The Mission Song Part 23

I was slowly recovering my faculties. "She was trying to stop an illegal war," I shouted, to my surprise. "We both were!"

Philip, ever the diplomat, stepped in to defuse the situation.

"The point is neither here nor there, surely," he gently remonstrated. "London can't be a haven for foreign activists. Least of all when they're over here on a nursing visa. Hannah fully accepted that, irrespective of the legal niceties, didn't she, Sam?"

"Once we'd explained the problem to her, she was fully cooperative," Sam agreed. "She was sad, naturally. But she didn't ask for a lawyer, she wasn't tiresome or obstreperous, and she signed her waivers without a murmur. That was because she knew what was best for her. And for you. And for her small boy, of course, her pride and joy. Noah. They choose such sweet names, don't they?"

"I demand to talk to her," I said, or perhaps shouted.

"Yes, well, I'm afraid there are no facilities for talking just now. She's in a holding centre, and you're where you are. And in just a few hours from now she'll be making an entirely voluntary exit to Kampala where she'll be reunited with Noah. What could be nicer than that?"

It took Philip to point the moral: "She went quietly, Salvo," he said, looking down at me. "We expect you to do the same." He had put on his soft-as-b.u.t.ter voice, but with a dash of official seasoning. "It has been brought to the attention of the Home Office by way of Arthur here, who has been extraordinarily helpful in his researches, thank you, Arthur that the man who calls himself Bruno Salvador is not now and never has been a British subject, loyal or otherwise. In short, he doesn't exist."

He allowed a two-second silence in memory of the dead.

"Your UK citizenship, with all its rights and privileges, was obtained by subterfuge. Your birth certificate was a lie. You were not a foundling, and your father was never a pa.s.sing seafarer with a spare baby to get rid of- well, was he?" he went on, appealing to my good sense. "We can only a.s.sume therefore that the British Consul in Kampala at the time of your birth succ.u.mbed to the blandishments of the Holy See. The fact that one you were not technically of an age to partic.i.p.ate in the deception is not, I am afraid, an excuse in law. Am I right, Arthur?"

"What law?" Arthur rejoined in a sprightly tone from the bay. "There isn't one. Not for him."

"The hard truth is, Salvo, that as you very well know, or should know, you have been an illegal immigrant ever since your ten-year-old feet touched down on Southampton dock-side, and in all that time you never once applied for asylum. You simply carried on as if you were one of us."

And here by rights my fury, which was coming and going pretty much of its own accord, should have jerked me out of my armchair for another go at his neck or some other part of his flexible, ultra-reasonable anatomy. But when you are trussed up like a f.u.c.king monkey, to use Haj's term, with your hands and ankles taped together, and the whole of you is strapped into a kitchen chair, opportunities for body language are curtailed, as Philip was the first to appreciate, for why else would he be risking an airy smile, and a.s.suring me there is a silver lining even to the darkest cloud?

"The long and the short of it is that the Congolese, we are reliably informed, will in principle, allowing time obviously for administrative necessities' indulgent smile 'and a word in the right ear from our Amba.s.sador in Kinshasa, and a birth certificate more representative of the historical realities, shall we say?" even more indulgent smile 'be delighted to welcome you as their citizen. Welcome you back, I should say, since technically you never left them. Only if that makes sense to you, of course. It's your life we're talking about, not ours. But it certainly makes admirable sense to us, doesn't it, Arthur?"

"Go where he likes, far as we're concerned," Arthur confirms from the bay. "Long as it's not here."

Sam in her motherly way agrees wholeheartedly with both Philip and Arthur. "It makes perfect sense to Hannah too, Salvo. And why should we hog all their best nurses, anyway? They're desperate. And frankly, Salvo, when you think about it, what has England without Hannah got to offer you? You're not thinking of going back to Penelope, I trust?"

Taking these matters as settled, Philip helps himself to my shoulder-bag, unzips it, and counts the notepads and tapes onto the table one by one.

"Marvellous," he declares, like a conjuror delighted with his trick. "And Hannah's two make the full seven. Unless of course you ran off duplicates. Then there really wouldn't be any saving of you. Did you?"

I'm suddenly so drowsy that he can't hear my reply, so he makes me repeat it, I suppose for the microphones.

"Wouldn't have been secure," I say again, and try to go back to sleep.

"And that was your only copy oiJ'Accuse! I take it? The one you gave to Thorne?" he goes on, in the tone of somebody wrapping up the final details.

I must have nodded.

