The Mission Song (37 page)

Run a bath. Lie in it. Catch myself attempting to reproduce Haj’s Mission school jingle. Why does a tortured man sing? she had asked me. Her patients didn’t sing, so why did Haj? Why does a grown man chant a dirge about a little girl’s virtue when he’s been beaten up?

Get out of bath. Clutching my transistor radio, I stand obliquely at the window, clad in my bath towel. Through the net curtains, I contemplate a no-name green van parked close to Mr Hakim’s front gate.
Exceptional rainfall in southern India. Reports of landslides. Many feared dead. Now for the cricket.

Five o’clock. I walk my mile but contrary to One-Day instructors’ advice I use the same phone box. I put in a pound and keep another ready, but the best I get is Grace’s answering service. If I’m Latzi, I should ring her after 10 p.m. when she’ll be in bed
alone
! Hoots of laughter. If I’m Salvo, I should be her welcome guest and leave a love-message for Hannah. I attempt to rise to her invitation:

‘Hannah darling, I love you.’ But I do not, for security reasons, add, as I might have done: I know what you’ve done and you were right to do it.

Using side roads I make my desultory way back to Mr Hakim’s. Post-bombing bicycles tick past me like ghostly horsemen. The no-name green van is still parked in front of the gates. It displays no parking permit. Listen to six o’clock news. The world remains where it was at two.

Food as diversion. In the postage-stamp-sized fridge, find half a two-day-old pizza, garlic sausage, pumpernickel bread, gherkins, Marmite for me. When Hannah first arrived in London from Uganda she shared digs with a German nurse and consequently assumed that all English people ate Knackwurst and sauerkraut and drank peppermint tea. Hence a silver packet of same in Mr Hakim’s fridge. Like all nurses, Hannah puts everything in the fridge whether or not it is perishable. If you can’t sterilise it freeze it, is her axiom. Warm up butter as prelude to spreading on pumpernickel bread. Spread Marmite. Eat slowly. Swallow with caution.

The seven o’clock news is identical to the six o’clock. Can the world really have done nothing for five whole hours? Careless of security considerations, I go online and scroll through the day’s trivia.
Suicide bombers in Baghdad have killed forty and injured hundreds
—or is it the other way round?
The newly appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations has filed another fifty objections to proposed reforms. The French President is entering hospital
, or coming out.
His ailments are subject to France’s Official Secrets Act
—but it sounds as though he’s got a bad eye.
Unconfirmed reports from the Congolese capital Kinshasa speak of a spontaneous outbreak of fighting between rival militias in the eastern region of the country.

Hannah’s rainbow cellphone is ringing. I bound across the room, grab her phone and return to my computer.

‘Salvo?’

‘Hannah. Marvellous. Hi.’

Sources close to the Congolese government in Kinshasa blame ‘imperialist elements in Rwanda’. Rwanda denies involvement.

‘You okay, Salvo? I love you so much.’ In French, the language of our love.

‘Fine. Great. Just longing for you to come back. How about you?’

‘I love you so much it’s stupid, Salvo. Grace says she never saw anyone so normal go so lovesick.’

The border area with Rwanda is described as peaceful with no unusual traffic.

I’m fighting on three fronts at once, which Maxie would not approve of. I’m trying to listen and speak and decide whether to tell her what I’m seeing when I don’t know whether it’s our war or someone else’s.

‘You know what, Salvo?’

‘What, my darling?’

‘Since I met you I lost three pounds.’

I have to digest this, reason it out. ‘Blame the unaccustomed exercise!’ I cry. ‘Blame
me
!’

‘Salvo?’

‘What, my love?’

‘I did something bad, Salvo. Something I’ve got to tell you about.’

A British Embassy official in Kinshasa describes rumours of British-led mercenaries in the region as ‘fanciful and absurd’.

Of course they are! They must be! The coup is nine days off! Or did Brinkley fire the starting pistol the moment I walked out of his house?

‘Listen. You haven’t. It’s all right. Truly! Whatever it is! Nothing matters! I know all about it. Tell me when you come back!’

Shrill kiddie noises off.

‘I’ve got to go back in there, Salvo.’

‘I understand! Go! I love you!’

End of endearments. End of phone call.

Four Swiss aviation technicians who were caught in the crossfire have requested the protection of Bukavu’s UN commander.

