Because Hal had neither the energy nor the inclination to keep her informed of his problems, Grace had no exact notion of the scale of the crisis that he now faced. In retaliation for the expulsion of its diplomats, the US government had reduced development aid to the country. The price of its principal exports was still falling, so public services could now be financed only through massive loans from foreign banks. Numerous corrupt officials had found ingenious ways to embezzle public funds, and the failure of various state-funded enterprises to break even, let alone turn a profit, compounded the government’s problems. In these circumstances, Hal was forced to the conclusion that only a steep rise in taxation might retrieve the deteriorating state of the nation’s finances. He knew that a drastic budget would be little understood and universally unpopular. Profiteering businessmen were sure to exploit its measures by upping the already inflated prices of imported goods. Peasant farmers would be hard hit and discontent among increasing numbers of unemployed workers might lead to rioting in the towns. But Hal had done his sums and could see no alternative.
The reaction was stronger than he had feared. When the public discovered how much more they were expected to pay for everyday items such as kerosene, cloths of Manchester cotton, shoes, flour, schnapps and beer, the outcry could not be silenced. For the first time since taking power, Emmanuel’s party lost the support of the trade unions. The dock workers of Port Rokesby were the first to go on strike. Soon they were joined by the miners of the Central Region and railway workers nationwide. Negotiations towards a settlement broke down. A new state of emergency was declared.
Grace and I discussed this dark time when we met after she returned alone from Equatoria. “Consider the irony,” she remarked. “Hal Brigshaw, avowed socialist and anti-imperialist son of a railwayman, whose freedom to think revolutionary thoughts had been financed by the inherited wealth of a brewer’s daughter, was now calling on the troops to put down a bunch of African railway workers who were striking over the price of beer!”
“I don’t see what else could have been done,” I answered her. “The banks were holding the country to ransom. Politically motivated people were exploiting the situation for their own advantage. I don’t think that Emmanuel and Hal had any choice.”
“Not if you accept their premises,” Grace replied. “Which only adds to the irony. They commanded all the instruments of power in a country which they’d founded on principles of freedom and justice, yet could only act in ways that made a mockery of both. You’re quite right – they were trapped inside the unintended consequences of their own actions. I didn’t get to see much of Emmanuel in those days but Hal… Poor Hal! He was like a man walking through a bad dream.”
Hal saw things differently of course. “It was our rotten luck to be hit by so many things at once,” he said when I visited him much later. “Yet I’m confident we could have handled all of it peaceably enough if Kanza Kutu’s people hadn’t been so bloody heavy-handed with the strikers.”
That heavy-handedness cost the lives of two dockers and injuries to many more, but it drove the rest of them back to work. The deaths went unreported by the state-owned media, which headlined instead a vituperative campaign of blame against Hanson Osari as the man responsible for the country’s financial crisis. The former minister was accused of embezzling government funds on a massive scale – funds now stashed away in private bank accounts abroad. This money had been used to finance the assassination plot and pay agents working to overthrow the government. So even before the treason trial began, Osari and his associates had been found guilty by TV and newspapers. All that remained was for the courts to punish them.
When I asked Hal whether he and Emmanuel had planned that press campaign, he denied it at once. “On the contrary. It was obvious that it might prejudice the outcome of the trial. But Kanza persuaded the Cabinet it was the best way of deflecting public hostility from the government.”
“And you went along with it?”
Hal raised his arms and brought the linked palms of his hands down to the top of his head. “Any politician will tell you that there are times when you have to massage the facts if you’re not to lose control of events.”
Meanwhile Grace looked on in dismay at the way things were going. As a trained lawyer, she was outraged to learn that there would be no jury at the treason trial. Her outrage turned to disbelief when, for want of substantial evidence, the State Prosecutor conducted his case entirely on the basis of hearsay, rhetoric and innuendo. Wary of her scorn, Hal refused to discuss the trial with her. His silence erupted into rage when she demanded that he publicly dissociate himself from what was happening. And then, to everyone’s amazement, the Chief Justice ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove its case.
For a moment it appeared that, despite all the pressures applied against them, the forms of justice had been preserved. But even as the opposition leaders began to celebrate, a meeting of the Inner Cabinet was called. Kanza Kutu insisted it was imperative that Osari and the others be rearrested before they could leave the country. Hal persuaded Emmanuel to exercise his presidential authority by sacking the Chief Justice and appointing a more reliable figure in his place. Then an act was rushed through parliament modifying the constitution in order to give the president powers to overturn the verdicts of specially convened courts in the interests of state security.
“It simply had to be done,” Hal insisted to me later. “The future of the country hung on it. If we’d we let Osari go free, he would have galvanized the opposition into disrupting government business. Our whole programme would have been thrown into disarray. Splits would have opened up along political and tribal lines. It was already beginning to happen inside the party itself. Everything was volatile. I was damned sure that if we didn’t assert control there was a risk of civil war. Balance all that against the fate of a handful of crooks who had certainly been up to no good even if the case wasn’t properly proved in court, and what are you going to do? We were in no doubt. They had to be found guilty. All of them. And yes, I don’t deny it, the risks were high. But the alternative was unthinkable.”
