by Ross Thomas
The Ile moved around the courtyard, speaking first to one of the prostrated Albertians, then to another. Some he spoke to did a half-pushup, turning their faces to him as they would to the sun. Onto their foreheads he pressed shillings. They stuck there with sweat. Then the beneficiaries resumed their positions. During the Ile’s tour of the courtyard, Dr. Diokadu followed closely behind, hitching up his robes nervously.
The Ile stopped where William was lying and said something. William did a half-pushup, lifted his face to the Ile, and replied. The Ile pasted a shilling on our driver’s forehead and looked over at us. He was a short man with a smooth, almost round head. His robes were pure white with gold embroidery. He wore the feathered boater with a slightly raffish air. He smiled and showed us a nice supply of gold teeth. He continued to look at us incuriously, said something to Dr. Diokadu, and nodded at Jenaro who bowed. As the Ile passed Shartelle he looked quickly to the right and left—and winked. Then he moved off towards the building and disappeared through the passageway, Dr. Diokadu and the retinue close behind.
“Sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived,” Jenaro said. “But I got tied up with the Leader. He wanted us to get together either before the Ile arrived or after he left. It looks as if it will be after. They’re going to have to go through the formal greeting routine for a while, so why don’t we have a beer?”
“You lead the way, Mr. Jenaro,” Shartelle said.
“Just call me Jimmy. Ohio State, class of ’55.”
Shartelle grinned. “I took notice that you spoke like a native.”
“Majored in business administration, lettered in golf—believe it or not.”
“I believe it,” Shartelle said.
“I’m just laying my credentials out.”
“They’re impressive,” I said.
“The Leader keeps a little beer tucked away among the lemon squash,” Jenaro said. “I think we can promote three bottles.”
He led us up a flight of stairs, down an outside balcony, and into a room that seemed to be an office. “The Leader’s study,” he explained, and walked to one side where a small three-foot office-type refrigerator sat next to some filing cabinets. Jenaro produced three bottles of beer, opened them, and motioned us to seats. He sat on the edge of the desk.
“I saw Downer a couple of days ago. He said you were due.”
“We got in yesterday morning.”
“Nice trip?”
“Fine.”
“You’re the Treasurer of the Party, right?” Shartelle asked.
“Right. The bag man, the fixer—if you know what I mean.”
“I believe I’ve heard the terms.”
Jenaro put his beer on the desk, and walked up and down the room. “There are three of us going towards the center—the federal parliament. The Leader, me—because I’ve got the safest district in the country—and Diokadu. You just met him. He’s our theoretician. Smart.”
He stopped in the middle of the room, assumed a putting stance, and aimed one at an imaginary hole. I judged it was a ten-footer.
“You hold a post in the regional government?” Shartelle asked.
“Minister of Information,” he said.
“That could be useful,” I said.
Jenaro nodded, aimed another imaginary putt, shot, and sighed. “I missed. I should have stayed in the States and turned pro. Maybe Gary Player and I could have teamed up on one of those Saturday afternoon TV golf tournaments. That would knock hell out of them in Cape Town, wouldn’t it?”
Shartelle stretched his long legs out and took a sip of beer from the bottle. Jenaro hadn’t offered any glasses.
“That’s a nice suit,” Jenaro said. “Seersucker?”
“I had this cloth run up for me special by a little old union-busting mill down in Alabama. I can get you a few yards if you like.”
Jenaro walked over and fingered Shartelle’s lapel. “Could you?”
“I’ll make a note of it,” I said. “We’ll get Duffy to fly it down.”
“Just get it to London,” Jenaro said. “My tailor’s there.”
“How do you see the political picture, Jimmy?” Shartelle asked.
Jenaro took careful aim and sank a twenty-footer. I started to tell him he was wiggling his butt too much, but didn’t. “Very rough. We’ve got the money; all we lack is votes.”
Shartelle nodded. “You can’t run a poll, can you?”
“I’m as close as they’ve got to one,” Jenaro said. “We can’t run a real poll because we don’t have the trained interviewers. And if we did have trained interviewers to do an in-depth thing à la Oliver Quayle or Lou Harris, the interviewers would have to speak ninety-odd dialects. We can take a spot survey, check the voters in the marketplace, on the road, wherever you find them, but it won’t mean much. We’ve got the tribal thing here in the west and over in the east. Up north, the Muslims are putting the fear of God or Allah into the people.”
“How do you figure it then?”
Jenaro walked behind the desk and slumped into the swivel chair. He propped his legs up on the desk and crossed his ankles.
“I don’t know. Unless we come up with something, I’m afraid the Leader, Diokadu and I are going to be the loyal opposition. But then I’m no great strategist. I can tell you down to a penny how much we’ve got in the coffers and how much we can tap a guy for. I know them all because I’ve been playing politics since I was sixteen years old. They shipped me off to the States to get rid of me, in fact. When I came back I made a pile in the import business and I got to know the business crowd—and that’s the same bunch in any country.”
