The Canal House

by Mark Lee

  “The twelve-year-old girl with shrapnel in her leg.”

  “Yes. Of course. Did you check her this morning?”

  “She’s hypotensive. Febrile. Looks shocky.”

  “Did you talk to her? Was John there to translate?”

  “She said she doesn’t want to lose her leg. If she has no leg, she’s useless and no one will ever marry her.”

  Julia hesitated for a moment, then poured off the disinfectant. She picked up two scalpels, a steel probe and tweezers, and carefully placed them on a sterile bandage. I knew what she was thinking—save the life in front of you, concentrate on the routine. “Well then, we’ll have to try very hard.”

  Isaac was waiting for me when I left the medical tent. He looked happy and I figured that no one had told him about the crash. Daniel’s watch was still hanging from the twine around his neck.

  “Are you going away in the plane?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Will you see Mrs. Joan and Mr. Daniel?”

  I should have been ready for a question like that, but I felt like I’d just been punched in the chest.

  “I’m going to see them in Kampala. We planned to have dinner together.” I slipped on my sunglasses so that the boy couldn’t see my eyes. “You’re a good friend, Isaac. You guided us all the way.”

  ON THE WAY BACK to Entebbe, Viltner pointed at landmarks and shouted questions: Do you remember this lake? What about that mountain? I looked out the window at the countryside and saw nothing but dry grass and an occasional village. It seemed as if the Cessna had been absorbed by the landscape. When we reached the airport two bush pilots were waiting there to ask questions. They told me that Paul Rosen’s father was flying in from New York on a chartered jet.

  After spending the night in a small hotel near Lake Victoria, I decided to return to London. Everyone in the Cessna was probably dead and I didn’t want to be there when they found the bodies. I took a flight to Kenya and started drinking little bottles of vodka the moment the plane left Nairobi. I hadn’t known Daniel very long and I was surprised how much his death bothered me. It was only when we were flying over North Africa that I admitted the truth to myself: I admired Daniel and hoped we could become friends. I hadn’t made many friends since I’d left Los Angeles. It was easier if I just did my job.

  I remained in my seat when we reached Heathrow airport and was the last person to get off the plane. Carter Howard and John Scofield, the Washington Post’s London bureau chief, were there waiting for me and the first thing Scofield said was, “Do you have pictures?”

  They drove me into London. Streetlights. Taxis. A blond girl on a billboard telling me that “paradise is a plane ticket away.” When we reached the office Ann Weinstein took my film and developed the photographs from my Nikon. I gave the story to Scofield, then did a phone interview with a Newsweek reporter in New York.

  “Is that all the film you have?” asked Carter. “You only took two rolls?”

  “There’s another roll in the camera, but that’s for the Telegraph.”

  “But you don’t work for them.”

  “Daniel does. He’s on contract.”

  Scofield turned to Carter Howard and rolled his eyes slightly. Go ahead, he seemed to be saying. Tell your employee that we want an exclusive.

  “Don’t give me any crap about this,” I said. “Daniel’s my friend and I’m going to file his story.”

  I left Park Street an hour later and took the underground to the Telegraph offices. Daniel’s young foreign editor was on vacation, but I found an experienced rewrite man named Stubbs. He sent my film downstairs, then interviewed me and turned my mumbled replies into a coherent article. When that was done we went to a pub and Stubbs ordered two pints of bitter.

  “This is all quite unfortunate,” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders but didn’t speak. Quite unfortunate.

  “Mr. McFarland was the real thing. He always focused on the facts, the little details. He understood the beauty of a simple declarative sentence.”

  The clerk at the Ruskin Hotel gave me the noisy room near the second-floor toilet, but I flopped on the bed and slept for a long time. When I woke up, I bought copies of the Telegraph and the Washington Post. Both papers gave a front-page position to the hostage story with a sidebar about the lost Cessna. I ate four bags of potato chips and drank four whiskeys at a pub, then went back to bed.

