"You will be merciful with Lorbeer," she announced.
But whether this was a prediction or a command, he couldn't tell.
CHAPTER TWENTY
"What the fuck does your man Quayle think he's playing at, Tim?" Curtiss demanded, swinging his huge body round on one heel to challenge Donohue down the echoing room. It was big enough for a good-sized chapel, with teak poles for rafters, and doors with prison hinges and tribal shields on the log-cabin walls.
"He's not our man, Kenny. He never was," Donohue replied stoically. "He's straight Foreign Office."
"Straight? What's straight about him? He's the most devious sod I ever heard of. Why doesn't he come to me if he's worried about my drug? The door's wide open. I'm not a monster, am I? What does he want? Money?"
"No, Kenny. I don't think so. I don't think money's what's on his mind."
That voice of his, thought Donohue, while he waited to learn why he had been sent for. I'll never get rid of it. Bullying and wheedling. Lying and self-pitying. But bullying its favorite mode by far. Rinsed but never laundered. The shadow of his Lancashire backstreet still peeping through, to the despair of all those elocution tutors who came and left at night.
"What's bugging him then, Tim? You know him. I don't."
"His wife, Kenny. She had an accident. Remember?"
Curtiss swung back to the great picture window and lifted his hands, palms upmost, appealing to the African dusk for reason. Beyond the bulletproof glass lay darkening lawns, at the end of them a lake. Lights twinkled on the hillsides. A few early stars penetrated the deep-blue evening mist.
"So his wife gets hers," Curtiss reasoned, in the same plaintive tone. "A bunch of bad boys went wild on her. Her piece of the black stuff did her over, what do I know? The way she was carrying on, she was asking for it. This is Turkana we're talking about, not fucking Surrey. But I'm sorry, yes? Very, very sorry."
But not perhaps as sorry as you ought to be, thought Donohue.
Curtiss had houses from Monaco to Mexico and Donohue hated all of them. He hated their stink of iodine and their cowed servants and vibrating wooden floors. He hated their mirrored bars and odorless flowers that eyed you like the bored hookers Curtiss kept around him. In his mind Donohue lumped them together with the Rolls-Royces, the Gulfstream and the motor yacht as a single tasteless gin palace straddled over half a dozen countries. But most of all he hated this fortified farm stuck on the shores of Lake Naivasha with its razor-wire fences and security guards and zebra-skin cushions and red-tiled floors and leopard-skin rugs and antelope sofas and pink-lit mirrored booze cabinet and satellite television set and satellite telephone, and motion sensors and panic buttons and handheld radios — because it was to this house, to this room and to this antelope sofa that he had been summoned cap in hand at Curtiss's whim for the last five years, to receive whatever scraps the great Sir Kenny K in his erratic magnanimity had seen fit to toss into the eager jaws of British Intelligence. And it was to this place that he had been summoned again tonight, for reasons he had yet to learn, just as he was uncorking a bottle of South African white before sitting down to a bit of lake salmon with his beloved wife Maud.
"Here's how we see it, Tim, old boy, for better or worse,"
ran a tense, eyes-only signal, written in the vaguely Wodehousian style of Roger, his regional director in London.
"On the visible front you should maintain friendly contact to match the public face you have established over the last five years. Golf, the odd drink, the odd lunch, etc., sooner you than me. On the covert side you should continue to act natural and look busy since the alternatives — severance, subject's consequent outrage, etc. — are too ghastly to contemplate in the present crisis. For your personal information, all hell has broken out on both sides of the river here, and the situation changes from day to day but always for the worse."
"Why did you come by car then, anyway?" Curtiss demanded in an aggrieved tone, as he continued to gaze out over his African acres. "You could have had the Beechcraft if you'd asked for it. Doug Crick had a pilot standing by for you. Are you trying to make me feel bad or something?"
"You know me, chief." Sometimes, out of passive aggression, Donohue called him chief, a title reserved in eternity for the head of his own Service. "I'm a car driver. Open the car windows, blow the dust out. Nothing I like more."
"On these fucking roads? You're out of your mind. I told the Man. Yesterday. I lie. Sunday. "What's the very first fucking thing a punter sees when he arrives at Kenyatta and gets on his safari bus?"' I asked him. "It's not the fucking lions and giraffes. It's your roads, Mr. President. It's your crumbling, horrible roads." The Man sees what he wants, that's his trouble. Plus he flies wherever he can. "It's the same with your trains," I told him. "Use your fucking prisoners," I said, "you've got enough of them. Put your prisoners to work on the tracks and give your trains a chance." "Talk to Jomo," he says. "Which Jomo's that?"' I say. "Jomo my new transport minister," he says. "Since when?"' I say. "Since just now," he says. Fuck him."
"Fuck him indeed," said Donohue devoutly, and smiled the way he often smiled when there was nothing to smile about: with his long, drooping head tipped goatishly to one side and back a notch, his yellowed eyes twinkling, and missing nothing while he stroked the fangs of his mustache.
An unprecedented silence filled the great room. The African servants had walked back to their villages. The Israeli bodyguards, those who weren't policing the grounds, were in the gatehouse watching a kung fu movie. Donohue had been treated to a couple of quick garrotings while he waited to be allowed to pass. The private secretaries and the Somali valet had been ordered to the staff compound on the other side of the farm. For the first time in living history, not a single telephone was ringing in a Curtiss household. A month ago Donohue would have had to fight to get a word in, and threaten to remove himself unless Curtiss gave him a few clear minutes one to one. Tonight he would have welcomed the chirrup of the house telephone or the squawk of the satcom that stood scowling on its trolley beside the enormous desk.
With his wrestler's back still turned to Donohue, Curtiss had adopted what for him was a ruminative pose. He was wearing what he always wore in Africa: white shirt with double cuffs and gold ThreeBees links, navy blue trousers, lacquered shoes with cockscombs at the sides and a gold watch thin as a penny round his great hairy wrist. But it was the black crocodile belt that held Donohue's attention. With other fat men of his acquaintance, the belt ran low at the front and the gut hung over it. But with Curtiss the belt stayed dead level like a perfect line drawn across the center of an egg, giving him the appearance of an enormous Humpty-Dumpty. His mane of dyed black hair was swept back Slav-style from his wide forehead and duck's-arsed at the nape. He was smoking a cigar and frowning each time he drew on it. When the cigar bored him, he would leave it smoldering on whatever priceless piece of furniture came to hand. When he wanted it, he would accuse the staff of stealing it.
"You know what the bastard's up to now, I suppose," he demanded.
"Moi?"
"Quayle."
"I don't think I do. Should I?"
"Don't they tell you? Or don't they care?"
"Perhaps they don't know, Kenny. All I've been told is, he's taking up his wife's cause — whatever that was — that he's out of touch with his employers, and he's flying solo. We know his wife owned a place in Italy and there's a theory that's where he may have gone to earth."
"What about fucking Germany?" Curtiss interrupted.
"What about fucking Germany?" Donohue asked, mimicking a style of speech he detested.