A Good Man in Africa (32 page)

The fish-pond formed an attenuated oval, roughly half a mile long and three hundred yards wide in the middle. A large stream poured sluggishly into it at one end but there was no obvious channel for the waters to escape. Perhaps the earth just seeped it up, Morgan thought, for the pond had the solid unnatural stillness of stagnancy and the huge pale-trunked trees that bordered it on the far bank were perfectly reflected in its mirror-like surface.

The beige-grey light of approaching dusk softened edges and blurred contours. Over to his right Morgan could see the white roof of a senior staff house, but apart from the tarmac road his car rested on, everything else was untouched and unchanged. He would not have been surprised if a pterodactyl had hunched itself into the air from the darkening trees, or if some squamous prehistoric beast had plodded out of the tall rushes onto the mud-beach below the road. He felt his depression icily grip his brain as he stared moodily across the neutral uncomplaining lake.

His gloomy reverie was interrupted by the sound of Adekunle’s Mercedes. Morgan got out of his car as Adekunle drew up behind him. Adekunle was smoking a large cigar but Morgan sensed that his normal mood of cynical joviality was absent.

“Mr. Leafy,” he said at once. “You have made me a worried man with your talk of problems and difficulties. What has gone wrong?”

Morgan kicked a pebble off the road. “I had an argument with Murray,” he said flatly. “Under the circumstances there’s no way we can play a friendly round of golf tomorrow.”

“No, this will not do,” Adekunle said sharply. “You cannot slip out of this so easily, my friend. You must put our … offer to Dr. Murray before the twenty-ninth of this month. I have decided that I must know my position before then.”

“I’m telling you we had a blazing row,” Morgan protested. “I shouted at him. I insulted him. Honestly, he must hate my guts.”

“A very poor joke, my friend. I see how you are trying,” Adekunle wiggled his hand, “to snake your way out of our agreement. It will not succeed, I warn you. You will only force me to take my complaints to Mr. Fanshawe.”

Morgan was almost sobbing with frustration. “It’s true, I tell you. It happened on Monday night … Oh, never mind.” He picked up a twig and flung it savagely at the glimmering fishpond. It was nearly dark. The crickets sawed away, the bats dipped above their heads. Something in his tone must have made Adekunle realise that he wasn’t joking.

“Alright,” Adekunle said grudgingly. “OK. You have a setback. But it must be overcome at some point before the election. I don’t care how. It is mandatory that this business with Dr.
Murray is secured before then. You must arrange it,” he waved his cigar aggressively at Morgan.

“But why me?” Morgan complained. “Why don’t you just ring him up? Put it to him straight?”

“My good friend Mr. Leafy,” Adekunle chuckled. “How very naive you are. Is it not better to be offered a … a financial inducement by one of your own people? By one who you would normally assume to be above this sort of transaction. A representative of the British Crown furthermore.” He took a satisfied puff at his cigar. “Believe me it is very hard to remain honest when the standards of the highest are in question.”

Morgan reluctantly conceded the acuteness of his logic. If, by implication, the Commission staff were on the make, why should anyone else worry about soiling their hands?
Quis custodiet
and all that. He wondered again how Murray would respond.

“Would you like to see what we are going to all this trouble about?” Adekunle asked.

Morgan said he might as well, and followed Adekunle up the road, away from the senior staff house and along the side of the fish-pond. At the end of the lake the road ascended a small hill and then curved round to rejoin the campus. Up at this slightly higher altitude Morgan could see behind him the lights of more staff houses.

“There you are,” Adekunle said. The ground in front of them dipped down into a shallow, marshy river valley, then rose suddenly on the other side to meet a small plateau. In the gathering darkness Morgan could make out a line of trees.

“This is the land I own,” Adekunle said. “Up as far as those trees. This is where they want to build the hall and cafeteria. As you can see, it is ideally placed.”

“Where’s the dump going to be?” Morgan asked unfeelingly.

“Beyond those trees. Far beyond them. I sold all that land several years ago. The refuse lorries and the night-soil transporters are already bringing the rubbish out here,” he added sadly. He paused. “Here we are ten minutes away from the lecture theatres, ten minutes’ walk from the university centre.” He looked at Morgan and then at the end of his cigar. “If not for Dr. Murray,” he said bitterly, “they would write me the cheque
today!
” He almost shouted the last word. “He has postponed the Building Committee three times already while he
pursued his investigations. I know he intends to give a negative report. And so now I am driven to these desperate measures.”