  The phone began ringing, but I felt like I was swimming through an underwater tunnel, trying to find a patch of light that would lead me to the surface. I breathed deeply, opened my eyes, and then it was morning again and the phone near the bed was still ringing.

  “Yeah?”

  I heard Ann Weinstein’s voice, bright and cheery. “He’s alive.”

  “What?”

  “Daniel’s alive. It’s a miracle, really. Everyone else died in the crash.”

  I pulled on some clothes and hurried down to the Newsweek offices. All they could tell me was that Daniel was at a rural clinic and that Paul’s father was flying north in a private plane. Throughout the day there were random particles of news, mostly from the World Wildlife Fund office in Kampala. We learned that Paul Rosen had discovered a group of Sudanese soldiers butchering an elephant and when he had swooped down to investigate, the plane had been hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. Daniel had broken his forearm and several ribs but was in fairly good condition. He had been flown back to Entebbe and taken to Nsambya Hospital in Kampala.

  All of us sat in Carter’s office waiting for Daniel’s phone call. We expected him to sound tired and sad, perhaps a little fragile, but ready to tell us his story. When he didn’t call by eight o’clock London time, Ann contacted Nsambya Hospital. A nurse told her that Mr. McFarland had paid his bill and left the hospital.

  During the next twelve hours, Daniel had gained access to a computer and a phone. He wrote one article about his interview with Samuel Okello and another about the Sudanese and the plane crash. All the publications he had contacted before leaving Rome were sent both articles. Daniel didn’t attach a personal note or any other indication that he had recovered from the accident. John Scofield contacted the New York desk, then called a German editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine. No one had actually spoken to Daniel. After completing his job in a professional manner, he stopped sending messages.

  It was a slow news week and Daniel’s articles got a fair amount of attention. In America, the media focused on Paul Rosen’s death. In Europe, the German government threatened to shut off aid to the Sudan unless they allowed the United Nations to conduct an independent investigation.

  If Daniel had been in New York or London during this period, he could have easily become a fifteen-minute celebrity. Instead, he stayed hidden and the media forgot about him. Magazine articles about Paul Rosen began to appear a few weeks later. I read about his wealthy family, prep school, Yale, and an attempt to play professional tennis. Paul had gone through a nightclub period in New York before a trip to Africa had inspired him to work for wildlife conservation. The articles reprinted one of my photographs of Paul and Tobias standing beside the Cessna.

  The American embassy in Kampala said that as far as it knew Daniel McFarland had left Uganda. I assumed that he had returned to Rome because someone had gone to the Stampa Estera and picked up his mail. Everyone sent Daniel letters, faxes, and e-mail, but he didn’t respond. His Italian cell phone had been switched off and the answering machine on his desk at the Stampa Estera was disconnected. It began to feel like he had died along with Paul and the others.

  I sent faxes and e-mail to the U.S. State Department, but no one there wanted to negotiate with the Lord’s Righteous Army. Finally I called the German embassy in Khartoum and talked to the commercial attaché. Using his contacts with the Sudanese military, he’d made a deal with Samuel Okello and exchanged two truckloads of food and medicine for the hostages. The moment they were set free, the American secretary of state held a news conference and tried to take
all the credit.

  The people who couldn’t contact Daniel called me. It was painful to talk to Paul Rosen’s mother and Joan’s eldest daughter. They wanted to speak to the person who had spent the last few minutes with their relatives. Was Paul happy? Did he mention his family? What did Joan say before the plane crashed? I mumbled my condolences and promised that I’d pass on their questions to Daniel.

  Even Richard Seaton called, twice. He wanted to talk to Daniel and was curious about why he had disappeared. “Does he need medical care, Nicky?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “How about a psychiatrist? I know a good one here in London.”

  “If I see Daniel, I’ll mention it to him.”

  “If you know that he’s actually in Rome, call Billy and he’ll make all the arrangements. You can fly down there in my jet.”

