Acts of faith (5 page)

He couldn’t resist complimenting her looks. She responded with a toss of her head and a short, self-deprecatory laugh before telling the servant, in flawless Swahili, to bring in a fresh pot of tea.

They followed her through a hall decorated with ancestral memorabilia—crossed elephant tusks, the hide of a leopard that appeared to have been slain back in the days when Denys Finch-Hatton and Isak Dinesen were loving it up. Diana’s loose trousers flowed about her hips and legs as she walked, and the swirl of linen over flesh would have been erotic if it weren’t for her brisk, straight-backed stride, like a sergeant major’s on parade. They entered a study—a lot of old books, more old photographs and moth-eaten skins, a Masai buffalo-hide shield hanging over a fireplace, in front of which two men sat, backs to the door.

“John, Doug, the circle for our seance is now complete,” Diana said.

The pair stood. One was in his forties, going bald, and stood five-six at the tallest. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his complexion was the color of uncooked oats. This was John Barrett. When, with a kind of reflexive respect, Fitzhugh called him “Father Barrett,” he grinned tightly and reminded him, in a brogue less pronounced than Malachy’s, that he had lost claim to that title.

“It’s just plain John,” he said.

The other man was about Fitzhugh’s height, with thick hair hued like khaki, a slim frame, and a long, thin nose, slightly hooked, giving him the aspect of a handsome raptor. He might have been thirty, though he easily could have passed for an undergraduate. Straight away Fitzhugh knew he was an American. It wasn’t the cowboy boots and Levi’s that declared his nationality, nor the scrubbed, healthy complexion, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower after a game of pick-up basketball. It was the way he stood, chin cocked up, shoulders slouched just a little, projecting the relaxed belligerence of a citizen of the nation that ran the world. Fitzhugh imagined that a young Englishman would have struck a similar stance out in India a century ago, or a young Roman in the court of some vassal Gaul.

“Doug Braithwaite,” he drawled, shaking Malachy’s hand, then Fitzhugh’s, gripping his forearm with his other hand, as though they were old comrades, reunited.

“Fitzhugh Martin.” He flexed his arm after a moment to signal Braithwaite to let it go.

“Great to meet you. Been hearing a lot about you.”

If it’s possible for eyes to embrace another person, his embraced Fitzhugh. They had that effect on everyone, creating an instant intimacy. Clear and gray, giving off the appealing gleam of artificial pearls, they flattered you the moment they fell on you, the directness of their gaze making you feel that he was interested only in you.

“It’s all been good,” he went on. “We’ve got something in common. We’re both on the UN’s shit list.”

“Doug used to fly for the UN out of Loki,” Diana interjected.

“I prefer to say that I flew for an airline contracted to the UN. PanAfrik Airways. Copilot on Hercs mostly,” he added, turning again to Fitzhugh. “I’m surprised we never ran into each other. It’s a big operation out there, but not that big.”

“Evidently it’s big enough for us not to have run into each other. I was in the field most of the time.”

“Got the heave-ho a couple of weeks ago.” There was an undertone of pride rather than shame in the statement. “Ran afoul of regulations. You know what I mean, Fitz.”

Actually, he didn’t quite but was somehow embarrassed to say so. He asked whom Braithwaite was flying for now.

“Myself, if I can ever get my hands on an airplane,” he answered, with a smile that looked a little forced.

“So what regulations did you run afoul of?”

“It would be quicker to tell you which ones I didn’t, Fitz,” came the evasive answer. “Sorry. Is Fitz okay, or do you prefer Fitzhugh?”

The American had very nice manners. Fitz was fine. Braithwaite insisted that he call him Doug.

“Brilliant,” Diana said, displaying her brilliant teeth for emphasis. “Now that we’re all on a first-name basis, shall we get on with things?”

