Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

The strains of Sibelius’s Karelia Suite filled the night air, the strings offering a cooling image of a near-frozen fjord—clean, compact, crisp. Natalie stared into the scarlet and crimson embers of the campfire. She was thinking about Christopher and Jack. This evening at dinner they hadn’t fought, exactly, but there had been niggles throughout. Eleanor had been away for a few days in Nairobi, visiting the bank, picking up money with which to pay the ancillary staff, and doing other chores. In fact, she had only just returned, as they were finishing dinner, having driven there and back. It turned out she hated flying and, when she could, took the Land Rover, even if it meant driving through many hours of darkness on dirt roads.

At one point during the evening, the conversation had turned—as it inevitably did turn, most nights—to the trial, and what might happen to the gorge. Everyone was even more gloomy now, now that the Maasai had increased the pressure by acquiring a gun. Jack had tried to lighten the mood by explaining that the practice of burying the dead was not only a Christian idea, but had been taken over from the Datoga tribespeople, who had been conquered by the Maasai in the early nineteenth century.

“The Datoga buried their famous warriors and, it seems, fig trees, which can grow to massive proportions, like the soil where humans are buried. That’s why you have the tradition, in this part of the world, of worshipping fig trees. They are sacred because they are infused with the spirit, the blood, of powerful ancestors. Because the fig trees that grow over the graves of past chiefs are especially vast, that proves how powerful their spirit is.”

“Nonsense!” Christopher had cried. “Romantic rubbish.”

Jack had fallen silent.

“Look around,” said Christopher. “There are fig trees all over the Serengeti—small, large, massive. Their size has nothing to do with who’s buried where, but how close they are to rivers, how deep the soil is, how exposed to the wind they are. Like all plant life.”

“I was just explaining Datoga and Maasai beliefs—”

“Why do only men worship the fig trees, then? The women worship those shifting sand dunes. That has nothing to do with the Datoga.”

“Those dunes aren’t very big. Maybe they didn’t exist in the nineteenth century.”

“You have an answer for everything, Jack.”

Christopher had left the table then, and stalked back to his tent.

Jack had gone and sat by the fire and, after a few minutes of desultory conversation, everyone else dispersed, embarrassed by the brothers’ behavior. Some went to their tents, Natalie to join Jack, just sitting, letting the shadows from the fire play over his face.

What was Jack thinking? she asked herself. Was Christopher smarting from his pilot error in front of her and Jonas?

Suddenly a figure slumped into the chair across the fire from hers.

Eleanor.

Jack looked up at his mother and smiled.

“You must be exhausted,” said Natalie. She looked at her watch. “It’s gone ten.”

“Those last thirty miles are bumpy,” Eleanor said. “We saw a lot of zebra and rhino and had to wait for them to move on. But I’ll live.”

She looked up as Naiva brought her a coffee and a small plate with a sandwich on it.

She sat, leaning into the fire, drinking her coffee and biting into the sandwich.

Jack hunched forward. “You heard about the Kalashnikov?”

Eleanor nodded. “Nasty. Highly illegal, of course. They won’t have a permit, but then they make a point of not recognizing Western—white—law. I’ll tell the local rangers but I doubt they’ll move in for just one gun. If they get more, however …” She shook her head.

“Did you get done what you needed to get done?” Jack kicked the fire.

Without speaking, still eating, Eleanor nodded. When she had finished swallowing, she said, “More than that. I saw Max. He had news from New York.” She bit into her sandwich again, chewed again, swallowed again.

The others waited.

Eleanor looked from Natalie to Jack and back to Natalie. “It would appear that Mr. Richard Sutton Senior is, as they say in America, a real piece of work.”

More biting, chewing, and swallowing. Eleanor was very hungry.

“So far as I can make out, he or his company have been the subject of more than one investigation by the New York Police Department, but they have never been able to get enough evidence to make the charges stick.”

“Those charges being—?”

Eleanor was again nodding and chewing at the same time. “Tenants, tenants in apartment blocks, are quite protected under American law. A landlord can’t just evict them, if he wants to upgrade a building, say, and sell it on. Sutton’s employer, however, the man who actually owns the real estate company, has a reputation for bringing pressure to bear on tenants—beatings, excrement through the letter box, their cars vandalized, that sort of thing. Of course, the tenants who receive this treatment are much too frightened to tell the police. They move on, which is what Sutton’s employer wants. And Sutton himself is the one who handles all the court cases and applications.”

She finished her sandwich. “But that’s not all, or the worst of it. Apparently at one point—this was a couple of years back—he was involved in a bidding war over a piece of land being sold for redevelopment. There were just two people competing for the land, Sutton’s employer and someone else. During the course of the bidding, the other man’s daughter was kidnapped—she was seven. Naturally, this other man, Sutton’s employer’s rival, lost interest in the bidding and dropped out while he searched for his daughter. The girl was returned, safe and sound, and no money changed hands. But, of course, that’s what makes it so suspicious. The handover of the money is always the most dangerous point for a kidnapper. In this case, the girl was just left outside a church. The only beneficiary of the whole business was the company Sutton is the corporate lawyer for, but again nothing could be proved.”

“The girl wasn’t harmed, you say?”

“Well, she wasn’t harmed physically. I can’t say what psychological damage she suffered and Max, or Max’s contact, didn’t know either.”

“That’s not what I meant,” replied Jack. “Do we think Sutton, or Sutton’s contacts, are capable of violence, real violence?”

Eleanor finished her coffee. “Beatings, intimidation, kidnap … if it’s true, it’s bad enough. And think: those actions were to secure buildings, they were done for money, for financial gain. In this case, in Natalie’s case, it’s Sutton’s own son, his only son, who is the center of the whole weather pattern. How much more determined will that make Sutton now, how much more ready to commit violence?”

She nursed her empty cup with one hand, warmed the other over the fire. “It was a long drive back from Nairobi and, yes, wearing. The roads are hard. But it gave me a chance to think, and I’ve come to a decision, two decisions actually.”

Her son looked at her.

“Max also happened to let slip that the British government is flying out a cohort of British journalists, for a background trip on Kenya ahead of the independence conference in London in February. They’re coming during a quiet time for news, between Christmas and the New Year. That seems too good an opportunity to pass up.” She paused. “We can’t dissuade Natalie from giving evidence, Jack—that would put her safety at risk. I see that now. Your solution, your idea, is the only road open. Let’s call a press conference. But here in Kenya, in Nairobi.”

Natalie’s heart lifted.