Acts of faith (80 page)

He couldn’t tell if the movement of Diana’s head meant no, or if it expressed her dismay at his inability to perceive her motives. He stood, brushed the seat of his trousers, and motioned at the sun, now darkening from orange to red. “Then what about your decision to come clean today?” he demanded as they started back. “Maybe you could tell me about that.”

“I believe I wanted you to dislike me, perhaps even hate me, for being so false.”

“What for?”

She murmured something indefinite.

“Your attempt failed. I’m upset, yes, but it would take more than what you’ve told me to get me to dislike you, and much more to hate you.”

She stopped walking and, with the Land Rover and the anxious askaris in sight, made a sound, half sigh, half sob. “I said at the beginning, I’ve been thinking about us, and . . .” She paused to regain her composure. “When this started off, I thought I was having a fling. I never thought it would come to this, to the way I feel about you. But I am all wrong for you. You’re young, you’re going to want children, if you don’t already. You are going to want a young wife, a family. I know you will. It’s been on your mind, hasn’t it?”

“Of course it has.”

“But you never mentioned it to me. It’s an unresolved question in your mind.”

“I suppose so. But why are you bringing it up now?

“Because I am the age I am. Because even if I were younger, I could never give you what you’ll want. Because I’ve never loved a man as I love you. I love you enough that I want only what’s best for you.”

He said quietly, “You’re a generous woman, but I don’t believe you’re that generous.”

Diana tossed her head backward in mock laughter. “Oh, all right, caught in another falsehood. I do want what’s best for you, but I’m not making a sacrifice. It’s all self-interest. I know you love me now, but in a year, or two years, I’m afraid you’ll begin to have doubts and regrets, and who could blame you? I would rather inflict this on myself now than have it inflicted on me later, when it will hurt ever so much more. You want it unvarnished, there you have it.”

When he grasped what she was saying—it took him a moment—he experienced a stab of panic. She’d caught him unprepared; except for her subdued mood today, she’d shown none of the usual signs of a woman who wants to call it off, given no warnings that this was coming. Or had she and he had somehow failed to recognize them?

“You’re inflicting it on me, too, not just yourself,” he said, his voice rising. “Not twenty minutes ago you asked me to kiss you like a man who loved you. Why would you—”

“I don’t know why. Must there be a rational explanation for everything?”

They rode back in an excruciating silence. Fitzhugh would have gotten out and walked if it wasn’t for the late hour and the near certainty that he’d be waylaid by bandits. He was in shock, and at the same time boiling with resentment, not only for her dropping this on him so abruptly but for her fatalism, her conviction that his feelings were destined to change and he destined to hurt her, as if he had no will of his own, no capacity to make choices.

She was staying with Tara Whitcomb. The interpreter swung through the gate to the Pathways compound and parked. Fitzhugh climbed out with Diana and took her aside.

“Maybe there aren’t explanations for everything,” he said with a kind of quiet violence, “but damn it, I am owed one for what you’re doing.”

“I have given it.”

“What are you? Some kind of prophet that you know what I’m going to do and what I’m going to feel a year from now, or two or three?”

“No, but I do have a pretty good idea.”

“Really? Or has all the talk finally gotten to you? Maybe it isn’t that you’re all wrong for me but that I’m all wrong for you.” He seized her wrist and held her arm alongside his. “See the contrast.”

She jerked free. “Do not be absurd. You don’t know me at all if you think that makes a difference to me.”

“I won’t let you do this. I won’t stand for it.” She laughed caustically at this masculine assertion, and he too had no sooner uttered it than he realized how silly it sounded. “I should have some say in it, and you’re not giving me any.”

The softening in his tone brought a softening in her—a relaxation in her posture, a slight loss of firmness in her gaze as she lowered her eyes. “Oh, but you do have a say. But you are going to have to do some hard thinking before you can say it. And when you do, you will have to say it without any doubts or equivocation, and believe me, I’ll know if there are any.”

“I will have to decide how much I can give up.”