“Things” turned out to be a kind of job interview, with Diana and Barrett asking what exactly Fitzhugh had done for the UN for how long and why he’d left. Malachy had told them all about that, but now apparently they needed to hear it from Fitzhugh himself. Barrett looked elfin, but there was nothing elfin about his manner. Pitched forward in a green leather armchair—the kind you see in men’s clubs—he fired his questions like a prosecutor. There seemed to be an anger in him; he was a regular little kettle on perpetual boil, though the source of the flame wasn’t immediately clear. Whatever, the man’s intensity compensated for his size; it forced everyone to pay attention to him, and (Fitzhugh doing some psychologizing) maybe that was the reason for it.

The servant came in, quietly served tea, and stole out again. The nature of the questions changed. What did Fitzhugh think the southern Sudanese were fighting for? Independence? Autonomy? A unified Sudan under a secular government? No idea, he replied. He wasn’t sure if they knew any longer. Sometimes he had the impression that the rebels were fighting out of sheer habit. After all, they had been at it, off and on, for thirty years.

“Out of
habit,
you say?” Barrett leaned farther forward, so that his body was bent like a stubby hairpin. “Oh, I cannot agree with that, not at all. They’re fighting because those butchers in Khartoum don’t give them any choice. Fight or die—it’s that simple, and make no mistake about it.”

“I suppose that’s true.” Fitzhugh, feeling a bit like a pupil who has given the wrong answer, glanced sidelong at Malachy for help, but he gave none; nor did Douglas Braithwaite, sitting directly across, long legs outstretched while he chewed on the tips of his aviator’s sunglasses and looked as if he were weighing Fitzhugh’s every word.

“There’s no supposin’ either,” said Barrett. His pallid face glowed. “It’s jihad for the Arabs, and there’s no quarter given in a jihad. Allah gives his stamp of approval to mass murder.” Barrett sat back and took a sip of tea, the color fading from his cheeks. “This war isn’t like these other African dust-ups. It’s a continuation of the Crusades. The crescent versus the cross. Comes down to that, wouldn’t you say?”

The war was nowhere near as clear-cut as that, but a voice in the back of Fitzhugh’s head cautioned him not to voice such an observation. Gray did not appear to be Barrett’s favorite color.

“Pardon me,” he said, wondering if it had been a mistake to buy a one-way ticket. “I’ve come all the way from the coast, thinking you were going to talk to me about a job.”

“And that is what we are doing. Isn’t that what we are doing?”

Barrett glanced at Diana, sitting alongside him, her legs crossed, hands clasped over a knee, hair aglow in the dazzle slicing through the casement windows.

“You’ve wandered a bit far afield,” she said in a voice tinged with exasperation. Soothing the scrapes caused by Barrett’s abrasiveness was probably something she did fairly often. “Your questions seem to be making Fitz uncomfortable.”

Fitzhugh remarked that he did not feel uncomfortable so much as baffled. It was as if Barrett were examining him not for his qualifications and experience but for his political correctness. He said that as a relief worker he had devoted himself to filling empty bellies, not to politics. “An empty belly is an empty belly, and what I think about the politics of the situation doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

“On the contrary. Politics has everything to do with it.”

“That isn’t what I said!” Fitzhugh’s voice broke, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s, as it usually did when he got angry. “I said that what
I think
about the politics has nothing to do with it.”

“A Jesuit is what you should have been, John Barrett,” Malachy said. “Why are you being so argumentative?”

“And look who’s talkin’. Malachy, there’s no man as contentious as you. I’m not arguin’. It’s dedicated people we’re lookin’ for, committed people. For when the goin’ gets rocky, as rocky it is bound to get.” Barrett removed his glasses, blew on the lenses, and wiped them deliberately with a handkerchief. “Relief work is full of dilettantes. Nice people lookin’ to do some good in the world so they can feel good about themselves. They hand out a few chocolate bars and go home.”

Fitzhugh offered a none-too-amiable smile. “What is it you’re suggesting?”

Barrett, returning his glasses to his face, was about to reply when Douglas made a sound—not a sigh, an exhalation rather, long and slow. It was almost inaudible, yet it had the same effect as a judge’s gavel in a noisy courtroom. The conversation stopped, everyone turned to him. Fitzhugh would always remember that moment distinctly, because it was the first time he’d observed the American’s peculiar power to draw all eyes and ears to himself with nothing more than a vague gesture, a change of expression, or a breath. It was a kind of magnetism, too effortless to have been learned.