  CARTER OFFERED ME an easy assignment—taking photos at a war crimes trial at The Hague—but I turned him down. I had to know if Daniel was all right so I took a short vacation and flew down to Rome. I left messages on Daniel’s answering machine at Bracciano, but he didn’t return my calls. Not knowing what else to do, I went to the Vatican and stared at the Pietà with the other tourists. Later that afternoon I dropped by the Contessa’s apartment on the Piazza Navona.

  I had to wait in the lobby for about twenty minutes until the doorman let me go up. Wearing a silk bathrobe, the Contessa stood in the doorway and blew cigarette smoke in my direction.

  “I don’t know where Daniel is, Mr. Bettencourt. He hasn’t called.”

  “He was in a plane crash in Africa. Three people died.”

  “Yes. Some British friends of mine read about it in the newspaper. Perhaps Daniel is alive. Perhaps he is dead. When selfish people disappear, no one really cares.”

  I looked down at her red toenails and little green sandals. “If you see Daniel would you tell him that I’m staying at the Hotel Centro.”

  “I’m not going to hear from him and you won’t either. Don’t waste your time, Mr. Bettencourt. Go home, if you have one.”

  Eating dinner that night, I decided to rent a car and go out to Bracciano. I didn’t know exactly where Daniel’s farmhouse was, but I thought I’d drive around and ask questions. When I got back to my hotel, a phone message was waiting for me: Domani. A mezzogiorno. Convento Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori.

  “Who called? Was it Mr. McFarland?”

  “It was a man, dottore. But he did not say his name.”

  “And I’m supposed to meet him tomorrow afternoon at a convent?”

  “Sί, dottore. It’s in the Trastevere district.”

  “What’s a man doing at a convent?”

  The desk clerk gave me a big smile. “I don’t know. But he speaks very good Italian.”

  After a bad night’s sleep I drank a double espresso with four lumps of sugar and crossed the Tiber at the Ponte Sisto. It was early autumn and the rains wouldn’t arrive for another month or so. The Tiber had a muddy brown color and the leaves on the sycamore trees were curling up at the edges like thin pieces of paper. Strolling through the narrow streets of Trastevere, I found the tailor’s shop that had transformed me, for one night, into an English gentleman. The same dummy was in the window with the same dusty bolt of cloth.

  I walked west on the Via Garibaldi, a narrow cobblestone road that curved up the slope of the Janiculum Hill. On the left side of the road there was a small courtyard filled with Fiats and a few scooters. The church of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolari looked like a shabby Gothic castle with bars on the lower windows. I could see that plaster had once covered the brick facade, but most of it had fallen off hundreds of years ago.

  The building had three marble archways framing wooden doors. Two of the doors led into a shadowy church. The third door was about twenty feet away and I assumed that it led to the convent. I knocked once, twice, then waited for several minutes. Finally the door creaked open a few inches and I encountered an elderly nun the size of an eight-year-old child.

  The nun saw the camera hanging from my shoulder and assumed that I was a tourist. “No ingresso,” she said firmly and tried to shut the door on my foot.

  “I received a message at my hotel. A man said—”

  “No ingresso!”

  “I’m looking for Daniel McFarland.”

  “Ahhh. Signor Daniel.” The little nun smiled as if I had said some magic words. She opened the door completely and gestured for me to come in.

  I followed her into a covered walkway surrounding a garden. All the doors were open and I could see into the nuns’ rooms as we passed them: a narrow bed set in the wall of the cubicle. A writing desk. A crucifix. A single chair. My guide glanced back to make sure that I was following her, then led me through the colonnade and into the garden. Generations of visiting relatives had left potted plants and flowers that had been placed in the courtyard’s moist soil. It was a jungle of mismatched plants, the kind of place where marigolds and tomato vines fought a murky battle with calla lilies.

  I smelled Daniel’s cigarette first. The little nun led me around a ficus bush and we found him sitting on a marble bench. Daniel had cut off the long brown hair that had looked so stylish at the Contessa’s party. His left forearm was in a cast and there were stitched-up cuts on his face. He looked tired and shaky, like a soldier who had survived an artillery barrage. After ten years of covering wars without a single injury, it seemed as if all the pain and confusion of those experiences had finally touched him.