Seated in the wicker chair with the transistor radio on the table beside me, I embark on a study of Mrs Hakim’s wallpaper while I listen to Gavin, our Central Africa correspondent, giving us the story so far:

According to the Congolese government in Kinshasa, a Rwandan-backed putsch has been nipped in the bud, thanks to a brilliantly executed security operation based on first-class intelligence.

Kinshasa suspects French and Belgian complicity, but does not rule out other unnamed Western powers.

Twenty-two members of a visiting African football club are being held for questioning following the discovery of a cache of small arms and heavy machine-guns at Bukavu airport.

No casualties reported. The footballers’ country of origin has not yet been ascertained.

The Swiss Embassy in Kinshasa, asked about the four Swiss aviation experts, declines to comment at this stage. Enquiries regarding their travel documents have been passed to Berne.

Thank you, Gavin. End of bulletin. End of any last lingering doubt.

Mrs Hakim’s guest lounge is a regal place with deep armchairs and an oil painting of a lakeside paradise with houris dancing on the shore. In one hour from now it will be the haunt of hard-smoking Asian salesmen watching Bollywood videos on a television set as big as a Cadillac, but for the time being it has the sweetened silence of an undertaker’s parlour and I am watching the ten o’clock news. Men in shackles change size. Benny has shrunk. Anton is bulky. Spider has grown nine inches since he passed out the plates in his improvised chef’s hat. But the star of the show is neither the UN’s Pakistani Commandant in his blue helmet, nor the colonel of the Congolese army with his swagger cane, but our skipper Maxie in fawn slacks with no belt and a sweat-soaked shirt minus one sleeve.

The slacks are all that is left of the go-anywhere khaki suit last seen when he was pressing a white envelope on me containing the seven thousand dollars’ fee that, in the gallantry of his heart, he prised out of the Syndicate. His face, deprived of Bogey’s enlarging spectacles, lacks the charisma that had cast its spell over me, but in other respects has grown into the part, being formed in an expression of gritty endurance that refuses to acknowledge defeat, no matter how many days it spends at the whipping post. The bulletproof hands are manacled in front of him and folded over one another like a dog’s paws. He has one desert boot on, and one bare foot to match the bare shoulder. But it isn’t the missing boot that’s slowing him down, it’s another set of shackles, short ones for a man of his height, and by the look of them too tight. He is staring straight at me and to judge by his vituperative jaw action he is telling me to go fuck myself, until it dawns on me that he must be telling this to the person who is filming him, not me personally.

On Maxie’s uneven heels come Anton and Benny, chained to one another and their skipper. Anton has some bruising on the left side of his face which I suspect has been caused by impertinence. The reason Benny looks smaller than actual size is that his chains hunch him downward in a mincing shuffle. His grey ponytail has been cropped to stubble by a single sweep of someone’s panga, giving the impression that they’ve got him ready for the guillotine. After Benny comes Spider, improviser of cattle prods and my fellow sound-thief, chained but upright. He has been allowed to keep his cap, which gives him a certain pertness. Being the acrobat he is, he doesn’t have the same problem as his short-stepping mates. Together, the four of them resemble an incompetent conga-party, jerking back and forth to a beat they can’t get the hang of.

After the white men come the footballers, some twenty of them in a receding line of miserable black shadows:
veterans, no mavericks, best fighters in the world
. But when I search nervously for a Dieudonné or a Franco, on the off-chance that somehow, in the mayhem of a failed operation, they have been caught up in the main affray, I’m relieved to see neither the hulk of the crippled old warrior nor the spectre of the haggard Banyamulenge leader among the prisoners. I didn’t look for Haj because somehow I knew he wouldn’t be there. A tidbit relished by commentators is that Maxie—known thus far only as ‘the alleged ringleader’—contrived to swallow his Sim-card at the moment of arrest.

I return to our bedroom and resume my study of Mrs Hakim’s wallpaper. On the radio, a junior minister of the Foreign Office is being interviewed:

‘Our hands are clean as a whistle, thank you, Andrew,’ she informs her inquisitor in the feisty language of New Labour at its most transparent. ‘HMG is nowhere in this one, trust me. All right, so one or other of the men is British. Give me a break! I’d have thought you’d have had a bit more respect for us, frankly. All the signals
we’re
getting say this was a botched, incompetent bit of private enterprise. It’s no good saying, “Who by?” all the time because I don’t
know
who by! What I
do
know is, it’s got amateur written all over it, and whatever else you may think we are, we’re not amateurs. And I believe in free speech too, Andrew. Goodnight!’

