megaphone crackles and squawks, ‘Move up!’ and Eve dutifully shuffles forward in the line of refugees.
The local Red Cross worker at the head of the line wears a fluorescent yellow waistcoat over his white Red Cross tee shirt. He wears the megaphone on a strap over his shoulder, holding a clipboard in one hand and the microphone and a pen in the other. He looks harassed as he tries to tick people off his list and keep the food distribution session under control. It’s only a small refugee camp, at Ikozi in south Kivu, just off the road from Bukavu out to Shabunda, but it still has five thousand people and is chaotic.
A former headmaster who lives in the camp helps him by measuring out the rice from sacks piled on the ground into the battered bowls and tatty sacks that people have brought with them.
Eve never wanted this passive life and it still feels alien to her. She was used to the hard work of village life: cooking, washing, tending the family vegetable patch. She is just an average girl with average dreams: she hopes one day to get the money to buy a hand-cranked sewing machine so she can set up as a seamstress and repair and make clothes.
Life has been pretty hard to her so far though. Her first husband, Bertrand, left her when she gave birth to an albino baby, regarding it as unclean. Eve’s own mother had shrieked with fear when the baby had emerged and run out of the hut. Bertrand left to return to his home village and she hasn’t heard from him since.
Some people do want albinos though. Hundreds are kidnapped and murdered in East Africa every year, their body parts dried and used as charms: tied to fishermen’s nets in Lake Kivu to attract a good catch, ground into powder and sprinkled by miners on the sides of their pits to draw precious metals to the surface, strapped to the front of traders’ trucks to bring them good fortune on journeys.
Where is my baby?
The thought of little Marie cut up and used in one of those scenarios is too much to bear.
Gabriel is the only piece of good news in her life. He met her when he was travelling through her village and was fascinated by her calm manner. The other girls teased Eve about him because he was so ugly. He wouldn’t have been Eve’s first pick but, as one of her friends said, love is a choice as well and in her circumstances she had to be realistic.
Gabriel is certainly ugly and he scares her sometimes with his intensity but he does also make her laugh. He is always so intent on impressing her, going on about his grand plans, angry in his desire to make money. He talks about his schemes for hours, using terms he has learned and that she doesn’t understand: brand value, profit margins, return on investment. She just sits and looks blank as he rants at her.
After a while though, he eases up and starts talking about people he has met on his travels. She has never travelled outside her village, but he has been all over the province, to the main towns of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira in the south and even as far as Beni in the goldfields in the far north. When he relaxes he can make her laugh with his stories about scrapes he has got into and deals he has done. That’s when she likes him, when his big jaw opens in a wide white grin and his prominent stomach shakes with laughter. They used to sit on the bench outside her hut and laugh and chat.
She hasn’t heard from him in a while though; he is overdue from his latest journey. She wonders what has happened to him – will he reject her because of the rape?
‘Move up!’
She shuffles forward and the headmaster bustles around, directing people to fill up their sacks and watching carefully that they don’t take too much. She hands over the chit for her family and then heaves the sack onto her back and walks away slowly and painfully.
Alex is showing Fang back out to his chauffeur-driven car parked on the gravel drive in front of the house. The April shower has passed and they make small talk about the weather and the best route back to London.
Alex is relieved that the meeting is over; he isn’t going to take the mission but he feels strangely disconcerted and cannot work out why.
As he gets to the car Fang turns and shakes his hand. The two tall men stand facing each other.
‘I realise that Operation Tiananmen is very large scale and takes a while to get used to but I am confident that once you have had time to think about it you will want to be involved. It would be the largest operation you could ever command.’
Alex smiles politely. ‘Well, thank you very much for your time in coming here today to explain it to me.’ He shakes the man’s hand.
He waves the car off as it moves away into the distance down the mile-long drive through the parkland until it passes the beech copse and is lost. He turns and looks at the dogs sitting at the top of the stone steps – his father’s two black labs, Bert and Audrey, that he inherited along with the title and estate when Sir Nicholas died a little while back.
The dogs miss the old man but Alex doesn’t. His father had been another Blues and Royals officer, a cantankerous alcoholic who had beaten his wife and whose influence had blighted Alex’s career in the regiment. He refused to let Alex go to university, which in the army, effectively barred him from promotion to colonel. Apart from which, in the small and snobbish world of the Household Cavalry, the reputation of drunkenness attached to the Devereux name had always made it hard for Alex to prove himself in the regiment.
His father’s final summation of his career had come in an argument over the phone during which he had shouted, ‘If you hadn’t been such a fucking failure, the family wouldn’t be in the mess it is!’ Alex had been struggling to disprove this assessment ever since.
Although Alex bears a grudge against his father and the British upper class, he isn’t going to bear one against the dogs. They need a walk, having been locked up in the kitchen during the meeting.
‘Come on!’ he says and walks off briskly round the corner of the house to the rose gardens in front of the Regency façade. The shower has blown over a trellis and he fossicks about, tutting and putting it back up. After that he spends a while throwing an old tennis ball for the dogs and they tangle with each other on the lawn.
He looks out over the parkland and then walks back round, entering the house from the other end through the door on the terrace into the library that he uses as his study in the red-brick Tudor section of the house. His desk is surrounded with piles of old copies of the Economist and periodicals from Chatham House, Royal United Services Institute, International Crisis Group and other defence think-tanks. The dogs jostle after him, puffing and grinning and wagging their tails. Now he has got his meeting out of the way he wonders what he will do today.
Life proceeds at a pretty slow pace. The repairs on the house are nearing completion, paid for with the money from his last big operation in Russia. It had fallen into disrepair as a result of his father’s drinking but has now been restored to something like its former glory: the roof has been redone, the dry rot sorted out and the gardens replanted. He’s got a final meeting in Hereford with the English Heritage surveyor but that’s not until next week.
Alex stops and realises he really is feeling unsettled by the meeting with Fang. He was supposed to be the Englishman at home in his castle, lord of all he surveys, and yet on a personal level he feels unnerved.
It was like sitting in a room with a global business droid looking at him through the narrow metal vision slits of his titanium glasses. He was a commercial chameleon, with a different name for every market he operated in, a multi-tasking, open-sourcing, integrated business platform capable of working simultaneously in multiple time zones. The guy was ten years younger than him but he was
