you. I’d just finished up in the ring.”

“The ring?”

“My horse. Where are you?”

He told her, and she said he was moving up in the world. He pictured her in jodhpurs and boots, tousling her hair, matted by the riding hat she was holding by the strap.

“I’m here with Doug and Wes. Talking to some wabenzi who’s interested in advancing us some capital.”

“Marvelous. I was speaking to John the other day, and he rather feels you’ve been neglecting him. He’s got, oh, tons of stuff waiting to go to the Nuba, and he can hardly get a plane scheduled.”

“We’ve been so committed. That mess in Bahr el Ghazal, yes?”

“Dreadful.”

“You heard what happened to Tara? To her pilot, I should say?”

“Ghastly.”

He paused to gather himself and, in a voice scrubbed of any emotion, asked if she was free for dinner. The first part of her answer—“Delighted!”—came so quickly and was so positive that the second part—“On condition Wes keeps the obnoxious remarks to a minimum”—didn’t register immediately. When it did, he hesitated.

“Are you there, Fitz?”

“Yes.” His heart was stammering. “Wesley won’t be there. Or Doug. I’m asking if you’re free.”

“I still am.”

“It’s a long way for you into town, and a woman alone ought not to be driving at night.”

“Perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“I know! I’d prefer a place out your way.”

“There’s the Horseman, which I don’t like, and the Rusty Nail, which I do. I know the chef. I’ll ring up for a table and meet you there. Now listen, Fitz, it’s a frightfully expensive cab ride. Let me pick that up.”

“I am perfectly capable of paying for myself.” He raised his voice to a feminine treble, mimicking her accent. “See you there. Seven.”

She laughed, and he heard her say, as if speaking to someone in the room with her, “My God, I believe I’ve been asked out on a date.”

He knew the dim lighting flattered her, erasing every line; still, his throat tightened a little when he saw her, ravishing in a sleeveless dove-gray blouse with a scooped neckline, and a linen skirt that teased her knees, a silk shawl tossed over her bare shoulders, a choker throwing off emerald gleams from her throat, her hair champagne-gold. Though he’d showered, shaved, brushed his hair, and splashed on some Bay Rum, he felt grubby and underdressed. He also felt conspicuous. Apart from some of the help and one black couple, his was the darkest complexion in the place. Plus, he was in the company of an older white woman, who might or might not be married (he still wasn’t sure) and who was obviously not dressed for a business meeting. He caught a few patrons stealing looks at the mismatched couple sitting at an intimate corner table, near a window. He tried to ignore them, reminding himself that he was now a junior, albeit very junior, partner in a successful young airline and belonged here as much as anyone else. Diana was perceptive enough to notice that he was failing to convince even himself.

“Do relax and don’t mind them,” she said, laying her hand on his. She seemed to deliberately leave it there as a waiter presented menus. “I know everybody here. It would be jolly fun to get some gossip going.”

He didn’t know what to make of the remark. There was some sort of encouragement in it, surely; but he didn’t care to be a prop in some game of cheap social scandal.

She did know everybody, interrupting her study of the menu several times to flutter her fingers (still no wedding band, he observed) at this table and that table. When the owner, a gaunt, papery-skinned man with a long English jaw, stopped by to pay his respects and make recommendations, Fitzhugh began to feel more at ease. Diana’s standing was such that she probably could have walked in here arm in arm with a Masai chief in full tribal regalia and not done herself or the chief any harm: an aristocrat who could get away with things prohibited to a woman of the hoi polloi. She asked the owner to give her very best to Rick in the kitchen. In a few moments Rick-in-the-kitchen dispatched a waiter to tell her that he’d just received a shipment of fresh prawns from the coast and would be delighted to prepare them especially for her and her guest in a garlic, butter, and white wine sauce, to be preceded by his signature dish, capellini primavera.

“Brilliant!”

When the waiter handed her the wine list, Fitzhugh gave up all notions of exercising any masculine authority. He was in her world.

“I think a Montrachet would be nice, don’t you?”

“Brilliant,” he said.

Over Rick-in-the-kitchen’s signature dish, he told her about the meeting with Adid, and that the man made him uncomfortable with his piercing look. He related his thoughts as he passed by the university, his memories of his unsuccessful stab at playing angry young man, when he’d led a protest march in honor of J. M. Kariuki, who’d been murdered by his political rivals. Those recollections had probably moved him to cancel out on Doug’s dinner plans—

“Fitz, dear,” she interrupted, and drew her face closer to whisper teasingly, “you are supposed to say that what moved you was an overwhelming desire for the pleasure of my company.”