“Fitz doesn’t seem like any dilettante to me,” he said in his pleasing drawl. “Seems all right to me, and I’m the one who’ll be working with him. So how about we end the inquisition and tell him what the job is?”

“Splendid suggestion.” Diana, rising, moved in a whisper of cotton and linen to a desk, one of those old campaign things with brass handles and corner brackets, and withdrew a large map, folded up with its printed side out. “Stuffy in here,” she murmured, and cranked a window open. Immediately the intoxicating scent from her gardens filled the room.

Diana spread the map over a table: a pilot’s chart, Fitzhugh saw by the black vector lines fanned across the green of equatorial swamps, the reddish browns and yellows of highlands and arid plains.

He shook a cigarette from his pack and asked Diana if she minded.

“Not at all, now that the window’s open. You are familiar with this neck of the woods?”

A lacquered fingernail fell on one of the brown patches toward the upper edge of the map, marked
Jebel al-Nubah
in transliterated Arabic, the Nuba mountains. The years that did not show in Diana’s face, Fitzhugh observed, were revealed in the fissured skin of her hands. They disappointed him somehow.

“Never been there,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has, oh, not for some time. No one from the outside.”

“Fitz, I’m gettin’ to be fond of your voice. There’s a smile in it.”

He looked at Barrett, leaning into the table, both sets of knuckles resting on the map, like a general planning a campaign.

“A smile?”

“Your voice smiles, even when you don’t. I believe it’s the cheeriest voice I’ve ever heard.”

“I’m told it’s boyish.”

“I delight in the sound of it.”

“Does that mean I’m hired?”

Barrett made an impatient gesture. “We know you could not have been
in
the Nuba mountains. We’re wonderin’ if you’re familiar with the situation up there.”

“Not much news comes out of there. Very isolated, very backward. I’m told the Nubans go about naked as Adam and Eve, some of them.”

“And not entirely by choice,” Barrett said.

“I did hear the government’s been bombing up there.”

“And two reasons for it.” His fingers spread into a V. “One ideological, the second more down to earth, under the earth in fact.” He folded one finger and with the other traced a road leading southward from the mountains to a town near the confluence of the Bahr el Ghazal river and the White Nile.

“Bentiu,” Fitzhugh said. “There’s oil there.”

“And lots of it,” said Barrett.

Then there was something about an international consortium, in partnership with the Sudanese state petroleum company, something more about building a thousand-mile pipeline all the way to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea.

“Construction’s well under way,” Barrett went on. “That gets done, and Sudan joins the club of big-time oil-exporting countries.”

“And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the government plans to buy with the revenues,” Douglas added.

Barrett said, “For years, Khartoum has been trying to clear people out of Bahr el Ghazal and other places in the south, as you well know. But now they’ve redoubled their efforts. You know, dryin’ up the sea of people the guerrilla fish swim in. And why? Amulet Energy—that’s what the consortium calls itself—wants to make sure the pipeline route is secure, and of course, so does the Sudanese government.”

Fitzhugh was momentarily distracted by his cigarette ash, about to fall on the map. He tapped it into his cupped hand, then went to the window and brushed it into a hibiscus shrub outside.

“I feel like I’ve walked into a military briefing. What does all this high-flown strategy have to do with me?”

“Part of the pipeline will pass near the Nuba,” Barrett said, his finger now tracking along the western border of the mountains. “Khartoum wants to make sure the area is firmly under its control. And so, yes, they’ve bombed. And also stirred up Arab tribes to raid Nuban villages. Those who weren’t killed outright were driven out of their homes, and those who didn’t die of starvation or disease were herded into internment camps and forced to convert to Islam. Would that jibe with what you’ve heard?”

Fitzhugh nodded, then thought to qualify his answer: What he’d heard about the Nuba wasn’t any different or worse than what he’d
seen
elsewhere in Sudan.