"Good. Then all we have left to do is smash your hard disk," he says with relief, and beckons to the blond boys in the doorway, who untie me but leave me on the ground while I get my circulation back.

"So how's Maxie doing these days?" I enquire, hoping to bring a blush to his crease less cheeks.

"Yes, well, poor Maxie, alas for him!" Philip sighs, as if reminded of an old friend. "As good as they come in that business, they tell me, but oh so headstrong. And silly of him to have jumped the gun."

"You mean silly of Brinkley," I suggest, but the name is unfamiliar to him.

There is business, as they say in the theatre world, about hauling me to my feet. After the whack on the head, I am heavier than I was, and one boy is not enough. Once they've got me standing, Arthur places himself in front of me, officiously pulling down the skirts of his jacket. He reaches into his breast pocket, produces a brown envelope marked on her majesty's service and slaps it into my unresisting hand.

"You have accepted this notice in the presence of witnesses," he announces to a larger room. "Kindly read it. Now."

The printed letter, when I am finally able to focus on it, tells me I am an unwanted person. Arthur gives me one of Haj's Parker pens. I make a few pa.s.ses with it and scrawl a ragged version of my signature. n.o.body shakes hands, we're too British, or we were. I fall in between the two boys. We step into the garden and they walk me to the gate. It's a sweltering day. What with the bomb scares and half the city on holiday, there's barely a soul about. A dark green van with no name and no windows has pulled up in front of the house. It's the twin of the van that sat outside the Hakims' boarding house, perhaps the same one. Four men in denims emerge from it and walk towards us. Their leader wears a policeman's cap.

"This one trouble?" he asks.

"Not now he isn't," says a blond boy.

39Q.

20.

An interpreter, Noah, even a top one, when he has nothing to interpret except himself, is a man adrift. Which is how I've come to write all this down without quite knowing whom I was writing to, but now I know it's you. It will be a few years yet before you are called upon to decipher what Mr. Anderson liked to call my Babylonian cuneiform, and when you do, I hope to be there beside you, showing you how it works, which won't be a problem provided you know your Swahili.

Watch out, my dearest adopted son, for anything in your life marked special. It's a word with many meanings, none good. One day I will read you The Count of Monte Cristo, a favourite of my late Aunt Imelda's. It's about the most special prisoner of them all. There are quite a lot of Monte Cristos in England now, and I am one of them.

A special van has no windows but special facilities on the floor for special detainees who for their safety and comfort are strapped to it for the three-hour journey. Lest they have it in mind to disturb the public peace with screams of protest, a special leather gag is provided at no extra cost.

Special prisoners have numbers instead of names. Mine is Two Six.

qqo A special hospitality block is a cl.u.s.ter of repainted Nissen huts, built for our gallant Canadian allies in 1940 and surrounded by enough barbed wire to keep out the entire n.a.z.i army, which is all right for the many British who still believe they are fighting the Second World War, but less all right for the incarcerated inmates of Camp Mary.

Why our camp should be named after the Mother of Christ is officially unknown. Some say the first Canadian commandant was a devout Catholic. Mr. J. P. Warner, formerly of the Royal Corps of Military Police and now Special Hospitality Officer, has a different story. According to him, Mary was a lady of the local town of Hastings who, in the darkest days of the war when Britain stood alone, favoured an entire platoon of Canadian pioneers between the hours of last parade and curfew the same evening.

My early brushes with Mr. Warner gave no hint of the warm relationship that would develop between us, but from the day he felt able to partake of Maxie's munificence, the bond was formed. He has no quarrel with darkies, he a.s.sures me, his grandfather having served in the Sudan Defence Force, and his father with our distinguished colonial police in Kenya during the troubles.

Special inmates enjoy special rights: the right not to venture beyond the borders of our compound the right not to join the dawn trek into town with other inmates, not to sell unscented roses to motorists at traffic lights, not to clean the windscreens of their BMWs in exchange for a few words of abuse the right to remain silent at all times, to make and receive no phone calls, to send no letters, and to receive only such incoming items as have been previously approved 33i by Authority and thereafter handed to me as a personal favour by Mr. J. P. Warner, whose responsibilities, he a.s.sures me, are awesome.

"I'm not listening to you, Two Six," he likes to advise me, wagging his finger in my face. "It's air I'm sitting with," he will add, accepting another gla.s.s of my Rioja. "Not flesh and bone at all." Yet Mr. Warner is a shrewd listener who has swum in all the oceans of life. He has managed military prisons in far outposts -and even, long ago, for misdemeanours he refuses to divulge, had a taste of his own medicine. "Conspiracies, Two Six, are not a problem. Everybody conspires, n.o.body gets done. But if it's cover-up time, G.o.d help us all."