He didn’t take it in the lighthearted spirit she’d meant it, and he protested that he had longed for the pleasure of her company, really, he had—but he couldn’t deny that he’d also dreaded, with a dread equal to the longing, listening to more talk about business plans and market share. In recent weeks he’d sensed that he was drawing further and further away from the man he used to be, and the outraged nineteen-year-old who’d led a protest march now seemed so far away as to be someone else. One more hour in the wabenzi’s presence would have made the distance feel all the greater. And yes, he added by way of epilogue, he was aware of the irony of his speaking this way in this place, sipping Montrachet and dining on capellini primavera with a beautiful woman.

Delivering the compliment caused his heart to stutter again, but Diana did not react. She only fixed him with her dark blue eyes—they looked indigo in the sconce’s hooded light—and daubed her lips with her napkin as the plates were cleared away.

“I must sound like I’m in a psychiatrist’s office,” he said, fearful of her silence.

“Not at all.” Again covering his hand, though in a more maternal way. “But if I can play amateur analyst, I’d say you suffer from a common delusion. You equate poverty with virtue, but it isn’t virtue. It’s just poverty.”

He shrugged one shoulder, screwed up a corner of his mouth.

“Oh, yes. You could go to any bush village right now, find the smartest kid there, send him to school, and make him a success, and he won’t be likely to turn out any better than anyone else, and maybe worse. You can bet he’ll forget where he comes from and everyone there. He’ll distance himself from the people who helped him on his way because he’ll need to believe he did it all on his own.”

“This sounds like the voice of experience.”

“It damned well is.” She sipped her wine. “But better that than to leave the kid there. And there’s always the chance you’ll find the one in a thousand who doesn’t forget and who makes a difference.”

“That’s it, Diana! That’s what I was saying. All I’ve wanted to do is to make a difference, not make money.”

The prawns arrived, twice the size of a man’s thumb, curled up pink in their shells.

“Fitz, there’s more of that nineteen-year-old in you than you know. The one does not necessarily preclude the other.”

She peeled one of the shellfish, stabbed it with her fork, and bit it in half; the sauce glistening on her lips made him want to bite them.

Searching for a lighter topic of conversation, he patted his midriff and joked that the expanding distance from his former inner self was being matched by an expansion of his outer self. Then, feeling that he was talking too much about himself, he asked what she’d been doing lately. The usual: scrounging after aid grants, visiting refugee camps, finding sponsors abroad, obtaining visas. Recently she’d befriended a young Kenyan craftsman who was trying to start his own shop. Lived in one of those corrugated iron shanties that line the Ngong road. No electricity or running water. She’d helped him find space where he could begin turning out tables and chairs for sale at the roadside.

“He’s related in some way to my housekeeper, so I took him on.” She sighed. “Wes would say, rich bitch with a guilty conscience.”

Fitzhugh bowed his head, pretending to an interest in the dessert menu. “I have a confession to make. When I first saw your place, I thought something like that myself, yes? Not rich bitch. A daughter of colonials, making up for the sins of the fathers.”

“Can’t say I blame you—”

The waiter interrupted, asking if they’d decided. Just coffee, said Diana. Fitzhugh followed suit, in the interest of his waistline.

“But I really think I do what I do because I love this place,” she resumed. “It is my country as much as it’s yours or anyone else’s. Oh, it was so exciting here, the first few years after independence, wasn’t it? All that hope and promise.”

Her tone was eulogistic. But now, she went on, Kenya, like the whole of black Africa, appeared to be devolving, not into the primitive conditions before European conquest but into chaos. The temptation to write it off as hopeless was irresistible, and she rather thought that much of the world had written it off. She hadn’t because she couldn’t, and she couldn’t because she loved her country and her continent too much. Couldn’t imagine herself living anywhere else, certainly not in the damp gloom of her ancestors’ homeland. The hope and promise had not been entirely extinguished. She was trying, with small actions like assisting the young craftsman, to keep the fragile flame burning. And with larger actions as well, like the White Papers she wrote for foundations and governmental aid agencies, pleading with them to do their bit to arrest Africa’s whirl to the bottom. She compared it to a family’s intervention on behalf of a relative destroying himself with alcohol or drugs. You do it because he’s your blood. Well, Africa was in everyone’s blood, from America to China, wasn’t it? This was where Lucy stood upright one gray dawn a million years ago and left in the mud of the Olduvai Gorge the footprints of the true Eve. The ribs and femurs and mandibles of her children were buried in African soil. Diana tilted her body forward; she seemed to be lit from within. If everyone turned their back on Africa, it would not merely fall further and further behind, it could very well lead the world into a dark and lawless tomorrow . . . then abruptly, she shook her head. “Goodness! Listen to me!”

