A: These are not however the only interests I am obliged to consider.
Q: Thank you. I think I have heard the answer I was waiting for.
Next day a formal request for the release of the Quayle papers was presented to the Foreign Office and backed by an application to the High Court. Simultaneously, and surely not by coincidence, a parallel initiative was mounted in Brussels by lawyers for friends and family of the late Dr. Arnold Bluhm. During the preliminary hearing, a racially varied crowd of mischief makers dressed in symbolic white coats paraded for television cameras outside the Brussels Palace of Justice and brandished placards bearing the slogan 'Nous Accusons'. The nuisance was quickly dealt with. A string of cross-petitions by the Belgian lawyers ensured that the case would run for years. However, it was now common knowledge that the company in question was none other than Karel Vita Hudson.
* * *
"Up there, that's the Lokomormyang range," Captain McKenzie informs Justin over the intercom. "Gold and oil. Kenya and Sudan been fighting about it for well on a hundred years. Old maps give it to the Sudan, new ones give it to Kenya. I reckon somebody slipped the cartographer a backhander."
Captain McKenzie is one of those tactful men who knows exactly when to be irrelevant. His chosen plane this time is a Beech Baron with twin engines. Justin sits beside him in the copilot's seat, listening without hearing, now to Captain McKenzie, now to the banter of other pilots in the vicinity: "How are we today, Mac? Are we above the cloud level or below?" — "Where the hell are you, man?" — "A mile to your right and a thousand feet below you. What's happened to your eyesight?" They are flying over flat brown slabs of rock, darkening into blue. The clouds are thick above them. Vivid red patches appear where the sun breaks through to strike the rock. The foothills ahead of them are tousled and untidy. A road appears like a vein among the muscles of the rock.
"Cape Town to Cairo," McKenzie says laconically. "Don't try it."
"I won't," Justin promises dutifully.
McKenzie banks the plane and descends, following its path. The road becomes a valley road, weaving along a ridge of snaking hills.
"Road to the right there, that's the road Arnold and Tessa took, Loki to Lodwar. Great if you don't mind bandits."
Coming awake, Justin peers deeply into the pale mist ahead of him, and sees Arnold and Tessa in their jeep with dust on their faces and the box of disks bobbing between them on the bench seat. A river has joined the Cairo road. It is called the Tagua, McKenzie says, and its source is high up in the Tagua mountains. The Taguas are eleven thousand feet high. Justin politely acknowledges this information. The sun goes in, the hills turns blue-black, menacing and separate, Tessa and Arnold vanish. The landscape is again godless, not a man or beast in any direction.
"Sudanese tribesmen come down from the Mogila range," McKenzie says. "In their jungle they wear nothing. Coming south they get all shy, wear these little bits of cloth. And boy, can they run!"
Justin gives a polite smile as brown treeless mountains rise crooked and half buried from the khaki earth. Behind them he makes out the blue haze of a lake.
"Is that Turkana?"
"Don't swim in it. Not unless you're very fast. Freshwater. Great amethysts. Friendly crocodiles."
Flocks of goat and sheep appear below them, then a village and a compound.
"Turkana tribesmen," McKenzie says. "Big shoot-out last year over livestock thefts. Best to steer clear of 'em."
"I shall," Justin promises.
McKenzie looks squarely at him, a prolonged, interrogative stare. "Not the only people to steer clear of, they tell me."
"No, indeed," Justin agrees.
"Couple of hours, we could be in Nairobi."
Justin shakes his head.
"Want me to stretch a point and take you over the border to Kampala? We've got fuel."
"You're very kind."
The road reappears, sandy and deserted. The plane reacts violently, nosing left and right like a plunging horse, as if nature is telling it to go back.
"Worst winds for miles around," McKenzie says. "Region's famous for 'em."
The town of Lodwar lies below them, set small among cone-shaped black hills, none more than a couple of hundred feet high. It looks neat and purposeful, with tin roofs, a tarmac airstrip and a school.
"No industry," McKenzie says. "Great market for cows, donkeys and camels if you're interested in buying."
"I'm not," says Justin with a smile.
"One hospital, one school, lot of army. Lodwar's the security center for the whole area. Soldiers spend most of their time in the Apoi hills, chasing bandits to no effect. Bandits from Sudan, bandits from Uganda, bandits from Somalia. A real nice catchment area for bandits. Cattle thieving is the local sport," McKenzie recites, back in his role of tour guide. "The Mandango steal cattle, dance for two weeks till another tribe steals them back."
"How far from Lodwar to the lake?" asks Justin.
"Give or take, fifty kilometers. Go to Kalokol. There's a fishing lodge there. Ask for a boatman called Mickie. His boy's Abraham. Abraham's all right as long as he's with Mickie, poison on his own."
"Thanks."
Conversation ends. McKenzie overflies the airstrip, waving his wingtips to signal his intent to land. He climbs again and returns. Suddenly they are on the ground. There is nothing more to say except, once more, thanks.
"If you need me, find someone who can call me on the radio," McKenzie says as they stand sweltering on the airstrip. "If I can't help you, there's a guy called Martin, runs the Nairobi School of Flying. Flying for thirty years. Trained in Perth and Oxford. Mention my name."
Thanks, says Justin again and, in his anxiety to be courteous, writes it down.
"Want to borrow my flight bag?" McKenzie asks, making a gesture with the black briefcase in his right hand. "Long-barreled target pistol, if you're interested. Gives you a chance at forty yards."
"Oh, I'd be no good at ten," Justin exclaims, with the kind of self-effacing laugh that dates from his days before Tessa.
"And this is Justice," McKenzie says, introducing a grizzled philosopher in a tattered T-shirt and green sandals who has appeared from nowhere. "Justice is your driver. Justin, meet Justice. Justice, meet Justin. Justice has a gentleman called Ezra who will be riding point with him. Anything more I can do for you?"
Justin draws a thick envelope from the pocket of his bush jacket. "I'd like you please to post this for me when you're next in Nairobi. Just the ordinary mail will do fine. She's not a girlfriend. She's my lawyer's aunt."
"Tonight soon enough?"
"Tonight would be splendid."
"Take care then," says McKenzie, slipping the envelope into his flight bag.
"Indeed I will," says Justin, and this time manages not to tell McKenzie he's been very kind.
* * *
The lake was white and gray and silver and the overhead sun made black and white stripes of Mickie's fishing boat, black in the shadow of the canopy, white and pitiless where the sun shone freely on the woodwork, white on the skin of the freshwater that popped and bubbled with the rising fish, white on the misted gray mountains that arched their backs under the sun's heat, white where it struck the black faces of old Mickie and his young companion the poisonous Abraham — a sneering, secretly angry child; McKenzie was quite right — who for some unfathomable reason spoke German and not English, so that the conversation, what there was of it, was three-cornered: German to Abraham, English to old Mickie and their own version of kiSwahili when they spoke between themselves. White also whenever Justin looked at Tessa, which was often, perched tomboy-style on the ship's prow where she was determined to sit despite the crocodiles, with one hand for the boat the way her father had taught her and Arnold never far away in case she slipped. On the boat's radio an English-language cookery program was extolling the virtues of sun-dried tomatoes.