Hal had come back from Government House late one night to find that Grace had already packed most of her clothes and possessions and intended to leave the country on the next available flight. Though she’d been disgusted by his actions in government and had known for some time about the mistress he kept in one of the wealthier quarters of Port Rokesby, her reasons were neither political nor moral. After all the hopes and hardships and disappointments they had shared together, what she could no longer bear was Hal’s refusal to communicate with her about the grave difficulties in which he found himself.
“He’d become unreachable,” she told me later. “He was beyond my reach at any rate, and I couldn’t live with him like that any more. I told him I was leaving, and that he was going to have to choose which was more important to him – his marriage and his family or his commitment to a political career that was now damaging his soul. I never doubted for a moment which way he would go.”
So Hal and Grace lived apart for the following two years, she mostly alone with her dogs in High Sugden, while Hal worked on, striving to retrieve amid the growing unrest of a disenchanted people some vestiges of his vision of a free African commonwealth that might offer a hopeful model to mankind.
One afternoon he was sweating in the torpid heat of his government office when he heard an unusual grinding noise outside. Looking out of the window he saw military vehicles entering the compound of Government House. Then the sound of gunshots cracked along the corridor. Moments later a terrified secretary ran down the corridor screaming that his friend Emmanuel Adjouna was dead, shot twice in the head. In the same intolerable instant Hal Brigshaw understood that such faltering life as remained in the Democratic Republic of Equatoria had been extinguished with him.
18
The Jaws of Orcus
Awake and alert, as though a switch had been thrown. A dog barking somewhere. Th
e tinny peal of the church clock counting five. My throat parched. Afternoon light glaring against my eyes. And hunger. Hunger shaking me between its teeth.
I must have slept for over ten hours, and it was now… which day? I’d flown out of Gatwick on Tuesday morning, slept in the cottage that night, then in the villa, then in the cottage again. And one night – or was it two? – no, I’d slept through most of two days, but only one night in the convento. Therefore: Saturday. It must be Saturday afternoon, which meant, if I stuck to the absurd deal I’d made, another whole day in this bare cell without food or company.
I pulled myself out of bed, crossed to the basin and drank three glasses of water before scouring my teeth. Lifting my head, I felt it swim.
Saturday afternoon. If the mystai had arrived on Friday morning and Adam was prepared to pick me up on Sunday evening, then it seemed likely that the climax of the ceremonies at the villa would happen tonight, quite soon, in just a few hours’ time. And if that was when and where the action was, then the journalist in me insisted it was where I had to be.
I took a hot shower, then a cold shower and changed into the last clean clothes in my bag. Checking my phone for messages, I found nothing there. Then I scribbled a quick note of thanks to Fra Pietro, slung my bag over my shoulder and slipped from the room, resolved to leave the convento unseen.
I passed down the stairs, round the cloister, and was crossing the tiled floor to the front door when one of the other doors opened. A friar I hadn’t seen before came out holding a brass candlestick. We both stopped in surprise. Full-bearded, burly in his brown habit, and built like a wrestler with enormous sandalled feet, he addressed me in throaty Italian. I caught only a greeting and his name: Fra Cherubino.
I smiled back, muttered, “Mangiare,” and mimicked putting food in my mouth.
“Ah, mangiare!” He tutted, smiling, shook his head at the frailty of civilian flesh, crossed the hall with his candlestick and went through another door. A couple of minutes later I was switching on the ignition of my car.
Taking the bend round the convento past the walls of the town, I drove down to the hump-backed bridge across the stream, but when I turned up the hill through the valley I was confronted by a road block bearing the sign:
STRADA INTERROTTA
As far as I knew, this road led only to the villa. So was it privately owned? Or did Gabriella pack enough power to get it closed? In either case it seemed that the only way through would be on foot, and hunger pangs had me jumpy at the prospect of a three-mile hike uphill.
I was on the point of giving up and turning back in search of food when a figure appeared out of the pines. He wore a black uniform with a holstered pistol at his belt. Staring at me through sunglasses, he held a two-way radio in his left hand while, with a gesture like that of a man brushing dust from his suit, his right hand signalled for me to go back the way I had come.
A policeman? A private security guard? I didn’t know, but the mere fact of his presence was enough to strengthen my suspicions. Before he could speak, I nodded, reversed the car onto the verge and drove back round the bend towards the bridge. Some distance down the lane, I parked on the verge and walked back to a track I’d spotted that might take me up the bank, through the pines, and on up to the next switchback curve on the road.
The track was steep and the ground rough. By the time I clambered the last few yards onto the road, I was sweating and short of breath. Hunger was driving me on, and all my senses were ablaze. Cicadas shrilled in my head. I could taste resin on the air and a hazy fragrance of rosemary and thyme. Clouds glowed in the evening sunlight.
After a couple of miles I came to a place where a stream trickled down the hillside. I knelt to drink, splashed my face and neck, and stood in green shade, thinking, while gnats danced around my head. If an armed sentinel had been posted on the road outside the village, then more guards were probably stationed at the gates to the drive. To avoid them, I would have to strike out across the hill and come at the villa from the cover of the trees. Checking my position against a mental map, I worked out that by following the stream up the hill, keeping my back to the sun, I should be headed in the right direction.