He was, as attentively as ever he’d listened to anyone. How glad he was that he’d chosen to spend these hours with her.

“That was beautiful, Diana.”

“But a bit too—too philosophical? Maybe pretentious?”

“No.” She who’d claimed a portion of his heart from the moment he’d first seen her now owned it all, and she’d seized his mind with it. He surrendered. He would not try to argue himself out of the emotion roaring through him. It wasn’t an emotion that had ever submitted to reason. The only thing left to do was to express it, if he could marshal the courage.

“Another confession,” he said. “That day when Malachy . . . when you came to the door? Malachy had told me how old you were.”

“Fifty-one last month,” she said, in a neutral voice.

“When you came to the door, I was expecting—I wasn’t expecting you to look the way you did, the way you do.”

“Vitamins and lots of riding.” She laughed. She didn’t want the conversation to go where he was taking it. She stroked his forearm. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of it. I believe you’ve said more lovely things to me than I’ve heard the past year.”

“I wasn’t intending to say lovely things. I was, am, well, you’re as beautiful inside as you are outside.” God, he thought, did I really say something that trite?

“Oh, bosh. I’m quite ordinary.”

“No, no. Listen, today at lunch, all of a sudden I needed to see you. It came from nowhere, but maybe it didn’t. I think I’m—” An icy pain bound his chest and trapped the words in his throat. She took advantage of his hesitation to keep them there.

“You’re what, thirty-odd?” she asked, sounding almost prosecutorial.

“Thirty-four. Five in a few more months.”

“My daughter, had she lived, would have been just a year younger.”

Stunned by this revelation, he blinked, swallowed, stirred his coffee cup with his spoon. The cup was empty, and the metal made a nerve-wracking sound against the china.

“Daughter,” he muttered after a long silence.

“Born dead.”

“I’m sorry. So you’re—”

“Yes.”

“You don’t wear a ring.”

“No.”

This was brutal. As her answer, delivered in a downward pitch, cut off further inquiry, he did not make any. He swept up the check before she could.

“I have an account here,” Diana said. “That’s completely unnecessary.”

“I asked you to dinner. You could at least leave me that.”

“Very well. But I insist on saving you the taxi fare and driving you back into town.”

He was going to make one final attempt. “Diana.”

Thinking that he was about to protest her offer, she turned partway around, patted the purse hanging from her chair, and said, “No rubbish about me driving myself back home alone. I have a friend who lives here, chap named Walther. I’ve been trained to use him, I practice with him about twice a month, and I wouldn’t think twice about pulling the trigger on some thug.”

Now he gave up and said, “I believe you wouldn’t. I didn’t realize I was in dangerous company.”

“Hardly.” She tossed her head in the self-deprecatory way that had so charmed him that afternoon in her foyer. “I’ve got to stop off at the loo. Meet you outside.”

He interrogated himself as he stood by the door, looking at the parking lot and the long drive sloping down in the darkness toward the road. Why had she accepted his invitation, and why had she touched his hand with such tender pressure, and why had she made that remark about the pleasure of her company? Why had she dressed and made herself up so gorgeously if not to look pleasing to him? Was he being presumptuous? Women had always come so easily to him, he must have thought she would too, despite the manifest obstacles, the pressures of convention. He must have misread her entirely. But if he hadn’t? Then she and her husband must be living under some sort of arrangement—You’re free to f*ck whomever you want so long as I am, too. Yes, that could be it. Long ago these white uplanders had established a reputation for adulterous hijinks, and he doubted they’d changed. It would be just the thing for a married middle-aged woman high up on the social ladder to have an adventure with a younger brown-skinned lover. Get some real gossip going, just for the thrill of it. A flash of pure rage brought sweat to his forehead. He shook out a cigarette, then tossed it unlit into the shrubbery. A new thought sprang up, calming him somewhat. She’d said she was going to drive herself back home, which didn’t suggest that she intended to make him a toy in some game of infidelity. Or was she playing it coy? He’d never been so confused. Well, he could thank her for preventing him from declaring his love and making a complete idiot of himself.

