Acts of faith (90 page)

Engrossed in these thoughts, he entered his and Diana’s banda and found her sleeping soundly, her deep, measured breaths like the sigh of a calm sea on a shore. He sat on the opposite bed and looked at her, screened by the white mosquito net. Soon the sound of her breathing in, breathing out, drew the agitation from his brain and into a feeling of utter peace. In that tranquil state, he recalled what he’d done, shielding her from the elephant charge, and he knew with mathematical certainty that there was no one else for whom he would have done the same. Only minutes ago he had protected her in another way, and there was no one else for whom he would have done that either. He went to her bedside, knelt on both knees, and lifting the net over his head, kissed her cheek, her throat, ears, and lips.

She stirred and said in a voice thick with sleep, “What are you doing?”

“Kissing you. You are Diana, the huntress, and you’ve snared me.”

Laughing, she cradled his head in her hands. “So business is over, and now it’s pleasure?”

“No, not that. You said I would know when I was sure and not a word from me till then. So now I am speaking the words.”

She released him and propped herself on her elbows, an attentive look on her face. “What has made you so sure all of a sudden? Just this morning you—”

“Never mind what I thought this morning, or an hour ago. I know it now. You are the most precious thing in the world to me. I could never be happy without you, and I want nothing more than to make you happy and not to be terrified of happiness.”

His fervor appeared to frighten her nonetheless, her blue irises darting side to side.

“Really, Diana, you will have no reason to be terrified. Look at me, on my knees. Isn’t that traditional? Will you marry me?”

She stared at him silently.

“You must answer!”

She clasped the back of his neck and tugged. “Get off your knees and into this bed and I will.”

He’d never been made love to as he was that afternoon. Parting with her in Nairobi two days later, he felt that the whole wide earth could be between them and they would still be together. They set a date three months from now but did not tell Douglas—Diana wanted it kept secret till she’d made arrangements, picked out a suitable dress, and had formal announcements printed up. She planned on a small, discreet wedding in her Karen garden, with a few friends, Fitzhugh’s family, and her only living relatives, a younger sister and a brother-in-law who lived in the UK.

After his return to Loki, everyone remarked on his demeanor, which went beyond his normal good humor, and asked what accounted for it. He was eager to tell them, to share his happiness but also to test their reactions, for one concern clouded his joy. There were moments when, picturing himself standing beside her in her garden, he would imagine people whispering that he had insinuated himself into her heart for reasons other than love.

In the meantime, he was occupied with the two tasks he’d set for himself: improving aircraft maintenance so the planes could pass any inspection, and bringing pilot documentation up to date. He told VanRensberg, the chief mechanic, to work overtime to take care of the former. With the latter, Wesley’s loadmaster, Nimrod, proved invaluable. The little Kikuyu knew everyone at DCA, including the director herself, with whom he arranged a meeting at her office at Jomo Kenyatta. She was a hefty, formidable woman aware that she was in the man’s world of Kenyan officialdom and determined to prove she belonged there. She stated that she was pleased to see the two representatives from Knight Air; she had recently received reports of certain irregularities in its operations. Fitzhugh didn’t need to ask the source of that information and credited himself for his percipience in guessing the action Tara would take.

“We’re aware of our problems,” he said. “That’s why we’re here. To correct them.”

The director offered him and Nimrod a sympathetic expression. What a pity they had not come sooner! Only this morning she had dispatched two inspectors to inform the airline that its pilots who lacked current Kenyan certification would be prohibited from flying until properly documented. “You must have passed each other in midair,” she said with a laugh that shook her considerable bosom. In an earlier time she would have been a great African mama, Fitzhugh thought, a village dispenser of cures, a conjure-woman tossing bones for a fee.

“We can’t afford to have several aircrews grounded,” he said. “Isn’t there some way you can stop this process?”