“So what I do is get in my Jag and go for bush. You know, park it at a government resthouse, change clothes and ride off into the boondocks on a bicycle. I talk with the villagers. Most don’t know who I am and I’ve got a gift for languages so the dialects come easy. I talk to them; they talk to me. I find out what they’re bitching about that week, and then come back and try to get it fixed so that the Leader can take the credit. I sometimes think that’s what all ministers should be doing instead of riding around in their Mercedes.”
“Been the downfall of many a politician I’ve known,” Shartelle said. “Let me ask you this: you know the trade union boys pretty well?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How they going?”
Jenaro made a small gesture with his hand, turning it palm up and palm down. “Who knows? Depends on who got to them last.”
“Who’s the top man?”
“The Secretary-General of the Trade Union Congress.”
“That corresponds to our AFL-CIO.”
“Roughly, except the Secretary-General doesn’t have to run for office every two or four years. He’s appointed for life.”
“Dedicated?”
Jenaro looked up at the ceiling. “To a point. He and I have had a few business deals together. He’s not above taking a profit, although it’s a dirty word in any speech he makes.”
“Has he got the power?”
“The real stuff?”
“That’s right.”
“He’s got it.”
“Will he make a deal?” Shartelle asked.
“For money? He doesn’t need money.”
“He needs something.”
Jenaro got up from the desk and walked the length of the room.
“He’d want it in writing.”
“How do he and the Chief get along?” Shartelle asked.
“Okay. Not close. Not distant. They’re aware of each other.”
“Well, I’ve got an idea. It might help do the job.”
“Talk it over with the Leader.”
“Well, now, Jimmy, the Chief seems to be a fine upstanding man who just might not want to get all involved in what I’ve got in mind. What I need is someone who might serve as the Chief’s emissary to organized labor—not out in public, mind you—but somebody who might drop the word where it would be most productive.”
Jenaro sat on the edge of t
he desk again. He moved around a lot. “We used to have some guys at Ohio State from the South who talked just like you. They’d talk and talk and the first thing I knew I was down fifty bucks in a poker game. But no offense. Wait till you get a bunch of Albertians together if you want to go all around Robin Hood’s barn before you get to the point. First they start out with the parables. Then come the proverbs. After the proverbs come the veiled metaphors. Then—maybe then, if you’re lucky—somebody might get to the point.”
Shartelle brushed a bit of ash from one well-cut lapel. “It’s my Southern upbringing, sir. We put a lot of store by polite conversation.”
Jenaro grinned. “Shit. What you want is for me to make a deal with the Trade Union Congress, right?”
“There’s something like that in the back of my mind.
Also, I might just have another role for you to play in this campaign.”
Jenaro rose and walked up and down the room again. “Clint,” he said, “we might just get along.”
“I’m sure we will. I’m just sure we will.”
An Albertian in a white coat poked his head in the door “Time for chop, Sah.”
“Now you meet the rest of the crowd, including the Ile. Not only does the Ile have votes, but he has money. That’s one reason we butter him up. And, of course, he is the traditional ruler.”
“I think he winked at me,” Shartelle said.
“I know he did,” I said.
“The old boy has been around in his own way. He puts up with the romance and ritual because the people like it—or seem to.”
“My, I thought it was fine!” Shartelle said. “Here he comes on with that old witch doctor prancing around in front of him wearing that Ft. Worth, Texas boat on his head and all those people flopping down on their faces. And then comes that old man with the gold staff a-tappin’ and a-chantin’ his praises. Hell, it was better than Father Divine. And then here comes that eight-foot horn and the drums a-talkin’ and then old Himself, sitting up straight and proud with those Hollywood shades and that straw hat with the ostrich plume floating out of it. Here he comes in that 1939 LaSalle limousine just like my daddy used to have. And then he gets out of the car, just as casual and calm as you please, and walks around sweat-pasting shillings on the folks’ heads. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
“Shartelle’s got his own notions of what Africa should be,” I told Jenaro.
“Tarzan and Timbuktu?”
“Something like that.”
Jenaro smiled and turned to Clint. “Just stick with me, Dad. I’ll see that you’re not disappointed.”
Chapter
12
We met them all—from the Minister of Home Affairs to the Premier’s assistant administrative aide. There were forty of them in the big room with the long table, take away or add a couple, and they moved around in a brilliant display of best-day robes and a babble of shrill conversation, not much of which Shartelle and I could get. We were the only whites in the room.
Chief Akomolo welcomed us warmly. “After this is over, I was hoping that we could get together. Can you stay?” We told him we could. He instructed Jimmy Jenaro to keep us in tow. Jimmy said: “Just stand still. They’ll all drift by before we sit down to chop.”
Each of the forty-odd men in the room made his way to the end of the room where the Ile sat on a foot-high dais in a chair fashioned from some kind of animal horn. When each got there he prostrated himself before the Ile, murmured a few words, and moved away. The Ile sipped on a bottle of orange squash and smiled blandly at the gathering. He looked a little bored.
They passed then—those who had not yet done so—to Chief Akomolo, shook hands, made their greetings, and then moved on to the drinks table. A number of stewards squirmed through the crowd bearing bottles of Ballantine’s Scotch which they pressed on anyone who would hold out his hand. I noticed that a few of the guests tucked a bottle or so away in the folds of their robes.
“You want a drink?” Jenaro asked.