“It would be quite a lot, I know that, and if you decide you can’t, I shall want to know that as well.”

“And if I decide I can, what then?”

Her response was a demure smile, but it was enough, and for an instant the thought that she would be his in marriage thrilled him. The feeling was strong enough that he almost declared on the spot that he’d resolved the question. The knowledge that he had not stopped him. Instead of making a declaration, he asked if, then, she was not ending it but merely calling for an intermission.

“Very well, an intermission,” she said. “And—there is no way to put this nicely—I do not want to see you till it’s over.”

As she looked up at him, she removed her hat. He observed that the twilight made the veins in her hand appear more prominent, while it deepened the furrows at the corners of her eyes and leached color from her hair. She hadn’t intended to make any impression, yet it was as if she’d consciously given him a preview of the future, challenging him to sound his love and discover if it had the depth to make the surrender she was asking of him.

He was relieved that Diana had decided to relent and give them another chance; but after he went to bed, relief turned into mild terror. Their future as a couple was entirely up to him. Doubts about his constancy assailed him. Maybe she was right—better that she suffer some pain now than more later—and yet he felt that she was asking too much of him. She’d known the risks when she got involved with him; she ought to be willing to take them and not expect ironclad guarantees. But then he recalled how she’d looked, standing there in the fading light, and thought that he was being unfair. There were risks she could not afford.

In the morning, without knowing why, Fitzhugh was determined to act as if nothing had changed. He followed his routine, rising at five to be on hand for the early flights, making up the next day’s schedules after breakfast, checking cargo manifests. He greeted Rachel and the ground and air crews in his usual cheerful manner. He took care of paperwork—lease payments, invoices, and so forth. At lunch he met Tim Fancher and Rob Handy to arrange a flight for them and several tons of supplies and equipment. The two missionaries were going to establish ministries in the Nuba mountains. They were brimming with enthusiasm for this project and couldn’t tell that he barely heard a word they said.

He spent the afternoon at two distasteful tasks. The first was delivering ten percent “commissions” to aid agency logisticians; the second was preparing a report for Hassan Adid, who was expected to arrive later in the day. Knight Air’s sugar daddy wanted to see how well the company had done in the past quarter. It had done very well, with gross sales of $1.6 million. Douglas’s Nuba Day experiment had been a success by and large. The mortar attack and the air raid had scared off a couple of independent agencies, but the rest had reacted as Douglas had hoped and predicted. Knight Air’s planes were flying nearly every day. A significant share of its income, however, had been earned from the gun-running done by Dare’s shell company, Yellowbird. In the interests of cloaking its activities, its records were kept on a separate set of books entrusted to Fitzhugh’s care. Half its earnings were automatically transferred each week from its bank in Uganda to Knight Air’s bank in Nairobi. This had presented a problem in bookkeeping: How to account for the extra income? It was solved by a simple expedient: For every actual mission flown by Yellowbird, a fictitious Knight Air mission was created. The phantom flights were then entered on Knight Air’s books, complete with phantom dates and destinations. The deception did not end there. Since the real customer, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, also had to be concealed, another client had to be found to explain who had paid for the flights. Wesley and Douglas thought that Barrett’s International People’s Aid could play this role, but they needed his consent, which required expanding the inner circle to include him. The ex-priest who thought the war was an extension of the Crusades not only gave his consent, he gave it with enthusiasm.

Thus the report to be presented to Adid was somewhat fraudulent, and in compiling it Fitzhugh felt like a white-collar criminal. True, the bottom line was an honest, accurate figure, but if Adid had known that nearly ten percent of it had come from arms smuggling, it was safe to predict that he would have withdrawn his interests from Knight Air and never invested another dollar. He would have considered the risk-reward ratio way out of line and placed no confidence in the cover that Douglas and Wesley had devised. Indeed, Fitzhugh himself had little confidence in it. Were the UN security office to get wind of what was going on, discovering the financial link between Knight Air and Yellowbird would not require a particularly vigorous investigation, and all attempts to make plausible denials would then sound most implausible. The least that would happen would be the loss of Knight Air’s UN-authorized contracts, which accounted for a third of its income. Fitzhugh’s belief in the worthiness of the clandestine operation remained steadfast (when he experienced doubts, all he had to do to dispel them was recall the flaming ruins of Manfred’s hospital), but the secrecy it demanded had polluted the atmosphere. He, Douglas, Wesley, Mary, and now Barrett had become co-conspirators, speaking in whispers, fudging the numbers, ever on the lookout for a breach in security. They were all flying on the dark side.