  Daniel stood and shook my hand. “Hello, Nicky. Good to see you again.”

  “What the hell are you doing in a convent?”

  “Smoking.” He sat down on the bench and I joined him. “Actually, I’ve been living here for the last two weeks. I don’t like Bracciano these days. It’s too exposed and there’s too much sunlight.”

  “So you just knocked on the door and the nuns let you move in?”

  “When I came back from Africa I made a contribution to the order’s hospice. The mother superior asked if I wanted the nuns to pray for me, but I told her I’d rather stay here for a few weeks. It’s worked out all right. They’ve gotten used to having me around.”

  Some leaves rustled and the nun reappeared with a white saucer. She placed it on the bench, smiled again, and left us alone. Daniel already had a saucer filled with ash. The nuns probably believed that all American males spent their recreational time smoking cigarettes and staring at tropical plants.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Want to tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t know if it would make any sense, Nicky. I’m a little confused right now.”

  I didn’t say anything and we both sat quietly on the bench. There’s one good thing about working in the so-called Third World—it teaches you how to wait. I had once spent several weeks in Kinshasa, waiting to take a ferry up the Congo River. First the boat’s engine exploded and then our captain was arrested for stealing a truckload of flashlight batteries. Every two or three days there was a new disaster, but the third-class passengers held on to their little patches of the deck. We weren’t going to leave Kinshasa, I thought. Not today or even next year. Then, one bright morning, we cast off lines and headed up the river.

  It was getting dark in the convent garden. Pots rattled in the kitchen as the nuns prepared supper. I wondered if we were going to sit there forever and decided that the convent wasn’t a bad place to spend eternity. All I needed was a cushion for the bench, some decent caviar on Melba toast with grated onion and a squeeze of lemon. Maybe a bottle of chilled white wine.

  “All of us have different assumptions about the world,” Daniel said. “They might be real or they might be illusions, but it doesn’t really matter. We believe in these stories, these little fantasies. They help us deal with our jobs and our personal desires. But sometimes, you’re caught up in a storm and then you see everything in a new way. What are you supposed to do, Nicky? How do you get n
ormal again?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Just talk to me.”

  7 BOMA MISSION

  When Daniel climbed into the Cessna with Joan Siebert, he assumed that they were going to fly south to Entebbe. Paul Rosen had a different plan. He still wanted to prove that Sudanese soldiers were crossing the border and killing animals in Kidepo park.

  “I’m going to fly over the park one more time,” he said. “It won’t take long.”

  “And what if we don’t see anything?” asked Daniel.

  “Then I’ve got to coax another reporter to come up here.”

  Daniel thought that Joan would be upset about the detour, but it didn’t appear to bother her. As they flew west over the park, Tobias kept pointing out different species of vultures and hawks that were riding the thermals. Joan borrowed some paper from Daniel so she could write down their names.

  “I still love Africa,” she told Daniel. “It’s important that you put that in your article. There’s nothing wrong with looking at chickadees and robins back home, but they can’t compare to a black-winged vulture.”

  A week earlier three adult elephants and a calf had wandered out of the park. They were still protected by Ugandan law, but Paul was worried about them. He passed low over a patch of thorn trees and found the water hole that the elephants had been using. Within a few minutes, they saw the calf alone, running across the savanna. The calf’s trunk was extended and he looked confused.

  “There!” Paul pointed west to some black specks floating in the air. They flew closer and the specks became vultures circling over a kill. Paul went lower and Daniel saw five men wearing tan uniforms standing next to an army truck. They were butchering three adult elephants with axes and knives. The area around the carcasses was dark where blood had been absorbed into the ground.

  “Do you see that?” Paul shouted. “You’re a witness!” He banked the plane hard and turned it around while Tobias fumbled in his backpack for a camera. As they passed over the soldiers a second time, several men ran to the truck to get their weapons.