Maxie has acquired a name. One of his ex-wives spotted him on television. A sweet man who just wouldn’t grow up, son of a parson. Sandhurst-trained, ran a mountaineering school in Patagonia, worked under contract to the United Arab Emirates, she says brightly. A Congolese academic calling himself the Enlightener is believed to be the mastermind behind the plot, but he has gone into hiding. Interpol is launching an enquiry. Of Lord Brinkley and his multinationally backed anonymous Syndicate and its designs on the Eastern Congo’s resources, nothing. Of Lebanese crooks and independent consultants and their friends, nothing. They were all playing golf, presumably.

I lie on the bed, listening to Mrs Hakim’s brass clock chiming out the halves and quarters. I think of Maxie chained to a whipping post. The morning dawns, the sun rises and I am still lying in my bed, unchained. Somehow it’s seven o’clock, then eight o’clock. Somehow the quarters keep chiming. The rainbow phone is trilling.

‘Salvo?’

Yes, Grace.

Why doesn’t she speak? Is she handing the phone to Hannah? Then why doesn’t Hannah take it? There’s background garble. A man’s name is being called by a commanding north country female voice. Who on earth is
Cyril Ainley
? I’ve never heard of a Cyril or an Ainley. Where are we? In hospital? In a waiting room somewhere? It’s only seconds I’m talking of. Milliseconds, while I steal every scrap of sound I can get my ears on.

‘Is that you, Salvo?’

Yes, Grace. This is Salvo. Her voice is damped right down. Is she phoning from a place where phones are forbidden? I can hear other people phoning. Her mouth is crammed into the mouthpiece, distorting the sound. She’s got a hand cupped over it. Suddenly the words are pouring out of her: a breathless, demented monologue that she can’t stop even if she wants to, and neither can I.

‘They’ve got her Salvo who they are God Himself only knows I’m at the police station reportin’ it but I can’t talk too much they took her clean off the pavement from beside me right outside the church we got rid of the kids and Amelia pretendin’ to have a fit and her mum sayin’ we spoiled her and Hannah and me we’re goin’ down the hill real cross at the ingratitude when this car stops and two fellows one black one white ordinary-lookin’ fellows Salvo and a white woman driver who keeps lookin’ straight out ahead of her through the windscreen never once turns her head the whole time they get out and the black one says Hi Hannah and puts his arm round her waist like he’s an old friend and sweeps her into the car and they’ve gone and now this nice police lady she’s askin’ me what kind of car and showin’ me pictures of cars hours it’s taken Hannah never said a word to me she didn’t have time and now the police are sayin’ maybe she wanted to go with those boys maybe this was some guy she was already goin’ with or thought she’d like to earn herself a few quid on her back with the both of them as if Hannah would do a thing like that they just snatched her off the street and the nice police lady is sayin’ well maybe she’s on the game and maybe you’re the same Grace there’s such a thing as wastin’ the time of a police officer you know it’s actually a crime Grace maybe you should be aware of that I lost my rag why don’t you put a bloody notice up I told her no blacks taken seriously so now she’s talkin’ to everybody except me.’

‘Grace!’

I said it again. Grace. Three, four times. Then I questioned her the way we question children, trying to calm her instead of scaring her. What happened? I don’t mean now, I mean in Bognor, while you were together. I mean the first night you were there, the night you told me she was at the movies with the big kids. That night.

‘It was a surprise for you, Salvo.’

What kind of surprise?

‘She was recordin’ somethin’ for you, a sound file, she called it, some piece of music she loved and wanted to give you. It was a secret.’

So where did she go to do that, Grace?

‘Some place Latzi told her, back up a hill somewhere, no traffic. We called up Latzi at his studio. These music freaks, they got friends like everywhere, Salvo. So Latzi knew a guy who knew a guy in Bognor, and Hannah, she went up to see him, while I kept it secret and that’s the whole of it. Jesus Christ, Salvo, what in high Heaven’s name is goin’ on?’

I ring off. Of course, Grace. Thank you. And having made the sound file from tapes five and six, she popped it into a computer, no doubt Latzi’s friend had one, and sent it to Haj’s e-mail address for his greater edification, to help him reason with his father whom he respects so much, but as it happened she needn’t have bothered, because by then the operation was going up in smoke, and the listeners and watchers and all the other people I had once mistaken for my friends were gathering round her for the kill.