Morgan didn’t try too hard to sympathise with him. “How much are you selling the land for?” he asked.

“Two hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds,” Adekunle said with feeling.

“For a ten thousand pound investment,” Morgan said. “Not bad.”

Adekunle came up to him and seized his arm. Morgan could smell his cigar smoke. “This is why, Mr. Leafy, you are going to help me, otherwise I take my complaints about your behaviour to the
High
Commissioner,” he threatened. “I will not need to go to Mr. Fanshawe; I will go to the top man.” He released his grip. “Your kind offer of a visit to London was most useful. I have some good friends there now. Believe me, Mr. Leafy, if I so wish I can make serious trouble for you. Find your own way to approach Murray. That is all. And before the twenty-ninth.” His voice was harsh and angry again.

Morgan tried to coax some saliva into his dry mouth. “But how?” he wailed. “Jesus Christ, I told you I.…”

“I don’t care!” Adekunle spat out suddenly, trembling with rage. “I certainly won’t give one bloody damn shit for the career of a junior diplomat!”

“Alright,” Morgan said weakly. “Alright. I’ll think of something.” He felt very tired, overcome with weariness. He turned and set off back down the road to his car. Adekunle caught up with him.

“Forgive me for losing my temper,” he said quietly, “but as I told you, the financial costs of an election campaign are high.” He added in a surprisingly meek tone, “You don’t know what this … this obstruction by Murray means. I have my own concerns.” Morgan said nothing. “There is no reason,” Adekunle went on, “why we should not
both
benefit from this, ah, how shall we say it? partnership.”

“Thanks,” Morgan said hollowly. He would do it, he knew, primarily to save his own tattered skin and secure his piddling job. But there was another reason. Something in him made him feel that Murray would accept the bribe this time, and he desperately wanted to be there the day his feet turned to clay and
his pedestal was kicked out from under him. And he wanted to be the one to apply the boot.

He stopped in his tracks. He had an idea.

“Do you know the golf professional at the club?” he asked.

“No,” Adekunle said. “What’s his name?”

“Bernard something. Bernard Odemu, I think.”

“Is he a Kinjanjan?”

“Yes.” Morgan paused. “Do you think you could ‘persuade’ him somehow to partner me with Murray in the Boxing Day golf tournament? I should think he’s the man responsible for the draw. Would that be possible, do you think?”

“Is that all?” Adekunle asked, amused. “Then of course.”

Power, Morgan thought, an amazing thing.

There was, Morgan decided, a distinct smell now coming from Innocence’s body: a sort of sour-sweet smell. Which wasn’t surprising, he admitted, as she had been lying out in the sun for nearly four days. It was the morning of 24 December—Christmas Eve—clear, bright, the sun shining, the temperature in the high eighties. He was waiting for Fanshawe.

Fanshawe had summoned him to the servants’ quarters to, as he put it, “sort out this Innocence-problem once and for all.” The Innocence-problem lay—as it had always done, unmovingly, stoically—beneath its garish shroud. As each day had gone by so the juju tokens had multiplied and now there were twenty or so little cairns or assemblies of leaf, twig and pebble clustered around the body.

He saw Fanshawe stride into the compound. He could tell from the quick no-nonsense pace that his superior was not in the best of moods. He sighed quietly to himself.

“Morning,” Fanshawe said brusquely. “How are things going?”

Morgan felt strangely composed and lethargically in control for some reason. His meeting with Adekunle seemed to have jolted him out of his incipient crack-up, shaped the random nature of his various problems, given him a direction to follow. At least he had to act now, however unsavoury those acts might
be. He also had the feeling that things couldn’t get much worse—but that, he knew, was a dangerous assumption to make.

“Well,” he said with a shrug in response to Fanshawe’s question, indicating at the same time Innocence’s body. “Not much change as you can see.” He was quite pleased with his insouciance; he decided it was a pose he should strive to adopt more often in future.

“Damnation!” Fanshawe swore, his brows knotting fiercely. “Intolerable bloody country,” he seethed. “They just go about their business—without a care in the world, as if it was an ordinary day—stepping over dead bodies without a second thought … Savage, unfeeling brutes.”

