Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

On the fifth day, just a few hours before his plane was due to leave, he found out why Teddy had called him in the night. It was in the Lagos Times . The Figuera , a Portuguese naval patrol vessel, had been sunk. She had fuelled in Bom Porto. Twelve hours out, a series of explosions had torn her apart. Nine crew members, including the captain, were missing, presumed dead. There was a photograph of the survivors — men wrapped in blankets, stepping ashore from a Swedish ship in Dakar. Another blotchy picture showed the bunkering station.

George, staring at the paper, felt first fury, then contempt. Teddy was a shit, a lying bastard and a bloody fool. He felt betrayed by his friend. How could he do this to me? Then, as no more than a guilty afterthought, he pitied the drowned sailors; the sea set alight, the broken ship going down.

It had always been understood. The bunkering station was out of the quarrel. It was like an independent state, a tiny Switzerland. The military governor accepted that. So did Aristide Varbosa. George was probably the only man in the entire country who enjoyed the trust of both sides in a war of small atrocities and dirty skirmishes. Now that trust was destroyed by this vicious, infantile piece of terrorism.

He flew back to Montedor, raging over every slow mile of the flight. He was too angry to eat or drink. He sat in First Class, scattering spent matches on the floor as he lit and relit his pipe and tried to learn the strange new language of scorn and dislike for Eduardo Duarte.

The military governor was a shy man. He had a bad complexion and looked scuffed like his uniform. His questions to George came out sounding like apologies.

“It is an appalling thing,” George said; “a disaster for the country.”

“I have to hold myself responsible. It was a simple failure of security.”

“Even so, they know that it’s in their own interests to—”

“This is not a football game. It is our job to protect our troops.”

“The only reason I’ve been able to keep the station running is because both you and the PAIM people have honoured the idea that it cannot ever be treated as either a target or a base. You know I have friends on both sides,” George said, wondering quite what it was that he wanted to confess.

“Of course. That is necessary. I understand that.”

George did not mention the telephone call. The last thing on his mind was any desire to shield Duarte. It was his own stupidity he was trying to hide: how could he have been so dim as to fail to see that it was his absence from Bom Porto, not his presence in Lagos, that Duarte had been checking?

The patrol boat dropped out of the news. The Creole day foreman was held in detention, along with six other of George’s men. There were rumours of torture; George was careful not to listen too closely.

Six months later, the Portuguese left. Varbosa was President of the Republic; Duarte was Minister of Highways. George stayed on at the bunkering station. After a few stiff weeks and two painful lunches, Duarte slipped back into being Teddy again. He was simply too funny to hate, George decided. And he was the only person that George knew in the city who could play squash.

If only things had rested there.

In December 1975, Teddy had produced a piece of paper in the bar of the Club Nautico and asked for George’s signature in triplicate. “Mr President requests,” he said.

“Why?”

“Oh, George, you know about the bullshit of office. Soon we’re going to be as bureaucratic as Egyptians. We black folks just love paperwork, honky.”

George signed.

A month later, they were leaving the club when Teddy opened the lapel of George’s white alpaca jacket and slipped an envelope into his pocket. “From the President’s office,” he said. George waited until he was home before he opened it.

The letter began “Honourable Sir” and named him as a loyal friend of the Republic of Montedor. Enclosed was an official-looking slip of paper, soon deciphered. It listed the number of a bank account in Carouge, Switzerland, and showed a bilan courant of $41,324.60. George felt a giddying rush of nausea and panic.

“Don’t be ridiculous—” he told Teddy the next evening.

“It’s not me, man,” Teddy said. He had just rechristened the Rua Marítima the Rua Fidel Castro, and had taken to going everywhere in his old faded-blue battledress.

“I don’t care who it is. You know I can’t take it.”

“You can’t take money from the government? Since when? You are a government employee now, George.”

“Not this money.”

“Your Christmas bonus. Listen, I know what you’re thinking. It has nothing at all to do with that gunboat. Nothing. I swear. By the Virgin and the holy saints, OK?”

“Patrol boat,” George said. “It was a fishery protection vessel.”

“Whatever. But I tell you, George. There’s no way you can give it back. You try talking to the President, you make a big insult to the government. Varbosa tries to pay you a tribute, not a big one, for your work in this country; you are going to throw it back in his face, huh? Because you are still angry over one operation of PAIM in four years of revolution?”

“I don’t take dash,” George said.

“It’s not dash, George. Anyway, it’s not a question of taking it. It’s there. It’s in your name. Varbosa himself can’t write a cheque on that account.”

“I don’t want it.”

“So give it to the birds.”

The more George thought about it, the more lonely the money made him feel. It made him feel a foreigner in the only place that he’d ever felt really at home. Had he been in England, the whole business would have been transparently offensive and absurd. Here, no-one could see his point. Not Teddy. Not even Vera. He didn’t dare mention it to Humphreys, who would have been scandalized by the story.

He buried the bank slip at the bottom of the inlaid Adeni chest, but the gross particularity of the figures stuck in his head. He tried translating them into other currencies, but they didn’t come near to adding up to a round sum in escudos, pounds, francs or marks. Roubles, maybe? Cuban pesetas? Whatever previous life those dollars had lived, George knew for sure that it was a disreputable one.

Twice a year, a letter came from the bank in Carouge. George threw them away unopened. He could feel the untouched money slowly growing behind his back. As the interest on it accumulated, so did the percentage on his embarrassment. He was ashamed of himself. Lying alone in the small hours, he pictured the Figuera ablaze, the slick of black oil staining the sea, the ballooning liferafts.

In 1980 he was in Geneva for three days. The OPEC Oil Ministers’ Conference had bred a swarm of satellite conferencelets, and George was delegated to one of these in order to lobby the representative from Curaçao. Driving his rented car back to Perdita Monaghan’s cavernous apartment in Vevey, he saw a sign saying CAROUGE 7km. It was still early afternoon: the banks would be open, Perdita was out for the day, the dreadful Fergus was in, as usual. George had time to kill. He took the turning.

The bank was a small one, in a shopping precinct off the main road. George gave his name and the account number to a teller who went away and busied himself at a computer terminal. He came back with a printed slip. $63,137.48. It wasn’t quite as much as George had feared it might be. He withdrew $500 and spent twenty minutes in the boutiques on the shopping precinct, where he bought a rainbow dressing gown, a miniature Japanese camera and a pair of Italian swimming trunks.

It didn’t work. The furies evidently weren’t going to be appeased by these daft offerings. At the thought of his pile of dirty money in Carouge, George still felt leaden.