Half an hour later, I was leaning against a turkey oak, panting as I gazed down across the villa. Between my vantage point and the main house, a range of smaller buildings stood beside a large vegetable garden and a walled orchard. Smoke drifted from a slowly burning bonfire, but there was no one about. Nor could I see anyone among the large number of cars parked in the front courtyard of the house. It was well after eight. The light was starting to fail.
When I moved in closer, strains of music lifted across the evening air – a consort of stringed instruments playing a tune so melancholy that it might have been the sound of dusk descending over the hills. Then I saw some movement below – a stately procession walking in pairs by candlelight from the rear door of the house across the courtyard to the arched gateway of the water theatre. More and more people came out of the house, until around thirty of them must have passed under the arch. All of them seemed to be wearing antique dress – high veiled hats and lace-fringed doublets with bulky sleeves, the men in capes, the women in full skirts, like people from another time. Was Marina among them somewhere? I could hear nothing except the music and the sounds of woodland under the setting sun.
It looked possible to edge round the orchard wall closer to the rear of the house, but as I stole quietly past the end cottage, the strains of music faded on the air and a dog began to bark. The coarse din echoed back off the darkening hillside across the whole estate. I froze for a moment, and then decided to make for the cover of the orchard wall before anyone came out. But then another dog answered the first from somewhere nearer the main house. Voices clipped the air, not loud but urgent. An iron gate squeaked open and a uniformed guard came out of the courtyard with a brawny mastiff held on a leash. A second man appeared behind him. I heard a radio crackling, but almost immediately the noise was drowned by a new sound from beyond the courtyard wall – the clatter of many torrents of water cascading among stones. Light from unseen sources illuminated the space beyond the wall. Instantly came the noise of a cheering crowd, then cries of “Bellissimo!” and “Bravo!”
I guessed that Gabriella’s water theatre must now be in operation, perhaps as a grand opening to whatever occult ritual had been devised for the company.
A soft breeze carrying a taint of woodsmoke drifted from the vegetable garden. Then the mastiff by the gate began to bay more loudly. I backed away in the direction from which I’d just come, but the dog that had first raised the alarm was still barking there, and I was caught between them now. Another exchange was followed by a staccato command to the dog. Seconds later the skid of gravel crunched the air behind me. Glancing back, I saw the mastiff hurtling out of the gloom. There was time only to make a half-turn and lift my left arm for protection as the dog leapt, struck me on the side of my chest with its massive paws and sent me flying. I hit the ground winded, scraping palms and knees against sharp gravel. When I turned my head, the dog’s mouth was over my face, slavering as it snarled. Moments later the first security man arrived and I was shouting, “Get this fucking animal off me,” when he pointed the nose of a pistol at my head.
An hour or so must have passed, during which time I was handcuffed, thoroughly frisked, questioned in halting English, then taken to a disused tack room behind the loggia at the front of the house. I was held there in total silence. The room smelt of leather and dry timber, and was empty except for a table and a few chairs. A deck of cards lay splayed on the table next to a tray, on which stood a moka and four small glasses.
Despite my protests, I was handcuffed to the chair and kept waiting, watched by a guard who spoke no English. My ankles throbbed from where my legs had been kicked apart, my arms were stiffening behind my back. The guard passed the time playing solitaire until his radio spluttered into life. He listened to some brief instructions, then folded the cards away,
crossed the room and went out, locking the door behind him. Several minutes later the door opened again, and a huge figure came into the room dressed in a black velvet doublet with slashed sleeves and matching hose, like a character out of Jacobean drama. His hands were gloved, his neck swathed in silk scarves beneath a plumed hat, and the face was entirely concealed behind a mask that shone with an ivory lustre in the light from the bare bulb. Its tilted eye slots and solemnly pursed lips held me for a long moment in a remote, implacable gaze.
“You can take the mask off, Larry,” I said. “Your weight’s a dead giveaway.”
Sighing, Larry shook his head and sat down in the chair across from me. Sweeping off his hat, he placed it on the table, brushing the white ostrich-feather plume with a gloved hand, but not removing his mask.
I shook the handcuffs behind my back. “You might at least have told them to get me out of these bloody things.”
“Had to make quite sure it was you, old chum.”
“Well now you’re sure.”
“Yes, and you’ve turned out to be exactly the sort of damned nuisance I anticipated. I can’t think why the others were so insistent that you stay. Nor for that matter why you should choose to do so. I wouldn’t have thought that this was your sort of thing at all.”
“But I can see why it’s yours,” I retorted. “Occult hocus-pocus in fancy dress. Plenty of old money financing your production values! Not much mystery about what keeps you here.” I took in the sardonic tilt of his head. “But the rest of it – heavies with guns and dogs and handcuffs? That worries me. That makes me question just what sort of fascistic shit you and Adam have got yourselves into.”
Larry tutted ruefully behind his mask. “I’m sorry you should think so badly of us. And a little disappointed, I have to say! Fascistic indeed! No, my dear. Absolutely not. Occult we may be, fascists we ain’t.”
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