She shook her head, declaring that the wheels were in motion. Withdrawing from his briefcase copies of the licenses of the pilots in question, along with other records, Fitzhugh expressed the hope that presenting these documents now, rather than waiting for her department to request them, would expedite the process. Most certainly it will save time, she said; nevertheless, it could take a month. She sat back, hands folded in her lap, her posture and her silence telling them that the next move was theirs. Nimrod made it, producing a cookie box from the briefcase.

“I remembered how much you like these,” he said. “They are made in America.”

“Oh yes, peanut butter.” The director’ s face brightened. “I love them.”

Nimrod placed the box on her desk.

She took the lagniappe, opened the top, and bowing her head, sniffed the contents. “They smell delicious. And how many cookies in this box? It doesn’t say.”

“There are enough for you and to share with your friends.”

“Excellent.” The woman raised her ponderous frame from the chair and extended her hand. “These matters will be cleared up very quickly. I can promise your pilots will have Kenya licenses within the week. It’s only a matter of finishing paperwork.”

They were back in Loki by nightfall. Fitzhugh reported to Douglas that the expedition had been successful. He was in a foul mood. The inspectors, unaware of the transaction that had taken place in Nairobi, had grounded six pilots and two aircraft that VanRensberg had not been able to attend to.

“I’ve got about fifty grand in lost revenue,” he said, waving a sheaf of contracts.

“We can absorb it,” Fitzhugh assured him. “It will all be back to normal in a week.”

“We’ll see. The director could screw us yet. Tara must have given her some cookies, too, so now we wait to find out which brand she likes best.”

“Tara doesn’t do business that way. She probably did nothing more than call the director’s attention to our problems and ask her to look into them, as a favor. But when it comes to doing a favor for nothing and another for something, you know which way she’ll go.”

“Jesus Christ!” Douglas tossed the papers aside. “Do you still think Tara is Mother Teresa with a pilot’s license? Of course she paid the director off to find as much wrong with us as she could. This means war.”

“War?”

“That bitch is out to ruin us. If we don’t act first, we’ll be toast.”

Fitzhugh, who’d been standing the whole time, sat at his desk and remarked that Douglas was creating a conflict where none existed, imputing to Tara motives he was sure she did not possess. She wasn’t out to ruin Knight Air . . . He stopped pursuing this argument, and what stopped him was a shred of wisdom he’d picked up from Malachy long ago, in one of their bull sessions: If someone deeply wishes for something to be so, his imagination will mold reality to conform to what is wished for. Douglas wanted a war with Tara, and he meant to have it. All he’d needed was a pretext, and now she had unwittingly given him one.

“I am going to ask you to do nothing,” Fitzhugh said. “You’ll only make a bad situation worse. Do nothing for one week. If the director isn’t as good as her word, then fight your war, but if she comes through for us, continue to do nothing. Agreed?”

Douglas made some vague gesture.

“What does that mean?”

“Okay,” he said.

The director responded favorably to her gift. Just six days later Knight Air’s two grounded planes were given clean bills of health, and its pilots were issued their documents. In the meantime, Douglas had flown to Nairobi for a meeting with Hassan Adid. He did not disclose, to Fitzhugh or to anyone, the purpose of this get-together.

A few days after it took place, Tara stormed into the office, as angry as Fitzhugh had ever seen her, and demanded to see Douglas immediately. Fitzhugh told her that he’d taken a flight to Bahr el Ghazal and wasn’t expected back till the afternoon. She hesitated, her eyes throwing off sparks, rocketing around the room until they settled back on him. Stepping forward, she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and slammed it on the desk.

“Look at that,” she said, her voice quavering. “Look at it and tell me what it is.”

Fitzhugh glanced at it. Nonplussed, he said nothing.

“Well, what is it?”

“Just what it says it is,” he answered with a nervous laugh. “It’s tomorrow’s schedule of UN-authorized flights. The one that’s faxed to Khartoum every morning.”

“No, it isn’t. It is corruption! Complete corruption!”

