“Oh my God. What a prospect — Commandant Mkade and Major Fielding let loose among us with guns. Why can’t you arrest Mkade?”
“Selufu says the trouble is the evidence is so vague. You can’t prove he was behind the burnings.”
Bray found a cheap window-envelope under the lump of malachite quartz (Rebecca’s gift) he kept on his desk at the boma. A note, on a sheet torn from an exercise book, written carefully along the lines in a mission-school hand: “Have a drink at the Fisheagle Inn tonight seven o’clock.” The full stop dug deeply into the paper, apparently in indecision about the correct form to be followed where there was to be no signature. It was felt that “Yours faithfully” was essential, anyway. He thought of Shinza; but why the Fisheagle? — Perhaps he was going to be invited to join the white vigilantes.
He had to find an excuse to slip away from Rebecca and Hjalmar; they would be astonished if at this hour when they were usually all sitting cooling off under the tree, he were to announce that he was going for a drink at the Fisheagle Inn. He remarked that he would have to see Sampson Malemba around seven; Hjalmar and Rebecca were pacing out the area under the fig, Hjalmar with a metal tape that shot forth like a chameleon’s tongue, Rebecca with a notebook and pencil. Hjalmar was beginning to busy himself quietly about the house; first he had rigged up an insect-repellent yellow light so that they could read outside at night, now he was going to make a paved area under the fig tree. Rebecca had remembered the pile of bricks left lying next door in the Tlumes’ garden by the government builders. Apparently, during the day, Hjalmar, Kalimo, Mahlope, and the elder Tlume children carted them over in wheelbarrows. Rebecca and Hjalmar were discussing whether they should be laid basket-weave pattern or in contrasting horizontal and vertical blocks. “Will they be cemented?” “No, no” Hjalmar demonstrated with his hands, “If bricks are laid properly, sunk up to the face in the ground and tightly together, they don’t need anything. If you like you can leave a few open spaces to put a small shrub or so — plant something, that looks quite nice, eh? After the rains are over, when it won’t get washed away, you can establish small plants.” “Won’t it be pretty by next year?” She turned enthusiastically to Bray.
He left them working on improvements for the house as if he, she, and Hjalmar were some sort of family making their home in a place where they expected to live undisturbed for the rest of their lives.
Dave, the black barman at the Fisheagle, was popular with the white men who went there to drink. He wore a midnight blue flunkey jacket and a bow-tie and had picked up many of their turns of phrase in his fluent English. “What’ll it be, Colonel, sir? — You on your own, or you want to wait?” Grinning, flourishing a napkin across the counter, setting his little saucers of crisps scudding. Bray was thinking how ridiculously conspicuous any man of Shinza’s would look here when he realized that it was the barman himself who was singling him out for attention. “Excuse me, Colonel, sir, but your car is blocking the way — could you please move it—” As he left the bar, the barman disappeared through another door and met him in the passage. “Just come this way, what a bother.” It was for the benefit of anyone who might hear; he steered Bray past crates of empty bottles: “Go round behind that hedge by the garage, my room is there, there with the tall roof, you can see it. You got my letter okay, eh? Just open the door — he’s inside …” Shinza had friends in some unexpected places. But that was because little Gala remained, on the surface, a white colonial town and one could make the mistake of seeing black men in white contexts — it was merely because he did his job well that the “character” Dave seemed to be a white black man who shared his customers’ interests rather than any other concern; at the end of colonial times in many African states white clubmen had been shocked to find that the man they thought of as their favourite waiter or driver was in his private life a political militant.
The yard of the hotel was dark except for a single bulb above the Men’s — the one that served the bar was out there so even if he were seen there would be nothing unusual about a white man wandering about near the servants’ quarters. In the outhouse room Shinza sat on a bed raised on bricks and covered with flowered cloth. “Look — before we say another word — Selufu’s got the go — ahead to pick up anyone he considers ‘undesirable,’ which means that he’s got plenty of informers about, so—”
Shinza was shaking his head, he pressed the point of his tongue up to the broken tooth. “I don’t go near the township, no worry about that — and these people here are a hundred per cent. Basil’s arrested — you know? He was picked up at Lanje, the same day as the twenty-three.”
Aleke had said that “there were a few others” in addition to the trade union leaders. Lanje was a small village near the capital. “Well”—Shinza cut himself short— “it had to be someone, I suppose. Bad it was Basil. James, I’ve got to have a car. Basil was using the old one, my father-in-law’s.”
“You were there too?”
Shinza dismissed it. “It was all right. They missed me. But none of us can go back for the car. I need one badly, badly. I must get out of here tonight.”
“That’s not easy. In Gala everyone knows everyone else’s car.”
“I know. But I’ve got to have one.”
“All right. I’ll try.”
“Don’t try, James; I must have it …”
The room was so small they seemed to be pushed too near each other. He said to Shinza, “Did you know about Tola Tola?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it unexpected?”
“Tola Tola was circling around us. Just before Congress he had a talk with me. He said he could carry the Msos with him, and of course, he knew a lot of people still believed in me …” Shinza laughed. “Eh? He thought if we could perhaps work together … he made it clear he could get the money — who for Christ’s sake was prepared to give money to Tola Tola? Eh? Anyway — he offered me a junior partnership or he tried to get me to talk so he could denounce me — I don’t know which it was … I told him he knew I had retired from politics. He said I was insulting him by treating him like a fool. Of course, travelling around all over, he found someone to back him, he could get his hands on things … look, James, I want you to go for us. Now.”
“To Switzerland.”
“Anywhere. Everywhere.”
Bray looked at him.
“Oh that ILO thing — well, it’s too late. There’s a chance now that may never come again. You know what I’m talking about. This mine strike wasn’t my doing, I don’t have to tell you that — but now that it’s going this way, I’ll have to move if I’m ever going to move at all. We must make use of it, you understand. It may still go on a long time, and if it becomes a general strike … if the whole country — James, what I want is you to go and get money for us. Quickly. Now. You know the right people in England. There are a few contacts of mine … there’s Sweden, East Germany. We must take money where we can, at this stage. I’ve got some, already, I’ve had some, of course. Somshetsi must have money if he’s going to help us and I need him. I need him, James. He’s got trained people … you know. With a small force of trained people in the right places at the right time, you take over your radio station and telecommunications … airport … you can bring it off without … almost without a scratch. If Mweta can’t hold this country together and we hang back, what’re you going to get? You’re going to get Tola Tola. You see that. Tola Tola or somebody like him. That’s what you’ll get. And the bribes’ll be bigger in the capital and the prisons will be fuller, and when the rains are late, like now, people will have to scratch for roots to make a bit of porridge, just the way it’s always been here.”
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