After five minutes, when the man with the cuts realized he was feeling no symptoms, he gave up the idea that he’d been poisoned. “Bring her along,” he said. “That man. Making fun of me.” He went over to kick the body to relieve his feelings, then followed Patricia and the others out of the house.
67
When the two government officials took the radio equipment out of the trunk of the Mercedes and set it up on the car’s hood, Balim was at first baffled. They’d already brought a truckload of soldiers with them to Port Victoria, these same soldiers now sprawled at their ease over the grassy slope between the hotel and the shore; who was left for these so-very-civil civil servants to get in touch with?
Someone. Godfrey Magon picked up the microphone and called a lot of letters and numbers into it, over and over, with maddening patience and to no effect at all, till abruptly the radio spoke in a snarling voice so distorted by static and a poor speaker system that Balim couldn’t understand a word of what was said. Apparently, though, Godfrey Magon could; he replied in rapid sentences, quick questions that were answered with the same loud brusque incomprehensibility. Finally satisfied, Magon put down the microphone, lit a cigar, and leaned against the Mercedes’s fender to gaze with benign self-complacence at the dark lake.
Meanwhile, Charles Obuong was admiring the hotel in the flickering light of the smoky oil-drum fire. “Good workmanship,” he told Balim. “I’m glad to see you took it seriously and not merely as a diversion.”
“I’m a businessman,” Balim answered. That was a point he wanted in the forefront of Obuong’s mind. He missed Isaac acutely; this was precisely the sort of person Isaac always handled.
“You are a very good businessman,” Obuong said. “I don’t doubt that, not at all.” Nodding at the unfinished hotel, he said, “Do you know what I foresee for this place?”
Balim foresaw nothing further than a sale at a modest profit to some retired Britisher or German who desired, on a small nest egg, to play African innkeeper. “I am eager to know,” he said.
“Here in Kenya,” Obuong began, in the style of a cocktail-party bore with a set piece to deliver, “we are creating a traditional civilization. That is, a civilization based on a growing middle class. Not socialism, not Tanzania’s collective farms”—said with some disdain—“nor the feudal states of most of black Africa, with their widening gulf between the rich few and the poor many. No; here in Kenya we are replicating, in less than a hundred years, the entire history of Europe.”
“Interesting,” Balim said politely.
Obuong smiled at him in the firelight. “More than interesting for you, Mr. Balim. Vital for you. The Asian must accommodate himself to Kenya if he wishes to survive here. So he must know what Kenya is, and what it is not.”
Balim said, “Mr. Obuong, can it be that you are friendly in spirit toward me?”
Obuong’s smile almost became a laugh, but then was replaced by earnestness. “Your former land,” he said, “is a very unhappy one. If the same sort of thing were to happen here, I personally would live in fear all the minutes of my life. I would be exposed because of my governmental position, and my success, and my education. A contented middle-class Kenya is necessary to my peace of mind.”
Admiringly Balim said, “Very few people, of any rank or color, have thought it through quite that clearly.”
“Whatever my personal opinions may be,” Obuong said, “and I will admit to you privately that I have my ambivalences, nevertheless I know that a Kenyan middle class must be heterogeneous. We need the Asian shopkeepers; we need the white farmers; we even need the Arabs from the coast.”
Smiling, Balim said, “Even?”
“Some of my ambivalence,” Obuong said, and shrugged. “I can get along with all sorts, if I must, to have a peaceful and comfortable life. Which brings me back, Mr. Balim, to this fine hotel of yours.”
“Ah, yes, my hotel.”
“Our tourist industry is still supported almost completely by the northern whites,” Obuong said, “but, as you know, those people will never come here.”
“One can hope,” Balim murmured.
“An intelligent businessman does not live on hope. We both know, Mr. Balim, this will never be a place for foreign whites to visit, despite the lake, the harbor, the potential. But what of our own middle class, eh? On my holiday, shall I go to Treetops to be stared at by the Swedes and Americans as though I were one of the exotic animals at the water hole? Where is my tourist spot, Mr. Balim?”
“Very interesting,” Balim said, this time meaning it.
“The growing middle class,” Obuong said, nodding at the hotel. “That’s the hope of the future for your hotel, Mr. Balim, as it is my personal hope for my personal future. Do not sell the hotel when this is all over. Do not throw it away.” Lowering his voice, turning his shoulder against his partner, Magon, over by the car, he said, “We can talk again, a little later. A few months from now.”
In Balim’s mind the flower opened. A partnership with Obuong, government influence, links to the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, improved roads, subsidiary businesses… I must buy a great deal more land here, Balim thought, knowing that Obuong was thinking the same thing. But I must buy through fronts, natives, not with the name Balim attached. Isaac can—
“Look!”
It was Magon. When Balim turned, Magon was standing beside the Mercedes, pointing out at the lake. “Ah, now,” Obuong said, awed, below his breath.
Far out on the lake, flames were leaping up, smoky and orange; an imitation of their oil-drum fire on a massive scale. “Bathar!” Balim called, and ran heavily down to the water’s edge, where he stood staring at the oblong bowl of flame against the black night. Sounds of guns and explosions came faintly over the water.
Obuong had immediately shouted something at Magon, who grabbed up the microphone and called into it, his voice merely excited. Obuong, meanwhile, came down to stand beside Balim and say, “Your son is with them?”
“Yes.”
“I’m surprised. I hadn’t thought—”
The abruptness with which Obuong cut off the sentence made Balim turn to give him a bitter smile. “You hadn’t thought Asians took their own risks, did their own dirty work. He wouldn’t be there if it were up to me. Bathar is already heterogeneous, part of your middle class. Shopkeepers know better than to look for adventure.”
“That’s no raft burning,” Obuong said, “it’s a ship. Come along; we’ll find out what’s happening.”
They went over together to the Mercedes, where the radio was responding to Magon’s questions. But Balim still found the radio voice unintelligible and was grateful when Magon translated: “A ship attacked the rafts. We have interceded.”
“In whose waters?” Obuong wanted to know.
Balim had his own more urgent question. While Magon relayed Obuong’s query through the radio, Balim said, “Who has interceded?”
“We have,” Obuong said. “The Navy. We put two patrol boats out there to make sure nothing went wrong.” With a limpid smile, he added, “Such as the rafts deciding to make for a different landfall.”
Magon said, “They’re in Ugandan waters, but there was no choice. It’s the Angel, out of Kisumu. It was firing on the rafts.”