“I really don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“I think you do. Read it more carefully. Oh, I’ll read it for you.” She snatched the paper and read aloud, “ ‘Operator—Knight Air, UN call sign Charley Five, destination Mapel, agency CARE. Operator—Knight Air, UN call sign Charley Six, destination Gogrial, agency Doctors Without Borders. Operator—Knight Air, UN call sign Charley Two Zero, destination Malualkon, agency Adventist Development.’ It goes on, but nowhere do you see a Pathways flight on this schedule, and that’s because I was notified yesterday morning that my UN call sign has been revoked.”

Now the cause of her fury had become clearer. Without a call sign, her air service could not deliver UN cargoes, and those accounted for most of her business. She was facing disaster.

“And how did all this come about?” she went on, lips trembling. “Your man Timmerman, your so-called marketing manager, when all he is, is a bloody fixer, that’s how. He pulled strings at the UN and had it done. That’s not a guess. I
know
he did. And I’m quite sure he didn’t do it on his own initiative. It wasn’t enough that you people used him to steal clients from me. You had to make it impossible for me to fly for any of them. That isn’t marketing, that’s crooked monopoly. And you have the gall to tell me you don’t understand what I’m getting at?”

“All I can say is that this is the first I’ve heard about this.”

“Rubbish!” she shrieked. “I shall be bankrupt within a month, and that is what you people want, isn’t it?” Without waiting for an answer, she placed her knuckles on the desk and leaned toward him, literally in his face. “You people have gone too fucking far, but I am not without resources, and we will see who goes farther.”

She turned and walked out, leaving him to wonder if her threat was an idle one, made in anger, or if it was a vow. If the latter, did she have a plan of action, and what was it? So Douglas had lied to him with one word—
“Okay.”
He and Adid had decided they had an opportunity that could not be passed up. Whose idea was it to employ Timmerman to have Tara’s call sign revoked? It had Adid’s stamp. Fitzhugh could almost hear him, assuring Douglas that with this single stroke they would eliminate the competition and grab one hundred percent of “market share.” Neither man would have seen it as wrong, for success in business, or at any rate in the cutthroat business of aid aviation, seemed to require a fundamental amorality. And yet Douglas had shown himself to be a moral man, a man of compassion who had risked a great deal, even his life, to bring succor to the starving, the sick, the defenseless. The contradiction between the idealist and the relentless entrepreneur was too great for Fitzhugh to resolve. He wondered how Douglas himself resolved it. His aphorism “We do what we have to do so we can do what we came here to do” wasn’t adequate as a resolution, for what had been done to Tara hadn’t needed to be done.

Faith in an idea, a theory, or a god is not easily surrendered when confronted by facts that embarrass it; and the greater one’s investment in it, the more difficult the surrender. The same is true of faith in a man. Having invested three years of his life in Douglas Braithwaite and Knight Air, Fitzhugh was unable to accept the notion that the American was unworthy of his loyalty or that his belief in him had been misplaced, despite evidence that he was self-centered, a liar, and ruthless. He persuaded himself that in this instance his friend had been manipulated by Adid. The cunning Somali had jerked the wires of Douglas’s passions and ambitions to bring out the worst in him. What was needed now was a countervailing influence to bring him around to the better side of his nature. Fitzhugh would be that influence and show him that the blow to Tara was, if not wrong, then misguided and likely to reap unforeseen and unpleasant consequences.

After Douglas returned from Bahr el Ghazal, Fitzhugh said he had to speak to him and invited him to take a walk, to ensure privacy. They took a road where the only ears were those of passing Turkana. Douglas, head bowed meditatively, hands in his back pockets, listened without any visible reaction to a summary of Tara’s visit.

“Well, she’s only being human,” he commented with a disengaged air.

“Because she’s so very angry? Wouldn’t you be if you were in her shoes?”

“I meant that when things go wrong, seriously wrong, it’s only human to blame circumstances or bad luck or someone else instead of yourself.”