He was looking right at her. She had never seen his eyes so clearly. They were like two spheres of lead.
‘I am asking you as a favour.’
‘Finding out and finding where are two favours.’
‘Then I am asking you as a favour, twice. And I will owe you, twice.’
Haran snapped his hands shut. The lemon-yellow leather gloves made a soft, rustling snapping, like a lizard trapping an insect.
‘I shall do what I can. I can promise no more than that. You understand that things are not so simple with the UN, or I would not have had to ask you the favour I have. My boys must be discreet if they are not to be discovered. It may be that they will find nothing. But you will still owe me the favour. Two favours.’
‘Haran, I knew from the moment I met you I would always be owing you.’
He smiled. Like his lead eyes, she had never seen him smile before. She wished she had not seen him smile now.
‘I shall have one of my boys escort you back to SkyNet. The streets are no longer as safe for visitors as they were, especially for white women. I am afraid there are thieves and conmen on every street corner.’
Gaby got up from the table. Mombi’s handsome envoy had returned with fresh coffee. Haran gently ran his gloved right hand along the possegirl’s jawline. Gaby shuddered.
20
‘Ten years ago this dusty, rutted dirt road would have been nose-to-tail with tour buses heading to the game lodges of West Tsavo National Park. Now the only vehicles that move along it are United Nations truck convoys. I counted fifty go past me ten minutes ago. Their dust still hangs in the air. And the place to which they are headed, where once Masai cattle and wild animals existed peacefully together, has turned into something from the Old Testament: an entire nation of refugees.
‘In the last census two years ago, the town of Merueshi had a population of three thousand. Today UNHCR estimates there are over one hundred thousand people camped out around Merueshi. In those two years, the Chaga has come. Terminum is just two kilometres to the south of us, ten minutes’ walk, and that, the UN says, is close enough. Everyone, and everything, is to be moved, down to the last cow and goat, the last stick of furniture.
‘From fifty kilometres around, the people have come to Merueshi to be evacuated. Some have their own transport, others were brought in by truck and bus, most have walked carrying all their worldly possessions. Now they wait to be taken north, and they wonder if the UN trucks will reach them before the Chaga does, and if they do make it out of here, what kind of life can they expect in the townships?
‘To be forced away from everything you have ever known is hard. What is intolerable is then to have even those few, precious things you have managed to salvage taken from you.
‘I’ve come to Merueshi, to the very edge of the Chaga and this scene of near-Biblical desolation, to investigate reports of widespread looting and extortion of refugees’ property. Not by criminals or gangs of bandits, those certainly exist, or even by profiteers selling space on their own truck trains, but by the very United Nations soldiers who are meant to be protecting them. I have received evidence of black marketeering in stolen goods by one particular unit of Azerbaijani soldiers under the flag of the United Nations.
‘And cut it.’
‘We’re still running,’ Faraway said behind the camera. ‘You can say it if you want to.’
‘Oh, all right then. You can edit this later. I’ll give you a mark.’ Gaby made a chopping motion with her right hand across the camera’s field of vision. ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, Merueshi, Kenya.’
‘And we are out.’
‘Did it look good? Is this sleeveless denim thing all right? No sweat stains under the armpits? If you made my ass look fat I will hang you by your balls. God, was my nose too shiny?’
Faraway doubled over with laughter.
‘You bitch just like Jake. You looked fine. You always look fine to me, Gaby. Mighty fine indeed. Two things, if you please. One, don’t swipe at flies with your hand, and two, your hair was blowing across your face. It might be a good idea to shoot it again.’
‘Jesus, Faraway. That bastard helicopter will come back. I know it. And I’m never as fresh the fourth time.’
She could see that Faraway was considering a sexual riposte, but instead he said, ‘Jake would do it again.’
‘Fuck Jake.’
She knew the look.
‘All right. We’ll do it again. Got the camp framed? I’ll give you a mark.’
‘One moment please. There seems to be a problem with the white balance.’
‘I knew it. You haven’t the first idea about that camera, have you? We should have waited for Tembo to come back. I don’t know why he trusted you with it.’
‘You trusted him with your Nissan.’
‘That’s different. He has to get the boy. I can’t go: the only white woman in fifty miles? What kind of relation is he anyway?’
‘Wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.’
‘Blood is much thicker than water in this country.’
‘But not so thick as money. And remember, I am only doing this because you promised to let me see you with no clothes on. Five minutes. In the middle of my living room.’
‘You can’t possibly hold me to that; come on, it was five o’clock in the morning, I would have promised anything.’
Faraway grinned behind the eyepiece as the lens closed in and pulled out into a wide-angle.
‘You have always known that what I want most in the world is to undress you and then fiki-fiki you as you have never been fiki-fikied before, Gaby McAslan. Is it red down there too?’
‘Shut your gob and we’ll go for another take.’
The bastard helicopter came back. It turned high in the air and swooped down low across the camp from its station to the east. Children hid from the hammer of its blades. Women pulled sheets over their heads to protect them from the dust. Lop-eared goats plunged and kicked on their hide tethers; a shit-smeared cow broke loose and careered between the huddles of people. Men in frayed shorts, faded T-shirts and baseball caps with the names of fertilizer companies on the front shooed it away with outspread arms. The helicopter hovered a moment over the refugees, delighting in the chaos it created, then put its down nose and slid up over the low hill where Gaby and Faraway did their fourth take of the news report. Dry brown grass raged and stormed. Dust flew up in a suffocating cloud. Faraway fought with the velcro closures on the camera hood. Gaby watched her prompt notes fly away from her. Combing her hair from her face, she could clearly see the pilot in the forward cockpit raise a forefinger in an obscene gesture. Gaby screamed curses into the roar of rotors shredding air. The helicopter banked again and slid away north along the line of the road in search of others to intimidate.
‘You will have your revenge,’ Faraway said. He was videoing cut-away footage of the camp. ‘Here it comes.’ A line of dust moved across the plain: an electric blue Nissan ATV, driving as fast as the mass of people permitted. ‘I am thinking,’ he continued, following it with his lens out of the camp and up the hill, ‘that maybe this is a thing worth doing after all. Maybe this will work and we will all be Leonard and Bernstein and have our faces on the television and not behind it.’
‘Woodward and Bernstein,’ Gaby corrected. She knew his cool by now. Anything that would earn him fame and face, especially among the easy women he met in Friday night jit-clubs, he would follow with the same phallic determination that he followed those same women home to their beds. Once vanity got him started, he was kept moving by a deeply uncool, unstreet sentimentality about the world’s unfairness. Tembo had required a different tack. Righteousness roused him. He was small, but mighty for justice. As Gaby had unrolled her story, Tembo had fetched the equipment her plan required and threw his overnight ready bag into the back of the ATV. His wife had gone about her early morning tasks with the patient resignation of African women who know that they carry the whole world on their backs.