There is comfort of a sort in knowing you are one of a kind.

Looking back, it was inevitable that my confinement at Camp Mary should have got off to a bad start. I see that now. Just arriving at Reception with special stamped all over me was enough to put hackles up. To have PV in addition against my name PV standing these days for potentially violent -well, you get whatever you deserve, as I learned when, in a spirit of solidarity, I joined a sit-in of Somalis on the roof of the old vicarage that serves as Camp Mary's headquarters. Our message to the world was peaceful. We had wives and Sunday School kids in bright cottons. The bed-sheets that we held out to the beam of the camp's searchlights were daubed with conciliatory words: don't send us home to be tortured, MR BLAIR! WE WANT TO BE TORTURED HERE! In One very important sense I was however at variance with my fellow demonstrators. While they were on their knees begging for permission to stay, I couldn't wait to be deported. But in QVQ.

confinement, team spirit is all, as I discovered to my cost when a contingent of no-name policemen in motorcycle helmets dispersed us with the aid of baseball bats.

Yet nothing in life, Noah, even a few broken bones, is without its reward. As I lay in that sick bay, manacled to the four corners of the bed and thinking there was little enough of life to live for, enter Mr. J. P. Warner with the first of the fifteen weekly letters I have received from the hand of your beloved mother. As a condition of going quietly, she had with typical bravura prised an address out of her captors where she could write to me. Much of what she wrote is not yet for your young eyes or ears. Your mother, though chaste, is a pa.s.sionate woman and speaks freely of her desires. But one cool evening, when you are very old, and you have loved as I have, I hope you will light a fire and sit beside it and read how, with every page your mother wrote to me, she brought tears of joy and laughter running down my prisoner's cheeks, washing away all thoughts of self-pity or despair.

The strides she is making in life more than compensate for my immobility. No mere Degree Nurse Hannah any more, but Sister Hannah in a brand-new teaching ward in the absolute best hospital in Kampala! And still somehow finding time to continue her studies in simple surgical procedures! On Grace's advice, she tells me, she has bought herself a temporary wedding ring to keep the wolves at bay till the day I am able to equip her with the permanent variety. And when a young intern groped her in the operating theatre, she gave him such a talking-to that he apologised to her three days running, then invited her to spend the weekend at his cottage, so she gave him another.

My one anxiety is that she may not know I have forgiven her for removing tapes five and six from my shoulder-bag and transmitting them without my prior knowledge to Haj. If only she could understand that there was never anything to forgive 2QQ.

in the first place! And if she can't, will she, as a good Mission girl, turn her back on me in favour of a man who has nothing to reproach her with? Such are the ingenious terrors which imprisoned lovers inflict upon themselves in the endless hours of the night.

And there was one letter, Noah, that for want of moral courage I at first declined to open at all. The envelope was thick, oily brown and faintly lined, a sure warning that Britain's secret over world was about to make its presence felt. For reasons of security, it bore a normal first-cla.s.s stamp instead of the printed logo declaring it to be On Her Majesty's Service. My name, number and the camp's address, accurate in every detail, were written in a hand as familiar to me as my own. For three days it stood staring at me from my window-sill. At length, fortified by an evening pa.s.sed with J. P. Warner and a bottle of Rioja procured for me with Maxie's ill-gotten wealth, I grabbed a soft plastic knife that is designed to spare me self-harm and slit its throat. I read the covering letter first. Plain white A4 paper, no watermark, address london and the date.

Dear Salvo, I am not officially familiar with the writer of the enclosed, neither have I perused its contents, which are in French. Barney a.s.sures me they are of a personal nature and not obscene. As you know, I do not believe in intruding upon the private domain unless the interests of Our Nation are at stake. It is my sincere wish that you will one day remember our collaboration in a more favourable light, since it is essential that Man at all times be protected from himself.

Tours ever, R. (Bob) Anderson.

By now of course my eye had lighted on the second envelope to which Mr. Anderson's covering letter made such tantalising reference. It was bulky and addressed in electronic print to Monsieur l'interprete Brian Sinclair at his post-office box number in Brixton. The sender's name, embossed in sky blue on the back, was given as the Comptoir Joyeux de Bukavu: a play, I quickly deduced, on Haj's full name of Honore Amour-Joyeuse. The contents were not so much a letter as a wad of random jottings done over a s.p.a.ce of days and nights. When I closed my eyes and sniffed the pages, I swear I inhaled the whiff of a woman's scent, and J. P. Warner said the same. The text was in French, handwritten in a meticulous academic style that even in hurried circ.u.mstances did not desert him, any more than did his scatological vocabulary.