“Shall we then?”

She’d freshened up, and her beauty instantly dissolved his turmoil. Love—that was the only word in his mind, the only thing he could feel.

She started across the lot with her sergeant major’s stride, her heels clicking martially on the pavement. They came to her car, the same sedan he’d seen her drive more than a year ago.

“My daughter was not by my husband, nor by any previous husband,” she announced without preamble. “My husband came later.”

He decided to be chivalrous and held the door for her, even as he thought, I don’t need or want to hear any of this. But as she climbed in, his eyes shot to her skirt, riding up to reveal her equestrienne’s thighs. She tugged it down, and the rustle of cloth against nylon brought on a convulsion of raw lust. He circled to his side and got in and slammed the door. She didn’t switch on the ignition. She looked at him with a peculiar intensity.

“David lives in the U.K. We’ve been separated for a very long time. For reasons that are—excuse me—none of your business, we’ve never divorced.” Money, he thought. “But I haven’t seen or heard from him in over ten years. So, this.”

She held up her bare left hand.

“There are some reasons that are my business,” he said coolly. “Why you’re bothering to tell me all this.”

“Frankly, I don’t know.”

What did he have to lose? He reached over with one arm and took her by the waist and kissed her—a hard, almost violent kiss, forcing her mouth open, his tongue darting in to lick the inside of her lips. He’d no idea what he was trying to express, love or anger or a little of both. She didn’t resist, nor did she respond, her body limp.

“That was the reason, yes?”

She drew away, flung her head over the back of the seat, and said in an aggravated tone, “Oh, Christ!”

“Was that the reason, Diana?”

“I’m flattered, really I am,” she replied, holding her gaze to the overhead light.

“I don’t want to flatter you. I want to know if that was the reason.”

Lowering her head to look out the windshield, she assumed the posture of a race car driver, gripping the wheel with extended arms.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with you, Lady Briggs.”

“Lady Briggs doesn’t know either.”

“Which is why you wouldn’t let me say what I wanted to say?”

“What do you think? This isn’t merely wrong, it’s absurd.” She hesitated. “I noticed the way you looked at me, the day Malachy brought you over for the meeting. I wonder if you noticed the way I looked at you.”

“I think so, yes.”

“And the times we’ve seen each other in Loki. The past several months, I’ve found you sneaking into my head like a bloody burglar, and I thought I must be mad or a randy hag looking to rob the cradle.”

He could not have been more thrilled, hearing this. “You’re no hag, and thirty-four going on -five is not the cradle.”

Then he swooped down on her and kissed her again. If his was gentler than his first, hers was more ardent. She bit his lips lightly, pulled away, and lightly nipped one ear, then the other. His hand fell to her lap, parted her thighs and moved up under her skirt, searching for the band of her pantyhose. She gently pushed him back.

“For God’s sake, not here.”

“No,” he said, smiling. “But you know, I’m still anxious about you driving home alone at night, no matter your little friend Walther.”

“Ha! I don’t know why I said that.” She tidied her blouse, smoothed her skirt. “Walther is locked in a drawer at my bedside. The only thing in my purse is a can of Mace, so old it’s rusty.”

“Now I am more anxious than ever. I think you should ease my anxieties.”

“I know about you, Fitz. More than you think. You’re quite the swordsman from what I’ve heard. I’ve no interest in adding to your collection. Here’s a black one, here’s a white one, here’s a young one, here’s an old one. Thanks very much, but no thank you.”

“I’m in love with you,” he said, and felt greatly relieved, like a criminal admitting to his crime.

She looked up again, and speaking to some invisible personage, she repeated her exasperated “Oh Christ!” adding, “He’s in love with me. Barely knows me and he’s in love with me.” She returned her eyes to him. “As to your anxieties, I have staff. They’d be scandalized, and they’re terrible gossips.”

“Then you should drive me to the Norfolk tonight and yourself home in the morning. Or would that scandalize them, too?”

“Not as much.” The statement came in a wavering voice, the next in a tone of fierce resolve. “I’ll ring them up and say I’m staying in town with a friend and not to worry.”

Then she turned the key and put the car in gear.