Rachel helped him put the report together. She was very good with accounts and could have been the company’s finance director instead of its secretary. Because she didn’t know she was participating in a fraud, Fitzhugh’s disgust with the job increased. He felt he was taking advantage of her innocence. As the afternoon wore on, different feelings took hold. He noticed how attractive she was, a woman of twenty-seven with hips and breasts that invited comparison to the African fertility statues sold in the crafts markets. Strange that he hadn’t noticed her attributes in all this time. Distracted from the task at hand, he asked himself, “Why didn’t I fall for her instead of for a white woman sixteen years older? What’s wrong with me?” His mind leaped all at once into a fantasy—he would woo and win this healthy Kikuyu and sire a brood of children, infusing a fresh river of pure African blood into the diluted veins of his family’s mongrel line. A notion seized him that if he could get Rachel into bed for just one night, he would be cured of his obsession with Diana and released from his dilemma. He imagined Rachel’s robust body under his, his sperm swimming into her fecund womb. Without a conscious thought as to what he was doing, he drew his chair closer to hers and leaned toward her as she worked the calculator. He suggested they have a drink after work. “No, thank you,” she replied, and pushed her chair away from him—a rejection that brought him to his senses. He stood, pretending to get something from the file cabinet, and rapped his temple with his knuckles, as if to physically knock the lustful thoughts from his head. Other thoughts intruded. If he did forsake his hopes for a family and marry Diana, how would they live? He would be out here, she would be in Nairobi, unless he quit and moved in with her. What then would he do for an occupation? He would be as good as a kept man. She wouldn’t be Mrs. Martin, he would be Mr. Briggs.

When Adid showed up with Douglas at around five, Fitzhugh welcomed the business discussions, which he generally loathed, as a diversion from his emotional turmoil. The wabenzi looked out of place in his custom-tailored sport jacket and Italian loafers as he made a quick inspection of the company’s aircraft. While he did, Douglas murmured to Fitzhugh, “Might be big news, my man. We’ll find out at dinner.”

They went to the office, where Adid studied the report and remarked that more business had been done with International People’s Aid this quarter than last. That was good, but what accounted for it? Douglas didn’t miss a beat—the increased sales were due to his promotional gambit, the Nuba Day event, which had inspired IPA to deliver more aid. The ease with which Douglas lied almost made Fitzhugh wince. The sincerity in his voice and the candor in his gray eyes were perfect forgeries, offering a glimpse of something hidden in his nature, a glimpse fleeting and disturbing, like the wink of a veil that reveals a scar on an otherwise attractive face.

At the Hotel California mess, Adid, who was accustomed to being waited on, endured the indignity of standing in a cafeteria line with grubby aid workers, aircraft mechanics in greasy coveralls, sweaty loadmasters. He, Douglas, and Fitzhugh sat at a corner table, out of earshot of the other diners. While they ate, Adid withdrew from his briefcase a sheaf of papers containing pie charts and bar charts and launched into a monologue about market share, gross profits, net profits, net profits after dividend distribution, retained profits. The company’s performance had been good overall but not as good as he’d expected. One of the pie charts was presented, showing that most gross sales came from the independent NGOs, the remainder from the NGOs affiliated with the UN.

“You have not marketed yourselves aggressively enough when it comes to the latter, and you need to,” he said. “There are, what? A dozen independent agencies and more than forty under the UN’s umbrella, but Knight Air has contracts with only a handful of those. Pathways has the rest locked up, some thirty altogether. Your competition is killing you there. “