Dear Zebra, Tapes weren't necessary. You screwed me, I screwed them.

Who the f.u.c.k's Hannah?

Why does she talk a lot of medical c.r.a.p at me and tell me to get my a.r.s.e checked by a urologist?

And why does she tell me to stand up to my revered father Luc, and here's the evidence to help me do it?

I didn't need any f.u.c.king evidence. As soon as I got home I told Luc that if he didn't want to end up dead and bankrupt the first thing he should do was pull the plug on the Mw.a.n.gaza.

The second thing he should do was advise the Mau Mau and the Banyamulenge they were making horses' a.r.s.es of themselves.

The third thing he should do was confess his soul to the nearest UN big cheese, and the fourth thing he should do was take an extended holiday in Alaska.

Hannah says you're in deep s.h.i.t in England, which sqi; knowing you does not surprise me. She prays that one day you may make it to the Congo. Well, maybe if you do, I'll behave like all the best crooks and endow a teaching post at the university of Bukavu, currently a disaster zone. And I won't give a f.u.c.k whether you teach languages or beer-drinking.

And make haste, because not all G.o.d's little angels at the gates of Heaven will protect Hannah's virtue from her wicked Uncle Haj's clutches when she comes back to Kivu.

In Bukavu it's business as usual. It rains nine months a year and when the drains back up, Independence Square becomes Independence Lake. Most weeks we can offer riots, demos and shoot-outs, although timings are unpredictable. A couple of months back, our home football team lost a big match, so the crowd lynched the referee and the police shot the only six guys who were doing absolutely nothing. None of this deters white Bible-thumping American evangelists with perfect hair telling us to love George Bush, and not f.u.c.k any more because G.o.d doesn't like it.

There's an old Belgian priest here who got shot in the a.r.s.e a few years back. Now and then he drops in on one of my nightclubs to get a free drink and talk about the good old days. When he mentions your father, he smiles. When I ask him why, he smiles a bit more. My guess is, your father screwed for the whole Mission.

My house in the Muhumba district is a Belgian colonial b.a.s.t.a.r.d's palace at the lake's edge, but he must have been a decent sort of b.a.s.t.a.r.d because he built a Garden of Eden all the way down to the water, with every flower you heard of and some you didn't. Candle trees, bottlebrush trees, aloe trees, bougainvillea, hibiscus, jacaranda, agapanthus and arrowroot, but my orchids are a f.u.c.k-up. We've got spiders the size of mice, and mouse birds with fluffy heads and long tails, in case you've forgotten. Our weaver birds have a great technique for pulling girls. The male weaves a nest on spec, then talks the girl inside. If she likes what she sees, they f.u.c.k. Tell that to your evangelists.

I meant to say that this garden has a bungalow. I built it for my sainted wet-nurse who took one look at it and died. She was the only woman I loved and never f.u.c.ked. It has a tin roof and a verandah and is presently occupied by about a million b.u.t.terflies and mosquitoes. If you ever make it to Bukavu, have it. The Goma cheese is still okay, the lights go out for three hours a day, but n.o.body puts out the lights on the fishing boats at night. Our leaders are total a.r.s.e holes who can't think beyond the level of five-year-olds. Not long ago, our masters in the World Bank conducted a lifestyle survey of the Congo. Question: If the State was a person, what would you do to it? Answer: We would kill him. We have Black Awareness but every street hawker in town is selling skin-lightener guaranteed to give you cancer. Young Congolese talk of Europe as the promised land. So be aware: if you make it here, you're going to look like a rejected zebra. The elections won't deliver solutions but they're ours. We have a const.i.tution. We have kids with polio and kids with the plague who are feeling richer by three million dirty dollars. One day, we may even have a future.

HAJ.

We are on the coast here too, Noah. Each morning my heart rises with the autumn sun. Each evening it sinks. But if I bring my chair to the window, and there's a good moon shining, I can just make out a sliver of sea a mile beyond the wire. And that's where their England ends and my Africa begins.

JOHN LE CAR RE was born in 1931. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a wide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. His recent novels include The Tailor of Panama, The Constant Gardener and Absolute Friends. The Mission Song is his twentieth novel.