“Well,” Morgan said thoughtfully. He liked beginning his sentences with “well”: it gave them a pondered, considered tone. “That’s only from our point of view you know, Arthur. Shango’s a fairly top-notch deity out here and we have to respect …”

“I’m not interested in this hocus-pocus rubbish, Leafy,” Fanshawe hissed through clenched teeth. A drop of spittle flew out of his mouth and landed on Morgan’s sleeve, but he charitably decided not to draw attention to it by dabbing it away with his handkerchief. He was cool. He had also noticed the pointed use of his surname. Fanshawe was really heating up, he thought; it was all getting on top of him.

“This bloody juju claptrap gets right up my … For Christ’s sake, man, the Duchess of Ripon is coming here tomorrow. The Queen’s personal representative! It’s impossible.” Fanshawe shook his head vigorously. “It
can’t
be here.”

“Well, …” Morgan began.

“I do wish you wouldn’t keep beginning all your remarks with ‘well,’ Leafy, it’s most irritating,” Fanshawe burst out temperamentally.

“Sorry, I’m sure,” Morgan said, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “I was just going to say that the Duchess is hardly likely to wander over to the servants’ quarters.”

“That doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference,” Fanshawe expostulated. “It’s the principle of the thing. For heaven’s sake, this is Commission property; you just can’t have it littered with decomposing bodies. And,” he added contemptuously, “if you can’t see that then I’m sorry for you. Very sorry indeed.”

A strained silence ensued. With his thumb-nail Morgan pushed back some encroaching cuticles.

“I suppose we’d better get it over with,” Fanshawe said suddenly and marched towards the body. “Come on,” he called to Morgan. Morgan joined him, wondering what he planned on doing.

“What are you going to do?” Morgan asked, looking round apprehensively at the audience of children and mothers that had gathered.

“I’m going to have a look, of course,” Fanshawe said, the points of a blush appearing on his cheek bones.

“Why?”

“Ah, to see for myself,” he said, smoothing his moustache, adding vaguely, “check up, you know.” Morgan realised that Fanshawe was fascinated: he felt the cloth was keeping something from him.

“It’s not a pretty sight,” Morgan cautioned.

“Please, masta,” a voice called from the crowd. They looked round, it was Isaac. He advanced a few paces. “I beg you, sah, nevah totch ’im one time. Make you go leff am, sah. Dis no respec’.”

“I am only going to look,” Fanshawe declaimed pompously. “Now don’t worry, Isaac.” He whispered to Morgan, “Pull back the cloth.” Morgan felt like saying, pull it back yourself. He was beginning to resent the assumption that he was some kind of mortuary assistant. However, he obeyed the order.

Fanshawe lurched back as if he’d been punched in the chest. His eyes bulged. “God,” he said hoarsely. Morgan breathed through his mouth. The crowd edged forward to catch a glimpse. Morgan threw the cloth back over Innocence’s body. He stepped away carefully.

“Phew,” he said to Fanshawe, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. “It’s amazing how quickly … you know, how fast everything …”

Fanshawe was pale and obviously shocked. He led Morgan unsteadily a little way down the compound.

“That does it,” he said vehemently. “She’s got to go. She has to. It’s … It’s obscene, that’s what it is. I’d no idea that sort of effect … well, happened. Get rid of her. That’s all. Away from here. Get rid of her, Morgan. Any way you can.”

Morgan felt the anger of the subordinate who always gets the dirty jobs. “But
how
, Arthur?” he protested. “Just tell me how and I’ll do it. Be reasonable, for God’s sake. You can see how impossible …”

“I don’t care!” Fanshawe almost shrieked. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours. It’s been days now since I asked you to take care of everything. If you had just handled things properly the first night we wouldn’t be in this frightful mess now. Get an armed guard, anything. Just get rid of that body before the Duchess arrives.” He stared furiously at Morgan for an instant, his jaw clenched, the muscles and tendons standing out on his neck. Then he turned abruptly on his heel and marched off back to the Commission.

Morgan stood in the compound, rigid with bile-churning rage. Fuck you! you stinking little shit! he mouthed at Fanshawe’s retreating back. He made twisted vampire claws with his hands and savaged the air in front of his face. He turned and glared at the crowd, slowly dispersing now. They might have been waxworks, moon-men or zombies for all the understanding their minds shared with his. But there again, he thought, the same could be said about the gulf that existed between him and Fanshawe.