“Scotch and water, if you can get it without trouble,” Shartelle said. I asked for the same. Jenaro stopped a passing waiter and told him to bring us three Scotches with water. He brought back three fifths and three glasses of water. Jenaro sighed, put two bottles down by a baseboard, uncapped one and poured us all a drink.
“For someone who never touches the stuff, the Leader runs up a hell of a monthly booze bill,” he said. “But it’s what they expect—the squeeze, the dash, the tip, the bribe. They all expect it and feel insulted if they don’t get it.”
First we met the Minister of Agriculture, and then the Minister of Public Works, and then the Minister of Transport, followed by the Minister of Trade and Commerce, who came just before the Minister of Internal Affairs and Labor, and after the Minister of Health. They all had a rough jest for Jenaro and a kind word of greeting for Shartelle and me. They were polite, a little shy perhaps, or maybe it was just suspicion. They moved on to talk among themselves.
“Some of them run their Ministries, some don’t,” Jenaro said in a low voice. “All of us—even I—depend on our Permanent Secretaries who are, with just a couple of exceptions, all British. They’re damned good, too, but after independence, they’ll be on their way out. Some immediately—some in a couple of months—a few longer. It’s the Albertization process.”
Some of the lesser chiefs and notables came by to be introduced. Shartelle was gracious and charming. I was warmly polite. These were the hangers-on, the toadies, the go-fors who surround any political activity and sometimes, surprisingly enough, prove useful. They’ll do anything at anytime for anyone in power. In the States, they would be hanging around the county courthouse.
“What happens when the British leave?” Shartelle asked.
“They’re training some good chaps to take their places, and they’re training them well. Of course, the British will get their lumpers.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a lump sum compensation for having their careers interrupted.” Jenaro paused to make a couple of more introductions. “For instance, suppose you were a bright young guy of twenty or twenty-one or twenty-two, just out of service after World War II with a fair education, and you hoped to come to Albertia in the colonial service. You go into a ministry in a rather low position, or for bush as assistant district officer, and you stick with it. You work yourself up by the time you’re thirty-five or thirty-six or thirty-seven to Under-Permanent Secretary or Assistant Permanent Secretary—and then you have the rug yanked out from under you. Or perhaps you’re forty or forty-five or fifty or older—but not old enough for full retirement. So what do you do, go back to London and sign up at the Labour Exchange?”
“Sounds like a reduction-in-force,” I said.
“Something like that. So we made a deal with them. They get out and depending upon their years of service, they get a lump sum payment. If a guy has been here for say, fifteen years, he gets about three-thousand quid. That’s the lump. But in addition to that he gets about a thousand quid a year for the rest of his life. No strings attached.”
“You wanted them out bad, didn’t you?” Shartelle said.
Jenaro nodded. “Bad enough. And, of course, they can take their lumpers now and get the hell out—and a lot of them are. But a lot more of them are staying for as long as they can. Funny, but I could never see the Amis staying under similar circumstances.”
“If we ever dreamed we weren’t desperately wanted and liked and loved by all, we’d be on the first plane out,” I said.
Jenaro introduced us to a straggler, an old man who frowned at us, scolded Jenaro in the tribal dialect, and then hurried off to see the Ile. “God knows who invited him,” Jenaro said. “Probably the Leader.”
The tall broad Albertian who had been with Chief Akomolo at Duffy’s office luncheon in London came through the door. In London, he had worn a suit. In Albertia, he wore his robes and he moved on sandaled feet across the room with grace and dignity and a p
eculiar aura of power. He went immediately to the Ile and the little man’s round face beamed as the younger man knelt before him in—my romantic notions told me—respect, not awe, as a returning, successful Roland would kneel to Charlemagne.
Shartelle poked me in the ribs. “There’s old Bristol Cream. My, he cuts a fine figure in those white flowing robes and that saucy little cap perched up on that goodlooking head.”
After exchanging a few words with the Ile, the big man made his way to Chief Akomolo. The same look of genuine pleasure appeared on the Chief’s face as the pair shook hands. He gestured towards us and the man in the white robes turned and moved our way.
“His last name’s Dekko, in case you forgot,” Shartelle said.
“Chief Dekko, call him,” Jimmy Jenaro said.
“Mr. Shartelle, it is indeed a pleasure to see you again.” He put his big hand out and Shartelle took it.
“I’ve been looking forward to it, Chief Dekko.”
“Really?” the big man said. “Why?”
It would have stopped some people momentarily, I guess. Me, for example. Even Duffy. Not Shartelle. “Because I wanted to get to know you better, and we didn’t get much of a chance to talk in London.”
“That’s true. Why don’t we sit together at chop?”
“I’d be happy to, sir,” Shartelle said.
“And Mr. Upshaw, is it not?” He put out his hand and I took it.
“Chief Dekko,” I said.
“Hello, Jimmy,” he said to Jenaro. “I am very angry with you.”
“Why?”
“You told me you’d teach me to play golf—that was last month. You haven’t called, you haven’t stopped by.”
“You’ve been in London.”
“For a week—it’s been a month. You must keep your promises.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“What time?”
“Nine—make it nine-thirty.”
